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PORTRAIT OF SHAKESPEARE, 
 After Droeshout. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 TO 
 
 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD pOWDEN 
 
 Lltt.D.. LL,D„ Dublin, LL.D.Edm.; D.C.L.Oxoii. 
 Professor of English Literature in the University of Dublin. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 i?95 
 
NOTE. 
 
 The publishers of the " Henry Irving Shakespeare" having de- 
 cided to issug the General Introduction to that edition in a separate 
 form, I have taken the opportunity to revise what was written, to 
 add some paragraphs on the great tragedies, and to compile, firom 
 sources easily accessible, a brief notice of the interpretations of 
 Shakespeare by great actors from Burbage to Macready. 
 
 If, in this Uttle volume, there be anything of useful guidance or 
 suggestion, I desire to connect it with the memory of my wife. 
 
 E. D. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 
 Introduction to Shakespeare; 
 
 I. Shakespeare's Life at Stratford and in London, i 
 II. The Poetical Creations of his Intellect and 
 
 Imagination, - - 43 
 
 III. The Pseudo-Shakespearian Plays, - - 85 
 
 IV. Influence of Shakespeare's Works on the 
 
 National Mind, 88 
 
 Appendix: 
 
 Dedication prefixed to the Folio of 1623, 129 
 
 Address prefixed to the Folio of 1623, - 130 
 Commendatory Verses from those prefixed to the 
 
 Folio of 1623, 132 
 
 Note on the Early Editions of Shakespeare, - 134 
 
 Portrait of Shakespeare, after Droeshout, - frontU. 
 Sketch of the Interior of the Swan Theatre, by 
 Johannes de Witt, ... . . 51 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 TO 
 
 SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 § I. The life of Shakespeare has been threefold : first, 
 the external life of good and evil fortune which he 
 lived as a youth in Stratford, as a player and play- 
 wright in London, and again as an honoured inhabi- 
 tant of his native town; secondly, the inner life of 
 his spirit, the wide-orbing movement of his intellect 
 and imagination of which we can read something in 
 his marvellous series of poetical creations, and can 
 conjecture more; and last, the life which he has 
 lived during three hundred years in the history of 
 the national mind of England, or rather we should 
 say the mind of humanity, the life of posthumous 
 influence which he has exercised, and exercises at 
 the present day, on the generations of mankind. 
 Of each of these it will be our endeavour to speak. 
 
 § 2. "All that is known with any degree of certainty 
 concerning Shakespeare is — that he was born at 
 Stratford-upon-Avon — married and had children 
 there — went to London, where he commenced actor, 
 and wrote poems and plays — returned to Stratford, 
 made his will, died and was buried." So wrote 
 Steevens a century ago, and De Quincey at a much 
 
2 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 more recent date is even briefer in his summing-up 
 of the facts: "That he lived, and that he died, and 
 that he was ' a little lower than the angels ' — these 
 make up pretty nearly the amount of our undis- 
 puted report". Having spoken of the perplexity 
 which we are likely to feel on finding the materials 
 for the biography of a transcendent writer so meagre 
 and so few, De Quincey goes on to solve the 
 difficulty by an elaborate argument intended to 
 prove that the parliamentary war and the local 
 feuds engendered by it extinguished those tradi- 
 tions and memorials of Shakespeare which, he says, 
 must have been abundant up to that era. In truth 
 there is no great cause for wonder or perplexity. 
 More is known of Shakespeare's life than Steevens 
 and De Quincey allege. More is known of Shake- 
 speare's life than of the lives of many of his dramatic 
 contemporaries. Far less has been ascertained 
 respecting the life of Marlowe, whose fame stood 
 so high in Elizabethan days, and whose personality 
 was undoubtedly a striking one. Far less has been 
 ascertained respecting the life of Webster or the life 
 of Ford, although these dramatists flourished at a 
 later time, and one of them was a gentleman of posi- 
 tion. The materials for John Fletcher's biography 
 are of the scantiest kind ; it is not certain whether 
 he went to Cambridge; it is not certain whether 
 he lived and died unmarried; from 1593 to 1607 
 his history is a complete blank. Yet Fletcher was 
 highly honoured by his contemporaries ; he survived 
 till the opening of the reign of Charles I. ; his father 
 was the Bishop of London. The Elizabethan age 
 was not an age of literary biography ; a playwright, 
 
PARENTAGE. 3 
 
 unless, like Ben Jonson, he were distinguished for 
 his scholarship and classical learning, was hardly 
 thought of as a man of letters. Our wonder as 
 regards Shakespeare should be, not that we know 
 so little, but that we know so much. Our acquaint- 
 ance with the facts of his outward history — partly 
 founded on tradition, partly on documents — is due 
 to the 2eal of lovers of the great dramatist, from the 
 actor Betterton to the latest and most indefatigable 
 of investigators, Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps. We cannot 
 hope that much additional light will ever be gained. 
 The facts which we possess are enough to assure 
 us that the greatest of poets conducted his material 
 life, after, perhaps, some errors of his ardent youth, 
 wisely and well to a prosperous issue. They are 
 enough to prove his good sense and discreet dealing 
 in worldly affairs. 
 
 § 3. Richard Shakespeare, the poet's grandfather, 
 was a Warwickshire farmer, renting land at Snitter- 
 field, a village some three or four miles from Strat- 
 ford-on-Avon. His son John, evidently a man of 
 some enterprise and energy, settled at Stratford 
 about 1551, and did business in Henley Street as 
 a fellmonger and glover. According to Aubrey he ^ 
 was a butcher, and it may be that he slaughtered 
 the beasts whose skins he converted into gauntlets 
 and leggings; according to Rowe he was a con- 
 siderable dealer in wool, and it is certain that he 
 had transactions in corn and in timber. In 1557 
 he greatly improved his position by his marriage 
 with Mary, the youngest and the favourite daughter 
 of Robert Arden, a wealthy farmer, lately deceased, 
 of the neighbouring hamlet of Wilmecote. That 
 
4 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 these Ardens were connected with an ancient family 
 of gentlefolk of that name has been asserted, and 
 may be true, but the statement cannot be proved. 
 Mary Arden inherited from her father an estate of 
 some sixty acres, known as Asbies, at Wilmecote, 
 together with the reversion to part of a larger pro- 
 perty at Snitterfield, on which Snitterfield property 
 her father-in-law, Richard Shakespeare, held land 
 as a tenant. From this date John Shakespeare 
 became a person of some importance at Stratford, 
 and he rose year by year in the esteem of his fellow- 
 townsmen. Appointed at first by the corporation 
 one of the officers whose duty it was to supervise 
 malt liquors and bread, he became in 1561 a 
 chamberlain of the borough, in 1565 an alderman, 
 and in 1568 he was elected to the most important 
 official position in the town, that of high bailiff. 
 It is true that he could not write even his name, 
 but the accomplishment of penmanship was rare 
 among the members of the corporation. He was 
 certainly a successful man of business and a skilful 
 accountant. 
 
 § 4. In the house in Henley Street towards the close 
 of April, 1564, was born William Shakespeare, the 
 eldest son of his parents. Two daughters, who died 
 in infancy, had been born before him. On April 
 the 26th the child was baptized ; a tradition of the 
 last century, that Shakespeare died upon his birth- 
 day, would favour the popular opinion that he was 
 born on April 23rd; but his monument states that 
 he died in his fifty-third year. Attention was called 
 by De Quincey to the fact that Shakespeare's only 
 grandchild, Elizabeth Hall, was married to Thomas 
 
STRATFORD-ON-AVON. 5 
 
 Nash on April 22nd, and he suggested that the day 
 may have been chosen as the anniversary of her 
 grandfather's birthday. The matter remains doubt- 
 ful. April the 23rd, Old Style, corresponds with 
 our present May 5 th. 
 
 Stratford-on-Avon, in which Shakespeare spent 
 his youth and to which he gladly returned in his 
 elder years, was a town of gable-roofed, timber or 
 timber-and-plaster houses, containing some fourteen 
 or fifteen hundred inhabitants. Its chief buildings 
 were the noble church hard by the river, and the 
 Guildhall where on occasions travelling companies 
 of actors would present their plays. Around it in 
 Warwickshire, " the heart of England", lay the per- 
 fection of rural landscape: in the Feldon division 
 such pasture-lands, with a wealth of wild flowers, as 
 Shakespeare has described in A Winter's Tale; and 
 in the Arden division the perfection of forest 
 scenery, such woodland glades and streams as he 
 has imagined in the French Arden of As You Like 
 It. During the Wars of the Roses the county was 
 divided against itself; Coventry was Lancastrian, 
 Warwick, for a time, Yorkist. The battle of Bos- 
 worth Field was fought near its north-eastern 
 border. Traditions of the stirring events of those 
 times must have lived on to Shakespeare's day, and 
 created in his imagination a sympathy with the great 
 historical figures of that period which he has repre- 
 sented with such life and force in his historical 
 dramas. 
 
 That Shakespeare was sent to the Free School at 
 Stratford is stated by his first biographer, Rowe, 
 and we may reasonably assume that such was the 
 
6 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 fact. Some knowledge of reading and writing was 
 required at entrance; the usual age of pupils when 
 admitted was seven. When duly drilled in the 
 Latin accidence (of which we have an amusing 
 Shakespearian reminiscence in Sir Hugh Evans' 
 examination of William Page in The Merry Wives 
 of Windsor), the boy began to construe from the 
 Sententiae Pueriles, and, if he remained long enough 
 at school, advanced as far as Ovid, Virgil, Cicero, 
 and the Eclogues of Mantuanus. Much has been 
 written on the subject of Shakespeare's learning. 
 From Ben Jonson's scholarly point of view he may 
 be said to have had "small Latin and less Greek". 
 Perhaps the Greek was nothing or next to nothing; 
 but Aubrey was probably not wrong when he stated 
 on the authority of a Mr. Beeston that Shakespeare 
 " understode Latine pretty well". In later years he 
 seems to have acquired a little knowledge of French, 
 and possibly a little knowledge of Italian. 
 
 § 5. At what age Shakespeare was withdrawn from 
 school we cannot tell. But we know that when he 
 was thirteen years old his father was no longer a 
 prosperous man, and that the fortunes of his house 
 continued for a considerable time to decline. While 
 John Shakespeare's means were first waxing and 
 then rapidly waning, his family had increased in 
 numbers. His son Gilbert, who afterwards became 
 a haberdasher in London and who lived certainly 
 to 1609, was born in 1566; Joan, who was married 
 to William Hart, and whose name appears in the 
 great dramatist's will, was born 1569; Anne, born 
 in 1 571, died in her eighth year; Richard, born in 
 March 1573-74, lived to manhood, dying at Stratford 
 
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 7 
 
 in 161 3; John Shakespeare's last child, Edmund, 
 born in 1580, became an actor, died in September 
 1607, and on the morning of his burial at St. 
 Saviour's, Southwark, a knell of the " great bell " 
 of the church was rung, a mark of respect secured 
 only by the payment of a considerable fee. Thus 
 with younger brothers and a sister requiring susten- 
 ance and education, and with narrowing means in 
 the household, William Shalcespeare. at the age of 
 thirteen may, as the tradition asserts, have been set 
 to help his father in business. An old parish clerk 
 of Stratford towards the close of the seventeenth 
 century declared that Shakespeare was bound 
 apprentice to a butcher; and according to Aubrey 
 he performed the sacrificial rites with dramatic 
 accompaniments, for "when he killed, a calf, he 
 would do it in a high style and make a speech". 
 According to another report he was a country 
 schoolmaster, and Malone has argued from Shake- 
 speare's frequent and exact use of law-terms that 
 most probably he was for two or three years in the 
 office of a Stratford attorney. We may indulge 
 our imagination by picturing the future poet rather 
 as a wool-stapler than as a butcher's lad. 
 
 What cannot be doubted is that his father had 
 passed from wealth to comparative poverty. In 
 1578 he effected a large mortgage on the estate of 
 Asbies ; when he tendered payment in the following 
 year it was refused until other sums due had been 
 repaid ; the money designed for the redemption of 
 Asbies had been obtained by the sale of his wife's 
 reversionary interest in the Snitterfield property. 
 His taxes were lightened, nor was he always able 
 
8 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 to pay those which were still claimed. He dropped 
 off from attendance at the town-council, and in 
 consequence was ultimately deprived of his alder- 
 man's gown (1586). He fell into debt, and was 
 tormented with legal proceedings. A commission 
 appointed to inquire respecting Jesuits, priests, and 
 recusants reported his name in 1592 among those 
 of persons who "come not to church for fear of 
 process for debt". It does not appear, however, that 
 he was obliged to part with his house in Henley 
 Street, and, as we shall see, his eldest son was care- 
 ful, when prosperity came to him in his dramatic 
 career, to restore the fallen fortunes of his father. 
 
 § 6. Before he was nineteen years old Shakespeare 
 had a new and a powerful motive for trying to 
 better himself in the world ; he had taken to himself 
 a wife. A bond given before the marriage, for the 
 security of the bishop in licensing the marriage after 
 once asking of the banns, is preserved in the registry 
 at Worcester. It is dated November 28, 1582. 
 The bride, Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a 
 substantial yeoman, lately deceased, of Shottery 
 . hamlet in the parish of Stratford, was between 
 seven and eight years older than her husband. The 
 sureties of the bond were friends of the Hathaway 
 family, and the seal of Anne's father was used on 
 the occasion, whence it has been inferred that the 
 Shottery folk rather than those of Henley Street 
 were desirous of the match. Whether the consent 
 of Shakespeare's parents was or was not given we 
 have no means of ascertaining. Shakespeare's 
 eldest child — Susanna — was baptized on May 26, 
 1583, just six months after the bond, preliminary to 
 
 (789.) 
 
MARRIAGE. 9 
 
 marriage, had been signed. The ceremony of wed- 
 lock may have been preceded by precontract, which 
 according to the custom of the time and place would 
 have been looked on as having the validity of 
 marriage, though as yet unsanctifiedby ecclesiastical 
 rites. Halliwell-Phillipps has aptly pointed out 
 that when Shakespeare's maternal grandfather, 
 Robert Arden, "settled part of an estate on his 
 daughter Agnes, on July the seventeenth, 1550, he 
 introduces her as nunc uxor Thome Stringer, ac 
 nuper uxor Johannis Hewyns, and yet the marriage 
 was not solemnized until three months afterwards". 
 It may be added that the words "wedded wife" 
 were at this time in no way tautological ; a woman 
 duly espoused might be a wife though the priestly 
 benediction of wedlock had not yet been bestowed. 
 The marriage of a boy of eighteen with a woman 
 eight years his senior, of humbler rank than his own 
 and probably uneducated, cannot be called prudent ; 
 but we have no evidence to prove that the union 
 was unhappy. Shakespeare remained in Stratford 
 with his wife until he went to seek his fortune in 
 London. Although he did not bring her and her 
 children to the capital, he certainly from time to 
 time visited his home. He looked forward to 
 returning to his native town, and living henceforth 
 by her side, and he actually carried that long-con- 
 templated purpose into effect. It may be, as 
 Shakespeare's Sonnets seem to indicate, that for a 
 season his heart was led astray by the intellectual 
 fascination of a woman who possessed all those 
 qualities of brilliance and cultured grace which 
 perhaps were lacking in his wife; but if so, Shake- 
 
 (789) B 
 
lO INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 speare perceived his error, and in due time returned 
 to the companion of his youth. In his will he 
 leaves her only his "second best bed with the 
 furniture", and this as an afterthought, for the 
 words occur as an interlineation; but without 
 special bequest she was sufficiently provided for 
 by free-bench and dower; the best bed, as Mr. 
 Halliwell-Phillipps suggests, was probably that re- 
 served for strangers, the second best may have been 
 that of the master and mistress of the house. We 
 cannot suppose that the wife of his early choice, 
 the daughter of a husbandman, could have followed 
 Shakespeare in his poetical mountings of mind or 
 in his profound dramatic studies of character, but 
 there is a wide field for mutual sympathy and help 
 in the common joys and sorrows and daily tasks 
 of household life, and the greatest of men are 
 sometimes they who can best value the qualities of 
 homely goodness. We cannot think of Shake- 
 speare's marriage as a rare union of perfect accord, 
 but we are not justiiied in speaking of it as unfor- 
 tunate. In A Midsummer Night's Dream Lysander 
 has a reference to love "misgraffed in respect of 
 years"; in Twelfth Night the Duke warns Viola, 
 when disguised in the garb of a youth, against the 
 danger of an unequal marriage : — 
 
 Let still the woman take 
 An elder than herself; so wears she to him, 
 So sways she level in her husband's heart. — (ii. 4. 30-32.) 
 
 Even if the lines were non-dramatic, they would 
 prove no more than that the writer with good sense 
 admitted as a rule that to which his own experience 
 
FAMILY TIES. II 
 
 may have been the exception. One other passage 
 from the plays has been cited as bearing on Shake- 
 speare's marriage, that passage in The Tempest 
 where Prospero, after he has given his daughter to 
 Ferdinand as his future bride, cautions the Prince 
 against " breaking her virgin-knot " before 
 
 All sanctimonious ceremonies may 
 
 With full and holy rite be minister'd. — (iv. I. i6, 17.) 
 
 The Tempest was probably written to grace some 
 noble wedding, and Shakespeare's mature wisdom 
 of life, uttering itself through Prospero, recognized 
 the fact that the sanctity of marriage can hardly be 
 guarded with too great jealousy. Having closed 
 the series of his dramatic works, perhaps with the 
 very play in which this passage occurs, he returned 
 to his home to find the happiness of his elder years 
 in company with her whom he had loved in boyhood. 
 
 § 7. For three or four years after his marriage Shake- 
 speare continued to reside at Stratford, and in 1585 
 his wife gave birth to twins, a boy and girl, baptized 
 (Feb. 2) Hamnet and Judith, doubtless after Hamnet 
 Sadler, a baker of Stratford, and Judith his wife. 
 For this Hamnet Sadler, presumably sponsor for 
 the boy, who, to the grief of his father, died before 
 he had reached the age of twelve (buried August 1 1, 
 1596), Shakespeare retained a regard to the close 
 of his life. He is remembered in the great drama- 
 tist's will, where the name appears in the form 
 " Hamlett " Sadler, receiving a bequest of one pound 
 six and eightpence "to buy him a ringe". 
 
 In what employments and with what recreations 
 these years at Stratford, growing years of early man- 
 
12 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 hood, went by we can but conjecture. How they 
 came to a close we are told by Shakespeare's first 
 biographer, Rowe: " He had by a misfortune, com- 
 mon enough to young fellows, fallen into ill com- 
 pany, and amongst them, some that made a frequent 
 practice of deer-stealing, engaged him more than 
 once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas 
 Lucy, of Charlcote, near Stratford. For this he was 
 prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, some- 
 what too severely; and in order to revenge that ill 
 usage, he made a ballad upon him. And though 
 this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, 
 yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it 
 redoubled the prosecution against him to that de- 
 gree, that he was obliged to leave his business and 
 family in Warwickshire, for some time, and shelter 
 himself in London." According to Archdeacon 
 Davies, vicar of Sapperton in the county of Glou- 
 cester, who died in 1708, Sir Thomas Lucy had the 
 young poacher "oft whipped and sometimes im- 
 prisoned", in revenge for which Shakespeare after- 
 wards made him "his Justice Clodpate [Justice 
 Shallow: clodpate meaning foolish] and calls him a 
 great man, and that in allusion to his name bore 
 three louses rampant for his arms". The first stanza 
 of the ballad which Rowe speaks of as lost is given 
 by Oldys on the authority of " a very aged gentle- 
 man living in the neighbourhood of Stratford", and 
 it contains the same offensive play on the name 
 Lucy — " O lowsie Lucy" — as that in the passage to 
 which Davies refers. 
 
 We can hardly doubt that there is a kernel of 
 truth in these traditions. Malone endeavoured to 
 
THE DEER-STEALING STORY. 1 3 
 
 disprove the deer-stealing story by showing that 
 Sir Thomas Lucy had no park at Charlcote; but 
 he may have had deer there ; or the scene of the 
 adventure, instead of Charlcote, may have been the 
 adjoining sequestered estate of Fulbroke, over which 
 Sir Thomas, as a local magnate devoted to the 
 crown, may have kept watch and ward. It has been 
 suggested that he may have felt some animosity 
 against the Shakespeare family as possibly having 
 sympathy with the old religion, for Sir Thomas was 
 not only a game preserver but a zealous Protestant. 
 The offence of poaching was commonly regarded at 
 the time by those who did not suffer from it as a 
 venial frolic of youth ; " the students of Oxford, the 
 centre of the kingdom's learning and intelligence,'' 
 says Halliwell-Phillipps, " had been for manygenera- 
 tions the most notorious poachers in all England ". 
 There can be no doubt that Shakespeare retained 
 some ill-will against the Lucy family. In The Merry 
 Wives of Windsor Justice Shallow fumes with vio- 
 lent indignation against Sir John Falstaff, whom he 
 charges with having beaten his men, killed his deer, 
 and broken open his lodge. Weare informed by Slen- 
 der that in the Shallow coat of arms are a " dozen 
 white luces", translated by Evans, the Welsh parson, 
 with unconscious humour, into "a dozenwhitelouses" 
 which "do become an old coat well". Sir Thomas 
 was a member of that strong Protestant commission 
 which reported that Shakespeare's father did not 
 attend church in 1592 for fear of process for debt, 
 a circumstance which might have kept the early 
 soreness of feeling from subsiding. If it is any 
 satisfaction to us we have some reason to believe 
 
14 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 that the barb prepared for Sir Thomas Lucy struck 
 home, and that the family did not forget the 
 mockery of their old coat. A copy of the 1619 
 Quarto edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor was 
 discovered not very long since among the family 
 records, the only copy of any one of Shakespeare's 
 plays in the early editions found at Charlcote. 
 
 § 8. In what year Shakespeare quitted Stratford 
 we cannot tell ; it can hardly have been earlier than 
 1585, and may have been a year or two later. Nor 
 can we say with certainty how he came to join him- 
 self to a company of players. From early childhood 
 he had opportunities of seeing dramatic perform- 
 ances. Perhaps he inherited from his father a taste 
 for the drama ; theatrical entertainments, as has been 
 noticed by Halliwell-Phillipps, are first heard of at 
 Stratford-on-Avon during the year of John Shake- 
 speare's bailiffship. While the players declaimed in 
 the Guildhall the boy may have looked on, standing 
 between his father's legs, as his contemporary Willis 
 tells us he did when he saw The Cradle of Security 
 acted before the aldermen and common council of 
 the city of Gloucester. He may have witnessed the 
 performance of the mysteries at Coventry on the 
 Corpus Christi festival ; his phrase " out-herods 
 Herod" is a reminiscence of the ramping and raging 
 king by whose command the innocents of Bethlehem 
 were slaughtered; his comparison of the flea on 
 Bardolph's fiery nose to " a black soul burning in 
 hell-fire" was the grotesque fancy of one who had 
 probably watched the exhibition of the damned 
 with their sooty faces and black and yellow garb 
 in the pageant at Coventry. Various companies of 
 
CONNECTION WITH THE THEATRE. I J 
 
 players visited Stratford from time to time and per- 
 formed under the patronage of the corporation; 
 before Shakespeare forsook his home, says Dyce, 
 " he had doubtless seen the best dramatic produc- 
 tions, such as they were, represented by the best 
 actors then alive". He may have made acquain- 
 tance with some of the London players, but the 
 assertions that the famous Burbage was from War- 
 wickshire, and that Thomas Greene, an actor of 
 James I.'s time, was a Stratford man, have been 
 made without sufficient evidence. Leicester's players 
 visited Stratford in 1587; it is supposed by Mr. 
 Fleay that Shakespeare joined them during or im- 
 mediately after their arrival, and during their travels 
 received his earliest instruction in comic acting from 
 Kempe and Pope, who soon after became noted 
 performers.^ But this is mere conjecture, and the 
 early traditions do not favour the notion that Shake- 
 speare left his native town with the design of taking 
 to the stage. They rather lead us to^ believe that 
 after his arrival in London he gradually found his 
 way towards his future profession. 
 
 According to a tradition, which is alleged to have 
 come down to us through Sir William D'Avenant, 
 the first employment of Shakespeare in connection 
 with the theatre was that of holding the horses of 
 gentlemen who had ridden to the playhouse. The 
 first building erected (1576) for the exhibition of 
 dramatic performances in England was that known 
 as "The Theatre", situated in the parish of Shore- 
 ditch. It was the property of James Burbage, father 
 
 * A Chronicle History of the Life and Work of William Shakespeare, 
 by F. G. Fleay, p. 8. 
 
l6 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 of Shakespeare's fellow-actor, the great tragedian, 
 Richard Burbage. James Burbage kept livery- 
 stables close by Smithfield, and it is an ingenious 
 suggestion of Halliwell-Phillipps that, on arriving in 
 London, Shakespeare may have sold at Smithfield 
 the horse on which he rode up to town, may then 
 and there have made the acquaintance of James 
 Burbage, and may have been employed by him to 
 take care of the horses of Burbage's Smithfield cus- 
 tomers who visited the theatre. The tradition adds 
 that Shakespeare made himself popular, and soon 
 had to hire lads to assist him, who, "when Will 
 Shakespeare was summoned were immediately to 
 present themselves, ' I am Shakespeare's boy, sir' " ; 
 whence the young lackeys, after their master's for- 
 tune had raised him to higher employment, con- 
 tinued to be known as "Shakespeare's Boys". An 
 old parish-clerk of Stratford, towards the close of 
 the seventeenth century, informed visitors that the 
 dramatist was first received into the playhouse as 
 " a serviture", that is, as an attendant on the players. 
 The stage-tradition of a hundred years ago was that 
 he acted as the prompter's assistant, giving the per- 
 formers notice to be ready when their presence was 
 required on the stage. 
 
 § 9. It is not surprising that Shakespeare's early 
 years in connection with the theatre should have 
 left no record behind them. We kno^v that he did 
 not cut himself adrift from Stratford and his own 
 family, for in 1587 he joined his father in an effort 
 to assign the title of the Asbies property to John 
 Lambert in consideration of the cancelling of the 
 previous mortgage and the payment of ;^20. But 
 
SPENSER. 17 
 
 beyond this fact we know nothing for certain until 
 1592, when he was an author and an actor, and of 
 importance in both capacities to his dramatic com- 
 pany. A year before this, in 1591, was published 
 Spenser's poem, The Tears of the Muses, in which 
 Thalia, the Muse of Comedy, laments the cessation 
 from authorship of some creator of general mirth 
 whom Spenser names "our pleasant Willy": 
 
 And he, the man whom Nature selfe had made 
 To mock her selfe, and Truth to imitate, 
 
 With kindly counter under mimic shade, 
 Our pleasant Willy, ah ! is dead of late. 
 
 It would be pleasant to suppose that the author of 
 the Faerie Queene here spoke of his great contem- 
 porary ; but it is much more probable that Spenser's 
 friend, the dramatist John Lyly, is meant.^ If 
 Spenser ever refers to Shakespeare, it is in his Colin 
 Clouts Come Home Again, in lines which describe 
 some high poet under the name of "Action", the 
 eaglet (from dtroc, an eagle). Colin Clouts was not 
 published until 1594, but probably was written in 
 whole or in part in 1591. The true name of 
 " Aetion" had, says Spenser, a heroic sound, which 
 agrees well with the name Shakespeare ; the epithet 
 "gentle" seems to be one to which our poet had 
 almost a peculiar right : 
 
 And there, though last not least, is Aetion, 
 A gentler shepheard may no where be found: 
 
 Whose Muse, full of high thoughts invention, 
 Doth like himselfe heroically sound. 
 
 ' Halliwell-Phillipps identifies " our pleasant Willy" with the comic 
 actor Richard Tarlton (died 1588); Professor Minto supposes him to be 
 Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
1 8 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 These lines, if written as early as 1591, were hardly 
 meant for Shakespeare; they may, however, be a 
 later insertion. But it seems not unlikely that 
 Drayton was intended^ who had written under the 
 poetical name of " Rowland", and whose Idea, as 
 some have thought, may be pointed to (though to 
 myself the notion appears far-fetched) by the choice 
 of the name Aetion {iS£a = a'inov). 
 
 § 10. There can be no mistake that Shakespeare 
 is the object of Greene's attack in the pamphlet 
 Greenes Groatsworth of Wit bought with a Million 
 of Repentance, written by the unhappy poet as he 
 lay dying in a mean house in Dowgate, attended 
 by a shoemaker'3 wife, his kind hostess and nurse. 
 The pamphlet must have been written in August, 
 1592. Having warned his friends Marlowe, Peele, 
 and "young Juvenal" (probably Lodge) against the 
 inconstancy of the players, he proceeds: "Yes, trust 
 theni not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified 
 with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt 
 in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to 
 bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you : and 
 being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne 
 conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie ". The 
 travestied line 
 
 Oh tiger's heart wrapt in a woman's hide, 
 
 is found in Richard, Duke of York, and also in the 
 Third Partof Henry VI., which isfounded onRichard, 
 Duke of York. In the old play Marlowe and Greene 
 had probably been collaborateurs, and it would seem 
 that Greene bitterly resented Shakespeare's rehand- 
 ling of his work, and felt indignant at the success 
 
SHAKESPEARE AS AN ACTOR. 1 9 
 
 of one whom he looked on as an unlettered rival. 
 Greene's pamphlet was seen through the press by- 
 Henry Chettle, and in December of the same year 
 he entered on the Stationers' Books his own prose 
 tract Kind-Hart's Dreame, in the preface to which 
 he apologizes to Shakespeare for Greene's unworthy 
 attack. He expresses his regret for not having used 
 his discretion in moderating the writer's warmth; 
 he is as sorry, he says, as if the original fault were 
 his own, " because my selfe have seene his [Shake- 
 speare's] demeanour no less civil than he exelent 
 in the qualitie he professes: Besides, divers of wor- 
 ship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which 
 argues his honesty, and ^lis facetious [i.e. felicitous] 
 grace in writing, that approves his Art ". The word 
 "quality" in this passage of Chettle's "Address to 
 the Gentlemen Readers" of his pamphlet has a spe- 
 cial reference to the profession of an actor, as it has 
 in Hamlet's inquiry respecting the boy-performers : 
 "Will they pursue the quality no longer than they 
 can sing.'" We may infer from Chettle's words that 
 Shakespeare was at least a respectable actor. Ac- 
 cording to Rowe, " the top of his performance was 
 the Ghost in his own Hamlet" a part requiring an 
 actor of good delivery though not a great artist. 
 There is some ground for thinking that he played 
 the part of Old Knowell in Jonson's Every Man in 
 His Humour, in the representation of which comedy 
 he certainly appeared. And there is a confused 
 tradition handed down by Oldys which makes it 
 probable that he was the Adam of his own As You 
 Like It. Whether he excelled or not in his practice 
 as an actor, Shakespeare certainly had a cultivated 
 
20 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 knowledge of the principles of the histrionic art; 
 the instructions given to the players by Hamlet 
 could have come from no one who had not carefully 
 studied the merits and the defects of the actor on 
 the boards; the writer of the words assigned to 
 Hamlet assuredly knew the grace of moderation 
 and reserve in the rendering of passion, and at the 
 same time knew the error of languor or inertness. 
 The latest express mention of Shakespeare as having 
 taken a part in the performance of a play is in con- 
 nection with Ben Jonson's Sejanus, which was per- 
 formed at the Globe Theatre in 1603 or 1604. But 
 in a document of 1 610 the Burbages speak of placing 
 Shakespeare as an actor among others at Blackfriars 
 Theatre. His name, however, does not appear in a 
 list of the actors of The Alchemist (1610), in which, 
 if he were then performing, he might naturally have 
 taken a part among his fellows. 
 
 § II. No doubt it was perceived at an early date 
 in Shakespeare's dramatic company that he could 
 aid them more by his pen than by his voice. As 
 we learn from the charges and insinuations of 
 Greene, part of Shakespeare's early work as a writer 
 for the stage was that of revising and adapting the 
 work of his predecessors or early contemporaries. 
 It was an excellent way of apprenticeship to his 
 dramatic craft. He learned to distinguish between 
 what is effective and ineffective on the stage; he 
 acquired the art of carrying on the action of a piece 
 without falling into tedious speech-making, he 
 studied the links and transitions of the dramatic 
 events, he came to see how these should be mani' 
 pulated, he learned how to develop a dramatic char- 
 
FIRST POEMS. 21 
 
 acter, how to regulate imagery and diction so that 
 they should never pass into the epical; and while 
 amending the pieces of others his own genius would 
 have enough of play to gain in strength, and enough 
 of restraint to save it from the waste of exuberant 
 power. 
 
 But the poet in Shakespeare could not be content 
 with what may be justly described as in a certain 
 degree hackwork. The poet in Shakespeare aspired 
 to an independent existence, and apparently he did 
 not yet perceive that through the drama alone could 
 his genius explore the heights and depths of passion 
 and of song. In the passage quoted from Kind- 
 Hart's Dreame the author informs his readers that 
 "divers of worship" have reported to him Shake- 
 speare's "facetious grace in writing". Possibly 
 Shakespeare had already earned the good opinion 
 and good-will of the Earl of Southampton. Early 
 in 1593 Richard Field, the son of a Stratford 
 tanner, himself a London printer, was carrying 
 through the press Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, 
 which was published in that year with a dedication 
 to Southampton, in which the author, speaking of 
 his young patron with graceful homage and of his 
 poem with becoming modesty, describes it as " the 
 first heire of my invention ". Doubtless several plays 
 of merit by Shakespeare had already appeared upon 
 the stage ; but they had not been published by the 
 press; they formed in the eyes of Shakespeare's 
 contemporaries hardly a part of literature proper; 
 they could not compete in dignity with such a 
 miniature epic as this which now appeared, and in 
 which Shakespeare first claimed his rank as poet 
 
22 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 Venus and Adonis at once became popular, and 
 edition followed edition during a series of years. 
 In the dedication Shakespeare promises that if his 
 poem should please the earl, he would take advan- 
 tage of all idle hours to prepare some "graver labour" 
 for his patron's honour. This graver labour, the 
 Lucrece, followed in 1594; graver because of its 
 tragic theme, and its celebration of the wronged, 
 yet triumphant, purity of woman. It is dedicated 
 to Southampton in words of loyal affection : "What 
 I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours, 
 being part in all I have, devoted yours"; and a 
 reference to favours received proves that the regard 
 and esteem were not on Shakespeare's side alone. 
 " There is ", says Rowe, " one instance so singular 
 in the magnificence of this patron of Shakespeare's, 
 that, if I had not been assured that the story was 
 handed down by Sir William D'Avenant, who was 
 probably very well acquainted with his affairs, I 
 should not have ventured to have inserted ; that my 
 Lord Southampton at one time gave him a thou- 
 sand pounds to enable him to go through with a 
 purchase which he heard he had a mind to". It is 
 supposed that the purchase was that of- the large 
 house named New Place in the centre of the town 
 of Stratford-on-Avon, which Shakespeare bought 
 for £60 in the spring of 1597, a gabled house of 
 brick, resting on stone foundations, with a bay- 
 window on the garden side. Report — if this be so — 
 exaggerated the amount of Southampton's gift, but 
 even sixty pounds in the days of Elizabeth was a 
 very considerable sum of money. 
 
 § 12. In December, 1594, Shakespeare appeared in 
 
FIRST PLAYS. 23 
 
 two comedies before Queen Elizabeth at Greenwich 
 Palace. Two eminent actors of his company, that 
 known as the Lord Chamberlain's servants, Richard 
 Burbage, the tragedian, and Kemp, a popular come- 
 dian, were associated with him on this occasion.^ 
 The queen, who had a keen eye for merit, honoured 
 Shakespeare and his art. Benjonson in his memorial 
 lines prefixed to the First Folio speaks of those 
 " flights " of the " Swan of Avon " 
 
 upon the bankes of Thames, 
 That so did take Eliza, and our lames. 
 
 Shakespeare's company repeatedly performed before 
 the queen at Richmond Palace, at Greenwich Palace, 
 at Whitehall. In the Christmas holidays of 1597 
 her Majesty witnessed a performance of Love's 
 Labour's Lost in its revised form, "newly corrected 
 and augmented". Next Christmas three plays were 
 given at Whitehall, among them probably The 
 Merry Wives of Windsor, by Elizabeth's express 
 desire. It is a well-known tradition that the queen 
 was so highly entertained by Falstaff, as seen in 
 the two parts of King Henry IV., that she com- 
 manded the dramatist to continue the character for 
 one play more, and show the fat knight in love. 
 That bright comedy of English rural life. The 
 Merry Wives, is said to have been the work of a 
 fortnight. At times, by special arrangement, Shake- 
 
 ^ Halliwell-Phillipps's statement as to the companies to which Shake- 
 speare belonged previously to his joining the Lord Chamberlain's ser- 
 vants deserves to be quoted : "It would appear not altogether unlikely 
 that the poet was one of Lord Strange's actors in March, 1592 ; one of 
 Lord Pembroke's a few months later ; and that he joined the company 
 of the Earl of Sussex in or before January, 1594". But on this subject 
 see especially Mr. Fleay's A Chronicle History of the Life and Work 
 of William Shakespeare. 
 
24 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 speare's plays were performed for the grave lawyers 
 of the Inns of Court in their mirth-loving hours of 
 leisure. On Innocents' Day, 1594, the day after 
 Shakespeare's performance before the queen at 
 Greenwich, The Comedy of Errors was presented 
 before a distinguished company in the hall of Gray's 
 Inn ; there had been some confusion and disturbance 
 in the earlier part of the evening, which ceased while 
 the spectators watched the entanglements of the 
 twins of Syracuse and Ephesus; ever afterwards 
 that night of Dec. 28, 1 594, was remembered as the 
 Night of Errors. Early in February, 1601-2, the 
 benchers of the Middle Temple witnessed in their 
 hall (which still exists) a performance of that de-. 
 lightful comedy Twelfth Night; the law student 
 John Manningham records the fact in his diary, 
 and tells us of his diversion at the odd figure of the 
 deluded Malvolio. But of these occasional perform- 
 ances by Shakespeare's company the most re- 
 markable were two which took place in the pre- 
 ceding year. On February 8th, 1601, the Earl of 
 Essex, accompanied by Shakespeare's patron, Henry 
 Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and Roger Man- 
 ners, Earl of Rutland, made their rash revolt in the 
 streets of London. On the preceding afternoon, by 
 special arrangement between the conspirators and 
 the Lord Chamberlain's servants, "a play of the 
 deposing and killing of King Richard" [«>. possibly 
 Shakespeare's King Richard II.] was represented 
 at the Globe Theatre.-' It was not a new play, and 
 
 ^ Shakespeare's play was already in print, but the earlier quartos — 
 those published in Elizabeth's reign — do not contain the deposition 
 scene, lines 154-318 of act iv. sc. 1. 
 
ROYAL PATRONAGE. 2$ 
 
 the actors, to provide against loss if the attendance 
 should be small, required that the sum of forty shil- 
 lings should be added by their employers to what- 
 ever might be taken at the door. Less than two 
 years previously, in this same Globe Theatre, Shake- 
 speare's lines in honour of Essex, then her Majesty's 
 representative in Ireland, had been delivered as part 
 of the prologue to the last act of King Henry V. 
 The unfortunate earl was executed on February 25. 
 Perhaps to make an outward show of equanimity, 
 Elizabeth spent the evening before his execution in 
 witnessing at Richmond Palace a dramatic perform- 
 ance by the same company of actors who, a few 
 days previously, had been employed to prepare the 
 minds of the Londoners for the treasonable out- 
 break of the doomed favourite. When the queen 
 died, in 1603, it was noticed in print by Henry 
 Chettle, the former editor of Greene's pamphlet, that 
 Shakespeare did not join in the poetical lamenta- 
 tions of the time. 
 
 § 13. James I. had not been many days in Lon- 
 don before he granted a license to the members of 
 Shakespeare's company to enact plays both in town 
 and in the provinces. In December, 1603, while 
 the king was a visitor at Wilton, the seat of William 
 Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, they received a call to 
 perform before the royal party. The editors of the 
 First Folio of Shakespeare's plays (1623), in the 
 dedication of that volume, addressing William Her- 
 bert and his brother Philip, Earl of Montgomery, 
 refer to the great favour which these patrons of art 
 had shown both to the author of the plays and the 
 plays themselves. When his Majesty's long-delayed 
 
 (789) c 
 
26 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 state entry into London took place, Shakespeare 
 and his fellows appeared in the king's train : " each 
 of them was presented with four yards and a half 
 of scarlet cloth, the usual dress allowance to players 
 belonging to the household. The poet and his col- 
 leagues were termed the king's servants, and took 
 rank at court amongst the Grooms of the Cham- 
 ber."^ We have records (copied for Malone) pf the 
 performance by the king's servants at Whitehall of 
 Othello (Nov. I, 1604), of Measure for Measure 
 (Dec. 26, 1604), and of King Lear (Dec. 26, 1606). 
 The lines in Measure for Measure (ii. 4. 24-30) 
 which describe the troubles of a king occasioned 
 by the over-demonstrative loyalty of his admiring 
 subjects, and those in Macbeth which tell of the 
 cure of the king's-evil by the royal touch, are sup- 
 posed to have been meant as compliments to King 
 James. 
 
 During the summer and early autumn months 
 the players often itinerated. Thus in the summer 
 of 1597 Shakespeare's company travelled through 
 Sussex and Kent; on Sept. 3rd they acted at 
 Dover, where, as Halliwell-Phillipps has observed, 
 the author of Lear might have seen the samphire 
 gatherers on the cliff, which may have served as 
 model for Edgar's imaginary precipice. They turned 
 westward in that year, reached Bristol, and per- 
 formed at Marlborough and Bath. In the autumn 
 of 1605 they travelled to Barnstaple, and before 
 returning to town acted before the mayor and cor- 
 poration of Oxford. In that city of spires and 
 
 * Halliwell-Phillipps : Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, vol, i, 
 p. 212, 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S THEATRES. 2^ 
 
 colleges Shakespeare probably lodged at John 
 D'Avenant's tavern, and knew the tavern-keeper's 
 handsome wife. Her boy, the future dramatist, Sir 
 William D'Avenant, born in March, 1 606, was re- 
 puted to be Shakespeare's godson. The gossip 
 which named our poet as father of the boy has no 
 real evidence to lend it support. 
 
 § 14. The playhouse in which Shakespeare first 
 acted, if not "The Theatre" which belonged to 
 James Burbage, must have been that named " The 
 Curtain ", which stood not far off in a division of 
 the parish of Shoreditch known as the Liberty of 
 Halliwell (holy well). Here, on the edge of the 
 great city, the country had actually begun ; we read 
 of a prentice in the year 1584 sleeping on the grass 
 "very nere the Theatre or Curten". In 1598 The 
 Theatre had ceased to be suitable for the require- 
 ments of the time, and in the winter of that year 
 (Dec-Jan. 1598-99) the timber of which it was 
 built was removed to Southwark with a view to its 
 forming part of a new and better structure. This 
 building, known as The Globe, from its sign of 
 Hercules or Atlas carrying his load, stood not far 
 from London Bridge, a little westward, and close 
 to the river on the Southwark side. Upon a circular 
 substructure rose two wooden stories, which in- 
 cluded- the galleries and boxes. These and the 
 stage were roofed with thatch ; the pit or yard was 
 open to the weather. In the profits of this theatre 
 Shakespeare was a sharer. Blackfriars Theatre, with 
 which also Shakespeare's name is associated, was 
 converted into a building for dramatic performances 
 from a large house purchased by the elder Burbage 
 
28 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 in 1596. The inhabitants of Blackfriars petitioned 
 the privy-council without success against the esta- 
 blishment of the theatre, setting forth in their 
 memorial the various dangers and annoyances to 
 which they would be subjected by its presence in 
 the neighbourhood. For a time it was leased by 
 the Burbages to one Evans for the performances 
 of the boy-actors, Her Majesty's Children of the 
 Chapel. When they quitted it Shakespeare's com- 
 pany took their place, and in the later days of his 
 dramatic career the great poet himself may have 
 appeared on the boards of Blackfriars. Dryden 
 informs us that The Tempest was represented at 
 this theatre and was well received. 
 
 § 15. The theatrical company which produced a 
 play in Elizabethan days had no wish to see the 
 work in print, its publication necessarily detracting 
 from the novelty of the piece. But from the year 
 1597 onwards several of Shakespeare's dramas were 
 placed in the hands of the booksellers, and were 
 printed, each singly, in quarto form. The first to 
 appear was King Richard II. (1597), from which 
 the deposition scene was omitted. It was speedily 
 followed by King Richard III. A pirated copy 
 of Romeo and Juliet, made up from fragments of 
 manuscript, eked out by notes taken during the 
 performance, and by recollected lines and speeches, 
 appeared in the same year (1597). In 1598 King 
 Henry IV. and the revised version of Love's 
 Labour's Lost were published. Hardly a year, 
 indeed, passed from this date until that of Shake- 
 speare's death without the appearance in quarto of 
 some new tragedy, history, or comedy, or the re- 
 
PALLADIS TAMIA. 29 
 
 publication of one which had already issued from 
 the press. The popularity of Shakespeare's two 
 chief non-dramatic poems was of remarkable con- 
 tinuance, as is attested by the number of successive 
 editions. Occasionally plays or poems by other 
 writers were foisted on the public by unscrupulous 
 publishers with the attractive name or initials of 
 William Shakespeare on the title-page. A hst of 
 his works, most valuable from the light it throws 
 on their chronology, appears in a " Comparative 
 Discourse of our English Poets with the Greeke, 
 Latine, and Italian Poets", which is printed near 
 the end of a little volume named Palladis Tamia 
 by Francis Meres, a Master of Arts of both univer- 
 sities. The chapter was written in the summer of 
 1598, and it bears remarkable testimony to the high 
 rank held by Shakespeare both as a narrative and 
 a dramatic poet. "As the soule of Euphorbus", 
 says Meres, " was thought to live in Pythagoras, feo 
 the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous 
 and honey-tongued Shakespeare; witnes his Venus 
 and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among 
 his private friends, &c. — As Plautus and Seneca are 
 accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among 
 the Latines, so Shakespeare among the English is 
 the most excellent in both kinds for the stage ; for 
 comedy, witnes his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, 
 his Love labors lost, his Love labours wonne, his 
 Midsummers night dreame, and his Merchant of 
 Venice ; for tragedy, his Richard the 2, Richard the 
 3, Henry the 4, King John, Titus Andronicus and 
 his Romeo and Juliet. — As Epius Stolo said that 
 the Muses would speake with Plautus tongue, if 
 
30 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 they would speak Latin ; so I say that the Muses 
 would speak with Shakespeares fine filed phrase, if 
 they would speake English." The Love's Labour 's 
 Won which Meres names may be a lost play of 
 Shakespeare, or possibly, as has been conjectured. 
 All 's Well that Ends Well in an earlier form may 
 have borne this title. The " sugred Sonnets among 
 his private friends " may be some of those printed 
 afterwards (1609) in the quarto edition of "Shake- 
 speare's Sonnets". Two of these sonnets, with a 
 different text, were included among the poems of 
 The Passionate Pilgrim, 1599, a slender volume 
 made up of pieces of verse, many of which are cer- 
 tainly not by Shakespeare, though his name is 
 placed upon the fraudulent title-page. A theory 
 most skilfully worked out by Mr. Tyler, with some 
 assistance from Mr. Harrison, which identifies the 
 young friend addressed in Shakespeare's Sonnets 
 with William Herbert, afterwards Earl of Pembroke, 
 and the raven-haired lady with Queen Elizabeth's 
 maid of honour, Mistress Mary Fitton, places the 
 first acquaintance of the poet with Herbert, then a 
 youth of eighteen, in the spring of the year 1598. 
 While several other theories of Shakespeare's Son- 
 nets are amusing from their absurdity, this is highly 
 interesting from its ingenuity; and yet it seems to 
 me to remain doubtful whether Herbert and his 
 mistress are in any way connected with these per- 
 plexing poems, which endlessly invite the reader 
 and endlessly baffle his attempts to read their 
 biographical meanings clear. Whether Shakespeare 
 formed the acquaintance of William Herbert in this 
 year or not, we may believe that it became memor- 
 
BEN JONSON. 31 
 
 able through the beginning of another friendship, 
 which, with some possible brief interruption, seems 
 to have been life-long. In September, 1598, Ben 
 Jonson's Every Man in his Humour was brought 
 out by the Lord Chamberlain's company. Accord- 
 ing to Rowe the comedy was on the point of being 
 rejected, when Shakespeare, casting his eye 'over 
 the manuscript, perceived its merit, and on reading 
 it through exerted his influence to secure its per- 
 formance. " I loved the man," wrote Jonson after 
 the death of Shakespeare, " and do honour his 
 memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any." It 
 was inevitable that Jonson, with his classical train- 
 ing and strict ideas on literary style, should be of 
 the opinion that Shakespeare often wronged his 
 genius by careless writing: "I remember the pla^^ers 
 have often mentioned it as an honour to Shake- 
 speare that, in his writing, whatsoever he penn'd he 
 never blotted out line. My answer hath been, would 
 he had blotted a thousand." The noble memorial 
 verses by Jonson prefixed to the First Folio Shake- 
 speare exalt our poet to a place beside his greatest 
 predecessors in the literature of Greece and Rome, 
 and do honour not only to his natural gifts but to 
 his art. Of the personal relations of the two great 
 dramatists we have a well-known and delightful 
 record in Fuller's Worthies, where he tells of their 
 many wit-combats: "Which two I behold like a 
 Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. 
 Master Jonson, like the former, was built far higher 
 in learning, solid, but slow in his performances. 
 Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser 
 in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all 
 
32 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds 
 by the quickness of his wit and invention." 
 
 § 1 6. Hours of brilliant wit-combat in the London 
 tavern did not cause Shakespeare to forget his 
 Stratford home. We have seen that in the spring 
 of 1597 he became the purchaser of New Place, a 
 large house standing in nearly an acre of ground. 
 The death of his son Hamnet, in August of the 
 preceding year, left him without male issue; but 
 his purpose to occupy a strong and dignified posi- 
 tion in his native town was not turned aside by this 
 grief, which, nevertheless, he must have keenly felt.'' 
 The draft of a grant of coat-armour to John Shake- 
 speare, dated October, 1596, is in existence. We 
 cannot doubt that the real mover in the matter was 
 John Shakespeare's prosperous son ; and the grant 
 not having been made, it was again sought three 
 years later. From 1 598 onwards we are to think 
 of the great poet as " William Shakespeare of Strat- 
 ford-on-Avon, in the county of Warwick, gentle- 
 man," although his time was mainly spent in the 
 metropolis or on his professional tours through the 
 provinces. He is returned as holding ten quarters 
 of corn in the Chapel Street Ward of Stratford, in 
 February, 1598. He seems already to have looked 
 forward to enjoying the pleasures of a country life. 
 He laid out part of his garden as a fruit orchard, 
 and at a later date it was he, according to a well- 
 authenticated tradition, who was the first to intro- 
 duce the mulberry tree among his townsfolk. An 
 
 1 Malone supposed that the lamentations of Constance in King John 
 for the loss of her boy may have derived some of their intensity of ex- 
 pression from Shakespeare's personal grief. But King John was pro- 
 bably written before 1596. 
 
A COUNTRY GENTLEMAN. 33 
 
 attempt was made (1597) by the family towards 
 the recovery of the mortgaged estate of Asbies, but, 
 as far as we are aware, without success. Abraham 
 Sturley of Stratford, writing to his brother-in-law, 
 Richard Quiney, in London (24th Jan. 1597-98), 
 mentions that " Mr. Shakspef is willinge to disburse 
 some monie upon some od yarde land or other at 
 Shotterie or near about us", and urges his corre- 
 spondent to move Mr. Shakespeare " to deal in the 
 matter of our tithes ". To purchase this tithe-lease 
 from the corporation would advantage both Shake- 
 speare and his neighbours : " by the friends he can 
 make therefor, we think it a fair mark for him to 
 shoot at; — it obtained would advance him indeed 
 and would do us much good ". " If you bargain 
 with William Shakespeare," writes Richard Quiney's 
 father (late in 1598 or early in 1599), "or receive 
 money therefor, bring your money home that you 
 may." Richard Quiney was negotiating in the 
 metropolis matters of importance for the Stratford 
 Corporation. The only letter addressed to Shake- 
 speare which is known to exist — and it is doubtful 
 whether the letter was ever delivered — is one from 
 this Quiney, himself a well-to-do Stratford mercer 
 (Oct. 1 598), asking for a loan of thirty pounds. We 
 learn at the same time from a letter of Sturley's 
 (4th Nov. 1598) that Shakespeare had undertaken 
 to negotiate an advance of money to the corpora- 
 tion. These details are of interest not only as evi- 
 dence of Shakespeare's growing prosperity and in- 
 fluence, but also as showing that he kept in close 
 relations with the men of Stratford and had a part 
 in the public concerns of the town. 
 
34 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 § 17. In the autumn of 1601 Shakespeare lost his 
 father; the funeral took place on September 8th. 
 His widowed mother lived for seven years more, 
 and it was at the same season of the year, and 
 almost to the day, that her death occurred (buried 
 September 9, 1608). John Shakespeare, once the 
 chief burgess of Stratford, had the satisfaction of 
 seeing the fallen fortunes of his family restored 
 through the energy and prudence of his son. An 
 important purchase of land — one hundred and 
 seven acres near Stratford — was made in May, 
 1602, for which Shakespeare paid the large sum 
 of ;£^320, his brother Gilbert acting in the affair 
 as his agent. A few months later, in September, 
 he added to his possessions a cottage and garden 
 opposite the lower grounds of New Place. His 
 largest purchase was that of July, 1605, when for 
 the sum of ;£^440 he obtained the unexpired term 
 of the moiety of a lease of the tithes of Stratford, 
 Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe. Twenty 
 acres of pasture were added to his arable land in 
 1610. The creator of Hamlet and King Lear evi- 
 dently lived in no dream-world, but had a vigorous 
 grasp of positive fact. A certain Philip Rogers 
 had received bushels of malt from Mr. William 
 Shakespeare to the value of ;^i, igs. lod., and had, 
 moreover, borrowed from him the sum of two 
 shillings. Six shillings had been paid back. But 
 the poet could not see why one pound, fifteen 
 shillings and tenpence due to him should remain 
 in Philip Rogers' pocket, and accordingly he took 
 proceedings (1604) to recover the balance of th6 
 debt. Again, in 1608-9 the author of the ardent 
 
JOYS AND SORROWS. 35 
 
 idealizing Sonnets, published in the latter year, 
 was prosecuting a suit for the recovery of a debt 
 of £6 owed by John Addenbroke, and when a 
 verdict was given for the debt and for costs, 
 Addenbroke not being found within the hberty of 
 the borough, Shakespeare pursued his cause against 
 the debtor's bail, a person named Horneby. It is 
 not always the case that a master in the world of 
 ideas and of imagination is also a master of prudent 
 husbandry in the material world. 
 
 The year 1607 was one of mingled joy and 
 sorrow. On June the 5 th Shakespeare's eldest 
 daughter, Susanna, was married in Stratford-on- 
 Avon to Mr. John Hall, a Master of Arts and a 
 successful physician. The bride was twenty-five 
 years of age; the bridegroom thirty-two. So mid- 
 summer had its rejoicings; but December closed 
 darkly, for it was on the last day of 1607 that the 
 great bell of St. Saviour's, Southwark, tolled for the 
 burial of Shakespeare's brother Edmund. A few 
 weeks later and Shakespeare had attained, before 
 the age of forty-four, the dignity of being a grand- 
 father; Elizabeth, the only daughter of the Halls, 
 was born in February, 1608, and her baby presence 
 must have cheered the few short remaining months 
 of the life of Shakespeare's mother.. It seems pro- 
 bable that he continued to reside in Stratford for a 
 little while after his mother's funeral, for on October 
 1 6th he stood as godfather at the baptism of William 
 Walker, the child of a mercer and alderman of the 
 town; to this godchild he afterwards bequeathed 
 "twenty shillings in gold ". 
 
 § 18. At what precise date Shakespeai-e retired 
 
36 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 from the theatre and sold his shares in the Globe 
 cannot be ascertained. It was probably not earlier 
 than 1611, not later than 1613. In March, 1613, 
 he bought for ;^I40 a house in London near the 
 Blackfriars Theatre, ;£"6o of the purchase money 
 remaining on mortgage. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps 
 supposes that Shakespeare may have intended to 
 convert part of the house, the ground-floor of which 
 had been a haberdasher's shop, into his town resi- 
 dence, and that at the date of the purchase he was 
 still connected with the stage. But all that we 
 certainly know is that before his death he leased 
 this London house to John Robinson, who, as 
 Halliwell-Phillipps notices, "was oddly enough, one 
 of the persons who had violently opposed the estab- 
 lishment of the neighbouring theatre". In mid- 
 summer of the year 16 13 the Globe Theatre was 
 destroyed by fire, "while Burbage's company were 
 acting the play of Henry VIII., and there shooting off 
 certain chambers in the way of triumph" (T. Lorkin's 
 letter to Sir T. Puckering). This Henry VIII. was 
 not improbably the play which, with certain altera- 
 tions, we possess among Shakespeare's works, and 
 which is partly from his hand. It is possible that 
 many manuscripts of dramatists — including some 
 by Shakespeare — perished in the flames. The 
 Globe was rebuilt in a costlier manner, and was 
 opened in 1614; but the stage on which the greatest 
 dramatic works in all literature had been first pre- 
 sented had ceased to exist, and their author, like 
 his own wise Prospero, had broken his magic staff 
 and put off his robes of enchantment. 
 
 § 19. We know little of Shakespeare's elder days 
 
IN RETIREMENT. 37 
 
 at Stratford. "The latter part of his life," says 
 Rowe, "was spent, as all men of good sense will 
 wish theirs may be, in ease, retirement, and the 
 conversation of his friends. . . . His pleasur- 
 able wit and good-nature engaged him in the ac- 
 quaintance and entitled him to the friendship of 
 the gentlemen of the neighbourhood." Amongst 
 his acquaintances was John Combe, who, dying in 
 1 6 14, left him a legacy of .£"5. A satirical epitaph 
 on Combe, said to have been produced impromptu 
 by Shakespeare, has been handed down by tradi- 
 tion ; but there is little evidence to show that the 
 lines are genuine. In the autumn of the same year 
 an attempt was made to inclose a portion of the 
 neighbouring common-fields. It is not quite cer- 
 tain whether Shakespeare endeavoured to forward 
 (as Halliwell-Phillipps maintains) or to oppose the 
 project; there is no doubt that he took measures 
 to secure himself against loss if the inclosure should 
 be effected.^ An entry of 1614 in the accounts of 
 the Stratford Chamberlain sets our fancy pleasantly 
 to work. " Item : For one quart of sack, and one 
 quart of clarett wine, given to a preacher at the 
 New Place xxd." Stratford had grown puritanical 
 since Shakespeare was a boy; in 1602, and again 
 in 1612, orders against plays and interludes were 
 made by the corporation; at last the players were 
 paid not to perform. " Mrs. Hall and her husband", 
 as I have elsewhere written, "did not forfeit the 
 
 ^ The words in the diary of Thomas Greene, town-cleric of Stratford, 
 commonly printed "Mr. Shakspeare tellyng J. Greene that he was 
 not able to bear the encloseing of Welcombe", seem in fact to be 
 "that I was not able", &c. Dr. Ingleby supposed that Greene wrote 
 "I" by mistake. 
 
38 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 poet's regard because they were somewhat puri- 
 tanically inclined. Perhaps Shakespeare's wife had 
 sought in religion a satisfaction which her marriage 
 had not afforded. We can imagine the great inter- 
 preter of life listening with a serious smile to the 
 whole truth as expounded by the preacher, and re- 
 cognizing as a pleasant human foible the preacher's 
 interest in claret and sherry sack." If there were 
 any truth in the crab-tree legend (which, however, 
 dates only from 1762) we should believe that Shake- 
 speare himself, with the encouragement of his com- 
 panion Ben Jonson, could for the nonce carouse 
 "potations pottle-deep", and become somewhat 
 more than flustered with his cups. 
 
 In February, 1616, Shakespeare saw Judith, his 
 second daughter, married. Her husband, Thomas 
 Quiney, a son of the Richard Quiney who had 
 begged Shakespeare for a loan of money, was four 
 years younger than his wife. He was certainly a 
 fairly educated man, and during the earlier portion 
 of his married life he occupied a good position in 
 the town, doing business as a vintner, and becoming 
 a member of the corporation and subsequently their 
 chamberlain. But after a time prosperity forsook 
 him, and he drifted to London. His eldest son, 
 named Shakespeare Quiney, died an infant; two 
 younger sons, Richard and Thomas, reached man- 
 hood, but both died childless before their mother, 
 who lived on through the Civil War to Restoration 
 days. She died in 1662 in her seventy-eighth year. 
 
 § 20. Before the marriage took place — a marriage 
 celebrated somewhat hastily without a license — 
 Shakespeare, then in perfect health, had given in- 
 
DEATH. 39 
 
 structions for his will. The draft copy was ready 
 for engrossment, but the fair copy had not yet been 
 made when in March, 1616, the testator was taken 
 seriously ill. Delay in obtaining the necessary 
 signatures was deemed inexpedient, and certain 
 corrections having been made by interlineation the 
 draft copy was duly signed by the sick man and 
 the witnesses. The chief part of his property was 
 left to his eldest daughter, but Judith received a 
 substantial sum of money; his sister Joan Hart, 
 who became a widow a few days before her brother's 
 death, was considerately remembered; small sums 
 were left to the sons of his sister; ten pounds to the 
 poor of Stratford; nor did Shakespeare as he lay 
 mortally ill forget his former fellows of the Globe 
 Theatre, for to Richard Burbage, John Hemmings, 
 and Henry Condell he left, by an interlineation, 
 "twenty -six shillings and eight pence a-piece to 
 buy them ringes". Beside the signatures at the 
 foot of each page the words " by me " at the close 
 of the will are in Shakespeare's handwriting, and 
 no other words, except his own name, remain to 
 us in the poet's autograph. On Tuesday, April 23, 
 1 6 16, the great spirit, "a little lower than the 
 angels", passed away.^ 
 
 The malady of which Shakespeare died is sup- 
 
 1 The name of Shakespeare is found written in a copy of Florio's 
 Montaigne purchased for ^^loo by the British Museum in 1838. Its 
 genuineness has been disputed. The words "Wllm Shakspeare, hun- 
 dred and twenty poundes " are written on a paper found in the original 
 binding of a copy of North's Plutarch, 1603, now in the Boston (U.S.A.) 
 Public Library. There are many reasons in favour of its genuineness, 
 but they are not decisive. It is not suggested that the volume ever be- 
 longed to Shakespeare. See Bulletin of the Boston Public Library, 
 vol. 8. no. 4. 
 
40 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 posed to have been a fever. According to the 
 memoranda-book written in 1662-63 by the Rev. 
 John Ward, vicar of Stratford-on-Avon, it was 
 contracted after a " merry meeting " with Drayton 
 and Ben Jonson, at which the convivial friends 
 "drank too hard". We may perhaps agree with 
 Halliwell-PhilHpps in finding a sufficient cause for 
 blood-poisoning in the wretched sanitary conditions 
 surrounding New Place. " If truth, and not romance, 
 is to be invoked," says this careful biographer, 
 " were there the woodbine and sweet honeysuckle 
 within reach of the poet's death-bed, their fragrance 
 would have been neutralized by their vicinity to mid- 
 dens, fetid water-courses, mud-walls, and piggeries." 
 On April 25th Shakespeare's body was laid in 
 its resting-place, the chancel of the parish church, 
 to which position for a grave the owner of the 
 tithes had an acknowledged right. The grave is 
 near the north wall of the chancel. Over the spot 
 where the body lies was placed a slab bearing the 
 inscription, which a tradition attributes to Shake- 
 speare himself: — 
 
 GOOD FREND FOR lESUS SAKE FORBEARE 
 TO DIGG THE DVST ENCLOASED HEARE; 
 BLESTE BE THE MAN THAT SPARES THES STONES, 
 AND CVRST BE HE THAT MOVES MY BONES. 
 
 " It should be remembered ", observes Halliwell- 
 Phillipps, "that the transfer of bones from graves 
 to the charnel-house was then an ordinary practice 
 at Stratford-on-Avon." Shakespeare's bones have 
 lain more secure in their modest grave during three 
 centuries than those of Schiller in the grand-ducal 
 vault at Weimar. 
 
THE STRATFORD BUST. 4I 
 
 §21. Shakespeare's widow lived for more than 
 seven years after her husband's death. She died 
 on August 6th, 1623. The Halls continued to 
 reside at New Place; the physician attained a high 
 reputation for skill in his profession ; in matters of 
 faith he seems to have inclined more decidedly to 
 Puritanism as the years went by. His death took 
 place in 1635 ; that of his wife, Susanna Hall — who 
 was esteemed for her goodness, piety, and bright 
 intelligence — in 1649. Ehzabeth Hall, Shake- 
 speare's grandchild, was twice married ; on April 22, 
 1626, to Thomas Nash, who died in 1647; and 
 secondly, about two years after, to Sir John Barnard 
 of Abington, in tbe county of Northampton. She 
 had no child by either husband, and on her death, 
 in February 1669-70, the lineal descent from Shake- 
 speare came to an end. 
 
 Not long after his death, certainly before 1623, 
 a monument was erected to Shakespeare on the 
 northern wall of the chancel of the parish church 
 at Stratford. It contains a life-sized bust, the work 
 either of Gerard Johnson, sculptor and "tombe- 
 maker", a native of Amsterdam who resided in 
 London, or of Johnson's son. The bust — a some- 
 what coarse piece of art — is made of a soft bluish 
 limestone; several excellent judges are of opinion 
 that it was cut from a death-mask as model. It 
 presents a face powerful and full-blooded, rather 
 than refined or subtle; the great dome of the 
 forehead is, however, a very striking feature. Ori- 
 ginally the bust was coloured to resemble life ; the 
 eyes a light hazel, the hair and beard auburn, the 
 doublet scarlet, and the sleeveless gown worn over 
 
 ( 789 ) D 
 
42 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 it black. The right hand holds a pen, the left 
 rests on a sheet of paper placed upon a cushion. 
 Underneath the cushion is the following inscrip- 
 tion : — 
 
 IVDICIO PYLIUM, GENIO SOCRATEM, ARTE MARONEM, 
 TERRA TEGIT, POPVLVS MjERET, OLYMPUS HABET. 
 
 STAY PASSENGER, WHY GOEST THOV BY SO FAST? 
 READ IF THOV CANST, WHOM ENVIOUS DEATH HATH PLAST, 
 WITH IN THIS MONVMENT SHAKSPEARE: WITH WHOME 
 QVICK NATVRE DIDE : WHOSE NAME DOTH DECK Ys TOMBE, 
 FAR MORE THAN COST: SIEH ALL, Yt HE HATH WRITT, 
 LEAVES LIVING ART, BVT PAGE, TO SERVE HIS WITT. 
 
 OBIIT ANNO DOi 1616. 
 
 iETATIS S3 DIE 23 AP. 
 
 In 1793, on the advice of Edmond Malone, the 
 bust was painted white ; and so it remained until 
 1861, when it was recoloured as at the first. Beside 
 the Stratford bust there is only one unquestionable 
 portrait of the great poet — that upon the title-page 
 of the First Folio (1623). It was engraved by 
 Martin Droeshout, and verses by Ben Jonson com- 
 mend it as a trustworthy likeness. It is ill executed, 
 yet it seems to me a more pleasing portrait than 
 the bust, while there is enough in common between 
 the two to assure us that in each there is at least 
 something of the substance of truth. The authen- 
 ticity of the celebrated Kesselstadt death-mask is 
 very doubtful, but we could wish to believe that 
 this noble and refined face was indeed that of 
 Shakespeare. The.Chandos, the Felton, the Jansen, 
 and the Stratford portraits are all of questionable 
 pedigree; many other alleged likenesses can be 
 proved to be forgeries. We must be content to 
 accept certain broad facts from the bust and the 
 Droeshout print, and supply from our imagination 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S MIND. 43 
 
 the spirit and the life which these unfortunately 
 lack. And if this should leave us at the last un- 
 satisfied we may be well content to follow the 
 counsel of Ben Jonson : 
 
 Reader, looke 
 Not on his Picture, but his Booke. 
 
 II. 
 
 §22. Studying Shakespeare's Book of Might, as 
 Jonson exhorts us to do, we assuredly make ac- 
 quaintance with the man in the best possible way; 
 we are constantly in contact with his mind; he 
 neighbours us on every side, rouses our intellect, 
 moves our passions, confirms our will, moulds our 
 character, touches our spirit to finer issues, envelops 
 us with the atmosphere of his wisdom, courage, 
 mirth, benignity. We breathe his influence. And 
 yet so effectually does he hide himself behind his 
 creation, that even while we live and move in his 
 power and presence, it seems as if we knew him 
 not and could never know him aright. Let us take 
 heart ; he who knows the offspring of Shakespeare's 
 genius knows the man, and indeed is far more inti- 
 mate with Shakespeare's mind than if he were to 
 meet the great poet now and' again in the tiring- 
 room of the Globe, or the inner chamber of the 
 Mermaid Tavern, or even in the quietude of his 
 Stratford fields and lanes. 
 
 Shakespeare was fortunate in the moment of his 
 advent to the stage. The English people had suc- 
 cessfully passed through a period of probation, and 
 now stood "upon the top of happy hpurs". The 
 
44 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 classical culture of the Renaissance and its pas- 
 sionate temper had been united in the national 
 mind with the grave thought and the moral earnest- 
 ness of the Reformation. The fires of Smithfield 
 were extinct; the conspiracies against the queen 
 had been defeated; the Spanish fleet had been 
 flung from our inviolable .shores. A spirit of un- 
 bounded energy was abroad, with an exultant 
 patriotic pride and an exhilarating consciousness 
 of power. It was a great age of action, and men 
 through their imagination were swift to enter into 
 all that great deeds spring from — high thoughts, 
 ardent desires, fierce indignation, fervent love. 
 Life in every form and aspect was infinitely inter- 
 esting to them. And if they saw and felt the 
 tragic side of things, none the less did they enjoy 
 the comedy of human existence. Its laughter and 
 its tears were alike near and real for them, and one 
 of these, as they felt, could easily pass into the 
 other. 
 
 The moment was especially a fortunate one for 
 a dramatic writer. The development of every art 
 during its earlier stages is gradual and slow; the 
 bud insensibly swells and matures, then suddenly 
 some genial morning the calyx bursts, the bud 
 becomes a blossom, and all its colour and fragrance 
 are open to the day. So it was with the dramatic 
 art in the later Elizabethan years. Its history 
 from the earliest miracle-plays had been one of 
 some centuries. The drama was not the creation 
 of a few eminent individuals, but rather a product 
 of the national mind distinguished by the features 
 of the national character. In the Collective Mystery, 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF THE DRAMA. 45 
 
 which surveyed the history of the human race from 
 the origin of man to the judgment-day, it had 
 gained an epic breadth. In the Moralities it had 
 acquired an ethical depth, a seriousness of moral 
 purpose, and this didactic tendency had in a measure 
 been saved from the aridity and abstractedness of 
 mere allegory by the close connection of the 
 Morality with historical passions, persons, and 
 events. In both the Miracles and the Moralities 
 scope had been found for the play of humour, some- 
 times deliberately sought as a relief from the poetry 
 of edification, sometimes naively minghng with 
 passages of grace, tenderness, or pathos, and en- 
 hancing the effect of these. Under the influence 
 of a growing sense of art, aided by classical models, 
 and Italian plays and tales of passion and of wit, 
 the elder forms of the English drama passed away 
 or were transriiuted into regular tragedy, comedy, 
 and history. The mirth was still often rude, but it 
 began to be organized around some dramatic centre, 
 and to find its sources not merely in ridiculous 
 incidents, but in what is mirth-provoking in human 
 character. The terror and pity were often coarsely 
 stimulated by scenes of outrage and inexhaustible 
 effusion of blood; but amid these scenes of horror 
 figures which had in them at least great tragic 
 possibilities sometimes appeared. Perhaps the most 
 truly English of the several dramatic forms was the 
 Chronicle History, allied at once with tragedy and 
 comedy, but in some degree saved from the extra- 
 vagances of each by the substantial matter of 
 historical fact with which it dealt. When great 
 deeds were actually accomplished by Englishmen 
 
4-6 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 they had a ready credence of the imagination for 
 the heroic achievements of their ancestors as set 
 forth in these Histories. They had even some of 
 the elements of a true historic sense. 
 
 § 23. Shakespeare's immediate predecessors in 
 the drama were scholar-poets, who yet, with one 
 exception — that of John Lyly — may be said to have 
 used popular methods, and to have made their 
 appeal not to scholarly or courtly spectators, but to 
 the public. As poets of the Renaissance they de- 
 lighted in classical allusion and classical imagery, 
 but these served chiefly as a colour and varnish of 
 their art ; in conception it was essentially romantic 
 and English of the Elizabethan days. The tragedies 
 of Marlowe in their plots are pure melodrama, but 
 the melodrama is glorified by the genius of a poet 
 who was a lofty idealist in art, and whose imagina- 
 tion hungered and thirsted after beauty. In each 
 of his earlier plays a great protagonist stands forth 
 who is the incarnation of some supreme passion; 
 Tamburlaine, embodying the mere lust of sway in 
 its crudest form; Barabas, the passion of avarice 
 with attendant power; Faustus, the desire of bound- 
 less knowledge with the empire that knowledge 
 brings. In Edward II. the dramatist gave the 
 model of a noble historical play, from which Shake- 
 speare perhaps made studies in writing scenes of 
 his own Richard II. Comedy owed nearly as much 
 to Greene and Peele as tragedy owed to Marlowe. 
 They first lifted comedy out of its mean surround- 
 ings and made it poetical. Not that they despised 
 buffooneries and horseplay as modes of raising a 
 laugh, but they did not rest content with these. 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S PREDECESSORS. 47 
 
 Amid the sordid haunts and coarse excesses of his 
 London life Greene had an imagination which de- 
 Hghted in the beauty and innocence of the country- 
 side and rural pleasures, real or Arcadian; in the 
 company of knaves and trulls he could conceive, 
 as no other dramatist of his time, the purity and 
 sweetness of English wife and maiden. From each 
 of his predecessors Shakespeare gained something 
 for his art, and he quickly surpassed them all. 
 From Marlowe he learnt the use of that majestic 
 measure, blank verse, first heard on a public stage 
 in the tragedy of Tamburlaine; and it became 
 ductile in his hands and capable of infinite variety. 
 From Greene he learnt the use of the rhymed 
 couplet, which he employed with such happy facility 
 in his earlier plays. Kyd it may have been who 
 instructed him in various pieces of rhetorical sleight 
 of hand in verse, which could be adapted to the 
 expression of dramatic passion or to the control of 
 that expression. The prose of lively dialogue, with 
 quick turns of wit and repartee, which we find in the 
 first comedies of Shakespeare, was in large measure 
 derived from Lyly. 
 
 § 24. In all that is external and mechanical 
 the theatre was still comparatively rude. During 
 Shakespeare's connection with the stage the build- 
 ings used for dramatic entertainments were of two 
 classes — public theatres, and those which were 
 called private. The private theatres were the 
 smaller in size, and were wholly roofed in, whereas 
 the public theatres, except over the stage and 
 boxes, were open to the sky. In private theatres 
 the performances commonly took place by the 
 
48 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 light of candles or cressets; in public theatres, by 
 daylight. In both the play began in the afternoon, 
 often at three o'clock, and ended at five or between 
 five and six o'clock. The spectators who occupied 
 the pit or " yard " were obliged in public theatres to 
 stand; in private theatres they were seated. The 
 interior form of theatres was usually circular or 
 oval, and the boxes or " rooms " and galleries or 
 " scaffolds " rose above one another in tiers as they 
 do at present. The prices for admittance to various 
 houses and to various parts of the house ranged 
 from one penny or twopence to two shillings or 
 half-a-crown. In public theatres young men of 
 rank and fashion were accommodated with stools 
 on each side of the rush-strewn stage, where their 
 attendants waited upon them and supplied them 
 with their pipes of tobacco. Ladies visiting the 
 theatre sometimes wore masks. Movable painted 
 scenery had not yet been devised; but stage pro- 
 perties, some of which served as elements of scenery, 
 were numerous ; rocks and tombs, stairs and 
 steeples, banks and bay-trees, are enumerated in 
 an old inventory. Costumes were often rich and 
 costly. In front of the stage ran curtains which 
 could be drawn and withdrawn as was needful, and 
 at the back of the stage similar curtains, named 
 " traverses ", occupied the place of our scenery, and 
 could be used for exits and entrances of actors. 
 When a tragedy was represented the stage was 
 sometimes hung with black. Towards the rear of 
 the stage rose an upper stage, from which, when it 
 seemed suitable, part of the dialogue could be 
 spoken. This upper stage might be imagined the 
 
THE MANNER OF PERFORMANCE. 49 
 
 walls of a besieged city as in King John, or a 
 balcony as in Romeo and Juliet, or a stage within 
 the stage as in the play-scene of Hamlet. The 
 opening of the play was announced by three sound- 
 ings or flourishes of the trumpet; during its per- 
 formance a flag displayed from the roof informed 
 the public in the streets that entertainment was 
 provided for them within. A player wearing a 
 black velvet cloak delivered the prologue. In the 
 intervals of acting the band, stationed below at 
 the side of the stage, helped to beguile the time. 
 Occasionally an epilogue was pronounced; we find 
 that such was the case with As You Like It, where 
 the epilogue is spoken by Rosalind in prose, and 
 The tempest, where it is spoken by Prospero in 
 verse. A prayer for the reigning monarch, recited 
 by the actors kneeling on the stage, closed the 
 piece. But this devout exercise was often im- 
 mediately preceded or followed by the clown's 
 "j'g"i ^ humorous or burlesque effusion in verse, 
 often rhymed, which the merryman sang, some- 
 times dancing while he sang, to the accompaniment 
 of pipe and tabor. It must be remembered as one 
 of the most important differences between the 
 Elizabethan stage and the stage subsequent to the 
 Restoration of King Charles II., that in the earlier 
 period female parts were taken by boys. " By 'r 
 lady," says Hamlet to the growing youth who acted 
 the Player Queen, " your ladyship is nearer to 
 heaven than when I saw you last, by the altitude of 
 a chopine. Pray God, your voice, like a piece of 
 uncurrent gold, be not cracked within the ring." 
 And among the possible indignities on which the 
 
so INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 imagination of the Egyptian queen dwells is that of 
 being presented by the comedians on the stage, 
 where some "squeaking Cleopatra" might "boy 
 her greatness". We can well believe that Shake- 
 speare would have rejoiced if it were possible to 
 intrust such parts as those of Cleopatra, Lady 
 Macbeth, Juliet, Rosalind, Viola, Imogen, to an 
 actress of genius, capable of entering into all his 
 meanings, instead of to a performer of the other 
 sex, " not old enough for a man, nor young enough 
 for a boy ; as a squash is before 't is a peascod, or a 
 codling when 't is almost an apple ". Nor can we 
 suppose that he was contented with the scanty 
 resources of the Elizabethan theatre, or thought its 
 poverty an advantage to his art. In the Prologue 
 to King Henry V. he apologizes for the very in- 
 adequate representation of great historical events, 
 and appeals to the imagination of the spectators to 
 supply the deficiencies of the stage. 
 
 A rude sketch of the interior of the Swan Theatre, 
 London, as it was about the year 1596, was not long 
 since brought to light in the University Library, 
 Utrecht. It is from the hand of a learned Dutch- 
 man, Johannes de Witt, who visited England towards 
 the close of the reign of Elizabeth.^ The stage, 
 strongly supported on timber bulks, is occupied by 
 three actors, and has for all its furniture a bench on 
 which a female figure is seated. Neither curtains 
 nor traverses appear. At the back of the stage, 
 which is open to the weather, is the tiring-room, to 
 which two doors give entrance, and above this rises 
 
 ^See Zur Kenntnis der Altenglischen Biihne, by Karl Theodore 
 Gaedertz (Bremen, i888). 
 
THE SWAN THEATRE. 
 
 SI 
 
 a covered balcony or row of boxes occupied by 
 spectators, but available at need for the actors. 
 
 ■^loMtiitsJiut mnV' 
 
 Sketch of the Interior of the Swan Theatre. 
 
 The trumpeter is seen at the door of a covered 
 chamber near the gallery-roof, and from its summit 
 floats a flag having upon it the figure_D^a swan. 
 
52 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 The form of the building is oval. No other draw- 
 ing of the interior of an Elizabethan theatre is 
 known to exist. 
 
 § 25. Assuming that Shakespeare, after the 
 alleged deer-stealing adventure, left Stratford for 
 London in 1586 or 1587, we can hardly suppose 
 that any of the work which has come down to us 
 was written before 1589. He had much to learn, 
 which could not be learnt in a day. At a consider- 
 ably later date he was still a workman in his 
 apprenticeship to the dramatic craft, engaged in 
 rehandling the work of Greene and Marlowe. He 
 continued to write for the stage until 1611 or per- 
 haps 1613. Thus his entire career as a dramatist 
 covers some twenty or at most five-and-twenty 
 years. Various attempts have been made by 
 Shakespeare scholars to distinguish the successive 
 stages in the development of his genius, and to 
 classify his plays in a series of chronological groups. 
 The latest attempt is that of a learned French 
 Orientalist, who is also a well-informed student of 
 English literature, M. James Darmesteter. It is 
 substantially identical with that which I had myself 
 proposed, a division of the total twenty or twenty- 
 five years of Shakespeare's authorship into four 
 periods of unequal length, to which I had given 
 names intended to lay hold of the student's memory, 
 names which, without being fanciful, should be 
 striking and easy to bear in mind. The earliest 
 period I called "In the Workshop ", meaning by 
 this the term of apprenticeship and tentative effort. 
 The years which immediately followed, during 
 which Shakespeare, though a master of his art, 
 
GROUPINGS OF THE PLAYS. 53 
 
 dwelt much on the broad surface of human life, 
 years represented by the best English histories and 
 some of the brightest comedies, I named " In the 
 World ". To indicate the third period, that of the 
 serious, dark, or bitter comedies, and those great 
 tragedies in which the poet makes his searching 
 inquisition into evil, the title " Out of the Depths " 
 served sufficiently well. Finally, for the closing 
 period, when the romantic comedies, at once grave 
 and glad — Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The 
 Tempest — were written, I chose the name " On 
 the Heights '', signifying thereby that in these ex- 
 quisite plays Shakespeare had attained an altitude 
 from which he saw human life in a clear and solemn 
 vision, looking down through a pellucid atmosphere 
 upon human joys and sorrows with a certain aloof- 
 ness or disengagement, yet at the same time with a 
 tender and pathetic interest. The names adopted 
 by M. Darmesteter may, if the reader chooses, 
 replace those which I ventured to offer, only 
 the reader should be on his guard against the 
 notion that at any time either what we now term 
 " pessimism " or what we term " optimism " formed 
 the creed, or any portion of the creed, of Shake- 
 speare. According to M. Darmesteter the first 
 period extends from 1588 to 1593; he names it 
 "Les Annies d'Apprentissage"; it is succeeded by 
 the "P^riode d'Epanouissement" (i 593-1601); upon 
 which follows the "P^riode Pessimiste" (1601-8); 
 and the great career closes with the rolling away of 
 clouds and the outbeaming of a serene sun in the 
 "Pdriode Optimiste" (1608-13). 
 § 26. In the study of the chronology of Shake- 
 
S4 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 speare's plays the larger results may be considered 
 as certain. Much was done long since to determine 
 the order of the plays by Malone. The dates of 
 the publication of the early quartos, the dates of the 
 entries of plays in the registers of the Stationers' 
 Company, mention of the plays, or allusion to them 
 or quotations from them, in contemporary writings, 
 references in the plays themselves to recent historical 
 events or incidents of the day, quotations made by 
 Shakespeare from books of known date — evidence 
 of these various kinds had accumulated long since 
 in the hands of students of the drama, and had 
 sufficed to ascertain the Shakespearian chronology 
 at least in outline. The internal evidence derived 
 from the changes of the dramatist's style and 
 diction, passing from the studious elaborateness of 
 such a play as The Two Gentlemen of Verona to 
 the subtlety in swiftness of utterance in such a play 
 as The Tempest, came to the aid of evidence that 
 was wholly or in part external. If classical allusions 
 were crowded and often inappropriate, if puns and 
 forced conceits were frequent, if the expression of 
 strong feeling swelled into bombast, it was easy to 
 perceive that the play must be of an early or 
 comparatively early date. If the structure of the 
 play and the grouping of the characters were stiff 
 and symmetrical, it could hardly belong to the 
 later stages of Shakespeare's authorship. If the 
 characterization was faint or over-broad, if the 
 thoughts on human life were slight and superficial, 
 if the wit was verbal and shallow, if the humour 
 was unmingled with pathos, again we might infer 
 that the work was one of the poet's earlier years. 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF STYLE. 55 
 
 No one who read the Comedy of Errors and 
 Measure for Measure could suppose that they lay 
 near one another in point of time; no one could 
 suppose that Romeo and Juliet, full of true passion 
 and beauty as it is, could be followed without a 
 great interval by Antony and Cleopatra. In recent 
 years the study of changes which Shakespeare's 
 versification underwent has in a striking manner 
 confirmed the results previously attained, and per- 
 haps has added something to them. As he grew to 
 be a master of his craft the poet came to feel that 
 rhyme rather interrupted than aided the expression 
 of dramatic feeling; having employed rhyme at 
 first freely, and then with reserve, he finally dis- 
 carded it altogether. At the same time his blank 
 verse underwent various changes, which may all be 
 summed up in the general statement that it became 
 less mechanical and more vital, less formally regular 
 and more swift, subtle and complex^ — complex not 
 with the intricacy of mechanical arrangement but 
 with the mystery and the movement of life. The 
 flow of the verse became freer; it paused less fre- 
 quently at the close of the line ; it ran into subtly 
 modulated periods ; it adapted itself to the expres- 
 sion of every varying mood of feeling ; it overleaped 
 the allotted ten syllables, or gathered itself up into 
 a narrower space as the movement of passion 
 required; it was no longer the decorated raiment 
 but rather the living body of the idea. 
 
 § 27. Shakespeare's years of apprenticeship pro- 
 duced tentative work of the most various kinds, 
 and constantly growing in excellence of handling. 
 Although himself no classical scholar, in the 
 
S6 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 higher sense of that word, and but slightly, if at all, 
 acquainted at first hand with Italian literature, his 
 early plays and poems exhibit the Renaissance 
 influences derived from classical themes, Latin 
 models in tragedy and comedy, and the glad- 
 coloured or sad-coloured literature of the south. 
 " Titus Andronicus," writes an excellent critic, " in 
 many of its characteristic features, reflects the 
 form of Roman tragedy almost universally ac- 
 cepted and followed in the earlier period of the 
 drama. . . . The Medea and Thyestes of Seneca 
 are crowded with Pagan horrors of the most revolt- 
 ing kind. It is true these horrors are usually 
 related, not represented, although in the Medea the 
 maddened heroine kills her children on the stage. 
 But from these tragedies the conception of the 
 physically horrible as an element of tragedy was 
 imported into the early English drama, and inten- 
 sified by the realistic tendency which the events of 
 the time and the taste of their ruder audiences had 
 impressed upon the common stages." With respect 
 to Titus Andronicus, however, we must remember 
 that, in all probability, Shakespeare is not respon- 
 sible for its horrors and shames. He may possibly 
 have begun his worldly career as a butcher's 
 apprentice at Stratford-on-Avon. We are not 
 compelled to believe that his dramatic career 
 opened in the slaughter-house. If, to aid his 
 theatrical fellows, he retouched the old play of 
 Titus Andronicus, he certainly took no pleasure in 
 lopped limbs and the reek of blood. If for an hour 
 he was brought into contact with the tragedy of 
 gross and material horror, it was only that he 
 
EARLY COMEDIES. 57 
 
 might turn away from it for ever. Whether he 
 wrote a few Hnes of the play here and a few lines 
 there, or wrote them not, concerns us but little ; the 
 play taken as a whole may justly be described as of 
 the pre-Shakespearian school. 
 
 The influence of Latin comedy is seen in the 
 Comedy of Errors. While the main subject was 
 derived from the Menaechmi of Plautus, some hints 
 were also taken from his Amphitruo. But if Seneca 
 was too heavy for Shakespeare, Plautus was some- 
 what too light. Our dramatist, indeed, complicates 
 the plot and diversifies the mirthful entanglements, 
 making the fun fly faster by adding to the twin- 
 brothers Antipholus their twin-attendants Dromio. 
 But he adds also a serious background, and towards 
 the close he rises for a little space from mirth to 
 pathos. The ingenious construction of the play, 
 its skilful network of incidents, its bright intricacy 
 which never falls into confusion are remarkable, 
 for Shakespeare is commonly credited with having 
 paid but little attention to his plots. 
 
 Love's Labour 's Lost may be earlier in date than 
 the Comedy of Errors. It was perhaps the first in- 
 dependent play of Shakespeare's authorship, but, as 
 we have received it, the work, considerably altered 
 from the original version, is a recast of the year 
 1598. Gervinus has remarked that the tone of the 
 Italian school prevails here more than in any other 
 play : " In the burlesque parts of Love's Labour 's 
 Lost we meet with two favourite characters or cari- 
 catures of the Italian comedy; the Pedant, that is 
 the schoolmaster and grammarian, and the military 
 Braggart, the Thraso of the Latin, the 'Captain 
 
 (789) E 
 
58 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 Spavento' of the Italian stage". Shakespeare, how- 
 ever, did not merely reproduce dramatic types or 
 stock figures; he had his eye on the affectations 
 and mannerisms of his own day. It is as if some- 
 one of our generation were to make his d^but by a 
 theatrical satire on the so-called aesthetes of a few 
 years since, with skits at our fashionable scientific 
 pedantry, our woman's-rights movement, and other 
 admired modes of the time. There is in Love's 
 Labour 's Lost an impatience of folly, dulness, and 
 ineptitude which is a happy symptom of youth. 
 Something of the writer's youthful philosophy also 
 appears in the play; it is a dramatic plea against 
 shaping our lives by narrow rules and artificial sys- 
 tems. Let us not confine ourselves within a pale 
 of petty regulations — such is Shakespeare's teach- 
 ing — but rather launch forth into the world, and 
 have faith in that broad wisdom or good sense 
 which comes by natural methods, a wisdom won 
 through joy and pain, through frank dealing with 
 our fellows, through the lore of life and love. In 
 certain speeches of Biron we seem to hear the 
 authentic voice of the youthful Shakespeare. ^ 
 
 The Comedy of Errors is a comedy of incidents 
 — almost a farce ; Love's Labour 's Lost is a comedy 
 of dialogue; in The Two Gentlemen of Verona 
 Shakespeare made his first essay in what we may 
 call romantic narrative comedy. The scene is Italy, 
 the land of romance for the imagination of Eliza- 
 bethan England. Some of the incidents seem to 
 be derived from a Spanish pastoral romance and 
 some from a tale by Bandello. Love and friend- 
 ship and their mutual relations form the general 
 
EARLY COMEDIES. 59 
 
 theme. The play is the harbinger of some of the 
 most exquisite of the later comedies, and contains 
 a series of sketches which were afterwards worked 
 up into finished pictures. Julia in her male disguise 
 announces, as it were, the more graceful disguisers 
 Viola and Rosalind, Portia and Imogen. The wit 
 combats of clowns have a fascination for Shake- 
 speare or for his audience, but in Launce appears 
 something better — the first of those vulgar humorists 
 who enrich the stage with so much of mirth and the 
 wisdom of mirth, and lacking whom the garden in 
 Illyria and the glades of Arden would appear half- 
 desolate. The Two Gentlemen of Verona would 
 seem to have been written with careful elaboration; 
 the characters are arranged so as to balance each 
 other with a somewhat artificial regularity; the 
 imagery and versification are studiously wrought. 
 The defects of the plot arise perhaps from the fact 
 that it was the author's first experiment in what I 
 have termed romantic narrative comedy. He was 
 not yet a master in the art of construction; if the 
 subject favoured him the plot of a play might be 
 excellent ; if it did not favour him, the scenes might 
 hang somewhat loosely together. 
 
 Another experiment, and in an altogether dif- 
 ferent direction, was made in A Midsummer Night's 
 Dream. It is in part a perfect piece of lyrical poetry, 
 in part a very imperfect drama. The characteriza- 
 tion of the lovers is faint and pale; their quarrels 
 and reconciliations interest us little ; they are indeed 
 invented to be the sport of accident, and so cannot 
 be strongly drawn. But the fairy poetry was a new 
 and exquisite creation in English literature; and 
 
6o INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 the English stage had previously possessed no 
 group of humorous figures to compare with that 
 formed by "sweet bully Bottom" and his compeers. 
 The scene is again classic ground, and the time is 
 that of classical antiquity ; but the spirit of the play 
 is essentially romantic. Theseus is a great medi- 
 aeval knight or an EHzabethan noble; his Ama- 
 zonian bride Hippolyta might as well be some 
 gracious English chatelaine. Everything in the 
 play mingles with its opposite in dream-like fashion 
 — the'modern and the antique, London and Athens, 
 the moonlight elves and the rude mechanicals, the 
 jests of fairyland and the vexations of mortal lovers, 
 fancy and frolic, magnificence and grotesqueness, 
 drollery and romance. 
 
 § 28. Of these early comedies in which Shakespeare 
 was experimenting in various directions, no one is 
 quite a dramatic masterpiece. Evidences of the 
 'prentice hand appear in each — here in tediousness 
 of dialogue, here in artificial arrangement of the 
 figures, here in faulty construction of the plot, here 
 in feebleness of characterization, here in languor of 
 style, and here in undramatic development of the 
 imagery. But each of these plays contains some- 
 thing admirable, something which no writer of the 
 time except Shakespeare could have created ; taken 
 together they make up a great achievement for a 
 poet's early years, and give unmistakable prediction 
 of the higher work which is to follow. It is worth 
 noting how often in this first group of comedies the 
 mirth is derived not from the deeper things of the 
 spirit, but from odd surprises, mistakes of identity, 
 disguisings, bewilderments, and confusion; in a 
 
THE POEMS. 6 1 
 
 word, from what is external and accidental rather 
 than from what is intimately related with character. 
 In A Midsummer Night's Dream the lyrical poet 
 in Shakespeare more nearly overmatches the dra- 
 matist than in any other of his plays. In Venus 
 and Adonis and Lucrece the dramatist causes some 
 embarrassment to the narrative poet. Shakespeare's 
 endeavour in the earlier of the two is first to paint 
 in the manner of an artist of the Renaissance a 
 glowing picture of the enamoured Queen of Love; 
 and secondly, to invent elaborate speeches for his 
 two chief personages in that style of high-wrought 
 fantasy which was the fashion of the time. He 
 succeeded in his endeavour, and the poem delighted 
 a generation of young readers. But the Venus and 
 Adonis has all the errors of a poet's early work and 
 all the vices of the Elizabethan style. It is full of 
 florid beauties ; it is infinitely sweet in its versifica- 
 tion ; but ingenuity too often replaces passion, and 
 the narrative is perpetually checked by elaborate 
 exercises of fancy. The companion poem Lucrece 
 ireverses the motive of the Venus; in the Venus 
 feminine passion strives against boyish coldness; 
 in Lucrece it is a man who makes his assault on 
 womanly chastity. Deep notes are sounded by the 
 poet, radiant heights are touched ; but he cannot in 
 these poems transcend the manner of his age. He 
 follows rather than leads. Having made these bril- 
 liant essays in a province not properly his own, 
 Shakespeare, notwithstanding the popularity of 
 both poems, seems to have recognized the fact that 
 here his genius could not find its true sphere, and 
 he never again attempted the miniature epic. 
 
62 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 § 29. While engaged on his early comedies Shake- 
 speare was also at work on historical tragedy. But 
 here he attained artistic independence only by de- 
 grees, and at first he was manifestly in tutelage to 
 his great predecessor Marlowe. The authorship of 
 the first part of Henry VI. is not ascertained; it 
 probably received additions from Shakespeare's 
 hand; but we may say of this play, as we have 
 said of Titus Andronicus, that it is essentially pre- 
 Shakespearian. In the Second and Third Parts of 
 Henry VI. the work of Shakespeare is found side 
 by side with that of Marlowe, and the pupil proved 
 himself so apt that it is a matter of extreme diffi^ 
 culty to distinguish his contributions from those of 
 the master. The younger poet had much to learn 
 from the mighty wielder of blank verse who has 
 poured into the English drama the life-blood of 
 passion and an unquenchable ardour of imagina- 
 tion. In the tragedy of King Richard III. Shake- 
 speare completed the tetralogy of the house of 
 York, and he sustained and even developed the 
 Marlowesque style of the earlier dramas. "This 
 only of all Shakespeare's plays", says Mr. Swin- 
 burne, "belongs absolutely to the school of Mar- 
 lowe. The influence of the elder master, and that 
 influence alone, is perceptible from end to end. . . . 
 It is as fiery in passion, as single in purpose, as rhe- 
 torical often though never so inflated in expression, 
 as Tamburlaine itself." The protagonist, as in the 
 tragedies of Marlowe, is thrust forward and domi- 
 nates the whole play. Its opening is in the manner 
 of Marlowe — an exordium in the form of a soliloquy. 
 
 The tetralogy of the House of Lancaster opens 
 
THE LANCASTER TETRALOGY. 63 
 
 with King Richard II. Whether that play was 
 chronologically a little earlier or a little later than 
 King Richard III. we shall do well to group the 
 three parts of King Henry VI. with King Richard 
 III., connected as they are by their subject, and 
 closely related by their Marlowesque style. King 
 Richard II., it seems to me, while historically the 
 first of the series of plays which is continued in 
 King Henry IV. and King Henry V., in point of 
 style, and perhaps also in the date of its produc- 
 tion, lies close to King John. In both plays Shake- 
 speare has almost entirely delivered himself from 
 the influence of Marlowe, though some scenes of 
 King Richard II. were not written without a vivid 
 recollection of passages in Marlowe's English his- 
 torical drama. In both plays Shakespeare seems 
 to be feeling after a way of his own — that manner 
 which was perfected in King Henry IV.; in both 
 plays rhyme is freely used, much more freely, how- 
 ever, in King Richard II., which is certainly earlier 
 in the chronological order than King John; from 
 both plays prose is absent. The subjects are not 
 historically connected; King John stands apart 
 from both the Lancastrian and the Yorkist series. 
 But there is this in common between King John 
 and King Richard II., that in each the dramatist 
 studies the ruin of his country as caused by evil or 
 incompetent rule, and in each he sounds some of 
 those trumpet-notes of patriotic enthusiasm which 
 must have echoed gloriously in the hearts of men 
 who had witnessed the recent overthrow of the Ar- 
 mada. The poet does not often deal in mere pane- 
 gyric of his native land, and he can smile humor- 
 
64 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 ously at the foibles of his countrymen ; he doubtless 
 felt that it is the part of a genuine patriot to make 
 keen inquisition into the sources of national disaster 
 and defection. But twice or three times his pride 
 and joy in the glorious land of his birth must have 
 an outbreak: 
 
 Come the three corners of the world in arms 
 
 And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue, 
 
 If England to itself do rest but true. 
 
 With such a trumpet-note King John closes. And 
 amid Gaunt's prophetic fears upon his death-bed 
 appears the vision of England as it had been and 
 might be again — 
 
 This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle. 
 
 This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, 
 
 This other Eden, demi-Paradise, . . . 
 
 This blessed spot, this earth, this realm, this England. 
 
 In King John the feebleness of foreign policy, in 
 King Richard II. the vices of domestic government 
 are censured. In each play individual strength and 
 courage are honoured; in King John the hope of 
 England centres in the person of Cceur de Lion's 
 bastard son, a mediaeval John Bull cased in armour; 
 in King Richard II. such salvation as is possible 
 must come from the aspiring Bolingbroke, "one 
 still strong man in a blatant land". Not that 
 Shakespeare justifies usurpation; the crime will 
 surely work out its evil effects, but even the usurp- 
 ing Bolingbroke as compared with the sentimental 
 Richard — a royal poseur — may be regarded as a 
 "saviour of society". 
 
 30. Romantic tragedy as distinguished from 
 
ROMEO AND JULIET. 65 
 
 historical is represented by one work of early date. 
 Romeo and Juliet stands alone as the lyrical tragedy 
 of youth and love and death. The poet in Shake- 
 speare, as we have said, somewhat embarrassed the 
 dramatist in A Midsummer Night's Dream; the 
 dramatist embarrassed the poet in the Rape of 
 Lucrece. Here, in Romeo and Juliet, each aids the 
 other, and the result is a work harmonious and 
 triumphant, in which song and speech become one 
 or something rarer than either is born of the two. 
 The play has no secondary action; our interest 
 from first to last is centered upon the star-crossed 
 lovers. Varying from his original, Shakespeare has 
 accelerated the action of the story, so that the 
 movement of the piece acquires a lyric swiftness 
 and its passion a lyric intensity. Here for the first 
 time on the English stage the terror of tragedy 
 became beautiful. The spectator in the presence of 
 untimely death and all the apparatus of the grave 
 is not overwhelmed by gross horror, but sustained 
 by the presence of beauty and the very chivalry of 
 young love. There are tokens of immature work- 
 manship in some portions of the play; inopportune 
 conceits, overstrained ingenuities, over-florid diction; 
 but we note such errors of style only to make us 
 feel more vividly that in Romeo and Juliet we have 
 still to do with the greatest of poets in his prime, 
 when his adult art has not yet lost all traces of its 
 adolescence. The mastery of his material appears 
 as much in the humorous scenes as in the tragic. 
 When we reflect that Mercutio and the Nurse are 
 but subordinate figures we obtain some measure of 
 the writer's affluence of creative power. 
 
66 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 § 31. But unlike "Juliet and her Romeo" there 
 are lovers on whom all the stars shed favourable 
 influence. In the Merchant of Venice Shakespeare 
 makes amends for the piteousness of his tragedy 
 by expending his finest art in making two human 
 creatures happy. The play, as I take it, stands 
 midway in the chronological sequence of the come- 
 dies between the earlier group of which I have 
 spoken, and those later comedies which lie close, 
 on either side, to the year 1600. In versification it 
 has something in common with the Two Gentle- 
 men of Verona, although its blank verse is far more 
 vigorous and dramatic. In its strength and beauty 
 of characterization it might take a place by the side 
 of Much Ado about Nothing or Twelfth Night. 
 The story of the caskets and the story of the pound 
 of flesh are skilfully intertangled. The deeper in- 
 terest of the play is over with the fourth act; but 
 in the fifth we have a delightful epilogue ; a counter- 
 feit lovers'-quarrel must put an edge on the bliss of 
 Bassanio and Portia. If any single thought presides 
 over the double action of the comedy and reappears^ 
 in a playful way in the fifth act it has reference to 
 the moral force of bonds and promises and inherited 
 obligations; but we must not, like the German 
 critics, reduce the play, full as it is of life and its 
 joys, to an abstraction, v In none of the previous 
 comedies can such breadth and strength of por- 
 traiture be found as here in the figure of Shylock. 
 And even Juliet seems but a passionate child of the 
 "South when compared with the gracious lady of 
 Belnriont, so richly endowed with gifts of mind, so 
 firm of will, so buoyant of temper, so noble in her 
 
THE FALSTAFF PLAYS. 6"] 
 
 serious moods, so charming in her play, so great a 
 giver, yet so delicate in her art of giving. 
 
 § 32. From comedy Shakespeare returned to his- 
 tory; from Italy he returned to England. In the 
 two parts of King Henry IV. and King Henry V. 
 he brought his series of English historical plays to 
 a close. The progress is great from King Richard 
 II. and King John. The dramatist has almost 
 escaped from the trammels of rhyme, and he has 
 learnt all the advantages of alternating verse with 
 prose. He knows how to ally the historical drama 
 with comedy now, not merely by an occasional 
 scene (like that of Jack Cade and his followers), 
 but by the presence of a great humorous personage. 
 The royal Bolingbroke, worn and saddened by the 
 weight of an usurper's crown, which yet he will not 
 resign till death discrown him, is at once a majes- 
 tic and a pathetic figure. But he is almost over- 
 shadowed by the ample figure of King Falstaff on 
 his tavern throne. A French critic has placed Fal- 
 staff by the side of Panurge and Sancho as one of 
 the humorous trinity created by the Renaissance 
 imagination ; but these seem compounded of simple 
 elements when compared with the rich amalgam of 
 comic qualities which make up Sir John. He dis- 
 appears of sad yet glorious necessity before we set 
 foot on the embattled plains of France. On the 
 stern field of Agincourt there is no place for a 
 champion so considerate on behalf of his own fat 
 carcass, and therefore Jack Falstaff must needs take 
 refuge from an ungrateful world in "Arthur's 
 bosom ". 
 
 With the reign of Henry V. and the King's 
 
68 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 laughing prophecy to his bride of a son " that shall 
 go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the 
 beard", Shakespeare almost touches the point from 
 which he had at first set out — the reign of Henry 
 VI. His portraits of English kings comprise that 
 of the pseudo-saint, a sorry plaything of circum- 
 stance, Henry VI.; the bold criminal, a warped 
 creature of daemonic force, Richard III.; the royal 
 voluptuary and sentimentalist, Richard II.; the 
 usurper strong and prudent, Henry IV., master of 
 men and events so far as they can be controlled by 
 anxious care and firm volition ; and finally Henry 
 v., in whom a frank goodness is at one with a 
 genius for empire and for battle. He is Shake- 
 speare's ideal king of England, his ideal man of 
 action. Around him as around its centre the loyalty 
 of England, Scotland, Wales is organized. But 
 while thus presenting a series of historical portraits 
 Shakespeare also traces the logic of historical events, 
 and exhibits the law of moral retribution in process 
 from generation to generation, the abiding and 
 living influence of good and evil deeds. We read 
 in his plays, and with a remarkable'degree of ful- 
 ness and faithfulness, the ethics of English history, 
 deduced from the day of Bolingbroke's challenge of 
 Norfolk to the day when Richard and Elizabeth 
 entered on their heritage of loyalty and power. 
 
 These studies in English history gave breadth to 
 Shakespeare's view of the world; they saved him 
 from any danger there may have been of his nar- 
 rowing as dramatist into an interpreter of the mere 
 romance of personal passion. And in shaping for 
 artistic purposes the substantial matter of history, 
 
LATER COMEDIES. 69 
 
 as he found it crudely presented in the chronicle of 
 Holinshed, he gained strength and skill of hand; 
 he could not here be fantastic; he could not permit 
 himself to be misled by ingenuities and conceits; 
 he must take his material as it was given to him, 
 discover where it would yield and where it would 
 resist, and so by prudent dealing mould it into 
 dramatic form. 
 
 § 33. It was probably while he was at work on 
 the English historical plays, but at what precise 
 date is undetermined, that Shakespeare made his 
 recast of the old Taming of a Shrew, and wrote the 
 admirably humorous Induction. We have good 
 reason for believing that the Merry Wives of Wind- 
 sor was an offshoot from King Henry IV. In the 
 Shrew Shakespeare followed the lead of his drama- 
 tic predecessor; in the Merry Wives he worked by 
 command, and, if we may trust the tradition, with 
 unusual haste. The humour of both plays has 
 something in common with that of the lower scenes 
 of the later English histories. It would seem as if 
 Shakespeare had carried over into comedy some of 
 the roughness and realism of the comic part of the 
 historical drama into which necessarily the romantic 
 could not enter. Katherina is a very enjoyable 
 whirlwind in petticoats; but we cannot place her 
 by the side of Beatrice or Rosalind. English low 
 life is presented in the miniature farce of Christopher 
 Sly, old Sly's son of Burtonheath, pedlar, bear-herd, 
 card-maker, and tinker; English middle-class life in 
 the Fords and Pages of Windsor, with their laugh- 
 ing dames, that comely English maiden sweet Anne 
 Page, her valiant lover young Master Slender, and 
 
•JO INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE, 
 
 the learned justice Robert Shallow, of the county 
 of Gloucester, esquire. In King Henry V. the 
 , Welshman plays his part and diverts the audience 
 with his courageous innocence and his "prave 'orts"; 
 there is also some pretty fooling of the Princess 
 Katharine in her French-English. Here in the 
 Merry Wives the Welsh parson displays another 
 kind of valour from that of Fluellen with a like 
 valorous maiming of the King's English, and is 
 paired over against the French doctor, whose passion 
 is so cruelly cozened at the close. From plump 
 Jack Falstafif drinking water of Thames amid a 
 redundance of foul linen we piously avert our eyes. 
 
 The same buoyant temper which animates King 
 Henry V. and gives its breezy freshness to The 
 Merry Wives of Windsor is sustained in the roman- 
 tic comedy of Much Ado About Nothing. Beatrice 
 and Benedick are perhaps a re-incarnation, and in 
 a finer stage of existence, of Rosaline and Biron in 
 the early comedy, which about this time Shake- 
 speare revised and partly rewrote. How the gayest 
 spirits may be allied with good breeding Beatrice 
 will show us ; she is not only witty, but also brave, 
 generous, and wise. And it is delightful to see how 
 a being so delightfully brilliant can be beguiled, not 
 to her destruction but to her own happiness, by the 
 blind leadings of her heart. If cleverness and in- 
 finite vivacity need their foil in pompous dulness, 
 we find that also in the play, for Dogberry and 
 goodman Verges climb to a height of sapient stu- 
 pidity and majestic ineptitude which borders on the 
 sublime. 
 
 Much Ado About Nothing was followed speedily 
 
LATER COMEDIES. "JX 
 
 by As You Like It, and probably after no long 
 interval by Twelfth Night. These three are the 
 sunniest of Shakespeare's comedies. In the woods 
 of Arden, indeed, the sunlight is tempered by green 
 boughs; the good Duke lives in banishment, his 
 daughter has had to fly from the usurper's court, 
 and in Jaques we meet for the first time in Shake- 
 speare's plays the satirist of humanity. But the 
 Duke turns to sweetness his light adversity; Rosa- 
 lind is not afflicted as she strolls through the wood- 
 land lawns which give Orlando shelter; Jaques, the 
 dilettante satirist, is anything but a Timon, and in 
 fact when he rails at mankind is only indulging an 
 idle humour; and have we not Touchstone always 
 at hand, moralist, courtier, critic, lover, poet, wit, to 
 resolve wisdom's white ray into the prismatic colours 
 of folly.' In Twelfth Night all that is most mirth- 
 ful and all that is most exquisite in the preceding 
 comedies reappear with something of added mirth 
 and grace. Malvolio would be too cruelly abused 
 did not self-love make him his own chief deceiver, 
 and self-importance protect him from some of the 
 anguish of the discovery. The play has the gaiety 
 and the good sense of the best comedies of Moliere, 
 with a tenderness and romantic beauty which lay 
 beyond the art of the French dramatist. 
 
 § 34. In the three comedies which follow these, 
 and which bring the series for the present to a close — 
 All 's Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, 
 and Troilus and Cressida^ — a different spirit pre- 
 vails. The strong-willed heroine of All 's Well is a 
 figure almost suited to tragedy; the play is a serious 
 
 ' About the date of Troilus, however, there is some uncertainty. 
 
72 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 study of the trials of heart of a woman who would 
 strengthen and save a man above her in rank but 
 far below her in character, one who through her aid 
 alone can attain to moral worth and dignity. Parolles 
 is almost too pitiful in his meanness to be a comic 
 personage ; the exposure of his cowardice is hardly 
 worth the trouble it costs. The sunshine and frolic 
 of Twelfth Night and As You Like It have disap- 
 peared; there is something forced in the laughter, 
 or at least it is laughter which may quickly die away 
 even if it should not turn to bitterness. Measure 
 for Measure is more than grave; it would be dark 
 were it not illuminated by the white light of Isa- 
 bella's chastity. The vileness of a corrupt city is 
 set before us with a painful realism. There are deep 
 searchings and probings of the evil and deceitful 
 heart of man. We are in the presence of death 
 which is the fruit of sin ; and life, the tender, florid 
 life, shrinks back amazed and appalled from the 
 grave and those vague vast regions to which it is the 
 portal. But virtue stands embodied in Isabel, and 
 providential forethought in the Duke, and therefore 
 we are saved from despair. Measure for Measure 
 is classed among the comedies, but it is a comedy 
 which has gone astray and wandered uncertainly 
 to the very borders of the realm of tragedy. Still 
 more remote, however, from the true spirit of 
 comedy is Troilus and Cressida. If Measure for 
 Measure is dark, it is not bitter ; the world which 
 contains an Isabel is not a worthless or contemptible 
 world. But in Troilus and Cressida life lies before 
 us like an unweeded garden, " things rank and gross 
 in nature possess it merely". I have elsewhere 
 
THE PERIOD OF GLOOM. 73 
 
 styled the play " the comedy of disillusion ". We 
 are introduced to heroic personages in order that 
 we may be for ever cured of hero-worship. Troilus 
 indeed is a gallant youth, but are we sure that he 
 will remain as generous and ardent when he escapes 
 from his boyish love-illusions? Ulysses is worldly 
 wisdom embodied; but there is no ray of the hea- 
 venly to illuminate and consecrate this wisdom. 
 The dog-like Thersites rails at all that we had sup- 
 posed noble ; we know that he is a dog, but is there 
 not after all a vein of coarse plebeian truth in the 
 railer's words.' This is not a comedy gone astray, 
 but a satire on human existence thrown into dra- 
 matic form. 
 
 § 35. All the indications derived from Shake- 
 speare's writings seem to point to the conclusion that 
 there was a period of his life when, as Hallam says, 
 "his heart was ill at ease and ill content with the 
 world or his own conscience". We may take the 
 year 1600 as a convenient date for marking the turn 
 in Shakespeare's temper, which, however, was of 
 course not a thing of an hour or a day. And it may 
 be that in the obscure confessions of the Sonnets 
 we find the key which unlocks the secrets of their 
 writer's heart. That he passed about this time 
 through a moral crisis seems certain. If we may 
 trust the Sonnets, he had given away his affections 
 to a friend who wronged him, and though in the end 
 Shakespeare transcended his sense of injury, the 
 pain and indignation left a deposit in his spirit. 
 But, what was worse, he had himself chiefly to 
 blame. He had yielded to the fascination of an 
 unworthy love, and was betrayed by her who had 
 
 (789) F 
 
74 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 played with all her art upon his passions, as a musi- 
 cian might play upon the strings of a lute; his plea- 
 sure, which at no time had been free from prickings 
 of remorse, turned in the end to bitterness. These 
 experiences left him in no fit mood for the making 
 of mirth; but if they darkened they deepened his 
 knowledge of the human heart and its mysteries ol 
 passion. " The memory of hours misspent," goes 
 on Hallam, soberest of critics, " the pang of affec- 
 tion misplaced or unrequited, the experience oi 
 man's worser nature which intercourse with un- 
 worthy associates, by choice or circumstance, pecu- 
 liarly teaches; these, as they sank down into the 
 depths of his great mind, seem not only to have 
 inspired into it the conception of Lear and Timon, 
 but that of one primary character — the censurer of 
 mankind." 
 
 M. James Darmesteter, as I have already men- 
 tioned, names the period during which Shakespeare 
 produced his great tragedies and the darker come- 
 dies the Pessimist period. I cannot accept the name. 
 Shakespeare's nearest approach to what we call 
 pessimism is not in Lear, nor even in Timon; it is 
 in the comedy of Troilus and Cressida, which I » 
 believe preceded these. As soon as Shakespeare 
 set himself in the tragedies to a deeper study of the 
 human heart and a more searching inquisition of 
 evil, he made a fresh and higher discovery of human 
 virtue. By the side of the captive Lear stands Cor- 
 delia, whose spirit is calm with the strength of self- 
 sacrificial love. Edgar, the true justiciary, remains 
 victor over the fallen body of Edmund. If Timon 
 despairs, it is because his heart was always weak, 
 
THE EARLY TRAGEDIES. 75 
 
 because he had lived among dreams and had never 
 grasped the facts of life. No; Shakespeare was 
 neither pessimist nor optimist; but a penetrating 
 student of man's heart, who would deny neither the 
 evil nor the good, neither the dark recesses of crime 
 nor the illuminated heights of virtue. 
 
 § 36. Two of the tragedies, the earliest in date, 
 seem to me to stand somewhat apart from the rest 
 — Hamlet and Julius Caesar. I have called them 
 " tragedies of reflection " as distinguished from the 
 tempestuous tragedies of passion such as King Lear, 
 Othello, and Timon. They may have preceded in 
 the chronological order the joyless comedies of 
 Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida. 
 Neither Hamlet nor Brutus, who is the hero of the 
 play of Julius Csesar, is led on to destruction by his 
 own passions; both are students, and we may say, 
 philosophers; both are idealists; but Hamlet's ideals 
 are laid waste, and the world grows sterile to his 
 view ; Brutus, on the contrary, lives and dies fortified 
 by the moral doctrine which shuts him in from a 
 true knowledge of the facts of existence and the 
 characters of men; both Hamlet and Brutus are 
 summoned to act on great occasions, and to both 
 ideas are more real than deeds. Brutus indeed can 
 act, and act with energy, but he misjudges men and 
 events. Hamlet sees things more truly, but in him 
 the continuous energy of the will is sapped, partly 
 by excess of reflective power, partly by a barren 
 despair about life. The errors of each arise, in a 
 measure at least, from a certain nobility of character. 
 They fall, but not dishonoured ; we feel that they 
 are spirits too erect or too delicate for the world of 
 
'j6 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 fraud and violence in which it was their fate to move. 
 In King Henry V. Shakespeare had presented a 
 great man of action, a master of events. When we 
 have given him the meed of admiration which is his 
 due, we let him pass upon his glorious way. Hamlet, 
 who is no master of events, who executes his pur- 
 pose desperately at last, and as it were by chance- 
 medley, whose life has effected so little that, com- 
 paring it with his great endowments, we may call 
 it a failure, interests us profoundly, and we return 
 again and again to gaze into the shadowy precincts 
 of his thought, and can never quite satisfy our 
 curiosity. 
 
 § 37. Of the great tragedies of passion which 
 follow who can speak adequately? Perhaps the 
 least inadequate word ever said respecting them is 
 that fine extravagance of Goethe in Wilhelm Meis- 
 ter: " They are no fictions {Gedichte). You would 
 think while reading them, you stood before the un- 
 closed awful Books of Fate, while the whirlwind of 
 most impassioned life was howling through the 
 leaves, and tossing them fiercely to and fro." And 
 the speaker in Goethe's romance goes on to tell of 
 their tenderness as well as their strength, their calm 
 as well as their force. These terrible leaves of the 
 Book of Fate, which we name Macbeth, Othello, 
 Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Timon, are 
 all concerned with the breaches of the law wrought 
 by passion, the rending of the bonds of loyalty, of 
 wedlock, of filial duty, of love of country and love 
 of humanity; they represent man at odds with the 
 moral order of things; they exhibit evil in its incu- 
 (bation and in its temporary triumph; passion in its 
 
OTHELLO. "]■] 
 
 complexity of motion, its occult movements, its 
 outbreak and violent fluctuations. But the effect 
 left on the spirit of the reader or spectator of these 
 plays is not one of disorder. The laws of human 
 life are not shaken ; the pillars of the divine order 
 stand sure. Even though Cordelia lie strangled 
 upon the lap of Lear we do not despair: "Upon 
 such sacrifices the gods themselves throw incense." 
 § 38. Othello (1604), founded on a tale in Cin- 
 thio's Hecatommithi, presents a striking contrast 
 with Hamlet, which perhaps immediately preceded 
 it in the chronological order. Here, instead of a 
 student, the hero is a great soldier, a man framed 
 for prompt and decisive action; instead of the re- 
 flective temperament of the North, we are shown 
 in their terrible workings the torrid passions of the 
 South; instead of wandering in vague mists and 
 cloud we seem to encounter a simoom. The subtle- 
 ties of Hamlet's intellect, the lingerings of Hamlet's 
 will caused us to dread a grievous miscarriage of jus- 
 tice; it is the blind precipitancy of Othello's heart 
 and hand which strikes us with terror. In the Moor 
 there is somewhat of the grand simplicity of the 
 barbarian, and he is taken in the toils of the craf- 
 tiest and boldest brain in Italy, His love is a rap- 
 ture of chivalry and fond protectiveness ; his jealousy 
 is no mean offspring of injured personal pride, but 
 the anguish of despair for human purity and truth. 
 I ago is Shakespeare's one absolute, irredeemable 
 villain ; irredeemable, because he has lost all faith in 
 the existence of goodness, and because all passions 
 are dead within him except those which gather 
 about self. There is no weak point in his panoply 
 
78 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 of disbelief and egoism; man and woman are 
 but tools in his hand which he uses, and despises 
 in the use. Two contrasted figures so superb and 
 so striking as Othello and lago had never before 
 been set over against each other in tragedy; it is 
 still the ambition of great actors to present in turn 
 each of the two parts which demand such high and 
 such opposing accomplishments of art. Desdemona, 
 the very rose of purest passion, made to worship and 
 to be worshipped, is flung away like a noisome weed ; 
 to slay her is as it were to slay love itself in its native 
 and original form. And yet we are made to feel 
 that love, not hatred, is the slayer. Desdemona dies 
 with the sacred falsehood of true love on her lips; 
 and Othello, in discovering her loyalty and exe- 
 cuting the doom upon himself, is restored to faith 
 and charity, if not to hope. It is the destroyer lago 
 who really perishes as a withered branch from the 
 tree of humanity. 
 
 § 39. In Othello the tragedy turns upon the rend- 
 ing of the bonds between husbahd and wife. In 
 King Lear (1605) the tragedy is that of violated 
 filial ties, and of a father saved — and scarcely saved — 
 from the despair, following upon unnatural cruelty, 
 by the redeeming passion of love in one daughter's 
 heart. The scale on which everything is presented 
 in this drama borders on the Titanic. The double 
 plot heightens and intensifies the eff"ect. Glouces- 
 ter's wrong and Gloucester's suffering are great, but 
 they fall well within the limits of humanity. The 
 passions of Lear almost break the bounds; there is 
 in them something vast and elemental ; and Nature 
 herself, with her deluging streams, and fierce thrusts 
 
MACBETH. 79 
 
 of lightning, and reverberated thunders, seems to 
 partake in and to reflect the chaos of the moral 
 world. Where hatred, deceit, and egoism are out- 
 rageous, love is deep and still, a pure and quiet 
 fount of blessing; Cordelia utters no passionate 
 outcry, but all that is of virtuous power in the play 
 organizes itself about her, or unconsciously takes 
 part with her. She dies as the martyr of love ; but 
 when her father falls upon her body, and his strong, 
 worn heart at last breaks through excess of strain, 
 he is looking for that unuttered word of love upon 
 her lips, the very expectation of which has saved 
 him from despair and moral death. Cordelia dies, 
 but love is not defeated. 
 
 § 40. Macbeth (1606) probably followed next to 
 King Lear. Our interest in this play is centred in 
 the pair of wedded criminals; Duncan and Banquo 
 and Macduff are figures of minor importance. 
 Through an act of guilty ambition the bond — no 
 longer a mere domestic bond — of loyalty between 
 king and subject is severed ; the culminating point in 
 the action of the play is the murder of Duncan; the 
 aspiring path to crime, and that dim blood-stained 
 path which leads downward from crime to the abyss 
 are traced in the earlier and in the later scenes. 
 The essence of the tragedy lies not so much in the 
 death of a virtuous king as in the parting of Macbeth 
 from whatever possibilities for good lay within his 
 nature. We watch him with an awful interest as we 
 might watch one, beyond our reach to succour, who 
 was slipping further and further down the edge of 
 some ghastly precipice, clinging feebly for a time 
 to grasses and shingle, and then fascinated by the 
 
8o INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 horror of his descent, and plunging forward. Mac- 
 beth's wife is more finely organized than he; she 
 weighs with steady hand the crown against the 
 crime, and having willed the end, accepts with it the 
 inevitable means. But, in assisting at the slaughter 
 of Duncan, she has slain herself; her strength for 
 crime is quickly exhausted ; she is herself banished 
 from life by those good laws of the world which she 
 had violated. The witches are at once sublime and 
 grotesque; they are not mere creatures of the brain 
 like the dagger that appeared before the murderer's 
 eyes; they are the incarnation of those evil powers 
 which exist around us, if not in nature, assuredly in 
 the world of human society, which are impotent 
 against the man whose heart is set on righteousness, 
 and lure to his ruin the man who pauses half-hearted 
 between good and evil. 
 
 § 41. Antony and Cleopatra (1607) and Coriolanus 
 (1608) may be viewed as contrasted dramatic studies. 
 In both plays a Roman is alienated from Rome ; the 
 bond between the citizen and his mother-country is 
 in one case slowly dissolved, in the other it is vio- 
 lently strained and severed. The crime of Antony 
 is that of a rich, pleasure-loving, voluptuous tem- 
 perament; the crime of Coriolanus springs from 
 overweening pride. Each is a great nature, .magni- 
 ficently endowed; and over each the influence of a 
 woman — a mistress or a mother — dominates. Hav- 
 ing painted in magic colours, as various as those of 
 the shifting sea, the Eastern witch, Antony's " Ser- 
 pent of Old Nilus", Shakespeare turned to carve, as 
 it were in deathless marble, the figure of his Roman 
 matron, a majestic caryatid upbearing the weight of 
 
TIMON OF ATHENS. 8 1 
 
 the Roman household. Perhaps something of the 
 great poet's poHtical feeling may be discovered 
 through his Coriolanus; he was certainly no demo- 
 cratic idealizer of the mob ; if he acknowledged the 
 good heart, he saw also the weak head of the people 
 acting en masse, or swayed by the wily demagogue ; 
 but he had at the same time a clear perception of 
 the vices of the patrician temper. We can well 
 believe that neither an unbridled democracy nor an 
 insolent aristocracy would have been altogether to 
 Shakespeare's liking. 
 
 § 42. The revolt against country in these two 
 Roman plays passes into revolt against humanity 
 in Timon of Athens. Only a portion of the play is 
 from Shakespeare's hand; but that portion was 
 written with full dramatic fervour. The misan- 
 thropy of Timon is the recoil from his own facile 
 optimism; he had never known men as they are; 
 his former careless generosity was far from true 
 benevolence; his present hatred of the evil race of 
 men is equally the passion of a dream. The creator 
 of Timon, who put into his lips such eloquent in- 
 vective against his kind, was himself no misan- 
 thrope. He had seen the evil and the good in the 
 human heart ; he would have the whole fact in his 
 view and nothing but the fact; he desired, before 
 all else, to see life whole; to be just of temper. And 
 justice in a great mind necessarily results in gentle- 
 ness when it has to deal with such creatures — so 
 nobly endowed, so pathetically frail, so sublime, so 
 ludicrous, so lovable — as man and woman. 
 
 §43. There are few transitions in literature more 
 remarkable than that from Shakespeare's tragedies 
 
82 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 of passion to the romantic plays, so grave and yet 
 so glad, of liis closing years of authorship. It is 
 the transition from tempest, with its lightnings and 
 thunderings, to a wide and illuminated calm. The 
 writer of these exquisite plays, Cymbeline, The 
 Winter's Tale, The Tempest, has none of the light- 
 ness of heart which is the property of youth; he 
 knows the wrongs of life ; he sees the errors of men ; 
 but he seems to have found a resting-place of faith, 
 hope, charity. The dissonances are resolved into a 
 harmony; the spirit of the plays is one of large 
 benignity ; they tell of the blessedness of the for- 
 giveness of injuries ; they show how broken bonds 
 between heart and heart may be repaired and re- 
 united; each play closes with a victory of love. 
 In Shakespeare's part of the drama of Pericles 
 several of the motives more fully developed in the 
 later plays are introduced; it is the story of loss 
 and recovery, through trial and sorrow, of a beloved 
 child. In Cymbeline husband and wife are parted 
 and for a while unjustly estranged, but only that 
 the joy of reunion may be more exquisite ; while, 
 at the same moment, a royal father, after years of 
 sorrow for their disappearance, regains his long-lost 
 sons. In The Winter's Tale husband and wife are 
 again, and more cruelly, estranged; their infant 
 daughter is believed to have perished by a barbar- 
 ous death; but at the last all Hermione's wrongs 
 are forgiven in her silent embrace of Leontes, and 
 are recompensed, as far as recompense is possible, 
 by her possession of the child, now in all the bloom 
 of early womanhood, for whose loss she had so long 
 lamented. In The Tempest grievous wrong has 
 
THE ROMANTIC PLAYS. 83 
 
 been wrought, and now the injured Duke of Milan 
 has all the ill-doers in his power; but he has come 
 to feel that "the rarer action is in virtue than in 
 vengeance"; he uses his supernatural power to 
 soften the hearts of the offenders, as far as that is 
 possible with any of them, and then he wins bade 
 their love by his forgiveness. And here again the 
 wisdom of those who attain through suffering is 
 contrasted with the beautiful joy of youth which as 
 yet has known no sorrow. Again there is a lost 
 child restored — Ferdinand to his father the King 
 of Naples; and again there is a rare environment 
 of natural beauty, the strange sea and the island of 
 enchantment, more wonderful, yet hardly more 
 quickening to the spirit, than the stormy ocean 
 and wide sea-coast of Pericles, the wild Welsh 
 mountains of Cymbeline, the fields with primrose 
 and daffodil of The Winter's Tale. The wrongs of 
 life and how they may be transcended ; trials of 
 the affections ; triumphs of fortitude and patience ; 
 magnanimous self-possession under suffering; love 
 purified by grief, and in the end supreme over all; 
 wisdom of the intellect at one with moral wisdom ; 
 the radiant joy of young and pure hearts: — these 
 are the themes of Shakespeare's latest plays. Yet 
 no moral is ever obtruded ; the dramatist is intent 
 only on duly presenting his characters and evolving 
 their action. If the Shakespearian fragment Pericles 
 be viewed as a kind of prologue to this group of 
 plays, we may describe the Shakespearian fragment 
 of King Henry VIII. as its epilogue. The same 
 spirit in a great measure presides over this play, 
 although, of course, its historical character causes 
 
84 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 that spirit to be the same with a diflference. Queen 
 Katherine is a Hermione of English history; she 
 has a like dignity, a like magnanimous courage 
 in adversity. It may be, as Dr. Garnett ingeni- 
 ously argues, that The Tempest is Shakespeare's 
 last complete play, and we gladly accept the idea 
 of Campbell that the great enchanter of the im- 
 aginary world of the drama bade farewell to the 
 stage in the person of his own Prospero ; with him 
 forswore his magic art, broke his staff of power, 
 and sunk his book "deeper than did ever plummet 
 sound ". If this be so, we may suppose that both 
 The Tempest and its author's contribution to the 
 pageant play of King Henry VIII. were written in 
 his retirement at Stratford, and reflect the harmoni- 
 ous wisdom of his years of rural leisure. 
 
 §44. Looking back over the events of Shake- 
 speare's life, and the series of his plays and poems, 
 observing especially the Sonnets, where we may 
 well believe the poet expresses his own feelings in 
 his own person, we seem to see a man not naturally 
 self-contained and self-possessed, but sensitive, eager, 
 ardent, of strong passions, quick imagination, uni- 
 versal sympathy; at the same time a man with a 
 central sanity of mind, and one for whom wisdom, 
 knowledge, and self-control were constantly growing 
 powers. So his material life, after certain errors 
 natural to his temperament, was conducted to a 
 prosperous issue ; and his ideal life, passing through 
 shine and shadow, touching all heights and depths 
 of human experience, attained at the close a high 
 table-land, where the light is clear and steadfast 
 and the finest airs of heaven are breathed by man. 
 
THE DOUBTFUL PLAYS. 85 
 
 He sees human existence widely, calmly, with a 
 temperate heart, with eyes purged and purified. 
 And he sees perhaps not only the vision of life, 
 but through it to deeper and larger things beyond. 
 Shakespeare does not tell us what he saw when he 
 looked beyond life with- those calm experienced 
 eyes. It was not his province to report such things 
 to us as if he were God's spy. But assuredly he 
 saw nothing which confused or clouded his soul; 
 else he could not feel towards this our mortal life 
 so purely, wisely, gently; else the great enchanter, 
 this Prospero of ours, could not so tranquilly resign 
 his magic robe and staff, dismiss his airy spirits, 
 and piously accept the duties of mere manhood.^ 
 
 III. 
 
 § 45. Before passing on to speak of the growth of 
 Shakespeare's fame a word may here be said of the 
 doubtful plays of Shakespeare, or, as several of them 
 may certainly be named, the pseudo-Shakespearian 
 plays. Of these plays one early historical drama 
 and one late romantic comedy have the best claim 
 to contain work from Shakespeare's hand. The 
 Raigne of King Edward the Third was entered on 
 the Stationers' Register, Dec. i, 159S, and was 
 published in quarto in 1596. There is no external 
 evidence to connect Shakespeare with the play, but 
 Capell in his prolusions of 1760 called attention to 
 a resemblance in style between this work and 
 Shakespeare's "earlier performances", and to the 
 
 ' In this paragraph I have appropriated a few sentences from an 
 article of mine entitled Shakespeare's Wisdom of Life, which I have not 
 reprinted since its first appearance. 
 
86 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 fact that Holinshed's Chronicles and Painter's 
 Palace of Pleasure (both books having been cer- 
 tainly used by Shakespeare for the plots of plays) 
 supplied the fable. Mr. Fleay believes that Ed- 
 ward III. was a play of Marlowe's which Shake- 
 speare altered and revised. The Shakespearian part 
 he holds to be from the entrance of King Edward 
 in the last scene of act i. to the end of act ii. 
 " For myself", writes Mr. Swinburne, who has made 
 a careful study of the play, " I am, and have always 
 been, perfectly satisfied with one single and simple 
 piece of evidence that Shakespeare had not a finger 
 in the concoction of King Edward III. He was 
 the author of King Henry V." If any man of 
 common judgment, Mr. Swinburne adds, can be 
 found to maintain the theory of Shakespeare's 
 possible partnership in the composition of the play, 
 " such a man will assuredly admit that the only 
 discernible or imaginable touches of his hand are 
 very slight, very few, and very early". This last 
 statement expresses sufficiently nearly my own 
 opinion. In the portion of King Edward III. 
 ascribed to Shakespeare by Mr. Fleay, the amorous 
 king makes an attempt upon the honour of the 
 Countess of Salisbury, which is met by a spirited 
 repulse. With a reference to the Roman Lucrece 
 the king, now brought to his better mind, addresses 
 her: 
 
 Arise, true English lady : whom our isle 
 May better boast of, than e'er Roman might 
 Of her, whose ransack'd treasury hath task'd 
 The vain endeavours of so many pens. 
 
 It seems to me far from probable that the author 
 
THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN. 87 
 
 of the Rape of Lucrece is here alluding to his own 
 poem. 
 
 § 46. The romantic comedy of The Two Noble 
 Kinsmen is of a much later date, and has certainly 
 a far stronger claim to be considered as in part the 
 work of Shakespeare. It was first printed in 1634, 
 eighteen years after our great dramatist's death, and 
 on the title-page it bore his name as joint-author 
 with Fletcher. Other external evidence than this 
 there is none. The internal evidence yields a 
 doubtful result. Several eminent critics— Coleridge, 
 Hallam, Dyce, Sidney Walker, Mr. Swinburne, and 
 others — have accepted the theory of Shakespeare's 
 joint authorship, and schemes for the distribution 
 of the acts and scenes between Fletcher and Shake- 
 speare have been proposed.^ But it is a remarkable 
 fact that one of the most accomplished and careful 
 students of the play, Professor Spalding, who in 
 1833 published an essay in which he endeavoured, 
 Avith singular fineness of criticism, to draw the line 
 between Shakespeare's handiwork and Fletcher's, 
 declared in 1840 that his opinion was then "not so 
 decided as it once was", and wrote in 1847 with 
 increasing doubts that "the question of Shake- 
 speare's share in this play is really insoluble". 
 What happened in Spalding's case has probably 
 happened with not a few persons, who at one time 
 were assured that the hand of Shakespeare can be 
 discerned in The Two Noble Kinsmen. The parts 
 ascribed to him seem to grow less like his work in 
 thought, feeling, and expression, as we, so to speak, 
 
 * Shakespeare's part : act i. (except part of sc. 2. ) ; act ii. sc. i ; 
 act. iii. sc. i. 2; act. iv, sc. 3; act v. (except sc. 2). 
 
88 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 live with them. The resemblance which at first 
 impressed us so strongly seems to fade, or, if it 
 remains, to be at most something superficial. At 
 the present moment the drift of opinion is rather 
 in favour of assigning the play to Fletcher and 
 Massinger. The subject of The Two Noble Kins- 
 men is the story of Palamon and Arcite (told by 
 Chaucer in his Knightes Tale), with which a wretched 
 underplot, the work of Fletcher, is connected. 
 
 No intelligent reader of Locrine, Mucedorus, The 
 London Prodigal, The Puritan, The Life and Death 
 of Thomas Cromwell, The History of Sir John Old- 
 castle, Fair Em, The Birth of Merlin, can suppose 
 that a single line was contributed to any one of 
 these plays by Shakespeare. It is conceivable that 
 touches from his hand may exist in A Yorkshire 
 Tragedy, and even in Arden of Feversham. But 
 the chance that this is actually the case is exceed- 
 ingly small. We may therefore set down King 
 Edward III. and The Two Noble Kinsmen as 
 doubtful plays; the rest for which an idle claim 
 has been made, should be named pseudo-Shake- 
 spearian. 
 
 IV. 
 
 §47. While Shakespeare lived his poems circulated 
 widely and received high commendation ; his plays 
 were favourites with the people, and were also 
 esteemed by the courtly patrons of the dr^ma. It 
 is probable that for some years after Shakespeare's 
 death the plays of Fletcher were more popular 
 upon the stage than those of any other writer. 
 Ben Jonson was looked on as the great master of 
 
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY APPRECIATION. 89 
 
 the scholarly or classical school of dramatic writing ; 
 he was, however, probably more praised by the 
 judicious than enjoyed by the ordinary spectators 
 of the theatre. Taste was deteriorating from Eliza- 
 bethan days ; the manlier temper of the drama was 
 declining; and Shakespeare's plays soon came to 
 be regarded as somewhat old-fashioned. Yet we 
 know that several were enacted before Charles I., 
 and were, as Sir Henry Herbert records in his 
 Office Book, "well likte by the kinge". It was 
 one of the virtues — not too numerous — of that 
 loyal courtier and slight poet Sir John Suckling 
 that he knew Shakespeare well ; when his portrait 
 was painted by Vandyke he was represented as 
 holding in his left hand a folio on the edge of which 
 is a paper bearing the name Shakespeare. The 
 growth of Puritanism was of course unfavourable 
 to the influence of a dramatic writer; yet Milton, 
 the greatest poet of Puritanism, did honour in his 
 earlier days to Shakespeare's memory in verses 
 which tell of the profound impression made by the 
 dramatist's "Delphic lines", and elsewhere cele- 
 brated him in contrast with Jonson, the poet of 
 art and erudition, for "his native woodnotes wild". 
 It was a grief to William Prynne, the author of 
 Histrio-Mastix (1633), that " Shackspeer's Plaies 
 are printed in the best Crowne paper, far better 
 than most Bibles " ; but that grief may have been 
 allayed by knowledge of the fact that no " crowne 
 paper" in folio form was used for this unworthy 
 purpose during the period of the struggle against 
 the bishops and the king. 
 
 In Restoration days, when the theatres were 
 
 (789) G 
 
go INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 reopened and possessed the new attraction of 
 actresses in the female parts, there was something 
 like a Shakespearian revival; but it was accom- 
 panied with the feeling that though Shakespeare 
 was a glory of the elder English drama, he be- 
 longed to an age half-barbarous in comparison 
 with one which had been refined by the growth of 
 general culture and by influences derived from 
 France. Killigrew's new theatre in Drury Lane 
 opened with King Henry IV. The great actor 
 Betterton appeared in several of Shakespeare's 
 leading characters. The dramatist D'Avenant did 
 honour to his memory. On Oct. ii, 1660, Mr. 
 Samuel Pepys saw the " Moor of Venice " at the 
 Cockpit, and on December 5 of the same year at 
 the New Theatre " The Merry Wives of Windsor ". 
 In later entries in his diary he mentions that he had 
 been present at performances of Romeo and Juliet, "a 
 play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my life " ; 
 A Midsummer Night's Dream, "the most insipid 
 ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life"; Twelfth 
 Night, "a silly play"; Macbeth, "a most excellent 
 play for variety" ; and to this last he returned again 
 and again. The altered taste of the time made it 
 seem necessary that Shakespeare's plays, in not a 
 few instances, should be recast and modernized, a 
 practice which was continued — and, as may readily 
 be conceived, often with lamentable results — during 
 the eighteenth century. The Tempest was altered 
 by D'Avenant and Dryden, with added spectacle 
 and song, new characters, and indecent dialogue. 
 Antony and Cleopatra was improved upon by 
 Sedley, Timon of Athens by Shadwell, Cymbeline 
 
DRYDEN ON SHAKESPEARE. 9 1 
 
 by D'Urfey. Songs were written for Macbeth; 
 Shylock was introduced at supper drinking a toast 
 to his lady Money; Grumio of the Taming of the 
 Shrew became a Scotchman. Tate made Edgar a 
 lover of Cordelia, and gave the tragedy a happy 
 denouement. Fortunately Hamlet escaped revision. 
 With this old play even the polite Mr. Pepys was 
 mightily pleased, and above all with Betterton in 
 the leading character, "the best part, I believe, 
 that ever man acted". 
 
 §48. Dryden venerated Shakespeare while he 
 admitted (1663) that "others are now generally 
 preferred before him ". In " An Essay on Dramatic 
 Poetry" (1668) he ventures to assert that Shake- 
 speare " was the man who of all modern and per- 
 haps ancient poets had the largest and most 
 comprehensive soul"; but Dryden was not insen- 
 sible to the fact that Shakespeare did not observe 
 the laws of the drama as laid down by the critics 
 whose authority was dominant in the Restoration 
 period. His own All for Love, a play on the sub- 
 ject of Antony and Cleopatra, was written in blank 
 verse, and he tells us that he aspired to imitate in 
 his style "the divine Shakespeare". "The poet 
 .iEschylus '', he says in his essay On the Grounds of 
 Criticism in Tragedy (1679), "was held in the same 
 veneration by the Athenians of after ages as Shake- 
 speare is by us." This essay, which shows a more 
 mature appreciation of Shakespeare's genius than 
 appears in Dryden's earlier writings, is supposed by 
 Dr. Johnson to have been occasioned by Thomas 
 Rymer's Tragedies of the last Age considered and 
 examined. In this and subsequent writings the 
 
92 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 laborious compiler of the Foedera applies to Shake- 
 speare the Aristotelian rules of tragedy, and finds 
 " in the neighing of a horse or the growling of a 
 mastiff . . . more humanity than many times in 
 the tragical flights of Shakespeare". Gildon and 
 Dennis replied to Rymer; and Dennis, who in his 
 better days was a far more intelligent critic than 
 Pope's satire would lead us to believe, wrote of 
 Shakespeare with sincere and ardent admiration. 
 " One may say of him," writes Dennis, " as they did 
 of Homer — that he had none to imitate, and is 
 himself inimitable. His imaginations were often 
 as just as they were bold and strong. He had a 
 natural discretion which never could have been 
 taught him, and his judgment was strong and 
 penetrating. He seems to have wanted nothing 
 but time and thought to have found out those rules 
 of which he appears so ignorant." When we reach 
 the age of Queen Anne we find the supremacy of 
 Shakespeare's genius generally acknowledged. 
 
 §49. The critical editions begin with that of 
 Nicholas Rowe, 1709. The demands of the seven- 
 teenth century had been satisfied by four editions in 
 folio, published respectively in 1623, 1632, 1663-64, 
 and 1685; if tried by the same test the popularity 
 of Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher appears to 
 have been less considerable. Rowe did something 
 to purge the text of Shakespeare from its grosser 
 errors; he was himself a dramatic poet, and more- 
 over, he was a man- of good sense. His corrections 
 are not those of a collater of early editions or a 
 student of our elder literature, but such as would 
 occur to any cultivated and judicious reader. He 
 
POPE AS EDITOR. 93 
 
 was the first to attempt to write a life of Shake- 
 speare; it is a slender production, but has a value 
 as containing some traditions not elsewhere to be 
 found. Pope followed Rowe in 1725 with his 
 edition in six quarto volumes. "The minute me- 
 chanical examination which the enterprise required", 
 writes Pope's latest biographer, Mr. Courthope, 
 "was little suited to the broad and generalizing 
 genius of Pope's criticism, nor did he approach his 
 task in that spirit of sympathy with his author 
 which just editing requires. He altered some 
 expressions in the text because they seemed to him 
 vulgar, and others because the versification did not 
 conform to his ideas of harmony. Comparatively 
 little of his labour was spent in research, but some 
 of the conjectural emendations were happy, and 
 the Preface to the edition, written in his best 
 style — and his critical prose is always excellent — 
 deserves the high commendation that Johnson 
 bestows upon it." In this Preface indeed some 
 admirable thoughts are admirably expressed. 
 "Shakespeare is not so much an imitator, as an 
 instrument of nature." Can more be said in fewer 
 words? And on one of the controversies of his 
 own day he thus pronounces his opinion: "To 
 judge of Shakespeare by Aristotle's rules, is like 
 trying a man by the laws of one country who acted 
 under those of another". That Shakespeare was a 
 careless writer who never blotted a line is denied 
 by Pope, on the evidence of the varying text of the 
 quartos; nor was he an unlearned man, unless 
 "learning" means no more than "languages". The 
 Shakespearian drama in comparison with the more 
 
9+ INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 finished and regular drama is like "an ancient 
 majestick piece of Go thick architecture compared 
 with a neat modern building. ... It has much 
 the greater variety, and much the nobler apart- 
 ments ; though we are often conducted to them by 
 dark, odd, and uncouth passages. Nor does the 
 whole fail to strike us with greater reverence, 
 though many of the parts are childish, ill-placed, 
 and unequal to its grandeur." Finer praise than 
 this we could not expect from the Augustan age 
 which delighted in Cato and the translation of 
 Homer. 
 
 Pope's rival as an editor of Shakespeare, Louis 
 Theobald, indebted to Pope, as he says, for some 
 "flagrant civilities", if he was a duller man than his 
 satirist of the Dunciad, was a far better Shake- 
 spearian scholar. His method of dealing with 
 Shakespeare was to treat his text as that of a 
 corrupt classic; and he claims to be the first to 
 approach any modern author in this manner. He 
 did some scholarly collation, and was often happy 
 in his conjectural emendations. To him we owe 
 "'a babbled o' green fields" in the account of 
 Falstaff's death, and the reading, whether right or 
 wrong, is one which alone might make an editor's 
 reputation. His Shakespeare Restored, in which 
 he exposes the errors of Pope, appeared in 1726; 
 his edition of Shakespeare in 1733. 
 
 § 50. The "Oxford Edition," in six quarto volumes, 
 was published in 1744. The editor's name did not 
 appear, but he was soon known to be Sir Thomas 
 Hanmer. Collins celebrated the editor and his 
 author in a poetical epistle, and the edition was 
 
HANMER AND WARBURTON. 95 
 
 generally received with favour. A country gentle- 
 man of literary tastes, Hanmer had amused his 
 leisure hours, he tells us, with noting the obscurities 
 and absurdities introduced into the text, and accord- 
 ing to the best of his judgment restoring the genuine 
 sense and purity of it. The emendations multiplied, 
 and " too partial friends " persuaded him to make 
 them public. Unfortunately he was not equipped 
 with the scholarship essential to editorial work. 
 "He did something to better", as Mr. Grant White 
 has justly said, " and somewhat more to injure the 
 text as Theobald left it." Three years later, in 
 1747, Warburton's edition, based on that of Pope, 
 appeared. In his preface he extravagantly over- 
 rates the value of Pope's work as an editor, and 
 attacks Theobald and Hanmer as having pirated 
 his own manuscript notes. The persuasions of 
 "dear Mr. Pope" induced Warburton to conde- 
 scend to a task so much beneath his high powers 
 as that of defending the true text of Shakespeare 
 from the wrongs done to it by dulness of appre- 
 hension and extravagance of conjecture. " Mr. 
 Pope was willing that his edition should be melted 
 down into mine, as it would, he said, afford him (so 
 great is the modesty of an ingenuous temper) a fit 
 opportunity of confessing his mistakes. In memory 
 of our friendship I have, therefore, made it our joint 
 edition.'' The modesty of an ingenuous temper 
 certainly was not a characteristic of Warburton. 
 His arrogance repels the reader, and when he goes 
 wrong, which happens very often, he does so with a 
 confidence amounting to effrontery. " Among the 
 commentators on Shakespeare", writes Hallam, 
 
96 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 with no unjust severity, "Warburton, always striv- 
 ing to display his own acuteness and scorn of 
 others, deviates more than anyone else from the 
 meaning." Yet, having before him the work of 
 Theobald and Hanmer, whom he denounces, his 
 text is in some respects an improvement on that of 
 Pope. The edition drew forth severe criticism from 
 contemporary scholars — Zachary Grey, Heath, 
 Upton, and especially from Thomas Edwards in 
 his satirical Canons of Criticism. Dr. Johnson, 
 who honoured Warburton above his deserts, de- 
 scribes Edwards as ridiculing the editor's errors 
 with " airy petulance suitable enough to the levity 
 of the controversy"; while Grey attacks them "with 
 gloomy malignity, as if he were dragging to justice 
 an assassin or an incendiary". 
 
 § 5 1. In the same year in which Warburton pub- 
 lished his edition, 1747, David Garrick pronounced 
 at the opening of Drury Lane Theatre the lines in 
 which Johnson, with a fine extravagance, sounded 
 the praises of Shakespeare : — 
 
 Each change of many-colour'd life he drew, 
 Exhausted worlds, and then imagin'd new : 
 Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign, 
 And panting Time toil'd after him in vain. 
 
 Johnson's long-promised edition of Shakespeare 
 was completed in 1765. He consulted the earlier 
 texts to some extent, but was disqualified for the 
 task of minute collation by his defective eyesight. 
 As a conjectural emender he was not happy; he 
 tells us that as he practised conjecture more he 
 learned to trust it less, and after he had printed a 
 
JOHNSON'S EDITION. 97 
 
 few plays resolved to insert none of his own 
 readings in the text His Preface is an admirable 
 piece of criticism, robust and common-sense, though 
 not illuminated by imagination, or very profound in 
 its philosophical views. "This", he writes, "is the 
 praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirror 
 of life; that he who has mazed his imagination in 
 following the phantoms which other writers raise 
 up before him, may here be cured of his delirious 
 ecstasies by reading human sentiments in human 
 language; by scenes from which a hermit may 
 estimate the transactions of the world, and a con- 
 fessor predict the progress of the passions." He 
 defends Shakespeare from the censure incurred by 
 his mingling comic with tragic scenes — here too 
 the poet did no more than hold the mirror up to 
 nature. Particularly noteworthy is Johnson's dis- 
 cussion of the doctrine of the unities of time and 
 place; the spectators "are always in their senses, 
 and know, from the first act to the last, that the 
 stage is only a stage;" knowing which they can 
 make time and place, as well as any other mode of 
 being, obsequious to the imagination. After his 
 manner as a critic Johnson sets his items of con- 
 demnation over against his items of praise; as a 
 moralist he is offended by Shakespeare's sacrifice 
 of virtue to convenience, his frequent violation of 
 poetical justice; the plots are often loosely formed; 
 the latter part of his plays especially is often 
 neglected ; the poet has little regar-d to historical 
 accuracy or local colour ; his contests of wit are 
 often marred by grossness ; in tragedy he is some- 
 times tumid and sometimes obscure ; in narrative he 
 
98 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 is often pompous and tedious ; his set speeches are 
 commonly cold and weak ; a quibble has a malig- 
 nant power over his mind, it is " the golden apple 
 for which he will always turn aside from his career, 
 or stoop from his elevation ". Some of Johnson's 
 censures are just, but it is evident that from his 
 eighteenth century standpoint he never quite com- 
 prehended the spirit of Elizabethan poetry. His 
 knowledge of human nature renders some of his 
 analyses of Shakespeare's characters of peculiar 
 value ; his comment on the cliaracter of Polonius is 
 an example of passages which at once elucidate 
 the meaning of Shakespeare and exhibit the mind 
 of his critic. 
 
 In the late editions of Johnson (1773 onwards) 
 his work is connected with that of George Steevens. 
 Steevens had previously (1766) reprinted twenty of 
 Shakespeare's plays from the early quarto editions. 
 He was a man of industry, learning, and acute 
 intellect; somewhat wanting in reverence, some- 
 what wanting in modesty, and perhaps in that 
 literary honesty which goes with freedom from 
 vanity. His influence was a quickening one where 
 dulness and stagnation are dangers; but his ani- 
 mation was not of the best or purest kind. The 
 edition of Johnson and Steevens in fifteen volumes, 
 1793, often called "Steevens' own", is that which 
 shows his work at its best. In his editorial work he 
 remembered the earlier but not the closing words 
 of the motto found in Spenser: "Be bold, be bold, 
 be not too bold". 
 
 § 52. The most laborious Shakespearian scholars 
 of the second half of the eighteenth century were 
 
CAPELL AND MALONE. 99 
 
 unquestionably Capell and Malone. " If the man 
 would have come to me," said Dr. Johnson of 
 Capell's Preface, " I would have endeavoured to 
 endow his purposes with words; for as it is, he 
 doth gabble monstrously." It is true that he 
 expressed himself with awkwardness ; but he had 
 a true conception of the scholar's duty, and the 
 preface of which Johnson speaks in this disparaging 
 way has been justly described by competent 
 authorities as the most valuable contribution to 
 Shakespearian criticism that had yet appeared. 
 All the quartos then accessible, and with them the 
 folios, were collated by Capell. His text conse- 
 quently is one of exceeding value, but unfortunately 
 he did not assign the emendations which he adopted 
 from other editors and critics to their individual 
 authors. His edition is Hkely to disappoint a 
 reader who comes to it for the first time, because it 
 was issued without the valuable annotations and 
 illustrations subsequently published in part in the 
 year 1774, and after Capell's death in their entirety 
 in three quarto volumes (1783) entitled Notes, 
 Various Readings, and the School of Shakespeare. 
 Valuable service was rendered by Capell in investi- 
 gating the sources of Shakespeare's plots. 
 
 The work of Edmond Malone began with an 
 Attempt to ascertain the Order in which the Plays 
 attributed to Shakespeare were Written, which he 
 handed over as a contribution to Steevens. This 
 was followed in 1780 by a Supplement to the 
 edition of 1778, containing the Poems, the doubtful 
 plays of the Folio of 1664, and among his Prolego- 
 mena a study of the early history of the Enghsh 
 
100 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 theatre. In 1790 he published his edition of the 
 Plays and Poems in ten volumes. His industry 
 was amazing; he was as honest as he was indus- 
 trious; and if he was not brilliant, like his rival 
 Steevens, he was free from the defects which some- 
 times accompany brilliancy in a critic. The debt 
 of all later Shakespeare students to Malone is in- 
 calculable. His studies and annotations are perhaps 
 best seen in the third "Variorum" edition of Shake- 
 speare, 1 82 1, edited by James Boswell from a copy 
 corrected by Malone. The earlier Variorum edi- 
 tions, called also the fifth and sixth editions of 
 Johnson and Steevens, appeared respectively in 
 1803 and 1813 under the editorship of Isaac Reed. 
 § 53. Malone's erudition was well employed in the 
 exposure of the celebrated Ireland forgeries. Tlie 
 father, Samuel Ireland, has suffered for the mis- 
 deeds of his son, Samuel William Henry Ireland, 
 who began his discreditable career by producing 
 for his father's delectation a forged document bear- 
 Shakespeare's signature. With the success of his 
 fraud the ambition of the young conveyancer's 
 apprentice took a higher flight. A large collection 
 of papers and relics obtained from an invisible old 
 gentleman came into the hands of the fortunate 
 youth. These included a love-letter to Anne Hath- 
 away, a lock of Shakespeare's hair, his profession 
 of faith, and many other treasures. Those who 
 desired to believe in the authenticity of the papers 
 looked hard and saw what they wished to see. An 
 ancestor, with superfluous letters in his name, 
 William Henrye Irelaunde, had saved Shakespeare 
 from drowning in the Thames, and what less could 
 
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY CRITICS. lOI 
 
 the grateful poet do than bequeath many papers 
 and books to his preserver for the delight of future 
 generations? In due time a play of the great 
 dr^atist came to light. Vortigern was actually 
 presented at Drury Lane Theatre to a full house, 
 but no second night was possible. Finally the 
 impostor came forward in 1796 with a confes- 
 sion; he was still under the age of twenty. His 
 father suffered deeply from the disgrace, and died 
 in 1800. William Henry Ireland survived until 
 
 1835. 
 
 § 54. The critics of the eighteenth century — Grey, 
 Upton, Heath, Ritson, Monck Mason, and others, 
 were in the main textual critics of greater or less 
 ability. Farmer's Essay on the Learning of Shake- 
 speare (1767) deserves special mention; in this he 
 aims at proving that Shakespeare's knowledge of 
 the classics was derived from translations: "He 
 remembered ", says Farmer, '' perhaps enough of his 
 school-boy learning to put the Hig, hag, hog, into the 
 mouth of Sir Hugh Evans; and might pick up in 
 the writers of the time, or the course of his conver- 
 sation, a familiar phrase or two of French or Italian : 
 but his studies were most demonstratively confined 
 to nature and his own language" . Another essay 
 of a different kind, Maurice Morgann's Dramatic 
 Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777). is a genial 
 piece of criticism, maintaining the thesis that Fal- 
 staff was no coward. Charlotte Lennox, the friend 
 of Dr. Johnson, did something by her Shakespeare 
 Illustrated (1753-54) to render the materials from 
 which the dramatist formed his plots better known. 
 Another lady, Mrs. Montagu, ventured to come 
 
I02 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 forward with a defence of Shakespeare against the 
 criticism of Voltaire. " When Shakespeare has got 
 Mrs. Montagu for his defender", said Johnson, "he 
 is in a poor state indeed." But Reynolds and 
 Garrick were of a different opinion. 
 
 §55- A new school of criticism illuminated the 
 study of Shakespeare in the early years of the 
 present century. Coleridge in his lectures con- 
 ceived art in general, and the dramatic art in par- 
 ticular, in a truer and higher way than any preceding 
 writer. He was neither in bondage to Aristotle 
 nor in revolt against him. He saw that the same 
 spirit was expressing itself through .^Eschylus, 
 Sophocles, and Shakespeare, though by methods 
 which differed with all the differences of epochs 
 and of races. He conceived Shakespeare's work 
 as a whole; he observed the fruit as it hung in 
 living beauty on the tree. And each play and 
 poem he also conceived as a living whole. He 
 studied its parts in their vital relation to one 
 another ; he did not murder to dissect His analyses, 
 or rather interpretations, of the characters of the 
 dramatis personcB, are the outcome of a penetrative 
 imagination ; they are new creations, as it were, of 
 the Shakespearian personages, transposed from 
 poetry to criticism. He does not measure them 
 by yard and line, but winds himself into their inner 
 being and discovers the secret of their life. Un- 
 fortunately his criticisms have reached us, for the 
 most part, in a fragmentary form; but often a 
 sentence of Coleridge is, as it were, a lamp and a 
 key, with the aid of which we can open and explore 
 the mysteries of the dramatist's art for ourselves. 
 
EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY CRITICS. I03 
 
 Hazlitt's light Is not so pure, his leading is not so 
 certain as Coleridge's; but he was ardent, and 
 threw strong gleams upon certain parts of Shake- 
 speare's work. Lamb, who touched nothing that 
 he did not adorn, attempted no systematic body of 
 criticism, but now with a loving phrase, now with 
 a paradox, now with a quip or crank, now with a 
 reminiscence from the stage, now with a brief 
 analysis of character, he helps us to a truer under- 
 standing of Shakespeare. The Tales from Shake- 
 speare by Lamb and his sister have served to intro- 
 duce many young readers to the plays from which 
 the narratives are derived. Among commentators 
 of learning rather than genius in the first thirty 
 years of this century Francis Douce was perhaps 
 the most eminent. His Illustrations of Shakspeare 
 and of Ancient Manners (1807) is a valuable store- 
 house of curious information. In 18 17 appeared 
 two quarto volumes entitled Shakespeare and his 
 Times, by Nathan Drake, which in their day ren- 
 dered useful service as a well-arranged compilation 
 of facts, with agreeable comment by one who, 
 though no original thinker, was a cultivated lover 
 of literature. 
 
 § 56. The most important editions of Shakespeare 
 which have been issued since the Variorum of 182 1 
 are those of Singer (1826),! Knight (1838-43), 
 ColHer (1841-44), Dyce (1857), Staunton (1857-60), 
 Halliwell (Folio 1853-65), and the Cambridge edi- 
 tion (1863-66). Into the comparative merits of 
 these it is not necessary to enter ; but the learning 
 
 'The dates of the first editions are given ; in several instances later 
 editions much altered and improved have appeared. 
 
I04 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 and sound judgment of Dyce deserve a special 
 acknowledgment, and no less the accuracy with 
 which the Cambridge editors have done the work 
 of collation, and the fulness with which they have 
 recorded the conjectural readings of earlier editors 
 and commentators. To these we must add the 
 edition of the German Shakespeare scholar Delius 
 (1854-61), and the American editions of R. Grant 
 White (1857-65), Hudson (1851-56), and Rolfe 
 (1884). Mr. Furness's Variorum Shakespeare (Phila- 
 delphia, 1871-92) sums up the work of all his pre- 
 decessors with respect to the plays included in the 
 volumes which have been issued; each volume is 
 indeed a little library in itself; but work so labori- 
 ous cannot be hastened, and as yet we have received 
 only a few plays from this most judicious and 
 learned editor. 
 
 The Shakespeare Society of England, in a series 
 of volumes dating from 1841 to 1853, reprinted 
 many rare and curious pieces of Elizabethan litera- 
 ture. In January, 1852, an eminent member of the 
 society, J. Payne Collier, announced that three 
 years previously he had obtained for a small sum 
 from the bookseller Rodd a copy of the second 
 Folio Shakespeare, containing many annotations — 
 which he had not observed at first — in a hand of 
 about the middle of the seventeenth century. This 
 volume became famous as the Perkins Folio, deriv- 
 ing its name from the fact that it bore on the cover 
 the inscription "Tho. Perkins his Booke". Collier 
 supposed, or pretended to suppose, that the numer- 
 ous corrections of the text, stage-directions, &c., 
 were the work of an early owner of the volume, 
 
SHAKESPEARE SOCIETIES. 105 
 
 who through his connection with the theatre and 
 attendance at performance of the plays had sources 
 of trustworthy information as to the genuine text. 
 Having previously given specimens of the "Old 
 Corrector's" work, Collier towards the close of 
 1852 published a volume of "Notes and Emenda- 
 tions" which was alleged to include all the most 
 important of the manuscript readings. When, in 
 1859, the Perkins Folio was submitted to the 
 scrutiny of experts, the manuscript notes were 
 declared to be modern forgeries. Pencil tracing 
 was found to have guided the pen in its simulation 
 of a seventeenth-century handwriting. Collier still 
 maintained that the annotations were genuine, and 
 controversy waxed warm. Competent authorities, 
 however, could not be deluded, and unfortunately 
 evidence had accumulated to confirm the impression 
 that this really learned and ingenious scholar in not 
 a few instances had yielded to the temptation to 
 win for himself by fraudulent documents a spurious 
 fame. It seemed to be the very wantonness of 
 literary dishonesty. 
 
 The "New Shakspere Society", founded by Mr. 
 Furnivall in 1874, applied itself with excellent 
 results to the study of the peculiarities of Shake- 
 speare's versification with a view to determining the 
 chronology of the plays. It reprinted some of the 
 early texts, and issued many interesting papers in 
 illustration of Shakespeare. Indirectly it led to 
 the most important service rendered in recent years 
 to the student — the publication of facsimile repro- 
 ductions of the early quartos. The first Folio had 
 previously been made generally accessible by Booth's 
 
 (789) H 
 
I06 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 accurate reprint and Staunton's photo-zincographed 
 facsimile. Among other aids to scholarship of re- 
 cent or comparatively recent years the chief are the 
 Concordance to the Plays, due to the loving indus- 
 try of Mrs. Cowden Clarke (who with her husband, 
 Charles Cowden Clarke, the friend of Keats, was 
 also an editor of Shakespeare's works) and the 
 Concordance to the Poems by the late Mrs. Furness ; 
 Schmidt's Shakespeare Lexicon, a monumental 
 work ; Hunter's Illustrations of the Life and Studies 
 of Shakespeare (1845); W. Sidney Walker's Shake- 
 speare's Versification (1854) and his Critical Exami- 
 nation of the Text of Shakespeare (1859) ; Professor 
 Ward's solid and judicious History of English 
 Dramatic Literature (1875); Mr. Fleay's Life and 
 Work of Shakespeare (1886), in which the results 
 of much research are united with ingenious, if not 
 always trustworthy, conjecture; and Mr. Halliwell- 
 Phillipps's Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, a 
 work which leaves little to be desired from a bio- 
 graphical point of view. 
 
 § 57. At the same time what has been called the 
 " aesthetic " study of Shakespeare advanced from 
 the point at which it had been left by Coleridge. 
 No critic, indeed, could penetrate more subtly to 
 Shakespeare's meanings than Coleridge did ; but 
 his work was fragmentary, a series of admirable 
 but disconnected notes. It remained to attempt 
 the great task of interpreting Shakespeare's work 
 in its totality. To this German students have at 
 least led the way. Around the name of Shake- 
 speare a vast library of German criticism has 
 accumulated, and of this library a considerable 
 
GERMAN APPRECIATION. 10/ 
 
 portion is neither laboriously dull nor extravagantly 
 theoretical. In Elizabethan days several of Shake- 
 speare's plays were performed in Germany by Eng- 
 lish companies travelling on the Continent, and 
 adaptations or imitations of them were produced 
 by German playwrights. But our great poet's 
 name was first mentioned in a German book in 
 1682; and even as late as 1740 Bodmer seems to 
 have known our " Saspar " (so he prints the name) 
 only as the author of A Midsummer Night's Dream. 
 An attempt to translate Julius Caesar into rhymed 
 Alexandrines was made in 1741 by C. W. Von 
 Borck, a Prussian minister of state, and seventeen 
 years later an equally unhappy travesty of Romeo 
 and Juliet was published at Basle. It was Lessing 
 who first taught his countrymen to honour Shake- 
 speare aright; opposing himself to the tyranny of 
 French models on the stage, he maintained that 
 judged even by the standards of antiquity Shake- 
 speare, whom Voltaire had styled " le Corneille de 
 Londres, grand fou d'ailleurs", was a higher dramatic 
 poet than the Corneille of Paris. In 1762 appeared 
 the first volume of Wieland's translation of twenty- 
 two plays by Shakespeare, on which the later com- 
 plete translation by Eschenburg (1775-77) was based. 
 Garrick's acting of Hamlet was described to German 
 readers by Lichenberg, and the manager of the 
 Hamburg theatre, Schroder — a player of great 
 eminence — put several of Shakespeare's tragedies 
 upon the boards. Herder shared in that enthusiasm 
 for our great dramatist which was extravagantly 
 expressed by his younger contemporaries of the 
 days of the Sturm und Drang. Goethe as a youth 
 
Io8 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 prepared an oration in Shakespeare's honour; in 
 manhood he illuminated the tragedy of Hamlet by 
 his admirable criticism introduced into Wilhelm 
 Meister's Apprenticeship ; in his elder years he de- 
 clared that had he been born an Englishman, with 
 Shakespeare's masterpieces in their full might before 
 him, they would have overpowered his imagination, 
 and he would not have known where to turn to find 
 an opening for his creative instinct. Schiller adapted 
 the tragedy of Macbeth, Goethe that of Romeo and 
 Juliet, to the German stage. Two valuable gifts to 
 lovers of Shakespeare came from the Romantic 
 school — Schlegel's and Tieck's incomparable trans- 
 lation of the plays; and the criticism of Schlegel 
 on dramatic art and literature, first offered in 1808 
 to a Viennese audience in the form of lectures. In 
 later years three important commentaries on the 
 complete works of Shakespeare have appeared in 
 Germany — that of Ulrici, which errs in German 
 fashion by reading into the dramas abstract ideas 
 of the critic's own theoretical mind; that of Ger- 
 vinus, which is thoughtful and sensible, but some- 
 what laboriously moralizing; and the lectures of 
 Kreyssig, which seem to me to exhibit German 
 Shakespearian criticism at its best. The William 
 Shakespeare of Karl Elze is a work of solid erudi- 
 tion, and for the German student a mine of informa- 
 tion. Since 1865 the German Shakespeare-Gesell- 
 schaft has published annually a volume of studies, 
 and among these the scholarly articles by Delius 
 deserve a special word of commendation. In 
 Cotta's Morgenblatt of 1864, the year of the ter- 
 centenary of Shakespeare's birth, and in the early 
 
THE FRENCH POINT OF VIEW. IO9 
 
 numbers of 1865 appeared a series of " Shakespeare 
 Studies by a Realist " which attracted the attention 
 of a wide circle of readers ; the articles were brilliant 
 in style, and it was refreshing in the midst of Teu- 
 tonic enthusiasm and Teutonic earnestness to hear 
 the voice of a critical Mephistopheles who denied 
 the supremacy of the English dramatist. The 
 loyal adherents of Shakespeare directed each his 
 lance against this unknown and profane Paynim, 
 who before long was discovered to bear the name 
 of Riimelin. His attack rather stimulated than 
 checked the " Shakespeare-mania " ; there is yet no 
 diminution of the seemingly inexhaustible stream 
 of German studies of our poet; it is still in Ger- 
 many, as when Goethe wrote, " Shakespeare und 
 kein Ende". 
 
 § 58. In France Voltaire called public attention 
 to the genius of Shakespeare, whom, however, he 
 represented as an intoxicated barbarian, "without 
 the smallest spark of good taste or the least know- 
 ledge of the rules". When in 1762 the French 
 Academy thanked Voltaire for his adaptation of 
 Julius Csesar they confessed that they were unable 
 to obtain a copy of his English original. Duels 
 adapted several of Shakespeare's plays — Romeo 
 and JuHet, Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, and Othello — 
 to the French stage. Hamlet in Duels' version lives 
 at the close of the play ; with the story of the lovers 
 of Verona the adapter entangles that of Dante's 
 Ugolino. The versions, however, did much to make 
 Shakespeare better known. The first French transla- 
 tion of all Shakespeare's plays was that of Letour- 
 neur (1776-82). The tone of his author was in some 
 
no INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 places altered to suit the taste of the age ; but his 
 enthusiasm for the English dramatist was evident. 
 The ardent eulogy of Shakespeare by Diderot is 
 characteristic of that great writer, who was in so 
 many ways an imitator in criticism. Madame de 
 Stael declared that while Shakespeare is the type 
 of the English, or rather the Northern genius, the 
 beauties of all countries and of -all times may be 
 found in his pages. In later years Guizot con- 
 tributed to French literature a sober study of 
 Shakespeare, and Victor Hugo a rhapsody of 
 praise. Victor Hugo's son, Fran5ois- Victor Hugo, 
 executed an admirable translation of Shakespeare, 
 and prefixed to each of the plays and poems an 
 interesting essay. The best fruits of recent Shake- 
 spearian scholarship in France, besides Hugo's 
 translation and that of M. Montegut, are the critical 
 studies of M. Mezi^res, and M. Paul Stapfer whose 
 work on Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity has 
 been translated into English.^ 
 
 § 59. Among recent English studies Lady 
 Martin's essays on Some of Shakespeare's Female 
 Characters have an interest as the critical inter- 
 pretations of one who was a distinguished inter- 
 preter of Shakespeare on the stage ; they may be 
 read with advantage in connection with the earlier 
 criticism of Mrs. Jameson in her Characteristics of 
 Women (1832). A series of thoughtful essays by 
 W. W. Lloyd was contributed to the 1856 edition 
 of Singer's Shakespeare and has since been sepa- 
 rately published. Hudson's Shakespeare; his 
 
 ' On Shakespeare in France see Lacroix's Histoire de I'lnfluence de 
 Shakespeare sur le Theatre francais (1856). 
 
RECENT CRITICS. Ill 
 
 Life, Art, and Characters, a thoughtful and sym- 
 pathetic piece of work, has achieved a deserved 
 popularity on both sides of the Atlantic. Mr. 
 Swinburne's A Study of Shakespeare (1880), 
 written with ardour and insight, characterizes the 
 three periods of the poet's development, the lyric 
 and fantastic period, the comic and historic, and 
 the tragic and romantic. Mr. Richard Moulton, 
 aiming at a popular illustration of the principles of 
 so-called "scientific criticism", has published some 
 excellent essays on "Shakespeare as a Dramatic 
 Artist" (1885). Two annotated editions of the 
 Sonnets have recently been published, the later, 
 that edited by Mr. Tyler, containing the results of 
 an ingenious endeavour to identify the persons of 
 the " Dark Lady " and " Mr. W. H." In number- 
 less editions the plays of Shakespeare have been 
 adapted to the purposes of education. Now, more 
 than at any previous period, our greatest poet, our 
 greatest Master of Life has a conspicuous part in 
 forming the mind of England. 
 
 § 60. The interpretation of Shakespeare by 
 commentators and critics has been slow, laborious, 
 cumulative. There is another kind of interpreta- 
 tion which is vital, of immediate efficacy, and 
 directly addressed to a multitude roused for the 
 time to imaginative sympathy — the interpretation 
 of great actors; unfortunately this can be but coldly 
 and imperfectly transmitted to posterity, and hence 
 it must be ever begun anew. The greatest tragic 
 actor of Shakespeare's time was Richard Burbage. 
 It has been suggested that Hamlet was made " fat 
 and scant of breath " to suit the stout person of this 
 
112 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 first Hamlet of the stage. ^ He was especially 
 identified in the popular imagination with the part 
 of King Richard HI., and his cry for "A horse! a 
 horse !" lived on in the ears of a generation. ^ 
 
 § 6i. Of post- Restoration actors who interpreted 
 Shakespeare the earliest and one of the most 
 admirable was Thomas Betterton. For upwards of 
 fifty years he held the stage, closing his dramatic 
 career amid the unbounded enthusiasm of the 
 spectators in 1710. He had the serious devotion to 
 his art which is proper to a great artist ; much per- 
 sonal dignity of life and manner; and his industry 
 was amazing. He is said to have created a hundred 
 and thirty new characters. His figure was not good; 
 but his voice was of an enchanting quality; his 
 countenance was expressive of passion as it were by 
 a touch of nature, without strain or exaggeration. 
 When as Prince of Denmark he encountered his 
 father's spirit the actor's face turned "as white as 
 his neckcloth". "When the Betterton-Brutus ", 
 says Colley Gibber, "was provoked in his dispute 
 with Cassius, his spirit flew only to his eye; his 
 steady look alone supplied that terror which he 
 disdained an intemperance in his voice should 
 rise to." His Othello and his Hamlet were in 
 a special degree masterpieces. For the latter part 
 it is said that he was instructed by D'Avenant in 
 the traditions of the stage handed down from the 
 days of Burbage and Taylor. The carping criticism 
 of the one hostile contemporary, Anthony Aston, is 
 
 1 "Faint and scant of breath" has been proposed, and the reading 
 is adopted by Mr. Tree in his stage-version of the play. 
 
 2 See the reference to Burbage as Richard in Bishop Corbet's Iter 
 Boreale. 
 
THE BETTERTONS. II3 
 
 itself a testimony to the sound judgment of the 
 great actor. " When he threw himself at Ophelia's 
 feet, he appeared a little too grave for a young 
 student just from the University of Wittenberg." 
 Too grave! — as if Hamlet were in truth "your only 
 jig-maker", and not rather among the saddest and 
 gravest of mortal men. "His repartees", goes on 
 Aston, " were more those of a philosopher than the 
 sporting flashes of young Hamlet." "Sporting 
 flashes" is good; yet who among Shakespeare's 
 characters is a philosopher if Hamlet be not one .'' 
 And we can well believe that if in this particular 
 Betterton acted upon the hints received from 
 D'Avenant, he was in fact embodying the con- 
 ception of the part which Shakespeare himself 
 may have expounded to his fellow players. " I 
 never", says Gibber, "heard a line in tragedy come 
 from Betterton, wherein my judgment, my ear, and 
 my imagination were not fully satisfied, which, 
 since his time, I cannot equally say of any one 
 actor whatsoever.'' The triumphs of half a century 
 did not overset the balance or mar the modesty 
 of one whom Pepys described as "a very sober, 
 serious man, and studious and humble, following 
 of his studies". He had the happiness of com- 
 panionship with a worthy wife, who was herself an 
 artist of high ability. As Mistress Saunderson in 
 Restoration days she played Ophelia to his Hamlet. 
 Her Lady Macbeth was declared to excel even 
 that of Mrs. Barry. She outlived her husband; but 
 his loss was followed for her by the loss of reason. 
 
 § 62. To Betterton's Hamlet, in the actor's early 
 days, the ghost was played with admirable effect by 
 
114 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 his eminent successor on the stage, Barton Booth. 
 Booth lacked, indeed, Betterton's regulated in- 
 dustry, but when roused he could toil with 
 passionate force. It is perhaps most to be noted 
 in Booth's honour, that while all the leading parts 
 were in his hands, he would readily yield these to 
 another — rarest of stage virtues — and himself show 
 his fine powers in the minor personages of the 
 drama. He played Laertes or Horatio as often as 
 he played Hamlet. "Although his Othello was 
 one of his grandest impersonations, he would take 
 Cassio, in order to give an aspirant a chance of 
 triumph in the Moor. In ' Macbeth ' Booth played 
 one night the hero of the piece; on another Banquo; 
 and, on a third, the little part of Lennox. He was 
 quite content that Gibber should play Wolsey, while 
 he captivated the audience by enacting the K>ng. 
 His Henry was a mixture of frank humour, dignity, 
 and sternness. Theophilus Gibber says enough to 
 convince us that Booth, in the King, could be 
 familiar without being vulgar, and that his anger 
 was of the quality that excites terror. He pro- 
 nounced the four words Go thy ways, Kate, with 
 such a happy emphasis as to win admiration and 
 applause : and ' when he said Now to breakfast with 
 what appetite you may, his expression was rapid and 
 vehement, and his look tremendous' "?■ 
 
 § 63. Robert Wilks, Irish by birth and education, 
 and some years senior to Booth, excelled chiefly in 
 comedy; but his Hamlet, and his Edgar in King 
 Lear were remembered with admiration. He played 
 the part of Buckingham in King Henry VIII. with 
 
 1 Doran's Annals of the English Stage, ed. 1888, vol. i. pp. V-lr'CA- 
 
WILKS, QUIN, MACKLIN. I15 
 
 fire in the earlier scene and with pathetic dignity in 
 that which preceded his execution. His Prince 
 Hal is described by Davies as one of the most 
 perfect renderings of the theatre. " At the Boar's 
 Head he was lively and frolicsome. In the recon- 
 ciliation with his father his penitence was ingenuous 
 and his promises of amendment were manly and 
 affecting. In the challenge with Hotspur his de- 
 fiance was bold, yet modest, and his triumph over 
 that impatient and imperious rebel was tempered 
 by generous regret." The stage Falstaff of the 
 same period, who in that part unquestionably sur- 
 passed all rivals, was James Quin. A third actor 
 of eminence, Charles Macklin, — like Wilks of Irish 
 origin — witnessed and shared in the stage history 
 of the eighteenth century during at least three of 
 its quarters. About 1725 he came to London; in 
 1789 with feeble frame and faihng memory he 
 made his last appearance. The most important 
 incident in his career as a Shakespearian inter- 
 preter was undoubtedly his presentation of Shylock 
 in 1 741. The Jew, during many years, had been 
 conceived basely as a low comic character, and 
 Shakespeare's play had been laid aside to make 
 room for Lord Lansdowne's unworthy alteration or 
 recast. Macklin revived the comedy in its original 
 beauty and grace ; and he exhibited Shylock not 
 as a comic villain but as a character of tragic dig- 
 nity. In 1772 he made an innovation in costume, 
 which may be noted as an indication that the town 
 was already touched by the romantic movement, 
 then in its earliest days ; Macbeth, the thane of 
 Glamis, had been wont to appear on the stage in 
 
Il6 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 the military costume of the day, with a tie-wig 
 and a suit of scarlet and gold; Macklin adopted 
 the national garb of Scotland, and saw that his 
 fellow-actors were also suitably dressed. It was as 
 Shylock that he attempted to act on his benefit 
 night when his age was either ninety or, as some 
 suppose, a hundred. "Who", he vaguely inquired, 
 "plays Shylock.'" "Who? why you, sir; you are 
 dressed for it." " He put his hand to his forehead, 
 and in a pathetic tone deplored his waning memory ; 
 and then went on the stage; spoke or tried to 
 speak two or three speeches; struggled with him- 
 self, made one or two fruitless efforts to get clear, 
 and then paused, collected his thoughts, and, in a 
 few mournful words, acknowledged his inability, 
 asked pardon, and under the farewell applause of 
 the house, was led off the stage for ever." ^ 
 
 § 64. The year 1741, memorable for Macklin's 
 restoration of the true Shylock, was yet more' 
 memorable through the presentation at the little 
 theatre in Ayliffe Street, Goodman's Fields, of 
 King Richard III. by "a gentleman", as the bills 
 announced, "who never appeared on any stage". 
 It was not strictly true that David Garrick (then 
 twenty-six years of age) had not previously acted in 
 public. He had appeared with applause at Ipswich, 
 but before October, 1741, he had not faced the 
 London public. The spectators were astonished 
 and delighted by the revelation of a new and 
 wonderful power. Every turn of passion, intel- 
 lectual pride, humour, irony, rage, despair, were 
 rendered with infallible effect; within a single part 
 
 1 Doran : Annals of the English Stage, vol. iii. pp. 74> 75, 
 
GARRICK. 117 
 
 a wide range of versatility was demonstrated. 
 Soon the more fashionable theatres were emptied, 
 and trains of carriages and crowds on foot 
 gathered to Goodman's Fields. Here was indeed 
 the true successor of Betterton. His audience, says 
 a historian of the stage, were especially impressed 
 by Garrick's " nature " — that is to say, his truth to 
 life. A mechanical method of delivery had since 
 the days of Betterton got possession of the theatre; 
 Garrick's elocution was the natural elocution of 
 passion, refined by art. " The chuckling exultation 
 of his 'So much for Buckingham!' was long a tra- 
 dition on the stage. . . . The rage and rapidity with 
 which he delivered 
 
 ' Cold friends to me ! What do they in the North, 
 When they should serve their sovereign in the West? 
 
 made a wonderful impression on the audience. 
 Hogarth has shown us how he looked when start- 
 ing from his dream ; and critics tell us that his cry 
 of 'Give me another horse !' was the cry of a gallant, 
 fearless man ; but that it fell into one of distress as 
 he said 'Bind up my wounds', while the 'Have 
 mercy, Heaven!' was moaned piteously on bended 
 knee." "Garrick", said Quin, "is a new religion; 
 the people follow him as another Whitiield, but 
 they will soon return to church again." They did 
 not, however, prove as willing as Quin supposed to 
 return from the religion of genuine nature to the 
 church of stage convention. 
 
 Next year, 1742, Garrick quitted Goodman's 
 Fields for Drury Lane, and while continuing his 
 Richard HI. he added to his repertory the difficult 
 
Il8 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 part of King Lear. The distraction and despair of 
 the afflicted king were studied from life; a gentle- 
 man of Garrick's acquaintance had been through 
 a melancholy accident the cause of his daughter's 
 death; his reason forsook him, and it was his habit 
 to go frequently to the window from which he had 
 allowed the child to fall, and there to re-enact his 
 last caresses, his agony, and his despair. From 
 suggestions derived thence and heightened by his 
 own genius, Garrick created his heart-breaking ex- 
 position of Lear's anguish as he hangs over the 
 body of Cordelia. "In that exquisite performance," 
 writes Gait, " which touched the heart of the spec- 
 tators with a sympathy more like grief than only 
 sympathy, he had no sudden starts nor violent ges- 
 ticulations; his movements were slow and feeble, 
 misery was in his look, he fearfully moved his head, 
 his eyes were fixed and glittering without specu- 
 lation; when he turned to those around him he 
 paused, seemed to be summoning remembrance, 
 and in every sad and demented feature expressed 
 a total alienation of mind."^ Thirteen years later 
 Garrick gave his rendering of Lear as it were in 
 rivalry; with the handsome young Irish actor, 
 Spranger Barry. An epigram of the day puts in 
 brief the judgment of the wits respecting this con- 
 test: — 
 
 The town has found out dififrent ways, 
 
 To praise the different Lears ; 
 To Barry they gave loud huzzas ! 
 
 To Garrick — only tears. 
 
 ^ Lives of the Players, vol. i. p. 257. In this passage Gait is "con- 
 veying " somewhat liberally from Murphy's Life of Garrick. 
 
GARRICK AND BARRY. II9 
 
 On an earlier occasion the rivalry between the same 
 two actors — the one appearing at Drury Lane, the 
 other at Covent Garden — was in the character of 
 Romeo. In the garden scenes Barry excelled; 
 Garrick surpassed him in the meetings of Romeo 
 with the Friar and the Apothecary. " Had I been 
 Juliet to Garrick's Romeo," said a lady who wit- 
 nessed both performances, " so ardent and impas- 
 sioned was he, I should have expected that he 
 would have come up to me in the balcony; but had 
 I been Juliet to Barry's Romeo, so tender, so elo- 
 quent, and so seductive was he, I should certainly 
 have gone down to him." Garrick's Juliet, Miss 
 Bellamy, was, however, more ardent in her passion 
 than Mrs. Gibber, who played with his rival. In 
 Othello, where Barry succeeded, Garrick may be 
 said to have failed; but his Hamlet and his Mac- 
 beth more than made amends. Through Hamlet's 
 emotion in presence of the ghost, the supernatural 
 seemed for the spectators to become a reality. His 
 colour left his cheeks; his voice became low and 
 interrupted ; he stood an image of awe, pity, rever- 
 ence, and horror.^ Garrick as Macbeth was praised 
 more for "nature " than for heroism. In the dagger 
 scene he was especially impressive; his rendering 
 is said to have differed as widely from the " majestic 
 solemnity" of John Kemble as from the "restless 
 ecstasy " of Quin. 
 
 § 65. In 1776 Garrick took his leave of the stage. 
 Five nights before that farewell he played his first 
 
 > The most interesting account of Garriclc as Hamlet is that written 
 by the German Lichtenberg, who is perhaps best remembered in con- 
 nection with the study of Hogarth in Germany. See also in Tom 
 Jones, book xvi. chap, v., the visit of Partridge to the playhouse 
 
I20 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 great part — that of Richard III. — to the Lady Anne 
 of Sarah Siddons. Her first appearance at Drury 
 Lane had been six months previously, when, on 
 December 29, 1775, her Portia was announced as 
 to be taken " by a young lady". She was now in 
 her twenty-first year, and had been married since 
 November, 1773. She belonged from her birth to 
 the stage ; both Roger Kemble, her father, and his 
 wife were strolling players. She made her first ap- 
 pearance at so early an age that the audience were 
 roused to indignant pity, which was appeased only 
 by her happy recitation of the fable "The Boys and 
 Frogs". Success came to her first in Bath, and 
 when in 1782 she passed from Bath to London, the 
 peals of applause which greeted her were such as 
 probably no actress had hitherto won. In comedy, 
 indeed, she achieved no triumph; her genius was 
 essentially of a tragic cast. Her Constance, Des- 
 demona, Volumnia, Cordelia were great and origi- 
 nal impersonations. Perhaps her highest achieve- 
 ments were in the part of the royal criminal. Lady 
 Macbeth, and that of the royal saint. Queen Katha- 
 rine. "Mrs. Siddons", writes Doran, "imagined 
 Lady Macbeth, the heroine of the most tragic of 
 tragedies, to be a delicate blonde, who ruled by her 
 intellect, and subdued by her beauty, but with 
 whom no one feeling of common general nature 
 was congenial; a woman prompt for wickedness, 
 but swiftly possessed by remorse; one who is 
 horror-stricken for herself and for the precious hus- 
 band, who, more robust and less sensitive, plunges 
 deeper into crime, and is less moved by any sense 
 of compassion or sorrow." Gait speaks from his 
 
MRS. SIDDONS. 121 
 
 personal recollection of the deep impression pro- 
 duced by the "low deep accent of apprehension, 
 or of conscious conspiracy which she sustained 
 throughout, especially as it influenced the utterance 
 of her Medean invocation to the 
 
 Spirits that tend on mortal thought, 
 
 and still more in the subsequent scene, where she 
 chastises with her valour the hesitation of Macbeth ". 
 The sleep-walking scene was, he adds, so tremen- 
 dous that whether literal in its truth to nature or 
 not, with such a character, gnawed with the Pro- 
 methean agonies of crime, it ought to have been 
 natural. Her Queen Katharine is described by the 
 same writer as only inferior to the sublimity of 
 Lady Macbeth, yet hardly comparable with that 
 part as being of so different a kind: "The manner 
 in which she retired from the trial scene was equal 
 to her grandeur at the banquet in Macbeth, and the 
 sensibility with which she uttered 'God help me!' 
 as she quitted the room, was perhaps the most 
 exquisitely just expression of grief and feeling ever 
 uttered in representation. I should, however, only 
 tire in prolonging the description of her dignity and 
 sensibility. Her excellence in these two great and 
 rare qualities constituted the main ingredient of her 
 amazing sorcery." Mrs. Siddons retired from the 
 stage in June 1812, closing her great career in the 
 part of Lady Macbeth. Her rare appearances on 
 subsequent occasions ceased in 18 19. The greatest 
 of tragic actresses was a true and admirable woman 
 in her domestic life; she had toiled for her children 
 and endured with courageous resignation the sorrow 
 (789) I 
 
122 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 of surviving all of them but one. When her death 
 took place on June 8, 183 1, it was felt that a light 
 and glory of England had been extinguished. 
 
 § 66. Sarah Siddons' brother, Charles Kemble, 
 became, by force of some native talent and much 
 careful study, a graceful and refined actor. His 
 Cassio, Faulconbridge, Macduff, Edgar, were each 
 the best rendering of the part in his time. But his 
 fame was obscured by the greater glory of his elder 
 brother, John Philip Kemble. After some training 
 at provincial theatres he appeared in 1783 at Drury 
 Lane as Hamlet, and it was quickly felt that a new 
 and distinguished actor had come upon the boards. 
 Two years later he played Othello to his sister's 
 Desdemona, and Macbeth to his sister's Lady Mac- 
 beth. His Lear, played in 1788 to his sister's Cor- 
 delia, was one of his most admirable performances. 
 But it was in his Roman parts that John Kemble, 
 with his noble figure and stately manner, showed 
 to most advantage; in particular he identified him- 
 self with Shakespeare's Coriolanus. " Had he only 
 acted in that character," writes a critic who was not 
 insensible to the weaknesses of Kemble's stately 
 mannerism, "he would have been deemed the very 
 greatest male actor ever seen ; it was in all points 
 of conception, look, and utterance equal to the 
 Lady Macbeth of Mrs. Siddons. In no other part 
 whatever did he, or could he, attain equal eminence." 
 John Kemble had received a liberal education at 
 Douay, and he possessed in addition to his genius 
 as an actor, something of a scholar's feeling for 
 precision of detail in the representation of a play 
 and in the arrangements of the stage. He had the 
 
EDMUND KEAN. 1 23 
 
 disadvantage of a weak voice; but his clear and 
 measured elocution added a beauty to poetry if it 
 were eloquent and rhetorical. He often failed to 
 interpret the quick and various turns of passion, 
 but where a steadfast strength of feeling or pathos, 
 allied to dignity, demanded expression, he was in 
 a high degree impressive. 
 
 § Qy. The Kemble dynasty, if it did not fall, 
 tottered before the irresistible onset of Edmund 
 Kean's genius. For sheer force of that which can 
 only be conferred by divine gift — genius in the ex- 
 position of passion — Kean probably ranks highest 
 among all actors of our English race. Each of his 
 greater renderings of Shakespeare was an inspired 
 commentary on the inmost spirit of the play. His 
 imaginative energy of feeling penetrated to the 
 heart of the mystery of each character which he 
 assumed, or, to speak more correctly, which for the 
 time he became. Even as we read the poor records 
 and analyses of his presentations of Shakespearian 
 characters, they are a light and a guide to criticism. 
 
 Edmund Kean was born in 1787, the child of 
 a worthless mother who gave him only coldness, 
 neglect, or cruelty. At three years old he was the 
 Cupid of a ballet. All his earlier years were a 
 ceaseless struggle against poverty, disappointment, 
 almost despair ; and yet there was that within him 
 which made total despair impossible. In 181 3 hope 
 lit up his prospects; but bitterness was even then 
 mingled with his joy. Dr. Drury, a member of the 
 Drury Lane Committee, discovered his extraordi- 
 nary powers, while he was playing as a stroller at 
 Dorchester; an engagement was promised him, but 
 
124 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 before he could leave Dorchester his first son, 
 Howard, with whom his heart was bound up, had. 
 died. The 26th of February, 18 14, was the most 
 memorable day in the life of Edmund Kean, and 
 one of the most memorable in the history of the 
 English stage. At length his opportunity had 
 come ; on that evening he appeared at Drury Lane 
 in the character of Shylock. As he trudged on foot 
 through snow and fog to the theatre, " I wish", he 
 exclaimed, "I was going to be shot!" When the 
 curtain fell it was known to those who could dis- 
 cern that the greatest exponent of human passion 
 ever seen upon the English stage had appeared. 
 He hurried back to his poor lodgings; "Mary," he 
 cried to his wife, "you shall ride in your carriage"; 
 and to his infant Charles, "You shall go to Eton"; 
 and then his face saddened as the words broke from 
 him, "If Howard had but lived to see it!" 
 
 § 68. To follow Kean through his successive 
 triumphs is impossible in such a brief sketch as the 
 present. His King Richard HI. was a masterpiece 
 even more extraordinary than his Shylock. The 
 disadvantages of his small figure and sometimes 
 harsh voice were entirely overcome or were for- 
 gotten ; his pale face was illuminated with the in- 
 spiration of his mind. " Joyous and sarcastic in the 
 opening soliloquy; devilish as he passed his bright 
 sword through the still breathing body of Lancaster ; 
 audaciously hypocritical, and almost too exulting 
 in the wooing of Lady Anne; cruelly kind to the 
 young Princes, his eye smiling while his foot seemed 
 restless to crush the two spiders that so vexed his 
 heart; in representing all this there was an origin- 
 
EDMUND KEAN. 125 
 
 ality and a nature which were entirely new to the 
 delighted kudience. Then they seemed to behold 
 altogether a new man revealed to them, in the first 
 words uttered by him from the throne, — ' Stand all 
 apart!' from which period to the last struggle with 
 Richmond there was an uninterrupted succession 
 of beauties. . . . The triumph was accumulative, 
 and it was crowned by the tent scene, the battle, 
 and the death. ... In the faint yet deadly-meant 
 passes which he made with his swordless arm after 
 he had received his death-blow, there was the con- 
 ception of a great artist ; and there died with him 
 a malignity which mortal man had never before so 
 terribly portrayed."^ 
 
 § 69. Hamlet and Othello succeeded King Rich- 
 ard III., and in neither did any diminution of power 
 appear. The passionate tenderness and the pas- 
 sionate fierceness of Othello were indeed rendered 
 as they had never been rendered before.^ Macbeth, 
 Romeo, Richard II., Timon showed under various 
 aspects the same astonishing genius in the interpre- 
 tation of passion. In 1 820 Kean enacted for the first 
 time the part of King Lear. He had studied and 
 rehearsed with ardour; on one occasion he played 
 scene after scene before the pier-glass from midnight 
 to noonday; in order to qualify himself for the re- 
 presentation of the distracted king, he constantly 
 visited the St. Luke's and Bethlehem hospitals. He 
 determined in 1823 to discard the mawkish version 
 of the play by Nahum Tate, and to retain the tragic 
 
 ' Doran: Annals, vol. iii. pp. 380, 381. 
 
 ' See a remarkable criticism of Kean's Othello in Letters on Eng- 
 land by Victoire Count de Soligny, i.e. P. G. Patmore, vol. ii. pp. 96- 
 118. 
 
126 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 close as imagined by Shakespeare. "There", he 
 said to his wife, pointing to the last scene of Lear, 
 " is the sacred page I am yet to expound." When 
 his Othello was alleged to be the most sublime and 
 impressive creation of his genius, he replied, " The 
 London audience have no notion of what I can do 
 until they see me over the dead body of Cordelia". 
 And so in truth it was; a competent judge who had 
 witnessed Garrick's performance of the part pro- 
 nounced it inferior to that of Kean. " Who ", asks 
 his biographer, Hawkins, " that once heard can ever 
 forget the terrors of that terrific curse, where, in the 
 wild storm of his conflicting passion, he threw him- 
 self on his knees, 'lifted up his arms, like withered 
 stumps, threw his head quite back, and, in that 
 position, as if severed from all that held him to 
 society, breathed a heart-struck prayer, like the 
 figure of a man obtruncated '}" An American writer, 
 Dana, conveys some impression of Kean's rendering 
 of the insanity of Lear: " His eye, when his senses 
 are first forsaking him, giving a questioning look at 
 what he saw, as if all before him was undergoing a 
 strange and bewildering change which confused his 
 brain — the wandering,lost motionsof his handswhich 
 seemed feeling for something familiar to them, on 
 which they might take hold and be assured of a safe 
 reality — the under monotone of his voice, as if he 
 was questioning his own being and all which sur- 
 rounded him-^the continuous, but slight oscillating 
 motion of the body, — all expressed, with fearful 
 truth, the dreamy state of a mind fast unsettling, 
 and making vain and weak efforts to find its way 
 back to its wonted reason. There was a childish, 
 
MACREADY. 12/ 
 
 feeble gladness in the eye, and a half-piteous smile 
 about the mouth at times, which one could scarce 
 look upon without shedding tears. As the derange- 
 ment increased upon him, his eye lost its notice of 
 what surrounded him, wandering over everything as 
 if he saw it not, and fastening upon the creatures 
 of his crazed brain. The helpless and delighted 
 fondness with which he clings to Edgar as an insane 
 brother is another instance of the justness of Mr. 
 Kean's conceptions. Nor does he lose the air of 
 insanity even in the fine moralizing parts, and where 
 he inveighs against the corruptions of the world. 
 There is a madness even in his reason." 
 
 Edmund Kean, now a broken and feeble man, 
 was playing his great part of Othello to the lago 
 of his son Charles on March 25, 1833, when the end 
 came. Having spoken with the old beauty of feel- 
 ing and expression Othello's farewell to the occupa- 
 tion of his life, he could not proceed with the next 
 speech ; he fell upon his son's shoulder, whispering, 
 "I am dying — speak to them for me". He was 
 borne off the stage, and after a lingering period of 
 weakness, died on May 1 5 of that year. 
 
 § 70. When the stage lost Kean there was no one 
 who could fill his place ; an actor of his kind does 
 not arise twice in a century. But Macready was in 
 the plenitude of such power as he possessed, and 
 he carried on with much dignity, culture, and intel- 
 lectual skill, the tradition of the stately school of 
 Kemble, qualified by something of Kean's pathetic 
 power. His first appearance at Covent Garden 
 Theatre was in i8i6; in 1819 he produced consider- 
 able effect in the part of Richard HI. In 1837 ^^ 
 
128 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 became lessee and manager of Covent Garden, and 
 his managership was honourably distinguished by 
 a series of Shakespearian revivals which, if not a 
 pecuniary success, were certainly full of interest 
 from the artistic point of view. Macready with his 
 cultivated taste did not aim at merely starring it 
 with one great part which should stand out from a 
 dead level of general mediocrity. He endeavoured 
 to make the rendering of the entire play harmonious. 
 In 1851 this excellent actor and most estimable 
 man retired from the stage. He had helped to in- 
 terpret Shakespeare by his own graceful and intel- 
 lectual renderings of individual parts, and still more 
 by that harmony in presenting the whole after 
 which he studiously sought. 
 
 At this point — the mid-point of the present cen- 
 tury — this brief sketch of Shakespearian stage- 
 history may fitly close. Much has been omitted; 
 Mrs. Pritchard, Mrs. Gibber, Mrs. Jordan, and, in 
 comparatively recent years, Henderson, Cooke, 
 Gharles Kean, and many another actor, might each, 
 in a fuller record, fitly claim a notice. Not a little 
 has been done in illustration of Shakespeare since 
 1 85 1; new and admirable achievements have glori- 
 fied our stage; great names have sprung into the 
 light of fame. But it is well that criticism should 
 pause at a point somewhat remote from the present 
 moment. The year of the first Great Exhibition 
 will serve sufficiently well for a resting-place. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 DEDICATION PREFIXED TO THE FOLIO 
 OF 1623. 
 
 To the most noble and incomparable pair of brethren, 
 William Earl of Pembroke, &=€., Lord Chamberlain to the King's 
 most excellent majesty, 
 and 
 Philip Earl of Montgomery, &'c.. Gentleman of his tnajesty's bed- 
 chamber; 
 Both Knights of the most noble order of the Garter, and our singular 
 good lords. 
 
 Right Honourable, 
 
 Whilst we study to be thankful in our particular 
 for the many favours we have received from your L.L., we 
 are fallen upon the ill fortune, to mingle two the most diverse 
 things that can be, fear and rashness, — rashness in the enter- 
 prise, and fear of the success. For when we value the places 
 your H.H. sustain, we cannot but know their dignity greater 
 than to descend to the reading of these trifles; and while we 
 name them trifles, we have deprived ourselves of the defence 
 of our dedication. But since your L.L. have been pleased to 
 think these trifles something heretofore, and have prosecuted 
 both them and their author living with so much favour, we 
 hope that (they outliving him, and he not having the fate, 
 common with some, to be executor to his own writings) you 
 will use the like indulgence toward them you have done unto 
 their parent. There is a great difference whether any book 
 choose his patrons, or find them: this hath done both. For 
 so much were your L.L. likings of the sgveral parts when 
 they were acted, as before they were published, the volume 
 asked to be yours. We have but collected them, and done 
 an office to the dead, to procure his orphans guardians; 
 without ambition either of self-profit or fame; only to keep 
 the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our 
 
130 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 Shakespeare, by humble offer of his plays to your most noble 
 patronage. Wherein, as we have justly observed no man to 
 come near your L.L. but with a kind of religious address, it 
 hath been the height of our care, who are the presenters, to 
 make the present worthy of your H.H. by the perfection. 
 But there we must also crave our abilities to be considered, 
 my lords. We cannot go beyond our own powers. Country 
 hands reach forth milk, cream, fruits, or what they have; and 
 many nations, we have heard, that had not gums and incense, 
 obtained their requests with a leavened cake. It was no 
 fault to approach their gods by what means they could: and 
 the most, though meanest, of things are made more precious 
 when they are dedicated to temples. In that name, there- 
 fore, we most humbly consecrate to your H.H. these remains 
 of your servant Shakespeare, that what delight is in them 
 may be ever your L.L., the reputation his, and the faults 
 ours, if any be committed by a pair so careful to show their 
 gratitude both to the living and the dead as is 
 
 Your Lordships' most bounden, 
 
 John Heminge, 
 Henry Condell, 
 
 ADDRESS PREFIXED TO THE FOLIO OF 1623. 
 
 To the great variety of readers. 
 
 From the most able to him that can but spell: there you 
 are numbered. We had rather you were weighed: especially 
 when the fate of all books depends upon your capacities; and 
 not of your heads alone, but of your purses. Well, it is now 
 public; and you will stand for your privileges, we know, — to 
 read and censure. Do so, but buy it first; that doth best 
 commend a book, the stationer says. Then how odd soever 
 your brains be or your wisdoms, make your license the same, 
 and spare not. Judge your six-pen'orth, your shillings-worth, 
 your five-shillings-worth at a time, or higher, so you rise to 
 the just rates, and welcome. But, whatever you do, buy. 
 
HEMINGE AND CONDELL'S ADDRESS. I31 
 
 Censure will not drive a trade, or make the jack go. And 
 though you be a magistrate of wit, and sit on the stage at 
 Black-friars or the Cock-pit, to arraign plays daily, know, 
 these plays have had their trial already, and stood out all 
 appeals, and do now come forth quitted rather by a decree 
 of court than any purchased letters of commendation. 
 
 It had been a thing, we confess, worthy to have been 
 wished, that the author himself had lived to have set forth 
 and overseen his own writings. But, since it hath been 
 ordained otherwise, and he by death departed from that right, 
 we pray you do not envy his friends the office of their care 
 and pain, to have collected and published them; and so to 
 have published them as where before you were abused with 
 divers stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed 
 by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors that exposed 
 them, even those are now offered to your view cured and 
 perfect of their limbs, and all the rest absolute in their num- 
 bers as he conceived them; who, as. he was a happy imitator 
 of nature, was a most gentle expresser of it: his mind and 
 hand went together; and what he thought, he uttered with 
 that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot 
 in his papers. But it is not our province, who only gather 
 his works and give them you, to praise him. It is yours that 
 read him: and there we hope, to your divers capacities, you 
 will find enough both to draw and hold you; for his wit can 
 no more lie hid than it could be lost. Read him, therefore; 
 and again and again: and if then you do not like him, surely 
 you are in some manifest danger not to understand him. 
 And so we leave you to other of his friends, whom if you 
 need, can be your guides: if you need them not, you can lead 
 yourselves and others. And such readers we wish him. 
 
 John Heminge, 
 Henry Condell. 
 
132 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 COMMENDATORY VERSES FROM THOSE 
 PREFIXED TO THE FOLIO OF 1623. 
 
 To the memory of my beloved, the author. Master William Shake- 
 speare, and what he hath left us. 
 
 To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name, 
 Am I thus ample to thy book and fame; 
 While I confess thy writings to be such 
 As neither man nor Muse can praise too much: 
 'Tis true, and all men's suffrage: but these ways 
 Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise; 
 For seeliest ignorance on these may light, 
 Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right; 
 Or blind affection, which doth ne'er advance 
 The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance; 
 Or crafty malice might pretend this praise. 
 And think to ruin where it seem'd to raise: 
 
 But thou art proof against them; and, indeed, 
 Above th' ill fortune of them or the need. 
 I, therefore, will begin. Soul of the age, 
 Th' applause, delight, the wonder of our stage, 
 My Shakespeare, rise ! I will not lodge thee by 
 Chaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie 
 A little further, to make thee a room: 
 Thou art a monument without a tomb. 
 And art alive still, while thy book doth live, 
 And we have wits to read, and praise to give. 
 That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses, — 
 I mean, with great but disproportioned Muses; 
 For if I thought my judgment were of years, 
 I should commit thee surely with thy peers. 
 And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine, 
 Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line: 
 And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek, 
 From thence to honour thee I would not seek 
 For names; but call forth thundering .(Eschylus, 
 Euripides, and Sophocles to us. 
 
BEN JONSON'S VERSES. 133 
 
 Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova, dead, 
 
 To life again, to hear thy buskin tread 
 
 And shake a stage; or when thy socks were on, 
 
 Leave thee alone for the comparison 
 
 Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome 
 
 Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. 
 
 Triumph, my Britain ! thou hast one to show, 
 
 To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe, 
 
 He was not of an age, but for all time; 
 
 And all the Muses still were in their prime, 
 
 When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm 
 
 Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm. 
 
 Nature herself was proud of his designs. 
 
 And joy'd to wear the dressing of his lines; 
 
 Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit, 
 
 As since she will vouchsafe no other wit: 
 
 The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes, 
 
 Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please; 
 
 But antiquated and deserted lie. 
 
 As they were not of Nature's family. 
 
 Yet must I not give Nature all; thy art, 
 
 My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part: 
 
 For though the poet's matter nature be. 
 
 His art doth give the fashion; and that he 
 
 Who casts to write a living line, must sweat, — 
 
 Such as thine are, — and strike the second heat 
 
 Upon the Muse's anvil; turn the same. 
 
 And himself with it, that he thinks to frame; 
 
 Or, for the laurel, he may gain a scorn, — 
 
 For a good poet's made, as well as bom: 
 
 And such wert thou. Look how the father's face 
 
 Lives in his issue; even so the race 
 
 Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines 
 
 In his well-tornfed and true-filfed lines; 
 
 In each of which he seems to shake a lance, 
 
 As brandish'd at the eyes of ignorance. 
 
 Sweet Swan of Avon, what a sight it were 
 
 To see thee in our waters yet appear, 
 
 And make those flights upon the banks of Thames, 
 
 That so did take Eliza and our James ! 
 
 But stay; I see thee in the hemisphere 
 
134 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 Advanc'd, and made a constellation there: 
 
 Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage 
 
 Or influence chide or cheer the drooping stage; 
 
 Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourn'd like night, 
 
 And despairs day, but for thy volume's light. 
 
 Ben: Jonson. 
 
 NOTE ON THE EARLY EDITIONS OF 
 SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 FOLIOS. 
 
 The First Folio was published in 1623, "printed by Isaac 
 Jaggard and Edward Blount." It contains thirty-six plays (Pericles 
 not being included in the Folios until 1664), arranged as Comedies, 
 Histories, and Tragedies. Shakespeare's fellow-actors, John Heminge 
 and Henry Condell, dedicate the volume to the brothers William, 
 Earl of Pembroke [William Herbert], and Philip, Earl of Mont- 
 gomery. In their address to the readers they ptofess to give for the 
 first time the true text, and it is implied that they printed from 
 Shakespeare's manuscripts. As a fact, the text abounds with errors, 
 and in many instances they evidently print from the Quartos. In 
 some cases the Folio gives a better text than the corresponding 
 Quarto. It is the sole original authority for seventeen plays. The 
 First Folio was reprinted by Upcott in 1807, and with great accuracy 
 by Lionel Booth (1S62-64). It has been reproduced with the aid of 
 photographic processes by Staunton, and in a reduced form (under 
 the superintendence of Halliwell-Phillipps) by Chatto and Windus. 
 
 The Second Folio, 1632. — Lowndes's statement that a copy 
 exists with the date 1631 has not been verified. The printer was 
 Thomas Cotes, and the property was vested in five booksellers. It 
 is a reprint from the First Folio, with some errors corrected, some 
 faultily altered to other erroneous readings, and many new errors 
 added. 
 
 The Third Folio, "printed for Philip Chetwinde." There are 
 two issues, 1663 and 1664. 
 
 The copies dated 1664 add " seven plays never before printed in 
 Folio," viz.: Pericles, Prince of Tyre: The London Prodigal; The 
 
THE EARLY EDITIONS. 135 
 
 History of Thomas Lord Cromwell; Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cob- 
 ham; The Puritan Widow; A Yorkshire Tragedy; The Tragedy 
 of Locrine. These plays seem to have been selected because either 
 the name of Shakespeare or the initials W. S. appear on the title- 
 pages of the Quartos. 
 The Fourth Folio, 1685, includes the seven plays added in 1664. 
 
 QUARTOS. 
 
 In the following table the Quarto editions of the Poems and Plays 
 are arranged in the order of the dates at which the first edition of 
 each appeared. An asterisk points out the particular Quarto from 
 which the text in the First Folio is printed. 
 
 Venus and Adonis, 1593, 1594, 1596, 1599, 1600, 1602, 1602, 
 
 1617, 1620, 1627 (at Edinburgh), 1630 ? (title-page lost), 1636. 
 Lucrece, 1594, 1598, 1600, 1607, 1616, 1624, 1632 (?), 1655. 
 Romeo and Juliet, 1597 (pirated and imperfect), IS99, *l609 ? 
 
 (without date), 1637. 
 King Richard 11., 1597, 1598, 1608, '1615, 1634. 
 King Richard III., 1597, 1598, 1602, 1605, 1612, 1622, 1629, 
 
 1634. 
 King Henry IV. Part I., 1598, 1599, 1604, 1608, '1613, 1622, 
 
 1632, 1639. 
 Love's Labour's Lost, '1598 (with Shakespeare's name on title, 
 
 for the first time on any play), 1631. 
 The Passionate Pilgrim, 1599, 1612 (called third edition on title- 
 page, but only two extant). 
 King Henry V., 1600 (pirated and imperfect), 1602, 1608 (both 
 
 reprinted from 1600). 
 King Henry IV. Part II., 1600. 
 Much Ado About Nothing, '1600. 
 A Midsummer's Night's Dream, 1600 (printed for Fisher), *l6oo 
 
 (printed by Roberts). 
 The Merchant of Venice, 1600 (printed by Roberts), *l6oo (printed 
 
 for Heyes), 1637, 1652. 
 Titus Andronicus (? possibly a lost quarto of 1594), 1600, 'leil. 
 The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1602, 1619 (both an imperfect 
 
 report of the early form of the play), 1630. 
 Hamlet, 1603 (imperfect report of play in first form), 1604, 1605, 
 
 1611, ? undated, 1637. 
 
136 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 King Lear, 1608, 1608 (both by same publisher), 1655. 
 
 Sonnets, l6og. 
 
 Troilus and Cressida, 1609, 1609. 
 
 Pericles, 1609, 1609, 1611, 1619, 1630, 1635. 
 
 Othello, 1622, 1630. 
 
 The "First Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses 
 of York and Lancaster" was printed in 1594 and 1600; the "True 
 Tragedy of Richard Duke of York" in 1595 and 1600; the "Whole 
 Contention " (in two parts) in 1619. 
 
 THE END 
 
William Shakespeare. 
 
 A Study in Elizabethan Literature. By Bar- 
 rett Wendell, Assistant Professor of English at Harvard Col- 
 lege. i2mo, 435 pages, $i 75. 
 
 The book comprises a series of lectures given by the author to his students at 
 Harvard College. Its purpose is to present a coherent view of the generally 
 accepted facts concerning the life and the work of Shakespeare, and to see 
 Shakespeare, as far as is possible at this distance of time, as he saw himself. 1 he 
 use of the hook, as contemplated by the author, is both for the general reader 
 and for students who are taking up the study, and require a serviceable instruc- 
 tion to accompany the critical reading of the various plays. To this latter 
 class the book appeals especially, as it has been developed by repeated contact 
 with college classes, and represents the results of the author's successful ex- 
 perience in this field of instruction. 
 
 /. Introduction. 
 II» The Facts of Shakespeare *s Life. 
 Ill, Literature and the Theatre in England until i^S"/* 
 IV* The Works of Shakespeare, 
 
 V. Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece. 
 VI. The Plays of Shakespeare^ from Titus Andronicus to 
 the Two Gentlemen of Verona, 
 VII. The Plays of Shakespeare^ from a Midsummernight'* s 
 Dream to Twelfth Night, 
 VIII. Shakespeari s Sonnets. 
 IX. The Plays of Shakespearcy from Julius Coesar to 
 Coriolanus. 
 X. Timon of Athens^ and Pericles, Prince of Tyre. 
 XI The Plays of Shakespeare-, from Cymbeline to 
 Henry VIII, 
 XII. William Shakespeare^ Authorities^ etc. 
 
 " This book is a notable contribution to Shakespearian literature, and I com- 
 mend it to all teachers, students, and critical readers of Shakespeare, as a dis- 
 cussion which they cannot afford to overlook.'' — Dr. W. J. Rolpe, in The 
 Critic. 
 
 " Its whole atmosphere, its tone, is characteristic and agreeable ; its many 
 bits of particular criticism are almost always put with a very nice touch. Mr. 
 Wendell has produced an excellent and thoroughly modem book on Shake- 
 speare." — Edward E. Hale, Jr., in The Dial. 
 
 For sale by all booksellers, or sent, postpaid, by the publishers upon 
 receipt of Price. 
 
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 NEW YORK. 
 
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