Dr. Farmer is of the same opinion, and thinks he sees something of Jonson's hand, here and there, in the dialogue also. After our author's retirement to the country, Jonson was perhaps employed to give a novelty "Yet ours for want hath not so lov'd the stage, —or with three rusty swords, Again, in his Silent Woman, A& IV. Sc. iv. 66 Nay, I would sit out a play, that were nothing but fights at sea, drum, trumpet, and target." We are told, in the memoirs of Ben Jonson's life, that he went to France in the year 1613. But at the time of the revival of King Henry VIII. he either had not left England, or was then returned; for he was a spectator of the fire which happened at the Globe theatre during the representation of that piece. It may, perhaps, seem extraordinary, that he should have presumed to prefix this covert censure of Shakspere to one of his own plays. But he appears to have eagerly embraced every opportunity of depreciating him. This occasional prologue (whoever was the writer of it) confirms the tradition handed down by Rowe, that our author retired from the stage about three years before his death. Had Rovelty to the piece by a new title and prologue, and to furnish the managers of the Globe with a description of the coronation ceremony, and of those other decorations with which, from his connection with A Had he been at that time joined with Heminge and Burbage in the management of the Globe theatre, he scarcely would have suffered the lines, above alluded to, to have been spoken. In lord Harrington's account of the money disbursed for the plays that were exhibited by his Majesty's servants, in the year 1613, before the Elector Palatine, all the payments are said to have been made to "John Heminge, for himself and the rest of his fellows;" from which we may conclude that he was then the principal manager. correspondent, however, of Sir Thomas Puckering's (as I learn from Mr. Tyrwhitt) in a MS. letter preserved in the Museum, and dated in the year 1613, calls the company at the Globe," Bourbage's company."-Shakspere's name stands before either of these in the licence granted by king James; and, had he not left London before that time, the players at the Globe theatre, I should imagine, would rather have been entitled his company.-The burlesque parody on the account of Falstaff's death, which is con tained in Fletcher's comedy of The Captain, acted in 1613, and the ridicule of Hamlet's celebrated soliloquy, and of Ophelia's death, in his Scornful Lady, which was represented about the same time, confirm the tradition, that our author had then retired from the stage, careless of the fate of his writings, inattentive to the illiberal attacks of his contemporaries, and negligent alike of present and posthumous fame. Inigo Jones, and his attendance at court, he was peculiarly conversant. The piece appears to have been revived with some degree of splendour; for Sir Henry Wotton gives a very pompous account of the representation. The unlucky accident that happened to the house during the exhibition, was occasioned by discharging some small pieces, called chambers, on king Henry's arrival at cardinal Wolsey's gate at Whitehall, one of which, being injudiciously managed, set fire to the thatched roof of the theatre *. The The Globe theatre (as I learn from the MSS. of Mr. Oldys) was thatched with reeds, and had an open area in its centre. This area we may suppose to have been filled by the lowest part of the audience, whom Shakspere calls the groundlings.—Chambers are not, like other guns, pointed horizontally, but are discharged as they stand erect on their breeches. The accident may, therefore, be easily accounted for. If these pieces were let off behind the scenes, the paper or wadding, with which their charges were confined, would reach the thatch on the inside; or, if fixed without the walls, it might have been carried by the wind to the top of the roof. This accident is alluded to in the following lines of Ben Jonson's Execration upon Vulcan; from which it appears, that he was at the Globe playhouse when it was burnt, á circumstance which, in some measure, strengthens the conjecture that he was employed on the revival of King Henry VIII, for this was not the theatre at which his pieces were sually represented: "Well The play, thus revived and new-named, was probably called, in the bills of that time, a new play; which might have led Sir Henry Wotton to describe it as such. And thus his account may be reconciled with that of the other contemporary writers, as well as with those arguments which have been here urged "Well fare the wise men yet on the Bank-side, "My friends, the watermen! they could provide And safely trust to dress, not burn their boats. "(Which some are pleas'd to style but thy mad prank) "Against the Globe, the glory of the Bank: "Which, though it were the fort of the whole parish, "Flank'd with a ditch, and forc'd out of a marish, "I saw with two poor chambers taken in, "And raz'd; ere thought could urge this might have been, "See the world's ruins! nothing but the piles "Left, and wit since to cover it with tiles. "The brethren, they straight nois'd it out for news, "'Twas verily some relick of the stews, "And this a sparkle of that fire let loose, "That was lock'd up in the Winchestrian goose, "When Venus there maintain'd her mistery. in in support of the early date of King Henry VIII. Every thing has been fully stated on each side of the question -The reader must judge. Mr. Roderick, in his notes on our author (appended to Mr. Edwards's Canons of Criticism), takes notice of some peculiarities in the metre of the play before us; viz. "that there are many more verses in it than in any other, which end with a redundant syllable”—“ very near two to one'-and that "the cæsuræ, or pauses of the verse, are full as remarkable." The redundancy, &c. observed by this critick, Mr. Steevens thinks (a remark which, having omitted to introduce in its proper place, he desires me to insert here), "was rather the effect of chance, than of design in the author; and might have arisen either from the negligence of Shakspere, who in this play has borrowed whole scenes and speeches from Holinshed, whose words he was probably in too much haste to compress into versification strictly regular and harmonious; or from the interpolations of Ben Jonson, whose hand Dr. Farmer thinks he occasionally perceives in the dialogue." Whether Mr. Roderick's position be well founded, is hårdly worth a contest; but the peculiarities which he has animadverted on (if such there be), add probability to the conjecture, that this piece underwent some alterations, after it had passed out of the hands of Shakspere. Our author had produced so many plays in the preceding years, that it is not likely that King Henry VIII. was written before 1601. It might, perhaps, with equal |