NOTE ON THE HISTORICAL PLAY OF KING EDWARD III.
1879.
The epitaph of German criticism on Shakespeare was long since written by
the unconscious hand which penned the following sentence; an inscription
worthy of perpetual record on the registers of Gotham or in the daybook
of the yet unstranded Ship of Fools.
"_Thomas Lord Cromwell:--Sir John Oldcastle:--A Yorkshire Tragedy_.--The
three last pieces are not only unquestionably Shakespeare's, but in my
opinion they deserve to be classed among his best and maturest works."
This memorable opinion is the verdict of the modest and judicious Herr
von Schlegel: who had likewise in his day the condescension to inform our
ignorance of the melancholy fact so strangely overlooked by the
contemporaries of Christopher Marlowe, that "his verses are flowing, but
without energy." Strange, but true; too strange, we may reasonably
infer, not to be true. Only to German eyes has the treasure-house of
English poetry ever disclosed a secret of this kind: to German ears alone
has such discord or default been ever perceptible in its harmonies.
Now the facts with regard to this triad of plays are briefly these.
_Thomas Lord Cromwell_ is a piece of such utterly shapeless, spiritless,
bodiless, soulless, senseless, helpless, worthless rubbish, that there is
no known writer of Shakespeare's age to whom it could be ascribed without
the infliction of an unwarrantable insult on that writer's memory. _Sir
John Oldcastle_ is the compound piecework of four minor playwrights, one
of them afterwards and otherwise eminent as a poet--Munday, Drayton,
Wilson, and Hathaway: a thin sample of poetic patchery cobbled up and
stitched together so as to serve its hour for a season without falling to
pieces at the first touch. The _Yorkshire Tragedy_ is a coarse, crude,
and vigorous impromptu, in which we possibly might almost think it
possible that Shakespeare had a hand (or at least a finger), if we had
any reason to suppose that during the last ten or twelve years of his
life {232} he was likely to have taken part in any such dramatic
improvisation.
The example and the exposure of Schlegel's misadventures in this line
have not sufficed to warn off minor blunderers from treading with emulous
confidence "through forthrights and meanders" in the very muddiest of
their precursor's traces. We may notice, for one example, the revival--or
at least the discussion as of something worth serious notice--of a
wellnigh still-born theory, first dropped in a modest corner of the
critical world exactly a hundred and seventeen years ago. Its parent,
notwithstanding this perhaps venial indiscretion, was apparently an
honest and modest gentleman; and the play itself, which this ingenuous
theorist was fain, with all diffidence, to try whether haply he might be
permitted to foist on the apocryphal fatherhood of Shakespeare, is not
without such minor merits as may excuse us for wasting a few minutes on
examination of the theory which seeks to confer on it the factitious and
artificial attraction of a spurious and adventitious interest.
"The Raigne of King Edward the third: As it hath bin sundrie times plaied
about the Citie of London," was published in 1596, and ran through two or
three anonymous editions before the date of the generation was out which
first produced it. Having thus run to the end of its natural tether, it
fell as naturally into the oblivion which has devoured, and has not again
disgorged, so many a more precious production of its period. In 1760 it
was reprinted in the "Prolusions" of Edward Capell, whose text is now
before me. This editor was the first mortal to suggest that his newly
unearthed treasure might possibly be a windfall from the topless tree of
Shakespeare. Being, as I have said, a duly modest and an evidently
honest man, he admits "with candour" that there is no jot or tittle of
"external evidence" whatsoever to be alleged in support of this
gratuitous attribution: but he submits, with some fair show of reason,
that there is a certain "resemblance between the style of" Shakespeare's
"earlier performances and of the work in question"; and without the
slightest show of any reason whatever he appends to this humble and
plausible plea the unspeakably unhappy assertion that at the time of its
appearance "there was no known writer equal to such a play"; whereas at a
moderate computation there were, I should say, on the authority of
Henslowe's Diary, at least a dozen--and not improbably a score. In any
case there was one then newly dead, too long before his time, whose
memory stands even higher above the possible ascription of such a work
than that of the adolescent Shakespeare's very self.
Of one point we may be sure, even where so much is unsure as we find it
here: in the curt atheological phrase of the Persian Lucretius, "one
thing is certain, and the rest is lies." The author of _King Edward
III_. was a devout student and a humble follower of Christopher Marlowe,
not yet wholly disengaged by that august and beneficent influence from
all attraction towards the "jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits"; and
fitter on the whole to follow this easier and earlier vein of writing,
half lyrical in manner and half elegiac, than to brace upon his punier
limbs the young giant's newly fashioned buskin of blank verse. The signs
of this growing struggle, the traces of this incomplete emancipation, are
perceptible throughout in the alternate prevalence of two conflicting and
irreconcilable styles; which yet affords no evidence or suggestion of a
double authorship. For the intelligence which moulds and informs the
whole work, the spirit which pervades and imbues the general design, is
of a piece, so to speak, throughout; a point imperceptible to the eye, a
touchstone intangible by the finger, alike of a scholiast and a dunce.
Another test, no less unmistakable by the student and no less
indiscernible to the sciolist, is this: that whatever may be the demerits
of this play, they are due to no voluntary or involuntary carelessness or
haste. Here is not the swift impatient journeywork of a rough and ready
hand; here is no sign of such compulsory hurry in the discharge of a task
something less than welcome, if not of an imposition something less than
tolerable, as we may rationally believe ourselves able to trace in great
part of Marlowe's work: in the latter half of _The Jew of Malta_, in the
burlesque interludes of _Doctor Faustus_, and wellnigh throughout the
whole scheme and course of _The Massacre at Paris_. Whatever in _King
Edward III_. is mediocre or worse is evidently such as it is through no
passionate or slovenly precipitation of handiwork, but through pure
incompetence to do better. The blame of the failure, the shame of the
shortcoming, cannot be laid to the account of any momentary excess or
default in emotion, of passing exhaustion or excitement, of intermittent
impulse and reaction; it is an indication of lifelong and irremediable
impotence. And it is further to be noted that by far the least
unsuccessful parts of the play are also by far the most unimportant. The
capacity of the author seems to shrink and swell alternately, to erect
its plumes and deject them, to contract and to dilate the range and orbit
of its flight in a steadily inverse degree to the proportionate interest
of the subject or worth of the topic in hand. There could be no surer
proof that it is neither the early nor the hasty work of a great or even
a remarkable poet. It is the best that could be done at any time by a
conscientious and studious workman of technically insufficient culture
and of naturally limited means.
I would not, however, be supposed to undervalue the genuine and graceful
ability of execution displayed by the author at his best. He could write
at times very much after the earliest fashion of the adolescent
Shakespeare; in other words, after the fashion of the day or hour, to
which in some degree the greatest writer of that hour or that day cannot
choose but conform at starting, and the smallest writer must needs
conform for ever. By the rule which would attribute to Shakespeare every
line written in his first manner which appeared during the first years of
his poetic progress, it is hard to say what amount of bad verse or
better, current during the rise and the reign of their several
influences,--for this kind of echo or of copywork, consciously or
unconsciously repercussive and reflective, begins with the very first
audible sound of a man's voice in song, with the very first noticeable
stroke of his hand in painting--it is hard to say what amount of
tolerable or intolerable work might not or may not be assignable by
scholiasts of the future to Byron or to Shelley, to Mr. Tennyson or to
Mr. Browning. A time by this rule might come--but I am fain to think
better of the Fates--when by comparison of detached words and collation
of dismembered phrases the memory of Mr. Tennyson would be weighted and
degraded by the ascription of whole volumes of pilfered and diluted verse
now current--if not yet submerged--under the name or the pseudonym of the
present {237} Viceroy--or Vice-empress is it?--of India. But the obvious
truth is this: the voice of Shakespeare's adolescence had as usual an
echo in it of other men's notes: I can remember the name of but one poet
whose voice from the beginning had none; who started with a style of his
own, though he may have chosen to annex--"annex the wise it call";
_convey_ is obsolete--to annex whole phrases or whole verses at need, for
the use or the ease of an idle minute; and this name of course is
Marlowe's. So starting, Shakespeare had yet (like all other and lesser
poets born) some perceptible notes in his yet half boyish voice that were
not borrowed; and these were at once caught up and re-echoed by such
fellow-pupils with Shakespeare of the young Master of them all--such
humbler and feebler disciples, or simpler sheep (shall we call them?) of
the great "dead shepherd"--as the now indistinguishable author of _King
Edward III_.
In the first scene of the first act the impotent imitation of Marlowe is
pitifully patent. Possibly there may also be an imitation of the still
imitative style of Shakespeare, and the style may be more accurately
definable as a copy of a copy--a study after the manner of Marlowe, not
at second hand, but at third. In any case, being obviously too flat and
feeble to show a touch of either godlike hand, this scene may be set
aside at once to make way for the second.
The second scene is more animated, but low in style till we come to the
outbreak of rhyme. In other words, the energetic or active part is at
best passable--fluent and decent commonplace: but where the style turns
undramatic and runs into mere elegiacs, a likeness becomes perceptible to
the first elegiac style of Shakespeare. Witness these lines spoken by
the King in contemplation of the Countess of Salisbury's beauty, while
yet struggling against the nascent motions of a base love:--
Now in the sun alone it doth not lie
With light to take light from a mortal eye:
For here two day-stars that mine eyes would see
More than the sun steal mine own light from me.
Contemplative desire! desire to be
In contemplation that may master thee!
_Decipit exemplar vitiis imitabile_: if Shakespeare ever saw or heard
these pretty lines, he should have felt the unconscious rebuke implied in
such close and facile imitation of his own early elegiacs. As a serious
mimicry of his first manner, a critical parody summing up in little space
the sweet faults of his poetic nonage, with its barren overgrowth of
unprofitable flowers,--bright point, soft metaphor, and sweet elaborate
antithesis--this is as good of its kind as anything between Aristophanes
and Horace Smith. Indeed, it may remind us of that parody on the soft,
superfluous, flowery and frothy style of Agathon, which at the opening of
the _Thesmophoriazusae_ cannot but make the youngest and most ignorant
reader laugh, though the oldest and most learned has never set eyes on a
line of the original verses which supplied the incarnate god of comic
song with matter for such exquisite burlesque.
To the speech above cited the reply of the Countess is even gracefuller,
and closer to the same general model of fanciful elegiac dialogue:--
Let not thy presence, like the April sun,
Flatter our earth, and suddenly be done:
More happy do not make our outward wall
Than thou wilt grace our inward house withal.
Our house, my liege, is like a country swain,
Whose habit rude, and manners blunt and plain.
Presageth naught; yet inly beautified
With bounty's riches, and fair hidden pride;
For where the golden ore doth buried lie,
The ground, undecked with nature's tapestry,
Seems barren, sere, unfertile, fruitless, dry;
And where the upper turf of earth doth boast
His pride, perfumes, {239} and particoloured cost,
Delve there, and find this issue and their pride
To spring from ordure and corruption's side.
But, to make up my all too long compare,
These ragged walls no testimony are
What is within; but, like a cloak, doth hide
From weather's waste the under garnished pride.
More gracious than my terms can let thee be,
Entreat thyself to stay awhile with me.
Not only the exquisite grace of this charming last couplet, but the
smooth sound strength, the fluency and clarity of the whole passage, may
serve to show that the original suggestion of Capell, if (as I think)
untenable, was not (we must admit) unpardonable. The very oversight
perceptible to any eye and painful to any ear not sealed up by stepdame
nature from all perception of pleasure or of pain derivable from good
verse or bad--the reckless reiteration of the same rhyme with but one
poor couplet intervening--suggests rather the oversight of an unfledged
poet than the obtuseness of a full-grown poeticule or poetaster.
But of how many among the servile or semi-servile throng of imitators in
every generation may not as much as this be said by tolerant or kindly
judges! Among the herd of such diminutives as swarm after the heel or
fawn upon the hand of Mr. Tennyson, more than one, more than two or
three, have come as close as his poor little viceregal or vice-imperial
parasite to the very touch and action of the master's hand which feeds
them unawares from his platter as they fawn; as close as this nameless
and short-winded satellite to the gesture and the stroke of
Shakespeare's. For this also must be noted; that the resemblance here is
but of stray words, of single lines, of separable passages. The whole
tone of the text, the whole build of the play, the whole scheme of the
poem, is far enough from any such resemblance. The structure, the
composition, is feeble, incongruous, inadequate, effete. Any student
will remark at a first glance what a short-breathed runner, what a broken-
winded athlete in the lists of tragic verse, is the indiscoverable author
of this play.
There is another point which the Neo-Shakespearean synagogue will by no
man be expected to appreciate; for to apprehend it requires some
knowledge and some understanding of the poetry of the Shakespearean
age--so surely we now should call it, rather than Elizabethan or
Jacobean, for the sake of verbal convenience, if not for the sake of
literary decency; and such knowledge or understanding no sane man will
expect to find in any such quarter. Even in the broad coarse comedy of
the period we find here and there the same sweet and simple echoes of the
very cradle-song (so to call it) of our drama: so like Shakespeare, they
might say who knew nothing of Shakespeare's fellows, that we cannot
choose but recognise his hand. Here as always first in the field--the
genuine and golden harvest-field of Shakespearean criticism, Charles Lamb
has cited a passage from _Green's Tu Quoque_--a comedy miserably
misreprinted in Dodsley's Old Plays--on which he observes that "this is
so like Shakespeare, that we seem to remember it," being as it is a
girl's gentle lamentation over the selfish, exacting, suspicious and
trustless love of man, as contrasted with the swift simple surrender of a
woman's love at the first heartfelt appeal to her pity--"we seem to
remember it," says Lamb, as a speech of Desdemona uttered on a first
perception or suspicion of jealousy or alienation in Othello. This
lovely passage, if I dare say so in contravention to the authority of
Lamb, is indeed as like the manner of Shakespeare as it can be--to eyes
ignorant of what his fellows can do; but it is not like the manner of the
Shakespeare who wrote _Othello_. This, however, is beside the question.
It is very like the Shakespeare who wrote the _Comedy of Errors--Love's
Labour's Lost--Romeo and Juliet_. It is so like that had we fallen upon
it in any of these plays it would long since have been a household word
in all men's mouths for sweetness, truth, simplicity, perfect and
instinctive accuracy of touch. It is very much liker the first manner of
Shakespeare than any passage in _King Edward III_. And no Sham
Shakespearean critic that I know of has yet assigned to the hapless
object of his howling homage the authorship of _Green's Tu Quoque_.
Returning to our text, we find in the short speech of the King with which
the first act is wound up yet another couplet which has the very ring in
it of Shakespeare's early notes--the catch at words rather than play on
words which his tripping tongue in youth could never resist:
Countess, albeit my business urgeth me,
It shall attend while I attend on thee.
And with this pretty little instance of courtly and courteous euphuism we
pass from the first to the second and most important act in the play.
Any reader well versed in the text of Shakespeare, and ill versed in the
work of his early rivals and his later pupils, might surely be forgiven
if on a first reading of the speech with which this act opens he should
cry out with Capell that here at least was the unformed hand of the
Master perceptible and verifiable indeed. The writer, he might say, has
the very glance of his eye, the very trick of his gait, the very note of
his accent. But on getting a little more knowledge, such a reader will
find the use of it in the perception to which he will have attained that
in his early plays, as in his two early poems, the style of Shakespeare
was not for the most part distinctively his own. It was that of a crew,
a knot of young writers, among whom he found at once both leaders and
followers to be guided and to guide. A mere glance into the rich lyric
literature of the period will suffice to show the dullest eye and teach
the densest ear how nearly innumerable were the Englishmen of Elizabeth's
time who could sing in the courtly or pastoral key of the season, each
man of them a few notes of his own, simple or fantastic, but all sweet,
clear, genuine of their kind:--
Facies non omnibus una,
Nec diversa tamen:
and yet so close is the generic likeness between flower and flower of the
same lyrical garden that the first half of the quotation seems but half
applicable here. In Bird's, Morley's, Dowland's collections of music
with the words appended--in such jewelled volumes as _England's Helicon_
and _Davison's Poetical Rhapsody_--their name is Legion, their numbers
are numberless. You cannot call them imitators, this man of that, or all
of any; they were all of one school, but it was a school without a master
or a head. And even so it was with the earliest sect or gathering of
dramatic writers in England. Marlowe alone stood apart and above them
all--the young Shakespeare among the rest; but among these we cannot
count, we cannot guess, how many were wellnigh as competent as he to
continue the fluent rhyme, to prolong the facile echo, of Greene and
Peele, their first and most famous leaders.
No more docile or capable pupil could have been desired by any master in
any art than the author of _David and Bethsabe_ has found in the writer
of this second act. He has indeed surpassed his model, if not in grace
and sweetness, yet in taste or tact of expression, in continuity and
equality of style. Vigour is not the principal note of his manner, but
compared with the soft effusive ebullience of his master's we may fairly
call it vigorous and condensed. But all this merit or demerit is matter
of mere language only. The poet--a very pretty poet in his way, and
doubtless capable of gracious work enough in the idyllic or elegiac line
of business--shows about as much capacity to grasp and handle the fine
intimacies of character and the large issues of circumstance to any
tragic or dramatic purpose, as might be expected from an idyllic or
elegiac poet who should suddenly assume the buskin of tragedy. Let us
suppose that Moschus, for example, on the strength of having written a
sweeter elegy than ever before was chanted over the untimely grave of a
friend and fellow-singer, had said within himself, "Go to, I will be
Sophocles"; can we imagine that the tragic result would have been other
than tragical indeed for the credit of his gentle name, and comical
indeed for all who might have envied the mild and modest excellence which
fashion or hypocrisy might for years have induced them to besprinkle with
the froth and slaver of their promiscuous and pointless adulation?
As the play is not more generally known than it deserves to be,--or
perhaps we may say it is somewhat less known, though its claim to general
notice is faint indeed compared with that of many a poem of its age
familiar only to special students in our own--I will transcribe a few
passages to show how far the writer could reach at his best; leaving for
others to indicate how far short of that not inaccessible point he is too
generally content to fall and to remain.
The opening speech is spoken by one Lodowick, a parasite of the King's;
who would appear, like Francois Villon under the roof of his Fat Madge,
to have succeeded in reconciling the professional duties--may I not say,
the generally discordant and discrepant offices?--of a poet and a pimp.
I might perceive his eye in her eye lost,
His ear to drink her sweet tongue's utterance;
And changing passion, like inconstant clouds,
That, rackt upon the carriage of the winds,
Increase, and die, in his disturbed cheeks.
Lo, when she blushed, even then did he look pale;
As if her cheeks by some enchanted power
Attracted had the cherry blood from his: {245a}
Anon, with reverent fear when she grew pale,
His cheeks put on their scarlet ornaments;
But no more like her oriental red
Than brick to coral, or live things to dead. {245b}
Why did he then thus counterfeit her looks?
If she did blush, 'twas tender modest shame,
Being in the sacred presence of a king;
If he did blush, 'twas red immodest shame
To vail his eyes amiss, being a king;
If she looked pale, 'twas silly woman's fear
To bear herself in presence of a king;
If he looked pale, it was with guilty fear
To dote amiss, being a mighty king.
This is better than the insufferable style of _Locrine_, which is in
great part made up of such rhymeless couplets, each tagged with an empty
verbal antithesis; but taken as a sample of dramatic writing, it is but
just better than what is utterly intolerable. Dogberry has defined it
exactly; it is most tolerable--and not to be endured.
The following speech of King Edward is in that better style of which the
author's two chief models were not at their best incapable for awhile
under the influence and guidance (we may suppose) of their friend
Marlowe.
She is grown more fairer far since I came hither;
Her voice more silver every word than other,
Her wit more fluent. What a strange discourse
Unfolded she of David and his Scots!
_Even thus_, quoth she, _he spake_--and then spake broad,
With epithets and accents of the Scot;
But somewhat better than the Scot could speak:
_And thus_, quoth she--and answered then herself;
For who could speak like her? but she herself
Breathes from the wall an angel's note from heaven
Of sweet defiance to her barbarous foes.
When she would talk of peace, methinks her tongue
Commanded war to prison; {246} when of war,
It wakened Caesar from his Roman grave
To hear war beautified by her discourse.
Wisdom is foolishness, but in her tongue;
Beauty a slander, but in her fair face;
There is no summer but in her cheerful looks,
Nor frosty winter but in her disdain.
I cannot blame the Scots that did besiege her,
For she is all the treasure of our land;
But call them cowards that they ran away,
Having so rich and fair a cause to stay.
But if for a moment we may fancy that here and there we have caught such
an echo of Marlowe as may have fallen from the lips of Shakespeare in his
salad days, in his period of poetic pupilage, we have but a very little
way to go forward before we come upon indisputable proof that the pupil
was one of feebler hand and fainter voice than Shakespeare. Let us take
the passage on poetry, beginning--
Now, Lodowick, invocate {247} some golden Muse
To bring thee hither an enchanted pen;
and so forth. No scholar in English poetry but will recognise at once
the flat and futile imitation of Marlowe; not of his great general style
alone, but of one special and transcendant passage which can never be too
often quoted.
If all the pens that ever poets held
Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds, and muses on admired themes;
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit;
If these had made one poem's period,
And all combined in beauty's worthiness,
Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest. {248}
Infinite as is the distance between the long roll of these mighty lines
and the thin tinkle of their feeble imitator's, yet we cannot choose but
catch the ineffectual note of a would-be echo in the speech of the King
to his parasite--
For so much moving hath a poet's pen, etc., etc.
It is really not worth while to transcribe the poor meagre versicles at
length: but a glance at the text will show how much fitter was their
author to continue the tradition of Peele than to emulate the innovations
of Marlowe. In the speeches that follow there is much pretty verbiage
after the general manner of Elizabethan sonnetteers, touched here and
there with something of a higher tone; but the whole scene drags, flags,
halts onward at such a languid rate, that to pick out all the prettiest
lines by way of sample would give a favourable impression but too likely
to be reversed on further and fuller acquaintance.
Forget not to set down, how passionate,
How heart-sick, and how full of languishment,
Her beauty makes me. . . . . .
Write on, while I peruse her in my thoughts.
Her voice to music, or the nightingale:
To music every summer-leaping swain
Compares his sunburnt lover when she speaks;
And why should I speak of the nightingale?
The nightingale sings of adulterate wrong;
And that, compared, is too satirical:
For sin, though sin, would not be so esteemed;
But rather virtue sin, sin virtue deemed.
Her hair, far softer than the silkworm's twist,
Like as a flattering glass, doth make more fair
The yellow amber:--_Like a flattering glass_
Comes in too soon; for, writing of her eyes,
I'll say that like a glass they catch the sun,
And thence the hot reflection doth rebound
Against my breast, and burns the heart within.
Ah, what a world of descant makes my soul
Upon this voluntary ground of love!
"Pretty enough, very pretty! but" exactly as like and as near the style
of Shakespeare's early plays as is the style of Constable's sonnets to
that of Shakespeare's. Unless we are to assign to the Master every
unaccredited song, sonnet, elegy, tragedy, comedy, and farce of his
period, which bears the same marks of the same date--a date, like our
own, of too prolific and imitative production--as we find inscribed on
the greater part of his own early work; unless we are to carry even as
far as this the audacity and arrogance of our sciolism, we must somewhere
make a halt--and it must be on the near side of such an attribution as
that of _King Edward III_. to the hand of Shakespeare.
With the disappearance of the poetic pimp and the entrance of the
unsuspecting Countess, the style rises yet again--and really, this time,
much to the author's credit. It would need a very fine touch from a very
powerful hand to improve on the delicacy and dexterity of the prelude or
overture to the King's avowal of adulterous love. But when all is said,
though very delicate and very dexterous, it is not forcible work: I do
not mean by forcible the same as violent, spasmodic, emphatic beyond the
modesty of nature; a poet is of course only to be commended, and that
heartily, for keeping within this bound; but he is not to be commended
for coming short of it. This whole scene is full of mild and temperate
beauty, of fanciful yet earnest simplicity; but the note of it, the
expression, the dominant key of the style, is less appropriate to the
utterance of a deep and deadly passion than--at the utmost--of what
modern tongues might call a strong and rather dangerous flirtation.
Passion, so to speak, is quite out of this writer's call; the depths and
heights of manly as of womanly emotion are alike beyond his reach.
Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,
He turns to favour and to prettiness.
"To favour and to prettiness"; the definition of his utmost merit and
demerit, his final achievement and shortcoming, is here complete and
exact. Witness the sweet quiet example of idyllic work which I extract
from a scene beginning in the regular amoebaean style of ancient
pastoral.
_Edward_. Thou hear'st me say that I do dote on thee.
_Countess_. If on my beauty, take it if thou canst;
Though little, I do prize it ten times less:
If on my virtue, take it if thou canst;
For virtue's store by giving doth augment:
Be it on what it will that I can give
And thou canst take away, inherit it.
_Edward_. It is thy beauty that I would enjoy.
_Countess_. O, were it painted, I would wipe it off,
And dispossess myself to give it thee:
But, sovereign, it is soldered to my life;
Take one and both; for like an humble shadow
It haunts the sunshine of my summer's life.
_Edward_. But thou mayst lend it me to sport withal.
_Countess_. As easy may my intellectual soul
Be lent away, and yet my body live,
As lend my body, palace to my soul,
Away from her, and yet retain my soul.
My body is her bower, her court, her abbey,
And she an angel, pure, divine, unspotted;
If I should lend her house, my lord, to thee,
I kill my poor soul, and my poor soul me.
Once more, this last couplet is very much in the style of Shakespeare's
sonnets; nor is it wholly unlike even the dramatic style of Shakespeare
in his youth--and some dozen other poets or poeticules of the time. But
throughout this part of the play the recurrence of a faint and
intermittent resemblance to Shakespeare is more frequently noticeable
than elsewhere. {252} A student of imperfect memory but not of defective
intuition might pardonably assign such couplets, on hearing them cited,
to the master-hand itself; but such a student would be likelier to refer
them to the sonnetteer than to the dramatist. And a casual likeness to
the style of Shakespeare's sonnets is not exactly sufficient evidence to
warrant such an otherwise unwarrantable addition of appendage to the list
of Shakespeare's plays.
A little further on we come upon the first and last passage which does
actually recall by its wording a famous instance of the full and ripened
style of Shakespeare.
He that doth clip or counterfeit your stamp
Shall die, my lord: and will your sacred self
Commit high treason 'gainst the King of heaven,
To stamp his image in forbidden metal,
Forgetting your allegiance and your oath?
In violating marriage' sacred law
You break a greater honour than yourself;
To be a king is of a younger house
Than to be married: your progenitor,
Sole reigning Adam on the universe,
By God was honoured for a married man,
But not by him anointed for a king.
Every possible reader, I suppose, will at once bethink himself of the
famous passage in _Measure for Measure_ which here may seem to be faintly
prefigured:
It were as good
To pardon him that hath from nature stolen
A man already made, as to remit
Their saucy sweetness, that do coin heaven's image
In stamps that are forbid:
and the very difference of style is not wider than the gulf which gapes
between the first style of Shakespeare and the last. But men of
Shakespeare's stamp, I venture to think, do not thus repeat themselves.
The echo of the passage in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, describing the
girlish friendship of Hermia and Helena, which we find in the first act
of _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, describing the like girlish friendship of
Emilia and Flavina, is an echo of another sort. Both, I need hardly say,
are unquestionably Shakespeare's; but the fashion in which the matured
poet retouches and completes the sketch of his earlier years--composes an
oil painting, as it were, from the hints and suggestions of a
water-colour sketch long since designed and long since half forgotten--is
essentially different from the mere verbal and literal trick of
repetition which sciolists might think to detect in the present instance.
Again we must needs fall back on the inevitable and indefinable test of
style; a test which could be of no avail if we were foolish enough to
appeal to scholiasts and their attendant dunces, but which should be of
some avail if we appeal to experts and their attentive scholars; and by
this test we can but remark that neither the passage in _A Midsummer
Night's Dream_ nor the corresponsive passage in _The Two Noble Kinsmen_
could have been written by any hand known to us but Shakespeare's;
whereas the passage in _King Edward III_. might as certainly have been
written by any one out of a dozen poets then living as the answering
passage in _Measure for Measure_ could assuredly have been written by
Shakespeare alone.
As on a first reading of the _Hippolytus_ of Euripides we feel that, for
all the grace and freshness and lyric charm of its opening scenes, the
claim of the poem to our ultimate approval or disapproval must needs
depend on the success or failure of the first interview between Theseus
and his calumniated son; and as on finding that scene to be feeble and
futile and prosaic and verbose we feel that the poet who had a woman's
spite against women has here effectually and finally shown himself
powerless to handle the simplest elements of masculine passion, of manly
character and instinct; so in this less important case we feel that the
writer, having ventured on such a subject as the compulsory temptation of
a daughter by a father, who has been entrapped into so shameful an
undertaking through the treacherous exaction of an equivocal promise
unwarily confirmed by an inconsiderate oath, must be judged by the result
of his own enterprise; must fail or stand as a poet by its failure or
success. And his failure is only not complete; he is but just redeemed
from utter discomfiture by the fluency and simplicity of his equable but
inadequate style. Here as before we find plentiful examples of the
gracefully conventional tone current among the lesser writers of the
hour.
_Warwick_. How shall I enter on this graceless errand?
I must not call her child; for where's the father
That will in such a suit seduce his child?
Then, _Wife of Salisbury_;--shall I so begin?
No, he's my friend; and where is found the friend
That will do friendship such endamagement?--{255}
Neither my daughter, nor my dear friend's wife,
I am not Warwick, as thou think'st I am,
But an attorney from the court of hell;
That thus have housed my spirit in his form
To do a message to thee from the king.
This beginning is fair enough, if not specially fruitful in promise; but
the verses following are of the flattest order of commonplace. Hay and
grass and the spear of Achilles--of which tradition
the moral is,
What mighty men misdo, they can amend--
these are the fresh and original types on which our little poet is
compelled to fall back for support and illustration to a scene so full of
terrible suggestion and pathetic possibility.
The king will in his glory hide thy shame;
And those that gaze on him to find out thee
Will lose their eyesight, looking on the sun.
What can one drop of poison harm the sea,
Whose hugy vastures can digest the ill
And make it lose its operation?
And so forth, and so forth; _ad libitum_ if not _ad nauseam_. Let us
take but one or two more instances of the better sort.
_Countess_. Unnatural besiege! Woe me unhappy,
To have escaped the danger of my foes,
And to be ten times worse invir'd by friends!
(Here we come upon two more words unknown to Shakespeare; {256}
_besiege_, as a noun substantive, and _invired_ for _environed_.)
Hath he no means to stain my honest blood
But to corrupt the author of my blood
To be his scandalous and vile soliciter?
No marvel though the branches be infected,
When poison hath encompassed the roots;
No marvel though the leprous infant die,
When the stern dam envenometh the dug.
Why then, give sin a passport to offend,
And youth the dangerous rein of liberty;
Blot out the strict forbidding of the law;
And cancel every canon that prescribes
A shame for shame or penance for offence.
No, let me die, if his too boisterous will
Will have it so, before I will consent
To be an actor in his graceless lust.
_Warwick_. Why, now thou speak'st as I would have thee speak;
And mark how I unsay my words again.
An honourable grave is more esteemed
Than the polluted closet of a king;
The greater man, the greater is the thing,
Be it good or bad, that he shall undertake;
An unreputed mote, flying in the sun,
Presents a greater substance than it is;
The freshest summer's day doth soonest taint
The loathed carrion that it seems to kiss;
Deep are the blows made with a mighty axe;
That sin doth ten times aggravate itself
That is committed in a holy place;
An evil deed, done by authority,
Is sin, and subornation: Deck an ape
In tissue, and the beauty of the robe
Adds but the greater scorn unto the beast.
(Here are four passably good lines, which vaguely remind the reader of
something better read elsewhere; a common case enough with the more
tolerable work of small imitative poets.)
A spacious field of reasons could I urge
Between his glory, daughter, and thy shame:
That poison shows worst in a golden cup;
Dark night seems darker by the lightning flash;
_Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds_;
And every glory that inclines to sin,
The shame is treble by the opposite.
So leave I, with my blessing in thy bosom;
Which then convert to a most heavy curse,
When thou convert'st from honour's golden name
To the black faction of bed-blotting shame! [_Exit_.
_Countess_. I'll follow thee:--And when my mind turns so,
My body sink my soul in endless woe! [_Exit_.
So much for the central and crowning scene, the test, the climax, the
hinge on which the first part of this play turns; and seems to me, in
turning, to emit but a feeble and rusty squeak. No probable reader will
need to be reminded that the line which I have perhaps unnecessarily
italicised appears also as the last verse in the ninety-fourth of those
"sugared sonnets" which we know were in circulation about the time of
this play's first appearance among Shakespeare's "private friends"; in
other words, which enjoyed such a kind of public privacy or private
publicity as one or two among the most eminent English poets of our own
day have occasionally chosen for some part of their work, to screen it
for awhile as under the shelter and the shade of crepuscular laurels,
till ripe for the sunshine or the storm of public judgment. In the
present case, this debatable verse looks to me more like a loan or maybe
a theft from Shakespeare's private store of undramatic poetry than a
misapplication by its own author to dramatic purposes of a line too apt
and exquisite to endure without injury the transference from its original
setting.
The scene ensuing winds up the first part of this composite (or rather,
in one sense of the word, incomposite) poem. It may, on the whole, be
classed as something more than passably good: it is elegant, lively, even
spirited in style; showing at all events a marked advance upon the scene
which I have already stigmatised as a failure--that which attempts to
render the interview between Warwick and the King. It is hardly,
however, I should say, above the highest reach of Greene or Peele at the
smoothest and straightest of his flight. At its opening, indeed, we come
upon a line which inevitably recalls one of the finest touches in a much
later and deservedly more popular historical drama. On being informed by
Derby that
The king is in his closet, malcontent,
For what I know not, but he gave in charge,
Till after dinner, none should interrupt him;
The Countess Salisbury, and her father Warwick.
Artois, and all, look underneath the brows;
on receiving, I say, this ominous intimation, the prompt and
statesmanlike sagacity of Audley leads him at once as by intuition to the
inference thus eloquently expressed in a strain of thrilling and exalted
poetry;
Undoubtedly, then something is amiss.
Who can read this without a reminiscence of Sir Christopher Hatton's
characteristically cautious conclusion at sight of the military
preparations arrayed against the immediate advent of the Armada?
I cannot but surmise--forgive, my friend,
If the conjecture's rash--I cannot but
Surmise the state some danger apprehends!
With the entrance of the King the tone of this scene naturally rises--"in
good time," as most readers will say. His brief interview with the two
nobles has at least the merit of ease and animation.
_Derby_. Befall my sovereign all my sovereign's wish!
_Edward_. Ah, that thou wert a witch, to make it so!
_Derby_. The emperor greeteth you.
_Edward_. Would it were the countess!
_Derby_. And hath accorded to your highness' suit.
_Edward_. Thou liest, she hath not: But I would she had!
_Audley_. All love and duty to my lord the king!
Edward. _Well, all but one is none_:--What news with you?
_Audley_. I have, my liege, levied those horse and foot,
According to your charge, and brought them hither.
_Edward_. Then let those foot trudge hence upon those horse
According to their discharge, and begone.--
_Derby_. I'll look upon the countess' mind
Anon.
_Derby_. The countess' mind, my liege?
_Edward_. I mean, the emperor:--Leave me alone.
_Audley_. What's in his mind?
_Derby_. Let's leave him to his humour.
[_Exeunt_ DERBY and AUDLEY
_Edward_. Thus from the heart's abundance speaks the tongue
Countess for emperor: And indeed, why not?
She is as _imperator_ over me;
And I to her
Am as a kneeling vassal, that observes
The pleasure or displeasure of her eye.
In this little scene there is perhaps on the whole more general likeness
to Shakespeare's earliest manner than we can trace in any other passage
of the play. But how much of Shakespeare's earliest manner may be
accounted the special and exclusive property of Shakespeare?
After this dismissal of the two nobles, the pimping poeticule, Villon
manque or (whom shall we call him?) reussi, reappears with a message to
Caesar (as the King is pleased to style himself) from "the more than
Cleopatra's match" (as he designates the Countess), to intimate that "ere
night she will resolve his majesty." Hereupon an unseasonable "drum
within" provokes Edward to the following remonstrance:
What drum is this, that thunders forth this march,
To start the tender Cupid in my bosom?
Poor sheepskin, how it brawls with him that beateth it!
Go, break the thundering parchment bottom out,
And I will teach it to conduct sweet lines
("That's bad; _conduct sweet lines_ is bad.")
Unto the bosom of a heavenly nymph:
For I will use it as my writing paper;
And so reduce him, from a scolding drum,
To be the herald, and dear counsel-bearer,
Betwixt a goddess and a mighty king.
Go, bid the drummer learn to touch the lute,
Or hang him in the braces of his drum;
For now we think it an uncivil thing
To trouble heaven with such harsh resounds.
Away! [_Exit_ Lodowick.
The quarrel that I have requires no arms
But these of mine; and these shall meet my foe
In a deep march of penetrable groans;
My eyes shall be my arrows; and my sighs
Shall serve me as the vantage of the wind
To whirl away my sweet'st {261} artillery:
Ah, but, alas, she wins the sun of me,
For that is she herself; and thence it comes
That poets term the wanton warrior blind;
But love hath eyes as judgment to his steps,
Till too much loved glory dazzles them.
Hereupon Lodowick introduces the Black Prince (that is to be), and
"retires to the door." The following scene opens well, with a tone of
frank and direct simplicity.
_Edward_. I see the boy. O, how his mother's face,
Moulded in his, corrects my strayed desire,
And rates my heart, and chides my thievish eye;
Who, being rich enough in seeing her,
Yet seeks elsewhere: and basest theft is that
Which cannot check itself on poverty.--
Now, boy, what news?
_Prince_. I have assembled, my dear lord and father,
The choicest buds of all our English blood,
For our affairs in France; and here we come
To take direction from your majesty.
_Edward_. Still do I see in him delineate
His mother's visage; those his eyes are hers,
Who, looking wistly {262a} on me, made me blush;
For faults against themselves give evidence:
Lust is a fire; and men, like lanterns, show
Light lust within themselves even through themselves.
Away, loose silks of wavering vanity!
Shall the large limit of fair Brittany {262b}
By me be overthrown? and shall I not
Master this little mansion of myself?
Give me an armour of eternal steel;
I go to conquer kings. And shall I then
Subdue myself, and be my enemy's friend?
It must not be.--Come, boy, forward, advance!
Let's with our colours sweep the air of France.
Here Lodowick announces the approach of the Countess "with a smiling
cheer."
_Edward_. Why, there it goes! that very smile of hers
Hath ransomed captive France; and set the king,
The dauphin, and the peers, at liberty.--
Go, leave me, Ned, and revel with thy friends. [_Exit_ PRINCE.
Thy mother is but black; and thou, like her,
Dost put into my mind how foul she is.
Go, fetch the countess hither in thy hand,
And let her chase away these winter clouds;
For she gives beauty both to heaven and earth. [_Exit_ LODOWICK.
The sin is more, to hack and hew poor men,
Than to embrace in an unlawful bed
The register of all rarieties {263a}
Since leathern Adam till this youngest hour.
_Re-enter_ LODOWICK _with the_ COUNTESS.
Go, Lodowick, put thy hand into my purse,
Play, spend, give, riot, waste; do what thou wilt,
So thou wilt hence awhile, and leave me here. [_Exit_ LODOWICK.
Having already, out of a desire and determination to do no possible
injustice to the actual merits of this play in the eyes of any reader who
might never have gone over the text on which I had to comment, exceeded
in no small degree the limits I had intended to impose upon my task in
the way of citation, I shall not give so full a transcript from the next
and last scene between the Countess and the King.
_Edward_. Now, my soul's playfellow! art thou come
To speak the more than heavenly word of yea
To my objection in thy beauteous love?
(Again, this singular use of the word _objection_ in the sense of offer
or proposal has no parallel in the plays of Shakespeare.)
_Countess_. My father on his blessing hath commanded--
_Edward_. That thou shalt yield to me.
_Countess_. Ay, dear my liege, your due.
_Edward_. And that, my dearest love, can be no less
Than right for right, and render {263b} love for love.
_Countess_. Than wrong for wrong, and endless hate for hate.
But, sith I see your majesty so bent,
That my unwillingness, my husband's love,
Your high estate, nor no respect respected,
Can be my help, but that your mightiness
Will overbear and awe these dear regards,
I bind my discontent to my content,
And what I would not I'll compel I will;
Provided that yourself remove those lets
That stand between your highness' love and mine.
_Edward_. Name them, fair countess, and by heaven I will.
_Countess_. It is their lives that stand between our love
That I would have choked up, my sovereign.
_Edward_. Whose lives, my lady?
_Countess_. My thrice loving liege,
Your queen, and Salisbury my wedded husband;
Who living have that title in our love
That we can not bestow but by their death.
_Edward_. Thy opposition {264a} is beyond our law.
_Countess_. So is your desire: If the law {264b}
Can hinder you to execute the one,
Let it forbid you to attempt the other:
I cannot think you love me as you say
Unless you do make good what you have sworn.
_Edward_. No more: thy husband and the queen shall die.
Fairer thou art by far than Hero was;
Beardless Leander not so strong as I:
He swom an easy current for his love;
But I will, through a helly spout of blood, {264c}
Arrive that Sestos where my Hero lies.
_Countess_. Nay, you'll do more; you'll make the river too
With their heartbloods that keep our love asunder;
Of which my husband and your wife are twain.
_Edward_. Thy beauty makes them guilty of their death
And gives in evidence that they shall die;
Upon which verdict I their judge condemn them.
_Countess_. O perjured beauty! more corrupted judge!
When, to the great star-chamber o'er our heads,
The universal sessions calls to count
This packing evil, we both shall tremble for it.
_Edward_. What says my fair love? is she resolute?
_Countess_. Resolute to be dissolved: {266} and, therefore, this:
Keep but thy word, great king, and I am thine.
Stand where thou dost; I'll part a little from thee;
And see how I will yield me to thy hands.
Here by my side do hang my wedding knives;
Take thou the one, and with it kill thy queen,
And learn by me to find her where she lies;
And with the other I'll despatch my love,
Which now lies fast asleep within my heart:
When they are gone, then I'll consent to love.
Such genuinely good wine as this needs no bush. But from this point
onwards I can find nothing especially commendable in the remainder of the
scene except its brevity. The King of course abjures his purpose, and of
course compares the Countess with Lucretia to the disadvantage of the
Roman matron; summons his son, Warwick, and the attendant lords; appoints
each man his post by sea or land; and starts for Flanders in a duly moral
and military state of mind.
Here ends the first part of the play; and with it all possible
indication, though never so shadowy, of the possible shadowy presence of
Shakespeare. At the opening of the third act we are thrown among a
wholly new set of characters and events, all utterly out of all harmony
and keeping with all that has gone before. Edward alone survives as
nominal protagonist; but this survival--assuredly not of the fittest--is
merely the survival of the shadow of a name. Anything more pitifully
crude and feeble, more helplessly inartistic and incomposite, than this
process or pretence of juncture where there is no juncture, this
infantine shifting and shuffling of the scenes and figures, it is
impossible to find among the rudest and weakest attempts of the dawning
or declining drama in its first or second childhood.
It is the less necessary to analyse at any length the three remaining
acts of this play, that the work has already been done to my hand, and
well done, by Charles Knight; who, though no professed critic or esoteric
expert in Shakespearean letters, approved himself by dint of sheer
honesty and conscience not unworthy of a considerate hearing. To his
edition of Shakespeare I therefore refer all readers desirous of further
excerpts than I care to give.
The first scene of the third act is a storehouse of contemporary
commonplace. Nothing fresher than such stale pot-pourri as the following
is to be gathered up in thin sprinklings from off the dry flat soil. A
messenger informs the French king that he has descried off shore
The proud armado (_sic_) of King Edward's ships;
Which at the first, far off when I did ken,
Seemed as it were a grove of withered pines;
But, drawing on, their glorious bright aspect,
Their streaming ensigns wrought of coloured silk,
Like to a meadow full of sundry flowers,
Adorns the naked bosom of the earth;
and so on after the exactest and therefore feeblest fashion of the Pre-
Marlowites; with equal regard, as may be seen, for grammar and for sense
in the construction of his periods. The narrative of a sea-fight ensuing
on this is pitiable beyond pity and contemptibly beneath contempt.
In the next scene we have a flying view of peasants in flight, with a
description of five cities on fire not undeserving of its place in the
play, immediately after the preceding sea-piece: but relieved by such
wealth of pleasantry as marks the following jest, in which the most
purblind eye will be the quickest to discover a touch of the genuine
Shakespearean humour.
_1st Frenchman_. What, is it quarter-day, that you remove,
And carry bag and baggage too?
_2nd Frenchman_. Quarter-day? ay, and quartering-day, I fear.
_Euge_!
The scene of debate before Cressy is equally flat and futile, vulgar and
verbose; yet in this Sham Shakespearean scene of our present poeticule's
I have noted one genuine Shakespearean word, "solely singular for its
singleness."
So may thy temples with Bellona's hand
Be still adorned with laurel victory!
In this notably inelegant expression of goodwill we find the same use of
the word "laurel" as an adjective and epithet of victory which thus
confronts us in the penultimate speech of the third scene in the first
act of _Antony and Cleopatra_.
Upon your sword
Sit laurel victory, and smooth success
Be strewed before your feet!
There is something more (as less there could not be) of spirit and
movement in the battle-scene where Edward refuses to send relief to his
son, wishing the prince to win his spurs unaided, and earn the
first-fruits of his fame single-handed against the heaviest odds; but the
forcible feebleness of a minor poet's fancy shows itself amusingly in the
mock stoicism and braggart philosophy of the King's reassuring
reflection, "We have more sons than one."
In the first and third scenes of the fourth act we may concede some
slight merit to the picture of a chivalrous emulation in magnanimity
between the Duke of Burgundy and his former fellow-student, whose refusal
to break his parole as a prisoner extorts from his friend the concession
refused to his importunity as an envoy: but the execution is by no means
worthy of the subject.
The limp loquacity of long-winded rhetoric, so natural to men and
soldiers in an hour of emergency, which distinguishes the dialogue
between the Black Prince and Audley on the verge of battle, is relieved
by this one last touch of quasi-Shakespearean thought or style
discoverable in the play of which I must presently take a short--and a
long--farewell.
Death's name is much more mighty than his deeds:
Thy parcelling this power hath made it more.
As many sands as these my hands can hold
Are but my handful of so many sands;
Then all the world--and call it but a power--
Easily ta'en up, and {269} quickly thrown away;
But if I stand to count them sand by sand
The number would confound my memory
And make a thousand millions of a task
Which briefly is no more indeed than one.
These quartered squadrons and these regiments
Before, behind us, and on either hand,
Are but a power: When we name a man,
His hand, his foot, his head, have several strengths;
And being all but one self instant strength,
Why, all this many, Audley, is but one,
And we can call it all but one man's strength.
He that hath far to go tells it by miles;
If he should tell the steps, it kills his heart:
The drops are infinite that make a flood,
And yet, thou know'st, we call it but a rain.
There is but one France, one king of France, {270}
That France hath no more kings; and that same king
Hath but the puissant legion of one king;
And we have one: Then apprehend no odds;
For one to one is fair equality.
_Bien coupe, mal cousu_; such is the most favourable verdict I can pass
on this voluminous effusion of a spirit smacking rather of the schools
than of the field. The first six lines or so might pass muster as the
early handiwork of Shakespeare; the rest has as little of his manner as
his matter, his metre as his style.
The poet can hardly be said to rise again after this calamitous collapse.
We find in the rest of this scene nothing better worth remark than such
poor catches at a word as this;
And let those milkwhite messengers of time
Show thy time's learning in this dangerous time;
a villainous trick of verbiage which went nigh now and then to affect the
adolescent style of Shakespeare, and which happens to find itself as
admirably as unconsciously burlesqued in two lines of this very scene:
I will not give a penny for a life,
Nor half a halfpenny to shun grim death.
The verses intervening are smooth, simple, and passably well worded;
indeed the force of elegant commonplace cannot well go further than in
such lines as these.
Thyself art bruised and bent with many broils,
And stratagems forepast with iron pens
Are texed {271} in thine honourable face;
Thou art a married man in this distress,
But danger woos me as a blushing maid;
Teach me an answer to this perilous time.
_Audley_. To die is all as common as to live;
The one in choice, the other holds in chase;
For from the instant we begin to live
We do pursue and hunt the time to die:
First bud we, then we blow, and after seed;
Then presently we fall; and as a shade
Follows the body, so we follow death.
If then we hunt for death, why do we fear it?
If we fear it, why do we follow it?
(Let me intimate a doubt in passing, whether Shakespeare would ever have
put by the mouth of any but a farcical mask a query so provocative of
response from an Irish echo--"Because we can't help.")
If we do fear, with fear we do but aid
The thing we fear to seize on us the sooner;
If we fear not, then no resolved proffer
Can overthrow the limit of our fate:
and so forth. Again the hastiest reader will have been reminded of a
passage in the transcendant central scenes of _Measure for Measure_:
Merely, thou art death's fool;
For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun,
And yet runn'st toward him still;
and hence also some may infer that this pitiful penny-whistle was blown
by the same breath which in time gained power to fill that archangelic
trumpet. Credat Zoilus Shakespearomastix, non ego.
The next scene is something better than passable, but demands no special
analysis and affords no necessary extract. We may just observe as
examples of style the play on words between the flight of hovering ravens
and the flight of routed soldiers, and the description of the sudden fog
Which now hath hid the airy floor of heaven,
And made at noon a night unnatural
Upon the quaking and dismayed world.
The interest rises again with the reappearance and release of Salisbury,
and lifts the style for a moment to its own level. _A tout seigneur tout
honneur_; the author deserves some dole of moderate approbation for his
tribute to the national chivalry of a Frenchman as here exemplified in
the person of Prince Charles.
Of the two next scenes, in which the battle of Poitiers is so
inadequately "staged to the show," I can only say that if any reader
believes them to be the possible work of the same hand which set before
all men's eyes for all time the field of Agincourt, he will doubtless die
in that belief, and go to his own place in the limbo of commentators.
But a yet more flagrant effect of contrast is thrust upon our notice at
the opening of the fifth act. If in all the historical groundwork of
this play there is one point of attraction which we might have thought
certain to stimulate the utmost enterprise and evoke the utmost
capacities of an aspiring dramatist, it must surely be sought in the
crowning scene of the story; in the scene of Queen Philippa's
intercession for the burgesses of Calais. We know how Shakespeare on the
like occasion was wont to transmute into golden verse the silver speech
supplied to him by North's version of Amyot's Plutarch. {273} With the
text of Lord Berners before him, the author of _King Edward III_. has
given us for the gold of Froissart not even adulterated copper, but
unadulterated lead. Incredible as it may seem to readers of the
historian, the poeticule has actually contrived so far to transfigure by
dint of disfiguring him that this most noble and pathetic scene in all
the annals of chivalry, when passed through the alembic of his
incompetence, appears in a garb of transforming verse under a guise at
once weak and wordy, coarse and unchivalrous. The whole scene is at all
points alike in its unlikeness to the workmanship of Shakespeare.
Here then I think we may finally draw bridle: for the rest of the course
is not worth running; there is nothing in the residue of this last act
which deserves analysis or calls for commentary. We have now examined
the whole main body of the work with somewhat more than necessary care;
and our conclusion is simply this: that if any man of common reading,
common modesty, common judgment, and common sense, can be found to
maintain the theory of Shakespeare's possible partnership in the
composition of this play, such a man will assuredly admit that the only
discernible or imaginable touches of his hand are very slight, very few,
and very early. For myself, I am and have always been perfectly
satisfied with one single and simple piece of evidence that Shakespeare
had not a finger in the concoction of _King Edward III_. He was the
author of _King Henry V_.