Chapter X: Appendix (2)

Here ends the first part of the play; and with it all possible indication, though never so shadowy, of the possible shadowy presence of Shakespeare. At the opening of the third act we are thrown among a wholly new set of characters and events, all utterly out of all harmony and keeping with all that has gone before. Edward alone survives as nominal protagonist; but this survival--assuredly not of the fittest--is merely the survival of the shadow of a name. Anything more pitifully crude and feeble, more helplessly inartistic and incomposite, than this process or pretence of juncture where there is no juncture, this infantine shifting and shuffling of the scenes and figures, it is impossible to find among the rudest and weakest attempts of the dawning or declining drama in its first or second childhood.

It is the less necessary to analyse at any length the three remaining acts of this play, that the work has already been done to my hand, and well done, by Charles Knight; who, though no professed critic or esoteric expert in Shakespearean letters, approved himself by dint of sheer honesty and conscience not unworthy of a considerate hearing. To his edition of Shakespeare I therefore refer all readers desirous of further excerpts than I care to give.

The first scene of the third act is a storehouse of contemporary commonplace. Nothing fresher than such stale pot-pourri as the following is to be gathered up in thin sprinklings from off the dry flat soil. A messenger informs the French king that he has descried off shore

The proud armado (_sic_) of King Edward's ships;
Which at the first, far off when I did ken,
Seemed as it were a grove of withered pines;
But, drawing on, their glorious bright aspect,
Their streaming ensigns wrought of coloured silk,
Like to a meadow full of sundry flowers,
Adorns the naked bosom of the earth;

and so on after the exactest and therefore feeblest fashion of the Pre- Marlowites; with equal regard, as may be seen, for grammar and for sense in the construction of his periods. The narrative of a sea-fight ensuing on this is pitiable beyond pity and contemptibly beneath contempt.

In the next scene we have a flying view of peasants in flight, with a description of five cities on fire not undeserving of its place in the play, immediately after the preceding sea-piece: but relieved by such wealth of pleasantry as marks the following jest, in which the most purblind eye will be the quickest to discover a touch of the genuine Shakespearean humour.

_1st Frenchman_. What, is it quarter-day, that you remove,
And carry bag and baggage too?

_2nd Frenchman_. Quarter-day? ay, and quartering-day, I fear.
_Euge_!

The scene of debate before Cressy is equally flat and futile, vulgar and verbose; yet in this Sham Shakespearean scene of our present poeticule's I have noted one genuine Shakespearean word, "solely singular for its singleness."

So may thy temples with Bellona's hand
Be still adorned with laurel victory!

In this notably inelegant expression of goodwill we find the same use of the word "laurel" as an adjective and epithet of victory which thus confronts us in the penultimate speech of the third scene in the first act of _Antony and Cleopatra_.

Upon your sword
Sit laurel victory, and smooth success
Be strewed before your feet!

There is something more (as less there could not be) of spirit and movement in the battle-scene where Edward refuses to send relief to his son, wishing the prince to win his spurs unaided, and earn the first-fruits of his fame single-handed against the heaviest odds; but the forcible feebleness of a minor poet's fancy shows itself amusingly in the mock stoicism and braggart philosophy of the King's reassuring reflection, "We have more sons than one."

In the first and third scenes of the fourth act we may concede some slight merit to the picture of a chivalrous emulation in magnanimity between the Duke of Burgundy and his former fellow-student, whose refusal to break his parole as a prisoner extorts from his friend the concession refused to his importunity as an envoy: but the execution is by no means worthy of the subject.

The limp loquacity of long-winded rhetoric, so natural to men and soldiers in an hour of emergency, which distinguishes the dialogue between the Black Prince and Audley on the verge of battle, is relieved by this one last touch of quasi-Shakespearean thought or style discoverable in the play of which I must presently take a short--and a long--farewell.

Death's name is much more mighty than his deeds:
Thy parcelling this power hath made it more.
As many sands as these my hands can hold
Are but my handful of so many sands;
Then all the world--and call it but a power--
Easily ta'en up, and {269} quickly thrown away;
But if I stand to count them sand by sand
The number would confound my memory
And make a thousand millions of a task
Which briefly is no more indeed than one.
These quartered squadrons and these regiments
Before, behind us, and on either hand,
Are but a power: When we name a man,
His hand, his foot, his head, have several strengths;
And being all but one self instant strength,
Why, all this many, Audley, is but one,
And we can call it all but one man's strength.
He that hath far to go tells it by miles;
If he should tell the steps, it kills his heart:
The drops are infinite that make a flood,
And yet, thou know'st, we call it but a rain.
There is but one France, one king of France, {270}
That France hath no more kings; and that same king
Hath but the puissant legion of one king;
And we have one: Then apprehend no odds;
For one to one is fair equality.

_Bien coupe, mal cousu_; such is the most favourable verdict I can pass on this voluminous effusion of a spirit smacking rather of the schools than of the field. The first six lines or so might pass muster as the early handiwork of Shakespeare; the rest has as little of his manner as his matter, his metre as his style.

The poet can hardly be said to rise again after this calamitous collapse. We find in the rest of this scene nothing better worth remark than such poor catches at a word as this;

And let those milkwhite messengers of time
Show thy time's learning in this dangerous time;

a villainous trick of verbiage which went nigh now and then to affect the adolescent style of Shakespeare, and which happens to find itself as admirably as unconsciously burlesqued in two lines of this very scene:

I will not give a penny for a life,
Nor half a halfpenny to shun grim death.

The verses intervening are smooth, simple, and passably well worded; indeed the force of elegant commonplace cannot well go further than in such lines as these.

Thyself art bruised and bent with many broils,
And stratagems forepast with iron pens
Are texed {271} in thine honourable face;
Thou art a married man in this distress,
But danger woos me as a blushing maid;
Teach me an answer to this perilous time.

_Audley_. To die is all as common as to live;
The one in choice, the other holds in chase;
For from the instant we begin to live
We do pursue and hunt the time to die:
First bud we, then we blow, and after seed;
Then presently we fall; and as a shade
Follows the body, so we follow death.
If then we hunt for death, why do we fear it?
If we fear it, why do we follow it?

(Let me intimate a doubt in passing, whether Shakespeare would ever have put by the mouth of any but a farcical mask a query so provocative of response from an Irish echo--"Because we can't help.")

If we do fear, with fear we do but aid
The thing we fear to seize on us the sooner;
If we fear not, then no resolved proffer
Can overthrow the limit of our fate:

and so forth. Again the hastiest reader will have been reminded of a passage in the transcendant central scenes of _Measure for Measure_:

Merely, thou art death's fool;
For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun,
And yet runn'st toward him still;

and hence also some may infer that this pitiful penny-whistle was blown by the same breath which in time gained power to fill that archangelic trumpet. Credat Zoilus Shakespearomastix, non ego.

The next scene is something better than passable, but demands no special analysis and affords no necessary extract. We may just observe as examples of style the play on words between the flight of hovering ravens and the flight of routed soldiers, and the description of the sudden fog

Which now hath hid the airy floor of heaven,
And made at noon a night unnatural
Upon the quaking and dismayed world.

The interest rises again with the reappearance and release of Salisbury, and lifts the style for a moment to its own level. _A tout seigneur tout honneur_; the author deserves some dole of moderate approbation for his tribute to the national chivalry of a Frenchman as here exemplified in the person of Prince Charles.

Of the two next scenes, in which the battle of Poitiers is so inadequately "staged to the show," I can only say that if any reader believes them to be the possible work of the same hand which set before all men's eyes for all time the field of Agincourt, he will doubtless die in that belief, and go to his own place in the limbo of commentators.

But a yet more flagrant effect of contrast is thrust upon our notice at the opening of the fifth act. If in all the historical groundwork of this play there is one point of attraction which we might have thought certain to stimulate the utmost enterprise and evoke the utmost capacities of an aspiring dramatist, it must surely be sought in the crowning scene of the story; in the scene of Queen Philippa's intercession for the burgesses of Calais. We know how Shakespeare on the like occasion was wont to transmute into golden verse the silver speech supplied to him by North's version of Amyot's Plutarch. {273} With the text of Lord Berners before him, the author of _King Edward III_. has given us for the gold of Froissart not even adulterated copper, but unadulterated lead. Incredible as it may seem to readers of the historian, the poeticule has actually contrived so far to transfigure by dint of disfiguring him that this most noble and pathetic scene in all the annals of chivalry, when passed through the alembic of his incompetence, appears in a garb of transforming verse under a guise at once weak and wordy, coarse and unchivalrous. The whole scene is at all points alike in its unlikeness to the workmanship of Shakespeare.

Here then I think we may finally draw bridle: for the rest of the course is not worth running; there is nothing in the residue of this last act which deserves analysis or calls for commentary. We have now examined the whole main body of the work with somewhat more than necessary care; and our conclusion is simply this: that if any man of common reading, common modesty, common judgment, and common sense, can be found to maintain the theory of Shakespeare's possible partnership in the composition of this play, such a man will assuredly admit that the only discernible or imaginable touches of his hand are very slight, very few, and very early. For myself, I am and have always been perfectly satisfied with one single and simple piece of evidence that Shakespeare had not a finger in the concoction of _King Edward III_. He was the author of _King Henry V_.

NOTE.

I was not surprised to hear that my essay on the historical play of King Edward III. had on its first appearance met in various quarters with assailants of various kinds. There are some forms of attack to which no answer is possible for a man of any human self-respect but the lifelong silence of contemptuous disgust. To such as these I will never condescend to advert or to allude further than by the remark now as it were forced from me, that never once in my life have I had or will I have recourse in self-defence either to the blackguard's loaded bludgeon of personalities or to the dastard's sheathed dagger of disguise. I have reviled no man's person: I have outraged no man's privacy. When I have found myself misled either by imperfection of knowledge or of memory, or by too much confidence in a generally trustworthy guide, I have silently corrected the misquotation or readily repaired the error. To the successive and representative heroes of the undying Dunciad I have left and will always leave the foul use of their own foul weapons. I have spoken freely and fearlessly, and so shall on all occasions continue to speak, of what I find to be worthy of praise or dispraise, contempt or honour, in the public works and actions of men. Here ends and here has always ended in literary matters the proper province of a gentleman; beyond it, though sometimes intruded on in time past by trespassers of a nobler race, begins the proper province of a blackguard.

REPORT ON THE PROCEEDINGS ON THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY SESSION OF THE NEWEST SHAKESPEARE SOCIETY.

A paper was read by Mr. A. on the disputed authorship of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. He was decidedly of opinion that this play was to be ascribed to George Chapman. He based this opinion principally on the ground of style. From its similarity of subject he had at first been disposed to assign it to Cyril Tourneur, author of _The Revenger's Tragedy_; and he had drawn up in support of this theory a series of parallel passages extracted from the speeches of Vindice in that drama and of Oberon in the present play. He pointed out however that the character of Puck could hardly have been the work of any English poet but the author of _Bussy d'Ambois_. There was here likewise that gravity and condensation of thought conveyed through the medium of the "full and heightened style" commended by Webster, and that preponderance of philosophic or political discourse over poetic interest and dramatic action for which the author in question had been justly censured.

Some of the audience appearing slightly startled by this remark (indeed it afterwards appeared that the Chairman had been on the point of asking the learned member whether he was not thinking rather of _Love's Labour's Lost_?), Mr. A. cited the well-known scene in which Oberon discourses with Puck on matters concerning Mary Stuart and Queen Elizabeth, instead of despatching him at once on his immediate errand. This was universally accepted as proof positive, and the reading concluded amid signs of unanimous assent, when

Mr. B. had nothing to urge against the argument they had just heard, but he must remind them that there was a more weighty kind of evidence than that adduced by Mr. A.; and to this he doubted not they would all defer. He could prove by a tabulated statement that the words "to" and "from" occurred on an average from seven to nine times in every play of Chapman; whereas in the play under consideration the word "to" occurred exactly twelve times and the word "from" precisely ten. He was therefore of opinion that the authorship should in all probability be assigned to Anthony Munday.

As nobody present could dispute this conclusion, Mr. C. proceeded to read the argument by which he proposed to establish the fact, hitherto unaccountably overlooked by all preceding commentators, that the character of Romeo was obviously designed as a satire on Lord Burghley. The first and perhaps the strongest evidence in favour of this proposition was the extreme difficulty, he might almost say the utter impossibility, of discovering a single point of likeness between the two characters. This would naturally be the first precaution taken by a poor player who designed to attack an all-powerful Minister. But more direct light was thrown upon the subject by a passage in which "that kind of fruit that maids call medlars when they laugh alone" is mentioned in connection with a wish of Romeo's regarding his mistress. This must evidently be taken to refer to some recent occasion on which the policy of Lord Burghley (possibly in the matter of the Anjou marriage) had been rebuked in private by the Maiden Queen, "his mistress," as meddling, laughable, and fruitless.

This discovery seemed to produce a great impression till the Chairman reminded the Society that the play in question was now generally ascribed to George Peele, {278} who was notoriously the solicitor of Lord Burghley's patronage and the recipient of his bounty. That this poet was the author of _Romeo and Juliet_ could no longer be a matter of doubt, as he was confident they would all agree with him on hearing that a living poet of note had positively assured him of the fact; adding that he had always thought so when at school. The plaudits excited by this announcement had scarcely subsided, when the Chairman clenched the matter by observing that he rather thought the same opinion had ultimately been entertained by his own grandmother.

Mr. D. then read a paper on the authorship and the hidden meaning of two contemporary plays which, he must regretfully remark, were too obviously calculated to cast a most unfavourable and even sinister light on the moral character of the new Shakespeare; whose possibly suspicious readiness to attack the vices of others with a view to diverting attention from his own was signally exemplified in the well-known fact that, even while putting on a feint of respect and tenderness for his memory, he had exposed the profligate haunts and habits of Christopher Marlowe under the transparent pseudonym of Christopher Sly. To the first of these plays attention had long since been drawn by a person of whom it was only necessary to say that he had devoted a long life to the study and illustration of Shakespeare and his age, and had actually presumed to publish a well-known edition of the poet at a date previous to the establishment of the present Society. He (Mr. D.) was confident that not another syllable could be necessary to expose that person to the contempt of all present. He proceeded, however, with the kind encouragement of the Chairman, to indulge at that editor's expense in sundry personalities both "loose and humorous," which being totally unfit for publication here are reserved for a private issue of "Loose and Humorous Papers" to be edited, with a running marginal commentary or illustrative and explanatory version of the utmost possible fullness, {279} by the Founder and another member of the Society. To these it might possibly be undesirable for them to attract the notice of the outside world. Reverting therefore to his first subject from various references to the presumed private character, habits, gait, appearance, and bearing of the gentleman in question, Mr. D. observed that the ascription of a share in the _Taming of the Shrew_ to William Haughton (hitherto supposed the author of a comedy called _Englishmen for my Money_) implied a doubly discreditable blunder. The real fact, as he would immediately prove, was not that Haughton was joint author with Shakespeare of the _Taming of the Shrew_, but that Shakespeare was joint author with Haughton of _Englishmen for my Money_. He would not enlarge on the obvious fact that Shakespeare, so notorious a plunderer of others, had actually been reduced to steal from his own poor store an image transplanted from the last scene of the third act of _Romeo and Juliet_ into the last scene of the third act of _Englishmen for my Money_; where the well-known and pitiful phrase--"Night's candles are burnt out"--reappears in all its paltry vulgarity as follows;--"Night's candles burn obscure." Ample as was the proof here supplied, he would prefer to rely exclusively upon such further evidence as might be said to lie at once on the surface and in a nutshell.

The second title of this play, by which the first title was in a few years totally superseded, ran thus: _A Woman will have her Will_. Now even in an age of punning titles such as that of a well-known and delightful treatise by Sir John Harrington, the peculiar fondness of Shakespeare for puns was notorious; but especially for puns on names, as in the proverbial case of Sir Thomas Lucy; and above all for puns on his own Christian name, as in his 135th, 136th, and 143rd sonnets. It must now be but too evident to the meanest intelligence--to the meanest intelligence, he repeated; for to such only did he or would he then and there or ever or anywhere address himself--(loud applause) that the graceless author, more utterly lost to all sense of shame than any Don Juan or other typical libertine of fiction, had come forward to placard by way of self-advertisement on his own stage, and before the very eyes of a Maiden Queen, the scandalous confidence in his own powers of fascination and seduction so cynically expressed in the too easily intelligible vaunt--A Woman will have her Will [Shakespeare]. In the penultimate line of the hundred and forty-third sonnet the very phrase might be said to occur:

So will I pray that thou mayst have thy Will.

Having thus established his case in the first instance to the satisfaction, as he trusted, not only of the present Society, but of any asylum for incurables in any part of the country, the learned member now passed on to the consideration of the allusions at once to Shakespeare and to a celebrated fellow-countryman, fellow-poet, and personal friend of his--Michael Drayton--contained in a play which had been doubtfully attributed to Shakespeare himself by such absurd idiots as looked rather to the poetical and dramatic quality of a poem or a play than to such tests as those to which alone any member of that Society would ever dream of appealing. What these were he need not specify; it was enough to say in recommendation of them that they had rather less to do with any question of dramatic or other poetry than with the differential calculus or the squaring of the circle. It followed that only the most perversely ignorant and aesthetically presumptuous of readers could imagine the possibility of Shakespeare's concern or partnership in a play which had no more Shakespearean quality about it than mere poetry, mere passion, mere pathos, mere beauty and vigour of thought and language, mere command of dramatic effect, mere depth and subtlety of power to read, interpret, and reproduce the secrets of the heart and spirit. Could any further evidence be required of the unfitness and unworthiness to hold or to utter any opinion on the matter in hand which had consistently been displayed by the poor creatures to whom he had just referred, it would be found, as he felt sure the Founder and all worthy members of their Society would be the first to admit, in the despicable diffidence, the pitiful modesty, the contemptible deficiency in common assurance, with which the suggestion of Shakespeare's partnership in this play had generally been put forward and backed up. The tragedy of _Arden of Feversham_ was indeed connected with Shakespeare--and that, as he should proceed to show, only too intimately; but Shakespeare was not connected with it--that is, in the capacity of its author. In what capacity would be but too evident when he mentioned the names of the two leading ruffians concerned in the murder of the principal character--Black Will and Shakebag. The single original of these two characters he need scarcely pause to point out. It would be observed that a double precaution had been taken against any charge of libel or personal attack which might be brought against the author and supported by the all-powerful court influence of Shakespeare's two principal patrons, the Earls of Essex and Southampton. Two figures were substituted for one, and the unmistakable name of Will Shakebag was cut in half and divided between them. Care had moreover been taken to disguise the person by altering the complexion of the individual aimed at. That the actual Shakespeare was a fair man they had the evidence of the coloured bust at Stratford. Could any capable and fair-minded man--he would appeal to their justly honoured Founder--require further evidence as to the original of Black Will Shakebag? Another important character in the play was Black Will's accomplice and Arden's servant--Michael, after whom the play had also at one time been called _Murderous Michael_. The single fact that Shakespeare and Drayton were both of them Warwickshire men would suffice, he could not doubt, to carry conviction with it to the mind of every member present, with regard to the original of this personage. It now only remained for him to produce the name of the real author of this play. He would do so at once--Ben Jonson. About the time of its production Jonson was notoriously engaged in writing those additions to the _Spanish Tragedy_ of which a preposterous attempt had been made to deprive him on the paltry ground that the style (forsooth) of these additional scenes was very like the style of Shakespeare and utterly unlike the style of Jonson. To dispose for ever of this pitiful argument it would be sufficient to mention the names of its two first and principal supporters--Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (hisses and laughter). Now, in these "adycions to Jeronymo" a painter was introduced complaining of the murder of his son. In the play before them a painter was introduced as an accomplice in the murder of Arden. It was unnecessary to dwell upon so trivial a point of difference as that between the stage employment or the moral character of the one artist and the other. In either case they were as closely as possible connected with a murder. There was a painter in the _Spanish Tragedy_, and there was also a painter in _Arden of Feversham_. He need not--he would not add another word in confirmation of the now established fact, that Ben Jonson had in this play held up to perpetual infamy--whether deserved or undeserved he would not pretend to say--the names of two poets who afterwards became his friends, but whom he had previously gibbeted or at least pilloried in public as Black Will Shakespeare and Murderous Michael Drayton.

Mr. E. then brought forward a subject of singular interest and importance--"The lameness of Shakespeare--was it moral or physical?" He would not insult their intelligence by dwelling on the absurd and exploded hypothesis that this expression was allegorical, but would at once assume that the infirmity in question was physical. Then arose the question--In which leg? He was prepared, on the evidence of an early play, to prove to demonstration that the injured and interesting limb was the left. "This shoe is my father," says Launce in the _Two Gentlemen of Verona_; "no, this left shoe is my father; no, no, this left shoe is my mother; nay, that cannot be so neither; yes, it is so, it is so; _it hath the worser sole_." This passage was not necessary either to the progress of the play or to the development of the character; he believed he was justified in asserting that it was not borrowed from the original novel on which the play was founded; the inference was obvious, that without some personal allusion it must have been as unintelligib1e to the audience as it had hitherto been to the commentators. His conjecture was confirmed, and the whole subject illustrated with a new light, by the well-known line in one of the Sonnets, in which the poet describes himself as "made lame by Fortune's dearest spite": a line of which the inner meaning and personal application had also by a remarkable chance been reserved for him (Mr. E.) to discover. There could be no doubt that we had here a clue to the origin of the physical infirmity referred to; an accident which must have befallen Shakespeare in early life while acting at the Fortune theatre, and consequently before his connection with a rival company; a fact of grave importance till now unverified. The epithet "dearest," like so much else in the Sonnets, was evidently susceptible of a double interpretation. The first and most natural explanation of the term would at once suggest itself; the playhouse would of necessity be dearest to the actor dependent on it for subsistence, as the means of getting his bread; but he thought it not unreasonable to infer from this unmistakable allusion that the entrance fee charged at the Fortune may probably have been higher than the price of seats in any other house. Whether or not this fact, taken in conjunction with the accident already mentioned, should be assumed as the immediate cause of Shakespeare's subsequent change of service, he was not prepared to pronounce with such positive confidence as they might naturally expect from a member of the Society; but he would take upon himself to affirm that his main thesis was now and for ever established on the most irrefragable evidence, and that no assailant could by any possibility dislodge by so much as a hair's breadth the least fragment of a single brick in the impregnable structure of proof raised by the argument to which they had just listened.

This demonstration being thus satisfactorily concluded, Mr. F. proceeded to read his paper on the date of _Othello_, and on the various parts of that play respectively assignable to Samuel Rowley, to George Wilkins, and to Robert Daborne. It was evident that the story of Othello and Desdemona was originally quite distinct from that part of the play in which Iago was a leading figure. This he was prepared to show at some length by means of the weak-ending test, the light-ending test, the double-ending test, the triple-ending test, the heavy-monosyllabic- eleventh-syllable-of-the-double-ending test, the run-on-line test, and the central-pause test. Of the partnership of other poets in the play he was able to adduce a simpler but not less cogent proof. A member of their Committee said to an objector lately: "To me, there are the handwritings of four different men, the thoughts and powers of four different men, in the play. If you can't see them now, you must wait till, by study, you can. I can't give you eyes." To this argument he (Mr. F.) felt that it would be an insult to their understandings if he should attempt to add another word. Still, for those who were willing to try and learn, and educate their ears and eyes, he had prepared six tabulated statements--

(At this important point of a most interesting paper, our reporter unhappily became unconscious, and remained for some considerable period in a state of deathlike stupor. On recovering from this total and unaccountable suspension of all his faculties, he found the speaker drawing gradually near the end of his figures, and so far succeeded in shaking off the sense of coma as to be able to resume his notes.)

That the first and fourth scenes of the third act were not by the same hand as the third scene he should have no difficulty in proving to the satisfaction of all capable and fair-minded men. In the first and fourth scenes the word "virtuous" was used as a dissyllable; in the third it was used as a trisyllable.

"Is, that she will to virtuous Desdemona." iii. 1.

"Where virtue is, these are more virtuous." iii. 3.

"That by your virtuous means I may again." iii. 4.

In the third scene he would also point out the great number of triple endings which had originally led the able editor of Euclid's Elements of Geometry to attribute the authorship of this scene to Shirley: _Cassio_ (twice), _patience_, _Cassio_ (again), _discretion_, _Cassio_ (again), honesty, _Cassio_ (again), _jealousy, jealous_ (used as a trisyllable in the verse of Shakespeare's time), company (two consecutive lines with the triple ending), _Cassio_ (again), _conscience, petition, ability, importunity, conversation, marriage, dungeon, mandragora, passion, monstrous, conclusion, bounteous_. He could not imagine any man in his senses questioning the weight of this evidence. Now, let them take the rhymed speeches of the Duke and Brabantio in Act i. Sc. 3, and compare them with the speech of Othello in Act iv. Sc. 2,

Had it pleased heaven
To try me with affliction.

He appealed to any expert whether this was not in Shakespeare's easy fourth budding manner, with, too, various other points already touched on. On the other hand, take the opening of Brabantio's speech--

So let the Turk of Cyprus us beguile;
We lose it not so long as we can smile.

That, he said, was in Shakespeare's difficult second flowering manner--the style of the later part of the earlier stage of Shakespeare's rhetorical first period but one. It was no more possible to move the one passage up to the date of the other than to invert the order of the alphabet. Here, then, putting aside for the moment the part of the play supplied by Shakespeare's assistants in the last three acts--miserably weak some of it was--they were able to disentangle the early love-play from the latter work in which Iago was principally concerned. There was at least fifteen years' growth between them, the steps of which could he traced in the poet's intermediate plays by any one who chose to work carefully enough at them. Set any of the speeches addressed in the Shakespeare part of the last act by Othello to Desdemona beside the consolatory address of the Duke to Brabantio, and see the difference of the rhetoric and style in the two. If they turned to characters, Othello and Desdemona were even more clearly the companion pair to Biron and Rosaline of _Love's Labour's Lost_ than were Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet the match-pair (_sic_) of Romeo and Juliet. In _Love's Labour's Lost_ the question of complexion was identical, though the parts were reversed. He would cite but a few parallel passages in evidence of this relationship between the subjects of the two plays.

_Love's Labour's Lost_, iv. 3. _Othello_.
1. "By heaven, thy love is black 1. "An old black ram." i. 1.
as ebony."
2. "No face is _fair_ that is not 2. "Your son-in-law is far more
full so black." _fair_ than black." i. 3.
3. "O paradox! Black is the 3. "How if she be black and
badge of hell." witty?" ii. 1.
4. "O, _if_ in black my lady's 4. "_If_ she be black, and thereto
brows be decked." have a wit." id.
5. "And therefore is she born 5. "A measure to the health of
to make black fair." black Othello." ii. 3.
6. "Paints itself black to 6. "For I am black." iii, 3.
imitate her brow."
7. "To look like her are 7. "_Begrimed_ and black." id.
_chimney-sweepers_ black."

Now, with these parallel passages before them, what man, woman, or child could bring himself or herself to believe that the connection of these plays was casual or the date of the first Othello removable from the date of the early contemporary late-first-period-but-one play _Love's Labour's Lost_, or that anybody's opinion that they were so was worth one straw? When therefore by the introduction of the Iago episode Shakespeare in his later days had with the assistance of three fellow-poets completed the unfinished work of his youth, the junction thus effected of the Brabantio part of the play with this Iago underplot supplied them with an evidence wholly distinct from that of the metrical test which yet confirmed in every point the conclusion independently arrived at and supported by the irresistible coincidence of all the tests. He defied anybody to accept his principle of study or adopt his method of work, and arrive at a different conclusion from himself.

The reading of Mr. G.'s paper on the authorship of the soliloquies in _Hamlet_ was unavoidably postponed till the next meeting, the learned member having only time on this occasion to give a brief summary of the points he was prepared to establish and the grounds on which he was prepared to establish them. A year or two since, when he first thought of starting the present Society, he had never read a line of the play in question, having always understood it to be admittedly spurious: but on being assured of the contrary by one of the two foremost poets of the English-speaking world, who was good enough to read out to him in proof of this assertion all that part of the play which could reasonably be assigned to Shakespeare, he had of course at once surrendered his own former opinion, well grounded as it had hitherto seemed to be on the most solid of all possible foundations. At their next meeting he would show cause for attributing to Ben Jonson not only the soliloquies usually but inconsiderately quoted as Shakespeare's, but the entire original conception of the character of the Prince of Denmark. The resemblance of this character to that of Volpone in _The Fox_ and to that of Face in _The Alchemist_ could not possibly escape the notice of the most cursory reader. The principle of disguise was the same in each case, whether the end in view were simply personal profit, or (as in the case of Hamlet) personal profit combined with revenge; and whether the disguise assumed was that of madness, of sickness, or of a foreign personality, the assumption of character was in all three cases identical. As to style, he was only too anxious to meet (and, he doubted not, to beat) on his own ground any antagonist whose ear had begotten {291} the crude and untenable theory that the Hamlet soliloquies were not distinctly within the range of the man who could produce those of Crites and of Macilente in _Cynthia's Revels_ and _Every Man out of his Humour_. The author of those soliloquies could, and did, in the parallel passages of _Hamlet_, rise near the height of the master he honoured and loved.

The further discussion of this subject was reserved for the next meeting of the Society, as was also the reading of Mr. H.'s paper on the subsequent quarrel between the two joint authors of Hamlet, which led to Jonson's caricature of Shakespeare (then retired from London society to a country life of solitude) under the name of Morose, and to Shakespeare's retort on Jonson, who was no less evidently attacked under the designation of Ariel. The allusions to the subject of Shakespeare's sonnets in the courtship and marriage of Epicoene by Morose were as obvious as the allusions in the part of Ariel to the repeated incarceration of Jonson, first on a criminal and secondly on a political charge, and to his probable release in the former case (during the reign of Elizabeth=Sycorax) at the intercession of Shakespeare, who was allowed on all hands to have represented himself in the character of Prospero ("it was mine art that let thee out"). Mr. I. would afterwards read a paper on the evidence for Shakespeare's whole or part authorship of a dozen or so of the least known plays of his time, which, besides having various words and phrases in common with his acknowledged works, were obviously too bad to be attributed to any other known writer of the period. Eminent among these was the tragedy of _Andromana, or the Merchant's Wife_, long since rejected from the list of Shirley's works as unworthy of that poet's hand. Unquestionably it was so; not less unworthy than _A Larum for London_ of Marlowe's. The consequent inference that it must needs be the work of the new Shakespeare's was surely no less cogent in this than in the former case. The allusion occurring in it to a play bearing date just twenty-six years after the death of Shakespeare, and written by a poet then unborn, was a strong point in favour of his theory. (This argument was received with general marks of adhesion.) What, he would ask, could be more natural than that Shirley when engaged on the revision and arrangement for the stage of this posthumous work of the new Shakespeare's (a fact which could require no further proof than he had already adduced), should have inserted this reference in order to disguise the name of its real author, and protect it from the disfavour of an audience with whom that name was notoriously out of fashion? This reasoning, conclusive in itself, became even more irresistible--or would become so, if that were anything less than an absolute impossibility--on comparison of parallel passages,

Though kings still hug suspicion in their bosoms,
They hate the causer. (_Andromana_, Act i. Sc. 3.)

Compare this with the avowal put by Shakespeare into the mouth of a king.

Though I did wish him dead
I hate the murderer. (_King Richard II_., Act v. Sc. 6.)

Again in the same scene:

For then her husband comes home from the Rialto.

Compare this with various passages (too familiar to quote) in the _Merchant of Venice_. The transference of the Rialto to Iberia was of a piece with the discovery of a sea-coast in Bohemia. In the same scene Andromana says to her lover, finding him reluctant to take his leave, almost in the very words of Romeo to Juliet,

Then let us stand and outface danger,
Since you will have it so.

It was obvious that only the author of the one passage could have thought it necessary to disguise his plagiarism in the other by an inversion of sexes between the two speakers. In the same scene were three other indisputable instances of repetition.

Mariners might with far greater ease
Hear whole shoals of sirens singing.

Compare _Comedy of Errors_, Act iii. Scene 2.

Sing, siren, for thyself.

In this case identity of sex was as palpable an evidence for identity of authorship as diversity of sex had afforded in the preceding instance.

Again:

Have oaths no _more validity_ with princes?

In _Romeo and Juliet_, Act iii. Scene 3, the very same words were coupled in the very same order:

_More validity_,
More honourable state, more courtship lies
In carrion flies than Romeo.

Again:

It would have killed a salamander.

Compare the _First Part of King Henry IV_, Act iii. Scene 3.

I have maintained that salamander of yours with fire any time this two
and thirty years.

In Act ii. Scene 2 the hero, on being informed how heavy are the odds against him in the field, answers,

I am glad on't; the honour is the greater.

To which his confidant rejoins:

The danger is the greater.

And in the sixth scene of the same act the messenger observes:

I only heard the prince wish
. . . . . . .
He had fewer by a thousand men.

Could any member doubt that we had here the same hand which gave us the like debate between King Henry and Westmoreland on the eve of Agincourt? or could any member suppose that in the subsequent remark of the same military confidant, "I smell a rat, sir," there was merely a fortuitous coincidence with Hamlet's reflection as he "whips out his rapier"--in itself a martial proceeding--under similar circumstances to the same effect?

In the very next scene a captain observes of his own troops

Methinks such tattered rogues should never conquer:

a touch that could only be due to the pencil which had drawn Falstaff's ragged regiment. In both cases, moreover, it was to be noted that the tattered rogues proved ultimately victorious. But he had--they might hardly believe it, but so it was--even yet stronger and more convincing evidence to offer. It would be remembered that a play called _The Double Falsehood_, formerly attributed to Shakespeare on the authority of Theobald, was now generally supposed to have been in its original form the work of Shirley. What, then, he would ask, could be more natural or more probable than that a play formerly ascribed to Shirley should prove to be the genuine work of Shakespeare? Common sense, common reason, common logic, all alike and all equally combined to enforce upon every candid judgment this inevitable conclusion. This, however, was nothing in comparison to the final proof which he had yet to lay before them. He need not remind them that in the opinion of their illustrious German teachers, the first men to discover and reveal to his unworthy countrymen the very existence of the new Shakespeare, the authenticity of any play ascribed to the possibly too prolific pen of that poet was invariably to be determined in the last resort by consideration of its demerits. No English critic, therefore, who felt himself worthy to have been born a German, would venture to question the postulate on which all sound principles of criticism with regard to this subject must infallibly be founded: that, given any play of unknown or doubtful authorship, the worse it was, the likelier was it to be Shakespeare's. (This proposition was received with every sign of unanimous assent.) Now, on this ground he was prepared to maintain that the claims of _Andromana_ to their most respectful, their most cordial, their most unhesitating acceptance were absolutely beyond all possibility of parallel. Not _Mucedorus_ or _Fair Em_, not _The Birth of Merlin_ or _Thomas Lord Cromwell_, could reasonably or fairly be regarded as on the same level of worthlessness with this incomparable production. No mortal man who had survived its perusal could for a moment hesitate to agree that it was the most incredibly, ineffably, inconceivably, unmitigatedly, irredeemably, inexpressibly damnable piece of bad work ever perpetrated by human hand. No mortal critic of the genuine Anglo-German school could therefore hesitate for a moment to agree that in common consistency he was bound to accept it as the possible work of no human hand but the hand of the New Shakespeare.

The Chairman then proceeded to recapitulate the work done and the benefits conferred by the Society during the twelve months which had elapsed since its foundation on that day (April 1st) last year. They had ample reason to congratulate themselves and him on the result. They had established an entirely new kind of criticism, working by entirely new means towards an entirely new end, in honour of an entirely new kind of Shakespeare. They had proved to demonstration and overwhelmed with obloquy the incompetence, the imbecility, the untrustworthiness, the blunders, the forgeries, the inaccuracies, the obliquities, the utter moral and literary worthlessness, of previous students and societies. They had revealed to the world at large the generally prevalent ignorance of Shakespeare and his works which so discreditably distinguished his countrymen. This they had been enabled to do by the simple process of putting forward various theories, and still more various facts, but all of equally incontrovertible value and relevance, of which no Englishman--he might say, no mortal--outside the Society had ever heard or dreamed till now. They had discovered the one trustworthy and indisputable method, so easy and so simple that it must now seem wonderful it should never have been discovered before, by which to pluck out the heart of the poet's mystery and detect the secret of his touch; the study of Shakespeare by rule of thumb. Every man, woman, and child born with five fingers on each hand was henceforward better qualified as a critic than any poet or scholar of time past. But it was not, whatever outsiders might pretend to think, exclusively on the verse-test, as it had facetiously been called on account of its total incompatibility with any conceivable scheme of metre or principle of rhythm--it was not exclusively on this precious and unanswerable test that they relied. Within the Society as well as without, the pretensions of those who would acknowledge no other means of deciding on debated questions had been refuted and repelled. What were the other means of investigation and verification in which not less than in the metrical test they were accustomed to put their faith, and by which they doubted not to attain in the future even more remarkable results than their researches had as yet achieved, the debate just concluded, in common with every other for which they ever had met or ever were likely to meet, would amply suffice to show. By such processes as had been applied on this as on all occasions to the text of Shakespeare's works and the traditions of his life, they trusted in a very few years to subvert all theories which had hitherto been held and extirpate all ideas which had hitherto been cherished on the subject: and having thus cleared the ground for his advent, to discover for the admiration of the world, as the name of their Society implied, a New Shakespeare. The first step towards this end must of course be the demolition of the old one; and he would venture to say they had already made a good beginning in that direction. They had disproved or they would disprove the claim of Shakespeare to the sole authorship of _Macbeth, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Hamlet_, and _Othello_; they had established or they would establish the fact of his partnership in _Locrine, Mucedorus, The Birth of Merlin, Dr. Dodipoll_, and _Sir Giles Goosecap_. They had with them the incomparable critics of Germany; men whose knowledge and judgment on all questions of English literature were as far beyond the reach of their English followers as the freedom and enlightenment enjoyed by the subjects of a military empire were beyond the reach of the citizens of a democratic republic. They had established and affiliated to their own primitive body or church various branch societies or sects, in England and elsewhere, devoted to the pursuit of the same end by the same means and method of study as had just been exemplified in the transactions of the present meeting. Still there remained much to be done; in witness of which he proposed to lay before them at their next meeting, by way of inauguration under a happy omen of their new year's work, the complete body of evidence by means of which he was prepared to demonstrate that some considerable portion, if not the greater part, of the remaining plays hitherto assigned to Shakespeare was due to the collaboration of a contemporary actor and playwright, well known by name, but hitherto insufficiently appreciated; Robert Armin, the author of _A Nest of Ninnies_.

ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS.

The humble but hard-working journeyman of letters who was charged with the honourable duty of reporting the transactions at the last meeting of the Newest Shakespeare Society on the auspicious occasion of its first anniversary, April 1st, has received sundry more or less voluminous communications from various gentlemen whose papers were then read or announced, pointing out with more or less acrimonious commentary the matters on which it seems to them severally that they have cause to complain of imperfection or inaccuracy in his conscientious and painstaking report. Anxious above all things to secure for himself such credit as may be due to the modest merit of scrupulous fidelity, he desires to lay before the public so much of the corrections conveyed in their respective letters of reclamation as may be necessary to complete or to rectify the first draught of their propositions as conveyed in his former summary. On the present occasion, however, he must confine himself to forwarding the rectifications supplied by two of the members who took a leading part in the debate of April 1st.