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Title: A Study of Shakespeare


Author: Algernon Charles Swinburne

Editor: Edmund Gosse

Release Date: August 1, 2005  [eBook #16412]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE***




This eBook was prepared by Les Bowler.





A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE
BY ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.


PREFACE TO THIS EDITION


Begun in the winter of 1874, a first instalment of "A Study of
Shakespeare" appeared in the _Fortnightly 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, 1875),
Swinburne said:

   "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 controversy with regard to the
internal evidence of composition 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
I.   FIRST PERIOD: LYRIC AND FANTASTIC
II.  SECOND PERIOD: COMIC AND HISTORIC
III. THIRD PERIOD: TRAGIC AND ROMANTIC
                         APPENDIX
I.   NOTE ON THE HISTORICAL PLAY OF KING EDWARD III.
II.  REPORT OF THE PROCEEDINGS ON THIS FIRST ANNIVERSARY SESSION OF THE
            NEWEST SHAKESPEARE SOCIETY
III. ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS




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 hundred 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 unsounded 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 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 manifest 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
undertaken 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
each fresh muster of hands.  At one time a main rock of offence on which
the stoutest ships of discovery were wont to split was the narrow and
slippery 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 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 students and lovers of either
art this may perhaps appear 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 application 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 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 asking; 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 Shakespeare 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 Salmasius 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 they would be.  In spite of all
tabulated statements 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 metrical test is doubtless, as they say, the surest or
the sole sure key to one side of the secret of Shakespeare; 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 sequence the quantity, order, and
proportion of single and double endings, of rhyme and blank verse, of
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 harmony 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 influences,
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 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.  Without 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 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 terminations 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 through its
several stages of expansion and transfiguration 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
perceptible: 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 diminution 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
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 conjecture 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 significance
in a passage hitherto neglected or misconstrued, 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 competent 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 personal or political allusions may lurk
under the text of Shakespeare we can never know, and should 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.

* * * * *

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
development 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
Shakespeare.  The principle here adopted and the views here put forward
have not been suddenly discovered 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 discussion with friends and fellow-students, the
opinions which I now submit to more public judgment.  How far they may
coincide with those advanced by others I cannot say, and have not been
careful to inquire.  The mere fact of coincidence 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 mainstay of his opinion.  It
is no part of my project or my hope to establish the actual date of any
among the 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 Malone 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
distinguish 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 conscious of having long since discovered
and verified 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 debatable 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 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 Shakespeare'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 finger.  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
undertaken 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.  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 reflorescence as in a Saint Martin's summer of
undecaying genius is the exquisite and crowning love-scene in the opera
or "ballet-tragedy" of _Psyche_, 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
masquerade 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 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 explanation 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 supposition of a double authorship is naturally as
impossible to refute as to establish by other than internal evidence and
appeal to the private judgment 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 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
carried, the audacious fatuity and the arrogant incompetence 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 consecrate 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 reawakened 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 centuries
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 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
challenged 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?
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 interpolation by Jonson; but in the descent
from these to the alleged adulteration of the text by Middleton 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 inventing 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 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's 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 evidence.  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 is the pretension of minor critics to dissect an authentic play of
Shakespeare scene by scene, and assign different parts of the same 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 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 suggestion 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 accounted 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 reasonable critics past and present combine to indicate an
unmistakable difference of touch or an unmistakable 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 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 authenticity or uniform workmanship of the _Taming of the 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 authorship
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 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
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 fourteen 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 stretches 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 and Silenus Still.  These twin
pillars of church and school and stage were strong enough to support on
the shoulders of their authority the first crude fabric or formless model
of our comic theatre, while the tragic boards were still creaking 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 modulation,
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.

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
weary 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.  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 1594, {30} 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 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
_Tamburlaine_, half adopting and half rejecting the innovations 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 Andronicus_ and the _First Part of King Henry the
Sixth_--the opening scene, for example, of either play.  With
_Andronicus_ it has also in common the quality of exceptional
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
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 revolution 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 respectably 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 and the little
birds; but the rest of the scene in which we come upon it, and the whole
scene preceding, 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. {33}  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
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
disturbance 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; they cannot
hold their own in the new order with even such discordant effect of
incongruous 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 rhyming 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 distilled
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 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 outbreak,
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
forego 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 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
passing 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 _Cymbeline_ 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 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 student 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 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
Shakespeare'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 lifelong study of this as of all other plays of Shakespeare,
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 Aumerle.  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, 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 "cannot 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 cannot 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 Apollonian 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
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 uncritical 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
reappearance 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, 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 haste and as little of
labour as might be possible to an impatient and uncertain hand.  Now all
tragic poets, I presume, from AEschylus 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 Moliere and in Congreve, {42} our own lesser
Moliere, so far inferior in breadth and depth, in tenderness and
strength, to the greatest writer of the "great age," 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 duality for the most part in
excess of the dramatic; but in _King Richard III_. 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 perceptible 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 expression, 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 _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 Marlowe.  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 contending 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 him, and
to him alone, is the honour of having embroidered 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 (what 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 incident 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 of farce with fancy, of lyric charm with
comic effect, which recurs so often in his later work, from the date of
_As You Like It_ to the date of the _Winter's Tale_, and which no later
poet had ventured to recombine 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 simplicity of lyric
or elegiac loveliness which fill and inform the scenes where Adriana, her
sister, and the Syracusan Antipholus exchange the expression of their
errors and their loves, belong to Shakespeare 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
element, the fantastic element, or even the elegiac element.  All these
queens and heroines of history and tragedy have rather an Ovidian than a
Sophoclean grace of bearing and of speech.

The example afforded by the _Comedy of Errors_ would suffice to show that
rhyme, however inadequate for tragic use, is by no means a bad instrument
for romantic comedy.  In another of Shakespeare'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 sweetness, 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 laughing eyes,
whose inspiration is nothing akin to Marlowe'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 Shakespeare's
comic invention, which on its own ground is perfect in its consistency,
blameless in composition 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 her baby lips in bubbling 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 AEgeon and the
appearance in the last scene of his wife: in _Love's 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 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 ultimately 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 Holofernes; 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 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 imprint of his hand.  The long-vexed
question as to the authorship of the latter parts of _King Henry VI_., in
their earlier or later form, has not been touched upon; nor do I design
to reopen that perpetual source of debate unstanchable and inexhaustible
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
unmistakable:--

   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 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 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 insurrection, 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 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 which 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 we have traces of Shakespeare'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; 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 composition
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 proposition 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 unmistakable 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
restored in the final revision of the entire poem as it now stands among
the collected works of Shakespeare.

No competent critic who has given due study to the 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 transfigured version of Clifford's monologue over his father's
corpse, which is certainly more in Shakespeare'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 Marlowe'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 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 VI_., 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 themselves than
any passage of the play which bears his name--are wellnigh identical in
either form of the poem; but the reviser, with admirable judgment, 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.

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 predecessor, 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 opposite 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 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.  Assuming 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 _Contention_, 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 meaning half expressed or a tone of half-uttered music;
to the invigoration of sense and metre by substitution of the right word
for the wrong, of a fuller 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 habit of dramatic poetry.  Such work as this, however
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 happens, the least
witness of tradition or outward likelihood 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.

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 coincidence 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 Lover's 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 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 speculation 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 indirect light
on the mystic matter remains as inaccessible 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 benefits beyond price, if my honoured friend
Dr. Grosart could find the means to put a crown upon the achievements 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 Shakespearean
students; by the issue or reissue in its full and perfect likeness,
collated at last and complete, of _Willobie his Avisa_. {63}

It was long since more than time that the worthless and impudent
imposture called _The Passionate 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: _The 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
publisher 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 instance 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 published text of _Love's 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 notable
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
commonplaces 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 stolen and garbled work of Marlowe and of Barnfield,
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.



II.


The second period is that of perfection in comic and historic style.  The
final heights and depths of 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 conceits 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; 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
instinct 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.

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 _Tempest_, 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 stage.  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 comedies, one of
them in great part the recast or rather the transfiguration of an earlier
poet's work, complete 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 labours in that line, must of course be recognised
and 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 impeccable 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 incident.  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 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 masterpiece that the mind turns at mention of its name.
The one entire and perfect chrysolite of _Othello_ is neither Othello nor
Desdemona nor Iago, 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 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 forefront 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 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 embroidery, 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 commission 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 reflection 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
provokes.  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 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 fortune, 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 kindliness, 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 indignation 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
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 transcendent 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,
Webster'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 beyond 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 opening 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 character, to handle its finer and more
subtle qualities, to harmonise its more untuned and jarring discords;
giving here and thus the first proof of a power never shared in like
measure by the mightiest among the sons of men, a sovereign and serene
capacity to fathom the else unfathomable depths of spiritual nature, to
solve its else insoluble riddles, to reconcile its else irreconcilable
discrepancies.  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
diversities 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 and ultimate ascension of dramatic poetry incarnate 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 apprehension 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
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
refraction 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
counterchange 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 simple as broad
sunlight though it be, has in it other features than this single and
beautiful likeness 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 something better worth the proof of war than
his miserable 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
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
embodiments or the exponents of single qualities and simple forces.  The
question of style also is therefore 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 of 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 Shakespeare who have not sometimes
felt that possibly the hardest problem involved in their study is that
which requires for its solution some reasonable and acceptable theory as
to the play of _King Henry VIII_.  None such has ever yet been offered;
and I certainly 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 certainly 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 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 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.  Now the motive here is as simple, the
emotion as natural as possible; the author is content to dispense 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 Buckingham will be found more forced in
situation, more fanciful in language than 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
described 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 as here?
where may we look for the same temperance 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
discernible 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 christening speech of Cranmer,
it might after all be almost impossible to resist the internal evidence
of 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 prelate.  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
criticism 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 posthumous 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 conjecture 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 miraculous
example of a man's genius for once transcending itself and for ever
eclipsing all its other achievements appears to me beyond all critical,
beyond all theological credulity.  Pathos and concentration 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 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,
{89} 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 precious quality; one _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 question 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 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
eloquently 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
handiwork 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 Shakespeare.  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 interpolated by Fletcher; we can pronounce with positive
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 Henry VIII_.  The lines of
demarcation, however visible or plausible, 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
comparative 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 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; {92} 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 numeration 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 established it can be by any such test
taken singly and, apart from all other points of evidence--the
collaboration of Fletcher with Shakespeare in this instance.  And if the
proof by mere metrical similitude is thus imperfect, there is here
assuredly 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 probable partnership of
Fletcher, the unity and sustained 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
unimportant 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 general model of Fletcher in his
tragic poetry.  On the other hand, we contend that its exceptional
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 support
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 illustrious 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
Frenchman and translator of the greatest Englishman--was only in this not
untimely, that it forbore him 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 perfect 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
companionship 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 translator upon the object of his labour and his love.  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 Shakespeare'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 probably 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 sent 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
convenience 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 Fletcher'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, he had to present an English king at war with
the papacy, in whom the assertion of national independence 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 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 personal 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 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 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 professedly 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 wellnigh a plausible argument might be raised by the critics
who deny the unity of authorship in King Henry VIII., 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 seasonable attraction served to float the
now forgotten 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 caede madenti_.
In any case, the humblest 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 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,
Faulconbridge 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 sympathy 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 playwright, 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
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
appearance 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 masterbuilder's
hands had not yet put the craft into seaworthy 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 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 V_., we may fairly say, is hardly less than
transformed.