A study of Shakespeare

A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE

THE GOLDEN PINE EDITION

Cloth 35 6d net ; leather 6s net .

POEMS AND BALLADS.
(First Series.)

POEMS AND BAIXADS.
(Second and Third Series.)

TRISTRAM OF LYONESSE.

ATALANTA IN CALYDON,
AND ERECHTHEUS.

SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE.
A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE.

*
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

A STUDY OF

SHAKESPEARE

By

Algernon Charles Swinburne

•

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

First Edition (Chatto &• Windus)

October 1879, Reprinted February '80,

June '95, September 1902
New Edition 1908 ; Reprinted 1909

The Golden Pine Edition (Heinemann 1918)

re

London : William Heinemann, 1918

PREFACE TO THIS EDITION

BEGUN in the winter of 1874, a first instalment of
"A Study of Shakespeare" appeared in the Fort-
nightly Review for May 1875, and a second in the
number for June 1876, but the completed work was
not issued in book form until June 1880. In a letter
to me (January 31 1 1875), Swinburne said :

4 ' I am now at work on my long-designed essay
or study on the metrical progress or development
of Shakespeare, as traceable by ear and not by
finger, and the general changes of tone and stages
of mind expressed or involved in this change or
progress of style."

The book was produced at the moment when contro-
versy with regard to the internal evidence of com-
position in the writings attributed to Shakespeare
was raging high, and the amusing appendices were
added at the last moment that they might infuriate
the pedants of the New Shakespeare Society. They
amply fulfilled that amiable purpose.

EDMUND GOSSE

September 1918

CONTENTS

A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE

PAGE

I. FIRST PERIOD : LYRIC AND FANTASTIC . . I

II. SECOND PERIOD : COMIC AND HISTORIC . . 66

III. THIRD PERIOD: TRAGIC AND ROMANTIC . .-170

APPENDIX

I. NOTE ON THE HISTORICAL PLAY OF KING

EDWARD III 231

II. REPORT OF THE PROCEEDINGS ON THE FIRST
ANNIVERSARY SESSION OF THE NEWEST SHAKE-
SPEARE SOCIETY 276 '

III. ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS .... 300

A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE.

I.

THE greatest poet of our age has drawn a parallel
of elaborate eloquence between Shakespeare and
the sea ; and the likeness holds good in many
points of less significance than those which have
been set down by the master-hand. For two hun-
dred years at least have students of every kind put
forth in every sort of boat on a longer or a shorter
voyage of research across the waters of that un-
sounded sea. From the paltriest fishing-craft to
such majestic galleys as were .steered by Coleridge
and by Goethe, each division of the fleet has done
or has essayed its turn of work ; some busied in
dredging alongshore, some taking surveys of this or
that gulf or headland, some putting forth through
shine and shadow into the darkness of the great
deep. Nor does it seem as if there would sooner
be an end to men's labour on this than on the other

2 A Study of Shakespeare.

sea. But here a difference is perceptible. The
material ocean has been so far mastered by the
wisdom and the heroism of man that we may look
for a time to come when the mystery shall be mani-
fest of its furthest north and south, and men resolve
the secret of the uttermost parts of the sea : the
poles also may find their Columbus. But the limits
of that other ocean, the laws of its tides, the motive
of its forces, the mystery of its unity and the secret
of its change, no seafarer of us all may ever think
thoroughly to know. No wind-gauge will help us
to the science of its storms, no lead-line sound for
us the depth of its divine and terrible serenity.

As, however, each generation for some two
centuries now or more has witnessed fresh attempts
at pilotage and fresh expeditions of discovery un-
dertaken in the seas of Shakespeare, it may be well
to study a little the laws of navigation in such
waters as these, and look well to compass and
rudder before we accept the guidance of a strange
helmsman or make proffer for trial of our own.
There are shoals and quicksands on which many a
seafarer has run his craft aground in time past, and
others of more special peril to adventurers of the
present day. The chances of shipwreck vary in a
certain degree with each new change of vessel and

A Study of Shakespeare. 3

each fresh muster of hands. At one time a main
rock of offence on which the stoutest ships of dis-
covery were wont to split was the narrow and slip-
pery reef of verbal emendation ; and upon this our
native pilots were too many of them prone to steer.
Others fell becalmed offshore in a German fog of/
philosophic theories, and would not be persuaded
that the house of words they had built in honour of
Shakespeare was " dark as hell," seeing " it had bay-
windows transparent as barricadoes, and the clear-
stories towards the south-north were as lustrous as
ebony." These are not the most besetting dangers
of more modern steersmen : what we have to guard
against now is neither a repetition of the pedantries
of Steevens nor a recrudescence of the moralities of
Ulrici. Fresh follies spring up in new paths of
criticism, and fresh labourers in a fruitless field are
at hand to gather them and to garner. A discovery
of some importance has recently been proclaimed
as with blare of vociferous trumpets and flutter of
triumphal flags ; no less a discovery than this —
that a singer must be tested by his song. Well, it
is something that criticism should at length be
awake to that wholly indisputable fact ; that learned
and laborious men who can hear only with their
fingers should open their eyes to admit such a

4 A Stiidy of Shakespeare.

novelty, their minds to accept such a paradox, as
that a painter should be studied in his pictures and
a poet in his verse. To the common herd of stu-
dents and lovers of either art this may perhaps ap-
pear no great discovery ; but that it should at length
have dawned even upon the race of commentators is
a sign which in itself might be taken as a presage of
new light to come in an epoch of miracle yet to be.
Unhappily it is as yet but a partial revelation that
has been vouchsafed to them. To the recognition of
the apocalyptic fact that a workman can only be
known by his work, and that without examination
of his method and material that work can hardly be
studied to much purpose, they have yet to add the
knowledge of a further truth no less recondite and
abstruse than this ; that as the technical work of a
painter appeals to the eye, so the technical work of
a poet appeals to the ear. It follows that men who
have none are as likely to arrive at any profitable
end by the application of metrical tests to the
work of Shakespeare as a blind man by the appli-
cation of his theory of colours to the work of
Titian.

It is certainly no news to other than professional
critics that no means of study can be more precious
or more necessary to a student of Shakespeare than

A Study of Shakespeare. 5

this of tracing the course of his work by the growth
and development, through various modes and
changes, of his metre. But the faculty of using
such means of study is not to be had for the ask-
ing ; it is not to be earned by the most assiduous
toil, it is not to be secured by the learning of years,
it is not to be attained by the devotion of a life. No
proficiency in grammar and arithmetic, no science
of numeration and no scheme of prosody, will be
here of the least avail. Though the pedagogue
were Briareus himself who would thus bring Shake-
speare under the rule of his rod or Shelley within
the limit of his line, he would lack fingers on which
to count the syllables that make up their music,
the infinite varieties of measure that complete the
changes and the chimes of perfect verse. It is but
lost labour that they rise up so early, and so late
take rest ; not a Scaliger or Salrnasius of them all
will sooner solve the riddle of the simplest than of
the subtlest melody. Least of all will the method
of a scholiast be likely to serve him as a clue to
the hidden things of Shakespeare. For all the
counting up of numbers and casting up of figures
that a whole university — nay, a whole universe of
pedants could accomplish, no teacher and no learner
will ever be a whit the nearer to the haven where

6 A Study of Shakespeare.

they would be. In spite of all tabulated state-
ments and regulated summaries of research, the
music which will not be dissected or defined, the
"spirit of sense" which is one and indivisible from the
body or the raiment of speech that clothes it, keeps
safe the secret of its sound. Yet it is no less a task
than this that the scholiasts have girt themselves
to achieve: they will pluck out the heart not of
Hamlet's but of Shakespeare's mystery by the
means of a metrical test ; and this test is to be
applied by a purely arithmetical process. It is
useless to pretend or to protest that they work by
any rule but the rule of thumb and finger : that
they have no ear to work by, whatever outward
show they may make of unmistakable ears, the very
nature of their project gives full and damning proof.
Properly understood, this that they call the metri-
cal test is doubtless, as they say, the surest or the
sole sure key to one side of the secret of Shake-
speare ; but they will never understand it properly
who propose to secure it by the ingenious device of
numbering the syllables and tabulating the results
of a computation which shall attest in exact se-
quence the quantity, order, and proportion of singk
and double endings, of rhyme and blank verse, of

A Study of Shakespeare. J

regular lines and irregular, to be traced in each play
by the horny eye and the callous finger of a pedant.
" I am ill at these numbers " ; those in which I
have sought to become an expert are numbers
of another sort ; but having, from wellnigh the
first years I can remember, made of the study of
Shakespeare the chief intellectual business and
found in it the chief spiritual delight of my whole
life, I can hardly think myself less qualified than
another to offer an opinion on the metrical points
at issue.

The progress and expansion of style and har-
mony in the successive works of Shakespeare must
in some indefinite degree be perceptible to the
youngest as to the oldest, to the dullest as to the
keenest of Shakespearean students. But to trace
and verify the various shades and gradations of
this progress, the ebb and flow of alternate in-
fluences, the delicate and infinite subtleties of
change and growth discernible in the spirit and
the speech of the greatest among poets, is a task
not less beyond the reach of a scholiast than
beyond the faculties of a child. He who would
attempt it with any chance of profit must above
all things remember at starting that the inner and

8 A Study of Shakespeare.

the outer qualities of a poet's work are of their
very nature indivisible ; that any criticism is of
necessity worthless which looks to one side only,
whether it be to the outer or to the inner quality
of the work ; that the fatuity of pedantic ignorance
never devised a grosser absurdity than the attempt
to separate aesthetic from scientific criticism by a
strict line of demarcation, and to bring all critical
work under one or the other head of this exhaustive
division. Criticism without accurate science of the
thing criticised can indeed have no other value than
may belong to the genuine record of a spontaneous
impression ; but it is not less certain that criticism
which busies itself only with the outer husk or
technical shell of a great artist's work, taking no
account of the spirit or the thought which informs
it, cannot have even so much value as this. With-
out study of his forms of metre or his scheme of
colours we shall certainly fail to appreciate or even
to apprehend the gist or the worth of a painter's or
a poet's design ; but to note down the number of
special words and cast up the sum of superfluous
syllables used once or twice or twenty times in the
structure of a single poem will help us exactly as
much as a naked catalogue of the colours employed

A Study of Shakespeare. 9

in a particular picture. A tabulated statement or
summary of the precise number of blue or green,
red or white draperies to be found in a precise
number of paintings by the same hand will not of
itself afford much enlightenment to any but the
youngest of possible students ; nor will a mere list
of double or single, masculine or feminine termina-
tions discoverable in a given amount of verse from
the same quarter prove of much use or benefit to
an adult reader of common intelligence. What
such an one requires is the guidance which can be
given by no metremonger or colour-grinder : the
suggestion which may help him to discern at once
the cause and the effect of every choice or change
of metre and of colour ; which may show him at
one glance the reason and the result of every shade
and of every tone which tends to compose and to
complete the gradual scale of their final harmonies.
This method of study is generally accepted as the
only one applicable to the work of a great painter
by any criticism worthy of the name : it should
also be recognised as the sole method by which the
work of a great poet can be studied to any serious
purpose. For the student it can be no less useful,
for the expert it should be no less easy, to trace

io A Study of Shakespeare.

through its several stages of expansion and trans-
figuration the genius of Chaucer or of Shakespeare,
of Milton or of Shelley, than the genius of Titian
or of Raffaelle, of Turner or of Rossetti. Some
great artists there are of either kind in whom no
such process of growth or transformation is percep-
tible : of these are Coleridge and Blake ; from the
sunrise to the sunset of their working day we can
trace no demonstrable increase and no visible dimi-
nution of the divine capacities or the inborn defects
of either man's genius ; but not of such, as a rule,
are the greatest among artists of any sort.

Another rock on which modern steersmen of a
more skilful hand than these are yet liable to run
through too much confidence is the love of their
own conjectures as to the actual date or the secret
history of a particular play or passage. To err on
this side requires more thought, more learning, and
more ingenuity than we need think to find in a
whole tribe of finger-counters and figure-casters ;
but the outcome of these good gifts, if strained or
perverted to capricious use, may prove no less
barren of profit than the labours of a pedant on
' the letter of the text. It is a tempting exercise
of intelligence for a dexterous and keen-witted

A Study of Shakespeare. 1 1

scholar to apply his solid learning and his vivid
fancy to the detection or the interpretation of some
new or obscure point in a great man's life or work ;
but none the less is it a perilous pastime to give
the reins to a learned fancy, and let loose conjec-
ture on the trail of any dubious crotchet or the
scent of any supposed allusion that may spring up
in the way of its confident and eager quest. To
start a new solution of some crucial problem, to
track some new undercurrent of concealed signi-
ficance in a passage hitherto neglected or miscon-
strued, is to a critic of this higher class a delight as
keen as that of scientific discovery to students of
another sort : the pity is that he can bring no such
certain or immediate test to verify the value of his
discovery as lies ready to the hand of the man of
science. Whether he have lit upon a windfall or a
mare's nest can be decided by no direct proof, but
only by time and the general acceptance of compe-
tent judges ; and this cannot often be reasonably
expected for theories which can appeal for support
or confirmation to no positive evidence, but at best
to a cloudy and shifting probability. What per-
sonal or political allusions may lurk under the text
of Shakespeare we can never know, and should

12 A Study of Shakespeare.

consequently forbear to hang upon a hypothesis of
this floating and nebulous kind any serious opinion
which might gravely affect our estimate of his
work or his position in regard to other men, with
whom some public or private interest may possibly
have brought him into contact or collision.

A Study of Shakespeare. 13

THE aim of the present study is simply to set
down what the writer believes to be certain
demonstrable truths as to the progress and deve-
lopment of style, the outer and the inner changes
of manner as of matter, of method as of design,
which may be discerned in the work of Shake-
speare. The principle here adopted and the views
here put forward have not been suddenly dis-
covered or lightly taken up out of any desire to
make a show of theoretical ingenuity. For years
past I have held and maintained, in private dis-
cussion with friends and fellow-students, the
opinions which I now submit to more public judg-
ment How far they may coincide with those
advanced by others I cannot say, and have not
been careful to inquire. The mere fact of coinci-

r4 A St^idy of Shakespeare.

rlence or of dissent on such a question is of less
importance than the principle accepted by either
student as the groundwork of his theory, the main-
stay of his opinion. It is no part of my project or
my hope to establish the actual date of any among
rhe various plays, or to determine point by point
the lineal order of their succession. I have
examined no table or catalogue of recent or of
earlier date, from the time of M alone onwards, with
a view to confute by my reasoning the conclusions
of another, or by the assistance of his theories to
corroborate my own. It is impossible to fix or
decide by inner or outer evidence the precise order
of production, much less of composition, which
critics of the present or the past may have set their
wits to verify in vain ; but it is quite possible to
show that the work of Shakespeare is naturally
divisible into classes which may serve us to distin-
guish and determine as by landmarks the several
stages or periods of his mind and art.

Of these the three chief periods or stages are so
unmistakably indicated by the mere text itself,
and so easily recognisable by the veriest tiro in the
school of Shakespeare, that even were I as certain
of being the first to point them out as I am con-
scious of having long since discovered and verified

A Study of Shakespeare. \ 5

them without assistance or suggestion from any but
Shakespeare himself, I should be disposed to claim
but little credit for a discovery which must in all
likelihood have been forestalled by the common
insight of some hundred or more students in time
past The difficulty begins with the really debat-
able question of subdivisions. There are certain
plays which may be said to hang on the borderland
between one period and the next, with one foot
lingering and one advanced ; and these must be
classed according to the dominant note of their style,
the greater or lesser proportion of qualities proper
to the earlier or the later stage of thought and
writing. At one time I was inclined to think the
whole catalogue more accurately divisible into four
classes ; but the line of demarcation between the
third and fourth would have been so much fainter
than those which mark off the first period from the
second, and the second from the third, that it
seemed on the whole a more correct and adequate
arrangement to assume that the last period might
be subdivided if necessary into a first and second
stage. This somewhat precise and pedantic scheme
of study I have adopted from no love of rigid or
formal system, but simply to make the method of
my critical process as clear as the design. That

1 6 A Study of Shakespeare.

design is to examine by internal evidence alone
the growth and the expression of spirit and of
speech, the ebb and flow of thought and style,
discernible in the successive periods of Shake-
speare's work ; to study the phases of mind, the
changes of tone, the passage or progress from an
old manner to a new, the reversion or relapse from
a later to an earlier habit, which may assuredly be
traced in the modulations of his varying verse, but
can only be traced by ear and not by ringer. I
have busied myself with no baseless speculations
as to the possible or probable date of the first
appearance of this play or of that on the stage ;
and it is not unlikely that the order of succession
here adopted or suggested may not always coincide
with the chronological order of production ; nor
will the principle or theory by which I have under-
taken to class the successive plays of each period
be affected or impaired though it should chance
that a play ranked by me as belonging to a later
stage of work should actually have been produced
earlier than others which in my lists are assigned
to a subsequent date. It is not, so to speak, the
literal but the spiritual order which I have studied
to observe and to indicate: the periods which I
seek to define belong not to chronology but to art.

A Study of Shakespeare. 17

No student need be reminded how common a thing
it is to recognise in the later work of a great artist
some partial reappearance of his early tone or
manner, some passing return to his early lines of
work and to habits of style since modified or
abandoned. Such work, in part at least, may
properly be said to belong rather to the earlier
stage whose manner it resumes than to the later
stage at which it was actually produced, and in
which it stands out as a marked exception among
the works of the same period. A famous and a
most singularly beautiful example of this reflor-
escence as in a Saint Martin's summer of undecay-
ing genius is the exquisite and crowning love-scene
in the opera or " ballet- tragedy " ofPsyctie, written in
his sixty-fifth year by the august Roman hand of
Pierre Corneille ; a lyric symphony of spirit and of
song fulfilled with all the colour and all the music
that autumn could steal from spring if October had
leave to go a Maying in some Olympian masque-
rade of melody and sunlight. And it is not easier,
easy as it is, to discern and to define the three main
stages of Shakespeare's work and progress, than to
classify under their several heads the representative
plays belonging to each period by the law of their
nature, if not by the accident of their date. There

i8 A Study of Shakespeare.

are certain dominant qualities which do on the
whole distinguish not only the later from the
earlier plays, but the second period from the first
the third period from the second ; and it is with
these qualities alone that the higher criticism, be it
aesthetic or scientific, has properly anything to do.
A new method of solution has been applied to
various difficulties which have been discovered or
invented in the text by the care or the perversity
of recent commentators, whose principle of ex-
planation is easier to abuse than to use with any
likelihood of profit. It is at least simple enough
for the simplest of critics to apply or misapply :
whenever they see or suspect an inequality or an
incongruity which may be wholly imperceptible to
eyes uninured to the use of their spectacles, they
assume at once the presence of another workman,
the intrusion of a stranger's hand. This sup-
position of a double authorship is naturally as
impossible to refute as to establish by other than
internal evidence and appeal to the private judg-
ment or perception of the reader. But it is no
better than the last resource of an empiric, the last
refuge of a sciolist ; a refuge which the soundest of
scholars will be slowest to seek, a resource which
the most competent of critics will be least ready to

A Study of Shakespeare. 19

adopt. Once admitted as a principle of general
application, there are no lengths to which it may
not carry, there are none to which it has not car-
ried, the audacious fatuity and the arrogant in-
competence of tamperers with the authentic text.
Recent editors who have taken on themselves the
high office of guiding English youth in its first
study of Shakespeare have proposed to excise or
to obelise whole passages which the delight and
wonder of youth and age alike, of the rawest as of
the ripest among students, have agreed to con-
secrate as examples of his genius at its highest. In
the last trumpet-notes of Macbeth's defiance and
despair, in the last rallying cry of the hero re-
awakened in the tyrant at his utmost hour of need,
there have been men and scholars, Englishmen
and editors, who have detected the alien voice of a
pretender, the false ring of a foreign blast that was
not blown by Shakespeare ; words that for cen-
turies past have touched with fire the hearts of
thousands in each age since they were first inspired
— words with the whole sound in them of battle or
a breaking sea, with the whole soul of pity and
terror mingled and melted into each other in the
fierce last speech of a spirit grown " aweary of the
sun;' have been calmly transferred from the

2O A Study of Shakespeare.

account of Shakespeare to the score of Middleton.
And this, forsooth, the student of the future is to
accept on the authority of men who bring to the
support of their decision the unanswerable plea of
years spent in the collation and examination of
texts never hitherto explored and compared with
such energy of learned labour. If this be the issue
of learning and of industry, the most indolent and
ignorant of readers who retains his natural capacity
to be moved and mastered by the natural delight
of contact with heavenly things is better off by
far than the most studious and strenuous of all
scholiasts who ever claimed acquiescence or chal-
lenged dissent on the strength of his lifelong
labours and hard-earned knowledge of the letter of
the text. Such an one is indeed "in a parlous
state " ; and any boy whose heart first begins to
burn within him, who feels his blood kindle and his
spirit dilate, his pulse leap and his eyes lighten,
over a first study of Shakespeare, may say to such
a teacher with better reason than Touchstone said
to Corin, " Truly, thou art damned ; like an ill-
roasted egg, all on one side." Nor could charity
itself hope much profit for him from the moving
appeal and the pious prayer which temper that
severity of sentence — " Wilt thou rest damned ?

A Stiidy of Shakespeare. 21

God help thee, shallow man ! God make incision
in thee ! Thou art raw." And raw he is like to
remain for all his learning, and for all incisions
that can be made in the horny hide of a self-
conceit to be pierced by the puncture of no man's
pen. It was bad enough while theorists of this
breed confined themselves to the suggestion of a
possible partnership with Fletcher, a possible inter-
polation by Jonson ; but in the descent from these
to the alleged adulteration of the text by Middle-
ton and Rowley we have surely sounded the very
lowest depth of folly attainable by the utmost
alacrity in sinking which may yet be possible to
the bastard brood of Scriblerus. For my part, I
shall not be surprised though the next discoverer
should assure us that half at least of Hamlet is
evidently due to the collaboration of Heywood,
while the greater part of Othello is as clearly
assignable to the hand of Shirley.

Akin to this form of folly, but less pernicious
though not more profitable, is the fancy of invent-
ing some share for Shakespeare in the composition
of plays which the veriest insanity of conjecture or
caprice could not venture to lay wholly to his
charge. This fancy, comparatively harmless as it
is, requires no ground of proof to go upon, no prop

22 A Study of Shakespeare.

of likelihood to support it ; without so much help
as may be borrowed from the faintest and most
fitful of traditions, it spins its own evidence spider-
like out of its own inner conscience or conceit, and
proffers it with confident complacency for men'
acceptance. Here again I cannot but see a mere
waste of fruitless learning and bootless ingenuity.
That Shakespeare began by retouching and
recasting the work of elder and lesser men we all
know ; that he may afterwards have set his hand
to the task of adding or altering a line or a passage
here and there in some few of the plays brought
out under his direction as manager or proprietor of
a theatre is of course possible, but can neither be
affirmed nor denied with any profit in default of
the least fragment of historic or traditional evi-
dence. Any attempt to verify the imaginary
touch of his hand in plays of whose history we
know no more than that they were acted on the
boards of his theatre can be but a diversion for the
restless leisure of ingenious and ambitious scholars ;
it will give no clue by which the student who
simply seeks to know what can be known with
certainty of the poet and his work may hope to be
guided towards any safe issue or trustworthy result.
Less pardonable and more presumptuous than this

A Study of Shakespeare. 23

is the pretension of minor critics to dissect an
authentic play of Shakespeare scene by scene, and
assign different parts of the sa'me poem to different
dates by the same pedagogic rules of numeration
and mensuration which they would apply to. the
general question of the order and succession of his
collective works. This vivisection of a single poem
is not defensible as a freak of scholarship, an
excursion beyond the bounds of bare proof, from
which the wanderer may chance to bring back, if
not such treasure as he went out to seek, yet some
stray godsend or rare literary windfall which may
serve to excuse his indulgence in the seemingly
profitless pastime of a truant disposition. It is a
pure impertinence to affirm with oracular assurance
what might perhaps be admissible as a suggestion
offered with the due diffidence of modest and
genuine scholarship ; to assert on the strength of
a private pedant's personal intuition that such
must be the history or such the composition of a
great work whose history he alone could tell,
whose composition he alone could explain, who
gave it to us as his genius had given it to him.

From these several rocks and quicksands I
trust at least to keep my humbler course at a safe
distance, and steer clear of all sandy shallows of

B

24 A Study of Shakespeare.

theory or sunken shoals of hypothesis on which no
pilot can be certain of safe anchorage ; avoiding all
assumption, though never so plausible, for which no
ground but that of fancy can be shown, all sugges-
tion though never so ingenious for which no proof
but that of conjecture can be advanced. For
instance, I shall neither assume nor accept the
theory of a double authorship or of a double date
by which the supposed inequalities may be ac-
counted for, the supposed difficulties may be swept
away, which for certain readers disturb the study of
certain plays of Shakespeare. Only where universal
tradition and the general concurrence of all reason-
able critics past and present combine to indicate
an unmistakable difference of touch or an unmis-
takable diversity of date between this and that
portion of the same play, or where the internal
evidence of interpolation perceptible to the most
careless and undeniable by the most perverse of
readers is supported by the public judgment of
men qualified to express and competent to defend
an opinion, have I thought it allowable to adopt
this facile method of explanation. No scholar,
for example, believes in the single authorship
of Pericles or Andronicus ; none, I suppose, would
now question the part taken by some hireling or

A Study of Shakespeare. 25

journeyman in the arrangement or completion for
the stage of Timon of Athens ; and few probably
would refuse to admit a doubt of the total authen-
ticity or uniform workmanship of the Taming of
ttie Shrew. As few, I hope, are prepared to
follow the fantastic and confident suggestions of
every unquiet and arrogant innovator who may
seek to append his name to the long scroll of
Shakespearean parasites by the display of a brand-
new hypothesis as to the uncertain date or author-
ship of some passage or some play which has never
before been subjected to the scientific scrutiny of
such a pertinacious analyst. The more modest
design of the present study has in part been
already indicated, and will explain as it proceeds if
there be anything in it worth explanation. It is no
part of my ambition to loose the Gordian knots
which others who found them indissoluble have
sought in vain to cut in sunder with blunter swords
than the Macedonian ; but after so many adventures
and attempts there may perhaps yet be room for
an attempt yet unessayed ; for a study by the ear
alone of Shakespeare's metrical progress, and a
study by light of the knowledge thus obtained of
the corresponsive progress within, which found
expression and embodiment in these outward and

26 A Study of Shakespeare.

visible changes. The one study will be then seen
to be the natural complement and the inevitable
consequence of the other ; and the patient pursuit
of the simpler and more apprehensible object of
research will appear as the only sure method by
which a reasonable and faithful student may think
to attain so much as the porch or entrance to that
higher knowledge which no faithful and reasonable
study of Shakespeare can ever for a moment fail
to keep in sight as the haven of its final hope, the
goal of its ultimate labour.

When Christopher Marlowe came up to London
from Cambridge, a boy in years, a man in genius,
and a god in ambition, he found the stage which he
was born to transfigure and re-create by the might
and masterdom of his genius encumbered with a
litter of rude rhyming farces and tragedies which
the first wave of his imperial hand swept so utterly
out of sight and hearing that hardly by piecing
together such fragments of that buried rubbish as
it is now possible to unearth can we rebuild in
imagination so much of the rough and crumbling
walls that fell before the trumpet-blast of
Tamburlaine as may give us some conception of
the rabble dynasty of rhymers whom he overthrew
— of the citadel of dramatic barbarism which was

A Study of Shakespeare. 27

stormed and sacked at the first charge of the
young conqueror who came to lead English
audiences and to deliver English poetry

From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay.

When we speak of the drama that existed before
the coming of Marlowe, and that vanished at his
advent, we think usually of the rhyming plays
written wholly or mainly in ballad verse of four-
teen syllables — of the Kings Darius and Cambyses,
the Promos and Cassandra of Whetstone, or the
Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes of George Peele.
If we turn from these abortions of tragedy to the
metrical farces which may fairly be said to contain
the germ or embryo of English comedy (a form of
dramatic art which certainly owes nothing to the
father of our tragic stage), we find far more of hope
and promise in the broad free sketches of the
flagellant head-master of Eton and the bibulous
Bishop of Bath and Wells ; and must admit that
hands used to wield the crosier or the birch proved
themselves more skilful at the lighter labours of
the stage, more successful even in the secular and
bloodless business of a field neither clerical nor
scholastic, than any tragic rival of the opposite
party to that so jovially headed by Orbilius Udall

28 A Study of Shakespeare.

and Silenus Still. These twin pillars of church
and school and stage were strong enough to sup-
port on the shoulders of their authority the first
crude fabric or formless model of our comic theatre,
while the tragic boards were still creaking1 and
cracking under the jingling canter of Cambyses or
the tuneless tramp of Gorboduc. This one play
which the charity of Sidney excepts from his
general anathema on the nascent stage of England
has hitherto been erroneously described as written
in blank verse ; an error which I can only attribute
to the prevalence of a groundless assumption that
whatever is neither prose nor rhyme must of
necessity be definable as blank verse. But the
measure, I must repeat, which was adopted by the
authors of Gorboduc is by no means so definable.
Blank it certainly is ; but verse it assuredly is not.
There can be no verse where there is no modula-
tion, no rhythm where there is no music. Blank
verse came into life in England at the birth of the
shoemaker's son who had but to open his yet
beardless lips, and the high-born poem which had
Sackville to father and Sidney to sponsor was
silenced and eclipsed for ever among the poor
plebeian crowd of rhyming shadows that waited
in death on the noble nothingness of its patrician
shade.

A Stvtdy of Shakespeare. 29

These, I suppose, are the first or the only plays
whose names recur to the memory of the general
reader when he thinks of the English stage before
Marlowe ; but there was, I suspect, a whole class
of plays then current, and more or less supported
by popular favour, of which hardly a sample is
now extant, and which cannot be classed with such
as these. The poets or rhymesters who supplied
them had already seen good to clip the cumbrous
and bedraggled skirts of those dreary verses, run
all to seed and weed, which jingled their thin bells
at the tedious end of fourteen weaiy syllables ;
and for this curtailment of the shambling and
sprawling lines which had hitherto done duty as
tragic metre some credit may be due to these
obscure purveyors of forgotten ware for the second
epoch of our stage : if indeed, as I presume, we
may suppose that this reform, such as it was, had
begun before the time of Marlowe ; otherwise, no
doubt, little credit would be due to men who with
so high an example before them were content
simply to snip away the tags and fringes, to patch
the seams and tatters, of the ragged coat of rhyme
which they might have exchanged for that royal
robe of heroic verse wherewith he had clothed
the ungrown limbs of limping and lisping tragedy.

3O A Study of Shakespeare.

But if these also may be reckoned among his
precursors, the dismissal from stage service of the
dolorous and drudging metre employed by the
earliest school of theatrical rhymesters must be
taken to mark a real step in advance ; and in that
case we possess at least a single example of the
rhyming tragedies which had their hour between
the last plays written wholly or partially in ballad
metre and the first plays written in blank verse.
The tragedy of Selimus, Emperor of the Turks,
published in 15 94,' may then serve to indicate this
brief and obscure period of transition. Whole
scenes of this singular play are written in rhyming
iambics, some in the measure of Don Juan, some
in the measure of Venus and Adonis. The couplets
and quatrains so much affected and so reluctantly
abandoned by Shakespeare after the first stage of
his dramatic progress are in no other play that I
know of diversified by this alternate variation of
sesta with ottava rima. This may have been an
exceptional experiment due merely to the caprice
of one eccentric rhymester ; but in any case we
may assume it to mark the extreme limit, the
ultimate development of rhyming tragedy after the
ballad metre had been happily exploded. The

1 Reprinted bj Dr. Grosart in his beautiful and valuable edition
of Greene's works.

A Stiidy of Shakespeare. 31

play is on other grounds worth attention as a sign
of the times, though on poetical grounds it is
assuredly worth none. Part of it is written in
blank verse, or at least in rhymeless lines ; so that
after all it probably followed in the wake of Tam-
burlaine, half adopting and half rejecting the inno-
vations of that fiery reformer, who wrought on the
old English stage no less a miracle than Hernani
on the French stage in the days of our fathers.
That Selimus was published four years later than
Tamburlaine, in the year following the death of
Marlowe, proves of course nothing as to the date
of its production ; and even if it was written and
acted in the year of its publication, it undoubtedly
in the main represents the work of a prior era to the
reformation of the stage by Marlowe. The level
regularity of its unrhymed scenes is just like that
of the weaker portions of Titus A ndroniciis and the
First Part of King Henry the Sixth — the opening
scene, for example, of either play. With Andro-
nicus it has also in common the quality of excep-
tional monstrosity, a delight in the parade of
mutilation as well as of massacre. It seems to me
possible that the same hand may have been at
work on all three plays ; for that Marlowe's is
traceable in those parts of the two retouched by
Shakespeare which bear no traces of his touch is

2 2

32 A Study of Shakespeare.

a theory to the full as absurd as that which would
impute to Shakespeare the charge of their entire
composition.

The revolution effected by Marlowe naturally
raised the same cry against its author as the revo-
lution effected by Hugo. That Shakespeare should
not at once have enlisted under his banner is less
inexplicable than it may seem. He was naturally
addicted to rhyme, though if we put aside the
Sonnets we must admit that in rhyme he never
did anything worth Marlowe's Hero and Leander :
he did not, like Marlowe, see at once that it must
be reserved for less active forms of poetry than the
tragic drama ; and he was personally, it seems, in
opposition to Marlowe and his school of academic
playwrights — the band of bards in which Oxford
and' Cambridge were respectively and so respect-
ably represented by Peele and Greene. But in his
very first plays, comic or tragic or historic, we can
see the collision and conflict of the two influences ;
his evil angel, rhyme, yielding step by step and
note by note to the strong advance of that better
genius who came to lead him into the loftier path
of Marlowe. There is not a single passage in
Titus Andronicus more Shakespearean than the
magnificent quatrain of Tamora upon the eagle

King Henry VI. Part I. 33

and the little birds ; but the rest of the scene in
which we come upon it, and the whole scene pre-
ceding, are in blank verse of more variety and
vigour than we find in the baser parts of the play ;
and these if any scenes we may surely attribute to
Shakespeare. Again, the last battle of Talbot
seems to me as undeniably the master's work as
the scene in the Temple Gardens or the courtship
of Margaret by Suffolk ; this latter indeed, full as
it is of natural and vivid grace, may perhaps not
be beyond the highest reach of one or two among
the rivals of his earliest years of work ; while as
we are certain that he cannot have written the
opening scene, that he was at any stage of his
career incapable of it, so may we believe as well as
hope that he is guiltless of any complicity in that
detestable part of the play which attempts to defile
the memory of the virgin saviour of her country.1
In style it is not, I think, above the range of
George Peele at his best : and to have written even
the last of those scenes can add but little discredit
to the memory of a man already disgraced as the

1 One thing is certain : that damnable last scene at which the
gorge rises even to remember it is in execution as unlike the crudest
phase of Shakespeare's style as in conception it is unlike the idlest
birth of his spirit. Let us hope that so foul a thing could not have
been done in even tolerably good verse.

34 A Study of Shakespeare.

defamer of Eleanor of Castile ; while it would be a
relief to feel assured that there was but one English
poet of any genius who could be capable of either
villainy.

In this play, then, more decisively than in
Titus Andronicus, we find Shakespeare at work (so
to speak) with both hands — with his left hand of
rhyme, and his right hand of. blank verse. The
left is loth to forego the practice of its peculiar
music ; yet, as the action of the right grows freer
and its touch grows stronger, it becomes more and
more certain that the other must cease playing,
under pain of producing mere discord and disturb-
ance in the scheme of tragic harmony. We
imagine that the writer must himself have felt the
scene of the roses to be pitched in a truer key than
the noble scene of parting between the old hero
and his son on the verge of desperate battle and
certain death. This is the last and loftiest farewell
note of rhyming tragedy ; still, in King Richard II.
and in Romeo and Juliet, it struggles for awhile
to keep its footing, but now more visibly in
vain. The rhymed scenes in these plays are too
plainly the survivals of a ruder and feebler stage of
work j they cannot hold their own in the new order
with even such discordant effect of incongruous

Romeo and Juliet 35

excellence and inharmonious beauty as belongs
to the death-scene of the Talbots when matched
against the quarrelling scene of Somerset and York.
Yet the briefest glance over the plays of the first
epoch in the work of Shakespeare will suffice to
show how protracted was the struggle and how
gradual the defeat of rhyme. Setting aside the
retouched plays, we find on the list one tragedy,
two histories, and four if not five comedies, which
the least critical reader would attribute to this first
epoch of work. In three of these comedies rhyme
can hardly be said to be beaten ; that is, the rhym-
ing scenes are on the whole equal to the unrhymed
in power and beauty. In the single tragedy, and
in one of the two histories, we may say that rhyme
fights hard for life, but is undeniably worsted ; that
is, they contain as to quantity a large proportion of
rhymed verse, but as to quality the rhymed part
bears no proportion whatever to the unrhymed.
In two scenes we may say that the whole heart or
spirit of Romeo and Juliet is summed up and dis- /
tilled into perfect and pure expression ; and these
two are written in blank verse of equable and
blameless melody. Outside the garden scene in
the second act and the balcony scene in the third,
there is much that is fanciful and graceful, much of

36 A Study of Shakespeare.

elegiac pathos and fervid if fantastic passion ; much
also of superfluous rhetoric and (as it were) of
wordy melody, which flows and foams hither and
thither into something of extravagance and
excess ; but in these two there is no flaw, no out-
break, no superflux, and no failure. Throughout
certain scenes of the third and fourth acts I think
it may be reasonably and reverently allowed that
the river of verse has broken its banks, not as yet
through the force and weight of its gathering
stream, but merely through the weakness of the
barriers or boundaries found insufficient to confine
it. And here we may with deference venture on a
guess why Shakespeare was so long so loth to fore-
go the restraint of rhyme. When he wrote, and even
when he rewrote or at least retouched, his youngest
tragedy he had not yet strength to walk straight
in the steps of the mighty master, but two months
older than himself by birth, whose foot never from
the first faltered in the arduous path of severer
tragic verse. The loveliest of love-plays is after all
a child of " his salad days, when he was green in
judgment," though assuredly not "cold in blood "
— a physical condition as difficult to conceive of
Shakespeare at any age as of Cleopatra. It is in
the scenes of vehement passion, of ardour and of
agony, that we feel the comparative weakness of

Romeo and Juliet. 37

a yet ungrown hand, the tentative uncertain grasp
of a stripling giant The two utterly beautiful
scenes are not of this kind ; they deal with simple
joy and with simple sorrow, with the gladness of
meeting and the sadness of parting love ; but
between and behind them come scenes of more
fierce emotion, full of surprise, of violence, of
unrest ; and with these the poet is not yet (if I
dare say so) quite strong enough to deal. Apollo
has not yet put on the sinews of Hercules. At a
later date we may fancy or may find that when
the Herculean muscle is full-grown the voice in
him which was as the voice of Apollo is for a pass-
ing moment impaired. In Measure for Measure,
where the adult and gigantic god has grappled
with the greatest and most terrible of energies and
of passions, we miss the music of a younger note
that rang through Romeo and Juliet ; but before
the end this too revives, as pure, as sweet, as fresh,
but richer now and deeper than its first clear notes
of the morning, in the heavenly harmony of Cyni-
beline and the Tempest.

The same effusion or effervescence of words is
perceptible in King Richard II. as in the greater
(and the less good) part of Romeo and Juliet ; and
not less perceptible is the perpetual inclination of

38 A Study of Shakespeare.

the poet to revert for help to rhyme, to hark back
in search of support towards the half-forsaken
habits of his poetic nonage. Feeling his foothold
insecure on the hard and high ascent of the steeps
of rhymeless verse, he stops and slips back ever
and anon towards the smooth and marshy meadow
whence he has hardly begun to climb. Any stu-
dent who should wish to examine the conditions .of
the struggle at its height may be content to analyse
the first act of this the first historical play of
Shakespeare. As the tragedy moves onward, and
the style gathers strength while the action gathers
speed, — as (to borrow the phrase so admirably
applied by Coleridge to Dryden) the poet's chariot-
wheels get hot by driving fast, — the temptation
of rhyme grows weaker, and the hand grows
firmer which before lacked strength to wave it off.
The one thing wholly or greatly admirable in this
play is the exposition of the somewhat pitiful but
not unpitiable character of King Richard. Among
the scenes devoted to this exposition I of course
include the whole of the death-scene of Gaunt, as
well the part which precedes as the part which
follows the actual appearance' of his nephew on the
stage ; and into these scenes the intrusion of
rhyme is rare and brief. They are written almost

King Richard II. 39

wholly in pure and fluent rather than vigorous or
various blank verse ; though I cannot discern in any
of them an equality in power and passion to the
magnificent scene of abdication in Marlowe's
Edward II. This play, I think, must undoubtedly
be regarded as the immediate model of Shake-
speare's ; and the comparison is one of inexhaustible
interest to all students of dramatic poetry. To the
highest height of the earlier master I do not think
that the mightier poet who was as yet in great
measure his pupil has ever risen in this the first (as
I take it) of his historic plays. Of composition and
proportion he has perhaps already a somewhat better
idea. But in grasp of character, always excepting
the one central figure of the piece, we find his hand
as yet the unsteadier of the two. Even after a life-
long study of this as of all other plays of Shake-
speare, it is for me at least impossible to determine
what I doubt if the poet could himself have clearly
defined — the main principle, the motive and the
meaning of such characters as York, Norfolk, and
Au merle. The Gaveston and the Mortimer of
Marlowe are far more solid and definite figures
than these ; yet none after that of Richard is more
important to the scheme of Shakespeare. They
are fitful, shifting, vaporous : their outlines change,

4O A Study of Shakespeare.

withdraw, dissolve, and " leave not a rack behind."
They, not Antony, are like the clouds of evening
described in the most glorious of so many glorious
passages put long afterwards by Shakespeare into
the mouth of his latest Roman hero. They " can-
not hold this visible shape " in which the poet at
first presents them even long enough to leave a
distinct image, a decisive impression for better or
for worse, upon the mind's eye of the most simple
and open-hearted reader. They are ghosts, not
men ; simulacra modis pallentia miris. You can-
not descry so much as the original intention of the
artist's hand which began to draw and relaxed its
hold of the brush before the first lines were fairly
traced. And in the last, the worst and weakest
scene of all, in which York pleads with Bolingbroke
for the death of the son whose mother pleads
against her husband for his life, there is a final
relapse into rhyme and rhyming epigram, into the
"jigging vein" dried up (we might have hoped)
long since by the very glance of Marlowe's Apol-
lonian scorn. It would be easy, agreeable, and
irrational to ascribe without further evidence than
its badness this misconceived and misshapen scene
to some other hand than Shakespeare's. It is
below the weakest, the rudest, the hastiest scene

King Richard II. 4 1

attributable to Marlowe ; it is false, wrong, artificial
beyond the worst of his bad and boyish work ; but
it has a certain likeness for the worse to the crudest
work of Shakespeare. It is difficult to say to what
depths of bad taste the writer of certain passages
in Venus and Adonis could not fall before his
genius or his judgment was full-grown. To invent
an earlier play on the subject and imagine this
scene a surviving fragment, a floating waif of that
imaginary wreck, would in my opinion be an un-
critical mode of evading the question at issue. It
must be regarded as the last hysterical struggle of
rhyme to maintain its place in tragedy ; and the
explanation, I would fain say the excuse, of its re-
appearance may perhaps be simply this ; that the
poet was not yet dramatist enough to feel for each
of his characters an equal or proportionate regard ;
to divide and disperse his interest among the
various crowd of figures which claim each in its
place, and each after its kind, a fair and adequate
share of their creator's attention and sympathy.
His present interest was here wholly concentrated
on the single figure of Richard ; and when that for
the time was absent, the subordinate figures became
to him but heavy and vexatious encumbrances, to
be shifted on and off the stage with as much of

42 A Study of Shakespeare.

haste and as little of labour as might be possible to
an impatient and uncertain hand. Now all tragic
poets, I presume, from ^Eschylus the godlike father
of them all to the last aspirant who may struggle
after the traces of his steps, have been poets before
they were tragedians ; their lips have had power to
sing before their feet had strength to tread the
stage, before their hands had skill to paint or carve
figures from the life. With Shakespeare it was so
as certainly as with Shelley, as evidently as with
Hugo. It is in the great comic poets, in Molierc
and in Congreve,1 our own lesser Moliere, so far
inferior in breadth and depth, in tenderness and
strength, to the greatest writer of the " great age,"

1 It is not the least of Lord Macaulay's offences against art that
he should have contributed the temporary weight of his influence as
a critic to the support of so ignorant and absurd a tradition of criti-
cism as that which classes the great writer here mentioned with the
brutal if " brawny " Wycheriey — a classification almost to be
paralleled with that which in the days of our fathers saw fit to
couple together the names of Balzac and of Sue. Any competent
critic will always recognise in The Way of the World one of the
glories, in The Country Wife one of the disgraces, of dramatic and
of English literature. The stains discernible on the masterpiece of
Congreve are trivial and conventional ; the mere conception of the
other man's work displays a mind so prurient and leprous, uncovers
such an unfathomable and unimaginable beastliness of imagination,
that in the present age at least he would probably have figured as a
virtuous journalist and professional rebuker of poetic vice or artistic
aberration.

King Richard III. 43

yet so near him in science and in skill, so like him
in brilliance and in force, — it is in these that we
find theatrical instinct twin-born with imaginative
impulse, dramatic power with inventive perception.
In the second historic play which can be
wholly ascribed to Shakespeare we still find the
poetic or rhetorical quality for the most part in
excess of the dramatic ; but in King Richard IIL
the bonds of rhyme at least are fairly broken. This
only of all Shakespeare's plays belongs absolutely
to the school of Marlowe. The influence of the
elder master, and that influence alone, is percep-
tible from end to end. Here at last we can see
that Shakespeare has decidedly chosen his side.
It is as fiery in passion, as single in purpose, as
rhetorical often though never so inflated in expres-
sion, as Tamburlaine itself. It is doubtless a better
piece of work than Marlowe ever did ; I dare not
say, than Marlowe ever could have done. It is not
for any man to measure, above all is it not for any
workman in the field of tragic poetry lightly to
take on himself the responsibility or the authority
to pronounce, what it is that Christopher Marlowe
could not have done ; but, dying as he did and
when he did, it is certain that he has not left us a
work so generally and so variously admirable as

44 ^ Study of Shakespeare.

King Richard III. As certain is it that but for
him this play could never have been written. At a
later date the subject would have been handled
otherwise, had the poet chosen to handle it at all ;
and in his youth he could not have treated it as
he has without the guidance and example of Mar-
lowe. Not only are its highest qualities of energy,
of exuberance, of pure and lofty style, of sonorous
and successive harmonies, the very qualities that
never fail to distinguish those first dramatic models
which were fashioned by his ardent hand ; the
strenuous and single-handed grasp of character
the motion and action of combining and contend-
ing powers, which here for the first time we find
sustained with equal and unfaltering vigour
throughout the length of a whole play, we perceive,
though imperfectly, in the work of Marlowe before
we can trace them even as latent or infant forces in
the work of Shakespeare.

In the exquisite and delightful comedies of his
earliest period we can hardly discern any sign, any
promise of them at all. One only of these, the
Comedy of Errors, has in it anything of dramatic
composition and movement ; and what it has of these,
I need hardly remind the most cursory of students, is
due by no means to Shakespeare. What is due to

The Comedy of Errors. 45

him, and to him alone, is the honour of having em-
broidered on the naked old canvas of comic action
those flowers of elegiac beauty which vivify and
diversify the scene of Plautus as reproduced by the
art of Shakespeare. In the next generation so
noble a poet as Rotrou, whom perhaps it might
not be inaccurate to call the French Marlowe, and
who had (wLat Marlowe had not) the gift of comic
as well as of tragic excellence, found nothing of
this kind and little of any kind to add to the old
poet's admirable but arid sketch of farcical inci-
dent or accident. But in this light and lovely
work of the youth of Shakespeare we find for the
first time that strange and sweet admixture ot
farce with fancy, of lyric charm with comic effect,
which recurs so often in his later work, from the
date of A s You Like It to the date of the Winter's
Tale, and which no later poet had ventured to recom-
bine in the same play till our own time had given
us, in the author of Tragaldabas, one who could
alternate without confusing the woodland courtship
of Eliseo and Caprina with the tavern braggardism
of Grif and Minotoro. The sweetness and simpli-
city of lyric or elegiac loveliness which fill and
inform the scenes where Adriana, her sister, and
the Syracusan Antipholus exchange the expression

46 A Study of Shakespeare.

of their errors and their loves, belong to Shake-
speare alone ; and may help us to understand how
the young poet who at the outset of his divine
career had struck into this fresh untrodden path of
poetic comedy should have been, as we have seen
that he was, loth to learn from another and an alien
teacher the hard and necessary lesson that this
flowery path would never lead him towards the
loftier land of tragic poetry. For as yet, even in
the nominally or intentionally tragic and historic
work of the first period, we descry always and
everywhere and still preponderant the lyric ele-
ment, the fantastic element, or even the elegiac
element. All these queens and heroines of history
and tragedy have rather an Ovidian than a Sopho-
clean grace of bearing and of speech.

The example afforded by the Comedy of Errors
would suffice to show that rhyme, however inade-
quate for tragic use, is by no means a bad instru-
ment for romantic comedy. In another of Shake-
speare's earliest works, which might almost be
described as a lyrical farce, rhyme plays also a
great part ; but the finest passage, the real crown
and flower of Love's Labour's Lost, is the praise or
apology of love spoken by Biron in blank verse.
This is worthy of Marlowe for dignity and sweet-

Love's Labour s Lost* 47

ness, but has also the grace of a light and radiant
fancy enamoured of itself, begotten between thought
and mirth, a child-god with grave lips and laugh-
ing eyes, whose inspiration is nothing akin to Mar-
lowe's. In this as in the overture of the play and
in its closing scene, but especially in the noble
passage which winds up for a year the courtship of
Biron and Rosaline, the spirit which informs the
speech of the poet is finer of touch and deeper of
tone than in the sweetest of the serious interludes of
the Comedy of Errors. The play is in the main a
yet lighter thing, and more wayward and capricious
in build, more formless and fantastic in plot, more
incomposite altogether than that first heir of Shake-
speare's comic invention, which on its own ground
is perfect in its consistency, blameless in composi-
tion and coherence ; while in Love's Labour's Lost
the fancy for the most part runs wild as the wind,
and the structure of the story is as that of a house
of clouds which the wind builds and unbuilds at
pleasure. Here we find a very riot of rhymes, wild
and wanton in their half-grown grace as a troop of
" young satyrs, tender-hoofed and ruddy-horned " ;
during certain scenes we seem almost to stand
again by the cradle of new-born comedy, and hear
the first lisping and laughing accents run over from

48 A Study of Shakespeare.

her baby lips in bubbling1 rhyme ; but when the
note changes we recognise the speech of gods. For
the first time in our literature the higher key of
poetic or romantic comedy is finely touched to a
fine issue. The divine instrument fashioned by
Marlowe for tragic purposes alone has found at
once its new sweet use in the hands of Shakespeare.
The way is prepared for As You Like It and the
Tempest ; the language is discovered which will befit
the lips of Rosalind and Miranda.

What was highest as poetry in the Comedy of
Errors was mainly in rhyme ; all indeed, we might
say, between the prelude spoken by ^Egeon and
the appearance in the last scene of his wife : in
LovJs Labour's Lost what was highest was couched
wholly in blank verse ; in the Two Gentlemen of
Verona rhyme has fallen seemingly into abeyance,
and there are no passages of such elegiac beauty as
in the former, of such exalted eloquence as in the
latter of these plays ; there is an even sweetness, a
simple equality of grace in thought and language
which keeps the whole poem in tune, written as it
is in a subdued key of unambitious harmony. In
perfect unity and keeping the composition of this
beautiful sketch may perhaps be said to mark a
stage of advance, a new point of work attained, a

Two Gentlemen of Verona. 49

faint but sensible change of manner, signalised by
increased firmness of hand and clearness of outline.
Slight and swift in execution as it is, few and
simple as are the chords here struck of character
and emotion, every shade of drawing and every
note of sound is at one with the whole scheme of
form and music. Here too is the first dawn of
that higher and more tender humour which was
never given in such perfection to any man as ulti-
mately to Shakespeare ; one touch of the by-play
of Launce and his immortal dog is worth all the
bright fantastic interludes of Boyet and Adriano,
Costard and Holof ernes ; worth even half the
sallies of Mercutio, and half the dancing doggrel
or broad-witted prose of either Dromio. But in
the final poem which concludes and crowns the
first epoch of Shakespeare's work, the special
graces and peculiar glories of each that went before
are gathered together as in one garland " of every
hue and every scent." The young genius of the
master of all our poets finds its consummation in
the Midsummer Night's Dream. The blank verse
is as full, sweet, and strong as the best of Biron's
or Romeo's ; the rhymed verse as clear, pure, and
true as the simplest and truest melody of Venus
and Adonis or the Comedy of Errors, But here

5O A Study of Shakespeare.

each kind of excellence is equal throughout ; there
are here no purple patches on a gown of serge, but
one seamless and imperial robe of a single dye.
Of the lyric or the prosaic part, the counterchange
of loves and laughters, of fancy fine as air and
imagination high as heaven, what need can there
be for any one to shame himself by the helpless
attempt to say some word not utterly unworthy ?
Let it suffice us to accept this poem as the landmark
of our first stage, and pause to look back from it on
what lies behind us of partial or of perfect work.

The highest point attained in this first period
lies in the domain of comedy or romance, and
belongs as much to lyric as to dramatic poetry ; its
sovereign quality is that of sweetness and springtide
of fairy fancy crossed with light laughter and light
trouble that end in perfect music. In history as
in tragedy the master's hand has not yet come to its
full strength and skill ; its touch is not yet wholly
assured, its work not yet wholly blameless. Besides
the plays undoubtedly and entirely due to the still
growing genius of Shakespeare, we have taken note
but of two among those which bear the partial im-
print of his hand. The long-vexed question as to
the authorship of the latter parts of King Henry
F/., in their earlier or later form, has not been

King Henry VI. Part II. 5 1

touched upon ; nor do I design to reopen that
perpetual source of debate unstanchable and inex-
haustible dispute by any length of scrutiny or
inquisition of detail. Two points must of course
be taken for granted : that Marlowe was more or
less concerned in the production, and Shakespeare
in the revision of these plays ; whether before or
after his additions to the original First Part of
King Henry VI. we cannot determine, though the
absence of rhyme might seem to indicate a later
date for the recast of the Contention. But it is
noticeable that the style of Marlowe appears more
vividly and distinctly in passages of the reformed
than of the unreformed plays. Those famous
lines, for example, which open the fourth act of
the Second Part of King Henry VI., are not to be
found in the corresponding scene of the first part
of the Contention ; yet, whether they belong to the
original sketch of the play, or were inserted as an
afterthought into the revised and expanded copy,
the authorship of these verses is surely unmistak-
able :—

The gaudy, blabbing, and remorseful day
Is crept into the bosom of the sea ;
And now loud howling wolves arouse the jades
That drag the tragic melancholy night —

Aut Christophorus Marlowe, aut diabolus ; it is

52 A Study of Shakespeare.

inconceivable that any imitator but one should
have had the power so to catch the very trick of
his hand, the very note of his voice, and incredible
that the one who might would have set himself to
do so : for if this be not indeed the voice and this
the hand of Marlowe, then what we find in these
verses is not the fidelity of a follower, but the
servility of a copyist. No parasitic rhymester of
past or present days who feeds his starveling
talent on the shreds and orts, "the fragments,
scraps, the bits and greasy relics " of another man's
board, ever uttered a more parrot-like note of
plagiary. The very exactitude of the repetition is
a strong argument against the theory which
attributes it to Shakespeare. That he had much
at starting to learn of Marlowe, and that he did
learn much — that in his earliest plays, and above
all in his earliest historic plays, the influence of the
elder poet, the echo of his style, the iteration of his
manner, may perpetually be traced — I have already
shown that I should be the last to question ; but
so exact an echo, so servile an iteration as this,
I believe we shall nowhere find in them. The
sonorous accumulation of emphatic epithets — as in
the magnificent first verse of this passage — is
indeed at least as much a note of the young

King Henry VI. Part //. 53

Shakespeare's style as of his master's ; but even
were this one verse less in the manner of the elder
than the younger poet — and this we can hardly
say that it is — no single verse detached from its
context can weigh a feather against the full and
flawless evidence of the whole speech. And of all
this there is nothing in the Contention ; the scene
there opens in bald and flat nakedness of prose,
striking at once into the immediate matter of stage
business without the decoration of a passing
epithet or a single trope.

From this sample it might seem that the main
difficulty must be to detect anywhere the sign-
manual of Shakespeare, even in the best passages
of the revised play. On the other hand, it has not
unreasonably been maintained that even in the next
scene of this same act in its original form, and in
all those following which treat of Cade's insur-
rection, there is evidence of such qualities as can
hardly be ascribed to any hand then known but
Shakespeare's. The forcible realism, the simple
vigour and lifelike humour of these scenes, cannot,
it' is urged, be due to any other so early at work
in the field of comedy. A critic desirous to press
this point might further insist on the likeness or
identity of tone between these and all later scenes

54 A Study of Shakespeare.

in which Shakespeare has taken on him to paint
the action and passion of an insurgent populace.
With him, it might too plausibly be argued, the
people once risen in revolt for any just or unjust
cause is always the mob, the unwashed rabble,
the swinish multitude ; full as he is of wise and
gracious tenderness for individual character, of swift
and ardent pity for personal suffering, he has no
deeper or finer feeling than scorn for " the beast
with many heads " that fawn and butt at bidding
as they are swayed by the vain and violent breath
of any worthless herdsman. For the drovers who
guide and misguide at will the turbulent flocks of
their mutinous cattle his store of bitter words is
inexhaustible ; it is a treasure-house of obloquy
v/hich can never be drained dry. All this, or nearly
all this, we must admit ; but it brings us no nearer
to any but a floating and conjectural kind of
solution. In the earliest form known to us of this
play it should seem that *ve have traces of Shake-
speare's handiwork, in the latest that we find
evidence of Marlowe's. But it would be something
too extravagant for the veriest wind-sucker among
commentators to start a theory that a revision was
made of his original work by Marlowe after
additions had been made to it by Shakespeare;

King Henry VI, Part II. 55

yet we have seen that the most unmistakable
signs of Marlowe's handiwork, the passages which
show most plainly the personal and present seal of
his genius, belong to the play only in its revised
form ; while there is no part of the whole com-
position which can so confidently be assigned to
Shakespeare as to the one man then capable of
such work, as can an entire and important episode
of the play in its unrevised state. Now the pro-
position that Shakespeare was the sole author of
both plays in their earliest extant shape is refuted
at once and equally from without and from within,
by evidence of tradition and by evidence of style.
There is therefore proof irresistible and unmistak-
able of at least a double authorship ; and the one
reasonable conclusion left to us would seem to be
this ; that the first edition we possess of these plays
is a partial transcript of the text as it stood after
the first additions had been made by Shakespeare
to the original work of Marlowe and others ; for
that this original was the work of more hands than
one, and hands of notably unequal power, we have
again the united witness of traditional and internal
evidence to warrant our belief: and that among
the omissions of this imperfect text were certain
passages of the original work, which were ultimately

56 A Stiidy of Shakespeare.

restored in the final revision of the entire poem as
it now stands among the collected works of Shake-
speare.

No competent critic who has given due study to
1 he genius of Marlowe will admit that there is a
single passage of tragic or poetic interest in either
form of the text, which is beyond the reach of the
father of English tragedy: or, if there be one
seeming exception in the expanded and trans-
figured version of Clifford's monologue over his
father's corpse, which is certainly more in Shake-
speare's tragic manner than in Marlowe's, and in
the style of a later period than that in which he
was on the whole apparently content to reproduce
or to emulate the tragic manner of Marlowe, there
is at least but this one exception to the general and
absolute truth of the rule ; and even this great
tragic passage is rather out of the range of Mar-
lowe's style than beyond the scope of his genius.
In the later as in the earlier version of these plays,
the one manifest excellence of which we have no
reason to suppose him capable is manifest in the
comic or prosaic scenes alone. The first great
rapid sketch of the dying cardinal, afterwards so
nobly enlarged and perfected on revision by the
same or by a second artist, is as clearly within the

King Henry VI. Part III. 57

capacity of Marlowe as of Shakespeare ; and in
either edition of the latter play, successively known
as The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, as
the Second Part of the Contention, and as the
Third Part of King Henry T/L, the dominant
figure which darkens all the close of the poem
with presage of a direr day is drawn by the same
strong hand in the same tragic outline. From the
first to the last stage of the work there is no mark
of change or progress here ; the whole play indeed
has undergone less revision, as it certainly needed
less, than the preceding part of the Contention.
Those great verses which resume the whole spirit
of Shakespeare's Richard — finer perhaps in them-
selves than any passage of the play which bears
his name — are wellnigh identical in either form of
the poem ; but the reviser, with admirable judg-
ment, has struck out, whether from his own text
or that of another, the line which precedes them
in the original sketch, where the passage runs
thus :—

I had no father, I am like no father ;

I have no brothers, I am like no brother ;

(this reiteration is exactly in the first manner of our
tragic drama ;)

And this word love, which greybeards term divine, etc.

58 A Study of Shakespeare.

It would be an impertinence to transcribe the rest
of a passage which rings in the ear of every reader's
memory ; but it may be noted that the erasure by
which its effect is so singularly heightened with the
inborn skill of so divine an instinct is just such an
alteration as would be equally likely to occur to
the original writer on glancing over his printed text
or to a poet of kindred power, who, while busied in
retouching and filling out the sketch of his prede-
cessor, might be struck by the opening for so great
an improvement at so small a cost of suppression.
My own conjecture would incline to the belief that
we have here a perfect example of the manner in
which Shakespeare may be presumed, when such a
task was set before him, to have dealt with the
text of Marlowe. That at the outset of his career
he was so employed, as well as on the texts of lesser
poets, we have on all hands as good evidence of
every kind as can be desired ; proof on one side
from the text of the revised plays, which are as
certainly in part the work of his hand as they are
in part the work of another ; and proof on the op-
posite side from the open and clamorous charge of
his rivals, whose imputations can be made to bear
no reasonable meaning but this by the most violent
ingenuity of perversion, and who presumably were

King Henry VI. Part III. 59

not persons of such frank imbecility, such innocent
and infantine malevolence, as to forge against their
most dangerous enemy the pointless and edgeless
weapon of a charge which, if ungrounded, must
have been easier to refute than to devise. Assum-
ing then that in common with other young poets of
his day he was thus engaged during the first years
of his connection with the stage, we should naturally
have expected to find him handling the text of
Marlowe with more of reverence and less of freedom
than that of meaner men : ready, as in the Conten-
tion, to clear away with no timid hand their weaker
and more inefficient work, to cancel and supplant
it by worthier matter of his own ; but when occupied
in recasting the verse of Marlowe, not less ready to
confine his labour to such slight and skilful strokes
of art as that which has led us into this byway of
speculation ; to the correction of a false note, the
addition of a finer touch, the perfection of a mean-
ing half expressed or a tone of half-uttered music ;
to the invigoration of sense and metre by substi-
tution of the right word for the wrong, of a ful lei-
phrase for one feebler ; to the excision of such
archaic and superfluous repetitions as are signs of
a cruder stage of workmanship, relics of a ruder
period of style, survivals of the earliest form or

60 A Study of Shakespeare.

habit of dramatic poetry. Such work as this, how-
ever humble in our present eyes, which look before
and after, would assuredly have been worthy of the
workman and his task ; an office no less fruitful of
profit, and no more unbeseeming the pupil hand of
the future master, than the subordinate handiwork
of the young Raffaelle or Leonardo on the canvas
of Verrocchio or Perugino.

Of the doubtful or spurious plays which have
been with more or less show of reason ascribed to
this first period of Shakespeare's art, I have here
no more to say than that I purpose in the proper
place to take account of the only two among them
which bear the slightest trace of any possible touch
of his hand. For these two there is not, as it hap-
pens, the least witness of tradition or outward like-
lihood which might warrant us in assigning them a
place apart from the rest, and nearer the chance of
reception into the rank that has been claimed for
them ; while those plays in whose favour there is
some apparent evidence from without, such as the
fact of early or even original attribution to the
master's hand, are, with one possible exception,
utterly beyond the pale of human consideration as
at any stage whatever the conceivable work of
Shakespeare,

Poems. 6 1

Considering that his two attempts at narrative
or rather semi-narrative and semi-reflective poetry
belong obviously to an early stage of his earliest
period, we may rather here than elsewhere take
notice that there are some curious points of coinci-
dence for evil as for good between the fortunes of
Shakespeare's plays and the fortunes of his poems.
In either case we find that some part at least of
his earlier and inferior work has fared better at the
blind hands of chance and the brutish hands of
printers than some part at least of his riper and
more precious products. His two early poems
would seem to have had the good hap of his
personal supervision in their passage through the
press. Upon them, at least since the time of
Coleridge, who as usual has said on this subject
the first and the last word that need be said, it
seems to me that fully sufficient notice and fully
adequate examination have been expended ; and
that nothing at once new and true can now be
profitably said in praise or in dispraise of them. Of
A Lovers Complaint, marked as it is throughout
with every possible sign suggestive of a far later
date and a far different inspiration, I have only
space or need to remark that it contains two of
the most exquisitely Shakespearean verses ever

62 A Study of Shakespeare.

vouchsafed to us by Shakespeare, and two of the
most execrably euphuistic or dysphuistic lines ever
inflicted on us by man. Upon the Sonnets such a
preposterous pyramid of presumptuous commentary
has long since been reared by the Cimmerian specu-
lation and Boeotian " brain-sweat " of sciolists and
scholiasts, that no modest man will hope and no wise
man will desire to add to the structure or subtract
from it one single brick of proof or disproof, theorem
or theory. As yet the one contemporary book which
has ever been supposed to throw any direct or in-
direct light on the mystic matter remains as inac-
cessible and unhelpful to students as though it had
never been published fifteen years earlier than the
date of their publication and four years before the
book in which Meres notices the circulation of
Shakespeare's " sugared sonnets among his private
friends." It would be a most noble and thankworthy
addition to a list of labours beyond praise and bene-
fits beyond price, if my honoured friend Dr. Grosart
could find the means to put a crown upon the achieve-
ments of his learning and a seal upon the obligations
of our gratitude by the one inestimable boon long
hoped for against hoping, and as yet but "a vision in
a dream" to the most learned and most loving of true

The Passionate Pilgrim. 63

Shakespearean students ; by the issue or reissue in
its full and perfect likeness, collated at last and
complete, of Willobie his Avisa}

It was long since more than time that the
worthless and impudent imposture called The Pas-
sionate Pilgrim should be exposed and expelled
from its station at the far end of Shakespeare's
poems. What Coleridge said of Ben Jonson's
epithet for "turtle-footed peace," we may say of
the label affixed to this rag-picker's bag of stolen
goods : T/ie Passionate Pilgrim is a pretty title, a
very pretty title ; pray what may it mean ? In all
the larcenous little bundle of verse there is neither
a poem which bears that name nor a poem by
which that name would be bearable. The pub-
lisher of the booklet was like "one Ragozine, a
most notorious pirate " ; and the method no less
than the motive of his rascality in the present in-

1 Since this passage first went to press, I have received from
Dr. Grosart the most happy news that he has procured a perfect copy
of this precious volume, and will shortly add it to his occasional issues
of golden waifs and strays forgotten by the ebb-tide of time. Not
even the disinterrrient of Robert Chester's "glorified " poem, with
its appended jewels of verse from Shakespeare's very hand and
from others only less great than Shakespeare's, all now at last reset
in their strange original framework, was a gift of greater price than
this.

c 2

64 A Study of Shakespeare.

stance is palpable and simple enough. Fired by
the immediate and instantly proverbial popularity
of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, he hired, we
may suppose, some ready hack of unclean hand to
supply him with three doggrel sonnets on the same
subject, noticeable only for their porcine quality of
prurience: he procured by some means a rough
copy or an incorrect transcript of two genuine and
unpublished sonnets by Shakespeare, which with
the acute instinct of a felonious tradesman he laid
atop of his worthless wares by way of gilding to
their base metal : he stole from the two years pub-
lished text of LOVJS Labour's Lost, and reproduced
with more or less mutilation or corruption, the
sonnet of Longavile, the " canzonet " of Biron, and
the far lovelier love-song of Dumaine. The rest
of the ragman's gatherings, with three most not-
able exceptions, is little better for the most part
than dry rubbish or disgusting refuse ; unless a
plea may haply be put in for the pretty common-
places of the lines on a " sweet rose, fair flower,"
and so forth ; for the couple of thin and pallid if
tender and tolerable copies of verse on " Beauty "
and " Good Night," or the passably light and lively
stray of song on " crabbed age and youth." I
need not say that those three exceptions are the

The Passionate Pilgrim. 65

stolen and garbled work of Marlowe and of Barn-
field, our elder Shelley and our first-born Keats ;
the singer of Cynthia in verse well worthy of
Endymion, who would seem to have died as a
poet in the same fatal year of his age that Keats
died as a man ; the first adequate English laureate
of the nightingale, to be supplanted or equalled by
none until the advent of his mightier brother.

66 A Study of Shakespeare.

1L

THE second period is that of perfection in comic
a/id historic style. The final heights and depths
vX)f tragedy, with all its reach of thought and
all its pulse of passion, are yet to be scaled and
sounded ; but to this stage belongs the special
quality of faultless, joyous, facile command upon
each faculty required of the presiding genius for
service or for sport. It is in the middle period of
his work that the language of Shakespeare is most
limpid in its fullness, the style most pure, the
thought most transparent through the close and
luminous raiment of perfect expression. The con-
ceits and crudities of the first stage are outgrown
and cast aside ; the harshness and obscurity which
at times may strike us as among the notes of his
third manner have as yet no place in the flawless
work of this second stage. That which has to be
said is not yet too great for perfection of utterance ;

A Study of Shakespeare. 67

passion has not yet grappled with thought in so
close and fierce an embrace as to strain and rend
the garment of words, though stronger and subtler
than ever was woven of human speech. Neither in
his first nor in his last stage would the style of
Shakespeare, even were it possible by study to
reproduce it, be of itself a perfect and blameless
model ; but his middle style, that in which the
typical plays of his second period are written,
would be, if it were possible to imitate, the most
absolute pattern that could be set before man. I
do not speak of mere copyist's work, the parasitic
knack of retailing cast phrases, tricks and turns of
accent, cadences and catchwords proper only to the
natural manner of the man who first came by in-
stinct upon them, and by instinct put them to use ;
I speak of that faithful and fruitful discipleship of
love with which the highest among poets and the
most original among workmen have naturally been
always the first to study and the most earnest to
follow the footsteps of their greatest precursors in
that kind. And this only high and profitable form of
study and discipleship can set before itself, even in
the work of Shakespeare, no pattern so perfect, no
model so absolute, as is afforded by the style or
manner of his second period.

68 A Study of Shakespeare.

To this stage belong by spiritual right if not
by material, by rule of (poetic order if not by date
of actual succession, the greatest of his English
histories and four of his greatest and most perfect
comedies ; the four greatest we might properly call
them, reserving for another class the last divine
triad of romantic plays which it is alike inaccurate
to number among tragedies or comedies proper :
the Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and the Tempesty
which belong of course wholly to his last manner, or,
if accuracy must be strained even to pedantry, to the
second manner of his third or final stagea A single
masterpiece which may be classed either among
histories or tragedies belongs to the middle period ;
and to this also we must refer, if not the ultimate
form, yet assuredly the first sketch at least of that
which is commonly regarded as the typical and
supreme work of Shakespeare. Three lesser come-
dies, one of them in great part the recast or rather
the transfiguration of an earlier poet's work, com-
plete the list of plays assignable to the second
epoch of his genius.

The ripest fruit of historic or national drama,
the consummation and the crown of Shakespeare's
Ubours in that line, must of course be recognised and

King John. 69

saluted by all students in the supreme and sovereign
trilogy of King Henry IV. and King Henry V.
On a lower degree only than this final and imperial
work we find the two chronicle histories which
remain to be classed. In style as in structure they
bear witness of a power less perfect, a less impec-
cable hand. They have less of perceptible instinct,
less of vivid and vigorous utterance ; the breath of
their inspiration is less continuous and less direct,
the fashion of their eloquence is more deliberate
and more prepense ; there is more of study and
structure apparent in their speech, and less in their
general scheme of action. Of all Shakespeare's
plays they are the most rhetorical ; there is more
talk than song in them, less poetry than oratory ;
more finish than form, less movement than inci-
dent. Scene is laid upon scene, and event succeeds
event, as stone might be laid on stone and story
might succeed story in a building reared by mere
might of human handiwork ; not as in a city or
temple whose walls had risen of themselves to the
lyric breath and stroke of a greater than Amphion ;
moulded out of music by no rule or line of mortal
measure, with no sound of axe or anvil, but only
of smitten strings : built by harp and not by hand.
The lordly structure of these poems is the work

70 A Study of Shakespeare.

of a royal workman, full of masterdom and might,
sublime in the state and strength of its many
mansions, but less perfect in proportion and less
aerial in build than the very highest fabrics
fashioned after their own great will by the supreme
architects of song. Of these plays, and of these
alone among the maturer works of Shakespeare, it
may be said that the best parts are discernible
from the rest, divisible by analysis and separable
by memory from the scenes which precede them or
follow and the characters which surround them or
succeed. Constance and Katherine rise up into
remembrance apart from their environment and
above it, stand clear in our minds of the crowded
company with which the poet has begirt their
central figures. In all other of his great tragic
works, — even in Hamlet, if we have grace and
sense to read it aright and not awry, — it is not of
any single person or separate passage that we
think when we speak of it ; it is to the whole mas-
terpiece that the mind turns at mention of its
name. The one entire and perfect chrysolite of
Othello is neither Othello nor Desdemona nor lago,
but each and all ; the play of Hamlet is more than
Hamlet himself, the poem even here is too great
to be resumed in the person. But Constance is

King John. 7 1

the jewel of King John, and Katherine is the
crowning blossom of King Henry VIII. — a funeral
flower as of " marigolds on death-beds blowing,"
an opal of as pure water as " tears of perfect moan,"
with fitful fire at its heart, ominous of evil and
sorrow, set in a mourning band of jet on the fore-
front of the poem, that the brow so circled may,
" like to a title-leaf, foretell the nature of a tragic
volume." Not indeed that without these the
ground would in either case be barren ; but that in
either field our eye rests rather on these and other
separate ears of wheat that overtop the ranks, than
on the waving width of the whole harvest at once.
In the one play our memory turns next to the
figures of Arthur and the Bastard, in the other to
those of Wolsey and his king : the residue in either
case is made up of outlines more lightly and
slightly drawn. In two scenes the figure of King
John rises indeed to the highest height even of
Shakespearean tragedy ; for the rest of the play
the lines of his character are cut no deeper, the
features of his personality stand out in no sharper
relief, than those of Eleanor or the French king ;
but the scene in which he tempts Hubert to the
edge of the pit of hell sounds a deeper note and
touches a subtler string in the tragic nature of man

72 A Study of Shakespeare.

than had been struck by any poet save Dante
alone, since the reign of the Greek tragedians.
The cunning and profound simplicity of the few
last weighty words which drop like flakes of poison
that blister where they fall from the deadly lips of
the king is a new quality in our tragic verse ; there
was no foretaste of such a thing in the passionate
imagination which clothed itself in the mighty
music of Marlowe's burning song. The elder
master might indeed have written the magnificent
speech which ushers in with gradual rhetoric and
splendid reticence the black suggestion of a deed
without a name ; his hand might have woven with
no less imperial skill the elaborate raiment of words
and images which wraps up in fold upon fold, as
with swaddling-bands of purple and golden em-
broidery, the shapeless and miscreated birth of a
murderous purpose that labours into light even
while it loathes the light and itself; but only
Shakespeare could give us the first sample of that
more secret and terrible knowledge which reveals
itself in the brief heavy whispers that seal the com-
mission and sign the warrant of the king. Webster
alone of all our tragic poets has had strength to
emulate in this darkest line of art the handiwork of
his master. We find nowhere such an echo or re-

King Jo Jin. 73

flection of the spirit of this scene as in the last
tremendous dialogue of Bosola with Ferdinand in
the house of murder and madness, while their
spotted souls yet flutter between conscience and
distraction, hovering for an hour as with broken
wings on the confines of either province of hell.
One pupil at least could put to this awful profit
the study of so great a model ; but with the single
and sublime exception of that other design from
the same great hand, which bares before us the
mortal anguish of Bracciano, no copy or imitation
of the scene in which John dies by poison has ever
come near enough to evade the sentence it pro-
vokes. The shrill tremulous agony of Fletcher's
Valentinian is to > the sullen and slow death-pangs
of Shakespeare's tyrant as the babble of a suckling
to the accents of a man. As far beyond the reach
of any but his maker's hand is the pattern of a
perfect English warrior, set once for all before the
eyes of all ages in the figure of the noble Bastard.
The national side of Shakespeare's genius, the
heroic vein of patriotism that runs like a thread of
living fire through the world-wide range of his
omnipresent spirit, has never, to my thinking, found
vent or expression to such glorious purpose as
here. Not even in Hotspur or Prince Hal has he

74 A Study of Shakespeare.

mixed with more godlike sleight of hand all the
lighter and graver good qualities of the national
character, or compounded of them all so lovable a
nature as this. In those others we admire and
enjoy the same bright fiery temper of soul, the
same buoyant and fearless mastery of fate or for-
tune, the same gladness and glory of life made
lovely with all the labour and laughter of its full
fresh days ; but no quality of theirs binds our
hearts to them as they are bound to Philip — not
by his loyal valour, his keen young wit, his kindli-
ness, constancy, readiness of service as swift and
sure in the day of his master's bitterest shame and
shamefullest trouble as in the blithest hour of
battle and that first good fight which won back his
father's spoils from his father's slayer ; but more
than all these, for that lightning of divine rage and
pity, of tenderness that speaks in thunder and in-
dignation that makes fire of its tears, in the horror
of great compassion which falls on him, the tempest
and storm of a beautiful and godlike anger which
shakes his strength of spirit and bows his high
heart down at sight of Arthur dead. Being thus,
as he is, the English masterwork of Shakespeare's
hand, we may well accept him as the best man
known to us that England ever made ; the hero

King John. 75

that Nelson must have been had he never come
too near Naples.

I am not minded to say much of Shakespeare's
Arthur ; there are one or two figures in the world
of his work of which there are no words that
would be fit or good to say. Another of these is
Cordelia. The place they have in our lives and
thoughts is not one for talk ; the niche set apart
for them to inhabit in our secret hearts is not
penetrable by the lights and noises of common
day. There are chapels in the cathedral of man's
highest art as in that of his inmost life, not made
to be set open to the eyes and feet of the world.
Love and death and memory keep charge for us
in silence of some beloved names. It is the
crowning glory of genius, the final miracle and
transcendant gift of poetry, that it can add to the
number of these, and engrave on the very heart of
our remembrance fresh names and memories of
its own creation.

There is one younger child in this heavenly
family of Shakespeare's who sits side by side with
Arthur in the secret places of our thought ; there
are but two or three that I remember among the
children of other poets who may be named in the
same year with them : as Fletcher's Hengo, Web-

j6 A Study of Shakespeare.

ster's Giovanni, and Landor's Caesarion. Of this
princely trinity of boys the " bud of Britain " is as
yet the most famous flower ; yet even in the
broken words of childish heroism that falter on
his dying lips there is nothing of more poignant
pathos, more " dearly sweet and bitter," than
Giovanni's talk of his dead mother and all her
sleepless nights now ended for ever in a sleep be-
yond tears or dreams. Perhaps the most nearly
faultless in finish and proportion of perfect nature
among all the noble three is Landor's portrait of
the imperial and right Roman child of Caesar and
Cleopatra. I know not but this may be found in
the judgment of men to come wellnigh the most
pathetic and heroic figure bequeathed us after
more than eighty years of a glorious life by the
indomitable genius of our own last Roman and
republican poet.

We have come now to that point at the open-
ing of the second stage in his work where the
supreme genius of all time begins first to meddle
with the mysteries and varieties of human char
acter, to handle its finer and more subtle qualities,
to harmonise its more untuned and jarring dis-
cords ; giving here and thus the first proof of
a power never shared in like measure by the

King John. 77

mightiest among the sons of men, a sovereign
and serene capacity to fathom the else unfathomable
depths of spiritual nature, to solve its else insolu-
ble riddles, to reconcile its else irreconcilable dis-
crepancies. In his first stage Shakespeare had
dropped his plummet no deeper into the sea of the
spirit of man than Marlowe had sounded before
him ; and in the channel of simple emotion no
poet could cast surer line with steadier hand than
he. Further down in the dark and fiery depths of
human pain and mortal passion no soul could
search than his who first rendered into speech the
aspirations and the agonies of a ruined and
revolted spirit And until Shakespeare found in
himself the strength of eyesight to read and the
cunning of handiwork to render those wider diver-
sities of emotion and those further complexities of
character which lay outside the range of Marlowe, he
certainly cannot be said to have outrun the winged
feet, outstripped the fiery flight of his forerunner.
In the heaven of our tragic song the first-born star
on the forehead of its herald god was not outshone
till the full midsummer meridian of that greater
godhead before whom he was sent to prepare a
pathway for the sun. Through all the forenoon of
our triumphant day, till the utter consummation

78 A Study of Shakespeare.

and ultimate ascension of dramatic poetry incar-
nate and transfigured in the master-singer of the
world, the quality of his tragedy was as that of
Marlowe's, broad, single, and intense ; large of
hand, voluble of tongue, direct of purpose. With
the dawn of its latter epoch a new power comes
upon it, to find clothing and expression in new
forms of speech and after a new style. The
language has put off its foreign decorations of lyric
and elegiac ornament ; it has found already its
infinite gain in the loss of those sweet superfluous
graces which encumbered the march and enchained
the utterance of its childhood. The figures which
it invests are now no more the types of a single
passion, the incarnations of a single thought. They
now demand a scrutiny which tests the power of
a mind and tries the value of a judgment ; they
appeal to something more than the instant appre-
hension which sufficed to respond to the immediate
claim of those that went before them. Romeo and
Juliet were simply lovers, and their names bring
back to us no further thought than of their love
and the lovely sorrow of its end ; Antony and
Cleopatra shall be before all things lovers, but the
thought of their love and its triumphant tragedy
shall recall other things beyond number — all the

King John. 79

forces and all the fortunes of mankind, all the
chance and all the consequence that waited on their
imperial passion, all the infinite variety of qualities
and powers wrought together and welded into the
frame and composition of that love which shook
from end to end all nations and kingdoms of the
earth.

The same truth holds good in lighter matters ;
Biron and Rosaline in comedy are as simply lovers
and no more as were their counterparts and coevals
in tragedy : there is more in Benedick and Beatrice
than this simple quality of love that clothes itself
in the strife of wits ; the injury done her cousin,
which by the repercussion of its shock and refrac-
tion of its effect serves to transfigure with such
adorable indignation and ardour of furious love
and pity the whole bright light nature of Beatrice,
serves likewise by a fresh reflection and counter-
change of its consequence to exalt and enlarge the
stature of her lover's spirit after a fashion beyond
the reach of Shakespeare in his first stage.
Mercutio again, like Philip, is a good friend and
gallant swordsman, quick-witted and hot-blooded,
of a fiery and faithful temper, loyal and light and
swift alike of speech and swordstroke ; and this is
all. But the character of the Bastard, clear and

8o A Study of Shakespeare.

simple as broad sunlight though it be, has in it
other features than this single and beautiful like-
ness of frank young manhood ; his love of country
and loathing of the Church that would bring it into
subjection are two sides of the same national
quality that has made and will always make every
Englishman of his type such another as he was in
belief and in unbelief, patriot and priest-hater ; and
no part of the design bears such witness to the
full-grown perfection of his creator's power and
skill as the touch that combines and fuses into
absolute unity of concord the high and various
elements of faith in England, loyalty to the
wretched lord who has made him knight and
acknowledged him kinsman, contempt for his
abjection at the foul feet of the Church, abhorrence
of his crime and constancy to his cause for some-
thing better worth the proof of war than his miser-
able sake who hardly can be roused, even by such
exhortation as might put life and spirit into the
dust of dead men's bones, to bid his betters stand
and strike in defence of the country dishonoured
by his reign.

It is this new element of variety in unity, this
study of the complex and diverse shades in a
single nature, which requires from any criticism

King Henry VIII. Si

worth attention some inquisition of character as
complement to the investigation of style. Analysis
of any sort would be inapplicable to the actors who
bear their parts in the comic, the tragic or historic
plays of the first period. There is nothing in them
to analyse ; they are, as we have seen, like all the
characters represented by Marlowe, the embodi-
ments or the exponents of single qualities and
simple forces. The question of style also is there-
fore so far a simple question ; but with the change
and advance in thought and all matter of spiritual
study and speculation this question also becomes
complex, and inseparable, if we would pursue it to
any good end, from the analysis of character and
subject. In the debate on which we are now to
enter, the question of style and the question of
character, or as we might say the questions of
matter and oi spirit, are more than ever indivisible
from each other, more inextricably inwoven than
elsewhere into the one most difficult question of
authorship which has ever been disputed in the
dense and noisy school or fought out in the wide
and windy field of Shakespearean controversy.

There can be few serious students of Shake-
speare who have not sometimes felt that possibly the
hardest problem involved in their study is that which

82 A Study of Shakespeare.

requires for its solution some reasonable and accept-
able theory as to the play of King Henry VIII.
None such has ever yet been offered ; and I cer-
tainly cannot pretend to supply one. Perhaps
however it may be possible to do some service by
an attempt to disprove what is untenable, even
though it should not be possible to produce in its
stead any positive proof of what we may receive
as matter of absolute faith.

The veriest tiro in criticism who knows anything
of the subject in hand must perceive, what is cer -
tainly not beyond a schoolboy's range of vision,
that the metre and the language of this play are in
great part so like the language and the metre of
Fletcher that the first and easiest inference would
be to assume the partnership of that poet in the
work. In former days it was Jonson whom the
critics and commentators of their time saw good to
select as the colleague or the editor of Shakespeare ;
but a later school of criticism has resigned the
notion that the fifth act was retouched and adjusted
by the author of Volpone to the taste of his patron
James. The later theory is more plausible than
this ; the primary objection to. it is that it is too
facile and superficial. It is waste of time to point
out with any intelligent and imaginative child with

King Henry VIII. 83

a tolerable ear for metre who had read a little of
the one and the other poet could see for himself—
that much of the play is externally as like the usual
style of Fletcher as it is unlike the usual style of
Shakespeare. The question is whether we can
find one scene, one speech, one passage, which in
spirit, in scope, in purpose, bears the same or any
comparable resemblance to the work of Fletcher.
I doubt if any man more warmly admires a poet
whom few can have studied more thoroughly than
I ; and to whom, in spite of all sins of omission and
commission, — and many and grievous they are,
beyond the plenary absolution of even the most
indulgent among critical confessors — I constantly
return with a fresh sense of attraction, which is
constantly rewarded by a fresh sense of gratitude
and delight. It is assuredly from no wish to pluck
a leaf from his laurel, which has no need of foreign
grafts or stolen garlands from the loftier growth of
Shakespeare's, that I venture to question his capacity
for the work assigned to him by recent criticism.
The speech of Buckingham, for example, on his
way to execution, is of course at first sight very
like the finest speeches of the kind in Fletcher;
here is the same smooth and fluent declamation,
the same prolonged and persistent melody, which

84 A Stiidy of Shakespeare.

if not monotonous is certainly not various ; the
same pure, lucid, perspicuous flow of simple rather
than strong and elegant rather than exquisite
English ; and yet, if we set it against the best
examples of the kind which may be selected from
such tragedies as Bonduca or The False One, against
the rebuke addressed by Caratach to his cousin or
by Caesar to the murderers of Pompey — and no
finer instances of tragic declamation can be chosen
from the work of this great master of rhetorical
dignity and pathos — I cannot but think we shall
perceive in it a comparative severity and elevation
which will be missed when we turn back from it to
the text of Fletcher. There is an aptness of phrase,
an abstinence from excess, a "plentiful lack" of
mere flowery and superfluous beauties, which we
may rather wish than hope to find in the most
famous of Shakespeare's successors. But if not his
work, we may be sure it was his model ; a model
which he often approached, which he often studied,
but which he never attained. It is never for
absolute truth and fitness of expression, it is always
for eloquence and sweetness, for fluency and fancy,
that we find the tragic scenes of Fletcher most
praiseworthy; and the motive or mainspring of
interest is usually anything but natural or simple.

King Henry VIII. 85

Now the motive here is as simple, the emotion as
natural as possible ; the author is content to dis-
pense with all the violent or far-fetched or fantastic
excitement from which Fletcher could hardly ever
bring himself completely to abstain. I am not
speaking here of those tragedies in which the hand
of Beaumont is traceable ; to these, I need hardly
say, the charge is comparatively inapplicable which
may fairly be brought against the unassisted works
of his elder colleague ; but in any of the typical
tragedies of Fletcher, in Thierry and Theodoret, in
Valentinian, in The Double Marriage, the scenes
which for power and beauty of style may reasonably
be compared with this of the execution of Bucking-
ham will be found more forced in situation, more
fanciful in language thaji this. Many will be found
more beautiful, many more exciting ; the famous
interview of Thierry with the veiled Ordella, and
the scene answering to this in the fifth act where
Brunhalt is confronted with her dying son, will be
at once remembered by all dramatic students ; and
the parts of Lucina and Juliana may each be de-
scribed as a continuous arrangement of passionate
and pathetic effects. But in which of these parts
and in which of these plays shall we find a scene
so simple, an effect so modest, a situation so unforced

86 A Sttidy of Shakespeare.

as here ? where may we look for the same temper-
ance of tone, the same control of excitement, the
same steadiness of purpose ? If indeed Fletcher
could have written this scene, or the farewell of
Wolsey to his greatness, or his parting scene with
Cromwell, he was perhaps not a greater poet, but
he certainly was a tragic writer capable of loftier
self-control and severer self-command, than he has
ever shown himself elsewhere.

And yet, if this were all, we might be content
to believe that the dignity of the subject and the
high example of his present associate had for once
lifted the natural genius of Fletcher above itself.
But the fine and subtle criticism of Mr. Spedding
has in the main, I think, successfully and clearly
indicated the lines of demarcation undeniably dis-
cernible in this play between the severer style of
certain scenes or speeches and the laxer and more
fluid style of others ; between the graver, solider,
more condensed parts of the apparently composite
work, and those which are clearer, thinner, more
diffused and diluted in expression. If under the
latter head we had to class such passages only as
the dying speech of Buckingham and the chris-
tening speech of Cranmer, it might after all be
almost impossible to resist the internal evidence of

King Henry VIII. 87

Fletcher's handiwork. Certainly we hear the same
soft continuous note of easy eloquence, level and
limpid as a stream of crystalline transparence, in
the plaintive adieu of the condemned statesman
and the panegyrical prophecy of the favoured pre^
late. If this, I say, were all, we might admit that
there is nothing — I have already admitted it — in
either passage beyond the poetic reach of Fletcher.
But on the hypothesis so ably maintained by the
editor of Bacon there hangs no less a consequence
than this : that we must assign to the same hand
the crowning glory of the whole poem, the death-
scene of Katherine. Now if Fletcher could have
written that scene — a scene on which the only cri-
ticism ever passed, the only commendation ever
bestowed, by the verdict of successive centuries, has
been that of tears and silence — if Fletcher could
have written a scene so far beyond our applause, so
far above our acclamation, then the memory of no
great poet has ever been so grossly wronged, so
shamefully defrauded of its highest claim to honour.
But, with all reverence for that memory, I must
confess that I cannot bring myself to believe it.
Any explanation appears to me more probable than
this. Considering with what care every relic of his
work was once and again collected by his posthu-

D

88 A Stitdy of Shakespeare.

mous editors — even to the attribution, not merely of
plays in which he can have taken only the slightest
part, but of plays in which we know that he had
no share at all — I cannot believe that his friends
would have let by far the brightest jewel in his
crown rest unreclaimed in the then less popular
treasure-house of Shakespeare. Belief or disbelief
of this kind is however but a sandy soil for con-
jecture to build upon. Whether or not his friends
would have reclaimed for him the credit of this
scene, had they known it (as they must have known
it) to be his due, I must repeat that such a mira-
culous example of a man's genius for once trans-
cending itself and for ever eclipsing all its other
achievements appears to me beyond all critical,
beyond all theological credulity. Pathos and con-
centration are surely not among the dominant
notes of Fletcher's style or the salient qualities of
his intellect. Except perhaps in the beautiful and
famous passage where Hengo dies in his uncle's
arms, I doubt whether in any of the variously and
highly coloured scenes played out upon the wide
and shifting stage of his fancy the genius of Fletcher
has ever unlocked the source of tears. Bellario and
Aspatia were the children of his younger colleague ;
at least, after the death of Beaumont we meet no

King Henry VIII. 89

such figures on the stage of Fletcher. In effect,
though Beaumont had a gift of grave sardonic
humour which found especial vent in burlesques of
the heroic style and in the systematic extravagance
of such characters as Bessus,1 yet he was above all
things a tragic poet ; and though Fletcher had great
power of tragic eloquence and passionate effusion,
yet his comic genius was of a rarer and more pre-
cious quality ; QUO. Spanish Curate is worth many a
Valentinian ; as, on the other hand, one Philaster
is worth many a Scornful Lady. Now there is no
question here of Beaumont ; and there is no ques-
tion that the passage here debated has been taken
to the heart of the whole world and baptized in the
tears of generations as no work of Fletcher's has
ever been. That Beaumont could have written it
I do not believe ; but I am wellnigh assured that
Fletcher could not. I can scarcely imagine that

1 Compare with Beaumont's admirable farce of Bessus the
wretched imitation of it attempted after his death in the Nice Valour
of Fletcher ; whose proper genius was neither for pure tragedy nor
broad farce, but for high comedy and heroic romance — a field of his
own invention ; witness Monsieur Thomas and The Knight of
Malta : while Beaumont has approved himself in tragedy all but
the worthiest disciple of Shakespeare, in farce beyond all comparison
the aptest pupil of Jonson. He could give us no Fox or Alchemist ;
but the inventor of Bessus and Calianax was worthy of the esteem
and affection returned to him by the creator of Morose and Rabbi
Busy.

9O A Study of Shakespeare.

the most fluid sympathy, the "hysteric passion**
most easily distilled from the eyes of reader or
spectator, can ever have watered with its tears the
scene or the page which sets forth, however elo-
quently and effectively, the sorrows and heroisms
of Ordella, Juliana, or Lucina. Every success but
this I can well believe them, as they assuredly
deserve, to have attained.

To this point then we have come, as to the
crucial point at issue ; and looking back upon those
passages of the play which first suggest the handi-
work of Fletcher, and which certainly do now and
then seem almost identical in style with his, I think
we shall hardly find the difference between these
and other parts of the same play so wide and so
distinct as the difference between the undoubted
work of Fletcher and the undoubted work of Shake-
speare. What that difference is we are fortunately
able to determine with exceptional certitude, and
with no supplementary help from conjecture of
probabilities. In the play which is undoubtedly a
joint work of these poets the points of contact
and the points of disunion are unmistakable by
the youngest eye. In the very last scene of The
Two Noble Kinsmen, we can tell with absolute
certainty what speeches were appended or interpo-

King Henry VIII. 9 1

lated by Fletcher ; we can pronounce with posi-
tive conviction what passages were completed and
what parts were left unfinished by Shakespeare.
Even on Mr. Spedding's theory it can hardly be
possible to do as much for King H&try VIII.
The lines of demarcation, however visible or plau-
sible, are fainter by far than these. It is certainly
not much less strange to come upon such passages
in the work of Shakespeare as the speeches of
Buckingham and Cranmer than it would be to
encounter in the work of Sophocles a sample of
the later and laxer style of Euripides ; to meet for
instance in the Antigone with a passage which
might pass muster as an extract from the Iphigenia
in Aulis. In metrical effects the style of the
lesser English poet is an exact counterpart of the
style of the lesser Greek ; there is the same com-
parative tenuity and fluidity of verse, the same
excess of short unemphatic syllables, the same
solution of the graver iambic into soft overflow of
lighter and longer feet which relaxes and dilutes
the solid harmony of tragic metre with notes of a
more facile and feminine strain. But in King
Henry VIII. it should be remarked that though
we not unfrequently find the same preponderance
as in Fletcher's work of verses with a double

92 A Study of Shakespeare.

ending— which in English verse at least are not in
themselves feminine, and need not be taken to
constitute, as in Fletcher's case they do, a note of
comparative effeminacy or relaxation in tragic
style — we do not find the perpetual predominance
of those triple terminations so peculiarly and
notably dear to that poet ; l so that even by the
test of the metre-mongers who would reduce the
whole question at issue to a point which might at
once be solved by the simple process of numera-
tion the argument in favour of Fletcher can
hardly be proved tenable ; for the metre which
evidently has one leading quality in common with
his is as evidently wanting in another at least as
marked and as necessary to establish — if estab-
lished it can be by any such test taken singly and

1 A desperate attempt has been made to. support the metrical
argument in favour of Fletcher's authorship by the production of a
list in which such words as slavery, emperor, pitying, difference, and
even Christians, were actually registered as trisyllabic terminations.
To such unimaginable shifts are critics of the finger-counting or syl-
labic school inevitably and fatally reduced in the effort to establish
by rule of thumb even so much as may seem verifiable by that rule
in the province of poetical criticism. Prosody is at best no more
than the skeleton of verse, as verse is the body of poetry ; while the
gain of such painful labourers in a field they know not how to till
is not even a skeleton of worthless or irrelevant fact, but the shadow
of such a skeleton reflected in water. It would seem that critics who
hear only through their fingers have not even fingers to hear with.

King Henry VIII. 93

apart from all other points of evidence — the colla-
boration of Fletcher with Shakespeare in this
instance. And if the proof by mere metrical
similitude is thus imperfect, there is here assur-
edly no other kind of test which may help to
fortify the argument by any suggestion of weight
even comparable to this. In those passages which
would seem most plausibly to indicate the pro-
bable partnership of Fletcher, the unity and sus-
tained force of the style keep it generally above
the average level of his ; there is less admixture or
intrusion of lyric or elegiac quality ; there is more
of temperance and proportion alike in declamation
and in debate. And throughout the whole play,
and under all the diversity of composite subject
and conflicting interest which disturbs the unity of
action, there is a singleness of spirit, a general
unity or concord of inner tone, in marked contrast
to the utter discord and discrepancy of the several
sections of The Two Noble Kinsmen. We admit,
then, that this play offers us in some not unimpor-
tant passages the single instance of a style not
elsewhere precisely or altogether traceable in
Shakespeare ; that no exact parallel to it can be
found among his other plays ; and that if not the
partial work it may certainly be taken as the

94 A Study of Shakespeare.

general model of Fletcher in his tragic poetry.
On the other hand, we contend that its excep-
tional quality might perhaps be explicable as a
tentative essay in a new line by one who tried so
many styles before settling into his latest ; and
that, without far stronger, clearer, and completer
proof than has yet been or can ever be advanced,
the question is not solved but merely evaded by
the assumption of a double authorship.

By far the ablest argument based upon a wider
ground of reason or of likelihood than this of
mere metre that has yet been advanced in sup-
port of the theory which would attribute a part of
this play to some weaker hand than Shakespeare's
is due to the study of a critic whose name —
already by right of inheritance the most illus-
trious name of his age and ours — is now for ever
attached to that of Shakespeare himself by right
of the highest service ever done and the noblest
duty ever paid to his memory. The untimely
death which removed beyond reach of our thanks
for all he had done and our hopes for all he might
do the man who first had given to France the first
among foreign poets — son of the greatest French-
man and translator of the greatest Englishman —
was only in this not untimely, that it forbore him

King Henry VIII. 95

till the great and wonderful work was done which
has bound two deathless names together by a
closer than the common link that connects the
names of all sovereign poets. Among all classic
translations of the classic works of the world, I
know of none that for absolute mastery and per-
fect triumph over all accumulation of obstacles,
for supreme dominion over supreme difficulty, can
be matched with the translation of Shakespeare
by Francois- Victor Hugo ; unless a claim of com-
panionship may perchance be put in for Urquhart's
unfinished version of Rabelais. For such success
in the impossible as finally disproves the right
of " that fool of a word " to existence — at least in
the world of letters — the two miracles of study and
of sympathy which have given Shakespeare to the
French and Rabelais to the English, and each in
his habit as he lived, may take rank together in
glorious rivalry beyond eyeshot of all past or
future competition.

Among the essays appended to the version of
Shakespeare which they complete and illustrate,
that which deals with the play now in question
gives as ample proof as any other of the sound
and subtle insight brought to bear by the trans-
lator upon the object of his labour and his love.

D 2

96 A Study of Shakespeare.

His keen and studious intuition is here as always
not less notable and admirable than his large and
solid knowledge, his full and lucid comprehension
at once of the text and of the history of Shake-
speare's plays ; and if his research into the inner
details of that history may seem ever to have erred
from the straight path of firm and simple certainty
into some dubious byway of theory or conjecture,
we may be sure at least that no lack of learning or
devotion, of ardour or intelligence, but more prob-
ably some noble thought that was fathered by a
noble wish to do honour to Shakespeare, has led
him to attribute to his original some quality foreign
to the text, or to question the authenticity of what
for love of his author he might not wish to find in
it. Thus he would reject the main part of the fifth
act as the work of a mere court laureate, an official
hack or hireling employed to anoint the memory
of an archbishop and lubricate the steps of a throne
with the common oil of dramatic adulation ; and
finding it in either case a task alike unworthy of
Shakespeare to glorify the name of Cranmer or to
deify the names of the queen then dead and the
king yet living, it is but natural that he should be
induced by an unconscious bias or prepossession of
the will to depreciate the worth of the verse spent

King Henry VIII. 97

on work fitter for ushers and embalmers and the
general valetry or varletry of Church and State.
That this fifth act is unequal in point of interest
to the better part of the preceding acts with which
it is connected by so light and loose a tie of con-
venience is as indisputable as that the style of
the last scene savours now and then, and for some
space together, more strongly than ever of Flet-
cher's most especial and distinctive qualities, or
that the whole structure of the play if judged
by any strict rule of pure art is incomposite and
incongruous, wanting in unity, consistency, and
coherence of interest. The fact is that here even
more than in King John the poet's hands were
hampered by a difficulty inherent in the subject.
To an English and Protestant audience, fresh from
the passions and perils of reformation and reaction,
lie had to present an English king at war with the
papacy, in whom the assertion of national inde-
pendence was incarnate ; and to the sympathies of
such an audience it was a matter of mere necessity
for him to commend the representative champion
of their cause by all means which he could compel
into the service of his aim. Yet this object was in
both instances all but incompatible with the
natural and necessary interest of the plot. It was

98 A Study of Shakespeare.

inevitable that this interest should in the main be
concentrated upon the victims of the personal or
national policy of either king ; upon Constance and
Arthur, upon Katherine and Wolsey. Where these
are not, either apparent in person on the stage, or
felt in their influence upon the speech and action
of the characters present, the pulse of the poem
beats fainter and its forces begin to flag. In King
John this difficulty was met and mastered, these
double claims of the subject of the poem and the
object of the poet were satisfied and harmonised,
by the effacement of John and the substitution of
Faulconbridge as the champion of the national
cause and the protagonist of the dramatic action.
Considering this play in its double aspect of tragedy
and history, we might say that the English hero
becomes the central figure of the poem as seen
from its historic side, while John remains the
central figure of the poem as seen from its tragic
side ; the personal interest that depends on per-
sonal crime and retribution is concentrated on the
agony of the king; the national interest which
he, though the eponymous hero of the poem, was
alike inadequate as a craven and improper as a
villain to sustain and represent in the eyes of the
spectators was happily and easily transferred to
the one person of the play who could properly

King Henry VIII. 99

express within the compass of its closing act at
once the protest against papal pretension, the
defiance of foreign invasion, and the prophetic
assurance of self-dependent life and self-sufficing
strength inherent in the nation then fresh from a
fiercer trial of its quality, which an audience of the
days of Queen Elizabeth would justly expect from
the poet who undertook to set before them in
action the history of the days of King John. That
history had lately been brought upon the stage
under the hottest and most glaring light that could
be thrown on it by the fire of fanatical partisanship ;
The Troublesome Reign of King John, weakest and
most wooden of all wearisome chronicles that ever
cumbered the boards, had in it for sole principle of
life its power of congenial appeal to the same
blatant and vulgar spirit of Protestantism which
inspired it. In all the flat interminable morass of
its tedious and tuneless verse I can find no blade
or leaf of living poetic growth, no touch but one of
nature or of pathos, where Arthur dying would fain
send a last thought in search of his mother. From
this play Shakespeare can have got neither hint
nor help towards the execution of his own ; the
crude rough sketch of the Bastard as he brawls and
swaggers through the long length of its scenes is

ioo A Study of Shakespeare.

hardly so much as the cast husk or chrysalid of the
noble creature which was to arise and take shape
for ever at the transfiguring touch of Shakespeare.
In the case of King Henry VIII. he had not even
such a blockish model as this to work from. The
one preceding play known to me which deals pro-
fessedly with the same subject treats of quite
other matters than are handled by Shakespeare,
and most notably with the scholastic adventures
or misadventures of Edward Prince of Wales and
his whipping-boy Ned Browne. A fresh and well-
nigh a plausible argument might be raised by the
critics who deny the unity of authorship in King
Henry VHL, on the ground that if Shakespeare
had completed the work himself he would surely
not have let slip the occasion to introduce one of
the most famous and popular of all court fools in
the person of Will Summers ; who might have
given life and relief to the action of many scenes
now unvaried and unbroken in their gravity of
emotion and event. Shakespeare, one would say,
might naturally have been expected to take up and
remodel the well-known figure of which his humble
precursor could give but a rough thin outline, yet
sufficient it should seem to attract the tastes to
which it appealed ; for this or some other quality of

King Henry VIII. 101

seasonable attraction served to float the now forgot-
ten play of Samuel Rowley through several editions.
The central figure of the huge hot-headed king,
with his gusts of stormy good humour and peals of
burly oaths which might have suited " Garagantua's
mouth " and satisfied the requirements of Hotspur,
appeals in a ruder fashion to the survival of the
same sympathies on which Shakespeare with a
finer instinct as evidently relied ; the popular
estimate of the bluff and brawny tyrant " who
broke the bonds of Rome " was not yet that of
later historians, though doubtless neither was it
that of the writer or writers who would champion
him to the utterance. Perhaps the opposite
verdicts given by the instinct of the people on
"bluff King Hal" and "Bloody Mary" may be
understood by reference to a famous verse of
Juvenal. The wretched queen was sparing of noble
blood and lavish of poor men's lives — cerdonibus
timenda ; and the curses under which her memory
was buried were spared by the people to her father,
Lamiarum ccede madenti. In any case, the hum-
blest not less than the highest of the poets who
wrote under the reign of his daughter found it safe
to present him in a popular light before an audience
of whose general prepossession in his favour William

IO2 A Study of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare was no slower to take advantage than
Samuel Rowley.

The two plays we have just discussed have one
quality of style in common which has already been
noted ; that in them rhetoric is in excess of action
or passion, and far in excess of poetry. They are
not as yet perfect examples of his second manner,
though far ahead of his first stage in performance
as in promise. Compared with the full and living
figure of Katherine or of Constance, the study of
Margaret of Anjou is the mere sketch of a poet
still in his pupilage: John and Henry, Faulcon-
bridge and Wolsey, are designs beyond reach of
the hand which drew the second and third Richard
without much background or dramatic perspective.
But the difficulties inherent in either subject are
not surmounted throughout with absolute equality
of success ; the very point of appeal to the sym-
pathy and excitement of the time may have been
something of a disturbing force in the composition
of the work — a loadstone rock indeed, of tempting
attraction to the patriot as well as to the play-
wright, but possibly capable of proving in some
measure a rock of offence to the poet whose ship
was piloted towards it. His perfect triumph in the
field of patriotic drama, coincident with the perfect

King Henry IV. 103

maturity of his comic genius and his general style,
has now to show itself.

The great national trilogy which is at once the
flower of Shakespeare's second period and the
crown of his achievements in historic drama —
unless indeed we so far depart from the established
order and arrangement of his works as to include
his three Roman plays in the same class with
these English histories — offers perhaps the most
singular example known to us of the variety in
fortune which befell his works on their first appear-
ance in print. None of these had better luck in
that line at starting than King Henry IV.; none
had worse than King Henry V. With Romeo and
Juliet, the Merry Wives of Windsor, and Hamlet,
it shares the remarkable and undesirable honour of
having been seized and boarded by pirates even
before it had left the dockyard. The master-
builder's hands had not yet put the craft into sea-
worthy condition when she was overhauled by these
Kidds and Blackbeards of the press. Of those
four plays, the two tragedies at least were
thoroughly recast, and rewritten from end to end :
the pirated editions giving us a transcript, more or
less perfect or imperfect, accurate or corrupt, of
the text as it first came from the poet's hand ; a

IO4 A Study of Shakespeare.

text to be afterwards indefinitely modified and
incalculably improved. Not quite so much can
be said of the comedy, which certainly stood in
less need of revision, and probably would not have
borne it so well ; nevertheless every little passing
touch of the reviser's hand is here also a noticeable
mark of invigoration and improvement. But King
Henry F., we may fairly say, is hardly less than
transformed. Not that it has been recast after the
fashion of Hamlet, or even rewritten after the
fashion of Romeo and Juliet ; vSut the corruptions
and imperfections of the pirated text are here
more flagrant than in any other instance; while
the general revision of style by which it is at once
purified and fortified extends to every nook and
corner of the restored and renovated building.
Even had we, however, a perfect and trustworthy
transcript of Shakespeare's original sketch for this
play, there can be little doubt that the rough
draught would still prove almost as different from
the final masterpiece as is the soiled and ragged
canvas now before us, on which we trace the out-
line of figures so strangely disfigured, made subject
to such rude extremities of defacement and de-
feature. There is indeed less difference between
the two editions in the comic than in the historic

King Henry IV. 105

scenes ; the pirates were probably more careful to
furnish their market with a fair sample of the
lighter than of the graver ware supplied by their
plunder of the poet ; Fluellen and Pistol lose less
through their misusage than the king ; and the
king himself is less maltreated when he talks plain
prose with his soldiers than when he chops blank
verse with his enemies or his lords. His rough
and ready courtship of the French princess is a
good deal expanded as to length, but (if I dare say
so) less improved and heightened in tone than we
might well have wished and it might well have borne;
in either text the hero's addresses savour rather of
a ploughman than a prince, and his finest courtesies
are clownish though not churlish. We may pro-
bably see in this rather a concession to the appe-
tite of the groundlings than an evasion of the
difficulties inherent in the subject-matter of the
scene ; too heavy as these might have been for
another, we can conceive of none too hard for the
magnetic tact and intuitive delicacy of Shake-
speare's judgment and instinct. But it must fairly
and honestly be admitted that in this scene we
find as little of the charm and humour inseparable
from the prince as of the courtesy and dignity to
be expected from the king.

io6 A Study of Shakespeare.

It should on the other hand be noted that the
finest touch in the comic scenes, if not the finest
in the whole portrait of Falstaff, is apparently an
afterthought, a touch added on revision of the
original design. In the first scene of the second
act Mrs. Quickly's remark that " he'll yield the
crow a pudding one of these days" is common to
both versions of the play ; but the six words fol-
lowing are only to be found in the revised edition ;
and these six words the very pirates could hardly
have passed over or struck out. They are not
such as can drop from the text of a poet unper-
ceived by the very dullest and horniest of human
eyes. " The king has killed his heart." Here is
the point in Falstaff's nature so strangely over-
looked by the man of all men who we should have
said must be the first to seize and to appreciate it.
It is as grievous as it is inexplicable that the
Shakespeare of France — the most infinite in com-
passion, in " conscience and tender heart," of all
great poets in all ages and all nations of the world
— should have missed the deep tenderness of this
supreme and subtlest touch in the work of the
greatest among his fellows. Again, with anything
but " damnable " iteration, does Shakespeare revert
to it before the close of this very scene. Even

King Henry IV. 107

Pistol and Nym can see that what now ails their
old master is no such ailment as in his prosperous
days was but too liable to " play the rogue with his
great toe." " The king hath run bad humours on
the knight " : " his heart is fracted, and corroborate."
And it is not thus merely through the eclipse of that
brief mirage, that fair prospect "of Africa, and golden
joys," in view of which he was ready to " take any
man's horses." This it is that distinguishes Falstaff
from Panurge ; that lifts him at least to the moral
level of Sancho Panza. I cannot but be reluctant to
set the verdict of my own judgment against that of
Victor Hugo's; I need none to remind me what and
who he is whose judgment I for once oppose, and
what and who am I that I should oppose it ; that he
is he, and I am but myself ; yet against his classifi-
cation of Falstaff, against his definition of Shake-
speare's un approached and unapproachable master-
piece in the school of comic art and humoristic na-
ture, I must and do with all my soul and strength
protest. The admirable phrase of " swine-centaur "
(centaure du pore) is as inapplicable to Falstaff as it
is appropriate to Panurge. Not the third person but
the first in date of that divine and human trinity of
humourists whose names make radiant for ever the
century of their new-born glory — not Shakespeare

io8 A Study of Shakespeare.

but Rabelais is responsible for the creation or the
discovery of such a type as this. " Suum cuique is
our Roman justice " ; the gradation from Panurge
to Falstaff is not downward but upward ; though
it be Victor Hugo's very self who asserts the
contrary.1 Singular as may seem the colloca-
tion of the epithet " moral " with the name " Fal-
staff," I venture to maintain my thesis ; that in
point of feeling, and therefore of possible moral
elevation, Falstaff is as undeniably the superior of
Sancho as Sancho is unquestionably the superior
of Panurge. The natural affection of Panurge is
bounded by the self-same limits as the natural
theology of Polyphemus ; the love of the one, like
the faith of the other, begins and ends alike at one

point ;

Myself,
And this great belly, first of deities ;

(in which line, by the way, we may hear as it were
a first faint prelude of the great proclamation to
come — the hymn of praise and thanksgiving for the
coronation day of King Caster ; whose laureate, we
know, was as lovingly familiar with the Polyphe-
mus of Euripides as Shakespeare with his own

1 "La dynastic du bon sens, inauguree dans Panurge, continuee
dans Sancho Pan£a, tourne a mal et avorte dans Falstaff."
(William SJtakesticare, deuxieme partie, livre premier, ch. ii.)

King Henry IV. 109

Pantagruel.) In Sancho we come upon a creature
capable of love — but not of such love as kills or
helps to kill, such love as may end or even as may
seem to end in anything like heartbreak. " And now
abideth Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, these
three ; but the greatest of these is Shakespeare."

I would fain score yet another point in the fat
knight's favour ; " I have much to say in the behalf
of that Falstaff." Rabelais, evangelist and prophet
of the Resurrection of the Flesh (so long entombed,
ignored, repudiated, misconstrued, vilified, by so
many generations and ages of Galilean preachers
and Pharisaic schoolmen) — Rabelais was content to
paint the flesh merely, in its honest human reality
— human at least, if also bestial ; in its frank and
rude reaction against the half brainless and wholly
bloodless teachers whose doctrine he himself on the
one hand, and Luther on the othe.r, arose together
to smite severally — to smite them hip and thigh,
even till the going down of the sun ; the mock sun
or marshy meteor that served only to deepen the
darkness encompassing on every side the doubly
dark ages — the ages of monarchy and theocracy, the
ages of death and of faith. To Panurge, therefore,
it was unnecessary and it might have seemed
inconsequent to attribute other gifts or functions

no A Study of Shakespeare.

than are proper to such intelligence as may ac-
company the appetites of an animal. That most
irreverend father in God, Friar John, belongs to a
higher class in the moral order of being ; and he
much rather than his fellow-voyager and penitent
is properly comparable with Falstaff. It is im-
possible to connect the notion of rebuke with the
sins of Panurge. The actual lust and gluttony,
the imaginary cowardice of Falstaff, have been
gravely and sharply rebuked by critical morality ;
we have just noted a too recent and too eminent
example of this ; but what mortal ever dreamed of
casting these qualities in the teeth of his supposed
counterpart ? The difference is as vast between
Falstaff on the field of battle and Panurge on the
storm-tossed deck as between Falstaff and Hotspur,
Panurge and Friar John. No man could show
cooler and steadier nerve than is displayed in
either case — by the lay as well as the clerical name-
sake of the fourth evangelist. If ever fruitless but
endless care was shown to prevent misunder-
standing, it was shown in the pains taken by
Shakespeare to obviate the misconstruction which
would impute to Falstaff the quality of a Parolles
or a Bobadil, a Bessus or a Moron. The delight-
ful encounter between the jester and the bear in

King Henry IV. in

the crowning interlude of La Princesse d'Elide
shows once more, I may remark, that Moliere
had sat at the feet of Rabelais as delightedly
as Shakespeare before him. Such rapturous in-
ebriety or Olympian incontinence of humour only
fires the blood of the graver and less exuberant
humourist when his lips are still warm and wet
from the well-spring of the Dive Bouteille.

It is needless to do over again the work which
was done, and well done, a hundred years since, by
the writer whose able essay in vindication and ex-
position of the genuine character of Falstaff elicited
from Dr. Johnson as good a jest and as bad a
criticism as might have been expected. His
argument is too thoroughly carried out at all
points and fortified on all hands to require or
even to admit of corroboration ; and the attempt
to appropriate any share of the lasting credit which
is his due would be nothing less than a disin-
genuous impertinence. I may here however
notice that in the very first scene of this trilogy
which introduces us to the ever dear and honoured
presence of Sir John, his creator has put into the
mouth of a witness no friendlier or more cand id
than Ned Poms the distinction between two as
true-bred cowards as ever turned back and one

ri2 A Study of Shakespeare.

who will fight no longer than he sees reason. In
this nutshell lies the whole kernel of the matter ;
the sweet, sound, ripe, toothsome, wholesome ker-
nel of FalstafTs character and humour. He will
fight as well as his princely patron, and, like the
prince, as long as he sees reason ; but neither Hal
nor Jack has ever felt any touch of desire to pluck
that " mere scutcheon " honour " from the pale-faced
moon." Harry Percy is as it were the true Sir
Bedivere, the last of all Arthurian knights ; Henry
V. is the first as certainly as he is the noblest of
those equally daring and calculating statesmen-
warriors whose two most terrible, most perfect, and
most famous types are Louis XL and Caesar Borgia.
Gain, " commodity," the principle of self-interest
which never but in word and in jest could become the
principle of action with Faulconbridge, — himself
already far more "a man of this world" than a
Launcelot or a Hotspur, — is as evidently the main-
spring of Henry's enterprise and life as of the con-
tract between King Philip and King John. The
supple and shameless egotism of the churchmen on
whose political sophistries he relies for external sup-
port is needed rather to varnish his project than to
reassure his conscience. Like Frederic the Great
before his first Silesian war, the future conqueror of

King Henry V. 113

Agincourt has practically made up his mind before
he seeks to find as good reason or as plausible excuse
as were likewise to suffice the future conqueror of
Rosbach. In a word, Henry is doubtless not the
man, as old Auchindrane expresses it in the noble
and strangely neglected tragedy which bears
solitary but sufficient witness to the actual
dramatic faculty of Sir Walter Scott's genius, to do
the devil's work without his wages ; but neither is
he, on the like unprofitable terms, by any manner
of means the man to do God's. No completer in-
carnation could be shown us of the militant
Englishman — Anglais pur sang ; but it is not only,
as some have seemed to think, with the highest,
the purest, the noblest quality of English character
that his just and far-seeing creator has endowed
him. The godlike equity of Shakespeare's judg-
ment, his implacable and impeccable righteousness
of instinct and of insight, was too deeply ingrained
in the very core of his genius to be perverted by
any provincial or pseudo-patriotic prepossessions ;
his patriotism was too national to be provincial.
Assuredly no poet ever had more than he : not
even the king of men and poets who fought at
Marathon and sang of Salamis : much less had
any or has any one of our own, from Miitori on to

H4 A Study of Shakespeare.

Campbell and from Campbell even to Tennyson.
In the mightiest chorus of King Henry V. we hear
the pealing ring of the same great English trumpet
that was yet to sound over the battle of the Baltic,
and again in our later day over a sea-fight of
Shakespeare's own, more splendid and heart-
cheering in its calamity than that other and all
others in their triumph ; a war-song and a sea-
song divine and deep as death or as the sea, mak-
ing thrice more glorious at once the glorious three
names of England, of Grenville, and of Tennyson
for ever. From the affectation of cosmopolitan indif-
ference not ^Eschylus, not Pindar, not Dante's very
self was more alien or more free than Shakespeare ;
but there was nothing of the dry Tyrtasan twang,
the dull mechanic resonance as of wooden echoes
from a platform, in the great historic chord of his
lyre. "He is very English, too English, even," says
the Master on whom his enemies alone — assuredly
not his most loving, most reverent, and most thank-
ful disciples — might possibly and plausibly retort
that he was " very French, too French, even " ; but
he certainly was not " too English" to see and cleave
to the main fact, the radical and central truth, of
personal or national character, of typical history or
tradition, without seeking to embellish, to degrade,

King Henry V. 115

in either or in any way to falsify it. From king
to king, from cardinal to cardinal, from the earliest
in date of subject to the latest of his histories, we
find the same thread running, the same link of
honourable and righteous judgment, of equitable
and careful equanimity, connecting and combining
play with play in an unbroken and infrangible chain
of evidence to the singleness of the poet's eye, the
identity of the workman's hand, which could do
justice and would do no more than justice, alike to
Henry and to Wolsey, to Pandulph and to John.
His typical English hero or historic protagonist
is a man of their type who founded and built up
the empire of England in India ; a hero after the
future pattern of Hastings and of Clive ; not less
daringly sagacious and not more delicately scru-
pulous, not less indomitable or more impeccable
than they. A type by no means immaculate, a
creature not at all too bright and good for English
nature's daily food in times of mercantile or
military enterprise ; no whit more if no whit less
excellent and radiant than reality. Arnica
Britannia, sed magis arnica veritas. The master
poet of England — all Englishmen may reasonably
and honourably be proud of it — has not two
weights and two measures for friend and foe.

n6 A Study of Shakespeare.

This palpable and patent fact, a3 his only and
worthy French translator has well remarked,
would of itself suffice to exonerate his memory
from the imputation of having perpetrated in its
evil entirety The First Part of King Henry VI.

There is, in my opinion, somewhat more of
internal evidence than I have ever seen adduced
in support of the tradition current from an early
date as to the origin of the Merry Wives oy
Windsor; a tradition which assigns to Queen
Elizabeth the same office of midwife with regard
to this comedy as was discharged by Elwood with
reference to Paradise Regained. Nothing could so
naturally or satisfactorily explain its existence as
the expression of a desire to see " Falstaff in love,"
which must have been nothing less than the equi-
valent of a command to produce him under the
disguise of such a transfiguration on the boards.
The task of presenting him so shorn of his beams,
so much less than archangel (of comedy) ruined,
and the excess of (humorous) glory obscured,
would hardly, we cannot but think and feel, have
spontaneously suggested itself to Shakespeare as
a natural or eligible aim for the fresh exercise of
his comic genius. To exhibit Falstaff as through-
out the whole course of five acts a credulous and

Merry Wives of Windsor. 117

baffled dupe, one " easier to be played on than a
pipe," was not really to reproduce him at all. The
genuine Falstaff could no more have played such
a part than the genuine Petruchio could have
filled such an one as was assigned him by Fletcher
in the luckless hour when that misguided poet
undertook to continue the subject and to correct
the moral of the next comedy in our catalogue of
Shakespeare's. The Tamer Tamed is hardly less
consistent or acceptable as a sequel to the Taming
of the Shrew than the Merry Wives of Windsor
as a supplement to King Henry IV. : and no con-
ceivable comparison could more forcibly convey
how broad and deep is the gulf of incongruity
which divides them.

The plea for once suggested by the author in
the way of excuse or extenuation for this incom-
patibility of Falstaff with Falstaff — for the viola-
tion of character goes far beyond mere inconsis-
tency or the natural ebb and flow of even the
brightest wits and most vigorous intellects — will
commend itself more readily to the moralist than
to the humanist ; in other words, to the preacher
rather than to the thinker, the sophist rather
than the artist. Here only does Shakespeare
show that he feels the necessity of condescending

1 1 8 A Study of Shakespeare.

to such evasion or such apology as is implied in
the explanation of Falstaff's incredible credulity
by a reference to " the guiltiness of his mind " and
the admission, so gratifying to all minds more
moral than his own, that " wit may be made a
Jack-a-Lent, when 'tis upon ill employment." It is
the best excuse that can be made ; but can we
imagine the genuine, the pristine Falstaff reduced
to the proffer of such an excuse in serious good
earnest ?

In the original version of this comedy there
was not a note of poetry from end to end ; as it
then appeared, it might be said to hold the same
place on the roll of Shakespeare's plays as is
occupied by Bartholomew Fair on the roll of Ben
Jonson's. From this point of view it is curious to
contrast the purely farcical masterpieces of the
town-bred schoolboy and the country lad. There
is a certain faint air of the fields, the river, and the
park, even in the rough sketch of Shakespeare's
farce — wholly prosaic as it is, and in no point
suggestive of any unlikelihood in the report which
represents it as the composition or rather as the
improvisation of a fortnight. We know at once
that he must have stroked the fallow greyhound
that was outrun on " Cotsall " ; that he must — and

Merry Wives of Windsor. 119

perhaps once or twice at least too often — have
played truant (some readers, boys past or present,
might wish for association's sake it could actually
have been Datchet-wards) from under the shadow
of good Sir Hugh's probably not over formidable
though " threatening twigs of birch," at all risks of
being " preeches " on his return, in fulfilment of the
direful menace held out to that young namesake
of his over whose innocence Mrs. Quickly was so
creditably vigilant. On the other hand, no student
of Jonson will need to be reminded how closely
and precociously familiar the big stalwart West-
minster boy, Camden's favoured and grateful pupil,
must have made himself with the rankest haunts
and most unsavoury recesses of that ribald water-
side and Smithfield life which he lived to repro-
duce on the stage with a sometimes insufferable
fidelity to details from which Hogarth might have
shrunk. Even his unrivalled proficiency in classic
learning can hardly have been the fruit of greater
or more willing diligence in school hours than he
must have lavished on other than scholastic studies
in the streets. The humour of his huge photo-
graphic group of divers " humours " is undeniably
and incomparably richer, broader, fuller of inven-
tion and variety, than any that Shakespeare's

E

120 A Study of Shakespeare.

lighter work can show; all the five acts of the
latter comedy can hardly serve as counterpoise, in
weight and wealth of comic effect, to the single
scene in which Zeal-of-the-Land defines the moral
and theological boundaries of action and intention
which distinguish the innocent if not laudable de-
sire to eat pig from the venial though not mortal
sin of longing to eat pig in the thick of the pro-
fane Fair, which may rather be termed a foul than
a fair. Taken from that point of view which looks
only to force and freedom and range of humorous
effect, Jonson's play is to his friend's as London is
to Windsor ; but in more senses than one it is to
Shakespeare's as the Thames at London Bridge is
to the Thames at Eton : the atmosphere of Smith-
field is not more different from the atmosphere of
the playing-fields ; and some, too delicate of nose
or squeamish of stomach, may prefer Cuckoo
Weir to Shoreditch. But undoubtedly the phan-
toms of Shallow and Mrs. Quickly which put in
(so to speak) a nominal reappearance in the Merry
Wives of Windsor are comparatively as poor and
thin if set over against the full rich outlines of
Rabbi Busy and Dame Purecraft as these again
are at all points alike inferior to the real Shallow
and the genuine Quickly of King Henry IV. It

Merry Wives of Windsor. 1 2 1

is true that Jonson's humour has sometimes less in
common with Shakespeare's than with the humour
of Swift, Smollett, and Carlyle. For all his admi-
ration and even imitation of Rabelais, Shakespeare
has hardly once or twice burnt but so much as a
stray pinch of fugitive incense on the altar of
Cloacina ; the only Venus acknowledged and
adored by those three latter humourists. If not
always constant with the constancy of Milton to
the service of Urania, he never turns into a dirtier
byway or back alley than the beaten path trodden
occasionally by most of his kind which leads them
on a passing errand of no unnatural devotion to
the shrine of Venus Pandemos.

When, however, we turn from the raw rough
sketch to the enriched and ennobled version of the
present play we find it in this its better shape more
properly comparable with another and a nobler
work of Jonson's — with that magnificent comedy,
the first avowed and included among his collection
by its author, which according to all tradition first
owed its appearance and success to the critical
good sense and generous good offices of Shake-
speare. Neither my duly unqualified love for the
greater poet nor my duly qualified regard for the
less can alter my sense that their mutual relations

122 A Study of Shakespeare.

are in this one case inverted ; that Every Man
in his Humour is altogether a better comedy
and a work of higher art than the Merry
Wives of Windsor. Kitely is to Ford almost
what Arnolphe is to Sganarelle. (As according
to the learned Metaphraste " Filio non potest
prseferri nisi films," even so can no one but
Moliere be preferred or likened to Moliere.)
Without actually touching like Arnolphe on
the hidden springs of tragedy, the jealous hus-
band in Jonson's play is only kept from trench-
ing on the higher and forbidden grounds of
passion by the potent will and the consummate
self-command of the great master who called him
up in perfect likeness to the life. Another or a
deeper tone, another or a stronger touch, in the
last two admirable scenes with his cashier and his
wife, when his hot smouldering suspicion at length
catches fire and breaks out in agony of anger,
would have removed him altogether beyond the
legitimate pale of comedy. As it is, the self-
control of the artist is as thorough as his grasp
and mastery of his subject are triumphant and
complete.

It would seem as though on revision of the
Merry Wives of Windsor Shakespeare had found

Merry Wives of Windsor. 123

himself unwilling or rather perhaps unable to leave
a single work of his hand without one touch or
breath on it of beauty or of poetry. The sole fit-
ting element of harmonious relief or variety in such
a case could of course be found only in an interlude
of pure fancy ; any touch of graver or deeper emo-
tion would simply have untuned and deranged the
whole scheme of composition. A lesser poet might
have been powerless to resist the temptation or
suggestion of sentiment that he should give to the
little loves of Anne Page and Fenton a touch of
pathetic or emotional interest ; but " opulent as
Shakespeare was, and of his opulence prodigal " (to
borrow a phrase from Coleridge), he knew better
than to patch with purple or embroider with
seed-pearl the hem of this homespun little piece of
comic drugget. The match between cloth of gold
and cloth of frieze could hardly have borne any
good issue in this instance. Instead therefore of
following the lead of Terence's or the hint of
Jonson's example, and exalting the accent of his
comedy to the full-mouthed pitch of a Chremes
or a Kitely, he strikes out some forty and odd lines
of rather coarse and commonplace doggrel about
brokers, proctors, lousy fox-eyed Serjeants, blue
and red noses, and so forth, to make room for the

1 24 A Study of Shakespeare.

bright light interlude of fairyland child's-play which
might not unfittingly have found place even with-
iii the moon-charmed circle of A Midsummer
Nights Dream. Even in that all heavenly poem
there are hardly to be found lines of more sweet
and radiant simplicity than here.

The refined instinct, artistic judgment, and con
summate taste of Shakespeare were perhaps never
so wonderfully shown as in his recast of another
man's work — a man of real if rough genius for
comedy — which we get in the Taming of the Shrew.
Only the collation of scene with scene, then of
speech with speech, then of line with line, will
show how much may be borrowed from a stranger's
material and how much ma^ be added to it by the
same stroke of a single hand. All the force and
humour alike of character and situation belong to
Shakespeare's eclipsed and forlorn precursor ; he
has added nothing ; he has tempered and enriched
everything. That the luckless author of the first
sketch is like to remain a man as nameless as the
deed of the witches in Macbeth, unless some chance
or caprice of accident should suddenly flash favour-
ing light on his now impersonal and indiscoverable
individuality, seems clear enough when we take
into account the double and final disproof of his

The Taming of the Shrew. 125

imaginary identity with Marlowe, which Mr. Dyce
has put forward with such unanswerable certitude.
He is a clumsy and coarse-fingered plagiarist from
that poet, and his stolen jewels of expression look
so grossly out of place in the homely setting of his
usual style that they seem transmuted from real to
sham. On the other hand, he is of all the Pre-Shake-
speareans known to us incomparably the truest, the
richest, the most powerful and original humour-
ist ; one indeed without a second on that ground,
for " the rest are nowhere." Now Marlowe, it need
scarcely be once again reiterated, was as certainly
one of the least and worst among jesters as he was
one of the best and greatest among poets. There
can therefore be no serious question of his partner-
ship in a play wherein the comic achievement is
excellent and the poetic attempts are execrable
throughout.

The recast of it in which a greater than Berni
has deigned to play the part of that poet towards
a lesser than Bojardo shows tact and delicacy per-
haps without a parallel in literature. No chance
of improvement is missed, while nothing of value is
dropped or thrown away.1 There is just now and

1 Possibly some readers may agree with my second thoughts, in
thinking that one exception may here be made and some surprise

126 A Study of Shakespeare.

then a momentary return perceptible to the skipping
metre and fantastic manner of the first period,
which may have been unconsciously suggested by
the nature of the task in hand — a task of itself im-
plying or suggesting some new study of old models ;
but the main style of the play in all its weightier
parts is as distinctly proper to the second period,
as clear an evidence of inner and spiritual affinity
(with actual tabulation of dates, were such a thing
as feasible as it is impossible, I must repeat that the
argument would here be — what it is now — in no wise
concerned), as is the handling of character through-
out ; but most especially the subtle force, the im-
peccable and careful instinct, the masculine delicacy
of touch, by which the somewhat ruffianly tempera-
ment of the original Ferando is at once .refined and
invigorated through its transmutation into the
hearty and humorous manliness of Petruchio's.

It is observable that those few and faint traces
which we have noticed in this play of a faded
archaic style trying as it were to resume a mockery
of revirescence are not wholly even if mainly

be here expressed at Shakespeare's rejection of Sly's memorable
query — " When will the fool come again, Sim ? " It is true that he
could well afford to spare it, as what could he not well afford to
spare ? but I will confess that it seems to me worthy of a place
among his own Sly's most admirable and notable sallies of humour.

The Taming of the Shrew. 127

confined to the underplot which a suggestion or
surmise of Mr. Collier's long since assigned to
Haughton, author of Englishmen for my Money^
or A Woman will have her Will : a spirited, vigor-
ous, and remarkably regular comedy of intrigue,
full of rough and ready incident, bright boisterous
humour, honest lively provinciality and gay high-
handed Philistinism. To take no account of this
attribution would be to show myself as shamelessly
as shamefully deficient in that respect and gratitude
which all genuine and thankful students will al-
ways be as ready to offer as all thankless and
insolent sciolists can ever be to disclaim, to the
venerable scholar who since I was first engaged
on these notes has added yet another obligation to
the many under which he had already laid all
younger and lesser labourers in the same field of
study, by the issue in a form fitly ennobled and en-
riched of his great historical work on our early
stage. It might seem something of an unintended
impertinence to add that such recognition of his
theory no more implies a blind acceptance of it —
whatever such acceptance on my part might be
worth — than the expression of such gratitude and
respect could reasonably be supposed to imply an
equally blind confidence in the authority or the

E 2

128 A Study of Shakespeare.

value of that version of Shakespeare's text which
has been the means of exposing a name so long
and so justly honoured, not merely to the natural
and rational inquisition of rival students, but to
the rancorous and ribald obloquy of thankless and
frontless pretenders.

Here perhaps as well as anywhere else I may
find a proper place to intercalate the little word I
have to say in partial redemption of my pledge to
take in due time some notice at more or less length
of the only two among the plays doubtfully ascribed
to Shakespeare which in my eyes seem to bear any
credible or conceivable traces of his touch. Of
these two I must give the lesser amount of
space and attention to that one which in itself
is incomparably the more worthy of discussion,
admiration, and regard. The reason of this lies in
the very excellence which has attracted to it the
notice of such competent judges and the suffrage
of such eminent names as would make the task of
elaborate commentary and analytic examination
something more than superfluous on my part;
whereas the other has never been and will never
be assigned to Shakespeare by any critical student
whose verdict is worth a minute's consideration or
the marketable value of a straw. Nevertheless it

Arden of Fever sham. 129

is on other grounds worth notice ; and such notice,
to be itself of any value, must of necessity be ela-
borate and minute. The critical analysis of King
Edward III. \ have therefore relegated to its
proper place in an appendix ; while I reserve a
corner of my text, at once out of admiration for
the play itself and out of reverence for the names
and authority of some who have given their verdict
in its behalf, for a rough and rapid word or two on
Arden of Feversham.

It is with equally inexpressible surprise that I
find Mr. Collier accepting as Shakespeare's any
part of A Warning for Fair Women, and rejecting
without compromise or hesitation the belief or
theory which would assign to the youth of Shake-
speare the incomparably nobler tragic poem in
question.1 His first ascription to Shakespeare of

1 History of English Dramatic Poetry, ed. 1879, v°l« "• PP-
437-447. In a later part of his noble and invaluable work (vol. iii.
p. 1 88) the author quotes a passage from "the induction to A
Warning for Fair Women, 1599 (to which Shakespeare most assuredly
contributed)." It will be seen that I do not shrink from admitting
the full weight of authority which can be thrown into the scale against
my own opinion. To such an assertion from the insolent organs of
pretentious ignorance I should be content with the simple rejoinder
that Shakespeare most assuredly did nothing whatever of the sort ;
but to return such an answer in the* present case would be to write
myself down — and that in company to which I should most empha-
tically object — as something very decidedly more — and worse — than
an ass.

1 30 A Study of Shakespeare.

A Warning for Fair Women is couched in terms
far more dubious and diffident than such as he
afterwards adopts. It " might," he says, " be given
to Shakespeare on grounds far more plausible "
(on what, except possibly those of date, I can-
not imagine) "than those applicable to Arden of
Feversham" He then proceeds to cite some de-
tached lines and passages of undeniable beauty and
vigour, containing equally undeniable coincidences
of language, illustration, and expression with " pas-
sages in Shakespeare's undisputed plays." From
these he passes on to indicate a " resemblance "
which "is not merely verbal," and to extract whole
speeches which "are Shakespearean in a much
better sense " ; adding in a surely too trenchant
fashion, " Here we say, aut Shakespeare aut dia-
boltis" I must confess, with all esteem for the
critic and all admiration for the brief scene cited,
that I cannot say, Shakespeare.

There are spirits of another sort from whom we
naturally expect such assumptions and inferences
as start from the vantage ground of a few separate
or separable passages, and clear at a flying leap
the empty space intervening which divides them
from the goal of evidence as to authorship. Such
a spirit was that of the late Mr. Simpson, to whose

Arden of Feversham. 131

wealth of misused learning and fertility of mis*
applied conjecture I have already paid all due
tribute ; but who must have had beyond all other
sane men — most assuredly, beyond all other fairly
competent critics — the gift bestowed on him by a
malignant fairy of mistaking assumption for argu-
ment and possibility for proof. He was the very
Columbus of mare's nests ; to the discovery of
them, though they lay far beyond the pillars of
Hercules, he would apply all shifts and all resources
possible to an ultra-Baconian process of unphilo-
sophical induction. On the devoted head of Shake-
speare— who is also called Shakspere and Chaxpur
— he would have piled a load of rubbish, among which
the crude and vigorous old tragedy under discussion
shines out like a veritable diamond of the desert.
His " School of Shakspere," though not an academy
to be often of necessity perambulated by the most
peripatetic student of Shakespeare, will remain as a
monument of critical or uncritical industry, a store-
house of curious if not of precious relics, and a warn-
ing for other than fair women — or fair scholars — to
remember where " it is written that the shoemaker
should meddle with his yard and the tailor with
his last, the fisher with his pencil and the painter
with his nets."

132 A Study of Shakespeare.

To me the difference appears immeasurable
between the reasons for admitting the possibility of
Shakespeare's authorship in the case of Arden of
Feverskam, and the pretexts for imagining the pro-
bability of his partnership in A Warning for Fair
Women. There is a practically infinite distinction
between the evidence suggested by verbal or even
more than verbal resemblance of detached line to
line or selected passage to passage, and the proof
supplied by the general harmony and spiritual simi-
larity of a whole poem, on comparison of it as a
whole with the known works of the hypothetical
author. This proof, at all events, we surely do not
get from consideration in this light of the plea put
forward in behalf of A Warning for Fair Women.
This proof, I cannot but think, we are very much
nearer getting from contemplation under the same
light of the claim producible for Arden ofFeversham.

A Warning for Fair Women is unquestionably
in its way a noticeable and valuable "piece of work,"
as Sly might have defined it. It is perhaps the
best example anywhere extant of a merely realistic
tragedy — of realism pure and simple applied to
the service of the highest of the arts. Very rarely
does it rise for a very brief interval to the height of
tragic or poetic style, however simple and homely.

Arden of Fever sham. 133

The epilogue affixed to Arden of Fevers/tarn asks
pardon of the "gentlemen" composing its audi-
ence for "this naked tragedy," on the plea that
" simple truth is gracious enough " without needless
ornament or bedizenment of "glozing stuff." Far
more appropriate would such an apology have
been as in this case was at least superfluous, if
appended by way of epilogue to A Warning for
Fair Wometc, That is indeed a naked tragedy ;
nine-tenths of it are in no wise beyond the reach
of an able, industrious, and practised reporter, com-
missioned by the proprietors of the journal on
whose staff he might be engaged to throw into the
form of scenic dialogue his transcript of the evi-
dence in a popular and exciting case of adultery
and murder. The one figure on the stage of this
author which stands out sharply defined in our
recollection against a background of undistin-
guished shadows is the figure of the adulterer and
murderer. This most discreditable of Browns has
a distinct and brawny outline of his own, a gait
and accent as of a genuine and recognisable man,
who might have put to some better profit his
shifty spirit of enterprise, his genuine capacity
of affection, his burly ingenuity and hardihood.
His minor confidants and accomplices, Mrs.

134 A Study of Shakespeare.

Drury and her Trusty Roger, are mere common-
place profiles of malefactors : but it is in the con-
trast between the portraits of their two criminal
heroines that the vast gulf of difference between
the capacities of the two poets yawns patent to
the sense of all readers. Anne Sanders and Alice
Arden stand as far beyond comparison apart as
might a portrait by any average academician and
a portrait by Watts or Millais. Once only, in
the simple and noble scene cited by the over
generous partiality of Mr. Collier, does the widow
and murderess of Sanders rise to the tragic height
of the situation and the dramatic level of the part
so unfalteringly sustained from first to last by the
wife and the murderess of Arden.

There is the self-same relative difference be-
tween the two subordinate groups of innocent
or guilty characters. That is an excellent and
effective touch of realism, where Brown comes
across his victim's little boy playing truant in the
street with a small schoolfellow ; but in Arden of
Fevers/tarn the number of touches as telling and
as striking as this one is practically numberless.
They also show a far stronger and keener faculty
of poetic if not of dramatic imagination. The
casual encounter of little Sanders with the yet red-

Arden of Fever sham. 135

handed murderer of his father is not comparable for
depth and subtlety of effect with the scene in which
Arden's friend Franklin, riding with him to Rayn-
ham Down, breaks off his " pretty tale " of a per-
jured wife, overpowered by a " fighting at his heart,"
at the moment when they come close upon the
ambushed assassins in Alice Arden's pay. But
the internal evidence in this case, as I have already
intimated, does not hinge upon the proof or the
suggestion offered by any single passage or by any
number of single passages. The first and last
evidence of real and demonstrable weight is the
evidence of character. A good deal might be said
on the score of style in favour of its attribution to
a poet of the first order, writing at a time when
there were but two such poets writing for the
stage ; but even this is here a point of merely secon-
dary importance. It need only be noted in pass-
ing that if the problem be reduced to a question
between the authorship of Shakespeare and the
authorship of Marlowe there is no need and no
room for further argument. The whole style of
treatment from end to end is about as like the
method of Marlowe as the method of Balzac is
like the method of Dumas. There could be no
alternative in that case ; so that the actual alter-

136 A Study of Shakespeare.

native before us is simple enough : Either this
play is the young Shakespeare's first tragic master-
piece, or there was a writer unknown to us then
alive and at work for the stage who excelled him
as a tragic dramatist not less — to say the very
least — than he was excelled by Marlowe as a narra-
tive and tragic poet.

If we accept, as I have been told that Goethe
accepted (a point which I regret my inability to
verify), the former of these alternatives — or if at
least we assume it for argument's sake in passing
— we may easily strengthen our position by adduc-
ing as further evidence in its favour the author's
thoroughly Shakespearean fidelity to the details of
the prose narrative on which his tragedy is founded.
But, it may be objected, we find the same fidelity
to a similar text in the case of A Warning for
Fair Women. And here again starts up the
primal and radical difference between the two
works : it starts up and will not be overlooked.
Equal fidelity to the narrative text we do un-
doubtedly find in either case ; the same fidelity we
assuredly do not find. The one is a typical ex-
ample of prosaic realism, the other of poetic reality.
Light from darkness or truth from falsehood is not
more infallibly discernible. The fidelity in the one

Arden of Feverskam. 137

case is exactly, as I have already indicated, the
fidelity of a reporter to his notes. The fidelity in
the other case is exactly the fidelity of Shake-
speare in his Roman plays to the text of Plutarch.
It is a fidelity which admits — I had almost written,
which requires — the fullest play of the highest
imagination. No more than the most realistic of
reporters will it omit or falsify any necessary or
even admissible detail ; but the indefinable quality
which it adds to the lowest as to the highest of
these is (as Lamb says of passion) " the all in all
in poetry." Turning again for illustration to one
of the highest names in imaginative literature —
a name sometimes most improperly and absurdly
inscribed on the register of the realistic school,1

1 Not for the first and probably not for the last time I turn,
with all confidence as with all reverence, for illustration and
confirmation of my own words, to the exquisite critical genius
of a long honoured and long lamented fellow -craftsman. The
following admirable and final estimate of the more special element
or peculiar quality in the intellectual force of Honore de Balzac
could only have been taken by the inevitable intuition and ren-
dered by the subtlest eloquence of Charles Baudelaire. Nothing
could more aptly and perfectly illustrate the distinction indicated in
my text between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality.

"I have many a time been astonished that to pass for an ob-
server should be Balzac's great popular title to fame. To me it had
always seemed that it was his chief merit to be a visionary, and a
passionate visionary. All his characters are gifted with the ardour
of life which animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply
coloured as dreams. From the highest of the aristocracy to the lowest

138 A Study of Shakespeare.

we may say that the difference on this point is not
the difference between Balzac and Dumas, but the
distinction between Balzac and M. Zola. Let us
take by way of example the character next in im-
portance to that of the heroine — the character of
her paramour. A viler figure was never sketched
by Balzac ; a viler figure was seldom drawn by

of the mob, all the actors in his Human Comedy are keener after living,
more active and cunning in their struggles, more staunch in endur-
ance of misfortune, more ravenous in enjoyment, more angelic in
devotion, than the comedy of the real world shows them to us. In
a word, every one in Balzac, down to the very scullions, has genius.
Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. It is ac-
tually Balzac himself. And as all the beings of the outer world pre-
sented themselves to his mind's eye in strong relief and with a telling
expression, he has given a convulsive action to his figures ; he has
blackened their shadows and intensified their lights. Besides, his
prodigious love of detail, the outcome of an immoderate ambition to
see everything, to bring everything to sight, to guess everything, to
make others guess everything, obliged him to set down more forcibly
the principal lines, so as to preserve the perspective of the whole.
He reminds me sometimes of those etchers who are never satisfied
with the biting-in of their outlines, and transform into very ravines
the main scratches of the plate. From this astonishing natural
disposition of mind wonderful results have been produced. But
this disposition is generally defined as Balzac's great fault. More
properly speaking, it is exactly his great distinctive quality. But
who can boast of being so happily gifted, and of being able to apply
a method which may permit him to invest — and that with a sure
hand — what is purely trivial with splendour and imperial purple ?
Who can do this ? Now, he who does not, to speak the truth, does
no great thing."

Nor was any very great thing done by the author of A Warning
f*r Fair Women.

Arden of Feversham* 139

Thackeray. But as with Balzac, so with the
author of this play, the masterful will combining
with the masterly art of the creator who fashions
out of the worst kind of human clay the breathing
likeness of a creature so hatefully pitiful and so
pitifully hateful overcomes, absorbs, annihilates all
sense of such abhorrence and repulsion as would
prove the work which excited them no high or even
true work of art. Even the wonderful touch of
dastardly brutality and pitiful self-pity with which
Mosbie at once receives and repels the condolence
of his mistress on his wound —

Alice. — Sweet Mosbie, hide thine arm, it kills ray heart.
Mosbie. — Ay, Mistress Arden , this is your favour. —

even this does not make unendurable the scenic
representation of what in actual life would be unen-
durable for any man to witness. Such an exhibi-
tion of currish cowardice and sullen bullying spite
increases rather our wondering pity for its victim
than our wondering sense of her degradation.
And this is a kind of triumph which only such an
artist as Shakespeare in poetry or as Balzac in
prose can achieve.

Alice Arden, if she be indeed a daughter of
Shakespeare's, is the eldest born of that group to
which Lady Macbeth and Dionyza belong hy right

140 A Study of Shakespeare.

of weird sisterhood. The wives of the thane of
Glamis and the governor of Tharsus, it need hardly
be said, are both of them creations of a much
later date — if not of the very latest discernible
or definable stage in the art of Shakespeare.
Deeply dyed as she is in bloodguiltiness, the wife
of Arden is much less of a born criminal than
these. To her, at once the agent and the patient
of her crime, the victim and the instrument of
sacrifice and blood-offering to Venus Libitina,
goddess of love and death, — to her, even in the
deepest pit of her deliberate wickedness, remorse
is natural and redemption conceivable. Like the
Phaedra of Racine, and herein so nobly unlike the
Phaedra of Euripides, she is capable of the deepest
and bitterest penitence, — incapable of dying with
a hideous and homicidal falsehood on her long
polluted lips. Her latest breath is not a lie but a
prayer.

Considering, then, in conclusion, the various
and marvellous gifts displayed for the first time on
our stage by the great poet, the great dramatist,
the strong and subtle searcher of hearts, the just
and merciful judge and painter of human passions,
who gave this tragedy to the new-born literature
of our drama; taking into account the really

Arden of Fever sham. 141

wonderful skill, the absoluteness of intuition and
inspiration, with which every stroke is put in that
touches off character or tones down effect, even in
the sketching and grouping of such minor figures
as the ruffianly hireling Black Will, the passionate
artist without pity or conscience,1 and above all
the " unimitated, inimitable " study of Michael, in
whom even physical fear becomes tragic, and
cowardice itself no ludicrous infirmity but rather a
terrible passion ; I cannot but finally take heart to
say, even in the absence of all external or tra-
ditional testimony, that it seems to me not pardon-
able merely nor permissible, but simply logical and
reasonable, to set down this poem, a young man's
work on the face of it, as the possible work of no
man's youthful hand but Shakespeare's.

No similar question is raised, no parallel pro-
blem stated, in the case of any one other among the
plays now or ever ascribed on grounds more or less

1 I do not know or remember in the whole radiant range of
Elizabethan drama more than one parallel tribute to that paid in
this play by an English poet to the yet foreign art of painting,
through the eloquent mouth of this enthusiastic villain of genius,
whom we might regard as a more genuinely Titianic sort of Wain-
wright. The parallel passage is that most lovely and fervid of all
imaginative panegyrics on this art, extracted by Lamb from the co-
medy of Doctor Dodipoll; which saw the light or twilight of publi-
cation just eight years later than Arden of Feversham.

142 A Study of Shakespeare.

dubious to that same indubitable hand. This
hand I do not recognise even in the Yorkshire
Tragedy, full as it is to overflowing of fierce animal
power, and hot as with the furious breath of some
caged wild beast. Heywood, who as the most
realistic and in some sense prosaic dramatist of his
time has been credited (though but in a modestly
tentative and suggestive fashion) with its author-
ship, was as incapable of writing it as Chapman of
writing the Shakespearean parts of The Two Noble
Kinsmen or Fletcher of writing the scenes of Wol-
sey's fall and Katherine's death in King Henry VIIL
To the only editor of Shakespeare responsible for
the two earlier of the three suggestions here set
aside, they may be forgiven on the score of insuffi-
cient scholarship and want of critical training ; but
on what ground the third suggestion can be excused
in the case of men who should have a better right
than most others to speak with some show of
authority on a point of higher criticism, I must
confess myself utterly at a loss to imagine. In the
Yorkshire Tragedy the submissive devotion of its
miserable heroine to her maddened husband is
merely doglike, — though not even, in the exquisitely
true and tender phrase of our sovereign poetess,
* most passionately patient." There is no likeness in

A Yorkshire Tragedy. 143

this poor trampled figure to " one of Shakespeare's
women " : Griselda was no ideal of his. To find its
parallel in the dramatic literature of the great age,
we must look to lesser great men than Shakespeare.
Ben Jonson, a too exclusively masculine poet, will
give us a couple of companion figures for her — or
one such figure at least ; for the wife of Fitzdottrel,
submissive as she is even to the verge of undignified
if not indecorous absurdity, is less of a human
spaniel than the wife of Corvino. Another such is
Robert Davenport's Abstemia, so warmly admired
by Washington Irving ; another is the heroine
of that singularly powerful and humorous tragi-
comedy, labelled Hoiv to Choose a Good Wife
from a Bad, which in its central situation anti-
cipates that of Leigh Hunt's beautiful Legend of
Florence ; while Decker has revived, in one of our
sweetest and most graceful examples of dramatic
romance, the original incarnation of that somewhat
pitiful ideal which even in a ruder and more
Russian century of painful European progress out
of night and winter could only be made credible,
acceptable, or endurable, by the yet unequalled
genius of Chaucer and Boccaccio.

For concentrated might and overwhelming
weight of realism, this lurid little play beats A

144 A Study of Shakespeare.

Warning for Fair Women fairly out of the field.
It is and must always be (I had nearly said, thank
heaven) unsurpassable for pure potency of horror ;
and the breathless heat of the action, its raging
rate of speed, leaves actually no breathing-time for
disgust ; it consumes our very sense of repulsion as
with fire. But such power as this, though a rare
and a great gift, is not the right quality for a
dramatist ; it is not the fit property of a poet
Ford and Webster, even Tourneur and Marston,who
have all been more or less wrongfully though more
or less plausibly attacked on the score of excess in
horror, have none of them left us anything so
nakedly terrible, so terribly naked as this. Passion
is here not merely stripped to the skin but stripped
to the bones. I cannot tell who could and I cannot
guess who would have written it. " Tis a very
excellent piece of work " ; may we never exactly
look upon its like again !

I thought it at one time far from impossible, if
not very nearly probable, that the author of Arden
of Fevcrsham might be one with the author of the
famous additional scenes to The Spanish Tragedy,
and that either both of these "pieces of work " or
neither must be Shakespeare's. I still adhere to
Coleridge's verdict, which indeed must be that of

The Spanish Tragedy. 145

all judges capable of passing any sentence worthier
of record than are

Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle
For girls of nine :

to the effect that those magnificent passages, well-
nigh overcharged at every point with passion and
subtlety, sincerity and instinct of pathetic truth, are
no less like Shakespeare's work than unlike Jon-
son's: though hardly perhaps more unlike the typical
manner of his adult and matured style than is the
general tone of The Case is Altered, his one surviv-
ing comedy of that earlier period in which we know
from Henslowe that the stout-hearted and long
struggling young playwright went through so much
theatrical hackwork and piecework in the same
rough harness with other now more or less notable
workmen then drudging under the manager's dull
narrow sidelong eye for bare bread and bare
shelter. But this unlikeness, great as it is and
serious and singular, between his former and his
latter style in high comedy, gives no warrant for us
to believe him capable of so immeasurable a trans-
formation in tragic style and so indescribable a
decadence in tragic power as would be implied in
a descent from the "fine madness" of "old Jero-
nymo " to the flat sanity and smoke-dried sobriety

146 A Study of Shakespeare.

of Catiline and Sejanus. — I cannot but think, too,
that Lamb's first hypothetical ascription of these
wonderful scenes to Webster, so much the most
Shakespearean in gait and port and accent of all
Shakespeare's liege men-at-arms, was due to a far
happier and more trustworthy instinct than led
him in later years to liken them rather to "the
overflowing griefs and talking distraction of Titus
Andronicus."

We have wandered it may be somewhat out
of the right time into a far other province of
poetry than the golden land of Shakespeare's
ripest harvest-fields of humour. And now, before
we may enter the " flowery square " made by the
summer growth of his four greatest works in pure
and perfect comedy " beneath a broad and equal-
blowing wind " of all happiest and most fragrant
imagination, we have but one field to cross, one
brook to ford, that hardly can be thought to keep
us out of Paradise. In the garden-plot on whose
wicket is inscribed All's Well that Ends Well, we
are hardly distant from Eden itself

About a young dove's flutter from a wood.

The ninth story of the third day -of the Deca-
meron is one of the few subjects chosen by Shake-

All's Well that Ends Well. 147

speare — as so many were taken by Fletcher —
which are less fit, we may venture to think, for
dramatic than for narrative treatment. He has
here again shown all possible delicacy of instinct
in handling a matter which unluckily it was not
possible to handle on the stage with absolute and
positive delicacy of feeling or expression. Dr.
Johnson — in my humble opinion, with some justice ;
though his verdict has been disputed on the score
of undeserved austerity — " could not reconcile his
heart to Bertram " ; and I, unworthy as I may be to
second or support on the score of morality the find-
ing of so great a moralist, cannot reconcile my
instincts to Helena. Parolles is even better than
Bobadil, as Bobadil is even better than Bessus ;
and Lafeu is one of the very best old men in all
the range of comic art. But the whole charm and
beauty of the play, the quality which raises it to
the rank of its fellows by making it loveable as well
as admirable, we find only in the " sweet, serene,
skylike " sanctity and attraction of adorable old age,
made more than ever near and dear to us in the
incomparable figure of the old Countess of Rous-
sillon. At the close of the play, Fletcher would
inevitably have married her to Lafeu — or rather
possibly, to the King.

148 A Study of Shakespeare.

At the entrance of the heavenly quadrilateral,
or under the rising dawn of the four fixed stars
which compose our Northern Cross among the
constellations of dramatic romance hung high in
the highest air of poetry, we may well pause for
very dread of our own delight, lest unawares we
break into mere babble of childish rapture and
infantile thanksgiving for such light vouchsafed
even to our " settentrional vedovo sito " that even
at their first dawn out of the depths

Coder pareva il ciel di lor fiammelle.

Beyond these again we see a second group arising,
the supreme starry trinity of the Winter's Tale,
the Tempest, and Cymbeline : and beyond these the
divine darkness of everlasting and all-maternal
night These seven lamps of the romantic drama
have in them— if I may strain the similitude a
little further yet — more of lyric light than could
fitly be lent to feed the fire or the sunshine of the
worlds of pure tragedy or comedy. There is more
play, more vibration as it were, in the splendours of
their spheres. Only in the heaven of Shakespeare's
making can we pass and repass at pleasure from
he sunny to the stormy lights, from the glory of
Cymbeline to the glory of Othello.

The Merchant of Venice. 149

In this first group of four — wholly differing on
that point from the later constellation of three
— there is but very seldom, not more than once or
twice at most, a shooting or passing gleam of any-
thing more lurid or less lovely than " a light of
laughing flowers." There is but just enough of
evil or even of passion admitted into their sweet
spheres of life to proclaim them living: and all
that does find entrance is so tempered by the
radiance of the rest that we retain but softened and
lightened recollections even of Shylock and Don
John when we think of the Merchant of Venice and
Much Ado about Nothing ; we hardly feel in As
You Like It the presence or the existence of
Oliver and Duke Frederick ; and in Twelfth Night,
for all its name of the midwinter, we find nothing
to remember that might jar with the loveliness of
love and the summer light of life.

No astronomer can ever tell which if any one
among these four may be to the others as a sun ; for
in this special tract of heaven " one star differeth "
not " from another star in glory." From each and all
of them, even " while this muddy vesture of decay
doth grossly close [us] in," we cannot but hear the
harmony of a single immortal soul

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins.

1 50 A Study of Shakespeare.

The coincidence of the divine passage in which
I have for once permitted myself the freedom of
altering for quotation's sake one little word, with
a noble excerpt given by Hallam from the Latin
prose writings of Campanella, may recall to us with
a doubly appropriate sense of harmonious fitness
the subtly beautiful image of Lord Tennyson ;—

Star to star vibrates light : may sou! to soul
Strike thro' a finer element of her own ?

Surely, if ever she may, such a flash might we
fancy to have passed from the spirit of the most
glorious martyr and poet to the spirit of the most
glorious poet and artist upon the face of the earth
together. Even to Shakespeare any association of
his name with Campanella's, as even to Campanella
any association of his name with Shakespeare's,
cannot but be an additional ray of honour: and
how high is the claim of the divine philosopher to
share with the godlike dramatist their common and
crowning name of poet, all Englishmen at least may
now perceive by study of Campanella's sonnets in
the noble and exquisite version of Mr. Symonds ; to
whom among other kindred debts we owe no higher
obligation than is due to him as the giver of these
poems to the inmost heart of all among his country-

As You Like It. 151

men whose hearts are worthy to hold and to hoard
up such treasure.

Where nothing at once new and true can be
said, it is always best to say nothing ; as it is in
this case to refrain from all reiteration of rhapsody
which must have been somewhat " mouldy ere " any
living man's " grandsires had nails on their toes," if
not at that yet remoter date " when King Pepin of
France was a little boy " and " Queen Guinever of
Britain was a little wench." In the Merchant of
Venice, at all events, there is hardly a single char-
acter from Portia to old Gobbo, a single incident
from the exaction of Shylock's bond to the compu-
tation of hairs in Launcelot's beard and Dobbin's
tail, which has not been more plenti fully beprosed
than ever Rosalind was berhymed. Much wordy
wind has also been wasted on comparison of Shake-
speare's Jew with Marlowe's ; that is, of a living
subject for terror and pity with a mere mouthpiece
for the utterance of poetry as magnificent as any
but the best of Shakespeare's.

Nor can it well be worth any man's while to say
or to hear for the thousandth time that As You
Like It would be one of those works which prove,
as Landor said long since, the falsehood of the stale
axiom that no work of man's can be perfect, were

152 A Study of Shakespeare.

it not for that one unlucky slip of the brush which
has left so ugly a little smear in one corner of the
canvas as the betrothal of Oliver to Celia ; though,
with all reverence for a great name and a noble
memory, I can hardly think that matters were much
mended in George Sand's adaptation of the play
by the transference of her hand to Jaques. Once
elsewhere, or twice only at the most, is any
such other sacrifice of moral beauty or spiritual
harmony to the necessities and traditions of the
stage discernible in all the world-wide work of
Shakespeare. In the one case it is unhappily
undeniable ; no man's conscience, no conceivable
sense of right and wrong, but must more or less
feel as did Coleridge's the double violence done
it in the upshot of Measure for Measure. Even in
the much more nearly spotless work which we have
next to glance at, some readers have perhaps not
unreasonably found a similar objection to the final
good fortune of such a pitiful fellow as Count
Claudio. It will be observed that in each case the
sacrifice is made to comedy. The actual or hypo-
thetical necessity of pairing off all the couples after
such a fashion as to secure a nominally happy and
andeniably matrimonial ending is the theatrical
idol whose tyranny exacts this holocaust of higher

Much Ado about Nothing. 153

and better feelings than the mere liquorish desire
to leave the board of fancy with a palatable morsel
of cheap sugar on the tongue.

If it is proverbially impossible to determine by
selection the greatest work of Shakespeare, it is
easy enough to decide on the date and the name of
his most perfect comic masterpiece. For absolute
power of composition, for faultless balance and
blameless rectitude of design, there is unquestion-
ably no creation of his hand that will bear com-
parison with Muck Ado About Nothing. The ulti-
mate marriage of Hero and Claudio, on which I
have already remarked as in itself a doubtfully
desirable consummation, makes no flaw in the dra-
matic perfection of a piece which could not other-
wise have been wound up at all. This was its one in-
evitable conclusion, if the action were not to come to
a tragic end ; and a tragic end would here have been
as painfully and as grossly out of place as is any but
a tragic end to the action of Measure for Measure.
As for Beatrice, she is as perfect a lady, though of
afar different age and breeding, as Celimene or Milla-
mant ; and a decidedly more perfect woman than
could properly or permissibly have trod the stage
of Congreve or Moliere. She would have disar-
ranged all the dramatic proprieties and harmonies

154 A Stiidy of Shakespeare.

of the one great school of pure comedy. The good
fierce outbreak of her high true heart in two swift
words — " Kill Claudio " * — would have fluttered the
dovecotes of fashionable drama to some purpose.
But Alceste would have taken her to his own.

No quainter and apter example was ever given
of many men's absolute inability to see the plainest
aims, to learn the simplest rudiments, to appreciate
the most practical requisites of art, whether applied
to theatrical action or to any other as evident as
exalted aim, than the instance afforded by that
criticism of time past which sagaciously remarked
that " any less amusingly absurd " constables than
Dogberry and Verges would have filled their parts
in the action of the play equally well. Our own
day has doubtless brought forth critics and students
of else unparalleled capacity for the task of laying
wind-eggs in mare's nests, and wasting all the
warmth of their brains and tongues in the hopeful
endeavour to hatch them : but so fine a specimen
was never dropped yet as this of the plumed or

1 I remember to have somewhere at some time fallen in with
some remark by some commentator to some such effect as this : that
it would be somewhat difficult to excuse the unwomanly violence of
this demand. Doubtless it would. And doubtless it would be
somewhat more than difficult to extenuate the unmaidenly indelicacy
of Jeanne Dare.

Twelfth Night. 155

plumeless biped who discovered that if Dogberry
had not been Dogberry and Verges had not been
Verges they would have been equally unsuccessful
in their honest attempt to warn Leonato betimes of
the plot against his daughter's honour. The only
explanation of the mistake is this ; and it is one
of which the force will be intelligible only to those
who are acquainted with the very singular physio-
logy of that remarkably prolific animal known to
critical science as the Shakespearean scholiast : that
if Dogberry had been other than Dogberry, or if
Verges had been other than Verges, the action and
catastrophe of the whole play could never have
taken place at all.

All true Pantagruelians will always, or at least
as long as may be permitted by the Society for
the Suppression of Vice, cherish with an especial
regard the comedy in which Shakespeare also has
shown himself as surely the loving as he would
surely have been the beloved disciple of that
insuppressible divine, the immortal and most
reverend vicar of Meudon. Two only among the
mighty men who lived and wrote and died within
the century which gave birth to Shakespeare were
found worthy of so great an honour at his hands as
the double homage of citation and imitation : and

156 A Study of Shakespeare.

these two, naturally and properly enough, were
Francois Rabelais and Christopher Marlowe. We
cannot but recognise on what far travels in what
good company " Feste the jester " had but lately
been, on that night of "very gracious fooling"
when he was pleased to enlighten the unforgetful
mind of Sir Andrew as to the history of Pigrogro-
mitus, and of the Vapians passing the equinoctial of
Queubus. At what precise degree of latitude and
longitude between the blessed islands of Medamothy
and Papimania this equinoctial may intersect the
Sporades of the outer ocean, is a problem on the
solution of which the energy of those many
modern sons of Aguecheek who have undertaken
the task of writing about and about the text and
the history of Shakespeare might be expended with
an unusually reasonable hope and expectation of
arriving at an exceptionally profitable end.

Even apart from their sunny identity of spirit
and bright sweet brotherhood of style, the two
comedies of Twelfth Night and As You Like 7i
would stand forth confessed as the common off-
spring of the same spiritual period by force and by
right of the trace or badge they proudly and pro-
fessedly bear in common, as of a recent touch from
the ripe and rich and radiant influence of Rabelais.

Twelfth Night. 157

No better and no fuller vindication of his happy
memory could be afforded than by the evident fact
that the two comedies which bear the imprint ot
his sign-manual are among all Shakespeare's works
as signally remarkable for the cleanliness as for
the richness of their humour. Here is the right
royal seal of Pantagruel, clean-cut and clearly
stamped, and unincrusted with any flake of dirt
from the dubious finger of Panurge. In the comic
parts of those plays in which the humour is rank
and flagrant that exhales from the lips of Lucio, of
Boult, or of Thersites, there is no trace or glimpse
of Rabelais. From him Shakespeare has learnt
nothing and borrowed nothing that was not wise
and good and sweet and clean and pure. All the
more honour, undoubtedly, to Shakespeare, that he
would borrow nothing else : but assuredly, also, all
the more honour to Rabelais, that he had enough
of this to lend.

It is less creditable to England than honourable
to France that a Frenchman should have been the
first of Shakespearean students to discover and to
prove that the great triad of his Roman plays is
not a consecutive work of the same epoch. Until
the appearance of Frangois-Victor Hugo's incom-
parable translation, with its elaborate and admirable

158 A Study of Shakespeare.

commentary, it seems to have been the universal
and certainly a most natural habit of English
criticism to take the three as they usually
appear together, in the order of historical chro-
nology, and by tacit implication to assume that
they were composed in such order. I should
take some shame to myself but that I feel more
of grateful pride than of natural shame in the
avowal that I at all events owe the first revela-
tion of the truth now so clear and apparent
in this matter, to the son of the common lord and
master of all poets born in his age — be they liege
subjects as loyal as myself or as contumacious
as I grieve to find one at least of my elders and
betters, whenever I perceive — as too often I
cannot choose but perceive — that the voice is the
voice of Arnold, but the hand is the hand of
Sainte-Beuve.

To the honoured and lamented son of our
beloved and glorious Master, whom neither I nor
any better man can ever praise and thank and
glorify enough, belongs all the credit of discerning
for himself and discovering for us all the truth that
Julius Casar is at all points equally like the
greatest works of Shakespeare's middle period and
unlike the works of his last It is in the main a

Julius C&sar. 159

play belonging to the same order as King Henry
IV.; but it differs from our English Henriade — as
remarkably unlike Voltaire's as Zaire is unlike
Othello — not more by the absence of Falstaff than
by the presence of Brutus. Here at least Shake-
speare has made full amends, if not to all modern
democrats, yet assuredly to all historical republi-
cans, for any possible or apparent preference of
royal to popular traditions. Whatever manner of
man may have been the actual Roman, our Shake-
spearean Brutus is undoubtedly the very noblest
figure of a typical and ideal republican in all the
literature of the world. " A democracy such as
yours in America is my abhorrence," wrote Landor
once to an impudent and foul-mouthed Yankee
pseudosopher, who had intruded himself on that
great man's privacy in order to have the pri-
vilege of afterwards informing the readers of
a pitiful pamphlet on England that Landor
had " pestered him with Southey " ; an imper-
tinence, I may add, which Mr. Landor at once
rebuked with the sharpest contempt and chas-
tised with the haughtiest courtesy. But, the old
friend and lifelong champion of Kossuth went
on to say, his feelings were far different towards
a republic ; and if on the one point, then not less

F 2

160 A Study of Shakespeare.

certainly on the other, we may be assured that his
convictions and his prepossessions would have been
shared by the author of Coriolanus and Julius
Ccesar.

Having now come perforce to the inevitable
verge of Hamlet, I hasten to declare that I can
advance no pretension to compete with the claim of
that " literary man " who became immortal by dint
of one dinner with a bishop, and in right of that
last glass poured out for him in sign of amity by
" Sylvester Blougram, styled in partibus Episcopus,
necnon the deuce knows what." I do not propose to
prove my perception of any point in the character
of Hamlet " unseized by the Germans yet." I can
only determine, as the Church Catechism was long
since wont to bid me, " to keep my hands from pick-
ing and stealing, and my tongue " not only " from
evil-speaking, lying, and slandering " — though this
itself is a form of abstinence not universally or
even commonly practised among the rampant rout
of rival commentators — but also, now as ever
throughout this study, from all conscious repetition
of what others have said before me.

In Hamlet, as it seems to me, we set foot as it
were on the bridge between the middle and the

Hamlet. 161

final period of Shakespeare. That priceless waif
of piratical salvage which we owe to the happy
rapacity of a hungry publisher is of course more
accurately definable as the first play of Hamlet
than as the first edition of the play. And this
first Hamlet, on the whole, belongs altogether
to the middle period. The deeper complexities
of the subject are merely indicated. Simple
and trenchant outlines of character are yet to be
supplanted by features of subtler suggestion and
infinite interfusion. Hamlet himself is almost
more of a satirist than a philosopher : Asper and
Macilente, Felice and Malevole, the grim studies
after Hamlet unconsciously or consciously taken by
Jonson and Marston, may pass as wellnigh pass-
able imitations, with an inevitable streak of carica-
ture in them, of the first Hamlet ; they would have
been at once puerile and ghastly travesties of the
second. The Queen, whose finished figure is now
something of a riddle, stands out simply enough
in the first sketch as confidant of Horatio if not as
accomplice of Hamlet. There is not more differ-
ence between the sweet quiet flow of those plain
verses which open the original play within the
play and the stiff sonorous tramp of their substi-
tutes, full-charged with heavy classic artillery of

1 62 A Study of Shakespeare.

Phoebus and Neptune and Tellus and Hymen,
than there is between the straightforward agents
of their own destiny whom we meet in the first
Hamlet and the obliquely moving patients who
veer sideways to their doom in the second.

This minor transformation of style in the inner
play, made solely with the evident view of mark-
ing the distinction between its duly artificial forms
of speech and the duly natural forms of speech
passing between the spectators, is but one among
innumerable indications which only a purblind
perversity of prepossession can overlook of the
especial store set by Shakespeare himself on this
favourite work, and the exceptional pains taken by
him to preserve it for aftertime in such fullness of
finished form as might make it worthiest of pro-
found and perpetual study by the light of far other
lamps than illuminate the stage. Of all vulgar
errors the most wanton, the most wilful, and the
most resolutely tenacious of life, is that belief
bequeathed from the days of Pope, in which it
was pardonable, to the days of Mr. Carlyle, in
which it is not excusable, to the effect that Shake-
speare threw off Hamlet as an eagle may moult a
feather or a fool may break a jest; that he
dropped his work as a bird may drop an egg

Hamlet. 163

or a sophist a fallacy ; that he wrote " for gain, not
giory," or that having written Hamlet he thought
it nothing very wonderful to have written. For
himself to have written, he possibly, nay pro-
bably, did not think it anything miraculous ;
but that he was in the fullest degree conscious of
its wonderful positive worth to all men for all time,
we have the best evidence possible — his own ; and
that not by mere word of mouth but by actual
stroke of hand. Ben Jonson might shout aloud
over his own work on a public stage, " By God 'tis
good," and so for all its real goodness and his real
greatness make sure that both the workman and his
work should be less unnaturally than unreasonably
laughed at ; Shakespeare knew a better way of
showing confidence in himself, but he showed not
a whit less confidence. Scene by scene, line for
line, stroke upon stroke and touch after touch, he
went over all the old laboured ground again ; and
not to ensure success in his own day and fill his
pockets with contemporary pence, but merely and
wholly with a purpose to make it worthy of him-
self and his future students. Pence and praise
enough it had evidently brought him in from the
first. No more palpable proof of this can be de-
sired than the instantaneous attacks on it, the jeers,

164 A Study of Shakespeare.

howls, hoots and hisses of which a careful ear may
catch some far faint echo even yet; the fearful
and furtive yelp from beneath of the masked and
writhing poeticule, the shrill reverberation all
around it of plagiarism and parody. Not one
single alteration in the whole play can possibly
have been made with a view to stage effect or to
present popularity and profit ; or we must suppose
that Shakespeare, however great as a man, was
naturally even greater as a fool. There is a class
of mortals to whom this inference is always grate-
ful— to whom the fond belief that every great
man must needs be a great fool would seem
always to afford real comfort and support : happy,
in Prior's phrase, could their inverted rule prove
every great fool to be a great man. Every change
in the text of Hamlet has impaired its fitness for
the stage and increased its value for the closet in
exact and perfect proportion. Now, this is not a
matter of opinion — of Mr. Pope's opinion or Mr.
Carlyle's ; it is a matter of fact and evidence.
Even in Shakespeare's time the actors threw out
his additions ; they throw out these very same
additions in our own. The one especial speech,
if any one such especial speech there be, in which
the personal genius of Shakespeare soars up to the

Hamlet. 165

very highest of its height and strikes down to the
very deepest of its depth, is passed over by
modern actors ; it was cut away by Hemings and
Condell. We may almost assume it as certain
that no boards have ever echoed — at least, more
than once or twice — to the supreme soliloquy oi
Hamlet. Those words which combine the noblest
pleading ever proffered for the rights of human
reason with the loftiest vindication ever uttered of
those rights, no mortal ear within our knowledge
has ever heard spoken on the stage. A convoca-
tion even of all priests could not have been more
unhesitatingly unanimous in its rejection than
seems to have been the hereditary verdict of all
actors. It could hardly have been found worthier
of theological than it has been found of theatrical
condemnation, Yet, beyond all question, magnifi-
cent as is that monologue on suicide and doubt
which has passed from a proverb into a byword, it
is actually eclipsed and distanced at once on philo-
sophic and on poetical grounds by the later soli-
loquy on reason and resolution.

That Shakespeare was in the genuine sense —
that is, in the best and highest and widest meaning
of the term — a free thinker, this otherwise practi
cally and avowedly superfluous effusion of all inmost

1 66 A Study of Shakespeare.

thought appears to me to supply full and sufficient
evidence for the conviction of every candid and
rational man. To that loftiest and most righteous
title which any just and reasoning soul can ever
deserve to claim, the greatest save one of all poetic
thinkers has thus made good his right for ever.

I trust it will be taken as no breach of my past
pledge to abstain from all intrusion on the sacred
ground of Gigadibs and the Germans, if I venture
to indicate a touch inserted by Shakespeare for no
other perceptible or conceivable purpose than to
obviate by anticipation the indomitable and ineradi-
cable fallacy of criticism which would find the key-
note of Hamlet's character in the quality of irresolu-
tion. I may observe at once that the misconcep-
tion involved in such a reading of the riddle ought
to have been evident even without this episodical
stroke of illustration. In any case it should be
plain to any reader that the signal characteristic of
Hamlet's inmost nature is by no means irresolution
or hesitation or any form of weakness, but rather
the strong conflux of contending forces. That dur
ing four whole acts Hamlet cannot or does not
make up his mind to any direct and deliberate
action against his uncle is true enough ; true,
also, we may say, that Hamlet had somewhat

Hamlet. 167

more of mind than another man to make up, and
might properly want somewhat more time than
might another man to do it in ; but not, I venture
to say in spite of Goethe, through innate inade-
quacy to his task and unconquerable weakness of
the will ; not, I venture to think in spite of Hugo,
through immedicable scepticism of the spirit and
irremediable propensity to nebulous intellectual
refinement. One practical point in the action of
the play precludes us from accepting so ready a
solution of the riddle as is suggested either by the
simple theory of half-hearted ness or by the simple
hypothesis of doubt. There is absolutely no other
reason, we might say there was no other excuse,
for the introduction or intrusion of an else super-
fluous episode into a play which was already, and
which remains even after all possible excisions, one
of the longest plays on record. The compulsory
expedition of Hamlet to England, his discovery by
the way of the plot laid against his life, his inter-
ception of the King's letter and his forgery of a
substitute for it against the lives of the King's
agents, the ensuing adventure of the sea-fight, with
Hamlet's daring act of hot-headed personal intre-
pidity, his capture and subsequent release on terms
giving no less patent proof of his cool-headed and

1 68 A Study of Shakespeare.

ready-witted courage and resource than the attack
had afforded of his physically impulsive and even
impetuous hardihood — all this serves no purpose
whatever but that of exhibiting the instant and
almost unscrupulous resolution of Hamlet's cha-
racter in time of practical need. But for all that
he or Hamlet has got by it, Shakespeare might too
evidently have spared his pains ; and for all this
voice as of one crying in a wilderness, Hamlet will
too surely remain to the majority of students, not
less than to all actors and all editors and all critics,
the standing type and embodied emblem of irresolu-
tion, half-heartedness, and doubt.

That Hamlet should seem at times to accept
for himself, and even to enforce by reiteration of
argument upon his conscience and his reason, some
such conviction or suspicion as to his own character,
tells much rather in disfavour than in favour of its
truth. A man whose natural temptation was to
swerve, whose inborn inclination was to shrink and
skulk aside from duty and from action, would
hardly be the first and last person to suspect his own
weakness, the one only unbiassed judge and witness
of sufficiently sharp-sighted candour and accuracy
to estimate aright his poverty of nature and the
malformation of his mind. But the high-hearted

Hamlet. 169

and tender-conscienced Hamlet, with his native bias
towards introspection intensified and inflamed and
directed and dilated at once by one imperative
pressure and oppression of unavoidable and un-
alterable circumstance, was assuredly and exactly
the one only man to be troubled by any momentary
fear that such might indeed be the solution of his
riddle, and to feel or to fancy for the moment
some kind of ease and relief in the sense of that
very trouble. A born doubter would have doubted
even of Horatio ; hardly can all positive and almost
palpable evidence of underhand instigation and
inspired good intentions induce Hamlet for some
time to doubt even of Ophelia.

1 70 A Study of Shakespeare.

III.

THE entrance to the third period of Shakespeare
is like the entrance to that lost and lesser Paradise
of old,

With dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms.

Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Antony, Timon,
these are names indeed of something more than
tragic purport. Only in the sunnier distance be-
yond, where the sunset of Shakespeare's imagi-
nation seems to melt or flow back into the sunrise,
do we discern Prospero beside Miranda, Florizel
by Perdita, Palamon with Arcite, the same
knightly and kindly Duke Theseus as of old ; and
above them all, and all others of his divine and
human children, the crowning and final and in-
effable figure of Imogen.

Of all Shakespeare's plays, King Lear is un-
questionably that in which he has come nearest to
the height and to the likeness of the one tragic
poet on any side greater than himself whom the

King Lear. 171

world in all its ages has ever seen born of time.
It is by far the most ^Eschylean of his works ; the
most elemental and primaeval, the most oceanic
and Titanic in conception. He deals here with no
subtleties as in Hamlet, with no conventions as in
Othello: there is no question of " a divided duty " or
a problem half insoluble, a matter of country and
connection, of family or of race; we look upward
and downward, and in vain, into the deepest things
of nature, into the highest things of providence ; to
the roots of life, and to the stars ; from the roots
that no God waters to the stars which give no man
light ; over a world full of death and life without
resting-place or guidance.

But in one main point it differs radically from
the work and the spirit of ^Eschylus. Its fatalism
is of a darker and harder nature. To Prometheus
the fetters of the lord and enemy of mankind were
bitter ; upon Orestes the hand of heaven was laid
too heavily to bear ; yet in the not utterly infinite
or everlasting distance we see beyond them the
promise of the morning on which mystery and
justice shall be made one ; when righteousness and
omnipotence at last shall kiss each other. But on
the horizon of Shakespeare's tragic fatalism we see
no such twilight of atonement, such pledge of re-

172 A St^{,dy of Shakespeare.

conciliation as this. Requital, redemption, amends,
equity, explanation, pity and mercy, are words
without a meaning here.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods ;
They kill us for their sport.

Here is no need of the Eumenides, children of
Night everlasting ; for here is very Night herself.

The words just cited are not casual or episo-
dical ; they strike the keynote of the whole poem,
lay the keystone of the whole arch of thought.
There is no contest of conflicting forces, no judg-
ment so much as by casting of lots : far less is
there any light of heavenly harmony or of
heavenly wisdom, of Apollo or Athene from above.
We have heard much and often from theologians
of the light of revelation : and some such thing
indeed we find in ^Eschylus : but the darkness of
revelation is here.

For in this the most terrible work of human
genius it is with the very springs and sources of
nature that her student has set himself to deal.
The veil of the temple of our humanity is rent in
twain. Nature herself, we might say, is revealed —
and revealed as unnatural. In face of such a world
as this a man might be forgiven who should pray
that chaos might come again. Nowhere else in

King Lear. 173

Shakespeare's work or in the universe of jarring
lives are the lines of character and event so broadly
drawn or so sharply cut Only the supreme self-
command of this one poet could so mould and
handle such types as to restrain and prevent their
passing from the abnormal into the monstrous :
yet even as much as this, at least in all cases but
one, it surely has accomplished. In Regan alone
would it be, I think, impossible to find a touch or
trace of anything less vile than it was devilish.
Even Goneril has her one splendid hour, her fire-
flaught of hellish glory ; when she treads under foot
the half-hearted goodness, the wordy and windy
though sincere abhorrence, which is all that the
mild and impotent revolt of Albany can bring to
bear against her imperious and dauntless devilhood ;
when she flaunts before the eyes of her " milk-
livered " and " moral fool " the coming banners of
France about the " plumed helm " of his slayer.

On the other side, Kent is the exception which
answers to Regan on this. Cordelia, the brotherless
Antigone of our stage, has one passing touch of
intolerance for what her sister was afterwards to
brand as indiscretion and dotage in their father,
which redeems her from the charge of perfection.
Like Imogen, she is not too inhumanly divine for

174 A Study of Shakespeare.

the sense of divine irritation. Godlike though they
be, their very godhead is human and feminine ; and
only therefore credible, and only therefore ador-
able. Cloten and Regan, Goneril and lachimo,
have power to stir and embitter the sweetness of
their blood. But for the contrast and even the
contact of antagonists as abominable as these,
the gold of their spirit would be too refined, the
lily of their holiness too radiant, the violet of
their virtue too sweet. As it is, Shakespeare has
gone down perforce among the blackest and the
basest things of nature to find anything so equally
exceptional in evil as properly to counterbalance and
make bearable the excellence and extremity of their
goodness. No otherwise could either angel have
escaped the blame implied in the very attribute and
epithet of blameless. But where the possible depth
of human hell is so foul and unfathomable as it
appears in the spirits which serve as foils to these,
we may endure that in them the inner height of
heaven should be no less immaculate and im-
measurable.

It should be a truism wellnigh as musty as
Hamlet's half cited proverb, to enlarge upon the
evidence given in King Lear of a sympathy with
the mass of social misery more wide and deep and

King Lear. 1 75

direct and bitter and tender than Shakespeare has
shown elsewhere. But as even to this day and
even in respectable quarters the murmur is not
quite duly extinct which would charge on Shake-
speare a certain share of divine indifference to
suffering, of godlike satisfaction and a less than
compassionate content, it is not yet perhaps utterly
superfluous to insist on the utter fallacy and falsity
of their creed who whether in praise or in blame
would rank him to his credit or discredit among
such poets as on this side at least may be classed
rather with Goethe than with Shelley and with
Gautier than with Hugo. A poet of revolution he
is not, as none of his country in that generation
could have been : but as surely as the author of
Julius Ccesar has approved himself in the best and
highest sense of the word at least potentially a
republican, so surely has the author of King Lear
avowed himself in the only good and rational sense
of the words a spiritual if not a political democrat
and socialist.

It is only, I think, in this most tragic of tra-
gedies that the sovereign lord and incarnate god of
pity and terror can be said to have struck with all
his strength a chord of which the resonance could
excite such angry agony and heartbreak of wrath as

176 A Study of Shakespeare.

that of the brother kings when they smote their
staffs against the ground in fierce imperious anguish
of agonised and rebellious compassion, at the ora-
cular cry of Calchas for the innocent blood of
Iphigenia. The doom even of Desdemona seems
as much less morally intolerable as it is more
logically inevitable than the . doom of Cordelia,
But doubtless the fatalism of Othello is as much
darker and harder than that of any third among
the plays of Shakespeare, as it is less dark and hard
than the fatalism of King Lear. For upon the head
of the very noblest man whom even omnipotence
or Shakespeare could ever call to life he has laid a
burden in one sense yet heavier than the burden of
Lear, insomuch as the sufferer can with somewhat
less confidence of universal appeal proclaim himself
a man more sinned against than sinning.

And yet, if .ever man after Lear might lift up
his voice in that protest, it would assuredly be none
other than Othello. He is in all the prosperous
days of his labour and his triumph so utterly and
wholly nobler than the self-centred and wayward
king, that the capture of his soul and body in the
unimaginable snare of lago seems a yet blinder and
more unrighteous blow

Struck by the envious wrath of man or God

Othello. 177

than ever fell on the old white head of that child-
changed father. But at least he is destroyed by the
stroke of a mightier hand than theirs who struck
down Lear. As surely as Othello is the noblest
man of man's making, lago is the most perfect evil-
doer, the most potent demi-devil. It is of course
the merest commonplace to say as much, and would
be no less a waste of speech to add the half com-
fortable reflection that it is in any case no shame
to fall by such a hand. But this subtlest and
strangest work of Shakespeare's admits and requires
some closer than common scrutiny. Coleridge has
admirably described the first great soliloquy which
opens to us the pit of hell within as " the motive-
hunting of a motiveless malignity." But subtle and
profound and just as is this definitive appreciation,
there is more in the matter yet than even this. It
is not only that lago, so to speak, half tries to make
himself half believe that Othello has wronged him,
and that the thought of it gnaws him inly like a
poisonous mineral : though this also be true, it is not
half the truth — nor half that half again. Malig-
nant as he is, the very subtlest and strongest com-
ponent of his complex nature is not even malignity.
It is the instinct of what Mr. Carlyle would call an
inarticulate poet. In his immortal study on the

178 A Study of Shakespeare.

^affair of the diamond necklace, the most profound
and potent humourist of his country in his century
has unwittingly touched on the mainspring of lago's
character — " the very pulse of the machine." He
describes his Circe de la Mothe-Valois as a prac-
tical dramatic poet or playwright at least in lieu
of play-writer : while indicating how and wherefore,
with all her constructive skill and rhythmic art in
action, such genius as hers so differs from the genius
of Shakespeare that she undeniably could not have
written a Hamlet. Neither could lago have written
an Othello. (From this theorem, by the way, a
reasoner or a casuist benighted enough to prefer
articulate poets to inarticulate, Shakespeare to
Cromwell, a fair Vittoria Colonna to a " foul Circe-
Megsera," and even such a strategist as Homer to
such a strategist as Frederic- William, would not illo-
gically draw such conclusions or infer such corol-
laries as might result in opinions hardly consonant
with the Teutonic-Titanic evangel of the preacher
who supplied him with his thesis.) " But what he
can do, that he will " : and if it be better to make a
tragedy than to write one, to act a poem than to sing
it, we must allow to lago a station in the hierarchy of
poets very far in advance of his creator's. None of
the great inarticulate may more justly claim place

Ot/ieUo. 179

and precedence. With all his poetic gift, he has no
poetic weakness. Almost any creator but his would
have given him some grain of spite or some spark
of lust after Desdemona. To Shakespeare's lago
she is no more than is a rhyme to another and arti-
culate poet.1 His stanza must at any rate and at
all costs be polished : to borrow the metaphor used
by Mr. Carlyle in apologetic illustration of a royal
hero's peculiar system of levying recruits for his
colossal brigade. He has within him a sense or
conscience of power incomparable : and this power
shall not be left, in Hamlet's phrase, " to fust in him
unused." A genuine and thorough capacity for
human lust or hate would diminish and degrade the
supremacy of his evil. He is almost as far above
or beyond vice as he is beneath or beyond virtue.
And this it is that makes him impregnable and in-
vulnerable. When once he has said it, we know as

1 What would at least be partly lust in another man is all but
purely hatred in lago.

Now I do love her too :

Not out of absolute lust, (though, peradventure,
I stand accountant for as great a sin)
But partly led to diet my revenge.

For " partly " read " wholly," and for " peradventure " read "as-
suredly, " and the incarnate father of lies, made manifest in the flesh,
here speaks all but all the truth for once, to himself alone.

1 80 A Study of Shakespeare.

well as he that thenceforth he never will speak
word. We could smile almost as we can see him
to have smiled at Gratiano's most ignorant and
empty threat, being well assured that torments will
in no wise ope his lips : that as surely and as
truthfully as ever did the tortured philosopher before
him, he might have told his tormentors that they
did but bruise the coating, batter the crust, or break
the shell of lago. Could we imagine a far other lost
spirit than Farinata degli Uberti's endowed with
Farinata's might of will, and transferred from the
sepulchres of fire to the dykes of Malebolge, we
might conceive something of lago's attitude in hell
— of his unalterable and indomitable posture for all
eternity. As though it were possible and necessary
that in some one point the extremities of all con-
ceivable good and of all imaginable evil should
meet and mix together in a new "marriage of
heaven and hell," the action in passion of the most
devilish among all the human damned could hardly
be other than that of the most godlike among all
divine saviours — the figure of lago than a reflec-
tion by hell-fire of the figure of Prometheus.

Between lago and Othello the position of
Desdemona is precisely that defined with such
quaint sublimity of fancy in the old English by-

Othello. 181

word — " between the devil and the deep sea." Deep
and pure and strong and adorable always and terri-
ble and pitiless on occasion as the sea is the great
soul of the glorious hero to whom she has given
herself; and what likeness of man's enemy from
Satan down to Mephistopheles could be matched
for danger and for dread against the good bluff
soldierly trustworthy figure of honest lago ? The
rough license of his tongue at once takes warrant
from his good soldiership and again gives warrant
for his honesty: so that in a double sense it does
him yeoman's service, and that twice told. It is
pitifully ludicrous to see him staged to the show
like a member — and a very inefficient member — of
the secret police. But it would seem impossible
for actors to understand that he is not a would-be
detective, an aspirant for the honours of a Vidocq,
a candidate for the laurels of a Vautrin : that he is
no less than Lepidus, or than Antony's horse, " a
tried and valiant soldier." It is perhaps natural
that the two deepest and subtlest of all Shake-
speare's intellectual studies in good and evil should
be the two most painfully misused and misunder-
stood alike by his commentators and his fellows
of the stage : it is certainly undeniable that no
third figure of his creation has ever been on both

182 A Study of Shakespeare.

sides as persistently misconceived and misrepre-
sented with such desperate pertinacity as Hamlet
and lago.

And it is only when lago is justly appreciated
that we can justly appreciate either Othello or
Desdemona. This again should surely be no
more than the truism that it sounds ; but practi-
cally it would seem to be no less than an adven-
turous and audacious paradox. Remove or deform
or diminish or modify the dominant features of the
destroyer, and we have but the eternal and vulgar
figures of jealousy and innocence, newly vamped
and veneered and padded and patched up for the
stalest purposes of puppetry. As it is, when
Coleridge asks "which do we pity the most" at the
fall of the curtain, we can surely answer, Othello.
Noble as are the " most blessed conditions " of " the
gentle Desdemona," he is yet the nobler of the
two ; and has suffered more in one single pang
than she could suffer in life or in death.

But if Othello be the most pathetic, King Lear
the most terrible, Hamlet the subtlest and deepest
work of Shakespeare, the highest in abrupt and
steep simplicity of epic tragedy is Macbeth. There
needs no ghost come from the grave, any reader
may too probably remark, to tell us this. But in

Macbeth. 183

the present generation such novelties have been
unearthed regarding Shakespeare that the reasser-
tion of an old truth may seem to have upon it some
glittering reflection from the brazen brightness of
a brand-new lie. Have not certain wise men of
the east of England — Cantabrigian Magi, led by
the star of their goddess Mathesis (" mad Mathesis,"
as a daring poet was once ill-advised enough to
dub her doubtful deity in defiance of scansion
rather than of truth) — have they not detected in
the very heart of this tragedy the "paddling palms
and pinching ringers " of Thomas Middleton ?

To the simpler eyes of less learned Thebans
than these — Thebes, by the way, was Dryden's
irreverent name for Cambridge, the nursing mother
of " his green unknowing youth," when that " rene-
gade " was recreant enough to compliment Oxford
at her expense as the chosen Athens of " his riper
age " — the likelihood is only too evident that the
sole text we possess of Macbeth has not been
interpolated but mutilated. In their version of
Othello, remarkably enough, the " player-editors,"
contrary to their wont, have added to the treasure-
house of their text one of the most precious jewels
that ever the prodigal afterthought of a great poet
bestowed upon the rapture of his readers. Some

184 A Study of Shakespeare.

of these, by way of thanksgiving, have complained
with a touch of petulance that it was out of place
and superfluous in the setting : nay, that it was
incongruous with all the circumstances — out of tone
and out of harmony and out of keeping with
character and tune and time. In other lips indeed
than Othello's, at the crowning minute of culminant
agony, the rush of imaginative reminiscence which
brings back upon his eyes and ears the lightning
foam and tideless thunder of the Pontic sea might
seem a thing less natural than sublime. But
Othello has the passion of a poet closed in as it
were and shut up behind the passion of a hero.
For all his practical readiness of martial eye and
ruling hand in action, he is also in his season " of
imagination all compact." Therefore it is that in
the face and teeth of all devils akin to lago that
hell could send forth to hiss at her election, we feel
and recognise the spotless exaltation, the sublime
and sunbright purity, of Desdemona's inevitable
and invulnerable love. When once we likewise
have seen Othello's visage in his mind,. we see too
how much more of greatness is in this mind than in
another hero's. For such an one, even a boy may
well think how thankfully and joyfully he would lay
down his life. Other friends we have of Shake*

Macbeth. 185

speare's giving whom we love deeply and well, if
hardly with such love as could weep for him all
the tears of the body and all the blood of the
heart : but there is none we love like Othello.

I must part from his presence again for a sea-
son, and return to my topic in the text of Macbeth.
That it is piteously rent and ragged and clipped
and garbled in some of its earlier scenes, the rough
construction and the poltfoot metre, lame sense
and limping verse, each maimed and mangled subject
of players' and printers' most treasonable tyranny-
contending as it were to seem harsher than the
other, combine in this contention to bear indispu-
table and intolerable witness. Only where the
witches are, and one more potent and more terrible
than all witches and all devils at their beck, can we
be sure that such traitors have not robbed us of
one touch from Shakespeare's hand. The second
scene of the play at least bears marks of such
handling as the brutal Shakespearean Hector's
of the "mangled Myrmidons"; it is too visibly
"noseless, 'handless, hacked and chipped" as it
comes to us, crying on Hemings and Condell.
And it is in this unlucky scene that unkindly criti-
cism has not unsuccessfully sought for the gravest
faults of language and manner to be found in

1 86 A Study of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare. For certainly it cannot be cleared
from the charge of a style stiffened and swollen
with clumsy braid and crabbed bombast. But
against the weird sisters, and her who sits above
them and apart, more awful than Hecate's very
self, no mangling hand has been stretched forth ;
no blight of mistranslation by perversion has fallen
upon the words which interpret and expound the
hidden things of their evil will.

To one tragedy as to one comedy of Shake-
speare's, the casual or the natural union of especial
popularity with especial simplicity in selection and
in treatment of character makes it as superfluous
as it would be difficult to attempt any application
of analytical criticism. There is nothing in them
of a nature so compound or so complex as to call
for solution or resolution into its primal elements.
Here there is some genuine ground for the gener-
ally baseless and delusive opinion of self-compla-
cent sciolism that he who runs may read Shake-
speare. These two plays it is hardly worth while
to point out by name : all probable readers will
know them at once for Macbeth and As You Like
It. There can hardly be a single point of incident
or of character on which the youngest reader will
not find himself at one with the oldest, the dullest

Coriolanus. 187

with the brightest among the scholars of Shake-
speare. It would be an equal waste of working
hours or of playtime if any of these should devote
any part of either a whole-schoolday or a holiday to
remark or to rhapsody on the character of Macbeth
or of Orlando, of Rosalind or of Lady Macbeth.
He that runs, let him read : and he that has ears,
let him hear.

I cannot but think that enough at least of time
has been spent if not wasted by able and even by
eminent men on examination of Coriolanus with
regard to its political aspect or bearing upon social
questions. It is from first to last, for all its tur-
moil of battle and clamour of contentious factions,
rather a private and domestic than a public or
historical tragedy. As in Julius Ccesar the family
had been so wholly subordinated to the state, and
all personal interests so utterly dominated by the
preponderance of national duties, that even the
sweet and sublime figure of Portia passing in her
" awful loveliness " was but as a profile half caught
in the background of an episode, so here on the
contrary the whole force of the final impression is
not that of a conflict between patrician and ple-
beian, but solely that of a match of passions
played out for life and death between a mother

1 88 A St^ldy of Shakespeare.

and a son. The partisans of oligarchic or demo-
cratic systems may wrangle at their will over the
supposed evidences of Shakespeare's prejudice
against this creed and prepossession in favour of
that : a third bystander may rejoice in the proof
thus established of his impartial indifference to-
wards either : it is all nothing to the real point
in hand. The subject of the whole play is not the
exile's revolt, the rebel's repentance, or the traitor's
reward, but above all it is the son's tragedy. The
inscription on the plinth of this tragic statue is
simply to Volumnia Victrix.

A loftier or a more perfect piece of man's work
was never done in all the world than this tragedy
of Coriolamis : the one fit and crowning epithet
for its companion or successor is that bestowed by
Coleridge — -"the most wonderful." It would seem
a sign or birthmark of only the greatest among
poets that they should be sure to rise instantly
for awhile above the very highest of their native
height at the touch of a thought of Cleopatra.
So was it, as we all know, with William Shake-
speare : so is it, as we all see, with Victor Hugo.
As we feel in the marvellous and matchless verses
of Zim~Zizimi all the splendour and fragrance
and miracle of her mere bodily presence, so from

Antony and Cleopatra. 189

her first imperial dawn on the stage of Shake-
speare to the setting of that eastern star behind a
pall of undissolving cloud we feel the charm and
the terror and the mystery of her absolute and
royal soul. Byron wrote once to Moore, with how
much truth or sincerity those may guess who
would care to know, that his friend's first " con-
founded book " of thin prurient jingle (" we call it
a mellisonant tingle-tangle/' as Randolph's mock
Oberon says of a stolen sheep-bell) had been
the first cause of all his erratic or erotic frailties :
it is not impossible that spirits of another sort may
remember that to their own innocent infantine
perceptions the first obscure electric revelation of
what Blake calls " the Eternal Female " was given
through a blind wondering thrill of childish rap-
ture by a lightning on the baby dawn of their
senses and their soul from the sunrise of Shake-
speare's Cleopatra.

Never has he given such proof of his incom-
parable instinct for abstinence from the wrong
thing as well as achievement of the right. He has
utterly rejected and disdained all occasion of set-
ting her off by means of any lesser foil than all
the glory of the world with all its empires. And

190 A Study of Shakespeare.

we need not Antony's example to show us that
these are less than straws in the balance.

Entre elle et 1'univers qui s'offraient a la fols
II hesita, lachant le monde dans son choix.

Even as that Roman grasp relaxed and let fall
the world, so has Shakespeare's self let go for
awhile his greater world of imagination, with all
its all but infinite variety of life and thought and
action, for love of that more infinite variety which
custom could not stale. Himself a second and a
yet more fortunate Antony, he has once more laid
a world, and a world more wonderful than ever,
at her feet. He has put aside for her sake all
other forms and figures of womanhood ; he, father
or creator of Rosalind, of Cordelia, of Desdemona,
and of Imogen, he too, like the sun-god and sender
of all song, has anchored his eyes on her whom
" Phcebus' amorous pinches " could not leave
" black," nor " wrinkled deep in time }> ; on that
incarnate and imperishable "spirit of sense," to
whom at the very last

The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch,
That hurts, and is desired.

To him, as to the dying husband of Octavia,
this creature of his own hand might have boasted

Antony and Cleopatra. 191

herself that the loveliest and purest among all her
sisters of his begetting,

with her modest eyes

And still conclusion, shall acquire no honour,
Demurring upon me.

To sum up, Shakespeare has elsewhere given us fn
ideal incarnation the perfect mother, the perfect
wife, the perfect daughter, the perfect mistress, or
the perfect maiden : here only once for all he has
given us the perfect and the everlasting woman.

And what a world of great men and great
things, " high actions and high passions," is this that
he has spread under her for a footcloth or hung
behind her for a curtain ! The descendant of that
other his ancestral Alcides, late offshoot of the
god whom he loved and who so long was loth to
leave him, is here as in history the visible one man
revealed who could grapple for a second with very
Rome and seem to throw it, more lightly than he
could cope with Cleopatra. And not the Roman
Landor himself could see or make us see more
clearly than has his fellow provincial of Warwick-
shire that first imperial nephew of her great first
paramour, who was to his actual uncle even such a
foil and counterfeit and perverse and prosperous
parody as the son of Hortense Beauharnais of Saint-

O 2

192 A Study of Shakespeare.

Leu to the son of Letizia Buonaparte of Ajaccio.
For Shakespeare too, like Landor, had watched his
" sweet Octavius " smilingly and frowningly " draw
under nose the knuckle of forefinger " as he looked
out upon the trail of innocent blood after the
bright receding figure of his brave young kinsman.
The fair-faced false "present God" of his poetic
parasites, the smooth triumphant patron and pre-
server with the heart of ice and iron, smiles before
us to the very life. It is of no account now to re-
member that

he at Philippi kept
His sword even like a dancer :

for the sword of Antony that struck for him is in
the renegade hand of Dercetas.

I have said nothing of Enobarbus or of Eros,
the fugitive once ruined by his flight and again
redeemed by the death-agony of his dark and
doomed repentance, or the freedman transfigured
by a death more fair than freedom through the
glory of the greatness of his faith : for who can
speak of all things or of half that are in Shake-
speare ? And who can speak worthily of any ?

I am come now to that strange part of a task
too high for me, where I must needs speak not
only (as may indeed well be) unworthily, but also
(as may well seem) unlovingly, of some certain

Troilus and Cressida. 193

portions in the mature and authentic work of
Shakespeare. "Though it be honest, it is never
good " to do so : yet here I cannot choose but
speak plainly after my own poor conscience, and
risk all chances of chastisement as fearful as any
once threatened for her too faithful messenger by
the heart-stricken wrath of Cleopatra.

In the greater part of this third period, taking
a swift and general view of it for contrast or com-
parison of qualities with the second, we constantly
find beauty and melody transfigured into harmony
and sublimity ; an exchange unquestionably for the
better : but in certain stages, or only perhaps in a
single stage of it, we frequently find humour and
reality supplanted by realism and obscenity ; an
exchange undeniably for the worse. The note of
his earliest comic style was often a boyish or a
birdlike wantonness, very capable of such liberties
and levities as those of Lesbia's sparrow with the
lip or bosom of his mistress ; as notably in the
parts of Boyet and Mercutio : and indeed there is
a bright vein of mere wordy wilfulness running
throughout the golden yo.uth of the two plays
which connects Love's Labour's Lost with Romeo
and Juliet as by a thread of floss silk not always
" most excellently ravelled," nor often unspotted or

194 A Study of Shakespeare.

unentangled. In the second period this gaiety
was replaced by the utmost frankness and fullness
of humour, as a boy's merry madness by the witty
wisdom of a man : but now for a time it would
seem as if the good comic qualities of either period
were displaced and ousted by mere coarseness and
crudity like that of a hard harsh photograph. This
ultra-Circean transformation of spirit and brutifica-
tion of speech we do not find in the lighter inter-
ludes of gre- it and perfect tragedy : for the porter
in Macbeth makes hardly an exception worth
naming. It is when we come upon the singular
little group of two or three plays not accurately
definable at all but roughly describable as tragi-
comedies, or more properly in two cases at least as
tragedies docked of their natural end, curtailed of
the due catastrophe — it is then that we find for the
swift sad bright lightnings of laughter from the
lips of the sweet and bitter fool whose timeless dis-
appearance from the stage of King Lear seems for
once a sure sign of inexplicable weariness or for-
getfulness on Shakespeare's part, so nauseous and
so sorry a substitute as the fetid fun and rancid
ribaldry of Pandarus and Thersites. I must have
leave to say that the coincidence of these two in
the scheme of a single play is a thing hardly bear-

Troilus and Cressida. 195

able by men who object to too strong a savour of
those too truly " Eternal Cesspools " over which the
first of living humourists holds as it were for ever
an everlasting nose — or rather, in one sense, does
not hold but expand it for the fuller inhalation of
their too congenial fumes with an apparent relish
which will always seem the most deplorable to
those who the most gratefully and reasonably
admire that high heroic genius, for love of which
the wiser sort of men must finally forgive all the
noisy aberrations of his misanthropy and philo-
bulgary, anti-Gallican and Russolatrous insanities
of perverse and morbid eloquence.

The three detached or misclassified plays of
Shakespeare in which alone a reverent and reason-
able critic might perhaps find something rationally
and really exceptionable have also this far other
quality in common, that in them as in his topmost
tragedies of the same period either the exaltation
of his eloquence touches the very highest point of
expressible poetry, or his power of speculation
alternately sounds the gulfs and scales the sum-
mits of all imaginable thought. In all three of
them the power of passionate and imaginative
eloquence is not only equal in spirit or essence but
identical in figure or in form : in those two of them

196 A St^ldy of Shakespeare.

which deal almost as much with speculative in-
telligence as with poetic action and passion, the
tones and methods, types and objects of thought,
are also not equal only but identical. An all but
absolute brotherhood in thought and style and
tone and feeling unites the quasi-tragedy of Troilus
and Cressida with what in the lamentable default
of as apt a phrase in English I must call by its
proper designation in French the tragedie manqute
of Measure for Measure. In the simply romantic
fragment of the Shakespearean Pericles, where there
was no call and no place for the poetry of specula-
tive or philosophic intelligence, there is the same
positive and unmistakable identity of imaginative
and passionate style.

I cannot but conjecture that the habitual
students of Shakespeare's printed plays must have
felt startled as by something of a shock when the
same year exposed for the expenditure of their six-
pences two reasonably correct editions of a play
unknown to the boards in the likeness of Troilus
and Cressida, side by side or cheek by jowl with
a most unreasonably and unconscionably incorrect
issue of a much older stage favourite, now newly
beautified and fortified, in Pericles Prince of Tyre.
Hitherto, ever since the appearance of his first poem,

Troilus and Cressida. 197

and its instant acceptance by all classes from courtiers
to courtesans under a somewhat dubious and two-
headed form of popular success, — * vrai succes de
scandale s'il en fut ' — even the potent influence and
unequivocal example of Rabelais had never once
even in passing or in seeming affected or infected the
progressive and triumphal genius of Shakespeare
with a taint or touch of any thing offensive to healthier
and cleanlier organs of perception than such as may
belong to a genuine or a pretending Puritan. But on
taking in his hand that one of these two new dramatic
pamphlets which might first attract him either by
its double novelty as a never acted play or by a title
of yet more poetic and romantic associations than
its fellow's, such a purchaser as I have supposed,
with his mind full of the sweet rich fresh humour
which he would feel a right to expect from Shake-
soeare, could hardly have undergone less than a
qualm or a pang of strong disrelish and distaste on
finding one of the two leading comic figures of the
play break in upon it at his entrance not even with
" a fool-born jest," but with full-mouthed and foul-
mouthed effusion of such rank and rancorous per-
sonalities as might properly pollute the lips even
of some emulous descendant or antiquarian re-
incarnation of Thersites, on application or even

198 A Study of Shakespeare.

apprehension of a whip cracked in passing over
the assembled heads of a pseudocritical and mock-
historic society. In either case we moderns at
least might haply desire the intervention of a
beadle's hand as heavy and a sceptral cudgel as
knotty as ever the son of Laertes applied to the
shoulders of the first of the type or the tribe of
Thersites. For this brutal and brutish buffoon —
I am speaking of Shakespeare's Thersites— has no
touch of humour in all his currish composition :
Shakespeare had none as nature has none to spare
for such dirty dogs as those of his kind or genera-
tion. There is not even what Coleridge with such
exquisite happiness defined as being the quint-
essential property of Swift — " anima Rabel&sii habi-
tans in sicco — the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry
place." It is the fallen soul of Swift himself at its
lowest, dwelling in a place yet drier : the familiar
spirit or less than Socratic daemon of the Dean
informing the genius of Shakespeare. And thus
for awhile infected and possessed, the divine genius
had not power to re-inform and re-create the
daemonic spirit by virtue of its own clear essence.
This wonderful play, one of the most admirable
among all the works of Shakespeare's immeasur-
able and unfathomable intelligence, as it must

Troilus and Cressida. 199

always hold its natural high place among the most
admired, will always in all probability be also, and
as naturally, the least beloved of all. It would be
as easy and as profitable a problem to solve the
Rabelaisian riddle of the bombinating chimaera
with its potential or hypothetical faculty of deriving
sustenance from a course of diet on second intentions,
as to read the riddle of Shakespeare's design in
the procreation of this yet more mysterious and
magnificent monster of a play. That on its pro-
duction in print it was formally announced as " a
new play never staled with the stage, never clapper-
clawed with the palms of the vulgar," we know ;
must we infer or may we suppose that therefore it
was not originally written for the stage ? Not all
plays were which even at that date appeared in
print : yet it would seem something more than
strange that one such play, written simply for the
study, should have been the extra-professional
work of Shakespeare : and yet again it would seem
stranger that he should have designed this prodi-
gious nondescript or portent of supreme genius for
the public stage : and strangest of all, if so, that
he should have so designed it in vain. Perhaps
after all a better than any German or Germanising
commentary on the subject would be the simple

2OO A Study of Shakespeare.

and summary ejaculation of Celia — "O wonder-
ful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful, and
yet again wonderful, and after that out of all
whooping ! " The perplexities of the whole matter
seem literally to crowd and thicken upon us
at every step. What ailed the man or any man
to write such a manner of dramatic poem at all ?
and having written, to keep it beside him or let
it out of his hands into stranger and more slip-
pery keeping, unacted and unprinted ? A German
will rush in with an answer where an Englishman
(non angelus sed Anglus) will naturally fear to
tread.

Alike in its most palpable perplexities and in
its most patent splendours, this political and philo-
sophic and poetic problem, this hybrid and hundred-
faced and hydra-headed prodigy, at once defies and
derides all definitive comment. This however we
may surely and confidently say of it, that of all
Shakespeare's offspring it is the one whose best
things lose least by extraction and separation from
their context. That some cynic had lately bitten
him by the brain — and possibly a cynic himself in
a nearly rabid stage of anthropophobia — we might
conclude as reasonably from consideration of the
whole as from examination of the parts more

Troilus and Cressida. 201

especially and virulently affected : yet how much
is here also of hyper-Platonic subtlety and sub-
limity, of golden and Hyblaean eloquence above
the reach and beyond the snap of any cynic's
tooth ! Shakespeare, as under the guidance at once
for good and for evil of his alternately Socratic and
Swiftian familiar, has set himself as if prepensely
and on purpose to brutalise the type of Achilles
and spiritualise the type of Ulysses. The former
is an enterprise never to be utterly forgiven by any
one who ever loved from the very birth of his boy-
hood the very name of the son of the sea-goddess :
in the glorious words of Mr. Browning's young
first-born poem,

Who stood beside the naked Swift -footed,

And bound [his] forehead with Proserpine's hair.

It is true, if that be any little compensation, that
Hector and Andromache fare here hardly better
than he : while of the momentary presentation of
Helen on the dirtier boards of a stage • more miry
than the tub of Diogenes I would not if I could and
I must not though I would say so much as one
single proper word. The hysterics of the eponymous
hero and the harlotries of the eponymous heroine
remove both alike beyond the outer pale of all
rational and manly sympathy ; though Shake-

2O2 A Stitdy of Shakespeare.

speare's self may never have exceeded or equalled
for subtle and accurate and bitter fidelity the study
here given of an utterly light woman, shallow and
loose and dissolute in the most literal sense, rather
than perverse or unkindly or unclean ; and though
Keats alone in his most perfect mood of lyric
passion and burning vision as full of fragrance as of
flame could have matched and all but overmatched
those passages in which the rapture of Troilus
makes pale and humble by comparison the keenest
raptures of Romeo.,

The relative disfavour in which the play of
Measure for Measure has doubtless been at all
times generally held is not in my opinion simply
explicable on the theory which of late years has been
so powerfully and plausibly advanced and advocated
on the highest poetic or judicial authority in France
or in the world, that in the land of many-coloured
cant and many-coated hypocrisy the type of Angelo
is something too much a prototype or an autotype
of the huge national vice of England. This com-
ment is in itself as surely just and true as it is inci-
sive and direct : but it will not cover by any man-
ner of means the whole question. The strong and
radical objection distinctly brought forward against
this play, and strenuously supported by the wisest

Measure fo r Measu re. 203

and the warmest devotee among all the worshippers
of Shakespeare, is not exactly this, that the Puritan
Angelo is exposed : it is that the Puritan Angelo
is unpunished. In the very words of Coleridge, it
is that by his pardon and his marriage " the strong
indignant claim of justice " is " baffled." The ex-
pression is absolutely correct and apt : justice is
nnt_rr{frf;]y pvaHf^^pr ignored or even defied : she
js both in the older and the newer sense of the
word directly and deliberately baffled ; buffeted,
^outraged, insulted, struck in the face. We are left
hungry and thirsty after having been made to thirst
and hunger for some wholesome single grain at
least of righteous and too long retarded retribution :
we are tricked out of our dole, defeated of our due,
lured and led on to look for some equitable and
satisfying upshot, defrauded and derided and sent
empty away.

That this play is in its very inmost essence a
tragedy, and that no sleight of hand or force of hand
could give it even a tolerable show of coherence or
consistency when clipped and docked of its proper
and rightful end, the mere tone of style prevalent
throughout all its better parts to the absolute ex-
clusion of any other would of itself most amply
suffice to show. Almost all that is here worthy of

2O4 A Study of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare at any time is worthy of Shakespeare
at his highest : and of this every touch, every line,
every incident, every syllable, belongs to pure and
simple tragedy. The evasion of a tragic end by
the invention and intromission of Mariana has
deserved and received high praise for its ingenuity :
but ingenious evasion of a natural and proper end
is usually the distinctive quality which denotes a
workman of a very much lower school than the school
of Shakespeare. In short and in fact, the whole
elaborate machinery by which the complete and
completely unsatisfactory result of the whole plot
is attained is so thoroughly worthy of such a con-
triver as M the old fantastical duke of dark corners "
as to be in a moral sense, if I dare say what I think,
very far from thoroughly worthy of the wisest and
mightiest mind that ever was informed with the
spirit or genius of creative poetry.

I have one more note to add in passing which
touches simply on a musical point in lyric verse ;
and from which I would therefore give any biped
who believes that ears " should be long to measure
Shakespeare " all timely warning to avert the length
of his own. A very singular question, and one to
me unaccountable except by a supposition which on
charitable grounds I should be loth to entertain for

Mea s^lre for Measure* 205

a moment — namely, that such ears are commoner
than I would fain believe on heads externally or
ostensibly human, — has been raised with regard to
the first immortal song of Mariana in the moated
grange. This question is whether the second verse
appended by Fletcher to that divine Shakespearean
fragment may not haply have been written by the
author of the first. The visible and audible evidence
that it cannot is of a kind which must at once leap
into sight of all human eyes and conviction of all
human ears. The metre of Shakespeare's verse, as
written by Shakespeare, is not the metre of Flet-
cher's. It can only seem the same to those who
hear by finger and not by ear : a class now at all
events but too evidently numerous enough to refute
Sir Hugh's antiquated objection to the once ap-
parently tautologous phrase of Pistol.1

1 I add the proof in a footnote, so as to take up no more than a
small necessary space of my text with the establishment of a fact
which yet can seem insignificant to no mortal who has a human ear
for lyric song. Shakespeare's verse, as all the wide world knows,
ends thus :

But my kisses bring again,
bring again,

Seals of love, but sealed in vain,
sealed in vain.

The echo has been dropped by Fletcher, who has thus achieved the
remarkable musical feat of turning a nightingale's note into a spar-
row's. The mutilation of Philomela by the hands of Tereus was a

206 A Study of Shakespeare.

It is of course inexplicable, but it is equally of
course undeniable, that the mention of Shake-
speare's Pericles would seem immediately and in-
variably to recall to a virtuous critical public of nice
and nasty mind the prose portions of the fourth
act, the whole of the prose portions of the fourth
act, and nothing but the prose portions of the fourth
act To readers and writers of books who readily
admit their ineligibility as members of a Society
for the Suppression of Shakespeare or Rabelais, of
Homer or the Bible, it will seem that the third and
fifth acts of this ill-fated and ill-famed play, and
with them the poetical parts of the fourth act, are
composed of metal incomparably more attractive.

jest compared to the mutilation of Shakespeare by the hands of
Fletcher : who thereby reduced the close of the first verse into agree-
ment if not into accordance with the close of his own. This ap-
pended verse, as all the world does not and need not know, ends
thus :

But first set my poor heart free,
Bound in those icy chains by thee.

Even an earless owner of fingers enough to count on may by their
help convince himself of the difference in metre here. But not only
does the last line, with unsolicited and literally superfluous liberality,
offer us a syllable over measure ; the words are such as absolutely
to defy antiphonal repetition or reverberation of the three last in
either line. Let us therefore, like good scriptural scholars, accord-
ing equally to the letter and the spirit of the text, render unto
Fletcher the things which be Fletcher's, and unto Shakespeare the
things which be Shakespeare's.

Pericles. 207

But the virtuous critic, after the alleged nature of
the vulturine kind, would appear to have eyes and
ears and nose for nothing else. It is true that
somewhat more of humour, touched once and again
with subtler hints of deeper truth, is woven into
the too realistic weft of these too lifelike scenes than
into any of the corresponding parts in Measure f of
Measure or in Troilus and Cressida ; true also that
in the hands of imitators, in hands so much weaker
than Shakespeare's as were Heywood's or Daven-
port's (who transplanted this unlovely episode from
Pericles into a play of his own), these very scenes
or such as they reappear unredeemed by any such
relief in all the rank and rampant ugliness of their
raw repulsive realism : true, again, that Fletcher
has once equalled them in audacity, while stripping
off the nakedness of his subject the last ragged and
rude pretence at a moral purpose, and investing it
instead with his very brightest robe of gay parti-
coloured humour : but after all it remains equally
true that to senses less susceptible of attraction by
carrion than belong to the vultures of critical and
professional virtue they must always remain as they
have always been, something very considerably
more than unattractive. I at least for one must
confess myself insufficiently virtuous to have evef

208 A Study of Shakespeare.

at any time for any moment felt towards them the
very slightest touch of any feeling more attractive
than repulsion. And herewith I hasten to wash
my hands of the only unattractive matter in the
only three of Shakespeare's plays which offer any
such matter to the perceptions of any healthy-
minded and reasonable human creature.

But what now shall I say that may not be too
pitifully unworthy of the glories and the beauties,
the unsurpassable pathos and sublimity inwoven
with the imperial texture of this very play ? the
blood-red Tyrian purple of tragic maternal jealousy,
which might seem to array it in a worthy attire
of its Tyrian name ; the flower-soft loveliness of
maiden lamentation over the flower-strewn seaside
grave of Marina's old sea-tossed nurse, where I
am unvirtuous enough (as virtue goes among
moralists) to feel more at home and better at ease
than in the atmosphere of her later lodging in
Mitylene ? What, above all, shall be said of that
storm above all storms ever raised in poetry, which
ushered into a world of such wonders and strange
chances the daughter of the wave-worn and world-
wandering prince of Tyre ? Nothing but this
perhaps, that it stands — or rather let me say that
it blows and sounds and shines and rings and

Pericles. 209

thunders and lightens as far ahead of all others as
the burlesque sea-storm of Rabelais beyond all
possible storms of comedy. The recent compiler
of a most admirably skilful and most delicately
invaluable compendium of Pantagruel or manual
by way of guidebook to Rabelais has but too
justly taken note of the irrefragable evidence there
given that the one prose humourist who is to Aris*
tophanes as the human twin-star Castor to Pollux
the divine can never have practically weathered
an actual gale ; but if I may speak from a single
experience of one which a witness long inured to
Indian storm as well as Indian battle had never
seen matched out of the tropics if ever overmatched
within them, I should venture to say, were the poet
in question any other mortal man than Shake"
speare, to whom all things were better known by
instinct than ever they can be to others by experi-
ence, that the painter of the storm in Pericles must
have shared the adventure and relished the rapture
of such an hour. None other most assuredly than
himself alone could have mingled with the material
passion of the elements such human passion of
pathos as thrills in such tenderly sublime under-
tone of an agony so nobly subdued through the
lament of Pericles over Thaisa. As in his opening

2io A Study of Shakespeare.

speech of this scene we heard all the clangour and
resonance of warring wind and sea, so now we
hear a sound of sacred and spiritual music as
solemn as the central monochord of the inner
main itself.

That the three last acts of Pericles, with the
possible if not over probable exception of the so-
called Chorus,1 are wholly the work of Shakespeare
in the ripest fullness of his latter genius, is a posi-
tion which needs exactly as much proof as does his
single-handed authorship of Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth,
and Othello. In the fifth act is a remarkable in-
stance of a thing remarkably rare with him ; the
recast or repetition in an improved and reinvigo-
rated form of a beautiful image or passage occur-
ring in a previous play. The now only too famous
metaphor of " patience on a monument smiling at
grief" — too famous we might call it for its own
fame — is transfigured as from human beauty to
divine, in its transformation to the comparison of
Marina's look with that of * Patience gazing on
kings' graves, and smiling Extremity out of act.'*

1 It is worth remark that in a still older sample of an older and
ruder form of play than can have been the very earliest mould in
which the pristine or pre- Shakespearean model of Pericles was cast,
the part of Chorus here assigned to Gower was filled by a represen-
tative of his fellow -poet Lydgate.

Pericles. 211

A precisely similar parallel is one to which I have
referred elsewhere ; that between the two passages
respectively setting forth the reciprocal love of
Helena and Hermia, of Emilia and Flavina. The
change of style and spirit in either case of reitera-
tion is the change from a simpler to a sublimer
form of beauty.

In the two first acts of Pericles there are faint
and rare but evident and positive traces of a pass-
ing touch from the hasty hand of Shakespeare:
even here too we may say after Dido : —

Nee tarn aversus equos Tyria sol jungit ab urbe.

It has been said that those most unmistakable verses
on " the blind mole " are not such as any man could
insert into another man's work, or slip in between
the lines of an inferior poet : and that they occur
naturally enough in a speech of no particular ex-
cellence. I take leave decisively to question the
former assertion, and flatly to contradict the latter.
The pathetic and magnificent lines in dispute do
not occur naturally enough, or at all naturally,
among the very poor, flat, creeping verses between
which they have been thrust with such over free-
handed recklessness. No purple patch was ever
more pitifully out of place. There is indeed no
second example of such wanton and wayward

212 A Study of Shakespeare.

liberality ; but the generally lean and barren style
of these opening acts does not crawl throughout on
exactly the same low level.

The last of the only three plays with which I
venture to find any fault on the score of moral taste
is the first on my list of the only three plays belong-
ing to this last period on which, as they now stand,
I trace the indisputable track of another touch
than Shakespeare's. But in the two cases remain-
ing our general task of distinction should on the
whole be simple and easy enough for the veriest
babes and sucklings in the lower school of Shake-
speare.

That the two great posthumous fragments we
possess of Shakespeare's uncompleted work are
incomplete simply because the labour spent on
either was cut short by his timeless death is the
first natural assumption of any student with an eye
quick enough to catch the point where the traces
of his hand break off ; but I should now be inclined
to guess rather that on reconsideration of the
subjects chosen he had rejected or dismissed them
for a time at least as unfit for dramatic handling.
It could have needed no great expenditure of
reasoning or reflection to convince a man of lesser
mind and less experience than Shakespeare's that

Timon of Athens. 213

no subject could possibly be more unmanageable,
more indomitably improper for such a purpose,
than he had selected in Timon of Athens. How
he came ever to fall across such a subject, to hit
upon such a choice, we can spend no profitable
time or pains in trying to conjecture. It is clear,
however, that at all events there was a season
when the inexplicable attraction of it was too
strong for him to resist the singular temptation to
embody in palpable form, to array in dramatic
raiment, to invest with imaginative magnificence,
the godless ascetic passion of misanthropy, the
martyrdom of an atheistic Stylites. Timon is
doubtless a man of far nobler type than any
monomaniac of the tribe of Macarius : but his im-
measurable superiority in spiritual rank to the
hermit fathers of the desert serves merely to make
him a thought madder and a grain more miserable
than the whole Thebaid of Christomaniacs rolled
into one. Foolish and fruitless as it has ever been
to hunt through Shakespeare's plays and sonnets
on the false scent of a fantastic trail, to put thau-
maturgic trust in a dark dream of tracking his urx-
traceable personality through labyrinthine byways
of life and visionary crossroads of character, it is
yet surely no blind assumption to accept the plain

214 ^ Study of Shakespeare.

evidence in both so patent before us. that he too
like other men had his dark seasons of outer or of
inner life, and like other poets found them or made
them fruitful as well as bitter, though it might be
but of bitter fruit. And of such there is here
enough to glut the gorge of all the monks in
mcnkery, or strengthen for a forty days' fast any
brutallest unwashed theomaniac of the Thebaid.
The most unconscionably unclean of all foul-
minded fanatics might have been satisfied with the
application to all women from his mother upwards
of the monstrous and magnificent obloquy found by
Timon as insufficient to overwhelm as his gold was
inadequate to satisfy one insatiable and indomit-
able " brace of harlots." In Troilus and Cressida
we found too much that Swift might have written
when half inspired by the genius of Shakespeare ;
in the great and terrible fourth act of Timon we
find such tragedy as Juvenal might have written
when half deified by the spirit of ^Eschylus.

There is a noticeable difference between the case
of Tiinon and the two other cases (diverse enough
between themselves) of late 01 mature work but
partially assignable to the hand of Shakespeare. In
Pericles we may know exactly how much was added
by Shakespeare to the work of we know not whom ;

Timon of Athens. 215

in The Tivo Noble Kinsmen we can tell sometimes
to a hair's breadth in a hemistich by whom how
much was added to the posthumous text of Shake-
speare ; in Timon we cannot assert with the same
confidence in the same accuracy that just so many
scenes and no more, just so many speeches and
none other, were the work of Shakespeare's or of
some other hand. Throughout the first act his
presence lightens on us by flashes, as his voice
peals out by fits, from behind or above the too
meanly decorated altar of tragic or satiric song : in
the second it is more sensibly continuous ; in the
third it is all but utterly eclipsed ; in the fourth it
is but very rarely intercepted for a very brief interval
in the dark divine service of a darker Commination
Day : in the fifth it predominates generally over the
sullen and brooding atmosphere with the fierce im-
perious glare of a " bloody sun " like that which the
wasting shipmen watched at noon "in a hot and
copper sky." There is here no more to say of a
poem inspired at once by the triune Furies of
Ezekiel, of Juvenal, and of Dante.

I can imagine no reason but that already sug-
gested why Shakespeare should in a double sense
have taken Chaucer for his mod el or example in leav-
ing half told a story which he had borrowed from the

H

2i6 A Study of Shakespeare.

father and master of our narrative poetry. Among
all competent scholars and all rational students of
Shakespeare there can have been, except possibly
with regard to three of the shorter scenes, no room
for doubt or perplexity on any detail of the sub-
ject since the perfect summary and the masterly
decision of Mr. Dyce. These three scenes, as no
such reader will need to be told or reminded, are
the two first soliloquies of the Gaoler's Daughter
after the release of Palamon, and the scene of the
portraits, as we may in a double sense call it, in
which Emilia, after weighing against each other in
solitude the likenesses of the cousins, receives from
her own kinsfolk a full and laboured description of
their leading champions on either side. Even set-
ting apart for once and for a moment the sovereign
evidence of mere style, we must recognise in this
last instance a beautiful and significant example
of that loyal and loving fidelity to the minoi
passing suggestions of Chaucer's text which on all
possible occasions of such comparison so markedly
and vividly distinguishes the work of Shakespeare's
from the work of Fletcher's hand. Of the pestilent
abuse and perversion to which Fletcher has put the
perhaps already superfluous hints or sketches by
Shakespeare for an episodical underplot, in his trans-

The Two Noble Kinsmen. 217

mutation of Palamon's love-stricken and luckless
deliverer into the disgusting burlesque of a mock
Ophelia, I have happily no need as I should
certainly have no patience to speak.1

After the always immitigable gloom of Timon
and the sometimes malodorous exhalations of the
three preceding plays, it is nothing less than " very
heaven" to find and feel ourselves again in the
midmost Paradise, the central Eden, of Shake-
speare's divine discovery — of his last sweet living
invention. Here again is air as pure blowing over
fields as fragrant as where Dante saw Matilda or
Milton saw Proserpine gathering each as deathless
flowers. We still have here to disentwine or dis-
entangle his own from the weeds of glorious and
of other than glorious feature with which Fletcher
has thought fit to interweave them ; even in the
close of the last scene of all we can say to a line,
to a letter, where Shakespeare ends and Fletcher
begins. That scene is opened by Shakespeare in
his most majestic vein of meditative or moral verse,

1 Except perhaps one little word of due praise for the pretty
imitation or recollection of his dead friend Beaumont rather than of
Shakespeare, in the description of the crazed girl whose "careless
tresses a wreath of bullrush rounded " where she sat playing with
flowers for emblems at a game of -love and sorrow — but liker in all
else to Bellario by another fountain-side than to Ophelia by the brook
of death.

2 1 8 A Study of Shakespeare.

pointed and coloured as usual with him alone by
direct and absolute aptitude to the immediate
sentiment and situation of the speaker and of no
man else: then either Fletcher strikes in for a
moment with a touch of somewhat more Shake-
spearean tone than usual, or possibly we have a
survival of some lines' length, not unretouched by
Fletcher, from Shakespeare's first sketch for a
conclusion of the somewhat calamitous and cum-
brous underplot, which in any case was ultimately
left for Fletcher to expand into such a shape and
bring by such means to such an end as we may
safely swear that Shakespeare would never have
admitted : then with the entrance and ensuing
narrative of Pirithous we have none but Shake-
speare before us again, though it be Shakespeare un-
doubtedly in the rough, and not as he might have
chosen to present himself after due revision, with
rejection (we may well suppose) of this point and
readjustment of that : then upon the arrival of the
dying Arcite with his escort there follows a griev-
ous little gap, a flaw but pitifully patched by
Fletcher, whom we recognise at wellnigh his worst
and weakest in Palamon's appeal to his kinsman
for a last word, " if his heart, his worthy, manly
heart " (an exact and typical example of Fletcher's

The Two Noble Kinsmen. 219

tragically prosaic and prosaically tragic dash of
incurable commonplace), "be yet unbroken," and
in the flaccid and futile answer which fails so
signally to supply the place of the most famous
and pathetic passage in all the masterpiece of
Chaucer; a passage to which even Shakespeare
could have added but some depth and grandeur of
his own giving, since neither he nor Dante's very
self nor any other among the divinest of men
could have done more or better than match it for
tender and pure simplicity of words more " dearly
sweet and bitter " than the bitterest or the sweetest
of men's tears. Then, after the duly and properly
conventional engagement on the parts of Palamon
and Emilia respectively to devote the anniversary
" to tears " and " to honour," the deeper note re-
turns for one grand last time, grave at once and
sudden and sweet as the full choral opening of an
anthem : the note which none could ever catch of
Shakespeare's very voice gives out the peculiar
cadence that it alone can give in the modulated
instinct of a solemn change or shifting of the
metrical emphasis or ictus from one to the other of
two repeated words : —

That nought could buy
Dear Icve, but loss of dear love I

22O A Study of Shakespeare.

That is a touch beyond the ear or the hand of
Fletcher : a chord sounded from Apollo's own
harp after a somewhat hoarse and reedy wheeze
from the scrannel-pipe of a lesser player than Pan.
Last of all, in words worthy to be the latest left of
Shakespeare's, his great and gentle Theseus winds
up the heavenly harmonies of his last beloved
great poem.

And now, coming at length within the very
circle of Shakespeare's culminant and crowning
constellation, bathing my whole soul and spirit
for the last and (if I live long enough) as surely
for the first of many thousand times in the splen-
dours of the planet whose glory is the light of
his very love itself, standing even as Dante

in the clear
Amorous silence of the Swooning-sphere,

what shall I say of thanksgiving before the final
feast of Shakespeare ?

The grace must surely be short enough if it
would at all be gracious. Even were Shakespeare's
self alive again, or he now but fifteen years since
gone home to Shakespeare,1 of whom Charles
Lamb said well that none could have written his
book about Shakespeare but either himself alone

1 On the I7th of September, 1864.

The Tempest. 221

or else he of whom the book was written, yet
could we not hope that either would have any new
thing to tell us of the Tempest, the Winter's Tale,
and Cymbeline. And for ourselves, what else could
we do but only ring changes on the word beautiful
as Celia on the word wonderful in her laughing
litany of love ? or what better or what more can
we do than in the deepest and most heartfelt sense
of an old conventional phrase, thank God and
Shakespeare ? for how to praise either for such a
gift of gifts we know not, knowing only and surely
that none will know for ever.

True or false, and it would now seem some-
thing less than likely to be true, the fancy which
assumed the last lines spoken by Prospero to be
likewise the last words of the last completed work
of Shakespeare was equally in either case at once
natural and graceful. There is but one figure
sweeter than Miranda's and sublimer than Pro-
spero's in all the range of heaven on which the
passion of our eyes could rest at parting. And
from one point of view there is even a more
heavenly quality perceptible in the light of this
than of its two twin stars. In no nook or corner
of the island as we leave it is any savour left
or any memory lingering of any inexpiable evil.

222 A Study of Shakespeare.

Alonzo is absolved ; even Antonio and Sebastian
have made no such ineffaceable mark on it by the
presence of their pardoned crimes as is made by
those which cost the life of Mamillius and the
labours of Imogen. Poor Caliban is left in such
comfort as may be allowed him by divine grace in
the favourable aspect of Setebos ; and his com-
rades go by us " reeling ripe " and " gilded " not by
" grand liquor " only but also by the summer light-
ning of men's laughter : blown softly out of our
sight, with a sound and a gust of music, by the
breath of the song of Ariel.

The wild wind of the Winter's Tale at its
opening would seem to blow us back into a win-
trier world indeed. And to the very end I must
confess that I have in me so much of the spirit of
Rachel weeping in Ramah as will not be comforted
because Mamillius is not. It is well for those
whose hearts are light enough, to take perfect
comfort even in the substitution of his sister
Perdita for the boy who died of "thoughts high
for one so tender." Even the beautiful sugges-
tion that Shakespeare as he wrote had in mind his
own dead little son still fresh and living at his
heart can hardly add more than a touch of addi-
tional tenderness to our perfect and piteous delight

The Winters Tale. 223

in him. And even in her daughter's embrace it
seems hard if his mother should have utterly for-
gotten the little voice that had only time to tell
her just eight words of that ghost story which
neither she nor we were ever to hear ended. Any
one but Shakespeare would have sought to make
pathetic profit out of the child by the easy means
of showing him if but once again as changed and
stricken to the death for want of his mother and
fear for her and hunger and thirst at his little high
heart for the sight and touch of her : Shakespeare
only could find a better way, a subtler and a deeper
chord to strike, by giving us our last glimpse of
him as he laughed and chattered with her " past
enduring," to the shameful neglect of those ladies
in the natural blueness of whose eyebrows as well
as their noses he so stoutly declined to believe.
And at the very end (as aforesaid) it may be that
we remember him all the better because the father
whose jealousy killed him and the mother for love
of whom he died would seem to have forgotten
the little brave sweet spirit with all its truth of
love and tender sense of shame as perfectly and
unpardonably as Shakespeare himself at the close
of King Lear would seem to have forgotten one
who never had forgotten Cordelia.

H 2

224 A Study of Shakespeare.

But yet — and here for once the phrase abhorred
by Cleopatra does not "allay the good" but only
the bad "precedence" — if ever amends could be
made for such unnatural show of seeming forget-
fulness ( " out on the seeming ! I will write against
it "—or would, had I not written enough already),
the poet most assuredly has made such amends
here. At the sunrise of Perdita beside Florizel
it seems as if the snows of sixteen winters had
melted all together into the splendour of one
unutterable spring. They " smell April and May "
in a sweeter sense than it could be said of " young
Master Fenton " : " nay, which is more," as his
friend and champion Mistress Quickly might have
added to mine host's commendatory remark, they
speak all April and May ; because April is in him
as naturally as May in her, by just so many
years' difference before the Mayday of her birth as
went to make up her dead brother's little lot of
living breath, which in Beaumont's most lovely and
Shakespeare-worthy phrase "was not a life ; -was
but a piece of childhood thrown away." Nor can
I be content to find no word of old affection for
Autolycus, who lived, as we may not doubt, though
but a hint or promise be vouchsafed us for all
assurance that he lived by favour of his " good

Cymbeline. 225

masters" once more to serve Prince Florizel and
wear three-pile for as much of his time as it might
please him to put on " robes " like theirs that were
"gentlemen born," and had "been so any time
these four hours." And yet another and a graver
word must be given with all reverence to the
"grave and good Paulina," whose glorious fire of
godlike indignation was as warmth and cordial to
the innermost heart while yet bruised and wrung
for the yet fresh loss of Mamillius.

The time is wellnigh come now for me to
consecyate in this book my good will if not good
work to the threefold and thrice happy memory of
the three who have written of Shakespeare as never
man wrote, nor ever man may write again ; to the
everlasting praise and honour and glory of Charles
Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Walter
Savage Landor ; " wishing," I hardly dare to say,
" what I write may be read by their light." The
play of plays, which is Cymbeline, remains alone
to receive the last salute of all my love.

I think, as far as I can tell, I may say I have
always loved this one beyond all other children of
Shakespeare. The too literal egoism of this pro-
fession will not be attributed by any candid or
even commonly honest reader to the violence of

226 A Study of Shakespeare.

vanity so much more than comical as to make me
suppose that such a record or assurance could in
itself be matter of interest to any man: but simply
to the real and simple reason, that I wish to
show cause for my choice of this work to wind
up with, beyond the mere chance of its posi-
tion at the close of the chaotically inconsequent
catalogue of contents affixed to the first edition.
In this casualty — for no good thing can reasonably
be ascribed to design on the part of the first
editors — there would seem to be something more
than usual of what we may call, if it so please us, a
happy providence. It is certain that no studious
arrangement could possibly have brought the book
to a happier end. Here is depth enough with
height enough of tragic beauty and passion, terror
and love and pity, to approve the presence of the
most tragic Master's hand ; subtlety enough of
sweet and bitter truth to attest the passage of the
mightiest and wisest scholar or teacher in the
school of the human spirit ; beauty with delight
enough and glory of life and grace of nature to
proclaim the advent of the one omnipotent Maker
among all who bear that name. Here above all
is the most heavenly triad of human figures that
ever even Shakespeare brought together ; a diviner

Cymbeline. 227

three, as it were a living god-garland of the noblest
earth-born brothers and loveworthiest heaven-born
sister, than the very givers of all grace and happi-
ness to their Grecian worshippers of old time over
long before. The passion of Posthumus is noble,
and potent the poison of lachimo ; Cymbeline has
enough for Shakespeare's present purpose of a the
king-becoming graces " ; but we think first and
last of her who was " truest speaker " and those who
" called her brother, when she was but their sister ;
she them brothers, when they were so indeed."
The very crown and flower of all her father's
daughters, — I do not speak here of her human
father, but her divine — -the woman above all
Shakespeare's women is Imogen. As in Cleopatra
we found the incarnate sex, the woman everlasting,
so in Imogen we find half glorified already the
immortal godhead of womanhood. I would fain
have some honey in my words at parting — with
Shakespeare never, but for ever with these notes
on Shakespeare; and I am therefore something
more than fain to close my book upon the name of
the woman best beloved in all the world of song
and all the tide of time ; upon the name of Shake-
speare's Imogen.

APPENDIX.

NOTE ON THE HISTORICAL PLA Y OF

KING EDWARD HI.

1879.

THE epitaph of German criticism on Shakespeare was
long since written by the unconscious hand which
penned the following sentence ; an inscription worthy of
perpetual record on the registers of Gotham or in the
daybook of the yet unstranded Ship of Fools.

" Ihomas Lord Cromwell: — Sir John Oldcastle : —
A Yorkshire Tragedy. — The three last pieces are not
only unquestionably Shakespeare's, but in my opinion
they deserve to be classed among his best and maturest
works."

This memorable opinion is the verdict of the modest
and judicious Herr von Schlegel : who had likewise in
his day the condescension to inform our ignorance of the
melancholy fact so strangely overlooked by the contem-
poraries of Christopher Marlowe, that " his verses are
flowing, but without energy." Strange, but true ; too
strange, we may reasonably infer, not to be true. Only
to German eyes has the treasure-house of English poetry
ever disclosed a secret of this kind : to German ears
alone has such discord or default been ever perceptible
in its harmonies.

232 A Study of Shakespeare.

Now the facts with regard to this triad of plays are
briefly these. Thomas Lord Cromwell is a piece of such
utterly shapeless, spiritless, bodiless, soulless, senseless,
helpless, worthless rubbish, that there is no known writer
of Shakespeare's age to whom it could be ascribed with-
out the infliction of an unwarrantable insult on that
writer's memory. Sir John Oldcastle is the compound
piecework of four minor playwrights, one of them after-
wards and otherwise eminent as a poet — Munday,
Drayton, Wilson, and Hathaway : a thin sample of poetic
patchery cobbled up and stitched together so as to serve
its hour for a season without falling to pieces at the
first touch. The Yorkshire Tragedy is a coarse, crude,
and vigorous impromptu, in which we possibly might
almost think it possible that Shakespeare had a hand (or
at least a ringer), if we had any reason to suppose that
during the last ten or twelve years of his life 1 he was likely
to have taken part in any such dramatic improvisation.

The example and the exposure of SchlegeFs misadven-
tures in this line have not sufficed to warn off minor blun-
derers from treading with emulous confidence " through
forthrights and meanders " in the very muddiest of their
precursor's traces. We may notice, for one example, the
revival — or at least the discussion as of something worth
serious notice — of awellnigh still-born theory, first dropped

1 The once too celebrated crime which in this play was exhibited
on the public stage with the forcible fidelity of a wellnigh brutal
realism took actual place on the private stage of fact in the year
1604. Four years afterwards the play was published as Shake-
speare's. Eight years more, and Shakespeare was with ^Eschylus.

Appendix. 233

in a modest corner of the critical world exactly a hundred
and seventeen years ago. Its parent, notwithstanding
this perhaps venial indiscretion, was apparently an honest
and modest gentleman ; and the play itself, which this
ingenuous theorist was fain, with all diffidence, to try
whether haply he might be permitted to foist on the
apocryphal fatherhood of Shakespeare, is not without such
minor merits as may excuse us for wasting a few minutes
on examination of the theory which seeks to confer on
it the factitious and artificial attraction of a spurious and
adventitious interest.

"The Raigne of King Edward the third: As it hath
bin sundrie times plaied about the Citie of London," was
published in 1596, and ran through two or three anony-
mous editions before the date of the generation was out
which first produced it. Having thus run to the end of
its natural tether, it fell as naturally into the oblivion
which has devoured, and has not again disgorged, so
many a more precious production of its period. In 1760
it was reprinted in the " Prolusions " of Edward Capell,
whose text is now before me. This editor was the first
mortal to suggest that his newly unearthed treasure might
possibly be a windfall from the topless tree of Shake-
speare. Being, as I have said, a duly modest and an
evidently honest man, he admits " with candour " that
there is no jot or tittle of " external evidence " whatsoever
to be alleged in support of this gratuitous attribution :
but he submits, with some fair show of reason, that
there is a certain "resemblance between the style of"
Shakespeare's "earlier performances and of the work

234 ^ Study pf Shakespeare.

in question " ; and without the slightest show of any
reason whatever he appends to this humble and plausible
plea the unspeakably unhappy assertion that at the time
of its appearance " there was no known writer equal to
such a play " ; whereas at a moderate computation there
were, I should say, on the authority of Henslowe's Diary,
at least a dozen — and not improbably a score. In any case
there was one then newly dead, too long before his time,
whose memory stands even higher above the possible
ascription of such a work than that of the adolescent
Shakespeare's very self.

Of one point we may be sure, even where so much is
unsure as we find it here : in the curt atheological phrase
of the Persian Lucretius, " one thing is certain, and the
rest is lies." The author of King Edward III. was a
devout student and a humble follower of Christopher
Marlowe, not yet wholly disengaged by that august and
beneficent influence from all attraction towards the "jig-
ging veins of rhyming mother- wits " ; and fitter on the
whole to follow this easier and earlier vein of writing,
half lyrical in manner and half elegiac, than to brace
upon his punier limbs the young giant's newly fashioned
buskin of blank verse. The signs of this growing struggle,
the traces of this incomplete emancipation, are perceptible
throughout in the alternate prevalence of two conflicting
and irreconcilable styles ; which yet affords no evidence
or suggestion of a double authorship. For the intelli-
gence which moulds and informs the whole work, the
spirit which pervades and imbues the general design, is
of a piece, so to speak, throughout ; a point impercep-

Appendix. 235

tible to the eye, a touchstone intangible by the finger,
alike of a scholiast and a dunce.

Another test, no less unmistakable by the student
and no less indiscernible to the sciolist, is this : that
whatever may be the demerits of this play, they are due
to no voluntary or involuntary carelessness or haste. Here
is not the swift impatient journeywork of a rough and
ready hand ; here is no sign of such compulsory hurry
in the discharge of a task something less than welcome,
if not of an imposition something less than tolerable,
as we may rationally believe ourselves able to trace in
great part of Marlowe's work : in the latter half of The
few of Malta, in the burlesque interludes of Doctor
Faustus, and wellnigh throughout the whole scheme and
course of The Massacre at Paris. Whatever in King
Edward III. is mediocre or worse is evidently such
as it is through no passionate or slovenly precipitation
of handiwork, but through pure incompetence to do
better. The blame of the failure, the shame of the
shortcoming, cannot be laid to the account of any mo-
mentary excess or default in emotion, of passing exhaustion
or excitement, of intermittent impulse and reaction ; it is
an indication of lifelong and irremediable impotence.
And it is further to be noted that by far the least unsuc-
cessful parts of the play are also by far the most unim-
portant. The capacity of the author seems to shrink and
swell alternately, to erect its plumes and deject them, to
contract and to dilate the range and orbit of its flight
in a steadily inverse degree to the proportionate interest
of the subject or worth of the topic in hand. There

236 A Study of Shakespeare.

could be no surer proof that it is neither the early nor
the hasty work of a great or even a remarkable poet
It is the best that could be done at any time by a con-
scientious and studious workman of technically insufficient
culture and of naturally limited means.

I would not, however, be supposed to undervalue the
genuine and graceful ability of execution displayed by
the author at his best. He could write at times very
much after the earliest fashion of the adolescent Shake-
speare ; in other words, after the fashion of the day or
hour, to which in some degree the greatest writer of that
hour or that day cannot choose but conform at starting,
and the smallest writer must needs conform for ever.
By the rule which would attribute to Shakespeare every
line written in his first manner which appeared during the
first years of his poetic progress, it is hard to say what
amount of bad verse or better, current during the
rise and the reign of their several influences, — for this
kind of echo or of copywork, consciously or uncon-
sciously repercussive and reflective, begins with the very-
first audible sound of a man's voice in song, with the very
first noticeable stroke of his hand in painting — it is hard
to say what amount of tolerable or intolerable work might
not or may not be assignable by scholiasts of the future
to Byron or to Shelley, to Mr. Tennyson or to Mr.
Browning. A time by this rule might come — but I am
fain to think better of the Fates — when by comparison
of detached words and collation of dismembered phrases
the memory of Mr. Tennyson would be weighted and
degraded by the ascription of whole volumes of pilfered
and diluted verse now current — if not yet submerged —

Appendix. 237

under the name or the pseudonym of the present l Viceroy
— or Vice-empress is it? — of India, But the obvious
truth is this : the voice of Shakespeare's adolescence had
as usual an echo in it of other men's notes : I can re-
member the name of but one poet whose voice from the
beginning had none ; who started with a style of his own,
though he may have chosen to annex — " annex the wise
it call " ; convey is obsolete — to annex whole phrases or
whole verses at need, for the use or the ease of an idle
minute ; and this name of course is Marlowe's. So
starting, Shakespeare had yet (like all other and lesser poets
born) some perceptible notes in his yet half boyish voice
that were not borrowed ; and these were at once caught
up and re-echoed by such fellow-pupils with Shakespeare
of the young Master of them all — such humbler and
feebler disciples, or simpler sheep (shall we call them ?)
of the great " dead shepherd " — as the now indistinguish-
able author of King Edward III.

In the first scene of the first act the impotent imi-
tation of Marlowe is pitifully patent. Possibly there may
also be an imitation of the still imitative style of Shake-
speare, and the style may be more accurately definable
as a copy of a copy — a study after the manner of Marlowe,
not at second hand, but at third. In any case, being
obviously too flat and feeble to show a touch of either
godlike hand, this scene may be set aside at once to
make way for the second.

The second scene is more animated, but low in style
till we come to the outbreak of rhyme. In other words,

1 Written in 1879.

238 A Study of Shakespeare.

the energetic or active part is at best passable — fluent and
decent commonplace : but where the style turns un-
dramatic and runs into mere elegiacs, a likeness becomes
perceptible t6 the first elegiac style of Shakespeare.
Witness these lines spoken by the King in contemplation
of the Countess of Salisbury's beauty, while yet struggling
against the nascent motions of a base love : —

Now in the sun alone it doth not lie

With light to take light from a mortal eye :

For here two day-stars that mine eyes would see

More than the sun steal mine own light from me.

Contemplative desire ! desire to be

In contemplation that may master thee \

Dedpit exemplar vitiis imitabile : if Shakespeare ever saw
or heard these pretty lines, he should have felt the un-
conscious rebuke implied in such close and facile imitation
of his own early elegiacs. As a serious mimicry of his
first manner, a critical parody summing up in little space
the sweet faults of his poetic nonage, with its barren
overgrowth of unprofitable flowers, — bright point, soft
metaphor, and sweet elaborate antithesis — this is as good
of its kind as anything between Aristophanes and Horace
Smith. Indeed, it may remind us of that parody on the
soft, superfluous, flowery and frothy style of Agathon,
which at the opening of the Thesmephoriazusce. cannot
but make the youngest and most ignorant reader laugh,
though the oldest and most learned has never set eyes
on a line of the original verses which supplied the incar-
nate god of comic song with matter for such exquisite
burlesque.

Appendix. 239

To the speech above cited the reply of the Countess
is even gracefuller, and closer to the same general model
of fanciful elegiac dialogue : —

Let not thy presence, like the April sun,
Flatter our earth, and suddenly be done :
More happy do not make our outward wall
Than thou wilt grace our inward house withal.
Our house, my liege, is like a country swain,
Whose habit rude, and manners blunt and plain.
Presageth naught ; yet inly beautified
With bounty's riches, and fair hidden pride ;
For where the golden ore doth buried lie,
The ground, undecked with nature's tapestry,
Seems barren, sere, unfertile, fruitless, dry ;
And where the upper turf of earth doth boast
His pride, perfumes,1 and particoloured cost,
Delve there, and find this issue and their pride
To spring from ordure and corruption's side.
But, to make up my all too long compare,
These ragged walls no testimony are
What is within ; but, like a cloak, doth hide
From weather's waste the under garnished pride.
More gracious than my terms can let thee be,
Entreat thyself to stay awhile with me.

Not only the exquisite grace of this charming last couplet,
but the smooth sound strength, the fluency and clarity of
the whole passage, may serve to show that the original
suggestion of Capell, if (as I think) untenable, was not
(we must admit) unpardonable. The very oversight per-

1 Capell has altered this to "proud perfumes"; marking the
change in a note, with the scrupulous honesty which would seem to
have usually distinguished him from more daring and more famous
editors.

240 A Study of Shakespeare.

ceptible to any eye and painful to any ear not sealed up
by stepdame nature from all perception of pleasure or
of pain derivable from good verse or bad — the reckless
reiteration of the same rhyme with but one poor couplet
intervening — suggests rather the oversight of an unfledged
poet than the obtuseness of a full-grown poeticule or
poetaster.

But of how many among the servile or semi-servile
throng of imitators in every generation may not as much as
this be said by tolerant or kindly judges ! Among the herd
of such diminutives as swarm after the heel or fawn upon
the hand of Mr. Tennyson, more than one, more than two
or three, have come as close as his poor little viceregal
or vice-imperial parasite to the very touch and action of the
master's hand which feeds them unawares from his platter
as they fawn ; as close as this nameless and short-winded
satellite to the gesture and the stroke of Shakespeare's.
For this also must be noted ; that the resemblance here
is but of stray words, of single lines, of separable passages.
The whole tone of the text, the whole build of the play,
the whole scheme of the poem, is far enough from any
such resemblance. The structure, the composition, is
feeble, incongruous, inadequate, effete. Any student will
remark at a first glance what a short-breathed runner,
what a broken-winded athlete in the lists of tragic verse,
is the indiscoverable author of this play.

There is another point which the Neo-Shakespearean
synagogue will by no man be expected to appreciate ;
for to apprehend it requires some knowledge and some
understanding of the poetry of the Shakespearean age — so-

Appendix. 241

surely we now should call it, rather than Elizabethan or
Jacobean, for the sake of verbal convenience, if not for
the sake of literary decency ; and such knowledge or
understanding no sane man will expect to find in any
such quarter. Even in the broad coarse comedy of the
period we find here and there the same sweet and simple
echoes of the very cradle-song (so to call it) of our drama :
so like Shakespeare, they might say who knew nothing of
Shakespeare's fellows, that we cannot choose but recognise
his hand. Here as always first in the field — the genuine-
and golden harvest-field of Shakespearean criticism,
Charles Lamb has cited a passage from Green's Tu Quoque
— a comedy miserably misreprinted in Dodsley's Old
Plays — on which he observes that " this is so like Shake-
speare, that we seem to remember it," being as it is a
girl's gentle lamentation over the selfish, exacting, sus-
picious and trustless love of man, as contrasted with the
swift simple surrender of a woman's love at the first
heartfelt appeal to her pity — " we seem to remember it,"
says Lamb, as a speech of Desdemona uttered on a first
perception or suspicion of jealousy or alienation in
Othello. This lovely passage, if I dare say so in con-
travention to the authority of Lamb, is indeed as like
the manner of Shakespeare as it can be — to eyes
ignorant of what his fellows can do ; but it is not like
the manner of the Shakespeare who wrote Othello.
This, however, is beside the question. It is very like the
Shakespeare who wrote the Comedy of Errors — Lovers
Labour's Lost — Romeo and Juliet. It is so like that had
we fallen upon it in any of these plays it would long since

242 A Study of Shakespeare.

have been a household word in all men's mouths for
sweetness, truth, simplicity, perfect and instinctive
accuracy of touch. It is very much liker the first manner
of Shakespeare than any passage in King Edward III.
And no Sham Shakespearean critic that I know of has
yet assigned to the hapless object of his howling homage
the authorship of Greeris Tu Quoque,

Returning to our text, we find in the short speech of
the King with which the first act is wound up yet another
couplet which has the very ring in it of Shakespeare's
early notes — the catch at words rather than play on words
which his tripping tongue in youth could never resist :

Countess, albeit my business urgeth me,
It shall attend while I attend on thee.

And with this pretty little instance of courtly and courteous
euphuism we pass from the first to the second and most
important act in the play.

1 Any reader well versed in the text of Shakespeare,
and ill versed in the work of his early rivals and his later
pupils, might surely be forgiven if on a first reading of the
speech with which this act opens he should cry out with
Capell that here at least was the unformed hand of the
Master perceptible and verifiable indeed. The writer, he
might say, has the very glance of his eye, the very trick
of his gait, the very note of his accent But on getting a
little more knowledge, such a reader will find the use of it
in the perception to which he will have attained that in his
early plays, as in his two early poems, the style of Shake-
speare was not for the most part distinctively his own. It

Appendix. 243

was that of a crew, a knot of young writers, among whom
he found at once both leaders and followers to be guided
and to guide. A mere glance into the rich lyric literature
of the period will suffice to show the dullest eye and teach
the densest ear how nearly innumerable were the English-
men of Elizabeth's time who could sing in the courtly or
pastoral key of the season, each man of them a few notes
of his own, simple or fantastic, but all sweet, clear, genuine
of their kind : —

Fades non omnibus una,
Nee diversa tamen :

and yet so close is the generic likeness between flower
and flower of the same lyrical garden that the first half of
the quotation seems but half applicable here. In Bird's,
Morley's, Dowland's collections of music with the words
appended — in such jewelled volumes as England s Helicon
and Davisoris Poetical Rhapsody — their name is Legion,
their numbers are numberless. You cannot call them
imitators, this man of that, or all of any ; they were all
of one school, but it was a school without a master or
a head. And even so it was with the earliest sect or
gathering of dramatic writers in England. Marlowe
alone stood apart and above them all — the young Shake-
speare among the rest ; but among these we cannot count,
we cannot guess, how many were wellnigh as competent as
he to continue the fluent rhyme, to prolong the facile echo,
of Greene and Peele, their first and most famous leaders.
No more docile or capable pupil could have been
desired by any master in any art than the author of Davia
and Bethsabc has found in the writer of this second act .

244 A Study of Shakespeare.

He has indeed surpassed his model, if not in grace and
sweetness, yet in taste or tact of expression, in continuity
and equality of style. Vigour is not the principal note
of his manner, but compared with the soft effusive ebulli-
ence of his master's we may fairly call it vigorous and
condensed. But all this merit or demerit is matter of
mere language only . The poet — a very pretty poet in
his way, and doubtless capable of gracious work enough
in the idyllic or elegiac line of business — shows about as
much capacity to grasp and handle the fine intimacies of
character and the large issues of circumstance to any
tragic or dramatic purpose, as might be expected from an
idyllic or elegiac poet who should suddenly assume the
buskin of tragedy. Let us suppose that Moschus, for
example, on the strength of having written a sweeter elegy
than ever before was chanted over the untimely grave of
a friend and fellow-singer, had said within himself, " Go
to, I will be Sophocles " ; can we imagine that the tragic
result would have been other than tragical indeed for
the credit of his gentle name, and comical indeed for all
who might have envied the mild and modest excellence
which fashion or hypocrisy might for years have induced
them to besprinkle with the froth and slaver of theii
promiscuous and pointless adulation ?

As the play is not more generally known than it
deserves to be, — or perhaps we may say it is somewhat
less known, though its claim to general notice is faint
indeed compared with that of many a poem of its age
familar only to special students in our own — I will tran-
scribe a few passages to show how far the writer could

Appendix. 245

reach at his best ; leaving for others to indicate how far
short of that not inaccessible point he is too generally
content to fall and to remain.

The opening speech is spoken by one Lodowick, a
parasite of the King's ; who would appear, like Frangois
Villon under the roof of his Fat Madge, to have succeeded
in reconciling the professional duties — may I not say, the
generally discordant and discrepant offices ? — of a poet
and a pimp.

I might perceive his eye in her eye lost,

His ear to drink her sweet tongue's utterance ;

And changing passion, like inconstant clouds,

That, rackt upon the carriage of the winds,

Increase, and die, in his disturbed cheeks.

Lo, when she blushed, even then did he look pale ;

As if her cheeks by some enchanted power

Attracted had the cherry blood from his : *

Anon, with reverent fear when she grew pale,

His cheeks put on their scarlet ornaments ;

But no more like her oriental red

Than brick to coral, or live things to dead.8

Why did he then thus counterfeit her looks ?

If she did blush, 'twas tender modest shame,

Being in the sacred presence of a king ;

If he did blush, 'twas red immodest shame

1 The feeble archaic inversion in this line is one among many
small signs which all together suffice, if not to throw back the date
of this play to the years immediately preceding the advent of Mar-
lowe or the full influence of his genius and example, yet certainly to
mark it as an instance of survival from that period of incomposite
and inadequate workmanship in verse.

2 Or than this play to a genuine work of Shakespeare's. " Brick
to coral " — these three words describe exactly the difference in tone
and shade of literary colour.

246 A Study of Shakespeare.

To vail his eyes amiss, being a king ;
If she looked pale, 'twas silly woman's fear
To bear herself in presence of a king ;
If he looked pale, it was with guilty fear
To dote amiss, being a mighty king.

This is better than the insufferable style of Leering
which is in great part made up of such rhymeless couplets,
each tagged with an empty verbal antithesis ; but taken as
a sample of dramatic writing, it is but just better than what
is utterly intolerable. Dogberry has defined it exactly ;
it is most tolerable — and not to be endured.

The following speech of King Edward is in that better
style of which the author's two chief models were not at
their best incapable for awhile under the influence and
guidance (we may suppose) of their friend Marlowe.

She is grown more fairer far since I came hither ;

Her voice more silver every word than other,

Her wit more fluent. What a strange discourse

Unfolded she of David and his Scots !

Even thus, quoth she, he spake — and then spake broad,

With epithets and accents of the Scot ;

But somewhat better than the Scot could speak :

And thus, quoth she — and answered then herself;

For who could speak like ner ? but she herself

Breathes from the wall an angel's note from heaven

Of sweet defiance to her barbarous foes.

When she would talk of peace, methinks her tongue

Commanded war to prison ; l when of war,

1 Here for the first time we come upon a verse not unworthy of
Marlowe himself — a verse in spirit as in cadence recalling the deep
oceanic reverberations of his " mighty line," profound and just and
simple and single as a note of the music of the sea. But it would
be hard if a devout and studious disciple were never to catch one
passing tone of his master's habitual accent. — It may be worth

Appendix. 247

It wakened Csesar from his Roman grave
To hear war beautified by her discourse.
Wisdom is foolishness, but in her tongue ;
Beauty a slander, but in her fair face ;
There is no summer but in her cheerful looks,
Nor frosty winter but in her disdain.
I cannot blame the Scots that did besiege her,
For she is all the treasnre of our land ;
But call them cowards that they ran away,
Having so rich and fair a cause to stay.

But if for a moment we may fancy that here and there
we have caught such an echo of Marlowe as may have
fallen from the lips of Shakespeare in his salad days, in his
period of poetic pupilage, we have but a very little way to go
forward before we come upon indisputable proof that the
pupil was one of feebler hand and fainter voice than Shake-
speare. Let us take the passage on poetry, beginning —

Now, Lodowick, invocate 1 some golden Muse
To bring thee hither an enchanted pen ;

while to observe that we find here the same modulation of verse —
common enough since then, but new to the patient auditors of GOT-
toduc and Locrine — which we find in the finest passage of Marlowe's
imperfect play of Dido, completed by Nash after the young Master's
untimely death.

Why star'st thou in my face ? If thou wilt stay,
Leap in my arms : mine arms are open wide :
If not— turn from me, and I'll turn from thee ;
For though thou hast the power to say farewell,
I have not power to stay thee.

But we may look long in vain for the like of this passage, taken
from the crudest and feeblest work of Marlowe, in the wide and
wordy expanse of King Edward ///.

1 A pre- Shakespearean word of single occurrence in a single play
of Shakespeare's, and proper to the academic school of playwrights.

248 A Study of Shakespeare.

and so forth. No scholar in English poetry but will re-
cognise at once the flat and futile imitation of Marlowe ;
not of his great general style alone, but of one special
and transcendant passage which can never be too often
quoted.

If all the pens that ever pcets held
Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds, and muses on admired themes ;
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit ;
If these had made one poem's period,
And all combined in beauty's worthiness,
Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest. l

Infinite as is the distance between the long roll of
these mighty lines and the thin tinkle of their feeble imi-
tator's, yet we cannot choose but catch the ineffectual
note of a would-be echo in the speech of the King to his
parasite —

For so much moving hath a poet's pen, etc., etc.

It is really not worth while to transcribe the poor meagre
versicles at length : but a glance at the text will show
how much fitter was their author to continue the tradition
of Peele than to emulate the innovations of Marlowe.
In the speeches that follow there is much pretty verbiage
after the general manner of Elizabethan sonnetteers,

1 The First Part of Tambttrlame the Great, Act v. Sc. ii.

Appendix. 249

touched here and there with something of a higher tone ;
but the whole scene drags, flags, halts onwaid at such a
languid rate, that to pick out all the prettiest lines by
way of sample would give a favourable impression but
too likely to be reversed on further and fuller acquaint-
ance.

Forget not to set down, how passionate,
How heart-sick, and how full of languishment,

Her beauty makes me

Write on, while I peruse her in my thoughts.
Her voice to music, or the nightingale :
To music every summer-leaping swain
Compares his sunburnt lover when she speaks ;
And why should I speak of the nightingale?
The nightingale sings of adulterate wrong ;
And that, compared, is too satirical :
For sin, though sin, would not be so esteemed ;
But rather virtue sin, sin virtue deemed.
Her hair, far softer than the silkworm's twist,
Like as a flattering glass, doth make more fair
The yellow amber : — Like a flattering glass
Comes in too soon ; for, writing of her eyes,
I'll say that like a glass they catch the sun,
And thence the hot reflection doth rebound
Against my breast, and burns the heart within.
Ah, what a world of descant makes my soul
Upon this voluntary ground of love !

" Pretty enough, very pretty ! but " exactly as like and as
near the style of Shakespeare's early plays as is the style
of Constable's sonnets to that of Shakespeare's. Unless
we are to assign to the Master every unaccredited song,
sonnet, elegy, tragedy, comedy, and farce of his period,
which bears the same marks of the same date — a date,
like our own, of too prolific and imitative production —

250 A Study of Shakespeare.

as we find inscribed on the greater part of his own early
work ; unless we are to carry even as far as this the
audacity and arrogance of our sciolism, we must some-
where make a halt — and it must be on the near side of
such an attribution as that of King Edward III. to the
hand of Shakespeare.

With the disappearance of the poetic pimp and the
entrance of the unsuspecting Countess, the style rises yet
again — and really, this time, much to the author's credit
It would need a very fine touch from a very powerful
hand to improve on the delicacy and dexterity of the
prelude or overture to the King's avowal of adulterous
love. But when all is said, though very delicate and
very dexterous, it is not forcible work : I do not mean by
forcible the same as violent, spasmodic, emphatic beyond
the modesty of nature ; a poet is of course only to be
commended, and that heartily, for keeping within this
bound ; but he is not to be commended for coming short
of it. This whole scene is full of mild and temperate
beauty, of fanciful yet earnest simplicity ; but the note of
it, the expression, the dominant key of the style, is less
appropriate to the utterance of a deep and deadly passion
than — at the utmost — of what modern tongues might
call a strong and rather dangerous flirtation. Passion,
so to speak, is quite out of this writer's call ; the depths
and heights of manly as of womanly emotion are alike
beyond his reach.

Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,
He turns to favour and to prettiness.

" To favour and to prettiness"; the definition of his

Appendix. 251

utmost merit and demerit, his final achievement and
shortcoming, is here complete and exact. Witness the
sweet quiet example of idyllic work which I extract from
a scene beginning in the regular amcebsean style of ancient
pastoral

Edward. Thou hear'st me say that I do dote on thee.

Countess. If on my beauty, take it if thou canst ;
Though little, I do prize it ten times less :
If on my virtue, take it if thou canst ;
For virtue's store by giving doth augment :
Be it on what it will that I can give
And thou canst take away, inherit it.

Edward. It is thy beauty that I would enjoy.

Countess. O, were it painted, I would wipe it oft.
And dispossess myself to give it thee :
But, sovereign, it is soldered to my life ;
Take one and both ; for like an humble shadow
It haunts the sunshine of my summer's life.

Edward. But thou mayst lend it me to sport withal.

Countess. As easy may my intellectual soul
Be lent away, and yet my body live,
As lend my body, palace to my soul,
Av/ay from her, and yet retain my soul.
My body is her bower, her court, her abbey,
And she an angel, pure, divine, unspotted ;
If I should lend her house, my lord, to thee,
I kill my poor soul, and my poor soul me.

Once more, this last couplet is very much in the style
of Shakespeare's sonnets ; nor is it wholly unlike even
the dramatic style of Shakespeare in his youth — and
some dozen other poets or poeticules of the time.
But throughout this part of the play the recurrence of
a faint and intermittent resemblance to Shakespeare is

252 A Study of Shakespeare.

more frequently noticeable than elsewhere. l A student
of imperfect memory but not of defective intuition might
pardonably assign such couplets, on hearing them cited,
to the master-hand itself; but such a student would be
likelier to refer them to the sonnetteer than to the
dramatist. And a casual likeness to the style of Shake-
speare's sonnets is not exactly sufficient evidence to
warrant such an otherwise unwarrantable addition or
appendage to the list of Shakespeare's plays.

A little further on we come upon the first and last
passage which does actually recall by its wording a famous
instance of the full and ripened style of Shakespeare.

He that doth clip or counterfeit your stamp

Shall die, my lord : and will your sacred self

Commit high treason 'gainst the King of heaven,

To stamp his image in forbidden metal,

Forgetting your allegiance and your oath ?

In violating marriage' sacred law

You break a greater honour than yourself ;

To be a king is of a younger house

Than to be married : your progenitor,

Sole reigning Adam on the universe,

By God was honoured for a married man,

But not by him anointed for a king.

Every possible reader, I suppose, will at once bethink
himself of the famous passage in Measure for Measurt
which here may seem to be faintly prefigured :

It were as good
To pardon him that hath from nature stolen

1 It may be worth a remark that the word power is constantly
u,sed as a dissyllable j another note of archaic debility or insufficiency
in metre.

Appendix. 253

A man already made, as to remit

Their saucy sweetness, that do coin heaven's image

In stamps that are forbid :

and the very difference of style is not wider than the gulf
which gapes between the first style of Shakespeare and
the last. But men of Shakespeare's stamp, I venture to
think, do not thus repeat themselves. The echo of the
passage in A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, describing
the girlish friendship of Hermia and Helena, which we
find in the first act of The Two Noble Kinsmen, describing
the like girlish friendship of Emilia and Flavina, is an
echo of another sort. Both, I need hardly say, are un-
questionably Shakespeare's; but the fashion in which
the matured poet retouches and completes the sketch
of his earlier years — composes an oil painting, as it were,
from the hints and suggestions of a water-colour sketch
long since designed and long since half forgotten— is
essentially different from the mere verbal and literal trick
of repetition which sciolists might think to detect in the
present instance. Again we must needs fall back on the
inevitable and indefinable test of style ; a test which could
be of no avail if we were foolish enough to appeal to
scholiasts and their attendant dunces, but which should
be of some avail if we appeal to experts and their atten-
tive scholars ; and by this test we can but remark that
neither the passage in A Midsummer Nighfs Dream
nor the corresponsive passage in The Two Noble Kinsmen
could have been written by any hand known to us but
Shakespeare's ; whereas the passage in King Edward II L
might as certainly have been written by any one out of a

254 A Study of Shakespeare.

dozen poets then living as the answering passage in
Measure for Measure could assuredly have been written
by Shakespeare alone.

As on a first reading of the Hippolyttis of Euripides
?ve feel that, for all the grace and freshness and lyric
charm of its opening scenes, the claim of the poem to
our ultimate approval or disapproval must needs depend
on the success or failure of the first interview between
Theseus and his calumniated son ; and as on finding
that scene to be feeble and futile and prosaic and verbose
we feel that the poet who had a woman's spite against
women has here effectually and finally shown himself
powerless to handle the simplest elements of masculine
passion, of manly character and instinct ; so in this less*
important case we feel that the writer, having ventured
on such a subject as the compulsory temptation of a
daughter by a father, who has been entrapped into so
shameful an undertaking through the treacherous exaction
of an equivocal promise unwarily confirmed by an incon-
siderate oath, must be judged by the result of his own
enterprise ; must fall or stand as a poet by its failure or
success. And his failure is only not complete ; he is but
just redeemed from utter discomfiture by the fluency and
simplicity of his equable but inadequate style. Here as
before we find plentiful examples of the gracefully conven-
tional tone current among the lesser writers of the hour.

Warwick. How shall I enter on this graceless errand?
I must not call her child ; for where's the father
That will in such a suit seduce his child ?
Then, Wife of Salisbury /—shall I so begin?

Appendix. 255

No, he's my friend ; and where is found the friend
That will do friendship such endamagement ? * —
Neither my daughter, nor my dear friend's wife,
I am not Warwick, as thou think 'st I am,
But an attorney from the court of hell ;
That thus have housed my spirit in his form
To do a message to thee from the king.

This beginning is fair enough, if not specially fruitful
in promise ; but the verses following are of the flattest
order of commonplace. Hay and grass and the spear of
Achilles — of which tradition

the moral is,
What mighty men misdo, they can amend —

these are the fresh and original types on which our little
poet is compelled to fall back for support and illustration
to a scene so full cf terrible suggestion and pathetic pos-
sibility.

The king will in his glory hide thy shame ;
And those that gaze on him to find out thee
Will lose their eyesight, looking on the sun.
What can one drop of poison harm the sea,
Whose hugy vastures can digest the ill
And make it lose its operation ?

And so forth, and so forth ; ad libitum if not ad nau-
seam. Let us take but one or two more instances of the
better sort

Countess. Unnatural besiege ! Woe me unhappy,
To have escaped the danger of my foes,
And to be ten times worse invir'd by friends !

1 Yet another essentially non- Shakespearean word, though
doubtless once used by Shakespeare ; this time a most ungraceful
Gallicism.

i 2

256 A Study of Shakespeare.

(Here we come upon two more words unknown to Shake-
speare ; l besiege^ as a noun substantive, and invired for
environed. )

Hath he no means to stain my honest blood

But to corrupt the author of my blood

To be his scandalous and vile soliciter ?

No marvel though the branches be infected,

When poison hath encompassed the roots ;

No marvel though the leprous infant die,

When the stern dam envenometh the dug.

Why then, give sin a passport to offend,

And youth the dangerous rein of liberty ;

Blot out the strict forbidding of the law ;

And cancel every canon that prescribes

A shame for shame or penance for offence.

No, let me die, if his too boisterous will

Will have it so, before I will consent

To be an actor in his graceless lust.

Warwick. Why, now thou speak'st as I would
have thee speak ;

And mark how I unsay my words again.

An honourable grave is more esteemed

Than the polluted closet of a king ;

The greater man, the greater is the thing,

Be it good or bad, that he shall undertake ;

An unreputed mote, flying in the sun,

Presents a greater substance than it is ;

The freshest summer's day doth soonest taint

1 It may obviate any chance of mistake if I observe that here as
elsewhere, when I mention the name that is above every name in
English literature, I refer to the old Shakespeare, and not to " the
new Shakspere " ; a novus homo with whom I have no acquaintance,
and with whom (if we may judge of a great — or a little — unknown
after the appearance and the bearing of those who select him as a
social sponsor for themselves and their literary catechumens) I can
most sincerely assert that I desire to have none.

Appendix. 257

The loathed carrion that it seems to kiss ;
Deep are the blows made with a mighty axe j
That sin doth ten times aggravate itself
That is committed in a holy place ;
An evil deed, done by authority,
Is sin, and subornation : Deck an ape
In tissue, and the beauty of the robe
Adds but the greater scorn unto the beast.

(Here are four passably good lines, which vaguely re-
mind the reader of something better read elsewhere ; a
common case enough with the more tolerable work of
small imitative poets.)

A spacious field of reasons could I urge
Between his glory, daughter, and thy shame :
That poison shows worst in a golden cup ;
Dark night seems darker by the lightning flash ;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds ;
And every glory that inclines to sin,
The shame is treble by the opposite.
So leave I, with my blessing in thy bosom;
Which then convert to a most heavy curse,
When thou convert'st from honour's golden name
To the black faction of bed-blotting shame ! [Exit.

Countess. I'll follow thee : — And when my mind turns so,
My body sink my soul in endless woe ! [Exit.

So much for the central and crowning scene, the test,
the climax, the hinge on which the first part of this play
turns ; and seems to me, in turning, to emit but a feeble
and rusty squeak. No probable reader will need to be
reminded that the line which I have perhaps unnecessarily
italicised appears also as the last verse in the ninety-fourth
of those " sugared sonnets" which we know were in circu-
lation about the time of this play's first appearance among
Shakespeare's " private friends " ; in other words, which

258 A Study of Shakespeare.

enjoyed such a kind of public privacy or private pub-
licity as one or two among the most eminent English
poets of our own day have occasionally chosen for some
part of their work, to screen it for awhile as under the
shelter and the shade of crepuscular laurels, till ripe for
the sunshine or the storm of public judgment. In the
present case, this debatable verse looks to me more like
a loan or maybe a theft from Shakespeare's private store
of undramatic poetry than a misapplication by its own
author to dramatic purposes of a line too apt and exquisite
to endure without injury the transference from its original
setting.

The scene ensuing winds up the first part of this com-
posite (or rather, in one sense of the word, incomposite)
poem. It may, on the whole, be classed as something
more than passably good : it is elegant, lively, even
spirited in style ; showing at all events a marked advance
upon the scene which I have already stigmatised as a
failure — that which attempts to render the interview be-
tween Warwick and the King. It is hardly, however, I
should say, above the highest reach of Greene or Peele
at the smoothest and straightest of his flight. At its
opening, indeed, we come upon a line which inevitably
recalls one of the finest touches in a much later and
deservedly more popular historical drama. On being
informed by Derby that

The king is in his closet, malcontent,
For what I know not, but he gave in charge,
Till after dinner, none should interrupt him ;
The Countess Salisbury, and her father Warwick,
Artois, and all, look underneath the brows ;

Appendix. 259

on receiving, I say, this ominous intimation, the prompt
and statesmanlike sagacity of Audley leads him at once
as by intuition to the inference thus eloquently expressed
in a strain of thrilling and exalted poetry ;

Undoubtedly, then something is amiss.

Who can read this without a reminiscence of Sir
Christopher Hatton's characteristically cautious conclu-
sion at sight of the military preparations arrayed against
the immediate advent of the Armada ?

I cannot but surmise — forgive, my friend,
If the conjecture's rash — I cannot but
Surmise the state some danger apprehends !

With the entrance of the King the tone of this scene
naturally rises — "in good time," as most readers will say.
His brief interview with the two nobles has at least the
merit of ease and animation.

Derby. Befall my sovereign all my sovereign's wish !

Edward. Ah, that thou wert a witch, to make it so 1

Derby. The emperor greeteth you.

Edward. Would it were the countess !

Derby. And hath accorded to your highness' suit.

Edward. Thou liest, she hath not : But I would she had !

Audley. All love and duty to my lord the king !

Edward. Well> all but one is none : — What news with you ?

Audley. I have, my liege, levied those horse and foot,
According to >our charge, and brought them hither.

Edward. Then let those foot trudge hence upon those horse
According to their discharge, and begone. —
Derby, I'll look upon the countess' mind
Anon.

Derby. The countess' mind, my liege ?

Edward. I mean, the emperor : — Leave me alone.

Audley. What's in his mind ?

260 A Study of Shakespeare.

Derby » Let's leave him to his humour.

[Exeunt DERBY and AUDLEY.

Edward. Thus from the heart's abundance speaks the tongue
Countess for emperor : And indeed, why not ?
She is as imperator over me ;
And I to her

Am as a kneeling vassal, that observes
The pleasure or displeasure of her eye.

In this little scene there is perhaps on the whole more
general likeness to Shakespeare's earliest manner than we
can trace in any other passage of the play. But how much
of Shakespeare's earliest manner may be accounted the
special and exclusive property of Shakespeare ?

After this dismissal of the two nobles, the pimping
poeticule, Villon manque or (whom shall we call him ?)
rdussi, reappears with a message to Caesar (as the King is
pleased to style himself) from " the more than Cleopatra's
match " (as he designates the Countess), to intimate that
ere night she will resolve his majesty." Hereupon an
unseasonable "drum within" provokes Edward to the
following remonstrance :

What drum is this, that thunders forth this march,
To start the tender Cupid in my bosom ?
Poor sheepskin, how it brawls with him that beateth it 1
Go, break the thundering parchment bottom out,
And I will teach it to conduct sweet lines

(" That's bad ; conduct sweet lines is bad.")

Unto the bosom of a heavenly nymph :
For I will use it as my writing paper ;
And so reduce him, from a scolding drum,
To be the herald, and dear counsel-bearer,

Appendix. 261

Betwixt a goddess and a mighty king.

Go, bid the drummer learn to touch the lute,

Or hang him in the braces of his drum ;

For now we think it an uncivil thing

To trouble heaven with such harsh resounds.

Away ! [Exit LoDOWlCK.

The quarrel that I have requires no arms

But these of mine ; and these shall meet my foe

In a deep march of penetrable groans ;

My eyes shall be my arrows ; and my sighs

Shall serve me as the vantage of the wind

To whirl away my sweet 'st 1 artillery :

Ah, but, alas, she wins the sun of me,

For that is she herself ; and thence it comes

That poets term the wanton warrior blind ;

But love hath eyes as judgment to his steps,

Till too much loved glory dazzles them.

Hereupon Lodowick introduces the Black Prince (that is
to be), and " retires to the door." The following scene
opens well, with a tone of frank and direct simplicity.

Edward. I see the boy. O, how his mother's face,
Moulded in his, corrects my strayed 'desire,
And rates my heart, and chides my thievish eye ;
Who, being rich enough in seeing her,
Yet seeks elsewhere : and basest theft is that
Which cannot check itself on poverty. —
Now, boy, what news ?

Prince. I have assembled, my dear lord and father,
The choicest buds of all our English blood,
For our affairs in France ; and here we come
To take direction from your majesty.

Edward. Still do I see in him delineate
His mother's visage ; those his eyes are hers,

1 Surely, for sweefst we should read swiff st.

262 A Study of Shakespeare.

Who, looking wistly l on me, made me blush ;

For faults against themselves give evidence :

Lust is a fire ; and men, like lanterns, show

Light lust within themselves even through themselves.

Away, loose silks of wavering vanity !

Shall the large limit of fair Brittany2

By me be overthrown ? and shall I not

Master this little mansion of myself?

Give me an armour of eternal steel ;

I go to conquer kings. And shall I then

Subdue myself, and be my enemy's friend ?

It must not be. — Come, boy, forward, advance!

I^et's with our colours sweep the air of France.

Here Lodowick announces the approach of the Countess
" with a smiling cheer."

Edward. Why, there it goes ! that very smile of hers
Hath ransomed captive France ; and set the king,
The dauphin, and the peers, at liberty. —

Go, leave me, Ned, and revel with thy friends. [Exit PRINCE.
Thy mother is but black ; and thou, like her,
Dost put into my mind how foul she is.
Go, fetch the countess hither in thy hand,
And let her chase away these winter clouds ;
For she gives beauty both to heaven and earth.

[Exit LODOWICK.

The sin is more, to hack and hew poor men,
Than to embrace in an unlawful bed

1 This word occurs but once in Shakespeare's plays —

And speaking it, he wistly looked on me ;

(King Richard II. Act v. Sc. 4.)

and in such a case, as in the previous instances of the words invocate
and endamagement, a mere OTTO| \sy6nevov can carry no weight of
evidence with it worth any student's consideration.

2 This form is used four times by Shakespeare as the equivalent
of Bretagne ; once only, in one of his latest plays, as a synonym for
Britain.

Appendix. 263

The register of all rarieties l

Since leathern Adam till this youngest hour.

Re-enter LODOWICK with the COUNTESS.
Go, Lodowick, put thy hand into my purse,
Play, spend, give, riot, waste ; do what thou wilt,
So thou wilt hence awhile, and leave me here. [Exit LODOWICK.

Having already, out of a desire and determination to do
no possible injustice to the actual merits of this play in
the eyes of any reader who might never have gone ovei
the text on which I had to comment, exceeded in n<r
small degree the limits I had intended to impose upon
my task in the way of citation, I shall not give so full a
transcript from the next and last scene between the
Countess and the King.

Edward. Now, my soul's playfellow ! art thou come
To speak the more than heavenly word of yea
To my objection in thy beauteous love?

(Again, this singular use of the word objection in the sense
of offer or proposal has no parallel in the plays of Shake-
speare.)

Countess. My father on his blessing hath commanded —

Edward. That thou shalt yield to me.

Countess. Ay, dear my liege, your due.

Edward. And that, my dearest love, can be no less
Than right for right, and Bender " love for love.

Countess. Than wrong for wrong, and endless hate for hate.
But, sith I see your majesty so bent,

1 Another word indiscoverable in any genuine verse of Shake-
speare's, though not (I believe) unused on occasion by some among
the poets contemporary with his earlier years.

2 This word was perhaps unnecessarily altered by our good
Capell to " tender."

264 A Study of Shakespeare.

That my unwillingness, my husband's love,
Your high estate, nor no respect respected,
Can be my help, but that your mightiness
Will overbear and awe these dear regards,
I bind my discontent to my content,
And what I would not I'll compel I will ;
Provided that yourself remove those lets
That stand between your highness' love and mine.

Edward. Name them, fair countess, and by heaven I will.

Countess. It is their lives that stand between our love
That I would have choked up, my sovereign.

Edward. Whose lives, my lady ?

Countess. My thrice loving liege,

Your queen, and Salisbury my wedded husband ;
Who living have that title in our love
That we can not bestow but by their death.

Edward. Thy opposition l is beyond our law.

Countess. So is your desire : If the law 2
Can hinder you to execute the one,
Let it forbid you to attempt the other :
I cannot think you love me as you say
Unless you do make good what you have sworn.

Edward. No more : thy husband and the queen shall die.
Fairer thou art by far than Hero was ;
Beardless Leander not so strong as I :
He sworn an easy current for his love ;
But I will, through a helly spout of blood,8
Arrive that Sestos where my Hero lies.

1 Yet another and a singular misuse of a word never so used or
misused by Shakespeare.

2 Qu. Why, so is your desire : If that the law, etc. ?

8 Sic. I should once have thought it impossible that any mortal
ear could endure the shock of this unspeakable and incomparable
verse, and find in the passage which contains it an echo or a trace
of the "music, wit, and oracle" of Shakespeare. But in those
days I had yet to learn what manner of ears are pricked up to listen
" when rank Thersites opes his mastiff jaws" in criticism of Homer

Appendix. 265

Countess. Nay, you'll do more ; youll make the river too
With their heartbloods that keep our love asunder ;
Of which my husband and your wife are twain.

Edward. Thy beauty makes them guilty of their death
And gives in evidence that they shall die ;
Upon which verdict I their judge condemn them.

Countess. O perjured beauty ! more corrupted judge !
When, to the great star-chamber o'er our heads,

or of Shakespeare. In a corner of the preface to an edition of
"Shakspere " which bears on its title-page the name (correctly
spelt) of Queen Victoria's youngest son prefixed to the name I have
just transcribed, a small pellet of dry dirt was flung upwards at me
from behind by the " able editor " thus irritably impatient to figure
in public as the volunteer valet or literary lackey of Prince Leopold.
Hence I gathered the edifying assurance that this aspirant to tha
honours of literature in livery had been reminded oi my humbler
attempts in literature without a livery by the congenial music of
certain four-footed fellow-critics and fellow-lodgers of his own in
the neighbourhood of Hampstead Heath. Especially and most na-
turally had their native woodnotes wild recalled to the listening
biped (whom partial nature had so far distinguished from the herd)
the deep astonishment and the due disgust with which he had disco-
vered the unintelligible fact that to men so ignorant of music or the
laws of music in verse as my presumptuous and pitiable self the test
of metrical harmony lay not in an appeal to the fingers but only in
an appeal to the ear — "the ear which he" (that is, which the
present writer) "makes so much of— AND WHICH SHOULD BE LONG
TO MEASURE SHAKSPERE. " Here then the great Sham Shake-
spearean secret is out at last. Had I but known in time my
lifelong error in thinking that a capacity to estimate the refinements
of word-music was not to be gauged by length of ear, by
hairiness of ear, or by thickness of ear, but by delicacy of ear alone,
I should as soon have thought of measuring my own poor human
organs against those of the patriarch or leader of the herd as of
questioning his indisputable right to lay down the law to all who
agree with his great fundamental theorem — that the longest ear is the
most competent to judge of metre. Habemus confitentem asinum.

266 A Sttidy of Shakespeare.

The universal sessions calls to count

This packing evil, we both shall tremble for it.

Edward. What says my fair love ? is she resolute ?

Countess. Resolute to be dissolved : ' and, therefore, this -
Keep but thy word, great king, and I am thine.
Stand where thou dost ; I'll part a little from thee ;
And see how I will yield me to thy hands.
Here by my side do hang my wedding knives ;
Take thou the one, and with it kill thy queen,
And learn by me to find her where she lies ;
And with the other I'll despatch my love,
Which now lies fast asleep within my heart :
When they are gone, then I'll consent to love.

Such genuinely good wine as this needs no bush.
But from this point onwards I can find nothing especially
commendable in the remainder of the scene except its
brevity. The King of course abjures his purpose, and
of course compares the Countess with Lucretia to the
disadvantage of the Roman matron • summons his son,
Warwick, and the attendant lords ; appoints each man
his post by sea or land ; and starts for Flanders in a duly
moral and military state of mind.

Here ends the first part of the play ; and with it all
possible indication, though never so shadowy, of the pos-
sible shadowy presence of Shakespeare. At the opening
of the third act we are thrown among a wholly new set of
characters and events, all utterly out of all harmony and
keeping with all that has gone before. Edward alone
survives as nominal protagonist ; but this survival — as-

1 A Latin pun, or rather a punning Latinism, not altogether
out of Shakespeare's earliest line. But see the note preceding this
one.

Appendix. 267

suredly not of the fittest — is merely the survival of the
shadow of a name. Anything more pitifully crude and
feeble, more helplessly inartistic and incomposite, than
this process or pretence of juncture where there is no
juncture, this infantine shifting and shuffling of the scenes
and figures, it is impossible to find among the rudest and
weakest attempts of the dawning or declining drama in
its first or second childhood.

It is the less necessary to analyse at any length the
three remaining acts of this play, that the work has already
been done to my hand, and well done, by Charles Knight ;
who, though no professed critic or esoteric expert in
Shakespearean letters, approved himself by dint of sheer
honesty and conscience not unworthy of a considerate
hearing. To his edition of Shakespeare I therefore refer
all readers desirous of further excerpts than I care to
give.

The first scene of the third act is a storehouse of con-
temporary commonplace. Nothing fresher than such
stale pot-pourri as the following is to be gathered up in
thin sprinklings from off the dry flat soil. A messenger
informs the French king that he has descried off shore

The proud armado (sic) of King Edward's ships ;
Which at the first, far off when I did ken,
Seemed as it were a grove of withered pines ;
But, drawing on, their glorious bright aspect,
Their streaming ensigns wrought of coloured silk,
Like to a meadow full of sundry flowers,
Adorns the naked bosom of the earth ;

and so on after the exactest and therefore feeblest fashion
of the Pre-Marlowites ; with equal regard, as may be

268 A Study of Shakespeare.

seen, for grammar and for sense in the construction of his
periods. The narrative of a sea-fight ensuing on this is
pitiable beyond pity and contemptibly beneath contempt
In the next scene we have a flying view of peasants
in flight, with a description of five cities on fire not un-
deserving of its place in the play, immediately after the
preceding sea-piece : but relieved by such wealth of
pleasantry as marks the following jest, in which the most
purblind eye will be the quickest to discover a touch of
the genuine Shakespearean humour.

1st frenchman. What, is it quarter-day, that you remove,
And carry bag and baggage too ?

2nd Frenchman. Quarter-day ? ay, and quartering-day, I fear.

Euge /

The scene of debate before Cressy is equally flat and
futile, vulgar and verbose ; yet in this Sham Shakespearean
scene of our present poeticule's I have noted one genuine
Shakespearean word, " solely singular for its singleness."

So may thy temples with Bellona's hand
Be still adorned with laurel victory 1

In this notably inelegant expression of goodwill we
find the same use of the word " laurel " as an adjective
and epithet of victory which thus confronts us in the
penultimate speech of the third scene in the first act oi
Antony and Cleopatra.

Upon your sword

Sit laurel victory, and smooth success
Be strewed before your feet !

There is something more (as less there could not be)
of spirit and movement in the battle -scene where Edward

Appendix. 269

refuses to send relief to his son, wishing the prince to win
his spurs unaided, and earn the firstfruits of his fame
single-handed against the heaviest odds \ but the forcible
feebleness of a minor poet's fancy shows itself amusingly
in the mock stoicism and braggart philosophy of the
King's reassuring reflection, " We have more sons than
one."

In the first and third scenes of the fourth act we may
concede some slight merit to the picture of a chivalrous
emulation in magnanimity between the Duke of Burgundy
and his former fellow-student, whose refusal to break his
parole as a prisoner extorts from his friend the concession
refused to his importunity as an envoy : but the execution
is by no means worthy of the subject.

The limp loquacity of long-winded rhetoric, so natural
to men and soldiers in an hour of emergency, which
distinguishes the dialogue between the Black Prince and
Audley on the verge of battle, is relieved by this one last
touch of quasi-Shakespearean thought or style discover-
able in the play of which I must presently take a short —
and a long — farewell.

Death's name is much more mighty than his deeds :
Thy parcelling this power hath made it more.
As many sands as these my hands can hold
Are but my handful of so many sands ;
Then all the world — and call it but a power —
Easily ta'en up, and J quickly thrown away ;
But if I stand to count them sand by sand

1 The simple substitution of the word "is" for the word "and"
would rectify the grammar here — were that worth while.

270 A Study of Shakespeare.

The number would confound my memory

And make a thousand millions of a task

Which briefly is no more indeed than one.

These quartered squadrons and these regiments

Before, behind us, and on either hand,

Are but a power : When we name a man,

His hand, his foot, his head, have several strengths ;

And being all but one self instant strength,

Why, all this many, Audley, is but one,

And we can call it all but one man's strength.

He that hath far to go tells it by miles ;

If he should tell the steps, it kills his heart :

The drops are infinite that make a flood,

And yet, thou know'st, we call it but a rain.

There is but one France, one king of France,1

That France hath no more kings ; and that same king

Hath but the puissant legion of one king ;

And we have one : Then apprehend no odds ;

For one to one is fair equality.

Bien coupe, mal cousu ; such is the most favourable
verdict I can pass on this voluminous effusion of a spirit
smacking rather of the schools than of the field. The
first six lines or so might pass muster as the early handi-
work of Shakespeare ; the rest has as little of his manner
as his matter, his metre as his style.

The poet can hardly be said to rise again after this
calamitous collapse. We find in the rest of this scene
nothing better worth remark than such poor catches at a
word as this ;

And let those milkwhite messengers of time
Show thy time's learning in this dangerous time ;

1 Qu. So there is but one France, etc. ?

Appendix. 271

a villainous trick of verbiage which went nigh now and
then to affect the adolescent style of Shakespeare, and
which happens to find itself as admirably as unconsciously
burlesqued in two lines of this very scene :

I will not give a penny for a life,

Nor half a halfpenny to shun grim death.

The verses intervening are smooth, simple, and
passably well worded ; indeed the force of elegant com-
monplace cannot well go further than in such lines as
these.

Thyself art bruised and bent with many broils,
And stratagems forepast with iron pens
Are texed * in thine honourable face ;
Thou art a married man in this distress,
But danger woos me as a blushing maid ;
Teach me an answer to this perilous time.

Audley. To die is all as common as to live ;
The one in choice, the other holds in chase ;
For from the instant we begin to live
We do pursue and hunt the time to die :
First bud we, then we blow, and after seed ;
Then presently we fall ; and as a shade
Follows the body, so we follow death.
If then we hunt for death, why do we fear it ?
If we fear it, why do we follow it ?

(Let me intimate a doubt in passing, whether Shakespeare
would ever have put by the mouth of any but a farcical
mask a query so provocative of response from an Irish
echo — " Because we can't help.")

1 Non- Shakespearean.

272 A Study of Shakespeare.

If we do fear, with fear we do but aid
The thing we fear to seize on us the sooner j
If we fear not, then no resolved proffer
Can overthrow the limit of our fate :

and so forth. Again the hastiest reader will have been
reminded of a passage in the transcendant central scenes
of Measure for Measure :

Merely, thou art death's fool ;
For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun,
And yet runn'st toward him still ;

and hence also some may infer that this pitiful penny-
whistle was blown by the same breath which in time
gained power to fill that archangelic trumpet. Credat
Zoilus Shakespearomastix, non ego.

The next scene is something better than passable,
but demands no special analysis and affords no necessary
extract. We may just observe as examples of style the
play on words between the flight of hovering ravens and
the flight ot routed soldiers, and the description of the
sudden fog

Which now hath hid the airy floor of heavea,
And made at noon a night unnatural
Upon the quaking and dismayed world.

The interest rises again with the reappearance and
release of Salisbury, and lifts the style for a moment to
its own level. A tout seigneur tout honneur ; the author
deserves some dole of moderate approbation for his
tribute to the national chivalry of a Frenchman as here
exemplified in the person of Prince Charles.

Appendix. 273

Of the two next scenes, in which the battle of Poitiers
is so inadequately " staged to the show," I can only say
that if any reader believes them to be the possible work
of the same hand which set before all men's eyes for all
time the field of Agincourt, he will doubtless die in that
belief, and go to his own place in the limbo of commen-
tators.

But a yet more flagrant effect of contrast is thrust
upon our notice at the opening of the fifth act. If in all
the historical groundwork of this play there is one point
of attraction which we might have thought certain to
stimulate the utmost enterprise and evoke the utmost
capacities of an aspiring dramatist, it must surely be
sought in the crowning scene of the story ; in the scene
of Queen Philippa's intercession for the burgesses of
Calais. We know how Shakespeare on the like occasion
was wont to transmute into golden verse the silver speech
supplied to him by North's version of Amyot's Plutarch.1
With the text of Lord Berners before him, the author of
King Edward III. has given us for the gold of Froissart
not even adulterated copper, but unadulterated lead.
Incredible as it may seem to readers of the historian, the
poeticule has actually contrived so far to transfigure by
dint of disfiguring him that this most noble and pathetic
scene in all the annals of chivalry, when passed through
the alembic of his incompetence, appears in a garb of

1 I choose for a parallel Shakespeare's use of Plutarch in the
composition of his Roman plays rather than his use of Hall and
Holinshed in the composition of his English histories, because
Froissart is a model more properly to be set against Plutarch than
against Holinshed or Hall.

274 A Study of Shakespeare.

transforming verse under a guise at once weak and wordy,
coarse and unchivalrous. The whole scene is at all
points alike in its unlikeness to the workmanship of
Shakespeare.

Here then I think we may finally draw bridle : for
the rest of the course is not worth running ; there is
nothing in the residue of this last act which deserves
analysis or calls for commentary. We have now examined
the whole main body of the work with somewhat more
than necessary care ; and our conclusion is simply this :
that if any man of common reading, common modesty,
common judgment, and common sense, can be found to
maintain the theory of Shakespeare's possible partnership
in the composition of this play, such a man will assuredly
admit that the only discernible or imaginable touches of
his hand are very slight, very few, and very early. For
myself, I am and have always been perfectly satisfied
with one single and simple piece of evidence that Shake-
speare had not a finger in the concoction of King Edward
III. He was the author of King Henry V.

Appendix. 275

NO TJS.

I WAS not surprised to hear that my essay on the historical
play of King Edward III. had on its first appearance met
in various quarters with assailants of various kinds. There
are some forms of attack to which no answer is possible for
a man of any human self-respect but the lifelong silence of
contemptuous disgust. To such as these I will never con-
descend to advert or to allude further than by the remark
now as it were forced from me, that never once in my
life have I had or will I have recourse in self-defence
either to the blackguard's loaded bludgeon of personal-
ities or to the dastard's sheathed dagger of disguise. I
have reviled no man's person : I have outraged no man's
privacy. When I have found myself misled either by im-
perfection of knowledge or of memory, or by too much
confidence in a generally trustworthy guide, I have silently
corrected the misquotation or readily repaired the
error. To the successive and representative heroes of
the undying Dunciad I have left and will always leave the
foul use of their own foul weapons. I have spoken freely
and fearlessly, and so shall on all occasions continue to
speak, of what I find to be worthy of praise or dispraise,
contempt or honour, in the public works and actions of
men. Here ends and here has always ended in literary
matters the proper province of a gentleman ; beyond it,
though sometimes intruded on in time past by trespassers
of a nobler race,begins the proper province of a blackguard

276 A Study of Shakespeare.

REPORT OF THE PROCEEDINGS ON THE
FIRST ANNIVERSARY SESSION OF THE
NEWEST SHAKESPEARE SOCIETY.

A PAPER was read by Mr. A. on the disputed authorship
of A Midsummer Night's Dream. He was decidedly of
opinion that this play was to be ascribed to George Chap-
man. He based this opinion principally on the ground
of style. From its similarity of subject he had at first
been disposed to assign it to Cyril Tourneur, author of
The Revenger's Tragedy; and he had drawn up in support
of this theory a series of parallel passages extracted from
the speeches of Vindice in that drama and of Oberon in the
present play. He pointed out however that the character
of Puck could hardly have been the work of any English
poet but the author of Bussy cFAmbois. There was
here likewise that gravity and condensation of thought
conveyed through the medium of the " full and heightened
style " commended by Webster, and that preponderance
of philosophic or political discourse over poetic interest
and dramatic action for which the author in question had
been justly censured.

Some of the audience appearing slightly startled by
this remark (indeed it afterwards appeared that the Chair-
man had been on the point of asking the learned member
whether he was not thinking rather of Love's Labour's
Lost?), Mr. A. cited the well-known scene in which
Oberon discourses with Puck on matters concerning
Mary Stuart and Queen Elizabeth, instead of despatching
him at once on his immediate errand. This was univer-

Appendix. 277

sally accepted as proof positive, and the reading con-
cluded amid signs of unanimous assent, when

Mr. B. had nothing to urge against the argument
they had just heard, but he must remind them that there
was a more weighty kind of evidence than that adduced
by Mr. A. ; and to this he doubted not they would all
defer. He could prove by a tabulated statement that
the words " to " and " from " occurred on an average from
seven to nine times in every play of Chapman ; whereas
in the play under consideration the word " to " occurred
exactly twelve times and the word " from " precisely ten.
He was therefore of opinion that the authorship should
in all probability be assigned to Anthony Munday.

As nobody present could dispute this conclusion,
Mr. C. proceeded to read the argument by which he
proposed to establish the fact, hitherto unaccountably
overlooked by all preceding commentators, that the
character of Romeo was obviously designed as a satire
on Lord Burghley. The first and perhaps the strongest
evidence in favour of this proposition was the extreme
difficulty, he might almost say the utter impossibility, of
discovering a single point of likeness between the two
characters. This would naturally be the first precaution
taken by a poor player who designed to attack an all-
powerful Minister. But more direct light was thrown
upon the subject by a passage in which " that kind of
fruit that maids call medlars when they laugh alone " is
mentioned in connection with a wish of Romeo's regard-
ing his mistress. This must evidently be taken to refer
to some recent occasion on which the policy of Lord
Burghley (possibly in the matter of the Anjou marriage)

278 A Study of Shakespeare.

had been rebuked in private by the Maiden Queen, " his
mistress/' as meddling, laughable, and fruitless.

This discovery seemed to produce a great impression
till the Chairman reminded the Society that the play in
question was now generally ascribed to George Peele/who
was notoriously the solicitor of Lord Burghley's patronage
and the recipient of his bounty. That this poet was the
author of Romeo and Juliet could no longer be a matter
of doubt, as he was confident they would all agree with
him on hearing that a living poet of note had positively
assured him of the fact ; adding that he had always thought
so when at school. The plaudits excited by this an-
nouncement had scarcely subsided, when the Chairman
clenched the matter by observing that he rather thought
the same opinion had ultimately been entertained by his
own grandmother.

Mr. D. then read a paper on the authorship and the
hidden meaning of two contemporary plays which, he
must regretfully remark, were too obviously calculated to
cast a most unfavourable and even sinister light on the
moral character of the new Shakespeare ; whose possibly
suspicious readiness to attack the vices of others with a
view to diverting attention from his own was signally ex-
emplified in the well-known fact that, even while putting

1 This brilliant idea has since been borrowed from the Chairman
— and that without acknowledgment — by one of those worthies
whose mission it is to make manifest that no burlesque invention of
mere man's device can improve upon the inexhaustible capacities of
Nature as shown in the production and perfection of the type irre-
verently described by Dryden as ' God Almighty's fool.'

Appendix. 279

on a feint of respect and tenderness for his memory,
he had exposed the profligate haunts and habits of
Christopher Marlowe under the transparent pseudonym of
Christopher Sly. To the first of these plays attention had
long since been drawn by a person of whom it was only
necessary to say that he had devoted a long life to the study
and illustration of Shakespeare and his age, and had actu-
ally presumed to publish a well-known edition of the poet
at a date previous to the establishment of the present So •
ciety. He (Mr. D. ) was confident that not another syllable
could be necessary to expose that person to the contempt
of all present. He proceeded, however, with the kind
encouragement of the Chairman, to indulge at that editor's
expense in sundry personalities both " loose and humor-
ous," which being totally unfit for publication here are re-
served for a private issue of "Loose and Humorous Papers"
to be edited, with a running marginal commentary or il-
lustrative and explanatory version of the utmost possible
fullness,1 by the Founder and another member of the
Society. To these it might possibly be undesirable for them
to attract the notice of the outside world. Reverting there-
fore to his first subject from various references to the pre-
sumed private character, habits, gait, appearance, and
bearing of the gentleman in question, Mr. D. observed
that the ascription of a share in the Taming of the Shrew
to William Haughton (hitherto supposed the author of
a comedy called Englishmen for my Money} implied a

1 This word was incomprehensibly misprinted in the first issue
of the Society's Report, where it appeared as " foulness." To pre-
vent misapprehension, the whole staff of printers was at once
discharged.

K

280 A Study of Shakespeare.

doubly discreditable blunder. The real fact, as he would
immediately prove, was not that Haughton was joint
author with Shakespeare of the Taming of the Shrew , but
that Shakespeare was joint author with Haughton of
Englishmen for my Money. He would not enlarge on
the obvious fact that Shakespeare, so notorious a plunderer
of others, had actually been reduced to steal from his own
poor store an image transplanted from the last scene of
the third act of Romeo and Juliet into the last scene of the
third act of Englishmen for my Money ; where the well-
known and pitiful phrase — " Night's candles are burnt
out " — reappears in all its paltry vulgarity as follows j
" Night's candles burn obscure." Ample as was the
proof here supplied, he would prefer to rely exclusively
upon such further evidence as might be said to lie at once
on the surface and in a nutshell.

The second title of this play, by which the first title
was in a few years totally superseded, ran thus : A Woman
will have her Will. Now even in an age of punning
titles such as that of a well-known and delightful treatise
by Sir John Harrington, the peculiar fondness of Shake-
speare for puns was notorious , but especially for puns
on names, as in the proverbial case of Sir Thomas Lucy ;
and above all for puns on his own Christian name, as in
his i35th, i36th, and i43rd sonnets. It must now be but
too evident to the meanest intelligence — to the meanest in-
telligence, he repeated ; for to such only did he or would he
then and there or ever or anywhere address himself — (loud
applause) that the graceless author, more utterly lost to all
sense of shame than any Don Juan or other typical libertine

Appendix. 281

of fiction, had come forward to placard by way of self-ad-
vertisement on his own stage, and before the very eyes of
a Maiden Queen, the scandalous confidence in his own
powers of fascination and seduction so cynically expressed
in the too easily intelligible vaunt — A Woman will have
her Will [Shakespeare]. In the penultimate line of the
hundred and forty-third sonnet the very phrase might be
said to occur : —

So will I pray that thou mayst have thy 'Will.

Having thus established his case in the first instance
to the satisfaction, as he trusted, not only of the present
Society, but of any asylum for incurables in any part of
the country, the learned member now passed on to the
consideration of the allusions at once to Shakespeare and
to a celebrated fellow-countryman, fellow-poet, and per-
sonal friend of his — Michael Drayton — contained in a
play which had been doubtfully attributed to Shakespeare
himself by such absurd idiots as looked rather to the
poetical and dramatic quality of a poem or a play than
to such tests as those to which alone any member of that
Society would ever dream of appealing. What these were
he need not specify ; it was enough to say in recommen-
dation of them that they had rather less to do with any
question of dramatic or other poetry than with the differ-
ential calculus or the squaring of the circle. It followed
that only the most perversely ignorant and aesthetically,
presumptuous of readers could imagine the possibility of
Shakespeare's concern or partnership in a play which had
no more Shakespearean quality about it than mere poetry,
mere passion, mere pathos, mere beauty and vigour of

282 A St^tdy of Shakespeare.

thought and language, mere command of dramatic effect,
mere depth and subtlety of power to read, interpret, and
reproduce the secrets of the heart and spirit. Could any
further evidence be required of the unfitness and unworthi-
ness to hold or to utter any opinion on the matter in
hand which had consistently been displayed by the poor
creatures to whom he had just referred, it would be found,
as he felt sure the Founder and all worthy members
of their Society would be the first to admit, in the despic-
able diffidence, the pitiful modesty, the contemptible
deficiency in common assurance, with which the sugges-
tion of Shakespeare's partnership in this play had gene-
rally been put forward and backed up. The tragedy of
Arden of Feversham was indeed connected with Shake-
speare— and that, as he should proceed to show, only too
intimately ; but Shakespeare was not connected with it —
that is, in the capacity of its author. In what capacity
would be but too evident when he mentioned the names
of the two leading ruffians concerned in the murder oi
the principal character — Black Will and Shakebag. The
single original of these two characters he need scarcely
pause to point out. It would be observed that a double
precaution had been taken against any charge of libel or
personal attack which might be brought against the author
and supported by the all-powerful court influence of
Shakespeare's two principal patrons, the Earls of Essex
and Southampton. Two figures were substituted for one,
and the unmistakable name of Will Shakebag was cut
in half and divided between them. Care had moreover
been taken to disguise the person by altering the com-

Appendix. 283

plexion of the individual aimed at. That the actual
Shakespeare was a fair man they had the evidence of the
coloured bust at Stratford. Could any capable and fair-
minded man — he would appeal to their justly honoured
Founder — require further evidence as to the original of
Black Will Shakebag ? Another important character in
the play was Black Will's accomplice and Arden's servant
— Michael, after whom the play had also at one time been
called Murderous Michael. The single fact that Shake-
speare and Dray ton were both of them Warwickshire men
would suffice, he could not doubt, to carry conviction
with it to the mind of every member present, with regard
to the original of this personage. It now only remained
for him to produce the name of the real author of this
play. He would do so at once — Ben Jonson. About the
time of its production Jonson was notoriously engaged in
writing those additions to the Spanish Tragedy of which
a preposterous attempt had been made to deprive him on
the paltry ground that the style (forsooth) of these addi-
tional scenes was very like the style of Shakespeare and
utterly unlike the style of Jonson. To dispose for ever of
this pitiful argument it would be sufficient to mention the
names of its two first and principal supporters — Charles
Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (hisses and laughter).
Now, in these " adycions to Jeronymo " a painter was in-
troduced complaining of the murder of his son. In the
play before them a painter was introduced as an accom-
plice in the murder of Arden. It was unnecessary to
dwell upon so trivial a point of difference as that between
the stage employment or the moral character of the one

284 A Study of Shakespeare.

artist and the other. In either case they were as closely
as possible connected with a murder. There was a painter
in the Spanish Tragedy, and there was also a painter in
Arden of Fever sham. He need not — he would not add
another word in confirmation of the now established fact,
that Ben Jonson had in this play held up to perpetual
infamy — whether deserved or undeserved he would not
pretend to say — the names of two poets who afterwards
became his friends, but whom he had previously gibbeted
or at least pilloried in public as Black Will Shakespeare
and Murderous Michael Drayton.

Mr. E. then brought forward a subject of singular
interest and importance — " The lameness of Shakespeare
— was it moral or physical ? " He would not insult their
intelligence by dwelling on the absurd and exploded
hypothesis that this expression was allegorical, but would
at once assume that the infirmity in question was physical.
Then arose the question — In which leg ? He was pre-
pared, on the evidence of an early play, to prove to
demonstration that the injured and interesting limb was
the left. " This shoe is my father," says Launce in the
Two Gentlemen of Verona; "no, this left shoe is my
father ; no, no, this left shoe is my mother ; nay, that can-
not be so neither ; yes, it is so, it is so ; // hath the worser
sole" This passage was not necessary either to the pro-
gress of the play or to the development of the character ;
he believed he was justified in asserting that it was not
borrowed from the original novel on which the play was
founded ; the inference was obvious, that without some per-
sonal allusion it must have been as unintelligible to the

Appendix. 285

audience as it had hitherto been to the commentators. His
conjecture was confirmed, and the whole subject illustrated
with a new light, by the well-known line in one of the Son-
nets, in which the poet describes himself as " made lame by
Fortune's dearest spite" : a line of which the inner meaning
and personal application had also by a remarkable chance
been reserved for him (Mr. E.)to discover. There could
be no doubt that we had here a clue to the origin of the
physical infirmity referred to ; an accident which must have
befallen Shakespeare in early life while acting at the For-
tune theatre, and consequently before his connection with
a rival company ; a fact of grave importance till now un-
verified. The epithet " dearest," like so much else in the
Sonnets, was evidently susceptible of a double interpreta-
tion. The first and most natural explanation of the term
would at once suggest itself; the playhouse would of
necessity be dearest to the actor dependent on it for sub-
sistence, as the means of getting his bread \ but he
thought it not unreasonable to infer from this unmistak-
able allusion that the entrance fee charged at the Fortune
may probably have been higher than the price of seats in
any other house. Whether or not this fact, taken in con-
junction with the accident already mentioned, should be
assumed as the immediate cause of Shakespeare's subse-
quent change of service, he was not prepared to pronounce
with such positive confidence as they might naturally ex-
pect from a member of the Society ; but he would take
upon himself to affirm that his main thesis was now and
for ever established on the most irrefragable evidence,
and that no assailant could by any possibility dislodge by

286 A Study of Shakespeare.

so much as a hair's breadth the least fragment of a single
brick in the impregnable structure of proof raised by the
argument to which they had just listened.

This demonstration being thus satisfactorily con-
cluded, Mr. F. proceeded to read his paper on the date
of Othello ', and on the various parts of that play respec-
tively assignable to Samuel Rowley, to George Wilkins,
and to Robert Daborne. It was evident that the story
of Othello and Desdemona was originally quite distinct
from that part of the play in which lago was a leading
figure. This he was prepared to show at some length by
means of the weak-ending test, the light-ending test, the
double-ending test, the triple-ending test, the heavy-
monosyllabic-eleventh-syllable-of-the-double-ending test,
the run-on-line test, and the central-pause test. Of the
partnership of other poets in the play he was able to
adduce a simpler but not less cogent proof. A member
of their Committee said to an objector lately : " To me,
there are the handwritings of four different men, the
thoughts and powers of four different men, in the play.
If you can't see them now, you must wait till, by study,
you can. I can't give you eyes." To this argument he
(Mr. F.) felt that it would be an insult to their under-
standings if he should attempt to add another word.
Still, for those who were willing to try and learn, and
educate their ears and eyes, he had prepared six tabulated
statements —

(At this important point of a most interesting paper,
our reporter unhappily became unconscious, and remained
for some considerable period in a state of deathlike

Appendix. 287

stupor. On recovering from this total and unaccountable
suspension of all his faculties, he found the speaker draw-
ing gradually near the end of his figures, and so far
succeeded in shaking off the sense of coma as to be able
to resume his notes. )

That the first and fourth scenes of the third act were
not by the same hand as the third scene he should have
no difficulty in proving to the satisfaction of all capable
and fair-minded men. In the first and fourth scenes
the word " virtuous " was used as a dissyllable ; in the
third it was used as a trisyllable.

"Is, that she will to virtuous Desdemona." iii. I.
" Where virtue is, these are more virtuous." iii. 3.
" That by your virtuous means I may again." iii. 4.

In the third scene he would also point out the great
number of triple endings which had originally led the able
editor of Euclid's Elements of Geometry to attribute
the authorship of this scene to Shirley : Cassia (twice),
patience. Cassia (again), discretion, Cassia (again), honesty,
Cassia (again), jealousy, jealous (used as a trisyllable in
the verse of Shakespeare's time), company (two consecu-
tive lines with the triple ending), Cassia (again), conscience,
petition, ability, importunity, conversation, marriage^
dungeon, mandragora, passion, monstrous, conclusion,
bounteous. He could not imagine any man in his senses
questioning the weight of this evidence. Now, let them
take the rhymed speeches of the Duke and Brabantio in

288 A Study of Shakespeare.

Act i. Sc. 3, and compare them with the speech of
Othello in Act iv. Sc. 2,

Had it pleased heaven
To try me with affliction.

He appealed to any expert whether this was not in
Shakespeare's easy fourth budding manner, with, too,
various other points already touched on. On the other
hand, take the opening of Brabantio's speech —

So let the Turk of Cyprus us beguile ;
We lose it not so long as we can smile.

That, he said, was in Shakespeare's difficult second
flowering manner — the style of the later part of the earlier
stage of Shakespeare's rhetorical first period but one. It
was no more possible to move the one passage up to the
date of the other than to invert the order of the alphabet.
Here, then, putting aside for the moment the part of
the play supplied by Shakespeare's assistants in the last
three acts — miserably weak some of it was— they were
able to disentangle the early love-play from the later
work in which lago was principally concerned. There
was at least fifteen years' growth between them, the steps
of which could be traced in the poet's intermediate plays
by any one who chose to work carefully enough at them.
Set any of the speeches addressed in the Shakespeare
part of the last act by Othello to Desdemona beside
the consolatory address of the Duke to Brabantio, and
see the difference of the rhetoric and style in the
two. If they turned to characters, Othello and Desde-
mona were even more clearly the companion pair to

Appendix.

289

Biron and Rosaline of Love's Labours Lost than were
Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet the match-pair (sic) of
Romeo and Juliet. In Love's Labours Lost the question
of complexion was identical, though the parts were
reversed. He would cite but a few parallel passages in
evidence of this relationship between the subjects of the
two plays.

Lovers Labour's Lost, iv. 3.

1. "By heaven, thy love is black

as ebony."

2. " No face is fair that is not

full so black."

3. "O paradox! Black is the

badge of hell."

4. " O,' if in black my lady's

brows be decked."

5. " And therefore is she born

to make black fair."

6. " Paints itself black to imitate

her brow."

7. "To look like her are chim-

ney-sweepers black. "

Othello.

1. "An old black ram." i. I.

2. "Your son-in-law is far more

fair than black." i. 3.

3. "How if she be black and

witty ?"ii. i.

4. " If she be black, and thereto

have a wit." id.

5. "A measure to the health di

black Othello." ii. 3.

6. "For I am black. "iii 3.

7. " Begrimed and black." id.

Now, -with these parallel passages before them, what
man, woman, or child could bring himself or herself to be-
lieve that the connection of these plays was casual or the
date of the first Othello removable from the date of the
early contemporary late-first-period-but-one play Love's
Labour's Lost, or that anybody's opinion that they were
so was worth one straw ? When therefore by the intro-
duction of the lago episode Shakespeare in his later days
had with the assistance of three fellow-poets completed

290 A Study of Shakespeare.

the unfinished work of his youth, the junction thus
effected of the Brabantio part of the play with this lago
underplot supplied them with an evidence wholly distinct
from that of the metrical test which yet confirmed in
every point the conclusion independently arrived at and
supported by the irresistible coincidence of all the tests.
He defied anybody to accept his principle of study or
adopt his method of work, and arrive at a different con-
clusion from himself.

The reading of Mr. G.'s paper on the authorship of
the soliloquies in Hamlet was unavoidably postponed till
the next meeting, the learned member having only time on
this occasion to give a brief summary of the points he was
prepared to establish and the grounds on which he was
prepared to establish them. A year or two since, when he
first thought of starting the present Society, he had never
read a line of the play in question, having always under-
stood it to be admittedly spurious : but on being assured
of the contrary by one of the two foremost poets of the
English-speaking world, who was good enough to read
out to him in proof of this assertion all that part of the
play which could reasonably be assigned to .Shakespeare,
he had of course at once surrendered his own former
opinion, well grounded as it had hitherto seemed to be
on the most solid of all possible foundations. At their
next meeting he would show cause for attributing to Ben
Jonson not only the soliloquies usually but inconsider-
ately quoted as Shakespeare's, but the entire original
conception of the character of the Prince of Denmark.
The resemblance of this character to that of Volpone

Appendix. 291

in The Fox and to that of Face in The Alchemist could
not possibly escape the notice of the most cursory reader.
The principle of disguise was the same in each case,
whether the end in view were simply personal profit, or
(as in the case of Hamlet) personal profit combined
with revenge ; and whether the disguise assumed was
that of mar'ness, of sickness, or of a foreign personality,
the assumption of character was in all three cases
identical. As to style, he was only too anxious to
meet (and, he doubted not, to beat) on his own ground
any antagonist whose • ear had begotten1 the crude and
untenable theory that the Hamlet soliloquies were not dis-
tinctly within the range of the man who could produce
those of Crites and of Macilente in Cynthia's Revels and
Every Man out of his Humour. The author of those
soliloquies could, and did, in the parallel passages of
Hamlet, rise near the height of the master he honoured
and loved.

The further discussion of this subject was reserved
for the next meeting of the Society, as was also the
reading of Mr. H.'s paper on the subsequent quarrel
between the two joint authors of Hamlet ', which led to
Jonson's caricature of Shakespeare (then retired from
London society to a country life of solitude) under the

1 When the learned member made use of this remarkable phiase
he probably had in his mind the suggestive query of Agnes, si ies
cnfants qi? on fait se faisaient par Poreille ? But the flower of rhe-
toric here gathered was beyond the reach of Arnolphe's innocent
ward. The procreation in such a case is even more difficult for fancy
to realise than the conception.

29 2 A Stiidy of Shakespeare.

name of Morose, and to Shakespeare's retort on Jonson,
who was no less evidently attacked under the designa-
tion of Ariel. The allusions to the subject of Shake-
speare's sonnets in the courtship and marriage of Epicoene
by Morose were as obvious as the allusions in the part of
Ariel to the repeated incarceration of Jonson, first on a
criminal and secondly on a political charge, and to his
probable release in the former case (during the reign of
Elizabeth =Sycorax) at the intercession of Shakespeare,
who was allowed on all hands to have represented him-
self in the character of Prospero (" it was mine art that
let thee out "). * Mr. I. would afterwards read a paper on
the evidence for Shakespeare's whole or part authorship
of a dozen or so of the least known plays of his time,
which, besides having various words and phrases in com-
mon with his acknowledged works, were obviously too
bad to be attributed to any other known writer of the
period. Eminent among these was the tragedy of
Andromana, or the Merchant's Wife, long since rejected
from the list of Shirley's works as unworthy of that poet's
hand. Unquestionably it was so ; not less unworthy
than A Larum for London of Marlowe's. The con-
sequent inference that it must needs be the work of
the new Shakespeare's was surely no less cogent in this
than in the former case. The allusion occurring in it to
a play bearing date just twenty-six years after the death
of Shakespeare, and written by a poet then unborn, was
a strong point in favour of his theory. (This argument
was received with general marks of adhesion.) What, he
would ask, could be more natural than that Shirley

Appendix. 293

when engaged on the revision and arrangement for the
stage of this posthumous work of the new Shakespeare's
(a fact which could require no further proof than he had
already adduced), should have inserted this reference
in order to disguise the name of its real author, and
protect it from the disfavour of an audience with whom
that name was notoriously out of fashion ? This reason-
ing, conclusive in itself, became even more irresistible — or
would become so, if that were anything less than an ab-
solute impossibility — on comparison of parallel passages.

Though kings still hug suspicion in their bosoms,
They hate the causer. (Andromana, Act i. Sc. 3.)

Compare this with the avowal put by Shakespeare into
the mouth of a king.

Though I did wish him dead
I hate the murderer. (King Richard //., Act v. Sc. 6.)

Again in the same scene :

For then her husband comes home from the Rialto.

Compare this with various passages (too familiar to quote)
in the Merchant of Venice. The transference of the Rialto
to Iberia was of a piece with the discovery of a sea-coast
in Bohemia. In the same scene Andromana says to
her lover, finding him reluctant to take his leave, almost
in the very words of Romeo to Juliet,

Then let us stand and outface danger,
Since you will have it so.

It was obvious that only the author of the one passage

294 A Study of Shakespeare.

could have thought it necessary to disguise his plagiarism
in the other by an inversion of sexes between the two
speakers. In the same scene were three other indis-
putable instances of repetition.

Mariners might with far greater ease
Hear whole shoals of sirens singing.

Compare Comedy of Errors, Act iii. Scene 2.
Sing, siren, for thyself.

In this case identity of sex was as palpable an evidence for
identity of authorship as diversity of sex had afforded in
the preceding instance.
Again :

Have oaths no more validity with princes ?

In Romeo and Juliet, Act iii. Scene 3, the very same
words were coupled in the very same order :

More validity,

More honourable state, more courtship lies
In carrion flies than Romeo.

Again :

It would have killed a salamander.

Compare the First Part of King Henry IV., Act iii.

Scene 3.

I have maintained that salamander of yours with fire any time
this two and thirty years.

In Act ii. Scene 2 the hero, on being informed how heavy
are the odds against him in the field, answers,
I am glad on't ; the honour is the greater.

Appendix. 295

To vhich his confidant rejoins :

The danger is the greater.

And in the sixth scene of the same act the messenger

observes :

I only heard the prince wish

He had fewer by a thousand men.

Could any member doubt that we had here the same
hand which gave us the like debate between King Henry
and Westmoreland on the eve of Agincourt ? or could
any -member suppose that in the subsequent remark of
the same military confidant, " I smell a rat, sir," there was
merely a fortuitous coincidence with Hamlet's reflection
as he " whips out his rapier " — in itself a martial proceed-
ing— under similar circumstances to the same effect ?

In the very next scene a captain observes of his own
troops

Methinks such tattered rogues should never conquer :

a touch that could only be due to the pencil which had
drawn FalstafFs ragged regiment. In both cases, more-
over, it was to be noted that the tattered rogues proved
ultimately victorious. But he had — they might hardly
believe it, but so it was — even yet stronger and more
convincing evidence to offer. It would be remembered
that a play called The Double Falsehood, formerly attribu-
ted to Shakespeare on the authority of Theobald, was
now generally supposed to have been in its original form
the work of Shirley. What, then, he would ask, could be
more natural or more probable than that a play formerly
ascribed to Shirley should prove to be the genuine work

296 A Study of Shakespeare.

of Shakespeare ? Common sense, common reason, com-
mon logic, all alike and all equally combined to enforce
upon every candid judgment this inevitable conclusion.
This, however, was nothing in comparison to the final
proof which he had yet to lay before them. He need
not remind them that in the opinion of their illustrious
German teachers, the first men to discover and reveal to
his unworthy countrymen the very existence of the new
Shakespeare, the authenticity of any play ascribed to the
possibly too prolific pen of that poet was invariably to be
determined in the last resort by consideration of its
demerits. No English critic, therefore, who felt himself
worthy to have been born a German, would venture to
question the postulate on which all sound principles of
criticism with regard to this subject must infallibly be
founded : that, given any play of unknown or doubtful
authorship, the worse it was, the likelier was it to be
Shakespeare's. (This proposition was received with every
sign of unanimous assent) Now, on this ground he was
prepared to maintain that the claims of Andromana to
their most respectful, their most cordial, their most unhesi-
tating acceptance were absolutely beyond all possibility
of parallel. Not Mucedorus or Fair Em, not The Birth of
Merlin or Thomas Lord Cromwell, could reasonably or
fairly be regarded as on the same level of worthlessness
with this incomparable production. No mortal man who
had survived its perusal could for a moment hesitate to
agree that it was the most incredibly, ineffably, inconceiv-
ably, unmitigatedly, irredeemably, inexpressibly damna-
ble piece of bad work ever perpetrated by human hand.

Appendix. 297

No mortal critic of the genuine Anglo-German school
could therefore hesitate for a moment to agree that in
common consistency he was bound to accept it as the
possible work of no human hand but the hand of the
New Shakespeare.

The Chairman then proceeded to recapitulate the
work done and the benefits conferred by the Society
during the twelve months which had elapsed since its
foundation on that day (April ist) last year. They had
ample reason to congratulate themselves and him on the
result. They had established an entirely new kind of
criticism, working by entirely new means towards an
entirely new end, in honour of an entirely new kind of
Shakespeare. They had proved to demonstration and
overwhelmed with obloquy the incompetence, the imbe-
cility, the untrustworthiness, the blunders, the forgeries,
the inaccuracies, the obliquities, the utter moral and
literary worthlessness, of previous students and societies.
They had revealed to the world at large the generally
prevalent ignorance of Shakespeare and his works which
so discreditably distinguished his countrymen. This they
had been enabled to do by the simple process of putting
forward various theories, and still more various facts, but
all of equally incontrovertible value and relevance, of which
no Englishman — he might say, no mortal — outside the
Society had ever heard or dreamed till now. They had
discovered the one trustworthy and indisputable method,
so easy and so simple that it must now seem wonderful
it should never have been discovered before, by which to
pluck out the heart of the poet's mystery and detect the

298 A Study of Shakespeare.

secret of his touch ; the study of Shakespeare by rule of
thumb. Every man, woman, and child born with five
fingers on each hand was henceforward better qualified
as a critic than any poet or scholar of time past. But
it was not, whatever outsiders might pretend to think,
exclusively on the verse-test, as it had facetiously been
called on account of its total incompatibility with any
conceivable scheme of metre or principle of rhythm — it
was not exclusively on this precious and unanswerable
test that they relied. Within the Society as well as with-
out, the pretensions of those who would acknowledge no
other means of deciding on debated questions had been
refuted and repelled. What were the other means of
investigation and verification in which not less than in
the metrical test they were accustomed to put their faith,
and by which they doubted not to attain in the future
even more remarkable results than their researches had
as yet achieved, the debate just concluded, in common
with every other for which they ever had met or ever
were likely to meet, would amply suffice to show. By
such processes as had been applied on this as on all
occasions to the text of Shakespeare's works and the tra-
ditions of his life, they trusted in a very few years to sub-
vert all theories which had hitherto been held and
extirpate all ideas which had hitherto been cherished on
the subject : and having thus cleared the ground for his
advent, to discover for the admiration of the world, as
the name of their Society implied, a New Shakespeare.
The first step towards this end must of course be the
demolition of the old one ; and he would venture to say

Appendix. 299

they had already made a good beginning in that direction.
They had disproved or they would disprove the claim of
Shakespeare to the sole authorship of Macbeth, Julius
Cczsar, King Lear, Hamht, and Othello ; they had estab-
lished or they would establish the fact of his partnership
in Locrine, Muccdorus, The Birth of Merlin, Dr. Dodi-
poll, and Sir Giles Goosecap. They had with them the
incomparable critics of Germany ; men whose knowledge
and judgment on all questions of English literature were
as far beyond the reach of their English followers as the
freedom and enlightenment enjoyed by the subjects of a
military empire were beyond the reach of the citizens of
a democratic republic. They had established and affili-
ated to their own primitive body or church various branch
societies or sects, in England and elsewhere, devoted to
the pursuit of the same end by the same means and
method of study as had just been exemplified in the
transactions of the present meeting. Still there remained
much to be done ; in witness of which he proposed to lay
before them at their next meeting, by way of inauguration
under a happy omen of their new year's work, the com-
plete body of evidence by means of which he was pre-
pared to demonstrate that some considerable portion, if
not the greater part, of the remaining plays hitherto
assigned to Shakespeare was due to the collaboration of a
contemporary actor and playwright, well known by name,
but hitherto insufficiently appreciated ; Robert Armin,
the author of A Nest of Ninnies.

3OO A Study of Shakespeare.

ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS.

THE humble but hard-working journeyman of letters who
was charged with the honourable duty of reporting the
transactions at the last meeting of the Newest Shakespeare
Society on the auspicious occasion of its first anniversary,
April i.st, has received sundry more or less voluminous
communications from various gentlemen whose papers
were then read or announced, pointing out with more or
less acrimonious commentary the matters on which it seems
to them severally that they have cause to complain of
imperfection or inaccuracy in his conscientious and pains-
taking report. Anxious above all things to secure for
himself such credit as may be due to the modest merit of
scrupulous fidelity, he desires to lay before the public so
much of the corrections conveyed in their respective
letters of reclamation as may be necessary to complete or
to rectify the first draught of their propositions as con-
veyed in his former summary. On the present occasion,
however, he must confine himself to forwarding the recti-
fications supplied by two of the members who took a
leading part in the debate of April ist.

The necessarily condensed report of Mr. A.'s paper

Appendix. 301

on A Midsummer Nights Dream may make the reasoning
put forward by that gentleman liable to the misconception
of a hasty reader. The omission of various qualifying
phrases has left his argument without such explanation, his
statements without such reservation, as he had been
careful to supply. He did not say in so many words that
he had been disposed to assign this drama to the author
of The Revenger's Tragedy simply on the score of the
affinity discernible between the subjects of the two plays.
He is not prone to self-confidence or to indulgence in para-
dox. What he did say was undeniable by any but those
who trusted 6nly to their ear, and refused to correct the con-
clusions thus arrived at by the help of other organs which
God had given them — their fingers, for example, and their
toes ; by means of which a critic of trained and compe-
tent scholarship might with the utmost confidence count
up as far as twenty, to the great profit of all students who
were willing to accept his guidance and be bound by his
decision on matters of art and poetry. Only the most
purblind could fail to observe, what only the most per-
verse could hesitate to admit, that there was at first sight
an obvious connection between the poison-flower —
" purple from love's wound" — squeezed by Oberon into
the eyes of the sleeping Titania and the poison rubbed by
Vindice upon the skull of the murdered Gloriana. No
student of Ulrici's invaluable work would think this a far-
fetched reference. That eminent critic had verified the
meaning and detected the allusion underlying many a pas-
sage of Shakespeare in which the connection of moral idea
was more difficult to establish than this. In the fifth act of

302 A Study of Shakespeare.

either play there was a masque or dramatic show of a
sanguinary kind ; in the one case the bloodshed was
turned to merry-making, in the other the merry-making
was turned to bloodshed. Oberon's phrase, "till I tor-
ment thee for this injury," might easily be mistaken for a
quotation from the part of Vindice. This explanation, he
trusted, would suffice to exonerate his original view from
any charge of haste or rashness ; especially as he had now
completely given it up, and adopted one (if possible)
more impregnably based on internal and external evi-
dence.

Mr. C. was not unnaturally surprised and indignant
to find his position as to Romeo and Lord Burghley barely
indicated, and the notice given of the arguments by which
it was supported so docked and curtailed as to convey a
most inadequate conception of their force. Among the
chief points of his argument were these : that the forsaken
Rosaline was evidently intended for the late Queen Mary,
during whose reign Cecil had notoriously conformed to
the observances of her creed, though ready on the acces-
sion of Elizabeth to throw it overboard at a day's notice ;
(it was not to be overlooked that the friar on first hear-
ing the announcement of this change of faith is made
earnestly to remonstrate, prefacing his reproaches with
an invocation of two sacred names — an invocation peculiar
to Catholics ;) that the resemblance between old Capulet
and Henry VIII. is obvious to the most careless reader ;
his oath of " God's bread ! " immediately followed by
the avowal "it makes me mad" is an unmistakable
allusion to the passions excited by the eucharistic con-

Appendix. 303

troversy ; his violence towards Juliet at the end of the
third act at once suggests the alienation of her father's
heart from the daughter of Anne Boleyn ; the self-con-
gratulation on her own " stainless " condition as a virgin
expressed by Juliet in soliloquy (Act iii. Sc. 2) while in
the act of awaiting her bridegroom conveys a furtive
stroke of satire at the similar vaunt of Elizabeth when
likewise meditating marriage and preparing to receive a
suitor from the hostile house of Valois. It must be un-
necessary to point out the resemblance or rather the
identity between the character and fortune of Paris and
the character and fortune of Essex, whose fate had been
foreseen and whose end prefigured by the poet with
almost prophetic sagacity. To tne far-reaching eye of
Shakespeare it must have seemed natural and inevitable
that Paris (Essex) should fall by the hand of Romeo
(Burghley) immediately before the monument of the
Capulets where their common mistress was interred alive
— immediately, that is, before the termination of the
Tudor dynasty in the person of Elizabeth, who towards
the close of her reign may fitly have been regarded as
one already buried with her fathers, though yet living in
a state of suspended animation under the influence of a
deadly narcotic potion administered by the friends of
Romeo — by the partisans, that is, of the Cecilian policy.
The Nurse was not less evidently designed to represent
the Established Church. Allusions to the marriage of the
clergy are profusely scattered through her speeches. Her
deceased husband was probably meant for Sir Thomas
More — ua merry man" to the last moment of his existence

304 A Study of Shakespeare.

— who might well be supposed by a slight poetic license to
have foreseen in the infancy of Elizabeth her future back-
sliding and fall from the straight path " when she came to
age." The passing expression of tenderness with which the
Nurse refers to his memory — " God be with his soul ! " —
implies at once the respect in which the name of the martyr
Chancellor was still generally held, and the lingering re-
mains of Catholic tradition which still made a prayer for
the dead rise naturally to Anglican lips. On the other hand,
the strife between Anglicans and Puritans, the struggle
of episcopalian with Calvinistic reformers, was quite as
plainly typified in the quarrel between the Nurse and
Mercutio, in which the Martin Marprelate controversy
was first unmistakably represented on the stage. The
" saucy merchant, that was so full of his ropery," with
his ridicule of the " stale " practice of Lenten fasting and
abstinence, his contempt for "a Lenten pie," and his
preference for a flesh diet as " very good meat in Lent,"
is clearly a disciple of Calvin ; and the impotence of the
Nurse, however scandalised at the nakedness of his
ribald profanity, to protect herself against it by appeal to
reason or tradition, is dwelt upon with an emphasis suf-
ficient to indicate the secret tendency of the poet's own
sympathies and convictions. In Romeo's attempt at con-
ciliation, and his poor excuse for Me-rcutio (which yet the
Nurse, an emblem of the temporising and accommodating
pliancy of episcopalian Protestantism, shows herself only
too ready to accept as valid) as " one that God hath made,
for himself to mar," — the allusion here is evidently to the
democratic and revolutionary tendencies of the doctrine

Appendix. 305

of Knox and Calvin, with its ultimate developments of
individualism and private judgment — we recognise the
note of Burghley's lifelong policy and its endeavour to
fuse the Protestant or Puritan party with the state Church
of the Tudors as by law established. The distaste of
Elizabeth's bishops for such advances, their flutter of
apprehension at the daring and their burst of indignation
at the insolence of the Calvinists, are significantly ex-
pressed in terms which seem to hint at a possible return
for help and protection to the shelter of the older faith
and the support of its partisans. " An 'a speak anything
against me, I'll take him down an 'a were lustier than he
is, and twenty such Jacks \ " (the allusion here is again
obvious, to the baptismal name of John Calvin and John
Knox, if not also to the popular byword of Jack Pres-
byter -,) " and if I cannot," (here the sense of insecurity
and dependence on foreign help or secular power becomes
transparent) " I'll find those that shall." She disclaims
communion with the Protestant Churches of the continent,
with Amsterdam or Geneva : " I am none of his flirt-gills ;
I am none of his skains-mates." Peter, who carries her fan
(i* to hide her face : for her fan's the fairer face" -3 we may
take this to be a symbol of the form of episcopal conse-
cration still retained in the Anglican Church as a cover
for its separation from Catholicism), is undoubtedly
meant for Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury ; the name
Peter, as applied to a menial who will stand by and suffer
every knave to use the Church at his pleasure, but is
ready to draw as soon as another man if only he may be
sure of having the secular arm of the law on his side,

306 A Study of Shakespeare.

implies a bitter sarcasm on the intruding official of state
then established by law as occupant of a see divorced
from its connection with that of the apostle. The sense
of instability natural to an institution which is compelled
to rely for support on ministers who are themselves
dependent on the state whose pay they draw for power
to strike a blow in self-defence could hardly be better
expressed than by the solemn and piteous, almost
agonised asseveration ; " Now, afore God, I am so vexed,
that every part about me quivers." To Shakespeare, it
cannot be doubted, the impending dissolution or disloca-
tion of the Anglican system in " every part " by civil war
and religious discord must even then have been but too
ominously evident.

If further confirmation could be needed of the under-
lying significance of allusion traceable throughout this
play, it might amply be supplied by fresh reference to
the first scene in which the Nurse makes her appearance
on the stage, and is checked by Lady Capulet in the full
tide of affectionate regret for her lost husband. We can
well imagine Anne Boleyn cutting short the regrets of
some indiscreet courtier for Sir Thomas More in the very
words of the text ;

Enough of this ; I pray thee, hold thy peace.

The " parlous knock " which left so big a lump upon
the brow of the infant Juliet is evidently an allusion to the
declaration of Elizabeth's illegitimacy while yet in her
cradle. The seal of bastardy set upon the baby brow of

Appendix. 307

Anne Boleyn's daughter may well be said to have
'• broken " it.

The counsel of the Nurse to Juliet in Act Hi. Scene 5
to forsake Romeo for Paris indicates the bias of the hier-
archy in favour of Essex — " a lovely gentleman " — rather
than of the ultra-Protestant policy of Burghley, who doubt-
less in the eyes of courtiers and churchmen was " a dish-
clout to him."

These were a few of the points, set down at random,
which he had been enabled to \ erify within the limits of
a single play. They would suflice to give an idea of the
process by which, when applied in detail to every one of
Shakespeare's plays, he trusted to establish the secret
history and import of each, not less than the general
sequence and significance of all. Further instalments of
this work would probably be issued in the forthcoming or
future Transactions of the Newest Shakespeare Society ;
and it was confidently expected that the final monument
of his research, when thoroughly completed and illustrated
by copious appendices, would prove as worthy as any
work of mere English scholarship could hope to be of a
place beside the inestimable cornmentaries of Gervinus,
Ulrici, and the Polypseudocriticopantodapomorosophisti-
coinetricoglossematographicomaniacal Company for the
Confusion of Shakespeare and Diffusion of Verbiage
(Unlimited).

CHIMERA. BOMBINANS IN VACUO.

308 A St^ldy of Shakespeare.

NOTE.

MINDFUL of the good old apologue regarding "the
squeak of the real pig," I think it here worth while to
certify the reader of little faith, that the more incredibly
impudent absurdities above cited are not so much or so
often the freaks of parody or the fancies of burlesque as
select excerpts and transcripts of printed and published
utterances from the " pink soft litter " of a living brood —
from the reports of an actual Society, issued in an
abridged and doubtless an emasculated form through
the columns of a, weekly newspaper. One final and un-
approachable instance, one transcendant and pyramidal
example of classical taste and of critical scholarship, I did
not venture to impair by transference from those columns
and transplantation into these pages among humbler
specimens of minor monstrosity. Let it stand here once
more on record as "a good jest for ever" — or rather as
the best and therefore as the worst, as the worst and
therefore as the best, of all possible bad jests ever to be
cracked between this and the crack of doom. Sophocles,
said a learned member, was the proper parallel to Shake-
speare among the ancient tragedians : ^Eschylus — hear,
O heaven, and give ear, O earth ! — sEschylus was only a
Marlowe.

The hand which here transcribes this most transcen-
dant utterance has written before now many lines in verse
s.nd in prose to the honour and glory of Christopher

Appendix. 309

Marlowe : it has never — be the humble avowal thus
blushingly recorded — it has never set down as the writer's
opinion that he was only an ^Eschylus. In other words,
it has never registered as my deliberate and judicial
verdict the finding that he was only the equal of the
greatest among all tragic and all prophetic poets ; of the
man who combined all the light of the Greeks with all
the fire of the Hebrews ; who varied at his will the reve-
lation of the single gift of Isaiah with the display of the
mightiest among the manifold gifts of Shakespeare-

THE END.

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