صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني

him, with one exception,-that of Pericles. Our opinion, however, is, that a great many difficulties would be avoided if we were to place the commencement of Shakspere's dramatic career at least six years earlier than it is usually placed ; and we shall state the reasons for this opinion as briefly as we can.

Robert Greene, in his "Groat's-worth of Wit," written while upon his deathbed, in 1592, speaks thus of a dramatic writer who had given him and others mortal offence by his success:-'There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his tiger's heart wrapt in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast 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.' There is little doubt that this bitter effusion of envy applies to Shakspere; but, surely, if he had begun to write for the stage in 1591, having produced, according to Malone, only his two parts of Henry VI. and the Two Gentlemen of Verona, when this pamphlet appeared, there was little reason for Greene to call him a Factotum,' and the only shakescene.' He had probably amended, or written, Pericles and Titus Andronicus at the same period, which would make Greene's envy have a larger store to feed upon. But let us imagine that he had, before 1592, produced the Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour Lost, and the Midsummer Night's Dream, as well as the plays we have mentioned, and Greene might then well call him a Johannes Factotum. Now, in the internal evidence furnished by these four comedies, and in the collateral circumstances which we know regarding them, there is literally nothing to show that they might not as well have been written before Shakspere was twenty-eight, that is, before 1592, as that they were written after that year. We know, absolutely, that these, as well as many more of Shakspere's plays, were written before 1598. Francis Meres, in his Wit's Treasury,' printed in 1598, after describing Shakspere as the most excellent for comedy and tragedy among the English' says, For comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love's Labour Won,* his Midsummer Night's Dream, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy, his Richard II., Richard III., Henry IV., King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet.' If we add Henry VI. and Pericles, we have seventeen plays produced (according to Malone and all the other authorities who make him begin to write in 1591) in seven years. But let us place the doubtful plays of Titus Andronicus and Pericles, and the unquestionably early comedies of the Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour Lost, the Comedy of Errors, and the Midsummer Night's Dream, in the six years before his biographers and critics have made him a writer for the stage-that is, between his twenty-first and twenty-sixth years-and we have eight of the histories, two of the comedies, and Romeo and Juliet, to occupy the remaining eight years. between 1590 and the publication of Meres's list. This, we apprehend, is a more probable division of the poet's labours than that ordinarily received. With all his fertility, the power of writing seventeen plays in seven years is a more extraordinary circumstance than that he should have written six of those plays before he was twenty-six.

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

If it is asked what principle is overthrown by making Shakspere a great dramatic writer before he was twenty-six, we reply, no principle whatever; nothing but the monstrous absurdity that having run away from Stratford for deer-stealing, he gained a living by holding horses at the door of the theatre, during the period when we think he was earning the reputation of the only shake-scene in the country.' There is, indeed, a theory of Malone's developed in more than a hundred pages of his Life of Shakspere, that some laudatory verses of Spenser, in his Tears of the Muses,' could not apply to Shakspere, as by some has been supposed,' because they would ascertain that he had acquired a considerable share of celebrity as a writer, some years before the end of 1590, when that piece was first published.' The 'some' who applied these verses to Shakspere were Dryden and Rowe. In our Life of Shakspere we shall have to examine this question minutely. In the mean time we give the three stanzas which Dryden 'supposed' to apply only to Shakspere; and we ask if Thalia, the muse of comedy, (who is speaking,) might not pay this compliment to the author of the Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour Lost, the Comedy of Errors, and the Midsummer Night's Dream, rather than to Lylly, the fantastic author of Euphues, whom Malone would make Spenser call

"The man whom Nature selfe had made

To mock her selfe."

Conjectured to be another name for All's Well that Ends Well.

These stanzas, which are as follow, were given by Rowe in his first edition of the Life of Shakspere, but were subsequently omitted without any reason being assigned :

"And HE, the man whom Nature selfe had made

To mock her selfe, and truth to imitate

With kindly counter, under mimick shade,
Our pleasaunt Willy, ah, is dead of late;
With whom all joy and jolly merriment
Is also deaded, and in dolour drent.

"Instead thereof, scoffing scurrilitie,

[ocr errors]

And scornful follie, with contempt is crept,
Rolling in rymes of shameles ribaudrie,
Without regard or due decorum kept:
Each idle wit at will presumes to make,
And doth the learneds taske upon him take.

But that same gentle spirit, from whose pen
Large streames of honnie and sweet nectar flowe,
Scorning the boldnes of such base-borne men,

Which dare their follies forth so rashlie throwe,
Doth rather choose to sit in idle cell,

Than so him selfe to mockerie to sell.'

"The critics and commentators appear to have agreed that Shakspere, whose mental powers were bestowed upon him in the extremest prodigality of Nature, was of wonderfully slow growth towards a capacity for intellectual production. They have all amused themselves with imagining his careful progress, from holding horses at the play-house door, to the greater dignity of a candle-snuffer within its walls, till in some lucky hour, when his genius was growing vigorous-that is, at the age of twenty-seven-be produced a play. They have little doubt that Shakspere was in London, and connected with the theatre as early as 1584; but then he had been a deer-stealer, and had seven years of probation to undergo! There was nothing extraordinary in Ben Jonson writing for the stage when he was only nineteen ;* but then Shakspere, you know, was an untutored genius, &c. &c.! A great deal of this monstrous trash has been swept away by the exertions of a gentleman equally distinguished for his acuteness and industry. It has been discovered by Mr. Collier,+ that in 1589, when Shakspere was only twenty-five, he was a joint proprietor in the Blackfriars theatre, with a fourth of the other proprietors below him in the list. He had, at twenty-five, a standing in society; he had the means, without doubt, of maintaining his family; as he advanced in the proprietorship of the same theatre, he realized a fortune. How had he been principally occupied from the time he left Stratford, to have become, somewhat rapidly, a person of importance amongst his friends and fellows?' We think, by making himself useful to them, beyond all comparison with others, by his writings. He may have begun badly; he may have written, wholly or in part, Andronicus and Pericles. But even in those plays there is writing such as no other but Shakspere could have produced. We are apt always to measure Shakspere with himself, because we have been unaccustomed to look at him as a boy-writer. Ben Jonson, in his Induction to Bartholomew Fair, first acted in 1614, makes the speakers say, 'He that will swear Jeronimo, or Andronicus, are the best plays, yet shall pass unexcepted at here, as a man whose judgment shows it is constant, and hath stood still these five-and-twenty or thirty years.' Five-andtwenty years before this time Shakspere was in his twenty-fifth year; and whether he wrote or altered Andronicus, he was two years younger than at the period when Malone considers that he commenced as a writer for the stage. Dr. Percy conjectures that Andronicus was not Shakspere's, because Jonson refers it to a period when our poet was only twenty-five. We think the passage proves that Shakspere had written or revised Andronicus, amongst other plays, before he was twenty-five. If we take the extreme period mentioned by Jonson, Andronicus might have been produced by the Shakspere of twenty.

*Gifford's Jonson, vol i. p. 208.

+ New facts regarding the Life of Shakspere,.p. 32.
Reliques, vol. i. p. 237. ed. 1799.

"It appears to us, then, not improbable that even before Shakspere left Stratford, he had attempted some play or plays which had become known to the London players. Thomas Greene, who, in 1586, was the fourth on the list of the Blackfriars shareholders, was Shakspere's fellow townsman. In one of the old come

dies, where Greene speaks in the character of a clown, he says

"I prattled poesie in my nurse's arms,

And, born where late our Swan of Avon sung,

In Avon's stream we both of us have laved."

In the register of the parish of Stratford there is also an entry of the burial of "Thomas Greene, alias Skaxspere," in 1589. This was probably the player's father; and he might, from the alias, be a relation of William Shakspere. But the young poet might have found another and more important friend in the Blackfriars company :-Richard Burbage, the great actor, who in his own day was called 'the English Roscius,' was also of Shakspere's county. In a letter of Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, (written about 1608,) introducing Burbage and Shakspere to the chancellor, it is said: They are both of one county, and, indeed, almost of one town.' It is perfectly clear, therefore, that Shakspere, from the easy access that he might have procured to these men, would have received inviting offers to join them in London, provided he had manifested any ability which would be useful to them. It seems pretty certain that he was never very eminent as a player. He might have originally joined the Blackfriars company in that vocation; but it appears much more probable that he should have previously asserted his claim to the character of a dramatic poet, by the production of some original composition. Looking, then, carefully at all of his dramas which may be indisputably considered as early productions, we have little doubt that the Two Gentlemen of Verona was produced by him as his first complete comedy. We should consider it his first complete play, if Pericles did not exist. We have Dryden's evidence that

'Shakspere's own muse his Pericles first bore.'

Let us read that play, as we ought to read the Two Gentlemen of Verona, as the work of a very young mau, and we shall see in each of them beauties such as no other young man could have produced."

If nothing could satisfy Malone in fixing the date but some approximative circumstance, he might have found several that would have suited just as well as Elizabeth's military aid sent to Henry IV. in 1591, and Raleigh's expedition to Guiana; and this, too, ten or twenty years earlier. In 1562, the fourth year of Elizabeth's reign, she sent over an army under the Earl of Warwick to assist the French Protestants; and from that time down to the year 1598, when the tolerant edict of Nantes was granted to the Huguenots, troops of English gentlemen, sometimes with and sometimes without the queen's consent, were constantly flocking to France to learn the art of war, and “try their fortunes there.” Sir Walter Raleigh himself went over as early as 1569 to commence his military education: and there went with him a troop of a hundred gentlemen volunteers-" a gallant company,' says De Thou, nobly mounted and accoutred." The diplomatic correspondence of the period preserved in the "Compleat Ambassador of Dudley Digges, in the Burleigh Papers, and other collections of state papers, are crowded for more than twenty years with the complaints of the French court at this constant presence of English soldiers of fortune, and of courtly youths who fought on the side of their rebellious subjects, as they called the French Protestants.

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

Again, in another direction, the contest between the Protestants of the Low Countries and the Spaniards began as early as 1564, and from that

* These lines are quoted by Chetwood in his British Theatre. Steevens thinks them a forgery; Malone pronounces them authentic.

† Collier, New Facts, p. 33.

period down to the close of the century, ardent young Englishmen went continually over to those wars, "to try their fortunes there." Surely the year 1585, when Leicester and Sydney went over to the Netherlands with five thousand English foot, and one thousand English horse, and a host of English youths of rank, might have suited Malone for fixing the date of the play just as well as 1591, (six years later,) when Essex passed over to France with a much less notable expedition.

But there was another country (God help it!) where there was plenty of war and trying of fortune on the part of English youths. This was Ireland, whither they went in shoals, in the hopes of enriching themselves in the conquest of Ulster, and the other parts still occupied by the natives. In 1573, when the father of Essex went over, his little army was chiefly composed of volunteers, young men of good family, who served at their own expense; and when the Lord Grey of Wilton was appointed deputy or lord-lieutenant, he took with him a great number of English youths, who served on the same conditions, and with the same hopes, to make their fortune there." Raleigh, no longer a youth, but the captain of a company, served under his lordship, and the poet Spenser filled a civil situation. And then, as to the other pursuit-to" discover islands far away"-why, the youths of England had been discovery mad at least ever since the year 1573, when Drake returned loaded with spoil from the isthmus of Darien and the Spanish Main. In 1577, when the great sailor went out on that expedition, in the course of which he circumnavigated the globe, and discovered many an island "far away," he was accompanied by many gentlemen, most of them being young men of noble families, younger brothers, who were eager to learn the art of navigation and to better their fortunes. Their example was followed by many other youths, who embarked with various commanders. And it is at the least a curious coincidence that in the year 1585, (the very year in which Leicester and Sydney went to the Netherlands,) Thomas Cavendish, the son of a gentleman of fortune in Suffolk, set sail for the new world entirely on his own account, and with a crew and officers who were chiefly youths of superior condition. In the following year, 1586, having sold or mortgaged all his property in England to raise money for the outlay, Cavendish equipped three vessels, manned them with adventurous youths, and commenced another voyage, which was much talked of at the time, and which, in the course of two years and a month, led him round the globe. This was a voyage far more likely to lead to undiscovered islands than Raleigh's expedition to Guiana in 1591, which was not a voyage of discovery at all, nor one got up by the youths of England, or marked by the romantic character which was likely to take a hold on the imagination of the poet. If we are not mistaken, these hasty considerations will induce the reader to believe that Malone's arbitrary way of fixing a date by the two lines quoted is altogether unsatisfactory, and that the said lines may very well (or much better) have been written five or six years earlier. We have no doubt whatever that the present editor, when he comes to the life of the poet, (which we look for with some eagerness,) will be able fully to make out his theory on this head, and also to clear up several other difficulties which have arisen out of misconceptions and unsupported assumptions. For the present we must take our leave of him but ere we do so, we will give two other short extracts from his "Introductory Notice."

"It may be convenient, in this place, very briefly to state our general views as to the chronology of Shakspere's plays.

"The evidence of Meres appears to us of the highest importance, in fixing a period at which we may make a large division of the great poet's labours. In 1598, we find that Shakspere had produced seventeen dramas, including the disputed plays of Pericles and Titus Andronicus, and three parts of Henry VI. This period is a middle division in Shakspere's literary life. Our opinion, contrary to that of Malone,

6

is, that he had acquired a considerable share of celebrity as a writer when Spenser published his Tears of the Muses,' in 1590;-that he had then produced, in addition to the writing or the revision of Pericles and Titus Andronicus, four or perhaps five comedies; if five, we will include the Merchant of Venice. In the period between 1590 and 1598, all his English historical plays were written, with the exception of Henry V. and Henry VIII. If Spenser described his pleasaunt Willy' as sitting in idle cell,' the great dramatist might be preparing his Histories,' in the desire to bring forward, systematically, a species of entertainment that should stem the popular attraction of the ugly barbarism and brutal ignorance' of those bombastic tragedies which the Thalia of Spenser describes, and which we know held possession of the stage of that period. During the interval from 1590 to 1598, we assume, upon Meres's authority, that he produced only one comedy, and one tragedy, (Romeo and Juliet,) in addition to those already assigned to the first half of his career as a dramatic poet. To the second great division of this career, from 1599 to 1613, or 1614, we have to assign the remaining two of his histories,Henry V. and Henry VIII.;-eight comedies,-the Merry Wives, Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, the Winter's Tale, Measure for Measure, the Tempest, and Twelfth Night; and ten tragedies,―Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, Lear, Cymbeline, Macbeth, Julius Cæsar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Othello. Meres said, in 1598, that as Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakspere, among the English, is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage. Let us, in addition to what Shakspere had written when he received from Francis Meres this contemporary praise, regard the glorious works which he produced in the second period of his dramatic life, and we cannot hesitate to assign him a place,

"Above all Greek, above all Roman fame."

The next passage has reference to the proper way of spelling the poet's name—a subject upon which there has been a deal of disputation!

"We have placed at the head of this notice the autograph of WILLM SHAKSPERE,' which we have been permitted to copy from his undoubted signature in the volume of Montaigne's Essays, by John Florio, which has been recently purchased, for a large sum, by the Trustees of the British Museum. This autograph has set at rest the long-disputed question of the mode in which the poet wrote his name. Sir Frederic Madden has satisfactorily shown, in a letter published in the Archæologia, vol. 27, that in the five other acknowledged genuine signatures in existence, namely, in the three attached to his will, and the two affixed to deeds connected with the mortgage and sale of a property in Blackfriars, the poet always wrote his name SHAKSPERE, and, consequently, that those who have inserted an e after the k, or an a in the second syllable, do not write the name (as far as we are able to judge) in the same manner as the poet himself uniformly would authorise us to do. In the Stratford Register, both at his baptism and burial, the name is spelt Shakspere. The printers, however, during his life, and in the folio of 1623, spell his name Shakespeare. In this edition, after much consideration, we have determined to follow the authority of the poet's autograph.

The Heir of Selwood. By the Authoress of "Mothers and Daughters," &c.

Of all Mrs. Gore's clever, sparkling novels, we are inclined to consider this, the last, as the very best. Her fine, tranchant satire was never so powerful and so well directed! The personges, or rather the classes upon which it falls, richly deserve the castigation. Well will it be for them and society at large if it produce pain and penitence, and amendment ! Certainly it is meant in no malicious spirit, nor is it ever: the bitter outpouring of one who despairs of human improvement or the destinies of her country. As usual in Mrs. Gore's writings, there is as much pathos and gentle writing as satire; and an exceedingly well-conducted plot brings out numerous scenes of deep and dramatic interest. Several of the

« السابقةمتابعة »