The second period is that of perfection in comic and historic style. The
final heights and depths of tragedy, with all its reach of thought and
all its pulse of passion, are yet to be scaled and sounded; but to this
stage belongs the special quality of faultless, joyous, facile command
upon each faculty required of the presiding genius for service or for
sport. It is in the middle period of his work that the language of
Shakespeare is most limpid in its fullness, the style most pure, the
thought most transparent through the close and luminous raiment of
perfect expression. The conceits and crudities of the first stage are
outgrown and cast aside; the harshness and obscurity which at times may
strike us as among the notes of his third manner have as yet no place in
the flawless work of this second stage. That which has to be said is not
yet too great for perfection of utterance; passion has not yet grappled
with thought in so close and fierce an embrace as to strain and rend the
garment of words, though stronger and subtler than ever was woven of
human speech. Neither in his first nor in his last stage would the style
of Shakespeare, even were it possible by study to reproduce it, be of
itself a perfect and blameless model; but his middle style, that in which
the typical plays of his second period are written, would be, if it were
possible to imitate, the most absolute pattern that could be set before
man. I do not speak of mere copyist's work, the parasitic knack of
retailing cast phrases, tricks and turns of accent, cadences and
catchwords proper only to the natural manner of the man who first came by
instinct upon them, and by instinct put them to use; I speak of that
faithful and fruitful discipleship of love with which the highest among
poets and the most original among workmen have naturally been always the
first to study and the most earnest to follow the footsteps of their
greatest precursors in that kind. And this only high and profitable form
of study and discipleship can set before itself, even in the work of
Shakespeare, no pattern so perfect, no model so absolute, as is afforded
by the style or manner of his second period.
To this stage belong by spiritual right if not by material, by rule of
poetic order if not by date of actual succession, the greatest of his
English histories and four of his greatest and most perfect comedies; the
four greatest we might properly call them, reserving for another class
the last divine triad of romantic plays which it is alike inaccurate to
number among tragedies or comedies proper: the _Winter's Tale_,
_Cymbeline_, and the _Tempest_, which belong of course wholly to his last
manner, or, if accuracy must be strained even to pedantry, to the second
manner of his third or final stage. A single masterpiece which may be
classed either among histories or tragedies belongs to the middle period;
and to this also we must refer, if not the ultimate form, yet assuredly
the first sketch at least of that which is commonly regarded as the
typical and supreme work of Shakespeare. Three lesser comedies, one of
them in great part the recast or rather the transfiguration of an earlier
poet's work, complete the list of plays assignable to the second epoch of
his genius.
The ripest fruit of historic or national drama, the consummation and the
crown of Shakespeare's labours in that line, must of course be recognised
and saluted by all students in the supreme and sovereign trilogy of King
Henry IV. and King Henry V. On a lower degree only than this final and
imperial work we find the two chronicle histories which remain to be
classed. In style as in structure they bear witness of a power less
perfect, a less impeccable hand. They have less of perceptible instinct,
less of vivid and vigorous utterance; the breath of their inspiration is
less continuous and less direct, the fashion of their eloquence is more
deliberate and more prepense; there is more of study and structure
apparent in their speech, and less in their general scheme of action. Of
all Shakespeare's plays they are the most rhetorical; there is more talk
than song in them, less poetry than oratory; more finish than form, less
movement than incident. Scene is laid upon scene, and event succeeds
event, as stone might be laid on stone and story might succeed story in a
building reared by mere might of human handiwork; not as in a city or
temple whose walls had risen of themselves to the lyric breath and stroke
of a greater than Amphion; moulded out of music by no rule or line of
mortal measure, with no sound of axe or anvil, but only of smitten
strings: built by harp and not by hand.
The lordly structure of these poems is the work of a royal workman, full
of masterdom and might, sublime in the state and strength of its many
mansions, but less perfect in proportion and less aerial in build than
the very highest fabrics fashioned after their own great will by the
supreme architects of song. Of these plays, and of these alone among the
maturer works of Shakespeare, it may be said that the best parts are
discernible from the rest, divisible by analysis and separable by memory
from the scenes which precede them or follow and the characters which
surround them or succeed. Constance and Katherine rise up into
remembrance apart from their environment and above it, stand clear in our
minds of the crowded company with which the poet has begirt their central
figures. In all other of his great tragic works,--even in _Hamlet_, if
we have grace and sense to read it aright and not awry,--it is not of any
single person or separate passage that we think when we speak of it; it
is to the whole masterpiece that the mind turns at mention of its name.
The one entire and perfect chrysolite of _Othello_ is neither Othello nor
Desdemona nor Iago, but each and all; the play of _Hamlet_ is more than
Hamlet himself, the poem even here is too great to be resumed in the
person. But Constance is the jewel of _King John_, and Katherine is the
crowning blossom of _King Henry VIII_.--a funeral flower as of "marigolds
on death-beds blowing," an opal of as pure water as "tears of perfect
moan," with fitful fire at its heart, ominous of evil and sorrow, set in
a mourning band of jet on the forefront of the poem, that the brow so
circled may, "like to a title-leaf, foretell the nature of a tragic
volume." Not indeed that without these the ground would in either case
be barren; but that in either field our eye rests rather on these and
other separate ears of wheat that overtop the ranks, than on the waving
width of the whole harvest at once. In the one play our memory turns
next to the figures of Arthur and the Bastard, in the other to those of
Wolsey and his king: the residue in either case is made up of outlines
more lightly and slightly drawn. In two scenes the figure of King John
rises indeed to the highest height even of Shakespearean tragedy; for the
rest of the play the lines of his character are cut no deeper, the
features of his personality stand out in no sharper relief, than those of
Eleanor or the French king; but the scene in which he tempts Hubert to
the edge of the pit of hell sounds a deeper note and touches a subtler
string in the tragic nature of man than had been struck by any poet save
Dante alone, since the reign of the Greek tragedians. The cunning and
profound simplicity of the few last weighty words which drop like flakes
of poison that blister where they fall from the deadly lips of the king
is a new quality in our tragic verse; there was no foretaste of such a
thing in the passionate imagination which clothed itself in the mighty
music of Marlowe's burning song. The elder master might indeed have
written the magnificent speech which ushers in with gradual rhetoric and
splendid reticence the black suggestion of a deed without a name; his
hand might have woven with no less imperial skill the elaborate raiment
of words and images which wraps up in fold upon fold, as with swaddling-
bands of purple and golden embroidery, the shapeless and miscreated birth
of a murderous purpose that labours into light even while it loathes the
light and itself; but only Shakespeare could give us the first sample of
that more secret and terrible knowledge which reveals itself in the brief
heavy whispers that seal the commission and sign the warrant of the king.
Webster alone of all our tragic poets has had strength to emulate in this
darkest line of art the handiwork of his master. We find nowhere such an
echo or reflection of the spirit of this scene as in the last tremendous
dialogue of Bosola with Ferdinand in the house of murder and madness,
while their spotted souls yet flutter between conscience and distraction,
hovering for an hour as with broken wings on the confines of either
province of hell. One pupil at least could put to this awful profit the
study of so great a model; but with the single and sublime exception of
that other design from the same great hand, which bares before us the
mortal anguish of Bracciano, no copy or imitation of the scene in which
John dies by poison has ever come near enough to evade the sentence it
provokes. The shrill tremulous agony of Fletcher's Valentinian is to the
sullen and slow death-pangs of Shakespeare's tyrant as the babble of a
suckling to the accents of a man. As far beyond the reach of any but his
maker's hand is the pattern of a perfect English warrior, set once for
all before the eyes of all ages in the figure of the noble Bastard. The
national side of Shakespeare's genius, the heroic vein of patriotism that
runs like a thread of living fire through the world-wide range of his
omnipresent spirit, has never, to my thinking, found vent or expression
to such glorious purpose as here. Not even in Hotspur or Prince Hal has
he mixed with more godlike sleight of hand all the lighter and graver
good qualities of the national character, or compounded of them all so
lovable a nature as this. In those others we admire and enjoy the same
bright fiery temper of soul, the same buoyant and fearless mastery of
fate or fortune, the same gladness and glory of life made lovely with all
the labour and laughter of its full fresh days; but no quality of theirs
binds our hearts to them as they are bound to Philip--not by his loyal
valour, his keen young wit, his kindliness, constancy, readiness of
service as swift and sure in the day of his master's bitterest shame and
shamefullest trouble as in the blithest hour of battle and that first
good fight which won back his father's spoils from his father's slayer;
but more than all these, for that lightning of divine rage and pity, of
tenderness that speaks in thunder and indignation that makes fire of its
tears, in the horror of great compassion which falls on him, the tempest
and storm of a beautiful and godlike anger which shakes his strength of
spirit and bows his high heart down at sight of Arthur dead. Being thus,
as he is, the English masterwork of Shakespeare's hand, we may well
accept him as the best man known to us that England ever made; the hero
that Nelson must have been had he never come too near Naples.
I am not minded to say much of Shakespeare's Arthur; there are one or two
figures in the world of his work of which there are no words that would
be fit or good to say. Another of these is Cordelia. The place they
have in our lives and thoughts is not one for talk; the niche set apart
for them to inhabit in our secret hearts is not penetrable by the lights
and noises of common day. There are chapels in the cathedral of man's
highest art as in that of his inmost life, not made to be set open to the
eyes and feet of the world. Love and death and memory keep charge for us
in silence of some beloved names. It is the crowning glory of genius,
the final miracle and transcendent gift of poetry, that it can add to the
number of these, and engrave on the very heart of our remembrance fresh
names and memories of its own creation.
There is one younger child in this heavenly family of Shakespeare's who
sits side by side with Arthur in the secret places of our thought; there
are but two or three that I remember among the children of other poets
who may be named in the same year with them: as Fletcher's Hengo,
Webster's Giovanni, and Landor's Caesarion. Of this princely trinity of
boys the "bud of Britain" is as yet the most famous flower; yet even in
the broken words of childish heroism that falter on his dying lips there
is nothing of more poignant pathos, more "dearly sweet and bitter," than
Giovanni's talk of his dead mother and all her sleepless nights now ended
for ever in a sleep beyond tears or dreams. Perhaps the most nearly
faultless in finish and proportion of perfect nature among all the noble
three is Landor's portrait of the imperial and right Roman child of Caesar
and Cleopatra. I know not but this may be found in the judgment of men
to come wellnigh the most pathetic and heroic figure bequeathed us after
more than eighty years of a glorious life by the indomitable genius of
our own last Roman and republican poet.
We have come now to that point at the opening of the second stage in his
work where the supreme genius of all time begins first to meddle with the
mysteries and varieties of human character, to handle its finer and more
subtle qualities, to harmonise its more untuned and jarring discords;
giving here and thus the first proof of a power never shared in like
measure by the mightiest among the sons of men, a sovereign and serene
capacity to fathom the else unfathomable depths of spiritual nature, to
solve its else insoluble riddles, to reconcile its else irreconcilable
discrepancies. In his first stage Shakespeare had dropped his plummet no
deeper into the sea of the spirit of man than Marlowe had sounded before
him; and in the channel of simple emotion no poet could cast surer line
with steadier hand than he. Further down in the dark and fiery depths of
human pain and mortal passion no soul could search than his who first
rendered into speech the aspirations and the agonies of a ruined and
revolted spirit. And until Shakespeare found in himself the strength of
eyesight to read and the cunning of handiwork to render those wider
diversities of emotion and those further complexities of character which
lay outside the range of Marlowe, he certainly cannot be said to have
outrun the winged feet, outstripped the fiery flight of his forerunner.
In the heaven of our tragic song the first-born star on the forehead of
its herald god was not outshone till the full midsummer meridian of that
greater godhead before whom he was sent to prepare a pathway for the sun.
Through all the forenoon of our triumphant day, till the utter
consummation and ultimate ascension of dramatic poetry incarnate and
transfigured in the master-singer of the world, the quality of his
tragedy was as that of Marlowe's, broad, single, and intense; large of
hand, voluble of tongue, direct of purpose. With the dawn of its latter
epoch a new power comes upon it, to find clothing and expression in new
forms of speech and after a new style. The language has put off its
foreign decorations of lyric and elegiac ornament; it has found already
its infinite gain in the loss of those sweet superfluous graces which
encumbered the march and enchained the utterance of its childhood. The
figures which it invests are now no more the types of a single passion,
the incarnations of a single thought. They now demand a scrutiny which
tests the power of a mind and tries the value of a judgment; they appeal
to something more than the instant apprehension which sufficed to respond
to the immediate claim of those that went before them. Romeo and Juliet
were simply lovers, and their names bring back to us no further thought
than of their love and the lovely sorrow of its end; Antony and Cleopatra
shall be before all things lovers, but the thought of their love and its
triumphant tragedy shall recall other things beyond number--all the
forces and all the fortunes of mankind, all the chance and all the
consequence that waited on their imperial passion, all the infinite
variety of qualities and powers wrought together and welded into the
frame and composition of that love which shook from end to end all
nations and kingdoms of the earth.
The same truth holds good in lighter matters; Biron and Rosaline in
comedy are as simply lovers and no more as were their counterparts and
coevals in tragedy: there is more in Benedick and Beatrice than this
simple quality of love that clothes itself in the strife of wits; the
injury done her cousin, which by the repercussion of its shock and
refraction of its effect serves to transfigure with such adorable
indignation and ardour of furious love and pity the whole bright light
nature of Beatrice, serves likewise by a fresh reflection and
counterchange of its consequence to exalt and enlarge the stature of her
lover's spirit after a fashion beyond the reach of Shakespeare in his
first stage. Mercutio again, like Philip, is a good friend and gallant
swordsman, quick-witted and hot-blooded, of a fiery and faithful temper,
loyal and light and swift alike of speech and swordstroke; and this is
all. But the character of the Bastard, clear and simple as broad
sunlight though it be, has in it other features than this single and
beautiful likeness of frank young manhood; his love of country and
loathing of the Church that would bring it into subjection are two sides
of the same national quality that has made and will always make every
Englishman of his type such another as he was in belief and in unbelief,
patriot and priest-hater; and no part of the design bears such witness to
the full-grown perfection of his creator's power and skill as the touch
that combines and fuses into absolute unity of concord the high and
various elements of faith in England, loyalty to the wretched lord who
has made him knight and acknowledged him kinsman, contempt for his
abjection at the foul feet of the Church, abhorrence of his crime and
constancy to his cause for something better worth the proof of war than
his miserable sake who hardly can be roused, even by such exhortation as
might put life and spirit into the dust of dead men's bones, to bid his
betters stand and strike in defence of the country dishonoured by his
reign.
It is this new element of variety in unity, this study of the complex and
diverse shades in a single nature, which requires from any criticism
worth attention some inquisition of character as complement to the
investigation of style. Analysis of any sort would be inapplicable to
the actors who bear their parts in the comic, the tragic or historic
plays of the first period. There is nothing in them to analyse; they
are, as we have seen, like all the characters represented by Marlowe, the
embodiments or the exponents of single qualities and simple forces. The
question of style also is therefore so far a simple question; but with
the change and advance in thought and all matter of spiritual study and
speculation this question also becomes complex, and inseparable, if we
would pursue it to any good end, from the analysis of character and
subject. In the debate on which we are now to enter, the question of
style and the question of character, or as we might say the questions of
matter and of spirit, are more than ever indivisible from each other,
more inextricably inwoven than elsewhere into the one most difficult
question of authorship which has ever been disputed in the dense and
noisy school or fought out in the wide and windy field of Shakespearean
controversy.
There can be few serious students of Shakespeare who have not sometimes
felt that possibly the hardest problem involved in their study is that
which requires for its solution some reasonable and acceptable theory as
to the play of _King Henry VIII_. None such has ever yet been offered;
and I certainly cannot pretend to supply one. Perhaps however it may be
possible to do some service by an attempt to disprove what is untenable,
even though it should not be possible to produce in its stead any
positive proof of what we may receive as matter of absolute faith.
The veriest tiro in criticism who knows anything of the subject in hand
must perceive, what is certainly not beyond a schoolboy's range of
vision, that the metre and the language of this play are in great part so
like the language and the metre of Fletcher that the first and easiest
inference would be to assume the partnership of that poet in the work. In
former days it was Jonson whom the critics and commentators of their time
saw good to select as the colleague or the editor of Shakespeare; but a
later school of criticism has resigned the notion that the fifth act was
retouched and adjusted by the author of _Volpone_ to the taste of his
patron James. The later theory is more plausible than this; the primary
objection to it is that it is too facile and superficial. It is waste of
time to point out with any intelligent and imaginative child with a
tolerable ear for metre who had read a little of the one and the other
poet could see for himself--that much of the play is externally as like
the usual style of Fletcher as it is unlike the usual style of
Shakespeare. The question is whether we can find one scene, one speech,
one passage, which in spirit, in scope, in purpose, bears the same or any
comparable resemblance to the work of Fletcher. I doubt if any man more
warmly admires a poet whom few can have studied more thoroughly than I;
and to whom, in spite of all sins of omission and commission,--and many
and grievous they are, beyond the plenary absolution of even the most
indulgent among critical confessors--I constantly return with a fresh
sense of attraction, which is constantly rewarded by a fresh sense of
gratitude and delight. It is assuredly from no wish to pluck a leaf from
his laurel, which has no need of foreign grafts or stolen garlands from
the loftier growth of Shakespeare's, that I venture to question his
capacity for the work assigned to him by recent criticism. The speech of
Buckingham, for example, on his way to execution, is of course at first
sight very like the finest speeches of the kind in Fletcher; here is the
same smooth and fluent declamation, the same prolonged and persistent
melody, which if not monotonous is certainly not various; the same pure,
lucid, perspicuous flow of simple rather than strong and elegant rather
than exquisite English; and yet, if we set it against the best examples
of the kind which may be selected from such tragedies as _Bonduca_ or
_The False One_, against the rebuke addressed by Caratach to his cousin
or by Caesar to the murderers of Pompey--and no finer instances of tragic
declamation can be chosen from the work of this great master of
rhetorical dignity and pathos--I cannot but think we shall perceive in it
a comparative severity and elevation which will be missed when we turn
back from it to the text of Fletcher. There is an aptness of phrase, an
abstinence from excess, a "plentiful lack" of mere flowery and
superfluous beauties, which we may rather wish than hope to find in the
most famous of Shakespeare's successors. But if not his work, we may be
sure it was his model; a model which he often approached, which he often
studied, but which he never attained. It is never for absolute truth and
fitness of expression, it is always for eloquence and sweetness, for
fluency and fancy, that we find the tragic scenes of Fletcher most
praiseworthy; and the motive or mainspring of interest is usually
anything but natural or simple. Now the motive here is as simple, the
emotion as natural as possible; the author is content to dispense with
all the violent or far-fetched or fantastic excitement from which
Fletcher could hardly ever bring himself completely to abstain. I am not
speaking here of those tragedies in which the hand of Beaumont is
traceable; to these, I need hardly say, the charge is comparatively
inapplicable which may fairly be brought against the unassisted works of
his elder colleague; but in any of the typical tragedies of Fletcher, in
_Thierry and Theodoret_, in _Valentinian_, in _The Double Marriage_, the
scenes which for power and beauty of style may reasonably be compared
with this of the execution of Buckingham will be found more forced in
situation, more fanciful in language than this. Many will be found more
beautiful, many more exciting; the famous interview of Thierry with the
veiled Ordella, and the scene answering to this in the fifth act where
Brunhalt is confronted with her dying son, will be at once remembered by
all dramatic students; and the parts of Lucina and Juliana may each be
described as a continuous arrangement of passionate and pathetic effects.
But in which of these parts and in which of these plays shall we find a
scene so simple, an effect so modest, a situation so unforced as here?
where may we look for the same temperance of tone, the same control of
excitement, the same steadiness of purpose? If indeed Fletcher could
have written this scene, or the farewell of Wolsey to his greatness, or
his parting scene with Cromwell, he was perhaps not a greater poet, but
he certainly was a tragic writer capable of loftier self-control and
severer self-command, than he has ever shown himself elsewhere.
And yet, if this were all, we might be content to believe that the
dignity of the subject and the high example of his present associate had
for once lifted the natural genius of Fletcher above itself. But the
fine and subtle criticism of Mr. Spedding has in the main, I think,
successfully and clearly indicated the lines of demarcation undeniably
discernible in this play between the severer style of certain scenes or
speeches and the laxer and more fluid style of others; between the
graver, solider, more condensed parts of the apparently composite work,
and those which are clearer, thinner, more diffused and diluted in
expression. If under the latter head we had to class such passages only
as the dying speech of Buckingham and the christening speech of Cranmer,
it might after all be almost impossible to resist the internal evidence
of Fletcher's handiwork. Certainly we hear the same soft continuous note
of easy eloquence, level and limpid as a stream of crystalline
transparence, in the plaintive adieu of the condemned statesman and the
panegyrical prophecy of the favoured prelate. If this, I say, were all,
we might admit that there is nothing--I have already admitted it--in
either passage beyond the poetic reach of Fletcher. But on the
hypothesis so ably maintained by the editor of Bacon there hangs no less
a consequence than this: that we must assign to the same hand the
crowning glory of the whole poem, the death-scene of Katherine. Now if
Fletcher could have written that scene--a scene on which the only
criticism ever passed, the only commendation ever bestowed, by the
verdict of successive centuries, has been that of tears and silence--if
Fletcher could have written a scene so far beyond our applause, so far
above our acclamation, then the memory of no great poet has ever been so
grossly wronged, so shamefully defrauded of its highest claim to honour.
But, with all reverence for that memory, I must confess that I cannot
bring myself to believe it. Any explanation appears to me more probable
than this. Considering with what care every relic of his work was once
and again collected by his posthumous editors--even to the attribution,
not merely of plays in which he can have taken only the slightest part,
but of plays in which we know that he had no share at all--I cannot
believe that his friends would have let by far the brightest jewel in his
crown rest unreclaimed in the then less popular treasure-house of
Shakespeare. Belief or disbelief of this kind is however but a sandy
soil for conjecture to build upon. Whether or not his friends would have
reclaimed for him the credit of this scene, had they known it (as they
must have known it) to be his due, I must repeat that such a miraculous
example of a man's genius for once transcending itself and for ever
eclipsing all its other achievements appears to me beyond all critical,
beyond all theological credulity. Pathos and concentration are surely
not among the dominant notes of Fletcher's style or the salient qualities
of his intellect. Except perhaps in the beautiful and famous passage
where Hengo dies in his uncle's arms, I doubt whether in any of the
variously and highly coloured scenes played out upon the wide and
shifting stage of his fancy the genius of Fletcher has ever unlocked the
source of tears. Bellario and Aspatia were the children of his younger
colleague; at least, after the death of Beaumont we meet no such figures
on the stage of Fletcher. In effect, though Beaumont had a gift of grave
sardonic humour which found especial vent in burlesques of the heroic
style and in the systematic extravagance of such characters as Bessus,
{89} yet he was above all things a tragic poet; and though Fletcher had
great power of tragic eloquence and passionate effusion, yet his comic
genius was of a rarer and more precious quality; one _Spanish Curate_ is
worth many a _Valentinian_; as, on the other hand, one _Philaster_ is
worth many a _Scornful Lady_. Now there is no question here of Beaumont;
and there is no question that the passage here debated has been taken to
the heart of the whole world and baptized in the tears of generations as
no work of Fletcher's has ever been. That Beaumont could have written it
I do not believe; but I am wellnigh assured that Fletcher could not. I
can scarcely imagine that the most fluid sympathy, the "hysteric passion"
most easily distilled from the eyes of reader or spectator, can ever have
watered with its tears the scene or the page which sets forth, however
eloquently and effectively, the sorrows and heroisms of Ordella, Juliana,
or Lucina. Every success but this I can well believe them, as they
assuredly deserve, to have attained.
To this point then we have come, as to the crucial point at issue; and
looking back upon those passages of the play which first suggest the
handiwork of Fletcher, and which certainly do now and then seem almost
identical in style with his, I think we shall hardly find the difference
between these and other parts of the same play so wide and so distinct as
the difference between the undoubted work of Fletcher and the undoubted
work of Shakespeare. What that difference is we are fortunately able to
determine with exceptional certitude, and with no supplementary help from
conjecture of probabilities. In the play which is undoubtedly a joint
work of these poets the points of contact and the points of disunion are
unmistakable by the youngest eye. In the very last scene of _The Two
Noble Kinsmen_, we can tell with absolute certainty what speeches were
appended or interpolated by Fletcher; we can pronounce with positive
conviction what passages were completed and what parts were left
unfinished by Shakespeare. Even on Mr. Spedding's theory it can hardly
be possible to do as much for _King Henry VIII_. The lines of
demarcation, however visible or plausible, are fainter by far than these.
It is certainly not much less strange to come upon such passages in the
work of Shakespeare as the speeches of Buckingham and Cranmer than it
would be to encounter in the work of Sophocles a sample of the later and
laxer style of Euripides; to meet for instance in the _Antigone_ with a
passage which might pass muster as an extract from the _Iphigenia in
Aulis_. In metrical effects the style of the lesser English poet is an
exact counterpart of the style of the lesser Greek; there is the same
comparative tenuity and fluidity of verse, the same excess of short
unemphatic syllables, the same solution of the graver iambic into soft
overflow of lighter and longer feet which relaxes and dilutes the solid
harmony of tragic metre with notes of a more facile and feminine strain.
But in _King Henry VIII_. it should be remarked that though we not
unfrequently find the same preponderance as in Fletcher's work of verses
with a double ending--which in English verse at least are not in
themselves feminine, and need not be taken to constitute, as in
Fletcher's case they do, a note of comparative effeminacy or relaxation
in tragic style--we do not find the perpetual predominance of those
triple terminations so peculiarly and notably dear to that poet; {92} so
that even by the test of the metre-mongers who would reduce the whole
question at issue to a point which might at once be solved by the simple
process of numeration the argument in favour of Fletcher can hardly be
proved tenable; for the metre which evidently has one leading quality in
common with his is as evidently wanting in another at least as marked and
as necessary to establish--if established it can be by any such test
taken singly and, apart from all other points of evidence--the
collaboration of Fletcher with Shakespeare in this instance. And if the
proof by mere metrical similitude is thus imperfect, there is here
assuredly no other kind of test which may help to fortify the argument by
any suggestion of weight even comparable to this. In those passages
which would seem most plausibly to indicate the probable partnership of
Fletcher, the unity and sustained force of the style keep it generally
above the average level of his; there is less admixture or intrusion of
lyric or elegiac quality; there is more of temperance and proportion
alike in declamation and in debate. And throughout the whole play, and
under all the diversity of composite subject and conflicting interest
which disturbs the unity of action, there is a singleness of spirit, a
general unity or concord of inner tone, in marked contrast to the utter
discord and discrepancy of the several sections of _The Two Noble
Kinsmen_. We admit, then, that this play offers us in some not
unimportant passages the single instance of a style not elsewhere
precisely or altogether traceable in Shakespeare; that no exact parallel
to it can be found among his other plays; and that if not the partial
work it may certainly be taken as the general model of Fletcher in his
tragic poetry. On the other hand, we contend that its exceptional
quality might perhaps be explicable as a tentative essay in a new line by
one who tried so many styles before settling into his latest; and that,
without far stronger, clearer, and completer proof than has yet been or
can ever be advanced, the question is not solved but merely evaded by the
assumption of a double authorship.
By far the ablest argument based upon a wider ground of reason or of
likelihood than this of mere metre that has yet been advanced in support
of the theory which would attribute a part of this play to some weaker
hand than Shakespeare's is due to the study of a critic whose
name--already by right of inheritance the most illustrious name of his
age and ours--is now for ever attached to that of Shakespeare himself by
right of the highest service ever done and the noblest duty ever paid to
his memory. The untimely death which removed beyond reach of our thanks
for all he had done and our hopes for all he might do, the man who first
had given to France the first among foreign poets--son of the greatest
Frenchman and translator of the greatest Englishman--was only in this not
untimely, that it forbore him till the great and wonderful work was done
which has bound two deathless names together by a closer than the common
link that connects the names of all sovereign poets. Among all classic
translations of the classic works of the world, I know of none that for
absolute mastery and perfect triumph over all accumulation of obstacles,
for supreme dominion over supreme difficulty, can be matched with the
translation of Shakespeare by Francois-Victor Hugo; unless a claim of
companionship may perchance be put in for Urquhart's unfinished version
of Rabelais. For such success in the impossible as finally disproves the
right of "that fool of a word" to existence--at least in the world of
letters--the two miracles of study and of sympathy which have given
Shakespeare to the French and Rabelais to the English, and each in his
habit as he lived, may take rank together in glorious rivalry beyond
eyeshot of all past or future competition.
Among the essays appended to the version of Shakespeare which they
complete and illustrate, that which deals with the play now in question
gives as ample proof as any other of the sound and subtle insight brought
to bear by the translator upon the object of his labour and his love. His
keen and studious intuition is here as always not less notable and
admirable than his large and solid knowledge, his full and lucid
comprehension at once of the text and of the history of Shakespeare's
plays; and if his research into the inner details of that history may
seem ever to have erred from the straight path of firm and simple
certainty into some dubious byway of theory or conjecture, we may be sure
at least that no lack of learning or devotion, of ardour or intelligence,
but more probably some noble thought that was fathered by a noble wish to
do honour to Shakespeare, has led him to attribute to his original some
quality foreign to the text, or to question the authenticity of what for
love of his author he might not wish to find in it. Thus he would reject
the main part of the fifth act as the work of a mere court laureate, an
official hack or hireling employed to anoint the memory of an archbishop
and lubricate the steps of a throne with the common oil of dramatic
adulation; and finding it in either case a task alike unworthy of
Shakespeare to glorify the name of Cranmer or to deify the names of the
queen then dead and the king yet living, it is but natural that he should
be induced by an unconscious bias or prepossession of the will to
depreciate the worth of the verse sent on work fitter for ushers and
embalmers and the general valetry or varletry of Church and State. That
this fifth act is unequal in point of interest to the better part of the
preceding acts with which it is connected by so light and loose a tie of
convenience is as indisputable as that the style of the last scene
savours now and then, and for some space together, more strongly than
ever of Fletcher's most especial and distinctive qualities, or that the
whole structure of the play if judged by any strict rule of pure art is
incomposite and incongruous, wanting in unity, consistency, and coherence
of interest. The fact is that here even more than in _King John_ the
poet's hands were hampered by a difficulty inherent in the subject. To
an English and Protestant audience, fresh from the passions and perils of
reformation and reaction, he had to present an English king at war with
the papacy, in whom the assertion of national independence was incarnate;
and to the sympathies of such an audience it was a matter of mere
necessity for him to commend the representative champion of their cause
by all means which he could compel into the service of his aim. Yet this
object was in both instances all but incompatible with the natural and
necessary interest of the plot. It was inevitable that this interest
should in the main be concentrated upon the victims of the personal or
national policy of either king; upon Constance and Arthur, upon Katherine
and Wolsey. Where these are not, either apparent in person on the stage,
or felt in their influence upon the speech and action of the characters
present, the pulse of the poem beats fainter and its forces begin to
flag. In _King John_ this difficulty was met and mastered, these double
claims of the subject of the poem and the object of the poet were
satisfied and harmonised, by the effacement of John and the substitution
of Faulconbridge as the champion of the national cause and the
protagonist of the dramatic action. Considering this play in its double
aspect of tragedy and history, we might say that the English hero becomes
the central figure of the poem as seen from its historic side, while John
remains the central figure of the poem as seen from its tragic side; the
personal interest that depends on personal crime and retribution is
concentrated on the agony of the king; the national interest which he,
though the eponymous hero of the poem, was alike inadequate as a craven
and improper as a villain to sustain and represent in the eyes of the
spectators was happily and easily transferred to the one person of the
play who could properly express within the compass of its closing act at
once the protest against papal pretension, the defiance of foreign
invasion, and the prophetic assurance of self-dependent life and self-
sufficing strength inherent in the nation then fresh from a fiercer trial
of its quality, which an audience of the days of Queen Elizabeth would
justly expect from the poet who undertook to set before them in action
the history of the days of King John. That history had lately been
brought upon the stage under the hottest and most glaring light that
could be thrown on it by the fire of fanatical partisanship; _The
Troublesome Reign of King John_, weakest and most wooden of all wearisome
chronicles that ever cumbered the boards, had in it for sole principle of
life its power of congenial appeal to the same blatant and vulgar spirit
of Protestantism which inspired it. In all the flat interminable morass
of its tedious and tuneless verse I can find no blade or leaf of living
poetic growth, no touch but one of nature or of pathos, where Arthur
dying would fain send a last thought in search of his mother. From this
play Shakespeare can have got neither hint nor help towards the execution
of his own; the crude rough sketch of the Bastard as he brawls and
swaggers through the long length of its scenes is hardly so much as the
cast husk or chrysalid of the noble creature which was to arise and take
shape for ever at the transfiguring touch of Shakespeare. In the case of
_King Henry VIII_. he had not even such a blockish model as this to work
from. The one preceding play known to me which deals professedly with
the same subject treats of quite other matters than are handled by
Shakespeare, and most notably with the scholastic adventures or
misadventures of Edward Prince of Wales and his whipping-boy Ned Browne.
A fresh and wellnigh a plausible argument might be raised by the critics
who deny the unity of authorship in King Henry VIII., on the ground that
if Shakespeare had completed the work himself he would surely not have
let slip the occasion to introduce one of the most famous and popular of
all court fools in the person of Will Summers, who might have given life
and relief to the action of many scenes now unvaried and unbroken in
their gravity of emotion and event. Shakespeare, one would say, might
naturally have been expected to take up and remodel the well-known figure
of which his humble precursor could give but a rough thin outline, yet
sufficient it should seem to attract the tastes to which it appealed; for
this or some other quality of seasonable attraction served to float the
now forgotten play of Samuel Rowley through several editions. The
central figure of the huge hot-headed king, with his gusts of stormy good
humour and peals of burly oaths which might have suited "Garagantua's
mouth" and satisfied the requirements of Hotspur, appeals in a ruder
fashion to the survival of the same sympathies on which Shakespeare with
a finer instinct as evidently relied; the popular estimate of the bluff
and brawny tyrant "who broke the bonds of Rome" was not yet that of later
historians, though doubtless neither was it that of the writer or writers
who would champion him to the utterance. Perhaps the opposite verdicts
given by the instinct of the people on "bluff King Hal" and "Bloody Mary"
may be understood by reference to a famous verse of Juvenal. The
wretched queen was sparing of noble blood and lavish of poor men's
lives--_cerdonibus timenda_; and the curses under which her memory was
buried were spared by the people to her father, _Lamiarum caede madenti_.
In any case, the humblest not less than the highest of the poets who
wrote under the reign of his daughter found it safe to present him in a
popular light before an audience of whose general prepossession in his
favour William Shakespeare was no slower to take advantage than Samuel
Rowley.
The two plays we have just discussed have one quality of style in common
which has already been noted; that in them rhetoric is in excess of
action or passion, and far in excess of poetry. They are not as yet
perfect examples of his second manner, though far ahead of his first
stage in performance as in promise. Compared with the full and living
figure of Katherine or of Constance, the study of Margaret of Anjou is
the mere sketch of a poet still in his pupilage: John and Henry,
Faulconbridge and Wolsey, are designs beyond reach of the hand which drew
the second and third Richard without much background or dramatic
perspective. But the difficulties inherent in either subject are not
surmounted throughout with absolute equality of success; the very point
of appeal to the sympathy and excitement of the time may have been
something of a disturbing force in the composition of the work--a
loadstone rock indeed, of tempting attraction to the patriot as well as
to the playwright, but possibly capable of proving in some measure a rock
of offence to the poet whose ship was piloted towards it. His perfect
triumph in the field of patriotic drama, coincident with the perfect
maturity of his comic genius and his general style, has now to show
itself.
The great national trilogy which is at once the flower of Shakespeare's
second period and the crown of his achievements in historic drama--unless
indeed we so far depart from the established order and arrangement of his
works as to include his three Roman plays in the same class with these
English histories--offers perhaps the most singular example known to us
of the variety in fortune which befell his works on their first
appearance in print. None of these had better luck in that line at
starting than _King Henry IV_.; none had worse than _King Henry V_. With
_Romeo and Juliet_, the _Merry Wives of Windsor_, and _Hamlet_, it shares
the remarkable and undesirable honour of having been seized and boarded
by pirates even before it had left the dockyard. The masterbuilder's
hands had not yet put the craft into seaworthy condition when she was
overhauled by these Kidds and Blackbeards of the press. Of those four
plays, the two tragedies at least were thoroughly recast, and rewritten
from end to end: the pirated editions giving us a transcript, more or
less perfect or imperfect, accurate or corrupt, of the text as it first
came from the poet's hand; a text to be afterwards indefinitely modified
and incalculably improved. Not quite so much can be said of the comedy,
which certainly stood in less need of revision, and probably would not
have borne it so well; nevertheless every little passing touch of the
reviser's hand is here also a noticeable mark of invigoration and
improvement. But _King Henry V_., we may fairly say, is hardly less than
transformed. Not that it has been recast after the fashion of _Hamlet_,
or even rewritten after the fashion of _Romeo and Juliet_; but the
corruptions and imperfections of the pirated text are here more flagrant
than in any other instance; while the general revision of style by which
it is at once purified and fortified extends to every nook and corner of
the restored and renovated building. Even had we, however, a perfect and
trustworthy transcript of Shakespeare's original sketch for this play,
there can be little doubt that the rough draught would still prove almost
as different from the final masterpiece as is the soiled and ragged
canvas now before us, on which we trace the outline of figures so
strangely disfigured, made subject to such rude extremities of defacement
and defeature. There is indeed less difference between the two editions
in the comic than in the historic scenes; the pirates were probably more
careful to furnish their market with a fair sample of the lighter than of
the graver ware supplied by their plunder of the poet; Fluellen and
Pistol lose less through their misusage than the king; and the king
himself is less maltreated when he talks plain prose with his soldiers
than when he chops blank verse with his enemies or his lords. His rough
and ready courtship of the French princess is a good deal expanded as to
length, but (if I dare say so) less improved and heightened in tone than
we might well have wished and it might well have borne; in either text
the Hero's addresses savour rather of a ploughman than a prince, and his
finest courtesies are clownish though not churlish. We may probably see
in this rather a concession to the appetite of the groundlings than an
evasion of the difficulties inherent in the subject-matter of the scene;
too heavy as these might have been for another, we can conceive of none
too hard for the magnetic tact and intuitive delicacy of Shakespeare's
judgment and instinct. But it must fairly and honestly be admitted that
in this scene we find as little of the charm and humour inseparable from
the prince as of the courtesy and dignity to be expected from the king.
It should on the other hand be noted that the finest touch in the comic
scenes, if not the finest in the whole portrait of Falstaff, is
apparently an afterthought, a touch added on revision of the original
design. In the first scene of the second act Mrs. Quickly's remark that
"he'll yield the crow a pudding one of these days" is common to both
versions of the play; but the six words following are only to be found in
the revised edition; and these six words the very pirates could hardly
have passed over or struck out. They are not such as can drop from the
text of a poet unperceived by the very dullest and horniest of human
eyes. "The king has killed his heart." Here is the point in Falstaff's
nature so strangely overlooked by the man of all men who we should have
said must be the first to seize and to appreciate it. It is as grievous
as it is inexplicable that the Shakespeare of France--the most infinite
in compassion, in "conscience and tender heart," of all great poets in
all ages and all nations of the world--should have missed the deep
tenderness of this supreme and subtlest touch in the work of the greatest
among his fellows. Again, with anything but "damnable" iteration, does
Shakespeare revert to it before the close of this very scene. Even
Pistol and Nym can see that what now ails their old master is no such
ailment as in his prosperous days was but too liable to "play the rogue
with his great toe." "The king hath run bad humours on the knight": "his
heart is fracted, and corroborate." And it is not thus merely through
the eclipse of that brief mirage, that fair prospect "of Africa, and
golden joys," in view of which he was ready to "take any man's horses."
This it is that distinguishes Falstaff from Panurge; that lifts him at
least to the moral level of Sancho Panza. I cannot but be reluctant to
set the verdict of my own judgment against that of Victor Hugo's; I need
none to remind me what and who he is whose judgment I for once oppose,
and what and who am I that I should oppose it; that he is he, and I am
but myself; yet against his classification of Falstaff, against his
definition of Shakespeare's unapproached and unapproachable masterpiece
in the school of comic art and humouristic nature, I must and do with all
my soul and strength protest. The admirable phrase of "swine-centaur"
(_centaure du porc_) is as inapplicable to Falstaff as it is appropriate
to Panurge. Not the third person but the first in date of that divine
and human trinity of humourists whose names make radiant for ever the
Century of their new-born glory--not Shakespeare but Rabelais is
responsible for the creation or the discovery of such a type as this.
"_Suum cuique_ is our Roman justice"; the gradation from Panurge to
Falstaff is not downward but upward; though it be Victor Hugo's very self
who asserts the contrary. {108} Singular as may seem the collocation of
the epithet "moral" with the name "Falstaff," I venture to maintain my
thesis; that in point of feeling, and therefore of possible moral
elevation, Falstaff is as undeniably the superior of Sancho as Sancho is
unquestionably the superior of Panurge. The natural affection of Panurge
is bounded by the self-same limits as the natural theology of Polyphemus;
the love of the one, like the faith of the other, begins and ends alike
at one point;
Myself,
And this great belly, first of deities;
(in which line, by the way, we may hear as it were a first faint prelude
of the great proclamation to come--the hymn of praise and thanksgiving
for the coronation day of King Gaster; whose laureate, we know, was as
lovingly familiar with the Polyphemus of Euripides as Shakespeare with
his own Pantagruel.) In Sancho we come upon a creature capable of
love--but not of such love as kills or helps to kill, such love as may
end or even as may seem to end in anything like heartbreak. "And now
abideth Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, these three; but the greatest
of these is Shakespeare."
I would fain score yet another point in the fat knight's favour; "I have
much to say in the behalf of that Falstaff." Rabelais, evangelist and
prophet of the Resurrection of the Flesh (so long entombed, ignored,
repudiated, misconstrued, vilified, by so many generations and ages of
Galilean preachers and Pharisaic schoolmen)--Rabelais was content to
paint the flesh merely, in its honest human reality--human at least, if
also bestial; in its frank and rude reaction against the half brainless
and wholly bloodless teachers whose doctrine he himself on the one hand,
and Luther on the other, arose together to smite severally--to smite them
hip and thigh, even till the going down of the sun; the mock sun or
marshy meteor that served only to deepen the darkness encompassing on
every side the doubly dark ages--the ages of monarchy and theocracy, the
ages of death and of faith. To Panurge, therefore, it was unnecessary
and it might have seemed inconsequent to attribute other gifts or
functions than are proper to such intelligence as may accompany the
appetites of an animal. That most irreverend father in God, Friar John,
belongs to a higher class in the moral order of being; and he much rather
than his fellow-voyager and penitent is properly comparable with
Falstaff. It is impossible to connect the notion of rebuke with the sins
of Panurge. The actual lust and gluttony, the imaginary cowardice of
Falstaff, have been gravely and sharply rebuked by critical morality; we
have just noted a too recent and too eminent example of this; but what
mortal ever dreamed of casting these qualities in the teeth of his
supposed counterpart? The difference is as vast between Falstaff on the
field of battle and Panurge on the storm-tossed deck as between Falstaff
and Hotspur, Panurge and Friar John. No man could show cooler and
steadier nerve than is displayed in either case--by the lay as well as
the clerical namesake of the fourth evangelist. If ever fruitless but
endless care was shown to prevent misunderstanding, it was shown in the
pains taken by Shakespeare to obviate the misconstruction which would
impute to Falstaff the quality of a Parolles or a Bobadil, a Bessus or a
Moron. The delightful encounter between the jester and the bear in the
crowning interlude of _La Princesse d'Elide_ shows once more, I may
remark, that Moliere had sat at the feet of Rabelais as delightedly as
Shakespeare before him. Such rapturous inebriety or Olympian
incontinence of humour only fires the blood of the graver and less
exuberant humourist when his lips are still warm and wet from the well-
spring of the _Dive Bouteille_.
It is needless to do over again the work which was done, and well done, a
hundred years since, by the writer whose able essay in vindication and
exposition of the genuine character of Falstaff elicited from Dr. Johnson
as good a jest and as bad a criticism as might have been expected. His
argument is too thoroughly carried out at all points and fortified on all
hands to require or even to admit of corroboration; and the attempt to
appropriate any share of the lasting credit which is his due would be
nothing less than a disingenuous impertinence. I may here however notice
that in the very first scene of this trilogy which introduces us to the
ever dear and honoured presence of Sir John, his creator has put into the
mouth of a witness no friendlier or more candid than Ned Poins the
distinction between two as true-bred cowards as ever turned back and one
who will fight no longer than he sees reason. In this nutshell lies the
whole kernel of the matter; the sweet, sound, ripe, toothsome, wholesome
kernel of Falstaff's character and humour. He will fight as well as his
princely patron, and, like the prince, as long as he sees reason; but
neither Hal nor Jack has ever felt any touch of desire to pluck that
"mere scutcheon" honour "from the pale-faced moon." Harry Percy is as it
were the true Sir Bedivere, the last of all Arthurian knights; Henry V.
is the first as certainly as he is the noblest of those equally daring
and calculating statesmen-warriors whose two most terrible, most perfect,
and most famous types are Louis XI. and Caesar Borgia. Gain,
"commodity," the principle of self-interest which never but in word and
in jest could become the principle of action with Faulconbridge,--himself
already far more "a man of this world" than a Launcelot or a Hotspur,--is
as evidently the mainspring of Henry's enterprise and life as of the
contract between King Philip and King John. The supple and shameless
egotism of the churchmen on whose political sophistries he relies for
external support is needed rather to varnish his project than to reassure
his conscience. Like Frederic the Great before his first Silesian war,
the future conqueror of Agincourt has practically made up his mind before
he seeks to find as good reason or as plausible excuse as were likewise
to suffice the future conqueror of Rosbach. In a word, Henry is
doubtless not the man, as old Auchindrane expresses it in the noble and
strangely neglected tragedy which bears solitary but sufficient witness
to the actual dramatic faculty of Sir Walter Scott's genius, to do the
devil's work without his wages; but neither is he, on the like
unprofitable terms, by any manner of means the man to do God's. No
completer incarnation could be shown us of the militant
Englishman--_Anglais pur sang_; but it is not only, as some have seemed
to think, with the highest, the purest, the noblest quality of English
character that his just and far-seeing creator has endowed him. The
godlike equity of Shakespeare's judgment, his implacable and impeccable
righteousness of instinct and of insight, was too deeply ingrained in the
very core of his genius to be perverted by any provincial or
pseudo-patriotic prepossessions; his patriotism was too national to be
provincial. Assuredly no poet ever had more than he: not even the king
of men and poets who fought at Marathon and sang of Salamis: much less
had any or has any one of our own, from Milton on to Campbell and from
Campbell even to Tennyson. In the mightiest chorus of _King Henry V_. we
hear the pealing ring of the same great English trumpet that was yet to
sound over the battle of the Baltic, and again in our later day over a
sea-fight of Shakespeare's own, more splendid and heart-cheering in its
calamity than that other and all others in their triumph; a war-song and
a sea-song divine and deep as death or as the sea, making thrice more
glorious at once the glorious three names of England, of Grenville, and
of Tennyson for ever. From the affectation of cosmopolitan indifference
not AEschylus, not Pindar, not Dante's very self was more alien or more
free than Shakespeare; but there was nothing of the dry Tyrtaean twang,
the dull mechanic resonance as of wooden echoes from a platform, in the
great historic chord of his lyre. "He is very English, too English,
even," says the Master on whom his enemies alone--assuredly not his most
loving, most reverent, and most thankful disciples--might possibly and
plausibly retort that he was "very French, too French, even"; but he
certainly was not "too English" to see and cleave to the main fact, the
radical and central truth, of personal or national character, of typical
history or tradition, without seeking to embellish, to degrade, in either
or in any way to falsify it. From king to king, from cardinal to
cardinal, from the earliest in date of subject to the latest of his
histories, we find the same thread running, the same link of honourable
and righteous judgment, of equitable and careful equanimity, connecting
and combining play with play in an unbroken and infrangible chain of
evidence to the singleness of the poet's eye, the identity of the
workman's hand, which could do justice and would do no more than justice,
alike to Henry and to Wolsey, to Pandulph and to John. His typical
English hero or historic protagonist is a man of their type who founded
and built up the empire of England in India; a hero after the future
pattern of Hastings and of Clive; not less daringly sagacious and not
more delicately scrupulous, not less indomitable or more impeccable than
they. A type by no means immaculate, a creature not at all too bright
and good for English nature's daily food in times of mercantile or
military enterprise; no whit more if no whit less excellent and radiant
than reality. _Amica Britannia, sed magis amica veritas_. The master
poet of England--all Englishmen may reasonably and honourably be proud of
it--has not two weights and two measures for friend and foe. This
palpable and patent fact, as his only and worthy French translator has
well remarked, would of itself suffice to exonerate his memory from the
imputation of having perpetrated in its evil entirety _The First Part of
King Henry VI_.
There is, in my opinion, somewhat more of internal evidence than I have
ever seen adduced in support of the tradition current from an early date
as to the origin of the _Merry Wives of Windsor_; a tradition which
assigns to Queen Elizabeth the same office of midwife with regard to this
comedy as was discharged by Elwood with reference to _Paradise Regained_.
Nothing could so naturally or satisfactorily explain its existence as the
expression of a desire to see "Falstaff in love," which must have been
nothing less than the equivalent of a command to produce him under the
disguise of such a transfiguration on the boards. The task of presenting
him so shorn of his beams, so much less than archangel (of comedy)
ruined, and the excess of (humorous) glory obscured, would hardly, we
cannot but think and feel, have spontaneously suggested itself to
Shakespeare as a natural or eligible aim for the fresh exercise of his
comic genius. To exhibit Falstaff as throughout the whole course of five
acts a credulous and baffled dupe, one "easier to be played on than a
pipe," was not really to reproduce him at all. The genuine Falstaff
could no more have played such a part than the genuine Petruchio could
have filled such an one as was assigned him by Fletcher in the luckless
hour when that misguided poet undertook to continue the subject and to
correct the moral of the next comedy in our catalogue of Shakespeare's.
_The Tamer Tamed_ is hardly less consistent or acceptable as a sequel to
the _Taming of the Shrew_ than the _Merry Wives of Windsor_ as a
supplement to _King Henry IV_.: and no conceivable comparison could more
forcibly convey, how broad and deep is the gulf of incongruity which
divides them.