The greatest poet of our age has drawn a parallel of
elaborate eloquence between Shakespeare and the sea;
and the likeness holds good in many points of less
significance than those which have been set down by
the master-hand. For two hundred years at least
have students of every kind put forth in every sort of
boat on a longer or a shorter voyage of research across
the waters of that unsounded sea. From the paltriest
fishing-craft to such majestic galleys as were steered
by Coleridge and by Goethe, each division of the fleet
has done or has essayed its turn of work; some busied
in dredging alongshore, some taking surveys of this
or that gulf or headland, some putting forth through
shine and shadow into the darkness of the great
deep. Nor does it seem as if there would sooner
be an end to men's labour on this than on the other
sea. But here a difference is perceptible. The material
ocean has been so far mastered by the wisdom
and the heroism of man that we may look for a time
to come when the mystery shall be manifest of its
furthest north and south, and men resolve the secret
of the uttermost parts of the sea: the poles also may
find their Columbus. But the limits of that other
ocean, the laws of its tides, the motive of its forces,
the mystery of its unity and the secret of its change,
no seafarer of us all may ever think thoroughly to
know. No wind-gauge will help us to the science of
its storms, no lead-line sound for us the depth of its
divine and terrible serenity.
As, however, each generation for some two centuries
now or more has witnessed fresh attempts at pilotage
and fresh expeditions of discovery undertaken in the
seas of Shakespeare, it may be well to study a little
the laws of navigation in such waters as these, and look
well to compass and rudder before we accept the
guidance of a strange helmsman or make proffer for
trial of our own. There are shoals and quicksands on
which many a seafarer has run his craft aground in
time past, and others of more special peril to adventurers
of the present day. The chances of shipwreck
vary in a certain degree with each new change of
vessel and each fresh muster of hands. At one time
a main rock of offence on which the stoutest ships of
discovery were wont to split was the narrow and
slippery reef of verbal emendation; and upon this our
native pilots were too many of them prone to steer.
Others fell becalmed offshore in a German fog of
philosophic theories, and would not be persuaded
that the house of words they had built in honour of
Shakespeare was 'dark as hell,' seeing 'it had bay-
windows transparent as barricadoes, and the clear-
stories towards the south-north were as lustrous as
ebony.' These are not the most besetting dangers
of more modern steersmen: what we have to guard
against now is neither a repetition of the pedantries
of Steevens nor a recrudescence of the moralities of
Ulrici. Fresh follies spring up in new paths of
criticism, and fresh labourers in a fruitless field are
at hand to gather them and to garner. A discovery
of some importance has recently been proclaimed
as with blare of vociferous trumpets and flutter of
triumphal flags; no less a discovery than this—
that a singer must be tested by his song. Well, it
is something that criticism should at length be awake
to that wholly indisputable fact; that learned and
laborious men who can hear only with their fingers
should open their eyes to admit such a novelty, their
minds to accept such a paradox, as that a painter
should be studied in his pictures and a poet in his
verse. To the common herd of students and lovers
of either art this may perhaps appear no great discovery;
but that it should at length have dawned
even upon the race of commentators is a sign which
in itself might be taken as a presage of new light to
come in an epoch of miracle yet to be. Unhappily
it is as yet but a partial revelation that has been
vouchsafed to them. To the recognition of the apocalyptic
fact that a workman can only be known by his work,
and that without examination of his method and
material that work can hardly be studied to much
purpose, they have yet to add the knowledge of a
further truth no less recondite and abstruse than this:
that as the technical work of a painter appeals to the
eye, so the technical work of a poet appeals to the ear.
It follows that men who have none are as likely to
arrive at any profitable end by the application of
metrical tests to the work of Shakespeare as a blind
man by the application of his theory of colours to the
work of Titian.
It is certainly no news to other than professional
critics that no means of study can be more precious
or more necessary to a student of Shakespeare than
this of tracing the course of his work by the growth
and development, through various modes and changes,
of his metre. But the faculty of using such means
of study is not to be had for the asking; it is not to
be earned by the most assiduous toil, it is not to be
secured by the learning of years, it is not to be attained
by the devotion of a life. No proficiency in grammar
and arithmetic, no science of numeration and no scheme
of prosody, will be here of the least avail. Though
the pedagogue were Briareus himself who would thus
bring Shakespeare under the rule of his rod or Shelley
within the limit of his line, he would lack fingers on
which to count the syllables that make up their music,
the infinite varieties of measure that complete the
changes and the chimes of perfect verse. It is but
lost labour that they rise up so early, and so late take
rest; not a Scaliger or Salmasius of them all will
sooner solve the riddle of the simplest than of the
subtlest melody. Least of all will the method of a
scholiast be likely to serve him as a clue to the hidden
things of Shakespeare. For all the counting up of
numbers and casting up of figures that a whole
university—nay, a whole universe of pedants could
accomplish, no teacher and no learner will ever be
a whit the nearer to the haven where they would be.
In spite of all tabulated statements and regulated
summaries of research, the music which will not be
dissected or defined, the 'spirit of sense' which is
one and indivisible from the body or the raiment of
speech that clothes it, keeps safe the secret of its sound.
Yet it is no less a task than this that the scholiasts
have girt themselves to achieve: they will pluck out
the heart not of Hamlet's but of Shakespeare's mystery
by the means of a metrical test; and this test is to be
applied by a purely arithmetical process. It is useless
to pretend or to protest that they work by any rule
but the rule of thumb and finger: that they have
no ear to work by; whatever outward show they may
make of unmistakable ears, the very nature of their
project gives full and damning proof. Properly understood,
this that they call the metrical test is doubtless,
as they say, the surest or the sole sure key to one side
of the secret of Shakespeare; but they will never
understand it properly who propose to secure it by
the ingenious device of numbering the syllables and
tabulating the results of a computation which shall
attest in exact sequence the quantity, order, and proportion
of single and double endings, of rhyme and
lank verse, of regular lines and irregular, to be traced
in each play by the horny eye and the callous finger
of a pedant. 'I am ill at these numbers'; those in
which I have sought to become an expert are numbers
of another sort; but having, from well-nigh the first
years I can remember, made of the study of Shakespeare
the chief intellectual business and found in it
the chief spiritual delight of my whole life, I can hardly
think myself less qualified than another to offer an
opinion on the metrical points at issue.
The progress and expansion of style and harmony
in the successive works of Shakespeare must in some
indefinite degree be perceptible to the youngest as
to the oldest, to the dullest as to the keenest of Shakespearean
students. But to trace and verify the various
shades and gradations of this progress, the ebb and
flow of alternate influences, the delicate and infinite
subtleties of change and growth discernible in the
spirit and the speech of the greatest among poets,
is a task not less beyond the reach of a scholiast than
beyond the faculties of a child. He who would
attempt it with any chance of profit must above all
things remember at starting that the inner and the
outer qualities of a poet's work are of their very
nature indivisible; that any criticism is of necessity
worthless which looks to one side only, whether it
be to the outer or to the inner quality of the work;
that the fatuity of pedantic ignorance never devised
a grosser absurdity than the attempt to separate
æsthetic from scientific criticism by a strict line of
demarcation, and to bring all critical work under one
or the other head of this exhaustive division. Criticism
without accurate science of the thing criticised
can indeed have no other value than may belong to
the genuine record of a spontaneous impression; but
it is not less certain that criticism which busies itself
only with the outer husk or technical shell of a great
artist's work, taking no account of the spirit or the
thought which informs it, cannot have even so much
value as this. Without study of his forms of metre
or his scheme of colours we shall certainly fail to
appreciate or even to apprehend the gist or the worth
of a painter's or a poet's design; but to note down
the number of special words and cast up the sum
of superfluous syllables used once or twice or twenty
times in the structure of a single poem will help us
exactly as much as a naked catalogue of the colours
employed in a particular picture. A tabulated statement
or summary of the precise number of blue or
green, red or white draperies to be found in a precise
number of paintings by the same hand will not of
itself afford much enlightenment to any but the
youngest of possible students; nor will a mere list
of double or single, masculine or feminine terminations
discoverable in a given amount of verse from
the same quarter prove of much use or benefit to an
adult reader of common intelligence. What such an
one requires is the guidance which can be given by
no metremonger or colour-grinder: the suggestion
which may help him to discern at once the cause and
the effect of every choice or change of metre and of
colour; which may show him at one glance the reason
and the result of every shade and of every tone which
tends to compose and to complete the gradual scale
of their final harmonies. This method of study is
generally accepted as the only one applicable to the
work of a great painter by any criticism worthy of
the name: it should also be recognised as the sole
method by which the work of a great poet can be
studied to any serious purpose. For the student it
can be no less useful, for the expert it should be no
less easy, to trace through its several stages of expansion
and transfiguration the genius of Chaucer or of
Shakespeare, of Milton or of Shelley, than the genius
of Titian or of Raffaelle, of Turner or of Rossetti.
Some great artists there are of either kind in whom
no such process of growth or transformation is
perceptible: of these are Coleridge and Blake; from
the sunrise to the sunset of their working day we can
trace no demonstrable increase and no visible diminution
of the divine capacities or the inborn defects of
either man's genius; but not of such, as a rule, are
the greatest among artists of any sort.
Another rock on which modern steersmen of a
more skilful hand than these are yet liable to run
through too much confidence is the love of their
own conjectures as to the actual date or the secret
history of a particular play or passage. To err on
this side requires more thought, more learning, and
more ingenuity than we need think to find in a whole
tribe of finger-counters and figure-casters; but the
outcome of these good gifts, if strained or perverted
to capricious use, may prove no less barren of profit
than the labours of a pedant on the letter of the text.
It is a tempting exercise of intelligence for a dexterous
and keen-witted scholar to apply his solid learning
and his vivid fancy to the detection or the interpretation
of some new or obscure point in a great man's
life or work; but none the less is it a perilous pastime
to give the reins to a learned fancy, and let loose
conjecture on the trail of any dubious crotchet or
the scent of any supposed allusion that may spring
up in the way of its confident and eager quest. To
start a new solution of some crucial problem, to track
some new undercurrent of concealed significance in
a passage hitherto neglected or misconstrued, is to a
critic of this higher class a delight as keen as that of
scientific discovery to students of another sort: the
pity is that he can bring no such certain or immediate
test to verify the value of his discovery as lies ready
to the hand of the man of science. Whether he have
lit upon a windfall or a mare's nest can be decided
by no direct proof, but only by time and the general
acceptance of competent judges; and this cannot
often be reasonably expected for theories which can
appeal for support or confirmation to no positive
evidence, but at best to a cloudy and shifting probability.
What personal or political allusions may lurk
under the text of Shakespeare we can never know,
and should consequently forbear to hang upon a
hypothesis of this floating and nebulous kind any
serious opinion which might gravely affect our estimate
of his work or his position in regard to other men,
with whom some public or private interest may possibly
have brought him into contact or collision.
The aim of the present study is simply to set down
what the writer believes to be certain demonstrable
truths as to the progress and development of style,
the outer and the inner changes of manner as of
matter, of method as of design, which may be
discerned in the work of Shakespeare. The principle
here adopted and the views here put forward have
not been suddenly discovered or lightly taken up
out of any desire to make a show of theoretical
ingenuity. For years past I have held and maintained,
in private discussion with friends and fellow-students,
the opinions which I now submit to more public
judgment. How far they may coincide with those
advanced by others I cannot say, and have not been
careful to inquire. The mere fact of coincidence or
of dissent on such a question is of less importance
than the principle accepted by either student as the
groundwork of his theory, the mainstay of his opinion.
It is no part of my project or my hope to establish
the actual date of any among the various plays, or
to determine point by point the lineal order of their
succession. I have examined no table or catalogue
of recent or of earlier date, from the time of Malone
onwards, with a view to confute by my reasoning the
conclusions of another, or by the assistance of his
theories to corroborate my own. It is impossible to
fix or decide by inner or outer evidence the precise
order of production, much less of composition, which
critics of the present or the past may have set their
wits to verify in vain; but it is quite possible to show
that the work of Shakespeare is naturally divisible
into classes which may serve us to distinguish and
determine as by landmarks the several stages or
periods of his mind and art.
Of these the three chief periods or stages are so
unmistakably indicated by the mere text itself, and
so easily recognisable by the veriest tiro in the school
of Shakespeare, that even were I as certain of being
the first to point them out as I am conscious of having
long since discovered and verified them without assistance
or suggestion from any but Shakespeare himself,
I should be disposed to claim but little credit for a
discovery which must in all likelihood have been
forestalled by the common insight of some hundred
or more students in time past. The difficulty begins
with the really debatable question of subdivisions.
There are certain plays which may be said to hang
on the borderland between one period and the next,
with one foot lingering and one advanced; and these
must be classed according to the dominant note of
their style, the greater or lesser proportion of qualities
proper to the earlier or the later stage of thought
and writing. At one time I was inclined to think
the whole catalogue more accurately divisible into
four classes; but the line of demarcation between
the third and fourth would have been so much fainter
than those which mark off the first period from the
second, and the second from the third, that it seemed
on the whole a more correct and adequate arrangement
to assume that the last period might be subdivided
if necessary into a first and second stage. This
somewhat precise and pedantic scheme of study I
have adopted from no love of rigid or formal system,
but simply to make the method of my critical process
as clear as the design. That design is to examine by
internal evidence alone the growth and the expression
of spirit and of speech, the ebb and flow of thought
and style, discernible in the successive periods of
Shakespeare's work; to study the phases of mind,
the changes of tone, the passage or progress from an
old manner to a new, the reversion or relapse from
a later to an earlier habit, which may assuredly be
traced in the modulations of his varying verse, but
can only be traced by ear and not by finger. I have
busied myself with no baseless speculations as to the
possible or probable date of the first appearance of
this play or of that on the stage; and it is not unlikely
that the order of succession here adopted or suggested
may not always coincide with the chronological order
of production; nor will the principle or theory by
which I have undertaken to class the successive plays
of each period be affected or impaired though it should
chance that a play ranked by me as belonging to a
later stage of work should actually have been produced
earlier than others which in my lists are assigned to
a subsequent date. It is not, so to speak, the literal
but the spiritual order which I have studied to observe
and to indicate: the periods which I seek to define
belong not to chronology but to art. No student need
be reminded how common a thing it is to recognise
in the later work of a great artist some partial
reappearance of his early tone or manner, some passing
return to his early lines of work and to habits of style
since modified or abandoned. Such work, in part at
least, may properly be said to belong rather to the
earlier stage whose manner it resumes than to the
later stage at which it was actually produced, and in
which it stands out as a marked exception among
the works of the same period. A famous and a most
singularly beautiful example of this reflorescence as
in a Saint Martin's summer of undecaying genius is
the exquisite and crowning love-scene in the opera or
'ballet-tragedy' of
Psyche, written in his sixty-fifth
year by the august Roman hand of Pierre Corneille;
a lyric symphony of spirit and of song fulfilled with
all the colour and all the music that autumn could
steal from spring if October had leave to go a Maying
in some Olympian masquerade of melody and sunlight.
And it is not easier, easy as it is, to discern
and to define the three main stages of Shakespeare's
work and progress, than to classify under their several
heads the representative plays belonging to each period
by the law of their nature, if not by the accident of
their date. There are certain dominant qualities which
do on the whole distinguish not only the later from
the earlier plays, but the second period from the first,
the third period from the second; and it is with these
qualities alone that the higher criticism, be it æsthetic
or scientific, has properly anything to do.
A new method of solution has been applied to
various difficulties which have been discovered or
invented in the text by the care or the perversity of
recent commentators, whose principle of explanation
is easier to abuse than to use with any likelihood of
profit. It is at least simple enough for the simplest
of critics to apply or misapply: whenever they see
or suspect an inequality or an incongruity which may
be wholly imperceptible to eyes uninured to the use
of their spectacles, they assume at once the presence
of another workman, the intrusion of a stranger's
hand. This supposition of a double authorship is
naturally as impossible to refute as to establish by
other than internal evidence and appeal to the private
judgment or perception of the reader. But it is no
better than the last resource of an empiric, the last
refuge of a sciolist; a refuge which the soundest of
scholars will be slowest to seek, a resource which
the most competent of critics will be least ready to
adopt. Once admitted as a principle of general
application, there are no lengths to which it may not
carry, there are none to which it has not carried, the
audacious fatuity and the arrogant incompetence of
tamperers with the authentic text. Recent editors
who have taken on themselves the high office of guiding
English youth in its first study of Shakespeare have
proposed to excise or to obelise whole passages which
the delight and wonder of youth and age alike, of the
rawest as of the ripest among students, have agreed
to consecrate as examples of his genius at its highest.
In the last trumpet-notes of Macbeth's defiance and
despair, in the last rallying cry of the hero re-awakened
in the tyrant at his utmost hour of need, there have
been men and scholars, Englishmen and editors, who
have detected the alien voice of a pretender, the false
ring of a foreign blast that was not blown by
Shakespeare; words that for centuries past have touched
with fire the hearts of thousands in each age since
they were first inspired—words with the whole sound
in them of battle or a breaking sea, with the whole
soul of pity and terror mingled and melted into each
other in the fierce last speech of a spirit grown
'aweary
of the sun,' have been calmly transferred from the
account of Shakespeare to the score of Middleton.
And this, forsooth, the student of the future is to
accept on the authority of men who bring to the
support of their decision the unanswerable plea of
years spent in the collation and examination of texts
never hitherto explored and compared with such
energy of learned labour. If this be the issue of
learning and of industry, the most indolent and ignorant
of readers who retains his natural capacity to be moved
and mastered by the natural delight of contact with
heavenly things is better off by far than the most
studious and strenuous of all scholiasts who ever
claimed acquiescence or challenged dissent on the
strength of his lifelong labours and hard-earned
knowledge of the letter of the text. Such an one
is indeed 'in a parlous state'; and any
boy whose
heart first begins to burn within him, who feels his
blood kindle and his spirit dilate, his pulse leap and
his eyes lighten, over a first study of Shakespeare,
may say to such a teacher with better reason than
Touchstone said to Corin, 'Truly, thou art damned;
like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side.' Nor could
charity itself hope much profit for him from the
moving appeal and the pious prayer which temper
that severity of sentence—'Wilt thou rest damned?
God help thee, shallow man! God make incision
in thee! Thou art raw.' And raw he is like to
remain for all his learning, and for all incisions that
can be made in the horny hide of a self-conceit to
be pierced by the puncture of no man's pen. It
was bad enough while theorists of this breed confined
themselves to the suggestion of a possible partnership
with Fletcher, a possible interpolation by Jonson;
but in the descent from these to the alleged adulteration
of the text by Middleton and Rowley we have
surely sounded the very lowest depth of folly attainable
by the utmost alacrity in sinking which may yet
be possible to the bastard brood of Scriblerus. For
my part, I shall not be surprised though the next
discoverer should assure us that half at least of Hamlet
is evidently due to the collaboration of Heywood,
while the greater part of Othello is as clearly
assignable to the hand of Shirley.
Akin to this form of folly, but less pernicious
though not more profitable, is the fancy of inventing
some share for Shakespeare in the composition
of plays which the veriest insanity of conjecture or
caprice could not venture to lay wholly to his charge.
This fancy, comparatively harmless as it is, requires
no ground of proof to go upon, no prop of likelihood
to support it; without so much help as may be
borrowed from the faintest and most fitful of traditions,
it spins its own evidence spider-like out of its
own inner conscience or conceit, and proffers it
with confident complacency for men's acceptance.
Here again I cannot but see a mere waste of fruitless
learning and bootless ingenuity. That Shakespeare
began by retouching and recasting the work of elder
and lesser men we all know; that he may afterwards
have set his hand to the task of adding or altering a
line or a passage here and there in some few of the
plays brought out under his direction as manager or
proprietor of a theatre is of course possible, but can
neither be affirmed nor denied with any profit in
default of the least fragment of historic or traditional
evidence. Any attempt to verify the imaginary touch
of his hand in plays of whose history we know no
more than that they were acted on the boards of
his theatre can be but a diversion for the restless
leisure of ingenious and ambitious scholars; it will
give no clue by which the student who simply seeks
to know what can be known with certainty of the
poet and his work may hope to be guided towards
any safe issue or trustworthy result. Less pardonable
and more presumptuous than this is the pretension
of minor critics to dissect an authentic play
of Shakespeare scene by scene, and assign different
parts of the same poem to different dates by the
same pedagogic rules of numeration and mensuration
which they would apply to the general question of
the order and succession of his collective works.
This vivisection of a single poem is not defensible
as a freak of scholarship, an excursion beyond the
bounds of bare proof, from which the wanderer
may chance to bring back, if not such treasure as
he went out to seek, yet some stray godsend or rare
literary windfall which may serve to excuse his
indulgence in the seemingly profitless pastime of a
truant disposition. It is a pure impertinence to
affirm with oracular assurance what might perhaps
be admissible as a suggestion offered with the due
diffidence of modest and genuine scholarship; to
assert on the strength of a private pedant's personal
intuition that such must be the history or such the
composition of a great work whose history he alone
could tell, whose composition he alone could explain,
who gave it to us as his genius had given it
to him.
From these several rocks and quicksands I trust
at least to keep my humbler course at a safe distance,
and steer clear of all sandy shallows of theory or
sunken shoals of hypothesis on which no pilot can be
certain of safe anchorage; avoiding all assumption,
though never so plausible, for which no ground but
that of fancy can be shown, all suggestion though
never so ingenious for which no proof but that of
conjecture can be advanced. For instance, I shall
neither assume nor accept the theory of a double
authorship or of a double date by which the supposed
inequalities may be accounted for, the supposed
difficulties may be swept away, which for certain
readers disturb the study of certain plays of
Shakespeare. Only where universal tradition and the
general concurrence of all reasonable critics past
and present combine to indicate an unmistakable
difference of touch or an unmistakable diversity of
date between this and that portion of the same play,
or where the internal evidence of interpolation
perceptible to the most careless and undeniable by the
most perverse of readers is supported by the public
judgment of men qualified to express and competent
to defend an opinion, have I thought it allowable to
adopt this facile method of explanation. No scholar,
for example, believes in the single authorship of
Pericles or Andronicus; none, I suppose, would now
question the part taken by some hireling or journeyman
in the arrangement or completion for the stage
of Timon of Athens; and few probably would refuse
to admit a doubt of the total authenticity or uniform
workmanship of The Taming of the Shrew. As few
I hope, are prepared to follow the fantastic and
confident suggestions of every unquiet and arrogant
innovator who may seek to append his name to the
long scroll of Shakespearean parasites by the display
of a brand-new hypothesis as to the uncertain date
or authorship of some passage or some play which
has never before been subjected to the scientific
scrutiny of such a pertinacious analyst. The more
modest design of the present study has in part been
already indicated, and will explain as it proceeds if
there be anything in it worth explanation. It is no
part of my ambition to loose the Gordian knots
which others who found them indissoluble have
sought in vain to cut in sunder with blunter swords
than the Macedonian; but after so many adventures
and attempts there may perhaps yet be room for
an attempt yet unessayed; for a study by the ear
alone of Shakespeare's metrical progress, and a study
by light of the knowledge thus obtained of the
corresponsive progress within, which found expression
and embodiment in these outward and visible changes.
The one study will be then seen to be the natural
complement and the inevitable consequence of the
other; and the patient pursuit of the simpler and
more apprehensible object of research will appear
as the only sure method by which a reasonable and
faithful student may think to attain so much as the
porch or entrance to that higher knowledge which
no faithful and reasonable study of Shakespeare can
ever for a moment fail to keep in sight as the haven
of its final hope, the goal of its ultimate labour.
When Christopher Marlowe came up to London
from Cambridge, a boy in years, a man in genius,
and a god in ambition, he found the stage which he
was born to transfigure and re-create by the might
and masterdom of his genius encumbered with a litter
of rude rhyming farces and tragedies which the first
wave of his imperial hand swept so utterly out of
sight and hearing that hardly by piecing together such
fragments of that buried rubbish as it is now possible
to unearth can we rebuild in imagination so much
of the rough and crumbling walls that fell before the
trumpet-blast of Tamburlaine as may give us some
conception of the rabble dynasty of rhymers whom he
overthrew—of the citadel of dramatic barbarism which
was stormed and sacked at the first charge of the
young conqueror who came to lead English audiences
and to deliver English poetry
From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay.
When we speak of the drama that existed before
the coming of Marlowe, and that vanished at his
advent, we think usually of the rhyming plays written
wholly or mainly in ballad verse of fourteen syllables
—of the Kings Darius and Cambyses, the Promos
and Cassandra of Whetstone, or the Sir Clyomon
and Sir Clamydes of George Peele. If we turn from
these abortions of tragedy to the metrical farces which
may fairly be said to contain the germ or embryo
of English comedy (a form of dramatic art which
certainly owes nothing to the father of our tragic
stage), we find far more of hope and promise in the
broad free sketches of the flagellant headmaster of
Eton and the bibulous Bishop of Bath and Wells;
and must admit that hands used to wield the crosier
or the birch proved themselves more skilful at the
lighter labours of the stage, more successful even in
the secular and bloodless business of a field neither
clerical nor scholastic, than any tragic rival of the
opposite party to that so jovially headed by Orbilius
Udall and Silenus Still. These twin pillars of church
and school and stage were strong enough to support
on the shoulders of their authority the first crude
fabric or formless model of our comic theatre, while
the tragic boards were still creaking and cracking
under the jingling canter of Cambyses or the tuneless
tramp of Gorboduc. This one play which the
charity of Sidney excepts from his general anathema
on the nascent stage of England has hitherto been
erroneously described as written in blank verse; an
error which I can only attribute to the prevalence
of a groundless assumption that whatever is neither
prose nor rhyme must of necessity be definable as
blank verse. But the measure, I must repeat, which
was adopted by the authors of Gorboduc is by no
means so definable. Blank it certainly is; but verse
it assuredly is not. There can be no verse where
there is no modulation, no rhythm where there is
no music. Blank verse came into life in England
at the birth of the shoemaker's son who had but
to open his yet beardless lips and the high-born
poem which had Sackville to father and Sidney to
sponsor was silenced and eclipsed for ever among
the poor plebeian crowd of rhyming shadows that
waited in death on the noble nothingness of its patrician
shade.
These, I suppose, are the first or the only plays
whose names recur to the memory of the general
reader when he thinks of the English stage before
Marlowe; but there was, I suspect, a whole class
of plays then current, and more or less supported
by popular favour, of which hardly a sample is now
extant, and which cannot be classed with such as
these. The poets or rhymesters who supplied them
had already seen good to clip the cumbrous and
bedraggled skirts of those dreary verses, run all to
seed and weed, which jingled their thin bells at the
tedious end of fourteen weary syllables; and for
this curtailment of the shambling and sprawling lines
which had hitherto done duty as tragic metre some
credit may be due to these obscure purveyors of
forgotten ware for the second epoch of our stage:
if indeed, as I presume, we may suppose that this
reform, such as it was, had begun before the time
of Marlowe; otherwise, no doubt, little credit would
be due to men who with so high an example before
them were content simply to snip away the tags and
fringes, to patch the seams and tatters, of the ragged
coat of rhyme which they might have exchanged for
that royal robe of heroic verse wherewith he had
clothed the ungrown limbs of limping and lisping
tragedy. But if these also may be reckoned among
his precursors, the dismissal from stage service of
the dolorous and drudging metre employed by the
earliest school of theatrical rhymesters must be taken
to mark a real step in advance; and in that case
we possess at least a single example of the rhyming
tragedies which had their hour between the last
plays written wholly or partially in ballad metre and
the first plays written in blank verse. The tragedy
of Selimus, Emperor of the Turks, published in 1594,
may then serve to indicate this brief and obscure
period of transition. Whole scenes of this singular
play are written in rhyming iambics, some in the
measure of Don Juan, some in the measure of Venus
and Adonis. The couplets and quatrains so much
affected and so reluctantly abandoned by Shakespeare
after the first stage of his dramatic progress
are in no other play that I know of diversified by
this alternate variation of sesta with ottava rima .
This may have been an exceptional experiment due
merely to the caprice of one eccentric rhymester;
but in any case we may assume it to mark the extreme
limit, the ultimate development of rhyming tragedy
after the ballad metre had been happily exploded.
The play is on other grounds worth attention as a
sign of the times, though on poetical grounds it is
assuredly worth none. Part of it is written in blank
verse, or at least in rhymeless lines; so that after
all it probably followed in the wake of Tamburlaine,
half adopting and half rejecting the innovations of
that fiery reformer, who wrought on the old English
stage no less a miracle than Hernani on the French
stage in the days of our fathers. That Selimus was
published four years later than Tamburlaine, in the
year following the death of Marlowe, proves of course
nothing as to the date of its production; and even
if it was written and acted in the year of its publication,
it undoubtedly in the main represents the work
of a prior era to the reformation of the stage by
Marlowe. The level regularity of its unrhymed
scenes is just like that of the weaker portions of
Titus Andronicus and the First Part of King Henry
the Sixth—the opening scene, for example, of either
play. With Andronicus it has also in common the
quality of exceptional monstrosity, a delight in the
parade of mutilation as well as of massacre. It seems
to me possible that the same hand may have been
at work on all three plays; for that Marlowe's is
traceable in those parts of the two retouched by
Shakespeare which bear no traces of his touch is
a theory to the full as absurd as that which would
impute to Shakespeare the charge of their entire
composition.
The revolution effected by Marlowe naturally raised
the same cry against its author as the revolution
effected by Hugo. That Shakespeare should not at
once have enlisted under his banner is less inexplicable
than it may seem. He was naturally addicted
to rhyme, though if we put aside the Sonnets we
must admit that in rhyme he never did anything
worth Marlowe's Hero and Leander: he did not,
like Marlowe, see at once that it must be reserved
for less active forms of poetry than the tragic drama;
and he was personally, it seems, in opposition to
Marlowe and his school of academic playwrights—
the band of bards in which Oxford and Cambridge
were respectively and so respectably represented by
Peele and Greene. But in his very first plays, comic
or tragic or historic, we can see the collision and
conflict of the two influences; his evil angel, rhyme,
yielding step by step and note by note to the strong
advance of that better genius who came to lead him
into the loftier path of Marlowe. There is not a
single passage in Titus Andronicus more Shakespearean
than the magnificent quatrain of Tamora upon the
eagle and the little birds; but the rest of the scene
in which we come upon it, and the whole scene
preceding, are in blank verse of more variety and
vigour than we find in the baser parts of the play;
and these if any scenes we may surely attribute to
Shakespeare. Again, the last battle of Talbot seems
to me as undeniably the master's work as the scene
in the Temple Gardens or the courtship of Margaret
by Suffolk; this latter indeed, full as it is of natural
and vivid grace, may perhaps not be beyond the
highest reach of one or two among the rivals of his
earliest years of work; while as we are certain that
he cannot have written the opening scene, that he
was at any stage of his career incapable of it, so may
we believe as well as hope that he is guiltless of any
complicity in that detestable part of the play which
attempts to defile the memory of the virgin saviour
of her country.
In style it is not, I think, above
the range of George Peele at his best: and to have
written even the last of those scenes can add but little
discredit to the memory of a man already disgraced
as the defamer of Eleanor of Castile; while it would
be a relief to feel assured that there was but one
English poet of any genius who could be capable of
either villainy.
In this play, then, more decisively than in Titus
Andronicus, we find Shakespeare at work (so to speak)
with both hands—with his left hand of rhyme, and
his right hand of blank verse. The left is loth to
forego the practice of its peculiar music; yet, as the
action of the right grows freer and its touch grows
stronger, it becomes more and more certain that the
other must cease playing, under pain of producing
mere discord and disturbance in the scheme of tragic
harmony. We imagine that the writer must himself
have felt the scene of the roses to be pitched in a
truer key than the noble scene of parting between
the old hero and his son on the verge of desperate
battle and certain death. This is the last and loftiest
farewell note of rhyming tragedy; still, in King
Richard II. and in Romeo and Juliet it struggles for
a while to keep its footing, but now more visibly
in vain. The rhymed scenes in these plays are too
plainly the survivals of a ruder and feebler stage of
work; they cannot hold their own in the new order
with even such discordant effect of incongruous
excellence and inharmonious beauty as belongs to
the death-scene of the Talbots when matched against
the quarrelling scene of Somerset and York. Yet
the briefest glance over the plays of the first epoch
in the work of Shakespeare will suffice to show how
protracted was the struggle and how gradual the
defeat of rhyme. Setting aside the retouched plays,
we find on the list one tragedy, two histories, and
four if not five comedies, which the least critical
reader would attribute to this first epoch of work.
In three of these comedies rhyme can hardly be said
to be beaten; that is, the rhyming scenes are on
the whole equal to the unrhymed in power and beauty.
In the single tragedy, and in one of the two histories,
we may say that rhyme fights hard for life, but is
undeniably worsted; that is, they contain as to
quantity a large proportion of rhymed verse, but
as to quality the rhymed part bears no proportion
whatever to the unrhymed. In two scenes we may
say that the whole heart or spirit of Romeo and Juliet
is summed up and distilled into perfect and pure
expression; and these two are written in blank verse
of equable and blameless melody. Outside the garden
scene in the second act and the balcony scene in the
third, there is much that is fanciful and graceful,
much of elegiac pathos and fervid if fantastic passion;
much also of superfluous rhetoric and (as it were)
of wordy melody, which flows and foams hither
and thither into something of extravagance and
excess; but in these two there is no flaw, no
outbreak, no superflux, and no failure. Throughout
certain scenes of the third and fourth acts I think
it may be reasonably and reverently allowed that
the river of verse has broken its banks, not as yet
through the force and weight of its gathering stream,
but merely through the weakness of the barriers or
boundaries found insufficient to confine it. And
here we may with deference venture on a guess why
Shakespeare was so long so loth to forego the restraint
of rhyme. When he wrote, and even when he rewrote
or at least retouched, his youngest tragedy he
had not yet strength to walk straight in the steps
of the mighty master, but two months older than
himself by birth, whose foot never from the first
faltered in the arduous path of severer tragic verse.
The loveliest of love-plays is after all a child of 'his
salad days, when he was green in judgment,' though
assuredly not 'cold in blood'—a physical condition
as difficult to conceive of Shakespeare at any age as
of Cleopatra. It is in the scenes of vehement passion,
of ardour and agony, that we feel the comparative
weakness of a yet ungrown hand, the tentative
uncertain grasp of a stripling giant. The two utterly
beautiful scenes are not of this kind; they deal with
simple joy and with simple sorrow, with the gladness
of meeting and the sadness of parting love; but
between and behind them come scenes of more fierce
emotion, full of surprise, of violence, of unrest; and
with these the poet is not yet (if I dare say so) quite
strong enough to deal. Apollo has not yet put on
the sinews of Hercules. At a later date we may
fancy or may find that when the Herculean muscle
is full-grown the voice in him which was as the voice
of Apollo is for a passing moment impaired. In
Measure for Measure, where the adult and gigantic
god has grappled with the greatest and most terrible
of energies and of passions, we miss the music of a
younger note that rang through Romeo and Juliet;
but before the end this too revives, as pure, as sweet,
as fresh, but richer now and deeper than its first clear
notes of the morning, in the heavenly harmony of
Cymbeline and The Tempest.
The same effusion or effervescence of words is
perceptible in King Richard II. as in the greater
(and the less good) part of Romeo and Juliet; and
not less perceptible is the perpetual inclination of
the poet to revert for help to rhyme, to hark back
in search of support towards the half-forsaken habits
of his poetic nonage. Feeling his foothold insecure
on the hard and high ascent of the steeps of rhymeless
verse, he stops and slips back ever and anon
towards the smooth and marshy meadow whence he
has hardly begun to climb. Any student who should
wish to examine the conditions of the struggle at its
height may be content to analyse the first act of
this the first historical play of Shakespeare. As the
tragedy moves onward, and the style gathers strength
while the action gathers speed,—as (to borrow the
phrase so admirably applied by Coleridge to Dryden)
the poet's chariot-wheels get hot by driving fast,—
the temptation of rhyme grows weaker, and the hand
grows firmer which before lacked strength to wave
it off. The one thing wholly or greatly admirable
in this play is the exposition of the somewhat pitiful
but not unpitiable character of King Richard. Among
the scenes devoted to this exposition I of course
include the whole of the death-scene of Gaunt, as
well the part which precedes as the part which follows
the actual appearance of his nephew on the stage
and into these scenes the intrusion of rhyme is rare
and brief. They are written almost wholly in pure
and fluent rather than vigorous or various blank
verse; though I cannot discern in any of them an
equality in power and passion to the magnificent
scene of abdication in Marlowe's Edward II. This
play, I think, must undoubtedly be regarded as the
immediate model of Shakespeare's; and the comparison
is one of inexhaustible interest to all students
of dramatic poetry. To the highest height of the
earlier master I do not think that the mightier poet
who was as yet in great measure his pupil has ever
risen in this the first (as I take it) of his historic plays.
Of composition and proportion he has perhaps already
a somewhat better idea. But in grasp of character,
always excepting the one central figure of the piece,
wve find his hand as yet the unsteadier of the two.
Even after a lifelong study of this as of all other
plays of Shakespeare, it is for me at least impossible
to determine what I doubt if the poet could himself
have clearly defined—the main principle, the motive
and the meaning, of characters as York, Norfolk,
and Aumerle. The Gaveston and the Mortimer of
Marlowe are far more solid and definite figures than
these; yet none after that of Richard is more
important to the scheme of Shakespeare. They are
fitful, shifting, vaporous: their outlines change,
withdraw, dissolve, and 'leave not a rack behind.' They,
not Antony, are like the clouds of evening described
in the most glorious of so many glorious passages
put long afterwards by Shakespeare into the mouth
of his latest Roman hero. They 'cannot hold this
visible shape' in which the poet at first presents
them even long enough to leave a distinct image, a
decisive impression for better or for worse, upon the
mind's eye of the most simple and open-hearted
reader. They are ghosts, not men; simulacra modis
pallentia miris . You cannot descry so much as the
original intention of the artist's hand which began
to draw and relaxed its hold of the brush before the
first lines were fairly traced. And in the last, the worst
and weakest scene of all, in which York pleads with
Bolingbroke for the death of the son whose mother
pleads against her husband for his life, there is a
final relapse into rhyme and rhyming epigram, into
the 'jigging vein' dried up (we might have hoped)
long since by the very glance of Marlowe's Apollonian
scorn. It would be easy, agreeable, and irrational
to ascribe without further evidence than its badness
this misconceived and misshapen scene to some other
hand than Shakespeare's. It is below the weakest,
the rudest, the hastiest scene attributable to Marlowe;
it is false, wrong, artificial beyond the worst of his
bad and boyish work; but it has a certain likeness
for the worse to the crudest work of Shakespeare.
It is difficult to say to what depths of bad taste the
writer of certain passages in Venus and Adonis could
not fall before his genius or his judgment was full-
grown. To invent an earlier play on the subject
and imagine this scene a surviving fragment, a floating
waif of that imaginary wreck, would in my opinion
be an uncritical mode of evading the question at
issue. It must be regarded as the last hysterical
struggle of rhyme to maintain its place in tragedy;
and the explanation, I would fain say the excuse,
of its reappearance may perhaps be simply this:
that the poet was not yet dramatist enough to feel
for each of his characters an equal or proportionate
regard; to divide and disperse his interest among
the various crowd of figures which claim each in its
place, and each after its kind, a fair and adequate
share of their creator's attention and sympathy. His
present interest was here wholly concentrated on the
single figure of Richard; and when that for the time
was absent, the subordinate figures became to him
but heavy and vexatious encumbrances, to be shifted
on and off the stage with as much of haste and as
little of labour as might be possible to an impatient
and uncertain hand. Now all tragic poets, I presume,
from Æschylus the godlike father of them all to the
last aspirant who may struggle after the traces of his
steps, have been poets before they were tragedians;
their lips have had power to sing before their feet
had strength to tread the stage, before their hands
had skill to paint or carve figures from the life. With
Shakespeare it was so as certainly as with Shelley,
as evidently as with Hugo. It is in the great comic
poets, in Molière and in Congreve,
our own lesser
Molière, so far inferior in breadth and depth, in
tenderness and strength, to the greatest writer of the
'great age,' yet so near him in science and in skill,
so like him in brilliance and in force,—it is in these that
we find theatrical instinct twin-born with imaginative
impulse, dramatic power with inventive perception.
In the second historic play which can be wholly
ascribed to Shakespeare we still find the poetic or
rhetorical quality for the most part in excess of the
dramatic; but in King Richard III. the bonds of
rhyme at least are fairly broken. This only of all
Shakespeare's plays belongs absolutely to the school
of Marlowe. The influence of the elder master, and
that influence alone, is perceptible from end to end.
Here at last we can see that Shakespeare has decidedly
chosen his side. It is as fiery in passion, as single in
purpose, as rhetorical often though never so inflated
in expression, as Tamburlaine itself. It is doubtless
a better piece of work than Marlowe ever did; I
dare not say, that Marlowe ever could have done.
It is not for any man to measure, above all it is not
for any workman in the field of tragic poetry lightly
to take on himself the responsibility or the authority
to pronounce, what it is that Christopher Marlowe
could not have done; but, dying as he did and when
he did, it is certain that he has not left us a work so
generally and variously admirable as King RichardIII. As certain is it that but for him this play could
never have been written. At a later date the subject
would have been handled otherwise, had the poet
chosen to handle it at all; and in his youth he could
not have treated it as he has without the guidance
and example of Marlowe. Not only are its highest
qualities of energy, of exuberance, of pure and lofty
style, of sonorous and successive harmonies, the very
qualities that never fail to distinguish those first
dramatic models which were fashioned by his ardent
hand; the strenuous and single-handed grasp of
character, the motion and action of combining and
contending powers, which here for the first time we
find sustained with equal and unfaltering vigour
throughout the length of a whole play, we perceive,
though imperfectly, in the work of Marlowe before
we can trace them even as latent or infant forces in
the work of Shakespeare.
In the exquisite and delightful comedies of his
earliest period we can hardly discern any sign, any
promise of them at all. One only of these, The Comedy
of Errors, has in it anything of dramatic composition
and movement; and what it has of these, I need
hardly remind the most cursory of students, is due
by no means to Shakespeare. What is due to him,
and to him alone, is the honour of having embroidered
on the naked old canvas of comic action those flowers
of elegiac beauty which vivify and diversify the scene
of Plautus as reproduced by the art of Shakespeare.
In the next generation so noble a poet as Rotrou,
whom perhaps it might not be inaccurate to call
the French Marlowe, and who had (what Marlowe
had not) the gift of comic as well as of tragic
excellence, found nothing of this kind and little of any
kind to add to the old poet's admirable but arid
sketch of farcical incident or accident. But in this
light and lovely work of the youth of Shakespeare
we find for the first time that strange and sweet
admixture of farce with fancy, of lyric charm with
comic effect, which recurs so often in his later work,
from the date of As You Like It to the date of The
Winter's Tale, and which no later poet had ventured
to recombine in the same play till our own time had
given us, in the author of Tragaldabas, one who could
alternate without confusing the woodland courtship
of Eliseo and Caprina with the tavern braggardism
of Grif and Minotoro. The sweetness and simplicity
of lyric or elegiac loveliness which fill and inform
the scenes where Adriana, her sister, and the
Syracusan Antipholus exchange the expression of their
errors and their loves, belong to Shakespeare alone;
and may help us to understand how the young poet
who at the outset of his divine career had struck
into this fresh untrodden path of poetic comedy
should have been, as we have seen that he was, loth
to learn from another and an alien teacher the hard
and necessary lesson that this flowery path would
never lead him towards the loftier land of tragic
poetry. For as yet, even in the nominally or
intentionally tragic and historic work of the first
period, we descry always and everywhere and still
preponderant the lyric element, the fantastic element,
or even the elegiac element. All these queens and
heroines of history and tragedy have rather an
Ovidian than a Sophoclean grace of bearing and of
speech.
The example afforded by The Comedy of Errors
would suffice to show that rhyme, however inadequate
for tragic use, is by no means a bad instrument for
romantic comedy. In another of Shakespeare's earliest
works, which might almost be described as a lyrical
farce, rhyme plays also a great part; but the finest
passage, the real crown and flower of Love's Labour's
Lost, is the praise or apology of love spoken by Biron
in blank verse. This is worthy of Marlowe for
dignity and sweetness, but has also the grace of a
light and radiant fancy enamoured of itself, begotten
between thought and mirth, a child-god with grave
lips and laughing eyes, whose inspiration is nothing
akin to Marlowe's. In this as in the overture of
the play and in its closing scene, but especially in
the noble passage which winds up for a year the
courtship of Biron and Rosaline, the spirit which
informs the speech of the poet is finer of touch and
deeper of tone than in the sweetest of the serious
interludes of The Comedy of Errors. The play is in
the main a yet lighter thing, and more wayward and
capricious in build, more formless and fantastic in
plot, more incomposite altogether than that first heir
of Shakespeare's comic invention, which on its own
ground is perfect in its consistency, blameless in
composition and coherence; while in Love's Labour's
Lost the fancy for the most part runs wild as the
wind, and the structure of the story is as that of a
house of clouds which the wind builds and unbuilds
at pleasure. Here we find a very riot of rhymes,
wild and wanton in their half-grown grace as a troop
of 'young satyrs, tender-hoofed and ruddy-horned';
during certain scenes we seem almost to stand again
by the cradle of new-born comedy, and hear the
first lisping and laughing accents run over from her
baby lips in bubbling rhyme; but when the note
changes we recognise the speech of gods. For the
first time in our literature the higher key of poetic
or romantic comedy is finely touched to a fine issue.
The divine instrument fashioned by Marlowe for
tragic purposes alone has found at once its new
sweet use in the hands of Shakespeare. The way is
prepared for As You Like It and The Tempest; the
language is discovered which will befit the lips of
Rosalind and Miranda.
What was highest as poetry in The Comedy of
Errors was mainly in rhyme; all indeed, we might
say, between the prelude spoken by Ægeon and
the appearance in the last scene of his wife: in
Love's Labour's Lost what was highest was couched
wholly in blank verse; in The Two Gentlemen of
Verona rhyme has fallen seemingly into abeyance,
and there are no passages of such elegiac beauty as
in the former, of such exalted eloquence as in the
latter of these plays; there is an even sweetness, a
simple equality of grace in thought and language
which keeps the whole poem in tune, written as it
is in a subdued key of unambitious harmony. In
perfect unity and keeping the composition of this
beautiful sketch may perhaps be said to mark a stage
of advance, a new point of work attained, a faint
but sensible change of manner, signalised by
increased firmness of hand and clearness of outline.
Slight and swift in execution as it is, few and simple
as are the chords here struck of character and emotion,
every shade of drawing and every note of sound is
at one with the whole scheme of form and music.
Here too is the first dawn of that higher and more
tender humour which was never given in such perfection
to any man as ultimately to Shakespeare;
one touch of the byplay of Launce and his immortal
dog is worth all the bright fantastic interludes of
Boyet and Adriano, Costard and Holofernes; worth
even half the sallies of Mercutio, and half the dancing
doggrel or broad-witted prose of either Dromio. But
in the final poem which concludes and crowns the
first epoch of Shakespeare's work, the special graces
and peculiar glories of each that went before are
gathered together as in one garland 'of every hue and
every scent.' The young genius of the master of all
our poets finds its consummation in the Midsummer
Night's Dream. The blank verse is as full, sweet,
and strong as the best of Biron's or Romeo's; the
rhymed verse as clear, pure, and true as the simplest
and truest melody of Venus and Adonis or The Comedy
of Errors. But here each kind of excellence is equal
throughout; there are here no purple patches on a
gown of serge, but one seamless and imperial robe
of a single dye. Of the lyric or the prosaic part, the
counterchange of loves and laughters, of fancy fine
as air and imagination high as heaven, what need
can there be for any one to shame himself by the
helpless attempt to say some word not utterly
unworthy? Let it suffice us to accept this poem as
the landmark of our first stage, and pause to look
back from it on what lies behind us of partial or of
perfect work.
The highest point attained in this first period lies
in the domain of comedy or romance, and belongs
as much to lyric as to dramatic poetry; its sovereign
quality is that of sweetness and springtide of fairy
fancy crossed with light laughter and light trouble
that end in perfect music. In history as in tragedy
the master's hand has not yet come to its full strength
and skill; its touch is not yet wholly assured, its
work not yet wholly blameless. Besides the plays
undoubtedly and entirely due to the still growing
genius of Shakespeare, we have taken note but of
two among those which bear the partial imprint of
his hand. The long-vexed question as to the authorship
of the latter parts of King Henry VI., in their
earlier or later form, has not been touched upon;
nor do I design to reopen that perpetual source of
debate, unstanchable and inexhaustible dispute by any
length of scrutiny or inquisition of detail. Two
points must of course be taken for granted: that
Marlowe was more or less concerned in the production,
and Shakespeare in the revision of these plays;
whether before or after his additions to the original
First Part of King Henry VI. we cannot determine,
though the absence of rhyme might seem to indicate
a later date for the recast of the Contention. But
it is noticeable that the style of Marlowe appears
more vividly and distinctly in passages of the
reformed than of the unreformed plays. Those famous
lines, for example, which open the fourth act of
the Second Part of King Henry VI. are not to be
found in the corresponding scene of the first part
of the Contention; yet, whether they belong to the
original sketch of the play, or were inserted as an
afterthought into the revised and expanded copy, the
authorship of these verses is surely unmistakable:—
The gaudy, blabbing, and remorseful day
Is crept into the bosom of the sea;
And now loud howling wolves arouse the jades
That drag the tragic melancholy night—
Aut Christophorus Marlowe, aut diabolus ; it is
inconceivable that any imitator but one should have
had the power so to catch the very trick of his hand,
the very note of his voice, and incredible that the one
who might would have set himself to do so: for if
this be not indeed the voice and this the hand of
Marlowe, then what we find in these verses is not the
fidelity of a follower, but the servility of a copyist.
No parasitic rhymester of past or present days who
feeds his starveling talent on the shreds and orts,
'the fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics'
of another man's board, ever uttered a more parrotlike
note of plagiary. The very exactitude of the
repetition is a strong argument against the theory
which attributes it to Shakespeare. That he had
much at starting to learn of Marlowe, and that he
did learn much—that in his earliest plays, and above
all in his earliest historic plays, the influence of the
elder poet, the echo of his style, the iteration of his
manner, may perpetually be traced—I have already
shown that I should be the last to question; but
so exact an echo, so servile an iteration as this, I
believe we shall nowhere find in them. The sonorous
accumulation of emphatic epithets—as in the magnificent
first verse of this passage—is indeed at least
as much a note of the young Shakespeare's style as
of his master's; but even were this one verse less
in the manner of the elder than the younger poet—
and this we can hardly say that it is—no single verse
detached from its context can weigh a feather against
the full and flawless evidence of the whole speech.
And of all this there is nothing in the Contention;
the scene there opens in bald and flat nakedness of
prose, striking at once into the immediate matter of
stage business without the decoration of a passing
epithet or a single trope.
From this sample it might seem that the main
difficulty must be to detect anywhere the sign-manual
of Shakespeare, even in the best passages of the
revised play. On the other hand, it has not
unreasonably been maintained that even in the next
scene of this same act in its original form, and in
all those following which treat of Cade's insurrection,
there is evidence of such qualities as can hardly be
ascribed to any hand then known but Shakespeare's.
The forcible realism, the simple vigour and lifelike
humour of these scenes, cannot, it is urged, be due
to any other so early at work in the field of comedy.
A critic desirous to press this point might further
insist on the likeness or identity of tone between
these and all later scenes in which Shakespeare has
taken on him to paint the action and passion of an
insurgent populace. With him, it might too plausibly
be argued, the people once risen in revolt for
any just or unjust cause is always the mob, the
unwashed rabble, the swinish multitude; full as he is
of wise and gracious tenderness for individual character,
of swift and ardent pity for personal suffering,
he has no deeper or finer feeling than scorn for 'the
beast with many heads' that fawn and butt at bidding
as they are swayed by the vain and violent breath
of any worthless herdsman. For the drovers who
guide and misguide at will the turbulent flocks of
their mutinous cattle his store of bitter words is
inexhaustible; it is a treasure-house of obloquy which
can never be drained dry. All this, or nearly all
this, we must admit; but it brings us no nearer to
any but a floating and conjectural kind of solution.
In the earliest form known to us of this play it should
seem that we have traces of Shakespeare's handiwork,
in the latest that we find evidence of Marlowe's.
But it would be something too extravagant for the
veriest wind-sucker among commentators to start a
theory that a revision was made of his original work
by Marlowe after additions had been made to it by
Shakespeare; yet we have seen that the most unmistakable
signs of Marlowe's handiwork, the passages
which show most plainly the personal and present
seal of his genius, belong to the play only in its revised
form; while there is no part of the whole composition
which can so confidently be assigned to Shakespeare
as to the one man then capable of such work, as can
an entire and important episode of the play in its
unrevised state. Now the proposition that Shakespeare
was the sole author of both plays in their
earliest extant shape is refuted at once, and equally
from without and from within, by evidence of tradition
and by evidence of style. There is therefore
proof irresistible and unmistakable of at least a double
authorship; and the one reasonable conclusion left
to us would seem to be this: that the first edition
we possess of these plays is a partial transcript of the
text as it stood after the first additions had been
made by Shakespeare to the original work of Marlowe
and others; for that this original was the work of
more hands than one, and hands of notably unequal
power, we have again the united witness of traditional
and internal evidence to warrant our belief: and that
among the omissions of this imperfect text were
certain passages of the original work, which were
ultimately restored in the final revision of the entire
poem as it now stands among the collected works of
Shakespeare.
No competent critic who has given due study to
the genius of Marlowe will admit that there is a
single passage of tragic or poetic interest in either
form of the text, which is beyond the reach of the
father of English tragedy: or, if there be one seeming
exception in the expanded and transfigured version
of Clifford's monologue over his father's corpse, which
is certainly more in Shakespeare's tragic manner than
in Marlowe's, and in the style of a later period than
that in which he was on the whole apparently content
to reproduce or to emulate the tragic manner of
Marlowe, there is at least but this one exception
to the general and absolute truth of the rule; and
even this great tragic passage is rather out of the
range of Marlowe's style than beyond the scope of
his genius. In the later as in the earlier version
of these plays, the one manifest excellence of which
we have no reason to suppose him capable is manifest
in the comic or prosaic scenes alone. The first
great rapid sketch of the dying cardinal, afterwards
so nobly enlarged and perfected on revision by the
same or by a second artist, is as clearly within the
capacity of Marlowe as of Shakespeare; and in
either edition of the latter play, successively known
as The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, as
the Second Part of the Contention, and as the Third
Part of King Henry VI., the dominant figure which
darkens all the close of the poem with presage of a
direr day is drawn by the same strong hand in the
same tragic outline. From the first to the last stage
of the work there is no mark of change or progress
here; the whole play indeed has undergone less
revision, as it certainly needed less, than the preceding
part of the Contention. Those great verses
which resume the whole spirit of Shakespeare's
Richard—finer perhaps in themselves than any passage
of the play which bears his name—are well-nigh
identical in either form of the poem; but the reviser,
with admirable judgment, has struck out, whether
from his own text or that of another, the line which
precedes them in the original sketch, where the
passage runs thus:—
I had no father, I am like no father
I have no brothers, I am like no brother;
(this reiteration is exactly in the first manner of our
tragic drama ;)
And this word love, which greybeards term divine, etc.
It would be an impertinence to transcribe the rest
of a passage which rings in the ear of every reader's
memory; but it may be noted that the erasure by
which its effect is so singularly heightened with the
inborn skill of so divine an instinct is just such an
alteration as would be equally likely to occur to
the original writer on glancing over his printed text
or to a poet of kindred power, who, while busied
in retouching and filling out the sketch of his
predecessor, might be struck by the opening for so great
an improvement at so small a cost of suppression.
My own conjecture would incline to the belief that
we have here a perfect example of the manner in
which Shakespeare may be presumed, when such a
task was set before him, to have dealt with the text
of Marlowe. That at the outset of his career he
was so employed, as well as on the texts of lesser
poets, we have on all hands as good evidence of
every kind as can be desired; proof on one side
from the text of the revised plays, which are as certainly
in part the work of his hand as they are in
part the work of another; and proof on the opposite
side from the open and clamorous charge of his
rivals, whose imputations can be made to bear no
reasonable meaning but this by the most violent
ingenuity of perversion, and who presumably were
not persons of such frank imbecility, such innocent
and infantine malevolence, as to forge against their
most dangerous enemy the pointless and edgeless
weapon of a charge which, if ungrounded, must have
been easier to refute than to devise. Assuming then
that in common with other young poets of his day
he was thus engaged during the first years of his
connection with the stage, we should naturally have
expected to find him handling the text of Marlowe
with more of reverence and less of freedom than
that of meaner men: ready, as in the Contention,
to clear away with no timid hand their weaker and
more inefficient work, to cancel and supplant it by
worthier matter of his own; but when occupied in
recasting the verse of Marlowe, not less ready to
confine his labour to such slight and skilful strokes
of art as that which has led us into this byway of
speculation; to the correction of a false note, the
addition of a finer touch, the perfection of a meaning
half expressed or a tone of half-uttered music; to
the invigoration of sense and metre by substitution
of the right word for the wrong, of a fuller phrase
for one feebler; to the excision of such archaic and
superfluous repetitions as are signs of a cruder stage
of workmanship, relics of a ruder period of style,
survivals of the earliest form or habit of dramatic
poetry. Such work as this, however humble in our
present eyes, which look before and after, would
assuredly have been worthy of the workman and his
task; an office no less fruitful of profit, and no more
unbeseeming the pupil hand of the future master,
than the subordinate handiwork of the young Raffaelle
or Leonardo on the canvas of Verrocchio or Perugino.
Of the doubtful or spurious plays which have
been with more or less show of reason ascribed to
this first period of Shakespeare's art, I have here
no more to say than that I purpose in the proper
place to take account of the only two among them
which bear the slightest trace of any possible touch
of his hand. For these two there is not, as it happens,
the least witness of tradition or outward likelihood
which might warrant us in assigning them a place
apart from the rest, and nearer the chance of reception
into the rank that has been claimed for them;
while those plays in whose favour there is some
apparent evidence from without, such as the fact of
early or even original attribution to the master's hand,
are, with one possible exception, utterly beyond the
pale of human consideration as at any stage whatever
the conceivable work of Shakespeare.
Considering that his two attempts at narrative or
rather semi-narrative and semi-reflective poetry belong
obviously to an early stage of his earliest period, we
may rather here than elsewhere take notice that there
are some curious points of coincidence for evil as for
good between the fortunes of Shakespeare's plays and
the fortunes of his poems. In either case we find
that some part at least of his earlier and inferior
work has fared better at the blind hands of chance
and the brutish hands of printers than some part
at least of his riper and more precious products.
His two early poems would seem to have had the
good hap of his personal supervision in their passage
through the press. Upon them, at least since the
time of Coleridge, who as usual has said on this
subject the first and the last word that need be said,
it seems to me that fully sufficient notice and fully
adequate examination have been expended; and that
nothing at once new and true can now be profitably
said in praise or in dispraise of them. Of A Lover's
Complaint, marked as it is throughout with every
possible sign suggestive of a far later date and a far
different inspiration, I have only space or need to
remark that it contains two of the most exquisitely
Shakespearean verses ever vouchsafed to us by Shakespeare,
and two of the most execrably euphuistic or
dysphuistic lines ever inflicted on us by man. Upon
the Sonnets such a preposterous pyramid of
presumptuous commentary has long since been reared
by the Cimmerian speculation and Bœotian 'brain-
sweat' of sciolists and scholiasts, that no modest man
will hope and no wise man will desire to add to the
structure or subtract from it one single brick of proof
or disproof, theorem or theory. As yet the one
contemporary book which has ever been supposed
to throw any direct or indirect light on the mystic
matter remains as inaccessible and unhelpful to
students as though it had never been published
fifteen years earlier than the date of their publication
and four years before the book in which Meres
notices the circulation of Shakespeare's 'sugared
sonnets among his private friends.' It would be a
most noble and thankworthy addition to a list of
labours beyond praise and benefits beyond price, if
my honoured friend Dr. Grosart could find the means
to put a crown upon the achievements of his learning
and a seal upon the obligations of our gratitude by
the one inestimable boon long hoped for against
hoping, and as yet but 'a vision in a dream' to the
most learned and most loving of true Shakespearean
students; by the issue or reissue in its full and perfect
likeness, collated at last and complete, of Willobie
his Avisa.
It was long since more than time that the worthless
and impudent imposture called The Passionate
Pilgrim should be exposed and expelled from its
station at the far end of Shakespeare's poems. What
Coleridge said of Ben Jonson's epithet for 'turtle-
footed peace,' we may say of the label affixed to this
rag-picker's bag of stolen goods: The Passionate
Pilgrim is a pretty title, a very pretty title; pray
what may it mean? In all the larcenous little bundle
of verse there is neither a poem which bears that
name nor a poem by which that name would be
bearable. The publisher of the booklet was like
'one Ragozine, a most notorious pirate'; and the
method no less than the motive of his rascality in
the present instance is palpable and simple enough.
Fired by the immediate and instantly proverbial
popularity of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, he
hired, we may suppose, some ready hack of unclean
hand to supply him with three doggrel sonnets on
the same subject, noticeable only for their porcine
quality of prurience: he procured by some means a
rough copy or an incorrect transcript of two genuine
and unpublished sonnets by Shakespeare, which with
the acute instinct of a felonious tradesman he laid
atop of his worthless wares by way of gilding to
their base metal: he stole from the two years published
text of Love's Labour's Lost, and reproduced
with more or less mutilation or corruption, the sonnet
of Longavile, the 'canzonet' of Biron, and the far
lovelier love-song of Dumaine. The rest of the
ragman's gatherings, with three most notable exceptions,
is little better for the most part than dry
rubbish or disgusting refuse: unless a plea may
haply be put in for the pretty commonplaces of the
lines on a 'sweet rose, fair flower,' and so forth;
for the couple of thin and pallid if tender and tolerable
copies of verse on 'Beauty' and 'Good Night,'
or the passably light and lively stray of song on
'crabbed age and youth.' I need not say that those
three exceptions are the stolen and garbled work of
Marlowe and of Barnfield, our elder Shelley and our
first-born Keats; the singer of Cynthia in verse
well worthy of Endymion, who would seem to have
died as a poet in the same fatal year of his age that
Keats died as a man; the first adequate English
laureate of the nightingale, to be supplanted or
equalled by none until the advent of his mightier
brother.