period in the life of Sforza, when, after the battle of Pavia, he was restored to the dukedom of Milan; or when, in 1525, he received a formal investiture of his dignity. All that Shakspere attempted to define was some period when there was a Duke of Milan holding his authority in a greater or less degree under the emperor. That period might have been before the time of Francesco Sforza. It could not have been after it, because, upon the death of that prince, the contest for the sovereignty of the Milanese was renewed between Francis I. and Charles V., till, in 1540, Charles invested his son Philip (afterwards husband of Mary of England) with the title, and the separate honours of a Duke of Milan became merged in the imperial family. The one historical fact, then, mentioned in this play, is that of the emperor holding his court at Milan, which was under the government of a duke, who was a vassal of the empire. Assuming that this fact prescribes a limit to the period of the action, we must necessarily place that period at least half a century before the date of the composition of this drama. Such a period may, or may not, have been in Shakspere's mind. It was scarcely necessary for him to have defined the period for the purpose of making his play more intelligible to his audience. That was all the purpose he had to accomplish. He was not, as we have said before, teaching history, in which he had to aim at all the exactness that was compatible with the exercise of his dramatic art. He had here, as in many other cases, to tell a purely romantic story; and all that he had to provide for with reference to what is called costume, in the largest sense of that word, was that he should not put his characters in any positions, or conduct his story through any details, which should run counter to the actual knowledge, or even to the conventional opinions of his audience. That this was the theory upon which he worked as an artist we have little doubt; and that he carried this theory even into wilful anachronisms we are quite willing to believe. He saw, and we think correctly, that there was not less real impropriety in making the ancient Greeks speak English than in making the same Greeks describe the maiden "in shady cloister mew'd," by the modern name of a nun.* He had to translate the images of the Greeks, as well as their language, into forms of words that an uncritical English audience would apprehend. Keeping this principle in view, whenever we meet with a commentator lifting up his eyes in astonishment at the prodigious ignorance of Shakspere, with regard to geography, and chronology, and a thousand other proprieties, to which the empire of poetry has been subjected by the inroads of modern accuracy, we picture to ourselves a far different being from the rude workman which their pedantic demonstrations have figured as the beau ideal of the greatest of poets. We see the most skilful artist employing his materials in the precise mode in which he intended to employ them; displaying as much knowledge as he intended to display; and, after all, committing fewer positive blunders, and incurring fewer violations of accuracy, than any equally prolific poet before or after him. If we compare, for example, the violations of historical truth on the part of Shakspere, who lived in an age when all history came dim and dreamy before the popular eye, and on the part of Sir Walter Scott, who lived in an age when all history was reduced to a tabular exactness-if we compare the great dramatist and the great novelist in this one point alone, we shall find that the man who belongs to the age of accuracy is many degrees more inaccurate than the man who belongs to the age of fable. There is, in truth, a philosophical point of view in which we must seek for the solution of those contradictions of what is real and probable, which, in Shakspere, his self-complacent critics are always delighted to refer to his ignorance. One of their greatest discoveries of his geographical ignorance is furnished in this play :-Proteus and his servant go to Milan by water. It is perfectly true that Verona is inland, and that even the river Adige, which waters Verona, does not take its course by Milan. Shakspere, therefore, was most ignorant of geography! In Shakspere's days countries were not so exactly mapped out as in our own, and therefore he may, from lack of knowledge, have made a boat sail from Verona, and have given Bohemia a sea-board. But let it be borne in mind that, in numberless other instances, Shakspere has displayed the most exact acquaintance with what we call geography-an acquaintance not only with the territorial boundaries, and the physical features of particular countries, but with a thousand nice peculiarities connected with their government and customs, which nothing but the most diligent reading and inquiry could furnish. Is there not, therefore, another solution of the ship at Verona, and the sea-board of Bohemia, than Shakspere's ignorance? Might not his knowledge have been in Midsummer Night's Dream. subjection to what he required, or fancied he required, for the conduct of his dramatic incidents ? Why does Scott make the murder of a Bishop of Liege, by William de la Marck, the great cause of the quarrel between Charles the Bold and Louis XI., to revenge which murder the combined forces of Burgundy and France stormed the city of Liege,-when, at the period of the insurrection of the Liegeois described in Quentin Durward, no William de la Marck was upon the real scene, and the murder of a Bishop of Liege by him took place fourteen years afterwards? No one, we suppose, imputes this inaccuracy to historical ignorance in Scott. He was writing a romance, we say, and he therefore thought fit to sacrifice historical truth. The real question, in all these cases, to be asked, is, Has the writer of imagination gained by the violation of propriety a full equivalent for what he has lost? In the case of Shakspere we are not to determine this question by a reference to the actual state of popular knowledge in our time. What startles us as a violation of propriety was received by the audience of Shakspere as a fact,-or, what was nearer the poet's mind, the fact was held by the audience to be in subjection to the fable which he sought to present ;-the world of reality lived in a larger world of art;-art divested the real of its formal shapes, and made its hard masses plastic. In our own days we have lost the power of surrendering our understanding, spell-bound, to the witchery of the dramatic poet. We cannot sit for two hours enchained to the one scene which equally represents Verona or Milan, Rome or London, and ask no aid to our senses beyond what the poet supplies us in his dialogue. We must now have changing scenes, which carry us to new localities; and pauses to enable us to comprehend the time which has elapsed in the progress of the action; and appropriate dresses, that we may at once distinguish a king from a peasant, and a Roman from a Greek. None of these aids had our ancestors ;-but they had what we have not-a thorough love of the dramatic art in its highest range, and an appreciation of its legitimate authority. Wherever the wand of the enchanter waved, there were they ready to come within his circle and to be mute. They did not ask, as we have been accustomed to ask, for happy Lears and unmetaphysical Hamlets. They were content to weep scalding tears with the old king, when his "poor fool was hanged," and to speculate with the unresolving prince even to the extremest depths of his subtlety. They did not require tragedy to become a blustering melodrame, or comedy a pert farce. They could endure poetry and wit-they understood the alternations of movement and repose. We have, in our character of audience, become degraded even by our advance in many appliances of civilization with regard to which the audiences of Shakspere were wholly ignorant. We know many small things exactly, which they were content to leave unstudied; but we have lost the perception of many grand and beautiful things which they received instinctively and without effort. They had great artists working for them, who knew that the range of their art would carry them far beyond the hard, dry, literal copying of every-day Nature which we call Art; and they laid down their shreds and patches of accurate knowledge as a tribute to the conquerors who came to subdue them to the dominion of imagination. What cared they, then, if a ship set sail from Verona to Milan, when Valentine and his man ought to have departed in a carriage;—or what mattered it if Hamlet went "to school at Wittemberg," when the real Hamlet was in being five centuries before the university of Wittemberg was founded! If Shakspere had lived in this age, he might have looked more carefully into his maps and his encyclopædias. We might have gained something, but what should we not have lost! We have been somewhat wandering from the immediate subject before us; but we considered it right, upon the threshold of our enterprise, to make a profession of faith with regard to what many are accustomed to consider irredeemable violations of propriety in Shakspere. We believe the time is passed when it can afford any satisfaction to an Englishman to hear the greatest of our poets perpetually held up to ridicule as a sort of inspired barbarian, who worked without method, and wholly without learning. But before Shakspere can be properly understood, the popular mind must be led in an opposite direction; and we must all learn to regard him, as he really was, as the most consummate of artists, who had a complete and absolute control over all the materials and instruments of his art, without any subordination to mere impulses and caprices,—with entire self-possession and perfect knowledge. " "Shakspere," says Malone, "is fond of alluding to events occurring at the time when be wrote;" and Johnson observes that many passages in his works evidently shew that "he often took advantage of the facts then recent, and the passions then in motion." This was a part of the method of * Life, vol. ii. p. 331. edit. 1821. Note on King John. Shakspere, by which he fixed the attention of his audience. The Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, says, "It is now since the earthquake eleven years." Dame Quickly, in the Merry Wives of Windsor, talks of her "knights, and lords, and gentlemen, with their coaches, I warrant you, coach after coach.” Coaches came into general use about 1605. "Banks's horse," which was exhibited in London in 1589, is mentioned in Love's Labour's Lost. These, amongst many other instances which we shall have occasion to notice, are not to be regarded as determining the period of the dramatic action; and, indeed, they are, in many cases, decided anachronisms. In the Two Gentlemen of Verona, there are several very curious and interesting passages which have distinct reference to the times of Elizabeth, and which, if Milan had then been under a separate ducal government, would have warranted us in placing the action of this play about half a century later than we have done. As it is, the passages are remarkable examples of Shakspere's close attention to "facts then recent;" and they shew us that the spirit of enterprise, and the intellectual activity which distinguished the period when Shakspere first began to write for the stage, found a reflection in the allusions of this accurate observer. We have noted these circumstances more particularly in our Illustrations; but a rapid enumeration of them may not be unprofitable. In the scene between Antonio and Panthino, where the father is recommended to "put forth" his son "to seek preferment," we have a brief but most accurate recapitulation of the stirring objects that called forth the energies of the master-spirits of the court of Elizabeth : "Some, to the wars, to try their fortune there; Some, to discover islands far away; Some, to the studious universities." Here, in three lines, we have a recital of the great principles that, either separately, or more frequently in combination, gave their impulses to the ambition of an Essex, a Sidney, a Raleigh, and a Drake :-War, still conducted in a chivalrous spirit, though with especial reference to the " "prefer ment" of the soldier ;-Discovery, impelled by the rapid development of the commercial resources of the nation, and carried on in a temper of enthusiasm which was prompted by extraordinary success and extravagant hope;-and Knowledge, a thirst for which had been excited throughout Europe by the progress of the Reformation and the invention of printing, which opened the stores of learning freely to all men. These pursuits had succeeded to the fierce and demoralizing passions of our long civil wars, and the more terrible contentions that had accompanied the great change in the national religion. The nation had at length what, by comparison, was a settled Government. It could scarcely be said to be at war; for the assistance which Elizabeth afforded to the Hugonots in France, and to those who fought for freedom of conscience and for independence of Spanish dominion in the Netherlands, gave a healthy stimulus to the soldiers of fortune who drew their swords for Henry of Navarre and Maurice of Nassau ;--and though the English people might occasionally lament the fate of some brave and accomplished leader, as they wept for the death of Sidney at Zutphen, there was little of general suffering that might make them look upon those wars as anything more to be dreaded than some well-fought tournament. Shakspere, indeed, has not forgotten the connexion between the fields where honour and fortune were to be won by wounds, and the knightly lists where the game of mimic war was still played upon a magnificent scale; where the courtier might, without personal danger, "Practise tilts and tournaments," before his queen, who sat in her "fortress of perfect beauty," to witness the exploits of the "fosterchildren of desire," amidst the sounds of cannon "fired with perfumed powder," and "moving mounts and costly chariots, and other devices."* There was another circumstance which marked the active and inquiring character of these days, which Shakspere has noticed : "Home keeping youths have ever homely wits," exclaims Valentine; and Panthino says of Proteus, it "Would be great impeachment to his age * See Illustrations to Act I. Travelling was the passion of Shakspere's times-the excitement of those who did not specially devote themselves to war, or discovery, or learning. The general practice of travelling supplies one, amongst many proofs, that the nation was growing commercial and rich, and that a spirit of inquiry was spread amongst the higher classes, which made it "impeachment to their age not to have looked upon foreign lands in their season of youth and activity. The allusions which we thus find in this comedy to the pursuits of the gallant spirits of the court of Elizabeth are very marked. The incidental notices of the general condition of the people are less decided; but a few passages that have reference to popular manners may be pointed out. The boyhood of Shakspere was passed in a country town where the practices of the Catholic church had not been wholly eradicted either by severity or reason. We have one or two passing notices of these. Proteus, in the first scene, says, "I will be thy Beadsman, Valentine." Shakspere had, doubtless, seen the rosary still worn, and the "beads bidden," perhaps even in his own house. Julia compares the strength of her affection to the unwearied steps of "the true-devoted pilgrim." Shakspere had, perhaps, heard the tale of some ancient denizen of a ruined abbey, who had made the pilgrimage to the shrine of our Lady at Loretto, or had even visited the sacred tomb at Jerusalem. Thurio and Proteus are to meet at "Saint Gregory's well." This is the only instance in Shakspere in which a holy well is mentioned; but how often must he have seen the country people, in the early summer morning, or after their daily labour, resorting to the fountain which had been hallowed from the Saxon times as under the guardian influence of some venerated saint. These wells were closed and neglected in London when Stowe wrote; but at the beginning of the last century, the custom of making journeys to them, according to Bourne, still existed among the people of the North; and he considers it to be "the remains of that superstitious practice of the Papists of paying adoration to wells and fountains." This play contains several indications of the prevailing taste for music, and exhibits an audience proficient in its technical terms; for Shakspere never addressed words to his hearers which they could not understand. This taste was a distinguishing characteristic of the age of Elizabeth; it was not extinct in those of the first Charles; but it was lost amidst the puritanism of the Commonwealth and the profligacy of the Restoration, and has yet to be born again amongst us. There is one allusion in this play to the games of the people-" bid the base," which shews us that the social sport which the school-boy and school-girl still enjoy,—that of prison base, or prison bars,— and which still make the village green vocal with their mirth on some fine evening of spring, was a game of Shakspere's days. In the long winter nights the farmer's hearth was made cheerful by the well-known ballads of Robin Hood; and to "Robin Hood's fat friar" Shakspere makes his Italian outlaws allude. But with music, and sports, and ales, and old wife's stories, there was still much misery in the land. “The beggar” not only spake "puling" " at Hallowmas," but his importunities or his threats were heard at all seasons. The disease of the country was vagrancy; and to this deep-rooted evil there were only applied the surface remedies to which Launce alludes, "the stocks" and "the pillory." The whole nation was still in a state of transition from semi-barbarism to civilization; but the foundations of modern society had been laid. The labourers had ceased to be vassals; the middle class had been created; the power of the aristocracy had been humbled, and the nobles had clustered round the sovereign, having cast aside the low tastes which had belonged to their fierce condition of independent chieftains. This was a state in which literature might, without degradation, be adapted to the wants of the general people; and "the best public instructor" then, was the drama. Shakspere found the taste created; but it was for him, most especially, to purify and exalt it. It is scarcely necessary, perhaps, to caution our readers against imagining that because Shakspere in this, as in all his plays, has some reference to the manners of his own country and times, he has given a false representation of the manners of the persons whom he brings upon his scene. The tone of the Two Gentlemen of Verona is, perhaps, not so thoroughly Italian as some of his later plays-the Merchant of Venice, for example; but we all along feel that his characters are not English. The allusions to home customs which we have pointed out, although curious and important as illustrations of the age of Shakspere, are so slight that they scarcely amount to any violation of the most scrupulous propriety; and regarded upon that principle which holds that in a work of art the exact should be in subordination to the higher claims of the imaginative, they are no violations of propriety at all. SCENES AND COSTUME. In the folio of 1623, there are no indications of the localities of the several SCENES. The notices, such as An open Place in Verona, The Garden of Julia's House, A Room in the Duke's Palace, A Forest near Mantua," are additions that have been usefully made, from time to time. The text, either specially or by allusion, of course furnishes the authority for these directions. The scenes which we have illustrated are the following; and we shall mention in this, as in all other cases, the authorities upon which we have founded our designs. 1. An open Place in Verona. In this view is seen the "Piazza della Bra" of Palladio, which was erected about the time of Shakspere; and, of course, somewhat later than the period we have assigned to the dramatic action. An old print in the British Museum has been here copied. 2, Room in the Duke's Palace at Milan. This is after a composition by Mr. A. Poynter, strictly in accordance with the architecture of the period. The apartment is supposed to open upon a loggia, with a balcony looking over a garden. 3. Street in Milan. The authorities for this view are, Aspar Veduta di Milano, and Veduta dell Ospitale Maggiore, 1456. The hospital is the large building shewn on the left of the design. 4. General View of Milan. Braun's Civitates Orbis Terrarum, a very curious work, in six folio volumes, first printed in 1523, contains a plan of Milan; and an old print in the King's Library has been partly copied, with some slight picturesque adaptations. 5. Forest near Mantua. A well-known print after Salvator Rosa has furnished this scene. 6. Court of the Palace, Milan. This is also after a composition by Mr. A. Poynter, in which he has endeavoured to exemplify the Lombard architecture of the sixteenth century. 7. Abbey at Milan. This is a view of the Cloister of Saint Ambrosio, in that city, a building existing at the period of the play. It is drawn from an original sketch. The period at which the incidents of this play are supposed to have taken place, has been our guide in the selection of its COSTUME. It is fixed, as we have previously noticed, by the mention of the Emperor holding "his Royal Court" at Milan, while there was a sovereign prince of that particular duchy. We have therefore chosen our pictorial illustrations from authorities of the commencement of the sixteenth century; as, after the death of Francesco Sforza, in 1535, the duchy of Milan became an appanage of the Crown of Spain, and, as such, formed part of the dominions of Philip II., husband of our Queen Mary. Ceasare Vecellio, the brother of Titian, in his curious work, "Habiti Antiche e Moderni di tutto il mondo," completed in 1589, presents us with the general costume of the noblemen and gentlemen of Italy at the period we have mentioned, which has been made familiar to us by the well-known portraits of the contemporary monarchs, Francis I. and our own Henry VIII, He tells us they wore a sort of diadem surmounted by a turban-like cap of gold tissue, or embroidered silk, a plaited shirt low in the neck with a small band or ruff, a coat or cassock of the German fashion, short in the waist and reaching to the knee, having sleeves down to the elbow, and from thence shewing the arm covered only by the shirt with wristbands or ruffles. The cassock was ornamented with stripes or borders of cloth, silk, or velvet of different colours, or of gold lace or embroidery, according to the wealth or taste of the wearer. With this dress they sometimes wore doublets and stomachers, or placcards, as they were called, of different colours, their shoes being of |