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CHARACTERISTICS 
 
 OF 
 
 ENGLISH POETS 
 
CHARACTERISTICS 
 
 OF 
 
 ENGLISH POETS 
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO SHIRLEY 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM MINTO, M.A. 
 
 AUTHOR OF 'A MANUAL OF ENGLISH PROSE LITERATURE' 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 
 
 EDINBURGH AND LONDON 
 
 Mnrr.ci.xxTV 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Two things are attempted in the following work, 
 which the author believes have not hitherto been 
 systematically accomplished. My chief object has 
 been to bring into as clear light as possible the charac- 
 teristics of the several poets within the period chosen. 
 And as a secondary object to this, I have endeavoured 
 to trace how far each poet was influenced by his lit- 
 erary predecessors and his contemporaries. This is 
 what I have attempted to do. The reader must not 
 in this volume expect to find the works of our poets 
 treated with reference to their race or their social sur- 
 roundings. " What sort of man was he .' " not " How 
 was he formed ? " is the leading question to which I 
 have endeavoured to supply an answer. 
 
 In thus deliberately adopting a method that is in 
 one vital respect the opposite of M. Taine's, I should 
 be sorry if it were supposed that I am insensible to 
 the value of what M. Taine has done for English 
 literature. It may be, as one of his critics has said, 
 that M. Taine has added little to the popular concep- 
 tion of the Englishman, as expressed in the nickname 
 " John Bull ; " but none the less on that account is it 
 a great and valuable work to have shown that the 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 characteristics thus vaguely summed up really pervade 
 the whole of our literature. Justly viewed, indeed, 
 the method pursued in this volume is not so much 
 the opposite as the complement of M. Taine's. His 
 endeavour was to point out what our writers had in 
 common ; mine has been to point out what each has 
 by distinction. I might advance, as a justification of 
 my attempt, that a thorough study of the individual 
 is indispensable to that higher study which has for its 
 object the determination of the characteristics of the 
 race. And besides, the most interesting study for 
 mankind will always be the individual man. 
 
 It may be objected to my method that it does not 
 systematically follow successive periods in the career 
 of the individual, the opening of new veins, the de- 
 velopment of new powers, the subjection to new in- 
 fluences. That is a method by itself, with its own 
 value and its own dangers. It is the method suitable 
 to monographs, or to history on a larger scale than is 
 here attempted. I must say that it seems to me to 
 have been of late somewhat overdone. It has been 
 pursued without due respect to the individuality 
 of the individual. Men's lives have been divided 
 into clear-cut periods, and those periods charac- 
 terised as if it were a law of nature that the in- 
 dividual became at sudden and definite epochs a 
 wholly new creature. All division into periods, unless 
 cautiously carried out, tends to obscure the fact that 
 every animated being retains its individual charac- 
 teristics from birth to maturity, from maturity to 
 decay. The child is father to the man : a young 
 cabbage does not become an old fig-tree. To trace 
 the gradual growth of powers and qualities, extended 
 
PREFACE. vii 
 
 range of effort, increased mastery of materials, is a 
 most interesting task. This I have incidentally en- 
 deavoured to do. But I conceive that it is of prior 
 interest to know what characteristics are of the es- 
 sence of a man's being, and are manifested in all his 
 outcomes ; and therefore my chief aim in each case 
 has been to seize those characteristics, and to make 
 my interpretation of them as plain and unmistakable 
 as lay in my power. 
 
 A smaller point in which I am especially open to 
 hostile criticism, is the modernised spelling of the texts 
 of Chaucer and his contemporaries and immediate suc- 
 cessors. I have done this after much consideration, 
 resolving to attempt it more by way of experiment 
 and for the purpose of eliciting opinion, than from 
 any settled conviction that it is the only proper course. 
 I am not insensible to the charm of the archaic spell- 
 ing ; and I know that to some minds modernisation 
 of spelling is as obnoxious as the performance of 
 Othello in a dress-coat. My object is to help my 
 readers to forget such small points as orthographical 
 differences between them and those poets of an elder 
 time, and to get nearer to the living spirit of them. 
 The tendency of all archaisms, as I shall point out 
 more fully in the case of Chaucer, is to impart into 
 the text a sentiment of old age and childishness, very 
 delightful in itself, but not so favourable to truth of 
 criticism. 
 
 W. MINTO. 
 
 August I, 1874. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I.— GEOFPBEY CHAUCEE. 
 
 FACE 
 
 I. His Life, Cliaracter, and Works, i 
 
 II. His Words, Metres, and Imagery, 22 
 
 III. The Chief QuaUties of his Poetry, 33 
 
 IV. His Delineation of Character, . . 51 
 
 CHAPTEE II.— CHAUCER'S CONTBMPOEAEIES 
 ANB SUCCESSORS. 
 
 I. English Contemporaries, — 
 
 I. William Langland. — 2. John Gower. — 3. Miracle-plays 
 and Mysteries. — 4. Metrical Romances, . . 59 
 
 II. Scottish Contemporaries, — 
 
 I. Barbour. — 2. Blind Harry, ... 85 
 
 III. English Successors, — 
 
 I. Occleve. — 2. Lydgate. — 3. Sir Thomas Malory. — 4. John 
 
 Skelton— 5. Stephen Hawes, ... 91 
 
 IV. Scottish Successors, — 
 
 I. James I. — 2. Robert Henryson. — 3. William Dunbar. 
 — 4. Gavin Douglas. — 5. Sir David Lindsay, . 122 
 
 CHAPTER III.— RENAISSANCE AND 
 TRANSITION. 
 
 I. Wyatt, ... 151 
 
 11. Surrey, ... • . 160 
 
 III. Writers of Mysteries, Moralities, Moral Interludes — 
 
 John Bale, ... . . 170 
 
C CONTENTS. 
 
 IV. John Heywood — Merry Interludes, . '77 
 
 V. Udall- Ralph Ro: 
 
 VI. Sackville, 
 VII. Edwards, 
 VIII. Gascoigne, 
 
 IX. Churchyard, 
 
 ster Doister, 
 
 i»i 
 187 
 196 
 200 
 207 
 
 X. Translators of Seneca and Ovid, . 208 
 
 CHAPTER IV.— EDMUND SPENSER. 
 
 I. His Life and Character, . . • 213 
 
 II. His Words, Metres, and Imagery, . 219 
 
 III. The Chief Qualities of his Poetry, . 224 
 
 CHAPTER V ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 I. Sidney, . • 242 
 
 II. Daniel, 250 
 
 HI. Constable, 255 
 
 IV. Lodge, 258 
 
 V. Watson, . . . 265 
 
 VI. Drayton, . . . 268 
 
 VII. Shakespeare— Sonnets, . . . 275 
 
 CHAPTER VI.— DRAMATISTS BEFORE 
 SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 I. Lyly, . . ■ 296 
 
 II. Marlowe, 299 
 
 III. Greene, 311 
 
 IV. Peele, 319 
 V. Nash, 324 
 
 VI. Kyd, 326 
 
 VII. Munday, . .- 328 
 
 VHI. Chettle, . . 329 
 
 CHAPTER VII.-WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 I. His Life and Character, . . 333 
 
 II. His Words and Imagery, . . 358 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 XI 
 
 III. Certain Qualities of liis Poetry, 
 
 IV. His Delineation of Character, 
 
 V. The Interaction of his Characters, . 
 
 VI. The Tranqnillising Close of his Tragedies, 
 
 363 
 399 
 414 
 
 417 
 
 CHAPTER VIII.-SHAKESPEAEE'S CONTEM- 
 PORARIES AND SUCCESSORS. 
 
 I. Chapman, 
 II. Marston, . 
 in. Jonson, 
 IV. Dekker, . 
 V. Middleton, 
 VI. Fletcher, . 
 VII. Webster, 
 VIII. Toumeur, 
 IX. Ford, 
 X. Massinger, 
 XI. Shirley, . 
 
 425 
 434 
 440 
 
 450 
 453 
 456 
 462 
 466 
 470 
 474 
 477 
 
 Appendix, 
 
 481 
 
CHARACTERISTICS 
 
 OF 
 
 ENGLISH POETS 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 
 (1340-1400.) 
 
 I. — His Life, Character, and Works. 
 
 To regard Chaucer as the first genial day in the spring of 
 English poetry, is to take, perhaps, a somewhat insular view 
 of his position. On a more comprehensive view, it would 
 appear more apposite to call him a fine day, if not the last 
 fine day, in the autumn of medieval European poetry. He 
 may be described as the father of English poetry — the first 
 great poet that used the English language ; but it is more 
 instructive to look upon him as the English son and heir of 
 a great family of French and Italian poets. He was the 
 great English master in a poetic movement that originated 
 in the south of Europe, among the provinces of theLangue 
 d'Oc, which had been going on with brilliant energy for 
 more than two centuries before his birth, and had produced 
 among its masterpieces the 'Romance of the Rose,' and the 
 poetry of Dante and Petrarch. 
 
 How the Troubadours came by their poetry is not, and 
 perhaps cannot be, sufficiently ascertained. Probably great 
 
 A 
 
2 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 
 
 significance ought to be attached to the fact that the south 
 of France and the east coast of Spain received a large 
 infusion of Greek blood from the Phocsean colonists of 
 Massilia (now Marseilles) and their offshoots. These 
 Greek colonists were something more than a handful of 
 adventurous settlers, such as might be absorbed in a com- 
 munity without appreciably affecting its character. Their 
 chief city, Massilia, soon after its foundation, became one 
 of the most prosperous and powerful communities on the 
 coasts of the Mediterranean, the successful rival of Car- 
 thage, the independent ally of Rome, and, under the early 
 emperors, the chief dispenser of liberal education to the 
 young rulers of the world. It may well have been that, in 
 these representatives of her race, taken from the home of 
 lyric poetry — the region of Alcseus and Sappho — ancient 
 Greece left to western Europe a more precious bequest, a 
 bequest that gave a more vital impulse to modem literature 
 than all the fragments of her art. In the eleventh and 
 twelfth centuries, the various provinces speaking the Langue 
 d'Oc, and especially Provence, were in a high state of 
 commercial prosperity and political freedom. We may 
 therefore, in the absence of certain knowledge, venture to 
 speculate that, when the Provengals, having achieved the 
 material basis for a great literary outburst, came in contact 
 with Arabian poetry through the Moors, the artistic ten- 
 dency of the Greek quickened with irrepressible life, and 
 throwing itself into the metrical forms that had given it the 
 awakening stimulus, blossomed and bore fruit with volup- 
 tuous luxuriance. But whatever may have been the origin 
 of Provengal poetry — however the Troubadours caught their 
 happy art, found it, or came by it — they certainly are the 
 poetic fathers of the Trouv^res and the early Italian poets ; 
 and through them the grandfathers of our own Chaucer. 
 
 Although the Trouvferes of the north of France received 
 their impulse from the Troubadours of the south, they were 
 not simply imitators and translators, rendering the produc- 
 tions of the Langue d'Oc into the Langue d'Oil. The bent 
 of their genius was no less decidedly epic than the bent 
 
HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. 3 
 
 of the Troubadours was lyric. They poured out of fertile 
 imaginations hundreds of chivalrous, amorous, and ludicrous 
 tales. Their subjects were the marvellous exploits of 
 heroes — notably Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, 
 and Charlemagne and his Paladins, — and the passions and 
 adventures, serious and comical, of inamoratos in every 
 condition of life. The authors of this literature were as 
 numerous as the authors of novels in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, and their fame was no less ephemeral. The most 
 celebrated single production of the Trouvferes was the 
 ' Romance of the Rose,' written by Guillaume de Lorris in 
 the beginning of the thirteenth century. The historians of 
 French literature regard this as the first great embodiment 
 of their national genius. It professes to be the record of a 
 dream. The dreamer walks out on a May morning through 
 exquisite scenery, enters an enclosed garden that comes in 
 sight, and meets with many adventures in the endeavour to 
 get possession of a beautiful rose, receiving help and hin- 
 drance from various inmates of the garden. The rose is 
 symbolical of female beauty, and the inmates of the garden 
 are personified abstractions of the various powers, feelings, 
 and circumstances — Courtesy, Courage, Shame, Suspicion, 
 Slander, Previous Ties, &c. — that further or retard the 
 lover's success. When Brunette Latini, the tutor of Dante, 
 went to Paris in 1260, this so-called " Romance " was the 
 theme of endless comment, criticism, and imitation. In 
 planning his ' Tesoretto,' Brunetto adopted the fashionable 
 form : lost his way in a forest, found himself in the presence of 
 Dame Nature, received from her much eloquent information, 
 and roamed on till he met with the four Cardinal Virtues, 
 attended by several fair Minor Moralities. Dante also used 
 the machinery of forest, dream, and benevolent conductor 
 through the region of his dream. Towards the end of the 
 thirteenth century, the work of Guillaume de Lorris received 
 fresh celebrity from its continuation by Jean 'de Meun, 
 sumamed Clopinel. Guillaume had left off before the rose 
 was attained, and Jean continued the pursuit, though in a 
 very different spirit. Guillaume was a man of refined senti- 
 
4 GEOFFREY CHAUCER: 
 
 ment, and made his pursuit of the rose a model of courteous 
 behaviour; but Jean was keen, observant, and cynical, a free- 
 thinker and a free speaker, and made the work a vehicle 
 for sharp satire on women and on the Church. All the 
 more for this difference of spirit, Jean de Mean increased 
 the reputation of the ' Romance of the Rose.' 
 
 One of Chaucer's first poetical efforts was a translation of 
 the ' Romance of the Rose ; ' and when we keep in view 
 that French could hardly have been less familiar to him 
 than English was to Scotchmen of the seventeenth century, 
 we cannot fail to see how much the Trouvferes must have 
 had to do with the awakening of his genius. Some patriotic 
 Englishmen have strongly resented the endeavour of M. 
 Sandras '■ to consider Chaucer as an imitator of the Trou- 
 vferes ; and they are probably justified in taking offence at 
 the word "imitator." It is too much to say that Chaucer 
 produced nothing but imitations of G. de Lorris or other 
 Trouvferes, till he conceived the plan of the ' Canterbury 
 Tales ; ' and that the ' Canterbury Tales,' though so far 
 original in form, are animated throughout by the spirit of 
 Jean de Meun. To say this is to produce a totally false 
 impression as regards the decided individuality and pro- 
 nounced English characteristics of Chaucer. He undoubt- 
 edly belongs to the line of the Trouvferes. He was a disciple 
 of theirs ; he studied in the school of GuiUaume de Lorris 
 and Jean de Meun. He adopted their poetical machinery 
 of vision and allegory. By them he was set upon making 
 his elaborate studies of colour and form. From them he 
 received the stimulus to his minute observation of character. 
 It was emulation of them that kindled his happy genius for 
 stoiy-telling : the inspiring beat of their bright movement 
 would not let him rest. The relation between Chaucer and 
 the Trouvbres is much closer than the relation between 
 Shakespeare and the foreign originals that supplied him 
 with plots, or than the relation between Mr Tennyson and 
 the Arthurian legends. Making allowance for differences 
 
 ^ Etude sur G. Chaucer consid^r^ comme imitateur des Trouv4res, 1859. 
 See, in particular, Mr Furnivall's ' Trial-Forewords,' Chaucer Society. 
 
HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. 5 
 
 of national character, Chaucer owed as much to Guillaume 
 de Lorris as Shakespeare to Marlowe, or Tennyson to 
 Wordsworth ; and in spite of national character, there was 
 probably more affinity between pupil and master in the 
 one case than in the others. At the same time, we should 
 keep clear of such a word as imitation, which would imply 
 that Chaucer had no character of his own. He received his 
 impulse from the French : he made liberal use of their forms 
 and their materials; yet his works bear the impress and 
 breathe the spirit of a strong individuality ; and this indi- 
 viduality, though most obvious in the ' Canterbury Tales,' 
 is throughout all his works distinctively English. Finally, 
 to add one word on the comparative extent of Chaucer's 
 obligations to Italian sources : while he translated largely 
 from Boccaccio, and while it may be possible to trace an 
 expansion of his poetic ideals coincident with the time 
 when he may be supposed to have made his first acquaint- 
 ance with Italian poetry, it is not to be questioned that he 
 was most deeply indebted for general form, imagery, and 
 characterisation to the Trouvferes, whose language and 
 works he must have been familiar with from boyhood. 
 
 The facts of Chaucer's early life are so uncertain that one 
 must not use them without caution ; but if our antiquarians 
 are right in supposing Chaucer to have been the son of a 
 London vintner,^ we may say that Chaucer received from 
 the Continent another benefit hardly less important than 
 poetic impulse — viz., poetic status. To the Troubadours, 
 who numbered among them men of all degrees, he was in- 
 debted for having raised the practice of poetry above the 
 level of rhyming ecclesiastics and minstrels, retained to 
 celebrate the exploits of their patrons, and having secured 
 to the poet as such a larger hold on public attention and 
 respect. One may imagine that the son of a vintner, even 
 with the genius of Chaucer, might have settled in a mon- 
 astery, and spent his powers on religious hymns in Latin; 
 with now and then a ballad or an alliterative poem, for the 
 
 1 This has at last been settled by Mr Furnivall. 
 
6 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 
 
 amusement or instruction of the neighbouring vulgar. Or 
 he might have drifted into wandering - minstrelsy, and 
 roamed from patron to patron, eking out the attractions of 
 his songs by tricks of legerdemain, and supplementing the 
 praises of the past by flattering prognostications of the 
 future. But, fortunately for himself and for the world, he 
 came at a time when the cultivation of poetry by men of 
 the highest degree had elevated the poet's standing, and 
 secured for genius of humble birth a claim to more respect- 
 ful patronage. 
 
 The balance of opinion has of late inclined to 1340 as 
 the approximate date of Chaucer's birth ; ^ and this, sug- 
 gested by the description of Chaucer in 1386 as "forty 
 years and upwards," is rather confirmed by the discovery 
 that Richard Chaucer, who died in 1349, was his grand- 
 father, and not his father. As yet, we are left uncertain as 
 to what start in life Chaucer received from his father, and 
 what he owed to the patronage of Edward III., or his son, 
 John of Gaunt. It may have been, as Professor Morley 
 supposes, that the vintner was wealthy, and able to send his 
 son to Cambridge. Or, if Chaucer's father was the John 
 Chaucer who accompanied Edward on his French expedi- 
 tion in the twelfth year of his reign, probably in connection 
 with the commissariat, he may have been brought under the 
 notice of the king, or the king's son, at a very early age. 
 There are many possible ways in which such a youth as 
 Chaucer, in such a position as a vintner's son, may be sup- 
 posed to have been taken into royal service. At any rate, 
 it is ascertained that Chaucer began to bear arms — not the 
 puissant pike, but the arms of a gentleman- — in 1359. He 
 accompanied Edward III.'s unfortunate army of invasion in 
 that year, and was taken prisoner by the French, probably 
 in the course of the disastrous retreat from Paris. And Mr 
 Furnivall has ascertained that the king paid ;!^i6 for his 
 ransom in 1360. 
 
 At Michaelmas in 1367, Chaucer received from the Ex- 
 
 1 The date 1328 rests on the authority of the monument in Westminster 
 Abbey put up in 1556 by Nicholas Brigham. 
 
HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. ^ 
 
 chequer his first half-yearly payment of a pension of twenty 
 marks, granted him as one of the king's " valetti,"i for good 
 service rendered to the king, to be continued for the whole 
 of his life, or until he should be otherwise provided for. 
 From that date onwards, the Issue Rolls of the Exchequer 
 afford significant indications of the fact that Chaucer had a 
 powerful friend at Court. Up to 1386, fortune would seem 
 to have been uniformly kind to him. He was several times 
 sent abroad on secret aifairs of state. Among other places, 
 he had an opportunity of visiting Italy while Petrarch was 
 still alive, and Boccaccio was in the height of his fame. In 
 1372 he was appointed one of the commissioners for arrang- 
 ing a commercial treaty with the Genoese, and visited 
 Florence and Genoa in the following year. Unless royal 
 favourites were then intrusted with very unsuitable posts, 
 our poet must have had a decidedly commercial turn. In 
 1374 he was appointed Comptroller of the Customs and 
 Subsidy of Wools, Skins, and Tanned Hides in the Port of 
 London ; and he had to perform his duties in person, 
 without the option of a deputy. In his " House of Fame," 
 perhaps with a reference to these duties, he speaks of going 
 home when his reckonings were made up and poring over 
 books till his eyes were dazed; and, doubtless, between 
 business and poetry, he- itiust have been closely occupied. 
 For several generatioiis before Chaucer's time, the success- 
 ful poets of France had been in the habit of receiving muni- 
 ficent presents, which enabled them to give their whole time 
 to poetry. Chaucer was not so fortunate, or unfortunate ; 
 his patron, instead of handing over to him jewels, horses, 
 houses, or lands, obtained a moderate pension for him from 
 the Crown, and the privilege of discharging the dry duties 
 of a moderately lucrative office — an arrangement which 
 may, perhaps, be considered peculiarly English, and which 
 probably combined a certain amount of leisure with a sohd 
 feeling of independence. Besides his pension and his 
 salary, he seems to have had an allowance for robes as one 
 of the king's esquires ; and he received the custody of a 
 
 1 Mr Fumivall has discovered an entry about him in 1366. 
 
° GEOFFREY CHAUCER: 
 
 wealthy minor, which brought him something equivalent to 
 about ;^iooo of our money. The accession of Richard II. 
 did not injure his position : his pension was confirmed, and 
 he received, besides, another annuity of twenty marks, in 
 Heu of a daily pitcher of wine. The Issue Rolls contain 
 further entries of money paid to him for his expenses abroad 
 on the king's service. In 1382 he was appointed Comptroller 
 of the Petty Customs of the Port of London, with the privi- 
 lege of appointing a deputy. In 1385 he was allowed to 
 name a deputy for his other comptrollership. In 1386 he sat 
 in Parliament as a Knight of the Shire of Kent. This was 
 the zenith of his fortunes. In that year John of Gaunt lost 
 his authority at Court. A commission was issued for in- 
 quiring, among other alleged abuses, into the state of the 
 subsidies and customs, and Chaucer was superseded in his 
 two comptrollerships. The new brooms had probably little 
 difficulty in finding an excuse for sweeping away the 
 protege of the fallen Minister. As is often the manner of 
 poets, he had saved little of his pensions and salaries as a 
 royal favourite and a public officer ; if, at least, we may 
 draw the natural inference from his two years afterwards 
 getting both his annuities transferred to another man. The 
 revival of John of Gaunt's influence in 1389 again brightened 
 his prospects. He was appointed Clerk of the King's Works. 
 In 1394 he obtained an annuity of ^20; but the decay of 
 his fortunes is too plainly indicated by the fact that he was 
 several times under the necessity of applying for small por- 
 tions of this pension in advance. It is pleasing, however, 
 to know that the last year of his life was made happy by the 
 accession of his patron's son, Henry Bolingbroke, who im- 
 mediately more than doubled his annuity by the additional 
 grant of forty marks. He would seem to have retired to a 
 tenement in the garden of the chapel of the Blessed Mary, 
 of Westminster. According to the inscription on his tomb 
 in Westminster Abbey, confirmed by the cessation of the 
 minutes of his pension, he died on the 25th October 1400. 
 Chaucer being the poet of love, special interest attaches 
 to his matrimonial relations. From an entry in the Ex- 
 
HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. 9 
 
 chequer Rolls, it appears that one Philippa Chaucer, a 
 " damoiselle " in waiting on Queen Philippa, was granted a 
 pension often marks yearly for life, on the 12th September 
 1366; and in a subsequent year this annuity was paid to 
 GeoflFrey Chaucer as her husband. It would seem, then, 
 that Chaucer was married before the above date to the 
 above Philippa. That this was the lady is confirmed by 
 the terms ^ of a joint annuity to Chaucer and his wife 
 Philippa, granted in 1374. There is, however, a passage 
 in the ' Book of the Duchess ' that seems to have staggered 
 belief in an otherwise plain fact. Chaucer opens that poem 
 with an account of a restlessness and sleeplessness that has 
 tormented him of late, and goes on to say that nobody need 
 ask what has been the matter with him, for he cannot or will 
 not tell. 
 
 " My selven cannot telle why 
 The sooth, but truly as I guess, 
 I hold it to be a sickness 
 That I have suffered this eight year. 
 And yet my boot is never the neer.^ 
 For there is physician but one 
 That may me heal. — But that is done : 
 Pass we over until eft : " 
 That will not be must needs be left. 
 Our first matter is good to keep." 
 
 Now this was not written before 1369; and if we suppose 
 the sickness to be love-sickness, and the phrase " but iAai 
 is done " to mean that the process of healing has been ac- 
 complished, we must suppose either that Chaucer was not 
 married in 1366, or that he brought an extra-conjugal flirta- 
 tion to a successful issue in 1369. But what is the right 
 construction of the phrase " but that is done " ? It seems 
 to me to be merely a phrase of transition : it is not the 
 healing or the eight years' sickness that is said to be "done," 
 but the parenthetical chaff about the reason of the sickness. 
 
 1 See Nicholas's Life of Chaucer, Aldine edition, p. 48, for the discus- 
 sion of this and of the probability that the lady was the daughter of Sir 
 Payne Roet, and sister of Katherine Swynford, wife of John of Gaunt, and 
 ancestress of the royal line of England. 
 
 2 Nearer. ^ Again. 
 
lO GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 
 
 " So much for that ; since we cannot know the cause, let 
 us pass it over till another time, and return to the sickness 
 itself, which is the real point in hand." Further, why 
 must the sickness be taken as love-sickness? Chaucer's 
 habit is to profess ignorance of love as a matter of per- 
 sonal experience. Perhaps, if Mr Furnivall is right in 
 guessing that Philippa was a termagant (which he does, 
 I must admit, on slender evidence), this was the cause of 
 the sleeplessness. I am inclined, however, looking at the 
 language and turn of humour in Chaucer's ' Complaint to his 
 Purse,' — which he jocularly calls " queen of comfort," his 
 "lady dear,'' the sound and colour of whose yellow coins 
 are peerless — to believe that here we have a complaint of 
 poverty in the same key of humour, with a still more deli- 
 cate appeal to his patron, which may have had the effect of 
 getting him his first pubhc employment in the following 
 year. There is every reason to suppose that he was poor. If 
 by 1386 he had saved no money from his various sources 
 of income, he must have found it hard to support himself 
 and his wife when he received nothing from the Crown but 
 his pension of twenty marks. The eight years would corre- 
 spond with the interval between his release from imprison- 
 ment in France and 1369 when the ' Book of the Duchess' 
 is supposed to have been written. At any rate, a passage 
 so uncertain must not stand in the way of the documen- 
 tary evidence of the poet's marriage. 
 
 What was the personal appearance of this soldier, scholar, 
 courtier, poet, man of business, and successful wooer of a 
 queen's maid of honour? The portrait by Occleve^ repre- 
 sents him probably after his retirement to the garden of St 
 Mary's, and with the monastic dress and gesture of a grave 
 teacher in dark gown and hood, pointing with the forefinger 
 of the right hand, holding a string of beads in his left, and 
 having an inkhorn dangling at his breast. The eyes are large 
 and grave, and the features regular, and small in proportion 
 
 1 See a photograph of it in Mr Fumivall's ' Trial-Forewords,' Cha-uccr 
 Society, 
 
HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. II 
 
 to the size of the head. In the description of himself in the 
 ' Canterbury Tales,' put into the mouth of the imperious host, 
 (/V(?/.to"Sir Thopas"), he probably was indulging his favour- 
 ite habit of ironical bantering. The small size of the waist 
 is certainly jocular, seeing that the host is described as a 
 large burgess. The mysterious elfish reserve, and attitude 
 of quiet listening, are in keeping with his position as the 
 observer and recorder of his companions ; and the thing is 
 no more trustworthy as a veritable portrait of Chaucer than 
 the reserved " Spectator '' as a sober description of Addison. 
 Knowing that Chaucer was a successful courtier, we look 
 in his works for the necessary qualifications. In the con- 
 trast between Placebo and Justinus in the Merchant's Tale, 
 we see that he had theorised on the conditions of success 
 at Court. Justinus, as his name partially implies, was out- 
 spoken and honest, churlish and cynical towards human 
 frailties : the sort of man that succeeds only when his ser- 
 vices are indispensable, or his eccentricities amusing. But 
 Placebo was a true courtier, who understood the courtier's 
 golden rule of never obtruding advice : he was wise enough 
 to agree with his superior's plans, and so evade dangerous 
 responsibilities — 
 
 " For, brother mine, of me take this motif : 
 I have now been a court-man all my life. 
 And, God it wot, though I unworthy be, 
 I have standen in full great degree 
 Abouten lordes of full high estate ; 
 Yet had I never with none of them debate. 
 I never them contraried truely. 
 I wot well that my lord can more than I, 
 What that he saith I hold it firm and stable ; 
 I say the same or elles thing semblable. 
 A full great fool is any counsellor 
 That serveth any lord of high honour 
 That dare presume or ones thinken it 
 That his counsel should pass his lordes wit." 
 
 Admirers of sturdy English independence — independence 
 that is more candid in the exposure of faults than in the 
 
12 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 
 
 acknowledgment of merits, will desire always to think of 
 Chaucer as having been more of the Justinus than the 
 Placebo. Perhaps he was a judicious mean between the 
 two— neither a churl nor a sycophant. At any rate, it is 
 worth noticing that he understood the arts of the courtier 
 if he cared to avail himself of his knowledge. One thing 
 could hardly have failed to be of service to him in his 
 diplomatic negotiations, and that was equability of temper. 
 There is every indication in his works that he was not an 
 eager, excitable man ; moody and uncertain. On the con- 
 trary, he would seem to have been tranquil and leisurely, 
 with his wits in easy command ; patient, not self-assertive, 
 yet with sufKcient backbone to defy Fortune when the worst 
 came to the worst. Such, at least, he appears in his works, 
 and such, from his diplomatic success, we may presume 
 him to have been in actual business ; though we should err 
 greatly if in every case we concluded that the diplomatist 
 with the pen has equanimity enough to be diplomatic with 
 the tongue. In his works, at least, he displays the most artful 
 and even-tempered courtesy. We see him with easy smile 
 deferentially protesting ignorance of the flowers of rhetoric; 
 throwing the blame of disagreeable things in his story on 
 some author that he professes to follow ; dismissing knotty 
 inquisitions as too difhcult for his humble wit ; evading 
 tedious or irrelevant narrations by referring the reader to 
 Homer, or " Dares," or " Dyte." He conducts us through 
 his narratives with facile eloquence, smoothing over what 
 is unpalatable, waving aside digressions, interspersing easy 
 reflections ; never staying too long upon one topic. If he 
 had equally ready command of his resources for the pur- 
 pose of keeping people in good-humour face to face with 
 himself, no wonder though the king found him useful in 
 embassies. Perhaps the best evidence of his equable un- 
 hurried ways is his patient following of the windings and 
 turnings of the psotracted subtlety of Pandams in medi- 
 ating between Troilus and Cresside. This is the unique 
 gift of the epic poet and of the novelist : it is their special 
 function, with due precautions against tediousness, to ex- 
 
HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. 1 3 
 
 hibit operations that are too subtle or too extended for the 
 stage. Contrast this engineering of Pandarus with the 
 wooing of Anne by Richard III. : the deception of Othello 
 by lago ; the fooling of Ajax by Ulysses. These are all 
 triumphs of active audacity as distinguished from patient in- 
 trigue : they are examples of working upon the feelings no 
 less perfectly adapted for stage effect than the calculations 
 of Pandarus are for subtle epic. And as these cases illus- 
 trate the distinction between what is suited for the differ- 
 ent species of composition, so I believe they illustrate a 
 distinction in the characters of the authors. Coleridge, 
 generalising as usual from himself, has said that all great 
 men are calm and self-possessed, and that " Shakespeare's 
 evenness and sweetness of temper were proverbial even 
 among his contemporaries." There is, perhaps, more truth 
 in the generalisation than there is in the professed state- 
 ment of fact, though both are open to considerable limita- 
 tions and explanations. There is no record of evenness of 
 temper as a characteristic of Shakespeare; and although 
 there were, one would be inclined to think, from the evidence 
 of his life and works, that while he may have been even- 
 tempered as compared with Marlowe and Ben Jonson, he 
 was a much more excitable man than Chaucer. I doubt 
 very much whether Shakespeare had the easy equable self- 
 possession of Chaucer : with all his fundamental tranquillity 
 and clear grasp, there was more fire in him — more of a ten- 
 dency to take daring liberties, and to mock danger with 
 cool assurance. I do not suppose that Shakespeare could 
 have practised the cruelty of Richard III. any more than 
 Chaucer could have undertaken the service that Pandarus 
 rendered to Troilus; but I believe that Shakespeare was 
 capable of the cool daring requisite in the one case, while 
 Chaucer had the easy equanimity requisite in the other. 1 
 
 ■• If there was any foundation for the charge of "raptus" against 
 Chaucer, recently brought to light by Mr Furnivall, it might throw some 
 doubt upon this speculation. Mr Furnivall's suggestion, however, that 
 Chaucer may have carried off the lady for somebody else, is all too much 
 in the way of identifying the poet with his own Pandarus. I am sorry (for 
 
14 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 
 
 How about Chaucer's qualifications for winning the heart 
 of a queen's maid of honour? Women are so capricious 
 in their Hkings, that one cannot infer much about the poet's 
 personality from that fact ; still, one is disposed to set 
 down his success with a lady in such a position as a high 
 testimonial to his courtliness of manner. In such matters, 
 too, much is the " force of heaven-bred poesy ; " and if 
 Chaucer was painfully unable to act on Valentine's sovereign 
 specific, and win his lady with gifts, he might make up on 
 Proteus's principle, and lay lime to tangle her desires with 
 roundels, ditties, songs, and virelays. His works show that 
 he was not likely to fail in the respectfulness that women are 
 said to love. He is on all occasions the champion of " gentle 
 women, gentle creatures ; " and, however much sly fun he 
 makes of their foibles, he compensates amply by frequently 
 expressed indignation at their wrongs, and praises of their 
 many virtues. M. Sandras could not have made a greater 
 mistake than when he said that Chaucer imitated the chival- 
 rous Guillaume de Lorris out of deference to the taste of the 
 Court, and had naturally more affinity of spirit with the 
 satirical Jean de Meun. The opposite of this is the natural 
 inference from the fact that Chaucer translated the whole 
 of Guillaume, and not more than one-sixth of Jean. M. 
 Sandras ingeniously explains this by saying that Chaucer 
 made large omissions from Jean's part, in order to reduce 
 the whole, if not to the original design, at least to some 
 sort of symmetry; but the explanation is more ingenious 
 than sound. All Chaucer's works show that he was most 
 intimately pervaded by chivalrous sentiment. 
 
 Gower bears a message from Venus to Chaucer, in which 
 she greets him as her own disciple and poet, with whose 
 glad songs the land is fulfilled over all, and to whom she is 
 especially beholden. And Chaucer himself more than once 
 expresses his devotedness to the Queen of Love, and claims 
 credit for meritorious service. In his old age he seems 
 
 my theory) that the suggestion is not yet confirmed : so far it partakes of 
 the mistaken hero-worship that prompted Mr Massey to discredit Shake- 
 speare with writing bawdy sonnets for the use of a friend. 
 
HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. 1 5 
 
 to have sobered down into becoming gravity, translating 
 Boethius on the Consolations of Philosophy, and writing a 
 Treatise on the Astrolabe for his little son Lewis — no less 
 fitting as an employment for grave years than significant as 
 an indication of his substantial strength of intellect ; but all 
 his best work as a poet was done at the instigation of love 
 and humour. It is remarkable that, while both his serious 
 and his comic productions are founded in most cases on 
 pre-existing works of art, in the serious pieces he follows his 
 original much more closely than in the comic. In his comic 
 tales, as Tyrwhitt says, " he is generally satisfied with bor- 
 rowing a slight hint of his subject, which he varies, enlarges, 
 and embellishes at pleasure, and gives the whole the air and 
 colour of an original." His imagination dwelt by prefer- 
 ence in the regions of brightness, sweetness, softness, and 
 laughter, in its broadest as well as its subtlest varieties. He 
 passed lightly over his opportunities of sublime description ; 
 he picked small personal threads out of the mighty web of 
 public transactions. Such grandeur as appears in his pages 
 is the grandeur of magnificent buildings, splendid pageants, 
 assemblies, and processions of knights and ladies in gor- 
 geous array. Affairs of the heart in high and humble life are 
 his themes ; he is the sympathetic poet of the aspirations, 
 sorrows, and manifold ludicrous complications of the tender 
 passion. 
 
 Perhaps too much has been made of the " Complaint of 
 Pity," as an indication that Chaucer's early life was saddened 
 by a hopeless passion. Several touches in the poem betray 
 that the lover's despair is not so deadly as he protests. Love 
 disappointments do not cause permanent melancholy, ex- 
 cept in subjects predisposed thereto. And though there 
 is a strong serious strand in the thread of Chaucer's life, 
 coming more into prominence as the soft outer nap is worn 
 off by the rubs of time, his youthful poetry contains an 
 immense preponderance of the gay over the grave. He was 
 not a mere butterfly; but, on the whole, he preferred the sun 
 to the shade. 
 
 Therein he showed his natural affinity for the Court. In 
 
1 6 GEOFFREY CHAUCER: 
 
 the ' Canterbury Tales ' it is tlie Monk that bores the merry 
 pilgrims with his humdrum tragedies ; and it is the Knight 
 that interposes to put a stop to him. The Knight does not 
 like to hear of sudden falls from great wealth and ease ; tales 
 of prosperous elevation ate more to his liking. It is the 
 grave professional men that tell the piteous tales : the Man 
 of Law recites the sufferings of faithful Constance, the Clerk 
 the trials of patient Griselda, the Doctor of Physic the 
 heartrending fate of Virginia. These things do not occur 
 by accident ; there is a studied epic propriety in them. 
 Chaucer evidently had his theory concerning what pertained 
 to the Court, and what went naturally with the hard mental 
 work of the learned professions. Looking back upon his own 
 life, we see that his mixed career had given him experience 
 of both, and that in his youth he inclined more to the one, 
 while in his old age, as was natural, he felt drawn more 
 towards the other. If he had but a short tenure of the 
 fresh May jollity of his Squire, he had an equally short 
 tenure of the pedantic dryness of his Clerk. If he suffered 
 eight years' sickness, whether from love or from poverty, or, 
 worst of all, from a horrible combination of these two mighty 
 powers, he yet had in his old age spirit enough left for the 
 gay jocularity of his " Complaint to his Purse." 
 
 When we look closely at the construction of his poems, 
 trying to realise how they were built up in the poet's mind, 
 we are confirmed in our first impressions of the equability of 
 his proceedings. We are not to suppose that he sang as the 
 birds sing, without effort — out of " the inborn kindly joyous- 
 ness of his nature," as Coleridge says. His work is too solid 
 for that. Those perfect touches of character in the Prologue 
 to the ' Canterbury Tales ' were not put together with unpre- 
 meditated flow : we should as soon believe that a picture of 
 Hogarth's was dashed off at a sitting. And, indeed, Chaucer 
 tells us himself, in his " House of Fame," that he wrote 
 love-songs till his head ached, and pored over books till his 
 eyes had a dazed look. Still, he worked equably, with patient 
 elaboration. He is not carried away into incontinent fine 
 frenzies of creation ; his words and images do not flash to- 
 
HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. 17 
 
 gether with lightning energy like the words and images of 
 Shakespeare. His imagination is not overpowered by ex- 
 cited fecundity. Perhaps none of our poets combine such 
 wealth of imagination with such perfect command over its 
 resources : such power of expressing the incident or feeling 
 in hand, with such ease in passing from it when it has 
 received its just proportion ; perhaps none of them can put 
 so much into the mouth of a personage, and at the same 
 time observe such orderly clearness, and such propriety of 
 character. If you wish to understand his processes of con- 
 struction, you cannot do better than study such passages as 
 the elaborate self-disclosure of Januarius, \^'hen he consults 
 with his friends about the expediency of marrying, or the 
 imprudent candour of the Pardoner, or the talk between 
 Chanticleer and Pertelot in the tale of the " Nun's Priest." 
 We are there struck by another consideration, and that is, 
 how much he must have owed to his predecessors the garru- 
 lous inventive Fableors of northern France ; and with what 
 clearness of eye, and freedom and firmness of hand, he 
 gathered, sifted, and recombined their opulent details of 
 action and character. The ' Canterbury Tales ' could no 
 more have grown out of the imagination and observation 
 of one man than the ' Iliad,' although one man had scope 
 for the highest genius in adding to, taking from, kneading, 
 and wholly recasting the materials furnished by many less 
 distinguished labourers. 
 
 It were a nice question to raise, whether Chaucer or 
 Shakespeare had the best knowledge of men. They ex- 
 hibit character under conditions so very different that it is 
 hard to make a satisfactory comparison. The epic poet 
 has a choice between describing his personages directly, 
 accumulating characteristic traits in a full portrait, and 
 making his persong.ges reveal themselves, as it were, un- 
 consciously in what they say and do; and usually he 
 supplements the one method by the other. He can put 
 before us at his leisure their whole outward personality, 
 voice, colour, general build, tricks of gesture, peculiar- 
 ities of dress. We are left in no doubt as to his ideal ; 
 
 B 
 
I 8 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 
 
 and are in a position to say at once whether the details are 
 consistent or inconsistent ; complete or meagre. Now, 
 the dramatic poet is much more limited. He may intro- 
 duce a striking feature now and then, such as FalstaiFs 
 fatness, Bardolph's red nose, Aguecheek's flaxen hair ; but 
 for the most part, he must leave the outward personality, 
 with all its suggestiveness, to the " make up " of the actor. 
 Hence, so far are we from seeing easily the consistency or 
 inconsistency of a dramatist's creations, that his intention 
 not unfrequently becomes a subject of dispute — the situa- 
 tions within the compass of a play rarely being sufficiently 
 varied to make the exhibition of character unequivocal. 
 Unless, indeed, the personages either describe themselves, 
 or are described by one another, or (as in Greek tragedy) 
 are known to the audience beforehand, their characters 
 must always be more or less enigmatical, seeing that every 
 action is open to several interpretations. It can never, 
 therefore, be quite satisfactory to compare a dramatist, as 
 regards knowledge of character, with an epic poet, and that, 
 too, an epic poet whose peculiar province is the epic of 
 manners and character. Although Shakespeare's person- 
 ages are not all so definitely, fully, and consistently char- 
 acterised as Chaucer's, we must not conclude that his 
 knowledge was inferior. In the case of such masters, one 
 might do worse than follow the commonplace advice to 
 study, enjoy, and admire both, without troubling one's head 
 about their respective merits. It is enough for us to know 
 that Chaucer observed with clear eye the characteristic 
 features and habits of the different classes in the England 
 of his time, and has set them down for us with the most 
 patient elaboration and the most genial spirit. 
 
 In trying to make out Chaucer's character from his 
 poetry, we can never be quite certain that we do not carry 
 our notions of his equability, not to mention his inborn 
 kindly joyousness, a great deal too far. The gay predomi- 
 nates in his works over the grave. They seldom turn to 
 the gloomy side of things. Yet the more intimately we 
 know him, the more we begin to form suspicions that, after 
 
HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. 1 9 
 
 all, his equanimity is only comparative, and that perfection 
 in this is as difficult to be attained as in any other virtue. 
 We see him chiefly in his flower-garden and summer-house ; 
 but beneath his gay manner as he receives visitors there, 
 we discover, after longer acquaintance, symptoms of sensi- 
 tive tenderness as well as sternness and strength where the 
 smiling serenity at first appeared to be imperturbable. 
 
 Chaucer's works are assigned by Professor Ten Brink to 
 three periods : the first ending with his departure for Italy 
 in 1372, comprising his "A B C," his translation of the 
 Roman de la Hose, and his " Book of the Duchess," and 
 representing his subordination to French influence ; the 
 second, ending in 1384, the supposed date of the " House 
 of Fame,'' comprising as well as that work, his " Life of St 
 Cecile " (Second Nun's Tale), his " Parliament of Fowls," his 
 " TroUus and Cresside," and his first version of the Knight's 
 Tale, and representing his subordination to Italian influ- 
 ence ; and the third, comprising "Annelida and Arcite," 
 the "Legend of Good Women," the 'Canterbury Tales,' and 
 the "Complaint of Mars and Venus," and representing 
 Chaucer's maturity and independence. I should be in- 
 clined to reject this division as throwing a factitious, and, 
 upon the whole, misleading light on the natural develop- 
 ment of Chaucer's genius. There is an immense advance 
 from the " Book of the Duchess " to the " House of Fame ;" 
 but I do not think that that advance is explained by sup- 
 posing French influence to have operated on the one, and 
 Italian influence on the other. The difference mainly re- 
 presents an increasing width of knowledge and mastery of 
 expression, fully accounted for by the interval between the 
 works. It seems to me that Chaucer had from first to last 
 more affinity with the French than with the Italians. I 
 can distinguish no change either in his methods or in his 
 spirit that is fairly attributable to Italian influence. He 
 was master of his own development from the time that he 
 received his first impulse from the French. The Italians 
 merely supphed him as they supplied Shakespeare with 
 
20 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 
 
 material. English obligations to Italian impulse belong to 
 the sixteenth century. The greater part of " Troilus and 
 Cresside " is Chaucer's own.^ He exalts the character of 
 Cresside in the chivalrous spirit common to him and Guil- 
 laume de Lorris ; and recasts Pandarus with a power of char- 
 acterisation inferior to nothing in the ' Canterbury Tales.' 
 
 Mr Fumivall's refinement of a fourth period, a period of 
 decay, into which he puts all the minor poems that he does 
 not like, seems purely arbitrary, so far as I can judge ; but 
 Mr Fumivall's devotion to the subject gives him a very 
 great authority. I should have been disposed to refer 
 Chaucer's " Flee fro the Press," to his final retirement from 
 the world, to the same date as his " Parson's Tale.'' 
 
 "The Testament of Love," the "Assembly of Ladies," 
 and the " Lamentation of Mary Magdalene," are now uni- 
 versally allowed not to be genuine works of Chaucer ; and 
 of late, the genuineness of the " Court of Love," the " Flower 
 and the Leaf," and " Chaucer's Dream," has been disputed 
 by Professor Ten Brink and Mr Bradshaw, and their argu- 
 ments have been accepted by Mr Furnivall. They proceed 
 chiefly with a rhyme test : the rhyming of the adverbial y 
 with the verbal and adjectival ye. They put together all 
 the works ascribed to Chaucer by early MSS., or mentioned 
 by himself or by Lydgate as his ; find that all these agree 
 in not admitting the y ye rhyme, and conclude that no work 
 admitting this rhyme can be genuinely Chaucer's. This is 
 the real strength of their case. They adduce also internal 
 evidence ; but that is more than overbalanced against them. 
 The weak point in the rhyme argument is the " Romance of 
 the Rose." Chaucer tells us that he made a translation of 
 this work, and yet it admits the objectionable rhyme. Mr 
 Bradshaw obviates the difficulty by declaring that the exist- 
 ing translation is not Chaucer's, but a translation by some- 
 
 1 See Mr W. M. Rossetti's admirable prefatory remarks to his compari- 
 son of the work with Boccaccio's Y-^iO'sX^sXo,. Chaucer Society, I do not 
 quite agree with Mr Rossetti, upon his own showing, that the chivalric 
 passion and gallantry came in great measure out of Boccaccio's poem into 
 Chaucer's. Troilus's courtship is modelled more, it seems to me, on the 
 pursuit of the Rose. 
 
HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. 21 
 
 body else, and that Chaucer's must have been lost. Pro- 
 fessor Ten Brink makes the more cautious and rational 
 conjecture that, when Chaucer translated the Romance, he 
 had not begun to restrict himself from the y ye rhyme, 
 which was freely used by all English poets before him. It 
 is hard to believe that this translation, if written before 
 Chaucer's, could have been unknown to him, and if known, 
 could have been ignored ; and the supposition that it could 
 have been written after his, without any reference to him, 
 is absurdly contrary to the customs of the time. And if 
 the existing translation is Chaucer's, the whole rhyme test 
 becomes of no value as applied to Chaucer's early poems ; 
 or rather, it tells in favour of their genuineness. If 
 the " Court of Love " and " Chaucer's Dream," which, if 
 Chaucer's at all, must, from their themes, be placed among 
 his very earliest efforts, had been written subject to the re- 
 striction, while the Romance is not, it would have been rather 
 a presumption against their genuineness ; but when all the 
 earliest works are found to agree in admitting the y ye 
 rhymes, the probability becomes as strong as possible that 
 Chaucer began by observing the metrical law of his prede- 
 cessors, and did not venture to restrict himself absolutely 
 till he had acquired greater command of the language. As 
 regards " Chaucer's Dream," it is not worth arguing about, 
 though creditable enough as an early performance : but it is 
 satisfactory to find that the rhyme test need not deprive us 
 of the "Court of Love," which Mr Swinburne has pro- 
 nounced " Chaucer's most beautiful of young poems ;" or 
 of the " Flower and the Leaf," which Dryden and Hazlitt 
 placed among the finest of Chaucer's works. It is also 
 satisfactory thaftthe cleverness of the test as a piece of ob- 
 servation is not discredited by its proving contrary to com- 
 mon-sense. It is simply incredible that these poems could 
 have been written by a poet whose name has perished. 
 If he had written before Chaucer, which could hardly 
 be seriously maintained, he could not but have become 
 famous ; and the probability is that Chaucer would have 
 mentioned him as the model of his seven-line stanza. If 
 
22 GEOFFREY CHAUCER: 
 
 he had written after Chaucer, he would certainly have men- 
 tioned Chaucer in his list of masters, according to the uni- 
 versal habit of the time. The idea of deliberate forgery is 
 out of the question ; and if the " Court of Love " had been 
 the work of a forger or an imitator, the artificial restriction 
 of rhyme was precisely the sort of thing he would labour to 
 observe. Finally, the " Court of Love " is unmistakably 
 imitated in the 'King's Quhair' of James I., whose cap- 
 tivity in England began only five years after Chaucer's 
 death, and yet he mentions no master except Chaucer, 
 Gower, and Lydgate. That makes it quite clear that James 
 attributed the " Court of Love " to Chaucer ; and what 
 need is there for further evidence ? ^ 
 
 II. — His Language, Metres, and Imagery. 
 
 Our philological authorities do not seem to be quite at 
 one about Chaucer's English. Mr Earle (' English Philo- 
 logy,' p. 75-97) says that Chaucer and Gower wrote King's 
 English, the language that had grown up at Court about 
 the person of the monarch ; and that this was distinguished 
 from all the contemporary dialects by its being formed more 
 under the influence of French. This position is not refuted 
 by counting the number of words derived from the French, 
 as Mr Ellis does for the Prologue to the ' Canterbury Tales,' 
 and finding that the proportion of words so derived is " not 
 quite one word in a line on an average." It is not so much 
 
 1 Philogenet, the name of the writer of the " Court of Love," comes curi- 
 ously near Philo Ghent, which Chaucer might well subscribe himself ; and 
 Philobone would pass for a pretty transmutation of Philippa, the name of 
 Chaucer's wife. True, Philobone is not Philogenet's mistress — she only 
 introduces him ; but this is in accordance with the Troubadour rule (which 
 may explain, also, the apparent inconsistency of "Chaucer's Dream"), 
 that, when the poet's mistress was attached to a court, he addressed his 
 songs to the presiding princess (see Mr Rutherford's Troubadours, p. 150). 
 Rosial, though intended for Phihppa, may thus have been formally Lady 
 Blanche, on whom Philippa attended. Once more, compare the name 
 Rosial with 11. 41-48 of the Romance, where the translator tells his patron- 
 ess that she "ought of price and right be cleped Rose of every wight." 
 But these may be mere accidental coincidences. 
 
HIS LANGUAGE, METRES, AND IMAGERY. 23 
 
 the number of words borrowed that Mr Earle insists upon, 
 as the general strain or rhythm of the language. Not that 
 he means to say that the King's English adopted the French 
 rhythm, but that, growing up as it did among persons 
 familiar with French, it acquired a rhythm of its own, dif- 
 ferent both from the French rhythm and from the rhythm 
 of the provincial dialects. To understand this, compare the 
 English of Chaucer or Gower with the English of Robert 
 de Brunne, or of Langland's 'Piers Plowman.' Differ- 
 ence in the inflections and in the proportion of French 
 words do not account for the immense indescribable dif- 
 ference in the general movement of the language.' This 
 movement, this rhythm, Mr Earle considers the distinctive 
 feature of the King's English. 
 
 Whether Dr Morris would accept Mr Earle's position or 
 not, I do not know. Dr Morris lays down that Chaucer 
 wrote in the East Midland dialect, and so far is at variance 
 with Mr Earle's statement, that the language of the Court 
 differed from all other dialects. But perhaps Dr Morris 
 means only that Chaucer uses the inflectional system of the 
 East Midland as distinguished from the Northern and the 
 Southern. These dialects have been defined by Dr Morris 
 with new precision.^ The Midland was the most widely 
 spread, and of its many varieties the East Midland was 
 the most important. It was first cultivated as a literary 
 dialect as early as the beginning of the thirteenth century ; 
 and it had then thrown off most of the older inflections, so 
 as to become in respect of inflectional forms and syntactical 
 structure as simple as our own. It was the dialect of Orm 
 and of Robert of Brunne. Wickliffe and Gower added 
 considerably to its importance, and Chaucer's influence 
 raised it to the position of the standard language. In 
 Chaucer's time it was the language of the metropoHs, and 
 had probably found its way south of the Thames into Kent 
 and Surrey. Such is Dr Morris's account of the East Mid- 
 land. So far as appears, he has not been struck with differ- 
 ences of rhythm, and it has not occurred to him whether 
 
 1 Gamett and Guest, however, are still worth reading. 
 
24 GEOFFREY CHAUCER: 
 
 the language of the Court was different in other respects 
 than inflections from the language of the metropolis. The 
 probabilities seem to be overwhelming in support of Mr 
 Earle's hypothesis, and justify him in saying that the facts 
 admit of no other explanation. The frequenters of the 
 Court, when they were ultimately forced to adopt the lan- 
 guage of the people, could not but have found it poorly 
 equipped for the varied needs of polite conversation ; and 
 even when they were not under the necessity of importing 
 words from the more cultivated French, must have been 
 compelled to introduce turns of expression to the extent of 
 altering the complexion of the language. 
 
 Whatever may be our conclusion as to the sources of 
 Chaucer's language, there can be little doubt that his genius 
 made it the standard language. A poet cannot, of course, 
 invent a language : what he writes must be intelligible to 
 his readers, and his admirers are constrained by the same 
 necessity of being intelligible to their readers. But if a 
 great poet had arisen before Chaucer in the Northern 
 dialect, or if Chaucer himself had written in that dialect, the 
 course of the English language might have been substan- 
 tially altered. In corroboration of this, Mr Earle remarks 
 that " the Tuscan form of modern Italian was decided by 
 the poetry of Dante, at a time when Florence and Tuscany 
 lay in comparative obscurity, and when more apparent influ- 
 ence was exercised by Venice, or Naples, or Sicily." I sus- 
 pect, however, that in all such cases the poet must be backed 
 by a cultivated society ; and that the only possibility likely to 
 have affected the course of standard English would have been 
 the existence of a high culture in the Court of Scotland, and the 
 ascendancy of a great poet there before the date of Chaucer. 
 
 One of the many directions of thorough antiquarian study 
 in this century has been towards the remains of old English; 
 and one of the most valuable triumphs of this patient 
 scholarship has been to restore the versification of Chaucer. 
 Chaucer's metre had been a vexed question ever since he 
 had been reduced to print. The change of pronunciation 
 
HIS LANGUAGE, METRES, AND IMAGERY. 2$ 
 
 had seriously affected the number of syllables in his verses ; 
 and his editors, Thynne and Speght, while they valiantly 
 abused detractors, could not, or at least did not, show how 
 to supply the missing syllables. Ascham, Sidney, Spenser, 
 and others of that age, recorded their admiration of the old 
 poet; but they omitted to say on what principles they 
 scanned his lines. A century later, Dryden, with his vigor- 
 ous habit of saying what he could not as well as what 
 he could admit, expressed the greatest veneration for 
 Chaucer; but considered that the rough diamond needed 
 smoothing for modem senses. He laid down in the 
 most positive manner that Chaucer's lines often have a 
 syllable too many and often a syllable too few. His per- 
 emptory opinion received a considerable shake from the 
 publication of Tyrwhitt's edition in 1778, with its "Essay 
 on the Language and Versification of Chaucer ; " but even 
 then a certain amount of scepticism might have been par- 
 donable. One might have been forgiven for entertaining 
 some doubts about Tyrwhitt's liberal restoration of final es, 
 to make up for the deficiency of feet when the text is pro- 
 nounced with the modern allowance of syllables. Tyr- 
 whitt did not apply sufficiently convincing scholarship to 
 show that these ^s were " survivals " of French and old 
 English (or Anglo-Saxon) terminations, and, still more 
 largely, of old English inflections. This was first thor- 
 oughly done by Guest, who pointed out that the dropping 
 of the final e is the exception, and expressed a hope that we 
 should one day have a list of all the words in which Chau- 
 cer has taken that liberty. I am not aware that the more 
 recent labours of Mr Ellis, Mr Skeat, and Mr Fumivall, 
 have realised this hope, but they have gone a considerable 
 way towards its fulfilment. The general reader should 
 see the sections added to Tyrwhitt's Essay by Mr Skeat, in 
 the Aldine edition of Chaucer, vol. i. 
 
 But not only have the missing syllables been recovered 
 by modem scholarship : an attempt has been made by Mr 
 Ellis, in his elaborate and ingenious work on Early Enghsh 
 Pronunciation, to recover the sounds of the vowels, so that 
 
26 GEOFFREY CHAUCER: 
 
 Chaucer may be declaimed as he was by his contemporaries. 
 Mr Ellis proceeds on the supposition that no two words 
 were set down as rhymes unless their sounds agreed per- 
 fectly ; and he starts from known vowel-sounds of Latin, 
 French, and English of the sixteenth century. The investi- 
 gation is interesting, and the results are as trustworthy as 
 the undertaking is courageous ; but nothing can restore for 
 us the old music of Chaucer's verse. It is musical to us — 
 exquisitely so — but the music is not the music that de- 
 lighted the Court of Richard II. We may learn to repeat 
 the articulations of his contemporaries, but we cannot hear 
 with their ears. 
 
 Chaucer has three principal metres : four-accent couplets 
 (the metre of Milton's " Comus "), in the "Romance of the 
 Rose," " Chaucer's Dream," the " Book of the Duchess," 
 and the "House of Fame;" rhyme-royaP — the metre of 
 Shakespeare's " Lucrece " — (a stanza of seven decasyllabics, 
 with rhymes of i, 3 + 2, 4, 5 -t- 6, 7), in the "Court of Love," 
 the "Parliament of Birds," the "Flower and the Leaf," 
 four of the ' Canterbury Tales,' and " Troilus and Cres- 
 side ; " and heroic, or five-accent couplets, in the " Legend 
 of Good Women," and most of the ' Canterbury Tales.' 
 
 The four-accent couplet is the original metre of the 
 Roman de la Rose and nearly all the French fabliaux, and 
 was the most common metre in English poetry during the 
 thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries. It is the prevailing 
 form in Dr Morris's ' Specimens of Early English,' being 
 
 1 "The epithet royal seems to be derived from the chant-royal ai the 
 French, a short poem in ballet-stave, written in honour of God and the 
 Virgin Mary ; and by which, according to French critics, the abilities of 
 the king were tested in the poetical contests at Rouen." — Guest's English 
 Rhythms, ii. 359. According to Warton, the title " Balad-Royal " was 
 first used in English by Caxton, being apphed to Herbert de Burgh's 
 stanza in his Translation of Cato's Morals. Gascoigne calls the same 
 stave " rythm-royal." It is sometimes said that the epithet " royal " was 
 derived from the circumstance that the stave was used by James I. of Scot- 
 land in the 'King's Quhair;' but this is probably a later supposition 
 based only upon the coincidence. If it had been the tradition, James VI. 
 of Scotland would hardly have appUed the term ' ' ballet-royal " to the stave 
 of eight, designating the seven-line stave— after its first memorable appear- 
 ance in English — Troilus verse. 
 
HIS LANGUAGE, METRES, AND IMAGERY. 2/ 
 
 used for all kinds of narrative matter, fables, romances, 
 tales, ' Sunday Sermons,' and political songs. Its facility is 
 rather a temptation than a check to a loquacious narrator ; 
 and Chaucer dances along in his jingling fetters with the 
 greatest vivacity, as if his fertile invention wanted some 
 severer restraint. He dashes off every now and then into 
 digressive reflections, and recalls himself with an effort, as 
 if he could hardly refrain from throwing in a few more of 
 the facile couplets before he had done. 
 
 " Troilus verse " was the favourite form of the fifteenth 
 century, and was frequently used in the sixteenth. It was, 
 indeed, the great stanza of English poetry, till Spenser 
 superseded it with the fuller music of his more elaborate 
 structure, and is a simpler and homelier dress correspond- 
 ing with the youth of the English muse. It may be dis- 
 puted in which of the two stanzas the greatest quantity 
 of English poetry has been written ; for while Troilus 
 verse was used by many poets of the fourteenth cen- 
 tury whose names even are seldom repeated now, the 
 Spenserian was the favourite stanza of the great revival 
 at the close of the eighteenth century, numbering among 
 its patrons Shenstone, Thomson, and Beattie, Campbell, 
 Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Chaucer used the seven- 
 line stanza to embody graceful allegories, and tales of sweet 
 pathos. His choice of this medium for the touching stories 
 of Constance and Griselda, and the woful legends of 
 Cecilia and little Nicholas, is approved by the later em- 
 ployment of it in Spenser's "Ruins of Time," Daniel's 
 " Complaint of Rosamond," and Shakespeare's "Lucrece " 
 and " Lover's Complaint." It is worth noting that though 
 Lydgate adopted the same stanza for his tragical " Falls of 
 Princes," Chaucer employs a heavier eight-line stanza for 
 his Monk's " Tragedies," or brief commiserations of poten- 
 tates that had fallen out of great prosperity. The seven-line 
 stave with its single repeat and appended couplet, a form 
 that lends itself naturally to the expression of graceful after- 
 thought or irrepressible sob, is too quick a measure for the 
 embodiment of statelier feeling. This was felt by Michael 
 
23 GEOFFREY CHAUCER: 
 
 Drayton when, after composing his poem on the wars of 
 the Barons of Richard II. in Troilus verse, he recast the 
 whole into heavier ottava rima. But ottava rima (the 
 stanza of ' Don Juan '), though strong enough for the vig- 
 orous march of Drayton's narrative, would not have been 
 sufficiently inwoven for the grave reflective sentiments of 
 the Monk's Laments, which are written in eight banded lines 
 (i, 3 + 2, 4, s, 7 + 6, 8) — the Spenserian stanza without the 
 concluding Alexandrine. 
 
 Five-accent couplets are more suited for comedy and the 
 comic epic, than for tragedy and the grand epic. This can 
 be called " heroic verse " only when heroism is taken to 
 imply a minimum of dignified feeling. There is, doubtless, 
 a certain strenuousness in its movement when the matter 
 is heavy ; it may be used to convey the impression of bold 
 splendid energy : but dignity and stateliness are out of the 
 question. If the ear attends to the rhyme at all, the ex- 
 pectation of it must be more or less of a distraction from 
 the feeling of massive grandeur. With the lighter material 
 of comedy, the regular beat of the rhyme is cheerful and 
 animating, if the couplet is occasionally divided and other 
 means are used to prevent the regularity from becoming 
 tedious. If one were disposed to venture on fine distinc- 
 tions, one might say that the ottava rima of ' Anster Fair ' 
 and ' Don Juan ' is the peculiarly appropriate metre of the 
 light epic, while the couplet is the predestined vehicle 
 of dramatic comedy. In the theatre the ear cannot wait 
 for the close of a stanza through several verses without 
 fatigue, and the quick recurrence of the rhyme is imperative. 
 In a light narrative intended to be read, longer suspense is 
 permissible, while at the same time the nature of the sub- 
 ject forbids intricacy; and ottava rima with its simple even 
 structure seems to answer the purpose about as exactly as 
 could be desired. 
 
 Chaucer's similitudes are taken from such familiar sources, 
 that M. Sandras charges him with giving a vulgar tone to 
 his renderings of the chivalrous romances of Boccaccio. 
 
HIS LANGUAGE, METRES, AND IMAGERY. 29 
 
 Whether it was that his English humour now and then broke 
 out through his chivalrous sentiment, or whatever may be 
 the explanation, there certainly is some ground for the 
 charge. The comparison of Cressida to the " chief letter 
 A," is so like our modern vulgar " A i," that we are not per- 
 haps unbiassed judges in that particular case. But there 
 are a few similitudes in the Knight's Tale expressed with 
 a primitive simplicity that must have drawn a smile from the 
 poet himself. Such is the comparison of Palamon and 
 Arcite quarrelling about Emily to two dogs fighting for a bone, 
 while a kite comes in and carries off the object of conten- 
 tion. And still more amusing and unworthy of the subject 
 is the comparison of poor humanity struggling on through 
 the dark world with uncertain footing, to a drunk man, 
 drunk as a mouse, who knows that he has a house, but does 
 not know how to reach it, and finds the way very slippery. 
 These similitudes are undeniably vivid : but unless our 
 judgment is biassed by modem feelings, they belonged even 
 in Chaucer's age more to the quaint monk than the chival- 
 rous knight. 
 
 Most of Chaucer's similitudes, however — and he uses 
 comparatively few, either as extended similes or as meta- 
 phors — are simple without being quaint or humorously in- 
 adequate to the subject. In this respect he contented him- 
 self with commonplaces, and made no eifort to embellish 
 his style with far-fetched flowers. He gives his warriors the 
 look of griffins and lions, and makes them fight like cruel 
 tigers and wild boars. Occasionally he expands the com- 
 parison, and gives it a certain local colour after the Italian 
 manner, as when he introduces the Thracian hunter, or the 
 tiger of the Galgopley, or the lion of Belmarie, or the pale 
 face of the criminal on his way to execution. In extolling 
 the charms of his heroines, he describes for the most part 
 directly; and when he wants a brief illumination, makes use 
 of the immemorial comparisons from the simple beauties of 
 inanimate nature, the rose and the lily, sunlight and moon- 
 Hght, spring-time and morning. 
 
 We are accustomed to think that Chaucer was able to dis- 
 
30 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 
 
 pense with a richly-loaded diction, because he wrote for 
 a primitive audience, thankful for small poetical mercies. 
 But they were not so unsophisticated that a poet could 
 make a reputation for colour, or as they might have called 
 it, flowers of rhetoric, " the blossoms fresh of Tullius' garden 
 sweet," upon the strength of comparing lovely women to 
 roses and lilies, sunshine and spring, perennial as is the 
 charm in thinking of such a likeness. Chaucer might have 
 had to bestir himself for less familiar " tropes " and figures, 
 had it not been that the structure of his poems gave him 
 the opportunity of flooding his pages with colour in direct 
 description. Beautiful women, heroic men, gorgeous build- 
 ings, gay processions, splendid armour, gardens and foun- 
 tains, woods and rivers, birds and beasts, come in his way 
 as the poet of fables and allegories, love, character, and 
 romantic adventure ; and he describes them enthusiastically 
 with the utmost opulence of detail. His pictorial imagina- 
 tion was not called upon for many fragmentary contributions, 
 but everj' now and then it received steady emplo)mient. 
 What need had his readers for isolated touches of colour 
 when their poet gave them such accumulations to revel in 
 as the Gardens of Venus, the Temple of Venus, the House 
 of Fame, the Court of Love, the Tournament before The- 
 seus, the rival troops of the knights and ladies of the Flower 
 and the Leaf ? 
 
 The "Parliament of Birds'' is perhaps the richest of 
 Chaucer's smaller poems — " imitations," as M. Sandras calls 
 them, — but the "Book of the Duchess" is as good an 
 example as need be of the poetical machinery that he in- 
 herited. The central aim of the poem is to commiserate 
 the death of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, and to express 
 the sorrow of her husband; but this object has grown into 
 fold after fold of richly-coloured and animated conception. 
 The poet begins by telling how, for eight years, he has suf- 
 fered from restlessness and sleeplessness, and how one night, 
 as he lay awake, he called for an old romance (apparently 
 Ovid's ' Metamorphoses,' in the original or in a French 
 translation), and read the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone. A 
 
HIS LANGUAGE, METRES, AND IMAGERY. 3 1 
 
 less skilful artist might have explained to us that his tale of 
 devotedness was a proper parallel to the mournful separation 
 of united love, of which he was preparing a memorial. But 
 though this was doubtless the real motive, the poet skilfully 
 invents another, which makes it appear as if the correspon- 
 dence were an accident, and varies the commonplace of 
 falling asleep over the introductory tale. The ostensible 
 motive is that the story of Ceyx and Alcyone involves the 
 agency of the god Morpheus, of whom the poet had never 
 heard before. Partly in game, he vows to make Morpheus 
 a present of a bed of down, if only he may obtain an evi- 
 dence of his divinity. Scarcely had he breathed this vow 
 when he fell asleep. 
 
 Next comes the dream, the opening of which is exceed- 
 ingly beautiful. 
 
 " Me thought thus that it was May, 
 And in the dawning I lay — 
 Me mette -^ thus in my bed all naked — 
 And looked forth, for I was waked 
 With smalle fowles a great heap, 
 That had affrayed me out of my sleep, 
 Through noise and sweetness of their song. 
 And, as me mette, they sat along 
 Upon my chamber roof without, 
 Upon the tiles over all about. 
 And songen everych in his wise 
 The moste solemne servise 
 By note that ever man, I trow, 
 Had heard. For some of them song low, 
 Some high, and all of one accord. 
 To tellen shortly at 00 word. 
 Was never heard so sweet a steven ^ 
 But it had be a thing of heaven ; 
 So merry a song, so sweet entunes. 
 That, certes, for the town of Tunis 
 I nold ^ but I had heard them sing : 
 For all my chamber gan to ring 
 Through singing of their harmony ; 
 For instrument nor melody 
 
 1 Dreamed. " Sound. ' Ne would. 
 
32 GEOFFREY CHAUCER: 
 
 Was nowhere heard yet half so sweet. 
 
 Nor of accord yet half so meet. 
 
 For there was none of them that feigned 
 
 To sing, for each of them him pained 
 
 To find out merry crafty notes. 
 
 They ne spared not their throats." 
 
 Then the decorations of his chamber are described, and 
 how as he lay admiring the bird concert and the bright 
 beams streaming through the painted window, he heard a 
 hunter try his horn, and footsteps of men, horses, and hounds, 
 and confused talk of hunting. He got up, and rode to the 
 forest, finding out by the way that the hunter was the Em- 
 peror Octavian. By-and-by the hounds are at fault, and 
 as the poet is loitering about, an incident happens that 
 conducts to the main subject of the poem. 
 
 " I was go walked fro my tree, 
 And as I went, there came by me 
 A whelp that fawned me as I stood. 
 That had y-followed and could no good : 
 It came and crept to me as low 
 Right as it hadde me y-know ; 
 Held down his head and joined his ears 
 And laid all smooths down his hairs. 
 I would have caught it, and anon 
 It fledde, and was fro me gone. 
 And I him followed, and it forth went 
 Down by a flowery greene went^ 
 Full thick of grass, full soft and sweet. 
 With floweres fel '' fair under feet. 
 And little used, it seemed thus ; 
 For both Flora and Zephyrus, 
 They two that maken flowres grow 
 Had made their dwelling there I trow. 
 For it was on to behold 
 As though the earth envye wold 
 To be gayer than the heaven. 
 To have more flowres suche seven ^ 
 As in the welkin starres be. 
 It had forgot the poverty 
 
 1 Path. ' Many. » Seven such, seven times as many. 
 
THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 33 
 
 That winter through his coldg morrows 
 Had made it suffer ; and his sorrows — 
 All was forgotten, and that was seen, 
 For all the wood was waxen green : 
 Sweetness of dew had made it wax.'' 
 
 While looking at the beasts that were roaming through 
 the wood, more in number than Argus could have counted, 
 he became aware of a knight in black, sitting with his back 
 against a huge oak-tree. This knight is supposed to reprcT 
 sent the mourning Duke of Lancaster ; and thus, through 
 the story of Ceyx and Alcyone, and the various scenes and 
 incidents of the May morning, we reach the main subject 
 of the poem. 
 
 III. — The Chief Qualities of his Poetry. 
 
 It is not unlikely that our impressions of the chief quali- 
 ties of Chaucer's poetry are different in some respects from 
 those felt 'by his contemporaries. In all probability we 
 pass lightly over many things that fascinated them, and ad- 
 mire many things that they received with comparative in- 
 difference. Their captivating novelties have become our 
 commonplaces, their impressive reflections have become 
 trite ; and, on the other hand, many passages that would 
 doubtless have seemed tame and commonplace to them, 
 strike us with all the freshness of reawakened nature, or 
 with the strange interest of things exhumed after long ages 
 of burial. 
 
 We cannot recover, with any assurance of certainty, the 
 feelings of Richard II.'s courtiers when first they were 
 charmed by the English language in the compositions of a 
 great poet. We cannot imagine how his descriptions of fair 
 women, fine buildings, flowers, trees, and bird-singing, were 
 heard or read by those familiar with the " Romance of 
 the Rose ; " nor how his ' Canterbury Tales ' affected 
 minds that knew such plots and incidents by the hundred. 
 We know what a master of language can do with the most 
 ' C 
 
34 GEOFFREY CHAUCER: 
 
 familiar materials ; we know how fervently Chaucer's power 
 was acknowledged, not only among his countrymen, but 
 also on the other side of the Channel : but how they felt 
 his power, which of its elements appealed to them most ir- 
 resistibly, must ever remain matter for speculation. 
 
 Archaisms of word and inflection cannot but be insepar- 
 able elements in the sum total of the effects of Chaucer's 
 poetry on us. Single words have changed their associa- 
 tions very materially since the days of Chaucer ; and there 
 are many that signify nothing to the present generation, 
 many that are empty sounds, whose meaning may be at- 
 tained only by dim approximation through glossarial syno- 
 nyms. Words faintly picked up from a glossary have not 
 the same power as the words of our mother-tongue. Even 
 if we have a literary famiharity with them, the matter is not 
 altogether mended. In all cases we may be sure that a 
 passage with obsolete words in it does not move us as it 
 moved contemporary readers. What may have been the 
 effect of the passage when its words were hung about with 
 the associations of the time, we cannot realise either by pa- 
 tient study or impatient flash of imagination : it is a dead 
 thing, that no intellectual alchemy can resuscitate. We 
 only know that it must have been different from what we 
 experience. A phrase in a modern poem, even, does not 
 go with equal power to the heart of every reader. Chance 
 associations are fruitful sources of colouring peculiar to 
 the individual. But to none of us can an obsolete word of 
 Chaucer's have the same associations that it bore to men in 
 whose mouths and ears it was a familiar visitor. 
 
 The natural .effect of archaisms on pathetic passages is 
 to make them sweeter and simpler by making them more 
 childlike. Such lines as — 
 
 " The newe green, of jolif ver the prime 
 And sweete smelling floweres white and red ;" 
 
 or- 
 
 ' And as I could this freshe flower I grette, 
 Kneeling alway, till it unclosed was 
 Upon the smalle, softe, sweete grass. 
 That was with floweres sweet embroided all " — 
 
THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 35 
 
 come to us like the prattle of childhood, and fill us with the 
 freshness of spring as no modern words could do. Even 
 lines that are not so appropriate in the infantile mouth, are 
 made prettier by their archaic garb. Take the following : — 
 
 " She was not brown ne dun of hue, 
 But white as snow y-fallen new. 
 Her nose was wrought at point devise, 
 For it was gentle and tretis, 
 With eyen glad and browes bent ; 
 Her hair down to her heeles went, 
 And she was simple as dove of tree ; 
 Full debonaire of heart was shei" 
 
 These lines, particularly the two about the nose, are such 
 as a modern reader would apply to a beautiful pet ; they 
 probably carried a more elevated sentiment when first 
 written. 
 
 Look now at a passage that, apart from the quaintness 
 of the language, should carry the sense of splendour — the 
 march of Theseus upon Thebes. 
 
 " The red statue of Mars with spear and targe 
 So shineth in his white banner large, 
 That all the fieldes glitterin up and doun : 
 And by his banner borne was his pennoun 
 Of gold full rich, in which there was y-beat 
 The Minotaur which that he wan in Crete. 
 Thus rid this duke, thus rid this conquerour, 
 And in his host of chivalry the flower, 
 Till that he came to Thebes and alight 
 Fair in a field there as he thought to fight." 
 
 The archaic inflections and turn of language give this 
 a quaint unction, as if it were the imperfect utterance of 
 an astonished child. The influence of the diction co-ope- 
 rates largely in reminding us that the splendour is a thing 
 of bygone times, strange and wonderful in our imaginations. 
 In the following astrological passage, matter and manner 
 go together in the same way. It is the reflection of the 
 " Man of Law " on the infatuated passion of the Soldan for 
 Constance. 
 
36 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 
 
 " Paraventure, in thilke large book 
 Which that men clepe the Heaven, y-written was 
 With starres, when that he his birthe took, 
 That he for love should have his death, alas ! 
 For in the starres, clearer than is glass, 
 Is written, God wot, whoso could it read 
 The death of every man withouten dread. 
 
 In starres many a winter there beforn 
 Was written the death of Hector, Achilles, 
 Of Pompey, Julius, ere they were born ; 
 The strife of Thebes, and of Hercules, 
 Of Sampson, Turnus, and of Socrates 
 The death ; but mennes wittes been so dull 
 That no wight can well read it at the full." 
 
 Later on in the same tale, there is another astrological 
 passage — an impassioned appeal to the starry destinies — 
 when Constance is setting sail for the East to the marriage 
 that proves so fatal. 
 
 " O firste moving cruel firmament ! 
 With thy diurnal sweigh that crowdest aye 
 And hurlest all fro East to Occident 
 That naturally would hold another way ! 
 Thy crowding set the heaven in such array 
 At the beginning of this fierce voyage, 
 That cruel Mars hath slain this marriage.'' 
 
 In this passage the archaic trappings, and particularly the 
 bit of dogma about the natural course of the firmament, are 
 rather in the way — interfering with our perception of the 
 dignity and passion of the apostrophe. 
 
 The archaic diction makes itself felt with peculiar har- 
 mony in the narrative of supernatural manifestations, such 
 as were ascribed to devils and magicians. Sir Walter Scott 
 might have envied the following account of the ritual of 
 Arcite in the temple of Mars, and the answer to his 
 prayer : — 
 
 " The prayer stint of Arcita the strong : 
 The ringes on the temple door that hong, 
 And eke the doores clattereden full fast. 
 Of which Arcita somewhat him aghast. 
 
THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. n 
 
 The fires brende up on the altar bright 
 That it gan all the temple for to light ; 
 A sweete smell anon the ground up gave 
 And Arcita anon his hand up have, 
 And more incense into the fire he cast, 
 With other rites mo, and at the last 
 The statue of Mars began his hauberk ring, 
 And with that sound he heard a murmuring 
 Full low and dim, and said thus, ' Victory ! ' " 
 
 This is a more active and instantaneously impressive sor- 
 cery than the calm power of the stars, and the archaisms 
 seem to go with it in readier harmony. 
 
 Take now another point. Chaucer sympathises deeply 
 with the victims of deceitful love, and assails false lovers 
 with cordial anger. If he were a dreamy poet like Spenser 
 — ^a poet whose indignation assumed a wailful and regretful 
 tone — the antique words and turns would be in perfect uni- 
 son ; they would help to translate the objects of our pity 
 and anger farther and farther away from the living world — 
 farther and farther back into a dim distance from indignant 
 tears and frowns. But Chaucer is the opposite of a dreamy 
 poet ; his feelings are fresh and quick, his expression direct 
 and demonstrative ; he pities Dido, Ariadne, Phyllis, Medea, 
 and flames out with fierce passion against .(Eneas, Theseus, 
 Demophon, and Jason, as heartily as if they had all been 
 his personal acquaintances. He cannot think of the treach- 
 ery of the false lovers without getting into a passion. 
 
 " But welaway ! the harm, the ruth, 
 That hath betide for such untruth ! 
 As men may oft in bookes read. 
 And all day see it yet in deed. 
 That for to thinken it a teen is." 
 
 He utterly repudiates the pretence of ^neas that he was 
 urged to leave Carthage by a destiny that he could not 
 disobey ; he treats this with scorn as a shallow and common- 
 place excuse for leaving a love that had become stale. He 
 travels beyond his authorities to imagine the complainings 
 
38 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 
 
 of the forsaken queen ; refers his readers for the whole of 
 the touching story to Ovid; and cries with sudden energy — 
 
 " And were it not too long to endite. 
 By God, I would it here write ! " 
 
 He is no less furious at Theseus — 
 
 " How false eke was Duke Theseus, 
 That as the story telleth us, 
 How he betrayed Adriane ; 
 The Devil be his soules bane !" 
 
 Demophon, the son of Theseus, wicked son of a wicked 
 sire, prone to deceit as the young of the fox, is treated 
 with contemptuous scorn for his treachery to Phyllis — 
 
 " Me list not vouchesafe on him to swink, 
 Dispenden on him a penful of ink. 
 For false he was in love right as his sire ; 
 The Devil set their soules both on fire ! " 
 
 Jason is held up to especial contempt ; the poet proceeds 
 to impeach him with especial zest — 
 
 " Thou root of false lovers, Duke Jason ! 
 Thou sly devourer and confusion 
 Of gentle women, gentle creatures ! " 
 
 Now, there is no mistaking the genuineness of all this 
 passion. But can we echo all these imprecations with true 
 fervour ? Do they not sound strange in our ears ? Can we 
 feel them as the poet's contemporaries did ? 
 
 It was the opinion of De Quincey that, in the quality 
 of animation, Chaucer is superior to Homer. The com- 
 parison is not, perhaps, altogether fair, because Chaucer's 
 themes, as a rule, admit of lighter treatment than Homer's : 
 but certainly no poet could well be more animated than 
 Chaucer. All his works are full of bright colour, fresh feel- 
 ing, and rapid ease and gaiety of movement. There is 
 no tedious dulness in his descriptions ; no lingering in the 
 march of his narrative. With all his loquacity and vivacity, 
 
THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 39 
 
 he knows when his readers have had enough of one thing, 
 and passes easily on to something else. The ease of his 
 transitions is very remarkable. Some writers drive so hard 
 at the expression of what lies before them for the moment, 
 that they cannot recover themselves quickly enough to 
 make a graceful turn to what succeeds : they throw them- 
 selves off the track, and become confused and uncertain 
 in their apprehension of the main subject. This Chaucer 
 never seems to do ; he always keeps his main subject clearly 
 and firmly in view ; and his well-marked digressions add 
 to the general animation, by dispersing the feeling of rigid 
 restraint without tending in the slightest to produce con- 
 fusion. 
 
 It is in the Knight's Tale and the Squke's Tale, which 
 deal to some extent with martial subjects, that Chau(!er may 
 most fairly be compared with Homer. The comparison is 
 not unfavourable to our native poet. Even in conveying a 
 vivid impression of the stir of an excited crowd, in which 
 Homer is so excelling, we cannot allow that Chaucer is in- 
 ferior. What, could be more animated than Chaucer's ac- 
 count in the Squire's Tale of the bustling and buzzing mul- 
 titude that assembled to stare at the magic horse, broad 
 mirror of glass, and ring of gold, and to exchange specula- 
 tions concerning the nature of these wonderful presents? 
 Take, again, the gathering to the tournament before Theseus, 
 in the Knight's Tale. What could be more inspiring, more 
 alive with bright movement, splendid evolution, and fresh 
 air than this ? The herald has just proclaimed that the more 
 deadly weapons are excluded from the lists ; whereupon — 
 " The voice of the people toucheth heaven. 
 So loude criede they with merry Steven : 
 ' God save such a lord that is so good : 
 He willeth no destruction of blood ! ' 
 Up goth the trumpes and the melody. 
 And to the listes ride the company 
 By ordinance through the city large, 
 Hanging with cloth of gold and not with serge. 
 Full like a lord this noble Duke can ride ; ' 
 These two Thebanes upon either side : 
 
40 GEOFFREY CHAUCER: 
 
 And after rode the Queen, and Emily, 
 And of ladies another company. 
 And of communes after their degree. 
 And thus they passeden through that city. 
 And to the listes comen they by time. 
 It was not of the day yet fully prime. 
 When sette was Theseus rich and high, 
 Hippolyta the Queen, and Emily, 
 And other ladies in their degrees about. 
 Unto the seates presseth all the rout ; 
 And westeward, thorough the gates of Mart, 
 Arcite, and eke the hundred of his part, 
 With banners red is entered right anon ; 
 And in that selve moment Palamon 
 Is under Venus, eastward in that place. 
 With banner white, and hardy cheer and face." 
 
 We should expect the courtier of Richard II., even when 
 writing in his old age, to be more animated in his treatment 
 of love than the blind old man of the rocky isle. And such 
 he is. We shall see that Chaucer specially excels in de- 
 picting the tender aspects of the passion, but he was a 
 master also of its cheering inspirations. Everybody has by 
 heart his cheerful description of the youthful squire. That 
 gay gentleman, however, was basking in the unbroken sun- 
 shine of love; you must take one who has known its dark 
 eclipse, if you wish to see an example of its full power. 
 Take Arcita of the Knight's Tale, who has been changed 
 by his passion out of all recognition : he has become lean, 
 hollow-eyed, and sallow, and his spirits have been so low 
 that the sound of music brought tears into his eyes. Con- 
 sider the change wrought on this woful lover when he has 
 made some progress towards success, and his youthful ener- 
 gies return to their natural tone. Take him when he walks 
 out of a May morning with his rising hopes, and drinks in 
 the sympathy of nature, which also is rejoicing in its re- 
 covery from darkness and winter. 
 
 " The busy larke, messenger of day, 
 Salueth in her song the morrow gray ; 
 And fiery Phoebus riseth up so bright 
 That all the orient laugheth of the light, 
 
THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 41 
 
 And with his streames dryeth in the greves 
 The silver droppes, hanging on the leaves. 
 And Arcita, that is in the court royal 
 With Theseus, his squier principal, 
 Is risen, and looketh on the merry day. 
 And for to doon his observance to May, 
 Remembering of the point of his desire. 
 He on his courser, starting as the fire. 
 Is ridden into the fieldes him to play. 
 Out of the court, were it a mile or tway. 
 And to the grove, of which that I you told. 
 By aventure his way he gan to hold, 
 To maken him a garland of the greves. 
 Were it of woodebind or hawthorn leaves, 
 And loud he sung against the sunne sheen : — 
 ' May, with all thy flowres and thy green. 
 Welcome be thou, faire freshe May ! 
 I hope that I some greene getten may.' 
 And fro his courser, with a lusty heart. 
 Into the grove full lustily he start. 
 And in a path he roamed up and down." 
 
 When we go for a feast of tender feeling to a poet pos- 
 sessing in large measure the quality of animation, we should 
 not go in a languid mood. We need not, of course, follow 
 his lead ; we may choose our own pace. Instead of going 
 with the surface of the lively brook, and seeing no more of 
 its pebbles and the beauties of its banks and winding nooks 
 than the rapid glance that its speed allows, we may fix on 
 delicious spots, and feed there to our heart's content. If, 
 however, we desire to get from a poet the maximum of 
 pleasure that he is capable of affording, perhaps it would be 
 more economical to take Spenser as the companion of our 
 languid moods, and reserve Chaucer till a season convenient 
 for livelier emotion. 
 
 Chaucer's heart fitted him well to be the poet of tender 
 sentiment. He seems to have dwelt with fond observation 
 on everything that was bright and pretty, from " the smalle 
 fowles that sleepen all the night with open eye," to the little 
 herd-grooms playing on their pipes of green corn. He 
 
42 GEOFFREY CHAUCER: 
 
 watched the little conies at their play, the little squirrels at 
 their sylvan feasts ; he looked into the " colde welle 
 streames, nothing dead," to admire 
 
 " The smalle fishes bright 
 With finnes red, and scales silver white." 
 
 He knew, too, the colour of every feather in Chanticleer, 
 and had minutely studied his majesty's habits towards his sub- 
 jects. But of all things of beauty in nature, the singing- 
 birds were his most especial favourites. He often dwells 
 on the ravishing sweetness of their melodies. His finest 
 picture of their exuberance of joy in the spring — their 
 tuneful defiance of the fowler, their billing and chirruping, 
 their vows of eternal fidelity — occurs in the opening of the 
 " Legend of Good Women." 
 
 A man of the world himself, Chaucer still could enter 
 into simple love-making among unsophisticated gentle 
 creatures of a larger growth than the amorous little birds. 
 Perhaps no passage shows the poet's exquisite tenderness 
 better than the wooing of Thisbe by Pyramus, so well 
 known in its ludicrous aspects from the caricature in " Mid- 
 summer Night's Dream ;" and it is but an act of justice to 
 these two faithful lovers to let them be seen as they were 
 conceived by a sympathetic poet. 
 
 " This wall, which that betwix them bothe stood, 
 Was cloven atwo, right fro the top adoun. 
 Of olde time, of his foundatioun. 
 But yet this clift was so narrow and lite 
 
 But what is that that love cannot espy ? 
 Ye lovers two, if that I shall not lie. 
 Ye founden first this little narrow clift ! 
 And with a sound as soft as any shrift. 
 They let their wordes through the clifte pace. 
 And tolden while they stooden in the place, 
 All their complaint of love and all their woe. 
 At every time when they durste so. 
 Upon the one side of the wall stood he, 
 And on that other side stood Thisbe, 
 
THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 43 
 
 The sweete sound of other to receive. 
 And thus their wardens woulde they deceive, 
 And every day this wall they woulde threat. 
 And wish to God that it were down y-beat. 
 
 Thus would they sayn : — ' Alas, thou wicked wall ! 
 Through thine envye thou us lettest all ! 
 Why nilt thou cleave, or fallen all atwo ? 
 Or at the leaste, but thou wouldest so. 
 Yet wouldest thou but ones let us meet. 
 Or ones that we mighte kissen sweet. 
 Then were we covered of our cares cold. 
 But natheless, yet be we to thee hold 
 In as much as thou sufferest for to gone 
 Our wordes through thy lime and eke thy stone. 
 Yet oughte we with thee been well apaid.' 
 
 And when these idle wordes weren said. 
 The colde wall they woulde kissen of stone, 
 And take their leave, and forth they woulde gone." 
 
 Thoroughly as his heart seems to go with this simple, 
 earnest passion, almost infantile in its fondness, he can 
 strike many another key in the infinitely varied art of love. 
 Especially is he skilled in the chivalrous profession of en- 
 tire submission to his lady's will, and humble adoration of 
 her pre-eminent excellence. Take, for example, the open- 
 ing stave of his humble prayer to Pity, which, without 
 doubt, the cruel fair was at liberty to apply to herself. 
 
 " Humblest of heart, highest of reverence, 
 Benigne flower, corown of virtues alle ! 
 Sheweth unto your royal excellence. 
 Your servant, if I durste me so calle. 
 His mortal harm, in which he is y-falle, 
 And not all only for his evil fare, 
 But for your renown, as I shall declare. 
 
 What needeth to show parcel of my pain, 
 Sith every wo that hearte may bethink, 
 I suffer ; and yet I dare not to you plain. 
 For well I wot, although I wake or wink. 
 Ye recke not whether I float or sink. 
 
44 GEOFFREY CHAUCER: 
 
 Yet natheless my truth I shall susteen, 
 Unto my death, and that shall well be seen." 
 
 The " Court of Love " opens with a still softer offering of 
 homage, graceful protestation of unworthiness, and entire 
 absolute devotion to his lady's will. 
 
 All forlorn lovers have his best services at their com- 
 mand. We may apply to him his own favourite line, many 
 times repeated — 
 
 " For pity runneth soon in gentle heart." 
 
 How feelingly he depicts the situation of Palamon— im- 
 prisoned and love-sick Palamon ! 
 
 " In darkness and horrible and strong prison 
 This seven year hath sitten Palamon, 
 Forpined, what for wo and for distress. 
 Who feeleth double sorrow and heaviness 
 But Palamon ? that love distraineth so. 
 That wood out of his wit he goth for wo." 
 
 The woful pangs of sweet Aurelius too, his languor 
 and furious torments, are followed with deep sympathy ; 
 and the heart-broken agony of forsaken Troilus is most 
 intimately realised. In the expression of " deep heart's- 
 sorrowing," Chaucer's words always flow with peculiar rich- 
 ness and intimate aptness of choice. 
 
 Naturally, however, it is womanhood in distress that 
 enters his heart with the keenest stroke. He might well 
 plead before the god and goddess of love that, if he had 
 laughed at some of the foibles of the sex, he had not been 
 indifferent to their virtues and their sufferings. His gallery 
 of distressed heroines was as wide as the range of legend 
 and history that was known to him : Constance, Griselda, 
 Virginia, Cecilia, Alcyone, Alcestis, Cleopatra, Thisbe, 
 Dido, Hypsipyle, Medea, Lucrece, Ariadne, Philomela, 
 Phyllis, Hypermnestra. The thought of their suffering 
 agitates him, destroys his composure ; he cannot proceed 
 without stopping to express his compassion, or to appeal 
 to heaven against the caprice of Fortune or the wicked- 
 
THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 45 
 
 ness of men. Sometimes his pity overpowers him, and 
 he abruptly refers to another author for the harrowing par- 
 ticulars. His representative the Host is almost choked 
 with emotion at the Doctor's tale of Appius and Virginia ; 
 he relieves himself with furious denunciation of Appius, and 
 tries to laugh the painful theme out of his memory. 
 
 The legends of Constance (Man of Law's Tale) and 
 Griselda (Clerk's Tale), have the happy termination of 
 comedy ; but the heroines are sorely tried in the course of 
 their history, and give noble proof of womanly devotedness. 
 They are, indeed, too sharply wounded by the sword of ad- 
 versity to be left by the narrators unpitied till the joy of 
 their final reward lifts us with them above the memory of 
 their sorrows. The guilty causes of their misery are de- 
 nounced and blamed in passing according to the degree pf 
 their guilt. The story of the poor martyr Cecilia (The 
 Second Nun's Tale) is told with the most touching tender- 
 ness : her love of Christ, her aspirations after purity, her 
 pious heroism before the judge and under the executioner, 
 are put in words that well become the gentle lips of the 
 supposed narrator. 
 
 One of the most delightful of the ' Canterbury Tales' is the 
 Franklin's Tale. The incorruptible fidelity of the beautiful 
 Dorigen, the equanimity and magnanimity of her brave 
 husband Arviragus, the resolution of the Squire Aurelius not 
 to be outdone in generosity by the Knight, capped by the 
 resolution of the Knight not to be outdone by the Squire, 
 make this tale a unique embodiment of the highest ideals of 
 chivalry : scrupulous adherence to a rash promise on the 
 one hand being met by renunciation of unfair advantage on 
 the other. 
 
 The " Legends of Good Women " are of a more tragic cast 
 than the tales of Griselda and Constance. They commemo- 
 rate the virtues of faithful women that died for love, most 
 of them owing their death to the perfidy of deceitful man. 
 We have already seen how the piteous heart of the poet 
 flames out against the traitors, and threatens them with 
 eternal shame. He contrasts their light love with the de- 
 
46 GEOFFREY CHAUCER: 
 
 votedness of his heroines, who held Hfe worthless without 
 the fulfilment of their single-hearted passion. 
 
 Chaucer's humour is the most universally patent and 
 easily recognised of his gifts. The smile or laugh that he 
 raises, by refined irony or by broad rough jest and incident, 
 is conspicuously genial. Mephistophelian mockery and' 
 Satanic grimness are not in his way. This had nothing to 
 do with his being the bright morning star of English poetry 
 — writing with the buoyancy of youth at a time when the 
 struggle for existence was less fierce, when there was no 
 bitter feeling between high and low, no envenomed warfare 
 of civil or religious party. There never has been age nor 
 country in which the fierce spirit has wanted fuel for its 
 fierceness. It was simply the nature of the man to be 
 genial, — ^" attempered and soft" as the climate of his gardens 
 of Venus. He would have been so in whatever age he had 
 lived. 
 
 The great criterion of good-nature, the indispensable basis 
 of humour, is the power of making or sustaining a jest at 
 one's own expense ; and none of our humorists bear this 
 test so well as Chaucer. He often harps on his own supposed 
 imperfections, his ignorance of love, his want of rhetorical 
 skill, his poverty. His poverty, real or pretended — and, 
 unfortunately, it would seem to have been real — is the sub- 
 ject of several jokes in his poems, as it must have been in 
 his private talk. "Tn the " House of Fame," when describ- 
 ing how the walls, roofs, and floors of the temple were 
 plated with gold half a foot thick "as fine as ducat in 
 Venice," he cannot resist the temptation to add — 
 
 " Of which too little in my pouch is." 
 
 His " Complaint to his Purse " is conceived in a very gay 
 spirit : — 
 
 " Now voucheth safe this day, ere it be night, 
 That I of you the blissful sound may hear, 
 Or see your colour like the sunne bright, 
 That of yellowness hadde never peer. 
 
THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 47 
 
 Ye be my life ! ye be mine heartes steer ! 
 Queen of comfort and goode company ! 
 Beth heavy again or elles mote I die." 
 
 We must know this hobby of his to understand the full 
 comic force of his comparing Alison to a newly-forged 
 noble, bright from the mint : and it seems to me that his 
 pretence of eight years' unrest and sleeplessness, in the 
 ' Book of the Duchess ' (see p. 9), is the same humour 
 cropping up in another form. 
 
 The freedom of his humour, as one would expect, was 
 progressive. There are unequivocal touches of humour 
 both in " Chaucer's Dream " and in the " Court of Love ; " 
 witness the sly treatment of Morpheus, and the poet's timid 
 entry into the sacred court ; but the humour, as became 
 the subjects, is lurking and subordinate. It is worth 
 noting, that in the " Court of Love," though he could not 
 profess entire ignorance of the passion as he did so often 
 afterwards, he professes to have kept out of the service of 
 Venus for a most unconscionable length of time ; he was 
 actually eighteen before he went to her Court, and then he 
 had to be summoned. But the humour is much less overt 
 in the " Court of Love " than in the more mature " House of 
 Fame." In that poem, as in the ' Canterbury Tales,' he 
 treats his own personality with reckless contempt. When 
 the poet is caught up, at first he loses consciousness ; but 
 by-and-by the eagle wakes him up with comical remon- 
 strances at his timidity. Half reassured, he begins to 
 wonder vaguely what all this can mean : — 
 
 " O God, thought I, that madest kind, 
 Shall I none other wayes die ? 
 Whe'r Joves will me stellify, 
 Or what thing may this signify ? 
 I neither am Enoch, ne Eli, 
 Ne Romulus, ne Ganymede, 
 That was y-bore up, as men read, 
 To heaven with Dan Jupiter, 
 And made the goddes botteler ! 
 Lo, this was then my fantasy ! 
 
48 GEOFFREY CHAUCER: 
 
 But he that bare me gan espy, 
 That I so thought, and saide this — 
 ' Thou deemest of thyself amiss ; 
 For Joves is not thereabout, 
 I dare will put thee out of doubt. 
 To make of thee as yet a star.' " 
 
 The comparison between his own stout person and Gany- 
 mede, and the implied conception of himself as the butler ^ 
 of the gods, are delicious. But, indeed, the passage 
 throughout is so rich, that it is difficult to say which is its 
 most comical touch. 
 
 The outcome of his broad humour is seen in the general 
 plan of the ' Canterbury Tales ' as much as in some of the 
 pronounced particulars. With the rougher sort of the pil- 
 grims, and as we shall presently see, only with them, the 
 pilgrimage is a tipsy revel, a hilarious holiday " outing." 
 They are the merriest company that mine " Host of the 
 Tabard " has had under his roof for many a day ; and they 
 are such jolly noisy good fellows that, at supper overnight, 
 the host is tempted to propose that he should go with them 
 and direct their merriment on the way. In the energy of 
 his good-fellowship and confident sudden prospect of a 
 hilarious journey, he cries for immediate decision on his 
 plan — 
 
 " Now by my father's soule that is dead, 
 But ye be merry, smiteth off mine head. 
 Hold up your hands withouten more speecji." 
 
 They agree; and the idea thus conceived rs carried out 
 with no less spirit. The pilgrims must have made a sen- 
 sation as they rode out of town. The more respectable 
 members of the company doubtless bore themselves with 
 becoming gravity, but the wilder spirits put no restraint 
 upon their mirth. The Miller brought them out of town to 
 the music of his bagpipes — and a bagpipe in the hands 
 of a drunk man is an instrument likely to attract some 
 
 1 This, however, is one of those cases where Time has lent an additional 
 touch to the humour. The butler was a higher functionary than we should 
 understand now by the name. 
 
THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 49 
 
 attention. The harum-scarum pimple-faced bacchanalian 
 Summoner had put on his head a garland large enough for 
 an alehouse sign, and flourished a cake as a buckler. His 
 friend and compeer the Pardoner had, "for jolUty," trussed 
 up his hood in his wallet, and let his yellow flaxen hair hang 
 in disorder on his shoulders, saying that it was the new 
 fashion. 
 
 " Full loud he sang ' Come hither, love, to me.' 
 This Summoner bare to him a stiff burdoun. 
 Was never trump of half so great a soun." 
 
 A company with spirits so uproarious in it tasked all the 
 Host's powers of maintaining order, authoritative though 
 he was. Of course they broke through. The Knight, who 
 drew the lot for telling the first tale, was allowed to finish 
 it ; but as soon as he had done, the drunk Miller struck in 
 and insisted on telling a noble tale that he knew. Though 
 hardly able to keep his seat, he was not so drunk as not to 
 know that he was drunk ; he knew that, he said, " by his 
 soun," and he besought them, if he said anything out of 
 place, to lay the blame on the ale of Southwark. His tale 
 does ample justice to his inspiration. The Host having 
 once let the reins out of his hands was not able to resume 
 them : the president of such a company must keep his 
 authority by giving his subjects liberty to take their own 
 way. The butt of the Miller's Tale was a carpenter ; and 
 the Reeve being a carpenter thought himself aggrieved, and 
 wanted to return the compliment by telling an equally coarse 
 tale about the cuckolding of a miller. The Host, with the 
 true instinct of a ruler, at once humoured him, and asserted 
 his own dignity by cutting short his prologue, and com- 
 manding him to tell his tale. Then the gross Cook, chuck- 
 ling over the discomfiture of the Miller, wanted to tell " a 
 little jape that fell in our city," and the judicious Host 
 granted permission. There was more intoxicated per- 
 sonality, wrangling, and peacemaking, as they went on. 
 The Friar enraged the Summoner by relating an awkward 
 adventure that happened to one of his profession ; ajid the 
 
 D 
 
so GEOFFREY CHAUCER: 
 
 Summoner gave a merciless Roland for his Oliver. After a 
 long draught of ale, the Pardoner recklessly exposed all the 
 tricks of his trade, and had the audacious assurance, after 
 this full confession of his roguery, to try to work upon the 
 feelings of his brother pilgrims, and extract money from 
 them. It is to be feared, too, that the Host required a 
 little too much of the " corny ale" to drown his pity for 
 poor Virginia : one cannot otherwise account for his getting 
 into a hot quarrel with the Pardoner, which required the 
 intervention of the Knight to smooth it over. Towards the 
 close of the pilgrimage the Cook showed symptoins of being 
 overcome with sleep and ale, and seemed to be in danger 
 of falling from his horse. The Host rebuked him, and the 
 Manciple fell out upon him with such a torrent of abuse, 
 that poor Robin overbalanced himself and tumbled to the 
 ground in a furious futile effort to articulate a reply, and 
 there was much shoving to and fro before they could set 
 him in the saddle again. A pretty pilgrimage to the shrine 
 of a saint ! There is endless food for deep animal laughter 
 in the humours of these riotous pilgrims — particularly that 
 madcap pair of ecclesiastics — the Summoner and the Par- 
 doner. One is constantly finding fresh points of comical 
 view in that precious couple. It is a mistake, I may re- 
 mark, to look in the 'Canterbury Tales' for satire. If 
 there is any it is there by failure and imperfection ; it is a 
 flaw in the poet's design, which was to provide material for 
 disinterested laughter, zealous and profound. To suppose 
 that there is any satire in the candid revelation of the Par- 
 doner's gross deceptions of the credulous vulgar, is to fail to 
 rise to the height of the humour of that great character. 
 There is no more ill-nature in the elaboration of his reck- 
 less freaks, than in the often-quoted and justly-praised deli- 
 cate irony of the opening of the Wife of Bath's Tale.^ 
 
 1 If M. Sandras had understood English humour, which seems to baifle 
 Frenchmen as Scotch "wut" baffles Englishmen, he would hardly have 
 said that in the 'Canterbury Tales' Chaucer's natural affinity with the 
 spirit of Jean de Meun is made conspicuous. In the following section 
 I shall sliow how Chaucer maintains his agreement with the spirit of 
 chivalry. 
 
HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. SI 
 
 As regards any lurking satirical purpose in the ' Canter- 
 bury Tales,' if we suppose that we discern any such purpose, 
 we may take for granted that we are still on the outside of 
 their riotous humour. It is true that a good many of the 
 pilgrims are men of somewhat damaged reputation, or, at 
 least, doubtful virtue. The Merchant is not beyond suspi- 
 cion ; the Miller steals corn ; the Reeve has secured a com- 
 fortable feathering for his own nest ; the Cook is a profligate 
 sot; all the ecclesiastics. Monk, Friar, and Pardoner, 
 exhibit a wide difference between their practice and their 
 doctrine; and even the respectable professional men, the 
 Lawyer and the Doctor, have a questionable liking for 
 large fees. But these failings are not dwelt upon from the 
 point of view of the satirist. With all their sinful taints, the 
 pilgrims are represented as being on the whole jovial com- 
 panions, satisfied with themselves and with each other ; the 
 taints, indeed, are not shown in the aspect of sins, but 
 rather in the aspect of ludicrous peccadilloes or foibles. 
 The sinners are elevated by the hilarity of the occasion 
 above the sense of sin ; and the poet does not hold them 
 up to scorn or contempt, but enters genially into the spirit 
 of their holiday revel. He does not join them to backbite 
 and draw out their weaknesses for the bitter amusement 
 or sharp dislike of his readers : he joins them to enjoy their 
 company. Chaucer's humour in the ' Canterbury Tales ' is 
 not in the spirit of Jean de Meun ; it comes much nearer 
 the spirit of Bums in the " Jolly Beggars." 
 
 IV. — His Delineation of Character. 
 
 It is somewhat startling to put together, as I have done 
 in the preceding section, the bufifoonery that went on 
 throughout the Canterbury pilgrimage. We remember the 
 tales of high chivalrous sentiment and exquisite pathos, and 
 we ask how these were compatible with such noisy ribaldry. 
 The explanation is, that the tales are suited to the characters 
 and manners of the different pilgrims ; and that while one 
 set of them indulge largely in ale and inebriated freaks and 
 
52 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 
 
 loud animal mirth, the more respectable sort preserve a 
 becoming dignity. 
 
 To a certain extent Professor Lowell is right in saying 
 that there is no caste feeling among Chaucer's pilgrims. 
 Knight and yeoman, monk and cook, lodge all night in the 
 same inn, set out in a company on the same errand, and 
 contribute to a common entertainment subject to the direc- 
 tion of one man, and that an innkeeper. But we should 
 gready misunderstand the delicacy of Chaucer's sense of 
 manners as well as of character, if we went away with the 
 impression that in the ' Canterbury Tales ' there is no trace 
 of the distinctions of rank, and that in the pilgrimage there 
 is no respect paid to persons. 
 
 In the Prologue, the poet begs pardon for not setting the 
 pilgrims in their degree — 
 
 " Also I pray you to forgive it me 
 All have I not set folk in their degree 
 Here in this tale, as that they shoulde stand : 
 My wit is short, ye may well understand." 
 
 He had a livelier plan in view than to make them tell off 
 their tales in the order of their rank. But though he did 
 not adopt this palpable and unmistakable way of indicat- 
 ing caste, he does really show respect of persons in several 
 less gross and obvious ways. A line is drawn, though unob- 
 trusively and with delicate suggestive art, between "the 
 gentles " and the other pilgrims. If this had not been done, 
 we should have been compelled to say that our poet had 
 inaccurately portrayed the life of the time. But he has done 
 it, and done it not by harsh angular forced assertion, but 
 easily and naturally in his clear-sighted shaping and working 
 out of his materials. The careful reader gets the clue from 
 such passages as that at the end of the Knight's Tale, where 
 we are told that the whole company, young and old, praised 
 it as a noble and memorable story, " and namely," that is, 
 particularly, " the gentles every one." That was the sort of 
 tale that the gentles felt themselves at liberty to approve of. 
 When the Pardoner took up with animation the Host's 
 
HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 53 
 
 request that he should tell a merry tale, forthwith "the 
 gentles" began to cry that they must have no ribaldry: 
 " Tell us," they said, " some moral thing that we may learn." 
 It is very misleading to apologise, as some writers on 
 Chaucer do, for the gross obscenity of certain of the tales, 
 on the ground that this was the outspoken fashion of the 
 time — that decorum then permitted greater freedom of lan- 
 guage. The savour of particular words may have changed 
 since the time of Chaucer ; but then, as now, people with 
 any pretensions to refinement were bound to abstain strictly 
 in the presence of ladies from all ribaldry of speech and 
 manner, on pain of being classed with "churls" and 
 " villains." In the " Court of Love," the gentle lover is 
 warned emphatically that he must not be 
 
 " Ribald in speech, or out of measure pass. 
 Thy bound exceeding ; think on this alway : 
 For women been of tender heartes aye." 
 
 And in the ' Canterbury Tales,' Chaucer carefully guards 
 himself against being supposed to be ignorant of this law. 
 The ribald tales are introduced as the humours of the lower 
 orders, persons ignorant or defiant of the rules of refined 
 society, and moreover, as we have seen, excited, intoxicated, 
 out for a pilgrimage as riotous and wild as our pilgrimage 
 to the Derby.i Such riotous mirth was very far indeed 
 
 ' That the behaviour of the more uproarious of Chaucer's pilgrims was 
 based on real life we may see from one Thorpe's indignant account of the 
 actual pilgrimages to the shrine of St Thomas (quoted in Morley's English 
 Writers, ii. 291): " They will ordain with them before to have with them 
 both men and women that can sing wanton songs, and some other pil- 
 grims will have with them bagpipes ; so that every town they come through, 
 what with the noise of their singing, and with the soimd of their piping, 
 and with the jangling of their Canterbury bells, and with the barking out of 
 dogs after them, that they make more noise than if the king came there 
 away with all his clarions and many other minstrels. And if these men and 
 women be a month in their pilgrimage, many of them shall be a half-year 
 after great janglers, tale-tellers, and liars." In saying that in Chaucer's 
 company "each fellow-traveller carried his wit for bagpipe," Professor 
 Morley seems to have overlooked the Miller's instrument, and generally he 
 seems inclined to make the pilgrimage a much tamer affair than it would 
 appear to have been. I have endeavoured to show how the poet's decorous 
 self-respect is reconciled with fidelity to the manners of the time. 
 
54 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 
 
 from being the fashion of the time among fashionable 
 people. Mark how careful Chaucer is to shield himself 
 from the responsibility of it. In the Prologue (1. 725), he 
 prays his readers of their courtesy not to set down his 
 plainness of speech as his " villany : " he is bound to record 
 faithfully every word that was said, though it had been said 
 by his own brother. He does, indeed, whether seriously or 
 jocularly, allege the example of Christ and Plato as autho- 
 rities for plainness of speech j but he does not repeat this 
 when he returns to the matter before the first of his free- 
 spoken tales. In the prologue to the Miller's Tale, he 
 is most explicit. He says that the obstinate Miller would 
 not forbear for any man, " but told his churlish tale in his 
 manner." And then he makes this clear and elaborate 
 apology for rehearsing it, — 
 
 " And, therefore, tN^ry gentle wight I pray, 
 For, Goddes love, deemeth not that I say 
 Of evil intent ; but for I must rehearse 
 Their tales all, be they better or worse. 
 Or elles falsen some of my matter. 
 And, therefore, whoso list it not to hear. 
 Turn over the leaf and chose another tale ; 
 For he shall find enowe great and small. 
 Of storial thing that toucheth gentilesse. 
 And eke morality and holiness. 
 Blameth not me, if that ye chose amiss. 
 The Miller is a churl, ye know well this j 
 So was the Reeve and other many mo. 
 And harlotry they tolden bothe two. 
 Aviseth you, and put me out of blame ; 
 And eke men shall not maken earnest of game." 
 
 Observe, accordingly, how the tales are distributed. No- 
 thing ribald is put into the mouth of the gentles, and nothing 
 ribald is told concerning their order. The "very perfect 
 gentle knight," who never said any villany to any manner 
 of man, recites the tale of Palamon and Arcite, with 
 its chivalrous love and rivalry, its sense of high womanly 
 beauty, its gorgeous descriptions of temple, ritual, proces- 
 
HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 55 
 
 sion, and tournament. His son, the gallant, well-mannered, 
 well-dressed squire, embroidered like a mead, with his head 
 full of love, romance, song, and music, gives a fragment 
 of a romance about King Cambuscan and his daughter 
 Canace, and the wonderful exploits of a magic horse, a 
 magic mirror, and a magic ring. The professional men — the 
 busy lawyer, the studious clerk, the irreligious but good- 
 hearted doctor — give the pathetic stories of Constance, 
 Griselda, and Virginia : the two first of which may be justly 
 described as tales of morality. The Franklin tells the old 
 Breton lay of Dorigen and Arviragus, models of chivalrous 
 virtue. The Prioress and the Second Nun relate holy 
 legends of mart3rrdom. These are " the gentles," and such 
 are their tales. The tales of vulgar merriment are told by 
 the Miller, the Reeve, the Wife of Bath, the Friar, the Sum- 
 moner, the Merchant, the Shipman. And as regard is had 
 to the condition of the narrator in the character of the tale 
 ascribed to him, so the persons engaged in degrading adven- 
 ture are below the rank of the gentles. Januarius, indeed, 
 in the Merchant's Tale, is called a worthy knight ; but he is 
 a blind dotard, long past knightly exercise and knightly 
 feeling : and his May, who is so easily won to play him false, 
 is represented as a maiden of small degree. The rank of 
 all the other befooled heroes is plain : they are a carpenter, 
 a miller, a summoner, a friar, and a merchant.^ The gentle 
 order is respected. They join the company, and enjoy the 
 ribald speech and behaviour of their riotous inebriated vul- 
 gar companions ; but they do not forfeit their self-respect, 
 by contributing a share to the noisy merriment. When they 
 have had enough of it, or when the tales threaten to become 
 
 1 Observe, in passing, another evidence of Chaucer's sense of courtly 
 propriety in his Troilus and Cressida. The knights and ladies that heard 
 his poems read would not have tolerated Shakespeare's representation of 
 Pandarus, one of the knights of Troy, as a gross procurer, or of Cressida, 
 a lady of rank, as an incontinent wanton. Chaucer's Pandarus is an ac- 
 complished knight, moved to his questionable service by pity for the de- 
 spair of his friend ; Cressida, the loveliest, most refined, and most discreet 
 of widows, overcome by passionate love, dexterous intrigue, and favouring 
 accidents. 
 
56 GEOFFREY CHAUCER : 
 
 too boisterous, they use their influence to give a more sober 
 tone to the proceedings. They do not break rough jests on 
 each other as the vulgar do. And mine host knows his 
 place sufficiently well to be less familiar and imperious with 
 them than with the Miller and the Cook : he is courteous 
 to the Knight, and ludicrously over-polite to the Prioress. 
 
 I may seem to have insisted too much on this distinction 
 between the " gentles " and the " roughs " in the Canter- 
 bury pilgrimage ; but the truth is, that we cannot have too 
 vivid a hold of this distinction if we wish to understand 
 either. the ' Canterbury Tales ' or Chaucer's poetry generally. 
 Unless we realise this, we cannot feel how thoroughly and 
 intimately his poems are transfused with chivalrous senti- 
 ment. What is more, we cannot appreciate the perfect 
 skill with which he has maintained this sentiment in the 
 ' Canterbury Tales,' and at the same time transferred to his 
 pages a faithful representation of vulgar manners in their 
 wildest luxuriance. 
 
 Waiving all questions as to whether Chaucer was most 
 of Norman or of Saxon, of Celt or of Teuton, we cannot 
 escape from admitting that he was deeply impressed with 
 the wide difference between chivalrous sentiments and the 
 sentiments and manners prevalent among the dependants 
 of chivalry. The difference may not have in reality been 
 so profound as it was in ideal : but Chaucer felt it deeply. 
 How deeply, we see most clearly in the " Cuckoo and Night- 
 ingale," and the "Parliamentof Birds,''where the antagonistic 
 sentiments are placed in express contrast. The Cuckoo is 
 a vulgar bird, and takes gross ridiculous views of love : the 
 Nightingale is a gentle bird, and regards love with delicate 
 seriousness. Similar types are represented, with greater 
 epic variety, in the " Parliament of Birds." There is no 
 mistaking the contrast in these allegorical fables ; the vul- 
 gar birds, the Water Fowls, the Seed Fowls, and the Worm 
 Fowls, are sharply snubbed for their chuckling vulgarity by 
 the haughty and refined Birds of Prey. But in the ' Canter- 
 bury Tales ' the poet has achieved the triumph of making 
 the antagonistic sentiments work smoothly side by side, and 
 
HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 57 
 
 that is really their main triumph as a broad picture of man- 
 ners and character. There, with dignified carriage, are 
 seen the type of men and women whose sensibilities were 
 trained to appreciate the tender refinement of Chaucer, 
 and who allowed themselves more boisterous entertainment 
 only under decorous pretexts, listening without participating. 
 Side by side, following their own humours with noisy inde- 
 pendence, are their vulgar associates, stopping at every ale- 
 stake to eat and drink, half choked with ribald laughter, 
 finding in the contrast between themselves and the reserved 
 gentles an additional incentive to their gross open mirth. 
 The ' Canterbury Tales ' embody two veins of feeling that 
 powerfully influenced the literature of the fifteenth century — 
 the sentiment that fed on chivalrous romances, and the 
 appetite for animal laughter that received among other 
 gratifications the grotesque literature of miracle-plays. 
 
 If we fail to perceive this contrast between the serious 
 and the ludicrous side of the Canterbury pilgrimage, if we 
 miss the poet's reconciliation of the two without repression 
 of either, Chaucer's genius, in so far as regards manners and 
 character, has laboured for us in vain. A dead weight flat- 
 tens his figures into the page. The exquisite delicacy of his 
 delineation is confused. We drag down the Knight and the 
 Prioress by involving them in the responsibility of the 
 Miller's Tale : we crush the life out of the Miller and the 
 Summoner, and reduce them to wretched lameness by sup- 
 posing them to fraternise with the Knight in a certain 
 amount of decorous restraint. The pilgrimage becomes a 
 muddled, jumbled, incoherent, unintelligible thing. 
 
 We must not, however, allow our attention to two large 
 divisipns, however much that may be the key to a right un- 
 derstanding of the ' Canterbury Tales,' to make us overlook 
 the varied types that lie within these divisions. Every 
 character, indeed, is typical— Knight, Squire, Yeoman, 
 Prioress, Monk, Friar, Merchant, Clerk, Sergeant of Law, 
 Frankhn, Cheapside Burgess, Cook, Shipman, Doctor of 
 Physic, Wife of Bath, Parson, Ploughman, Miller, Manciple, 
 Reeve, Summoner, Pardoner : and the characteristics of 
 
58 GEOFFREY CHAUCER: 
 
 their various lines of life are drawn as no other generation 
 has been in equal space. I shall not attempt to pick out 
 supreme examples of Chaucer's skill. The compression of 
 masterly touches in that Prologue can hardly be spoken of 
 in sane language : there is not one of the seven or eight 
 hundred lines but contains something to admire. 
 
 Apart from the skill of the delineation, one typical indi- 
 vidual is specially interesting from his relations to the time, 
 and that is the poor Parson. He cannot be said to belong, 
 in rank at least, to the gentle class : he is of poor extraction, 
 the brother of the Ploughman. He represents the serious 
 element among the lower classes. During the riot of the 
 pilgrimage, he is put down and silenced. He ventures to 
 rebuke the Host for his profane language, and is jeered at 
 and extinguished by that worthy as a Lollard. But when 
 the ribald intoxication of the road has exhausted itself, his 
 grave voice is heard and respected : and he brings the pil- 
 grims into Canterbury with a tale more in harmony with the 
 ostensible object of their journey. 
 
59 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES AND 
 SUCCESSORS. 
 
 I. — English Contemporaries. 
 (1332-1400?) 
 
 I. William Langland — Piers the Plowman. 
 
 This chapter deals with second-rate, third-rate, and fourth- 
 rate poets or versifiers who flourished from the time of 
 Chaucer down to the early part of the sixteenth century. 
 Chaucer had no worthy rival among his contemporaries, 
 and no English poet worthy to be placed by his side ap- 
 peared before the time of Spenser. Still, it is well to char- 
 acterise the poets of this sober interval, however humble. 
 The task may be dreary, but we cannot always live with the 
 great minds, and we are rewarded by the study of medioc- 
 rities with a more vivid sense of the beauty and strength of 
 their betters. 
 
 The most noteworthy of Chaucer's contemporaries was 
 William Langland, author of the ' Vision of William con- 
 cerning Piers the Plowman,' commonly known as the 
 'Vision of Piers Plowman.' Not much is ascertained about 
 his life. Mr Skeat ^ considers it probable that he was bom 
 about 1332, at Cleobury Mortimer ; that he wrote the first 
 version of his poem (the A-text) in 1362, the second version 
 
 1 See his elaborate Introduction to the Clarendon Press selection, and 
 his editions of the various texts for the Early English Text Society. 
 
6o CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 (the B-text) in 1377, and the last version (the C-text) be- 
 tween 1380 and 1390; that he wrote a poem on the 
 Deposition of Richard II. ; and that he did not long survive 
 the accession of Henry IV. He is generally supposed to 
 have been a secular priest. It is obvious that he was 
 familiar with London; and it may be inferred, from his 
 mention of the Malvern Hills, that he lived in their neigh- 
 bourhood. 
 
 Langland wrote in the old English alliterative metre; but 
 he went to the fashionable modern poetry for the machinery 
 of dream and allegory. He walks abroad on a May morn- 
 ing, like any poet of the period, lays himself down by a 
 stream under a broad bank, and as he looks into the water, 
 is lulled to sleep by the merry sound. He then dreams, 
 and sees an allegorical field, full of folk ; an allegorical 
 tower, and an allegorical dale, with a dungeon. He is 
 visited by a supernaturally lovely allegorical lady, who ex- 
 plains the meaning of what he sees. He is next witness of 
 an allegorical drama ; an allegorical marriage is' proposed, 
 the banns are forbidden, the whole party is carried before 
 the king ; and, after several symbolical incidents, judgment 
 is pronounced. Wishing now to change the scene, the poet 
 awakes his dreamer, and presently sends him asleep again, 
 and opens up to him the vision of the Seven Deadly Sins, 
 and of Piers the Plowman. The same artifice for changing 
 the scene is used nine other times in the course of the 
 poem. 
 
 But though the machinery of the poem reminds us that 
 Langland had read in the same school of poetry as Chaucer, 
 there is a considerable change of climate from the " Court of 
 Love " or the ' Canterbury Tales ' to the ' Vision of Piers the 
 Plowman.' Between the Court of Love, indeed, and Piers 
 the Plowman, comparison brings to light only irreconcilable 
 and deadly antagonism : they typify the conflict between 
 sensuous art and puritanism. What the one approves and 
 makes battle for, the other condemns and strives to extir- 
 pate. Langland is not a rabid Puritan — he is not a rabid 
 man ; but he regards the votaries of the lust of the flesh and 
 
WILLIAM LANGLAND. 6 1 
 
 the lust of the eyes mournfully as deluded victims, and 
 he denounces all minstrels and mirth-makers as heartless 
 insulters of the miseries of the world. Philogenet, as the 
 author of songs and ditties that might be sung in honour of 
 the Queen of Love, would have come under Langland's 
 fierce scorn, among " japers and janglers, Judas' children, 
 that feign them fantasies, and make themselves fools." ^ 
 Langland would have used even stronger language towards 
 the " Court of Love " than Milton used towards Sir Philip 
 Sidney's " Arcadia," when he called it " a vain amatorious 
 poem." He makes no distinction between wandermg min- 
 strels and other purveyors for idle luxury : he scorns them 
 collectively with no less vehemence than the Puritans of the 
 seventeenth century scorned the strolling player. Langland 
 was far from having Milton's genius to tempt him into vio- 
 lations of his own doctrine ; but he had some difficulty in 
 reconciling even the modest flights of his muse with his 
 paramount and imperious moral earnestness. He had qualms 
 about " meddling with makings," when he might have been 
 saying his psalter or praying for his benefactors ; and had 
 to reassure himself by quoting the example of Cato and 
 other holy men, who played a little that they might be more 
 perfect in many places. 
 
 The contrast between Piers and the ' Canterbury Tales ' is 
 still more instructive. We have seen that, though Chaucer 
 does not represent his pilgrims as being perfect, he exhibits 
 their shortcomings in a genial light. He introduces us to a 
 company of people on the whole happy and self satisfied, 
 and alleges no reason why they should be otherwise. He 
 is, in short, an artist of manners and character, who chooses 
 a moment when his personages are seen to advantage, and 
 when their imperfections are amusing without being pain- 
 fully offensive. Langland writes with a very different pur- 
 pose. His aim is, not to seize the happy moment in things 
 as they are, but to make a stem comparison of things as 
 
 1 In the prologue, Mr Skeat renders "japers and janglers, "jesters and 
 slanderers ; but I doubt whether the notion of slander is intended. See 
 Passus, *. 1. 31 (Text-B), "And japers and jugglers axiA janglers of 
 gests." 
 
62 CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 they are with things as they ought to be — to place the ex- 
 isting state of society side by side with a lofty ideal, and 
 elevate the depraved by energetic reproof and exhortation. 
 What renders the difference in spirit between the two poets 
 all the more remarkable is, that they treat of the same 
 period ; and that, when we reflect independently on the sub- 
 stance of what they convey to us, we draw from both the 
 same conclusions regarding the prevalent state of society. 
 There is, indeed, one exception. Langland gives us no idea 
 of the refinement of sentiment among the gentle folks : he 
 includes them in the general censure of ribald amusements ; 
 and, on the other hand, Chaucer, in his portrait of the " very 
 perfect gentle knight," drew an ideal rarely realised, and 
 suppressed the fact that knights very often treated their 
 vassals with scant justice, and tyrannised over them like a 
 cat among mice. Concerning the lower classes, we gather 
 from them substantially the same facts. We learn from 
 Chaucer, as well as from Langland, that merchants, millers, 
 and cooks cheated their customers ; that reeves (or stew- 
 ards) cheated their masters ; that doctors and lawyers were 
 bent upon making money ; that monks were more convers- 
 ant with field-sports than religious duties ; that friars were 
 unconscionable beggars ; that pardoners told atrocious lies, 
 and made audacious extortions from the credulous vulgar ; 
 and that, amidst considerable drunkenness, waste, and ri- 
 baldry, there lived also men of honest industry and sincere 
 piety. And if we look beneath the surface of Langland's 
 invective, we see that poor people were not reduced to a 
 state of uninterrupted wretchedness by the oppression of the 
 rich, and their own intemperance. We reflect that, though 
 their recreations were not to the poet's taste, their life must 
 have been occasionally brightened by these japers and 
 jugglers and janglers of jests. But so different are Chaucer 
 and Langland in the spirit of their pictures, that it needs an 
 effort of reflection to discover the shadows of the one and 
 the lights of the other. 
 
 Take a few details of Langland's picture of the life of 
 England. In the " fair field of folk," described in his pro- 
 
WILLIAM LANGLAND. 63 
 
 logues, he sees all manner of men moving about, the mean 
 and the rich, " working and wandering as the world asketh." 
 As Chaucer puts the knight in the foreground, so Lang- 
 land gives the first place to his ideal of humble virtue — the 
 hard-working honest ploiighman — 
 
 " Some putten them to the plough, played full seld, 
 In setting and in sowing swonken^ full hard, 
 And wonnen that wasters with gluttony destroyeth." 
 
 The sight of conscientious labour at once arouses the 
 moralist's anger at unprofitable indolence. He places in 
 immediate contrast a form of immorality most despicable 
 in his eyes, and most pardonable in the eyes of the artist — 
 
 " And some putten them to pride, apparelled them thereafter 
 In countenance of clothing comen disguised." 
 
 In this category he would probably have placed Chaucer's 
 youthful squire, embroidered as a mead. After his ideal of 
 active life, with the unproductive display that consumes its 
 fruits, comes an ideal of contemplative life — 
 
 " In prayers and in penance putten them many ; 
 All for love of our lord liveden full strait, 
 In hope for to have heavenric bliss ; 
 As anchorites and hermits, that holden them in their cells, 
 And coveten not in country to kairen^ about, 
 For no lickerish livelihood their likam' to please." 
 
 Then follow various contrasts : Thriving merchants — " as 
 it seemeth to our sight that such men thriveth" — minstrels, 
 beggars, palmers, hermits, friars, pardoners, absentee parish 
 priests ; idle and dishonest men— 
 
 " Bidders' and beggars fast about gede,° 
 With their belly and their bags of bread full y-crammed ; 
 Faiteden' for their food, foughten at ale ; 
 In gluttony, God it wot, gone they to bed. 
 And risen with ribaldry the Roberdes knaves ; 
 
 1 Toiled. ' Cany themselves, gad. ^ Body. 
 
 * Synonym for beggars. ^ Goed— went. 
 
 8 Made up tales — used false pretences. 
 
64 CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 Sleep and sorry sloth pursueth them ever. 
 
 Pilgrims and palmers plighted them together, 
 To seek Saint James and saintes in Rome ; 
 They went forth in their way with many wise tales, 
 And hadden leave to lie all their life after. 
 I saw some that saiden they had y-sought saintes ; 
 To each a tale that they told their tongue was tempered to lie, 
 More than to say sooth ; it seemed by their speech. 
 
 Hermits on an heap, with hooked staves, 
 Wenten to Walsingham, and their wenches after ; 
 Great lubbers and long, that loath were to swink. 
 Clothed them in copes to be knowen from other ; 
 And shapen them hermits their ease to have." 
 
 How different is this righteous animosity from the spirit of 
 such artists as Bums and Chaucer, whose eyes are all for 
 picturesqueness and humour ! The difference is still more 
 marked in his picture of the interior of an inn. Glutton is 
 tempted to enter on his way to confession ; goes in swear- 
 ing, and finds a collection of habitual topers, — Cis the shoe- 
 maker's wife, Wat the warrener and his wife, Tim the tinker 
 and two of his apprentices, Hick the hackneyman, Hugh 
 the needle-seller, Clarice of Cock Lane, the clerk of the 
 Church, Daw the dyker. Sir Piers of Pridie, Pemel of 
 Flanders, a ribibe-player, a rat-catcher, Robin the roper, 
 Clement the cobbler. Rose the dish-seller, Godfrey of Gar- 
 lickhithe, Griffin the Welshman. All the ugly details of the 
 debauchery are brought into prominence. They barter 
 clothes with noisy squabbling over their value ; they pass 
 the cup greedily, snatching it from one another's hands with 
 laughs and frowns, and continue their noisy carouse till 
 evensong. Glutton drinks a gallon and a gill of ale, and 
 manifests the most repulsive symptoms of intoxication. 
 The picture, as a whole, is graphic, but intentionally coarse 
 and disgusting ; throughout, the author's purpose is to make 
 debauchery odious by showing its ugliest side. The glut- 
 ton is not the hero of the evening, the triumphant leader 
 of coarse delights ; he is a moral spectacle, a warning to 
 drunkards and ne'er-do-wells. Contrast Langland's treat- 
 ment of him with Chaucer's treatment of the Cook, at the 
 
WILLIAM LANGLANB. 6$ 
 
 close of the pilgrimage, before the Manciple's Tale. The 
 Cook is roundly reproved by the Manciple for making a 
 beast of himself; but his drunken eccentricities are pre- 
 sented in such a way as to make them laughable rather 
 than disgusting. 
 
 Langland is not without genuine humour,^ though his 
 moral purpose forbids him to allow it anything like full 
 scope. He shows unmistakable enjoyment of fun in his 
 account of the career of "Lady Meed," the allegorical 
 embodiment of wealth ; he narrates with much gusto the 
 respectful treatment she received from judges, clerks of the 
 court, and confessors, and even from the king himself. In 
 his account of the Seven Deadly Sins, also, whose charac- 
 teristic appearances he describes with considerable pictorial 
 force, he sometimes relaxes into a smile or a laugh. Per- 
 haps the most unequivocal flash of humour in the whole 
 poem is his making Avarice mistake the meaning of "resti- 
 tution" — 
 
 " ' Repentedest thou ever,' quoth Repentance, ' ne restitution 
 
 madest ?' 
 ' Yes, once I was harboured,' quoth he, ' with an heap of 
 
 chapmen ; 
 I rose when they were a-rest, and y-rifled their mails !' 
 ' That was no restitution,' quoth Repentance, ' but a robber's 
 
 theft ; 
 Thou hadst be better worthy be hanged therefore 
 Than for all that that thou hast here shewed.' 
 ' I weened rifling were restitution,' quoth he ; ' for I learned 
 
 never read on book, 
 And I can no French in faith, but of the farthest end of 
 
 Norfolk.' " 
 
 But humour is, on the whole, rare in Langland's work, 
 and certainly it was no part of his purpose. He was a 
 morahst, not a humorist. If his ridicule had produced 
 laughter for laughter's sake, and raised no moral disappro- 
 bation, he would probably have taken himself to task for 
 having missed his mark. He laughed at things that he 
 
 1 Mr Lowell finds in Langland an equal sense of fun with Chaucer's ; 
 but Mr Lowell would find a sense of fun in the demonstrations of Euclid. 
 
66 CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 wished to see abolished, and used ridicule as a means to 
 make them hateful and loathsome, and to secure their aboli- 
 tion. He wished to make the glutton odious as a waster 
 of the fruits of honest labour, and so discourage intemper- 
 ance. He caricatured Lady Meed to make people ashamed 
 of paying respect to riches. He represented the palmer as 
 ignorant of the way to truth, and made the friars pretend 
 that Do-well dwelt only with them, in order to expose and 
 thereby reform their hypocrisy and exaggerated pretensions. 
 He satirised the unscrupulous impositions of the pardoners, 
 because he hated their unprofitable idleness and luxury, and 
 was indignant at their robbing the poor man of his hard- 
 earned bread. Langland is, in short, a Puritan of the 
 fourteenth century. When we look from the ' Canterbury 
 Tales' to his stern series of visions, we see that the an- 
 tagonism between Cavalier and Roundhead began long 
 before it.culminated in civil war. Only, in Langland's time, 
 the champion of the poor was still hopeful of redress. 
 Langland was an apostle of purification, not of reconstruc- 
 tion. He believed devoutly in Holy Church, and desired 
 only to see churchmen acting up to their professions. He 
 raised not a word in dispute of the privileges of the nobility; 
 he desired only that they should remember and discharge 
 their duties to those beneath them. 
 
 The cardinal virtue in Langland's eyes is industry. Like 
 Carlyle, he proclaims a gospel of work. He expresses the 
 teaching of Kind Wit — that is, natural wit or common- 
 sense, in a form that reminds us of Carlyle's — ' Two men I 
 honour and no third.' 
 
 " Kind wit would that each a wight wrought, 
 Or in dyking or in delving or in travailing in prayers ;■ 
 Contemplative life or active life, Christ would men wrought." 
 
 The paramount obligation of this duty is preached at eveiy 
 turn of the poem. The mere choice of Piers as the man 
 that he delights to honour, still more his final transfigura- 
 tion of the honest ploughman into a type of Christ, is a 
 bold assertion of the dignity of the humblest labourer, and 
 
WILLIAM LANGLAND. 6/ 
 
 the contemptibility of idleness. And there are many minor 
 inculcations of the same doctrine. When the Seven Deadly 
 Sins are converted and cry out for a guide to Truth, Piers 
 steps forward and offers to conduct them when they have 
 helped him to ear his field of corn ; and he sets them all 
 sturdily to work, with the exception of the Knight, who 
 undertakes to secure him protection for the fruits of his toil. 
 The substance of the teaching of Holy Church is, that faith 
 without works is " dead as a door-post ;" and this is in part 
 another aspect of the same doctrine. Two of the five sons 
 of Inwit (Conscience), the constable of the castle that 
 Nature has built to hold Anima (the Soul), are Work-well- 
 with-thy-hands and Sir Godfrey Go-well.* Again, industry 
 is the most prominent of the qualifications for obtaining the 
 company of Do-well. And as Langland resembles Carlyle 
 in his earnest upholding of the duty of work, so the resem- 
 blance extends to the provision of strenuous punishment 
 for idlers. We have seen how our poet denounces sturdy 
 beggars and lazy lubbers of hermits. When these gentry 
 come to honest Piers, pretending that they cannot work for 
 him, but offering to give him the benefit of their prayers, he 
 allows hunger to restore them the use of their limbs. In 
 like manner. Conscience is a strong advocate of the rod 
 for the lazy back. 
 
 Another doctrine, less obtrusively expressed, is the right 
 of individual judgment in matters of religion. This is not 
 exactly a protest in favour of reason as against authority. 
 It really is part of Langland's championship of the illiterate 
 but honest poor. He pits their Kind-wit or common-sense 
 against the learning of the clergy. He does this indirectly 
 through the medium of his allegorical personages. Piers 
 obtains from Truth a pardon containing only two lines — 
 " They that have done good, shall go into eternal life ; 
 They that have done evil, into eternal fire." 
 A priest laughs at this pardon, and at first Piers is in de- 
 
 1 Mr Skeat commits a slight and natural inadvertence in describing these 
 five sons as The Five Senses. They are See-well, Hear-vvfell, Say-well, 
 Work-well, and Go-welL 
 
68 CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 spair, and thinks of leaving his plough and taking to prayer 
 and penance ; but after a little he is emboldened to dispute 
 the priest's authority. At another time, William the poet 
 in his own person opposes Clergy, one of his characters, 
 and stoutly maintains that learning is more of a hindrance 
 than a help towards the kingdom of heaven — 
 
 " Aren none rather y-ravished from the right belief 
 Than are the cunning clerks' that con many books ; 
 Ne none sooner saved ne sadderi of belief 
 Than plowmen and pastors and poor common labourers. 
 
 Souters^ and shepherds, such lewed^ jots 
 Piercen with a pater-noster the palace of heaven, 
 And passen purgatory penanceless at their hence parting 
 Into the bliss of paradise, for their pure belief." 
 
 Further, he makes Nature Wit laugh at the voluble talk of 
 Dame Study. It is remarkable, however, that in his en- 
 largement of the original poem he qualifies this extreme 
 disparagement of learning. In J'assus XII., Imaginative 
 reminds him of the good done by men of learning, bids 
 him never despise them, and tells him that Learning and 
 Nature Wit are of the same kindred, and, indeed, near 
 cousins. 
 
 The poem, as a whole, is not a connected historical alle- 
 gory like the ' Pilgrim's Progress ' or the ' Holy War.' 
 The poet evades the difficulty of weaving the action of his 
 allegorical personages into a simple connected story. He 
 presents us with a series of eleven more or less disjointed 
 visions or dreams, and leaves us to divine for ourselves 
 whether or not these visions are allegories of consecutive 
 stages in the religious life. On examination, we find that 
 the visions are not consecutive. The first vision is a view 
 of life by itself, designed to symbolise the corrupting in- 
 fluence of wealth (" Lady Meed "), its frequent union with 
 falsehood, its doubtful compatibility with truth and con- 
 science, its possession of the services of wisdom and wit. 
 The next vision is a complete change of scene with a new 
 
 1 More sober and sure. " Shoemakers. 3 Illiterate. 
 
WILLIAM LANGLAND. 69 
 
 set of allegorical personages ; it represents the conversion 
 of the Seven Deadly Sins by Repentance, and their refor- 
 mation by Piers Plowman, a poor husbandman, who is 
 afterwards seen to typify the condescension of Christ to 
 human nature. Then follow the Vision of Wit, Study, 
 Clergy, and Scripture; the Vision of Fortune, Nature, and 
 Reason; the Vision of Imaginative; the Vision of Con- 
 science, Patience, and Haukyn, the Active Man — a series 
 of visions all bearing on the life of Do-well, the good life, 
 the life of honest industry. Next we have the Vision of 
 the Soul and of the Tree of Charity ; the Vision of Faith, 
 Hope, and Charity; the Vision of the Triumph of Piers 
 the Plowman — a series of visions bearing on the life of 
 Do-bet, the better life, the life of faith, hope, and charity. 
 Finally, we have two visions — the Vision of Grace and the 
 Vision of Antichrist — bearing on the life of Do-best, the 
 best life. Taken as a whole, these groups of visions do 
 not allegorise any religious progress, any growth of religion 
 in the soul; the one is not deduced from the other. In 
 the three last divisions of the poem certain virtues and 
 heavenly endowments are set forth in order from good to 
 best ; but this is an order of regular exposition, a climax, 
 and not an order of development in the progressive Chris- 
 tian. Piers Plowman is the hero of the poem, and the 
 chief connecting link of the dreams, inasmuch as the author, 
 once having seen him, is very desirous, in more than one of 
 the subsequent dreams, to see him again. 
 
 In -describing the various personages of his allegory, 
 Langland, as we have already said, has another object than 
 to produce an artistic picture. Yet in his description of the 
 Seven Deadly Sins — a subject that often engaged mediaeval 
 artists — the word-painting, simply as such, is exceedingly 
 powerful. The effect cannot be said to be pleasing; the 
 poet or preacher was himself full of strong abhorrence of 
 the subject, desired to disgust and repel his reader no less 
 strongly, and has emphatically succeeded — at least for 
 modern readers. But the energy of the characterisation 
 is tremendous — 
 
70 CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 " And then came Covetice — can I him not descrive, 
 So hungrily and hollow Sir Hervy him looked. 
 He was beetle-browed, and babber-lipped also, 
 With two bleared eyen as a blind hag ; 
 And as a leathern purse lolled his cheeks. 
 Well sidder i than his chin : they chivelled for eld ; 
 And as a bondman< of his bacon his beard was bedravelled. 
 With a hood on his head, a lousy hat above. 
 And in a tawny tabard of twelve winter age, 
 All to-torn and bawdy, and full of lice creeping ; 
 But if that a louse could have leapen the better. 
 She should not have walked on that walsh ^ so was it thread- 
 bare." 
 
 Such hideous and loathsome ideals, though caviare to the 
 general run of moderns, may have been enjoyed by our 
 Middle Age ancestors. They were realised in the moral- 
 plays, doubtless with the best intentions ; but they probably 
 rather amused than instructed the rude audience. Spenser 
 also applied his genius to similar subjects; but whether 
 from moral enthusiasm or from a disinterested taste for 
 horrors, it is difficult to say. 
 
 As regards the use of the alliterative metre in ' Piers Plow- 
 man,' although Langland was contemporary with Chaucer, 
 we must not look upon this as an archaic affectation or a 
 proof of uncultivated rusticity. Langland acted wisely in 
 choosing the alliterative metre. Of the forms then in use, 
 it was decidedly the best for a didactic poem. Some critics 
 have shown an unreasonable prejudice against alliteration ; 
 it has even been stigmatised as " a vulgar trick.'' Old 
 Thomas Fuller, and the unknown framers of our popular 
 proverbial wisdom, knew its value for aphorisms and epi- 
 grams — at least they used it, consciously or unconsciously, 
 with good effect. And in like manner, Langland, whether 
 by chance or by good judgment, adopted the form best 
 suited to his materials. Not to mention its value as a help 
 to the memory, how much better than jingling octosyllabics, 
 sing-song ballad metre, or even than heroic couplets, is its 
 
 ' Longer. ^ Filthy garment. (?) 
 
JOHN GOWER. 71 
 
 incisive emphasis suited to tiie vigour of Langland's thought 
 and sentiment. 
 
 The poem on the deposition of Richard II., ascribed by 
 Mr Wright to Langland, has every appearance of being his 
 composition. There are constant minute coincidences of 
 expression ; and the general strain of the sentiment, the 
 fierce scorn for wasteful idleness, and the burning indig- 
 nation against oppression and neglect of the weak, as well 
 as the general energy of the verse, are in eminent corre- 
 spondence with ' Piers Plowman.' 
 
 2. John Gower {d. 1408). 
 
 Gower is intrinsically a much less significant figure than 
 Langland, but his name is more closely associated with 
 Chaucer's, and occurs most readily next to his in any enu- 
 meration of the poets of the time. The basis of this repu- 
 tation is very clearly stated by Mr Earle (English Philology, 
 p. 76) : " One is apt to imagine, previous to a study of their 
 works, that they " (Chaucer and Gower) " were a par nobile 
 fratrum — brothers and equals in poetry and genius; and that 
 they had contributed equally, or nearly so, towards the 
 making of English literature. But this is very far from 
 being the case. That which united them at first, and which 
 continues to be the sole ground of coupling their names to- 
 gether, is just this, that they wrote in the same general strain 
 and in the same language. By this is meant, first, that they 
 were both versed in the learning then most prized, and both 
 delivered what they had to say in the terms then most ad- 
 mired ; and, secondly, that both wrote the English of the 
 Court. If affinity^ of genius had been the basis of classifi- 
 cation, the author of ' Piers Plowman ' had more right to 
 rank with Chaucer than the prosaic Gower, But in this 
 Chaucer and Gower are united, in that they both wrote the 
 particular form of English which was henceforward to be 
 established as the standard form of the national language ; 
 
 1 1 should consider the word "affinity" rather loose in this connection. 
 I have enlarged upon the disparity, or even antagonism, of genius between 
 the two. But Mr Earle's general meaning is obvious. 
 
72 CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 and their books were the leading English classics of the 
 best society down to the opening of a new era under 
 Elizabeth." 
 
 Even this modified title to rank with Chaucer needs some 
 qualification. Gower was of about the same age as Chaucer, 
 probably several years older, but he did not write in EngKsh 
 till his old age. Up to 1393 he was known to the reading 
 public only as a writer of French and Latin ; and after that 
 date he continued to use Latin as the medium for his poli- 
 tical poetry. 
 
 It requires some courage to begin a course of reading in 
 Gower after Professor Lowell's energetic summing up and 
 appalling illustration of his demerits. " Gower," he says, 
 " has positively raised tediousness to the precision of 
 science ; he has made dulness an heirloom for the students, 
 of our literary history. As you slip to and fro on the frozen 
 levels of his verse, which give no foothold to the mind ; as 
 your nervous ear awaits the inevitable recurrence of his 
 rhyme, regularly pertinacious as the tick of an eight-day 
 clock, and reminding you of Wordsworth's 
 
 ' Once more the ass did lengthen out 
 The hard, dry see-saw of his horrible bray,' — 
 
 you learn to dread, almost to respect, the powers of this 
 indefatigable man. He is the undertaker of the fair medias- 
 val legend, and his style has the hateful gloss, the seemingly 
 unnatural length, of a coffin. Love, beauty, passion, nature, 
 art, life, the natural and the theological virtues — there is 
 nothing beyond his power to disenchant, nothing out of 
 which the tremendous hydraulic press of his allegory (or 
 whatever it is, for I am not sure if it be not something even 
 worse) will not squeeze all feeling and freshness, and leave 
 it a juiceless pulp. It matters not where you try him, 
 whether his story be Christian or pagan, borrowed from 
 history or fable, you cannot escape him. Dip in at the 
 middle or the end, dodge back to the beginning, the patient 
 old man is there to take you by the button and go on with 
 his imperturbable narrative. You may have left off with 
 
JOHN GOWER. 73 
 
 Clytemnestra, and you may begin again with Samson ; it 
 makes no odds, for you cannot tell one from t'other. . . 
 Our literature had to lie by and recruit for more than four 
 centuries ere it could give us an equal vacuity in Tupper, 
 so persistent a uniformity of commonplace in the ' Recrea- 
 tions of a Country Parson.' " Warton's verdict is more 
 solemn than this, but hardly more favourable ; and it is 
 a melancholy thought that the old man tedious has of late 
 found no sympathisers. 
 
 John Gower was an esquire of Kent.^ He was not in 
 priesf s orders, but he was so far connected with the Church 
 that he held the living of Great Braxted, in Essex. He was 
 the most widely-read scholar of his age ; saw but little of 
 the Court; had a recluse's peevishness and unfavourable 
 views of life; and a recluse's pleasure in rank-flavoured tales. 
 One cannot but have a certain compunction in transcribing 
 Lowell's wicked rending to pieces of the industrious old 
 rhymer's reputation : all the more when one sees from his 
 description of the effects produced upon him by his lady's 
 voice and the metres of the old romances, that, prosy and 
 feeble though his writings are, he was not altogether dead 
 to the higher emotions. If it could be of any service in 
 making his dulness more acceptable, one would be glad to 
 apply to him Chaucer's account of the dejected Arcite — 
 
 " And if he hearde song or instrument 
 Then would he weep, he mighte not be stent ; 
 So feeble were his spirits and so low." 
 
 In this susceptibility of ear, "moral Gower," as Chaucer 
 called him, bore a resemblance to the judicious Hooker, 
 whom he resembled farther in scholarship and in feebleness 
 of constitution. 
 
 Gower's principal French work, entitled Speculum Medi- 
 tantis (' Mirror of a Meditating Mind') — which seems to 
 have been a didactic poem on Vices and Virtues, and the 
 principal support of his " moral " character- — is now lost : 
 but some French Balades of his have been preserved. His 
 
 1 Sir Harris Nicolas. See Morley's English Writers, ii. 69; and Thynne's 
 Animadversions on Speght's Chaucer, Early English Text Society, p. 14. 
 
74 CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 Latin poems were political in their scope. The first of 
 them — Vox Clamantis, ' The Voice of one crying aloud,' or 
 ' An Earnest Appeal ' — was evoked by the rebellion of Jack 
 Straw in 1381. In this poem, while satirising the corrup- 
 tions of society, which he considers the distempering causes 
 of such insurrections, he shows a warm attachment to the 
 young king, from whom he had received tokens of favour ; 
 but in subsequent productions, in the same tone of com- 
 plaint against the times, he seems to have changed sides, 
 and includes the king among other social corruptions.^ 
 
 His principal English work — almost his only preserved 
 composition in English — is Confessio Amantis, ' The Con- 
 fession of a Lover.' The word "confession" is here used 
 in its ecclesiastical sense : Confessio Amantis is not an auto- 
 biographical work like Augustine's Confessions, or the 
 Confessions of an Opium-eater, but a dialogue between 
 a penitent and his confessor. Strangely enough for the 
 " moral " Gower, the religion of the parties is not Chris- 
 tianity, but love ; the confessor is a priest of Venus. Sub- 
 stantially, the work is a miscellany of tales, fantastic 
 love-philosophy, pseudo-Aristotelian mysticism (embracing 
 alchemy, astrology, magic, palmistry, geomancy). The 
 confessional form is merely a device for stringing this 
 heterogeneous lore together. The love portion of it is 
 described by Warton : ^ " The ritual of religion is applied to 
 the tender passion, and Ovid's ' Art of Love ' is blended 
 with the breviary. In the course of the confession, every 
 evil affection of the human heart, which may tend to 
 impede the progress or counteract the success of love, is 
 scientifically subdivided, and its fatal effects exemplified by 
 a variety of apposite stories, extracted from classics and 
 chronicles." Some of these stories, particularly two cases 
 of incest, were pronounced by Chaucer very " immoral " — 
 
 " Of whiche cursed stories I say fy ! " 
 
 For himself, Chaucer said that — 
 
 1 Wright's Political Poems and Songs, in the Master of the Rolls series. 
 ^ History of English Poetry— Section xix. (on Gower). 
 
JOHN GOWER. 75 
 
 "He of full avisement 
 Would never write in none of his sermons 
 Of such unkind ^ abominations." 
 
 In spite, however, of these "incidental divertisements," 
 readers of Mrs Stowe literature would find Gower very dry 
 material : these oases occur in a very wide Sahara. 
 
 The inaccuracy of his statements regarding personages 
 mentioned in Scripture and in Latin and Greek classical 
 .literature, becomes credible only when we remember that 
 he lived before the revival of learning. Before the inven- 
 tion of movable types, the multiplication and diffusion of 
 books in manuscript was not calculated to preserve accu- 
 rate historical knowledge. The student was not likely to 
 have access to many books, and the few accessible to him 
 probably bore no indication of the relative dates and general 
 position of their authors. He was to be pardoned under 
 the circumstances, if he believed that Ovid was the founder 
 of the Latin language, or that Noah and Abraham were old 
 writers on astrology and magic. Gower had to trust volu- 
 minous compilations of theory, fact, and fiction, made by 
 men whose scholarly advantages were little superior to his 
 own : Secretum Secretorum Aristotelis (' The Secret of the 
 Secrets of Aristotle'); Memorim Seculorum ('Memorials of 
 the Ages ') ; Speculum Regum (' Mirror of Kings ') ; Gesta 
 Romanorum (' Acts of the Romans '). His notions of 
 chronology are sufficiently well illustrated by his summary 
 of the wonderful knowledge and the renowned teachers 
 of Ulysses : — 
 
 " He was a worthy knight and king 
 
 And clerk renowned in every thing. 
 
 He was a great rhetorian ; 
 
 He was a great magician : 
 
 Of Tullius the rhetoric ; 
 
 Of King Zoroastes the magic ; 
 
 Of Ptolemy the Astronomy ; 
 
 Of Plato the Philosophy ; 
 
 Of Daniel the sleepy dreams ; 
 
 Of Neptune the water streams ; 
 1 Unnatural. 
 
T6 CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 Of Solomon and the Proverbs ; 
 Of Macer all the strength of herbs ; 
 And the physic of Hypocras ; 
 And like unto Pythagoras 
 Of surgery he knew the cures." 
 
 3. Miracle-plays and Mysteries. 
 
 Though there is no pre-eminent chief in this species of 
 composition, they formed so large a part of the entertain- • 
 ment of the vulgar during the fourteenth and fifteenth 
 centuries, that we must try to make out their characteristics. 
 There are at least three allusions to them in the ' Canterbury 
 Tales,' all in the Prologue and Tale of the Miller. The 
 Miller cries in Pilatds voice {Prol. 16); Absolon is said to 
 " play Herod on a scaffold high " {Tale, 198); and Nicholas 
 makes reference to Noah's difficulty in getting his wife into 
 the ark (353) — a stock incident in the Mysteries. We may 
 therefore suppose that, when Chaucer wrote the Miller's 
 Tale, he was fresh from an exhibition of these Scriptural 
 dramas. It will be seen in what here follows, that though 
 they were professedly designed for the encouragement of 
 morality and holiness, they harmonise in spirit more with 
 the Miller's Tale than the Parson's. 
 
 Miracle-plays, in the strict sense of the tenn, were 
 dramatic representations of miracles performed by saints ; 
 Mysteries, of incidents from the New Testament and 
 elsewhere, bearing upon the fundamental principles of 
 Roman Catholicism. This distinction, however, is hardly 
 kept up in the practical application of the terms. They 
 were performed in the churches, or on stages erected in the 
 churchyard or in the fields, or, as at Coventry, on movable 
 stages wheeled from street to street. The actors were in 
 some cases the brethren of a monastery, in *)me cases the 
 members of a trade guild. The authors were monks. As 
 regards other particulars of the representation, " it appears," 
 says Mr Wright in his Introduction to the ' Chester Plays,' 
 " that the spectators paid for the sight : either seats were 
 purchased, or a collection was made. At a later period we 
 
MIRACLE-PLAYS AND MYSTERIES. "J "J 
 
 find that . . . there were different floors or partitions to 
 represent heaven, earth, and hell, and that very intricate 
 and ingenious machinery must have been used to produce 
 different effects. Masks were also used, at least in the 
 thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, so that the whole per- 
 formance must have borne considerable analogy to the 
 rude Greek comedy in the days of Thespis." ^ 
 
 Besides a few isolated plays, as old as the fifteenth or 
 even the fourteenth century, there have been preserved 
 three complete sets of Mysteries dramatising Biblical and 
 apocryphal incidents from the Creation to the death and 
 resurrection of Christ, and His ascension and return in 
 glory on!' Doomsday : the ' Townley Mysteries,' published 
 by the Surtees Society in 1836; the ' Coventry Mysteries,' 
 edited for the Shakespeare Society by Mr Halliwell, 1841 ; 
 the ' Chester Plays,' edited for the same Society by Mr T. 
 Wright, 1847. 
 
 Though the ostensible object of these plays was to in- 
 struct the illiterate in a knowledge of Scripture, and edify 
 them in love of God and fear of the devil, the eflfect of 
 them as a whole must, to use Chaucer's classification, have 
 partaken more of coarse comedy than of either morality or 
 holiness. It was natural that they should occur to Chaucer 
 when he began to write the first of his series of ribald tales, 
 and that he should strike the key-note of boisterous humour 
 by making the Miller break through the decorous recep- 
 tion of the Knight's Tale with a voice like Pilate's in the 
 Mysteries. Various liberties were taken with Scriptural 
 personages for the sake of comic effect. Both in the 
 Chester and in the Townley series, Noah's wife is represented 
 as somewhat of a shrew, who gives the patriarch a great 
 deal of trouble before he can get her into the ark. In the 
 ' Coventry Mysteries,' Joseph is represented as a contemp- 
 tible and impotent old man, who marries Mary under com- 
 pulsion, alleges that he is neither able nor willing to act as 
 
 ^ There is an elaborate account of Miracle-Plays, Moral Plays, &c., in 
 Collier's 'History of Dramatic Poetry.' Hone's 'Ancient Mysteries De- 
 scribed ' is an entertaining book. 
 
78 CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 a husband, is certain that he has been dishonoured when 
 Mary proves to be with child, and expresses his conviction 
 in very plain language. Mary's account of her condition 
 is treated with coarse increduHty by everybody, till her 
 veracity is vindicated by a miracle. The shepherds to 
 whom the angel declared the birth of Christ give another 
 opportunity for ludicrous invention. Herod is a favour- 
 ite character — a ludicrously inflated tyrant, blasphemously 
 rampant and boastful, carried off in the end by a demon. 
 Even the Massacre of the Innocents becomes a rude bur- 
 lesque : the mothers assail the soldiers with gross language, 
 and beat them with extravagant fury. In this way is the 
 Scripture brought down to the level of the multitude ; and 
 one does not wonder that these Mysteries were often de- 
 nounced by earnest preachers. There doubtless is religious 
 feeling in them, earnest praise and adoration of God ; but 
 it is difficult to suppose that the serious element predomi- 
 nated over the comic. The coarse comic incidents must 
 have flavoured the whole ; in judging of the probable effect 
 of the serious portions, we must take into account the 
 ludicrous surroundings, and we must not suppose that the 
 rude audience were so very differently constituted from 
 ourselves that they viewed with gravity things that appear 
 supremely ludicrous to us. The cooks and millers, cobblers 
 and carpenters, of the fourteenth century, were by no means 
 blind to comic effect ; and if they had their chuckle over 
 some of the grotesque figures in church architecture, they 
 were not as solemn as Methodists at the exhibition of a 
 Mystery. It is apparent on all hands that the sense of the 
 ridiculous was very powerful in the fourteenth century; re- 
 ligion no more than love was sacred from its rude sport. 
 Remember that these Mysteries were exhibited at festivals, 
 and consider the following picture of how the common 
 people enjoyed themselves at Christmas ^ — 
 
 " The lewed people then algates agree. 
 And carols singen every Christmas tide, 
 
 1 Quoted in Hone's Ancient Mysteries, p. 90. 
 
MIRACLE-PLAYS AND MYSTERIES. 79 
 
 Not with shamefasteness but jocundly, 
 
 And holly boughs about ; and all aside 
 
 The brenning fire them eaten and them drink, 
 
 And laughen merrily, and maken rout. 
 
 And pipe and dancen and them rage ; ne swink 
 
 Ne nothing else twelve day they woulde not." 
 
 The Mysteries exhibited on holidays, either general Church 
 holidays or days sacred to the memory of some patron 
 saint, were part and parcel of this hearty enjoyment. At 
 York, previous to the year 1426, the revelling and drunken- 
 ness at the representation of the Mysteries was such that 
 they had to be discontinued. We have a curious evidence 
 of the amusing character of Mysteries generally in a portion 
 of a Latin story quoted by Mr Wright. Certain persons 
 walking in a meadow " saw before them a vast crowd of 
 people assembled, and heard them now hushed and silent, 
 now bursting into loud laughter. Wondering, therefore, 
 why there was so great a congregation in such a place, they 
 concluded that a performance was going on of those plays 
 that we call miracles'' What could be more significant ? 
 One class of personages seem to have been special objects 
 of merriment — the devil and his attendant demons got up 
 with horns, tails, claws, and hideous mask. Professor 
 Morley, who holds that the chief interest of the Mysteries 
 was tragic, affirms that the whole endeavour in the make-up 
 of the demons was to render them terrible. I am very far 
 from agreeing with this. The women and children among 
 the spectators might be horrified, as they still are at ugly 
 masks ; but a sturdy Englishman out for a holiday and well 
 lined with beer would probably laugh the louder the more 
 shrilly his weaker friends were excited to scream. When 
 we study the demons closely, it becomes obvious that terror 
 was not the sole aim of their existence. Take, for example, 
 the devil of the ' Coventry Mysteries,' the most serious of 
 our three sets. How does he express himself when cast by 
 God out of heaven ? — 
 
 " At thy bidding thy will I werk, 
 And pass fro joy to paine smert, 
 
8o CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 Now I am a devil full derk 
 
 That was an angel bright. 
 Now to hell the way I take, 
 
 In endless pain there to be pight. 
 For fear of fire a 
 
 In hell dungeon my den is dight." 
 
 A single utterance like this, accompanied doubtless by the 
 sound of a horn, as the blowing of the nose is still rendered 
 in pantomimes, would effectually destroy the devil's in- 
 fluence for terror, at least in that representation, not to say 
 that it would unsettle any serious impression from what 
 preceded. I have noticed two other places in the ' Coventry 
 Mysteries ' where the great enemy of mankind expresses his 
 emotion in the same way. So far from helping to make 
 demons more terrible, the Mysteries embodied the hideous 
 ideals of the popular imagination, and raised temporary 
 laughter by making them ridiculous — treated them, for the 
 time being, as so much ludicrous capital. If superstitious 
 fears had been absolutely bodiless before then — if the 
 Mysteries had been the means of clothing the devil in popu- 
 lar imagination with claws, hoofs, horns, and tail — it might 
 have been argued that they did add to the dreadful attri- 
 butes of his fallen majesty. And even as it is, it may 
 reasonably be maintained that the laughter was temporary, 
 and that the actual representation of the hideous being had 
 a permanent effect of terror. I am inclined, however, to 
 believe that the Mysteries left the fear of the devil where 
 they found it, and simply provided the vulgar with a good 
 day's sport. 
 
 4. Metrical Romances. 
 
 The mythopceic faculty or unstudied imagination of the 
 Middle Ages was occupied in the main with two kinds of 
 matter : the heroism of religion and the heroism of chivalry, 
 miraculous saints and no less miraculous knights. The 
 legends of the saints and the romances of the knights grew 
 out of the same unchastened desire of the natural man after 
 superhuman ideals ; the desire to escape from the chilling 
 
METRICAL ROMANCES. 8 1 
 
 limitations to perfection of character and nobility of achieve- 
 ment in actual life. Such, in the broadest view, was the 
 origin of Middle Age romances, religious as well as secular; 
 they were produced by the generating force that created 
 Romulus, Numa, and Egeria, Achilles, Ulysses, and Circe, — 
 a passion for the marvellous that still survives and operates, 
 and promises to bid defiance for many coming generations 
 to all appliances for the discovery and diffusion of verified 
 knowledge. Doubtless in all ages many less generous 
 motives have conspired to the invention and spread of fic- 
 tions ; patron saints have been made wonderful in the eyes 
 of devotees, and ancestors have been magnified to move 
 the bounty of descendants. In most cases, too, the passion 
 has taken a patriotic turn. It was inevitable that men 
 should, in creating heroes, show a preference for their own 
 country and kindred. Still, vanity much less than disin- 
 terested love of the marvellous has ever presided over all 
 such creations. 
 
 In the voluminous discussions regarding the origin of 
 medieeval romance — ^whether it was Scaldic, or Arabic, or 
 Classic — too little respect has been shown to the perma- 
 nent sources of romance in the human mind. It has never 
 required any great impulse to excite those sources to pro- 
 ductive activity. The magnificent enthusiasm of religion 
 and chivalry that sent the crusaders to Palestine could not 
 have failed to evoke a frenzy of romantic invention. When 
 the English began to be conscious of a national unity, they 
 made for themselves a fabulous connection with such 
 ancient history as was known to them : derived their 
 government from the Trojans, and their Christianity from 
 Joseph of Arimathea. They provided themselves with a 
 national hero, surrounded him with knights, and engaged 
 him and them in honourable adventures. It is vain to look 
 for a historical basis to the operations of the romantic 
 imagination ; this faculty owns no allegiance to fact. Our 
 business, however, is not with romance in general, but 
 with the very humble romances extant in English in the 
 time of Chaucer, 
 
 r 
 
8? CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 Chaucer has burlesqued the metrical romances of the 
 wandering minstrels in his tale of Sir Thopas. He enume- 
 rates some of the productions that will bear comparison 
 with his parody — 
 
 " Men speaken of remans of price 
 Of Horn Child and of Ypotis, 
 
 Of Bevis and Sir Guy, 
 Of Sir Libeaux and Pleindamour ; 
 But Sir Thopas beareth the flower 
 
 Of real chivalry." 
 
 All these romances, or at least romances on all these 
 heroes, except Pleindamour, are still in existence ; and if 
 they are the same, the parody cannot be said to depart far 
 from the original. They deal with the usual subjects of 
 romance — giants, enchantments, obstructive knights, and 
 invincible champions — and their diction may fairly be de- 
 scribed as unmitigated doggerel. The following two stanzas 
 are from ' Lybeaus Disconus,' Le Beau Desconnu, The Fair 
 Unknown (Ritson's Metrical Romances) : — 
 
 "Anon that maid Helen 
 Was set with knightes ten, 
 
 Before Sir Lambard ; 
 She and the dwarf I mean, 
 Told seven deedes keen. 
 
 That he did thitherward : 
 And how that Sir Lybeaus, 
 Fought with fele shrews. 
 
 And for no death ne spared : 
 Lambard was glad and blithe 
 And thankeden fele sith ^ 
 
 God and St Edward. 
 
 Anon with milde cheer 
 They set to the supper 
 
 With muche glee and game ; 
 Lambard and Lybeaus, in fere,^ 
 Of aventures that there were 
 
 Talked both in same. 
 
 1 Many times. ^ In company. 
 
METRICAL ROMANCES. 83 
 
 The said Lybeaus, Sir Constable, 
 Telleth me withouten fable, 
 
 What is the knightes name, 
 That holdeth so in prison 
 The lady of Synadon 
 
 That is so gentle a dame." 
 
 ■ 
 
 All, or nearly all, English romances were translated from 
 the French. In the case of a few unimportant ones, no 
 French originals have been discovered, and they may there- 
 fore be presumed to have been written in EngHsh to begin 
 with ; but all the romances belonging to the great Arthurian 
 cycle were originally composed in French, though some, if 
 not most of them, by Englishmen for Anglo-Norman readers. 
 
 The Romance of Ywain and Gawain, sons respectively 
 of Urien, King of Gore, and Lot of Orkney, and nephews 
 of Arthur, is ascribed by Ritson to the reign of Richard II. 
 This romance is considerably superior to Horn Child or 
 Lybeaus. The two cousins, and firm friends, are really 
 noble mirrors of knighthood. Their prowess is supreme 
 at Arthur's Court, and they are the very flowers of courtesy 
 and generosity. Ywain (Ewen, or Owen) is the hero of 
 the piece in so far that its object is to relate his adventures. 
 He kills a fair lad)^s husband, marries her, rides away on 
 promise of returning within a twelvemonth, is tempted by his 
 love of tourneying to stay beyond his time, incurs his lady's 
 fierce displeasure, goes mad, is restored to his wits, and, 
 after many perils and successes, is reunited to the object of 
 his faithful affections. The romance abounds in the mar- 
 vels of its class. A knight-errant comes to a well of cold 
 water, with a basin of gold hanging near; he takes the basin 
 and sprinkles some water on an emerald stone; immedi- 
 ately there arises a furious tempest of hail, rain, snow, sleet, 
 thunder, and scorching lightning. When the storm subsides, 
 a flock of birds alight near him, and by-and-by comes a 
 knight, with the sound of many horsemen, spurring on eagerly 
 to do battle to the stranger who has dared so to trouble the 
 realm. Ywain's lady gives him an enchanted ring with va- 
 rious wonderful properties — 
 
84 CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 " I shall tell to you anon 
 
 The virtue that is in the stone : 
 
 It is no prison shall you hold, 
 
 AH if your foes be many fold ; 
 
 With sickness shall ye not be ta'en, 
 
 Ne of your blood shall ye lose nane." 
 One of the most striking wonders in the romance is the 
 attachment of a lion to the person of Ywain. The knight 
 had saved his life in an encounter with a dragon, and from 
 that moment the royal beast becomes his faithful attendant 
 and body-guard, and renders him very valuable service in 
 his encounters. 
 
 Though Ywain is the hero of the romance, his cousin 
 Gawain is a still nobler and more illustrious figure. Ywain, 
 indeed, when they are unawares matched against each 
 other, fights with him through a whole long day till dark- 
 ness sets in, without losing ground ; but Gawain is repre- 
 sented as the most famous of Arthur's knights, to whom the 
 distressed naturally apply for succour. Gawain's fortune 
 has been very hard in the growth and variation of Arthu- 
 rian romance. Other heroes of later invention have been 
 exalted at his expense. In the Romance of Merlin,^ which 
 is the chief authority for the early history of Arthur, Gawain 
 is the noblest ideal of knighthood. Again and again the 
 romance dwells upon his irresistible strength and generous 
 disposition. King Bors says, that if he live he will be the 
 most illustrious knight that ever was. He is " a wise knight, 
 and without pride, and the most courteous that was in the 
 Bloy Breteyne, and the best taught in all things, and ever 
 true to God and to his lord." And, again, he is said to be 
 "one of the best knights and wisest of the world, and 
 thereto the least mis-speaker and none avaunter, and the 
 best taught of all things that longeth to worship or curtesy." 
 But this reputation was too bright in the eyes of other roman- 
 cers with heroes of their own to celebrate ; and so Gawain 
 was depreciated, that more unrivalled lustre might accrue to 
 Lancelot, Pelleas, Lamorak, or Tristan. All these knights 
 
 1 An English fifteenth-century version of this romance is published by the 
 Early English Text Society. 
 
JOHN BARBOUR. 8S 
 
 were brought into conflict with him, and came off victorious. 
 Worse than that, the glory of his courtesy was tarnished by 
 a base explanation. It was fabled that he was sworn to 
 courteous behaviour as a punishment for a most unknightly 
 action done in his youth. And last of all came Mr Tenny- 
 son, and pursued the unfortunate knight with bitter hatred 
 and spiteful detraction, because he was the half-brother (Mr 
 Tennyson would say the full brother) of Mordred ; and it 
 suited the laureate's purpose to argue that treachery, masked 
 by smiling manners, ran in the blood.^ 
 
 II. — Scottish Contemporaries. 
 
 I. John Barbour {d. 1396). 
 
 The impulse of mediaeval poetry had no very consider- 
 able effect on Scotland till the end of the fifteenth century. 
 Not till then was there anything that could be called a 
 flowering period of Scottish song. In the fourteenth cen- 
 tury, however, there was a certain emulous response to the 
 Continental singers : a response, too, that was inspired by 
 no small ambition. The Scottish poets of the fourteenth 
 century were not content to echo with or without variations 
 the favourite romances of the west of Europe : they struck 
 a bolder, a more original, a more closely patriotic note. 
 Events had recently happened that fascinated them more 
 than the most dazzling achievements of the European mo- 
 dels of knighthood, and filled them with pride as well as 
 reverence. Alexander, Arthur, Charlemagne, were faint 
 personages to them in comparison with their own national 
 heroes. Their country was fresh from a successful struggle 
 to maintain her independence against English aggression ; 
 and in the exultation of their triumphant resistance, they 
 had no interest in weaving romantic webs of splendid colours 
 round ideal champions of other causes. Even the great 
 cause of Christian against Saracen, in which the religious 
 
 1 National jealousy of the Scots may have had something to do with the 
 degeneration of Gawain in the romances. The romance of Ywain and 
 Gawain is in the Northern dialect. 
 
86 CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 imagination of the Middle Ages had exhibited Alexander, 
 as well as Arthur and Charlemagne, stirred them with a 
 vaguer and feebler enthusiasm than memories of their own 
 recent deliverance from impending slavery. And in the 
 leaders of their war of independence, they were proud to 
 be able to show to the world 'fresh mirrors of chivalry. 
 They were not ashamed to place Douglas side by side with 
 Hector of Troy, and to claim for Wallace and Bruce end- 
 less honour among the foremost heroes of romance. 
 
 John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, who undertook 
 to relate the exploits of the Bruce in four-accent couplets, 
 was a scholar, an ardent patriot, and a warm admirer of 
 chivalry. Zeal for study, both of books and of men, the en- 
 thusiasm of knowledge, may be said to be characteristic of 
 the Scotch ; and Barbour was in this respect a Scot of the 
 Scots. In 1357, when he had already attained the dignity 
 of archdeacon, he applied to his king, David II., to procure 
 him a passport from Edward III., and went south with three 
 scholars under his charge to study at Oxford. Again, in 
 1364, he obtained permission to " study at Oxford or else- 
 where as he might think proper.'' In 1365, and again in 
 1368, he passed through England towards France to prose- 
 cute his studies in Paris. The terms of the safe-conducts 
 granted to him show that he travelled not merely as the 
 superintendent of the studies of youthful wards, but for the 
 increase of his own knowledge.^ 
 
 While thus devoted to the life contemplative, the life 
 active had a strong hold of his imagination. " The heart 
 of the soldier beat under the frock of the churchman." 
 The spirit of chivalry found a fit dwelling-place in the 
 grave Scotch student : nowhere did its attributes of courage, 
 gentleness, generosity, fidelity, and high honour meet with 
 a warmer reception, and nowhere was everything antago- 
 nistic to it excommunicated with heartier indignation. Be- 
 lievers in race will not fail to observe that Barbour was born 
 in the north-east of Scotland, and that in the population of 
 this district there was a large admixture of settlers from the 
 
 1 See Mr Innes's preface to the Spalding Club edition. 
 
JOHN BARBOUR. 87 
 
 opposite coasts of Norway and Denmark — men of the same 
 race as the Norman founders of chivalry — so that the patri- 
 otic, warlike-minded churchman may have inherited from 
 roving and reaving ancestors his passion for celebrating 
 heroic achievements. At all events, race or no race, the 
 passion was strong within him. He enters the battle with 
 his hero, and lays about him with sturdy enthusiasm. The 
 shock of Brace's spear is irresistible ; and when his spear is 
 shivered and his good sword drawn, there is death in every 
 sweep of his arm : heads are smitten off, helmets cleft, 
 shoulder-plated arms shorn away like corn before the scythe. 
 He does not hesitate to oppose the Bruce single-handed to 
 two hundred men, and bring him off victorious after much 
 slaughter; comparing this incomparable achievement with 
 the defeat of fifty men by the hardy son of Tydeus. With 
 what energy he recounts the discomfiture of the three gi- 
 gantic Macindrossans, who attempted to take Robert alive ! 
 How thoroughly he enjoys the feat of the king in bringing 
 the giant who has leapt on his horse behind him round from 
 the crupper within reach of his deadly sword ! Our arch- 
 deacon had a most admiring eye for a strong arm. When 
 the patriots, in the beginning of the enterprise, are rowing 
 towards Cantyre as a safe winter retreat, he imagines crowds 
 of spectators on the shore looking at them as they rise on 
 the rowing-benches, and admiring the stalwart hands that 
 were more familiar with the spear than with the oar. Sir 
 Walter Scott must have envied his description of the 
 doughty Douglas — 
 
 " But he was not so fair that we, 
 Should speak greatly of his beauty. 
 In visage was he somedeal grey, 
 And had black hair as I heard say ; 
 But of limbes he was well made, 
 With bones great and shoulders braid ; ^ 
 
 When he was blithe he was lovely, 
 And meek and sweet in company ; 
 
 1 Broad. 
 
88 CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES, 
 
 But who in battle might him see, 
 All other countenance had he." • 
 
 This trim carpet-knight and grim champion had the 
 noblest attribute of strength — generosity. When Bruce 
 sent him to help outnumbered Randolph at Bannockbum, 
 he halted when he saw the enemy begin to give way, that 
 he might not rob his friend of any part of the honour of 
 success. 
 
 But courage was not the only chivalrous virtue that the 
 Scottish poet of chivalry held in admiration. There are 
 other elements in his portrait of Douglas — 
 
 " He was in all his deedes leal,' 
 For him dedeigned not to deal 
 With treachery ne with falset. 
 His heart on high honour was set, 
 And him contained in such manner 
 That all him loved that were him near." 
 
 This disdain of falsehood Barbour was prepared to practise 
 as well as to admire. He held it to be his duty to give 
 impartial praise to brave achievements — 
 
 " But whether so he be friend or foe 
 That winnes prize of chivalry, 
 Men should speak thereof lealely.'' 
 
 And he scrupulously fulfilled the obligation in his own case. 
 We may be certain that he added only the attractions of 
 rhyme to the traditional glory of his hero ; and he does not 
 fail to recognise and honour a valiant enemy. He duly 
 records and extols the magnanimity of Sir Giles de Argen- 
 tine in raising his battle-cry and rushing to certain death 
 rather than leave the field of Bannockbum alive. Nor is 
 Barbour deficient in apprehending the chivalrous respect 
 for women. He particularly commends the sturdy Douglas 
 for his assiduity in hunting and fishing for the ladies of the 
 party when their fortunes were at the lowest. And Bruce 
 himself is almost Quixotic in his devotion to the tender sex. 
 On a critical occasion he delays the march of his army 
 
 1 Faithful— &7«/, 
 
JOHN BARBOUR. 89 
 
 rather than imperil the safety of a poor laundress in his 
 train. No act on record of any knight of romance can 
 exceed that : it is as incomparable a proof of his tender- 
 ness as the combat with two hundred is of his courage and 
 strength. 
 
 The enthusiastic Pinkerton preferred Barbour, " taking 
 the total merits of the work together, ... to the melancholy 
 sublimity of Dante, and the amorous quaintness of Petrarca;" 
 and every Scotchman whose patriotism would be above sus- 
 picion must wish that he could agree with Pinkerton. There 
 is, indeed, a certain epic swing and momentum about the 
 romance of the Bruce ; its vigorous opening picture of the 
 prostration of Scotland under the English, and its passion- 
 ate aspiration after freedom, place a powerful arrest on the 
 wandering attention, and summon us with no small cogency 
 to hear the story of enfranchisement through its ups and 
 downs of hope and danger to the triumphant end. If he 
 had stopped with the battle of Bannockburn, Barbour's 
 Bruce might have been called a historical epic, bearing to 
 the epic proper the same relation that the chronicle history 
 bears to the regular drama. But by carrying his story on 
 to the death of Bruce, he conforms it to the laws of the 
 metrical romance, which, doubtless, were the laws that he 
 set himself to observe, and very likely the only laws known 
 to him. The manners and sentiments, as we have seen, 
 are those of chivalry, Barbour was a distinct observer, and 
 he had the consistent, pure, defined sentiments of a clear- 
 headed man, careful always to. establish a harmony between 
 the sentiment and the object. There is not much embel- 
 lishment in his style. He presents us with but few studies 
 of natural scenery, and those bare and meagre ; and he 
 draws no extended portraits of the beautiful women that 
 moved among and commanded the homage of his brave 
 men. His diction rises considerably above the rude dog- 
 gerel of rhyming chronicles ; he is superior to the necessities 
 of make-rhymes. Undoubtedly, however, the main charm 
 of Barbour's Bruce lies in the cordial energy of its battles 
 and rencounters. 
 
go CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 2. Henry the Minstrel, "Blind Harry," the champion of 
 the fame of William Wallace, was bom at least half a century 
 later than Barbour. One does not like to say severe things 
 about a poor old wandering minstrel. Like many other 
 bygones that were interesting to bygones, he and his heroic 
 verse, once an acceptable arrival at many a lively feast and 
 proud residence, would be considered a terrible visitation 
 in modern society. Blind Harry has not the elements of 
 perennial interest. Only strong patriotism could have com- 
 posed, and only strong patriotism could have listened to, 
 his strains. Till very recently, however, he was popular 
 among the Scottish peasantry, circulating no longer in oral 
 recitation,! but in printed copies, often beardless and 
 well-thumbed. Of late he has been superseded by Miss 
 Porter's ' Scottish Chiefs.' 
 
 III. — English Successors. 
 
 It does no great violence to fact to treat all the English 
 poets of the fifteenth century as the disciples of Chaucer. 
 Almost everything of value in the poetry of that century — 
 and not much has been preserved, if there was much to 
 preserve^was due to the impulse given by Chaucer. A 
 great deal of versification went on out of the reach of that 
 impulse, in the shape of chronicles, lives of saints, transla- 
 tions from the French, and other miscellaneous lines. Prose 
 romances also were translated. But the two or three poets 
 that rise above the herd had^ or professed to have, an ac- 
 quaintance with Chaucer, and acknowledged allegiance to 
 him, though all of them were far from catching any tincture 
 of the charm of his verse. It is, indeed, significant of the 
 general dulness of ear, as well as poverty of execution, that 
 Skelton places Gower and Lydgate on the same level with 
 the master from whose greatness to their littleness is such a 
 fathomless sheer descent. 
 
 1 I remember, however, a sturdy beggar of the name of Wallace, who was 
 much revered by schoolboys as a lineal descendant from the national hero, 
 and who used to recite from ' ' Blind Harry " violent incidents, such as the 
 breaking of the churl's back, withappropriate gesticulation. 
 
THOMAS OCCLEVE, ^I 
 
 I. Thomas Occleve. (1370-1430?) 
 
 Of the immediate successors of Chaucer, the most cele- 
 brated is Lydgate ; but Occleve, or Hoccleve, comes first in 
 order of time. It is to -Occleve that we owe our standard 
 portrait of Chaucer. He was a most ardent and admiring 
 disciple of the great poet, and more than once lamented him 
 in such strains as these, extolling his knowledge in rhetoric, 
 philosophy, and poetry, and inveighing against the indis- 
 criminate ravages of death — 
 
 " O master dear and father reverent, 
 My master Chaucer, flower of eloquence, 
 Mirror of fructuous intendement ! 
 O universal father in science, 
 Alas, that thou thine excellent prudence 
 In thy bed mortal mightest not bequeathe ! 
 What ailed Death, alas ! why would he slee thee ? 
 
 O Death, thou didest not harm singular 
 
 In slaughter of him, but all this land it smarteth ! 
 
 But, natheless, yet hast thou no power 
 
 His name to slay : his high virtue astarteth 
 
 Unslain from thee, which aye us lifely hearteth 
 
 With bookes of his ornate inditing, 
 
 That is to all this land enlumining." 
 
 And again — 
 
 " She might have tarried her vengeance a while 
 Till that some man had equal to thee be. 
 Nay, let be that ! she knew well that this isle 
 May never man bring forthe like to thee. 
 And her office needes do mote she ; 
 
 God bade her do so, I trust for the best. 
 
 O master, master, God thy soule rest ! " 
 
 In Thynne's edition of Chaucer, in 1532, there was 
 printed, among other miscellaneous pieces, a "Letter of 
 Cupid," written in 1402. No other production ascribed to 
 Occleve appeared in print for more than two hundred years ; 
 and after Warton characterised him as a feeble poet of cold 
 genius, the very titles of whose poems were chiUing to the 
 
92 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 searchers after invention and fancy, the unfortunate poet 
 ran a considerable risk of extinction. In 1796, however, 
 George Mason printed various poems from an MS. that 
 Warton had not seen, and pleaded for a more favourable 
 verdict. 
 
 Occleve is certainly an interesting character, if not an 
 interesting poet. " Cold " was a singularly inappropriate 
 word to apply to him. He seems to have been a fellow 
 of infinite warmth and geniality. He is supposed to have 
 been bom in 1370, and he emerges at the Court of Richard 
 II. in 1387. The luxurious extravagance of that Court 
 found in him a congenial spirit. He could never pass 
 the sign of Bacchus, with its invitation to thirsty passengers 
 to moisten their clay, so long, at least, as he had anything 
 in his purse ; and he spent much money in the temples of 
 a goddess of still more questionable character. He was a 
 favourite among cooks and taverners, from the circumstance 
 that he always paid them what they asked. Only two men 
 of his acquaintance could equal him in drinking at night 
 and lying in bed in the morning. The only thing that pre- 
 served his life from the brawls incident to such habits was 
 an invincible cowardice : he never traduced men except in 
 a whisper. All this we know from his own humorous con- 
 fessions. He tells us also that his excesses exhausted his 
 money, although he held a valuable office, and impaired 
 his health, though nature had given him a strong consti- 
 tution. He would seem to have received a pension of 
 twenty marks a-year from Henry IV., and various begging 
 poetical addresses are extant to show that he suffered from 
 a chronic scarcity of coin. In the introduction to his poem 
 De Regimine Principum (" On the Government of Princes," 
 written in 141 1 or 1412), he relates his distressed circum- 
 stances, and how an old man had advised him to write a 
 work and dedicate it to Prince Henry, who might perhaps 
 be induced thereby at least to see that his annuity was 
 regularly paid. There would seem to have been not a 
 little of Falstaff in his character. He addressed a poem 
 to Sir John Oldcastle, full of grave disputation, which re- 
 
THOMAS OCCLEVE. 93 
 
 ceives a somewhat mock-serious air from his advice to the 
 good knight to leave oflf studying Holy Writ, and read 
 ' Lancelot of the Lake,' or ' Vegetius,' or ' The Siege of 
 Troy,' confining his Bible reading, if he must read t]je 
 Bible, to Judges, Kings, Joshua, Judith, the Chronicles, 
 and the Maccabees, all of which are most authentic and 
 pertinent to chivalry. Although he had been appointed a 
 writer to the Privy Seal, probably in 1387,1 his hopes were 
 long set on obtaining a benefice in the Church, but at last 
 he married in despair. In the beginning of the reign of 
 Henry VI., he wrote an appeal for pecuniary help to Car- 
 penter, afterwards Bishop of Worcester; and unless his 
 conduct was more respectable in his later years, when 
 seventy winters had passed over his head, this petition 
 must be taken as being very much of a piece with Falstaff's 
 application for a loan to the Lord Chief-Justice. His last 
 patron seems to have been the Duke of York ; and he lived 
 to the good old age of eighty, having contrived probably to 
 pass through life very easily, from his success in conciliating 
 patronage, and in borrowing without repaying. 
 
 The " Letter of Cupid " is full of sly humour and tender 
 feeling. It is addressed by Cupid to all his subjects, to warn 
 them of the grievous complaints that have been made to 
 him by ladies of honour and reverence concerning the 
 deceitful outrages and offences done them by men. They 
 complain particularly of the little island of Albion, — 
 
 " Passing all landes, on the little isle 
 That cleped is Albion they must complain. 
 They say that there is crop and root of guile 
 
 ^ This date should probably be 1387, the date also of Ocoleve's coming to 
 Court. In his "Address to Health," Occleve speaks of twenty years of mis- 
 spent life ; in his De Regimine Principum, he speaks of having been a 
 writer to the Privy Seal for "twenty year and four come Easter." The 
 date of the one poem is supposed to be 1406, and of the other 141 2 ; but the 
 circumstances make 1407 and 1411 equally probable ; and if we accept these 
 dates with an interval of four years between the two compositions, it be- 
 comes likely that Oocleve's memory went back to the same date as the be- 
 ginning of his dissipation and his official appointment. The date of the 
 appointment is usually given as 1392, from a curious mistake of ' ' twenty 
 years and four " for twenty. 
 
94 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 So can the men dissimulen and feign, 
 With standing droppes in their eyen twain 
 When that their heartes feeleth no distress 
 To blinden women with their doubleness. 
 
 Their wordes spoken be so sighingly 
 With so piteous a cheer and countenance, 
 That every wight that meaneth truely 
 Deemeth they in heart haven such grievance. 
 They say so importable is their penance 
 That but their lady lust to shew them grace 
 They right anon must sterven in the place. 
 
 Ah, lady mine, they say, I you ensure. 
 As doth me grace, and I shall ever be. 
 While that my life may lasten and endure, 
 To you as humble and low in each degree 
 As possible is, and keep all things in secre. 
 Right as yourselven listeth that I do. 
 And else mine hearte mote brast in two.'' 
 
 This is what the wicked men do ; and Cupid deeply com- 
 passionates the injured women — 
 
 " O faithful woman, full of innocence, 
 Thou art deceived by false apparence." 
 
 He proceeds to show how men overcome silly, simple, inno- 
 cent women, and then go and boast of their success ; he 
 asks them, Is this an honourable vaunt? To be sure, men 
 say that women are unfaithful — but what is this but envy 
 and pique at failure to achieve their infamous designs? 
 Granted that here and there may be found a woman un- 
 faithful : did not some of the angels fall, and was not one 
 of the apostles a traitor ? Cupid then administers a severe 
 rebuke to men that slander women, bidding them think of 
 their own mothers — 
 
 " Oh, every man ought have an heart tender 
 To a woman and deem her honourable. 
 Whether his shape be thick or elles slender. 
 Or he be good or bad. It is no fable. 
 Every wight wote that wit hath reasonable. 
 
THOMAS OCCLEVE. 95 
 
 That of a woman he descended is ; 
 Then is it shame of her to speak amiss. 
 
 A wicked tree good fruit may none forth bring, 
 For such the fruit is aye as is the tree ; 
 Take heed of whom thou took thy beginning. 
 Let thy mother be mirror unto thee, 
 Honour her, if thou wolte honoured be. 
 Despiseth her then not in no manner, 
 Lest that thereby thy wickedness appear." 
 
 It is a fashion with poets whenever they mention women 
 to rail at them, and rake up the stories of Adam, David, 
 Samson, and Solomon ; this, says Cupid, is a tyranny that 
 he will not permit, and is exercised chiefly by worn-out old 
 scoundrels who try to discredit what they can no longer 
 enjoy. He threatens to punish them by making them 
 maugre their will fall in love with " the foulest slut in all the 
 town," and extol her as a duchess or a queen. He refers to 
 the ' Romance of the Rose ' as a manual of the arts of love, 
 and says it is no wonder though women prove unfaithful 
 when men assail them with such craft. He draws unfavour- 
 able contrasts between Jason and Medea, .^Eneas and Dido. 
 He even defends Eve : it was her trusting confiding nature 
 that induced her to believe the serpent; no thought of guile 
 entered her mind; only a man, himself accustomed to 
 deceit, would have suspected any harm. Finally, he bids 
 men honour women for the sake of the Virgin Mary, who 
 next to God is man's best friend, at whose girdle hangs the 
 key of mercy; and commends the fidelity of women to 
 Christ when men forsook Him, and the heroism of female 
 martyrs. 
 
 The De Regimine Principum, translated from .(Egidius, 
 with an original introduction in the form of a dialogue be- 
 tween the author and an old man, is a didactic poem on the 
 duties of the king, involving the discussion of domestic and 
 foreign relations. There are some faint traces of Occleve's 
 jocularity in the opening dialogue. He is very rich in one 
 thing, and that is indigence. Some people complain of 
 Fortune as my Lady Changeable : she is too much my Lady 
 
96 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 Steadfast and Stable with him, for she keeps him constantly 
 in poverty. These, however, are rare touches of light in the 
 sombre didactic, which is simply rhymed politics, of interest 
 only to the political historian. Occleve belongs to the 
 numerous class of abuse-mongers : an easy trade, and 
 nothing but a mechanical trade to a man of his tempera- 
 ment. He asks where pity is gone, that so many gentlemen 
 who spent their substance in the wars with France now 
 go about in poverty ; inveighs against the degeneracy of 
 knights, who fight not for honour as in the old time, but for 
 gain ; attacks the clergy for their desire of pluralities, and 
 their stingy neglect of church roof and altar ; laments the 
 necessity of propitiating men of power in the courts of law ; 
 condemns infantine betrothals, the abundance of paramours, 
 and the lack of conjugal fidelity. His advice to the king, 
 Henry V., Falstafif's Hal, is all very sound, and all very 
 commonplace. Perhaps the most striking of his precepts 
 is his deprecation of the wars between France and England. 
 Christian princes should not make war on each other ; they 
 should combine against the infidel. Henry should make 
 peace by marriage. All this might be very creditable to 
 honest Thomas's humanity, were it not to be suspected 
 that he had got wind of this basis of peace-making as a 
 thing in contemplation. At least, however, let him have 
 the credit of concurring ; and let us hope that Henry took 
 in good part another hint of a more personal nature — that 
 he should never grant pensions unless he meant to pay 
 them. 
 
 2. John Lydgate. (1380-1450?) 
 
 One expects to find in Lydgate, who belonged to the 
 Church, a supreme exponent of saintly ideals. But though 
 the Monk of Bury wrote several lives of saints, he was not 
 so much a religious enthusiast as a professional poet, with 
 facile pen at the command of many patrons for many dif- 
 ferent purposes. 
 
 Lydgate is the most celebrated of the successors of 
 Chaucer, and for more than a century after his death almost 
 
JOHN LYDGATE. 97 
 
 divided the honours of poetry with his great master. Later 
 posterity, however, has not confirmed this reputation; and it 
 is but justice to him to say that he himself made no preten- 
 sion to the high rank accorded him by his own and several 
 following generations. If the " Flower of Courtesy " is his, 
 the ending is a modest and fair estimate of his powers ; and 
 if it should turn out not to be his, other passages no less 
 modest may be produced from his undoubted compositions. 
 It runs thus — 
 
 " Ever as I can surprisen in mine heart, 
 Alway with fear, betwixen dread and shame, 
 Lest out of lose ' any word should astart 
 In this metre, to make it seemen lame. 
 Chaucer is dead, which that had such a name 
 Of fair making, that was withouten ween ^ 
 Fairest in our tongue as the laurer green. 
 
 We may assayen for to counterfeit 
 
 His gaye style, but it nill not ybe ; 
 
 The well is dry, with the liquor so sweet 
 
 Both of Clio and of Calliope ; 
 
 And first of all I will excusen me 
 
 To her that is the ground of goodlihed, 
 And thus I say unto her womanhead." 
 
 It would be ungenerous to take the poet at his own modest 
 estimate, framed in accordance with the poetical etiquette 
 of his time, were it not that still more unfavourable estimates 
 have been given by some modern critics. Percy, Ritson, 
 and Pinkerton treat him with contempt : Ritson, in par- 
 ticular, scoffing at " these stupid and fatiguing productions, 
 and their still more stupid and disgusting author." Even 
 after he had been vindicated by Warton, the editor of ' A 
 Chronicle of London ' quoted some of his poems with the 
 remark, " It seems no subject escaped that eternal scribbler's 
 attention." Now, although his verses, as they have come 
 down to us, are often intolerably lame, let us, out of respect 
 for the judgment of our ancestors, see what good can be 
 said of the sum total of his literary exertions. Seeing that 
 
 1 Order. ^ Doubt. 
 
98 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 Warton is his most indulgent critic/ it may be well to let 
 Warton speak for him as much as possible, leaving severe 
 and exacting criticism to make what deductions it thinks 
 proper. 
 
 If Lydgate is deficient in quality, he makes up in quantity. 
 He was a most indefatigable and versatile poet. In 1598, 
 Speght enumerated 1x4 different pieces, original and trans- 
 lated, ascribed to Lydgate; and Ritson, in 1782, was able to 
 bring the number up to 251. Speght's catalogue embraces 
 Lydgate's three principal works — The " Siege of Thebes ; " 
 " Bochas upon the Fall of Princes : at the Commandment 
 of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester ; " " The History, Siege, 
 and Destruction of Troy : at Commandment of K. Henry 
 the Fifth, 141 2," — followed by a strangely heterogeneous 
 assortment of psalms, hymns, calendars, pedigrees, lives of 
 saints, moral allegories, prayers, astrological and philoso- 
 phical memoranda, popular ballads, disguisings, mummings, 
 and direct moral exhortations. The best known of his 
 minor poems are " The Dance of Death " and the " London 
 Lackpenny." " No poet seems to have possessed a greater 
 versatility of talents. He moves with equal ease in every 
 mode of composition. His hymns and his ballads have 
 the same degree of merit ; and whether his subject be the 
 life of a hermit or a hero, of Saint Austin or Guy Earl of 
 Warwick, ludicrous or legendary, religious or romantic, a 
 history or an allegory, he writes with facility. His transi- 
 tions were rapid, from works of the most serious and labo- 
 rious kind, to sallies of levity and pieces of popular enter- 
 tainment. His muse was of universal access ; and he was 
 not only the poet of his monastery, but of the world in 
 general. If a disguising was intended by the company of 
 goldsmiths, a mask before his majesty at Eltham, a May- 
 game for the sheriff and aldermen of London, a mumming 
 before the lord mayor, a procession of pageants from the 
 creation for the festival of Corpus Christi, or a carol for the 
 coronation, Lydgate was consulted, and gave the poetry." 
 
 1 See also an eloquent tribute to the old poet in Professor Morley's Eng- 
 lish Writers, ii. 424. 
 
JOHN LYDGATE. 99 
 
 We may, then, consider Lydgate as a facile and accom- 
 plished versifier, with a flexible wealth of second-hand 
 poetical beauties : if his own imagination was superseded 
 by wide knowledge and fluency, he at least was able to put 
 the imaginations of others under judicious exactions. He 
 cultivated poetry as the Greek rhetoricians are said to have 
 cultivated rhetoric. He came after a long line of Middle- 
 Age poets who had discovered and refined all the nuggets 
 of their peculiar mine. The Italian and the French poets 
 had exhausted the commonplaces, and Chaucer had carried 
 away all the best of the new vein of English life and man- 
 ners. A very original genius might have been powerful 
 enough to open a new mine, though it may be doubted 
 whether the time was then ripe for.it ; but Lydgate's genius 
 was pliant and obsequious, and he contented himself with 
 selecting and fusing into new combinations the refined gold 
 of his predecessors. " After a short education at Oxford, 
 he travelled into France and Italy, and returned a complete 
 master of the language and the literature of both countries. 
 He chiefly studied the Italian and French poets, particu- 
 larly Dante, Boccaccio, and Alain Chartier ; and became 
 so distinguished a proficient in polite learning, that he 
 opened a school in his monastery for teaching the sons 
 of the nobility the arts of versification and the elegancies 
 of composition." 
 
 The " Flower of Courtesy," from which we have already 
 quoted, whether Lydgate's or not, is a fair illustration of 
 his manner as a hack versifier. It is written in Troilus 
 verse — Lydgate's favourite metre, which he used with 
 wooden indifference for all sorts of subjects — and is a 
 eulogy of the wondrous beauty and many virtues of a lady, 
 an expert recombination of the chief commonplaces of 
 enamoured praise. She is as the sun among the stars, the 
 sovereign ruby among rich stones, the sweet rose among 
 fresh flowers ; she is in all truth and soberness (sbothfast- 
 ness) the fairest and the best of her sex, a pattern of stead- 
 fastness, a mirror of seemliness ; she is " of port benign and 
 wonder glad of cheer," discreet and wise, with all her desires 
 
lOO CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 governed by wit and high prudence ; her busy charge is 
 virtue ; she is the consolation of the sick and the enemy of 
 slander ; there is no changing nor doubleness in her. Her 
 poet is rude ; he has not the skill to describe her praises ; 
 he knows no rhetoric. She is good as Polyxena, fair as 
 Helen, steadfast as Dorigen, constant and faithful as Cleo- 
 patra; citron (bright of hue) as the white Antigone of Troy; 
 meek as Hester, prudent as Judith, kind as Alcestis, 
 patient as Griselda, discreet as Ariadne, honest as Lucrece, 
 faithful as Penelope, fair as Phyllis, innocent as Hypsipyle, 
 seemly as Canace, &c., &c. 
 
 One of his mechanical arts is rather curious. In his 
 narratives he seems to intersperse descriptive and moral- 
 ising passages at short intervals for the deliberate pur- 
 pose of agreeably breaking the march of events. It is 
 not probable that the intervals are studiously regular ; but 
 it does seem as if, after a considerable reach of narrative, 
 he took counsel with himself and said — " It is time now 
 that we had a break; I must seize the first opportunity." 
 AVhat begets this suspicion is the fact that he occasionally 
 seems to make such opportunities, when they do not occur 
 naturally. 
 
 His abundant command of poetical language and imagery 
 betrays him into diffuseness and pleonastic accumulation. 
 This is the vice of his position as the heir of many genera- 
 tions of creative poets. Inheriting vast poetical wealth, 
 he spends it prodigally ; he does not refine his rich inheri- 
 tance with tasteful activity, but enjoys the easy luxurious 
 pleasure of telling out and heaping up his glittering hoards. 
 "We spoke of his fusing into new combinations, but very 
 often he simply accumulates. This appears particularly in 
 official pieces rapidly made to order. Take for example 
 his description of the seven attendants in the pageant of 
 Nature, Grace, and Fortune, set forth in a poem upon the 
 reception of Henry VI. in London after his coronation as 
 King of France, 1429^ — 
 
 1 Attributed to him in Mr Halliwell's edition of his Minor Poems for the 
 Percy Society. Quoted also as his in ' A Chronicle of London. ' 
 
JOHN LYDGATE. loi 
 
 " On the right hand of these Emperesses, 
 Stood seven maidenes very celestial ; 
 Like Phcebus' beames shone their golden tresses, 
 Upon their heads each having a crownal, 
 Of port and cheere seeming immortal : 
 In sight transcending all earthly creatures, 
 So angelic they vi'eren of their figures. 
 
 All clad in white, in token of cleanness, 
 Like pure virgines as in their ententes, 
 Showing outward an heavenly fresh brightness ; 
 Streamed with sunnes weren all their garmentes, 
 Afore provided for pure innocentes : 
 Most columbine of cheer and of looking. 
 Meekly rose up at the coming of the king." 
 
 This is doggerel five-piled, though the elements thus 
 mechanically piled up were originally exquisite. It is, how- 
 ever, an extreme example, and perhaps when Lydgate falls 
 to be edited, it may be shown that this rude stuff is un- 
 worthy of him. Mr Wright ascribes to him an address to 
 the boy-king on the same occasion, very little superior, it 
 must be confessed, in workmanship. 
 
 What chiefly recommended him to his contemporaries 
 was, we may conjecture, his narrative vigour; or, generally, 
 his qualifications for writing a serious epic. Chaucer being 
 so much the servant of the comic muse, with an eye for the 
 humorous, the pathetic, and the picturesque, in familiar life 
 and manners, the moment was singularly opportune for a 
 poet prepared to deal with the darker side of life and the 
 weightier incidents of national or civic history. Lydgate him- 
 self might not have seen the opening : the versatile monk 
 was probably fully occupied with miscellaneous orders for 
 hymns, prayers, lives of saints, and disguisings — too busy 
 or too contented to look beyond his orders, except in an 
 occasional popular ballad for relaxation. But a tragic epic 
 was suggested to him by a noble patron : it was at the gra- 
 cious command of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester — a royal 
 minister sensible of the insecurity of his own position — that 
 Lydgate undertook to translate 'Boccaccio's Fall of Princes,' 
 a collection of short poems like the Monk's tragedies in the 
 
102 CHAUCER S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 ' Canterbury Tales.' The work was undertaken to satisfy 
 a thirst for tragic recital ; and it fulfilled that mission till 
 superseded by the fruits of the next great poetical season. 
 It was sufficiently comprehensive in its catalogue of unfor- 
 tunate celebrities ; it travelled downwards through all his- 
 tory, sacred and profane, known to the author, from Adam 
 and Eve to John, King of France, and his misfortune at 
 Poictiers in 1356. 
 
 Lydgate had no special call to tragic poetry. He had 
 neither depth nor refinement of poetical feeling. But he had 
 abundance of poetical language, and he was able to express 
 the conceptions of his original in a style not so very unworthy. 
 His "gigantic and monstrous image of Fortune" is quoted 
 by Warton as an example of " Gothic greatness : " — 
 
 " While Bochas pensive stood in his library. 
 With cheer oppressed, pale in his visage, 
 Some deal abashed, alone and solitary ; 
 To him appeared a monstruous image, 
 Parted in twain of colour and courage, 
 Her righte side full of summer flowers. 
 The tother oppressed with winter stormy showers. 
 
 Bochas astonied, full fearful to abraid,' 
 When he beheld the wonderful figure 
 Of Fortune, thus to himself he said : 
 ' What may this mean ? Is this a creature, 
 Or a monster transformed again nature. 
 Whose burning eyen sparkle of their light 
 As do the stars the frosty winter night ?' 
 
 And of her cheere full good heed he took ; 
 Her face seeming cruel and terrible. 
 And by disdaine menacing of look ; 
 Her hair untrussed, hard, sharp, and horrible, 
 ; Froward of shape, loathsome and odible :^ 
 An hundred hands she had of each a part,' 
 In sundry wise hergiftes to depart.* 
 
 Some of her handes lift up men aloft. 
 To high estate of worldly dignity ; 
 Another hande griped full unsoft, 
 
 1 Rise. 2 Hateful. s On each side. i Distribute. 
 
JOHN LYDGATE. IO3 
 
 Which cast another in great adversity, 
 Gave one richesse, another poverty." 
 
 According to Warton, our poet's chief excellence is in 
 florid description. He is very gorgeous in his architecture ; 
 giving to Greeks and Trojans all the magnificence of Gothic 
 masonry. The following passage from Warton illustrates 
 this peculiarity, and, at the same time, the absurdity of his 
 anachronisms : " The poet (following Colonna) supposes 
 that Hector was buried in the principal church of Troy, 
 near the high altar, within a magnificent oratory, erected 
 for that purpose, exactly resembling the Gothic shrines of 
 our cathedrals, yet charged with many romantic decora- 
 tions. 
 
 " ' With crafty arches raised wonder clean, 
 Embowered over all the work to cure, 
 So marvellous was the celature, 
 That all the roof and closure environ, 
 Was of fine gold y-plated up and down, 
 With knottes graven wonder curious 
 Fret full of stones rich and precious.' 
 
 "The structure is supported by angels of gold. The 
 steps are of crystal.) Within, is not only an image of 
 Hector in solid gold ; but his body embalmed, and ex- 
 hibited to view with the resemblance of real life, by means 
 of a precious liquor circulating through every part in golden 
 tubes artificially disposed, and operating on the principles 
 of vegetation. This is from the chemistry of the times. 
 Before the body were four inextinguishable lamps in golden 
 sockets. To complete the work, Priam founds a regiilar 
 chantry of priests, whom he accommodates with mansions 
 near the church, and endows with revenues, to sing in this 
 oratory for the soul of his son Hector." Lydgate's contem- 
 poraries doubtless enjoyed these descriptions, at a time 
 when their senses were being opened to similar splendours 
 in the churches, monasteries, and public buildings of their 
 own towns and villages. Even to modern readers, in spite 
 of their " capricious incredibilities and absurd inconsisten- 
 
104 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 cies," they are not without a certain charm of barbaric mag- 
 nificence. 
 
 The particulars of Lydgate's "florid landscapes" are 
 picked and chosen from hundreds of preceding artists. 
 We have the newe green, and the younge green, the soft 
 blowing of Zephyrus, the sweet dew, the soft showers, the 
 wholesome balm, the lustie hcour, the tapestry of divers 
 blowers in the meadows, the singing of birds, the glancing 
 of leaves in the sunshine. " The colouring of our poet's 
 mornings is often remarkably rich and splendid," says 
 Warton ; and quotes the following : — 
 
 " When that the rowes and the rayes red 
 Eastward to us full early ginnen spread. 
 Even at the twilight in the dawning, 
 When that the lark of custom ginneth sing, 
 For to saluten in her heavenly lay 
 The lusty goddess of the morrow gray, 
 I mean Aurora, which afore the sun 
 Is wont t' enchase the blacks skyes dun, 
 And all the darkness of the dimmy night 
 And fresh Phcebus, with comfort of his light, 
 And with the brightness of his beames sheen. 
 Hath overgilt the huge hilles green, 
 And floweres eke, again the morrow tide. 
 Upon their stalks gan plain their leaves wide.'' 
 
 3. Sir Thomas Malory. 
 
 The date of Caxton's print of Malory's ' Morte d' Arthur ' 
 is 1485, the year of the deposition of Richard III., and the 
 final settlement of the strife between the Houses of York 
 and Lancaster. From the prime of Lydgate's life (1420-30) 
 to this date, is a long interval, during which the English 
 muse contented herself with very humble efforts at poetry. 
 Rhyme and metre were used rather plentifully for chronicles, 
 moral treatises (translated from Latin), chivalrous romances, 
 lives of saints, by such versifiers as John Harding, William 
 of Nassington, Benedict Burgh, Hugh Campden, Thomas 
 Chester ; but none of their performances rise to the humblest 
 grade of mediocrity. 
 
SIR THOMAS MALORY. ICS 
 
 This wide literary desert corresponds with an inglorious 
 political interval, and it is usual to connect the two as effect 
 and cause. Between the death of Henry V. in 1422 and 
 the accession of Henry VII. in 1485, the country was first 
 exhausted and depressed by a lingering and ultimately un- 
 successful war with France, and afterwards distracted by the 
 Wars of the Roses. It is affirmed that literature could not 
 have flourished while the country was so unsettled. Now I 
 am not prepared to deny so time-honoured a proposition in 
 the Philosophy of History, the most difficult and the most 
 confidently practised of all philosophies, but one may be 
 allowed to express some doubts. Sixty-three years is a long 
 period of depression. Conceive it divided into months, 
 and weeks, and days ; and then say whether you consider 
 it possible. Put yourself in the place of a courtier or a 
 monk with a natural taste for reading and writing : would 
 the rumour of an unsuccessful battle keep your books shut 
 and your pen idle for two or three years ? The country was 
 never so lawless that you ran any exceptional risk of being 
 robbed of your books and manuscripts : you were as safe in 
 the reign of Henry VI. or Edward IV. as Chaucer was in 
 the reign of Richard II. But the truth is that there was 
 nothing like a cessation of literary effort during these dis- 
 turbed generations : there was plenty of writing, though 
 none of it approached to excellence. Wars of independ- 
 ence, a struggle for national existence, may absorb the in- 
 terests of a whole people for a brief period ; but I doubt 
 whether any other political disorder would have this effect. 
 There must be some connection between politics and liter- 
 ature, yet there are some startling instances of literature 
 quietly pursuing its own way in the midst of political dis- 
 turbance.i The last three years of " Bloody Mary's " reign 
 were by no means tranquil, yet Tottel's Miscellany with 
 the love-lyrics of Wyatt and Surrey, was pubhshed in 
 1557. Look, again, at the list of books published during 
 the heat of the Great Rebellion ; ^ poems by Waller were 
 
 "^ See Chap. iii. , under Sackville. 
 
 " See Masson's Milton and his Times, iii . 446. 
 
I06 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 published in 1644, and poems by Milton in 1645. I should 
 certainly decline without further discussion to hold the 
 wars with France and the Wars of the Roses answerable for 
 the dearth of English poetry during the fifteenth century. 
 The versifiers of that century were merely versifiers, not 
 because of foreign or civil war, but because they had not 
 the genius to be anything more : and I fear the Philosophy 
 of History must be content with that truism until the con- 
 pections between politics and literature are more thoroughly 
 expiscated. Great literary movements, once they have 
 taken hold of the body of a continent, would not seem to be 
 very much affected by the general political condition. 
 
 Sir Thomas Malory's ' Morte d' Arthur ' is a condensation 
 of an extensive literature — the prose romances on the sub- 
 ject of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Its 
 humble prose is all that we have to show as a national epic. 
 It is compiled and abridged from French prose romances 
 written during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth cen- 
 turies, and contains the most famous exploits fabled of our 
 national heroes. Its chief pretence to unity is that it be- 
 gins with the birth of Arthur and ends with his death. It 
 is, further, consistent in recognising throughout the in- 
 vincible superiority of Lancelot of the Lake. Otherwise, 
 its variety is somewhat bewildering, in spite of the obliging 
 printer's division into twenty-one books. It is a book to 
 choose when restricted to one book, and only one, as the 
 companion of solitude ; there might then be some hope of 
 gaining a clear mastery over its intricacies, a vivid concep- 
 tion of each several adventure of Gawain and his brothers, 
 of Pelinore, Lancelot, Pelleas, Tristram, Palamides Lam- 
 orak, Percival, Galahad, and their interminable friends, foes, 
 and fair ladies. 
 
 Mr Tennyson's " Idylls of the King" have drawn especial 
 attention to Malory in this generation. The old knight is 
 very pleasant reading. He describes warlike encounters 
 with great spirit and graphic homely language; and his 
 simple old English is very telling in the record of such 
 pathetic incidents as the unhappy love of the maid of Asto- 
 
SIR THOMAS MALORY. 1 07 
 
 lat. His work being more or less of an abridgment, he is 
 obliged to sacrifice much of the picturesque detail of his 
 originals, and the story sometimes becomes a catalogue of 
 encounters, with but little variation of the familiar incidents 
 of knights hurled over their horses' tail, swords flashed out, 
 shields lifted high, and helmets struck with stunning blow. 
 Yet the ' Morte d' Arthur' is, as it was designed to be, a most 
 entertaining book. 
 
 Mr Tennyson has taken considerable liberties in his 
 adaptation of the legends or fictions collected by Malory. 
 This he was fully entitled to do : there is nothing sacred in 
 them, and an artist may do with them as he pleases, bearing 
 always the responsibility of treating the subject in such a 
 way as to justify himself. So far from being offended at 
 any modification of the story of the 'Morte d' Arthur,' we 
 should owe no gratitude to a modern poet who should 
 simply versify Malory's prose, whether in substance or in 
 detail. We can have no quarrel with a modern poet for 
 using the ' Morte d' Arthur ' as so much raw material to be 
 worked at discretion. It is vain to look for any profound 
 and consistent unity in such a compilation of the uncon- 
 certed labours of different authors — authors working not 
 only without concert, but even with conflicting aims. And 
 therefore I think that Mr Hutton, in his eloquent defence 
 of the " Idylls of the King " 1 from the strictures of Mr Swin- 
 burne, commits a mistake when he tries to make out that 
 Mr Tennyson's conception of the story is more consonant 
 with the original designs than Mr Swinburne's. Mr Tenny- 
 son is fully entitled to bend the story to his own purposes ; 
 and Mr Hutton is much more happy in his interpreta- 
 tion and justification of the Idylls upon their independent 
 merits. 
 
 What Mr Tennyson has really done, has been to take up 
 one motive to the creation of Arthur, and to regenerate his 
 whole life in rigorous conformity thereto. This generating 
 or regenerating motive is considerably different from any of 
 the several motives that produced the heterogeneous cliar- 
 
 ' Macmillan's Magazine, December 1872. 
 
I08 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 acter of the ' Morte d'Arthur,' but it may be said to be the 
 modern and idyllic equivalent of one of them. So far, the 
 character and achievements of Arthur may be described 
 with Mr Hutton as a "mystic medieval vision." There is 
 a certain " halo of spiritual glory " round Arthur's head. 
 He ministered to other sentiments than religious enthu- 
 siasm : he was a mirror of perfect knighthood, an object 
 of national pride, and the adventures of himself and his 
 knights furnished a luxurious feast to the passion for the 
 marvellous. But religious enthusiasm was undoubtedly one 
 motive, and a great motive, for his creation. He was the 
 champion of Christianity against the heathen, and his re- 
 turn was looked for to aid in the recovery of the Holy 
 Cross. And it is this side of Arthur's character that Mr 
 Tennyson has set himself to treat in his own way. His 
 Arthur is still a perfect knight, a national hero, and a centre 
 of marvellous adventure ; but he is above everything a de- 
 fender of the faith according to Mr Tennyson's ideal, and 
 according to the moral sense of the present generation — a 
 hero of divine origin, of immaculate purity, of unwavering 
 and unintermitting singleness of purpose. Now, in these 
 particulars, Mr Tennyson departs from the Arthur of the 
 old story. There was something supernatural in the origin 
 of the old Arthur, but he was not literally heaven-sent : he 
 was a child of shamefulness — not begotten in lawful wed- 
 lock. His father, Uther Pendragon, was transformed by the 
 art of the magician. Merlin, into the likeness of Ygeme's 
 husband, and Arthur was the issue of this illicit love and 
 supernatural delusion of a faithful wife. Again, the Arthur 
 of the old story was not stainless in the sense of loving one 
 woman and cleaving to her. When he was a young squire, 
 and before his origin was known either to himself or to the 
 public, he lay with Morgause (or Bellicent), the wife of Lot, 
 his half-sister ; and in that unwittingly incestuous connec- 
 tion begat Mordred, who became afterwards his fatal enemy. 
 After the battle with the eleven kings at Bredigan, he grati- 
 fied by the help of Merlin (who would not seem to have 
 been scrupulous about playing the pander) a passing fancy 
 
SIR THOMAS MALORY. IO9 
 
 for Lienors. And even after his marriage with Guinevere, 
 not to mention his unwitting adultery with the false Guine- 
 vere, he was not the high, cold, self-contained Arthur of 
 Mr Tennyson. On one occasion, at least, he showed the 
 wantonness of gallant curiosity, when he persisted against 
 Lancelot's dissuasion in riding up to the fair Isoud, and 
 staring at her until he was smitten off his horse by Sir Pala- 
 mides for his discourtesy. Finally, as regards his singleness 
 of purpose in driving out the heathen, therein also Mr 
 Tennyson's Arthur is a refinement upon the Arthur of the 
 old story, who made great war for the common selfish 
 purpose of " getting all England into his hand ; " and 
 did not scruple to try to secure his power by committing 
 to the mercy of the waves all children born on May-day, 
 because Merlin told him " that he that should destroy him 
 should be born on May-day." 
 
 Arthur is not the only personage in the old story whose 
 character Mr Tennyson has chosen to modify. In the 
 romance of Merlin, the magician falls hopelessly in love 
 with Nimian, a maiden of great beauty and wisdom, teaches 
 her all his enchantments, and is ultimately enclosed by her 
 in a magic house without walls, that she may enjoy his love 
 without interruption. In the ' Morte d' Arthur ' this lady is 
 Nimue, one of the damsels of the lake ; Merlin persecutes 
 her with his love, letting her have no rest ; she " is ever 
 passing weary of him, and fain would be delivered of him, 
 for she is afeard of him, because he is a devil's son ; " and 
 at last she gets an opportunity to enclose him under a stone 
 for ever. Nimue was afterwards one of the good angels of 
 the Round Table, gained the love of Pelleas, brought up 
 Lancelot, and more than once saved the life of Arthur, ever 
 doing "great goodness unto King Arthur, and to all his 
 knights, by her sorcery and enchantments." This exquisite 
 creation of romance, to whose father Diana had promised 
 that her beauty would subdue the wisest man of all the 
 world, Mr Tennyson has replaced by Vivien, a wanton lady 
 of the court, wholly without precedent in romance, who, out 
 of vulgar ambition to outwit the great wizard, wrings his 
 
no CHAUCER S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 secret from him by wearing him out with voluble flattery 
 and such arts as the female Yahoo applied to the naked 
 GuUiver.i The sons of Bellicent, again, are seriously trans- 
 figured by Mr Tennyson. In the old story, Arthur's death, 
 through the treason and by the hand of Mordred, his own 
 son by unconscious incest, appears as the inexorable ven- 
 geance of an iron law that accepts no plea of ignorance. 
 The king is punished by the fruit of his own involuntary 
 crime. Mr Tennyson wipes off this blot of incest from the 
 life of his spotless hero, and attributes the treason of Mor- 
 dred, whom he represents as the lawful son of Lot, to simple 
 depravity of nature. And to deepen the colours of this 
 natural taint, he extends it to Gawain, the son of Bellicent 
 and Lot, incriminating the whole of them as a crafty deceit- 
 ful race, with traitor hearts hid under a courteous exterior. 
 
 These modifications of the old story and the old charac- 
 ters must be left to justify themselves, very much as if the 
 modem version were a wholly new creation. It is best on 
 all grounds to regard it as such : we should spoil the ' Morte 
 d'Arthur ' were we to read it by the light of Mr Tennyson's 
 conceptions ; and we should be unfair to Mr Tennyson were 
 we to condemn him for departing from the somewhat un- 
 certain outlines of the ' Morte d'Arthur.' We must take the 
 " Idylls of the King " on their own merits. If Mr Tennyson 
 had been writing a tragedy on a theme that appears on the 
 surface, at least, so admirably suited for tragedy, one cannot 
 see that he would have gained anything by rejecting the 
 incestuous birth of Mordred and its fatal consequences. 
 But the " Idylls of the King " are idylls ; and besides, it 
 is said that their characters are symbolic, that they con- 
 stitute a spiritual allegory. If that is so, it were well, per- 
 haps, that Mr Tennyson should follow the example of 
 Spenser, and explain his purpose. One would then have 
 some confidence in judging whether all his departures from 
 
 1 1 am not sure that Mr Swinburne is right in speaking of Vivien as a 
 vilification of the Lady of the Lake. Mr Tennyson has kept up the Lady 
 of the Lake as a benignant enchantress, only he has disconnected her from 
 the disappearance of Merlin, and ascribed that to an independent and 
 wholly new personage. 
 
JOHN SKELTON. Ill 
 
 the old story were made in the best interests of the symbolic 
 figures. Apart, however, from the symbolism of the charac- 
 ters, it is obvious that their greater simplicity is in accordance 
 with the idyllic nature of the poem. We are not distracted 
 by bewildering mixtures of good and evil in the " Idylls of 
 the King : " the king is blameless ; Mordred is wholly vile, 
 with no justification as an instrument of Nemesis, or a re- 
 venger of the inhuman attempts upon his own infant life ; 
 Lancelot and Guinevere are noble natures stained by one 
 great sin. As the simple clearly outlined figures pass before 
 us, we are not agitated by changing admiration and abhor- 
 rence ; their first impression is ever deepened as they come 
 and go by repeated strokes on the same spot of our moral 
 vision. When the catastrophe comes, and death passes over 
 them, we look back upon their lives without the conflict of 
 emotion that appertains to tragedy. They affect us as 
 visionary types, not as men and women of mixed passions. 
 
 4. John Skelton (1460-1529). 
 
 This is a fresh, audacious, boisterous, wayward pupil of 
 Chaucer's, very different from the tame decorous Lydgate. 
 He plays wanton freaks with the time-honoured copy-books 
 of the school : writes a few lines in sober imitation, and 
 then dashes off into all sorts of madly capricious irregulari- 
 ties. He is, indeed, so independent of models that he 
 should have a chapter to himself, were it not that this would 
 exaggerate him out of all proportion to his poetic importance. 
 It wants some leniency in the definition of poetry to allow 
 him the title of poet at all ; he was not much more of a 
 poet than Swift. 
 
 A genius thus "wild, madding, jocund, and irregular," is 
 naturally a puzzle to his critics, and he has been very variously 
 estimated. He had no doubt of his own position himself : 
 in his genial impiKlent way he wrote a poem of sixteen 
 hundred lines (the " Garland of Laurel ") in which Fame 
 and Pallas hold a complimentary dialogue over him; Gower, 
 Chaucer, and Lydgate, overcome his modest scruples to 
 
112 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 enter the Temple of Fame ; and a bevy of fair and noble 
 ladies embroider a rich crown for him with silk threads of 
 green, red, tawny, white, black, purple, and blue. Other 
 critics have been less favourable. Webbe, in his ' Discourse 
 of English Poetry' (1586), was tolerably gracious: "I 
 with good right yield him the title of a poet ; he was doubt- 
 less a pleasant conceited fellow, and of a very sharp wit, 
 exceeding bold, and would nip to the very quick where he 
 once set hold." But the courtly Puttenham, in his ' Art 
 of English Poesy' (1589), found Skelton's coarseness more 
 offensive : he is " a sharp satirist, but with more railing and 
 scofifery than became a poet-laureate ; such among the 
 Greeks were called Fantomimi ; with us. Buffoons, altogether 
 applying their wits to scurrilities and other ridiculous mat- 
 ters." However, he found a champion in D'Israeli, who 
 pronounced him " too original for some of his critics ; they 
 looked on the surface, and did not always suspect the 
 depths they glided over.'' 
 
 There is one depth that we may very easily glide over, if 
 we are not on our guard. If we are not accustomed to dis- 
 tinguish between occasional moods and predominant char- 
 acter, we may fail to notice that the most furious occasional 
 riots of ridicule and laughter are compatible with prevailing 
 seriousness and good sense. Reading "Philip Sparrow," 
 or the "Tunning of Elinour Rumming," we may refuse to 
 believe in the possibility of the solid qualities that procured 
 for Skelton the charge of educating the young prince (after- 
 wards Henry VIII.), and the honour of being hailed by 
 Erasmus as unum lumen ac decus — the only light and orna- 
 ment — of British letters. But a little knowledge of the 
 versatility of human nature will prevent us from falling into 
 Miss Strickland's mistake of describing Skelton as a " ribald 
 and ill-living wretch," who probably " laid the foundation 
 for his royal pupil's grossest crimes.'' This is not merely 
 judging without allowance from Skelton's writings, but 
 taking for granted as gospel truth all the mythical tales that 
 have accumulated round Skelton's name ; it is like describ- 
 ing George Buchanan from the chap-books as the " king's 
 
JOHN SKELTON. 1 13 
 
 fool." Skelton belongs to a type by no means uncommon : 
 a man habitually serious and laborious, but endowed with 
 the ungovernable energy that under excitement displays 
 itself in rude bursts of extravagant mirth, and effusions of 
 demonstrative affection. 
 
 When we look through the two volumes of Skelton's 
 works collected by Mr Dyce,^ we find underlying- the 
 mantling humour abundant evidence of a clear and capacious 
 mind. The " Bowge of Court "— " Ship of Court," a satirical 
 allegory — and the moral interlude, " Magnificence," are 
 written with consistency and force of character, and abound 
 in terse maxims of worldly wisdom : these productions show 
 that the "ribald and ill-living wretch" was a penetrating 
 observer, and might have been a sage counsellor. In Skel- 
 ton's writings, however, it is not to be denied that the extra- 
 vagantly ludicrous intrudes itself on every other quality; 
 before he can go far in a serious vein, the humour collects 
 again, and explodes at the slightest touch, irresistibly forcing 
 his personages into violent movements and extreme mani- 
 festations. For instance, in his " Bowge of Court," he goes 
 on for a little with his delineation of personified Disdain in 
 tolerable soberness, though with occasional strong touches 
 verging on the ludicrous; but this serious proceeding has not 
 endured long when we come to a livelier stanza — 
 
 " Forthwith he made on me a proud assault, 
 With scornful look moved all in mood ; 
 He went about to take me in a fault ; 
 
 He frowned, he stared, he stamped where he stood. 
 I looked on him, I weened he had been wood. 
 He set the arm proudly under the side. 
 And in this wise he gan with me to chide." 
 
 All his personages are thrown more or less into these laugh- 
 able exaggerated attitudes : the poet's irrepressible humour 
 
 i 1843. Mr Dyce says that, " of almost all Skelton's writings which have 
 descended to our times, the first editions have perished ; and it is impossible 
 to determine either at what period he commenced his career as a poet, or at 
 what date his various pieces were originally written." Many of the works 
 enumerated in the Garden of Laurel are no longer in known existence. 
 
 H 
 
114 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 transforms them all into caricatures. Prince Magnificence 
 is the Herod of the Mysteries out-Heroded, blown up with 
 absurd pride, declaring himself peerless and incomparable, 
 threatening to drive down everybody like dastards with a 
 dint of his fist, or flap them like fools to fall at his feet. In 
 extreme contrast to this heavy tyrant is the airy skipping 
 and strutting sprightliness of Courtly Abusion — 
 
 " What now, let see, 
 Who looketh on me 
 Well round about 
 How gay and how stout 
 That I can wear 
 Courtly my gear : 
 My hair busheth 
 So pleasantly, 
 My robe rusheth 
 So ruttingly : 
 Me seem I fly, 
 I am so light 
 To dance delight." 
 
 Not less extravagant is the wild hilarity of Liberty, singing 
 as he dwells on sweet recollections — 
 
 " With, ' Yea, marry, sirs,' thus should it be : 
 I kissed her sweet and she kissed me ; 
 I danced the darling on my knee ; 
 I garred her gasp, I garred her glee. 
 With, ' Dance on the lea, the lea ! ' 
 I bassed that baby with heart so free : 
 She is the boot of all my bale." 
 
 This last passage reminds us of the demonstrative fond- 
 ness of Swift's " Journal to Stella," and the suggestion of 
 resemblance is still stronger in the lament for " Philip 
 Sparrow," written in name of a young lady to commemo- 
 rate her loss of a pet. The tender bits in " Philip Sparrow " 
 and in the " Journal to Stella " are written in exactly the 
 same strain of fondling affection. We should not have 
 been surprised to find the following passage in the " Jour- 
 
JOHN SKELTON. IIS 
 
 nal," as Swift's interpretation of Stella's feelings on a sim- 
 ilar occasion — 
 
 "It was so pretty a fool : 
 It would sit on a stool, 
 And learned after my school 
 For to keep his cut, 
 With, ' Philip, keep your cut ! ' 
 
 It had a velvet cap, 
 And would sit on my lap. 
 And seek after small worms. 
 And sometimes white bread crumbs : 
 And many times and oft 
 Between my breasts soft 
 
 It would lie and rest ; 
 
 It was proper and presL 
 
 Sometimes he would gasp 
 When he saw a wasp ; 
 
 A fly or a gnat 
 
 He would fly at that ; 
 
 And prettily he would pant 
 
 When he saw an ant ; 
 
 Lord, how he would pry 
 
 After the butterfly ! 
 
 Lord, how he would hop 
 
 After the grassop ! 
 
 And when I said, Phip, Phip ! 
 
 Then he would leap and skip, 
 
 And take me by the lip. 
 
 Alas, it will me slo 
 
 That Philip is gone me fro ! 
 
 Alas, mine heart it slayeth. 
 My Philip's doleful death ! 
 When I remember it, 
 How prettily it would sit. 
 Many times and oft. 
 Upon my finger aloft ! 
 I played with him tittle tattle. 
 And fed him with my spattle. 
 With his bill between my lips ; 
 It was my pretty Phips ! 
 
tl6 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 Many a pretty kuss 
 Had I of his sweet muss ; 
 And now the cause is thus, 
 That he is slain me fro 
 To my great pain and wo." 
 
 With all his bufifooning and humour, Skelton was capable 
 of sharp satire and fierce invective. He was not so wrapt 
 up in grotesque fancies and ebullient self-complacency as 
 to be satisfied with the whole world as well as with himself. 
 He was a good and an extensive hater. More than one of his 
 contemporaries felt his power to nip to the quick. He had 
 personal quarrels with one Garnesche, a gentleman usher at 
 court ; Barclay, the Scotch author of the ' Ship of Fools ; ' 
 Gaguin, a French ambassador; and Lily, the grammarian. 
 His poems against Garnesche are preserved, and are rare 
 studies in foul language. A more illustrious object of his 
 aversion and rude railing rhymes was Cardinal Wolsey. At 
 one time Skelton enjoyed the patronage of the Cardinal, 
 and rendered homage in his dedications ; but afterwards he 
 took or received offence, and assailed his former patron 
 with remarkable boldness and scurrilous rancour. The 
 following is a specimen of his voluble abuse : — 
 
 " Our barons be so bold 
 Into a mouse-hole they wold 
 Run away and creep, 
 Like a mayny of sheep : 
 Dare not look out at dur 
 For dread of the mastiff cur. 
 For dread of the butcher's dog, 
 Would worry them like a hog. 
 
 For and this cur do gnarr. 
 They must stand all afar. 
 To hold up their hand at the bar. 
 For all their noble blood, 
 He plucks them by the" hood. 
 And shakes them by the ear, 
 And brings them in such fear ; 
 He baiteth them like a bear, 
 Like an ox or a bull : 
 Their wits, he saith, are dull ; 
 
JOHN SKELTON. II7 
 
 He saith they have no brain 
 
 Their estate to maintain ; 
 
 And malceth them to bow the knee 
 
 Before his majesty ; 
 
 Judges of the King's laws 
 
 He counts them fools and daws. 
 
 In the Chancery where he sits 
 
 But such as he admits 
 
 None so hardy to speak ; 
 
 He saith — "Thou huddy peak, 
 
 Thy learning is too lewd, 
 
 Thy tongue is not well thewed 
 
 To seek before our grace ; 
 
 And openly in that place 
 
 He rages and he raves 
 
 And calls them cankered knaves. 
 
 Thus royally he doth deal 
 
 Under the King's broad seal ; 
 
 And in the Chequer he them checks ; 
 
 In the Star Chamber he nods and becks, 
 
 And beareth him there so stout. 
 
 That no man dare rout, 
 
 Duke, Earl, Baron, nor Lord, 
 
 But to his sentence must accord ; 
 
 Whether he be knight or squire 
 
 All men must follow his desire." 
 
 Although himself in orders and not averse to preferment 
 in the Church, Skelton did not refrain from exercising his 
 satire on the state of religion. " Colin Clout " is one of the 
 most celebrated attacks on the clergy prior to the Reforma- 
 tion, and must have helped materially to increase, or at 
 least to support, the popular dissatisfaction with the Church. 
 His position may be said to be characteristic of English 
 Church reformers. He attacks the officials, but spares the 
 institutions. He is most scornful towards certain presump- 
 tuous young scholars who had shown some desire for re- 
 form of doctrine. He triei hard to make them ashamed 
 of their little rags of rhetoric, their little lumps of logic, 
 their pieces and patches of philosophy. In " Colin Clout," 
 
Il8 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 with a certain assumption of irony, he disclaims the char- 
 acter of a reformer, because people do not like the inquisi- 
 tive, prying, meddlesome ways of such a character. For 
 himself, the time seems so utterly out of joint, that he 
 doubts the use of trying to set it right. He proposes merely 
 to repeat what he, Colin Clout, hears as he wanders in and 
 out among the people. He merely retails what they say 
 hugger-mugger, or the " logic that they chop " — 
 
 '■ And in their fury hop 
 When the good ale sop 
 Doth dance in their fore top." 
 
 The common people, he says ironically, are doubtless 
 liars, slanderers, and railing rebels ; but they have much to 
 say about the pride, venality, luxury, and debauchery of the 
 clergy, both great and small. The higher clergy, forgetting 
 their humble origin, keep great state ; treat the lords tem- 
 poral with open insolence ; hunt, hawk, neglect their duties, 
 rob and spoil their charge, admit to holy orders worthless 
 untaught drunkards — men of small intelligence and great 
 sloth ; have their houses adorned with lascivious pictures. 
 The begging friars intrigue with the servants, encourage 
 them in discontent, flatter them with filed tongue and pleas- 
 ant style, and wheedle from them the good things of the 
 larder. It is really too bad of the common people to make 
 such accusations — 
 
 " What hath laymen to do 
 The gray goose for to shoe ? 
 Like hounds of hell 
 They cry and they yell 
 How that ye sell 
 The grace of the Holy Ghost : 
 Thus they make their boast 
 Throughout every coast 
 How some of you do eat 
 In Lenten season flesh meat. 
 Pheasants, partridge, and cranes ! 
 Men call you therefore profanes. 
 Ye pick no shrimps nor pranes ; 
 
STEPHEN HA WES. II9 
 
 Salt-fish, stock-fish, nor herring, 
 It is not for your wearing : 
 Nor in holy Lenten season 
 Ye will neither beans nor peasen, 
 But ye will look to be let loose 
 To a pig or a goose ; 
 Your gorge not endued 
 Without a capon stewed 
 Or a stewed cockle." 
 
 The chief production of Skelton's that has laughter for 
 its ultimate end, is the " Tunning of Elinour Rumming," a 
 picture of a low alewife and her customers. It is too 
 coarse to quote. It deals with the same materials as 
 Burns's " Jolly Beggars ; " but the treatment is as widely 
 different as the character of the writers. Bums, with 
 catholic sympathy, enters into the spirit of the "splore" 
 held by his " gangrel bodies," his vagrant waifs. In the ex- 
 citement of the festivity their sorrows are forgotten, their 
 rags unheeded ; they are raised to the rank of gods. Skel- 
 ton, on the other hand, writes in a strain that would please 
 a teetotal lecturer. Elinour and her friends are reduced by 
 their craving for drink to the level of beasts. They are 
 painted with harsh, coarse, c)fnical feeling, as by one utterly 
 revolted and enraged at their squalid, uncared-for persons, 
 their unclean habits, and miserable shifts to get their fill of 
 the old hag's filthy ale. We laugh at their preposterous 
 mishaps, but it is a bestial orgie. 
 
 5. — Stephen Hawes. 
 
 This well-intentioned versifier was contemporary with 
 Skelton ; but two men could not well be more dissimilar. 
 Hawes is said to have been a travelled Oxonian, and to 
 have obtained a place in the household of Henry VII. by 
 his knowledge of French and facility in repeating the Eng- 
 lish poets. Of this last accomplishment there are many 
 traces in his " Pastime of Pleasure," a didactic poem in a 
 thin disguise of romantic allegory ; and it is pretty nearly 
 
120 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 the only accomplishment or claim to interest that the poem 
 exhibits. If Skelton is fresh as a relief from Lydgate, 
 Hawes is doubly dull and spiritless after Skelton. When we 
 come to Hawes, we regret that Professor Lowell threw 
 away his eloquent illustrations of tediousness upon Gower. 
 He should have kept them for the so-called " Pastime of 
 Pleasure." Gower cannot boast of such a perseverance 
 in drivel ; and it beats either of the two living exemplars, 
 whom cis-Atlantic politeness forbids us to name. 
 
 In the prefatory address " To the Reader," we are in- 
 formed that the title of the work is a pious fraud : that the 
 design of the writer is to entice young men, by the promise 
 of pastime and pleasure, into a course of valuable instruction 
 in the seven sciences and in moral habits. He holds out 
 the unsophisticated bait that "herein thou mayest easily 
 find (as it were in pastime), without offence of nature, that 
 thing, and in short space, which many great clerks without 
 great pains and travail, and long continuance of time here- 
 tofore could never obtain nor get." The various precepts 
 are made attractive to youth by being represented as the 
 course that a young man must follow before he can hope to 
 win a lady's favour. The hero of the poem, Graunde Am- 
 oure, relates how he met Fame : how she fired his fancy by 
 a description of the incomparable La Belle Pucelle : how 
 she directed him to the tower of Doctrine, where he was in- 
 structed in succession by seven mistresses. Grammar, Logic, 
 Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, and Astronomy : 
 how in the chamber of Music he met his fair lady, wooed 
 and won her love, but was parted from her and warned that 
 he must conquer certain giants before she became his : how 
 he conquered those giants with the help of certain personi- 
 fications whom he met on the way, and married La Belle 
 Pucelle. When he had lived many years with his wife, Age 
 walked into his house, bringing Policy and Avarice. Fame 
 celebrates him after his death. 
 
 AVarton has said that Hawes " has added new graces 
 to Lydgate's manner ; " and we may admit this if we are 
 allowed to give our own interpretation to the words. But 
 
STEPHEN HAWES. 121 
 
 what are we to make of Southey's saying that the " Pastime 
 of Pleasure," composed as he himself states in 1506, is " the 
 best English poem of its century"? That such a judg- 
 ment should have been given by any one that had read any 
 of Hawes's predecessors, is a standing puzzle and bewil- 
 derment. As we plod conscientiously through the dreary 
 pastime, we cannot help wondering whether Southey, who 
 could not " afford either time or eyesight for correcting the 
 proof-sheets of such a volume " as his British Poets, but who 
 afforded the floating power of his name to the most execrably 
 inaccurate reprint ever offered to the public, had ever been 
 foolish enough to waste either time or eyesight on Hawes 
 in any form whatever. Nothing short of a few pages of the 
 poem can give the reader an adequate idea of its lustreless 
 retailing of borrowed beauties, its mechanical piecing to- 
 gether of lines and rhymes with unmeaning and tautologous 
 fag-ends and bits. Take his description of his matchless 
 heroine. La Belle Pucelle, which he has laboured with es- 
 pecial care — 
 
 " Inwhich dwelleth by great authority 
 La Belle Pucelle, which is so fair and bright ; 
 To whom in beauty no peer I can see : 
 For like as Phoebus, above all stars in light. 
 When that he is in his sphere aright, 
 Doth exceed with his beames clear. 
 So doth her beauty above other appear. 
 
 She is both good, aye wise, and virtuous, 
 And also descended of a noble line ; 
 Rich, comely, right meek, and bounteous ; 
 All manner virtues in her clearly shine ; 
 No vice of her may right long domine : 
 And I, dame Fame, in every nation 
 Of her do make the same relation." 
 
 Take another specimen, in the old spelling, and see 
 whether that flavour of antiquity makes the style more 
 •enjoyable. I give also the original uniform pointing as it 
 appears in SQuthey's text, not venturing to make a new dis- 
 tribution of the adjuncts — 
 
12,2 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. » 
 
 " The roufe was painted, with golden beames 
 The windowes crystall, clearely clarified 
 The golden raies, and depured streames 
 Of radiant Phoebus, that was purified 
 Right in the Bull, that time so domified 
 Throughe windowes, was resplendishant 
 About the chamber, faire and radiaunt " 
 
 There is a grammatical connection among these scattered 
 members, and to discover it will be a fair exercise in 
 punctuation. 
 
 The "Pastime of Pleasure" is said to have been composed 
 in 1506. It was first printed in 15 17, and it was reprinted 
 in i5S4and in 1555. It was included in Southey's selection 
 from Early British Poets in 183 1. Antony Wood lamented 
 that, in his time, it was " thought but worthy of a ballad- 
 monger's stall." We are less astonished at this than at the 
 fact that Southey considered it worth reprinting in full in a 
 selection that had no room for a single passage from Lyd- 
 gate or Dunbar. Some of the critics of Southey^s genera- 
 tion, in their laudable zeal to make Art the handmaid of 
 Morality, seem to have been betrayed into criticising upon 
 the principle that everything moral is poetical, no matter 
 how tame, stupid, and lifeless. 
 
 IV. — Scottish Successors. 
 
 The Scottish disciples of Chaucer are, on the whole, a 
 more brilliant line of descendants than their English breth- 
 ren. The seeds of mediaeval poetry found a virgin soil in 
 Scotland ; and though the stems and flowers had something 
 of the Scotch hardness, the crop was luxuriant enough. 
 
 I. James I. (1394-1437)- 
 
 This accomplished and unfortunate king — bom in 1394, 
 held as a captive in England from 1405 to 1424, and 
 assassinated, after a firm and popular reign, in 1437 — was 
 by far the most successful imitator of Chaucer. Though he 
 
JAMES I. 123 
 
 has no title to the rank of original poet, which some of his 
 admirers claim for him, his "King's Quhair " {Quire or 
 Book) is justly the most celebrated English poem of the 
 fifteenth century. It is written in Troilus verse, and is com- 
 monly said, though the notion is probably erroneous,^ to 
 have given that stanza its designation of rhyme-royal. In 
 general structure, the poem belongs to the same family as 
 Chaucer's graceful fantasies. The main incident is imitated 
 from the Knight's Tale ; and a good many thoughts and 
 turns of expression have apparently been caught from read- 
 ing " Troilus and Cresside." The royal poet supposes him- 
 self, after his restoration to his kingdom, to waken towards 
 midnight, when — 
 
 " High in the heavenes figure circulere 
 The ruddy starres twinkled as the fire, 
 And in Aquary Cinthia the clear 
 Rinsed her tresses like the golden wire.'' 
 
 He falls a-thinking, and, finding "that he cannot sleep, 
 reads ' Boece's Consolations.' But Boece is no sleep-com- 
 peller, and keeps his majesty awake with thoughts on the 
 variableness of Fortune. He tosses about, and travels rest- 
 lessly over his past life — 
 
 " Among the thoughtes rolling to and fro, 
 Fell me to mind of my fortune and ure," 
 In tender youth how she was first my foe. 
 And eft' my friend, and how I got recure 
 Of my distress, and all my adventure 
 I gan o'er hale, that longer sleep ne rest 
 Ne might I not, so were my wittes wrest." 
 
 Suddenly the matins bell begins to sound, and seems to 
 say to him — " Tell on, man, what thee befel." He resolves 
 at once to do so ; gets up, takes a pen, makes the sign of 
 the cross, invokes CalHope and her sisters in the name of 
 Mary, and forthwith proceeds to tell the story of his capti- 
 vity and courtship. He relates how his father prepared to 
 1 See before, p. 26. ^ Use— hap. » Again. 
 
124 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 send him to France, and how he was captured by an Eng- 
 lish ship and imprisoned in the tower. There he lay bewail- 
 ing his sad fortune through the long days and nights. But 
 suddenly joy came out of torment. From his prison win- 
 dow he could see into a fair garden, with flower-beds, haw- 
 thorn hedges, and leafy trees, filled with singing birds ; and 
 there one fresh May morning came to gather flowers a 
 vision of beauty that sent the blood of all his body to his 
 heart — a lady with " beauty enough to make a world to 
 dote," so fair that she might be taken for "god Cupido's 
 own princess," or " even very Nature the goddess," the 
 painter of all the heavenly colours of the garden, come in 
 person to survey her handiwork. For a moment he was 
 astounded ; but soon he began to feel that he had become 
 for ever thrall to the fair apparition.^ He drank in all the 
 particulars of her beauty ; noted her attire, which was loose 
 and simple, and feasted his eyes on a heart-shaped ruby 
 hanging from a gold necklace, and burning like a wanton 
 flame on her white throat ; chided the nightingale for not 
 singing to her ; and after her departure, sat at his window 
 in despair till night came on, leaning his head on the cold 
 stone and bemoaning his destiny. 
 
 The conception of all this is well calculated to give scope 
 for luxurious execution. It is a spacious and effective 
 framework for studies of melancholy reflection, pangs of 
 thwarted love, scenical richness, and womanly beauty. The 
 execution, however, is not equal to the conception : it 
 comes very far short of the softness, delicacy, and volup- 
 tuous richness of Chaucer. In what follows of the poem — 
 for the above is comprised in two out of the six cantos — 
 one is no less struck by the largeness and clearness of the 
 plan, the vigorous judgment in bringing good situations 
 naturally and fitly within the course of the poem. In 
 
 1 This is commonly supposed to be a true narrative of King James's first 
 vision of Lady Jane Beaufort. There is not the slightest reason to believe 
 that it is anything but a romantic fancy, imitated from the appearance of 
 Emily to Palamon and Arcite. As a real incident, it is as probable as that 
 a turtle-dove brought him the blissful news of relief from his pain (Canto 
 vi. S-7)- 
 
JAMES I. 125 
 
 Canto iii. he is transported to the Court of Venus, to 
 plead for mercy from the Queen of Love, whose power he 
 has long set at nought. In Canto iv. he is conducted to 
 the Palace of Minerva, and receives much wise counsel.^ 
 In Canto v. he goes in quest of Fortune, along the banks 
 of a river, and through woods filled with all manner of wild 
 beasts ; finds her " howflSng " on the ground, with her wheel 
 before her, and obtains assurance of her favour. In the last 
 Canto a turtle-dove presents him with a formal notification 
 that his prayers have been heard, and that his desires will 
 be speedily fulfilled. Readers familiar with Chaucer will 
 see that the royal imitator has contrived to run the stream 
 of his story past the very best opportunities for description, 
 through the very heart of the country pictured in the " Court 
 of Love," the " Parliament of Birds," and the " House of 
 Fame." And it must be owned that, while the " King's 
 Quhair " seems deficient in richness and delicacy of colour- 
 ing when placed side by side with the work of the master, it 
 reads remarkably well when removed from damaging com- 
 parison, and is infinitely the best composition produced in 
 the school of Chaucer. There is real passion in it, and a 
 real sense of beauty, though the expression fails to strike 
 through and rise above the embarrassing self-criticism that 
 cramps so many Scotch attempts at eloquence and poetry. 
 The proportions are good, but the surface is dry and hard. 
 
 In confirmation of this, the lover's approach and address 
 to Venus (Canto iii. 25-28) may be compared with similar 
 passages in the " Court of Love." The third of these stanzas 
 
 1 The introduction of the Goddess of Wisdom into a love poem is remark- 
 able. The King of Scots does not represent her like Jean de Meun's 
 "Reason," as a cynical scoffer at love; she is a sage monitor, enjoining 
 temperance of appetite, and she is recommended to the lover by the God- 
 dess of Love herself. Venus and Minerva are represented by King James 
 as keeping up friendly relations. It is noticeable, also, that he does not follow 
 Philogenet in proclaiming war against Diana. As regards the position of 
 ecclesiastics in our poet's Court of Venus, he imitates Philogenet in hav- 
 ing a multitude of monks and nuns lamenting that their friends had con- 
 demned them in youth to the cloister ; and he has also a full great number 
 that had freely served Love in secret ; these have hoods over their faces, 
 and are waited on by Repentance. 
 
126 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 is modelled on the invocation to the Virgin in the ' Canter 
 bury Tales ' of the Second Nun. 
 
 " With quaking heart astonate of that sight 
 Unnethes ^ wist I what that I should sain, 
 But at the last febilly as I might 
 With my handes on both my knees twain, 
 There I begouth " my cares to complain ; 
 With ane humble and lamentable cheer 
 Thus salute I that goddess bright and clear. 
 
 High Queen of Love ! star of benevolence ! 
 
 Piteous princess, and planet merciable ! 
 
 Appeaser of malice and violence ! 
 
 By virtue pure of your aspectes hable 
 
 Unto your grace let now been acceptable 
 My pure request, that can no further gone 
 To seeken help, but unto you alone., 
 
 As ye that been the succour and sweet well 
 Of remedy, of careful heartes cure. 
 And in the huge weltering waves fell. 
 Of loves rage, blissful haven and sure : 
 O anchor and true of our good aventure. 
 Ye have your man with his good will conquest, 
 Mercy, therefore, and bring his heart to rest." 
 
 The beginning of Canto v., describing his journey in quest 
 of Fortune, also comes into direct comparison with Chaucer 
 ("Parliament of Birds," i8o, 360, &c.) 
 
 " Where in a lusty plain took I my way. 
 Along a river, pleasant to behold, 
 Embroiden all with freshe flowres gay, 
 Where through the gravel, bright as any gold. 
 The crystal water ran so clear and cold, 
 That in mine eare made continually 
 A manner soun melled with harmony. 
 
 That full of little fishes by the brim. 
 
 Now here now there, with backes blue as lead. 
 
 Leapt and played, and in a rout gan swim 
 
 1 Hardly. = Began. 
 
ROBERT HENRYSON. 1 27 
 
 So prettily, and dressed them to spread 
 
 Their coral finnes as the ruby red, 
 
 That in the sunneshine their scales bright 
 As gesserant aye glittered in my sight." 
 
 Two humorous poems — "Peebles to the Play" and 
 " Christ's Kirk on the Green " — dealing with the riotous 
 merry-making of the lower orders, and written with very 
 hearty spirit, are ascribed to James I. by a preponderance 
 of authority. Since, however, their authorship is disputed, 
 and we^phall have abundant illustration of Scotch humorous 
 poetry in Dunbar, I shall pass them over. 
 
 2. Robert Henryson. (1425-1495 ?) 
 
 The schoolmaster of Dunfermline had much less power 
 than King James, but his poetry was more self-determined 
 and less imitative. The only ascertained date in his life is 
 his admission to the newly-founded University of Glasgow 
 under the title of Licentiate in Arts and Bachelor in Degrees 
 in 1462 : he may thence be conjectured to have flourished 
 midway between King James and Dunbar. He seems to 
 have been a grave, religious, gentle scholar, observant, full 
 of prudent precepts, melancholy reflections, and quiet humour. 
 He wrote little, and elaoorated that little with Virgilian 
 care. He generally imposed upon himself the double 
 restraint of rhyme and alliteration, and fitted most of his 
 ballads with a refrain : he used considerable variety of 
 metre. King James's style was opposed to the English in 
 point of difiuseness, but Henryson studied compression even 
 more than his royal predecessor : he would seem to have 
 struggled to express himself in few words and circumstances, 
 and to make the few as pregnant as possible. In this respect 
 he is an extreme contrast to Lydgate. 
 
 Henryson's most celebrated composition is a continuation 
 of Troilus, called the " Testament of Cresside," written with 
 a view to providing a suitable retribution for the fair lady's 
 breach of faith : in an important council of the Gods of the 
 Seven Planets, she is doomed to leprosy, and bequeaths a 
 
128 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 lamentation and a warning to all false lovers. He is also 
 the author of the first pastoral poem in the language — 
 " Robin and Malkin ; " and of one of the earliest Scotch 
 ballads— "The Bluidy Serk," a religious allegpry. He 
 wrote also a poem on Orpheus and Eurydice, and versified 
 certain ' Fables of ^sop.' 
 
 The opening stanza of his "Praise of Age" is a fair 
 specimen of his most spirited manner, though containing 
 perhaps less alliteration than usual : 
 
 " Intil a garth,' under a red rosere,^ 
 
 An old man and decrepid hard I sing ; 
 
 Gay was the note, sweet was the voice and clear, 
 It was great joy to hear of such a thing : 
 And to my doom, he said, in his diting. 
 
 For to be young I would not, for my wiss 
 Of all this world to make me lord and king : 
 
 The more of age the nearer heavenes bliss." 
 
 The following seven -line staves display considerable 
 power — 
 
 " Syne ^ Winter wan, when austere j^olus, 
 
 God of the wind, with blastes boreal 
 
 The green garment of Summer glorious 
 
 Has all to rent and riven in pieces small : 
 
 Then flowres fair, faded with frost, mon fall. 
 And birdes blithe changes their notes sweet 
 Intil mourning, near slain with snow and sleet.* 
 
 Syne comes Ver, when Winter is away, 
 
 The secretar of Summer with his seal ; 
 
 When columbine up keekes^ through the clay, 
 
 Whilk fleyed ' was before with frostes fell ; 
 
 The mavis and the merle begins to mell ; ' 
 The lark on loft, with other birdes small 
 Then drawes forth from dern,° o'er down and dale.'' 
 
 ^ Into a garden. " Rose-bush. 3 Then — next. 
 
 * The readings " austem," "changit," and "in still muming," are obvi- 
 ously erroneous. 
 » Peeps. "* Frightened. ? Mingle. 
 
 8 Secret — hiding-place. 
 
WILLIAM DUNBAR. 1 29 
 
 3. William Dunbar. (1460-15 ?) 
 
 The pride of early Scottish poetry is William Dunbar. 
 He is usually spoken of as being, next to Burns, the greatest 
 poet that Scotland has produced. Looking upon him simply 
 as a Scottish poet, we may regard King James and Henry- 
 son as his precursors, and as isolated fine days before the 
 confirmed summer. But this altogether exaggerates his 
 importance in a more cosmopolitan view. Employing the 
 machinery of allegorical dream and sweet spring proemiums, 
 he must be considered as being through Chaucer one of the 
 numerous poetical offspring of the Roman de la Rose : he is 
 the best Scottish representative of the movements initiated 
 and transmitted by that poem. Other influences went to 
 the making of his poetry, but his main impulse came from 
 Chaucer. He was formed in the school of Chaucer, as 
 Chaucer was in the school of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean 
 de Meun. 
 
 The first record of Dunbar's name is in the register of 
 the University of St Andrews, where he appears in 1477 as 
 a " Determinant," or Bachelor of Arts, and again in 1479 as 
 Master of Arts. The next record is in the register of the 
 Privy Seal : in the year 1500 he obtained a yearly pension of 
 ten pounds for life, or until he should be promoted to an 
 ecclesiastical benefice. But the gaping spaces between 
 these meagre and insignificant records are filled up from 
 hints in the works of the poet and his poetical antagonist, 
 Walter Kennedy. In early life he joined the Franciscan 
 friars, and begged in the habit of that order. S^ddressing 
 the pretended St Francis, he says — 
 
 " Gif ever my fortune was to be a friar, 
 The date thereof is past full many a year ; 
 For in to every lusty town and place 
 Of all England, from Berwick to Calais, 
 I have in to thy habit made good cheer. 
 
 In friares weed full fairly have I fleeched 
 In it have I in pulpit gone and preached 
 
 1 Begged. 
 I 
 
130 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 In Derntoun kirk and eek in Canterbury ; 
 In it I passed at Dover o'er the ferry- 
 Through Picardy, and there the people teached." 
 
 By James IV., who came to the throne in 1488, he would 
 seem to have been employed as a clerk to foreign embassies, 
 visiting Paris more than once in that capacity. Later in 
 life he proved the value of his early practice as a beggar by 
 the ingenuity and variety of his supplications to the king. 
 He received occasional gratuities, and an increase of his 
 pension ; but he never attained the fat Church benefice that 
 he coveted and prayed for so earnestly. 
 
 This jolly quick-witted friar and courtier is sometimes 
 called the Scottish Chaucer. The two have, indeed, a good 
 many pointg of resemblance. Both were men of the world 
 and favourites at Court; companionable men, witty and 
 good-humoured : both showed sufficient address and busi- 
 ness dexterity to be employed on embassies of state. But 
 if we wish to give the title of " Scottish Chaucer " its full 
 significance, we must place considerable emphasis on the 
 adjective. Dunbar and Chaucer belong to the same class 
 of easy self-contained men, whose balance is seldom de- 
 ranged by restless straining and soaring ; but within that 
 happy pleasure-loving circle they occupy distinct habitations : 
 and one way of bringing out their difference of spirit is to 
 lay stress upon their nationality. Dunbar is unmistakably 
 Scotch. He is altogether of stronger and harder — perhaps of 
 harsher — nerve than Chaucer ; more forcible and less diffuse 
 of speech ; his laugh is rougher ; he is boldly sarcastic and 
 derisive to persons ; his ludicrous conceptions rise to more 
 daring heights of extravagance ; and, finally, he has a more 
 decided turn for preaching — for offering good advice. Not 
 that he is always strong-headed, extravagantly humorous, 
 or gravely moral ; there are green places in his heart, and 
 his fancies are sometimes sweet and graceful; but the 
 strength of head, the extravagance of humour, and the 
 gravity of good counsel are, upon the whole, predominant 
 in his composition. 
 
 It is significant of Dunbar's intellectual activity that his 
 
WILLIAM DUNBAR. 131 
 
 versification is more varied than we find in any of his Eng- 
 lish predecessors. He studies variety of stanza by interweav- 
 ing lines of different length, with rhymes and refrains at 
 different intervals. Besides the famiUar Troilus verse of 
 seven lines, he uses stanzas of four lines, of five lines, of six 
 lines, of eight lines, of nine lines, and of twelve lines. In 
 some of his stanzas the lines have five accents, in some 
 four. In his " Dance of Seven Deadly Sins," he uses the 
 arrangement adopted in the opening of Burns's " Jolly Beg- 
 gars " — couplets of four-accent lines separated by single lines 
 of three accents : his stanza, however, is of twelve lines. 
 
 His most finished poem is an allegory called the " Golden 
 Targe," printed in 1508, and evidently intended to show the 
 world at large what he could do. The Golden Targe is 
 the armour of Reason against importunate Desire ; but the 
 weapon itself is but a small figure in the poem. He opens 
 with a description of a mirthful morning in May ; in which 
 he shows that the habit of St Francis did not prevent him 
 from enjoying the favourite season of the lover. He has 
 fairly succeeded in his ambition to strike out new fancies. 
 The picture is most carefully studied, and the colours are 
 really gorgeous. 
 
 " Full angelic the birdes sang their hours.^ 
 Within their curtains green, into their bowers, 
 
 Apparelled white and red, with bloomes sweet : 
 Enamelled was the field with all colours, 
 The pearly droppes shook in silver showers, 
 
 While all in balm did branch and leaves fleet : ' 
 
 To part fro Phoebus did Aurora greet,^ 
 Her crystal tears I saw hang on the flowers 
 
 Whilk he for love all drank up with his heat. 
 For mirth of May, with skippes and with hops, 
 The birdes sang upon the tender crops, 
 
 With curious notes as Venus chapel clerks : 
 The roses young, new spreading of their knops,* 
 Were powdered bright with heavenly beryl drops, 
 
 Through beames red, burning as ruby sparks ; 
 
 The skyes rang for shouting of the larks ; 
 
 1 Orisons. '■ Float. ' Weep. * Buds. 
 
132 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 The purple heaven o'erscailed ^ in silver sops ; 
 Oergilt the trees, branches, leaves, and barks." 
 
 After five stanzas of such elaborate delineation, he proceeds 
 to say that he fell asleep, and begins to relate his dream : — 
 
 " What through the merry fowles harmony, 
 And through the rivers sound that ran me by, 
 
 On Flora's mantle I sleeped as I lay ; 
 Where soon into my dreames fantasy 
 I saw approach, against the orient sky, 
 
 A sail, as white as blossom upon spray. 
 
 With merse ^ of gold, bright as the star of day, 
 Whilk tended to the land full lustily, 
 
 As falcon swift desirous of her prey. 
 
 And hard on board unto the bloomed meads, 
 Among the greene rispes ' and the reeds. 
 
 Arrived she ; wherefro anon there lands 
 An hundred ladies, lusty into weeds, 
 As fresh as flowres that in May upspreads. 
 
 In kirtles green, withouten carol or bands : 
 
 Their brighte hairs hang glittering on the strands. 
 In tresses clear, whipped with golden threads, 
 
 With pappes white, and middles small as wands." 
 
 He then portrays some of the personages in this ravishing 
 vision of beauties : among others — 
 
 " There saw I May, of mirthful monthes queen. 
 Betwixt April, and June, her sister sheen. 
 
 Within the garden walking up and down, 
 Whom of the fowles gladdeth all bedeen : * 
 She was full tender in her yeares green. 
 
 There saw I Nature present her a gown 
 
 Rich to behold, and noble of renown, 
 Of every hue under the heaven that been 
 
 Depaint, and broad by good proportion." 
 
 ' Overflowed. Cf. Douglas's Virgil, Prol. Book xiii. 1. 26 — 
 " The recent dew begynnis doun to shale*' 
 From the same passage I have conjectured that "sops" and not "slops'" 
 is the true reading here. See 1. 41 — 
 
 " Out ouer the swyre " [hill-top] " swymmys the soppis of myst." 
 ' Mast. 3 Coarse grass. * Immediately. 
 
WILLIAM DUNBAR. 1 33 
 
 His own situation is very luxuriously painted : — 
 
 " Full lustily these ladies all in fere^ 
 Entered within this park of most pleasere, 
 
 Where that I lay o'erhielt * with leaves rank ; 
 The merry fowles blissfullest of cheer, 
 Salute Nature, methought, on their manner, 
 
 And every bloom on branch, and eke on bank, 
 
 Opened and spread their balmy leaves dank, 
 Full low inclining to their Queen so clear, 
 
 Whom of their noble nourishing they thank." 
 
 Thereafter follow more of these studies of luxurious spec- 
 tacle and situation, which must be owned to be no mean 
 emulation of Chaucer ; and at last, just in the middle of the 
 poem, he introduces what the title indicates as its main pur- 
 pose : narrating how he was espied by the Queen of Love ; 
 how she sent her fair minions in pursuit of him — Beauty, 
 Fair Having, Fine Portraiture, Pleasance, and Lusty Cheer ; 
 how Reason defended him with her golden targe ; how his 
 assailants were reinforced; how Reason was for a time 
 overborne and the poet taken prisoner; how ^olus dis- 
 persed the brilliant gathering, and sent them all to sea 
 again ; and how he awoke and found himself in his pleas- 
 ant valley, amidst soft air and tender sunshine, with the 
 birds singing merrily around him. He ends off with a pan- 
 egyric of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, and a modest ad- 
 dress to his own " little Quhair," his humble book. With 
 all its transparent artificiality, the ingenious author had no 
 small reason to be proud of it. He was an imitator of 
 forms that had lost the freshness of youth, and he belonged 
 to a nation never conspicuous for softness and delicacy ; 
 yet he could send forth his book with a feeling that he had 
 made a very creditable contribution to the mediaeval play 
 of fancy and study of form and colour. 
 
 The " Golden Targe " was obviously, as we have said, 
 one of his most ambitious and laboured compositions. 
 Another allegory, which was reprinted in ' Brydges's Resti- 
 
 1 Company. ^ O'ershielded. 
 
134 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 tuta ' with a very high encomium, is called the " Thistle and 
 the Rose." This was written in 1503, to celebrate the 
 marriage of King James IV. with the Princess Margaret of 
 England ; and a very ingenious and flattering epithalamium 
 it is. After an elaborate description of the usual May 
 morning, the poet makes Dame Nature summon before her 
 the birds and the beasts, the flowers and the herbs. In deli- 
 cate flattery of his patron, the red lion rampant is described 
 as a most terrible beast ; and receives Nature's injunctions 
 to extend his protection to the inferior kinds — 
 " Exerce justice with mercy and conscience, 
 
 And let no small beast suffer scathe ne scorns 
 Of greate beasts that been of more puissance ; 
 Do law alike to apes and unicorns, 
 And let no bowgle ^ with his boisteous horns 
 The meek plough-ox oppress, for all his pride. 
 But in the yoke go peaceable. him beside." 
 
 When Queen Nature comes to the flowers, she looks with 
 profound respect upon " the awful Thistle," and his environ- 
 ing " bush of spears," and bids him maintain order among 
 the herbs and flowers like a discreet king as he is. In par- 
 ticular is the Thistle told to honour the fresh Rose ; and 
 under the symbol of that flower, the poet celebrates in 
 most flattering stanzas the " blissful angelic beauty " of the 
 Princess Margaret. 
 
 In the moral apologue of the Merle (or Blackbird) and 
 the Nightingale, we have an example of the same species 
 of composition as Chaucer's Cuckoo and Nightingale. The 
 Nightingale, however, is no longer the representative of 
 chivalrous love as opposed to the vulgar love of the Cuckoo. 
 She represents the love of God in antagonism to the love of 
 earthly creatives, symbolised by the Blackbird. The follow- 
 ing are the opening stanzas : — 
 
 " In May, as that Aurora did upspring 
 
 With crystal eyen chasing the cloudes sable, 
 I heard a Merle with merry notes sing 
 A song of love with voice right comfortable, 
 
 1 Buffalo. 
 
WILLIAM DUNBAR. 1 35 
 
 Against the orient beames amiable, 
 Upon a blissful branch of laurel green ; 
 
 This was her sentence sweet and delectable, 
 A lusty life in Loves service been. 
 
 Under this branch ran down a river bright, 
 
 Of balmy liquor, crystalline of hue. 
 Against the heavenly azure skyes light ; 
 
 Where did upon the tother side pursue 
 
 A Nightingale with sugared notes new. 
 Whose angel feathers as the peacock shone : 
 
 This was her song and of a sentence true, 
 All love is lost but upon God alone." 
 
 It would appear that the Scotchman had never seen a 
 nightingale in the course of his wanderings. His opposition 
 of religious love to love in general, and his alienation of 
 the nightingale from chivalrous love, shows the spirit of 
 the friar predominating over the spirit of knighthood. Dun- 
 bar has none of the chivalrous feeling of Barbour or of King 
 James. 
 
 In the above extracts we have specimens of the sweet 
 moods of Dunbar's rugged good-humoured Scotch nature. 
 He shows little inclination for the loftier flights of poetry : 
 he had not the soaring genius of Burns. Partly, this is 
 owing to his natural easy temperament ; partly, no doubt, 
 to his circumstances. There was little encouragement to 
 soar in writing for the Court of James IV., among jealous 
 rivals ready to pounce with keen sarcasm and hearty mad- 
 cap derision upon any attempt at fine composition. All 
 Dunbar's attempts in the way of serious sublime writing are 
 upon religious themes. He has a hymn on the Nativity, 
 another on the Resurrection, and a curiously-rhymed "Ballet 
 of our Lady." His hymn on the Nativity is commonplace 
 and uninspired in comparison with Milton's. The follow- 
 ing is one of the best stanzas : — 
 
 " Celestial fowles in the air 
 
 Sing with your notes upon height ! 
 
 In firthes and in forests fair 
 
 Be mirthful now at all your might ! 
 
 For passed is your doleful night ; 
 
136 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 Aurora has the cloudes pierct 
 The sun is risen with gladsome light, 
 Et nobis Puer natus est." ^ 
 
 Undoubtedly the most striking quality in Dunbar's poems 
 and ballads is his wild Scotch humour — the humour of ro- 
 bust nerves, delighting in extravagantly ludicrous concep- 
 tions of exalted things, and dealing hard knocks to persons 
 without malice, and with the redeeming consciousness of 
 being prepared to receive the same in return. It is only 
 under the afflatus of this spirit that his imagination is rapt 
 up and hurried on beyond its usual sober pace. His other 
 productions are comparatively cold-blooded and mechanical 
 — mere exercises of skill. 
 
 The bedlamite philosophy of his wilder moods is ex- 
 pressed in the following stanza, which concludes a poem 
 designed to express the folly of having money without en- 
 joyment : — 
 
 " Now all this time let us be merry. 
 And setnot by this world a cherry: 
 
 Now while there is good wine to sell. 
 He that does on dry bread worry 
 I give him to the Devil of Hell." 
 
 The last expression is an instance of his habit of making 
 humorously free with dread ideas and personages. He does 
 so very frequently. He is especially familiar with the enemy 
 of mankind and his myrmidons, and credits them with many 
 a ludicrous prank. His " Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins," 
 set agoing in hell by " Auld Mahoun," ^ is a phantasmagoric 
 extravagance as wild and grim as could well be conceived : 
 mirth could not well be more demoniacally riotous. It 
 is totally different in purpose from Langland's "Vision 
 of the Seven Deadly Sins ; " there is not the faintest sus- 
 picion of a moral in it. Even the fast and furious " splore " 
 of the " Jolly Beggars " is less fantastic. Pride, Ire, Envy, 
 Covetousness, Idleness, Lechery, Gluttony, each with a train 
 
 1 And to us a son is bom. 
 
 ^ Mahomet, a synonym for the arch-enemy. 
 
WILLIAM DUNBAR. 1 37 
 
 of representative followers, dance in characteristic fashion 
 on the floor of their house of torment ; while fiends stand 
 by enjoying the sport, and encouraging the dance with 
 various hot applications. The Covetous vomit hot gold at 
 each other, and the fiends stand ready as they discharge 
 one shot, to fill them " new up to the throat " with another. 
 The followers of Idleness ("Sweimess") require special 
 stimulus to dance. Belial lashes them with a bridle-rein, 
 and that failing, the fiends lose patience, and try a stronger 
 measure — 
 
 " In dance they were so slow of feet. 
 They gave them in the fire a heat, 
 And made them quicker of cunnyie." 
 
 The concluding stanza of the poem is a ludicrous derision 
 of the Highlandmen, to whom the Lowlanders always had 
 a strong aversion. Mahoun sends for one of them, and has 
 a coronach sung over him, whereupon the Erse men assemble 
 and so deafen Satan with their outlandish clatter, that in a 
 fury he sinks them to " the deepest pit of hell," and smothers 
 them with smoke. It needs a strong nerve to laugh over 
 such horrors ; but to one with the requisite vigour there is 
 considerable humorous body and power in the stanza — 
 
 " Then cried Mahound for a Highland pagean : 
 Syne ran a fiend to fetch Macfadzean 
 
 Far northward in a nook ; 
 By he the coronach had done shout, 
 Erse men so gathered him about, 
 
 In hell great room they took : 
 These termagants; with tag and tatter, 
 Full loud in Erse begouth to clatter, 
 
 And roup* like raven and rook. 
 The Devil' so deaved " was with their yell. 
 That in the deepest pit of hell 
 
 He smothered them with smoke." 
 
 Dunbar is no less free in his ridicule of persons. He and 
 another poet, Walter Kennedy, in the enjoyment of their 
 gift of rhyme and metre, amused themselves and the Court 
 I Croak. 2 Deafened. 
 
138 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 generally with a pitched battle of " flyting " or vituperation. 
 They are said to have been very good friends, and to have 
 abused each other purely in sport, as was done by the 
 Italian poets Luigi Pulci and Matteo Franco ; but friend- 
 ship put no restraint upon their tongues ; they could hardly 
 have been more abusive if they had been in virulent earnest. 
 They threw into the struggle their whole wealth of gross 
 epithets, and neither of them was poor in the commodity. 
 It is hardly worth while to quote any of this curious amuse- 
 ment. Dunbar found better subjects for his humorous 
 derision in Andro Kennedy and the Abbot of Tungland. 
 Mr Andro seems to have been a graceless and inveterate 
 wine-bibber, and Dunbar writes a testament for him in lines 
 of four accents, alternated with the formularies of a will 
 and shreds of the breviary in Latin. The old sinner is 
 made to leave his soul to his lord's wine-cellar, and his 
 body to a brewer's dunghill. He will have no decorous 
 funeral, but a rout of his own boon companions, drinking 
 and weeping, as he had been wont to do, and preceded by 
 two rustics with a barrel slung on a pole. No anthem is to 
 be chanted over his grave, no bell to be rung, but he must 
 be buried to a " spring " on the bagpipes : and instead of a 
 cross by his side, he must have four flagons of sack to 
 frighten away the fiends.'- 
 
 On the poor Abbot of Tungland, Dunbar is still more 
 severe. The Abbot was one Damian, a naturalised French 
 physician, a bold, boastful, ingenious fellow, who undertook 
 to transmute metals into gold, and to fly in the air, and who 
 
 ^ " I will no Priestes for me sing 
 
 Dies ilia, dies irce ; 
 Nor yet no belles for me ring 
 
 Sicut semper solet fieri I 
 But a bagpipe to play a spring, 
 
 Et unuTfi ale wisp ante me : 
 Instead of banners for to bring 
 
 Qvatuor lagenas cervisim : 
 Within the grave to set such thing 
 
 In modum. crucis juxta me. 
 To fley the fiends, then buirdly sing 
 
 £>e terra palmasti me." 
 
GAWAIN DOUGLAS. 1 39 
 
 succeeded in keeping the king's favour and getting Church 
 preferment before Dunbar in spite of all his failures. The 
 poet's device is to make him figure in wonderfully ludicrous 
 dreams. In one vision he appears hand in hand with a 
 person in the habit of St Francis, who turns out to be the 
 Devil, and vanishes "with stink and fiery smoke." In 
 another, in ridicule of his attempt to fly, he is represented 
 as soaring into the air " as ane horrible griffoun," meeting 
 with a she-dragon in the clouds, and begetting the Anti- 
 christ. But he is assailed most openly and licentiously of 
 all in the " Feigned Friar of Tungland : " he there mounts 
 into the air much to the astonishment and speculation of 
 the regular winged denizens, and, as a strange new bird, 
 becomes a mark for most ludicrous and coarse indignities. 
 
 When we read Dunbar's " Twa Married Women and the 
 Widow," and his burlesque " Jousts between the Tailor and 
 the Shoemaker," we become less and less surprised that the 
 poet never rose to the dignity of the mitre. Humour no- 
 where runs riot in madder intoxication than in his pages. 
 His appetite for mirth is unbounded, — Brobdingnagian. 
 He turns the world topsy-turvy : seizes on the most vener- 
 able and dreadful things,- and dances them about on the top 
 of their head. He subjects his rivals to imaginary indig- 
 nities with all the freedom and zest of Aristophanes : he 
 burlesques the services of the Church ; and as a crowning 
 variation of the sober march of ordinary life, visits hell that 
 he may revel with Satan and his imps in their glee over the 
 tortures of the damned. 
 
 4. Gawain Douglas (1475-1522). 
 
 This remarkable poet, of a house of illustrious warriors 
 and politicians, .was the third son of Archibald, the sixth 
 and "great" Earl of Angus. He was educated for the 
 Church, and presented to the bishopric of Dunkeld in 1515. 
 Armed force had to be used before he obtained possession 
 of his sacred ofEca In these turbulent times his birth 
 proved fatal to him. His nephew, the Earl of Angus, 
 
I40 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 having married the queen-mother, he became involved in 
 political troubles, and had to take refuge in England, where 
 he died of the plague in 1522. Though Douglas had lofty 
 notions of pubHc duty, he was not a fighting churchman : 
 his implication in politics was the inevitable result of his 
 connections, and he strove to act the part of a dignified 
 peace-maker. His poems were written before his nomina- 
 tion to a bishopric. In his youth he translated Ovid De 
 Remedio Amoris; — but the work has not been preserved. 
 " King Heart,'' an allegory of the various good and evil 
 sentiments that strive for possession of the human heart, 
 is referred to the same period. The " Palace of Honour," 
 a rich vision of desert wildernesses, pleasant plains, proces- 
 sions, elaborate architecture, gods, goddesses, heroes, and 
 heroines, was completed in 1501, two years before the pub- 
 lication of Dunbar's " Golden Targe:" it is written in the 
 same nine-line stanza. His translation of the ^neid into 
 heroic couplets was composed in eighteen months, from 
 January 1512 to July 1513. 
 
 Each of the Books of the ^neid, as well as the Thirteenth 
 Book added by Mafifeus, is furnished by the translator with 
 a prologue : and it is generally agreed that these prologues 
 are the most favourable specimens of his ability. Most of 
 them are disquisitions of a religious and moral nature, as 
 became his reverend character ; but those prefixed to the 
 Seventh, the Twelfth, and the Thirteenth Books, describe 
 the season of the year in which they were begun — a winter 
 day, a May morning, and a June sunset. These scenical 
 studies are remarkable for magnificent opulence of detail 
 and strength of colour. In the prologue to the Twelfth Book 
 in particular, he seems to have braced himself for a final 
 effort, and resolved to gather together every personifica- 
 tion of the phenomena of morning — -every appearance of 
 sky, cloud, earth, and water— every attitude of every herb, 
 flower, bird, beast, and insect. Nothing is left in a state of 
 suggestion for the reader to fill up : the particulars of the 
 richly-coloured landscape are tumbled out before us with 
 unreserved profusion. It is difficult to convey an idea of 
 
GAWAIN DOUGLAS. 141 
 
 the tedious diffuseness of this description without quoting 
 the whole ; but the following few of the two hundred and 
 seventy lines are as much as we have room for : — 
 
 " And blissful blossoms in the bloomed yard ^ 
 Submits their heads in the young sun's safeguard : 
 Ive leaves rank o'erspread the barmkin ^ wall ; 
 The bloomed hawthorn clad his pikes all ; 
 Forth of fresh burgeons' the wine grapes ying 
 Along the trellis did on twistes hing ; 
 The locked buttons on the gemmed trees, 
 O'erspreading leaves of nature's tapestries ; 
 Soft grassy verdure after balmy showers 
 On curling stalkes smiling to their flowers ; 
 Beholding them so many diverse hue, 
 Some pers,* some pale, some burnet,^ and some blue, 
 Some grey, some gules, some purple, some sanguare. 
 Blanched, or brown, sauch^ yellow many are, 
 Some heavenly coloured in celestial gre/ 
 Some watery-hued as the haw ^ wally ' sea, 
 And some depart in freckles red and white. 
 Some bright as gold with aureate leaves lite. 
 The daisy did unbroad her crownal small. 
 And every flower unlapped" in the dale 
 In battled grass burgeons, the banewort wild, 
 The clover, catchook, and the camomile ; 
 The flour de lys " ' 
 
 But we need not proceed with the catalogue, nor transcribe 
 the ten or twelve lines that labour to express the fragrance 
 of the scene. The reader must imagine the effect of two 
 hundred and seventy lines on the same scale of minute 
 description. The learned Bishop had no notion of artistic 
 restraint : he poured out his stores of synonym and circum- 
 stance with immoderate prodigality. When we open his 
 Virgil, the first dozen lines of the preface astound us with 
 a torrent of eulogistic epithets addressed to the great master : 
 and this first impression of overpowering volubility is often 
 repeated in the course of perusal. He apologises for not 
 being able to render the sententious Virgil word for word — 
 
 1 Garden " Rampart. ' Sprigs. * A grey colour. 
 
 5 Dark brown. 6 Willow. ' Degree. 
 
 8 Adjective of colour. ' Wavy. 1° Unfolded. 
 
142 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 " Some time the text mun have an exposition, 
 Some time the colour will cause a little addition, 
 And some time of one word I mun make three." 
 
 And remarkable though the undertaking was, and merito- 
 rious the execution, one cannot help smiling at the Bishop's 
 notions of unfolding the effect of his compressed original. 
 He felt uneasy at the thought of leaving a condensed ex- 
 pression to make itself understood. 
 
 These diffuse descriptions give a good opportunity for 
 comparing the diction of the poet with contemporary 
 English. It is peculiarly instructive to compare his descrip- 
 tion of Winter with the opening of Sackville's " Induction " 
 in the ' Mirror for Magistrates.' ^ Three points of difference 
 are disclosed : he is fond of taking, direct from French, 
 words never received into English ; he makes considerable 
 coinages from Latin ; and his names for familiar things are 
 in many cases peculiar to Scotch and northern English. 
 These differences are more marked in Douglas than in 
 Dunbar — not so much, I believe, because Douglas was an 
 extensive innovator, as because he was so immoderately 
 copious. They would probably have used the same names 
 for the same things or ideas ; but Douglas ranged over a 
 much greater variety of particulars, and thus exposed his 
 vocabulary to view at a much greater number of points. 
 There was, however, undoubtedly a tendency among Scotch 
 writers of that and the following generation to introduce 
 new vocables from French and Latin. 
 
 An interesting contrast might be drawn between the 
 high-minded decorous Bishop and the easy-minded merry- 
 making Friar. There is an exceedingly lofty moral tone 
 in all Douglas's poetry. He carries the chivalrous zeal of 
 his family into his championship of virtue. The gist of his 
 " Palace of Honour " is that virtue is the only true chivalry: 
 
 ' Both these descriptions of winter are intended to harmonise with visits 
 to the infernal regions; Douglas has been there, and Sackville is going. 
 They proceed upon Henryson's maxim — 
 
 " Ane doleful season to ane careful dyte 
 Should correspond and be equivalent." 
 
SIR DAVID LINDSAY. 143 
 
 and he maintains the same thesis in his prologues to the 
 j^neid. He evidently had some compunctions about 
 spending his time on a translation of a pagan book ; and 
 he upholds its moral value, and the substantial resemblance 
 of VirgU's religion to Christianity, with warm argument and 
 fiery assertion. He was too strenuous a man to let his 
 conscience sleep while he engaged in stolen delights of 
 poetic imagination : he would have hung up his harp if he 
 had not been able to reconcile it with his sense of duty. 
 
 5. Sir David Lindsay (1490-1557). 
 
 Though Lindsay's poetry takes us down to the middle of 
 the sixteenth century, his most fitting place is among the 
 poets of the present chapter. He was formed almost ex- 
 clusively by their influences. While his English contem- 
 poraries, Wyatt and Surrey, received their main impulse from 
 Italy, his acknowledged masters were Chaucer, Gower, Lyd- 
 gate, Henryson, Dunbar, and Douglas. We should, how- 
 ever, be misleading were we to call him an imitator of 
 Chaucer. He used poetical forms chiefly for political and 
 social purposes ; and this being the chief motive of his pro- 
 ductions, he did not go far afield for models, but accommo- 
 dated to his own spirit such shapes as were fashionable 
 around him in the Scottish Court. He had not enough 
 disinterested enthusiasm for poetry to read the Italians, or 
 the revived Greek and Roman classics. There is no allusion 
 to Dante or Petrarch in his works, and only a second-hand 
 allusion to Boccaccio ; while of Greek and Latin classics, he 
 selects for special mention "the ornate Ennius," and Hesiod, 
 " of Greece the perfect poet sovereign." I should doubt 
 whether he was very familiar even with Chaucer : Lydgate 
 and his own Scotch predecessors would seem to have been 
 his principal reading. But it is difficult to trace obligations 
 in works that sacrifice poetical graces to practical aims. 
 Lindsay did not cultivate poetry for its own reward. His 
 poems were very famqus among his countrymen ; but they 
 
144 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 were admired not so much for their poetical charms as for 
 their powerful help to the good cause of the Reformation. 
 
 Sir David Lindsay of the Mount (his family seat in Fife- 
 shire) was a great power in the Court of James V. He had 
 been appointed gentleman-usher to that prince in 1512, 
 after a course of study at St Andrews and a visit to Italy, 
 and he never lost the favour that he established with his 
 youthful charge. He was knighted and made Lion King 
 of Arms in 1530, was employed as an ambassador, and re- 
 presented the burgh of Cupar in four successive Parliaments 
 from 1543 to 1546. But above all, he was allowed the ut- 
 most freedom of pen ; and was tolerated in trenchant abuse 
 and biting satire of the Church, as well as in very frank ad- 
 vice to the king himself Most of his poems — the " Dream" 
 (1528); the "Testament of the Papingo" (1530); "A 
 Satire of the Three Estates " (1535) ; the " Complaint of the 
 King's Auld Hound Bagsche" (1536); "Kitty's Confes- 
 sion" (1549) — make a free distribution of blows, cuts, and 
 stings among ecclesiastics and courtiers. 
 
 The parts of royal favourite and Church reformer have 
 not much natural affinity : it must be rare to find the two 
 combined in one person. Lindsay had a good many hu- 
 manities in him that one does not expect to find in the ac- 
 tive antagonist of an established faith. He was an eminently 
 genial man. When we read how he nursed and amused his 
 young master, we do not wonder that he was beloved and 
 favoured in return. In the epistle to his " Dream," he re- 
 minds the king as follows : — 
 
 " When thou was young I bore ye in mine arm 
 Full tenderly, till thou begouth to gang,^ 
 And in thy bed oft happit ' thee full warm, 
 With lute in hand, syne sweetly to thee sang : 
 Sometime, in dancing, feiraly' I flang ; 
 And,, sometime, playand farces on the floor ; 
 And, sometime, on mine office takand cure : 
 
 And, sometime, like a fiend transfigurate ; 
 And, sometime, like the grisly ghost of gye ; * 
 
 ' Began to go. ^ Covered. ' Wonderfully. * ? 
 
SIR DAVID LINDSAY. 145 
 
 In divers forms, oft times, disfigurate ; 
 And, sometime, disaguised full pleasantly." 
 
 Most undignified relaxation for a Church reformer. The 
 reminiscences of the " Complaint " bring up other particulars 
 of this romping and affectionate relationship ; disclosing the 
 young prince astride the gentleman-usher's neck, or borne 
 on his back like a chapman's pack, or urging with imperfect 
 articulation — " p|, da lyn," Play, David Lindsay, upon the 
 lute. There were also many tales told of Hector, Arthur, 
 Alexander, Caesar, Jason, Troilus, sieges of Tyre, Thebes, and 
 Troy, prophecies of Merlin, Bede, and Thomas the Rhymer. 
 Lindsay was evidently no narrow Puritan in his notions of 
 training young royalty. He has left also among his works 
 one unmistakable evidence of the breadth of his sympathies 
 — his " History of a noble and valiant squire, William Mel- 
 drum," written, not in his green youth, when feats of arms 
 and amorous adventures are most likely to captivate, but in 
 1550, when he had reached the mature age of sixty. It 
 certainly is remarkable that the historian of Squire Meldrum 
 should have been with Knox at St Andrews in 1547, acting 
 as one of the Reformer's most urgent supporters ; and should 
 have written the grave morality of the " Monarchy " in 1553. 
 The great body of his verses, however, bore on practical 
 life. While the kindly exuberance of spirits that made 
 him so delightful a playmate for the infant prince gave viva- 
 city and verve to all his compositions, and spread their pop- 
 ularity far and wide, the substance of them was moral and 
 political ; amusement was not their end and aim, but a means 
 to secure goodwill for the underlying doctrines. The siege 
 of the Papingo's (parrot's) deathbed by her kind friends the 
 Magpie, the Raven, and the Kite, was amusing enough ; but 
 the fact that the Magpie represented a " canon regular," the 
 Raven a black monk, and the Kite a holy friar, excited 
 a much keener interest than if the fable had symbolised 
 nothing but the greed of legacy-hunters in general. The 
 " Satire of the Three Estates," though incUned to be tedious 
 from its inordinate length, was very entertaining as a mo- 
 rality-play ; but it must have owed its main attractions to 
 
 K 
 
146 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 its bearings on what was in immediate agitation throughout 
 the kingdom. And, to take his attempt at a " tragedy," — 
 in Lydgate's sense and not in Marlowe's — the fall of Car- 
 dinal Beaton was impressive merely as an illustration of the 
 caprice of Fortune ; but Lindsay would not have undertaken 
 to make a poem on the subject, had he not been desirous 
 to impress his countrymen with the crimes that led to the 
 Cardinal's overthrow. 
 
 One might select from the ornamental fringes to Lind- 
 say's satirical verse occasional passages of genuine poetical 
 enthusiasm, in which he has suspended and forgotten his 
 didactic, and done his best to express the situation. His 
 " Dream " is the earliest and most poetical of his works ; in 
 it his satirical aims were considerably abashed and qualified 
 by emulation of his models, and it contains passages that 
 will bear comparison with anything, in his Scotch prede- 
 cessors. Take, for instance, part of his description of Win- 
 ter in the prologue. It is fit and proper that the strength 
 of both Douglas and Lindsay, these last survivors of the 
 Chaucerian school, should lie in the description of winter. 
 Douglas wrote nothing superior to his prologue to the 
 Seventh Book of his translation, and Lindsay wrote nothing 
 superior to the following. He has walked out well wrapt 
 up in cloak and hood, with " double shoen " on his feet, and 
 " mittens " on his hands : — ■ 
 
 " I met Dame Flora, in dule' weed disaguised, 
 Whilk into May was dulce and delectable ; 
 With stalwart storms her sweetness was surprised ; 
 Her heavenly hues were turned into sable, 
 Whilk umwhile were to lovers amiable. 
 Fled from the frost the tender flowers I saw, 
 Under Dame Nature's mantle lurking law." 
 
 The small fowles in flockes saw I flee, 
 To Nature, making great lamentation : 
 They lighted down beside me, on a tree ; 
 Of their complaint I had compassion ; 
 And with a piteous exclamation, 
 
 1 Doleful. 2 Lo^, 
 
SIR DAVID LINDSAY. 147 
 
 They said — Blessed be Summer with his flowers, 
 And waryed ^ be thou, Winter, with thy showers. 
 
 Alas, Aurora ! the silly lark gan cry, 
 Where hast thou left thy balmy liquor sweet. 
 That us rejoiced, we mounting in the sky ? 
 Thy silver drops are turned into sleet. 
 
 fair Phoebus, where is thy wholesome heat ? 
 Why tholes ^ thou thy heavenly pleasant face 
 With misty vapours to be obscured, alace ! 
 
 Where art thou, May, with June, thy sister sheen. 
 Well bordered with daisies of delight ? 
 And gentle July, with thy mantle green, 
 Enamelled with roses red and white ? 
 Now old and cold Januar, in despite, 
 Reaves from us all pastime and pleasure. 
 Alas ! what gentle heart may this endure ? 
 
 O'ersoiled are with cloudes odious 
 The golden skyes of the orient, 
 Changing in sorrow our song melodious, 
 Whilk we had wont to sing with good intent. 
 Resounding to the heavenes firmament : 
 But now our day is changed into night. 
 With that they rose and flew out of my sight." 
 
 In the course of his dream, Lindsay is conducted by Re- 
 membrance — not so very appropriate a personification in 
 this case — to hell, but his description of it is entirely subor- 
 dinate to satirical purposes, and contains about as little 
 grandeur as could possibly be thrown into any verses on the 
 situation. He proceeds at once to the popes, emperors, 
 cardinals, prelates, priors, abbots, friars, monks, clerks, 
 priests, and " bings " or heaps of all sorts of churchmen, 
 and specifies the causes of their perdition with an eye to 
 personages still in the land of the living. Lindsay probably 
 took the idea of this visit to the nether regions from Doug- 
 las's translation of the .^neid. - 
 
 1 Cursed. ^ Endurest. 
 
148 CHAUCER'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 6. North-Country Ballad-Makers. 
 
 The border-land between England and Scotland was the 
 scene of many tragedies — of daring exploits, violent outrages, 
 fierce acts of vengeance ; and the feuds, loves, and humours 
 of the robust Borderers, if they found no great poet to com- 
 memorate them, found many sympathetic minstrels whose 
 simple and often powerful verses were committed by oral 
 recitation to the memories of the common folk. It was not 
 till the middle of last century that any attempt was made to 
 collect and print these popular treasures, and consequently 
 we cannot be sure that we have any pieces as old as the 
 fourteenth or even the fifteenth century in their original 
 form. They must have been more or less modernised, if 
 not otherwise altered, as they passed from minstrel to min- 
 strel, and from one generation of reciters to another. Still, 
 there is reason to believe that there were current in the 
 North Country during those centuries, ballads upon most of 
 the themes in our extant ballad-literature : Border battles 
 such as- Chevy Chase and Otterbume ; freebooting raids 
 by such heroes as Kinmont Willie and William of Cloudesly ; 
 outrages such as that committed by Edom of Gordon ; tragi- 
 cal jealousy, love between the children of enemies, love be- 
 tween high and low, stepmother cruelty, deadly mistakes, 
 such as we find in the ballads of Young Waters, Helen of 
 Kirkconnell, Clerk Saunders, the Child of Elle, Annie of 
 Lochroyan, Gil Morice, and many others ; the mysterious 
 dealings of fairies with such heroes as Tamlane and True 
 Thomas. In short, there circulated in that wild border-land 
 in the ballad form, and steeped in a superstitious atmosphere 
 of thrilling omens and apparitions, such tales as afterwards 
 formed the material of English tragedy and the romantic 
 drama. And yet two curious things are to be remarked : 
 that the North Country never produced a great dramatist ; 
 and that no great English drama, with the exception, per- 
 haps, of Macbeth, was based upon the incidents commemo- 
 rated in these ballads. 
 
149 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 Most of the poets discussed in this chapter received their 
 main impulse from Italy. We have seen how the impulse 
 given by Chaucer directly and through his immediate dis- 
 ciples gradually died away, sinking into the inane repetitions 
 of Hawes, or awakening the more individual energies of 
 Skelton or Lindsay, who paid only a formal allegiance to 
 the ruling powers, and substantially followed their own 
 personal will ; and we have now to deal with a more varied 
 literature, which was largely influenced by the study of 
 Italian. Not that only Italian influences were operative on 
 the writers embraced in this chapter, but these were the 
 main influences. Nor did our poets follow at the heels of 
 Italian masters with slavish imitation : still, they received 
 from Italian masters their most potent stimulus. Wyatt, 
 Surrey, Sackville, Gascoigne, and even Spenser, while 
 preserving their individual and national characteristics, 
 formed themselves upon Italian models much more than 
 upon any previous productions of the English imagination. 
 Tottel's Miscellany, published in 1557, but containing 
 the poetical efforts of the preceding quarter of a century, 
 marks an epoch in English poetry. A collection of songs 
 and sonnets by the courtiers of Henry VIII., it is a fit 
 spring prelude to the great Elizabethan season : of some- 
 what uncertain glory like April itself, struggling out with its 
 sunshine and bird-singing through clouds and rain, yet on 
 the whole victorious in hiding the rotten wrecks of winter 
 
ISO RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 with fresh vegetation. It was a hopeful thing for those 
 days that the enthusiasm of poetry had seized upon the 
 Court : before this time, though several noblemen had 
 extended their patronage to poets, no person of rank in 
 England had endeavoured to sing for himself The new 
 " courtly makers," as Puttenham calls them, of whom the two 
 chiefs were Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Earl of Surrey, 
 had " travelled into Italy, and there tasted the sweet and 
 stately measures and style of the Italian poesy," and came 
 home filled with" the zeal of " novices newly crept out of 
 the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch." Love was 
 the natural theme of these ardent disciples of the gay 
 science ; and Petrarch was their model. Tottel's Miscellany 
 is our first collection of love-lyrics : and after the droning 
 narratives and worn-out rhymes of Lydgate and Hawes, the 
 "depured streams," "golden beams," and "fiery leams," 
 these eloquent and freshly-worded complaints of the malice 
 and treachery of Cupid are a blessed relief. 
 
 It is not hard to discern general causes that must have 
 favoured this brilUant efflorescence of English genius. The 
 case of James I. of Scotland shows that a century before 
 the time of Henry VIII., the royal families at least received 
 some sort of literary education. But if we may trust the 
 statement of Erasmus, it was not till the end of the fifteenth 
 century and the beginning of the sixteenth that the English 
 nobility began to be solicitous about the education of their 
 children, and to engage as tutors the most eminent scholars 
 that were to be procured. We may therefore suppose that 
 about the middle of the reign of Henry VIII. , our " young 
 barbarians " began to revel in the spirit of newly-acquired 
 freedom from ignorance, and like the French after the 
 Revolution, thirsted for an outlet to their energy. Their 
 king had been educated under Skelton, a poet, however 
 eccentric, and had imbibed among his many accomplish- 
 ments a love for the generous arts. The cultivation of 
 poetry at the Court of Scotland might have shamed them 
 into exertion ; but abroad they had in the brilliant Court of 
 Lorenzo de Medici the traditions of a nobler example to 
 
SIR THOMAS WYATT. 151 
 
 excite their emulation. The interest of literary Europe had 
 for some time centred in Italy. The tutors of the young 
 English nobility had gone there to study the ancient classics 
 under masters whose patient enthusiasm had gained the key 
 to those treasures ; and coming home brimful of the Italian 
 scenery and the Italian manners, as well as the wonderful 
 old learning, had created among their pupils a imiversal 
 desire to travel into this Land of Promise, and see its mar- 
 vels with their own eyes. And there the youthful travellers 
 found and brought to England with them a treasure more 
 valuable even than had been imported by their sage instruc- 
 tors : they found a new literature, palpitating with fresh life, 
 and they were fired with ambition to emulate its beauties in 
 their own tongue. This secondary and accidental result of 
 the revival of learning was of more value to our literature 
 than the primary movement itself: the most profound and 
 wide-reaching impulses come from living sources. 
 
 Why poetry at the Court of Henry took the form of songs 
 and sonnets is a more perplexing question. Petrarch was 
 probably known to Chaucer and to Lydgate ; but they were 
 not moved by his example. I can venture on no deeper 
 explanation than that Petrarch suited the taste of Wyatt 
 and Surrey as Boccaccio suited the taste of Chaucer and 
 Lydgate. One might speculate at length and plausibly on 
 the why and the wherefore, but with httle satisfaction to 
 one's self and probably less to one's readers. Among the 
 poets included in this chapter most of the great Italians 
 found congenial disciples: Sackville studied Dante; Gas- 
 coigne translated from the plays of Ariosto and the prose 
 tales of Bandello ; and Spenser owed considerable obliga- 
 tions to the romantic epics of Ariosto and Tasso. I do 
 not see that you can account for the choice of master 
 except by supposing a natural affinity in the individual pupil. 
 
 I.— Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1541). 
 
 The names of Surrey and Wyatt are usually placed 
 together as two great reformers of English verse, and often 
 
1 52 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 in such a way as to convey the impression that Wyatt was 
 the humble friend and imitator of Surrey. A close atten- 
 tion to dates and other circumstances leads us to reverse 
 this position of the " chieftains." Whoever was the first of 
 Henry's "courtly makers," it seems tolerably clear that 
 Wyatt was the poetical father and not the pupil of Surrey. 
 Wyatt was born in 1503. He was admitted to St John's 
 College, Cambridge, in 1515, the year before the supposed 
 date of Surrey's birth. In 1525, when Surrey was nine 
 years old, and was living at Kenninghall under the care of 
 a tutor, Wyatt took a leading part in a great feat of arms 
 at Greenwich, and was a favourite of Henry on account 
 of his wit. There is a tradition that shortly afterwards he 
 went to travel in Italy ; but this fact does not rest on con- 
 temporary authority. In 1537 he was sent as ambassador 
 to the Court of Charles V. in Spain — Surrey's age at this 
 time being twenty-one. Seeing that from 1537 till his pre- 
 mature death in 1541, Wyatt was with short intervals closely 
 occupied in public business, we may reasonably presume 
 that most of his poetry was written before 1537 ; we may 
 at least be certain that he had studied French, Italian, and 
 Spanish, and had begun the practice of poetry, before that 
 date. If we suppose Surrey to have been the prime mover 
 of Wyatt's literary activity, we must suppose that accom- 
 plished young nobleman's influence on his senior to have 
 begun at a very early age, and to have worked its perfect 
 work before he was one-and-twenty. The thing is not per- 
 haps impossible ; but it is much more likely that the influ- 
 ence proceeded the other way. In proof thereof, we may 
 notice that Surrey addresses Wyatt with the reverence of a 
 pupil, thus — 
 
 " But I that knew what harboured in that head, 
 What virtues rare were tempered in that breast, 
 Honour the place that such a jewel bred, 
 And kiss the ground whereas thy corse doth rest. 
 
 A head where wisdom mysteries did frame ; 
 Whose hammers beat still in that lively brain, 
 
SIR THOMAS WYATT. 153 
 
 As on a stithe : where that some work of fame 
 Was daily wrought, to turn to Britain's gain. 
 
 A hand that taught what might be said in rhyme : 
 That reft Chaucer the glory of his wit." 
 
 In another of Surrey's sonnets, entitled " A Praise of Sir 
 Thomas Wyatt the elder, for his excellent learning," Wyatt 
 is compared to the deified heroes who introduced arts " in 
 the rude age when knowledge was not rife;" and putting 
 together the praises bestowed on him by Surrey and others, 
 the dates of his life, and the known character of the man, 
 we need have little doubt that Wyatt was the first of Henry's 
 courtly makers, and the initiator of the new movement in 
 English poetry. Surrey's brilliant character, romantic life, 
 and untimely fate, must not be allowed to rob his humbler 
 friend of due honour.^ Wyatt had more natural affinity 
 with certain parts of the Southern character. His outward 
 features, his " visage stern but mild," — dark complexion, 
 long grave face, and retreating forehead — do not belong to 
 a common English type. He was probably selected as am- 
 bassador to the Spanish Court because his manners were 
 suited to the position. His poems abound in non-English 
 characteristics ; grave dignity and sweetness, delicate irony, 
 
 1 Dr Nott's account of the relations between Wyatt and Surrey is exceed- 
 ingly hazy and inconsistent. He supposes Wyatt to have adopted the 
 iambic (that is, the fall of the accent regularly on every second syllable) 
 from Surrey ; yet he also supposes certain poems in this metre to have been 
 addressed to Anne Boleyn, and to have been written before 1530, when 
 Surrey was only thirteen years old. He contends that Wyatt's versification 
 became smoother after he was in contact with Surrey, and that they trans- 
 lated certain sonnets together as it were for practice : yet one of those 
 sonnets (which we shall presently quote) is perhaps; the most irregular of 
 all that Wyatt wrote. Mr Guest also, usually an indisputable authority, 
 is here found inadvertent. He makes Surrey the great leader in introduc- 
 ing new forms, ascribing to him the first use of the banded three-line stave, 
 of ottava rima, and of the sonnet. Yet Surrey never used ottava rima at all : 
 and in another place, Mr Guest assigns a stave of one of Wyatt's odes to 
 the year 1520, at which time Surrey was only four years old. The prime 
 cause of all these mistakes about the relations of the two poets is the fact 
 of Surrey's name appearing first on the title-page of Tottel's collection, 
 which was probably out of compliment to his rank. 
 
154 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 temperate gaiety, absence of incontinent excitement under 
 the influence of strong feeling. This greater natural affinity 
 with his models, is the cause both of his being and of his 
 appearing less original than Surrey, at the same time that it 
 fitted him to lead the way in appropriating a vein of love- 
 poetry new to English verse. 
 
 There is perhaps no better way of bringing out the self- 
 controlled gravity of Wyatt's spirit than comparing him with 
 the more excitable and demonstrative Surrey in their trans- 
 lations of the same sonnet. They will illustrate at the same 
 time another thing, and that is how thoroughly translators 
 colour originals with their own feelings. The run of the 
 thoughts being the same, we might easily overlook this ; 
 but after a minute study and patient reaUsation of the effect 
 of every epithet, the lines, which remain dead to the casual 
 reader, come to life and assert their individuality and differ- 
 ence of origin. Take the two in succession : — 
 
 Wyatt. 
 
 " The long love that in my thought I harbour. 
 And in my heart doth keep his residence. 
 Into my face presseth with bold pretence, 
 
 And there campeth, displaying his banner. 
 
 She that me learns to love and to suifer, 
 And wills that my trust, and lust's negligence 
 Be reined by reason, shame, and reverence. 
 
 With his hardiness takes displeasure. 
 
 Wherewith Love to the heart's forest he fleeth. 
 Leaving his enterprise with pain and cry. 
 
 And there him hideth and not appeareth. 
 
 What may I do when my master feareth. 
 But in the field with him to live and die? 
 For good is the life ending faithfully." 
 
 Surrey. 
 
 " Love that liveth and reigneth in my thought. 
 That built his seat within my captive breast. 
 Clad in the arms wherein with me he fought. 
 Oft in my face he doth his banner rest. 
 
SIR THOMAS WYATT. IS J 
 
 She that me taught to love and suffer pain, 
 
 My doubtful hope and eke my hot desire 
 With shamefast cloak to shadow and refrain, 
 
 Her smiling face converteth straight to ire. 
 And coward Love then to the heart apace 
 
 Taketh his flight, whereas he lurks and plains 
 His purpose lost, and dare not show his face. 
 
 For my lord's guilt thus faultless bide I pains. 
 Yet from my lord shall not my foot remove ; 
 Sweet is his death that takes his end by love." 
 
 Now compare the two versions as regards their predominant 
 spirit. The master of Wyatt's heart has long held dominion 
 there, but fears to encounter the all-conquering lady : at last 
 he musters confidence, presses boldly forward into the face 
 " and there campeth, displaying his banner." A long period 
 of quiescence is suddenly broken by a grand imposing move- 
 ment. Surrey's tjrrant is more energetic ; he strikes us as a 
 more stirring blustering fellow ; he reigns actively, he has 
 built a seat, he has the insignia of power about him ; and as 
 soon as he has conquered the heart, he often sallies out and 
 makes a show against the dreaded enemy. Whereas Wyatt's 
 master is normally reserved and hesitating, and rouses him- 
 self to one grand effort, Surrey's master is restlessly active. 
 When Wyatt's master does resolve to move, he fortifies him- 
 self in a camp, and unfolds his colours firmly; Surrey's 
 master seems to be always fiddling in and out with his ban- 
 ner. When we study their behaviour after the lady's angry 
 look has put them to flight, we find the same contrast. 
 Compare the three following lines in Surrey's sonnet with 
 the corresponding three in Wyatt's — 
 
 " And coward Love then to the heart apace 
 
 Taketh his flight, whereas he lurks and plains 
 His purpose lost, and dare not show his face." 
 
 Wyatt's Love, when resolution fails him, retreats with inarti- 
 culate cry, and hides himself as it were in a forest : Surrey's 
 Love, with the epithet " coward " on his back, lurks about 
 bemoaning his failure. It is a small but important element 
 in the effect that in the one sonnet Love's brief challenge 
 
156 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 in the face is an " enterprise," undertaken after long misgiv- 
 ing, and abandoned with inarticulate despair : while in the 
 other it is simply a " purpose,", often entered upon, and 
 often departed from with demonstrative timidity. 
 
 Wyatt's poems are full of melancholy, dispersed some- 
 times by a firmer and more confident mood, but frequently 
 deepening into bitterness. The poet has suffered much at 
 the hands of Cupid — " his old dear enemy, his froward 
 master." His youth has been shamefully abused by false- 
 hood. He has been made a filing instrument to sharpen 
 the advances of another. His mistress has been taken from 
 him by a wealthier rival. If this, however, was his only 
 passion,! he must have suffered a great deal before it came 
 to this end. Sometimes armed sighs stopped his way when 
 he had resolved to pray to her for comfort ; sometimes his 
 traitorous tongue betrayed him at a critical moment, and 
 refused to proceed with his suit. He was constrained to 
 cry for death or mercy. His bed was wet with his tears ; 
 the snows could not redress his heat, and the sun could not 
 abate his cold. He compares his love to the Alps — 
 
 " Like unto these immeasurable mountains 
 So is my painful life the burden of ire : 
 For high be they and high is my desire : 
 And I of tears and they be full of fountains." 
 
 He calls on woods, hills, and vales, to resound his plaints : 
 he finds a voice for his anguish in the huge oaks that roar 
 in the wind. His very life threatens to give way, if he re- 
 ceive no comfort — 
 
 " So feeble is the thread, that doth the burden stay, 
 Of my poor life : in heavy plight that falleth in decay : 
 That but it have elsewhere some aid or some succours, 
 The running spindle of my fate anon shall end his course." 
 
 1 He complains that May was a peculiarly unhappy month to him : and 
 seeing that Anne Boleyn was executed in May, and was certainly taken 
 possession of by a more powerful man than Wyatt, Dr Nott conjectures 
 that she was the mistress of our poet's heart. We English take things so 
 seriously that we cannot suppose Wyatt's mistress to have been imaginary, 
 or to have given him no just ground for his many complaints of her 
 cruelty. 
 
SIR THOMAS WYATT. 157 
 
 By-and-by, in the depth of his agonies, he shows some re- 
 sentment against his unkind mistress — 
 
 " What rage is this ? what furor ? of what kind ? 
 What power, what plague, doth weary thus my mind ? 
 Within my bones to rankle is assigned 
 What poison pleasant sweet ? 
 
 Lo, see, mine eyes flow with continual tears : 
 The body still away sleepless it wears : 
 My food nothing my fainting strength repairs. 
 Nor doth my limbs sustain. 
 
 In deep wide wound, the deadly stroke doth turn, 
 To cureless scar that never shall return. 
 Go to : triumph : rejoice thy goodly turn : 
 Thy friend thou dost oppress. 
 
 Oppress thou dost, and hast of him no cure : 
 Nor yet my plaint no pity can procure : 
 Fierce tiger, fell, hard rock without recure, 
 Cruel rebel to Love, 
 
 Once may thou love, never beloved again : 
 So love thou still and not thy love obtain : 
 So wrathful love with spites of just disdain. 
 May fret thy cruel heart." 
 
 This resentful mood gains strength ; he begins to curse the 
 time when he first fell in love — 
 
 " When first mine eyes did view and mark. 
 Thy fair beauty for to behold ; 
 And when mine ears listened to hark 
 The pleasant words that thou me told : 
 I would as then I had been free 
 From ears to hear and eyes to see." 
 
 He complains sadly that he has been deceived and forsaken : 
 " they flee from me that sometime did me seek." He re- 
 minds himself bitterly of better days ; tortures himself with 
 rapturous memories of her visits to him in his chamber. 
 Then he makes an effort, and addresses her with resolution 
 to know the worst — 
 
158 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 " Madame, withouten many words, 
 
 Once am I sure you will or no ? 
 
 And if you will, then leave your bords. 
 
 And use your wit and show it so ; 
 
 For with a beck you shall me call. 
 
 And if of one that burns alway, 
 , Ye have pity or ruth at all, 
 
 Answer him fair with yea or nay. 
 
 If it be yea, I shall be fain : 
 
 If it be nay, friends as before. 
 
 You shall another man obtain 
 
 And I mine own and yours no more." 
 
 And finally he summons up courage to take leave of her for 
 ever ; but his courageous resolution to part friends breaks 
 down, proves to have been a self-delusion : he cannot part 
 from her with equanimity — 
 
 " My lute, awake ! perform the last 
 Labour that thou and I shall waste. 
 
 And end that I have now begun. 
 And when this song is sung and past 
 
 My lute, be still, for I have done. 
 
 Proud of the spoil that thou hast got, 
 Of simple hearts through loves shot, 
 
 By whom unkind thou hast them won ; 
 Think not he hath his bow forgot 
 
 Although my lute and I have done. 
 
 Vengeance shall fall on thy disdain, 
 That makest but game on earnest pain. 
 
 Think not alone under the sun 
 Unquit to cause thy lovers plain, 
 
 Although my lute and I have done. 
 
 May chance thee lie wither'd and old, 
 In winter nights that are so cold, 
 
 Plaining in vain unto the moon : 
 Thy wishes then dare not be told. 
 
 Care then who list, for I have done."^ 
 
 ' This may have suggested Tennyson's "Lady Clara Vere de Vere," which 
 differs considerably in tone, from its accusing the lady of presuming on her 
 rank, and its recommendation of charitable works as nobler employment 
 than flirtation. 
 
SIR THOMAS WYATT. 159 
 
 The gravity and dignity, the tones of mournful and bitter 
 sweetness in Wyatt's verse, are not a mere cultivated imita- 
 tion of Italian models : they flow from a deep-seated con- 
 stitutional sadness. Henry's favourite wit would not seem 
 to have been a happy man. One of his sonnets is a defence 
 of himself from a charge of variability or moodiness. He 
 is familiar with the concealment of the mind by colour 
 contrary of feigned visage. Despondency is often his com- 
 panion : he turns to his dumb dependants and fondles them 
 with bitter reflection on the faithlessness of his human 
 friends. 
 
 " Lux, my fair falcon, and thy fellows all, 
 How well pleasant it were your liberty ! 
 
 Ye not forsake me, that fair mought you fall. 
 But they that sometime liked my company, 
 
 Like lice away from dead bodies they crawl. 
 Lo ! what a proof in light adversity ! 
 
 But ye, my birds, I swear by all your bells, 
 
 Ye be my friends, and so be but few else." 
 
 Active cynicism — cynicism no longer mournful, but 
 kindled into delight by its own exercise — is seen in Wyatt's 
 satires, written in imitation of Horace. There are three of 
 them, all in the terza rima or banded three-line stave : their 
 titles are, " Of the mean and sure Estate, written to John 
 Poins," '' Of the Courtier's Life, written to John Poins," and 
 " How to use the Court and himself therein, written to Sir 
 Francis Bryan." These are our first English imitations of 
 Horace ; and if Horace is taken as the standard of satire, 
 Wyatt has the best claim to the position of first English 
 satirist, which is sometimes assigned to later satirists, Lodge, 
 Donne, or Hall. 
 
 Although Wyatt preceded Surrey, and should not be 
 robbed of the honour of that position, it is not to be pre- 
 tended that he had Surrey's ease and accuracy of expression. 
 He has indeed occasional felicities of higher and more 
 delicate charm than anything to be found in Surrey ; single 
 lines and parts of lines whose words have fallen together 
 with the perfection of instinct. But he is in general awkward 
 
l60 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 and embarrassed in his management of the complicated 
 staves which he had the courage to attempt. His rhymes 
 are exceedingly faulty, falling often upon unaccented inflec- 
 tional terminations such as eth, ed, and ing, thus — 
 
 " I fare as one escaped that fleeth, 
 Glad he is gone, and yet still feareth 
 Spied to be caught, and so dreadeth 
 That he for nought his pain loseth." 
 
 He makes other rhyme with higher and her ; maister with 
 nature; accited with tryed and presented. In some of his 
 pieces nearly one-fourth of the rhymes are of this nature. 
 His metre, also, is questionable. He employs words with 
 their foreign accents, and, generally, seems to study only to 
 have the proper number of syllables. This is the most 
 charitable supposition : it might be contended that he 
 simply counts syllables and arbitrarily puts an accent upon 
 every second syllable without regard to its acknowledged 
 accent. And with all these licences he has some difficulty 
 in filling up the measure of his stanzas. It is, however, 
 only in his sonnets, and his compositions in terza rima and 
 ottava rima, that these defects appear. His songs are no 
 less flowing than Surrey's, and to the full as musical. In 
 them he moves like a runner escaped from a thicket into 
 the open plain. He "sends his complaints and tears to 
 sue for grace" with genuine lyric rapture — 
 
 " Pass forth my wonted cries 
 
 Those cruel ears to pierce, 
 Which in most hateful wise 
 
 Do still my plaints reverse. 
 Do you, my tears, also 
 
 So wet her barren heart. 
 That pity there may grow 
 
 And cruelty depart." 
 
 II. — Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (15 16-1547). 
 
 The editor of Tottel's Miscellany speaks of the honour- 
 able style of the noble Earl of Surrey, and the weightiness 
 
EARL OF SURREY. i6l 
 
 of the deep-witted Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder's verse." 
 There is some discrimination in the epithets. Surrey 
 has not the deep and subtle feelings of Wyatt j but he 
 has a captivating sweetness, a direct eloquence, a gen- 
 erous impetuosity, that make him a much more universal 
 favourite. 
 
 Warton dwells at some length on Surrey's life as throw- 
 ing light upon the character and subjects of his poetry. 
 The prevailing errors in Surrey's biography may have had 
 something to do with the misconception of his position in 
 literature. If he had, as was at one time the accepted 
 belief, been engaged in the battle of Flodden (three years 
 before he was bom), he might well have taken precedence 
 of Wyatt. Warton does not fall into this mistake : but he 
 affirms that Surrey was educated at Windsor with Henry's 
 natural son, the Duke of Richmond ; and repeats the fiction 
 of Thomas Nash that Surrey made the tour of Europe as a 
 knight-errant, upholding against all comers the superiority 
 of his mistress Geraldine. The facts are these. From his 
 birth till 1524, Henry Howard lived in his father's house — 
 in the summer time at Tendring Hall, Suffolk, in the winter 
 time at Hunsdon in Hertfordshire : he is not known to have 
 been the companion of the youthful Duke of Richmond till 
 • their education (in the limited meaning of the word) was 
 completed. Surrey's boyhood was probably passed at 
 Kenninghall, under the care of a tutor : the pleasures that 
 he recounts as passed in Windsor with a king's son in his 
 childish years were probably not enjoyed till 1534, by which 
 time both had been at Cambridge, had taken part in royal 
 pageants, and had been married, or at least affianced, to noble 
 ladies. His itinerant championship of Geraldine is purely 
 fabulous. The lady is conjectured to have been Elizabeth 
 Fitzgerald, daughter of the Earl of Kildare : but seeing 
 that she was only four years old when Surrey married in 
 1532, and was herself married to Sir Anthony Brown at the 
 age of fifteen in 1543, we may beUeve with Dr Nott that the 
 passion was altogether ideal, and perhaps the effect^ rather 
 than the cause of Surrey's turn for sonnet-writing. Belong- 
 
 L 
 
1 62 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 ing to the most powerful family in England, Surrey was a 
 prominent figure at Court: in the festivities at Henry's 
 marriage with Anne of Cleves in 1540, he was the leader of 
 one of the sides in the tournament. His imperious spirit 
 more than once committed him to durance vile : once for 
 challenging to a duel, and again for breaking the windows 
 of the citizens of London under the pretence (serious or 
 comical) of alarming their guilty minds with fear of ap- 
 proaching Divine vengeance. He held commands in the 
 unimportant wars with Scotland and France that occupied 
 the later years of the reign of Henry, and distinguished 
 himself by his personal courage. In December 1546, at 
 the instance of certain enemies, he was lodged in the 
 Tower ; and in the January following, was brought to trial 
 for high treason, condemned, and executed. He was 
 charged with having "falsely, maliciously, and traitorously 
 set up and bore the arms of Edward the Confessor." 
 
 Surrey is described as a somewhat small man, strongly 
 knit, with a dark piercing eye and a composed thoughtful 
 countenance. He was much more impetuous and gushing 
 than Wyatt : proud, confident, indiscreet in word and 
 action : profuse in his expenses, sumptuous in apparel and 
 mode of living : courteous and affable to inferiors, haughty 
 to equals, and willing to acknowledge no superior. 
 
 Surrey's originality was not of the fastidious kind that re- 
 jects thoughts and images simply because they have occurred 
 to a predecessor. His imagery is not strikingly new. In his 
 irresistible energetic way he made free use of whatever sug- 
 gested itself in the moment of composition, no matter where 
 it might have come from. He borrowed many phrases, 
 many images, and many hints of phrases and images, from 
 his friend Wyatt.^ What he borrowed, however, he passed 
 through his own mint. He vividly realised in his own 
 
 1 It will at once be asked — how do we know that Wyatt was the lender 
 and not the borrower ? Apart from the probabilities of dates, we know 
 from such small facts as the following : Surrey assigns to Wyatt, the sig- 
 nificant figure that the scar of a severe wound is never effaced ; and in the 
 poem containing that figure we find several other expressions that are used 
 by Surrey. Such a fact, of course, is not conclusive ; it might plausibly 
 
EARL OF SURREY. 163 
 
 experience the feelings that other poets professed, and the 
 imagery they employed to give expression to their feelings. 
 At times, indeed, he seems like a spasmodic poet to be agi- 
 tating himself for the sake of the experience. All his poetry 
 thus displays a modified originality. He probably would 
 not have observed what he delineates, nor would he have 
 thought of the means of delineation, without an obtrusive 
 stimulus, a broad hint ; but once his eyes were turned to 
 the proper quarter, and he was told as it were what to look 
 for, he used his own eyesight independently, and cast about 
 him for the means of giving expression to what he saw and 
 felt. He had an energetic, versatile mind, singularly open 
 to impressions and impulses : versifying the moods and 
 circumstances of love in songs and sonnets was merely one 
 of the channels that his energy was guided into ; and once 
 set agoing he versified in his own way, just as in war he 
 aspired to direct operations in his own way. 
 
 Compared with Wyatt, Surrey strikes one as having much 
 greater aflBuence of words^ — the language is more plastic in 
 his hands. When his mind is full of an idea he pours it 
 forthwith soft voluble eloquence'; he commands such abun- 
 dance of words that he preserves with ease a uniform 
 measure. Uniformity, indeed, is almost indispensable to 
 such abundance : we read him with the feeling that in a 
 " tumbling metre " his fluency would run away with him. 
 Such impetuous affluent natures as his need to be held in 
 with the bit and bridle of uniformity. A calm composed 
 man like Wyatt, with a fine ear for varied melodies, may be 
 trusted to elaborate tranquilly irregular and subtle rhythms; 
 to men like Surrey there is a danger in any medium between 
 " correctness " and Skeltonian licence. 
 
 Surrey goes beyond Wyatt in the enthusiasm of nature, 
 in the worship of bud and bloom. In the depths of his 
 amorous despair, the beauty of the tender green, and the 
 
 be turned the other way. That it points in the way here indicated appears 
 farther from the form of Surrey's reference ; he quotes Wyatt as a master ; — 
 
 " Yet Solomon said, the wronged shall recure : 
 But Wyatt said true, the scar doth aye endure.*' 
 
1 64 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 careless happiness of the brute creation, arrest his eye, and 
 detain him for certain moments from his own sorrow. His 
 most frequently quoted sonnet is a picture of the general 
 happiness of nature in spring, artfully prolonged to the last 
 line, when his own misery bursts in, refusing any longer to 
 be comforted or held at a distance with other interests. 
 There is great freshness in his enjoyment of spring; he 
 describes what he has seen and felt : — 
 
 "When Summer took in hand the Winter to assail, 
 With force of might, and virtue great, his stormy blasts to quail ; 
 
 And when he clothed fair the earth about with green. 
 And every tree new garmented that pleasure was to seen : 
 
 Mine heart gan new revive, and changed blood did stur 
 Me to withdraw my winter woe, that kept within the durre. 
 
 Abroad, quod my desire, assay to set thy foot. 
 Where thou shalt find the summer sweet, for sprung is 
 every root : 
 
 And to thy health, if thou wert sick, in any case. 
 Nothing more good than in the spring the air to feel a space. 
 
 There thou shalt hear and see all kinds of birds y-wrought. 
 Well tune their voice with warble small, as Nature hath 
 them taught. 
 
 Thus pricked me my lust the sluggish house to leave, 
 And for my health I thought it best, such counsel to receive. 
 
 So on a morrow forth, unwist of any wight, 
 I went to prove how well it would my heavy burden light. 
 
 And when I felt the air so pleasant round about. 
 Lord ! to myself how glad I was that I had gotten out. 
 
 There might I see how Ver had every blossom bent ; 
 And eke the new betrothed birds y-coupled how they went. 
 
 And in their songs methought, they thanked Nature much. 
 That by her licence all that year to love their hap was such." 
 
 Nature, however, was not always a soothing balm to his 
 restlessness : her sweet dews fell unheeded on the tumult 
 of his veins ; his hurrying thoughts would not obey the ad- 
 monition of her stately movements. In the repose of mid- 
 night his complaint rose with unabated anguish : — 
 
 "Alas ! so all things now do hold their peace ! 
 Heaven and earth disturbed in nothing : 
 
EARL OF SURREY. 165 
 
 The beasts, the air, the birds their song do cease ; 
 
 The nightes chair the stars about doth bring : 
 Calm is the sea ; the waves work less and less. 
 
 So am not I, whom love alas doth wring, 
 Bringing before my face the great increase 
 
 Of my desires, whereat I weep and sing, 
 In joy and wo as in a doubtful ease. 
 
 For my sweet thoughts sometime do pleasure bring, 
 But by-and-by the cause of my disease 
 
 Gives me a pang that inwardly doth sting. 
 When that I think what grief it is again 
 To live and lack the thing should rid my pain." 
 
 What a contrast to the repose of Greek sculpture ! how 
 fine a subject for Mr Matthew Arnold's lesson of "Self- 
 Dependence " ! 
 
 It is exceedingly difficult to trace differences of character 
 in the love poems of Surrey and Wyatt. We find in Surrey 
 a greater richness of circumstance and epithet, a more 
 glowing colour ; but we cannot lay our finger upon any one 
 mood in either poet, and say with confidence that we should 
 be surprised to find it in the other. For one thing Surrey 
 wrote comparatively few poems, so that we have no assur- 
 ance of having boxed the compass of his moods ; and for 
 another thing, it was part of his energetic versatility to 
 be able to throw himself into an imaginary situation upon 
 any accidental hint, and compose a song or sonnet to 
 correspond. 
 
 Surrey, upon the whole, strikes us as more light-hearted 
 and ebullient ; less deeply penetrated by the earnestness of 
 passion. None of Wyatt's songs open with the ringing 
 strength and joyous brightness of Surrey's " praise of his 
 love, wherein he reproveth them that compare their ladies 
 with his :" — 
 
 " Give place, ye lovers, here before 
 
 That spent your boasts and brags in vain : 
 My lady's beauty passeth more 
 
 The best of yours, I dare well sain, 
 Than doth the sun the candle light. 
 Or brightest day the darkest night. 
 
1 66 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 And thereto hath a truth as just, 
 
 As had Penelope the fair ; 
 For what she saith, ye may it trust. 
 
 As it by writing sealed were. 
 And virtues hath she many mo 
 Than I with pen have skill to show. 
 
 I could rehearse, if that I would, 
 The whole effect of Nature's plaint. 
 
 When she had lost the perfect mould. 
 The like to whom she could not paint : 
 
 With wringing hands how she did cry, 
 
 And what she said, I know it, I." ^ 
 
 Compliments that flow with such a current, and sparkle 
 with such bubbles, do not come from the depths. Again, 
 Wyatt is too intensely in earnest to love on without hope of 
 success : he seeks after a definite sign, and when the signs 
 seem unfavourable, bitterly takes refuge in self-sufficing 
 pride. Surrey, on the other hand, with light-hearted gene- 
 rosity, is content only to be hers " although his chance be 
 nought ; " and with a hopefulness that shows how slender 
 a hold the passion has upon him, finds consolation in 
 thinking of the long toils and ultimate triumph of the 
 Greeks before Troy. Once more, when Wyatt suspects his 
 lady of playing false, he mocks his own stupidity, and 
 gravely resolves to be wiser in future ; beneath his assumed 
 
 1 The sonnet by Fiorenzuola, from which this is imitated, was a favourite 
 with the translators and imitators of the sixteenth century. There are 
 other two versions of it in Tottel's Miscellany, one of them attributed to 
 Heywood, which opens with the following rather pretty staves : — 
 
 " Give place you ladies, and begone ! 
 Boast not yourselves at all : 
 For here at hand approacheth one 
 whose face will stain you all. 
 
 The virtue of her lovely looks 
 
 Excels the precious stone : 
 I wish to have none other books 
 
 To read or look upon. 
 
 In each of her two crystal eyes 
 
 Smileth a naked boy ; 
 It would you all in heart suffice 
 
 To see that lamp of joy." 
 
EARL OF SURREY. 1 67 
 
 indifference of tone, we see that the lesson has been bitter. 
 In a similar situation, Surrey prides himself upon his acute- 
 ness in seeing through the practices of faithless women : — 
 
 " Too dearly had I bought my green and youthful years. 
 If in mine age I could not find when craft for love appears. 
 And seldom though I come in court among the rest, 
 Yet can I judge in colours dim as deep as can the best" 
 
 In another poem he is represented by the editor of ' Tottel' 
 as " a careless man, scorning and describing the subtle 
 usage of women toward their lovers." Still, all these signs 
 may be deceptive, and one would not care to dogmatise on 
 the difference between the two lovers. 
 
 None of Wyatt's poems are dramatic: he speaks for 
 himself; he does not put himself in the place of others and 
 express their emotions for them. Two or three of Surre/s 
 poems, on the other hand, have this dramatic turn. He 
 sets himself to express, in two different metres, the com- 
 plaint of a lady whose lover is absent upon the sea — an 
 early Mariana. The following are three staves of the first 
 complaint : — 
 
 " When other lovers in arms across, 
 
 Rejoice their chief delight ; 
 Drowned in tears to mourn my loss, 
 
 I stand the bitter night. 
 In my window where I may see. 
 Before the winds how the clouds flee. 
 Lo, what a mariner Love hath made me ! 
 
 And in green waves when the salt flood 
 
 Doth rise by rage of wind : 
 A thousand fancies in that mood 
 
 Assail my restless mind. 
 Alas ! now drencheth my sweet foe, 
 That with the spoil of my heart did go. 
 And left me, but alas ! why did he so ? 
 
 And when the seas wax calm again, 
 
 To chase fro me annoy ; 
 My doubtful hope doth cause me plain, 
 
 So dread cuts off my joy. 
 
1 68 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 Thus is my wealth mingled with wo, 
 And of each thought a doubt doth grow, 
 Now he comes ! will he come ? alas ! no, no. 
 
 The forms of sonnet used by Wyatt and Surrey are 
 various ; they were experimenting, and neither of them 
 seems to have been fascinated by any one form. They 
 several times attempted constructing the fourteen lines 
 throughout upon two rhymes, as in Surrey's — " Alas ! so all 
 things now do hold their peace" (p. 164); a form of no 
 particular beauty, and attractive to verse-writers chiefly as 
 an exercise of skill in rhyming. The two most important 
 types are seen in their rival versions of the same sonnet, 
 quoted at p. 154. Wyatt follows the arrangement observed 
 by Petrarch, and thus loosely spoken of as the Italian form; 
 Surrey, the arrangement adopted by Shakespeare, and thus 
 loosely spoken of as the English form. The fourteen lines 
 of Wyatt's version are divided into two parts : first a stanza 
 of eight lines, consisting of two quatrains banded together 
 by common rhymes : then a stanza of six lines, consisting 
 of two tercettes, also banded together by common rhymes. 
 In this type of sonnet, a certain variety was permitted in 
 the disposition of the rh3mies within these limits : in the 
 banded quatrains, they might either be alternate, or succes- 
 sive as in Wyatt's sonnet ; and in the tercettes there might 
 be two rhymes or three connected in any order that the 
 sonneteer could devise. The form of Surrey^s version, the 
 English form, is an easier arrangement, which came into 
 use in Italy in the beginning of the sixteenth century. In 
 it the division into two stanzas is broken up, and the four- 
 teen lines arranged in three independent quatrains closed in 
 by a couplet. As we shall see, the form was adopted and 
 regularly used by Daniel for his " Sonnets to Delia ; " and 
 from him was adopted by Shakespeare. Before the " Son- 
 nets to Delia," the Italian form was rather the favourite 
 with English sonneteers : it was employed constantly by 
 Sidney. 
 
 Surrey's poem composed during his imprisonment in 
 
EARL OF SURREY. 1 69 
 
 Windsor, is claimed by Dr Nott, who edits Surrey with 
 more than a biographer's enthusiasm, as the first specimen 
 of our elegiac stave — four heroic lines rhyming alternately. 
 This poem contains twelve such staves. Curiously enough, 
 however, the whole is shut in with a final couplet, so that 
 the poem is really a sonnet with twelve quatrains instead of 
 three. It is a confirmation of Mr Guest's intrinsically pro- 
 bable conjecture that the elegiac stave arose from the 
 breaking up of the sonnet into easier forms. Mr Guest, 
 however, is wrong in saying that the final stage of dropping 
 the couplet did not come on till after Milton. Elegiacs 
 without any such appendage are found in the poems of 
 Robert Greene. 
 
 The chief feather in Surrey's plume as a verse-writer is 
 his introduction of blank verse. He employed it in his 
 translation of the Second and Fourth Books of the .(Eneid, 
 which is memorable also as an indication of the growing 
 study of the ancient classics in England. Although Gawain 
 Douglas is a prior claimant to the honour of producing the 
 first English translation of an ancient classic (if Douglas's 
 language is entitled to be called English), Surrey has suffi- 
 cient honour in his choice of the unrhymed form. About 
 the same time the Italians were beginning to experiment in 
 dispensing with rhyme ; and Surrey had the good fortune, 
 or the good sense, to apply to the translation of the great 
 Roman epic the form that has since been established as 
 English heroic verse. His blank verse is described by 
 Conington as a good beginning, but " not entitled to any 
 very high positive praise," being " languid and monotonous, 
 and sometimes unmetrical and inharmonious." Surrey's 
 direct knowledge of the classics preserved him as it preserved 
 Wyatt and others of the time from the gross mediaeval 
 blunders : yet it is significant of his being only among the 
 pioneers that in his praise of Wyatt he speaks of "Dan 
 Homer's rhymes," "who feigned gests of heathen princes 
 sung." 
 
 We should not omit to notice, among other evidences of 
 Surrey's searching versatility and eager activity seeking vent 
 
170 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 in many forms, that he made an attempt also at pastoral 
 poetry. His " Complaint of a dying Lover refused upon 
 his Lady's unjust mistaking of his writing," is put into the 
 mouth of a shepherd. In this he followed the example of 
 the Italian imitators of Virgil. His metre seems to be a 
 modification of the old ballad form of long rhyming 
 couplets : he shortens the first line of the couplet by an 
 accent, or two syllables, thus — 
 
 " In Winter's just return, when Boreas gan his reign, 
 And every tree unclothed fast as Nature taught them plain ; 
 In misty morning dark, as sheep are then in hold, 
 I hied me fast, it set me on, my sheep for to unfold, 
 And as it is a thing that lovers have by fits. 
 Under a palm I heard one cry as he had lost his wits." 
 
 III. — Writers of Mysteries, Moralities, " Moral Interludes : " 
 John Bale. 
 
 The writers that fall under this section lay wholly out 
 of the current of Italian influences. The primitive English 
 drama was as little affected by the causes that furthered the 
 poetry of Wyatt and Surrey as it had been a century and a 
 half before, by the movement of which the main English 
 outcome was Chaucer. With its firm hold of popular sym- 
 pathies, through its ministration to simple inartificial 
 wants, it continued to flourish when the spirit of Chaucer 
 decayed, and maintained a certain struggle for existence 
 even after the full maturity of the Elizabethan drama, of 
 which it had some claim to be considered the parent. 
 Throughout its lease of life it was a direct response to a 
 popular demand : it knew its audience, and gave them what 
 they desired. 
 
 In one view, indeed, this rude religious drama cannot be 
 held to have remained unaffected by surrounding influences. 
 The Moral-plays, in which the characters were personified 
 virtues and vices — Reason, Repentance, Avarice, Sensuality, 
 Folly, &c. — may be regarded as a modification produced, 
 
JOHN BALE. 171 
 
 not by a development from within, but by the action of 
 neighbouring forces. As the materials of one section of 
 Chaucer's poetry were the offspring of a union between Ab- 
 straction and Sense, so the moral-plays may be looked upon 
 as a cross between Abstraction and the Miracle-plays. It 
 really is immaterial to this view what conclusion we adopt 
 as to the precise transition from miracle-play to moral-play, 
 whether we suppose the transition to have taken place by 
 the gradual introduction of abstract personifications among 
 Scriptural and legendary individuals, or suppose it to have 
 taken place at a leap by the use of moral tales of personi- 
 fications instead of Scripture and legend as subjects for 
 dramatic representation. In either view, we are at liberty 
 to regard the transition as an encroachment made by the 
 abstracting tendency of the Middle Ages upon a simple 
 popular entertainment. 
 
 Moral-plays, in whatever way they were suggested, were 
 common throughout the fifteenth century, and had not 
 quite died out at the end of the sixteenth. They, as well 
 as Mysteries, were largely used by the advocates and the 
 opponents of the Reformation to promote their respective 
 views. To give some idea of their nature, we may look at 
 " The World and the Child," Mundus et Infans, which is 
 called "a proper new interlude/' showing the estate of 
 childhood and manhood.^ It has no regard for the unity 
 of time : it conducts a child from the cradle to the grave 
 without 'change of scene. It has no plot : it is really a 
 descriptive or panoramic dialogue, in which the Prince of 
 this World holds conversations with a human creature at 
 various stages of its existence, giving his commands to it, 
 and receiving at the end of every seven years an account of 
 its proceedings. The outUne is something Hke this. Mun- 
 dus enters boasting of his palace, his stalled horses, his 
 riches, his command of mirth and game. He is prince of 
 
 1 Mr Collier gives a particular account of "Nature," a morality by 
 Henry Medwall, chaplain to Cardinal Morton.— Hist, of Dram. Poet. ii. 
 298. See Mr Collier's work for a complete account of our primitive 
 drama. 
 
172 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 power and of plenty ; and he smites with poverty all that 
 come not when he calls. Infans next tells us that he is a 
 child like other children, " gotten in game and in great sin," 
 and complains of his nakedness and poverty. He beseeches 
 Mundus to clothe him and feed him — 
 
 " Sir, of some comfort I you crave 
 Meat and cloth my life to save, 
 And I your true servant shall be." 
 
 Mundus hearkens to his prayer, gives him gay garments, 
 names him Wanton, and bids him return for further con- 
 sideration when fourteen years are come and gone. Wanton 
 is delighted, and repeats with great zest the various amuse- 
 ments and tricks of sportive boydom — top-spinning, biting 
 and kicking, making mouths at his seniors and skipping off, 
 telling lies, dancing, playing at cherry pit, whistling, plun- 
 dering orchards, harrying nests. It is considered quite 
 enough for Wanton simply to recapitulate those recreations 
 to give the audience to understand that he has lived 
 through them ; and after the recapitulation he says — 
 
 " But, sirs, when I was seven year of age 
 I was sent to the World to take wage, 
 And this seven year I've been his page 
 And kept his commandement. 
 
 Now I will wend to the World and worthy emperor. 
 Hail, Lord of great honour ! 
 
 This seven year I have served you in hall and in bower 
 With all my true intent." 
 
 Mundus has not left the stage all this time, and he returns 
 a gracious answer, calling Wanton his darling dear. He 
 christens him anew Lust and Liking, and bids him enjoy 
 all game and glee and gladness, and come again at the end 
 of seven years. After another speech, enumerating the 
 doings of lusty youth. Lust and Liking returns aged twenty- 
 one, ready for further orders. Mundus christens him Man- 
 hood, and bids him worship seven kings, which are no other 
 than the seven deadly sins — Pride, Envy, Wrath, Covetous- 
 ness, Sloth, Gluttony, Lechery. Manhood promises to 
 
JOHN BALE. 173 
 
 honour them all, and presently announces himself a stalwart 
 and stout lord, of wide dominion and wide fame. While 
 he is boasting of his might and main, Conscience passes by, 
 and they have a dialogue. Conscience discoursing good 
 counsel, meeting at first with much insolence, but ultimately 
 succeeding in making Manhood very uncomfortable. Man- 
 hood is glad when Conscience says farewell, although he 
 admits the truth of what he has said. Folly next enters, 
 brimful of audacious impertinence, and after some disputa- 
 tion, persuades Manhood that he is a better leader than 
 Conscience. Just as Manhood is about to follow Folly, 
 Conscience returns, and finding it impossible to restrain 
 Manhood, calls in the aid of Perseverance. Before Perse- 
 verance has well explained his functions. Manhood returns 
 in the guise of Age, lamenting his bowed body and his 
 former service of the seven deadly sins. In this mood he 
 is converted, receives the name of Repentance, and so the 
 play ends. 
 
 Another piece of this class, with more pretence to plot 
 and vivacity, is " Hick-Scomer," also written during the 
 reign of Henry VIII. The personages are Freewill and 
 Imagination (two dissolute characters, companions of Hick- 
 Scomer) ; Pity (who tries to mediate between these two 
 ATorthies when they quarrel, and is seized upon, after the 
 usual fate of peace-makers, by both the wranglers and put 
 in the stocks) ; and Perseverance and Contemplation (who 
 succeed in reclaiming Freewill and Imagination to a vir- 
 tuous life). This play gives a really lively picture of man- 
 ners ; Hick-Scomer representing the travelled gallant'; Free- 
 will and Imagination, the " rufflers," profligate swaggering 
 fellows, not very particular in their ways of making money; 
 Pity, the good man who laments the degeneracy of the 
 age, and thinks that wickedness was never so prevalent as 
 in his own time ; and Perseverance and Contemplation, 
 ideals of virtuous conduct and humane desire for the good 
 of mankind. 
 
 The influence of this popular drama in forming public 
 opinion was deeply respected by Henry and his successors, 
 
174 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 who framed acts and issued proclamations lamenting the 
 inquietation of their people by diversity of opinion, and in- 
 terdicting all plays that had not received the royal sanction. 
 Both Mysteries and Moralities were used to leaven the 
 popular mind with sound doctrine. 
 
 John Bale (1495-1563), a zealous reformer, favoured 
 by Cromwell, forced to flee the country after his death in 
 1540, recalled by Edward VI. and made Bishop of Ossory, 
 exiled under Mary, restored once more at the accession of 
 Elizabeth, wrote no less than nineteen plays to promote 
 the Reformation. " God's Promises," reprinted in Dodsley's 
 Old Plays, was written in 1538, and entitled "A Tragedy or 
 Interlude, manifesting the chief promises of God unto man 
 by all ages in the old law, from the fall of Adam to the in- 
 carnation of the Lord Jesus Christ." The composition is 
 much more solid than that of the " World and the Child," 
 but the plan of the work is very much the same. It is di- 
 vided into seven Acts, in each of which God sustains a 
 dialogue with a Scriptural patriarch or a prophet : Adam, 
 Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, John the Baptist. 
 Each of the Acts begins with a declaration of God's anger 
 against man, proceeds with deprecating entreaties from the 
 representative of man, and ends with a promise of mercy. 
 The pious author thus embraces within his play the chief pro- 
 mises of a Saviour, as made to Adam, Abraham, David, and 
 Isaiah. Three other mysteries by Bale are extant — " The 
 Three Laws, of Nature, Moses, and Christ;" "John the 
 Baptist's Preaching in the Wilderness ;" and " The Tempta- 
 tion of Christ." This last is called by the author a comedy.^ 
 
 Bishop Bale used Scripture-plays seriously for the pur- 
 pose of disseminating his own views of Biblical truth. It is 
 to his plays that we must go if we wish to keep up the idea 
 that the object and function of mysteries was to diffuse 
 among the people a knowledge of Holy Writ. Moral-plays 
 were also utilised by the champions of the Reformation. 
 
 ^ Bale, says Mr Collier, was the first to apply, or rather to mis-apply, the 
 words "tragedy" and "comedy" to dramatic representations in English. 
 
JOHN BALE. 175 
 
 In the battle against the old faith, mysteries and moralities 
 may be said to have served two separate functions — 
 mysteries being employed in the constructive work of 
 spreading the light of the Bible, and moralities in the de- 
 structive work of ridiculing the priests and tenets of Roman 
 Catholicism. In the moral-play of "Lusty Juventus," 
 written during the reign of Edward VI., the ministers and 
 the ritual of Roman Catholicism are represented as being 
 the offspring of hypocrisy, the daughter of the devil, and he 
 is represented as complaining that the Reformation is tak- 
 ing away his choicest instruments. It was natural that 
 when Mary ascended the throne, her party should employ 
 the same organ to play a very different tune. Under Mary 
 it was the new faith and its professors that had to be dis- 
 credited and made odious. In the " Interlude of Youth," 
 Youth is seduced by the ordinary means of Riot and Pride, 
 and reclaimed by Charity with sound Catholic doctrine. 
 And in a " merry interlude, entitled Respublica," Reforma- 
 tion figures as an alias of Oppression, with Insolence and 
 Adulation as his comrades, and the three behave so badly 
 that Nemesis comes down from heaven with her four fair 
 ladies to chastise them and redress their perversion of " all 
 right and all order of true j ustice. " The three iniquities pay 
 court to Avarice, a touchy old gentleman. Reformation 
 says — 
 
 " And to you have we borne hearty favours alway." 
 
 To which Avarice replies shortly and sharply — 
 
 " And I warrant you hanged for your labours one day." 
 
 Whereupon Reformation and Adulation chime in together, 
 but get little encouragement from their irascible patron — 
 
 R. &> A. Even as our God we have alway honoured you. 
 Avar. And e'en as your God I have aye succoured you. 
 R. &" A. We call you our founder by all holy hallows. 
 Avar. Founder me no foundering, but beware the gallows. 
 
 This employment of a rude drama for political and reli- 
 
176 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 gious purposes is heavy reading, now that the freshness of 
 its apphcations is gone. It has little interest as literature 
 side by side with the poetry of Wyatt and Surrey. Occa- 
 sionally, however, the dreary waste is relieved by a spark- 
 ling interval. There are two songs in " Lusty Juventus " 
 which step out of their lifeless surroundings, and challenge 
 comparison with the new poetry of the period. They ap- 
 peal to us as things of native growth against the imports of 
 the Italian school. They are genuinely EngUsh, and have 
 something of the quality of the snatches of song inter- 
 spersed through the mature Elizabethan drama. The first 
 of them is the opening of the play, and is sung by Lusty 
 Juventus himself upon his entrance : — 
 
 " In a herbere green asleep whereas I lay, 
 The birds sang sweet in the midst of the day ; 
 I dreamed fast of mirth and play. 
 
 In youth is pleasure — in youth is pleasure. 
 
 Methought I walked still to and fro. 
 And from her company I could not go ; 
 But when I waked, it was not so. 
 
 In youth is pleasure — in youth is pleasure. 
 
 Therefore my heart is surely pight, 
 Of her alone to have a sight. 
 Which is my joy and heart's delight. 
 
 In youth is pleasure — in youth is pleasure.'* 
 
 The other is in a similar strain : — 
 
 " Why should not youth fulfil his own mind. 
 As the course of nature doth him bind ? 
 Is not everything ordained to do his kind ? 
 Report me to you — report me to you. 
 
 Do not the flowers spring fresh and gay, 
 Pleasant and sweet in the month of May ? 
 And when their time cometh they fade away. 
 Report me to you — report me to you. 
 
 Be not the trees in winter bare ? 
 Like unto their kind, such they are. 
 
JOHN HEYWOOD. 177 
 
 And when they spring their fruits declare. 
 Report me to you — report me to you. 
 
 What should youth do with the fruits of age. 
 But live in pleasure in his passage ? 
 For when age cometh his lusts will 'suage. 
 Report me to you — report me to you. 
 
 Why should not youth fulfil his own mind, 
 As the course of nature doth him bind?" 
 
 IV. — John Heywood : " Merry Interludes " — 27ie Four 
 P's — Ther sites. 
 
 The " merry interludes" of John Heywood, an epigram- 
 matist and noted jester or wit, in great favour with Mary, 
 but driven abroad, on the accession of Elizabeth, by his 
 adherence to the Roman Catholic faith, lie between moral- 
 ities, otherwise called " moral interludes," and the regular 
 comedy. They have not the plot of regular comedy, and 
 they are superior to moralities in the exhibition of character, 
 because they bring on the stage not personified abstractions 
 but representatives of professions. In spirit they have 
 much in common with the modem farce, being designed 
 for the same purpose of keeping an audience in broad enjoy- 
 ment for a short time. Heywood's " merry interludes " are 
 fine examples of broad, boisterous, healthy English humour. 
 He took a pride in his own " mad merry wit." 
 
 " Art thou Heywood, with thy mad merry wit? 
 
 Yea ! forsooth, Master, that name is even hit. 
 Art thou Heywood, that applies! mirth more than thrift ? 
 
 Yes, sir, I take merry mirth a golden gift. 
 Art thou Heywood, that hast made many mad plays ? 
 
 Yea, many plays, few good works in my days." 
 
 It seems a strange thing that this madcap should have suf- 
 fered persecution for his rSligious faith : it is a parallel to the 
 contemporary paradox of the facetious but fundamentally 
 serious Sir Thomas More. From his interludes one might 
 suppose Heywood's leanings to have been the other way — 
 
 M 
 
178 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 towards the Reformers rather than the Papists : in his 
 extant plays, priests, palmers, and pardoners are the chief 
 butts of his ridicule. One of them — " The Pardoner, the 
 Friar, the Curate, and neighbour Pratt " — exhibits a struggle 
 between a Pardoner and a Friar for the temporary use of 
 the Curate's church, and the vain efforts of the Curate and 
 neighbour Pratt to keep the peace. Another, entitled " A 
 merry play between John the husband, Tib the wife, and 
 Sir Jhan the priest," has for its subjects a henpecked hus- 
 band and a clerical paramour. The main fun of a third — 
 "The Four P's, or the Palmer, the Pardoner, the Potecary, 
 and the Pedlar " — turns upon engaging three notorious 
 liars in a competition to prove which can tell the biggest 
 lie, the fourth standing by as judge. 
 
 The "Four P's," which is reprinted in Dodsle/s Old Plays, 
 is brimful of bright broad humour. The Palmer enters and 
 tells what he is, where he has travelled, and why he goes on 
 pilgrimage. So far all is serious : we have a pious man 
 before us, enumerating his pilgrimages, and crossing him- 
 self as he repeats his devout motives : — 
 
 " To these, with many other one, 
 Devoutly have I prayed and gone, 
 Praying to them to pray for me 
 Unto the blessed Trinity. 
 By whose prayers and my daily pain 
 I trust the sooner to obtain 
 For my salvation, grace, and mercy. 
 For be ye sure I think assuredly 
 Who seeketh saints for Christes sake 
 And namely such as pain do take 
 On foot to punish their frail body, 
 Shall thereby merit more highly 
 Than by anything done by man." 
 
 But the Pardoner enters, and dissipates the devout atmo- 
 sphere with mad spirit. " For all your labour and ghostly 
 intent," he says to the Palmer, "you return as wise as you 
 went." The pilgrim should have come to him. 
 
JOHN HEYWOOD. 179 
 
 " Now mark in this what wit ye have, 
 To seek so far and help so nigh ; 
 Even here at home is remedy : 
 For at your door myself doth dwell 
 Who could have saved your soul as well 
 As all your wide wand'ring shall do, 
 Though ye went thrice to Jericho. 
 
 Give me but a penny or twopence. 
 And as soon as the soul departeth hence, 
 In half-an-hour or three quarters at the most, 
 The soul is in heaven with the Holy Ghost." 
 
 The Apothecary now enters with an irreverent inquiry, 
 and proceeds to boast with coarse strong humour that he is 
 of more service to the health of souls than either Pardoner 
 or Palmer. 
 
 " No soul, ye know, entreth heaven gate 
 Till from the body he be separate : 
 And whom have ye known die honestly 
 Without help of the Potecary. 
 
 Since of our souls the multitude 
 I send to heaven when all viewed. 
 Who should but I then all together 
 Have thank of all their coming thither." 
 
 And the Pardoner and the Potecary assert their rival claims 
 as follows : — 
 
 " Par. If ye killed a thousand in an hour space, 
 
 When come they to heaven dying out of gfrace ? 
 
 Pot. But if a thousand pardons about their necks were tied. 
 
 When come they to heaven if they never died ? " 
 
 Thus the two knaves jest about serious things. Then the 
 Pedlar enters and sets forth his wares; and after much 
 humorous sparring chiefly between the Pardoner and the 
 Potecary, who make very rough fun of one another's pre- 
 tensions, they settle down into the serious competition in 
 lying. The comparatively quiet Palmer outwits his more 
 
l8o RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 boisterous companions, and tricks them into a confession 
 of his superiority. Gravely taking up the Pardoner's tale 
 of a visit to hell, and of the devil's desire to get his kingdom 
 kept clear of women, the Palmer wonders how women can 
 be such shrews in the nether world, for in all his travels, in 
 the course of which he has seen three hundred thousand 
 women, he has never seen one woman out of patience. All 
 cry out that this is a great lie. 
 
 This kind of " merry interlude " was in high favour ; its 
 heroes must have been felt to be an advance in point of 
 comical interest upon the "vice" of the moralities. The 
 fun, indeed, was of the same boisterous breadth in the 
 morahties, and grew out of similar conceptions and situa- 
 tions ; but in the interludes the comical element was ex- 
 tracted and, the heavy prosy element left behind. This 
 process of extraction is seen in the interlude of " Thersites,"^ 
 a revel of gross exaggerated boasting and violent contrast 
 between pretension and performance. Thersites is very 
 much the same character as the Herod of the Mysteries 
 and the Magnificence of the Moralities, only he is exhibited 
 without any admixture of more serious elements ; he is a 
 pure extravagance from beginning to end. The hero enters 
 with a club on his neck, shouting — 
 
 " Have in a ruffler, forth of the Greek land, 
 Called Thersites, if ye will me know ; 
 Aback, give me room, in my way do not stand, 
 For if ye do, I will soon lay you low." 
 
 He speaks with contempt of the Greek chiefs, vowing that 
 if he meets them he will make the dastards "run into a 
 bag to hide them fro me, as from the devil of hell." 
 After some comical misunderstanding, he obtains from 
 Mulciber various pieces of armour, boasting louder and 
 louder after each successive piece, adjuring all the great 
 heroes of antiquity — Hercules, Samson, Cacus, Arthur, 
 Launcelot, &c. &c. — to come and fight with him, declaring 
 
 1 Written apparently in 1537 ; not printed till 1561 ; reprinted for the 
 Roxburghe Club in 1820. 
 
NICHOLAS UDALL. l8l 
 
 them to be puny things. " O good Lord," he cries, " how 
 broad is my breast !" 
 
 " Behold you my hands, my legs, and my feet. 
 Every part is strong, proportionable, and meet : 
 Think you that I am. not feared in field and street." 
 
 Getting more and more intoxicated with the idea of his own 
 might, he avows his intention of making a voyage to hell, 
 to beat the devil and his dame and bring away the souls. 
 Then he will go to old purgatory, and will supersede the 
 need of pardons to let out the sufferers. Finally, he will 
 climb to heaven, fetch away Peter's keys, keep them him- 
 self, and let in a great rout, for " why should such a fisher 
 keep good fellows out?" By-and-by his mother enters, 
 and he expresses a vehement desire to fight with some lion 
 or other wild beast, resisting his mother's tearful and kneel- 
 ing entreaties that he will stay at home. Not Jupiter himself 
 could restrain him. Presently a snail comes in, at which 
 Thersites falls into a cold perspiration, in his alarm mis- 
 taking it for a sow or a cow; he fights against it with his 
 club, then casts away his club and takes to his sword, 
 whereupon the snail draws his horns in, and he professes 
 himself satisfied. Miles has entered while the combat was 
 going on, and at the termination, when Thersites renews 
 his bragging, offers to fight him. Thersites takes refuge 
 at his mother's back, crying out that he is pursued by a 
 thousand horsemen. This is the end of the plot; what 
 follows is an incoherent appendage — a visit from Tele- 
 machus with a flattering introduction from Ulysses, asking 
 Thersites to make his old mother charm the boy for a 
 juvenile complaint of a not particularly delicate nature. 
 
 V. — Nicholas Udall (1505-1556) : Ralph Roister 
 Doister — Gammer Gurton's Needle. 
 
 Udall, sometime head-master at Eton, and celebrated 
 for the severity of his discipline, is the founder of English 
 
1 82 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 comedy. Evidences remain of his liking for Terence and 
 for Erasmus : in 1533 he compiled and published certain 
 translations from Terence under the title of ' Flowers from 
 Latin speaking ; ' and he translated Erasmus's Apophthegms 
 in 1542, and his Paraphrase of the New Testament between 
 1542 and 1545. He early acquired, and maintained to the 
 close of his life, a reputation for the writing of plays and 
 pageants. He was employed along with Leland in 1533 in 
 composing verses for the city pageant exhibited before 
 Anne Boleyn, when she rode through London to her 
 coronation. And he was mentioned by Maty in a docu- 
 ment of 1554 as one that had "heretofore showed and 
 mindeth hereafter to show his diligence in setting forth of 
 dialogues and interludes before us for our regal disport 
 and recreation." 
 
 The date of the composition of his great comedy ' Ralph 
 Roister Doister,' is not ascertained : ^ Mr Collier suggests 
 that it was written in Udall's youth. It is a great step in 
 advance of moralities and interludes. The author names 
 Plautus and Terence as his models, and terms the work an 
 interlude or comedy, as if wishing to claim kindred with a 
 higher order of composition. He had sufficient genius to 
 borrow from the Romans a superior construction of play 
 without sacrificing any of his native humour to foreign 
 affectations. Roister Doister rises above preceding drama- 
 tic representations in English in the formal excellence of 
 being divided into Acts and Scenes, and, still more, in hav- 
 ing a plot based upon lively misunderstandings — ^the proper 
 and peculiar plot of comedy. Its leading characters, too, 
 are deliberate studies. The action of the play consists in 
 the wooing of a widow, Dame Constance, by a boastful 
 half-witted rich fellow, Ralph Roister Doister, who is set 
 on and befooled by Matthew Merrygreek, an imitation of 
 Terence's clever rogue and parasite. The play opens 
 with the entrance of Merrygreek singing and cheerfully 
 
 1 The only extant copy wants the title-page. We know that a printer 
 had a licence to print the play in 1566. It is reprinted by the Shakespeare 
 Society, and is inchided by Mr Arber in his series of English Reprints. 
 
NICHOLAS UDALL. 1 83 
 
 recounting [his various shifts to gain an idle livelihood. 
 Ralph, he says, is his chief banker and sheet-anchor, and 
 one of the greatest louts in the kingdom. Presently Ralph 
 enters, and from that moment till the end of the play is the 
 victim of Merrygreek's tricks and extortions. The rogue 
 discovers that he is in love, and ready to run mad ; and after 
 hearing of the lady's wealth, and moralising that marriage 
 money usually shrinks, he works in the most amusing way 
 on the hero's vanity. 
 
 Ralph is a fine subject for ludicrous misadventures, and 
 Merrygreek fools him to the top of his bent. His loutish 
 character is kept up with many delightful touches of con- 
 sistent humour. Acting always with the malicious Merry- 
 greek at his elbow, he tries to follow Ovid's precept of 
 gaining over the lady's servants : but not having the courage 
 to approach Tibet Talkapace, a saucy coquettish handmaid, 
 he makes up to old Madge Mumblecrust, the nurse, and 
 while he is whispering into her ear, Merrygreek comes up 
 with a following, pretends to take old Madge for the otyect 
 of Ralph's devotion, and salutes her with absurd courtesy, 
 much to Ralph's fury. Next Merrygreek acts as ambassa- 
 dor, brings back an insulting reply, and on Ralph's declaring 
 himself unable to survive the shock, has a funeral service 
 performed over him. Then Ralph employs a scrivener to 
 write a moving letter, and Merrygreek in reading it to the 
 lady, punctuates it, as Quince does the prologue in " Mid- 
 summer Night's Dream," in such a way as to reverse the 
 meaning, send her away in a passion, and make Ralph vow 
 to have the scrivener's life. Finally, Merrygreek eggs him 
 on to take the lady by force : she arms her maid-servants 
 for the defence, and a comical battle ensues in which Ralph 
 is ignominiously beaten. 
 
 The play is saved from being a mere extravagance by the 
 danger of serious consequences to Dame Constance from 
 the suit of her foolish admirer. She is affianced to an 
 honest merchant, Gawin Goodluck; and he, on hearing 
 mistaken reports which cause him to doubt her fidelity, is 
 disposed to break off the engagement. However, all comes 
 
1 84 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 right in the end: the faithful Constance is married to 
 honest Gawin, and Ralph is pardoned his troublesome 
 advances. 
 
 It is impossible to say what may have been the single in- 
 fluence of ' Roister Doister ' on English comedy : the pro- 
 babihty is that its influence was inconsiderable. It was not 
 printed till 1566, and by that time the more powerful in- 
 fluences of early Italian comedy were beginning to operate. 
 Besides, with all its cleverness and delicate humour, the 
 spirit of ' Roister Doister ' is essentially boyish : it was 
 written to be acted by boys, and its extravagant incidents 
 are of a kind to draw shouts of delight from boys. There 
 are shrewd touches of worldly wisdom in it ; but, as a whole, 
 it has not the robustness of comedy framed for the enjoy- 
 ment of full-grown men and women. Our early comedy 
 was largely coloured by the circumstance that much of it 
 was written for boys. The interlude of ' Jack Juggler' ^ is 
 another example. This interlude was produced under the 
 inspiration of Plautus, and it is superior in point of construc- 
 tion to earlier interludes, being, indeed, a farce with aiplot 
 perfectly rounded off. But it is too extravagant and unreal 
 for our national comedy. It is entitled " a new interlude 
 for children to play; both witty and very pleasant." The 
 personages are Master Boungrace, a gallant; Dame Coy, a 
 gentlewoman; Jack Juggler, "the vice;" Jenkin Careaway, 
 a lackey ; and Alice Trip and Go, a maid. Poor Careaway, 
 the lackey, has need for all his powers of banishing melan- 
 choly. His mistress is a pretty gingerly piece, as dainty and 
 as nice as a halfpennyworth of silver spoons, but, like all 
 other women, " a very cursed shrew by the blessed Trinity, 
 and a very devil," and she takes special delight in getting 
 him now and then by the pate as an afternoon exercise for 
 her bodily health. His master is worse even than his mis- 
 tress, once he is thoroughly angered. The maid Alison is 
 a mincing, bridling, simpering, pranking young lady, quaver- 
 
 1 Entered in the Stationers' Book, 1562-3 : reprinted for the Roxburghe 
 Club in 1820. 
 
NICHOLAS UDALL. 1 85 
 
 ing and warbling with every joint in her body when she 
 goes out, chatting Hke a pye, speaking like a "parrot popin- 
 jay," "as fine as a small j silken thread;" and, what is of 
 more consequence to the unfortunate lackey, a spiteful 
 lying girl, never so happy as when she has a tale against 
 him, and enjoying unbounded credit mth her mistress. To 
 crown all, he has a cunning and revengeful enemy in Jack 
 Juggler. When he has been sent out a message, and has 
 loitered, as he usually does, playing at bucklers, overturning 
 the fruiterer's wife's basket and stealing her apples, losing 
 his money at dice, and so forth. Jack Juggler puts on a suit 
 of the same livery, takes possession of the house gate, and 
 swears to the delinquent idler, that he is Jenkin Careaway, 
 and boldly calls the real Jenkin a drunken knave for pre- 
 tending to that name. Juggler beats the puzzled Jenkin 
 till he denies his own identity, and bewilders him by telling 
 him all that he has done that day, till the boy is disposed to 
 think as well as to say that he is not himself. When left 
 alone, he cries — 
 
 " Good Lord of heaven, where did I myself leave ? 
 Or who did me of my name by the way bereave ? 
 For I am sure of this in my mind 
 That I did in no place leave myself behind. 
 If I had my name played away at dice, 
 Or had sold myself to any man at a price. 
 Or had made a fray and had lost it in fighting, 
 Or it had been stolen from me sleeping. 
 It had been a matter and I would have kept patience, 
 But it spiteth my heart to have lost it by such open negli- 
 gence." 
 
 In his anxiety about his personality, he forgets all the lies 
 he has invented to excuse his delays to his mistress and his 
 master, and tells them what he has done ; so that Juggler 
 has the satisfaction of seeing " the calf" soundly thrashed, 
 Dame Coy shouting to her enraged hiisband — 
 
 " Lay on and spare not for the love of Christ, 
 Joll his head to a post, and favour your fist : 
 
1 86 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 Now, for my sake, sweetheart, spare and favour your hand, 
 And lay him about the ribs with this wand." 
 
 The interlude concludes with moralisings by Jenkin on the 
 wrongs inflicted on innocent simplicity by strength and 
 subtlety. 
 
 The well-known play of 'Gammer Gurton's Needle' 
 (which is entitled a right pithy, pleasant, and merry comedy,, 
 and is divided into Acts and Scenes), is supposed to have 
 been written about 1560, and, before the discovery of ' Rois- 
 ter Doister,' enjoyed the distinction of being considered our 
 first regular comedy. It is said to have been written by 
 " Mr S., Master of Arts ;" and its humour, which is certainly 
 more robust than the humour of 'Roister Doister,' may have 
 been considered suitable to the expanded tastes of Eton 
 boys after they became undergraduates. It has, however, 
 less of the character of a comedy than ' Roister Doister ; ' 
 it is essentially a farce, designed throughout for the free 
 play of lungs and diaphragm, and the broadening and em- 
 purpling of long and pale countenances. An irascible old 
 gammer, such as Noah's wife, has always been a favourite 
 character on the farcical stage : we see at the present day in 
 Christmas Pantomimes how much can be got out of such 
 a personage when enacted by a man, and in those days 
 when greater freedom was allowed, we may imagine how 
 laughter was made to hold both his sides. Gammer Gur- 
 ton's temper is sorely tried. One day when she is mending 
 her husband's breeches, Gib the cat seizes the opportunity of 
 indulging herself with a little milk. Gammer starts up and 
 flings the breeches at the thief. On taking them up again, 
 she cannot find the needle, and turns the house topsy- 
 turvy in the search for it, interfering sadly with the comfort 
 of goodman Hodge, who makes desperate suggestions as to 
 possible places of concealment A mischievous neighbour 
 Diccon is tickled by the loss, and devises sundry practical 
 jokes out of it. He tells the Gammer that Dame Chat has 
 stolen it, and then goes to Dame Chat and tells her that 
 Gammer Gurton accuses her of stealing her cock : in con- 
 
THOMAS SACKVILLE. 1 87 
 
 sequence of which malicious misinformation the two dames 
 proceed to words, and from words to blows. Again, Diccon 
 informs Dr Rat the curate that, if he goes to Dame Chat's, 
 he will find her sewing with the very needle ; and then in- 
 forms Dame Chat that that evening Hodge intends to make 
 a return visit to her roost : the result of which plot is that 
 the curate's skull is nearly fractured by the enraged dame 
 with a door-bar. Ultimately the needle is discovered by 
 accident embedded in the part of Hodge's apparel on 
 which he usually sits. 
 
 VI. — Thomas Sackville (1536-7 — 1608) : The 
 Mirror for Magistrates. 
 
 In 1559, two years after the publication of Tottel's Mis- 
 cellany, was published a collection of poems more sombre 
 in their hues than the gay songs and sonnets of Surrey and 
 Wyatt. Instead of Love, their burden was the mutability 
 of Fortune as shown in the rise and fall of kings, rebels, 
 and noble ministers of state ; and the gloomy record of 
 ambition and disaster was called ' The Mirror for Magis- 
 trates ' — a glass wherein rulers might see the dangers that 
 beset unrighteous aspiration. 
 
 The work was projected in 1555, about the middle of 
 the reign of Mary : and critics have not failed to remark 
 how naturally the time called for such a mirror. It should, 
 however, be borne in mind that in the same year, 1555, 
 appeared an edition of Chaucer ; and that Tottel's Songs 
 and Sonnets first saw the hght in print during the same 
 "bloody" reign. I have already (p. 105) made some re- 
 marks on the dubiety of the connection between literature 
 and politics. The origin of the ' Mirror for Magistrates ' 
 is one of the facts that most strikingly illustrate how quietly 
 literary operations proceed in the midst of political dis- 
 quietude. In 1554 or 1555, Wayland the printer was pro- 
 ducing an edition of Lydgate's translation of Boccaccio's 
 ' Fall of Princes ' (in rivalry to an edition by Tottel), and 
 was advised by several of his patrons, " both honourable 
 
1 88 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 and worshipful," " to have the story continued from whereas 
 Bochas left unto this present time, chiefly of such as Fortune 
 had dallied with here in this island, which might be a mirror to 
 all men as well nobles as others." Wayland applied to one 
 William Baldwin — a graduate of Oxford, who in 1549 de- 
 scribed himself as " servant with Edward Whitchurch " the 
 printer,! and who was prepared to write plays and philoso- 
 phical treatises as well as poems ; but Baldwin would not 
 undertake the task without assistance. Accordingly, learned 
 men, to the number of seven, were invited to a consulta- 
 tion, to which Baldwin resorted with Lydgate's translation 
 under his arm ; and there and then they agreed to supple- 
 ment Boccaccio (who had left off with the capture of the 
 King of France at Poictiers in 1359) by calling up the 
 shades of unfortunate English kings and ministers, from the 
 time of Richard II., and making them bewail "their griev- 
 ous chances, heavy destinies, and woful misfortunes." It 
 was agreed that Baldwin should " usurp Bochas' room," the 
 ghostly figures being supposed to address themselves to 
 him, and that each of the company should take upon him 
 some unfortunate's lament. George Ferrers — a lawyer who 
 maintained himself in Court favour under Henry, Edward, 
 Mary, and Elizabeth, and who was noted as a director of 
 dramatic pageants — undertook the first of the tragic series, 
 the fall of Chief-Justice Tresilian, remarking on the abun- 
 dant material in our earlier history, but deferring to the 
 printer's wish to have merely a continuation of Boccaccio 
 as an experimental speculation. This was the origin of the 
 ' Mirror for Magistrates.' An enterprising printer was eager 
 for trade, ready to print anything, whether grave or gay, that 
 was likely to sell ; and when he had in hand an edition of 
 Lydgate's translation of the ' Fall of Princes,' one of his 
 customers suggested a continuation of the work to modem 
 times. This is what it comes to when we scrutinise the 
 phantom of a gloomy book rising out of a gloomy reign. 
 It rises side by side with another bookseller's speculation of 
 
 ^ Printers now began to be, to some extent, the patrons of literary men ; 
 who still, however, depended more upon the munificence of noble patrons. 
 
THOMAS SACKVILLE. 1 89 
 
 gayer aspect, both fitted to gratify interests that never die 
 out among the reading portion of any community. The 
 imagination can never live upon comedy alone; some of 
 us are more mirthful than others, and more mirthful at 
 some times than at other times, but nearly all of us desire 
 to alternate the gay with the grave. As the ' Mirror ' itself 
 was designed to show, no period in our annals had 
 been exempt from the caprices of Fortune j had such a 
 reign as Mary's been enough to extinguish love and mirth 
 among her subjects, all our poetry anterior to her reign 
 would have been overhung by the gloom of Erebus. 
 
 The first edition of the ' Mirror,' published as we have 
 said in 1559,^ contained nineteen legends from the reigns of 
 Richard II., Henry IV., Henry V., Henry VI., and Edward 
 IV. Twelve of these are attributed to Baldwin, three to 
 Ferrers : Baldwin was also general editor, and wove the 
 stories together by a prose narrative of the remarks made 
 when they were first read in the conclave of authors. In 
 1563 appeared a second edition, with eight more legends 
 of later date. In 1574, John Higgins went back to the 
 fabulous beginnings of our history, and wrote sixteen legends 
 of unfortunate British princes between "the coming of Brute 
 and the incarnation of our Saviour." In 1578, Thomas 
 Blennerhasset wrote twelve legends of the times between 
 Csesar and the Conquest. Various scattered additions were 
 made during the reign of Elizabeth j but the next great 
 event in the bibliography of the work was the collection 
 of the whole by Richard Niccols in 1610. Niccols took 
 great liberties with the text, and omitted all the intermediate 
 Venvoys of Higgins and conversations of Baldwin and Blen- 
 nerhasset. The standard modem edition is Haslewood's, 
 
 1815. 
 
 Thomas Sackville, created Baron Buckhurst in 1567 and 
 Earl of Dorset in 1603, has no right to be called the "pri- 
 mary inventor " of the ' Mirror for Magistrates,' seeing that 
 his Induction and his Legend of the Duke of Buckingham 
 were not printed till the second edition in 1563 ; but his 
 
 1 The publication was delayed by Mary's Chancellor. 
 
IQO RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 name may still be associated with the work as its most dis- 
 tinguished contributor. He infused into it a new and 
 higher spirit. His coadjutors could have been content to 
 drone on with scattered legends on the old plan, but Sack- 
 ville aspired to emulate Dante with a connected epic. His 
 language, also, as well as his conception, is fresh and 
 powerful : his singing-robes are new and rich, and throw a 
 double dinginess on the verses of his associates, which are 
 covered with mean and incongruous patches. 
 
 Sackville's plan is this. He walks out at nightfall to- 
 wards the close of autumn, when the declining light and the 
 approaching winter remind him sharply of the changes of 
 fortune. In the midst of his gloomy meditations, there 
 suddenly appears before him a hideous figure in the extremity 
 of grief and despair. This figure is Sorrow, who discourses 
 to him of the frailty of human greatness, and conveys him 
 through a gloomy entrance to the abode of departed spirits, 
 proposing to show him the ghosts of unfortunate peers and 
 princes, and to make them relate their history. The first 
 of these unfortunates is the Duke of Buckingham, who was 
 decapitated by Richard HI. Sackville's purpose was to 
 continue the list of ill-starred British warriors and statesmen 
 backwards to the Conquest, working into his plan the legends 
 already versified by Ferrers and Baldmn. Very naturally 
 and properly he deposed Baldwin from the place of Boc- 
 caccio, and made the ghost of Buckingham address him- 
 self:— 
 
 "And, Sackville, sith in purpose now thou hast 
 The woful fall of princes to descrive, 
 Whom Fortune hath uplift, and 'gain down cast, 
 To show thereby the unsurety in this life," &c. 
 
 Sackville never went beyond his one legend, and the other 
 contributors do not seem to have been prepared to merge 
 themselves in his plan, so that his complaint of Bucking- 
 ham, with the Induction prefixed, was simply printed among 
 the rest in the original chronological order. "^ 
 
 ' When Higgins subsequently went back to Brute the Trojan, he aspired 
 to be the leading figure, and copied Sackville's Induction. He failed. 
 
THOMAS SACKVILLE. 191 
 
 Sackville's position in literature is unique. He projected 
 and began our first grand epic, and wrote our first tragic 
 drama, "■ at once taking a permanent rank in the history of 
 our poetry, and placing himself at the head of contemporary 
 English poets, before he had completed his twenty-seventh 
 year : then, so far as is known, he abandoned the Muses 
 for good. After a short period of dissipation and reckless 
 profusion, he reformed, entered public hfe, was employed 
 on diplomatic service by Elizabeth, succeeded Burleigh as 
 Lord High Treasurer, and continued to be the greatest 
 subject of the realm during the first five years of the reign 
 of James ; but though he lived to the age of seventy-one, he 
 is not known to have written one line after his contribution 
 to the ' Mirror for Magistrates.' 
 
 The ' Mirror for Magistrates,' being designed as a con- 
 tinuation of Lydgate's translation, was written chiefly in the 
 same seven-line stanza. It is probably in consequence of 
 his study of Lydgate that Sackville, while writing in this 
 stanza, uses a greater number of archaic words than in 
 ' Gorboduc,' which is written in blank verse. His turns of 
 expression generally afibrd abundant traces of the influence 
 of Wyatt and Surrey : echoes of Wyatt's Penitential Psalms 
 are especially frequent. As he wrote in youth, and probably 
 also in haste, his debts to predecessors are particularly easy 
 to follow j and it is obvious that he was a careful student of 
 Dante and Virgil, as well as of our native poets. From 
 Dante, undoubtedly, he received his main inspiration. 
 
 The personified abstractions that Sackville met in the 
 abode of fallen princes are drawn with great power and 
 harmony of attributes. In the opening of his Induction, as 
 
 however, to digest the unmanageable mass of legends, so that the ' Mirror 
 for Magistrates ' remained to the last a crude abortion of the grand epic. 
 The authors were certainly not a " mirror for magistrates" in their unsub- 
 ordinated action and craving for personal pre-eminence. 
 
 1 ' The Tragedy of Ferrex ' and Porrex, first acted in the Christmas Revels 
 of the Inner Temple, afterwards before Elizabeth at Whitehall, Jan. 18, 
 1561. It was published by the authors in 1570, having previously appeared 
 in a surreptitious edition. In the edition of 1590 the title was altered to 
 ' Gorboduc. ' Thomas Norton was conjoined in the authorship, but his share 
 cannot be traced, and is believed to be small. 
 
192 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 we have said, he describes himself as meeting the hideous 
 figure of Sorrow at nightfall in a dreary evening, when the 
 bare trees and blustering winds reminded him of Fortune's 
 changes ; and he observes the same propriety in describing 
 the tenants of the infernal gulf with their behaviour and 
 various circumstances. Sackville's personifications of Sorrow, 
 Remorse, Dread, Revenge, Misery, Care, Sleep, Old Age, 
 Malady, Famine, Death, War, were conceived with a sus- 
 tained energy and pregnant significance then unparalleled 
 in our literature. They were not eclipsed by the efforts of 
 Spenser in the same vein ; ^ and they held their ground till 
 the freshness of such creations had faded. The following 
 is his picture of Misery : — 
 
 " His face was lean and somedeal pined away, 
 And eke his hands consumed to the bone ; 
 But what his body was I cannot say, 
 For on his carcase raiment had he none, 
 Save clouts and patches pieced one by one ; 
 With staff in hand and scrip on shoulders cast, 
 His chief defence against the winter's blast. 
 
 His food for most was wild fruits of the tree. 
 Unless sometimes some crumbs fell to his share ; 
 Which in his wallet long, God wot, kept he, 
 As on the which full daintily would he fare : 
 His drink the running stream, his cup the bare 
 Of the palm closed ; his bed the hard cold ground. 
 To this poor life was Misery ybound." 
 
 This picture is all the more remarkable when we consider 
 the rank of the poet. And when we consider his youth, we 
 are also surprised at his vivid picture of hoary, trembling 
 Old Age, bemoaning with broken and hollow plaint his 
 forepast youth, but still clinging to life, and praying that 
 he be not yet sent down to the grave, to lie for ever in 
 darkness : — 
 
 " Crook-backed he was, tooth-shaken, and blear-eyed. 
 Went on three feet, and sometimes crept on four, 
 
 1 They are all quoted in England's Parnassus, 1600. 
 
THOMAS SACKVILLE. 1 93 
 
 With old lame bones that rattled by his side, 
 His scalp all pill'd, and he with eld forlore : 
 His wither'd fist still knocking at death's door ; 
 Fumbling and drivelling as he draws his breath ; 
 For brief, the shape and messenger of death." 
 
 The grisly shape of Famine is described as tearing her 
 own flesh for hunger, clutching at everything that comes 
 near her, and gnashing on her own bones. Her destruction 
 by Death is a fearful picture of fiendish triumph: — 
 
 " On her while we thus firmly fixed our eyes, 
 That bled for ruth of such a dreary sight, 
 Lo ! suddenly she shrieked in so huge wise. 
 As made hell-gates to shiver with the might : 
 Wherewith a dart we saw how it did light 
 Right on her breast, and therewithal pale Death 
 Enthrilling it to reave her of her breath." 
 
 Campbell has compared the Induction to " a landscape 
 on which the sun never shines." The gloom is farther in- 
 tensified by some exquisite hints of what the landscape was 
 before " hawthorn had lost his motley livery," and before 
 " the naked twigs were shivering all for cold." We pass 
 through the horrors of the nether world with a feeling that 
 it is winter also in the upper world : and we shudder still 
 more when we think on the sweet season that winter has 
 supplanted. In the middle of the " Complaint of Bucking- 
 ham " there is another powerful effect of contrast. Bucking- 
 ham swoons at the recollection of a dependant's treachery ; 
 and while he lies between death and life, the poet relieves 
 the horrors of the scene by a description of midnight 
 peace : — 
 
 ' " Midnight was come, and every vital thing 
 
 With sweet sound sleep their weary limbs did rest ; 
 The beasts were still, the little birds that sing 
 Now sweetly slept beside their mothers' breast : 
 The old and all were shrouded in their nest. 
 The waters calm, the cruel seas did cease, 
 The woods, the fields, and all things held their peace. 
 N 
 
194 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 The golden stars were whirl'd amid their race, 
 And on the earth did laugh with twin]<ling light. 
 When each thing, nestled in his resting-place, 
 Forgat day's pain with pleasure of the night : 
 The hare had not the greedy hounds in sight, 
 The fearful deer of death stood not in doubt. 
 The partridge dreamt not of the falcon's foot 
 
 The ugly bear now minded not the stake, 
 Nor how the cruel mastives do him tear ; 
 The stag lay still unroused from the brake, 
 The foamy boar feared not the hunter's spear. 
 All thing was still in desert, bush, and brear. 
 With quiet heart now from their travails ceast. 
 Soundly they slept in midst of all their rest." 
 
 Thetragedy of "Gorboduc"was written by one profoundly 
 interested in grave problems of state, and was designed for 
 an audience whose interests were also deeply political. 
 Gorboduc, a fabulous King of Britain, B.C. 500, takes 
 counsel about dividing his realm in his lifetime between 
 his two sons, Ferrex and Porrex, and makes the division 
 against the advice of his wisest counsellors. Ferrex and 
 Porrex are jealous of each other : this jealousy is fanned 
 by mischievous flatterers : Porrex, the younger, suddenly 
 issues from his own dominions with an invading army and 
 puts his brother to death : in revenge, he is assassinated by 
 their mother Videna : finally, Videna and Gorboduc are 
 murdered by the populace to avenge the assassination of 
 Porrex, and the race of Brutus being thus extinguished, the 
 kingdom is left a prey to contending factions. The story 
 gives ample scope for the display of political wisdom ; and 
 the various opportunities are used with a fulness that no 
 doubt sustained the interest of Elizabeth and her courtiers, 
 though it would be dull enough to the play-goers of our 
 time. But the story contains also tragic materials of uni- 
 versal interest. The unnatural jealousy of Ferrex and 
 Porrex, inflamed by devilish suggestions to the horror of 
 fratricide ; the love of Videna for her eldest son, begetting 
 the fierce thirst for a revenge so monstrous ; the blind fury 
 
THOMAS SACKVILLE. 195 
 
 of the populace lighting upon innocent old Gorboduc, 
 whose only crime was infatuated parental fondness; and 
 the final reduction of a well-ordered prosperous kingdom to 
 a confused and embroiled anarchy, form no ordinary com- 
 plication of human passions and human weakness leading 
 to tragic consequences. 
 
 Although, however, Sackville is the author of the first 
 extant tragedy in the English language, and though it de- 
 serves all Pope's encomium for its propriety of sentiments, 
 unaffected perspicuity, easy flow of numbers, " chastity, 
 correctness, and gravity," he is not to be called the " founder 
 of English tragedy." That title is reserved for Marlowe. 
 The reason for the seeming inconsistency is, that Sackville 
 adhered to classic models, and did not adapt himself to the 
 changed mode of representation. There is a radical differ- 
 ence between " Gorboduc " and the form of tragedy that es- 
 tablished itself on the English stage. The actors of Greek 
 and Roman tragedy, to suit their large public theatres, were 
 raised on thick-soled buskins, and stuffed out to more than 
 human bulk. Thus stiffened, they could not represent ani- 
 mated action, and were forced to suppose such action to take 
 place behind the scenes, and to communicate the state of 
 affairs to the audience, in narrative, soliloquy, and dialogue. 
 EngUsh actors, on the other hand, were hampered by no 
 bodily encumbrance, and were free to engage in battle, 
 murder, and violent struggle : and thus it was possible for 
 English dramatists to bring the action on the stage. Apart, 
 therefore, from the debated question'of good or bad taste in 
 filling the stage with violent action, it is clear that this was 
 not possible for the classical dramatist, whereas it was 
 possible for the English dramatist. Now Sackville, in our 
 first English tragedy, did not fully avail himself of the 
 possibilities of the modem stage. The war between Porrex 
 and Ferrex, the murder of Porrex by Videna, the storming 
 of the palace and the massacre of old Gorboduc by the 
 rabble, were narrated, not represented, as they would have 
 been by the later Elizabethan actors. It is, however, worthy 
 of notice, that he did to some extent avail himself of the 
 
196 ' RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 modern possibilities in the " dumb show " before the Acts. 
 " The order and signification of the dumb show before the 
 Fifth Act," is set down as follows : " First the drums and 
 flutes began to sound, during which there came forth upon 
 the stage a company of harquebushers and of armed men, 
 all in order of battle. These after their pieces discharged, 
 and that the armed men had three times marched about the 
 stage, departed, and then the drums and flutes did cease. 
 Hereby was signified tumults, rebellions, arms, and civil 
 wars to follow, &c." There we have a certain anticipation 
 of the " excursions " and hand-to-hand fighting afterwards 
 incorporated with the play. Although, therefore, we may 
 not call Sackville the " founder," we may very well call him 
 the " pioneer," of English tragedy, as well as of our grand 
 epic. 
 
 VII. — Richard Edwards (1523-1566): Damon and 
 Pythias — Paradise of Dainty Devices. 
 
 About the time of the first representation of "Gorboduc," 
 was presented also for the entertainment of her Majesty 
 the comedy of " Damon and Pythias," which is in some 
 respects of a higher order than the imitations of Plautus 
 and Terence, composed for the boys of Eton or the under- 
 graduates of the Universities. The author was Richard 
 Edwards, Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal, a 
 poet and a musician, formerly a student of Christ Church, 
 Oxford : and he would seem to have kept in mind in whose 
 presence his play was to be acted. It is to be presumed, 
 from bloodthirsty Mary's preference for Heywood and 
 Udall, that she enjoyed a hearty laugh for its own sake ; 
 but her successor, if we may judge from her warm commen- 
 dations of "Damon and Pythias," though not averse to 
 comic scenes of a broad character, desired to encourage a 
 more decorous order of play with some pretence to gravity, 
 wisdom, and refined sentiment — an easy, pleasant, witty 
 play, enforcing a lofty sentiment and a lesson of state, such 
 as she and her statesmen might listen to with pleasure, and 
 
RICHARD EDWARDS. 1 97 
 
 without incurring the charge of frivolity. At any rate this 
 was the kind of play that Edwards furnished and that her 
 Majesty commended. It is a praise of true friendship and 
 an exposure of false friendship, ending with the moral 
 that— 
 
 " The strongest guard that kings can have 
 Are constant friends their state to save" — 
 
 and a prayer that God grant such friends to Queen Eliza- 
 beth. Edwards goes to classical story for a pair of noble 
 friends, Damon and Pythias, and exhibits them at the Court 
 of the tyrant Dionysius the younger in glaring contrast to 
 two false friends, two men who pretend friendship from in- 
 terested motives — Aristippus, the worldly-wise philosopher, 
 a type of an urbane courtier, and Carisophus, a vile type of 
 spy and informer. The devotion of the two faithful friends 
 is fiercely tried and nobly maintained, while the other 
 partnership is dissolved the moment it ceases to be useful 
 to one of the parties. A good deal of amusing action and 
 witty dialogue is got out of the relations of Aristippus and 
 Carisophus to the Court and to each other : and a passage 
 of more boisterous entertainment is rather forcibly provided 
 by introducing Grim, a collier of Croydon, as purveyor , of 
 coals to Dionysius. 
 
 Edwards starts in his prologue with very sound principles 
 for the composition of comedy : — 
 
 " In Comedies' the greatest skill is this, rightly to touch 
 All things to the quick, and eke to frame each person so. 
 That by his common talk you may his nature rightly know : 
 A Roister ought not to preach, that were too strange to hear. 
 But as from virtue he doth swerve, so ought his words appear : 
 The old man is sober, the young man rash, the Lover 
 
 triumphing in joys. 
 The Matron grave, the Harlot wild and full of wanton toys. 
 Which all in one course they no wise do agree : 
 So correspondent to their kind their speeches ought to be.'' 
 
 And it must be owned that he fulfils these conditions with 
 no small success. He is not particular to realise the politi- 
 
198 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 cal or religious talk that may be supposed to have taken 
 place at the Court of Syracuse, but he makes the most of 
 the common hints of the character of Dionysius, and de- 
 velopes Aristippus with considerable spirit from the famous 
 line of Horace — 
 
 " Omnis Aristippum decuit color et status at res." 
 
 One very striking passage in the play is that where 
 Damon quotes the description of Ulysses in Horace's ver- 
 sion of the opening lines of the Odyssey as the description 
 of "a perfect wise man" — qui mores hominum muliorum vidit 
 et urbes — one who had seen cities and the manners of many 
 different men. This ideal is significant of the coming ex- 
 cellence of English drama ; and there are not wanting other 
 evidences that observation of character was then quite a 
 mania among literary men. 
 
 Edwards was the author also of a play on " Palamon and 
 Arcite," which has not been preserved. We have, however, 
 another monument of his poetical taste and talent in the 
 ' Paradise of Dainty Devices,' a miscellany of amatory and 
 moral pieces, similar to Tottell's Miscellany. It was not 
 published till 1576, ten years after the death of its editor. 
 It ran through several editions before the end of the cen- 
 tury. This paradise was described by a critic of the period 
 as "a packet of bald rhymes;" and the description could 
 not easily be improved. It is lugubrious and barren of 
 genius to a degree. All the contributors write in the same 
 doleful strain. As a whole, it gives an impression of dis- 
 mal monotony ; and when we put together the productions 
 of the several writers, we find them one and all in doleful 
 dumps. Edwards laments the prevalence of flattery, the 
 subtle sleights practised at Court, the slow fulfilment of pro- 
 mises, the general want of truth, the rapid decay of worldly 
 beauties, the delay of his desires, the cruel power of For- 
 tune. He denounces the frauds that beguile simple 
 honesty :— 
 
RICHARD EDWARDS. I99 
 
 " I see the serpent vile, that lurks under the green, 
 How subtilly he shrouds himself that he may not be seen : 
 And yet his foster'd bane his leering looks bewray. 
 Wo worth the wily heads that seeks the simple man's decay ! 
 
 Wo worth the feigning looks on favour that do wait ! 
 
 Wo worth the feigned friendly heart that harbours deep deceit ! 
 
 Wo worth the viper's brood ! O thrice wo worth I say 
 
 All worldly wily heads that seeks the simple man's decay ! " 
 
 His coadjutors are equally miserable and indignant against 
 wrong-doing. W. Hunnis is eloquent in lover's melancholy : 
 he repents the folly of misplaced affection and misspent 
 youth : he compares himself to a dove on a leafless branch 
 weeping and wailing and tearing its breast : finding no joy 
 in life he desires death. He is no less unhappy in his no- 
 tions of friendship. Thomas, Lord Vaux, several of whose 
 pieces had appeared in Tottell's Miscellany, is also a sorrow- 
 ful singer : and Jasper Heywood, Francis Kinwelmarsh, 
 Sands, F. M., and Richard Hill, are all laid under contri- 
 bution for poems of a grave or lugubrious cast. The live- 
 liest of the company is Edward, Earl of Oxford. He also, 
 indeed, bewails the loss of his good name, and cries for 
 help to gods, saints, sprites, powers, and howling hounds 
 of hell ; writes of rejected loves and unattained desires, 
 of trickling tears and irremediable pensiveness. But his 
 wounds are obviously shallow. The sprightly verses on a 
 reply given by Desire have more of his heart in them : — 
 
 " The lively lark did stretch her wing 
 The messenger of morning bright : 
 And with her cheerful voice did sing 
 The day's approach, discharging night, 
 When that Aurora blushing red 
 Descried the guilt of Thetis' bed. 
 Laradon tan tan, Tedriton teight. 
 
 I went abroad to take the air, 
 And in the meads I met a knight, 
 Clad in carnation colour fair. 
 
200 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 I did salute the youthful wight ; 
 Of him his name I did inquire ; 
 He sighed and said, I am Desire. 
 Laradon tan tan, Tedriton teight. 
 
 Desire I did desire to stay, 
 Awhile with him I craved talk : 
 The courteous wight said me no nay, 
 But hand'in hand with me did walk. 
 Then in desire I asked again 
 What thing did please and what did pain. 
 Laradon tan tan. 
 
 He smiled and thus he answered me : 
 Desire can have no greater pain. 
 Than for to see another man 
 The thing desired to obtain. 
 No joy no greater too than this 
 Than to enjoy what others miss. 
 Laradon tan tan." 
 
 Vin. — George Gascoigne (1525-1577). 
 
 Within the first ten years of Elizabeth's reign another 
 novelty was added to the drama. In 1566, George Gas- 
 coigne translated from Ariosto . for representation at Gray's 
 Inn, the prose comedy Gli-Suppositi. This, acted under the 
 title of " The Supposes," is the first comedy written in Eng- 
 lish prose, and in plot, situation, and character, it approaches 
 nearer than " Damon and Pythias" to the established type 
 of English comedy. One great tribute to its excellence is 
 the use made of its plot and its situations by Shakespeare : 
 the underplot in the " Taming of the Shrew " is an adapta- 
 tion of the plot of " The Supposes," and a great many of the 
 situations or relations between the various characters might 
 be paralleled from Shakespeare's comedies. 
 
 George Gascoigne, "soldier and poet" as he loved to de- 
 scribe himself, was the most versatile writer belonging to the 
 first half of Elizabeth's reign ; and contrived to anticipate 
 more than one of the forms of composition in which the 
 
GEORGE GASCOIGNE. 201 
 
 later Elizabethans achieved their fame. Few writers can 
 claim a more varied list of literary exploits. Besides his 
 prose comedy, he translated from the Italian of Bandello the 
 prose tale of " Jeronimi," perhaps the first novel printed in 
 English : wrote the mock-heroic poem of " Dan Bartholo- 
 mew," our first attempt to rival the mock-heroic poetry of 
 the Italians : wrote three acts of " Jocasta," the first adap- 
 tation of a Greek tragedy performed on the English stage : 
 prepared masques for Queen Elizabeth : composed in prose 
 a dull " tragical comedy " "The Glass of Government : " and 
 wrote the " Steel Glass," the first extensive EngUsh satire. 
 
 His personal history is not without interest. It affords 
 a touching example of middle-age rendered miserable by 
 thoughtless youth. When he went up from Cambridge to 
 the Inns of Court, a vigorous, enthusiastic young fellow, 
 "well-born, tenderly fostered, and delicately accompanied," 
 he was ready to join friends and companions in any excite- 
 ment, animal or intellectual. One of his earliest adventures 
 in London was a temporary imprisonment during the year 
 1548, on a charge of dicing and other disreputable practices. 
 Entering into the fashion of the time, he wrote love-verses 
 whose coarse boisterous humour was warmly resented by 
 the graver sort when first they appeared in print. Aspiring 
 to political distinction, he sat as a burgess for Bedford dur- 
 ing the reign of Mary. When play-writing became the rage, 
 he at once figured in the front of play-wrights. Before this, 
 having impaired his estate by his extravagance, and being 
 disinherited as a prodigal son, he had sought to retrieve his 
 fortunes by marrying a rich widow ; but either the money 
 was tied up from him for behoof of the lady's children by 
 her former husband, or he got it into his hands and ran 
 through it before 1572, for at that date he endeavoured to 
 gain admission into Parliament as burgess for Midhurst, 
 and was defeated by formal objections, which represented 
 him as being a slanderous rhymer, a notorious ruf- 
 fian, an atheist, a manslaughterer, and an extensive 
 debtor lurking about in fear of apprehension, and seek- 
 ing admission to Parliament that he might be able to 
 
202 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 defy his creditors. It may have been this last ignoble 
 motive, if not the motive of retrieving his name by brave 
 achievements, that induced him to cross over to Holland 
 and seek a commission under the Prince of Orange. After 
 his return from Holland in 1573, he made shift to live by 
 his pen. He was now well on to fifty, harassed by debt, 
 met on all sides with cold looks, bitterly regretful of the mad 
 follies of his youth. During his absence, some of his ques- 
 tionable poesies had been printed, and were read with 
 indignation by the guardians of public morality. Soon 
 after his return, in 1575, he issued an edition of his works 
 under the title of ' Flowers, Herbs, and Weeds.' In a pre- 
 fatory epistle to " reverend divines," he apologises humbly 
 but with some bitterness for the faults of his youth ; and out 
 of deference to them reprints his youthful effusions in a 
 purified form, and with the self-accusing title of " weeds." 
 There is a bitterness in all his later compositions. He often 
 writes as if experience had taught him that he must not 
 speak evil of dignitaries, while he chafed against the en- 
 forced restraint ; in the tone of his protestations of respect, 
 he betrayed a somewhat savage sense of the injustice done 
 him by merciless remembrance of his misspent youth. 
 Poor man : he might have written well if the world had 
 gone pleasantly with him, but he was disconcerted and em- 
 bittered by coldness and suspicion. Yet he was not wholly 
 without countenance and patronage. Arthur Lord Grey of 
 Wilton was a steady friend to him, and might have secured 
 him preferment had he not himself fallen into disgrace. 
 He was asked by the Earl of Leicester to help in the page- 
 ants for the entertainment of Elizabeth in the famous recep- 
 tion at Kenilworth. Still his poems have a consistent tinge 
 of gloom. In the epistle dedicatory to his "Steel Glass" 
 (1576), he records how he was "derided, suspected, ac- 
 cused, and condemned; yea, more than that, vigorously 
 rejected when he proffered amends for his harm." " The 
 Drum of Doomsday," "The view of Worldly Vanities," "The 
 Shame of Sin," " The Needle's Eye," " Remedies against the 
 Bitterness of Death," " A Delicate Diet for Dainty-mouthed 
 
GEORGE GASCOIGNE. 203 
 
 Drunkards," " The Grief of Joy," " The Griefs or Discommo- 
 dities of Lusty Youth," " The Vanities of Beauty," " The 
 Faults of Force and Strength," "The Vanities of Activities," 
 are the significantly cheerless titles and sub-titles of his 
 last productions. He died at Stamford towards the end 
 of 1577. 
 
 Not that Gascoigne was a man of first-rate genius. He 
 never would have been anything higher than a versatile 
 master of verse. But his energy was prodigious ; and the 
 career of such energy is always an interesting spectacle. 
 
 Some of the precepts in his " Notes of Instruction" ^ in 
 verse-making may be put in evidence regarding his qualifi- 
 cations as a poet. The most suggestive is his advice to 
 young poets in search of rhyme — " When you have set down 
 your first verse, take the last word thereof, and count over 
 all the words of the self-same sound by order of the alpha- 
 bet." Another sound practical advice is to use as few poly- 
 syllables as possible ; first, because the most ancient English 
 words are of one syllable, but also because " words of one 
 syllable will more easily fall to be short or long as occasion 
 requireth." Characteristic of his own clearness and vigour 
 is his advice to study perspicuity, to abstain from Latin in- 
 versions, to be sparing of poetical licences, and to avoid 
 commonplaces. It is remarkable also that he enunciates 
 a principle which is sometimes spoken of as being of later 
 growth — " Remember to place every word in his natural 
 emphasis or sound, that is to say, in such wise, and with 
 such length or shortness, elevation or depression of syllables 
 as it is commonly pronounced and used." He also lays 
 down a strict rule of caesura. 
 
 The " Jocasta," an adaptation from the " Phcenisss " of 
 Euripides, contains some powerful situations, buF they are 
 lost in the mass of tedious narrative dialogue. The blank 
 verse has every appearance of having been patched up 
 hurriedly. One of the best passages is the interchange of 
 defiance between Etiocles and Polynices in the presence of 
 
 1 Reprinted by Mr Arber along with the " Steel Glass" and the " Com- 
 plaint of Philomene." 
 
204 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 their mother : it would have been difficult to destroy the 
 tragic force of such a situation. 
 
 The tale of Ferdinando Jeronimi and Leonora de Val- 
 asco is a voluptuous story of warm but fickle love, won 
 easily and lost through exacting causeless jealousy. It was 
 probably one item in the education of that generation of 
 poets in the arts and ways of love : its main lesson, apart 
 from its exquisite little windings and turnings, being that 
 where a woman yields her whole heart she is implacably 
 offended when she discovers that she is not trusted. In 
 style the tale is the parent of the tales of Lyly and Greene. 
 Its " euphuism" is not so methodical as Euphuism strictly 
 so called — the developed mannerism of Lyly : but one 
 might quote from Gascoigne passages that contain all the 
 elements of that mannerism. Gascoigne, however, was too 
 robust a nature to develop this sort of figurative language 
 into a system. After a euphuistic passage, he begins a new 
 paragraph by saying — "to speak English." 
 
 His love-verses are not the verses of a sentimental in- 
 amorato, or impassioned lover. He woos more like Dio- 
 mede than like Troilus, praising his lady's beauty with 
 humorous ardour, and bidding her " farewell with a mis- 
 chief " when she proves inconstant. Grave and reverend 
 divines had some reason to complain of a poet who pub- 
 lished three sonnets written upon the occasion of presenting 
 his mistress with a copy of the " Golden Ass" of Apuleius. 
 His more serious lyrics have an impetuous movement and 
 rough fire in them that make us think of poor George as an 
 imperfect BjTon, — resembling Byron as he did not a little 
 in his life, and complaining of the same identification of 
 himself with his heroes. 
 
 There is abundance of comic vigour and mad rollicking 
 humour in " Dan Bartholomew of Bath." It may be made 
 another point of comparison with Byron; but its general 
 strain bears more resemblance to Lockhart's " Mad Banker 
 of Amsterdam." The hero's courtship and deceptive 
 triumph, his discomfiture and dolorous laments, his Last 
 Will and Testament, his Subscription and Seal, his Fare- 
 
GEORGE GASCOIGNE. 20$ 
 
 well, and " The Reporter's " conclusion in the style of the 
 ' Mirror for Magistrates,' are executed with great spirit. 
 The account of his falling in love will give an idea of the 
 style : — 
 
 " For though he had in all his learned lore 
 Both read good rules to bridle fantasy, 
 And all good authors taught him evermore 
 To love the mean and leave extremity ; 
 Yet Kind hath left him such a quality, 
 That at the last he quite forgot his books, 
 And Jastened fancy with the fairest looks. 
 
 For proof ; when green youth leapt out of his eye. 
 
 And left him now a man of middle age, 
 
 His hap was yet with wandering looks to spy 
 
 A fair young imp of proper personage, 
 
 fike born (as he) of honest parentage : 
 
 And truth to tell, my skill it cannot serve 
 
 To praise her beauty as it did deserve. 
 
 First for her head : the hairs were not of gold, 
 But of some other metal far more fine, 
 Whereof each crinet seemed, to behold. 
 Like glistering wires against the sun that shine ; 
 And therewithal the blazing of her eyne 
 Was like the beams of Titan, truth to tell. 
 Which glads us all that in this world do dwell. 
 
 Upon her cheeks the lily and the rose 
 Did intermeet with equal change of hue. 
 And in her gifts no lack I can suppose 
 But that at last (alas) she was untrue : 
 Which flinging fault, because it is not new 
 Nor seldom seen in kits of Cressid's kind, 
 I marvel not, nor bear it much in mind. 
 
 That mouth of hers which seemed to flow with mell 
 
 In speech, in voice, in tender touch, in taste : 
 
 That dimpled chin wherein delight did dwell. 
 
 That ruddy lip wherein was pleasure placed ; 
 
 Those well-shaped hands, fine arms, and slender waist. 
 
 With all the gifts which gave her any grace. 
 
 Were smiling baits which caught fond fools apace.'' 
 
206 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 " The Glass of Government " belongs to the broken-down 
 and disheartened period of his life. It was published in 
 "575- He calls it a tragical comedy to illustrate the 
 rewards and punishments of virtues and vices, consecrates 
 the title-page with a quotation from Scripture, and fills a 
 preliminary fly-leaf with pious, loyal, patriotic, and moral 
 saws. The prologue forbids all expectations of merry jest 
 and vain delight, referring wanton play-goers to interludes 
 and Italian toys, and announcing that the comedy is not 
 a comedy in Terence's sense, but a mirror to lords and 
 citizens, and a beacon to rash youth. The argument is the 
 history of four young men, two of 'quick capacity, who 
 become dissipated, and end their careers in shame — two of 
 dull understanding, but steady industry, who are preferred 
 to honourable positions. The play is saturated with good 
 advice, the education of the young men affording oppor- 
 tunities for commonplace counsel and the exposition of 
 learned precepts by exemplary parents and teachers, pos- 
 sessing the profoundest sense of their responsibilities. 
 Copious citations are made from Scripture, and from Greek 
 and Roman moralists and poets. It is virtually a moral- 
 play, with individual names given to the abstractions, and 
 the parasite of Latin comedy in place of the Vice of the 
 Moralities. 
 
 " The Steel Glass " shows poor Gascoigne sunk deep in 
 the slough of despondency and bitterness. And in one of 
 his smaller poems it is sad to find him thus looking back to 
 the strength of his youth, and reflecting that strength is 
 after all a dangerous thing, which may in the end prove to 
 be a less bountiful gift of nature than weakness : — 
 
 " I have been strong (I thank my God therefore) 
 And did therein rejoice as most men did : 
 I leapt, I ran, I toiled and travailed sore, 
 My might and main did covet to be kid.'- 
 But lo : behold : my merry days amid, 
 One heady deed my haughty heart did break, 
 And since (full oft) I wished I had been weak. 
 
 ^ Known. 
 
THOMAS CHURCHYARD. . 207 
 
 The weakling he sits buzzing at his book, 
 Or keeps full close, and loves to live in quiet : 
 For lack of force he warily doth look 
 In every dish which may disturb his diet. 
 He neither fights nor runneth after riot. 
 But stays his steps by mean and measure too, 
 And longer lives than many strong men do." 
 
 IX. — Thomas Churchyard (1520-1604). 
 
 Much tamer in every way than Gascoigne was this other 
 soldier and poet, yet he is an interesting man, if for no 
 other reason than that he saw the wonderful growth of the 
 Elizabethan literature from its beginnings to its maturity. 
 He lived for some two years in the service of the Earl of 
 Surrey, contributed to Tottel's Miscellany and to the 'Mirror 
 for Magistrates,' and survived to issue several books con- 
 temporaneously with the plays of Shakespeare. He began 
 life as a gay gallant or " royster " at the Court of Henry 
 VIII., and he saw the accession of James I. Though his 
 poetry is of small account, his life was eventful and interest- 
 ing. In the war with Scotland under Edward VI. he was 
 taken prisoner; being ransomed, he returned to Court, 
 found himself forgotten and neglected, and turned his face, 
 swearing, " as long as he his five wits had, to come in Court 
 no more." He courted a widow, who shamelessly told him 
 he had too little money for her : whereupon, in the rage of 
 his disappointment, he broke his lute, burnt his books and 
 MSS., and went abroad to the Emperor as a soldier of 
 fortune. 
 
 He served in Mary's wars with France in the last year 
 of her reign; was taken prisoner; became very popular 
 among the cultivated French, and rewarded their courtesy 
 by cleverly escaping to England. He lived through the 
 whole of the reign of Elizabeth, engaging in various warlike 
 adventures, for which he seems to have received very poor 
 recompense, and making some effort to live by his pen. His 
 
208 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 chief writings/ besides the stories of Lord Mowbray and 
 Shore's Wife in the ' Mirror for Magistrates,' were extracts 
 from his own experience; — Churchyard's Chips, 1565; 
 Churchyard's Choice, 1579 ; Churchyard's Charge, "a light 
 bundle of lively discourses," 1580; Churchyard's Challenge, 
 1593; and Churchyard's Charity, "a musical consort of 
 heavenly harmony," 1595. In these works he appears as 
 a garrulous, gossiping old fellow, fond of reciting his own 
 exploits, and overflowing with good advice and general 
 goodwill — on easy confidential terms with the public. So 
 far as his works afford indications, he was tolerably happy 
 in his old age. There would seem to have been a change 
 in his circumstances between 1565 and 1580. In 1565 he 
 narrated his own life in most lugubrious Mirror for Magis- 
 trates strain, under the title of " A tragical discourse of the 
 unhappy man's life." In 1578 he translated Ovid De Tristi- 
 bus. But in 1580 he gave another version of his life in 
 dancing ballad couplets as "a story translated out of 
 French," dwelling with particular gusto on his powers of 
 amusing and gaining the friendship of his enemies during 
 his periods of captivity in Scotland and France. He kept 
 on writing with great activity till the very last, publishing 
 no less than thirty-five works during the last twenty-five 
 years of his long life. Such was the Nestor of the Eliza- 
 bethan heroes. 
 
 X. — Translators of Seneca and Ovid. 
 
 Our translators were drawn to Seneca by the same feel- 
 ings that led to the production of the ' Mirror for Magis- 
 trates.' They found in him a similar vein of declamation 
 on the downfall of greatness, the evanescent character of 
 prosperity, the slipperiness of the heights of pride. Thomas 
 Newton, who collected the translations of the several trage- 
 
 1 For reprints see ' Bibliographical Miscellanies,' Oxford, 1813 ; Frondes 
 Caduccs, Auchinleck Press, 1816-17 > and (specially) ' Chips concerning Scot- 
 laud, ' edited, with Life, by George Chalmers, 1817. 
 
TRANSLATORS OF SENECA AND OVID. 209 
 
 dies in 1581, enlarged expressly on their moral tone. 
 He affected to believe that Seneca might be charged with 
 encouraging ambition, cruelty, incontinence, &c. ; and 
 affirmed in denial of any such charge that " in the whole 
 catalogue of heathen writers there is none that does so 
 much with gravity of philosophical sentences, weighti- 
 ness of sappy words, and authority of sound matter, to 
 beat down sin, loose life, dissolute dealing, and unbridled 
 sensuality." 
 
 It is not worth while, if it were possible, to recall the 
 personalities of the several translators. The first of them 
 was Jasper Heywood, then an Oxford undergraduate, who 
 set to work to translate the 'Troas,' immediately after 
 the publication of the 'Mirror for Magistrates' in 1559. 
 He was followed by Alexander Nevile, John Studley, and 
 Thomas Nuce : and the separate translations were col- 
 lected into one volume by Thomas Newton in 1581. The 
 translations are avowedly free. In his preface to the 
 ' Troas,' Heywood says that he has endeavoured to keep 
 touch with the Latin, not word for word or verse for verse, 
 but in such a way as to expound the sense ; and Nevile, 
 who was but sixteen when he wrote, and whose preface is 
 an amusing study of inflated precocity and stilted moralising, 
 boldly affirmed his intention of wandering from his author, 
 roving where he listed, adding and subtracting at pleasure. 
 Of course none of the translators make the remotest ap- 
 proach to the style of Seneca : they simply transmute him 
 into the poetical commonplaces of Lydgate and the ' Mirror.' 
 Look, for instance, at Studley's rendering of the invocation 
 of Medea in the Fourth Act : — 
 
 " O flittering flocks of grisly ghosts 
 that sit in silent seat, 
 O ugsome Bugs, O Goblins grim 
 
 of hell, I you entreat ! 
 O lowering Chaos, dungeon blind 
 
 and dreadful darken'd pit 
 Where Ditis muffled up in clouds 
 of blackest shades doth sit ! 
 O 
 
210 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 O wretched woful wawling souls 
 
 your aid I do implore, 
 That linked lie with jingling chains 
 
 on wailing Limbo shore ! 
 O mossy den where death doth couch 
 
 his ghastly carrion face : 
 Release your pangs, O sprites, and to 
 
 this wedding hie apace. 
 Cause ye the snaggy wheel to pause, 
 
 that rents the carcase bound ; 
 Permit Ixion's racked limbs 
 
 to rest upon the ground ; 
 Let hunger-bitten Tantalus 
 
 with gaunt and pined paunch. 
 Sup by Pirene's gulphed stream, 
 
 his swelling thirst to staunch." 
 
 A collector of " sound and fury " would find many amus- 
 ing passages in these translations. At the same time, the 
 raw material, very raw though it was, may have been useful 
 to Shakespeare or any dramatist that knew how to refine it. 
 It is not impossible that Shakespeare derived from these 
 rude translations some hints for his incomparable studies of 
 oppressed and desperate women. 
 
 What drew Arthur Golding to translate Ovid's Metamor- 
 phoses, is hard to conjecture. If it had been Ovid's 'Art 
 of Love,' one might have pointed to the translation as part 
 of the amatory movement in literature, standing to the 
 translation of Seneca as Tottel's Miscellany to the ' Mirror 
 for Magistrates.' But Golding was not the sort of man 
 from whom one would expect a translation of an amatory 
 work. He was an indefatigable translator from Latin, but 
 his subjects generally were of a different cast. He began 
 in 1562 by translating with fervent Protestant zeal a brief 
 treatise on the burning of Bucer and Phagius in the time of 
 Queen Mary, setting forth " the fantastical and tyrannous 
 dealings of the Romish Church, together with the godly 
 and modest regiment of the true Christian Church." The 
 
TRANSLATORS OF SENECA AND OVID. 211 
 
 tract is picturesque and forcible. His next performance was 
 a translation of Aretine's history of the wars between "the 
 Imperials and the Goths for the possession of Italy,'' pub- 
 lished in 1563. He translated from Justin in 1564; Caesar's 
 Commentaries in 1565; and numerous ecclesiastical and 
 other works. His translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses 
 was completed in 1567. It is not very exact, nor calculated 
 to convey an idea of the poet's exquisite delicacy of expres- 
 sion ; but it was quite good enough to reveal to non-classical 
 readers a new world of graceful fancies. Shakespeare must 
 have revelled in it, denuding the exquisite fancies of what 
 was rough in the manner of their presentation, and letting 
 them lie in his mind, and stimulate his imagination to beget 
 many others of the same kind. The following is a speci- 
 men which may have been in Shakespeare's mind when he 
 imagined the station of Mercury new lighted on a heaven- 
 kissing hill : — 
 
 " And thereupon he call'd his son that Maia had him born, 
 Commanding Argus should be killed. He made no long 
 
 abode, 
 But tied his feathers to his feet, and took his charmed rod 
 (With which he bringeth things asleep, and fetcheth souls 
 
 from hell,) 
 And put his hat upon his head ; and when that all was 
 
 well, 
 He leaped from his father's towers and down to earth 
 
 he flew. 
 And there both hat and wings also he lightly from him 
 
 threw. 
 Retaining nothing but his staff, the which he closely held 
 Between his elbow and his side, and through the common 
 
 field 
 Went plodding like some good plain soul that had some flock 
 
 to feed." 
 
 Prefixed to the work is an epistle also in Alexandrines, 
 moralising the various fables, asking the pious reader to un- 
 derstand good men by " gods," and to see in Fate and For- 
 
212 RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. 
 
 tune aspects of the eternal Providence ; and arguing that, 
 though the Scriptures are the only true fountains of know- 
 ledge, yet much may be learnt from these pagan writers when 
 rightly interpreted. The following is part of the moral of 
 Phaeton : — 
 
 " This fable also doth advise all parents and all such 
 As bring up youth to take good heed of cockering them too 
 much." 
 
213 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 EDMUND SPENSER. 
 
 (1552-1598.) 
 
 I. — His Life and Character. 
 
 Although, in Dryden's phrase, "Spenser more than once 
 insinuates that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his 
 body," there can be no doubt that Spenser's chief impulse 
 in the composition of his principal poem was derived from 
 Ariosto and Tasso. It is, indeed, not difficult to adduce 
 passages from the ' Faery Queen,' founded on Chaucer or 
 Sir Thomas Malory. Spenser was a most learned poet, 
 more so probably than any great English poet, except Mr 
 Swinburne ; and he assimilated and incorporated material 
 from many predecessors — English, French, Italian, Latin, 
 and Greek. " E. K.," the inspired commentator on his 
 ' Shepherd's Calendar,' after enumerating as writers of pas- 
 toral poetry Theocritus, Virgil, Mantuanus, Petrarca, and 
 Boccaccio, comes finally to Marot, Sanazarro, "and also 
 divers other excellent both Italian and French poets," and 
 adds " whose footing this author everywhere foUoweth, yet 
 so as few, but they be well scented, can trace him out." 
 Our poet laid all under contribution, not stealing clumsily 
 and mechanically, but using the products of other imagina- 
 tions as food for his own. The Italian masters, undoubtedly, 
 were his chief models and exemplars, although he never 
 followed them to the oppression, still less to the suppres- 
 sion, of his own spirit. The ' Faery Queen ' is of the same 
 
214 EDMUND SPENSER: 
 
 kindred with the 'Orlando Furioso' and the 'Gerusalemme 
 Liberata.' In Spenser's poem, perhaps, the allegory had 
 greater generative force : but all three agree in the essential 
 respect of being the elements of chivalrous romance used 
 by great artists for purely artistic purposes. 
 
 The translations of Ariosto and Tasso executed about the 
 time of the appearance of the ' Faery Queen,' are a proof 
 of the interest then prevailing in these poems of chivalry. 
 A translation of Ariosto's ' Orlando Furioso,' by Sir John 
 Harrington, was published in 1591 : one translation of 
 Tasso's 'Godfrey of Bulloigne,' or 'Jerusalem Delivered,' 
 by Richard Carew, in 1594, and another, more celebrated, 
 by Sir Edward Fairfax, in 1600. Both Harrington's and 
 Fairfax's are smooth and copious, and supplied ' England's 
 Parnassus ' with many choice extracts. They are in ottava 
 rima, and are far from having Spenser's inimitable music ; 
 yet, if an unobservant reader were set down to some of 
 those extracts, the general resemblance of strain, of matter 
 and imagery, is such that he would probably refer them at 
 once to Spenser.^ 
 
 Spenser's lineage and life have been made subjects for 
 laborious inquiry and nice speculation. He was bom 
 in London, and is supposed to have belonged to a Lanca- 
 shire branch of the ennobled family of Spencer. The date 
 of his birth is generally fixed about 1552. He entered 
 Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a sizar, in 1569: became 
 
 1 Sir John Harrington might be taken as a typical Elizabethan courtier 
 — a handsome young fellow, possessed of a keen eye for fun as well as for 
 beauty, and a very ready command of language. Besides translating 
 ' Orlando Furioso,' which the Queen is said to have imposed upon him as 
 a punishment for translating the episode of ' Alcina and Ruggiero, ' he 
 wrote Epigrams, composed ' Polindor and Flostella,* a mock-heroic poem 
 in couplets, full of fresh feeling and cleverness, and expounded the merits 
 of one of the most valuable sanitary contrivances of civilised life in a prose 
 treatise — ' Ajax Metamorphosed ' — boiUng over with gross Rabelaisian hu- 
 mour. Fairfax was a quieter man, of secluded studious habits. Dryden, in 
 the preface to his Fables, is loud in praise of the beauty of Fairfax's 
 numbers, which, he says. Waller himself owned to have been his model. 
 ' ' Milton was the poetical son of Spenser, and Mr Waller of Fairfax." 
 
HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 21$ 
 
 B.A. in 1 573, M.A. in 1576. After his residence at Cam- 
 bridge, he is believed to have gone to the north of England ; 
 to have returned south in 1578 by the advice of his college 
 friend Gabriel Harvey j and to have been introduced by 
 Harvey to Sir Philip Sidney. Sidney and the Earl of 
 Leicester took him by the hand and advanced his fortunes. 
 
 In 1579 he dedicated to Sidney his first poetical effort, 
 'The Shepherd's Calendar,' containing twelve pastorals, 
 one for each month, classified as moral, plaintive, and 
 recreative. About this time, in his correspondence with 
 Harvey, mention is made of various works now lost, but 
 probably, with the exception of his 'Nine Comedies,' 
 partially embodied in what he afterwards published. By 
 that time, also, he had begun the ' Faery Queen.' 
 
 In 1580, at the age of twenty-seven, he entered upon 
 official life : in that year he went to Ireland as secretary to 
 the viceroy. Lord Grey. He is usually said to have returned 
 to England in 1582, when Lord Grey was recalled: and 
 his business employment for the rest of his life is ignored. 
 Only three facts are known, but they are significant. In 
 1581 he was appointed clerk to the Irish Court of Chancery. 
 In 1588 he resigned that appointment for the office of Clerk 
 to the Council of Munster. In 1598 he was recommended 
 by the Queen as a suitable person to be Sheriff of Cork ; 
 but had to flee the country in less than a month afterwards. 
 For eighteen years, therefore, with the exception of two 
 brief ascertained visits to England, the author of the ' Faery 
 Queen' remained in Ireland, nominally at least, as an 
 official clerk : and the last appointment would seem to 
 show that his duties were more than nominal, and were 
 efficiently discharged. 
 
 In 1586 his friends obtained for him a grant of three 
 thousand acres of forfeited land at Kilcolman, near Cork. 
 It being a condition of the grant that the holder should 
 cultivate the soil, our poet probably at once went into 
 residence. There, on the borders of a lake, amid beautiful 
 scenery, with easy official duties, and with occasional visits 
 from his friends — Sir Walter Raleigh among the number — 
 
2l6 EDMUND SPENSER: 
 
 he placidly elaborated his 'Faery Queen.' In 1590 he 
 crossed St George's Channel in Raleigh's company, with 
 three Books ready for the printer ; saw to the publication of 
 ' them ; was introduced to Elizabeth ; and recrossed to Kil- 
 colman, probably in the spring of 1591, with a substantial 
 proof of her Majesty's favour in the shape of a grant for a 
 yearly pension of fifty pounds, and the consequent honorary 
 title of Poet-laureate-. In 1591, some minor poems of his 
 were published, with or without his superintendence : " The 
 Ruins of Time," "The Tears of the Muses," "Virgil's 
 Gnat," " Prosopopoeia, or Mother Hubbard's Tale," " Muio- 
 potmos, or the Fate of the Butterfly," and " Visions of the 
 World's Vanity." About the same timei he wrote his 
 " Daphnaida," an elegy on the death of a noble lady. His 
 next publications were in 1595: when Ponsonby issued in 
 separate volumes, and at different times, ' Colin Clout's 
 Come Home Again ' (a poem interesting from its allusions 
 to his contemporaries), along with a lament for Sir Philip Sid- 
 ney, and his " Amoretti " and " Epithalamion," love-sonnets 
 and a marriage-song, occasioned by his wooing and its suc- 
 cessful termination in 1594. In 1596 he went over to 
 England and superintended the publication of three more 
 Books of the ' Faery Queen,' along with a second edition of 
 the first three. In the same year appeared in one volume 
 his " Prothalamion " (spousal verses), the elegiac "Daph- 
 naida'' already mentioned, and four H3Tims. In 1598 he 
 was driven from Kilcolman by the outbreak of Tyrone's 
 rebellion. His wife and himself escaped, but in the hurry 
 and panic they left a little child behind them, and never 
 saw it again. Their house was sacked and burned. He 
 died soon after in London, January 1599. His 'View of 
 the State of Ireland,' a prose dialogue, completed in 1596, 
 was not published tiU 1633. 
 
 " Short curling hair, a full moustache, cut after the pattern 
 
 ' Probably before. It is dated Jan. i, 1591 ; and we know (Preface to 
 ' Shepherd's Calendar ') that Spenser made the year begin with January, and 
 not, as was then usual, with March. 
 
HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 217 
 
 of Lord Leicester's, close-clipped beard, heavy eyebrows, 
 and under them thoughtful brown eyes, whose upper eye- 
 lids weigh them dreamily down ; a long and straight nose, 
 strongly developed, answering to a long and somewhat 
 spare face, with a well-formed sensible-looking forehead ; a 
 mouth almost obscured by the moustache, but still showing 
 rather full lips, denoting feeling, well set together, so that 
 the warmth of feeling shall not run riot, with a touch 
 of sadness in them ; — such is the look of Spenser as his 
 portrait hands it down to us." ^ 
 
 What may have been the extent of his official duties we 
 do not know ; but, to judge from internal evidence, no man 
 ever lived more exclusively in and for poetry than Spenser. 
 We try in vain for any image to express the voluptuous 
 completeness of his immersion in the colours and music of 
 poetry. He was a man of reserved and gentle disposition, 
 and he turned luxuriously from the rough world of facts 
 to the ampler ether, the diviner air, the softer and more 
 resplendent forms of Arcadia, and the delightful land of 
 Faery. While the dramatists were labouring to make the 
 past present, his imagination worked in an opposite line : 
 his effort was to remove hard, clear, visible, and tangible 
 actualities to dreamy regions, and there to reproduce them 
 in a glorified state with softer and warmer forms and colours, 
 or, as the case might be, in a degraded state with attributes 
 exaggerated in hideousness. His own Pastoral land and 
 Faery land he had furnished with a geography, a popula- 
 tion, and a history of their own, and there chiefly his ima- 
 gination loved to dwell and pursue its creative work. But 
 his spirit, restless and insatiate in its search for deliverance 
 from the cold and definite world, never disdained to enter 
 the abodes prepared by other poets. He expatiated fireely 
 through the realms of ancient mythology, and often soared 
 up and poised his wing in mystical contemplation of love 
 and beauty. 
 
 More than one of Spenser's contemporaries expressed 
 
 1 Rev. G. W. Kitchin, in Clarendon Press edition of ' Faery Queen.' 
 
2l8 EDMUND SPENSER: 
 
 admiration of his " deep conceit." The luxuriance of leaf 
 and blossom in his poems is deeply rooted in meditation. 
 The profound allegory of the ' Faery Queen' has been sup- 
 posed to be alarming to the easy general reader ; and several 
 critics, out of a laudable desire to extend Spenser's popu- 
 larity, have assured us that we may give over all anxiety 
 about the hidden meaning and yet lose none of the enjoy- 
 ment of the plain story. If, indeed, we desire to understand 
 fully the rich activity and subtlety of the poet's imagination, 
 we do well to get possession of the allegorical ground-work, 
 and study from that point the luxuriant growth of enfolding 
 images. But that effort is necessary only if we desire to 
 feel stems growing and leaves and flowers bursting about 
 us with unceasing energy and boundless profusion. 
 
 Many have asserted, and Christopher North indignantly 
 denied, that Spenser's imagination overpowered his judg- 
 ment. The meaning of the assertors seems to be, that 
 Spenser's fertile mind conceived many images that offend 
 against good taste or that twine themselves together with 
 bewildering intricacy, and his judgment was not strong 
 enough to keep them back. In all such cases the critic can 
 speak only for himself Warton, and many sober-minded 
 people who read poetry with a certain amount of pleasure, 
 would doubtless often be bewildered and occasionally dis- 
 gusted in journeying through the intricate paths and en- 
 countering some of the monstrous personages of the land of 
 Faery. Wilson was too enraptured with the poem to be 
 conscious of any such faults : he was not, perhaps, so easily 
 bewildered nor so easily disgusted by strongly painted 
 " lumps of foul deformity." 
 
 Spenser was not without a full share of the poet's alleged 
 peculiar failings, vanity and irritability. Like Sir Walter 
 Scott, our other great poet of chivalrous heroism, he loved 
 to dwell on his ancestry : he somewhat ostentatiously 
 claimed kindred with the noble house of Spencer. Over 
 his natural pride in the exercise of his great gift, he spread 
 but a thin disguise : his transparent compliments to himself 
 are almost unique. He wrote, or procured or allowed a 
 
HIS WORDS, METRES, AND GENERAL FORM. 219 
 
 mysterious friend to write, under the initials E. K., an in- 
 troduction and explanatory notes to his ' Shepherd's Calen- 
 dar,' comparing this trial of his wings with similar essays 
 by Theocritus and Virgil, and announcing him as "one 
 that in time shall be able to keep wing with the best." 
 Among the shepherds he represents himself under the names 
 of Colin Cout and young Cuddy, and makes other shep- 
 herds speak of these sweet players on the oaten pipe with 
 boundless admiration as the joy of their fellows and the 
 rivals of Calliope herself.^ As for the poet's irritability, that 
 appears in the covert bitterness of his attacks on Roman 
 Catholics and other objects of his dislike, but most unmis- 
 takably in his ' View of the State of Ireland.' His temper 
 was too thin for the asperities of public life. These, how- 
 ever, are the unfavourable aspects of the poet's amiable 
 nature. More favourable aspects of the same reserved 
 meditative disposition appear in his warm gratitude to bene- 
 factors, his passion for temperance and purity, and his deep 
 religious earnestness. 
 
 II. — His Words, Metres, and General Form. 
 
 Consistently with his shrinking from the cold realities of 
 the present, Spenser gave a softer tinge to his diction by 
 here and there introducing a word of the Chaucerian time. 
 Even his diction was to be slightly mellowed with antiquity; 
 he loved now and then to have upon his tongue a word 
 with this soft unction round it. It is strange that the 
 archaic character of his diction should ever have been 
 doubted. The fact was recognised at the time. F. Beau- 
 mont, in an epistle prefixed to Speght's Chaucer, says that 
 "Maister Spenser, following the counsel of Tully in De 
 Oratore for reviving of ancient words, hath adorned his own 
 style with that beauty and gravity which Tully speaks of, 
 and his much frequenting of Chaucer's ancient speeches 
 causeth many to allow far better of him than otherwise they 
 
 1 See also Appendix. 
 
220 EDMUND SPENSER : 
 
 would." And a still better and earlier authority, the 
 shadowy E. K., anticipated the objections to disused words, 
 saying that the poet, "having the sound of ancient poets still 
 ringing in his ears, mought needs in singing, hit out some of 
 their tunes." " But whether he useth them by such casualty 
 and custom, or of set purpose and choice, as thinking them 
 fittest for such rustical rudeness of shepherds, either for that 
 their rough sounds would make his rhymes more ragged and 
 rustical, or else because such old and obsolete words are 
 most used of country folk, sure I think, and I think not 
 amiss, that they bring great grace, and as one would say 
 authority to the verse." " Ancient solemn words are a 
 great ornament." " Tully saith that ofttimes an ancient 
 word maketh the style seem grave, and as it were reverend, 
 no otherwise than we honour and reverence grey hairs for a 
 certain religious regard which we have of old age." Yet 
 what Spenser prided himself upon was denied of him by 
 some modem admirers, who thought it a detraction. 
 
 Our poet had, however, in the rich music of his verse, a 
 fuller protection to interpose between himself and the harsh 
 discords of real life. He was a great metrician. With his 
 friend Gabriel Harvey at Cambridge, with Sidney at Pens- 
 hurst, with Raleigh at Kilcolman, his talk ran often on the 
 subject of metres. He interested himself in Harvey's en- 
 thusiasm for unrhymed dactylic hexameters ; but though 
 he approved of them in theory, and produced a specimen 
 with which he was himself highly pleased, he was not so 
 unwise as to waste upon the experiment a poem of any 
 length. Some of the stanzas in his ' Shepherd's Calendar ' 
 are exceedingly pretty, particularly the light, airy, childlike 
 jig of the contest between Perigot and Willy. But his 
 greatest achievement was the stanza that bears his name, 
 which he formed by adding an Alexandrine to the stave 
 used in Chaucer's Monk's Tale. In the last great revival 
 of poetry this stanza was warmly adopted. " All poets," 
 says Wilson, " have, since Warton's time, agreed in think- 
 ing the Spenserian stanza the finest ever conceived by the 
 
HIS WORDS, METRES, AND GENERAL FORM. 221 
 
 soul of man — and what various delightful specimens of it 
 have we now in our language ! Thomson's ' Castle of In- 
 dolence,' Shenstone's ' Schoolmistress,' Beattie's ' Minstrel,' 
 Burns's ' Cotter's Saturday Night,' Campbell's ' Gertrude of 
 Wyoming,' Scott's ' Don Roderick,' Wordsworth's ' Female 
 Vagrant,' Shelley's ' Revolt of Islam,' Keats's ' Eve of St 
 Agnes,' Croly's 'Angel of the World,' Byron's ' Childe 
 Harold ' ! " It lends itself with peculiar harmony to impas- 
 sioned meditation and luxurious description. 
 
 Spenser's sonnets, entitled " Amoretti," composed to com- 
 memorate his love for the lady whom he afterwards married, 
 are very intricate in form. They consist of three quatrains 
 closed in by a couplet, the first quatrain being interwoven 
 with the second and the second with the third. They obey 
 the rule that confines eadh sonnet to a distinct idea. Their 
 beauties, however, are wholly technical; their thin pale 
 sentiment and frigid conceits are fatal to anything like 
 profound human interest. 
 
 Very different from the involved and timid sonnets is the 
 triumphant "Epithalamion," which celebrates the completion 
 of the same courtship. I know no poem that realises so 
 directly and vividly the idea of winged words : no poem 
 whose verses soar and precipitate themselves with such a 
 vehemence of impetuous ardour and exultation. 
 
 Spenser followed the example of Virgil in trying his skill 
 first upon pastoral poetry. This poetical exercise of his has 
 been criticised by various standards, and pronounced want- 
 ing. The ' Shepherd's Calendar ' was unhappily praised by 
 Dryden as showing mastery of the northern dialect, and as 
 being an exact imitation of Theocritus : this was subse- 
 quently seen to be a mistake, and, the standard of compari- 
 son being retained, Spenser was blamed because he did not 
 imitate Theocritus. Amid the mass of confused criticism 
 of these pastorals, where each critic pronounces from some 
 vague ideal of what pastoral poetry ought to be, the funda- 
 mental objection has always been that they do not repre- 
 sent the actual life of shepherds. Shepherds in real life do 
 
222 EDMUND SPENSER: 
 
 not sit in the shade playing on pan-pipes, improvising songs 
 for wagers of lambs and curiously carved bowls, and dis- 
 coursing in rhymed verse about morality, religion, and poli- 
 tics. But it was not Spenser's design to paint real shepherds, 
 or to copy the features of real pastoral life. His shepherds 
 are allegorical representatives of his friends and his enemies, 
 and exponents of his artistic, moral, and other theories, the 
 whole drifted into a land of the imagination. If we are 
 asked why he chose such a disguise, we must go back to 
 his character, and point to his turn for the picturesque, and 
 his delight in withdrawing from direct contact with the 
 actual world. He loved to wrap hard facts in soft and pic- 
 turesque allegory. Sir Philip Sidney killed at Zutphen 
 becomes the shepherd Astrophel of Arcadia torn to death 
 by a savage beast, and transformed along with his love 
 Stella into a red and blue flower like a star. Such an 
 Arcadia is purely fanciful, and must be criticised as such 
 not from an unsympathetic distance but out of the mood 
 in which it was conceived. If, indeed, it is said that in the 
 strictly pastoral parts of the poem, Spenser is far inferior to 
 Theocritus, that he neglects the minuter daily and hourly 
 changes of aspect in field and sky, and that there is too little 
 sunshine in his Arcadia, one can understand this criticism 
 as indicating positive defects : the poet might have brought 
 more of this into his Arcadia with the effect of enriching 
 it, and without doing harm to his design. But we miss the 
 whole intention and effect of the poetry if we exact from 
 the poet an adherence to the conditions of the actual life of 
 shepherds. The picturesque environment of hill, wood, 
 dale, silly sheep and ravenous wild beasts, is all that the 
 poet cares for : if he helps us to remember that we are 
 amongst such scenery, he has fulfilled his design. We are 
 not to look for North of England dialect or North of 
 England scenery : if we would enjoy Spenser's Arcadia, 
 we must simply let ourselves float into a dreamland of 
 unsubstantial form and colour. The pastoral surroundings 
 are of value only in so far as they colour and transfigure the 
 sentiments of the poetry. 
 
HIS WORDS, METRES, AND GENERAL FORM. 223 
 
 It was again in professed imitation of Virgil that our poet 
 raised his pipe " from rustic tunes to chant heroic deeds." 
 His knights are as shadowy as his shepherds. Spenser's 
 design was not, like Sir Walter Scott's, to revive in imagi- 
 nation the manners, customs, and adventures of chivalry. 
 In the 'Faery Queen,' as in the 'Shepherd's Calendar,' his 
 design was to translate bare realities into poetical form and 
 colour. Stating the general scope of the work, and passing 
 over his adumbrations of living characters, we may say 
 that his knights and fair ladies are virtues impersonated ; 
 his monsters and feigned fair ladies, vices impersonated. So 
 far there is a resemblance between the ' Shepherd's Calen- 
 dar ' and the ' Faery Queen : ' both lead us into allegorical 
 worlds. But the two worlds are very different ; they rose up 
 in the poet's imagination at the bidding of very different emo- 
 tions. In the ' Shepherd's Calendar ' all is pan-piping and 
 peace, composed sadness and grave moral reflection. In the 
 ' Faery Queen,' on the other hand, we are brought into a 
 land of storms and sunshine, fierce encounter and rapturous 
 love-making ; we are hurried in rapid change through lively 
 emotions of mystery, terror, voluptuous security, heart- 
 rending pity, and admiration of superhuman prowess — 
 through various scenes from the "Den of Error" to the 
 " House of Holiness," from the " Bower of BUss" to the 
 " Gardens of Adonis : " now hideousness triumphs, and 
 beauty is in distress ; and anon the gates are burst open by 
 a blast of Arthur's horn, or Britomart charges with her 
 charmed spear. The pastoral allegory is insipid if we ignore 
 the hidden meaning ; but Faery land is a land of wonder 
 and beauty, where we need remember the hidden meaning 
 only if we desire to pay just homage to the genius of the 
 poet. 
 
 Dryden and many others have complained of occasional 
 intricacy and incoherence in the ' Faery Queen.' The ad- 
 mirers of the poet should not meet this complaint by deny- 
 ing the fact : for a fact it is that Spenser does often violate 
 the plain laws of space and time.i To maintain coherence, 
 I See, for very decided cases, Book IV., Cantos 8, 9, 10. 
 
224' EDMUND SPENSER : 
 
 prolonged actions must sometimes be supposed to happen 
 in no time : and personages are sometimes present or 
 absent as it suits the poet's convenience, coming or going 
 without remark. The proper excuse is to say that the 
 scene is laid " in the delightful land of Faery," where per- 
 plexity and confusion are as natural as in a dream. The 
 real explanation probably is, that the poet wrote with great 
 facility, and that in "winging his flight rapidly through the 
 prescribed labyrinth of sweet sounds," he sometimes sang 
 himself to sleep, and forgot exactly where he was. 
 
 III. — The Chief Qualities of his Poetry. 
 
 In Thomas Campbell's criticism of the ' Faery Queen,' 
 it is said that, " on a comprehensive view of the whole work, 
 we certainly miss the charm of strength, symmetry, and 
 rapid or interesting progress." The criticism, like all others 
 from the same pen, is carefully studied and just ; but it is 
 somewhat startling without farther explanation of the terms. 
 By rapid or interesting progress we must not understand 
 rapid or interesting succession of events ; we must lay 
 emphasis on the word progress. Incidents succeed one 
 another quickly and suddenly as in a dream : but they do 
 not progress with the interest of increasing suspense to- 
 wards their professed end, the accomplishment of the 
 commands of Gloriana " that greatest glorious Queen of 
 Faery land." Nor, had the poem been completed, is it 
 easy to see how the additional cantos could have corrected 
 what we have, and made part answer to part with even 
 balance : the poet makes no apparent effort to proportion 
 with nice care the weight and space assigned to each per- 
 sonage, situation, and adventure. This will be readily 
 allowed. But the critic's meaning in saying that we miss 
 the charm of strength, is more liable to be misunderstood. 
 
 If by " strength" is meant the sentiment inspired by the 
 ideal presence of superior might, then, so far from missing 
 that charm in the ' Faery Queen,' we are kept under its fas- 
 
THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 22$ 
 
 cination from beginning to end of the poem : imposing 
 situations and mighty beings surround us on every hand. 
 We are carried through waste wildernesses and interminable 
 forests, the haunts of monsters and powerful magicians : 
 forests darkened by frightful shadows, and filled with sad 
 trembling sounds. Hideous giants and dragons, puissant 
 knights, enchanted weapons, grim caves, stately palaces, 
 gloomy dungeons — these and suchlike conceptions in the 
 ' Faery Queen' occupy our imaginations with a perpetual 
 stir of wonder, admiration, and awe. " We do not often," 
 says I. Disraeli, "pause at elevations which raise the feeling 
 of the sublime." If that is so, which I very much doubt, it 
 must be because, in that land of wonders, one thing is not 
 felt to be more wonderful than another. We are sustained 
 at a sublime elevation throughout : we move among the 
 primeval elements of sublimity : even on the Idle Lake, 
 or in the Bower of Bliss, or in the Gardens of Adonis, 
 where the senses ache with beauty, our voluptuous delight 
 is permeated and elevated by the presence of supernatural 
 agency. It may perhaps be pleaded by the nice discrimi- 
 nators of language that there is too much grotesqueness and 
 excitement in Spenser's Faery land to warrant the appli- 
 cation of the term " sublime : " many, doubtless, would re- 
 strict the name to Miltonic sublimity, the steady planetary 
 sublimity that overawes into calmness. Spenser, it is true, 
 sustains us at a different pitch from Milton. To come fully 
 under the spell of the ' Faery Queen,' we must make our- 
 selves as little children listening to the wondrous tales of a 
 nurse : the very diction has in it something of the affected 
 strange words, feigned excitement, and mouthed tones of 
 softness and wonder put on by a skilful story-teller to such 
 an audience : and when we yield ourselves to the poet in 
 such a spirit, he makes our hearts throb with the same ab- 
 sorbing emotions. Of these emotions perhaps the most 
 fitting names are wonder and dread ; but they are also fitly 
 termed modes of sublimity, when they rise to a certain 
 pitch. We should call both Milton and Spenser sublime, 
 but sublime in different ways. 
 
 P 
 
226 EDMUND SPENSER : 
 
 What then did Campbell mean by saying that in the 
 ' Faery Queen ' we miss the charm of strength ? He meant, 
 probably, the strength arising from clearness and brevity 
 of expression : in description, he says, Spenser " exhibits 
 nothing of the brief strokes and robust power which charac- 
 terise the very greatest poets." It would perhaps be more 
 accurate to say that the brief strokes are supplemented and 
 their abrupt concentrated effect weakened or at least softened 
 by subsequent diffusion. Compare, for example, with Lu- 
 crece's frantic exclamations against Night, the following by: 
 impatient Arthur when darkness comes between him and 
 his pursuit of Florimel (iii. 4) : — 
 
 " Night ! thou foul mother of annoyance sad, 
 
 Sister of heavy Death, and nurse of Woe, 
 
 Which wast begot in Heaven, but for thy bad 
 
 And brutish shape thrust down to Hell below, 
 
 Where by the grim flood of Cocytus slow, 
 
 Thy dwelling is in Erebus' black house, 
 
 (Black Erebus, thy husband, is the foe 
 
 Of all the gods) where thou ungracious 
 Half of thy days dost lead in horror hideous. 
 
 What had the Eternal Maker need of thee. 
 The world in his continual course to keep, 
 That dost all things deface, ne lettest see 
 The beauty of his work ? Indeed in sleep 
 The slothful body that doth love to steep 
 His lustless limbs, and drown his baser mind. 
 Doth praise thee oft, and oft from Stygian deep. 
 Calls thee his goddess, in his error blind, 
 And great dame Nature's handmaid cheering every kind. 
 
 But well I wot that to an heavy heart. 
 Thou art the root and nurse of bitter cares, 
 Breeder of new, renewer of old smarts ; 
 Instead of sleep thou lendest railing tears, 
 Instead of sleep thou sendest troublous fears 
 And dreadful visions, in the which alive 
 The dreary image of sad Death appears : 
 So from the weary spirit thou dost drive 
 Desired rest, and men of happiness deprive. 
 
THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY, 22/ 
 
 Under thy mantle black there hidden lie 
 Light-shunning Theft, and traitorous Intent, 
 Abhorred Bloodshed, and vile Felony, 
 Shameful Deceit, and Danger imminent, 
 Foul Horror, and eke hellish Dreariment : 
 All these I wot in thy protection be, 
 And light do shun for fear of being shent : 
 For light y-like is loathed of them and thee ; 
 And all that lewdness love do hate the light to see." 
 
 Here we have no lack of brief strokes, but they are not 
 final and solitary : the poet does not leave his conceptions 
 pent up and struggling with repressed force, but expands 
 them into sublime images. Another way of understanding 
 how Spenser's wide expansive manner is opposed to abrupt 
 strength, would be to compare any of his pitched duels with 
 similar performances by Mr Tennyson, in which brevity and 
 symmetry are carried almost to the pitch of burlesque, 
 Compare, for example, the encounter of Guyon and Brito- 
 mart (iii. i), with the fight between Gareth and the Evening 
 Star. 
 
 The visit of Duessa to Dame Night, and the journey of 
 the weird pair to bring the wounded Sansjoy to ^sculapius, 
 who had been thrust down to hell by the jealousy of Jove, 
 is a passage of magnificent power ; the terrible figure of the 
 ancient but still mighty mother out of whose womb came 
 earth and the ruler of heaven and earth, at whose presence 
 dogs bay, owls shriek, and wolves howl, and whose arrival 
 causes such excitement amidst the ghastly population of 
 hell, is quite a typical conception of wild Gothic grandeur : — 
 
 " So wept Duessa until eventide 
 That shining lamps in Jove's high house was light. 
 Then forth she rose, ne longer would abide. 
 But comes unto the place where the heathen knight 
 In slumbering swound, nigh void of vital sprite. 
 Lay covered with enchanted cloud all day : 
 Whom when she found, as she him left in flight, 
 To wail his woful case she would not stay. 
 
 But to the eastern coast of Heaven makes speedy way. 
 
228 EDMUND SPENSER: 
 
 Where grisly Night, with visage deadly sad. 
 That Phoebus' cheerful face durst never view. 
 And in a foul black pitchy mantle clad, 
 She finds forth coming from her darksome mew, 
 Where she all day did hide her hated hue. 
 Before the door her iron chariot stood, 
 Already harnessed for journey new. 
 And coal-black steeds yborn of hellish brood 
 That on their rusty bits did champ as they were wood. 
 
 Who when she saw Duessa, sunny bright, 
 Adorned with gold and jewels shining clear. 
 She greatly grew amazed at the sight, 
 And the unacquainted light began to fear, 
 (For never did such brightness there appear) ; 
 And would have back retired to her cave. 
 Until the witch's speech she gan to hear, 
 Saying — ' Yet, O thou dreaded dame, I crave 
 Abide, till I have told the message which I have.' 
 
 She stayed ; and forth Duessa gan proceed : 
 ' O thou, most ancient grandmother of all. 
 More old than Jove, whom thou at first didst breed. 
 Or that great house of gods celestial : 
 Which was begot in Demogorgon's hall. 
 And sawest the secrets of the world unmade ! 
 'Why sufferest thou thy nephews dear to fall 
 With elfin sword, most shamefully betrayed ? 
 Lo, where the stout Sansjoy doth sleep in deadly shade ! 
 
 ' And, him before, I saw with bitter eyes 
 The bold Sansfoy shrink underneath his spear : 
 And now the prey of fowls in field he lies, 
 Nor wailed of friends nor laid on groaning bier. 
 That whilom was to me too dearly dear. 
 Oh ! what of gods them boots it to be bom 
 If old Aveugle's sons so evil hear? 
 Or who shall not great Nightes children scorn. 
 When two of three her nephews are so foul forlorn ? 
 
 ' Up, then ; up, dreary dame, of darkness queen ! 
 Go, gather up the relics of thy race ! 
 Or else go them avenge ; and let be seen 
 That dreadest Night in brightest day hath place, 
 And can the children of fair Light deface ! ' 
 
THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 229 
 
 Her feeling speeches some compassion moved 
 In heart, and change in that great mother's face ; 
 Yet pity in her heart was never proved 
 Till then, for evermore she hated, never loved. 
 
 Then to her iron wagon she betakes, 
 And with her bears the foul well-favoured witch ; 
 Through mirksome air her ready way she makes. 
 Her twofold team (of which two black as pitch. 
 And two were brown, yet each to each unlitch) 
 Did softly swim away, ne ever stamp 
 Unless she chanced their stubborn mouths to twitch ; 
 Then, foaming tar, their bridles they would champ, 
 And trampling the fire element would fiercely ramp. 
 
 So well they sped that they be come at length 
 Unto the place whereas the Paynim lay 
 Devoid of outw^ard sense and native strength, 
 Covered with charmed cloud from view of day 
 And sight of men since his late luckless fray. 
 His cruel wounds with cruddy blood congealed 
 They binden up so wisely as they may, 
 And handle softly till they can be healed; 
 So lay him in her chariot close in night concealed. 
 
 And all the while she stood upon the ground, 
 The wakeful dogs did never cease to bay ; 
 As giving warning of the unwonted sound. 
 With which her iron wheels did them affray, 
 And her dark grisly look them much dismay. 
 The messenger of death, the ghastly owl, 
 With dreary shrieks did also her bewray ; 
 And hungry wolves continually did howl 
 
 At her abhorred face,' so filthy and so foul. 
 
 * 
 
 Thence turning back in silence soft they stole. 
 And brought the heavy corse with easy pace 
 To yawning gulf of deep Avernus hole ; 
 By that same hole an entrance, dark and base. 
 With smoke and sulphur hiding all the place. 
 Descends to Hell ; there creature never past. 
 That back returned without heavenly grace ; 
 But dreadful furies, which their chains have brast. 
 And damned sprites sent forth to make ill men aghast. 
 
230 EDMUND SPENSER: 
 
 By that same way the direful dames do drive 
 Their mournful chariot, filled with rusty blood, 
 And down to Pluto's house are come belive : 
 Which passing through on every side there stood 
 The trembling ghosts with sad amazed mood, 
 Chattering their iron teeth, and staring wide 
 With stony eyes ; and all the hellish brood 
 Of fiends infernal flocked on every side 
 To gaze on earthly wight that with the night durst ride." 
 
 Other celebrated passages of powerful composition in the 
 ' Faery Queen ' are — the Cave of Despair (i. 9) ; the fight 
 between St George and the Dragon, where the partition be- 
 tween the sublime and the ridiculous is specially thin (i. 11); 
 the Cave of Mammon (ii. 7) ; the despair of Malbecco (end 
 of iii. 10): the house of Ate (iv. i); the protracted tourna- 
 ments in iv. 3 and iv. 4 ; the exploits of Arthegal and Talus 
 (v. 2). The situation of Britomart in the forest when her 
 companions suddenly disappear in chase of the sudden ap- 
 parition of Florimel and the foster (iii. i) ; and her situation 
 in the enchanter's palace when the house is shaken and the 
 doors clapped by the sudden whirlwind that preludes the 
 Mask of Cupid (iii. 12), may be mentioned as specially 
 effective movements. The action of Britomart's enchanted 
 spear throughout Books iii. and iv. would satisfy Campbell's 
 desideratum of a " brief stroke : " there is, however, a touch 
 of the ludicrous in the amazement of the unhorsed cham- 
 pions. 
 
 Spenser's 'Arcadia' is not a region of absolutely un- 
 ruffled peace, seeing that some of the poet's shepherds are 
 sufficiently miserable and irate to have recourse to satire. 
 Satire, however, in the mouths of creatures so simple and 
 shadowy, cannot sound harsh and biting : it rather amuses 
 us gently than fills us with sympathetic bitterness. Most 
 of the poems in the ' Shepherd's Calendar' fall under the 
 heads "recreative" and "plaintive." The pictures of pas- 
 toral recreation are very sweet and pretty. In the eclogue 
 for May, old Palinode thus exquisitely describes a merry- 
 
THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 23 1 
 
 making of the young folks, and sighs that his old limbs are 
 now too stiff for the furious glee of their innocent sports : — 
 
 " Sicker this morrow, no longer ago, 
 I saw a shoal of shepherds outgo 
 With singing, and shouting, and jolly cheer : 
 Before them yode a lusty tabrere, 
 That to the menyie a horn-pipe played, 
 Whereto they dancen each one with his maid. 
 To see those folks make such jovisance. 
 Made my heart after the pipe to dance. 
 Tho to the greenwood they speeden hem all. 
 To fetchen home May with their musical ; 
 And home they bringen in a royal throne. 
 Crowned as king ; and his queen attone 
 Was lady Flora, on whom did attend 
 A fair flock of fairies, and a fresh bend 
 Of lovely nymphs. O that I were there, 
 To helpen the ladies their May bush to bear ! " 
 
 But his pastoral lays and ditties, with their cold atmo- 
 sphere and simple staves, become intolerably tame and insi- 
 pid after the wondrous beauties and full rich music of the 
 ' Faery Queen.' With all its lofty character as a chronicle 
 of martial deeds, and though the stately Muse is here pre- 
 sented " with quaint Bellona in her equipage," the softer 
 passages will always be read as the most incomparable 
 fruits of the poet's genius. The Idle Lake (ii. 6), the 
 Bower of Bliss (ii. 12), and the Gardens of Adonis 
 (iii. 6), are unrivalled as pictures of voluptuous dreamy 
 delight. Una among the worshipping Satyrs, with the fair 
 Hamadryades and light-foot Naiades running to see her 
 lovely face (i. 6) ; the huntress Belphcebe with her broad 
 forehead stepping forth from the thicket (ii. 3) ; the court- 
 ing of Florimel by the witch's son (iii. 7) ; Pastorella 
 among the shepherds (vi. 9), — are pictures that touch our 
 fancies with a livelier, less languid, but not less exquisite, 
 sense of beauty. Again in the fourth canto of the Third 
 Book, which describes the Rich Strand or Pretious Shore 
 of Marinell, and the journey of sad Cymoent with her 
 
232 EDMUND SPENSER: 
 
 team of dolphins over the broad round back of Neptune, the 
 voluptuous elements of the description are interpenetrated 
 by the impassioned grief of the goddess for her beloved son, 
 and the hushed anxiety and tender handling of the sympa- 
 thising nymphs ; in that passage we taste the last extreme 
 of tender ecstasy : — 
 
 " Eftsoons both flowers and garlands far away 
 She flung, and her fair dewy locks yrent ; 
 To sorrow huge she turned her former play, 
 And gamesome mirth to grievous dreariment : 
 She threw herself down on the continent, 
 Ne word did speak but lay as in a swown. 
 Whiles all her sisters did for her lament 
 With yelling outcries, and with shrieking sown ; 
 And every one did tear her garland from her crown. 
 
 Soon as she up out of her deadly fit 
 Arose, she bade her chariot to be brought ; 
 And all her sisters that with her did sit. 
 Bade eke at once their chariots to be sought : 
 Tho full of bitter grief and pensive thought 
 She to her wagon clomb : clomb all the rest 
 And forth together went with sorrow fraught : 
 The waves obedient to their behest 
 Them yielded ready passage and their rage surceast. 
 
 Great Neptune stood amazed at their sight, 
 Whiles on his broad round back they softly slid, 
 And eke himself mourned at their mournful plight, 
 Yet wist not what their wailing meant, yet did 
 For great compassion of their sorrow, bid 
 His mighty waters to them buxom be : 
 Eftsoons the roaring billows still abid, 
 And all the grisly monsters of the sea 
 Stood gaping at their gait, and wondered them to see. 
 
 A team of dolphins ranged in array 
 Drew the smooth chariot of sad Cymoent ; 
 They were all taught by Triton to obey 
 To the long reins at her commandement : 
 As swift as swallows on the waves they went, 
 
THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 233 
 
 That their broad flaggy fins no foam did rear, 
 Ne bubbling roundel they behind them sent ; 
 The rest of other fishes drawen were 
 Which with their finny oars the swelling sea did shear. 
 
 Soon as they been arrived on the brim 
 Of the rich strond, their chariots they forbore, 
 And let their timid fishes softly swim 
 Along the margent of the foamy shore, 
 Lest thty their fins should bruise, and surbate sore 
 Their tender feet upon the stony ground : 
 And coming to the place where all in gore 
 And cruddy blood enwallowed they found 
 The luckless Marinell lying in deadly swound. 
 
 His mother swooned thrice, and the third time 
 Could scarce recovered be out of her pain ; 
 Had she not been devoid of mortal slime. 
 She should not then have been relieved again : 
 But soon as life recovered had the rein, 
 She made so piteous moan and dear waiment, 
 That the hard rocks could scarce from tears refrain ; 
 And all her sister nymphs with one consent 
 Supplied her sobbing breaches with sad complement. 
 
 Thus when they all had sorrowed their fill. 
 They softly gan to search his grisly wound : 
 And that they might him handle more at will. 
 They him disarmed ; and spreading on the ground 
 Their watchet mantles fringed with silver round. 
 They softly wiped away the jelly blood 
 From the orifice; which having well upbound. 
 They poured in sovereign balm and nectar good. 
 Good both for earthly medicine and for heavenly -food. 
 
 Tho, when the lily-handed Liagore 
 (This Liagore whilom had learned skill 
 In leech's craft, by great Apollo's lore, 
 Sith her whilom upon high Pindus hill 
 He loved, and at last her womb did fill 
 With heavenly seed, whereof wise Paeon sprung) 
 Did feel his pulse, she knew there stayed still 
 Some little life his feeble sprites among ; 
 Which to his mother told, despair she from her flung. 
 
234 EDMUND SPENSER: 
 
 Tho, up him taking in their tender hands 
 They easily unto her chariot bear ; 
 Her team at her commandment quiet stands, 
 Whiles they the corse into her wagon rear, 
 And strow with flowers the lamentable bier ; 
 Then all the rest into their coaches climb, 
 And through the brackish waves their passage shear ; 
 Upon great Neptune's neck they softly swim, 
 And to her watery chamber swiftly carry him. 
 
 Deep in the bottom of the sea her bower 
 Is built of hollow billows heaped high, 
 Like to thick clouds that threat a stormy shower. 
 And vaulted aJl within like to the sky, 
 In which the gods do dwell eternally; 
 There they him laid in easy couch well dight. 
 And sent in haste for Tryphon, to apply 
 ' Salves to his wounds, and medicines of might : 
 For Tryphon of sea-gods the sovereign leech is hight." 
 
 To get a full notion of Spenser's power of " ravishing 
 human sense " with word-music, one must read at least a 
 canto, if not a whole book of the 'Faery Queen.' The 
 dreamy melodious softness of his numbers and his ideas 
 has something of the luxurious charm that the song of the 
 mermaids had for the ear of Guyon (Book ii. Canto 12) : — 
 
 " And now they nigh approached to the stead 
 Whereas those mermaids dwelt ; it was a still 
 And calmy bay, on th' one side sheltered 
 With the broad shadow of an hoary hill. 
 
 So now to Guyon as he passed by. 
 Their pleasant tunes they sweetly thus applied ; 
 " O thou fair son of gentle Faery, 
 Thou art in mighty arms most magnified 
 Above all knights that ever battle tried : 
 O turn thy rudder hitherward a while ! 
 Here may thy storm-beat vessel safely ride ; 
 This is the port of rest from troublous toil, 
 The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil." 
 
THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 235 
 
 With that the rolling sea, resounding soft, 
 In his big base them fitly answered; 
 And on the rock the waves breaking aloft 
 A solemn mean unto them measurM ; 
 The whiles sweet Zephyrus loud whistlel^d 
 His treble — a strange kind of harmony, 
 Which Guyon's senses softly tickel&d, 
 That he the boatman bade row easily 
 And let him hear some part of their rare melody." 
 
 It is usually said that Spenser has no humour. His 
 humour, indeed, is of the most quiet and lurking order, and 
 may easily pass unobserved among so many objects of 
 wonder and beauty. But though unobtrusive it is neverthe- 
 less there. The drowsy irritability of Morpheus (i. i), and 
 the idiotic " He could not tell" of the grave and reverend 
 Ignaro (i. 8), are in the most delicate vein of humour. 
 Archimago's disguise as a hermit, and his affectation of 
 childish senility and unworldly simplicity, are also very 
 delicately touched off: the enemy of mankind appears 
 as — 
 
 " An aged sire, in long black weeds y-clad. 
 His feet all bare, his beard all hoary grey. 
 And by his belt his book he hanging had ; 
 Sober he seem'd and very sagely sad ; 
 And to the ground his eyes were lowly bent. 
 Simple in shew, and void of malice bad ; 
 And all the way he prayed as he went. 
 And often knocked his breast, as one that did repent. 
 
 He fair the knight saluted, louting low. 
 Who fair him quited, as that courteous was ; 
 And after asked him, if he did know 
 Of strange adventures, which abroad did pass, 
 ' Ah ! my dear son,' quoth he, ' how should, alas ! 
 Silly old man that lives in hidden cell, 
 Bidding his beads all day for his trespass. 
 Tidings of war and worldly trouble tell ? 
 With holy father sits not with such things to mell." " 
 
 We may be certain, from Spenser's antipathy to the 
 Roman Catholics, that this was a character in one of the 
 
236 EDMUND SPENSER: 
 
 lost nine Comedies : the sudden casting off of the disguise, 
 and the flaming out in his true colours as — 
 
 " A bold bad man ! that dared to call by name 
 ' Great Gorgon, prince of darkness and dead night — " 
 
 would have been a startling effect. 
 
 The most openly humorous character in the 'Faery Queen' 
 is Braggadocio, whose behaviour is often farcical. See his 
 bold pretences to Archimago, and his abject terror and 
 ignominious skulking, in Book ii. 3. 
 
 Spenser has been accused of bad taste in mixing up hea- 
 then mythology with the narratives of the Bible. In Book 
 ii. Canto 7, he represents Tantalus and Pontius Pilate as 
 suffering in the same place of punishment. The answer 
 that wicked men of all ages and creeds may reasonably be 
 supposed to suffer together, is complete. 
 
 He has also been accused of interfering with ancient 
 mythology, marrying Clio to Apollo, making Cupid the 
 sister of the Graces, bringing Neptune to the marriage of 
 the Thames and the Medway, and adding without authority 
 to Neptune's retinue. On this great liberty I do ilot ven- 
 ture to pronounce. 
 
 He has been accused of extravagant violations of proba- 
 bility. To this it may be answered that, when we consent 
 to be introduced to Faery land, we sign a dispensation from 
 the ordinary conditions of life. 
 
 These charges are frivolous : much more plausibility at- 
 taches to his alleged transgressions of the boundary between 
 pleasure and disgust. The picture of Error is said to be in- 
 tolerably loathsome — 
 
 "Therewith she spew'd out of her filthy maw 
 A flood of poison horrible and black, 
 Full of great lumps of flesh and gobbets raw. 
 Which stunk so vilely that it forc'd him slack 
 His grasping hold, and from her turn aback ; 
 Her vomit full of books and papers was, 
 With loathly frogs and toads, which eyes did lack, 
 
THE CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 237 
 
 And creeping sought way in the weedy grass ; 
 Her filthy parbrealc all the place defiled has." 
 
 The picture of Duessa unmasked is still more disgusting. 
 And yet Burke is said to have been fond of quoting the de- 
 scription of Error. To persons of sober refinement, for 
 whom the energy of indignant disgust has no fascination but 
 is merely repulsive, such passages can be justified only 3" 
 being occasional discords, heightening by contrast tin,- aT- 
 rounding harmonies, or at the worst, disagreeable episodes 
 tided over by the general sublimity and beauty. Yet the 
 critic should not ignore the fact that great poets of our race 
 have created such passages, and that many readers are drawn 
 to them by irresistible fascination. It is a paradox that de- 
 scriptions of things so foul and odious should possess any 
 spell : but it is not to be denied that they do possess a 
 strong spell, and that for minds of the most poetical con- 
 stitution. Spenser's design may have been entirely moral 
 in drawing repulsive pictures of Error and Popery ; but there 
 is, whatever may have been his design, a certain intrinsic 
 charm of sublime exaltation in the supreme energy of 
 loathing. 
 
238 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 The last ten or fifteen years of the sixteenth century was a 
 period of amazing poetic activity : there is nothing like it in 
 the history of our literature. Never in any equal period of 
 our history did so much intellect go to the making of verses- 
 They had not then the same number of distracting claims : 
 literary ambition had fewer outlets. Carlyle, Grote, Mill, 
 Gladstone, Disraeli, had they lived in the age of Elizabeth, 
 would all have had to make their literary reputation in 
 verse, and all might have earned a respectable place among 
 our poets — might, at least, like Francis Bacon, have com- 
 posed some single piece of sufficient excellence to be 
 thought worthy of the ' Golden Treasury of Songs and 
 Lyrics.' Amidst a general excitement and ambition of 
 fame the gift of song may be brought to light where in less 
 favourable circumstances it might have been extinguished 
 by other interests. And the rivalry of men endowed with 
 eager and powerful intellects must always act as a stimulus 
 to the genuine poet, although all their efforts come short of 
 the creations of genius. 
 
 Three fashions of love-poetry may be particularised as flour- 
 ishing with especial vigour during those ten or fifteen years 
 — pastoral songs and lyrics, sonnets, and tales of the same 
 type as Venus and Adonis. Spenser did much to confirm 
 if not to set the pastoral fashion ; but perhaps still more 
 was done by Sir Philip Sidney with his ' Arcadia ' and his 
 sonnets of Astrophel to Stella. These two poets leading 
 the way to the sweet pastoral country of craggy mountain, 
 
ELIZABETHAN LOVE-POETRY. 239 
 
 hill and valley, dale and field, the greater portion of the 
 tuneful host crowded after them, transforming themselves 
 into Damons, Dorons, and Coridons, and piping to cruel 
 Phillises, Phillidas, and Carmelas.^ Out of this masquerad- 
 ing grew many beautiful lyrics. ' England's Helicon,' which 
 was published in 1600, and which gathered the harvest of 
 this pastoral poetry, is by many degrees the finest of the 
 numerous miscellanies of the Elizabethan age. It contained 
 selections from Spenser, Sidney, Greene, Lodge, J. Wootton, 
 Bolton, Bariiefield, "Shepherd Tonie," Drayton, Shakes- 
 peare, and others of less note. 
 
 Many of these pastorals took the form of sonnets, but I 
 single out sonnet-writing as a fashion by itself, in order to 
 draw attention to the numerous bodies of sonnets published 
 in the last decade of the century as lasting monuments of 
 sustained passion, real or ideal. The list is very remarkable. 
 It opens with the publication of Sidney's sonnets to Stella 
 in 1591, and includes — Daniel's sonnets to Delia, pub- 
 lished in 1592; Constable's sonnets to Diana, 1592; 
 Lodge's sonnets to Phillis, 1593 j Watson's Tears of Fancy, 
 or Love Disdained, 1593; Drayton's Idea's Mirror, "amours 
 in quatorzains," in 1594 ; and Spenser's Amoretti or Sonnets 
 in 1596.^ 
 
 Hardly less notable is the fancy for short mythological 
 or historical love-tales. The way in this form of composi- 
 tion was led by Thomas Lodge, who published in 1589 the 
 poem of ' Glaucus and Scylla,' narrating with many pretty 
 circumstances the cruelty of Scylla to Glaucus, in punish- 
 ment whereof she was transformed into a dangerous rock 
 on the coasts of Sicily. Marlowe began and Chapman 
 
 1 The land of ideal shepherds was only one of the ideal countries fre- 
 quented by the artistic courtiers of Elizabeth. They were as eager to des- 
 cry new worlds of imagination as her navigators were to discover new 
 regions in the terraqueous globe. In the masques presented at Court we 
 find inhabitants of four great worlds or continents— the country of Shep- 
 herds, the country of Faeries, the Mythological world, and the world of 
 Personified Abstractions. 
 
 ^ In this chapter I have used the order of the publication of these sonnets 
 as a basis of arrangement for the predecessors of Shakespeare in that form 
 of composition. 
 
240 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 finished the tale of Hero and Leander ; Shakespeare sang 
 the love of Venus and Adonis : Drayton the love of Endy- 
 mion and Phcebe ; Chapman (in ' Ovid's Banquet of Sense') 
 the love of Ovid and Julia. The voluptuous descriptions 
 of these tales could not have been expected to go on with- 
 out sooner or later exciting the spirit of derisive parody : 
 and accordingly, in 1598, Shakespeare's "Venus andAdonis" 
 was rudely burlesqued by the satirical Marston in a comi- 
 cal version of the tale of " Pygmalion and Galatea." To 
 prevent any undue indignation at the liberty thus taken 
 with our great dramatist, I may here intimate a suspicion, 
 for which I shall afterwards produce some grounds, that 
 certain of Shakespeare's sonnets — those, namely, from the 
 127th to the iS2d inclusive — were designed to ridicule the 
 effusions of some of his seriously or feignedly love-sick pre- 
 decessors. Marston's profane parody may thus assume the 
 aspect of a Nemesis. 
 
 The enthusiasm of beauty was strong in the Elizabethan 
 poets. With many of them it was a fierce and earnest thirst. 
 Their lives were hot, turbulent, precarious : they turned 
 often to the bloom of fair cheeks and the lustre of bright 
 hair as a passionate relief from desperate fortunes. Beauty 
 was pursued by Greene and Marlowe not as a luxury but 
 as a fierce necessity — as the only thing that could make 
 life tolerable. Such visions as Hero and fair Samela filled 
 them with mad ecstasy in the height of their intemperate 
 orgies, and were called back for soothing worship in their 
 after-fits of exhaustion and savage despondency. In many 
 others of calmer and more temperate lives, beauty excited 
 less ardent transports, and yet was a powerful influence. 
 Beauty was a very prevailing religion ; the perfections of 
 woman, excellence of eye, of lip, of brow, were meditated 
 on and adored with devout rapture ; and though the 
 votary's enthusiasm in some cases travelled into licentious 
 delirium, in gentler natures it bred soft and delicate fancies, 
 of the most exquisite tenderness. Beauty was part of all 
 their lives, and shaped itself in each mind according to the 
 soil. A very surprising number of different soils it found 
 
ELIZABETHAN LOVE-POETRY. 24 1 
 
 to grow in, and very remarkable were the products. One 
 meets the same flowers again and again, but always with 
 some individual grace. Even third-rate and fourth-rate 
 poets do not seem to be weaving garlands of flowers 
 plucked from the verses of the masters : they develop 
 the common seeds in their own way. Consider, for ex- 
 ample, the following madrigal by John Wootton, a name 
 now utterly forgotten by the generality, and a poet of 
 whose personality nothing survives but his name and his 
 contributions to ' England's Helicon : ' — 
 
 " Her eyes like shining lamps in midst of night, 
 Night dark and dead : 
 Or as the stars that give tlie seamen light, 
 Light for to lead 
 Their wandering ships. 
 
 Amidst her cheeks the rose and lily strive, 
 
 Lily snow-white : 
 When their contend doth make their colour thrive, 
 
 Colour too bright 
 
 For shepherd's eyes. 
 
 Her lips like scarlet of the finest dye. 
 
 Scarlet blood-red : 
 Teeth white as snow, which on the hills doth lie, 
 
 Hills overspread 
 
 By Winter's force. 
 
 Her skin as soft as is the finest silk, 
 
 Silk soft and fine : 
 Of colour like unto the whitest milk. 
 
 Milk of the kine 
 
 Of Daphnis' herd. 
 
 As swift of foot as is the pretty roe. 
 
 Roe swift of pace : 
 When yelping hounds pursue her to and fro. 
 
 Hounds fierce in chase 
 
 To reave her life." 
 
242 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 I.— Sir Philip Sidney 1 (1554-1586). 
 
 In 1591 a volume of sonnets was issued under the editor- 
 ship of Thomas Nash, containing Sidney's " Astrophel and 
 Stella," twenty-eight sonnets by Samuel Daniel, and other 
 poems by " Divers Noblemen and Gentlemen." The pub- 
 lication was most probably surreptitious : Daniel, who pub- 
 lished his " Sonnets to Delia " in the following year, com- 
 plained that " a greedy printer had published some of his 
 sonnets along with those of Sir Philip Sidney; " and a cor- 
 rected and authentic edition of Sidney's sonnets was issued 
 before the close of 159 1. 
 
 The main attraction of Nash's volume was the " Astro- 
 phel and Stella '' series of sonnets ; this was the title of the 
 work, the other poems being merely appended. The editor 
 extolled Sidney with characteristic eloquence and extrava- 
 gance. He apologises for commending a poet " the least 
 syllable of whose name, sounded in the ears of judgment, 
 is able to give the meanest line he writes a dowry of immor- 
 tality." He deplores the long absence of England's Sun, 
 and ridicules the gross fatty flames that have wandered 
 abroad like hobgoblins with a wisp of paper at their tails in 
 the middest eclipse of his shining perfections. " Put out 
 your rush candles, you poets and rhymers," he cries ; "and 
 bequeath your crazed quatorzains to the chandlers ; for lo ! 
 here he cometh that hath broken your legs.'' 
 
 The story of the romantic passion between Sidney and 
 Penelope Devereux, Astrophel and Stella, is well known to 
 readers of literary history. Lady Penelope, sister of the 
 unfortunate Earl of Essex, was some nine years younger 
 than her distinguished lover. Her father had formed a 
 high opinion of Sir Philip's promise, and on his deathbed 
 expressed a wish for their union : but her guardians were 
 in favour of a wealthier match, and two or three years after 
 
 ^ I have given some account of Sidney's life and character in my 
 Manual of English Prose Literature, and shall here confine myself to his 
 sonnets. 
 
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 24"3 
 
 the old Earl's death, she was married at the age of seven- 
 teen, much against her own wishes, to an unattractive young 
 nobleman, Lord Rich. This event may have been hastened 
 by Sidney's attitude before the marriage. If his self-re- 
 proaches in the sonnets were well founded, he would seem 
 to have been undecided and vacillating in his addresses, 
 his natural impulses being obstructed by a pedantic fancy 
 that love was unworthy of a great thinker like himself — 
 perhaps a temporary result of his correspondence with Lan- 
 guet : but when the lady was married out of his reach, his 
 love became most ardent, and he courted her favours in a 
 long series of passionate sonnets. Seeing that he very soon 
 after married another lady — a daughter of Sir Francis Wal- 
 singham — it might with some reason be inferred that there 
 was in Sidney's as in other sonnets not a little make-believe 
 passion, and that his delight as an ambitious young poet 
 at finding such an amount of literary capital was quite as 
 strong as the pain of the disappointment. Certainly, how- 
 ever. Lady Rich, whose rare charms of beauty and wit were 
 the theme of many celebrated Elizabethan pens, was likely 
 enough to be the object of a genuine passion. As the hus- 
 band of a man whom she disliked and kept in thorough 
 fear and subjection, and as the brother of an ambitious 
 nobleman nearly related to the throne, she led as she ad- 
 vanced in years a brilliant and a troubled life, and was in 
 the Court of England the most conspicuous and fascinating 
 woman of her generation. When Sidney wrote his sonnets 
 she was in the prime of her beauty, and he may well have 
 been sincere in deploring the loss of such a prize, and pray- 
 ing in wailful sonnets that he might continue to have a place 
 in her affections. 
 
 In the choice of ideas for his sonnets Sidney prided him- 
 self on being original.^ This was a natural reaction from 
 the long line of imitators between Surrey and himself. In 
 Watson's ' Hecatompathia, or Passionate Century of Love,' 
 
 1 He carried his disdain of commonplace into other walks of love. The 
 ladies of the Court thought him a dry-as-dust because he wore no particular 
 colours "nor nourished special locks of vowed hair." — Son. 54. 
 
244 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 published in 1582, about the time when Sidney was com- 
 posing his sonnets, the imitative and artificial character of 
 the fashionable English love-poetry was specially illustrated 
 by the candid acknowledgments of the accompanying notes. 
 The poet makes no pretence to spontaneous eifusion. Pre- 
 fixed to the many ingenious praises of his lady's beauty, and 
 allegations of her cruelty, and his own varied professions of 
 unalterable love and consuming pangs of despair, are full 
 references to the literary sources of his inspiration. Before 
 depicting the pangs of Cupid's deadly dart and praying for 
 its withdrawal, the commentary informs us that " the author 
 hath wrought this passion out of Stephanus Forcatulus." 
 Before a dire lament that Neptune's waves might be renewed 
 from the poet's weeping eyes, Vulcan's forge from the flames 
 within his breast, and the windbags of ^Solus from his sob- 
 bing sighs, we are candidly informed that " the invention of 
 this Passion is borrowed for the most part from Seraphine, 
 Son. 125." A praise of his lady is imitated from Petrarch : 
 a sweet fancy about the capture of Love by the Muses, from 
 Ronsard : a vision of his lady in sleep from Hercules 
 Strozza. Another commendation of the most rare excel- 
 lencies of his mistress is imitated from a famous sonnet by 
 Fiorenzuola the Florentine, which was imitated also by 
 Surrey and by two other writers in Tottel's Miscellany. So 
 with the majority of Watson's " passions," as he called his 
 poems ; very few of them professed to be wholly original, 
 and the adaptation was generally very slight. Now Sidney 
 revolted from this habit of adopting the praises, vows, and 
 "deploring dumps" of other amorous singers. He swore 
 "by blackest brook of hell," that he was "no pick-purse of 
 another's wit." His eloquence came from a different source : 
 "his lips were sweet, inspired with Stella's kiss.'' He had 
 tried the old plan — - 
 
 " I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe 
 Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain ; 
 Oft turning others' leaves to see if thence would flow 
 Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain." 
 
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 245 
 
 But Invention, the child of Nature, fled from the blows 
 of Study. He sat biting his pen, and beating himself for 
 spite, till at last — 
 
 " Fool ! said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write." 
 
 His success was such that he could not refrain from boastful 
 tirades against the old imitators — 
 
 " You that do Dictionary's method bring 
 Into your rhymes, running in rattling rows ; 
 You that poor Petrarch's long deceased woes 
 With new-born sighs and denizened wit do sing, 
 You talce wrong ways, those far-fetched helps be such 
 As do betray a want of inward touch." 
 
 This and many other passages in Sidney illustrate the 
 almost Homeric complacency of self-estimate among the 
 Elizabethans. 
 
 Most of the conceptions and conceits in Sidney's sonnets 
 are really his own ; and they display very exquisite subtlety 
 and tenderness of fancy. In these respects they deserve 
 all the admiration they received from his contemporaries. 
 What, for example, could be finer than the ruling conceit of 
 his 38th sonnet? 
 
 " This night while Sleep begins with heavy wings, 
 To hatch mine eyes, and that unbitted thought 
 Doth fall to stray, and my chief powers are brought 
 
 To leave the sceptre of all subject things : 
 
 The first -that straight my fancy's error brings 
 Unto my mind, is Stella's image, wrought 
 By Love's own self, but, with so curious draught 
 
 That she, methinks, not only shines but sings. 
 I start, look, hark : but what in closed-yp sense 
 
 Was held, in open sense it flies away. 
 Leaving me nought but wailing eloquence : 
 
 I, seeing better sights in Sight's decay 
 Called it anew, and wooed sleep again : 
 But him, her host, that unkind guest had slain." 
 
 The first fifty or sixty sonnets exhibit Astrophel's love in 
 what may be called in fashionable mathematical language 
 
246 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 the statical stage : the subsequent dynamical stage being 
 composed of sonnets descriptive of moods and conceits oc- 
 casioned by a sequence of incidents between the lovers — 
 supposed encouragement, venturous liberties, discourage- 
 ment, despair, and so forth. During the statical or brood- 
 ing stage, the poet-lover's mind is occupied with similitudes 
 and all sorts of fanciful inventions to set forth the incom- 
 parable charms of his mistress and the unexampled force of 
 his passion. During that period his love is subject to no 
 fluctuations, no dynamic change ; it suffers neither increase 
 nor abatement. It is chiefly in this stage that the soft 
 gracefulness and ethereal reach of Sidney's fancy are dis- 
 played. Instead of the sighing lover's commonplace raw 
 assertion that his mistress is fairer than Helen, or Semele, 
 or Ariadne, or Chloris, or any other mythological beauty, 
 or that she would have borne away the apple from Juno, 
 Pallas, and Venus, Astrophel presents Stella with the follow- 
 ing ingenious and delicately wrought conceit, enlivened by 
 a sportive breath of tender humour : — 
 
 " Phoebus was judge between Jove, Mars, and Love, 
 Of those three gods whose arms the fairest were : 
 Jove's golden shield did eagles sable bear. 
 
 Whose talons held young Ganymede above : 
 But in vert field Mars bore a golden spear. 
 
 Which through a bleeding heart his point did shove. 
 
 Each had his crest ; Mars carried Venus' glove, 
 Jove on his helm the thunder-bolt did rear. 
 
 Cupid then smiles : see for on his crest there lies 
 Stella's fair hair ; her face he makes his shield. 
 Whose roses gules are borne in silver field. 
 
 Phoebus drew wide the curtains of the skies 
 To blaze these last, and sware devoutly then 
 The first thus match'd, were scantly gentlemen.'' 
 
 He is brimful of fancies equally delicate. Venus falls 
 out on Cupid because under terror of the threats of Mars 
 he would not wound that god deep enough. The angry 
 mother breaks her son's bow and shafts, and the poor boy 
 is disconsolate — 
 
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 247 
 
 " Till that his grandame Nature, pitying it, 
 Of Stella's brows made him two better bows. 
 And in her eyes of arrows infinite : 
 O how for joy he leaps ! O how he crows ! 
 And straight therewith, lilce wags new got to play. 
 Falls to shrewd turns, — and I was in his way." 
 
 The commonplace that his mistress's eyes are like 
 stars he builds up into a profession of faith in Astrology. 
 He takes Plato's saying, that if Virtue could come directly 
 in contact with our eyes, it would raise flames of love in 
 our souls, and maintains the truth of the doctrine, for 
 Virtue has taken Stella's shape, and he is conscious of the 
 efFect in his own person. He exults over Reason, who at 
 first intermeddled and decried, but when Stella appeared, 
 knelt down and ofifered to produce good reasons for loving 
 her. He is puzzled to rnake out why his plaints move her 
 so faintly. He will not admit that she is hard-hearted ; but 
 at last he hits upon the true explanation — 
 
 " I much do guess, yet find no truth, save this. 
 That when the breath of my complaints doth touch 
 Those dainty doors unto the court of bliss, 
 The heavenly nature of that place is such 
 That once come there the sobs of mine annoys 
 Are metamorphosed straight to tunes of joys." 
 
 These sweet fancies rise in the head when the heart is 
 comparatively tranquil. When storms began to agitate, the 
 lover's strains became more impassioned. The following is 
 the 48th sonnet : — 
 
 " Soul's joy, bend not those morning stars from me, 
 Where virtue is made strong by beauty's might ; 
 Where Love is chasteness, pain doth learn delight, 
 
 And humbleness grows on with majesty. 
 
 Whatever may ensue, O let me be 
 Copartner of the riches of that sight : 
 Let not mine eyes be hell-driven from that light : 
 
 O look ! O shine ! O let me die, and see ! 
 For though I oft myself of them bemoan, 
 , That through my heart their beamy darts be gone. 
 
248 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 Whose cureless wounds, e'en now, most freshly bleed ; 
 Yet since my death-wound is already got, 
 Dear killer, spare not thy sweet cruel shot : 
 
 A kind of grace it is to slay with speed." 
 
 Farther on in the series, having so far conquered the 
 lady's indifference, he prays for and receives a kiss, " poor 
 hope's first wealth, hostage of promised weal, breakfast of 
 Love," and expresses his rapture in several most im- 
 passioned sonnets. The. following is the 8ist : — 
 
 " O kiss, which dost those ruddy gems impart, 
 
 Or gems, or fruits, of new-found Paradise : 
 Breathing all bliss and sweet'ning to the heart ; 
 
 Teaching dumb lips a nobler exercise ! 
 
 O kiss, which souls, even souls, together. ties 
 By links of Love, and only Nature's art : 
 
 How fain would I paint thee to all men's eyes, 
 Or of thy gifts, at least, shade out some part. 
 
 But she forbids ; with blushing words she says, 
 
 She builds her fame on higher-seated praise : 
 But my heart burns, I cannot silent be. 
 
 Then since, dear life, you fain would have me peace, 
 And I, mad with delight, want wit to cease. 
 
 Stop you my mouth with still, still kissing me." 
 
 Sidney observes the Petrarchian form of the sonnet in so 
 far as regards the division of the stanza into two staves, the 
 first of eight lines with two rhymes, the second of six lines 
 with three rhymes. Whether for ease or for variety, he is 
 not particular about the arrangement of the rhymes within 
 these limits. In the first stave he employs sometimes the 
 alternate, sometimes the successive arrangement ; and when 
 the rhymes are alternate, he sometimes reverses but oftener 
 repeats in the second quatrain the order of the first. In the 
 second stave, he sometimes intenveaves the lines so as to 
 make a stave proper ; but oftener he subdivides it into a 
 quatrain followed by a couplet. Sometimes, as in two of 
 the sonnets above quoted, he begins with the couplet and 
 ends with the quatrain ; and the arrangement is seemingly 
 
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 249 
 
 dictated not by ease or accident, but by a just sense of 
 metrical effect. 
 
 Interspersed with the sonnets are several songs, and in 
 these our poet is happier than in the more confined 
 measures. The last of these songs, which is in the form 
 adopted by Shakespeare for the serenade to Silvia (Two 
 Gent, of Ver., iv. 2), contains some very sweet staves. The 
 two first lines go to the lady ; the three following to the 
 lover : — 
 
 " Who is it that this dark night 
 
 Underneath my window plaineth^? 
 It is one, who from thy sight 
 
 Being (ah !) exiled, disdaineth 
 Every other vulgar light. 
 
 Why, alas ! and are you he ? 
 
 Be not yet those fancies changed ? 
 Dear, when you find change in me 
 
 Tho' from me you be estranged 
 Let my change to ruin be. 
 
 But Time will these thoughts remove : 
 Time doth work what no man knoweth. 
 
 Time doth as the subject prove. 
 With time still affection groweth 
 
 In the faithful turtle-dove. 
 
 What if ye new beauties see 
 
 Will not they stir new affection ? 
 I will think they pictures be 
 
 Image-like of saint-perfection. 
 Poorly counterfeiting thee." 
 
 Two such songs as this and the one to Silvia make the 
 stave seem the only true form for a lover's lyric : the lines 
 run into music oif their own accord, and scatter sweet 
 perfumes with their light motion. There is nothing more 
 ravishing in the language. 
 
250 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 II. — Samuel Daniel (1562-1619). 
 
 Daniel, bom near Taunton in Somersetshire, was the son 
 of a music-master, but somehow obtained a university edu- 
 cation at Oxford. He published a translation of Paulus 
 Jovius's ' Discourse of Rare Inventions ' in 1585 at the age 
 of twenty-three, and soon afterwards became tutor to Lady 
 Anne Clifford. A man of taste and refined feeling, very 
 unlike some of the sturdy contemporary plants who lived 
 by acting and play- writing, Daniel grew up under the 
 shelter of noble- patronage, conciliating favour by the ami- 
 ability of his disposition as well as by the gracefulness 
 of his literary compliments. He enjoyed the patronage of 
 the Earl of Southampton and of the Pembroke family. 
 Through the influence of his noble friends, he had ob- 
 tained in 1593 the Mastership of the Revels, for which 
 poor John Lyly had waited so long and begged so ear- 
 nestly ; and after the accession of James, he was made 
 Gentleman - Extraordinary, and subsequently one of the 
 Grooms of the Privy Chamber to the Queen Consort. 
 His chief poetical works were — Sonnets to " Delia," 1592 ; 
 " Delia " augmented, along with the " Complaint of Rosa- 
 mond" and the "Tragedy of Cleopatra,'" 1394; metrical 
 history of the " Civil Wars," 1604 ; " Tragedy of Philotas," 
 161 1 ; "Hymen's Triumph, a pastoral tragi-comedy," not 
 published till 1623. He wrote several other pieces of less 
 importance. His plays were produced for the entertain- 
 ment of the Court ; and it may have been this connection 
 that dictated his choice of the Wars of the Roses as a sub- 
 ject. He also wrote in prose a History of England. 
 
 Had Daniel lived in the present day, his destiny probably 
 would have been to write scholarly and elegant articles in 
 the magazines, ripe fruits of leisurely study, cultivated 
 taste, and easy command of polite English. His was not 
 one of the stormy irregular natures that laid the foundation 
 and raised the structure of the English drama : the elements 
 of his being were softly blended, and wrought together 
 
SAMUEL DANIEL. 25 1 
 
 mildly and harmoniously. In the prologue to "Hymen's 
 Triumph," he declares that he has no rude antique sport to 
 offer — 
 
 " But tender passions, motions soft and grave 
 The still spectators must expect to have." 
 
 He wrote for Cynthia, and therefore his play — 
 
 " Must be gentle like to her 
 Whose svireet affections mildly move and stir." 
 
 He might have said the same about all his poetry. He 
 was no master of strong passions : he never felt them, and 
 he could not paint them. Between his Cleopatra and 
 Shakespeare's there is a wide gulf. But he is most ex- 
 quisite and delicate in pencilling " tender passions, motions 
 soft and grave." 
 
 Without being strikingly original, Daniel has a way and 
 a vein of his own. He fills his mind with ideas and forms 
 from extraneous sources, and with quietly operating plas- 
 ticity reshapes them in accordance with the bent of his own 
 modes of thought and feeling. He had not the Shake- 
 spearian lightning quickness in adaptation and extension : 
 the process in him was more peaceable and easy. The dic- 
 tion of his poems is choice ; the versification easy and flow- 
 ing. He often puts things with felicitous terseness and 
 vigour, and his words almost invariably come together 
 happily and harmoniously. 
 
 The publication of Daniel's sonnets in 1592 is an epoch 
 in the history of the English Sonnet. This was the first 
 body of sonnets written in what is sometimes called by 
 pre-eminence the English form — three independent qua- 
 trains closed in by a couplet. Daniel also set an example 
 to Shakespeare in treating the sonnet as a stanza, connect- 
 ing several of them together as consecutive parts of a larger 
 expression. Apart from their form, there is not very much 
 interest in the sonnets to Delia. They have all Daniel's 
 smoothness and felicity of phrase, and are pervaded by 
 exceedingly sweet and soft sentiment. Though they rouse 
 
252 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 no strong feelings, they may be dwelt upon by a sympathetic 
 reader with lively enjoyment. One of them, with somewhat 
 greater depth of feeling than most of the others, the son- 
 net beginning — " Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable 
 Night," is ranked among the best sonnets in the language. 
 But their most general interest is found in their relation to 
 Shakespeare's sonnets, several of which seem to have been 
 built up from ideas suggested by the study of those to 
 Delia.i In the following sonnets, for example, readers fa- 
 miliar with Shakespeare's will not fail to remark a certain 
 similarity of idea, although the two series of sonnets differ 
 as widely as the genius of the two poets. 
 
 Sonnet 37. 
 " But love whilst that thou mayst be loved again, 
 
 Now whilst thy May hath filled thy lap with flowers ; 
 Now whilst thy beauty bears without a stain : 
 
 Now use the summer smiles, ere winter lowers : 
 And whilst thou spreadst unto the rising Sun 
 
 The fairest flower that ever saw the light, 
 Now joy thy time before thy sweet be done ; 
 
 And, Delia, think thy morning must have night. 
 And that thy brightness sets at length to west. 
 
 When thou wilt close up that which now thou show'st, 
 And thinks the same becomes thy fading best. 
 
 Which then shall most inveil and shadow most. 
 Men do not weigh the stalk for that it was. 
 When once they find her flower, her glory pass." 
 
 Sonnet 39. 
 " When winter snows upon thy sable hairs. 
 
 And frost of age hath nipt thy beauties near ; 
 
 1 The Sonnets to Delia on their first issue were preceded by a prose dedi- 
 cation to the Countess of Pembrolte, ' ' Sidney's sister, Pembrolie's mother : " 
 the poet desiring " to be graced by the countenance of your protection ; 
 whom the fortune of our time hath made the happy and judicial patroness 
 of the Muses (a glory hereditary to your house)." To the second issue was 
 prefixed a dedicatory sonnet to the same lady, entitling her as the "wonder 
 of these, glory of other times ; " affirming that his sonnets were " her own, 
 begotten by her hand ; " and that though the travail was his, the glory 
 must be hers. These facts, and some of the expressions, are interesting to 
 those who believe that the friend of Shakespeare's sonnets was this lady's 
 son. 
 
SAMUEL DANIEL. 253 
 
 When dark shall seem thy day that never clears, 
 
 And all lies withered that was held so dear : 
 Then take this picture which I here present thee, 
 
 Limned with a pencil not all unworthy : 
 Here see the gifts that God and Nature lent thee ; 
 
 Here read thyself, and what I suffer'd for thee. 
 This may remain thy lasting monument, 
 
 Which happily posterity may cherish ; 
 These colours with thy fading are not spent. 
 
 These may remain, when thou and I shall perish. 
 If they remain, then thou shalt live thereby : 
 They will remain, and so thou canst not die." 
 
 Sonnet 41. 
 
 " Be not displeased that these my papers should 
 
 Bewray unto the world how fair thou art ; 
 Or that my wits have showed the best they could 
 
 The chastest flame that ever warmed heart ! 
 Think not, sweet Delia, this shall be thy shame. 
 
 My Muse should sound thy praise with mournful warble; 
 How many live, the glory of whose name 
 
 Shall rest in ice, when thine is graved in marble ! 
 Thou mayst in after-ages live esteemed 
 
 Unburied in these lines, reserved in pureness ; 
 These shall entomb those eyes, that have redeemed 
 
 Me from the vulgar, thee from all obscureness. 
 Although my careful accents never moved thee. 
 Yet count it no disgrace that I have loved thee." 
 
 Sonnet 52. 
 
 " Let others sing of knights and paladins. 
 
 In aged accents and untimely words ; 
 Paint shadows in imaginary lines 
 
 Which well the reach of their high wits records 
 But I must sing of thee, and those fair eyes 
 
 Authentic shall my verse in time to come 
 When yet th' unborn shall say, ' Lo where she lies 
 
 Whose beauty made him speak, that else was dumb.' 
 These are the arks, the trophies I erect. 
 
 That fortify thy name against old age ; 
 And these thy sacred virtues must protect. 
 
 Against the dark and Time's consuming rage. 
 
254 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 Though th' error of my youth in them appear 
 Suffice they show I lived and loved thee dear." 
 
 Daniel's genius is best shown in the expression of be- 
 reaved love in the " Complaint of Rosamond," and in 
 " Hymen's Triumph " — as Spenser said, " in tragic plaints 
 and passionate mischance." In the expression of courtship 
 love, his imagination is cold and acts artificially and me- 
 chanically : but when the beloved object is taken away, he 
 is moved to the depths, and pours forth his strains with 
 genuine warmth. The passion has still a certain softness 
 in it : his lovers have not the inconsolable fierce distraction 
 of Shakespeare's forsaken lover, " tearing of papers, break- 
 ing rings atwain :" they do not shriek undistinguished woe: 
 but they sigh deeply, and their voices are richly laden with 
 impassioned remembrance. The plaintive sorrow of Thyr- 
 sis is sweet and profound. But nothing that Daniel has 
 written flows with surer instinct and more natural impulse 
 than the agonised endearments of Harry over the body of 
 Rosamond. Wholly different in character from the frantic 
 doting of Venus over her lost Adon, these verses are hardly 
 less perfect as the utterance of a milder and less fiercely 
 fond passion. The deep heart's sorrow of the bereaved 
 lover makes itself felt in every line — 
 
 " Then as these passions do him overwhelm 
 He draws him near my body to behold it ; 
 And as the vine married unto the elm 
 With strict embraces, so doth he enfold it : 
 And as he in his careful arms doth hold it 
 Viewing the face that even death commends, 
 On senseless lips millions of kisses spends. 
 
 ' Pitiful mouth,' said he, 'that living gavest 
 The sweetest comfort that my soul could wish : 
 O be it lawful now, that dead thou havest, 
 This sorrowing farewell of a dying kiss. 
 And you, fair eyes, containers of my bliss. 
 Motives of love, born to be matched never, 
 Entomb'd in your sweet circles, sleep for ever. 
 
SAMUEL DANIEL. 255 
 
 ' Ah, how methinks I see Death dallying seeks 
 To entertain itself in Love's sweet place ! 
 Decayed roses of discoloured cheeks, 
 •Do yet retain dear notes of former grace, 
 And ugly Death sits fair within her face ; 
 Sweet remnants resting of vermilion red, 
 That Death itself doubts whether she be dead. 
 
 ' Wonder of beauty, O receive these plaints, 
 These obsequies, the last that I shall make thee : 
 For lo, my soul that now already faints, 
 (That loved thee living, dead will not forsake thee) 
 Hastens her speedy course to overtake thee. 
 I'll meet my death, and free myself thereby, 
 For ah, what can he do that cannot die ? 
 
 ' Yet, ere I die, thus much my soul doth vow, 
 Revenge shall sweeten death with ease of mind : 
 And I will cause posterity shall know, 
 How fair thou wert above all woman kind. 
 And after-ages monuments shall find 
 Showing thy beauty's title, not thy name, 
 Rose of the world that sweetened so the same.' " 
 
 III. — Henry Constable (1555 ?-i6io?) 
 
 Constable was of Roman Catholic family, and was edu- 
 cated at St John's, Cambridge, where he took the degree ot 
 B.A. in 1579. He was obliged to leave England in 1595, 
 from suspicion of treasonable practices. Venturing back in 
 1601 or 1602, he was committed to the Tower, from which 
 he was not released till towards the close of 1604. He is 
 mentioned as if he were still alive in the ' Return from Par- 
 nassus ' (1606), and in Bolton's ' Hypercritica ' (1616) as if 
 he were then dead. The first edition of his sonnets to 
 "Diana" appeared in 1592, and contained 23; a second 
 was issued in 1594, containing 27. Sixty-three sonnets 
 by Constable, methodically arranged in sevens, are printed 
 in the Harleian Miscellany from a MS. known as Todd's 
 MS. : this collection comprises all that appear in the 
 
2S6 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 printed collections. Constable wrote also certain ' Spiri- 
 tual Sonnets,' and a version of the tale of Venus and 
 Adonis, which was not published till 1600, but is believed 
 to have been written earlier. 
 
 Like Daniel, Constable does not attempt the delineation 
 of stormy passions, yet his deepest vein is quite different 
 from Daniel's. He has a more ardent soul than Daniel : 
 his imagination is more warmly and richly coloured : he has 
 more of flame and less of moisture in him. Daniel's words 
 flow most abundantly and with happiest impulse when his 
 eye is dim with tears ; Constable's when his whole being is 
 aglow with the rapture of beauty. Tears fall from the poet's 
 eyes in the following sonnet, but they fall like rain in sun- 
 shine. The occasion is his lady's walking in a garden : — ■ 
 
 " My lady's presence makes the roses red 
 
 Because to see her lips they blush for shame : 
 
 The lily's leaves for envy pale became, 
 And her white hands in them this envy bred. 
 The marigold abroad its leaves did spread 
 
 Because the sun's and her power is the same ; 
 
 The violet of purple colour came, 
 Dyed with the blood she made my heart to shed. 
 
 In brief, all flowers from her their virtue take ; 
 From her sweet breath their sweet smells do proceed ; 
 
 The living heat which her eyebeams do make 
 Warmeth the ground, and quickeneth the seed. 
 
 The rain wherewith she watereth these flowers 
 
 Falls from mine eyes which she dissolves in showers." 
 
 The following is more characteristic of his soaring ardour 
 — " rapture all air and fire ; " though the structure is some- 
 what artificial ; — 
 
 ," Blame not my heart for flying up so high, 
 Sith thou art cause that it this flight begun, 
 For earthly vapours, drawn up by the sun, 
 
 Comets become, and night-suns in the sky. 
 
 My humble heart so with thy heavenly eye 
 Drawn up aloft, all low desires doth shun : 
 Raise thou me up, as thou my heart hast done. 
 
HENRY CONSTABLE. 257 
 
 So during night, in heaven remain may I. 
 
 Blame not, I say again, my high desire, 
 Sith of us both the cause thereof depends : 
 
 In thee doth shine, in me doth burn a fire ; 
 Fire draweth up others, and itself ascends. 
 
 Thine eye a fire, and so draws up my love ; 
 
 My love a fire, and so ascends above." 
 
 The most exquisite of his sonnets for sweet colour and 
 winning fancy is that where he compares his love to a beg- 
 gar at the door of beauty — 
 
 " Pity refusing my poor Love to feed, 
 
 A beggar starved for want of help he lies. 
 And at your mouth, the door of beauty, cries 
 
 That thence some alms of sweet grants may proceed. 
 
 But as he waiteth for some almes-deed, 
 A cherry tree before the door he spies — 
 O dear, quoth he, two cherries may suffice. 
 
 Two only life may save in this my need. 
 
 But beggars can they nought but cherries eat ? 
 
 Pardon my Love, he is a goddess' son, 
 And never feedeth but of dainty meat. 
 
 Else need he not to pine as he hath done. 
 For only the sweet fruit of this sweet tree 
 Can give food to my love, and life to me." 
 
 In one of his sonnets he makes the same glorious claim 
 for his lady that Shakespeare makes for the fair youth of 
 his adoration — 
 
 " Miracle of the world ! I never will deny 
 
 That former poets praise the beauty of their days ; 
 But all those beauties were but figures of thy praise, 
 And all those poets did of thee but prophesy." 
 
 His amorous sonnets and other light poems were the effu- 
 sions of his youth, and like Spenser he turned in his older 
 years to the contemplation of heavenly beauty. He con- 
 cludes his love-sonnets by saying — 
 
 " For if none ever loved like me, then why 
 
 Still blameth he the things he doth not know ? 
 And he that hath so loved will favour show. 
 For he hath been a fool as well as I." 
 R 
 
258 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 And adds in prose — " When I had ended this last sonnet, 
 and found that such vain poems as I had by idle hours 
 writ, did amount just to the climacterical number 63 ; me- 
 thought it was high time for my folly to die, and to employ 
 the remnant of wit to other calmer thoughts less sweet and 
 less bitter." There can be little doubt that the beautiful 
 " spiritual sonnets " ascribed to him by Mr Park, and 
 printed in vol. ii. of the ' Hehconia,' are his composition. 
 Those addressed to " our Blessed Lady " are particularly 
 fine. 
 
 IV. — Thomas Lodge (1556-1625). 
 
 Lodge, the next in order of our sonneteers, led rather a 
 varied life. His father was a grocer in London, who in 
 1563 attained to the dignity of Lord Mayor. He entered 
 Trinity College, Oxford, in 1573, and Lincoln's Inn in 1578; 
 but literature seems to have had more attraction for him 
 than the bar. In 1586, and again in 1591-3, we find him 
 engaged in privateering expeditions to the West Indies, in 
 search of excitement and adventure. He belonged to the 
 wild society of Greene, Marlowe, and Nash ; but if he took 
 much part in their dissipations, he had strength enough 
 to survive it, and when the leaders of the set died off, he 
 became sober and respectable, studied medicine, gave up 
 poetry, and spent the leisure of his professional life in trans- 
 lating Josephus, and the " works, both natural and moral," 
 of Seneca. His chief productions were — A ' Defence of 
 Poetry, Music, and Stage-Plays,' in reply to Stephen Gos- 
 son's 'School of Abuse,' 1580; 'Alarm against Usurers,' 
 along with the novelette of ' Forbonius and Prisceria,' 1584 ; 
 ' Scylla's Metamorphosis,' with " sundry most absolute 
 Poems and Sonnets," 1589: 'Euphues Golden Legacy,' 
 (reprinted in Mr Collier's ' Shakespeare's Library,' as being 
 the basis of " As You Like It," 1590 ; ' Phyllis honoured with 
 Pastoral Sonnets,' 1593; 'The Wounds of Civil War,' a 
 tragedy on the history of Marius and Sylla, 1594; 'A Fig 
 for Momus,' a body of satires, 1595 ; ' Wit's Misery and the 
 
THOMAS LODGE, 259 
 
 World's Madness,' a prose satire, 1596; 'A Marguerite of 
 America,' a very tragical novel, 1596. 
 
 Lodge's love-poems have an exquisite delicacy and grace : 
 they breathe a tenderer and truer passion than we find in 
 any of his contemporaries. His sonnets are more loose 
 and straggling, slighter and less compactly built, than Con- 
 stable's or Daniel's ; but they have a wonderful charm of 
 sweet fancy and unaffected tenderness. His themes are 
 the usual praises of beauty and complaints of unkindness ; 
 but he contrives to impart to them a most unusual air 
 of sincere devotion and graceful fervour. None of his 
 rivals can equal the direct and earnest simplicity and grace 
 of his adoration of Phyllis, and avowal of faith in her con- 
 stancy. 
 
 " Fair art thou, Phyllis ; ay, so fair, sweet maid, 
 
 As nor the sun nor I have seen more fair ; 
 For in thy cheeks sweet roses are embayed 
 
 And gold more pure than gold doth gild thy hair. 
 Sweet bees have hived their honey on thy tongue, 
 
 And Hebe spiced her nectar with thy breath : 
 About thy neck do all the graces tiirong 
 
 And lay such baits as might entangle Death. ^ 
 In such a breast what heart would not be thrall ? 
 
 From such sweet arms who would not wish embraces ? 
 At thy fair hands who wonders not at all. 
 
 Wonder itself through ignorance embases. 
 Yet natheless ^ho' wondrous gifts you call these, 
 My faith is far more wonderful than all these." 
 
 There is a seeming artlessness in Lodge's sonnets, a win- 
 nuig directness, that constitutes a great part of their charm. 
 They seem to be uttered through a clear and pure medium 
 straight from the heart : their tender fragrance and music 
 come from the heart itself. If the poet's design was to 
 assume a pastoral innocence and simplicity, he has 
 eminently succeeded. There are many conceits in his 
 sonnets, but they are expressed so simply and naturally 
 that they take on the semblance of half-earnest beliefs. A 
 simple silly Arcadian may be allowed the sweet fancy of 
 
26o ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 supposing a storm to be the result of Aurora's envy and 
 despair at seeing his lovely mistress. 
 
 " The dewy roseate Morn had with her hairs 
 
 In sundry sorts the Indian clime adorned ; 
 And now her eyes apparelled in tears 
 
 The loss of lovely Memnon long had mourned : 
 Whenas she spied the nymph whom I admire, 
 
 Kembing her locks, of which the yellow gold 
 Made blush the beauties of her curled wire. 
 
 Which heaven itself with wonder might behold : 
 Then red with shame, her reverend locks she rent. 
 
 And weeping hid the beauty of her face — 
 The flower of fancy wrought such discontent : 
 
 The sighs which 'midst the air she breathed a space 
 A three days' stormy tempest did maintain, 
 Her shame a fire, her eyes a swelling rain." 
 
 And when despair seizes him, with what earnestness he 
 makes his appeal to the last relief : — 
 
 " Burst, burst, poor heart, thou hast no longer hope : 
 
 Captive mine eyes unto eternal sleep ; 
 Let all my senses have no further scope ; 
 
 Let death be lord of me and all my sheep. 
 •For Phyllis hath betrothed fierce disdain. 
 
 That makes his mortal mansion in her heart ; 
 And tho' my tongue have long time taken pain. 
 
 To sue divorce and wed her to desart. 
 She will not yield ; my words can have no power ; 
 
 She scorns my faith ; she laughs at my sad lays ; 
 She fills my soul with never-ceasing sour, 
 
 Who filled the world with volumes of her praise. 
 In such extremes what wretch can cease to crave 
 His peace from Death who can no mercy have ? " 
 
 It may, however, be acknowledged that Lodge's nature 
 was not specially fitted for the sonnet form of composition ; 
 he was not sufficiently patient and meditative to elaborate 
 intricate stanzas. His lines have on them the dewy freshness 
 of an impulsive gush, — a freshness off which the dew has not 
 been brushed by the travail of thought; and the opening 
 of his sonnets in many cases leads us to expect better things 
 
THOMAS LODGE. 26 1 
 
 than we find as we proceed when the leading idea has been 
 hammered out into a quatorzain. In the sonnet that opens 
 with the lines — 
 
 " Ah, pale and dying infant of the spring, 
 How rightly now do I resemble thee ! 
 That self-same hand that thee from stalk did wring. 
 Hath rent my breast and robbed my heart from me " — 
 
 the conclusion is laboured and disappointing. And still 
 more disappointing is the sonnet to his lady on her sickness, 
 which opens with the exquisitely tender verses — 
 
 " How languisheth the primrose of love's garden ? 
 How trill her tears the elixir of my senses? " 
 
 Although it contains two other beautiful lines of adjura- 
 tion — 
 
 " Ah, roses, love's fair roses, do not languish : 
 Blush through the milk-white veil that holds you covered." 
 
 Mixed with his sonnets to Phyllis, and scattered through 
 his prose tales, are many lyrics of less intricate measure, 
 which show Lodge's charm at the height of its power. 
 Take, for example, the two following in honour of Phyllis : — 
 
 " Love guards the roses of thy lips. 
 
 And flies about them like a bee ; 
 If I approach, he forward skips, 
 
 And if I kiss, he stingeth me. 
 Love in thine eyes doth build his bower, 
 
 And sleeps within their pretty shine ; 
 And if I look the boy will lower, 
 
 And from their orbs shoot shafts divine. 
 Love works thy heart within his fire 
 
 And in my tears doth firm the same ; 
 And if I tempt, it will retire. 
 
 And of my plaints doth make a game. 
 Love, let me cull her choicest flowers, 
 
 And pity me, and calm her eye ; 
 Make soft her heart, dissolve her lowers. 
 
 Then will I praise thy deity. 
 But if thou do not. Love, I'll truly serve her. 
 In spite of thee, and by firm faith deserve her." 
 
262 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 " My Phyllis hath the morning sun, 
 
 At first to look upon her, 
 And Phyllis hath morn-waking birds 
 
 Her risings for to honour. 
 My Phyllis hath prime feathered flowers 
 
 That smile when she treads on them. 
 And Phyllis hath a gallant flock 
 
 That leaps since she doth own them. 
 But Phyllis hath so hard a heart, 
 
 Alas that she should have it ! 
 As yields no mercy to desart 
 
 Nor grace to those that crave it. 
 Sweet sun, when thou lookest on, 
 
 Pray her regard my moan. 
 Sweet birds, when you sing to her. 
 
 To yield some pity woo her. 
 Sweet flowers, whenas she treads on, 
 Tell her her beauty deads one. 
 And if in life her love she nill agree me. 
 Pray her before I die she'll come and see me.' 
 
 Not less exquisite is Rosalind's Madrigal : — 
 
 " Love in my bosom like a bee 
 
 Doth suck his sweet : 
 Now with his wings he plays ftfith me. 
 
 Now with his feet. 
 Within mine eyes he makes his nest, 
 His bed amid my tender breast, 
 My kisses are his daily feast, 
 And yet he robs me of my rest. 
 
 Ah, wanton, will ye ? 
 
 And if I sleep then percheth he 
 
 With pretty flight. 
 And makes his pillow of my knee 
 
 The livelong night. 
 Strike I my lute, he tunes the string. 
 He music plays if so I sing, 
 He lends me every lovely thing : 
 Yet cruel he my heart doth sting. 
 
 Whist, wanton, still ye. 
 
THOMAS LODGE. 263 
 
 Else I with roses every day- 
 Will whip you hence ; 
 
 And bind you when you long to play 
 For your offence. 
 
 I'll shut mine eyes to keep you in, 
 
 I'll make you fast it for your sin, 
 
 I'll count your power not worth a pin, 
 
 Alas ! what hereby shall I win, 
 If he gainsay me ? 
 
 What if I beat the wanton boy 
 
 With many a rod ? 
 He will repay me with annoy. 
 
 Because a god. 
 Then sit thou safely on my knee 
 And let thy bower my bosom be : 
 Lurk in mine eyes, I like of thee : 
 O Cupid, so thou pity me. 
 
 Spare not but play thee." 
 
 " Scylla's Metamorphosis," the tale of Glaucus and Scylla, 
 is interesting on its own account, and further, as the pro- 
 bable model of Shakespeare's " Venus and Adonis," whose 
 unhappy loves it introduces as an episode. It is at least 
 the first published of the apocryphal classical tales which at 
 that time became a transient fashion — the English antici- 
 pator, if not the model, of Marlowe's " Hero and Leander," 
 Drayton's " Endymion and Phoebe," and Chapman's " Ovid's 
 Banquet of Sense." I need not follow the windings of the 
 tale. The gist is that Scylla was metamorphosed as a 
 punishment for her cruelty to Glaucus, a sea-god : and the 
 interest of the poem lies in its voluptuous descriptions. I 
 may quote his picture of the anguish of Venus for compari- 
 son with Daniel's Henry and Shakespeare's Venus : it is 
 more a pretty grief than a deep passion : its sweetness 
 reminds us of a child's endearments to a dead pet bird. 
 
 " He that hath seen the sweet Arcadian boy 
 Wiping the purple from his forced wound. 
 His pretty tears betokening his annoy ; 
 His sighs, his cries, his falling on the ground ; 
 
264 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 The echoes ringing from the rocks his fall, 
 The trees with tears reporting of his thrall. 
 
 And Venus starting at her love-mate's cry 
 Forcing her birds to haste her chariot on ; 
 
 And, full of grief, at last, with piteous eye. 
 Seen where all pale with death he lay alone 
 
 Whose beauty quail'd as wont the lilies droop 
 
 When wasteful winter winds do make them stoop. 
 
 Her dainty hand addressed to claw her dear, 
 Her roseal lip allied to his pale cheek. 
 
 Her sighs, and then her looks and heavy cheer, 
 Her bitter threats, and then her passions meek ; 
 
 How on his senseless corpse she lay a-crying, 
 
 As if the boy were then but new a-dying." 
 
 Lodge's " Fig for Momus " is often amusing, but the 
 satire is not very pungent. He was much too good-natured 
 a man to be a satirist : he was not capable even of smiling 
 spite, much less of bitter derision. His " Epistles " are en- 
 titled to the claim that he makes for them, of being the 
 first productions of the kind in English, and their date dis- 
 poses at once of Joseph Hall's conceited boast — 
 
 " I first adventure, follow me who list 
 And be the second English satirist." 
 
 But priority is their chief merit : they are colourless imita- 
 tions of Horace. Marston is the first real English satirist. 
 
 Nor can Lodge be said to have been successful as a 
 dramatist. The " Wounds of Civil War " is a heavy drama. 
 Sylla is drawn with considerable power as a bold rough 
 man with a certain sense of humour in him : ambitious, 
 boastful, treating his enemies with scoffing contempt, making 
 a jest of death and cruelty, rudely repelling compliments, 
 provoking public censure for the pleasure of defying it. He 
 may have supplied some raw material for Shakespeare's 
 " Coriolanus." Sylla talks very much in the vein of Tambur- 
 laine ; and it is probable from this that Lodge may fairly get 
 the credit or discredit of the extravagant ramps of Rasni in 
 the "Looking-glass for London," which he wrote in con- 
 
THOMAS WATSON. 265 
 
 junction with Greene. It is a curious thing that men Hke 
 Lodge and Peele should quite equal, if not surpass, even 
 Marlowe in outrageous heroics. One wonders that the 
 Herod of the Mysteries should be out-Heroded by one who 
 dwells with such fresh enthusiasm on tender beauties. How 
 difterent are Sylla's rants from this strain ! — 
 
 " O shady vale, O fair enriched meads, 
 
 O sacred woods, sweet fields, and rising mountains ; 
 O painted flowers, green herbs where Flora treads, 
 Refreshed by wanton winds and watery fountains." 
 
 Perhaps, however, it is not more surprising than that the 
 author of " Tamburlaine " should be the author of " Hero 
 and Leander." 
 
 V. — Thomas Watson (1557 ?-iS92?). 
 
 We have mentioned incidentally the ' 'Exaro/i'ra^/a, or Pas- 
 sionate Century of Love,' by Thomas Watson. Watson 
 first appeared as an author in 1581, with a translation into 
 Latin of the 'Antigone' of Sophocles. The "Passionate 
 Century" (that is. Hundred) was published in 1582. Three 
 years after, he executed a Latin elegiac poem, entitled 
 "Amyntas." He continued the practice of Latin verse 
 alongside of EngUsh : in 1590 he published an "Eglogue 
 upon the Death of Sir Francis Walsingham " in Latin and 
 English, adopting in this case the title of " Meliboeus.'' In 
 1593, in which year he was mentioned as if then dead,i his 
 last work was published — a collection of sixty sonnets, en- 
 titled "The Tears of Fancy, or Love Disdained." 
 
 Neither the "Century of Love" nor the "Tears of 
 Fancy " belongs to a high order of poetry. The " Century " 
 was avowedly an exercise of skill : the love-passion, he tells 
 us in the Preface, was "but supposed." With this the 
 critic has no quarrel : so far Watson differs from many of 
 his poetical brethren, only in the perhaps superfluous can- 
 
 ^ See the Introduction to Mr Arber's reprint. 
 
266 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 dour of the avowal. The misfortune is that the supposition, 
 the imaginative passion, is weak. There is no constructive 
 vitality in his lines; the words and images seem brought 
 together by a process of mechanical accumulation. The 
 " Tears of Fancy " are decidedly superior to the " Love- 
 passions," but here also there is a fatal lack of spontaneity 
 and freshness : the superiority has every appearance of being 
 due to the author's study of Spenser. 
 
 The " Passionate Century " is worth reading as a reper- 
 tory of commonplace lover's hyperboles. There never was 
 so sweet a lady, never so fond nor so distraught a lover. 
 Hand, foot, lip, eye, brow, and golden locks are all incom- 
 parable. The ages never have produced, and never will 
 produce, such another; Apelles could not have painted 
 her, Praxiteles could not have sculptured her, Virgil and 
 Homer could not have expressed her, and Tully would not 
 have ventured to repeat the number of her gifts. She is 
 superior to all the mythological paramours of Jove. The 
 various goddesses have contributed their best endowments, 
 mental and physical, to make her perfect. Her voice 
 excels Arion's harp, Philomela's song, Apollo's lute ; yea — 
 
 " Music herself and all the Muses nine 
 For skill or voice their titles may resign.'' 
 
 The despair produced in the lover's heart by the disdain of 
 such a paragon is in a corresponding ratio. Vesuvius is 
 nothing to the fire that consumes his heart. The pains of 
 hell would be a compa.rative relief He suffers the com- 
 bined tortures of Tantalus, Ixion, Tityus, and Sisyphus : — 
 
 " If Tityus, wretched wight, beheld my pains. 
 He would confess his wounds to be but small : 
 A vulture worse than his tears all my veins, 
 
 Yet never lets me die, nor live at all. 
 Would God a while I might possess his place. 
 To judge of both which were in better case." 
 
 The Tears of Fancy, which, as we have said, are chiefly 
 imitation gems, observe the same form as Daniel's. The 
 
THOMAS WATSON. 267 
 
 two following quatrains, with their pretty anadiphsis, or 
 doubling in one line upon the last words of the preceding, 
 are an extreme example of the poet's imitation of Spenser. 
 Cupid is the eager fugitive, bent on mischief : — 
 
 " Then on the sudden fast away he fled, 
 
 He fled apace as from pursuing foe : 
 Ne ever looked he back, ne turned his head. 
 
 Until he came whereas he wrought my woe. 
 The casting from his back his bended bow. 
 
 He quickly clad himself in strange disguise : 
 In strange disguise that no man might him know. 
 
 So coucht himself within my Lady's eyes." 
 
 The two following conceits are in his best manner, and 
 derive a certain interest from their having apparently been 
 imitated in Shakespeare's sonnets 46 and 47 : — 
 
 " My heart imposed this penance on mine eyes. 
 
 Eyes the first causers of my heart's lamenting : 
 That they should weep till love and fancy dies, , 
 
 Fond love the last cause of my heart's repenting. 
 Mine eyes upon my heart inflict this pain. 
 
 Bold heart that dared to harbour thoughts of love ! 
 That it should love and purchase fell disdain, 
 
 A grievous penance, which my heart doth prove. 
 Mine eyes did weep as heart had then imposed 
 
 My heart did pine as eyes had it constrained : 
 Eyes in their tears my paled face disclosed. 
 
 Heart in his sighs did show it was disdained. 
 So th' one did weep, th' other sigh'd, both grieved. 
 For both must live and love, both unrelieved." 
 
 " My heart accused mine eyes and was offended. 
 
 Vowing the cause was in mine eyes' aspiring : 
 Mine eyes affirmed my heart might well amend it. 
 
 If he at first had banished love's desiring. 
 Heart said that love did enter at the eyes. 
 
 And from the eyes descended to the heart : 
 Eyes said that in the heart did sparks arise. 
 
 Which kindled flame that wrought the inward smart. 
 Heart said eyes' tears might soon have quench'd that flame, 
 
 Eyes said heart's sighs at first might love excite. 
 
268 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 So heart the eyes, and eyes the heart did blame, 
 
 Whilst both did pine, for both the pain did feel. 
 Heart sighed and bled, eyes wept and gazed too much : 
 Yet must I gaze because I see none such." 
 
 These sonnets, with or without the following beginning of 
 Watson's 2 2d Love-passion — 
 
 " When wert thou born, sweet Love ? who was thy sire ? 
 When Flora first adorn'd Dame Tellus' lap. 
 Then sprung I forth with wanton Hot Desire. 
 
 Who was thy nurse, to feed thee first with pap ? 
 Youth first with tender hand bound up my head. 
 Then said, with looks alone I should be fed " 
 
 may have suggested the song in the ' Merchant of Venice,' 
 Act iii. 2, " Tell me, where is Fancy bred." ^ 
 
 VI. — Michael Drayton (1563-1631). 
 
 In Spenser's " Colin Clout's Come Home Again,'' pub- 
 lished in 1595, occur four lines that are commonly supposed 
 to refer to Shakespeare — 
 
 " And there though last not least is Action ; 
 A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found : 
 Whose muse, full of high thought's invention. 
 Doth like himself heroically sound." 
 
 At least an equal probability may be made out for Drayton. 
 Drayton made his debut as a pastoral poet in 1593, with his 
 " Idea : Shepherd's Garland, fashioned in Nine Eclogues ; " 
 and followed this up in 1594 with a body of sonnets — ■ 
 " Idea's Mirror, Amours in Quatorzains " — and the mytho- 
 
 1 A writer in the ' Quarterly Review,' No. 267, ascribes the suggestion of 
 this song to a sonnet by Jacopo da Lentino. The sonnet is not known to 
 have been printed before 1661, but the writer supposes Shakespeare to have 
 seen it in MS., and considers it a proof that Shakespeare could read Italian, 
 if not that he had been in Italy ! The coincidence is certainly striking, but 
 the birthplace of Love or Fancy in the eyes was a commonplace. I have 
 remarked several English poems of the time quite capable of having given 
 the suggestion. 
 
MICHAEL DRAYTON. 269 
 
 logical tale of " Endymion and Phoebe." It has been con- 
 sidered conclusive against the probability of his being 
 referred to by Spenser that "he had published nothing in 
 an heroical strain even in 1595;" and that "it would be 
 difficult to assign any meaning to the assertion that his 
 name did, like himself, heroically sound." But Drayton's 
 first publication, 'Harmony of the Church,' 1591, versified 
 the highest poetry of the Old Testament, and loftily dis- 
 claimed all intention of " feeding any vain humour ; " while 
 the poetical name that he assumed was Rowland or Roland, 
 the most heroic name in chivalry. Spenser, full as he was 
 of Ariosto, was much more likely to be struck with the 
 heroic sound of Roland than of Shakespeare. Further, the 
 aspiring character of Drayton's muse would seem to have 
 struck other minds than Spenser's. Prefixed to " Endymion 
 and Phoebe " is a commendatory poem containing the 
 following lines : — 
 
 " Rowland, when first I read thy stately rhymes 
 In shepherd's weeds when yet thou livedst unknown, 
 
 I then beheld thy chaste Idea's fame 
 Put on the wings of thy immortal style. 
 
 Thy fiery spirit mounts up to the sky, 
 And what thou writest lives to Eternity." 
 
 Drayton did more afterwards to show the loftiness or 
 heroism of his thoughts. His chief productions were — 
 " Mortimeriados " (a poem on the civil wars in the reign of 
 Edward II., recast and published in 1603 under the title of 
 the " Barons' Wars "), 1596 ; " England's Heroical Epistles " 
 (imaginary letters after the manner of Ovid between lovers 
 celebrated in English history), 1598; "Polyolbion" (a 
 metrical description of England, county by county), eighteen 
 books in 1612, thirty complete in .1622; "The Battle of 
 Agincourt,'' 1627. 
 
 Not much is known of his personal history. He was 
 born at HartshOl, Atherston, Warwickshire, near the river 
 Anker. In one of his poems he speaks of himself as 
 
270 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 having been a " proper goodly page." His relations with 
 patrons and patronesses are known only from his dedications, 
 which are addressed to various honourable and noble per- 
 sonages. In the course of his numerous publications, he 
 fell into disagreeable terms with the booksellers : in a letter 
 to Drummond, he calls them " a company of base knaves, 
 whom I both scorn and kick at." In person, he was a 
 swart little man, full of energy and an enthusiastic sense of 
 his own powers ; erudite, laborious, versatile ; noted for the 
 respectability of his life, and distinguished by the ardour of 
 his orthodox and patriotic sentiments. I doubt whether 
 he had any special call to poetry beyond the contagion of 
 circumstances ; ambition made his verses. No person with 
 literary gifts could have lived in such an atmosphere with- 
 out catching something of the poetic frenzy : one could 
 hardly have helped learning how to express the fiery touch 
 of love, and the sweet influences of nature. Drayton has a 
 suspicious pride in the exercise of his gift : originality and 
 versatility are the two qualities that he boasts of, as if he 
 had overmastered the muse by intellectual force rather than 
 won her by natural affinity. Yet he has written some in- 
 teresting poetry : his " Nymphidia " is a pretty burlesque of 
 love, jealousy, combat, and reconciliation at the Court of 
 Faeryland ; his " Polyolbion," a miracle of industry and 
 sustained enthusiasm, contains some fine descriptions ; one, 
 at least, of his sonnets (that quoted in Mr Palgrave's 
 ' Golden Treasury ') is exceedingly happy and ingenious ; 
 and his poem on the Battle of Agincourt is vivid, stirring, 
 and filled throughout with the most glowing patriotism. 
 His ode on the Battle of Agincourt is, perhaps, his master- 
 piece : Mr Swinburne ranks it with Campbell's " Battle of 
 the Baltic," of which it seems to have been the model. 
 
 " Fair stood the wind for France, 
 When we our sails advance, 
 Nor now to prove our chance 
 
 Longer not tarry, 
 But put into the main : 
 At Kaux the mouth of Seine 
 
MICHAEL DRAYTON. 27 1 
 
 With all his warlike train 
 Landed King Harry. 
 
 And taking many a fort 
 Furnish'd in warlike sort 
 Coming toward Agincourt 
 
 In happy hour ; 
 Skirmishing day by day 
 With those oppose his way 
 Whereas the general lay 
 
 With all his power'. 
 
 And ready to be gone. 
 Armour on armour shone, 
 Drum unto drum did groan, 
 
 To hear was wonder ; 
 That with the cries they make 
 The very earth did shake ; 
 Trumpfet to trumpet spake, 
 
 Thunder to thunder. 
 
 Well it thine age became, 
 O noble Erpingham ! 
 That didst the signal frame 
 
 Unto the forces ; 
 When from a meadow by, 
 Like a storm suddenly. 
 The English archery 
 
 Stuck the French horses. 
 
 When down their bows they threw, 
 And forth their bilboes drew. 
 And on the French they flew. 
 
 No man was tardy. 
 Arms from the shoulder sent ; 
 Scalps to the teeth were rent ; 
 Down the French peasants went : 
 
 These were men hardy. 
 
 On happy Crispin day 
 Fought was the noble fray. 
 Which Fame did not delay 
 To England to carry. 
 
272 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 O when shall Englishmen 
 With such acts fill a pen, 
 Or England breed again 
 Such a King Harry ! " 
 
 There is something of the same fire in his poem on the 
 same glorious battle, though it is weighted and obscured by 
 the laborious circumstantiality, the industrious particularisa- 
 tion, which is so conspicuous also in his " Polyolbion." He 
 names the various ships, and describes the colours and 
 ensigns of the various companies, with Homeric minuteness 
 and more than Homeric ardour : and realises such scenes 
 as the two camps on the night before the battle with great 
 variety of vivid details. His circumstantiality sometimes 
 has the powerful effect so often remarked in the descriptions 
 of Defoe : for example, the following incidents in the siege 
 of Harfleur : — 
 
 " Now upon one side you should hear a cry 
 
 And all that quarter clouded with a smother ; 
 
 The like from that against it by and by, 
 As though the one were echo to the other, 
 
 The king and Clarence so their turns can ply ; 
 And valiant Glo'ster shows himself their brother. 
 
 Whose mines to the besieged more mischief do. 
 
 Than with the assaults above, the other two. 
 
 An old man sitting by the fireside 
 
 Decrepit with extremity of age. 
 Stilling his little grandchild when it cried, 
 
 Almost distracted with the batteries' rage ; 
 Sometimes doth speak it fair, sometimes doth chide : 
 
 As thus he seeks its mourning to assuage, 
 By chance a bullet doth the chimney hit. 
 Which falling in doth kill both him and it. 
 
 Whilst the sad weeping mother sits her down, 
 To give her little new-born babe the pap, 
 
 A luckless quarry, levelled at the town, 
 Kills the sweet baby sleeping in her lap, 
 
 That with the fright she falls into a swoon ; 
 From which awaked, and mad with the mishap. 
 
 As up a rampier shrieking she doth climb. 
 
 Comes a great shot, and strikes her limb from limb. 
 
MICHAEL DRAYTON. 273 
 
 Whilst a sort run confusedly to quench 
 Some palace burning, or some fired street, 
 
 Called from where they were fighting in the trench. 
 They in their way with balls of wildfire meet, 
 
 So plagued are the miserable French, 
 Not above head but also under feet ; 
 
 For the fierce English vow the town to take, 
 
 Or of it soon a heap of stones to make. 
 
 Hot is the siege, the English coming on 
 As men so long to be kept out that scorn, 
 
 Careless of wounds, as they were made of stone, 
 As with their teeth the walls they would have torn : 
 
 Into a breach who quickly is not gone. 
 Is by the next behind him overborne ; 
 
 So that they found a place that gave them way. 
 
 They never cared what danger therein lay." 
 
 If his sonnets have no great intrinsic interest, they derive 
 a certain adventitious interest from their illustrative bearing 
 on the sonnets of Shakespeare. The following, with its 
 curious points of resemblance to Shakespeare's 144th sonnet 
 — " Two loves I have of comfort and despair " — raises a 
 doubt whether that perplexing sonnet is not more figurative 
 than is commonly supposed. If I am right in my recollec- 
 tion that it did not appear before the edition of 1602, it 
 may have been imitated from Shakespeare's, which appeared 
 in 1599 ; and at any rate, taken in connection with the last 
 lines of Shakespeare's sonnet, it raises the question whether 
 Shakespeare's worser spirit was so serious an evil as the 
 first part of the sonnet represents. 
 
 " An evil spirit your beauty haunts me still. 
 
 Wherewith, alas ! I have been long possesst. 
 Which ceaseth not to tempt me to each ill. 
 
 Nor gives me once but one poor minute's rest : 
 In me it speaks whether I sleep or wake. 
 
 And when by means to drive it out I try. 
 With greater torments then it me doth take, 
 
 And tortures me in most extremity : 
 Before my face it lays down my despairs 
 
 And hastes me on unto a sudden death ; 
 S 
 
274 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 Now tempting me to drown myself in tears 
 
 And then in sighing to give up my breath : 
 Thus am I still provoked to every evil 
 By this good wicked spirit, sweet angel devil." 
 
 In Drayton's sonnets we find several of the conceits that 
 appear in Shakespeare's, such as the warfare between heart 
 and eyes and the play upon the identity of the lover and 
 his beloved ; but it may perhaps be more serviceable to 
 quote his version of another commonplace, the promise of 
 immortality to his mistress, to help to correct a vulgar 
 notion that Shakespeare stood alone in the lofty confidence 
 of eternal memory. 
 
 " How many paltry, foolish, painted things, 
 
 That now in coaches trouble every street, 
 Shall be forgotten, whom no poet sings, 
 
 Ere they be well wrapped in their winding-sheet ! 
 Where I to thee eternity shall give. 
 
 When nothing else remaineth of these days. 
 And queens hereafter shall be glad to live 
 
 Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise ; 
 Virgins and matrons reading these my rhymes, 
 
 Shall be so much delighted with thy story. 
 That they shall grieve they lived not in these times 
 
 To have seen thee, their sex's only glory : 
 So shalt thou fly above the vulgar throng 
 Still to survive in my immortal song." 
 
 " Stay, speedy Time, behold before thou pass. 
 
 From age to age, what thou hast sought to see. 
 One in whom all the excellencies be ; 
 In whom Heaven looks itself as in a glass : 
 Time, look thou too in this tralucent glass 
 And thy youth past in this pure mirror see. 
 As the world's beauty in his infancy. 
 What it was then, and thou before it was ; 
 Pass on, and to posterity tell this ; 
 
 Yet see thou tell but truly what hath been : 
 Say to our nephews, that thou once hast seen 
 In perfect human shape, all heavenly bliss : 
 And bid them mourn, nay more, despair with thee 
 When she is gone, her like again to see." 
 
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 275 
 
 William Shakespeare — Sonnets. 
 
 After a survey of the huge issue of sonnets between 1591 
 and 1594, the characteristics of the sonnets of Shakespeare 
 seem to stand out with greater distinctness. They divide 
 themselves into three classes. First come the sonnets of 
 the ' Passionate Pilgrim,' some of which rise out of the re- 
 lations between Venus and Adonis, and most of which are 
 in the same strain, treating the theme of love with a certain 
 lightness. Next come the twenty-six sonnets placed among 
 his Sonnets so-called, between the 127th and the 15 2d in- 
 clusive : sonnets sufficiently alarming at first sight, but not 
 so very terrible when we examine them boldly. Finally 
 comes the main body of his sonnets, addressed to his friend. 
 These are in every way more powerful and mature. The 
 second and third classes are, as we shall see, strongly con- 
 trasted in sentiment with the effusions of preceding son- 
 neteers. 
 
 In 1598, one Francis Meres, in a work entitled ' Palladis 
 Tamia, Wit's Treasury ' eulogised the various English poets, 
 finding parallels for them among the Greek and Latin poets. 
 Among others, he remarked on Shakespeare, and said — " As 
 the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, 
 so the sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and 
 honey-tongued Shakespeare ; witness his Venus and Adonis, 
 his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends, 
 &c." The sonnets pubHshed in the following year in the 
 'Passionate Pilgrim,' which bore Shakespeare's name on 
 the title-page, fully answer this description : ^ they may with 
 sufficient propriety be said to be animated by the sweet 
 witty soul of Ovid. The rest of Shakespeare's sonnets were 
 
 1 Part, at least, of the ' Passionate Pilgrim ' was composed by Shakes^ 
 peare. See Mr Collier's remarks on the subject. I should be disposed to 
 assent to nearly all, if not all, that IMessrs Clark and Wright have published 
 as Shakespeare's under that title. (See under "Marlowe.") The name 
 ' ' sonnet " was not confined to quatorzains ; several of the Passionate Pil- 
 grim's sonnets are in the six-line staves used in Watson's ' ' Passionate 
 Century of Love." 
 
276 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 not published till 1609, when they were issued as 'Shakes- 
 peare's Sonnets,' " never before imprinted ; '' and some 
 critics have asseverated with unaccountable confidence that 
 the second issue must be the sonnets spoken of by Meres, 
 although the publication of them had been delayed. There 
 is not the slightest ground for this assertion : " among his 
 private friends " cannot be taken to mean " to his private 
 friend." In the sonnets of the ' Passionate Pilgrim ' there 
 is quite enough to justify the words of Meres. Besides, 
 Meres seems to have made his comparison with some 
 notion of its meaning, seeing that " Venus " and " Lucrece" 
 at once carry us to the Ajnores and the Heroides ; and in 
 the case of the sonnets addressed to a friend the compari- 
 son would be wholly inapplicable. Further, the 107th 
 sonnet, containing the hne — 
 
 " The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured," 
 
 must have been written after the death of Elizabeth, to 
 whose name of " Cynthia " the line is an undoubted refer- 
 ence. 
 
 Sonnets cxxvii.-clii. are, as I have said, startling at first 
 sight. They are unmistakably addressed to a woman of 
 loose character, and they seem to represent the poet as in- 
 volved in a disreputable passion. But when we look more 
 closely into them, we begin to suspect that, if those sonnets 
 are to be treated as bearing all on one subject, we do wrong 
 to take too serious a view of them. One must not treat 
 published sonnets addressed to a courtesan as earnest 
 private correspondence, or as grave confessions whispered 
 in the ear of a ghostly counsellor. I believe that the proper 
 view is to regard them as exercises of skill, undertaken in 
 a spirit of wanton defiance and derision of commonplace. 
 When young Hal was told of his father's triumphs, the 
 humorous youth indulged in a curious eccentricity, which, 
 if I am not in error, represents exactly the spirit of these 
 sonnets — 
 
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 277 
 
 " His answer was, he would unto the stews 
 And from the commonest creature pluck a glove, 
 And wear it as a favour ; and with that 
 He would unhorse the lustiest challenger." 
 
 Now those who have gone through the overwhelming 
 mass of sonnets poured out about the time when Shakes- 
 peare began to write — sonnets in admiring praise and mourn- 
 ful blame of Stella, Delia, Diana, Phyllis, and Idea — will not 
 be slow to understand, if not to sympathise with, the wanton 
 outburst of impatient genius. The new sonneteer lays 
 down a humorous challenge — Give place, ye lovers, who 
 boast of beauty and virtue : my mistress is neither fair nor 
 faithful, yet I can praise her with as much zeal and fury as 
 the best of you — 
 
 " My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun ; 
 
 Coral is far more red than her lips' red : 
 If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun ; 
 
 If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. 
 I have seen roses damasked, red and white. 
 
 But no such roses see I in her cheeks ; 
 And in some perfumes is there more delight. 
 
 Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. 
 I love to hear her speak, yet well I know 
 
 That music hath a far more pleasing sound ; 
 I grant I never saw a goddess go : 
 
 My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground : 
 And yet, by Heaven, I think my love as rare 
 As any she, belied by false compare." 
 
 He is no tame admirer and adorer, seeing nothing in his 
 mistress but perfection : he woos with a bolder cheer. He 
 tells her plainly that he does not love her with his eyes, for 
 they see in her a thousand errors : yet his heart loves her 
 in spite of them (cxli.) He speculates on the cause of the 
 lover's blindness : concludes that it comes from watching 
 and tears : and apostrophises the cunning of Love in thus 
 hiding his mistress's imperfections (cxlviii.) When she 
 swears that she is made of truth, he believes her — although 
 he knows that she lies (cxxxviii.) He must surely be frantic 
 
278 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 mad to swear her fair and think her bright when she is 
 black as hell and dark as night (cxlvii.) His complaints of 
 unkindness and allegations of cruelty might easily pass as 
 serious, did not the other sonnets reveal the humorous 
 mockery : yet they are not without the jocular touch. He 
 complains of unkindness with a leniency hardly consistent 
 with serious passion — 
 
 " Tell me thou lovest elsewhere ; but in my sight, 
 Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside." 
 
 That is to say, do whatever you please behind my back, 
 but do not ogle other men before my eyes (cxxxix.) He 
 accuses her of pride and cruelty, but warns her not to carry 
 it too far — lest he do — what ? commit suicide ? no, but — 
 
 " Lest sorrow lend me words, and words express 
 The manner of my pity-wanting pain." 
 
 Two or three of the series, and particularly cxxviii., praise 
 the lady without obvious mockery, yet with a certain gay 
 familiarity. The only sonnet of the series radically incon- 
 sistent with this theory is the 146th. Down to the 143d 
 the gay defiant tone is unmistakable : two or three after 
 that are uncertain and equivocal, and the 146th seems un- 
 mistakably serious. Must we then give up the theory? I 
 think not. There is an obvious explanation which one may 
 produce without being liable to a charge of sophistry ; and 
 that is, that Shakespeare, having taken up the relation be- 
 tween a lover and a courtesan originally in wanton humorous 
 defiance of somewhat lackadaisical effusions, his dramatic 
 instinct could not be restrained from pursuing the relation- 
 ship farther into more serious aspects. 
 
 The sonnets addressed to a friend — a young nobleman, 
 apparently, whose bounty the poet has experienced, and 
 whose personal gifts and graces he admires with impas- 
 sioned fondness — depart very strikingly from the sonnets 
 of Shakespeare's predecessors. He ceases to reiterate Pet- 
 
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 279 
 
 rarch's woes, and opens up a new vein of feeling. Love is 
 still the argument — love's fears and confidences, crosses and 
 triumphs — ^but it is love for a different object under differ- 
 ent conditions. We find in Shakespeare's sonnets most of 
 the commonplaces of the course of true love, coldness and 
 reconciliation, independence and devoted submission, but 
 they are transferred to the course of impassioned friendship, 
 and thereby transfigured. Are, then, these moods of im- 
 passioned friendship real or feigned, utterances from the 
 heart, or artificial creations to break the monotony of the 
 language and imagery of passionate admiration between 
 the sexes? Some modem critics would have us believe 
 that the theme is not friendship in any ■ shape, real or 
 feigned : the sentiment of the sonnets, they say, is too warm 
 to be inspired except by the charms of woman : Shakes- 
 peare could not have admired beauty so fondly in any 
 youth however beautiful. These critics maintain that the 
 sonnets must have been addressed to a woman : and Cole- 
 ridge went the length of saying that one sonnet where the 
 sex is indisputable must have been introduced as a blind.^ 
 All this is the mere insanity of critical dogmatism, main- 
 tained in defiance of the most obtrusive facts. Mr Gerald 
 Massey, not being able to get over masculine pronouns and 
 other indications of gender, but still, unwilling to admit that 
 some of the sonnets could have been addressed to a man, 
 professes to distinguish between sonnets of friendship and 
 sonnets of sexual love, and redistributes them accordingly. 
 In sonnets addressed unequivocally to his youthful friend, 
 it is, says Mr Massey, manly beauty that the poet extols. 
 What, then, are we to make of Sonnet iii., where the young 
 man is told — 
 
 " Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee 
 Calls back the lovely April of her prime " ? 
 
 Mr Massey draws the line between manly beauty and 
 womanly beauty at whiteness of hand and fragrance of 
 
 1 This is hardly less curious than the amiable Opium-eater's notion that 
 Hamlet's character was exceedingly like his own. 
 
28o ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 breath : when Shakespeare praises these points of beauty, 
 he must be addressing a woman.i Yet in Sonnet cvi. 
 Shakespeare ascribes " sweet beauty's best " without dis- 
 tinction to ladies and lovely knights — 
 
 " When in the chronicle of wasted time 
 
 I see descriptions of the fairest wights, 
 And beauty making beautiful old rhyme 
 
 In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights; 
 Then in the blazon of sweet beauty's best, 
 
 Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow, 
 I see their antique pen would have express'd 
 
 Ev'n such a beauty as you master now." 
 
 Further, Mr Massey, if I mistake not, ascribes to the 
 friend Sonnet liii. containing these lines — 
 
 " Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit 
 Is poorly imitated after you ; 
 On Helen's cheek all art of beauty set. 
 And you in Grecian tires are painted new." 
 
 And when we look to the description of Adonis we find 
 such lines as — 
 
 " Once m-ore the ruby-coloured portal opened 
 That to his mouth did honey passage yield." 
 
 And— 
 
 " Who when he lived his breath and beauty set 
 Gloss on the rose, smell to the violet." 
 
 It is bad enough to defy all indications of gender and de- 
 clare that none of these sonnets were addressed to a young 
 man : it is perhaps worse to say that some are and some are 
 not, and to make an arbitrary selection, taking one's own 
 feelings as the exact measure of the poet's. Admiration of 
 the personal beauty of his friend is too closely woven into 
 the sonnets to be detached in this way. They are interpene- 
 trated with it : it is expressed as warmly in sonnets when 
 
 ^ Gilderoy, in the ballad, is said to have a breath as sweet as rose, and a 
 hand fairer than any lady's, and yet he was a manly youth whom none 
 dared meet single-handed, and who "bauldly bare away the gear of many 
 a lawland loon. " 
 
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 28 1 
 
 the sex happens to be unequivocal, as in others where the 
 rashness of dogmatic ingenuity is restrained by no such 
 accident. 
 
 The friendship expressed in Shakespeare's sonnets was 
 probably no less real than the love professed for their mis- 
 tresses by other sonneteers. Friendship is not quite dead 
 even in these degenerate days ; there are still people alive 
 to whom the warmth of the warmest of Shakespeare's 
 sonnets would not appear an exaggeration. But there would 
 seem to have been a pecuUar exaltation of the sentiment of 
 friendship among the Elizabethan poets. The titles of Ed- 
 ward's plays are " Damon and Pythias '' and " Palamon and 
 Arcite;" and in the one that has been preserved friendship 
 is extolled above all other blessings. The ' Paradise of 
 Dainty Devices ' is full of " praises of friendship." The 
 dramatists did not hesitate to bring it into collision with 
 love, and to represent it as rising in some cases higher than 
 love itself. Marlowe makes Edward II. desert his queen 
 for the sake of Gaveston, and declare that he will rather 
 lose his kingdom than renounce his favourite. In Lyly's 
 "Endymion," Eumenides affirms that " such is his unspotted 
 faith to Endymion, that whatsoever seemeth a needle to 
 prick his finger is a dagger to wound his heart ; " and when 
 it is in his power to obtain whatever he asks, he hesitates 
 between the recovery of his friend Endymion and the 
 possession of his mistress Semele, and is finally decided 
 by an old man in favour of the friend. Shakespeare him- 
 self has treated the problem in his " Two Gentlemen of 
 Verona." In Proteus, the weaker-willed nature, new love is 
 an irresistible passion stronger than friendship, and stronger 
 also than old love ; but in the manlier Valentine friendship 
 is the nobler sentiment of the two, and even when his friend 
 is convicted of the grossest treachery he comes generously 
 forward and says — " All that is mine in Silvia I give thee." 
 Commentators unable to understand this supreme and per- 
 haps fantastic generosity of friendship, as Mr Gerald Massey 
 is unable to understand the impassioned friendship of the 
 sonnets, think there must be something wrong with the con- 
 
282 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 elusion of the play : they wholly miss the design of the 
 dramatist, and cry out that he has had recourse to a forced 
 and unnatural expedient to extricate himself from a difficult 
 complication. All these that I have mentioned, with the 
 exception of Edward and Gaveston, were cases of friend- 
 ship between equals. Bacon laid down that friendship 
 could not exist between equals ; and the Elizabethans were 
 familiar with the often-quoted friendships between Alexander 
 and Hephaestion, Hercules and Hylas, Achilles and Pa- 
 trocles, Socrates and Alcibiades, in which the sentiment was 
 enhanced by the charms of strength on the one hand, and 
 youth and laeauty on the other. It is not impossible that 
 the influence of the maiden queen had something to do 
 with the laudation of friendship in the Elizabethan age ; 
 and the representation of women's parts on the stage by 
 boys may have fostered to an unusual degree the sentimen- 
 tal admiration of beautiful youths. This last influence 
 could hardly but have affected Shakespeare, seeing that he 
 acted up to boys in that character, and that they must oc- 
 casionally have crossed his mind with their " small pipes " 
 and " smooth and rubious " lips when he was composing 
 praises of the beauty that they represented. And it is 
 difficult to see what can have been meant by the expression 
 " Socratem ingenio" — a Socrates in disposition — in Shakes- 
 peare's epitaph, if it does not point to his sentiment for 
 beautiful young men. 
 
 The sonnets, with the exception perhaps of the first 
 seventeen advising his beautiful friend to marry, which may 
 have been the poet's first offering of verses, or may have 
 been composed at any time and placed first as a suitable 
 preface, seem to follow the history of the friendship. I do 
 not quite agree with Mr Armitage Brown's division of the 
 ' Sonnets ' into separate poems, in each of which the sonnet 
 form is merely used as a stanza ; but it seems to me unmis- 
 takable that there is a sequence in them, not only to this 
 extent that several consecutive sonnets are occupied with 
 the same theme, but to this further extent that the themes 
 are consecutive, arising naturally as if in the course of the 
 
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 283 
 
 poet's varying relations with his friend, relations real or im- 
 agined. Certainly there is no justification for the course 
 that Mr Massey has adopted of treating the sonnets as 
 if they had been written on' separate slips to different per- 
 sons for different purposes, and shuffled together by the 
 publisher. 
 
 The great question in connection with the sonnets is, 
 who was Shakespeare's friend and the object of his praises? 
 The poet's lofty promise of immortal memory has been ful- 
 filled more liberally and less exactly than he intended : he, 
 or his publisher for him, may be said to have immortalised 
 everybody in that generation whose initials are known to 
 have been W and H, read either way ; and the actual friend 
 comes in for nothing more than a share of the disputed 
 honour, if indeed he has as yet been recognised at all. 
 
 By the testimony of the sonnets themselves, Shakespeare's 
 friend was young and beautiful, of rank superior to the poet, 
 a bountifiil patron, and very much courted by rival poets. 
 Now two young noblemen are known to have extended 
 their patronage to Shakespeare — Henry Wriothesley, Earl 
 of Southampton, and William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. 
 It was to Southampton that Shakespeare dedicated ' Venus 
 and Adonis' — the first heir of his invention — in 1593, and 
 ' Lucrece' in the following year. The first dedication was 
 couched in terms of distant respect : the second, which was 
 as follows, bears in its warmth of expression a striking simi- 
 larity to the language of the sonnets, particularly sonnet 
 26, — " The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end ; 
 whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a super- 
 fluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable dis- 
 position, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it as- 
 sured of acceptance. What I have done is yours ; what I 
 have to do is yours ; being part in all I have, devoted yours. 
 Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater; 
 meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I 
 wish long life, still lengthened with all happiness." There 
 is also a tradition that Southampton at one time made the 
 poet a present of a thousand pounds. The evidence for the 
 
284 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 patronage of Shakespeare by Pembroke is not so pointed, 
 but is quite trustworthy. Shakespeare's fellow-players, 
 Heming and Condell, dedicated the folio of 1623 to the 
 " incomparable pair of brethren," the Earl of Pembroke and 
 the Earl of Montgomery, calling the poet " your servant 
 Shakespeare," and mentioning that they had " prosecuted 
 both the plays and their author living with much favour." 
 Both Southampton and Pembroke were younger men than 
 the poet, Southampton by nine years (being born in 1573), 
 Pembroke by sixteen years (being born in 1580). There is 
 no record of personal beauty in Southampton, while there 
 is in the case of Pembroke : but the known partiality of 
 affection forbids us to lay much stress on that. Both were 
 bountiful patrons of literature, and had sonnets addressed 
 to them by Daniel, Chapman, Withers, and many others. 
 
 When we cast about for presumptions to turn the balance 
 of probability one way or the other, we naturally look first 
 to the inscription prefixed to the sonnets by the publisher. 
 It runs as follows — " To the onlie begetter of these 
 
 INSUING SONNETS MR W. H. ALL HAPPINESS AND THAT 
 ETERNITIE PROMISED BY OUR EVER-LIVING POET WISHETH 
 THE WELL-WISHING ADVENTURER IN SETTING FORTH T. T." 
 
 Now the phrase " only begetter " sounds strange in nine- 
 teenth century ears ; we should call the poet the only be- 
 getter.^ But the humility of dedication was carried much 
 farther by the Elizabethans. Shakespeare himself, in dedi- 
 cating his " Lucrece " to Southampton, used the expression 
 — ^" what I have done is yours ; what I have to do is yours." 
 It is in allusion to this practice of poets that the Duke 
 in "Twelfth Night," apostrophising greatness cries — 
 
 " Thousand escapes of wit 
 
 Make thee \he./ather of their idle dreams." 
 
 And in the dedication of Daniel's sonnets to " Delia," to the 
 
 1 Too much stress should not be given to the " only." It need mean 
 nothing more than "matchless," "incomparable;" a stray superlative, 
 as in the phrases " only rare poet," " only expected imp of a noble house," 
 or Shakespeare's own expression in the first sonnet — "only herald of the 
 gaudy spring. " 
 
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 28$ 
 
 Countess of Pembroke, the mother of the young Earl of 
 Pembroke just mentioned, we seem to have the very ori- 
 ginal of "T. T.'s" expression. 1 "Vouchsafe," the poet 
 says — 
 
 " Vouchsafe now to accept them as thine own, 
 Begotten by thy hand and my desire, 
 Wherein my zeal and thy great might is shown." 
 
 And this although Lady Mary was not Delia, but only lent 
 her name to countenance the young poet's first effusion. 
 Had, then, Mr W. H. no nearer relation than this to 
 Shakespeare's Sonnets : was he not the noble young friend, 
 but only some person whose favour T. T. was anxious to 
 conciliate ? One does not like to say dogmatically what a 
 bookseller might or might not have done in those days, but 
 I am inclined to think that " Mr W. H." must stand for 
 Shakespeare's friend and patron — for this reason, that I can- 
 not bring myself to believe that any bookseller would have 
 dared to divert the poet's promise of immortality from a 
 person of rank such as Shakespeare's friend and patron un- 
 doubtedly was. I do not think the " Mr " need stand in 
 our way. Sidney is called Master Philip Sidney in Webbe's 
 ' Discourse of English Poetry,' and Lord Buckhurst is en- 
 tered as M. Sackville in ' England's Parnassus.' Certainly, 
 although so great an authority as Mr Collier considers " Mr " 
 a serious difficulty, it is much easier to find probable rea- 
 sons for the title than to find any tolerable reason for the 
 bookseller's appropriating the poet's promise for the bene- 
 fit of a friend of his own so obscure that history has pre- 
 served no memorial of his name. This would have been 
 so idiotic that it is incredible. I see no reason for refus- 
 ing to believe that W. H. are the initials of the name of 
 Shakespeare's friend. Now, curiously enough, W. H. are 
 the initials of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and 
 H. W. are the initials of Henry Wriothesley, Eari of South- 
 ampton. Dr Nathan Drake contended that the Earl of 
 
 1 Bosivell's idea that "begetter" meant " obtainer, " and that MrW. 
 H. was the person who obtained the sonnets for T. T., is a clever guess of 
 the unaided understanding, but is wildly uncritical and baseless. 
 
286 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 Southampton was meant, and that the inversion of the 
 initials was intended as a blind. But if any blind was 
 thought necessary, why have a dedication at all? And 
 why use a blind that must at once draw suspicion on the 
 Earl of Pembroke ? If the "Mr" was blind enough, the 
 inversion of the initials was unnecessary— and if it was not, 
 then the Earl of Pembroke was pointed to ; and if the son- 
 nets were such that the Earl of Southampton was ashamed 
 of them, it is not likely that T. T. would have fathered them 
 on the Earl of Pembroke. But though the initials have proved 
 a sufRcent blind to the eyes of posterity, I doubt very much 
 whether any blind was intended or effected by them when 
 they first appeared. In all probability, the object of Shakes- 
 peare's sonnets was perfectly well known to the first readers 
 of them : and W. H. pointed to William Herbert as surely as 
 T. T. pointed to Thomas Thorpe the bookseller.^ 
 
 There is one circumstance which at first glance appears 
 insignificant, but which, when considered, appears an almost 
 conclusive presumption in favour of the Earl of. Pembroke, 
 and that is the parent that Shakespeare's friend is said to 
 take after. In the 3d sonnet the friend is told — 
 " Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee 
 Calls back the lovely April of her prime." 
 Now it is open to say that this means no more than that 
 Shakespeare's friend bore a resemblance to his mother 
 more than to his father. But it is difficult to be satisfied 
 with this interpretation when we remember who was " Pem- 
 broke's mother," and recall Ben Jonson's famous epitaph — 
 
 " Underneath this sable hearse 
 Lies the subject of all verse, 
 
 ' Seeing that Shakespeare lays so much stress on their difference of rank 
 in the sonnets, and agrees that he cannot always be acknowledged in p>ib- 
 hc, it would have been inconsistent for him to have dedicated them openly 
 in his own name to his patron at full length. This may account for the 
 publisher's taking the dedication in hand, and as it were endorsing the com- 
 pliments of the poet. It might even have been necessary that the sonnets 
 should appear to be published without consent of either poet or patron, 
 and that the publisher should use the timid but transparent veil of "Mr 
 W. H." as if he had made the dedication of his own accord and without 
 permission. But this, of course, is pure speculation. 
 
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 287 
 
 Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother ; 
 Death ! ere thou hast slain another 
 Learned and fair and good as she, 
 Time shall throw a dart at thee." 
 
 No illustrious family ever won the hearts of the poets so 
 completely as the Sidneys, and not of the poets only but of 
 all men : they were universal favourites. As Sidney was con- 
 sidered the jewel of Elizabeth's Court, and his sister the 
 paragon of her sex, so Pembroke was said to be "the most 
 universally beloved and esteemed of any man " of his age. 
 This lends additional point to Shakespeare's urgency for 
 the marriage of his friend : he might well be anxious for 
 the preservation of so noble a stock. 
 
 Any inference to be drawn from dates is also on the 
 whole favourable to the claims of Pembroke as against 
 Southampton. One thing, indeed, at first seems to be in 
 favour of Southampton — namely, the number of coincidences 
 in expression bfetween the sonnets and comedies composed 
 before the end of the century. But two facts combine to 
 deprive this argument from coincidences of any value. 
 One is that it was in those plays that Shakespeare made his 
 first studies of the non-tragical relations between lovers, and 
 formed his ways of looking at and expressing those rela- 
 tions : it was inevitable, therefore, that when he took up the 
 parallel relations of friendship, the treatment should exhibit 
 coincidences. And the other is that the comedies were 
 frequently repeated, so that the poet was not allowed to 
 forget his earlier studies : he might have gone home any 
 evening before 1609 with his head fiill of "Love's Labour 
 Lost" or the " Comedy of Errors." We cannot, therefore, 
 argue from coincidences in idea and expression that a 
 sonnet and a play were composed at the same date. The 
 only sonnet of really indisputable date is the 107th, contain- 
 ing the reference to the death of Elizabeth or " Cynthia " 
 as the eclipse of " the mortal moon :" this must have been 
 composed after it had been seen that Elizabeth's death 
 was to be followed by no dangerous consequences. This 
 sonnet must have been composed some time after March 
 
28S ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 1603. Now, in the 104th sonnet, the poet tells his friend 
 that three winters and three summers have passed since 
 first they met. If, then, there is any chronological sequence 
 in the sonnets, if there is not a gap of several years between 
 the 104th and the loyth — and in the absence of evidence 
 to the contrary the presumption is that there is not — this 
 would seem to show that Shakespeare made the acquaint- 
 ance of his friend not long before the beginning of the 
 century. Which conclusion exactly suits the claims of 
 Pembroke, who came to London in 1598, a youth of 18 — 
 and is radically adverse to the claims of Southampton, 
 whom Shakespeare knew at least as early as 1594. The 
 argument is not entitled to much weight, inasmuch as it 
 presumes a chronological sequence, but it deserves to be 
 mentioned as a slight corroboration. 
 
 Again, in the first sonnet, where the poet opens his re- 
 commendations of marriage, the friend is called " only 
 herald to the gaudy spring." What gaudy spring? Is 
 this another reference to the time described in the 107th 
 sonnet — 
 
 " Incertainties now crown themselves assured, 
 And peace proclaims olives of endless age. 
 Now with the drops of this most balmy time 
 My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes " ? 
 
 The minds of men seem to have been agitated by the fear 
 of a disputed succession after the death of Elizabeth, and 
 there was a disposition, partly from relief at the passing of 
 the crisis without disturbance, and partly from a desire to 
 flatter the new king, to hail the accession of James hope- 
 fully and joyfully as a spring. Thus Daniel in his Panegyric 
 to the King's Most Excellent Majesty, exclaimed — 
 
 " What a return of comfort dost thou bring, 
 Now at this fresh returning of our blood ! 
 This meeting with the opening of the spring, 
 
 To make our spirits likewise to embud ! 
 What a new season of encouraging 
 Begins to enlength the days disposed to good ! 
 
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 289 
 
 What apprehension of recovery 
 Of greater strength, of more ability! 
 
 The pulse of England never yet did beat 
 
 So strong as now : nor ever were our hearts 
 Let out to hopes so spacious and so great 
 
 As now they are : nor ever in all parts 
 Did we thus feel so comfortable heat 
 
 As now the glory of thy worth imparts : 
 The whole complexion of the commonwealth 
 
 So weak before, hoped never for more health." 
 
 It is not at all improbable that Shakespeare's " gaudy 
 spring" was this same exultant season ; and if so, Southamp- 
 ton cannot have been the friend addressed with such glow- 
 ing flattery and urgent fervour, seeing that he had then been 
 married for several years. Pembroke was then twenty- 
 three years of age, and as the representative of the Sidneys 
 might well be hailed as "the world's fresh ornament," and 
 "only herald of the gaudy spring." The fact is, that the 
 more one looks into this vexed question, the more does one 
 find little particulars emerging, singly inconclusive, but all 
 increasing the weight of the probability that Pembroke was 
 the man. 
 
 Let us turn now for a moment to a question hardly less 
 interesting, namely — Who was the rival poet alluded to in 
 the sonnets ? So complete is the parallel of this course of 
 true friendship to the course of true love that even the 
 passion of jealousy finds a place. Nine sonnets (Ixxviii.- 
 Ixxxvi.) are occupied with the pretensions of other poets, 
 and one poet in particular, to the gracious countenance of 
 his patron. In the 80th sonnet he cries : — 
 
 " O how I faint when I of you do write, 
 
 Knowing a better spirit doth use your name, 
 And in the praise thereof spends all his might, 
 
 To make me tongue-tied, speaking of your fame ! 
 But since your worth, wide as the ocean is. 
 
 The humble as the proudest sail doth bear, 
 My saucy bark inferior far to his 
 On your broad main doth wilfully appear.'' 
 T 
 
290 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 Who was this " better spirit " ? I hope I shall not be 
 held guilty of hunting after paradox if I say that every 
 possible poet has been named but the right one, nor of 
 presumption if I say that he is so obvious that his escape 
 from notice is something little short of miraculous. The 
 86th sonnet supplies ample means of identification : — 
 
 " Was it the proud full sail of his great verse, 
 
 Bound for the prize of all too precious you, 
 That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse. 
 
 Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew ? 
 Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write 
 
 Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead ? 
 No, neither he, nor his compeers by night 
 
 Giving him aid, my verse astonished. 
 He, nor that affable familiar ghost 
 
 Which nightly gulls him with intelligence, 
 As victors of my silence cannot boast : 
 
 I was not sick of any fear from thence : 
 But when your countenance filled up his line. 
 Then lacked I matter ; that enfeebled mine." 
 
 The allusions to supernatural assistance are here very 
 pointed, and upon the strength of them Marlowe has been 
 suggested as having been a man of dark and mysterious 
 reputation, who was suspected of dealings with evil spirits. 
 The insuperable objection to Marlowe is that he died in 
 1593 ; and even supposing Southampton to have been 
 Shakespeare's patron, we have no evidence of their ac- 
 quaintance prior to 1593, and there is no evidence that 
 Marlowe was acquainted with Southampton at all. Mr 
 Massey, however, argues confidently for Marlowe, on the 
 ground that there was nobody else to whom the pointed 
 charge of supernatural dealing could apply. But there 
 was another to whom the allusions apply more pointedly 
 than to Marlowe, and that was George Chapman, a man less 
 honoured now, but numbered in his own generation among 
 the greatest of its poets. Chapman was a man of over- 
 powering enthusiasm, ever eager in magnifying poetry, and 
 advancing fervent claims to supernatural inspiration. In 
 
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 29 1 
 
 1594 he published a poem called the " Shadow of Night," 
 which goes far to estabhsh his identity with Shakespeare's 
 rival. In the Dedication, after animadverting severely on 
 vulgar searchers after knowledge, he exclaims — " Now what 
 a supererogation in wit this is, to think Skill so mightily 
 pierced with their loves that she should prostitutely show 
 them her secrets, when she will scarcely be looked upon 
 by others bui with invocation, fasting, watching; yea, not 
 without having drops of their souls like a heavenly familiar." 
 Here we have something like a profession of the familiar 
 ghost that Shakespeare saucily laughs at. But Shakes- 
 peare's rival gets his intelligence by night : special stress is 
 laid in the sonnet upon the aid of his compeers by night, 
 and his nightly familiar. Well, Chapman's poem is called 
 the " Shadow of Night," and its purpose is to extol the 
 wonderful powers of Night in imparting knowledge to her 
 votaries. He addresses her with fervent devotion : — 
 
 " Rich tapered sanctuary of the blest, 
 Palace of ruth, made all of tears and rest, 
 To thy black shades and desolation 
 I consecrate my life." 
 
 And he cries : — 
 
 " All you possessed with indepressed spirits, 
 Endued with nimble and aspiring wits. 
 Come consecrate with me to sacred Night 
 Your whole endeavours and detest the light. 
 
 No pen can anything eternal write 
 
 That is not steeped in humour of the Night." 
 
 It is not simply that night is the best season for study : 
 the enthusiastic poet finds more active assistance than 
 silence and freedom from interruption. When the avenues 
 of sense are closed by sleep, his soul rises to the court of 
 Skill (the mother of knowledge, who must be propitiated by 
 drops of the soul like an heavenly familiar), and if he could 
 only remember what he learns there, no secret would be 
 hid from him. 
 
292 ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS. 
 
 " Let soft sleep. 
 Binding my senses lose my working soul, 
 That in her highest pitch she may control 
 The court of Skill, compact of mystery. 
 Wanting but franchisement and memory 
 To reach all secrets." 
 
 As regards the other feature in the rival poet, the proud 
 full sail of his great verse, that applies with almost too 
 literal exactness to the Alexandrines of Chapman's Homer, 
 part of which appeared in 1596 ; and as for its being bound 
 for the prize of Shakespeare's patron, both Pembroke and 
 Southampton were included in the list of those honoured 
 with dedicatory sonnets in a subsequent edition. Chap- 
 man's chief patron was Sir Francis Walsingham, whose 
 daughter Sir Philip Sidney had married, and nothing could 
 have been more natural than that the old man should in- 
 troduce his favourite to the Countess of Pembroke or her 
 son. But apart from Alexandrines and proved or probable 
 connection with Southampton and Pembroke, I contend 
 that the other reference to Chapman is too pointed to be 
 mistaken ; and though Chapman's name has not received 
 due prominence in the manuals of our literature, no one 
 who has read any of his poetry, and who knows his own 
 lofty pretensions and the rank accorded him in his own 
 generation, will think that his " proud sail " has been un- 
 duly honoured by the affected jealousy and good-humoured 
 banter of the " saucy bark " of Shakespeare. 
 
293 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 A VERY natural question to ask, in beginning the study of 
 the EHzabethan drama, is, What were the causes of that 
 extraordinary outburst of creative genius ? No satisfactory 
 answer has yet been given to that question : perhaps none 
 can be given. There the literature stands full grown ; but 
 when we are asked how it came there, we can do little more 
 than point to the names of its creators, and say that their 
 genius was equal to the task of producing it. We may, 
 besides, interest ourselves in studying circumstances that 
 may be presumed to have been favourable to its devel- 
 opment, and may make a very good show in the way of 
 general explanation. England had very recently passed 
 through the crisis of the Reformation, and was still excited 
 and exalted to an unusual pitch of energy by apprehensions 
 of intestine plots and foreign invasion : the pulse of the 
 country beat high with success and thirst for new enterprise. 
 When men are unfortunate and despondent, they have no 
 heart to go and look at the mimicry of action and passion : 
 it is only when their enterprises succeed that they can go 
 with free hearts and applaud the heroics of Tamburlaine or 
 weep over the sorrows of Desdemona, The Elizabethans were 
 prosperous in war and in commerce : they repelled the Span- 
 iard, and brought home richly-laden argosies from east and 
 west: they were strong, thriving, hopeful men, with nerves 
 that could bear a good thrill of tragic horror, and sides that 
 the most boisterous laughter was unable to shake too rudely. 
 But one must have no small confidence in the power of 
 
294 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 general conditions over specific effects who would venture 
 to say that our dramatists would never have come into exist- 
 ence, or would have sought some other line of activity, had 
 Mary remained upon the throne instead of Elizabeth, and 
 had England continued at peace with Spain. Doubtless a 
 material basis of prosperity was indispensable to the support 
 of dramatic entertainments : it was absolutely necessary 
 that there should be enough free wealth to fill the theatres. 
 But one fails to see what the stir of the Reformation had to 
 do with the dramatic tendencies of Marlowe, or how the 
 defeat of the Armada was concerned in the migration of 
 Shakespeare from Stratford to the London stage. 
 
 One thing is clear from the study of the literature preced- 
 ing the great dramatic outburst, and that is, that there was 
 abundance of material lying ready to the shaping and in- 
 spiring genius of the dramatist. There were numberless 
 tales and chronicles of love and war to furnish him with 
 plots or suggestions of plots : even if he knew no language 
 but his own, the enterprise of printers had furnished him 
 not only with the works of native poets and chroniclers, but 
 with hosts of translations from Italian, French, and Latin. 
 Observation of men was a prevailing passion, and literature 
 was crowded with sententious maxims of character and 
 politics. The passion of love had been expressed in many 
 different moods and phases, and attempts had been made 
 to treat with becoming gravity the tragic themes of disaster 
 and death. Literature was undoubtedly ripe for dramatic 
 embodiment. But why the accumulated wisdom and senti- 
 ment was thrown into the form of dramas and not into the 
 form of prose tales, and why the dramatic form rose to such 
 greatness, are problems that refuse to be solved by a study 
 of general conditions : they throw us back for explanation 
 upon the power of individual genius. 
 
 The adoption of the dramatic form by no means began 
 with Marlowe. We have seen how tragedies and comedies 
 were written by Sackville, Edwards, and Gascoigne, in imi- 
 tation and emulation of the i Italians. Between 1568 and 
 1580, Mr Collier tells us, some fifty dramas from various 
 
DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 295 
 
 sources, modern and classical, were presented at Court. 
 But these, it may be presumed, were on the classical model, 
 and the art of the classical drama is in a large measure nar- 
 rative; the most moving incidents are related, not acted. 
 Gascoigne and the translators of Seneca were unable to rise 
 in their narrative above the level of the ' Mirror for Magis- 
 trates.' And if we may judge from the more original works 
 of Sackville and Daniel, no productions on the classical 
 model could have engaged public interest. Many tragedies 
 were composed in English before Marlowe's "Tamburlaine ;" 
 but Marlowe may be called the founder of English tragedy, 
 inasmuch as he gave the first conspicuous example of the 
 fresh form that was taken up with such ardour by the great 
 line of Elizabethan dramatists. 
 
 Marlowe was not exactly the first to represent on the 
 stage actions that the Greek dramatist supposed to take 
 place behind the scenes and communicated to the audience 
 in a subsequent narrative by an eyewitness. Among Mr 
 Collier's reprints is an example of a mixed morality and 
 history, containing the revenge of Orestes upon his mother 
 and her paramour, and mixing up personified abstractions, 
 Vice, Nature, Truth, Fame, Duty, with Orestes, Clytem- 
 nestra, .iEgisthus, Menelaus, and other actual personages. 
 In this drama there is a lively battle upon the stage, with a 
 direction, " let it be long ere you can win the city ; " and 
 though Clytemnestra is dismissed under custody, .^Egisthus 
 is seized, dragged violently, and hanged before the audience 
 in spite of his entreaties for mercy. The date of this 
 drama is 1567, and from it we may conclude that as early 
 as that date the popular instinct had broken through the 
 restrictions of Horace, founded as they were upon the 
 natural limitations of a stage wholly different in structure 
 and appointments from our own. While, at Court, frigid 
 and artificial restrictions were maintained when the neces- 
 sity for them no longer existed, they were cast aside in per- 
 formances for the entertainment of the rude vulgar. Mar- 
 lowe's position, therefore, is this : he did not originate the 
 idea of bringing tragic action on the stage, but he was the 
 
296 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 first writer of plays whose genius was adequate to the 
 powerful situations introduced by the popular instinct for 
 dramatic effect. 
 
 I. — John Lyly (1554-1606). 
 
 John Lyly, the Euphuist,i " the witty, comical, facetiously 
 quick and unparalleled John Lyly," was our first extensive 
 writer of comedies. He produced no fewer than nine 
 pieces — one in blank verse, seven in prose, and one in 
 rhyme. " The Woman in the Moon " (which is in blank 
 verse, and which he calls " his first dream in Phcebus' holy 
 bower," though not printed till 1597); "Alexander and 
 Campaspe" (printed in 1584); "Sappho and Phao" (1584) 
 "Endymion" (1591); "Galathea" (1592); "Midas" (1592) 
 " Mother Bombie" (1594); " The Maid's Metamorphosis' 
 (in rhyme and only probably his, 1600) ; " Love's Meta- 
 morphosis" (1601). Lyly's plays are the sort of gay, fan- 
 tastic, insubstantial things that may catch widely as a 
 transient fashion, but are too extravagant to receive sym- 
 pathy from more than one generation : critics in general 
 set their heels on his delicate constructions. His plays 
 were acted by the children of the Revels, and he would 
 seem to have indulged in airy and childish caprices of 
 fancy to match. Perhaps he wrote with an abiding con- 
 sciousness that ladies were to make the chief part of his 
 audience, and thought only of bringing smiles on their 
 faces with pretty quibbles and mildly sentimental or child- 
 ishly jocular situations. In " EndjTnion," Tellus expresses 
 surprise that Corsites, being a captain, " who should sound 
 nothing but terror, and suck nothing but blood," talks so 
 softly and politely. " It agreeth not with your calling," 
 she says, " to use words so soft as that of love." And 
 
 1 I have given some account of his Euphuism in my Manual of English 
 Prose Literature. Lyly was a great tobacco-taker : one wonders that no 
 devoted champion of the weed has ever remarked the coincidence be- 
 tween its introduction and the beginning of the greatness of the English 
 drama. 
 
JOHN LYLY. 297 
 
 Corsites replies with the utmost urbanity — " Lady, it were 
 unfit of wars to discourse with women, into whose minds 
 nothing can sink but smoothness." In accordance with 
 this idea, Lyly's subjects, except in " Alexander and Cam- 
 paspe " and " Mother Bombie," are mythological and pas- 
 toral : and in none of them is any deep feeling excited. 
 He is careful not to alarm his courtly audience with the 
 prospect of terrible consequences : the stream of incidents 
 moves with very slight interruptions to a happy conclusion, 
 enlivened with fantastic love-talk, fantastic moralisings on 
 ambition, war, peace, avarice, illicit love, and other com- 
 monplaces, and the pranks and puns of mischievous vi- 
 vacious boys. The fabric is so slight and artificial that 
 we are in danger of undervaluing the powers of the work- 
 man, who was a most ingenious and original man, and de- 
 served all the adjectives of his publisher. His plays are 
 vessels filled to the brim with sparkling hquor, which stands 
 to Shakespeare's comedy in the relation of lemonade to 
 champagne. The whole thing is a sort of ginger-pop. in- 
 toxication ; with airy bubbles of fanciful conceits winking 
 all over. 
 
 If there is no extravagance of passion in Lyly, there is 
 the utmost extravagance of ingenious fancy. Wit being 
 defined as an ingenious and unexpected play upon words, 
 Lyly's comedies are full of it. There is hardly a sentence 
 in the whole of them that does not contain some pun, or 
 clever antithesis, or far-fetched image. He is so uninter- 
 ruptedly witty that he destroys his own wit : the play on 
 words and images ceases to be unexpected, and so falls out 
 of the definition. Yet a little of it is very pretty even now; 
 and if we could call up the Children of the Chapel Royal 
 to fire off his crackers, and poise his glittering conceits, and 
 imagine ourselves listening with the much-flattered Cynthia, 
 we might conceive the possibility of sitting out a whole 
 comedy with pleased faces. 
 
 Lyly carries his love of contrast and delicate symmetrical 
 arrangement into the structure of his plays, scene being 
 balanced against scene, and character against character. In 
 
298 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 "Alexander and Campaspe," his first published play, he 
 attempted, after the model of Edwards's " Damon and 
 Pythias," more substantial characters than he afterwards 
 produced in his mythological and pastoral conceptions. 
 One of his most elaborate and characteristic personages 
 is Sir Tophas, in " Endymion," a fat, vainglorious, foolish 
 squire, who struts about armed with weapons of sport, and 
 breathing out bloodthirsty sentiments against wrens, black- 
 birds, sheep, and other such harmless enemies. Sir Tophas 
 is the Falstaff of children, reminding us of the story that 
 Shakespeare when a boy used to kill a calf with an air : he 
 has also points of resemblance with Pistol, Holofernes, and 
 Don Armado. He has a little follower Epiton, like Ar- 
 mado's Moth, with whom he holds discourses, and he falls 
 in love with Dipsas, as Armado with Jaquenetta. 
 
 " Tophas. Epi. 
 
 Epiton. Here, sir. 
 
 Top. I brook not this idle humour of love ; it tickles not my 
 liver, from whence lovemongers in former ages seemed to infer 
 it should proceed. 
 
 Epi. Love, sir, may lie in your lungs, and I think it doth, and 
 that is the cause you blow and are so pursy. 
 
 Top. Tush, boy ; I think it is but some device of the poet to 
 get money. 
 
 Epi. A poet ; what's that ? 
 
 Top. Dost thou not know what a poet is ? 
 
 Epi. No. 
 
 Top. Why, fool, a poet is as much as one should say — a poet. 
 But soft ! yonder be two wrens ; shall I shoot at them ? 
 
 Epi. They are two lads. 
 
 Top. Larks or wrens, I will kill them. 
 
 Epi. Larks "i are you blind ? they are two little boys. 
 
 Top. Birds or boys, they are but a pittance for my breakfast ; 
 therefore have at them, for their brains must as it were em- 
 broider my bolts." 
 
 The finest things in Lyly's plays are the occasional songs. 
 " Cupid and my Campaspe played " is often quoted, and 
 Sappho's song is hardly less pretty. 
 
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 299 
 
 " O cruel Love ! on thee I lay 
 My curse, which shall strike blind the day ; 
 Never may sleep with velvet hand 
 Charm thine eyes with sacred wand ; 
 Thy jailors shall be hopes and fears ; 
 Thy prison-mates groans, sighs, and tears ; 
 Thy play to wear out weary times 
 Fantastic passions, vows, and rhymes ; 
 Thy bread be frowns ; thy drink be gall ; 
 Such as when you Phao call 
 The bed thou liest on by despair ; 
 Thy sleep, fond dreams : thy dreams, long care ; 
 Hope (like thy fool), at thy bed's head. 
 Mock thee, till madness strike thee dead. 
 As Phao, thou dost me, with thy proud eyes ; 
 In thee poor Sappho lives, for thee she dies." 
 
 II. — Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593). 
 
 When we pass from Lyly to Marlowe we find ourselves in 
 a wholly different atmosphere. They wrote for a different 
 audience, a different stage, different actors ; and the plays 
 are not more unlike than were the lives and characters of 
 the authors. The plays written by Lyly for the Court, and 
 represented by the children of the Chapel Royal, do not 
 come up to M. Taine's description of the ferocity of English 
 manners in that age: their mythological and pastoral worlds 
 are the opposite of a violent and complete expansion of 
 nature. In Marlowe's plays, on the other hand, written for 
 the public theatre, there is ferocity enough, and a good 
 many of the restraints of nature as well as of jJrobability are 
 violently, broken through. Passing from Lyly to Marlowe 
 is like passing from sentimental modern comedy to the 
 blood and convulsion, powder and poison drama that still 
 keeps its hold on the south side of the Thames. M. Taine 
 should not have been so anxious to make out that the Eliza- 
 bethan drama was a faithful reflection of the manners of the 
 Court : one might as soon take Mr Boucicault's Irish dramas 
 as an index to the character of the modem English gentle- 
 
300 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 man. It is the pit and not the boxes that theatrical man- 
 agers must chiefly keep in view, if they wish their theatres 
 to pay : we are not entitled to infer, from the thrilling ago- 
 nies, fierce passions, and bloodthirsty heroics of the Eliza- 
 bethan drama, anything except that they pleased the body 
 of the house. Modern critics have endorsed the judgment 
 of the EHzabethan pit; Lyly and Daniel, with their gentle 
 plays adapted to gentle ears, now require an education to 
 appreciate them, while we are never weary of admiring the 
 gigantic powers that dared to express the tempest and whirl- 
 wind of unrestrained passion. But it is not by any means 
 certain that this was the view taken by the gallants of the 
 day, who lounged on the stage or in the boxes (" rooms," 
 as they were then called), and exchanged chaff with the 
 groundlings : it is not impossible that the violent passions 
 of the drama, so far from being an attraction for them by 
 natural affinity, were the subjects of their derision, torn to 
 tatters as the passions most usually have been by robustious 
 actors. The passion for heroics and horrors was by no 
 means universal in the Elizabethan age any more than in 
 our own. Thomas Nash ridiculed vainglorious tragedians 
 with their swelling bombast of bragging blank verse. Lodge 
 even ventured to deride the cries for revenge uttered by the 
 Ghost in "Hamlet,"a part represented, according to tradition, 
 by the divine dramatist himself Tragedy was one of the 
 themes of the weak and conceited satires of Joseph Hall. 
 The eulogists of Shakespeare lay stress not upon his power 
 of expressing tragic passions, but upon his sweet witty soul, 
 his mellifluous and honied tongue, his silver tongue, his 
 honey-flowing vein, and the sugared tongues and attractive 
 beauty of his personages. Entries remain in the ' Accounts 
 of the Revels,' of dramas by Shakespeare presented at the 
 Court of James : the list comprises one tragedy, one histo- 
 rical play, and eight comedies. Everything goes to show 
 that in the Elizabethan age persons of fashion and refine- 
 ment, if they did not actually consider tragedy vulgar, at 
 least had a preference for comedy. The spirit then prevail- 
 ing on that point at Court was not so very different from 
 
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 3OI 
 
 what prevailed when Chaucer wrote, and made his repre- 
 sentative of " the gentles " put a stop to the tragic recitals 
 of the Monk. 
 
 The tragic drama emanated from the people. It had its 
 beginnings in the public theatre, and its first and greatest 
 authors were men of the people. Men do not learn 
 passion and the expression of passion, so far as these can 
 •be learnt, from national movements, but from the experience 
 of their own individual struggle for existence or fame. 
 Men of easy unvaried lives, who have never had to fight 
 with poverty or slander, the malice of fortune or the malice 
 of men, cannot be dramatists. 
 
 Marlowe was only two months older than Shakespeare, 
 having been bom in February 1564. His father was a 
 shoemaker in Canterbury, with a somewhat numerous 
 family. His first education was probably got at the en- 
 dowed king's school, and he went to Cambridge (Benet 
 College, Corpus Christi) in 1581. He is not recorded to 
 have held a scholarship, and he may have owed his main- 
 tenance at College to a wealthy relative or other patron. 
 He received the degree of M.A. in 1587, but before that 
 he would seem to have renounced the sure prospects of 
 the staid professions for the precarious career of actor and 
 playwright. "Tamburlaine the Great" is inferred by 
 Collier and Dyce to have been his first play, and to have 
 been acted anterior to 1587, though not printed till 1590. 
 None of his other plays were printed till after his death ; but 
 Mr Dyce supposes them to have been produced in the 
 following order—" Faustus," " Jew of Malta," " Edward II.," 
 "Massacre at Paris." He lost his life in 1593 in a miser- 
 able brawl. Among the papers left behind him were part 
 of the tragedy of " Dido," afterwards completed by Nash ; 
 a metrical paraphrase of part of Mus^us's "Hero and 
 Leander," afterwards continued by Chapman ; a translation 
 of some of Ovid's Elegies ; and a translation into blank 
 verse of the First Book of Lucan.^ 
 1 For the discussion of other works attributed. to him see the 'Account 
 
302 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 Marlowe's life was brief and probably dissolute. We 
 have no right to identify a dramatist with his characters, 
 but it is impossible to disregard the combined evidences 
 of his dramatic conceptions and the accusations brought 
 against him by more respectable contemporaries. His 
 chief characters, Tamburlaine, Faustus, and the Jew of 
 Malta, are not the creations of a calm mind : their volcanic 
 passions and daring scepticism are the offspring of a 
 turbulent, vehement, irregular nature, bold and defiant of 
 public opinion. Marlowe's alleged writings against the 
 Trinity have never been seen ; in all probability, like some 
 alleged infidel works of the Middle Ages, they never 
 existed : but there seems no reason to doubt that he was, 
 as his accusers stated, a man that neither feared God 
 nor regarded man. Beauty, which he worshipped with 
 passionate devotion, was the only sunshine of his life, and 
 it shone with, a burning fierceness proportioned to the 
 violence of his tempestuous moods. The vision of Hero 
 and Leander is a rapt surrender of the whole soul to im- 
 passioned meditation on luxurious beauty. In his life as 
 in his plays, such intervals of delight were probably rare. 
 Tamburlaine is a most impassioned adorer of divine Zeno- 
 crate ; Faustus hangs in ecstatic worship on the lips of 
 Helen ; but these are only brief transports in lives where 
 energy and ambition are devouringly predominant. Mar- 
 lowe's genius was little adapted to sonneteering and pastoral 
 poetry : he stigmatised the fashionable love-lyrics as " egre- 
 gious foppery," and derided them with rough ridicule. He 
 wrote no sonnets ; only one pastoral song has been ascribed 
 to him,^ and it is direct and fresh, a movement of impatient 
 
 of Marlowe and his writings in IVIr Dyce's edition p. Iviii-lxvii. (1850) ; 
 and Bell's Greene and Marlowe, p. 150, (1856). I adhere to Bell's remarks 
 on the authorship of "Lust's Dominion" and "The First Part of the 
 Contention." If isolated coincidences of expression are taken as proof of 
 authorship, almost any given play in the Elizabethan age might be as- 
 signed to any given author: the dramatists made so communistically free 
 with the productions of their fellows. In spite of its dealing with events 
 subsequent to Marlowe's death, "Lust's Dominion " is on the whole much 
 more like his work than "The First Part of the Contention." 
 1 The song of the ' ' Passionate Shepherd to his Love " is ascribed to Mar- 
 
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 303 
 
 captivating sweetness, an impulsive tone of invitation 
 that will take no denial. Marlowe was a clear and power- 
 ful genius, and we often seem to catch in his poetry an 
 undertone of almost angry contempt for commonplace. 
 
 The most generally impressive of Marlowe's works is his 
 fragment on the tale of Hero and Leander, and if we 
 founded solely upon this, we should form most erroneous 
 notions of his 'genius. We should suppose his worship 
 of beauty, which was but a rare and transient passion, to 
 have been the presiding force of his imagination. It 
 is in his plays that we find the world of storm and strife 
 wherein he delighted to expatiate, and a most Titanic world 
 it is, immeasurably transcending nature in breadth and 
 height of thought, feeling, and destructive energy ; a region 
 where everything is on a gigantic scale, peopled with crea- 
 tures that are monstrous in the largeness of their composi- 
 tion and the fierceness of their passions. " Tamburlaine 
 the Great " was his first play, and serves as well as any 
 other to give a notion of his grand manner. Tamburlaine 
 (better known as Timour the Tartar) is represented as a 
 Scythian shepherd, whose ambition, fed by heavenly por- 
 tents and oracles, soars to the height of subduing the three 
 continents : he aspires to spread his name 
 
 "As far as Boreas claps his brazen wings. 
 Or fair Bootes sends his cheerful light." ' 
 
 Theridamas, a Persian general, is sent to take the mad 
 shepherd prisoner, but when he sets eyes on him he is se- 
 
 lowe in ■ England's Helicon,' but this is rot conclusive, as pieces were not 
 always given to their true authors in these miscellanies. The curious 
 thing is, that in the ' ' Passionate Pilgrim " where it is given as Shakespeare's, 
 all the staves would pass for his : but in E. H. two more staves are given 
 that seem to be in Marlowe's distinctive vein. 
 
 1 This passage seems to be referred to in Nash's celebrated Epistle pre- 
 fixed to Greene's "Menaphon," where he speaks of vainglorious tragedians 
 who think themselves all right " if they once but get Boreas by the beard 
 and the heavenly Bull by the dewlap." If so, this would confirm Mr 
 Collier's opinion that Marlowe is the "idiot art-master" assailed in that 
 connection, and cast some doubt on the propriety of M. Taine's taking 
 Marlowe's plays as the standard of English taste in that age. 
 
304 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 duced from his allegiance by miraculous fascination. He 
 stands rooted to the earth, and exclaims : — 
 
 " Tamburlaine ! a Scythian shepherd so embellished 
 With Nature's pride and richest furniture ! 
 His looks do menace Heaven and dare the gods ; 
 His fiery eyes are fixed upon the earth, 
 As if he now devised some stratagem, 
 Or meant to pierce Avernus' darksome vaults 
 To pull the triple-headed dog from hell." 
 
 When this tremendous being breaks silence, his speech is 
 pregnant with sublime energy : — 
 
 " Forsake thy king, and do but join with me. 
 And we will triumph over all the world : 
 I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains. 
 And with my hand turn Fortune's wheel about ; 
 And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere 
 Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome. 
 Draw forth thy sword thou mighty man at arms, 
 Intending but to raze my charmed skin, 
 And Jove himself will stretch his hand from heaven 
 To ward the blow, and shield me safe from harm." 
 
 Tamburlaine's vaunts are justified by events : he soon 
 gains the crown of Persia : then turns his arms against the 
 countless legions of the Turks, subdues their emperor Baja- 
 zeth (whom he carries about in a cage and uses upon oc- 
 casion as a footstool), and bestows kingdoms upon his 
 most eminent followers. Towards the end of the First 
 Part of his eventful drama, he thus sums up his achieve- 
 ments : — 
 
 " The god of war resigns his seat to me, 
 Meaning to make me general of the world : 
 Jove, viewing me in arms, looks pale and wan. 
 Fearing my power should pull him from his throne : 
 Where'er I come the Fatal Sisters sweat, 
 And grisly Death, by running to and fro. 
 To do their ceaseless homage to my sword : 
 And here in Afric, where it seldom rains, 
 
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 305 
 
 Since I arrived with my triumphant host, 
 
 Have swelling clouds, drawn from wide-gaping wounds, 
 
 Been oft resolved in bloody purple showers, 
 
 A meteor that might terrify the earth. 
 
 And make it quake at every drop it drinks : 
 
 Millions of souls sit on the banks of Styx, 
 
 Waiting the back-return of Charon's boat ; 
 
 Hell and Elysium swarm with ghosts of men, 
 
 That I have sent from sundry foughten fields. 
 
 To spread my fame through hell and up to heaven.'' 
 
 In the Second Part the poet's imagination expatiates in 
 a still ampler range of extravagance. Two of the con- 
 queror's sons display their father's spirit. " Wading through 
 blood to a throne " would be but a tame image to them. 
 When their father talks of what must be the character of 
 his successor, one of them says that, were the throne 
 placed in a sea of blood, he would prepare a ship and sail 
 to it ; and the other, with still greater hardihood, cries : — 
 
 " And I would strive to swim through pools of blood, 
 Or make a bridge of murdered carcases, 
 Whose arches should be framed with bones of Turks 
 Ere I would lose the title of a king." 
 
 His wife Zenocrate falling sick, he consoles himself with 
 sublime fancies of the reception preparing for her in 
 heaven : — 
 
 " Now walk the angels on the walls of heaven 
 As sentinels to warn th' immortal souls 
 To entertain divine Zenocrate. 
 
 The cherubins and holy seraphins 
 
 That sing and play before the King of kings, 
 
 Use all their voices and their instruments 
 
 To entertain divine Zenocrate : 
 
 And in this sweet and curious harmony. 
 
 The god that tunes this music to our souls, 
 
 Holds out his hand in highest majesty 
 
 To entertain divine Zenocrate." 
 
 His raving over her death is hardly less extravagant :— 
 
 U 
 
306 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 " What, is she dead ? Techelles, draw thy sword, 
 And wound the earth that it may cleave in twain, 
 And we descend into the infernal vaults, 
 To hale the Fatal Sisters by the hair. 
 And throw them in the triple moat of hell, 
 For taking hence my fair Zenocrate. 
 Cassane and Theridamas, to arms ! 
 Raise cavalieros higher than the clouds. 
 And with the cannon break the frame of heaven ; 
 Batter the shining palace of the sun 
 And shiver all the starry firmament. 
 For amorous Jove hath snatched my love from hence. 
 Meaning to make her stately queen of heaven." 
 
 Tamburlaine is, if possible, increased in fierceness by the 
 death of his queen. He lays waste the town where she 
 died with fire and sword : and proceeding in his irresistible 
 career of conquest, harnesses kings to his chariot, and 
 stabs one of his own sons for effeminate shirking of war. 
 His last exploit is the capture of Babylon, He binds the 
 Babylonians hand and foot, and drowns man, woman, and 
 child : then bums the sacred books of Mahomet, daring the 
 prophet, if he have any power, to come down and take 
 vengeance. Immediately thereafter he is seized by a 
 sudden and mysterious distemper. He maintains his sub- 
 lime spirit to the last. He represents death as afraid to 
 confront him eye to eye : — 
 
 " See where my slave, the ugly monster Death, 
 Shaking and quivering, pale and wan for fear. 
 Stands aiming at me with his murdering dart. 
 Who flies away at every glance I give, 
 And, when I look away, comes stealing on ! " 
 
 Yet once more, in spite of Death, he takes the field, and 
 scatters his enemies " like summer's vapours vanished by 
 the sun : " then calls for a map that he may trace the ex- 
 tent of his conquests, and see how much of the world re- 
 mains to subdue ; commends the completion of the triumph 
 to his son ; and bids his friends farewell — 
 
 " For Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die." 
 
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 307 
 
 It is not alone the inflated ambition and miraculous suc- 
 cess of the hero, that raise and swell the effect of this play 
 to dimensions so astounding. His chief followers and his 
 chief enemies express themselves with hardly inferior energy ; 
 and our minds are filled with amazement at the hundreds of 
 thousands under various kings and emperors arrayed for and 
 against the magnificent conqueror.^ 
 
 " Tamburlaine " was Marlowe's first play, but the impet- 
 uous swell of his conceptions cannot be said to have been 
 much moderated as he went on. His " raptures all air and 
 fire" were not, I believe, the extravagance of youth; still 
 less could they have been, as Mr Collier seems to think, the 
 result of inexperience in blank verse, and mistaken effort 
 to make up by bombastic terms for the absence of rhyme ; 
 they were part of the constitution of this individual man. 
 It is impossible to say what he might have done had his 
 life been longer : he might have exhausted this high astound- 
 ing vein, and proved himself capable of opening up another. 
 But as long as he lived he found fuel for his lofty raptures. 
 He could not repeat another conqueror of the world, but 
 his heroes are all expanded to the utmost possible limit of 
 their circumstances. The Jew of Malta is an incarnation of 
 the devil himself: he is no less universal in his war against all 
 mankind that are within reach of his power : he fights single- 
 handed with monstrous instruments of death against a whole 
 city, and does not scruple to poison even his own daughter. 
 Faustus is not a malevolent being, but his ambition is even 
 greater than Tamburlaine's ; he soars beyond the petty 
 possibilities of humanity, leagues himself with superhuman 
 powers, and rides through space in a fiery chariot exploring 
 the secrets of the universe. Even in his historical play of 
 
 ' The resources of the scene-painter and the stage machinist were not 
 then developed. A board with a name upon it indicated the place of the 
 action ; and supernatural personages descended and reascended only when 
 the carpenter "could conveniently." But it seems probable that part of 
 the success of Tamburlaine was due to its spectacular eifect, introducing as 
 it did potentates in the costumes of their several regions. Greene and 
 Peele seem to have taken the hint. Belinus and Abdelmelec may have in- 
 ■ voked the aid of the Turkish emperor to afford an opportunity of exhibit- 
 ing the gorgeous costumes of himself and his retinue of kings. 
 
308 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 Edward II., where he is bound by the shackles of recent 
 history more or less known to his audience, the conflict of 
 explosive passions is superhuman in its energies ; the king's 
 court is a hell of extravagant affection and fiendish spite, 
 wanton tyranny and mutinous unapproachable fierceness — 
 a den of wild beasts.'- 
 
 It is sometimes said by way of superlative eulogy that the 
 tragedy of Edward II. is worthy of Shakespeare. Such a 
 notion could not be held for a moment by any one accus- 
 tomed to draw distinctions among the objects of his admi- 
 ration. The manner of Marlowe is as different as possible 
 from the manner of Shakespeare. Not to enter into minute 
 comparisons of expression, which, though somewhat tedious, 
 is perhaps the most distinct way of conveying how radically 
 they differ, it is sufficient to mention two great points of 
 contrast, significant of the deepest differences of constitution. 
 Marlowe has very little humour, and very little sense of varied 
 aspects of character. Shakespeare is said to have borrowed 
 the idea of Richard II. from Marlowe's Edward II., and his 
 Hotspur from Marlowe's young Mortimer. Now compare 
 the conceptions of the two dramatists. Edward and Richard 
 agree only in being weak and wasteful kings, Mortimer and 
 Hotspur in being irrepressible noblemen, with a natural de- 
 light in war. On the throne and in the dungeon Edward 
 is more contemptible than Richard. Edward, indeed, is a 
 spoiled child of Titanic breed : he has the infatuated loves 
 and spites of a spoiled child ; and the cruel indignities put 
 upon him after his dethronement, seem aimed in contempt 
 at his effeminacy. He clings to Gaveston as to a forbidden 
 toy. When his nobles stalk defiantly from his presence 
 and leave him to storm in monologue, he takes revenge by 
 bullying his wife. In the true spirit of a wayward child, he 
 loads Gaveston with honours to spite the fractious noble- 
 men : he affirms tliat he cares for the throne only as a means 
 of indulging his favourite. Shakespeare's Richard II. is a 
 
 1 This would almost seem to be the original of M. Taine's conception of 
 sixteenth-century England. 
 
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 309 
 
 very different being. He is said to be wasteful and given to 
 favouritism : but in all his appearances upon the stage, he 
 comports himself with royal dignity. The faults that work 
 his overthrow are impetuous indiscretion, and a greater love 
 for Fine Art than the duties of government. His reverses 
 turn upon a much finer pivot than Edward's gross abuse of 
 power: he might have kept his throne had he not on a 
 random impulse stopped the combat between Bolingbroke 
 and Mowbray and sent them both into banishment : — 
 
 " O when the king did throw his warder down, 
 His own life hung upon the staff he threw." 
 
 Richard's death is heroic ; and his reflections in the dun- 
 geon may be contrasted with Gaveston's schemes for the 
 amusement of Edward, as showing the higher reach of his 
 philosophic and artistic culture. A close comparison of 
 Mortimer and Hotspur reveals still more striking dissimi- 
 larities. Mortimer is outspoken and delights in war like 
 Hotspur, but he shows no trace of the amiable qualities of 
 Harry Percy. He is actuated by a coarse ambition to marry 
 the queen and seize the throne, and is the author of the 
 gross cruelty wreaked upon the helpless king. Harry Percy 
 is presented in more varied as well as more amiable lights. 
 He chafes and " chaffs " Glendower with impudence privi- 
 leged by its happy audacity. He is wrapt up in warlike 
 schemes : he gives playful evasive answers to his wife's 
 questions ; sometimes he is so preoccupied that he does not 
 apswer till an hour afterwards. He is fondly beloved by 
 his Kate : while he is alive, he is her " mad ape," her 
 " paraquito," a dear provoking fellow ; and when he dies, 
 her noble eulogy of his chivalrous nature shows how deep 
 was his hold of her affections. To his rival Hal, his over- 
 powering devotion to war sometimes appears a little comical ; 
 but his courage and prowess receive all deference and 
 honour. Of all those traits that give Harry Percy individual 
 life, there is not the faintest prefiguration in Marlowe's young 
 Mortimer. Character-painting, indeed, was not in Marlowe's 
 way : his personages do not show many-sided character in 
 
310 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 their different relations. All his creations relax under the 
 charms of love, and express themselves with glowing affec- 
 tion ; but they all relax and warm into raptures very much 
 after the same fashion. There is no such discrimination in 
 Marlowe as the distinction between the wooing of Troilus 
 and the wooing of Diomede, not to speak of finer distinc- 
 tions. Even Edward's love for Gaveston and the Jew's love 
 for his daughter flow into the same current of language as 
 Tamburlaine's love for Zenocrate, and Faustus's admiration 
 of Helen. 
 
 The fragment of " Hero and Leander" is incomparably 
 the finest product of Marlowe's genius : it is one of the chief 
 treasures of the language. The poet is fairly intoxicated 
 with the beauty of his subject : he has thought about the 
 two lovers, and dreamed about them, and filled his imagi- 
 nation with their charms ; he writes with ecstasy as if obey- 
 ing an impulse that he can resist no longer, and in every 
 other line expressions escape him that have all the warmth 
 of involuntary bursts of admiration. He dashes into the 
 subject with passionate eagerness, outlining the situation 
 with a few impatient strokes, and at once proceeding to 
 descant on the beauty of Hero : — 
 
 " On Hellespont, guilty of true lovers' blood, 
 In view and opposite two cities stood, 
 Sea-borderers, disjoined by Neptune's might ; 
 The one Abydos, the other Sestos hight. 
 At Sestos Hero dwelt ; Hero the fair. 
 Whom young Apollo courted for her hair, 
 And offered as a dower his burning throne 
 Where she should sit for men to gaze upon. 
 
 Some say for her the fairest Cupid pined, 
 And looking in her face was strooken blind. 
 But this is true ; so like was one the other, 
 As he imagined Hero was his mother ; 
 And oftentimes into her bosom flew, 
 About her naked neck his bare arms threw, 
 And laid his childish head upon her breast, 
 And with still panting rock, there took his rest. 
 
ROBERT GREENE. 31 1 
 
 So lovely fair was Hero, Venus' nun, 
 As Nature wept thinking she was undone. 
 Because she took more from her than she left, 
 And of such wondrous beauty her bereft : 
 Therefore in sign her treasure suffered wrack, 
 Since Hero's time hath half the world been black." 
 
 From Hero he passes to Leander — 
 
 " Amorous Leander, beautiful and young, 
 Whose tragedy divine Musasus sung, 
 Dwelt at Abydos ; since him dwelt there none 
 For whom succeeding times make greater moan." 
 
 Leander's beauty is painted in even more glowing colours 
 than Hero's. In his picture of the infatuated doating of 
 Edward II. on Piers Gaveston, Marlowe had already shown 
 that he understood the passion that may be felt for the 
 beauty of young men, and here we have a stronger evidence. 
 He describes Leander with something like a Greek feeling 
 for his beauties, his arms, his smooth breast, his white 
 shoulder, his orient cheeks and lips : some of the particu- 
 lars would seem to have been adopted by Shakespeare and 
 applied to the praise of his beautiful friend. The poem as 
 a whole is more voluptuous and earnestly impassioned in 
 sentiment than Shakespeare's corresponding poem of "Venus 
 and Adonis :" the poet did not live to carry the tale into its 
 tragic stage. 
 
 III. — Robert Greene (1560-1592). 
 
 To class Greene among the dramatists is rather a harsh 
 measure for his reputation, although the arrangement is jus- 
 tified by his relations with the stage. When Shakespeare 
 began to write, Marlowe and Greene were the most firmly 
 established playwrights, and both himself and his friends 
 testify to the eagerness of rival managers to obtain the 
 hastiest of Greene's performances. Yet Greene's plays are 
 by no means the best fruits of his pen. He began his 
 literary career as an author of love-tales or novels in prose 
 
312 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 interspersed with songs and lyrics ; and as he had a most 
 rich and vivid feeling for colour, and a fine ear for the music 
 of verse, these occasional pieces are by far his best produc- 
 tions. If, therefore, we were to estimate him by quaUty 
 rather than by quantity, we should place hinj rather among 
 the love-poets than among the dramatists. As a dramatist 
 he was a follower of Lyly and Marlowe : as a writer of 
 pastoral lyrics he was Marlowe's predecessor and superior. 
 
 The earliest production of Greene's hitherto discovered 
 is "Mamillia," an imitation to a certain extent of Lyly's 
 " Euphues," published in 1583, while the author was in resi- 
 dence at Clare Hall, Cambridge, just before taking the 
 degree of M.A. He had come up from Norwich to St 
 John's, and had graduated B. A. in 1578 : after that, though 
 his father would not seem to have been a rich man, he 
 found means to travel in Spain, Italy, and other parts of the 
 Continent. According to his own account, written in death- 
 bed repentance, he had learnt in Italy luxurious, profligate, 
 and abominable habits, and on his return soon exhausted 
 both his money and his credit, and was at his wits' end for 
 a suitable profession. After vacillating for a little between 
 the Church and Physic, he finally gravitated to the last re- 
 sort of such unsteady spirits — " became an author of plays 
 and a penner of love-pamphlets." " Mamillia " was rapidly 
 followed by a host. of other love-pamphlets : " Morando," 
 " Menaphon," " Perimedes the Blacksmith," " Pandosto, the 
 Triumph of Time " (reprinted by Mr Collier as the founda- 
 rionof the "Winter's Tale"), "Philomela, the LadyFitzwater's 
 Nightingale" (reprinted along with " Menaphon" in Brydges' 
 " Archaica"), and many others. These euphuistically-embel- 
 lished tales were the fashionable reading of ladies on their 
 first appearance, and afterwards went through many editions, 
 to the delight of sentimental maids in humbler life. Greene's 
 fertility is all the more amazing when we consider the de- 
 bauched life that he led : we need not wonder at his early 
 death when we see how he burnt the candle at both ends — 
 hard work and immoderate dissipation. Five of his plays 
 have come down to us : " Orlando Furioso " (published 
 
ROBERT GREENE. 313 
 
 ^594)j " Looking-Glass for London and England" (1594, 
 written in conjunction with Lodge); "Friar Bacon and 
 Friar Bungay" (1594); "James the Fourth" (1598); "Al- 
 phonsus, King of Arragon" (1599). " George-a-Green, the 
 Pinner of Wakefield" (1599), is also attributed to him. 
 
 Greene saw a great deal of villanous company during his 
 brief career in London. His own excuse for his choice of 
 depraved associates was that he wished to paint their man- 
 ners. It is not impossible that this was part of his motive 
 for consorting with rogues and sharpers : it may even have 
 been the apology that he offered to his own conscience. 
 Yet with all allowances for his thus stooping to gain profes- 
 sional ends, we shall probably not be far wrong if we accept 
 Mr Dyce's conclusion, that of all " the Muse's sons whose 
 vices have conducted them to shame and sorrow, none, 
 perhaps, have sunk to deeper degradation and misery." 
 We must not be prejudiced against Greene because he 
 assailed the youthful Shakespeare so bitterly, nor must we 
 take Gabriel Harvey's picture as accurate in every particu- 
 lar. But it seems indisputable that Greene reduced him- 
 self to extreme distress by extravagant profligacy ; that he 
 spent recklessly, and was not over-scrupulous in replenishing 
 his coffers ; and that in his struggle for the means of de- 
 bauchery he was bitterly jealous and envious of all literary 
 competitors. Marlowe as well as Shakespeare had been an 
 object of attack when he began his career of playwright : he 
 was seemingly attacked in Nash's preface to Greene's "Me- 
 naphon," and afterwards his "Tamburlaine" and its blank 
 verse were directly sneered at by Greene himself Indeed, 
 Greene confessed in his repentant fit that he could not keep 
 a friend : he behaved to his friends in such a way as to turn 
 them into utter enemies. 
 
 It seems possible to trace the reaction from this intem- 
 perate life of debauchery, hard work, and bitterness, in the 
 passionate beauty of Greene's lyrics : one can understand 
 with what a transport of relief he would throw himself out 
 of his base surroundings into the dreams of a happy pasto- 
 ral country and the music of sweet verse. There is nothing 
 
314 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 in his dramas to suggest the profligacy of the author. They 
 are of the nature of comedies : they terminate happily, and 
 in accordance with the strictest principles of morality. His 
 heroines — Angelica, the fair maid of Fressingfield, Dorothea, 
 Isabel — are models of moral no less than of physical beauty. 
 
 On the whole, Greene seems to have been a clever ready- 
 witted fellow, with a gift of sweet song, and unbounded 
 facility in the use of words : bold, shameless, somewhat 
 cynical and bitter : prepared to write to the utmost of his 
 ability in any vein that would sell : a boisterous reveller, 
 incapable of foregoing a rough joke even at the expense of 
 his dearest friend. This was the man as he appeared to 
 his fellows. But he would seem to have had an inner life 
 of remorseful fits, abject in proportion to the intemperate 
 height of his orgies. If indeed we had no authority beyond 
 his " Repentance" and his " Groat's Worth of Wit" we might 
 easily believe these to have been written for the sole pur- 
 pose of replenishing his purse. But there are trustworthy 
 accounts of his deathbed behaviour, when his "jolly long 
 red peak " and " well-proportioned body " were finally pros- 
 trated; and these accounts lead us to believe that his re- 
 pentance was unfeigned. And, indeed, the tone of his 
 plays, and his delight in the imagination of beauty, inno- 
 cence, and country joys, are indications of a better nature 
 that lay hid under poor Robert's outer profligacy. 
 
 Greene has no claim to high rank as a dramatist, and yet 
 he deserves considerable study as a precursor of Shakes- 
 peare. Although his blank verse is somewhat monotonous, 
 yet there is incisive and vivid energy in his language : and 
 he had probably more influence than Marlowe in forming or 
 enriching Shakespeare's diction. Take at random, as an 
 illustration, the induction to Act ii. of " Alphonsus : " — 
 
 " Thus from the pit of pilgrim's poverty 
 Alphonsus 'gins by step and step to climb 
 Unto the top of friendly Fortune's wheel. 
 From banished state, as you have plainly seen, 
 He is transform'd into a soldier's life, 
 And marcheth in the ensign of the King 
 
ROBERT GREENE. 315 
 
 Of worthy Naples, which Belinus hight ; 
 Not for because that he doth love him so, 
 But that he may revenge him on his foe. 
 Now on the top of lusty barbed steed 
 He mounted is, in glittering armour clad, 
 Seeking about the troops of Arragon, 
 For to encounter with his traitorous niece. 
 How he doth speed and what doth him befall, 
 Mark this our act, for it doth show it all." 
 
 The versification of this is exceedingly flat, but here and 
 there are touches of vivid expression. The opening of this 
 Act is energetic, reminding us of Gloucester's " Down, down 
 to hell, and say I sent thee thither." Alphonsus kills Fla- 
 minius, and exclaims — 
 
 " Go, pack thee hence unto the Stygian lake, 
 And make report unto thy traitorous sire 
 How well thou hast enjoyed the diadem 
 Which he by treason set upon thy head ; 
 And if he ask thee who did send thee down, 
 Alphonsus say, who now must wear thy crown." 
 
 Greene is sometimes accused of ranting. The chief 
 basis for this accusation is the character of Rasni, King of 
 Nineveh, in the " Looking-Glass for London and England." 
 This " Imperial swaggerer," as Campbell calls him, is puffed 
 up with immeasurable pride till the prophet Jonah lets the 
 wind out of him ; and glories in a strain somewhat like 
 Tamburlaine, but more like the conventional Herod of the 
 Mysteries : — 
 
 " Great Jewry's God, that foiled stout Benhadad, 
 Could not rebate the strength that Rasni brought ; 
 For be he God in heaven, yet, viceroys, know, 
 Rasni is god on earth and none but he." 
 
 It should be remarked, however, that this play was written 
 oy Greene in conjunction with Lodge, and that Greene's 
 portion of the work was probably the delineation of the ex- 
 tortion, roguery, and debauchery of Nineveh, which was to 
 say, of London. The particulars of the sumptuous wedding, 
 
3l6 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 indeed, are quite in Greene's style ; he was at home in the 
 exercise of accumulating gorgeous particulars. But there is 
 nothing to approach the extravagant inflation of Rasni in 
 any play of Greene's sole workmanship. He essayed a 
 counterpart to Tamburlaine in his Alphonsus, and there had 
 ample opportunity for unbounded rant; but Alphonsus 
 bears his exploits lightly, and indulges but sparingly in the 
 swelling utterance of aspiration and triumph. Greene was 
 too C5mical to have command of language for a character of 
 sustained pride; he could pump up expression for a good 
 many emotions, but his nature was dry in that region. He 
 is, indeed, a standing refutation of the plausible idea that 
 rant belongs to the infancy of the drama. Rant goes rather 
 with the nature of the individual ; and Greene, with all his 
 roughness and recklessness, was fitted to be the pupil of 
 Lyly more than of Marlowe. 
 
 Like most of his predecessors, from Chaucer downwards, 
 Greene makes frequent use of the goddesses and celebrated 
 beauties of Grecian mythology for purposes of comparison. 
 But he does more than merely repeat the names, saying 
 that a heroine is as fair as Helen or as faithful as Penelope : 
 he evidently exerted his imagination to conceive them in a 
 certain visual semblance of beauty. We are not, of course, 
 to suppose that he had any notion of conceiving classical 
 beauty as different from English beauty : when he spoke of 
 the port of Juno and the foot of Thetis, he probably had in 
 his mind's eye a gait and an instep that had charmed him 
 in the neighbourhood of St Paul's. Still, he had the notion 
 of giving life to dead names. He had also the notion of 
 conceiving these antique paragons at supreme moments in 
 their history when their charms were at full height. Semele, 
 Chloris, Daphne, Thetis, and others, are taken at the 
 moment when their beauty proved irresistible even to the 
 gods : Venus at the moment of her highest triumph. Amu- 
 rack exclaims of his wife Fausta — 
 
 " Behold the gem and jewel of mine age ! 
 See where she comes, whose heavenly majesty 
 
ROBERT GREENE. 317 
 
 Doth far surpass the brave and gorgeous pace 
 Which Cytherea, daughter unto Jove, 
 Did put in ure whenas she had obtained 
 The golden apple at the shepherd's hands." 
 
 This vein of classical allusion is one of the outcomes of 
 Greene's passion for beautiful forms and colours. It is 
 carried out to a weakness in his dramas, rendering him 
 peculiarly open to the charge made at the time against Uni- 
 versity poets generally — he " smacks too much of Ovid." 
 He sadly violates dramatic propriety by ascribing an ac- 
 quaintance with the Roman poet to all his characters indis- 
 criminately. Even lovely Peggy, the keeper's daughter at 
 Fressingfield, can discourse of Phcsbus courting lovely 
 Semele, of the matchless hue of Helen, of the scrolls that 
 Jove sent to Danae ; she puts up an appeal to " fond Ate, 
 doomer of bad-boding fates ;" and says with enthusiasm that 
 Lacy is 
 
 " Proportioned as was Paris when, in gray, 
 He courted CEnon in the vale of Troy.'' 
 
 If, however, we wish to see Greene at his best, we must 
 go to the occasional songs in his prose tales.^ We might, 
 indeed, compile from his plays a florilegium of pretty lines, 
 such as — 
 
 " Thou gladsome lamp that wait'st on Phoebus' train, 
 Spreading thy kindness through the jarring orbs, 
 That in their union praise thy lasting powers ; 
 Fair pride of morn, sweet beauty of the even ! " 
 
 Or— 
 
 " Sleep like the smiling purity of heaven, 
 When mildest wind is loath to blend the peace." 
 
 But a collection of his lyrics— songs, roundelays, jigs, sonet- 
 tos, madrigals, ditties, and odes — is really like his own 
 Cuba, a region enriched — 
 
 "With favours sparkling from the smiling heavens." 
 
 1 These are reprinted in Bell's Poets, along with ' ' Hero and Leander "— 
 a charming volume. 
 
3l8 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 Very often he rounds off in a few lines a perfect subject for 
 the painter, as in the burden of Sephestia's song to her 
 child— 
 
 " Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee ; 
 When thou art old there's grief enough for thee." 
 
 Or the opening lines of Menaphon's roundelay — 
 
 " When tender ewes, brought home with evening sun, 
 Wend to their folds. 
 And to their holds 
 The shepherds trudge when light of day is done." 
 
 In the tales these verses come in as if the author's thoughts 
 were tired of their prose vehicle, and spontaneously and 
 irresistibly blossomed into song. His excellence in short 
 verses, or in a capricious mixture of short verses with long, 
 is a curious contrast to the baldness and monotony of his 
 blank verse : it surprises us as when an indifferent walker 
 proves a light and graceful runner. There is nothing in 
 any of his plays to suggest a possibility of such as the fol- 
 lowing : — 
 
 " Ah, what is love ? It is a pretty thing, 
 As sweet unto a shepherd as a king ; 
 
 And sweeter too. 
 For kings have cares that wait upon a crown, 
 And cares can make the sweetest love to frown : 
 
 Ah then, ah then. 
 If country loves such sweet desires do gain. 
 What lady would not love a shepherd swain ? 
 
 His flocks are folded, he comes home at night, 
 As merry as a king in his delight ; 
 
 And merrier too. 
 For kings bethink them what the state require, 
 Where shepherds careless carol by the fire : 
 
 Ah then, ah then. 
 If country loves such sweet desires do gain, 
 What lady would not love a shepherd swain " ? 
 
 In more regular and even measures, Greene is compara- 
 tively stiff and restrained. One of his longest poems, 
 
GEORGE PEELE. 319 
 
 which contains passages equal to his best, is printed in 
 the ' Phoenix Nest,' with the title " A most Rare and Ex- 
 cellent Dream, learnedly set down by a worthy gentleman, 
 a brave scholar, and M. of Arts in both universities." It 
 has not been identified as Greene's by Mr Dyce or Mr 
 Bell ; but the title, taken in conjunction with the style, may 
 be considered conclusive evidence. The measure is the 
 seven-line stave of Troilus verse. 
 
 IV. — George Peele (1558-1598). 
 
 Peele was a few years older than either Marlowe or 
 Greene, and had published a rhymed play before Marlowe 
 began to write, but we place him after these two, because 
 he probably followed them as a writer for the public stage. 
 He was a gentleman by birth, took the degree of M.A. at 
 Oxford (Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke College) in 1579, 
 and possessed some land in right of his wife : but, eschew- 
 ing the steady professions, he went up to London in 1581, 
 and soon became known as one of the authors whose living 
 was gained by their wits. He was a conspicuous figure in 
 the same dissipated circle as Marlowe and Greene : and 
 acquired such notoriety as a profligate wit that a body of 
 'Merry Conceited Jests '^ was fathered upon him — ap- 
 parently without much mistake of paternity. 
 
 The plays attributed to Peele in Mr Dyce's edition are 
 "The Arraignment of Paris " (1584, a rhymed play, written 
 for private representation before the Queen by the children 
 of the Chapel) ; " The Chronicle History of Edward I." 
 (1593); "The Battle of Alcazar" (1594); "The Old 
 Wives' Tales " (1595, supposed to be the basis of Milton's 
 " Comus") ; " David and Bethsabe " (i 599, the best of Peek's 
 Plays); "Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes " (1599). He was 
 frequently employed to devise pageants, and several of 
 these have been preserved. He wrote also a poem in 
 heroic couplets, "The Tale of Troy," and various mis- 
 
 ' "]est" meamDg practical joie. 
 
320 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 cellaneous poems. His extant works are not so numerous 
 as Greene's ; and he would seem to have been a much less 
 productive writer. His literary career was twice as long as 
 Greene's. In the ' Jests ' we are told that " George was 
 of the poetical disposition, never to write so long as his 
 money lasted : " and if we may trust that authority, he had 
 many madcap and unscrupulous ways of " raising the wind," 
 from nominal borrowing to downright cozenagq. 
 
 Peele was a man of softer and subtler make than Greene : 
 a handsome person with a thin womanish voice ; of light 
 and nimble fancy, and smooth ingenious execution : with- 
 out the faintest desire to use honest means in procuring a 
 livelihood. Poor Greene was not very scrupulous, but he 
 thought it necessary to justify his keeping company with 
 blackguards ; he worked hard, advocated high morality, 
 and suffered occasional visitations of conscience. Peele's 
 choice of subjects does not betray any stifled morality in 
 him. The most marked hint of the writer's personality 
 appears in the ingenuity of his compliments direct and in- 
 direct to his audience. The denouement of "The Arraign- 
 ment of Paris " is an audacious compliment to Elizabeth. 
 The idea is that the judgment of Paris is called in question, 
 as being unjust and partial ; Paris is arraigned before a 
 council of the gods ; the matter is referred to the arbitration 
 of Diana ; and she, to keep the peace of Olympus, awards 
 the apple to Elizabeth, a peerless nymph, aparagon, as stately 
 as Juno, as wise as Minerva, as lovely as Venus, and as 
 chaste as Diana herself.^ His two chronicle histories had 
 a large adventitious interest for the time, as gratifying the 
 prevailing English hatred of Spain and Popery. Elinor, 
 the Spanish queen of Edward I., is represented as a monster 
 of cruelty and pride : and Stukely, the hero of the " Battle 
 of Alcazor," is a renegade Englishman, commissioned by 
 the Pope to raise a rebellion in Ireland. Most Elizabethan 
 
 1 Udall paid a similar compliment to Anne Boleyn in 1532, representing 
 that the golden apple was not worthy of her ; and a Mr Pownd repeated it 
 for the gratification of Elizabeth in 1566 ; but these did not carry it to the 
 extent of making it the aim of an entire play. 
 
GEORGE PEELE. 32 I 
 
 dramatists paid incidental compliments to Elizabeth and to 
 their country : Peele seems to have deliberately aimed at 
 securing patronage by making whole plays a bolus of flat- 
 tery. Spenser's ' Faery Queen ' and Lyly's " Midas " as well 
 as his " Endymion," were also designed to flatter Elizabeth ; 
 but Spenser and Lyly used a decorous veil of allegory. 
 
 It pleased the erratic Nash to commend Peele in 1587 
 " as the chief supporter of pleasance now living, the Atlas 
 of poetry, and primus verhorum artifex" — " chief engineer 
 of phrases." This was in opposition to Marlowe. Posterity 
 has certainly reversed this haphazard judgment as regards 
 the general power of the rival poets : it is universally 
 allowed that " Marlowe had a far more powerful intellect 
 than Peele, and a far deeper insight into the human heart " 
 — ^was, in short, a poet of immeasurably higher order. On 
 the matter of skill in blank verse, Campbell and Mr Payne 
 Collier are at variance. Campbell spoke strongly in favour 
 of Peele : " There is no such sweetness of versification and 
 imagery to be found in our blank verse anterior to Shakes- 
 peare." Mr Collier ascribes this honour to Marlowe, 
 pointing out the fact that Peele did not write a complete 
 play in blank verse till Marlowe had set the example, 
 and declaring his best blank verse to be for the most part 
 monotonous. Mr Collier is too truculent on this point of 
 versification. The general strain of the two poets is so 
 very different, that one cannot decide the question by 
 counting their pauses and their trochaic and monosyllabic 
 endings. The versification of "David and Bethsabe" is 
 undoubtedly sweet. Blank verse would not have been 
 suitable for " The Arraignment of Paris," a piece moving 
 with almost pantomimic gaiety. Peele acted with judgment 
 in reserving blank verse for the formal orations of Paris and 
 Diana. 
 
 The occasional ranting in " Edward I.," and the prevailmg 
 extravagance of the " Battle of Alcazar," are remarkable as 
 coming from the same pen as " The Arraignment of Paris " 
 and " David and Bethsabe." I can hardly believe that the 
 bombast of Muly Mahamet — whom even more than Tam- 
 
 X 
 
322 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 burlaine Shakespeare had in his eye in the burlesque of. 
 Pistol — was a serious expression according to the author's- 
 notions of art : we reconcile it with Peek's character only 
 by supposing it to have been an audacious experiment in 
 rivalry of the heroics of Tamburlaine. It seems to have- 
 succeeded. The incident burlesqued in "Feed and grow 
 fat, my fair Calipolis," was specially famous. The Moor, 
 Muly Mahamet, with his wife Calipolis and his son, are 
 fleeing before the army of Abdelmelec, when Calipolis 
 grows faint from hunger. Muly rushes off the stage shout- 
 ing — " Famine shall pine to death, and thou shalt live ; " and 
 re-enters with a piece of flesh upon his sword — 
 
 " Hold thee, Calipolis, feed, and faint no more ; 
 This flesh I forced from a lioness, 
 Meat of a princess, for a princess meet : 
 
 Feed, then, and faint not, fair Calipolis ; 
 For rather than fierce famine shall prevail 
 To gnaw thy entrails with her thorny teeth, 
 The conquering lioness shall attend on thee. 
 
 Jove's stately bird with wide-commanding wings 
 Shall hover still about thy princely head, 
 And beat down fowl by shoals into thy lap ; 
 Feed, then, and faint not, fair Calipolis." 
 
 This incident struck the popular fancy very much like Tam- 
 burlaine's entrance in a car of gold drawn by two kings 
 with bits in their mouths ; and offered a bright mark for 
 Shakespeare's ridicule. Pistol's strong language about the 
 Furies, Pluto's damned lake, Erebus, and tortures vile also, 
 seems to be founded on passages in the same play. In the 
 explanation of the dumb-show before Act I. we find the 
 following : — 
 
 "Till Nemesis, high mistress of revenge. 
 That with her scourge keeps all the world in awe. 
 With thundering drum awakes the God of War, 
 And calls the Furies from Avernus' crags. 
 To range, and rage, and vengeance to inflict. 
 Vengeance on this accursed Moor for sin." 
 
GEORGE PEELE. 323 
 
 In the dumb-show before Act II. Nemesis again uses her 
 drum, and — 
 
 '"Larums aloud into Alecto's ears, 
 And with her thundering wakes whereas they lie 
 In cave as dark as hell and beds of steel, 
 The Furies, just imps of dire revenge." 
 
 In Act I. Muly Mahamet Seth exclaims — 
 
 " Sheath not your swords, soldiers of Amurath, 
 Sheath not your swords, you Moors of Barbary, 
 That fight in right of your anointed king, 
 But follow to the gates of death and hell, 
 Pale death and hell, to entertain his soul ; 
 Follow, I say, to burning Phlegethon, 
 This traitor-tyrant and his companies.'' 
 
 Muly Mahamet himself ends off Act IV. with an apos- 
 trophe to the Furies, and a mad frenzy of imprecation : — 
 
 "You bastards of the Night and Erebus, 
 Fiends, Furies, hags that fight in beds of steel, 
 Range through this army with your iron whips. 
 
 And lastly for revenge, for deep revenge, 
 Whereof thou goddess and deviser art. 
 Damned let him be, damned, and condemned to bear 
 All torments, tortures, plagues, and pains of hell." 
 
 We see in these passages where Pistol may have caught 
 his trick of repeating emphatic words. The facetious Peele 
 in all likelihood piled up these agonies for popular effect 
 with hardly less sense of their ludicrous extravagance than 
 Shakespeare himself. 
 
 In strange contrast to these mad explosions are the rich 
 fancy and tender feeling of " David and Bethsabe " and the 
 delicate airy wit of " The Arraignment of Paris." Camp- 
 bell has quoted the finest passage in "David and Bethsabe," 
 but the following is not much inferior. It is David's excla- 
 mation at the sight of Bethsabe approaching in obedience 
 to his summons : — 
 
324 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 " Now comes my lover tripping like the roe, 
 And brings my longings tangled in her hair. 
 To joy her love I'll build a kingly bower. 
 Seated in hearing of a hundred streams, 
 That for their homage to her sovereign looks. 
 Shall, as the serpents fold into their nests 
 In oblique turnings, wind their nimble waves 
 About the circles of her curious walks ; 
 And with their murmur summon easeful sleep 
 To lay his golden sceptre on her brows." 
 
 The following is also a sweet picture, although, perhaps, 
 the sweetness is too surfeiting : — 
 
 " The time of year is pleasant for your grace, 
 And gladsome summer in her shady robes 
 Crowned with roses and with painted flowers. 
 With all her nymphs shall entertain my lord, 
 That, from the thicket of my verdant groves, 
 Will sprinkle honey-dews about his breast. 
 And cast sweet balm upon his kingly head." 
 
 The sprightly art of the " Arraignment " would seem but 
 stale in a quotation. The most elaborate joke in it seems 
 intended to ridicule the amorous pining of Spenser's ' Shep- 
 herd's Calendar.' Colin is introduced bewailing the cruelty 
 of Love, and commiserated by his friends Hobinol, Diggon, 
 and Thenot : shortly afterwards his hearse is brought in, 
 and shepherds sing welladay over his untimely death. His 
 sweetheart Thestylis woos and is rejected by a "fouL 
 crooked churl." Our knowledge of the personal jealousies 
 and friendships of the period is imperfect and perplexing ; 
 but it is probable that the " Palin " whom Spenser mentions 
 in Colin Clout as " envying at his rustic quill " was George 
 Peele, and that this was the expression of the envy. 
 
 V. — Thomas Nash (1558-1600?). 
 
 Marlowe's unfinished tragedyof "Dido" was completed by 
 Thomas Nash ; and though this clever writer is memorable 
 
THOMAS NASH. 325 
 
 chiefly as a prose satirist, yet his name will always be re- 
 membered most naturally in connection with his poetical 
 associates, Greene, Marlowe, Lodge, and Peele. Nash was 
 educated at Cambridge, which he seems to have left in some 
 disgrace, and his first essay in print was the dashing critical 
 preface to Greene's " Menaphon " in 1587. ^ clever harum- 
 scarum fellow, with a quick sense of the ludicrous, and an 
 unsparing tongue, he found admirable scope for his powers 
 in replying to the Martin Marprelate tracts, which he did 
 in some four or five different pamphlets in and about the 
 year 1589. In the same year he opened up a vein of gene- 
 ral prose satire in his ' Anatomy of Absurdity,' a general 
 attack on whatever struck him as ridiculous in contempor- 
 ary literature and manners — ^ranging consequently within a 
 wide circle. In 1592 he continued his exercitations in this 
 vein with ' Pierce Penniless, his Supplication to the Devil.' 
 But meantime he had become involved in a quarrel with 
 Gabriel Harvey, the friend of Spenser, and his brothers, of 
 which a full account is given in D'Israeli's ' Quarrels of 
 Authors.' The original cause of Nash's ire seems to have 
 been the offensive conceit of Richard Harvey, who in the 
 Marprelate controversy had tried " to play Jack of both 
 sides," sneering at all parties to the dispute, and had re- 
 peated the offence in a subsequent publication, in which he 
 went the length of terming all poets and writers about 
 London " piperly make-plays and make-baits." Nash was 
 thoroughly in his element in taking up such a taunt. 
 Throughout the various pamphlets of the celebrated logo- 
 machy, he seems never to lose for a moment his feeling of 
 complete and easy mastery over his opponent, writing al- 
 ways with good-humoured assurance of victory, and with 
 the unsparing derision of one who fears no retort. In the 
 opening of his ' Strange News,' a reply to Harvey's attack 
 on the deceased Greene, he bids the Lord have mercy on 
 poor Gabriel, for he is fallen into hands that will plague 
 him. Harvey's poetical pretensions, and, above all, his 
 hexameters, are ridiculed in this pamphlet with wonderful 
 spirit and direct freshness and copiousness of language. 
 
326 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 It confirms Nash's protestations that the quarrel was none 
 of his seeking, to find him in his ' Christ's Tears over Jeru- 
 salem,' a religious and moral performance strangely differ- 
 ent from the writer's previous effusions, making certain 
 overtures towards reconciliation. These overtures being 
 rejected, he returned with redoubled incisiveness to his 
 former ways of warfare, which continued till the mouths of 
 the antagonists were shut by the intervention of the scan- 
 dalised Government. 
 
 Nash was imprisoned in 1597 for his share in a play 
 called the " Isle of Dogs," which has not been preserved. 
 " Summer's Last Will and Testament " is the only play of 
 his that has come down to us. It is of the nature of a 
 Masque, in which the seasons are the prominent figures ; 
 was written for representation on the private stage of some 
 nobleman, whose name is unknown, and was acted in 1592, 
 though not published till 1600. On the whole it is a some- 
 what dull production, as the author himself seems to have 
 felt. Frantic efforts are made to say witty and pretty things 
 about the seasons, and to deliver striking saws about mis- 
 cellaneous objects, dogs and drunkards, bookish theorists, 
 and misanthropists. The best part of it is the song quoted 
 in Palgrave's Treasury. Nash has no marked dramatic 
 talent. His forte lay in what Mr Collier calls " humorous 
 objurgation : " he throws himself into that vein with a sad 
 want of continence, but with unflagging vivacity, and un- 
 failing copiousness both of words and of conceptions. He 
 tried also a tale — " Jack Wilton " — but did not succeed : he 
 never is anything except when in the full swing of harum- 
 scarum raillery. 
 
 VI.— Thomas Kyd. (?) 
 
 The author of " Jeronimo" (produced.in 1588) and its 
 continuation " The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is mad 
 again," belongs to the " robustious " school of rampant hero- 
 ism. Ben Jonson's calling him the " sportive Kyd," is a 
 joke. Kyd, however, possesses merits and a character of 
 
THOMAS KYD. 327 
 
 his own. In direct and vivid energy of language, in power- 
 ful antithesis of character, and in skilful and effective con- 
 struction of plot, in the chief qualities that make a good 
 acting play, " The Spanish Tragedy " will bear comparison 
 with the best work of any of Shakespeare's predecessors. 
 That it passed through more editions than perhaps any play 
 of the Elizabethan age is not at all surprising ; it offered 
 many points for ridicule to the wits of the time, but its un- 
 flagging interest and strong emotions of pity and suspense 
 went straight to the popular heart. 
 
 The prominence of " Hieronimo " in the public mind is 
 shown by the mention made of it in Jonson's " Cynthia's 
 Revels," the " Return from Parnassus," Thomas May's 
 " Heir,'' and other writings of the time. A less obtrusive 
 evidence — but more complimentary to Kyd if it arose from 
 choice and not from necessity — is the fact of Shakespeare's 
 familiarity with the play, as proved by numerous echoes and 
 adaptations of its phraseology and its situations. 
 
 One remarkable point in the plot of this double play is 
 the breadth and scope of the action. Lorenzo, an anti- 
 type of lago, plans the murder of his brother-in-law Andrea, 
 and the dishonour of his sister Belimperia. Jeronimo and 
 his son Horatio, the friend of Andrea, become aware of the 
 plot, and write to Andrea warning him of his danger. Were 
 the villain at this point to be exposed and the intended vic- 
 tim preserved for a happy life, or were all the principal per- 
 sonages to perish tragically, the action of the play would 
 stUl be of ordinary breadth. But this is only half of the 
 action of the First Part of Jeronimo. Jeronimo's letter 
 never reaches Andrea, and Lorenzo's plot miscarries by an 
 ingeniously conceived accident ; yet, after all, the man 
 whose assassination was arranged, is dishonourably killed in 
 battle by the myrmidons of Balthazar, the young prince of 
 Portugal, and the First Part ends with Andrea's ghost be- 
 queathing to Horatio the duty of revenge. In the Second 
 Part, a marriage is contrived between Balthazar, who has 
 been taken prisoner, and Belimperia the widow of Andrea. 
 •She loathes him and falls in love with Horatio. Horatio, 
 
328 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARf. 
 
 the appointed revenger of Andrea's death, is hanged in his 
 father's garden by Lorenzo and Balthazar. This takes 
 place in the first two Acts. The remaining three are occu- 
 pied with Hieronimo's madness at the loss of his only son, 
 partly real, partly feigned. Like Hamlet, he is not at first 
 certain of the murderers, and even when he discovers them 
 indubitably, he bides his time. At last he hits upon the 
 scheme of representing a play before the Court, and pro- 
 curing that the actors be Lorenzo, Balthazar, Belimperia, and 
 himself. They kill in earnest where they should kill but in 
 jest : Belimperia stabs Balthazar, whose servants had killed 
 her husband, and then stabs herself; Hieronimo stabs 
 Lorenzo, the murderer of his son, then makes a speech 
 disclosing to the horrified Court the " realism " of the play, 
 and hangs himself 
 
 VII. — Anthony Munday (1553-162-?). 
 
 Munday is known to have been employed in fourteen 
 plays between 1597 and 1603, and he was probably a con- 
 stant writer for the stage for many years before that date. 
 AVhen quite a youth he seems to have been seized with a 
 passion for travel, and to have run away from his father's 
 with as much money as he could scrape together, and 
 crossed the Channel strange countries for to see. He and 
 his companion were robbed on their way through France, 
 and after some adventures were persuaded to join the 
 English Seminary in Rome. After a time he made his way 
 back to England, and published an account of his experi- 
 ences under the title ' The English Roman Life,' " discours- 
 ing the lives of such Englishmen as by secret escape leave 
 their own country to live in Rome under the servile yoke of 
 the Pope's government." This was in 1582, and he would 
 seem to have now made his living by translating from 
 French and Italian, and composing rhymed plays. A 
 rhymed play of his — " Fidele and Fortunatus," was entered 
 on the Stationers' Books ini 5 84. The " Downfal of Robert 
 Earl of Huntingdon," which was published in 1601, is sup- 
 
HENRY CHETTLE. 329 
 
 posed to have been originally and chiefly the work of Mun- 
 day, modified by Chettle. Later in life, he seems to have 
 abandoned the stage for the counter : he devised and wrote 
 the Lord Mayor's pageant in 1605, entitling it — " The 
 Triumphs of Reunited Britannia," and is described on the 
 title-page as "citizen and draper." He was several times 
 employed after this to write these pageants, and was driven 
 to complain of the difficulty of finding new subjects. The 
 golden fleece being the drapers' coat of arms, he twice made 
 use of the voyage of the Argo : and when the Mayor hap- 
 pened to be a fishmonger, he treated the citizens to " Chry- 
 sanaleia, or the Golden Fishing," to signify the close alliance 
 between the Fishmongers and the Goldsmiths. 
 
 There is nothing in Munday's compositions above the 
 tamest mediocrity, and he is worth mentioning only as a 
 specimen of the literary journeyman of the time. 
 
 VIIL — Henry Chettle (1563-160-?). 
 
 Chettle, the editor of Greene's posthumous " Groatsworth of 
 Wit,"which"contained the memorable attack on Shakespeare, 
 was very much superior to Munday. He seems to have been 
 originally a printer or stationer (he subscribes himself " sta- 
 tioner " in a note of acknowledgment to Henslowe in 1598), 
 and probably took to writing plays about the same time as 
 Marlowe. Between 1597 and 1 603, during which time he was 
 often in distress from want of money, his name is connected 
 with the production of forty-seven plays, of sixteen of which 
 he was sole author. Of his sixteen original plays, only one 
 survives, " Hoffinan, or a Revenge for a Father," a tragedy, 
 written probably about 1602, to compete with Shakespeare's 
 " Hamlet," then in course of successful performance at the 
 Globe Theatre. Of the thirty-one plays that he had a share 
 in, all but three are lost— " Patient Grissell" (Chettle, 
 Dekker, and Haughton), "Robin Hood" (Chettle and 
 Munday), " Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green " (Chettle and 
 Day). In 1607, Dekker speaks of Chettle as being in the 
 
330 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 Elysian fields, and gives the only record we have of his per- 
 sonal appearance — namely, that he was a fat man. 
 
 " Hoffman " is a horrid inflated thing, absurd and bloody. 
 The hero in revenging his father certainly does not suffer 
 from the weakness of irresolution. Fortune throws an 
 opportunity in his way, and he seizes it pitilessly, and 
 makes it beget other opportunities, till a long list of enemies, 
 their relatives, and the stranger within their gates, perish by 
 poison or steel. His mission of slaughter is very nearly 
 fulfilled when he has the weakness to fall in love with the 
 Duchess of Luneberg, one of his intended victims, who 
 pretends to listen to his addresses, and betrays him to his 
 father's death by a red-hot crown of iron. It is remarkable 
 that Chettle, like so many other of the Elizabethan poets, 
 no matter how inflated he is in expressing vehement pas- 
 sions of rage, hatred, and revenge, displays considerable 
 felicity in the expression of the tender feelings. One might 
 apply to the poets of that age two lines used by old Janicolo 
 in " Patient Grissell "— 
 
 " Indeed, my child, men's eyes do nowadays 
 Quickly take fire at the least spark of beauty." 
 
 The beginning of the Third Act of " Hoffman " is very 
 beautiful. It is a moonlight scene between the runaways 
 Lodowick and Lucibella, imitated apparently from the 
 " Merchant of Venice." They have walked tiU they are 
 weary, the moon strewing silver on their path, and weeping 
 a gentle dew on the flower-spotted earth. The flowers are 
 beguiled by the light of Lucibella's eyes to open their 
 petals "as when they entertain the lord of May." They 
 rest on a bank of violets, and talk themselves asleep. 
 
 "Loci. O Love's sweet touch ! with what a heavenly charm 
 Do your soft fingers my war-thoughts disarm ! 
 Prussia had reason to attempt my life, 
 Enchanted by the magic of thy looks 
 That cast a lustre on the blushing stars. 
 Pardon, chaste Queen of Beauty ! make me proud, 
 To rest my toiled head on your tender knee ! 
 
HENRY CHETTLE. 331 
 
 My chin with sleep is to my bosom bowed ; 
 
 Fair, if you please, a little rest with me ! 
 
 [He reclines his head upon her lap. 
 Luci. No, I'll be sentinel ; I'll watch for fear 
 
 Of venomous worms or wolves, or wolvish thieves. 
 
 My hand shall fan your eyes, like the filmed wing 
 
 Of drowsy Morpheus : and my voice shall sing 
 
 In a low compass for a lullaby. 
 Lod. I thank you ! I am drowsy ; sing, I pray. 
 
 Or sleep ; do what you please ; I'm heavy, I ! 
 
 Good night to all our care ! Oh ! I am blest 
 
 By this soft pillow, where my head doth rest ! 
 
 [LoDOWiCK sleeps. 
 Luci. In sooth, I'm sleepy too ; I cannot sing : 
 
 My heart is troubled with some heavy thing. 
 
 Rest on these violets, whilst I prepare 
 
 In thy soft slumber to receive a share ! 
 
 Blush not, chaste Moon, to see a virgin lie 
 
 So near a prince ! 'tis no immodesty ; 
 
 For when the thoughts are pure, no time nor place 
 
 Have power to work fair chastity's disgrace. 
 
 Lod'wick, I clasp thee thus ! so, arm clip arm ; 
 
 Let sorrow fold them that wish true love's harm ! 
 
 \She sleeps, embracing Lodowick." 
 
 The finest lines in the play are the exclamation of Matthias 
 when he believes that he has killed Lucibella unjustly, and 
 finds that she still breathes — 
 
 " There's life in Lucibella, for I feel 
 A breat^ more odoriferous than balm 
 Thrill through the coral portals of her lips." 
 
 The beautiful song in " Patient Grissell," quoted in Pal- 
 grave's Treasury under the title of " The Happy Heart," is 
 in all probability the work of Dekker. But Chettle also had 
 a certain gift of song. He appended to his " Mourning 
 Garment, in memory of the death of Elizabeth," a "Shep- 
 herd's Spring Song," in celebration of the accession of 
 James. Such raptures can hardly be other than feigned ; 
 still, there are touches of beauty in the song. 
 
332 DRAMATISTS BEFORE SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 " Thenot and Chloris, red-lipped Driope, 
 
 Shepherds, nymphs, swains, all that delight in field, 
 Living by harmless thrift, your fat herds yield, 
 Why slack ye now your loved company ? 
 Up sluggards, learn, the lark doth mounted sing 
 His cheerful carols, to salute our king. 
 
 The mavis, blackbird, and the little wren, 
 The nightingale upon the hawthorn brier. 
 And all the wing'd musicians in a quire 
 
 Do with their notes rebuke dull lazy men. 
 Up, shepherds, up, your sloth breeds all your shames ; 
 You sleep like beasts, while birds salute K. James. 
 
 The gray-eyed morning with a blustering cheek. 
 Like England's royal rose mixt red and white. 
 Summons all eyes to pleasure and delight : 
 
 Behold the evening's dews do upward reek, 
 Drawn by the sun, which now doth gild the sky 
 With its light-giving and world-cheering eye. 
 
 Oh, that's well done ! I see your cause of stay 
 Was to adorn your temples with fresh flowers ; 
 And gather beauty to bedeck your bowers 
 
 That they may seem the cabinets of May. 
 
 Honour this time, sweetest of all sweet springs. 
 That so much good, so many pleasures brings." 
 
333 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 I. — His Life and Character. 
 
 Steevens, Hallam, and Dyce are unreasonably sceptical and 
 depressing in their summary of "all that is known with 
 any degree of certainty concerning Shakespeare." It is our 
 own fault if we are disappointed and perplexed by what 
 antiquarians have discovered, and if we refuse to interpret 
 facts, because they do not illustrate Shakespeare's character 
 in the precise way that we desire. A good deal more is 
 known concerning Shakespeare than that " he was bom 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." The industry of antiquarians has brought to 
 light many significant facts concerning the poet's family; 
 concerning the public institutions and customs at Stratford 
 during his boyhood ; and concerning the life of a player in 
 London when Shakespeare belonged to the profession. To 
 the same industry we are indebted for some suggestive par- 
 ticulars more directly personal : we know some facts about 
 his marriage, his wife, and his children ; we have memorials 
 of the effect that his poems and plays produced upon his 
 contemporaries ; we know whether he returned to Stratford 
 poor or rich, from necessity or from choice, a broken-down 
 Bohemian or a prosperous and respected townsman ; and 
 
334 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 we know tlfat after his death and burial, a bust was erected 
 to his memory in the church of his native town, and that 
 this bust still exists to show what sort of man he was in 
 outward appearance. 
 
 Shakespeare died on the 23d of April 1616, and the tra- 
 dition is that he died on his birthday.^ The register of his 
 baptism is consistent with this : he was baptised on the 
 26th of April 1564. But the exact day of Shakespeare's 
 birth is not worth discussing : much more important is it to 
 know what were the surroundings of his childhood, what 
 was his father's business, and the probable condition of his 
 father's household. When the future "myriad-minded" 
 dramatist came into the world, his father's household seems 
 to have been radiant with the good-humour of prosperous 
 industry and enterprise. The son of a substantial farmer 
 at Snitterfield, three or four miles from Stratford, John 
 Shakespeare had some thirteen years before opened a shop 
 in Henley Street, Stratford. What he sold in this shop has 
 been much disputed : he certainly sold gloves, and he pro- 
 bably sold also meat, wool, and barley. It is not uncom- 
 mon now for farmers' sons in the neighbourhood of towns to 
 set up as corn-merchants or butchers ; and there is nothing 
 improbable in supposing that in those days, when there was 
 less trade and less division of labour, John Shakespeare 
 may have retailed farm produce to the townspeople of 
 Stratford, selling them barley, mutton, wool, and sheepskin 
 gloves. But whatever he sold, the important fact is that he 
 had prospered. Three years after he had settled in Strat- 
 ford he had been able to buy two small copyhold properties. 
 Soon after (probably in 1557) he had married Mary Arden 
 of Wilmecote, daughter of a substantial yeoman or pro- 
 prietor-farmer in the neighbourhood, and heiress to a small 
 farm called Ashbies. He had mixed with credit in the 
 public affairs of the town : he had been appointed an ale- 
 taster and elected a burgess; and before 1564 had filled in 
 
 1 Mr Bolton Coraey contests this on the ground that Shakespeare is said 
 by the monument to have died in his S3d year. But if he had completed 
 his S2d year, he might have been said to be in his 53d. 
 
HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 335 
 
 succession the offices of constable, affeeror (assessor of 
 fines), and chamberlain. 
 
 Such were the circumstances that Shakespeare was born 
 into. Two little sisters, born before him, had died in in- 
 fancy; another brother, named Gilbert, was baptised on 
 October 13, 1566 ; a sister, named Joan, on April 15, 1569; 
 another sister, named Anna (who died in infancy), on Sep- 
 tember 28, 1571. During this time John Shakespeare con- 
 tinued to prosper and rise in the esteem of the corporation. 
 When little William was seven years old, his father attained 
 the summit of municipal dignity ; being on September 5, 
 15 7 1, elected chief alderman for the ensuing year. 
 
 Our next question is — What were the provisions for 
 school education in Stratford ? A free school had been re- 
 stored to the town in the reign of Edward VI., and to this 
 in all probability Shakespeare was sent at an early age. 
 Holofernes, the pedantic schoolmaster in " Love's Labour 
 Lost," is said to teach boys the horn-book at the charge- 
 house on the top of the hill, charge-house meaning free- 
 school;^ and Shakespeare's education at the free-school 
 probably began with the alphabet.' At any rate, he was 
 probably taught the rudiments of Latin at the free-school, 
 receiving very much the sort of education given to a clever 
 boy at a parish school in the north of Scotland. He 
 learned enough to enter into the humour of Sir Hugh 
 Evans's lesson to Master William Page ; to smell Costard's 
 false Latin ; and to put jocularly into the mouth of Holo- 
 fernes the first line of the eclogues of Mantuanus the Car- 
 melite — lines then as familiar to schoolboys as the first lines 
 of Virgil's eclogues are now. Such, so far as his plays 
 afford any warrant, was the extent of Shakespeare's Latin 
 knowledge. Greek was not then taught in these schools. 
 Ben Jonson's saying that he knew small Latin and less 
 Greek, is obviously an epigrammatic way of saying that he 
 knew no Greek at all. 
 
 1 CAarge-house, because it did not charge fees? Or because it was 
 maintained at the public charge ? In the absence of certain knowledge, 
 one would conjecture that the charge-house was a primary school to the 
 free grammar-school. 
 
336 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 Take Shakespeare next at a point where his schoolboy- 
 days are over. How long did he continue at school? 
 There is a tradition that he was withdrawn from school 
 earlier than he might otherwise have been by the narrow 
 circumstances of his father. So far this is substantiated by 
 the ascertained fact that in 1578, when Shakespeare was 
 fourteen years old, his father mortgaged the estate at 
 Ashbies : from that date onwards there are unmistakable 
 evidences of poverty gaining upon John Shakespeare's re- 
 sources. Under such stress of circumstances nothing 
 could be more natural than to withdraw the eldest boy 
 from school to assist in the miscellaneous business of 
 butchering, wool-selling, glove-making, and farming. There 
 is nothing more unlikely, more incongruous, or more dero- 
 gatory in Shakespeare's helping to kill a sheep, or make a 
 glove, or herd cows in his boyhood, than in Bums's casting 
 peats, pulling turnips, or gauging beer-barrels in his man- 
 hood. Such occupations gave strength to their minds as 
 well as to their bodies : it brought home to them the earn- 
 estness of the struggle for existence, and widened and 
 deepened their sympathies with the mass of their fellow- 
 men. 
 
 To account for Shakespeare's knowledge of legal terms, 
 Malone conjectured that after leaving school he was articled 
 to an attorney in Stratford. But Shakespeare needed no 
 experience of an attorney's office to awaken his interest in 
 legal terms. He had motive enough without going beyond 
 his father's household. There are no family secrets from 
 the children of the poor. Shakespeare doubtless heard the 
 painful deliberations of his once prosperous parents, knew 
 all their difficulties, and perused the mortgage bond with a 
 boy's grave curiosity and awe. Then, and more than once 
 again, before he established himself and his parents in as- 
 sured comfort, he received the sharpest of stimulants to 
 make out the exact meaning of legal terms. 
 
 This, however, is the serious side of our poet's youth. It 
 doubtless had a brighter side. Poverty could not repress 
 such energy, ebullient spirits, and fresh open senses. We 
 
HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 337 
 
 may imagine the boy often running cheerfully between the 
 shop in the town and the farm in the country : sticking a 
 cowslip in his breast, and looking down at its cinque spots ; 
 whistling after the birds ; rolling in the sun upon a bank of 
 wild thyme ; reading and spouting Sir Bevis of Southampton 
 or Sir Guy of Warwick, and building, perhaps, many a boy- 
 ish castle in the air. He was doubtless popular among his 
 father's and his grandfather's ploughmen and shepherds : a 
 leading spirit in the antics on Plough-Monday and at the 
 Feast of Sheep-shearing. We may imagine him a favourite 
 with some garrulous old repository of "merry tales of errant 
 knights, queens, lovers, lords, ladies, giants, dwarfs, thieves, 
 cheaters, witches, fairies, gobUns, friars, &c.," which Burton 
 says were among the ordinary recreations of winter : we 
 may imagine the boy listening gratefully to such tales while 
 the old gossip is — 
 
 " Sitting in a corner turning crabs, 
 Or coughing o'er a warmed pot of ale." 
 
 If we imagine him thus employed in his boyhood, we 
 can understand with what delight he reverted to such scenes 
 amidst the excitement and nerve-shattering racket of an 
 actor's, life in London : we can enter with more vivid sym- 
 pathy into his songs about spring freshness and simple 
 winter comforts when they take us^back with him from the 
 hot exhaustion of the playhouse to the brightness of his 
 youth in Stratford. 
 
 But while we imagine Shakespeare engaging with high 
 spirits in every sort of game and glee, one form of recreation 
 in particular demands our attention as having probably 
 exercised a powerful influence on his future career. This 
 was the representation of plays in Stratford. We know 
 from the records of the corporation of Stratford that it was 
 visited by various companies of players, the Queen's Com- 
 pany, the servants of Lord Worcester, of Lord Leicester, of 
 Lord Warwick, and of other noblemen. There was a per- 
 formance by such a company in the Guildhall when John 
 Shakespeare was baiUfif : and some of the actors were pro- 
 
 Y 
 
338 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 bably entertained in his house, and gazed at with wonder 
 by his Httle son, then a child of five years. From his sixth 
 year onwards, Shakespeare had thus frequent opportunities 
 of witnessing plays. By the time he was two-and-twenty, 
 he may have seen, as Mr Dyce says, " the best dramatic 
 productions, such as they were, represented by the best 
 actors then alive." Further, our knowledge of the customs 
 of the country enables us to conjecture with reasonable pro- 
 bability that Shakespeare was more than a spectator of play- 
 acting. Apart from the well-known tendency of schoolboys 
 in a country town to imitate the latest sensation in their 
 play-ground, we know that throughout England in Shakes- 
 peare's youth dramatic pageants of various kinds, from 
 " storial shows " to morris-dancing, were regular features in 
 the amusements of the established festivals — Twelfth-Night, 
 Shrove-Tuesday, Hock-Tuesday, May-day, Whitsuntide, &c. 
 In Stratford, Whitsuntide seems to have been the favourite 
 season for these exhibitions : as Hock-Tuesday was the 
 usual time for the annual plays of the men of Coventry. In 
 the " Winter's Tale," Perdita is made to say — 
 
 " Methinks I play as I have seen them do 
 In IVhiisun' Pastorals''' 
 
 And in the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," Julia, disguised as 
 a page, feigns that — 
 
 " At Pentecost, 
 When all our pageants of delight were played, 
 Our youth got me to play the woman's part." 
 
 The exhibition of the Nine Worthies in " Love's Labour 
 Lost" and the " tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and 
 his love Thisbe " in " Midsummer Night's Dream," were in 
 all likelihood caricatures of the sort of thing that young 
 Shakespeare actually saw in Stratford, and actually took 
 part in. In these annual midsummer pageants of delight 
 doubtless were included many varieties of performance — 
 from the more ambitious efforts of the schoolmaster to the 
 humble endeavours of hard-handed men that had never 
 
HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 339 
 
 laboured in their minds before, and toiled their unbreathed 
 memories for the first time. We may imagine Shakespeare, 
 while still a schoolboy, with his small features and elegant 
 shape, chosen to " play the woman's part," and instructed 
 in such undertakings as — 
 
 " Ariadne passioning 
 For Theseus' perjury and unjust flight." 
 
 We may imagine him at a somewhat later stage writing a 
 play for a party of his boon-companions, and organising of 
 an evening in the woods about Stratford some such rude 
 rehearsals as Peter Quince superintended " in the palace 
 wood, a mile without the town, by moonlight." Holofemes, 
 who plays three "worthies" himself, and Bottom, who covets 
 every effective part, who can " speak in a monstrous little 
 voice," who can roar either terribly or " as gently as any 
 sucking dove," and whom the politic Quince propitiates by 
 assigning him Pyramus — " a sweet-faced man ; a proper 
 man, as one shall see in a summer's day ; a most lovely 
 gentleman-like man" — were doubtless caricatures from 
 nature. Another reminiscence of these extravagantly 
 amusing rehearsals — the most enjoyable part of all amateur 
 representations — may be traced in " Love's Labour Lost " in 
 Boyet's account of the preparations for the Russian mas- 
 querade (Act v. 2, 107.) 
 
 If, then, we take any part of Shakespeare's life between 
 boyhood and manhood, we find nature making great pre- 
 parations for the future many-sided dramatist. We find the 
 boy's life placed at times under deep shadows, and we find 
 the shadows left at home and forgotten, returning, perhaps, 
 with momentary pang to mingle sadness with mirth. When 
 he went out thinking gloomily of his father's accumulating 
 distress and of the cheerless prospect for his little brothers 
 and little sister, the darkness would often be chased from 
 his susceptible spirit by spring freshness, sunshine, and 
 bird-singing, or by the company of light-hearted friends ; 
 and he thus had early experience of all varieties of mood 
 between despair and immoderate mirth. Had Shakespeare's 
 
340 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 life been all light and no shadow during that plastic period 
 of youth when the man's chief tendencies are formed, he 
 could never have searched so thoroughly the depths and the 
 heights of the human heart. 
 
 Further, when we know the dramatic tendency of Strat- 
 ford, we lessen the miracle of his sudden rise as an actor 
 and a dramatist. That a raw youth from the country, un- 
 used to the stage and the pen, should in the course of five 
 or six years have risen to the highest rank as a writer ot 
 plays, is simply incredible. The boy is always father to 
 the man : supreme achievements demand a prolonged con- 
 spiracy of circumstances. It need not lessen our reverence 
 for the mighty genius of Shakespeare to find reason for 
 believing that he was to the manner bom ; that reckoning 
 Time with her millioned accidents gave him a special edu- 
 cation for the stage. Not only had he in his youth wit- 
 nessed plays and taken part in plays, but in all likelihood 
 he had even as a boy read tales and romances with a special 
 eye to plots and incidents suitable for dramatic representa- 
 tion. This much, in the failure of assured knowledge, we 
 may reasonably conjecture as quite within the probabilities, 
 or at least the possibilities, of the case. 
 
 The first documentary memorial of Shakespeare, next to 
 the record of his baptism, is his marriage bond. This is 
 dated November 28, 1582: he being then under nineteen 
 years of age. His bride was Anne Hathaway, daughter of 
 Richard Hathaway, a substantial yeoman, living at Shottery, 
 a hamlet about a mile from Stratford. Anne was about 
 eight years older than her boy-husband. From the signa- 
 tures to the document Mr Halliwell argues rather question- 
 ably that the parents of both parties approved of the match. 
 One thing, at least, is clear, that there was in some quarter 
 a certain eagerness for the ceremony : they were married 
 " with once asking of the banns of matrimony between them," 
 and there is a clause in the bond throwing all the responsi- 
 bility upon " the said Wilham " himself, and "saving harm- 
 less " the Lord Bishop and his officers. The most probable 
 reason for this expedition appears in the date of the bap- 
 
HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 34 1 
 
 tism of their first child, Susanna, May 26, 1583. For this 
 youthful indiscretion Shakespeare has been treated much 
 more leniently than Burns has been for a similar offence : 
 poor Anne Hathaway with her eight years of seniority gets 
 all the blame. 
 
 The next great event in his life is traditionary : he is said 
 to have been prosecuted for stealing Sir Thomas Lucy's 
 deer. Malone, De Quincey, and many others reject this in- 
 cident, founding triumphantly on the fact that Sir Thomas 
 Lucy had no park. It is alleged, on the other hand, that 
 though Sir Thomas had no park, " he may have had deer ; 
 for his son and successor sent a buck as a present to Lord 
 EUesmere in 1602." There is nothing improbable in the 
 incident ; and it is no whit more derogatory to the dignity 
 of Shakespeare than the mere fact of his humble birth. To 
 call the offence ^.ttr-stealing is to name it from the point of 
 view of a game-preserver or a gamekeeper. We know that 
 Lucy and the townsmen of Stratford were not on good 
 terms : Mr Halliwell has found the record of a " riot " made 
 " upon " him ; and the excitable son of a popular burgess 
 would 'doubtless consider it a good joke to carry off the un- 
 popular gentleman's deer, more particularly if he had few 
 of them. But it is unnecessary to suppose that Shakes- 
 peare was actuated by anything beyond a natural liking " to 
 hunt the wild deer, and to follow the roe." 
 
 The tradition is that his trespass against Sir Thomas com- 
 pelled Shakespeare to leave Stratford. Another reason may 
 have co-operated in persuading him to seek fortune else- 
 where — namely, his father's accumulating embarrassments. 
 He may also have been somewhat frightened at the prospect 
 of a large family : twin-children of his, Hamnet and Judith, 
 were baptised on Feb. 2, 1585. From whatever reason, he 
 left Stratford and became a player in the Queen's company, 
 performing at Blackfriars Theatre. The supposed date of 
 this step is 1586. The probability is that he joined the 
 Queen's or some other company as it passed through Strat- 
 ford. The story given in Greene's ' Groatsworth of Wit ' of 
 the beginning of his connection with the stage shows by what 
 
342 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 inducements the profession was recruited. The player that 
 persuaded Greene to join him had been a " country author, 
 passing at a Moral," had seen the-time when he carried his 
 playing fardle or bundle on his back, and had risen to have a 
 share in playing apparel alone worth more than two hundred 
 pounds. Such an example of success might well have in- 
 duced Shakespeare to leave his dull and cramped life at 
 home : and he may have been employed from the first, upon 
 a reputation as a "country author," to remodel and adapt 
 plays. 
 
 The notion that Spenser referred to Shakespeare as " our 
 pleasant Willy" in the 'Tears of the Muses' in 1591 is a 
 most mistaken and almost ludicrous attempt to snatch a 
 compliment for the great dramatist. It would indeed have 
 been more of a compliment to Spenser to make out that he 
 discerned the coming man : but the possibility vanishes 
 before the slightest attention to the real circumstances. 
 The Tears of the Muses were supposed to be shed over 
 the decay of learning. Thalia, the Muse of Comedy, was 
 particularly sad over the absence of " learning's treasure " 
 from the theatres, and the presumption of illiterate up- 
 starts. Learned men, men of university education, no 
 longer wrote comedy for the stage : it was abandoned to 
 the base-born and illiterate. The lament was very charac- 
 teristic of the aristocratic and refined Spenser, who had 
 himself written comedies that were never represented. 
 With what reason, then, is it supposed that Spenser in- 
 cluded Shakespeare among the learned men, whose absence 
 Thalia deplored ? Is there any evidence for supposing that 
 Shakespeare at the age of twenty-seven could be spoken 
 of as a writer of comedies who had of late ceased writing 
 in disgust at the prevailing scurrility and ribaldry? Could 
 he, while struggling as an actor and playwright to maintain 
 himself and his family, be said to be holding haughtily aloof 
 from the stage, because it had been taken possession of by 
 base-born men with no university education ? Supposing 
 that Shakespeare had written any comedies before that 
 time, and supposing that Spenser, who lived for the most 
 
HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 343 
 
 part in Ireland, had ever heard of his name, there would 
 have been some ground for construing the lines — 
 
 " Each idle wit at will presumes to make, 
 And doth the learned's task upon him take," 
 
 into an ill-natured sneer at the extra-academical poet. I 
 do not believe that these lines were pointed at Shakespeare, 
 but I have no doubt that he smarted under their arrogance, 
 and resented Spenser's academic pride in his sarcastic 
 parody of the title of the work in "Midsummer Night's 
 Dream " — 
 
 " The thrice three Muses mourning for the death 
 Of learning, late deceased in beggary." 
 
 It is no doubt pleasing to suppose that when the gracious 
 light of Shakespeare appeared in the orient, all other j)oets 
 at once did homage to his sacred majesty. But the aca- 
 demic poets, even such of them as had condescended or 
 been driven to write for the public stage, Marlowe, Greene, 
 Nash, and Lodge, would have had to swallow very strong 
 prejudices before they admitted Shakespeare to their fellow- 
 ship, and recognised his claims to equal criticism. Marlowe 
 opened his " Tamburlaine " with a contemptuous go-by to the 
 " jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits." Nash, in his epistle 
 to Greene's " Menaphon," sneers at the efforts of " those that 
 never were gowned in the university," laughs at the idea of men 
 " busying themselves with the endeavours of art that could 
 scarcely Latinise their neck-verse if they should have need :" 
 they live by crumbs from the translator's trencher, and ob- 
 tain from English Seneca "v^holelfamleis — I should say, 
 handfuls of tragical speeches." ^ These were general de- 
 nunciations of extra-academical presumption. But Greene, 
 in his dying ' Groatsworth of Wit,' made a direct attack on 
 Shakespeare. He recommended his friends to give up 
 
 1 This was in 1587. There are certain slight traces of Seneca in Shakes- 
 peare's "Hamlet," but this was probably an earlier version of the play on 
 which Shakespeare founded. 
 
344 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 play-writing as no longer a fit occupation for gentlemen ; 
 censured the ingratitude and presumption of players, and 
 assailed in particular one "upstart crow beautified with our 
 feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapt in a player's hide, 
 supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as 
 the best of you ; and being an absolute Johannes Fac-totum, 
 is, in his own conceit, the only Shakescene in a country." 
 It is unnecessary to suppose that this bitter outburst, the 
 best of all testimonies to Shakespeare's power, was caused 
 by his having been employed to remodel any of Greene's 
 plays. The phrase "beautified with our feathers" may be, 
 as we are entitled to infer from the tone of Nash's epistle, 
 nothing more than an expression of academical arrogance, 
 looking down with supreme contempt upon the ungowned 
 playwright as one that could not possibly have anything ex- 
 cept what he stole from more learned authors.^ 
 
 In Lodge's prose satire, 'Wit's Misery or the World's 
 Madness,' of date 1596, there is a passage that may or may 
 not be another insult to our dramatist from the same set of 
 university pens. He is describing a personification of 
 Envy, and goes on to say among other things that "he 
 walks in black under colour of gravity, and looks as pale 
 as the visard of the ghost which cried so miserably at the 
 theatre like an oysterwise, Hamlet, revenge."^ Now, if there 
 is anything in the tradition that Shakespeare played the 
 part of the ghost in " Hamlet,'' we have here a slight touch 
 of ridicule at Shakespeare's acting, and a partisan support by 
 Lodge of his old friend Greene. That, however, depends 
 entirely upon the worth of the tradition, which certainly 
 has a good many plausible considerations in its favour. 
 Be that as it may, there is another passage in this same 
 
 ^ There is a remarkable passage in " Hamlet " (ii. -a, 353-370), where the 
 habit of attacking " the common stages " is sharply ridiculed. The poet 
 is advised not to be so severe on the common player, because he may be 
 obliged to take to the trade himself. 
 
 ^ This passage at least establishes one of two things ; either that Shakes- 
 peare's ' ' Hamlet " was upon the stage in 1596, or that the preceding play 
 on the same subject also contained the ghost. Shakespeare was as likely 
 to have played the ghost in the one version as in the other. 
 
HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER, 345 
 
 work of Lodge's a few pages farther on which has an un- 
 doubted interest. Lodge enumerates the " divine wits " of 
 the time, and the following is his list : " Lyly, the famous 
 for facility in discourse; Spenser, best read in ancient 
 poetry ; Daniel, choice in word and invention ; Drayton, 
 diligent and formal; Th. Nash, true English Aretine." 
 Shakespeare is not mentioned. 
 
 Lodge's mention of Drayton confirms my opinion (p. 268) 
 that he and not Shakespeare is the Aetion of Spenser's 
 " Colin Clout." True, " diligent and formal " are epithets 
 very different from Spenser's high eulogium; but the ex- 
 pression " choice in word and invention," applied to Daniel, 
 is not more unlike Spenser's praises of that poet. The fact 
 is that Lodge's epithets apply, and apply with much dis- 
 crimination, chiefly to the sonnets of the two poets. And 
 apart from this mention of Drayton by Lodge, I doubt very 
 much whether " Venus and Adonis " would have suited the 
 taste of Spenser. The man who considered it necessary 
 to apologise for the sensuous freedom of his own descrip- 
 tions of earthly beauty, may well be supposed to have 
 looked coldly on the rampant paganism of the first heir of 
 Shakespeare's invention. No ; I believe that Shakespeare 
 struggled into fame in the teeth of strong prejudices, and 
 that the estabUshed potentate of the literary world, the 
 refined and haughty Spenser, did nothing to help his ascent. 
 Shakespeare was an enthusiastic admirer of Spenser, but 
 the elder poet was much less catholic, infinitely more 
 narrow and exclusive. In the very passage where he praised 
 Aetion, Spenser declared that no living poet was to be 
 compared to Sir Philip Sidney — always, of course, except- 
 ing himself. The first recognitions of Shakespeare came 
 from humbler pens. Henry Chettle, the stationer and 
 playwright, who edited Greene's 'Groats worth of Wit,' 
 apologised a few months afterwards for the attack on Shakes- 
 peare, and mentioned his civil demeanour, his excellence 
 as a player, his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, 
 the two last particulars being " reported by divers of wor- 
 ship." This is the first complimentary notice of Shakes- 
 
346 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 peare, and it comes from one who was himself an ungowned 
 playwright. The compliments paid by Barnfield, Meres, 
 Weaver, and others to Shakespeare's honey-flowing vein, 
 and suchlike, were not only the homage of very inferior 
 men, but followed upon a wide public recognition of the 
 poet's power. The general public were really the first to 
 recognise Shakespeare : no literary potentate bailed him 
 out of obscurity. His "Venus and Adonis," published in 
 1593, ran rapidly through several editions, reaching a fifth 
 in 1602. His "Lucrece," published in the following year, 
 though not so popular as its forerunner, still was widely 
 sold. His plays became the talk of the town. In the nth 
 satire of his " Scourge of Villainy," 1598, Marston asks what 
 is doing in the theatres, and finds that the rage is all for 
 '' Romeo and Juliet." 
 
 " Luscus, what's played to-day ? Faith now I know ; 
 I set thy lips abroach, from whence doth flow 
 Nought but pure Juliet and Romeo." 
 
 The Queen heard of Shakespeare's fame, had his plays 
 represented at Court, and was " taken " with them : seeing 
 Falstaff in " Henry IV.," she is said to have desired to see 
 the fat knight in love, and thus to have suggested the 
 " Merry Wives of Windsor." There was a demand for his 
 plays in print. In 1597 he published three tragedies, 
 "Richard II.," "Richard III.," and "Romeo and JuHet." In 
 1598 he published "Love's Labour Lost "and "Henry IV.," 
 besides second editions of "Richard 11." and "Richardlll. :" 
 in 1599, second editions of " Romeo " and "Henry IV. : " in 
 1600, two editions of a " A Midsummer Night's Dream," two 
 editionsofthe "Merchantof Venice," " zHenrylV.," "Henry 
 v.," "' Much Ado about Nothing," and a second edition of 
 " Titus Andronicus." After 1600, he seems to have felt his 
 fame to be assured, and to have found it more profitable 
 to let his plays be seen only in stage representation. He 
 probably made an agreement with the management of 
 Blackfriars Theatre to refrain from publication that he 
 might not damage the attendance at the playhouse. Even 
 
HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 347 
 
 before 1600 he did not publish every play that he wrote : 
 Meres enumerates six comedies and six tragedies of his put 
 upon the stage before 1598: namely, "Two Gentlemen of 
 Verona," "Comedy of Errors," "Love's Labour Lost," 
 " Love's Labour Won," (supposed to be the play now known 
 by the title "All's Well that Ends Well,") "Midsummer 
 Night's Dream," "Merchant of Venice," "Richard II.," 
 "Richard III.," "Henry IV," "John," " Titus Andronicus," 
 and " Romeo and Juliet." Four of these were not published 
 till after his death. 
 
 Shakespeare was thus in high repute before the close of 
 the century. His popularity did not decrease after the ac- 
 cession of James. Such was the demand for his works that 
 in 1603 a piratical bookseller issued an unauthorised and 
 imperfect edition of "Hamlet," based, probably, upon notes 
 of the play taken during the representation : this provoked 
 him to break through his rule, and he published a correct 
 edition in the following year. In 1608, for some reason un- 
 known, he made another exception to his rule, and published 
 the tragedy of "King Lear :" it was so popular that three 
 editions were printed in the same year. In that year, also, a 
 third and a fourth edition of " Richard II." were called for ; 
 besides a third edition of " Henry V." and a fourth edition 
 of "Henry IV." He frequently received the honour of having 
 his plays represented at Court : he was the king's favourite 
 dramatist, and there is a tradition that he received a com- 
 plimentary letter from the king's own hand. There are 
 evidences, also, that he was prospering in worldly affairs, as 
 well as in the good opinion of those around him. Early in 
 1597 he bought for ;^6o (equivalent to ten times as much 
 of our money) one of the best houses in Stratford, called 
 New Place. Fortunately, also, there have been preserved 
 letters written in that and the following year by natives of 
 Stratford : in which correspondence the poet is spoken of 
 as a man likely to invest money in Stratford, is asked for 
 the loan of ^^30, and is recommended as a person likely to 
 procure a loan for a friend and countryman. In 1602 he 
 made a more extensive investment near his native town — 
 
348 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 buying for ^320 a hundred and seven acres of arable land 
 in the parish of Old Stratford. In the same year he pur- 
 chased some property in the town of Stratford. In 1605 
 he made his largest purchase : paying ;^44o for the remain- 
 der of a lease — granted in 1544 for ninety-two years — of the 
 tithes great and small of Stratford, Old Stratford, Bishop- 
 ton, and Welcombe. 
 
 At what time he retired from the stage is not known with 
 certainty, any more than the date of his entrance upon it. 
 A tradition is recorded in Ward's Diary, extending from 
 1648 to 1679, that Shakespeare "frequented the plays all 
 his younger time, but in his elder days lived at Stratford, 
 and supplied the stage with two plays every year, and for 
 it had an allowance so large that he spent at the rate of 
 _;^iooo a-year as I have heard." Ward was vicar of Strat- 
 ford-on-Avon, and as he may have had his information from 
 persons that had been acquainted with Shakespeare, there 
 is no reason to discredit the main fact. We may lawfully 
 suppose that Shakespeare spent his latter years at Stratford 
 in comfortable ease, looking after his farm and his tithes, 
 and enjoying the conversation of his friends. His father 
 had died in 1601, and his mother died in 1608 ; but his 
 wife was still alive, and his daughter was well married to a 
 doctor in Stratford, and presented him with a little grand- 
 daughter to be the old man's darling. Some traditions are 
 preserved of his witty repartees in genial Stratford society ; 
 but none of them bear any internal evidence of genuineness. 
 
 Shakespeare died at New Place, on the 23d of April 
 16 1 6. The only record of the cause of his death is the 
 following entry in the Diary just mentioned : " Shakes- 
 peare, Drayton, and Ben Jon son had a merry meeting, and 
 it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever 
 there contracted." On this Mr Dyce remarks : " That 
 such a symposium was held is likely enough. Drayton, a 
 native of Warwickshire, and frequently in the neighbour- 
 hood of Stratford, may fairly be presumed to have partaken 
 at times of Shakespeare's hospitality; and Jonson, who, 
 about two years after, wandered on foot into Scotland and 
 
HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 349 
 
 back again, would think little of a journey to Stratford for 
 the sake of visiting so dear a frend ; nevertheless, we should 
 hardly be justified in determining the cause of Shakespeare's 
 death on the authority of a tradition which was not written 
 down till nearly half a century after the event." 
 
 Three elaborate works have been written on the portraits 
 of Shakespeare : Boaden's, 1824 ; Wivell's, 1827 ; and Fris- 
 well's, 1864. Friswell's, entitled 'Life Portraits of Shakes- 
 peare,' is recommended by its containing photographs of 
 the principal portraits — the Stratford bust, the Droeshout 
 engraving, the Chandos painting (the original of the most 
 common Shakespeare face), the Jansen painting, and the 
 Felton head. Only the first two of these portraits are 
 known for certain to be portraits of Shakespeare. The 
 bust, probably put up very soon after the poet's death, was 
 seen and praised as a faithful likeness in 1623. The Droe- 
 shout engraving appeared on the title-page of the first edi- 
 tion of Shakespeare's plays in the same year, and received 
 a high compliment in Ben Jonson's famous commendatory 
 verses : it is a bad engraving, but may have been a fair 
 likeness. The bust, however, which is believed to have 
 been copied from a cast taken after death — a practice then 
 sufficiently common — may be accepted upon all considera- 
 tions as the most trustworthy memorial of the poet's face ; 
 the top and back part of the head seem to be rounded 
 off in a regular oval without any pretension to phrenologi- 
 cal fidelity. The forehead is not so high as in the ideal 
 Shakespeare's head, but is broad, full, and smoothly arched ; 
 it is well balanced by the substantial English yeoman jaw 
 and double-chin. In proportion to the full forehead and full 
 underface, the intermediate features are small and delicate, 
 and they are set with the same easy symmetry. From the 
 shortness of the nose and the length of the upper lip, it has 
 been conjectured that the sculptor had an accident with the 
 nose ; but we should remember that Scott's upper lip was 
 also irregularly long, and that Shakespeare's admirers were 
 not likely to accept a maimed sculpture. Originally the 
 
350 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 
 
 bust was coloured : the hands and face of a flesh colour, the 
 eyes of a light hazel, the hair and beard auburn. Towards 
 the end of last century, it was coated over with white paint 
 by one of those respectable mediocrities whose sense of pro- 
 priety is sometimes more destructive than the most outrage- 
 ous VandaKsm. It has since been restored to its original 
 colours. 
 
 It is a favourite way with some eulogists of Shakespeare 
 to deny him all individuality whatsoever. He was not one 
 man, they say, but an epitome of all men. His mind, says 
 Hazlitt, " had no one peculiar bias or exclusive excellence 
 more than another. He was just like any other man, but 
 that he was like all other men. He was the least of an 
 egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in' him- 
 self ; but he was all that others were or that they could be- 
 come." Against such a degradation of Shakespeare's char- 
 acter, or of any man's character, it is our duty to protest. 
 In trying to make Shakespeare more than human, the reck- 
 less panegyrist makes him considerably less than human : 
 instead of the man whose prudence made him rich, whose 
 affectionate nature made him loved almost to idolatry, and 
 whose genius has been the wonder of the world, we are 
 presented with plasticity in the abstract, an object not more 
 interesting than a quarry of potter's clay. 
 
 One of the most curious traits in Shakespeare's character 
 is his worldly wisdom. I do not allude to what is called 
 the wisdom of Shakespeare, as displayed in his maxims of 
 morality and politics. I mean the commonplace virtue, 
 rarely exhibited by men of genius, of prudently expending 
 the material rewards of their toil. We are indebted to the 
 antiquaries for the illustration of this. Not only have they 
 shown us how he invested large savings in his native town, 
 but by ransacking corporation records and other public 
 archives they have discovered for us how firmly he looked 
 after his property. We find him in 1604 prosecuting one 
 Rogers who had bought malt from him and failed to pay. 
 We find him in 1608 bringing an action against John Ad- 
 
HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 351 
 
 denbroke for recovery of a small debt, and thereafter, on the 
 flight of the debtor, proceeding against the security. In 
 1612 we find him conjoined in a petition to the Court of 
 Chancery to compel certain sharers in the farming of the 
 tithes to pay their just proportions of a common burden. 
 In 16 14 he took measures to resist the proposed enclosure 
 of certain common lands which would have affected the 
 value of his property. These little items are not without an 
 interest : they are small in themselves, but they suggest a 
 good deal. The hardships of Shakespeare's early days, the 
 misfortunes of his father, had taught him prudence : he was 
 evidently a firm man of business, not to be imposed upon 
 or cheated with impunity. 
 
 This combination of sure and firm-set prudence with 
 heaven-climbing genius is the fundamental wonder in Shakes- 
 peare, the permanent marvel of his constitution. From 
 whatever point we look at him, this wonder emerges. With 
 all his capricious streamers of fancy, he does not gyrate off 
 into aimless oddity and eccentricity. The torrent, tempest, 
 and whirlwind of impassioned imagination is, in him, con- 
 trolled by a temperance that pulls it back from the raving 
 frenzy of incontinent riot. He is copiously inventive and 
 original, but he does not vex, strain, and dislocate his faculty 
 by striving after plots, characters, maxims, words, and 
 images that had never before been seen in print, or heard 
 upon the stage. Large, steadfast, clear-eyed sagacity and 
 sanity are everywhere conspicuous in Shakespeare. 
 
 Readers of Shakespeare not familiar with the antecedent 
 literature are naturally enough betrayed into thinking that 
 he drew all his wise sentences about character, morality, 
 and politics from his own experience and observation. 
 Now this is the very thing that his sagacity kept him from 
 attempting. He knew how poor a show one man's experi- 
 ence can make, and he opened his mind freely to the ac- 
 cumulated experience of ages. There were abundant 
 stores within his reach. The moral-plays were store-houses 
 of proverbial philosophy : the common wisdom of many 
 generations was harvested and preserved there as in gran- 
 
3 52 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 aries. The works of all our poets from Chaucer downwards 
 were full of similar generalisations : they were studiously- 
 affected in the tales and plays of his immediate predeces- 
 sors. To have neglected these accumulations, if it had been 
 possible, would have been the reverse of wise : Shakespeare 
 used them liberally. It is not to be supposed that he de- 
 liberately and in cold blood searched in these repositories 
 for matter to fill up a dialogue ; but his mind was full of 
 them, and he took what came to him in the act of compo- 
 sition and what best suited his purposes, without troubling 
 himself as to whether it was original or commonplace. 
 And in like manner with his imagery. Before he began 
 to write, nature had been ransacked and even a fabulous 
 natural history invented in the craze for imagery. This, 
 doubtless, gave an immense stimulus to the poet's original 
 faculty, as the passion for moral and political saws gave to 
 his powers of observation. But had Shakespeare resolved 
 to use no weighty sentence and no figure of speech that 
 had ever been used before, he would have been forfeiting 
 all hope of success as a dramatist ; deUberately taking up 
 with the gleanings, the husks, and the crumbs. A play 
 furnished only with recondite maxims and far-fetched 
 imagery would have been intolerably thin and meagre. 
 One thing, however, was and is to be expected from dra- 
 matists having recourse to the great accumulated wealth of 
 literature : we expect them to give a new application, and, 
 above all, a new expression, to what they borrow. We give 
 them liberty to take the seeds, but not to take the plant. 
 This was what Shakespeare did. Now and then, perhaps, 
 he carried off a whole plant, when he was in a hurry ; but 
 in nearly every case he took only the seed, the suggestion, 
 and from it reared a plant far excelling the original stock. 
 So incomparable was his genius for expression, that very 
 rarely did he fail to improve what he appropriated. And 
 therein lay his power and excellence : not in that he added 
 more than any other man to the immense stock of old- 
 world wisdom, but in that he gave to what he adopted an 
 expression so superlative that generalised observations 
 
HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 353 
 
 centuries older than him have passed into common speech 
 in his forms. His wisdom was the wisdom of sagacious 
 choice and happy application : but his genius was his 
 own. 
 
 If we wish to have a vivid impression of the superiority 
 of Shakespeare's judgment, we cannot do better than com- 
 pare his plays with tales on which they have been founded. 
 He did not exhaust himself in trying to discover new situ- 
 ations ; but going in with victorious opulence of matter, 
 took the best situations that occurred to him, from his own 
 mind or from novels, poems, histories, or even from plays 
 then upon the stage, and filled them out in a way that tran- 
 scended all competition. When our dramatic antiquaries 
 meet in Shakespeare with a story that they have not 
 hitherto discovered in any previous writer, they pursue 
 their inquiries with full confidence that they will some day 
 stumble upon the original. And these discoveries, so far 
 from hurting Shakespeare's reputation, are the most astonish- 
 ing disclosures of his power. Not only does he enrich the 
 story, and give an incomparable embodiment and expression 
 to the characters, but he recasts the plot and the relations 
 of the dramatis ^ersonm with large and clear judgment, so 
 as to produce a more harmonious whole. 
 
 "Myriad-minded" has become a favourite epithet for 
 Shakespeare : " myriad-mooded," if it did not sound so 
 odd, might be more precisely descriptive of the dramatist's 
 most essential endowment. One man becomes able to 
 understand the mental habits of many other men if he 
 passes through many changes of mood : if the world pre- 
 sents itself to him in many different lights according to his 
 varying states of mind. A stolid, immobile man — or a man, 
 however mobile, whose life was easy, unvaried, unexcited 
 — could not be a dramatist of any considerable range : no 
 power of imaginative genius can go far in constructing 
 states of mind that have never fallen within the lines of 
 its experience. But, indeed, active imaginative genius, 
 combined with keen interest in human beings, must inevi- 
 tably produce incessant variableness of mood : a man witL 
 
 z 
 
354 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 these qualities in him must be constantly and inconti- 
 nently changing his imaginary relations with the world : his 
 imagination will not allow him to be tranquil : moodiness, 
 variableness, is the imperious law of his being. Shakes- 
 peare, in imagining the general mental attitude of crafty 
 Bolingbroke, cynical Timon, melancholy Jacques, mad- 
 headed Hotspur, or even dare-devil Richard, and uncon- 
 scionable Falstaff, fell back upon more or less temporary 
 attitudes of his own variable mind. There could not be a 
 more monstrous mistake than to suppose the great drama- 
 tist to have been a calm man, who was never melancholy, 
 and who sat comfortably in a study turning the world round 
 for his amusement, and meditating quietly on the strange 
 fellows that nature had formed in her time. He could not 
 have understood so many of those strange fellows unless 
 he had for however brief an interval passed through the 
 experience of their moods. We know that Shakespeare 
 lived a life of changeful circumstances. In his boyhood, 
 his father's position underwent a gradual change in the 
 eyes of the townspeople of Stratford; and in his youth 
 he took an unusual step that also exposed him to various 
 comments. In London he experienced the feelings of 
 gradually making his way in the world through various ob- 
 structions, and at all times he occupied a doubtful position, 
 exposing him to great variety of treatment between the 
 extremes of insult and admiration. He was brought into 
 direct contact with men of all classes, and received with all 
 the diversity of manner experienced by men whose position 
 is not fixed by rigid convention. Now a man of active 
 imagination and quick susceptibilities could not but have 
 approached these changing circumstances in different moods ; 
 now melancholy, now defiant, sometimes eager, sometimes 
 cool and indifferent, disposed sometimes to laugh at every- 
 thing, and sometimes to cry at nothing. In the course of 
 his varied life, he had, doubtless, a touch of the dissolute 
 and reckless spirit of his favourite " Hal " — " of all humours 
 that have showed themselves humours since the old days 
 of goodman Adam ; " as well as of the grave, politic, and 
 
HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 355 
 
 resolute spirit of Hal's father, Bolingbroke, or Hal himself 
 when he became the heroic Harry the Fifth. 
 
 The amazing thing is to find all this variableness, without 
 which dramatic insight is impossible, in combination with 
 the fundamental steadiness, without which dramatic exe- 
 cution is impossible. All this variableness had, as it were, 
 a centre — was an incessant movement above, below, and 
 around a fixed centre of gravity. For all his presumable 
 moodiness, Shakespeare would seem to have never com- 
 posed but in one mood — the mood of dramatic impartiality. 
 Nobody has been able to detect in his character any strong 
 bias of opinions held dogmatically by himself. He would 
 seem to have composed with intense concentration, setting 
 himself with all the strength of his imagination to express 
 the particular concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, 
 actions, and motives that emerged from his story of love or 
 revenge, and allowing himself to be swayed by no consider- 
 ations except dramatic effect. Preachers sometimes essay 
 to prove his religion and morality by choice excerpts, but 
 they only prove that he put such sentiments into the mouths 
 of his characters : he holds the mirror up to the irreligion 
 and immorality of Edmund and lago, and displays them 
 with equal clearness and force. One of his characters ex- 
 plains away prophecy, another rationalises presentiments, a 
 third declares that miracles are ceased, and that we can 
 admit only natural means : yet ghosts walk in his dramas, 
 men are haunted by evil forebodings, and calamities are 
 heralded by monstrous portents. It is vain to look for con- 
 sistent opinions where the dramatist's principle is to embody 
 men of all shades with strict impartiality in their exact form 
 and pressure. 
 
 The most amiable and one of the best attested features 
 of Shakespeare's character, is the constancy of certain 
 attachments. We may well suppose that, with an imagina- 
 tion ever ready to invest objects with attributes not their own, 
 and sufficiently subtle to find for Titania points of attraction 
 in the head of an ass, Shakespeare had many passing loves 
 and friendships. But he was capable also of constant 
 
35^ WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 attachment. The strongest evidence of this is found in his 
 continued visits to his native place, and his final settlement 
 there in the evening of his life. True, had we no other 
 evidence of his intense affections, the fact of his retirement 
 to Stratford might be otherwise interpreted : it might be 
 said that he left London and its pleasant society because 
 there his profession as an actor exposed him to indignities 
 that his pride would not brook, and went to Stratford be- 
 cause there he was treated as a person of consequence. In 
 support of this might be alleged the significant fact that in 
 1596 his father, probably at his instigation, applied for a 
 grant of arms at the Heralds' College. We know from 
 Shakespeare's sonnets that he felt keenly the inferiority and 
 disgrace attaching to his profession ; and it is not unlikely 
 that he went back to the scenes of his boyhood with a cer- 
 tain feeling of relief from the scene of his humiliation. It 
 is not perhaps to be denied that Shakespeare was glad to 
 leave London, with all the attractions of wit-combats with 
 Ben Jonson at the Mermaid, because he had not Big Ben's 
 rough indifference to public opinion, and could not bear to be 
 patronised for his genius by men that felt themselves above 
 his profession. But while we acknowledge all this, we have 
 still to account for the fact that his native town of Stratford 
 was the chosen place of his retirement : he might have in- 
 vested his gains in some quarter where he was utterly un- 
 known, but for the desire to be near the friends and the 
 scenes of his youth. And we are entitled to put upon the fact 
 its most natural construction, when we find that supported 
 by the warmth of attachment expressed in his sonnets, and 
 the recorded testimonies of the gentleness of his nature. 
 " I loved the man," said Ben Jonson, "and do honour his 
 memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was, 
 iildeed, honest, and of an open and free nature." 
 
 One of the main objects of the New Shakspere Society 
 set on foot by the great society-maker, Mr Furnivall, is to 
 settle the chronology of Shakespeare's ^ plays, with a view 
 
 ' I spell the name as it is spelt wherever it occurs in print in the poet's 
 time. 
 
HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 357 
 
 to determining the development of his art. There is a good 
 basis of external evidence to begin with, in the plays pub- 
 lished before 1600, and it is probable that the application 
 of various tests will enable critics to arrange the plays not 
 published before 1623 in some approach to the order of 
 their composition, and even to detect additions or altera- 
 tions made on the first copy. I have not yet seen any con- 
 siderations affording grounds for departing to any great 
 extent from Malone's arrangement, except in the case of 
 the " Tempest," which was probably composed before the 
 date assigned by Malone. I should place the "Winter's 
 Tale " at the end of the list of Shakespeare's works. But 
 the subject will be more ripe for discussion when the 
 Shakspere Society has published its labours. 
 
 Increase of power is most apparent in Shakespeare's 
 tragedies. He began with imitating Marlowe. In " Titus 
 Andronicus," and the two Chronicle Histories on the wars 
 between York and Lancaster — which I take to be authentic 
 works of Shakespeare's — the imitation of Marlowe is so 
 strong, that several critics have ascribed them to that poet, 
 in defiance both of external and of internal evidence. But 
 he soon left off this imitation. There is no more of it in 
 "Richard III." or in "Richard II." than there is in 
 " Hamlet " or " Macbeth." I should be disposed to place 
 "Richard II." after "Richard III.," partly because "Richard 
 III." is a natural continuation of the preceding chronicle 
 histories, and partly because " Richard II." is more richly 
 coloured, showing the poet's advance towards " Romeo and 
 Juliet." It is remarkable that " Richard II." contains no 
 mixture of comedy. In " Romeo and Juliet," the dramatist 
 first dares to exhibit the grave and the ridiculous side by 
 side in the same action. His great tragedies, which repre- 
 sent the maturity of his power, are more darkly coloured 
 and more strongly woven together than his earlier efforts. 
 
 The danger in the application of tests is that facts be 
 more or less bent to suit them. I am not sure that Mr J. 
 W. Hales, so far as one can gather from the report of his 
 lectures in the 'Academy,' has altogether escaped this danger. 
 
358 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 He certainly exaggerates the faintness of the characterisa- 
 tion in Shakespeare's earlier work. That is a quality which 
 must appear in a man's earHest works, if he has got it in 
 him at all. It may be admitted that Shakespeare acquired 
 greater power in the expression of character. That could 
 hardly have been otherwise. But to say that there is only 
 one character in "Richard III.," and no character in 
 " Love's Labour Lost," or in the " Two Gentlemen of 
 Verona," is to raise a doubt whether Mr Hales has very 
 much appreciation of the sayings and doings that reveal 
 character. As a study of character, Shakespeare's Margaret, 
 is quite equal to his Richard, and the three disconsolate 
 ladies are distinguished with subtle and careful art. Valen- 
 tine and Proteus are distinct and purposely opposed types 
 of character : and Mr Hales gives other evidence of hasty 
 study or imperfect appreciation of this play when he describes 
 it as an inconsistency on the part of Silvia, of which Shakes- 
 peare would not have been guilty in later years, to reject 
 the love of Proteus, and yet agree to send her picture to 
 him next morning. The four lovers in "Love's Labour 
 Lost " are also distinct men, and this play conta;ins also the 
 character of Holofernes, a study not inferior in subtle art to 
 the Sir Toby Belch of Shakespeare's most mature period. 
 But perhaps when Mr Hales has explained his views at 
 greater length, they may prove more in accordance with the 
 facts than appears in a condensed summary. I cannot, 
 however, say that I expect any very strikingly new results 
 from the application of " tests " to settle the order of Shakes- 
 peare's plays. 
 
 II. — His Words and Imagery. 
 
 The art of putting things cleverly and playing upon 
 words was never carried to a greater height than in the age 
 of Elizabeth. The Elizabethans were conscious word- 
 artists — " engineers of phrases, " as Thomas Nash said, 
 '.'To see this age!" cries the clown in "Twelfth Night," 
 
HIS WORDS AND IMAGERY. 359 
 
 " a sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit ; how 
 quickly the wrong side may be turned outward ! " And this 
 same clown was acting in delicious caricature of the age, 
 when he fastidiously rejected the word "element" — "Who 
 you are and what you would are out of my welkin, I might 
 say ' element,' but the word is overdone." 
 
 The delight in similitudes went naturally with this extra- 
 vagant craze for uncommon expression : the fancy was soli- 
 cited, and when solicitation failed, was tortured to satisfy 
 the reigning fashion. They ransacked for comparisons the 
 heavens above, the earth beneath, the waters under the 
 earth, and the historical and mythical generations of earth's 
 inhabitants. The wit of those days viewed the whole world 
 as so much figurative material; he knew it as a painter 
 knows his box of colours, or an enthusiastic botanist the 
 flora of his own parish. 
 
 That was the sort of fermentation likely to produce great 
 masters of words. To call a spade a spade is a most be- 
 numbing and stifling maxim to literary genius : an Eliza- 
 bethan would not have called a spade a spade if he could 
 possibly have found anything else to call it. The Eliza- 
 bethan literature would not have been the rich field that it 
 is had a wretched host of Dean Alfords been in the ascen- 
 dant, with their miserable notions about idiomatic purity 
 and Queen's English. 
 
 The number of words used by Shakespeare is said to be 
 15,000; and the prodigious magnitude of this number is 
 usually brought out by comparing it with Milton's number, 
 which is 8000.1 We might say to him as Katherine said to 
 Wolsey : — 
 
 1 Shakespeare's tise of technical terms and phrases deserves special 
 notice, as having created quite a department of literature. Several volumes 
 have been written, dwelling upon all phraseology that belongs, whether 
 exclusively or not, to special trades, occupations, or professions ; each con- 
 tending for some one occupation that Shakespeare must have engaged in be- 
 fore he could have been able to use its technicalities with such abundance 
 and discrimination. The phraseology of law, medicine, surgery, chemistry, 
 war, navigation, music, field-sports, black-art — the phraseology of each 
 of these was used by Shakespeare, it is argued, with the intelligence of an 
 experienced proficient. ' We have also special treatises on his acquaintance 
 
36o WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 "Your words, 
 Domestics to you, serve your will as 't please 
 Yourself pronounce their office ; " 
 
 and add that his verbal establishment was upon an un- 
 paralleled scale. To some extent, indeed, it would seem 
 that those hosts of servants were too officious ; obtruding 
 their services in such jostling numbers as to embarrass 
 operations. It would appear as if, when Shakespeare sat 
 in the heat of composition, every word in the sentence just 
 penned overwhelmed him with its associations ; so perfectly 
 were his intellectual forces mobilised, and so fresh and 
 eager were they for employment. And besides these 
 officious troops of words, he had in his service troops of 
 images no less officious, no less ready to appear upon the 
 slightest hint. Upon the slightest hint that they were 
 wanted, they came flashing in with lightning excitement 
 from all quarters ; from pages of poems, histories, and even 
 compendiums, from echoes of the stage, from all regions of 
 earth and sky that he had seen or realised in thought. 
 
 M. Taine lays most stress upon the copiousness of Shakes- 
 peare's imagery. " It is a series of paintings which is un- 
 folded in his mind. He does not seek them, they come of 
 themselves ; they crowd within him, covering his arguments ; 
 they dim with their brightness the pure light of logic. He 
 does not labour to explain or prove; picture on picture, 
 image on image, he is for ever copying the strange and 
 
 with botany, entomology, and orthithology. Wheneachof several volumes 
 contends for a different occupation as the occupation of Shakespeare's 
 youth or early manhood, and each argues on the same fundamental prin- 
 ciple with equal conclusiveness, they refute each other and discredit their 
 common principle. The principle underlying all these arguments is, that a 
 man cannot use the phraseology of an occupation without having prac- 
 tised that occupation. It is reduced to an absurdity by the latest work in 
 the department, Mr Blades's ' Shakspere and Typography ; ' in which it 
 is cleverly argued from Shakespeare's use of printing technicalities thaf he 
 must have been a printer. The fact is that Shakespeare's contemporaries 
 as well as himself ransacked all trades and professions for striking phrases. 
 Legal terms were in particular request, and it was not necessary for Shakes- 
 peare to study, much less to practise law, in order to acquire them : they 
 abounded in the general literature of the period. 
 
HIS WORDS AND IMAGERY. 36 1 
 
 splendid visions which are engendered one within a'nother> 
 and are heaped up within him." 
 
 Now I am not prepared to admit that Shakespeare's 
 argumentative faculty was thus overwhelmed by the enthu- 
 siasm of imagery. If the dramatist's mind had been thus 
 overpoweringly pictorial, he would have been too much 
 carried away by the imagination of the splendid portents, 
 the blazing meteors, and feverish earthquakes, that prefigured 
 Glendower's birth, to be capable of meeting it with Hot- 
 spur's rejoinder, conceived on the soundest principles of 
 inductive philosophy; the fascination of the fiery heaven 
 and shaking earth would have prevented him from seeing 
 that the same things might have happened if Glendower's 
 mother's cat had but kittened though himself had never been 
 born. That is a typical instance of logical faculty rising 
 superior to the engrossing force of imagination. Apart, 
 however, from that, I am of opinion that M. Taine exagger- 
 ates the pictorial side of Shakespeare's genius. It doubtless 
 affords a very plausible explanation of Shakespeare's mixed 
 metaphors to say that they were produced by the press and 
 crush of thronging images ; as his liberties with grammati- 
 cal usage arose from over-abundance and strong pressure of 
 words. But there is reason to believe that Shakespeare, 
 like every other great verbal artist, took more delight in 
 words than in forms and colours, as a painter takes more 
 delight in forms and colours than in words : and that he 
 was tempted both to mixed metaphors and to violations of 
 grammatical usage by a desire for fresh and startling com- 
 binations of words. This thirst of his ear for new conjunc- 
 tions overpowered every other consideration. When he was 
 importuned by several images at once, he knocked two or 
 three of them forcibly together ; but I believe that the 
 temptation to do so came chiefly from his delight in the 
 new marriage of words thus consummated. 
 
 Indeed, we spread a radical misconception of the poet's 
 art, of the means whereby he gains his hold upon our sensi- 
 bilities, when we lay M. Taine's stress upon the genesis of 
 his imagery. It is not the pictures of form and colour that 
 
362 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 ^re the principal ingredients in the poet's charm : they com- 
 plete the spell, but are not the essence of it. What takes us 
 captive is the gathering up of ideas in new groups under new 
 bands of words ; our senses are ravished by new combinar 
 tions of words in a poem as by fresh harmonies in an ora- 
 torio. In a new combination of words, of course, we are, 
 affected by much beyond the mere sound, though that, 
 doubtless, is a large element to many minds. The words 
 appeal to us by multitudinous associations, awake slumbering 
 echoes in many different chambers of our being : the charm 
 of the new encounter is that it rouses and locks together 
 many memories never before united. Several people in the 
 Elizabethan age, or indeed in any other age, could have led 
 us through " a wood, crowded with interwoven trees and 
 luxuriant bushes, which conceal you and close your path, 
 which delight and dazzle your eyes by the magnificence 
 of their verdure and the wealth of their bloom." Spenser 
 comes very much nearer this description than Shakespeare, 
 to my mind : to me it conveys not the remotest approach 
 to the peculiar effect of Shakespeare. Simple and easy as 
 the operation seems, the power of fresh and effective word- 
 combination is one of the rarest of gifts : it is indispensable 
 to a great poet ; and part of Shakespeare's main distinction 
 among great poets is the possession of this power in an in- 
 comparable degree. Something in the effect of his combina^ 
 tions upon us is due, no doubt, to change in the usage of 
 words : many words whose conjunction raised no surprise 
 in an Elizabethan, have since wandered away from each 
 other and gathered other associations about them, so that 
 their reunion in our minds is like the reunion of youthful 
 friends in old age. The words lay near each other then, 
 and had little variety of idea to bring into collision : now, in 
 this later stage of their existence, they have lived long apart, 
 they surprise us by their mutual recognition, and they bring 
 many memories into shifting indefinite comparison, inde- 
 finably charming collision. 
 
 In reading Shakespeare's predecessors, we often meet 
 
CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 363 
 
 with what appear to have been the suggestions oj seeds of 
 passages in his plays ; and the comparison of the suggestion 
 with its development gives a most vivid notion of the am- 
 plitude and rapidity of growth in Shakespeare's mind. So 
 abundant and mobile were words and images in that soil, 
 so warm its generating force, that a seed fallen there at 
 once germinated and shot up with the utmost facility of 
 assimilation into a complete organism. Take a simple case. 
 When Gaveston, in Marlowe's " Edward II.," returns from 
 banishment, and is recognised as the king's favourite, he 
 is besieged by a host of hunters for patronage. Among the 
 rest is a traveller, at whom Gaveston looks for a moment, 
 and then says — " Let me see : thou wouldst do well to wait 
 at my trencher and tell me hes at dinner-time ; and as I like 
 your discoursing, I'll have you." Shakespeare seems to 
 have been tickled with this deliberate utilisation of the tra- 
 veller, for he makes the Bastard in " King John," when he 
 has obtained royal favour, take dehght in the prospect of 
 the same entertainment. But in Shakespeare's mind the 
 idea ripens into a complete picture of well-fed satisfaction, 
 condescension, obsequiousness, and rambling after-dinner 
 talk (" King John," i. i, 190). 
 
 III. — Certain Qualities of his Poetry. 
 
 The most general reader is impressed by the width of 
 Shakespeare's range through varied effects of strength, 
 pathos, and humour : and minute methodical reading brings 
 an increase of admiration. It must not, however, be sup- 
 posed that Shakespeare's poetry embraces all the qualities 
 to be found in all other poets — that every effect producible 
 by poetry on the human spirit finds its most conspicuous 
 exemplification in his plays. He fills us with wonder, with 
 submissive awe, with heroic energy ; he runs us through the 
 gamut of tears and laughter, smiling and sadness : ho mor- 
 tal man has struck so many different notes ; yet with all his 
 marvellous versatility, he had his own individual touch, and 
 
364 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 he left an inexhaustible variety of notes to be sounded. 
 Shakespeare was a man of wonderful range ; but his plays 
 are not a measure of the effects that lie within the compass 
 of poetic language. 
 
 The might that Shakespeare excels in expressing is not 
 the might of slow and regular agencies, but the might of 
 swift and confounding agencies. His power is figured in 
 the boast of Prospero — 
 
 " To the dread rattling thunder 
 Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak 
 With his own bolt." 
 
 The awful energies that he sets in motion move with light- 
 ning swiftness and overpowering suddenness : the sublime 
 influence does not soar and sail above us ; it comes about 
 our senses, flashing and cracking, dazzling and confounding, 
 like Jove's own bolt. His words pass over us like the burst 
 and ear-deafening voice of the oracle over Cleomenes, sur- 
 prising the hearer into nothingness ; or flame before our 
 amazed eyes like the sight-outrunning activity of Ariel on 
 board the king's ship in the tempest. Milton's sublimity 
 has not the same life, the same magic energy : it is statelier 
 and less intimate : the effect is not so sudden and over- 
 whelming. There is an excitement akin to madness in the 
 swiftly concentrated energy of some of Shakespeare's occa- 
 sional bursts. Lear's curses are quivering with compressed 
 force — 
 
 " All the stored vengeances of heaven fall 
 On her ungrateful top ! Strike her young bones, 
 Ye taking airs, with lameness ! " 
 
 And again — 
 
 " Now all the plagues that in the pendulous air 
 Hang fated o'er men's faults light on thy daughters ! " 
 
 There is a similar half-maddening excitement compressed, 
 as it were, with strong hand, but trembling on the verge of 
 frantic explosion in Lucrece's invocation of Night — 
 
CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 365 
 
 " O comfort-killing Night, image of hell ! 
 
 Dim register and notary of shame ! 
 Black stage for tragedies and murders fell ! 
 
 Vast sin-concealing chaos ! nurse of blame ! 
 
 Blind muffled bawd ! dark harbour for defame ! 
 Grim cave of death ! whispering conspirator 
 With close-tongued treason and the ravisher." 
 
 Claudio's anticipation of the horrors of death (" Measure 
 for Measure," iii. i, 118), Lady Macbeth's invocation (i. 5, 
 40), Calphurnia's description of the portents ("Julius 
 Caesar," ii. 2, 13), Othello's imprecation on himself (v. 2, 
 277), are pregnant with a similar energy. Such passages 
 are few and far between, as in a volcanic country you find 
 many grandeurs with supreme accumulations here and there. 
 In Macbeth's dark hints to his wife about the plot to mur- 
 der Banquo, the sublime passion is calmer and less thrilling, 
 but there is a lurking devil of swift excitability even in that 
 lofty passage : — 
 
 " Macb. There's comfort yet ; they are assailable : 
 Then be thou jocund ; ere the bat hath flown 
 His cloister'd flight, ere to black Hecat's summons 
 The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums 
 Hath rung night's yawning peal, there shall be done 
 A deed of dreadful note. 
 
 Lady Macb. What's to be done ? 
 
 Macb. Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck. 
 Till thou applaud the deed. Come, seeling night, 
 Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day ; 
 And with thy bloody and invisible hand 
 Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond 
 Which keeps me pale ! Light thickens ; and the crow 
 Makes wing to the rooky wood : 
 Good things of day begin to droop and drowse ; 
 While night's black agents to their preys do rouse." 
 
 I am not aware that any passage can be quoted from 
 Shakespeare with the composed, stately, sustained grandeur 
 of Milton's description of Satan : Shakespeare's sublime 
 agencies do not move with the same massive dignity — they 
 are instinct with quick life and motion, and their change of 
 
366 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 attitude is like lightning. The planetary Miltonic grandeur 
 was not, indeed, suited to his purposes as a dramatist. A 
 Satan of Miltonic dignity put upon the stage must have ap- 
 peared iriore or less of a bombast Tamburlaine. Cassar, 
 " the foremost man of all this world," who, as Casca mock- 
 ingly said, " bestrode the narrow world like a Colossus," and 
 who, as he said himself, was "constant as the northern 
 star," is Shakespeare's nearest approach to Miltonic gran- 
 ■ deur of conception ; but the grandeur is not sustained as in 
 Milton, it is made up by momentary glances of the poet's 
 swift-ranging imagination. Othello is grand with a volcanic 
 grandeur : he is easily moved ; he blazes out suddenly with 
 such commands as — 
 
 " Hold, for your lives ! 
 
 He that stirs next to carve for his own rage 
 Holds his soul light; he dies upon his motion." 
 
 Henry V. was a favourite with the poet, and the prologue 
 to the play where he appears, after shaking oflf the base 
 contagious clouds that smothered up his beauty from the 
 world, is conceived in a spirit of swelling sublimity; but 
 mark the nature and attitude of the powers held in reserve 
 by the mighty monarch — 
 
 " O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend 
 The brightest heaven of invention ! 
 A kingdom for a stage, princes to act 
 And monarchs to behold the swelling scene ! 
 Then should the warlike Harry, like himself 
 Assume the port of Mars ; and at his heels 
 Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire 
 Crouch for employment." 
 
 In accordance with this characteristic, Shakespeare's de- 
 scriptions of storms and tempests, or the dread witching 
 hour with devilry in the mysterious background ; of hurly- 
 burly, riot, and confusion, or vague impending terrors ; of 
 hell let loose or hell pent up and stealthily preparing to 
 spring out, — are far and away incomparable. Description is 
 
CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 367 
 
 more in the way of the epic poet than of the dramatist; but 
 the dramatist also, even on the modern type, often has oc- 
 casion to describe what his personages saw before they 
 made their appearance on the stage. Shakespeare loses no 
 opportunity for description. Sometimes, as in the begin- 
 ning of the Second Act of " Othello," he makes persona:ges 
 on the stage describe with vivid effect what they see taking 
 place behind the scenes — the struggle of vessel after vessel 
 on a fiercely tempestuous sea. In " Pericles," he brings a 
 storm as it were on the stage, asking the audience to 
 imagine the stage to be the deck of the sea-tost mariners, 
 and making his personages speak and act as if on ship- 
 board. The scene (" Pericles " iii. i) is one of Shakespeare's 
 most magnificent passages. 
 
 Storms in the social world, "the grappling vigour and 
 rough frown of war," were large elements in the Elizabethan 
 drama, and Shakespeare entered into them with delighted 
 energy. The various circumstances of war are described 
 in his historical plays with a spirit and vividness that one 
 might expect from a professional man of blood, possessed 
 with the habitual fierceness of M. Taine's typical Eliza- 
 bethan. His imagination revelled in the scenic glories and 
 horrors of invasion and conflict. The picture of the invad- 
 ing army in " Richard II." ii. 3, 95 — 
 
 " Frighting the pale-faced villages with war 
 And ostentation of despised arms " — 
 
 carries his peculiar thrill in its compressed force : and there 
 is a still more unhinging panic-striking energy in the an- 
 nouncement made to King John (v. i, 35) — 
 
 " And wild amazement hurries up and down 
 The little number of your doubtful friends." 
 
 He describes the night watch before the battle with the 
 dreadful note of preparation ("Henry V." iv.. Prologue), 
 and the bloody field after the battle (" Henry V." iv. 7, 74). 
 The actual horrors of extended conflict he would not seem 
 to have realised minutely, or to have considered fitted for 
 
368 . WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 narration, except in such special episodes as the death of 
 York and Suffolk (" Henry V." iv. 6). Conflict on the large 
 scale he expressed in vague powerful figures, such as the 
 following in a speech of the Bastard's (" King John," ii. i, 
 
 35°)— 
 
 " Ha, majesty ! how high thy glory towers, 
 When the rich blood of kings is set on fire ! 
 O, now doth Death line his dead chaps with steel : 
 The swords of soldiers are his teeth, his fangs : 
 And now he feasts, mousing the flesh of men 
 In undetermined differences of kings. 
 Why stand these royal fronts amazed thus ? 
 Cry ' havoc ! ' kings ; back to the stained field 
 You equal potents, fiery kindled spirits ! 
 Then let confusion of one part confirm 
 The other's peace ; till then, blows, blood, and death ! " 
 
 So much for scenic grandeurs, which are but accidents 
 in the drama ; let us look now at spiritual grandeurs, which 
 are the dramatic pith and essence. One main function of 
 the drama is to conceive and express the storms of the in- 
 dividual heart under all the variety of passions that stir it 
 to the depths — love, jealousy, despair, revenge, ambition. 
 These storms may arise under endless variety of conditions, 
 and we require of the dramatist not only adequate energy 
 of expression but a certain truth to nature in the origin and 
 fluctuation of passion : the passion must neither arise nor 
 change without just motive. As the passion transcends 
 nature, so may — indeed, so must — the motive : but the re- 
 lation between the two must not outrage nature. In this 
 correspondence between the motive and the passion con- 
 sists dramatic truth : dramatic subtlety is shown chiefly in 
 the fluctuations of passion. It is Shakespeare's supreme 
 pre-eminence to combine this truth and subtlety with in- 
 comparable energy of expression. 
 
 Many people believe that there is hardly a situation in 
 life that cannot be paralleled from Shakespeare ; and, 
 curiously enough, this contrast between physical and spir- 
 itual commotions is definitely expressed by one of his dra- 
 
CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 369 
 
 matic creatures, and the spiritual declared to be the more 
 impressive. In " King John " (v. 2, 40), Lewis replies as 
 follows to Salisbury's agitation and conflict of spirit at fol- 
 lowing the banners of his country's invader : — 
 
 " A noble temper dost thou show in this : 
 And great affections, wrestling in thy bosom, 
 Doth make an earthquake of nobility. 
 
 My heart hath melted at a lady's tears, 
 
 Being an ordinary inundation ; 
 
 But this effusion of such manly drops, 
 
 This shower, blown up by tempest of the soul. 
 
 Startles mine eyes, and makes me more amazed 
 
 Than had I seen the vanity top of heaven 
 
 Figured quite o'er with burning meteors." 
 
 Bacon wondered why a woman's eye should be so gazed at 
 when the beauties of the heavens were so little regarded. 
 I'hat wonder spoke the philosopher no less unmistakably 
 than the above passage speaks the dramatist. Human pas- 
 sion affected him more than the grandest phenomena of 
 , inanimate nature. 
 
 No poet has approached Shakespeare in imagining and 
 expressing the tempest raised in the soul by supernatural 
 apparitions. This is another aspect of his power over the 
 expression of wild, swift - thrilling excitement. Macbeth's 
 agitation after his first interview with the witches, his quiver- 
 ing horror and hoarse cries before the ghost of Banquo, the 
 suppressed delirium of Hamlet's first address to the ghost 
 of his father, exhibit the poet's power in its maturity, when 
 art moves with the freedom of instinct, and imagination and 
 expression go together with hand loosely in hand. Clarence's 
 dream (" Richard III.," i. 4, 43) is an earlier effort, and more 
 commonplace in conception ; but the apparition of Edward, 
 a swift interlacing of heaven and hell, has the inexpressible 
 Shakespearian thrill. 
 
 The fierce passions of the fight, the fiery exhortations of 
 excited leaders, ferocious teeth-grinding challenge and in- 
 dignant defiance, infuriated pursuit and savage standing at 
 
 2 A 
 
370 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 bay, are prominent in several of Shakespeare's plays. We 
 must not, however, suppose that his imagination worked to 
 gratify a blood-sucking disposition, a savage thirst for wounds 
 and falls, and agonised contortions, the delight of strong 
 nerves in drums, trumpets, the clash of swords and shields, 
 the discharge of small-arms and cannon, the hurried move- 
 ments of charge and retreat. Mere warlike enthusiasm, the 
 thirst for fighting and glory, is never more than a subordi- 
 nate passion in his dramas. Its various moods- — its hardy 
 aspiration " to pluck bright honour from the pale-faced 
 moon " (" I Henry IV.," i. 3, 201) ; its eager revelling in the 
 anticipated combat (" i Henry IV.," iv. i, in); its de- 
 light in the most deafening sounds of war (" King John," 
 ii. I, 372); its contemptuous braving of the enemy 
 (" King John," v. 2, 130) — are rendered with the greatest 
 spirit in the speeches of the hot-headed, " wasp-stung and 
 impatient," Hotspur, and the strong humorous soldier of 
 fortune, Faulconbridge. When the warlike fit is on him. 
 Hotspur is the very incarnation of the demon of war, the 
 unmistakable son of Bellona : he speaks plain cannon-fire 
 and breathes cannon-smoke : in his dreams he mutters 
 words of encouragement to his horse, and his face is strained 
 with phantom effort. But both Hotspur and the Bastard 
 are exhibited to the audience rather as characters, or, as 
 they were then called, " humours," than heroes. Hotspur's 
 uncontrollable ardour is snubbed sarcastically by his uncle 
 and his father, and his fire-eating propensities generally are 
 ridiculed by the more versatile Prince Harry. And simi- 
 larly, when the Bastard, a more robust warrior than Percy, 
 gives his bragging message to the King of France, he is 
 called a scold, and contemptuously interrupted by the rattle 
 of drums. Achilles and Ajax, the champions of the Greeks, 
 are mere fighting machines, senseless blocks, coarse and 
 insolent as buffaloes. Coriolanus and Antony, who go to 
 battle like the war-horse of the Bible, are moved by nobler 
 passions than the savage instinct for bringing their strength 
 to the trial of mortal combat. Shakespeare, while he re- 
 cognised the nobility of the soldier's aspiration — 
 
CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 37 1 
 
 " To win renown 
 Even in the jaws of danger and of death '' — 
 
 had a most civilised contempt for the causeless exercise of 
 brute force. 
 
 A spirit of deeper and more bitter fierceness is shovm by 
 men that fight not for the mere love of fighting, but in de- 
 fence of insulted honour, or in support of incensed hatred. 
 The cross accusations and challenges of Bolingbroke and 
 Mowbray in the First Act of " Richard II." are an example. 
 The two enemies assail each other with indignant words 
 before the King, such terms passing between them as 
 " traitor and miscreant," " pale trembling coward," " a slan- 
 derous coward and a villain." Gages are thrown and taken 
 up, when the King and Gaunt interfere to keep the peace. 
 " Cousin," says the King to Bolingbroke, " throw up your 
 gage ; do you begin." Bolingbroke refuses — 
 
 " O God defend my soul from such deep sin ! 
 Shall I seem crest-fallen in my father's sight ? 
 Or with pale beggar fear impeach- my height 
 Before this out-dared bastard ? Ere my tongue 
 Shall wound my honour with such feeble wrong, 
 Or sound so base a parle, my teeth shall tear 
 The slavish motive of recanting fear 
 And spit it bleeding in his high disgrace 
 Where shame doth harbour, ev'n in Mowbray's face.'' 
 
 This indomitable ferocity is from the politic and normally 
 self-restrained Bolingbroke : no wonder that M. Taine found 
 it difficult to see the soft moods of such a character. In 
 the lists, however, when their hatred is settling into their 
 arms and their tongues are correspondingly relieved, their 
 mutual defiance is perceptibly milder : they take their sta- 
 tions no less gaily than two duellists from the Court of 
 Louis XIV. The ferocity of speech is left for the impatient 
 onlooker, old Gaunt : the combatants go to mortal battle — 
 
 " As gentle and as jocund as to gest." 
 
 — Richard II., i. 3, 60-90. 
 
 Warlike fury becomes most impressive, and demands the 
 
372 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 utmost strain of imagination to give it deep and full body, 
 when it rises out of the decay of hope, when the soldier's 
 arm is his last refuge against the falling off of friends and 
 the thickening troops of enemies. It is when the warrior is 
 baited like Macbeth, or hunted like Richard, or caught in 
 the toils like Antony, that the war passion concentrates for 
 a burst of supreme energy, quickening the most peaceful 
 pulses and thrilling the least combustible nerves with sym- 
 pathetic fire. In the case of Richard, indeed, there is 
 less propriety in the word concentration ; — 
 
 " Let's to "t pell-mell, 
 If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell " — 
 
 is a resolution that mounts very little above his uniform 
 level of dare-devilry. We are conscious of hardly any rise 
 of temperature in Richard till we reach the peremptory 
 savage fury of his last moments, and he can hardly be said 
 to concentrate, to bend up, his energies for this culmination 
 of rage — it is only that the exasperation of circumstances 
 has blown his normal fiendishness to a white heat. His 
 energies are maintained throughout at a fiendish pitch : he 
 was created when the young dramatist had not ventured on 
 deep fluctuations. With Macbeth the supreme moment 
 comes when the promise is explained away that had before 
 steeled him with a trust in invulnerable destiny. For a 
 moment the stripping off of that supernatural protection 
 cows his better part of man, but it is only a momentary 
 crouch : there is a depth beneath undrawn : and what con- 
 densed firmness and ferocity there is in his bearing when 
 he towers up and fronts Macduff with his last defiance — 
 
 " I will not yield, 
 To kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet. 
 And to be baited with the rabble's curse. 
 Though Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane, 
 And thou opposed, being of no woman born, 
 Yet I will try the last. Before my body 
 I throw my warlike shield," &c. 
 
 In the "old ruffian," the magnanimous "sworder," 
 
CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 373 
 
 Antony, when hemmed in Hke a lion by overpowering 
 numbers, the spirit mounts above the dark fierceness of 
 despair. He goes to battle with savage laughter: his 
 bloodthirsty ferocity is strangely tempered with sweetness, 
 if not with light. Bewitched by his passion for Cleopatra, 
 he has let slip opportunity after opportunity till the final 
 straggle can be delayed no longer : he rouses himself per- 
 force and puts forth his strength to show the world that — 
 
 " 'Tis better playing with a lion's whelp, 
 Than with an old one dying." 
 
 His talk with Cleopatra at the banquet on the evening 
 before his last effort, is a fine illustration of Shakespeare's 
 bold and sure treatment of the stormiest passions. The 
 dramatist takes on the situation as it were instinctively : 
 the words seem to come by spontaneous impulse. An- 
 tony's last " gaudy night " is no carousal to drown care : no 
 effort to forget the coming morrow. War is not excluded 
 from the banquet : on the contrary, he is the guest of the 
 evening : he sits on Antony's right, while Love is on the 
 left. 
 
 Akin to martial rage is fiery invective, the warfare of the 
 tongue, the last resource of women and misanthropes, of 
 oppressed Margarets and soured Timons. Amidst the 
 circle of tearful afflicted women bereaved by the multiplied 
 villanies of Richard III., Margaret stands out with irre- 
 pressible fierceness flashing through and burning up her 
 tears, husbandless, childless, friendless, utterly impotent, but 
 indomitable. In her young and beautiful days, when 
 Suffolk brought her from France as " nature's miracle," to be 
 the wife of King Henry, she gave ample proof that she was 
 a woman of spirit. She came among Henry's mutinous 
 nobles and haughty ladies with an imperial resolution to be 
 no nominal queen. She bitterly resented the king's un- 
 manliness. She boxed the ears of the proud wife of Glou- 
 cester. When Henry weakly made over the succession to 
 the Duke of York, she took the field in behalf of her 
 defrauded son; defeated York and took him prisoner- 
 
374 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 
 
 dipped a handkerchief in the blood of the boy Rutland, 
 and offered it to the captive father to wipe his eyes with. 
 She stabbed York with her own hand. Such was the 
 beautiful " she-wolf of France," the " tiger's heart wrapt in 
 a woman's hide," in the prime of her youth. In "Richard 
 III.," she reappears withered and wrinkled, bereft of hus- 
 band, son, and every vestige of power ; but neither age nor 
 misfortune can quench her fiery energy. She is turned all 
 to envenomed bitterness, hungry for revenge, "well skilled 
 in curses," never opening her mouth save to give passage 
 to " the breath of bitter words." No hope but the hope of 
 revenge survives to detain her longer in England. Herself 
 impotent, she hangs about the Court to ease her heart with 
 curses, and pray that her eyes may see revenge ; she lies in 
 wait for opportunities of chilling the prosperous with pro- 
 phecies of pain and ruin, and adding with her bitter tongue 
 to the miseries of the wretched. When poor Elizabeth, the 
 wife of dying Edward, exclaims — "Small joy have I in 
 being England's queen,'' Margaret enters behind with the 
 bitter addition — 
 
 " And lessen'd be that small, God, I beseech thee ! 
 Thy honour, state, and seat is due to me." 
 
 Richard alone is a match for her. He treats her curses 
 with humorous indifference. She assails him with a torrent 
 of incomparably savage epithets — " elvish-marked, abortive, 
 rooting hog," " slander of thy mother's heavy womb," &c., 
 — and he takes even her breath away for a moment by 
 coolly completing the curse with her own name. But her 
 hard bitter spirit encounters no such check, and moves 
 on with triumphant volubility in the incomparable scene 
 (" Richard III." iv. 4), where she intrudes upon the pros- 
 trate mourners Elizabeth and the Duchess of York. This 
 was one of Shakespeare's earlier efforts ; but he never again 
 equalled the concentrated bitter fierceness of this she-wolPs 
 hunger for revenge, fiendish laughter over its partial accom- 
 plishment, and savage prayer for its completion. Words 
 could not hiss and sting with more envenomed intensity 
 
CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 37S 
 
 than in the speech that she concludes with the prayer for 
 Richard's death — 
 
 " Cancel his bond of life, dear God, I pray, 
 That I may live to say, The dog is dead." 
 
 The general misanthropy of Timon is a more massive 
 feeling than Margaret's sharp and piercing special hatred 
 and keen hunger for revenge, the rage of a tigress robbed 
 of her whelps. There is the difference between them that 
 there is between piercing personal invective and large de- 
 nunciations of universal depravity. There is a grandeur 
 in Timon's misanthropy, as there was in the imperial 
 munificence of his better days : his feelings at no time are 
 in the common roll : there is a largeness of heart about 
 him, an impassioned superiority to ordinary prudence and 
 ordinary sobriety of judgment. His affections move not 
 in petty rivulets within severely restraining bounds of in- 
 tellect : their motion is oceanic. When he was rich he 
 gave about him without a thought of consequences, and 
 without the faintest suspicion of human honesty and grati- 
 tude ; and when the scales are plucked rudely from his eyes, 
 and friend after friend' in quick succession proves ungrate- 
 ful, his impetuous tide of disgust is too powerful to receive 
 the slightest check from the arguments of temperate judg- 
 ment. From first to last he is a creature of unreasoning 
 impulse and passion. 
 
 The surest evidence that a dramatist has taken hold of 
 the complete body of a strong passion is seen in his re- 
 presentation of its transfiguring power. The power of 
 strong feeling to transfigure and distort, to make foul things 
 seem fair to the impassioned vision and fair things foul, is 
 a very familiar fact, understood to a certain depth by the 
 most ordinary novelist. Almost anybody could have con- 
 ceived the perversion of the brave o'erhanging firmament 
 by the force of melancholy into a foul and pestilent con- 
 gregation of vapours. But there are much more startling 
 and sweeping transfigurations wrought by the fire of passsion 
 among Shakespeare's characters. One of the most striking 
 
376 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 is the revelation of his mother's guilt by Hamlet in the 
 closet scene ("Hamlet," iii. 4, 40). In the rising frenzy 
 of his moral indignation, all nature seems to join with the 
 avenger in flaming horror and hideous disgust at the mon- 
 strosity of the crime : — 
 
 " Heaven's face doth glow ; 
 Yea, this solidity and compound mass, 
 With tristful visage as against the doom 
 Is thought-sick at the act." 
 
 But for a sudden marvellous leap of passion even this 
 shuddering frenzy is inferior in power to Isabella's fierce 
 rejection of the unworthy proposals of Angelo ("Measure 
 for Measure," ii. 4, 100). 
 
 But if Shakespeare is supreme in angry invective, he is 
 equally supreme in the expression of the impassioned trans- 
 ports of love. The whole soul agitated by love was no 
 less at his command : the tumults and steady raptures, the 
 sudden bursts and overwhelming tides of absorbing passion, 
 whether of hatred or of love, found in him an understand- 
 ing heart and a copious tongue. His two great love" 
 tragedies, "Romeo and Juliet," and "Antony and Cleo- 
 patra," certainly not inferior to the greatest of his works, 
 were a sufficient peace-offering to Venus for his disparage- 
 ment of her power in his sonnets and his " Two Gentlemen 
 of Verona : " they recanted his trifling with friendship as 
 a master-passion, and laid the strongest ties of kindred and 
 ambition at the feet of the all-powerful goddess. Juliet 
 may for a moment be angry with Romeo for the death 
 of her kinsman Tybalt, but her whole soul is up in arms 
 when she hears the words, " Shame come to Romeo ! " — 
 
 " Blistered be thy tongue 
 For such a wish ! He was not born to shame : 
 Upon his brow shame is ashamed to sit ; 
 For 'tis a throne where honour may be crowned 
 Sole monarch of the universal earth ! " 
 
 There is a fine contrast throughout between the two pairs 
 
CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 377 
 
 of lovers, Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra. 
 Juliet's fiery brevity and flashing sublime splendour is no 
 less in keeping with her virgin youth, than is the magnificent 
 torrent of hyperboles with which the passionate Queen of 
 Egypt deifies her paramour characteristic of her meretricious 
 maturity and experience. In vain poor Dolabella makes 
 polite efforts to be heard : there is no resisting the tide of 
 Cleopatra's eloquence — 
 
 " Cleo. I dream'd there was an Emperor Antony : 
 O, such another sleep, that I might see 
 But such another man ! 
 
 DoL If it might please ye 
 
 Cleo. His face was as the heavens : and therein stuck 
 A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted 
 The little O, the earth. 
 
 Dol. Most sovereign creature 
 
 Cleo. His legs bestrid the ocean : his rear'd arm 
 Crested the world : his voice was propertied, 
 As all the tuned spheres : and that to friends ; 
 But when he meant to quail and shake the orb, 
 He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty 
 There was no winter in't ; an autumn 'twas 
 That grew the more by reaping : his delights 
 Were dolphin-like ; they show'd his back above 
 The element they lived in : in his livery 
 Walk'd crowns and crownets ; realms and islands were 
 As plates dropp'd from his pocket." 
 
 Shakespeare was just such a servant as Venus loves ; not too 
 tamely obedient and reverential, often breaking loose in fits of 
 capricious mockery and flat contradiction, yet every now and 
 again giving unequivocal tokens of respect. So perfect was 
 his mastery over the language of genuine passion, that he 
 was never afraid to bring it into contrast with mock hyper- 
 bole or unsentimental worldliness. His sympathies with 
 Biron, Benedick, Mercutio, and Diomede,did not prevent him 
 from giving earnest expression to the soaring raptures of the 
 youthful lovers, Romeo and Troilus. Even the mocking 
 Biron himself is touched with the sacred flame, and renders 
 homage to the power of his divinity in verses of dazzling 
 
378 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 
 
 magnificence ("Love's Labour Lost," iv. 3, 231). But 
 though Biron raises his divinity to a dazzKng height, and 
 draws a fine scenic picture of her majesty, his transports 
 are formal compared with the agonised soul's hunger of 
 Troilus, stalking about Cressid's door — 
 
 " Like a strange soul upon the Stygian banks 
 Staying for waftage." 
 
 And all other lovers' raptures must yield to the world- 
 absorbing passion of Romeo in the Sixth Scene of the Second 
 Act, where the violent delights of the lovers are approaching 
 their culmination — 
 
 "Friar. So smile the heavens upon this holy act, 
 That after hours with sorrow chide us not ! 
 
 Rom. Amen, amen ! but come what sorrow can. 
 It cannot countervail the exchange of joy 
 That one short minute gives me in her sight : 
 Do thou but close our hands with holy words, 
 Then love-devouring death do what he dare ; 
 It is enough I may but call her mine." 
 
 The dazzling and confounding power of the sudden ap- 
 parition of beauty is described with inspired zeal in the 
 unexpected outburst of the merry lord, Biron. But Biron's 
 description of the majesty of his mistress is surpassed in 
 idolatrous elevation and enraptured homage by Cassio's 
 welcome to Desdemona (" Othello," ii. i, 83). 
 
 " O, behold. 
 The riches of the ship is come on shore ! 
 Ye men of Cyprus, let her have your knees. 
 Hail to thee, lady ! and the grace of heaven. 
 Before, behind thee, and on every hand, 
 Enwheel thee round ! " 
 
 Such a reception is worthy of the lady " that paragons de- 
 scription, and wild fame." When, however, the poet has to 
 describe the power of more than mortal charms, he sur- 
 passes his wildest tributes to mortal beauty. Oberon's 
 account of the effects of the mermaid's song (" Midsummer 
 
CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 379 
 
 Night's Dream," ii. i, 148) dwindles all other hyperboles 
 into meanness — 
 
 " My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou rememberest 
 Since once I sat upon a promontory, 
 And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back 
 Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, 
 That the rude sea grew civil at her song, 
 And certain stars shot madly from their spheres 
 To hear the sea-maid's music." 
 
 In all these passages the energy is swift and darting, with 
 here and there a momentary poise or slowing of speed, as it 
 dwells on some revelation of spiritual or scenic grandeur. 
 There is no end to the variety of movement, no bounds 
 to its range : it ascends to the most passionate heaven of 
 love, and enters with equal zest the gloomiest hell of hatred 
 and desperate fury, of bitter curses and set teeth. But 
 wherever the energy goes, it goes swiftly. It does not wait 
 calmly to gather body and proceed with quietly overbearing 
 stateliness : when checked, it rages impatiently, and pierces 
 irresistibly through all impediments. 
 
 This is the general character of the strength of Shakes- 
 peare's genius. We must not, however, allow this dazzling 
 movement of lightnings in the atmosphere of his tragedies 
 to blind us to the vast firmament that overhangs the whole, 
 and displays itself in quiet grandeur when the hurly-burly of 
 conflicting passions has stormed itself to rest. The poet 
 recognises an overruling Destiny above all the tumult. It 
 is not a cold remote power of marble majesty : it is repre- 
 sented (Sonnet 115) as being in intimate connection with 
 human affairs — 
 
 " Reckoning Time, whose million'd accidents 
 Creep in 'twixt vows and change decrees of kings. 
 Tan sacred beauty, blunt the sharp'st intents, 
 Divert strong minds to the course of altering things." 
 
 Nothing is more remarkable in Shakespeare's plays, and 
 nothing contributes more to make them a faithful image of 
 life, than the prominence given to the influence of chance. 
 
380 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 of undesigned accidents. The most tragic events turn on 
 the most trifling circumstances. The fate of Richard II. is 
 traced to a momentary impulse. When Bolingbroke and 
 Mowbray are mounted for the encounter, and waiting for 
 the signal to charge, the king on a sudden thought throws 
 down his warder, stops the fight, and sends the combatants 
 into exile. That impulse cost him kingdom and life (" 2 
 Henry IV." iv. i, 125) — 
 
 " O when the king did throw his warder down, 
 His own life hung upon the staff he threw." 
 
 Poor Desdemona's fate hangs on the accidental dropping 
 of a handkerchief. The unhappy deaths of Romeo and 
 Juliet are the result of the miscarriage of a letter. " The 
 most noble blood of all this world " might not have been 
 spilt untimely had Csesar not postponed reading the schedule 
 of Artemidorus. Wolsey fell from the full meridian of his 
 glory through a single slight inadvertence : one fatal slip 
 which not all his deep sagacity could redeem. But the pre- 
 dominance of chance over human designs is most powerfully 
 brought home in the tragedy of " Hamlet," whose fate turns 
 on accident after accident. The passage just quoted from 
 the sonnets reads as a commentary on the fortunes of Ham- 
 let, and should be printed in the beginning of all copies of 
 the play, to induce the lofty vein of reflection designed by 
 the poet as the main effect of the whole, and to undo the 
 wretched criticism that would degrade it to the level of a 
 sermon against procrastination. The poet leaves us in no 
 doubt as to his intention, although one might easily have 
 apprehended it from his treatment of slight turning-points 
 and weak beginnings of things in other plays. In the Second 
 Scene of the last Act, Hamlet tells Horatio how accidentally 
 and how rashly he discovered the treachery of Rosencranz 
 and Guildenstem. He lay sleepless in his cabin, when an 
 impulse took him to rise and rob them of their packet — 
 
 " Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting, 
 That would not let me sleep ; methought I lay 
 Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly, 
 
CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 38 1 
 
 And praised be rashness for it, let us know, 
 
 Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well 
 
 When our deep plots do pall j and that should teach us 
 
 There's a divinity that shapes our ends, 
 
 Rough-hew them how we will." 
 
 That is Shakespeare's poetical religion : a power variously- 
 denominated Destiny, Fate, Chance, Providence — supreme 
 over mortal affairs. The varied energies of the world, 
 which no man has ever embodied with such force and 
 subtlety of conception and expression, are governed and 
 shut in by great sublimities of time and space. Read his 
 sonnets and mark how frequently his meditations fall into 
 this vein — 
 
 " When I consider everything that grows 
 Holds in perfection but a little moment, 
 That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows 
 Whereon the stars in secret influence comment." 
 
 It is the stars that guide our moving, that govern our con- 
 ditions. But nothing can preserve us against " confounding 
 age's cruel knife " — 
 
 " Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore. 
 So do our minutes hasten to their end." 
 
 Sometimes his spirit revolts against the tyranny of Time 
 and Fate. He imparts fresh vigour to the commonplace 
 boast that the record of his love shall outlive ruin and 
 decay. At other moments, the relentless march of time is 
 evidently disquieting to him, and he seems ready to cry 
 with his own Henry — 
 
 " O God ! that one might read the book of Fate 
 And see the revolution of the times 
 Make mountains level, and the continent 
 Weary of solid firmness, melt itself 
 Into the sea ! and, other tinjes, to see 
 The beachy girdle of the ocean 
 Too wide for Neptune's hips ; how chances mock. 
 And changes fill the cup of alteration 
 
382 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 With divers liquors ! O, if this were seen, 
 
 The happiest youth, viewing his progress through, 
 
 What perils past, what crosses to ensue. 
 
 Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.'' 
 
 The thought of Destiny expands the sadness of tragic 
 conclusions to more voluminous dimensions and invests 
 them with a softer complexion : conducting the living river 
 of tears to the ocean, carrying the visible smoke of sighs 
 into the vague all-embracing air. But apart from this 
 thought, the tendency of all tragic agitation is to subside 
 into the calm of sadness. The fiercest storms of passion 
 wear a sad look when viewed from the repose of the con- 
 clusion. Even the arrogance of Coriolanus and the heady 
 impetuosity of Hotspur make us shake the head when we 
 see the curtain fall on their dead bodies, and go back in 
 imagination to the powerful manner of their life. Think of 
 the warm rhapsodies of Romeo and Juliet, intoxicated by 
 "the strong new wine of love," when you see them lying 
 before the tomb of the Capulets, and you cannot keep your 
 heart from filling. 
 
 The pathos of sad conclusions is the proper pathos of 
 tragedy. Not till all is over are we suffered to lapse into 
 the attitude of sadness. If an agent of prime importance 
 gives way under the blows of outrageous fortune, is utterly 
 bereft of hope, whether in his own powers or in external aid, 
 as happens in " Henry VHI." to Wolsey, — ^we are not per- 
 mitted to linger over his downfall — we must on with the 
 march of events till the play is played out. The dramatist 
 must not induce us to yield to the fascination of passing 
 calamities : we may follow him with tears in our eyes as we 
 glance backward on fallen idols, but to persevere in a wor- 
 ship of sorrow before the play is ended, would be a course 
 of undramatic stubbornness. 
 
 If we detach individual lives from the rich interdependent 
 complexity of a play, the pathetic moment, the moment 
 seized upon by the mind under the fascination of pity, 
 is analogous to the close of the Fifth Act — is the end of 
 
CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 383 
 
 some great hope, or of all hope, the moment of special or 
 general despair. So long as the spirit is militant against 
 calamity, it appeals to the sympathies of the energetic ; not 
 until it succumbs does it claim the sympathy of the sad. 
 Dido with the willow in her hand, the pale forsaken maid 
 " shrieking undistinguished woe " — 
 
 " Tearing of papers, breaking rings atwain, 
 Storming her world with sorrow's wind and rain " — 
 
 are pathetic objects, on which we dwell with sorrow undis- 
 turbed by forward-looking excitement: their drama is 
 ended, they are beyond the reach of aid ; there is no pro- 
 spect of deliverance to hold us in suspense. Ariadne 
 passioning for the perjury and cruel flight of Theseus is an 
 object of pathetic meditation only when we look beyond her 
 bitter hours of desertion to her final deliverance : if we 
 vividly realise the moment when she first discovers her 
 lover's perjury, and cries desperately for help, we are too 
 much disturbed by anger and anxiety to wrap ourselves up 
 in heavy folds of sadness. 
 
 Individual lives may be dwelt upon with least abnegation 
 of rich general eflfects, in the historical plays, which are 
 more loosely woven together ; and the case of Constance 
 in " King John " is one of the finest of our dramatist's studies 
 of heart-broken women. When the message is brought to 
 her that the King of France has abandoned her quarrel and 
 compounded peace with England, she is fitful and caprici- 
 ous in her sorrow, but her spirit does not fail : her sorrows 
 are proud : and when the kings enter, she rises up and 
 assails them with acrimonious accusations of oppression and 
 perjury. Margaret herself is not more skilled in curses, 
 more instinct with the breath of bitter words. When, how- 
 ever, Arthur is taken prisoner, her defiance breaks down ; 
 and she walks about invoking Death, with dishevelled 
 hair — 
 
 " Look, who comes here ! a grave unto a soul ; 
 Holding the eternal spirit against her will 
 In the vile prison of afflicted breath." 
 
384 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 " Patience, good lady ! " says Philip, tenderly ; " comfort, 
 gentle Constance ! " But there is no comfort for her. 
 
 " No, I defy all counsel, all redress, 
 But that which ends all counsel, true redress, 
 Death, death ; O amiable, lovely Death ! 
 Thou odoriferous stench ! sound rottenness ! 
 Arise forth from the couch of lasting night 
 Thou hate and terror to posterity, 
 And I will kiss thy detestable bones 
 And put my eyeballs in thy vaulty brows, 
 And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust, 
 And be a carrion monster like thyself : 
 Come grin on me, and I will think thou smilest, 
 And bless thee as thy wife. Misery's love, 
 O, come to me ! " 
 
 Grief has full possession of her ; all thoughts of redress and 
 revenge have died out ; bitterness is transfigured into 
 ecstatic sweetness. Deeply touched by her passion, Philip 
 pleads — ■ 
 
 " O fair affliction, peace ! " 
 
 But this only gives a new motive to her outcries, supplies 
 new fuel to the chemistry that converts every thought, 
 word, and sight into images of despair. 
 
 " No, no, I will not, having breath to cry ;' 
 O that my tongue were in the thunder's mouth ! 
 Then with a passion would I shake the world ; 
 And rouse from sleep that fell anatomy 
 Which cannot hear a lady's feeble voice, 
 Which scorns a modern invocation." 
 
 Philip tells her that this is madness ; whereupon she wishes 
 that she were mad if thereby she might "madly think a 
 babe of clouts were he." Then he also gives way to piteous 
 fancies, unable longer to comfort her with formal words of 
 compassion and consolation : — 
 
 " Bind up those tresses. O, what love I note 
 In the fair multitude of those her hairs ! 
 
CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 385 
 
 Where but by chance a silver drop hath fallen, 
 Even to that drop ten thousand wiry friends 
 Do glue themselves in sociable grief, 
 Like true, inseparable, faithful loves 
 Sticking together in calamity." 
 
 She hears him as if she heard him not, and says mechanic- 
 ally and incoherently — " To England, if you will." He re- 
 peats, " Bind up your hairs," recalling her to his meaning. 
 She rouses herself, and instantly turns this also into a 
 mournful symbol : — 
 
 " Yes, that I will ; and wherefore will I do it ? 
 I tore them from their bonds and cried aloud 
 ' O that these hands could so redeem my son 
 As they have given these hairs their liberty ! ' 
 But now I envy at their liberty. 
 And will again commit them to their bonds 
 Because my poor child is a prisoner." 
 
 To my mind Shakespeare's mastery over keys of sadness 
 is the most memorable 'side of his mighty genius. His in- 
 timate knowledge of the sorrows of women is hardly more 
 remarkable than the varieties of pathos in his representations 
 of unfortunate kings and Ministers. Richard II., Henry 
 VI., Gloucester, and Wolsey bear the crush of misfortune 
 each in different spirit, characteristic of their several frames 
 of mind. There is a certain mournful gaiety in Richard's 
 demeanour in accordance with his magnanimous dignity 
 and indifference to life : he says farewell to his queen with 
 exquisite tenderness, yet with epithets that look like an 
 ostentation of light-heartedness : — 
 
 " Join not with grief, fair woman, do not so, 
 To make my end too sudden : learn, good soul. 
 To think our former state a happy dream ; 
 From which awaked, the truth of what we are 
 Shows us but this : I am sworn brother, sweet. 
 To grim Necessity, and he and I 
 Will keep a league till death. Hie thee to France, 
 And cloister thee in some religious house : 
 Our holy lives must win a new world's crown. 
 Which our profane hours here have stricken down.'' 
 2 B 
 
386 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 Of his queen he says : — 
 
 " She came adorned hither like sweet May. 
 Sent back like Hallowmas or short'st of day." 
 
 The weak Henry VI. pines for rest as rest : he would gladly 
 lay aside the cares of state if only he could get in exchange 
 the crown of a peaceful life : — 
 
 " O God ! methinks it were a happy life, 
 To be no better than a homely swain ; 
 To sit upon a hill as I do now. 
 To carve out dials quaintly, point by point, 
 Thereby to see the minutes how they run. 
 How many make the hour full complete; 
 How many hours bring about the day ; 
 How many days will finish up the year ; 
 How many years a mortal man may live.'' 
 
 Compare, again, Gloucester and Wolsey, in their decline 
 and fall. The good Duke Humphrey is moved deeply by 
 the degradation of his " sweet Nell ; " but his own fall he 
 takes with the matter-of-fact callousness of an unromantic 
 man of the world, prepared for reverses as the natural 
 course of things. (" 2 Henry VI.," ii. 4, i.) — 
 
 " Thus sometimes hath the brightest day a cloud ; 
 And after summer evermore succeeds 
 Barren winter, with his wrathful nipping cold : 
 So cares and joys abound, as seasons fleet." 
 
 Poor Wolsey, aspiring and demonstrative, the man of grand 
 and studied manners, whose every public act is impressive, 
 cannot creep into his narrow bed so quietly : his last words 
 touch our deepest feelings with the skill of a profound 
 theatrical artist. His end is thus described (" Henry VIII.," 
 iv., 2. 18):— 
 
 " At last, with easy roads, he came to Leicester, 
 Lodged in the abbey ; where the reverend abbot. 
 With all his convent, honorably received him ; 
 To whom he gave these words — ' O, father abbot, 
 An old man, broken with the storms of state. 
 Is come to lay his weary bones among ye j 
 
CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 387 
 
 Give him a little earth for charity ! ' 
 So went to bed ; where eagerly his sickness 
 Pursued him still ; and, three nights after this, 
 About the hour of eight, which he himself 
 Foretold should be his last, full of repentance. 
 Continual meditations, tears and sorrows. 
 He gave his honours to the world again. 
 His blessed part to heaven, and slept in peace." 
 
 All these wrecks of fortune are touching, inexpressibly 
 touching, but each in a way consistent with the character 
 of the individual. 
 
 Our poet's sympathies with humanity were wide-reaching, 
 but they did not exhaust the fine energy of his imagination. 
 The lower creation claimed a share of his interest ; impor- 
 tuned him, as it were, to devote some passing moments to 
 the realisation of their joys and agonies. The observations 
 of the melancholy Jacques on the wounded deer have 
 always been held among the most prized " gems of Shakes- 
 peare;" and none of his descriptions are more touching 
 and tender than the picture of the protracted anxieties of 
 the hunted hare in "Venus and Adonis," (/. 678). 
 
 The close alliance in Shakespeare's mind between sad- 
 ness and love is shown in the moonlight scene between 
 Lorenzo and Jessica ("Merchant of Venice," v. i). The 
 lovers walk in an avenue under bright moonlight in perfect 
 stillness — 
 
 " When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees. 
 And they did make no noise," — 
 
 and conjure up pictures in harmony with the scene. One 
 of the pictures that the moonlight pours in upon their happy 
 hearts is the sorceress Medea gathering her enchanted herbs 
 — a conception in the finest harmony with the soft myste- 
 rious light of the moon. But the other three are pictures 
 of sighing, ill-starred, forlorn lovers, Troilus, Thisbe, and 
 Dido. The moonlight hours are peculiarly sacred to lovers, 
 and their placid influence tends to tranquillity and sadness. 
 
388 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 Happy successful love is akin to sadness ; it is unsatisfied 
 sighing that raises tempests in the soul, and confident hope 
 or reckless despair that inspires to heroic deeds. In the 
 moment of assured success the lover may be seated on the 
 highest pinnacle of triumph, in rapture at having won the 
 world's dearest possession; but triumph soon gives place 
 to more tranquil joy, falls naturally into the common 
 pathetic key of love and soft diffused sadness. 
 
 Shakespeare shows in many passages his deep feeling 
 for the pathos and witchery of moonlight. In the " Two 
 Gentlemen of Verona" (iii. 2), Proteus thus advises 
 Thurio — 
 
 " Visit by night your lady's chamber-window 
 With some sweet concert ; to their instruments, 
 Tune a deploring dump : the night's dead silence 
 Will well become such sweet complaining grievance." 
 
 'Who is Silvia' sung in the still moonlight, is certainly 
 fitted to ravish human sense. One can never cease to be 
 astonished at the commentary of Gervinus on this most 
 exquisite of songs ; he refuses to accept it as a specimen 
 of the genuine Shakespearian love-l)Tic, and supposes it to 
 be accommodated to the cloddy and stupid character of 
 Thurio ! These exquisite strains should always be con- 
 ceived in their original connection sounding through the 
 still silvery-lighted air. Shakespeare's delight in music 
 under such circumstances appears to have been ecstatic. ' 
 His famous commendation of music is put into the mouth 
 of Lorenzo in the scene already referred to : the musicians 
 are introduced with the thrilling line — 
 
 " Come, ho ! and wake Diana with a hymn " — 
 
 and when the ears of the lovers are surfeited with sweet 
 sounds, the music dies away at the softly breathed com- 
 mand — 
 
 " Peace, ho ! the moon sleeps with Endymion, 
 And would not be awaked." 
 
 There are some exquisite moonlight scenes in " Midsummer 
 
CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 389 
 
 Night's Dream." Oberon's vision of the wonderful sea-maid 
 is granted him by the Hght of the moon ; and all the fun 
 and pathos of that delightful night is transacted under the 
 same bewitching luminary. 
 
 It is a familiar law of our nature that we never admire 
 things so profoundly as when we are in danger of losing 
 them : love is always increased by the near prospect of 
 separation. In the garden scene between Romeo and 
 Juliet, the danger of interruption and death to the daring 
 youth gives a keener passion to the mutual confessions 
 and protestations of the lovers, and helps to make this 
 scene the finest love-passage in the whole range of our 
 drama. One does not wonder that this play took London 
 by storm, and that play-goers could not open their mouths 
 without talking of Juliet and Romeo. Othello's endear- 
 ments to Desdemona before committing the fatal act, which 
 have an inexpressible power over our deepest feelings, are 
 a more extreme case of the same principle. Perhaps the 
 most touching lines in Shakespeare are those beginning — 
 "When I have plucked the rose" (" Othello," v, 2, 13). 
 
 Of all Shakespeare's Comedies, perhaps " Twelfth Night" 
 is the most richly woven with various hues of love, serious 
 and mock-heroic. The amorous threads take warmer shift- 
 ing colours from their neighbourhood to the unmitigated 
 remorseless merry-making of the harum-scarum old wag Sir 
 Toby and his sparkling captain in mischief, the "most 
 excellent devil of wit," Maria. Beside their loud convi- 
 viality and pitiless fun the languishing sentiment of the culti- 
 vated love-lorn Duke stands out seven times refined, and 
 goes with exquisite touch to the innermost sensibilities. 
 
 The two comedies most rich in scenic beauty, in dazzling 
 play of fancy, are the " Tempest " and " Midsummer Night's 
 Dream." The beauties of the " Tempest " are comparatively 
 stately : dainty Ariel is a gentle obedient spirit, affectionately 
 and minutely attentive to his master's behests, and these 
 behests have a certain colour of Prospero's own dignity and 
 lofty tenderness. The masque of Iris, Ceres, and Juno, 
 unfolded to the wondering eyes of the young couple as an 
 
39° WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 indulgent display of the magician's art, is a majestic vision, 
 a richly-coloured representation of stately beneficence. 
 The character of the " Tempest" is seen in Caliban's sum- 
 mation of the wonders of the island. This is one of those 
 prodigal efflorescences that dazzle even the mind accus- 
 tomed to the luxuriance of Shakespeare : it is as if the poet 
 had exerted himself to gather together all the celestial 
 effects of that astonishing play and overwhelm the senses by 
 a sudden revelation of accumulated beauties (" Tempest," 
 iii. 2, 143) :— 
 
 " Be not afeard ; the isle is full of noises, 
 Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. 
 Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments 
 Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices 
 That, if I then had waked after long sleep, 
 Will make me sleep again : and then, in dreaming, 
 The clouds methought would open and show riches 
 Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked, 
 I cried to dream again." 
 
 The " Midsummer Night's Dream " has none of this state- 
 liness : it is a wild revel of fancy, " a debauch of the senses 
 and the imagination." Puck, the presiding spirit, has a 
 very different master from Ariel, and very different notions 
 of duty. He is, indeed, "the pert and nimble spirit of 
 mirth;" a mistake of Oberon's orders does not lie heavy 
 on his conscience — the more mistakes the merrier — 
 
 "And those things do best please me. 
 That befal preposterously." 
 
 In this play, also, there is the happiest use of contrasts. The 
 airy debauch of fancy is mixed up with a debauch of 
 farcical invention. The graceful delicate little shapes of the 
 fairies, with their swift motions, their pretty spites and 
 shudders, their nomad life among Nature's choicest treasures 
 of form and colour, are a fine contrast to the hard-handed, 
 thick-headed, honest workmen. The beauty as well as the 
 fun of the piece is heightened by the earnestness of every- 
 body except Puck, the chuckling contriver of so much con- 
 
CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 39 r 
 
 fusion. , It was not without propriety that Shakespeare put 
 into this play his famous account of the seething brains and 
 shaping fantasies of "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet;" 
 at the close of the story of that wonderful night, he might 
 well reflect upon the nature of the poet's imagination. 
 
 Two qualities that deeply affect Shakespeare's sense of 
 the ludicrous are conspicuous in the " Midsummer Night's 
 Dream " — the essential sympathetic kindliness of his nature, 
 and the astonishing swiftness of his transitions from the 
 serious to the ridiculous point of view. The fine taste of 
 Sir Philip Sidney objected to making sport of the mispro- 
 nunciations of foreigners, as being an offensive assumption 
 of superiority, and Shakespeare seems to have felt compunc- 
 tions about laughing at the honest efforts of poor fellows 
 that had never laboured in their minds before. Accord- 
 ingly, the gentle-hearted Hippolyta is made to protest 
 against this source of amusement, saying — 
 
 " I love not to see wretchedness o'ercharged 
 And duty in his service perishing." 
 
 And Theseus is saved from the vulgar littleness of seeking 
 amusement in the blunders of men anxious to do him service, 
 by being made to express a greater pleasure in the modesty 
 of fearful duty than in the rattling tongue of saucy and auda- 
 cious eloquence. Our conscience is thus set at rest, and we 
 are enabled to laugh at the absurdities of Pyramus, Thisbe, 
 Wall, Moonshine, and Lion with genial good-nature, and 
 without any odious contempt for the honest amateurs. 
 
 The lightning swiftness of Shakespeare's intellect is in 
 nothing more conspicuous than in the rapidity of his transi- 
 tions from the serious to the ludicrous, such as we have in 
 the love-making of Titania to Bottom, and the translated 
 weaver's grovelling asinine replies. The essence of the 
 ludicrous is the sudden degradation of things or the turn- 
 ing of them upside down, and in the rapidity and complete- 
 ness of this operation Shakespeare is incomparable — even 
 " the merry Greek, tart Aristophanes " must yield the palm. 
 
392 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 Shakespeare has such variety that he never exhausts you 
 with one thing : when you have laughed your fill he changes 
 the scene, and does not bring you back to ludicrous con- 
 ceptions till your lungs have been refreshed by an interval 
 of rest. And when he is in the ludicrous vein, he throws 
 his heart into it : the mischievous spirit of comical degra- 
 dation coming upon him after a fit of serious creation finds 
 him ready and wilUng for the wildest pranks. With what 
 profane glee he upsets all the grave emotions proper to the 
 piteous tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, which Chaucer handles 
 with such tender sympathy among his " Legends of Good 
 Women." ^ Shakespeare also could take a pathetic concep- 
 tion of Thisbe fearfully o'ertripping the dew ; but when the 
 tale came in his way as a subject for comic treatment, he 
 carried out the work of ludicrous subversion with pitiless 
 completeness. He thoroughly enjoyed putting off the 
 buskin and playing riotous capers in the sock. He might 
 well have applied to himself part of Falstafifs self-complacent 
 reflection, and said — " The brain of this foolish compounded 
 clay, man, is not able to invent anything that tends to 
 laughter more than I invent." The marvel is that his own 
 serious conceptions were safe in his hands ; that one with 
 so quick an eye for the ludicrous and so thorough an exe- 
 cution could allow his imagination to persist in a serious 
 vein at all. This is, indeed, another aspect of the funda- 
 mental wonder in Shakespeare — self-command : command 
 over forces that have proved absolute and ungovernable in 
 every other case where they have existed in equal degree. 
 
 One of the best examples of Shakespeare's extraordinary 
 swiftness in changing his point of view is found in the 
 Second Scene of the Fifth Act of " Troilus and Cressida," 
 where Troilus and Ulysses are eavesdropping and com- 
 menting on the behaviour of Cressida with Diomede, while 
 Thersites stands behind and remarks on the whole situation. 
 The comment of the impish mocker upon the passionate 
 
 1 There is a full version of the story in the ' Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant 
 Inventions, ' not nearly so delicate as Chaucer's, and this may have been 
 Shakespeare's basis. 
 
CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 393 
 
 apostrophe of the indignant betrayed lover is incomparably 
 fine : it takes us by surprise, and the more we dwell upon 
 it the more exquisite its edge seems to be : — 
 
 " Tro. Ay, Greek ; and that shall be divulged well 
 In character as red as Mars his heart 
 Inflamed with Venus : ne'er did young man fancy 
 With so eternal and so fixed a soul. 
 Hark, Greek : as much as I do Cressid love, 
 So much by weight hate I her Diomed : 
 That sleeve is mine that he'll bear on his helm ; 
 Were it a casque composed by Vulcan's skill, 
 My sword should bite it : not the dreadful spout 
 Which shipmen do the hurricano call, 
 Constringed in mass by the almighty sun, 
 Shall dizzy with more clamour Neptune's ear 
 In his descent than shall my prompted sword 
 Falling on Diomed. 
 
 Ther. He'll tickle it for his concupy." 
 
 Two of Shakespeare's comedies, the "Taming of the 
 Shrew " and the " Comedy of Errors," belong mainly to 
 the province of farce : they are longer, and contain more 
 fully delineated characters than modern farces, but their 
 chief incidents are of the extravagant sort generally under- 
 stood as farcical. The " Taming of the Shrew," indeed, is 
 now usually acted in a curtailed form, in which only the 
 more extravagant incidents are retained : and in this form 
 it has all the broad effect of a boisterous afterpiece. It 
 should be remarked, however, that the most farcial inci- 
 dents in both stories — the behaviour of Petruchio in 
 church, and the wild revenge taken by Antipholus on the 
 lean-faced anatomy of the conjuror Pinch — are narrated 
 and not represented on the stage. 
 
 I have more than once spoken of Shakespeare's self- 
 restraint as a most marvellous thing, considering the sort 
 of self that he had to restrain. In all cases where he is 
 alleged to have been hurried beyond his own control into 
 bewildered excitement, the ground of the allegation lies in 
 
394 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 the critic's inability to rise to the heights of tragic emotion : 
 the poet's imagination is sure and unfaltering at the most 
 dizzy elevations, though the critic, hampered, probably 
 robbed of his natural strength and palsied by artificial 
 notions of what is becoming, cannot follow him with the 
 same certainty of step. Most persons of the same race 
 with Shakespeare should be able to feel his firm mastery 
 over the most perturbing passions, if only they could give 
 themselves up to the guidance of his imagination without 
 constraint. 
 
 A standing count against Shakespeare, among those who 
 looked upon him as a wild irregular genius, was the unbe- 
 coming intrusion of low comedy into tragic situations. His 
 worst offences in this respect were considered to be the 
 Clown in the last Scene of " Cleopatra," the Porter in Act 
 ii. Scene 3 of " Macbeth," and the Fool in Act iii. Scene 2 
 of " Lear." An easy and satisfactory explanation of the 
 Gravedigger in " Hamlet" might be found in the general 
 distemperment of that play; but those others were coarse 
 violations of propriety, to be dismissed simply as examples 
 of the gross taste of the age that could tolerate them. Now, 
 doubtless, those passages are too gross for modern ears : and 
 yet, we cannot condemn them except when we come upon 
 them without having entered into the stormy passions in the 
 midst of which they occur. The Fool in " Lear " comes in 
 when the poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man has 
 been, scene after scene, gradually wrought up to almost 
 inarticulate frenzy, and is wandering shelterless amidst 
 unheard-of bursts of thunder, sheets of fire, and groans of 
 roaring wind and rain ; to fix one's thoughts continuously 
 on the maddening situation of the poor old man would be 
 insupportable — some relief is imperatively demanded. And 
 a very touching relief it is to pass from the monstrous 
 unkindness of the daughters and the growing madness of 
 the old man to the devotedness of the hired boy Fool, 
 following his master through such a tempest, and trying to 
 divert him with his professional sallies, as if neither daughters 
 nor elements were unkind. Nor is the matter of the Fool's 
 
CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 395 
 
 wit so incongraous : laughter is a natural outlet for absorbing 
 agitation — poor old Lear is too far gone to laugh, his brain 
 is beginning to turn, but he smiles at the boy's efforts, and 
 is soothed by them. The case of the Fool in " Lear " is thus 
 exceedingly complicated : his presence affects us powerfully 
 in many and shifting ways, which cannot be clearly stated. 
 The other two cases are very much simpler : in them the 
 art of the dramatist is less subtle and more unmistakable. 
 Nobody capable of being absorbed and fascinated by the 
 horrors of the scene in the court of Macbeth's castle can 
 fail to acknowledge the gratefulness of the transition to the 
 unconcern and coarse humour of the Porter. De Quiucey 
 wrote in delighted admiration of the perfection of dramatic 
 skill that recalls us from the demoniac world of the murderers 
 by the knocking at the gate. The many-sided significance 
 of that startling knock, the rush of reflection that it sets 
 free, makes it indeed an incomparable stroke of dramatic 
 genius : but it does not necessarily recall us from the mur- 
 der; for a moment it aggravates the strain of our suspense; 
 we do not breathe freely till the sleepy, unconcerned, and 
 deliberate porter appears with his utter relaxation of the 
 preceding tragic intensity. The change is complete in 
 several aspects, and we return with all the greater force to 
 the evolution of the tragedy after this brief interval of free 
 breath. The case of the Clown in " Antony and Cleopatra " 
 is somewhat more subtle and difficult for cool reason to 
 comprehend. His stupid lumpish answers about the worm 
 are also of the nature of a reUef to tragic intensity of strain 
 in the audience; but they are more : like the sayings of the 
 Fool in " Lear," they enter into the main current of the 
 play — they are a relief to the high-strung excitement of the 
 queen. Cleopatra is working herself up to the pitch of 
 self-destruction, and the insensate dull stupidity of the 
 Clown comes in opportunely to keep her from passing out 
 of her resolution into delirious hysterics. Neither she nor 
 Charmian could die with calm bravery : they keep down 
 their fears of death with forced laughter and forced atten- 
 tion to trifles : they trifle with death, and put off the fatal 
 
39^ WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 moment as long as they can, and you feel that any untoward 
 turn might make them shriek with horror and fall down in 
 trembling impotence to despatch themselves. 
 
 To many minds Isabella's protestation to Angelo and 
 Constance's invocation of Death must appear extravagant 
 and unnatural. To understand them one must be able to 
 recognise the transfiguring force of intense passion ; one 
 must understand the alchemical brain that our dramatist 
 ascribes to lunatics, lovers, and poets. Other passions than 
 love are a momentary madness, and change whatever the 
 eye falls upon into accordance with their imperious needs : 
 and whoever has not a living knowledge of this transfiguring 
 power, cannot but think it an extravagance to speak of 
 wearing the impression of keen whips as rubies, or to hail 
 the hideous skeleton of death as an object to be embraced 
 and kissed as a longed-for husband. There is strict dramatic 
 truth in Macbeth's fancy that the blood on his hands would 
 incarnadine the multitudinous seas, making the green, one 
 red. The same law of the human mind is the justification 
 of little Arthur's agonised pleadings for his life to Hubert 
 in "King John" (iv. i, loo), which might otherwise appear 
 to be cold, artificial, and incongruous conceits. The poor 
 child's frenzy of terror and eager clinging to life transforms 
 the murderer's implements into active advocates for his 
 safety — 
 
 "Arthur. .... O spare mine eyes, 
 
 Though to no use but still to look on you ! 
 Lo, by my troth, the instrument is cold 
 And would not harm me. 
 
 Hubert. I can heat it, boy. 
 
 Arth. No, in good sooth : the fire is dead with grief, 
 Being create for comfort, to be used 
 In undeserved extremes ; see else yourself; 
 There is no malice in this burning coal ; 
 The breath of heaven has blown his spirit out 
 And strewed repentant ashes on his head. 
 
 Hub. But with my breath I can revive it, boy. 
 
 Arth. An if you do, you will but make it blush 
 And glow with shame of your proceedings, Hubert : 
 
CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. 39/ 
 
 Nay, it perchance will sparkle in your eyes ; 
 And like a dog that is compelled to fight, 
 Snatch at his master that doth tarre him on. 
 All things that you should use to do me wrong 
 Deny their office : only you do lack 
 That mercy which fierce fire and iron extends, 
 Creatures of note for mercy-lacking uses. 
 
 Hub. Well, see to live ; I will not touch thine eye 
 For all the treasure that thine uncle owes : 
 Yet am I sworn and I did purpose, boy. 
 With this same very iron to burn them out." 
 
 Finally, let us see what can be said for and against the 
 extravagant ramps of some of Shakespeare's heroes. There 
 are passages in "Julius Cassar" and "Coriolanus" almost 
 as bombastic as anything to oe found in Shakespeare's 
 dramatic predecessors. Caesar's bearing in the interview 
 with the conspirators, when they beg the repeal of Publius 
 Cimber's banishment, is not less lofty than Tamburlaine's 
 inflation, though more calm and dignified — 
 
 " Know Csesar doth not wrong, nor without cause 
 Will he be satisfied." 
 
 And the speech beginning — 
 
 " I could be well moved, if I were as you " — 
 
 may not be an offence against the modesty of nature, but 
 taken by itself, is an offence against the modesty of art. 
 The boasts and brags of Coriolanus out-Herod the Herod of 
 the Mysteries. For example (i. i, 200) — 
 
 " Would the nobility lay aside their ruth. 
 And let me use my sword, I'd make a quarry 
 With thousands of these quarter'd slaves, as high 
 As I could pick my lance." 
 
 And (iv. 5, 112) — 
 
 " Let me twine 
 Mine arms about that body, where against 
 My grained ash an hundred times hath broke 
 And scarr'd the moon with splinters." 
 
398 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE': 
 
 It is a noticeable circumstance that these inflated speeches 
 — as well as one or two in " Antony and Cleopatra " — are 
 put in the mouths of Roman heroes. I am not quite sure 
 that this is not one explanation and justification of them : 
 they may have been Shakespeare's ideal of what appertained 
 to the Roman character. But apart from their being true 
 to the Roman manner, they may be justified also on the 
 principle of variety. It must have been a relief to Shakes- 
 peare's mind, ever hungry for fresh types of character, to 
 expatiate in the well-marked high-astounding ideal ; and it is 
 equally a relief to the student or spectator who may have 
 followed his career and dwelt with appreciative insight on 
 his varied representation of humanity. This is the broadest 
 justification: if we consider more curiously, other justifica- 
 tions make themselves palpable. The inflation of Corio- 
 lanus and Csesar is not like Tamburlaine's presented to us 
 as a thing unquestioned and admired by those around them, 
 as being, for aught said upon the stage to the contrary, the 
 becoming language of heroic manhood. The violent lan- 
 guage of Coriolanus is deprecated by his friends, and raises 
 a furious antagonism in his enemies. Side by side with 
 Caesar's high conception of himself, we have the humorous 
 expression of his greatness by blunt Casca and the sneering 
 of cynical Cassius. In the case of Caesar, too, there is a 
 profound contrast between his lofty declaration of immov- 
 able constancy and the immediate dethronement of the 
 god to hfeless clay. We must not take the rant of Caesar, 
 Coriolanus, or Antony by itself simply as rant, and wish 
 with Ben Jonson that it had been blotted out. We must 
 consider whether it does not become the Roman character: 
 we must remember that a varied artist like Shakespeare may 
 be allowed an occasional rant as a stretch to powers weary 
 of the ordinary level ; and above all, we must observe how 
 it is regarded by other personages in the drama — in what 
 light it is presented to the audience. 
 
HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 399 
 
 IV. — His Delineation of Character. 
 
 One large deduction must always be made from our asser- 
 tion of Shakespeare's truth to nature. All his personages, ex- 
 cept intended Malaprops, are supposed to have the gift of 
 perfect expression. The poet is the common interpreter. 
 Gervinus, indeed, professes to find in some cases a corre- 
 spondence between characters and their mode of expression ; 
 but we may rest assured that all such discoveries are reached 
 by twisting accident into the semblance of design. We 
 might as soon try to argue that it was natural for Shakes- 
 peare's personages to speak in blank verse. It is expected 
 of a dramatist that he shall give as perfect expression as he 
 can to the emotions and thoughts that occur : the conditions 
 of his art impose no limits upon him in this direction except 
 that his personages must not illustrate their meaning by 
 allusions flagrantly beyond the possibilities of their know- 
 ledge. If the emotions of the dramatis personm are in keep- 
 ing with their characters and their situations, and are at the 
 same time theatrically effective, the dramatist has fulfilled 
 the weightier part of dramatic law. 
 
 Shakespeare's personages have all their author's vividness, 
 energy, and delicacy of language, and all the abstractness 
 of phrase and profusion of imagery characteristic of the 
 Elizabethans. Shakespeare could never have been what 
 he is had he been fettered by considerations of exact truth 
 to nature or to history. We are not to believe that when 
 he put into Macbeth's mouth the famous adjuration of the 
 witches, he paused to consider whether a man in such a 
 situation would naturally have so much to say : he took a 
 firm grasp of the heroic exaltation proper to such a moment, 
 and gave his imagination full swing to body it forth to the 
 audience. Nor must we take exception to the abstruse, 
 antithetical, and metaphysical statement of the conflict of 
 motives in Macbeth's soliloquies, and say that such coher- 
 ence and figurative force of expression would have been im- 
 possible in a rude thane so violently agitated ; enough that 
 
400 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 such an internal conflict was natural to a man of Macbeth's 
 character — the poet must be left free to express the fluctuat- 
 ing passion with all the force of his genius. 
 
 Nor did Shakespeare impede the free movement of his 
 genius by vexatious attention to little details of costume and 
 surroundings : he makes Romans toss caps in the air, and 
 wave hats in scorn, makes Hector quote Aristotle, makes 
 Mantuan outlaws swear by the bare scalp of Robin Hood's 
 fat friar. Yet such was the vivid and searching force of his 
 intellect, the quickness of his constructive energy, that in 
 a brief effort of intense concentration, he was able to realise 
 a scene in its essential circumstances and feelings with a 
 propriety that the mere scholar would not have attained 
 after years spent in the laborious accumulation of accurate 
 particulars. He could hardly have seized the leading feat- 
 ures with such freshness had he stood hesitating and con- 
 sulting authorities about details : he went in boldly, and his 
 clearness of insight kept him right in the main. Hazlitt 
 quotes his picture of Caliban as a special example of his 
 truth to nature. Now the realisation of Caliban is not 
 faultless. It does not seem to have been observed that 
 though Caliban tastes intoxicating liquor for the first time 
 from the flask of Stephano, yet, at the end of the play, he 
 expresses a civilised contempt for a drunkard. Still we 
 should not be disposed for a slight inadvertence like this 
 - — which doubtless might be plausibly argued to be no inad- 
 vertence at all, but a stroke of profound wisdom — to mod- 
 erate very much what Hazlitt says, that " the character of 
 Caliban not only stands before us with a language and 
 manners of its own, but the scenery and situation of the 
 enchanted island he inhabits, the traditions of the place, its 
 strange noises, its hidden recesses, his frequent haunts and 
 ancient neighbourhood, are given with a miraculous truth 
 of nature, and with all the familiarity of an old recollection." 
 This is very far from being literally true ; yet when we com- 
 pare Shakespeare's characters with what other dramatists 
 have accomplished, we must admit that some such super- 
 human exaggeration is needed to give the ordinary reader 
 a just idea of his marvellous pre-eminence. 
 
HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 4OI 
 
 Shakespeare's historical plays afford the most unambiguous 
 and indisputable evidence of his close study of character, 
 and his inexhaustible fertility in giving it expression. He 
 could not merely sum up a character in such general lan- 
 guage as he puts into the mouth of the Duchess of York 
 concerning her son Richard : — 
 
 " Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy ; 
 Thy school-days frightful, desperate, wild, and furious. 
 Thy prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturous, 
 Thy age confirmed, proud, subtle, bloody, treacherous.'' 
 
 But he had a living and manageable knowledge of the sub- 
 jective moods and objective manifestations of the character 
 thus summed up ; he could imagine the feelings, actions, 
 and artifices of such a man under a great variety of circum- 
 stances. Many people have knowledge of character enough 
 to draw the general outlines of Richard, but who has shown 
 sufficient knowledge of character to embody such a concep- 
 tion ? This power is shown in all his plays, but is most con- 
 spicuous and easily recognised in his historical plays, 
 because there he had more definite materials for his imagi- 
 nation to lay hold of and work into consistent characterisa- 
 tions. What chiefly makes his characters so life-like is their 
 many-sidedness. The poet's just sense of clear broad 
 dramatic effect is shown in making his leading characters 
 approach to well-marked types ; but the various characters 
 are much more than narrow abstractions — each has traits 
 that individualise him, and strongly colour his behaviour. 
 Take his soldiers, his mighty men of war,, the bastard Fal- 
 conbridge in "King John," Hotspur in "Henry IV.," 
 Coriolanus, and Antony. All have a powerful theatrical 
 effect as men of heroic strength and courage, but each is 
 a distinct character : the Bastard is individualised by his 
 robust hearty humour and unpretentious loyalty ; Hotspur, 
 by his wasp-stung impatience, absorbed manner, and irresis- 
 tible ebullience of animal spirits ; Coriolanus, by his patri- 
 cian pride ; Antony, by his oratorical skill, his fondness for 
 the theatre, and his sensuality. The various qualities of 
 each are consistent with their warlike reputation, and 
 
 2 C 
 
402 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 studiously consistent with one another. So his kings, John, 
 Richard II., Henry IV., Henry V., Henry VI., Henry 
 VIII., all have a certain kingly dignity, and yet they are 
 distinct individuals : the weak kings, Richard, John, and 
 Henry VI., are weak in different and characteristic ways 
 — Richard from impulsive generosity, John from moral ob- 
 liquity, Henry from constitutional imbecility. Look again 
 at the extraordinary circle of sorrowing women round 
 Richard III., how skilfully they are distinguished : the she- 
 wolf Margaret, the motherly old Duchess, the weak and 
 jdelding Anne, the high-spirited and clever Ehzabeth, bear 
 their sorrows in widely different attitudes. Or we might 
 make a small gallery of portraits of high ecclesiastics — the 
 worldly smooth papal legate Pandulph in " King John," the 
 fiery unscrupulous Beaufort in " Henry VI.," the ambitious 
 noble-minded Wolsey, the meek but firm Cranmer — all ex- 
 hibited with unmistakable individuality. 
 
 Of his historical plays, the First " Henry IV." is one of 
 the finest in study of character. The classical histories 
 also abound in fine discrimination. " Troilus and Cressida" 
 is strongly coloured by the mediaeval prejudice in favour 
 of the Trojans, which has led the dramatist to present the 
 fighting heroes of the Greeks as stupid blocks, mere draught- 
 oxen yoked by superior intellect to plough up the wars ; but 
 the various conceptions are worked out with very skilful 
 touches. "Julius Caesar'' also contains very clearly marked 
 delineations, — Brutus, Cassius, Casca, Antony, Portia : the 
 dramatist worked from translated authorities, but no one 
 has ventured to dispute the essentials of his interpretations. 
 None of the Roman plays, however, contain finer character- 
 isation than the two parts of " Henry IV.," which between 
 them exhibit the characters of the King himself, the Prince, 
 Hotspur, Glendower, Lady Percy, Falstaff and his com- 
 panions. The great magician Glendower is drawn with 
 remarkable dehcacy ; his indulgence towards the whims of 
 Hotspur is a very happy stroke, in fine keeping with the 
 qualities found in union with his deep knowledge and lofty 
 pretensions (" i Henry IV." iii. i) : — 
 
HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 403 
 
 " In faith he is a worthy gentleman, 
 Exceedingly well read, and profited 
 In strange concealments, valiant as a lion 
 And wondrous affable, and as bountiful 
 As mines of India." 
 
 There are a good jmany points of resemblance between 
 Prince. Henry and Hamlet, although they seem to stand 
 contrasted as examples of princely gaiety and princely 
 melancholy. Harry might pass for Ophelia's picture of 
 Hamlet before his noble mind was overthrown : he has 
 "the courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword." 
 True, these qualities in Harry are smothered up from the 
 world when first he is introduced to us ; but when he has 
 mounted the throne his friends reckon up his virtues and 
 argue that he must have used wildness as a veil to con- 
 templation. They say (" Henry V." i. i, 38) : — 
 
 " Hear him but reason in divinity. 
 And all-admiring with an inward wish 
 You would desire the king were made a prelate ; 
 Hear him debate of commonwealth affairs 
 You'Id say it hath been all in all his study ; 
 List his discourse of war, and you shall hear 
 A fearful battle rendered you in music ; 
 Turn him to any course of policy 
 The Gordian knot of it he will unloose 
 Familiar as his garter : that, when he speaks, 
 The air, a chartered libertine, is still, 
 And the mute wonder lurketh in men's ears 
 To steal his sweet and honeyed sentences." 
 
 Further, as Harry is opposed , to impatient and warlike 
 Hotspur, and is anxious to try skill in arms with him, so 
 Hamlet is opposed to Laertes. And the resemblance goes 
 deeper. Harry is eminently a conscientious man : he 
 assumes the crown with a deep sense of his responsibilities, 
 and will not undertake the war with France and involve the 
 two nations in bloodshed until he is fully assured by his 
 counsellors of the perfect justice of his cause (" Henry V." 
 i. 2, 10 — 30). In like manner Hamlet abstains from the 
 bloody business of revenge till he obtains unequivocal proofs 
 
404 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 
 
 of his uncle's guilt and utter badness of heart. Nor is 
 Harry's companionship with Falstaff inconsistent with 
 Hamlet's character. The prince goes with that wild set for 
 the purpose of studying them and seeing life (" 2 Henry 
 IV." iv. 4, 68), as Hamlet frequented the players. And 
 he is not without gloomy fits : he is not always in the vein 
 for doffing the world aside and bidding it pass. His father's 
 description of him would apply exactly to Hamlet : — 
 
 " For he is gracious, if he observed ; 
 He hath a tear for pity and a hand 
 Open as day for melting charity : 
 Yet notwithstanding, being incensed, he's flint, 
 As humorous as winter and as sudden 
 As flaws congealed in the spring of day. 
 His temper, therefore, must be well observed : 
 Chide him for faults, and do it reverently. 
 When you perceive his blood inclined to mirth; 
 But being moody, give him line and scope." 
 
 Such a prince might very easily fall into melancholy, if an 
 uncle married his mother within two months of his father's 
 death and " popped in between the election and his hopes." 
 Hamlet, however, is younger than the companion of Fal- 
 staff. There is noground whatsoever for the prevailing notion 
 that Hamlet's age must be set down as thirty. It proceeds 
 upon two quite unfounded assumptions : that the married 
 life of the player King and Queen corresponds exactly in 
 its duration of thirty years to the married life of Hamlet's 
 father and mother, and that young Hamlet was born within 
 a year of their marriage. Several circumstances show that 
 Hamlet's age is at the utmost seventeen or eighteen. He 
 has just returned from the University of Wittenberg, and 
 wishes to go back ; the boy that played the woman's part 
 when he was there is not yet too old for the office ; his 
 friend Horatio is still there, Laertes is just setting out on his 
 travels. The usual age for youths at that stage of their 
 education in Shakespeare's England was between sixteen 
 and eighteen. And if our philosophical German friends 
 should insist that Shakespeare had his own idea of the 
 
HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 405 
 
 proper age for leaving the university, and that that age was 
 thirty, what are we to make of the passage where Polonius 
 and Laertes warn OpheUa against entertaining the youth's 
 professions of love, alleging among other things, that his 
 love is but " a violet in the youth of primy nature," and 
 will change when he grows older? Laertes actually speaks 
 of him as not yet full grown (i. 3, 11) — 
 
 " For nature, crescent, does not grow alone 
 In thews and bulk, but as this temple waxes. 
 The inward service of the mind and soul 
 Grows wide withal. Perhaps he loves you now," &c. 
 
 The chief diiBculty in the play of Hamlet is the prince's 
 delay in the execution of his revenge. When his father's 
 ghost makes the first revelation of foul play, he cries — 
 
 " Haste me to know't, that I with wings as swift 
 As meditation or the thoughts of love 
 May sweep to my revenge." 
 
 Yet when he is told that the murderer is his uncle, he is so 
 amazed and staggered that he does not at once proceed to 
 execute vengeance, but adds delay to delay, and at last kills 
 the murderer upon an unpremeditated impulse. Now 
 Goethe's well-known theory is that this delay proceeds from 
 irresolution and weakness. The key to Hamlet's character 
 is found in the words — 
 
 " The time is out of joint : O cursed spite 
 That ever I was born to set it right." 
 
 Hamlet is a soft, calm-tempered, cultivated prince : he 
 has not the strength of nerve to be a hero. " Shakespeare 
 meant in the present case to represent the effects of a great 
 action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it." 
 The great objection to this theory, apart from its unaccount- 
 able blindness to Hamlet's real temper, is its utter degradation 
 of the just effect of the tragedy. It suggests as the proper 
 reflection when vengeance is at last accomplished, not the 
 thought put into our minds by the dramatist himself, (v. 2, 
 7) of an overruling interference with man's petty designs, 
 but the mean disenchanting consideration that Hamlet was 
 
406 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 a poor creature or he would have done it much sooner. 
 Such a stupid degradation of a tragedy by depriving the 
 hero of all nobility of motive, is without a parallel in the 
 annals of criticism : and that this should have been done 
 under pretence of philosophical criticism, is enough to throw 
 discredit for ever on the name of philosophy. 
 
 Goethe tried to form an idea of what Hamlet might have 
 been had his father's life been prolonged. Now the value 
 of this as a critical method will appear if we apply it to the 
 life of Prince Henry. But at any rate, we are bound to 
 take into account what happened when Hamlet's father's 
 life was cut short ; we cannot be allowed to substitute our 
 own conception of what a young prince delicately reared 
 ought to be, for the real Hamlet as revealed by the play. 
 What evidence, then, is there for saying that Hamlet was 
 weak, irresolute, cowardly? When he hears that his 
 father's spirit is in arms he resolves to watch for it : he 
 crosses its path and addresses it at the risk of being 
 blasted : not setting his life at a pin's fee; he disregards the 
 warnings of his companions, throws them oflf when they 
 seek to restrain him, and puts himself in the power of the 
 dread figure without knowing whether it comes from heaven 
 or from hell. When the monstrous revelation is made, his 
 heart and strength threaten to faU him : he cries : — 
 
 " Hold, hold, my heart ; 
 And you, my sinews, grow not instant old. 
 But bear me stiffly up." 
 
 And we are asked to believe that this was the effect of 
 fear : the man who has just displayed superhuman daring 
 and reckless indifference to life, and who afterwards leads 
 the way in boarding a pirate, quakes at the prospect of 
 putting his life in danger ! Nothing but theory-blunderers 
 could fail to see the real meaning of Hamlet's agitation : he 
 is for a moment astounded and staggered at the monstrosity 
 of the crime. But why does he not recover himself, rush 
 off, and despatch his uncle at once, or at least rouse the 
 people as Laertes afterwards did when his father was killed, 
 
HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 407 
 
 and besiege the palace ? Was not this consideration para- 
 lysing action ? Most undoubtedly, consideration here in- 
 terposed between impulse and action ; but we do not call 
 that weakness, irresolution or cowardice. We call it a 
 proof of strength to refrain from rushing intemperately into 
 action. Mark the contrast between Hamlet and Laertes : 
 it is the same contrast that Shakespeare draws between 
 Henry and Hotspur. Laertes impetuously raises the 
 people, and threatens to punish — the wrong man : he is, like 
 Hotspur, a " wasp-stung and impatient fool." And that is 
 what we should have called Hamlet if he had run upon the 
 instant at the bidding of the ghost, and thrust his sword 
 into his uncle : and if he had gone to the people shouting 
 what his father's ghost had revealed, they would very pro- 
 perly have thought him mad or cunningly ambitious. But 
 Hamlet, like Henry, is a man of larger intelligence looking 
 before and after : he is no more a coward than Henry was 
 when he summoned his counsellors before rushing into war ; 
 but he desires to be assured of the justice of his cause. 
 He at once resolves upon a plan : he will put an antic dis- 
 position on, and watch for confirmation. But is not his 
 outcry against the cursed spite of fortune a proof that he 
 was unwilling to undertake the task of revenge ? It proves, 
 at least, that he did not like the situation that the spite of 
 fortune had thrust upon him. But was it weak, irresolute, 
 or cowardly, to be agonised by the thought that his father 
 had been killed and his mother strumpeted by his uncle, 
 and under the anguish of this thought to express a passing 
 wish that he had never been bom into a world where such 
 crimes were possible ? 
 
 For some time Hamlet's cloak of madness helps him to 
 discover nothing : he only finds spies set upon him to dis- 
 cover the secret of his derangement. With characteristic 
 recklessness he does not carry the pretence far : he merely 
 goes about in disordered dress, and in rapt study, and 
 makes himself disagreeable to the astonished court by the 
 causticity of his remarks : in fact, he uses the pretence of 
 madness as a privilege. The King and Queen suspect the 
 
408 WILI.IAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 cause of his melancholy, and employ Rosencranz and Guild- 
 enstem to sound him ; but at the same time they allow the 
 obtrusive wiseacre, old Polonius, who knows all about 
 everything and is never wrong, to use means for testing his 
 confident theory of the Prince's madness. The employ- 
 ment of Ophelia as a decoy increases Hamlet's sense of the 
 foulness of the world, and throws him with increased force 
 on his friendship with Horatio ; but he can discover no- 
 thing. At last chance throws the players in his way, and 
 he at once concocts a scheme for turning them to account. 
 In the mean time, however, the emotion shown by one of 
 the actors in reciting a passionate speech makes him accuse 
 himself of cowardice in thus delaying the execution of the 
 Ghost's commands ; and if Goethe had been present at his 
 deUberations, he would have seconded the young Prince's 
 morbid self-accusings. But reason prevails : he reflects 
 justly that the Ghost may have been sent by the devil to 
 tempt him to damnation, and resolves to have proof of his 
 uncle's guilt more relative than the word of an ambiguous 
 apparition. 
 
 But why does Hamlet still delay when he has received 
 strong confirmation from the play? He gets an oppor- 
 tunity : he comes upon his uncle kneeling in prayer : why 
 does he withhold ? Not from fear : not from irresolution : 
 but from cold iron determination sure of its victim and re- 
 solved not to strike till the most favourable moment He 
 is tempted to the weakness of yielding to impulse ; but he 
 holds back with inflexible strength. His words are instinct 
 with the most iron energy of will (iii. 3, 73). In the inter- 
 view with his mother, hearing somebody stir behind the 
 arras, he either conceives that now he has caught the 
 villain in an unsanctified moment, or he cannot resist the 
 excitement of the unexpected opportunity : he makes a 
 pass through the arras, and kills Polonius. When he is 
 harrowing his mother's soul with reproaches, the Ghost re- 
 appears avowedly to whet his almost blunted purpose, but 
 with the effect of diverting the rising frenzy of his invec- 
 tive : the departed spirit retains its tenderness for the weak 
 
HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 409 
 
 woman, and is pained to see her thus tormented by ex- 
 posure and remorse. And Hamlet still bides his time. Was 
 this cowardice? In his sharp self- questionings, he calls 
 it so himself. On his way to England another incident 
 occurs that makes him reflect on his own conduct, and he 
 says : — 
 
 " Now whether it be 
 Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple 
 Of thinking too precisely on the event, 
 A thought which quartered, hath but one part wisdom 
 And ever three parts coward, / do not know 
 Why yet I live to say ' This things to do; ' 
 Sith I have cause and will and strength and means 
 To do 7." 
 
 His delay was inexplicable to Hamlet himself, though 
 we aire all so confident in explaining it for him. One might 
 have pointed out to him, without seconding his own mor- 
 bid and unjustifiable accusation of cowardice, that he had 
 still no means of satisfying the people that he was a pious 
 avenger and not merely a mad or an ambitious murderer, 
 more particularly after he had incurred the accidental taint 
 of the murder of Polonius, whom he was not to know that 
 the King would inter in hugger-mugger. And the desire to 
 be above suspicion, to have an unblemished reputation, 
 was a strong motive with Hamlet, as we see from his dying 
 injunction to Horatio to tell his story to the world and 
 clear his wounded name from unjust aspersion. But I do 
 not think that it was the dramatist's intention to represent 
 this as the chief motive for Hamlet's delay, otherwise he 
 would have brought it out more strongly. No ; the above 
 passage, taken in conjunction with Hamlet's communica- 
 tions to Horatio in the beginning of the last Scene, supplies 
 the real clue to the dramatist's intention in the concluding 
 Acts. Hamlet does not know why he delays : he is not 
 afraid— there is not the slightest trace of such a motive in 
 his behaviour from first to last— but he restrains himself 
 in a blind inexplicable vague trust that some supremely 
 
410 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 favourable moment will occur. Meantime Destiny is ripen- 
 ing the harvest for him : a Divinity is shaping his ends : 
 his indiscretions serve him when his deep plots do pall. 
 The measure of his uncle's guilt, already full, is now heaped 
 over ; crime begets crime ; Hamlet returns from England 
 with documentary evidence of the villain's designs upon his 
 own life. He has no time to lose : the news will soon be 
 brought from England of the result of his stratagem : he 
 resolves to make swift use of the interim. But the supreme 
 moment comes after all without his contrivance, and is 
 more comprehensive in its provisions for justice than any 
 scheme that could have been devised by single wisdom, and 
 executed by single power. Claudius is at last caught by 
 vengeance in an act that has no relish of salvation in it, 
 is surprised in an infamous plot, and sent to hell with a 
 heavier load of guilt upon his back : and others brought 
 within the widening vortex of the original crime, are in- 
 volved in the final ruin. Horatio is left to sum up the 
 story ; — 
 
 " Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, 
 Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, 
 Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, 
 And in this upshot purposes mistook 
 Fallen on the inventors' heads." 
 
 Volumes might be written, and indeed have been written, 
 on Shakespeare's characters. Their sayings and doings are 
 not an exact transcript of life ; but they produce the dra- 
 matic illusion of life more perfectly than if they were actual 
 copies. The varied concerns of life do not divert and dis- 
 tract his personages in exactly the same way as in the 
 course of an actual ruling passion ; and yet the diversion of 
 circumstances in real life is represented in his plays and 
 gives his personages the appearance of actual beings. Al- 
 though Hamlet vows to wipe everything from his memory 
 save the Ghost's commandment, Nature is too strong for 
 him : he is interested in the news from Wittenberg, he can- 
 not resist the old desire to see his play acted in a becoming 
 
HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 411 
 
 and workmanlike manner, and even when the crisis is at 
 hand, he is sufficiently disengaged to bandy words with the 
 Gravedigger and with Osric. Such is Ufe, a mixture of 
 great concerns and small : a man possessed with one great 
 unintermitted object is a madman, and plays that represent 
 the reciprocal action and reaction of such characters, are 
 not a representation of life. 
 
 The greatest of Shakespeare's comic characters is Fal- 
 staff, and he also, curiously enough, has suffered somewhat 
 at the hands of a friendly German commentator. Ger- 
 vinus alleges " sensual pleasure and brutishness as the 
 starting-point and aim of Falstaff's whole being." Now 
 this is taking too serious and unsympathetic a view of "that 
 huge bombard of sack, that grey iniquity, that father ruf- 
 fian, that vanity in years ; " and if the ghost of Sir John 
 could address a word to this defamer, he would doubtless 
 ask — " I would your commentatorship would take me with 
 you; whom means your commentatorship ?" There is not 
 a little in common between Falstaff and Autolycus. Their 
 moral (or rather immoral) principles are the same, and they 
 have the same witty resourcefulness. Both have come 
 down in the world from being pages to being " squires of 
 the night's body," "Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the 
 shade, minions of the moon." If the fat knight had had 
 "but a belly of any indifFerency," he says, "he would 
 simply have been the most active fellow in Europe : " and 
 in that case, had he only not lost his voice by halloing and 
 singing of anthems, the resemblance between him and Au- 
 tolycus would have been tolerably complete. The starting- 
 point and aim of Sir John as a subject to invent laughter 
 and an object for laughter to be invented on, is his fat un- 
 abashed self-satisfaction, and good-humoured volubihty in 
 the conscious absence of nearly all the virtues. He is an 
 absolute negation of the cardinal virtues of temperance and 
 piety, and of the hardly less important virtues of honesty, 
 veracity, active courage, and chastity : but when any breach 
 of these virtues is brought home to him, when he is caught 
 telling incomprehensible lies or abusing his friends behind 
 
412 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 their back or " misusing the king's press most damnably," 
 lie is not ashamed, but is ever ready with some quick- 
 witted excuse. Virtue contends with the fat rogue and is 
 worsted : he is impervious to the arrows of remorse : no 
 amount of plain tales can put him down, disturb the serenity 
 of his chuckle, or abate his hunger and thirst for sugar and 
 sack. It is this complete rout of Virtue by the old rascal 
 that is so ludicrous. If his delinquencies were more serious 
 than they are, if he were a man scattering firebrands, ar- 
 rows, and death, our moral sentiments would be too much 
 outraged to laugh over his victory. But he is compara- 
 tively harmless : he is too fat " with drinking of old sack 
 and unbuttoning after supper, and sleeping on benches 
 after noon,'' to be a dangerous character : and we cannot 
 help extending a laughing sympathy to his presence of 
 mind, readiness of wit, volubility of tongue, and good- 
 humoured surrender of his person to be the occasion of wit 
 in others. Gervinus, if I mistake not, accuses him of want- 
 ing courage. This depends upon what meaning is attached 
 to courage. Sir John, as we know him, is not much of a 
 fighting man ; he does not fight longer than he sees reason : 
 but he is too self-complacent and self-confident to be called 
 a coward. In the Gadshill encounter, he heads the attack 
 on the travellers : afterwards he makes a few passes before 
 he runs away, while his comrades take to their heels at once : 
 and he leads his ragamuffin company where they are pep- 
 pered, although he does despise honour and fall down pre- 
 tending to be dead before the infuriated Douglas. But 
 granting his physical courage to be but small, his moral 
 courage is dauntless. When the sheriff comes to the door 
 of the tavern with his formidable train. Sir John is not in 
 the least disconcerted, but is eager to have the play placed 
 out, and he falls asleep behind the arras in a situation where 
 a cowardly breaker of the laws would have been perspiring 
 with fear. Even the excitement of battle does not unhinge 
 his fat composure : — 
 
 " Prince I prithee, lend me thy sword. 
 
 Fal. O Hal, I prithee, give me leave to breathe awhile. Turk 
 
HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER. 413 
 
 Gregory never did such deeds in arms as I have done this day. 
 I have paid Percy, I have made him sure. 
 
 Prince. He is, indeed ; and living to kill thee. I prithee 
 lend me thy sword. 
 
 Fal. Nay, before God, Hal, if Percy be alive, thou get'st not 
 my sword ; but take my pistol, if thou wilt. 
 
 Prince. Give it me : what, is it in this case ? 
 
 Fal. Ay, Hal ; 'tis hot, 'tis hot ; there's that will sack a city. 
 [The Prince draws it out, and finds it to be a bottle ofsack^ " 
 
 He pursues his intrigues with the " Merry Wives of Wind- 
 sor " with a boldness equally imperturbable : he is not de- 
 terred by one mishap after another from again running into 
 danger. No : if we overlook Sir John's courage, we miss 
 the essence of his humour. Sir John is no sneaking sinner : 
 he meets all charges of iniquity with a full unabashed eye 
 glistening out of his fat countenance, with voluble assertions 
 of his own virtue and loud denunciations of the degeneracy 
 of the times. After his flight from Gadshill he does not 
 hide his face for shame, but enters the " Boar's Head " 
 shouting for sack and exclaiming against cowardice : — 
 
 " You rogue, here's lime in this sack too : there is nothing 
 but roguery to be found in villanous man : yet a coward is 
 worse than a cup of sack with lime in it. A villanous coward ! 
 Go thy ways, old Jack ; die when thou wilt ; if manhood, good 
 manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the earth, then am I 
 a shotten herring. There live not three good men unhanged 
 in England ; and one of them is fat and grows old : God help 
 the while ! a bad world, I say. I would I were a weaver ; I 
 could sing psalms or anything, A plague of all cowards, I say 
 still." 
 
 In his exquisite interview with the Lord Chief- Justice, he 
 abuses these costermonger times, says he has lost his voice 
 with halloing and singing of anthems, wishes to God his 
 name were not so terrible to the enemy, and crowns his 
 impudence by asking the loan of a thousand pounds. There 
 is a good deal more than " sensual pleasure and brutish- 
 ness " in the character of Sir John : it is not his sensual 
 pleasure and brutishness that we laugh at, but the ingenuity 
 
414 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 and brazen presence of mind with which he glosses over his 
 vices. Humour involves a surprise of mood as wit involves 
 a surprise of words : and Falstaff's way of taking things is 
 certainly very different from what the ordinary way of the 
 world leads us to expect. Sir John, too, is a wit as well as 
 a besotted voluptuary and a willing butt for the wit of others. 
 His ridicule of Bardolph's nose is incomparable. Down in 
 Gloucestershire we see him watching Shallow and Slender 
 with observant eye, and contemptuously noting their pecu- 
 liarities with a view to future capital. " I will devise mat- 
 ter enough out of this Shallow to keep Prince Harry in 
 continual laughter the wearing out of six fashions, which is 
 four terms, or two actions, and a' shall laugh without inter- 
 vallums." 
 
 V. — The Inter-action of his Characters. 
 
 A writer may have the power of expressing many varieties 
 of passion, may have a profound sense of beauty, a quick 
 sense of the ludicrous, and a perfect knowledge of character, 
 and yet fail in the dramatist's most essential faculty — the 
 power of representing one character in active influence upon 
 another. The dramatist has to deal not with still life or 
 with tranquil exposition : he must bring impassioned men 
 and women face to face, and show how their words operate 
 upon one another to comfort, to cajole, to convince, to 
 soothe, and to inflame. The problem ever before the 
 mind of the dramatist is, in mathematical language, to 
 estimate the effect of a given expression on a given charac- 
 ter in a given state of feeling. Then this effect reacts, and 
 the reaction reacts, and other influences come in and join 
 in the complicated process of action and reaction, so that 
 the ability to hold your shifting data unconfused, to solve 
 problem after problem with unerring judgment, and to keep 
 all your results within the just limits of dramatic effect, is 
 one of the rarest of human gifts. This is dramatic genius. 
 
 Shakespeare's swiftness of intellect, fine emotional dis- 
 
THE INTER- ACTION OF HIS CHARACTERS. 415 
 
 crimination, and unfailing self-command, were tasked to 
 the utmost in the representation of this reciprocal action. 
 In his three greatest triumphs in the exhibition of what 
 Bacon calls " working " a man — the instigation of Othello's 
 jealousy by lago (" Othello," iii. 3), the puffing up of 
 Ajax's pride by Ulysses ("Troilus and Cressida," ii. 3), and 
 the wooing of Anne by Richard III. ("Richard III.," i. 2) 
 — the influence can hardly be said to be reciprocal : the 
 agent stands with immovable self-possession, only keeping 
 himself on the alert to follow up with all his dexterity the 
 effect produced by each stroke. A similar remark may be 
 made concerning the half-wilful torture of Juliet by her 
 Nurse ("Romeo and Juliet," iii. 2), or the gradual agitation 
 of Posthumus by the lies of the villain lachimo (" Cymbe- 
 line,'' ii. 4), or the annoyance and final discomfiture of the 
 Chief- Justice by the imperturbable Falstafif (" 2 Henry IV." 
 i. 2). So, too, in the swaying of the passions of the 
 " mutable rank-scented " Roman mob in " Coriolanus " and 
 " Julius Cffisar," there is not much reaction : the dramatist 
 has set himself to represent the fluctuations of an excitable 
 crowd under the power of adroit oratory, the orator himself 
 in each case persevering steadily in his objects. But 
 Shakespeare did not shrink from the infinitely more difficult 
 task of making both parties to a dialogue exert a powerful 
 influence on each other. Of this there are memorable 
 examples in the opening acts of " Macbeth," and in several 
 scenes of " Coriolanus " and " Julius Csesar." The quarrel 
 between Brutus and Cassius ("Julius Caesar," iv. 3), and 
 the interview of Coriolanus with his mother, his wife, and 
 his son (" Coriolanus," v. 3), are managed with consummate 
 knowledge of the heart, and unerring grasp of imagination 
 upon its slightest and most shifting fluctuations. One would 
 not venture to say that Shakespeare's power of identifying 
 himself with his characters, and wonderful swiftness in pass- 
 ing from one personality to another, increased after the 
 time when he composed "Richard III.," and delineated 
 the scenes between Margaret and the objects of her hatred: 
 but certainly he increased in the masterly ease of his transi- 
 
4l6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 
 
 tions. The greatest monument of his dramatic subtlety is 
 the tragedy of " Antony and Cleopatra." With all its noble 
 bursts of passion and occasional splendour of description, 
 this play has not perhaps the massive breadth of feeling and 
 overpowering interest of the four great tragedies, " Mac- 
 beth," " Hamlet," " Lear," and " Othello ;" but it is greater 
 even than " Macbeth " and " Othello " in the range of its 
 mastery over the fluctuations of profound passion : it is the 
 greatest of Shakespeare's plays in the dramatist's greatest 
 faculty. The conflict of motives in " Hamlet " is an 
 achievement of genius that must always be regarded with 
 wonder and reverence; but, to my mind, "Antony and 
 Cleopatra " is the dramatist's masterpiece. One may have 
 less interest in the final end of the subtle changes wrought 
 in the hero and heroine : but in the pursuit and certain 
 grasp of those changes, Shakespeare's dramatic genius ap- 
 pears at its supreme height. 
 
 Schlegel quotes with approbation a saying of Lessing's re- 
 garding Shakespeare's exhibition of the gradual progress of 
 passion from its first origin. " He gives," says Lessing, "a 
 living picture of all the slight and secret artifices by which 
 a feeling steals into our souls, of all the imperceptible ad- 
 vantages which it there gains, of all the stratagems by which 
 it makes every other passion subservient to itself, till it be- 
 comes the sole tyrant of our desires and our aversions." 
 This incautious hyperbole tends to confuse the boundaries 
 between the drama and the novel or epic of manners. The 
 remark is more applicable to the novels of George Eliot, or 
 to the " Troilus and Cressida" of Chaucer, than to the plays 
 of Shakespeare. The slight and stealthy growth of passion 
 is wholly unsuited for the stage. In the drama, life is con- 
 densed and concentrated ; the pulses of life and the ener- 
 gies of growth are quickened. Passions spring up with more 
 than tropical rapidity. The mutual love of Romeo and 
 Juliet, the misanthropy of Timon, the ambition of Macbeth, 
 Hamlet's thirst for revenge, Lear's fatal hatred of Cordelia, 
 Othello's jealousy — are all passions of sudden growth, 
 lago's artifices are subtle but swift and instantaneously 
 
TRANQUILLISING CLOSE OF HIS TRAGEDIES. 417 
 
 effectual: Othello's pang at his first stab (iii. 3, 35) is not 
 less sharp than the heart's wound of young Romeo by 
 the first shaft from JuUet's eyes. The dramatist is very 
 well aware that the first suggestion commonly works more 
 slowly : he makes lago say — 
 
 " Dangerous conceits are, in their natures, poisons, 
 Which at the first are scarce found to distaste, 
 But with a little act upon the blood — 
 Burn like the mines of sulphur." 
 
 But his poison must work swiftly ; inflammatory insinuations 
 must be accumulated and compressed so as to force the 
 passion at once into a blaze : before an hour is over, 
 lago exclaims in agony — 
 
 " Not poppy, nor mandragora. 
 Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, 
 Shall ever medjcine thee to that sweet sleep 
 Which thou owedst yesterday." 
 
 Hamlet's action is tempered by subsequent reflections, but 
 his desire for revenge attains its utmost vehemence at the 
 first supernatural solicitation : he at once passionately vows 
 to wipe from his memory every record but the ghost's com- 
 mandment. Macbeth does not proceed instantly to murder 
 Duncan ; but the confirmation of part of the promise of the 
 witches immediately raises the terrible suggestion — 
 
 " Whose horrid image doth unfix his hair 
 And make his seated heart knock at his ribs. 
 Against the use of nature." 
 
 The great stages of the growth of passion are indicated in 
 Shakespeare's dramas with all the power of his genius, but the 
 development proceeds with fiery vehemence. Slight and 
 stealthy development belongs to the domain of the novelist. 
 
 VI. — The Tranquillising Close of his Tragedies. 
 
 I have already drawn attention (p. 380) to the presence 
 of Destiny or Fortune as an impelling or thwarting influ- 
 2 D 
 
4l8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 ence in Shakespeare's dramas. In all his tragedies the 
 influence of this mighty World-power on the concerns of 
 men is more or less suggested. Romeo takes refuge in 
 death from its persecutions : " O, here," he cries at the 
 tomb of Juhet — ■ 
 
 " O, here 
 Will I set up my everlasting rest, 
 And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars 
 From this world-wearied flesh." 
 
 Before the battle of Philippi, when even Cassius begins 
 partly to credit things that do presage, Brutus, who in the 
 end prefers leaping into the pit to tarrying till he is pushed, 
 is resolute to hold out while any hope remains : — 
 
 " Arming himself with patience 
 To stay the providence of some high powers 
 That govern us below." 
 
 Macbeth at first is disposed to commit himself to the 
 control of Chance : — • 
 
 " If Chance will have me king, why Chance may crown me, 
 Without my stir." 
 
 And his wife sees the hand of Fate in the half-fulfiUed 
 predictions of the witches and the entrance of Duncan 
 under her battlements. The bastard Edmund ridicules the 
 excellent foppery of the world in making guilty of our 
 disasters the sun, moon, and stars; but later in the play 
 old Kent can find no other satisfactory way of accounting 
 for the cruelty of Goneril and Regan, and the kindness of 
 Cordelia : — 
 
 " It is the stars. 
 The stars above us, govern our conditions." 
 
 Othello exclaims of the supposed treachery of Desde- 
 mona : — 
 
 " 'Tis destiny unshunnable as death." 
 
TRANQUILLISING CLOSE OF HIS TRAGEDIES. 419 
 
 And when he calls to mind his prowess in happier days, 
 cries : — 
 
 " O vain boast ! 
 Who can control his fate ? " 
 
 The magnanimous Antony rises superior to the enmity of 
 Fate : when his soldiers are lamenting round him, he says 
 to them : — 
 
 " Nay, good my fellows, do not please sharp Fate 
 To grace it with your sorrows : bid that welcome 
 Which comes to punish us, and we punish it 
 Seeming to bear it lightly." 
 
 The thought of inevitable Destiny, iron Fate, is a great 
 tranquilliser, and rolls over tragic catastrophes like the calm 
 grandeur of stars after a storm. When our minds are 
 fatigued by the spectacle of horrors, or poignant griefs, or 
 violent struggles of fatal issue, this thought unfolds itself to 
 soothe the tumult. We subdue the keen agitation of par- 
 ticular calamities by fixing our eyes on the calm majesty of 
 the irresistible forces of the universe : we take some part 
 of the disturbing culpability of individual agents off their 
 shoulders, and lay it on the Stars, dread agents equally 
 above our love and our hatred. Before the awful magni- 
 ficence of their doings, our fierce detestation of individual 
 malice is subdued, and the sorrows of the individual lose 
 their sharpness merged in the sorrows of mankind. 
 
 The power that overhangs Shakespeare's tragedies ap- 
 pears also in the aspect of an inexorable and relentless 
 Justice, blindly dealing out the punishment of death to all 
 who are wilfully or accidentally brought within the sweep 
 of her sword. Not the slightest culpability is left un- 
 avenged. None remain alive at the end who have been so 
 intimately mixed up with the chief victims that their sur- 
 vival would chafe our sense of justice and vex our medita- 
 tions on the impartial rigour of the Destinies. Not one 
 false step within the tragic circle can be withdrawn. Con- 
 scious or unconscious, intentional or unintentional, all com- 
 
420 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : 
 
 plicity is fearfully punished. We ask what poor Cordelia 
 had done that she should perish untimely; and Justice 
 points to her wayward refusal to humour the exacting irrita- 
 bility of her doting old father. Ophelia? She was thrust 
 for a moment by the wretched rash intruding Polonius be- 
 tween Hamlet and his revenge : for one moment she was 
 the innocent tool of the guilty, and though her sad fate was 
 avenged on Hamlet, she could not escape. Consider 
 how you should have felt had Cordelia survived Lear or 
 Ophelia survived her father, her brother, and her lover, and 
 you will recognise the dramatic justice of involving them 
 in the general ruin of their friends and enemies. The fate 
 of Desdemona is too harrowing if we miss the complete- 
 ness of the dramatist's design in the outlines of her char- 
 acter. In the first frenzy of our grief and anger, our 
 thoughts run fiercely towards revenge. We do not regret 
 the death of Emilia, remembering that she had been guilty 
 of stealing the fatal handkerchief We behold with savage 
 satisfaction the remorse of Othello, and his desperate retri- 
 bution on himself We exercise our ingenuity in devising 
 tortures for lago, the fiendish contriver of all the mischief 
 Then when justice has been surfeited, and the awful ques- 
 tion — Who can control his fate ? rolls its starry grandeurs 
 over the fatigued spirit, we revert to the life of the victim, 
 and in that mood we recognise a sinister influence even in 
 the stars of poor Desdemona. She was not a pale creature 
 of colourless blood, framed for a long unruffled life. Her 
 nature was capable of the intemperate passion that leads 
 too surely to tragic consequences. That passionate love of 
 hers for the warlike Moor, which seemed so monstrous and 
 unnatural to her father, and which was construed so craftily 
 by lago, was too immoderate to be innocuous : " such vio- 
 lent delights have violent ends." The powers that gave 
 her the heart to slight men of her own complexion and 
 degree and fix her affections on a Moor, had destined her 
 to unhappiness. Remove this vicious mole of nature from 
 Desdemona, leave her a cold pattern of propriety reserved 
 
TRANQUILLISING CLOSE OF HIS TRAGEDIES. 42 1 
 
 to her lover and obedient to her parents, and you find it 
 much more difficult to quell your uneasiness at the crushing 
 of such a flower under the wheel of Destiny. The vicious 
 mole is small in proportion to the retribution : but the 
 fact that she was in a measure, however faint, accessory 
 to her own ruin, blends with other mitigations of the final 
 horror. 
 
422 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES AND 
 SUCCESSORS. 
 
 The more we read of Elizabethan literature, the more we 
 become convinced of the vast superiority of Shakespeare. 
 If one begins the study of the Elizabethan dramatists with 
 a stern resolution to throw aside all prepossessions, and 
 judge every man as if one had heard nothing whatever 
 about him before, the first conclusion reached from dipping 
 here and dipping there into choice passages may well be, 
 that they all wrote with very much the same kind of power. 
 But when we have lived in their company for some time, 
 and studied their works in various lights, we become aware 
 of immeasurable differences. Gradually we come to see 
 that each man applies a different kind of power to the 
 expression of every thought, the conception of every char- 
 acter, the construction of every scene ; and the sum of 
 these individualities is enormous. 
 
 But though no other Elizabethan dramatist could make 
 the shadow of a claim to be the equal of Shakespeare, 
 there were other men among them justly entitled to be 
 called great. Why, it is often asked, was there such a 
 cluster of great dramatists in that age? Why, we may 
 reply, should there not have been? The drama at that 
 time offered a new and exciting field to the English imagi- 
 nation ; and the English imagination, finding the field con- 
 genial, rushed into it, and worked at the exalted pitch of 
 energy which new things inspire. Marlowe was really the 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES. 423 
 
 Columbus of a new literary world. He emancipated the 
 English mind from classical notions of stiff decorum — the 
 necessary accompaniments of the large theatre and the 
 cothurnus and the mask — and by so doing, opened up 
 infinite possibilities to the dramatist. Now, indeed, the 
 drama could be a representation of passionate life. Men 
 struggling passionately after antagonistic aims could now 
 be brought face to face ; and the ups and downs, the hopes 
 and fears, the shrinkings and the darings of the struggle 
 and the characters of the combatants, could be placed in 
 swift and dazzling and heart-shaking succession visibly be- 
 fore the eyes of the spectators. The stage even dared to 
 show how men and women bore themselves in the presence 
 of incensed Death — how their spirits quailed or remained 
 constant in fierce defiance with the knife at their throat. 
 Never was there an emancipation so calculated to excite 
 the human intellect to the very utmost of its powers. No 
 wonder that the age should have produced the largest clus- 
 ter of great names in our literature. 
 
 Further, I believe it may be said that it is indispensable 
 to the production of a very great man that a number of 
 great men should work side by side. They not only stimu- 
 late one another to extreme effort, but they also, consci- 
 ously and unconsciously, get from one another invaluable 
 helps and suggestions. In literature, in art, in commerce, 
 all through life, I believe this rule holds. In all things it 
 is an infallible source of degeneration to keep company 
 with inferior minds. You cannot even have a good whist- 
 player, or billiard-player, or croquet-player, without others 
 to spur him on ; remove the stimulus of competition, and 
 he inevitably demoralises. Distinguished criminals do not 
 occur singly. What great orator ever rose up from a low 
 general level ? When one man makes a tremendous fortune, 
 you are certain to find others following hard in his wake. 
 Greatness in the humblest walks as well as in the highest is 
 so difficult an achievement, and demands such a persistence 
 in heroic effort, that men cannot persevere unto the end, 
 but fall away from the straight course unless they are kept 
 
424 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 to it by the most powerful of human motives — the ambition 
 of making or keeping a reputation. 
 
 The dramatists of greatest general repute next to Shakes- 
 peare are Ben Jonson and John Fletcher.^ There are good 
 grounds for their pre-eminence. Among their contempor- 
 aries and competitors were men of higher and rarer qualities, 
 men of more interesting character ; but no others, excepting 
 always Marlowe and Shakespeare, gave so much original 
 impulse to the drama, established themselves so firmly and 
 unmistakably as leaders of literature. We shall- see that it 
 is a mistake to regard Jonson as an imitator of classical 
 models ; and that he himself took a juster view of his posi- 
 tion when he disclaimed adherence to Plautus and Terence, 
 and declared himself the inventor of a new comedy. Jonson 
 was the first English dramatist who found the whole 
 materials of his comedy in contemporary life. He may 
 have taken this idea from the Latin comedians, but his 
 method as well as his spirit was essentially different from 
 theirs. Chapman was an older man than Jonson, and 
 Dekker excelled him in the fidelity and delicacy of his de- 
 lineation of life ; but both were his disciples. As regards 
 Fletcher, who threw into the drama not only the high spirits 
 and daring manner of aristocratic youth, but also a sweet 
 odour of poetry brought from the vales of Arcadia and the 
 gardens of the Faery Queen, he is the real progenitor of the 
 drama of the Restoration. Charles Lamb was not strictly 
 correct in saying that " quite a new turn of tragic and comic 
 interest came in with the Restoration." It was not strictly 
 new : it had at least been foreshadowed by Fletcher. Dry- 
 den was Fletcher's pupil in tragedy as Wycherley was in 
 comedy. Their work was the natural development of his 
 when relieved from the restraining influences of his age — 
 in tragedy, the competition of men who wrote with a high 
 sense of artistic responsibility, and in comedy, the regard to 
 decency imposed by a decorous female sovereign and her 
 successor, a royal old wife. The young barbarians who 
 
 ' I shall show reason for believing that injustice is done to Fletcher by 
 writing his name with Beaumont's. 
 
GEORGE CHAPMAN. 425 
 
 enjoyed the obscenities of Fletcher would not have been 
 shocked by the indecent wit of Wycherley or Congreve, and 
 probably looked upon Shakespeare as old-fashioned and 
 stilted. 
 
 I have said nothing about the influence of the Spanish 
 drama on Elizabethan dramatists, because I do not believe 
 that it could have exercised, or did exercise, any appre- 
 ciable influence. It may have been that Marlowe was 
 induced to write for the public stage by hearing of a great 
 popular drama in Spain — news which he might have had 
 from his friend Greene if he did not know it otherwise ; but 
 once the Elizabethan drama was in full career, it was no 
 more possible to turn it into the channels of the Spanish 
 drama, than to turn the Rhine at Frankfort into the Rhone, 
 or to sensibly change the waters of the Ganges by bucket- 
 fuls from the Volga. Much of the material of the English 
 drama was taken from Southern Europe, where intrigue and 
 passion have freer play than with us ; but the mode of re- 
 presentation was wholly indigenous. 
 
 I. — George Chapman (1559-1634). 
 
 George Chapman is conspicuous among the mob of easy 
 and precocious writers in his generation for his late entrance 
 into the service of the Muses, and his loudly proclaimed 
 enthusiasm and strenuous labours in that service. He made 
 no secret of the effort that it cost him to climb Parnassus, 
 or of his fiery resolution to reach the- top ; he rather exag- 
 gerated his struggles and the vehemence of his ambition. 
 He refrained from publication till he was thirty-five years 
 old, and then burst upon the world like a repressed and 
 accumulated volcano. The swelling arrogance ^ and lofty 
 expectations with which he had restrained his secret labours 
 
 1 A profession of contempt for critics was quite a commonplace in tliose 
 days ; but Chapman is peculiarly earnest. His fury at some exceptions 
 taken to his Homer was boundless : he fairly gnashed his teeth at the 
 frontless detractions of some stupid ignorants tliat, ' ' no more knowing me 
 ' than their own beastly ends, and I ever (to my knowledge) blest from their 
 sight, whisper behind me, vilifying of my translation. " 
 
426 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 display themselves without reserve in the ' Shadow of 
 Night ' — his first contribution to print. The dedication of 
 that poem and the poem itself strike the key-note of his 
 literary character. " It is," he bursts out, " an exceeding 
 raptureofdelightin the deep search of knowledge . . . that 
 maketh man manfully endure the extremes incident to that 
 Herculean labour : from flints must the Gorgonian fount be 
 smitten." ..." Men must be shod by Mercury, girt with 
 Saturn's adamantine sword, take the shield from Pallas, the 
 helm from Pluto, and have the eyes of Graia (as Hesiodus 
 arms Perseus against Medusa), before they can cut off the 
 viperous head of benumbing ignorance, or subdue their 
 monstrous affections to a most beautiful judgment." If 
 Night, " sorrow's dread sovereign," will only give his 
 " working soul " skill to declare the griefs that he has 
 suffered, she will be able to sing all the tortures of Earth, — 
 " And force to tremble in her trumpeting 
 Heaven's crystal spheres." 
 
 He adjures Night, the mother of all knowledge, to give 
 force to his words : — 
 
 " Then let fierce bolts, well ramm'd with heat and cold, 
 In Jove's artillery my words unfold 
 To break the labyrinth of every ear, 
 And make each frighted soul come forth and hear. 
 Let them break hearts, as well as yielding airs. 
 That all men's bosoms (pierced with no affairs 
 But gain of riches) may be lanced wide, 
 And with the threats of virtue terrified." 
 
 One cannot wonder that this fiery aspirant to fame, so lofty 
 in his pretensions, so novel in his strain, drew all men's eyes 
 upon him, and found many admirers eager to support his 
 claim to stand among the greatest poets. Englishmen have 
 never been deficient in the worship of force : and the 
 vehement enthusiasm of George Chapman exerted a strong 
 fascination.! 
 
 Very little is known concerning Chapman prior to 1594, 
 the date of the publication of his ' Shadow of Night.' He 
 is believed to have been born at Hitchin, and to have 
 
 1 See above, p. 292. 
 
GEORGE CHAPMAN. 427 
 
 studied at Oxford, and perhaps also at Cambridge. The 
 probability is that he had matured several works before he 
 began to publish, because he issued three or four different 
 productions in rapid succession, and then remained silent 
 for six or seven years, presumably till he was ready for an- 
 other attack upon the public. He followed up his ' Shadow 
 of Night' in 1595 with a luxurious study in sensuous de- 
 scription— ' Ovid's Banquet of Sense;' and his "Blind 
 Beggar of Alexandria " was played by the Lord Admiral's 
 men in the same year, though not published till 1598. 
 
 The chronology of the instalments of his translation of 
 Homer has been greatly obscured by the rash assertions of 
 Warton ; but the facts seem to be that he published seven 
 books in Alexandrines in 1598 : the ' Shield of Achilles ' in 
 heroic couplets in the same year ; and twelve books com- 
 plete in 1606. "A Humorous Day's Mirth," a comedy, 
 was published in 1599, having been sundry times acted 
 before. He offered no other play to the public till 1605, 
 when he printed the comedy of " All Fools." Thereafter he 
 seems to have divided his energies between writing come- 
 dies and tragedies and translating from the Classics. His 
 Comedies, in addition to those already mentioned, were, — 
 " Monsieur D'Olive," 1606; " The Gentleman Usher," 1606; 
 " May-Day," 161 1 ; " The Widow's Tears," 161 2. His Tra- 
 gedies, — "Bussy d'Ambois," 1607; "Revenge of Bussy 
 d'Ambois," 1613; "The Conspiracy and Tragedy of 
 Charles, Duke of Byron," in two plays, 1608 ; " Caesar and 
 Pompey," not published till 163 1 ; "Alphonsus," 1654; 
 " Revenge for Honour,'' 1654. As regards translations, he 
 was able to boast towards the close of his career that he 
 had translated all the works attributed to Homer. He pub- 
 lished a oontinuation of Marlowe's " Hero and Leander " 
 in 1606. 
 
 The circumstantial richness of description in Chapman's 
 two earliest pieces is very remarkable. That was evidently 
 his first study, and he pursued it with untiring enthusiasm 
 till he obtained complete mastery. In the ' Shadow of 
 Night ' there are some studiously elaborate descriptions, 
 such as the following : — 
 
428 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 " And as, when Chloris paints th' enamelled meads, 
 A flock of shepherds to the bagpipe treads 
 Rude rural dances with their country loves : 
 Some afar off observing their removes — 
 Turns and returns, quick footing, sudden stands. 
 Reelings aside, odd motions with their hands. 
 Now back, now forwards, now lock'd arm in arm — 
 Not hearing music, think it is a charm. 
 That like loose fools at bacchanalian feasts 
 Make them seem frantic in their barren jests." 
 
 But ' Ovid's Banquet of Sense ' is his most fervent and 
 indefatigable effort in the way of rich description. As if he 
 had resolved to acquire once for all a complete command 
 of sensuous expression, he there narrates a happy adventure 
 that procured the gratification of all the senses, and tasks 
 the whole power of his fancy in a protracted endeavour to 
 depict the sweet tumult raised in the soul by their various 
 objects. The argument of the poem is, that Ovid having 
 fallen in love with Julia, daughter of Augustus, whom he 
 celebrated under the name of Corinna, found means to 
 enter the imperial gardens and see Corinna playing on her 
 lute and singing, and afterwards entering her bath, which 
 had been filled with the richest perfumes. In this adven- 
 ture all Ovid's senses were feasted : his hearing with her 
 voice and lute, his sense of smell with the dispersed odours, 
 his eye with her disrobed figure, his mouth with a kiss. He 
 is permitted also to touch her side- — the gratification of 
 Feeling, which Chapman calls the senses' groundwork, the 
 emperor of the senses, whom it is no immodesty to serve. 
 ' Ovid's Banquet of Sense ' is really a banquet of most ex- 
 quisite poetry — a most determined effort by the indomitable 
 poet to eclipse by fervid elaboration all the raptures of pre- 
 vious pairs of mythological lovers — Lodge's Glaucus and 
 Scylla, Marlowe's Hero and Leander, Shakespeare's Venus 
 and Adonis, Drayton's Endymion and Phoebe. How ela- 
 borately, for example, and with what glowing colours, he 
 describes Ovid's feelings when Corinna stooped down to 
 kiss him ! — 
 
GEORGE CHAPMAN. 429 
 
 " Her moving towards him made Ovid's eye 
 Believe the firmament was coming down 
 
 To take him quick to immortality, 
 And that the ambrosian kiss set on the crown : 
 
 She spake in kissing, and her breath infused 
 Restoring syrup to his taste in swoon ; 
 
 And he imagined Hebe's hands had bruised 
 
 A banquet of the gods into his sense, 
 
 Which filled him with this furious influence. 
 
 The motion of the heavens that did beget 
 The golden age, and by whose harmony 
 Heaven is preserved, in me on work is set.' 
 
 All instruments of deepest melody, 
 Set sweet in my desire, to my love's liking. 
 
 With this sweet kiss in me their tunes apply, 
 As if the best musician's hands were striking : 
 This kiss in me hath endless music closed. 
 Like Phoebus' lute, on Nisus' towers imposed. 
 
 And as a pebble cast into a spring. 
 We see a sort of trembling circles rise. 
 
 One forming other in their issuing, 
 Till over all the fount they circulise ; 
 
 So this perpetual-motion-making kiss 
 Is propagate through all my faculties. 
 
 And makes my breast an endless fount of bliss ; 
 
 Of which if gods would drink, their matchless fare 
 
 Would make them much more blessed than they are. 
 
 But as when sounds do hollow bodies beat, 
 Air gathered there, compressed and thickened. 
 
 The self-same way she came doth make retreat. 
 And so affects the sounds re-echoed 
 
 Only in part, because she weaker is 
 
 In that redition than when first she fled. 
 
 So I, alas ! faint echo of this kiss. 
 
 Only reiterate a slender part 
 
 Of that high joy it worketh in my heart" 
 
 This fervid vividness and laboured minuteness of realis- 
 ation is characteristic of all Chapman's descriptions. All 
 his pictures, whether of beauty or of grandeur, whether 
 voluptuous or horrible, strike us as if they had been exe- 
 
430 SHAKESPEARES CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 cuted under a fiery determination to make them thorough. 
 In translating Homer, he was rarely content to dismiss a 
 simile with the simple handling of the original : he usually 
 conceived the image for himself, and wrestled with it 
 vehemently to make it yield up greater plenitude of detail. 
 
 What chiefly strikes us when we survey Chapman's career 
 through his successive publications, is his steady improve- 
 ment in every vein that he set himself to master. We 
 should naturally infer from his late appearance in print, 
 which is altogether without a parallel in that age, that his 
 intellect was somewhat stiff and stubborn, not easily set in 
 motion or put upon a track ; and this inference is confirmed 
 by an examination of his beginnings and gradual progress 
 in different veins. Sensuous description would seem to 
 have been his first ambition, and to this he held his intel- 
 lect by sheer force of ardent enthusiasm till he succeeded 
 up to his ideal. In translating Homer, he had reached the 
 thirteenth book before he fairly entered into the heart of 
 his subject : " when driving through his thirteenth and last 
 books, I drew the main depth, and saw the round coming 
 of this silver bow of our Phoebus ; the clear scope and 
 contexture of his work ; the full and most beautiful figures 
 of his persons." Once warmed to his subject and fairly got 
 under way, his motion was rapid enough ; bodies that are 
 difficult to move are also difficult to stop. He boasted that 
 he drove through the last twelve books in fifteen weeks.^ 
 When we look to his comedies and his tragedies, we find in 
 like manner poor beginnings and determined improvement. 
 " All Fools " is a great advance on the " Blind Beggar of 
 Alexandria," and " May-Day," with all its coarseness, is in 
 many respects a more masterly composition than "All 
 Fools." The " Revenge for Honour " is incomparably the 
 best of his tragedies. 
 
 One great aim in his comedies is to exhibit the gulling 
 of one personage by another. If one were to take Chap- 
 
 ' It is somewhat curious that want of competent time is one of his 
 excuses for making so little of the first twelve books. One often finds 
 very stiff laborious men anxious to have credit for rapid composition. 
 
GEORGE CHAPMAN. 43 1 
 
 man's comedies as mirrors of the time, one would suppose 
 that the chief recreation of the young courtiers of Elizabeth 
 and James was to find butts for their wit and subjects for 
 practical jokes. Chapman was probably put on this track 
 by Jonson's " Every Man in his Humour," and he hammered 
 at the idea with characteristic pertinacity. There is much 
 clever deception — clever, indeed, to extreme improbability 
 — in the " Blind Beggar," which was produced before Ben 
 Jonson's first play ; but Chapman's first effort in the repre- 
 sentation of deliberate gulling appears in his " Humorous 
 Day's Mirth," where the old husband Labernel, the old 
 father Foyes, and the young pretentious simpleton Bestia 
 (the same character as Jonson's ' Stephen '), are notoriously 
 deceived by a pack of waggish gallants. The gulling in 
 " All Fools," as the .title indicates, is universal -.^ every one 
 of the dramatis persona is more or less victimised. Again, 
 Monsieur D'Olive is gulled by two young courtiers; and 
 the Gentleman Usher, Bassiolo, by the two lovers Vincentio 
 and Margaret, who make him their medium of communica- 
 tion, and flatter him into the belief that they are a pair of 
 foolish bashful lovers, very much indebted to his kindly 
 offices for helping them to declare their mutual passion. 
 The "Gentleman Usher " is, taken all in all, the best of Chap- 
 man's comedies ; it contains a certain admixture of serious 
 plot (which would have been better if he could have re- 
 frained from introducing the supernatural), and the gulling 
 of Bassiolo is his masterpiece in that way. The most 
 riotous and laughable gulling, however, occurs in the coarsest 
 of his comedies, " May-Day," which contains more spirited 
 dialogue, more piquant characters, and more ludicrous inci- 
 dents, than any of its predecessors. 
 
 Another of his comic aims, persisted in with no less 
 resolution, is to exhibit the hypocrisy, inconsistency, and 
 general frailty of women. This, indeed, may be said to be 
 one of his aims in all his plays : he has not drawn a single 
 fine female character of any mark in any play from the 
 
 1 It is difficult to see why Mr Hallam speaks of this play as a tragi- 
 comedy. 
 
432 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 "Blind Beggar" to the "Revenge for Honour:" all from 
 
 ^giale to Caropia have some taint upon them. Chapman 
 
 would almost seem to have been like his own Rinaldo in 
 
 " All Fools," who had vowed eternal war against the whole 
 
 sex. And in displaying their frailties, as in other aims 
 
 that he took in hand, he improved very much with practice. 
 
 The behaviour of Samathis and Elimine in the " Blind 
 
 Beggar," though a sufficiently malicious conception, is too 
 
 violently improbable to have much point as a satire : Irus, 
 
 who figures as four different personages in the play, marries 
 
 Samathis as Leon, and Elimine as Hermes, and afterwards 
 
 as Hermes, seduces Samathis, and as Leon, Elimine. 
 
 Florila, the fair Puritan, in the " Humorous Day's Mirth," 
 
 is more of a satire on female weakness. But Chapman's 
 
 greatest achievement in this vein is the " Widow's Tears,'' in 
 
 which he makes young Tharsalio conquer a youthful widow, 
 
 who had sworn eternal constancy, within a few months of 
 
 her husband's death, and that, too, by representations of 
 
 the least reputable sort ; and, as a secondary plot, elaborates 
 
 Petronius Arbiter's story of the widow of Ephesus,'- who 
 
 went to starve herself to death in her husband's tomb, and 
 
 was there wooed and won by a soldier stationed near on 
 
 guard of some crucified bodies. 
 
 In his first tragedies. Chapman's main endeavour was to 
 build up a majestic dialogue with weighty moral sentences. 
 In the dedication of his " Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois " he 
 falls out upon certain critics who seem to have formd fault 
 with the want of probability both in the characters and in 
 the action of his plays. "And for the authentical truth," 
 says he in defence, " of either person or action, who (worth 
 the respecting) will expect it in a poem, whose subject is 
 not truth, but things like truth ? Poor envious fools they 
 are that cavil at truth's want in these natural fictions : 
 material instruction, elegant and sententious excitation to 
 virtue, and deflection from her contrary being the soul, 
 limbs, and limits of an authentical tragedy." His senten- 
 tious excitations to virtue are powerfully expressed. He 
 
 1 Repeated in Jeremy Taylor's ' Holy Dying.' 
 
GEORGE CHAPMAN. 433 
 
 would seem to have studied to fulfil his early prayer to 
 Night, concentrating explosive forces, and firing off each 
 word of his maxims like a cannon-ball. But the thunder 
 of this moral artillery is too continuous and deafening ; the 
 interchange of elaborate sentences between his personages, 
 especially in the two Byron plays, becomes intolerably 
 tedious. In his latest tragedies, however, Chapman ob- 
 serves a much better proportion of weighty saws. In the 
 " Revenge for Honour " the dialogue is much more full of 
 life than in any of his previous tragedies. 
 
 Chapman's designs were always ambitious ; but he was 
 guided more like a pedant by authoritative models than like 
 a genuine artist by a clear judgment and sure instinct of 
 his own. He had, undoubtedly, immense power ; but his 
 sail was a great deal prouder and fuller than his ship. Both 
 in his comedies and in his tragedies he burdened himself 
 with an unavailing effort to imitate the Latin and Greek 
 classics : he probably flattered himself in so doing with a feel- 
 ing of superiority to less learned playwrights ; but he might 
 have been more successful if he had imitated the published 
 works of Shakespeare. But ambitious and resolute George 
 would have scorned to imitate consciously any of his con- 
 temporaries : he aspired to stand out among them as a 
 heaven - sent genius, in rapt communion with the great 
 empress of all secrets. He might, indeed, hold intercourse 
 with the mighty minds of old, and submit to their teaching ; 
 he might also take up the conceptions of contemporary 
 writers, and show the proper way to carry them out ; but 
 imitate — never. How, then, is this reconciled with what I 
 have just said, that Chapman imitated like a pedant ? The 
 explanation is, that Chapman, like many other men, was 
 self-deluded in his conviction of originality and inspiration. 
 His originality was of the nature of oddity, eccentricity, 
 quaintness— a forcible wrench given to commonplace or 
 borrowed ideas, characters, images, and turns of expression. 
 He was really very much influenced by contemporaries, and 
 commonly for good. The influence of Shakespeare, to all 
 appearance, operated strongly on the composition of his 
 
 2 E 
 
434 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 "Revenge for Honour;" and it is, as I have already said, 
 by far the best of his tragedies. His earliest tragedies con- 
 tain splendid passages of description, and a plethora of 
 pithy and noble sentences; but his "Revenge for Honour" 
 is, in respect of lively dialogue, powerfully drawn character, 
 clearly conceived interaction, absorbing plot, and terrible 
 catastrophe, — entitled to a high place among the works of 
 the best tragedians. The chief drawback to Chapman's 
 comedies is the universal ignobility of the characters — the 
 tide " All Fools " might almost be extended to his come- 
 dies generally. And one fatal drawback to all his plays 
 is his low conception of female character. No plays can 
 have a durable popularity that have none of the softer gifts 
 and graces to mingle with their comic humours or tragic 
 horrors. 
 
 II. — John Marston (157 ?-i634). 
 
 John Marston is the Skelton or Swift of the Elizabethan 
 period. Like them, he wrote in denunciation and derision 
 of what seemed to him vicious or weakly sentimental ; and 
 like them, he impatiently carried a passion for directness of 
 speech to the extremes of coarseness. He was for no half- 
 veiled exposure of vices. " Know," he cried, in the preface 
 to the ' Scourge of Villany,' his first furious lash at the age, 
 " I hate to affect too much obscurity and harshness, because 
 they profit no sense. To note vices so that no man can 
 understand them is as fond as the French execution in 
 picture." And a contemporary (in the anonymous " Return 
 from Parnassus ") confirmed this self-estimate of his pur- 
 poses : — 
 
 " Tut, what cares he for modest close-couched terms 
 Cleanly to gird our looser libertines? 
 Give him plain naked words, stript from their shirts, 
 That might beseem plain-dealing Aretine ! " 
 
 jVEarston's satires are not elegant, self-complacent exer- 
 
JOHN MARSTON. 435 
 
 citations in imitation of Horace, such as Hall was so vain 
 of writing; he wrote in a more savage and less affected 
 vein : — 
 
 " Unless the Destin's adamantine band 
 Should tie my teeth, I cannot choose but bite." 
 
 One of his mottoes is taken from Juvenal, with whom 
 he had more in common than with Horace — Difficile est 
 satiram non scribere — "It is difficult not to write satire." 
 There would be an almost Timonic grandeur in the swell- 
 ing energy of his defiance of public opinion were it not for 
 the satirist's half-humorous enjoyment of his own position. 
 " I dare defend my plainness against the verjuice face of 
 the crabbedest Satirist that ever stuttered. He that thinks 
 worse of my rhymes than myself, I scorn him, for he can- 
 not ; he that thinks better is a fool. ... If thou pgr- 
 usest me with an impartial eye, read on ; if otherwise, know 
 I neither value thee nor thy censure." Whatever other 
 people are afraid to do has a great charm for Marston. 
 He dedicates his "Scourge of Villany" to Detraction, and 
 bids her snarl, bark, and bite, — for his spirit scorns her 
 spite : — 
 
 " My spirit is not puft up with fat fume 
 Of slimy ale, or Bacchus' heating grape ; 
 My mind disdains the dungy muddy scum 
 Of abject thoughts and Envy's raging hate." 
 
 With somewhat less coarse bravery he consigns himself to 
 everlasting oblivion — "mighty gulf, insatiate cormorant" 
 — in opposition to the usual aspirations for eternal me- 
 mory : — 
 
 " Let others pray 
 For ever their fair poems flourish may ; 
 But as for me, hungry Oblivion, 
 Devour me quick." 
 
 He beseeches the wits to malign him ; nothing could 
 give him greater pleasure :^ — 
 
436 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 " Preface, read on ; for your extremest dislikes 
 Will add a pinion to my praise's flights. 
 Oh ! how I bristle up my plumes of pride ! 
 Oh ! how I think my satires dignified ! 
 When I once hear some quaint Castillo, 
 Some supple-mouthed slave, some lewd Tubrio, 
 Some spruce pedant, or some span-new-come fry 
 Of Inns-o'-Court, striving to vilify 
 My dark reproofs ! Then do but rail at me— 
 No greater honour craves my poesy." 
 
 Almost nothing is known concerning Marston's private 
 life. He is believed to be the John Marston who was ad- 
 mitted B.A. at Oxford in 1593, as being the eldest son of 
 an Esquire, his father belonging to the city of Coventry. 
 He began his literary career in 1598, publishing in that year 
 "Pygmalion's Image, and certain Satires," and " The Scourge 
 of Villany, Three Books of Satires." He is supposed to be 
 the Maxton or Mastone, " the new poet," mentioned in 
 Henslowe's Diary in 1599 ; and the play there referred to 
 is supposed to be his " Malcontent," published in 1604 in 
 two editions — one with, and the other without, an Induc- 
 tion by Webster. His other plays published were — " An- 
 tonio and Mellida," 1602; "Antonio's Revenge," 1602; 
 "The Dutch Courtesan," 1605; " Parasitaster," i6o6j " So- 
 phonisba," 1606; " What You Will," 1607; " The Insatiate 
 Countess," 16 13. He was also conjoined with Chapman 
 and Jonson in the composition of " Eastward Ho ! " certain 
 passages of which, written by Chapman and Marston be- 
 tween them, gave such offence to the Scotch predilections 
 of the king that it brought the trio to prison, and very 
 nearly to the pillory. Marston and Jonson were less friendly 
 in after life, as they had been at enmity before.^ Jonson 
 told Drummond that he once " beat Marston and took his 
 
 ' Jonson made Marston the subject of a play in 1601 — "The Poetaster." 
 He, and not (as D'Israeli states) Dekker, is Crispinus : the parody of 
 Marston's style in the Fifth Act is unmistakable. The reconciliation must 
 have been only temporary, Marston dedicated his ' ' Malcontent " to 
 Jonson in 1604. 
 
JOHN MARSTON. 437 
 
 pistol from him." Marston's total abstinence from literature 
 during the last twenty years of his life is not explained. 
 
 One of Marston's favourite butts, both in his Satires and 
 m his plays, was the puling sentimentality of enamoured 
 sonneteers. He goes beyond himself in the invention of 
 mad indignities, coarse and subtle, overt and sly, for these 
 forlorn creatures; parodies them and scoffs at them; buffets 
 them, as it were, tweaks their noses, stealthily pulls out hairs 
 and puts in pins, kicks them out of his presence. 
 
 " Sweet-faced Corinna, deign the riband tie 
 Of thy cork-shoe, or else thy slave will die : 
 Some puling sonnet tolls his passing bell ; 
 Some sighing elegy must ring his knell. 
 Unless bright sunshine of thy grace revive 
 His wambling stomach, certes he will dive 
 Into the whirlpool of devouring death. 
 And to some mermaid sacrifice his breath.'' 
 
 I have endeavoured to show that Shakespeare co- 
 operated with this derision of forced love-sighs, writing 
 certain of his sonnets in ridicule of their windy suspiration. 
 But Shakespeare himself was not always above the con- 
 tempt of the predestined cynic. 'Venus and Adonis' was 
 singled out by Marston as the type of dangerously voluptu- 
 ous poetry, and unmercifully parodied in his "Pygmalion and 
 Galatea," the arts of the goddess to win over the cold youth 
 being coarsely paralleled in mad mockery by the arts of 
 Pygmalion to bring his beloved statue to life. The risk in 
 all such parodies is that they be taken as serious produc- 
 tions. This has been the fate of Shakespeare's sonnet 
 parodies ; and Marston either feared or had actually in- 
 curred a similar calamity. 
 
 " Curio, know'st my sprite. 
 Yet deem'st that in sad seriousness I write 
 Such nasty stuff as is Pygmalion ? 
 
 O barbarous dropsy noil ! 
 Think'st thou that genius that attends my soul, 
 And guides my fist to scourge magnificoes. 
 Will deign my mind be rank'd in Paphian shows ? " 
 
438 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 Marston seems to have had rather a fancy for parody- 
 ing Shakespeare : he more than once has a fiing at " A 
 horse, a horse ! my kingdom for a horse ! " and in " The 
 Malcontent " he has several hits at passages in Hamlet, in- 
 cluding " Illo, ho, ho, ho, art there, old Truepenny?" and 
 a parody on Hamlet's reflection, " What a piece of work is 
 man ! " But he also paid the great dramatist the compli- 
 ment of imitating from him. In " The Malcontent," the 
 conception of the villain Mendozo is indebted in several 
 particulars to Richard IH. And the hinge of the plot is 
 borrowed indirectly from " Hamlet." A banished Duke of 
 Genoa returns to court in the disguise of Malevolo, an ill- 
 conditioned cynic, who deliberately uses his reputation for 
 craziness as a licence to tell people of their vices in very 
 surly terms face to face. This origin of the idea of Mal- 
 evolo might not have occurred to us but for the parodies of 
 Hamlet in the play : and it has a certain value as showing 
 Marston's notion of the feigned madness of Hamlet. 
 
 Marston's plays are very remarkable and distinctive pro- 
 ductions. They are written with amazing energy — energy 
 audacious, defiant, shameless, yet, when viewed in the 
 totality of its manifestations, not unworthy to be called 
 Titanic. They make no pretence to dramatic impartiality ; 
 they are written throughout in the spirit of his satires ; his 
 puppets walk the stage as embodiments of various ramifi- 
 cations of deadly sins and contemptible fopperies, side by 
 side with virtuous opposites and indignant commenting 
 censors. His characters, indeed, speak and act with vigor- 
 ous life : they are much more forcible and distinct person- 
 alities than Chapman's characters. But though Marston 
 brings out his characters sharply and clearly, and puts them 
 in lifelike motion, they are too manifestly objects of their 
 creator's liking and disliking : some are caricatured^ some 
 are unduly black, and some unduly stainless. From one 
 great fault Marston's personages are exceedingly free : they 
 may be overdrawn, and they may be coarse, but they are 
 seldom dull — their life is a rough coarse life, but life it is. 
 And all his serious creations have here and there put into 
 
JOHN MARSTON. 439 
 
 their mouths passages of tremendous energy. Charles Lamb 
 has gathered from Marston, for his ' Specimens of English 
 Dramatic Poets,' extracts of passionate declamation and 
 powerful description hardly surpassed in all that rich col- 
 lection. 
 
 As we read Marston's plays, too, the conviction gains 
 ground upon us that, after all, he was not the ill-condi- 
 tioned, snarling, and biting cur that he would have us 
 believe himself to be, but a fairly honest fellow of very 
 powerfiil intellect, only rude and rugged enough to have a 
 mad delight in the use of coarse paradox and strong lan- 
 guage. He was not a self-satisfied snarler, girding freely at 
 the world, but tender of his own precious personality. His 
 plays convince us that there was a touch of sincere modesty 
 in his prayer to Oblivion : — ^ 
 
 " Accept my orison. 
 My earnest prayers, which do importune thee 
 With gloomy shade of thy still empery 
 To veil both me and my rude poesy. 
 Far worthier lines, in silence of thy state, 
 Do sleep securely, free from love or hate." 
 
 In the Induction to " What You Will," he makes Doricus 
 turn round on Philomene, who is railing against the stupidity 
 of the public in the vein of the "Scourge of Villany," and 
 call the strain rank, odious, and leprous — " as your friend 
 the author . . . seems so fair in his own glass . . . that he 
 talks once of squinting critics, drunken censure, splay- 
 footed opinion, juiceless husks, I ha' done with him, I ha' 
 done with him." And in the body of the same play he is 
 hardy enough to make Quadratus fall out upon Kinsayder, 
 his own nom deplume in his early satires : — 
 
 " Why, you Don Kinsayder, 
 Thou canker-eaten, rusty cur, thou snaffle 
 To freer spirits." 
 
 We cannot complain of ill-treatment from a cynic so 
 unmerciful to himself, so uncompromising in his gross 
 ebullient humour. We are inclined to concede to him that 
 
440 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 like his own Feliche, he " hates not man, but man's lewd 
 qualities." There are more amiable and admirable charac- 
 ters in his plays than in Chapman's. He has good char- 
 acters to set off the bad : the treacherous, unscrupulous 
 Mendozo is balanced by the faithful Celso ; the shamelessly 
 frail Aurelia by the constant Maria; the cruel, boastful 
 Piero by the noble Andrugio ; the impulsive, unceremoni- 
 ous, warm-hearted, pert, forward, inquisitive, chattering 
 Rossaline, by the true and gentle Mellida. 
 
 III. — Ben Jonson (1573-1637). 
 
 Ben Jonson had a mind of immense force and pertinaci- 
 ous grasp ; but nothing could be wider of the truth than 
 the notion maintained wth such ferocity by Gifford, that 
 he was the father of regular comedy, the pioneer of severe 
 and correct taste. Jonson's domineering scholarship must 
 not be taken for more than it was worth : it was a large 
 and gratifying possession in itself, but he would probably 
 have written better plays and more poetry without it. It is 
 a sad application of the mathematical method to the history 
 of our literature to argue that the most learned playwright 
 of his time superseded the rude efforts of such untaught 
 mother-wits as Shakespeare with compositions based on 
 classical models. What Jonson really did was to work out 
 his own ideas of comedy and tragedy, and he expressly 
 claimed the right to do so. The most scrupulous adherence 
 to the unity of time, and the most rigid exclusion of tragic 
 elements. from comedy, do not make a play classical. Ben 
 Jonson conformed to these externals ; but there was not a 
 more violently unclassical spirit than his among all the 
 writers for the stage in that generation.^ His laborious 
 accumulation of learned details, his fantastic extravagance 
 of comic and satirical imagination, the heavy force of his 
 
 ' His picture of the Court of Augustus, which Lamb praises so highly, 
 was founded probably on what he saw or what he desiderated at the 
 Court of England. Jonson seems always to have had friends among the 
 courtiers. 
 
BEN JONSON. 441 
 
 expression, his study of " humours," had their origin in his 
 own nature, and not in the models of Greece and Rome. 
 
 Jonson, according to his own account, was- of Scotch 
 extraction, his grandfather being a Johnstone of Annandale, 
 who settled in Carlisle, and was taken into the service of 
 Henry VIII. His father, who suflFered persecution under 
 Mary, and afterwards became " a grave minister of the 
 gospel," died before our poet's birth. Whether or not his 
 mother married a bricklayer as her second husband, it 
 would seem that in his youth he was apprenticed to that 
 trade, but not before he had received at least the rudiments 
 of a good education at Westminster School under Camden, 
 a patron to whom he was never backward in acknowledg- 
 ing his obligations. From bricklaying he went in disgust 
 to soldiering, and served a brief campaign in the Low 
 Countries, distinguishing himself in a single combat with a 
 champion of the enemy, whom he killed and stripped in 
 the sight of both camps. How he began his connection 
 with the stage is not known. He is called "bricklayer"' in 
 1598 in a letter of Henslowe's giving an account of a duel 
 that he fought in that year with a player ; but before that 
 time he had begun to write plays. A version of his " Every 
 Man in his Humour " would seem to have been put on the 
 stage in 1596, and the play was published in 1598. The 
 dates of the production of his subsequent plays, as given by 
 Gifford, are as follows : " The Case is Altered," published 
 1598; "Every Man out of his Humour," 1599; "Cynthia's 
 Revels," 1600; "Poetaster," 1601; "Sejanus," 1603 ; "East- 
 ward Ho !" (written in conjunction with Chapman and 
 Marston), 1605 ; "Volpone, or The Fox," 1605 ; "Epicoene, 
 or The Silent Woman," 1609; "The Alchemist," 1610; 
 "Catiline," 161 1 ; "Bartholomew Fair," 1614; "The Devil 
 is an Ass," 1616 ; "The Staple of News," 1625 ; " The New 
 
 1 Collier's ' Memoirs of Edward AUeyn,' p. 50. It would not have been 
 at all unlike the man to work as a bricklayer while writing for the stage. 
 He might have enjoyed the defiance of pubHc opinion in honest labour. 
 This would give a Uterality to Dekker's taunt' of "the lime-and-mortar 
 poet." But Jonson is entered as "player" in 1596. He can hardly be 
 supposed to have returned to bricklaying. 
 
442 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 Inn," 1630 ; " The Magnetic Lady," 1632 ; " The Tale of a 
 Tub," 1633. These plays were not the author's chief means 
 of living : they were not as a rule popular. He told Dnim- 
 mond in 1618 that all his plays together had not brought 
 him ;^20o. A more lucrative employment was the pre- 
 paration of Masques for the Court : he seems to have fur- 
 nished the Court with a masque or other entertainment 
 almost every year from the accession of James till 1627, 
 when his quarrel with Inigo Jones lost him this pleasant 
 source of income. In 16 13 he went abroad in charge of 
 the eldest son of Sir Walter Raleigh. In 16 16 he obtained 
 from the Crown a pension of 100 marks. This was con- 
 firmed to him by Charles ; yet from his loss of the Court 
 entertainments, and the failure of the last plays that he 
 wrote, his closing years were embittered by distressful 
 poverty. In his celebrated conversations with Drummond 
 during his visit to Scotland in 1618-19, he complained that 
 poetry had " beggared him when he might have been a 
 rich lawyer, physician, or merchant;" and his circumstances 
 at that time were affluent compared with what they were in 
 his later years. 
 
 Jonson's person was not built on the classical type of 
 graceful or dignified symmetry : he had the large and 
 rugged dimensions of a strong Borderland reiver, swollen 
 by a sedentary life into huge corpulence. Although in his 
 later days he jested at his own " mountain belly and his 
 rocky face," he probably bore his unwieldy figure with a 
 more athletic carriage than his namesake the lexicographer. 
 Bodily as well as mentally he belonged to the race of Anak. 
 His position among his contemporaries was very much 
 what Samuel Johnson's might have been had he been con- 
 tradicted and fought against by independent rivals, jealous 
 and resentful of his dictatorial manner. Ben Jonson's large 
 and irascible personality could not have failed to command 
 respect ; but his rivals had too much respect for themselves 
 to give way absolutely to his authority. They refused to 
 be as grasshoppers in his sight. We should do wrong, 
 however, to suppose that this disturbed the giant's peace of 
 
BEN JONSON. 443 
 
 mind. Gifford, who makes a good many mistakes in the 
 course of his rabidly one-sided memoir of Jonson, is cer- 
 tainly right in saying that he was not an envious man. His 
 arrogance was the arrogance of irascible and magnanimous 
 strength — good-natured when not thwarted, and placable 
 when well opposed. If his rivals refused to be as grasshop- 
 pers, he accepted them contentedly at their own valuation, 
 with, perhaps, passing fits of occasional ill-temper. There 
 is no evidence to support his alleged jealousy of Shakes- 
 peare : it is quite possible that he may have made occa- 
 sional sharp remarks about his great contemporary; but 
 when he sat down to remember the worth of the mighty 
 dead, his words breathed nothing but sincere and generous 
 admiration and warm friendship. His relations with Mar- 
 ston and Inigo Jones are typical of the man. He quarrelled 
 with them and showed them up, was reconciled, and quar- 
 relled again. He took offence at Marston, and ridiculed 
 him unmercifully as Crispinus "The Poetaster;" became 
 friends with him again ; received the dedication of his 
 " Malcontent; " and wrote with him and Chapman in "East- 
 ward Ho ! " yet told Drummond that he had many quarrels 
 with Marston. He scoffed at Inigo Jones in " Bartholomew 
 Fair" as Lanthorn Leatherhead, a puppet-seller and con- 
 triver of masques ; ^ co-operated with him afterwards in the 
 preparation of court entertainments ; and finally broke with 
 him utterly, and tried to extinguish him with lofty con- 
 tempt. There seems to be no denying that Ben was 
 irascible and diflJcult to get on with. Yet there was a 
 fundamental large-hearted good-humour in him too. We 
 must not judge of him altogether by his conversations with 
 Drummond, as Drummond himself did : he was the sort of 
 man that falls into fits of incontinent railing and deprecia- 
 tion, and so conveys an erroneous impression of his normal 
 
 1 Gifford denied this without authority. It is supported by the Drum- 
 mond conversations, in which Jonson said (in i6i8) that he had told 
 Prince Charles that "when he wanted words to set forth a knave, he would 
 name him an Inigo ; ' ' and also by the language of his final ' ' Expostulation 
 with Inigo Jones." 
 
444 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 inner nature. In his better moods he was not unwilling to 
 laugh at his own failings. He had many friends among the 
 great patrons of poetry. 
 
 When we examine into the alleged correctness of Jonson's 
 plays, we find curious evidence of how his known acquaint- 
 ance with the classics has imposed upon his critics. " Gene- 
 rally speaking,'' says Gifford, " his characters have but one 
 predominating quality : his merit (whatever it be) consists 
 in the felicity with which he combines a certain number 
 of such personages, distinct from one another, into a well- 
 ordered and regular plot, dexterously preserving the unities 
 of time and place, and exhibiting all the probabilities which 
 the most rigid admirer of the ancient models could possibly 
 demand." The regularity of the plot and the observation 
 of the probabilities are parts of Gifford's preconceived ideal, 
 formed without the sHghtest attention to the facts. As 
 regards regularity, Jonson is so far regular that in most of 
 his plays four acts are occupied in exhibiting every man in 
 his humour,! -v^hile the fifth act exhibits every man out of 
 his humour ; and the " humours " overmaster every other 
 consideration. In the running criticisms of Mitis and 
 Cordatus, the author's friends, in " Every Man out of his 
 Humour," he is careful to point out that "herein his art 
 appears most full of lustre, and approacheth nearest the 
 life : " it is like the course of things in reality that his actors 
 should for some time " strongly pursue and continue their 
 
 ^ The word "humour" was much in use in Jonson's time. He com- 
 plained that it was abused to signify any capricious fancy or affectation : a 
 man wore a pied feather, or a cable hat-band, or a three-piled ruif, or a 
 yard of shoe-tie, and called it his humour. Nym, in Henry IV. , uses it 
 in a still looser sense. Jonson is careful to explain the signification of the 
 term in his plays ("Every Man in his Humour," Induction). I need not 
 quote his etymology at length — he often shows a scholarly hankering after 
 etymological fancies — but his conclusion is, that the term may, by meta- 
 •phor, apply itself — 
 
 *' Unto the general disposition ; 
 As when some one peculiar quality 
 Doth so possess a man that it doth draw 
 All his effects, his spirits, and his powers. 
 In their confluctions all to run one way, 
 This may be truly said to be a humour." 
 
BEN JONSON. 445 
 
 humours," and thereafter, in the flame and height of them, 
 be suddenly laid flat. Macilente, Carlo Buffone, and 
 others, in " Every Man out of his Humour ; " Amorphus in 
 " Cynthia's Revels ; " Crispinus in " The Poetaster ; " Vol- 
 pone and his dupes in " The Fox ; " Face and Subtle and 
 their dupes in " The Alchemist ; " Overdo and his friends 
 in "Bartholomew Fair;" Fitzdottrel in "The Devil is an 
 Ass j " — all come to grief in the last act, after a triumphant 
 career in their several humours. So far, Ben Jonson's 
 comedies are well-ordered and regular — so far they have a 
 rigorous and unbending unity ; but the connection between 
 the various victims of tyrannical humours is of the loosest 
 kind, and there is no attempt at subtlety of construction or 
 artful excitation of suspense in preparing the way for the 
 final collapse : the whole interest lies in the representation 
 of the characters and the incidents.^ Probability, either of 
 character or of incident, is about the last thing one would 
 think of alleging. Ben Jonson's "humours," by his own 
 definition of them, are caricatures. It is ridiculous to sup- 
 pose that they were taken from life : there never was any 
 such drawing of the thoughts and feelings one way outside 
 the walls of Bedlam. The " humour " of legacy-hunting was 
 never so omnipotent over all effects, spirits, and powers, in 
 real life, as it is made out to be in " The Fox." And the 
 incidents — such as the swooning of Fungoso at sight of 
 Brisk's new suit, the sealing up of Bufibne's mouth, the 
 inexpressibly ludicrous tournament in court-compliment 
 between Azotus and Mercury, the vomiting of Crispinus, 
 &c., &c. — are conceived in the spirit of the wildest farce 
 or the most bitterly exaggerated satire. There is, indeed, 
 a parallel to Jonson's mad upsetting of things among the 
 classics : Aristophanes is a devil of mirth no less fantastic 
 and much more unconstrained than Jonson ; but we do not 
 look to Aristophanes for good order, regularity, or " all the 
 
 1 The celebrated band of amateurs — including Charles Dickens and Mr 
 G. H. Lewes — who acted ' ' Every Man in his Humour " with such success, 
 chose the play, I believe, chiefly on account of the number of good char- 
 acters in it. 
 
446 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 probabilities which the most rigid admirer of the ancient 
 models could possibly demand." 
 
 Jonson, indeed, explicitly professed his independence 
 of correct classical models, and proclaimed his affinity with 
 the older and more licentious forms. In the Induction 
 to " Every Man out of his Humour," Cordatus, the man 
 "inly acquainted with the scope and drift of the plot,'' ex- 
 plains that the play is "strange, and of a particular kind by 
 itself, somewhat like 'Vetus Comcedia.' " "Does the 
 author," asks Mitis, " observe all the laws of comedy in it, 
 according to the Terentian manner?" "O no," replies 
 Cordatus, " these are too nice observations." He can dis- 
 cern no necessity for adhering to the Terentian model. The 
 laws of comedy were not a revelation or a sudden inspira- 
 tion of genius : each playwright reserved the fullest libert)' 
 to innovate upon his predecessors " according to the ele- 
 gancy and disposition of those times wherein he wrote.'' 
 " I see not then but we should enjoy the same licence, or 
 free power to illustrate and heighten our invention, as they 
 did ; and not be tied to those strict and regular forms which 
 the niceness of a few, who are nothing but form, would 
 thrust upon us." It is a curious illustration of the blind- 
 ness of preconception that Giiford should have read this 
 and yet persisted in magnifying Jonson as the apostle of 
 regularity - — the very thing that he contemptuously dis- 
 claimed. True, Jonson might not have understood himself. 
 We know that, although he professed to cleanse the stage 
 of ribaldry, foul and unwashed brothelry, and suchlike, he 
 nevertheless, like many another professed and earnest 
 moralist, drew in the interests of morality foul and disgust- 
 ing pictures, quite as demoralising as anything that the most 
 licentious dramatist ever ventured to portray. None of 
 the Elizabethan dramatists exceed in unwashed filth some 
 of the passages in " The Silent Woman," and " Bartholomew 
 Fair." We should not have suspected that Jonson was an 
 apostle of decency, if he had not told us. But in the mat- 
 ter of correctness and regularity, it needed no Cordatus, 
 inly acquainted with the author's drift, to inform us that 
 
BEN JONSON. 447 
 
 Jonson's study of " humours " is " strange, and of a particular 
 kind by itself, somewhat like ' Vetus Comcedia,' " — a very 
 remarkable outcome of a powerful and original mind, which 
 was not very popular at the time, but which strongly 
 affected the practice of contemporary dramatists, and has 
 been fully honoured by posterity. 
 
 The only sense in which correctness can be applied to 
 Jonson is careful elaboration — laborious filling in of details. 
 Whether in the exhibition of character, or in the description 
 of places or things, he is never content with a bold sketch 
 and a few significant particulars. The characteristic of 
 plodding dogged thoroughness runs through all his work, 
 but is most conspicuous and obtrusive in passages where he 
 has an opportunity of displaying technical knowledge, — as 
 when he expounds the stock-in-trade and the business cares 
 of a draper, or the various vessels and other implements of 
 an alchemist's laboratory, or the ingredients of a fine lady's 
 cosmetic or a witch's charm, or the precise language of the 
 acknowledged processes for raising the devil, or transmuting 
 the baser metals into gold. It is in studying this peculiarity 
 that we get a just idea of the vastness of Jonson's scholar- 
 ship, his prodigious patience of research, and strength of 
 memory. His scholarship was not so much an athletic 
 scholarship, like Spenser's, as a vast knowledge of all sorts 
 of dry details from all sorts of sources ; and when we con- 
 sider the extent of it, we cannot sufficiently admire the 
 power and the patience that have compelled it into drama- 
 tic existence, and endowed it with a certain dramatic life. 
 
 We need not dwell on Ben Jonson's tragedies, " Sejanus" 
 and " Catiline.'' His warmest admirers have not much to 
 say in favour of them. " Catiline" is better than " Sejanus," 
 but even " Catiline" wants the elements of an effective 
 drama. Looking at these tragedies, I am wholly at a loss 
 to understand M. Taine's opinion that Jonson possesses in 
 an eminent degree the art of development, of drawing up 
 ideas in connected rank. The primary rule of development 
 is to present your audience first with the broad outlines, 
 and then to fill in the details clearly. This is the rule of 
 
448 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 development observed by Shakespeare and by all conscious 
 or unconscious masters of the art of presentation. But this 
 rule is not observed by Jonson : in spite of his Herculean 
 efforts to marshal his vast scholarship, he was too much 
 overwhelmed by it to put his readers in clear possession of 
 character and situation by bold decisive strokes and well- 
 judged and opportune sequence. Compare the opening 
 of his " Sejanus" with the opening of "Titus Andronicus." 
 In " Titus Andronicus" the dramatist had to deal with 
 numerous characters and complicated relations, yet we take 
 them all in at our first reading of the first act : the leading 
 parties are brought boldly and clearly on the stage at once 
 in such a way as to command our interest, and minor rela- 
 tions appear as we proceed with perfectly-judged sequence. 
 The sanie may be seen in Shakespeare's more mature 
 Roman dramas, "Julius Csesar " and " Coriolanus." In 
 " Sejanus," on the other hand, laborious attention and seve- 
 ral readings of the opening passages are needed before we 
 comprehend the situation. Two unimportant personages 
 come in with long-winded talk about the arts of worldly 
 advancement, and describe some half-dozen characters in a 
 string in such a way that the sharpest hearer must get be- 
 wildered as to their relative positions and claims upon his 
 interest. It seems to me that M. Taine must have formed 
 his opinion of Jonson's skill in development from observing 
 his persistent iteration throughout each play of the main 
 characteristics of his personages, and his habit of expound- 
 ing the intention of important passages, as if he could not 
 trust to the unaided understanding of the audience. Thus 
 Ben hammers into us the daring, forward, impetuous char- 
 acter of Cethegus ; and before the scene in which Catiline 
 practises to win over allies, makes the arch-conspirator 
 unfold to his wife how he means to work upon their various 
 weaknesses. But this is not so much skilful development 
 as superfluous care and weak distrust of the intelligence of 
 his. hearers. 
 
 In Jonson's comedies there are occasional passages that 
 may justly be called tragic, but they belong to low, coarse, 
 
BEN JONSON. 449 
 
 revolting tragedy. The misanthropy of Macilente in "Every 
 Man out of his Humour" is tragic ; it is theTimonism of a 
 thoroughly ill-conditioned foul-mouthed churl. The scene 
 between Volpone, Corvino, and Celia ("The Fox," iii. 5)— 
 the foul abuse of his wife by Corvino, and the struggle be- 
 tween Volpone and Celia — is monstrously tragic : if the 
 moralist desired to heal spiritual diseases by such an exhibi- 
 tion, he has not scrupled to administer a very strong medi- 
 cine. The opening scene of " The Alchemist," between the 
 sharpers Subtle and Face and their confederate and common 
 mistress Dol, might pass in a modern sensational drama from 
 the south side of the Thames but for the coarseness and the 
 power of the language : it is a unique revelation of hellish 
 discord and odious patching-up of a villanous alliance ; and 
 Its initiatory fascination was doubtless a chief cause in 
 making " The Alchemist " Jonson's most successful play. 
 
 The most generally pleasing remains of Jonson's genius 
 are his occasional songs, his Masques, and his " Sad Shep- 
 herd." The " Sad Shepherd " is not quite complete ; but, 
 though not without a few blots and stains, it contains some 
 of Jonson's finest poetry. The shepherdess Amie is such a 
 sweet creation that one is indignant at the dramatist for the 
 vulgar and wholly superfluous immodesty of one of her ex- 
 pressions in her first confession of unrest : to the pure all 
 things are pure, but it exposes the simple shepherdess to 
 unnecessary ridicule from the ordinary reader. One is sur- 
 prised to find such sympathy with simple innocence in rare 
 but rough Ben — all the more that the " Sad Shepherd " was 
 written in his later years, when he was exacerbated by 
 failure and poverty. 
 
 " I do remember, Marian, I have oft 
 With pleasure kist my lambs and puppies soft ; 
 And once a dainty fine roe-fawn I had. 
 Of whose out-skipping bounds I was as glad 
 As of my health ; and him I oft would kiss ; 
 Yet had his no such sting or pain as this : 
 They never prick'd or hurt my heart ; and for 
 They were so blunt and dull, I wish no more. 
 2 F 
 
450 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 But this that hurts and pricks doth please ; this sweet 
 Mingled with sour, I wish again to meet : 
 And that delay, methinks, most tedious is 
 That keeps or hinders me of Karol's kiss." 
 
 IV. — Thomas Dekker (1577-1638). 
 
 The skirmish between Marston, Jonson, and Dekker, is 
 one of the most famous " quarrels of authors." Who gave 
 the first offence is a matter of dispute : Jonson said it was 
 Marston and Dekker, and Dekker said it was Jonson. 
 When Jonson caricatured Marston as Crispinus the Poet- 
 aster, with a very slight passing thrust at Dekker under 
 the name of Demetrius, he professed that he had received 
 information of their intention to attack him; and when 
 Dekker replied with " Satiromastrix, or The Untrussing of 
 the Humorous Poet," he read Jonson a dignified lecture on 
 his jealous disposition, and represented himself and Marston 
 as acting reluctantly in self-defence. On which side the 
 truth lies, it is impossible to say; the facts are against 
 Jonson, inasmuch as he struck the first blow ; and his 
 alleged acquaintance with the evil intentions of Marston 
 and Dekker is such as might easily have been inserted 
 between the first acting of " The Poetaster,'' and the publi- 
 cation of it.i At any rate, Dekker had very much the best 
 of the contest. From GifTord's saying that " Dekker writes 
 in downright passion, and foams through every page,'' we 
 should infer that he had never read " Satiromastrix," were it 
 not the case that he makes mistakes equally gross concern- 
 ing plays that he must have read. Dekker writes with the 
 greatest possible lightness of heart, easy mockery, and free 
 abuse. It is absurd to say that he " makes no pretensions 
 to invention, but takes up the characters of his predecessor, 
 and turns them the seamy side without." Tucca is the only 
 
 1 All the part of Demetrius looks as if it had been inserted after Jonson 
 was informed of Dekker's intention to "untruss him" in revenge of 
 Marston. 
 
THOMAS DEKKER. 45 1 
 
 character that he borrows, and a very ingenious idea it is 
 — one of the best parts of the joke — to set Jonson's own 
 free-spoken swaggerer to abuse himself. Dekker's Tucca is 
 much more ably wrought out than Jonson's ; he has a much 
 finer command of what Widow Minever calls " horrible 
 ungodly names ; " and his devices to obtain money are 
 equally shameless and amusing. All the other characters, 
 and what plot there is, are Dekker's own ; he, of course, 
 uses the names Horace, Crispinus, and Demetrius, other- 
 wise there would have been no point in his reply — but he 
 gives them very different characters. William Rufus, whom 
 GifiFord supposed to be the " rude and ignorant soldier " of 
 that name, is conjectured to have been no other than 
 Shakespeare — "learning's true Maecenas, poesy's King;" 
 and perhaps to a playwright like Dekker, Shakespeare 
 might appear a true Msecenas, although at first sight one 
 would naturally think rather of the Earl of Pembroke or 
 some other noble patron of letters. I am surprised that so 
 able a critic as Mr S)mionds should say that "Satiromastrix " 
 is not to be named in the same breath with the " Poetaster,'' 
 and that its success must have been due to the acting. To be 
 sure it does not reproduce the Court of Augustus with the 
 same verisimilitude — its flight is much too light-winged and 
 madding for any such scholarly achievement. The Court of 
 Augustus would have broken the continuity of the play 
 with yawning intervals ; the frail, fallible, and romantic 
 Court of William Rufus is more in keeping with its ebullient 
 and victorious humour. " Satiromastrix," the castigation of 
 the satirist, is not in itself a satire so much as a genial con- 
 fident mockery : it accomplished the main end of such 
 productions — the applause of the playgoers ; and I must 
 confess that I for one should have been inclined to give 
 the clever rogue a hand, however badly his counterblast 
 had been put on the stage. 
 
 Of Dekker's personal history few particulars are known. 
 The dates both of his birth and of his death are only ap- 
 proximate conjectures. He seems to have made his living 
 by plays, pageants, and prose pamphlets, and to have been 
 
452 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 almost as prolific and versatile as Defoe, although his 
 labours did not always suffice to keep him out of " the 
 Counter in the Poultry," and the King's Bench Prison. 
 He is first named in ' Henslowe's Diary' in 1597, and he 
 would seem to have been conjoined with Chettle, Haugh- 
 ton. Day, and Jonson on several plays before the close of 
 the century. The first play published as his was " The 
 Shoemaker's HoHday," in 1600 : and the subsequent list 
 is— "The Pleasant Comedy of Old Fortunatus," 1600; 
 " Satiromastrix," 1602; " Patient Grissel " (in conjunction 
 with Chettle and Haughton), 1603 ; " The Honest Whore " 
 (Parti.), 1604; "The Whore of Babylon," 1607; "West- 
 ward Ho ! " " Northward Ho ! " and " Sir Thomas Wyatt " (in 
 conjunction with Webster), 1607 ; " The Roaring Girl" (in 
 conjunction with Middleton), 161 1 ; " If it be not good, the 
 Devil is in it," 1612 ; "The Virgin Martyr" (in conjunction 
 with Massinger), 1622; "Match me in London," 1631 ; 
 " The Wonder of a Kingdom " 1636 ; " The Sun's Darling " 
 (not pubHshed till 1656) ; and "The Witch of Edmonton," 
 1658 (written in conjunction with Ford). 
 
 Dekker was a man of less determined painstaking than 
 Chapman or Jonson, but of greater natural quickness and 
 fineness of vision, more genial warmth of sympathy, and 
 more copious spontaneity of expression. The fertility of his 
 conception and the sweetness of his verse were not surpassed 
 by any of his great contemporaries : his melting tenderness of 
 sympathy and light play of humour are peculiarly his own. 
 He had more in common with Shakespeare than with any 
 of the three sturdy writers whom we have been discussing. 
 Hazlitt complains of Shakespeare's comic Muse, as such, 
 that it is " too good-natured and magnanimous," that it 
 " does not take the highest pleasure in making human 
 nature look as mean, as ridiculous, and as contemptible as 
 possible." This is plainly a characteristic of Shakespeare's 
 comedy as distinguished from the Terentian manner ; but 
 I should not call it a fault. I know no reason why this 
 should be placed outside the limits of what is strictly called 
 comedy. I should be inclined to call this the crowning 
 
THOMAS MIDDLETON. 45 3 
 
 excellence of English comedy — that it is able to present 
 such a web of the admirable and the ridiculous as life 
 itself appears when viewed in a pleasant mood. This is 
 the kind of comedy that Dekker naturally pursued. He 
 had a very strong propensity towards fun, darted into every 
 opening that promised laughter with the gleefiilness of a 
 boy ; but he had also a strong love for the virtues, and a 
 genial belief in human goodness, and delighted to picture 
 an honest citizen, a repentant sinner, a relenting father, a 
 merciful prince. Neither his humour nor his love for 
 gentleness of heart was diminished by his poverty and 
 frequent distress. If Dekker, as Jonson said, " was a 
 rogue and not to be trusted," he always took a kinder and 
 more lenient view of humanity than appears in the plays of 
 his enemy, — the stem scourge of vice and folly. Dekker's 
 genius had many points of resemblance with Chaucer's. 
 
 If, with Hamlet, we take the purpose of playing to be " to 
 show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the 
 very age and body of the time his form and pressure," 
 Dekker must receive a high place among the dramatists. 
 There is none of them that has preserved so many lifelike 
 intimations of the state of the various classes of society in 
 that age. His plots are loosely constructed ; but occasional 
 scenes are wrought out with the utmost vividness, and the 
 most complete and subtle exhibition of character and 
 habits. Dekker's being born in London, and his excep- 
 tional acquaintance with strange bedfellows in the course 
 of his miserable life, gave him an advantage as the abstract 
 and brief chronicle of the time over Shakespeare, who was 
 bred in the country, and passed a comparatively prosperous 
 and respectable life in London — apart altogether from the 
 fact that Shakespeare's imagination would not let him rest 
 content with so close a transcript of nature. 
 
 V. — Thomas Middleton (1570-1639). 
 
 Middleton's comedies come nearer than Dekker's to 
 Hazlitt's idea of " making human nature look as mean, as 
 
454 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 ridiculous, and as contemptible as possible;" and they also 
 put human nature into very laughable situations. Middle- 
 ton, whose birth Mr Dyce fixes at a date not earlier than 
 1570, began like Marston as a satirist, publishing ' Micro- 
 cynicon,' " six snarling satires," in couplets, in 1599; and 
 followed up this with a prose satire, called the 'Black 
 Book,' in 1604. But he achieved no great success in this 
 fashionable and artificial line of composition : his rhymed 
 satire is inferior to Marston's or Donne's, and his prose very 
 inferior to Dekker's ' Seven Deadly Sins of London.' These 
 performances, however, sufficiently show the character of 
 the man — his' broad, clever, unsentimental humour, and 
 shrewd common-sense. 
 
 Middleton was formally conjoined with Dekker in the 
 composition of " The Honest Whore," though his share is 
 not conspicuous ; and he would seem in his earliest work 
 to have looked up to Dekker as a friend and master. His 
 Simon the Tanner, the "Mayor of Quinborough," is an 
 imitation of Dekker's Simon Eyre the shoemaker, Mayor of 
 London. But the romantic and tragic element in- that play 
 is very coarse compared with the serious side of Dekker's 
 plays ; and Middleton found a more congenial field in the 
 unmixed comedy of Jonson and Chapman. "A Trick to 
 Catch the Old One," and " A Mad World, my Masters," 
 were apparently written at the instigation of Chapman's 
 " All Fools," the great exemplar and archetype of the Eng- 
 lish comedy of " gulling." In this type of comedy Middle- 
 ton is exceedingly happy, and surpasses his masters in 
 ingenuity of construction, and easy accumulation of mirth- 
 ful circumstances. The fun begins early, and goes on to 
 the end with accelerating speed. He excels particularly in 
 making his gulls accessory to their own deception, and in 
 putting into their mouths statements that have, to those in 
 the secret, a meaning very much beyond what they intend. 
 From the preface to " The Roaring Girl "■ — which was writ- 
 ten in conjunction with Dekker, and bears marks of his 
 hand in the shopping and gallanting scenes, if not also in 
 the character ascribed to Moll, and some of the speeches 
 
THOMAS MIDDLETON. 455 
 
 put into her mouth — we learn that Middleton prided him- 
 self on the construction of his comedies. There is an 
 alteration, he says, now in the fashion of play-making: 
 " your huge bombasted plays, quilted with mighty words to 
 lean purpose," have gone out of fashion, and neater inven- 
 tions, with single plots and quaint conceits, have been set 
 up. He professes also to be more decent than some of his 
 predecessors, and has a gird apparently at Marston or Jon- 
 son, as some obscene fellow, who cares not what he writes 
 against others, yet rips up the most nasty vice in his own 
 plays, and presents it to a modest assembly. It is the ex- 
 cellency of a writer, says Middleton, to leave things better 
 than he finds them. According to this principle, in the 
 " Trick to Catch the Old One,"i and the " Mad World," the 
 courtesans are married and made honest women — the rakes 
 are reclaimed ; and though no,lesson is weightily inculcated, 
 there is less indecency than in the works of more preten- 
 tious moralists. 
 
 Middleton's genius — and genius he did possess in no 
 small measure — was essentially comical and unromantic. 
 If Middleton " is admired for a certain wild and fantastic 
 fancy, which delights in portraying scenes of witchcraft and 
 supernatural agency," the admiration must come from people 
 who have read only the witch-scenes in " The Witch," and 
 have not quite appreciated even them. Middleton's witches, 
 which Malone first held, and then did not hold, to have 
 been created before Shakespeare's,^ exist more for comic 
 
 1 This play furnished the plot of Massinger's " New Way to Pay Old 
 Debts." The titles of the plays, in fact, are interchangeable : both the 
 scapegrace heroes extract by the same device rather more than their rights 
 from usurious and grasping uncles. The character of Sir Giles has more 
 force than any creation of Middleton's ; but the germ of the character was 
 probably taken from Middleton's " Pecunious Lucre," or Sir Alexander 
 Wargrave in " The Roaring Girl." 
 
 s^Thechief resemblances are, that both poets introduce Hecate as the 
 queen of the witches, and that the songs "Come away" and "Black 
 Spirits," of which only the first words are given in " Macbeth," are set down 
 in full in "The Witch." "The Witch" was not printed till 1778, when it 
 was discovered in MS. by Mr Isaac Reed. If the songs were popular 
 witch-songs, whether vmtten before or after Shakespeare wrote ' ' Macbeth, " 
 they may have been adopted in the stage copy of the play. 
 
456 SHAKESPEARE'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 and spectacular purposes than as an integral part of a tragic 
 conception. Familiarity breeds contempt: if they had 
 been consulted only by the Duchess, with a view to the 
 murder of her husband, they might have kept up an appear- 
 ance of dignity and terror; but when the drunk Alma- 
 childes staggers in among them, upsets some of the bel- 
 dams, and is received by Hecate as a favoured lover, we 
 cease to have much respect for them, even though they do 
 profess to exercise the terrible power of raising jars, jeal- 
 ousies, strifes, and heart-burning disagreements like a thick 
 scarf o'er life. The visit of the fantastical gentleman whom 
 Hecate has thrice enjoyed in incubus, is a very happy in- 
 spiration in the same vein as Tam o' Shanter's admiration 
 of the heroine of Alloway Kirk : the scene is a fine oppor- 
 tunity for a comic actor ; but it is damaging to the respect- 
 ability of the dread Hecate. The tragedy of " Women 
 Beware Women," the last act of which makes a quick 
 despatch of all the chief actors after the model of the 
 Spanish Tragedy, is sadly wanting in dignity of character. 
 The characters are all so vile that the pity and terror pro- 
 duced by their death is almost wholly physical. Tragedy, 
 as I have said, was not Middleton's/^^^ife. 
 
 VI. — John Fletcher (1579-1625). 
 
 It is not without compunction that one ventures to dis- 
 solve the long-established union between the names of 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, and to characterise the second and 
 principal member by himself. The rigour of my plan de- 
 mands it. There are ample materials for forming an esti- 
 mate of Fletcher, because he wrote, plays unassisted pro- 
 bably before, and certainly after, his partnership with 
 Beaumont ; while in groping after the character of Beau- 
 mont we must trust chiefly to imperfect materials — a masque, 
 a few poems, vague traditions, and arbitrary recognition of 
 portions of his joint work with Fletcher. If there had been 
 marked differences between the plays written by Fletcher 
 alone, and those written by him in conjunction with Beau- 
 
JOHN FLETCHER. 457 
 
 mont, one might have proceeded with some confidence to 
 allocate their respective shares in the joint compositions/ 
 But I must confess for myself that there is no passage in 
 any of the joint plays that I could affirm with any confi- 
 dence not to be Fletcher's — not to contain traces of his 
 hand. Of the three plays in which it is known for certain 
 that Beaumont took part — the " Maid's Tragedy," " Philas- 
 ter," and " A King and No King " — all have the same com- 
 plexion as Fletcher's single compositions, similar characters, 
 similar sentiments, and similar impelling forces. One would 
 expect the metre to be a good criterion of separate identity. 
 The abundance of feminine endings in Fletcher's undoubted 
 verse, and his habit of running one line into another, have 
 been suggested as tests ; but the application of these tests 
 is rendered uncertain by the fact that they do not apply to 
 Fletcher's "Faithful Shepherdess." We cannot pick out 
 certain passages as being Beaumont's, simply on the ground 
 that they contain a smaller proportion of feminine endings 
 than certain other passages which may be supposed to be 
 Fletcher's. On the whole, I see no reason to doubt the 
 opinion current during the reign of Charles I., and com- 
 municated by Bishop Earle to Aubrey, that Beaumont's 
 chief share in the plays lay in correcting the exuberance of 
 Fletcher. Almost all the commendatory poems prefixed to 
 the edition of 1647 — poems by Denham, Waller, Lovelace, 
 Herrick, Lowell, Cartwright, Richard Brome, &c. — are ad- 
 dressed to Fletcher alone. Richard Brome, Jonson's ser- 
 vant and pupil, who knew Fletcher intimately, and was as 
 likely as any man to be aware of the exact relationship 
 between the two dramatists, gives all the glory to Fletcher. 
 The truth probably is, that Beaumont applied his superior 
 judgment to the task of amending Fletcher's first drafts, 
 seeing that his prolific partner was strongly adverse to the 
 labour of correction. I cannot say that there is any one 
 scene in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher which I should 
 feel warranted in assigning to Beaumont alone, although it 
 is quite possible that he contributed whole Scenes, if not 
 whole Acts. 
 
45 8 SHAKESPEARE'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 All the dramatists hitherto considered in our survey agree 
 in being men of humble extraction, who had to fight their 
 way in the world through manifold difficulties. Fletcher is 
 only partly an exception to this agreement. He was the 
 son of a Kentish clergyman, who rose to the rank of bishop ; 
 but his father died in 1596, when he was seventeen years 
 old, and left a widow and a large family in distressed cir- 
 cumstances. Five years before his father's death, Fletcher 
 had entered Bennet College, Cambridge, and he was resi- 
 dent there in 1593. No other particulars of his private life 
 have been ascertained. He seems to have begun to write 
 for the stage about 1606, the supposed date of his " Woman- 
 Hater;" and before he was cut off by the plague in 1625, 
 he had written or co-operated in writing no less than sixty 
 plays. 
 
 Fletcher entered the dramatic field when the rivalry of 
 wit was at its hottest. He belonged to the lighter build of 
 combatants — the saucy bark, rather than the imperious, 
 proud, full sail. It is significant of his personal appearance 
 that his portraits were considered failures : there was no 
 catching the quick play of his vivacious features. His first 
 dramatic effort — if the " Woman-Hater " is so — was in the 
 mock-heroic vein, and gave proof of a comic genius second 
 only to Shakespeare's. There are two comic heroes in the 
 play — Gondarino, a ridiculously ill-conditioned and techy 
 hater of women ; and Lazarillo, a fanatic and insatiable 
 gourmand. Gondarino's sourness takes the fancy of a 
 mischief-loving young lady, Oriana, who amuses herself and 
 gives rise to some most ludicrous scenes by making violent 
 love to the old porcupine, very much to his disgust. In 
 the pursuit of her whim, however, she compromises herself 
 by equivocal behaviour, and narrowly escapes falling a vic- 
 tim to the cynic's ludicrously diabolical project of revenge. 
 Alongside this series of incidents, and partly interwoven 
 with them, runs the mock-heroic passion of Lazarillo, whose 
 sole aim in life is to get possession of dainty food without 
 paying for it. His goddess is Plenty, and his daily prayer 
 to her is, " Fill me this day with some rare delicates." A 
 
JOHN FLETCHER. 459 
 
 sumptuous feast is the sacrifice tliat he vows to perform. 
 Bills of fare are his holy scriptures, which he never fails to 
 take up with reverence. Lazarillo's page, whose office it is 
 to haunt the kitchens of the great, and bring instant word 
 of forthcoming dishes, in order that his master may devise 
 stratagems and ambuscades to procure a taste of them, one 
 day reports that the Duke's table is to be graced by— the 
 head of an Umbrana. " Is it possible ? " cries Lazarillo ; 
 "can heaven be so propitious to the Duke?" And forth- 
 with he vows to pursue this Umbrana's head with all his 
 strength, mind, and heart. He procures an introduction 
 to the Duke, only to find that the Duke has sent the ob- 
 ject of his idolatry to Gondarino : when good fortune has 
 thrown Gondarino in his way, and he is beginning to 
 rejoice, he finds that it has gone to Gondarino's mercer: 
 when he has skilfully engineered an invitation to dine with 
 the mercer, he finds that the mercer has sent it to a woman 
 of doubtful fame. After these and other checks at mo- 
 ments when the Umbrana's head was almost between his 
 teeth, he at last attains it by marrying the mercer's mistress. 
 The intensity of Lazarillo's passion for the rare morsel, his 
 ecstasies when he is on the point of attaining it, his pro- 
 found dejection and distraction after each temporary re- 
 pulse to his hopes, are in the maddest vein of mock- 
 heroism. 
 
 The "Woman-Hater" is a good introduction to Fletcher's 
 gay and daring humour. He indulged it without much 
 regard for decency : he had less veneration than Shakes- 
 peare to check him : he is more coolly contemptuous in 
 laying serious respectabilities by the heels. The " Faithful 
 Shepherdess " gives us a more beautiful side of his char- 
 acter, developed with the same freedom and abandonment 
 of himself to the fiill swing o^ a ruling sentiment. This 
 masque, though naturally enough condemned when put on 
 the public stage as a drama, furnished Milton with a model 
 for his " Comus," and is in itself one of the finest monu- 
 ments of our moralising pastoral poetry. Fletcher throws 
 himself unreservedly into the loves and crosses of Amoret 
 
46o SHAKESPEARE'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 and Perigot, and the pious austerity of the bereaved Clorin, 
 and lets his imagination revel in picturing the scene of 
 their adventures. The wood where the mistakes of a night 
 are enacted is very fitting for a romantic drama : — 
 
 " For in that holy wood is consecrate 
 A virtuous well, about whose flowery banks 
 The nimble-footed fairies dance their rounds 
 By the pale moonshine, dipping often-times 
 Their stolen children, so to make them free 
 From dying flesh and dull mortality. 
 By this fair fount hath many a shepherd sworn 
 And given away his freedom ; many a troth 
 Been plighted, which nor Envy nor old Time 
 Could ever break, with many a chaste kiss given. 
 In hope of coming happiness." 
 
 The mad irrepressible humour of the poet, however, 
 broke through the sweet surface of his romantic conception : 
 he spoiled his paradise by introducing, as evil principles, 
 the wantons Cloe and Alexis, and the malignant Sullen 
 Shepherd, and investing them with characters so disgusting, 
 that their gross humour, instead of operating as an elevat- 
 ing contrast, tends rather to throw a taint of ridicule on 
 the whole composition. 
 
 From Dryden down to Coleridge, all Fletcher's critics 
 have remarked his success in representing the easy and 
 animated conversation of young gentlemen. Don John 
 in the "Chances," Mirabel in the "Wild Goose Chase," 
 Cleremont in the " Little French Lawyer," Don Jamie and 
 Leandro in the " Spanish Curate," Monsieur Thomas, and 
 many others, use much less abstruse language than 
 Shakespeare's Biron, Gratiano, Benedick, and suchlike, and 
 language consequently better suited to the mouths of 
 young men of blood and fashion. The truth is, that 
 Fletcher's easy, rapid, copious style, preserved by his good 
 taste and sense of humour from conceits, and by his super- 
 ficial nature from any kind of depth or intricacy, approaches 
 nearer the language of polite conversation than the style of 
 any of his contemporaries ; the ease and sprightliness is not 
 
JOHN FLETCHER. 461 
 
 specially put on for young men of spirit, but is a pervading 
 characteristic of his style. There is a similar dash and 
 abandonment in the language of all his personages : he 
 throws himself heartily and impetuously, but not deeply, 
 into a situation, and expresses the sentiment of the mo- 
 ment with unfailing abundance of clear, bright-coloured, 
 gracious, and noble words. 
 
 Apart from his fertile humour, which is no less varied 
 than unscrupulous, the main charm of Fletcher lies in the 
 plentiful stream of simple ideas and readily understood 
 feelings, expressed in felicitous and animated language. 
 When we try to grasp the consistency of his characters, 
 and regard his plays as wholes, we discover many evidences 
 of weak characterisation and hasty construction. It is 
 remarkable how few of his personages are throughout ad- 
 mirable, beautiful, or venerable; and this arises not from 
 cynical purpose, as in Jonson, but from sketchiness and 
 shallowness of conception. He is fond of delineating 
 exemplarUy virtuous women ; but chastity is too often and 
 too prominently their sole claim upon our interest, and 
 many of them pollute their lips with language the reverse 
 of lovely. His magnanimous heroes, also, harp too much 
 on one string : he could not have ventured to show a hero 
 in his domestic and playful side as Shakespeare does with 
 Hotspur. And many of his personages, both male and 
 female — Sorano, Protaldye, Brunhalt, &c., &c. — are abom- 
 inably vile, — vile almost beyond parallel. One cannot say 
 that in the plays pruned by the revision or enlarged by 
 the co-operation of Beaumont, there is much difference in 
 these respects. There are exquisite passages in the sad 
 stories of Aspatia and Euphrasia, as there are in the 
 stories of Amoret or Evanthe, showing them to be children 
 of the same deHcate fancy ; but there is a want of body in 
 the appeal that they make to our sympathies : they are, be- 
 sides, brought into too close contact with the pitch that de- 
 files. And both the "Maid's Tragedy" and "Philaster" are 
 seriously disfigured by the ignoble and repulsive character 
 of the impelling forces : the shameless intrigue of Evadne 
 
462 SHAKESPEARE'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 and the king is too violent an outrage on decency, too base 
 and animal, to permit any dignity to envelop its tragic 
 consequences ; and the easy credence given to the filthy 
 accusations of Megra, so base, unsupported, and obviously 
 malicious, makes us look upon the hero as a fool, and 
 seriously affects his claims to our interest and admiration. 
 
 VII. — John Webster (?) 
 
 Dekker's partner in "Westward Ho!" "Northward Ho!" 
 and " Sir Thomas Wyatt," was to all appearance as different 
 from himself as one man of genius could be from another 
 — a man who sank deep shafts into the mines of tragedy, 
 and built up his plays with profound design and deliberate 
 care. Dekker is not more remarkable for his genial repro- 
 duction of city life in loosely contrived scenes, and for his 
 easy unstudied sympathy with deep heart's-sorrowing and 
 keen heart's-bitterness, than Webster is for his penetrat- 
 ing grasp of character, meditated construction of intricate 
 scenes, and elaborate, just, and powerful treatment of ter- 
 rible situations. One would expect from the joint work of 
 two such men results of the most supreme kind — plays that 
 might compete with the unrivalled Shakespeare. But the 
 excellent qualities of two men cannot be fused into one 
 work of art : two minds cannot work as one with the united 
 strength of the strong faculties of both. Of the three joint 
 plays of Dekker and Webster, two of them, "Westward Ho ! " 
 and " Northward Ho ! " are not distinguishable from the un- 
 aided productions of Dekker; while the third, "Sir Thomas 
 Wyatt," in the mutilated and imperfect shape that has been 
 handed down to us, contains strong marks of Webster, and 
 may be regarded as being, in great part, the first effort of 
 his powerful genius. 
 
 Concerning Webster's life one can only repeat the same 
 tale of ignorance that must be told concerning so many of 
 our dramatists. He was bom free of the Merchant Tailors' 
 Company ; began to write for the stage as early as 1601 ; 
 
JOHN WEBSTER. 463 
 
 and we may conjecture, from his predilection for scenes in 
 courts of law and his elaborate treatment of them, that he 
 had been bred to the profession. His quotations show that 
 he had at least been taught Latin, and so far had received 
 a learned education. His fame rests on three tragedies and 
 a tragic comedy, — " Vittoria Corombona, the White Devil," 
 pubHshed in 1612 j " The Duchess of Malfi," 1623 ; " The 
 Devil's Law-Case," a tragi-comedy, 1623 ; and "Appius and 
 Virginia," not published till 1654.1 
 
 In the preface to "Vittoria Corombona," Webster defends 
 himself against the charge of being a slow composer. We 
 find this charge also in a contemporary satirist (' Notes from 
 Blackfiriars,' 1620), who draws a very lively picture of 
 " crabbed Websterio : " — 
 
 " See how he draws his mouth awry of late, 
 How he scrubs, wrings his wrists, scratches his pate ; 
 A midwife, help ! . . . . 
 Here's not a word cursively I have writ 
 But he'll industriously examine it ; 
 And in some twelve months thence, or thereabout. 
 Set in a shameful sheet my errors out." 
 
 Webster does not deny the charge ; but he answers his cri- 
 tics with a bold tradition : " Alcestides objecting that 
 Euripides had only in three days composed three verses, 
 whereas himself had written three hundred ; ' Thou tellest 
 truth,' quoth he, ' but here's the difference : thine shall only 
 be read for three days, whereas mine shall continue three 
 ages.' " Webster's characters could not have been drawn 
 nor his scenes constructed in a hurry. Appius and Romelio 
 are unsurpassed as broad and elaborate studies, filled in 
 with indefatigable detail and accommodated with subtle 
 art to a profound conception. In following these master- 
 pieces the student of character is kept in an ecstasy of de- 
 light by stroke after stroke of the most unerring art. In 
 every other scene their replies and ways of taking things 
 
 1 In an able essay on Webster, in ' Eraser's Magazine,' May 1874, Mr 
 Edmund Gosse pointed out,; for the first time, Webster's share in " A Cure 
 for a Cuckold," Mr Gosse's paper is otherwise of special interest. 
 
464 Shakespeare's successors. 
 
 surprise us, yet every such paradox on reflection is seen to 
 accord with the central conception of their character, and 
 increases our admiration of the dramatist's deep insight and 
 steady grasp. And these plays are not merely closet-plays, 
 whose excellences can be picked out and admired only at 
 leisure. The characters have not the simplicity and popular 
 intelligibility of Shakespeare's Richard or lago. The plots, 
 too, except in "Appius and Virginia," where all the incidents 
 lie in the direct line of the catastrophe, are involved with 
 obscure windings and turnings. Yet all the scenes are 
 carefully constructed for dramatic effect. Mark how studi- 
 ous Webster has been that his actors shall never go lamely 
 off the stage : they make their exit at happily chosen mo- 
 ments, and with some remark calculated to leave a buzz of 
 interest behind them. When we look closely into Webster's 
 plays we become aware that no dramatist loses more in 
 closet perusal : all his dialogues were written with a careful 
 eye to the stage. Everywhere throughout his plays we 
 meet with marks of deep meditation and just design. It is 
 not with his plays as with Fletcher's : the more we study 
 Webster, the more we find to admire. His characters ap- 
 proach nearer to the many-sidedness of real men and women 
 than those of any dramatist except Shakespeare ; and his 
 exhibition of the changes of feeling wrought in them by the 
 changing progress of events, though characterised by less of 
 revealing instinct and more o' penetrating effort than appear 
 in Shakespeare, is hardly less powerful and true. 
 
 Webster did not attempt comedy, unless in conjunction 
 with Dekker, and before he had felt where his strength lay. 
 The moral saws wrought into his dialogues show that his 
 meditations held chiefly to the dark side of the world. In 
 forming our impression of the man, we are perhaps unduly 
 dominated by the concluding scenes of " Vittoria Corom- 
 bona" and " The Duchess of Malfi:" it is from these scenes 
 that he has received the name of " the terrible Webster." 
 It showed a strange ignorance of his own power that in the 
 preface to " Vittoria " he regretted that the nature of the 
 English stage would not permit him to write sententious 
 
JOHN WEBSTER. 465 
 
 tragedy after the model of the ancients, " observing all the 
 critical laws, as height of style and gravity of person, en- 
 riching it with the sententious chorus, and, as it were, enli- 
 vening death in the passionate and weighty nuntius." He 
 does undoubtedly observe height of style, and his persons 
 are exempt from meanness and ignobility. Uncontrollable 
 passionate love, and a temporary insanity of avarice pursued 
 with subtle policy and bitterly repented of, are the chief 
 impelling forces of his four great plays ; and even inferior 
 instruments of villany, such as Ludowick, Flamineo, and 
 Bosola, are invested with a certain dignity. But that Web- 
 ster should have desired to relate those terri&c death-scenes 
 instead of exhibiting them as he has done, showed a strange 
 obliviousness of the basis of his own fame and the excel- 
 lence of modem [tragedy. Not to mention his grander 
 scenes, how tame and unimpressive would have been the 
 fate of the poisoned Brachiano in the narrative of a mes- 
 senger to his beloved mistress Vittoria, compared with what 
 it is when we are brought face to face with the fearfully 
 punished sinner and the passionately interested witnesses 
 of his agony. 
 
 " Brack. Oh ! I am gone already. The infection 
 Flies to the brain and heart. O thou strong heart ! 
 There's such a covenant 'tween the world and it. 
 They're loath to break. 
 
 Giovanni. O my most loved father ! 
 
 Brack. Remove the boy away : 
 Where's this good woman ? had I infinite worlds, 
 They are too little for thee. Must I leave thee.' 
 What say you, screech-owls ? is the venom mortal .? 
 
 Physician. Most deadly. 
 
 Brack. Most corrupted, politic hangman ! 
 You kill without book ; but your art to save 
 Fails you as oft as great men's needy friends. 
 I that have given life to offending slaves 
 And wretched murderers, have I not power 
 To lengthen mine own a twelvemonth ? 
 Do not kiss me, for I shall poison thee ; 
 This unction is sent from the Great Duke of Florence. 
 2 G 
 
466 SHAKESPEARE'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 Fran, de Medici [his enemy the Great Duke in disguise"]. Sir, 
 be of comfort. 
 
 Brack. O thou soft natural death, that art joint-twin 
 To sweetest slumber ! no rough-bearded comet 
 Stares on thy mild departure ; the dull owl 
 Beats not against thy casement ; the hoarse wolf 
 Scents not thy carrion. Pity winds thy corse 
 Whilst horror waits on princes. 
 
 Vittoria Corombo?ta. I am lost for ever ! 
 
 Brack. How miserable a thing it is to die 
 'Mongst women howling ! what are those ? 
 
 Flamineo. Franciscans. 
 They have brought the extreme unction. 
 
 Brack. On pain of death let no man name death to me : 
 It is a word most infinitely terrible. 
 Withdraw into our cabinet." 
 
 Brachiano's bidding Vittoria not kiss him or she will be 
 poisoned, is characteristic of Webster's subtle art. The 
 wretched man had been moved by his passion for Vittoria, 
 the " white devil," to poison his wife, and the deed had 
 been heartlessly done by anointing with a deadly unction 
 the lips of a picture of her husband which the poor lady 
 was in the habit of kissing every night before she went to 
 bed; and this line at once shows the direction of Bra- 
 chiano's franticly shifting thoughts, and brings the crime by 
 a sudden flash side by side with the punishment and the 
 impassioned motive. 
 
 VIII.— Cyril Tourneur (?) 
 
 Toumeur's name will always be associated with Webster's, 
 because his nature led him within the same circle of tenible 
 subjects. Only two of his plays survive, the " Revenger's 
 Tragedy " and the " Atheist's Tragedy " — the one first pub- 
 lished in 1607, the other in 161 1. Nothing more is known 
 about him, except that he wrote also a play called the 
 " Nobleman," which was utilised by Warburton's cook. 
 
 Tourneur was far from having the breadth and the 
 weight of Webster's genius : he does not take so deep a 
 
CYRIL TOURNEUR. 467 
 
 hold of the being of his personages. Yet he is entitled to 
 a high and unique place among the Elizabethan dramatists. 
 There is a piercing intelligence in his grasp of character, 
 a daring vigour and fire in his expression. His two plays 
 show no elaborate study of variety of character ; but he 
 burns the chief moods of his principal characters deep into 
 the mind. 
 
 Vindici, in the " Revenger's Tragedy," forms an interest- 
 ing comparison with Hamlet. His character, one need 
 hardly say, is not so versatile and complete as Hamlet's ; 
 but " Hamlet,'' also, is a revenger's tragedy: and it is worth 
 while to look at the two side by side. Vindici is sustained 
 throughout in one mood : from the first he knows who it is 
 that has robbed him of his mistress, and he pursues the 
 murderer with unwavering hatred. At no time is his spirit 
 filled with weariness of the whole course of the world : he 
 lives throughout at a demoniac pitch, turned all to gall and 
 wormwood by the bitter wrong done to him, and expatiat- 
 ing on the world with daring wit, fierce biting mockery. 
 The critics of last generation, in their remarks on the un- 
 seasonable levity of Hamlet, seemed to have lost sight of 
 the fact that the deepest and most wringing sorrow, when 
 it is not too strong for the frame of the sufferer, finds vent 
 more in laughter than in tears. Vindici's laughter is still 
 more terrible than Hamlet's, because his angry bitterness 
 is so unrelaxed and unvaried by gentle moods. Even his 
 anger does not pass through many phases. There is no 
 sustained weight of indignation in it : the intense scofl^ing 
 vein is paramount, and the earnestness of his passion only 
 flashes through at fiery intervals. In the scene in which he 
 explains to his brother the plan of revenge that he has 
 formed, his fantastic demoniac mirth, his bitter buffoonery 
 is at its height ; and the passage is one of the many that 
 show how much higher those dramatists rose into the extra- 
 vagances of human passion than sober-footed critics have 
 since been able to follow them. Vindici's bride, Gloriana, 
 had been ravished and poisoned by the Duke, and Vindici, 
 the better to effect his revenge, had fiercely forced himself 
 
468 SHAKESPEARE'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 to assume the disguise of a pander. In this disguise he 
 had been employed 'by the Duke to procure a mistress, and 
 he explains (Act iii.) to his brother with bitter dehght who 
 the mistress is that he has provided. He keeps the skull 
 of his dead bride in his study, and he has resolved to bring 
 this veiled to the old " luxur " at the appointed spot, and 
 when the deception is discovered, to consummate his revenge. 
 
 " Enter Vindici with Hippolyto his brother. 
 
 Vind. O sweet, delectable, rare, happy, ravishing ! 
 
 Hipp. Why, what's the matter, brother? 
 
 Vind. O, 'tis able to make a man spring up and knock his 
 
 forehead against yon silver ceiling. 
 Hipp. Pr'ythee tell me . 
 
 Vind. The old Duke . 
 
 Hires me by price to greet him with a lady 
 In some fit place, veiled from the eyes of the court 
 
 I have took care 
 For a delicious lip, a sparkling eye ! 
 You shall be witness, brother. 
 Be ready ; stand with your hat off. 
 
 Hipp. Troth I wonder what lady it should be ; 
 Yet 'tis no wonder, now I think again, 
 To have a lady stoop to a Duke. 
 
 EnterViNDlci with the skull of his love dressed up in tires. 
 
 Vind. Madam, his grace will not be absent long. 
 Secret? Ne'er doubt us. Madam. 'Twill be worth 
 Three velvet gowns to your ladyship. Known ? 
 Few ladies respect that disgrace ; a poor thin shell ! 
 'Tis the best grace you have to do it well. 
 I'll save your hand that labour. I'll unmask you. 
 
 Hipp. Why, brother, brother? 
 
 Vind. Art thou beguiled now ? 
 Have I not fitted the old surfeiter 
 With a quaint piece of beauty ? . 
 Here's an eye, 
 Able to tempt a great man — to serve God. 
 A pretty hanging lip, that has forgot now to dissemble. 
 
CYRIL TOURNEUR. 469 
 
 Methinks this mouth should make a swearer tremble, 
 
 A drunkard clasp his teeth, and not undo them 
 
 To suffer wet damnation to run through them. 
 
 Here's a cheek keeps her colour, let the wind go whistle. 
 
 Spout, rain, we fear thee not : be hot or cold, 
 
 All's one with us. And is not he absurd 
 
 Whose fortunes are upon their faces set. 
 
 That fear no other God but wind and wet. 
 
 Hipp. Brother, you've spoke that right. 
 Is this the form that living shone so bright ? 
 
 Vind. The very same. 
 And now methinks I could e'en chide myself 
 For doating on her beauty, though her death 
 Shall be avenged after no common action." 
 
 There are many striking passages in Tourneur of splendid 
 declamation and masterly description. Perhaps none is 
 more remarkable than that quoted by Lamb under the title 
 of " The Drowned Soldier." With all one's reverence for 
 Lamb as a critic, one cannot help saying that this title and 
 his slightly disparaging remark about the weaving of paren- 
 thesis within parenthesis shows that he did not feel the 
 peculiar and wonderful power of the description. It is not 
 the drowned soldier that we are interested in : it is the 
 movements of his terrible murderer. I know nothing com- 
 parable to this passage as a description of the fearfulness of 
 the sea: it makes one shudder to read it — as if the gigantic 
 sea-serpent himself were hissing and wallowing before us in 
 his uncouth and horrible pity. 
 
 " Walking upon the fatal shore. 
 Among the slaughtered bodies of their men, 
 » Which the full-stomached sea had cast upon 
 
 The sands, it was my unhappy chance to light 
 Upon a face, whose favour when it lived 
 My astonished mind informed me I had seen. 
 He lay in his armour, as if that had been 
 His coffin ; and the weeping sea (like one 
 Whose milder temper doth lament the death 
 Of him whom in his rage he slew) runs up 
 The shore, embraces him, kisses his cheek ; 
 Goes back again, and forces up the sands 
 
47° SHAKESPEARE'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 To bury him ; and every time it parts, 
 Sheds tears upon him ; till at last (as if 
 It could no longer endure to see the man 
 Whom it had slain, yet loath to leave him) with 
 A kind of unresolved unwilling pace, 
 Winding her waves one in another (like 
 A man that folds his arms, or wrings his hands 
 For grief), ebbed from the body, and descends 
 As if it would sink down into the earth, 
 And hide itself for shame of such a deed." 
 
 IX. — John Ford (1586-1640?) 
 
 Whoever wishes to fully understand Ford's genius should 
 read Mr Swinburne's paper in the ' Fortnightly Review ' of 
 July 1871. All other criticisms must appear faint and 
 colourless after that masterpiece of searching criticism and 
 noble language. It is still, however, open to consider Ford 
 more especially as a dramatist. In what follows, my endea- 
 /our has been to trace the influence of Ford's character on 
 the structure of his plays. 
 
 Little is known of Ford's life. Two doggerel lines that 
 have come down in a contemporary satire on the poets of 
 the time are rather expressive of what seems to have been 
 the character of the man : — 
 
 " Deep in a dump John Ford alone was got. 
 With folded arms and melancholy hat." 
 
 He seems to have been a proud, reserved, austere kind of 
 man, of few and warm attachments, with but slender gifts 
 in the way of ebullient spirits or social flow. He was a 
 barrister, with a respectable ancestry to look back to ; and 
 though he wrote several plays, and did not disdain to work 
 in conjunction with such a professional playwright as 
 Dekker, he was nervously anxious lest it should be sup- 
 posed that he made his living by play-writing. In his first 
 Prologue he spoke contemptuously of such as made poetry 
 a trade, and he took more than one opportunity of protest- 
 ing that his plays were the fruits of leisure, the issue of less 
 serious hours. Some of his plays he dedicated to noblemen. 
 
JOHN FORD. 471 
 
 but he was careful to assure them that it was not his habit 
 to court greatness, and that his dedication was a simple 
 offering of respect without mercenary motive. His first 
 play, " The Lover's Melancholy," he dedicated to his friends 
 in Gray's Inn, avowing that he desired not to please the 
 many, but to obtain the free opinion of his equals in con- 
 dition. 
 
 Ford had good reason for making this independent stand. 
 Although Shakespeare had made his living chiefly by poetry, 
 and had been not very scrupulous in using the fancies and 
 inventions of others, there were many traders in play-writing 
 with whom it was not so reputable to be classed. The 
 servility of begging dedications, too, had become quite 
 loathsome. At the same time, the haughty reserved dispo- 
 sition out of which this independence came was not favour- 
 able to dramatic excellence. A play written to please the 
 few is not likely to be a good play. The dramatist must 
 be above the narrowness of sympathy that this impUes. 
 And this ungeniality produces failure where, on first consi- 
 deration, a nineteenth-century reader would least expect it. 
 Such a reader, on hearing of an Elizabethan playwright 
 anxious to please the few, would expect to find him abstain- 
 ing from the indecency that makes so many of these plays 
 unfit for family reading. But it is quite the other way. 
 Ford's low-comedy scenes are very coarse and very dull. 
 To be sure, the gentlemen of Gray's Inn, the few for whom 
 Ford wrote, were not particular on this point. But this was 
 not the main cause of the offensiveness of Ford's attempts 
 at humour. The main cause was his want of sympathy 
 with his low-comedy puppets. He makes them express 
 tliemselves as if he disliked them and wished to make them 
 odious and contemptible : their coarseness is unprovoked, 
 gratuitous, with very little of wit or humour to redeem it. 
 Fletcher's Megra and other creations of that type are 
 quite as gross as Ford's Putana ; but the dramatist enters 
 into their obscene humour, and in some degree takes away 
 the attention from its obscenity by the cleverness of its in- 
 trusions, the comical irrepressibility of its chuckle. Now 
 
472 SHAKESPEARE'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 Ford had not sufficient freedom of high spirits to enter into 
 the humour of his Putanas and Berghettos, and there is 
 a C)rnicism, a harshness, an offensive exaggeration, in his 
 representation of the frankness of their language. 
 
 But the haughty reserve and want of heartiness in Ford's 
 nature told against his plays in a much more serious re- 
 spect. He would not seem to have looked at his plays 
 from the point of view of his audience, or to have exerted 
 himself to stir their interest or to keep it from flagging. 
 There is a certain haughtiness of touch even in his lan- 
 guage ; sometimes a repudiation of emphasis, as if he did 
 not care to be impressive on a slight occasion ; sometimes 
 a wilful abstraseness, as if it mattered nothing though his 
 words were misunderstood. This alone is often the cause 
 of considerable reaches of dull dialogue — dull, that is to 
 say, for the purposes of the stage. In his first play, also, 
 "The Lover's Melancholy," three acts pass before any very 
 strong interest is excited in the personages or the action. 
 The main issues presented to us are— what is the cause of 
 the Prince of Cyprus's melancholy, and whether he will 
 recover from it. It is hinted that this melancholy may 
 have dangerous consequences — that discontent is mutter- 
 ing at home, and that enemies are gathering on the borders 
 of the kingdom, presuming on the inactivity of the prince ; 
 but these consequences, instead of being powerfully repre- 
 sented, so as to throw the interest of a mixed audience 
 keenly on the prince's dejection and indifference to affairs 
 of state, are only dimly and faintly mentioned, in such a 
 way that no ordinary hearer would perceive their import- 
 ance. In the underplot we are never agitated by any fear 
 of an untoward issue. We never have any serious appre- 
 hension that the haughty Thaumasta will eventually reject 
 Menaphon, or that the noble and prosperous Amethus will 
 falter in his love to Cleophila. And the story of the Prince 
 Palador and his mistress Eroclea, with its picture of the 
 forlorn Eroclea, and its finely wrought presentation of their 
 reunion, is not by itself, without further development, 
 enough for a drama : it is better suited for a descriptive epic. 
 
JOHN FORD. 473 
 
 It is only in his two great tragedies, the " Broken Heart " 
 and "'Tis Pity she's a Whore," that Ford's power is un- 
 mistakably shown. In them he has to deal, from the first 
 scene, with men under the fiill sway of intelligible passion ; 
 and in the presence of passion his haughtiness, his reserve, 
 his indifference, vanishes, and he enters earnestly into the 
 work of interpretation. The second of these two plays, in 
 spite of the harsh, affected, and offensive levity of the title, 
 is Ford's masterpiece, — the play that justifies Mr Swin- 
 burne's eloquent panegyric, and will always be most in the 
 critic's mind in all attempts to fix Ford's place among the 
 dramatists. In the "Broken Heart," notwithstanding its 
 many powerful and touching passages, there is somewhat 
 too much of learned delineation of character : the noble 
 heroism of strength and impetuosity in Ithocles and Cal- 
 antha is too obtrusively balanced against the tamer heroism 
 of determined endurance in the other pair of lovers, Orgilus 
 and Penthea. All the persons of the drama have names 
 expressive of their leading qualities ; and at the close, our 
 wonder at the strangeness of the lunatic jealousy of Bas- 
 sanes, the pitiless, dogged, irreconcilable revengefulness of 
 Orgilus, the bitter constancy of Penthea in starving herself 
 to death, seriously obstructs the nobler emotions of horror 
 and pity. Even the closing scene, in which the heroic 
 Calantha hears of the death of her father and her lover, 
 and gives no sign of sorrow till the duties of her high state 
 have been performed, when her overstrained heart-strings 
 break, and she falls dead on the body of her slain lover, is 
 more likely to stun and amaze all but the select few, than 
 to come home powerfully to their sympathies. But there 
 are no such scholarly obstructions to the terrible tragedy 
 of fate-driven love between Brother and Sister. In it 
 passion is supreme from the first scene to the last. 
 
 A man can never wholly hide a ruling tendency in his 
 nature; and even Ford's great tragedies are not without 
 traces of his harshness and severity. There is something 
 very unsatisfactory in the characters of Bassanes and 
 Vasques : it frets and vexes us at the end to see such base 
 
474 SHAKESPEARE'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 deformities stand by and triumph at the fall of nobler 
 natures. We may think them unworthy of the sword of 
 poetic justice — we may reason them out of the sphere of 
 guilt in the tragedy ; but their triumph disconcerts us. 
 
 X. — Philip Massinger (1584-1640). 
 
 Massinger had less original force than any of the other 
 great dramatists. He was eminently a cultivated dramatist, 
 a man of broad, liberal, adaptive mind, fluent and versatile, 
 with just conceptions of dramatic effect, and the power of 
 giving copious expression to his conceptions without strain- 
 ing or dislocating effort. Yet he was much too strong and 
 vigorous to be a mere imitator. His nature was not such 
 as to fight against the influence of his great predecessors : 
 his mind opened itself genially to their work, and absorbed 
 their materials and their methods ; but he did not simply 
 reproduce them — they decomposed, so to speak, in his 
 mind, and lay there ready to be laid hold of and embodied 
 in new organisms. So far he resembled Shakespeare, in 
 that he had good sense enough not to harass himself in 
 straining after little novelties : his judgment was broad and 
 manly. But he was far from resembling Shakespeare in 
 swiftness and originality of imagination : his muse was 
 comparatively tame and even-paced. The common remark 
 that his diction is singularly free from archaisms shows us 
 one aspect of the soundness of his taste, and bears testi- 
 mony, at the same time, to his want of eccentricity and 
 original force. He was the Gray of his generation — greater 
 than Gray, inasmuch as his generation was greater than 
 Gray's — a man of large, open, fertile, and versatile mind. 
 
 His personal career is obscure. His father was " a 
 servant " in the family of the Herberts of Pembroke, as we 
 know from the dedication of his " Bondman," and " spent 
 many years in the service of that honourable house ; " but 
 whether the service was menial, or such as might be 
 rendered by a gentlaman, there is no means of ascertaining. 
 
PHILIP MASSINGER. 47$ 
 
 At any rate, Massinger's position was not such as to pre- 
 vent him from going to Oxford in 1602, or from being in 
 a debtor's prison about 16 14, and under the necessity of 
 joining with two others in begging an advance of ;^5 from 
 Henslowe to procure his release. From the almost desper- 
 ate mendicancy of his dedications, which are the extreme 
 opposites of Ford's, one would judge him to have lived in 
 wretched poverty : and the entry of his death in the register 
 of St Saviour's — "buried Philip Massinger, a stranger" — 
 gives us no ground for hoping against the most natural 
 inference. 
 
 The probability is that Massinger began to write for the 
 stage about 1606, if not a year or two earlier, going up 
 from the university as Marlowe and Thomas Nash had 
 done some twenty years before, in search of literary fame 
 and the mysteries of London life. He did not, however, 
 begin to publish till much later, his first printed play being 
 " The Virgin Martyr," which appeared in 1622, and in 
 which he had the assistance of Dekker. Only twelve of 
 his plays were published during his lifetime, out of the 
 thirty-seven which he is known to have written. Perhaps 
 we have the less reason to regret this, because the plays 
 published in his lifetime are decidedly superior to those 
 published after his death. He himself saw in print, besides 
 " The Virgin Martyr,"—" The Duke of Milan," 1623 ; "The 
 Bondman," 1624; "The Roman Actor," 1629; "The 
 Picture," 1630; "The Fatal Dowry," 1632; "The Maid of 
 Honour," 1632; "A New Way to Pay Old Debts," 1633 ; 
 and "The Great Duke of Florence," 1636. After all, it 
 may be that Mr Warburton's cook, who is said to have 
 covered his pies and lighted his fires with some twelve of 
 Massinger's plays, may have done both the world and the 
 poet a service. 
 
 Gifford entertained the notion that Massinger must have 
 turned Roman CathoKc when he was at Oxford. The 
 notion is based upon the use that Massinger makes of a 
 Roman Catholic legend in "The Virgin Martyr," and the 
 fair character that he gives to a Jesuit priest in "The 
 
4/6 SHAKESPEARE'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 Renegade." One wants proof more relative : this only 
 proves that Massinger was able to treat Roman Catholics 
 with dramatic impartiality, and that he was not insensible 
 to the beauty of their miraculous legends. Coleridge's 
 notion about Massinger's democratic leanings is equally 
 questionable. Massinger, indeed, makes one of his cha- 
 racters sigh for the happy times when lords were styled 
 fathers of families. He makes another say that princes do 
 well to cherish goodness where they find it, for — 
 
 "They being men and not gods, Contarino, 
 They can give wealth and titles, but not virtues." 
 
 He makes Timoleon administer a sharp rebuke to the men 
 of Syracuse for corruption prevailing in high places, and 
 rate them soundly for preferring golden dross to liberty. 
 
 In the same play (" The Bondman "), he takes an evident 
 pleasure in representing the indignities put upon high-fed 
 madams by their insurgent slaves : and in " The City 
 Madam," he ridicules with much zest the pretensions of 
 upstart wealth. But all these things are as consistent with 
 a benevolent paternal Toryism as with Whiggery, and are 
 to be looked upon as indications simply of the dramatist's 
 range of sympathies, and not of any discontent on his part 
 with the estabhshed framework of government or society. 
 
 Hartley Coleridge, in his rambling and racy introduction 
 to Massinger and Ford, commits himself to the extraordi- 
 nary statement that Massinger had no humour. " Mas- 
 singer would have been the dullest of jokers, if Ford had 
 not contrived to be still duller." I have already remarked 
 on the severity and ungeniality of Ford's character ; but 
 there is nothing connected with Massinger to imply that 
 he bore the least resemblance to Ford in this point. On 
 the contrary, all Massinger's characteristics are those of 
 a widely sympathetic man, with a genial propensity to 
 laughter. He has written several very obscene passages, 
 such as the courtship of Asotus by Corisca in "The Bond- 
 man," but they are all pervaded by genuine humour ; and a 
 countless number of his scenes, such as that between Well- 
 
JAMES SHIRLEY. 477 
 
 born and Marrall in " A New Way to Pay Old Debts," are 
 irresistibly laughable. It may perhaps be said with justice 
 that there is often a certain serious motive underljdng 
 Massinger's humour, which connects itself with the earnest- 
 ness of his distressed life ; but humour he undoubtedly had, 
 and that of the most ebullient and irrepressible sort. 
 
 One fancies indeed, but it may be the result of our 
 knowledge of his painful life, that there is a certain sad 
 didactic running through all Massinger's work. The 
 " Duke of Milan," by far his greatest drama, has not the 
 satisfying close of Shakespeare's tragedies. It preaches 
 directly the moral deducible from " Romeo and Juliet," that 
 violent delights have violent ends ; but whereas we do not 
 vex ourselves with vain wishes that Romeo and Juliet had 
 been united in happy marriage, we are at the death of 
 Sforza and Marcelia disconcerted by the feeling that their 
 fate ought to have been, and easily might have been, dif- 
 ferent. And in his other tragedies we are haunted at the 
 close by a similar uneasiness : the purgation of the mind 
 by pity and terror is not effected — the tumult that they 
 raise is not tranquillised. All tragedies, of course, are 
 susceptible of a didactic interpretation j but those in which 
 the didactic has a sharp edge, affect us in quite a different 
 way from those in which it is vaguely present as part of a 
 grand and overwhelming impression ; and Massinger's con- 
 clusions have a sharp edge. Again, his romantic tragi-come- 
 dies, and even his comedies, have also a serious tinge, apart 
 from the natural interest of the development of the story. 
 They do not directly preach at us, but the colour of the 
 subject-matter suggests that the dramatist was not wholly 
 free-minded and studious only of dramatic and scenic 
 impressions. 
 
 XL — James Shirley (1596-1667). 
 
 More is known about Shirley than about some of his 
 more distinguished, or at least abler contemporaries. He 
 was bom in London, and educated at Merchant Tailors' 
 
478 SHAKESPEARE'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 School, St John's College, Oxford, and Catherine Hall, 
 Cambridge. He took orders, and was presented to a 
 living in Hertfordshire; but in a short time he became 
 Roman Catholic, left his living, turned schoolmaster for a 
 while; and at last, finding this employment also "uneasy 
 to him, he retired to the metropolis, lived in Gray's Inn, 
 and set up for a playmaker." He was twenty-eight or 
 twenty-nine when he went up to London (probably in 1624 
 or 1625), and in the course of a few years he got into the 
 full swing of dramatic composition, and produced plays at 
 the rate of two or three or four a-year. The chief were — 
 " Love's Tricks," a comedy, 1625; "The Maid's Revenge," 
 a tragedy, 1626; "The Brothers," a comedy, 1626; "The 
 Witty Fair One," a comedy, 1628; "The Wedding," a 
 comedy, 1628; "The Grateful Servant," a tragi-comedy, 
 1629 ; " The Traitor," a tragedy (perhaps Shirley's best) ; 
 "The Changes, or Love in a Maze," 1632 ; "The Ball" 
 (written in conjunction with Chapman, but almost wholly 
 Shirley's), 1632 ; " The Gamester," a comedy, 1633 ; "The 
 Example" (containing an imitation of Ben Jonson's humours), 
 1634; "The Opportunity," 1634; " The Lady of Pleasure " 
 (perhaps the best of Shirley's comedies), 1635; "The 
 Cardinal," a tragedy (an attempt to compete with Webster's 
 "Duchess of Malfi"), 1641. Under the Commonwealth, 
 Shirley, after some vicissitudes during the civil war, was 
 obliged to return to his old trade of teaching ; and at the 
 Restoration, though several of his plays were revived, he 
 made no attempt to resume his connection with the stage. 
 
 Shirley's first essay in print was a poem entitled "Echo'' 
 (afterwards printed under the more suggestive title of " Nar- 
 cissus "). A man's youthful work is always a good index of 
 his tendencies and powers, and in this poem the nature of 
 Shirley's gifts shines unmistakably through the lines. He 
 goes boldly to work with jaunty self-assured ease : there is 
 pith and " go " in his style ; he is borne on with pride in 
 his triumphs of expression, but he is victorious with weapons 
 which other men have provided. He has no originality of 
 idea, or situation^ or diction. 
 
JAMES SHIRLEY. 479 
 
 The same thing strikes us in his plays. Lamb says of 
 him that " he was the last of a great race, all of whom 
 spoke nearly the same language, and had a set of moral 
 feelings and notions in coirimon." But the really great 
 men of the race, not merely Shakespeare, Jonson, and 
 Fletcher, but Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Ford, and 
 Massinger, spoke the same language with a difference ; 
 and each had moral feelings and notions of his own. In 
 Shirley the distinctive individual difference was small, both 
 in amount and in kind : he was not a great man in himself, 
 but an essentially small man inspired by the creations of 
 great men. Fletcher was his master and exemplar, as 
 Shakespeare was Massinger's ; but he imitated much more 
 closely, was much more completely carried away by this 
 model than Massinger was. And although his language 
 and moral feelings and notions (even as regards female 
 types and kings) are Fletcher's, and he had most ambition 
 to emulate Fletcher's dashing and brilliant manner, yet 
 Shirley's plays contain frequent echoes of other dramatists. 
 One great interest in reading him is that he reminds us so 
 often of the situations and characters of his predecessors. 
 It is good for the critic, if for nobody else, to read Shirley, 
 because there he finds emphasised all that told most 
 effectively on the playgoers of the period. We read 
 Greene and Marlowe to know what the Elizabethan drama 
 was in its powerful but awkward youth ; Shirley to know 
 what it was in its declining but facUe and still powerful old 
 age. 
 
 There were many other able playmakers in the great 
 dramatic period, and notably four Thomases, Thomas Hey- 
 wood, Thomas Rowley, Thomas Randolph, and Thomas 
 May, but no other that can be called great, either by origin- 
 ality or by imitation. None of them gave proof of the intel- 
 lectual calibre even of Middleton, the least important figure 
 whom I have attempted to characterise in this chapter. 
 
48o SHAKESPEARE'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 True, Charles Lamb has called Thomas Haywood " a prose 
 Shakespeare," and that prolific author of 250 plays doubt- 
 less has a certain sweet vein of grandmotherly tenderness 
 in him ; but if Elia had lived till now, he would, perhaps, 
 have described good old Heywood more accurately by call- 
 ing him a garrulous Longfellow. 
 
 One may hope to be excused for feeling no desire to go 
 farther down the scale than Middleton and Shirley. In 
 stud3dng the literature that led to the supreme efflorescence 
 of the Elizabethan drama, one thinks no relic too humble 
 to be worth discussing; but when so many large and 
 powerful minds invite our companionship, and continue 
 always to lay before us fresh points of interest and fresh 
 matter for thought, it is intolerably dull to turn from them 
 to the crowd of mediocrities who hang about their doors and 
 follow their footsteps. 
 
48 1 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 Our Pleasant Willy. 
 
 Three stanzas are often quoted from Thalia's complaint re- 
 garding the decay of the theatres in Spenser's "Tears of the 
 Muses," and it has been elaborately argued that they refer to 
 Shakespeare. The date of their publication is 1591. 
 
 ' ' And he, the man whom Nature's self had made 
 
 To mock herself, and truth to imitate, 
 With kindly counter under mimic shade. 
 
 Our pleasant Willy, ah ! is dead of late ; 
 With whom all joy and jolly merriment 
 Is also deaded, and in dolour drent. 
 
 Instead thereof scoffing Scurrility, 
 And scornful Folly with Contempt is crept. 
 
 Rolling in rhymes of shameless ribaldry 
 Without regard or due decorum kept ; 
 
 Each idle wit at will presumes to make, 
 
 And doth the leamed's task upon him take. 
 
 But that same gentle spirit from whose pen 
 Large streams of honey and sweet nectar flow, 
 
 Scorning the boldness of such base-born men, 
 Which dare their follies forth so rashly throw ; 
 
 Doth rather choose to sit in idle cell, 
 
 Than so himself to mockery to sell." 
 
 I have stated some reasons (p. 345) for refusing to believe 
 that these stanzas, however appropriate to Shakespeare we 
 may think them, can possibly have been applied to him in 
 1 59 1. I believe that death is, in the first stanza, real and 
 
 2 H 
 
482 APPENDIX. 
 
 not metaphorical, and that Willy is Spenser's friend Sidney. 
 Sidney's death is lamented under that name in an eclogue in 
 Davidson's Poetical Rhapsody—" an eclogue made long since 
 upon the death of Sir Philip Sidney." 
 
 " Ye shepherds' boys that lead your flocks, 
 The whilst your sheep feed safely round about, 
 Break me your pipes that pleasant sound did yield, 
 Sing now no more the songs of Colin Clout : 
 Lament the end of all our joy, 
 Lament the source of all annoy ; 
 Willy is dead 
 That wont to lead 
 Our flocks and us in mirth and shepherds' glee : 
 Well could he sing. 
 Well dance and spring ; 
 Of all the shepherds was none such as he. 
 
 How often hath his skill in pleasant song. 
 Drawn all the water-nymphs from out their bowers ? 
 How have they lain the tender grass along. 
 And made him garlands gay of smelling flowers ? 
 Phoebus himself that conquer'd Pan, 
 Striving with Willy nothing wan ; 
 
 Methinks I see 
 
 The time when he 
 Pluckt from his golden locks the laurel crown ; 
 
 And go to raise 
 
 Our Willy's praise, 
 Bedeckt his head and softly set him down. 
 
 The learned Muses flockt to hear his skill. 
 And quite forgot their water, wood, and mount ; 
 They thought his songs were done too quickly still. 
 Of none but Willy's pipe they made account. 
 He sung ; they seem'd in joy to flow : 
 He ceast ; they seemed to weep for woe ; 
 
 The rural rout 
 
 All round about 
 Like bees came swarming thick to hear him sing ; 
 
 Ne could they think 
 
 On meat or drink 
 While Willy's music in their ears did ring. ,', 
 
 But now, alas ! such pleasant mirth is past ; 
 Apollo weeps, the Muses rend their hair. 
 
APPENDIX. 483 
 
 No joy on earth that any time can last. 
 See where his breathless corpse lies on the bier. 
 That self-same hand that reft his life 
 Hath turned shepherd's peace to strife. 
 
 Our joy is fled 
 
 Our life is dead, 
 Our hope, our help, our glory, all is gone : 
 
 Our poet's praise, 
 
 Our happy days. 
 And nothing left but grief to think thereon. " 
 
 The only difficulty in the way of supposing our pleasant Willy 
 to be Sir Philip Sidney is purely factitious.^ It is taken for 
 granted that all the three of Spenser's stanzas refer to the same 
 person as the first ; and then it is argued that the death of our 
 pleasant Willy must be only metaphorical in the first, meaning 
 really his cessation from the composition of comedies, because 
 in the third he is said to be producing large streams of tra- 
 gedies. But any person who looks at the whole lament will 
 see that two different persons must be intended. The sequence 
 of thought is this : The first of the three stanzas laments that 
 Willy is dead ; the second, that scoffing scurrility and scornful 
 folly have occupied the stage in his stead ; the third approves 
 the conduct of a living and producing writer in abstaining from 
 co-operation with base-born play-wrights. If we suppose "that 
 same gentle spirit " to refer back to our pleasant Willy, and not 
 forward to the next line, we land ourselves in a contradiction 
 whether we regard Willy's death as literal or metaphorical, 
 because this gentle spirit is both really and poetically alive 
 — large streams of honey and nectar are flowing from him. 
 I believe that in the third stanza Thalia refers to Spenser him- 
 self, and that here we have his justification of himself for com- 
 plaining of the withdrawal of learning from the stage, and yet 
 sending no compositions of his own to prop it up. Some such 
 justification was certainly required : Spenser could hardly have 
 asked why learning had forsaken the stage, without giving a 
 reason for withholding contributions from his own copious pen. 
 The vanity of the excuse will not surprise any one who knows 
 what he makes Hobinol and others say concerning Colin Clout. 
 
 1 The fact that Sidney did not write comedies, if we exclude his " Lady 
 of the May " from that title, is immaterial. The poet only says that Nature 
 had made him to write comedies — "to mock herself with kindly counter 
 under mimic shade." 
 
PRINTED JIY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AX1> SONS, EDINBURGH.