A Study of Shakespeare Part 11

But we may look long in vain for the like of this pa.s.sage, taken from the crudest and feeblest work of Marlowe, in the wide and wordy expanse of _King Edward III_.

{247} A pre-Shakespearean word of single occurrence in a single play of Shakespeare's, and proper to the academic school of playwrights.

{248} _The First Part of Tamburlaine the Great_, Act v. Sc. ii.

{252} It may be worth a remark that the word _power_ is constantly used as a dissyllable; another note of archaic debility or insufficiency in metre.

{255} Yet another essentially non-Shakespearean word, though doubtless once used by Shakespeare; this time a most ungraceful Gallicism.

{256} 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 _novus h.o.m.o_ 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 a.s.sert that I desire to have none.

{261} Surely, for _sweet'st_ we should read _swift'st_.

{262a} 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 _invocate_ and _endamagement_, a mere [Greek text] can carry no weight of evidence with it worth any student's consideration.

{262b} This form is used four times by Shakespeare as the equivalent of Bretagne; once only, in one of his latest plays, as a synonym for Britain.

{263a} Another word indiscoverable in any genuine verse of Shakespeare's, though not (I believe) unused on occasion by some among the poets contemporary with his earlier years.

{263b} This word was perhaps unnecessarily altered by our good Capell to "tender."

{264a} Yet another and a singular misuse of a word never so used or misused by Shakespeare.

{264b} Qu. Why, so is your desire: If that the law, etc.?

{264c} _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 pa.s.sage which contains it an echo or a trace of the "music, wit, and oracle" of Shakespeare. But in those days I had yet to learn what manner of ears are p.r.i.c.ked up to listen "when rank Thersites opes his mastiff jaws" in criticism of Homer or of Shakespeare. In a corner of the preface to an edition of "Shakspere" which bears on its t.i.tle-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 a.s.surance 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 naturally 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 discovered 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 Shakespearean 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 Latin pun, or rather a punning Latinism, not altogether out of Shakespeare's earliest line. But see the note preceding this one.

{269} The simple subst.i.tution of the word "is" for the word "and" would rectify the grammar here--were that worth while.

{270} Qu. So there is but one France, etc.?

{271} Non-Shakespearean.

{273} 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.

{278} This brilliant idea has since been borrowed from the Chairman--and that without acknowledgment--by one of those worthies whose mission it is to make manifest that no burlesque invention of mere man's device can improve upon the inexhaustible capacities of Nature as shown in the production and perfection of the type irreverently described by Dryden as 'G.o.d Almighty's fool.'

{279} This word was incomprehensibly misprinted in the first issue of the Society's Report, where it appeared as "foulness." To prevent misapprehension, the whole staff of printers was at once discharged.

{291} 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 faisaient pas l'oreille_? But the flower of rhetoric here gathered was beyond the reach of Arnolphe's innocent ward. The procreation in such a case is even more difficult for fancy to realise than the conception.