II THE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE[4] (continued 2)

So long as Shakespeare’s authorship was not doubted there seems to have been no desire on the part of commentators to call attention to faults which are obvious to every careful reader of the play. Most of the early criticisms are confined to remarks on single scenes or speeches irrespective of the general character of the drama and its personages. Comments such as the following of Dr. Drake fairly represent those of most writers until the middle of the last century. He writes in 1817: “The entire interest of the tragedy turns upon the characters of Queen Katherine and Cardinal Wolsey, the former being the finest picture of suffering and defenceless virtue, and the latter of disappointed ambition, that poet ever drew.” Dr. Johnson, who ranks the play as second class among the historical works, had previously asserted “that the genius of Shakespeare comes in and goes out with Katherine. Every other part may be easily conceived and easily written.”

When, however, the play is judged as a work of art in its complete form, the difficulty of writing favourably of its dramatic qualities becomes evident by the apologetic modes of expression used. Schlegel remarks that “Henry VIII.” has somewhat “of a prosaic appearance, for Shakespeare, artist-like, adapted himself to the quality of his materials. While others of his works, both in elevation of fancy, and in energy of pathos and character tower far above this, we have here, on the other hand, occasion to admire his nice powers of discrimination and his perfect knowledge of courts and the world.” Coleridge is content to define the play as that of “a sort of historical masque or show play”; and Victor Hugo observes that Shakespeare is so far English as to attempt to extenuate the failings of Henry VIII., adding, “it is true that the eye of Elizabeth is fixed upon him!”

In an interesting little volume containing the journal of Emily Shore, who made some valuable contributions to natural history, are to be found some remarks upon the play written in the year 1836. The criticism is the more noteworthy since Miss Shore was only in her sixteenth year when she wrote it, and she then showed no slight appreciation of literature, especially of Shakespeare:

“This evening my uncle finished reading ‘King Henry VIII.’ I must say I was mightily disappointed in it. Whether it is that I am not capable of understanding Shakespeare and cannot distinguish his beauties, I do not know. There is no effort in Shakespeare’s works; he takes so little pains that what is interesting or noble or sublime or finely exhibiting the features of the mind, seems to drop from his pen by chance. One cannot help thinking that every play is executed with slovenly neglect, that he has done himself injustice and that if he pleased he might have given to the world works which would throw into the shade all that he has actually written. To be sure this gives one a very exalted idea of his intellect, for even if the mere unavoidable overflowings of his genius excel the depths of other men’s minds, how magnificent must have been the fountain of that genius whose very bubbles sparkle so beautifully! But to speak of ‘Henry VIII.’ in particular. Henry himself, Katherine and Wolsey, though they display a degree of character, are not half so vigorously drawn as I had expected, or as I would methinks have done myself. The character of Cranmer exists more in Henry’s language about him than in his own actions.”

To come now to the opinion of the German commentators. Gervinus observes:

“No one in this short explanation of the main character of ‘Henry VIII.’ will mistake the certain hand of the poet. It is otherwise when we approach closer to the development of the action and attentively consider the poetic diction. The impression on the whole becomes then at once strange and unrefreshing; the mere external threads seem to be lacking which ought to link the actions to each other; the interest of the feelings becomes strangely divided, it is continually drawn into new directions and is nowhere satisfied. At first it clings to Buckingham, and his designs against Wolsey, but with the second act he leaves the stage; then Wolsey attracts our attention in an increased degree, and he, too, disappears in the third act; in the meanwhile our sympathies are more and more strongly drawn to Katherine, who then likewise leaves the stage in the fourth act; and after we have been thus shattered through four acts by circumstances of a purely tragic character, the fifth act closes with a merry festivity for which we are in no wise prepared, crowning the King’s loose passion with victory in which we could take no warm interest.”

Ulrici is even more severe in his remarks upon the play:

“The drama of ‘Henry VIII.’ is poetically untrue, devoid of real life, defective in symmetry and composition, because wanting in internal organic construction, i.e., in ethical vitality.”

So also is Professor Hertzberg:

“A chronicle history with three and a half catastrophes varied by a marriage and a coronation pageant, ending abruptly with the baptism of a child in which are combined the elements of a satirical drama with a prophetic ecstasy, and all this loosely connected by the nominal hero whom no poet in heaven or earth could ever have formed into a tragic character.”

And Dr. Elze, who is a warm supporter of Shakespeare’s authorship, admits that the play—

“measured by the standard of the historical drama is inferior to the other histories and wants both a grand historical substance and the unity of strictly defined dramatic structure.”

But it is not only with the general design of the play and its feeble characterization that fault is found, but also with the versification. The earliest criticism on the peculiarity of the metre of the play appeared about 1757. It consists of some remarks, published by Mr. Thomas Edwards, which were made by Mr. Roderick on Warburton’s edition of Shakespeare. Mr. Roderick, after pointing out that there are in the play many more lines than in any other which end with a redundant syllable, continues:

“This Fact (whatever Shakespeare’s design was in it) is undoubtedly true, and may be demonstrated to Reason, and proved to sense; the first by comparing any number of lines in this Play, with an equal number in any other Play, by which it will appear that this Play has very near two redundant verses to one in any other Play. And to prove it to sense, let anyone read aloud an hundred lines in any other Play, and an hundred in this; and if he perceives not the tone and cadence of his own voice to be involuntarily altered in the latter case from what it was in the former, I would never advise him to give much credit to the information of his ears.”

Later on we find that Emerson is also struck with the peculiarity of the metre, and in his lecture on “Representative Men,” observes:

“In ‘Henry VIII.’ I think I see plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his (Shakespeare’s) own finer structure was laid. The first play was written by a superior thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines and know well their cadence. See Wolsey’s soliloquy, and the following scene with Cromwell, where, instead of the metre of Shakespeare, whose secret is that the thought constructs the tune, so that reading for the sense will best bring out the rhythm; here the lines are constructed on a given tune; and the verse has even a trace of pulpit eloquence.”

Now these quotations, it may be urged, were picked out with a view to prejudice a favourable opinion of the play. But disparagements are, none the less, important links in a question of authorship. In fact it was because Shakespearian critics, of undisputed authority, declared that “Henry VIII.” was not a play worthy of the poet’s genius that a few advanced scholars were encouraged to come forward and pronounce that no part of the play had been written by Shakespeare.

In the autumn of 1850 Mr. Spedding, the able editor of Bacon’s works, published a paper in the Gentleman’s Magazine in which he stated it to be his belief that a great portion of the play of “Henry VIII.” was written by Fletcher; a conjecture that indeed had been anticipated and was at once confirmed by other writers. Tennyson, on Mr. Spedding’s authority, had pointed out many years previously the resemblance of the style in some parts of the play to Fletcher’s. In fact, the conclusion arrived at by the advanced critics was that the play has two totally different metres which are the work of two different authors. On this point Mr. Spedding wrote:

“A distinction so broad and so uniform running through so large a portion of the same piece cannot have been accidental, and the more closely it is examined, the more clearly will it appear that the metre in these two sets of scenes is managed upon entirely different principles and bears evidence of different workmen.”

This conclusion, however, was not endorsed by all commentators. It was acknowledged that metrical evidence must not be neglected, and that “there is no play of Shakespeare’s in which eleven syllable lines are so frequent as they are in “Henry VIII.”; and even Swinburne, whose faith in Shakespeare’s authorship was unwavering, asserted “that if not the partial work it may certainly be taken as the general model of Fletcher, in some not unimportant passages.” It was contended besides that the poet’s hand was hampered by a difficulty inherent in the subject, since of all Shakespeare’s plays, “Henry VIII.” is the nearest in its story to the poet’s own time, and that the elliptical construction and the licence of versification, which are peculiar to this play, are necessary in order to bring the dialogue closer to the language of common life. In fact, Mr. Spedding’s opponents, while admitting an anonymous hand in the prologue and epilogue, rejected the theory as to the manner in which the collaboration was carried out, and asserted that the structure of the play, the development of the action and the characters showed it to be the work of one hand, and that Shakespeare’s.

Another challenger of the metre was Mr. Robert Boyle, who endeavoured to show, from a careful and elaborate study of Elizabethan blank verse, that Shakespeare had no share whatever in the composition of the play, and that whoever was the author who collaborated with Fletcher (in Mr. Boyle’s opinion it was Massinger) he certainly did not write before 1612, for the metrical peculiarities of the verse are those of the later dramatic style, of which the earliest characteristics did not make themselves felt in the work of any poet till about 1607. It was after reading this paper that Robert Browning, then the president of the New Shakspere Society, wrote his final judgment on the play which was published in the Society’s “Transactions.”

“As you desired I have read once again ‘Henry the Eighth’; my opinion about the scanty portion of Shakespeare’s authorship in it was formed about fifty years ago, while ignorant of any evidence external to the text itself. I have little doubt now that Mr. Boyle’s judgment is right altogether; that the original play, presumably Shakespeare’s, was burnt along with the Globe Theatre; that the present work is a substitution for it, probably with certain reminiscences of ‘All is true.’ In spite of such huff-and-bullying as Charles Knight’s for example, I see little that transcends the power of Massinger and Fletcher to execute. It is very well to talk of the tediousness of the Chronicles, which have furnished pretty well whatever is admirable in the characters of Wolsey and Katherine; as wisely should we depreciate the bone which holds the marrow we enjoy on a toast. The versification is nowhere Shakespeare’s. But I have said my little say for what it is worth.”

There is yet another peculiarity that is special to this play, and it is one which seems to have escaped the notice of the critics. The stage-directions in it are unlike those of any other play published in the first folio. In no other play are they so full, and so carefully detailed. With the exception of “Henry VIII.,” the stage-directions in the folio are so few in number and so abbreviated that they appear to have been written solely for the author’s convenience. It is very rare that any reference is made to movement, more than to indicate the entrance or exit of characters, or to note that they fight or that they die. Sometimes the characters are not so much as named, and the direction is simply, “Enter the French Power and the English Lords”; at other times the directions are so concise as to be almost incomprehensible to the modern reader, for example, “Enter Hermione (like a statue),” “Enter Imogene (in her bed)”! The legitimate inference, therefore, is that Shakespeare considered it to be no part of his business to be explicit in these matters. It is startling, then, to find, in the play of “Henry VIII.,” a stage-direction so elaborate as the following: “The Queen makes no answer, rises out of her chair, goes about the Court, comes to the King, and kneels at his feet, then speaks.” No doubt in Elizabeth’s time all stage movement was of the simplest kind, and of a conventional order, so as to be applicable to a great variety of plays, and what was special to any particular play in the way of movement would, in Shakespeare’s dramas, be explained at rehearsal by the author. So that the detailed and minute stage-directions that in the first folio are special to “Henry VIII.” would seem to suggest that the play was written at a time when the author was absent from the theatre. To the actor, however, who is experienced in the technicalities of the stage, these elaborate directions show that the author was not only very familiar with what in theatrical parlance is known as stage “business,” but that he regarded the minute description of the actors’ movements as forming an essential part of the dramatist’s duty. In fact, the story of the play is made subservient to the “business” or to pageant throughout. A dramatic incident, then a procession, another dramatic incident, and then another procession. This seems to be the sort of effect aimed at. Towards the year 1610 the taste for spectacle created by the genius of Inigo Jones spread from the Court to the public theatre. Perhaps this may account for Shakespeare’s early retirement. He wrote plays and not masques, and his genius lay in portraying the drama of human life. Unlike Ben Jonson, he never devoted his talents to the service of the stage carpenter. Seeing the altered condition of the public taste, there would be nothing unnatural in his yielding his place silently and without bitterness to others who were willing to supply the theatrical market with the desired commodity. Had Shakespeare wanted money it would perhaps be difficult to deny that he would have adapted his work to the requirement of the times. But by 1610 he was very well able to live in retirement upon a competent income, and it is difficult to believe that one who had attained his wonderful balance of intellect and heart, of reason and imagination, would have condescended to elaborate the details of baptismal and coronation festivities.

And now in conclusion, what is there to be said for or against the genuineness of the play? The supporters of the Shakespearian authorship dwell upon the beauty of particular passages, and on the general similarity, in many scenes, to Shakespeare’s verse in his later plays; the sceptics contend that it is a mistake to leave entirely out of view the most important part of every drama—viz., its action and its characterization; and unreasonable, moreover, to suppose that Shakespeare had no imitators at the close of his successful career. But, say the admirers, this kind of reasoning is no evidence that Shakespeare was not the author of all that is most liked in the play. Here, however, we are met with the argument that the popular scenes of all others in the play, are those the most easily to be identified with the metre peculiar to Fletcher. Then, again, it is hardly possible to accept the opinion of Charles Knight, Professor Delius, and Dr. Elze that all the shortcomings of the play, both in the structure and versification, are due to the fact that the poet was hampered by a “difficulty inherent in the subject.” Is genius ever hampered by its subject? Does not history prove the contrary? Have not the shackles put upon musicians, poets, painters, and sculptors by their patrons, instead of checking their genius, elicited the most exquisite products of their imagination? The conscientious inquirer, therefore, who wades through a mass of literary criticism in the hope of obtaining some elucidation of the question, seems only doomed to experience disappointment. Nothing is gained but an unsettling of all preconceived ideas. If expectations of a possible solution are aroused they are not fulfilled because the unprejudiced mind refuses to accept conjectural criticism and to believe more than it is possible to know. Still, it must be admitted that in re-reading the play in the light of all the more modern criticism upon it, the dissatisfaction with the inferior portions becomes more acute, while the finer scenes shine with a lessened glory. It is not only dramatic perception in the development of character that is wanting, but the power which gives words form and meaning is also lacking; the closely packed expression, the lifelike reality and freshness, the rapid and abrupt turnings of thought, so quick that language can hardly follow fast enough; the impatient audacity of intellect and fancy with which we are familiar in Shakespeare’s later plays are not to be found in “Henry VIII.” We miss even the objections raised by modern grammarians, the idle conceits, the play upon words, the puns, the improbability, the extravagance, the absurdity, the obscenity, the puerility, the bombast, the emphasis, the exaggeration. Therefore it must be admitted that in order to uphold “Henry VIII.” as a late play of Shakespeare’s, it becomes necessary for his sincere admirers to invent all sorts of apologies for its faults, and to overlook the consistent development of the poet’s genius from the close of the great tragedies to the play of the “Tempest,” “where we see him shining to the last in a steady, mild, unchanging glory.”

Troilus and Cressida[9]

The mystery in which the history of this play is shrouded bewilders students, for the information available is scanty. The play was entered on the Stationers’ Register on February 7, 1603, as “The Booke of Troilus and Cresseda,” but it was not to be printed until the publisher had got the necessary permission from its owners; and it was also the same book, “as it is acted by my Lord Chamberlen’s men,” and a play of Shakespeare’s had never before been entered on the Register as one that was being acted at the time of its publication, plays being seldom printed in those days until they had become, to some extent, obsolete on the stage. Then Mr. A. W. Pollard points out that the Globe managers often got some publisher to enter a play on the Stationers’ Register in order to protect their playhouse copies from pirates, and for this or some other reason not yet fully explained, the play did not get printed. But on January 28, 1609, another firm of publishers entered on the Register a book with a similar name, which soon afterwards was published, with the following words on its title-page: “The Historie of Troylus and Cresseda. As it was acted by the Kings Majesties servants at the ‘Globe.’” Shortly afterwards this title-page was suppressed, being torn out of the book, and another one inserted to allow of the following qualification: “The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid. Excellently expressing the beginning of their loves, with the conceited wooing of Pandarus, Prince of Licia.” On both title-pages Shakespeare is announced as the author, and apparently the object of the second title-page was to contradict the former statement that the play had been acted at the Globe, or, in other words, was the property of the Globe managers; and also to suggest by the title “Prince of Licia” that the book was not the same play as the one the actors of the theatre owned. In addition to the altered title there appeared on the back of the new leaf a preface, and this was another unusual proceeding, since there had not appeared before one attached to a Shakespeare play. No further editions were issued until 1623, when Heminge and Condell published their player’s copy, with additions and corrections taken from the 1609 quarto. It was inserted in the first folio in a position between the Histories and Tragedies, where it appears unpaged after having been removed from its original position among the Tragedies. No mention is made of it in the contents of the volume. In the folio the play is called a tragedy, which, if a correct title, is not the one given to it in the 1609 preface.

Now, in the Epilogue to “Henry IV., Part Two,” we have this allusion to a recently acted play by Shakespeare, which had not been well received by the audience, “Be it known to you, as it is very well, I was lately here in the end of a displeasing play, to pray your patience for it and to promise you a better. I meant, indeed, to pay you with this.” And in 1903 Mr. Arthur Acheson, of Chicago, in his book on “Shakespeare and the Rival Poet,” advanced the theory (1) that this “displeasing play,” was “Troilus and Cressida”; (2) that it was written at some time between the autumn of 1598 and the spring of 1599; (3) that it preceded and did not follow Ben Jonson’s “Poetaster,” and therefore had nothing to do with the “War of the Theatres”; (4) that it was written to ridicule Chapman’s fulsome praise of Homer and his Greek heroes—praise which was displayed in his prefaces to the seven books of the Iliad issued in that year. On this point Mr. Acheson says, forcibly:

“Chapman claims supremacy for Homer, not only as a poet, but as a moralist, and extends his claims for moral altitude to include the heroes of his epics. Shakespeare divests the Greek heroes of the glowing, but misty, nimbus of legend and mythology, and presents them to us in the light of common day, and as men in a world of men. In a modern Elizabethan setting he pictures these Greeks and Trojans, almost exactly as they appear in the sources from which he works. He does not stretch the truth of what he finds, nor draw wilfully distorted pictures, and yet, the Achilles, the Ulysses, the Ajax, etc., which we find in the play, have lost their demigodlike pose. How does he do it? The masterly realistic and satirical effect he produces comes wholly from a changed point of view. He displays pagan Greek and Trojan life in action—with its low ideals of religion, womanhood, and honour, with its bloodiness and sensuality—upon a background from which he has eliminated historical perspective.”

Nor is this explanation inapplicable when we realize how exaggerated are Chapman’s eulogies on Homer. To take as an instance the following passage:

“Soldiers shall never spende their idle howres more profitablie then with his studious and industrious perusell; in whose honors his deserts are infinite. Counsellors have never better oracles then his lines; fathers have no morales so profitable for their children as his counsailes; nor shal they ever give them more honord injunctions then to learne Homer without book, that being continually conversant in him his height may descend to their capacities, and his substance prove their worthiest riches. Husbands, wives, lovers, friends, and allies, having in him mirrors for all their duties; all sortes of which concourse and societie, in other more happy ages, have in steed of sonnets and lascivious ballades, sung his Iliades.”

Now, Mr. Acheson may be right as to the date in which “Troilus and Cressida” was written, because neither in its dramatic construction nor in its verse and characterization can the play consistently be called a later composition, so that it is possible to contend that the whole of the play, with the exception, perhaps, of the prologue, was written before “Henry IV., Part Two.” It can be urged, also, that Ben Jonson’s “Poetaster,” which was acted in 1601, contains allusions to Shakespeare’s play, and to its having been unfavourably received; then that certain incidents in the life of Essex come into the play, and that these would not have been mentioned had the play been written later than the spring of 1599, when Essex had left for Ireland.

With regard to the “Poetaster,” it is now generally admitted that there is no evidence to support the assertion that, at the time this satirical play was written, its author was on bad terms with Shakespeare. In it Jonson announced his next production to be a tragedy, and in 1603 “Sejanus” followed at the Globe; Shakespeare was in the cast, and may have been also a collaborator. But the failure of this tragedy to please the patrons of the Globe may have led to a temporary estrangement from that theatre, for Jonson did not undervalue himself or forget that Chapman, as Mr. Acheson has clearly shown, was always a bitter opponent of Shakespeare, while it was characteristic of Jonson himself to be equally ready to defend or to quarrel with friends. Now in the “Poetaster” Jonson refers to Chapman and to his “divine” Homer, as, for instance, when he makes the father of Ovid say: “Ay, your god of poets there, whom all of you admire and reverence so much, Homer, he whose worm-eaten statue must not be spewed against but with hallowed lips and grovelling adoration, what was he? What was he?... You’ll tell me his name shall live; and that, now being dead, his works have eternized him and made him divine” (Act I., Scene 1.) Again, the incident of the gods’ banquet, although it is modelled by Ben Jonson upon the synod of the Iliad, is obviously a satire upon Chapman’s ecstatic admiration for Homer’s heroes. It may also refer to Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida,” for if this comedy was acted in 1598 it might well have been suppressed after its first performance, since to the groundlings it must have been “caviare,” and to Chapman’s allies, the scholars, a malicious piece of “ignorance and impiety,” while the Court would have been sure to take offence at the Essex incidents. Besides Jonson, in the “Poetaster,” seems to be defending someone from attacks who has dared to laugh at Chapman’s idol. This appears in such witty expressions as “Gods may grow impudent in iniquity, and they must not be told of it” ... “So now we may play the fool by authority” ... “What, shall the king of gods turn the king of good fellows, and have no fellow in wickedness? This makes our poets that know our profaneness live as profane as we” (Act IV., Scene 3.) Continually in this play is Jonson attacking Chapman for the same reason that Shakespeare did, and, more than this, Jonson proclaims that the poet Virgil is as much entitled to be regarded “divine” as Homer, while the word “divine” is seized hold of for further satire in the remark, “Well said, my divine deft Horace.”

Jonson says he wrote his “Poetaster” to ridicule Marston, the dramatist, who previously had libelled him on the stage. In addition to Marston, Jonson appeared himself in the play as Horace, together with Dekker and other men in the theatre. It was but natural, then, for commentators to centre their attention on those parts of the play where Marston and Horace were prominent. But there is an underplot to which very little attention hitherto has been given, and it is hardly likely, if Jonson was writing a comedy in order to satirize living persons and contemporary events, that his underplot would be altogether free from topical allusions. It may be well, then, to relate the story of the underplot, and, if possible, to try to show its significance. Julia, who is Cæsar’s daughter, lives at Court, and she invites to the palace her lover, Ovid, a merchant’s son, and some tradesmen of the town, with their wives; then she contrives, unknown to her father, for these plebeians to counterfeit the gods at a banquet prepared for them. An actor of the Globe reports to one of Cæsar’s spies that Julia has sent to the playhouse to borrow suitable properties for this “divine” masquerade, so that while the sham gods are in the midst of their licentious convivialities Cæsar suddenly appears, led there by his spy, and is horrified at the daring act of profanity perpetrated by his daughter. “Be they the gods!” he exclaims,

Then he goes on to say:

And then, with correct imperial conventionality, he proceeds to punish the offenders, locking up his daughter behind “iron doors” and exiling her lover. Now, Horace—that is to say, Jonson—is supposed by the revellers to be responsible for having betrayed the inspirer of these antics. But this implication Jonson indignantly repudiates in a scene between Horace, the spy, and the Globe player, in which Horace severely upbraids them for their malice:

a rebuke that found expression in almost similar words in the 1609 preface to Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida”: “For it is a birth of (that) brain that never undertook anything comical vainly: and were but the vain names of comedies changed for titles of commodities or of plays for pleas, you should see all those grand censors that now style them such vanities flock to them for the main grace of their gravities.” Now Jonson, if he, indeed, intended to defend the attacks made on his friend Shakespeare’s play, has shown considerable adroitness in the delicate task he undertook, for since the “Poetaster” was written to be acted at the Blackfriars, a theatre under Court patronage, Jonson could not there abuse “the grand censors,” and this he avoids doing by making Cæsar justly incensed at the impudence of the citizens in daring to counterfeit the divine gods, while Horace, out of reach of Cæsar’s ear, soundly rates the police spy and the actor for mistaking the shadow for the substance and regarding playacting as if it were political conspiracy. But what, it may be contended, connects the underplot in the “Poetaster” directly with Shakespeare’s play is the speech of citizen Mercury and its satirical insistence that immorality may be tolerated by the gods:

“The great god Jupiter, of his licentious goodness, willing to make this feast no fast from any manner of pleasure, nor to bind any god or goddess to be anything the more god or goddess for their names, he gives them all free licence to speak no wiser than persons of baser titles; and to be nothing better than common men or women. And, therefore, no god shall need to keep himself more strictly to his goddess than any man does to his wife; nor any goddess shall need to keep herself more strictly to her god than any woman does to her husband. But since it is no part of wisdom in these days to come into bonds, it should be lawful for every lover to break loving oaths, to change their lovers, and make love to others, as the heat of everyone’s blood and the spirit of our nectar shall inspire. And Jupiter save Jupiter!”

Now this speech, it may be contended, is but a good-natured parody of Shakespeare’s travesty of the Iliad story, as he wrote it in answer to Chapman’s absurd claim for the sanctity of Homer’s characters. Shakespeare’s consciousness of power might naturally have incited him to place himself immediately by the side of Homer, but it is more likely that he was interested in the ethical than in the personal point of view. Unlike most of his plays, as Dr. Ward has pointed out, this comedy follows no single original source accurately, because the author’s satire was more topical than anything he had previously attempted, except, perhaps, in “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” But Shakespeare for once had miscalculated not his own powers, but the powers of the “grand censors,” who could suppress plays which reflected upon the morality or politics of those who moved in high places; nor had he sufficiently allowed for the hostility of the “sinners who lived in the suburbs.” Shakespeare, indeed, found one of the most striking compositions of his genius disliked and condemned not from its lack of merit, but for reasons that Jonson so forcibly points out in words put into the mouth of Virgil:

The stigma that rested on Shakespeare in his lifetime for having written this play rests on him still, for some unintelligible reason, since no man ever sat down to put his thoughts on paper with a loftier motive. But so it is! Then, as now, whenever a dramatist attempts to be teacher and preacher, all the other teachers and preachers in the world hold up their hands in horror and exclaim: “What impiety! What stupendous ignorance!”

Gervinus, in his criticism of this play, compares the satire of the Elizabethen poet with that of Aristophanes, and points out that the Greek dramatist directed his sallies against the living. This, he contends, should ever be the object of satire, because a man must not war against the defenceless and dead. Yet Shakespeare’s instincts as a dramatist were too unerring for him to be unconscious of this fundamental principle of his art. The stage in his time supplied the place now occupied by the Press, and political discussions were carried on in public through the mouth of the actor, of which few indications can now be traced on the printed page, owing to the difficulty of fitting the date of composition with that of the performance. Heywood, the dramatist, in his answer to the Puritan’s abuse of the theatre, alludes to the stage as the great political schoolmaster of the people. And yet until recent years the labours of commentators have been chiefly confined to making literary comparisons, to discovering sources of plots, and the origin of expressions, so that there still remains much investigation needed to discover Shakespeare’s political, philosophical, and religious affinities as they appear reflected in his plays. Mr. Richard Simpson, the brilliant Shakespearian scholar, many years ago pointed out the necessity for a new departure in criticism, and added that it was still thought derogatory to Shakespeare “to make him an upholder of any principles worth assertion,” or to admit that, as a reasoner, he took any decided part in the affairs which influenced the highest minds of his day. Now, in regard to politics, government by factions was then the prevailing feature; factions consisting of individuals who centred round some nobleman, whom the Queen favoured and made, or weakened, according to her judgment or caprice. In the autumn of 1597 Essex’s influence over the Queen was waning, and after a sharp rebuke received from her at the Privy Council table, he abruptly left the Court and sullenly withdrew to his estate at Wanstead, where he remained so long in retirement that his friends remonstrated with him against his continued absence. One of them, who signed himself “Thy true servant not daring to subscribe,” urged him to attend every Council and to let nothing be settled either at home or abroad without his knowledge. He should stay in the Court, and perform all his duties there, where he can make a greater show of discontent than he possibly could being absent; there is nothing, adds this writer, that his enemies so much wish, enjoy, and rejoice in as his absence. He is advised not to sue any more, “because necessity will entreat for him.” All he need do now is to dissemble like a courtier, and show himself outwardly unwilling of that which he has inwardly resolved. For by retiring he is playing his enemies’ game, since “the greatest subject that ever is or was greatest, in the prince’s favour, in his absence is not missed.” In “Troilus and Cressida” we have a similar situation, and we hear similar advice given. Achilles, like Essex, has withdrawn unbidden and discontentedly to his tent, refusing to come again to his general’s council table. For doing so Ulysses remonstrates with him in almost the same words as the writer of the anonymous letter.

Then Achilles replies:

And Ulysses continues:

If, again, we turn to the life and letters of Essex, we find there that upon the 11th of February, 1598, “it is spied out by some that my Lord of Essex is again fallen in love with his fairest B.: it cannot chance but come to her Majesty’s ears, and then he is undone.” The lady in question was Mary Brydges, a maid-of-honour and celebrated beauty. Again, in the same month Essex writes to the Queen, “I was never proud till your Majesty sought to make me too base.” And Achilles is blamed by Agamemnon for his pride in a remarkably fine passage. Then after news had come of the disaster to the Queen’s troops in Ireland, in the summer of 1598, Essex reminds the Queen that, “I posted up and first offered my attendance after my poor advice to your Maj. But your Maj. rejected both me and my letter: the cause, as I hear, was that I refused to give counsel when I was last called to my Lord Keeper.” A similar situation is found in the play. Agamemnon sends for Achilles to attend the Council and he refuses to come, and later on, when he desires a reconciliation, the Council pass him by unnoticed. It is almost impossible to read the third act of this play without being reminded of these and other incidents in Essex’s life. Nor would Shakespeare forget the stir that had been created in London when in 1591 it was known at Court that Essex, at the siege of Rouen, had sent a personal challenge to the governor of the town couched in the following words: “Si vous voulez combattre vous-même à cheval ou à pied je maintiendrai que la querelle du rois est plus juste que celle de la ligue, et que ma Maîtresse est plus belle que la votre.” And Æneas, the Trojan, brings a challenge in almost identical words from Hector to the Greeks. It is true that this incident is in the Iliad together with the incidents connected with the withdrawal of Achilles, but Shakespeare selected his material from many sources and appears to have chosen what was most likely to appeal to his audience. Now it is not presumed that Achilles is Essex, nor that Ajax is Raleigh, nor Agamemnon Elizabeth, or that Shakespeare’s audience for a moment supposed that they were; although it is to be noticed that the Achilles who comes into Shakespeare’s play is not the same man at the beginning and end of the play as he is in the third act, where, in conversation with Ulysses he suddenly becomes an intelligent being and not simply a prize-fighter. To the injury of his drama, Shakespeare here runs away from his Trojan story, and does so for reasons that must have been special to the occasion for which the play was written. For about this time, the Privy Council wrote to some Justices of the Peace in Middlesex, complaining that certain players at the Curtain were reported to be representing upon the stage “the persons of some gentlemen of good descent and quality that are yet alive,” and that the actors were impersonating these aristocrats “under obscure manner, but yet in such sorte as all the hearers may take notice of the matter and the persons that are meant thereby. This being a thing very unfit and offensive.” The protest seems almost to suggest that the Achilles’s scenes in Shakespeare’s play express, “under obscure manner,” reflections upon contemporary politicians. But, indeed, the growing political unrest which marked the last few years of Elizabeth’s reign could not fail to find expression on the stage.

It must be remembered, besides, that the years 1597 to 1599 were marked by a group of dramas which may be called plays of political adventure. Nash had got into trouble over a performance of “The Isle of Dogs” at the Rose in 1597. In the same year complaints were made against Shakespeare for putting Sir John Oldcastle on the stage in the character of Falstaff. Also at the same period Shakespeare’s “Richard the Second” was published, but not without exciting suspicions at Court, for the play had a political significance in the eyes of Catholics: Queen Mary of Scotland told her English judges that “she remembered they had done the same to King Richard, whom they had degraded from all honour and dignity.” Then on the authority of Mr. H. C. Hart we are told that Ben Jonson brought Sir Walter Raleigh, the best hated man in England, on to the stage in the play of “Every Man Out of His Humour,” in 1599, and, as a consequence, in the summer of the same year it was decided by the Privy Council that restrictions should be placed on satires, epigrams, and English histories, and that “noe plays be printed except they be allowed by such as have an authoritie.” Dramatists, therefore, had to be much more circumspect in their political allusions after 1599 than they were before.

There are two new conjectures therefore put forward in this article: (1) That the underplot in the “Poetaster” contains allusions to Shakespeare’s play, and (2) that the withdrawal of Achilles is a reflection on the withdrawal of Essex from Elizabeth’s Court. Presuming that further evidence may one day be found to support these suppositions, it is worth while to consider them in relation to the history of the play.

And first to clear away the myth in connection with the idea that this is one of Shakespeare’s late plays, or that it was only partly written by the poet, or written at different periods of his life. It may be confidently asserted that Shakespeare allowed no second hand to meddle with a work so personal to himself as this one, nor was he accustomed to seek the help of any collaborator in a play that he himself initiated. We know, besides, that he wrote with facility and rapidly. As to the date of the play, the evidence of the loose dramatic construction, and the preference for dialogue where there should be drama, place it during the period when Shakespeare was writing his histories. The grip that he ultimately obtained over the stage handling of a story so as to produce a culminating and overpowering impression on his audience is wanting in “Troilus and Cressida.” In fact, it is impossible to believe that this play was written after “Julius Cæsar,” “Much Ado,” or “Twelfth Night.” Nor is there evidence of revision in the play, since there are no topical allusions to be found in it which point to a later date than 1598 except perhaps in the prologue, which could hardly have been written before 1601, and did not appear in print before 1623. Again, it is contended that there is too much wisdom crammed into the play to allow of its being an early composition. But the false ethics underlying the Troy story, which Shakespeare meant to satirize in “Troilus and Cressida,” had been previously exposed in his poem of “Lucrece”:

The difficulty with commentators is the knowledge that the play might have been written yesterday, while the treatment of the subject, in its modernity, is as far removed from “The Tempest” as it is from “Henry V.” Now, if the drama be recognized as a satire written under provocation and with extraordinary mental energy, the date of the composition can be as well fixed for 1598, when Shakespeare was thirty-four years old, as for the year 1609. There is, besides, something to be said with regard to its vocabulary, as Mr. Richard Simpson has shown, which is peculiar to this play alone. Shakespeare introduces into it a large number of new words which he had never used before and never employed afterwards. The list is a long one. There are 126 latinized words that are coined or used only for this play, words such as propugnation, protractive, Ptisick, publication, cognition, commixture, commodious, community, complimental. And in addition to all the latinized words there are 124 commoner words simple and compound, not elsewhere to be found in the poet’s plays, showing an unwonted search after verbal novelty.

We will now, with the help of the new information, attempt to unravel the mystery as to the history of the play. The creation of the character of Falstaff in “Henry IV.” (Part I.) brought Shakespeare’s popularity, as a dramatist, to its zenith, and he seized the opportunity to reply to the attacks made upon himself, as a poet, by his rival poet, Chapman, and wrote a play giving a modern interpretation to the story of Troy, and working into the underplot some political allusion to Essex and the Court. The play may have been acted at the Curtain late in 1598, or at the Globe in the spring of 1599, or, perhaps, privately at some nobleman’s mansion, who might have been one of Essex’s faction. It was not liked, and Shakespeare experienced his first and most serious reverse on the stage. But he quickly retrieved his position by producing another Falstaff play, “Henry IV.” (Part II.), in the summer of 1599, followed by “Henry V.” in the same autumn, when Essex’s triumphs in Ireland are predicted. Shakespeare, none the less, must have felt both grieved and annoyed by the treatment his satirical comedy had received from the hands of the “grand censors.” So at Christmas, 1601, when Ben Jonson produced his “Poetaster” at Blackfriars, the younger dramatist defended his friend from the silly objections which had been made to the Trojan comedy. Then early in 1603 a revival of “Troilus and Cressida” may have been contemplated at the Globe, and also its publication, but the death of Essex was still too near to the memory of Londoners to make this possible, and the suggestion may have been dropped on the eve of its fulfilment; Shakespeare, meanwhile, had written a prologue, to be spoken by an actor in armour, in imitation of Jonson’s prologue, with a view to protect his play from further hostility. In 1609 Shakespeare was preparing to give up his connection with the stage, and may have handed his copy of the play to some publishers, for a consideration, and the book was then printed. The Globe players, however, demurred and claimed the property as theirs. The publishers then removed their first title page and inserted another one to give the appearance to the reader of the play being new. They also wrote a preface to show that the publication, if unauthorized, was warranted, since the play had not been acted on the public stage. The real object of the preface, however, was to defend the play from the attacks of the “grand censors,” who thought that the comedy had some deep political significance, and was not merely intended to amuse and instruct. It also shows the writer’s resentment at the high-handed action of the “grand possessors,” the Globe players, who were unwilling either to act the play themselves or yet to allow it to be published.