A Study of Shakespeare Part 8

He that hath far to go tells it by miles; If he should tell the steps, it kills his heart: The drops are infinite that make a flood, And yet, thou know'st, we call it but a rain.

There is but one France, one king of France, {270} That France hath no more kings; and that same king Hath but the puissant legion of one king; And we have one: Then apprehend no odds; For one to one is fair equality.

_Bien coupe, mal cousu_; such is the most favourable verdict I can pa.s.s on this voluminous effusion of a spirit smacking rather of the schools than of the field. The first six lines or so might pa.s.s muster as the early handiwork of Shakespeare; the rest has as little of his manner as his matter, his metre as his style.

The poet can hardly be said to rise again after this calamitous collapse.

We find in the rest of this scene nothing better worth remark than such poor catches at a word as this;

And let those milkwhite messengers of time Show thy time's learning in this dangerous time;

a villainous trick of verbiage which went nigh now and then to affect the adolescent style of Shakespeare, and which happens to find itself as admirably as unconsciously burlesqued in two lines of this very scene:

I will not give a penny for a life, Nor half a halfpenny to shun grim death.

The verses intervening are smooth, simple, and pa.s.sably well worded; indeed the force of elegant commonplace cannot well go further than in such lines as these.

Thyself art bruised and bent with many broils, And stratagems forepast with iron pens Are texed {271} in thine honourable face; Thou art a married man in this distress, But danger woos me as a blushing maid; Teach me an answer to this perilous time.

_Audley_. To die is all as common as to live; The one in choice, the other holds in chase; For from the instant we begin to live We do pursue and hunt the time to die: First bud we, then we blow, and after seed; Then presently we fall; and as a shade Follows the body, so we follow death.

If then we hunt for death, why do we fear it?

If we fear it, why do we follow it?

(Let me intimate a doubt in pa.s.sing, whether Shakespeare would ever have put by the mouth of any but a farcical mask a query so provocative of response from an Irish echo--"Because we can't help.")

If we do fear, with fear we do but aid The thing we fear to seize on us the sooner; If we fear not, then no resolved proffer Can overthrow the limit of our fate:

and so forth. Again the hastiest reader will have been reminded of a pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sable, but demands no special a.n.a.lysis and affords no necessary extract. We may just observe as examples of style the play on words between the flight of hovering ravens and the flight of routed soldiers, and the description of the sudden fog

Which now hath hid the airy floor of heaven, And made at noon a night unnatural Upon the quaking and dismayed world.

The interest rises again with the reappearance and release of Salisbury, and lifts the style for a moment to its own level. _A tout seigneur tout honneur_; the author deserves some dole of moderate approbation for his tribute to the national chivalry of a Frenchman as here exemplified in the person of Prince Charles.

Of the two next scenes, in which the battle of Poitiers is so inadequately "staged to the show," I can only say that if any reader believes them to be the possible work of the same hand which set before all men's eyes for all time the field of Agincourt, he will doubtless die in that belief, and go to his own place in the limbo of commentators.

But a yet more flagrant effect of contrast is thrust upon our notice at the opening of the fifth act. If in all the historical groundwork of this play there is one point of attraction which we might have thought certain to stimulate the utmost enterprise and evoke the utmost capacities of an aspiring dramatist, it must surely be sought in the crowning scene of the story; in the scene of Queen Philippa's intercession for the burgesses of Calais. We know how Shakespeare on the like occasion was wont to trans.m.u.te into golden verse the silver speech supplied to him by North's version of Amyot's Plutarch. {273} With the text of Lord Berners before him, the author of _King Edward III_. has given us for the gold of Froissart not even adulterated copper, but unadulterated lead. Incredible as it may seem to readers of the historian, the poeticule has actually contrived so far to transfigure by dint of disfiguring him that this most n.o.ble and pathetic scene in all the annals of chivalry, when pa.s.sed through the alembic of his incompetence, appears in a garb of transforming verse under a guise at once weak and wordy, coa.r.s.e 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 a.s.suredly admit that the only discernible or imaginable touches of his hand are very slight, very few, and very early. For myself, I am and have always been perfectly satisfied with one single and simple piece of evidence that Shakespeare had not a finger in the concoction of _King Edward III_. He was the author of _King Henry V_.

NOTE.

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 a.s.sailants 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 condescend to advert or to allude further than by the remark now as it were forced from me, that never once in my life have I had or will I have recourse in self-defence either to the blackguard's loaded bludgeon of personalities 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 imperfection 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 trespa.s.sers of a n.o.bler race, begins the proper province of a blackguard.

REPORT ON 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 Night's Dream_. He was decidedly of opinion that this play was to be ascribed to George Chapman. He based this opinion princ.i.p.ally on the ground of style. From its similarity of subject he had at first been disposed to a.s.sign it to Cyril Tourneur, author of _The Revenger's Tragedy_; and he had drawn up in support of this theory a series of parallel pa.s.sages 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 _Bussy d'Ambois_. There was here 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 Chairman had been on the point of asking the learned member whether he was not thinking rather of _Love's 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 universally accepted as proof positive, and the reading concluded amid signs of unanimous a.s.sent, 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 a.s.signed to Anthony Munday.

As n.o.body 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 upon the subject by a pa.s.sage in which "that kind of fruit that maids call medlars when they laugh alone" is mentioned in connection with a wish of Romeo's regarding 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, laughable, 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, {278} 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 a.s.sured him of the fact; adding that he had always thought so when at school. The plaudits excited by this announcement 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 Shakespeare; whose possibly suspicious readiness to attack the vices of others with a view to diverting attention from his own was signally exemplified in the well-known fact that, even while putting on a feint of respect and tenderness for his memory, he had exposed the profligate haunts and habits of Christopher Marlowe under the transparent pseudonym 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 ill.u.s.tration of Shakespeare and his age, and had actually presumed to publish a well-known edition of the poet at a date previous to the establishment of the present Society. 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 humorous," which being totally unfit for publication here are reserved for a private issue of "Loose and Humorous Papers" to be edited, with a running marginal commentary or ill.u.s.trative and explanatory version of the utmost possible fullness, {279} 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 therefore to his first subject from various references to the presumed 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_) implied a 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 nutsh.e.l.l.

The second t.i.tle of this play, by which the first t.i.tle was in a few years totally superseded, ran thus: _A Woman will have her Will_. Now even in an age of punning t.i.tles such as that of a well-known and delightful treatise by Sir John Harrington, the peculiar fondness of Shakespeare 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. It must now be but too evident to the meanest intelligence--to the meanest intelligence, he repeated; for to such only did he or would he then and there or ever or anywhere address himself--(loud applause) that the graceless author, more utterly lost to all sense of shame than any Don Juan or other typical libertine of fiction, had come forward to placard by way of self-advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.sed on to the consideration of the allusions at once to Shakespeare and to a celebrated fellow-countryman, fellow-poet, and personal 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 recommendation of them that they had rather less to do with any question of dramatic or other poetry than with the differential 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 poetry, mere pa.s.sion, mere pathos, mere beauty and vigour of 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 required of the unfitness and unworthiness 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 despicable diffidence, the pitiful modesty, the contemptible deficiency in common a.s.surance, with which the suggestion of Shakespeare's partnership in this play had generally been put forward and backed up. The tragedy of _Arden of Feversham_ was indeed connected with Shakespeare--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 princ.i.p.al 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 princ.i.p.al patrons, the Earls of Ess.e.x and Southampton. Two figures were subst.i.tuted for one, and the unmistakable name of Will Shakebag was cut in half and divided between them. Care had moreover been taken to disguise the person by altering the complexion 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 that Shakespeare 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 additional 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 princ.i.p.al supporters--Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (hisses and laughter). Now, in these "adycions to Jeronymo" a painter was introduced complaining of the murder of his son. In the play before them a painter was introduced as an accomplice 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 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 became 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 a.s.sume that the infirmity in question was physical. Then arose the question--In which leg? He was prepared, 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 cannot be so neither; yes, it is so, it is so; _it hath the worser sole_." This pa.s.sage was not necessary either to the progress of the play or to the development of the character; he believed he was justified in a.s.serting that it was not borrowed from the original novel on which the play was founded; the inference was obvious, that without some personal allusion it must have been as unintelligib1e to the audience as it had hitherto been to the commentators. His conjecture was confirmed, and the whole subject ill.u.s.trated with a new light, by the well-known line in one of the Sonnets, 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 Fortune theatre, and consequently before his connection with a rival company; a fact of grave importance till now unverified. The epithet "dearest," like so much else in the Sonnets, was evidently susceptible of a double interpretation. 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 subsistence, as the means of getting his bread; but he thought it not unreasonable to infer from this unmistakable 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 conjunction with the accident already mentioned, should be a.s.sumed as the immediate cause of Shakespeare's subsequent change of service, he was not prepared to p.r.o.nounce with such positive confidence as they might naturally expect from a member of the Society; but he would take upon himself to affirm that his main thesis was now and for ever established on the most irrefragable evidence, and that no a.s.sailant could by any possibility dislodge by 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 concluded, Mr. F. proceeded to read his paper on the date of _Oth.e.l.lo_, and on the various parts of that play respectively a.s.signable to Samuel Rowley, to George Wilkins, and to Robert Daborne. It was evident that the story of Oth.e.l.lo and Desdemona was originally quite distinct from that part of the play in which Iago 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 understandings 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 stupor. On recovering from this total and unaccountable suspension of all his faculties, he found the speaker drawing 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 notes.)

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 Desdemona." iii. 1.

"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: _Ca.s.sio_ (twice), _patience_, _Ca.s.sio_ (again), _discretion_, _Ca.s.sio_ (again), honesty, _Ca.s.sio_ (again), _jealousy, jealous_ (used as a trisyllable in the verse of Shakespeare's time), company (two consecutive lines with the triple ending), _Ca.s.sio_ (again), _conscience, pet.i.tion, ability, importunity, conversation, marriage, dungeon, mandragora, pa.s.sion, 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 Act i. Sc. 3, and compare them with the speech of Oth.e.l.lo 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 pa.s.sage up to the date of the other than to invert the order of the alphabet. Here, then, putting aside for the moment the part of the play supplied by Shakespeare's a.s.sistants in the last three acts--miserably weak some of it was--they were able to disentangle the early love-play from the latter work in which Iago was princ.i.p.ally concerned. There was at least fifteen years' growth between them, the steps of which could he 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 Oth.e.l.lo 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, Oth.e.l.lo and Desdemona were even more clearly the companion pair to Biron and Rosaline of _Love's Labour's Lost_ than were Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet the match-pair (_sic_) of Romeo and Juliet. In _Love's Labour's Lost_ the question of complexion was identical, though the parts were reversed. He would cite but a few parallel pa.s.sages in evidence of this relationship between the subjects of the two plays.