To enter with applause. An Actors Art, This, a Re-entrance to a Plaudite."* * Latin imperative pl., “applaud, or clap, ye," pronounced to the audience by the actors or the Epilogue, at the conclusion of a play. Generally the words, Vos valete, et plaudite, “ Farewell, and applaud," were used. See Plays of Terence, at the end. CHRONOLOGY OF THE PLAYS. T has been a special object of Shakespearian study, of late years, IT a study, hate years, cal order of the Plays, with the ulterior object of tracing the development of the poet's dramatic art, and his own individual growth; in other words, of studying his works in their totality, and with reference to the personality of which they are a manifestation. That chronological order has been settled as conclusively as it can, perhaps, ever be, and the results toward the realization of the ulterior object I have named, are already of the highest importance. Of these results, Professor Dowden's "Shakspere: a critical study of his Mind and Art," is, perhaps, the best expression. There is, perhaps, no great author, whose growth can be more distinctly traced through his works, than can Shakespeare's, from the period of his apprenticeship, when he retouched and reconstructed old plays, and tried his hand cautiously at original work - that period being represented by such plays as the 1st, 2d, and 3d parts of Henry VI., Love's Labour's Lost, The Comedy of Errors, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona up to the period of his full development and ripeness, represented by his great tragedies, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra and, finally, the Plays now usually called Romances (characterized as they all are by romantic elements), Cymbeline, The Tempest, and The Winter's Tale. Between the earliest and the latest work, is a period of twenty-two or twenty-three years, say from 1590 or '91 to 1612 or '13; and the steady and healthy growth traceable throughout this period bears testimony that the vigorous vitality of the author was maintained to the end. The evidence which has been brought to bear upon the dates of composition of the several plays, is chiefly of three kinds : 1. That which is wholly external. 2. That which is partly external and partly internal. 3. That which is wholly internal. Edmund Malone, the latest of the Shakespeare editors of the 18th century, first undertook systematically to settle the chronology of the Plays; and the result of his investigations was first published in 1778, in an Essay entitled "An Attempt to ascertain the order in which the Plays of Shakespeare were written." He confined himself chiefly to the 1st and 2d kinds of evidence, namely, that which is wholly external, and that which is partly external and partly internal (meaning by the latter, "supposed allusions in the Plays, to contemporary circumstances and events "). Of the first kind are "the dates of the quarto editions of some of the Plays, entries in the Register of the Stationers' Company, and references to the Plays in contemporary books or manuscripts." These several kinds of evidence served to reach an approximate chronological order upon which could be based the third kind of evidence, namely, that which is wholly internal (furnished by the verse), and which has served to rectify considerably the conclusions arrived at, from the other kinds of evidence. It should be stated that Malone recognized the verse test, especially rhyme. He frequently alludes to it. In treating of the date of composition of Love's Labour's Lost, he notes "the frequent rhymes with which it abounds, of which, in his [Shakespeare's] early performances, he seems to have been extremely fond." To this remark he appends a long note, in which he anticipates much that has been set forth, of late years, in regard to the rhyme test. Under Romeo and Juliet, he speaks of rhyming as "a practice from which he [Shakespeare] gradually departed, though he never wholly deserted it." Under Cymbeline, he says, "The versification of this play bears, I think, a much greater re semblance to that of The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, than to any of our author's earlier plays." The first valuable contribution to the study of the verse was a little volume, published anonymously in 1857 (the author was a Mr. Bathurst) and entitled "Remarks on the Differences in Shakespeare's Versification in different periods of his life, and on the like points of difference in Poetry generally." Though in some respects a pioneer work, it maps out, with great sagacity, the whole subject, which has since been so minutely worked up by several members of the New Shakspere Society of London. SHAKESPEARE'S VERSE. WH WHEN Shakespeare began to write, blank verse had not yet reached, was very far from having reached, that development which adapted it to the highest dramatic purposes. It owed its earliest form to the rhyming pentameter couplet. Rhyme imparts an emphasis to the end of a verse and presents a check more or less strong, to the flowing of one verse into another. The consequence is, that, in rhymed verse, the thought is more or less obliged to move within prescribed limits. It is sectioned off by the metre, and pause-emphasis and pause-melody are thereby more precluded than in free blank verse. But in the earliest blank verse in the literature, Lord Surrey's translation of the 2d and 4th Books of Virgil's Æneid (about 1540), fashioned as it was, upon rhyming verse, the melody resulting from variety of pause is a minimum. George P. Marsh says of Surrey's blank verse, that it "is very often quite undistinguishable from common prose." But the fact is, that the reader is kept all the time too conscious of the metrical bondage to which the thought is subjected. We do not find, in the words of Milton, "the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another." It is presumed that in the material for which blank verse is a proper vehicle, there is preserved a certain equilibrium of thought and feeling, the former being more generally in the ascendant, and such material would therefore be bondaged by the cyclic movement which, to material containing a predominance of feeling over thought, would not be bondage at all but would be the movement which it would naturally seek for itself. Thought tends toward a straightforward movement toward what the Anglo-Saxons called |