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 'FROM THE 
 
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 COLLECTED BY 
 
 BENNO LOEWY 
 
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 BEQUEATHED TO CORNELL UNIVERSITY 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PR 2976.S97S9 1880 
 
 A study of Shakespeare. 
 
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A Study of Shakespeare 
 
WORKS BY^MR. SWINBURNE. 
 
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A Study of Shakespeare 
 
 BY 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 TflltuOll 
 
 CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY 
 1880 
 
 The Hghi of iranslaiion is reserved ] 
 
 L. 
 
LONDON : PRINTED BY 
 
 3POTTISW0ODE AND CO., NEW-STHEET SQUARE 
 
 AND PARLIAMENT STREET 
 
TO 
 JAMES ORCHARD HALLIWELL-PHILLIPPS. 
 
 That a sample or excerpt given from this book while as 
 yet save in design unfinished should have found such favour 
 in your sight and won such approval at your hands as you then 
 by word alike and action so cordially expressed, is reason 
 enough why I should inscribe it with your name : even if I felt 
 less pleasure in the reflection and the record that this little 
 labour of a lifelong love had at once the doubly good fortune 
 and the doubly grateful success, to be praised by those who 
 have earned the praise and thanks of all true Shakespearean 
 scholars, and dispraised by such as have deserved their natural 
 doom to reap neither but frpm the harvest of their own 
 applause or that of their fellows. It might be hard for a 
 personally unbiassed judgment to strike the balance oj 
 genuine value and significance between these two forms of 
 acknowledgment : but it will be evident which is to me the 
 more precious, when 1 write your name above my own on 
 the votive scroll which attaches my offering to the shrine of 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 
 
a Cornell University 
 y Library 
 
 The original of this bool< is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92401 31 58393 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. First Period : Lyric and Fantastic . i 
 
 II. Second Period: Comic and Historic . 66 
 
 III. Third Period : Tragic and Romantic . 170 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 I. Note on the Historical Play of King 
 
 Edward III. 231 
 
 II. Report of the Proceedings on the First 
 Anniversary Session of the Newest 
 Shakespeare Society . . . .276 
 
 III. Additions and Corrections .... 300 
 
A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 I. 
 
 The greatest poet of our age has drawn a parallel 
 of elaborate eloquence between Shakespeare and 
 the sea ; and the likeness holds good in many 
 points of less significance than those which have 
 been set down by the master-hand. For two hun- 
 dred 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 un- 
 sounded 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 
 
 B 
 
2 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 mani- 
 fest 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 un- 
 dertaken 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 
 
A Study of Shakespeare, 3 
 
 each fresh muster of hands. , At one time a main 
 -rock of offence on which the stoutest ships of dis- 
 covery were wont to split was the narrow and slip- 
 pery 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 b^en 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 spng. 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 &y&s to admit such a 
 
4 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 stu- 
 dents and lovers of either art this may perhaps ap- 
 pear 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 appli- 
 cation 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 
 
A Siudy of Shakespeare. 5 
 
 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 ask- 
 ing ; 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 Shake- 
 speare 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 
 
6 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 they would be. In spite of all tabulated state- 
 ments 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 metri- 
 cal test is doubtless, as they say, the surest or the 
 sole sure key to one side of the secret of Shake- 
 speare ; 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 se- 
 quence the quantity, order, and proportion of single 
 and double endings, of rhyme and blank verse, of 
 regular lines and irregular, to be traced in each play 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 7 
 
 by the horny eye and the callous finger of a pedant. 
 " I am ill at these numbers " ; those in which I 
 ■have sought to become an expert are numbers 
 -of another sort ; but having, from wellnigh^ the 
 first years I can remember, made of the study of 
 Shakespeare the chief intellectual business and 
 found in it the chief spiritual delight of my whole 
 life, I can hardly think myself less qualified than 
 another to ofier an opinion on the metrical points 
 at issue. 
 
 The progress and expansion of style and har- 
 mony 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 in- 
 fluences, 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 ot a poet's work are of their 
 veiy~naHiririn3ivislOeTtha^^ ^ is Qf 
 
8 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 necessity worthless which looks to one side only, 
 whether it be to the outer or to the inner quality 
 of the work ; that the fatuity of pedantic ignorance 
 never devised a grosser absurdity than the attempt 
 to separate aesthetic from scientific criticism by a 
 strict line of demarcation, and to bring all critical 
 work under one or the other head of this exhaustive 
 division. Criticism without accurate science of the 
 thing criticised can indeed have no other value than 
 may belong to the genuine record of a spontaneous 
 impression ; but it is not less certain that criticism 
 which busies itself only with the outer husk or 
 technical shell of a great artist's work, taking no 
 account of the spirit or the thought which informs 
 it, cannot have even so much value as this. With- 
 out 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 
 summaiy of the precise number of blue or green, 
 red or white draperies to be found in a precise 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 9 
 
 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 termina- 
 tions 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 cdn 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 trans- 
 figuration 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 
 
lo A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 great artists there are of either kind in whom no 
 such process of growth or transformation is percep- 
 tible : 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 dimi- 
 nution 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 conjee- 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 1 1 
 
 ture 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 signi- 
 ficance in a passage hitherto neglected or miscon- 
 strued, is to a critic of this higher class a delight as 
 Iceen 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 compe- 
 tent 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 per- 
 sonal 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. When, 
 
12 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 however, such a wealth and weight of learnings ' 
 such brilliancy and fertility of conjecture, have 
 together been brought to bear upon this question 
 as we have seen of late years applied to it, we can- 
 not but hope that some real light may be struck 
 out on the subject in passing ; and even if we get 
 none sure or strong enough to steer by in safety 
 towards any actual port of belief, we may thank- 
 fully enjoy the new knowledge and the fresh 
 illustration supplied by such labours as those of 
 the editor of the Siege of Antwerp, the first and (to 
 the keen disappointment I should think of many 
 students besides myself) the last instalment issued 
 during the editor's lifetime of a series projected 
 under the title of The School of Shakespeare, or 
 the author of some articles in the last numbers 
 published of the North British Review, on the 
 supposed secret meanings and latent controversies 
 traceable in the works of Shakespeare, Jonson, and 
 their several satellites or subordinates, antagonists 
 or allies. Absolute confidence or positive belief 
 we need not feel bound or inclined to accord to the 
 conjectures of such writers ; but from the treasures 
 of their critical and historical scholarship, from the 
 acute and strenuous exercise of the energies of 
 their thought, from the ardour of study and 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 1 3 
 
 intelligence devoted to matters of such keen inter- 
 est to us all, it must be our own fault and our own 
 loss if we fail to carry away any sense of profit or 
 iTOrpression of enjoyment. And this we may do 
 while guarding ourselves against the temptation 
 to assume or to accept as matter of established 
 fact any theory, though never so ingenious, which 
 has no evident footing on the solid ground of 
 proof. 
 
 The aim of the present study is simply to set 
 do\irn what the writer believes to be certain 
 ^demonstrable truths as to the progress and deve- 
 lopBrent ofstyle^^ the outer and the inner changes 
 of manner as of matter, of method as of design, 
 which may be discerned in the work of Shake- 
 speare. The principle here adopted and the views 
 here put forward have not been suddenly dis- 
 covered 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 dis- 
 cussion with friends and fellow-students, the 
 opinions which I now submit to more public judg- 
 ment. How far they may coincide with those 
 advanced by others I cannot say, and have not 
 been careful to inquire. The mere fact of coinci- 
 
14 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 dence 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 main- 
 stay 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 M alone 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 distin- 
 guish 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 con- 
 scious of having long since discovered and verified 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 15 
 
 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 debat- 
 able 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 
 arrangeiUlnt 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 r 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 
 
1 6 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 Shake- 
 speare'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 under- 
 taken 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^roduced 
 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. 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 1 7 
 
 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 reflor- 
 escence as in a Saint Martin's summer of undecay- 
 ing genius is the exquisite and crowning love-scene 
 in the opera or " ballet-tragedy " o{ 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 masque- 
 rade 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 
 
 C 
 
i8 A Shidy of Sliakespeare. 
 
 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 quahties alone that the higher criticism, be it 
 aesthetic or scientific, has properly anything to do. 
 A new method of solution has been apphed to 
 various difficulties which have been discovered or 
 invented in the text by the care or the perversity 
 of recent commentators, whose principle of ex- 
 planation 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 (sup- 
 position of a double authorship is naturally as 
 impossible to refute as to establish by other than 
 internal evidence and appeal to the private judg- 
 ment 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 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 19 
 
 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 car- 
 ried, the audacious fatuity and the arrogant in- 
 competence 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 con- 
 secrate 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 cen- 
 turies 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 
 
20 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 chal- 
 lenged 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? 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 21 
 
 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 inter- 
 polation by Jonson ; but in the descent from these 
 to the alleged adulteration of the text by Middle- 
 ton 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 invent- 
 ing 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 
 
2 2 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 spiderT 
 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 evi- 
 -dence. 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 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 23 
 
 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, 
 wWose 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 
 
24 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 sugges- 
 tion 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 ac- 
 counted 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 reason- 
 able critics past and present combine to indicate 
 an unmistakable difference of touch or an unmis- 
 takable 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 cf 
 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 
 oi Pericles or Androiiicns ; none, I suppose, would 
 now question the part taken by some hireling or 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 25 
 
 journeyman in the arrangement or completion for 
 the stage of Timon of A thens ; and few probably 
 would refuse to admit a doubt of the total authen- 
 ticity 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 author- 
 ship 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 
 
26 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 
 esearch 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 tEFitage wKicK"he 
 wasi?onrTd"frahsfigufe"a'nd 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 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 27 
 
 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 four- 
 teen 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 EngUsh 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 head-master of Eton and the bibulous 
 Bishop of Bath and Wells ; and must admit that 
 hands used to wield the crosier or the birch proved 
 themselves more skilful at the lighter labours of 
 the stage, more successful even in the secular and 
 bloodless business of a field neither clerical nor 
 scholastic, than any tragic rival of the opposite 
 party to that so jovially headed by Orbilius Udall 
 
28 A Stttdy of Shakespeare. 
 
 and Silenus Still. These twin pillars of church 
 and school and stage were strong enough to sup- 
 port 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 modula- 
 tion, no rhythm where there is no music. Blank 
 verse came into life in England at the birth of the 
 shbemaTcer's s'on who had but to open his yet 
 beardless lips, and the high-born poem which had 
 Sackvill^ 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 
 
A Shidy of Shakespeare. 29 
 
 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. 
 
32 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 1 594, 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 D071 Jtian, 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 riina. 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 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 31 
 
 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 Tam- 
 burlaine, half adopting and half rejecting the inno- 
 vations of that fiery reformer, who wrought on the 
 old English stage no less a miracle than Hemani 
 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 Andro- 
 nicus it has also in common the quality of excep- 
 tional 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 
 
32 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 
 fraised the same cry against its author as the revo- 
 ' lution effected by Hugo. That Shakespeare should 
 not at once have enlisted under his banner is less 
 i 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 seemsj in 
 opposition to Marlowe and his school of academic 
 playwrights — the band of bards in which Oxford 
 and Cambridge were respectively and so respect- 
 ably 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 
 Tiius Attdronicus more Shakespearean than the 
 magnificent quatrain of Tamora upon the eager 
 
A Study of Slmkespeare. 33 
 
 and the little birds ; but the rest of the scene in 
 which we come upon it, and the whole scene pre- 
 ceding, 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 
 
 ' One thing is certain : that damnable last scene at which the 
 gorge rises even to remember it is in execution as unlike the crudest 
 phase of Shakespeare's style as in conception it is unlike the idlest 
 birth of his spirit. Let us hope that so foul a thing could not have 
 been done in even tolerably gond verse. 
 
 D 
 
34 .-^ Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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,, mox£„deasiif£ly„^thaa., in 
 Tihis Andronicus, we find Shakespeare at work (so 
 to speak) with both hands— with his^Jeft, hanci of 
 rhyme, and his right hand of blank verse. The 
 left is loth to forego the practice of its peculiar 
 itmsic ; 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 disturb- 
 ance 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, \n King Richard 11. 
 and in Romeo and Juliet, it struggles for, awhile 
 to keep its footing, but now more visibly in 
 vain. The rhymed scenes in these plays are too 
 plainly the survivals of a ruder and feebler stage of 
 work ; they cannot hold their own in the new order 
 with even such discordant effect of incongruous 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 35 
 
 excellence and inharmonious beauty as belongs 
 to the death-scene of the Talbots when matched 
 against the quartelling scene of Somef set 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 rhym- 
 ing scenes are on the whole equal to the unrhymed 
 in powfer 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 dis- 
 tilled 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 
 
36 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 o 
 
 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 out- 
 break, 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 fore- 
 go the restraint of rhyme. When he wrote, and even 
 when he rewrote or at least retouched, his youngest 
 tragedy he had not yet strength to walk straight 
 in the steps of the mighty master, but two months 
 older than himself by birth, whose foot never from 
 the first faltered in the arduous path of severer 
 tragic verse. The loveliest of love-plays is after all 
 a child of " his salad days, when he was green in 
 judgment," though assuredly not "cold in blood " 
 — a physical condition as difficult to conceive of 
 Shakespeare at any age as of Cleopatra. It is in 
 the scenes of vehement passion, of ardour and of 
 agony, that we feel the comparative weakness of 
 
A Siudy of Shakespeare, 37 
 
 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 pass- 
 ing 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 Cj>m- 
 beline 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 oi Romeo and Juliet ; and 
 not less perceptible is the perpetual inclination. of 
 
38 A Shidy of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 stu- 
 dent 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 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 39 
 
 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 Shake- 
 speare's ; and the comparison is one of inexhaustible 
 interest to all students of dramatic poetry. To the 
 highest height of the earlier master I do not think 
 that the mightier poet who was as yet in great 
 measure his pupil has ever risen in this the first (as 
 I take it) of his historic plays. Of composition and 
 proportion he has perhaps already a somewhat better 
 idea. But in grasp of character, always excepting 
 the one central figure of the piece, we find his hand 
 as yet the unsteadier of the two. Even after a life- 
 long study of this as of all other plays of Shake- 
 speare, it is for me at least impossible to deteirmiile 
 what I doubt if the poet could himself have clearly 
 defined — the main principle, the motive aftd the 
 meaning of such characters as York, Norfolk, and 
 Aumerle. The Gaveston and the Mortimer of 
 Marlowe are far more solid and definite figures 
 than these ; yet none after that of Richard is more 
 important to the scheme of Shakespeare. They 
 are 'fitful, shifting; vaporous : their outlines change. 
 
40 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 " can- 
 not hold this visible shape " in which the poet at 
 first presents them even long enough to leave a 
 distiftct 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 pallcntia iniris. You can- 
 not 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 Apol- 
 lonian 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 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 41 
 
 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 un- 
 critical 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 re- 
 appearance 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 
 
42 A Study of Shakespeare.. 
 
 haste and as little of labour as might be possible to 
 an impatient and uncertain hand. Now all tragic 
 poets, I presume, from ^schylus the godlike father 
 of them all to the last aspirant who may struggle 
 after the traces of his steps, have been poets before 
 they were tragedians ; their lips have had power to 
 sing before their feet had strength to tread the 
 stage, before their hands had skill to paint or carve 
 figures from the life. With Shakespeare it was so 
 as certainly as with Shelley, as evidently as with 
 Hugo. It is in the great comic poets, in Moliere 
 and in Congreve,' our own lesser Moliere, so far 
 inferior in breadth and depth, in tenderness and 
 strength, to the greatest writer of the "great age,"' 
 
 ' It is not the least of Lord Macaulay's offences against art that 
 he should have contributed the temporary weight of his influence as 
 a critic to the support of so ignorant and absurd a tradition of criti- 
 cism as that which classes the great writer here mentioned with the' 
 brutal if ' ' brawny " Wycherley — a classification almost to be 
 paralleled with that which in the days of our fathers saw fit to 
 couple together the names of lialzac and of Sue. Any competent 
 critic will always recognise in The Way of the World one of the 
 glories, in The Country Wife one of the disgraces, of dramatic and 
 of English literature. The stains discernible on the masterpiece of 
 Congreve are trivial and conventional ; the mere conception of the 
 other man's work displays a mind so prurient and leprous, uncovers 
 such an unfathomable and unimaginable beastliness of imagination, 
 that in the present age at least he would probably have figured as a, 
 virtuous journalist and professional rebuker of poetic vice or artistic 
 aberration. 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 43 
 
 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 percep- 
 tible 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 expres- 
 sion, as Tamburlaine itself It is doubtless a better 
 piece of work than Marlowe ever did ; I dare not 
 say, than Marlowe ever could have done. It is not 
 for any man to measure, above all is it not for any 
 workman in the field of tragic poetry lightly to 
 take on himself the responsibility or the authority 
 to pronounce, what it is that Christopher Marlowe 
 could not have done ; but, dying as he did and 
 when he did, it is certain that he has not left us a 
 work so generally and so variously admirable as 
 
44 A Shidy of Shakespeare. 
 
 King Richard III. As certain is it that but for 
 him this play could never have been written. At a 
 later date the subject would have been handled 
 otherwise, had the poet chosen to handle it at all ; 
 and in his youth he could not have treated it as 
 he has without the guidance and example of Mar- 
 lowe. 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 ; thq 
 strenuous and single-handed grasp of character, 
 the motion and action of combining and contend- 
 ing 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 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 45 
 
 him, and to him alone, is the honour of having em- 
 broidered 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 inci- 
 dent 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 oi As Y on Like It to the date of the Winter's 
 Tale, and which no later poet had ventured to recom- 
 bine 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 simpli- 
 city of lyric or elegiac loveliness which fill and 
 inform the scenes where Adriana, her sister, and 
 the Syracusan Antipholus exchange the expression 
 
46 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 of their errors and their loves, belong to Shake- 
 speare 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 ele- 
 ment, the fantastic element, or even the elegiac 
 element. A 11 the.se queens and heroines of history 
 and tragedy have rather an Ovidian than a Sopho- 
 clean grace of bearing and of speech. 
 
 The example afforded by the Comedy of Errors 
 would suffice to show that rhyme, however inade- 
 quate for tragic use, is by no means a bad instru- 
 ment for romantic comedy. In another of Shake- 
 speare'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 sweet- 
 
A Study of Shakespeare^ 47 
 
 ness, 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 laugh- 
 ing eyes, whose inspiration is nothing akin to Mar- 
 lowe'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 
 jncomposite altogether than that first heir of Shake, 
 speare's comic invention, which on its own ground 
 is perfect in its consistency, blameless in composi- 
 tion and coherence ; while in Lovis 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 
 
48 A Study of Shakespeare^ 
 
 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 Vou 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 .(Egeon and 
 the appearance in the last scene of his wife : in 
 Lov^s Labours 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 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 49 
 
 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 
 sirnple 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 ulti- 
 mately to Shakespeare ; one touch of the by-play 
 of Launce and his immortal dog is worth all the 
 bright fantastic , interludes of Boyet and Adriano, 
 Costard and Halofernes ; 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 Nighfs 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 
 
 E 
 
50 A Stttdy of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 im- 
 print 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 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 5 1 
 
 touched upon ; nor do I design to reopen that 
 perpetual source of debate unstanchable and inex- 
 haustible 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 unmistak- 
 able : — 
 
 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, etc. 
 
 Aut Christophorus Marlowe, aut diabolus ; it is 
 
52 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 inconceivable that any tmitator but one should 
 have had the power so to catch the very trick of 
 his hand, the very note of his voice, and incredibly 
 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 thesie 
 verses is not the fidelity of a fellower, but the 
 servility of a copyist. No parasitic rhymester of 
 past or present days who feeds his starveling 
 talent on the shreds and orts, "the fragments, 
 scraps, the bits and greasy relics " of another man's 
 board, ever uttered a more parrot-like note of 
 plagiary. The very exactitude of the repetition is 
 a strong argument against the theory which 
 attributes it to Shakespeare. That he had much 
 at starting to learn of Marlowe, and that he did 
 learn much— that in his earliest plays, and above 
 all in his earliest historic plays, the influence of the 
 elder poet, the echo of his style, the iteration of his 
 manner, may perpetually be traced — I have already 
 shown that I should be the last to question ; bijt 
 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— f|s 
 indeed at least as much a note of the young 
 
A Sttidy of Shakespeare. 53 
 
 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 hardlj- 
 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 ilat 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 insur- 
 rection, 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 
 
54 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 
 v/hichcan 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 Shake- 
 speare'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 ; 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 55 
 
 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 com- 
 position which can so confidently be assigned to 
 Shakespeare as to the one man then capable of 
 such work, as can ^n entire and important episode 
 of the play in its um-evised state. Now the pro- 
 position 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 unmistak- 
 able 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 uneiqual 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 
 
56 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 restored in the final revision of the entire poem as 
 it now stands among the collected works of Shake- 
 speare. 
 
 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 trans- 
 figured version of Clifford's monologue over his 
 father's corpse, which is certainly more in Shake- 
 speare'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 Mar- 
 lowe'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 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 57 
 
 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 them- 
 selves than any passage of the play which bears 
 his name^— are wellnigh identical in either form of 
 the poem ; but the reviser, with admirable judg- 
 ment, 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. 
 
58 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 prede- 
 cessor, 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 op- 
 posite 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 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 59 
 
 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. Assum- 
 ing 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 Conten- 
 tion, 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 mean- 
 ing half expressed or a tone of half-uttered music ; 
 to the invigoration of sense and metre by substi- 
 tution 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 
 
6o A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 habit of dramatic poetry. Such work as this, how- 
 ever 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 hap- 
 pens, the least witness of tradition or outward like- 
 lihood 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, 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 6 1 
 
 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 coinci- 
 dence 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 suflSoient 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 Lovers 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 
 
62 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 vouchsafed to us by Shakespeare, and two of the 
 most execrably euphuistic or dysphufstic 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 specu- 
 lation- and Boeotian " brain-sweat " of sciolists and 
 scholiasts, that no modest man will hope and no wise 
 man will desire to add to the structure or subtract 
 from it one single brick of proof or disproofs theorem' 
 or theory. As yet the one contemporary book which 
 has ever been supposed to throw any direct or in- 
 direct light on the mystic matter remains as inac- 
 cessible 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 bene- 
 fits beyond price, if my honoured friend Dr. Grosart 
 could find the means to put a crown upon the achieve- 
 ments 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 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 63 
 
 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 Pas^ 
 sionate 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 pub- 
 lisher 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 in- 
 
 1 
 ' Since this passage first went to press, I have received from 
 Dr. Grosart the most happy news that he has procured a perfect copy 
 of this precions volume, and will shortly add it to his occasional issues 
 of golden waifs and strays forgotten by the ebb-tide of time. Not 
 even the disinterment of Robert Chester's "glorified " poem, with 
 its appended jewels of verse from Shakespeare's very hand and 
 from others only less great than Shakespeare's, all now at last reset 
 in their strange original framework, was a gift of greater price than 
 this. 
 
64 A Shtdy of Shakespeare. 
 
 stance 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 pub- 
 lished text of Lovds 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 not- 
 able 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 common- 
 places 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 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 65 
 
 stolen and garbled work of Marlowe and of Barn- 
 field, 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. 
 
66 A. Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 II. 
 
 The second period is that of perfection in comic 
 and historic style. The final heights and depths 
 of tragedy, with all its reach of thought and 
 all its pulse of passion, are yet to be scaled and 
 sounded ; but to this stage belongs the special 
 quality of faultless, joyous, facile command upon 
 each faculty required of the presiding genius for 
 service or for sport. It is in the middle period of 
 his work that the language of Shakespeare is most 
 limpid in its fullness, the style most pure, the 
 thought most transparent through the close and 
 luminous raiment of perfect expression. The con- 
 ceits and crudities of the first stage are outgrown 
 and cast aside ; the harshness and obscurity which 
 at times may strike us as among the notes of his 
 third manner have as yet no place in the flawless 
 work of this second stage. That which has to be 
 said is not yet too great for perfection of utterance ; 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 67 
 
 passion has not yet grappled with thought in so 
 close and fierce an embrace as to strain and rend 
 the garment of words, though stronger and subtler 
 than ever was woven of human speech. Neither in 
 his first nor in his last stage would the style of 
 Shakespeare, even were it possible by study to 
 reproduce it, be of itself a perfect and blameless 
 model; but his middle style, that in which the 
 typical plsys of his second period are written, 
 Would be, if it were possible to imitate, the most 
 absolute pattern that could be set before man. I 
 do hot speak of mere Copyist's work, the parasitic 
 knack of retailing cast phrases, tricks and turns of 
 accent, cadences and catchwords proper only to the 
 natural manner of the man who first came by in- 
 stinct upon them, and by instinct put thfem to use ; 
 I speak of' that faithful and fruitful discipleship of 
 love With which the highest among poet's and the 
 most original among workmen have naturally been 
 always the first to' study 'and the most earnest' to 
 follow the footsteps of their greatest precursors in 
 that kind. And this only high and profitable form of 
 study arid dis'cipleship "can set before itself, even in 
 the workbf Sha;kespeai-e, no pattern so perfect, no 
 inodel so absolute, as is afforded by the style or 
 manner of his second period. 
 
■ 68 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 To this stage belong by spiritual right if not 
 by material, by rule of poetic order if not by date 
 of actual succession, the greatest of his English 
 histories and four of his greatest and most perfect 
 • comedies ; the four greatest we might properly call 
 them, reserving for another class the last divine 
 triad of romantic plays which it is alike inaccurate 
 to number among tragedies or comedies proper : 
 the Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and the Tempest, 
 which belong of course wholly to his last manner, or, 
 if accuracy must be strained even to pedantry, to the 
 second manner of his third or final stage. A single 
 masterpiece which may be classed either among 
 histories or tragedies belongs to the middle period ; 
 and to this also we must refer, if not the ultimate 
 form, yet assuredly the first sketch at least of that 
 which is commonly regarded as the typical and 
 supreme work of Shakespeare. Three lesser come- 
 dies, one of them in great part the recast or rather 
 the transfiguration of an earlier poet's work, com- 
 plete the list of plays assignable to the second 
 epoch of his genius. 
 
 The ripest fruit of historic or national drama, 
 the consummation and the crown of Shakespeare's 
 labours in that line, must of course be recognised and 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 69 
 
 saluted by all students in the supreme and sovereign 
 trilogy of King Henry IV. and King Henry V. 
 On a lower degree only than this final and imperial 
 work we find the two chronicle histories which 
 remain to be classed. In style as in structure they 
 bear witness of a power less perfect, a less impec- 
 cable hand. They have less of perceptible instinct, 
 less of vivid and vigorous utterance ; the breath of 
 their inspiration is less continuous and less direct, 
 the fashion of their eloquence is more deliberate 
 and more prepense ; there is more of study and 
 structure apparent in their speech, and less in their 
 general scheme of action. Of all Shakespeare's 
 plays they are the most rhetorical ; there is more 
 talk than song in them, less poetry than oratory ; 
 more finish than form, less movement than inci- 
 dent. Scene is laid upon scene, and event succeeds 
 event, as stone might be laid on stone and story 
 might succeed story in a building reared by mere 
 might of human handiwork ; not as in a city or 
 temple whose walls had risen of themselves to the 
 lyric breath and stroke of a greater than Amphion ; 
 moulded out of music by no rule or line of mortal 
 measure, with no sound of axe or anvil, but only 
 of smitten strings : built by harp and not by hand. 
 The lordly structure of these poems is the work 
 
'JO A Sttidy of Shakespeare. 
 
 of a royal workman, full of masterdom and might, 
 sublime in the state and strength of its many- 
 mansions, but less perfect in proportion and less 
 aerial in build than the very highest fabrics 
 fashioned after their own great will by the supreme 
 architects of song. Of these plays, and of these 
 alone among the maturer works of Shakespeare, it 
 may be said that the best parts are discernible 
 from the rest, divisible by analysis and separable 
 by memory from the scenes which precede them or 
 follow and the characters which surround them or 
 succeed. Constance and Katherine rise up into 
 remembrance apart from their environment and 
 above it, stand clear in our minds of the crowded 
 company with which the poet has begirt their 
 central figures. In all other of his great tragic 
 works, — even in Hamlet, if we have grace and 
 sense to read it aright and not awry, — it is not of 
 any single person or separate passage that we 
 think when we spealc of it ; it is to the whole mas- 
 terpiece that the mind turns at mention of its 
 name. The one entire and perfect chrysolite of 
 Othello is neither Othello nor Desdemona nor lago, 
 but each and all ; the play of Hamlet is more than 
 Hamlet himself, the poem even here is too great 
 to be resumed in the person. But Constance is 
 
A Study of Shakespeai^e. 7 r 
 
 the jewel of King John, and Katherine is the 
 crowning blossom of King Henry VIII. — a funeral 
 flower as of " marigolds on death-beds blowing," 
 an opal of as pure water as " tears of perfect moan," 
 with .fitful fire at. its heart, ominous of evil and 
 sorrow, set in a mourning band of jet on the fore- 
 front of the poem, that the brow so circled may, 
 " like to a title-leaf, foretell the nature of a tragic 
 volume." Not indeed that without these the 
 ground would in either case be barren ; but that in 
 either field our eye rests rather on these and other 
 separate ears of wheat that overtop the ranks, than 
 on the waving width of the whole harvest at once. 
 In the one play our memory turns next to the 
 figures of Arthur and the Bastard, in the other to 
 those of Wolsey and his king : the residue in either 
 case is made up of outlines more lightly and 
 slightly drawn. In two scenes the figure of King 
 John rises indeed to the highest height even of 
 Shakespearean tragedy ; for the rest of the play 
 the lines of his character are cut no deeper, the 
 features of his personality stand out in no sharper 
 relief, than those of Eleanor or the French king ; 
 but the scene in which he tempts Hubert to the 
 edge of the pit of hell sounds a deeper note and 
 touches a subtler string in the tragic nature of man 
 
72 A Study of Shakespeai'e. 
 
 than had been struck by any poet save Dante 
 alone, since the reign of the Greek tragedians. 
 The cunning and profound simplicity of the few- 
 last weighty words which drop like flakes of poison 
 that blister where they fall from the deadly lips of 
 the king is a new quality in our tragic verse ; there 
 was no foretaste of such a thing in the passionate 
 imagination which clothed itself in the. mighty 
 music of Marlowe's burning song. The elder 
 master might indeed have v/ritten the magnificent 
 speech which ushers in with gradual rhetoric and 
 splendid reticence the black suggestion of a deed 
 without a name ; his hand might have woven with 
 no less imperial skill the elaborate raiment of words 
 and images which wraps up in fold upon fold, as 
 with swaddling-bands of purple and golden em- 
 broidery, the shapeless and miscreated birth of a 
 murderous purpose that labours into light even 
 while it loathes the light and itself; but only 
 Shakespeare could give us the first sample of that 
 more secret and terrible knowledge which reveals 
 itself in the brief heavy whispers that seal the com- 
 mission and sign the warrant of the king. Webster 
 alone of all our tragic poets has had strength to 
 emulate in this darkest line of art the handiwork of 
 his master. We find nowhere such an echo or re- 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 73 
 
 flection of the spirit of this scene as in the last 
 tremendous dialogue of Bosola with Ferdinand in 
 the house of murder' and madness, while their 
 spotted souls yet flutter between conscience and 
 distraction, hovering for an hour as with broken 
 wings on the confines of either province of hell. 
 One pupil at least could put to this awful profit 
 the study of so great a model ; but with the single 
 and sublime exception of that other design from 
 the same great hand, which bares before us the 
 mortal anguish of Bracciano, no copy qr imitation 
 of the scene in which John dies by poison has ever 
 come near enough to evade the sentence it pro- 
 vokes. The shrill tremulous agony of Fletcher's 
 Valentinian is to the sullen and slow death-pangs 
 of Shakespeare's tyrant as the babble of a suckling 
 to the accents of a man. As far beyond the reach 
 of any but his maker's hand is the pattern of a 
 perfect English warrior, set once for all before the 
 eyes of all ages in the figure of the noble Bastard. 
 The national side of Shakespeare's genius, the 
 heroic vein of patriotism that runs like a thread of 
 living fire through the world-wide range of his 
 omnipresent spirit, has never, to my thinking, found 
 vent or expression to such glorious purpose as 
 here. Not even in Hotspur or Prince Hal has he 
 
74 ^ Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 mixed with more godlike sleight of hand all the 
 lighter and graver good qualities of the national 
 character, or compounded of them all so lovable a 
 nature as this. In those others we admire and 
 enjoy the same bright fiery temper of soul, the 
 same buoyant and fearless mastery of fate or for- 
 tune, the same gladness and glory of life made 
 lovely with all the labour and laughter of its full 
 fresh days ; but no quality of theirs binds our 
 hearts to them as they are bound to Philip — not 
 by his loyal valour, his keen young wit, his kindli- 
 ness, constancy, readiness of service as swift and 
 sure in the day of his master's bitterest shame and 
 shamefullest trouble as in the blithest hour of 
 battle and that first good fight which won back his 
 father's spoils from his father's slayer ; but more 
 than all these, for that lightning of divine rage and 
 pity, of tenderness that speaks in thunder and in- 
 dignation that makes fire of its tears, in the horror 
 of great compassion which falls on him, the tempest 
 and storm of a beautiful and godlike anger which 
 shakes his strength of spirit and bows his high 
 heart down at sight of Arthur dead. Being thus, 
 as he is, the English masterwork of Shakespeare's 
 hand, we may well accept him as the best man 
 known to us that England ever made ; the hero 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 75 
 
 that Nelson must have been had he never come 
 too near Naples. 
 
 I am not minded to say much of Shakespeare's 
 Arthur ; there are one or two figures in the world 
 of his work of which there are no words that 
 would be fit or good to say. Another of these is 
 Cordelia. The place they have in our lives and 
 thoughts is not one for talk ; the niche set apart 
 for them to inhabit in our secret hearts is not 
 penetrable by the lights and noises of common 
 day. There are chapels in the cathedral of man's 
 highest art as in that of his inmost life, not made 
 to be set open to the eyes and feet of the world. 
 I^ove and death and memory keep charge for us 
 in silence of some beloved names. It is the 
 crowning glory of genius, the final miracle and 
 transcendant gift of poetry, that it can add to the 
 number of these, and engrave on the very heart of 
 our remembrance fresh names and memories of 
 its own creation. 
 
 There is one younger child in this heavenly 
 * family of Shakespeare's who sits side by side with 
 Arthur in the secret places of our thought ; there 
 are but two or three that I remember among the 
 children of other poets who may be named in the 
 same year with them : as Fletcher's Hengo, Web- 
 
76 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 ster's Giovanni, and Landor's Csesarion. Of this 
 princely trinity of boys the " bud of Britain " is as 
 yet the most famous flower ; yet even in the 
 broken words of childish heroism that falter on 
 his dying lips there is nothing of more poignant 
 pathos, more "dearly sweet and bitter," than 
 Giovanni's talk of his dead mother and all her 
 sleepless nights now ended for ever in a sleep be- 
 yond tears or dreams. Perhaps the most nearly 
 faultless in finish and proportion of perfect nature 
 among all the noble three is Landor's portrait of 
 the imperial and right Roman child of Caesar and 
 Cleopatra. I know not but this may be found in 
 the judgment of men to come wellnigh the most 
 pathetic and heroic figure bequeathed us after 
 more than eighty years of a glorious life by the 
 indomitable genius of our own last Roman and 
 republican poet. 
 
 We have come now to that point at the open- 
 ing of the second stage in his work where the 
 supreme genius of all time begins first to meddle 
 with the mysteries and varieties of human char- 
 acter, to handle its finer and more subtle qualities, 
 to harmonise its more untuned and jarring dis- 
 cords; giving here and thus the first proof of 
 a power never shared in like measure by the 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 'j'j 
 
 mightiest among the sons of men, a sovereign 
 and serene capacity to fathom the else unfathomable 
 depths of spiritual nature, to solve its else insolu- 
 ble riddles, to reconcile its else irreconcilable dis- 
 crepancies. In his first stage Shakespeare, had 
 dropped his plummet no deeper into the sea of the 
 spirit of man than Marlowe had sounded before 
 him ; and in the channel of simple emotion no 
 poet could cast surer line with steadier hand than 
 he. Further down in the dark and fiery depths of 
 human pain and mortal passion no soul could 
 search than his who first rendered into speech the 
 aspirations and the agonies of a ruined and 
 revolted spirit. And until Shakespeare found in 
 himself the strength of eyesight to read and the 
 cunning of handiwork to render those wider diver- 
 sities of emotion and those further complexities of 
 character which lay outside the range of Marlowe, he 
 certainly cannot be said to have outrun the winged 
 feet, outstripped the fiery flight of his forerunner. 
 In the heaven of our tragic song the first-born star 
 on the forehead of its herald god was not outshone 
 till the full midsummer meridian of that greater 
 godhead before whom he was sent to prepare a 
 pathway for the sun. Through all the forenoon of 
 our triumphant day, till the utter consummation 
 
78 A Shidy of Shakespeare. 
 
 and ultimate ascension of dramatic poetry incar- 
 nate and transfigured in the master-singer of the 
 world, the quality of his tragedy was as that of 
 Marlowe's, broad, single, and intense ; large of 
 hand, voluble of tongiie, direct of purpose. With 
 the dawn of its' latter epoch a new power comes 
 upon it, to find clothing and expression in new 
 forms of speech and after a new style. The 
 language has put off its foreign decoi-ations of lyric 
 and elegiac ornament ; it has found already its 
 infinite gain in the loss of those sweet superfluous 
 graces which encumbered the march and enchained 
 the utterance of its childhood. The figures which 
 it invests are now no iftore the types of a single 
 passion, the incarnations of a single thought They 
 now demand a scrutiny which tests the power of 
 a mind and tries the value of a judgment ; they 
 appeal to something more than the instant appre- 
 hension which sufficed to respond to the imnlediate 
 claim of those that went before them. Romeo and 
 Juliet were simply lovers, and their names bring 
 back to us no further thought than of their love 
 and the lovely sorrow of its end ; Antony and 
 Cleopatra shall be before all things lovers, but the 
 thought of their love and its triumphant tragedy 
 shall recall other things beyond number — all the 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 79 
 
 forces and all the fortunes of mankind, all the 
 chance and all the consequence that waited on their 
 imperial passion, all the infinite variety of qualities 
 and powers wrought together and welded into the 
 frame and composition of that love which shook 
 from end to end all nations and kingdoms of the 
 earth. 
 
 The same truth holds good in lighter matters ; 
 Biron and Rosaline in comedy are as simply lovers 
 and no more as were their counterparts and coevals 
 in tragedy : there is more in Benedick and Beatrice 
 than this simple quality of love that clothes itself 
 in the strife of wits ; the injury done her cousin, 
 which by the repercussion of its shock and refrac- 
 tion of its effect serves to transfigure with such 
 adorable indignation and ardour of furious love 
 and pity the whole bright light nature of Beatrice, 
 serves likewise by a fresh reflection and counter- 
 change of its consequence to exalt and enlarge the 
 stature of her lover's spirit after a fashion beyond 
 the reach of Shakespeare in his first stage. 
 Mercutio again, like Philip, is a good friend and 
 gallant swordsman, quick-witted and hot-blooded, 
 of a fiery and faithful temper, loyal and light and 
 swift alike of speech and swordstroke ; and this is 
 all. But the character of the Bastard, clear, and 
 
8o A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 simple as broad sunlight though it be, has in it 
 other features than this single and beautiful like- 
 ness of frank young manhood ; his love of country 
 and loathing of the Church that would bring it into 
 subjection are two sides of the same national 
 quality that has made and will always make every 
 Englishman of his type such another as he was in 
 belief and in unbelief, patriot and priest-hater ; and 
 no part of the design bears such witness to the 
 full-grown perfection of his creator's power and 
 skill as the touch that combines and fuses into 
 absolute unity of concord the high and various 
 elements of faith in England, loyalty to the 
 wretched lord who has made him knight and 
 acknowledged him kinsman, contempt for his 
 abjection at the foul feet of the Church, abhorrence 
 of his crime and constancy to his cause for some;- 
 thing better worth the proof of war than his miser- 
 able sake who hardly can be roused, even by such 
 exhortation as might put life and spirit into the 
 dust of dead men's bones, to bid his betters stand 
 and strike in defence of the country dishonoured 
 by his reign. 
 
 It is this new element of variety in unity, this 
 study of the complex and diverse shades in a 
 single nature, which requires from any criticism 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 8 1 
 
 worth attention some inquisition of character as 
 complement to the investigation of style. Analysis 
 of any sort would be inapplicable to the actors who 
 bear their parts in the comic, the tragic or historic 
 plays of the first period. There is nothing in them 
 to analyse ; they are, as we have seen, like all the 
 characters represented by Marlowe, the embodi- 
 ments or the exponents of single qualities and 
 simple forces. The question of style also is there- 
 fore so far a simple question ; but with the change 
 and advance in thought and all matter of spiritual 
 study and speculation this question also becomes 
 complex, and inseparable, if we would pursue it to 
 any good end, from the analysis of character and 
 subject. In the debate on which we are now to 
 enter, the question of style and the question of 
 character, or as we might say the questions of 
 matter and of spirit, are more than ever indivisible 
 from each other, more inextricably inwoven than 
 elsewhere into the one most difficult question of 
 authorship which has ever been disputed in the 
 dense and noisy school or fought out in the wide 
 and windy field of Shakespearean controversy. 
 
 There can be few serious students of Shake- 
 speare who have not sometimes felt that possibly the 
 hardest problem involved in their study is that which 
 
 G 
 
82 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 requires for its solution some reasonable and accept- 
 able theory as to the play of King Henry VIII. 
 None such has ever yet been offered ; and I cer- 
 tainly cannot pretend to supply one. Perhaps 
 however it may be possible to do some service by 
 an attempt to disprove what is untenable, even 
 though it should not be possible to produce in its 
 stead any positive proof of what we may receive 
 as matter of absolute faith. 
 
 The veriest tiro in criticism who knows anything 
 of the subject in hand must perceive, what is cer- 
 tainly not beyond a schoolboy's range of vision,' 
 that the metre and the language of this play are in 
 great part so like the language and the metre of 
 Fletcher that the first and easiest inference would 
 be to assume the partnership of that poet in the 
 work. In former days it was Jonson whom the 
 critics and commentators of their time saw good to 
 select as the colleague or the editor of Shakespeare ; 
 but a later school of criticism has resigned the 
 notion that the fifth act was retouched and adjusted 
 •by the author of Volpone to the taste of his patron 
 James. The later theory is more plausible than 
 this ; the primary objection to it is that it is too 
 facile and superficial. It is waste of time to point 
 out with any intelligent and imaginative child with 
 
A Shidy of Shakespeare. 83 
 
 a tolerable ear for metre who had read a little of 
 the one and the' other poet could see for himself — 
 that much of the play is externally as like the usual 
 style of Fletcher as it is unlike the usual style of 
 Shakespeare. The question is whether we can 
 find one scene, one speech, one passage, which in 
 spirit, in scope, in purpose, bears the same or any 
 comparable resemblance to the work of Fletcher. 
 I doubt if any man more warmly admires a poet 
 whom few can have studied more thoroughly than 
 I ; and to whom, in spite of all sins of omission and 
 commission, — and many and grievous they are, 
 beyond the plenary absolution of even the most 
 indulgent among critical confessors — I constantly 
 return with a fresh sense of attraction, which is 
 constantly rewarded by a fresh sense of gratitude 
 and delight. It is assuredly from no wish to pluck 
 a leaf from his laurel, which has no need of foreign 
 grafts or stolen garlands frorn the loftier growth of 
 Shakespeare's, that I venture to question his capacity 
 for the work assigned to him by recent criticism. 
 The speech of Buckingham, for example, on his 
 way to execution, is of course at first sight very 
 like the finest speeches of the kind in Fletcher; 
 here is the same smooth and fluent declamation, 
 the same prolonged and persistent melody, which 
 
84 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 if not monotonous is certainly not various ; the 
 same pure, lucid, perspicuous flow of simple rather 
 than strong and elegant rather than exquisite 
 English; and yet, if we set it against the best 
 examples of the kind which may be selected from 
 such tragedies as Bonduca or The False One, against 
 the rebuke addressed by Caratach to his cousin or 
 by Caesar to the murderers of Pompey — and no 
 finer instances of tragic declamation can be chosen 
 from the work of this great master of rhetorical 
 dignity and pathos — I cannot but think we shall 
 perceive in it a comparative severity and elevation 
 which will be missed when we turn back from it to 
 the text of Fletcher. There is an aptness of phrase, 
 an abstinence from excess, a " plentiful lack " of 
 mere flowery and superfluous beauties, which we 
 may rather wish than hope to find in the most 
 famous of Shakespeare's successors. But if not his 
 work, we may be sure it was his model ; a model 
 which he often approached, which he often studied; 
 but which he never attained. It is never for 
 absolute truth and fitness of expression, it is always 
 for eloquence and sweetness, for fluency and fancy, 
 that we find the tragic scenes of Fletcher most 
 praiseworthy ; and the motive or mainspring of 
 interest is usually anything but natural or simple. 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 85 
 
 Now the motive here is as simple, the emotion as 
 natural as possible ; the author is content to dis- 
 pense with all the violent or far-fetched or fantastic 
 excitement from which Fletcher could hardly ever 
 bring himself completely to abstain. I am not 
 speaking here of those tragedies in which the hand 
 of Beaumont is traceable ; to these, I need hardly 
 say, the charge is comparatively inapplicable which 
 may fairly be brought against the unassisted works 
 of his elder colleague ; but in any of the typical 
 tragedies of Fletcher, in Thierry and Theodoret, in 
 Valentinian, in The Double Marriage, the scenes 
 which for power and beauty of style may reasonably 
 be compared with this of the execution of Bucking- 
 ham will be found more forced in situation, more 
 fanciful in language than this. Many will be found 
 more beautiful, many more exciting ; the famous 
 interview of Thierry with the veiled Ordella, and 
 the scene answering to this in the fifth act where 
 Brunhalt is confronted with her dying son, will be 
 at once remembered by all dramatic students ; and 
 the parts of Lucina and Juliana may each be de- 
 scribed as a continuous arrangement of passionate 
 and pathetic effects. But in which of these parts 
 and in which of these plays shall we find a scene 
 so simple,an effect so modest, a situation so unforced 
 
86 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 as here ? where may we look for the same temper- 
 ance of tone, the same control of excitement, the 
 same steadiness of purpose? If indeed Fletcher 
 could have written this scene, or the farewell of 
 Wolsey to his greatness, or his parting scene with 
 Cromwell, he was perhaps not a greater poet, but 
 he certainly was a tragic writer capable of loftier 
 self-control and severer self-command, than he has 
 ever shown himself elsewhere. 
 
 And yet, if this were all, we might be content 
 to believe that the dignity of the subject and the 
 high example of his present associate had for once 
 lifted the natural genius of Fletcher above itself. 
 But the fine and subtle criticism of Mr. Spedding 
 has in the main, I think, successfully and clearly 
 indicated the lines of demarcation undeniably dis- 
 cernible in this play between the severer style of 
 certain scenes or speeches and the laxer and more 
 fluid style of others ; between the graver, solider, 
 more condensed parts of the apparently composite 
 work, and those which are clearer, thinner, more 
 diffused and diluted in expression. If under the 
 latter head we had to class such passages only as 
 the dying speech of Buckingham and the chris- 
 tening speech of Cranmer, it might after all be' 
 almost impossible to resist the internal evidence of 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 87 
 
 Fletcher's handiwork. Certainly we hear the same 
 soft continuous note of easy eloquence, level and 
 limpid as a stream of crystalline transparence, in 
 the plaintive adieu of the condemned statesman 
 and the panegyrical prophecy of the favoured pre- 
 late. If this, I say, were all, we might admit that 
 there is nothing — I have already admitted it — in 
 either passage beyond the poetic reach of Fletcher. 
 But on the hypothesis so ably maintained by the 
 editor of Bacon there hangs no less a consequence 
 than this : that we must assign to the same hand 
 the crowning glory of the whole poem, the death- 
 scene of Katherine. Now if Fletcher could have 
 written that scene — a scene on which the ohly cri- 
 ticism ever passed, the only commendation ever 
 bestowed, by the verdict of successive centuries, has 
 been that of tears and silence — if Fletcher could 
 have written a scene so far beyond our applause, so 
 far above our acclamation, then the memory of no 
 great poet has ever been so grossly wronged, so 
 shamefully defrauded of its highest claim to honour. 
 But, with all reverence for that memory, I must 
 confess that I cannot bring myself to believe it. 
 Any explanation appears to me more probable than 
 this. Considering with what care every relic of his- 
 work was once and again collected by his posthu- 
 
88 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 mous editors — even to the attribution, not merely of 
 plays in which he can have taken only the slightest 
 part, but of plays in which we know that he had 
 no share at all — I cannot believe that his friends 
 would have let by far the brightest jewel in his 
 crown rest unreclaimed in the then less popular 
 treasure-house of Shakespeare. Belief or disbelief 
 of this kind is however but a sandy soil for con- 
 jecture to build upon. Whether or not his friends 
 would have reclaimed for him the credit of this 
 scene, had they known it (as they must have known 
 it) to be his due, I must repeat that such a mira- 
 culous example of a man's genius for once trans- 
 cending itself and for ever eclipsing all its other 
 achievements appears to me beyond all critical, 
 beyond all theological credulity. Pathos and con- 
 centration are surely not among the dominant 
 notes of Fletcher's style or the salient qualities of 
 his intellect. Except perhaps in the beautiful and 
 famous passage where Hengo dies in his uncle's 
 arms, I doubt whether in any of the variously and 
 highly coloured scenes played out upon the wide 
 and shifting stage of his fancy the genius of Fletcher 
 has ever unlocked the source of tears. Bellario and 
 Aspatia were the children of his younger colleague ; 
 at least, after the death of Beaumont we meet no 
 
A Shidy of Shakespeare. 89 
 
 such figures on the stage of Fletcher. In effect, 
 though Beaumont had a gift of grave sardonic 
 humour which found especial vent in burlesques of 
 the heroic style and in the systematic extravagance 
 of such characters as Bessus,' yet he was above all 
 things a tragic poet ; and though Fletcher had great 
 power of tragic eloquence and passionate effusion, 
 yet his comic genius was of a rarer and more pre- 
 cious quality ; one Spanish Curate is worth many a 
 Valentinian ; as, on the other hand, one Philaster 
 is worth many a Scornful Lady. Now there is no 
 question here of Beaumont ; and there is no ques- 
 tion that the passage here debated has been taken 
 to the heart of the whole world and baptized in the 
 tears of generations as no work of Fletcher's has 
 ever been. That Beaumont could have written it 
 I do not believe ; but I am wellnigh assured that 
 Fletcher could not. I can scarcely imagine that 
 
 ' Compare with Beaumont's admirable farce of Bessus the 
 wretched imitation of it attempted after his death in the Nice Valour 
 ai Fletcher ; whose proper genius was neither for pure tragedy nor 
 broad farce, but for high comedy and heroic romance — a field of his 
 own invention ; witness Monsieur Thomas and The Knight of 
 Malta : while Beaumont has approved himself in tragedy all but 
 the worthiest disciple of Shakespeare, in farce beyond all comparison 
 the aptest pupil of Jonson. He could give us no Fox or Alchemist ; 
 but the inventor of Bessus and. Calianax was worthy of the esteem 
 and affection returned to him by the creator of Morose and Rabbi 
 Busy. 
 
90 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 the most fluid sympathy, the " hysteric passion " 
 most easily distilled from the eyes of reader or 
 spectator, can ever have watered with its tears the 
 scene or the page which sets forth, however elo- 
 quently and effectively, the sorrows and heroisms 
 of Ordella, Juliana, or Lucina. Every success but 
 this I can well believe them, as they assuredly 
 deserve, to have attained. 
 
 To this point then we have come, as to the 
 crucial point at issue ; and looking back upon those 
 passages of the play which first suggest the handi- 
 work of Fletcher, and which certainly do now and 
 then seem almost identical in style with his, I think 
 we shall hardly find the difference between these 
 and other parts of the same play so wide and so 
 distinct as the difference between the undoubted 
 work of Fletcher and the undoubted work of Shake- 
 speare. What that difference is we are fortunately 
 able to determine with exceptional certitude, and 
 with no supplementary help from conjecture of 
 probabilities. In the play which is undoubtedly a 
 joint work of these poets the points of contact 
 and the points of disunion are unmistakable by 
 the youngest eye. In the very last scene of, The 
 Two Noble Kinsmen, we can tell with absolute 
 certainty what speeches were appended or interpo- 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 91 
 
 l^ted by Fletcher ; we can pronounce with posi- 
 tive conviction what passages were completed and 
 what parts were left unfinished by Shakespeare. 
 Even on Mr. Spedding's theory it can hardly be 
 possible to do as much for King Henry VIII. 
 The lines of demarcation, however visible or plau- 
 sible, are fainter by far than these. It is certainly 
 not much less strange to come upon such passages 
 in the work of Shakespeare as the speeches of 
 Buckingham and Cranmer than it would be to 
 encounter in the work of Sophocles a sample of 
 the later and laxer style of Euripides ; to meet for 
 instance in the Antigone with a passage which 
 might pass muster as an extract from the Iphigenia 
 in Aulis. In metrical effects the style of the 
 lesser English poet is an exact counterpart of the 
 style of the lesser Greek ; there is the same com- 
 parative tenuity and fluidity of verse, the same 
 excess of short unemphatic syllables, the same 
 solution of the graver iambic into soft overflow of 
 lighter and longer feet which relaxes and dilutes 
 the solid harmony of tragic metre with notes of a 
 more facile and feminine strain. But in King 
 Henry VIII. it should be remarked that though 
 we not unfrequently find the same preponderance 
 as in Fletcher's work of verses with a double 
 
92 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 ending — which in English verse at least are not in 
 themselves feminine, and need not be taken to 
 constitute, as in Fletcher's case they do, a note of 
 comparative effeminacy or relaxation in tragic 
 style — we do not find the perpetual predominance 
 of those triple terminations so peculiarly and 
 notably dear to that poet ; ' so that even by the 
 test of the metre-mongers who would reduce the 
 whole question at issue to a point which might at 
 once be solved by the simple process of numera- 
 tion the argument in favour of Fletcher can 
 hardly be proved tenable ; for the metre which 
 evidently has one leading quality in common with 
 his is as evidently wanting in another at least as 
 marked and as necessary to establish — if estab- 
 lished it can be by any such test taken singly and 
 
 ' A desperate attempt was made to confute this argument by the 
 production of a list in which such words as slavery, emperor, pitying, 
 difference, and even Christians, were actually registered as trisyllabic 
 terminations. To such unimaginable shifts are critics of the finger- 
 counting or syllabic school inevitably and fatally reduced in the effort 
 to establish by rule of thumb even so much as may seem verifiable 
 by that rule in the province of poetical criticism. Prosody is at 
 best no more than the skeleton of verse, as verse is the body of 
 poetry ; while the gain of such painful labourers in a field they 
 know not how to till is not even a skeleton of worthless or irre- 
 levant fact, but the shadow of such a skeleton reflected in water. 
 It would seem that critics who hear only through their fingers have 
 not even fingers to hear with. 
 
A Shtdy of Shakespeare. 93 
 
 apart from all other points of evidence — the colla- 
 boration of Fletcher with Shakespeare in this 
 instance. And if the proof by mere metrical 
 similitude is thus imperfect, there is here assur- 
 edly no other kind of test which may help to 
 fortify the argument by any suggestion of weight 
 even comparable to this. In those passages which 
 would seem most plausibly to indicate the pro- 
 bable partnership of Fletcher, the unity and sus- 
 tained force of the style keep it generally above 
 the average level of his ; there is less admixture or 
 intrusion of lyric or elegiac quality ; there is more 
 of temperance and proportion alike in declamation 
 and in debate. And throughout the whole play, 
 and under all the diversity of composite subject 
 and conflicting interest which disturbs the unity of 
 action, there is a singleness of spirit, a general 
 unity or concord of inner tone, in marked contrast 
 to the utter discord and discrepancy of the several 
 sections of The Two Noble Kinsmen. We admit, 
 then, that this play offers us in some not unimpor- 
 tant passages the single instance of a style not 
 elsewhere precisely or altogether traceable in 
 Shakespeare ; that no exact parallel to it can be 
 found among his other plays ; and that if not the 
 partial work it may certainly be taken as the 
 
94 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 general model of Fletcher in his tragic poetry. 
 On the other hand, we contend that its excep- 
 tional quality 'might perhaps be explicable as a 
 tentative essay in a new line by one who tried so 
 many styles before settling into his latest ; and 
 that, without far stronger, clearer, and completer 
 proof than has yet been or can ever be advanced, 
 the question is not solved but merely evaded by 
 the assumption of a double authorship. 
 
 By far the ablest argument based upon a wider 
 ground of reason or of likelihood than this of 
 mere metre that has yet been advanced in sup- 
 port of the theory which would attribute a part of 
 this play to some weaker hand than Shakespeare's 
 is due to the study of a critic whose name — 
 already by right of inheritance the most illus- 
 trious name of his age and ours — is now for ever 
 attached to that of Shakespeare himself by right 
 of the highest service ever done and the noblest 
 duty ever paid to his memory. The untimely 
 death which removed beyond reach of our thanks 
 for all he had done and our hopes for all he might 
 do the man who first had given to France the first 
 among foreign poets — son of the greatest French- 
 man and translator of the greatest Englishman 
 
 was only in this not untimely, that it forbore him 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 95 
 
 till the great and wonderful work was done which 
 has bound two deathless names together by a 
 closer than the common link that connects the 
 names of all sovereign poets. Among all classic 
 translations of the classic works of the world, I 
 know of none that for absolute mastery and per- 
 fect triumph over all accumulation of obstacles, 
 for supreme dominion over supreme difficulty, can 
 be matched with the translation of Shakespeare 
 by Fran5ois-Victor Hugo ; unless a claim of com- 
 panionship may perchance be put in for Urquhart's 
 unfinished version of Rabelais. For such success 
 in the impossible as finally disproves the right 
 of " that fool of a word " to existence — at least in 
 the world of letters — the two miracles of study and 
 of sympathy which have given Shakespeare to the 
 French and Rabelais to the English, and each in 
 his habit as he lived, may take rank together in 
 glorious rivalry beyond eyeshot of all past or 
 future competition. 
 
 Among the essays appended to the version of 
 Shakespeare which they complete and illustrate, 
 that which deals with the play now in question 
 gives as ample proof as any other of the sound 
 and subtle insight brought to bear by the trans- 
 la,tor upon the object of his labour and his love. 
 
96 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 His keen and studious intuition is here as always 
 not less notable and admirable than his large and 
 solid knowledge, his full and lucid comprehension 
 at once of the text -and of the history of Shake- 
 speare's plays ; and if his research into the inner 
 details of that history may seem ever to have erred 
 from the straight path of firm and simple certainty 
 into some dubious byway of theory or conjecture, 
 we may be sure at least that no lack of learning or 
 devotion, of ardour or intelligence, but more prob- 
 ably some noble thought that was fathered by a 
 noble wish to do honour to Shakespeare, has led 
 him to attribute to his original some quality foreign 
 to the text, or to question the authenticity of what 
 for love of his author he might not wish to find in 
 it. Thus he would reject the main part of the fifth 
 act as the work of a mere court laureate, an official 
 hack or hireling employed to anoint the memory 
 of an archbishop and lubricate the steps of a throne 
 wtth the common oil of dramatic adulation ; and 
 finding it in either case a task alike unworthy of 
 Shakespeare to glorify the name of Cranmer or to 
 deify the names of the queen then dead and the 
 king yet living, it is but natural that he should be 
 induced by an unconscious bias or prepossession of 
 the will to depreciate the worth of the verse spent 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 97 
 
 on work fitter for ushers and embalmers and the 
 general valetry or varletry of Church and State. 
 That this fifth act is unequal in point of interest 
 to the better part of the preceding acts witli which 
 it is connected by so light and loose a tie of con- 
 venience is as indisputable as that the style of 
 the last scene savours now and then, and for some 
 space together, more strongly than ever of Flet- 
 cher's most especial and distinctive qualities, or 
 that the whole structure of the play if judged 
 by any strict rule of pure art is incomposite and 
 incongruous, wanting in unity, consistency, and 
 coherence of interest. The fact is that here even 
 more than in King John the poet's hands were 
 hampered by a difficulty inherent in the subject. 
 To an English and Protestant audience, fresh from 
 the passions and perils of reformation and reaction, 
 he had to present an English king at war with the 
 papacy, in whom the assertion of national inde- 
 pendence was incarnate ; and to the sympathies of 
 such an audience it was a matter of mere necessity 
 for him to commend the representative champion 
 of their cause by all means which he could compel 
 into the service of his aim. Yet this object was in 
 both instances all but incompatible with the 
 natural and necessary interest of the plot. It was 
 
 H 
 
gS A Shidy of Shakespeare. 
 
 inevitable that this interest should in the main be 
 concentrated upon the victims of the personal or 
 national policy of either king ; upon Constance and 
 Arthur, upon Katherineand Wolsey. Where these 
 are not, either apparent in person on the stage, or 
 felt in their influence upon the speech and action 
 of the characters present, the pulse of the poem 
 beats fainter and its forces begin to flag. In King 
 John this difficulty was met and mastered, these 
 double, claims of the subject of the poem and the 
 object of the poet were satisfied and harmonised, 
 by the effacement of John and the substitution of 
 Faulconbridge as the champion of the national 
 cause and the protagonist of the dramatic action. 
 Considering this play in its double aspect of tragedy 
 and history, we might say that the English hero 
 becomes the central figure of the poem as seen 
 from its historic side, while John remains the 
 central figure of the poem as seen from its tragic 
 side ; the personal interest that depends on per- 
 sonal crime and retribution is concentrated on the 
 agony of the king ; the national interest which 
 he, though the eponymous hero of the poem, was 
 alike inadequate as a craven and improper as a 
 villain to sustain and represent in the eyes of the 
 spectators was happily and easily ti-ansferred to 
 the one person of the play who could properly 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 99 
 
 express within the compass of its closing act at 
 once the protest against papal pretension, the 
 defiance of foreign invasion, and the prophetic 
 assurance of self-dependent life and self-sufficing 
 strength inherent in the nation then fresh from a 
 fiercer trial of its quality, which an audience of the 
 days of Queen Elizabeth would justly expect from 
 the poet who undertook to set before them in 
 action the history of the days of King John. That 
 history had lately been brought upon the stage 
 under the hottest and most glaring light that could 
 be thrown on it by the fire of fanatical partisanship ; 
 The Troublesome Reign of King John, weakest and 
 most wooden of all wearisome chronicles that ever 
 cumbered the boards, had in it for sole principle of 
 life its power of congenial appeal to the same 
 blatant and vulgar spirit of Protestantism which 
 inspired it. In all the flat interminable morass of 
 its tedious and tuneless verse I can find no blade 
 or leaf of living poetic growth, no touch but one of 
 nature or of pathos, where Arthur dying would fain 
 send a last thought in search of his mother. From 
 this play Shakespeare can have got neither hint 
 nor help towards the execution of his own ; th§ 
 crude rough sketch of the Bastard as he brawls and 
 swaggers through the long length of its scenes is 
 
lOO A Sludy of Shakespeare. 
 
 hardly so much as the cast husk or chrysalid of the 
 noble creature which was to arise and take shape 
 for ever at the transfiguring touch of Shakespeare. 
 In the case of King Henry VIII. he had not even 
 such a blockish model as this to work from. The 
 one preceding play known to me which deals pro- 
 fessedly with the same subject treats of quite 
 other matters than are handled by Shakespeare, 
 and most notably with the scholastic adventures- 
 or misadventures of Edward Prince of Wales and 
 his whipping-boy Ned Browne. A fresh and well- 
 nigh a plausible argument might be raised by the 
 critics who deny the unity of authorship in King 
 Henry VIII. , on the ground that if Shakespeare 
 had completed the work himself he would surely 
 not have let slip the occasion to introduce one of 
 the most famous and popular of all court fools in 
 the person of Will Summers ; who might have 
 given life and relief to the action of many scenes 
 now unvaried and unbroken in their gravity of 
 emotion and event. Shakespeare, one would say, 
 might naturally have been expected to take up and 
 rernodel the well- known figure of which his humble 
 precursor could give but a rough thin outline, yet 
 sufficient it should seem to attract the tastes to 
 which it appealed ; for this or some other quality of 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. loi 
 
 seasonable attraction served to float the now forgot- 
 ten play of Samuel Rowley through. several editions. 
 The central figure of the huge hot-headed king, 
 with his gusts of stormy good humour and peals of 
 burly oaths which might have suited " Garagantua's 
 mouth " and satisfied the requirements of Hotspur, 
 appeals in a ruder fashion to the survival of the 
 same sympathies on which Shakespeare with a 
 finer instinct as evidently relied ; the popular 
 estimate of the bluff and brawny tyrant " who 
 broke the bonds of Rome " was not yet that of 
 later historians, though doubtless neither was it 
 that of the writer or writers who would champion 
 him to the utterance. Perhaps the opposite 
 verdicts given by the instinct of the people on 
 ^' bluff King Hal" and "Bloody Mary" may be 
 understood by reference to a famous verse of 
 Juvenal. The wretched queen was spairing of noble 
 blood and lavish of poor men's lives— cerdonibus 
 timenda ; and the curses under which her memory 
 was buried were spared by the people to her father, 
 Lamiarum ccede madenti. In any case, the hum- 
 blest not less than the highest of the poets who 
 wrote under the reign of his daughter found it safe 
 to present him in a popular light before an audience 
 of whose general prepossession in his favour William 
 
I02 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 Shakespeare was no slower to take advantage than 
 Samuel Rowley. 
 
 The two plays we have just discussed have one 
 quality of style in common which has already been 
 noted ; that in them rhetoric is in excess of action 
 or passion, and far in excess of poetry. They are 
 not as yet perfect examples of his second manner, 
 though far ahead of his first stage in performance 
 as in promise. Compared with the full and living 
 figure of Katherine or of Constance, the study of 
 Margaret of Anjou is the mere sketch of a poet 
 still in his pupilage : John and Henry, Faulcon- 
 bridge and Wolsey, are designs beyond reach of 
 the hand which drew the second and third Richard 
 without much background or dramatic perspective; 
 But the difficulties inherent in either subject are 
 not surmounted throughout with absolute equality 
 of success ; the very point of appeal to the sym- 
 pathy and excitement of the time may have been 
 something of a disturbing force in the composition 
 of the work — a loadstone rock indeed, of tempting 
 attraction to the patriot as well as to the play- 
 wright, but possibly capable of proving in some 
 measure a rock of offence to the poet whose ship 
 was piloted towards it. His perfect triumph in the 
 field of patriotic drama, coincident with the perfect 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 103 
 
 maturity of his comic genius and his general style; 
 has now to show itself. 
 
 The great national trilogy which is at once the 
 flower of Shakespeare's second period and the 
 crown -of his achievements in historic drama — 
 unless indeed we so far depart from the established 
 order and arrangement of his works as to include 
 his three Roman plays in the same class with 
 these English histories — ofifers perhaps the most 
 singular example known to us of the variety in 
 fortune which befell his works on their first appear- 
 ance in print. None of these had better luck in 
 that line at starting than King Henry IV. ; none 
 had worse than King Henry V. With Romeo and 
 Juliet, the Merry Wives of Windsor, and Hamlet, 
 it shares the remarkable and undesirable honour of 
 having been seized and boarded by pirates even 
 before it had left the dockyard. The master- 
 builder's hands had not yet put the craft into sea- 
 worthy condition when she was overhauled by these 
 Kidds and Blackbeards of the press. Of those 
 four plays, the two tragedies at least were 
 thoroughly recast, and rewritten from end to end : 
 the pirated editions giving us a transcript, more or 
 less perfect or imperfect, accurate or corrupt, of 
 the text as it- first .came from the poet's hand ; a 
 
I04 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 text to be afterwards indefinitely modified and 
 incalculably improved. Not quite so much can 
 be said of the comedy, which certainly stood in 
 less need of revision, and probably would not have 
 borne it so well ; nevertheless every little passing 
 touch of the reviser's hand is here also a noticeable 
 mark of invigoration and improvement. But King 
 Henry V-, we may fairly say, is hardly less than 
 transformed. Not that it has been recast after the 
 fashion of Hamlet, or even rewritten after the 
 fashion of Romeo and Juliet ; but the corruptions 
 and imperfections of the pirated text are here 
 more flagrant than in any other instance ; while 
 the general revision of style by which it is at once 
 purified and fortified extends to every nook and 
 corner of the restored and renovated building. 
 Even had we, however, a perfect and. trustworthy 
 transcript of Shakespeare's original sketch for this 
 play, there can be little doubt that the rough 
 draught would still prove almost as different from 
 the final masterpiece as is the soiled and ragged 
 canvas now before us, on which we trace the out- 
 line of figures so strangely disfigured, made subject 
 to such rude extremities of defacement and de- 
 feature. There is indeed less difference between 
 the two editions in the comic than in the historic 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 105 
 
 scenes ; the pirates were probably more careful to 
 furnish their market with a fair sample of the 
 lighter than of the graver ware supplied by their 
 plunder of the poet ; Fluellen and Pistol lose less 
 through their misusage than the king ; and the 
 king himself is less maltreated when he talks plain 
 prose with his soldiers than when he chops blank 
 verse with his enemies or his lords. His rough 
 and ready courtship of the French princess is a 
 good deal expanded as to length, but (if I dare say 
 so) less improved and heightened in tone than we 
 might well have wished and it might well have borne ; 
 in either text the hero's addresses savour rather of 
 a ploughman than a prince, and his finest courtesies 
 are clownish though not churlish. We may pro- 
 bably see in this rather a concession to the appe- 
 tite of the groundlings than an evasion of the 
 difficulties inherent in the subject-matter of the 
 scene ; too heavy as these might have been for 
 another, we can conceive of none too hard for the 
 magnetic tact and intuitive delicacy of Shake- 
 speare's judgment and instinct. But it must fairly 
 and honestly be admitted that in this scene we 
 find as little of the charm and humour inseparable 
 from the prince as of the courtesy and dignity to 
 be expected from the king. 
 
io6 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 It should on the other hand be noted that the 
 finest touch in the comic scenes, if not the finest 
 in the whole portrait of Falstaff, is apparently an 
 afterthought, a touch added on revision of the 
 original design. In the first scene of the second 
 act Mrs. Quickly's remark that " he'll yield the 
 crow a pudding one of these days" is common to 
 both versions of the play ; but the six words fol- 
 lowing are only to be found in the revised edition ; 
 and these six words the very pirates could hardly 
 have passed over or struck out. They are not 
 such as can drop from the text of a poet unper- 
 ceived by the very dullest and horniest of human 
 eyes. " The king has killed his heart." Here is 
 the point in Falstaff's nature so strangely over- 
 looked by the man of all men who we should have 
 said must be the first to seize and to appireciate it. 
 It is as grievous as it is inexplicable that the 
 Shakespeare of France — the most infinite in com- 
 passion, in " conscience and tender heart," of all 
 great poets in all ages and all nations of the world 
 — should have missed the deep tenderness of this 
 supreme and subtlest touch in the work of the 
 greatest among his fellows. Again, with anything 
 but " damnable " iteration, does Shakespeare revert 
 to it before the close of this very scene. Even 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 107 
 
 Pistol and Nym can see that what now ails their 
 old master is no such ailment as in his prosperous 
 days was but too liable to " play the rogue with his 
 great toe." " The king hath run bad humours on 
 the knight " : " his heart is fracted, and corroborate." 
 And it is not thus merely through the eclipse of that 
 brief mirage, that fair prospect "of Africa, and golden 
 joys," in view of which he was ready to " take any 
 man's horses." This it is that distinguishes FalstafF 
 from Panurge ; that lifts him at least to the moral 
 level of Sancho Panza. I cannot but be reluctant to 
 set the verdict of my own judgment against that of 
 Victor Hugo's ; I need none to remind me what and 
 who he is whose judgment I for once oppose, and 
 what and who am I that I should oppose it ; that he 
 is he, and I am but myself; yet against his cla!ssifi- 
 cation of Falstaff, against his definition of Shake- 
 speare's unapproached and unapproachable master- 
 piece in the school of comic art and humoristic na- 
 ture, I must and do with all my soul and strength 
 protest. The admirable phrase of " swine-centaur " 
 {centaure du pore) is as inapplicable to FalstaiT as it 
 is appropriate to Panurge. Not the third person but 
 the first in date of that divine and human trinity of 
 humourists whose names make radiant for ever the 
 century of their new-born glory— not Shakespeare 
 
io8 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 but Rabelais is responsible for the creation or the 
 discovery of such a type as this. " Snum cuique is 
 our Roman justice " ; the gradation from Panurge 
 to Ealstaff is not downward but upward ; though 
 it be Victor Hugo's very self who asserts the 
 contrary.* Singular as may seem the colloca- 
 tion of the epithet " moral " with the name " Fal- 
 staff," I venture to maintain my thesis ; that in 
 point . of feeling, and therefore of possible moral 
 elevation, Falstaff is as undeniably the superior of 
 Sancho as Sancho is unquestionably the superior 
 of Panurge. The natural affection of Panurge is 
 bounded by the self-same limits as the natural 
 theology of Polyphemus ; the love of the one, like 
 the faith of the other, begins and ends alike at one 
 point ; 
 
 Myself, 
 And this great belly, first of deities ; 
 
 (in which line, by the way, we may hear as it were 
 a first faint prelude of the great proclamation to 
 come — the hymn of praise and thanksgiving for the 
 coronation day of King Gaster ; whose laureate, we 
 know, was as lovingly familiar with the Polyphe- 
 mus of Euripides as Shakespeare with his owri 
 
 ' " La dynastie du bon sens, inauguree dans Panurge, continuec 
 dans Sancho Pan9a, tourne a mal et avorte dans Falstaff." 
 (William Shakespeare, deuxieme partie, livre premier, ch. ii.) 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 109 
 
 Pantagruel.) In Sancho we come upon a creature 
 capable of love— but not of such love as kills or 
 helps to kill, such love as may end or even as may 
 seem to end in anything like heartbreak. " And now 
 abideth Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, these 
 three ; but the greatest of these is Shakespeare." 
 
 I would fain score yet another point in the fat 
 knight's favour ; " I have much to say in the behalf 
 of that Falstaff." Rabelais, evangelist and prophet 
 of the Resurrection of the Flesh (so long entombed, 
 ignored, repudiated, misconstrued, vilified, by so 
 many generations and ages of Galilean preachers 
 and Pharisaic schoolmen) — Rabelais was content to 
 paint the flesh merely, in its honest human reality 
 — human at least, if also bestial ; in its frank and 
 rude reaction against the half brainless and wholly 
 bloodless teachers whose doctrine he himself on the 
 one hand, and Luther on the other, arose together 
 to smite severally — to smite them hip and thigh, 
 even till the going down of the sun ; the mock sun 
 or marshy meteor that served only to deepen the 
 darkness encompassing on every side the doubly 
 dark ages — the ages of monarchy and theocracy, the 
 ages of death and of faith. To Panurge, therefore, 
 it was unnecessary and it might have seemea 
 inconsequent to attribute other gifts or functions 
 
no A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 than are proper to such intelligence as may ac- 
 company the appetites of an animal. That most 
 irreverend father in God, Friar John, belongs to a 
 higher class in the moral order of being ; and he 
 much rather than his fellow-voyager and penitent 
 is properly comparable with Falstaff. It is im-r 
 possible to connect the notion of rebuke with the 
 sins of Panurge. The actual lust and gluttony, 
 the imaginary cowardice of Falstaff, have been 
 gravely and sharply rebuked by critical morality ; 
 we have just noted a too recent and too eminent 
 example of this ; but what mortal ever dreamed of 
 casting these qualities in the teeth of his supposed 
 counterpart ? The difference is as vast between 
 Falstaff on the field of battle and Panurge on the 
 storm-tossed deck as between Falstaff and Hotspur, 
 Panurge and Friar John. No man could show 
 cooler and steadier nerve than is displayed in 
 either case — by the lay as well as the clerical name- 
 sake of the fourth evangelist. If ever fruitless but 
 endless care was shown to prevent misunder- 
 standing, it was shown in the pains taken by 
 Shakespeare to obviate the misconstruction which 
 would impute to Falstaff the quality of a Parolles 
 or a Bobadil, a Bessus or a Moron. The delight- 
 ful encounter between the jester and the bear in 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 1 1 1 
 
 the crowning interlude of La Princesse d'Elide 
 shows once more, I may remark, that Mohere 
 had sat at the feet of Rabelais as delightedly 
 as Shakespeare before him. Such rapturous in- 
 ebriety or Olympian incontinence of humour only 
 fires the blood of the graver and less exuberant 
 humourist when his lips are still warm and wet 
 from the well-spring of the Dive Bouteille. 
 
 It is needless to do over again the work which 
 was done, and well done, a hundred years since, by 
 the writer whose able essay in vindication and ex- 
 position of the genuine character of Falstaff elicited 
 from Dr. Johnson as good a jest and as bad a 
 criticism as might have been expected. His 
 argument is too thoroughly carried out at all 
 points and fortified on all hands to require or 
 even to admit of corroboration ; and the attempt 
 to appropriate any share of the lasting credit which 
 is his due would be nothing less than a disin- 
 genuous impertinence. I may here however 
 notice that in the very first scene of this trilogy 
 which introduces us to the ever dear and honoured 
 presence of Sir John, his creator has put into the 
 mouth of a witness no friendlier or more candid 
 than Ned Poins the distinction between two as 
 true-bred cowards as ever turned back and one 
 
112 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 who will fight no longer than he sees reason. In 
 this nutshell lies the whole kernel of the matter ; 
 the sweet, sound, ripe, toothsome, wholesome ker- 
 nel of Falstaff's character and humour. He will 
 fight as well as his princely patron, and, like the 
 prince, as long as he sees reason ; but neither Hal 
 nor Jack has ever felt any touch of desire to pluck 
 that " mere scutcheon " honour " from the pale-faced 
 moon." Harry Percy is as it were the true Sir 
 Bedivere, the last of all Arthurian knights ; Henry 
 V. is the first as certainly as he is the noblest of 
 those equally daring and calculating statesmen- 
 warriors whose two most terrible, most perfect, and 
 most famous types are Louis XL and Czesar Borgia. 
 Gain, " commodity," the principle of self-interest 
 which never but in word and in jest could become the 
 principle of action with Faulconbridge, — himself 
 already far more "a man of this world" than a 
 Launcelot or a Hotspur, — is as evidently the main- 
 spring of Henry's enterprise and life as of the con- 
 tract between King Philip and King John. The 
 supple and shameless egotism of the churchmen on 
 whose political sophistries he relies for external sup- 
 port is needed rather to varnish his project than to 
 reassure his conscience. Like Frederic the Great 
 before his first Silesian war, the future conqueror of 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 113 
 
 Agincourt has practically made up his mind before 
 tie seeks to find as good reason or as plausible excuse 
 IS were likewise to suffice the future conqueror of 
 Rosbach. In a word, Henry is doubtless not the 
 man, as old Auchindraqe expresses it in the nOble 
 and strangely neglected tragedy which bears 
 solitary but sufficient witness to the actual 
 dramatic faculty of Sir Walter Scott's genius, to do 
 the devil's work without his wages ; but neither is 
 he, on the like unprofitable terms, by any manner 
 of means the man to do God's. No completer in- 
 carnation could be shown us of the militant 
 Englishman — Anglais pur sang ; but it is not only, 
 as some have seemed to think, with the highest, 
 the purest, the noblest quality of English character 
 that his just and far-seeing creator has endowed 
 him. The godlike equity of Shakespeare's judg- 
 ment, his implacable and impeccable righteousness 
 of instinct and of insight, was too deeply ingrained 
 in the very core of his genius to be perverted by 
 any provincial or pseudo-patriotic prepossessions; 
 his patriotism was too national to be provincial. 
 Assuredly no poet ever had more than he : not 
 even the king of men and poets who fought at 
 Marathon and sang of Salamis : much less had 
 any or has any one of our own, from Milton on to 
 
 I 
 
1 14 A Study of Shakespeare.- 
 
 Campbell and from Campbell even to Tennyson. 
 In the mightiest chorus of King Henry V. we hear 
 the pealing ring of the same great English trumpet 
 that was yet to sound over the battle of the Baltic, 
 and again in our later day over a sea-fight of 
 Shakespeare's own, more splendid and heart- 
 cheering in its calamity than that other and all 
 others in their triumph ; a war-song and a sea^ 
 song divine and deep as death or as the sea, mak- 
 ing thrice more glorious at once the glorious three 
 names of England, of Grenville, and of Tennyson 
 for ever. From the affectation of cosmopolitan indif- 
 ference not ^schylus, not Pindar, not Dante's very 
 self was more alien or more free than Shakespeare ; 
 but there was nothing of the dry Tyrtsean twang, 
 the dull mechanic resonance as of wooden echoes 
 from a platform, in the great historic chord of his 
 lyre. " He is very English, too English, even," says 
 the Master on whom his enemies alone — assuredly 
 not his most loving, most reverent, and most thank- 
 ful disciples^ — might possibly and plausibly retort 
 that he was " very French, too French, even " ; but 
 he certainly was not " too English" to see and cleave 
 to the main fact, the radical and central truth, of 
 personal or national character, of typical history or 
 tradition, without seeking to embellish, to degrade, 
 
A study of Shakespeare. 115 
 
 n either or m any way' to falsify it. From king 
 :o king, from cardinal to cardinal, from the earliest 
 n date of subject to the latest of his histories, we 
 ind the same thread running, the same link of 
 [lonourable and righteous judgment, of equitable 
 md careful equanimity, connecting and combining 
 play with play in an unbroken and infrangible chain 
 of evidence to the singleness of the poet's eye, the 
 identity of the workman's hand, which could do 
 justice and would do no more than justice, alike to 
 Henry and to Wolsey, to Pandulph and to John. 
 His typical English hero or historic protagonist 
 is a man of their type who founded and built up 
 the empire of England in India ; a hero after the 
 future pattern of Hastings and of Clive ; not less 
 daringly sagacious and not more delicately scru- 
 pulous, not less indomitable or more impeccable 
 than they. A type by no means immaculate, a 
 creature not at all too bright and good for English 
 nature's daily food in times of mercantile or 
 military enterprise ; no whit more if no whit less 
 excellent and radiant than reality. Arnica 
 Britannia, sed ■ magis arnica Veritas. The master 
 poet of England — all Englishmen may reasonably 
 and honourably be proud of it — has not two 
 weights and two measures for friend and foe. 
 
1 r6 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 This palpable and patent fact, as his only and 
 worthy French translator has well remarked, 
 would of itself suffice to exonerate his memory 
 from the imputation of having perpetrated in its 
 evil entirety The First Part of King Heiiry VI. 
 
 There is, in my opinion, somewhat more of 
 internal evidence than I have ever seen adduced 
 in support of the tradition current from an early 
 date as to the origin of the Merry Wives of 
 Windsor; a tradition which assigns to Queen 
 Elizabeth the same office of midwife with regard 
 to this comedy as was discharged by Elwood with 
 reference to Paradise Regained. Nothing could so 
 naturally or satisfactorily explain its existence as 
 the expression of a desire to see " Falstaff in love," 
 which must have been nothing less than the equi- 
 valent of a command to produce him under the 
 disguise of such a transfiguration on the boards. 
 The task of presenting him so shorn of his beams, 
 so much less than archangel (of comedy) ruined, 
 and the excess of (humorous) glory obscured, 
 would hardly, we cannot but think and feel, have 
 •spontaneously suggested itself to Shakespeare as 
 a natural or eligible aim for the fresh exercise of 
 his comic genius. To exhibit Falstaff as through- 
 out the whole course of five acts a credulous and 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 117 
 
 baffled dupe, one " easier to be played on than a 
 pipe," was not really to reproduce him at all. The 
 genuine Falstaff could no more have played such 
 a part than the genuine Petruchio could have 
 filled such an orte as was assigned him by Fletcher 
 in the luckless hour when that misguided poet 
 undertook to continue the subject and to correct 
 the moral of the next comedy in our catalogue of 
 Shakespeare's. The Tamer Tamed is hardly less 
 consistent or acceptable as a sequel to the Taming 
 of the Shrew than the Merry Wives of Windsor 
 as a supplement to King Henry IV. : and no con- 
 ceivable comparison could more forcibly convey 
 how broad and deep is the gulf of incongruity 
 which divides them. 
 
 The plea for once suggested by the author in 
 the way of excuse or extenuation for this incom- 
 patibility of Falstaff with Falstaff — for the viola- 
 tion of character goes far beyond mere inconsis- 
 tency or the natural ebb and flow of even the 
 brightest wits and most vigorous intellects — will 
 commend itself more readily to the moralist than 
 to the humanist ; in other words, to the preacher 
 rather than to the thinker, the sophist rather 
 than the artist. Here only does Shakespeare 
 show that he feels the necessity of condescending. 
 
1 1 8 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 to such evasion or such apology as is implied in 
 the explanation of Falstafif's incredible credulity 
 by a reference to " the guiltiness of his mind " and 
 the admission, so gratifying to all minds more 
 moral than his own, that " wit may be made a 
 Jack-a-Lent, when 'tis upon ill employment." It is 
 the best excuse that can be made ; but can we 
 imagine the genuine, the pristine Falstaff reduced 
 to the proffer of such an excuse in serious good 
 earnest ? 
 
 In the original version of this comedy there 
 was not a note of poetry from end to end ; as it 
 then appeared, it might be said to hold the same 
 place on the roll of Shakespeare's plays as is 
 occupied by Bartholojnew Fair on the roll of Ben 
 Jonson's. From this point of view it is curious to 
 contrast the purely farcical masterpieces of the 
 town-bred schoolboy and the country lad. There 
 is a certain faint air of the fields, the river, and the 
 park, even in the rough sketch of Shakespeare's 
 farce — wholly prosaic as it is, and in no point 
 suggestive of any unlikelihood in the report which 
 represents it as the composition or rather as the 
 improvisation of a fortnight. We know at once 
 that he must have stroked the fallow greyhound 
 that was outrun on " Cotsall " ; that he must — and 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 119 
 
 perhaps once or twice at least too often — have 
 played truant (some readers, boys past or present, 
 might wish for association's sake it could actually 
 have been Datchet-wards) from under the shadow 
 of good Sir Hugh's probably not over formidable 
 though " threatening twigs of birch," at all risks of 
 being " preeches " on his return, in fulfilment of the 
 direful menace held out to that young namesake 
 of his over whose innocence Mrs. Quickly was so 
 creditably vigilant. On the other hand, no student 
 of Jonson will need to be reminded how closely 
 and precociously familiar the big stalwart West- 
 minster boy, Camden's favoured and grateful pupil, 
 must have made himself with the rankest haunts 
 and most unsavoury recesses of that ribald water- 
 side and Smithfield life which he lived to repro- 
 duce on the stage with a sometimes insufferable 
 fidelity to details from which Hogarth might have 
 shrunk. Even his unrivalled proficiency in classic 
 learning can hardly have been the fruit of greater 
 or more willing diligence in school hours than he 
 must have lavished on other than scholastic studies 
 in the streets. The humour of his huge photo- 
 graphic group of divers "humours" is undeniably 
 and incomparably richer, broader, fuller of inven- 
 tion and variety, than any that Shakespeare's 
 
120 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 lighter work can show; all the five acts of the 
 latter comedy can hardly serve as- counterpoise, in 
 weight and wealth of comic effect, to the single 
 scene in which Zeal-of-the-Land defines the moral 
 and theological boundaries of action and intention 
 which distinguish the innocent if not laudable de- 
 sire to eat pig from the venial though not mortal 
 sin of longing to eat pig in the thick of the pro- 
 fane Fair, which may rather be termed a foul than 
 a fair. Taken from that point of view which looks 
 only to force and freedom and range of humorous 
 effect, Jonson's play is to his friend's as London is 
 to Windsor ; but in more senses than one it is to 
 Shakespeare's as the Thames at London Bridge is 
 to the Thames at Eton : the atmosphere of Smith- 
 field is not more different from the atmosphere of 
 the playing-fields ; and some, too delicate of nose 
 or squeamish of stomach, may prefer Cuckoo 
 Weir to Shoreditch. But undoubtedly the phan- 
 toms of Shallow and Mrs. Quickly which put in 
 (so to speak) a nominal reappearance in the Merry 
 Wives of Windsor are comparatively as poor and 
 thin if set over against the full rich outlines of 
 Rabbi Busy and Dame Purecraft as these again 
 are at all points alike inferior to the real Shallow 
 and the genuine Quickly of King Henry IV. It 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. . 121 
 
 is true that Jonson's humour has sometimes less in 
 common with Shakespeare's than with the humour 
 of Swift, Smollett, and Carlyle. For all his admi- 
 ration and even imitation of Rabelais, Shakespeare 
 has hardly once or twice burnt but so much as a 
 stray pinch of fugitive incense on the altar of 
 Cloacina ; the only Venus acknowledged and 
 adored, by those three latter humourists. If not 
 always constant with the constancy of Milton to 
 the service of Urania, he never turns into a dirtier 
 byway or back alley than the beaten path trodden 
 occasionally by most of his kind which leads them 
 on a passing errand of no unnatural devotion to 
 the shrine of Venus Pandemos. 
 
 When, however, we turn from the raw rough 
 sketch to the enriched and ennobled version of the 
 present play we find it in this its better shape more 
 properly comparable with another and a nobler 
 work of Jonson's — with that magnificent comedy, 
 the first avowed and included among his collection 
 by its author, which according to all tradition first 
 owed its appearance and success to the critical 
 good sense and generous good offices of Shake- 
 speare. Neither my duly unqualified love for the 
 greater poet nor my duly qualified regard for the 
 less can alter my sense that their mutual relations 
 
122 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 are in this one case inverted ; that Every Man in 
 his Humour is altogether a better comedy and a 
 work of higher art than the Merry Wives of 
 Windsor. 
 
 Kitely is to Ford almost what Arnolphe is to 
 Sganarelle. (As according to the learned Meta- 
 phraste " Filio non potest pr^ferri nisi filius," even 
 so can no one but Moliere be preferred or likened 
 to Moliere.) Without actually touching like 
 Arnolphe on the hidden springs of tragedy, the 
 jealous husband in Jonson's play is only kept from 
 trenching on the higher and forbidden grounds of 
 passion by the potent will and the consummate 
 self-command of the great master who called him 
 up in perfect likeness to the life. Another or a 
 deeper tone, another or a stronger touch, in the 
 last two admirable scenes with his cashier and his 
 wife, when his hot smouldering suspicion at length 
 catches fire and breaks out in agony of anger, 
 would have removed him altogether beyond the 
 legitimate pale of comedy. As it is, the self-con- 
 trol of the artist is as thorough as his grasp and 
 mastery of his subject are triumphant and com- 
 plete. 
 
 It would seem as though on revision of the 
 Merry W^'^^ of Windsor Sha,kespeare had found 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 12 2i 
 
 himself unwilling or rather perhaps unable to leave 1 
 a single work of his hand without one touch or 
 breath on it of beauty or of poetry. The sole fit- 
 ting element of harmonious relief or variety in such 
 a case could of course be found only in an interlude 
 of pure fancy ; any touch of graver or deeper emo- 
 tion would simply have untuned and deranged the 
 whole scheme of composition. A lesser poet might 
 have been powerless to resist the temptation or 
 suggestion of sentiment that he should give to the 
 little loves of Anne Page and Fenton a touch of 
 pathetic or emotional interest ; but " opulent as 
 Shakespeare was, and of his opulence prodigal " (to 
 borrow a phrase from Coleridge), he knew better 
 than to patch with purple or embroider with 
 seed-pearl the hem of this homespun little piece of 
 comic drugget. The match between cloth of gold 
 and cloth of frieze could hardly have borne any 
 good issue in this instance. Instead therefore of 
 following the lead of Terence's or the hint of 
 Jonson's example, and exalting the accent of his 
 comedy to the full-mouthed pitch of a Chremes 
 or a Kitely, he strikes out some forty and odd lines 
 of rather coarse and commonplace doggrel about 
 brokers, proctors, lousy fox-eyed Serjeants, blue 
 and red noses, and so forth, to make room for the 
 
1 24 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 bright light interlude of fairyland child's-play which 
 might not unfittingly have found place even with- 
 in the moon-charmed circle of A Midsummer 
 Nighfs Dream. Even in that all heavenly poem 
 there are hardly to be found lines of more sweet 
 and radiant simplicity than here. 
 
 The refined instinct, artistic judgment, and con- 
 summate taste of Shakespeare were perhaps never 
 so wonderfully shown as in his recast of another 
 man's work — a man of real if rough genius for 
 comedy — which we get in the Taming of the Shrew. 
 Only the collation of scene with scene, then of 
 speech with speech, then of line with line, will 
 show how much may be borrowed from a stranger's 
 material and how much may be added to it by the 
 same stroke of a single hand. All the force and 
 humour alike of character and situation belong to 
 Shakespeare's eclipsed and forlorn precursor ; he 
 has added nothing ; he has tempered and enriched 
 everything. That, the luckless author of the first 
 sketch is like to remain a man as nameless as the 
 deed of the witches in Macbeth, unless some chance 
 or caprice of accident should suddenly flash favour- 
 ing light on his now impersonal and indiscoverable 
 individuality, seems clear enough when we take 
 into account the double and final disproof of his 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 125 
 
 imaginary identity with Marlowe, which Mr. Dyce 
 has put forward with such unanswerable certitude. 
 He is a clumsy and coarse-fingered plagiarist from 
 that poet, and his stolen jewels of expression look 
 so grossly out of place in the homely setting of his 
 usual style that they seem transmuted from real to 
 sham. On the other hand, he is of all the Pre-Shake- 
 speareans known to us incomparablyihe truest, the 
 richest, the most powerful and original humour- 
 ist ; one indeed without a second on that ground, 
 for " the rest are nowhere." Now Marlowe, it need 
 scarcely be once again reiterated, was as certainly 
 one of the least and worst among jesters as he was 
 one of the best and greatest among poets. There 
 can therefore be no serious question of his partner- 
 ship in a play wherein the comic achievement is 
 excellent and the poetic attempts are execrable 
 throughout. 
 
 The recast of it in which a greater than Berni 
 has deigned to play the part of that poet towards 
 a lesser than Bojardo shows tact and delicacy per- 
 haps without a parallel in literature. No chance 
 of improvement is missed, while nothing of value is 
 dropped or thrown away'.' There is just now and 
 
 ' Possibly some readers may agree with my second thoughts, in 
 .thinking that one exception may here be made and some surprise 
 
126 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 then a momentary return perceptible to the skipping 
 metre and fantastic manner of the first period, 
 which may have been unconsciously suggested by 
 the nature of the task in hand — a task of itself im- 
 plying or suggesting some new study of old models ; 
 but the main style of the play in all its weightier 
 parts is as distinctly proper to the second period, 
 as clear an evidence of inner and spiritual affinity 
 (with actual tabulation of dates, were such a thing 
 as feasible as it is impossible, I must repeat that the 
 argument would here be — what it is now — in no wise 
 concerned), as is the handling of character through- 
 out ; but most especially the subtle force, the im- 
 peccable and careful instinct, the masculine delicacy 
 of touch, by which the somewhat ruffianly tempera- 
 ment of the original Ferando is at once refined and 
 invigorated through its transmutation into the 
 hearty and humorous manliness of Petruchio's. 
 
 It is observable that those few and faint traces 
 which we have noticed in this play of a faded 
 archaic style trying as it were to resume a mockery 
 of revirescence are not wholly even if mainly 
 
 be here expressed at Shakespeare's rejection of Sly's memorable 
 query — " When will the fool come again, Sim ? " It is true that he 
 could well afford to spare it, as what could he not well afford to 
 spare ? but I will confess that it seems to me worthy of a place 
 among his own Sly's most admirable and notable sallies of humour. 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 127 
 
 confined to the underplot which a suggestion or 
 surmise of Mr. Collier's long since assigned to 
 Haughton, author of Englishmen for my Money, 
 or A Woman will have her Will : a spirited, vigor* 
 ous, and remarkably regular comedy of intrigue, 
 full of rough and ready incident, bright boisterous 
 humour, honest lively provinciality and gay high- 
 handed Philistinism. To take no account of this 
 attribution would be to show myself as shamelessly 
 as shamefully deficient in that respect and gratitude 
 which all genuine and thankful students will al- 
 ways be as ready to offer as all thankless and 
 insolent sciolists can ever be to disclaim, to the 
 venerable scholar who since I was first engaged 
 on these notes has added yet another obligation to 
 the many under which he had already laid all 
 younger and lesser labourers in the same field of 
 study, by the issue in a form fitly ennobled and en- 
 riched of his great historical work on our early 
 stage. It might seem something of an unintended 
 impertinence to add that such recognition of his 
 theory no more implies a blind acceptance of it — 
 whatever such acceptance on my part might be 
 worth — than the expression of such gratitude and 
 respect could reasonably be supposed to imply an 
 equally blind confidence in the authority or the 
 
128 A Study of ShakespepL'i^e. 
 
 value of that version of Shakespeare's text which 
 has been the means of exposing a name so long 
 and so justly honoured, not merely to the natural 
 and rational inquisition of rival students, but to 
 the rancorous and ribald obloquy of thankless and 
 frontless pretenders. 
 
 Here perhaps as well as anywhere else I may 
 find a proper place to intercalate the little word I 
 have to say in partial redemption of my pledge to 
 take in due time some notice at more or less length 
 of the only two among the plays doubtfully ascribed 
 to Shakespeare which in my eyes seem to bear any 
 credible or conceivable traces of his touch. Of 
 these two I must give the lesser amount of 
 space and attention to that one which in itself 
 is incomparably the more worthy of discussion, 
 admiration, and regard. The reason of this lies in 
 the very excellence which has attracted to it the 
 notice of such competent judges and the suffrage 
 of .such eminent names as would make the task of 
 elaborate commentary and analytic examination 
 something more than superfluous on my part ; 
 whereas the other has never been and will never 
 be assigned to Shakespeare by any critical student 
 whose verdict is worth a minute's consideration or 
 the marketable value of a straw. Nevertheless it 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 129 
 
 is on other grounds worth notice ; and such notice^ 
 to be itself of any value, must of necessity be ela- 
 borate and minute. The critical analysis of King 
 Edward III. I have therefore relegated to its 
 proper place in an appendix ; while I reserve a , 
 corner of my text, at once out of admiration for 
 the play itself and out of reverence for the names 
 and authority of some who have given their verdict 
 in its behalf, for a rough and rapid word or two on 
 Arden of Feversham. 
 
 It is with equally inexpressible surprise that I 
 find Mr. Collier accepting as Shakespeare's any 
 part of A Warning for Fair Women, and rejecting 
 without compromise or hesitation the belief or 
 theory which would assign to the youth of Shake- 
 speare the incomparably nobler tragic poem in 
 question.' His first ascription to Shakespeare of 
 
 ' History of English Dramatic Poetry, ed. 1879, vol. ii. pp. 
 437-447- In a later part of his noble and invaluable work (vol. iii. 
 p. 188) the author quotes a passage from "the induction to A 
 IVarning for Fair Women, 1599 (towhich Shakespeare most assuredly 
 contributed)." It will be seen that I do not shrink from admitting 
 the full weight of authority which can be thrown into the scale against 
 my own opinion. To such an assertion from the insolent organs of 
 l^retentious ignorance I should be content with the simple rejoinder 
 that Shakespeare most assuredly did nothing whatever of the sort ; 
 but to return such an answer in the present case would be to write 
 myself down — and that in company to which I should most empha- 
 tically object — as something very decidedly more — and worse — than 
 an ass. 
 
 K 
 
130 A Study of ShaJ^speare. 
 
 A Warning for Fair Women is couched in terms 
 far more dubious and diffident than such as he 
 afterwards adopts. It " might," he says, " be given 
 to Shalfespeare on grounds far more plausible " 
 (on what, except possibly those of date, I can- 
 not imagine) "than those applicable to Arden of 
 Feversham'' He then proceeds to cite some de- 
 tached lines and passages of undeniable beauty and 
 vigour, containing equally undeniable coincidences 
 of language, illustration, and expression with "pas- 
 sages in Shakespeare's undisputed plays." From 
 these he passes on to indicate a " resemblance " 
 which "is not merely verbal," and to extract whole 
 speeches which "are Shakespearean in a much 
 better sense " ; adding in a surely too trenchant 
 fashion, " Here we say, aut Shakespeare aut dia- 
 iolus." I must confess, with all esteem for the 
 critic and all admiration for the brief scene cited, 
 that I cannot say, Shakespeare. 
 
 There are spirits of another sort from whom we 
 naturally expect such assumptions and inferences 
 as start from the vantage ground of a few separate 
 or separable passages, and clear at a flying leap 
 the empty space intervening which divides them 
 from the goal of evidence as to authorship. Such 
 a spirit was that of the late Mr. Simpson, to whose 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 131 
 
 wealth of misused learning and fertility of mis- 
 applied conjecture I have already paid all due 
 tribute ; but who must have had beyond all other 
 sane men— most assuredly, beyond all other fairly 
 competent critics — the gift, bestowed on him by a 
 malignant fairy of mistaking assumption for argu- 
 ment and possibility for proof He was the very 
 Columbus of mare's nests ; to the discovery of 
 them, though they lay far beyond the pillars of 
 Hercules, he would apply all shifts and all resources 
 possible to an ultra-Baconian process of unphilo- 
 sophical induction. On the devoted head of Shake- 
 speare — who is also called Shakspere and Chaxpur 
 ' — he would have piled a load of rubbish, among which 
 the crude and vigorous old tragedy under discussion 
 shines out like a veritable diamond of the desert. 
 His " School of Shakspere," though not an academy 
 to be often of necessity perambulated by the most 
 peripatetic student of Shakespeare, will remain as a 
 monument of critical or uncritical industry, a store- 
 house of curious if not of precious relics, and a warn- 
 ing for other than fair women — or fair scholars — to 
 remember where " it is written that the shoemaker 
 should meddle with his yard and the tailor with 
 his last, the fisher with his pencil and the painter 
 with his nets." 
 
 K 2 
 
132 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 To me the difference appears immeasurable 
 between the reasons for admitting the possibility of 
 Shakespeare's authorship in the case of Arden of 
 Feversham, and the pretexts for imagining the pro- 
 bability of his partnership in A Warning for Fair 
 Women. There is a practically infinite distinction 
 between the evidence suggested by verbal or even 
 more than verbal resemblance of detached line to 
 line or selected passage to passage, and the proof 
 supplied by the general harmony and spiritual simi- 
 larity of a whole poem, on comparison of it as a 
 whole with the known works of the hypothetical 
 author. This proof, at all events, we surely do not 
 get from consideration in this light of the plea put 
 forward in behalf of A Warming for Fair Women. 
 This proof, I cannot but think, we are very much 
 nearer getting from contemplation under the same 
 light of the claim producible for A rden of Feversham. 
 
 A Warning for Fair Women is unquestionably 
 in its way a noticeable and valuable "piece of work," 
 as Sly might have defined it. It is perhaps the 
 best example anywhere extant of a merely realistic 
 tragedy — of realism pure and simple applied to 
 the service of the highest of the arts. Very rarely 
 does it rise for a very brief interval to the height of 
 tragic or poetic style, however simple and homely. 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 133 
 
 The epilogue affixed to Arden of Fevershani asks 
 pardon of the "gentlemen" composing its audi- 
 ence for "this naked tragedy," on the plea that 
 " simple truth is gracious enough" without needless 
 ornament or bedizenment of "glozing stuff." Far 
 more appropriate would such an apology have 
 been as in this case was at least superfluous, if 
 appended by way of epilogue to A Warning for 
 Fair Women. That is indeed a naked tragedy ; 
 nine-tenths of it are in no wise beyond the reach 
 of an able, industrious, and practised reporter, com- 
 missioned by the proprietors of the journal on 
 whose staff he might be engaged to throw into the 
 form of scenic dialogue his transcript of the evi- 
 dence in a popular and exciting case of adultery 
 and murder. The one figure on the stage of this 
 author which stands out sharply defined in our 
 recollection against a background of undistin- 
 guished shadows is the figure of the adulterer and 
 murderer. This most discreditable of Browns has 
 a distinct and brawny outline of his own, a gait 
 and accent as of a genuine and recognisable man, 
 who inight have put to some better profit his 
 shifty spirit of enterprise, his genuine capacity 
 of affection, his burly ingenuity and hardihood. 
 Hia minor confidants and accomplices, Mrs. 
 
134 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 Druiy and her Trusty Roger, are mere common- 
 place profiles of, malefactors : but it is in the con- 
 trast between the portraits of their two criminal 
 heroines that the vast gulf of difference between 
 the capacities of the two poets yawns patent to 
 the sense of all readers. Anne Drury and Alice 
 Arden stand as far beyond comparison apart as 
 might a portrait by any average academician and 
 a portrait by Whistler or Legros. Once only, in 
 the simple and noble scene cited by the over 
 generous partiality of Mr. Collier, do^s the widow 
 and murderess of Drury rise to the tragic height 
 of the situation and the dramatic level of the part 
 so unfalteringly sustained from first to last by the 
 wife and the murderess of Arden. 
 
 There is the self-same relative difference be- 
 tween the two subordinate groups of innocent 
 or guilty characters. That is an excellent and 
 effective touch of realism, where Brown comes 
 across his victim's little boy playing truant in the 
 street with a small schoolfellow; but in Arden of 
 Feversham the number of touches as telling and 
 as striking as this one is practically numberless. 
 They also show a far stronger and keener faculty 
 of poetic if not of dramatic imagination. The 
 casual encounter of little Sanders with the yet red^ 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 135 
 
 handed murderer of his father is not comparable for 
 depth and subtlety of effect with the scene in which 
 Arden's friend Franklin, riding with him to Rayn- 
 ham Down, breaks off his " pretty tale " of a per- 
 jured wife, overpowered by a " fighting at his heart," 
 at the moment when they come close upon the 
 ambushed assassins in Alice Arden's pay. But 
 the internal evidence in this case, as I have already 
 intimated, does not hinge upon the proof or the 
 suggestion offered by any single passage or by any 
 number of single passages. The first and last 
 evidence of real and demonstrable weight is the 
 evidence of character. A good deal might be said 
 on the score of style in favour of its attribution to 
 a poet of the first .order,- writing at a time when 
 there were but two such* poets writing for the 
 stage ; but even this is here a point of merely secon- 
 dary importance. It need only be noted in pass- 
 ing that if the problem be reduced to a question 
 between the authorship of Shakespeare and the 
 authorship of Marlowe there is no need and no 
 room for further argument. The • whole style of 
 treatment from end to end is -about as like the 
 method of Marlowe as the method of Balzac is 
 like the method of Dumas. There could be no 
 alternative in that case ; so that the actual alter- 
 
136 A Sticdy of Shakespeare. 
 
 native before us is simple enough : Either this 
 play is the young Shakespeare's first tragic master- 
 piece, or there was a writer unknown to us then 
 alive and at work for the stage who excelled him 
 as a tragic dramatist not less — to say the very 
 least — than he was excelled by Marlowe as a narra- 
 tive and tragic poet. 
 
 If we accept, as I have been told that Goethe 
 accepted (a point which I regret my inability to 
 verify), the former of these alternatives — or if at 
 least we assume it for argument's sake in passing 
 — we may easily strengthen bur position by adduc- 
 ing as further evidence in its favour the author's 
 thoroughly Shakespearean fidelity to the details of 
 the prose narrative on which his tragedy is founded. 
 But, it may be objected, we find the same fidelity 
 to a similar text in the case of A Warning for 
 Fair Women. And here again starts up the 
 primal and radical difference between the two 
 works : it starts up and will not be overlooked. 
 Equal fidelity to the narrative text we do un- 
 doubtedly find in either case ; the same fidelity we 
 assuredly do not find. The one is a typical ex- 
 ample of prosaic realism, the other of poetic reality. 
 Light from darkness or truth from falsehood is not 
 more infallibly discernible. The fidelity in the one 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 137 
 
 case is exactly, as I have already indicated, the 
 fidelity of a reporter to his notes. The fidelity in 
 the other case is exactly the fidelity of Shake- 
 speare in his Roman plays to the text of Plutarch. 
 It is a fidelity which admits — I had almost written, 
 which requires — the fullest play of the highest 
 imagination. No more than the most realistic of 
 reporters will it omit or falsify any necessary or 
 even admissible detail ; but the indefinable quality 
 ■which it adds to the lowest as to the highest of 
 these is (as Lamb says of passion) " the all in all 
 in poetry." Turning again for illustration to one 
 of the highest names in imaginative literature— 
 a name sometimes most improperly and absurdly 
 inscribed on the register of the realistic school,' 
 
 ' Not for the first and probably not for the last time I turn, 
 with all confidence as with all reverence, for illustration and 
 confirmation of my own words, to the exquisite critical genius 
 of a long honoured and long lamented fellow-craftsman. The 
 following admirable and final estimate of the more special element 
 or peculiar quality in the intellectual force of Honore de Balzac 
 could only have been taken by the inevitable intuition and ren- 
 dered by the subtlest eloquence of Charles Baudelaire. Nothing 
 could more aptly and perfectly illustrate the distinction indicated in 
 my text between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality. 
 
 " I have many a time been astonished that to pass for an ob- 
 server should be Balzac's great popular title to fame. To me it had 
 always seemed that it was his chief merit to be a visionary, and a 
 passionate visionary. All his characters are gifted with the ardour 
 of life which animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply 
 coloured as dreams. From the highest of the aristocracy to the lowest 
 
138 A Sht-dy of Shakespeare. 
 
 we may say that the difference on this point- is not 
 the difference between Balzac and Dumas, but the 
 distinction between Balzac and M. Zola. Let us 
 take by way of example the character next in im- 
 portance to that of the heroine — the character of 
 her paramour. A viler figure was never sketched 
 by Balzac ; a viler figure was seldom drawn by 
 
 of the mob, all the actors in his Human Comedy zxe. keener after living, 
 more active and cunning in their struggles, more staunch in endur- 
 ance of misfortune, more ravenous in enjoyment, more angelic in 
 devotion, than the comedy of the real world shows them to us. In 
 a word, every one in Balzac, down to the very scullions, has genius'. 
 Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. It is ac- 
 tually Balzac himself. And as all the beings of the outer world pre- 
 sented themselves to his mind's eye in strong relief and with a telling 
 expression, he has given a convulsive action to his figures ; he has 
 blackened their shadows and intensified their lights. Besides, his 
 prodigious love of detail, the outcome of an immoderate ambition to 
 see everything, to bring everything to sight, to guess everything, to 
 make others guess everything, obliged him to set down more forcibly 
 the principal lines, so as to preserve the perspective of the whole. 
 He reminds me sometimes of those etchers who are never satisfied 
 with the biting-in of their outlines, and transform into very ravines 
 the main scratches of the plate. From this astonishing natural 
 disposition of mind wonderful results have been produced. But 
 this disposition is generally defined as Balzac's great fault. More 
 properly speaking, it is exactly his great distinctive quality. But 
 who can boast of being so happily gifted, and of being able to apply 
 a method which may permit him to invest — and that with a sure 
 hand — what is purely trivial with splendour and imperial purple ? 
 Who can do this ? Now, he who does not, to speak the truth, does 
 no great thing." 
 
 Nor was any very great thing done by the author of A Warning 
 for Fair Women. 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 139 
 
 Thackeray. But as with Balzac, so with the 
 author of this play, the masterful will combining 
 with the masterly art of the creator who fashions 
 out of-the worst kind of human clay the breathing 
 likeness of a creature so hatefully pitiful and so 
 pitifully hateful overcomes, absorbs, annihilates all 
 sense of such abhorrence and repulsion as would 
 prove the work which excited them no high or even 
 true work of art. Even the wonderful touch of 
 dastardly brutality and pitiful self-pity with which 
 Mosbie at once receives and repels the condolence 
 of his mistress on his wound — 
 
 Alice. — Sweet Mosbie, hide thine arm, it kills my heart. 
 Mosbie. — Ay, Mistress Arden, this is your favour . — 
 
 even this does not make unendurable the scenic 
 r'epresentation of what in actual life would be unen- 
 durable for any man to witness. Such an exhibi- 
 tion of currish cowardice and sullen bullying spite 
 increases rather our wondering pity for its victim 
 than our wondering sense of her degradation. 
 And this is a kind of triumph which only such an 
 artist as Shakespeare in poetry or as Balzac in 
 prose can achieve. 
 
 Alice Arden, if she be indeed a daughter of 
 Shakespeare's, is the eldest born of that group to 
 which Lady Macbeth and Dionyza belong by right 
 
140 A SHidy of Shakespeare. 
 
 of weird sisterhood. The wives of the thane of 
 Glamis and the governor of Tharsus, it need hardly 
 be said, are both of them creations of a much 
 later date — if not of the very latest discernible 
 or definable stage in the art of Shakespeare. 
 Deeply dyed as she is in bloodguiltiness, the wife 
 of Arden is much less of a born criminal than 
 these. To her, at once the agent and the patient 
 of her crime, the victim and the instrument of 
 sacrifice and blood-offering to Venus Libitina, 
 goddess of love and death, — to her, even in the 
 deepest pit of her deliberate wickedness, remorse 
 is natural and redemption conceivable. Like the 
 Phsedra of Racine, and herein so nobly unlike the 
 Phaedra of Euripides, she is capable of the deepest 
 and bitterest penitence, — incapable of dying with 
 a hideous and homicidal falsehood on her long 
 polluted lips. Her latest breath is not a lie but a 
 prayer. 
 
 Considering, then, in conclusion, the various 
 and marvellous gifts displayed for the first time on 
 our stage by the great poet, the great dramatist, 
 the strong and subtle searcher of hearts, the just 
 and merciful judge and painter of human passions, 
 who gave this tragedy to the new-born literature 
 of our drama ; taking into account the really 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 141 
 
 wonderful skill,' the absoluteness of intuition and 
 inspiration, with which every stroke is put in that 
 touches off character or tones down effect, even in 
 the, sketching and grouping of such minor figures 
 as the ruffianly hireling Black Will, the passionate 
 artist without pity or conscience,' and above all 
 the "unimitated, inimitable" study of Michael, in 
 whom even physical fear becomes tragic, and 
 cowardice itself no ludicrous infirmity but rather a 
 terrible passion ; I cannot but finally take heart to 
 say, even in the absence of all external or tra- 
 ditional testimony, that it seems to me not pardon- 
 able merely nor permissible, but simply logical and 
 reasonable, to set down this poem, a young man's 
 work on the face of it, as the possible work of ho 
 man's youthful hand but Shakespeare's. 
 
 No similar question is raised, no parallel pro- 
 blem stated, in the case of any one other among the 
 plays now or ever ascribed on grounds more or less 
 
 ' I do not know or remember in the whole radiant range of 
 Elizabethan drama more than one parallel tribute to that paid in 
 this play by an English poet to the yet foreign art of painting, 
 through the eloquent mouth of this enthusiastic villain of genius, 
 whom we might regard as a more genuinely Titianic sort of Wain- 
 wright. The parallel passage is that most lovely and fervid of all 
 imaginative panegyrics on this art, extracted by Lamb from the co- 
 medy ol Doctor DodipoU ; which saw the light or twilight of publi- 
 cation just eight years later than Arden of Feversliam, 
 
142 A Study of Shakespem^e. 
 
 dubious to that same indubitable hand. This 
 hand I do not recognise even in the Yorkshire 
 Tragedy, full as it is to overflowing of fierce animal 
 power, and hot as with the furious breath of some 
 caged wild beast. Heywood, who as the most 
 realistic and in some sense prosaic dramatist of his 
 time has been credited (though but in a modestly 
 tentative and suggestive fashion) with its author- 
 ship, was as incapable of writing it as Chapman of 
 writing the Shakespearean parts of The Two Noble 
 Kinsmen or Fletcher of writing the scenes of Wol- 
 sey's fall and Katherine's death in King Henry VIII. 
 To the only editor of Shakespeare responsible for 
 the two earlier of the three suggestions here set 
 aside, they may be forgiven on the score of insuffi- 
 cient scholarship and want of critical training ; but 
 on what ground the third suggestion can be excused 
 in the case of men who should have a better right 
 than most others to speak with some show of 
 authority on a point of higher criticism, I must 
 confess myself utterly at a loss to imagine. In the 
 Yorkshire Tragedy the submissive devotion of its 
 miserable heroine to her maddened husband is 
 merely doglike, — though not even, in the exquisitely 
 true and tender phrase of our sovereign poetess, 
 " most passionately patient." There is no likeness in 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 143 
 
 this poor trampled figure to " one of Shakespeare's 
 women " : Griselda was no ideal of his. To find its 
 parallel in the dramatic literature of the great age, 
 we must look to lesser great men than Shakespeare. 
 Ben Jonson, a too exclusively masculine poet, will 
 give us a couple of companion figures for her — or 
 one such figure at least ; for the wife of Fitzdottrel, 
 submissive as she is even to the verge of undignified 
 if not indecorous absurdity, is less of a human 
 spaniel than the wife of Corvino. Another such is 
 Robert Davenport's Abstemia, so warmly admired 
 by Washington Irving; another is the heroine of that 
 singularly powerful and humorous tragicomedy, 
 labelled How to Choose a Good Wife from a Bad, 
 which in its central situation anticipates that of 
 Leigh Hunt's beloved and lovely Legend of 
 Florence ; while Decker has revived, in one of our 
 sweetest and most graceful examples of dramatic 
 romance, the original incarnation of that somewhat 
 pitiful ideal which even in a ruder and more 
 Russian century of painful European progress out 
 of night and winter could only be made credible, 
 acceptable, or endurable, by the yet unequalled 
 genius of Chaucer and Boccaccio. 
 
 For concentrated might and overwhelming 
 weight of realism, this lurid little play beats A 
 
144 -^ Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 Warning for Fair Women {2ivc\y out of the field. 
 It is and must always be (I had nearly said, thank 
 heaven) unsurpassable for pure potency of horror ; 
 and the breathless heat of the action, its raging 
 rate of speed, leaves actually no breathing-time for 
 disgust ; it consumes our very sense of repulsion as 
 with fire. But such power as this, though a rare 
 and a great gift, is not the right quality for a 
 dramatist ; it is not the fit property of a poet. 
 Ford and Webster, even Tourneur and Marston,who 
 have all been more or less wrongfully though more 
 or less plausibly attacked on the score of excess in 
 horror, have none of them left us anything so 
 nakedly terrible, so terribly naked as this. Passion 
 is here not merely stripped to the skin but stripped 
 to the bones. I cannot tell who could and I cannot 
 guess who would have written it. " 'Tis a very 
 excellent piece of work " ; may we never exactly 
 look upon its like again ! 
 
 I thought it at one time far from impossible, if 
 not very nearly probable, that the author of Arden 
 of Fevcrsham might be one with the author of the 
 famous additional scenes to The Spanish Tragedy,. 
 and that either both of these " pieces of work " or 
 neither must be Shakespeare's. I still adhere to 
 Coleridge's verdict, which indeed must be that of 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 145 
 
 all judges capable of passing any sentence worthier 
 of record than are 
 
 Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle 
 For girls of nine : 
 
 to the effect that those magnificent passages, well- 
 nigh overcharged at every point with passion and 
 subtlety, sincerity and instinct of pathetic truth, are 
 no less like Shakespeare's work than unlike Jon- 
 son's: thoughhardly perhaps more unlike the typical 
 manner of his adult and matured style than is the 
 general tone of The Case is Altered, his one surviv- 
 ing comedy of that earlier period in which we know 
 from Henslowe that the stout-hearted and long 
 struggling young playwright went through so much 
 theatrical hackwork and piecework in the same 
 rough harness with other now more or less notable 
 workmen then drudging under the manager's dull 
 narrow sidelong eye for bare bread and bare 
 shelter. But this unlikeness, great as it is and 
 serious and singular, between his former ancf his 
 latter style in high comedy, gives no warrant for us 
 to believe him capable of so immeasurable a trans- 
 formation in tragic style and so indescribaDie a 
 decadence in tragic power as would be implied in 
 a descent from the "fine madness" of "old Jero- 
 nymo " to the flat sanity and smoke-dried sobriety 
 
 L 
 
T 4*5 A Shidy of Shakespeare. 
 
 of Catiline and Sejanus. — ^I cannot but think, too, 
 that Lamb's first hypothetical ascription of these 
 wonderful scenes to Webster, so much the most 
 Shakespearean in gait and port and accent of all 
 Shakespeare's liege men-at-arms, was due to a far 
 happier and more trustworthy instinct than led 
 him in later years to liken them rather to "the 
 overflowing griefs and talking distraction of Titus 
 Andronicus." 
 
 We have wandered it may be somewhat out 
 of the right time into a far other province of 
 poetry than the golden land of Shakespeare's 
 ripest harvest-fields of humour. And now, before 
 we may enter the " flowery square " made by the 
 summer growth of his four greatest works in pure 
 and perfect comedy " beneath a broad and equal- 
 blowing wind" of all happiest and most fragrant 
 imagination, we have but one field to cross, one 
 brook to ford, that hardly can be thought to keep 
 us olit of Paradise. In the garden-plot on whose 
 wicket is inscribed All's Well that. Ends Well, we 
 are hardly distant from Eden itself 
 
 About a young dove's flutter from a wood. 
 
 The ninth story of the third day of the Deca- 
 meron is one of the few subjects chosen by Shake- 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 147 
 
 speare — as so many were taken by Fletcher — 
 which are less fit, we may venture to think, for 
 dramatic than for narrative treatment. He has 
 here again shown all possible delicacy of instinct 
 in handling a matter which unluckily it was not 
 possible to handle on the stage with absolute and 
 positive delicacy of feeling or expression. Dr. 
 Johnson — in my humble opinion, with some justice ; 
 though his verdict has been disputed on the score 
 of undeserved austerity — " could not reconcile his 
 heart to Bertram " ; and I, unworthy as I may be to 
 second or support on' the score of morality the find- 
 ing of so great a moralist, cannot reconcile my 
 instincts to Helena. Parolles is even better than 
 Bobadil, as Bobadil is even better than Bessus ; 
 and Lafeu is one of the very best old men in all 
 the range of comic art. But the whole charm and 
 beauty of the play, the quality which raises it to 
 the rank of its fellows by making it loveable as well 
 as admirable, we find only in the " sweet, serene, 
 skylike " sanctity and attraction of adorable old age, 
 made more than ever near and dear to us in the 
 incomparable figure of the old Countess of Rous- 
 sillon. At the close of the play, Fletcher would 
 inevitably have married her to Lafeu— or rather, 
 possibly, to the King. 
 
148 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 At the entrance of the heavenly quadrilateral, 
 or under the rising dawn of the four fixed stars 
 which compose our Northern Cross among the 
 constellations of dramatic romance hung high in 
 the highest air of poetry, we may well pause for 
 very dread of our own delight, lest unawares we 
 break into mere babble of childish rapture and 
 infantile thanksgiving for such light vouchsafed 
 even to our " settentrional vedovo sito " that even 
 at their first dawn out of the depths 
 
 Goder pareva il ciel di lor fiammelle. 
 
 Beyond these again we see a second group arising, 
 the supreme starry trinity of the Wintej''s Tale, 
 the Tempest, and Cyniheline : and beyond these the 
 divine darkness of everlasting and all-maternal 
 night. These seven lamps of the romantic drama 
 have in them — if I may strain the similitude a 
 little further yet — more of lyric light than could 
 fitly be lent to feed the fire or the sunshine of the 
 worlds of pure tragedy or comedy. There is more 
 play, more vibration as it were, in the splendours of 
 their spheres. Only in the heaven of Shakespeare's 
 making can we pass and repass at pleasure from 
 the sunny to the stormy lights, from the glory of 
 Cymhcline to the glory of Othello. 
 
A Study of Shakespeare, 1 49 
 
 In this first group of four — wholly differing on 
 that point from the later constellation of three 
 — there is but very seldom, not more than once or 
 twice at most, a shooting or passing gleam of any- 
 thing more lurid or less lovely than " a light of 
 laughing flowers." There is but just enough of 
 evil or even of passion admitted into their sweet 
 spheres of life to proclaim them living: and all 
 that does find entrance is so tempered by the 
 radiance of the rest that we retain but softened and 
 lightened recollections even of Shylock and Don 
 John when we think of the Merchant of Venice and 
 Much Ado about Nothing ; we hardly feel m As 
 You Like It the presence or the existence of 
 Oliver and Duke Frederick ; and in Twelfth Night, 
 for all its name of the midwinter, we find nothing 
 to remember that might jar with the loveliness of 
 love and the summer light of life. 
 
 No astronomer can ever tell which if any one 
 among these four may be to the others as a sun ; for 
 in this special tract of heaven " one star differeth " 
 not " from another star in glory." From each and all 
 of them, even " while this muddy vesture of decay 
 doth grossly close [us] in," we cannot but hear the 
 harmony of a single immortal soul 
 
 Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins. 
 
150 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 m 
 
 The coincidence of the divine passage in which 
 I have for once permitted myself the freedom of 
 altering for quotation's sake one little word, with 
 a noble excerpt given by Hallam from the Latin 
 prose writings of Campanella, may recall to us with 
 a doubly appropriate sense of harmonious fitness 
 the subtly beautiful image of Mr. Tennyson ; — 
 
 Star to star vibrates light : may soul to soul 
 Strike thro' a finer element of her own ? 
 
 Surely, if ever she may, such a flash might we 
 fancy to have passed from the spirit of the most 
 glorious martyr and poet to the spirit of the most 
 glorious poet and aiiist upon the face of the earth 
 together. Even to Shakespeare any association of 
 his name with Campanella's, as even to Campanella 
 any association of his name with Shakespeare's, 
 cannot but be an additional ray of honour : and 
 how high is the claim of the divine philosopher to 
 share with the godlike dramatist their common and 
 crowning name of poet, all Englishmen at least may 
 now perceive by study of Campanella's sonnets in 
 the noble and exquisite version of Mr. Symonds ; to 
 whom among other kindred debts we owe no higher 
 obligation than is due to him as the giver of these 
 poems to the inmost heart of all among his countiy- 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 151 
 
 men whose hearts are worthy to hold and to hoard 
 up such treasure. 
 
 Where nothing at once new and true can be 
 said, it is always best to say nothing ; as it is in 
 this case to refrain from all reiteration of rhapsody 
 which must have been somewhat " mouldy ere " any 
 living man's " grandsires had nails on their toes," if 
 not at that yet remoter date " when King Pepin 6f 
 France was a little boy " and " Queen Guinever of 
 Britain was a little wench." In the Merchant of 
 Venice, at all events, there is hardly a single char- 
 acter from Portia to old Gobbo, a single incident 
 from the exaction of Shylock's bond to the compu - 
 tation of hairs in Launcelot's .beard and Dobbin's 
 tail, which has not been more plentifully beprosed 
 than ever Rosalind was berhymed. Much wordy 
 wind has also been wasted on comparison of Shake- 
 speare's Jew with Marlowe's ; that is, of a living 
 subject for terror and pity with a mere mouthpiece 
 for the utterance of poetry as magnificent as any 
 but the best of Shakespeare's. 
 
 Nor can it well be worth any man's while to say 
 or to hear for the thousandth time that As You 
 Like It would be one of those works which prove, 
 as Landor said long since, the falsehood of the stale 
 axiom that no work of man's can be perfect, werei 
 
152 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 it not for that one unlucky slip of the brush which 
 has left so ugly a little smeur in one corner of the 
 canvas as the betrothal of Oliver to Celia ; though, 
 with all reverence for a great name and a noble 
 memory, I can hardly think that matters were much 
 mended in George Sand's adaptation of the play 
 by the transference of her hand to Jaques. Once 
 elsewhere, or twice only at the most, is any 
 such other sacrifice of moral beauty or spiritual 
 harmony to the necessities and traditions of the 
 stage discernible in all the world-wide work of 
 Shakespeare. In the one case it is unhappily 
 undeniable ; no man's conscience, no conceivable 
 sense of right and wrong, but must more or less 
 feel as did Coleridge's the double violence done 
 it in the upshot of Measure for Measure. Even in 
 the much more nearly spotless work which we have 
 next to glance at, some readers have perhaps not 
 unreasonably found a similar objection to the final 
 good fortune of such a pitiful fellow as Count 
 Claudio. It will be observed that in each case the 
 sacrifice is made to comedy. The actual or hypo- 
 thetical necessity of pairing off all the couples after 
 such a fashion as to secure a nominally happy and 
 undeniably matrimonial ending is the theatrical 
 idol whose tyranny exacts this holocaust of higher 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 153 
 
 and better feelings than the mere liquorish desire 
 to leave the board of fancy with a palatable morsel 
 of cheap sugar on the tongue. 
 
 If it is proverbially impossible to determine by 
 selection the greatest work of Shakespeare, it is 
 easy enough to decide on the date and the name of 
 his most perfect comic masterpiece. For absolute 
 power of composition, for faultless balance and 
 blameless rectitude of design, there is unquestion- 
 ably no creation of his hand that will bear com- 
 parison with Muck Ado About Nothing. The ulti- 
 mate marriage of Hero and Claudio, on which I 
 have already remarked as in itself a doubtfully 
 desirable consummation, makes no flaw in the dra- 
 matic perfection of a piece which could not other- 
 wise have been wound up at all. This was its one in- 
 evitable conclusion, if the action were not- to come to 
 a tragic end ; and a tragic end would here have been 
 as painfully and as grossly out of place as is any but 
 a tragic end to the action of Measure for Measure, 
 As for Beatrice, she is as perfect a lady, though of 
 afar different age and breeding, as Celim^ne or Milla- 
 mant ; and a decidedly more perfect woman than 
 could properly or permissibly have trod the stage 
 of Congreve or Moliere. She would have disar- 
 ranged all the dramatic proprieties and harmonies 
 
154 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 of the one great school of pure comedy. The good 
 fierce outbreak of her high true heart in two swift 
 words — " Kill Claudio " ' — would have fluttered the 
 dovecotes of fashionable drama to some purpose. 
 But Alceste would have taken her to his own. 
 
 No quainter and apter example was ever given 
 of many men's absolute inability to see the plainest 
 aims, to learn the simplest rudiments, to appreciate 
 the most practical requisites of art, whether applied 
 to theatrical action or to any other as evident as 
 exalted aim, than the instance afforded by that 
 criticism of time past which sagaciously remarked 
 that " any less amusingly absurd " constables than 
 Dogberry and Verges would have filled their parts 
 in the action of the play equally well. Our own 
 day has doubtless brought forth critics and students 
 of else unparalleled capacity for the task of laying 
 wind-eggs in mare's nests, and wasting all the 
 warmth of their brains and tongues in the hopeful 
 endeavour to hatch them : but so fine a specimen 
 was never dropped yet as this of the plumed or 
 
 • I remember to have somewhere at some time fallen in with 
 some remark by some commentator to some such effect as this : that 
 it would be somewhat difficult to excuse the unwomanly violence of 
 this demand. Doubtless it would. And doubtless it would be 
 somewhat more than difficult to extenuate the unmaidenly indelicacy 
 of Jeanne Dare. 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 155 
 
 plumeless biped who discovered that if Dogberry- 
 had not been Dogberry and Verges had not been 
 Verges they would have been equally unsuccessful 
 in their honest attempt to warn Leonato betimes of 
 the plot against his daughter's honour. The only 
 explanation of the mistake is this ; and it is one 
 of which the force will be intelligible only to those 
 \yho are acquainted with the very singular physio- 
 logy of that remarkably prolific animal known to 
 critical science as the Shakespearean scholiast : that 
 if Dogberry had been other than Dogberry, or if 
 Verges had been other than Verges, the action and 
 catastrophe of the whole play could never have 
 taken place at all. 
 
 All true Pantagruelians will always, or at least 
 as long as may be permitted by the Society for 
 the Suppression of Vice, cherish with an especial 
 regard the comedy in which Shakespeare also has 
 shown himself as surely the loving as he would 
 surely have been the beloved disciple of that 
 insuppressible divine, the immortal and most 
 reverend vicar of Meudon. Two only among the 
 mighty men who lived and wrote and died within 
 the century which gave birth to Shakespeare were 
 found worthy of so great an honour at his hands as 
 the double homage of citation and imitation : and 
 
156 A Sttidy of Shakespeai'e. 
 
 these two, naturally and properly enough, were 
 Francois Rabelais and- Christopher Marlowe. We 
 cannot but recognise on what far travels in what 
 good company " Feste the jester " had but lately 
 been, on that night of "very gracious fooling" 
 when he was pleased to enlighten the unforgetful 
 mind of Sir Andrew as to the history of Pigrogro- 
 mitus, and of the Vapians passing the equinoctial of 
 Queubus. At what precise degree of latitude and 
 longitude between the blessed islands of Medamothy 
 and Papimania this equinoctial may intersect the 
 Sporades of the outer ocean, is a problem on the 
 solution of which the energy of those many 
 modern sons of Aguecheek who have undertaken 
 the task of writing about and about the text and 
 the history of Shakespeare might be expended with 
 an unusually reasonable hope and expectation of 
 arriving at an exceptionally profitable end. 
 
 Even apart from their sunny identity of spirit 
 and bright sweet brotherhood of style, the two 
 comedies of Twelfth Night and As You Like It 
 would stand forth confessed as the common off- 
 spring of the same spiritual period by force and by 
 right of the trace or badge they proudly and pro- 
 fessedly bear in common, as of a recent touch from 
 the ripe and rich and radiant influence of Rabelais. 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 157 
 
 No better and no fuller vindication of his happy 
 memory could be aiiforded than by the evident fact 
 that the two comedies which bear the imprint of 
 his sign-manual are among all Shakespeare's works 
 as signally remarkable for the cleanliness as for 
 the richness of their humour. Here is the right 
 royal seal of Pantagruel, clean-cut and clearly 
 stamped, and. unincrusted with any flake of dirt 
 from the dubious finger of Panurge. In the comic 
 parts of those plays in which the humour is rank 
 and flagrant that exhales from the lips of Lucio, of 
 Boult, or of Thersites, there is no trace or glimpse 
 of Rabelais. From him Shakespeare has learnt 
 ^othing and borrowed nothing that was not wise 
 and good and sweet and clean and pure. All the 
 more honour, undoubtedly, to Shakespeare, that he 
 would borrow nothing else : but assuredly, also, all 
 the more honour to Rabelais, that he had enough 
 of this to lend. 
 
 It is less creditable to England than honourable 
 to France that a Frenchman should have been the 
 first of Shakespearean students to discover and to 
 prove that the great triad of his Roman plays is 
 not a consecutive work of the same epoch. Until 
 the appearance of Frangois-Victor Hugo's incom- 
 parable translation, with its elaborate and admirable 
 
158 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 commentary, it seems to have been the universal 
 and certainly a most natural habit of English 
 criticism to take the three as they usually 
 appear together, in the order of historical chro- 
 nology, and by tacit implication to assume that 
 they were composed in such order. I should 
 take some shame to myself but that I feel more 
 of grateful pride than of natural shame in the 
 avowal that I at all events owe the first revela- 
 tion of the truth now so clear and apparent 
 in this matter, to the son of the common lord and 
 master of all poets born in his age — be they liege 
 subjects as loyal as myself or as contumacious 
 as I grieve to find one at least of my elders and 
 betters, whenever I perceive — as too often I 
 cannot choose but perceive — that the voice is the 
 voice of Arnold, but the hand is the hand of 
 Sainte-Beuve. 
 
 To the honoured and lamented son of our 
 beloved and glorious Master, whom neither I nor 
 any better man can ever praise and thank and 
 glorify enough, belongs all the credit of discerning 
 for himself and discovering for us all the truth that 
 Julius Caesar is at all points equally like the 
 greatest works of Shakespeare's middle period and 
 unlike the works of his last. It is in the main a 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. ' 159 
 
 play belonging to the same order as Km^;- Henry 
 /K / but it differs from our English Henriade — as 
 remarkably unlike Voltaire's as Zaire is unlike 
 Othello — not more by the absence of Falstaff than 
 by the presence of Brutus. Here at least Shake- 
 speare has made full amends, if not to all modern 
 democrats, yet assuredly to all historical republi- 
 cans, for any possible or apparent preference of 
 royal to popular traditions. Whatever manner of 
 man may have been the actual Roman, our Shake, 
 spearean Brutus is undoubtedly the very noblest 
 figure of a typical and ideal republican in all the 
 literature of the world. "A democracy such as 
 yours in America is my abhorrence," wrote Landor 
 once to an impudent and foul-mouthed Yankee 
 philosophaster (this word, permissible or not, but 
 certainly convenient, is none of mine, but belongs 
 to the late Mr. Kingsley), who had intruded himself 
 on that great man's privacy in order to have the 
 privilege of afterwards informing the readers of 
 a pitiful pamphlet on England that Landor had 
 " pestered him with Southey " ; an impertinence, I 
 may add, which Mr. Landor at once rebuked with 
 the sharpest contempt and chastised with the 
 haughtiest courtesy. But, the old friend and 
 lifelong champion of Kossuth went on to say, his 
 
i6o A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 feelings were far different towards a republic ; and 
 if on the one point, then not less certainly on the 
 other, we may be assured that his convictions and 
 his prepossessions would have been shared by the 
 author of Coriolanus and Julius Ccesar. 
 "^ Having now come perforce to the inevitable 
 verge of Hamlet, I hasten to declare that I can 
 advance no pretension to compete with the claim of 
 that " literary man " who became immortal by dint 
 of one dinner with a bishop, and in right of that 
 last glass poured out for him in sign of amity by 
 " Sylvester Blougram, styled in partibus Episcopus, 
 necnon the deuce knows what." I do not propose to 
 prove my perception of any point in the character 
 of Hamlet " unseized by the Germans yet." I can 
 only determine, as the Church Catechism was long 
 since wont to bid me, " to keep my hands from pick- 
 ing and stealing, and my tongue '' not only " from 
 evil-speaking, lying, and slandering " — though this 
 itself is a form of abstinence not universally or 
 even commonly practised among the rampant rout 
 of rival commentators — but also, now as ever 
 throughout this study, from all conscious repetition 
 of what others have said before me. 
 
 In Hamlet, as it seems to me, we set foot as it 
 were on the bridge between the middle and the 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. i6i 
 
 final period of Shakespeare. That priceless waif 
 of piratical salvage which we owe to the happy 
 rapacity of a hungry publisher is of course more 
 accurately definable as the first play of Hamlet 
 than as the first edition of the play. And this 
 first Hamlet, on the whole, belongs altogether 
 to the middle period. The deeper complexities 
 of the subject are merely indicated. Simple 
 and trenchant outlines of character are yet to be 
 supplanted by features of subtler suggestion and 
 infinite interfusion. Hamlet himself is almost 
 more of a satirist than a philosopher : Asper and 
 Macilente, Felice and Malevole, the grim studies 
 after Hamlet unconsciously or consciously taken by 
 Jonson and Marston, may pass as wellnigh pass- 
 able imitations, with an inevitable streak of carica- 
 ture in them, of the first Hamlet ; they would have 
 been at once puerile and ghastly travesties of the 
 second. The Queen, whose finished figure is now 
 something of a riddle, stands out simply enough 
 in the first sketch as confidant of Horatio if not as 
 accomplice of Hamlet. There is not more differ- 
 ence between the sweet quiet flow of those plain 
 verses which open the original play within the 
 play and the stiff sonorous tramp of their substi- 
 tutes, full-charged with heavy classic artillery of 
 
 M 
 
1 62 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 Phoebus and Neptune and Tellus and Hymen, 
 than there is between the straightforward agents 
 of their own destiny whom we meet in the first 
 Hamlet and the obHquely moving patients who 
 veer sideways to their doom in the second. 
 
 This minor transformation of style in the inner 
 play, made solely with the evident view of mark- 
 ing the distinction between its duly artificial forms 
 of speech and the duly natural forms of speech 
 passing between the spectators, is but one among 
 innumerable indications which only a purblind 
 perversity of prepossession can overlook of the 
 especial store set by Shakespeare himself on this 
 favourite work, and the exceptional pains taken by 
 him to preserve it for aftertime in such' fullness of 
 finished form as might make it worthiest of pro- 
 found and perpetual study by the light of far other 
 lamps than illuminate ' the stage. Of all vulgar 
 errors the most wanton, the most wilful, and the 
 most resolutely tenacious of life, is that belief 
 bequeathed from the days of Pope, in which it 
 was pardonable, to the days of Mr. Carlyle, in 
 which it is not excusable, to the effect that Shake- 
 speare threw off Hamlet as an eagle may moult a 
 feather or a fool may break a jest ; "that he 
 dropped his work as a bird may drop an &g^ 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 1 6 
 
 o 
 
 or a sophist a fallacy ; that he wrote " for gain, not 
 glory," or that having written Hamlet he thought 
 it nothing very wonderful to have written. For 
 himself to have written, he possibly, nay , pro- 
 bably, did not think it anything miraculous ; 
 but that he was in the fullest degree conscious of 
 its wonderful positive worth to all men for all time, 
 we have the best evidence possible — his own; and 
 that not by mere word of mouth but by actual 
 stroke of hand. Ben Jonson inight shout aloud 
 over his own work on a public stage, " By God 'tis 
 good," and so for all its real goodness and his real 
 greatness make sure that both the workman and his 
 work should be less unnaturally than unreasonably 
 laughed at ; Shakespeare knew a better way of 
 showing confidence in himself, but he showed not 
 a whit less confidence. Scene by scene, line for 
 line, stroke upon stroke and touch after touch, he 
 went over all the old laboured ground again ; and 
 not to ensure success in his own day and fill his 
 pockets with contemporary pence, but merely and 
 wholly with a purpose to make it worthy of him- 
 self and his future students. Pence and praise 
 enough it had evidently brought him in from the 
 first. No more palpable proof of this can be de- 
 sired than the instantaneous attacks on it, the jeers, 
 
164 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 howls, hoots and hisses of which a careful ear may 
 catch some far faint echo even yet; the fearful 
 and furtive yelp from beneath of the masked and 
 writhing poeticule, the shrill reverberation all 
 around it of plagiarism and parody. Not one 
 single alteration in the whole play can possibly 
 have been made with a view to stage effect or to 
 present popularity and profit ; or we must suppose 
 that Shakespeare, however great as a man, was 
 naturally even greater as a fool. There is a class 
 of mortals to whom this inference is always grate- 
 ful — to whom the fond belief that every great 
 man must needs be a great fool would seem 
 always to afford real comfort and support : happy, 
 in Prior's phrase, could their inverted rule prove 
 every great fool to be a great man. Every change 
 in the text of Hamlet has impaired its fitness for 
 the stage and increased its value for the closet in 
 exact and perfect proportion. Now, this is not a 
 matter of opinion — of Mr. Pope's opinion or Mr. 
 Carlyle's ; it is a matter of fact and evidence. 
 Even in Shakespeare's time the actors threw out 
 his additions ; they throw out these very same 
 additions in our own. The one especial speech, 
 if any one such especial speech there be, in which 
 the personal genius of Shakespeare soars up to the 
 
A StiLciy of Shakespeare. 165 
 
 very highest of its height and strikes down to the 
 very deepest of its depth, is passed over by 
 modern actors ; it was cut away by Hemings and 
 Condell. We may almost assume it as certain 
 that no boards have ever echoed — at least, more 
 than once or twice — to the supreme soliloquy of 
 Hamlet. Those words which combine the noblest 
 pleading ever profifered for the rights of human 
 reason with the loftiest vindication ever uttered of 
 those rights, no mortal ear within our knowledge 
 has ever heard spoken on the stage. A convoca- 
 tion even of all priests could not have been more 
 unhesitatingly unanimous in its rejection than 
 seems to have been the hereditary verdict of all 
 actors. It could hardly have been found worthier 
 of theological than it has been found of theatrical 
 condenination. Yet, beyond all question, magnifi- 
 cent as is that monologue on suicide and doubt 
 which has passed from a proverb into a byword, it 
 is actually eclipsed and distanced at once on philo- 
 sophic and on poetical grounds by the later soli- 
 loquy on reason and resolution. 
 
 That Shakespeare was in the genuine sense — 
 that is, in the best and highest and widest meaning 
 of the term — a free thinker, this otherwise practi- 
 cally and avowedly superfluous effusion of all inmost 
 
1 66 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 thought appears to me to supply full and sufficient 
 evidence for the conviction of every candid and 
 rational man. To that loftiest and most righteous 
 title which any just and. reasoning soul can ever 
 deserve to claim, the greatest save one of all poetic 
 thinkers has thus made good his right for ever. 
 
 I trust it will be taken as no breach of my past 
 pledge to abstain from all intrusion on the sacred 
 ground of Gigadibs and the Germans, if I venture 
 'to indicate a touch inserted by Shakespeare for no 
 other perceptible or conceivable purpose than to 
 obviate by anticipation the indomitable and ineradi- 
 cable fallacy of criticism which would find the key- 
 note of Hamlet's character in the quality of irresolu- 
 tion. I may observe at once that the misconcep- 
 tion involved in such a reading of the riddle ought 
 to have been evident even without this episodical 
 stroke bf illustration. In any case it should be 
 plain to any reader that the signal characteristic of 
 Hamlet's inmost nature is by no means irresolution 
 or hesitation or any form of weakness, but rather 
 the strong conflux of contending forces. That dur- 
 ing four whole acts Hamlet cannot or does not 
 make up his mind to any direct and deliberate 
 action against his uncle is true enough ; true, 
 also, we may say, that Hamlet had somewhat 
 
A Shidy of Shakespeare. 167 
 
 more of mind than another man to make up, and 
 might properly want somewhat more time than 
 might another man to do it in ; but not, I venture 
 to say in spite of Goethe, through innate inade- 
 quacy to his task and unconquerable weakness of 
 the will ; not, I venture to think in spite of Hugo, 
 through immedicable scepticism of the spirit and 
 irremediable propensity to nebulous intellectual 
 refinement. One practical point in the action of 
 the play precludes us from accepting so ready a 
 solution of the riddle as is suggested either by the 
 simple theory of half-heartedness or by the simple 
 hypothesis of doubt. There is absolutely no other 
 reason, we might say there was no other excuse, 
 for the introduction or intrusion of an else super- 
 fluous episode into a play which was already, and 
 which remains even after all possible excisions, one 
 of the longest plays on record. The compulsory 
 expedition of Hamlet to England, his discovery by 
 the way of the plot laid against his life, his inter- 
 ception of the King's letter and his forgery of a 
 substitute for it against the lives of the King's 
 agqnts, the ensuing adventure of the sea-fight, with 
 Hamlet's daring act of hot-headed personal intre- 
 pidity, his capture and subsequent release on terms 
 giving no less patent proof of his cool-headed and 
 
1 68 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 ready-witted courage and resource than the attack 
 had afforded of his physically impulsive and even 
 impetuous hardihood — all this serves no purpose 
 whatever but that of exhibiting the instant and 
 almost unscrupulous resolution of Hamlet's cha- 
 racter in time of practical need. But for all that 
 he or Hamlet has got by it, Shakespeare might too 
 evidently have spared his pains ; and for all this 
 voice as of one crying in a wilderness, Hamlet will 
 too surely remain to the majority of students, not 
 less than to all actors and all editors and all critics, 
 the standing type and embodied emblem of irresolu- 
 tion, half-heartedness, and doubt. 
 
 That Hamlet should seem at times to accept 
 for himself, and even to enforce by reiteration of 
 argument upon his conscience and his reason, some 
 such conviction or suspicion as to his own character, 
 tells much rather in disfavour than in favour of its 
 truth. A man whose natural temptation was to 
 swerve, whose inborn inclination was to shrink and 
 skulk aside from duty and from action, would 
 hardly be the first and last person to suspect his own 
 weakness, the one only unbiassed judge and witness 
 of sufficiently sharp-sighted candour and accuracy 
 to estimate aright his poverty of nature and the 
 malformation of his mind. But the high-hearted 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 169 
 
 and tender-conscienced Hamlet, with his native bias 
 towards introspection intensified and inflamed and 
 directed and dilated at once by one imperative 
 pressure and oppression of unavoidable and un- 
 alterable circumstance, was assuredly and exactly 
 the one only man to be troubled by any momentary 
 fear that such might indeed be the solution of his 
 riddle, and to feel or to fancy for the moment 
 some kind of ease and relief in the sense of that 
 very trouble. A born doubter would have doubted 
 even of Horatio ; hardly can all positive and almost 
 palpable evidence of underhand instigation and 
 inspired good intentions induce Hamlet for some 
 time to doubt even of Ophelia. 
 
170 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 III. 
 
 The entrance to the third period of Shakespeare 
 is like the entrance to that lost and lesser Paradise 
 of old, 
 
 With dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms. 
 
 Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Antony, Timon, 
 these are names indeed of something more than 
 tragic purport. Only in the sunnier distance be- 
 yond, where the sunset of Shakespeare's imagi- 
 nation seems to melt or flow back into the sunrise, 
 do we discern Prospero beside Miranda, Florizel 
 by Perdita, Palamon with Arcite, the same 
 knightly and kindly Duke Theseus as of old ; and 
 above them all, and all others of his divine and 
 human children, the crowning and final and in- 
 effable figure of Imogen. 
 
 Of all Shakespeare's plays. King Lear is un- 
 questionably that in which he has come nearest to 
 the height and to the likeness of the one tragic 
 poet on any side greater than himself whom the 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 171 
 
 world in all its ages has ever seen born of time. 
 It is by far the most ^schylean of his works ; the 
 most elemental and primaeval, the most oceanic 
 and Titanic in conception. He deals here with no 
 subtleties as in Hamlet, with no conventions as in 
 Othello: there is no question of " a divided duty " or 
 a problem half insoluble, a matter of country and 
 connection, of family or of race; we look upward 
 and downward, and in vain, into the deepest things 
 of nature, into the highest things of providence ; to 
 the roots of life, and to the stars ; from the roots 
 that no God waters to the stars which give no man 
 light ; over a world full of death and life without 
 resting-place or guidance. 
 
 But in one main point it differs radically from 
 the work and the spirit of ^schylus. Its fatalism 
 is of a darker and harder nature. To Prometheus 
 the fetters of the lord and enemy of mankind were 
 bitter ; upon Orestes the hand of heaven was laid 
 too heavily to bear ; yet in the not utterly infinite 
 or everlasting distance we see beyond them the 
 promise of the morning on which mystery and 
 justice shall be made one ; when righteousness and 
 omnipotence at last shall kiss each other. But on, 
 the horizon of Shakespeare's tragic fatalism we see. 
 no such twilight of atonement, such pledge of re-r 
 
1/2 A Shidy of Shakespeare. 
 
 conciliation as this. Requital, redemption, amends, 
 equity, explanation, pity and mercy, are words 
 without a meaning here. 
 
 As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods ; 
 They kill us for their sport. 
 
 Here is no need of the Eumenides, children of 
 Night everlasting ; for here is very Night herself. 
 
 The words just cited are not casual or episo- 
 dical ; they strike the keynote of the whole poem, 
 lay the keystone of the whole arch of thought. 
 There is no contest of conflicting forces, no judg- 
 ment so much as by casting of lots : far less is 
 there any light of heavenly harmony or of 
 heavenly wisdom, of Apollo or Athene from above. 
 We have heard much and often from theologians 
 of the light of revelation : and some such thing 
 indeed we find in .^Eschylus : but the darkness of 
 revelation is here^ 
 
 For in this the most terrible work of human 
 genius it is with the very springs and sources of 
 nature that her student has set himself to deal. 
 The veil of the temple of our humanity is rent in 
 twain. Nature herself, we might say, is revealed — 
 and revealed as unnatural. In face of such a world 
 as this a man might be forgiven who should pray 
 that chaos might come again. Nowhere else in 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 173 
 
 Shakespeare's work or in the universe of jarring 
 lives are the lines of character and event so broadly 
 drawn or so sharply cut. Only the supreme self- 
 command of this one poet could so mould and 
 handle such types as to restrain and prevent their 
 passing from the abnormal into the monstrous : 
 yet even as much as this, at least in all cases but 
 one, it surely has accomplished. In Regan alone 
 would it be, I think, impossible to find a touch or 
 trace of anything less vile than it was devilish. 
 Even Goneril has her one splendid hour, her fire- 
 flaught of hellish glory ; when she treads under foot 
 the half-hearted goodness, the wordy and windy 
 though sincere abhorrence, which is all that the 
 mild and impotent revolt of Albany can bring to 
 bear against her imperious and dauntless devilhood ; 
 when she flaunts before the eyes of her "milk- 
 livered " and " moral fool " the coming banners of 
 France about the " plumed helm " of his slayer. 
 
 On the other side, Kent is the exception which 
 answers to Regan on this. Cordelia, the brotherless 
 Antigone of our stage, has one passing touch of 
 intolerance for what her sister was afterwards to 
 brand as indiscretion and dotage in their father, 
 which redeems her from the charge of perfection. 
 Like Imogen, she is net too inhumanly divine for 
 
174 A Study of Shakespeare.- 
 
 the sense of divine irritation. Godlike though they 
 be, their very godhead is human and feminine ; and 
 only therefore credible, and only therefore ador- 
 able. Cloten and Regan, Goneril and lachimo, 
 have power to stir and embitter the sweetness of 
 their blood. But for the contrast and even the 
 contact of antagonists as abominable as these, 
 the gold of their spirit would be too refined, the 
 lily of their holiness too radiant, the violet of 
 their virtue too sweet. As it is, Shakespeare has 
 gone down perforce among the blackest and the 
 basest things of nature to find anything so equally 
 exceptional in evil as properly to counterbalance and 
 make bearable the excellence and extremity of their 
 goodness. No otherwise could either angel have 
 escaped the blame implied in the very attribute and 
 epithet of blameless. But where the possible depth 
 of human hell is so foul and unfathomable as it 
 appears in the spirits which serve as foils to these, 
 we may endure that in them the inner height of 
 heaven should be no less immaculate and im- 
 measurable, 
 
 It should be a truism wellnigh as musty as 
 Hamlet's half cited proverb, to enlarge upon the 
 evidence given in Kwg Leaj- of a sympathy with 
 the mass of social misery more wide and deep and 
 
A Study of Sliakespearc. 175 
 
 direct and bitter and tender than Shakespeare has 
 shown elsewhere. But as even to this day and 
 even in respectable quarters the murmur is not 
 quite duly extinct which would charge on Shake- 
 speare a certain share of divine indifference to 
 suffering, of godlike satisfaction and a less than 
 compassionate content, it is not yet perhaps utterly 
 superfluous to insist on the utter fallacy and falsity 
 of their creed who whether in praise or in blame 
 would rank him to his credit or discredit among 
 such poets as on this side at least may be classed 
 rather with Goethe than with Shelley and with 
 Gautier than with Hugo. A poet of revolution he 
 is not, as none of his country in that generation 
 could have been : but as surely as the author of 
 Julius Ccesar has approved himself in the best and 
 highest sense of the word at least potentially a 
 republican, so surely has the author of King Lear 
 avowed himself in the only good and rational sense 
 of the words a spiritual if not a political democrat 
 and socialist. 
 
 It is only, I think, in this most tragic of tra- 
 gedies that the sovereign lord and incarnate god of 
 pity and terror can be said to have struck with all 
 his strength a chord of which the resonance could 
 excite such angr>' agony and heartbreak of wrath as 
 
176 A Sttcdy of Shakespeare. 
 
 that of the brother kings when they smote their 
 staffs against the ground in fierce imperious anguish 
 of agonised and rebellious compassion, at the ora- 
 cular cry of Calchas for the innocent blood of 
 Iphigenia. The doom even of Desdemona seems 
 as much less morally intolerable as it is more 
 logically inevitable than the doom of Cordelia. 
 But doubtless the fatalism of Othello is as much 
 darker and harder than that of any third among 
 the plays of Shakespeare, as it is less dark and hard 
 than the fatalism of King Lear. For upon the head 
 of the very noblest man whom even omnipotence 
 or Shakespeare could ever call to life he has laid a 
 burden in one sense yet heavier than the burden of 
 Lear, insomuch as the sufferer can with somewhat 
 less confidence of universal appeal proclaim himself 
 a man more sinned against than sinning. 
 
 And yet, if ever man after Lear might lift up 
 his voice in that protest, it would assuredly be none 
 other than Othello. He is in all the prosperous 
 days of his labour and his triumph so utterly and 
 wholly nobler than the self-centred and wayward 
 king, that the capture of his soul and body in the 
 unimaginable snare of lago seems a yet blinder and 
 more unrighteous blow 
 
 Struck by the envious wrath of man or God 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. I'j'j 
 
 than ever fell on the old white head of that child- 
 changed father. But at least he is destroyed by the 
 stroke of a mightier hand than theirs who struck 
 down Lear. As surely as Othello is the noblest 
 man of man's making, lago is the most perfect evil- 
 doer, the most potent demi-devil. It is of course 
 the merest commonplace to say as much, and would 
 be no less a waste of speech to add the half com- 
 fortable reflection that it is in any case no shatne 
 to fall by such a hand. But this subtlest and 
 strangest work of Shakespeare's admits and requires 
 some closer than common scrutiny. Coleridge has 
 admirably described the first great soliloquy which 
 opens to us the pit of hell within as " the motive- 
 hunting of a motiveless malignity." But subtle and 
 profound and just as is this definitive appreciation, 
 there is more in the matter yet than even this. It 
 is not only that lago, so to speak, half tries to make 
 himself half believe that Othello has wronged him, 
 and that the thought of it gnaws him inly like a 
 poisonous mineral : though this also be true, it is not 
 half the truth — nor half that half again. Malig- 
 nant as he is, the very subtlest and strongest com- 
 ponent of his complex nature is not even malignity. 
 It is the instinct of what Mr. Carlyle would call an 
 inarticulate poet. In his immortal study on the 
 
 N 
 
178 A Study of Sliakespeare. 
 
 affair of the diamond necklace, the most profound 
 and potent humourist of his country in his century 
 has unwittingly touched on the mainspring of lago's 
 character — " the very pulse of the machine." He 
 describes his Circe de la Mothe-Valois as a prac- 
 tical dramatic poet or playwright at least in lieu 
 of play-writer : while indicating how and wherefore, 
 with all her constructive skill and rhythmic art in 
 action, such genius as hers so differs from the genius 
 of Shakespeare that she undeniably could not have 
 written a Hamlet. Neither could lago have written 
 an Othello. (From this theorem, by the way, a 
 reasoner or a casuist benighted enough to prefer 
 articulate poets to inarticulate, Shakespeare to 
 Cromwell, a fair Vittoria Colonna to a " foul Circe- 
 Megaera," and even such a strategist as Homer to 
 such a strategist as Frederic-William, would not illo- 
 gically draw such conclusions or infer such corol- 
 laries as might result in opinions hardly consonant 
 with the Teutonic-Titanic evangel of the preacher 
 who supplied him with his thesis.) " But what he 
 can do, that he will " : and if it be better to make a 
 tragedy than to write one, to act a poem than to sing 
 it, we must allow to lago a station in the hierarchy of 
 poets very far in advance of his creator's. None of 
 the great inarticulate may more justly claim place 
 
A Stitdy of Shakespeare, 179 
 
 and precedence. With all his poetic gift, he has no 
 poetic weakness. Almost any creator but his would 
 have given him some grain of spite or some spark 
 of lust after Desdemona. To Shakespeare's lago 
 she is no more than is a rhyme to another and arti- 
 culate poet.' His stanza must at any rate and at 
 all costs be polished : to borrow the metaphor used 
 by Mr. Carlyle in apologetic illustration of a royal 
 hero's peculiar system of levying recruits for his 
 colossal brigade. He has within him a sense or 
 conscience of power incomparable : and this power 
 shall not be left, in Hamlet's phrase, " to fust in him 
 unused." A genuine and thorough capacity for 
 human lust or hate would diminish and degrade the 
 supremacy of his evil. He is almost as far above 
 or beyond vice as he Is beneath or beyond virtue. 
 And this it is that makes him impregnable and in- 
 vulnerable. When once he has said it, we know as 
 
 ' What would at least be partly lust in another man is all but 
 purely hatred in lago. 
 
 Now I do love her too : 
 Not out of absolute lust, (though, peradventure, 
 I stand accountant for as great a sin) 
 But partly led to diet my revenge. 
 
 For " partly " read " wholly," and for " peradventure " read "as- 
 suredly, " and the incarnate father of lies, made manifest in the flesh, 
 here speaks all but all the truth for once, to himself alone. 
 
 N 2 
 
1 8o A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 well as he that thenceforth he never will speak 
 word. We could smile almost as we can see him 
 to have smiled at Gratiano's most ignorant and 
 empty threat, being well assured that torments will 
 in no wise ope his lips : that as surely and as 
 truthfully as ever did the tortured philosopher before 
 him, he might have told his tormentors that they 
 did but bruise the coating, batter the crust, or break 
 the shell of lago. Could we imagine a far other lost 
 spirit than Farinata degli Uberti's endowed with 
 Farinata's might of will, and transferred from the 
 sepulchres of fire to the dykes of Malebolge, we 
 might conceive something of lago's attitude in hell 
 ^of his unalterable and indomitable posture for all 
 eternity. As though it were possible and necessary 
 that in some one point the extremities of all con- 
 ceivable good and of all imaginable evil should 
 meet and mix together in a new "marriage of 
 heaven and hell," the action in passion of the most 
 devilish among all the human damned could hardly 
 be other than that of the most godlike among all 
 divine saviours — the figure of lago than a reflec- 
 tion by hell-fire of the figure of Prometheus. 
 
 Between lago and Othello the position of 
 Desdemona is precisely that defined with such 
 quaint sublimity of fancy in the old English by- 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 i»i 
 
 word — " between the devil and the deep sea." Deep 
 and pure and strong and adorable always and terri- 
 ble and pitiless on occasion as the sea is the great 
 soul of the glorious hero to whom she has given 
 herself ; and what likeness of man's enemy from 
 Satan down to Mephistopheles could be matched 
 for danger and for dread against the good bluff 
 soldierly trustworthy figure of honest lago ? The 
 rough license of his tongue at once takes warrant 
 from his good soldiership and again gives warrant 
 for his honesty: so that in a double sense it does 
 him yeoman's service, and that twice told. It is 
 pitifully ludicrous to see him staged to the show 
 like a member — and a very inefiScient member — of 
 the secret police. But it would seem impossible 
 for actors to understand that he is not a would-be 
 detective, an aspirant for the honours of a Vidocq, 
 a candidate for the laurels of a Vautrin : that he is 
 no less than Lepidus, or than Antony's horse, " a 
 tried and valiant soldier." It is perhaps natural 
 that the two deepest and subtlest of all Shake- 
 speare's ihtellectual studies in good and evil should 
 be the two most painfully misused and misunder- 
 stood alike by his commentators and his fellows 
 of the stage : it is certainly undeniable that no 
 third figure of his creation has ever been on both 
 
1 82 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 sides as persistently misconceived and misrepre- 
 sented with such desperate pertinacity as Hamlet 
 and lago. 
 
 And it is only when lago is justly appreciated 
 that we can justly appreciate either Othello or 
 Desdemona. This again should surely be no 
 more than the truism that it sounds ; but practi- 
 cally it would seem to be no less than an adven- 
 turous and audacious paradox. Remove or deform 
 or diminish or modify the dominant features of the 
 destroyer, and we have but the eternal and vulgar 
 figures of jealousy and innocence, newly vamped 
 and veneered and padded and patched up for the 
 stalest purposes of puppetry. As it is, when 
 Coleridge asks " which do we pity the most" at the 
 fall of the curtain, we can surely answer, Othello. 
 Noble as are the " most blessed conditions" of " the 
 gentle Desdemona," he is yet the nobler of the 
 two ; and has suffered more in one single pang 
 than she could suffer in life or in death. 
 
 But if Othello be the most pathetic. King Lear 
 the most terrible, Hamlet the subtlest and deepest 
 work of Shakespeare, the highest in abrupt and 
 steep simplicity of epic tragedy is Macbeth. There 
 needs no ghost come from the grave, any reader 
 may too probably remark, to tell us this. But in 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 183 
 
 the present generation such novelties have been 
 unearthed regarding Shakespeare that the reasser- 
 tion of an old truth may seem to have upon it some 
 glittering reflection from the brazen brightness of 
 a brand-new lie. Have not certain wise men of 
 the east of England— Cantabrigian Magi, led by 
 the star of their goddess Mathesis (" mad Mathesis," 
 as a daring poet was once ill-advised enough to 
 dub her doubtful deity in defiance of scansion 
 rather than of truth) — have they not detected in 
 the very heart of this tragedy the " paddling palms 
 and pinching fingers " of Thomas Middleton ? 
 
 To the simpler eyes of less learned Thebans 
 than these — Thebes, by the way, was Dryden's 
 irreverent name for Cambridge, the nursing mother 
 of "his green unknowing youth," when that "rene- 
 gade " was I'ecreant enough to compliment Oxford 
 at her expense as the chosen Athens of " his riper 
 age" — the likelihood is only too evident that the 
 sole text we possess of Macbeth has not been 
 interpolated but mutilated. In their version of 
 Othello, remarkably enough, the "player-editors," 
 contrary to their wont, have added to the treasure- 
 house of their text one of the most precious jewels 
 that ever the prodigal afterthought of a great poet 
 bestowed upon the rapture of his readers. Some- 
 
184 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 of these, by way of thanksgiving, have complained 
 with a touch of petulance that it was out of place 
 and superfluous in the setting : nay, that it was 
 incongruous with all the circumstances — out of tone 
 and out of harmony and out of keeping with 
 character and tune and time. In other lips indeed 
 than Othello's, at the crowning minute of culminant 
 agony, the rush of imaginative reminiscence which • 
 brings back upon his eyes and ears the lightning- 
 foam and tideless thunder of the Pontic sea might 
 seem a thing less natural than sublime. But 
 Othello has the passion of a poet closed in as it 
 were and shut up behind the passion of a hero. 
 For all his practical readiness of martial eye and 
 ruling hand in action, he is also in his season " of 
 imagination all compact." Therefore it is that in 
 the face and teeth of all devils akin to lago that 
 hell could send forth to hiss at her election, we feel 
 and recognise the spotless exaltation, the sublime 
 and sunbright purity, of Desdemona's inevitable 
 and invulnerable love. When once we likewise 
 have seen Othello's visage in his mind, we see too 
 how much more of greatness is in this mind than in 
 another hero's. For such an one, even a boy may 
 well think how thankfully and joyfully he would lay 
 down his life. Other friends we have of Shake- 
 
A Shidy of Shakespeare. 185 
 
 speare's giving whom we love deeply and well, if 
 hardly with such love as could weep for him all 
 the tears of the body and all the blood of the 
 heart : but there is none we love like Othello. 
 
 I must part from his presence again for a sea- 
 son, and return to my topic in the text of Macbeth. 
 That it is piteously rent and ragged and clipped 
 and garbled in some of its earlier scenes, the rough 
 construction and the poltfoot metre, lame sense 
 and limping verse, each maimed and mangled subject 
 of players' and printers' most treasonable tyranny 
 contending as it were to seem harsher than the 
 other, combine in this contention to bear indispu- 
 table and intolerable witness. Only where the 
 witches are, and one more potent and more terrible 
 than all witches and all devils at their beck, can we 
 be sure that such traitors have not robbed us of 
 one touch from Shakespeare's hand. The second 
 scene of the play at least bears marks of such 
 handling as the brutal Shakespearean Hector's 
 of the "mangled Myrmidons"; it is too visibly 
 " noseless, handless, hacked and chipped " as it 
 comes to us, crying on Hemings and Condell. 
 And it is in this unlucky scene that unkindly criti- 
 cism has not unsuccessfully sought for the gravest 
 faults of language and manner to be found in 
 
1 86 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 Shakespeare. For certainly it cannot be cleared 
 from the charge of a style stiffened and swollen 
 with clumsy braid and crabbed bombast. But 
 against the weird sisters, and her who sits above 
 them and apart, more awful than Hecate's very 
 self, no mangling hand has been stretched forth ; 
 no blight of mistranslation by perversion has fallen 
 upon the words which interpret and expound the 
 hidden things of their evil will. 
 
 To one tragedy as to one comedy of Shake-" 
 speare's, the casual or the natural i«iion of especial 
 popularity with especial simplicity in selection and 
 in treatment of character makes it as superfluous 
 as it would be difficult to attempt any application 
 of analytical criticism. There is nothing in them 
 of a nature so compound or so complex as to call 
 for solution or resolution into its primal elements. 
 ' Here there is some genuine ground for the gener- 
 ally baseless and delusive opinion of self-compla- 
 cent sciolism that he who runs may' read Shake- 
 speare. These two plays it is hardly worth while 
 to point out by name : all probable readers will 
 know them at once for Macbeth and As You Like 
 It. There can hardly be a single point of incident 
 or of, character on which the youngest reader will 
 not find himself at' one with the oldest, the dullest 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 187 
 
 with the brightest among the scholars of Shake- 
 speare. It would be an equal waste of working 
 hours or of playtime if any of these should devote 
 any part of either a whole-schoolday or a holiday to 
 remark or to rhapsody on the character of Macbeth 
 or of Orlando, of Rosalind or of Lady Macbeth. 
 He that runs, let him read : and he that has ears, 
 let him hear. 
 
 I cannot but think that enough at least of time 
 has been spent if not wasted by able and even by 
 eminent men om. examination of Coriolamis with 
 regard to its political aspect or bearing upon social 
 questions. It is from first to last, for all its tur- 
 moil of battle and clamour of contentious factions, 
 rather a private and domestic than a public or 
 historical tragedy. As in Julius Casar the family 
 had been so wholly subordinated to the state, and 
 all personal interests so utterly dominated by the 
 preponderance of national duties, that even the 
 sweet and sublime figure of Portia passing in her 
 " awful loveliness " was but as a profile half caught 
 in the background of an episode, so here on the 
 contrary the whole force of the final impression is 
 not that of a conflict between patrician and ple- 
 beian, but solely that of a match of passions 
 played out for life and death between a mother 
 
1 8 8 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 and a son. The partisans of oligarchic or demo- 
 cratic systems may wrangle at their will over the 
 supposed evidences of Shakespeare's prejudice 
 against this creed and prepossession in favour of 
 that : a third bystander may rejoice in the proof 
 thus established of his impartial indifference to- 
 Vi'ards either : it is all nothing to the real point 
 in hand. The subject of the whole play is not the 
 exile's revolt, the rebel's repentance, or the traitor's 
 reward, but above all it is the son's tragedy. The 
 inscription on the plinth of this tragic statue is 
 simply to Volumnia Victrix. 
 
 A loftier or a more perfect piece of man's work 
 was never done in all the world than this tragedy 
 of Coriolanus : the one fit and crowning epithet 
 for its companion or successor is that bestowed by 
 Coleridge — "the most wonderful." It would seem 
 a sign or birthmark of only the greatest among 
 poets that they should be sure to rise instantly 
 for awhile above the very highest of their native 
 height at the touch of a thought of Cleopatra. 
 So was it, as we all know, with William Shake- 
 speare : so is it, as we all see, with Victor Hugo. 
 As we feel in the marvellous and matchless verses 
 of Zim-Zizimi all the splendour and fragrance 
 and miracle of her mere bodily presence, so from 
 
A Study, of Shakespeare, i86 
 
 her first imperial dawn on the stage of Shake- 
 speare to the setting of that eastern star behind a 
 pall of undissolving cloud we feel the charm and 
 the terror and the mystery of her absolute and 
 royal soul. Byron wrote once to Moore, with how 
 much truth or sincerity those may guess who 
 would care to know, that his friend's first " con- 
 founded book" of thin prurient jingle ("we call it 
 a mellisonant tingle-tangle," as Randolph's mock 
 Oberon says of a stolen sheep-bell) had been 
 the first cause of all his erratic or erotic frailties : 
 it is not impossible that spirits of another sort may 
 remember that to their own innocent infantine 
 perceptions the first obscure electric revelation of 
 what Blake calls " the Eternal Female " was given 
 through a blind wondering thrill of childish rap- 
 ture by a lightning on the baby dawn of their 
 senses and their soul from the sunrise of Shake- 
 speare's Cleopatra. 
 
 Never has he given such proof of his incom- 
 parable instinct for abstinence from the wrong 
 thing as well as achievement of the right. He has 
 utterly rejected and disdained all occasion of set- 
 ting her off by means of any lesser foil than all 
 the glory of the world with all its empires. And 
 
I go A Study of Shakespeatc. 
 
 we need not Antony's example to show us that 
 these are less than straws in the balance. 
 
 Entre elle et I'univers qui s'offraient a la fols 
 II hesita, lachant le monde dans son choix. 
 
 Even as that Roman grasp relaxed and let fall 
 the world, so has Shakespeare's self let go for 
 awhile his greater world of imagination, with all 
 its all but infinite variety of life and thought and 
 action, for love of that more infinite variety which 
 custom could not stale. Himself a second and a 
 yet more fortunate Antony, he has once more laid 
 a world, and a world more wonderful than ever, 
 at her feet. He has put aside for her sake all 
 other forms and figures of womanhood ; he, father 
 or creator of Rosalind, of Cordelia, of Desdemona, 
 and of Imogen, he too, like the sun-god and sender 
 of all song, has anchored his eyes on her whom 
 " Phcebus' amorous pinches " could not leave 
 " black," nor " wrinkled deep in time " ; on that 
 incarnate and imperishable "spirit of sense," to 
 whom at the veiy last 
 
 The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch, 
 That hurts, and is desired. 
 
 To him, as to the dying husband of Octavia, 
 this creature of his own hand might have boasted 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 191 
 
 herself that the loveliest and purest among all her 
 sisters of his begetting, 
 
 with her modest eyes 
 And still conclusipn, shall acquire no honour, 
 Demurring upon me. 
 
 To sum up, Shakespeare has elsewhere given us in 
 ideal incarnation the perfect mother, the perfect 
 wife, the perfect daughter, the perfect mistress, or 
 the perfect maiden : here only once for all he has 
 given us the perfect and the everlasting woman. 
 
 And what a world of great men and great 
 things, " high actions and high passions," is this that 
 he has spread und^r her for a footcloth or hung 
 behind her for a curtain ! The descendant of that 
 other his ancestral Alcides, late offshoot of the 
 god whom he loved and who so long was loth to 
 leave him, is here as in history the visible one man 
 revealed who could grapple for a second with very 
 Rome and seem to throw it, more lightly than he 
 could cope with Cleopatra. And not the Roman 
 Landor himself could see or make us see more 
 clearly than has his fellow provincial of Warwick- 
 shire that first imperial nephew of her great first 
 paramour, who was to his actual uncle even such a 
 foil and counterfeit and perverse and prosperous 
 parody as the son of Hortense Beauharnais of Saint- 
 
192 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 Leu to the son of Letizia Buonaparte of Ajaccio. 
 For Shakespeare too, like Landor, had watched his 
 " sweet Octavius " smilingly and frowningly " draw 
 under nose the knuckle of forefinger " as he looked 
 out upon the trail of innocent blood after the 
 bright receding figure of his brave young kinsman. 
 The fair-faced false " present God " of his poetic 
 parasites, the smooth triumphant patron and pre- 
 server with the heart of ice and iron, smiles before 
 us to the very life. It is of no account now to re- 
 member that 
 
 he at Philippi kept 
 His sword even like a dancer : 
 
 for the sword of Antony that struck for him is in 
 the renegade hand of Dercetas. 
 
 I have said nothing of Enobarbus or of Eros, 
 the fugitive once ruined by his flight and again 
 redeemed by the death-agony of his dark and 
 doomed repentance, or the freedman transfigured 
 by a death more fair than freedom through the 
 glory of the greatness of his faith : for who can 
 speak of all things or of half that are in Shake- 
 speare ? And who can speak worthily of any.' 
 
 I am come now to that strange part of a task 
 too high for me, where I must needs speak not 
 only (as may indeed well be) unworthily, but also 
 (as may well seem) unlovingly, "of Some certain 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 193 
 
 portions in the mature and authentic work of 
 Shakespeare. "Though it be honest, it is never 
 good " to do so : yet here I cannot choose but 
 speak plainly after my own poor conscience, and 
 risk all chances of chastisement as fearful as any 
 once threatened for her too faithful messenger by 
 the heart-stricken wrath of Cleopatra. 
 
 In the greater part of this third period, taking 
 a swift and general view of it for contrast or com- 
 parison of qualities with the second, we constantly 
 find beauty and melody transfigured into harmony 
 and sublimity ; an exchange unquestionably for the 
 better : but in certain stages, or only perhaps in a 
 single stage of it, we frequently find humour and 
 reality supplanted by realism and obscenity ; an 
 exchange undeniably for the worse. The note of 
 his earliest comic style was often a boyish or a 
 birdlike wantonness, very capable of such liberties 
 and levities as those of Lesbia's sparrow with the 
 lip or bosom of his mistress ; as notably in the 
 parts of Boyet and Mercutio : and indeed there is 
 a bright vein of mere wordy wilfulness running 
 throughout the golden youth of the two plays 
 which connects Lovers Labouf's Lost with Romeo 
 and Juliet as by a thread of floss silk not always 
 " most excellently ravelled," nor often unspotted or 
 
 O 
 
194 ^ Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 -unentangled. In the second period this gaiety 
 was replaced by the utmost frankness and fullness 
 • of humour, as a boy's merry madness by the witty 
 wisdom of a man : but now for a time it would 
 seem as if the good comic qualities of either period 
 were displaced and ousted by mere coarseness and 
 crudity like that of a hard harsh photograph. This 
 ultra-Circean transformation of spirit and brutifica- 
 tion of speech we do not find in the lighter inter- 
 ludes of great and perfect tragedy : for the porter 
 in Macbeth makes hardly an exception worth 
 naming. It is when we come upon the singular 
 little group of two or three plays not accurately 
 definable at all but roughly describable as tragi- 
 comedies, or more properly in two cases at least as 
 tragedies docked of their natural end, curtailed of 
 the due catastrophe — it is then that we find for the 
 rswift sad bright lightnings of laughter from the 
 lips of the sweet and bitter fool whose timeless dis- 
 appearance from the stage of King Lear seems for 
 once a sure sign of inexplicable weariness or for- 
 getfulness on Shakespeare's part, so nauseous and 
 so sorry a substitute as the fetid fun and rancid 
 ribaldry of Pandarus and Thersites. I must have 
 leave to say that the coincidence of these two in 
 the scheme of a single play is a thing hardly bear- 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 195 
 
 able by men who object to too strong a savour of 
 those too truly " Eternal Cesspools " over which the 
 first of living humourists holds as it were for ever 
 an everlasting nose — or rather, in one sense, does 
 not hold but expand it for the fuller inhalation of 
 their too congenial fumes with an apparent relish 
 which will always seem the most deplorable to 
 those who the most gratefully and reasonably 
 admire that high heroic genius, for love of which 
 the wiser sort of men must finally forgive all the 
 noisy aberrations of his misanthropy and philo- 
 bulgary, anti-Gallican and Russolatrous insanities 
 of perverse and morbid eloquence. 
 
 The three detached or misclassified plays of 
 Shakespeare in which alone a reverent and reason- 
 able critic might perhaps find something rationally 
 and really exceptionable have also this far other 
 quality in common, that in them as in his topmost 
 tragedies of the same period either the exaltation 
 of his eloquence touches the very highest point of 
 expressible poetry, or his power of speculation 
 alternately sounds the gulfs and scales the sum- 
 mits of all imaginable thought. In all three of 
 them the power of passionate and imaginative 
 eloquence is not only equal in spirit or essence but 
 identical in figure or in form : in those two of them 
 
196 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 which deal almost as much with speculative in- 
 telligence as with poetic action and passion, the 
 tones and methods, types and objects of thought, 
 are also not equal only but identical. An all but 
 absolute brotherhood in thought and style and 
 tone and feeling unites the quasi-tragedy of Troilus 
 and Cressida with what in the lamentable default 
 of as apt a phrase in English I must call by its 
 proper designation in French the tragMie manqiih 
 of Measure for Measure. In the simply romantic 
 fragment of the Shakespearean Pericles, where there 
 was no call and no place for the poetry of specula- 
 tive or philosophic intelligence, there is the same 
 positive and unmistakable identity of imaginative 
 and passionate style. 
 
 I cannot but conjecture that the habitual 
 students of Shakespeare's printed plays must have 
 felt startled as by something of a shock when the 
 same year exposed for the expenditure of their six- 
 pences two reasonably correct editions of a play 
 unknown to the boards in the likeness of Troilus 
 and Cressida, side by side or cheek by jowl with 
 a most unreasonably and unconscionably incorrect 
 issue of a much older stage favourite, now newly 
 beautified and fortified, in Pericles Prince of Tyre. 
 Hitherto, ever since the appearance of his first poem. 
 
A Study of Shakespeare, 197 
 
 and its instant acceptance by all classes from courtiers 
 to cburtesans under a soriiewhat dubious and two- 
 headed form of popular success, — ' vrai succes de 
 scandale s'il en fut ' — even the potent influence and 
 unequivocal example of Rabelais had never once 
 even in passing or in seeming affected or infected the 
 progressive and triumphal genius of Shakespeare 
 with a taint or touch of anything offensive to healthier 
 and cleanlier organs of perception than such as may 
 belong to a genuine or a pretending Puritan. But on 
 taking in his hand that one of these two new dramatic 
 pamphlets which might first attract him either by 
 its double novelty as a never acted play or by a title 
 of yet more poetic and romantic associations than 
 its fellow's, such a purchaser as I have supposed, 
 with his mind full of the sweet rich fresh humour 
 which he would feel a right to expect from Shake- 
 speare, could hardly have undergone less than a 
 qualm or a pang of strong disrelish and distaste on 
 finding one of the two leading comic figures of the 
 play break in upon it at his entrance not even with 
 " a fool-born jest," but with full-mouthed and foul- 
 mouthed effusion of such rank and rancorous per- 
 sonalities as might properly pollute the lips even 
 of some emulous descendant or antiquarian re- 
 incarnation of Thersites, on application or even 
 
igS A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 apprehension of a whip cracked in passing over 
 the assembled heads of a pseudocritical and mock- 
 historic society. In either case we moderns at 
 least might haply desire the intervention of a 
 beadle's hand as heavy and a sceptral cudgel as 
 knotty as ever the son of Laertes applied to the 
 shoulders of the first of the type or the tribe of 
 Thersites. For this brutal and brutish buffoon — 
 I am speaking of Shakespeare's Thersites— has no 
 touch of humour in all his currish composition : 
 Shakespeare had none as nature has none to spare 
 for such dirty dogs as those of his kind or genera- 
 tion. There is not even what Coleridge with such 
 exquisite happiness defined as being the quint- 
 essential property of Swift — " aninia Rabclasii habi- 
 tans in sicca — the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry 
 place." It is the fallen soul of Swift himself at its 
 lowest, dwelling in a. place yet drier : the familiar 
 spirit or less than Socratic daemon of the Dean 
 informing the genius of Shakespeare. And thus 
 for awhile infected and possessed, the divine genius 
 had not power to re-inform and re-create the 
 dsmonic spirit by virtue of its own clear essence. 
 This wonderful play, one of the most admirable 
 among all the works of Shakespeare's immeasur- 
 able and unfathomable intelligence, as it must 
 
A Stitdy of Shakespeare. 199 
 
 always hold its.natural high place among the most 
 admired, will always in all probability be also, and 
 as naturally, the least beloved of all. It would be 
 as easy and as profitable a problem to solve the 
 Rabelaisian riddle of the bombinating chimtera 
 with its potential or hypothetical faculty of deriving 
 sustenance from a course of diet on second intentions, 
 as to read the riddle of Shakespeare's desigh in 
 the procreation of this yet more mysterious and 
 magnificent monster of a play. That on its pro- 
 duction in print it was formally announced as " a 
 new play never staled with the stage, never clapper- 
 clawed with the palms of the vulgar," we know ; 
 must we infer or may we suppose that therefore it 
 was not originally written for the stage "i Not all 
 plays were which even at that date appeared in 
 print : yet it would seem something more than 
 strange that one such play, written simply for the 
 study, should have been the extra-professional 
 work of Shakespeare : and yet again it would seem 
 stranger that he should have designed this prodi- 
 gious nondescript or portent of supreme genius for 
 the public stage : and strangest of all, if so, that 
 he should have so designed it in vain. Perhaps 
 after all a better than any German or Germanising 
 commentary on the subject would be the simple 
 
200 A Study of Shakespeare, 
 
 and summary ejaculation of Celia — "O wonder- 
 ful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful, and 
 yet again wonderful, and after that out of all 
 whooping ! " The perplexities of the whole matter 
 seem literally to crowd and thicken upon us 
 at every step. What ailed the man or any man 
 to write such a manner of dramatic poem at all ? 
 and having written, to keep it beside him or let 
 it out of his hands into stranger and more slip- 
 pery keeping, unacted and unprinted ? A German 
 will rush in with an answer where an Englishman 
 {non angelus sed Anglus) will naturally fear to 
 tread. 
 
 Alike in its most palpable perplexities and in 
 its most patent splendours, this political and philo- 
 sophic and poetic problem, this hybrid and hundred- 
 faced and hydra-headed prodigy, at once defies and 
 derides all definitive comment. This however we 
 may surely and confidently say of it, that of all 
 Shakespeare's offspring it is the one whose best 
 things lose least by extraction and separation from 
 their context. That some cynic had lately bitten 
 him by the brain — and possibly a cynic himself in 
 a nearly rabid stage of anthropophobia— we might 
 conclude as reasonably from consideration of the 
 whole as from examination of the parts more 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 20 r 
 
 especially and virulently affected : yet how much 
 is here also of hyper- Platonic subtlety and sub- 
 limity, of golden and Hyblaean eloquence above 
 the reach and beyond the snap of any cynic's 
 tooth ! Shakespeare, as under the guidance at once 
 for good and for evil of his alternate by Socratic and 
 Swiftian familiar, has set himself as if prepensely 
 and on purpose to brutalise the type of Achilles 
 and spiritualise the type of Ulysses. The former 
 is an enterprise never to be utterly forgiven by any 
 one who ever loved from the very birth of his boy- 
 hood the very name of the son of the sea-goddess : 
 in the glorious words of Mr. Browning's young 
 first-born poem, 
 
 Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed, . 
 
 And bound [his] forehead with Proserpine's hair. 
 
 It is true, if that be any little compensation, that 
 Hector and Andromache fare here hardly better 
 than he : while of the momentary presentation of 
 Helen on the dirtier boards of a stage more miry 
 than the tub of Diogenes I would not if I could and 
 I must not though I would say so much as one 
 single proper word. The hysterics of the eponymous 
 hero and thie harlotries of the eponymous heroine 
 remove both alike beyond the outer pale of all 
 rational and manly, sympathy; though Shake- 
 
202 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 speare's self may never have exceeded or equalled 
 for subtle and accurate and bitter fidelity the study 
 here given of an utterly light woman, shallow and 
 loose and dissolute in the most literal sense, rather 
 than perverse or unkindly or unclean ; and though 
 Keats alone in his most perfect mood of lyric 
 passion and burning vision as full of fragrance as of 
 flame could have matched and all but overmatched 
 those passages in which the rapture of Ti'oilus 
 makes pale and humble by comparison the keenest 
 raptures of Romeo. 
 
 The relative disfavour in which the play of 
 Measure for Measure has doubtless been at all 
 times generally held is not in my opinion simply 
 explicable on the theory which of late years has been 
 so powerfully and plausibly advanced and advocated 
 on the highest poetic or judicial authority in France 
 or in the world, that in the land of many-coloured 
 cant and many-coated hypocrisy the type of Angelo 
 is something too much a prototype or an autotype 
 of the huge national vice of England. This com- 
 ment is in itself as surely just and true as it is inci- 
 sive and direct : but it will not cover by any man- 
 ner of means the whole question. The strong and 
 radical objection distinctly brought forward against 
 this play, and strenuously supported by the wisest 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 203 
 
 and the warmest devotee among all the worshippers 
 of Shakespeare, is not exactly this, that the Puritan 
 Angelo is exposed : it is that the Puritan Angelo 
 is unpunished. In the very words of Coleridge, it 
 is that by his pardon and his marriage " the strong 
 indignant claim of justice " is " baflEled." The ex- 
 pression is absolutely correct and apt : justice is 
 not merely evaded or ignored or even defied : she 
 is both in the older and the newer sense of the 
 word directly and deliberately baffled ; buffeted, 
 outraged, insulted, struck in the face. We are left 
 hungry and thirsty after having been made to thirst 
 and hunger for some wholesome single grain at 
 least, of righteous and too long retarded retribution: 
 we are tricked out of our dole, defeated of our due, 
 lured and led on to look for some equitable and 
 satisfying upshot, defrauded and derided and sent 
 empty away. 
 
 That this play is in its very inmost essence a 
 tragedy, and that no sleight of hand or force of hand 
 could give it even a tolerable show of coherence or 
 consistency when clipped and docked of its pi'oper 
 and rightful end, the mere tone of style prevalent 
 throughout all its better parts to the absolute ex- 
 clusion of any other would of itself most amply 
 suffice to show. Almost all that is here worthy of 
 
204 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 Shakespeare at any time is worthy of Shakespeare 
 at his highest : and of this every touch, every line, 
 every incident, every-syllable, belongs to pure and 
 simple tragedy. The evasion of a tragic end by 
 the invention and intromission of Mariana has 
 deserved and received high praise for its ingenuity : 
 but ingenious evasion of a natural and proper end 
 is usually the distinctive quality which denotes a 
 workman of a very much lower school than the school 
 of Shakespeare. In short and in fact, the whole 
 elaborate machinery by which the complete and 
 completely unsatisfactory result of the whole plot 
 is attained is so thoroughly worthy of such a con- 
 triver as " the old fantastical duke of dark corners " 
 as to be in a moral sense, if I dare say what I think, 
 very far from thoroughly worthy of the wisest and 
 mightiest mind that ever was informed with the 
 spirit or genius of creative poetry. 
 
 I have one more note to add in passing which 
 touches simply on a musical point in lyric verse ; 
 and from which I would therefore give any biped 
 who believes that ears " should be long to measure 
 Shakespeare " all timely warning to avert the length 
 of his own. A very singular question, and one to 
 me unaccountable except by a supposition which on 
 charitable grounds I should be loth to entertain for 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 205 
 
 a moment — namely, that such ears are commoner 
 than I would fain believe on heads externally or 
 ostensibly human, — has been raised with regard to 
 the first immortal song of Mariana in the moated 
 grange. This question is whether the second verse 
 appended by Fletcher to that divine Shakespearean 
 fragment may not haply have been written by the 
 author of the first. The visible and audible evidence 
 that it cannot is of a kind which must at once leap 
 into sight of all human eyes and conviction of all 
 human ears. The metre of Shakespeare's verse, as 
 written by Shakespeare, is not the metre of Flet- 
 cher's. It can only seem the same to those who 
 hear by finger and not by ear : a class now at all 
 events but too evidently numerous enough to refute 
 Sir Hugh's antiquated objection to the once ap- 
 parently tautologous phrase of Pistol.' 
 
 ' I add the proof in a footnote, so as to take up no more than a 
 small necessary space of my text with the establishment of a fact 
 which yet can seem insignificant to no mortal who has a human ear 
 for lyric song. Shakespeare's verse, as all the wide world knows, 
 ends thus : 
 
 But my kisses bring ^ain, 
 bring again, 
 Seals of love, but sealed in vain, 
 sealed in vain. 
 
 The echo has been dropped by Fletcher, who has thus achieved the 
 remarkable musical feat of turning a nightingale's note into a spar- 
 row's. The mutilation of Philomela by the hands of Tereus was a 
 
2o6 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 It is of course inexplicable, but it is equally of 
 course undeniable, that the mention of Shake- 
 speare's Pericles would seem immediately and in- 
 variably to recall to a virtuous critical public of nice 
 and nasty mind the prose portions of the fourth 
 act, the whole of the prose portions of the fourth 
 act, and nothing but the prose portions of the fourth 
 act. To readers and writers of books who readily 
 admit their ineligibility as members of a Society 
 for the Suppression of Shakespeare or Rabelais, of 
 Homer or the Bible, it will seem that the third and 
 fifth acts of this ill-fated and ill-famed play, and 
 with them the poetical parts of the fourth act, are 
 composed of metal incomparably more attractive. 
 
 jest compared to the mutilation of Shakespeare by the hands of 
 Fletcher : who thereby reduced the close of the first verse into agree- 
 ment if not into accordance with the close of his own. This ap- 
 pended verse, as all the world does not and need not know, ends 
 thus ■■ 
 
 But first set my poor heart free, 
 
 Bound in those icy chains by thee. 
 
 Even an earless owner of fingers enough to count on may by their 
 help convince himself of the difference in metre here. But not only 
 does the last line, with unsolicited and literally superfluous liberality, 
 offer us a syllable over measure ; the words are such as absolutely 
 to defy autiphonal repetition or reverberation of the three last in 
 either line. Let us therefore, like good scriptural scholars, accord- 
 ing equally to the letter and the spirit of the text, render unto 
 Fletcher the things which be Fletcher's, and unto Shakespeare the 
 things which be Shakespeare's. 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 207 
 
 But the virtuous critic, after the alleged nature of 
 the vulturine kind, would appear to have eyes and 
 ears and nose for nothing else. It is true that 
 somewhat more of humour, touched once and again 
 with subtler hints of deeper truth, is woven into 
 the too realistic weft of these too lifelike scenes than 
 into any of the corresponding parts in Measure for 
 Meastire or in Troilus and Cressida ; true also that 
 in the hands of imitators, in hands so much weaker 
 than Shakespeare's as were Heywood's or Daven- 
 port's (who transplanted this unlovely episode from 
 Pericles into a play of his own), these very scenes 
 or such as they reappear unredeemed by any such 
 relief in all the rank and rampant ugliness of their 
 raw repulsive realism : true, again, that Fletcher 
 has once equalled them in audacity, while stripping 
 off the nakedness of his subject the last ragged and 
 rude pretence at a moral purpose, and investing it 
 instead with his very brightest robe of gay parti- 
 coloured humour : but after all it remains equally 
 true that to senses less susceptible of attraction by 
 carrion than belong to the vultures of critical and 
 professional virtue they must always remain as they 
 have always been, something very considerably 
 more than unattractive. I at least for one must 
 confess myself insufficiently virtuous to have ever 
 
2o8 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 at any time for any moment felt towards them the 
 very slightest touch of any feeling more attractive 
 than repulsion. And herewith I hasten to wash 
 my hands of the only unattractive matter in the 
 only three of Shakespeare's plays which, offer any 
 such matter to the perceptions of any healthy- 
 minded and reasonable human creature. 
 
 But what now shall I say that may not be too 
 pitifully unworthy of the glories and the beauties, 
 the unsurpassable pathos and sublimity inwoven 
 with the imperial texture of this very play .' the 
 blood-red Tyrian purple of tragic maternal jealousy, 
 which might seem to array it in a worthy attire 
 of its Tyrian name ; the flower-soft loveliness of 
 maiden lamentation over the flower-strewn seaside 
 grave of Marina's old sea-tossed nurse, where I 
 am unvirtuous enough (as virtue goes among 
 moralists) to feel more at home and better at ease 
 than in the atmosphere of her later lodging in 
 Mitylene .' What, above all, shall be said of that 
 storm above all storms ever raised in poetry, which 
 ushered into a world of such wonders and strange 
 chances the daughter of the wave-worn and world- 
 wandering prince of Tyre.' Nothing but this 
 perhaps, that it stands — or rather let me say that 
 it blows and sounds and shines and rings and 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 209 
 
 thunders and lightens as far ahead of all others as 
 the burlesque sea-storm of Rabelais beyond all 
 possible storms of comedy. The recent compiler 
 of a most . admirably skilful and most delicately 
 invaluable compendium of Pantagruel or manual 
 by way of guidebook to Rabelais has but too 
 justly, taken note of the irrefragable evidence there 
 given that the one prose humourist who is to Aris- 
 tophanes as the human twin-star Castor to Pollux 
 the divine can never have practically weathered 
 an actual gale ; but if I may speak from a single 
 experience of one which a witness long inured to 
 Indian storm as well as Indian battle had never 
 seen matched out of the tropics if ever overmatched 
 within them, I should venture to say, were the poet 
 in question any other mortal man than Shake- 
 speare, to whom all things were better known by 
 instinct than ever they can be to others by experi- 
 ence, that the painter of the storm in Pericles must 
 have shared the adventure and relished the rapture 
 of such an hour. None other most assuredly than 
 himself alone could have mingled with, the material 
 passion of the elements such human passion of 
 pathos as thrills in such tenderly sublime under- 
 tone of an agony so nobly subdued through the 
 lament of Pericles over Thaisa. As in his opening 
 
 P 
 
2IO A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 speech of this scene we heard all the clangour and 
 resonance of warring wind and sea, so now we 
 hear a sound of sacred and spiritual music as 
 solemn as the central monochprd of the inner 
 main itself. 
 
 That the three last acts of Pericles, with the 
 possible if not over probable exception of the so- 
 called Chorus/ are wholly the work of Shakespeare 
 in the ripest fullness of his latter genius, is a posi- 
 tion which needs exactly as much proof as does his 
 single-handed authorship of Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, 
 and Othello. In the fifth act is a remarkable in- 
 stance of a thing remarkably rare with him ; the 
 .recast or repetition in an improved and reinvigo- 
 rated form of a beautiful image or passage occur- 
 ring in a previous play. The now only too famous 
 metaphor of " patience on a monument smiling at 
 grief" — too famous we might call it for its own 
 fame — is transfigured as from human beauty to 
 divine, in its transformation to the comparison of 
 Marina's look with that of " Patience gazing on 
 kings' graves, and smiling Extremity out of act." 
 
 ' It is worth remark that in a still older sample of an older and 
 ruder form of play than can have been the very earliest mould in 
 which the pristine or pre- Shakespearean model of Pericles was cast, 
 the part of Chorus here assigned to Gower was filled by a represen- 
 tative of his fellow -poet Lydgate. 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 211 
 
 A precisely similar parallel is one to which I have 
 referred elsewhere ; that between the two passages 
 respectively setting forth the reciprocal love of 
 Helena and Hermia, of Emilia and Flavina. The 
 change of style and spirit in either case of reitera- 
 tion is the change from a simpler to a sublimer 
 form of beauty. 
 
 In the two first acts of Pericles there are faint 
 and rare but evident and positive traces of a pass- 
 ,ing touch from the hasty hand of Shakespeare : 
 even here too we may say after Dido : — 
 
 Nee tam aversus equos Tyria sol jungit ab urbe. 
 
 It has been said that those most unmistakable verses 
 on " the blind mole " are not such as any man could 
 insert into another man's work, or slip in between 
 the lines of an inferior poet : and that they occur 
 naturally enough in a speech of no particular ex- 
 cellence. I take leave decisively to question the 
 former assertion, and flatly to contradict the latter. 
 The pathetic and magnificent lines in dispute do 
 not occur naturally enough, or at all naturally, 
 among the very poor, flat, creeping verses between 
 which they have been thrust with such over free- 
 handed recklessness. No purple patch was ever 
 more pitifully out of place. There is indeed no 
 second example of such wanton and wayward 
 
212 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 liberality ; but the generally lean and barren style 
 of these opening acts d9es not crawl throughout on 
 exactly the same low level. 
 
 The last of the only three plays with which I 
 venture to find any fault on the score of moral taste 
 is the first on my list of the only three plays belong- 
 ing to this last period on which, as they now stand, 
 I trace the indisputable track of another touch 
 than Shakespeare's. But in the two cases remain- 
 ing our general task of distinction should on the 
 whole be simple and easy enough for the veriest 
 babes and sucklings in the lower school of Shake- 
 speare. 
 
 That the two great posthumous fragments we 
 possess of Shakespeare's uncompleted work are 
 incomplete simply because the labour spent on 
 either was cut short by his timeless death is the 
 first natural assumption of any student with an eye 
 quick enough to catch the point where the traces 
 of his hand break off ; but I should now be inclined 
 to guess rather that on reconsideration of the 
 subjects chosen he had rejected or dismissed them 
 for a time at least as unfit for dramatic handling. 
 It could have needed no great expenditure of 
 reasoning or reflection to convince a man of lesser 
 mind and less experience than Shakespeare's that 
 
A Shidy of Shakespeare. 213 
 
 no subject could possibly be more unmanageable, 
 more indomitably improper for such a purpose, 
 than he had selected in Timon of Athens. How 
 he came ever to fall across such a subject, to hit 
 upon such a choice, we can spend no profitable 
 time or pains in trying to conjecture. It is clear, 
 however, that at all events there was a season 
 when the inexplicable attraction of it was too 
 strong for him to resist the singular temptation to 
 embody in palpable form, to array in dramatic 
 raiment, to invest with imaginative magnificence, 
 the godless ascetic passion of misanthropy, the 
 martyrdom of an atheistic Stylites. Timon is 
 doubtless a man of far nobler type than any 
 monomaniac of the tribe of Macarius : but his im- 
 measurable superiority in spiritual rank to the 
 hermit fathers of the desert serves merely to make 
 him a thought madder and a grain more miserable 
 than the whole Thebaid of Christomaniacs rolled 
 into one. Foolish and fruitless as it has ever been 
 to hunt through Shakespeare's plays and sonnets 
 on the false scent of a fantastic trail, to put.thau- 
 maturgic trust in a dark'dream of tracking his un- 
 traceable personality through labyrinthine byways 
 of life and visionary crossroads of character, it is 
 yet surely no blind assumption to accept the plain 
 
2 14 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 evidence in both so patent before us, that he too 
 like other men had his dark seasons of outer or of 
 inner life, and like other poets found them or made 
 them fruitful as well as bitter, though it might be 
 but of bitter fruit. And of such there is here' 
 enough to glut the gorge of all the monks in 
 monkery, or strengthen for a forty days' fast any 
 brutallest unwashed theomaniac of the Thebaid. 
 The most unconscionably unclean of all foul- 
 minded fanatics might have been satisfied with the 
 application to all women from his mother upwards 
 of the monstrous and magnificent obloquy found by 
 Timon as insufficient to overwhelm as his gold was 
 inadequate to satisfy one insatiable and indomit- 
 able " brace of harlots." In Troilus and Cressida 
 we found too much that Swift might have written 
 when half inspired by the genius of Shakespeare ; 
 in the great and terrible fourth act of Timon we 
 find such tragedy as Juvenal might have written 
 when half deified by the spirit of ^schylus. 
 
 There is a noticeable difference between the case 
 of Timon and the two other cases (diverse enough 
 between themselves) of late or mature work but 
 partially assignable to the hand of Shakespeare. In 
 Pericles we may know exactly how much was added 
 by Shakespeare to the work of we know not whom ; 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 2 1 5 
 
 in The Two Noble Kinsmen we can tell sometimes 
 to a hair's breadth in a hemistich by whbm how 
 much was added to the posthumous text of Shake- 
 speare ; in Timon we cannot assert with the same 
 confidence in the same accuracy that just so many 
 scenes and no more, just so many speeches and 
 none other, were the yvork of Shakespeare's or of 
 some other hand. Throughout the first act his 
 presence lightens on us by flashes, as his voice 
 peals out by fits, from behind or above the too 
 meanly decorated altar of tragic or satiric song : in 
 the second it is more sensibly continuous ; in the 
 third it is all but utterly eclipsed ; in the fourth it 
 is but very rarely intercepted for a very brief interval 
 in the dark divine service of a darker Commination 
 Day: in the fifth it predominates generally over the 
 sullen and brooding atmosphere with the fierce im- 
 perious glare of a " bloody sun " like that which the 
 wasting shipmen watched at noon " in a hot and 
 copper sky." There is here no more to say of a 
 poem inspired at once by the triune Furies of 
 Ezekiel, of Juvenal, and of Dante. 
 
 I can imagine no reason but that already sug- 
 gested why Shakespeare should in a double sense 
 have taken Chaucer for his model or example in leav- 
 ing half told a story which he had borrowed from the , 
 
2i6 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 father and master of our narrative poetry. Among 
 all competent scholars and all rational students of 
 Shakespeare there can have been, except possibly 
 with regard to three of the, shorter scenes, no room 
 for doubt or perplexity on any detail of the sub- 
 ject since the perfect summary and the masterly 
 dcfcision of Mr. Dyce. These three scenes, as no 
 such reader will need to be told or reminded, are 
 the two first soliloquies of the Gaoler's Daughter 
 after the release of Palamon, and the scene of the 
 portraits, as we may in a double sense call it, in 
 which Emilia, after weighing against each other in 
 solitude the likenesses of the cousins, receives from 
 her own kinsfolk a full and laboured description of 
 their leading champions on either side. Even set- 
 ting apart for once and for a moment the sovereign 
 evidence of mere style, we must recognise in this 
 last instance a beautiful and significant example 
 of that loyal and loving fidelity to the minor 
 passing suggestions of Chaucer's text which on all 
 possible occasions of such comparison so markedly 
 and vividly distinguishes the work of Shakespeare's 
 from the work of Fletcher's hand. Of the pestilent 
 abuse and perversion to which Fletcher has put the 
 perhaps already superfluous hints or sketches by 
 Shakespeare for an episodical underplot, in his trans- 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 217 
 
 mutation of Palamon's love-stricken and luckless 
 deliverer into the disgusting burlesque of a mock 
 Ophelia, I have happily no need as I shoul4 
 certainly have no patience to speak.' 
 
 After the always immitigable gloom of Timon 
 and the sometimes malodorous exhalations of the 
 three preceding plays, it is nothing less than " very 
 heaven" to find and feel ourselves again in the 
 midmost Paradise, the central Eden, of Shake- 
 speare's divine discovery — of his last sweet living 
 invention. Here again is air as pure blowing over 
 fields as fragrant as where Dante saw Matilda or 
 Milton saw Proserpine gathering each as deathless 
 flowers. We still have here to disentwine or dis- 
 entangle his own from the weeds of glorious and 
 of other than glorious feature with which Fletcher 
 has thought fit to interweave them ; even in the 
 close of the last scene of all we can say to a line, 
 to a letter, where Shakespeare ends and Fletcher 
 begins. That scene is opened by Shakespeare in 
 his most majestic vein of meditative or moral verse, 
 
 ' Except perhaps one little word of due praise for the pretty- 
 imitation or recollection of his dead friend Beaumont rather than of 
 Shakespeare, in the description of the crazed girl whose " careless 
 tresses a wreath of buUrush rounded " where she sat playing with 
 flowers for emblems at a game of love and sorrow — but liker in all 
 else to Bellario by another fountain-side than to Ophelia by the brook 
 of death. 
 
2 1 8 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 pointed and coloured as usual with him alone by 
 direct and absolute aptitude to the immediate 
 sentiment and situation of the speaker and of no 
 man else : then either Fletcher strikes in for a 
 moment with a touch of somewhat more Shake- 
 spearean tone than usual, or possibly we have a 
 survival of some lines' length, not unretouched by 
 Fletcher, froni Shakespeare's first sketch for a 
 conclusion of the somewhat calamitous and cum- 
 brous underplot, which in any case was ultimately 
 left for Fletcher to expand into such a shape and 
 bring by such means to such an end as we may 
 safely swear that Shakespeare would never have 
 admitted : then with the entrance and ensuing 
 narrative of Pirithous we have none but Shake- 
 speare before us again, though it be Shakespeare un- 
 doubtedly in the rough, and not as he might have 
 chosen to present himself after due revision, with 
 rejection (we may well suppose) of this point and 
 readjustment of that : then upon the arrival of the 
 dying Arcite with his escort there follows a griev- 
 ous little gap, a flaw but pitifully patched by 
 Fletcher, whom we recognise at wellnigh his worst 
 and weakest in Palamon's appeal' to his kinsman 
 for a last word, " if his heart, his worthy, manly 
 heart " (an exact and typical example of Fletcher's 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 219 
 
 tragically prosaic and prosaically tragic dash of 
 incurable commonplace), "be yet unbroken," and 
 in the flaccid and futile answer which fails so 
 signally to supply the place of the most famous 
 and pathetic passage in all the masterpiece of 
 Chaucer ; a passage to which even Shakespeare 
 could have added but some depth and grandeur of 
 his own giving, since neither he nor Dante's very 
 self nor any other among the divinest of men 
 could have done more or better than match it for 
 tender and pure simplicity of words more " dearly 
 sweet and bitter " than the bitterest or the sweetest 
 of men's tears. Then, after the duly and properly 
 conventional engagement on the parts of Palamon 
 and Emilia respectively to devote the anniversary 
 " to tears " and " to honour," the deeper note re- 
 turns for one grand last time, grave at once and 
 sudden and sweet as the full choral opening of an 
 anthem : the note which none could ever catch of 
 Shakespeare's very voice gives out the peculiar 
 cadence that it alone can give in the modulated 
 instinct of a solemn change or shifting of the 
 metrical emphasis or ictus from one to the other of 
 two repeated words : — 
 
 That nought could buy 
 Dear love, but loss of dear love ! 
 
2 20 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 That is a touch beyond the ear or the hand of 
 Fletcher : a chord sounded from Apollo's own 
 harp after a somewhat hoarse and reedy wheeze 
 from the scrannel-pipe of a lesser player than Pan. 
 Last of all, in words worthy to be the latest left of 
 Shakespeare's, his great and gentle Theseus winds 
 up the heavenly harmonies of his last beloved 
 great poem. 
 
 And now, coming at length within the very 
 circle of Shakespeare's culminant and crowning 
 constellation, bathing my whole soul and spirit 
 for the last and (if I live long enough) as surely 
 for the first of many thousand times in the splen- 
 dours of the planet whose glory is the light of 
 his very love itself, standing even as Dante 
 
 in the clear 
 Amorous silence of the Swooning-sphere, 
 
 what shall I say of thanksgiving before the final 
 feast of Shakespeare t 
 
 The grace must surely be short enough if it 
 would at all be gracious. Even were Shakespeare's 
 self alive again, or he ixow but fifteen years since 
 gone home to Shakespeare,' of whom Charles 
 Lamb said well that none could have written his 
 book about Shakespeare but either himself alone 
 ' On the 17th of September, 1864. 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 2 2 1 
 
 or else he of whom the book was written, yet 
 could we not hope that either would have any new 
 thing to tell us of the Tempest, the Winter's Tale, 
 and Cymbeline. And for ourselves, what else could 
 we do but only ring changes on the word beautiful 
 as Celia on the word wonderful in her laughing 
 litany of love ? or what better or what more can 
 we do than in the deepest and most heartfelt sense 
 of an old conventional phrase, thank God and 
 Shakespeare ? for how to praise either for such a 
 gift of gifts we know not, knowing only and surely 
 that none will know for ever. 
 
 True or false, and it would now seem some- 
 thing less than likely to be true, the fancy which 
 assumed the last lines spoken by Prospero to be 
 likewise the last words of the last completed work 
 of Shakespeare was equally in either case at once 
 natural and graceful. There is but one figure 
 sweeter than Miranda's and sublimer than Pro- 
 spero's in all the range of heaven on which the 
 passion of our eyes could rest at parting. And 
 from one point of view there is even a more 
 heavenly quality perceptible in the light of this 
 than of its two twin stars. In no nook or corner 
 of the island as we leave it is any savour left 
 or any memory lingering of any inexpiable evil. 
 
2 22 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 Alonzo is absolved ; even Antonio and Sebastian 
 have made no such ineffaceable mark on it by the 
 presence of their pardoned crimes as is made by 
 those which cost the life of Mamillius and the 
 labours of Imogen. Poor Caliban is left in such 
 comfort as may be allowed him by divine grace in 
 the favourable aspect of Setebos ; and his com- 
 rades go by us " reeling ripe '.' and " gilded " not by 
 " grand liquor " only but also by the summer light- 
 ning of men's laughter : blown softly out of our 
 sight, with a sound and a gust of music, by the 
 breath of the song of Ariel. 
 
 The wild wind of the Winter's Tale at its 
 opening would seem to blow us back into a win- 
 trier world indeed. And to the very end I must 
 confess that I have in me so much of the spirit of 
 Rachel weeping in Ramah as will not be comforted 
 because Mamillius is not. It is well for those 
 whose hearts are light enough, to take perfect 
 comfort even in the substitution of his sister 
 Perdita for the boy who died of "thoughts high 
 for one so tender." Even the beautiful sugges- 
 tion that Shakespeare as he wrote had in mind his 
 own dead little son still, fresh and living at his 
 heart can hardly add more than a touch of addi- 
 tional tenderness to our perfect and piteous delight 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 223 
 
 in him. And even in her daughter's embrace it 
 seems hard if his mother should have utterly for- 
 gotten the little voice that had only time to tell 
 her just eight words of that ghost story which 
 neither she nor we were ever to hear ended. Any 
 one but Shakespeare would have sought to make 
 pathetic profit out of the child by the easy means 
 of showing him if but once again as changed and 
 stricken to the death for want of his mother and 
 fear for her and hunger and thirst at his little high 
 heart for the sight and touch of her : Shakespeare 
 only could find a better way, a subtler and a deeper 
 chord to strike, by giving us our last glimpse of 
 him as he laughed and chattered with her " past 
 enduring," to the shameful neglect of those ladies 
 in the natural blueness of whose eyebrows as well 
 as their noses he so stoutly declined to believe. 
 And at the very end (as aforesaid) it may be that 
 we remember him all the better because the father 
 whose jealousy killed him and the mother for love 
 of whom he died would seem to have forgotten 
 the little brave sweet spirit with all its truth of 
 love and tender sense of shame as perfectly and 
 unpardonably as Shakespeare himself at the close 
 of King Lear would seem to have forgotten one 
 who never had forgotten Cordelia. 
 
224 -^ Study of Shakespeare^ 
 
 But yet — and here for once the phrase abhorred 
 by Cleopatra does not " allay the 'good" but only 
 the bad "precedence" — if ever amends could be 
 made for such unnatural show of seeming forget- 
 fulness ( " out on the seeming ! I will write against 
 it " — or would, had I not written enough already), 
 the poet most assuredly has made such amends 
 here. At the sunrise of Perdita beside Florizel 
 it seems as if the snows of sixteen winters had 
 melted all together into the splendour of one 
 unutterable spring. They "smell April and May" 
 in a sweeter sense than it could be said of " young 
 Master Fenton " : " nay, which is more," as his 
 friend and champion Mistress Quickly might have 
 added to mine host's commendatory remark, they 
 speak all April and May ; because April is in him 
 as naturally as May in her, by just so many 
 years' difference before the Mayday of her birth as 
 went to make up her dead brother's little lot of 
 living breath, which in Beaumont's most lovely and 
 Shakespeare-worthy phrase " was not a life ; was 
 but a piece of childhood thrown away." Nor can 
 I be content to find no word of old affection for 
 Autolycus, who lived, as we may not doubt, though 
 but a hint or promise be vouchsafed us for all 
 assurance that he lived by favour of his "good 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 225 
 
 masters " once more to serve Prince Florizel and 
 wear three-pile for as much of his time as it might 
 please him to put on " robes " like theirs that were 
 "gentlemen born," and had "been so any time 
 these four hours." And yet another and a graver 
 word must be given with all reverence to the 
 " grave and good Paulina," whose glorious fire of 
 godlike indignation was as warmth and cordial to 
 the innermost heart while yet bruised and wrung 
 for the yet fresh loss of Mamillius. 
 
 The time is wellnigh come now for me to 
 consecrate in this book my good will if not good 
 work to the threefold and thrice. happy memory of 
 the three who have written of Shakespeare as never 
 man wrote, nor ever man may write again ; to the 
 everlasting praise and honour and glory of Charles 
 Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Walter 
 Savage Landor ; " wishing," I hardly da,re to say, 
 " what I write may be read by their light." The 
 play of plays, which is Cymbelme, remains alone 
 to receive the last salute of all my love. 
 
 I think, as far as I can tell, I may say I have 
 always loved this one beyond all other children of 
 Shakespeare. The too literal egoism of this pro- 
 fession will not be attributed by any candid or 
 even commonly honest reader to the violence of 
 
 Q 
 
226 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 vanity so much more than comical as to make me 
 suppose that such a record or assurance could in 
 itself be matter of interest to any man : but simply 
 to the real and simple reason, that I wish to 
 show cause for my choice of this work to wind 
 up with, beyond the mere chance of its posi- 
 tion at the close of the chaotically inconsequent 
 catalogue of contents affixed to the first edition. 
 In this casualty — for no good thing can reasonably 
 be ascribed to design on the part of the first 
 editors — there would seem to be something more 
 than usual of what we may call, if it so please us, a 
 happy providence. It is certain that no studious 
 arrangement could possibly have brought the book 
 to a happier end. Here is depth enough with 
 Jieight enough of tragic beauty and passion, terror 
 and love and pity, to approve the presence of the 
 most tragic Master's hand ; subtlety enough of 
 sweet and bitter truth to attest the passage of the 
 mightiest and wisest scholar or teacher in the 
 school of the human spirit ; beauty with delight 
 enough and glory of life and grace of nature to 
 proclaim the advent of the one omnipotent Maker 
 among all who bear that name. Here above all 
 is the most heavenly triad of human figures that 
 ever even Shakespeare brought together ; a diviner 
 
A Study of Shakespeare. 227 
 
 three, as it were a living god-garland o£ tlie noblest 
 earth-born brothers and loveworthiest lieaven-born 
 sister, than the very givers of all grace and happi- 
 ness to their Grecian worshippers of old time over 
 long before. The passion of Posthumus is noble, 
 and potent the poison of lachimo ; Cymbeline has 
 enough for Shakespeare's present purpose of " the 
 king-becoming graces " ; but we think first and 
 last of her who was " truest speaker '' and those who 
 " called her brother, when she was but their sister ; 
 she them brothers, when they were so indeed." 
 The very crown and flower of all her father's 
 daughters, — I do not speak here of her human 
 father, but her divine — the woman above all 
 Shakespeare's women is Imogen. As in Cleopatra 
 we found the incarnate sex, the woman everlasting, 
 so in Imogen we find half glorified already the 
 immortal godhead of womanhood. I would fain 
 have some honey in my words at parting — with 
 Shakespeare never, but for ever with these notes 
 on Shakespeare; and I am therefore something 
 more than fain to close my book upon the name of 
 the woman best beloved in all the world of song 
 and all the tide of time ; upon the name of Shake- 
 speare's Imogen. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
NOTE ON THE HISTORICAL PLAY OF 
 KING EDWARD IIL 
 
 The epitaph of German criticism on Shakespeare was 
 long since \vritten 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 rhodest 
 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 contem- 
 poraries of Christopher Marlowe, that " his verses are 
 flowing, but without energy." Strange, but true j 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. 
 
232 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 NoAv 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 with- 
 out 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 after- 
 wards 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 ivithout 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 ' he was likely 
 to have taken part in any such dramatic improvisation. 
 
 The example and the exposure of Schlegel's misadven- 
 tures in this line have not sufficed to warn off minor blun- 
 derers from treading v/ith 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 awellnigh still-born theory, first dropped 
 
 ' The once too celebrated crime which inthis-play \yas- exhibited 
 on the public stage with the forcible fidelity of a wellliigh brutal 
 realism took actual place on the private stage of'fact in' tlie'year 
 1604. Four years afterwards the play was ' piiblis¥e(l ' as Shake- 
 speare's. Eight years more, and Shakespeare was'with'i^ischylus.'. 
 
Appendix. 233 
 
 in a modest corner of the critical world exactly a hundred 
 and seventeen years ago. Its parent, not\Yithstanding 
 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 anony- 
 mous 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 Shake- 
 speare. 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 : 
 btlt ,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 
 
234 -^ Study, of Shakespeare. 
 
 in question"; and without the sHghtest 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 " jig^ 
 ging 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 intelli- 
 gence 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 impercep- 
 
Appendix. 235 
 
 tible 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 mo- 
 mentary 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 unsuc- 
 cessful parts of the play are also by far the most unim- 
 portant. The capacity of the author seems to shrink and 
 swell alternately, to erect its plumes arid 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 
 
236 A Study of Shakespeai'e. 
 
 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 con- 
 scientious 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 Shake- 
 speare ; 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 uncon- 
 sciously 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 
 
Appendix, 237 
 
 and diluted verse now current — if not yet submerged — 
 under the name or the pseudonym of the present 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 re- 
 member 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 indistinguish- 
 able author of King Edward III. 
 
 In the first scene of the first act the impotent imi- 
 tation of Marlowe is pitifully patent. Possibly there may 
 also be an imitation of the still imitative style of Shake-" 
 speare, 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, 
 
238 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 the energetic or active part is at best passable — fluent and 
 decent commonplace : but where the style turns un- 
 dramatic 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 I 
 
 Dectpit exemplar vitiis imitabile : if Shakespeare ever saw 
 or heard these pretty lines, he should have felt the un- 
 conscious 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 ban-en 
 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 
 50ft, superfluous, flowery and frothy style of Agathon, 
 which at the opening of the Thesmophonaztisa cannot 
 but make the youngest and most ignorant reader laugh, 
 though the oldest and most learned has never set eyes 
 on a Hne of the original verses which supplied the incar- 
 nate god of comic song with matter for such exquisite 
 burlesque. 
 
Appendix. 239 
 
 To the speech above cited the reply of the Countess 
 is even gracefuUer, 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,' 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 per- 
 
 ' Capell has altered this to "proud perfumes "; marking the 
 change in a note, with the scrupulous honesty which would seem to 
 have usually distinguished him from more daring and more famous 
 editors. 
 
240 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 ceptible 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 
 
Appendix. 24 1 
 
 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 Greeiis Ttc Qtioque 
 — a comedy miserably misreprinted in Dodsley's Old 
 Plays — on which he observes that " this is so like Shake- 
 speare, that we seem to remember it," being as it is a 
 girl's gentle lamentation over the selfish, exacting, sus- 
 picious 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 con- 
 travention 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 — Lovis 
 ^Labour's Lost — Romeo and yuliet. It is so like that had 
 we fallen upon it in any of these plays it would long since 
 
 R 
 
242 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 JII. 
 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 Qiwque. 
 
 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 iirgeth 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 Shake- 
 speare was not for the most part distinctively his own. It 
 
Appendix. 245 
 
 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 Englishr 
 men 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 : — 
 
 Fades non omnibus una, 
 Nee 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 Shake- 
 speare 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 iPeele, 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 JBeihsa6e has found in the writer of this second act- 
 
244 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 '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 ebulli- 
 ence 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 
 familar only to special students in our own — I will tran- 
 scribe a few passages to show how far the writer could 
 
Appendix. 245 
 
 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 Frangois 
 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 1- — of a poet 
 and a pimp. 
 
 I might pecceive 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 disturbM 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 : ' 
 
 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. ^ 
 
 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 
 
 ' The feeble archaic inversion in this line is one among many 
 small signs which all together suffice, if not to throw back the date 
 of this play to the years immediately preceding the advent of Mar- 
 lowe or the full influence of his genius and example, yet certainly to 
 mark it as an instance of survival from that period of incomposite 
 and inadequate workmanship in verse. 
 
 ^ Or than this play to a genuine work of Shakespeare's. " Brick 
 to coral " — these three words describe exactly the difference in tone 
 and shade of literary colour. 
 
246 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 ! 
 
 Eveti 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 ; ' when of war, 
 
 ' Here for the first time we come upon a verse not unworthy of 
 Marlowe himself — a verse in spirit as in cadence recalling the deep 
 oceanic reverberations of his "mighty line,'" profound and just and 
 simple and single as a note of the music of the sea. But it would 
 be'hard if a devout and studious disciple were never to catch one 
 passing tone of his master's habitual accent. — It may be w-orth 
 
Appendix. 247 
 
 It wakened Czesar from his Rdman gi-ave 
 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 Shake- 
 speare. Let us take the passage on poetry, beginning — 
 
 Now, Lodowicls, invocate ' some golden Muse 
 To bring thee hither an enchanted pen ; , 
 
 while to observe that we find here the same modulation of verse- 
 common enough since then, but new to the patient auditors of Gor- 
 boduc and Locrine — which we find in the finest passage of Marlowe's 
 imperfect play of Dido, completed by Nash after the young Master's 
 untimely death. 
 
 Why star'st thou in my face ? If thou wilt stay, 
 Leap in my arms :mine arms are open wide : 
 If not — turn from me, and I'll turn from thee ; 
 For though thou hast the power to say farewell, 
 I have not power to stay thee. 
 But we may look long in vain for the like of this passage, taken 
 from the crudest and feeblest work of Marlowe, in the wide and 
 wordy expanse of King Edward III. 
 
 ' "' A pre-Shakespearean word of single occurrence in a single play 
 of Shakespeare's, and proper to the academic school of playwrights. 
 
248 A Shidy of Shakespeare. 
 
 and so forth. No scholar in English poetry but will re- 
 cognise 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. ' 
 
 Infinite as is the distance between the long roll of 
 these mighty lines and the thin tinkle of their feeble imi- 
 tator'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, 
 
 ' The First Part of Tamburlaim the Great, Act v. So. ii. 
 
Appendix. 249 
 
 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 acquaint- 
 ance. 
 
 Forget not to set down, how passionate, 
 How heart-sick, and how full of languishment. 
 
 Her beautv makes me 
 
 Write on, " hile 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 — 
 
250 A Study of Shakespea7'e. 
 
 as we find inscribed on tlae 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 some- 
 where 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 tlte 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 
 
Appendix. 251 
 
 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 amcebsean 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 j 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 
 
252. A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 more frequently noticeable: than elsewhere.^ 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 Shake- 
 speare's sonnets is not exactly sufficient evidence to 
 warrant such an otherwise unwarrantable addition or 
 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 
 
 ' It may be worth a remark that the word fmaer is constantly 
 used as a dissyllable ; another note of archaic debility or insufficiency 
 in metre. 
 
Appendix. 253 
 
 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 un- 
 questionably 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 repetitioii 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 atten- 
 tive 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 IIT. 
 might as certainly have been written by any one out of a 
 
2 54 ^ Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 incon- 
 siderate oath,, must be judged by the result of his own 
 enterprise ; must fall 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 conven- 
 tional 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? 
 
Appendix. 255 
 
 No, he's my friend ; and where is found the friend 
 That will do friendship such endamagement ? '-:- 
 Neither my daughter, nor my dear friend's wife, 
 I am not Warwick, as thou think'st I am, 
 But an atlorney 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 pos- 
 sibility. 
 
 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 nau- 
 seam. 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 ! 
 
 ' Yet another essentially non-Shakespearean word, though 
 doubtless once used by Shakespeare ; this time a most ungraceful 
 Gallicism, 
 
256 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 (Here we come upon two more words unknown to Shake- 
 speare ; ' besiege, as a noun substantive, and invired for 
 environed. ) 
 
 Hath he no means to stain my honest blood 
 But to corrupt the authof 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 eveiy 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 
 
 ' It may obviate any chance of mistake if I observe that here as 
 elsewhere, when I mention the name that is above every name in 
 English literature, I refer to the old Shakespeare, and not to ' ' the 
 new Shakspere " ; a nmiiis homo with whom I have no acquaintance, 
 and with whom (if we may judge of a great — or a little — unknown 
 after the appearance and the bearing of those who select him as a 
 social sponsor for themselves and their literary catechumens) I can 
 most sincerely assert that I desire to have none. 
 
Appendix. 257 
 
 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 re- 
 mind the reader of something better read elsewhere j 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 j 
 Lilies thai fester smell far worse than weeds ; 
 And every glory that inclines to sin, 
 The shame is treble by the opposite. 
 So leave I, vrith 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 ! \jExit. 
 
 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 circu- 
 lation about the time of this play's first appearance among 
 Shakespeare's " private friends " ; in other words, which 
 
 S 
 
258 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 enjoyed such a kind of public privacy or private pub- 
 licity 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 com- 
 posite (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 be- 
 .iween 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 ; 
 
Appendix. 259 
 
 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 conclu- 
 sion 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 jour' 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. 
 
 Atidley. What's in his mind ? 
 
26o A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 manqud or (whom shall we call him ?) 
 r^ussi, 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, 
 
Appendix. 261 
 
 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. 
 
 ■^way ! lExit 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 ' 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 j 
 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, 
 
 ■ Surely, for sweet'st we should read swi/t'st. 
 
262 A StiLcly of Shakespeare. 
 
 Who, looking wistly ' 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 ^ 
 
 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 smihng 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 Prin'CE. 
 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 
 
 ' This word occurs but once in Shakespeare's plays — 
 And speaking it, he wistly looked on me ; 
 
 {King Richard II. Act v. Sc. 4.) 
 and in such a case, as in the previous instances of the words mfOiTrtfe 
 and endaviagenieni, a mere aira| Aeyrf/ievoj/ can carry no weight of 
 evidence with it worth any student's consideration. 
 
 "^ This fonn is used four times by Shakespeare as the equivalent 
 of Bretagne ; once only, in one of his latest plays, as a synonym for 
 Britain. 
 
Appendix. 263 
 
 The register of all rarieties ' 
 
 Since leathern Adam till this youngest hour. 
 
 Re-enter LoDowiCK imth the Countess. 
 Gj, 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 Shake- 
 speare.) 
 
 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 ' love for love. 
 
 Countess. Than wrong for wrong, and endless hate for hate. 
 But, sith I see your majesty so bent, 
 
 ' Another word indiscoverable in any genuine verse of Shake- 
 speare's, though not (I believe) unused on occasion by some among 
 the poets contemporary with his earlier years. 
 
 ^ This word was perhaps unnecessarily altered by our good 
 Capell to "tender." 
 
264 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 ' is beyond our law. 
 . Countess. So is your desire : If the law ^ 
 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 sworn an easy current for his love ; 
 But I will, through a helly spout of blood,' 
 Arrive that Sestos where my Hero lies. 
 
 ' Yet another and a singular misuse of a word never so used or 
 misused by Shakespeare. 
 
 ' Qu. Why, so is your desire : If that the law, etc. ? 
 
 ' Sic. I should once have thought it impossible that any mortal 
 ear could endure the shock of this unspeakable and incomparable 
 verse, and find in the passage which contains it an echo or a trace 
 of the "music, wit, arid oracle" of Shakespeare. But in those 
 days I had yet to learn what manner of ears are pricked up to listen 
 " when rank Thersites opes his mastiff jaws" in criticism of Homer 
 
Appendix. 265 
 
 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 ! 
 Wien, to the great star-chamber o'er our heads, 
 
 or of Shakespeare. In a corner of the preface to an edition of 
 "Shakspere" which bears on its title-page the name (correctly 
 spelt) of Queen Victoria's youngest son prefixed to the name I have 
 just transcribed, a small pellet of dry dirt was flung upwards at me 
 from behind by the " able editor " thus irritably impatient to figure 
 in public as the volunteer valet or literary lackey of Prince Leopold. 
 Hence I gathered the edifying assurance that this aspirant to the 
 honours of literature in livery had been reminded of my humbler 
 attempts in literature without a livery by the congenial music of 
 certain four-footed fellow-critics and fellow-lodgers of his own in 
 the neighbourhood of Hampstead Heath. Especially and most na- 
 turally had their native woodnotes wild recalled to the listening 
 biped (whom partial nature had so far distinguished from the herd) 
 the deep astonishment and the due disgust with which he had disco- 
 vered the unintelligible fact that to men so ignorant of music or the 
 laws of music in verse as my presumptuous and pitiable self the test 
 of metrical harmony lay not in an appeal to the fingers but only in 
 an appeal to the ear — "the ear which he" (that is, which the 
 present writer) " makes so much of— AND WHICH should be long 
 TO MEASURE Shakspere. " Here then the great Sham Shake- 
 spearean secret is out at last. Had I but known in time my 
 lifelong error in thinking that a capacity to estimate the refinements 
 of word-music was not to be gauged by length of ear, by 
 hairiness of ear, or by thickness of ear, but by delicacy of ear alone, 
 I should as soon have thought of measuring my own poor human 
 organs against those of the patriarch or leader of the herd as of 
 questioning his indisputable right to lay down the law to all who 
 agree with his great fundamental theorem — that the longest ear is the 
 most competent to judge of metre. Habemus confitentem asinum. 
 
266 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 : ' 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 pos- 
 sible 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 — as-. 
 
 ', A Latin pun, or rather a punning Latinism, not altogether, 
 out of Shakespeare's earliest line. But see the note preceding this, 
 
Appendix. 267 
 
 suredly hot of the fittest^s 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 dpneto my hand, and well done, by Charles Knight ; 
 who, though no professed critic or esoteric expert in 
 Shakespearean letters, approved himself by dint of shetr 
 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 con- 
 temporary 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 
 
268 A Shidy of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 un- 
 deserving 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. 
 
 \st Frenchman. What, is it quarter-day, that you remove, 
 
 And carry bag and baggage too ? 
 2.nd 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 
 
Appendix. 269 
 
 refuses to send relief to his son, wishing the prince to win 
 his spurs unaided, and earn the firstfruits 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 discover- 
 able 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 ' quickly thrown away ; 
 But if I stand to count them sand by sand 
 
 ' The simple substitution of the word "is" for the word "and" 
 would rectify the grammar here — were that worth while. 
 
270 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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, ' 
 
 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, vial 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 handi- 
 work 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 ; 
 
 Qu. So there is but one France, etc. ? 
 
Appendix. 271 
 
 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 com- 
 monplace 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 ' 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 il, 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.") 
 
 ' Non- Shakespearean. 
 
2/2 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 resolvM 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 qualcing and dismayW 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. 
 
Appendix. 273 
 
 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 commen- 
 tators. 
 
 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.' 
 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 
 
 ' I choose for a parallel Shakespeare's use of Plutarch in the 
 composition of his Roman plays rather than his use of Hall and 
 Holinshed in the composition of his English, histories, because 
 Froissart is a model more properly to be set against Plutarch than 
 against Holinshed or Hall. 
 
 T 
 
2 74 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 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 Shake- 
 speare had not a finger in ^'e.corvcoc'aonoi King Edward 
 JII. He was the author of King Henry V. 
 
Appendix. 275 
 
 NO TE. 
 
 I WAS not surprised to hear that my essay on the historical 
 play of King Edward III. had on its first appearance met 
 in various quarters with assailants of various kinds. There 
 are some forms of attack to which no answer is possible for 
 a man of any human self-respect but the lifelong silence of 
 contemptuous disgust. To such as these I will never con- 
 descend to advert or to allude further than by the remark 
 now as it were forced from me, that never once in my 
 life haye I had or will I have recourse in self-defence 
 either to the blackguard's loaded bludgeon of personal- 
 ities or to the dastard's sheathed dagger of disguise. I 
 have reviled no man's person : I have outraged no man's 
 privacy. When I have found myself misled either by im- 
 perfection of knowledge or of memory, or by too much 
 confidence in a generally trustworthy guide, I have silently 
 corrected the misquotation or readily repaired the 
 error. To the successive and representative heroes of 
 the undying Dunciad I have left and will always leave the 
 foul use of their own foul weapons. I have spoken freely 
 and fearlessly, and so shall on all occasions continue to 
 speak, of what I find to be worthy of praise or dispraise, 
 contempt or honour, in the public works and actions of 
 men. Here ends and here has always ended in literary 
 matters the proper province of a gentleman ; beyond it, 
 though sometimes intruded on in time past by trespassers 
 of a nobler race,begins the proper province of a blackguard. 
 
276 A Study of Shakes fear e. 
 
 REPORT OF THE PROCEEDINGS ON THE 
 FIRST ANNIVERSARY SESSION OF THE 
 NEWEST SHAKESPEARE SOCIETY. 
 
 A PAPER was read by Mr. A. on the disputed authorship 
 of A Midsummer Nighfs Dream. He was decidedly of 
 opinion that this play was to be ascribed to George Chap- 
 man. He based this opinion principally on the ground 
 of style. From its similarity of subject he had at first 
 been disposed to assign it to Cyril Tourneur, author of 
 The Revengei^s Tragedy; and he had drawn up in support 
 -of this theory a series of parallel passages extracted from 
 the speeches of Vindice in that drama and of Oberon in the 
 present play. He pointed out however that the character 
 ■of Puck could hardly have been the work of any English 
 poet but the author of Fussy d^Ambois. There was 
 liere likewise that gravity and condensation of thought 
 conveyed through the medium of the " full and heightened 
 style " commended by Webster, and that preponderance 
 of philosophic or political discourse over poetic interest 
 and dramatic action for which the author in question had 
 been justly censured. 
 
 Some of the audience appearing slightly startled by 
 this remark (indeed it afterwards appeared that the Chair- 
 man had been on the point of asking the learned member 
 
Appendix. ' 277 
 
 whether he was not thinking rather of Lovis Labour's 
 Lost?), Mr. A. cited the well-known scene in which 
 Oberon discourses with Puck on matters concerning 
 Mary Stuart and Queen Elizabeth, instead of despatching 
 him at once on his immediate errand. This was univer- 
 sally accepted as proof positive, and the reading con- 
 cluded amid signs of unanimous assent, when 
 
 Mr. B. had nothing to urge against the argument 
 they had just heard, but. he must remind them that there 
 was a more weighty kind of evidence than that adduced 
 by Mr. A. ; and to this he doubted not they would all 
 defer. He could prove by a tabulated statement that 
 the words " to " and " from " occurred on an average from 
 seven to nine times in every play of Chapman ; whereas 
 in the play, under consideration the word "to" occurred 
 exactly twelve times and the word " from " precisely ten. 
 He was therefore of opinion that the authorship should 
 in all probability be assigned to Anthony Munday. - 
 
 As nobody present could dispute' this conclusion, 
 Mr. C. proceeded to read the argument by which he 
 proposed to establish the fact, hitherto unaccountably 
 overlooked by all preceding commentators, that the 
 character of Romeo was obviously designed as a satire 
 on Lord Burghley. The first and perhaps the strongest 
 evidence in favour of this proposition was .the extreme 
 difficulty, he might almost say the utter impossibility, of 
 discovering a single point of likeness between, the two 
 characters. This would naturally - be the first precaution 
 taken by a poor player who designed to attack an all- 
 powerful Minister. But more direct light was thrown 
 
278 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 upon the subject by a passage in which " that kind of 
 fruit that maids call medlars when they laugh alone " is 
 mentioned in connection with a wish of Romeo's, regard- 
 ing his mistress. This must evidently be taken to refer 
 to some recent occasion on which the policy of Lord 
 Burghley (possibly in the matter of the Anjou marriage) 
 had been rebuked in private by the Maiden Queen, "his 
 mistress," as meddling, laughaJble, and fruitless. 
 
 This discovery seemed to produce a great impression 
 till the Chairman reminded the Society that the play in 
 question was now generally ascribed to George Peele, who 
 was notoriously the solicitor of Lord Burghley's patronage 
 and the recipient of his bounty. That this poet was the 
 author of Romeo and Juliet could no longer be a matter 
 of doubt, as he was confident they would all agree with 
 him on hearing that a living poet of note had positively 
 assured him of the fact ; adding that he had always thought 
 so when at school. The plaudits excited by this an- 
 nouncement had scarcely subsided, when the Chairman 
 clenched the matter by observing that he rather thought 
 the same opinion had ultimately been entertained by his 
 own grandmother. 
 
 Mr. D. then read a paper on the authorship and the 
 hidden meaning of two contemporary plays which, he 
 must regretfully remark, were too obviously calculated to 
 cast a most unfavourable and even sinister light on the 
 moral character of the new Shakesjjeare ; whose possibly 
 suspicious readiness to attack the vices of others with a 
 view to diverting attention from his own was signally ex- 
 emplified in the well-known fact that, even while putting 
 
Appendix. 2 79 
 
 on a feint of respect and tenderness for his memory, 
 he had exposed the profligate haunts and habits of 
 Christopher Marlowe under the transparenfpseudonyni of 
 Christopher Sly. To the first of these plays attention had 
 long since been drawn by a person of whom it was only 
 necessary to say that he had devoted a long life to the study 
 and illustration of Shakespeare and his age, and had actu- 
 ally presumed to publish a well-known edition of the poet 
 at a date previous to the establishment of the present So- 
 ciety. He (Mr. D. ) was confident that not another syllable 
 could be necessary to expose that person to the contempt 
 of all present. He proceeded, however, with the kind 
 encouragement of the Chairman, to indulge at that editor's 
 expense in sundry personalities both " loose and humor- 
 ous," which being totally unfit for publication here are re- 
 served for a private issue of " Loose and Humorous Papers " 
 to be edited, with a running marginal commentary or il- 
 lustrative and explanatory version of the utmost possible 
 fullnes.s,' by the Founder and another member of the 
 Society. To these it might possibly be undesirable for them 
 to attract the notice of the outside world. Reverting there- 
 fore to his first subject from various references to the pre- 
 sumed private character, habits, gait, appearance, and 
 bearing of the gentleman in question, Mr. D. observed 
 that the ascription of a share in the Taming of the Shrew 
 to William Haughton (hitherto supposed the author of 
 a comedy called Englishmen for my Money) impUed a 
 
 » This word was incomprehensibly misprinted in the first issue 
 of the Society's Report, where it appeared as "foulness.'' To pre- 
 ■ vent misapprehension, the whole staff of printers was at once 
 discharged. 
 
28o A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 doubly discreditable blunder. The real fact, as he would 
 immediately prove, was not that Haughton was joint 
 author with Shakespeare of the Taming of the Shrew, but 
 that Shakespeare was joint author with Haughton of 
 Englishmen for my Money. He would not enlarge on 
 the obvious fact that Shakespeare, so notorious a plunderer 
 of others, had actually been reduced to steal from his own 
 poor store an image transplanted from the last scene of 
 the third act of Romeo and Juliet into the last scene of the 
 third act of Englishmen for my Money ; where the well- 
 known and pitiful phrase — "Night's candles are burnt 
 out " — reappears in all its paltry vulgarity as follows ; 
 " Night's candles burn obscure." Ample as was the 
 proof here supplied, he would prefer to rely exclusively 
 upon such further evidence as might be said to lie at once 
 on the surface and in a nutshell. 
 
 The second title of this play, by which the first title 
 was in a few years totally superseded, ran thus : A Woman 
 will have her Will. Now even in an age of punning 
 titles such as that of a well-known and delightful treatise 
 by Sir John Harrington, the peculiar fondness of Sh.ake- 
 speare for puns was notorious ; but especially for puns 
 on names, as in the proverbial case of Sir Thomas Lucy ; 
 and above all for puns on his own Christian name, as in 
 his 135th, 136th, and 143rd sonnets. Il must now be but 
 too evident to the meanest intelligence — to the meanest in- 
 telligence, he repeated ; for to such only did he or would he 
 then and there or ever or anywhere address himself — (loud 
 applause) that die graceless author, more utterly lost to all 
 sense of shame than any Don Juan or other typical libertine 
 
Appendix. 281 
 
 of fiction, had come forward to placard by way of self-ad- 
 vertisement on his own stage, and before the very eyes of 
 a Maiden Queen, the scandalous confidence in his own 
 powers of fascination and seduction so cynically expressed 
 in the too easily intelligible vaunt — A Woman will have 
 her Will [Shakespeare]. In the penultimate line of the 
 hundred and forty-third sonnet the very phrase might be 
 said to occur : — 
 
 So will I pray that thou mayst have thy Will. 
 Having thus established his case in the first instance 
 to the satisfaction, as he trusted, not only of the present 
 Society, but of any asylum for incurables, in any part of 
 the country, the learned member now passed on to the 
 consideration of the allusions at once to Shakespeare and 
 to a celebrated fellow-countryman, fellow-poet, and per- 
 sonal friend of his — Michael Drayton — contained in a 
 play which had been doubtfully attributed to Shakespeare 
 himself by such absurd idiots as looked rather to the 
 poetical and dramatic quality of a poem or a play than 
 to such tests as those to which alone any member of that 
 Society would ever dream of appealing. What these were 
 he need not specify ; it was enough to say in recommen- 
 dation of them that they had rather less to do with any 
 question of dramatic or other poetry than with the differ- 
 ential calculus or the squaring of the circle. It followed 
 that only the most perversely ignorant and aesthetically 
 presumptuous of readers could imagine the possibility of 
 Shakespeare's concern or partnership in a play which had 
 no more Shakespearean quality about it than mere poetr)', 
 mere passion, mere pathos, mere beauty and vigour of 
 
282 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 thought and language, mere command of dramatic effect, 
 mere depth and subtlety of power to read, interpret, and 
 reproduce the secrets of the heart and spirit. Could any- 
 further evidence be requited of the unfitness and unworthi- 
 ness to hold or to utter any opinion on the matter in 
 hand which had consistently been displayed by the poor 
 creatures to whom he had just referred, it would be found, 
 as he felt sure the Founder and all worthy members 
 of their Society would be the first to admit, in the despic- 
 able diffidence, the pitiful modesty, the contemptible 
 deficiency in common assurance, with which the sugges- 
 tion of Shakespeare's partnership in this play had gene- 
 rally been put forward and backed up. The tragedy of 
 Arden of Feversham was indeed connected with Shake- 
 speare — and that, as he should proceed to show, only too 
 intimately ; but Shakespeare was not connected with it — 
 that is, in the capacity of its author. In what capacity 
 would be but too evident when he mentioned the names 
 of the two leading ruffians concerned in the murder of 
 the principal character — Black Will and Shakebag. The 
 single original of these two characters he need scarcely 
 pause to point out. It would be observed that a double 
 precaution had been taken against any charge of libel or 
 personal attack which might be brought against the author 
 and supported by the all-powerful court influence of 
 Shakespeare's two principal patrons, the Earls of Essex 
 and Southampton. Two figures were substituted for one, 
 and the unmistakable name cf Will Shakebag was cut 
 in half and divided between them. Care had moreover 
 been taken to disguise the person by altering the com- 
 
Appendix. 28 
 
 o 
 
 plexion of the individual aimed at. That the actual 
 Shakespeare was a fair man they' had the evidence of the 
 coloured bust at Stratford. Could any capable and fair- 
 minded man — he would appeal to their justly honoured 
 Founder — ^require further evidence as to the original of 
 Black Will Shakebag ? Another important character in 
 the play was Black Will's accomplice and Arden's servant 
 — Michael, after whom the play had also at one time been 
 called Murderous Michael. The single fact thaf Shake- 
 speare and Drayton were both of them Warwickshire men 
 would suffice, he could not doubt, to carry conviction 
 with it to the mind of every member present, with regard 
 to the original of this personage. It now only remained 
 for him to produce the name of the real author of this 
 play. He.would do so at once — Ben Jonson. About the 
 time of its production Jonson was notoriously engaged in 
 writing those additions to the Spanish Tragedy of which 
 a preposterous attempt ,had been made to deprive him on 
 the paltry ground that the style (forsooth) of these addi- 
 tional scenes was very like the style of Shakespeare and 
 utterly unlike the style of Jonson. To dispose for ever of 
 this pitiful argument it would be sufficient to mention the 
 names of its two first and principal supporters — Charles 
 Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (hisses and laughter). 
 Now, in these " adycions to Jeronymo " a painter was in- 
 troduced complaining of the murder of his son. In the 
 play before. them a painter was introduced as an accom- 
 plice in the murder of Arden. It was unnecessary to 
 dwell upon so trivial a point of difference as that between 
 the stage employment or the moral character of the one 
 
284 ' A Siuay of Shakespeare. 
 
 artist and the other. In either case they were as closely 
 as possible connected with a murder. There was a painter 
 in the Spanish Tragedy, and there was also a painter in 
 Arden of Feversham. He need not — ^he would not add 
 another word in confirmation of the now established fact, 
 that Ben Jonson had in this play held up to perpetual 
 infamy — whether deserved or undeserved he would not 
 pretend to say — the names of two poets who afterwards 
 becam^his friends, but whom he had previously gibbeted 
 or at least pilloried in public as Black Will Shakespeare 
 and Murderous Michael Drayton. 
 
 Mr. E. then brought forward a subject of singular 
 interest and importance — " The lameness of Shakespeare 
 — was it moral or physical ? " He would not insult their 
 intelligence by dwelling on the absurd and exploded 
 hypothesis that this expression was allegorical, but would 
 at once assume that the infirmity in question was physical. 
 Then arose the question — In which leg ? He was pre- 
 pared, on the evidence of an early play, to prove to 
 demonstration that the injured and interesting limb was 
 the left. " This shoe is my father," says Launce in the 
 Two Gentlemen of Verona; " no, this left shoe is my 
 father ; no, no, this left shoe is my mother ; nay, that can- 
 not be so neither ; yes, it is so, it is so ; it hath the worser 
 sole." This passage was not necessary either to the pro- 
 gress of the play or to the development of the character ; 
 he believed he was justified in asserting that it was net 
 borrowed from the original novel on which the play was 
 founded ; the inference was obvious, that without some per- 
 sonal allusion it must have been as unintelligible to the 
 
Appendix. 285 
 
 audience as it had hitherto been to the commentators. His 
 conjecture was confirmed, and the whole subject illustrated 
 with a new light, by the well-known line in one of the Son- 
 nets, in which the poet describes himself as " made lame by 
 Fortune's dearest spite " : a line of which the inner meaning 
 and personal application had also by a remarkable chance 
 been reserved for him (Mr. E.)to discover. There could 
 be no doubt that we had here a clue to the origin of the 
 physical infirmity referred to ; an accident which must have 
 befallen Shakespeare in early life while acting at the For- 
 tune theatre, and consequently before his connection with 
 a rival company ; a fact of grave importance till now un- 
 verified. The epithet " dearest," like so much else in the 
 Sonnets, was evidently susceptible of a double interpreta- 
 tion. The first and most natural explanation of the term 
 would at once suggest itself; the playhouse would of 
 necessity be dearest to the actor dependent on it for sub- 
 sistence, as the means of getting his bread ; but he 
 thought it not unreasonable to infer from this unmistak- 
 able allusion that the entrance fee charged at the Fortune 
 may probably have been higher than the price of seats in 
 any other house. Whether or not this fact, taken in con- 
 junction with the accident already mentioned, should be 
 assumed as the immediate cause of Shakespeare's subse- 
 quent change of service, he was not prepared to pronounce 
 with such positive confidence as they might naturally ex- 
 pect-from a member of the Society ; but he would take 
 upon himself to afiSirm that his main thesis was now and 
 for ever established on the most irrefragable evidence, 
 and that no assailant could by any possibility dislodge by 
 
286 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 so much as a hair's breadth the least fragment of a single 
 brick in the impregnable structure of proof raised by the 
 argument to which they had just listened. 
 
 This demonstration being thus satisfactorily con- 
 cluded, Mr. F. proceeded to read his paper on the date 
 of Othello, and on the various parts of that play respec- 
 tively assignable to Samuel Rowley, to George Wilkins, 
 and to Robert Daborne. It was evident that the story 
 of Othello and Desdemona was originally quite distinct 
 from that part of the play in which lago was a leading 
 figure. This he was prepared to show at some length by 
 means of the weak-ending test, the light-ending test, the 
 double-ending test, the triple-ending test, the heavy- 
 monosyllabic-eleventh-syllable-of-the-double-ending test, 
 the run-on-line test, and the central-pause test. Of the 
 partnership of other poets in the play he was able to 
 adduce a simpler but not less cogent proof. A member 
 of their Committee said to an objector lately : " To me, 
 there are the handwritings of four different men, the 
 thoughts and powers of four different men, in the play. 
 If you can't see them now, you must wait till, by study, 
 you can. I can't give you eyes," To this argument he 
 (Mr. F.) felt that it would be an insult to their under- 
 standings if he should attempt to add another word. 
 Still, for those who were willing to try and learn, and 
 educate their ears and eyes, he had prepared six tabulated 
 statements — 
 
 (At this important point of a most interesting paper, 
 our reporter unhappily became unconscious, and remained 
 for some considerable period in a state of deathlike 
 
Appendix. 287 
 
 stupor. On recovering from this total and unaccountable 
 suspension of all his faculties, he found the speaker draw- 
 ing gradually near the end of his figures, and so far 
 succeeded in shaking off the sense of coma, as to be able 
 to resume his n,otes.) 
 
 , That the first and fourth scenes of the third act were 
 not by the same hand as the third scene he should have 
 no difficulty in proving to the satisfaction of all capable 
 and fair-minded men. In the first and fourth scenes 
 the word " virtuous '' was used as a dissyllable ; in the 
 third it was used as a trisyllable. 
 
 " Is, that she will to virtuous Dcsdemona." iii. i. 
 " Where virtue is, these are more virtuous." iii. 3. 
 " That by your virtuous means I may again." iii. 4. 
 
 In the third scene he would also point out the great 
 number of triple endings which had originally led the able 
 editor of Euclid's Elements of Geometry to attribute 
 the authorship of this scene to Shirley : Cassia (twice), 
 patience, Cassia (again), disa-etian, Cassia (again), honesty. 
 Cassia (again), jealausy, jealaus (used as a trisyllable in 
 the verse of Shakespeare's time), campany (two consecu- 
 tive hues with the triple ending). Cassia (again), canscience, 
 petition, ability, importtinity, conversation, marriage, 
 dungeon, mandragara, passion, monstrous, conclusion, 
 bounteous. He could not imagine any man in his senses 
 questioning the weight of this evidence. Now, let them 
 take the rhymed speeches of the Duke and Brabantio in 
 
288 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 Act i. Sc. 3, and compare them with the speech of 
 
 Othello in Act iv. Sc. 2, 
 
 Had it pleased heaven 
 To try me with affliction. 
 
 He appealed to any expert whether this was not in 
 Shakespeare's easy fourth budding manner, with, too, 
 various other points already touched on. On the other 
 hand, take the opening of Brabantio's speech — 
 
 So let the Turk of Cyprus us beguile ; 
 We lose it not so long as we can smile. 
 
 That, he said, was in Shakespeare's difficult second 
 flowering manner — the style of the later part of the earlier 
 stage of Shakespeare's rhetorical first period but one. It 
 was no more possible to move the one passage up to the 
 date of the other than to invert the order of the alphabet. 
 Here, then, putting aside for the moment the part oi 
 the play supplied by Shakespeare's assistants in the last 
 three acts— miserably weak some of it was — they were 
 able to disentangle the early love-play from the later 
 work in which lago was principally concerned. There 
 was at least fifteen years' growth between them, the steps 
 of which could be traced in the poet's intermediate plays 
 by any one who chose to work carefully enough at them. 
 Set any of the speeches addressed in the Shakespeare 
 part of the last act by Othello to Desdemona beside 
 the consolatory address of the Duke to Brabantio, and 
 see the difference of the rhetoric and style in the 
 two. If they turned to characters, Othello and Desde- 
 mona were even more clearly the companion pair to 
 
Appendix. 
 
 289 
 
 Biron and Rosaline of Lov^s Labour's Lost than were 
 Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet the match-pair {sic) of 
 Romeo and Juliet. In Lovds Labour's Lost the question 
 of icomplexion was identical, though the parts were 
 reversed. He would cite but a few parallel passages in 
 evidence of this relationship between the subjects of the 
 two plays. 
 
 I.ov^s Labour's Lost, iv. 3. 
 
 ' ' By heaven, thy love is black 
 
 as ebony." 
 ' ' No face is fair that is not 
 
 full so black." 
 "O paradox! Black is the 
 
 badge of hell." 
 " O, if in black my lady's 
 
 brows be decked." 
 "And therefore is she born 
 
 to make black fair." 
 ' ' Paints itself black to imitate 
 
 her brow." 
 " To look like her are chim- 
 ney-sweepers black." 
 
 Othello. 
 
 1. " An old black ram." i. I. 
 
 2. " Your son-in-law is far more 
 
 fair than black." i. 3. 
 
 3. "How if she be black and 
 
 witty?" ii. I. 
 
 4. " T/' she be black, and thereto 
 
 have a wit." id. 
 
 5. " A measure to the health of 
 
 black Othello." ii. 3. 
 
 6. "For I am black." iii, 3. 
 
 7. " Begrimed and black." id. 
 
 Now, with these parallel passages before them, what 
 man, woman, or child could bring himself or herself to be- 
 lieve that the connection of these plays was casual or the 
 date of the first Othello removable from the date of the 
 early contemporary late-first-period-but-one play Lovds 
 Labour's Lost, or that anybody's opinion that they were 
 so was worth one straw ? When therefore by the intro- 
 duction of the lago episode Shakespeare in his later days 
 had with the assistance of three fellow-poets completed 
 
 U 
 
290 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 the unfinished work of his youth, the junction thus 
 effected of the Brabantio part of the play with this lago 
 underplot supplied them with an evidence wholly distinct 
 from that of the metrical test which yet confirmed in 
 every point the conclusion independently arrived at and 
 supported by the irresistible coincidence of all the tests. 
 He defied anybody to accept his principle of study or 
 adopt his method of work, and arrive at a different con- 
 clusion from himself. 
 
 The reading of Mr. G.'s paper on the authorship of 
 the soliloquies in Hamlet was unavoidably postponed till 
 the next meeting, the learned member having only time on 
 this occasion to give a brief summary of the points he was 
 prepared to establish and the grounds on which he was 
 prepared to establish them. A year or two since, when he 
 first thought of starting the present Society, he had never 
 read a line of the play in question, having always under- 
 stood it to be admittedly spurious : but on being assured 
 of the contrary by one of the two foremost poets of the 
 English-speaking world, who was good enough to read 
 out to him in proof of this assertion all that part of the 
 play which could reasonably be assigned to Shakespeare, 
 he had of course at once surrendered his own former 
 -opinion, well grounded as it had hitherto seemed to be 
 •on the most solid of all possible foundations. At their 
 next meeting he would show cause for attributing to Ben 
 Jonson not only the soliloquies usually but inconsider- 
 ately quoted as Shakespeare's, but the entire original 
 conception of the character of the Prince of Denmark. 
 The resemblance of this character to that of Volpone 
 
Appendix. 291 
 
 in The Fox and to that of Face in The Alchemist could 
 not possibly escape the notice of the most cursory reader. 
 The principle of disguise was the same in each case, 
 whether the end in view were simply personal profit, or 
 (as in the case of Hamlet) personal profit combined 
 with revenge ; and whether the disguise assumed was 
 that of madness, of sickness, or of a foreign personality, 
 the assumption of character was in all three cases 
 identical. As to style, he was only too anxious to 
 meet (and, he doubted not, to beat) on his own ground 
 any antagonist whose ear had begotten' the crude and 
 untenable theory that the Hamlet soliloquies were not dis- 
 tinctly within the range of the man who could produce 
 those of Crites and of Macilente in Cynthia's Revels and 
 Every Man out of his Humour. The author of those 
 soliloquies could, and did, in the parallel passages of 
 Hamlet, rise near the height of the master he honoured 
 and loved. 
 
 The further discussion of this subject was reserved 
 for the next meeting of the Society, as was also the 
 reading of Mr. H.'s paper on the subsequent quarrel 
 between the two joint authors of Hamlet, which led to 
 Jonson's caricature of Shakespeare (then retired from 
 London society to a countrj' life of solitude) under the 
 
 ' When the learned member made use of this remarkable phrase 
 he probably had in his mind the suggestive query of Agnes, si les 
 enfants qu' on fait se faisaimt far Voreille ? But the flower of rhe- 
 toric here gathered was beyond the reach of Amolphe's innocent 
 ward. The procreation in such a case is even more difficult for fancy 
 to realise than the conception. 
 
 u 3 
 
292 A Study 0/ Shakespeare. 
 
 name of Morose, and to Shakespeare's retort on Jonson, 
 who was no less evidently attacked under the designa- 
 tion of Ariel. The allusions to the subject of Shake- 
 speare's sonnets in the courtship and marriage of Epicoene 
 by Morose were as obvious as the allusions in the part of 
 Ariel to the repeated incarceration of Jonson, first on a 
 criminal and secondly on a political charge, and to his 
 probable release in the former case (during the reign of 
 Elizabeth=Sycorax) at the intercession of Shakespeare, 
 who was allowed on all hands to have represented him- 
 self in the character of Prospero ("it was mine art that 
 let thee out "). Mr. I. would afterwards read a paper on 
 the evidence for Shakespeare's whole or part authorship 
 of a dozen or so of the least known plays of his time, 
 which, besides having various words and phrases in com- 
 mon with his acknowledged works, were obviously too- 
 bad to be attributed to any other known writer of the 
 period. Eminent among these was the tragedy of 
 Andromana, or the Merchant's Wife, long since rejected 
 from the list of Shirley's works as unworthy of that poet's 
 hand. Unquestionably it was so ; not less unworthy 
 than A Larum for London of Marlowe's. The con- 
 sequent inference that it must needs be the work of 
 the new Shakespeare's was surely no less cogent in this 
 than in the former case. The allusion occurring in it to 
 a play bearing date just twenty-six years after the death 
 of Shakespeare, and written by a poet then unborn, was 
 a strong point in favour of his theory. (This argument 
 was received with general marks of adhesion.) What, he 
 would ask, could be more natural than that Shirley 
 
Appendix. 293 
 
 when engaged on the revision and arrangement for the 
 stage of this posthumous work of the new Shakespeare's 
 (a fact which could require no further proof than he had 
 already adduced), should have inserted this reference 
 in order to disguise the name of its real author, and 
 protect it from the disfavour of an audience with whom 
 that name was notoriously out of fashion ? This reason- 
 ing, conclusive in itself, became even more irresistible — or 
 would become so, if that were anything less than an ab- 
 solute impossibility — on comparison of parallel passages. 
 
 Though kings still hug suspicion in their bosoms. 
 They hate the causer. (Andromana, Act i. So. 3.) 
 
 Compare this with the avowal put by Shakespeare into 
 the mouth of a king. 
 
 Though I did wish him dead, 
 I hate the murderer, {^ing Richard II., Act v. Sc. 6.) 
 
 Again in the same scene : 
 
 For then her husband comes home from the Rialto. 
 
 Compare this with various passages (too familiar to quote) 
 in the Merchant of Venice. The transference of the Rialto 
 to Iberia was of a piece with the discovery of a sea-coast 
 in Bohemia. In the same scene Andromana says to 
 her lover, finding him reluctant to take his leave, almost 
 in the very words of Romeo to Juliet, 
 
 Then let us stand and outface danger. 
 Since you will have it so. 
 
 It was obvious that only the author of the one passage 
 
294 ^ Stzidy of Shakespeare. 
 
 could have thought it necessary to disguise his plagiarism 
 in the other by an inversion of sexes between the two 
 speakers. In the same scene were three other indis- 
 putable instances of repetition. 
 
 Mariners might with far greater ease 
 Hear whole shoals of sirens singing. 
 
 Compare Comedy of Errors, Act iii. Scene 2. 
 
 Sing, siren, for thyself. 
 
 In this case identity of sex was as palpable an evidence for 
 identity of authorship as diversity of sex had afforded in 
 the preceding instance. 
 Again : 
 
 Have oaths no more validity with princes ? 
 
 In Rovieo and Jidiet, Act iii. Scene 3, the very same 
 words were coupled in the very same order : 
 
 More validity. 
 More honourable state, more courtship lies 
 In carrion flies than Romeo. 
 
 Again : 
 
 It would have killed a salamander. 
 
 Compare the First Part of King Henry IV., Act iii. 
 Scene 3. 
 
 I have maintained that salamander of yours with fire any time 
 this two and thirty years. 
 
 In Act ii. Scene 2 the hero, on being informed how heavy 
 are the odds against him in the field, answers, 
 I am glad on't ; the honour is the greater. 
 
Appendix. 295 
 
 To, which his confidant rejoins : 
 
 The danger is the greater.- 
 
 And in the sixth scene of the same act the messenger 
 observes : 
 
 I only heard the prince wish 
 
 He had fewer by a thousand men. 
 
 Could any member doubt that we had here the same 
 hand which gave us the Uke debate between King Henry 
 and Westmoreland on the eve of Agincourt ? or could 
 any member suppose that in the subsequent remark of 
 the sa:me military confidant, " I smell a rat, sir," there was 
 merely a fortuitous coincidence with Hamlet's reflection 
 as he "whips out his rapier" — in itself a martial proceed- 
 ing—under similar circumstances to the same effect ? 
 
 In the very next scene a captain observes of his own 
 troops 
 
 Methinks such tattered rogues should never conquer : 
 
 a touch that could only be due to the pencil which had 
 drawn Falstaff's ragged regiment. In both cases, more- 
 over, it was to be noted that the tattered rogues proved 
 ultimately victorious. But he had— they might hardly 
 believe it, but so it was — even yet stronger and more 
 convincing evidence to offer. It would be remembered 
 that a play called The Double Falsehood, formerly attribu- 
 ted to Shakespeare on the authority of Theobald, was 
 now generally supposed to have been in its original form 
 the work of Shirley. What, then, he would ask, could be 
 more natural or more probable than that a play formerly 
 ascribed to Shirley should prove to be the genuine work 
 
296 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 of Shakespeare ? Common sense, common reason, com- 
 mon logic, all alike and all equally combined to enforce 
 upon every candid judgment this inevitable conclusion. 
 This, however, was nothing in comparison to the final 
 proof which he had yet to lay before them. He need 
 not remind them that in the opinion of their illustrious 
 German teachers, the first men to discover and reveal to 
 his unworthy countrymen the very existence of the new 
 Shakespeare, the authenticity of any play ascribed to the 
 possibly too prolific pen of that poet was invariably to be 
 determined in the last resort by consideration of its 
 demerits. No English critic, therefore, who felt himself 
 worthy to have been* born a German, would venture to 
 question the postulate on which all sound principles of 
 criticism with regard to this subject must infallibly be 
 founded : that, given any play of unknown or doubtful 
 authorship, the worse it was, the likelier was it to be 
 Shakespeare's. (This proposition was received with every 
 sign of unanimous assent.) Now, on this ground he was 
 prepared to maintain that the claims of Andromana to 
 their most respectful, their most cordial, their most unhesi- 
 tating acceptance were absolutely beyond all possibility 
 of parallel. Not Mucedorus or Fair Em, not The Birth of 
 Merlin or Thomas Lord Cromwell, could reasonably or 
 fairly be regarded as on the same level of worthlessness 
 with this incomparable production. No mortal man who 
 had survived its perusal could for a moment hesitate to 
 agree that it was the most incredibly, ineffably, inconceiv- 
 ably, unmitigatedly, irredeemably, inexpressibly damna- 
 ble piece of bad work ever perpetrated by human hand. 
 
Appendix. 297 
 
 No mortal critic of the genuine Anglo-German school 
 could therefore hesitate for a moment to agree that in 
 common consistency he was bound to accept it as the 
 possible work of no human hand but the hand of the 
 New Shakespeare. 
 
 The Chairman then proceeded to recapitulate the 
 work done and the benefits conferred by the Society 
 during the twelve months which had elapsed since its 
 foundation on that day (April ist) last year. They had 
 ample reason to congratulate themselves and him on the 
 result. They had established an entirely new kind of 
 criticism, working by entirely new means towards an 
 entirely new end, in honour of an entirely new kind of 
 Shakespeare. They had proved to demonstration and 
 overwhelmed with obloquy the incompetence, the imbe- 
 cility, the untrustworthiness, the blunders, the forgeries, 
 the inaccuracies, the obliquities, 'the utter moral and 
 literary worthlessness, of previous students and societies. 
 They had revealed to the world at large the generally 
 prevalent ignorance of Shakespeare and his works which 
 so discreditably distinguished his countrymen. This they 
 had been enabled to do by the simple process of putting 
 forward various theories, and still more various facts, but 
 all of equally incontrovertible value and relevance, of which 
 no Englishman — he might say, no mortal — outside the 
 Society had ever heard or dreamed till now. They had 
 discovered the one trustworthy and indisputable method, 
 so easy and so simple that it must now seem wonderful 
 it should never have been discovered before, by which to 
 pluck out the heart of the poet's mystery and detect the 
 
298 A Study, of Shakespeare. 
 
 secret of his touch ; the study of Shakespeare by rule of 
 thumb. Every man, woman, and child bom with five 
 fingers on each hand was henceforward better qualified 
 as a critic than any poet or scholar of time past. But 
 it was not, whatever outsiders might pretend to think, 
 exclusively on the verse-test, as it had facetiously been 
 called on account of its total incompatibility with any 
 conceivable scheme of metre or principle of rhythm — it 
 was not exclusively on this precious and unanswerable 
 test that they relied. Within the Society as well as with- 
 out, the pretensions of those who would acknowledge no 
 other means of deciding on debated questions had been 
 refuted and repelled. What were the other means of 
 investigation and verification in which ilot less than in 
 the metrical test they were accustomed to put their faith, 
 and by which they doubted not to attain in the future 
 even more remarkable results than their researches had 
 as yet achieved, the debate just concluded, in common 
 with every other for which they ever had met or ever 
 were likely to meet, would amply suffice to show. By 
 such processes as had been applied on this as on all 
 occasions to the text of Shakespeare's works and the tra- 
 ditions of his life, they trusted in a very few years to sub- 
 vert all theories which had hitherto been held and 
 extirpate all ideas which had hitherto been cherished on 
 the subject : and having thus cleared the ground for his 
 advent, to discover for the admiration of the world, as 
 the name of their Society implied, a New Shakespeare. 
 The first step towards this end must of course be the 
 demolition of the old one ; and he would venture to say 
 
Appendix. ■ 299 
 
 they had already made a good beginning in that direction. 
 They had disproved or they would disprove the claim of 
 Shakespeare to the sole authorship of Macbeth, Julius 
 CcBsar, King Lear, Hamlet, and Othello ; they had estab- 
 lished or they would establish the fact of his partnership 
 in Locrine, Mucedorus, The Birth of Merlin, Dr. Dodi- 
 poll, and Sir Giles Goosecap. They had with them the 
 incomparable critics of Germany ; men whose knowledge 
 and judgment on all questions of English literature were 
 as far beyond the reach of their English followers as the 
 freedom and enlightenment enjoyed by the subjects of a 
 military empire were beyond the reach of the citizens of 
 a democratic republic. They had established and affili- 
 ated to their own primitive body or church various branch 
 societies or sects, in England and elsewhere, devoted to 
 the pursuit of the same end by the same means and 
 method of study as had just been exemplified in the 
 transactions of the present meeting. Still there remained 
 much to be done ; in witness of which he proposed to lay 
 before them at their next meeting, by way of inauguration 
 under a happy omen of their new year's work, the com- 
 plete body of evidence by means of which he was pre- 
 pared to demonstrate that some considerable portion, if 
 not the greater part, of the remaining plays hitherto 
 assigned to Shakespeare was due to the collaboration of a 
 contemporary actor and playwright, well known by name, 
 but hitherto insufficiently appreciated ; Robert Armin, 
 the author of A Nest of Ninnies. 
 
300 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS. 
 
 The humble but hard-working journeyman of letters who 
 was charged with the honourable duty of reporting the 
 transactions at the last meeting of the Newest Shakespeare 
 Society on the auspicious occasion of its first anniversary, 
 April ist, has received sundry more or less voluminous 
 communications from various gentlemen whose papers 
 were then read or announced, pointing out with more or 
 less acrimonious commentary the matterson which it seems 
 to them severally that they have cause to complain of 
 imperfection or inaccuracy in his conscientious and pains- 
 taking report. Anxious above all things to secure for 
 himself such credit as may be due to the modest merit of 
 scrupulous fidelity, he desires to lay before the public so 
 much of the corrections conveyed in their respective 
 letters of reclamation as may be necessary to complete or 
 to rectify the first draught of their propositions as con- 
 veyed in his former summary. On the present occasion, 
 however, he must confine himself to forwarding the recti- 
 fications supplied by two of the members who took a 
 leading part in the debate of April ist. 
 
 The necessarily condensed report of Mr. A.'s paper 
 
Appenaix. 301 
 
 on A Midsummer Nighfs Dream may make the reasoning' 
 put forward by that gentleman liable to the misconception 
 of a hasty reader. The omission of various qualifying 
 phrases has left his argument without such explanation, his 
 statements without such reservation, as he had been 
 careful to supply. He did not say in so many words that 
 he had been disposed to assign this drama to the author 
 of The Revenger's Tragedy simply on the score of the 
 affinity discernible between the subjects of the two plays. 
 He is not prone to self-confidence or to indulgence in para- 
 dox. What he did say was undeniable by any but those 
 who trusted only to their ear, and refused to correct the con- 
 clusions thus arrived at by the help of other organs which 
 God had given them — their fingers, for example, and their 
 toes ; by means of which a critic of trained and compe- 
 tent scholarship might with the utmost confidence count 
 up as far as twenty, to the great profit of all students who 
 were willing to accept his guidance and be bound by his 
 decision on matters of art and poetry. Only the most 
 purblind could fail to observe, what only the most per- 
 verse could hesitate to admit, that there was at first sight 
 an obvious connection between the poison-flower — 
 "purple from love's wojind" — squeezed by Oberon into 
 the eyes of the sleeping Titania and the poison rubbed by 
 Vindice upon the skull of the murdered Gloriana. No 
 student of Ulrici's invaluable work would think this a far- 
 fetched reference. That eminent critic had verified the 
 meaning and detected the allusion underlying many a pas- 
 sage of Shakespeare in which the connection of moral idea 
 was more difficult to establish than this. In the fifth act of 
 
302 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 either play there was a masque or dramatic show of a 
 sanguinary kind ; in the one case the bloodshed was 
 turned to merry-making, in the other the merry-making 
 was turned to bloodshed. Oberon's phrase, " till I tor- 
 ment thee for this injury," might easily be mistaken for a 
 quotation from the part of Vindice. This explanation, he 
 trusted, would suffice to exonerate his original view from 
 any charge of haste or rashness ; especially as he had now 
 completely given it Up, and adopted one (if possible) 
 more impregnably based on internal and external evi- 
 dence. 
 
 Mr. C. was not unnaturally surprised and indignant 
 to find his position as to Romeo and Lord Burghley barely 
 indicated, and the notice given of the arguments by which 
 it was supported so docked and curtailed as to convey a 
 most inadequate conception of their force. Among the 
 chief points of his argument were these : that the forsaken 
 Rosaline was evidently intended for the late Queen Mary, 
 during whose reign Cecil had. notoriously conformed to 
 the observances of her creed, though ready on the acces- 
 sion of Elizabeth to throw it overboard at a day's notice ; 
 (it was not to be overlooked that the friar on first hear- 
 ing the announcement of this change of faith is made 
 earnestly to remonstrate, prefacing his reproaches with 
 an invocation of two sacred names — an invocation peculiar 
 to Catholics ;) that the resemblance between old Capulet 
 and Henry VIII. is obvious to the most careless reader ; 
 his oath of " God's bread ! " immediately followed by 
 the avowal "it makes me mad" is an unmistakable 
 allusion to the passions excited by the eucharistic con- 
 
Appendix. 303 
 
 troversy ; his violence towards Juliet at the end of the 
 third act at once suggests the alienation of her father's 
 heart from the daughter of Anne Boleyn ; the self-con- 
 gratulation on her own " stainless " condition as a virgin 
 expressed by Juliet in soliloquy (Act iii. Sc. 2) while in 
 the act of awaiting her bridegroom conveys a furtive 
 stroke of satire at the similar vaunt of Elizabeth when 
 likewise meditating marriage and preparing to receive a 
 suitor from the hostile house of Valois. It must be un- 
 necessary to point out the resemblance or rather the 
 identity between the character and fortune of Paris and 
 the character and fortune of Essex, whose fate had been 
 foreseen and whose end prefigured by the poet with 
 almost prophetic sagacity. To the far-reaching eye of 
 Shakespeare it must have seemed natural and inevitable 
 that Paris (Essex) should fall by the hand of Romeo 
 (Burghley) immediately before the monument of the 
 Capulets where their common mistress was interred dlive 
 — immediately, that is, before the termination of the 
 Tudor dynasty in the person of Elizabeth, who towards 
 the close of her reign may fitly have been regarded as 
 one already buried with her fathers, though yet living in 
 a state of suspended animation under the influence of a 
 deadly narcotic potion administered by the friends of 
 Romeo — by the partisans, that is, of the Cecilian policy. 
 The Nurse was not less evidently designed to represent 
 the Established Church. Allusions to the marriage of the 
 clergy are profusely scattered through her speeches. Her 
 deceased husband was probably meant for Sir Thomas 
 More — "a merry man" to the last moment of his existence 
 
304 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 — who might well be supposed by a slight poetic license to 
 have foreseen in the infancy of Elizabeth her future back- 
 sliding and fall from the straight path " when she came to 
 age." The passing expression of tenderness with which the 
 Nurse refers to his memory — " God be with his soul ! " — 
 implies at once the respect in which the name of the martyr 
 Chancellor was still generally held, and the lingering re- 
 mains of Catholic tradition which still made a prayer for 
 the dead rise naturally to Anglican lips. On the other hand, 
 the strife between Anglicans and Puritans, the struggle 
 of episcopalian with Calvinistic reformers, was quite as 
 plainly typified in the quarrel between the Nurse and 
 Mercutio, in which the Martin Marprelate controversy 
 was first unmistakably represented on the stage. The 
 " saucy merchant, that was so full of his ropery," with 
 his ridicule of the " stale " practice of Lenten fasting and 
 abstinence, his contempt for "a Lenten pie," and his 
 preference for a flesh diet as " very good meat in Lent," 
 is clearly a disciple of Calvin ; and the impotence of the 
 Nurse, however scandalised at the nakedness of his 
 ribald profanity, to protect herself against it by appeal to 
 reason or tradition, is dwelt upon with an emphasis suf- 
 ficient to indicate the secret tendency of the poet's own 
 sympathies and convictions. In Romeo's attempt at con- 
 ciliation, and his poor excuse for Mercutio (which yet the 
 .Nurse, an emblem of the temporising and accommodating 
 pliancy of episcopalian Protestantism, shows herself only 
 too ready to accept as valid) as " one that God hath made, 
 for himself to mar," — the allusion here is evidently to the 
 democratic and revolutionary tendencies of the doctrine 
 
Appendix. 305 
 
 of Knox and Calvin, with its ultimate developments of 
 individualism and private judgment — we recognise the 
 note of Burghley's lifelong policy and its endeavour to 
 fuse the Protestant or Puritan party with the state Church 
 of the Tudors as by law established. The distaste of 
 Elizabeth's bishops for such advances, their flutter of 
 apprehension at the daring and their burst of indignation 
 at the insolence of the Calvinists, are significantly ex- 
 pressed in terms which seem to hint at a possible return 
 for help and protection to the shelter of the older faith 
 and the support of its partisans. " An 'a speak anything 
 against me, I'll take him down an 'a were lustier than he 
 is, and twenty such Jacks ; " (the allusion here is again 
 obvious, to the baptismal name of John Calvin and John 
 Knox, if not also to the popular byword of Jack Pres- 
 byter ;) " and if I cannot," (here the sense of insecurity 
 and dependence on foreign help or secular power becomes 
 transparent) " I'll find those that shall." She disclaims 
 communion with the Protestant Churches of the continent, 
 with Amsterdam or Geneva : " I am none of his flirt-gills.; 
 I am none of his skains-mates." Peter, who carries her fan 
 (" to hide her face : for her fan's the fairer face" ; we may 
 take this to be a symbol of the form of episcopal conse- 
 cration still retained in the Anglican Church as a cover 
 for its separation from Catholicism), is undoubtedly 
 meant for Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury ; the name 
 Peter, as applied to a menial who will stand by and suffer 
 every knave to use the Church at his pleasure, but is 
 ready to draw as soon as another man if only he may be 
 sure of having the secular arm of the law on his side, 
 
 X 
 
306 A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 implies a bitter sarcasm on the intruding official of state 
 then established by law as occupant of a see divorced 
 from its connection with that of the apostle. The sense 
 of instability natural to an institution which is compelled 
 to rely for support on ministers who are themselves 
 dependent on the state whose pay they draw for power 
 to strike a blow in self-defence could hardly be better 
 expressed than by the solemn and piteous, almost 
 agonised 'asseveration ; " Now, afore God, I am so vexed, 
 that every part about me quivers." To Shakespeare, it 
 cannot be doubted, the impending dissolution or disloca- 
 tion of the Anglican system in " every part " by civil war 
 and religious discord must even then have been but too 
 ominously evident. 
 
 If further confirmation could be needed of the under- 
 lying significance of allusion traceable throughout this 
 play, it might amply be supplied by fresh reference to 
 the first scene in which the Nurse makes her appearance 
 on the stage, and is checked by Lady Capulet in the full 
 tide of affectionate regret for her lost husband. We can 
 well imagine Anne Boleyn cutting short the regrets of 
 some indiscreet courtier for Sir Thomas More in the very 
 words of the text ; 
 
 Enough of this j I pray thee, hold thy peace. 
 
 The " parlous knock " which left so big a lump upon 
 the brow of the infant Juliet is evidently an allusion to the 
 declaration of Elizabeth's illegitimacy while yet in her 
 cradle. The seal of bastardy set upon the baby brow of 
 
Appenaix. 307 
 
 Anne Boleyn's daughter may well be said to have 
 " broken " it. 
 
 The counsel of the Nurse to Juliet in Act iii. Scene 5 
 to forsake Romeo for Paris indicates the bias of the hier- 
 archy in favour of Essex^-" a lovely gentleman " — rather 
 than of the ultra-Protestant policy of Burghley, who doubt- 
 less in the eyes of courtiers and churchmen was " a dish- 
 clout to him." 
 
 These were a few of the points, set down at random, 
 which he had been enabled to verify within the limits of 
 a single play. They would suffice to give an idea of the 
 process by which, when applied in detail to every one of 
 Shakespeare's plays, he trusted to establish the secret 
 history and import ,of each, not less than the general 
 sequence and significance of all. Further instalments of 
 this work would probably be issued in the forthcoming or 
 future Transactions of the Newest Shakespeare Society ; 
 and it was confidently expected that the final monument 
 of his research, when thoroughly completed and illustrated 
 by cqpious appendices, would prove as worthy as any 
 work of mere English scholarship could hope to be of a 
 place beside the inestimable commentaries of Gervinus, 
 Ulrici, and the Polypseudocriticopantodapomorosophisti- 
 cometricoglossematographicomaniacal Company for the 
 Confusion of Shakespeare and Diffusion of Verbiage 
 Unlimited). 
 
 Chimera Bombinans in Vacuo. 
 
3o8 A Study of SJtakesfeare. 
 
 NOTE. 
 
 Mindful of , the good old apologue regarding " the 
 squeak of the real pig," I think it here worth while to 
 certify the reader of little faith, that the more incredibly 
 impudent absurdities above cited are not so much or so 
 often the freaks of parody or the fancies of burlesque as 
 select excerpts and transcripts of printed and published 
 utterances from the " pink soft litter " of a living brood — 
 from the reports of an actual Society, issued in an 
 abridged and doubtless an emasculated form through 
 the columns of a weekly newspaper. One final and un- 
 approachable instance, one transcendant and pyramidal 
 example of classical taste and of critical scholarship, I did 
 not venture to impair by transference from those columns 
 and transplantation into these pages among humbler 
 specimens of minor monstrosity. Let it stand here once 
 more on record as " a good jest for ever " — or rather as 
 the best and therefore as the worst, as the worst and 
 therefore as the best, of all possible bad jests ever to be 
 cracked between this and the crack of doom. Sophocles, 
 said a learned member, was the proper parallel to Shake- 
 speare among the ancient tragedians : ^schylus — hear, 
 O heaven, and give ear, O earth ! — ^schylus was only a 
 Marlowe. 
 
 The hand which here transcribes this most transcen- 
 dant utterance has written before now many lines in verse 
 and in prose to the honour and glory of Christopher 
 
Appendix. 309' 
 
 Marlowe : it has never — be the humble avowal thus 
 blushingly recorded — it has never set down as the writer's 
 opinion that he was only an ^schylus. In other words, 
 it has never registered as my deliberate and judicial 
 verdict the finding that he was only the equal of the 
 greatest among all tragic and all prophetic poets ; of the 
 man who combined all the light of the Greeks with all 
 the fire of the Hebrews ; who varied at his will the reve- 
 lation of the single gift of Isaiah with the display of the 
 mightiest among the manifold gifts of Shakespeare. 
 
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