Front matter (continued 12)

If, as we see, an allegory may be ingeniously drawn from a work which never was allegorical; so when an allegory seems designed, its secret application is usually the forlorn hope of literature, since the most subtile conjectures on these enigmas have wholly differed from each other.

Persons and incidents in an allegorical fiction are noses of wax, ever to be shaped by a more adroit finger. But in a lengthened allegory, the ground is often shifted; the allegorister tires of his allegory, and at length means what he says and nothing more. This has driven the expounders of the double sense into the absurdity of explaining an identical object, sometimes in a metaphysical, and at others in a material sense; they take up what their fancy requires, and cautiously drop what would place them in an inextricable position.

Dante opened his great work in the darkness of an allegory; but how the erratic commentators have lost their way in “Le tenebre della Divina Commedia!” What are the three allegorical animals which open “the Vision?” The double sense remains inexplicable from its abundant explanations. Are these animals personifications of three great passions? Is the gay panther the type of luxurious pleasure, the lion of ambition, the she-wolf of avarice? But what if the spotted panther should be the representative of Dante’s own Florence, and its spots indicate the Neri and the Bianchi factions? The hungry lion, with its lofty head, would then be superb France, and the lean she-wolf, never satiate, be devouring Rome. Yet a later revelation from Niebuhr, according to his Platonic ideas, sees but three metaphysical beings the types of the soul, the understanding, and the senses. Should some future allegorister discover, by his historical, political, and ethical fancies, that the three animals were designed, one for a wavering and maculated Ghibelline, and the others for the resolute papal Guelphs, the probability would be much the same. In truth we can afford but small confidence to these expounders of the double sense; for when Jean Molinet allegorised the “Roman de la Rose,” and illustrated it by historical appliances, as chronology was rarely consulted in his day, it appears that this good canon of Valenciennes had allegorised in reference to persons who flourished and events which occurred posterior to the time of the writers.

In the instances which we have indicated, such as in Ariosto and Tasso, it was the commentator who had indulged his allegorical genius, not the original writers themselves. With one of our great poets unhappily the case is reversed; the poetic character and destiny of Spenser stand connected with allegory; for here the poet himself prematurely meditated on his allegory before he invented his fiction. The difference is immense. Spenser fell a victim to this phantom of the poetic creed of his day. Deeming a mystic allegory a novel spirit in poesy, he who was to run the glorious career of Faery-land first forged the brazen bonds which he could never shake off. His invention was made subordinate to a prescribed system. The poet was continually running after the allegory, which he did not always care to recover in the exuberance of his imagination, and the copious facility of his stanzas. Often must he have deprived his twelve knights-errant of their tangible humanity, perpetually relapsing into their metaphysical nonentities—Sir Guyon into temperance, Arthegal into justice, and Sir Caladore into courtesy!

Yet this is not the sole defect of the allegorical character of the “Faery Queen.” We may suspect that when Spenser decided on constructing an allegorical poem, he had not any settled notions of the artifice of types, nor yet of the subjects to be symbolised; of fictions which were to conceal truths, and of truths which might be mistaken for fictions. A strange confusion often prevails in his system, sometimes ambiguous, sometimes contradictory, whenever the allegory loses itself in what is not allegorical, or the reality is as suddenly lost amid the mystical fancies.

The poet himself announced that the “Faery Queen” was “a continued allegory or dark conceit;” and he was so strongly convinced that “all allegories are doubtfully construed,” that he determined to expound his own text regarding a most eminent personage; but this was merely to secure a courtly eulogy on a royal patroness. “In the ‘Faerie Queene’ I mean glory in my general intention, but in my particular I conceive the most excellent and glorious person of the Queen and her kingdom in Faery-land.” He afterwards adds that “in some places also I do otherwise shadow her.” And further, the poet informs us that “her Majesty is two persons, a royal Queen and a most virtuous and beautiful lady.” Truly her Majesty might have viewed herself “in mirrors more than one,” and, as she much liked, in different dresses. Now as the Faerie Queen, now as Belphœbe, now as Cynthia, now as Mercilla; and in the “Legend of Chastity,” who would deny that Britomart is the shadow of the Virgin Queen, notwithstanding that this lady-warrior bears a closer resemblance to Virgil’s Camilla, to Ariosto’s Bradamante, and Tasso’s Clorinda? All this the poet has revealed; but had he been silent, these mystical types might have baffled even the perilous ingenuity of Upton, his egregious expounder of the double sense, the exuberance of whose conjectural sagacity might have enlightened and charmed even Spenser himself!

The poet was himself aware that when an allegory does not gracefully unveil itself, it admits of the most dubious expositions. The allegories of the “Faery Queen” which allude to public events are transparent. The first book exhibits the struggles of the Reformation with papistry. Una is Truth, the Red-cross Knight the Christian militant, still subjected to trial and infirmity, separated from Una, or as it was called, “the true Religion,” by the magical illusions of Archimagus, whom Warton considers was the arch-fiend himself, but Upton only an adumbration of “his Holiness.” The terrible giant, Orgoglio, seems to have a stronger claim to be the proud and potent Bishop of Rome, enamoured as he is of Superstition in the false Duessa, that gorgeous enchantress, so fair and foul, arrayed in purple and scarlet, whom he has seated on his seven-headed dragon, and on whose head he has placed a triple crown. The dark den of monstrous Error, the hastening cavalcade of every splendid vice, the combat with the Infidel Sans Foy, the church militant finally triumphant in the solemn union of the Red-cross with Una, complete the allegory of “Holiness.” The Apocalypse may serve as the commentary on some of these personages; but the well-known title of the lady may not be risked to “ears polite.” But such is the moveable machinery of allegorical history, that Sir Walter Scott, in his review of Todd’s Spenser, has discovered many other shadowings of facts, in the history of Christian “Holiness,” who, like the Red-cross Knight, separated from Una, had to encounter “the monster Error, and her brood,” in paganism, before the downfall of Orgoglio and Duessa, and popery in England; in the freedom of the Red-cross Knight from his imprisonment, our critic reveals the establishment of the Protestant Church.4 Sir Walter might have noticed Spenser’s abhorrence of the puritans.

The allegory is still more obvious when the poet alludes to some contemporary events. It is then a masquerade by daylight, where the maskers pass on, holding their masks in their hands. In the fifth book we see the distressed Knight Bourbon, opposed by a rabble-rout in his attempt to possess himself of the Lady Fleur de Lis, whom he loves for “her lordships and her lands.” He bears away that half-reluctant and coy lady. But for this purpose Bourbon had basely changed his shield, and, reproached by Sir Arthegal or Justice, he offers but a recreant’s apology:—

——When time shall serve, My former shield I may resume again; To temporise is not from truth to swerve. Fie on such forgerie! said Arthegal, Under one hood to shadow faces twain.

The change of shields of Sir Bourbon is the change of faith of Henry of Navarre; and the reluctant mistress is that uncompliant France whom he forced to take him as her monarch. Not less obvious is the episode of the Lady Belgé calling for aid on the British prince—she, now widowed, and whose seventeen sons were reduced to five by the cruelties of Geryon, and the horrors of that implacable “monster, who lay hid in darkness, under the cursed Idol’s altar-stone;” the great revolution of the Netherlands, the reduction of the seventeen provinces, and the horrors of a Romish persecution, are apparent.

But when the allegory runs into obscurer incidents and more fictitious personages than those which we have noticed, it becomes rarefied into volatile conjecture, or by our ingenuity may be shaped into partial resemblances, always uncertain, when we accept invented fictions as historical evidence. We know that a writer of an elaborate fictitious narrative may have touched on circumstances and characters caught from life; but all these, in passing through the mind of the inventor, are usually so altered from their reality, to be accommodated to the higher design of the invention, that any parallel in private history, or any likeness of an individual character, any indistinct allusion, can never deserve our historical confidence. A picture of human nature would be an anomalous work, in which we could trace no resemblance to individuals, or discover no coincidences of circumstances.

A century and a half after the publication of the “Faery Queen,” a commentator of “the double sense” revealed to its readers that sealed history which they had never read, and which the poet had never divulged. A few traditional rumours may have floated down; but it was Upton’s edition which startled the world by the abundance of its modern revelations.

John Upton, prebendary of Rochester, and the master of a public school, which he raised to eminence, was distinguished for his scholastic acquirements, the depth of his critical erudition, and for his acquaintance with the history of the Elizabethan court, chiefly, however, drawn from Camden. Acute in his emendations of texts, they were not, however, slightly tinged by an over-refining pedantry at the cost of his taste; and as his judgment was the infirmest of his faculties, in his enthusiasm for an historical illustration of Spenser, he seems often encumbered by his knowledge striking out similitudes and parallels; a few appear not infelicitous, but many are suggested in the licentiousness of vague conjecture, or left half in the light and half in the dark. His “Critical Observations on Shakspeare” remind one of Bentley’s “slashing” of Milton. Dr. Johnson has been censured for the severity of his character of Upton; I know not whether the doctor ever attended to Upton’s Commentary on Spenser; he has, however, admirably hit off a prominent feature of our critic. “Every cold”—in Upton’s case I would rather say warm—“empiric, when his heart is expanded by a successful experiment, swells into a theorist.”

“In one sense,” says Upton, “you are in Fairy-Land, yet in another you may be in the British dominions.” And further, “where the moral allusion is not apparent, you must look for an historical allusion.” Such are the fundamental positions of the allegorical theory, by which a conjectural historian designs to unveil the secret sense of a romantic epic; the poet, according to him, having frigidly descended into the historiographer of the court of Elizabeth, rather than of the court of the Faery Queen—to catch “the Cynthias of the minute,” and to waste his colours on their evanescent portraits.

And amusing it is to watch the historical conjecturer of a romantic poem perilously creeping along the dark passages of secret history; but he is often at a stand. In “the palpable obscure,” the historical reality, which he seems to be touching, suddenly disappears under his grasp. We have no golden key to open the occult chamber, where we are told so many knights and ladies lie entranced near two centuries in their magical sleep, and where, amid the shadowiness, the historical necromancer promptly furnishes us with their very names, recognising all these enchanted persons by their very attitudes.

One of his most felicitous conjectures regards “the gentle squire Timias” as the poet’s honoured friend, Sir Walter Rawleigh. Sir Walter once incurred the disgrace of the Queen by a criminal amour with one of the maids of honour; he was for some time banished the court; but the injury to the lady was expiated by marriage. The private history we are to look for in the Allegory. Timias offends Belphœbe the patroness of Chastity, and the Queen of England, who surprised “the gentle squire” in a very suspicious attitude of tenderness with Amoret. This lady was suffering from violence, having been “rapt by greedie Lust,” and the gentle squire himself had partaken of the mischance, in encountering that savage. Timias; the knight, is seen—

From her fair eyes wiping the dewy wet, Which softly slid; and kissing them atween, And handling soft the hurts which she did get.

Belphœbe on the sudden appears, and indignantly exclaims—

“Is this the Faith?” she said, and said no more; But turn’d her face, and fled away for evermore.

In a romantic scene,5 “the gentle squire” in banishment is wasted with grief, so as not to be recognised by his friends; his lone companion is a turtle-dove, a magical and sympathizing bird, who entices Belphœbe, that Sovereign Chastity, to pursue its playful flight, till it leads her to the cell of the miserable man from whom she had so long averted her face, and Timias recovers her favour.

In this extended scene we are to view the condition of Rawleigh during his disgrace; and the opening of the canto gives some countenance to the particular application. The aptitude of a resemblance, however, may only be a coincidence. The fatal error of our conjectural historian is that of spinning at his allegory long after he is left without a thread. In Amoret’s calamitous adventure, “rapt by greedie Lust,” Upton sees an adumbration of the lady of Sir Walter before her marriage; and in another adventure, where another person, Serena, with “the gentle squire,” are both carried to a hermit’s cell, to be healed of the wounds inflicted by calumny and scandal, their condition after marriage. Our diviner, as further evidence of “the double sense,” discovers how remarkably appropriate was the name of Serena to the lady of Rawleigh.

In all these transmigrations of persons the enigmatical expounder acknowledges that the typical incidents suddenly diverge from their prototype. The parallels run crooked, and the fictions will not square with the facts; and he desperately exclaims that “the poet has designedly perplexed the story:” but he concludes with this hardy assumption, “If the reader cannot see through these disguises, he will see nothing but the dead letter.” And what but “the dead letter,” as this hierophant of mystic senses asperses the free inventions of genius, can now interest the readers of Spenser? For the honour of our poet we protest against the dark and broken dreams hovering about a commentator’s desk. Who can credit that the courteous and courtly spirit of Spenser would thus lay bare to the public eye the delicate history of the lady of Sir Walter, even by a remote allusion? Yet this he does by connecting her name with Amoret carried away by “greedie Lust,” and with Serena, who required to be healed of the wounds inflicted by scandal. Can we conceive that the poet would have thus deliberately re-opened the domestic wound, still tender, of his patron-friend, and distressed that “serene” lady, in a poem to be read by them, to be conned by malicious eyes, and to be consigned to posterity?

The readers of Upton’s revelations may often be amused by his lettered ingenuity reasoning with eager perversity. In Book II. Canto i. a pathetic incident occurs in a forest, where we find a lady with her infant on her bosom, and her knight extended in death beside her. Her shriek is deadly as the blow she has given herself. Guyon the Knight of Temperance flies to her succour; dying, she tells how “her liefest lord” had been beguiled, “for he was flesh,” by Acrasia, or sensual pleasure. The lady had recovered him from the fell embraces of that sorceress, who, in parting, seduces him to drink from a charmed cup her accursed wine. On his return homewards with his lady he would quench his thirst at a fountain, but

So soon as Bacchus with the Nymphe does lincke,

that is, the instant the pure water reaches his viny lips, he tastes, and he dies!

The Knight of Temperance takes the infant from the bleeding bosom of the mother to wash it in the fountain—but no water could cleanse its bloody hand; hence it was to be called “Ruddimane:” it was “a sacred symbol in the son’s flesh, to tell of the mother’s innocence.” Upton had discovered that the great Irish insurrectionist O’Neal, as Camden records, “dwelt in all the pollutions of unchaste embraces, and had several children by O’Donnel’s wife.”

The badge of the O’Neals was “a bloody hand.” In the ecstasy of divination he exclaims, “This lady with the bloody-handed babe is—the wife of O’Neal!” The dying lady had told her sad tale, but never had she hinted at the Irish origin. Her knight had fallen a victim to Acrasia; a suitable incident in the legend of temperance—a result of that “passion” at which the poet pointed, and described as one which

Robs Reason of her due regality.

And this simple incident is converted into the fate of the O’Neals, presenting an image of the miseries of the Irish rebellion!

We pass by the contemporary portraits inscribed by our speculative historian with real names. When fancy is busy, likenesses are often found; a single feature is sometimes taken for a whole physiognomy. Never surely did our conjecturer shoot wider of the mark than when he discovered in the two burlesque characters of the poltroon Braggadochio and his cheating squire Trompart, the Duke of Anjou and his envoy Simier. These were eminent characters known in the court of Elizabeth. To the French prince the Queen seemed partial, and once placed a ring on his finger, too sanguinely accepted as a plight of betrothment; and Simier was a discreet diplomatist, whom the Queen publicly commended for his conduct. To have degraded such distinguished men by such vulgar baseness would have been a discrepancy in the taste and decorum of our courtly poet which Spenser never betrayed.6

In regard to Spenser, after all these allusions problematical for a succeeding generation, the poet is no longer to be judged by the darkness which has hidden small and fugitive matters. We cannot know the degree which Spenser allowed himself in distant allusions to the court of Elizabeth, or, as the poet himself vaguely said, to “Fairy-land;” he may have promised far more than he would care to perform; for an epical poet must have found the descent into a chronicler of scandalous legends, a portrayer of so many nameless personages, incompatible with the flow and elevation of his themes. And for what was never ascertained in its own age we dare not confide to that mystical vaticinator of past events, a conjectural historian!

Our interpreter of allegory was honest as well as hardy; in truth, he is sometimes startled at the historical revelations which crowd on his mind. It required “the hound’s fine footing,” to borrow the beautiful figure of Spenser himself, for our conjecturer to course in this field of allegory. With great candour he says, “Let us take care we do not overrun our game, or start more game than we are able to catch.” His occasional dilemmas are amusing. He perplexed himself by a discovery that Amoret, whom he had made the lady of Sir Walter Rawleigh, might also have served for Mary Queen of Scots. In this critical crucifixion, he cries in torture, “I will neither affirm nor deny that Amoret is the type of Mary Queen of Scots!” But he had his ecstasies; for on another occasion, having indulged a very extravagant fancy, he exclaims in joyous rapture, “This may show how far types and symbols may be carried!” Yet, with his accustomed candour, he lowers down. “If the reader should think my arguments too flimsy, and extended beyond their due limits, and should laugh

To see their thrids so thin as spiders frame, And eke so short that seem’d their ends out shortly came,

let him consider the latitude of interpretation all types and symbolical writings admit.”7 Truly that latitude has been too often abused on graver subjects than “The Faery Queen;” but the honesty of our mystical interpreter of double senses may plead for the extravagance of his ingenuity whenever he needs our indulgence.

Enough on this curious subject of allegory—this child of darkness among the luminous progeny of fancy. We have shown its changeable nature, and how frequently it fails in unity and clearness; we have demonstrated that “the double sense”—this system of types and symbols—has served as an imposture, since allegories have been deduced from works which were not allegorical, and forced interpretations of an ambiguous sense have led to fallacies which have fatally been introduced into history, into politics, and into theology.

1 We have a collection of these “Allegoricæ Homericæ.” Even the great Verulam caught the infectious ingenuity; and, in “the wisdom of the ancients,” explains everything with the skill of a great Homeric scholiast.

2 Berni’s “Bojardo,” canto xxxi. st. 2. He has hardly improved the verse in the “Inferno,” canto ix. ver. 61.—

O voi ch’avete gl’intelletti sani, Mirate la dottrina che s’asconde, Sotto il velame degli versi strani.

3 The “Allegoria dalla Poema” is appended to the ancient editions of Tasso’s “Gerusalemme Liberata.” The one before me is dated Ferrara, 1582. I believe it has been indignantly rejected by modern editors. When we detect Tasso seriously describing Godfrey as the type of the human understanding—Rinaldo, and Tancred, and others, as different faculties of the soul—and the common soldiers as the body of man—we regret that an honourable mind should degrade itself by such literary imposture. At length, having succeeded in imposing on others, he attempted to impose on himself; for he actually commenced a second “Jerusalem” on the allegorical system, and did not more happily succeed in his elder days than our Akenside in his philosophical destruction of his youthful poem.

4 “Edinburgh Review,” vol. vii. p. 215.

5 Book III. canto viii.

6 It has been observed of Upton that, though an excellent classical scholar, he was little versed in the romances of chivalry. In the romance of “Gyron le Courtois” he would have found the original of the farcical Knight Braggadochio; a fact, long after I had written the above, which I owe to Mr. Southey. Such ludicrous caricatures are unusual with the delicacy and elegance of Spenser; and they seem never to have been struck in his mint. I suspect we should not have had such farcical personages in the “Faery Queen,” had not Spenser’s propensity to imitation induced him to follow his beloved patron, who has not happily introduced in the “Arcadia” the low comic of Damœtas and his ugly daughter Mopsa.

7 Upton’s note at the close of the fifth book of “The Faery Queen.”

THE FIRST TRAGEDY AND THE FIRST COMEDY.

In the transition from the simpler interlude to the aggrandizement of a more complicate scene and more numerous personages, so indistinct were the notions of tragedy and comedy, that the writer of a morality in 1578, declaring that his purpose was to represent “the manners of men, and fashion of the world now-a-days,” distinguishes his drama both as “a Pleasant Tragedy” and “a Pitiful Comedy.”1 This play, indeed, may be placed among the last of the ancient dramas; and it is probable that the author considered that these vague expressions might serve to designate a superior order of dramatic productions.

The term Comedy was as indefinite in France as with ourselves. Margaret of Valois, in 1544, gave the title of comedy to such scriptural pieces as The Nativity, The Adoration of the Kings, and The Massacre of the Innocents; and in Spain, at the same period, they also called their moral pieces comedies. The title of one of these indicates their matter, La Doleria del Sueño del Mundo; Comedia tratada por via de Philosophia Moral,—“The Anguish of the Sleep of the World; a Comedy treated in the style of Philosophic Morality.” Comedy was the general appellative for a play. Shakspeare himself calls the play of the players in Hamlet both a tragedy and a comedy. It is quite evident that at this period they had no distinct conception of comedy merely as a pleasant exhibition of society. Aristotle had not afforded them a correct description in our sense, drawing his notions from the old comedy, those personal satires or farcical lampoons acted on the Athenian stage.

To this day we remain still unsatisfied what Dante meant by calling his great poem a “Commedia.” Dante throws the same sort of mystery over the species of his poem as he has done over the creation of a classical diction for his own Italy. According to his interpretation, the lofty style was denominated tragic, and in opposition to it he has called his work “Commedia,” as of a more humble style; and on another occasion he describes comedy as something that begins sadly and ends happily, as we find it in his great poem. We must, however, accept the definition as very obscure, when we consider that both his subject and his diction so often led him to sublimity of conception and expression; but the style of criticism was yet unformed in the days of the Italian Homer.

It is remarkable that Boccaccio has entitled his pastoral of “Ameto” a “Commedia delle Ninfe Fiorentine.” It is difficult to imagine that the almost contemporaneous commentator would have misused the word; we might presume he attached the idea of a drama to this disputed term.

While these indistinct notions of tragedy and comedy were prevalent with us, even long after we had a public theatre, we really possessed tragedy and comedy in their more classical form; Tragedy, which soared to the sententiousness of Seneca; and Comedy, which sported with Plautus and Terence.

We owe this first TRAGEDY in our language, represented before the Queen in 1561, by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple, to the master-spirit who planned The Mirror for Magistrates, and left as its model The Induction. Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, the first Earl of Dorset, in that national poem had struck with the nerve of Chaucer while he anticipated the grave melodious stanza and the picturing invention of Spenser. But called away from the land of the muses to the political cabinet, this fine genius seems repeatedly to have consigned his works to the hands of others; even his lighter productions are still concealed from us in their anonymous condition. As in The Mirror for Magistrates Sackville had resigned that noble scheme to inferior names, so in this tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex, or, as it was sometimes entitled, The Tragedy of Gorboduc, while his genius struck out the same originality of plan, yet the titlepage informs us that he accepted a coadjutor in Thomas Norton, who, as much as we know of him in other things, was a worthy partner of Sternhold and Hopkins.

In this first tragedy in our language, cast in the mould of classical antiquity, we find a division of scenes and a progressive plot carried on, though somewhat heavily, through five acts; the ancient ethical choruses are preserved, changing their metres with rhyme. And here, for the first time, blank verse was recited on the stage. Notwithstanding these novel refinements, our first tragedy bears a strong impress of ancient simplicity. Every act was preceded by “a dumb show,” prefiguring the incidents of the opening act; these scenical displays of something considered to be analogous to the matter were remains of the pageants.

Blank verse, which the Earl of Surrey had first invented for his version of Virgil, the Earl of Dorset now happily applied to the dramatic dialogue. To both these noblemen our poets owe their emancipation from rhyme; but the rhythmical artifices of blank verse were not discovered in the monotonous, uncadenced lines of its inventors. The happiest inventor does not overcome all difficulties.

Sackville, in this tragedy, did not work with the potent mastery of his Induction; his fire seems smothered in each exact line; he steals on with care but with fear, as one treading on ice, and appears not to have settled in his mind the true language of emotion, for we feel none. He is ethical more than dramatic. His lifeless personages have no distinctness of character; his speeches are scholastic orations: but the purity of his diction and the aptness of his epithets are remarkable; his words and phrases are transparent; and he may be read with ease by those not versed in ancient lore. The political part of the tragedy is not destitute of interest; developing the misery of fraternal wars, the division of sovereign power, each contending for dominion, and closing in the dissolution of all government, by the despair of a people. We have ourselves witnessed in these times a similar scene of the enmity of brothers and monarchs.

A political anecdote confining this tragedy is worth recording. In the discussions of the dangers and mischiefs of such a state of insubordination, the poet, adopting the prevalent notions of the divine right and the authority of “the absolute king,” inculcates the doctrine of passive obedience. These lines, which appear in the first edition, were silently removed from the later ones.2 It is an evidence that these dreary principles, which in the following reigns of James and Charles produced such fatal misunderstandings, even at this time began to be questioned. Our poet, however, under the reckless councils of a court minion, had covered the severest satire on those monarchs who rage with “the lust of kingdoms,” and “subject to no law,” and who hold their enormous will to be the privilege of regal power. Sackville seems to have adopted the principle which Machiavel had artfully managed in his “Prince,” in the spirit of damning irony.

There is such a level equality throughout the whole style of this drama,3 that it has given rise to a suspicion that the work could only be the composition of one mind and one ear. It is not in the constitution of the human intellect that Norton could emulate Sackville, or that Sackville could bring himself down to Norton. This internal evidence struck Warton; and tracing it by The Mirror for Magistrates, the suspicion was confirmed; the scenes of Gorboduc are visibly marked with the greater poet’s characteristics, “in a perspicuity of style and a command of numbers superior to the tone of his times.” The name of Norton affixed to the titlepage might only indicate his management of the pageants! and possibly, being a licenser of books and a puritan, even his name might be a recommendation of this drama, for certain persons. Few things in those days were more loosely conducted than the business and the artifices of printers, who generally procured their copies surreptitiously, or were permitted to accommodate them to their own free management and deceptive titlepages.

We must not decide on the first tragedy by a comparison with the more attractive and impassioned ones which soon afterwards inundated our theatres. The court-circle had never before listened to such an amazing novelty; and the poetic critic of that day pronounced that “those stately speeches and well-sounding phrases were full of notable morality, which it doth most delightfully teach.” Sir Philip Sidney only grieved that this tragedy might not remain as an exact model of all tragedies, being “faulty both in place and time, the two necessary companions of all corporal actions.” Sidney did not live to witness the code of Aristotle impugned, and his unities set at defiance, by a swarm of dramatic bees, whose wild music and native sweetness were in their own humming and their own honey.

This our first tragedy attracted by its classical form the approval of some great moderns. Rymer, a stout Aristotelian, who has written on tragedy, was astonished to find “such a classical fable on this side the Alps,” which, he plainly tells us, “might have been a better direction to Shakspeare and Jonson than any which they had the luck to follow.” And Pope was not the less struck by the chaste style and the decorum of Sackville, who having several murders in his tragedy, veiled them from the public eye; conforming to the great Horatian canon, they are told, and not viewed in the representation. Pope in conversation declared, too, that Sackville wrote in a much purer style than Shakspeare in his first plays, without affectation and bombast! and he has delivered a more formal decision in print. “The writers of the succeeding age might have improved as much in other respects by copying from Sackville, from a propriety in the sentiments and dignity in the sentences, and an unaffected perspicuity of style, which all the succeeding poets, not excepting Shakspeare himself, either little understood or perpetually neglected.”

These are edicts from the school of classical antiquity. It was on the earnest recommendation of Pope that Spence published an edition of this tragedy, which had accidentally been put into the hands of Pope by the father of the Wartons. Our vernacular writers, even the greatest, were almost unknown in that day, and they only accidentally occurred.4

Spence, a feeble classical critic, was so overcome by the notion that “a privy-counsellor” must be more versant in the language and the feelings of royalty than a plebeian poet, that in his preface pointing out “the stately speeches,” he exclaimed in ecstasy—“’Tis no wonder if the language of kings and statesmen should be less happily imitated by a poet than a privy-counsellor.” To vindicate Shakspeare, at whom this unguarded blow seemed levelled, the historian of our poetry, seated in his professorial chair, flung his lightning on the impious critic. “Whatever merit there is in this play, and particularly in the speeches, it is more owing to the poet than the privy-counsellor. If a first minister was to write a tragedy, I believe the piece will be the better the less it has of the first minister. When a statesman turns poet, I should not wish him to fetch his ideas or his language from the cabinet. I know not why a king should be better qualified than a private man to make kings talk in blank verse.”

Literary history would have supplied the positive fact. Cardinal Richelieu, that great minister, wrote a memorable tragedy; and, in accordance with his own familiar notions, the minister called it Europe. It was written in the style of “a privy-counsellor,” and it was hissed! while Corneille, who wrote as a poet, for the national theatre, composed sentiments which statesmen got by heart.

Our literary antiquaries long doted on the first English comedy—Gammer Gurton’s Needle—being a regular comedy in five acts in rhyme. The rusticity of the materials is remarkable. A diligent crone, darning the lower habiliments of Hodge, loses her needle—

A little thing, with a hole in the end, as bright as any siller (silver), Small, long, sharp at the point, and straight as any piller.

Had a needle not been a domestic implement of more rarity than it is since Birmingham flourished, we had not had such a pointed and polished description. In fact, the loss of the Gammer’s needle sets the whole village in flames; the spark falling from the mischievous waggery of a Tom o’ Bedlam in an artful insinuation against a certain gossip notable for the luxuriance of her grotesque invectives. Dame Chat is a scold, whose curses and oaths neither the fish-market nor Shakspeare himself could have gone beyond. Brawls and battles involve the justice, the curate, and the devil himself, in their agency. The prime author of all the mischief produces the catastrophe; for he contrives to make Hodge extract from a part more tender than his heart the cause of so much discord, with great risk to its point and straightness; and the parties conclude—

For Gammer Gurton’s needle’s sake let us have a PLAUDITE!

The writer of this extraordinary, and long supposed to be the earliest comedy in our language, the titlepage informs us was Mr. S——, Master of Arts; and, moreover, that it was acted at the University of Cambridge. When afterwards it was ascertained that Mr. S—— was no less a person than John Still, subsequently Bishop of Bath and Wells, it did not diminish the number of its admirers. The black-letter brotherhood were long enamoured of this most ancient comedy, as a genuine beauty of the infancy of the drama. Dodsley and Hawkins enshrined Gammer Gurton’s Needle in their “Reliquary;” and literary superstition

Swore it was the relick of a saint.

The mere lovers of antiquity endured the raillery of the wits for the puerility of the plot, the vulgar humour, and the homeliness of the style. One had asserted that “Still had displayed the true genius of comedy, and the choice of his subject only was to be regretted;” another declared that “the vein of familiar humour and a kind of grotesque imagery are not unlike some parts of Aristophanes, but without the graces of language.” Thus one admirer gives up the subject, and another the style! Even Warton fondly lingered in an apology for the grossness of the “Gammer.”—“In a polished age that writer would have chosen, nor would he perhaps have disgraced, a better subject. It has been thought surprising that a learned audience could have endured some of the indelicate scenes. But the established festivities of scholars were gross, and agreeable to their general habits.” This apology has turned out to be more plausible than true.

This ancient comedy is the work of a truly comic genius, who knew not how to choose his subject, and indulged a taste repulsive to those who only admit of delicate, and not familiar humour. Its grossness, however, did not necessarily result from the prevalent grossness of the times; since a recent discovery, with which Warton was unacquainted, has shown the world that an English comedy which preceded the hitherto supposed first comedy in our language, is remarkable for its chasteness—the propriety of its great variety of characters, the truth of the manners in a wide circle of society, and the uninterrupted gaiety pervading the whole airy composition.

So recently as in 1818 an ancient printed drama, styled Ralph Roister Doister, was discovered;5 a legitimate comedy of five acts in rhyme, and, as the writer himself professes, modelled on the dramas of Plautus and Terence. He claims for it the honour of the highest class—that of “Comedy,” but this term was then so indistinct that the poet adds the more usual one of “Enterlude.”

Gammer Gurton is a representation of sordid rusticity. Roister Doister opens the moveable scenery of domestic life in the metropolis—touched with care, and warm with reality. The plot, without involution, progresses through the acts. An egotistical and affectedly amorous hair-brain, ever lamenting the dangerous beauty of his ridiculous self, fancies to marry a fair dame. He is hit off as

So fervent hot wooing, and so far from wiving, I trow, never was any creature living.

He is the whetstone of a sharp parasite, whose opening monologue exhibits his full portrait—

But, know ye, that for all this merry note of mine, He might oppose me now that should ask where I dine.

He runs over a nomenclature of a most variegated acquaintance, with some fugitive strictures exquisitely personal. We find ourselves in a more advanced stage in society than we expected in the reigns of our last Henry or Edward. Such personages abounded in the twenty years of peace and luxury under James the First, when the obsequious hanger-on flourished among the town-heroes of “The Gull’s Horn-book.” This parasite is also one of those domestic dependents whose shrewdness and artifices supply a perpetual source of comic invention; such as those found among the Latin dramatists, whose scenes and incidents are Grecian, and from whom this “Matthew Merry-greek” by his name seems happily transplanted. This poet delights by scenes coloured with the truth of nature, and by the clear conception of his domestic personages. There is a group of domestics—the ancient housekeeper spinning on her distaff amidst her maidens, some sowing, some knitting, all in free chat; these might have formed a study for the vivid Teniers, and even for Shakspeare in his happiest vein. They are not the domestics of Swift and of Mandeville—the spoilers of the establishment; not that they are without the common feelings of the servants’ hall, for they have at heart the merry prosperity of their commonwealth. After their “drudgerie,” to dissipate their “weariness” was the fundamental principle of the freedom of servitude. Their chorus is “lovingly to agree.” A pleasant song, on occasion of the reception of “a new-come man” in the family, reveals the “mystery” of their ancient craft.6

These early dramatists describe their characters by their names; an artless mode, which, however, long continued to be the practice of our comic writers, and we may still trace it in modern comedies. Steele, in his periodical paper, “The Lover,” condemned it as no better a device than of underwriting the name of an animal; it is remarkable, that in this identical paper an old bachelor is called “Wildgoose,” and the presumed author of “The Lover” is Marmaduke “Myrtle.” Anstey has made the most happy use of characteristic names in the “Bath Guide,” which is an evidence that they may still be successfully appropriated, whenever an author’s judgment equals the felicity of his invention.

Of a comedy, conjectured to have been written at the close of the reign of Henry the Eighth, we may be surprised that the language hardly retains a vestige of the rust of antiquity:—so true it is that the familiar language of the people has been preserved with rare innovations. Its Alexandrine measure properly read or chanted is a metre which runs on with facility; the versification has even happily imitated the sounds of the different instruments played on in one of the serenades; a refinement which we could not have imagined to have been within the reach of an artificer of verse in those days. All this would look suspicious, if for an instant we could imagine that this admirable drama was the contrivance of some Chatterton or Ireland. In style and versification the writer far distanced those of his contemporaries, whose affectation of phrases rendered them harsh and obscure; he has, therefore, approached us. It is remarkable also that the very measure of this ancient dramatist, though those whose ear is only used to the decasyllabic measure have called it “a long hobbling metre,” has been actually chosen by a modern poet, when writing familiar dialogue with the design of reviving rhymed comedy.7

The fate of some books is as remarkable as the histories of some men. This lorn and lost drama, deprived even of its title and the printer’s name, offered no clue to the discovery of the fine genius who composed it; and the possessor, who deposited it in the library of Eton College, was not at all aware of its claim to be there preserved. It was to subsequent research, after the reprint had been made, that both the writer and the celebrity of his comedy were indisputably ascertained. We owe the discovery to a comic incident in the drama: an amatory epistle prepared by a scrivener’s hand, for our gay amourists then could not always compose, if they could write their billets-doux, being maliciously read to the lady, by purposely neglecting the punctuation, turned out to be a severe satire. The discomfited lover hastens to wreak his vengeance on the hapless scribe, who, however, reading it with the due punctuation, proves it to be a genuine love-letter. Wilson, in his “Art of Logic,” gave this letter as an example of the use of punctuation in settling the sense; and without which, as in the present instance, we may have “a double sense and contrary meaning.” He fortunately added that his example was “taken out of an interlude made by Nicholas Udall.”

This was the learned Udall, the Master of Eton School; and this very comedy had been so universally admired, that “Roister-Doister” became a proverbial phrase to designate a hair-brained coxcomb. We now possess two pictures of the habits, the minds, and the dialogue of the English people in rural and in city life by two contemporaries, who wanted not the art of “holding the mirror up to nature.”

1 “A Moral and Pitiful Comedie,” entitled, “All for Money,” &c., by T. Lupton, 1578. In the prologue the author calls it “A Pleasant Tragedy.”

2 The lines, which are very miserable, are preserved in Dodsley’s “Old Plays.”

3 Warton has analysed this drama in his “History of English Poetry,” vol. iv. 178, 8vo. It is in the Collection of Dodsley and Hawkins.

4 This our first tragedy, Ferrex and Porrex, offers a striking evidence of our literary knowledge. Dryden, alluding to it, refers to a spurious copy published under the title of Gorboduc but he could not have seen it, for he calls it Queen Gorboduc, whereas he is King; and he appears to think that it was written in rhyme; and notices Shakspeare as the inventor of blank verse! When Pope requested Spence to reprint Gorboduc, they were so little cognisant of these matters, that the spurious and defective Gorboduc was printed instead of the genuine Ferrex and Porrex. This ignorance of our ancient writers lasted to a later period.

5 Reprinted by the Rev. Mr. Briggs, the possessor. After a limited reprint it was republished as the first number of a cheap edition of Old English Dramas, published by T. White, 1830; a work carried on to a few volumes only. The text reads apparently very correct, and seems to have passed under a skilful eye. I have read it with attention, because I read it with delight. [It has since been reprinted by the Shakspeare Society, carefully collated from the unique original now in Eton College Library, by Mr. Payne Collier.]

6 This song of Domesticity, as probably it never has been noticed, I preserve in the note, that the reader may decide on the melody of such native simplicity.

This song may have been written about the close of the reign of Henry the Eighth. The short ballad metres in our ancient poems are perfectly harmonious, and the songs are racy and joyous,—

I. A thing very fitte For them that have witte And are felowes knitte Servants in one house to bee, As fast fast for to sitte, And not oft to flitte Nor varie a whitte, But lovingly to agree. II. No man complainyng Nor other disdainyng For losse or for gainyng, But felowes or friends to bee, No grudge remainyng, No work refrainyng, Nor helpe restrainyng, But lovingly to agree. III. No man for despite By worde or by write His felowe to twite, But further in honestie; No good turns entwite Nor old sores recite, But let all goe quite, And lovingly to agree. IV. After drudgerie When they be werie, Then to be merie, To laugh and sing they be free With chip and cherie, High derie derie, Trill on the berie, And lovingly to agree!

7 Hayley.

THE PREDECESSORS AND CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE.

The establishment of a variety of theatres is an incident in the history of the people, as well as of the national genius. The drama at first existed, it may be said, in privacy. Royalty and nobility maintained their own companies; the universities acted at their colleges, the “children” or the singing boys at the public schools, the lawyers at their halls; and some of the gentry at their seats had servants who were players. A stage for strollers would occasionally be hastily erected in the unsheltered yards of inns, and they would ramble into the country till an Act of Elizabeth in 1572 controlled these erratic bodies, classing them with “rogues and vagabonds.” Throughout the kingdom there was a growing predilection for theatrical entertainments—it was the national anticipation of a public theatre.

If Elizabeth, a popular sovereign, in 1572 checked the strollers assuming the character of players, two years afterwards, in 1574, she granted a patent to the servants of the Earl of Leicester1 “to exercise the faculty of playing stage-plays, as well for the recreation of our loving subjects, as for our solace and pleasure;” and she added, “within our city of London, and of any of our cities.” This was a boon royally given, in which her “loving subjects” might gather from the tone of this dramatic state-paper, that the queen had resolved in council that the public should not be denied sharing in her own amusements.

The pleasures of the people were not, however, yet those of their grave seignors. The puritanic spirit of the anti-dramatists, which sometimes divided the councils of the queen, had lodged among the honest wardmotes. A protracted contest between the privy-council and the lord mayor in common council, with protests and petitions, rose up; and long it seemed hopeless to patronise the players, who were not suffered to play. The Recorder Fleetwood, of whom we have many curious police-reports in the style of a lieutenant de police—as the chief of his own spies, and the executioner of his own decrees—had himself a fertile dramatic invention, which was largely developed in the singular “orders of the common-council” against the alarming innovation of PUBLIC PLAYS in the boundaries of the civic jurisdiction.2 There was not a calamity, moral and physical, which could happen to any city which the Recorder has not made concomitant with the opening of playhouses. The infection of the plague was, however, then an irrefutable argument. In this contest between the court and the city, the common-council remained dogged assertors of their privileges; they drove the players from their sacred precincts to the boundaries and to “the liberties,” where, however, they harassed these children of fancy by a novel claim, that none were to be free in the “liberties” but themselves, which argument was submitted to the law officers for their decision. The privy-council once more interfered, by a declaration that the chief justices had not yet been able to determine their case, and therefore there was to be no present “intermeddling.” It is evident that the government all along had resolved that the people should have a theatre. After two years of opposition to the patent granted to the players in 1574, the first playhouse was built—a timber house in the suburbs—and received the appropriate title of “The Theatre;” and about the same time “The Curtain” rose in its vicinage, a name supposed to have been derived from that appendage to a stage; for to those who had been accustomed to the open stage of an inn-yard, the drop or “curtain” separating the actors from the audience was such a novelty, that it left its name to the house. The Blackfriars, the Round Globe, the Square Fortune—whence Edward Alleyn, by his histrionic fame, drew the wealth which endowed Dulwich College—are names almost consecrated by the eminent geniuses whose lives were connected with these theatres; and at one time it appears that seventeen playhouses had been erected; they were, however, wooden and thatched, till the Fortune was built with brick, and, in the theatrical phrase, “the heavens,” that is, the open top, was tiled.

The popular fervour of the drama had now a centrical attraction; a place of social resort, with a facility of admission, was now opened;3 and when yet there was no reading public, the theatre would be substituted for the press; and often, wearied of the bearward and coarser sports, they flocked to the more intellectual entertainment. The playhouse was a wider sphere for their exertions, and it opened an arduous competition for the purveyors of these incessant novelties. The managers of theatres had now to look about for plays and playwrights. A general demand required, not only an abundant, but, unfortunately, a rapid supply. What a crisis for genius, for its development and its destruction!

This was an event in the history of our literature which has not occurred in the literary history of any other European people. It was about the middle of the reign of Elizabeth that a race of dramatic writers burst forth on the nation—writers, not easily numbered, of innumerable dramas.

Literature now opened a new avenue for a poor scholar, the first step of advancement in society from a collegiate life for those who found their future condition but ill provided for. A secretaryship, a chaplainship, or to be a gentleman’s usher—in a word, an humble retainer in great families—circumscribed the ambition of the meek and the worthy; but there were others, in “their first gamesome age,” whose

——doting sires, Carked and cared to have them lettered— But their kind college from the teat did tent, And forced them walk before they weaned were.4

This, however, is but the style of apology which one of them gives to veil the fact that many were ejected from “the teat.” Fiery emanations these, compelled to leave their cloistered solitudes, restless and reckless, they rushed to the metropolis, where this new mart of genius in the rising dramatic age was opened. Play-writing and play-acting, for they were often combined, were too magical a business to resist its delusions.

They wrote, with rare exceptions, without revision. An act or two, composed with some meditation to awaken interest—a few moveable scenes rapidly put together—and, at some fortunate moment, a burst of poetry—usually wound up in pell-mell confusion; for how could they contrive a catastrophe to the chaos? Such writers relied on the passing curiosity which their story might raise, and more on the play of the actors, who, in the last bustling scenes, might lend an interest which the meagre dialogue of the economical poet so rarely afforded. They never wrote for posterity, and seem never to have pretended to it. They betrayed no sympathy for their progeny; the manager’s stock was the foundling hospital for this spurious brood; the Muse even often sold her infant while it still lay on the breast. The huddled act of a play was despatched to the manager as the lure of a temporary loan, accompanied by a promissory note of expedition; and assuredly they kept to their word if ever they concluded the work.

This facility of production may be accounted for, not only from the more obvious cause which instigated their incessant toil, but from the ready sources whence they drew their materials. They dramatised evanescent subjects, in rapid competition, like the ballad-makers of their own day, or the novelists of ours; they caught “the Cynthia of the minute”—a domestic incident—a tragic tale engaging the public attention produced many domestic tragedies founded on actual events; they were certain of exciting the sympathies of an audience. Two remarkable ones have been ascribed to Shakespeare by skilful judges: Arden of Feversham, where the repentance of an adulterous wife in the agony of conscience so powerfully reminds one of the great poet, that the German, Tieck, who has recently translated it, has not hesitated to subscribe to the opinion of some of our own critics; and The Yorkshire Tragedy, which was printed with the name of Shakespeare in his own lifetime, and has been held to be authentic; and surely The Yorkshire Tragedy at least possessed an equal claim with the monstrous Titus Andronicus5 not to be ejected from the writings of Shakespeare. It is most probable that that, among others, was among the old plays which he often took in hand; and our judicial decisions have not always found “the divinity which stirs within them.” The Italian novelists, which had been recently translated in Painter’s “Palace of Pleasure,” these dramatists ransacked for their plots; this source opened a fresh supply of invention, and a combination of natural incidents, which varies the dry matter-of-fact drawn from the “Chronicles,” which in their hands too often produced mere skeletons of poetry. They borrowed from the ancients when they could. Plautus was a favourite. They wrote for a day, and did not expect to survive many.

The rapid succession of this multitude of plays is remarkable; many have wholly perished by casualties and dispersions, and some possibly may still lie unsunned in their manuscript state.6 We have only the titles of many which were popular, while the names of some of these artificers have come down to us without any of their workmanship. In a private collection, Langbaine had gathered about a thousand plays, besides interludes and drolls; and yet these were but a portion of those plays, for many never passed through the press; the list of anonymous authors is not only considerable, but some of these are not inferior in invention and style to the best.7 We may judge of the prolific production of these authors by Thomas Heywood, a fluent and natural writer, who never allowed himself time to cross out a line, and who has casually informed us that “he had either an entire hand, or at least a main finger, in two hundred and twenty plays.”

The intercourse of the proprietors or managers of the theatres and these writers has been only incidentally, and indeed accidentally, revealed to us.8 It was justly observed by Gifford, that these dramatic poets, either from mortification or humility, abstained from dwelling, or even entering upon their personal history. Though frequent in dedications, they are seldom explicit; and even their prefaces fail to convey any information, except of their wants or their grievances, from evils which are rarely specified. The truth is, that this whole poetical race, which suddenly broke out together, a sort of wild insurrection of genius, early found that they were nothing more than the hirelings of some crafty manager, at whose beck and mercy they lived. Writing plays was soon held to be as discreditable an occupation as that of the players themselves; indeed, not seldom the poets themselves were actors—these departments were so frequently combined, that the term player is sometimes used equally for a performer on the stage, and a writer of plays.

This fraternity, children of ill-fortune and of passion, were scarce distinguishable from each other; and if the fortunes, and the fate of some, are more known, it is but by the recklessness of their days—their criminal impetuosity. Several perished in their immaturity, torches blazing, while they were consuming themselves. The chance-record of the violent end of one; a cry of desperation still more horrible of another; the death-bed repentance of a third; the dishonourable life of dupery probably practised by a fourth;9 are adapted to enter into moral, if not into literary history.

The Psychologist, the historian of the soul among the brotherhood of genius—for such were many among them—feels how precious are the slight memorials of noble passions, disguised by a degraded existence. However tortuous their lives seem, some grasped at celebrity, and some looked towards distant fame. If some have eloquently reproached themselves, there are, too, those who exulted in the consciousness of their intellectual greatness. They were of different magnitude, and in the scroll of their names some have been recognised by posterity.

An ungenial critic has morosely censured Robert Greene, who, harboured in an obscure lodging, which a poor man’s charity had yielded, when lying on his death-bed, prayed for the last favour that poor man’s charity could bestow on a miserable, but a conscious poet—that his coffin might be covered with bays. In the shadow of death, the poet and the romancer dwelt on the fame which he cherished as life.

Even their small theatres appeared to the poet “thronged,” and the heart of the dramatist would swell at “the shouts and claps.” Drayton, who, at a later day, joined in several dramas, has perpetuated this rejoicing of the poet, which he himself had experienced in that small world “the proud round” of the Globe Theatre. It is a sonnet in the collection which he has entitled “Idea,” and which no successful dramatist will read without some happy emotion.

In pride of wit, when high desire of fame Gave life and courage to my labouring pen, And first the sound and vertue of my name Were grace and credit in the ears of men; With those the thronged theaters that presse, I in the circuit for the Lawrell strove, Where the full praise, I freely must confesse, In heate of blood and modest minde might move; With SHOWTS and CLAPS at every little PAWSE When the prowd ROUND on everie side hath rung.

The ample roll might not be tedious, though it were long, had we aught to record of this brotherhood of genius—but nothing we know of the much-applauded, and much-ridiculed, and most ingenious John Lyly; nothing of the searching and cynical Marston; nothing of the inventive and flowing Dekker; nothing of the unpremeditated strains of the fertile Heywood; nor of the pathetic Webster; nor of Middleton, from whose “Witch” Shakespeare borrowed his incantations; nor of Rowley, whom Shakespeare aided; nor of the equal and grave Massinger; nor of the lonely and melancholy Ford.

Among these poets stood He, in whose fire the Greek of Homer burned clear in his Homeric English. Chapman often caught the ideas of Homer, and went on writing Homerically; at once the translator and the original. One may read in that “most reverend aspect” of his, the lofty spirit that told how, above all living, was to him the poet’s life—when he exclaimed—

The work that I was born to do is done! The conclusion Makes the beginning of my life; for never Let me be said to live, till I live ever!10

The plays were bought by a manager for his company, and each company was jealously alive that no other should perform their purchased copies. These monopolists were therefore anxious to suppress the publication of plays, and to smother the fame of their dramatist on their own boards. The players, who were usually copartners, at the sovereign pleasure of their proprietorship, unmercifully mutilated the tender limbs of their poet,11 or what was not less usual, made him for ever ridiculous by foisting in whole scenes of the basest humour, as clap-traps for “the groundlings,” and which sometimes were perpetuated in the prompter’s copy. Such scenes of ribaldry have tainted even immortal pages, and have provoked much idle criticism either to censure or to palliate.

As the stock-copies increased and lost their novelty, they required some new-fashioning. The tarnished piece was drawn out of the theatrical wardrobe; once in vogue, and now neglected, the body, not yet moth-eaten, might be flounced with new scenes. To this humiliated state of jobbers of old plays, were reduced the most glorious names in our drama’s roll. Shakespeare, Jonson, and Massinger sate down to this obscure drudgery. Our earlier commentators on Shakespeare had no suspicion that even his plays were often rifacimentos of neglected stock-copies. When the account-books of Henslow, the manager, were discovered at Dulwich College, they supplied some strange literary anecdotes. This entry appears, “lent to Bengemen Jonson, forty shillings for his adycions to Jeronymo,” which was an old favourite play of Kyd’s. Again, more lent for “new adycions.” When Hawkins republished “Jeronymo” in his collection, he triumphantly rejected these “adycions,” as being “foisted in by the players.” This he had detected by collation with the first edition; further his critical decision could not advance. The Diary of Henslow was fatal to the matter-of-fact critic—the passages he had ejected relate to the madness of Hieronymo for the murder of his son; the learned poet never wrote with such a Shakespearian force.

Our early dramatists not only jobbed in this chance-work, but established a copartnership for the quicker manufacture; and we find sometimes three or four poets working on one play, share and share alike, or in due proportions, whenever they could peaceably adjust their mutual celebrities.12 Could we penetrate into the recesses of the theatre of that day, I suspect we should discover civil wars in the commonwealth. These partners sometimes became irreconcilably jealous. Jonson and Marston and Decker, who had zealously co-operated, subsequently exhausted their quivers at one another. Greene was incurably envious of Marlow, and got his friend Nash to be as much so, till Marlow and Nash compromised, and wrote together the tragedy of Dido, with the affection of twins. Lofty Chapman flashed an “invective” against proud “Ben,” and when Anthony Munday, a copious playwright, was hailed by a critic as “the best plotter,” Jonson, in his next play, ridiculed “the best plotter.” Can we forget that in Eastward Hoe, one of the most amusing of our old comedies, whence Hogarth borrowed the hint of his “Idle and Industrious Apprentices,” by Jonson, Chapman and Marston, the madness of Ophelia is poorly ridiculed? It would seem that a junction of the poets usually closed in a rupture.

Our first tragedy and comedy were moulded on the classical model, for both the writers were university-men. It is, however, remarkable that the greater number of our early dramatists who now occupy our attention were also members of the universities, had taken a degree, and some were skilful Greek scholars.13 How then did it happen, that not one of these scholars submitted to the artificial apparatus and the conventional code of their legislator, the Stagyrite? We observe a sudden revolution in the dramatic art.

Our poets had not to address scholastic critics; for, as one of them has delivered himself,—

————They would have GOOD PLAYS, and not produce Such musty fopperies of antiquity; Which do not suit the humorous age’s back, With clothes in fashion.

It was their business to raise up that multiform shape which alone could win the mutable attention of a very mixed audience. At once they clung to the human nature before them; they ran through all the chords of the passions; mingling the comic with the tragic, they struck out a new course in their inartificial drama. They were at all events inventors, for they had no prototypes. Every poet was an original, more suo, mindless of the encumbering alloy, for they knew that the vein they had opened was their own, and confided too frequently in its abundance to find its richness. It was a spontaneous burst which broke forth in the excitement of these new times, and which, as far as the careless prodigality of the vernacular genius is concerned, in the raciness of its idiom, and the flow of its conceptions, and the freshness of its imagery, can never return, for the virgin genius of a people must pass away!

Valueless, indeed, was our early drama held by graver men. Sir Thomas Bodley wholly rejected from his great library all plays, “to avoid stuffing it with baggage-books;” but more particularly objected to “English Plays, as unlike those of other nations, which are esteemed for learning the languages; and many of them,” he adds, “are compiled by men of great wisdom and learning.”

The perplexities of the founder of the noble Bodleian Library were occasioned by our dramatic illegitimacy; we had no progenitors, and we were not spell-bound by the three unities. Originality in every kind startled the mind which could only pace in the trammels of authority. On the principle Bodley rejected our English plays he also condemned our English philosophy; and Lord Bacon rallied him on that occasion by a good-humoured menace of “a cogitation against Libraries,” which must have made the cheeks of the great collector of books tingle. Bodley with excellent truth described himself as “the carrier’s horse which cannot blench the beaten way in which I was trained.”

In banishing the productions of the national genius from that national library which his hand had proudly erected, little was Bodley able to conceive, that a following generation would dwell on those very “English plays,” would appeal to them as the depositaries of our language, and as the secret history of the people, a history which no historian writes, their modes of thinking in the transition of their manners, in the vicissitudes of their passions, and in the scenes of their politics and their religion; and what most would have astonished our great bibliophile, that collectors like himself, presuming on “their wisdom and learning,” would devote their vigils to collate, to comment, and to edit “these baggage-books of English plays,” and above all, that foreigners, after a century or two, should enrich their own literature by the translations, or enlarge their own genius by the imitations of these bold originals.

By emancipating themselves from the thraldom of Greece and the servility of Rome our dramatists have occasioned later critics to separate our own from the classical drama of antiquity. They are placed in “the Romantic” school; a novel technical term, not individually appropriate, and which would be less ambiguous if considered as “the Gothic.”14 At the time when Italy and France had cast themselves into thraldom, by adhering to the contracted models of the drama of antiquity, two nations in Europe, without any intercourse whatever, for even translation was not yet a medium, were spontaneously creating a national drama accordant with the experience, the sympathies, and the imagination of their people. The theatre was to be a mirror of enchantment, a moveable reflection of themselves. These two nations were England and Spain. The dramatic history of Spain is the exact counterpart which perfectly tallies with our own. In Spain the learned began with imitations and translations of the ancient classics; but these formal stately dramas were so coldly received, that they fell into desuetude, and were succeeded by those whose native luxuriant genius reached to the secret hearts of their audience; and it was this second race, not, indeed, so numerous as our own, who closed with the Spanish Shakespeare.15 This literary phenomenon, though now apparent, was not perceived when it was occurring.

Every taste has delivered its variable decision on these our old plays, each deciding by its own standard; and the variance is occasioned not always by deficiency in critical judgment, but in the very nature of the object of criticism, in the inherent defect of our ancient drama itself. These old plays will not endure criticism. They were not written for critics, and they now exist even in spite of criticism. They were all experiments of the freest genius, rarely placed under favouring circumstances. They were emanations of strong but short conceptions, poured forth in haste and heat; they blotted their lines as rarely as we are told did Shakespeare; they revelled in their first conceptions, often forgotten in their rapid progress; the true inspiration was lodged in their breasts, the hidden volcano has often burst through its darkness, and flamed through a whole scene, for often have they written as Shakespeare wrote. We may look in them for entire scenes, felicitous lines, and many an insulated passage, studies for a poet; anthologies have been drawn from these elder dramatists.16 We may perceive how this sudden generation of poets, some of whose names are not familiar to us, have moulded our language with the images of their fancy, and strengthened it by the stability of their thoughts.

1 This Patent, corrected from a former copy in Rymer, has been recovered by Mr. Collier.—Annals of the Stage, i. 211.

2 This singular document, incorrectly given by Strype, Mr. Collier has completed. “It throws much new light on the state of the drama at this period;” and still more on the strange arguments which the Puritans of the day alleged against players and plays.—Mr. Collier has preserved an old satirical epigram which had been perilous to print at that day; it was left for posterity on the fly-leaf of a book. It is addressed to—

“‘The Fooles of the Cittee,’— They establish as a rule, Not one shall play the fool, But they—a worthy school!”

3 At the inferior playhouses the admission was as low as a penny for “the groundlings” who stood in the roofless pit, which still retained the name of “the yard”—evidently from the old custom of playing in the yards of inns. In the higher theatres “a room,” or box, varied from sixpence to two shillings and sixpence. They played in daylight, and rose from their dinner to the playhouse. It was one of the City regulations, that “no playing be in the dark, so that the auditory may return home before sunset.” Society was then in its nursery-times; and the solemnity of “the orders in common council” admirably contrasts with their simplicity; but they acted under the terror that, when they entered a playhouse, they were joining in “the devil’s service!”

4 Two such poor scholars are introduced in “The Return from Parnassus” alternately “banning and cursing Granta’s muddy bank;” and Cambridge, where “our oil was spent.”

5 The popular taste at all times has been prone to view in representation the most harrowing crimes—probably influenced by the vulgar notion that, because the circumstances are literally true, they are therefore the more interesting. One of these writers was Robert Yarrington, who seems to have been so strongly attracted to this taste for scenical murder, that he wrote “Two Lamentable Tragedies,” which he contrived to throw into one play. By a strange alternation, the scene veers backwards and forwards from England to Italy, both progressing together;—the English murder is of a merchant in Thames-street, and the Italian of a child in a wood by ruffians hired by the uncle; the ballad deepens the pathetic by two babes—but which was the original of a domestic incident which first conveyed to our childhood the idea of an unnatural parent? It appears that we had a number of what they called “Lamentable Tragedies,” whose very titles preserve the names of the hapless victims. Taylor, the Water-poet, alludes to these “as murders fresh in memory;” and has himself described “the unnatural father who murdered his wife and children” as parallel to one of ancient date. Acts of lunacy were not then distinguishable from ordinary murders.—Collier, iii. 49.

6 Not many years ago Isaac Reed printed The Witch of Middleton. Recently another manuscript play appeared, The Second Maiden’s Tragedy. To the personal distresses of the actors in the days of the Commonwealth we owe several dramas, which they published, drawn out of the wrecks of some theatrical treasury; such was The Wild-Goose Chase of Fletcher, which they assured us was the poet’s favourite. It is said that more than sixty of these plays, in manuscript, were collected by Warburton, the herald, and from the utter neglect of the collector had all gone to singe his fowls. When Theobald solemnly declared that his play, The Double Falsehood, was written by Shakespeare, it was probably one of these old manuscript plays. This drama was not unsuccessful; nor had Theobald shot far wide of the mark, since Farmer ascribed it to Shirley, and Malone to Massinger.

7 See the last and enlarged edition of Charles Lamb’s “Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets.” In the second volume, in “Extracts from the Garrick Plays,” under the odd names of ”Doctor Dodypol, a comedy, 1600,” we have scenes exquisitely fanciful—and Jack Drum’s Entertainment, 1601, where “the free humour of a noble housekeeper” may be placed by the side of the most finished passages even in Shakespeare. Yet Doctor Dodypol has wholly escaped the notice even of catalogue-scribes—and Jack Drum is not noticed by the collectors of these old plays. I only know these two dramas by the excerpts of Lamb; but if the originals are tolerably equal with “The Specimens,” I should place these unknown dramas among the most interesting ones.

8 By the discovery of the Diary of Henslow, the illiterate manager of the theatre, connected with Edward Alleyn. Henslow was the pawnbroker of the company, and the chancellor of its exchequer. He could not spell the titles of the plays; yet, in about five years, 160 were his property. He had not less than thirty different authors in his pay.—Collier, iii. 105. [His Diary has been published by the Shakespeare Society under the editorship of Mr. Payne Collier.—Ed.]

9 Marlow—Nash—Greene—Peele.

10 When Pope translated Homer, Chapman’s version lay open before him. The same circumstance, as I have witnessed, occurred with the last translator—Mr. Sotheby. Charles Lamb justly appreciated Chapman, when he observed, that “He would have made a great epic poet, if indeed he has not abundantly shown himself to be one; for his Homer is not so properly a translation, as the stories of Achilles and Ulysses rewritten. The earnestness and passion which he has put into every part of these poems would be incredible to a reader of more modern translations.”

The striking portrait of Chapman is prefixed to Mr. Singer’s elegant edition of this poet’s version of Homer’s “Battle of the Frogs and the Mice”—and the Hymns. His Iliad, collated with his last corrections and alterations, well deserves to fill a stationary niche in our poetical library. Chapman has, above all our poets, most boldly, or most gracefully, struck out those “words that burn”—compound epithets.

11 An original leaf of the manuscript of one of Marlow’s plays, in the possession of Mr. J. P. Collier, is a singular literary curiosity. On a collation with the printed copy, the mutilations are not only excessive, but betray a defective judgment. An elaborate speech, designed by the poet to develope the character of the famous Guise, was cut down to four meagre lines.—Annals of the Stage, iii. 134.

12 Charles Lamb has alluded to this fact; and, in one of his moments of enthusiasm, exclaims—“This was the noble practice of these times.” Would not the usual practice of a man of genius, working his own drama, be “nobler?” We presume the unity of feeling can only emanate from a single mind. In the instance here alluded to we should often deceive ourselves if we supposed, from the combination of names which appear on the old titlepages, that those who are specified were always simultaneously employed in the new direction of the same play. Poets were often called in to alter the old or to supply the new, which has occasioned incongruities which probably were not to be found in the original state.

13 Green, Nash, Lyly, Peele, and Marston were from the university—Marlow and Chapman were exquisite translators from the Greek.

14 The term, the Romantic School, is derived from the langue Romans or Romane, under which comprehensive title all the modern languages may be included; formed, as they are, out of the wrecks of the Latin or Roman language. However this may apply to the origin of the languages, the term is not expressive of the genius of the people. In the common sense of the term “Romantic,” the Æneid of Virgil is as much a Romance as that of Arthur and his knights. The term “Romantic School” is therefore not definite. By adopting the term Gothic, in opposition to the Classical, we fix the origin, and indicate the species.

15 Bouterwek’s Hist. of Spanish Lit. i. 128.

16 Two of these collections are to be valued.

“Cotgrave’s English Treasury of Wit and Language,” 1655. He neglected to furnish the names of the dramatic writers from whom he drew the passages. Oldys, with singular diligence, succeeded in recovering these numerous sources, which I transcribed from his manuscript notes. Oldys’ copy should now repose in the library of Mr. Douce, given to the Bodleian.

A collection incomparably preferable to all preceding ones is “The British Muse, or a Collection of Thoughts—Moral, Natural, or Sublime—of our English poets who flourished in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” by Thomas Hayward, gent. 1732, in three volumes. It took a new title, not a new edition, as “The Quintessence of English Poetry.” Such a title could not recommend itself. The prefatory matter was designed for a critical history of all these Anthologies, and was the work of Oldys; but it was miserably mangled by Dr. Campbell, then the Aristarchus of the booksellers, to save print and paper! Our literary antiquary has vented, in a manuscript note, his agony and his indignation. He had also greatly assisted the collector; the circuit is wide and copious, and there is not a name of note which does not appear in these volumes. The ethical and poetic powers of our old dramatic poets, as here displayed, I doubt could be paralleled by our literary neighbours. We were a thoughtful people at the time that our humour was luxuriant—as lighter gaiety was from the first the national inheritance of France.

Of this collection, says Oldys, “Wherever you open it, you are in the heart of your subject. Every leaf includes many lessons, and is a system of knowledge in a few lines. The merely speculative may here find experience; the flattered, truth; the diffident, resolution, &c.” For my part, I think of these volumes as highly as Oldys himself.

But what has occasioned the little success of these collections of single passages and detached beauties, like collections of proverbs, is the confusion of their variety. We are pleased at every glance; till the eye, in weariness, closes over the volume which we neglect to re-open.

Charles Lamb’s “Specimens of English Dramatic Poets” is of deeper interest. He was a nobler workman, and he carries us on through whole scenes by a true unerring emotion. His was a poetical mind labouring in poetry.

SHAKESPEARE.

The vicissitudes of the celebrity of Shakespeare may form a chapter in the philosophy of literature and the history of national opinions. Shakespeare was destined to have his dramatic faculty contested by many successful rivals, to fall into neglect, to be rarely acted and less read, to appear barbarous and unintelligible, to be even discarded from the glorious file of dramatists by the anathemas of hostile criticism; and finally, in the resurrection of genius (a rare occurrence!) to emerge into universal celebrity. This literary history of Shakespeare is an incident in the history of the human mind singular as the genius which it relates to. The philosopher now contemplates the phenomenon of a poet who in his peculiar excellence is more poetical than the poets of every other people. We have to track the course of this prodigy, and if possible to comprehend the evolutions of this solitary luminary. It is knowledge which finally must direct our feelings in the operations of the mind as well as in the phenomena of nature. We are conscious that even the anomalous is regulated by its own proper motion, and that there is nothing in human nature so arbitrary as to stand by itself so completely insulated as to be an effect without a cause.

Shakespeare is a poet who is always now separated from other poets, and the only one, except Pope, whose thoughts are familiar to us as household words. His eulogy has exhausted the language of every class of enthusiasts, the learned and the unlearned, the profound and the fantastical. The writings of this greatest of dramatists are, as once were those of Homer, a Bible whence we receive those other revelations of man, and of all that concerns man. There was no excess of wonder and admiration when Hurd declared that “This astonishing man is the most original THINKER and SPEAKER since the days of Homer.”

The halo which surrounds the poetic beatitude has almost silenced criticism in its devotion; but a literary historian may not at all times be present in the choir of votaries; his labours lie outwards among the progressive opinions of a people, nor is he free to pass over what may seem paradoxical if it lies in his way.

The universal celebrity of Shakespeare is comparatively of recent origin: received, rejected, and revived, we must ascertain the alternate periods, and we must look for the causes of the neglect as well as the popularity of the poet. We may congratulate ourselves on the numerous escapes of our national bard from the oblivion of his dramatic brothers. The history and the works of Shakespeare, and perhaps the singularity of the poet’s character in respect to his own writings, are some of the most startling paradoxes in literary history.

Malone describes Shakespeare as “the great poet whom nature framed to disregard the wretched models that were set before him, and to create a drama from his own native and original stores.” This cautious but creeping commentator, notwithstanding that he had often laboured to prove the contrary, gaily shot this arrow drawn from the quiver of Dryden, who has delivered very contradictory notions of Shakespeare. Veritably—for we are now writing historically—Shakespeare never “created our drama, disregarding the wretched models before him;” far from this! the great poet had those models always before him, and worked upon them; no poet has so freely availed himself of the inventions of his predecessors, and in reality many of the dramas of Shakespeare had been written before he wrote.

It cannot be denied that our great poet never exercised his invention in the fables of his dramas; thus he spared himself half the toil of his work. He viewed with the prophetic eye of genius the old play or the old story, and at once discovered all its capabilities; he saw at once all that it had and all that it had not; its characterless personages he was confident that he could quicken with breath and action, and that his own vein, allowed to flow along the impure stream, would have the force to clear the current, and to expand its own lucid beauty.

Had not the felicitous genius of our bard revelled in this facility of adopting and adapting the ready-made inventions of many a luckless playwright, we might have lost our Shakespeare; for he never wrote for us, but for his little theatre. He had no leisure to afford whole days in constructing plots for plays, nor much troubled himself with those which he followed closely even to a fault; nor did the quickness of his genius neglect a solitary thought, nor lose a fortunate expression. To what extent were these borrowings from manuscript plays we cannot even surmise; we have one specimen of Shakespeare’s free use of whatever the poet’s judgment caught, in those copious passages which he transplanted from North’s “Plutarch” and Holinshed’s “Chronicles,” lending their words his own music.

One of his commentators, George Steevens, published six old plays on which Shakespeare had grounded six of his own; but this rash act was in the early days of the commentatorship; Steevens must soon have discovered the inconvenience of printing unreadable dramas, to exhibit the concealed industry of the mighty bard. The spells of Shakespeare did not hang on the artificial edifice of his fable; he looked abroad for mankind, and within his own breast for all the impulses of the beings of his imagination. All he required was a scene; then the whole “sphere of humanity,” as Jonson expressed it, lie wide before him. There was a Jew before the Merchant of Venice; a shrew had been tamed before Katherine by Petruchio; a King Lear and his three daughters, before the only one the world knows; and a tragical Hamlet had philosophised like Seneca, as the satirical Nash told, before our Shakespeare’s: but this list is needless, for it would include every drama he has left us. Even the beings of his creation lie before him in their embryon state. His creative faculty never required more than a suggestion. The prototype of the wonderful Caliban has not hitherto been discovered, but the fairies of the popular mythology become the creatures of his own imagination. Middleton first opened the incantations of “the witches.” The Hecate of Middleton is a mischief-brooding hag, gross and tangible, and her “spirits, black, white, and grey,” with her “devil-toad, devil-ram, devil-cat, and devil-dam,” disturb their spells by the familiar drollery of their names, and their vulgar instincts. Out of this ordinary domestic witchcraft the mightier poet raised “the weird sisters,”

That look not like the inhabitants o’ the earth, And yet are on’t,

nameless, bodiless, vanishing shadows!

And what seemed corporal Melted as breath into the wind.

The dramatic personages which seem to me peculiar to Shakespeare, and in which he evidently revelled, serving his purposes on very opposite occasions, are his clowns and domestic fools. Yet his most famous comic personage, the fat knight, was the rich graft on the miserable scion of Sir John Oldcastle, in an old play; the slight hint of “a mere pampered glutton” was idealised into that inimitable variety of human nature combined in one man—at once so despicable and so delightful!

The life of our poet remains almost a blank, and his very name a subject of contention.1 Of that singular genius who is now deemed the national bard, we can only positively ascertain that the place of his birth was that of his death; a circumstance which, for a poet, is some evidence of his domestic prosperity; but the glorious interval of existence, how and all he performed on the stage of human life, no one observed as differing from his fellows of the company, and he of all men the least; and of his productions, wherein we are to find every excellence to which any poet has reached, our scepticism is often at work to detect what is Shakespearian among that which cannot be.

Of the idle traditions of the youth of Shakespeare, Malone, after “foraging for anecdotes” during half a century, has painfully satisfied us that all which so many continued to repeat was apocryphal. Having with his own eyes ascertained that Sir Thomas Lucy had no park, he closed with his famous corollary, that “therefore he could have no deer to be stolen.” But other parks and other deer were liable to the mischance of furnishing venison for a young deer-fancier to treat his friends; and Sir Thomas Lucy, probably, was Justice Shallow on this occasion to the poetic stripling. The other circumstances of the poet’s early life, too well known to repeat, may stand on the same ground. Personal facts may come down to us confused, inaccurate, and mistaken, but they do not therefore necessarily rest on no foundation. The invention of such irrelevant circumstances seems to be without a motive; and though the propagators of gossip are strange blunderers, they rarely aspire to be original inventors. We are not concerned with such tales, for there is nothing in them which is peculiar to the idiosyncrasy of the great poet.

The first noticeable incident in the life of Shakespeare was his marriage in 1582, in his eighteenth year; the nuptials of the poet seem an affair of domestic convenience, rather than a poetical incident in “the romance of life.”

In 1586, being only twenty-two years of age, Shakespeare quitted home for the metropolis.

At this critical moment of his life, which Malone sought for in despair, we should have remained in darkness, had not the unfortunate and intrepid industry of the most devoted enthusiast of the Shakespearian school lifted his steady torch.2 Shakespeare arrived at the theatre not to hold the horses of gentlemen, as was so long reported, without, for he had a more friendly interest within, doors. There he joined a neighbour in his shire, Richard Burbage, who subsequently became the renowned actor of the future Shakespeare’s creations; and likewise Thomas Green, his townsman, and no inferior actor and poet. It is hardly a conjecture to presume that their friendly invitations had tempted our youthful adventurer to join their company. In three years Shakespeare obtained shares in the theatre, which multiplied every year, till he became the joint-proprietor with Burbage. The friendship of the actor and the dramatist was a golden bond, when each had conferred on the other their mutual popularity. The plays of Shakespeare were higher favourites with the public during the lifetime of this Garrick of the poet’s own days; and the renowned actor was so charmed by his own success, that he perpetuated among his daughters the delightful name of Juliet, which reminded him, with pride, of his own exquisite Romeo.

Shakespeare proved a closer and a more refined observer of the art of acting than nature had enabled him to show himself as an actor, by practising his own professional precepts. Two actors, who long survived the poet, recorded that he had critically instructed the one to enact Hamlet, and the other Henry the Eighth.3

How in an indifferent actor like Shakespeare was betrayed those latent dramatic faculties by which he was one day to be the delight of that stage which he could not tread, remains a secret which the poet has not told. But whether it was by accident or in some happy hour, we know not, that Shakespeare, in conning the manuscript of some wretched drama, felt the glorious impulse which prompted the pen to strike out whole passages, and to interpolate whole scenes; that moment was the obscure birth of his future genius. How he was employed at this unknown era of his life, the peevish jealousy of a brother of the craft has curiously informed us.

When Shakespeare was a name yet scarcely known, save to that mimetic world, tenanted by playwrights, it appears that he was there sustaining an active and secret avocation. The great bard had been serving a silent apprenticeship to the dramatic muse, by trying his hand on the old stock-pieces which lay in the theatrical treasury, and further venturing his repolishing touches on the new. Marlowe, Lodge, and Peele had submitted to his soft pencillings or his sharp pruning-hook. The actors were often themselves a sort of poets, and would compete with those who were only poets; and in pricing the hasty wares, would often have them fashioned to their liking. Alluding to the treatment the dramatists were enduring from their masters, Robert Greene indignantly addressed his peers. This curious passage, first discovered by Tyrwhit, has been often quoted, and indispensably must be once more; for it tells us how Shakespeare, in 1592, had been fully employed within six years of his arrival at the metropolis. Greene desires his friends would no longer submit to the actors. “Do not trust those burrs, who have sought to cleave to us all; those puppets that speak from our mouths, those antics garnished in our colours. Is it not strange that I to whom they all have been beholding, is it not like that you to whom they all too have been beholding, shall, were ye in that case I am now, be both of them at once forsaken?4 Yes, trust them not! There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that with his tyger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast5 out a blank verse as the best of you, and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene in a country.”

“The absolute Johannes Factotum,” “the only shake-scene,” and “the crow beautified with their feathers,” are one person; but “the tyger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide,” particularly points out that person. It is, in fact, a parody of a line composed by this batch of poets in one of their dramas, The Contention of the Two Houses of York and Lancaster; and which, with many others, Shakespeare had wholly appropriated. In the third part of King Henry the Sixth, in Act I., Scene IV., it stands as Peele or Greene had originally composed it—