Chapter XXII: Part 22

Our early dramatists not only jobbed in this chance-work, but established a copartnership for the quicker manufacture; and we find sometimes three or four poets working on one play, share and share alike, or in due proportions, whenever they could peaceably adjust their mutual celebrities.[12] Could we penetrate into the recesses of the theatre of that day, I suspect we should discover civil wars in the commonwealth. These partners sometimes became irreconcilably jealous. Jonson and Marston and Decker, who had zealously co-operated, subsequently exhausted their quivers at one another. Greene was incurably envious of Marlow, and got his friend Nash to be as much so, till Marlow and Nash compromised, and wrote together the tragedy of _Dido_, with the affection of twins. Lofty Chapman flashed an "invective" against proud "Ben," and when Anthony Munday, a copious playwright, was hailed by a critic as "the best plotter," Jonson, in his next _play_, ridiculed "the best plotter." Can we forget that in _Eastward Hoe_, one of the most amusing of our old comedies, whence Hogarth borrowed the hint of his "Idle and Industrious Apprentices," by Jonson, Chapman and Marston, the madness of Ophelia is poorly ridiculed? It would seem that a junction of the poets usually closed in a rupture.

Our first tragedy and comedy were moulded on the classical model, for both the writers were university-men. It is, however, remarkable that the greater number of our early dramatists who now occupy our attention were also members of the universities, had taken a degree, and some were skilful Greek scholars.[13] How then did it happen, that not one of these scholars submitted to the artificial apparatus and the conventional code of their legislator, the Stagyrite? We observe a sudden revolution in the dramatic art.

Our poets had not to address scholastic critics; for, as one of them has delivered himself,--

--------They would have GOOD PLAYS, and not produce
Such musty fopperies of antiquity;
Which do not suit the humorous age's back,
With clothes in fashion.

It was their business to raise up that multiform shape which alone could win the mutable attention of a very mixed audience. At once they clung to the human nature before them; they ran through all the chords of the passions; mingling the comic with the tragic, they struck out a new course in their inartificial drama. They were at all events inventors, for they had no prototypes. Every poet was an original, _more suo_, mindless of the encumbering alloy, for they knew that the vein they had opened was their own, and confided too frequently in its abundance to find its richness. It was a spontaneous 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[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 Aeneid 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 _bombast[5] 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 Parliament that could be framed could not compel their perusal. Shall we ascribe to this caustic wit a singular deficiency in his judicial decisions, or look to some other cause for the ejection of these sonnets which have become of late the subject of so much curious inquiry? An ingenious attempt has been recently made to form what is called an autobiography of the poet by stringing together the sonnets in six distinct poems; this would be sufficient evidence that they had never passed under the eye of the author, and that he could have had no concern in a publication which has thus mutilated his living members. This bookseller's collection remains for more than one cause an ambiguous volume.

Shakespeare now stands alone the national bard; but hoary Time, which has decreed who are his inferiors, once saw them his equals; and when he mingled with his fellows, possibly the world looked up to a Coryphaeus whose name was not Shakespeare. Two inquiries interest us: Was the pre-eminence of our national bard acknowledged by his contemporaries?--and, What cause occasioned the utter neglect of his own reputation?

Among his contemporaries, Shakespeare could not possess the pre-eminence of the present age, for who were then to be his judges? His rivals or his audience? Our gentle Shakespeare, as Jonson called him, perhaps at no time appreciated his own genius at its peculiar excellence, and therefore was not likely to discover his solitary pre-eminence among a formidable crowd of rivals, nor were they likely to acknowledge in their friend "Will" the prevailing charm which has now subdued the world. They have even occasionally darted a shaft of ridicule or a sharp parody at our immortal tragedian; the madness of Hamlet and Ophelia could serve these dramatic writers as a subject for raillery;[8] and the airy Fletcher, who would have emulated Shakespeare, was guilty of sneering at his inimitable master. The learned JONSON was apt to be critical; CHAPMAN cast his Greek glances haughtily on the vernacular bard; MARSTON was caustic; and DRAYTON, his intimate, who had composed two or three tragedies, could hardly perceive any supremacy in SHAKESPEARE, and for us, seems parsimoniously to commend his "comic vein" as strong

As any one that traffick'd with the stage;

while BEN JONSON is hailed as

Lord of the theatre, who could bear
The buskin, as the sock, away.

It was not from his dramatic brothers that SHAKESPEARE could have discovered his more than supremacy; and while the brotherhood had family quarrels among themselves, Shakespeare appears never to have moved offensively or defensively. Gifford tells us that he has never mentioned one of his contemporaries with commendation, and only once appears, with Jonson and others, to have contributed some commendatory lines to the volume of an obscure and whimsical poet.[9] As Shakespeare did not deal in this literary traffic of that day, he has received fewer tributes than some of the meanest of our poets. But if Shakespeare has not noticed any of his associates, neither has the poet ever alluded to himself in his works. He never exults in his triumphs, nor is querulous on those who oppugned them.

With his audience he was unquestionably popular; we hear of none of his plays having been condemned, though such mischances are recorded of his rivals, and, above all, of his great compeer Jonson. We know that he was fortunate in the personation of his characters; and those natural touches, listened to on the spot when nature was left free to act her part, fell on contagious and instantaneous sympathies. But if the poet charmed by his "many-coloured life," his very faults were not less delightful. His audience revelled in bustle and bombast, and it is possibly in compliance with their stirring unchastised taste that we have received so much of his rude originals.

Our poet's recklessness of the fate of his own dramas, and his utter disregard of posterity, is at least one unquestionable fact in the blank page of his life. He was utterly reckless of his personal reputation among his contemporary readers, or otherwise he would not have suffered in his lifetime mutilated dramas, or even their first draughts, surreptitiously procured, to pass under his own name;--huddled pieces without even the divisions of the acts, or crude and ridiculous dramas which he was incapable of having written. These were suicidal acts of his own fame, but they never broke his silence; and even in his retreat from the metropolis, in the leisure of his native bowers of Avon, Shakespeare felt not

That last infirmity of noble minds,
The spur of fame,

pricking his patient acquiescence, and disturbing his careless freedom; he issued no protest, he uttered no complaint, against the effrontery of the printers of those days, who published, as "newly corrected by William Shakespeare," old plays which he never wrote; nor did he yield the yearnings of a nurse to those ricketty children of the press which passed as his progeny, bearing a name which he never could have deemed immortal. We may trace to its real cause this utter carelessness of his poetical existence.

The horizon of this poet's hopes was bounded by his daily task and his prosperous theatre. Assuredly it was not an ordinary gratification to be conscious that his friend Burbage would call into a real existence _Romeo_, _Macbeth_, and _Othello_, and that the shares of the playhouse would in due time be transferred for Warwickshire acres. But his mind was above his condition, and however the dramatist flourished at "the Globe," Shakespeare himself felt the misery of a degraded station;--players and play-writing were held to be equally despicable in that day. This "secret sorrow" he may have himself confided to us; for in one of "the sonnets," he pathetically laments the compulsion which forced him to the trade of pleasing the public; and this humiliation, or this "stain," as the poet felt it, is illustrated by a novel image--"Chide Fortune," exclaims the bard,

The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds;
Thence comes it that _my name receives a brand;
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in_, LIKE THE DYER'S HAND.

SHAKESPEARE, in the vigour of life, withdrew from the theatre and the metropolis, returning to his native abode.[10] "The properties and the wardrobe" were now exchanged for "land and tithes." It is consolatory for us to have ascertained that our national bard, not yet, however, national, did not participate in the common misery of his noblest brothers. Four years glided away in the tranquil obscurity of his family, till his death! Yet still some old associations survived with the dramatic bard, some reveries of the winter theatre of "the Blackfriars," and the summer Globe "open to the sky," for we are told that two or three of his noblest dramas were composed during his retirement; and he retained his unbroken love for old companionship to the last, for, by a credible tradition, Shakespeare died of a fever contracted by convivial indulgence at a joyous meeting with his beloved cronies Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton.

We hear nothing more of SHAKESPEARE nor of any fragmentary manuscripts; no verses were scattered on his funereal bier as with Spenser, no sepulchral volume of elegies was gathered, as with Jonson, to consecrate his memory. There was yet no SHAKESPEARE! no national bard! The poet himself could not have favoured a friend with a copy of many of his own plays, and probably could not himself have repeated one of those admired soliloquies which we now get by rote. SHAKESPEARE was wholly insensible to the days which were to come. All this to us seems incredible!

Seven years passed away silently, and the nation remained without their Shakespeare, although Jonson, in the very year that the poet had deceased, had set the first example of a collection of dramas made by their own author; the volume sanctioned by his critical learning he dignified as his "works:" a proud distinction by which he laid himself open to the epigrammatists. At length, in 1623, two of Shakespeare's fellow-comedians, Heminges and Condell, published the first folio edition of "Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies."

These player-editors profess that "they have done this office to the dead only to keep the memory of so worthy a _friend and fellow_ alive as was our Shakespeare." Yet their utter negligence shown in "their fellow's" volume is no evidence of their pious friendship, nor perhaps of their care or their intelligence. The publication was not, I fear, so much an offering of affection as a pretext to secure the copyright. Their real design seems to have been to recover the monopoly of ALL the plays, having lost the proprietorship of several which had _stolen abroad in Shakespeare's lifetime_, and to obtain this crafty purpose they practised a fraudulent deception.

_Fifteen quarto plays_ the public already possessed; no one appears to have known how they had issued from the study of the poet, or the treasury of the theatre. Our player-editors, however, now cautioned their readers that these fifteen plays were a fraud practised on them; that "they were stolen and surreptitious copies maimed and deformed." But what these new editors themselves alleged, they knew was false; for they actually reprinted, unaltered, in their own collection these declared surreptitious copies. As the reprint became subject to their negligence, these _first editions_ were appreciated by Capel and Malone as manuscripts, and by these quarto plays they corrected the text of the folio volume. The mystifying republication of these fifteen quarto plays is a piece of literary history of no common occurrence. CAPEL imagined that the player-editors merely reprinted these very copies which they had so loudly decried to save the labour of transcription. But looking closer into this affair, we seem to detect that a double deception was practised. The printers of these plays had secured the copyright by entering them at Stationers' Hall, and when the folio collection was projected it was found necessary by Heminges and Condell to admit the proprietors into the copartnership of the volume. Hence their names appear in the titlepage. Malone imagined that this circumstance indicated that the volume of Shakespeare was considered so great a risk that it required the joint aid of these printers. But the parties only united to secure the monopoly of all the plays.

It therefore results that the player-editors pretended to warn the public that all the preceding editions were "maimed and deformed," and the proprietors of these pretended surreptitious editions silently acquiesced in their own condemnation, for the future advantages they expected to derive from their share in the monopoly.

It is quite obvious that the first proprietors of the quarto plays could never have acquired such complete copies without either Shakespeare or his company having furnished them. Yet Shakespeare, if he had connived at these publications, could never have revised the press; another evidence of the utter recklessness of the poet of the fate of his dramas.

The player-editors supplied about twenty new dramas, and by another adroit deception in their titlepage they announced that all the dramas were NOW published "acording to the original copies."