I.

The greatest poet of our age has drawn a parallel of elaborate eloquence

between Shakespeare and the sea; and the likeness holds good in many

points of less significance than those which have been set down by the

master-hand. For two hundred years at least have students of every kind

put forth in every sort of boat on a longer or a shorter voyage of

research across the waters of that unsounded sea. From the paltriest

fishing-craft to such majestic galleys as were steered by Coleridge and

by Goethe, each division of the fleet has done or has essayed its turn of

work; some busied in dredging alongshore, some taking surveys of this or

that gulf or headland, some putting forth through shine and shadow into

the darkness of the great deep. Nor does it seem as if there would

sooner be an end to men's labour on this than on the other sea. But here

a difference is perceptible. The material ocean has been so far mastered

by the wisdom and the heroism of man that we may look for a time to come

when the mystery shall be manifest of its furthest north and south, and

men resolve the secret of the uttermost parts of the sea: the poles also

may find their Columbus. But the limits of that other ocean, the laws of

its tides, the motive of its forces, the mystery of its unity and the

secret of its change, no seafarer of us all may ever think thoroughly to

know. No wind-gauge will help us to the science of its storms, no lead-

line sound for us the depth of its divine and terrible serenity.

As, however, each generation for some two centuries now or more has

witnessed fresh attempts at pilotage and fresh expeditions of discovery

undertaken in the seas of Shakespeare, it may be well to study a little

the laws of navigation in such waters as these, and look well to compass

and rudder before we accept the guidance of a strange helmsman or make

proffer for trial of our own. There are shoals and quicksands on which

many a seafarer has run his craft aground in time past, and others of

more special peril to adventurers of the present day. The chances of

shipwreck vary in a certain degree with each new change of vessel and

each fresh muster of hands. At one time a main rock of offence on which

the stoutest ships of discovery were wont to split was the narrow and

slippery reef of verbal emendation; and upon this our native pilots were

too many of them prone to steer. Others fell becalmed offshore in a

German fog of philosophic theories, and would not be persuaded that the

house of words they had built in honour of Shakespeare was "dark as

hell," seeing "it had bay-windows transparent as barricadoes, and the

clear-stories towards the south-north were as lustrous as ebony." These

are not the most besetting dangers of more modern steersmen: what we have

to guard against now is neither a repetition of the pedantries of

Steevens nor a recrudescence of the moralities of Ulrici. Fresh follies

spring up in new paths of criticism, and fresh labourers in a fruitless

field are at hand to gather them and to garner. A discovery of some

importance has recently been proclaimed as with blare of vociferous

trumpets and flutter of triumphal flags; no less a discovery than

this--that a singer must be tested by his song. Well, it is something

that criticism should at length be awake to that wholly indisputable

fact; that learned and laborious men who can hear only with their fingers

should open their eyes to admit such a novelty, their minds to accept

such a paradox, as that a painter should be studied in his pictures and a

poet in his verse. To the common herd of students and lovers of either

art this may perhaps appear no great discovery; but that it should at

length have dawned even upon the race of commentators is a sign which in

itself might be taken as a presage of new light to come in an epoch of

miracle yet to be. Unhappily it is as yet but a partial revelation that

has been vouchsafed to them. To the recognition of the apocalyptic fact

that a workman can only be known by his work, and that without

examination of his method and material that work can hardly be studied to

much purpose, they have yet to add the knowledge of a further truth no

less recondite and abstruse than this; that as the technical work of a

painter appeals to the eye, so the technical work of a poet appeals to

the ear. It follows that men who have none are as likely to arrive at

any profitable end by the application of metrical tests to the work of

Shakespeare as a blind man by the application of his theory of colours to

the work of Titian.

It is certainly no news to other than professional critics that no means

of study can be more precious or more necessary to a student of

Shakespeare than this of tracing the course of his work by the growth and

development, through various modes and changes, of his metre. But the

faculty of using such means of study is not to be had for the asking; it

is not to be earned by the most assiduous toil, it is not to be secured

by the learning of years, it is not to be attained by the devotion of a

life. No proficiency in grammar and arithmetic, no science of numeration

and no scheme of prosody, will be here of the least avail. Though the

pedagogue were Briareus himself who would thus bring Shakespeare under

the rule of his rod or Shelley within the limit of his line, he would

lack fingers on which to count the syllables that make up their music,

the infinite varieties of measure that complete the changes and the

chimes of perfect verse. It is but lost labour that they rise up so

early, and so late take rest; not a Scaliger or Salmasius of them all

will sooner solve the riddle of the simplest than of the subtlest melody.

Least of all will the method of a scholiast be likely to serve him as a

clue to the hidden things of Shakespeare. For all the counting up of

numbers and casting up of figures that a whole university--nay, a whole

universe of pedants could accomplish, no teacher and no learner will ever

be a whit the nearer to the haven where they would be. In spite of all

tabulated statements and regulated summaries of research, the music which

will not be dissected or defined, the "spirit of sense" which is one and

indivisible from the body or the raiment of speech that clothes it, keeps

safe the secret of its sound. Yet it is no less a task than this that

the scholiasts have girt themselves to achieve: they will pluck out the

heart not of Hamlet's but of Shakespeare's mystery by the means of a

metrical test; and this test is to be applied by a purely arithmetical

process. It is useless to pretend or to protest that they work by any

rule but the rule of thumb and finger: that they have no ear to work by,

whatever outward show they may make of unmistakable ears, the very nature

of their project gives full and damning proof. Properly understood, this

that they call the metrical test is doubtless, as they say, the surest or

the sole sure key to one side of the secret of Shakespeare; but they will

never understand it properly who propose to secure it by the ingenious

device of numbering the syllables and tabulating the results of a

computation which shall attest in exact sequence the quantity, order, and

proportion of single and double endings, of rhyme and blank verse, of

regular lines and irregular, to be traced in each play by the horny eye

and the callous finger of a pedant. "I am ill at these numbers"; those

in which I have sought to become an expert are numbers of another sort;

but having, from wellnigh the first years I can remember, made of the

study of Shakespeare the chief intellectual business and found in it the

chief spiritual delight of my whole life, I can hardly think myself less

qualified than another to offer an opinion on the metrical points at

issue.

The progress and expansion of style and harmony in the successive works

of Shakespeare must in some indefinite degree be perceptible to the

youngest as to the oldest, to the dullest as to the keenest of

Shakespearean students. But to trace and verify the various shades and

gradations of this progress, the ebb and flow of alternate influences,

the delicate and infinite subtleties of change and growth discernible in

the spirit and the speech of the greatest among poets, is a task not less

beyond the reach of a scholiast than beyond the faculties of a child. He

who would attempt it with any chance of profit must above all things

remember at starting that the inner and the outer qualities of a poet's

work are of their very nature indivisible; that any criticism is of

necessity worthless which looks to one side only, whether it be to the

outer or to the inner quality of the work; that the fatuity of pedantic

ignorance never devised a grosser absurdity than the attempt to separate

aesthetic from scientific criticism by a strict line of demarcation, and

to bring all critical work under one or the other head of this exhaustive

division. Criticism without accurate science of the thing criticised can

indeed have no other value than may belong to the genuine record of a

spontaneous impression; but it is not less certain that criticism which

busies itself only with the outer husk or technical shell of a great

artist's work, taking no account of the spirit or the thought which

informs it, cannot have even so much value as this. Without study of his

forms of metre or his scheme of colours we shall certainly fail to

appreciate or even to apprehend the gist or the worth of a painter's or a

poet's design; but to note down the number of special words and cast up

the sum of superfluous syllables used once or twice or twenty times in

the structure of a single poem will help us exactly as much as a naked

catalogue of the colours employed in a particular picture. A tabulated

statement or summary of the precise number of blue or green, red or white

draperies to be found in a precise number of paintings by the same hand

will not of itself afford much enlightenment to any but the youngest of

possible students; nor will a mere list of double or single, masculine or

feminine terminations discoverable in a given amount of verse from the

same quarter prove of much use or benefit to an adult reader of common

intelligence. What such an one requires is the guidance which can be

given by no metremonger or colour-grinder: the suggestion which may help

him to discern at once the cause and the effect of every choice or change

of metre and of colour; which may show him at one glance the reason and

the result of every shade and of every tone which tends to compose and to

complete the gradual scale of their final harmonies. This method of

study is generally accepted as the only one applicable to the work of a

great painter by any criticism worthy of the name: it should also be

recognised as the sole method by which the work of a great poet can be

studied to any serious purpose. For the student it can be no less

useful, for the expert it should be no less easy, to trace through its

several stages of expansion and transfiguration the genius of Chaucer or

of Shakespeare, of Milton or of Shelley, than the genius of Titian or of

Raffaelle, of Turner or of Rossetti. Some great artists there are of

either kind in whom no such process of growth or transformation is

perceptible: of these are Coleridge and Blake; from the sunrise to the

sunset of their working day we can trace no demonstrable increase and no

visible diminution of the divine capacities or the inborn defects of

either man's genius; but not of such, as a rule, are the greatest among

artists of any sort.

Another rock on which modern steersmen of a more skilful hand than these

are yet liable to run through too much confidence is the love of their

own conjectures as to the actual date or the secret history of a

particular play or passage. To err on this side requires more thought,

more learning, and more ingenuity than we need think to find in a whole

tribe of finger-counters and figure-casters; but the outcome of these

good gifts, if strained or perverted to capricious use, may prove no less

barren of profit than the labours of a pedant on the letter of the text.

It is a tempting exercise of intelligence for a dexterous and keen-witted

scholar to apply his solid learning and his vivid fancy to the detection

or the interpretation of some new or obscure point in a great man's life

or work; but none the less is it a perilous pastime to give the reins to

a learned fancy, and let loose conjecture on the trail of any dubious

crotchet or the scent of any supposed allusion that may spring up in the

way of its confident and eager quest. To start a new solution of some

crucial problem, to track some new undercurrent of concealed significance

in a passage hitherto neglected or misconstrued, is to a critic of this

higher class a delight as keen as that of scientific discovery to

students of another sort: the pity is that he can bring no such certain

or immediate test to verify the value of his discovery as lies ready to

the hand of the man of science. Whether he have lit upon a windfall or a

mare's nest can be decided by no direct proof, but only by time and the

general acceptance of competent judges; and this cannot often be

reasonably expected for theories which can appeal for support or

confirmation to no positive evidence, but at best to a cloudy and

shifting probability. What personal or political allusions may lurk

under the text of Shakespeare we can never know, and should consequently

forbear to hang upon a hypothesis of this floating and nebulous kind any

serious opinion which might gravely affect our estimate of his work or

his position in regard to other men, with whom some public or private

interest may possibly have brought him into contact or collision.

* * * * *

The aim of the present study is simply to set down what the writer

believes to be certain demonstrable truths as to the progress and

development of style, the outer and the inner changes of manner as of

matter, of method as of design, which may be discerned in the work of

Shakespeare. The principle here adopted and the views here put forward

have not been suddenly discovered or lightly taken up out of any desire

to make a show of theoretical ingenuity. For years past I have held and

maintained, in private discussion with friends and fellow-students, the

opinions which I now submit to more public judgment. How far they may

coincide with those advanced by others I cannot say, and have not been

careful to inquire. The mere fact of coincidence or of dissent on such a

question is of less importance than the principle accepted by either

student as the groundwork of his theory, the mainstay of his opinion. It

is no part of my project or my hope to establish the actual date of any

among the various plays, or to determine point by point the lineal order

of their succession. I have examined no table or catalogue of recent or

of earlier date, from the time of Malone onwards, with a view to confute

by my reasoning the conclusions of another, or by the assistance of his

theories to corroborate my own. It is impossible to fix or decide by

inner or outer evidence the precise order of production, much less of

composition, which critics of the present or the past may have set their

wits to verify in vain; but it is quite possible to show that the work of

Shakespeare is naturally divisible into classes which may serve us to

distinguish and determine as by landmarks the several stages or periods

of his mind and art.

Of these the three chief periods or stages are so unmistakably indicated

by the mere text itself, and so easily recognisable by the veriest tiro

in the school of Shakespeare, that even were I as certain of being the

first to point them out as I am conscious of having long since discovered

and verified them without assistance or suggestion from any but

Shakespeare himself, I should be disposed to claim but little credit for

a discovery which must in all likelihood have been forestalled by the

common insight of some hundred or more students in time past. The

difficulty begins with the really debatable question of subdivisions.

There are certain plays which may be said to hang on the borderland

between one period and the next, with one foot lingering and one

advanced; and these must be classed according to the dominant note of

their style, the greater or lesser proportion of qualities proper to the

earlier or the later stage of thought and writing. At one time I was

inclined to think the whole catalogue more accurately divisible into four

classes; but the line of demarcation between the third and fourth would

have been so much fainter than those which mark off the first period from

the second, and the second from the third, that it seemed on the whole a

more correct and adequate arrangement to assume that the last period

might be subdivided if necessary into a first and second stage. This

somewhat precise and pedantic scheme of study I have adopted from no love

of rigid or formal system, but simply to make the method of my critical

process as clear as the design. That design is to examine by internal

evidence alone the growth and the expression of spirit and of speech, the

ebb and flow of thought and style, discernible in the successive periods

of Shakespeare's work; to study the phases of mind, the changes of tone,

the passage or progress from an old manner to a new, the reversion or

relapse from a later to an earlier habit, which may assuredly be traced

in the modulations of his varying verse, but can only be traced by ear

and not by finger. I have busied myself with no baseless speculations as

to the possible or probable date of the first appearance of this play or

of that on the stage; and it is not unlikely that the order of succession

here adopted or suggested may not always coincide with the chronological

order of production; nor will the principle or theory by which I have

undertaken to class the successive plays of each period be affected or

impaired though it should chance that a play ranked by me as belonging to

a later stage of work should actually have been produced earlier than

others which in my lists are assigned to a subsequent date. It is not,

so to speak, the literal but the spiritual order which I have studied to

observe and to indicate: the periods which I seek to define belong not to

chronology but to art. No student need be reminded how common a thing it

is to recognise in the later work of a great artist some partial

reappearance of his early tone or manner, some passing return to his

early lines of work and to habits of style since modified or abandoned.

Such work, in part at least, may properly be said to belong rather to the

earlier stage whose manner it resumes than to the later stage at which it

was actually produced, and in which it stands out as a marked exception

among the works of the same period. A famous and a most singularly

beautiful example of this reflorescence as in a Saint Martin's summer of

undecaying genius is the exquisite and crowning love-scene in the opera

or "ballet-tragedy" of _Psyche_, written in his sixty-fifth year by the

august Roman hand of Pierre Corneille; a lyric symphony of spirit and of

song fulfilled with all the colour and all the music that autumn could

steal from spring if October had leave to go a Maying in some Olympian

masquerade of melody and sunlight. And it is not easier, easy as it is,

to discern and to define the three main stages of Shakespeare's work and

progress, than to classify under their several heads the representative

plays belonging to each period by the law of their nature, if not by the

accident of their date. There are certain dominant qualities which do on

the whole distinguish not only the later from the earlier plays, but the

second period from the first, the third period from the second; and it is

with these qualities alone that the higher criticism, be it aesthetic or

scientific, has properly anything to do.

A new method of solution has been applied to various difficulties which

have been discovered or invented in the text by the care or the

perversity of recent commentators, whose principle of explanation is

easier to abuse than to use with any likelihood of profit. It is at

least simple enough for the simplest of critics to apply or misapply:

whenever they see or suspect an inequality or an incongruity which may be

wholly imperceptible to eyes uninured to the use of their spectacles,

they assume at once the presence of another workman, the intrusion of a

stranger's hand. This supposition of a double authorship is naturally as

impossible to refute as to establish by other than internal evidence and

appeal to the private judgment or perception of the reader. But it is no

better than the last resource of an empiric, the last refuge of a

sciolist; a refuge which the soundest of scholars will be slowest to

seek, a resource which the most competent of critics will be least ready

to adopt. Once admitted as a principle of general application, there are

no lengths to which it may not carry, there are none to which it has not

carried, the audacious fatuity and the arrogant incompetence of tamperers

with the authentic text. Recent editors who have taken on themselves the

high office of guiding English youth in its first study of Shakespeare

have proposed to excise or to obelise whole passages which the delight

and wonder of youth and age alike, of the rawest as of the ripest among

students, have agreed to consecrate as examples of his genius at its

highest. In the last trumpet-notes of Macbeth's defiance and despair, in

the last rallying cry of the hero reawakened in the tyrant at his utmost

hour of need, there have been men and scholars, Englishmen and editors,

who have detected the alien voice of a pretender, the false ring of a

foreign blast that was not blown by Shakespeare; words that for centuries

past have touched with fire the hearts of thousands in each age since

they were first inspired--words with the whole sound in them of battle or

a breaking sea, with the whole soul of pity and terror mingled and melted

into each other in the fierce last speech of a spirit grown "aweary of

the sun," have been calmly transferred from the account of Shakespeare to

the score of Middleton. And this, forsooth, the student of the future is

to accept on the authority of men who bring to the support of their

decision the unanswerable plea of years spent in the collation and

examination of texts never hitherto explored and compared with such

energy of learned labour. If this be the issue of learning and of

industry, the most indolent and ignorant of readers who retains his

natural capacity to be moved and mastered by the natural delight of

contact with heavenly things is better off by far than the most studious

and strenuous of all scholiasts who ever claimed acquiescence or

challenged dissent on the strength of his lifelong labours and

hard-earned knowledge of the letter of the text. Such an one is indeed

"in a parlous state"; and any boy whose heart first begins to burn within

him, who feels his blood kindle and his spirit dilate, his pulse leap and

his eyes lighten, over a first study of Shakespeare, may say to such a

teacher with better reason than Touchstone said to Corin, "Truly, thou

art damned; like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side." Nor could charity

itself hope much profit for him from the moving appeal and the pious

prayer which temper that severity of sentence--"Wilt thou rest damned?

God help thee, shallow man! God make incision in thee! Thou art raw."

And raw he is like to remain for all his learning, and for all incisions

that can be made in the horny hide of a self-conceit to be pierced by the

puncture of no man's pen. It was bad enough while theorists of this

breed confined themselves to the suggestion of a possible partnership

with Fletcher, a possible interpolation by Jonson; but in the descent

from these to the alleged adulteration of the text by Middleton and

Rowley we have surely sounded the very lowest depth of folly attainable

by the utmost alacrity in sinking which may yet be possible to the

bastard brood of Scriblerus. For my part, I shall not be surprised

though the next discoverer should assure us that half at least of

_Hamlet_ is evidently due to the collaboration of Heywood, while the

greater part of _Othello_ is as clearly assignable to the hand of

Shirley.

Akin to this form of folly, but less pernicious though not more

profitable, is the fancy of inventing some share for Shakespeare in the

composition of plays which the veriest insanity of conjecture or caprice

could not venture to lay wholly to his charge. This fancy, comparatively

harmless as it is, requires no ground of proof to go upon, no prop of

likelihood to support it; without so much help as may be borrowed from

the faintest and most fitful of traditions, it spins its own evidence

spider-like out of its own inner conscience or conceit, and proffers it

with confident complacency for men's acceptance. Here again I cannot but

see a mere waste of fruitless learning and bootless ingenuity. That

Shakespeare began by retouching and recasting the work of elder and

lesser men we all know; that he may afterwards have set his hand to the

task of adding or altering a line or a passage here and there in some few

of the plays brought out under his direction as manager or proprietor of

a theatre is of course possible, but can neither be affirmed nor denied

with any profit in default of the least fragment of historic or

traditional evidence. Any attempt to verify the imaginary touch of his

hand in plays of whose history we know no more than that they were acted

on the boards of his theatre can be but a diversion for the restless

leisure of ingenious and ambitious scholars; it will give no clue by

which the student who simply seeks to know what can be known with

certainty of the poet and his work may hope to be guided towards any safe

issue or trustworthy result. Less pardonable and more presumptuous than

this is the pretension of minor critics to dissect an authentic play of

Shakespeare scene by scene, and assign different parts of the same poem

to different dates by the same pedagogic rules of numeration and

mensuration which they would apply to the general question of the order

and succession of his collective works. This vivisection of a single

poem is not defensible as a freak of scholarship, an excursion beyond the

bounds of bare proof, from which the wanderer may chance to bring back,

if not such treasure as he went out to seek, yet some stray godsend or

rare literary windfall which may serve to excuse his indulgence in the

seemingly profitless pastime of a truant disposition. It is a pure

impertinence to affirm with oracular assurance what might perhaps be

admissible as a suggestion offered with the due diffidence of modest and

genuine scholarship; to assert on the strength of a private pedant's

personal intuition that such must be the history or such the composition

of a great work whose history he alone could tell, whose composition he

alone could explain, who gave it to us as his genius had given it to him.

From these several rocks and quicksands I trust at least to keep my

humbler course at a safe distance, and steer clear of all sandy shallows

of theory or sunken shoals of hypothesis on which no pilot can be certain

of safe anchorage; avoiding all assumption, though never so plausible,

for which no ground but that of fancy can be shown, all suggestion though

never so ingenious for which no proof but that of conjecture can be

advanced. For instance, I shall neither assume nor accept the theory of

a double authorship or of a double date by which the supposed

inequalities may be accounted for, the supposed difficulties may be swept

away, which for certain readers disturb the study of certain plays of

Shakespeare. Only where universal tradition and the general concurrence

of all reasonable critics past and present combine to indicate an

unmistakable difference of touch or an unmistakable diversity of date

between this and that portion of the same play, or where the internal

evidence of interpolation perceptible to the most careless and undeniable

by the most perverse of readers is supported by the public judgment of

men qualified to express and competent to defend an opinion, have I

thought it allowable to adopt this facile method of explanation. No

scholar, for example, believes in the single authorship of _Pericles_ or

_Andronicus_; none, I suppose, would now question the part taken by some

hireling or journeyman in the arrangement or completion for the stage of

_Timon of Athens_; and few probably would refuse to admit a doubt of the

total authenticity or uniform workmanship of the _Taming of the Shrew_.

As few, I hope, are prepared to follow the fantastic and confident

suggestions of every unquiet and arrogant innovator who may seek to

append his name to the long scroll of Shakespearean parasites by the

display of a brand-new hypothesis as to the uncertain date or authorship

of some passage or some play which has never before been subjected to the

scientific scrutiny of such a pertinacious analyst. The more modest

design of the present study has in part been already indicated, and will

explain as it proceeds if there be anything in it worth explanation. It

is no part of my ambition to loose the Gordian knots which others who

found them indissoluble have sought in vain to cut in sunder with blunter

swords than the Macedonian; but after so many adventures and attempts

there may perhaps yet be room for an attempt yet unessayed; for a study

by the ear alone of Shakespeare's metrical progress, and a study by light

of the knowledge thus obtained of the corresponsive progress within,

which found expression and embodiment in these outward and visible

changes. The one study will be then seen to be the natural complement

and the inevitable consequence of the other; and the patient pursuit of

the simpler and more apprehensible object of research will appear as the

only sure method by which a reasonable and faithful student may think to

attain so much as the porch or entrance to that higher knowledge which no

faithful and reasonable study of Shakespeare can ever for a moment fail

to keep in sight as the haven of its final hope, the goal of its ultimate

labour.

When Christopher Marlowe came up to London from Cambridge, a boy in

years, a man in genius, and a god in ambition, he found the stage which

he was born to transfigure and re-create by the might and masterdom of

his genius encumbered with a litter of rude rhyming farces and tragedies

which the first wave of his imperial hand swept so utterly out of sight

and hearing that hardly by piecing together such fragments of that buried

rubbish as it is now possible to unearth can we rebuild in imagination so

much of the rough and crumbling walls that fell before the trumpet-blast

of _Tamburlaine_ as may give us some conception of the rabble dynasty of

rhymers whom he overthrew--of the citadel of dramatic barbarism which was

stormed and sacked at the first charge of the young conqueror who came to

lead English audiences and to deliver English poetry

From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,

And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay.

When we speak of the drama that existed before the coming of Marlowe, and

that vanished at his advent, we think usually of the rhyming plays

written wholly or mainly in ballad verse of fourteen syllables--of the

_Kings Darius_ and _Cambyses_, the _Promos and Cassandra_ of Whetstone,

or the _Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes_ of George Peele. If we turn from

these abortions of tragedy to the metrical farces which may fairly be

said to contain the germ or embryo of English comedy (a form of dramatic

art which certainly owes nothing to the father of our tragic stage), we

find far more of hope and promise in the broad free stretches of the

flagellant head-master of Eton and the bibulous Bishop of Bath and Wells;

and must admit that hands used to wield the crosier or the birch proved

themselves more skilful at the lighter labours of the stage, more

successful even in the secular and bloodless business of a field neither

clerical nor scholastic, than any tragic rival of the opposite party to

that so jovially headed by Orbilius Udall and Silenus Still. These twin

pillars of church and school and stage were strong enough to support on

the shoulders of their authority the first crude fabric or formless model

of our comic theatre, while the tragic boards were still creaking and

cracking under the jingling canter of _Cambyses_ or the tuneless tramp of

_Gorboduc_. This one play which the charity of Sidney excepts from his

general anathema on the nascent stage of England has hitherto been

erroneously described as written in blank verse; an error which I can

only attribute to the prevalence of a groundless assumption that whatever

is neither prose nor rhyme must of necessity be definable as blank verse.

But the measure, I must repeat, which was adopted by the authors of

_Gorboduc_ is by no means so definable. Blank it certainly is; but verse

it assuredly is not. There can be no verse where there is no modulation,

no rhythm where there is no music. Blank verse came into life in England

at the birth of the shoemaker's son who had but to open his yet beardless

lips, and the high-born poem which had Sackville to father and Sidney to

sponsor was silenced and eclipsed for ever among the poor plebeian crowd

of rhyming shadows that waited in death on the noble nothingness of its

patrician shade.

These, I suppose, are the first or the only plays whose names recur to

the memory of the general reader when he thinks of the English stage

before Marlowe; but there was, I suspect, a whole class of plays then

current, and more or less supported by popular favour, of which hardly a

sample is now extant, and which cannot be classed with such as these. The

poets or rhymesters who supplied them had already seen good to clip the

cumbrous and bedraggled skirts of those dreary verses, run all to seed

and weed, which jingled their thin bells at the tedious end of fourteen

weary syllables; and for this curtailment of the shambling and sprawling

lines which had hitherto done duty as tragic metre some credit may be due

to these obscure purveyors of forgotten ware for the second epoch of our

stage: if indeed, as I presume, we may suppose that this reform, such as

it was, had begun before the time of Marlowe; otherwise, no doubt, little

credit would be due to men who with so high an example before them were

content simply to snip away the tags and fringes, to patch the seams and

tatters, of the ragged coat of rhyme which they might have exchanged for

that royal robe of heroic verse wherewith he had clothed the ungrown

limbs of limping and lisping tragedy. But if these also may be reckoned

among his precursors, the dismissal from stage service of the dolorous

and drudging metre employed by the earliest school of theatrical

rhymesters must be taken to mark a real step in advance; and in that case

we possess at least a single example of the rhyming tragedies which had

their hour between the last plays written wholly or partially in ballad

metre and the first plays written in blank verse. The tragedy of

_Selimus, Emperor of the Turks_, published in 1594, {30} may then serve

to indicate this brief and obscure period of transition. Whole scenes of

this singular play are written in rhyming iambics, some in the measure of

_Don Juan_, some in the measure of _Venus and Adonis_. The couplets and

quatrains so much affected and so reluctantly abandoned by Shakespeare

after the first stage of his dramatic progress are in no other play that

I know of diversified by this alternate variation of _sesta_ with _ottava

rima_. This may have been an exceptional experiment due merely to the

caprice of one eccentric rhymester; but in any case we may assume it to

mark the extreme limit, the ultimate development of rhyming tragedy after

the ballad metre had been happily exploded. The play is on other grounds

worth attention as a sign of the times, though on poetical grounds it is

assuredly worth none. Part of it is written in blank verse, or at least

in rhymeless lines; so that after all it probably followed in the wake of

_Tamburlaine_, half adopting and half rejecting the innovations of that

fiery reformer, who wrought on the old English stage no less a miracle

than _Hernani_ on the French stage in the days of our fathers. That

_Selimus_ was published four years later than _Tamburlaine_, in the year

following the death of Marlowe, proves of course nothing as to the date

of its production; and even if it was written and acted in the year of

its publication, it undoubtedly in the main represents the work of a

prior era to the reformation of the stage by Marlowe. The level

regularity of its unrhymed scenes is just like that of the weaker

portions of _Titus Andronicus_ and the _First Part of King Henry the

Sixth_--the opening scene, for example, of either play. With

_Andronicus_ it has also in common the quality of exceptional

monstrosity, a delight in the parade of mutilation as well as of

massacre. It seems to me possible that the same hand may have been at

work on all three plays; for that Marlowe's is traceable in those parts

of the two retouched by Shakespeare which bear no traces of his touch is

a theory to the full as absurd as that which would impute to Shakespeare

the charge of their entire composition.

The revolution effected by Marlowe naturally raised the same cry against

its author as the revolution effected by Hugo. That Shakespeare should

not at once have enlisted under his banner is less inexplicable than it

may seem. He was naturally addicted to rhyme, though if we put aside the

Sonnets we must admit that in rhyme he never did anything worth Marlowe's

_Hero and Leander_: he did not, like Marlowe, see at once that it must be

reserved for less active forms of poetry than the tragic drama; and he

was personally, it seems, in opposition to Marlowe and his school of

academic playwrights--the band of bards in which Oxford and Cambridge

were respectively and so respectably represented by Peele and Greene. But

in his very first plays, comic or tragic or historic, we can see the

collision and conflict of the two influences; his evil angel, rhyme,

yielding step by step and note by note to the strong advance of that

better genius who came to lead him into the loftier path of Marlowe.

There is not a single passage in _Titus Andronicus_ more Shakespearean

than the magnificent quatrain of Tamora upon the eagle and the little

birds; but the rest of the scene in which we come upon it, and the whole

scene preceding, are in blank verse of more variety and vigour than we

find in the baser parts of the play; and these if any scenes we may

surely attribute to Shakespeare. Again, the last battle of Talbot seems

to me as undeniably the master's work as the scene in the Temple Gardens

or the courtship of Margaret by Suffolk; this latter indeed, full as it

is of natural and vivid grace, may perhaps not be beyond the highest

reach of one or two among the rivals of his earliest years of work; while

as we are certain that he cannot have written the opening scene, that he

was at any stage of his career incapable of it, so may we believe as well

as hope that he is guiltless of any complicity in that detestable part of

the play which attempts to defile the memory of the virgin saviour of her

country. {33} In style it is not, I think, above the range of George

Peele at his best: and to have written even the last of those scenes can

add but little discredit to the memory of a man already disgraced as the

defamer of Eleanor of Castile; while it would be a relief to feel assured

that there was but one English poet of any genius who could be capable of

either villainy.

In this play, then, more decisively than in _Titus Andronicus_, we find

Shakespeare at work (so to speak) with both hands--with his left hand of

rhyme, and his right hand of blank verse. The left is loth to forego the

practice of its peculiar music; yet, as the action of the right grows

freer and its touch grows stronger, it becomes more and more certain that

the other must cease playing, under pain of producing mere discord and

disturbance in the scheme of tragic harmony. We imagine that the writer

must himself have felt the scene of the roses to be pitched in a truer

key than the noble scene of parting between the old hero and his son on

the verge of desperate battle and certain death. This is the last and

loftiest farewell note of rhyming tragedy; still, in _King Richard II_,

and in _Romeo and Juliet_, it struggles for awhile to keep its footing,

but now more visibly in vain. The rhymed scenes in these plays are too

plainly the survivals of a ruder and feebler stage of work; they cannot

hold their own in the new order with even such discordant effect of

incongruous excellence and inharmonious beauty as belongs to the death-

scene of the Talbots when matched against the quarrelling scene of

Somerset and York. Yet the briefest glance over the plays of the first

epoch in the work of Shakespeare will suffice to show how protracted was

the struggle and how gradual the defeat of rhyme. Setting aside the

retouched plays, we find on the list one tragedy, two histories, and four

if not five comedies, which the least critical reader would attribute to

this first epoch of work. In three of these comedies rhyme can hardly be

said to be beaten; that is, the rhyming scenes are on the whole equal to

the unrhymed in power and beauty. In the single tragedy, and in one of

the two histories, we may say that rhyme fights hard for life, but is

undeniably worsted; that is, they contain as to quantity a large

proportion of rhymed verse, but as to quality the rhymed part bears no

proportion whatever to the unrhymed. In two scenes we may say that the

whole heart or spirit of _Romeo and Juliet_ is summed up and distilled

into perfect and pure expression; and these two are written in blank

verse of equable and blameless melody. Outside the garden scene in the

second act and the balcony scene in the third, there is much that is

fanciful and graceful, much of elegiac pathos and fervid if fantastic

passion; much also of superfluous rhetoric and (as it were) of wordy

melody, which flows and foams hither and thither into something of

extravagance and excess; but in these two there is no flaw, no outbreak,

no superflux, and no failure. Throughout certain scenes of the third and

fourth acts I think it may be reasonably and reverently allowed that the

river of verse has broken its banks, not as yet through the force and

weight of its gathering stream, but merely through the weakness of the

barriers or boundaries found insufficient to confine it. And here we may

with deference venture on a guess why Shakespeare was so long so loth to

forego the restraint of rhyme. When he wrote, and even when he rewrote

or at least retouched, his youngest tragedy he had not yet strength to

walk straight in the steps of the mighty master, but two months older

than himself by birth, whose foot never from the first faltered in the

arduous path of severer tragic verse. The loveliest of love-plays is

after all a child of "his salad days, when he was green in judgment,"

though assuredly not "cold in blood"--a physical condition as difficult

to conceive of Shakespeare at any age as of Cleopatra. It is in the

scenes of vehement passion, of ardour and of agony, that we feel the

comparative weakness of a yet ungrown hand, the tentative uncertain grasp

of a stripling giant. The two utterly beautiful scenes are not of this

kind; they deal with simple joy and with simple sorrow, with the gladness

of meeting and the sadness of parting love; but between and behind them

come scenes of more fierce emotion, full of surprise, of violence, of

unrest; and with these the poet is not yet (if I dare say so) quite

strong enough to deal. Apollo has not yet put on the sinews of Hercules.

At a later date we may fancy or may find that when the Herculean muscle

is full-grown the voice in him which was as the voice of Apollo is for a

passing moment impaired. In _Measure for Measure_, where the adult and

gigantic god has grappled with the greatest and most terrible of energies

and of passions, we miss the music of a younger note that rang through

_Romeo and Juliet_; but before the end this too revives, as pure, as

sweet, as fresh, but richer now and deeper than its first clear notes of

the morning, in the heavenly harmony of _Cymbeline_ and _The Tempest_.

The same effusion or effervescence of words is perceptible in _King

Richard II_. as in the greater (and the less good) part of _Romeo and

Juliet_; and not less perceptible is the perpetual inclination of the

poet to revert for help to rhyme, to hark back in search of support

towards the half-forsaken habits of his poetic nonage. Feeling his

foothold insecure on the hard and high ascent of the steeps of rhymeless

verse, he stops and slips back ever and anon towards the smooth and

marshy meadow whence he has hardly begun to climb. Any student who

should wish to examine the conditions of the struggle at its height may

be content to analyse the first act of this the first historical play of

Shakespeare. As the tragedy moves onward, and the style gathers strength

while the action gathers speed,--as (to borrow the phrase so admirably

applied by Coleridge to Dryden) the poet's chariot-wheels get hot by

driving fast,--the temptation of rhyme grows weaker, and the hand grows

firmer which before lacked strength to wave it off. The one thing wholly

or greatly admirable in this play is the exposition of the somewhat

pitiful but not unpitiable character of King Richard. Among the scenes

devoted to this exposition I of course include the whole of the death-

scene of Gaunt, as well the part which precedes as the part which follows

the actual appearance of his nephew on the stage; and into these scenes

the intrusion of rhyme is rare and brief. They are written almost wholly

in pure and fluent rather than vigorous or various blank verse; though I

cannot discern in any of them an equality in power and passion to the

magnificent scene of abdication in Marlowe's _Edward II_. This play, I

think, must undoubtedly be regarded as the immediate model of

Shakespeare's; and the comparison is one of inexhaustible interest to all

students of dramatic poetry. To the highest height of the earlier master

I do not think that the mightier poet who was as yet in great measure his

pupil has ever risen in this the first (as I take it) of his historic

plays. Of composition and proportion he has perhaps already a somewhat

better idea. But in grasp of character, always excepting the one central

figure of the piece, we find his hand as yet the unsteadier of the two.

Even after a lifelong study of this as of all other plays of Shakespeare,

it is for me at least impossible to determine what I doubt if the poet

could himself have clearly defined--the main principle, the motive and

the meaning of such characters as York, Norfolk, and Aumerle. The

Gaveston and the Mortimer of Marlowe are far more solid and definite

figures than these; yet none after that of Richard is more important to

the scheme of Shakespeare. They are fitful, shifting, vaporous: their

outlines change, withdraw, dissolve, and "leave not a rack behind." They,

not Antony, are like the clouds of evening described in the most glorious

of so many glorious passages put long afterwards by Shakespeare into the

mouth of his latest Roman hero. They "cannot hold this visible shape" in

which the poet at first presents them even long enough to leave a

distinct image, a decisive impression for better or for worse, upon the

mind's eye of the most simple and open-hearted reader. They are ghosts,

not men; _simulacra modis pallentia miris_. You cannot descry so much as

the original intention of the artist's hand which began to draw and

relaxed its hold of the brush before the first lines were fairly traced.

And in the last, the worst and weakest scene of all, in which York pleads

with Bolingbroke for the death of the son whose mother pleads against her

husband for his life, there is a final relapse into rhyme and rhyming

epigram, into the "jigging vein" dried up (we might have hoped) long

since by the very glance of Marlowe's Apollonian scorn. It would be

easy, agreeable, and irrational to ascribe without further evidence than

its badness this misconceived and misshapen scene to some other hand than

Shakespeare's. It is below the weakest, the rudest, the hastiest scene

attributable to Marlowe; it is false, wrong, artificial beyond the worst

of his bad and boyish work; but it has a certain likeness for the worse

to the crudest work of Shakespeare. It is difficult to say to what

depths of bad taste the writer of certain passages in _Venus and Adonis_

could not fall before his genius or his judgment was full-grown. To

invent an earlier play on the subject and imagine this scene a surviving

fragment, a floating waif of that imaginary wreck, would in my opinion be

an uncritical mode of evading the question at issue. It must be regarded

as the last hysterical struggle of rhyme to maintain its place in

tragedy; and the explanation, I would fain say the excuse, of its

reappearance may perhaps be simply this; that the poet was not yet

dramatist enough to feel for each of his characters an equal or

proportionate regard; to divide and disperse his interest among the

various crowd of figures which claim each in its place, and each after

its kind, fair and adequate share of their creator's attention and

sympathy. His present interest was here wholly concentrated on the

single figure of Richard; and when that for the time was absent, the

subordinate figures became to him but heavy and vexatious encumbrances,

to be shifted on and off the stage with as much of haste and as little of

labour as might be possible to an impatient and uncertain hand. Now all

tragic poets, I presume, from AEschylus the godlike father of them all to

the last aspirant who may struggle after the traces of his steps, have

been poets before they were tragedians; their lips have had power to sing

before their feet had strength to tread the stage, before their hands had

skill to paint or carve figures from the life. With Shakespeare it was

so as certainly as with Shelley, as evidently as with Hugo. It is in the

great comic poets, in Moliere and in Congreve, {42} our own lesser

Moliere, so far inferior in breadth and depth, in tenderness and

strength, to the greatest writer of the "great age," yet so near him in

science and in skill, so like him in brilliance and in force;--it is in

these that we find theatrical instinct twin-born with imaginative

impulse, dramatic power with inventive perception.

In the second historic play which can be wholly ascribed to Shakespeare

we still find the poetic or rhetorical duality for the most part in

excess of the dramatic; but in _King Richard III_. the bonds of rhyme at

least are fairly broken. This only of all Shakespeare's plays belongs

absolutely to the school of Marlowe. The influence of the elder master,

and that influence alone, is perceptible from end to end. Here at last

we can see that Shakespeare has decidedly chosen his side. It is as

fiery in passion, as single in purpose, as rhetorical often though never

so inflated in expression, as _Tamburlaine_ itself. It is doubtless a

better piece of work than Marlowe ever did; I dare not say, than Marlowe

ever could have done. It is not for any man to measure, above all is it

not for any workman in the field of tragic poetry lightly to take on

himself the responsibility or the authority to pronounce, what it is that

Christopher Marlowe could not have done; but, dying as he did and when he

did, it is certain that he has not left us a work so generally and so

variously admirable as _King Richard III_. As certain is it that but for

him this play could never have been written. At a later date the subject

would have been handled otherwise, had the poet chosen to handle it at

all; and in his youth he could not have treated it as he has without the

guidance and example of Marlowe. Not only are its highest qualities of

energy, of exuberance, of pure and lofty style, of sonorous and

successive harmonies, the very qualities that never fail to distinguish

those first dramatic models which were fashioned by his ardent hand; the

strenuous and single-handed grasp of character, the motion and action of

combining and contending powers, which here for the first time we find

sustained with equal and unfaltering vigour throughout the length of a

whole play, we perceive, though imperfectly, in the work of Marlowe

before we can trace them even as latent or infant forces in the work of

Shakespeare.

In the exquisite and delightful comedies of his earliest period we can

hardly discern any sign, any promise of them at all. One only of these,

the _Comedy of Errors_, has in it anything of dramatic composition and

movement; and what it has of these, I need hardly remind the most cursory

of students, is due by no means to Shakespeare. What is due to him, and

to him alone, is the honour of having embroidered on the naked old canvas

of comic action those flowers of elegiac beauty which vivify and

diversify the scene of Plautus as reproduced by the art of Shakespeare.

In the next generation so noble a poet as Rotrou, whom perhaps it might

not be inaccurate to call the French Marlowe, and who had (what Marlowe

had not) the gift of comic as well as of tragic excellence, found nothing

of this kind and little of any kind to add to the old poet's admirable

but arid sketch of farcical incident or accident. But in this light and

lovely work of the youth of Shakespeare we find for the first time that

strange and sweet admixture of farce with fancy, of lyric charm with

comic effect, which recurs so often in his later work, from the date of

_As You Like It_ to the date of the _Winter's Tale_, and which no later

poet had ventured to recombine in the same play till our own time had

given us, in the author of _Tragaldabas_, one who could alternate without

confusing the woodland courtship of Eliseo and Caprina with the tavern

braggardism of Grif and Minotoro. The sweetness and simplicity of lyric

or elegiac loveliness which fill and inform the scenes where Adriana, her

sister, and the Syracusan Antipholus exchange the expression of their

errors and their loves, belong to Shakespeare alone; and may help us to

understand how the young poet who at the outset of his divine career had

struck into this fresh untrodden path of poetic comedy should have been,

as we have seen that he was, loth to learn from another and an alien

teacher the hard and necessary lesson that this flowery path would never

lead him towards the loftier land of tragic poetry. For as yet, even in

the nominally or intentionally tragic and historic work of the first

period, we descry always and everywhere and still preponderant the lyric

element, the fantastic element, or even the elegiac element. All these

queens and heroines of history and tragedy have rather an Ovidian than a

Sophoclean grace of bearing and of speech.

The example afforded by the _Comedy of Errors_ would suffice to show that

rhyme, however inadequate for tragic use, is by no means a bad instrument

for romantic comedy. In another of Shakespeare's earliest works, which

might almost be described as a lyrical farce, rhyme plays also a great

part; but the finest passage, the real crown and flower of _Love's

Labour's Lost_, is the praise or apology of love spoken by Biron in blank

verse. This is worthy of Marlowe for dignity and sweetness, but has also

the grace of a light and radiant fancy enamoured of itself, begotten

between thought and mirth, a child-god with grave lips and laughing eyes,

whose inspiration is nothing akin to Marlowe's. In this as in the

overture of the play and in its closing scene, but especially in the

noble passage which winds up for a year the courtship of Biron and

Rosaline, the spirit which informs the speech of the poet is finer of

touch and deeper of tone than in the sweetest of the serious interludes

of the _Comedy of Errors_. The play is in the main a yet lighter thing,

and more wayward and capricious in build, more formless and fantastic in

plot, more incomposite altogether than that first heir of Shakespeare's

comic invention, which on its own ground is perfect in its consistency,

blameless in composition and coherence; while in _Love's Labour's Lost_

the fancy for the most part runs wild as the wind, and the structure of

the story is as that of a house of clouds which the wind builds and

unbuilds at pleasure. Here we find a very riot of rhymes, wild and

wanton in their half-grown grace as a troop of "young satyrs,

tender-hoofed and ruddy-horned"; during certain scenes we seem almost to

stand again by the cradle of new-born comedy, and hear the first lisping

and laughing accents run over from her baby lips in bubbling rhyme; but

when the note changes we recognise the speech of gods. For the first

time in our literature the higher key of poetic or romantic comedy is

finely touched to a fine issue. The divine instrument fashioned by

Marlowe for tragic purposes alone has found at once its new sweet use in

the hands of Shakespeare. The way is prepared for _As You Like It_ and

the _Tempest_; the language is discovered which will befit the lips of

Rosalind and Miranda.

What was highest as poetry in the _Comedy of Errors_ was mainly in rhyme;

all indeed, we might say, between the prelude spoken by AEgeon and the

appearance in the last scene of his wife: in _Love's Labour's Lost_ what

was highest was couched wholly in blank verse; in the _Two Gentlemen of

Verona_ rhyme has fallen seemingly into abeyance, and there are no

passages of such elegiac beauty as in the former, of such exalted

eloquence as in the latter of these plays; there is an even sweetness, a

simple equality of grace in thought and language which keeps the whole

poem in tune, written as it is in a subdued key of unambitious harmony.

In perfect unity and keeping the composition of this beautiful sketch may

perhaps be said to mark a stage of advance, a new point of work attained,

a faint but sensible change of manner, signalised by increased firmness

of hand and clearness of outline. Slight and swift in execution as it

is, few and simple as are the chords here struck of character and

emotion, every shade of drawing and every note of sound is at one with

the whole scheme of form and music. Here too is the first dawn of that

higher and more tender humour which was never given in such perfection to

any man as ultimately to Shakespeare; one touch of the by-play of Launce

and his immortal dog is worth all the bright fantastic interludes of

Boyet and Adriano, Costard and Holofernes; worth even half the sallies of

Mercutio, and half the dancing doggrel or broad-witted prose of either

Dromio. But in the final poem which concludes and crowns the first epoch

of Shakespeare's work, the special graces and peculiar glories of each

that went before are gathered together as in one garland "of every hue

and every scent." The young genius of the master of all our poets finds

its consummation in the _Midsummer Night's Dream_. The blank verse is as

full, sweet, and strong as the best of Biron's or Romeo's; the rhymed

verse as clear, pure, and true as the simplest and truest melody of

_Venus and Adonis_ or the _Comedy of Errors_. But here each kind of

excellence is equal throughout; there are here no purple patches on a

gown of serge, but one seamless and imperial robe of a single dye. Of

the lyric or the prosaic part, the counterchange of loves and laughters,

of fancy fine as air and imagination high as heaven, what need can there

be for any one to shame himself by the helpless attempt to say some word

not utterly unworthy? Let it suffice us to accept this poem as the

landmark of our first stage, and pause to look back from it on what lies

behind us of partial or of perfect work.

The highest point attained in this first period lies in the domain of

comedy or romance, and belongs as much to lyric as to dramatic poetry;

its sovereign quality is that of sweetness and springtide of fairy fancy

crossed with light laughter and light trouble that end in perfect music.

In history as in tragedy the master's hand has not yet come to its full

strength and skill; its touch is not yet wholly assured, its work not yet

wholly blameless. Besides the plays undoubtedly and entirely due to the

still growing genius of Shakespeare, we have taken note but of two among

those which bear the partial imprint of his hand. The long-vexed

question as to the authorship of the latter parts of _King Henry VI_., in

their earlier or later form, has not been touched upon; nor do I design

to reopen that perpetual source of debate unstanchable and inexhaustible

dispute by any length of scrutiny or inquisition of detail. Two points

must of course be taken for granted: that Marlowe was more or less

concerned in the production, and Shakespeare in the revision of these

plays; whether before or after his additions to the original _First Part

of King Henry VI_. we cannot determine, though the absence of rhyme might

seem to indicate a later date for the recast of the _Contention_. But it

is noticeable that the style of Marlowe appears more vividly and

distinctly in passages of the reformed than of the unreformed plays.

Those famous lines, for example, which open the fourth act of the _Second

Part of King Henry VI_. are not to be found in the corresponding scene of

the first part of the _Contention_; yet, whether they belong to the

original sketch of the play, or were inserted as an afterthought into the

revised and expanded copy, the authorship of these verses is surely

unmistakable:--

The gaudy, blabbing, and remorseful day

Is crept into the bosom of the sea;

And now loud howling wolves arouse the jades

That drag the tragic melancholy night--

_Aut Christophorus Marlowe, aut diabolus_; it is inconceivable that any

imitator but one should have had the power so to catch the very trick of

his hand, the very note of his voice, and incredible that the one who

might would have set himself to do so: for if this be not indeed the

voice and this the hand of Marlowe, then what we find in these verses is

not the fidelity of a follower, but the servility of a copyist. No

parasitic rhymester of past or present days who feeds his starveling

talent on the shreds and orts, "the fragments, scraps, the bits and

greasy relics" of another man's board, ever uttered a more parrot-like

note of plagiary. The very exactitude of the repetition is a strong

argument against the theory which attributes it to Shakespeare. That he

had much at starting to learn of Marlowe, and that he did learn much--that

in his earliest plays, and above all in his earliest historic plays, the

influence of the elder poet, the echo of his style, the iteration of his

manner, may perpetually be traced--I have already shown that I should be

the last to question; but so exact an echo, so servile an iteration as

this, I believe we shall nowhere find in them. The sonorous accumulation

of emphatic epithets--as in the magnificent first verse of this

passage--is indeed at least as much a note of the young Shakespeare's

style as of his master's; but even were this one verse less in the manner

of the elder than the younger poet--and this we can hardly say that it

is--no single verse detached from its context can weigh a feather against

the full and flawless evidence of the whole speech. And of all this

there is nothing in the _Contention_; the scene there opens in bald and

flat nakedness of prose, striking at once into the immediate matter of

stage business without the decoration of a passing epithet or a single

trope.

From this sample it might seem that the main difficulty must be to detect

anywhere the sign-manual of Shakespeare, even in the best passages of the

revised play. On the other hand, it has not unreasonably been maintained

that even in the next scene of this same act in its original form, and in

all those following which treat of Cade's insurrection, there is evidence

of such qualities as can hardly be ascribed to any hand then known but

Shakespeare's. The forcible realism, the simple vigour and lifelike

humour of these scenes, cannot, it is urged, be due to any other so early

at work in the field of comedy. A critic desirous to press this point

might further insist on the likeness or identity of tone between these

and all later scenes in which Shakespeare has taken on him to paint the

action and passion of an insurgent populace. With him, it might too

plausibly be argued, the people once risen in revolt for any just or

unjust cause is always the mob, the unwashed rabble, the swinish

multitude; full as he is of wise and gracious tenderness for individual

character, of swift and ardent pity for personal suffering, he has no

deeper or finer feeling than scorn for "the beast with many heads" that

fawn and butt at bidding as they are swayed by the vain and violent

breath of any worthless herdsman. For the drovers who guide and misguide

at will the turbulent flocks of their mutinous cattle his store of bitter

words is inexhaustible; it is a treasure-house of obloquy which can never

be drained dry. All this, or nearly all this, we must admit; but it

brings us no nearer to any but a floating and conjectural kind of

solution. In the earliest form known to us of this play it should seem

that we have traces of Shakespeare's handiwork, in the latest that we

find evidence of Marlowe's. But it would be something too extravagant

for the veriest wind-sucker among commentators to start a theory that a

revision was made of his original work by Marlowe after additions had

been made to it by Shakespeare; yet we have seen that the most

unmistakable signs of Marlowe's handiwork, the passages which show most

plainly the personal and present seal of his genius, belong to the play

only in its revised form; while there is no part of the whole composition

which can so confidently be assigned to Shakespeare as to the one man

then capable of such work, as can an entire and important episode of the

play in its unrevised state. Now the proposition that Shakespeare was

the sole author of both plays in their earliest extant shape is refuted

at once and equally from without and from within, by evidence of

tradition and by evidence of style. There is therefore proof

irresistible and unmistakable of at least a double authorship; and the

one reasonable conclusion left to us would seem to be this; that the

first edition we possess of these plays is a partial transcript of the

text as it stood after the first additions had been made by Shakespeare

to the original work of Marlowe and others; for that this original was

the work of more hands than one, and hands of notably unequal power, we

have again the united witness of traditional and internal evidence to

warrant our belief: and that among the omissions of this imperfect text

were certain passages of the original work, which were ultimately

restored in the final revision of the entire poem as it now stands among

the collected works of Shakespeare.

No competent critic who has given due study to the genius of Marlowe will

admit that there is a single passage of tragic or poetic interest in

either form of the text, which is beyond the reach of the father of

English tragedy: or, if there be one seeming exception in the expanded

and transfigured version of Clifford's monologue over his father's

corpse, which is certainly more in Shakespeare's tragic manner than in

Marlowe's, and in the style of a later period than that in which he was

on the whole apparently content to reproduce or to emulate the tragic

manner of Marlowe, there is at least but this one exception to the

general and absolute truth of the rule; and even this great tragic

passage is rather out of the range of Marlowe's style than beyond the

scope of his genius. In the later as in the earlier version of these

plays, the one manifest excellence of which we have no reason to suppose

him capable is manifest in the comic or prosaic scenes alone. The first

great rapid sketch of the dying cardinal, afterwards so nobly enlarged

and perfected on revision by the same or by a second artist, is as

clearly within the capacity of Marlowe as of Shakespeare; and in either

edition of the latter play, successively known as _The True Tragedy of

Richard Duke of York_, as the _Second Part of the Contention_, and as the

_Third Part of King Henry VI_., the dominant figure which darkens all the

close of the poem with presage of a direr day is drawn by the same strong

hand in the same tragic outline. From the first to the last stage of the

work there is no mark of change or progress here; the whole play indeed

has undergone less revision, as it certainly needed less, than the

preceding part of the _Contention_. Those great verses which resume the

whole spirit of Shakespeare's Richard--finer perhaps in themselves than

any passage of the play which bears his name--are wellnigh identical in

either form of the poem; but the reviser, with admirable judgment, has

struck out, whether from his own text or that of another, the line which

precedes them in the original sketch, where the passage runs thus:--

I had no father, I am like no father;

I have no brothers, I am like no brother;

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

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

It would be an impertinence to transcribe the rest of a passage which

rings in the ear of every reader's memory; but it may be noted that the

erasure by which its effect is so singularly heightened with the inborn

skill of so divine an instinct is just such an alteration as would be

equally likely to occur to the original writer on glancing over his

printed text or to a poet of kindred power, who, while busied in

retouching and filling out the sketch of his predecessor, might be struck

by the opening for so great an improvement at so small a cost of

suppression. My own conjecture would incline to the belief that we have

here a perfect example of the manner in which Shakespeare may be

presumed, when such a task was set before him, to have dealt with the

text of Marlowe. That at the outset of his career he was so employed, as

well as on the texts of lesser poets, we have on all hands as good

evidence of every kind as can be desired; proof on one side from the text

of the revised plays, which are as certainly in part the work of his hand

as they are in part the work of another; and proof on the opposite side

from the open and clamorous charge of his rivals, whose imputations can

be made to bear no reasonable meaning but this by the most violent

ingenuity of perversion, and who presumably were not persons of such

frank imbecility, such innocent and infantine malevolence, as to forge

against their most dangerous enemy the pointless and edgeless weapon of a

charge which, if ungrounded, must have been easier to refute than to

devise. Assuming then that in common with other young poets of his day

he was thus engaged during the first years of his connection with the

stage, we should naturally have expected to find him handling the text of

Marlowe with more of reverence and less of freedom than that of meaner

men: ready, as in the _Contention_, to clear away with no timid hand

their weaker and more inefficient work, to cancel and supplant it by

worthier matter of his own; but when occupied in recasting the verse of

Marlowe, not less ready to confine his labour to such slight and skilful

strokes of art as that which has led us into this byway of speculation;

to the correction of a false note, the addition of a finer touch, the

perfection of a meaning half expressed or a tone of half-uttered music;

to the invigoration of sense and metre by substitution of the right word

for the wrong, of a fuller phrase for one feebler; to the excision of

such archaic and superfluous repetitions as are signs of a cruder stage

of workmanship, relics of a ruder period of style, survivals of the

earliest form or habit of dramatic poetry. Such work as this, however

humble in our present eyes, which look before and after, would assuredly

have been worthy of the workman and his task; an office no less fruitful

of profit, and no more unbeseeming the pupil hand of the future master,

than the subordinate handiwork of the young Raffaelle or Leonardo on the

canvas of Verrocchio or Perugino.

Of the doubtful or spurious plays which have been with more or less show

of reason ascribed to this first period of Shakespeare's art, I have here

no more to say than that I purpose in the proper place to take account of

the only two among them which bear the slightest trace of any possible

touch of his hand. For these two there is not, as it happens, the least

witness of tradition or outward likelihood which might warrant us in

assigning them a place apart from the rest, and nearer the chance of

reception into the rank that has been claimed for them; while those plays

in whose favour there is some apparent evidence from without, such as the

fact of early or even original attribution to the master's hand, are,

with one possible exception, utterly beyond the pale of human

consideration as at any stage whatever the conceivable work of

Shakespeare.

Considering that his two attempts at narrative or rather semi-narrative

and semi-reflective poetry belong obviously to an early stage of his

earliest period, we may rather here than elsewhere take notice that there

are some curious points of coincidence for evil as for good between the

fortunes of Shakespeare's plays and the fortunes of his poems. In either

case we find that some part at least of his earlier and inferior work has

fared better at the blind hands of chance and the brutish hands of

printers than some part at least of his riper and more precious products.

His two early poems would seem to have had the good hap of his personal

supervision in their passage through the press. Upon them, at least

since the time of Coleridge, who as usual has said on this subject the

first and the last word that need be said, it seems to me that fully

sufficient notice and fully adequate examination have been expended; and

that nothing at once new and true can now be profitably said in praise or

in dispraise of them. Of _A Lover's Complaint_, marked as it is

throughout with every possible sign suggestive of a far later date and a

far different inspiration, I have only space or need to remark that it

contains two of the most exquisitely Shakespearean verses ever vouchsafed

to us by Shakespeare, and two of the most execrably euphuistic or

dysphuistic lines ever inflicted on us by man. Upon the Sonnets such a

preposterous pyramid of presumptuous commentary has long since been

reared by the Cimmerian speculation and Boeotian "brain-sweat" of

sciolists and scholiasts, that no modest man will hope and no wise man

will desire to add to the structure or subtract from it one single brick

of proof or disproof, theorem or theory. As yet the one contemporary

book which has ever been supposed to throw any direct or indirect light

on the mystic matter remains as inaccessible and unhelpful to students as

though it had never been published fifteen years earlier than the date of

their publication and four years before the book in which Meres notices

the circulation of Shakespeare's "sugared sonnets among his private

friends." It would be a most noble and thankworthy addition to a list of

labours beyond praise and benefits beyond price, if my honoured friend

Dr. Grosart could find the means to put a crown upon the achievements of

his learning and a seal upon the obligations of our gratitude by the one

inestimable boon long hoped for against hoping, and as yet but "a vision

in a dream" to the most learned and most loving of true Shakespearean

students; by the issue or reissue in its full and perfect likeness,

collated at last and complete, of _Willobie his Avisa_. {63}

It was long since more than time that the worthless and impudent

imposture called _The Passionate Pilgrim_ should be exposed and expelled

from its station at the far end of Shakespeare's poems. What Coleridge

said of Ben Jonson's epithet for "turtle-footed peace," we may say of the

label affixed to this rag-picker's bag of stolen goods: _The Passionate

Pilgrim_ is a pretty title, a very pretty title; pray what may it mean?

In all the larcenous little bundle of verse there is neither a poem which

bears that name nor a poem by which that name would be bearable. The

publisher of the booklet was like "one Ragozine, a most notorious

pirate"; and the method no less than the motive of his rascality in the

present instance is palpable and simple enough. Fired by the immediate

and instantly proverbial popularity of Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_,

he hired, we may suppose, some ready hack of unclean hand to supply him

with three doggrel sonnets on the same subject, noticeable only for their

porcine quality of prurience: he procured by some means a rough copy or

an incorrect transcript of two genuine and unpublished sonnets by

Shakespeare, which with the acute instinct of a felonious tradesman he

laid atop of his worthless wares by way of gilding to their base metal:

he stole from the two years published text of _Love's Labour's Lost_, and

reproduced with more or less mutilation or corruption, the sonnet of

Longavile, the "canzonet" of Biron, and the far lovelier love-song of

Dumaine. The rest of the ragman's gatherings, with three most notable

exceptions, is little better for the most part than dry rubbish or

disgusting refuse; unless a plea may haply be put in for the pretty

commonplaces of the lines on a "sweet rose, fair flower," and so forth;

for the couple of thin and pallid if tender and tolerable copies of verse

on "Beauty" and "Good Night," or the passably light and lively stray of

song on "crabbed age and youth." I need not say that those three

exceptions are the stolen and garbled work of Marlowe and of Barnfield,

our elder Shelley and our first-born Keats; the singer of Cynthia in

verse well worthy of Endymion, who would seem to have died as a poet in

the same fatal year of his age that Keats died as a man; the first

adequate English laureate of the nightingale, to be supplanted or

equalled by none until the advent of his mightier brother.