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burst which broke forth in the excitement of these new times, and
which, as far as the careless prodigality of the vernacular genius is
concerned, in the raciness of its idiom, and the flow of its
conceptions, and the freshness of its imagery, can never return, for
the virgin genius of a people must pass away!
Valueless, indeed, was our early drama held by graver men. Sir
Thomas Bodley wholly rejected from his great library all plays, “to
avoid stuffing it with baggage-books;” but more particularly objected
to “English Plays, as unlike those of other nations, which are
esteemed for learning the languages; and many of them,” he adds,
“are compiled by men of great wisdom and learning.”
The perplexities of the founder of the noble Bodleian Library were
occasioned by our dramatic illegitimacy; we had no progenitors, and
we were not spell-bound by the three unities. Originality in every
kind startled the mind which could only pace in the trammels of
authority. On the principle Bodley rejected our English plays he also
condemned our English philosophy; and Lord Bacon rallied him on
that occasion by a good-humoured menace of “a cogitation against
Libraries,” which must have made the cheeks of the great collector
of books tingle. Bodley with excellent truth described himself as “the
carrier’s horse which cannot blench the beaten way in which I was
trained.”
In banishing the productions of the national genius from that
national library which his hand had proudly erected, little was Bodley
able to conceive, that a following generation would dwell on those
very “English plays,” would appeal to them as the depositaries of our
language, and as the secret history of the people, a history which no
historian writes, their modes of thinking in the transition of their
manners, in the vicissitudes of their passions, and in the scenes of
their politics and their religion; and what most would have
astonished our great bibliophile, that collectors like himself,
presuming on “their wisdom and learning,” would devote their vigils
to collate, to comment, and to edit “these baggage-books of English
plays,” and above all, that foreigners, after a century or two, should
enrich their own literature by the translations, or enlarge their own
genius by the imitations of these bold originals.
By emancipating themselves from the thraldom of Greece and the
servility of Rome our dramatists have occasioned later critics to
separate our own from the classical drama of antiquity. They are
placed in “the Romantic” school; a novel technical term, not
individually appropriate, and which would be less ambiguous if
considered as “the Gothic.”14 At the time when Italy and France had
cast themselves into thraldom, by adhering to the contracted models
of the drama of antiquity, two nations in Europe, without any
intercourse whatever, for even translation was not yet a medium,
were spontaneously creating a national drama accordant with the
experience, the sympathies, and the imagination of their people. The
theatre was to be a mirror of enchantment, a moveable reflection of
themselves. These two nations were England and Spain. The
dramatic history of Spain is the exact counterpart which perfectly
tallies with our own. In Spain the learned began with imitations and
translations of the ancient classics; but these formal stately dramas
were so coldly received, that they fell into desuetude, and were
succeeded by those whose native luxuriant genius reached to the
secret hearts of their audience; and it was this second race, not,
indeed, so numerous as our own, who closed with the Spanish
Shakespeare.15 This literary phenomenon, though now apparent,
was not perceived when it was occurring.
Every taste has delivered its variable decision on these our old
plays, each deciding by its own standard; and the variance is
occasioned not always by deficiency in critical judgment, but in the
very nature of the object of criticism, in the inherent defect of our
ancient drama itself. These old plays will not endure criticism. They
were not written for critics, and they now exist even in spite of
criticism. They were all experiments of the freest genius, rarely
placed under favouring circumstances. They were emanations of
strong but short conceptions, poured forth in haste and heat; they
blotted their lines as rarely as we are told did Shakespeare; they
revelled in their first conceptions, often forgotten in their rapid
progress; the true inspiration was lodged in their breasts, the hidden
volcano has often burst through its darkness, and flamed through a
whole scene, for often have they written as Shakespeare wrote. We
may look in them for entire scenes, felicitous lines, and many an
insulated passage, studies for a poet; anthologies have been drawn
from these elder dramatists.16 We may perceive how this sudden
generation of poets, some of whose names are not familiar to us,
have moulded our language with the images of their fancy, and
strengthened it by the stability of their thoughts.
1 This Patent, corrected from a former copy in Rymer, has been recovered by Mr. Collier.
—Annals of the Stage, i. 211.
2 This singular document, incorrectly given by Strype, Mr. Collier has completed. “It
throws much new light on the state of the drama at this period;” and still more on the
strange arguments which the Puritans of the day alleged against players and plays.—Mr.
Collier has preserved an old satirical epigram which had been perilous to print at that day; it
was left for posterity on the fly-leaf of a book. It is addressed to—
“‘The Fooles of the Cittee,’—
They establish as a rule,
Not one shall play the fool,
But they—a worthy school!”
3 At the inferior playhouses the admission was as low as a penny for “the groundlings”
who stood in the roofless pit, which still retained the name of “the yard”—evidently from
the old custom of playing in the yards of inns. In the higher theatres “a room,” or box,
varied from sixpence to two shillings and sixpence. They played in daylight, and rose from
their dinner to the playhouse. It was one of the City regulations, that “no playing be in the
dark, so that the auditory may return home before sunset.” Society was then in its nursery-
times; and the solemnity of “the orders in common council” admirably contrasts with their
simplicity; but they acted under the terror that, when they entered a playhouse, they were
joining in “the devil’s service!”
4 Two such poor scholars are introduced in “The Return from Parnassus” alternately
“banning and cursing Granta’s muddy bank;” and Cambridge, where “our oil was spent.”
5 The popular taste at all times has been prone to view in representation the most
harrowing crimes—probably influenced by the vulgar notion that, because the
circumstances are literally true, they are therefore the more interesting. One of these
writers was Robert Yarrington, who seems to have been so strongly attracted to this taste
for scenical murder, that he wrote “Two Lamentable Tragedies,” which he contrived to throw
into one play. By a strange alternation, the scene veers backwards and forwards from
England to Italy, both progressing together;—the English murder is of a merchant in
Thames-street, and the Italian of a child in a wood by ruffians hired by the uncle; the ballad
deepens the pathetic by two babes—but which was the original of a domestic incident
which first conveyed to our childhood the idea of an unnatural parent? It appears that we
had a number of what they called “Lamentable Tragedies,” whose very titles preserve the
names of the hapless victims. Taylor, the Water-poet, alludes to these “as murders fresh in
memory;” and has himself described “the unnatural father who murdered his wife and
children” as parallel to one of ancient date. Acts of lunacy were not then distinguishable
from ordinary murders.—Collier, iii. 49.
6 Not many years ago Isaac Reed printed The Witch of Middleton. Recently another
manuscript play appeared, The Second Maiden’s Tragedy. To the personal distresses of the
actors in the days of the Commonwealth we owe several dramas, which they published,
drawn out of the wrecks of some theatrical treasury; such was The Wild-Goose Chase of
Fletcher, which they assured us was the poet’s favourite. It is said that more than sixty of
these plays, in manuscript, were collected by Warburton, the herald, and from the utter
neglect of the collector had all gone to singe his fowls. When Theobald solemnly declared
that his play, The Double Falsehood, was written by Shakespeare, it was probably one of
these old manuscript plays. This drama was not unsuccessful; nor had Theobald shot far
wide of the mark, since Farmer ascribed it to Shirley, and Malone to Massinger.
7 See the last and enlarged edition of Charles Lamb’s “Specimens of the English
Dramatic Poets.” In the second volume, in “Extracts from the Garrick Plays,” under the odd
names of ”Doctor Dodypol, a comedy, 1600,” we have scenes exquisitely fanciful—and Jack
Drum’s Entertainment, 1601, where “the free humour of a noble housekeeper” may be
placed by the side of the most finished passages even in Shakespeare. Yet Doctor Dodypol
has wholly escaped the notice even of catalogue-scribes—and Jack Drum is not noticed by
the collectors of these old plays. I only know these two dramas by the excerpts of Lamb;
but if the originals are tolerably equal with “The Specimens,” I should place these unknown
dramas among the most interesting ones.
8 By the discovery of the Diary of Henslow, the illiterate manager of the theatre,
connected with Edward Alleyn. Henslow was the pawnbroker of the company, and the
chancellor of its exchequer. He could not spell the titles of the plays; yet, in about five
years, 160 were his property. He had not less than thirty different authors in his pay.—
Collier, iii. 105. [His Diary has been published by the Shakespeare Society under the
editorship of Mr. Payne Collier.—Ed.]
9 Marlow—Nash—Greene—Peele.
10 When Pope translated Homer, Chapman’s version lay open before him. The same
circumstance, as I have witnessed, occurred with the last translator—Mr. Sotheby. Charles
Lamb justly appreciated Chapman, when he observed, that “He would have made a great
epic poet, if indeed he has not abundantly shown himself to be one; for his Homer is not so
properly a translation, as the stories of Achilles and Ulysses rewritten. The earnestness and
passion which he has put into every part of these poems would be incredible to a reader of
more modern translations.”
The striking portrait of Chapman is prefixed to Mr. Singer’s elegant edition of this poet’s
version of Homer’s “Battle of the Frogs and the Mice”—and the Hymns. His Iliad, collated
with his last corrections and alterations, well deserves to fill a stationary niche in our
poetical library. Chapman has, above all our poets, most boldly, or most gracefully, struck
out those “words that burn”—compound epithets.
11 An original leaf of the manuscript of one of Marlow’s plays, in the possession of Mr. J.
P. Collier, is a singular literary curiosity. On a collation with the printed copy, the mutilations
are not only excessive, but betray a defective judgment. An elaborate speech, designed by
the poet to develope the character of the famous Guise, was cut down to four meagre lines.
—Annals of the Stage, iii. 134.
12 Charles Lamb has alluded to this fact; and, in one of his moments of enthusiasm,
exclaims—“This was the noble practice of these times.” Would not the usual practice of a
man of genius, working his own drama, be “nobler?” We presume the unity of feeling can
only emanate from a single mind. In the instance here alluded to we should often deceive
ourselves if we supposed, from the combination of names which appear on the old
titlepages, that those who are specified were always simultaneously employed in the new
direction of the same play. Poets were often called in to alter the old or to supply the new,
which has occasioned incongruities which probably were not to be found in the original
state.
13 Green, Nash, Lyly, Peele, and Marston were from the university—Marlow and
Chapman were exquisite translators from the Greek.
14 The term, the Romantic School, is derived from the langue Romans or Romane,
under which comprehensive title all the modern languages may be included; formed, as
they are, out of the wrecks of the Latin or Roman language. However this may apply to the
origin of the languages, the term is not expressive of the genius of the people. In the
common sense of the term “Romantic,” the Æneid of Virgil is as much a Romance as that of
Arthur and his knights. The term “Romantic School” is therefore not definite. By adopting
the term Gothic, in opposition to the Classical, we fix the origin, and indicate the species.
15 Bouterwek’s Hist. of Spanish Lit. i. 128.
16 Two of these collections are to be valued.
“Cotgrave’s English Treasury of Wit and Language,” 1655. He neglected to furnish the
names of the dramatic writers from whom he drew the passages. Oldys, with singular
diligence, succeeded in recovering these numerous sources, which I transcribed from his
manuscript notes. Oldys’ copy should now repose in the library of Mr. Douce, given to the
Bodleian.
A collection incomparably preferable to all preceding ones is “The British Muse, or a
Collection of Thoughts—Moral, Natural, or Sublime—of our English poets who flourished in
the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” by Thomas Hayward, gent. 1732, in three
volumes. It took a new title, not a new edition, as “The Quintessence of English Poetry.”
Such a title could not recommend itself. The prefatory matter was designed for a critical
history of all these Anthologies, and was the work of Oldys; but it was miserably mangled
by Dr. Campbell, then the Aristarchus of the booksellers, to save print and paper! Our
literary antiquary has vented, in a manuscript note, his agony and his indignation. He had
also greatly assisted the collector; the circuit is wide and copious, and there is not a name
of note which does not appear in these volumes. The ethical and poetic powers of our old
dramatic poets, as here displayed, I doubt could be paralleled by our literary neighbours.
We were a thoughtful people at the time that our humour was luxuriant—as lighter gaiety
was from the first the national inheritance of France.
Of this collection, says Oldys, “Wherever you open it, you are in the heart of your
subject. Every leaf includes many lessons, and is a system of knowledge in a few lines. The
merely speculative may here find experience; the flattered, truth; the diffident, resolution,
&c.” For my part, I think of these volumes as highly as Oldys himself.
But what has occasioned the little success of these collections of single passages and
detached beauties, like collections of proverbs, is the confusion of their variety. We are
pleased at every glance; till the eye, in weariness, closes over the volume which we neglect
to re-open.
Charles Lamb’s “Specimens of English Dramatic Poets” is of deeper interest. He was a
nobler workman, and he carries us on through whole scenes by a true unerring emotion.
His was a poetical mind labouring in poetry.
SHAKESPEARE.
The vicissitudes of the celebrity of Shakespeare may form a chapter
in the philosophy of literature and the history of national opinions.
Shakespeare was destined to have his dramatic faculty contested by
many successful rivals, to fall into neglect, to be rarely acted and
less read, to appear barbarous and unintelligible, to be even
discarded from the glorious file of dramatists by the anathemas of
hostile criticism; and finally, in the resurrection of genius (a rare
occurrence!) to emerge into universal celebrity. This literary history
of Shakespeare is an incident in the history of the human mind
singular as the genius which it relates to. The philosopher now
contemplates the phenomenon of a poet who in his peculiar
excellence is more poetical than the poets of every other people. We
have to track the course of this prodigy, and if possible to
comprehend the evolutions of this solitary luminary. It is knowledge
which finally must direct our feelings in the operations of the mind
as well as in the phenomena of nature. We are conscious that even
the anomalous is regulated by its own proper motion, and that there
is nothing in human nature so arbitrary as to stand by itself so
completely insulated as to be an effect without a cause.
Shakespeare is a poet who is always now separated from other
poets, and the only one, except Pope, whose thoughts are familiar to
us as household words. His eulogy has exhausted the language of
every class of enthusiasts, the learned and the unlearned, the
profound and the fantastical. The writings of this greatest of
dramatists are, as once were those of Homer, a Bible whence we
receive those other revelations of man, and of all that concerns man.
There was no excess of wonder and admiration when Hurd declared
that “This astonishing man is the most original thinker and speaker
since the days of Homer.”
The halo which surrounds the poetic beatitude has almost silenced
criticism in its devotion; but a literary historian may not at all times
be present in the choir of votaries; his labours lie outwards among
the progressive opinions of a people, nor is he free to pass over
what may seem paradoxical if it lies in his way.
The universal celebrity of Shakespeare is comparatively of recent
origin: received, rejected, and revived, we must ascertain the
alternate periods, and we must look for the causes of the neglect as
well as the popularity of the poet. We may congratulate ourselves on
the numerous escapes of our national bard from the oblivion of his
dramatic brothers. The history and the works of Shakespeare, and
perhaps the singularity of the poet’s character in respect to his own
writings, are some of the most startling paradoxes in literary history.
Malone describes Shakespeare as “the great poet whom nature
framed to disregard the wretched models that were set before him,
and to create a drama from his own native and original stores.” This
cautious but creeping commentator, notwithstanding that he had
often laboured to prove the contrary, gaily shot this arrow drawn
from the quiver of Dryden, who has delivered very contradictory
notions of Shakespeare. Veritably—for we are now writing
historically—Shakespeare never “created our drama, disregarding the
wretched models before him;” far from this! the great poet had
those models always before him, and worked upon them; no poet
has so freely availed himself of the inventions of his predecessors,
and in reality many of the dramas of Shakespeare had been written
before he wrote.
It cannot be denied that our great poet never exercised his
invention in the fables of his dramas; thus he spared himself half the
toil of his work. He viewed with the prophetic eye of genius the old
play or the old story, and at once discovered all its capabilities; he
saw at once all that it had and all that it had not; its characterless
personages he was confident that he could quicken with breath and
action, and that his own vein, allowed to flow along the impure
stream, would have the force to clear the current, and to expand its
own lucid beauty.
Had not the felicitous genius of our bard revelled in this facility of
adopting and adapting the ready-made inventions of many a luckless
playwright, we might have lost our Shakespeare; for he never wrote
for us, but for his little theatre. He had no leisure to afford whole
days in constructing plots for plays, nor much troubled himself with
those which he followed closely even to a fault; nor did the
quickness of his genius neglect a solitary thought, nor lose a
fortunate expression. To what extent were these borrowings from
manuscript plays we cannot even surmise; we have one specimen of
Shakespeare’s free use of whatever the poet’s judgment caught, in
those copious passages which he transplanted from North’s
“Plutarch” and Holinshed’s “Chronicles,” lending their words his own
music.
One of his commentators, George Steevens, published six old
plays on which Shakespeare had grounded six of his own; but this
rash act was in the early days of the commentatorship; Steevens
must soon have discovered the inconvenience of printing unreadable
dramas, to exhibit the concealed industry of the mighty bard. The
spells of Shakespeare did not hang on the artificial edifice of his
fable; he looked abroad for mankind, and within his own breast for
all the impulses of the beings of his imagination. All he required was
a scene; then the whole “sphere of humanity,” as Jonson expressed
it, lie wide before him. There was a Jew before the Merchant of
Venice; a shrew had been tamed before Katherine by Petruchio; a
King Lear and his three daughters, before the only one the world
knows; and a tragical Hamlet had philosophised like Seneca, as the
satirical Nash told, before our Shakespeare’s: but this list is needless,
for it would include every drama he has left us. Even the beings of
his creation lie before him in their embryon state. His creative faculty
never required more than a suggestion. The prototype of the
wonderful Caliban has not hitherto been discovered, but the fairies
of the popular mythology become the creatures of his own
imagination. Middleton first opened the incantations of “the witches.”
The Hecate of Middleton is a mischief-brooding hag, gross and
tangible, and her “spirits, black, white, and grey,” with her “devil-
toad, devil-ram, devil-cat, and devil-dam,” disturb their spells by the
familiar drollery of their names, and their vulgar instincts. Out of this
ordinary domestic witchcraft the mightier poet raised “the weird
sisters,”
That look not like the inhabitants o’ the earth,
And yet are on’t,
nameless, bodiless, vanishing shadows!
And what seemed corporal
Melted as breath into the wind.
The dramatic personages which seem to me peculiar to
Shakespeare, and in which he evidently revelled, serving his
purposes on very opposite occasions, are his clowns and domestic
fools. Yet his most famous comic personage, the fat knight, was the
rich graft on the miserable scion of Sir John Oldcastle, in an old play;
the slight hint of “a mere pampered glutton” was idealised into that
inimitable variety of human nature combined in one man—at once so
despicable and so delightful!
The life of our poet remains almost a blank, and his very name a
subject of contention.1 Of that singular genius who is now deemed
the national bard, we can only positively ascertain that the place of
his birth was that of his death; a circumstance which, for a poet, is
some evidence of his domestic prosperity; but the glorious interval
of existence, how and all he performed on the stage of human life,
no one observed as differing from his fellows of the company, and
he of all men the least; and of his productions, wherein we are to
find every excellence to which any poet has reached, our scepticism
is often at work to detect what is Shakespearian among that which
cannot be.
Of the idle traditions of the youth of Shakespeare, Malone, after
“foraging for anecdotes” during half a century, has painfully satisfied
us that all which so many continued to repeat was apocryphal.
Having with his own eyes ascertained that Sir Thomas Lucy had no
park, he closed with his famous corollary, that “therefore he could
have no deer to be stolen.” But other parks and other deer were
liable to the mischance of furnishing venison for a young deer-
fancier to treat his friends; and Sir Thomas Lucy, probably, was
Justice Shallow on this occasion to the poetic stripling. The other
circumstances of the poet’s early life, too well known to repeat, may
stand on the same ground. Personal facts may come down to us
confused, inaccurate, and mistaken, but they do not therefore
necessarily rest on no foundation. The invention of such irrelevant
circumstances seems to be without a motive; and though the
propagators of gossip are strange blunderers, they rarely aspire to
be original inventors. We are not concerned with such tales, for
there is nothing in them which is peculiar to the idiosyncrasy of the
great poet.
The first noticeable incident in the life of Shakespeare was his
marriage in 1582, in his eighteenth year; the nuptials of the poet
seem an affair of domestic convenience, rather than a poetical
incident in “the romance of life.”
In 1586, being only twenty-two years of age, Shakespeare quitted
home for the metropolis.
At this critical moment of his life, which Malone sought for in
despair, we should have remained in darkness, had not the
unfortunate and intrepid industry of the most devoted enthusiast of
the Shakespearian school lifted his steady torch.2 Shakespeare
arrived at the theatre not to hold the horses of gentlemen, as was so
long reported, without, for he had a more friendly interest within,
doors. There he joined a neighbour in his shire, Richard Burbage,
who subsequently became the renowned actor of the future
Shakespeare’s creations; and likewise Thomas Green, his townsman,
and no inferior actor and poet. It is hardly a conjecture to presume
that their friendly invitations had tempted our youthful adventurer to
join their company. In three years Shakespeare obtained shares in
the theatre, which multiplied every year, till he became the joint-
proprietor with Burbage. The friendship of the actor and the
dramatist was a golden bond, when each had conferred on the other
their mutual popularity. The plays of Shakespeare were higher
favourites with the public during the lifetime of this Garrick of the
poet’s own days; and the renowned actor was so charmed by his
own success, that he perpetuated among his daughters the
delightful name of Juliet, which reminded him, with pride, of his own
exquisite Romeo.
Shakespeare proved a closer and a more refined observer of the
art of acting than nature had enabled him to show himself as an
actor, by practising his own professional precepts. Two actors, who
long survived the poet, recorded that he had critically instructed the
one to enact Hamlet, and the other Henry the Eighth.3
How in an indifferent actor like Shakespeare was betrayed those
latent dramatic faculties by which he was one day to be the delight
of that stage which he could not tread, remains a secret which the
poet has not told. But whether it was by accident or in some happy
hour, we know not, that Shakespeare, in conning the manuscript of
some wretched drama, felt the glorious impulse which prompted the
pen to strike out whole passages, and to interpolate whole scenes;
that moment was the obscure birth of his future genius. How he was
employed at this unknown era of his life, the peevish jealousy of a
brother of the craft has curiously informed us.
When Shakespeare was a name yet scarcely known, save to that
mimetic world, tenanted by playwrights, it appears that he was there
sustaining an active and secret avocation. The great bard had been
serving a silent apprenticeship to the dramatic muse, by trying his
hand on the old stock-pieces which lay in the theatrical treasury, and
further venturing his repolishing touches on the new. Marlowe,
Lodge, and Peele had submitted to his soft pencillings or his sharp
pruning-hook. The actors were often themselves a sort of poets, and
would compete with those who were only poets; and in pricing the
hasty wares, would often have them fashioned to their liking.
Alluding to the treatment the dramatists were enduring from their
masters, Robert Greene indignantly addressed his peers. This
curious passage, first discovered by Tyrwhit, has been often quoted,
and indispensably must be once more; for it tells us how
Shakespeare, in 1592, had been fully employed within six years of
his arrival at the metropolis. Greene desires his friends would no
longer submit to the actors. “Do not trust those burrs, who have
sought to cleave to us all; those puppets that speak from our
mouths, those antics garnished in our colours. Is it not strange that I
to whom they all have been beholding, is it not like that you to
whom they all too have been beholding, shall, were ye in that case I
am now, be both of them at once forsaken?4 Yes, trust them not!
There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that with his
tyger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to
bombast5 out a blank verse as the best of you, and being an
absolute Johannes Factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-
scene in a country.”
“The absolute Johannes Factotum,” “the only shake-scene,” and
“the crow beautified with their feathers,” are one person; but “the
tyger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide,” particularly points out that
person. It is, in fact, a parody of a line composed by this batch of
poets in one of their dramas, The Contention of the Two Houses of
York and Lancaster; and which, with many others, Shakespeare had
wholly appropriated. In the third part of King Henry the Sixth, in Act
I., Scene IV., it stands as Peele or Greene had originally composed it
—
O, tyger’s heart wrapt in a woman’s hide!
This attack on our untiger-like Shakespeare turns poor Greene into
an enraged wasp, peevish and mortified at the Shakespearian hand
which had often larded his leanness, or scarified his tumidities.
Greene charges Shakespeare with altering the plays of himself,
Marlowe, Lodge, and Peele, and then claiming all the merit of the
work!6
Our great bard was not insensible to the fancy of his querulous
libeller, since it was on Greene’s “Dorastus and Fawnia” Shakespeare
founded his Winter’s Tale, as he took his As You Like It from Lodge’s
“Rosalynd,” whose very name he preserved. Thus borrowing from
the writings of his unfortunate and reckless brothers of Parnassus,
he has made immortal works which have long expired.
The active employment of Shakespeare among the old plays was
so well known at the time, that when his name became familiar to
the public, the printers were often eager to obtain the original
neglected plays in their meagre condition, to avail themselves of the
popularity of the Shakespearian rifacimentos. Fraud and deception
were evidently practised on the uncritical readers. One of these
cunning publishers issued the old play of The Contention of the Two
Houses, &c., as newly corrected and enlarged by William
Shakespeare; which was true as it was acted on the stage, but false
in the copy of the elder dramatist which was republished. In this
manner several plays not only bear the consecrating name of
Shakespeare, but seven which are now discarded from his works
appeared in the edition of Rowe; in some of these the hand of
Shakespeare appears to have been discerned; and it has been
suggested by Mr. Collier, an experienced critic in the history of the
drama, that it is possible that all the plays of Shakespeare have not
yet been given to the world.
In the second and third parts of King Henry the Sixth, for the first
was placed in his volume merely to complete the historical series,
Shakespeare made ample use of several dramas; and Malone, whose
microscopic criticism obtained for him the sarcastic cognomen of
Minutius Felix, by an actual scrutiny, which we may well believe cost
him the most anxious pains, computed the lines of these dramas,
and has passed his word, that of six thousand and forty-three lines,
one thousand seven hundred and seventy-one were written by some
author who preceded Shakespeare; two thousand three hundred and
seventy-three were formed by him on the foundation laid by his
predecessors, and one thousand eight hundred and forty-nine lines
were entirely our poet’s own composition. Malone has even contrived
to distinguish them in the text; those which Shakespeare adopted
are printed in the usual manner; the speeches which he altered or
expanded, are marked by inverted commas; and to all the lines
entirely composed by himself, asterisks are prefixed. A critical reader
may derive a curious gratification by attending to this novel text of
our national poet; the only dramatist to whom this singularity has
ever occurred, and on whose writings this anomalous operation
could have been performed.
Shakespeare was more conversant with these preceding
dramatists, most of whose writings have perished, than we can ever
discover; but it is fortunate for us that his creative faculties brooded
over such a world of chaotic genius. He scrupled not to appropriate
those happier effusions which were not only worthy of his own
genius, but are not distinguishable from it. Sometimes he only
retouched, sometimes he nobly amplified, expanding a slight hint
into some glorious passage, and elevating a creeping dialogue into
an impassioned scene. His judgment was always the joint-workman
of his fancy.
Who by the interior evidence could have conjectured that the
following Shakespearian effusion, musical with his own music, was,
in truth, a mere transcription from an old play of Richard Duke of
York, whose author remains unknown? I mark by italics the
rejections of Shakespeare. In the slight emendations, we may
observe that our poet consulted his ear; but in the first verse he has
chosen a more expressive term.
————Doves will peck in rescue (safeguard) of their brood.
Unreasonable creatures feed their young;
And though man’s face be fearful to their eyes,
Yet, in protection of their tender ones,
Who hath not seen them even with those same wings
Which they have sometimes used in fearful flight,
(Which sometime they have used with fearful flight,)
Make war with him that climb’d unto their nest,
Offering their own lives in their young’s defence?
The speech of Queen Margaret, in the third part of Henry the
Sixth, Act V. Scene IV., in the old play, consisted of a single metaphor
included in twelve lines. The single metaphor was not rejected, but it
is amplified and nobly sustained through forty lines in the queen’s
animated address to the lords:—
The mast but now blown overboard,
The cable broke, the holding anchor lost, &c.
The two celebrated scenes in which the dead body of the
murdered Duke of Gloster is placed before us, with such precision of
horror, minutely appalling, and of the raving despair of Cardinal
Beaufort so awfully depicted by his death, “making no sign,” are
splendours whose igniting sparks flew out of the ashes of old plays,
one of King John, and the other of The Contentions of the Two
Houses, and of the chronicles. But still these sublime descriptions
and these fearful images are the inspirations of Shakespeare; their
truth of nature, and the completeness of the purpose of the poet,
the bare originals could not impart.
These ascertained evidences may suffice—it would be tedious to
proceed with their abundance—of the studiousness and propriety of
Shakespeare in his adoptions and adaptations of our earlier drama.
Dr. Farmer was the first to discover that these plays were not written
originally by Shakespeare; but that able researcher was not then
aware of what only the progress of discovery could demonstrate,
that hardly a single drama of our national bard can be deemed to
have been of his own original invention.
While thus occupied in altering and writing old plays for his own
theatre, in 1593 first appeared to the world the name of William
Shakespeare in the dedication to the Earl of Southampton of his
“Venus and Adonis.” The poet has called this poem, of a few pages,
“the first heir of my invention.” For him who had already written
much, the expression is singular, and it looks like a tacit
acknowledgment that the poet considered that the five or six plays
which he had already set forth had really no claim to “his invention.”
And the dedication betrays the tremulousness of a virgin effort.
“Should this first heir prove deformed,” declared our poet in his own
Shakespearian diction, “I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather,
and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad
a harvest.” The poet, doubtless, was induced to proceed; for the
following year, 1594, produced his “Lucrece.” He described his first
poem as “unpolished lines;” and he still calls his second his
“untutored lines.” As the former, so likewise is the present dedicated
to the same earl. The fervour of the style indicates the influence of
the patron, and the singleness of the devotion of the poet, who tells
his noble patron “What I have done is yours, and what I have to do
is yours.” The humble actor’s intercourse with his noble friend is a
remarkable incident, for the poet was not yet famous when he
prefixed his name to these poems. This earl, then in his youth, we
learn was attached to theatrical amusements; and it has been
ingeniously conjectured that the princely donation of a thousand
pounds, which the peer presented to the poet, a tradition which
Davenant had handed down, may have occurred, if it ever
happened, in the interval between the publication of these two
poems.
The Ovidian deliciousness of “Venus and Adonis,” and the more
solemn narrative of “Tarquin and Lucrece,” early obtained celebrity
among the youthful and impassioned generation. Shakespeare was
long renowned as the amatory poet of the nation by many who had
not learned to distinguish the bard among his dramatic brethren.
Numerous editions of these poems confirm their popularity, and the
public voice resounded from the lyres of many poets.
No poet more successfully opened his career than Shakespeare by
these two popular poems; but it is remarkable that he made no
farther essay with a view to permanent fame, which, as it would
seem to us, he never imagined he was to derive from his dramas.
Meres, a critic of the day, has informed us that, in 1598, some
sonnets by Shakespeare were in circulation among his friends. These
were effusions of the hour; and, possibly, some may have been
descriptive of his own condition. In 1599, a poetical collection called
“The Passionate Pilgrim,” appeared under the name of Shakespeare;
and ten years afterwards another, entitled “Shakespeare’s Sonnets,”
was given to the world; but as poetical miscellanies were formed in
those days by publishers who were not nice in the means they used
to procure manuscripts, it is quite uncertain what are genuine and
what may be the composition of other writers in these collections.
In “The Passionate Pilgrim,” some critics find difficulty in tracing
the hand of the poet; and we accidentally discover by the complaint
of Heywood, a congenial dramatist, that there were two of his
poems in one edition of this collection; and we know that there were
also other poems by Marlowe, and Barnefield, and others. Heywood
tells us that Shakespeare was greatly offended at this licentious use
of his name;7 but he must have been imperturbably careless on such
matters, otherwise he would not have suffered three editions of this
spurious miscellany.
The fate of “The Sonnets” is remarkable. Steevens boldly ejected
them from the poet’s works, declaring that the strongest Act of
