the old plays mentioned by Malone is altogether a fallacy. Like the 'Henry VI.' it wants, for the most part, the

"Linked sweetness long drawn out."

of the later plays, and so do The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' and 'The Comedy of Errors.' But to compare the play, as a whole, even with 'Jeronimo' (and Kyd, in freedom and variety of rhythm, whatever he may want in majesty, is superior to Marlowe) argues, we think, an incompetent knowledge of the things compared. To compare it with the old King Leir,' and the greater number of the plays in Malone's list, is to compare the movement of the hunter with that of the horse in the mill. The truth is, that, after the first scene of Andronicus,' in which the author sets out with the stately pace of his time, we are very soon carried away, by the power of the language, the variety of the pause, and the especial freedom with which trochees are used at the ends of lines, to forget that the versification is not altogether upon the best Shaksperean model. There is the same instrument, but the performer has not yet thoroughly learnt its scope and its power.

Horn has a very just remark on the language of Titus Andronicus :'-" Foremost we may recognise with praise the almost never-wearying power of the language, wherein no shift is ever used. We know too well how often, in many French and German tragedies, the princes and princesses satisfy themselves to silence with a necessary Hélas! Oh Ciel! O Schicksal! (0 Fate!) and similar cheap outcries: but Shakspere is quite another man, who, for every degree of pain, knew how to give the right tone and the right colour. In the bloody sea of this drama, in which men can scarcely keep themselves afloat, this, without doubt, must have been peculiarly difficult." We regard this decided language, this absence of stage conventionalities, as one of the results of the power which the poet possessed of distinctly conceiving his situations with reference to his characters. The Ohs! and Ahs! and Heavens! of the English stage, as well as the O Ciel! of the French, are a consequence

of feebleness, exhibiting itself in commonplaces. The greater number of the old English dramatists, to do them justice, had the same power as the author of "Titus Andronicus' of grappling with words which they thought fitting to the situations. But their besetting sin was in the constant use of that "huffing, braggart, puft" language, which Shakspere never employs in the dramas which all agree to call his, and of which there is a very sparing portion even in 'Titus Andronicus.' The temptation to employ it must have been great indeed; for when, in every scene, the fearful energies of the action

"On horror's head horrors accumulate," it must have required no common forbearance, and therefore no common power, to prescribe that the words of the actors should not

"Outface the brow of bragging horror." The son of Tamora is to be killed; as he is led away, she exclaims

"Oh! cruel, irreligious piety!" Titus kills Mutius: the young man's brother earnestly says

"My lord, you are unjust." When Tamora prescribes their terrible wickedness to her sons, Lavinia remon

strates

"O! Tamora, thou bear'st a woman's face."

When Marcus encounters his mutilated niece, there is much poetry, but no raving. When woe upon woe is heaped upon Titus, we have no imprecations:

"For now I stand as one upon a rock,

Environ'd with a wilderness of sea;
Who marks the waxing tide grow wave by
wave,

Expecting ever when some envious surge
Will in his brinish bowels swallow him."

In one situation, after Titus has lost his hand,
Marcus says-

"Oh! brother, speak with possibilities,

And do not break into these deep extremes." What are the deep extremes? The unhappy

E

-perhaps the most popular play of the early stage, and, in many respects, a work of great | power, thus concludes, with a sort of Chorus spoken by a ghost:

66

Ay, now my hopes have end in their effects,
When blood and sorrow finish my desires.
Horatio murder'd in his father's bower;
Vile Serberine by Pedringano slain;
False Pedringano hang'd by quaint device;
Fair Isabella by herself misdone;
Prince Balthazar by Belimperia stabb'd;
The Duke of Castille, and his wicked son,
Both done to death by old Hieronimo,
By Belimperia fallen, as Dido fell;
And good Hieronimo slain by himself:

Ay, these were spectacles to please my soul."

Here is murder enough to match even 'Andronicus.' This slaughtering work was accompanied with another peculiarity of the unformed drama-the dumb show.

Words

were sometimes scarcely necessary for the exposition of the story; and, when they were, no great care was taken that they should be very appropriate or beautiful in themselves. Thomas Heywood, himself a prodigious manufacturer of plays in a more advanced period, writing as late as 1612, seems to look upon these semi-pageants, full of what the actors call "bustle," as the wonderful things of the modern stage:-"To see, as I have seen, Hercules, in his own shape, hunting the boar, knocking down the bull, taming the hart, fighting with Hydra, murdering Geryon, slaughtering Diomed, wounding the Stymphalides, killing the Centaurs, pashing the lion, squeezing the dragon, dragging Cerberus in chains, and, lastly, on his high pyramides writing Nil ultra-oh, these were sights to make an Alexander."* With a stage that presented attractions like these to the multitude, is it wonderful that the young Shakspere should have written a Tragedy of Horrors?

But Shakspere, it is maintained, has given us no other tragedy constructed upon the principle of Titus Andronicus.' Are we quite sure?

Do we know what the first 'Hamlet' was? We have one sketch, which may be most instructively compared with

* An Apology for Actors.'

the finished performance; but it has been conjectured, and we think with perfect propriety, that the 'Hamlet' which was on the stage in 1589, and then sneered at by Nash, "has perished, and that the quarto of 1603 gives us the work in an intermediate state between the rude youthful sketch and the perfected Hamlet,' which was published in 1604." All the action of the perfect 'Hamlet is to be found in the sketch published in 1603; but the profundity of the character is not all there,-very far from it. We have little of the thoughtful philosophy, of the morbid feeelings, of Hamlet. But let us imagine an earlier sketch, where that wonderful creation of Hamlet's character may have been still more unformed; where the poet may have simply proposed to exhibit in the young man a desire for revenge, combined with irresolution-perhaps even actual madness. Make Hamlet a common dramatic character, instead of one of the subtilest of meta

physical problems, and what is the tragedy? A tragedy of blood. It offends us not now, softened as it is, and almost hidden, in the atmosphere of poetry and philosophy which surrounds it. But look at it merely with reference to the action; and of what materials is it made? A ghost described; a ghost appearing; the play within a play, and that a play of murder; Polonius killed; the ghost again; Ophelia mad and self-destroyed; the struggle at the grave between Hamlet and Laertes; the queen poisoned; Laertes killed Hamlet; and, last of all, Hamlet's death. with a poisoned rapier; the king killed by

No wonder Fortinbras exclaims

"This quarry cries on havoc." Again, take another early tragedy, of which

we may well believe that there was an earlier sketch than that published in 1597-'Romeo and Juliet.' We may say of the delicious poetry, as Romeo says of Juliet's beauty, that it makes the charnel-house "a feasting presence full of light." But imagine a Romeo and Juliet' conceived in the immaturity of the young Shakspere's powera tale of love, but surrounded with horror.

+ Edinburgh Review,' vol. lxxi. p. 475.

There is enough for the excitement of an uninstructed audience: the contest between the houses; Mercutio killed; Tybalt killed; the apparent death of Juliet; Paris killed in the churchyard; Romeo swallowing poison; Juliet stabbing herself. The marvel is, that the surpassing power of the poet should make us forget that Romeo and Juliet' can present such an aspect. All the changes which

6

we know Shakspere made in 'Hamlet,' and 'Romeo and Juliet,' were to work out the peculiar theory of his mature judgment— that the terrible should be held, as it were, in solution by the beautiful, so as to produce a tragic consistent with pleasurable emotion. Herein he goes far beyond Webster. His art is a higher art.

THE external testimony that Shakspere was the author of 'Pericles' would appear to rest upon strong evidence; it was published with Shakspere's name as the author during his lifetime. But this evidence is not decisive. In 1600 was printed 'The first part of the true and honourable history of the Life of Sir John Oldcastle, &c. Written by William Shakespeare;'* and we should be entitled to receive that representation of the writer of 'Sir John Oldcastle' as good evidence of the authorship, were we not in possession of a fact which entirely outweighs the bookseller's insertion of a popular name in his title-page. In the manuscript diary of Philip Henslowe, preserved at Dulwich College, is the following entry :-"This 16 of October, 99, Receved by me, Thomas Downton, of Phillip Henslow, to pay Mr. Monday, Mr. Drayton, and Mr. Wilson and Hathway, for the first pte of the Lyfe of Sr Jhon Ouldcasstell, and in earnest of the Second Pte, for the use of the compayny, ten pownd, I say receved 10li."+ The title-page of 'Pericles,' in 1609, might have been as fraudulent as that of 'Sir John Oldcastle' in 1600.

The play of 'Pericles,' as we learn by the original title-page, was "sundry times acted by his Majesty's servants at the Globe." The proprietary interest in the play for the purposes of the stage (whoever wrote it) no

* "Some of the copies have not Shakespeare's name on the title." COLLIER.

'Diary of Philip Henslowe;' edited by J. Payne Collier.

doubt remained in 1623 with the proprietors of the Globe Theatre-Shakspere's fellowshareholders. Of the popularity of 'Pericles' there can be no doubt. It was printed three times separately before the publication of the folio of 1623; and it would have been to the interest of the proprietors of that edition to have included it amongst Shakspere's works. Did they reject it because they could not conscientiously affirm it to be written by him, or were they unable to make terms with those who had the right of publication?

It is a most important circumstance, with reference to the authenticity of 'Titus Andronicus,' that Meres, in 1599, ascribed that play to Shakspere. We have no such testimony in the case of 'Pericles;' but the tradition which assigns it to Shakspere is pretty constant. Malone has quoted a passage from 'The Times displayed, in Six Sestiads,' a poem published in 1646, and dedicated by S. Shephard to Philip, Earl of Pembroke:

:

"See him, whose tragic scenes Euripides
Doth equal, and with Sophocles we may
Compare great Shakspeare: Aristophanes
Never like him his fancy could display:
Witness The Prince of Tyre, his Pericles:
His sweet and his to be admired lay
He wrote of lustful Tarquin's rape, shows he
Did understand the depth of poesie."
Six years later, another writer, J. Tatham,
in verses prefixed to Richard Brome's 'Jovial

"But Shakespeare, the plebeian driller, was Founder'd in his Pericles, and must not pass."

Dryden, in his prologue to Charles Davenant's 'Circe,' in 1675, has these lines:

doubt then that Dryden was a competent reporter of the traditions of the stage, and not necessarily of the traditions that survived after the Restoration. We can picture the young poet, naturally anxious to approach as closely to Shakspere as possible, taking a

flight,

Did no Volpone, nor no Arbaces, write;

But hopp'd about, and short excursions made
From bough to bough, as if they were afraid,
And each was guilty of some slighted maid.
Shakspeare's own Muse his Pericles first bore;
The Prince of Tyre was elder than the Moor.
"T is miracle to see a first good play:

All hawthorns do not bloom on Christmas-
day."

The mention of Shakspere as the author of 'Pericles' in the poems printed in 1646 and 1652 may in some respect be called traditionary; for the play was not printed after 1635, till it appeared in the folio of 1664. Dryden, most probably, read the play in that folio edition. Mr. Collier says, "I do not at all rely upon Dryden's evidence farther than to establish the belief as to the authorship entertained by persons engaged in theatrical affairs after the Restoration." But is such evidence wholly to be despised? and must the belief be necessarily dated "after the Restoration?" Dryden was himself forty-four years of age when he wrote "Shakspeare's own Muse," &c. He had been a writer for the stage twelve years. He was the friend of Davenant, who wrote for the stage in 1626. Of the original actors in Shakspere's plays Dryden himself might have known, when he was a young man, John Lowin, who kept the Three Pigeons Inn at Brentford, and died very old, a little before the Restoration; and Joseph Taylor, who died in 1653, although, according to the tradition of the stage, he was old enough to have played Hamlet under Shakspere's immediate instruction; and Richard Robinson, who served in the army of Charles I., and has an historical importance through having been shot to death by Harrison, after he had laid down his arms, with this exclamation from the stern republican, "Cursed is he that doth the work of

inn, and listening to the old man's recital of the recollections of his youth amidst those scenes from which he was banished by the violence of civil war and the fury of puritanical intolerance. We accept, then, Dryden's assertion with little doubt; and we approach to the examination of the internal evidence of the authenticity of 'Pericles' with the conviction that, if it be the work of Shakspere, the foundations of it were laid when his art was imperfect, and he laboured somewhat in subjection to the influence of those ruder models for which he eventually substituted his own splendid examples of dramatic excellence.

There is a very striking passage in Sidney's 'Defence of Poesy,' which may be taken pretty accurately to describe the infancy of the dramatic art in England, being written some four or five years before we can trace any connection of Shakspere with the stage. The passage is long, but it is deserving of attentive consideration:

"But they will say, how then shall we set forth a story which contains both many places and many times? And do they not know that a tragedy is tied to the laws of Poesy, and not of History, not bound to follow the story, but having liberty either to feign a quite new matter, or to frame the history to the most tragical convenience? Again, many things may be told which cannot be showed: if they know the difference betwixt reporting and representing. As for example, I may speak, though I am here, of Peru, and in speech digress from that to the description of Calecut: but in action I cannot represent it without Pacolet's horse. And so was the manner the ancients took by some Nuntius, to recount things done in former time, or other place.

"Lastly, if they will represent an History, they must not (as Horace saith) begin above,