A Study of Shakespeare Part 9

_Love's Labour's Lost_, iv. 3. _Oth.e.l.lo_.

1. "By heaven, thy love is black 1. "An old black ram." i. 1.

as ebony."

2. "No face is _fair_ that is not 2. "Your son-in-law is far more full so black." _fair_ than black." i. 3.

3. "O paradox! Black is the 3. "How if she be black and badge of h.e.l.l." witty?" ii. 1.

4. "O, _if_ in black my lady's 4. "_If_ she be black, and thereto brows be decked." have a wit." id.

5. "And therefore is she born 5. "A measure to the health of to make black fair." black Oth.e.l.lo." ii. 3.

6. "Paints itself black to 6. "For I am black." iii, 3.

imitate her brow."

7. "To look like her are 7. "_Begrimed_ and black." id.

_chimney-sweepers_ black."

Now, with these parallel pa.s.sages before them, what man, woman, or child could bring himself or herself to believe that the connection of these plays was casual or the date of the first Oth.e.l.lo removable from the date of the early contemporary late-first-period-but-one play _Love's Labour's Lost_, or that anybody's opinion that they were so was worth one straw?

When therefore by the introduction of the Iago episode Shakespeare in his later days had with the a.s.sistance of three fellow-poets completed the unfinished work of his youth, the junction thus effected of the Brabantio part of the play with this Iago 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 conclusion 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 understood it to be admittedly spurious: but on being a.s.sured 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 a.s.sertion all that part of the play which could reasonably be a.s.signed 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 inconsiderately 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 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 a.s.sumed was that of madness, of sickness, or of a foreign personality, the a.s.sumption 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 {291} the crude and untenable theory that the Hamlet soliloquies were not distinctly 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 pa.s.sages 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 country life of solitude) under the name of Morose, and to Shakespeare's retort on Jonson, who was no less evidently attacked under the designation of Ariel. The allusions to the subject of Shakespeare'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 himself 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 common 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 consequent 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 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 reasoning, conclusive in itself, became even more irresistible--or would become so, if that were anything less than an absolute impossibility--on comparison of parallel pa.s.sages,

Though kings still hug suspicion in their bosoms, They hate the causer. (_Andromana_, Act i. Sc. 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. (_King Richard II_., Act v. Sc. 6.)

Again in the same scene:

For then her husband comes home from the Rialto.

Compare this with various pa.s.sages (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 pa.s.sage could have thought it necessary to disguise his plagiarism in the other by an inversion of s.e.xes between the two speakers. In the same scene were three other indisputable instances of repet.i.tion.

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 ident.i.ty of s.e.x was as palpable an evidence for ident.i.ty of authorship as diversity of s.e.x had afforded in the preceding instance.

Again:

Have oaths no _more validity_ with princes?

In _Romeo and Juliet_, 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.

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 like debate between King Henry and Westmoreland on the eve of Agincourt?

or could any member suppose that in the subsequent remark of the same 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 proceeding--under similar circ.u.mstances 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, moreover, 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 attributed 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 of Shakespeare? Common sense, common reason, common 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 a.s.sent.) Now, on this ground he was prepared to maintain that the claims of _Andromana_ to their most respectful, their most cordial, their most unhesitating 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, inconceivably, unmitigatedly, irredeemably, inexpressibly d.a.m.nable piece of bad work ever perpetrated by human hand.

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 1st) 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 imbecility, 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 secret of his touch; the study of Shakespeare by rule of thumb. Every man, woman, and child born 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 without, 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 not 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 traditions of his life, they trusted in a very few years to subvert 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 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 Caesar, King Lear, Hamlet_, and _Oth.e.l.lo_; they had established or they would establish the fact of his partnership in _Locrine, Mucedorus, The Birth of Merlin, Dr. Dodipoll_, 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 affiliated 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 complete body of evidence by means of which he was prepared to demonstrate that some considerable portion, if not the greater part, of the remaining plays. .h.i.therto a.s.signed 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_.

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 1st, 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 matters on which it seems to them severally that they have cause to complain of imperfection or inaccuracy in his conscientious and painstaking 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 conveyed in his former summary. On the present occasion, however, he must confine himself to forwarding the rectifications supplied by two of the members who took a leading part in the debate of April 1st.

The necessarily condensed report of Mr. A.'s paper on _A Midsummer Night's 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 a.s.sign 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 p.r.o.ne to self-confidence or to indulgence in paradox. What he did say was undeniable by any but those who trusted only to their ear, and refused to correct the conclusions thus arrived at by the help of other organs which G.o.d had given them--their fingers, for example, and their toes; by means of which a critic of trained and competent 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 perverse could hesitate to admit, that there was at first sight an obvious connection between the poison-flower--"purple from love's wound"--squeezed by Oberon into the eyes of the sleeping t.i.tania 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 pa.s.sage of Shakespeare in which the connection of moral idea was more difficult to establish than this. In the fifth act of 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 torment 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 evidence.

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 accession of Elizabeth to throw it overboard at a day's notice; (it was not to be overlooked that the friar on first hearing 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 "G.o.d's bread!"

immediately followed by the avowal "it makes me mad" is an unmistakable allusion to the pa.s.sions excited by the eucharistic controversy; 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-congratulation 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 unnecessary to point out the resemblance or rather the ident.i.ty between the character and fortune of Paris and the character and fortune of Ess.e.x, 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 (Ess.e.x) should fall by the hand of Romeo (Burghley) immediately before the monument of the Capulets where their common mistress was interred alive--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--who might well be supposed by a slight poetic license to have foreseen in the infancy of Elizabeth her future backsliding and fall from the straight path "when she came to age." The pa.s.sing expression of tenderness with which the Nurse refers to his memory--"G.o.d be with his soul!"--implies at once the respect in which the name of the martyr Chancellor was still generally held, and the lingering remains 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 sufficient to indicate the secret tendency of the poet's own sympathies and convictions. In Romeo's attempt at conciliation, 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 G.o.d hath made, for himself to mar,"--the allusion here is evidently to the democratic and revolutionary tendencies of the doctrine 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 expressed 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 l.u.s.tier 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 Presbyter;) "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 consecration 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, 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 inst.i.tution 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 a.s.severation; "Now, afore G.o.d, I am so vexed, that every part about me quivers." To Shakespeare, it cannot be doubted, the impending dissolution or dislocation of the Anglican system in "every part" by civil war and religious discord must even then have been but too ominously evident.