Mipvmwmjm mmmmmm amammms tm r-^^ / V nimmmmmmimmmm m mi muiii in i > i Hum mamv gt^jii \nmM\mmmnmammmmmmw i mmA ' THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE CHARACTERISTICS OF ENGLISH POETS CHARACTEKISTICS OF ENGLISH POETS FROM CHAUCER TO SHIRLEY BY WILLIAM MINTO, M.A. PROFESSOR OF LOGIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN SECOND EDITION WILLIAM BLACKWOOD A^D SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MDCCCLXXXV 'PR50Z/ PEEFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. Two things are attempted in the following work, which the author believes have not hitherto been systematically ac- complished. My chief object has been 'to bring into as clear light as possible the characteristics of the several poets ^ within the period chosen. And as a secondary object to this, I have endeavoured to trace how far each poet was in- ^ fluenced by his literary predecessors and his contemporaries. This is what I have attempted to do. The reader must not in this volume expect to find the works of our poets treated with reference to their race or their social surroundings. " What sort of man was he ? " not " How was he formed ? " ^ is the leading question to which I have endeavoured to supply an answer. In thus deliberately adopting a method that is in one vital respect the opposite of M. Taine's, I should be sorry if it were supposed that I am Thsensible to the value of what M. Taine has done for English literature. It may be, as one of his critics has said, that M. Taine has added little to the popular conception of the Englishman, as expressed in the nickname " John Bull " ; but none the less on that account is it a great and valuable work to have shown that the characteristics thus vaguely summed up really pervade the whole of our literature. Justly viewed, indeed, the method pursued in this volume is not so much the opposite as the complement of M, Taine's. His endeavour was to point out what our writers had in common ; mine has been to point out what each has by distinction. I might advance, as a justification of my attempt, that a thorough study of \^ VI PREFACE. the individual is indispensable to that higher study which has for its object the determination of the characteristics of the race. And besides, the most interesting study for man- kind will always be the individual man. It may be objected to my method that it does not syste- matically follow successive periods in the career of the indi- vidual, the ojoening of new veins, the development of new powers, tlie subjection to new influences. That is a method by itself, with its own value and its own dangers. It is the method suitable to monographs, or to history on a larger scale than is here attempted. I must say that it seems to me to have been of late somewhat overdone. It has been pursued without due respect to the individuality of the individual. Men's lives have been divided into clear-cut periods, and those periods characterised as if it were a law of nature that the individual became at sudden and definite epochs a wholly new creature. All division into periods, unless cautiously carried out, tends to obscure the fact that every animated being retains its individual characteristics from birth to maturity, from maturity to decay. The child is father to the man : a young cabbage does not become an old fig-tree. To trace the gradual growth of powers and qualities, extended range of effort, increased mastery of materials, is a most interesting task. This I have inciden- tally endeavoured to do. But I conceive that it is of prior interest to know what characteristics are of the essence of a man's being, and are manifested in all his outcomes ; and therefore my chief aim in each case has been to seize those characteristics, and to make my interpretation of them as plain and unmistakable as lay in my power. A smaller point in which I am especially open to hostile •^ criticism, is the modernised spelling of the texts of Chaucer and his contemporaries and immediate successors, I have done this after much consideration, resolving to attempt it more by way of experiment and for the purpose of eliciting opinion, than from any settled conviction that it is the only PREFACE. Vll proper course. I am not insensible to the charm of the archaic spelling ; and I know that to some minds modern- isation of s]3elling is as obnoxious as the performance of Othello in a dress-coat. My object is to help my readers to forget such small points as orthographical differences between them and those poets of an elder time, and to get nearer to the living spirit of them. Tlie tendency of all archaisms, as I shall point out more fully in the case of Chaucer, is to impart into the text a sentiment of old age and childishness, very delightful in itself, but not so favour- able to truth of criticism. W. MINTO. Aitgtist 1, 1874. PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. There are three points in particular on which I have made any considerable alteration from the text of the first edition — the relation of Chaucer to the English Court and to French poetry (chap, i.) ; the connection, or rather the non-connec- tion, of the Wars of the Eoses with the decadence of English poetry in the fifteenth century (chap. ii. sect, iii.) ; and the "causes" of the development of the Elizabethan drama (chap, vi.) On these points I have tried to express more fully and clearly the views originally put forward. In revis- ing this edition I have gained less than I had expected from the enormous mass of interesting commentary on Chaucer and Shakespeare published within the last ten years, the reason doubtless being that my book is concerned with one' main purpose — the exposition of the characters, personal and artistic, of the poets dealt with. Every student of English literature must rejoice to find so many able and ingenious scholars at work in this field, and everybody must be sensible of the great value of their results ; but as re- gards my own special purpose, I have not found occasion 1 Yin PREFACE. for material change. How far this is due to prejudice and preoccupation, others must judge. Some of the writer's incidental essays in the hazardous work of verifying anonymous allusions in Elizabethan lit- erature, have been more favourably received than he had ventured to hojDe. Two of them have been almost uni- versally accepted, the identification of the rival poet of Shakespeare's Sonnets with Chapman, and the identification of Spenser's "Action" with Drayton, under his poetical name " Eowland." The identification of " Our pleasant Willy" with Sidney, and of "That same gentle Spirit" with Spenser himself (Appendix A), I regard as equally certain, but such does not seem to be the general opinion of those who have taken any notice of my arguments. The discussion of the age and character of Hamlet is much more argumentative than I should make it now when Goethe's view of the character is less generally ac- cepted. The views I contended for were novel at the time. The arguments for Hamlet's age contained in the body of the play (see p. 309) had strangely escaped the notice of Shakespearian critics. I have added in an Appendix a commendatory sonnet, of date 1591, and have put forward some considerations, originally printed in the ' Examiner ' some ten years ago, for believing it to be Shakespeare's. I cannot expect many to take the trouble of following arguments of such minuteness. Most readers will judge, as I did myself at first, from a general impression. But I must beg those who do interest themselves in such a dilettante inquiry, to observe the nature of my argument, that it is not founded on single coincidences of expression, such as might be made out from any Elizabethan author, but on coincidence with a whole circle of associated ideas, images, and words. W. M. August 1885. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I.— GEOFFREY CHAUCER. PAGE I. His Life, Character, and Works, . . . . i II. His Words, Metres, and Imagery, . . . .17 III. The Chief Qualities of his Poetry, .... 25 IV. His Delineation of Character, . • ■ . • 39 CHAPTER II.— CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES AND SUCCESSORS. I. English Contemporaries,— I. William Langland.— 2. John Gower.— 3. Miracle-plays and Mysteries. — 4. Metrical Romances, . . 45 II. Scottish Contemporaries,— I. Barbour. — 2. Blind Harry, .... 65 III. English Successors, — I. Occleve. — 2. Lydgate.— 3. Sir Thomas Malory. — 4. John Skelton.— 5. Stephen Hawes, .... 69 IV. Scottish Successors, — I. James I.— 2. Robert Henryson.— 3. William Dunbar.— 4. Gawain Douglas. — 5. Sir David Lindsay, . . 93 CHAPTER III.-RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. I. Wyatt, ....... II. Surrey, ....••• III. Writers of Mysteries, Moralities, Moral Interludes — Johi Bale, ....•• IV. John Heywood — Merry Interludes, 116 123 130 135 X CONTENTS. V. Udall — Ralph Eoister Doister, VI. Sackville, VII. Edwards, VIII. Gascoigne, IX. Churchyard, X. Translators of Seneca and Ovid, 139 143 150 153 158 159 CHAPTER IV.— EDMUND SPENSER. I. His Life and Character, II. His Words, Metres, and Imagery, III. The Chief Qualities of his Poetry, 163 168 171 CHAPTER V.-ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. I. Sidney, .... 185 II. Daniel, .... 191 III. Constable, 195 IV. Lodge, .... 197 V. Watson, 203 VI. Drayton, 205 VII. Shakespeare — Sonnets, 210 CHAPTER VI.— DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. I. Lyly, . 228 II. Marlowe, 230 III. Greene, 240 IV. Peele, . 246 V. Nash, . 250 VI. Kyd, . 251 VII. Munday, 253 VIII. Chettle, 253 CHAPTER VII.- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. I. His Life and Character, ..... 257 II. His Words and Imagery, ..... 274 III. Certain Qualities of his Poetry, .... 278 IV. His Delineation of Character, ..... 305 V. The Interaction of his Characters, .... 317 VI. The Tranquillis ing Cloi 36 of hif Tragedies, 319 CONTENTS. XI CHAPTER VIII.-SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEM- PORARIES AND SUCCESSORS. I. Chapman, II. Marston, III. JonsoD, IV. Dekker, V. Middleton, VI. Fletcher, VII. Webster, VIII. Tourneur, IX. Ford, . X. Massinger, XI. Shh'ley, 325 332 344 347 350 354 357 360 363 366 APPENDIX A— "Our Pleasant Willy" . . .368 APPENDIX B— An Unrecognised Sonnet by Shakespeare? 371 CHAEACTEEISTICS OF ENGLISH POETS. CHATTEE I. GEOFFREY CHAUCEE. (1340-1400.) I. — His Life, Character, and Works. To regard Chaucer as the first genial day in the spring of English poetry, is to take, perhaps, a somewhat insular view of his position. On a more comprehensive view, it would appear more apposite to call him a fine day, if not the last fine day, in the autumn of mediaeval European poetry. He may be described as the father of English poetry — the first great poet that used the English language ; but it is more instructive to look upon him as the English son and heir of a great family of French and Italian poets. He was the great English master in a poetic movement that originated in the south of Europe, among the provinces of the Langue d'Oc, which had been going on with brilliant energy for more than two centuries before his birth, and had produced among its masterpieces the ' Romance of the Rose,' and the poetry of Dante and Petrarch. How the Troubadours came by their poetry is not, and perhaps cannot be, sufficiently ascertained. Probably great significance A 2 GEOFFREY CHAUCEE : ought to be attached to the fact that the south of France and the east coast of Spain received a large infusion of Greek blood from the Phoctean colonists of ]\Iassilia (now ^Marseilles) and their otfshoots. These Greek colonists were something more than a handful of adventurous settlers, such as might be absorbed in a community without appreciably affecting its character. Their cliief city, ]Massilia, soon after its foundation, became one of the most prosperous and powerful communities on the coasts of the Mediterranean, the successful rival of Carthage, the independent ally of Eome, and, under the early emperors, the chief dispenser of liberal education to the young rulers of the world. It may well have been that, in these representatives of her race, taken from the home of lyric poetry — the region of Alcteus and Sappho — ancient Greece left to Western Europe a more precious bequest, a bequest that gave a more vital impulse to modern literature than all the fragments of her art. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the various provinces speaking the Langue d'Oc, and especially Pro- vence, were in a high state of commercial prosperity and political freedom. We may therefore, in the absence of certain knowledge, venture to speculate that, when the Provencals, having achieved the material basis for a great literary outburst, came in contact with Arabian poetry through the Moors, the artistic tendency of the Greek quickened with irrepressible life, and throwing itself into the metrical forms that had given it the awakening stimulus, blossomed and bore fruit with voluptuous luxuriance. But what- ever may have been the origin of Provem^al poetry — however the Troubadours caught their happy art, found it, or came by it — they certainly are the poetic fathers of the Trouveres and the early Italian poets ; and through them the grandfathers of our own Chaucer. Although the Trouveres of the north of France received their impulse from the Troubadours of the south, they were not simply imitators and translators, rendering the productions of the Langue d'Oc into the Langue d'Oil. The bent of their genius was no less decidedly epic than the bent of the Troubadours was lyric. They poured out of fertile imaginations hundreds of chivalrous, amorous, and humorous tales. The history of this great creative movement, within its limits of two centuries, is a subject in itself. English- men took part in it, as a result of the close political connection between England and the north of France, but no writer of mark used any dialect of English. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote in Latin ; Walter Map in French. These are great names in the literature of England and of the Middle Ages, but they do not belong to English literature. Cliaucer was the first writer for all time that used the English language. But viewed as a figure in European literature, he must HIS LIFE, CHARACTEK, AND WOEKS. 3 be regarded as the last of the Trouvferes. His works float on the surface of the same literary wave ; a deep gulf lies between them and the next, on the crest of which are tlie works of our great Elizabethans. Some patriotic Englishmen have strongly resented the endeavour of M. Sandras ^ to consider Chaucer as an imitator of the Trouveres. They are justified in taking offence at the word "imitator." It is too much to say that Chaucer produced nothing but imitations of G. de Lorris or other Trouveres, till he conceived the plan of the ' Canterbury Tales ' ; and that the ' Canterbury Tales,' though so far original in form, are animated throughout by the spirit of Jean de Meun. To say this is to produce a totally false impression as regards the decided individuality and pro- nounced English characteristics of Chaucer. He undoubtedly belongs to the line of the Trouveres. He was a disciple of theirs ; he studied in the school of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, by the side of Guillaume de Machault and Eustache Deschamps. He adopted the same poetical machinery of vision and allegory. He made the same elaborate studies of colour and form. From French predecessors he received the stimulus to his minute obser- vation of character. It was emulation of them that kindled his happy genius for story-telling. The relation between Chaucer and the Trouveres is much closer than the relation between Shake- speare and the foreign originals that supplied him with plots, or than the relation between Mr Tennyson and the Arthurian legends. Making allowance for differences of national character, Chaucer owed as much to Guillaume de Lorris as Shakespeare to Marlowe, or Tennyson to Wordsworth ; and in spite of national character, there was probably more affinity between pupil and master in the one case than in the others. At the same time, we should keep clear of such a word as imitation, Avhich would imply that Chaucer had no character of his own. He received his impulse from the French : he made liberal use of their forms and their materials ; yet his works bear the impress and breathe the spirit of a strong individuality ; and this individuality, though most obvious in the ' Canterbury Tales,' is throughout all his works distinctively English. Finally, to add one word on the comparative extent of Chaucer's obligations to Italian sources : while he translated largely from Boccaccio, and while it may be possible to trace an expansion of his poetic ideals coincident with the time when he maybe supposed to have made his first acquaint- ance with Italian poetry, it is not to be questioned that he was most deeply indebted for general form, imagery, and character- isation to the Trouveres, whose language and works he must have been familiar with from boyhood. 1 Etude sur G. Chaucer considere comme iniitateur des Trouveres, 1859. See, in particular, ^Iv Furuivall's ' Trial-Forewords,' Chaucer Society. 4 GEOFFEEY CHAUCEE : Various circumstances helped to bring tlie son of a London vintner under tlie influence of French poetry. Many details of Chaucer's life have been gradually recovered by successive genera- tions of antiquaries, from Thynne and . Speght to Nicolas and Furnivall/ but none of them is more significant as regards the influences that shaped the growing poet than the recently dis- covered fact that in 1357 he was a page in the household of Prince Lionel. His age was then probably fifteen, or at the utmost seventeen, and whether or not he had been at Cambridge before — the LTniversity age being then much younger than it is now — this position ensured him the best education of the time. And while the youth was in this much-coveted service, a great public event happened. The French king, captured at Poictiei-s by the Black Prince, was brought to London in triumph. In accordance with the chivah'ous usage then dominant at the English Court, the royal prisoner, so far from being treated with indignity, was received with as much show of respect and georgeous ceremony as if he had been a distinguished potentate on a friendly visit. He brought a large retinue with him, and he was lodged in what was then considered the finest house in England, John of Gaunt' s Savoy Palace. During his four years' captivity, tournaments were frequently held in his honour, hunting and hawking parties were arranged for his diversion, and everything possible was done to make life pleasant for him. Chaucer, as a member of Prince Lionel's household, must have made the acquaintance of some of King John's numerous retinue. He would naturally be thrown into company with youths in a similar position to himself, and as one of a page's duties Avas to amuse his master or mistress with reading, and the French king was a lover of poetry, Chaucer must thus have had his attention vividly turned, if it had not been turned before, to the French poetry then fashionable. Soon after- wards he had another opportunity. The page was advanced to the dignity of "squire" in 1359, and in Edward IIL's unfortu- nate expedition of that year into France, was taken prisoner and detained till the following year. Of his treatment during this captivity we know nothing specific, but we may assume from the custom of the time that it was not harsh, and that the young squire, if he had a passion for poetry, would have access to con- genial company. The king paid ^16 for his ransom after the Peace of Bretigny. It may almost be said to have been an accident that Chaucer did not write in French, as his contemporary Gower began by doing. But he had the sense to discern a capable literary instru- ment in the nascent English, which the king at this time was 1 Of late years Mr Furnivall and the Chaucer Society have left hardly a paper uuturned in extant official records. HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS, 5 doing his utmost to encourage. A poet is not begotten by cir- cumstances, but circumstances may do much to make or mar him, and a man of genius, able to make the new language move in verse, was sure of a warm welcome at the Court of Edward III. The atmosphere was most favourable to the development of a poet of genial pleasure-loving disposition. Edward's reign was the flowering period of chivalry in England. It was the midsummer, the July, of chivalry ; the institution was then in full blossom. All that it is customary to say about the gladness of life in the England of Chaucer's time was true of the Court ; if a whole nation could be gladdened by the beautiful life of a favoured few, then all England must have been happy and merry. Pageantry was never more gorgeous or more frequent, courtesy of manner never more refined. The Court was like the Garden of ]\Iirth in the ' Romance of the Rose ' ; there were hideous figures on the out- side of the walls, but inside all was sunshine and merry-making, and now and then the doors were thrown open and gaily attired parties issued forth to hunt or tournament. These amusements were arranged on a scale of unparalleled splendour. It was a most gladsome and picturesque life at the Court of Edward III., and in that life Chaucer's poetry was an incident. This is the key to its joyous character. Animated playing on the surface of passion without breaking the crust, humorous pretence of incapacity when dull or difficult subjects come in the way, an eye for the picturesque, abundant supply of incident, never-failing fertility of witty suggestion — these are some of the qualities that made Chaucer's poetry acceptable to the audience for which he wrote. He never ventured on dangerous ground. He kept as far as possible from disagreeable realities. We search in vain for the most covert allusion to the painful events of the time. Devas- tating pestilences, disaster abroad, discontent and insurrection at home — he took for granted that his audience did not care to hear about such things, and he passed such things by. They wished to be entertained, and he entertained them charmingly, with lively adventures in high and humble life, pictures of the life chivalric with its hunts and tournaments, pictures of the life vulgar with its intervals of riotous mirth, sweet love-tales, comical intrigues, graphic and humorous sketches of character. It would seem that Chaucer, like Shakespeare after him, was brought professionally face to face with the people whose sym- pathies he wished to command, and thus, like Mr Gladstone's orator, drew from his audience in a vapour what he gave back to them in a shower. Seven years after his return from imprison- ment in France, he received a life pension of twenty marks for good service done the king as a " valettus," and in the year fol- lowing he appears in the Exchequer Rolls as an Esquire of the 6 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : Household. Unfortunately the Houseliold Book of Edward III. has not been recovered, so that we cannot know directly what Chaucer's official duties were. But Mr Furnivall has examined the book in which Edward IV.'s domestic system is set forth, Avith a word of compliment to Edward III. as "the first setter of certainties among his domestical meyne," and it appears there that the Esquires of Household "were accustomed, winter and summer, in afternoons and evenings, to draw to Lords' chambers within Court, there to keep honest company after their cunning, in talking of chronicles of kings and of others policies, or harping, singing, or other acts martials, to help to occupy the Court and accompany strangers till the time of their departing." This, then, was probably the practice when Chaucer served the king, and it was one of his official duties to make the time pass pleasantly for the king's visitors. He could, if he liked, instead of harping or singing, or talking history or politics, try the effect of his own verses on an audience not likely to submit to boredom. At the time when Chaucer passed into manhood, in the seventh decade of his century, there was a remarkable concurrence of circumstances favourable to the development of an English poet. Given a man of poetic irenius within the circle of the Court, the time had come if the man was there : he could hardly escape such a consp)iracy of influences to stimulate and foster his gift. Poetry was recognised as one of the graces of a courtly life ; the queen was interested in the art, and had French metricians about her, Froissart among the number ; the king also was an emulous patron, and besides was anxious, along with all his Court, for a poet who should do honour to the language which had at last established itself as the language of the whole nation. The opportunity was there ; the call was urgent. Chaucer was able to respond. The hour had come, and the man as well. Chaucer continued to rise steadily in royal favour, and in the prime of his life was frequently employed in important diplomatic missions — a sufficient testimony to his powers of making himself agreeable. Up to 1386, fortune would seem to have been uni- formly kind to him. Among other places, he had an opportunity of visiting Italy while Petrarch was still alive and Boccaccio was in the height of his fame. In 1372 he was appointed one of the commissioners for arranging a commercial treaty with the Genoese, and visited Florence and Genoa in the following year. Unless royal favourites were then intrusted with very unsuitable posts, our poet must have had a decidedly commercial turn. In 1374 he was appointed Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidy of Wools, Skins, and Tanned Hides in the Port of London ; and he had to perform his duties in person, without the option of a deputy. In his " House of Fame," perhaps with a reference to HIS LIFE, CHAEACTEE, AND WOIJKS. 7 these duties, he speaks of going home when his reclvonings were made up and poring over books till his eyes were dazed ; and doubtless, between business and poetry, he must have been closely occupied. For several generations before Chaucer's time, the successful poets of France had been in the habit of receiving munificent presents, which enabled them to give their whole time to poetry. Chaucer was not so fortunate, or unfortunate ; his patron, instead of handing over to him jewels, horses, houses, or lands, obtained a moderate pension for him from the Crown, and the privilege of discharging the dry duties of a moderately lucra- tive office — an arrangement which may, perhaps, be considered peculiarly English, and which probably combined a certain amount of leisure with a solid feeling of independence. Besides his pension and his salary, he seems to have had an allowance for robes as one of the king's esquires ; and he received the custody of a wealthy minor, which brought him something equivalent to about ;z^iooo of our money. The accession of Richard II. (1377) did not injure his position : his pension was confirmed, and he received, besides, another annuity of twenty marks, in lieu of a daily pitcher of wine. The Issue Rolls contain further entries of money paid to him for his expenses abroad on the king's service. In 1382 he was appointed Comptroller of the Petty Customs of the Port of London, with the privilege of appointing a deputy. In 1385 he was allowed to name a deputy for his other comptrollership. In 1386 he sat in Parliament as a Knight of the Shire of Kent. This was the zenith of his fortunes. In that year John of Gaunt lost his authority at Court. A commission was issTied for in- quiring, among other alleged abuses, into the state of the subsidies and custf)ms, and Chaucer was superseded in his two comptroller- ships. The new brooms had probably little difficulty in finding an excuse for sweeping away the protege of the fallen Minister. As is often the manner of poets, he had saved little of his pensions and salaries as a royal favourite and a public officer ; if, at least, we may draw the natural inference from his two years afterwards getting both his annuities transferred to another man. The re- vival of John of Gaunt's influence in 1389 again brightened his prospects. He was appointed Clerk of the King's Works. In 1394 he obtained an annuity of ;£2o ; but the decay of his fortunes is too plainly indicated by the fact that he was several times under the necessity of applying for small portions of this pension in advance. It is pleasing, however, to know that the last year of his life was made happy by the accession of his patron's son, Henry Bolingbroke, who immediately more than doubled his annuity by the additional grant of forty marks. He would seem to have retired to a tenement in the garden of the chapel of the Blessed Mary, of Westminster. According to the 8 GEOFFREY CHAUCER: inscription on his tomb in Westminster Abbey, confirmed by the cessation of the minutes of his pension, he died on the 25th October 1400. • These main facts in Chaucer's life are drawn from official records. While they leave the imagination room enough to picture the poet's life at Court, they mark the outlines of that life with sufficient distinctness. We must be careful about filling in details of his inner history from supposed autobiographical references in his poems. Chaucer's biographers too often take the poet literally, ignoring his ironic humour and his conventional artistic pretences. 'They argue from one or two jests at his wife's expense, of a kind that might be made by the most afi'ectionate of husbands, provided there was no real ground for them, that his wife was a shrew and his married life far from happy. They accept as matter of fact to be gravely discussed the poet's statement in the opening of the ' Book of the Duchess,' which serves happily as part of the artistic setting of that poem, that he has been unable to sleep night or day for eight years. This confession of a long and hopeless love- passion is taken with such unhesitating faith, that it is set against and allowed to overbear otherwise plain documentary evidence of the date of Chaucer's marriage to one of the " damoiselles " of the Queen's Chamber. But why take such conventional artistic pre- tences literally 1 In the beautiful Prologue to the ' Legend of Good Women ' the poet tells us that on the first of May he hied him to the fields before sunrise to see the daisy unclose, and that he spent the whole day leaning on his elbow and his side, " For nothing elles, and I shall not lie, But for to look upon the daisy." The scent and colour of the flowery meadow were so sweet that the poet thought he could live in it the whole month of May, "Withouten sleep, withouten meat or drink." Are we to take this pretty fancy literally, as a modern imitator of the mediaeval poets is said to have clone 1 Extravagant love- sorrows, fantastically transcending poor human nature's powers of endurance, were equally a commonplace of the school in which Chaucer wrote. What was the personal appearance of this soldier, scholar, courtier, poet, man of business, and successful wooer of a queen's maid of honour 1 The portrait procured by Occleve ^ represents him probably after his retirement to St Mary's, and with the monastic dress and gesture of a grave teacher in dark gown and hood, pointing with the forefinger of the right hand, holding [^ See a photogi-aph of it in Mr Furnivall's ' Trial-Forewords,' Chaucer Society.] HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. 9 a string of beads in his left, and having an inkhorn dangling at his breast. The eyes are large and grave, and the features regular, and small in proportion to the size of the head. In the description of himself in the ' Canterbury Tales,' put into the mouth of the imperious host {Prol. to " Sir Thopas "), he probably vpas in- dulging his favourite habit of ironical bantering. The small size of the waist is certainly jocular, seeing that the host is described as a large burgess. The mysterious elfish reserve, and attitude of quiet listening, are in keeping with his position as the observer and recorder of his companions ; and the thing is no more trust- worthy as a veritable portrait of Chaucer than the reserved "Spectator" as a sober description of Addison. Knowing that Chaucer was a successful courtier, we look in his works for the necessary qualifications. In the contrast between Placebo and Justinus in the Merchant's Tale, we see that he had theorised on the conditions of success at Court. Justinus, as his name partially implies, was outspoken and honest, churlish and cynical towards human frailties : the sort of man that succeeds only when his services are indispensable, or his eccentricities amusing. But Placebo was a true coiirtier, who understood the courtier's golden rule of never obtruding advice : he was wise enough to agree with his superior's plans, and so evade dangerous responsibilities — " For, brother mine, of me take this motif : I have now been a conrt-man all my life, And, God it wot, though I unworthy be, I have standen in full great degree Abouten lordes of full high estate ; Yet had I never with none of them debate. I never them contraried truely I wot well that my lord can more than I, AVhat that he saith I hold it firm and stable ; I say the same or elles thing semblable. A full great fool is any counsellor Tliat serveth any lord of high honour That dare presume or ones thinken it That liis counsel should pass his lordes wit." Admirers of sturdy English independence — independence that is more candid in the exposure of faults than in the acknowledg- ment of merits, will desire always to think of Chaucer as having been more of the Justinus than the Placebo. Perhaps he was a judicious mean between the two — neither a churl nor a sycophant. At any rate, it is worth noticing that he understood the arts of the courtier if he cared to avail himself of his knowledge. One thing could hardly have failed to be of service to him in his dii)lomatic negotiations, and that was equability of temper. There is every indication in his works that he was not an eager, excitable man ; 10 GEOFFREY CHAUCEE : moody and uncertain. On tlie contraiy, lie would seem to have been tranquil and leisurely, with his wits in easy command ; patient, not self-assertive, yet with sufficient backbone to defy Fortune when the worst came to the worst. Such, at least, he appears in his works, and such, from his diplomatic success, we may presume him to have been in actual business ; though we should err greatly if in every case we concluded that the diplom- atist with the pen has equanimity enough to be diplomatic with the tongue. In his works, at least, he displays the most artful and even-tempered courtesy. We see him with easy smile defer- entially protesting ignorance of the flowers of rhetoric ; throwing the blame of disagreeable things in his story on some author that he professes to follow ; dismissing knotty inquisitions as too difficult for his humble wit ; evading tedious or irrelevant narra- tions by referring the reader to -Homer, or "Dares," or "Dyte." He conducts us through his narratives with facile eloquence, smoothing over what is unpalatable, waving aside digressions, interspersing easy reflections ; never staying too long upon one topic. If he had equally ready command of his resources for the purpose of keeping people in good-humour face to face with him- self, no wonder though the king found him useful in embassies. Perhaps the best evidence of his equable unhurried ways is his patient following of the windings and turnings of the protracted subtlety of Pandarus in mediating between Troilus and Cresside. This is the unique gift of the epic poet and of the novelist : it is their special function, with due precautions against tediousness, to exhibit operations that are too subtle or too extended for the stage. Contrast this engineering of Pandarus with the wooing of Anne by Richard III. ; the deception of Othello by lago ; the fooling of Ajax by Ulysses. These are all triumphs of active audacity as distinguished from patient intrigue : they are examples of working ujjon the feelings no less perfectly adapted for stage effect than the calculations of Pandarus are for subtle epic. And as these cases illustrate the distinction between what is suited for the different species of composition, so I believe they illustrate a distinction in the charactei's of the authors. Coleridge, generalis- ing as usual from himself, has said that all great men are calm and self-possessed, and that " Shakespeare's evenness and sweetness of temper were proverbial even among his contemporaries." There is, perhaps, more truth in the generalisation than there is in the pro- fessed statement of fact, though both are open to considerable limitations and explanations. There is no record of evenness of temper as a characteristic of Shakespeare ; and although there were, one would be inclined to think, from the evidence of his life and works, that while he may have been even-tempered as compared with Marlowe and Ben Jonson, he was a much more excitable man HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. 11 than Chaucer. I doubt veiy much whether Shakespeare had the easy equable self-possession of Chaucer : witli all his fundamental tranquillity and clear grasp, there was more fire in him — more of a tendency to take daring liberties, and to mock danger with cool assurance. I do not suppose that Shakespeare could have prac- tised the cruelty of Richard III. any more than Chaucer could have undertaken the service that Pandarus rendered to Troilus ; but I believe that Shakespeare was capable of the cool daring requisite in the one case, while Chaucer had the easy equanimity requisite in the other. How about Chaucer's qualifications for winning the heart of a queen's maid of honour ? His works show that he was not likely to fail in the respectfulness that women are said to love. He is on all occasions the champion of "gentle women, gentle creatures;" and, however much sly fun he makes of their foibles, he makes ample compensation in praises of their beauty, their constancy, their self-sacrifice. M. Sandras could not have made a greater mistake than when he said that Chaucer imitated the chivalrous Guillaume de Lorris out of deference to the taste of the Court, and had naturally more affinity of spirit with the satirical Jean de Meun. There was nothing monkish in Chaucer's spirit. Gower bears a message from Venus to Chaucer, in which she greets him as her own disciple and poet, with whose glad songs the land is fulfilled over all, and to whom she is especially beholden. And Chaucer himself more than once expresses his devotedness to the Queen of Love, and claims credit for meritorious service. In middle life he seems to have sobered down into becominsf 2;rav- ity, translating Boethius on the Consolations of Philosophy, and writing a Treatise on the Astrolabe for his little son Lewis — no less fitting as an employment for grave years than significant as an indication of his substantial strength of intellect. But all his best work as a poet was done at the instigation of love and humour, and his humour was not monastic. It is remarkable that, while both his serious and his comic productions are founded in most cases on pre-existing works of art, in the serious pieces he follows his original much more closely than in the comic. In his comic tales, as Tyrwhitt says, "he is generally satisfied with borrowing a slight hint of his subject, which he varies, enlarges, and embellishes at pleasure, and gives the whole the air and colour of an original." His imagination dwelt by preference in the regions of brightness, sweetness, softness, and laughter, in its broadest as well as its subtlest varieties. He passed lightly over his opportunities of sublime description ; he picked small personal threads out of the mighty web of public transactions. Such grandeur as appears in his pages is the grandeur of magnifi- cent buildings, splendid pageants, assemblies, and processions of 12 GEOFFEEY CHAUCEK : knights and ladies in gorgeous array. Affairs of the heart in high and humble life are his themes ; he is the sympathetic poet of the aspirations, sorrows, and manifold ludicrous complications of the tender passion. And though there is a strong serious strand in the thread of Chaucer's life, coming more into promi- nence as the soft outer nap is worn off by the rubs of time, his youthful poetry contains an immense preponderance of the gay over the grave. He was not a mere butterfly ; but, on the whole, he preferred the sun to the shade. Therein he showed his natural aflfinity for the Court. In the ' Canterbury Tales ' it is the Monk that bores the merry pil- grims with his humdrum tragedies ; and it is the Knight that interposes to put a stop to him. The Knight does not like to hear of sudden falls from great wealth and ease ; tales of pros- perous elevation are more to his liking. It is the grave pro- fessional men that tell the piteous tales : the Man of Law recites the sufferings of faithful Constance, the Clerk the trials of patient Griselda, the Doctor of Physic the heartrending fate of Virginia. These things do not occur by accident ; there is a studied epic propriety in them. Chaucer evidently had his theory concerning what pertained to the Court, and what went naturally with the hard mental work of the learned professions. Looking back upon his own life, we see that his mixed career had given him ex- perience of both, and that in his youth he inclined more to the one, while in his old age, as was natural, he felt drawn more towards the other. When we look closely at the construction of his poems, trying to realise how they were built up in the poet's mind, we are confirmed in our first impressions of the equability of his pro- ceedings. We are not to suppose that he sang as the birds sing, without effort — out of " the inborn kindly joyousness of his na- ture," as Coleridge says. His work is too solid for that. Those perfect touches of character in the Prologue to the ' Canterbury Tales ' were not put together with unpremeditated flow : we should as soon believe that a picture of Hogarth's was dashed off at a sitting. And, indeed, Chaucer tells us himself, in his "House of Fame," that he wrote love-songs till his head ached, and pored over books till his eyes had a dazed look. Still, he worked equably, with patient elaboration. He is not carried away into incontinent fine frenzies of creation ; his words and images do not flash together with lightning energy like the words and images of Shakespeare. His imagination is not overpowered by excited fecundity. Perhaps none of our poets combine such wealth of imagination with such perfect command over its resources : such power of expressing the incident or feeling in hand, with such ease in passing from it when it has received its HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. 13 just proportion ; perhaps none of them can put so much into tlie mouth of a personage, and at the same time observe such orderly clearness, and such propriety of character. If you wish to un- derstand his processes of construction, you cannot do better than study such passages as the elaborate self-disclosure of Januarius, when he consults with his friends about the expediency of marrying, or the imprudent candour of the Pardoner, or the talk between Chanticleer and Pertelot in the tale of the " Nun's Priest." We are there struck by another consideration, and that is, how much he must have owed to his predecessors the garru- lous inventive Fableors of northern France ; and with what clear- ness of eye, and freedom and firmness of hand, he gathered, sifted, and recombined their opulent details of action and character. The ' Canterbury Tales ' could no more have grown out of the imagination and observation of one man than the 'Iliad,' although one man had scope for the highest genius m adding to, taking from, kneading, and wholly recasting the materials furnished by many less distinguished labourers. It were a nice question to raise, whether Chaucer or Shake- speare had the best knowledge of men. They exhibit character under conditions so very different that it is hard to make a satis- factory comparison. The epic poet has a choice between describ- ing his personages directly, accumulating characteristic traits in a full portrait, and making his personages reveal themselves, as it were, unconsciously in what they say and do ; and usually he supplements the one method by the other. He can put before us at his leisure their whole outward personality, voice, colour, general build, tricks of gesture, peculiarities of dress. We are left in no doubt as to his ideal; and are in a position to say at once whether the details are consistent or inconsistent ; complete or meagre. Now, the dramatic poet is much more limited. He may introduce a striking feature now and then, such as Falstaff's fatness, Bardolph's red nose, Aguecheek's flaxen hair ; but for the most part, he must leave the outward personality, with all its suggestiveness, to the "make up" of the actor. Hence, so far are we from seeing easily the consistency or inconsistency of a dramatist's creations, that his intention not unfrequently becomes a subject of dispute — the situation within the compass of a play rarely being sufficiently varied to make the exhibition of character unequivocal. Unless, indeed, the personages either describe themselves, or are described by one another, or (as in Greek tragedy) are known to the audience beforehand, their characters must always be more or less enigmatical, seeing that every action is open to several interpretations. It can never, therefore, be quite satisfactory to compare a dramatist, as regards knowledge of character, with an epic poet, and that, too, an epic 14 GEOFFKEY CHAUCER: poet whose peculiar province is the epic of manners and character. Although Shakespeare's personages are not all so definitely, fully, and consistently characterised as Chaucer's, we must not conclude that his knowledge was inferior. In the case of such masters, one might do worse than follow the commonplace advice to study, enjoy, and admire both, without troubling one's head about their respective merits. It is enough for us to know that Chaucer observed with clear eye the characteristic features and habits of the difierent classes in the England of his time, and has set them down for us with the most patient elaboration and the most genial spirit. In trying to make out Chaucer's character from his poetry, we can never be quite certain that we do not carry our notions of his equability, not to mention his inborn kindly joyousness, a great deal too far. The gay predominates in his works over the grave. They seldom turn to the gloomy side of things. Yet the more intimately we know him, tlie more we begin to form suspicions that, after all, his equanimity is only com^iarative, and that perfection in this is as difficult to be attained as in any other virtue. We see him chiefly in his flower-garden and summer- house ; but beneath his gay manner as he receives visitors there, we discover, after longer acquaintance, symptoms of sensitive tenderness as well as sternness and strength where the smiling serenity at first appeared to be imperturbable. Chaucer's works are assigned by Professor Ten Brink to three periods: the first ending with his departure for Italy in 1372, comprising his " A B C," his translation of the Roman de la Rose, and his "Book of the Duchess," and representing his subordina- tion to French influence; the second, ending in 1384, the sujjposed date of the "House of Fame," comprising, as well as that work, his " Life of St Cecile " (Second Nun's Tale), his " Parliament of Fowls," his "Troilus and Cresside," and his first version of the Knight's Tale, and representing his subordination to Italian influ- ence ; and the third, comprising "Annelida and Arcite," the " Legend of Good Women," the ' Canterbury Tales,' and the " Complaint of Mars and Venus," and representing Chaucer's maturity and independence. I should be inclined to reject this division as throwing a factitious, and, upon the whole, misleading light on the natural development of Chaucer's genius. There is a certain advance from the " Book of the Duchess " to the " House of Fame" ; but I do not think that that advance is explained by supposing French influence to have operated on the one, and Italian influence on the other. The difi^erence mainly represents an increasing width of knoAvledge and mastery of expression, fully accounted for by the interval between the works. It seems to me HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. 15 that Chaucer had from first to last more aftinity with the French than with the Italians. I can distinguish no change either in his methods or in his spirit that is fairly attributable to Italian in- fluence. He was master of his own development from the time that he received his first impulse from the French. The Italians merely supplied him as they supplied Shakespeare with material. English obligations to Italian impulse belong to the sixteenth century. The greater part of " Troilus and Cresside " is Chaucer's own.i He exalts the character of Cresside in the chivalrous spirit common to him and Guillaume de Lorris ; and recasts Pandarus with a power of characterisation inferior to nothing in the ' Can- terbury Tales.' Mr Furnivall's refinement of a fourth period, a period of decay, into which he puts all the minor poems that he does not like, seems purely arbitrary, so far as I can judge ; but Mr Furnivall's devotion to the subject gives him a very great authority. I should have been disposed to refer Chaucer's "Flee fro the Press" to his final retirement from the world, to the same date as his " Parson's Tale." The " Testament of Love," the " Assembly of Ladies," and the " Lamentation of ]\Iary Magdalene," are now universally allowed not to be genuine works of Chaucer; and of late, the genuine- ness of the "Court of Love," the "Flower and the Leaf," and "Chaucer's Dream," has been disputed by Professor Ten Brink and Mr Bradshaw, and their arguments have been accepted by Mr Furnivall. In a previous edition of this book I showed that the arguments then adduced against the genuineness of the " Court of Love " were inconclusive. The case has since then been strengthened by J\Ir Skeat and Mr Furnivall, who also con- tend that the extant translation of the Rovinn de la Rose is not Chaucer's. Textual criticism on such a point is entitled to every respect, and they have also in their favour the fact that in the unique MSS. of these works no author's name is given. The grammar differs in important and obvious particulars from Chaucer's, and the works have been ascribed to him on conjecture. The case against genuineness is so strong, that Mr Skeat is par- donably impatient with those who do not at once own themselves convinced. Now I am not particularly concerned to stand up for the " Court of Love" as Chaucer's, for the simple reason that my business is with his character as a poet ; and it seems to me so thoroughly Chaucerian in spirit, that my impressions of the man 1 See Mr W. M. Rossetti's admirable prefatory remarks to liis comi>ari.soii of the work with Boccaccio's Filostrato, Chaucer Society. I ^ " Lay on and spare not for the love of Clirist, JoU his head to a post, and favour your fist : Now, for my sake, sweetheart, spare and favour your hand, And lay him about the ribs with this wand." The interlude concludes with moralisings by Jenkin on the wrongs inflicted on innocent simplicity by strength and subtlety. The well-known play of ' Gammer Gurton's Needle' (which is entitled a right pithy, pleasant, and merry comedy, and is divided into Acts and Scenes), is supposed to have been written about 1560, and, before the discovery of 'Roister Doister,' enjoyed the distinction of being considered our first regular comedy. It is said to have been written by "Mr S., Master of Arts"; and its humour, which is certainly more robust than the humour of ' Roister Doister,' may have been considered suitable to the ex- panded tastes of Eton boys after they became undergraduates.^ It has, however, less of the character of a comedy than 'Roister Doister;' it is essentially a farce, designed throughout for the free play of lungs and diaphragm, and the broadening and em- purpling of long and pale countenances. An irascible old gammer, THOMAS SACKVILLE. 143 sucli as Noah's wife, Las always been a favourite character on the farcical stage : we see at the present day in Christmas Pantomimes how much can be got out of such a personage when enacted by a man, and in those days when greater freedom was allowed, we may imagine how laughter was made to hold both his sides. Gammer Gurton's temper is sorely tried. One day when she is mending her husband's breeches, Gib, the cat, seizes the oppor- tunity of indulging herself with a little milk. Gammer starts up and flings the breeches at the thief. On taking them up again, she cannot find the needle, and turns the house topsy-turvy in the search for it, interfering sadly with the comfort of goodman Hodge, who makes desperate suggestions as to possible places of concealment. A mischievous neighbour Diccon is tickled by the loss, and devises sundry practical jokes put of it. He tells the Gammer that Dame Chat has stolen it, and then goes to Dame Chat and tells her that Gammer Gurton accuses her of stealing her cock : in consequence of which malicious misinformation the two dames proceed to words, and from words to blows. Again, Diccon informs Dr Rat the curate that, if he goes to Dame Chat's, he will find her sewing with the very needle ; and then informs Dame Chat that that evening Hodge intends to make a return visit to her roost : the result of which plot is that the curate's skull is nearly fractured by the enraged dame with a door-bar. Ultimately the needle is discovered by accident embedded in the part of Hodge's apparel on which he usually sits. VI.— Thomas Sackville (1536-7 — 1608): Tlie Mi7'ror for Magistrates. In 1559, two years after the publication of Tottel's Miscellany, was published a collection of poems more sombre in their hues than the gay songs and sonnets of Surrey and Wyat. Instead of Love, their burden was the mutability of Fortune as shown in the rise and fall of kings, rebels, and noble ministers of state ; and the gloomy record of ambition and disaster was called ' The Mirror for Magistrates' — a glass wherein rulers might see the dangers that wait on greatness. The work was projected in 1555, about the middle of the reign of Mary : and critics have not failed to remark how naturally the time called for such a mirror. It should, however, be borne in mind, that in the same year, 1555, appeared an edition of Chaucer ; and that Tottel's Songs and Sonnets first saw the light in print during the same "bloody" reign. I have already (p. 70) made some remarks on the dubiety of the connection between literature and politics. The origin of the ' Mirror for Magistrates ' is one 144 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. of the facts that most strikingly illustrate how quietly literary ojjerations proceed in the midst of political disquietude. In 1554 Of 155S1 Wayland the printer was producing an edition of Lyd- gate's translation of Boccaccio's ' Fall of Princes' (in rivalry to an edition by Tottel), and was advised by several of his patrons, " both honourable and worshipful," " to have the story continued from whereas Bochas left unto this present time, chiefly of such as Fortune had dallied with here in this island, which might be a mirror to all men as well nobles as others." Wayland applied to one William Baldwin — a graduate of Oxford, who in 1549 described himself as "servant with Edward Whitchurch" the printer,^ and who was prepared to write plays and philosophical treatises as well as poems ; but Baldwin would not undertake the task with- out assistance. Accordingly, learned men, to the number of seven, were invited to a consultation, to which Baldwin resorted with Lydgate's translation under his arm ; and there and then they agreed to supplement Boccaccio (who had left off with the capture of the King of France at Poictiers) by calling up the shades of unfortunate English kings and ministers, from the time of Puchard II., and making them bewail "their grievous chances, heavy destinies, and woful misfortunes." It was agreed that Baldwin should " usurp Bochas' room," the ghostly figures being supposed to address themselves to him, and that each of the company should take upon him some unfortunate's lament. George Fer- rers — -a lawyer who maintained himself in Court favour under Henry, Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth, and who was noted as a director of dramatic pageants — undertook the first of the tragic series, the fall of Chief-.Justice Tresilian, remarking on the abun- dant material in our earlier history, but deferring to the printer's wish to have merely a continuation of Boccaccio as an experi- mental speculation. This was the origin of the 'Mirror for ^Magistrates. ' An enterprising printer was eager for trade, ready to print anything, whether grave or gay, that was ready to sell ; and when he had in hand an edition of Lydgate's translation of the ' Fall of Princes,' one of his customers suggested a continua- tion of the work to modern times. This is what it comes to when we scrutinise the phantom of a gloomy book rising out of a gloomy reign. It rises side by side with another bookseller's speculation of gayer aspect, both fitted to gratify interests that never die out among the reading portion of any community. The imagination can never live upon comedy alone ; some of us are more mirthful than others, and more mirthful at sometimes than at other times, but nearly all of us desire to alternate the gay with the grave. As the 'Mirror' itself was designed to show, no period in our 1 Printers now began to be, to some extent, the i^atroiis of literary men ; who still, however, depended more upon the niuuilicence of uol)le patrons. THOMAS SACKVILLE. 145 annals had been exempt from the caprices of Fortune ; had such a reign as Mary's been enough to extinguish love and mirth among her subjects, all our poetry anterior to her reign would have been overhung by the gloom of Erebus. The first edition of the ' Mirror,' published as we have said in 1559,1 contained nineteen legends from the reigns of Richard IL, Henry IV., Henry V., Henry VI., and Edward IV. Twelve of these are attributed to Baldwin, three to Ferrers : Baldwin was also general editor, and wove the stories together by a prose narrative of the remarks made when they were first read in the conclave of authors. In 1563 appeared a second edition, with eight more legends of later date. In 1574, John Higgins went back to the fabulous beginnings of our history, and wrote sixteen legends of unfortunate British princes between " the coming of Brute and the incarnation of our Saviour." In 1578, Thomas Blennerhasset wrote twelve legends of the times between Caesar and the Conquest. Various scattered additions were made during the reign of Elizabeth; but the next great event in the biblio- graphy of the work was the collection of the whole by Richard Niccols in 1610. Niccols took great liberties with the text, and omitted all the intermediate V envoys of Higgins and conversations of Baldwin and Blennerhasset. The standard modern edition is Haslewood's, 181 5. Thomas Sackville, created Baron Buckhurst in 1567 and Earl of Dorset in 1603, has no right to be called the "primary inventor" of the 'Mirror for Magistrates,' seeing that his In- duction and his Legend of the Duke of Buckingham were not printed till the second edition in 1563; but his name may still be associated with the work as its most distinguished contributor. He infused into it a new and higher spirit. His coadjutors would have been content to drone on with scattered legends on the old plan, but Sackville aspired to emulate Dante with a connected epic. His language, also, as well as his conception, is fresh and powerful : his singing-robes are new and rich, and throw a double dinginess on the verses of his associates, which are covered with mean and incongruous patches. Sackville' s plan is this. He walks out at nightfall towards the close of autumn, when the declining light and the approaching winter remind him sharply of the changes of fortune. In the midst of his gloomy meditations, there suddenly appears before him a hideous figure in the extremity of grief and despair. This figure is sorrow, who discourses to him of the frailty of human greatness, and conveys him through a gloomy entrance to the abode of departed spirits, proposing to show him the ghosts of unfortunate peers and princes, and to make them relate their 1 The publication was delayed by Mary's Chancellor. K 146 EENAISSANCE AND TEANSITIOK history. The first of these unfortunates is the Duke of Bucking- ham, who was decapitated by Richard III. Sackville's purpose was to continue the list of ill-starred British warriors and statesmen backwards to the Conquest, working into his plan the legends already versified by Ferrers and Baldwin. Very naturally and properly he deposed Baldwin from the place of Boccaccio, and made the ghost of Buckingham address himself :— "And, Sackville, sith in purpose now thou hast The woful fall of princes to descrive, "Whom Fortune hath uplift, and 'gain down cast, To show thereby the unsurety in this life," &c. Sackville never went beyond his one legend, and the other con- tributors do not seem to have been prepared to merge themselves in his plan, so that his complaint of Buckingham, with the Induction prefixed, was simply printed among the rest in the original chronological order, i Sackville's position in literature is unique. He projected and began our first grand epic, and wrote our first tragic drama,^ at once taking a permanent rank in the history of our poetry, and placing himself at the head of contemporary English poets, before he had completed his twenty-seventh year : then, so far as is known, he abandoned the Muses for good. After a short period of dissipation and reckless profusion, he reformed, entered public life, was employed on diplomatic service by Elizabeth, succeeded Burleigh as Lord High Treasurer, and continued to be the greatest subject of the realm during the first five years of the reign of James ; but though he lived to the age of seventy-one, he is not known to have written one line after his contribution to the 'Mirror for Magistrates.' The ' Mirror for Magistrates,' being designed as a continuation of Lydgate's translation, was written chiefly in the same seven-line stanza. It is probably in consequence of his study of Lydgate that Sackville, while writing in this stanza, uses a greater number of archaic words than in ' Gorboduc,' which is Avritten in blank verse. His turns of expression generally afford abundant traces of 1 When Higgins subsequently went back to Brute the Trojan, he aspired to be the leading tigure, and copied Sackville's Induction. He failed, however, to digest the unmanageable mass of legends, so that the ' Mirror for Magistrates ' remained to the last a crude abortion of tlie grand epic. The authors were certainly not a "mirror for magistrates" in their unsubordinated action and craving for personal pre-eminence. - ' The Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex,' first acted in the Christmas Revels of the Inner Temple, afterwards before Elizabeth at Whitehall, Jan. i8, 1561. It was published by the authors in 1570, having previously appeared in a surreptitious edition. In tlie edition of 1590 tlie title was altered to ' Gorboduc' Thomas Norton was conjoined in the authorship, but his share cannot be traced, and is believed to be small. THOMAS SACKVILLE. 147 the influence of Wyat and Surrey : echoes of Wyat's Penitentia 1 Psahns are especially frequent. As he wrote in youth, and prob- ably also in haste, his debts to predecessors are particularly easy to follow ; and it is obvious that he was a careful student of Dante and Virgil, as well as of our native poets. From Dante, undoubtedly, he received his main inspiration. The personified abstractions that Sackville met in the abode of fallen princes are drawn with great power and harmony of attri- butes. In the opening of his Induction, as we have said, he describes himself as meeting the hideous figure of Sorrow at nightfall in a dreary evening, when the bare trees and blustering winds reminded him of Fortune's changes ; and he observes the same propriety in describing the tenants of the infernal gulf with their behaviour and various circumstances. Sackville's personifi- cations of Sorrow, Remorse, Dread, Revenge, Misery, Care, Sleep, Old Age, Malady, Famine, Death, War, were conceived with a sustained energy and pregnant significance then unparalleled in our literature. They were not eclipsed by the efforts of Spenser in the same vein ; ^ and they held their ground till the freshness of such creations had faded. The following is his picture of Misery : — " His face was lean ami somedeal pined away, And eke his hands consnmed to the bone ; But what his body was I cannot say, For on his carcase raiment liad he none, Save clouts and patches pieced one by one ; With statr in hand and scrip on shoulders cast, His chief defence against the winter's blast. His food for most was wild fruits of the tree, Unless sometimes some crumbs fell to his share ; Which in his wallet long, God wot, kept he, As on the which full daintily would he fare : His drink the running stream, his cup the bare Of the palm closed ; his bed the hard cold ground. To this poor life was Misery ybound." This picture is all the more remarkable when we consider the rank of the poet. And when we consider his youth, we are also surprised at his vivid picture of hoary, trembling Old Age, be- moaning with broken and hollow plaint his forepast youth, but still clinging to life, and praying that he be not yet sent down to the grave, to lie for ever in darkness : — • " Crook-backed he was, tooth-shaken, and blear-eyed, Went on three feet, and sometimes crept on four. With old lame bones that rattled by his side, 1 They are all quoted in England's Parnassus, i6oo. 148 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. His scalp all jiillM, aiirl lie with eld forlore: His wither'd list still knocking at dcatli's door; Fumbling and drivelling as he draws liis breatli For brief, tlie shape and messenger of death." The grisly shape of Famine is described as tearing her own flesh for hunger, clutching at everything that comes near her, and gnashing on her own bones. Her destruction by Death is a fearful picture of fiendish triumph : — *' On her while we thus firmly fixed our eyes, That bled for ruth of such a dreary sight, Lo ! suddenly she shrieked in so huge wise. As made hell-gates to shiver with the might : Wherewith a dart we saw how it did light Right on her breast, and therewithal pale Death Enthrilling it to reave her of her breath." Campbell has compared the Induction to "a landscape on which the sun never shines." The gloom is farther intensified by some exquisite hints of what the landscape was before "hawthorn had lost his motley livery," and before " the naked twigs were shivering all for cold." We pass through the horrors of the nether world with a feeling that it is winter also in the upper world : and we shudder still more when we think on the sweet season that winter has supplanted. In the middle of the " Complaint of Bucking- ham " there is another powerful eflFect of contrast. Buckingham swoons at the recollection of a dependant's treachery ; and while he lies between death and life, the poet relieves the horrors of the scene by a description of midnight peace : — " Midnight was come, and every vital thing With sweet sound sleep their weary limbs did rest ; Tlie beasts were still, the little birds that sing Now sweetly slept beside their mothers' breast : The old and all were shrouded in their nest. The waters calm, the cruel seas did cease, The woods, the fields, and all things held their peace. The golden stars were whirl'd amid their race, And on the earth did laugh with twinkling light, When each thing, nestled in his resting-place, Forgat day's pain with pleasure of the night : The hare had not the greedy hounds in sight. The fearful deer of death stood not in doubt. The partridge dreamt not of the falcon's foot. The ugly bear now minded not the stake. Nor how the cruel mastives do him tear ; The stag lay still unroused from the brake, The foamy hoar feared not the hunter's spear. All thing was still in desert, bush, and brear. With quiet heart now from their travails ceast, Soundly they slept in midst of all their rest." THOMAS SACKVILLE. 149 The tragedy of "Gorboduc" was written by one profoundly interested "in grave problems of state, and was designed for an audience whose interests were also deeply political. Gorboduc, a fabulous King of Britain, B.C. 500, takes counsel about dividing his realm in his lifetime between his two sons, Ferrex and Porrex, and makes the division against the advice of his wisest counsellors. Ferrex and Porrex are jealous of each other : this jealousy is fanned by mischievous flatterers : Porrex, the younger, suddenly issues from his own dominions with an invading army and puts his brother to death : in revenge, he is assassinated by their mother Videna : finally, Videna and Gorboduc are murdered by the populace to avenge the assassination of Porrex, and the race of Brutus being thus extinguished, the kingdom is left a prey to contending factions. The story gives ample scope for the display of political wisdom ; and the various opportunities are used with a fulness that no doubt sustained the interest of Elizabeth and her courtiers, though it would be dull enough to the play-goers of our time. But the story contains also tragic materials of universal interest. The unnatural jealousy of Ferrex and Porrex, inflamed by devilish suggestions to the horror of fratricide; the love of Videna for her eldest son, begetting the fierce thirst for a revenge so monstrous ; the blind fury of the populace lighting upon inno- cent old Gorboduc, whose only crime was infatuated parental fond- ness ; and the final reduction of a well-ordered prosperous kingdom to a confused and embroiled anarchy, form no ordinary complica- tion of human passions and human weakness leading to tragic consequences. Although, however, Sackville is the author of the first extant tragedy in the English language, and though it deserves all Pope's encomium for its propriety of sentiments, unaffected perspicuity, easy flow of numbers, " chastity, correctness, and gravity," he is not to be called the " founder of English tragedy." That title is reserved for INIarlowe. The reason for the seeming inconsistency is, that Sackville adhered to classic models, and did not adapt him- self to the changed mode of representation. There is a radical diflference between " Gorboduc " and the form of tragedy that established itself on the English stage. The actors of Greek and Roman tragedy, to suit their large public theatres, were raised on thick-soled buskins, and stuffed out to more than human bulk. Thus stiffened, they could not represent animated action, and were forced to suppose such action to take place behind the scenes, and to communicate the state of aft airs to the audience, in narrative, soliloquy, and dialogue. English actors, on the other hand, were hampered by no bodily encumbrance, and were free to engage in battle, murder, and violent struggle : and thus it was possible for English dramatists to bring the action on the stage. Apart, there- 150 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. fore, from the debated question of good or bad taste in filling the stage with violent action, it is clear that this was not possible for the classical dramatist, whereas it was possible for the English dramatist. Now Sackville, in our first English tragedy, did not fully avail himself of the possibilities of the modern stage. The war between Porrex and Ferrex, the murder of Porrex by Videna, the storming of the palace and the massacre of old Gorboduc by the rabble, were narrated, not represented, as they would have been by the later Elizabethan actors. It is, however, worthy of notice, that he did to some extent avail himself of the modern possibilities in the "dumb show" before the Acts. " The order and signification of the dumb show before the Fifth Act," is set down as follows : " First the drums and flutes began to sound, during which there came forth upon the stage a company of harque- bushers and of armed men, all in order of battle. These after their pieces discharged, and that the armed men had three times marched about the stage, departed, and then the drums and flutes did cease. Hereby was signified tumults, rebellions, arms, and civil wars to follow, ifec." There we have a certain anticipation of the "excursions" and hand-to-hand fighting afterwards incorporated with the play. Although, therefore, we may not call Sackville the " founder," we may very well call him the " pioneer," of English tragedy, as well as of our grand epic. VII. — EiCHARD Edwards (1523-156C) : Damon and Pythias — Paradise of Dainty Devices. About the time of the first representation of " Gorboduc," was presented also for the entertainment of her Majesty the comedy of " Damon and Pythias," which is in some respects of a higher order than the imitations of Plautus and Terence, composed for the boys of Eton or the undergraduates of the Universities. The author was Richard Edwards, Master of the Children of the Chapel Eoyal, a poet and a musician, formerly a student of Christ Church, Oxford : and he would seem to have kept in mind in whose presence his play was to be acted. It is to be presumed, from bloodthirsty Mary's preference for Hey wood and Udall, that she enjoyed a hearty laugh for its own sake ; but her successor, if we may judge from her warm commendations of " Damon and Pythias," though not averse to comic scenes of a broad character, desired to en- courage a more decorous order of play with some pretence to gravity, wisdom, and refined sentiment — an easy, pleasant, witty play, enforcing a lofty sentiment and a lesson of state, such as she and her statesmen might listen to with pleasure, and without in- curring the charge of frivolity. At any rate this was the kind of RICHARD EDWARDS. 151 play that Edwards furnished and that her Majesty commended. It is a praise of true friendship and an exposure of false friendship, endins: with the moral that — ■ 'O " The strongest guard that kings can have Are constant friends then- state to save " — and a prayer that God grant such friends to Queen Elizabeth. Edwards goes to classical story for a pair of noble friends, Damon and Pythias, and exhibits them at the Court of the tyrant Dionysius the younger in glaring contrast to two false friends, two men who pretend friendship from interested motives — Aristippus, the world- ly-wise philosopher, a ty[)e of an urbane courtier, and Carisophus, a vile type of spy and informer. The devotion of the two faith- ful friends is fiercely tried and nobly maintained, while the other partnership is dissolved the moment it ceases to be useful to one of the parties. A good deal of amusing action and witty dialogue is got out of the relations of Aristippus and Carisophus to the Court and to each other : and a passage of more boisterous entertainment is rather forcibly provided by introducing Grim, a collier of Croy- don, as jDurveyor of coals to Dionysius. Edwards starts in his prologue with very sound principles for the composition of comedy : — " In Comedies the greatest skill is this, rightly to touch All things to the (|uick, and eke to frame each person so, That by his common talk you may his nature rightly know : A Roister ought not to preach, that were too strange to hear, But as from virtue he doth swerve, so ought his words appear : The old man is sober, the young man rash, the Lover triumphing in joys, The Matron grave, the Harlot wild and full of wanton toys. Which as in one course all they no wise do agree : So correspondent to their kind their speeches ought to be." And it must be owned that he fulfils these conditions with no small success. He is not particular to realise the political or religious talk that may be sirpposed to have taken place at the Court of Syracuse, but he makes the most of the common hints of the character of Dionysius, and develops Aristippus with con- siderable spirit from the famous line of Horace — ■' Omnis Aristippuni decuit color et status et res." One very striking passage in the play is that where Damon quotes the description of Ulysses in Horace's version of the opening lines of the Odyssey as the description of "a perfect wise man " — qui mores hominum 77mltorum vidit et urbes — one who had seen cities and the manners of many different men. This ideal is significant of the coming excellence of English 152 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. drama ; and there are not wanting other evidences that observa- tion of character was then quite a mania among literary men. Edwards was the author also of a play on " Palanion and Arcite," which has not been preserved. We have, however, another monument of his poetical taste and talent in the ' Para- dise of Dainty Devices,' a miscellany of amatory and moral pieces, similar to Tottel's Miscellany. It was not published till 1576, ten years after the death of its editor. It ran through several editions before the end of the century. This paradise was de- scribed by a critic of the period as "a packet of bald rhymes"; and the description could not easily be improved. It is lugubrious and barren of genius to a degree. All the contributors write in the same doleful strain. As a whole, it gives an impression of dismal monotony ; and when we put together the productions of the several writers, we find them one and all in doleful dumps. Edwards laments the prevalence of flattery, the subtle sleights practised at Court, the slow fulfilment of promises, the general want of truth, the rapid decay of worldly beauties, the delay of his desires, the cruel power of Fortune. He denounces the frauds that beguile simple honesty : — " I see the serpent vile, that lurks under the green, How subtilly he shrouds himself that he may not be seen : And yet his foster'd bane his leering looks bewray. Wo worth the wily heads that seeks the simple man's decay ! Wo worth the feigning looks on favour that do wait ! Wo worth the feigned friendly heart that harbours deep deceit ! Wo worth the viper's brood ! thrice wo worth I say- All worldly wily heads that seeks the simple man's decay ! " His coadjutors are equally miserable and indignant against wrong- doing. W. Hunnis is eloquent in lover's melancholy : he repents the folly of misplaced affection and misspent youth : he compares himself to a dove on a leafless branch weeping and wailing and tearing its breast : finding no joy in life he desires death. He is no less unhappy in his notions of friendship. Thomas, Lord Vaux, several of Avhose pieces had appeared in Tottel's Miscellany, is also a sorrowful singer : and Jasper Heywood, Francis Kinwel- marsh, Sands, F. M., and Richard Hill, are all laid under contri- bution for poems of a grave or lugubrious cast. The liveliest of the company is Edward, Earl of Oxford. He also, indeed, be\vails the loss of his good name, and cries for help to gods, saints, sprites, powers, and howling hounds of hell ; writes of rejected loves and unattained desires, of trickling tears and irremediable pensiveness. But his wounds are obviously shallow. The sprightly verses on a reply given by Desire have more of his heart in them : — GEORGE GASCOIGNE. 153 "The lively lark did stretch her wing The messenger of morning bright : And with her cheerful voice did sing The day's approach, discharging night, When that Aurora blushing red Descried the guilt of Thetis' bed. Laradon tan tan, Tedriton teight. I went abroad to take the air, And in the meads I met a knight, Clad in carnation colour fair. I did salute the youthful wight ; Of him his name 1 did inquire ; He sighed and said, 1 am Desire. Laradon tan tan, Tedritou teight. Desire I did desire to stay, Awhile with him I craved talk : The courteous wight said me no nay, But hand in hand with me did walk. Then in desire I asked again What thing did jdease and what did pain. Laradon tan tan. He smiled and thus he answered me : Desire can have no greater pain, Than for to see another man The thing desired to obtain. No joy no greater too than this Than to enjoy what others miss. Laradon tan tan." VIII. — George Gascoigxe (1525-157 7). Within the first ten years of Elizabeth's reign another novelty was added to the drama. In 1566, George Gascoigne translated from Ariosto, for representation at Gray's Inn, the prose comedy Gli-Svppositi. This, acted under the title of " The Supposes," is the first comedy written in English prose, and in plot, situation, and character, it approaches nearer than "Damon and Pythias" to the established type of English comedy. One great tribute to its excellence is the use made of its plot and its situations by Shakespeare : the underplot in the " Taming of the Shrew " is an adaptation of the plot of " The Supposes," and a great many of the situations or relations between the various characters might be paralleled from Shakespeare's comedies. George Gascoigne, " soldier and poet "as he loved to describe himself, was the most versatile writer belonging to the first half of Elizabeth's reign : and contrived to anticipate more than one of the forms of composition in which the later Elizabethans achieved their fame. Few writers can claim a more varied list of 154 EENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. literary exploits. Besides his prose comedy, he translated from the Italian of Bandello the prose tale of " Jeronimi," perhaps the first novel printed in English : wrote the mock-heroic poem of " Dan Bartholomew," onr first attempt to rival the mock-heroic poetry of the Italians : wrote three acts of " Jocasta," the first adaptation of a Greek tragedy performed on the English stage : prepared masques for Queen Elizabeth : composed in prose a dull " tragical comedy " " The Glass of Government " : and wrote the " (Steel Glass," the first extensive English satire. His personal history is not without interest. It affords a touch- ing example of middle -age rendered miserable by thoughtless youth. When he went up from Cambridge to the Inns of Court, a vigorous, enthusiastic young fellow, " well-born, tenderly fostered, and delicately accompanied," he was ready to join friends and companions in any excitement, animal or intellectual. One of his earliest adventures in London was a temporary imprisonment during the year 1548, on a charge of dicing and other disrepu- table practices. Entering into the fashion of the time, he wrote love-verses whose coarse boisterous humour was warmly resented by the graver sort Avlien first they appeared in print. Aspiring to political distinction, he sat as a burgess for Bedford during the reign of Mary. When play-writing became the rage, he at once figured in the front of play-wrights. Before this, having impaired his estate by his extravagance, and being disinherited as a prodigal son, he had sought to retrieve his fortunes by marry- ing a rich widow ; but either the money was tied up from him for behoof of the lady's children by her former husband, or he got it into his hands and ran through it before 1572, for at that date he endeavoured to gain admission into Parliament as bur- gess for Midhurst, and was defeated by formal objections, which represented him as being a slanderous rhymer, a notorious ruffian, an atheist, a manslaughterer, and an extensive debtor lurking about in fear of apj^rehension, and seeking admission to Parlia- ment that he might be able to defy his creditors. It may have been this last iguoble motive, if not the motive of retrieving his name by brave achievements, that induced him to cross over to Holland and seek a commission under the Prince of Orange. After his return from Holland in 1573, he made shift to live by his pen. He was now well on to fifty, harassed by debt, met on all sides with cold looks, bitterly regretful of the mad follies of his youth. During his absence, some of his cjuestionable poesies had been printed, and were read with indignation by the guardians of public morality. Soon after his return, in 1575, he issued an edition of his works under the title of ' Flowers, Herbs, and Weeds.' In a prefatory epistle to " reverend divines," he apolo- gises humbly but with soine bitterness for the faults of his youth ; GEORGE GASCOIGNE. 155 and out of deference to them reprints his youthful effusions in a purified form, and with the self-accusing title of " weeds." [There is a bitterness in all his later compositions. He often writes as if experience had taught him that he must not speak evil of dignitaries, while he chafed against the enforced restraint ; in the tone of his protestations of respect, he betrayed a some- what savage sense of the injustice done him by merciless remem- brance of his misspent youtliTX Poor man : he might have written well if the world had gone -^easantly with him, butlhe was dis- concerted and embittered by coldness and suspicion; Yet he was not wholly without countenance and patronage. Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton was a steady friend to him, and might have secured him preferment had he not himself fallen into disgrace. He was asked by the Earl of Leicester to help in the pageants for the entertainment of Elizabeth in the famous reception at Kenil- worth. Still his poems have a consistent tinge of glooin!^ In the e})istle dedicatory to his "Steel Glass" (1576), he records how he was " derided, suspected, accused, and condemned ; yea, more than that, vigorously rejected when he proffered amends for his harm." "The Drum of Doomsday," "The View of Worldly Vanities," "The Shame of Sin," " The Needle's Eye," "Remedies against the Bitterness of Death," " A Delicate Diet for Dainty- mouthed Drunkards," " The Grief of Joy," " The Griefs or Dis- commodities of Lusty Youth," " The Vanities of Beauty," " The Faults of Force and Strength," " The Vanities of Activities," are the significantly cheerless titles and sub-titles of his last produc- tions. He died at Stamford towards the end of 1577. Not that Gascoigne was a man of first-rate genius. He never would have been anything higher than a versatile master of verse. But his energy was prodigious ; and the career of such energy is always an interesting spectacle. Some of the precepts in his " Notes of Instruction " ^ in verse- making may be put in evidence regarding his qualifications as a poet. The most suggestive is his advice to young poets in search of rhyme — " When you have set down your first verse, take the last word thereof, and count over all the words of the self-same sound by order of the alphabet." Another sound practical ad- vice is to use as few polysyllables as possible ; first, because the most ancient English words are of one syllable, but also because " words of one syllable will more easily fall to be short or long as occasion requireth." Characteristic of his own clearness and vigour is his advice to study perspicuity, to abstain from Latin inversions, to be sparing of poetical licences, and to avoid com- monplaces. It is remarkable, also, that he enunciates a prin- 1 Reprinted by Mr Arber along with the " Steel Glass " and the " Complaint of Philomeue." 156 EENAISSANCE AND TEANSITION. ciple Avliich is sometimes spoken of as being of later growth — " Piemember to place every word in his natural emphasis or sound • — that is to say, in such wise, and with such length or shortness, elevation or depression of syllables, as it is commonly pronounced and used." He also lays down a strict rule of cajsura. The " Jocasta," an adaptation from the "Phcenissse" of Eurip- ides, contains some powerful situations, but they are lost in the mass of tedious narrative dialogue. The blank verse has every appearance of having been patched up hurriedly. One of the best passages is the interchange of defiance between Etiocles and Poly- nices in the presence of their mother : it would have been difficult to destroy the tragic force of such a situation. The tale of Ferdinando Jeronimi and Leonora de Valasco is a voluptuous story of warm but fickle love, won easily and lost through exacting causeless jealousy. It was probably one item in the education of that generation of poets in the arts and ways of love : its main lesson, apart from its exquisite little windings and turnings, being that where a woman yields her whole heart she is implacably offended when she discovers that she is not trusted. In style the tale is the parent of the tales of Lyly and Greene. Its "euphuism" is not so methodical as euphuism strictly so called — the developed mannerism of Lyly : but one might quote from Gascoigne passages that contain all the elements of that mannerism. Gascoigne, however, was too robust a nature to develop this sort of figurative language into a system. After a euphuistic passage, he begins a new paragraph by saying — " to speak English." Jlis love-verses are not the verses of a sentimental inamorato, or impassioned lover. He woos more like Diomede than like Troilus, praising his lady's beauty with humorous ardour, and bidding her " farewell with a mischief " when she proves incon- stant. Grave and reverend divines had some reason to complain of a poet who published three sonnets written upon the occasion of presenting his mistress with a copy of the " Golden Ass " of Apuleius. His more serious lyrics have an impetuous movement and rough fire in them that make us think of poor George as an imperfect Byron, — resembling Byron as he did not a little in his life, and complaining of the same identification of himself with hisjieroes. There is abundance of coiuic vigour and mad rollicking humour in " Dan Bartholomew of Bath." ^ It may be made another point of comparison with Byron ; but its general strain bears more re- semblance to Lockhart's " Mad Banker of Amsterdam." The hero's courtship and deceptive triumph, his discomfiture and dolo- rous laments, his Last Will and Testament, his Subscription and Seal, his Farewell, and " The Reporter's " conclusion in the style GEOEGE GASCOIGNE. 157 of the ' Mirror for ]\ras;istrates,' are executed with fljreat spirit. The style The account of his falling in love will give an idea of the " For though he had in all his learned lore Both read good rules to bridle fantasj', And all good authors taught him evermore To love the mean and leave extremity ; Yet Kind hatli left him such a quality, That at the last he ({uite forgot his books, And fastened fancy with the fairest looks. For proof : when green youth leapt out of his eye, And left him now a man of middle age, His hap was j^'t with wandering looks to spy A fair young imp of proper personage, Eke born (as he) of honest parentage : And truth to tell, my skill it cannot serve To })raise her beauty as it did deserve. First for her head : the hairs were not of gold, But of some othei' metal far more fine, Whereof each crinet seemed, to behold. Like glistering wires against the sun that shine ; And therewitlial the blazing of her ej'ue Was like the beams of Titan, truth to tell, Which glads us all that in this world do dwell. Upon her cheeks the lih- and the rose Did intermeet with equal change of hue. And in her gifts no lack I can suppose But that at last (alas) she was untrue : Which hinging fault, because it is not new Nor seldom seen in kits of C'ressid's kind, I marvel not, nor bear it much in mind. That mouth of hers which seemed to flow with niell In speech, in voice, in tender touch, in taste : That dimpled chin wherein delight did dwell, That ruddy lip wherein was pleasure placed ; Those well-shaped hands, tine arms, and slender waist, With all the gifts which gave her any grace, Were smiling baits which caught fond fools apace." " The Glass of Government " belongs to the broken-down and disheartened period of his life. It was published in 1575. He calls it a tragical comedy to illustrate the rewards and punish- ments of virtues and vices, consecrates the title-page with a quo- tation from Scripture, and fills a preliminary fly-leaf with pious, loyal, patriotic, and moral saws. The prologue forbids all ex- pectations of merry jest and vain delight, referring wanton play- goers to interludes and Italian toys, and announcing that the comedy is not a comedy in Terence's sense, but a mirror to lords 158 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. and citizens, and a beacon to rasli youth. The argument is the history of four young men, two of quick capacity, who become dissipated, and end their careers in shame — two of dull under- standing, but steady industry, who are preferred to honourable positions. The play is saturated with good advice, the education of the young men affording opportunities for commonplace counsel and the exposition of learned precepts by exemplary parents and teachers, possessing the profoundest sense of their responsibilities. Copious citations are made from Scripture, and from Greek and Roman moralists and poets. It is virtually a moral-play, with in- dividual names given to the abstractions, and the parasite of Latin comedy in place of the Vice of the Moralities. "The Steel Glass" shows poor Gascoigne sunk deep in the slough of despondency and bitterness. And in one of his smaller poems it is sad to find him thus looking back to the strength of his youth, and reflecting that strength is after all a dangerous thing, which may in the end prove to be a less bountiful gift of nature than weakness : — " I have been strong (I thank my God therefore) And did therein rejoice as most men did : I leapt, I ran, I toiled and travailed sore, My niif^ht and main did covet to be kid.^ Bnt lo : behold : my merry days amid, One heady deed my haughty heart did break, And since (full oft) I wished I had been weak. The weakling he sits buzzing at his book, Or kee)is full close, and loves to live in quiet : For lack of force he warily doth look In every dish which may disturb his diet. He neither fights nor runneth after riot. But stays his steps by mean and measure too, And longer lives than many strong men do." IX. — Thomas Churchyard (i 520-1604). Much tamer in every way than Gascoigne was this other soldier and poet, yet he is an interesting man, if for no other reason than that he saw the wonderful growth of the Elizabethan literature from its beginnings to its maturity. He lived for some two years in the service of the Earl of Surrey, contributed to Tottel's Mis- cellany and to the ' ]\Iirror for Magistrates,' and survived to issue several books contemporaneously with the plays of Shakespeare. He began life as a gay gallant or " royster " at the Court of Henry VIII., and he saw the accession of James I. Though his poetry is of small account, his life was eventful and interest- 1 Known. TEANSLATOES OF SENECA AND OVID. 159 iug. In the war with Scotland under Edward VI. he was taken prisoner ; being ransomed, he returned to Court, found himself forgotten and neglected, and turned his face, swearing, "as long as he his five wits had, to come in Court no more." He courted a widow, who shamelessly told him he had too little money for her : whereupon, in the rage of his disappointment, he broke his lute, burnt his books and MSS., and went abroad to the Emperor as a soldier of fortune. He served in Mary's wars with France in the last year of her reign ; was taken prisoner ; became very popular among the cul- tivated French, and rewarded their courtesy by cleverly escaping to England. He lived through the whole of the reign of Eliza- beth, engaging in various warlike adventures, for which he seems to have received very poor recompense, and making some effort to live by his pen. His chief writings,^ besides the stories of Lord Mowbray and Shore's Wife in the ' Mirror for Magistrates,' were extracts from his own experience ; — Churchyard's Chips, 1565; Churchyard's Choice, 1579; Churchyard's Charge, "alight bundle of lively discourses," 1580; Churchyard's Challenge, 1593; and Churchyard's Charity, "a musical consort of heavenly har- mony," 1595. In these works he appears as a garrulous, gossip- ing old fellow, fond of reciting his own exploits, and overflowing with good advice and general goodwill — on easy confidential terms with the public. So far as his works aflbrd indications, he was tolerably happy in his old age. There would seem to have been a change in his circumstances between 1565 and 1580. In 1565 he narrated his own life in most lugubrious Mirror for Magistrates strain, under the title of "A tragical discourse of the unhappy man's life." In 1578 he translated Ovid De Tridihus. But in 1580 he gave another version of his life in dancing ballad couplets as "a story translated out of French," dwelling with par- ticular gusto on his powers of amusing and gaining the friend- ship of his enemies during his periods of captivity in Scotland and France. He kept on writing with great activity till the very last, publishing no less than thirty-five works during the last twenty- five years of his long life. Such was the Nestor of the Eliza- bethan heroes. X. — Translators of Seneca and Ovid. Our translators were drawn to Seneca by the same feelings that led to the production of the 'Mirror for Magistrates.' They found in him a similar vein of declamation on the downfall 1 For reprints see ' Bibliogrcapliical Miscellauies,' Oxford, 1813; Frondes Caducic, Aucliinleck Press, 1816-17 ; and (specially) ' Chips concerning Scot- land,' edited, with Life, by George Chalmers, 1817. IGO RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. of greatness, the evanescent character of prosperity, the slipperi- ness of the heights of pride. Tliomas Newton, who collected the translations of the several tragedies in 1581, enlarged expressly on their moral tone. He affected to believe that Seneca might be charged with encouraging ambition, cruelty, incontinence, &c. ; and affirmed in denial of any such charge that "in the whole catalogue of heathen writers there is none that does so much with gravity of philosophical sentences, weightiness of sappy words, and authority of sound matter, to beat down sin, loose life, dissolute dealing, and unbridled sensuality." It is not worth while, if it were possible, to recall the person- alities of the several translators. The first of them was Jasper Heywood, then an Oxford undergraduate, who set to woi-k to translate the ' Troas,' immediately after the publication of the ' Mirror for Magistrates ' in 1559. He was followed by Alexander Nevile, John Studley, and Thomas Nuce : and the separate trans- lations were collected into one volume by Thomas Newton in 1 58 1. The translations are avowedly free. In his preface to the 'Troas,' Heywood says that he has endeavoured to keep touch with the Latin, not word for word or verse for verse, but in such a way as to expound the sense ; and Nevile, who Avas but sixteen when he wrote, and whose preface is an amusing study of inflated precocity and stilted moralising, boldly affirmed his intention of wandering from his author, roving where he listed, adding and subtracting at pleasure. Of course none of the translators make the remotest approach to the style of Seneca : they simply trans- mute him into the poetical commonplaces of Lydgate and the ' Mirror.' Look, for instance, at Studley's rendering of the in- vocation of Medea in the Fourth Act : — " flittering flocks of grisly ghosts that sit in silent seat, ugsonie Bugs, Goblins grim of hell, I you entreat ! lowering Chaos, dungeon blind • And dreadful darken'd pit Where Ditis niulHed up in clouds of blackest shades doth sit ! wretched woful wawling souls your aid I do implore. That linked lie with jingling chains on wailing Limbo shore ! mossy den where death doth couch his ghastly carrion face : Release your pangs, sprites, and to this wedding hie apace. Cause ye the snaggy wheel to pause that rents the carcase bound ; Permit Ixion's racked limbs to rest upon the ground ; TRANSLATOES OF SENECA AND OVID. 161 Let liunger-bitten Tantalus with gaunt and pined paunch, Sup by Pirene's gulphed stream, his swelling thirst to staunch." A collector of " sound and fury " would find many amusing passages in these translations. At the same time, the raw material, very raw though it was, may have been useful to Shake- speare or any dramatist that knew how to refine it. It is not im- jDossible that Shakespeare derived from these rude translations some hints for his incomparable studies of oppressed and desperate women. What drew Arthur Golding to translate Ovid's Metamorphoses, is hard to conjecture. If it had been Ovid's ' Art of Love,' one might have pointed to the translation as part of the amatory movement in literature, standing to the translation of Seneca as Tottel's Miscellany to the 'Mirror for Magistrates.' But Golding was not the sort of man from whom one would expect a transla- tion of an amatory work. He was an indefatigable translator from Latin, but his subjects generally were of a different cast. He began in 1562 by translating with fervent Protestant zeal a brief treatise on the burning of Bucer and Phagius in the time of Queen Mary, setting forth " tlie fantastical and tyrannous dealings of the Eomish Church, together with the godly and modest regiment of the true Christian Church." The tract is picturesque and forcible. His next performance was a translation of Aretine's history of the wars between " the Imperials and the Goths for the possession of Italy," published in 1563. He trans- lated from Justin in 1564; Ccesai''s Commentaries in 1565; and numerous ecclesiastical and other works. His translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses was completed in 1567. It is not very exact, nor calculated to convey an idea of the poet's exquisite delicacy of expression ; but it was quite good enough to reveal to non-classical readers a new world of graceful fancies. Shake- speare must have revelled in it, denuding the exquisite fancies of what was rough in the manner of their presentation, and letting them lie in his mind, and stimulate his imagination to beget many others of the same kind. The following is a sjjecimen which may have been in Shakespeare's mind when he imagined the station of Mercury new lighted on a heaven-kissing hill : — " And thereupon he call'd his son that Maia had him born, Commanding Argus should bo killed. He made no long abode, But tied his feathers to his feet, and took his charmed rod (With which he bringeth things asleep, and fetcheth souls from hell,) And put his hat upon his head ; and when that all was well, L 1G2 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. He leaped from his fatlier's towers and down to earth he flew, And there both hat and wings also he lightly from him threw, Retaining nothing but his staff, the which he closely held Between his elbow and his side, and through the common field Went plodding like some good plain soul that had some flock to feed." Prefixed to the work is an epistle also in Alexandrines, moralis- ing the various fables, asking the pious reader to understand good men by " gods," and to see in Fate and Fortune aspects of the eternal Providence ; and arguing that, though the Scriptures are the only true fountains of knowledge, yet much may be learnt from these pagan writers when rightly interpreted. The following is part of the moral of Phaeton : — " This fable also doth advise all parents and all such As bring up youth to take good heed of cockering them too much." 1G3 CHAPTER lY. EDMUND SPENSER. (1552-1598.) I. — His Life and Chakactbr. Although, in Dryden's phrase, " Spenser more than once insin- uates that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body," there can be no doubt that Spenser's chief impulse in the composition of his princi[)al poem was derived from Ariosto and Tasso. It is, indeed, nut difficult to adduce passages from the ' Faery Queen,' founded on Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory. Spenser was a most learned poet, more so probably than any great English poet, except Mr Swinburne ; and he assimilated and incorporated mate- rial from many predecessors — English, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek. "E. K.," the inspired commentator on his 'Shepherd's Calendar,' after enumerating as writers of pastoral poetry Theoc- ritus, Virgil, Mantuanus, Petrarca, and Boccaccio, comes finally to Marot, Sanazarro, " and also divers other excellent both Italian and French poets," and adds, "whose footing this author every- where followeth, yet so as few, but they be well scented, can trace him out." Our poet laid all under contribution, not stealing clumsily and mechanically, but using the products of other imaginations as food for his own. The Italian masters, un- doubtedly, were his chief models and exemplars, although he never followed them to the oppression, still less to the suppres- sion, of his own spirit. The ' Faery Queen ' is of the same kin- dred with the ' Orlando Furioso ' and the ' Gerusalemme Liberata.' In Spenser's poem, perhaps, the allegory had greater generative force : but all three agree in the essential respect of having the elements of chivalrous romance used by great artists for purely artistic purposes. The translations of Ariosto and Tasso executed about the time of the appearance of the ' Faery Queen,' are a proof of the interest 164 EDMUND SPENSER: "jthen prevailing in these poems of chivalry. A translation of I Ariosto's ' Orlando Furioso,' by Sir John Harrington, was pub- lished in 1 59 1 : one translation of Tasso's 'Godfrey of Builoigne,' i or 'Jerusalem Delivered,' by Richard Carew, in 1594, and another, /more celebrated, by Sir Edward Fairfax, in 1600. Both Harring- ' ton's and Fairfax's are smooth and copious, and supplied 'Eng- land's Parnassus ' with many choice extracts. They are in ottava rinia, and are far from having Spenser's inimitable music ; yet, if an unobservant reader were set down to some of those extracts, the general resemblance of strain, of matter and imagery, is such that he would probably refer them at once to Spenser.^ Spenser's lineage and life have been made subjects for laborious inquiry and nice speculation. He was born in London, and is supposed to have belonged to a Lancashire branch of the ennobled family of Spencer. The date of his birth is generally fixed about 1552. He entered Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a sizar, in 1569 ; became B.A. in 1573, M.A. in 1576. After his residence at Cam- bridge, he is believed to have gone to the north of England ; to have returned south in 1578 by the advice of his college friend Gabriel Harvey ; and to have been introduced by Harvey to Sir Philip Sidney. Sidney and the Earl of Leicester took him by the hand and advanced his fortunes. In 1579 he dedicated to Sidney his first poetical effort, 'The Shepherd's Calendar,' containing twelve pastorals, one for each month, classified as moral, plaintive, and recreative. About this time, in his correspondence with Harvey, mention is made of various works now lost, but probably, with the exception of his ' Nine Comedies,' partially embodied in what he afterwards pub- lished. / By that time, also, he had begun the ' Faery Queen.' ) In 1580, at the age of twenty-seven, he entered upon official life : in that year he went to Ireland as secretary to the viceroy, Lord Grey. He is usually said to have returned to England in 1582, when Lord Grey was recalled : and his business employment for the rest of his life is ignored. Only three facts are known, but they are significant. In 1581 he was appointed clerk to the 1 Sir John Harrington might be taken as a typical Elizabethan courtier — a handsome young fellow, possessed of a keen eye for fun as well as for beauty, and a very ready command of language. Besides translating ' Orlando Furioso,' which the Queen is said to have imposed upon him as a punishment for translat- ing the episode of ' Alcina and Euggiero,' he wrote epigrams, composed ' Poliudor and Flostella,' a mock-heroic poem in couplets, full of fresh feeling and clever- ness, and expounded the merits of one of the most valuable sanitary contriv- ances of civilised life in a prose treatise — ' Ajax Metamorphosed ' — boiling over with gross Rabelaisian humour. Fairfax was a quieter man, of secluded studious haliits. Dryden, in tlie preface to his faVjles, is loud in praise of the beauty of Fairfax's numbers, which, he says, Waller himself owned to have been his model. " Milton was the poetical son of Spenser, and Mr Waller of Fairfax." HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 165 Irish Court of Chancery. In 1588 he resigned that appointment for the office of Clerk to the Council of Munster. In 1598 he was recommended by the Queen as a suitable person to be Sheriff of Cork ; but had to flee the country in less than a month after- wards. For eighteen years, therefore, with the exception of two brief ascertained visits to England, the author of the ' Faery Queen ' remained in Ireland, nominally at least, as an official clerk ; and the last appointment would seem to show that his duties were more than nominal, and were efficiently discharged. In 1586 his friends obtained for him a grant of three thousand acres of forfeited land at Kilcolman, near Cork. It being a con- dition of the grant that the holder should cultivate the soil, our poet probably at once went into residence. There, on the borders of a lake, amid beautiful scenery, with easy official duties, and with occasional visits from his friends — Sir Walter Raleigh among the number— he placidly elaborated his 'Faery Queen.' In 1590 he crossed St George's Channel in Raleigh's company, with three books ready for the printer ; saw to the publication of them ; was introduced to Elizabeth ; and recrossed to Kilcolman, probably in the spring of 1591, with a substantial proof of her Majesty's favour in the shape of a grant for a yearly pension of fifty pounds, and the consequent honorary title of Poet-Laureate. In 1591, some minor poems of his were published, with or without his superintendence: "The Ruins of Time," "The Tears of the Muses," "Virgil's Gnat," " Prosopopceia, or Mother Hubbard's Tale," "Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterfly," and "Visions of the World's Vanity." About the same time ^ he wrote his " Daphnaida," an elegy on the death of a noble lady. His next publications were in 1595 : when Ponsonby issued in separate volumes, and at different times, ' Colin Clout's Come Home Again ' (a poem interesting from its allusions to his contempo- raries), along with a lament for Sir Philip Sidney, and his "Amoretti" and " E})ithalamion," love-sonnets and a marriage- song, occasioned by his wooing and its successful termination in 1594. In 1596 he went over to England and superintended the publication oFthree more Books of the ' Faery Queen,' along with a second edition of the first three. In the same year appeared in one volume his " Prothalamion " (spousal verses), the elegiac "Daphnaida" already mentioned, and four Hymns. In 1598 he was driven from Kilcolman by the outbreak of Tyrone's rebellion. His wife and himself escaped, but in the hurry and panic they left a little child behind them, and never saw it again. Their house was sacked and burned. He died soon after in London, January 1 Probably before. It is dated Jan. i, 1591 ; and we know (Preface to 'Sheplieril's Calendar') that Spenser made the year begin with January, and not, as was then usual, with March. 166 EDMUND SPENSER: 1599. His ' View of the tState of Ireland,' a prose dialogue, com- pleted in 1596, was not published till 1633. " Short curling hair, a full moustache, cut after the pattern of Lord Leicester's, close-clipped beard, heavy eyebrows, and under them thoughtful brown eyes, whose upper eyelids weigh them dreamily down ; a long and straight nose, strongly developed, answering to a long and somewhat spare face, with a Avell-formed sensible-looking forehead ; a mouth almost obscured by the mous- tache, but still showing rather full lips, denoting feeling, well set together, so that the warmth of feeling shall not run riot, with a touch of sadness in them ; — such is the look of Spenser, as his portrait hands it down to us."^ What may have been the extent of his official duties we do not know; but, to judge from internal evidence, no man ever lived 'more exclusively in and for poetry than Spenser. We try in vain for any image to express the voluptuous completeness of his im- mersion in the colours and music of poetry. He was a man of reserved and gentle disposition, and he turned luxuriously from the rough world of facts to the ampler ether, the diviner air, the softer and more resplendent forms of Arcadia, and the delightful land of Faery. While the dramatists were labouring to make the past present, his imagination worked in an opposite line : his effort was to remove hard, clear, visible, and tangible actualities to dreamy regions, and there to reproduce them in a glorified state with softer and warmer forms and colours, or, as the case might be, in a degraded state, with attributes exaggerated in hideousness. His own Pastoral land and Faery land he had fur- nished with a geography, a population, and a history of their own, and there chiefly his imagination loved to dwell and pursue its creative work. But his spirit, restless and insatiate in its search V for deliverance from the cold and definite world, never disdained to enter the abodes prepared by other poets. He expatiated freely through the realms of ancient mythology, and often soared uj) and poised his wing in mystical contemplation of love and beauty. More than one of Spenser's contemporaries expressed admira- tion of his " deep C(mceit." The luxuriance of leaf and blossom in his poems is deeply rooted in meditation. The profound alle- gory of the ' Faery Queen ' has been supposed to be alarming to the easy general reader ; and several critics, out of a laudable desire to extend Spenser's popularity, have assured us that we may give over all anxiety about the hidden meaning and yet lose none of the enjoyment of the plain story. If, indeed, we desire 1 Rev. 6. W. Kitcliin, iu Clai'eudon Press edition of ' Faery Queen. ' HIS LIFE AND CHAKACTER. 167 to understand fully the rich activity and subtlety of the poet's imagination, we do well to get possession of the allegorical ground- work, and study from that point the luxuriant growth of enfolding images. But that effort is necessary only if we desire to feel stems growing and leaves and flowers bursting about us with un- ceasing energy and boundless profusion. Many have asserted, and Christopher North indignantly denied, that Spenser's imagination overpowered his judgment. The meaning of the assertors seems to be, that Spenser's fertile mind conceived many images that offend against good taste or that twine themselves together with bewildering intricacy, and his judgment was not strong enough to keep them back. In all such cases the critic can speak only for himself. Warton, and many sober- minded people who read poetry with a certain amount of pleasure, would doubtless often be bewildered and occasionally disgusted in journeying through the intricate paths and encountering some of the monstrous personages of the land, of Faery. Wilson was too enraptured with the poem to be conscious of any such faults : he was not, perhaps, so easily bewildered nor so easily disgusted by strongly painted "lumps of foul deformity." Spenser Avas not without a full share of the poet's alleged peculiar failings, vanity and irritability. Like Sir Walter Scott, our other great poet of chivalrous heroism, he loved to dwell on his ancestry : he somewhat ostentatiously claimed kindred with the noble house of Spencer. Over his natural pride in the exer- cise of his great gift, he spread but a thin disguise : his trans- parent compliments to himself are almost unique. He wrote, or procured or allowed a mysterious friend to write, under the initials 'E. K., an introduction and explanatory notes to his ' Shepherd's Calendar,' comparing this trial of his wings with similar essays by Theocritus and Virgil, and announcing him as "one that in time shall be able to keep wing with the best." Among the shepherds he represents himself under the names of Colin Clout and young Cuddy, and makes other shepherds speak of these sweet players on the oaten pipe with boundless admiration as the joy of their fellows and the rivals of Calliope herself.^ As for the poet's irritability, that appears in the covert bitterness of his attacks on Roman Catholics and other subjects of his dislike, but most un- mistakably in his ' View of the State of Ireland.' His temper Avas too thin for the asperities of public life. These, however, are the unfavourable aspects of the poet's amiable nature. ]\Iore favour- able aspects of the same reserved meditative disposition appear in his warm gratitude to benefactors, his passion for temperance and purity, and his deep religious earnestness. 1 See also Aj)pendix. 168 EDMUND SPENSER: 11. — His Words, Metres, and General Form. Consistently with his shrinking from the cold realities of the present, Spenser gave a softer tinge to his diction by here and there introducing a word of the Chaucerian time. Even his dic- tion was to be slightly mellowed with antiquity; he loved now and then to have upon his tongue a word with this soft unction round it. It is strange that the archaic character of his diction should ever have been doubted. The fact was recognised at the time. F. Beaumont, in an epistle prefixed to Speght's Chaucer, says that " Maister Spenser, following the counsel of TuUy in De Oratore for reviving of ancient words, hath adorned his own style with that beauty and gravity which Tully speaks of, and his much frequenting of Chaucer's ancient speeches causeth many to allow far better of him than otherwise they would." And a still better and earlier authority, the shadowy E. K., anticipated the objec- tions to disused words, saying that the poet, " having the sound of ancient poets still ringing in his ears, mought needs in singing, hit out some of their tunes." "But whether he useth them by such casualty and custom, or of set purpose and choice, as thinking them fittest for such rustical rudeness of shepherds, either for that their rough sounds would make his rhymes more ragged and rustical, or else because such old and obsolete words are most used of country folk, sure I think, and I think not amiss, that they bring great grace, and as one would say authority to the verse." " Ancient solemn words are a great ornament." " Tully saith that ofttimes an ancient word maketh the style seem grave, and as it were reverend, no otherwise than we honour and reverence grey hairs for a certain religious regard which we have of old age." Yet what Spenser prided himself upon was denied of him by some modern admirers, who thought it a detraction. Our poet had, however, in the rich music of his verse, a fuller protection to interpose between himself and the harsh discords of real life. He was a great metrician. With his friend Cabriel Harvey at Cambridge, with Sidney at Penshurst, with Raleigh at Kilcolman, his talk ran often on the subject of metres. He inter- ested himself in Harvey's enthusiasm for unrhymed dactylic hex- ameters ; but though he approved of them in theory, and produced a specimen with which he was himself highly pleased, he was not so unwise as to waste upon the experiment a poem of any length. Some of the stanzas in his ' Shepherd's Calendar ' are exceedingly pretty, particularly the light, airy, childlike jig of the contest between Perigot and Willy. lUit his greatest achievement was the stanza that bears his name, which he formed by adding an Alex- andrine to the stave used in Chaucer's Monk's Tale. In the last HIS WOEDS, METRES, AND GENERAL FORM. 169 great revival of poetry this stanza was warmly adopted. " All poets," says Wilson, "have, since Warton's time, agreed in think- ing the Spenserian stanza the finest ever conceived by the soul of man — and what various delightful specimens of it have we now in our language ! Thomson's ' Castle of Indolence,' Shenstone's ' Schoolmistress,' Seattle's ' Minstrel,' Burns's ' Cotter's Saturday Night,' Campbell's ' Gertrude of Wyoming,' Scott's ' Don Koder- ick,' Wordsworth's ' Female Vagrant,' Shelley's ' Kevolt of Islam,' Keats's 'Eve of St Agnes,' Crofy's 'Angel of the World,' Byron's ' Childe Harold ' ! " It lends itself with peculiar harmony to im- passioned meditation and luxurious description. Spenser's sonnets, entitled " Amoretti," composed to commem-^ orate his love for the lady whom he afterwards married, are very intricate in form. They consist of three quatrains closed in by a couplet, the first quatrain being interwoven with the second and the second with the third. They obey the rule that confines each sonnet to a distinct idea. Their beauties, however, are wholly tech- nical ; their thin pale sentiment and frigid conceits are fatal to any- thing like profound human interest. Very difterent from the involved and timid sonnets is the trium- phant " Epithalamion," which celebrates the completion of the same courtship. I know no poem that realises so directly and vividly the idea of winged words : no poem whose verses soar and precipitate themselves with such a vehemence of impetuous ardour and exultation. Spenser followed the example of Virgil in trying his skill first upon pastoral poetry. This poetical exercise of his has been criticised by various standards, and pronounced wanting. The 'Shepherd's Calendar' was unhappily praised by Dryden as show- ing mastery of the northern dialect, and as being an exact imita- tion of Theocritus : this was subsequently seen to be a mistake, and, the standard of comparison being retained, Spenser was blamed because he did not imitate Theocritus. Amid the mass of confused criticism of these pastorals, where each critic pronounces from some vague ideal of what pastoral poetry ought to be, the fundamental objection has always been that they do not represent the actual life of shej^herds. Shepherds in real life do not sit in the shade playing on pan-pipes, improvising songs for wagers of lambs and curiously carved bowls, and discoursing in rhymed verse about morality, religion, and politics. But it was not Spenser's design to paint real shepherds, or to copy the features of real pastoral life. His shepherds are allegorical representatives of his friends and his enemies, and exponents of his artistic, moral, and other theories, the whole drifted into a land of the imagina- tion. If we are asked why he chose such a disguise, we must go 170 EDMUND SPENSER: back to his character, and point to his turn for the picturesque, and his delight in withdrawing from direct contact with the actual world. He loved to wrap hard facts in soft and picturesque allegory. Sir Philip Sidney killed at Zutphen becomes the shep- herd Astrophel of Arcadia torn to death by a savage beast, and transformed along with his love Stella into a red and blue flower like a star. Such an Arcadia is purely fanciful, and must be criticised as such not from an unsympathetic distance but out of the mood in which it was conceived. If, indeed, it is said that in the strictly pastoral parts of the poem, Spenser is far inferior to Theocritus, that he neglects the minuter daily and hourly changes of aspect in field and sky, and that there is too little sunshine in his Arcadia, one can understand this criticism as indicating posi- tive defects : the poet might have brought more of this into his Arcadia with the effect of enriching it, and without doing harm to his design. But we miss the whole intention and effect of the - I)oetry if we exact from the poet an adherence to the conditions of the actual life of shepherds. The picturesque environment of hill, wood, dale, silly sheep and ravenous wild beasts, is all that the poet cares for : if he helps us to remember that we are amongst such scenery, he has fulfilled his design. We are not to look for North of England dialect or North of England scenery : if we would enjoy Spenser's Arcadia, we must simply let ourselves float into a dreamland of unsubstantial form and colour. The pastoral surroundings are of value only in so far as they colour and transfigure the sentiments of the poetry. It was again in professed imitation of Virgil that our poet raised his pipe "from rustic tunes to chant heroic deeds." His knights are as shadowy as his shepherds. Spenser's design Avas not, like Sir Walter Scott's, to revive in imagination the manners, customs, and adventures of chivalry. In the ' Faery Queen,' as in the ' Shepherd's Calendar,' his design was to translate bare realities into poetical form and colour. Stating the general scope of the work, and passing over his adumbrations of living charac- ters, we may say that his knights and fair ladies are virtues impersonated ; his monsters and feigned fair ladies, vices imper- ^ sonated. So far there is a resemblance between the ' Shepherd's Calendar' and the 'Faery Queen:' both lead us into allegorical worlds. But the two worlds are very different ; they rose up in the poet's imagination at the bidding of very different emotions. In the ' Shepherd's Calendar ' all is pan-piping and peace, com- posed sadness and grave moral reflection. In the ' Faery Queen,' on the other hand, we are brought into a land of storms and sun- shine, fierce encounter and rapturous love-making ; we are hurried in rapid change through lively emotions of mystery, terror, volup- tuous security, heartrending pity, and admiration of superhuman THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 171 prowess — through various scenes, from the "Den of Error" to the "House of Holiness," from the "Bower of Bliss" to the "Gardens of Adonis" : now hideousness triumphs, and beauty is in distress ; and anon the gates are burst open by a blast of Arthur's horn, or Britomart charges with her charmed spear. The pastoral allegory is insipid if we ignore the hidden meaning ; but Faery land is a land of wonder and beauty, where we need v remember the hidden meaning only if we desire to pay just homage to the genius of the poet. Dryden and many others have complained of occasional intri- cacy and incoherence in the 'Faery Queen.' The admirers of the poet should not meet this complaint by denying the fact : for a fact it is that Spenser does often violate the plain laws of space and time.^ To maintain coherence, prolonged actions must some- times be supposed to happen in no time : and personages are some- times present or absent as it suits the poet's convenience, coming or going without remark. The proper excuse is to say that the scene is laid " in the delightful land of Faery," where perplexity and confusion are as natural as in a dream. The real explanation probably is, that the poet wrote with great facility, and that in " winging his flight rapidly through the prescribed labyrinth of sweet sounds," he sometimes sang himself to sleep, and forgot exactly where he was. III. — The Chief Qualities of his Poetry. In Thomas Campbell's criticism of the ' Faery Queen,' it is said that, " on a comprehensive view of the whole work, we cer- tainly miss the charm of strength, symmetry, and rapid or in- \ teresting progress." The criticism, like all others from the same pen, is carefully studied and just ; but it is somewhat startling v Avithout farther explanation of the terms. By rapid or interesting progress we must not understand rapid or interesting succession of events ; we must lay emphasis on the word progy-ess. Incidents succeed one another cpiickly and suddenly as in a dream : but they do not progress with the interest of increasing suspense towards their professed end, the accomplishment of the commands of Gloriana, "that greatest glorious Queen of Faery laud." Nor, had the poem been completed, is it easy to see how the additional cantos could have corrected what we have, and made part answer to part with even balance : the poet makes no apparent effort to proportion with nice care the weight and space assigned to each personage, situation, and adventure. This will be readily allowed. But the critic's meaning in saying that we miss the charm of strength, is more liable to be misunderstood. 1 See, for very decided cases, Book IV., Cantos 8, 9, 10. 172 EDMUND SPENSER: If by " strength " is meant the sentiment inspired by the ideal presence of superior might, then, so far from missing that charm in the ' Faery Queen,' we are kept under its fascination from beginning to end of the poem : imposing situations and mighty beings surround us on every hand. We are carried through waste wildernesses and interminable forests, the haunts of monsters and powerful magicians : forests darkened by frightful shadows, and filled with sad trembling sounds. Hideous giants and dragons, puissant knights, enchanted weapons, grim caves, stately palaces, gloomy dungeons — these and suchlike conceptions in the ' Faery Queen ' occupy our imaginations with a perpetual stir of wonder, admiration, and awe. " We do not often," says I. Disraeli, "pause at elevations which raise the feeling of the sublime." If that is so, which I very much doubt, it must be because, in that land of won- ders, one thing is not felt to be more wonderful than another. We are sustained at a sublime elevation throughout : we move among the primeval elements of sublimity : even on the Idle Lake, or in the Bower of Bliss, or in the Gardens of Adonis, where the senses ache with beauty, our voluptuous delight is permeated and elevated by the presence of su})ernatural agency. It may per- haps be pleaded by the nice discriminators of language that there is too much grotesqueness and excitement in Spenser's Faery land to warrant the application of the term "sublime": many, doubtless, would restrict the name to Miltonic sublimity, the steady planetary sublimity that overawes into calmness. Spenser, it is true, sustains us at a different pitch from Milton. To come fully under the spell of the ' Faery Queen,' we must make our- selves as little children listening to the wondrous tales of a nurse : the very diction has in it something of the affected strange words, feigned excitement, and mouthed tones of softness and wonder put on by a skilful story-teller to such an audience : and when we yield ourselves to the poet in such a spirit, he makes our hearts throb with the same absorbing emotions. Of these emotions per- haps the most fitting names are wonder and dread ; but they are also fitly termed modes of sublimity, when they rise to a certain pitch. We should call both Milton and Spenser sublime, but sublime in different ways. What then did Campbell mean by saying that in the ' Faery Queen ' we miss the charm of strength 1 He meant, probably, the strength arising from clearness and brevity of expression : in description, he says, Spenser " exhibits nothing of the brief strokes and robust power which characterise the very greatest poets." It would perhaps be more accurate to say that the brief strokes are supplemented and their abrupt concentrated effect weakened or at least softened by subsequent difi'usion. Compare, for example, with Lucrece's frantic exclamations against Night, the following THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETKY. 173 by impatient Arthur when darkness comes between him and his pursuit of Florimel (iii. 4) : — • " Night ! thou fonl mother of annoyance sad, Sister of heavy Death, and nurse of Woe, Wliich wast begot in Heaven, but for thy l)ad And brutish shape thrust down to Hell below, Where by the grim flood of Cocytus slow, Thy dwelling is in Erebus' black house, (Black Erebus, tliy husl)and, is the foe Of all the gods) where thou ungracious Half of thy days dost lead in horror hideous. What had the Eternal Maker need of thee, The world in his continual course to keep, That dost all things deface, ne lettest see The beauty of his work ? Indeed in sleep The slothful body that doth love to steep His lustless limbs, and drown his baser mind, Doth ]n'aise thee oft, and oft from Stygian deep. Calls thee his goddess, in his error blind, And great dame Nature's handmaid cheering every kind. But well I wot that to an heavy heart, Thou art the root and nurse of bitter cares, Breeder of new, renewer of old smarts ; Instead of sleep thou lendest railing tears. Instead of sleep thou sendest troublous fears And dreadful visions, in the which alive The dreary image of sad Death appears : So from the weary spirit thou dost drive Desired rest, and men of happiness deprive. Under thy mantle black there hidden lie Light-shuiniing Theft, and traitorous Intent, Abhorred Bloodshed, and vile Felony, Shameful Deceit, and Danger imminent. Foul Horror, and eke hellish Dreariment : All these I wot in thy protection be, And light do shun for fear of being shent : For light y-like is loathed of them and thee ; And all that lewdness love do hate the light to see. " Here we have no lack of brief strokes, but they are not final and solitary : the poet does not leave his conceptions pent up and struggling with repressed force, but expands them into sublime images. Another way of understanding how Spenser's wide ex- pansiye manner is opposed to abrupt strength, would be to coinpare afiy of his pitched duels with similar performances by Mr Tennyson, in which brevity and symmetry are carried almost to the pitch of burlesque. Compare, for example, the encounter of Guyon and Britomart (iii. i), with the fight between Garetli and the Evening Star. 174 EDMUND SPENSEK: The visit of Duessa to Dame Night, and the journey of the weird pair to bring the wounded Sansjoy to ^sculapius, who had been thrust down to hell by the jealousy of Jove, is a passage of magnificent i:)Ower ; the terrible figure of the ancient but still mighty mother out of whose womb came earth and the ruler of heaven and earth, at whose presence dogs bay, owls shriek, and wolves howl, and whose arrival causes such excitement amiilst the ghastly population of hell, is quite a typical conception of wild Gothic grandeur (I. 5) : — ' ' So wept Duessa until eventide That shining lamps in Jove's high house were light. Then forth she rose, ne longer would abide, But comes unto the place where the heathen knight In slumbering swound, nigh void of vital sprite, Lay covered with enclianted cloud all day : Whom when she found, as she him left in flight. To wail his woful case she would not stay, But to the eastern coast of Heaven makes speedy way. Where grisly Night, with visage deadly sad, That Phoebus' cheerful face durst never view. And in a foul black pitchy mantle clad, She finds forth coming from her darksome mew. Where she all day did hide her hated hue. Before the door her iron chariot stood, Already harnessed for journey new, And coal-black steeds yborn of hellish brood That on their rusty bits did champ as they were wood. Who when she saw Duessa, sunny bright, Adorned with gold and jewels shining clear, She greatly grew amazed at the sight, And the unacquainted light began to fear, (For never did such brightness there appear) ; And would have back retired to her cave. Until the witch's speech she gan to hear, Saying — 'Yet, tliou dreaded dame, I crave Abide, till I have told the message which I have. ' She stayed ; and forth Duessa gan proceed : '0 thou, most ancient grandmother of all, More old than Jove, whom thou at first didst breed, Or that great house of gods celestial : Which was begot in Demogorgon's hall, And sawest the secrets of the world unmade ! Why sufferest thou thy nephews dear to fall With elfin sword, most shamefully betrayed? Lo, where the stout Sansjoy doth sleep in deadly shade ! ' And, him before, I saw with bitter eyes The bold Sansfoy shrink underneath his spear : And now the prey of fowls in field he lies, Nor wailed of friends nor laid on groaning bier. That whilom was to me too dearly dear. THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 175 Oh ! what of gods them boots it to lie born If okl Aveugle's sons so evil hear ? Or who shall not great Nightiis children scorn, When two of three her nephews are so foul forlorn ? ■ Up, then ; up, dreary dame, of darkness queen ! Go, gather up the relics of thy rac Or else go them avenge ; and let be seen That dreadest Night in brightest day hath place, And can the children of fair Light deface ! ' Her feeling speeches some com[)assion moved In heart, and change in that great mother's face ; Yet pity in her heart was never proved Till then, for evermore she hated, never loved. Then to her iron wagon she betakes, And with her bears the foul well-favoured witch ; Through mirksome air her ready way she makes. Her twofold team (of which two black as pitch. And two were brown, yet each to each uulitch) Did softly swim away, ne ever stamp Unless she chanced their stubborn mouths to twitch Then, foaming tar, their bridles they would champ, And trampling the fire element would fiercely ramp. So well they sped that they be come at length Unto the place whereas the Paynim lay Devoid of outward sense and native strength. Covered with charmed cloud from view of day And sight of men since his late luckless fray. His cruel wounds with cruddy blood congealed They binden up so wisely as they may, And handle softly till they can be healed ; So lay him in her chariot close in night concealed. And all the while she stood upon the ground. The wakeful dogs did never cease to bay ; As giving warning of the unwonted sound, With which her iron wheels did them aifray, And her dark grisly look them much dismay. The messenger of death, the ghastly owl. With dreary shrieks did also her bewray; And hungry wolves continually did howl At her abhorred face, so filthj' and so foul. Thence turning back in silence soft they stole, And brought the heavy corse with easy pace To yawning gulf of deep Avernus hole ; By that same hole an entrance, dark and base. With smoke and sulphur hiding all the place, Descends to Hell ; there creature never past, That back returned without heavenly grace ; But dreadful furies, which their chains have brast. And damned sprites sent forth to make ill men aghast. 176 EDMUND SPENSEK: By that same way the dii'eful dames do drive Their mournful chariot, idled with rusty blood, And down to Pluto's house are come belive : AVhich passing through on every side there stood The trembling ghosts with sad amazed mood, Chattering their iron teeth, and staring wide With stony eyes ; and all the hellish brood Of fiends infernal flocked on every side To gaze on earthly wight that with the night durst ride." Other celebrated passages of powerful composition in the ' Faery / Queen ' are — the Cave of Despair (i. 9) ; the fight between St George and the Dragon, where the j^artition between the sublime and the ridiculous is specially thin (i. 11) ; the Cave of Mammon • (ii. 7); the despair of Malbecco (end of iii. 10): the house of Ate (iv. i); the protracted tournaments in iv. 3 and iv. 4; the exploits of Arthegal and Talus (v. 2). The situation of Britomart in the forest when her companions suddenly disappear in chase of the sudden apparition of Florimel and the foster (iii. i); and her situation in the enchanter's palace when the house is shaken and the doors clapped by the sudden whirlwind that preludes the Mask of Cupid (iii. 12), may be mentioned as specially effective movements. The action of Britomart' s enchanted spear through- out Books iii. and iv. would satisfy Camp1)eirs desideratum of a "brief stroke": there is, however, a touch of the ludicrous in the amazement of the unhorsed champions. Spenser's Arcadia is not a region of absolutely unruffled iDeace, seeing that some of the poet's shepherds are sufficiently miserable and irate to have recourse to satire. Satire, however, in the mouths of creatures so simple and shadowy, cannot sound harsh and biting : it rather amuses us gently than fills us with sym- pathetic bitterness. Most of the poems in the ' Shepherd's Calendar' fall under the heads "recreative" and "plaintive." The pictures of pastoral recreation are very sweet and pretty. In the eclogue for May, old Palinode thus exquisitely describes a merry-making of the young folks, and sighs that his old limbs are now too stiff for the furious glee of their innocent sports : — j " Sicker this morrow, no longer ago, I saw a shoal of sheplierds outgo With singing, and shouting, and jolly cheer: Before them yode a lusty tabrere, That to the menyie a horn-pipe played. Whereto they dancen each one with his maid. To see those folks make such jovisance. Made my heart after the pipe to dance. Tho to the greenwood they speeden hem all, To fetchen home May with their musical ; THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETEY. 177 And home they bringen in a royal throne, Crowned as king ; and his queen attone Was lady Flora, on whom did attend A fair ilock of fairies, and a fresh bend Of lovely nymphs. that I were there, To helpen the ladies their May bush to bear ! But his pastoral lays and ditties, with their cold atmosphere and simple staves, become intolerably tame and insipid after the wondrous beauties and full rich music of the 'Faery Queen.' With all its lofty character as a chronicle of martial deeds, and though the stately Muse is here presented " with quaint Bellona in her equipage," the_ softer passages will always be read as the inost incomparable fruits of the poet's genius. The Idle Lake (ii. 6), the Bower of Bliss (ii. i2),~"and the Gardens of Adonis (iii. 6), are unrivalled as pictures of voluptuous dreamy delight. Una among the worshipping Satyrs, with the fair Hamadryades and light-foot Naiades running to see her lovely face (i. 6) ; the huntress Belphabe with her broad forehead stepping forth from the thicket (ii. 3) ; the courting of Florimel by the witch's son (iii. 7); Pastorella among the shepherds (vi. 9), — are pictures that touch our fancies with a livelier, less languid, but not less exquisite; sense of beauty. Again in the fourth canto of the Third Book, which describes the Rich Strand or Pretious Shore of Marinell, and the journey of sad Cymoent with her team of dolphins over the broad round back of Neptune, the voluptuous elements of the descri|)tion are interpenetrated by the impassioned grief of the goddess for her beloved son, and the hushed anxiety and tender handling of the sympathising nymphs ; in that passage we taste the last extreme of tender ecstasy : — " Eftsoons both flowers and garlands far awaj' She flung, and her fair dewy locks yrent ; To sorrow huge she turned her former play, And gamesome mirth to grievous dreariment : , She threw herself down on the continent, Ne word did speak but lay as in a swown, Whiles all her sisters did for her lament With yelling outcries, and with shrieking sown ; And every one did tear her garland from her crown. Soon as she up out of her deadly fit Arose, she bade her chariot to be brought ; And all her sisters that with her did sit. Bade eke at once their chariots to be sought : Tho full of bitter grief and pensive thouglit She to her wagon clomli : clomb all the rest And forth together went with sorrow fraught : The waves obedient to their behest Them yielded ready passage and their rage surceast. M 178 EDMUND SPENSEE: Great Neptune stood amazed at their sight, Whiles on his broad round back they softly slid, And eke hinaself mourned at their mourni'ul ]>light, Yet wist not what their wailing meant, j^et did For great compassion of their sorrow, bid His mighty waters to them Ijuxom be : Eftsoons the roaring billows still abid. And all the grisly monsters of the sea Stood gaping at their gait, and wondered them to see. A team of dolphins ranged in array Drew the smooth chariot of sad Cymoent ; They were all taught by Triton to obey To the long reins at her commandcment : As swift as swallows on the waves they went. That their broad flaggy fins no foam did rear, Ne bubbling roundel they behind them sent ; The rest of other fishes drawen were Which with their finny oars the swelling sea did shear. Soon as they been arrived on the brim Of the rich strond, their chariots they forbore, And let their timid fishes softly swim Along the margent of the foamy shore, Lest they their fins should bruise, and surbate sore Their tender feet upon the stony ground : ^ And coming to the place where all in gore And cruddy blood enwallowed they found The luckless iVIarinell lying in deadly swound. His mother swooned thrice, and the third time Could scarce recovered be out of her ]>ain ; Had she not been devoid of mortal slime, She should not then have been relieved again : But soon as life recovered had the rein, She made so piteous moan and dear wairaent, That the hard rocks could scarce from tears refrain ; And all her sister nymphs with one consent Supplied her sobbing breaches with sad complement. Thus when they all had sorrowed their fill. They softly gan to search his grisly wound : And that they might him handle more at will. They him disarmed ; and spreading on the ground Their watchet mantles fringed with silver round, They softly wii>ed away the jelly blood From the orifice ; which having well u{)bound, They poured in sovereign balm and nectar good, Good both for earthly medicine and for heavenly food. Tho, when the lily-handed Liagore (This Liagore whilom had learned skill In leech's craft, by great Apollo's lore, Sith her whilom upon high Pindus hill He loved, and at last her womb did fill THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETEY. 179 Witli heavenly seed, whereof wise Paeon sprung) Did I'eul his pulse, she knew there stayed still Some little life his feeble sprites among ; Which to his mother told, despair she from her flung. Tho, up him taking in their tender hands They easily unto her chariot bear ; Her team at her commandment quiet stands, Whiles they the corse into her wagon rear, And strow with flowers the lamentable bier ; Then all the rest into their coaches climb, And through the brackish waves their passage shear ; Upon great Neptune's neck they softly swim, And to her watery chamber swiftly carry him. Deep in the bottom of the sea her bower Is built of hollow billows heajied high. Like to thick clouds that threat a stormy shower. And vaulted all within like to the sky, In which the gods do dwell eternally ; There they liim laid in easy couch well dight. And sent in haste for Tryphon, to apply Salves to his wounds, and medicines of might : For Tryphon of sea-gods the sovereign leech is hight." To get a full notion of Spenser's power of " ravishing human sense" with word-music, one must read at least a canto, if not a^'whole book of the 'Faery Queen.' The dreamy melodious soft- ness of his numbers and his ideas has somethina; of the luxurious charm that the song of the mermaids had for the ear of Guyon (Book ii. Canto 12) : — " And now they nigh approached to the stead Whereas those mermaids dwelt ; it was a still And calmy bay, on th' one side sheltered With the broad shadow of an hoary hill. So now to Guyon as he passed by. Their pleasant tunes they sweetly thus applied ; ' thou fair son of gentle Faery, Thou art in mighty arms most magnified Above all knights that ever battle tried : turn thy rudder hitherward a while ! Here may thy storm-beat vessel safely ride ; Thisjs the port of rest from troublous toil, The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil.' With that the rolling sea, resounding soft, In his big base them fitly answered ; And on the rock the waves breaking aloft A solemn mean unto them measured ; The whiles sweet Zephyrus loud whistleled His treble — a strange kind of harmony. Which Guyon's senses softly tickeled. That he the boatman bade row easily And let him hear some part of their rare melody." 180 EDMUND SPENSEK: It is usually said that Spenser lias no humour. His humour, indeed, is of the most quiet and lurking order, and may easily pass unobserved among so many objects of wonder and beauty. But though unobtrusive it is nevertheless there. The drowsy irritability of Morpheus (i. i), and the idiotic " He could not tell " of the grave and reverend Ignaro (i. 8), are in the most delicate vein of humour. Archiniago's disguise as a hermit, and his affec- tation of childish senility and unworldly simplicity, are also very delicately touched off : the enemy of mankind appears as — "An aged sire, in long black weeds y-clad, His feet all bare, his beard all hoary grey, And by his belt his book he hanging had ; Sober he seem'd and very sagely sad; And to the ground his eyes were lowly bent, Simple in shew, and void of malice bad ; And all the way he prayed as he went, And often knocked his breast, as one that did repent. He fair the knight saluted, louting low. Who fair him quited, as that courteous was ; And after asked him, if he did know Of strange adventures, which abroad did pass, 'Ah ! my dear son,' quoth he, 'how should, alas ! Silly old man that lives in hidden cell. Bidding his beads all day for his trespass, Tidings of war and worldly trouble tell ? With holy father sits not with such things to melL' " We may be certain, from Spenser's antipathy to the Eoman Catholics, that this was a character in one of the lost nine Comedies : the sudden casting off of the disguise, and the flaming out in his true colours as — ' ' A bold bad man ! that dared to call by name Great Gorgon, prince of darkness and dead night — " would have been a startling effect. The most openly humorous character in the ' Faery Queen ' is Braf^gadocio, whose behaviour is often farcical. See his bold pretences to Archimago, and his abject terror and ignominious skulking, in Book ii. 3. Spenser has been accused of bad taste in mixing up heathen mythology with the narratives of the Bible. In Book ii. Canto 7, he represents Tantalus and Pontius Pilate as suffering in the same place of punishment. The answer that wicked men of all ages and creeds may reasonably be supposed to suffer together, is complete. He has also been accused of interfering with ancient mythology, THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETEY. 181 marrying Clio to Apollo, making Cupid the sister of the Graces, bringing Neptune to the marriage of the Thames and the Medway, and adding without authority to Neptune's retinue. On this great liberty I do not venture to pronounce. He has been accused of extravagant violations of probability. To this it may be answered that, when we consent to be intro- duced to Faery land, we sign a dispensation from the ordinary conditions of life. These charges are frivolous : much more plausibility attaches to his alleged transgressions of the boundary between pleasure and disgust. The picture of Error is said to be intolerably loathsome — " Tlierewitli she spew'd out of her filthy maw A fiood of poison liorrihle and black, Full of great lumps of flesh and gobbets raw, Which stunk so vilely that it forc'd him slack His grasping hold, and from her turn aback ; Her vomit full of books and papers was. With loathly frogs and toads, which eyes did lack. And creeping sought way in the weedy grass ; Her filthy parbi'eak all the place defiled has. " The picture of Duessa unmasked is still more disgusting. And yet Burke is said to have been fond of quoting the description of Error. To persons of sober refinement, for whom the energy of indignant disgust has no fascination but is merely repulsive, such passages can be justified only as being occasional discords, height- ening by contrast the surrounding harmonies, or at the worst, disagreeable episodes tided over by the general sublimity and beauty. Yet the critic should not ignore the fact that great poets of our race have created such passages, and that many readers are drawn to them by irresistible fascination. It is a paradox that descriptions of things so foul and odious should possess any spell : but it is not to be denied that they do possess a strong spell, and that for minds of the most poetical constitution. Spenser's design may have been entirely moral in drawing repulsive pictures of Error and Popery ; but there is, whatever may have been his design, a certain intrinsic charm of sublime exaltation in the supreme energy of loathing. 182 CHAPTER V. ELIZABETHAN^ SOj^NETEEES. The last ten or fifteen years of the sixteenth century was a period of amazing poetic activity : there is notliing like it in the history of our literature. Never in any equal period of our history did so much intellect go to the making of verses. They had not then the same number of distracting claims : literary ambition had fewer outlets. Carlyle, Grote, ]\lill, Gladstone, Disraeli, had they lived in the age of Elizabeth, would all have had to make their literary reputation in verse, and all might have earned a respect- able place among our poets — might, at least, like Francis Bacon, have composed some single piece of sufficient excellence to be thought worthy of the ' Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics.' Amidst a general excitement and ambition of fame the a;ift of song may be brought to light where in less favourable circum- stances it might have been extinguished by other interests. And the rivalry of men endowed with eager and powerful intellects must always act as a stimulus to the genuine poet, although all their efforts come short of the creations of genius. Three fashions of love-poetry may be particularised as flourish- ing with especial vigour during those ten or fifteen years — pastoral songs and lyrics, sonnets, and tales of the same type as Venus and Adonis. Spenser did much to confirm if not to set the pastor,al fashion ; but perhaps still more was done by Sir Philip Sidney with his ' Arcadia ' and his sonnets of Astropliel to Stella. These two poets leading the way to the sweet pastoral country of craggy mountain, hill and valley, dale and field, the greater portion of the tuneful host croAvded after them, transforming themselves into Damons, Dorons, and Coridons, and piping to cruel Phillises, Phillidas, and Carmelas.i Out of this masquerading grew many 1 The land of ideal shepherds was only one of the ideal countries frequented by the artistic courtiers of ElizaVieth. They were as eager to descrj' new worlds of imagination as her navigators were to discover new regions in the terraqueous globe. In the masques presented at Court we find inhabitants of four great worlds or continents — the country of Shepherds, the country of Faeries, the Mythological world, and the world of Personified Abstractions. ELIZABETHAN LOVE-POETRY. 183 beautiful lyrics. 'England's Helicon,' wliicli was published in 1600, and which gathered the harvest of this pastoral poetry, is by many degrees the finest of the numerous miscellanies of the Elizabethan age. It contained selections from Spenser, Sidney, Greene, Lodge, J. Wootton, Bolton, Barnefield, " Shepherd Tonie," Drayton, Shakespeare, and others of less note. Many of these pastorals took the form of sonnets, but I single out sonnet-writing as a fashion by itself, in order to draw attention to the numerous bodies of sonnets published in the last decade of the century as lasting monuments of sustained passion, real or ideal. The list is very remarkable. It opens with the publication of Sidney's sonnets to Stella in 1591, and includes — Daniel's sonnets to Delia, published in 1592 ; Constable's sonnets to Diana, 1592 ; Lodge's sonnets to Phillis, 1593 ; Watson's Tears of Fancy, or Love Disdained, 1593; Drayton's Idea's Mirror, "amours in quatorzains," in 1594; and Spenser's Amoretti or Sonnets in 1596.^ Hardly less notable is the fancy for short mythological or historical love-tales. The way in this form of composition was led by Thomas Lodge, who published in 15 89 the poem of ' Glaucus and Scylla,' narrating with many pretty circumstances the cruelty of Scylla to Glaucus, in punishment whereof she was transformed into a dangerous rock on the coasts of Sicily. Mar- lowe began and Chapman finished the tale of Hero and Leander ; Shakespeare sang the love of Venus and Adonis : Drayton the love of Endymion and Phoebe ; Chapman (in ' Ovid's Banquet of Sense') the love of Ovid and Julia. The voluptuous descriptions of these tales could not have been expected to go on without sooner or later exciting the spirit of derisive parody : and accord- ingly, in 1598, Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" was rudely burlesqued by the satirical Marston in a comical version of the tale of "Pygmalion and Galatea." To prevent any undue indig- nation at the liberty thus taken with our great dramatist, I may here intimate a suspicion, for which I shall afterwards produce some grounds, that certain of Shakespeare's sonnets — those, namely, from the 127th to the 15 2d inclusive — were designed to ridicule the effusions of some of his seriously or feignedly love-sick predecessors. Marston' s profane parody may thus assume the aspect of a Nemesis. The enthusiasm of beauty was strong in the Elizabethan poets. With many of them it was a fierce and earnest thirst. Their lives Avere hot, turbulent, precarious : they turned often to the bloom of fair cheeks and the lustre of bright hair as a passionate relief from desperate fortunes. Beauty was pursued by Greene 1 In this chapter I have used the order of the publication of these sonnets as a basis of arrangement for the predecessors of Shakespeare in that form of com- position. 184 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEEES. and Marlowe not as a luxury but as a fierce necessity — as the only thing that could make life tolerable. Such visions as Hero and fair Samela filled them with mad ecstasy in the height of their intemperate orgies, and were called back for soothing worship in their after-fits of exhaustion and savage despondency. In many others of calmer and more temjDerate lives, beauty excited less ardent transports, and yet was a powerful influence. Beauty was a very prevailing religion ; the perfections of woman, excellence of eye, of lip, of brow, were meditated on and adored with devout rapture ; and though the votary's enthusiasm in some cases travelled into licentious delirium, in gentler natures it bred soft and delicate fancies, of the most exquisite tenderness. Beauty was part of all their lives, and shaped itself in each mind according to the soil. A very surprising number of different soils it found to grow in, and very remarkable were the products. One meets the same flowers again and again, but always with some in- dividual grace. Even third-rate and fourth-rate poets do not seem to be weaving garlands of flowers plucked from the verses of the masters : they develop the common seeds in their own way. Con- sider, for example, the following madrigal by John Wootton, a name now uttterly forgotten by the generality, and a poet of whose personality nothing survives but his name and his contribu- tions to ' England's Helicon : ' — o Her eyes like shining lamps in midst of night, Night dark and dead : Or as the stars that give the seamen light, Light for to lead Their wandering ships. Amidst her cheeks the rose and lilj' strive, Lily snow-white : When their contend doth make their colour thrive, Colour too bright For shepherd's eyes. Her lips like scarlet of the finest dye, Scarlet blood-red : Teeth white as snow, which on the hills doth lie, Hills overspread By Winter's force. Her skin as soft as is the finest silk, Silk soft and fine : Of colour like unto the whitest milk, j\lilk of the kine Of Daphnis' herd. As swift of foot as is the pretty roe, Roe swift of pace : When yelping hounds pursue her to and fro, Hounds fierce in chase To reave her life." SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 185 I. — Sir Philip Sidney^ (1554-1586). In 1 59 1 a volume of sonnets was issued under the editorship of Thomas JSTash, containing Sidney's " Astrophel and Stella," twenty- eight sonnets by Samuel Daniel, and other poems by " Divers Noblemen and Gentlemen." The publication was most probably surreptitious: Daniel, who published his "Sonnets to Delia" in the foUoAving year, complained that " a greedy printer had pub- lished some of his sonnets along with those of Sir Philip Sidney ; " and a corrected and authentic edition of Sidney's sonnets was issued before the close of 1591. The main attraction of Nash's volume was the " Astrophel and Stella " series of sonnets ; this was the title of the work, the other poems being merely appended. The editor extolled Sidney with characteristic eloquence and extravagance. He apologises for com- mending a poet " the least syllable of whose name, sounded in the ears of judgment, is able to give the meanest line he writes a dowry of immortality." He deplores the long absence of England's Sun, and ridicules the gross fatty flames that have wandered abroad like hobgoblins with a wisp of paper at their tails in the middest eclipse of his shining perfections. " Put out your rush candles, you poets and rhymers," he cries; "and bequeath your crazed quatorzains to the chandlers ; for lo ! here he cometh that hath broken your legs." The story of the romantic passion between Sidney and Penelope Devereux, Astrophel and Stella, is well known to readers of literary history. Lady Penelope, sister of the unfortunate Earl of Essex, was some nine years younger than her distinguished lover. Her father had formed a high opinion of Sir Philip's promise, and on his deathbed expressed a wish for their union : but her guardians were in favour of a wealthier match, and two or three years after the old Earl's death, she was married at the age of seventeen, much against her own wishes, to an unattractive young nobleman, Lord Pich. This event may have been hastened by Sidney's attitude before the marriage. If his self-reproaches in the sonnets were well founded, he would seem to have been undecided and vacillating in his addresses, his natural impulses being obstructed by a pedantic fancy that love was unworthy of a great thinker like himself — perhaps a temporary result of his correspondence with Languet : but when the lady was married out of his reach, his love became most ardent, and he courted her favours in a long series of passionate sonnets. Seeing that he very soon after mar- ried another lady — a daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham — it 1 I have given some account of Sidney's life and character in my Manual of English Prose Literature, and shall here contiue myself to his sonnets. 186 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. might with some reason be inferred that there was in Sidney's as in other sonnets not a little make-believe passion, and that his delight as an ambitious young poet at finding such an amount of literary capital was quite as strong as the pain of the disai^point- ment. Certainly, however, Lady Rich, whose rare charms of beauty and wit were the theme of many celebrated Elizabethan pens, was likely enough to be the object of a genuine passion. As the wife of a man whom she disliked and kept in thorough fear and subjec- tion, and as the sister of an ambitious nobleman nearly related to the throne, she led as she advanced in years a brilliant and a troubled life, and was in the Court of England the most con- spicuous and fascinating woman of her generation. When Sidney wrote his sonnets she was in the prime of her beauty, and he may well have been sincere in deploring the loss of such a prize, and praying in wailful sonnets that he might continue to have a place in her affections. In the choice of ideas for his sonnets Sidney prided himself on being original. i This was a natural reaction from the long line of imitators between Surrey and himself. In Watson's ' Hecatom- pathia, or Passionate Century of Love,' published in 1582, about the time when Sidney was composing his sonnets, the imitative and artificial character of the fashionable English love-poetry was specially illustrated by the candid acknowledgments of the accom- panying notes. The })oet makes no pretence to spontaneous effusion. Prefixed to the many ingenious praises of his lady's beauty, and allegations of her cruelty, and his own varied professions of un- alterable love and consuming pangs of despair, are full references to the literary sources of his inspiration. Before depicting the pangs of Cupid's deadly dart and praying for its withdrawal, the commentary informs us that " the author hath wrought this passion out of Stephanus Forcatulus." Before a dire lament that Nep- tune's waves might be renewed from the poet's weeping eyes, Vulcan's forge from the flames within his breast, and the windbags of tEoIus from his sobbing sighs, we are candidly informed that " the invention of this Passion is borrowed for the most part from Seraphine, Son. 125." A praise of his lady is imitated from Petrarch : a sweet fancy about the capture of Love by the Muses, from Ronsard : a vision of his lady in sleep from Hercules Strozza. Another commendation of the most rare excellencies of his mistress is imitated from a famous sonnet by Fiorenzuola the Florentine, which was imitated also by Surrey and by two other writers in Tottel's Miscellany. So with the majority of Watson's " passions," as he called his poems ; very few of them professed to be wholly 1 He carried his disdain of commonplace into other walks of love. The lailies of the Court thought him a dry-as-dust because he wore no particular colours "nor nourished special locks of vowed hair." — Sou. 54. SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 187 original, and the adaptation was generally very slight. Now Sidney revolted from this habit of adopting the praises, vows, and " deploring dumps " of other amorous singers. He swore " by blackest brook of hell," that he was "no pick-purse of another's wit." His eloquence came from a different source : "his lips were sweet, inspired with Stella's kiss." He had tried the old plan — " I songlit fit words to paint the blackest face of woe Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain ; Oft turning others' leaves to see if thence would flow Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain." But Invention, the child of Nature, fled from the blows of Study. He sat biting his pen, and beating himself for spite, till at last — "Fool ! said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write." His success was such that he could not refrain from boastful tirades against the old imitators — "You that do Dictionary's method bring Into your rhj'mes, running in rattling rows ; You that poor Petrarch's long deceased woes With new-born sighs and denizened wit do sing, You take wrong ways, those far-fetched helps be such As do betray a want of inward touch." This and many other passages in Sidney illustrate the almost Homeric complacency of self-estimate among the Elizabethans. Most of the conceptions and conceits in Sidney's sonnets are really his own ; and they display very exquisite subtlety and tenderness of fancy. In these respects they deserve all the admiration they received from his contemporaries. What, for example, could be finer than the ruling conceit of his 38 th sonnet 1 "This night while Sleep begins Avith heavy wings. To hatch mine eyes, and that unbitted thought Doth fall to stray, and my chief powers are brought To leave the sceptre of all subject things : The first that straight my fancy's error brings Unto my mind, is Stella's image, wrought By Love's own self, but, with so curious draught That she, methinks, not only shines but sings. I start, look, hark : but what in closed-up sense Was held, in open sense it flies away, Leaving me nought but wailing eloquence : I, seeing better sights in Sight's deca}' Called it anew, and wooed sleep again : But him, her host, that unkind guest had slain." 188 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. The first fifty or sixty sonnets exhibit Astrophel's love in what may be called in fashionable mathematical language the statical stage : the subsequent dynamical stage being composed of sonnets descriptive of moods and conceits occasioned by a sequence of incidents between the lovers — supposed encouragement, venturous liberties, discouragement, despair, and so forth. During the statical or brooding stage, the poet-lover's mind is occupied with similitudes and all sorts of fanciful inventions to set forth the imcomparable charms of his mistress and the unexampled force of his passion. During that period his love is subject to no fluctuations, no dynamic change ; it suffers neither increase nor abatement. It is chiefly in this stage that the soft gracefulness and ethereal reach of Sidney's fancy are disjjlayed. Instead of the sighing lover's commonplace raw assertion that his mistress is fairer than Helen, or Semele, or Ariadne, or Chloris, or any other mythological beauty, or that she would have borne away the apple from Juno, Pallas, and Venus, Astrophel presents Stella with the following ingenious and delicately wrought conceit, enlivened by a sportive breath of tender humour : — "Phcebus was judge between Jove, Mars, and Love, Of those three gods whose arms the fairest were : Jove's golden shield did eagles sable bear, Whose talons held young Ganymede above : But in vert field Mars bore a golden spear, Which through a bleeding heart his point did shove. Each liad his crest ; Mars carried Venus' glove, Jove on liis helm the thunder-bolt did rear. Cupid then smiles : see ! on his crest there lies Stella's fair hair ; her face he makes his shield, Whose roses gules are borne in silver field. Plioebus drew wide tlie curtains of the skies To blaze these last, and sware devoutly then The first thus match' d, were scantly gentlemen." He is brimful of fancies equally delicate. Venus falls out on Cupid because under terror of the threats of Mars he would not wound that god deep enough. The angry mother breaks her son's bow and shafts, and the poor boy is disconsolate — i "Till that his gi-andame Nature, pitying it, Of Stella's brows made him two better bows, And in her ej'es of arrows infinite : how for joy he leaps ! hoAV he crows ! Anil straight therewith, like wags new got to play, Falls to shrewd turns,— and I was in his way." The commonplace that his mistress's eyes are like stars he builds up into a profession of faith in Astrology. He takes SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 189 Plato's saying, that if Virtue could come directly in contact with our eyes, it would raise flames of love in our souls, and maintains the truth of the doctrine, for Virtue has taken Stella's shape, and he is conscious of the effect in his own person. He exults over Reason, who at first intermeddled and decried, but when Stella appeared, knelt down and offered to produce good reasons for loving her. He is puzzled to make out why his plaints move her so faintly. He will not admit that she is hard-hearted ; but at last he hits upon the true explanation : — " I much do guess, yet find no truth, save this, That wlien tlie breath of my complaints doth touch Those dainty doors unto the court of bliss, The heavenly nature of that place is such That once come there the sobs of mine annoys Are metamorphosed straight to tunes of joys." These sweet fancies rise in the head when the heart is com- paratively tranquil. When storms began to agitate,^ the lover's strains became more impassioned. The following is the 48th sonnet : — " Soul's joy, bend not those morning stars from me, Where virtue is made strong by beauty's might ; Where Love is chasteness, pain doth learn delight, And humbleness grows on with majesty. Wbatever may ensue, let me be Copartner of the riches of that sight : Let not mine eyes be hell-driven from that light : look ! shine ! let me die, and see ! For though I oft myself of them bemoan, That through my heart their beamy darts be gone, Whose cureless wounds, e'en now, most freshly bleed ; Yet since my death-wound is already got, Dear killer, spare not thy sweet cruel shot : A kind of grace it is to slay with speed." Farther on in the series, having so far conquered the lady's indifference, he prays for and receives a kiss, " poor hope's first wealth, hostage of promised weal, breakfast of Love," and expresses his rapture in several most impassioned sonnets. The following' is the 8ist: — *o kiss, which dost those ruddy gems impart, Or gems, or fruits, of new-found Paradise : Breathing all bliss and sweet'ning to the heart ; Teaching dumb lips a nobler exercise ! kiss, which souls, even souls, together ties By links of Love, and only Nature's art : How fain would 1 paint thee to all men's eyes, Or of thy gifts, at least, shade out some part ! 190 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. But she forbids ; with bhishing words she says, She buihls her fame on higher-seated praise : But my heart burns, I cannot silent be. Then since, dear life, you fain would have me peace, And I, mad with delight, want wit to cease. Stop you my mouth with still, still kissing me. " Sidney observes the Petrarcliian form of the sonnet in so far as regards the division of the stanza into two staves, the first of eight lines with two rhymes, the second of six lines with three rhymes. Whether for ease or for variety, he is not particular about the arrangement of the rhymes within these limits. In the first stave he employs sometimes the alternate, sometimes the successive arrangement ; and when the rhymes are alternate, he sometimes reverses but oftener repeats in the second quatrain the order of the first. In the second stave, he sometimes interweaves the lines so as to make a stave proper ; but oftener he subdivides it into a quatrain followed by a couplet. Sometimes, as in two of the sonnets above quoted, he begins with the couplet and ends with the quatrain ; and the arrangement is seemingly dictated not by ease or accident, but by a just sense of metrical etifect. Interspersed with the sonnets are several songs, and in these our poet is happier than in the more confined measures. The last of these songs, which is in the form adopted by Shakespeare for the serenade to Silvia (Two Gent, of Ver., iv. 2), contains some very sweet staves. The two first lines go to the lady ; the three follow- ing to the lover : — " Who is it that this dark night Underneath my window plaineth ? It is one, who from thy sight Being (ah !) exiled, disdaineth Every other vulgar light. Why, alas ! and are you he ? Be not yet those fancies changed ? Dear, when you find change in me Tho' from me you be estranged Let my change to ruin be. But Time will these thoughts remove : ! Time doth work what no man knoweth. Time doth as the subject prove. With time still affection groweth In the faithful turtle-dove. What if ye new beauties see Will not they stir new affection ? I will think they pictures be Image-like of saint-perfection, » Poorly counterfeiting thee. " SAMUEL DANIEL. 191 Two such songs as this and the one to Silvia make the stave seem the only true form for a lover's lyric : the lines run into music of their own accord, and scatter sweet perfumes with their light motion. There is nothing more ravishing in the language. II. — Samuel Daniel (1562-16 19). Daniel, born near Taunton in Somersetshire, was the son of a music-master, but somehow obtained a university education at Oxford. He published a translation of Paulus Jovius's 'Discourse of Rare Inventions' in 1585 at the age of twenty-three, and soon afterwards became tutor to Lady Anne Clifford. A man of taste and refined feeling, very unlike some of the sturdy contemporary plants who lived by acting and play-writing, Daniel grew up under the shelter of noble patronage, conciliating favour by the amiability of his disposition as well as by the gracefulness of his literary compliments. He enjoyed the patronage of the Earl of Southampton and of the Pembroke family. Through the influence of his noble friends, he had obtained in 1593, the Mastership of the Pievels, for which poor -John Lyly had waited so long and begged so earnestly; and after the accession of James, he was made Gentleman-Extraordinary, and subsequently one of the Grooms of the Privy Chamber to the Queen Consort. His chief poetical works were — Sonnets to "Delia," 1592; "Delia" aug- mented, along with the "Complaint of Rosamond" and the "Tragedy of "Cleopatra," 1594; metrical history of the "Civil Wars," 1604; " Tragedy of Philotas," 161 1; " Hymen's Triumph, a pastoral tragi-comedy," not published till 1623. He wrote several other pieces of less importance. His plays were produced for the entertainment of the Court ; and it may have been this connection that dictated his choice of the Wars of the Roses as a subject. He also wrote in prose a History of England. Had Daniel lived in the present day, his destiny probably would have been to write scholarly and elegant articles in the magazines, ripe fruits of leisurely study, cultivated taste, and easy command of polite English. His was not one of the stormy irregular natures that laid the foundation and raised the structure of the English drama : the elements of his being were softly blended, and wrought together mildly and harmoniously. In the prologue to "Hymen's Triumph," he declares that he has no rude antique sport to offer — ' ' But tender passions, motions soft and grave The still spectators must expect to have." 192 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. He wrote for Cynthia, and therefore his play— " Must be gentle like to her Whose sweet affections mildly move and stir." He might have said the same about all his poetry. He was no master of strong passions : he never felt them, and he could not paint them. Between his Cleopatra and Shakespeare's there is a wide gulf. But he is most exquisite and delicate in pencilling "tender passions, motions soft and grave." Without being strikingly original, Daniel has a way and a vein of his own. He fills his mind with ideas and forms from extra- neous sources, and with quietly operating plasticity reshapes them in accordance with the bent of his own modes of thought and feeling. He had not the Shakespearian lightning quickness in adaptation and extension ; the process in him was more peaceable and easy. The diction of his poems is choice ; the versification easy and flowing. He often puts things with felicitous terseness and vigour, and his words almost invariably come together happily and harmoniously. The publication of Daniel's sonnets in 1592 is an epoch in the history of the English Sonnet. This was the first body of sonnets written in what is sometimes called by pre-eminence the English form — three independent quatrains closed in by a couplet. Daniel also set an example to Shakespeare in treating the sonnet as a stanza, connecting several of them together as consecutive parts of a larger expression. Apart from their form, there is not very much interest in the sonnets to Delia. They have all Daniel's smoothness and felicity of phrase, and are pervaded by exceed- ingly sweet and soft sentiment. Though they rouse no strong feelings, they may be dwelt upon by a sympathetic reader with lively enjoyment. One of them, with somewhat greater depth of feeling than most of the others, the sonnet beginning — " Care- charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night," is ranked among the best sonnets in the language. But their most general interest is found in their relation to Shakespeare's sonnets, several of which seem to have been built up from ideas suggested by the study of those to Delia.^ In the following sonnets, for example, readers familiar 1 The Sonnets to Delia on their first issue were preceded hy a prose dedication to the Countess of Pembroke, "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother" : tlie poet desiring "to be graced by the countenance of your protection ; whom the for- tune of our time hath made the happy and judicial patroness of the Muses (a glory hereditary to your house)." To the second issue was prefixed a dedicatory sonnet to the same lady, entitling her as the "wonder of these, glory of other times"; altirming that his sonnets were "her own, liegotten by her hand"; and that though the travail was his, the glory must be hers. These facts, and some of the expressions, are interesting to those who believe that the friend of Shakespeare's sonnets was this lady's son. SAMUEL DANIEL. 193 with Shakespeare's will not fail to remark a certain similarity of idea, although the two series of sonnets differ as widely as the genius of the two poets. Sonnet 37. " But love whilst that thou mayst be loved again, Now whilst thy May hath filled thy lap with flowers ; Now whilst thy beauty bears without a stain : Now use the summer smiles, ere winter lowers : And whilst thou spreadst unto the rising Sun The fairest flower that ever saw the light. Now joy thy time before thy sweet be done ; And, Delia, think thy morning must have night, And that thy brightness sets at length to west. When thou wilt close up that which now thou show'st, And think the same becomes thy fading best, Which then shall most inveil and shadow most. Men do not weigh the stalk for that it was. When once they find her flower, her glory pass." Sonnet 39. " When winter snows upon thy sable hairs, And frost of age hath nipt thy beauties near ; When dark shall seem thy day that never clears, And all lies withered that was held so dear : Then take this picture which I here present thee, Limned with a pencil that's not all unwortliy : Here see the gifts that God and Nature lent thee ; Here read thyself, and what I sufiFer'd for thee. This may remain thy lasting monument. Which happily posterity may cherish ; These colours with thy fading are not spent, These may remain, when thou and I shall perish. If they remain, then thou shalt live thereby: They will remain, and so thou canst not die." Sonnet 41. " Be not displeased that these my papers should Bewray unto the world how fair thou art ; Or that my wits have showed the best they could The chastest flame that ever warmed heart ! Think not, sweet Delia, this shall be thy shame, My Muse should sound thy praise with mournful warble ; How many live, the glory of whose name Shall rest in ice, when thine is graved in marble ! Thou mayst in after-ages live esteemed Unburied in these lines, reserved in pureness ; These shall entomb those eyes, that have redeemed Me from the vulgar, thee from all obscureness. Although my careful accents never moved thee. Yet count it no disgi-ace that I have loved thee." N 194 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. Sonnet 52. ' ' Let others sing of knights and paladins, In aged accents and nntimely words ; Paint shadows in imaginary lines Which well the reach of their high wits records ; But I must sing of thee, and those fair eyes Authentic shall my verse in time to come When yet tli' unborn shall say, ' Lo where she lies Whose beauty made him speak, that else was dumb.' These are the arks, the trophies I erect, That fortify thy name against old age ; And these thj^ sacred virtues must protect, ' Against the dark and Time's consuming rage. Thougli th' error of my youtli in them appear Suffice they show I lived and loved thee dear. " Daniel's genius is best shown in the expression of bereaved love in the " Complaint of Rosamond," and in " Hymen's Tri- umph " — as Spenser said, " in tragic plaints and passionate mis- chance." In the expression of courtship love, his imagination is cold and acts artificially and mechanically : but when the beloved object is taken away, he is moved to the depths, and pours forth his strains with genuine warmth. The passion has still a certain softness in it : his lovers have not the inconsolable fierce distrac- tion of Shakespeare's forsaken lover, " tearing of papers, break- ing rings atwain : " they do not shriek undistinguished woe : but they sigh deeply, and their voices are richly laden with im- passioned remembrance. The plaintive sorrow of Thyrsis is sweet and profound. But nothing that Daniel has written floAvs with surer instinct and more natural impulse than the agonised endear- ments of Harry over the body of Rosamond. Wholly different in character from the frantic doting of Venus over her lost Adon, these verses are hardly less perfect as the utterance of a milder and less fiercely fond passion. The deep heart's sorrow of the bereaved lover makes itself felt in every line — " Then as these passions do him overwhelm He draws him near my body to behold it ; And as the vine married unto the elm With strict embraces, so doth he enfold it : And as he in his careful arms doth hold it Viewing the face that even death commends On senseless lips millions of kisses spends. ' Pitiful mouth,' said he, ' that living gavest Tlie sweetest comfort that my soul could wish : be it lawful now, that dead thou havest, This sorrowing farewell of a dying kiss. And you, fair eyes, containers of my bliss. Motives of love, born to be matched never, Entomb'd in your sweet circles, sleep for ever. HENRY CONSTABLE. 195 ' Ah, liow methinks I see Death dallyiug seeks To entertain itself in Love's sweet place ! Decayed roses of discoloured cheeks, Do yet retain dear notes of former grace, And ugly Death sits fair within her face ; Sweet remnants resting of vermilion red, That Death itself doubts whether she be dead. ' Wonder of beauty, receive these plaints. These obsequies, the last that I shall make thee : For lo, my soul that now already faints, (That loved the living, dead will not forsake thee) Hastens her speedy course to overtake thee. I'll meet my death, and free myself thereby, For ah, what can he do that cannot die ? ' Yet, ere I die, thus much my soul doth vow. Revenge shall sweeten death with ease of mind : And I will cause posterity shall know. How fair thou wert above all womankind. And after-ages monuments shall find Showing thy beauty's title, not thy name, Eose of the world that sweetened so the same.' " III. — Henry Constable (1555 ?-i6io'?). Constable was of Roman Catholic family, and was educated at St John's, Cambridge, where he took the degree of B.A. in 1579. He was obliged to leave England in 1595, from suspicion of trea- sonable practices. Venturing back in 1601 or 1602, he was com- mitted to the Tower, from which he was not released till towards the close of 1604. He is mentioned as if he were still alive in the 'Return from Parnassus' (1606), and in Bolton's ' Hypercritica ' (161 6) as if he were then dead. The first edition of his sonnets to "Diana" appeared in 1592, and contained 23; a second was issued in 1594, containing 27. Sixty-three sonnets by Constable, methodically arranged in sevens, are printed in the Harleian Mis- cellany from a MS. known as Todd's MS. : this collection comprises all that appear in the printed collections. Constable wrote also certain ' Spiritual Sonnets,' and a version of the tale of Venus and Adonis, which was not published till 1600, but is believed to have been written earlier. Like Daniel, Constable does not attempt the delineation of stormy passions, yet his deepest vein is quite different from Daniel's. He has a more ardent soul than Daniel : his imagin- ation is more warmly and richly coloured : he has more of flame and less of moisture in him. Daniel's words flow most abundantly and with happiest impulse when his eye is dim with tears ; Con- stable's when his whole being is aglow with the rapture of beauty. Tears fall from the poet's eyes in the following sonnet, but they 196 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEEKS. fall like rain in sunshine. The occasion is his lady's walking in a garden : — &"' " My lady's presence makes the roses red Because to see her lips they blush for shame : The lily's leaves for envy pale became, And her white hands in them this envy bred. The marigold abroad its leaves did spread Because the sun's and her power is the same ; The violet of purple colour came, Dyed with the blood she made my heart to shed. In brief, all flowers from her their virtue take ; From her sweet breath their sweet smells do proceed ; The living heat which her eyebeams do make Warmeth the ground, and quickeneth the seed. The rain wherewith she watereth these flowers Falls from mine eyes which she dissolves in showers." The following is more characteristic of his soaring ardour — "rapture all air and fire;" though the structure is somewhat artificial : — " Blame not my heart for flying up so high, Sith thou art cause that it this flight begun, For earthly vapours, drawn up by the sun, Comets become, and night-suns in the sky. My humble heart so with thy heavenly eye Drawn up aloft, all low desires doth shun : Raise thou me up, as thou my heart has done, So during night, in heaven remain may I. Blame not, I say again, m}' high desire, Sith of us both the cause thereof depends : In thee doth shine, in me doth burn a fire ; Fire draweth up others, and itself ascends. Thine eye a fire, and so draws up my love ; My love a fire, and so ascends above." The most exquisite of his sonnets for sweet colour and winning fancy is that where he compares his love to a beggar at the door of beauty — • " Pity refusing my poor Love to feed, A beggar starved for want of help he lies, Aud at your mouth, the door of beauty, cries That thence some alms of sweet grants may proceed. But as he waiteth for some ahnes-deed, A cherry tree before the door he spies — dear, (juotli he, two cherries may suffice. Two only life may save in this my need. But beggars can they nought but cherries eat ? Pardon my Love, he is a goddess' son, Aud never feedeth but of dainty meat. Else need he not to i)ine as he hath done. For only the sweet fruit of tliis sweet tree Can give food to my love, and life to me." THOMAS LODGE. 197 In one of his sonnets lie makes tlie same glorious claim for his lady that Shakespeare makes for the fair youth of his adoration — " Miracle of the world ! I never will deny- That former poets praise the beauty of their days ; But all those beauties were but figures of thy praise, And all those poets did of thee but prophesj'. " His amorous sonnets and other light poems were the effusions of his youth, and like Spenser he turned in his older years to the contemplation of heavenly beauty. He concludes his love-sonnets by saying — " For if none ever loved like me, then wh}!- Still blameth he the things he doth not know ? And he that hath so loved will favour show, For he hath been a fool as well as I." And adds in prose — " When I had ended this last sonnet, and found that such vain poems as I had by idle hours writ, did amount just to the climacterical number 63 ; methought it was high time for my folly to die, and to employ the remnant of wit to other calmer thoughts less sweet and less bitter." There can be little doubt that the beautiful " spiritual sonnets " ascribed to him by Mr Park, and printed in vol. ii. of the ' Heli- conia,' are his composition. Those addressed to " our Blessed Lady" are particularly fine. IV. — Thomas Lodge (155 6- 1625). Lodge, the next in order of our sonneteers, led rather a varied life. His father was a grocer in London, who in 1563 attained to the dignity of Lord Mayor. He entered Trinity College, Oxford, in 1573, and Lincoln's Inn in 1578; but literature seems to have had more attraction for him than the bar. In 1586, and again in 1591-3, we find him engaged in privateering expeditions to the West Indies, in search of excitement and adventure. He belonged to the wild society of Greene, Marlowe, and Nash ; but if he took much part in their dissipations, he had strength enough to sur- vive it, and when the leaders of the set died off, he became sober and respectable, studied medicine, gave up poetry, and spent the leisure of his professional life in translating Josephus, and the " works, both natural and moral," of Seneca. His chief pro- ductions were— A ' Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage-plays,' in reply to Stephen Gosson's 'School of Abuse,' 1580; 'Alarm against Usurers,' along with the novelette of Torbonius and Prisceria,' 1584; ' Scylla's Metamorphosis,' with "sundry most absolute Poems and Sonnets," 1589; 'Euphues Golden Legacy,' 198 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. (reprinted in Mr Collier's ' Shakespeare's Library,' as being the basis of "As You Like It," 1590 ; ' Pliyllis honoured with Pastoral Sonnets,' 1593; 'The Wouncls of Civil War,' a tragedy on the history of Marius and Sylla, 1594; 'A Fig for Momus,' a body of satires, 1595 ; 'Wit's Misery and the World's Madness,' a prose satire, 1596; 'A Marguerite of America,' a very tragical novel, ^596. Lodge's love-poems have an exquisite delicacy and grace : they breathe a tenderer and truer passion than we find in any of his contemporaries. His sonnets are more loose and straggling, slighter and less compactly built, than Constable's or Daniel's; but they have a wonderful charm of sweet fancy and unaffected tenderness. His themes are the usual praises of beauty and complaints of unkindness ; but he contrives to impart to them a most unusual air of sincere devotion and graceful fervour. None of his rivals can equal the direct and earnest simplicity and grace of his adoration of Phyllis, and avowal of faith in her constancy. " Fan- art thou, Phyllis ; ay, so fan-, sweet maid, As nor the sun nor I have seen more fair ; For in thy cheeks sweet roses are embayed And gold more pure than gold doth gild thy hair. Sweet bees have hived their honey on thy tongue, And Hebe spiced her nectar with thy breath : About thy neck do all the graces throng And lay such baits as miglit entangle Death. In such a breast what heart would not be thrall ? From such sweet arms who would not wish embraces ? At thy fair hands who wonders not at all, Wonder itself through ignorance embases. Yet natheless tho' wondrous gifts you call these, My faith is far more wonderful than all these." There is a seeming artlessness in Lodge's sonnets, a winning directness, that constitutes a great part of their charm. They seem to be uttered through a clear and pure medium straight from the heart : their tender fragrance and music come from the heart itself. If the poet's design was to assume a pastoral innocence and simplicity, he has eminently succeeded. There are many conceits in his sonnets, but they are expressed so simply and naturally that they take on the semblance of half- earnest beliefs. A simple silly Arcadian may be allowed the sweet fancy of supposing a storm to be the result of Aurora's envy and despair at seeing his lovely mistress. " The dewy roseate Morn had with her hairs In sundry sorts the Indian clime adorned ; And now her eyes apparelled in tears The loss of lovely Memnon long had mourned : THOMAS LODGE. 199 Whenas she spied tlie nympli whom I admire, Kembing her locks, of which the yellow gold Made blush the beauties of her curled wire. Which heaven itself with wonder might behold : Then red with shame, her reverend locks she rent, And weeping hid the beaut)' of her face — The flower of fancy wrought such discontent : The sighs which 'midst the air she breathed a space A three days' stormy tempest did maintain, Her shame a fire, her eyes a swelling rain." And when despair seizes him, with what earnestness he makes his appeal to the last relief ! — " Burst, burst, poor heart, thou hast no longer hope : Captive mine eyes unto eternal sleep ; Let all my senses have no further scope ; Let death be lord of me and all my slieep. For Phyllis hath betrothed fierce disdain. That makes his mortal mansion in her heart ; And tho' my tongue have long time taken pain, To sue divorce and wed her to desart. She will not yield; my words can have no power ; She scorns my faith ; she laughs at my sad lays ; She fills my soul with never-ceasing sour. Who filled the world with volumes of her praise. In such extremes what \vi'etch can cease to crave His peace from Death who can no mercy have ? " It may, however, be acknowledged that Lodge's nature was not specially fitted for the sonnet form of composition ; he was not sufficiently patient and meditative to elaborate intricate stanzas. His lines have on them the dewy freshness of an impulsive gush, — a freshness off which the dew has not been brushed by the travail of thought ; and the opening of his sonnets in many cases leads us to expect better things than we find as we proceed when the leading idea has been hammered out into a c[uatorzain. In the sonnet that opens with the lines — ' ' Ah, pale and dying infant of the spring. How rightly now do I resemble thee ! That self-same hand that thee from stalk did wring. Hath rent my breast and robbed my heart from me " — the conclusion is laboured and disappointing. And still more disappointing is the sonnet to his lady on her sickness, which opens with the exquisitely tender verses — " How languisheth the primrose of love's garden ? How trill her tears the elixir of my senses ? " Although it contains two other beautiful lines of adjuration — "Ah, roses, love's fair roses, do not languish : Blush through the milk-white veil that holds you covered." 200 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. Mixed with liis sonnets to Phyllis, and scattered through his prose tales, are many lyrics of less intricate measure, which show Lodge's charm at the height of its power. Take, for example, the two following in honour of Phyllis : — ' ' Love guards the roses of thy lips, And flies about them like a bee ; If I approach, he forward skips, And if I kiss, he stingeth nie. Love in thine eyes doth buikl his bower, And sleeps within their pretty shine ; , And if I look the boy will lower, And from their orbs shoot shafts divine. Love works thy heart within his fire And in my tears doth firm the same ; And if I tempt, it will retire, And of my plaints doth make a game. Love, let me cull her choicest flowers, And pity me, and calm her eye ; Make soft her heart, dissolve her lowers. Then will I praise thy deity. But if thou do not, Love, I'll truly serve her, In spite of thee, and by firm faith deserve her. "My Phyllis hath the morning sun. At first to look upon her. And Phyllis hath morn-waking birds > Her risings for to honour. My Phyllis hath prime feathered flowers That smile when she treads on them. And Phyllis hath a gallant flock That leaps since she doth own them. But Phyllis hath so hard a heart, Alas that she should have it ! As yields no mercy to desart Nor grace to those that crave it. Sweet sun, when thou lookest on. Pray her regard my moan. Sweet birds, when you sing to her, To yield some pity woo her. Sweet flowers, whenas she treads on. Tell her her beauty deads one. And if in life her love she nill agree me, Pray her before I die she'll come and see me. ' Not less exquisite is Rosalind's Madrigal : — ' " Love in my bosom like a bee Doth suck his sweet : Now with his wings he plays with me. Now with his feet. Within mine eyes he makes his nest. His bed amid my tender breast. My kisses are his daily feast, And yet he robs me of my rest. Ah, wanton, will ye ? THOMAS LODGE. 201 And if I sleep then percheth he With pretty flight, And makes his pillow of my knee The livelong night. Strike I my lute, he tunes the string, He music plays if so I sing, He lends me everj' lovely thing : Yet cruel he my heart doth sting. Whist, wanton, still ye, Else I with roses every day Will whip you hence ; And bind you when you long to play For your offence. I'll shut mine eyes to keep you in, I'll make you fast it for your sin, I'll count your power not worth a pin, Alas ! what hereby shall I win, If he gainsay me ? "Wliat if I beat the wanton boy With many a rod ? He will repay me with annoy, Because a god. Then sit thou safely on my knee And let thy bower my bosom be : Lurk in mine eyes, I like of thee : Cupid, so thou pity rae. Spare not bi;t play thee. " "Scylla's Metamorphosis," the tale of Glaucus and Scylla, is interesting on its own account, and further, as the probable model of Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," whose unhappy loves it introduces as an episode. It is at least the first published of the apocryphal classical tales which at that time became a transient fashion — the English anticipator, if not the model, of Marlowe's " Hero and Leander," Drayton's " Endymion and Phoebe," and Chajiman's "Ovid's Banquet of Sense." I need not follow the windings of the tale. The gist is that Scylla was metamorphosed as a punishment for her cruelty to Glaucus, a sea-god : and the interest of the poem lies in its voluptuous descriptions. I may quote his picture of the anguish of Venus for comparison with Daniel's Henry and Shakespeare's Venus : it is more a pretty grief than a deep passion : its sweetness reminds us of a child's endearments to a dead pet bird. " He that hath seen the sweet Arcadian boy Wiping the purple from his forced wound, His pretty tears betokening his annoy ; His sighs, his cries, his falling on the ground ; The echoes ringing from the rocks his fall, The trees with tears reporting of his thrall. 202 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. And Venus starting at her love-mate's cry Forcing her birds to haste her chariot on ; And, full of grief, at last, with piteous eye, Seen where all pale with death he lay alone "Whose beauty quail'd as wont the lilies droop When wasteful winter winds do make them stoop. Her dainty hand addressed to claw her dear, Her roseal lip allied to his pale cheek. Her sighs, and then her looks and hea\'y cheer. Her bitter threats, and then her passions meek ; How on his senseless corpse she lay a-crying, As if the boy were then but new a-dying." Lodge's "Fig for Momus" is often amusing, but the satire is not very pungent. He Avas much too good-natured a man to be a satirist : he was not capable even of smiling spite, much less of bitter derision. His " Epistles " are entitled to the claim that he makes for them, of being the first productions of the kind in English, and their date disposes at once of Joseph Hall's conceited boast — " I first adventure, follow me who list And be the second English satirist." ^o'- But priority is their chief merit : they are colourless imitations of Horace. Marston is the first real English satirist. Nor can Lodge be said to have been successful as a dramatist. The "Wounds of Civil War" is a heavy drama. Sylla is drawn with considerable power as a bold rough man with a certain sense of humour in him : ambitious, boastful, treating his enemies with scoffing contempt, making a jest of death and cruelty, rudely repelling compliments, provoking public censure for the pleasure of defying it. He may have supplied some raw material for Shakespeare's " Coriolanus." Sylla talks very much in the vein of Tamburlaine ; and it is probable from this that Lodge may fairly get the credit or discredit of the extravagant ramps of Rasni in the "Looking-glass for London," • which he wrote in conjunction with Greene. It is a curious thing that men like Lodge and Peele should quite equal, if not surpass, even Marlowe in outrageous heroics. One wonders that the Herod of the Mysteries should be out-Heroded by one who dwells with such fresh enthusiasm on tender beauties. How different are Sylla's rants from this strain ! — " shady vale, fair enriched meads, sacred woods, sweet fields, and rising mountains ; painted flowers, green herbs where Flora treads, Refreshed by wanton winds and watery fountains. " Perhaps, however, it is not more surprising than that the author of "Tamburlaine" should be the author of "Hero and Leander." THOMAS WATSON. 203 V. — Thomas Watson (1557^-1592?). We have mentioned incidently the ' 'EKaro/ATra^ta, or Passion- ate Century of Love,' by Thomas Watson. Watson first appeared as an author in 1581, with a translation into Latin of the 'Antigone' of Sophocles. The "Passionate Century" (that is, Hundred) was published in 1582. Three years after, he executed a Latin elegiac poem, entitled "Amyntas." He continued the practice of Latin verse alongside of English : in 1590 he published an " Eglogue upon the Death of Sir Francis Walsingham " in Latin and English, adopting in this case the title of " Meliboeus." In 1593, in which year he was mentioned as if then dead,i his last work was published— a collection of sixty sonnets, entitled "The Tears of Fancy, or Love Disdained." Neither the "Century of Love" nor the "Tears of Fancy" belongs to a high order of poetry. The " Century" was avowedly an exercise of skill : the love-passion, he tells us in the Preface, was "but supposed." With this the critic has no cjuarrel : so far Watson differs from many of his poetical brethren, only in the perhaps superfluous candour of the avowal. The misfortune is that the supposition, the imaginative passion, is weak. There is no constructive vitality in his lines ; the words and images seem brought together by a process of mechanical accumulation. The " Tears of Fancy " are decidedly superior to the " Love- passions," but here also there is a fatal lack of spontaneity and freshness : the superiority has every appearance of being due to the author's study of Spenser. The "Passionate Century" is worth reading as a repertory of commonplace lover's hyperboles. There never was so sweet a lady, never so fond nor so distraught a lover. Hand, foot, lip, eye, brow, and golden locks are all incomparable. The ages never have produced, and never will produce, such another; Apelles could not have painted her, Praxiteles could not have sculptured her, Virgil and Homer could not have expressed her, and Tully would not have ventured to repeat the number of her gifts. She is superior to all the mythological paramours of Jove. The various goddesses have contributed their best endowments, mental and physical, to make her perfect. Her voice excels Arion's harp, Philomela's song, Apollo's lute ; yea — • " Music herself and all the Muses nine For skill or voice their titles may resign. " The despair produced in the lover's heart by the disdain of such a paragon is in a corresponding ratio. Vesuvius is nothing to 1 See the iatroductiou to Mr Arber's reprint. 204 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. the fire that consumes his heart. The pains of hell would be a comparative relief. He suffers the combined tortures of Tantalus, Ixion, Tityus, and Sisyphus : — " If Tityus, wretched wiglit, beheld my pains, He would confess his wounds to be but small : A vulture worse than his tears all my veins, Yet never lets me die, nor live at all, Would God a while I mi,r,'ht possess his place, To judge of both which were in better case." The " Tears of Fancy," which, as we have said, are chiefly imi- tation gems, observe the same form as Daniel's. The two follow- ing quatrains, with their pretty anadiplusis, or doubling in one line upon the last words of the preceding, are an extreme example of the poet's imitation of Spenser. Cupid is the eager fugitive, bent on mischief : — " Then on the sudden fast away he fled, He fled apace as from pursuing foe : Ne ever looked he back, ne turned his head, Until he came whereas he wrought my woe. The' casting from his back his bended bow, He quickly clad himself in strange disguise : In strange disguise that no man might him know, So coucht himself within my Lady's eyes." The two following conceits are in his best manner, and derive a certain interest from their having apparently been imitated in Shakespeare's sonnets 46 and 47 : — " My heart imposed this penance on mine eyes. Eyes the first causers of my heart's lamenting : That they should weep till love and fancy dies, Fond love the last cause of my heart's repenting. Mine eyes upon my heart inflict this pain, Bold heart that dared to harbour thoughts of love ! That it should love and purchase fell disdain, A grievous penance, which my heart doth prove. Mine eyes did weep as heart had then imposed. My heart did pine as eyes had it constrained : Eyes in their tears my paled face disclosed. Heart in his sighs did show it was disdained. So th' one did weep, th' other sigh'd, both grieved, For both must live and love, both unrelieved. " " My heart accused mine eyes and was offended. Vowing the cause was in mine eyes' aspiring : Mine eyes affirmed my heart might well amend it, If he at first had banished love's desiring. Heart said that love did enter at the eyes, And from the eyes descended to the heart : Eyes said that in the heart did sparks arise, "Which kindled flame that wrought the inward smart. MICHAEL DRAYTON. 205 Heai-t said eyes' tears might soon have quench'd that flame, Eyes said heart's sighs at iirst might love excite. So heart tlie eyes, and eyes the heart did blame, Whilst both did pine, for both the pain did feel. Heart sighed and bled, eyes wept and gazed too much : Yet must I gaze because I see none such." These sonnets, with or without the following beginning of Watson's 2 2d Love-passion — " When wert thou born, sweet Love ? who was thy sire ? When Flora first adorn 'd Dame Tellus' lap. Then sprung I forth with wanton Hot Desire. Who was thy nurse, to feed thee first with pap ? Youth first with tender hand bound up my head, Then said, with looks alone I should be fed " may have suggested the song in the 'Merchant of Venice,' Act iii. 2, "Tell me, where is Fancy bred."i VI. — Michael Drayton (1563-163 i). In Spenser's " Colin Clout's Come Home Again," published in 1595, occur four lines that are coaunonly supposed to refer to Shakespeare — • ' ' And there though last not least is Action ; A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found : Whose muse, full of high thought's invention. Doth like himself heroically sound. " A much stronger probability may be made out for Drayton. Drayton made his deUU as a pastoral poet in 1593, with his "Idea: Shepherd's Garland, fashioned in Nine Eclogues;" and followed this up in 1594 with a body of sonnets — "Idea's Mirror, Amours in Quatorzains " — and the mythological tale of "Endy- mion and Phoebe." It has been considered conclusive against the probability of his being referred to by Spenser that " he had published nothing in an heroical strain even in 1595 ;" and that " it would be difficult to assign any meaning to the assertion that his name did, like himself^ heroically sound." But Drayton's first publication, 'Harmony of the Church,' 1591, versified the highest poetry of the Old Testament, and loftily disclaimed all intention of "feeding any vain humour"; while the poetical name that he assumed was Eowland or Roland, the most heroic name in s 1 A writer in the ' Quarterly Review,' No. 267, ascribes the suggestion of thi, song to a sonnet by Jacopo da Lentino. The sonnet is not known to have been printed before 1661, but the writer supposes Shakespeare to liave seen it in MS., and considers it a proof that Shakespeare coiild read Italian, if not that he hail been in Italy ! The coincidence is certainly striking, but the birthplace of Love or Fancy in the eyes was a commonplace. I have remarked several English poems of the time quite capable of having given the suggestion. 206 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. chivalry. Spenser, full as he was of Ariosto, was much more likely to be struck with the heroic sound of Roland than of Shakespeare. Further, the aspiring character of Drayton's muse would seem to have struck other minds than Spenser's. Prefixed to " Endymion and Phcebe " is a commendatory poem containing the following lines : — "Rowland, when first I read thy stately rhymes In shepherd's weeds when yet thou livedst unknown, I then beheld thy chaste Idea's fame Put on the wings of thy immortal style. Thy fiery spirit mounts up to the sky, And what thou writest lives to Eternity." Drayton did more afterwards to show the loftiness or heroism of his thoughts. His chief productions were — " Mortimeriados " (a poem on the civil wars in the reign of Edward II., recast and published in 1603 under the title of the "Barons' Wars"), 1596; " England's Heroical Epistles " (imaginary letters after the manner of Ovid between lovers celebrated in English history), 1598 ; " Polyolbion " (a metrical description of England, county by county), eighteen books in 16 12, thirty complete in 1622; "The Battle of Agincourt," 1627. Not much is known of his personal history. He was born at Hartshill, Atherston, Warwickshire, near the river Anker. In one of his poems he speaks of himself as having been a " proper goodly page." His relations with patrons and patronesses are known only from his dedications, which are addressed to various honourable and noble personages. In the course of his numer- ous publications, he fell out lamentably with the booksellers : in a letter to Drummond, he calls them "a company of base knaves, whom I both scorn and kick at." In person, he was a swart little man, full of energy and an enthusiastic sense of his own powers ; erudite, laborious, versatile ; noted for the respecta- bility of his life, and distinguished by the ardour of his orthodox and patriotic sentiments. I doubt whether he had any special call to poetry beyond the contagion of circumstances ; ambition made his verses. No person with literary gifts could have lived in such an atmosphere without catching something of the poetic frenzy : one could hardly have helped learning how to express the fiery touch of love, and the sweet influences of nature. Drayton has a suspicious pride in the exercise of his gift : originality and versatility are the two qualities that he boasts of, as if he had overmastered the muse by intellectual force rather than won her by natural affinity. Yet he has written some interesting poetry : his "Nymphidia" is a pretty burlesque of love, jealousy, combat, MICHAEL DEAYTON. 207 and reconciliation at the Court of Faeryland ; his " Polyolbion," a miracle of industry and sustained enthusiasm, contains some fine descriptions ; one, at least, of his sonnets (that quoted in Mr Palgrave's 'Golden Treasury') is exceedingly hapi:)y and in- genious ; and his poem on the Battle of Agincourt is vivid, stirring, and filled throughout with the most glowing patriotism. His ode on the Battle of Agincourt is, perhaps, his masterpiece : Mr Swinburne ranks it with Campbell's "Battle of the Baltic," of which it seems to have been the model. ' ' Fair stood the wind for France, When we our sails advance, Nor now to prove our cliance Longer not tarry, But put into the main : At Kaux the moutli of Seine With all his warlike train Landed King Harry. And taking many a fort Furnish 'd in warlike sort Coming toward Agincourt In happy hour ; Skirmishing day by day With those oppose his way Whereas the general lay With all his power. And ready to be gone, Armour on armour shone, Drum unto drum did groan', To hear was wonder ; That with the cries they make The very earth did shake ; Trumpet to trumpet spake, Thunder to thunder. Well it thine age became, noble Erpiugham ! That didst the signal frame Unto the forces ; When from a meadow by. Like a storm suddenly. The English archery Stuck the French horses. When down their bows they threw, And forth their bilboes drew, And on the French they flew, No man was tardy. Arms from the shoulder sent ; Scalps to the teeth were rent ; Down the French joeasants went : These were men hardy. 208 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEEES. On happy CrisjDiu day Fought was the noble fray, Which Fame did not dcLay To England to carry. when shall Englishmen With such acts fill a pen, Or England breed again Such a King Harry ! " There is something of the same fire in his poem on the same glorious battle, though it is weighted and obscured by the laborious circumstantiality, the industrious particularisation, which is so conspicuous also in his "Polyolbion." He names the various ships, and describes the colours and ensigns of the various com- panies, with Homeric minuteness and more than Homeric ardour : and realises such scenes as the two camps on the night before the battle with great variety of vivid details. His circumstantiality sometimes has the powerful effect so often remarked in' the descriptions of Defoe : for example, the following incidents in the siege of Harfleur :— ■^o^ ' Now upon one side you should hear a cry And all that quarter clouded with a smother ; The like from that against it by and by, As though the one were echo to the other, The king and Clarence so their turns can ply ; And valiant Glo'ster shows himself their brother, AVhose mines to the besieged more mischief do. Than with the assaults above, the other two. An old man sitting by the fireside Decrepit with extremity of age. Stilling his little grandchild when it cried, Almost distracted with the batteries' rage ; Sometimes doth speak it fair, sometimes doth chide ; As thus he seeks its mourning to assuage. By chance a bullet doth the chimney hit, Which falling in dotli kill both him and it. Whilst the sad weeping mother sits her down. To give her little new-born babe the pap, A luckless quarry, levelled at the town, Kills the sweet baby sleeping in her la]), That with the fright she falls into a swoon ; From which awaked, and mad with the mishap. As up a rampier shrieking she doth climb, Comes a great shot, and strikes her limb from limb. W^hilst a sort run confusedly to quench Some palace burning, or some fired street, Called from where they were fighting in the trench. They in their way with balls of wildfire meet, MICHAEL DKAYTON. 209 So plagued are the miserable French, Not above head but also under feet ; For the fierce Engli.sli vow the town to take, Or of it soou a heap of stones to make. Hot is the siege, the English coming on As men so long to be kept out that scorn. Careless of wounds, as they were made of stone, As with their teeth the walls they would have torn : Into a breach who quickly is not gone, Is by the next behind him overborne ; So that they found a place that gave them way, They never cared what danger therein lay." If his sonnets have no great intrinsic interest, they derive a certain adventitious interest from their illustrative bearing on the sonnets of Shakespeare. The following, with its curious points of resemblance to Shakespeare's 144th sonnet— "Two loves I have of comfort and despair " — raises a doubt whether that perplexing sonnet is not more figurative than is commonly supposed. If I am right in my recollection that it did not appear before the edition of 1602, it may have been imitated from Shakespeare's, which appeared in 1599; and at any rate, taken in connection with the last lines of Shakespeare's sonnet, it raises the question whether Shakespeare's worser spirit was so serious an evil as the first part of the sonnet represents. " An evil spirit your beauty haunts nie still, Wherewith, alas ! I have been long possesst, Which ceaseth not to tempt me to each ill. Nor gives me once but one poor minute's rest : In me it speaks whether 1 sleep or wake. And when by means to drive it out I try. With greater torments then it me doth take, And tortures me in most extremity : Before my face it lays down my despairs And hastes me on unto a sudden death ; Now tempting me to drown myself in tears And then in sighing to give up my breath : Thus am I still provoked to every evil By this good wicked spirit, sweet angel devil. " In Drayton's sonnets we find several of the conceits that appear in Shakespeare's, such as the warfare between heart and eyes and the play upon the identity of the lover and his beloved ; but it may perhaps be more serviceable to quote his version of another commonplace, the promise of immortality to his mistress, to help to correct a vulgar notion that Shakespeare stood alone in the lofty confidence of eternal memory. " How many paltry, foolish, painted things, That now in coaches trouble every street, Shall be forgotten, whom no poet sings, Ere they be well wrapped in their winding-sheet ! 210 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. "Where I to thee eternity shall give, When nothing else remaineth of these days, And queens hereafter shall be glad to live Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise ; Virgins and matrons reading these my rhymes, Shall be so mucli delighted with thy story. That they shall grieve they lived not in these times To have seen thee, their sex's only glory : So shalt thou fly above the vulgar throng Still to survive in my immortal song." " Stay, speedy Time, behold before thou pass, From age to age, what thou hast sought to see, One in whom all the excellencies be ; In whom Heaven looks itself as in a glass : Time, look thou too in this tralucent glass And thy youth past in this pure mirror see, As the world's beauty in his infancy, What it was then, and thou before it was ; Pass on, and to posterity tell this ; Yet see thou tell but trul}' what hath been : Say to our nephews, that thou once hast seen In perfect human shape, all heavenly bliss: And bid them mourn, nay more, despair with thee When she is gone, her like again to see." VI r. — "William S h akespeaee — Sonnets. After a survey of the huge issue of sonnets between 1591 and 1594, the characteristics of the sonnets of Sliakespeare seem to stand out Avith greater distinctness. They divide themselves into three classes. First come the sonnets of the ' Passionate Pilgrim,' some of which rise out of the relations between Venus and Adonis, and most of which are in the same strain, treating the theme of love with a certain lightness. Next come the twenty-six son- nets placed among his Sonnets so-called, between the 127th and tlie 15 2d inclusive : sonnets sufficiently alarming at first sight, but not so very terrible when we examine them boldly. Finally comes the main body of his sonnets, addressed to his friend. These are in every way more powerful and mature. The second and third classes are, as we shall see, strongly contrasted in sentiment with the effusions of preceding sonneteers. In 1598, one Francis Meres, in a work entitled '■ Palladis Tamia, Wit's Treasury',' eulogised the various English poets, finding par- allels for them among the Greek and Latin poets. Among others, he remarked on Shakespeare, and said : " As the soul of Euphor- bus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare ; witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends," &ic. The sonnets published in the WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 211 following year in the ' Passionate Pilgrim,' which bore Shake- speare's name on the title-page, fully answer this description : ^ they may with sufficient propriety be said to be animated by the sweet witty soul of Ovid. The rest of Shakespeare's sonnets were not published till 1609, when they were issued as 'Shakespeare's Sonnets,' "never before imprinted"; and some critics have assev- erated with unaccountable confidence that the second issue imist be the sonnets spoken of by Meres, although the publication of them had been delayed. There is not the slightest ground for this assertion : " among his private friends " cannot be taken to mean "to his private friend." In the sonnets of the 'Passion- ate Pilgrim ' there is quite enough to justify the words of Meres. Besides, Meres seems to have made his comparison with some notion of its meaning, seeing that " Venus " and " Lucrece " at once carry us to the Amoves and the Heroides ; and in the case of the sonnets addressed to a friend the comparison would be wholly inapplicable. Further, the 107th sonnet, containing the line — " The mortal moon hatli her eclipse endured," must have been written after the death of Elizabeth, to whose name of " Cynthia " the line is an undoubted reference. Sonnets cxxvii.-clii. are, as I have said, startling at first sight. They are unmistakably addressed to a woman of loose character, and they seem to represent the poet as involved in a disreputable passion. But when we look more closely into them, we begin to suspect that, if those sonnets are to be treated as bearing all on one subject, we do wrong to take too serious a view of them. One must not treat published sonnets addressed to a courtesan as earnest private correspondence, or as grave confessions whis- pered in the ear of a ghostly counsellor. I believe that the proper view is to regard them as exercises of skill, undertaken in a spirit of wanton defiance and derision of commonplace. When young Hal was told of his father's triumphs,^ the humor- ous youth indulged in a curious eccentricity, which, if I am not in error, represents exactly the spirit of these sonnets — " His answer was, he would unto the stews, And from the commonest creature })luck a glove, And wear it as a favour ; and with that He would unhorse the lustiest challenger." Now those who have gone through the overwhelming mass of 1 Part, at least, of the ' Passionate Pilgrim ' was composed by Shakespeare. See Mr Collier's remarks on the subject. I sliould be disposed to assent to nearly all, if not all, that Messrs Clai-k and Wriglit have published as Shake- speare's under that title. (See under "Marlowe.") The name "sonnet" was not confined to quatorzains ; several of the Passionate Pilgi'im's sonnets are in the six-line staves used in Watson's " Passionate Century of Love." 212 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. sonnets poured out about the time when Shakespeare began to write — sonnets in admiring praise and mournful blame of Stella, Delia, Diana, Phyllis, and Idea — will not be slow to understand, if not to sympathise with, the wanton outburst of impatient genius. The new sonneteer lays down a humorous challenge — Give place, ye lovers, who boast of beauty and virtue : my mistress is neither fair nor faithful, yet I can praise her with as much zeal and fury as the best of you — " My mistress' eyes are notliing like the sun ; Coral is far more red than her lips' red : If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun ; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks ; And in some perfumes is there more delight, Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound ; I grant I never saw a goddess go : My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground : And yet, by Heaven, I think my love as rare As any she, belied by false compare. " He is no tame admirer and adorer, seeing nothing in his mistress but perfection : he woos with a bolder cheer. He tells her plainly that he does not love her with his eyes, for they see in her a thou- sand errors : yet his heart loves her in spite of them (cxli. ) He speculates on the cause of the lover's blindness : concludes that it comes from watching and tears : and apostrophises the cunning of Love in thus hiding his mistress's imperfections (cxlviii.) When she swears that she is made of truth, he believes her — although he knows that she lies (cxxxviii.) He must surely be frantic mad to swear her fair and think her bright when she is black as hell and dark as night (cxlvii.) His complaints of unkindness and allega- tions of cruelty might easily pass as serious, did not the other son- nets reveal the humorous mockery : yet they are not without the jocular touch. He complains of unkindness with a leniency hardly consistent with serious passion — " Tell me thou lovest elsewhere ; but in my sight, Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside. " That is to say, do whatever you please behind my back, but do not ogle other men before my eyes (cxxxix.) He accuses her of pride and cruelty, but warns her not to carry it too far — lest he do — what 1 commit suicide 1 no, but — " Lest sorrow lend me words, and words express The manner of my pity-wanting pain." WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 213 Two or three of the series, and particularly cxxviii., praise the lady without obvious mockery, yet with a certain gay familiarity. The only sonnet of the series radically inconsistent with tbis theory is the 146th. Down to the 143d the gay defiant tone is unmis- takable : two or three after that are uncertain and equivocal, and the 146th seems unmistakably serious. Must we then give up the theory 1 I think not. There is an obvious explanation Avhich one may produce without being liable to a charge of sophistry ; and that is, that Shakespeare, having taken up the relation between a lover and a courtesan originally in wanton humorous defiance of somewhat lackadaisical eftusions, his dramatic instinct could not be restrained from pursuing the relationship farther into more serious aspects. The sonnets addressed to a friend — a young nobleman, apparently, whose bounty the poet has experienced, and whose personal gifts and graces he admires with impassioned fondness — depart very strikingly from the sonnets of Shakespeare's predecessors. He ceases to reiterate Petrarch's woes, and opens up a new vein of feeling. Love is still the argument — love's fears and confidences, crosses and triumphs — but it is love for a diflferent object under different conditions. We find in Shakespeare's sonnets most of the commonplaces of the course of true love, coldness and recon- ciliation, independence and devoted submission, but they are transferred to the course of impassioned friendship, and thereby transfigured. Are, then, these moods of impassioned friendship real or feigned, utterances from the heart, or artificial creations to break the monotony of the language and imagery of passionate admiration between the sexes ? Some modern critics would have us believe that the theme is not friendship in any shape, real or feigned : the sentiment of the sonnets, they say, is too warm to be inspired except by the charms of woman : Shakespeare could not have admired beauty so fondly in any youth however beautiful. These critics maintain that the sonnets must have been addressed to a woman : and Coleridge went the length of saying that one sonnet where the sex is indisputable must have been introduced as a blind. 1 All this is the mere insanity of critical dogmatism, maintained in defiance of the most obtrusive facts. Mr Gerald Massey, not being able to get over masculine pronouns and other indications of gender, but still unwilling to admit that some of the sonnets could have been addressed to a man, professes to distinguish between sonnets of friendship and sonnets of sexual love, and redistributes them accordingly. In sonnets addressed unequivocally to his youthful friend, it is, says Mr Massey, manly 1 This is hardly less curious than tlie amiable Opium-eater's notion that Hamlet's character was exceedingly like his own. 214 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. beauty that the poet extols. What, then, are we to make of Sonnet iii., where the young man is told — " Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee Calls back the lovely April of her prime " ? Mr Massey draws the line between manly beauty and womanly beauty at Avhiteness of hand and fragrance of breath : when Shakespeare praises these points of beauty, he must be address- ing a woman. 1 Yet in Sonnet cvi. Shakespeare ascribes "sweet beauty's best" without distinction to ladies and lovely knights — "When in the chronicle of wasted time I see descriptions of the fairest wights, And beauty making beautiful old rhyme In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights ; Then in the blazon of sweet beauty's best, Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow, I see their antique pen would have express'd Ev'n such a beauty as you master now." Further, Mr Massey, if I mistake not, ascribes to the friend Sonnet liii. containing these lines — " Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit Is poorly imitated after you ; On Helen's cheek all art of beauty set. And you in Grecian tires are painted new." And when we look to the description of Adonis we find such lines as — " Once more the ruby-coloured portal opened That to his mouth did honey passage yield. " And— Who when he lived his breath and beauty set Gloss on the rose, smell to the violet." It is bad enough to defy all indications of gender and declare that none of these sonnets were addressed to a young man : it is perhaps worse to say that some are and some are not, and to make an arbitrary selection, taking one's own feelings as the exact measure of the poet's. Admiration of the personal beauty of his friend is too closely woven into the sonnets to be detached in this way. They are interpenetrated with it : it is expressed as warmly in sonnets when the sex happens to be unequivocal, as in others where the rashness of dogmatic ingenuity is restrained by no such accident. 1 Gilderoy, in the ballad, is said to have a breath as sweet as rose, and a hand fairer tlian any lady's, and yet he was a manly youth whom none dared meet singledianded, and who " bauldly bare away the gear of many a Lawland loon." WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 215 The friendship expressed in Shakespeare's sonnets was prob- ably no less real than the love professed for their mistresses by other sonneteers. Friendship is not quite dead even in these degenerate days. There are still people alive to whom the warmth of the warmest of Shakespeare's sonnets would not appear an exaggeration. But there would seem to liave been a peculiar exaltation of the sentiment of friendship among the Elizabethan poets. The titles of Edward's plays are "Damon and Pythias" and " Palamon and Arcite " ; and in the one that has been pre- served friendship is extolled above all other blessings. The 'Paradise of Dainty Devices ' is full of "praises of friendship." The dramatists did not hesitate to bring it into collision with love, and to' represent it as rising in some cases higher than love itself. Marlowe makes Edward II. desert his queen for the sake of Gave- ston, and declare that he will rather lose his kingdom than renounce his favourite. In Lyly's " Endymion," Eumenides affirms that " such is his unspotted faith to Endymion, that whatsoever seemeth a needle to prick his finger is a dagger to wound his heart ; " and when it is in his power to obtain whatever he asks, he hesitates between the recovery of his friend Endymion and the possession of his mistress Semele, and is finally decided by an old man in favour of the friend. Shakespeare himself has treated the problem in his "Two Gentlemen of Verona." In Proteus, the weaker - willed nature, new love is an irresistible passion stronger than friendship, and stronger also than old love • but in the manlier Valentine friendship is the nobler sentiment of the two, and even when his friend is convicted of the grossest treachery he comes generously forward and says, "All that is mine in Silvia I give thee." Commentators unable to understand this supreme and perhajDS fantastic generosity of friendship, as Mr Gerald Massey is unable to understand the impassioned friendship of the sonnets, think there must be something wrong with the conclusion of the play : they wholly miss the design of the dramatist, and cry out that he has had recourse to a forced and unnatural ex- pedient to extricate himself from a difficult complication. All these that I have mentioned, with the exception of Edward and Gaveston, were cases of friendship between equals. Bacon laid down that friendship could not exist between equals ; and the Elizabethans were familiar with the often quoted friendships between Alexander and Hephfestion, Hercules and Hylas, Achilles and Patrocles, Socrates and Alcibiades, in which the sentiment was enhanced by the charms of strength on the one hand, and youth and beauty on the other. It is not impossible that the influence of the maiden queen had something to do with the laudation of friendship in the Elizabethan age ; and the represen- tation of women's parts on the stage by boys may have fostered to 216 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. an unusual degree the sentimental admiration of beautiful youths. This last influence could hardly but have affected Shakespeare, seeing that he acted up to boys in that character, and that they must occasionally have crossed his mind with their "small pipes" and " smooth and rubious " lips when he was composing praises of the beauty that they represented. And it is difficult to see what can have been meant by the expression " Socratem ingenio" — a So- crates in disposition — in Shakespeare's epitaph, if it does not jjoint to his sentiment for beautiful young men. The sonnets, with the exception perhaps of the first seventeen advising his beautiful friend to marry, which may have been the poet's first off"ering of verses, or may have been composed at any time and placed first as a suitable preface, seem to follow the history of the friendship. I do not quite agree with Mr Armitage Brown's division of the ' Sonnets ' into separate poems, in each of which the sonnet form is merely used as a stanza ; but it seems to me unmistakable that there is a sequence in them, not only to this extent that several consecutive sonnets are occupied with the same thpme, but to this further extent that the themes are consecutive, arising naturally as if in the course of the poet's varying relations with his friend, relations real or imagined. Certainly there is no justification for the course that Mr Massey has adopted of treat- ing the sonnets as if they had been written on separate slips to different persons for different purposes, and shuflled together by the publisher. The, great question in connection with the sonnets is, who was Shakespeare's friend and the object of his praises 1 The poet's lofty promise of immortal memory has been fulfilled more liber- ally and less exactly than he intended : he, or his publisher for him, may be said to have immortalised everybody in that genera- tion whose initials are known to have been W. and H., read either way; and the actual friend comes in for nothing more than a share of the disputed honour, if, indeed, he has as yet been recognised at all. By the testimony of the sonnets themselves, Shakespeare's friend was young and beautiful, of rank superior to the poet, a bountiful patron, and very much courted by rival poets. Now two young noblemen are known to have extended their patronage to Shakespeare — Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and Wil- liam Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. It was to Southampton that Shakespeare dedicated ' Venus and Adonis ' — the first heir of his invention— in 1593, and ' Lucrece ' in the following year. The first dedication was couched in terms of distant respect : the second, which was as follows, bears in its warmth of expression a striking similarity to the language of the sonnets, particularly sonnet 26, — " The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end; WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 217 whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours ; what I have to do is yours ; being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater ; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with all happi- ness." There is also a tradition that Southampton at one time made the poet a present of a thousand pounds. The evidence for the patronage of Shakespeare by Pembroke is not so pointed, but is quite trustworthy. Shakespeare's fellow-players, Heming and Condell, dedicated the folio of 1623 to the "incomparable pair of brethren," the Earl of Pembroke and the Earl of Montgomery, calling the poet "your servant Shakespeare," and mentioning that they had " prosecuted both the plays and their author living with much favour." Both Southampton and Pembroke were younger men than the poet, Southampton by nine years (being born in 1573), Pembroke by sixteen years (being born in 15S0). There is no record of personal beauty in Southampton, while there is in the case of Pembroke : but the known partiality of affection forbids us to lay much stress on that. Both were bountiful patrons of literature, and had sonnets addressed to them by Daniel, Chap- man, Withers, and many others. When we cast about for presumptions to turn the balance "of probability one way or the other, we naturally look first to the inscription prefixed to the sonnets by the publisher. It runs as follows : " To THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF THESE INSUING SONNETS Mr W. H. all happiness and that eternitie promised by OUR ever -living poet wisheth the well-wishing adven- turer IN setting forth T.T." Now the phrase " only begetter " sounds strange in nineteenth-century ears ; xm should call the poet the only begetter.i But the humility of dedication was carried much farther by the Elizabethans. Shakespeare himself, in dedicating his " Lucrece " to Southampton, used the expression — "what I have done is yours ; what I have to do is yours." It is in allusion to this practice of poets that the Duke in " Twelfth Night," apostrophising greatness cries — ' ' Thousand escapes of wit Make thee the /a^/icr of their idle dreams." And in the dedication of Daniel's sonnets to " Delia," to the Countess of Pembroke, the mother of the young Earl of Pembroke 1 Too much stress should not be given to the " only." It need mean nothing more than "niatcldess," "incomparalile" ; a strong superlative, as in the phrases " only rare poet," ^' only expected imp of a noble house," or Sliakespeare's own expression in the first sonnet — "only herald of the gandy spring." 218 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. just mentioned, we seem to have the very original of " T. T.'s" expression.^ "Vouchsafe," the poet says — " Vouchsafe now to accept them as thine own, Begotten by thy hand and my desire, Wherein my zeal and thy great might is shown." And this although Lady Mary was not Delia, but only lent her name to countenance the young poet's first effusion. Had, then, Mr W. H. no nearer relation than this to Shakespeare's Sonnets : was he not the noble young friend, but only ;some person whose favour T. T. was anxious to conciliate 1 One does not like to say dogmatically what a bookseller might or might not have done in those days, but I am inclined to think that " Mr W. H." must stand for Shakespeare's friend and patron — for this reason, that I cannot bring myself to believe that any bookseller would have dared to divert the poet's promise of immortality from a person of rank such as Shakespeare's friend and patron undoubtedly was. I do not think the "Mr" need stand in our way. Sidney is called Master Philip Sidney in Webbe's ' Discourse of English Poetry,' and Lord Buckhurst is entered as M. Sackville in ' Eng- land's Parnassus.' Certainly, although so great an authority as Mr Collier considers " Mr " a serious difficulty, it is much easier to find probable reasons for the title than to find any tolerable reason for the bookseller's appropriating the poet's promise for the benefit of a friend of his own so obscure that history has preserved no memorial of his name. This would have been so idiotic that it is incredible. I see no reason for refusing to believe that W. H. are the initials of the name of Shakespeare's friend. Now, curiously enough, W. H. are the initials of William Her- bert, Earl of Pembroke, and H. W. are the initials of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. Dr Nathan Drake contended that the Earl of Southampton was meant, and that the inversion of the initials was intended as a blind. But if any blind was thought necessary, why have a dedication at all 1 And why use a blind that must at once draw suspicion on the Earl of Pem- broke ? If the "Mr" was blind enough, the inversion of the initials was unnecessary — and if it was not, then the Earl of Pem- broke was pointed to ; and if the sonnets were such that the Earl of Southampton was ashamed of them, it is not likely that T. T. would have fathered them on the Earl of Pembroke. But though the initials have proved a sufficient blind to the eyes of posterity, I doubt very much whether any blind was intended or effected by them when they first appeared. In all probability, 1 But the truth is, that the original might have been found in any dedication from Geoffrey of Monmouth's downwards. It is a commonplace compliment from poet to patron. — 1885. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 219 the object of Shakespeare's sonnets was perfectly well known to the first readers of them : and W. H. pointed to William Herbert as surely as T. T. pointed to Thomas Thorpe the bookseller. i There is one circumstance which at first glance appears in- significant, but which, when considered, appears an almost con- clusive presumption in favour of the Earl of Pembroke, and that is the parent that Shakespeare's friend is said to take after. In the 3d sonnet the friend is told — " Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee Calls back the lovely April of her prime." Now it is open to say that this means no more than that Shake- speare's friend bore a resemblance to his mother more than to his father. But it is difficult to be satisfied with this interpre- tation when we remember who was " Pembroke's mother," and recall Ben Jonson's famous epitaph — " Underneath this sable hearse Lies the subject of all verse, Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother ; Death ! ere thou hast slain another Learned and fair and good as she, Time shall throw a dart at thee." No illustrious family ever won the hearts of the poets so complete- ly as the Sidneys, and not of the poets only but of all men : they were universal favourites. As Sidney was considered the jewel of Elizabeth's Court, and his sister the paragon of her sex, so Pembroke was said to be " the most universally beloved and esteemed of any man" of his age. This lends additional point to Shakespeare's urgency for the marriage of his friend : he might well be anxious for the preservation of so noble a stock. Any inference to be drawn from dates is also on the whole favourable to the claims of Pembroke as against Southampton. One thing, indeed, at first seems to be in favour of Southampton — namely, the number of coincidences in expression between the sonnets and comedies composed before the end of the century. But two facts combine to deprive this argument from coincidences 1 Seeing that Shakespeare lays so much stress on their difference of rank in the sonnets, and agrees that "he cannot always be acknowledged in public, it would have been inconsistent for him to have dedicated them openly in his own name to his patron at full length. This may account for the publisher's tak- ing the dedication in hand, and as it were endorsing the compliments of the poet. It might even have been necessary that the sonnets should appear to be published without consent of either poet or patron, and that the publisher should use the timid but transparent veil of " Mr W. H." as if he had made the dedication of his own accord and without permission. But this, of course, is pure speculation. 220 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. of any value. One is that it was in those plays that Shakespeare made his first studies of the non-tragical relations between lovers, and formed his ways of looking at and expressing those relations : it was inevitable, therefore, that when he took up the parallel rela- tions of friendship, the treatment should exhibit coincidences. And the other is that the comedies were frequently repeated, so that the poet was not allowed to forget his earlier studies : he might have gone home any evening before 1609 with his head full of " Love's Labour Lost" or the " Comedy of Errors." We can- not, therefore, argue from coincidences in idea and expression that a sonnet and a play were composed at the same date. The only sonnet of really indisputable date is the 107th, containing the reference to the death of Elizabeth or "Cynthia" as the eclipse of " the mortal moon " : this must have been composed after it had been seen that Elizabeth's death was to be followed by no dangerous consequences. This sonnet must have been composed some time after March 1603. Now, in the 104th sonnet, the poet tells his friend that three winters and three summers have passed since first they met. If, then, there is any chronological sequence in the sonnets, if there is not a gap of several years between the 104th and the 107th — and in the absence of evidence to the con- trary the presumption is that there is not — this would seem to show that Shakespeare made the acquaintance of his friend not long before the beginning of the century. Which conclusion exactly suits the claims of Pembroke, who came to London in 1598, a youth of 18 — and is radically adverse to the claims of Southampton, whom Shakespeare knew at least as early as 1594- The argument is not entitled to much weight, inasmuch as it pre- sumes a chronological sequence, but it deserves to be mentioned as a slight corroboration. Again, in the first sonnet, where the poet opens his recommen- dations of marriage, the friend is called " only herald to the gaudy spring." What gaudy spring 1 Is this another reference to the time described in the io7tli sonnet — ' ' Incertainties now crown themselves assured, And peace proclaims olives of endless age. Now tvith the dro2)s of this most balmy time My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes " ? The minds of men seem to have been agitated by the fear of a disputed succession after the death of Elizabeth, and there was a disposition, partly from relief at the passing of the crisis without disturbance, and partly from a desire to flatter the new king, to hail the accession of James hopefully and joyfully as a spring. Thus Daniel in his Panegyric to the King's Most Excellent Majesty, exclaimed — WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 221 " What a return of comfort dost tliou bring, Now at this fresh returning of our blood ! This meeting with the opening of the spring, To make our spirits likewise to embud ! AVhat a new season of encouraging Begins to enlength the days disposed to good ! WJiat apprehension of recovery Of greater strength, of more ability ! The pulse of England never yet did beat So strong as now : nor ever were our hearts Let out to hopes so spacious and so great As now they are : nor ever in all parts Did we thus feel so comfortable heat As now the glory of thy worth imparts : The whole complexion of the commonwealth So weak before, hoped never for more health." It is not at all improbable tliat Shakespeare's "gaudy spring" was this same exultant season ; and if so, Southampton cannot have been the friend addressed with such glowing flattery and urgent fervour, seeing that he had then been married for several years. Pembroke was then twenty-three years of age, and, as the represen- tative of the Sidneys, might well be hailed as " the world's fresh ornament," and " only herald of the gaudy spring." The fact is, that the more one looks into this vexed question, the more does one find little particulars emerging, singly inconclusive, but all in- creasing the weight of the probability that Pembroke was the man.i Let us turn now for a moment to a question hardly less interest- ing, namely — Who was the rival poet alluded to in the sonnets ? So complete is the parallel of this course of true friendship to the course of true love that even the passion of jealousy finds a place. Nine sonnets (Ixxviii. - Ixxxvi. ) are occupied with the pretensions of other poets, and one poet in particular, to the gracious countenance of his patron. In the 8oth sonnet he cries : — "0 how I faint when I of you do write, Knowing a better spirit doth use your name, And in the praise thereof spends all his might, To make me tongue-tied, speaking of your fame ! But since your worth, wide as the ocean is, The humble as the proudest sail doth bear, My saucy bark inferior far to his On your broad main doth wilfully appear." Who was this " better spirit " 1 I hope I shall not be held guilty of hunting after paradox if I say that every possible poet 1 Mr Thomas Tyler and Rev. W. A. Harrison have recently adduced new argu- ments in favour of Pembroke. See Academy, March 8 and 22, April 19, June 7 and 21, July 5, 1884. 222 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. has been named but the right one, nor of presumption if I say that he is so obvious that his escape from notice is something little short of miraculous. The 86th sonnet supplies ample means of identification : — • " Was it the proud full sail of his great verse, Bound for the prize of all too precious you, That did my ripe thouglits in my brain inhearse, Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew ? Was it his spirit, by sjiirits taught to write Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead ? No, neither he, nor his compeers by night Giving him aid, my verse astonished. He, nor that affable familiar ghost Which nightly gulls hinr with intelligence, As victors of my silence cannot boast : I was not sick of any fear from thence : But when your countenance filled up his line, Then lacked I matter ; that enfeebled mine. " The allusions to supernatural assistance are here very pointed, and upon the strength of them Marlowe has been suggested as having been a man of dark and mysterious reputation, who was suspected of dealings with evil spirits. The insuperable objection to Marlowe is that he died in 1593 ; and even supposing South- ampton to have been Shakespeare's patron, we have no evidence of their acquaintance prior to 1593, and there is no evidence that Marlowe was acquainted with Southampton at all. Mr Massey, however, argues confidently for Marlowe, on the ground that there was nobody else to whom the pointed charge of supernatural dealing could apply. But there was another to whom the allusions apply more pointedly than to Marlowe, and that was George Chapman, a man less honoured now, but numbered in his own generation among the greatest of its poets. Chapman was a man of overpowering enthusiasm, ever eager in magnifying poetry, and advancing fervent claims to supernatural inspiration. In 1594 he published a poem called the "Shadow of Night," which goes far to establish his identity with Shakespeare's rival. In the De- dication, after animadverting severely on vulgar searchers after knowledge, he exclaims — " Now what a supererogation in wit this is, to think Skill so mightily pierced with their loves that she should prostitutely show them her secrets, when she will scarcely be looked upon by others hut with invocation, fasting, watching ; yea, not without having drops of their souls like a heavenly familiar." Here we have something like a profession of the familiar ghost that Shakespeare saucily laughs at. But Shakespeare's rival gets his intelligence by night : special stress is laid in the sonnet upon the aid of his compeers by night, and his nightly familiar. Well, Chapman's poem is called the "Shadow of Night," and its WILLIAM SHAKESPEAltE. 223 purpose is to extol the wonderful powers of Night in impart- ing knowledge to her votaries. He addresses her with fervent devotion : — "Rich tapered sanctuary of the blest, Palace of ruth, made all of tears and rest, To thy black shades and desolation I consecrate my life," And he cries : — "All you possessed with indepressed spirits. Endued with nimble and aspiring wits, Come consecrate with me to sacred Night Your whole endeavours and detest the light. 'o^ No pen can anything eternal write That is not steeped in humour of the Night." It is not simply that night is the best season for study : the enthusiastic poet finds more active assistance than silence and freedom from interruption. When the avenues of sense are closed by sleep, his soul rises to the court of Skill (the mother of knowledge, who must be propitiated by drops of the soul like an heavenly familiar), and if he could only remember what he learns there, no secret would be hid from him. "Let soft sleep, Binding my senses lose my working soul. That in her highest pitch she may control The court of Skill, compact of mystery. Wanting but franchisement and memory To reach all secrets. " As regards the other feature in the rival poet, " the proud full sail of his great verse," that applies with almost too literal exact- ness to the Alexandrines of Chapman's Homer, part of which appeared in 1596; and as for its being bound for the prize of Shakespeare's patron, both Pembroke and Southampton were in- cluded in the list of those honoured with dedicatory sonnets in a subsequent edition. Chapman's chief patron was Sir Francis Walsingham, whose daughter Sir Philip Sidney had married, and nothing could have been more natural than that the old man should inti'oduce his favourite to the Countess of Pembroke or her son. But apart from Alexandrines and proved or probable connection with Southampton and Pembroke, I contend that the other reference to Chapman is too pointed to be mistaken ; and though Chapman's name has not received due prominence in the manuals of our literature, no one who has read any of his poetry, and who knows his own lofty pretensions and the rank accorded him in his own generation, will think that his "proud sail" has been unduly honoured by the affected jealousy and good-humoured banter of the " saucy bark " of Shakespeare. 224 CHAPTEE VI. DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. A VERY natural question to ask, in beginning tbe study of the Elizabethan drama, is, What were the causes of that extraordinary outburst of creative genius 1 No satisfactory answer has yet been given to that question : perhaps none can be given. There the lit- erature stands full grown ; but when we are asked how it came there, we can do little more than point to the names of its creators, and say that their genius was equal to the task of producing it. Time, with its slow development of new theatrical customs out of new social needs, brought them their opportunity. The stimu- lating novelty of the form must stand first in the list of " causes" of the greatness of the Elizabethan drama. The significance of this simple fact, as generally happens Avith obvious facts, has been overlooked by ietiological speculators. Two great types of drama — using the word as equivalent to tragic drama — have been born into the world ; both attained their supreme height within a generation of their birth, and all subsequent attempts to revive their early magnificence have been little better than mechanical attempts to make a living body. If we wish to know what the Greek type of drama is capable of, we must go to the Athenian dramatists of the fifth century B.C. ; and if we wish to know what the English type of drama is capable of, we must go to Shake- speare and his immediate contemporaries and successors. The fascination of these organs of expression for the human spirit was greatest while they were new. To put it somewhat mathemati- cally, in the first generation of their existence they drew towards them irresistibly a larger proportion of free intellect than they were ever able to attract in subsequent generations. This is the law of all subjects of disinterested intellectual effort, whether artistic or scientific. The most ambitious intellects rush after the newest subjects with which they have affinity : if the subjects are great, and succeed in fascinating congenial minds, then the results are great. DEAMATISTS BEFOKE SHAKESPEARE. 225 Such was the happy fortune of the Elizabethan drama — a fortune that comes to the human race at rare intervals. While Sackville, Gascoigne, and Daniel were composing scholarly imita- tions of the Greek drama to produce a feeble agitation of pity and terror in the minds of Cynthia and her courtiers, lifeless shadows of a once glorious form, Fortune beckoned to Marlowe and showed him the way to a new dramatic world. Marlowe was really the Columbus of the English drama. It is not very easy to say now what it was that induced him, a university man, to give his pen to the service of the common stage, and try to redeem it from " the jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits ; " it is not impossible that he had heard of the success of the popular drama in Spain. But whatever moved him to write " Tamburlaine " for a vulgar audience, he Avas the first to enter in and take possession of a region which offered infinite new possibilities to the dramatist. The representation of passionate conflict was insuperably ham- pered by the conditions of the Greek stage. The large Greek theatres necessitated masks and padded and stiff'ened figures : and thus lively conflict, whether of mind or of body, was rendered impossible. English dramatists, writing for actors who came on the stage in their natural faces and figures, were throwing away their opportunities for giving a more vivid representation of life when they accommodated themselves to Greek models. By good luck or sagacious insight, Marlowe initiated a drama that took full advantage of the changed manner of stage representation. Men could now be brought face to face in passionate antagonism, and all the vicissitudes of the struggle put before the spectator with lifelike force. What a revelation it was ! what a fascination it must have had upon all dramatic minds ! The Elizabethans were called upon to re-write the history of human passion in all its phases and stages : and there were men among them who took delight in the task that Fate or Fortune had imposed. They fulfilled their mission with keen emulation : they reaped the harvest with such thoroughness as to leave little behind for the gleaners of after-times. Many circumstances favoured them : many things must contri- bute to the success of such an enterprise. England had very recently passed through the crisis of the Eeformation, and was still excited and exalted to an unusual pitch of energy by appre- hensions of intestine plots and foreign invasion : the pulse of the country beat high with success and thirst for new enterprise. When men are unfortunate and despondent, they have no heart to go and look at the mimicry of action and passion : it is only when their enterprises succeed that they can go with free hearts and applaud the heroics of Tamburlaine or weep over the sorrows of Desdemona. The Elizabethans were prosperous in war and P 226 DKAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. in commerce : they repelled the Spaniard, and brought home richly laden argosies from east and west : they were strong, thriv- ing, hopeful men, with nerves that could bear a good thrill of tragic horror, and sides that the most boisterous laughter was unable to shake too rudely. But one must have no small confi- dence in the power of general conditions over specific effects who would venture to say that our dramatists would never have come into existence, or would have sought some other line of activity, had Mary remained upon the throne instead of Elizabeth, and had England continued at peace with Spain. Doubtless a material basis of prosperity was indispensable to the support of dramatic entertainments : it was absolutely necessary that there should be enough free wealth to fill the theatres. But one fails to see what the stir of the Eeformation had to do with the dramatic tendencies of Marlowe, or how the defeat of the Armada was concerned in the migration of Shakespeare from Stratford to the London stage. A more vital condition of the great dramatic outburst was the abundance of material lying ready to the shaping and inspiring genius of the dramatist. There were numberless tales and chroni- cles of love and war to furnish him with plots or suggestions of plots : even if he knew no language but his own, the enterprise of printers had furnished him not only with the works of native poets and chroniclers, but with hosts of translations from Italian, French, and Latin. Observation of men was a prevailing passion, and literature was crowded Avith sententious maxims of character and politics. The passion of love had been expressed in many different moods and phases, and attempts had been made to treat with be- coming gravity the tragic themes of disaster and death. Literature was undoubtedly ripe for dramatic embodiment. In studying the development of the drama under Elizabeth, a broad distinction must be drawn between the Court stage and the popular stage. The Court stage was ruled by classical traditions and Italian precedents ; it was in the popular stage that the new drama was rooted, and it is there that we must look for the first sprouts of its vigorous life. It was an age of widespread interest in play-acting ; but there were two very different kinds of theatrical audience, and the plays that pleased the one would have been far from satisfactory to the other. The difference was as great as the difference now is between east-end theatres and west-end, probably greater and more clearly marked. The audiences had different tastes, and plays were written and acted to correspond. Amateur companies were formed at the public schools, at the universities, at the Inns of Court, and their performances were graced occasion- ally with the presence of royalty. Between 1568 and 1580, Mr Collier tells us, some fifty dramas were presented at Court. To judge from such specimens as remain, the authors of these fashion- DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 227 able plays followed literary usages in their compositions. Their comedies were modelled on the new Italian comedy ; their tragedies abstained from the actual exhibition of violent passion, and dread- ful deeds were told but not enacted. Lyly and Daniel, rivals for the Mastership of the Eevels, furnish a clue to the Queen's taste, by which the fashion was determined. Her predecessor, "Bloody" Mary, had apparently a liking for broad and boisterous farce. But Queen Elizabeth was a person of much more culture and refinement. The light sparkling word-play of Lyly, and the gentle decorous passion of Daniel, were more after her standard than farcical buffoonery or violent tragedy. How high the cp;arrel ran at the end of her reign between the fashionable critics and the caterers for the common stage, Ave may gather from the conversation between Hamlet and Eosencrantz on the subject : " There was, for a while, no money bid for argument, unless the poet and the player went to cuffs in the question." This rough distinction between the Court stage and the common stage is of importance, because it is true in the main to say that the great work effected by the genius of Shakespeare and his con- temporaries was the reconciliation of the two stages by the union of what was best in both. Doubtless, in all that they had to say against coarseness, rant, bombast, absurd and revolting incident, the literary critics were in the right. So far, their contemptuous laughter at the common stage was well founded. But they failed to see that the common stage, in thi'owing off the restrictions of Horace and Aristotle upon violent incident — restrictions due to the accidents of Greek theatrical representation — had set dramatists free for a new kind of work. The preposterous half-serious tyrants of Mysteries, Moralities, and Chronicle Histories, the Pilate, the Herod, the Magnificence, the King Cambyses, when they committed and superintended deeds of blood before the eyes of a half-shudder- ing, half-laughing audience, were making possible the full presenta- tion on the stage of such characters as Othello and Macbeth. But for the infusion of new life from the common stage, Daniel's " Cleo- patra" might have remained the high-water mark of the poetic drama ; and but for the ingrafting of the culture of centuries on its wild stock, the common stage might never have risen above the vein of King Cambyses. Marlowe was not exactly the first to represent on the stage actions that the Greek dramatist supposed to take place behind the scenes and communicated to the audience in a subsequent narrative by an eyewitness. Among Mr Collier's reprints is an example of a mixed morality and history, containing the revenge of Orestes upon his mother and her paramour, and mixing up personified abstractions, Vice, Nature, Truth, Fame, Duty, with Orestes, Clytemnestra, vEgisthus, Menelaus, and other actual per- 228 DKAMATISTS BEFOEE SHAKESrEAEE. sonages. In this drama tliere is a lively battle upon the stage, with a direction, " let it be long ere you can win the city ; " and though Clytemnestra is dismissed under custody, vEgisthus is seized, dragged violently, and hanged before the audience in spite of his entreaties for mercy. The date of this drama is 1567, and from it we may conclude that as early as that date the popular in- stinct had broken through the restrictions of Horace, founded as they were upon the natural limitations of a stage wholly different in structure and appointments from our own. While, at Court, friifid and artificial restrictions were maintained when the neces- sity for them no longer existed, they were cast aside in perfor- mances for the entertainment of the rude vulgar. Marlowe's position, therefore, is this : he did not originate the idea of bring- ing tragic action on the stage, but he was the first writer of plays whose genius was adequate to the powerful situations introduced by the popular instinct for dramatic effect. I. — John Lyly (1554-1606). John Lyly, the Euphuist,i " the witty, comical, facetiously quick and unparalleled John Lyly," was our first extensive writer of comedies. He produced no fewer than nine pieces — one in blank verse, seven in prose, and one in rhyme. " The Woman in the Moon" (which is in blank verse, and which he calls "his first dream in Phoebus' holy bower," though not printed till 1597) ; "Alexander and Campaspe " (printed in 1584); "Sappho and Phao" (1584); "Endymion"(i59i);"Galathea" (1592); "Midas" (1592); "Mother Bombie" (1594); "The Maid's Metamorpho- sis" (in rhyme and only probably his, 1600); " Love's Metamor- phosis" (1601). Lyly's plays are the sort of gay, fantastic, in- substantial things that may catch widely as a transient fashion, but are too extravagant to receive sympathy from more than one generation : critics in general set their heels on his delicate con- structions. His plays were acted by the children of the Eevels, and he would seem to have indulged in airy and childish caprices of fancy to match. Perhaps he wrote with an abiding conscious- ness that ladies were to make the chief part of his audience, and thought only of bringing smiles on their faces with pretty quibbles and mildly sentimental or childishly jocular situations. In " En- dymion," Tellus expresses surprise that Corsites, being a captain, "who should sound nothing but terror, and suck nothing but blood," talks so softly and politely. " It agreeth not with your 1 I have given some account of liis Euphuism in ray ' Manual of English Prose Literature.' Lyly was a great tobacco-taker ; one wonders that no devoted champion of the weed has ever remarked the coincidence between its introduc- tion and the beginning of the greatness of the English drama. JOHN LYLY. 229 calling," she says, "to use words so soft as that of love." And Corsites replies with the utmost urbanity — " Lady, it were unfit of wars to discourse with women, into whose minds nothing can sink but smoothness." In accordance with this idea, Lyly's sub- jects, except in " Alexander and Campaspe " and " Mother Bom- bie," are mythological and pastoral : and in none of them is any deep feeling excited. He is careful not to alarm his courtly audience with the prospect of terrible consequences : the stream of incidents moves with very slight interruptions to a happy conclu- sion, enlivened with fantastic love-talk, fantastic moralisings on ambition, war, peace, avarice, illicit love, and other commonplaces, and the pranks and puns of mischievous vivacious boys. The fabric is so slight and artificial that we are in danger of undervaluing the powers of the workman, who was a most ingenious and original man, and deserved all the adjectives of his publisher. His plays are vessels filled to the brim with sparkling liquor, which stands to Shakespeare's comedy in the relation of lemonade to champagne. The whole thing is a sort of ginger-pop intoxication ; with airy bubbles of fanciful conceits winking all over. If there is no extravagance of passion in Lyly, there is the ut- most extravagance of ingenious fancy. Wit being defined as an ingenious and unexpected play upon words, Lyly's comedies are full of it. There is hardly a sentence in the whole of them that does not contain some jiun, or clever antithesis, or far-fetched image. He is so uninterruptedly witty that he destroys his own wit : the play on words and images ceases to be unexpected, and so falls out of the definition. Yet a little of it is very pretty even now ; and if we could call up the Children of the Chapel Royal to fire off his crackers, and poise his glittering conceits, and im- agine ourselves listening with the much-fiattered Cynthia, we might conceive the possibility of sitting out a whole comedy with pleased faces. Lyly carries his love of contrast and delicate symmetrical ar- rangement into the structure of his plays, scene being balanced against scene, and character against character. In " Alexander and Campaspe," his first published play, he attempted, after the model of Edwards's "Damon and Pythias," more substantial char- acters than he afterwards produced in his mythological and pas- toral conceptions. One of his most elaborate and characteristic personages is Sir Tophas, in "Endymion," a fat, vainglorious, foolish squire, who struts about armed with weapons of sport, and breathing out bloodthirsty sentiments against wrens, blackbirds, sheep, and other such harmless enemies. Sir Tophas is the Fal- staff of children, reminding us of the story that Shakespeare when a boy used to kill a calf with an air : he has also points of resem- blance with Pistol, Holofernes, and Don Armado. He has a little 230 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. follower Epiton, like Armado's Moth, with whom he holds dis- courses, and he falls in love with Dij^sas, as Armado with Jaque- netta. " Tophas. Epi. Epiton. Here, sh\ Top. I brook not this idle humour of love ; it tickles not my liver, from whence lovemongers in former ages seemed to infer it slioukl proceed. Ejn. Love, sir, may lie in your lungs, and I think it doth, and that is the cause you blow and are so pursy. Top. Tush, boy ; I think it is but some device of the poet to get money. Epi. A poet ; what's that ? To'p. Dost thou not know what a poet is ? Epi. No. Top. "Why, fool, a poet is as much as one should say — a poet. But soft ! yonder be two wrens ; shall I shoot at them ? E2n. They are two lads. Top. Larks or wrens, I will kill them. Epi. Larks ? are you blind 1 they are two little boys. Top. Birds or boys, they are but a pittance for my breakfast ; therefore have at them, for their brains must as it were embroider my bolts." The finest things in Lyly's plays are the occasional songs. " Cupid and my Campaspe played " is often quoted, and Sappho's song is hardly less pretty. "0 cruel Love ! on thee I lay J\Iy curse, which shall strike blind the day ; Never may sleep with velvet hand t'harm thine eyes with sacred wand ; Thy jailors shall be hopes and fears ; Thy prison-mates groans, sighs, and tears ; Thy play to wear out weary times Fantastic passions, vows, and rhymes ; Thy bread be frowns ; thy drink be gall ; Such as when you Phao call The bed thou liest on by despair ; Thy sleep, fond dreams : thy dreams, long care; Hope (like thy fool), at thy bed's head. Mock thee, till madness strike thee dead. As Phao, thou dost me, with thy proud eyes ; In thee poor Sappho lives, for thee she dies." II. — Christopher Marlowe (i 564-1 593). When we pass from Lyly to Marlowe we find ourselves in a Avholly difi'erent atmosphere. They wrote for a difierent audience, a different stage, diiferent actors ; and the plays are not more unlike than were the lives and characters of the authors. The plays written by Lyly for the Court, and represented by the children of the Chapel Pioyal, do not come up to M. Taine's description of the ferocity of English manners in that age : their CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 231 mythological and pastoral worlds are the opposite of a violent and complete expansion of nature. In Marlowe's plays, on the other hand, written for the public theatre, there is ferocity enough, and a good many of the restraints of nature as well as of probability are violently broken through. Passing from Lyly to Marlowe is like passing from sentimental modern comedy to the blood and convulsion, powder and poison drama that still keeps its hold in many of our theatres. M. Taine should not have been so anxious to make out that the Elizabethan drama was a faithful reflection of the manners of the Court : one might as soon take Mr Boucicault's Irish dramas as an index to the character of the modern English gentleman. It is the pit and not the boxes that theatrical managers must chiefly keep in view, if they wish their theatres to pay : we are not entitled to infer, from the thrilling agonies, fierce passions, and bloodthirsty heroics of the Elizabethan drama, anything except that they pleased the body of the house. Modern critics have endorsed the judgment of the Elizabethan pit ; Lyly and Daniel, with their gentle plays adapted to gentle ears, now require an education to appreciate them, while we are never weary of admiring the gigantic powers that dared to express the tempest and whirlwind of unrestrained passion. But it is not by any means certain that this was the view taken by the gallants of the day, who lounged on the stage or in the boxes ("rooms," as they were then called), and exchanged chaif with the ground- lings : it is not impossible that the violent passions of the drama, so far from being an attraction for them by natural affinity, were the subjects of their derision, torn to tatters as the passions most usually have been by robustious actors. The passion for heroics and horrors was by no means universal in the Elizabethan age any more than in our own. Thomas Nash ridiculed vainglorious tragedians with their swelling bombast of bragging blank verse. Lodge even ventured to deride the cries for revenge uttered by the Ghost in " Hamlet," a part represented, according to tradition, by the divine dramatist himself. Tragedy was one of the themes of the weak and conceited satires of Joseph Hall. The eulogists of Shakespeare lay stress not upon his power of expressing tragic passions, but upon his sweet witty soul, his mellifluous and honeyed tongue, his silver tongue, his honey-flowing vein, and the sugared tongues and attractive beauty of his personages. Entries remain in the ' Accounts of the Revels,' of dramas by Shakespeare pre- sented at the Court of James : the list comprises one tragedy, one historical play, and eight comedies. Everything goes to show that in the Elizabethan age persons of fashion and refinement, if they did not actually consider tragedy vulgar, at least had a preference for comedy. The spirit then prevailing on that point at Court was not so very different from what prevailed 232 DEAMATISTS BEFOEE SHAKESPEARE. when Chaucer wrote, and made his representative of " the gentles " put a stop to the tragic recitals of the Monk. The tragic drama emanated from the people. It had its begin- nings in the public theatre, and its first and greatest authors were men of the people. Men do not learn passion and the expression of passion, so far as these can be learnt, from national movements, but from the experience of their own individual struggle for exist- ence or fame. Men of easy unvaried lives, who have never hadto fight with poverty or slander, the malice of fortune or the malice of men, cannot be dramatists. Marlowe was only two months older than Shakespeare, having been born in February 1564. His father was a shoemaker in Canterbury, with a somewhat numerous family. His first educa- tion was probably got at the endowed king's school, and he went to Cambridge (Benet College, Corpus Christi) in 15S1. He is not recorded to have held a scholarship, and he may have owed his maintenance at college to a wealthy relative or other patron. He received the degree of M.A. in 1587, but before that he would seem to have renounced the sure prospects of the staid professions for the precarious career of actor and playwright. " Tamburlaine the Great" is inferred by Collier and Dyce to have been his first play, and to have been acted anterior to 1587, though not printed till 1590. None of his other plays were printed till after his death ; but j\Ir Dyce supposes them to have been produced in the following order— " Faustus," "Jew of Malta," "Edward II.," "Massacre at Paris." He lost his life in 1593 in a miserable brawl. Among the papers left behind him were part of the tragedy of " Dido," afterwards completed by Nash ; a metrical paraphrase of part of Musa^us's " Hero and Leander," afterwards continued by Chapman ; a translation of some of Ovid's Elegies ; and a translation into blank verse of the First Book of Lucan.^ Marlowe's life was brief and probably dissolute, ^ye_have no right to identify a dramatist with his characters, but it is impos- sible to disregard the combined evidences of his dramatic concep- tions and the accusations brought against him by more respectable contemporaries. His chief characters, Tamburlaine, Faustus, and the Jew of Malta, are not the creations of a calm mind: their 1 For the discussion of other works attributed to him see the ' Account of Marlowe and his writings' in Mr Dyce's edition, pp. Iviii-lxvii. (1850); and Bell's Greene and Marlowe, p. 150 (1856). I adhere to Bell's remarks on the authorship of "Lust's Dominion" and "The First Part of the Contention." If isolated coincidences of expression are taken as proof of authorship, almost any given play in the Elizabethan age might be assigned to any given author : the dramatists made so communistically free with the productions of their fel- lows. In spite of its dealing with events subsequent to Marlowe's death, " Lust's Dominion " is, on the whole, much more like his work than " The First Part of the Contention." CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 233 volcanic passions and daring scepticism are tlie offspring of a turbulent, vehement, irregular nature, bold and defiant of public opinion. Marlowe's alleged writings against the Trinity have never been seen ; in all probability, like some alleged infidel works of the Middle Ages, they never existed : but there seems no reason to doubt that he was, as his accusers stated, a man that neither feared God nor regarded man. Beauty, which he worshipped with passionate devotion, was the only sunshine of his life, and it shone with a burning fierceness proportioned to the violence of his tempestuous moods. The vision of Hero and Leander is a rapt surrender of the whole soul to impassioned meditation on luxuri- ous beauty. In his life as in his plays, such intervals of delight were probably rare. Tamburlaine is a most impassioned adorer of divine Zenocrate ; Faustus hangs in ecstatic worship on the lips of Helen ; but these are only brief transports in lives where energy and ambition are devouringly predominant. Marlowe's genius was little adapted to sonneteering and pastoral poetry : he stigmatised the fashionable love-lyrics as "egregious foppery," and derided them with rough ridicule. He wrote no sonnets; only one pastoral song has been ascribed to him,^ and it is direct and fresh, a movement of impatient captivating sweetness, an impulsive tone of invitation that will take no denial. Marlowe was a clear and powerful genius, and we often seem to catch in his poetry an undertone of almost angry contempt for common- place. The most generally impressive of Marlowe's works is his frag- ment on the tale of Hero and Leander, and if we founded solely upon this, we should form most erroneous notions of his genius. We should suppose his worship of beauty, -which was but a rare and transient passion, to have been the presiding force of his imagination. It is in his plays that we find the world of storm and strife wherein he delighted to expatiate, and a most Titanic world it is, immeasurably transcending nature in breadth and height of thought, feeling, and destructive energy ; a region where everything is on a gigantic scale, peopled with creatures that are monstrous in the largeness of their composition and the fierceness of their passions. "Tamburlaine the Great" was his first play, and serves as well as any other to give a notion of his grand manner. Tamburlaine (better known as Timour the Tartar) is represented as a Scythian shepherd, whose ambition, fed by 1 The song of tlie "Passionate Shepherd to his Love" is ascribed to Marlowe in ' England's Helicon,' but this is not conclusive, as pieces were not always given to their true authors in these miscellanies. The curious thing is, that in the "Passionate Pilgrim," where it is given as Shakespeare's, all the staves would pass for his : but in E. H. two more staves are given that seem to be in Marlowe's distinctive vein. 234 DRAMATISTS BEFOEE SHAKESPEARE. heavenly portents and oracles, soars to the height of subduing the three continents : he aspires to spread his name " As far as Boreas claps his brazen wings, Or fair Bootes sends his cheerful light. " ^ Theridamas, a Persian general, is sent to take the mad shepherd prisoner, but when he sets eyes on him he is seduced from his allegiance by miraculous fascination. He stands rooted to the earth, and exclaims : — " Tamburlaine ! a Scythian shepherd so embellished With Nature's pride and richest furniture ! His looks do menace Heaven and dare the gods ; His fiery eyes are fixed upon the earth, As if he now devised some stratagem, Or meant to pierce Avernus' darksome vaults To pull the triple-headed dog from hell. " When this tremendous being breaks silence, his speech is pregnant with sublime energy : — "Forsake thy king, and do but join with me, And we will triumph over all the world : I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains, And with my hand turn Fortune's wheel about ; And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome. Dra^\• forth thy sword thou mighty man at arms, Intending but to raze my charmed skin, And Jove himself will stretch his hand from heaven To ward the blow, and shield me safe from harm. " Tamburlaine's vaunts are justified by events : he soon gains the crown of Persia : then turns his arms against the countless legions of the Turks, subdues their emperor Bajazeth (whom he carries about in a cage and uses upon occasion as a footstool), and bestows kingdoms upon his most eminent followers. Towards the end of the First Part of his eventful drama, he thus sums up his achievements : — " The god of war resigns his seat to me, Meaning to make me general of the world : Jove, viewing me in arms, looks pale and wan, Fearing my power should pull him from his throne : Where'er I come the Fatal Sisters sweat, 1 This passage seems to be referred to in Nash's celebrated Epistle prefixed to Greene's " Menaphon," where he speaks of vainglorious tragedians who think themselves all right " if they once but get Boreas by the beard and the heavenly Bull by the dewlap." If so, this would contirni Mr Collier's opinion that Mar- lowe is the "idiot art-master" assailed in tliat connection, and cast some doubt on the propriety of M. Taine's taking Marlowe's plays as the standard of English taste in that age. CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 235 And gi'isly Death, by running to and fro, To do their ceaseless homage to my sword : And here in Afrie, where it sehlom rains. Since I arrived with my triumphant host, Have swelling clouds, drawn from wide-gaping wounds, Been oft resolved in bloody purple showers, A meteor that might terrify the earth, And make it quake at every drop it drinks : Millions of souls sit on the banks of Styx, Waiting the back-return of Charon's boat ; Hell and Elysium swarm with ghosts of men, That 1 have sent from sundry foughten fields, To spread my fame through hell and up to heaven." In the Second Part the poet's imagination expatiates in a still ampler range of extravagance. Two of the conqueror's sons dis- play their father's spirit. "Wading through blood to a throne" would be but a tame image to them. When their father talks of what must be the character of his successor, one of them says that, were the throne placed in a sea of blood, he would prepare a ship and sail to it ; and the other, with still greater hardihood, cries : — " And I would strive to swim through pools of blood, Or make a bridge of murdered carcases, Whose arches should be framed with bones of Turks, Ere I would lose the title of a king." 'O" His wife Zenocrate falling sick, he consoles himself with sublime fancies of the reception preparing for her in heaven : — " Now walk the angels on the walls of heaven As sentinels to warn th' immortal souls To entertain divine Zenocrate. The cherubins and holy seraphins That sing and play before the King of kings, Use all their voices and their instruments To entertain divine Zenocrate : And iti this sweet and curious harmony. The god that tunes this music to our souls, Holds out his hand in highest majesty To entertain divine Zenocrate." His raving over her death is hardly less extravagant : — ' ' What, is she dead ? Techelles, draw thy sword, And wound the earth that it may cleave in twain, And we descend into the infernal vaults. To hale the Fatal Sisters by the hair. And throw them in the triple moat of hell. For taking hence my fair Zenocrate. Cassane and Theridamas, to arms ! Raise cavalieros higher than the clouds, 236 DEAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. And with the cannon break the frame of heaven : Batter the shining palace of the sun And shiver all the starry firmament, For amorous Jove hath snatched my love from hence, Meaning to make her stately f|ueen of heaven." Tamburlaine is, if possible, increased in fierceness by the death of his queen. He lays waste the town where she died with fire and sword : and proceeding in his irresistible career of conquest, harnesses kings to his chariot, and stabs one of his own sons for effeminate shirking of war. His last exploit is the capture of Babylon. He binds the Babylonians hand and foot, and drowns man, woman, and child ; then burns the sacred books of Mahomet, daring the prophet, if he have any power, to come down and take vengeance. Immediately thereafter he is seized by a sudden and mysterious distemper. He maintains his sublime spirit to the last. He represents death as afraid to confront him eye to eye : — " See where my slave, the ugly monster Death, Shaking and quivering, pale and wan for fear, Stands aiming at me with his murdering dart. Who flies away at every glance I give, And, when I look away, comes stealing on ! " Yet once more, in spite of Death, he takes the field, and scatters his enemies " like summer's vapours vanished by the sun : " then calls for a map that he may trace the extent of his conquests, and see how much of the world remains to subdue ; commends the com- pletion of the triumph to his son ; and bids his friends farewell — " For Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die." It is not alone the inflated ambition and miraculous success of the hero, that raise and swell the effect of this play to dimensions so astounding. His chief followers and his chief enemies express themselves with hardly inferior energy ; and our minds are filled with amazement at the hundreds of thousands under various kings and emperors arrayed for and against the magnificent conqueror.^ "Tamburlaine" was Marlowe's first play, but the impetuous swell of his conceptions cannot be said to have been much moder- ated as he went on. His "raptures all air and fire" were not, I believe, the extravagance of youth ; still less could they have been, 1 The resources of the scene-painter and the stage macliinist were not then de- veloped. A board with a name upon it indicated the place of the action ; and supernatural personages descended and reascended only when the carpenter " could conveniently." But it seems probable that part of the success of 'Tam- burlaine ' was due to its spectacular eftect, introducing as it did potentates in the costumes of their several regions. Greene and Peele seem to have taken the hint. Belinus and Abdelmelec may have invoked the aid of the Turkish emperor to afford an opportunity of exhibiting the gorgeous costumes of himself and his retinue of kings. CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 237 as Mr Collier seems to think, the result of inexperience in blank verse, and mistaken effort to make up by bombastic terms for the absence of rhyme ; they were part of the constitution of this in- dividual man. It is impossible to say what he might have done had his life been longer : he might have exhausted this high as- tounding vein, and proved himself capable of opening up another. But as long as he lived he found fuel for his lofty raptures. He could not repeat another conqueror of the world, but his heroes are all expanded to the utmost possible limit of their circumstances. The Jew of Malta is an incarnation of the devil himself : he is no less universal in his war against all mankind that are within reach of his power : he fights single-handed with monstrous instruments of death against a whole city, and does not scruple to poison even his own daughter. Faustus is not a malevolent being, but his ambi- tion is even greater than Tamburlaine's ; he soars beyond the petty possibilities of humanity, leagues himself with superhuman powers, and rides through space in a fieiy chariot exploring the secrets of the universe. Even in his historical play of Edward II., where he is bound by the shackles of recent history more or less known to his audience, the conflict of explosive passions is superhuman in its energies ; the king's court is a hell of extravagant affection and fiendish spite, wanton tyranny and mutinous unapproachable fierceness — a den of wild beasts.^ It is sometimes said by way of superlative eulogy that the tragedy of Edward II. is worthy of Shakespeare. Such a notion could not be held for a moment by any one accustomed to draw distinctions among the objects of his admiration. The manner of Marlowe is as different as possible from the manner of Shakespeare. Not to enter into minute comparisons of expression, which, though somewhat tedious, is perhaps the most distinct way of conveying how radically they differ, it is sufficient to mention two great points of contrast, significant of the deepest differences of consti- tution. Marlowe has very little humour, and veiy little sense of varied aspects of character. Shakespeare is said to have borrowed the idea of Eichard II. from Marlowe's Edward II., and his Hot- spur from Marlowe's young Mortimer. Now, compare the concep- tions of the two dramatists. Edward and Eichard agree only in being weak and wasteful kings, Mortimer and Hotspur in being irrepressible noblemen, with a natural delight in war. On the throne and in the dungeon Edward is more contemptible than Eichard. Edward, indeed, is a spoiled child of Titanic breed : he has the infatuated loves and spites of a spoiled child ; and the cruel indignities put upon him after his dethronement seem aimed 1 This would almost seem to be the original of M. Taine's concei^tion of six- teenth-century England. 238 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. in contempt at his effeminacy. He clings to Gaveston as to a for- bidden toy. When his nobles stalk defiantly from his presence and leave him to storm in monologue, he takes revenge by bullying his wife. In the true spirit of a wayward child, he loads Gaveston with honours to spite the fractious noblemen : he affirms that he cares for the throne only as a means of indulging his favourite. Shakespeare's Richard II. is a very different being. He is said to be wasteful and given to favouritism : but in all his appearances upon the stage he comports himself with royal dignity. The faults that work his overthrow are impetuous indiscretion and a greater love for Fine Art than the duties of government. His reverses turn upon a much finer pivot than Edward's gross abuse of power : he might have kept his throne had he not on a random impulse stoj^ped the combat between Bolingbroke and Mowbray, and sent them both into banishment : — " when the king did throw his warder down, His own life hung upon the staff he threw. " Richard's death is heroic ; and his reflections in the dungeon may be contrasted with Gaveston's schemes for the amusement of Edward, as showing the higher reach of his philosophic and artistic culture. A close comparison of JMortimer and Hotspur reveals still more striking dissimilarities. Mortimer is outspoken and delights in war like Hotspur, but he shows no trace of the amiable qualities of Harry Percy. He is actuated by a coarse ambition to marry the queen and seize the throne, and is the author of the gross cruelty wreaked upon the helpless king. Harry Percy is presented in more varied as well as more amiable lights. He chafes and " chaffs " Glendower with impudence privileged by its happy audacity. He is wrapt up in warlike schemes : he gives playful evasive answers to his wife's questions ; sometimes he is so preoccupied that he does not answer till an hour afterwards. He is fondly beloved by his Kate : while he is alive, he is her " mad ape," her " paraquito," a dear provoking fellow ; and when he dies, her noble eulogy of his chivalrous nature shows how deep was his hold of her affections. To his rival Hal, his overpowering devotion to war sometimes appears a little comical ; but his courage and prowess receive all deference and honour. Of all those traits that give Harry Percy individual life, there is not the faintest prefiguration in Marlowe's young Mortimer. Character - painting, indeed, was not in Marlowe's way : his personages do not show many-sided character in their different relations. All his creations relax under the charms of love, and express themselves with glowing affection ; but they all relax and warm into raptures very much after the same fashion. There is no such discrimination in Marlowe as the distinction CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 239 between the wooing of Troilus and the wooing of Diomecle, not to speak of finer distinctions. Even Edward's love for Gaveston and the Jew's love for his daughter flow into the same current of language as Tamburlaine's love for Zenocrate, and Faustus's admiration of Helen. The fragment of "Hero and Leander" is incomparably the finest product of Marlowe's genius : it is one of. the chief treasures of the language. The poet is fairly intoxicated with the beauty of his subject : he has thought about the two lovers, and dreamed about them, and filled his imagination with their charms ; he writes with ecstasy as if obeying an impulse that he can resist no longer, and in every other line expressions escape him that have all the warmth of involuntary bursts of admiration. He dashes into the subject with passionate eagerness, outlining the situation with a few impatient strokes, and at once proceeding to descant on the beauty of Hero : — " On Hellespont, guilty of true lovers' blood, In view and opposite two cities stood, Sea-borderers, disjoined by Neptune's might ; The one Abydos, the other Sestos hight. At Sestos Hero dwelt ; Hero the fair, "Whom young Apollo courted for her hair. And ollered as a dower his burning throne Where she should sit for men to gaze upon. Some say for her the fairest Cupid pined, And looking in her face was strooken blind. But this is true ; so like was one the other. As he imagined Hero was his mother; And oftentimes into her bosom flew. About her naked neck his bare arms threw, And laid his childish head upon her breast, And with still panting rock, there took his rest. So lovely fair was Hero, Y&nus' nun, As Nature wept thinking she was undone, Because she took more from her than she left, And of such wondrous beauty her bereft : Therefore in sign her treasui'e sutfered wrack, Since Hero's time hath half the world been black." From Hero he passes to Leander — " Amorous Leander, beautiful and young, W^hose tragedy divine Musffius sung. Dwelt at Abydos ; since him dwelt there none For whom succeeding times make greater moan." Leander's beauty is painted in even more glowing colours than Hero's. In his picture of the infatuated doting of Edward 11. on Piers Gaveston, Marlowe had already shown that he. understood 240 DEAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. the passion that may be felt for the beauty of young men, and here we have a stronger evidence. He describes Leander with something like a Greek feeling for his beauties, his arms, his smooth breast, his white shoulder, his orient cheeks and lips : some of the particulars would seem to have been adopted by Shakespeare and applied to the praise of his beautiful friend. The poem as a whole is more voluptuous and earnestly im- passioned in sentiment than Shakespeare's corresponding poem of " Venus and Adonis " : the poet did not live to carry the tale into its tragic stage. III. — Egbert Greene (i 560-1 592). To class Greene among the dramatists is rather a harsh measure for his reputation, although the arrangement is justified by his re- lations with the stage. When Shakespeare began to write, Mar- lowe and Greene were the most firmly established playwrights, and both himself and his friends testify to the eagerness of rival mana- gers to obtain the hastiest of Greene's performances. Yet Greene's plays are by no means the best fruits of his pen. He began his literary career as an author of love-tales or novels in prose inter- spersed with songs and lyrics : and as he had a most rich and vivid feeling for colour, and a fine ear for the music of verse, these occasional i)ieces are by far his best productions. If, therefore, we were to estimate him by quality rather than by quantity, we should place him rather among the love-poets than among the dramatists. As a dramatist he was a follower of Lyly and Marlowe : as a writer of pastoral lyrics he was Marlowe's predecessor and superior. The earliest production of Greene's hitherto discovered is " Mamillia," an imitation to a certain extent of Lyly's " Euphues," published in 1583, Avhile the author was in residence at Clare Hall, Cambridge, just before taking the degree of ]\I.A. He had come up from Norwich to St John's, and had graduated B.A. in 1578 : after that, though his father would not seem to have been a rich man, he found means to travel in Spain, Italy, and other parts of the Continent. According to his own account, written in deathbed repentance, he had learnt in Italy luxurious, profligate, and abominable habits, and on his return soon exhausted both his money and his credit, and was at his wits' end for a suitable pro- fession. After vacillating for a little between the Church and Physic, he finally gravitated to the last resort of such unsteady spirits — " became an author of plays and a penner of love-pamph- lets." "Mamillia" was rapidly followed by a host of other love- pamphlets : " Morando," " Menaphon," " Perimedes the Black- smith," " Pandosto, the Triumph of Time" (reprinted by Mr Collier as the foundation of the "Winter's Tale"), "Philomela, ROBERT GREENE. 241 the Lady Fitzwater's Nightingale " (reprinted along with " Mena- j)hon" in Brydges' "Archaica"), and many others. These euphuistically embellished tales were the fashionable reading of ladies on their first appearance, and afterwards went through many editions, to the delight of sentimental maids in humbler life. Greene's fertility is all the more amazing when we consider the debauched life that he led : we need not wonder at his early death when we see how he burnt the candle at both ends — hard work and immoderate dissipation. Five of his plays have come down to us : " Orlando Furioso " (published 1594); " Looking-Glass for London and England" (1594, written in conjunction with Lodge); "Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay" (1594); "James the Fourth" (1598); " Alphonsus, King of Arragon " (1599). " George-a-Green, the Pinner of Wakefield " (1599), is also attributed to him. Greene saw a great deal of villanous company during his brief career in London. His own excuse for his choice of depraved associates was that he wished to paint their manners. It is not impossible that this was part of his motive for consorting with rogues and sharpers : it may even have been the apology that he offered to his own conscience. Yet with all allowances for his thus stooping to gain professional ends, we shall probably not be far wrong if we accept Mr Dyce's conclusion, that of all " the Muse's sons whose vices have conducted them to shame and sor- row, none, perhaps, have sunk to deeper degradation and misery." We must not be prejudiced against Greene because he assailed the youthful Shakespeare so bitterly, nor must we take Gabriel Harvey's picture as accurate in every particular. But it seems indisputable that Greene reduced himself to extreme distress by extravagant profligacy ; that he spent recklessly, and was not over- scrupulous in replenishing his coft'ers ; and that in his struggle for the means of debauchery he was bitterly jealous and envious of all literary competitors. Marlowe as well as Shakespeare had been an object of attack when he began his career of playwright : he was seemingly attacked in Nash's preface to Greene's " Menaphon," and afterwards his " Tamburlaine " and its blank verse were directly sneered at by Greene himself. Indeed, Greene confessed in his repentant fit that he could not keep a friend : he behaved to his friends in such a way as to turn them into utter enemies. It seems possible to trace the reaction from this intemperate life of debauchery, hard work, and bitterness, in the passionate beauty of Greene's lyrics : one can understand with Avhat a trans- port of relief he would throw himself out of his base surroundings into the dreams of a happy pastoral country and the music of sweet verse. There is nothing in his dramas to suggest the prof- ligacy of the author. They are of the nature of comedies : they terminate happily, and in accordance with the strictest principles Q 242 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. of morality. His heroines — Angelica, the fair maid of Fressing- field, Dorothea, Isabel — are models of moral no less than of physi- cal beauty. On the whole, Greene seems to have been a clever ready-witted fellow, with a gift of sweet song, and unbounded facility in the use of words : bold, shameless, somewhat cynical and bitter : pre- pared to write to the utmost of his ability in any vein that would sell : a boisterous reveller, incapable of foregoing a rough joke even at the expense of his dearest friend. This was the man as he appeared to his fellows. But he would seem to have had an inner life of remorseful fits, abject in proportion to the intemperate height of his orgies. If indeed we had no authority beyond his "Repentance" and his "Groat's Worth of Wit" we might easily believe these to have been written for the sole purpose of replen- ishing his purse. But there are trustworthy accounts of his death- bed behaviour, when his "jolly long red peak" and "well-propor- tioned body" were finally prostrated; and these accounts lead us to believe that his repentance was unfeigned. And, indeed, the tone of his plays, and his delight in the imagination of beauty, innocence, and country joys, are indications of a better nature that lay hid under poor Robert's outer profligacy. Greene has no claim to high rank as a dramatist, and yet he deserves considerable study as a precursor of Shakespeare. Al- though his blank verse is somewhat monotonous, yet there is incisive and vivid energy in his language : and he had probably more influence than Marlowe in forming or enriching Shakespeare's diction. Take at random, as an illustration, the induction to Act ii. of " Alphonsus" : — ■ " Thus from the pit of pilgrim's poverty Alphonsns 'gins by step and step to climb Unto the top of friendly Fortune's wheel. From banished state, as you have plainly seen, He is transform'd into a soldier's life, And mareheth in the ensign of the King Of worthy Naples, which Beliinis hight ; Not for because that he doth love him so, But that he may revenge him on his foe. Now on the top of lusty barbed steed He mounted is, in glittering armour clad, Seeking about the troops of Arragon, For to encounter with his traitorous niece. How he doth speed and what doth him befall, Mark this our act, for it doth show it all." The versification of this is exceedingly flat, but here and there are touches of vivid expression. The opening of this Act is energetic, reminding us of Gloucester's " Down, down to hell, and say I sent thee thither." Alphonsus kills Flaminius, and exclaims— KOBERT GREENE. 243 " Go, pack tliee hence unto the Stygian lake, And make report unto thy traitorous sire How well thou hast enjoyed the diadem Which he by treason set upon thy head ; And if he ask thee who did send thee down, Alphonsus say, who now must wear thy crown. " Greene is sometimes accused of ranting. The chief basis for this accusation is the character of Rasni, King of Nineveh, in the " Looking - Glass for London and England." This "Imperial swaggerer," as Campbell calls him, is puffed up with immeasur- able pride till the prophet Jonah lets the wind out of him ; and glories in a strain somewhat like Tamburlaine, but more like the conventional Herod of the Mysteries :— " Great Jewry's God, that foiled stout Benhadad, Could not rebate the strength that Rasni brought; For be he God in heaven, yet, viceroys, know, Rasni is god on earth and none bat he." It should be remarked, however, that this play was written by Greene in conjunction with Lodge, and that Greene's portion of the work was probably the delineation of the extortion, roguery, and debauchery of Nineveh, which was to say, of London. The particulars of the sumptuous wedding, indeed, are quite in Greene's style ; he was at home in the exercise of accumulating gorgeous particulars. But there is nothing to approach the extravagant inflation of Easni in any play of Greene's sole workmanship. He essayed a counterpart to Tamburlaine in his Alphonsus, and there had ample opportunity for unbounded rant ; but Alphonsus bears his exploits lightly, and indulges but sparingly in the swelling utterance of aspiration and triumph. Greene was too cynical to have command of language for a character of sustained pride ; he could pump up expression for a good many emotions, but his nature was dry in that region. He is, indeed, a standing refuta- tion of the plausible idea that rant belongs to the infancy of the drama. Rant goes rather with the nature of the individual ; and Greene, with all his roughness and recklessness, was fitted to be the pupil of Lyly more than of Marlowe. Like most of his predecessors, from Chaucer downwards, Greene makes frequent use of the goddesses and celebrated beauties of Grecian mythology for purposes of comparison. But he does more than merely repeat the names, saying that a heroine is as fair as Helen or as faithful as Penelope : he evidently exerted his imagin- ation to conceive them in a certain visual semblance of beauty. We are not, of course, to suppose that he had any notion of con- ceiving classical beauty as different from English beauty : when he spoke of the port of Juno and the foot of Thetis, he probably 244: DKAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. had in liis mind's eye a gait and an instep that had charmed him in the neighbourhood of St Paul's. Still, he had the notion of giving life to dead names. He had also the notion of conceiving these antique paragons at supreme moments in their history when their charms were at full height. Semele, Chloris, Daphne, Thetis, and others, are taken at the moment when their beauty proved irresistible even to the gods : Venus at the moment of her highest triumph. Amurack exclaims of his wife Fausta — " Behold the gem and jewel of mine age ! See where she comes, wliose heavenly majesty Doth far surpass the brave and gorgeous pace Whicli Cj-therea, daughter unto Jove, Did put in ure wlienas she had obtained The golden apple at the shepherd's hands." This vein of classical allusion is one of the outcomes of Greene's passion for beautiful forms and colours. It is carried out to a weakness in his dramas, rendering him peculiarly open to the charge made at the time against University poets generally — he "smacks too much of Ovid." He sadly violates dramatic pro- priety by ascribing an acquaintance with the Eoman poet to all his characters indiscriminately. Even lovely Peggy, the keeper's daughter at Fressingfield, can discourse of Phoebus courting lovely Semele, of the matchless hue of Helen, of the scrolls that Jove sent to Danae; she puts up an appeal to "fond Ate, doomer of bad-boding fates ; " and says with enthusiasm that Lacy is " Proportioned as was Paris when, in gTay, He courted (Enon in the vale of Troy." If, however, we wish to see Greene at his best, we must go to the occasional songs in his prose tales.^ We might, indeed, com- pile from his plays a florilegium of pretty lines, such as — " Thou gladsome lamp tliat wait'st on Phadms' train, Spreading thy kindness through the jarring orbs, That in their union praise thy lasting powers; Fair pride of morn, sweet beauty of the even ! " Or- Sleep like the smiling purity of heaven, When mildest wind is loath to blend the peace." But a collection of his lyrics — songs, roundelays, jigs, sonettos, madrigals, ditties, and odes — is really like his own Cuba, a region enriched "With favours sparkling from the smiling heavens." 1 These are reprinted in Bell's Poets, along with " Hero and Leander "—a charming volume." KOBERT GREENE, 245 Very often he rounds off in a few lines a perfect subject for the painter,! ^s in the burden of Sephestia's song to her child — " Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee; AVhun thou art old there's grief enough ior tliee." Or the opening lines of Menaphon's roundelay — " When tender ewes, brought home with evening sun, Wend to their folds. And to their holds The shepherds trudge when light of day is done." In the tales these verses come in as if the author's thoughts were tired of their prose vehicle, and spontaneously and irresistibly blossomed into song. His excellence in short verses, or in a capricious mixture of short verses with long, is a curious contrast to the baldness and monotony of his blank verse : it surprises us as when an indifferent walker proves a light and graceful runner. There is nothing in any of his plays to suggest a possibility of such as the following : — " Ah, what is love ? It is a pretty thing, As sweet unto a shepherd as a king ; And sweeter too. For kings have cares that wait upon a crown, And cares can make the sweetest love to frown : Ah then, ah then. If country loves such sweet desires do gain, What lady would not love a shepherd swain ? His flocks are folded, he comes home at night, As merry as a king in his delight ; And merrier too. For kings bethink them what the state require. Where shepherds careless carol by the fire : Ah then, ah then. If country loves such sweet desires do gain, What lady would not love a shepherd swain ? " In more regular and even measures, Greene is comparatively stiff" and restrained. One of his longest poems, which contains passages equal to his best, is printed in the ' Phoenix Nest,' with the title " A most Rare and Excellent Dream, learnedly set down by a worthy gentleman, a brave scholar, and M. of Arts in both universities." It has not been identified as Greene's by Mr Dyce or Mr Bell ; but the title, taken in conjunction with the style, may be considered conclusive evidence. The measure is the seven-line stave of Troilus verse. 1 Since this was written, Mr Gosse has suggested that Greene's sense of colour was probably cultivated by the study of Italian paintings, which he might have seen during his travels. 246 DEAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. lA^ — George Peele (155S-1598). Peele was a few years older than either Marlowe or Greene, and had published a rhymed play before j\Iarlowe began to write, but we place him after these two, because he probably followed them as a writer for the public stage. He was a gentleman by birth, took the degree of M.A. at Oxford (Broadgates Hall, now Pem- broke College) in 1579, and possessed some land in right of his wife : but, eschewing the steady professions, he went up to London in 1581, and soon became known as one of the authors whose living was gained by their wits. He was a conspicuous figure in the same dissipated circle as Marlowe and Greene : and acquired such notoriety as a profligate wit that a body of ' Merry Conceited Jests ' ^ was fathered upon him — apparently without much mis- take of paternity. The plays attributed to Peele in Mr Dyce's edition are " The Arraignment of Paris" (1584, a rhymed play, written for private representation before the Queen by the children of the Chapel) ; " The Chronicle History of Edward I." (1593); "The Battle of Alcazar" (1594); "The Old Wives' Tales" (1595, supposed to be the basis of Milton's "Comus"); "David and Bethsabe" (1599, the best of Peele's Plays) ; " Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes " (1599). He was frequently employed to devise pageants, and several of these have been preserved. He wrote also a poem in heroic couplets, " The Tale of Troy," and various miscellaneous poems. His extant works are not so numei'ous as Greene's ; and he would seem to have been a much less productive writer. His literary career was twice as long as Greene's. In the ' Jests ' Ave are told that " George was of the poetical disposition, never to write so long as his money lasted : " and if we may trust that authority, he had many madcap and unscrupulous ways of " raising the wind," from nominal borrowing to downright cozenage. Peele was a man of softer and subtler make than Greene : a handsome person with a thin womanish voice ; of light and nimble fancy, and smooth ingenious execution : without the faintest desire to use honest means in procuring a livelihood. Poor Greene was not very scrupulous, but he thought it necessary to justify his keeping company with blackguards ; he worked hard, advocated high morality, and suffered occasional visitations of conscience. Peele's choice of subjects does not betray any stifled morality in him. The most marked hint of the writer's personality appears in the ingenuity of his compliments direct and indirect to his audience. The denouement of " The Arraignment of Paris" is an audacious compliment to Elizabeth. The idea is that the judg- 1 "Jest" iw^^nrng practical joke. GEOEGE PEELE. 247 merit of Paris is called in question, as being unjust and partial ; Paris is arraigned before a council of the gods ; the matter is referred to the arbitration of Diana ; and she, to keep the peace of Olympus, awards the apple to Elizabeth, a peerless nymph, a paragon, as stately as Juno, as wise as Minerva, as lovely as Venus, and as chaste as Diana herself.^ His two chronicle histo- ries had a large adventitious interest for the time, as gratifying the prevailing English hatred of Spain and Popery. Elinor, the Spanish queen of Edward L, is represented as a monster of cru- elty and pride : and Stukely, the hero of the " Battle of Alcazar," is a renegade Englishman, commissioned by the Pope to raise a rebellion in Ireland. Most Elizabethan dramatists paid incidental compliments to Elizabeth, and to their country : Peele seems to have deliberately aimed at securing patronage by making whole plays a bolus of flattery. Spenser's ' Faery Queen ' and Lyly's "Midas" as well as his "Endymion," were also designed to flatter Elizabeth ; but Spenser and Lyly used a decorous veil of allegory. It pleased the erratic Nash to commend Peele in 1587 "as the chief supporter of pleasance now living, the Atlas of poetry, and j^rirmis verhorum m'lifex^'' — " chief engineer of phrases." This was in opposition to Marlowe. Posterity has certainly reversed this haphazard judgment as regards the general power of the rival poets : it is universally allowed that " Marlowe had a far more powerful intellect than Peele, and a far deeper insight into the human heart" — was, in short, a poet of immeasurably higher order. On the matter of skill in blank verse, Campbell and Mr Payne Collier are at variance. Campbell spoke strongly in favour of Peele : " There is no such sweetness of versification and imagery to be found in our blank verse anterior to Shakespeare." Mr Collier ascribes this honour to Marlowe, pointing out the fact that Peele did not write a complete play in blank verse till Marlowe had set the example, and declaring his best blank verse to be for the most part monotonous. Mr Collier is too truculent on this point of versification. The general strain of the two poets is so very different, that one cannot decide the question by counting their pauses and their trochaic and monosyllabic endings. The versification of " David and Bethsabe " is undoubtedly sweet. Blank verse would not have been suitable for " The Arraignment of Paris," a piece moving with almost pantomimic gaiety. Peele acted with judgment in reserving blank verse for the formal orations of Paris and Diana. The occasional ranting in "Edward I.," and the prevailing 1 Udall paid a similar compliment to Anne Boleyn in 1532, representing that the golden apple was not worthy of her ; and a Mr Pownd repeated it for the gratification of Elizabeth in 1566 ; but these did not carry it to the extent of making it the aim of an entire play. 248 DKAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. extravasrance of the " Battle of Alcazar," are remarkable as coming from the same pen as "The Arraignment of Paris" and "David and Bethsabe." I can hardly believe that the bombast of Muly Mahamet — whom even more than Tamburlaine Shake- speare had in his eye in the burlesque of Pistol — was a serious expi'ession according to the author's notions of art : we reconcile it with Peele's character only by supposing it to have been an audacious experiment in rivalry of the heroics of Tamburlaine. It seems to have succeeded. The incident burlesqued in " Feed and grow fat, my fair Calipolis," was specially famous. The Moor, Muly Mahamet, with his wife Calipolis and his son, are fleeing before the army of Abdelmelec, when Calipolis grows faint from hunger. Muly rushes off the stage shouting—" Famine shall pine to death, and thou shalt live ;" and re-enters with a piece of flesh upon his sword — " Hold thee, Calipolis, feed, and faint no more ; This Hesli I forced from a lioness, Meat of a princess, for a princess meet : • <•>•• Feed, then, and faint not, fair Calipolis ; For rather than fierce famine shall prevail To gnaw thy entrails with her thorny teeth, The conquering lioness shall attend on thee. Jove's stately bird with wide-commanding wings Shall hover still about thy princely head, And beat down fowl by shoals into thy lap ; Feed, then, and faint not, fair Calipolis." This incident struck the popular fancy very much like Tam- burlaine's entrance in a car of gold drawn by two kings with bits in their mouths ; and offered a bright mark for Shakespeare's ridicule. Pistol's strong language about the Furies, Pluto's damned lake, Erebus, and tortures vile also, seems to be founded on passages in the same play. In the explanation of the dumb- show before Act I. we find the following : — " Till Nemesis, high mistress of revenge. That with her scourge keeps all the world in awe, With thundering drum awakes the God of War, And calls the Furies from Avernus' crags. To range, and rage, and vengeance to inflict. Vengeance on this accursed Moor for sin. " In the dumb-show before Act II. Nemesis again uses her drum, and — " 'Larums aloud into Alecto's ears, And with her thundering wakes whereas they lie In cave as dark as hell and beds of steel, The Furies, just imps of dire revenge." GEORGE TEELE. 249 In Act I. Muly Mahamet Seth exclaims — " Sheath not your swords, sokliers of Amurath, Sheath not your swords, you Moors of Barbary, That fight in right of your anointed king, But follow to the gates of death and hell, Pale death and hell, to entertain his soul ; Follow, I say, to burning Phlegethon, This traitor-tyrant and his companies." Muly Mahamet himself ends off Act IV. with an apostrophe to the Furies, and a mad frenzy of imprecation : — " You bastards of the Night and Erebus, Fiends, Furies, hfigs that fight in beds of steel, Range through this army with your irou whips. And lastly for revenge, for deep revenge, Whereof thou goddess and deviser art. Damned let him be, damned, and condemned to hear All torments, tortures, plagues, and pains of hell. " We see in these passages where Pistol may have caught his trick of repeating emphatic words. The facetious Peele in all likelihood piled up these agonies for popular effect with hardly less sense of their ludicrous extravagance than Shakespeare himself. In strange contrast to these mad explosions are the rich fancy and tender feeling of "David and Bethsabe" and the delicate airy wit of "The Arraignment of Paris." Campbell has quoted the finest passage in "David and Bethsabe," but the following is not much inferior. It is David's exclamation at the sight of Bethsabe approaching in obedience to his summons : — " Now comes my lover tripping like the roe. And brings my longings tangled in her hair. To joy her love I'll build a kingly bower. Seated in hearing of a hundred streams, That for their homage to her sovereign looks. Shall, as the serpents fold into their nests In oblique turnings, wind their nimble waves About the circles of her curious walks ; And with their murmur summon easeful sleep To lay his golden sceptre on her brows. " The following is also a sweet picture, although, perhaps, the sweetness is too surfeiting : — " The time of year is pleasant for your grace, And gladsome summer in her shady robes Crowned with roses and with painted flowers. With all her nymphs shall entertain my lord. That, from the thicket of my verdant groves. Will sprinkle honey -dews about his breast. And cast sweet balm upon his kingly head." 250 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. The sprightly art of the "Arraignment" would seem but stale in a quotation. The most elaborate joke in it seems intended to ridicule the amorous pining of Spenser's 'Shepherd's Calendar.' Colin is introduced bewailing the cruelty of Love, and com- miserated by his friends Hobinol, Diggon, and Thenot : shortly afterwards his hearse is brought in, and shepherds sing welladay over his untimely death. His sweetheart Thestylis woos and is rejected by a "foul crooked churl." Our knowledge of the personal jealousies and friendships of the period is imperfect and perplexing; but it is probable that the "Palin" whom Spenser mentions in Colin Clout as " envying at his rustic quill " was George Peele, and that this was the expression of the envy. V. — Thomas Nash (1558-1600?). Marlowe's unfinished tragedy of " Dido " was completed by Thomas Nash ; and though this clever writer is memorable chiefly as a prose satirist, yet his name will always be remembered most naturally in connection with his poetical associates, Greene, Mar- lowe, Lodge, and Peele. Nash was educated at Cambridge, which he seems to have left in some disgrace, and his first essay in print was the dashing critical preface to Greene's "Menaphon" in 1587. A clever harum-scarum fellow, with a quick sense of the ludi- crous, and an unsparing tongue, he found admirable scope for his powers in replying to the Martin Marprelate tracts, which he did in some four or five different pamphlets in and about the year 1589. In the same year he opened up a vein of general prose satire in his ' Anatomy of Absurdity,' a general attack on what- ever struck him as ridiculous in contemporary literature and manners — ranging consequently within a wide circle. In 1592 he continued his exercitations in this vein with ' Pierce Penniless, his Supplication to the Devil.' But meantime he had become in- volved in a quarrel with Gabriel Harvey, the friend of Spenser, and his brothers, of which a full account is given in D'Israeli's ' Quarrels of Authors.' The original cause of Nash's ire seems to have been the offensive conceit of Richard Harvey, who in the Marprelate controversy had tried " to play Jack of both sides," sneering at all parties to the dispute, and had repeated the offence in a subsequent publication, in which he went the length of term- ing all poets and writers about London " piperly make-plays and make-baits." Nash was thoroughly in his element in taking up such a taunt. Throughout the various pamphlets of the cele- brated logomachy, he seems never to lose for a moment his feeling of complete and easy mastery over his opponent, writing always with good-humoured assurance of victory, and with the unsparing THOMAS KYD. 251 derision of one who fears no retort. In the opening of his ' Strange News,' a reply to Harvey's attack on the deceased Greene, he bids the Lord have mercy on poor Gabriel, for he is fallen into hands that will plague him. Harvey's poetical pre- tensions, and, above all, his hexameters, are ridiculed in this pamphlet with wonderful spirit and direct freshness andjcopious- ness of language. It confirms Nash's protestations that the quarrel was none of his seeking, to find him in his ' Christ's Tears over Jerusalem,' a religious and moral performance strangely different from the writer's previous effusions, making certain over- tures towards reconciliation. These overtures being rejected, he returned with redoubl(^ incisiveness to his former ways of warfare, which continued till the mouths of the antagonists Avere shut by the intervention of the scandalised Government. Nash was imprisoned in 1597 for his share in a play called the "Isle of Dogs," which has not been preserved. " Summer's Last Will and Testament" is the only play of his that has come down to us. It is of the nature of a jNIasque, in which the seasons are the prominent figures ; was written for representation on the private stage of some nobleman, whose name is unknown, and was acted in 1592, though not published till 1600. On the whole it is a somewhat dull production, as the author himself seems to have felt. Frantic efforts are made to say witty and pretty things about the seasons, and to deliver striking saws about miscellaneous objects, dogs and drunkards, bookish theorists, and misanthropists. The best part of it is the song quoted in Palgrave's Treasury. Nash has no marked dramatic talent. His forte lay in what Mr Collier calls " humorous objurgation " : he throws himself into that vein with a sad want of continence, but with unflagging vivacity, and unfailing copiousness both of words and of conceptions. He tried also a tale — " Jack Wilton " — but did not succeed: he never is anything except when in the full swing of harum-scarum raillery. VI.— Thomas Kyd. (?) The author of " Jeronimo" (produced in 1588) and its con- tinuation "The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is mad again," belongs to the " robustious " school of rampant heroism. Ben Jonson's calling him the " sportive Kyd " is a joke. Kyd, how- ever, possesses merits and a character of his own. In direct and vivid energy of language, in powerful antithesis of character, and in skilful and effective construction of plot, in the chief qualities that make a good acting play, " The Spanish Tragedy " will bear comparison with the best work of any of Shakespeare's predeces- sors. That it passed through more eclitions than perhaps any play 252 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESREARE. of the Elizabethan age is not at all surpi-ising ; it offered many points for ridicule to the wits of the time, but its unflagging interest and strong emotions of pity and suspense went straight to the popular heart. The prominence of " Hieronimo " in the public mind is shown by the mention made of it in Jonson's " Cynthia's Revels," the " Return from Parnassus," Thomas May's " Heir," and other writ- ings of the time. A less obtrusive evidence — but moi"e compli- mentary to Kyd if it arose from choice and not from necessity- is the fact of Shakespeare's familiarity with the play, as proved by numerous echoes and adaptations of its phraseology and its situations. One remarkable point in the plot of this double play is the breadth and scope of the action. Lorenzo, an antitype of lago, plans the murder of his brother-in-law Andrea, and the dishon- our of his sister Belimperia. Jeronimo and his son Horatio, the friend of Andrea, become aware of the plot, and write to Andrea warning him of his danger. Were the villain at this point to be exposed and the intended victim preserved for a happy life, or were all the principal personages to perish tragically, the action of the play would still be of ordinary breadth. But this is only half of the action of the First Part of Jeronimo. Jeronimo's letter never reaches Andrea, and Lorenzo's plot miscarries by an ingeni- ously conceived accident ; yet, after all, the man whose assassina- tion was arranged is dishonourably killed in battle by the myr- midons of Balthazar, the young prince of Portugal, and the First Part ends with Andrea's ghost bequeathing to Horatio the duty of revenge. In the Second Part, a marriage is contrived between Balthazar, who has been taken prisoner, and Belimperia the widow of Andrea. She loathes him and falls in love with Horatio. Horatio, the appointed revenger of Andrea's death, is hanged in his father's garden by Lorenzo and Balthazar. This takes place in the first two Acts. The remaining three are occu- pied with Hieronimo's madness at the loss of his only son, partly real, partly feigned. Like Hamlet, he is not at first certain of the murderers, and even when he discovers them indubitably, he bides his time. At last he hits upon the scheme of represent- ing a play before the Court, and procuring that the actors be Lorenzo, Balthazar, Belimperia, and himself. They kill in earnest where they should kill but in jest : Belimperia stabs Balthazar, whose servants had killed her husband, and then stabs herself ; Hieronimo stabs Lorenzo, the murderer of his son, then makes a speech disclosing to the horrified Court the " realism " of the play, and hangs himself. HENEY CHETTLE. 253 VII. — Anthony Munday (1553-162-?). Munday is known to have been employed in fourteen plays between 1597 and 1603, and he was probably a constant writer for the stage for many years before that date. When quite a youth he seems to have been seized with a passion for travel, and to have run away from his father's with as much money as he could scrape together, and crossed the Channel strange coun- tries for to see. He and his companion were robbed on their way through France, and after some adventures were persuaded to join the English Seminary in Rome. After a time he made his way back to England, and published an account of his experi- ences under the title ' The English Roman Life,' " discoursing the lives of such Englishmen as by secret escape leave their own coun- try to live in Rome under the servile yoke of the Pope's govern- ment." This was in 1582, and he would seem to have now made his living by translating from French and Italian, and composing rhymed plays. A rhymed play of his — " Fidele and Fortunatus," was entered on the Stationers' Books in 1584. The " Downfal of Robert Earl of Huntingdon," which was published in 1601, is supposed to have been originally and chiefly the work of Llun- day, modified by Chettle. Later in life, he seems to have aban- doned the stage for the counter : he devised and wrote the Lord Mayor's pageant in 1605, entitling it — "The Triumphs of Re- united Britannia," and is described on the title-page as "citizen and draper." He was several times employed after this to write these pageants, and w^as driven to complain of the difficulty of finding new subjects. The Golden Fleece being the drapers' coat of arms, he twice made use of the voyage of the Argo : and when the Mayor happened to be a fishmonger, he treated the citizens to " Chrysanaleia, or the Golden Fishing," to signify the close alliance between the Fishmongers and the Goldsmiths. There is nothing in Munday's compositions above the tamest mediocrity, and he is worth mentioning only as a specimen of the literary journey man of the time. VIII. — Henry Chettle (1563-160-?). Chettle, the editor of Greene's posthumous " Groatsworth of Wit," which contained the memorable attack on Shakespeare, was very much superior to ]\Iunday. He seems to have been originally a printer or stationer (he subscribes himself "sta- tioner" in a note of acknowledgment to Henslowe in 1598), and probably took to writing plays about the same time as Marlowe. Between 1597 and 1603, during which time he was 254 DRAMATISTS BEFOEE SlIAKESPEAEE. often in distress from Avant of money, liis name is connected with the production of forty-seven plays, of sixteen of which he was sole author. Of his sixteen original plays, only one survives, "Hoffman, or a Revenge for a Father," a tragedy, written probably about 1602, to compete with Shakespeare's "Hamlet," then in course of successful performance at the Globe Theatre. Of the thirty-one plays that he had a share in, all but three are lost — " Patient Grissell " (Chettle, Dekker, and Haughton), "Kobin Hood" (Chettle and Munday), "Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green" (Chettle and Day). In 1607, Dekker speaks of Chettle as being in the Elysian fields, and gives the only record we have of his personal appearance — namely, that he was a fat man. " Hoffman" is a horrid inflated thing, absurd and bloodj^ The hero in revenging his father certainly does not suffer from the weakness of irresolution. Fortune throws an opportunity in his way, and he seizes it pitilessly, and makes it beget other oppor- tunities, till a long list of enemies, their relatives, and the stranger within their gates, perish by poison or steel. His mission of slaughter is very nearly fulfilled when he has the weakness to fall in love with the Duchess of Luneberg, one of his intended victims, who pretends to listen to his addresses, and betrays him to his father's death by a red-hot crown of iron. It is remarkable that Chettle, like so many other of the Elizabethan poets, no matter how inflated he is in expressing vehement passions of rage, hatred, and revenge, displays considerable felicity in the expres- sion of the tender feelings. One might apply to the poets of that age two lines used by old Janicolo in "Patient Grissell" — " Indeed, my child, men's eyes do nowadays Quickly take fire at the least spark of beauty." The begdnning of the Third Act of "Hoffman" is very beautiful. It is a moonlight scene between the runaways Lodowick and Lucibella, imitated apparently from the "Merchant of Venice." They have walked till they are weary, the moon strewing silver on their path, and weeping a gentle dew on the flower-spotted earth. The flowers are beguiled by the light of Lucibella's eyes to open their petals "as when they entertain the lord of May." They rest on a bank of violets, and talk themselves asleep. " Lod. Love's sweet toi;cli ! with what a heavenly charm Do j'-our soft fingers my war-thonghts disarm ! Prussia had reason to attempt my life, Enchanted by the magic of tliy looks That cast a lustre on tlie blushing stars. Pardon, cliaste Queen of Beauty ! make me proud, To rest my toiled head on your tender kuee ! HENKY CHETTLE. 255 My chin with sleep is to my bosom bowed ; Fair, if you please, a little rest with me ! [He reclines his head xq)on her laj). Luci. No, I'll bo sentinel ; I'll watch for fear Of venomous worms or wolves, or wolvish thieves. My hand shall fan your eyes, like the filmed wing Of drowsy Morpheus : and my voice shall sing In a low compass for a lullaby. Lod. I thank you ! I am drow' sy ; sing, I pray. Or sleej) ; do what you please ; I'm heavy, I ! Good night to all our care ! Oh ! I am blest By this soft pillow, where my head doth rest ! [LoDOWiCK sleeps. Lioci, In sooth, I'm sleepy too ; I cannot sing : My heart is troubled with some heavy thing. Rest on these violets, whilst I prepare In thy soft slumber to receive a share ! Blush not, chaste moon, to see a virgin lie So near a prince ! 'tis no immodesty ; For when the thoughts are pure, no time nor place Have power to work fair chastity's disgrace. Lod'wick, I clasp thee thus ! so, arm clip arm ; Let sorrow fold them that wish true love's harm ! \_She sleeps, embracing Lodowick." The finest lines in tlie play are the exclamation of jNIatthias when he believes that he has killed Lucibella unjustly, and finds that she still breathes — " There's life in Lucibella, for I feel A In-eath more odoriferous than balm Thrill through the coral portals of her lips." The beautiful song in " Patient Grissell," quoted in Palgrave's Treasury under the title of " The Happy Heart," is in all proba- bility the work of Dekker. But Chettle also had a certain gift of song. He appended to his " Mourning Garment, in mem- ory of the death of Elizabeth," a "Shepherd's Spring Song," in celebration of the accession of James. Such raptures can hardly be other than feigned ; still, there are touches of beauty in the song. " Thenot and Chloris, red-lipped Driope, Shepherds, nymphs, swains, all that delight in field. Living by harmless thrift, your fat herds yield, Why slack ye now your loved company ? Up sluggards, learn, the lark doth mounted sing His cheerful carols, to salute our king. The mavis, blackbird, and the little wren. The nightingale u]ion the hawthorn brier, And all the wiug'd nmsicians in a quire Do with their notes rebuke dull lazy men. Up, shepherds, up, your sloth breeds all your shames ; You sleep like beasts, while birds salute K. James. 256 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. The gray-eyed morning with a blustering cheek, Like England's royal ruse mixt red and white, Summons all eyes to pleasure and delight : Behold the evening's dews do upward reek, Drawn by the sun, which now doth gild the sky With its light-giving and world-cheering eye. Oh, that's well done ! I see your cause of stay Was to adorn your temples with fresh flowers ; And gather beauty to bedeck your bowers That they may seem the cabinets of May. Honour this time, sweetest of all sweet springs. That so much good, so many pleasures brings." 257 CHAPTEE VII. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. I, — His Life and Character. Steevens, Hallam, and Dyce are unreasonably sceptical and depressing in their summary of "all that is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakespeare." It is our own fault if we are disappointed and perplexed by what antiquaries have discovered, and if we refuse to interpret facts, because they do not illustrate Shakespeare's character in the precise way that we desire. A good deal more is known concerning Shakespeare than that " he was born at Stratford-upon-Avon — married and had children there — went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and plays — returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried." The industry of anticpiaries has brought to light many significant facts concerning the poet's family ; concern- ing the public institutions and customs at Stratford during his boyhood ; and concerning the life of a player in London when Shakespeare belonged to the profession. To the same industry we are indebted for some suggestive particulars more directly personal : we know some facts al:)out his marriage, his wife, and his children ; we have memorials of the effect that his poems and plays produced upon his contemporaries ; we know whether he returned to Stratford poor or rich, from necessity or from choice, a broken-down Bohemian or a prosperous and respected townsman ; and we know that after his death and burial, a bust was erected to his memory in the church of his native town, and that this bust still exists to show what sort of man he was in outward ai^pearance. Shakespeare died on the 23d of April 16 16, and the tradition is that he died on his birthday.^ The register of his baptism is 1 Mr Bolton Corney contests this on the ground that Shakespeare is said by the monument to have died in his 53d year. But if he had completed his 52d year, he might have been said to be in his 53d. 258 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: consistent with this : he was baptised on the 26th of April 1564. But the esact day of Shakesjjeare's birth is not worth discussing : much more important is it to know what were the surroundings of his childhood, what was his father's business, and the probable condition of his father's household. When the future "myriad- minded " dramatist came into the world, his father's household seems to have been radiant with the good-humour of prosperous industry and enterprise. The son of a substantial farmer at Snitterfield, three or four miles from Stratford, John Shakespeare had some thirteen years before opened a shop in Henley Street, Stratford. What he sold in this shop has been much disputed : he certainly sold gloves, and he probably sold also meat, wool, and barley. It is not uncommon now for farmers' sons in the neigh- bourhood of towns to set up as corn-merchants or butchers ; and there is nothing improbable in supposing that in those days, when there was less trade and less division of labour, John Shakespeare may have retailed farm produce to the townspeople of Stratford, selling them barley, mutton, wool, and sheepskin gloves. But whatever he sold, the important fact is that he had prospered. Three years after he had settled in Stratford he had been able to buy two small copyhold properties. Soon after (probably in 1557) he had married Mary Arden of Wilmecote, daughter of a substan- tial yeoman or proprietor-farmer in the neighbourhood, and heiress to a small farm called Ashbies. He had mixed with credit in the public affairs of the town : he had been ajipointed an ale-taster and elected a burgess; and before 1564 had filled in succession the offices of constable, afFeeror (assessor of fines), and chamberlain. Such were the circumstances that Shakespeare was born into. Two little sisters, born before him, had died in infancy ; another brother, named Gilbert, was baptised on October 13, 1566; a sister, named Joan, on April 15, 1569; another sister, named Anna (who died in infancy), on September 28, 157 1. During this time John Shakespeare continued to prosper and rise in the esteem of the corporation. When little William was seven years old, his father attained the sunnnit of municipal dignity, — being on Sep- tember 5, 157 1, elected chief alderman for the ensuing year. Our next question is — What were the provisions for school education in Stratford 1 ^ A free school had been restored to the town in the reign of Edward VI., and to this in all probability Shakespeare was sent at an early age, six or seven, and taught the rudiments of Latin. He learned at least enough to enter into the humour of Sir Hugh Evans's lesson to Master William Page ; to smell Costard's false Latin ; and to put jocularly into the mouth 1 This subject has beeu thoroughly discussed by Professor Spencer Baynes in a series of papers in 'Eraser's M.agazine,' 1879-80. Mr Baynes supjilies most ingenious and conclusive proof that Shakespeare read Ovid in the original. HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 259 of Holofernes the (irst line of the eclogues of Mantuanus the Car- melite — lines then as familiar to schoolboys as the first lines of Virgil's eclogues are now. Such, so far as his plays afford any warrant, was the extent of Shakespeare's Latin knowledge. Ben Jonson's saying that he knew small Latin and less Greek, is obviously an epigrammatic way of saying that he knew no Greek at all. Take Shakespeare next at a point where his schoolboy days are over. How long did he continue at school "? There is a tradition that he was withdrawn from school earlier than he might other- wise have been by the narrow circumstances of his father. So far this is substantiated by the ascertained fact that in 1578, when Shakespeare was fourteen years old, his father mortgaged the estate at Ashbies : from that date onwards there are unmistakable evidences of poverty gaining upon John Shakespeare's resources. Under such stress of circumstances nothing could be more natural than to withdraw the eldest boy from school to assist in the mis- cellaneous business of butchering, wool-selling, glove-making, and ' farming. There is nothing more unlikely, more incongruous, or more derogatory in Shakespeare's helping to kill a sheep, or make a glove, or herd cows in his boyhood, than in Burns's casting peats, pulling turnips, or gauging beer-barrels in his manhood. Such occu]iations gave strength to their minds as well as to their bodies : it brought home to them the earnestness of the struggle for exist- ence, and widened and deepened their sympathies with the mass of their fellow men. To account for Shakespeare's knowledge of legal terms, Malone conjectured that after leaving school he was articled to an attor- ney in Stratford. But Shakespeare needed no experience of an attorney's office to awaken his interest in legal terms. He had motive enough without going beyond his father's household. There are no family secrets from the children of the poor. Shake- speare doubtless heard the painful deliberations of his once pros- perous parents, knew all their difficulties, and perused the mortgage bond with a boy's grave curiosity and awe. Then, and more than once again, before he established himself and his parents in assured comfort, he received the sharpest of stimulants to make out the exact meaning of legal terms. This, however, is the serious side of our poet's youth. It doubtless had a brighter side. Poverty could not repress such energy, ebullient spirits, and fresh open senses. We may imagine the boy often running cheerfully between the shop in the town and the farm in the country : sticking a cowslip in his breast, and looking down at its cinque spots ; whistling after the birds ; roll- ing in the sun upon a bank of wild thyme ; reading and spouting Sir Bevis of Southampton or Sir Guy of Warwick, and buildimr, 260 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : perhaps, many a boyish castle in the :iir. He was doubtless popular among his father's and his grandfather's ploughmen and shepherds : a leading spirit in the antics on Plough-Monday and at the Feast of Sheep-shearing. We may imagine him a favourite with some garrulous old repository of " merry tales of errant knights, cpieens, lovers, lords, ladies, giants, dwarfs, thieves, cheaters, witches, fairies, goblins, friars, ifec," which Burton says were among the ordinary recreations of winter : we may imagine the boy listening gratefully to such tales while the old gossip is — " Sitting in a corner turning crabs, Or coughing o'er a warmed pot of ale." If we imagine him thus employed in his boyhood, we can under- stand with what delight he reverted to such scenes amidst the ex- citement and nerve-shattering racket of an actor's life in London : we can enter with more vivid sympathy into his songs about spring freshness and simple winter comforts when they take us back with him from the hot exhaustion of the playhouse to the brightness of Ms youth in Stratford. But while we imagine Shakespeare engaging with high spirits in every sort of game and glee, one form of recreation in particular demands our attention as having probably exercised a powerful in- fluence on his future career. This was the representation of plays in Stratford. We know from the records of the corporation of Stratford that it was visited by various companies of players, the Queen's Company, the servants of Lord Worcester, of Lord Lei- cester, of Lord Warwick, and of other noblemen. There was a performance by such a company in the Guildhall when John Shakespeare was bailiff": and some of the actors were probably entertained in his house, and gazed at with wonder by his little son, then a child of five years. From his sixth year onwards, Shakespeare had thus frequent opportunities of witnessing plays. By the time he was two-and-twenty, he may have seen, as Mr Dyce says, " the best dramatic productions, such as they were, re- presented by the best actors then alive." Further, our knowledge of the customs of the country enables us to conjecture with reason- able probability that Shakespeare was more than a spectator of play-acting. Apart from the well-known tendency of schoolboys in a country town to imitate the latest sensation in their play- ground, we know that throughout England in Shakespeare's youth dramatic pageants of various kinds, from " storial shows" to morris-dancing, were regular features in the amusements of the established festivals — Twelfth-Night, Shrove-Tuesday, Hock-Tues- day, May-day, Whitsuntide, &c. In Stratford, Whitsuntide seems to have been the favourite season for these exhibitions : as Hock- HIS LIFE AND CIIARACTEK. 261 Tuesday was the usual time for the annual plays of the men of Coventry. In the " Winter's Tale," Perdita is made to say — " Mcthiiiks I play as I liave seen them do In Whiisun' Pastorals." And in the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," Julia, disguised as a page, feigns tliat — "At Pentecost, When all our pageants of delight ivcre played. Our youth got me to play tlie woman's part." The exhibition of the Nine Worthies in " Love's Labour Lost" and the " tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thi.sbe " in " Midsummer Night's Dream," were in all likelihood caricatures of the sort of thing that young Shakespeare actually saw in Strat- ford, and actually took part in. In these annual midsummer pageants of delight doubtless Avere included many varieties of per- formance — from the more ambitious efforts of the schoolmaster to the humble endeavours of hard-handed men that had never laboured in their minds before, and toiled their unbreatlied memories for the first time. We may imagine Shakespeare, while still a schoolboy, with his small features and elegant shape, chosen to " play the woman's part," and instructed in such undertakings as — ' ' Ariadne passioning For Theseus' perjury and unjust flight." We may imagine him at a somewhat later stage writing a play for a party of his boon companions, and organising of an evening in the woods about Stratforcl some such rude rehearsals as Peter Quince superintended " in the palace wood, a mile without the town, by moonlight." Holofernes, who plays three " worthies " himself, and Bottom, who covets every effective part, who can " speak in a monstrous little voice," who can roar either terribly or "as gently as any sucking dove," and whom the politic Quince propitiates by assigning him Pyramus — " a sweet-faced man ; a proper man, as one shall see in a summer's day; a most lovely gentleman-like man " — were doubtless caricatures from nature. Another reminis- cence of these extravagantly amusing rehearsals — the most enjoy- able part of all amateur representations — may be traced in "Love's Labour Lost" in Boyet's account of the preparations for the Rus- sian masquerade (Act v. 2, 107). If, then, we take any part of Shakespeare's life between boy- hood and manhood, we find nature making great preparations for the future many-sided dramatist. We find the boy's life placed at times under deep shadows, and we find the shadows left at home and forgotten, returning, perhaps, with momentary pang to mingle 262 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: sadness witli mirth. When he went out thinking gloomily of his father's accumulating distress and of the cheerless prospect for his little brothers and little sister, the darkness would often be chased from his susceptible spirit by spring freshness, sunshine, and bird- singing, or by the company of light-hearted frien^ls; and he thus had early experience of all varieties of mood between despair and immoderate mirth. Had Shakespeare's life been all light and no shadow during that plastic period of youth when the man's chief tendencies are formed, he could never have searched so thoroughly the depths and the heights of the human heart. Further, when we know the dramatic tendency of Stratford, we lessen the miracle of his sudden rise as an actor and a dramatist. That a raw youth from the country, unused to the stage and the pen, should in the course of five or six years have risen to the highest rank as a writer of plays, is simply incredible. The boy is always father to the man : supreme achievements demand a pro- longed conspiracy of circumstances. It need not lessen our rever- ence for the mighty genius of Shakespeare to find reason for believing that he was to the manner born ; that reckoning Time with her millioned accidents gave him a special education for the stage. Not only had he in his youth witnessed plays and taken part in plays, but in all likelihood he had even as a boy read tales and romances with a special eye to plots and incidents suitable for dramatic representation. This nuich, in the failure of assured knowledge, we may reasonably conjecture as quite within the probabilities, or at least the possibilities, of the case. The first documentary memorial of Shakespeare, next to the record of his baptism, is his marriage bond. This is dated Novem- ber 28, 1582 : he being then under nineteen years of age. His bride was Anne Hathaway, daughter of Kichard Hathaway, a substantial yeoman, living at Shottery, a hamlet about a mile from Stratford. Anne was about eight years older than her boy- husband. From the signatures to the document Mr Halliwell- Phillipps argues that the parents of both parties approved of the match. One thino; at least is clear, that there was in some • 1 quarter a certain eagerness for the ceremony : they were married " with once asking of the banns of matrimony between them," and there is a clause in the bond throwing all the responsibility upon "the said William" himself, and "saving harmless" the Lord Bishop and his officers. The most probable reason for this expedi- tion appears in the date of; the baptism of their first child, Susanna, May 26, 1583. „The next great event in his life is traditionary : he is said to have been prosecuted for stealing Sir Thomas Lucy's deer. Malone, De Quincey, and many others reject this incident, founding trium- phantly on the fact that Sir Thomas Lucy had no park. It is Ills LIFE AND CHAllACTEI!. 2G3 alleged, on the other hand, that though Sir Thomas had no park, " he may have had deer ; for his son and successor sent a buck as a present to Lord Ellesmere in 1602." There is nothing improb- able in the incident; and it is no whit more derogatory to the dignity of Shakespeare than the mere fact of his humble birth. To call the offence dnQv-stealmg is to name it from the point of view of a game-preserver or a gamekeeper. We know that Lucy and the townsmen of Stratford were not on good terms : Mr Halliwell-Phillipps has discovered a "riot" made "upon" him; and the excitable son of a popular burgess would doubtless con- sider it a good joke to carry oft" the unpopular gentleman's deer, more particularly if he had few of them. ]jut it is unnecessary to suppose that Shakespeare was actuated by anything beyond a natural liking "to hunt the Avild deer, and to follow the roe." The tradition is that his trespass against Sir Thomas compelled Shakespeare to leave Stratford. Another reason may have co- operated in persuading him to seek fortune elsewhere— namely, his father's accumulating embarrassments. He may also have been somewhat frightened at the prospect of a large family : twin- children of his, Hamnet and Judith, were baptised on Feb. 2, 1585. From whatever reason, he left Stratford and became a player in the Queen's company, performing at Blackfriars Theatre. The supposed date of this step is 1586. The probability is that he joined the Queen's or some other company as it passed through Stratford. The story given in Greene's ' Groatsworth of Wit' of the beginning of his connection with the stage shows by what inducements the profession was recruited. The player that per- suaded Greene to join him had been a " cou)itry author, passing at a Moral," had seen the time when he carried his playing fardle or bundle on his back, and had risen to have a share in playing apparel alone worth more than two hundred pounds. Such an example of success might well have induced Shakespeare to leave his dull and cramped life at home : and he may have been em- ployed from the first, upon a reputation as a " country author," to remodel and adapt plays. The notion that Spenser referred to Shakespeare as "our pleas- ant Willy" in the 'Tears of the Muses' in 1591 is a most mis- taken and almost ludicrous attempt to snatch a compliment for the great dramatist. It would indeed have been more of a com- pliment to Spenser to make out that he discerned the coming man : but the possibility vanishes before the slightest attention to the real circumstances. The Tears of the Muses were supposed to be shed over the decay of learning. Thalia, the Muse of Comedy, was particularly sad over the absence of "learning's treasure" from the theatres, and the presumi)tion of illiterate upstarts. Learned men, men of university education, no longer wrote 264 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: comedy for the stage : it was abandoned to the base-born and illiterate. The lament was very characteristic of the aristocratic and refined Spenser, who had himself written comedies that were never represented. With what reason, then, is it supposed that Spenser included Shakespeare among the learned men whose absence Thalia deplored 1 Is there any evidence for supposing that Shakespeare at the age of twenty-seven could be sj^oken of as a writer of comedies who had of late ceased writing in disoust at the prevailing scurrility and ribaldry 1 Could he, while straggling as an actor and playwright to maintain himself and his family, be said to be holding haughtily aloof from the stage, because it had been taken possession of by base-born men with no university education 1 Supposing that Shakespeare had written any comedies before that time, and supposing that Spenser, who lived for the most part in Ireland, had ever heard of his name, there would have been some ground for construing the lines — " Each idle wit at will presumes to make, And doth the learned's task upon hira take," into an ill-natured sneer at the extra-academical poet. I do not believe that these lines were pointed at Shakespeare, but I have no doubt that he smarted under their arrogance, and resented Spenser's academic pride in his sarcastic parody of the title of the work in " ^Midsummer Night's Dream " — " The thrice three Muses mourning for the death Of learning, late deceased in beggary." It is no doubt pleasing to suppose that when the gracious light of Shakespeare appeared in the orient, all other poets at once did homage to his sacred majesty. But the academic poets, even such of them as had condescended or been driven to write for the public stage, Marlowe, Greene, Nash, and Lodge, would have had to swallow very strong prejudices before they admitted Shakespeare to their fellowship, and recognised his claims to equal criticism. Marlowe opened his " Tamburlaine " with a contemptuous go-by to the "jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits." Nash, in his epistle to Greene's '' Menaphon," sneers at the efforts of "those that never were gowned in the university," laughs at the idea of men " busying themselves with the endeavours of art that could scarcely Latinise their neck-verse if they should have need : " they live by crumbs from the translator's trencher, and obtain from English Seneca " whole Hamlets — I should say, handfuls of tragi- cal speeches." ^ These Avere general denunciations of extra-aca- demical presumption. But Greene, in his dying ' Groatsworth of 1 This was in 1587. There are certain slight traces of Seueca in Shakespeare's " Hamlet," but this was probably an earlier version of the play on which Sliake- speare founded. HIS LIFE AND CHAKACTER. 265 Wit,' made a direct attack on Shakespeare. He recommended hi.s friends to give up })lay-writing' as no longer a fit occupation for gentlemen ; censured the ingratitude and presumption of players, and assailed in particular one " upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that with his Tu/er^s heart wrapt in a idayer^ a hide, sup- poses he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Fac-totum, is, in his own conceit, the only 81iakescene in a country." It is unnecessary to suppose that this bitter outburst, the best of all testimonies to Shakespeare's power, was caused by his having been employed to remodel any of Greene's plays. The phrase " beautified with our feathers" may be, as we are entitled to infer from the tone of Nash's epistle, nothing more than an expression of academical arrogance, looking down with supreme contempt upon the un- gowned playwright as one that could not possibly have anything except what he stole from more learned authors.^ In Lodge's prose satire, 'Wit's Misery or the World's Madness,' of date 1596, there is a passage that may or may not be another insult to our dramatist from the same set of university pens. He is describing a personification of Envy, and goes on to say among other things that " he walks in Jolack under colour of gravity, and looks as pale as the visard of the ghost which cried so miserably at the theatre like an oysterwise,- Hamlet., o-evenge." ^ Now, if there is anything in the tradition that Shakespeare played the part of the ghost in " Hamlet," we have here a slight touch of ridicule at Shakespeare's acting, and a partisan support by Lodge of his old friend Greene. That, however, depends entirely upon the worth of the tradition, which certainly has a good many plausible considerations in its favour. Be that as it may, there is another passage in this same work of Lodge's a few pages farther on Avhicli has an undoubted interest. Lodire enumerates the " divine wits " of the time, and the following is his list : " Lyly, the famous for facility in discourse ; Spenser, best read in ancient poetry ; Daniel, choice in word and invention ; Dray- ton, diligent and formal; Th. Nash, true English Aretine." Shakespeare is not mentioned. Lodge's mention of Drayton confirms my opinion (p. 205) that he and not Shakespeare is the Aetion of Spenser's "Colin Clout." 1 There is a remarkable passage in " Hamlet " (ii. 2, 353-370), where the habit of attacking "the common stages" is sharply ridiculed. The poet is advised not to be so severe on the common player, because he may be obliged to take to the trade himself. 2 Oysterwise, whether misprint or not, is the reading, not oystervnfe, as always quoted. Oysters do gape very much, as actors often do in mouthing this cry. ^ This passage at least establishes one of two things : either that Shake- speare's "Hamlet" was upon the stage in 1596, or that the preceding play on the same subject also contained the ghost. Shakesjieare was as likely to have played the ghost in the one version as in the other. 266 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: True, " diligent and formal " are epithets very different from Spenser's high eulogium ; Ijut the expression " choice in word and invention," applied to Daniel, is not more unlike Spenser's praises of that poet. The fact is that Lodge's epithets apply, and apply with much discrimination, chiefly to the sonnets of the two poets. And apart from this mention of Drayton by Lodge, I doubt very much whether " Venus and Adonis " would have suited the taste of Spenser. The man who considered it necessary to apolo- gise for the sensuous freedom of his own descriptions of earthly beauty, may well be supposed to have looked coldly on the ram- pant paganism of the first heir of Shakespeare's invention. No; I believe that Shakespeare straggled into fame in the teeth of strong prejudices, and that the established potentate of the literary world, the refined and haughty Spenser, did nothing to help his ascent. Shakespeare was an enthusiastic admirer of Spenser, but the elder poet was much less catholic, infinitely more narrow and exclusive. In the very passage where he praised Action, Spenser declared that no living poet was to be compared to Sir Philip Sidney — always, of course, excepting himself. The first recogni- tions of Shakespeare came from humbler pens. Henry Chettle, the stationer and playwright, who edited Greene's ' Groatsworth of Wit,' apologised a few months afterwards for the attack on Shakespeare, and mentioned his civil demeanour, his excellence as a player, his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, the two last particulars being " reported by divers of worship." This is the first complimentary notice of Shakespeare, and it comes from one who was himself an ungowned playwright. The compliments paid by Barufield, Meres, Weever, and others to Shakespeare's honey-tiowing vein, and suchlike, were not only the homage of very inferior men, but followed upon a wide public recognition of the poet's power. The general public were really the first to recognise Shakespeare : no literary potentate bailed him out of obscurity. His "Venus and Adonis," published in 1593, ran rapidly through several editions, reaching a fifth in 1602. His " Lucrece," published in the following year, though not so popu- lar as its forerunner, still was widely sold. His plays became the talk of the town. In the nth satire of his " Scourge of Villainy," 1598, Marston asks what is doing in the theatres, and finds that the rairc is all for "Romeo and Juliet." *o~- " Liiscus, what's played to-day ? Faith now I know ; I set thy lips abroach, from whence doth flow Nought but poor Juliet and Komeo. " The Queen heard of Shakespeare's fame, had his plays represented at Court, and was "taken" with them: seeing FalstafF in "Henry IV.," she is said to have desired to see the fat knight in love, and HIS LIFE AXD CHARACTER. 267 thus to have suggested the " Merry Wives of Windsor." There was a demand for his plays in print. In 1597 he published three tragedies, "Richard II.," "Richard III.," and "Romeo and Jufiet." In 1598 he published "Love's Labour Lost" and "Henry IV.," besides second editions of "Richard II." and "Richard IIL" : in 1599, second editions of "Romeo" and "Henry IV.": in 1600, two editions of a "Midsummer Night's Dream," two editions of the "Merchant of Venice," "2 Henry IV.," "Henry V.," "Much Ado about Nothing," and a second edition of "Titus Andronicus." After 1600 he seems to have felt his fame to be assured, and to have found it more profitable to let his plays be seen only in stage representation. He probably made an agreement with the management of Blackfriars Theatre to refrain from publication that he might not damage the attend- ance at the playhouse. Even before 1600 he did not publish every play that he wrote : Meres enumerates six comedies and six tragedies of his put upon the stage before 1598: namely, "Two Gentlemen of Verona," " Comedy of Errors," " Love's Labour Lost," "Love's Labour Won" (supposed to be the play now known by the title "All's Well that Ends Well"), "Midsummer Night's Dream," " Merchant of Venice," " Richard IL," "Richard IIL," "Henry IV.," "John," " Titus Andronicus," and "Romeo and Juliet." Four of these were not published till after his death. Shakespeare was thus in high repute before the close of the century. His popularity did not decrease after the accession of James. Such was the demand for his works that in 1603 a piratical l)ookseller issued an unauthorised and imperfect edition of "Hamlet," based, probably, upon notes of the play taken during the representation : this provoked him to break through his rule, and he published a correct edition in the following year. In 1608, for some reason unknown, he made another exception to his rule, and published the tragedy of " King Lear " : it was so popular that three editions were i)rinted in the same year. In that year, also, a third and a fourth edition of "Richard II." were called for; besides a third edition of "Henry V." and a fourth edition of "Henry IV." He frequently received the honour of having his plays represented at (,'ourt : he was the king's favourite dramatist, and there is a tradition that he received a complimentary letter from the king's own hand. There are evidences, also, that he was prospering in worldly affairs as well as in the good opinion of those around him. Early in 1597 he bought for ^60 (equivalent to ten times as much of our money) one of the best houses in Strat- ford, called New Place. Fortunately, also, there have been pre- served letters written in that and the following year by natives of Stratford : in which correspondence the poet is spoken of as a man 268 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE: likely to invest money in Stratford, is asked for the loan of ^30, and is recommended as a person likely to procure a loan for a friend and countryman. In 1602 he made a more extensive investment near his native town — buying for ;^32o a hundred and seven acres of arable land in the parish of Old Stratford. In the same year he purchased some property in the town of Strat- ford. In 1605 he made his largest purchase : paying ^440 for the remainder of a lease- — granted in 1544 for ninety-two years — ■ of the tithes great and small of Stratford, Old Stratford, Bishop- ton, and Welcombe. At what time he retired from the stas-e is not known with certainty, any more than the date of his entrance upon it. A tradition is recorded in Ward's Diary, extending from 1648 to 1679, that Shakespeare "frequented the plays all his younger time, but in his elder days lived at Stratford, and supplied the stage with two plays every year, and for it had an allowance so large that he spent at the rate of p/^iooo a-year, as I have heard." Ward was vicar of Stratford-on-Avon, and as he may have had his information from persons that had been acquainted with Shake- speare, there is no reason to discredit the main fact. We may lawfully siqipose that Shakespeare spent his latter years at Strat- ford in comfortable ease, looking after his farm and his tithes, and enjoying the conversation of his friends. His father had died in 1 60 1, and his mother died in 160S ; but his wife was still alive, and his daughter w^as well married to a doctor in Stratford, ancl presented him with a little grand-daughter to be the old man's darling. Some traditions are preserved of his witty repartees in genial Stratford society ; but none of them bear any internal evi- dence of genuineness. Shakespeare died at New Place, on the 23d of April 1616. The only record of the cause of his death is the following entry in the Diary just mentioned : " Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard, for Shake- speare died of a fever there contracted." On this Mr Dyce re- marks : " That such a symposium was held is likely enough. Drayton, a native of Warwickshire, and frequently in the neigh- bourhood of Stratford, may fairly be presumed to have partaken at times of Shakespeare's hos]>itality ; and Jonson, who, about two years after, wandered on foot into Scotland and back again, would think little of a journey to Stratford for the sake of visiting so dear a friend ; nevertheless, we should hardly be justified in deter- mining the cause of Shakes])eare's death on the authority of a tradition which was not written down till nearly half a century after the event." Three elaborate works have been written on the portraits of ins LIFE AND CHAEACTEK. 2G9 Shakespeare: Boadeu's, 1824; Wivell's, 1827; and Friswell's, 1864. Friswell's, entitled 'Life Portraits of Shakespeare,' is re- commended by its containing photographs of the principal por- traits — the Stratford bust, the Droeshout en "raving, the Chandos painting (the firiginal of the most connnon Shakespeare face), the Jansen painting, and the Felton head. Only the first two of these portraits are known for certain to be portraits of Shakespeare, The bust, probably put up very soon after the poet's death, was seen and praised as a faithful likeness in 1623. The Droeshout engraving appeared on the title-page of the first edition of Shake- speare's plays in the same year, and received a high compliment in Ben Jonson's famous conunendatory verses : it is a bad engraving, but may have been a fair likeness. The bust, however, which is believed to have been copied from a cast taken after death — a practice then sufficiently common — may be accepted upon all con- siderations as the most trustworthy memorial of the poet's face ; the top and back part of the head seem to be rounded off in a regular oval without any pretension to phrenological fidelity. The forehead is not so high as in the ideal Shakespeare's head, but is broad, full, and smoothly arched ; it is well balanced by the sub- stantial English yeoman jaw and double chin. In proportion to the full forehead and full underface, the intermediate features are small and delicate, and they are set with the same easy symmetry. From the shortness of the nose and the length of the upper lip, it has been conjectured that the sculptor had an accident with the nose ; but we should remember that Scott's upper lip was also irregularly long, and that Shakespeare's admirers were not likely to accept a maimed sculpture. Originally the bust was coloured : the hands and face of a flesh colour, the eyes of a light hazel, the hair and beard auburn. Towards the end of last century, it was coated over with white paint by one of those respectable medioc- rities whose sense of propriety is sometimes more destructive than the most outrageous Vandalism. It has since been restored to its original colours. It is a favourite way with some eulogists of Shakespeare to deny him all individuality whatsoever. He was not one man, they say, but an epitome of all men. His mind, says Hazlitt, " had no one peculiar bias or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself ; but he was all that others were or that they could become." Against such a degradation of Shakespeare's character, or of any man's character, it is our duty to protest. In trying to make Shakespeare more than human, the reckless pane- gyrist makes him considerably less than human : instead of the 270 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE: man whose prudence made liim rich, whose affectionate nature made him loved almost to idolatry, and whose genius has been the wonder of the world, we are presented with plasticity in the ab- stract, an object not more interesting than a quarry of potter's clay. One of the most curious traits in Shakespeare's character is his worldly wisdom. I do not allude to what is called the wisdom of Shakespeare, as displayed in his maxims of morality and politics. I mean the commonplace virtue, rarely exhibited by men of genius, of prudently expending the material rewards of their toil. We are indebted to the antiquaries for the illustration of this. Not only have they shown us how he invested large savings in his native town, but by ransacking corporation records and other pub- lic archives they have discovered for us how firmly he looked after his property. We find him in 1604 prosecuting one Eogers who had bought malt from him and failed to pay. We find him in 1608 bringing an action against John Addenbroke for recovery of a small debt, and thereafter, on the flight of the debtor, proceed- ing against the security. In 161 2 we find him conjoined in a petition to the Court of Chancery to compel certain sharers in the farming of the tithes to pay their just proportions of a common burden. In 1614 he took measures to lesist the proposed enclos- ure of certain common lands which would have affected the value of his property. These little items are not without an interest : they are small in themselves, but they suggest a good deal. The hardships of Shakespeare's early days, the misfortunes of his father, had taught him prudence : he was evidently a firm man of business, not to be imposed upon or cheated with impunity. This combination of sure and firm-set prudence with heaven- climbing genius is the fundamental wonder in Shakespeare, the permanent marvel of his constitution. From whatever point we look at him, this wonder emerges. With all his capricious stream- ers of fancy, he does not gyrate off into aimless oddity and eccentricity. The torrent, tempest, and whirlwind of impassioned imagination is, in him, controlled by a temperance that pulls it back from the raving frenzy of incontinent riot. He is copiously inventive and original, but he does not vex, strain, and dislocate his faculty by striving after plots, characters, maxims, words, and images that had never before been seen in print, or heard upon the stage. Large, steadfast, clear-eyed sagacity and sanity are everywhere conspicuous in Shakespeare. Readers of Shakespeare not familiar with the antecedent litera- ture are naturally enough betrayed into thinking that he drew all his wise sentences about character, morality, and politics from his own experience and observation. Now this is the very thing that his sagacity kept him from attempting. He knew how poor a HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 271 show one iiian's experience can make, and he opened his mind freely to the accumulated experience of ages. There were abun- dant stores within his reach. The moral-plays were store-houses of proverbial philosophy : the common wisdom of many generations was harvested and preserved there as in granaries. The works of all our poets from Chaucer downwards were fidl of similar gen- eralisations : they were studiously affected in the tales and plays of his immediate predecessors. To have neglected these accumu- lations, if it had been possible, would have been the reverse of wise : Shakespeare used them liberally. It is not to be supposed that he deliberately and in cold blood searched in these reposi- tories for matter to fill up a dialogue ; but his mind was full of them, and he took what came to him in the act of composition and what best suited his purposes, without troubling himself as to whether it was original or commonplace. And in like manner with his imagery. Before he began to write, nature had been ransacked and even a fabulous natural history invented in the craze for imagery. This, doubtless, gave an immense stimulus to the poet's original faculty, as the passion for moral and political saws gave to his powei'S of observation. But had Shakespeare resolved to use no weighty sentence and no figure of speech that had ever been used before, he would have been forfeiting all hope of success as a dramatist ; deliberately taking up with the glean- ings, the husks, and the crumbs. A play furnished only with recondite maxims and [far-fetched imagery would have been in- tolerably thin and meagre. One thing, however, was and is to be expected from dramatists having recourse to the great accumulated wealth of literature : we expect them to give a new application, and, above all, a new expression, to what they borrow. We give them liberty to take the seeds, but not to take the plant. This was what Shakespeare did. Now and then, perhaps, he car- ried off a whole plant, when he was in a hurry ; but in nearly every case he took only the seed, the suggestion, and from it reared a plant far excelling the original stock. So incomparable was his genius for expression, that very rarely did he fail to im- prove what he appropriated. And therein lay his power and ex- cellence : not in that he added more than any other man to the im- mense stock of old-world wisdom, but in that he gave to what he adopted an expression so superlative that generalised observations centuries older than him have passed into common speech in his forms. His wisdom was the wisdom of sagacious choice and happy application : but his genius was his own. If we wish to have a vivid impression of the superiority of Shakespeare's judgment, we cannot do better than compare his plays with tales on which they have been founded. He did not exhaust himself in trying to discover new situations ; but going in 272 AVILLTAM SIIAKESPEAEE : with victorious opulence of matter, took the best situations that occurred to him, from his own mind or from novels, poems, his- tories, or even from plays then upon the stage, and filled them out in a way that transcended all competition. When our dramatic antiquaries meet in Shakespeare with a story that they have not hitherto discovered in any previous writer, they pursue their in- quiries with full confidence that they will some day stumble upon the original. And these discoveries, so far from hurting Shake- speare's reputation, are the most astonishing disclosures of his power. Not only does he enrich the story, and give an incompar- able embodiment and expression to the characters, but he recasts the plot and the relations of the dramatis persome with large and clear judgment, so as to produce a more harmonious whole. " Myriad-minded " has become a favourite epithet for Shake- speare : " myriad-mooded," if it did not sound so odd, might be more precisely descriptive of the dramatist's most essential endow- ment. One man becomes able to understand the mental habits of many other men if he passes through many changes of mood : if the world presents itself to him in many different lights accord- ing to his varying states of mind. A stolid, immobile man — or a man, however mobile, whose life was easy, unvaried, unexcited — could not be a dramatist of any considerable range : no power of imaginative genius can go far in constructing states of mind that have never fallen within the lines of its experience. But, indeed, active imaginative genius, combined with keen interest in human beings, must inevitably produce incessant variableness of mood : a man with these qualities in him must be constantly and incon- tinently changing his imaginary relations with the world : his imagination will not allow him to be tranquil : moodiness, variable- ness, is the imperious law of his being. Shakespeare, in imagining the general mental attitude of crafty Bolingbroke, cynical Timon, melancholy Jacques, mad -headed Hotspur, or even dare-devil Richard, and unconscionable Falstaff, fell back upon more or less temporary attitudes of his own variable mind. There could not be a more monstrous mistake than to suppose the great dramatist to have been a calm man, who was never melancholy, and who sat comfortably in a study turning the world round for his amusement, and meditating quietly on the strange fellows that nature had formed in her time. He could not have understood so many of those strange fellows unless he had for however brief an interval passed through the experience of their moods. We know that Shakespeare lived a life of changeful circumstances. In his boy- hood, his father's position underwent a gradual change in the eyes of the townspeople of Stratford ; and in his youth he took an unusual step that also exposed him to various comments. In London he experienced the feelings of gradually making his way ia HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 273 the world through various obstructions, and at all times he occu- pied a doubtful position, exposing him to great variety of treat- ment between the extremes of insult and admiration. He was brought into direct contact with men of all classes, and received with all the diversity of manner experienced by men whose posi- tion is not fixed by rigid convention. Now a man of active imagination and quick susceptibilities could not but have approached these changing circumstances in difi"erent moods ; now melancholy, now defiant, sometimes eager, sometimes cool and indifterent, disposed sometimes to laugh at everything, and sometimes to cry at nothing. In the course of his varied life, he had, doubtless, a touch of the dissolute and reckless spirit of his favourite " Hal " — " of all humours that have showed themselves humours since the old days of goodman Adam ; " as well as of the grave, politic, and resolute spirit of Hal's father, Bolingbroke, or Hal himself when he became the heroic Harry the Fifth. The amazing thing is to find all this variableness, without which dramatic insight is impossible, in combination with the fundamental steadiness, without which dramatic execution is impossible. All this variableness had, as it were, a centre — was an incessant movement above, below, and around a fixed centre of gravity. For all his presumable moodiness, Shakespeare would seem to have never composed but in one mood — the mood of dramatic impartiality. Nobody has been able to detect in his character any strong bias of opinions held dogmatically by him- self. He would seem to have composed with intense concentra- tion, setting himself with all the strength of his imagination to express the particular concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives that emerged from his story of love or revenge, and allowing himself to be swayed by no considerations except dramatic effect. Preachers sometimes essay to prove his religion and morality by choice excerpts, but they only prove that he put such sentiments into the mouths of his characters : he holds the mirror up to the irreligion and immorality of Edmund and lago, and displays them with equal clearness and force. One of his characters explains away prophecy, another rationalises pre- sentiments, a third declares that miracles are ceased, and that we can admit only natural means : yet ghosts walk in his dramas, men are haunted by evil forebodings, and calamities are heralded by monstrous portents. It is vain to look for consistent opinions where the dramatist's principle is to embody men of all shades with strict impartiality in their exact form and pressure. The most amiable and one of the best attested features of Shakespeare's character, is the constancy of certain attachments. We may well suppose that, with an imagination ever ready to invest objects with attributes not their own, and sufficiently subtle S 274 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: to find for Titania points of attraction in tlie liead of an ass, Sliakespeare had many passing loves and friendships. But he was capable also of constant attachment. The strongest evidence of this is found in his continued visits to his native place, and his final settlement there in the evening of his life. True, had we no other evidence of his intense affections, the fact of his retire- ment to Stratford might be otherwise interpreted : it might be said that he left London and its pleasant society because there his profession as an actor exposed him to indignities that his pride would not brook, and went to Stratford because there he was treated as a person of consequence. In support of this might be alleged the significant fact that in 1596 his father, probably at his instigation, applied for a grant of arms at the Heralds' College. We know from Shakespeare's sonnets that he felt keenly the inferiority and disgrace attaching to his profession ; and it is not unlikely that he went back to the scenes of his boyhood with a certain feeling of relief from the scene of his humiliation. It is not perhaps to be denied that Shakespeare was glad to leave London, with all the attractions of wit-combats with Ben Jonson at the Mermaid, because he had not Big Ben's rough indifference to public opinion, and could not bear to be patronised for his genius by men that felt themselves above his profession. But while we acknowledge all. this, we have still to account for the fact that his native town of Stratford was the chosen place of his retirement : he might have invested his gains in some quarter where he was utterly unknown, but for the desire to be near the friends and the scenes of his youth. And we are entitled to put upon the fact its most natural construction, when we find that supported by the warmth of attachment expressed in his sonnets, and the recorded testimonies of the gentleness of his nature. "I loved the man," said Ben Jonson, "and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature." II. — His Words and Imagery. The art of putting things cleverly and playing upon words was never carried to a greater height than in the age of Elizabeth. The Elizabethans were conscious word-artists — " engineers of phrases," as Thomas Nash said. " To see this age ! " cries the clown in "Twelfth Night," "a sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit ; how quickly the wrong side may be turned out- ward ! " And this same clown was acting in delicious caricature of the age, when he fastidiously rejected the woi'd "element" — " Who you are and what you would are out of my welkin, I might say 'element,' but the word is overdone." HIS WOEDS AND IMAGERY. 275 The delight in similitudes went naturally with this extravagant craze for uncommon expression : the fancy was solicited, and when solicitation failed, was tortured to satisfy the reigning fashion. They ransacked for comparisons the heavens above, the earth beneath, the waters under the earth, and the historical and mythical generations of earth's inhabitants. The wit of those days viewed the whole world as so much figurative material ; he knew it as a painter knows his box of colours, or an enthusi- astic botanist the flora of his own parish. That was the sort of fermentation likely to produce great masters of words. To call a spade a spade is a most benumb- ing and stifling maxim to literary genius : an Elizabethan would not have called a spade a spade if he could possibly have found anything else to call it. The Elizabethan liter- ature would not have been the rich field that it is had a wretched host of Dean Alfords been in the ascendant, with their miserable notions about idiomatic purity and Queen's English. The number of words used by Shakespeare is said to be 15,000 ; and the prodigious magnitude of this number is usually brought out by comparing it with ^lilton's number, which is 8000.^ We might say to him as Katherine said to Wolsey : — ■ "Your words, Domestics to you, serve your will as't please Yourself pronounce their office ; " and add that his verbal establishment was upon an unparalleled scale. To some extent, indeed, it would seem that those hosts of ^ Shakespeare's use of technical terms and phrases deserves special notice, as having created quite a department of literature. Several volumes have been written, dwelling upon all phraseology that belongs, whether exclusively or not, to special trades, occupations, or professions ; each contending for some one occupation tliat Shakespeare must have engaged in before he could have been able to use its technicalities with such abundance and discrimination. The phraseology of law, medicine, surgery, chemistry, war, navigation, music, field-sports, black-art — the phraseology of each of these was used by Shakespeare, it is argued, with the intelligence of an experienced proficient. We have also special treatises on his acquaintance with botany, entomology, and ornithology. When each of several volumes contends for a dilierent occupation as the occu- pation of Sliakespeare's youth or early manhood, and each argues on the same fundamental principle with equal conclusiveness, they refute each other and discredit their common princii)le. The principle underlying all these arguments is, that a man cannot use the phraseology of an occupation without having prac- tised that occupation. It is reduced to an absurdity by tlie latest work in the department, Mr Blades's 'Shakspere and Typography,' in which it is cleverly argued from Shakespeare's use of printing technicalities that he must have been a printer. Tlie fact is that Shakespeare's contemporaries as well as himself ransacked all trades and ijrofessions for striking phrases. Legal terms were in particular request, and it was not necessary for Shakespeare to study, much less to practise law, in order to acquire them : they abounded in the general liter- ature of the period. 276 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: servants were too officious ; obtruding their services in such jost- ling numbers as to embarrass operations. It would appear as if, when Shakespeare sat in the heat of composition, every Avord in the sentence just penned overwhelmed him with its associations ; so perfectly were his intellectual forces mobilised, and so fresh and eager were they for employment. And besides these officious troops of words, he had in his service troops of images no less officious, no less ready to appear upon the slightest hint. Upon the slightest hint that they were wanted, they came flashing in with lightning excitement from all quarters ; from pages of poems, histories, and even compendiums, from echoes of the stage, from all regions of earth and sky that he had seen or realised in thought. M. Taine lays most stress upon the copiousness of Shakespeare's imagery. " It is a series of paintings which is unfolded in his mind. He does not seek them, they come of themselves ; they crowd within him, covering his arguments ; they dim with their brightness the pure light of logic. He does not labour to explain or prove ; picture on picture, image on image, he is for ever copy- ing the strange and splendid visions which are engendered one within another, and are heaped up within him." Now I am not prepared to admit that Shakespeare's argumenta- tive faculty was thus overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of imagery. If the dramatist's mind had been thus overpoweringly pictorial, he would have been too much carried away by the imagination of the splendid portents, the blazing meteors, and feverish earthquakes, that prefigured Glendower's birth, to be capable of meeting it with Hotspur's rejoinder, conceived on the soundest principles of induc- tive philosophy ; the fascination of the fiery heaven and shaking earth would have prevented him from seeing that the same things might have happened if Glendower's mother's cat had but kittened though himself had never been born. That is a typical instance of logical faculty rising superior to the engrossing force of imagd- nation. Apart, however, from that, I am of opinion that M. Taine exaggerates the pictorial side of Shakespeare's genius. It doubtless affi)rds a very plausible explanation of Shakespeare's mixed metaphors to say that they were produced by the press and crush of thronging images ; as his liberties with grammatical usage arose from over-abundance and strong pressure of words. But there is reason to believe that Shakespeare, like every other great verbal artist, took more delight in Avords than in forms and colours, as a painter takes more delight in forms and colours than in words : and that he was tempted both to mixed metaphors and to viola- tions of grammatical usage by a desire for fresh and startling combinations of words. This thirst of his ear for new conjunc- tions overpowered every other consideration. When he was HIS WOEDS AND IMAGERY. 277 importuned by several images at once, he knocked two or three of them forcibly together ; but I believe that the temptation to do so came chietiy from his delight in the new marriage of words thus consummated. Indeed, we spread a radical misconception of the poet's art, of the means whereby he gains his hold upon our sensibilities, when we lay M. Taine's stress upon the genesis of his imagery. It is not the pictures of form and colour that are the principal in- gredients in the poet's charm : they complete the spell, but are not the essence of it. What takes us captive is the gathering up of ideas in new groups under new bands of words ; our senses are ravished by new combinations of words in a poem as by fresh harmonies in an oratorio. In a new combination of Avords, of course, we are affected by much beyond the mere sound, though that, doubtless, is a large element to many minds. The words appeal to us by multitudinous associations, awake slumber- ing echoes in many different chambers of our being : the charm of the new encounter is that it rouses and locks together many memories never before united. Several people in the Elizabethan age, or indeed in any other age, could have led us through "a wood, crowded with interwoven trees and luxuriant bushes, which conceal you and close your path, which delight and dazzle your eyes by the magnificence of their verdure and the wealth of their bloom." Spenser comes very much nearer this description than Shakespeare, to my mind : to me it conveys not the remotest approach to the peculiar effect of Shakespeare. Simple and easy as the operation seems, the power of fresh and effective word-com- bination is one of the rarest of gifts : it is indispensable to a great poet; and part of Shakespeare's main distinction among great poets is the possession of this power in an incomparable degree. Something in the effect of his combinations upon us is due, no doubt, to change in the usage of words : many words whose con- junction raised no surprise in an Elizabethan, have since wandered away from each other and gathered other associations about them, so that their reunion in our minds is like the reunion of youthful friends in old age. The words lay near each other then, and had little variety of idea to bring into collision : now, in this later stage of their existence, they have lived long apart, they surprise us by their mutual recognition, and they bring many memt)ries into shifting indefinite comparison, indefinably charming collision. In reading Shakespeare's predecessors, we often meet with what appear to have been the suggestions or seeds of passages in his plays ; and the comparison of the suggestion with its development gives a most vivid notion of the amplitude and rapidity of growth in Shakespeare's mind. So abundant and mobile were words and 278 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE: images in that soil, so warm its generating force, that a seed fallen there at once germinated and shot up with the utmost facility of assimilation into a complete organism. Take a simple case. When Gaveston, in Marlowe's "Edward II.," returns from ban- ishment, and is recognised as the king's favourite, he is besieged by a host of hunters for patronage. Among the rest is a traveller, at whom Gaveston looks for a moment, and then says — " Let me see : thou wouldst do well to wait at my trencher and tell me lies at dinner-time; and as I like your discoursing, I'll have you." Shakespeare seems to have been tickled with this deliberate utilisa- tion of the traveller, for he makes the Bastard in " King John," when he has obtained royal favour, take delight in the prospect of the same entertainment. But in Shakespeare's mind the idea ripens into a complete picture of well-fed satisfaction, condescension, obsequiousness, and rambling after-dinner talk (" King John," i. I, 190). III. — Certain Qualities of his Poetry. The most general reader is impressed by the width of Shake- speare's range through varied effects of strength, pathos, and humour : and minute methodical reading brings an increase of admiration. It must not, however, be supposed that Shakespeare's poetry embraces all the qualities to be found in all other poets — that every effect producible by poetry on the human spirit finds its most conspicuous exemplification in his plays. He fills us with wonder, with submissive awe, with heroic energy ; he runs us through the gamut of tears and laughter, smiling and sadness : no mortal man has struck so many different notes ; yet witli all his marvellous versatility, he had his own individual touch, and he left an inexhaustible variety of notes to be sounded. Shake- speare was a man of wonderful range ; but his plays are not a measure of the effects that lie within the compass of poetic language. The might that Shakespeare excels in expressing is not the might of slow and regular agencies, but the might of swift and confounding agencies. His power is figured in the boast of Prospero — " To the dread rattling thunder Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak With his own bolt." The awful energies that he sets in motion move with lightning swiftness and overpowering suddenness : the sublime influence does not soar and sail above us ; it comes about our senses, flash- ing and crackling, dazzling and confounding, like Jove's own bolt. His words pass over us like the burst and ear-deafening voice of CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 279 the oracle over Cleoraenes, surprising the hearer into nothingness ; or flame before our amazed eyes like the sight-outrunning activity of Ariel on board the king's ship in the tempest. Milton's sub- limity has not the same life, the same magic energy : it is statelier and less intimate : the effect is not so sudden ancl overwhelming. There is an excitement akin to madness in the swiftly concen- trated energy of some of Shakespeare's occasional bursts. Lear's curses are quivering with compressed force — " All the stored vengeances of heaven fall On her ungrateful top ! Strike her young bones, Ye taking airs, with lameness ! " And again — " Now all the plagues that in the pendulous air Hang fated o'er men's faults light on thy daughters ! " There is a similar half-maddening excitement compressed, as it were, with strong hand, but trembling on the verge of frantic explosion, in Lucrece's invocation of Night — " comfort-killing Night, image of hell ! Dim register and notary of shame ! Black stage for tragedies and murders fell ! Vast sin-concealing chaos ! nurse of hlame ! Blind muflied bawd ! dark harbour for defame ! Grim cave of death ! whispering conspirator "With close-tongued treason and the ravisher." Claudio's anticipation of the horrors of death (" Measure for Measure," iii. i, ii8), Lady Macbeth's invocation (i. 5, 40), Cal- phurnia's description of the portents ("Julius Caesar," ii. 2, 13), Othello's imprecation on himself (v. 2, 277), are pregnant with a similar energy. 8ach passages are few and far between, as in a volcanic country you find many grandeurs with supreme accunmla- tions here and there. In Macbeth's dark hints to his wife about the plot to murder Banquo, the sublime passiou is calmer and less thrilling, but there is a lurking devil of swift excitability even in that lofty passage : — " Macb. There's comfort yet ; they are assailable : Then be thou jocund ; ere the bat hath flown His cloister'd flight, ere to black Hecat's summons The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums Hath rung night's yawning peal, there shall be done A deed of dreadful note. Lady Mach. What's to be done ? Macb. Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, Till thou applaud the deed. Come, seeling night, Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day ; And with thy bloody and invisible hand Cancel and tear to jjieces that great bond 280 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE. Which keeps me pale ! Light thickens ; and the crow Makes wing to the rooky wood : Good things of day begin to droop and drowse ; Wliile night's black agents to their preys do rouse." I am not aware that any passage can be quoted from Shake- speare with the composed, stately, sustained grandeur of Milton's description of Satan : Shakespeare's sublime agencies do not move with the same massive dignity — they are instinct with quick life and motion, and their change of attitude is like lightning. The planetary Miltonic grandeur was not, indeed, suited to his purposes as a dramatist. A Satan of Miltonic dignity put upon the stage must have appeared more or less of a bombast Tambur- laine. Caesar, " the foremost man of all this world," who, as Casca mockingly said, " bestrode the narrow world like a Colossus," and who, as he said himself, was " constant as the northern star," is Shakespeare's nearest approach to Miltonic grandeur of concep- tion ; but the grandeur is not sustained as in Milton, it is made up by momentary glances of the poet's SAvi ft- ranging imagination. Othello is grand with a volcanic grandeur : he is easily moved ; he blazes out suddenly with such commands as — " Hold, for your lives ! He that stirs next to carve for his own rage Holds his soul light ; he dies upon his motion. " Henry V. was a favourite with the poet, and the prologue to the play where he appears, after shaking off the base contagious clouds that smothered up his beauty from the world, is conceived in a spirit of swelling sublimity ; but mark the nature and attitude of the powers held in reserve by the mighty monarch — " for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention ! A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene ! Then should the warlike Harry, like himself Assume the port of Mars ; and at his heels Lcasli'd in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire Crouch for employment. " In accordance with this characteristic, Shakespeare's descrip- tions of storms and tempests, or the dread witching hour with devilry in the mysterious background ; of hurly-burly, riot, and confusion, or vague impending terrors ; of hell let loose or hell pent up and stealthily preparing to spring out, — are far and away incomparable. Description is more in the way of the epic poet than of the dramatist ; but the dramatist also, even in the niodern ■drama, often has occasion to describe what his personages saw before CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 281 they made their appearance on the stage. Shakespeare loses no opportunity for description. Sometimes, as in the beginning of the Second Act of " Othello," he makes personages on the stage describe with vivid eftect what they see taking place behind the scenes — the struggle of vessel after vessel on a fiercely tempestuous sea. In "• Pericles," he brings a storm as it were on the stage, asking the audience to imagine the stage to be the deck of the sea-tost mariners, and making his personages speak and act as if on shipboard. The scene (" Pericles," iii. i) is one of Shakespeare's most magnificent passages. Storms in the social world, "the grappling vigour and rough frown of war," were large elements in the Elizabethan drama, and Shakespeare entered into them with delighted energy. The various circumstances of war are described in his historical plays with a spirit and vividness that one might expect from a professional man of blood, possessed with the habitual fierceness of M. Taine's typical Elizabethan. His imagination revelled in the scenic glories and horrors of invasion and conflict. The picture of the invading army in "Richard II." ii. 3, 95 — " Frighting the pale-faced villages with war And ostentation of despised arms "■ — carries his peculiar thrill in its compressed force : and there is a still more unhinging panic-striking energy in the announcement made to King John (v. i, 35) — " And wild amazement hurries up and down The little number of your doubtful friends." He describes the night watch before the battle with the dreadful note of preparation ("Henry V." iv., Prologue), and the bloody field after the battle ("Henry V." iv. 7, 74). The actual horrors of extended confiict he would not seem to have realised minutely, or to have considered fitted for narration, except in such special episodes as the death of York and Sufi'olk (" Henry V." iv. 6). Conflict on the large scale he expressed in vague powerful figures, such as the following in a speech of the Bastard's (" King John," ii. I, 350)— " Ha, majesty! how high thy glory towers, When the rich blood of kings is set on fire ! 0, now doth Death line his dead chaps with steel : The swords of soldiers are his teeth, his fangs : And now he feasts, mousing the flesh of men In undetermined differences of kings. Why stand these royal fronts amazed thus ? Cry ' havoc ! ' kings ; back to the stained field You equal potents, fiery kindled spirits ! Then let confusion of one part confirm The other's peace ; till then, blows, blood, and death ! " 282 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : So much for scenic grandeurs, which are but accidents in the drama ; let us look now at spiritual grandeurs, which are the dramatic pith and essence. One main function of the drama is to conceive and express the storms of the individual heart under all the variety of passions that stir it to the depths — love, jealousy, despair, revenge, ambition. These storms may arise under endless variety of conditions, and we require of the dramatist not only adequate energy of expression but a certain truth to nature in the origin and fluctuation of passion : the passion must neither arise nor change without just motive. As the passion transcends nature, so may — indeed, so must — the motive : but the relation between the two must not outrage nature. In this correspondence between the motive and the passion consists dramatic truth : dramatic subtlety is shown chiefly in the fluctuations of passion. It is Shakespeare's supreme pre-eminence to combine this truth and subtlety with incompar- able energy of expression. Many people believe that there is hai'dly a situation in life that cannot be paralleled from Shakespeare ; and, curiously enough, this contrast between physical and spiritual commotions is definitely expressed by one of his dramatic creatures, and the spiritual declared to be the more impressive. In "King John" (v. 2, 40), Lewis replies as follows to Salisbury's agitation and conflict of spirit at following the banners of his country's in- vader : — ■ " A noble temper dost thou show in this : And great affections, wrestling in tliy bosom, Doth make an earthi[nake of nobilit\^ My heart hath melted at a lady's tears, Being an ordinary inundation ; But this effusion of such manly drops, This shower, blown up by tempest of the soul, Startles mine eyes, and makes me more amazed Than liad I seen the vanity top of heaven Figured quite o'er with burning meteors." Bacon wondered why a woman's eye should be so gazed at when the beauties of the heavens were so little regarded. That wonder spoke the philosopher no less unmistakably than the above passage speaks the dramatist. Human passion affected him more than the grandest phenomena of inanimate nature. No poet has approached Shakespeare in imagining and express- ing the tempest raised in the soul by supernatural apparitions. This is another aspect of his power over the expression of wild, swift-thrilling excitement. Macbeth's agitation after his first interview with the witches, his quivering horror and hoarse cries CEKTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 283 before the ghost of Banquo, the suppressed delirium of Hamlet's first address to the ghost of his father, exhibit the poet's power iu its maturity, when art moves with the freedom of instinct, and imagination and expression go together with hand loosely in hand. Clarence's dream (" Richard III," i. 4, 43) is an earlier effort, and more commonplace in conception ; but the apparition of Edward, a swift interlacing of heaven and hell, has the inexpressible Shakespearian thrill. The fierce passions of the fight, the fiery exhortations of excited leaders, ferocious teeth-grinding challenge and indignant defiance, infuriated pursuit and savage standing at bay, are prominent in several of Shakespeare's plays. We must not, however, suppose that his imagination worked to gratify a blood- sucking disposition, a savage thirst for wounds and falls, and agonised contortions, the delight of strong nerves in drums, trumpets, the clash of swords and shields, the discharge of small-arms and cannon, the hurried movements of charge and retreat. Mere warlike enthusiasm, the thirst for fighting and glory, is never more than a subordinate passion in his dramas. Its various moods — its hardy aspiration " to pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon" (" i Henry IV.," i. 3, 201); its eager revelling in the anticipated combat (" i Henry IV.," iv. i, m); its delight in the most deafening sounds of war (" King John," ii. I, 372); its contemptuous braving of the enemy ("King John," v. 2, 130) — are rendered with the greatest spirit iu the speeches of the hot-headed, " wasp-stung and impatient," Hotspur, and the strong humorous soldier of fortune, Faulconbridge. When the warlike fit is on him, Hotspur is the very incarnation of the demon of war, the unmistakable son of Bellona : he speaks plain cannon-fire and breathes cannon-smoke : in his dreams he mutters words of encouragement to his horse, and his face is strained with phantom effort. "But both Hotspur and the Bastard are exhibited to the audience rather as characters, or, as they were then called, "humours," than heroes. Hotspur's uncontrollable ardour is snubbed sarcastically by his uncle and his father, and his fire- eating propensities generally are ridiculed by the more versatile Prince Harry. And similarly, when the Bastard, a more robust warrior than Percy, gives his bragging message to the King of France, he is called a scold, and contemptuously interrupted by the rattle of drums. Achilles and Ajax, the champions of the Greeks, are mere fighting machines, senseless blocks, coarse and insolent as buffaloes. Coriolanus and Antony, who go to battle like the war-horse of the Bible, are riioved by nobler passions than the savage instinct for bringing their strength to the trial of mortal combat. Shakespeare, while he recognised the nobility of the soldier's aspiration — 284 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: " To -win renown Even in the jaws of clanger and of death " — had a most civilised contempt for the causeless exercise of brute force. A spirit of deeper and more bitter fierceness is shown by men that fight not for the mere love of fighting, but in defence of in- sulted honour, or in support of incensed hatred. The cross accusa- tions and challenges of Bolingbroke and Mowbray in the First Act of " Richard II." are an example. The two enemies assail each other with indignant words before the King, such terms pass- ing between them as " traitor and miscreant," " pale trembling coward," " a slanderous coward and a villain." Gages are thrown and taken up, when the King and Gaunt interfere to keep the peace. " Cousin," says the King to Bolingbroke, " throw up your gagej do you begin." Bolingbroke refuses — " God defend my soul from such deep sin ! Shall I seem crest-fallen in my father's sight ? Or with pale beggar fear impeach my height Before this out-dared bastard? Ere my tongue Shall wound my honour with such feeble wrong, Or soi;nd so base a parle, mj' teeth shall tear The slavish motive of recanting fear And spit it bleeding in liis high disgrace Where shame doth harbour, ev'n in Mowbray's lace.' This indomitable ferocity is from the politic and normally self-restrained Bolingbroke : no wonder that M. Taine found it difficult to see the soft moods of such a character. In the lists, however, Avhen their hatred is settling into their arms and their tongues are correspondingly relieved, their mutual defiance is perceptibly milder : they take their stations no less gaily than two duellists from the Court of Louis XIV. The ferocity of speech is left for the impatient onlooker, old Gaunt : the combatants go to mortal battle — " As gentle and as jocund as to gest. " —Richard 11., \. 3, 60-90. Warlike fury becomes most impressive, and demands the utmost strain of imagination to give it deep and full body, when it rises out of the decay of hope, when the soldier's arm is his last refuge against the falling ofi:' of friends and the thickening troops of enemies. It is when the warrior is baited like Macbeth, or hunted like Richard, or caught in the toils like Antony, that the war passion concentrates for a burst of supreme energy, quickening the most peaceful pulses and thrilling the least combustible nerves with sympathetic fire. In the case of Richard, indeed, there is less propriety in the word concentration ; — CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS TOETEY. 285 " Let's to 't pell-mell, If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell "— is a resolution that mounts very little above his uniform level of dare-devilry. We are conscious of hardly any rise of temperature in Richard till we reach the peremptory savage fury of his last moments, and he can hardly be said to concentrate, to bend up, his energies for this culmination of rage — it is only that the exasperation of circumstances has blown his normal fiendishness to a white heat. His energies are maintained throughout at a fiendish pitch : he was created when the young dramatist had not ventured on deep fluctuations. With Macbeth the supreme mo- ment comes when the promise is explained away that had before steeled him with a trust in invulnerable destiny. For a moment the stripping off of that supernatural protection cows his better part of man, but it is only a momentary crouch : there is a depth beneath undrawn : and what condensed firmness and ferocity there is in his bearing when he towers up and fronts Macduff with his last defiance — " I will not J'ield, To kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet, And to be baited with the rabble's curse. Though Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane, And thou op[)osed, being of no woman born. Yet I will try the last. Before my body I throw my warlike shield," &c. In the "old ruflian," the magnanimous "sworder," Antony, when hemmed in like a lion by overpowering numbers, the spirit mounts above the dark fierceness of despair. He goes to battle with savage laughter : his bloodthirsty ferocity is strangely tem- pered with sweetness, if not with light. Bewitched by his passion for Cleopatra, he has let slip opportunity after opportunity till the final struggle can be delayed no longer : he rouses himself perforce and puts forth his strength to show the world that — • " 'Tis better playing with a lion's whelp, Than witli an old one dying." His talk with Cleopatra at the banquet on the evening before his last effort, is a fine illustration of Shakespeare's bold and sure treatment of the stormiest passions. The dramatist takes on the situation as it were instinctively : the words seem to come by spontaneous impulse. Antony's last " gaudy night" is no carousal to drown care : no effort to forget the coming morrow. War is not excluded from the banquet : on the contrai-y, he is the guest of the evening : he sits on Antony's right, while Love is on the left. Akin to martial rage is fiery invective, the warfare of the tongue, 28G WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE: the last resource of women and misantliropes, of oppressed Mar- garets and soared Timons. Amidst the circle of tearful afflicted women bereaved by the multiplied villanies of Richard III., Margaret stands out with irrepressible fierceness flashing through and burning up her tears, husbandless, childless, friendless, utterly impotent, but indomitable. In her young and beautiful days, when Suffolk brought her from France as " nature's miracle," to be the wife of King Henry, she gave ample proof that she was a woman of spirit. She came among Henry's mutinous nobles and haughty ladies with an imperial resolution to be no nominal queen. She bitterly resented the king's unmanliness. She boxed the ears of the proud wife of Gloucester. When Henry weakly made over the succession to the Duke of York, she took the field in behalf of her defrauded son ; defeated York and took him prisoner ; dipped a handkerchief in the blood of the boy Rutland, and offered it to the captive father to wipe his eyes with. She stabbed York with her own hand. Such was the beautiful " she-wolf of France," the "tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide," in the prime of her youth. In " Richard III.," she reappears withered and wrinkled, bereft of husband, son, and every vestige of power ; but neither age nor misfortune can quench her fiery energy. She is turned all to envenomed bitterness, hungry for revenge, " well skilled in curses," never opening her mouth save to give passage to " the breath of bitter words." No hope but the hope of revenge survives to detain her longer in England. Herself impotent, she hangs about the Court to ease her heart with curses, and pray that her eyes may see revenge ; she lies in wait for opi)ortunities of. chilling the prosperous with prophecies of pain and ruin, and adding with her bitter tongue to the miseries of the wretched. When poor Elizabeth, the wife of dying Edward, exclaims — " Small joy have I in being England's queen," Margaret enters behind with the bitter addition — " And lessened be that small, God, I beseecli tliee ! Thy honour, state, and seat is due to me." Richard alone is a match for her. He treats her curses with humorous indifference. She assails him with a torrent of incom- parably savage epithets — " elvish-marked, abortive, routing hog," " slander of thy mother's heavy womb," &c., — and he takes even her breath away for a moment by coolly completing the curse with her own name. But her hard bitter spirit encounters no such check, and moves on with triumphant volubility in the incom- parable scene ("Richard III." iv. 4), where she intrudes upon the prostrate mourners Elizaljeth and the Duchess of York. This was one of Shakespeare's earlier efforts ; but he never again equalled the concentrated bitter fierceness of this she- wolf's hunger for CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 287 revenge, fiendish, laugliter over its partial accomplishment, and savage prayer for its completion. Words could not hiss and sting with more envenomed intensity than in the speech that she con- cludes with the prayer for Richard's death — " Cancel his bond of life, dear God, I pray, That I may live to say, The dog is dead." The general misanthropy of Timon is a more massive feeling than ]\Iargaret's sharp and piercing special hatred and keen hunger for revenge, the rage of a tigress robbed of her whelps. There is the difference between them that there is between piercing per- sonal invective and large denunciations of universal depravity. There is a grandeur in Timon' s misanthropy, as there was in the imperial munificence of his better days : his feelings at no time are in the common roll : there is a largeness of heart about him, an impassioned superiority to ordinary prudence and ordinary sobriety of judgment. His affections move not in petty rivulets within severely restraining bounds of intellect : their motion is oceanic. When he was rich he gave about him without a thought of consequences, and without the faintest suspicion of human honesty and gratitude ; and when the scales are plucked rudely from his eyes, and friend after friend in quick succession proves ungrateful, his impetuous tide of disgust is too powerful to receive the slightest check from the arguments of temperate judgment. From first to last he is a creature of unreasoning impulse and passion. The surest evidence that a dramatist has taken hold of the complete body of a strong passion is seen in his representation of its transfiguring power. The power of strong feeling to trans- figure and distort, to make foul things seem fair to the impas- sioned vision and fair things foul, is a very familiar fact, under- stood to a certain depth by the most ordinary novelist. Almost anybody could have conceived the perversion of the brave o'erhang- ing firmament by the force of melancholy into a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. But there are much more startling and sweeping transfigurations wrought by the fire of passion among Shakespeare's characters. One of the most striking is the revela- tion of his mother's guilt by Hamlet in the closet scene (" Hamlet," iii. 4, 40). In the rising frenzy of his moral indignation, all nature seems to join with the avenger in flaming horror and hideous disgust at the monstrosity of the crime : — " Heaven's face doth glow ; Yea, this solidity and com[)Oinid mass, With tristful visage as against the doom Is thought-sick at the act." 288 WILLIAM SIIAKESPEAKE: But for a sudden marvellous leap of passion even this shudder- ing frenzy is inferior in power to Isabella's fierce rejection of the unworthy proposals of Angelo ("Measure for Measure," ii. 4, 100). But if Shakespeare is supreme in angry invective, he is equally supreme in the expression of the impassioned transports of love. The whole soul agitated by love was no less at his command : the tumults and steady raptures, the sudden bursts and over- whelming tides of absorbing passion, whether of hatred or of love, found in him an understanding heart and a copious tongue. His two great love tragedies, "Romeo and Juliet," and "Antony and Cleopatra," certainly not inferior to the greatest of his works, were a sufficient peace-offering to Venus for his disparagement of her power in his sonnets and his "Two Gentlemen of Verona :" they recanted his trifling with friendship as a master-passion, and laid the strongest ties of kindred and ambition at the feet of the all-powerful goddess. Juliet may for a moment be angry with Romeo for the death of her kinsman Tybalt, but her whole soul is up in arms when she hears the words, " Shame come to Romeo ! " — • " Blistered be thy tongue For such a wish ! He was not born to shame : Upon his brow shame is ashamed to sit ; For 'tis a throne where honour may be crowned Sole monarch of the universal earth ! " There is a fine contrast throughout between the two pairs of lovers, Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra. Juliet's fiery brevity and flashing sublime splendour is no less in keeping with her virgin youth, than is the magnificent torrent of hyperboles with which the passionate Queen of Egypt deifies her paramour char- acteristic of her meretricious maturity and experience. In vain poor Dolabella makes polite efforts to be heard : there is no resist- ing the tide of Cleopatra's eloquence — " Cleo. I dreamed there was an Emperor Antony : 0, such another sleep, tliat I niiglit see But such another man ! Dol. If it miglit please ye Clco. His face was as the heavens : and therein stuck A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted The little 0, the earth. Dol. Most sovereign creature Cleo. His legs bestrid the ocean : his rear'd arm Crested the world : his voice was propertied, As all tlie tuned spheres : and that to friends ; But when he meant to quail and sliake the orb, Ho was as rattling thunder. For his bounty There was no winter in't ; an autumn 'twas That grew the more by reaping : his delights CEETAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETKY. 289 "Were dolphin-like ; they show'd his back above The element they lived in : iu his livery Walk'd crowns and crownets ; realms and islands were As i)lates dropp'd from his pocket." Shakespeare was just such a servant as Venus loves ; not too tamely obedient and reverential, often breaking loose in fits of capricious mockery and flat contradiction, yet every now and again giving unequivocal tokens of respect. So perfect was his mastery over the language of genuine passion, that he was never afraid to bring it into contrast with mock hyperbole or unsenti- mental worldliness. His sympathies with Biron, Benedick, Mer- cutio, and Diomede, did not prevent him from giving earnest expression to the soaring raptures of the youthful lovers, Romeo and Troilus. Even the mocking Biron himself is touched with the sacred flame, and renders homage to the power of his divinity in verses of dazzling magnificence (" Love's Labour Lost," iv. 3, 231). But though Biron raises his divinity to a dazzling height, and draws a fine scenic picture of her majesty, his transports are formal compared with the agonised soul's hunger of Troilus, stalk- ing about Cressid's door — " Like a strange soul upon the Stygian banks Staying for waftage. " And all other lovers' raptures must yield to the world-absorbing passion of Romeo in the Sixth Scene of the Second Act, where the violent delights of the lovers are approaching their culmination — " Friar. So smile the heavens upon this lioly act, That after hours with sorrow chide us not ! Jiovi. Amen, amen ! but come what sorrow can, It cannot countervail the exchange of joy That one short minute gives me in her sight : Do thou but close our hands with holy words, Then love-devouring death do what he dare ; It is enough I may but call her mine." The dazzling and confounding power of the sudden apparition of beauty is described with inspired zeal in the unexpected out- burst of the merry lord, Biron. But Biron's description of the majesty of his mistress is surpassed in idolatrous elevation and enraptured homage by Cassio's welcome to Desdemona (" Othello," ii. I, 83). "0, behold, The riches of the ship is come on shore ! Ye men of Cyprus, let her have your knees. Hail to thee, lady ! and the grace of heaven, Before, behind thee, and on every hand, Enwheel tliee round ! " 290 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: Such a reception is worthy of the lady " that paragons description, and wild fame." When, however, the poet has to describe the power of more than mortal charms, he surpasses his wildest tributes to ntortal beauty. Oberon's account of the effects of the mermaid's song ("Midsummer Night's Dream," ii. i, 148) dwindles all other hyperboles into meanness — " My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou reinemberest Since once I sat upon a promontory, And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, That the rude sea grew civil at her song, And certain stars shot madly from their spheres To hear the sea-maid's music." In all these passages the energy is swift and darting, with here and there a momentary poise or slowing of speed, as it dwells on some revelation of spiritual or scenic grandeur. There is no end to the variety of movement, no bounds to its range : it ascends to the most passionate heaven of love, and enters with equal zest the gloomiest hell of hatred and desperate fury, of bitter curses and set teeth. But wherever the energy goes, it goes swiftly. It does not wait calmly to gather body and proceed with quietly over- bearing stateliness : when checked, it rages impatiently, and pierces irresistibly through all impediments. This is the general character of the strength of Shakespeare's genius. We must not, however, allow this dazzling movement of lightnings in the atmosphere of his tragedies to blind us to the vast firmament that overhangs the whole, and displays itself in quiet grandeur when the hurly-burly of conflicting passions has stormed itself to rest. The poet recognises an overruling Destiny above all the tumult. It is not a cold remote power of marble majesty : it is represented (Sonnet 115) as being in intimate con- nection with human affairs — " Reckoning Time, whose million'd accidents Creep in 'twixt vows and change decrees of kings, Tan sacred beauty, blunt tlie sharp'st intents, Divert strong minds to the course of altering things." 'to Nothing is more remarkable in Shakespeare's plays, and nothing contributes more to make them a faithful image of life, than the prominence given to the influence of chance, of undesigned acci- dents. The most tragic events turn on the most trifling circum- stances. The fate of Eichard II. is traced to a momentary im- pulse. When Bolingbroke and Mowbray are mounted for the encounter, and waiting for the signal to charge, the king on a sudden thought throws down his warder, stops the fight, and sends CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETEY. 291 the combatants into exile. That impulse cost him kingdom and life (" 2 Henry IV.," iv. i, 125)— " wlien the king did throw his warder down, His own life hung upon the statf he threw. " Poor Desdemona's fate hangs on the accidental dropping of a handkerchief. The unhappy deaths of Eomeo and Juliet are the result of the miscarriage of a letter. " The most noble blood of all this world " might not have been spilt untimely had Caesar not postponed reading the schedule of Artemidorus. Wolsey fell from the full meridian of his glory through a single slight inadvertence : one fatal slip which not all his deep sagacity could redeem. But the predominance of chance over human designs is most power- fully brought home in the tragedy of " Hamlet," whose fate turns on accident after accident. The passage just quoted from the son- nets reads as a commentary on the fortunes of Hamlet, and should be printed in the beginning of all copies of the play, to induce the lofty vein of reflection designed by the poet as the main effect of the whole, and to undo the wretched criticism that would de- grade it to the level of a sermon against procrastination. The poet leaves us in no doubt as to his intention, although one might easily have apprehended it from his treatment of slight turning- points and weak beginnings of things in other plays. In the Second Scene of the last Act, Hamlet tells Horatio how accident- ally and how rashly he discovered the treachery of Rosencranz and Guildenstern. He lay sleepless in his cabin, when an impulse took him to rise and rob them of their jjacket — " Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting, That would not let me sleep ; methought I lay "Worse than the mutines in the Inllioes. Kashly, And praised be rashness for it, let us know, Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well When our deep plots do pall; and that should teach us Tliere's a divinity that shapes our ends. Rough-hew them how we will." That is Shakespeare's poetical religion : a j^ower variously denominated Destiny, Fate, Chance, Providence — supreme over mortal affairs. The varied energies of the world, which no man has ever embodied with such force and subtlety of conception and expression, are governed and shut in by great sublimities of time and space. Read his sonnets and mark how frequently his medi- tations fall into this vein — "When I consider everything that grows Holds in perfection but a little moment, That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows Whereon the stars in secret influence comment." 292 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE: It is the stars that guide our moving, that govern our conditions. But nothing can preserve us against "confounding age's cruel knife"— "Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end." Sometimes his spirit revolts against the tyranny of Time and Fate. He imparts fresh vigour to the commonplace boast that the record of his love shall outlive ruin and decay. At other moments, the relentless march of time is evidently disquieting to him, and he seems ready to cry with his own Henry IV. (iii. i, 45) — • "0 God ! tliat one might read the Book of Fate And see the revohition of the times Make mountains level, and the continent Wrnry of solid firmness, melt itself Into the sea ! and, other times, to see The beachy girdle of the ocean Too wide for Neptune's hips ; how chances mock, And changes fill the cup of cdteration With divers liquors ! Oh, if this were seen, The happiest youth, viewing his progress through. What perils past, what crosses to ensue, Would shut the book, and sit him down and die." The thought of Destiny expands the sadness of tragic conclu- sions to more voluminous dimensions and invests them with a soft- er complexion : conducting the living river of tears to the ocean, carrying the visible smoke of sighs into the vague all-embracing air. But apart from this thought, the tendency of all tragic agitation is to subside into the calm of sadness. The fiercest storms of passion wear a sad look when viewed from the repose of the conclusion. Even the arrogance of Coriolanus and the heady impetuosity of Hotspur make us shake the head when we see the curtain fall on their dead bodies, and go back in imagination to the powerful manner of their life. Think of the warm rhapsodies of Romeo and Juliet, intoxicated by " the strong new wine of love," when you see them lying before the tomb of the Capulets, and you cannot keep your heart from filling. The pathos of sad conclusions is the proper pathos of tragedy. Not till all is over are we sufiered to lapse into the attitude of sadness. If an agent of prime importance gives way under the blows of outrageous fortune, is utterly bereft of hope, whether in his own powers or in external aid, as happens in " Henry VIII." to Wolsey, — we are not permitted to linger over his downfall — we must on with the march of events till the play is played out. The dramatist must not induce us to yield to the fascination of passing calamities : we may follow him with tears in our eyes as we CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 293 glance backward on fallen idols, but to persevere in a worship of sorrow before the play is ended, would be a course of undraniatic stubbornness. If we detach individual lives from the rich interdependent com- plexity of a play, the pathetic moment, the moment seized upon by the mind under the fascination of pity, is analogous to the close of the Fifth Act — is the end of some great hope, or of all hope, the moment of special or general despair. So long as the spirit is militant against calamity, it appeals to the sympathies of the energetic ; not until it succumbs does it claim the sympathy of the sad. Dido with the willow in her hand, the pale forsaken maid " shrieking undistinguished woe " — "Tearing of papers, breaking rings atwain, Storming her world with sorrow's wind and rain " — are pathetic objects, on which we dwell with sorrow undisturbed by forward-ldoking excitement : their diama is ended, they are beyond the reach of aid ; there is no prospect of deliverance to hold us in suspense. Ariadne passioning for the perjury and cruel flight of Theseus is an object of pathetic meditation only when we look beyond her bitter hours of desertion to her final deliverance : if we vividly realise the moment when she first discovers her lov- er's perjury, and cries desperately for help, we are too much dis- turbed by anger and anxiety to wrap ourselves up in heavy folds of sadness. Individual lives may be dwelt upon with least abnegation of rich general effects, in the historical plays, which are more loosely woven together ; and the case of Constance in " King John " is one of the finest of our dramatist's studies of heart-broken women. When the message is brought to her that the King of France has abandoned her quarrel and compounded peace with England, she is fitful and capricious in her sorrow, but her spirit does not fail : her sorrows are proud : and when the kings enter, she rises up and assails them with acrimonious accusations of oppression and perjury. Margaret herself is not more skilled in curses, more instinct with the breath of bitter words. When, however, Arthur is taken prisoner, her defiance breaks down ; and she walks about invoking Death, with dishevelled hair — " Look, who conies here ! a grave unto a soul ; Holding the eternal spirit against her will In the vile prison of afflicted breath." " Patience, good lady ! " says Philip, tenderly ; " comfort, gentle Constance ! " But there is no comfort for her. " No, I defy all counsel, all redress, But that which ends all counsel, true redress, 294 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAIIE : Death, death ; amiable, lovel}' Death ! Thou odoriferous stencil ! sound rottenness ! Arise forth from the couch of lasting night Thou hate and terror to posterity, And I will kiss thy detestable bones And put my eyeballs in thy vanity brows, And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust, And be a carrion monster like thyself : Come grin on me, and I will think thou smilest. And bless thee as thy wife. Misery's love, 0, come to me ! " Grief has full possession of lier ; all tliouglits of redress and revenge have died out ; bitterness is transfigured into ecstatic sweetness. Deeply touched by her passion, Philip pleads — " fair affliction, peace ! " But this only gives a new motive to her outcries, supplies new fuel to the chemistry that converts every thought, word, and sight into images of despair. ' ' No, no, I will notj having breath to cry ; that my tongue were in the thunder's mouth ! Then with a passion would I shake the world ; And rouse from sleep that fell anatomy Which cannot hear a lady's feeble voice, Which scorns a modern invocation. " Philip tells her that this is madness ; whereupon she wishes that she were, mad if thereby she might " madly think a babe of clouts were he." Then he also gives way to piteous fancies, unable longer to comfort her with formal words of compassion and consolation : — " Bind up those tresses. 0, what love I note In the fair multitude of those her hairs ! Where but by chance a silver drop hath fallen, Even to that drop ten thousand wiry friends Do glue themselves in sociable grief. Like true, inseparable, faithful loves Sticking together in calamity." She hears him as if she heard him not, and says mechanically and incoherently — "To England, if you will." He repeats, "Bind up your hairs," recalling her to his meaning. She rouses herself, and instantly turns this also into a mournful symbol : — " Yes, that I will ; and wherefore will I do it ? 1 tore them from their bonds and cried aloud ' that these hands could so redeem my son As they have given these hairs their liberty ! ' But now I envy at their liberty. And will again commit them to their bonds Because my poor child is a prisoner," CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETEY. 295 To my mind Shakespeare's mastery over keys of sadness is the most memorable side of his mighty genius. His intimate know- ledge of the sorrows of women is hardly more remarkable than the varieties of pathos in his representations of unfortunate kings and ministers. Richard II., Henry VI., Gloucester, and Wolsey bear the crush of misfortune each in diiferent spirit, characteristic of their several frames of mind. There is a certain mournful gaiety in Richard's demeanour in accordance with his magnani- mous dignity and indifference to life : he says farewell to his queen with exquisite tenderness, yet with epithets that look like an ostentation of light-heartedness : — " Join not with grief, fair woman, do not so, To make my end too sudden : learn, good soul, To think our former state a happy dream ; From which awaked, the truth of what we are Sliows us but this : I am sworn brotlier, sweet, To grim Necessity, and lie and I Will keep a league till death. Hie thee to France, And cloister thee in some religious house : Our holy lives must win a new world's crown, "Which our profane hours here have stricken down." Of his queen he says : — " She came adorned hither like sweet May. Sent back like Hallowmas or short'st of day." The weak Henry VI. pines for rest as rest : he would gladly lay aside the cares of state if only he could get in exchange the crown of a peaceful life : — " God ! methinks it were a happy life, To be no better than a homely swain ; To sit upon a hill as I do now, To carve out dials quaintly, point by point, Thereby to see the minutes how they run. How many make the hour full complete ; How many hours bring about the day ; How many days will finish up the year ; How many years a mortal man may live. " Compare, again, Gloucester and Wolsey, in their decline and fall. The good Duke Humphrey is moved deeply by the degradation of his " sweet Nell "; but his own fall he takes with the matter-of- fact callousness of an unromantic man of the world, prepared for reverses as the natural course of things. (" 2 Henry VI.," ii. 4, i)— ; " Thus sometimes hath the brightest day a cloud ; And after summer evermore succeeds Barren winter, with his wrathful nipping cold : So cares and joys abound, as seasons fieet. " 29 G WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE : Poor Wolsey, aspiring and demonstrative, the man of grand and studied manners, whose every public act is impressive, cannot creep into his narrow bed so quietly: his last words touch our deepest feelings with the skill of a profound theatrical artist. His end is thus described (" Henry VIII.," iv. 2, 18) : — " At last, with easy roads, he came to Leicester, Lodged in tlie abbey ; where the reverend abbot, Witli all his convent, honorably received hiin ; To whom he gave these woi'ds — ' 0, father abbot, An old man, broken with the storms of state. Is come to lay Ms %veary bones among ye ; Give him a little earth for charity ! ' So went to bed ; where eagerly his sickness Pursned him still ; and, three nights after this, About the hour of eight, which lie himself Foretold should be hi« last, full of repentance, Continual meditations, tears and sorrows, He gave his lionours to the world again, His blessed part to heaven, and slept in peace." All these wrecks of fortune are touching, inexpressibly touching, but each in a way consistent with the character of the individual. Our poet's sympathies with humanity were wide-reaching, but they did not exhaust the fine energy of his imagination. The lower creation claimed a share of his interest ; importuned him, as it were, to devote some passing moments to the realisation of their joys and agonies. The observations of the melancholy Jacques on the wounded deer have always been held among the most prized "gems of Shakespeare;" and none of his descriptions are more touching and tender than the picture of the protracted anxieties of the hunted hare in "Venus and Adonis," (l. 678). The close alliance in Shakespeare's mind between sadness and love is shown in the moonlight scene between Lorenzo and Jessica ("Merchant of .Venice," v. i). The lovers walk in an avenue under bright moonlight in perfect stillness — " When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, And they did make no noise," — and conjure up ])ictures in harmony with the scene. One of the pictures that the moonlight pours in upon their happy hearts is the sorceress Medea gathering her enchanted herbs — a conception in the finest harmony with the soft mysterious light of the moon. But the other three are pictures of sighing, ill-starred, forlorn lovers, Troilus, Thisbe, and Dido. The moonlight hours are peculiarly sacred to lovers, and their placid influence tends to tranquillity and sadness. Happy successful love is akin to sad- ness ; it is unsatisfied sighing that raises tempests in the soul, and CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 297 confident hope or reckless despair that inspires to heroic deeds. In the moment of assured success the lover may be seated on the highest pinnacle of triumph, in rapture at having won the world's dearest possession ; but triumph soon gives place to more tranquil joy, falls naturally into the common imthetic key of love and soft diffused sadness. Shakespeare shows in many passages his deep feeling for the pathos and witchery of moonlight. In the " Two Gentlemen of Verona" (iii. 2), Proteus thus advises Thurio — " Visit by night j'our lady's chamber-window With some sweet concert; to their instruments, Tnne a deploring dump : the night's dead silence Will well become such sweet complaining grievance." ' Who is Silvia ' sung in the still moonlight, is certainly fitted to ravish human sense. One can never cease to be astonished at the commentary of Gervinus on this most exquisite of songs ; he refuses to accept it as a specimen of the genuine Shakespearian love-lyric, and supposes it to be accommodated to the cloddy and stupid character of Thurio ! These exquisite strains should always be conceived in their orioinal connection sounding throuiih the still silvery-lighted air. Shakespeare's delight in music under such circumstances appears to have been ecstatic. His famous commendation of music is put into the mouth of Lorenzo in the scene already referred to : the musicians are introduced with the thrilling line — ■ " Come, ho ! and wake Diana with a hymn " — and when the ears of the lovers are surfeited with sweet sounds, the music dies away at the softly breathed command — " Peace, ho! the moon sleeps with Endymion, And would not be awaked." There are some exquisite moonlight scenes in "Midsummer Night's Dream." Oberon's vision of the wonderful sea-maid is granted him by the light of the moon ; and all the fun and pathos of that delightful night is transacted under the same bewitching luminary. It is a familiar law of our nature that we never admire things so profoundly as when we are in danger of losing them : love is always increased by the near prospect of separation. In the garden scene between Eomeo and Juliet, the danger of interrup- tion and death to the daring youth gives a keener passion to the mutual confessions and protestations of the lovers, and helps to make this scene the finest love-passage in the whole range of our drama. One does not wonder that this play took London by 298 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: storm, and that play-goers could not open their mouths without talking of Juliet and Eomeo. Othello's endearments to Des- demona before committing the fatal act, which have an inexpres- sible power over our deepest feelings, are a more extreme case of the same principle. Perhaps the most touching lines in Shake- speare are those beginning — "When I have plucked the rose" ("Othello," V. 2, 13)^ Of all Shakespeare's Comedies, perhaps "Twelfth Night" is the most richly woven with various hues of love, serious and mock- heroic. The amorous threads take warmer shifting colours from their neighbourhood to the unmitigated remorseless merry-making of the harum-scarum old wag Sir Toby and his sparkling captain in mischief, the " most excellent devil of wit," Maria. Beside their loud conviviality and pitiless fun the languishing sentiment of the cultivated love-lorn I3uke stands out seven times refined, and goes with exquisite touch to the innermost sensibilities. The two comedies most rich in scenic beauty, in dazzling play of fancy, are the "Tempest" and "Midsummer Night's Dream." The beauties of the " Tempest " are comparatively stately : dainty Ariel is a gentle obedient spirit, affectionately and minutely attentive to his master's behests, and these behests have a cer- tain colour of Prospero's own dignity and lofty tenderness. The masque of Iris, Ceres, and Juno, unfolded to the wondering eyes of the young couple as an indulgent display of the magician's art, is a majestic vision, a richly-coloured representation of stately beneficence. The character of the " Tempest " is seen in Caliban's summation of the wonders of the island. This is one of those prodigal efflorescences that dazzle even the mind accustomed to the luxuriance of Shakesjjeare : it is as if the poet had exerted himself to gather together all the celestial effects of that astonish- ing play and overwhelm the senses by a sudden revelation of accumulated beauties ("Tempest," iii. 2, 143): — ' ' Be not afear J ; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a tlionsand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices Tiiat, if I then had Malced after long sleep, Will make me sleep again : and then, in dreaming, The clouds niethought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked, I cried to dream again." The "Midsummer Night's Dream" lias none of this stateliness : it is a wild revel of fancy, " a debauch of the senses and the imagination." Puck, the presiding spirit, has a very different master from Ariel, and very different notions of duty. He is, indeed, "the pert and nimble spirit of mirth j " a mistake of CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 299 Oberon's orders does not lie heavy on his conscience — the more mistakes the merrier — " Ami those things do best please me, That befal preposterously." In this play, also, there is the happiest use of contrasts. The airy debauch of fancy is mixed up with a debauch of farcical invention. The graceful delicate little shapes of the fairies, with their swift motions, their pretty spites and shudders, their nomad life among Nature's choicest treasures of form and colour, are a fine contrast to the hard-handed, thick-headed, honest workmen. The beauty as well as the fun of the piece is heightened by the earnestness of everybody except Puck, the chuckling contriver of so much confusion. It was not without pro{)riety that Shakespeare put into this play his famous account of the seething brains and shaping fantasies of " the lunatic, the lover, and the poet ; " at the close of the story of that wonderful night, he might well reflect upon the nature of the poet's imagination. Two qualities that deeply affect Shakespeare's sense of the ludicrous are conspicuous in the " Midsummer Night's Dream " — the essential sympathetic kindliness of his nature, and the aston- ishing swiftness of his transitions from the serious to the ridicu- lous point of view. The fine taste of Sir Philip Sidney objected to making sport of the mispronunciations of foreigners, as being an ofi'ensive assumption of superiority, and Shakespeare seems to have felt compunctions about laughing at the honest eflbrts of poor fellows that had never laboured in their minds before. Accordingly, the gentle-hearted Hipi)olyta is made to protest against this source of amusement, saying — " I love not to see wretchedness o'ercharged And duty in his service perishing." And Theseus is saved from the vulgar littleness of seeking amuse- ment in the blunders of men anxious to do him service, by being made to express a greater pleasure in the modesty of fearful duty than in the rattling tongue of saucy and audacious eloquence. Our conscience is thus set at rest, and we are enabled to laugh at the absurdities of Pyramus, Thisbe, Wall, Moonshine, and Lion with genial good-nature, and without any odious contempt for the honest amateurs. The lightning swiftness of Shakespeare's intellect is in nothing more conspicuous than in the rapidity of his transitions from the serious to the ludicrous, such as we have in the love-making of Titania to Bottom, and the translated weaver's grovelling asinine replies. The essence of the ludicrous is the sudden degradation 300 WILLIAM SHAKESrEAEE: of things or the turning of them upside down, and in the rapidity and completeness of this operation Shakespeare is incomparable- even " the merry Greek, tart Aristophanes " must yield the palm. Shakespeare has such variety that he never exhausts you with one thing : when you have laughed your fill he changes the scene, and does not bring you back to ludicrous conceptions till your lungs have been refreshed by an interval of rest. And when he is in the ludicrous vein, he throws his heart into it : the mischievous spirit of comical degradation coming upon him after a fit of sei'ious creation finds him ready and willing for the wildest pranks. With what profane glee he upsets all the grave emotions proper to the piteous tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, which Chaucer handles with such tender sympathy among his " Legends of Good Women." ^ Shakespeare also could take a pathetic conception of Thisbe fearfully o'ertripping the dew ; but when the tale came in his way as a subject for comic treatment, he carried out the work of ludicrous subversion with pitiless completeness. He thoroughly enjoyed putting off the buskin and playing riotous capers in the sock. He might well have applied to himself part of Falstaft^'s self-complacent reflection, and said — " The brain of this foolish compounded clay, man, is not able to invent anything that tends to laughter more than I invent." The marvel is that his own serious conceptions were safe in his hands ; that one with so quick an eye for the ludicrous and so thorough an execution could allow his imagination to persist in a serious vein at all. This is, indeed, another aspect of the fundamental wonder in Shakespeare — self- command : command over forces that have proved absolute and ungovernable in every other case where they have existed in equal degree. One of the best examples of Shakespeare's extraordinary swift- ness in changing his point of view is found in the Second Scene of the Fifth Act of " Troilus and Cressida," where Troilus and Ulysses are eavesdropping and commenting on the behaviour of Cressida with Diomede, while Thersites stands behind and remarks on the whole situation. The comment of the impish mocker upon the passionate apostrophe of the indignant betrayed lover is incom- parably fine : it takes us by surprise, and the more we dwell upon it, the more exquisite its edge seems to be : — " Tro. Ay, Greek ; and that shall be divulged well 111 character as red as Mars his heart Inflamed with Vermis : ne'er did young man fancy With so eternal and so fixed a soul. 1 There is a full version of the story in the 'Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions,' not nearly so delicate as Chaucer's, and this may have been Shake- speare's basis. CEETAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 301 Hark, Greek : as much as I do Cressid love, So much by weight hate I her Diomed : Tliat sleeve is mine that he'll bear on his helm ; Were it a casr[ue composed by Vulcan's skill, My sword should bite it : not the dreadful spout Which shipmen do the hurricano call, Constringed in mass by the almighty sun, Shall dizzy with more clamour Neptune's ear In his descent than shall my prompted sword Falling on Diomed. Ther. He'll tickle it for his concupy. " Two of Shakespeare's comedies, the "Taming of the Shrew" and the "Comedy of Errors," belong mainly to the province of farce : they are longer, and contain more fully delineated charac- ters than modern farces, but their chief incidents are of the extravagant sort generally understood as farcical. The " Taming of the Shrew," indeed, is now usually acted in a curtailed form, in which only the more extravagant incidents are retained : and in this form it has all the broad effect of a boisterous afterpiece. It should be remarked, however, that the most farcial incidents in both stories — the behaviour of Petruchio in church, and the wild revenge taken by Antipholus on the lean-faced anatomy of the conjuror Pinch — are narrated and not represented on the stage. I have more than once spoken of Shakespeare's self-restraint as a most marvellous thing, considering the sort of self that he had to restrain. In all cases where he is alleged to have been hurried be- yond his own control into bewildered excitement, the ground of the allegation lies in the critic's inability to rise to the heights of tragic emotion : the poet's imagination is sure and unfaltering at the most dizzy elevations, though the critic, hampered, probably robbed of his natural strength and palsied by artificial notions of what is becoming, cannot follow him with the same certainty of step. Most persons of the same race with Shakespeare should be able to feel his firm mastery over the most perturbing passions, if only they could give themselves up to the guidance of his imagin- ation without constraint. A standing count against Shakespeare, among those who looked upon him as a wild irregular genius, was the unbecoming intru- sion of low comedy into tragic situations. His worst offences in this respect were considered to be the Clown in the last Scene of "Cleopatra," the Porter in Act ii. Scene 3 of "Macbeth," and the Fool in Act iii. Scene 2 of "Lear." An easy and satisfactory explanation of the Gravedigger in " Hamlet " might be found in the general distemperment of that play ; but those others were coarse violations of propriety, to be dismissed simply as examples of the gross taste of the age that could tolerate them. Now, 302 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: doubtless, those passages are too gross for modern ears : and yet, we cannot condemn tliem except when we come upon them with- out having entered into the stormy passions in the midst of which they occur. The Fool in " Lear " comes in when the poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man has been, scene after scene, gradually wrought up to almost inarticulate frenzy, and is wandering shel- terless amidst unheard-of bursts of thunder, sheets of fire, and groans of roaring wind and rain ; to fix one's thoughts continu- ously on the maddening situation of the poor old man would be insupportable — some relief is imperatively demanded. And a very touching relief it is to pass from the monstrous unkind- ness of the daughters and the growing madness of the old man to the devotedness of the hired boy Fool, following his master through such a tempest, and trying to divert him with his pro- fessional sallies, as if neither daughters nor elements were unkind. IS'or is the matter of the Fool's wit so inconsrruous : laughter is a natural outlet for absorbing agitation — poor old Lear is too far gone to laugh, his brain is beginning to turn, but he smiles at the boy's efforts, and is soothed by them. The case of the Fool in "Lear" is thus exceedingly complicated: his presence afi'ects us powerfully in many and shifting ways, which cannot be clearly stated. The other two cases are very much simpler : in them the art of the dramatist is less subtle and more unmistakable. No- body capable of being absorbed and fascinated by the horrors of the scene in the court of Macbeth's castle can fail to acknowledge the gratefulness of the transition to the unconcern and coarse humour of the Porter. De Quincey wrote in delighted admira- tion of the perfection of dramatic skill that recalls us from the demoniac world of the murderers by the knocking at the gate. The many-sided significance of that startling knock, the rush of reflection that it sets free, makes it indeed an incomparable stroke of dramatic genius : but it does not necessarily recall us from the murder ; for a moment it aggravates the strain of our suspense ; we do not breathe freely till the sleepy, unconcerned, and deliber- ate porter appears with his utter relaxation of the preceding tragic intensity. The change is complete in several aspects, and we re- turn with all the greater force to the evolution of the tragedy after this brief interval of free breath. The case of the Clown in " An- tony and Cleopatra" is somewhat more subtle and difficult for cool reason to comprehend. His stupid lumpish answers about the worm are also of the nature of a relief to tragic intensity of strain in the audience ; but they are more : like the sayings of the Fool in " Lear," they enter into the main current of the play — they are a relief to the high-strung excitement of the queen. Cleopatra is working herself up to the pitch of self-destruction, and the insensate dull stupidity of the Clown comes in oppor- CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 303 tunely to keep her from passing out of her resolution into deliri- ous hysterics. Neither she nor Charmian could die with calm bravery : they keep down their fears of death with forced laugh- ter and forced attention to trifles : they trifle with death, and put off the fatal moment as long as they can, and you feel that any untoward turn might make them shriek with horror and fall down in trembling impotence to despatch themselves. To many minds Isabella's protestation to Angelo and Constance's invocation of Death must appear extravagant and unnatural. To understand them one must be able to recognise the transfiguring force of intense passion ; one must understand the alchemical brain that our dramatist ascribes to lunatics, lovers, and poets. Other passions than love are a momentary madness, and change what- ever the eye falls upon into accordance with their imperious needs : and whoever has not a living knowledge of this transfiguring power, cannot but think it an extravagance to speak of wearing the impression of keen whips as rubies, or to hail the hideous skeleton of death as an object to be embraced and kissed as a longed-for husband. There is strict dramatic truth in Macbeth's fancy that the blood on his hands would incarnadine the multi- tudinous seas, making the green, one red. The same law of the human mind is the justification of little Arthur's agonised plead- ings for his life to Hubert in "King John" (iv. i, loo), which might otherwise appear to be cold, artificial, and incongruous conceits. The poor child's frenzy of terror and eager clinging to life transforms the murderer's implements into active advocates for his safety — " Arthur. .... spare mine eyes, Though to no use but still to loolc on you ! Lo, by my trotli, tlie instrument is cold And would not harm me. Hubert. I can lieat it, boy. Arth. No, in good sooth : the fire is dead with grief, Being create for comfort, to be used In undeserved extremes ; see else yourself ; Tliere is no malice in this burning coal ; The breath of heaven has blown his spirit out And strewed repentant ashes on his head. Hub. But with my breath I can revive it, boy. Arth. An if you do, you will but make it blush And glow with shame of your proceedings, Hubert : Naj"-, it perchance will sparkle in your eyes ; And like a dog that is compelled to fight, Snatch at his master that doth tarre him on. All things tliat you should use to do me wrong Deny their office : only you do lack That mercy whicli fierce fire and iron extends, Creatures of note for mercy-lacking uses. Huh. Well, see to live ; I will not touch thine eye 304 WILLIAM SHAIvESPEAEE : For all the treasure that thine uncle owes : Yet am I sworn and I did purpose, boy, With this same very iron to burn them out." Finally, let us see what can be said for and against tlie extra- vagant ramps of some of Shakespeare's heroes. There are pas- sages in " Julius Caesar " and "Coriolanus" almost as bombastic as'^anything to be found in Shakespeare's dramatic predecessors. Caesar's bearing in the interview with the conspirators, when they beg the repeal of Publius Cimber's banishment, is not less lofty than Tamburlaine's inflation, though more calm and dignified— " Know Cassar doth not wrong, nor without cause Will he be satisfied." And the speech beginning — " I could be well moved, if I were as you" — may not '"be an offence against the modesty of nature, but taken by itself, is an offence against the modesty of art. The boasts and brac«-s of Coriolanus out-Herod the Herod of the Mysteries. For example (i. i, 200) — " Would the nobility lay aside their ruth, And let me use my sword, I'd make a quarry With thousands of these quarter'd slaves, as high As I could pick my lance." And (iv, 5, 112) — " Let me twine Mine arms about that body, where against My grained ash an hundred times hath broke And scarr'd the moon with splinters." It is a noticeable circumstance that these inflated speeches — as well as one or two in "Antony and Cleopatra" — are put in the mouths of Roman heroes. I am not quite sure that this is not one explanation and justification of them : they may have been Shakespeare's ideal of what appertained to the Roman character. But apart from their being true to the Roman manner, they may be justified also on the principle of variety. It must have been a relief to Shakespeare's mind, ever hungry for fresh types of character, to expatiate in the well-marked high-astounding ideal ; and it is equally a relief to the student or spectator who may have followed his career and dwelt with appreciative insight on his varied representation of humanity. This is the broadest justifi- cation : if we consider more curiously, other justifications make themselves palpable. The inflation of Coriolanus and Cjesar is not like Tamburlaine's presented to us as a thing unquestioned and admired by those around them, as being, for aught said upon HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 305 the stage to the contrary, the becoming language of heroic man- hood. The violent language of Coriolanus is deprecated by his friends, and raises a furious antagonism in his enemies. Side by side with Caesar's high conception of himself, we have the humorous expression of his greatness by blunt Casca and the sneering of cynical Cassius. In the case of Caesar, too, there is a profound contrast between his lofty declaration of immovable constancy and the immediate dethronement of the god to lifeless clay. We must not take the rant of Caisar, Coriolanus, or Antony by itself simply as rant, and wish with Ben Jonson that it had been blotted out. We must consider whether it does not become the Roman character : we must remember that a varied artist like Shakespeare may be allowed an occasional rant as a stretch to powers weary of the ordinary level ; and above all, we must observe how it is regarded by other personages in the drama — in what light it is presented to the audience. IV. — His Delineation op Character. One large deduction must always be made from our assertion of Shakespeare's truth to nature. All his personages, except intended Malaprops, are supposed to have the gift of perfect expression. The poet is the common interpreter. Gervinus, indeed, professes to find in some cases a correspondence between characters and their mode of expression ; but we may rest assured that all such dis- coveries are reached by twisting accident into the semblance of design. We might as soon try to argue that it was natural for Shakespeare's personages to speak in blank verse. It is expected of a dramatist that he shall give as perfect expression as he can to the emotions and thoughts that occur : the conditions of his art impose no limits upon him in this direction except that his personages must' not illustrate their meaning by allusions flagrantly beyond the possibilities of their knowledge. If the emotions of the dramatis persons are in keeping with their characters and their situations, and are at the same time theatrically effective, the dramatist has fulfilled the weightier part of dramatic law. Shakespeare's personages have all their author's vividness, en- ergy, and delicacy of language, and all the abstractness of phrase and profusion of imagery characteristic of the Elizabethans. Shakespeare could never have been what he is had he been fettered by considerations of exact truth to nature or to history. We are not to believe that when he put into Macbeth's mouth the famous adjuration of the witches, he paused to consider whether a man in such a situation would naturally have so much to say ; he took a firm grasp of the heroic exaltation proper to such a moment, U 30G WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: and gave his imagination full swing to body it forth to the audience. Nor must we take exception to the abstruse, antithetical, and metaphysical statement of the conflict of motives in Macbeth's soliloquies, and say that such coherence and figurative force of expression would have been impossible in a rude thane so violently agitated ; enough that such an internal conflict was natural to a man of Macbeth's character — the poet must be left free to exjjress the fluctuating passion with all the force of his genius. Nor did Shakespeare impede the free movement of his genius by vexatious attention to little details of costume and surround- ings : he makes Romans toss caps in the air, and wave hats in scorn, makes Hector quote Aristotle, makes Mantuan outlaws swear by the bare scalp of Robin Hood's fat friar. Yet such was the vivid and searching force of his intellect, the quickness of his constructive energy, that in a brief etifort of intense concentration, he was able to realise a scene in its essential circumstances and feelings with a propriety that the mere scholar would not have attained after years spent in the laborious accumulation of accu- rate particulars. He could hardly have seized the leading features with such freshness had he stood hesitating and consulting autho- rities about details : he went in boldly, and his clearness of insight kept him right in the main. Hazlitt quotes his picture of Caliban as a special example of his truth to nature. Now the realisation of Caliban is not faultless. It does not seem to have been observed that though Caliban tastes intoxicating liquor for the first time from the flask of Stephano, yet, at the end of the play, he ex- presses a civilised contempt for a drunkard. Still we should not be disposed for a slight inadvertence like this — which doubtless might be plausibly argued to be no inadvertence at all, but a stroke of profound wisdom — to moderate very much what Hazlitt says, that " the character of Caliban not only stands before us with a language and manners of its own, but the scenery and situation of the enchanted island he inhabits, the traditions of the })lace, its strange noises, its hidden recesses, his frequent haunts and ancient neighbourhood, are given with a miraculous truth of nature, and with all the familiarity of an old recollection." This is very far from being literally true ; yet when Ave compare Shakespeare's characters with what other dramatists have accomplished, we must admit that some such superhuman exaggeration is needed to give the ordinary reader a just idea of his marvellous pre-eminence. Shakespeare's historical plays afi'ord the most unambiguous and indisputable evidence of his close study of character, and his inexhaustible fertility in giving it expression. He could not merely sum up a character in such general language as he puts into the mouth of the Duchess of York concerning her son Richard : — HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 307 " Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy ; Thy school-days frightful, desperate, wild, and furious, Thy prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturous, Thy age confirmed, proud, subtle, bloody, treacherous. " But lie had a living and manageable knowledge of the subjective moods and objective manifestations of the character thus summed up ; he could imagine the feelings, actions, and artifices of such a man under a great variety of circumstances. Many people have knowledge of character enough to draw the general outlines of Richard, but who has shown sufficient knowledge of character to embody such a conception t. This power is shown in all his plays, but is most conspicuous and easily recognised in his historical plays, because there he had more definite materials for his imagi- nation to lay hold of and work into consistent characterisations. What chiefly makes his characters so life-like is their many-sided- ness. The poet's just sense of clear broad dramatic eft'ect is shown in making his leading characters approach to well-marked types ; but the various characters are much more than narrow abstractions — each has traits that individualise him, and strongly colour his behaviour. Take his soldiers, his mighty men of war, the bastard Faulconbridge in " King .John," Hotspur in " Henry IV.," Coriola- nus, and Antony. All have a powerful theatrical effect as men of heroic strength and courage, but each is a distinct character : the Bastard is individualised by his robust hearty humour and unpre- tentious loyalty ; Hotspur, by his wasp-stung impatience, absorbed manner, and irresistible ebullience of animal spirits ; Coriolanus, by his patrician pride ; Antony, by his oratorical skill, his fondness for the theatre, and his sensuality. The various qualities of each are consistent with their warlike reputation, and studiously con- sistent with one another. So his kings, John, Bichard II., Henry IV., Henry V., Henry VI., Henry VIII. , all have a certain kingly dignity, and yet they are distinct individuals : the Aveak kings, Bichard, John, and Henry VI., are weak in different and character- istic ways — Bichard from impulsive generosity, John from moral obliquity, Henry from constitutional imbecility. Look again at the extraordinary circle of sorrowing women round Bichard III., how skilfully they are distinguished : the she-wolf Margaret, the motherly old Duchess, the weak and yielding Anne, the high- spirited and clever Elizabeth, bear their sorrows in widely diiferent attitudes. Or we might make a small gallery of portraits of high ecclesiastics — the worldly smooth papal legate Pandulph in " King John," the fiery unscrupulous Beaufort in " Henry VI.," the ambitious noble-minded Wolsey, the meek but firm Cranmer — all exhibited with unmistakable individuality. Of his historical plays, the First "Henry IV." is one of the finest in study of character. The classical histories also abound in 308 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE: fine discrimination. " Troilus and Cressida " is strongly coloured by the mediieval prejudice in favour of the Trojans, which has led the dramatist to present the fighting heroes of the Greeks as stupid blocks, mere draught-oxen yoked by superior intellect to })lough up the wars ; l:)ut the various conceptions are worked out with very skilful touches. "Julius Caesar" also contains very clearly marked delineations, — Brutus, Cassius, Casca, Antony, Portia: the dramatist worked from translated authorities, but no one has ventured to dispute the essentials of his interpretations. None of the Roman plays, however, contain finer characterisation than the two parts of " Henry IV.," which between them exhibit the characters of the King himself, the Prince, Hotspur, Glendower, Lady Percy, Falstaff and his companions. The great magician, Glendower, is drawn with remarkable delicacy ; his indulgence towards the whims of Hotspur is a very happy stroke, in fine keeping with the qualities found in union with his deep knowledge and lofty pretensions (" i Henry IV.," iii. i) : — • " In faith he is a worthy gentleman, Exceedingly well read, and profited In strange concealments, valiant as a lion And wondrous affable, and as bonntiful As mines of India." There are a good many points of resemblance between Prince Henry and Hamlet, although they seem to stand contrasted as examples of princely gaiety and princely melancholy. Harry might pass for Ophelia's })icture of Hamlet before his noble mind was overthrown : he has " the courtier's, soldier's, schol- ar's eye, tongue, sword." True, these cjualities in Harry are smothered up from the world when first he is introduced to us ; but when he has mounted the throne his friends reckon up his virtues and argue that he must have used wildness as a veil to contemplation. They say (" Henry V.," i. i, 38) : — " Hear him bnt reason in divinity, And all-admiring with an inward wish You would desire the king were made a prelate ; Hear him debate of commonwealth atfairs You'ld say it hath been all in all his study ; List his discourse of war, and you shall hear A fearful battle rendered you in music ; Turn him to any course of policy Tlic, Gordian knot of it he will unloose Familiar as his garter : that, when he speaks, The air, a chartered libertine, is still, And the mute wonder Inrketh in men's ears To steal his sweet and honeyed sentences. " Further, as Harry is o})posed to impatient and warlike Hotspur, HIS DELINEATION OF CHAllACTEK. 309 and is anxious to try skill in arms with him, so Hamlet is opposed to Laertes. And the resemblance goes deeper. Harry is eminently a conscientious man : he assumes the crown with a deep sense of his responsibilities, and will not undertake the war with France and involve the two nations in bloodshed until he is fully assured by his counsellors of the perfect justice of his cause ("Henry V.," i. 2, 10-30). In like manner Hamlet abstains from the bloody business of revenge till he obtains unequivocal proofs of his uncle's guilt and utter badness of heart. Nor is Harry's companionship with Falstaff inconsistent with Hamlet's character. The prince goes with that wild set for the purpose of studying them and seeing life (" 2 Henry IV.," iv. 4, 68), as Hamlet frequented the players. And he is not without gloomy fits : he is not always in the vein for doffing the world aside and bidding it pass. His father's description of him would apply exactly to Hamlet : — " For he is gracious, if he be observed ; He hath a tear for pity and a hand Olien as day for melting charity : Yet notwithstanding, being incensed, he's flint, As humorous as winter and as sudilen As tiaw^s congealed in the spring of day, His temper, therefore, must be well observed : Chide liim lor faults, and do it reverently, When you perceive his blood inclined to mirth ; But being moody, give him line and sco[ie. " Such a prince might very easily fall into melancholy, if an uncle married his mother within two months of his father's death and "jwpped in between the election and his hopes." Hamlet, however, is younger than the companion of Falstaff. There is no ground whatsoever for the prevailing notion that Handet's age nu;st be set down as thirty. It proceeds upon two quite unfounded assumptions : that the married life of the player King and Queen corresponds exactly in its duration of thirty years to the married life of Hamlet's father and mother, and that the Gravedigger is our only explicit authority. Sev- eral circumstances show that Hamlet's age is at the utmost seventeen or eighteen. He has just returned from the University of Wittenberg, and wishes to go back ; tlie boy that played the woman's part when he was there is not yet too old for the office ; his friend Horatio is still there, Laertes is just setting out on his travels. The usual age for youths at that stage of their educa- tion in Shakespeare's England was between sixteen and eigh- teen. And if our philosophical German friends should insist that Shakespeare had his own idea of the proper age for leaving the University, and that that age was thirty, what are we to 310 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE: make of the passage where Polonius and Laertes warn Ophelia against entertaining the youth's professions of love, alleging among other things, that his love is but "a violet in the youth of primy nature," and will change when he grows older 1 Laertes actually speaks of him as not yet full grown (i. 3, 11) — " For nature, crescent, does not grow alone In thews and bulk, hut as this temple waxes, The inward service of the mind and soul Grows wide withal. Perhaps he loves you now," &c. The chief difficulty in the play of Hamlet is the prince's delay in the execution of his revenge. When his father's ghost makes the first revelation of foul play, he cries — " Haste me to know't, that I with wings as swift As meditation or the thouglits of love May sweep to iny revenge." Yet when he is told that the murderer is his uncle, he is so amazed and staggered that he does not at once proceed to execute ven- geance, but adds delay to delay, and at last kills the murderer upon an unpremeditated impulse. Goethe's well-known theory is that this delay proceeds from irresolution and weakness. The key to Hamlet's character is found in the words — " The time is out of joint : cursed spite That ever I was born to set it right." Hamlet is a soft, calm-tempered, cultivated prince : he has not the strength of nerve to be a hero. " ShakesDeare meant in the present case to represent the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it." Now to ascribe Hamlet's delay to weakness of character, and not to the overwhelming shock of the ghost's monstrous revelations, is to miss the just effect of the tragedy. This I take to be compassion for the strug- gles of a noble youth, confronted as he steps across the threshold of life in all the generous ardour and sweetness of " primy nature " by the discovery of an unnatural crime, perpetrated by those whom he most loves and trusts ; confounded, distempered, un- hinged, jangled by this horrible discovery ; summoned to revenge, but reluctant to believe facts so foul; distrustful, his faith in humankind blasted, seeking bitterly for a revenge that shall be adequate, and guided to it at last by the " Divinity that shapes our ends when our deep plots do pall." Goethe tried to form an idea of what Hamlet might have been had his father's life been prolonged. Now the value of this as a critical method will appear if we apply it to the life of Prince Henry. But at any rate, we are bound to take into account what HIS DELINEATIOX OF CIIAEACTEE. 311 happened when Hamlet's father's life was cut short ; we cannot be allowed to substitute our own conception of what a young prince delicately reared ought to be, for the real Hamlet as revealed by the play. What evidence, then, is there for saying that Hamlet was weak, irresolute, cowardly ? When he hears that his father's spirit is in arms he resolves to watch for it : he crosses its path and addresses it at the risk of being blasted : not setting his life at a pin's fee, he disregards the warnings of his companions, throws them off when they seek to restrain him, and puts himself in the power of the dread figure without knowing whether it comes from heaven or from hell. When the mon- strous revelation is made, his heart and strength threaten to fail him : he cries : — " Hold, hold, my heart ; And yon, my sinews, grow not instant old. But bear me stiiSy up." And we are asked to believe that this was the effect of fear : the man who has just dis})layed superhuman daring and reckless indifference to life, and who afterwards leads the way in boarding a pirate, quakes at the prospect of putting his life in danger ! Nothing but theory-blunderers could fail to see the real meaning of Hamlet's agitation : he is for a moment astounded and stag- gered at the monstrosity of the crime. But why does he not recover himself, rush off, and despatch his uncle at once, or at least rouse the people as Laertes afterwards did when his father was killed, and besiege the palace 1 Was not this consideration paralysing action 1 Most undoubtedly, consideration here inter- posed beween impulse and action ; but we do not call that weak- ness, irresolution, or cowardice. W^e call it a proof of strength to refrain from rushing intemperately into action. Mark the contrast between Hamlet and Laertes : it is the same contrast that Shakespeare draws between Henry and Hotspur. Laertes impetuously raises the people, and threatens to punish — the wrong man : he is, like Hotspur, a " wasp-stung and impatient fool." And that is what we should have called Hamlet if he had run upon the instant at the bidding of the ghost, and thrust his sword into his uncle : and if he had gone to the people shouting what his father's ghost had revealed, they would very properly have thought him mad or cunningly ambitious. But Hamlet, like Henry, is a man of larger intelligence looking before and after : he is no more a coward than Henry was when he summoned his counsellors before rushing into war ; but he desires to be assured of the justice of his cause. He at once resolves upon a plan : he will put an antic disposition on, and watch for confirmation. But is not his outcry against the cursed spite of fortune a proof that 312 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE: he was unwilling to undertake the task of revenge 1 It proves, at least, that he did not like the situation that the spite of fortune had thrust upon him. But was it weak, irresolute, or cowardly, to be agonished by the thought that his father had been killed and his mother strurapeted by his uncle, and under the anguish of tliis thought to express a passing wish that he had never been born into a world where such crimes were possible 1 For some time Hamlet's cloak of madness helps him to discover nothing : he only finds spies set upon him to discover the secret of his derangement. With characteristic recklessness he does not carry the pretence far : he merely goes about in disordered dress, and in rapt study, and makes himself disagreeable to the aston- ished court by the causticity of his remarks : in fact, he uses the pretence of madness as a privilege. The King and Queen sus- pect the cause of his melancholy, and employ Rosencranz and Guildenstern to sound him ; but at the same time they allow the obtrusive wiseacre, old Polonius, who knows all about everything and is never wrong, to use means for testing his confident theory of the Prince's madness. The employment of Ophelia as a decoy increases Hamlet's sense of the foulness of the world, and throws him with increased force on his friendshi[) with Horatio ; but he can discover nothing. At last chance throws the players in his way, and he at once concocts a scheme for turning them to account. In the meantime, however, the emotion shown by one of the actors in reciting a ]iassionate speech makes him accuse himself of cowardice in thus delaying the execution of the Ghost's commands; and if Goethe had been present at his deliberations, he would have seconded the young Prince's morbid self-accnsings. P>ut reason prevails : he reflects justly that the Ghost may have been sent by the devil to tempt him to damnation, and resolves to have proof of his uncle's guilt more relative than the word of an ambiguous apparition. But why does Hamlet still delay when he has received strong confirmation from the play 1 He gets an opportunity : he comes upon his uncle kneeling in prayer : why does he withhold 1 Not from fear : not from irresolution : but from cold iron determin- ation sure of its victim and resolved not to strike till the most favourable moment. He is tempted to the weakness of yielding to impulse ; but he holds back with inflexible strength. His words are instinct with the most iron energy of will (iii. 3, 73). In the interview with his mother, hearing somebody stir behind the arras, he either conceives that now he has caught the villain in an unsanctified moment, or he cannot resist the excitement of the unexpected opportunity : he makes a pass through the arras, and kills Polonius. When he is harrowing his mother's soul with reproaches, the Ghost reappears avowedly to whet his almost HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 313 blunted purpose, but with the effect of diverting the rising frenzy of his invective : the departed spirit retains it tenderness for the vs^eak vi^oman, and is pained to see her thus tormented by exposure and remorse. And Hamlet still bides his time. Was this cow- ardice 1 In his sharp self-questionings, he calls it so himself. On his way to England another incident occurs that makes him reflect on his own conduct, and he says : — "Now whether it be Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple Of tliinkiiig too ]irecisely on the event, A thought which quartered, hath but one part wisdom And ever tliree parts coward, / do not know Why yet I live to say '■ This thing's to do ; ' Sith I have cause and will and strength and means To do V." His delay was inexplicable to Hamlet himself, though we are all so confident in explaining it for him. One might have pointed out to him, without seconding his own morbid and unjustifiable accusation of cowardice, that he had still no means of satisfying the peo|)le that he was a pious avenger and not merely a mad or an ambitious murderer, more particularly after he had incurred the accidental taint of the murder of Polonius, whom he was not to know that the King would inter in hugger-mugger. And the de- sire to be above suspicion, to have an unblemished reputation, was a strong motive with Handet, as we see from his dying injunction to Horatio to tell his story to the world and clear his W(uuided name from unjust aspersion. But I do not think that it was the dramatist's intention to represent this as the chief motive for Hamlet's delay, otherwise he would have brought it out more strongly. No ; the above passage, taken in conjunction with Hamlet's communications to Horatio in the beginning of the last Scene, supplies the real clue to the dramatist's intention in the concluding Acts. Hamlet does not know why he delays : he is not afraid — there is not the slightest trace of such a motive in his behaviour from first to last — but he restrains himself in a blind inexplicable vague trust that some supremely favourable moment will occur. Meantime Destiny is ripening the harvest for him : a Divinity is shaping his ends : his indiscretions serve him when his deep plots do pall. The measure of his uncle's guilt, already full, is now heaped over ; crime begets crime ; Hamlet returns from Eng- land with documentary evidence of the villain's designs upon his own life. He has no time to lose : the news will soon be brought from En2;land of the result of his stratagem : he resolves to make swift use of the interim. But the supreme moment comes after all without his contrivance, and is more comprehensive in its pro- visions for justice than any scheme that could have been devised 314 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: by single wisdom, and executed by single power. Claudius is at last caught by vengeance in an act that has no relish of salvation in it, is surprised in an infamous plot, and sent to hell with a heavier load of guilt upon his back : and others brought within the widening vortex of the original crime, are involved in the final ruin. Horatio is left to sum up the story : — " Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, And in this upshot purposes mistook Fallen on the inventors' heads. " Volumes might be written, and indeed have been written, on Shakespeare's characters. Their sayings and doings are not an exact transcript of life ; but they produce the dramatic illusion of life more perfectly than if they were actual copies. The varied concerns of life do not divert and distract his personages in exactly the same way as in the course of an actual ruling passion ; and yet the diversion of circumstances in real life is represented in his plays and gives his personages the appearance of actual beings. Although Hamlet vows to wipe everything from his memory save the Ghost's conmiandment, Nature is too strong for him : he is interested in the news from Wittenberg, he cannot resist the old desire to see his play acted in a becoming and workmanlike man- ner, and even when the crisis is at hand, he is sutRciently disen- gaged to bandy words with the Gravedigger and with Osric. Such is life, a mixture of great concerns and small : a man possessed with one great unintermitted object is a madman ; and plays that represent the reciprocal action and reaction of such characters, are not a representation of life. The greatest of Shakespeare's comic characters is Falstaff, and he also, curiously enough, has suffered somewhat at the hands of a friendly German commentator. Gervinus alleges "sensual pleasure and brutishness as the starting-point and aim of Falstaff's whole being." Now this is taking too serious and unsympathetic a view of " that huge bombard of sack, that grey iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years ; " and if the ghost of Sir John could address a word to this defamer, he would doubtless ask — " I would your commentatorship would take me with you ; whom means your commentatorship 1 " There is not a little in common be- tween Falstaff and Autolycus. Their moral (or rather immoral) principles are the same, and they have the same witty resourceful- ness. Both have come down in the world from being pages to being " squires of the night's body," " Diana's foresters, gentle- men of the shade, minions of the moon." If the fat knight had had " but a belly of any indifferency," he says, " he would simply HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 315 have been the most active fellow in Europe : " and in that case, had he only not lost his voice by halloing and singing of anthems, the resemblance between him and Autolycus would have been tolerably complete. The starting-point and aim of Sir John as a subject to invent laughter and an object for laughter to be in- vented on, is his fat unabashed self-satisfaction, and good-hum- oured volubility in the conscious absence of nearly all the virtues. He is an absolute negation of the cardinal virtues of temperance and piety, and of the hardly less important virtues of honesty, veracity, active courage, and chastity : but when any breach of these virtues is brought home to him, when he is caught telling incomprehensible lies or abusing his friends behind their back or " misusing the king's press most damnably," he is not ashamed, but is ever ready with some quick-witted excuse. Virtue con- tends with the fat rogue and is worsted : he is impervious to the arrows of remorse : no amount of plain tales can put him down, disturb the serenity of his chuckle, or abate his hunger and thirst for sugar and sack. It is this complete rout of Virtue by the old rascal that is so ludicrous. If his delinquencies were more seri- ous than they are, if he were a man scattering firebrands, arrows, and death, our moral sentiments would be too much outraged to laugh over his victory. But he is comparatively harmless : he is too fat " with drinking of old sack and unbuttoning after supper, and sleeping on benches after noon," to be a dangerous character : and we cannot help extending a laughing sympathy to his presence of mind, readiness of wit, volubility of tongue, and good-hum- oured surrender of his person to be the occasion of wit in others. Gervinus, if I mistake not, accuses him of wanting courage. This depends upon what meaning is attached to courage. Sir John, as we know him, is not much of a fighting man ; he does not fight longer than he sees reason : ■ but he is too self-complacent and self- confident to be called a coward. In the Gadshill encounter, he heads the attack on the travellers : afterwards he makes a few passes before he runs away, while his comrades take to their heels at once : and he leads his ragamuffin company where they are peppered, although he does despise honour and fall down pretend- ing to be dead before the infuriated Douglas. But granting his physical courage to be but small, his moral courage is dauntless. When the sheriff comes to the door of the tavern with his formid- able train. Sir John is not in the least disconcerted, but is eager to have the play played out, and he falls asleep behind the arras in a situation where a cowardly breaker of the laws would have been perspiring with fear. Even the excitement of battle does not un- hinge his fat composure : — '^Prince I pritliee, lend me thy sword. Fal. Hal, I prithee, give me leave to breathe awhile. Turk Gregory 31 G WILLIAM SIIAKESPEAIIE : never did such deeds in arms as I liave doue this day. I have paid Percj% I have made him sure. Prince. He is, indeed ; and living to kill thee. I prithee lend me thy sword. Fal. Nay, before God, Hal, if Percy be alive, thou get'st not my sword ; but take my ]iistol, if thou wilt. Prince. Give it me : what, is it in this case ? Fal. Ay, Hal ; 'tis hot, 'tis hot ; there's tliat will sack a city. [The Prince draws it out, and finds it to he a bottle of sack.] " He pursues his intrigues with the "Merry Wives of Windsor" with a boldness equally imperturbable : he is not deterred by one mishap after another from again running into danger. No : if we overlook Sir John's courage, we miss the essence of his humour. Sir John is no sneaking sinner : he meets all charges of iniquity with a full unabashed eye glistening out of his fat countenance, with voluble assertions of his own virtue and loud denunciations of the degeneracy of the times. After his Hight from Gadshill he does not hide his face for shame, but enters the " Boar's Head " shouting for sack and exclaiming against cowardice : — "You rogue, here's lime iu this sack too : there is nothing but roeuery to be found in villanous man : yet a coward is woi'ae than a cup of sack with lime in it. A villanous coward ! Go thy ways, old Jack ; die when thou wilt ; if manhood, good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the earth, then am I a shotten herring. There live not three good men un- hanged in England ; and one of tliem is fat and grows old : God heli) the while a bad world, I say. I would I were a weaver ; I could sing psalms or anything. A plague of all cowards, I say still." In his exquisite interview with the Lord Chief-Justice, he abuses these costermonger times, says he has lost his voice with hallo- ing and singing of anthems, wishes to God his name were not so terrible to the enemy, and crowns his impudence by asking the loan of a thousand pounds. There is a good deal more than "sen- sual pleasure and brutishness " in the character of Sir Jnhn : it is not his sensual pleasure and brutishness that we laugh at, but the ingenuity and brazen presence of mind with which he glosses over his vices. Humour involves a surprise of mood as wit involves a surprise of words : and Falstaff's way of taking things is certainly very different from what the ordinary way of the world leads us to expect. Sir John, too, is a wit as well as a besotted voliip- tuary and a willing butt for the wit of others. His ridicule of Bardolph's nose is incomparable. Down in Gloucestershire we see him watching Shallow and Slender with observant eye, and contemptuously noting their peculiarities with a view to future capital. " I will devise matter enough out of this Shallow to keep Prince Harry in continual laughter the wearing out of six fashions, which is four terms, or two actions, and a' shall laugh without intervallums." THE INTEK-ACTION OF HIS CHARACTERS. 317 V. — The Inter-actiox of his Characters. A writer may have the power of expressing many varieties of passion, may have a profound sense of beauty, a quick sense of the ludicrous, and a perfect knowledge of character, and yet fail in the dramatist's most essential faculty — the power of represent- ing one character in active influence upon another. The dram- atist has to deal not with still life or with trancjuil exposition : he must bring impassioned men and women face to face, and show how their words operate upon one another to comfort, to cajole, to convince, to soothe, and to inflame. The problem ever before the mind of the dramatist is, in mathematical language, to estimate the effect of a given expression on a given character in a given state of feeling. Then this effect reacts, and the reaction reacts, and other influences come in and join in the complicated process of action and reaction, so that the ability to hold your shifting data unconfused, to solve problem after problem with unerring judgment, and to keep all your results within the just limits of dramatic effect, is one of the rarest of human gifts. This is dram- atic genius. Shakespeare's swiftness of intellect, fine emotional discrimina- tion, and unfailing self-command, were tasked to the utmost in the representation of this reciprocal action. In his three greatest triumphs in the exhibition of what Bacon calls "working" a man — the instigation of Othello's jealousy by lago ("Othello," iii. 3), the puffing up of Ajax's pride by Ulysses (" Troilus and Cressida," ii. 3), and the wooing of Anne by Richard III. ("Richard III," i. 2) — the influence can hardly be said to be reciprocal : the agent stands with immovable self-possession, only keeping himself on the alert to follow up with all his dexterity the effect produced by each stroke. A similar remark may be made concerning the half-wilful torture of Juliet by her Nurse (" Romeo and Juliet," iii. 2), or the gradual agitation of Posthumus by the lies of the villain lachimo (" Cymbeline," ii. 4), or the annoyance and final discomfiture of the Chief-Justice by the imperturbable Falstaff (" 2 Henry IV.," i. 2). So, too, in the swaying of the passions of the "mutable rank-scented" Roman mob in "Coriolanus" and " Julius Ciesar," there is not much reaction : the dramatist has set himself to represent the fluctuations of an excitable crowd under the power of adroit oratory, the orator himself in each case persevering steadily in his objects. But Shakespeare did not shrink from the infinitely more difllcult task of making both parties to a dialogue exert a powerful influence on each other. Of this there are memorable examples in the opening acts of "Macbeth," and in several scenes of "Coriolanus" and " Julius Cyesar." The quarrel between Brutus and Cassius ("Julius 318 WILLIAM SIIAKESPEAIIE : Ccesar," iv. 3), and the interview of Coriolanus ■with his mother, his wife, and his son (" Coriolanus," v. 3), are managed with con- summate knowledge of the heart, and unerring grasp of imagin- ation upon its slightest and most shifting fluctuations. One would not venture to say that Shakespeare's power of identifying himself with his characters, and wonderful swiftness in passing from one personality to another, increased after the time when he composed "Richard III.," and delineated the scenes between Mar- garet and the objects of her hatred : but certainly he increased in the masterly ease of his transitions. The greatest monument of his dramatic subtlety is the tragedy of "Antony and Cleopatra." With all its noble bursts of passion and occasional splendour of description, this play has not perhaps the massive breadth of feel- ing and overpowering interest of the four great tragedies, " Mac- beth," "Hamlet," "Lear," and "Othello"; but it is greater even than "Macbeth" and "Othello" in the range of its mastery over the fluctuations of profound passion : it is the greatest of Shake- speare's plays in the dramatist's greatest faculty. The conflict of motives in " Hamlet " is an achievement of genius that must al- ways be regarded with wonder and reverence ; but, to my mind, "Antony and Cleopatra" is the dramatist's masterpiece. One may have less interest in the final end of the subtle changes Avrought in the hero and heroine : but in the pursuit and certain grasp of those changes, Shakespeare's dramatic genius appears at its supreme height. Schlegel quotes with approbation a saying of Lessing's regard- ing Shakespeare's exhibition of the gradual progress of passion from its first origin. " He gives," says Lessing, " a living picture of all the slight and secret artifices by which a feeling steals into our souls, of all the imperceptible advantages which it there gains, of all the stratagems by which it makes every other passion subser- vient to itself, till it becomes the sole tyrant of our desires and our aversions." This incautious hyperbole tends to confuse the boundaries between the drama and the novel or epic of manners. The remark is more applicable to the novels of George Eliot, or to the " Troilus and Cressida" of Chaucer, than to the plays of Shakespeare. The slight and stealthy growth of passion is Avliolly unsuited for the stage. In the drama, life is condensed and con- centrated ; the pulses of life and the energies of growth are quick- ened. Passions spring up with more than tropical rapidity. The mutual love of Romeo and Juliet, the misanthropy of Timon, the ambition of Macbeth, Hamlet's thirst for revenge, Lear's fatal hatred of Cordelia, Othello's jealousy — are all passions of sudden growth. lago's artifices are subtle but swift and instantaneously effectual : Othello's pang at his first stab (iii. 3, 35) is not less sharp than the heart's wound of young Romeo by the first shaft TRANQUILLISING CLOSE OF HIS TRAGEDIES. 31 from Juliet's eyes. The dramatist is very well aware that the first suggestion commonly works more slowly : he makes lago say— "Dangerous conceits are, in their natures, poisons, Which at the first are scarce found to distaste, But with a Uttle act upon the blood — Burn hke the mines of sulphur." But his poison must work swiftly; inflammatory insinuations must be accumulated and compressed so as to force the passion at once into a blaze : before an hour is over, lago exclaims in agony— " Not poppy, nor mandragora, Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep Which thou owedst yesterday." Hamlet's action is tempered by subsequent reflections, but his desire for revenge attains its utmost vehemence at the first supernatural solicitation : he at once passionately vows to wipe from his memory every record but the ghost's commandment. Macbeth does not proceed instantly to murder Duncan ; but the confirmation of part of the promise of the witches immediately raises the terrible suggestion — " Whose horrid image doth unfix his hair And make his seated heart knock at his ribs, Against the use of nature." The great stages of the growth of passion are indicated in Shake- speare's dramas with all the power of his genius, but the develop- ment proceeds with fiery vehemence. Slight and stealthy develop- ment belongs to the domain of the novelist. VI. — The Tranquillising Close of his Tragedies. I have already drawn attention (p. 290) to the presence of Destiny or Fortune as an impelling or thwarting influence in Shakespeare's dramas. In all his tragedies the influence of this mighty World-power on the concerns of men is more or less suggested. Homeo takes refuge in death from its persecutions : " O, here," he cries at the tomb of Juliet — " 0, here Will I set up my everlasting rest, And shake the yoke of inausj)icious stars From this world- wearied llesh." 320 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : Before the battle of Philii)pi, when even Cassius begins partly to credit things that do presage, Brutus, who in the end prefers leaping into the pit to tarrying till he is pushed, is resolute to hold out while any hope remains : — " Arininr^ himself Avith patience To stay the providence of some high powers That govern us below." Macbeth at first is disposed to commit himself to the control of Chance : — " If Chance will have me king, why Chance may crown me, "Witliout my stir." And his wife sees the hand of Fate in the half-fulfilled pre- dictions of the witches and the entrance of Duncan under her battlements. The bastard Edmund ridicules the excellent foppery of the world in making guilty of our disasters the sun, moon, and stars ; but later in the play old Kent can find no other satisfactory way of accounting for the cruelty of Goneril and Regan, and the kindness of Cordelia : — " It is tlie stars, The stars above ns, govern our conditions." Othello exclaims of the supposed treachery of Desdemona : — " 'Tis destiny unshunnable as death." And when he calls to mind his prowess in happier days, cries : — " vain boast ! Who can control his fate V The magnanimous Antony rises superior to the enmity of Fate : when his soldiers are lamenting rouncl him, he says to them : — " N"ay, good my fellows, do not please sharp Fate To grace it with yonr sorrows : bid that welcome Which comes to punish us, and we punish it Seeming to bear it lightly. " The thought of inevitable Destiny, iron Fate, is a great tran- quilliser, and rolls over tragic catastrophes like the calm grandeur of stars after a storm. When our minds are fatigued by the spec- tacle of horrors, or poignant griefs, or violent struggles of fatal issue, this thought unfolds itself to soothe the tumult. We sub- due the keen agitation of particular calamities by fixing our eyes on the calm majesty of the irresistil^le forces of the universe : we take some part of the disturbing culpability of individual TRANQUILLISING CLOSE OF HIS TRAGEDIES. 321 agents off their slioulder.s, and lay it on the Stars, dread agents equally above our love and our hatred. Before the awful mag- nificence of their doings, our fierce detestation of individual malice is subdued, and the sorrows of the individual lose their sharp- ness merged in the sorrows of mankind. The power that overhangs Shakespeare's tragedies appears also in the aspect of an inexorable and relentless Justice, blindly deal- ing out the punishment of death to all who are Avilfully or accident- ally brought within the sweep of her sword. Not the slightest culpability is left unavenged. None remain alive at the end who have been so intimately mixed up with the chief victims that their survival would chafe our sense of justice and vex our medita- tions on the impartial rigour of the Destinies. Not one false step within the tragic circle can be withdrawn. Conscious or uncon- scious, intentional or unintentional, all complicity is fearfully punished. We ask what poor Cordelia had done that she should perish untimely ; and Justice points to her wayward refusal to humour the exacting irritability of her doting old father. Ophelia 1 She was thrust for a moment by the wretched rash intruding Polonius between Hamlet and his revenge : for one moment she was the innocent tool of the guilty, and though her sad fate was avenged on Hamlet, she could not escape. Consider how you should have felt had Cordelia survived Lear or Ophelia survived her father, her brother, and her lover, and you will recognise the dramatic justice of involving them in the general ruin of their friends and enemies. The fate of Desdemona is too har- rowing if we miss the completeness of the dramatist's design in the outlines of her character. In the first frenzy of our grief and anger, our thoughts run fiercely towards revenge. We do not regret the death of Emilia, remembering that she had been guilty of stealing the fatal handkerchief. We behold with savage satisfaction the remorse of Othello, and his desperate retribution on himself. We exercise our ingenuity in devising tortures for lago, the fiendish contriver of all the mischief. Then when justice has been surfeited, and the awful question — Who can control his fate ? rolls its starry grandeurs over the fatigued spirit, we revert to the life of the victim, and in that mood we recognise a sinister influence even in the stars of poor Desdemona. She was not a pale creature of colourless blood, framed for a long unruffled life. Her nature was capable of the intemperate passion that leads too surely to tragic consequences. That jjassionate love of hers for the warlike ]\Ioor, which seemed so monstrous and unnatural to her father, and which was construed so craftily by lago, was too immoderate to be innocuous : " such violent delights have violent ends." The powers that gave her the heart to slight men of her own complexion and degree and fix her afl;ections on a X 322 WILLIAM SIIAKESPEAKE. INfoor, had destined her to unha2:)piness. Remove this vicious mole of nature from Desdemona, leave her a cold pattern of projjriety reserved to her lover and obedient to her parents, and you find it much more difficult to quell your uneasiness at the crushing of such a flower under the wheel of Destiny. The vicious mole is small in proportion to the retribution : but the fact that she was in a measure, however faint, accessory to her own ruin, blends with other mitigations of the final horror. 323 CHAPTER VIIL SHAKESPEAEE'S CONTEMPORAEIES AND SUCCESSOES. The more we read of Elizabethan literature, the more we become convinced of the vast superiority of >Shakespeare. If one begins the study of the Elizabethan dramatists with a stern resolution to throw aside all prepossessions, and judge every man as if one had heard nothing wbatever about him before, the first conclusion reached from dipping iiere and dipping there into choice passages may well be, that they all wrote with very much the same kind of power. But when Ave have lived in their company for some time, and studied their works in various lights, we become aware of immeasurable diiSferences. Gradually we come to see that each man applies a different kind of power to the expression of every thought, the conception of every character, the construction of every scene; and the sum of these individualities is enormous. But though no other Elizabethan dramatist could make the shadow of a claim to be the equal of Shakespeare, there were other men among them justly entitled to be called great. Why, it is often asked, was there such a cluster of great dramatists in that age 1 Why, we may reply, should there not have been 1 The drama at that time offered a new and exciting field to the English imagination ; and the English imagination, finding the field congenial, rushed into it, and worked at the exalted pitch of energy which new things inspire. Marlowe was really the Colum- bus of a new literary world. He emancipated the English mind from classical notions of stiff" decorum — the necessary accompani- , ments of the large theatre and the cothurnus and the mask — and by so doing, opened up infinite possibilities to the dramatist. Now, indeed, the drama could be a representation of passionate life. Men struggling passionately after antagonistic aims could now be brought face to face ; and the ups and downs, the hopes and fears, the shrinkings and the darings of the struggle and the characters of the combatants, could be placed in swift and dazzling 324 siiAKEsrE are's contemporaeies. and heart-shaking succession visibly before the eyes of the specta- tors. The stage even dared to show how men and women bore themselves in the presence of incensed Death — how their spirits quailed or remained constant in fierce defiance Avith the knife at their throat. Never was there an emancipation so calculated to excite the human intellect to the very utmost of its powers. No wonder that the age should have produced the largest cluster of great names in our literature. Further, I believe it may be said that it is indispensable to the production of a very great man that a number of great men should work side by side. They not only stimulate one another to ex- treme effort, but they also, consciously and unconsciously, get from one another invaluable helps and suggestions. In literature, in art, in commerce, all through life, I believe this rule holds. In all things it is an infallible source of degeneration to keep com- pany with inferior minds. You cannot even have a good whist- player, or billiard-player, or cricketer, without others to spur him on ; remove the stimulus of competition, and inevitably he is demoralised. Distinguished criminals do not occur singly. What great orator ever rose up from a low general Jevel 1 When one man makes a tremendous fortune, you are certain to find others follow- ing hard in his wake. Greatness in the humblest walks as well as in the highest is so difficult an achievement, and demands such a persistence in heroic effort, that men cannot persevere unto the end, but fall away from the straight course unless they are kept to it by the most powerful of human motives — the ambition of making or keeping a reputation. The dramatists of greatest general repute next to Shakespeare are Ben Jonson and John Fletcher, i There are good grounds for their pre-eminence. Among their contemporaries and competitors were men of higher and rarer qualities, men of more interesting character ; but no others, excepting always Marlowe and Shake- speare, gave so much original impulse to the drama, established themselves so firmly and unmistakably as leaders of literature. We shall see that it is a mistake to regard Jonson as an imitator of classical models ; and that he himself took a juster view of his position when he disclaimed adherence to Plautus and Terence, and declared himself the inventor of a new comedy. Jonson was the first Fniilish dramatist who found the Avhole materials of his comedy in contemporary life. He may have taken this idea from the Latin comedians. But his method as well as his spirit was essentially different from theirs. Chai)man was an older man than Jonson, and Dekker excelled him in the fidelity and delicacy of his delineation of life ; but both were his disciples. As regards 1 I shall show reason for believing that injustice is clone to Fletcher by writing his name with Beaumont's. GEOEGE CHAPMAN. 325 Fletcher, who threw into the drama not only the high spirits and daring manner of aristocratic youth, but also a sweet odour of poetry brought from the vales of Arcadia and the gardens of the Faery Queen, he is the real progenitor of the drama of the Restoration. Charles Lamb Avas not strictly correct in saying that " quite a new turn of tragic and comic interest came in with the Restoration." It was not strictly new : it had at least been foreshadowed by Fletcher. Dryden was Fletcher's pupil in tragedy as Wycherley was in comedy. Their work was the natural development of his when relieved from the restraining influences of his age — in tragedy, the competition of men who wrote with a high sense of artistic responsibility, and in comedy, the regard to decency imposed by a decorous female sovereign and her successor, a royal old woman. The young barbarians who en- joyed the obscenities of Fletcher would not have been shocked by the indecent wit of Wycherley or Congreve, and probably looked upon (Shakespeare as old-fashioned and stilted. I have said nothing about the influence of the Spanish drama on Elizabethan dramatists, because I do not believe that it could have exercised, or did exercise, any appreciable influence. It may have been that INIarlowe was induced to write for the public stage by hearing of a great popular drama in Spain — news which he might have had from his friend Greene if he did not know it otherwise ; but once the Elizabethan drama was in full career, it was no more possible to turn it into the channels of the Spanish drama, than to turn the Rhine at Frankfort into the Rhone, or to sensibly change the waters of the Ganges by bucketfuls from the Volga. Much of the material of the English drama was taken from Southern Europe, where intrigue and passion have freer }ilay than with us ; but the mode of representation was wholly indigenous. I. — George Chapman (i 559-1 634). George Chapman is conspicuous among the mob of easy and precocious writers in his generation for his late entrance into the service of the Muses, and his loudly proclaimed enthusiasm and strenuous labours in that service. He made no secret of the effort that it' cost him to climb Parnassus, or of his fiery resolution to reach the top ; he rather exaggerated his struggles and the vehe- mence of his ambition. He refrained from pubKcation till he was thirty-five years old, and then burst upon the world like a repressed and' accumulated volcano. The swelling arrogance^ and lofty 1 A profession of coiiteinpt for critics was quite a conmionplace in those days ; but Chapman is peculiarly earnest. His fury at some exceptions taken to his Homer was boundless : he fairly gnashed his teeth at the froutless detractions 326 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPOEARIES. expectations with wliicli he had restrained his secret labours display themselves without reserve in the ' (Shadow of Night ' — his first contribution to print. The dedication of that poem and the poem itself strike the key-note of his literary character. " It is," he bursts out, " an exceeding rapture of delight in the deep search of knowledge . . . that maketh man manfully endure the extremes incident to that Herculean labour : from flints must the Gorgonian fount be smitten." ..." Men must be shod by Mercury, girt with Saturn's adamantine sword, take the shield from Pallas, the helm from Pluto, and have the eyes of Graia (as Hesiodus arms Perseus against Medusa), before they can cut off the viperous head of benumbing ignorance, or subdue their monstrous affections to a most beautiful judgment." If Night, "sorrow's dread sovereign," will only give his " working soul " skill to declare the griefs that he has sufiered, she will be able to sing all the tortures of Earth, — • "And force to tremble in lier trumpeting Heaven's crystal spheres." He adjures Night, the mother of all knowledge, to give force to his words : — • " Then let fierce bolts, well ramm'd with, heat and cold, In Jove's artillery my words unfold To break the labyrintli of every ear, And make cacli friglited soul come forth and hear. Let them break hearts, as well as yielding airs, That all men's bosoms (pierced \\ath no affairs But gain of riches) may be lanced wide, And with the threats of virtue terrified." One cannot wonder that this fiery aspirant to fame, so lofty in his pretensions, so novel in his strain, drew all men's eyes upon him, and found many admirers eager to support his claim to stand among the greatest poets. Englishmen have never been deficient in the worship of f(jrce : and the vehement enthusiasm of George Chapman exerted a strong fascination.^ Very little is known concerning Chapman prior to 1594, the date of the publication of his ' Shadow of Night.' He is believed to have been born at Hitchin, and to have studied at Oxford, and perhaps also at Cambridge. The probability is that he had ma- tured several works before he began to publish, because he issued three or four different productions in rapid succession, and then remained silent f&r six or seven years, presumably till he was ready for another attack upon the public. He followed up his of some stupid ignor.ints that, "no more knowing me than their own beastly ends, and I ever (to my knowludge) blest from their siglit, whisper behind me, vilifying of my translation." 1 See above, p. 223. GEOKGE CHAPMAN. 327 'Shadow of Night' in 1595 with a luxurious study in sensuous description — ' Ovid's Banquet of Sense ; ' and his " Blind Beggar of Alexandria" was played by the Lord Admiral's men in the same year, though not published till 1598. The chronology of the instalments of his translation of Homer has been greatly obscured by the rash assertions of Warton ; but the facts seem to be that he published seven books in Alexan- drines in 1598 : the 'Shield of Achilles' in heroic couplets in the same year; and twelve books complete in 1606. "A Humorous Day's Mirth," a comedy, was published in 1599, having lieen sundry times acted before. He oifered no other play to the public till 1605, when he printed the comedy of " All Fools." There- after he seems to have divided his energies between writing come- dies and tragedies and translating from the Classics. His Comedies, in addition to those already mentioned, were, — " ]\[on- sieur D'Olive," 1606; "The Gentleman Usher," 1606; "May- Day," 161 1 ; "The Widow's Tears," 1612. His Tragedies,— " Bussy d'Ambois," 1607; "Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois," 1613 ; "The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron," in two plays, 1608; " Caesar and Pompey," not published till 1631 ; "Alphonsus," 1654; "Revenge for Honour," 1654. As regards translations, he was able to boast towards the close of his career that he had translated all the works attributed to Homer. He published a continuation of Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" in 1606. The circumstantial richness of description in Chapman's two earliest pieces is very remarkable. That was evidently his first study, and he pursued it with untiring enthusiasm till he obtained complete mastery. In the ' Shadow of Night ' there are some studiously elaborate descriptions, such as the following : — "And as, when CHoris paints th' enamelled meads, A flock of sheplierds to the bagpipe treads Rude rural danees with their country loves : Some afar oiY observing their removes — Turns and returns, quick footing, sudden stands, Reelings aside, odd motions with their hands, Now back, now forwards, now kicked arm in arm — Not hearing music, think it is a charm, That like loose fools at bacchanalian feasts Make them seem frantic in their barren jests." But ' Ovid's Banquet of Sense ' is his most fervent and indefati- gable effort in the way of rich description. As if he had resolved to acquire once for all a complete command of sensuous expression, he there narrates a happy adventure that procured the gratifica- tion of all the senses, and tasks the whole power of his fancy in a protracted endeavour to depict the sweet tumult raised in the soul 328 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES. l)y their various objects. The argument of the poem is, that Ovid having fallen in love with Julia, daughter of Augustus, whom he celebrated under the name of Corinna, found means to enter the imperial gardens and see Corinna playing on her lute and singing, and afterwards entering her bath, which had been filled with the richest perfumes. In this adventure all Ovid's senses were feasted ; his hearing with her voice and lute, his sense of smell with the dispersed odours, his eye with her disrobed figure, his mouth with a kiss. He is permitted also to touch her side — the gratification of Feeling, which Chapman calls the senses' groundwork, the emperor of the senses, whom it is no immodesty to serve. ' Ovid's Banquet of Sense ' is really a banquet of most exquisite poetry — a most determined effort by the indomitable poet to eclipse by fervid elaboration all the raptures of previous pairs of mythological lovers — Lodge's Glaucus and Scylla, Mar- lowe's Hero and Leander, Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, Dray- ton's Endymion and Phtebe. How elaborately, for example, and with what glowing colours, he describes Ovid's feelings when Corinna stooped down to kiss him ! — " Her moving towards him made Ovid's eye Believe the firmament was coming down To take him quick to immortality, And that the ambro.siau kiss set on the crown : She spake in kissing, and her breath infused Restoring syrup to his taste in swoon ; And he imagined Hebe's hands had bruised A banquet of the gods into his sense, Which filled him with this furious influence. The motion of the heavens that did beget The golden age, and l)y whose harmony Heaven is preserved, in me on work is set. All instruments of deepest melody. Set sweet in my desire, to my love's liking, With this sweet kiss in me their tunes apply, As if the best musician's hands were striking : This kiss in me hath endless music closed, Like Phoebus' lute, on Nisus' towers imposed. And as a pebble cast into a spring, We see a sort of ti'embling circles rise, One forming other in their issuing, Till over all the fount they circulise ; So this perpetual motion-making-kiss Is propagate through all my faculties, And makes my bi'east an endless fount of bliss ; Of which if gods would drink, their matchless fare Would make them much more blessed than they are. But as when sounds do hollow bodies beat, Air gathered there, compressed and thickened, GEORGE CHAPMAN. 329 Tlio self-same way she came dotli make retreat, And so affects the sounds re-echoed Only in part, because she weaker is In that redition than when first she lied. So I, alas ! faint echo of this kiss, Only reiterate a slender part Of that high joy it worketh in my heart." This fervid vividness and laboured minuteness of realisation is characteristic of all Chapman's descrijitions. All his pictures, whether of beauty or of grandeur, whether voluptuous or horrible, strike us as if they had been executed under a fiery determination to make them thorough. In translating Homer, he was rarely content to dismiss a simile with the simple handling of the original : he usually conceived the image for himself, and wrestled with it vehemently to make it yield up greater plenitude of detail. What chiefly strikes us when we survey Chapman's career through his successive publications, is his steady improvement in every vein that he set himself to master. We should naturally infer from his late appearance in print, which is altogether with- out a parallel in that age, that his intellect was somewhat stiff and stubborn, not easily set in motion or put upon a track ; and this inference is confirmed by an examination of his beginnings and gradual progress in different veins. Sensuous description would seem to have been his first ambition, and to this he held his intellect by sheer force of ardent enthusiasm till he succeeded up to his ideal. In translating Homer, he had reached the thirteenth book before he fairly entered into the heart of his subject : " when driving through his thirteenth and last books, I drew the main dei^th, and saw the round coming of this silver bow of our Phffibus ; the clear scope and contexture of his work ; the full and most beautiful figures of his persons." Once warmed to his subject and fairly got under way, his motion was rapid enough ; bodies that are difficult to move are also difficult to stop. He boasted that he drove through the last twelve books in fifteen weeks. 1 When we look to his comedies and his tragedies, we find in like manner poor beginnings and determined improvement. "All Fools" is a great advance on the "Blind Beggar of Alex- andria," and "May-Day," with all its coarseness, is in many respects a more masterly composition than "All Fools." The " Revenge for Honour " is incomparably the best of his tragedies. One great aim in his comedies is to exhibit the gulling of one personage by another. If one were to take Chapman's comedies 1 It is somewhat cm'ions that want of competent time is one of his excuses for making so little of the tirst twelve hooks. One often finds very stiff laborious men anxious to have credit for rapid composition. 330 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES. as mirror.s of the time, one would suppose that the chief recreation of the young courtiers of Elizabeth and James was to find butts for their wit and subjects for practical jokes. Chapman was pro- bably put on this track by Jonson's " Every Man in his Humour," and he hammered at the idea with characteristic pertinacity. There is much clever deception — clever, indeed, to extreme im- probability — in the " Blind I5eggar," which was produced before Ben Jonson's first play ; but Chapman's first effort in the repre- sentation of deliberate gulling appears in his " Humorous Day's Mirth," where the old husband Labernel, the old father Foyes, and the young pretentious simpleton Bcstia (the same character as Jonson's ' Stephen '), are notoriously deceived by a pack of waggish gallants. The gulling in "All Fools," as the title indicates, is universal : ^ every one of the dramatis j^'crsonm is more or less victimised. Again, Monsieur D' Olive is gulled by two young courtiers ; and the Gentleman Usher, Bassiolo, by the two lovers Vincentio and Margaret, who make him their medium of communication, and flatter him into the belief that they are a pair of foolish bashful lovers, very much indebted to his kindly offices for helping them to declare their mutual passion. The " Gentleman Usher " is, taken all in all, the best of Chapman's comedies ; it contains a certain admixture of serious plot (which would have been better if he could have refrained from intro- ducing the supernatural), and the gulling of Bassiolo is his mas- terpiece in that way. The most riotous and laughable gulling, however, occui\s in the coarsest of his comedies, "May -Day," which contains more spirited dialogue, more piquant characters, and more ludicrous incidents, than any of its predecessors. Another of his comic aims, persisted in with no less resolution, is to exhibit the hypocrisy, inconsistency, and general frailty of women. This, indeed, may be said to be one of his aims in all his plays : he has not drawn a single fine female character of any mark in any play from the " Blind Beggar " to the " Revenge for Honour " : all from j^giale to Caropia have some taint upon them. Chapman would almost seem to have been like his own Ptinaldo in " All Fools," who had vowed eternal war against the whole sex. And in displaying their frailties, as in other aims that he took in hand, he improved very much with practice. The be- haviour of Samathis and Elimine in the " Blind Beggar," though a sufficiently malicious conception, is too violently improbable to have much point as a satire : Irus, who figures as four different personages in the play, marries Samathis as Leon, and Elimine as Hermes, and afterwards as Hermes, seduces Samathis, and as Leon, Elimine. Florila, the fair Puritan, in the " Humorous 1 It is ilifllcult to see why Mr Hallani sjjeak.s of tliis play as a tragi-comedy. GEOKGE CHAPMAN. 331 Day's Mirth," is more of a satire on female weakness. But Chapman's greatest achievement in this vein is the " Widow's Tears," in which he makes young Tharsalio conquer a youthful widow, who had sworn eternal constancy, within a few months of her husband's death, and that, too, by representations of the least reputable sort ; and, as a secondary plot, elaborates Petronius Arbiter's story of the widow of Ephesus,^ who went to starve herself to death in her husband's tomb, and was there wooed and won by a soldier stationed near on guard of some crucified bodies. In his first tragedies, Chapman's main endeavour was to build up a majestic dialogue with weighty moral sentences. In the dedication of his " Revenge of Bussy d'Aml^ois " lie falls out upon certain critics who seem to have found fault with the want of probability both in the characters and in the action of his plays. " And for the authentical truth," says he in defence, " of either person or action, who (worth the respecting) will expect it in a poem, whose subject is not truth, but things like truth 1 Poor envious fools they are that cavil at truth's want in these natural fictions : material instruction, elegant and sententious excitation to virtue, and deflection from her contrary being the soul, limbs, and limits of an authentical tragedy." His sententious excitations to virtue are powerfully expressed. He would seem to have studied to fulfil his early prayer to Night, concentrating explosive forces, and firing ofi" each word of his maxims like a cannon-ball. But the thunder of this moral artillery is too continuous and deafening; the interchange of elaborate sentences between his personages, especially in the two Byron plays, becomes intolerably tedious. In his latest tragedies, however. Chapman observes a much better proportion of weighty saws. In the " Revenge for Honour " the dialogue is much more full of life than in any of his previous tragedies. Chapman's designs were always ambitious ; but he was guided more like a pedant by authoritative models than like a genuine artist by a clear judgment and sure instinct of his own. He had, undoubtedly, immense power ; but his sail was a great deal prouder and fuller than his ship. Both in his comedies and in his tragedies he burdened himself with an unavailing effort to imitate the Latin and Greek classics : he probably flattered him- self in so doing with a feeling of superiority to less learned play- wrights ; but he might have l)een more successful if he had imitated the published works of Shakespeare. But ambitious and resolute George would have scorned to imitate consciously any of his contemporaries : he aspired to stand out among them as a heaven-sent genius, in rapt communion with the great empress 1 Repeated in Jeremy Taylor's ' Holy Dying.' 332 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPOU ARIES. of all secrets. He might, indeed, hold intercourse with the mighty minds of old, and submit to their teaching ; he might also take up the conceptions of contemporary writers, and show the proper way to carry them out ; but imitate — never. How, then, is this recon- ciled with what I have just said, that Chapman imitated like a pedant 1 The explanation is, that Chapman, like many other men, was self-deluded in his conviction of originality and inspira- tion. His originality was of the nature of oddity, eccentricity, quaintness — a forcible wrench given to commonplace or bor- rowed ideas, characters, images, and turns of expression. He was really very much influenced by contemporaries, and commonly for good. The influence of tShakespeare, to all appearance, operated strongly on the composition of his " Revenge for Honour " ; and it is, as I have already said, by far the best of his tragedies. His earliest tragedies contain splendid passages of description, and a plethora of pithy and noble sentences ; but his " Revenge for Honour " is, in respect of lively dialogue, powerfully drawn char- acter, clearly conceived interaction, absorbing plot, and terrible catastrophe, entitled to a high place among the works of the best tragedians. The chief drawback to Chapman's comedies is the universal ignobility of the characters — the title " All Fools " might almost be extended to his comedies generally. And one fatal drawback to all his plays is his low conception of female character. No plays can have a durable popularity that have none of the softer gifts and graces to mingle with their comic humours or tragic horrors. II. — John Marston (157 ?-i634). John Marston is the Skelton or Swift of the Elizabethan period. Like them, he wrote in denunciation and derision of what seemed to him vicious or weakly sentimental ; and like them, he im- patiently carried a passion for directness of speech to the extremes of coarseness. He was for no half - veiled exposure of vices. " Know," he cried, in the preface to ' The Scourge of Villany,' his first furious lash at the age, " I hate to affect too much obscurity and harshness, because they profit no sense. To note vices so that no man can understand tliem is as fond as the French execu- tion in picture." And a contemporary (in the anonymous " Return from Parnassus ") confirmed this self-estimate of his purposes : — " Tut, what cares he for modest close-couclied terms Cleanly to gird our looser libertines ? Give him plain naked words, stript from tlieir shirts, That might beseem plain-dealing Aretine ! " Marston's satires are not elegant, self-complacent exercitations JOHN MARSTON. 333 in imitation of Horace, such as Hall was so vain of writing- ; lie wrote in a more savage and less affected vein : — " Unless the Destin's adamantine band Should tie my teeth, I cannot choose but bite." One of his mottoes is taken from Juvenal, with whom he had more in common than with Horace — Dijjicile est satiraiii non scrihcre — "It is difficult 7wt to write satire." There would be an almost Timonic grandeur in the swelling energy of his defiance of public opinion were it not for the satirist's half-humorous enjoy- ment of his own position. " I dare defend my plainness against the verjuice face of the crabbedest Satirist that ever stuttered. He that thinks worse of my rhymes than myself, I scorn him, for he cannot ; he that thinks better is a fool. ... If thou perusest me with an impartial eye, read on ; if otherwise, know I neither value thee nor thy censure." Whatever other people are afraid to do has a great charm for Marston. He dedicates his " Scourge of Villany " to Detraction, and bids her snarl, bark, and bite, — for his spirit scorns her spite : — " My spirit is not puft up with fat fume Of slimy ale, or 13acchus' heating grape ; My mind disdains the dungy muddy scum Of abject thoughts and Envy's raging hate." With somewhat less coarse bravery he consigns himself to ever- lasting oblivion — "mighty gulf, insatiate cormorant" — in opposi- tion to the usual aspirations for eternal memory : — " Let others pray For ever their fair poems llouiish may ; But as for me, hungry Oblivion, Devour me quick." He beseeches the wits to malign him; nothing could give him greater pleasure : — " Profaee, read on ; for your extremest dislikes Will add a pinion to my praise's flights. Oh ! how I bristle up ray plumes of pride ! Oil ! how I think my satires dignilied ! When I once hear some (juaint Oastilio, Some supple-mouthed slave, some lewd Tubrio, Some spruce pedant, or some span-new-come fry Of Inus-o'-Court, striving to vilify ]My dark reproofs ! Then do but rail at me— No greater honour craves my poesy." Almost nothing is known concerning ]\Iarston's private life. He is believed to be the John Marston who was admitted B.A. at Oxford in 1593, as being the eldest son of an Esquire, his father 334 Shakespeare's contempobaeies. belonging to the city of Coventry. He began his literary career in 1598, publishing in that year "Pygmalion's Image, and certain Satires," and "The Scourge of Villany, Three Books of Satires." He is supposed to be the IMaxton or JNIastone, " the new poet," mentioned in Henslowe's Diary in 1599; and the play there referred to is supposed to be his "Malcontent," published in 1604 in two editions — one with, and the other without, an Induction by Webster. His other plays published were — " Antonio and Mel- lida," 1602; "Antonio's Revenge," 1602; "The Dutch Courte- san," 1605; " Parasitaster," 1606; " Sophonisba," 1606; "What you Will," 1607; "The Insatiate Countess," 1613. He was also conjoined with Chapman and Jonson in the composition of " East- ward Ho!" certain passages of which, written by Chapman and Marston between them, gave such offence to the Scotch predilec- tions of the king that it brought the trio to prison, and very nearly to the pillory. Marston and Jonson were less friendly in after life, as they had been at enmity before. ^ Jonson told Drum- mond that he once "beat Marston and took his pistol from him." ^Nlarston's total abstinence from literatnre during the last twenty years of his life is not explained. One of Marston's favourite butts, both in his Satires and in his plays, was the puling sentimentality of enamoured sonneteers. He goes beyond himself in the invention of mad indignities, coarse and subtle, overt and sly, for these forlorn creatures ; paro- dies them and scoffs at them ; buffets them, as it were, tweaks their noses, stealthily pulls out hairs and puts in pins, kicks them out of his presence. " Sweet-faced Corinna, deign the riband tie Of thy cork-shoe, or else thy slave will die : Some puling sonnet tolls his passing liell; Some sighing elegy must ring his knell. Unless bright sunshine of thy grace revive His wanil)ling stomach, certes he will dive Into the whirlpool of devouring deatli, And to some mermaid sacrifice his breath." I have endeavoured to show that Shakespeare co-operated with this derision of forced love-sighs, writing certain of his sonnets in ridicule of their windy suspiration. But Shakespeare himself was not always above the contempt of the predestined cynic. ' Venus and Adonis ' was singled out by Marston as the type of danger- ously voluptuous poetry, and unmercifully parodied in his " Pyg- malion's Image," the arts of the goddess to win over the cold 1 Jonson made Marston the suliject of a play in 1601 — " The Poetaster." He, and not (as D'Israeli states) Dekker, is Crispinus : tlie parody of Marston's style in the Fifth Act is unmistakable. The reconciliation must have been only tem- porary. Marston dedicated his "Malcontent" to Jonson in 1604. JOHN MAESTON. 335 youth being coarsely paralleled in mad mockery by the arts of Pygmalion to bring his beloved statue to life. The risk in all such parodies is that they be taken as serious productions. This has been the fate of Shakespeare's sonnet parodies ; and Marston either feared or had actually incurred a similar calamity. " Curio, know'st my sprite, Yet deem'st that in sad seriousness I write Such nasty stuff as is P3'gmalion ? barbarous dropsy noil ! Think'st thou tliat genius that attends my soul, And guides my iist to scourge magnilicoes, Will deign my mind be rank'd in Paphian shows?" Marston seems to have had rather a fancy for parodying Shake- speare : he more than once has a fling at " A horse, a horse ! my kingdom for a horse ! " and in " The Malcontent " he has several ... hits at passages in Hamlet, including " IIlo, ho, ho, ho, art there, old Truepenny?" and a parody on Hamlet's reflection, "What a piece of work is man ! " But he also paid the great dramatist the compliment of imitating from him. In " The INIalcontent," the conception of the villain Mendozo is indebted in several particulars to Richard III. And the hinge of the plot is borrowed indirectly from " Hamlet." A banished Duke of Genoa returns to court in the disguise of Malevolo, an ill-conditioned cynic, who deliberately uses his reputation for craziness as a licence to tell people of their vices in very surly terms face to face. This origin of the idea of Malevolo might not have occurred to us but for the parodies of Hamlet in the play : and it has a certain value as showing Marston' s notion of the feigned madness of Hamlet. Marston's plays are very remarkable and distinctive produc- tions. They are written with amazing energy — energy audacious, defiant, shameless, yet, Avhen viewed in the totality of its manifes- tations, not unworthy to be called Titanic. They make no pretence to dramatic impartiality ; they are written throughout in the spirit of his satires ; his puppets walk the stage as embodiments of various ramifications of deadly sins and contemptible fopperies, side by side with virtuous opposites and indignant commenting censors. His characters, indeed, speak and act with vigorous life : they are much more forcible and distinct personalities than Chap- man's characters. But though Marston brings out his characters sharply and clearly, and puts them in lifelike motion, they are too manifestly objects of their creator's liking and disliking : some are caricatured, some are unduly black, and some unduly stainless. From one great fault Marston's personages are exceedingly free : they may be overdrawn, and they may be coarse, but they are seldom dull — their life is a rough coarse life, but life it is. And all his serious creations have here and there put into their mouths 336 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPOEARIES. passages of tremendous energy. Charles Lamb has gathered from Marston, for his ' Specimens of English Dramatic Poets,' extracts of passionate declamation and powerful description hardly sur- passed in all that rich collection. As we read Marston's plays, too, the conviction gains ground upon us that, after all, he was not the ill-conditioned, snarling, and biting cur that he M'ould have us believe himself to be, but a fairly honest fellow of very powerful intellect, only rude and rugged enough to have a mad delight in the use of coarse paradox and strong language. He was not a self-satisfied snarler, girding freely at the world, but tender of his own precious personality. His plays convince us that there was a touch of sincere modesty in his prayer to Oblivion : — " Accept my orison, My earnest prayers, wliicli do importune thee "VVitli .gloomy shade of thy still enipery To veil both me and my rndu poesj'. Far worthier lines, in silence of thy state, Do sleep securely, free from love or liate." In the Induction to "What you Will," he makes Doricus turn round on Philomene, who is railing against the stupidity of the pul)lic in the vein of the " Scourge of Villany," and call the strain rank, odious, and leprous — " as your friend the author . . . seems so fair in his own glass . . . that he talks once of squinting critics, drunken censure, splay-footed opinion, juiceless husks, I ha' done with him, I ha' done with him." And in the body of the same play he is hardy enough to make Quadratus fall out upon Kin- sayder, his own nom de ■phiiiia in his early satires : — " Wliy, you Don Kinsayder, Thou canker-eaten, rusty cur, thou snaffle To freer spirits." We cannot complain of ill-treatment from a cynic so unmerciful to himself, so uncompromising in his gross ebullient humour. We are inclined to concede to him that, like his own Feliche, he " hates not man, but man's lewd qualities." There are more amiable and admirable characters in his plays than in Chapman's. He has good characters to set off the bad : the treacherous, unscrupulous Mendozo is balanced by the faithful Celso ; the shamelessly frail Aurelia by the constant Maria ; the cruel, boastful Piero by the noble Andrugio ; the impulsive, unceremonious, warm-hearted, pert, forward, inquisitive, chattering Rossaline, by the true and gentle Mellida. BEN JONSON. 337 III. — Een Jonson (1573-1637). Ben Jonson had a mind of immense force and pertinacious grasp ; but nothing could be wider of the truth than the notion maintained with such ferocity by GifFord, that he was the father of regular comedy, the pioneer of severe and correct taste. Jon- son's domineering scholarship must not be taken for more than it was worth : it was a large and gratifying possession in itself, but he would probably have written better plays and more poetry without it. It is a sad application of the mathematical method to the history of our literature to argue that the most learned playwright of his time superseded the rude efforts of such un- taught mother-wits as Shakespeare with compositions based on classical models. What Jonson really did was to work out his own ideas of comedy and tragedy, and he expressly claimed the right to do so. The most scrupulous adherence to the unity of time, and the most rigid exclusion of tragic elements from comedy, do not make a play classical. Ben Jonson conformed to these externals ; but there was not a more violently unclassical spirit than his among all the writers for the stage in that generation.^ His laborious accumulation of learned details, his fantastic extra- vagance of comic and satirical imagination, the heavy force of his expression, his study of " humours," had their origin in his own nature, and not in the models of Greece and Rome. Jonson, according to his own account, was of Scotch extraction, his grandfather being a Johnstone of Annandale, who settled in Carlisle, and was taken into the service of Henry VIII. His father, who suffered persecution under Mary, and afterwards be- came " a grave minister of the gospel," died before our poet's birth. Whether or not his mother married a bricklayer as her second husband, it would seem that in his youth he was appren- ticed to that trade, but not before he had received at least the rudiments of a good education at Westminster School under Cam- den, a patron to whom he was never backward in acknowledging his obligations. From bricklaying he went in disgust to soldiering, and served a brief campaign in the Low Countries, distinguishing himself in a single combat with a champion of the enemy, whom he killed and stripped in the sight of both camps. How he began his connection with the stage is not known. He is called "brick- layer" - in 1598 in a letter of Henslowe's giving an account of a 1 His pichire of the Court of Augustus, which Lamb praises so highly, was founded probal;>ly on what he saw or what he desiderated a.t the Court of Eng- land. Jonson Seems always to have had friends among the courtiers. 2 Collier's ' Memoirs of Edward Alleyn,' p. 50. It would not have been at all unlike the man to work as a bricklayer while writing for tlie stage. He might have enjoyed the deliance of public opiiuon in honest labour. This would give Y 338 SHAKESrEARE's CONTEMPOKAKIES. duel that he fought in that year with a player ; Imt before that time he had begun to write plays. A version of his " Every Man in his Hunrour " would seem to have been put on the stage in 1596, and the play was published in 1598. The dates of the pro- duction of his subsequent plays, as given by GifFord, arc as follows : "The Case is Altered," published 159S; "Every Man out of his Humour," 1599; " Cynthia's Revels," 1600; "Poetaster," 1601; " Sejanus," 1603 ; " Eastward Ho !" (written in conjunction with Chapman and Marston), 1605; " Volpone, or The Fox," 1605; "Epicoene, or The Silent Woman," 1609; "The Alchemist," 1610; "Catiline," 161 1; "Bartholomew Fair," 1614; "The Devil is an Ass," 1616; "The Staple of News," 1625; "The New Inn," 1630; " The Magnetic Lady," 1632; "The Tale of a Tub," 1633. These plays were not the author's chief means of living : they were not as a rule popular. He told Drummond in 16 1 8 that all his plays together had not brought him ^200. A more lucrative employment was the preparation of Masques for the Court : he seems to have furnished the Court with a masque or other entertainment almost every year from the accession of James till 1627, when his quarrel with Inigo Jones lost him this })leasant source of income. In 1613 he went abroad in charge of the eldest son of Sir Walter Raleigh. In 16 16 he obtained from the Crown a pension of 100 marks. This was confirmed to him by Charles ; yet from his loss of the Court entertainments, and the failure of the last plays that he wrote, his closing years were em- bittered by distressful poverty. In his celebrated conversations with Drummond during his visit to Scotland in 161 8-19, he com- plained that poetry had " beggared him when he might have been a rich lawyer, physician, or merchant;" and his circumstances at that time were affluent compared with what they were in his later years. Jonson's person was not built on the classical type of graceful or dignified symmetry : he had the large and rugged dimensions of a strong Borderland reiver, swollen by a sedentary life into huge corpulence. Although in his later days he jested at his own " mountain belly and his rocky face," he probably bore his un- wieldy figure with a more athletic carriage than his namesake the lexicographer. Bodily as well as mentally he belonged to the race of Anak. His position among his contemporaries was very much what Samuel Johnson's might have been had he been con- tradicted and fought against by independent rivals, jealous and resentful of his dictatorial manner. Ben Jonson's large and iras- cible personality could not have failed to command respect ; but a litL'i-ality to Dekker's taunt of "the lime-and-mortar poet." But Jonson is entered as " player" in 1596. He can hardly be supposed to have returned to bricklaying. BEN JONSON. 339 his rivals had too much respect for themselves to give way abso- lutely to his authority. They refused to be as grasshoppers in his sight. We should do wrong, however, to suppose that this dis- turbed the giant's peace of mind. Gifibrd, who makes a good many mistakes in the course of his rabidly one-sided memoir of Jonson, is certainly right in saying that he was not an envious man. His arrogance was the arrogance of irascible and magnani- mous strength — good-natured when not thwarted, and placable when well opposed. If his rivals refused to be as grasshoppers, he accepted them contentedly at their own valuation, with, per- haps, passing fits of occasional ill-temper. There is no evidence to support his alleged jealousy of Shakespeare : it is quite possible that he may have made occasional sharp remarks about his great contemporary ; but when he sat down to remember the worth of the mighty dead, his words breathed nothing but sincere and generous admiraticm and warm friendship. His relations with Marston and Inigo Jones are typical of the man. He quarrelled with them and showed them up, was reconciled, and quarrelled again. He took offence at Marston, and ridiculed him unmerci- fully as Crispinus "The Poetaster"; became friends with him again; received the dedication of his "Malcontent"; and wrote with him and Chapman in " Eastward Ho ! " yet told Drummond that he had many quarrels with Marston. He scoffed at Inigo Jones in " Bartholomew Fair" asLanthorn Leatherhead, a puppet- seller and contriver of masques ; ^ co-operated with him afterwards in the preparation of Court entertainments ; and finally liroke with him utterly, and tried to extinguish him with lofty contempt. There seems to be no denying that Ben was irascible and difficult to get on with. Yet there was a fundamental large-hearted good- humour in him too. We must not judge of him altogether by his conversations with Drummond, as Drummond himself did : he was the sort of man that falls into fits of incontinent railing and de- preciation, and so conveys an erroneous impression of his normal inner nature. In his better moods he was not unwilling to laugh at his own failings. He had many friends among the great patrons of poetry. When we examine into the alleged correctness of Jonson's plays, we find curious evidence of how his known acquaintance with the classics has imposed upon his critics. " Generally speaking," says Gilford, " his characters have but one predominating quality : his merit (whatever it be) consists in the felicity with which he com- bines a certain number of such personages, distinct from one 1 Gifford denied tliis without authority. It is supported by tlie Drummond conversations, in whicli Jonson said (in 1618) that he had told Prince Cliarles that " when he wanted words to set forth a knave, he would name him an Ini- go ; " and also by the language of his final " Expostulation with Inigo Jones." 340 SIIAKESrEARE'S CONTEMPOEARIES. another, into a well-ordered and regular plot, dexterously preserv- ing the unities of time and place, and exhibiting all the probabili- ties which the most rigid admirer of the ancient models could possibly demand." The regularity of the plot and the observation of the })rol)abilities are parts of Clifford's preconceived ideal, formed without the slightest attention to the facts. As regards regularity, Jonson is so far regular that in most of his plays four acts are occupied in exhibiting every man in his humour,^ while the fifth act exhibits every man out of his humour ; and the " humours " overmaster every other consideration. In the running criticisms of Mitis and Cordatus, the author's friends, in " Every Man out of his Humour," he is careful to point out that " herein his art appears most full of lustre, and approacheth nearest the life : " it is like the course of things in reality that his actors should for some time " strongly pursue and continue their humours," and thereafter, in the flame and height of them, be suddenly laid flat. Macilente, Carlo Buftbne, and others, in " Every Man out of his Humour"; Amorphus in " Cynthia's Revels"; Crispinus in "The Poetaster"; Volpone and his dupes in "The Fox"; Face and Subtle and their dupes in " The Alchemist " ; Overdo and his friends in " Bartholomew Fair"; Fitzdottrel in " The Devil is an Ass " ; — all come to grief in the last act, after a triumphant career in their several humours. So far, Ben Jonson's comedies are well- ordered and regular — so far they have a rigorous and unbending unity ; but the connection between the various victims of tyran- nical humours is of the loosest kind, and there is no attempt at subtlety of construction or artful excitation of suspense in prepar- ing the way for the final collapse : the whole interest lies in the representation of the characters and the incidents." Probability, either of character or of incident, is about the last thing one would think of alleging. Ben Jonson's " humours," by his own defini- tion of them, are caricatures. It is ridiculous to suppose that they 1 The \vorular witch-songs, whether written before or after Shakespeare wi'ote "Macbeth," they may have been adopted in the stage co^jy of the play. 350 SHAKESPEAKE .S SUCCESSOHS. VI. — John Fletcher ( 1 579-1625). It is not without compunction that one ventures to dissolve the long - established union between the names of Beaumont and Fletcher, and to characterise the second and principal member by himself. The rigour of my plan demands it. There are ample materials for forming an estimate of Fletcher, because he wrote plays unassisted probably before, and certainly after, his partnership with Beaumont ; while in groping after the character of Beaumont we must trust chiefly to imperfect materials— a masque, a few poems, vague traditions, and arbitrary recognition of portions of his joint work with Fletcher. If there had been marked ditterences between the plays written by Fletcher alone, and those written by him in conjunction with Beaumont, one might have proceeded with some confidence to allocate their respective shares in the joint compositions. But I must confess for myself that there is no passage in any of the joint plays that I could afHrm with any confidence not to be Fletcher's — not to contain traces of his hand. Of the three plays in which it is known for certain that Beaumont took part — the " Maid's Tragedy," " Philaster," and " A King and No King " — all have the same complexion as Fletcher's single compositions, similar characters, similar sentiments, and similar impelling forces. One would expect the metre to be a good criterion of separate identity. The abundance of feminine endings in Fletcher's undoubted verse, and his habit of running one line into another, have been sug- gested as tests; but the application of these tests is rendered uncertain by the fact that they do not apply to Fletcher's " Faithful Shepherdess." We cannot pick out certain passages as being Beaumont's, simply on the ground that they contain a smaller proportion of feminine endings than certain other pas- sages Avhich may be supposed to be Fletcher's. On the whole, I see no reason to doubt the opinion currrent during the reign of Charles I., and communicated by Bishop Earle to Aubrey, that Beaumont's chief share in the inlays lay in correcting the exuber- ance of Fletcher. Almost all the commendatory poems prefixed to the edition of 1647 — poems by Denham, Waller, Lovelace, Herrick, Lowell, Cartwright, Iiichard Brome, &c. — are addressed to Fletcher alone. Iiichard Brome, Jonson's servant and pupil, who knew Fletcher intimately, and was as likely as any man to be aware of the exact relationship between the two dramatists, gives all the glory to Fletcher. The truth probably is, that Beau- mont applied his superior judgment to the task of amending Fletcher's first drafts, seeing that his prolific partner w^as strongly averse to the labour of correction. I cannot say that there is any one scene in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher which I JOHN FLETCHER. 351 should feel warranted in assigning to Beaumont alone, although it is quite possible that he contributed whole Scenes, if not whole Acts. All the dramatists hitherto considered in our survey agree in being men of humble extraction, who had to fight their way in the world through manifold difficulties. Fletcher is only partly an exception to this agreement. He was the son of a Kentish clergyman, who rose to the rank of bishop ; but his father died in 1596, when he was seventeen years old, and left a widow and a large family in distressed circumstances. Five years before his father's death, Fletcher had entered Bennet College, Cambridge, and he was resident there in 1593. No other particulars of his private life have been ascertained. He seems to have begun to write for the stage about 1606, the supposed date of his "Woman- Hater"; and before he was cut off by the plague in 1625, he had written or co-operated in writing no less than sixty plays. Fletcher entered the dramatic field when the rivalry of wit was at its hottest. He belonged to the lighter build of combatants — the saucy bark, rather than the imperious, jiroud, full sail. It is significant of his personal appearance that his portraits were con- sidered failures : there was no catching the quick play of his vivacious features. His first dramatic effort— if the " Woman- Hater " is so — was in the mock-heroic vein, and gave proof of a comic genius second only to Shakespeare's. There are two comic heroes in the play — Gondarino, a ridiculously ill-conditioned and techy hater of women ; and Lazarillo, a fanatic and insatiable gourmand. Gondariuu's sourness takes the fancy of a mischief- loving young lady, Oriana, who amuses herself and gives rise to some most ludicrous scenes by making violent love to the old porcupine, very much to his disgust. In the pursuit of her whim, however, she compromises herself by equivocal behaviour, and narrowly escapes falling a victim to the cynic's ludicrously diaboli- cal project of revenge. Alongside this series of incidents, and partly interwoven with them, runs the mock-heroic passion of Lazarillo, whose sole aim in life is to get possession of dainty food without paying for it. His goddess is Plenty, and his daily prayer to her is, " Fill me this day with some rare delicates." A sumptuous feast is the sacrifice that he vows to perform. Bills of fare are his holy scriptures, which he never fails to take up with reverence. Lazarillo's page, whose office it is to haunt the kitchens of the great, and bring instant word of forthcoming dishes, in order that his master may devise stratagems and ambuscades to procure a taste of them, one day reports that the Duke's table is to be graced by — the head of an Umbrana. "Is it possible'?" cries Lazarillo ; " can heaven be so propitious to the Duke 1 " And forthwith he vows to pursue this Umbrana's head with all his 352 SHAKESPEARE'S SUCCESSORS. .strength, mind, and heart. He procures an introduction to the Duke, only to find that the Duke has sent the object of his idolatry to Gondarino : when good fortune has thrown Gondarino in Ms way, and he is beginning to rejoice, he finds that it has gone to Gondarino's mercer : when he has skilfully engineered an invitation to dine with the mercer, he finds that the mercer has sent it to a woman of doubtful fame. After these and other checks at moments when the Umbrana's head was almost between his teeth, he at last attains it by marrying the mercer's mistress. The intensity of Lazarillo's passion for the rare morsel, his ecstasies when he is on the point of attaining it, his profound dejection and distraction after each temporary repulse to his hopes, are in the maddest vein of mock-heroism. The " Woman-Hater " is a good introduction to Fletcher's gay and daring humour. He indulged it without much regard for decency : he had less veneration than Shakespeare to check him : he is more coolly contemptuous in laying serious respectabilities by the heels. The " Faithful Shepherdess " gives us a more beautiful side of his character, developed with the same free- dom and abandonment of himself to the full swing of a ruling sentiment. This masque, though naturally enough condemned when put on the public stage as a drama, furnished Milton with a model for his "Comus," and is in itself one of the finest monuments of our moralising pastoral poetry. Fletcher throws himself unreservedly into the loves and crosses of Amoret and Perigot, and the pious austerity of the bereaved Clorin, and lets his imagination revel in picturing the scene of their adventures. The wood where the mistakes of a night are enacted is very fitting for a romantic drama : — " For ill that holy wood is consecrate A virtuous -well, about whose llowery banks The nimble- footed fairies dance tbeir rounds ]\y the ])ale moonsliine, di;ii)ing often-tiines Tbeir stolen children, so to make them free From dying ilesh and dull mortality. By this fair fount bath many a shepherd sworn And given away his freedom ; many a troth Been plighted, wbicli nor Envy nor old Time Could ever break, with many a chaste kiss given, In hope of coming bappiness." The mad irrepressible humour of the poet, however, broke through the sweet surface of his romantic conception : he spoiled his paradise by introducing, as evil princi[)les, the wantons Cloe and Alexis, and the malignant Sullen Shepherd, and investing them with characters so disgusting, that their gross hiunour, instead of operating as an elevating contrast, tends rather to throw a taint of ridicule on the whole composition. JOHN FLETCHER. 353 From Dryden down to Coleridge, all Fletcher's critics have remarked his success in representing the easy and animated conversation of young gentlemen. Don John in the " Chances," Mirabel in the " Wild Goose Chase," Cleremont in the " Little French Lawyer," Don .Jamie and Leandro in the " Spanish Curate," Monsieur Thomas, and many others, use much less abstruse language than Shakespeare's Biron, Gratiano, Benedick, and suchlike, and language consequently better suited to the mouths of young men of blood and fashion. The truth is, that Fletcher's easy, rapid, copious style, preserved by his good taste and sense of humour from conceits, and by his superficial nature from any kind of depth or intricacy, approaches nearer the language of polite conversation than the style of any of his contemporaries : the ease and sprightliness is not specially put on for young men of spirit, but is a pervading characteristic of his style. There is a similar dash and abandonment in the language of all his personages : he throws himself heartily and impetuously, but not deeply, into a situation, and expresses the sentiment of the moment with unfailing] abundance of clear, bright-coloured, gracious, and noble words. Apart from his fertile humour, which is no less varied than un- scrupulous, the main charm of Fletcher lies in the plentiful stream of simple ideas and readily understood feelings, expressed in felicitous and animated language. When we try to grasp the consistency of his characters, and regard his plays as wholes, we discover many evidences of weak characterisation and hasty construction. It is remarkable how few of his personages are throughout admirable, beautiful, or venerable ; and this arises not from cynical purpose, as in Jonson, but from sketchiness and shallowness of conception. He is fond of delineating exemplarily virtuous women ; but chastity is too often and too prominently their sole claim upon our interest, and many of them pollute their lips with language the reverse of lovely. His magnanimous heroes, also, harp too much on one string : he could not have ventured to show a hero in bis domestic and playful side, as Shakespeare does with Hotspur. And many of his personages, both male and female — Sorano, Protaldye, Brunhalt, &c. &c. — are abominably vile, — vile almost beyond parallel. One cannot say that in the plays pruned by the revision or enlarged by the co-operation of Beaumont, there is much differ- ence in these respects. There are exquisite passages in the sad stories of Aspatia and Euphrasia, as there are in the stories of Amoret or Evanthe, showing them to be children of the same delicate fancy ; but there is a want of body in the appeal that they make to our sympathies : they are, besides, brought into too close contact with the pitch that defiles. And both the " Maid's Tragedy" and " Philaster" are seriously disfigured by the ignoble Z 354 Shakespeare's successors. and repulsive character of the impelling forces : the shameless intrigue of Evadne and the king is too violent an outrage on de- cency, too base and animal, to permit any dignity to envelop its tragic consequences ; and the easy credence given to the filthy accusations of Megra, so base, unsupported, and obviously mali- cious, makes us look upon the hero as a fool, and seriously affects his claims to our interest and admiration. VII. — John Webster (?). Dekker's partner in " Westward Ho ! " " Northward Ho ! " and "Sir Thomas Wyatt," was to all appearance as different from him- self as one man of genius could be from another — a man who sank deep shafts into the mines of tragedy, and built up his plays with profound design and deliberate care. Dekker is not more remarkable for his genial reproduction of city life in loosely contrived scenes, and for his easy unstudied sympathy with deep heart' s-sor rowing and keen heart' s-bitterness, than Webster is for his penetrating grasp of character, meditated construction of intricate scenes, and elaborate, just, and powerful treatment of terrible situations. One would expect from the joint work of two such men results of the most supreme kind — plays that might compete with the unrivalled Shake- speare. But the excellent qualities of two men cannot be fused into one work of art : two minds cannot work as one with the united strength of the strong faculties of both. Of the three joint plays of Dekker and Webster, two of them, " Westward Ho ! " and " Northward Ho ! " are not distinguishable from the unaided pro- ductions of Dekker ; while the third, " Sir Thomas Wyatt," in the mutilated and imperfect shape that has been handed down to us, contains strong marks of Webster, and may be regarded as being, in great part, the first effort of his powerful genius. Concerning Webster's life one can only rej^eat the same tale of ignorance that must be told concerning so many of our dramatists. He was born free of the Merchant Tailors' Company ; began to write for the stage as early as 1601 ; and we may conjecture, from his predilection for scenes in courts of law and his elaborate treat- ment of them, that he had been bred to the profession. His quotations show that he had at least been taught Latin, and so far had received a learned education. His fame rests on three tragedies and a tragic comedy, — " Vittoria Corombona, the White Devil," published in 161 2 ; " The Duchess of Malfi," 1623 ; " The Devil's Law-Case," a tragi-comedy, 1623; and " Appius and Virginia," not published till 1654.^ ^ Mr E. Gosse artjues that the main plot in " A Cure for a Cuckohl " is Web- ster's. But the share of each of two joint authors must always he doubtful. See article ou Middleton, 'Academy,' August 22, 1885. JOHN WEBSTER. 355 In the preface to " Vittoria Corombona," Webster defends him- self against the charge of being a slow composer. We find this charge also in a contemporary satirist (' Notes from Blackfriars,' 1620), who draws a very lively picture of " crabbed Websterio " : — ' ' See liow he draws his moutli awry of late, How he scrubs, wrings his wrists, scratches his pate ; A midwife, help ! . . . . Here's not a word cursively I have writ But he'll industriously examine it ; And in some twelve months thence, or thereabout, Set in a shameful sheet my errors out." Webster does not deny the charge ; but he answers his critics with a bold tradition : " Alcestides objecting that Euripides had only in three days composed three verses, whereas himself had written three hundred ; ' Thou tellest truth,' quoth he, ' but here's the difference : thine shall only be read for three days, whereas mine shall continue three ages.' " Webster's characters could not have been drawn nor his scenes constructed in a hurry. Appius and Romelio are unsurpassed as broad and elaborate studies, filled in with indefatigable detail and accommodated with subtle art to a profound conception. In following these masterpieces the student of character is kept in an ecstasy of delight by stroke after stroke of the most unerring art. lu every other scene their replies and ways of taking things surprise us, yet every such paradox on reflection is seen to accord with the central conception of their character, and increases our admiration of the dramatist's deep insight antl steady grasp. And these plays are not merely closet- plays, whose excellences can be picked out and admired only at leisure. The characters have not the simplicity and popular in- telligibility of Shakespeare's Richard or lago. The plots, too, except in " Appius and Virginia," where all the incidents lie in the direct line of the catastrophe, are involved with obscure windings and turnings. Yet all the scenes are carefully constructed for dramatic eti'ect. Mark how studious Webster has been that his actors shall never go lamely off the stage : they make their exit at happily chosen moments, and with some remark calculated to leave a buzz of interest behind them. When we look closely into Webster's plays we become aware that no dramatist loses more in closet perusal : all his dialogues were written with a careful eye to the stage. Everywhere throughout his plays we meet with marks of deep meditation and just design. It is not with his plays as with Fletcher's. The more we study Webster, the more we find to admire. His characters approach nearer to the many-sidedness of real men and women than those of any dramatist except Shake- speare ; and his exhibition of the changes of feeling wrought in 356 SHAKESPEAKES SUCCESSORS. them by the changing progress of events, though characterised by- less of revealing instinct and more of penetrating effort than appear in Shakespeare, is hardly less powerful and true. Webster did not attempt comedy, unless in conjunction with Dekker, and before he had felt where his strength lay. The moral saws wrought into his dialogues show that his meditations held chiefly to the dark side of the world. In forming our impression of the man, we are perhaps unduly dominated by the concluding scenes of " Vittoria Corombona " and " The Duchess of Malfi " : it is from these scenes that he has received the name of "the terrible Webster." It showed a strange ignorance of his own power that in the preface to "Vittoria" he regretted that the nature of the English stage would not permit him to write sententious tragedy after the model of the ancients, "observing all the critical laws, as height of style and gravity of person, en- riching it with the sententious chorus, and, as it were, enlivenincf drdth in the passionate and wevjlity nuntius." He does undoubt- edly observe height of style, and his persons are exempt from meanness and ignobility. Uncontrollable passionate love, and a temporary insanity of avarice pursued with subtle policy and bitterly repented of, are the chief impelling forces of his four great plays ; and even inferior instruments of villany, such as Ludowick, Flamineo, and Bosola, are invested with a certain dignity. But that Webster should have desired to relate those terrific death-scenes instead of exhibiting them as he has done, showed a strange obliviousness of the basis of his own fame and the excellence of modern tragedy. Not to mention his grander scenes, how tame and unimpressive would have been the fate of the poisoned Brachiano in the narrative of a messenger to his beloved mistress Vittoria, compared with what it is when we are brought face to face with the fearfully punished sinner and the passionately interested witnesses of his agony. "Brack. Oil! I am gone already. The infection Flies to the Lrain and heart. tlion strong heart ! There's such a covenant 'tween the world and it, They're loath to break. Giovanni. my most loved father ! Brack. Remove the boy away : Where's this good woman ? had I infinite worlds, They are too little for thee. Must I leave thee ? What say j'ou, screech-owls ? is the venom mortal ? Physician. Most deadly. Brack. Most corrupted, politic hangman ! You kill without book ; but your art to save Fails you as oft as great men's needy friends. I that have given life to offending slaves And wretched murderers, have I not power To lengthen mine own a twelvemonth ? CYKIL TOUENEUR. 357 Do not kiss me, for I sluiU poison thee ; This unction is sent from the Great Duke of Florence. Fran, dc Medici [his enemy the Great Duke in disgitisc]. Sir. he of comfort. Brack. thou soft natural death, that art joint-twin To sweetest slumber ! no rough-bearded comet Stares on thy mild departure ; the dull owl Beats not against thy casement ; the hoarse wolf Scents not thy carrion. Pity winds thy corse Whilst horror waits on princes. Vittoria Cororiibona. I am lost for ever ! Brack. How miserable a thing it is to die 'Mongst women howling ! what are those ? Flamineo. Franciscans. They have brought the extreme unction. Brack. On pain of death let no man name death to me : It is a word most infinitely terrible. Withdraw into our cabinet." Brachiano's bidding Vittoria not kiss him or slie will be poisoned, is characteristic of Webster's subtle art. The wretched man had been moved by his passion for Vittoria, the "white devil," to poison his wife, and the deed had been heartlessly done by anointing with a deadly unction the lips of a picture of her husband which the poor lady was in the habit of kissing every night before she went to bed ; and this line at once shows the direction of Brachiano's franticly shifting thoughts, and brings the crime by a sudden Hash side by side with the punishment and the impassioned motive. VIII.— Cyril Tournbur (?). Tourneur's name will always be associated with Webster's, because his nature led him within the same circle of terrible subjects. Only two of his plays survive, the "Revenger's Tragedy" and the "Atheist's Tragedy"— the one first published in 1607, the other in 161 1. Nothing more is known about him, except that he wrote also a play called the " Nobleman," which was utilised by Warburton's cook. Tourneur was far from having the breadth and the weight of Webster's genius : he does not take so deep a hold of the being of his personages. Yet he is entitled to a high and unique place among the Elizabethan dramatists. There is a piercing intelligence in his grasp of character, a daring vigour and fire in his expression. His two plays show no elaborate study of variety of character ; but he burns the chief moods of his principal characters deep into the mind. Vindici, in the " Eevenger's Tragedy," forms an interesting comparison with Hamlet. His character, one need hardly say, is 358 SHAKESPEARE'S SUCCESSORS. not so versatile and complete as Hamlet's ; but " Hamlet," also, is a revenger's tragedy : and it is worth while to look at the two side by side. Vindici is sustained throughout in one mood : from the first he knows who it is that has robbed him of his mistress, and he pursues the murderer with imwavering hatred. At no time is his spirit tilled with weariness of the whole course of the world : he lives throughout at a demoniac pitch, turned all to gall and wormwood by the bitter wrong done to him, and expatiating on the world with daring wit, fierce biting mockery. The critics of last generation, in their remarks on the unseasonable levity of Handet, seemed to have lost sight of the fact that the deepest and most wringing sorrow, when it is not too strong for the frame of the sufferer, finds vent more in laughter than in tears. Vindici's laughter is still more terrible than Hamlet's, because his angry bitterness is so unrelaxed and unvaried by gentle moods. Even his anger does not pass through many phases. There is no sustained weight of indignation in it : the intense scoffing vein is }»aramount, and the earnestness of his passion only flashes through at fiery intervals. In the scene in which he explains to his brother the plan of revenge that he has formed, his fantastic demoniac mirth, his bitter buffoonery is at its height ; and the passage is one of the many that show how much higher those dramatists rose into the extravagances of human passion than sober-footed critics have since been able to follow them. Vindici's bride, Gloriana, had been ravished and poisoned by the Duke, and Vindici, the better to effect his revenge, had fiercely forced himself to, assume the disguise of a pander. In this disguise he had been employed by the Duke to procure a mistress, and he explains (Act iii.) to his brother with bitter delight who the mistress is that he has provided. He keeps the skull of his dead bride in his study, and he has resolved to bring this veiled to the old "luxur" at the appointed spot, and when the deception is discovered, to consummate his revenue. 'O" '^ Enter ViNUici untlo HirroLYTo Ms brother. Vind. sweet, delectable, rare, happy, ravishing ! Hipp. Why, wliat's the matter, brother ? Vind. 0, 'tis able to make a man spring up and knock bis forehead against yon silver ceiling. Hipp. Pr'ythee tell me .... Vind. ' ' ' Tlie old Duke . Hires me by price to greet him with a lady In some lit place, veiled from the eyes of the court. I have took care For a delicioiis lip, a sparkling eye ! You shall be witness, brother. Be ready ; stand witli your hat olf. CYRIL TOUENEUE, 359 Hipp. Truth I woink'r wliat lady it should be; Yet 'tis no wonder, now I think again, To have a lady stoop to a Duke. Enter ViNDici with the skull of his leva dressed up in tires. Find. Madam, his grace will not be absent long. Secret? Ne'er doubt us. Madam. 'Twill be worth Three velvet gowns to your ladyship. Known ? Few ladies respect that disgrace ; a poor thin shell ! 'Tis the best grace you have to do it well. I'll save your hand that labour. I'll unmask you. Hiiyp. Why, brother, brother ? Vind. Art thou beguiled now ? Have I not fitted the old sui'feiter With a (j^uaint piece of beauty ? . Here's an eye. Able to tempt a great man — to serve God. A pretty hanging lip, tliat has forgot now to dissemble. Methinks this mouth should make a swearer tremble, A drunkard clasp his teetli, and not uudo them To suffer wet damnation to run through them. Here's a cheek keeps her colour, let the wind go whistle. Spout, rain, we fear thee not : be hot or cold, All's one with us. And is not he absurd Whose fortunes are upon tlicir faces set, That fear no other God but wind and wet. Hi2^p. Brother, you've spoke that right. Is this the form that living shone so bright ? Vind. The very same. And now methinks I could e'en chide myself For doating on her beauty, though her death Shall be avenged after no common action." 'o^ There are many striking passages in Tourneur of splendid declamation and masterly description. Perhaps none is more remarkable than that quoted by Lamb under the title of " The Drowned Soldier." With all one's reverence for Lamb as a critic, one cannot help saying that this title and his slightly disparaging remark about the weaving of parenthesis within parenthesis sliows that he did not feel the peculiar and wonderful power of the description. It is not the drowned soldier that we are interested in : it is the movements of his terrible murderer. I know nothing comparable to this passage as a description of the fearfulness of the sea : it makes one shudder to read it — as if the gigantic sea- serpent himself were hissing and wallowing before us in his un- couth and horrible pity. " Walking upon the fatal shore, vVmong the slauglitered bodies of their men, Which the full-stomached sea had cast u]ion The sands, it was my unhappy chance to light Upon a face, whose favour when it lived 360 SHAKESPEARE'S SUCCESSORS. My astonished mind informed me I had seen. He lay in his armour, as if that had been His coffin ; and the weeping sea (like one Whose milder temper doth lament the death Of him whom in his rage he slew) runs up The shore, embraces him, kisses his cheek ; Goes back again, and forces up the sands To bury him ; and every time it parts, Sheds tears upon him ; till at last (as if It could no longer endure to see the man Whom it had slain, yet loath to leave him) with A kind of unresolved unwilling pace. Winding her waves one in another (like A man that folds his arms, or wrings his hands For grief), ebbed from the body, and descends As if it would sink down into the earth, And hide itself for shame of such a deed." IX. — John Ford (1586-1640?). Whoever wishes to fully understand Ford's genius shouKl read Mr Swinburne's paper in the 'Fortnightly Eeview ' of July 187 1. All other criticisms must appear faint and colourless after that masterpiece of searching criticism and noble language. It is still, however, open to consider Ford more especially as a dramatist. In what follows, my endeavour has been to trace the influence of Ford's character on the structure of his plays. Little is known of Ford's life. Two doggerel lines that have come down in a contemporary satire on the poets of the time are rather expressive of what seems to have been the character of the man : — " Deep in a dump John Ford alone was got, With folded arms and melancholy hat." He seems to have been a jjroud, reserved, austere kind of man, of few and warm attachments, with but slender gifts in the way of ebullient spirits or social flow. He was a barrister, with a respect- able ancestry to look back to ; and though he wrote several j)lays, and did not disdain to work in conjunction with such a profes- sional playwright as Dekker, he was nervously anxious lest it should be supposed that he made his living by play-writing. In his first Prologue he spoke contemptuously of such as made poetry a trade, and he took more than one opportunity of protesting that his plays were the fruits of leisure, the issue of less serious hours. Some of his plays he dedicated to noblemen, but he was careful to assure them that it was not his habit to court greatness, and that his dedication was a simple offering of respect without mer- cenary motive. His first play, "The Lover's Melancholy," he dedicated to his friends in Gray's Inn, avowing that he desired JOHN FOKD. 361 not to please the many, but to obtain the free opinion of his equals in condition. Ford had good reason for making this independent stand. Although Shakespeare had made his living chiefly by poetry, and had been not very scrupulous in using the fancies and inventions of others, there were many traders in j^lay-writing with whom it was not so reputable to be classed. The servility of begging dedications, too, had become quite loathsome. At the same time, the haughty reserved disposition out of which this independence came was not favourable to dramatic excellence. A play written to please the few is not likely to be a good play. The dramatist must be above the narrowness of sympathy that this implies. And this ungeniality produces failure where, on first consideration, a nineteenth-century reader would least expect it. Such a reader, on hearing of an Elizabethan playwright anxious to please the few, would expect to find him abstaining from the indecency that makes so many of these plays unfit for family reading. But it is quite the other way. Ford's low-comedy scenes are very coarse and very dull. To be sure, the gentlemen of Gray's Inn, the few for whom Ford wrote, were not particular on this point. But this was not the main cause of the ofFensiveness of Ford's attempts at humour. The main cause was his want of sympathy with his low-comedy puppets. He makes them express themselves as if he disliked them and wished to make them odious and contemp- tible : their coarseness is unprovoked, gratuitous, with very little of wit or humour to redeem it. Fletcher's Megra and other creations of that type are quite as gross as Ford's Putana ; but the dramatist enters into their obscene humour, and in some deicree takes away the attention from its obscenity by the cleverness of its intrusions, the comical irrepressibility of its chuckle. Now Ford had not sufficient freedom of high spirits to enter into the humour of his Putanas and Berghettos, and there is a cynicism, a harshness, an oifensive exaggeration, in his representation of the frankness of their language. But the haughty reserve and want of heartiness in Ford's nature told against his plays in a much more serious respect. He would not seem to have looked at his plays from the point of view of his audience, or to have exerted himself to stir their interest or to keep it from flagging. There is a certain haughtiness of touch even in his language ; sometimes a repudiation of emphasis, as if he did not care to be impressive on a slight occasion ; sometimes a wilful abstruseness, as if it mattered nothing though his words were misunderstood. This alone is often the cause of considerable reaches of dull dialogue — dull, that is to say, for the purposes of the stage. In his first play, also, "The Lover's Melancholy," three acts pass before any very strong interest is excited in the 362 shakespeaee's successors. personages or the action. The main issues presented to us are — what is the cause of the Prince of Cyprus's melancholy, and whether he will recover from it. It is hinted that this melancholy may have dangerous consequences — that discontent is muttering at home, and that enemies are gathering on the borders of the kingdom, presuming on the inactivity of the prince : but these consequences, instead of being powerfully represented, so as to throw the interest of a mixed audience keenly on the prince's dejection and indifference to affairs of state, are only dimly and faintly mentioned, in such a way that no ordinary hearer would perceive their importance. In the underplot we are never agitated by any fear of an untoward issue. We never have any serious apprehension that the haughty Thaumasta will eventually reject Menaphon, or that the noble and prosperous Ametlms will falter in his love to Cleophila. And the story of the Prince Palador and his mistress Eroclea, with its picture of the forlorn Eroclea, and its finely wrought presentation of their reunion, is not by itself, without further development, enough for a drama : it is better suited for a descriptive epic. It is only in his two great tragedies, the " Broken Heart " and " 'Tis Pity she's a Whore," that Ford's power is unmistakably shown. In them he has to deal, from the first scene, with men under the full sway of intelligible passion ; and in the presence of passion his haughtiness, his reserve, his indifference, vanishes, and he enters earnestly into the work of interpretation. The second of these two plays, in spite of the harsh, affected, and offensive levity of the title, is Ford's masterpiece, — the play that justifies Mr Swinburne's eloquent panegyric, and will always be most in the critic's mind in all attempts to fix Ford's place among the dramatists. In the " Broken Heart," notwithstanding its many powerful and touching passages, there is somewhat too much of learned delineation of character : the noble heroism of strength and impetuosity in Ithocles and Calantha is too obtrusively bal- anced against the tamer heroism of determined endurance in the other pair of lovers, Orgilus and Penthea. All the persons of the drama have names expressive of their leading qualities ; and at the close, our wonder at the strangeness of the lunatic jealousy of Bassanes, the pitiless, dogged, irreconcilable revengefulness of Orgilus, the bitter constancy of Penthea in starving herself to death, seriously obstructs the nobler emotions of horror and pity. Even the closing scene, in which the heroic Calantha hears of the death of her father and her lover, and gives no sign of sorrow till the duties of her high state have been performed, when her over- strained heart-strings break, and she falls dead on the body of her slain lover, is more likely to stun and amaze all but the select few, than to come home powerfully to their sympathies. But there are PHILIP MASSINGEK. 363 no such scholarly obstructions to the terrible tragedy of fate-driveu love between Brother and Sister. In it passion is supreme from the first scene to the last. A man can never Avholly hide a ruling tendency in his nature ; and even Ford's great tragedies are not without traces of his harshness and severity. There is something very unsatisfactory in the characters of Bassanes and Vasques : it frets and vexes us at the end to see such base deformities stand by and triumph at the fall of nobler natures. We may think them unworthy of the sword of poetic justice — we may reason them out of the sphere of guilt in the tragedy ; but their triumph disconcerts us. X. — Philip Massinger (i 584-1 640). Massinger had less original force than any of the other great dramatists. He was eminently a cultivated dramatist, a man of broad, liberal, adaptive mind, fluent and vei'satile, with just con- ceptions of dramatic effect, and the power of giving copious ex- pression to his conceptions without straining or dislocating eftbrt. Yet he was much too strong and vigorous to be a mere imitator. His nature was not such as to fight against the influence of his great predecessors : his mind opened itself genially to their work, and absorbed their materials and their methods ; but he did not simply reproduce them — they decomposed, so to speak, in his mind, and lay there ready to be laid hold of and embodied in new organisms. So far he resembled Shakespeare, in that he had good sense enough not to harass himself in straining after little novel- ties : his judgment was broad and manly. But he was far from resembling Shakespeare in swiftness and originality of imagination : his muse was comparatively tame and even-paced. The common remark that his diction is singularly free from archaisms shows us one aspect of the soundness of his taste, and bears testimony, at the same time, to his want of eccentricity and original force. He was the Gray of his generation — greater than Gray, inasmuch as his generation was greater than Gray's — a man of large, open, fertile, and versatile mind. His personal career is obscure. His father was " a servant " in the family of the Herberts of Pembroke, as we know from the dedication of his " Bondman," and " spent many years in the service of that honourable house ; " but whether the service was menial, or such as might be rendered by a gentleman, there is no means of ascertaining. At any rate, Massinger' s position was not such as to prevent him from going to Oxford in 1602, or from being in a debtor's prison about 1614, and under the necessity of joining with two others in begging an advance of ;?£"5 from Henslowe to procure his release. From the almost desperate 364 shakespeake's successors. mendicancy of his dedications, which are the extreme opposites of Ford's, one would judge him to have lived in wretched poverty : and the entry of his death in the register of St Saviour's — "buried Philip Massinger, a stranger" — gives us no ground for hoping against the most natural inference. The probability is that Massinger began to write for the stage about 1606, if not a year or two earlier, going up from the university as Marlowe and Thomas Nash had done some twenty years before, in search of literary fame and the mysteries of London life. He did not, however, begin to publish till much later, his first printed play being " The Virgin Martyr," which appeared in 1622, and in which he had the assistance of Dekker. Only twelve of his plays were published during his lifetime, out of the thirty-seven which he is known to have written. Perhaps we have the less reason to regret this, because the plays published in his lifetime are decidedly superior to those published after his death. He himself saw in print, besides "The Virgin Martyr," — "The Duke of Milan," 1623; "The Bondman," 1624; "The Roman Actor," 1629; "The Picture," 1630; "The Fatal Dowry," 1632 ; "The Maid of Honour," 1632 ; "A New Way to Pay Old Debts," 1633 ; and "The Great Duke of Florence," 1636. After all, it may be that Mr Warburton's cook, who is said to have covered his pies and lighted his fires with some twelve of Massinger's plays, may have done both the world and the poet a service. Gifford entertained the notion that Massinger must have turned Roman Catholic when he was at Oxford. The notion is based upon the use that Massinger makes of a Roman Catholic legend in " The Virgin Martyr," and the fair character that he gives to a Jesuit priest in " The Renegado." One wants proof more relative : this only proves that Massinger was able to treat Roman Catholics with dramatic impartiality.^ Coleridge's notion about Massinger's democratic leanings is equally questionable. Massinger, indeed, makes one of his characters sigh for the happy times when lords were styled fathers of families. He makes another say that princes do well to cherish goodness where they find it, for — " They being men and not gods, Contarino, They can give wealth and titles, but not virtues. " He makes Timoleon administer a sharp rebuke '^to the men of Syracuse for corruption prevailing in high places, and rate them soundly for preferring golden dross to liberty. In the same play ("The Bondman"), he takes an evident pleasure in representing the indignities jjut upon high-fed madams by their insurgent slaves : and in " The City Madam " he ridicules ^ But see article on Massinger iu ' Encycloptedia Britauuica. ' PHILIP MASSINGER. 365 with much zest the pretensions of upstart wealth. But all these things are as consistent with a benevolent paternal Toryism as with Whiggery, and are to be looked upon as indications simply of the dramatist's range of sympathies, and not of any discontent on his part with the established framework of government or society. Hartley Coleridge, in his rambling and racy introduction to Massinger and Ford, commits himself to the extraordinary state- ment that Massinger had no humour. "Massinger would have been the dullest of jokers, if Ford had not contrived to be still duller." I have already remarked on the severity and ungeniality of Ford's character ; but there is nothing connected with Mas- singer to imply that he bore the least resemblance to Ford in this point. On the contrary, all Massinger's characteristics are those of a widely sympathetic man, with a genial propensity to laughter. He has written several very obscene passages, such as the court- ship of Asotus by Corisca in " The Bondman," but they are all pervaded by genuine humour ; and a countless number of his scenes, such as that between Wellborn and Marrall in " A New Way to Pay Old Debts," are irresistibly laughable. It may per- haps be said with justice that there is often a certain serious motive underlying Massinger's humour, which connects itself with the earnestness of his distressed life ; but humour he undoubt- edly had, and that of the most ebullient and irrepressible sort. One fancies indeed, but it may be the result of our knowledge of his painful life, that there is a certain sad didactic running through all Massinger's work. The " Duke of Milan," by far his greatest drama, has not the satisfying close of Shakespeare's tragedies. It preaches directly the moral deducible from " Romeo and Juliet," that violent delights have violent ends ; but whereas we do not vex ourselves with vain wishes that Romeo and Juliet had been united in happy marriage, we are at the death of Sforza and Marcelia disconcerted by the feeling that their fate ought to have been, and easily might have been, different. And in his other tragedies Ave are haunted at the close by a similar uneasi- ness : the purgation of the mind by pity and terror is not effected — the tumult that they raise is not tranquillised. All tragedies, of course, are susceptible of a didactic interpretation ; but those in which the didactic has a sharp edge, affect us in quite a different way from those in which it is vaguely present as part of a grand and overwhelming impression ; and Massinger's conclusions have a sharp edge. Again, his romantic tragi-comedies, and even his comedies, have also a serious tinge, apart from the natural interest of the development of the story. They do not directly preach at us, but the colour of the subject-matter suggests that the dramatist was not wholly free-minded and studious only of dramatic and scenic impressions. 366 Shakespeare's successors. XI. — James Shirley (1596-1667). ]\Iore is known about Shirley than about some of his more dis- tinguished, or at least abler contemporaries. He was born in London, and educated at Merchant Tailors' School, St John's College, Oxford, and Catherine Hall, Cambridge. He took orders, and was presented to a living in Hertfordshire ; but in a short time he became Roman Catholic, left his living, turned schoolmaster for a while ; and at last, finding this employment also " uneasy to him, he retired to the metropolis, lived in Gray's Inn, and set up for a playmaker." He was twenty-eight or twenty-nine when he went up to London (probably in 1624 or 1625), and in the course of a few years he got into the full swing of dramatic composition, and produced plays at the rate of two or three or four a-year. The chief were — "Love's Tricks," a comedy, 1625 ; "The Maid's Revenge," a tragedy, 1626; "The Brothers," a comedy, 1626; "The "witty Fair One," a comedy, 1628; "The Wedding," a comedy, 1628; "The Grateful Servant," a tragi-comedy, 1629; "The Changes, or Love in a Maze," 1632; "The Ball" (written in conjunction with Chapman, but almost wholly Shirley's), 1632 ; "The Gamester," a comedy, 1633; "The Example" (containing an imitation of Ben Jonson's kmnours), 1634; "The Oppor- tunity," 1634; "The Traitor," a tragedy (perhaps Shirley's best), 1635 j " l'^^ Lady of Pleasure " (perhaps the best of his comedies), 1635; "The Cardinal," a tragedy (an attempt to compete with Webster's " Duchess of Malfi "), 1641. Under the Commonwealth, Shirley, after some vicissitudes during the civil war, was obliged to return to his old trade of teaching ; and at the Restoration, though several of his plays were revived, he made no attempt to resume his connection with the stage. Shirley's first essay in print was a poem entitled " Echo " (after- wards printed under the more suggestive title of "Narcissus"). A man's youthful work is always a good index of his tendencies and powers, and in this poem the nature of Shirley's gifts shines unmistakably through the lines. He goes boldly to work with jaunty self-assured ease : there is pith and " go " in his style ; he is borne on with pride in his triumphs of expression, but he is victorious with weapons which other men have provided. He has no originality of idea, or situation, or diction. The same thing strikes us in his plays. Lamb says of him that " he was the last of a great race, all of whom spoke nearly the same language, and had a set of moral feelings and notions in common." But the really great men of the race, not merely Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher, but Chapman, Dekker, Web- ster, Ford, and Massinger, spoke the same language with a differ- JAMES SHIELEY. 367 ence ; and each had moral feelings and notions of his own. In Shirley the distinctive individual difference was small, both in amount and in kind : he was not a great man in himself, but an essentially small man inspired by the creations of great men. Fletcher was his master and exemplar, as Shakespeare was ]\Ias- singer's ; but he imitated much more closely, was much more completely carried away by this model than Massinger was. And although his language and moral feelings and notions (even as regards female types and kings) are Fletcher's, and he had most ambition to emulate Fletcher's dashing and brilliant manner, yet Shirley's plays contain frequent echoes of other dramatists. One great interest in reading him is that he reminds us so often of the situations and characters of his predecessors. It is good for the critic, if for nobody else, to read Shirley, because there he finds emphasised all that told most eflfectively on the playgoers of the period. We read Greene and j\Iarlowe to know what the Eliza- bethan drama was in its powerful but awkward youth ; Shirley to know what it was in its declining but facile and still poAverful old age. There were many other able playmakers in the great dramatic period, and notably four Thomases, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Rowley, Thomas Eandolph, and Thomas May, but no other that can be called great, either by originality or by imitation. True, Charles Lamb has called Thomas Heywood "a prose Shake- speare," and that prolific author of 250 plays doubtless has a certain sweet vein of grandmotherly tenderness in him ; but if Elia had lived till now, he would, perhaps, have described good old Heywood more accurately by calling him a garrulous Longfellow. One may hope to be excused for feeling no desire to go farther down the scale than Middleton and Shirley. In studying the literature that led to the supreme eiflorescence of the Elizabethan drama, one thinks no relic too humble to be worth discussing ; but when so many large and powerful minds invite our com- panionship, and continue always to lay before us fresh points of interest and fresh matter for thought, it is intolerably dull to turn from them to the crowd of mediocrities who hang about their doors and follow their footsteps. 368 APPENDIX A. OUR PLEASANT WILLY. Three stanzas are often quoted from Tlialia's complaint regarding the decay of the theatres in Spenser's " Tears of the Muses," and it has been elaborately argued that they refer to Shakespeare. The date of their publication is 1591. " And he, the man whom Nature's self had made To mock herself, and truth to imitate, With kindly counter under mimic shade, Our pleasant Willy, ah ! is dead of late; ' With whom all joy and jolly merriment Is also deaded, and in dolour drent. Instead thereof scoffing Scurrility, And scornful Folly with Contempt is crept. Rolling in rhymes of shameless ribaldry Without regard or due decorum kept ; Each idle wit at will presumes to make. And doth the learned's task upon him take. But that same gentle spirit from whose pen Large streams of honey and sweet nectar flow, Scorning the boldness of such 1)ase-born men. Which dare their follies forth so rashly throw ; Doth rather choose to sit in idle cell. Than so himself to mockery to sell." I have stated some reasons (p. 263) for refusing to believe that these stanzas, however appropriate to Shakespeare we may think them, can possibly have been applied to him in 1591. I believe that death is, in the first stanza, real and not metaphorical, and that Willy is Spenser's friend Sidney. Sidney's death is lamented under that name in an eclogue in Davidson's Poetical Rhapsody — "an eclogue made long since upon the death of Sir Philip Sidney." " Ye she]iherds' boys that lead your flocks, The whilst your sheep feed safely round about, Break me your pipes that pleasant sound did yield, Sing now no more the songs of Colin Clout : " OUE PLEASANT WILLY." 369 Lament the end of all our joj', Lament the source of all annoy ; Willy is dead That wont to lead Our flocks and us in mirth and shepherds' glee : Well could he sing, Well dance and spring ; Of all the shepherds was none such as he. How often hath his skill in pleasant song Dra'wn all the water-nymphs from out their bowers 1 How have they lain the tender grass along, And made him garlands gay of smelling flowers ? Phoebus himself that conquer'd Pan, Striving with Willy nothing wan ; Methinks I see The time when he Pluckt from his golden locks the laurel cro\vn ; And so to raise Our Willy's praise, Bedeckt his head and softly set him down. The learned Muses flockt to hear his skill, And quite forgot their water, wood, and mount ; They thought his songs were done too quickly still, Of none but Willy's pipe they made account. He sung ; they seem'd in joy to flow : He ceast ; they seem'd to weep for woe ; The rural rout All I'oiind about Like bees came swarming thick to hear him sing ; Ne could they think On meat or drink While Willy's music in their ears did ring. But now, alas ! such pleasant mirth is past ; Apollo weeps, the Muses rend their hair. No joy on earth that any time can last. See where his breathless corpse lies on the bier. That self-same hand that reft his life Hath turned shephei'd's peace to strife. Our joy is fled, Our life is dead, Our hope, our help, our glory, all is gone : Our poet's praise. Our happy days, And nothing left but grief to think thereon." The only difficulty in the way of supposing our pleasant Willy to be Sir Philip Sidney is purely factitious. ^ It is taken for granted that all the three of Spenser's stanzas refer to the same person as the first ; and then it is argued that the death of our pleasant Willy must be only metaphorical in tlie first, meaning really his cessation from the composition of comedies, because in the third he is said to be producing large streams of tragedies. But any person who looks at 1 Tlie fact that Sidney did not write comedies, if we exclude his " Lady of the May" from that title, is immaterial. The poet only says that Nature had made him to \vrite comedies — "to mock herself with kindly counter under mimic shade." 2 A 370 APPENDIX A. the whole himent will see that two different persons must be intended. The sequence of thought is this : The first of the three stanzas laments that Willy is dead ; the second, that scoffing scurrility and scornful folly have occupied the stage in his stead ; the third approves the conduct of a li\'ing and producing writer in abstaining from co-operation with base-born plaj''- Wrights. If we suppose " that same gentle spirit " to refer back to our pleasant Willy, and not forward to the next line, we land ourselves in a contradiction whether we regard Willy's death as literal or metaphorical, because this gentle spirit is both really and poetically alive — large streams of honey and nectar are flowing from him. I believe that in the third stanza Thalia refers to Spenser himself, and that here we have his justification of himself for complaining of the withdrawal of learning from the stage, and yet sending no compositions of his own to prop it up. Some such justification was certainly required : Spenser could hardly have asked why learning had forsaken the stage, without giving a reason for withholding contrilnitions from his own copious pen. The vanity of the excuse "will not surprise any one who knows what he makes Hobiuol and others say concerning Colin Clout. 371 APPENDIX B. AN UNRECOGNISED SONNET BY SHAKESPEARE ? In the Elizabethan age of our literature, when there were neither dailies, weeklies, monthlies, nor quarterlies in which it might be possible to express a friendly partiality for a new book, it was a common mark of friendship to send to an author a set of eulogistic verses, to be printed at the beginning of his book as a guarantee of its worth. In those days very few books were published without one or more such introductory j^oems of commendation. It was, perhaps, inevitable that this peculiar form of literatui'e should, even in the rich Elizabethan age, be remarkable chietly for poverty of invention ; the circle of ideas for these commendations is almost necessarily limited. We find in great plenty siich verses as the following : — He that shall read thy characters, Nic. Breton, And weigh them well, must say they are well written ; or — Wlio reads this book with a judicious eye, Will in true judgment true disci'etion try ; or — Read with regard what here with due regard Our second Ciceronian Soutliwell seut. Such is the commonplace commendatory poem ; and the friendly eulogiums of the greatest masters, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Chapman, or Ford, rise very little, if at all, above the level. Most of them are of the three-piled hyperbolical order — containiug loud assertions of merit with loud defiance of contradiction, and playing if possible upon the name of the piece or of the author. Even Chap- man's ingenuity could devise nothing better than the following lines in a eulogium on Ben Jonson's "Volpone, or The Fox :" — Come yet more forth, Volpone, and tliy chase Perform to all length, for thy breath will serve thee ; Tlie usurer shall never wear thy case, Meu do not hunt to kill hut to preserve thee. 372 APPENDIX B, A very fair impression of the general character of commendatory verses may be got from the following set composed by Henry Upcher for Greene's " Menaphon " : in cleverness and prettiness this is dis- tinctly above the average : — Delicious words, the life of wanton wit, That (loth inspire our souls with sweet content, Wliy hath your father' Hermes thouglit it fit, Mine eyes should surfeit by my heart's consent ? Full twenty summers have I fading seen, And twenty Floras in their golden guise ; Yet never viewed I snch a pleasant Greene, As this whose garnish'd gleads, comi)ar'irit, in me regenerate, Doth with a twofold vigour lift me uji To reach a victory above my head, Add proof unto none armour with thy prayers. Gaunt, in answer to this, bids him " rouse up his youthful blood." Shakespeare has now to find for Mowbray a suitable balance to this vaunting. He wishes to make Mowbray express in turn how de- lighted he is at the prospect of the encounter. When Marlowe in " Edward II." had to make Gaveston express intense delight at his return from banishment, he used the following image : — The shepherd nipt with biting Winter's rage Frolics not more to see the jiainted Spring Than I do to behold your Majesty. Now the form used by Shakespeare in the following lines to express Mowbray's exultation is so similar to this passage in Marlowe, with which Shakespeare must have been familiar, that it almost looks as if this liad been in his mind when he wrote them ; and if so, the association between Spring and enfrancliisement had occurred to him directly, as it liad to Phaeton : — 378 APPENDIX B. However God or fortune cast my lot, There lives or dies, true to King Ilicliard's tlirone, A loyal, just, and upright gentleman. Never did captive with a freer heart Cast off his chains of bondage and embrace His-gnJdni uncontrnlVd enfranchisement. More than my dancing soul doth celebrate This feast of battle with mine adversary. The pride of the youthful spirit, the "p;leefal boast" of everythinrr in the Spring, and the sense of newly ac(|uired freedom as expressed by the word enfranchisement, would seem to have been in Shake- speare's mind parts of one circle of ideas and expressions. The same association of youthful spirit and enfranchisement appears in his de- scription of Adonis's horse — But when he saw his love, his youtKs fair fee, He held such petty bnndarje in disdain ; Throwing the liase thong from his Trending crest, Enfranchising his mouth, his back, his breast. Can this same definite circle of words and ideas be pointed out in any other Elizabethan writer ? If not, is there not some probability that Shakespeare and Phaeton are the same ? While Shakespeare makes the Spring " put a spirit of youth in eA'erything," Phaeton makes the Spring "spend her franchise on each living thing" ; but Shakespeare twice uses youthful spirit and enfranchisement as allied words and ideas, and twice describes birth as an enfranchisement. Moreover, Shakespeare speaks of the child as being imprisoned before its Ijirth, and of natural things as being imprisoned before their birth in the Spring-time. The word " vaunt " is so common that we should not care to lay any stress upon its being used both by Shakespeai'e and by Phaeton to express the ^personified feelin.^-s of the Spring. One thing, however, we may remark as characteristic of Shakespeare. Phaeton does not iise the word in the same conventional meaningless way as " Summer's ^^ricZe," or "Spring's froud livery" : he carries the figure a little deeper, gives it a meaning and a new life by suggesting why things vaunt in the Spring-time — they '■^ vaunt of their release" from the tyranny of Winter. Such an identification, of course, does not admit of demonstrative proof : all that we can possibly provide in the absence of authentic contemporary testimony that Shakespeare and Phaeton were the same, is a concurrence of presumptions, separately feeble, severally open to banter, but together attbrding as firm a ground for belief as can be had in such matters. I fear the attempt to trace the move- ments of Shakespeare's mind may be regarded as supersubtle ; but I cannot refrain from noting another small coincidence. In the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," written, according to Malone, in the same year as the sonnet, the word " enfranchise " occurs in curious prox- imity to "Phaethon." When the Duke (iii. 1) detects Valentine in a design to carry away Silvia, and takes a sonnet from the lover's person, he cries — AN UNEECOGNISED SONNET BY SHAKESPEAKE ? 379 What's here? 'Silvia, tliis night I will enfranchise thee.'. 'Tis so : and here's the ladder for the purpose. Wliy, Phaethon, — for thou art Merops' sou, — Wilt thou aspire to guide the heavenly car, And with thy daring folly burn the world. Now there is not a very strong similarity between the sitiiation of Phaethon and the situation of a young man about to elope with his mistress — at least not enough for the one directly to suggest the other. The elopement of the Duke's daughter Avith Valentine was not likely to set the world on fire. If, however, Shakespeare wrote Phaeton's sonnet, the marked word " enfranchise," which was evi- dently a sweet morsel to his mouth, would naturally s^^ggest the sonnet ; and the faint resemblance between Valentine and Phaethon would flash iipon his mind when the idea of Phaethon's ambition had been suggested by this accidental reminder ! I need hardly say that the coincidence may be purely accidental, and that the ambition of Valentine in " reaching at stars because they shone over him," may have been quite enough to suggest the ambition of Phaethon. So much for the correspondence of the words and substance of Phaeton's imagery with the Shakespearian circle. The rest of the sonnet oilers less field for telling correspondence : every poet in those days played upon names, every poet admired Spenser, and every poet was intei'ested in what came out of Italy. Shakespeare indulged in all sorts of puns upon names, serioiis and sportive ; he admired S]3enser, as appears from traces of Spenser's influence, even if we reject the open comjaliment in the disputed " Passionate Pilgrim " ; and the beginning of act i. of the " Taming of the Shrew " shows that his thoughts had turned to Italy as the nursery of arts (although a passage in " Richard II." shows that he had no liking for the slavish imitation of Italian manners). But in these respects he stood by no means alone. In Phaeto:i's maimer, however, of playing upon the name there is something Shakespearian, if not peculiardy and dis- tinctively so. The reader will have noticed that both in Harry Upcher's verses and in Chapman's, the puns upon the names are introduced indirectly : we are not expressly infirmed that the names are susce]itible of such and such an interpretation, but the pun is made, and we are left to see it for ourselves. I have looked over a good number of these sonnets and verses, and find the same thing in them all. But in Phaeton's sonnet it is dill'erent. Here there is no pun at all in the strict sense of the word, there is merely a serious abstract statement — "whose name agrees with thy increase." Now this form occurs several times in Shakespeare. In "Richard II.," when the king asks, " How is't with aged Gaunt ] " the sick old man answers — 0, how that name befits my composition ! In "Cymbeline," when Imogen tells Lucius that her name is Fidele, he answers — Thou dost approve thyself the very same ; Thy name iits well thy faith, thy faith thy name. 380 APPENDIX B. In both these cases the form of the expression corresponds as closely as possible with Phaeton's ; and simple as the form may ajipear, and though it might in the present day be paralleled from Bret Harte, I have not found the same form in any Elizabethan except Shakespeare. If it proved anything, one might go through Phaeton's sonnet word by word, as well as line by line, and point out that the cardinal verbs occur in Shakespeare in similar situations. "Agrees with," "left" (for left off), "spends," "set," and words cognate to them, are to be found in exactly parallel situations. But, although I have a general impression that these four constructions are not so common in other Elizabethans as in Shakespeare, one does not pretend to the super- human reading that would entitle one to altirm that proposition absolutely and dogmatically. I therefore only suggest, with all willingness to accept demonstrated correction, whether it is not the case. An obvious objection might be raised on the form of Phaeton's sonnet. It is not composed like Shakespeare's in the form of three quatrains and a couplet, but consists of an eight-line stave and a six- line stave. This objection is met by pointing to tlie date, 1591. The form ultimately adopted by Sliakespeare was established in England l)y Daniel and Drayton in 15!J2 and 1594. Sidney, who set the fashion of sonnet-writing at the time, followed the Italian model, as Phaeton does. Finally — I put this argument last, though it was the first to strike me — attentive readers of poetry must have remarked that the effort of fully realising what they read differs for different poets. In all poets we may encounter passages of special difficulty ; but, on the whole, each poet keeps us at a particular intellectual strain. This is determined chiefly by the degree of abstractness or abstruseness in the language, and by the degree of clearness and power in tlie ideas. Shakespeare's language is peculiarly abstract, but his ideas are clear and definite : as we read, we are baffled by the abstractness, but stimulated by the clearness and power : once excited and braced up to the requisite intellectual pitch, Ave read him with greater ease than a less abstract but more intangible and feeble writer. Phaeton's sonnet is not a large field to experiment upon ; but, as nearly as I can judge, it requires very much the same intellectual strain as one of Shakespeare's sonnets. Let the reader compare it for himself with the sonnets of Sidney, Daniel, Drayton, and Shakespeare ; he will be struck both with special expressions and with a certain clear firmness and boldness in the general method. Phaeton's sonnet, in fact, first struck me as being Shakespeare's some thirteen years ago, when I had been spending some weeks over the sonnet literature of the Eliza- bethan period. I had met with the sonnet before and been suffi- ciently impressed by it to copy it out simply as a very superior specimen of the commendatory sonnet ; but it did not strike me as Shakespeare's till I happened to take it up when my mind was full of the styles of the various sonneteers of tlie time. I afterwards made the detailed comparisons which are here set forth. On the whole I venture to think that I have altogether produced a sufficient number of presumptions in favour of the identification of AN UNEECOGNISED SONNET BY SHAKESPEAEE ? 381 Shakespeare and Phaeton to warrant me in submitting the sonnet to the consideration of those who take an interest in such matters. If this sonnet is Shakespeare's, it was the first known composition of his that saw the light of print. When we remember how the player was jeered at by University men for trying to write plays and thus attempting the task of the learned, we see a characteristic meaning in his use of the name ' Phaethon.' Of course, seeing that Phaeton's sonnet appeared in 1591, it is open to anybody to argue that Shakespeare may have read the sonnet, and been so impressed by it that it formed his whole habit in dealing with the Seasons for the rest of his life. For any critic who is base enough to upset my elaborate arguments in this way, I have no answer but astonished silence. A few particulars may be added about John Florio, to whom the sonnet was addressed. He was the most eminent teacher of Italian in London at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seven- teenth century, and ultimately numbered Prince Henry and the Queen among his pupils. Naturally also at a time when the litera- ture of Italy was exercising so powerful an influence on our own, he was a favourite with poets. Ben Jonson presented a copy of ' The Fox' to him with the inscription, "To his loving father and worthy friend, master John Florio, Ben Jonson seals this testimony of his friendship and love." Florio was born in London in 1545, his parents being Italian refugees, belonging to the persecuted sect of the Waldenses. During the reign of Mary, they had to seek an asylum on the Continent, but Florio reap- peared in 1576 as tutor to a son of the Bisliop of Durham, at Magdalen College, Oxford. His first publication was in 1578, an extraordinary collection of wise sayings on all subjects from Italian authors. It bore the alliterative and punning title — ' Florio, his First Fruits.' Shake- speare was evidently familiar with this storehouse of gnomic wisdom, which deserves the attention of the New Shakspere Society. It was dedicated to the Earl of Leicester. Thereafter Florio, who loved to subscribe himself " Resolute John Florio," and was evidently a man of great energy and industry as well as learning and wit, matri- culated at Oxford, his college being Magdalen, and apparently re- mained there for some time teaching Italian and French to certain scholars of the University. His 'Second Fruits' appeared in 1591. This is the work to which Phaeton's sonnet is prefixed. It would appear from the preface that by this time he was established in London, and was already engaged on his most laborious work, an Italian dictionary, which was published in 1598, under the title 'A World of Words.' In the preface to this last book, he speaks of himself as having been for some years in " the pay and patronage " of the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare's first patron. There is a curious passage in the address to the reader, which seems to refer to Phaeton's sonnet : " There is another sort of leering curs, that rather 382 APPENDIX B. snarl than bite, whereof I couhl instance in one, who lighting npon a good sonnet of a gentleman's, a friend of mine, that loved Letter to be a poet than to be counted so, called the author a rymer, notwith- standing he had more skill in good poetry than my sly gentleman seemed to have in good manners or humanity." That this refers to Phaeton's sonnet is probable from the fact that the whole address is a boisterously vituperative retort in the manner of the period to some ' H. S.,' who had spoken disrespectfully of Florio's ' Second Fruits.' Florio's last publication was a translation of Montaigne's essays, undertaken on the advice of Sir Edward Wotton, and prosecuted under the encouragement of six noble ladies, his pupils. This appeared in 1603. Thereafter Florio was fortunate enough to obtain royal patronage, and lived to the good old age of eighty, dying in 1G25. To Warburton we owe the supremely absurd suggestion that this versatile Italian was the original of Holofernes in ' Love's Labour's Lost.' Shakespeare was conjectured to have thus caricatured him because he criticised the Chronicle Histories in vogue on the English stage when Shakespeare began to write. PRINTF.D EV WILLIAM r.LACKWOOD AND SONS, IN ONE YOLVME. 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