Part. I cannot persuade myself that these were not from the very

first the work of Shakespeare. It is evident that they cannot proceed

from the pen of Marlowe. An attempt has been made to attribute them

to Greene, on the ground that there are other folk-scenes in his

works which display a similar strain of humour. But the difference

is enormous. It is true that the text here follows the chronicle

with extraordinary fidelity; but it was precisely in this ingenious

adaptation of material that Shakespeare always showed his strength.

And these scenes answer so completely to all the other folk-scenes in

Shakespeare, and are so obviously the outcome of the habit of political

thought which runs through his whole life, becoming ever more and more

pronounced, that we cannot possibly accept them as showing only the

trivial alterations and retouches which elsewhere distinguish his text

from the older version.

These admissions made, however, there is on the whole no difficulty in

distinguishing the work of other hands in the old texts. We can enjoy,

point by point, not only Shakespeare's superiority, but his peculiar

style, as we here find it in the very process of development; and we

can study his whole method of work in the text which he ultimately

produces.

We have here an almost unique opportunity of observing him in the

character of a critical artist. We see what improvements he makes

by a trivial retouch, or a mere rearrangement of words. Thus, when

Gloucester says of his wife (Part. II., Act ii. 4)--

"Uneath may she endure the flinty streets,

To tread them with her tender-feeling feet,"

all his sympathy speaks in these words. In the old text it is she

who says this of herself. In York's great soliloquy in the first

act, beginning "Anjou and Maine are given to the French," the first

twenty-four lines are Shakespeare's; the rest belong to the old text.

From the second "Anjou and Maine" onwards, the verse is conventional

and monotonous; the meaning ends with the end of each line, and a

pause, as it were, ensues; whereas the verse of the opening passage is

full of dramatic movement, life, and fire.

Again, if we turn to York's soliloquy in the third act (sc. I)--

"Now, York, or never, steel thy fearful thoughts,"

and compare it in the two texts, we find their metrical differences

so marked that, as Miss Lee has happily put it, the critic can no

more doubt that the first version belongs to an earlier stage in the

development of dramatic poetry, than the geologist can doubt that a

stratum which contains simpler organisms indicates an earlier stage of

the earth's development than one containing higher forms of organic

life. There are portions of the Second Part which no one can believe

that Shakespeare wrote, such as the old-fashioned fooling with Simpcox,

which is quite in the manner of Greene. There are others which, without

being unworthy of Shakespeare, not only indicate Marlowe in their

general style, but are now and then mere variations of verses known to

be his. Such, for example, is Margaret's line in Part III., Act i.:--

"Stern Faulconbridge commands the narrow seas,"

which clearly echoes the line in Marlowe's _Edward II._:--

"The haughty Dane commands the narrow street."

What interests us most, perhaps, is the relation between Shakespeare

and his predecessor with respect to the character of Gloucester. It

cannot be denied or doubted that this character, the Richard III. of

after-days, is completely outlined in the earlier text; so that in

reality Shakespeare's own tragedy of _Richard III.,_ written so much

later, is still quite Marlowesque in the fundamental conception of its

protagonist. Gloucester's two great soliloquies in the third part of

_Henry VI_. are especially instructive to study. In the first (iii. 2)

the keynote of the passion is indeed struck by Marlowe, but all the

finest passages are Shakespeare's. Take, for example, the following:--

"Why then, I do but dream on sovereignty;

Like one that stands upon a promontory,

And spies a far-off shore where he would tread,

Wishing his foot were equal with his eye;

And chides the sea that sunders him from thence,

Saying--he'll lade it dry to have his way:

So do I wish the crown, being so far off,

And so I chide the means that keep me from it;

And so I say--I'll cut the causes off,

Flattering me with impossibilities."

The last soliloquy (v. 6), on the other hand, belongs entirely to the

old play. A thoroughly Marlowesque turn of phrase meets us at the very

beginning:--

"See, how my sword weeps for the poor king's death."

Shakespeare has here left the powerful and admirable text untouched,

except for the deletion of a single superfluous and weakening verse,

"I had no father, I am like no father," which is followed by the

profoundest and most remarkable lines in the play:--

"I have no brother, I am like no brother;

And this word love, which greybeards call divine,

Be resident in men like one another,

And not in me: I am myself alone."

[1] _New Shakspere Society's Transactions_, 1875-76, pp. 219-303.

[2] "Tantæne animis cœlestibus iræ!--Medice, te ipsum!--Gelidus

timor occupat artus--La fin couronne les œuvres--Di faciant! laudis

summa sit ista tuæ."

VIII

_CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE AND HIS LIFE-WORK--TITUS ANDRONICUS_

The man who was to be Shakespeare's first master in the drama--a master

whose genius he did not at the outset fully understand--was born two

months before him. Christopher (Kit) Marlowe, the son of a shoemaker

at Canterbury, was a foundation scholar at the King's School of his

native town; matriculated at Cambridge in 1580; took the degree of

B.A. in 1583, and of M.A. at the age of twenty-three, after he had

left the University; appeared in London (so we gather from an old

ballad) as an actor at the Curtain Theatre; had the misfortune to

break his leg upon the stage; was no doubt on that account compelled

to give up acting; and seems to have written his first dramatic work,

_Tamburlaine the Great_, at latest in 1587. His development was much

quicker than Shakespeare's, he attained to comparative maturity much

earlier, and his culture was more systematic. Not for nothing had he

gone through the classical curriculum; the influence of Seneca, the

poet and rhetorician through whom English tragedy comes into relation

with the antique, is clearly recognisable in him, no less than in his

predecessors, the authors of _Gorboduc_ and _Tancred and Gismunda_ (the

former composed by two, the latter by five poets in collaboration);

only that the construction of these plays, with their monologues

and their chorus, is directly imitated from Seneca, while the more

independent Marlowe is influenced only in his diction and choice of

material.

In him the two streams begin to unite which have their sources in

the Biblical dramas of the Middle Ages and the later allegorical

folk-plays on the one hand, and, on the other hand, in the Latin plays

of antiquity. But he entirely lacks the comic vein which we find in

the first English imitations of Plautus and Terence--in _Ralph Roister

Doister_ and in _Gammer Gurtoris Needle_, acted, respectively, in

the middle of the century and in the middle of the sixties, by Eton

schoolboys and Cambridge students.

Kit Marlowe is the creator of English tragedy. He it was who

established on the public stage the use of the unrhymed iambic

pentameter as the medium of English drama. He did not invent English

blank verse--the Earl of Surrey (who died in 1547) had used it in his

translation of the _Æneid_, and it had been employed in the old play of

_Gorboduc_ and others which had been performed at court. But Marlowe

was the first to address the great public in this measure, and he did

so, as appears from the prologue to _Tamburlaine_, in express contempt

for "the jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits" and "such conceits as

clownage keeps in pay," seeking deliberately for tragic emphasis and

"high astounding terms" in which to express the rage of Tamburlaine.

Before his day, rhymed couplets of long-drawn fourteen-syllable verse

had been common in drama, and the monotony of these rhymes naturally

hampered the dramatic life of the plays. Shakespeare does not seem at

first to have appreciated Marlowe's reform, or quite to have understood

the importance of this rejection of rhyme in dramatic writing. Little

by little he came fully to realise it. In one of his first plays,

_Love's Labour's Lost,_ there are nearly twice as many rhymed as

unrhymed verses, more than a thousand in all; in his latest works rhyme

has disappeared. There are only two rhymes in _The Tempest_, and in _A

Winters Tale_ none at all.

Similarly, in his first plays (like Victor Hugo in his first Odes),

Shakespeare feels himself bound to make the sense end with the end of

the verse; as time goes on, he gradually learns an ever freer movement.

In _Love's Labour's Lost_ there are eighteen end-stopped verses (in

which the meaning ends with the line) for every one in which the sense

runs on; in _Cymbeline_ and _A Winter's Tale_ they are only about two

to one. This gradual development affords one method of determining the

date of production of otherwise undated plays.

Marlowe seems to have led a wild life in London, and to have been

entirely lacking in the commonplace virtues. He is said to have

indulged in a perpetual round of dissipations, to have been dressed

to-day in silk, to-morrow in rags, and to have lived in audacious

defiance of society and the Church. Certain it is that he was killed

in a brawl when only twenty-nine years old. He is said to have found

a rival in company with his mistress, and to have drawn his dagger to

stab him; but the other, a certain Francis Archer, wrested the dagger

from his grasp, and thrust it through his eye into his brain. It is

further related of him that he was an ardent and aggressive atheist,

who called Moses a juggler and said that Christ deserved death more

than Barabbas. These reports are probable enough. On the other hand,

the assertion that he wrote books against the Trinity and uttered

blasphemies with his latest breath, is evidently inspired by Puritan

hatred for the theatre and everything concerned with it. The sole

authority for these fables is Beard's _Theatre of God's Judgments_

(1597), the work of a clergyman, a fanatical Puritan, which appeared

six years after Marlowe's death.

There is no doubt that Marlowe led an extremely irregular life, but

the legend of his debaucheries must be much exaggerated, if only from

the fact that, though he was cut off before his thirtieth year, he has

yet left behind him so large and puissant a body of work. The legend

that he passed his last hours in blaspheming God is rendered doubly

improbable by Chapman's express statement that it was in compliance

with Marlowe's dying request that he continued his friend's paraphrase

of _Hero and Leander_. The passionate, defiant youth, surcharged with

genius, was fair game for the bigots and Pharisees, who found it only

too easy to besmirch his memory.

It is evident that Marlowe's gorgeous and violent style, especially as

it bursts forth in his earlier plays, made a profound impression upon

the youthful Shakespeare. After Marlowe's death, Shakespeare made a

kindly and mournful allusion to him in _As You Like It_ (iii. 5), where

Phebe quotes a line from his _Hero and Leander_:--

"Dead shepherd! now I find thy saw of might:

'Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not at first sight?'"

Marlowe's influence is unmistakable not only in the style and

versification but in the sanguinary action of _Titus Andronicus;_

clearly the oldest of the tragedies attributed to Shakespeare.

The evidence for the Shakespearian authorship of this drama of horrors,

though mainly external, is weighty and, it would seem, decisive. Meres,

in 1598, names it among the poet's works, and his friends included it

in the First Folio. We know from a gibe in Ben Jonson's Induction to

his _Bartholomew Fair_ that it was exceedingly popular. It is one of

the plays most frequently alluded to in contemporary writings, being

mentioned twice as often as _Twelfth Night_, and four or five times as

often as _Measure for Measure_ or _Timon_. It depicts savage deeds,

executed with the suddenness with which people of the sixteenth century

were wont to obey their impulses, cruelties as heartless and systematic

as those which characterised the age of Machiavelli. In short, it

abounds in such callous atrocities as could not fail to make a deep

impression on iron nerves and hardened natures.

These horrors are not, for the most part, of Shakespeare's invention.

An entry in Henslowe's diary of April 11, 1592, mentions for the first

time a play named _Titus and Vespasian_ ("tittus and vespacia"), which

was played very frequently between that date and January 1593, and was

evidently a prime favourite. In its English form this play is lost;

no Vespasian appears in our _Titus Andronicus_. But about 1600 a play

was performed in Germany, by English actors, which has been preserved

under the title, _Eine sehr klägliche Tragœdia von Tito Andronico und

der hoffertigen Kayserin, darinnen denckwürdige actiones zubefinden_,

and in this play a Vespasian duly appears, as well as the Moor Aaron,

under the name of Morian; so that, clearly enough, we have here a

translation, or rather a free adaptation, of the old play which formed

the basis of Shakespeare's.

We see, then, that Shakespeare himself invented only a few of the

horrors which form the substance of the play. The action, as he

presents it, is briefly this:--

Titus Andronicus, returning to Rome after a victory over the Goths, is

hailed as Emperor by the populace, but magnanimously hands over the

crown to the rightful heir, Saturninus. Titus even wants to give him

his daughter Lavinia in marriage, although she is already betrothed to

the Emperor's younger brother Bassianus, whom she loves. When one of

Titus's sons opposes this scheme, his father kills him on the spot.

In the meantime, Tamora, the captive Queen of the Goths, is brought

before the young Emperor. In spite of her prayers, Titus has ordered

the execution of her eldest son, as a sacrifice to the manes of his

own sons who have fallen in the war; but as Tamora is more attractive

to the Emperor than his destined bride, the young Lavinia, Titus makes

no attempt to enforce the promise he has just made, and actually

imagines that Tamora is sincere when she pretends to have forgotten all

the injuries he has done her. Tamora, moreover, has been and is the

mistress of the cruel and crafty monster Aaron, the Moor.

At the Moor's instigation, she induces her two sons to take advantage

of a hunting party to murder Bassianus; whereupon they ravish Lavinia,

and tear out her tongue and cut off her hands, so that she cannot

denounce them either in speech or writing. They remain undetected,

until at last Lavinia unmasks them by writing in the sand with a stick

which she holds in her mouth. Two of Titus's sons are thrown into

prison, falsely accused of the murder of their brother-in-law; and

Aaron gives Titus to understand that their death is certain unless he

ransoms them by cutting off his own right hand and sending it to the

Emperor. Titus cuts off his hand, only to be informed by Aaron, with

mocking laughter, that his sons are already beheaded--he can have their

heads, but not themselves.

He now devotes himself entirely to revenge. Pretending madness, after

the manner of Brutus, he lures Tamora's sons to his house, ties their

hands behind their backs, and stabs them like pigs, while Lavinia, with

the stumps of her arms, holds a basin to catch their blood. He bakes

their heads in a pie, and serves it up to Tamora at a feast given in

her honour, at which he appears disguised as a cook.

In the slaughter which now sets in, Tamora, Titus, and the Emperor are

killed. Ultimately Aaron, who has tried to save the bastard Tamora has

secretly borne him, is condemned to be buried alive up to the waist,

and thus to starve to death. Titus's son Lucius is proclaimed Emperor.

It will be seen that not only are we here wading ankle-deep in blood,

but that we are quite outside all historical reality. Among the many

changes which Shakespeare has made in the old play is the dissociation

of this motley tissue of horrors from the name of the Emperor

Vespasian. The part which he plays in the older drama is here shared

between Titus's brother Marcus and his son Lucius, who succeeds to the

throne. The woman who answers to Tamora is of similar character in the

old play, but is Queen of Ethiopia. Among the horrors which Shakespeare

found ready made are the rape and mutilation of Lavinia and the way in

which the criminals are discovered, the hewing off of Titus's hand,

and the scenes in which he takes his revenge in the dual character of

butcher and cook.

The old English poet evidently knew his Ovid and his Seneca. The

mutilation of Lavinia comes from the _Metamorphoses_ (the story of

Procne), and the cannibal banquet from the same source, as well as from

Seneca's _Thyestis_. The German version of the tragedy, however, is

written in a wretchedly flat and antiquated prose, while Shakespeare's

is couched in Marlowesque pentameters.

The example set by Marlowe in _Tamburlaine_ was no doubt in some

measure to blame for the lavish effusion of blood in the play adapted

by Shakespeare, which may in this respect be bracketed with two other

contemporary dramas conceived under the influence of _Tamburlaine_,

Robert Greene's _Alphonsus King of Arragon_ and George Peele's _Battle

of Alcazar_. Peele's tragedy has also its barbarous Moor, Muley Hamet,

who, like Aaron, is probably the offspring of Marlowe's malignant Jew

of Malta and his henchman, the sensual Ithamore.

Among the horrors added by Shakespeare, there are two which deserve a

moment's notice. The first is Titus's sudden and unpremeditated murder

of his son, who ventures to oppose his will. Shocking as it seems to

us to-day, such an incident did not surprise the sixteenth century

public, but rather appealed to them as a touch of nature. Such lives

as Benvenuto Cellini's show that even in highly cultivated natures,

anger, passion, and revenge were apt to take instantaneous effect in

sanguinary deeds. Men of action were in those days as ungovernable as

they were barbarously cruel when a sudden fury possessed them.

The other added trait is the murder of Tamora's son. We are reminded of

the scene in _Henry VI_, in which the young Prince Edward is murdered

in the presence of Queen Margaret; and Tamora's entreaties for her son

are among those verses in the play which possess the true Shakespearian

ring.

Certain peculiar turns of phrase in _Titus Andronicus_ remind us of

Peele and Marlowe.[1] But whole lines occur which Shakespeare repeats

almost word for word. Thus the verses--

"She is a woman, therefore may be woo'd;

She is a woman, therefore may be won,"

reappear very slightly altered in _Henry VI_., Part I.:--

"She's beautiful, and therefore to be woo'd;

She is a woman, and therefore to be won;"

while a similar turn of phrase is found in Sonnet XLI.:--

"Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won;

Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed;"

and, finally, a closely related distich occurs in Richard the Third's

famous soliloquy:

"Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?

Was ever woman in this humour won?"

It is true that the phrase "She is a woman, therefore may be won,"

occurs several times in Greene's romances, of earlier date than _Titus

Andronicus_, and this seems to have been a sort of catchword of the

period.

Although, on the whole, one may certainly say that this rough-hewn

drama, with its piling-up of external effects, has very little in

common with the tone or spirit of Shakespeare's mature tragedies, yet

we find scattered through it lines in which the most diverse critics

have professed to recognise Shakespeare's revising touch, and to catch

the ring of his voice.

Few will question that such a line as this, in the first scene of the

play--

"Romans--friends, followers, favourers of my right!"

comes from the pen which afterwards wrote _Julius Cæsar_. I may

mention, for my own part, that lines which, as I read the play through

before acquainting myself in detail with English criticism, had struck

me as patently Shakespearian, proved to be precisely the lines which

the best English critics attribute to Shakespeare. To one's own mind

such coincidences of feeling naturally carry conviction. I may cite as

an example Tamora's speech (iv. 4):--

"King, be thy thoughts imperious, like thy name.

Is the sun dimm'd, that gnats do fly in it?

The eagle suffers little birds to sing,

And is not careful what they mean thereby;

Knowing that with the shadow of his wings

He can at pleasure stint their melody.

Even so may'st thou the giddy men of Rome."

Unmistakably Shakespearian, too, are Titus's moving lament (iii.

I) when he learns of Lavinia's mutilation, and his half-distraught

outbursts in the following scene foreshadow even in detail a situation

belonging to the poet's culminating period, the scene between Lear

and Cordelia when they are both prisoners. Titus says to his hapless

daughter:

"Lavinia, go with me:

I'll to thy closet; and go read with thee

Sad stories chanced in the times of old."

In just the same spirit Lear exclaims:

"Come, let's away to prison ...

. . . . . so we'll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales."

It is quite unnecessary for any opponent of blind or exaggerated

Shakespeare-worship to demonstrate to us the impossibility of bringing

_Titus Andronicus_ into harmony with any other than a barbarous

conception of tragic poetry. But although the play is simply omitted

without apology from the Danish translation of Shakespeare's works, it

must by no means be overlooked by the student, whose chief interest

lies in observing the genesis and development of the poet's genius. The

lower its point of departure, the more marvellous its soaring flight.

[1] "Gallops the zodiac" (ii. I, line 7) occurs twice in

Peele. The phrase "A thousand deaths" (same scene, line 79) appears in

Marlowe's _Tamburlaine_.

IX

_SHAKESPEARE'S CONCEPTION OF THE RELATIONS OF THE SEXES--HIS MARRIAGE

VIEWED IN THIS LIGHT--LOVES LABOUR'S LOST--ITS MATTER AND STYLE--JOHN

LYLY AND EUPHUISM--THE PERSONAL ELEMENT_

During these early years in London, Shakespeare must have been

conscious of spiritual growth with every day that passed. With his

inordinate appetite for learning, he must every day have gathered new

impressions in his many-sided activity as a hard-working actor, a

furbisher-up of old plays in accordance with the taste of the day for

scenic effects, and finally as a budding poet, in whose heart every

mood thrilled into melody, and every conception clothed itself in

dramatic form. He must have felt his spirit light and free, not least,

perhaps, because he had escaped from his home in Stratford.

Ordinary knowledge of the world is sufficient to suggest that his

association with a village girl eight years older than himself could

not satisfy him or fill his life. The study of his works confirms

this conjecture. It would, of course, be unreasonable to attribute

conscious and deliberate autobiographical import to speeches torn from

their context in different plays; but there are none the less several

passages in his dramas which may fairly be taken as indicating that

he regarded his marriage in the light of a youthful folly. Take, for

example, this passage in _Twelfth Night_ (ii. 4):--

"_Duke_. What kind of woman is't?

_Vio_.

Of your complexion.

_Duke_. She is not worth thee then. What years, i' faith?

_Vio_. About your years, my lord.

_Duke_. Too old, by Heaven. Let still the woman take

An elder than herself; so wears she to him,

So sways she level in her husband's heart:

For, boy, however we do praise ourselves,

Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,

More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn,

Than women's are.

_Vio_.

think it well, my lord.

_Duke_. Then, let thy love be younger than thyself,

Or thy affection cannot hold the bent;

For women are as roses, whose fair flower,

Being once display'd, doth fall that very hour."

And this is in the introduction to the Fool's exquisite song about the

power of love, that song which "The spinsters and the knitters in the

sun And the free maids, that weave their thread with bones, Do use to

chant"--Shakespeare's loveliest lyric.

There are passages in other plays which seem to show traces of personal

regret at the memory of this early marriage and the circumstances under

which it came about. In the _Tempest_, for instance, we have Prospero's

warning to Ferdinand (iv. I):--

"If thou dost break her virgin-knot before

All sanctimonious ceremonies may,

With full and holy rite, be minister'd,

No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall

To make this contract grow, but barren hate,

Sour-ey'd disdain, and discord, shall bestrew

The union of your bed with weeds so loathly,

That you shall hate it both."

Two of the comedies of Shakespeare's first period are, as we might

expect, imitations, and even in part adaptations, of older plays. By

comparing them, where it is possible, with these earlier works, we

can discover, among other things, the thoughts to which Shakespeare,

in these first years in London, was most intent on giving utterance.

It thus appears that he held strong views as to the necessary

subordination of the female to the male, and as to the trouble caused

by headstrong, foolish, or jealous women.

His _Comedy of Errors_ is modelled upon the _Menœchmi_ of Plautus, or

rather on an English play of the same title dating from 1580, which

was not itself taken direct from Plautus, but from Italian adaptations

of the old Latin farce. Following the example of Plautus in the

_Amphitruo_, Shakespeare has supplemented the confusion between the

two Antipholuses by a parallel and wildly improbable confusion between

their serving-men, who both go by the same name and are likewise twins.

But it is in the contrast between the two female figures, the married

sister Adriana and the unmarried Luciana, that we catch the personal

note in the play. On account of the confusion of persons, Adriana rages

against her husband, and is at last on the point of plunging him into

lifelong misery. To her complaint that he has not come home at the

appointed time, Luciana answers:--

"A man is master of his liberty:

Time is their master; and, when they see time,

They'll go, or come: if so, be patient, sister.

_Adriana_. Why should their liberty than ours be more?

_Luciana_. Because their business still lies out o' door.

_Adr_. Look, when I serve him so, he takes it ill.

_Luc_. O! know he is the bridle of your will.

_Adr_. There's none but asses will be bridled so.

_Luc_. Why, headstrong liberty is lash'd with woe.

There's nothing situate under heaven's eye

But hath his bound, in earth, in sea, in sky:

The beasts, the fishes, and the winged fowls.

Are their males' subjects, and at their controls.

Men, more divine, the masters of all these,

Lords of the wide world, and wild wat'ry seas,

. . . . . . . . .

Are masters to their females, and their lords:

Then, let your will attend on their accords."

In the last act of the comedy, Adriana, speaking to the Abbess accuses

her husband of running after other women:--

"_Abbess_. You should for that have reprehended him.

_Adriana_. Why, so I did.

_Abb_. Ay, but not rough enough.

_Adr_. As roughly as my modesty would let me.

_Abb_. Haply, in private.

_Adr_. And in assemblies too.

_Abb_. Ay, but not enough.

_Adr_. It was the copy of our conference.

In bed, he slept not for my urging it:

At board, he fed not for my urging it;

Alone, it was the subject of my theme;

In company, I often glanced it:

Still did I tell him it was vile and bad.

_Abb_. And therefore came it that the man was mad:

The venom clamours of a jealous woman

Poison more deadly than a mad dog's tooth.

It seems, his sleeps were hinder'd by thy railing,

And thereof comes it that his head is light.

Thou say'st, his meat was sauc'd with thy upbraidings:

Unquiet meals make ill digestions;

Thereof the raging fire of fever bred:

And what's a fever but a fit of madness?"

At least as striking is the culminating point of Shakespeare's

adaptation of the old play called _The Taming of a Shrew_. He took very

lightly this piece of task-work, executed, it would seem, to the order

of his fellow-players. In point of diction and metre it is much less

highly finished than others of his youthful comedies; but if we compare

the Shakespearian play (in whose title the Shrew receives the definite

instead of the indefinite article) point by point with the original, we

obtain an invaluable glimpse into Shakespeare's comic, as formerly into

his tragic, workshop. Few examples are so instructive as this.

Many readers have no doubt wondered what was Shakespeare's design in

presenting this piece, of all others, in the framework which we Danes

know in Holberg's[1] _Jeppe paa Bjerget._ The answer is, that he had

no particular design in the matter. He took the framework ready-made

from the earlier play, which, however, he throughout remodelled and

improved, not to say recreated. It is not only far ruder and coarser

than Shakespeare's, but does not redeem its crude puerility by any

raciness or power.

Nowhere does the difference appear more decisively than in the great

speech in which Katharine, cured of her own shrewishness, closes the

play by bringing the other rebellious women to reason. In the old play

she begins with a whole cosmogony: "The first world was a form without

a form," until God, the King of kings, "in six days did frame his

heavenly work":--

"Then to his image he did make a man,

Olde Adam, and from his side asleepe

A rib was taken, of which the Lord did make

The woe of man, so termd by Adam then,

Woman for that by her came sinne to vs,

And for her sin was Adam doomd to die.

As Sara to her husband, so should we

Obey them, loue them, keepe and nourish them

If they by any meanes doo want our helpes,

Laying our handes vnder theire feete to tread,

If that by that we might procure there ease."

And she herself sets the example by placing her hand under her

husband's foot.

Shakespeare omits all this theology and skips the Scriptural

authorities, but only to arrive at the self-same result:--

"Fie, fie! unknit that threatening unkind brow,

And dart not scornful glances from those eyes,

To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor.

. . . . . . . . .

A woman mov'd is like a fountain troubled,

Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty;

And, while it is so, none so dry or thirsty

Will deign to sip, or touch one drop of it.

Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,

Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,

And for thy maintenance; commits his body

To painful labour, both by sea and land,

To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,

Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;

And craves no other tribute at thy hands,

But love, fair looks, and true obedience,

Too little payment for so great a debt.

Such duty as the subject owes the prince,

Even such a woman oweth to her husband;

And when she's froward, peevish, sullen, sour,

And not obedient to his honest will,

What is she but a foul contending rebel,

And graceless traitor to her loving lord?"

In these adapted plays, then, partly from the nature of their subjects

and partly because his thoughts ran in that direction, we find

Shakespeare chiefly occupied with the relation between man and woman,

and specially between husband and wife. They are not, however, his

first works. At the age of five-and-twenty or thereabouts Shakespeare

began his independent dramatic production, and, following the natural

bent of youth and youthful vivacity, he began it with a light and

joyous comedy.

We have several reasons, partly metrical (the frequency of rhymes),

partly technical (the dramatic weakness of the play), for supposing

_Love's Labour's Lost_ to be his earliest comedy. Many allusions point

to 1589 as the date of this play in its original form. For instance,

the dancing horse mentioned in i. 2 was first exhibited in 1589; the

names of the characters, Biron, Longaville, Dumain (Duc du Maine),

suggest those of men who were prominent in French politics between 1581

and 1590; and, finally, when we remember that the King of Navarre, as

the Princess's betrothed, becomes heir to the throne of France, we

cannot but conjecture a reference to Henry of Navarre, who mounted

that throne precisely in 1589. The play has not, however, reached us

in its earliest form; for the title-page of the quarto edition shows

that it was revised and enlarged on the occasion of its performance

before Elizabeth at Christmas 1597. There are not a few places in which

we can trace the revision, the original form having been inadvertently

retained along with the revised text. This is apparent in Biron's long

speech in the fourth act, sc. 3:--

"For when would you, my lord, or you, or you,

Have found the ground of study's excellence,

Without the beauty of a woman's face?

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:

They are the ground, the books, the academes,

From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire."

This belongs to the older text. Farther on in the speech, where we find

the same ideas repeated in another and better form, we have evidently

the revised version before us:--

"For when would you, my liege, or you, or you,

In leaden contemplation have found out

Such fiery numbers, as the prompting eyes

Of beauty's tutors have enrich'd you with?

. . . . . . . .

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:

They sparkle still the right Promethean fire,

They are the books, the arts, the academes,

That show, contain, and nourish all the world;

Else none at all in aught proves excellent."

The last two acts, which far surpass the earlier ones, have evidently

been revised with special care, and some details, especially in

the parts assigned to the Princess and Biron, now and then reveal

Shakespeare's maturer style and tone of feeling.

No original source has been found for this first attempt of the young

Stratfordian in the direction of comedy. For the first, and perhaps

for the last time, he seems to have sought for no external stimulus,

but set himself to evolve everything from within. The result is that,

dramatically, the play is the slightest he ever wrote. It has scarcely

ever been performed even in England, and may, indeed, be described as

unactable.

It is a play of two motives. The first, of course, is love--what else

should be the theme of a youthful poet's first comedy?--but love

without a trace of passion, almost without deep personal feeling, a

love which is half make-believe, tricked out in word-plays. For the

second theme of the comedy is language itself, poetic expression--for

its own sake--a subject round which all the meditations of the young

poet must necessarily have centred, as, in the midst of a cross-fire of

new impressions, he set about the formation of a vocabulary and a style.

The moment the reader opens this first play of Shakespeare's, he

cannot fail to observe that in several of his characters the poet is

ridiculing absurdities and artificialities in the manner of speech

of the day, and, moreover, that his personages, as a whole, display

a certain half-sportive luxuriance in their rhetoric as well as in

their wit and banter. They seem to be speaking, not in order to

inform, persuade, or convince, but simply to relieve the pressure of

their imagination, to play with words, to worry at them, split them

up and recombine them, arrange them in alliterative sequences, or

group them in almost identical antithetic clauses; at the same time

making sport no less fantastical with the ideas the words represent,

and illustrating them by new and far-fetched comparisons; until the

dialogue appears not so much a part of the action or an introduction

to it, as a tournament of words, clashing and swaying to and fro,

while the rhythmic music of the verse and prose in turns expresses

exhilaration, tenderness, affectation, the joy of life, gaiety or

scorn. Although there is a certain superficiality about it all, we

can recognise in it that exuberance of all the vital spirits which

characterises the Renaissance. To the appeal--

"White-handed mistress, one sweet word with thee,"

comes the answer--

"Honey, and milk, and sugar: there are three."

And well may Boyet say (v. 2):--

"The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen

As is the razor's edge invisible,

Cutting a smaller hair than may be seen;

Above the sense of sense, so sensible

Seemeth their conference; their conceits have wings

Fleeter than arrows, bullets, wind, thought, swifter things."

Boyet's words, however, refer merely to the youthful gaiety and

quickness of wit which may be found in all periods. We have here

something more than that: the diction of the leading characters, and

the various extravagances of expression cultivated by the subordinate

personages, bring us face to face with a linguistic phenomenon which

can be understood only in the light of history.

The word Euphuism is employed as a common designation for these

eccentricities of style--a word which owes its origin to John Lyly's

romance, _Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit_, published in 1578. Lyly was

also the author of nine plays, all written before 1589, and there is no

doubt that he exercised a very important influence upon Shakespeare's

dramatic style.

But it is a very narrow view of the matter which finds in him the sole

originator of the wave of mannerism which swept over the English poetry

of the Renaissance.

The movement was general throughout Europe. It took its rise in the

new-born enthusiasm for the antique literatures, in comparison with

whose dignity of utterance the vernacular seemed low and vulgar. In

order to approximate to the Latin models, men devised an exaggerated

and dilated phraseology, heavy with images, and even sought to attain

amplitude of style by placing side by side the vernacular word and the

more exquisite foreign expression for the same object. Thus arose the

_alto estilo_, the _estilo culto_. In Italy, the disciples of Petrarch,

with their _concetti_, were dominant in poetry; in Shakespeare's own

time, Marini came to the front with his antitheses and word-plays. In

France, Ronsard and his school obeyed the general tendency. In Spain,

the new style was represented by Guevara, who directly influenced Lyly.

John Lyly was about ten years older than Shakespeare. He was born in

Kent in 1553 or 1554, of humble parentage. Nevertheless he obtained

a full share of the literary culture of his time, studied at Oxford,

probably by the assistance of Lord Burleigh, took his Master's degree

in 1575, afterwards went to Cambridge, and eventually, no doubt on

account of the success of his _Euphues_, found a position at the

court of Elizabeth. For a period of ten years he was Court Poet, what

in our days would be called Poet Laureate. But his position was without

emolument. He was always hoping in vain for the post of Master of the

Revels, and two touching letters to Elizabeth, the one dated 1590,

the other 1593, in which he petitions for this appointment, show that

after ten years' labour at court he felt himself a ship-wrecked man,

and after thirteen years gave himself up to despair. All the duties and

responsibilities of the office he coveted were heaped upon him, but he

was denied the appointment itself. Like Greene and Marlowe, he lived a

miserable life, and died in 1606, poor and indebted, leaving his family

in destitution.

His book, _Euphues_, is written for the court of Elizabeth. The

Queen herself studied and translated the ancient authors, and it

was the fashion of her court to deal incessantly in mythological

comparisons and allusions to antiquity. Lyly shows this tendency in

all his writings. He quotes Cicero, imitates Plautus, cites numberless

verses from Virgil and Ovid, reproduces almost word for word in his

_Euphues_ Plutarch's _Treatise on Education,_ and borrows from Ovid's

_Metamorphoses_ the themes of several of his plays. In _A Midsummer

Night's Dream_, when Bottom appears with an ass's head and exclaims,

"I have a reasonable good ear for music; let's have the tongs and the

bones," we may doubtless trace the incident back to the metamorphosis

of Midas in Ovid, but through the medium of Lyly's _Mydas_.

It was not merely the relation of the age to antiquity that produced

the fashionable style. The new intercourse between country and country

had quite as much to do with it. Before the invention of printing, each

country had been spiritually isolated; but the international exchange

of ideas had by this time become very much easier. Every European

nation begins in the sixteenth century to provide itself with a library

of translations. Foreign manners and fashions, in language as well as

in costume, came into vogue, and helped to produce a heterogeneous and

motley style.

In England, moreover, we have to note the very important fact that,

precisely at the time when the Renaissance began to bear literary

fruit, the throne was occupied by a woman, and one who, without

possessing any delicate literary sense or refined artistic taste, was

interested in the intellectual movement. Vain, and inclined to secret

gallantries, she demanded, and received, incessant homage, for the

most part in extravagant mythological terms, from the ablest of her

subjects--from Sidney, from Spenser, from Raleigh--and was determined,

in short, that the whole literature of the time should turn towards her

as its central point. Shakespeare was the only great poet of the period

who absolutely declined to comply with this demand.

It followed from the relation in which literature stood to Elizabeth

that it addressed itself as a whole to women, and especially to

ladies of position. _Euphues_ is a ladies' book. The new style may be

described, not inaptly, as the development of a more refined method of

address to the fair sex.

Sir Philip Sidney, in a masque, had done homage to Elizabeth, then

forty-five years old, as "the Lady of the May." A letter which Sir

Walter Raleigh, after his disgrace, addressed from his prison to Sir

Robert Cecil on the subject of Elizabeth, affords a particularly

striking example of the Euphuistic style; admirably fitted as it

certainly was to express the passion affected by a soldier of forty for

the maiden of sixty who held his fate in her hands:--

"While she was yet nigher at hand, that I might hear of her

once in two or three days, my sorrows were the less; but

even now my heart is cast into the depth of all misery. I

that was wont to behold her riding like Alexander, hunting

like Diana, walking like Venus, the gentle wind blowing

her fair hair about her pure cheeks like a nymph; sometime

sitting in the shade like a goddess; sometime singing like

an angel; sometime playing like Orpheus. Behold the sorrow

of this world! Once amiss, hath bereaved me of all."[2]

The German scholar Landmann, who has devoted special study to

Euphuism,[3] has justly pointed out that the greatest extravagances of

style, and the worst sins against taste, of that period are always to

be found in books written for ladies, celebrating the charms of the

fair sex, and seeking to please by means of highly elaborated wit.

This may have been the point of departure of the new style; but it soon

ceased to address itself specially to feminine readers, and became a

means of gratifying the propensity of the men of the Renaissance to

mirror their whole nature in their speech, making it peculiar to the

point of affectation, and affected to the point of the most daring

mannerism. Euphuism ministered to their passion for throwing all they

said into high and highly coloured relief, for polishing it till it

shone and sparkled like real or paste diamonds in the sunshine, for

making it ring, and sing, and chime, and rhyme, without caring whether

reason took any share in the sport.

As a slight but characteristic illustration of this tendency, note the

reply of the page, Moth, to Armado (iii. I):--

"_Moth_. Master, will you win your love with a French brawl?

"_Arm_. How meanest thou? brawling in French?

"_Moth_. No, my complete master; but to jig off a tune at

the tongue's end, canary to it with your feet, humour it

with turning up your eyelids, sigh a note, and sing a note;

sometime through the throat, as if you swallowed love with

singing love; sometime through the nose, as if you snuffed

up love by smelling love; with your hat, penthouse-like,

o'er the shop of your eyes; with your arms crossed on your

thin belly-doublet, like a rabbit on a spit; or your hands

in your pocket, like a man after the old painting; and keep

not too long in one tune, but a snip and away. These are

complements, these are humours, these betray nice wenches,

that would be betrayed without these, and make them men of

note (do you note me?), that most are affected to these."

Landmann has conclusively proved that John Lyly's _Euphues_ is only an

imitation, and at many points a very close imitation, of the Spaniard

Guevara's book, an imaginary biography of Marcus Aurelius, which, in

the fifty years since its publication, had been six times translated

into English. It was so popular that one of these translations passed

through no fewer than twelve editions. Both in style and matter

_Euphues_ follows Guevara's book, which, in Sir Thomas North's

adaptation, bears the title of _The Dial of Princes_.

The chief characteristics of Euphuism were parallel and assonant

antitheses, long strings of comparisons with real or imaginary natural

phenomena (borrowed for the most part from Pliny's _Natural History_),

a partiality for images from antique history and mythology, and a love

of alliteration.

Not till a later date did Shakespeare ridicule Euphuism properly so

called--to wit, in that well-known passage in _Henry IV.,_ Part I.,

where Falstaff plays the king. In his speech beginning "Peace, good

pint-pot! peace, good tickle-brain!" Shakespeare deliberately parodies

Lyly's similes from natural history. Falstaff says:--

"Harry, I do not only marvel where thou spendest thy time,

but also how thou art accompanied: for though the camomile,

the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth,

the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears."

Compare with this the following passage from Lyly (cited by Landmann):--

"Too much studie doth intoxicate their braines, for (say

they) although yron, the more it is used, the brighter it

is, yet silver with much wearing doth wast to nothing ...

though the Camomill, the more it is troden and pressed

downe, the more it spreadeth, yet the Violet, the oftner

it is handeled and touched, the sooner it withereth and

decayeth."

Falstaff continues in the same exquisite strain:--

"There is a thing, Harry, which thou hast often heard of,

and it is known to many in our land by the name of pitch:

this pitch, as ancient writers do report, doth defile; so

doth the company thou keepest."

This citation of "ancient writers" in proof of so recondite a

phenomenon as the stickiness of pitch is again pure Lyly. Yet again,

the adjuration, "Now I do not speak to thee in drink, but in tears; not

in pleasure, but in passion; not in words only, but in woes also," is

an obvious travesty of the Euphuistic style.

Strictly speaking, it is not against Euphuism itself that Shakespeare's

youthful satire is directed in _Love's Labour's Lost_. It is certain

collateral forms of artificiality in style and utterance that are

aimed at. In the first place, bombast, represented by the ridiculous

Spaniard, Armado (the suggestion of the Invincible Armada in the name

cannot be unintentional); in the next place, pedantry, embodied in the

schoolmaster Holofernes, for whom tradition states that Florio, the

teacher of languages and translator of Montaigne, served as a model--a

supposition, however, which seems scarcely probable when we remember

Florio's close connection with Shakespeare's patron, Southampton.

Further, we find throughout the play the over-luxuriant and far-fetched

method of expression, universally characteristic of the age, which

Shakespeare himself had as yet by no means succeeded in shaking off.

Only towards the close does he rise above it and satirise it. That is

the intent of Biron's famous speech (v. 2):--

"Taffata phrases, silken terms precise,

Three-pil'd hyperboles, spruce affectation,

Figures pedantical: these summer-flies

Have blown me full of maggot ostentation.

I do forswear them; and I here protest,

By this white glove, (how white the hand, God knows)

Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express'd

In russet yeas, and honest kersey noes."

In the very first scene of the play, the King describes Armado, in too

indulgent terms, as--

"A refined traveller of Spain;

A man in all the world's new fashion planted,

That hath a mint of phrases in his brain;

One, whom the music of his own vain tongue

Doth ravish like enchanting harmony."

Holofernes the pedant, nearly a century and a half before Holberg's

Else Skolemesters,[4] expresses himself very much as she does:--

"_Holofernes_. The posterior of the day, most generous sir,

is liable, congruent, and measurable for the afternoon: the

word is well cull'd, chose; sweet and apt, I do assure you,

sir; I do assure."

Armado's bombast may probably be accepted as a not too extravagant

caricature of the bombast of the period. Certain it is that the

schoolmaster Rombus, in Sir Philip Sidney's _Lady of the May_,

addresses the Queen in a strain no whit less ridiculous than that of

Holofernes. But what avails the justice of a parody if, in spite of the

art and care lavished upon it, it remains as tedious as the mannerism

it ridicules! And this is unfortunately the case in the present

instance. Shakespeare had not yet attained the maturity and detachment

of mind which could enable him to rise high above the follies he

attacks, and to sweep them aside with full authority. He buries himself

in them, circumstantially demonstrates their absurdities, and is

still too inexperienced to realise how he thereby inflicts upon the

spectator and the reader the full burden of their tediousness. It is

very characteristic of Elizabeth's taste that, even in 1598, she could

still take pleasure in the play. All this fencing with words appealed

to her quick intelligence; while, with the unabashed sensuousness

characteristic of the daughter of Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn, she

found entertainment in the playwright's freedom of speech, even, no

doubt, in the equivocal badinage between Boyet and Maria (iv. I).

As was to be expected, Shakespeare is here more dependent on models

than in his later works. From Lyly, the most popular comedy-writer

of the day, he probably borrowed the idea of his Armado, who answers

pretty closely to Sir Tophas in Lyly's _Endymion_, copied, in his turn,

from Pyrgopolinices, the boastful soldier of the old Latin comedy.

It is to be noted, also, that the braggart and pedant, the two comic

figures of this play, are permanent types on the Italian stage, which

in so many ways influenced the development of English comedy.

The personal element in this first sportive production is, however,

not difficult to recognise: it is the young poet's mirthful protest

against a life immured within the hard-and-fast rules of an artificial

asceticism, such as the King of Navarre wishes to impose upon his

little court, with its perpetual study, its vigils, its fasts, and its

exclusion of womankind. Against this life of unnatural constraint the

comedy pleads with the voice of Nature, especially through the mouth of

Biron, in whose speeches, as Dowden has rightly remarked, we can not

infrequently catch the accent of Shakespeare himself. In Biron and his

Rosaline we have the first hesitating sketch of the masterly Benedick

and Beatrice of _Much Ado About Nothing_. The best of Biron's speeches,

those which are in unrhymed verse, we evidently owe to the revision of

1598; but they are conceived in the spirit of the original play, and

merely express Shakespeare's design in stronger and clearer terms than

he was at first able to compass. Even at the end of the third act Biron

is still combating as well as he can the power of love:--

"What! I love! I sue! I seek a wife!

A woman, that is like a German clock,

Still a repairing, ever out of frame,

And never going aright, being a watch,

But being watch'd that it may still go right!"

But his great and splendid speech in the fourth act is like a hymn to

that God of Battles who is named in the title of the play, and whose

outpost skirmishes form its matter:--

"Other slow arts entirely keep the brain,

And therefore, finding barren practisers,

Scarce show a harvest of their heavy toil;

But love, first learned in a lady's eyes,

Lives not alone immured in the brain,

But, with the motion of all elements,

Courses as swift as thought in every power,

And gives to every power a double power,

Above their functions and their offices.

It adds a precious seeing to the eye;

A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind;

A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound,

When the suspicious head of theft is stopp'd:

Love's feeling is more soft, and sensible,

Than are the tender horns of cockled snails.

. . . . . . . .

Never durst poet touch a pen to write,

Until his ink were temper'd with Love's sighs;

O! then his lines would ravish savage ears,

And plant in tyrants mild humility."

We must take Biron-Shakespeare at his word, and believe that in these

vivid and tender emotions he found, during his early years in London,

the stimulus which taught him to open his lips in song.

[1] Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754), the great comedy-writer of

Denmark, and founder of the Danish stage.--(TRANS.)

[2] _Raleigh_, by Edmund Gosse (English Worthies Series), p. 57.

[3] _New Shakspere Society's Transactions_,1880-86, Pt. ii. p. 241.

[4] The schoolmaster's wife in Ludvig Holberg's inimitable

comedy, _Barselstuen._--(TRANS.)

X

_LOVE'S LABOUR'S WON: THE FIRST SKETCH OF ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS

WELL--THE COMEDY OF ERRORS--THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA_

As a counterpart to the comedy of _Love's Labour's Lost_, Shakespeare

soon after composed another, entitled _Love's Labour's Won_. This we

learn from the celebrated passage in Francis Meres' _Palladis Tamia_,

where he enumerates the plays which Shakespeare had written up to that

date, 1598. We know, however, that no play of that name is now included

among the poet's works. Since it is scarcely conceivable that a play

of Shakespeare's, once acted, should have been entirely lost, the only

question is, which of the extant comedies originally bore that title.

But in reality there is no question at all: the play is _All's Well

that Ends Well_--not, of course, as we now possess it, in a form and

style belonging to a quite mature period of the poet's life, but as it

stood before the searching revision, of which it shows evident traces.

We cannot, indeed, restore the play as it originally issued from

Shakespeare's youthful imagination. But there are passages in it which

evidently belong to the older version, rhymed conversations, or at any

rate fragments of dialogue, rhymed letters in sonnet form, and numerous

details which entirely correspond with the style of _Love's Labour's

Lost_.

The piece is a dramatisation of Boccaccio's story of Gillette of

Narbonne. Only the comic parts are of Shakespeare's invention; he has

added the characters of Parolles, Lafeu, the Clown, and the Countess.

Even in the original sketch he no doubt gave new depth and vitality

to the leading characters, who are mere outlines in the story. The

comedy, as we know, has for its heroine a young woman who loves the

haughty Bertram with an unrequited and despised passion, cures the

King of France of a dangerous sickness, claims as her reward the right

to choose a husband from among the courtiers, chooses Bertram, is

repudiated by him, and, after a nocturnal meeting at which she takes

the place of another woman whom he believes himself to have seduced, at

last overcomes his resistance and is acknowledged as his wife.

Shakespeare has here not only shown the unquestioning acceptance

of his original, which was usual even in his riper years, but has

transferred to his play all its peculiarities and improbabilities. Even

the psychological crudities he has swallowed as they stand--such, for

instance, as the fact of a delicate woman forcing herself under cover

of night upon the man who has left his home and country for the express

purpose of escaping from her.

Shakespeare has drawn in Helena a patient Griselda, that type of loving

and cruelly maltreated womanhood which reappears in German poetry in

Kleist's _Käthchen von Heilbronn_--the woman who suffers everything in

inexhaustible tenderness and humility, and never falters in her love

until in the end she wins the rebellious heart.

The pity is that the unaccommodating theme compelled Shakespeare to

make this pearl among women in the end enforce her rights, after the

man she adores has not only treated her with contemptuous brutality,

but has, moreover, shown himself a liar and hound in his attempt to

blacken the character of the Italian girl whose lover he believes

himself to have been.

It is very characteristic of the English renaissance, and of the public

which Shakespeare had in view in his early plays, that he should make

this noble heroine take part with Parolles in the long and jocular

conversation (i. I) on the nature of virginity, which is one of the

most indecorous passages in his works. This dialogue must certainly

belong to the original version of the play.

We must remember that Helena, in that version, was in all probability

very different from the high-souled woman she became in the process

of revision. She no doubt expressed herself freely, according to

Shakespeare's youthful manner, in rhyming reveries on love and fate,

such as the following (i. I):--

"Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie

Which we ascribe to Heaven: the fated sky

Gives us free scope; only, doth backward pull

Our slow designs, when we ourselves are dull.

What power is it which mounts my love so high;

That makes me see, and cannot feed mine eye?

The mightiest space in fortune Nature brings

To join like likes, and kiss like native things.

Impossible be strange attempts to those

That weigh their pains in sense, and do suppose,

What hath been cannot be. Who ever strove

To show her merit, that did miss her love?"

Or else he made her pour forth multitudinous swarms of images, each

treading on the other's heels, like those in which she forecasts

Bertram's love-adventures at the court of France (i. I):--

"There shall your master have a thousand loves,

A mother, and a mistress, and a friend,

A phœnix, captain, and an enemy,

A guide, a goddess, and a sovereign,

A counsellor, a traitress, and a dear;

His humble ambition, proud humility,

His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet,

His faith, his sweet disaster; with a world

Of pretty, fond, adoptious Christendoms,

That blinking Cupid gossips."

_Loves's Labour's Won_ was probably conceived throughout in this

lighter tone.

There can be little doubt that the figure of Parolles was also sketched

in the earlier play. It forms an excellent counterpart to Armado in

_Love's Labour's Lost_. And in it we have undoubtedly the first faint

outline of the figure which, seven or eight years later, becomes

the immortal Falstaff. Parolles is a humorous liar, braggart, and

"misleader of youth," like Prince Henry's fat friend. He is put to

shame, just like Falstaff, in an ambuscade devised by his own comrades;

and being, as he thinks, taken prisoner, he deserts and betrays his

master. Falstaff hacks the edge of his sword in order to appear

valiant; and Parolles says (iv. I), "I would the cutting of my garments

would serve the turn, or the breaking of my Spanish sword."

In comparison with Falstaff the character is, of course, meagre and

faint. But if we compare it with such a figure as Armado in _Love's

Labour's Lost_, we find it sparkling with gaiety. It was, in all

probability, touched up and endowed with new wit during the revision.

On the other hand, there is a good deal of quite youthful whimsicality

in the speeches of the Clown, especially in the first act, which there

is no difficulty in attributing to Shakespeare's twenty-fifth year. The

song which the Fool sings at this point (i. 3) seems to belong to the

earlier form, and with it the speeches to which it gives rise:--

"_Countess_. What! one good in ten? you corrupt the song,

sirrah.

"_Clown_. One good woman in ten, madam, which is a purifying

o' the song. Would God would serve the world so all the

year! we'd find no fault with the tithe-woman, if I were the

parson. One in ten, quoth 'a! an we might have a good woman

born but for every blazing star, or at an earthquake, 't

would mend the lottery well."

In treating of _Love's Labour's Won_, we must necessarily fall back

upon more or less plausible conjecture. But we possess other comedies

dating from this early period of Shakespeare's career in which the

improvement of his technique and his steady advance towards artistic

maturity can be clearly traced.

First and foremost we have his _Comedy of Errors_, which must belong

to this earliest period, even if it comes after the two Love's Labour

comedies. It is written in a highly polished, poetical style; it

contains fewer lines of prose than any other of Shakespeare's

comedies; but its

diction is full of dramatic movement, the rhymes do not impede the

lively flow of the dialogue, and it has three times as many unrhymed as

rhymed verses.

Yet it must follow pretty close upon the plays we have just reviewed.

Certain phrases in the burlesque portrait of the fat cook drawn by

Dromio of Syracuse (iii. 2) help to put us on the track of its date.

His remark, that Spain sent whole "armadoes of caracks" to ballast

themselves with the rubies and carbuncles on her nose, indicates a time

not far remote from the Armada troubles. A more exact indication may be

found in the answer which the servant gives to his master's question

as to where France is situated upon the globe suggested by the cook's

spherical figure. "Where France?" asks Antipholus; and Dromio replies,

"In her forehead; arm'd and reverted, making war against her heir."

Now, in 1589, Henry of Navarre really ceased to be the heir to the

French throne, although his struggle for the possession of it lasted

until his acceptance of Catholicism in 1593. Thus we may place the date

of the play somewhere between the years 1589 and 1591.

This comedy on the frontier-line of farce shows with what giant strides

Shakespeare progresses in the technique of his art. It has the blood of

the theatre in its veins; we can already discern the experienced actor

in the dexterity with which the threads of the intrigue are involved,

and woven into an ever more intricate tangle, until the simple solution

is arrived at. While _Love's Labour's Lost_ still dragged itself

laboriously over the boards, here we have an impetus and a _brio_ in

all the dramatic passages which reveal an artist and foretell a master.

Only the rough outlines of the play are taken from Plautus; and the

motive, the possibility of incessant confusion between two masters and

two servants, is manipulated with a skill and certainty which astound

us in a beginner, and sometimes with quite irresistible whimsicality.

No doubt the merry play is founded upon an extreme improbability. So

exact is the mutual resemblance of each pair of twins, no less in

clothing than in feature, that not a single person for a moment doubts

their identity. Astonishing resemblances between twins do, however,

occur in real life; and when once we have accepted the premises, the

consequences develop naturally, or at any rate plausibly. We may even

say that in the art of intrigue-spinning, which was afterwards somewhat

foreign and unattractive to him, the poet here shows himself scarcely

inferior to the Spaniards of his own or of a later day, remarkable as

was their dexterity.

Now and then the movement is suspended for the sake of an exchange of

word-plays between master and servant; but it is generally short and

entertaining. Now and then the action pauses to let Dromio of Syracuse

work off one of his extravagant witticisms, as for example (iii. 2):--

"_Dromio S_. And yet she is a wondrous fat marriage.

"_Antipholus S_. How dost thou mean a fat marriage?

"_Dro. S_. Marry, sir, she's the kitchen-wench, and all

grease; and I know not what use to put her to, but to make a

lamp of her, and run from her by her own light. I warrant,

her rags, and the tallow in them, will burn a Poland winter:

if she lives till doomsday, she'll burn a week longer than

the whole world."

As a rule, however, the interest is so evenly sustained that the

spectator is held in constant curiosity and suspense as to the upshot

of the adventure.

At one single point the style rises to a beauty and intensity which

show that, though Shakespeare here abandons himself to the light play

of intrigue, it is a diversion to which he only condescends for the

moment. The passage is that between Luciana and Antipholus of Syracuse

(iii. 2), with its tender erotic cadences. Listen to such verses as

these:--

"_Ant. S_. Sweet mistress (what your name is else, I know not,

Nor by what wonder you do hit of mine),

Less in your knowledge, and your grace, you show not,

Than our earth's wonder; more than earth divine.

Teach me, dear creature, how to think and speak:

Lay open to my earthy-gross conceit,

Smother'd in errors, feeble, shallow, weak,

The folded meaning of your words' deceit.

Against my soul's pure truth, why labour you

To make it wander in an unknown field?

Are you a god? would you create me new?

Transform me then, and to your power I'll yield."

Since the play was first published in the Folio of 1623, it is of

course, not impossible that Shakespeare may have worked over this

lovely passage at a later period. But the whole structure of the

verses, with their interwoven rhymes, points in the opposite direction.

We here catch the first notes of that music which is soon to fill

_Romeo and Juliet_ with its harmonies.

The play which in all probability stands next on the chronological list

of Shakespeare's works, _The Two Gentlemen of Verona,_ is also one in

which we catch several anticipatory glimpses of later productions,

and is in itself a promising piece of work. It surpasses the earlier

comedies in two respects: first, in the beauty and clearness with which

the two young women are outlined, and then in the careless gaiety which

makes its first triumphant appearance in the parts of the servants.

Only now and then, in one or two detached scenes, do Speed and Launce

bore us with euphuistic word-torturings; as a rule they are quite

entertaining fellows, who seem to announce, as with a flourish of

trumpets, that, unlike either Lyly or Marlowe, Shakespeare possesses

the inborn gaiety, the keen sense of humour, the sparkling playfulness,

which are to enable him, without any strain on his invention, to

kindle the laughter of his audiences, and send it flashing round the

theatre from the groundlings to the gods. He does not as yet display

any particular talent for individualising his clowns. Nevertheless

we notice that, while Speed impresses us chiefly by his astonishing

volubility, the true English humour makes its entrance upon the

Shakespearian stage when Launce appears, dragging his dog by a string.

Note the torrent of eloquence in this speech of Speed's, enumerating

the symptoms from which he concludes that his master is in love:--

"First, you have learn'd, like Sir Proteus, to wreath

your arms, like a malcontent; to relish a love-song,

like a robin-redbreast; to walk alone, like one that had

the pestilence; to sigh, like a school-boy that had lost

his ABC; to weep, like a young wench that had buried her

grandam; to fast, like one that takes diet; to watch, like

one that fears robbing; to speak puling, like a beggar at

Hallowmas. You were wont, when you laugh'd, to crow like

a cock; when you walk'd, to walk like one of the lions;

when you fasted, it was presently after dinner; when you

look'd sadly, it was for want of money; and now you are

metamorphosed with a mistress, that, when I look on you, I

can hardly think you my master."

All these similes of Speed's are apt and accurate; it is only the way

in which he piles them up that makes us laugh. But when Launce opens

his mouth, unbridled whimsicality at once takes the upper hand. He

comes upon the scene with his dog:--

"Nay, 'twill be this hour ere I have done weeping; all the

kind of the Launces have this very fault.... I think Crab,

my dog, be the sourest-natured dog that lives: my mother

weeping, my father wailing, my sister crying, our maid

howling, our cat wringing her hands, and all our house in a

great perplexity, yet did not this cruel-hearted cur shed

one tear. He is a stone, a very pebble-stone, and has no

more pity in him than a dog; a Jew would have wept to have

seen our parting: why, my grandam, having no eyes, look you,

wept herself blind at my parting. Nay, I'll show you the

manner of it. This shoe is my father:--no, this left shoe

is my father;--no, no, this left shoe is my mother;--nay,

that cannot be so, neither:--yes, it is so, it is so; it

hath the worser sole. This shoe, with the hole in it, is my

mother, and this my father. A vengeance on't! there't is:

now, sir, this staff is my sister; for, look you, she is as

white as a lily, and as small as a wand: this hat is Nan,

our maid: I am the dog;--no, the dog is himself, and I am

the dog,--O! the dog is me, and I am myself: ay, so, so."

Here we have nothing but joyous nonsense, and yet nonsense of a

highly dramatic nature. That is to say, here reigns that youthful

exuberance of spirit which laughs with a childlike grace, even where

it condescends to the petty and low; exuberance as of one who glories

in the very fact of existence, and rejoices to feel life pulsing and

seething in his veins; exuberance such as belongs of right, in some

degree, to every well-constituted man in the light-hearted days of his

youth--how much more, then, to one who possesses the double youth of

years and genius among a people which is itself young, and more than

young: liberated, emancipated, enfranchised, like a colt which has

broken its tether and scampers at large through the luxuriant pastures.

_The Two Gentlemen of Verona_--which, by the way, is Shakespeare's

first declaration of love to Italy--is a graceful, entertaining, weakly

constructed comedy, dealing with faithful and faithless love, with

the treachery of man and the devotion of woman. Its hero, a noble and

wrongfully-banished youth, comes to live the life of a robber captain,

like Schiller's Karl von Moor two centuries later, but without a spark

of his spirit of rebellion. The solution of the imbroglio, by means of

the instant and unconditional forgiveness of the villain, is so naïve,

so senselessly conciliatory, that we feel it to be the outcome of a

joyous, untried, and unwounded spirit.

Shakespeare has borrowed part of his matter from a novel entitled

_Diana_, by the Portuguese Montemayor (1520-1562). The translation, by

Bartholomew Yong, was not printed until 1598, but the preface states

that it had then been completed for fully sixteen years, and manuscript

copies of it had no doubt passed from hand to hand, according to

the fashion of the time. On comparing the essential portion of the

romance[1] with _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, we find that Proteus's

infidelity and Julia's idea of following her lover in male attire, with

all that comes of it, belong to Montemayor. Moreover, in the novel,

Julia, disguised as a page, is present when Proteus serenades Sylvia

(Celia in the original). She also goes to Sylvia at Proteus's orders

to plead his cause with her; but in the novel the fair lady falls in

love with the messenger in male attire--an incident which Shakespeare

reserved for _Twelfth Night_. We even find in _Diana_ a sketch of the

second scene of the first act, between Julia and Lucetta, in which the

mistress, for appearance' sake, repudiates the letter which she is

burning to read.

One or two points in the play remind us of _Lovers Labour's Won_, which

Shakespeare had just completed in its original form; for example,

the journey in male attire in pursuit of the scornful loved one.

Many things, on the other hand, point forward to Shakespeare's later

work. The inconstancy of the two men in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_

is a variation and parody of Proteus's fickleness in this play. The

beginning of the second scene of the first act, where Julia makes

Lucetta pass judgment on her different suitors, is the first faint

outline of the masterly scene to the same effect between Portia and

Nerissa in _The Merchant of Venice_. The conversation between Sylvia

and Julia, which brings the fourth act to a close, answers exactly to

that between Olivia and Viola in the first act of _Twelfth Night._

Finally, the fact that Valentine, after learning the full extent of

his false friend's treachery, offers to resign to him his beautiful

betrothed, Sylvia, in order to prove by this sacrifice the strength of

his friendship, however foolish and meaningless it may appear in the

play, is yet an anticipation of the humble renunciation of the beloved

for the sake of the friend and of friendship, which impresses us so

painfully in Shakespeare's Sonnets.

In almost every utterance of the young women in this comedy we see

nobility of soul, and in the lyric passages a certain pre-Raphaelite

grace. Take, for example, what Julia says of her love in the last scene

of the second act:--

"The current, that with gentle murmur glides,

Thou know'st, being stopp'd, impatiently doth rage;

But, when his fair course is not hindered,

He makes sweet music with the enamell'd stones,

Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge

He overtaketh in his pilgrimage.

. . . . . . . .

I'll be as patient as a gentle stream,

And make a pastime of each weary step,

Till the last step have brought me to my love;

And there I'll rest, as, after much turmoil,

A blessed soul doth in Elysium."

And although the men are here of inferior interest to the women, we yet

find in the mouth of Valentine outbursts of great lyric beauty. For

example (iii. I):--

"Except I be by Silvia in the night,

There is no music in the nightingale;

Unless I look on Silvia in the day,

There is no day for me to look upon.

She is my essence; and I leave to be,

If I be not by her fair influence

Foster'd, illumin'd, cherish'd, kept alive."

Besides the strains of passion and of gaiety in this light acting play,

a third note is clearly struck, the note of nature. There is fresh air

in it, a first breath of those fragrant midland memories which prove

that this child of the country must many a time have said to himself

with Valentine (v. 4):--

"How use doth breed a habit in a man!

This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods,

I better brook than nourishing peopled towns."

In many passages of this play we are conscious for the first time of

that keen love of nature which never afterwards deserts Shakespeare,

and which gives to some of the most mannered of his early efforts, as,

for example, to his short narrative poems, their chief interest and

value.

[1] _The Shepherdess Felismena_ in Hazlitt's _Shakespeare's

Library_, Pt. I. vol. i. ed. 1875.

XI

_VENUS AND ADONIS: DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE--THE RAPE OF LUCRECE:

RELATION TO PAINTING_

Although Shakespeare did not publish _Venus and Adonis_ until the

spring of 1593, when he was twenty-nine years old, the poem must

certainly have been conceived, and probably written, several years

earlier. In dedicating it to the Earl of Southampton, then a youth

of twenty, he calls it "the first heire of my invention;" but it by

no means follows that it is literally the first thing he ever wrote.

The expression may merely imply that his work for the theatre was

not regarded as an independent exercise of his poetic talent. But

the over-luxuriant style betrays the youthful hand, and we place it,

therefore, among Shakespeare's writings of about 1590-91.

He had at this period, as we have seen, won a firm footing as an actor,

and had made himself not only useful but popular as an adapter of old

plays and an independent dramatist. But the drama of that time was

not reckoned as literature. There was all the difference in the world

between a "playwright" and a real poet. When Sir Thomas Bodley, about

the year 1600, extended and remodelled the old University Library, and

gave it his name, he decreed that no such "riffe-raffes" as playbooks

should ever find admittance to it.

Without being actually ambitious, Shakespeare felt the highly natural

wish to make a name for himself in literature. He wanted to take his

place among the poets, and to win the approval of the young noblemen

whose acquaintance he had made in the theatre. He also wanted to show

that he was familiar with the spirit of antiquity.

Spenser (born 1553) had just attracted general attention by publishing

the first books of his great narrative poem. What more natural than

that Shakespeare should be tempted to measure his strength against

Spenser, as he already had against Marlowe, his first master in the

drama?

The little poem of _Venus and Adonis_, and its companionpiece, _The

Rape of Lucrece_, which appeared in the following year, have this great

value for us, that here, and here only, are we certain of possessing a

text exactly as Shakespeare wrote it, since he himself superintended

its publication.

Italy was at this time the centre of all culture. The lyric and minor

epic poetry of England were entirely under the influence of the Italian

style and taste. Shakespeare, in _Venus and Adonis_, aims at the

insinuating sensuousness of the Italians. He tries to strike the tender

and languorous notes of his Southern forerunners. Among the poets of

antiquity, Ovid is naturally his model. He takes two lines from Ovid's

_Amores_ as the motto of his poem, which is indeed, nothing but an

expanded version of a scene in the _Metamorphoses_.

The name of Shakespeare, like the names of Æschylus, Michael Angelo,

and Beethoven, is apt to ring tragically in our ears. We have almost

forgotten that he had a Mozartean vein in his nature, and that his

contemporaries not only praised his personal gentleness and "honesty,"

but also the "sweetness" of his singing.

In _Venus and Adonis_ glows the whole fresh sensuousness of the

Renaissance and of Shakespeare's youth. It is an entirely erotic poem,

and contemporaries aver that it lay on the table of every light woman

in London.

The conduct of the poem presents a series of opportunities and

pretexts for voluptuous situations and descriptions. The ineffectual

blandishments lavished by Venus on the chaste and frigid youth, who,

in his sheer boyishness, is as irresponsive as a bashful woman--her

kisses, caresses, and embraces, are depicted in detail. It is as

though a Titian or Rubens had painted a model in a whole series of

tender situations, now in one attitude, now in another. Then comes the

suggestive scene in which Adonis's horse breaks away in order to meet

the challenge of a mare which happens to wander by, together with the

goddess's comments thereupon. Then new advances and solicitations,

almost inadmissibly daring, according to the taste of our day.

An element of feeling is introduced in the portrayal of Venus's anguish

when Adonis expresses his intention of hunting the boar. But it is to

sheer description that the poet chiefly devotes himself--description of

the charging boar, description of the fair young body bathed in blood,

and so forth. There is a fire and rapture of colour in it all, as in a

picture by some Italian master of a hundred years before.

Quite unmistakable is the insinuating, luscious, almost saccharine

quality of the writing, which accounts for the fact that, when his

immediate contemporaries speak of Shakespeare's diction, honey is the

similitude that first suggests itself to them. John Weever, in 1595,

calls him "honey-tongued," and in 1598 Francis Meres uses the same

term, with the addition of "mellifluous."

There is, indeed, an extraordinary sweetness in these strophes.

Tenderness, every

here and there, finds really entrancing utterance. When Adonis has for

the first time harshly repulsed Venus, in a speech of some length:--

"'What! canst thou talk?' quoth she, 'hast thou a tongue?

O, would thou hadst not, or I had no hearing!

Thy mermaid's voice hath done me double wrong;

I had my load before, now press'd with bearing:

Melodious discord, heavenly tune harsh-sounding,

Ear's deep-sweet music, and heart's deep-sore wounding,'"

But the style also exhibits numberless instances of tasteless Italian

artificiality. Breathing the "heavenly moisture" of Adonis's breath, she

"Wishes her cheeks were gardens full of flowers,

So they were dew'd with such distilling showers."

Of Adonis's dimples it is said:--

"These lovely caves, these round enchanting pits,

Open'd their mouths to swallow Venus' liking."

"My love to love," says Adonis, "is love but to disgrace it." Venus

enumerates the delights he would afford to each of her senses

separately, supposing her deprived of all the rest, and concludes

thus:--

"'But, O, what banquet wert thou to the taste,

Being nurse and feeder of the other four

Would they not wish the feast might ever last,

And bid Suspicion double-lock the door,

Lest Jealousy, that sour unwelcome guest,

Should, by his stealing in, disturb the feast?'"

Such lapses of taste are not infrequent in Shakespeare's early comedies

as well. They answer, in their way, to the riot of horrors in _Titus

Andronicus_--analogous mannerisms of an as yet undeveloped art.

At the same time, the puissant sensuousness of this poem is as a

prelude to the large utterance of passion in _Romeo and Juliet_, and

towards its close Shakespeare soars, so to speak, symbolically, from a

delineation of the mere fever of the senses to a forecast of that love

in which it is only one element, when he makes Adonis say:--

"I Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,

But Lust's effect is tempest after sun;

Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain,

Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done:

Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies;

Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies.'"

It would, of course, be absurd to lay too much stress on these edifying

antitheses in this unedifying poem. It is more important to note that

the descriptions of animal life--for example, that of the hare's

flight--are unrivalled for truth and delicacy of observation, and to

mark how, even in this early work, Shakespeare's style now and then

rises to positive greatness.

This is especially the case in the descriptions of the boar and of the

horse. The boar--his back "set with a battle of bristly pikes," his

eyes like glow-worms, his snout "digging sepulchres where'er he goes,"

his neck short and thick, and his onset so fierce that

"The thorny brambles and embracing bushes,

As fearful of him, part; through which he rushes"

--this boar seems to have been painted by Snyders in a huntingpiece, in

which the human figures came from the brush of Rubens.

Shakespeare himself seems to have realised with what mastery he had

depicted the stallion; for he says:--

"Look, when a painter would surpass the life,?

In limning out a well-proportion'd steed,

His art with nature's workmanship at strife,

As if the dead the living should exceed;

So did this horse excel a common one,

In shape, in courage, colour, pace, and bone."

We can feel Shakespeare's love of nature in such a stanza as this:--

"Round-hoof'd, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,

Broad breast, full eye, small head, and nostril wide,

High crest, short ears, straight legs, and passing strong,

Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide:

Look, what a horse should have, he did not lack,

Save a proud rider on so proud a back."

How consummate, too, is the description of all his movements:--

"Sometime he scuds far off, and there he stares;

Anon he starts at stirring of a feather."

We hear "the high wind singing through his mane and tail." We are

almost reminded of the magnificent picture of the horse at the end of

the Book of Job: "He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage....

He smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and

the shouting." So great is the compass of style in this little poem

of Shakespeare's youth: from Ovid to the Old Testament, from modish

artificiality to grandiose simplicity.

_Lucrece_, which appeared in the following year, was, like _Venus and

Adonis_; dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, in distinctly more

familiar, though still deferential terms. The poem is designed as a

counterpart to its predecessor. The one treats of male, the other of

female, chastity. The one portrays ungovernable passion in a woman;

the other, criminal passion in a man. But in _Lucrece_ the theme is

seriously and morally handled. It is almost a didactic poem, dealing

with the havoc wrought by unbridled and brutish desire.

It was not so popular in its own day as its predecessor, and it does

not afford the modern reader any very lively satisfaction. It shows an

advance in metrical accomplishment. To the six-line stanza of _Venus

and Adonis_ a seventh line is added, which heightens its beauty and its

dignity. The strength of _Lucrece_ lies in its graphic and gorgeous

descriptions, and in its sometimes microscopic psychological analysis.

For the rest, its pathos consists of elaborate and far-fetched rhetoric.

The lament of the heroine after the crime has been committed is pure

declamation, extremely eloquent no doubt, but copious and artificial

as an oration of Cicero's, rich in apostrophes and antitheses. The

sorrow of "Collatine and his consorted lords" is portrayed in laboured

and quibbling speeches. Shakespeare's knowledge and mastery are most

clearly seen in the reflections scattered through the narrative--such,

for instance, as the following profound and exquisitely written stanza

on the softness of the feminine nature:--

"For men have marble, women waxen minds,

And therefore are they form'd as marble will;

The weak oppress'd, the impression of strange kinds

Is form'd in them by force, by fraud, or skill:

Then call them not the authors of their ill,

No more than wax shall be accounted evil,

Wherein is stamp'd the semblance of a devil."

In point of mere technique the most remarkable passage in the poem is

the long series of stanzas (lines 1366 to 1568) describing a painting

of the destruction of Troy, which Lucrece contemplates in her despair.

The description is marked by such force, freshness, and naïvete as

might suggest that the writer had never seen a picture before:--

"Here one man's hand leaned on another's head,

His nose being shadowed by his neighbour's ear."

So dense is the throng of figures in the picture, so deceptive the

presentation,

"That for Achilles' image stood his spear,

Grip'd in an armed hand: himself behind

Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind,

A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head,

Stood for the whole to be imagined."

Here, as in all other places in which Shakespeare mentions pictorial

or plastic art, it is realism carried to the point of illusion that he

admires and praises. The paintings in the Guild Chapel at Stratford

were, doubtless, as before mentioned, the first he ever saw. He may

also, during his Stratford period, have seen works of art at Kenilworth

Castle or at St. Mary's Church in Coventry. In London, in the Hall

belonging to the Merchants of the Steel-Yard, he had no doubt seen

two greatly admired pictures by Holbein which hung there. Moreover,

there were in London at that time not only numerous portraits by Dutch

masters, but also a few Italian pictures. It appears, for example,

from a list of "Pictures and other Works of Art" drawn up in 1613

by John Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, that there hung at Whitehall a

painting of Julius Cæsar, and another of Lucretia, said to have been

"very artistically executed." This picture may possibly have suggested

to Shakespeare the theme of his poem. Larger compositions were no

doubt familiar to him in the tapestries of the period (the hangings at

Theobald's presented scenes from Roman history); and he may very likely

have seen the excellent Dutch and Italian pictures at Nonsuch Palace,

then in the height of its glory.

His reflections upon art led him, as aforesaid, to the conclusion that

it was the artist's business to keep a close watch upon nature, to

master or transcend her. Again and again he ranks truth to nature as

the highest quality in art. He evidently cared nothing for allegorical

or religious painting; he never so much as mentions it. Nor, with all

his love for "the concord of sweet sounds," does he ever allude to

church music.

The description of the great painting of the fall of Troy is no mere

irrelevant decoration to the poem; for the fall of Troy symbolises

the fall of the royal house of Tarquin as a consequence of Sextus's

crime. Shakespeare did not look at the event from the point of view

of individual morality alone; he makes us feel that the honour of a

royal family, and even its dynastic existence, are hazarded by criminal

aggression upon a noble house. All the conceptions of honour belonging

to mediæval chivalry are transferred to ancient Rome. "Knights, by

their oaths, should right poor ladies' harms," says Lucrece, in calling

upon her kinsmen to avenge her.

In his picture of the sack of Troy, Shakespeare has followed the second

book of Virgil's _Æneid_; for the groundwork of his poem as a whole he

has gone to the short but graceful and sympathetic rendering of the

story of Lucretia in Ovid's _Fasti_ (ii. 685-852).

A comparison between Ovid's style and that of Shakespeare certainly

does not redound to the advantage of the modern poet. In opposition

to this semi-barbarian, Ovid seems the embodiment of classic

severity. Shakespeare's antithetical conceits and other lapses of

taste are painfully obtrusive. Every here and there we come upon such

stumbling-blocks as these:--

"Some of her blood still pure and red remain'd,

And some look'd black, and that false Tarquin stain'd;"

or,

"If children pre-decease progenitors,

We are their offspring, and they none of ours."

This lack of nature and of taste is not only characteristic of the

age in general, but is bound up with the great excellences and rare

capacities which Shakespeare was now developing with such amazing

rapidity. His momentary leaning towards this style was due, in part at

least, to the influence of his fellow-poets, his friends, his rivals in

public favour--the influence, in short, of that artistic microcosm in

whose atmosphere his genius shot up to sudden maturity.

We talk of "schools" in literature, and it is no exaggeration to say

that every period of rich productivity presupposes a school or schools.

But the word "school," beautiful in its original Greek signification,

has been narrowed and specialised by modern usage. We ought to say

"forcing-house" instead of "school"--to talk of the classic and the

romantic forcing-house, the Renaissance forcing-house,[1] and so forth.

In very small communities, where there is none of that emulation which

alone can call forth all an artist's energies, absolute mastery is as

a rule unattainable. Under such conditions, a man will often make a

certain mark early in life, and find his success his ruin. Others seek

a forcing-house outside their native land--Holberg in Holland, England,

and France; Thorvaldsen in Rome; Heine in Paris. The moment he set foot

in London, Shakespeare was in such a forcing-house. Hence the luxuriant

burgeoning of his genius.

He lived in constant intercourse and rivalry with vivid and daringly

productive spirits. The diamond was polished in diamond dust.

The competitive instinct (as Rümelin has rightly pointed out) was

strong in the English poets of that period. Shakespeare could not but

strive from the first to outdo his fellows in strength and skill. At

last he comes to think, like Hamlet: however deep they dig--

"it shall go hard

But I will delve one yard below their mines"

--one of the most characteristic utterances of Hamlet and of

Shakespeare.

This sense of rivalry contributed to the formation of Shakespeare's

early manner, both in his narrative poems and in his plays. Hence

arose that straining after subtleties, that absorption in quibbles,

that wantoning in word-plays, that bandying to and fro of shuttlecocks

of speech. Hence, too, that state of over-heated passion and

over-stimulated fancy, in which image begets image with a headlong

fecundity,

like that of the low organisms which pullulate by mere

scission.

This man of all the talents had the talent for word-plays and

thought-quibbles among the rest; he was too richly endowed to be

behind-hand even here. But there was in all this something, foreign

to his true self. When he reaches the point at which his inmost

personality begins to reveal itself in his writings, we are at once

conscious of a far deeper and more emotional nature than that which

finds expression in the teeming conceits of the narrative poems and the

incessant scintillations of the early comedies.

[1] The author's idea is, I think, best rendered by this literal

translation; but the Danish word _Drivhus_ is much less cumbrous than

its English equivalent.--TRANS.

XII

_A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM--ITS HISTORICAL CIRCUMSTANCES--ITS

ARISTOCRATIC, POPULAR, COMIC, AND SUPERNATURAL ELEMENTS_

In spite of the fame and popularity which _Venus and Adonis_ and

_Lucrece_ won for Shakespeare, he quickly understood, with his

instinctive self-knowledge, that it was not narrative but dramatic

poetry which offered the fullest scope for his powers.

And now it is that we find him for the first time rising to the full

height of his genius. This he does in a work of dramatic form; but,

significantly enough, it is not as yet in its dramatic elements that

we recognise the master-hand, but rather in the rich and incomparable

lyric poetry with which he embroiders a thin dramatic canvas.

His first masterpiece is a masterpiece of grace, both lyrical

and comic. _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ was no doubt written as a

festival-play or masque, before the masque became an established

art-form, to celebrate the marriage of a noble patron; probably for the

May festival after the private marriage of Essex with the widow of Sir

Philip Sidney in the year 1590. In Oberon's great speech to Puck (ii.

2) there is a significant passage about a throned vestal, invulnerable

to Cupid's darts, which is obviously a flattering reference to

Elizabeth in relation to Leicester; while the lines about a little

flower wounded by the fiery shaft of love mournfully allude, in the

like allegorical fashion, to Essex's mother and her marriage with

Leicester, after his courtship had been rejected by the Queen. Other

details also point to Essex as the bridegroom typified in the person of

Theseus.

How is one to speak adequately of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_? It is

idle to dwell upon the slightness of the character-drawing, for the

poet's effort is not after characterisation; and, whatever its weak

points, the poem as a whole is one of the tenderest, most original, and

most perfect Shakespeare ever produced.

It is Spenser's fairy-poetry developed and condensed; it is Shelley's

spirit-poetry anticipated by more than two centuries. And the airy

dream is shot with whimsical parody. The frontiers of Elf-land and

Clown-land meet and mingle.

We have here an element of aristocratic distinction in the princely

couple, Theseus and Hippolyta, and their court. We have here an element

of sprightly burlesque in the artisans' performance of Pyramus and

Thisbe, treated with genial irony and divinely felicitous humour.

And here, finally, we have the element of supernatural poetry, which

soon after flashes forth again in _Romeo and Juliet_, where Mercutio

describes the doings of Queen Mab. Puck and Pease-blossom, Cobweb and

Mustardseed--pigmies who hunt the worms in a rosebud, tease bats, chase

spiders, and lord it over nightingales--are the leading actors in an

elfin play, a fairy carnival of inimitable mirth and melody, steeped

in a midsummer atmosphere of mist-wreaths and flower-scents, under the

afterglow that lingers through the sultry night. This miracle of happy

inspiration contains the germs of innumerable romantic achievements in

England, Germany, and Denmark, more than two centuries later.

There is in French literature a graceful mythological play of somewhat

later date--Molière's _Psyché_--in which the exquisite love-verses

which stream from the heroine's lips were written by the sexagenarian

Corneille. It is, in its way, an admirable piece of work. But read it

and compare it with the nature-poetry of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_,

and you will feel how far the great Englishman surpasses the greatest

Frenchmen in pure unrhetorical lyrism and irrepressibly playful,

absolutely poetical poetry, with its scent of clover, its taste of wild

honey, and its airy and shifting dream-pageantry.

We have here no pathos. The hurricane of passion does not as yet

sweep through Shakespeare's work. No; it is only the romantic and

imaginative side of love that is here displayed, the magic whereby

longing transmutes and idealises its object, the element of folly,

infatuation, and illusion in desire, with its consequent variability

and transitoriness. Man is by nature a being with no inward compass,

led astray by his instincts and dreams, and for ever deceived either

by himself or by others. This Shakespeare realises, but does not, as

yet, take the matter very tragically. Thus the characters whom he here

presents, even, or rather especially, in their love-affairs, appear as

anything but reasonable beings. The lovers seek and avoid each other

by turns, they love and are not loved again; the couples attract each

other at cross-purposes; the youth runs after the maiden who shrinks

from him, the maiden flees from the man who adores her; and the poet's

delicate irony makes the confusion reach its height and find its

symbolic expression when the Queen of the Fairies, in the intoxication

of a love-dream, recognises her ideal in a journeyman weaver with an

ass's head.

It is the love begotten of imagination that here bears sway. Hence

these words of Theseus (v. I):--

"Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,

Are of imagination all compact."

And then follows Shakespeare's first deliberate utterance as to the

nature and art of the poet. He is not, as a rule, greatly concerned

with the dignity of the poet as such. Quite foreign to him is the

self-idolatry of the later romantic poets, posing as the spiritual

pastors and masters of the world. Where he introduces poets in his

plays (as in _Julius Cæsar_ and _Timon_), it is generally to assign

them a pitiful part. But here he places in the mouth of Theseus the

famous and exquisite words:--

"The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Such tricks hath strong imagination."

When he wrote this he felt that his wings had grown.

As _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ was not published until 1600, it is

impossible to assign an exact date to the text we possess. In all

probability the piece was altered and amplified before it was printed.

Attention was long ago drawn to the following lines in Theseus's speech

at the beginning of the fifth act:--

"_The thrice three Muses mourning for the death_

_Of Learning, late deceas'd in beggary._

This is some satire, keen and critical."

Several commentators have seen in these lines an allusion to the death

of Spenser, which, however, did not occur until 1599, so late that

it can scarcely be the event alluded to. Others have conjectured a

reference to the death of Robert Greene in 1592. The probability is

that the words refer to Spenser's poem, _The Tears of the Muses_,

published in 1591, which was a complaint of the indifference of the

nobility towards the fine arts. If the play, as we have so many reasons

for supposing, was written for the marriage of Essex, these lines

must have been inserted later, as they might easily be in a passage

like this, where a whole series of different subjects for masques is

enumerated.

The important passage (ii. 2) where Oberon recounts his vision has

already been mentioned. It follows Oberon's description of the mermaid

seated on a dolphin's back--

"Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath

That certain stars shot madly from their spheres,"

--an allusion, not, as some have supposed, to Mary Stuart, who was

married to the Dauphin of France, but to the festivities and fire-work

displays which celebrated Elizabeth's visit to Kenilworth in 1575.

The passage is interesting, among other reasons, because we have here

one of the few allegories to be found in Shakespeare--an allegory

which has taken that form because the matters to which it alludes

could not be directly handled. Shakespeare is here referring back,

as English criticism has long ago pointed out,[1] to the allegory

in Lyly's mythological play, _Endymion_. There can be no doubt

that Cynthia (the moon-goddess) in Lyly's play stands for Queen

Elizabeth, while Leicester figures as Endymion, who is represented

as hopelessly enamoured of Cynthia. Tellus and Floscula, of whom the

one loves Endymion's "person," the other his "virtues," represent the

Countesses of Sheffield and Essex, who stood in amatory relations to

Leicester. The play is one tissue of adulation for Elizabeth, but is

so constructed as at the same time to flatter and defend Leicester.

In defiance of the actual fact, it exhibits the Queen as entirely

inaccessible to her adorer's homage, and Leicester's intrigue with the

Countess of Sheffield as a mere mask for his passion for the Queen;

in other words, it represents these relations as the Queen would wish

to have them understood by the people, and Leicester by the Queen.

The Countess of Essex, who was afterwards to play so large a part in

Leicester's life, plays a very small part in the drama. Her love finds

expression only in one or two unobtrusive phrases, such as her cry of

joy on seeing Endymion, after the forty years' sleep in which he has

grown an old man, rejuvenated by a single kiss from Cynthia's lips.

The relation between Leicester and Lettice, Countess of Essex, must

certainly have made a deep impression upon Shakespeare. By Leicester's

contrivance, her husband had been for a long time banished to

Ireland, first as commander of the troops in Ulster, and afterwards

as Earl-Marshal; and when he died, in 1576--commonly thought, though

without proof, to have been poisoned--his widow, after a lapse of only

a few days, went through a secret marriage with his supposed murderer.

When Leicester, twelve years later, met with a sudden death, also,

according to popular belief, by poison, the event was regarded as a

judgment on a great criminal. In all probability, Shakespeare found in

these events one of the motives of his _Hamlet_. Whether the Countess

Lettice was actually Leicester's mistress during her husband's lifetime

is, of course, uncertain; in any case, the Countess's relation to

Robert, Earl of Essex, her son by her first marriage, was always of the

best. She was, however, punished by the Queen's displeasure, which was

so vehement that she was forbidden to show herself at court.

Shakespeare has retained Lyly's names, merely translating them into

English. Cynthia has become the moon, Tellus the earth, Floscula the

little flower; and with this commentary, we are in a position to admire

the delicate and poetical way in which he has touched upon the family

circumstances of the supposed bridegroom, the Earl of Essex:--

"_Oberon_. That very time I saw (but thou couldst not),

Flying between the cold moon and the earth,

Cupid all arm'd: a certain aim he took

At a fair vestal throned by the west,

And loos'd his love-shaft smartly from his bow,

As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.

But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft

Quench'd in the chaste beams of the wat'ry moon,

And the imperial votaress passed on,

In maiden meditation, fancy-free.

Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell:

It fell upon a little western flower,

Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,

And maidens call it Love-in-idleness."

It is with the juice of this flower that Oberon makes every one upon

whose eyes it falls dote upon the first living creature they happen to

see.

The poet's design in the flattery addressed to Elizabeth--one of the

very few instances of the kind in his works--was no doubt to dispose

her favourably towards his patron's marriage, or, in other words, to

deprecate the anger with which she was in the habit of regarding any

attempt on the part of her favourites, or even of ordinary courtiers,

to marry according to their own inclinations. Essex in particular had

stood very close to her, since, in 1587, he had supplanted Sir Walter

Raleigh in her favour; and although the Queen, now in her fifty-seventh

year, was fully thirty-four years older than her late adorer,

Shakespeare did not succeed in averting her anger from the young

couple. The bride was commanded "to live very retired in her mother's

house."

_Midsummer Night's Dream_ is the first consummate and immortal

masterpiece which Shakespeare produced.

The fact that the pairs of lovers are very slightly individualised, and

do not in themselves awaken any particular sympathy, is a fault that we

easily overlook, amid the countless beauties of the play. The fact that

the changes in the lovers' feelings are entirely unmotived is no fault

at all, for Oberon's magic is simply a great symbol, typifying the

sorcery of the erotic imagination. There is deep significance as well

as drollery in the presentation of Titania as desperately enamoured of

Bottom with his ass's head. Nay, more; in the lovers' ever-changing

attractions and repulsions we may find a whole sportive love-philosophy.

The rustic and popular element in Shakespeare's genius here appears

more prominently than ever before. The country-bred youth's whole

feeling for and knowledge of nature comes to the surface, permeated

with the spirit of poetry. The play swarms with allusions to plants

and insects, and all that is said of them is closely observed and

intimately felt. In none of Shakespeare's plays are so many species

of flowers, fruits, and trees mentioned and characterised. H. N.

Ellacombe, in his essay on _The Seasons of Shakspere's Plays_,[2]

reckons no fewer than forty-two species. Images borrowed from nature

meet us on every hand. For example, in Helena's beautiful description

of her school friendship with Hermia (iii. 2), she says:--

"So we grew together,

Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,

But yet an union in partition;

Two lovely berries moulded on one stem."

When Titania exhorts her elves to minister to every desire of her

asinine idol, she says (iii. I):--

"Be kind and courteous to this gentleman:

Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes;

Feed him with apricocks, and dewberries,

With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries.

The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees,

And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs,

And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes,

To have my love to bed, and to arise;

And pluck the wings from painted butterflies,

To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes.

Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies."

The popular element in Shakespeare is closely interwoven with his love

of nature. He has here plunged deep into folk-lore, seized upon the

figments of peasant superstition as they survive in the old ballads,

and mingled brownies and pixies with the delicate creations of

artificial poetry, with Oberon, who is of French descent ("Auberon,"

from _l'aube du Jour_), and Titania, a name which Ovid gives in his

_Metamorphoses_ (iii. 173) to Diana as the sister of the Titan Sol.

_The Maydes Metamorphosis,_ a play attributed to Lyly, although not

printed till 1600, may be older than _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. In

that case Shakespeare may have found the germ of some of his fairy

dialogue in the pretty fairy song which occurs in it. There is a marked

similarity even in details of dialogue. For example, this conversation

between Bottom and the fairies (iii. I) reminds us of Lyly[3]:--

"_Bot_. I cry your worship's mercy, heartily.--I beseech

your worship's name.

"_Cob_. Cobweb.

"_Bot_. I shall desire you of more acquaintance, good Master

Cobweb. If I cut my finger, I shall make bold with you. Your

name, honest gentleman?

"_Peas_. Pease-blossom.

"_Bot_. I pray you, commend me to Mistress Squash, your

mother, and to Master Peascod, your father. Good Master

Pease-blossom, I shall desire you of more acquaintance

too.--Your name, I beseech you, sir.

"_Mus_. Mustard-seed.

"_Bot_. Good Master Mustard-seed, I know your patience

well: that same cowardly, giant-like oxbeef hath devoured

many a gentleman of your house. I promise you, your kindred

hath made my eyes water ere now. I desire you of more

acquaintance, good Master Mustard-seed."

The contrast between the rude artisans' prose and the poetry of the

fairy world is exquisitely humorous, and has been frequently imitated

in the nineteenth century: in Germany by Tieck; in Denmark by J. L.

Heiberg, who has written no fewer than three imitations of _A Midsummer

Night's Dream--The Elves, The Day of the Seven Sleepers_, and _The

Nutcrackers_.

The fairy element introduced into the comedy brings in its train

not only the many love-illusions, but other and external forms of

thaumaturgy as well. People are beguiled by wandering voices, led

astray in the midnight wood, and victimised in many innocent ways. The

fairies retain from first to last their grace and sportiveness, but the

individual physiognomies, in this stage of Shakespeare's development,

are as yet somewhat lacking in expression. Puck, for instance, is a

mere shadow in comparison with a creation of twenty years later, the

immortal Ariel of _The Tempest_.