No More Learning

When the list of uncertain certainties is overstepped,
and men begin to construct out of the Sonnets a history of the
course of untrue love in both cases, and endeavour to extend this
history into something like a cipher chronicle of a great part of
Shakespeare's life, we have, obviously, passed into cloudland.
There is no limit to the interpretations possible to a tolerably
lively fancy; and the limitless becomes more infinitely unlimited
in respect to the criticisms and countercriticisms of these inter-
pretations themselves.
On the other hand, it is possible to lay rather too much stress
on the possibility of there being no interpretation at all or very
little, of the Sonnets being merely, or mainly, literary exercises.
It is, of course, perfectly true that the form, at this time, was an
extremely fashionable exercise; and, no doubt, in some cases, a
fashionable exercise merely. It is further true that, great as are
the poetical merits and capacities of the sonnet, historically it has
been, and from its nature was almost fated to be, more the prey
of
'common form' than almost any other variety of poetic composi-
tion. The overpowering authority of Petrarch started this common
form; and his Italian and French successors, enlarging it to a
certain extent, stereotyped and conventionalised it even still more.
It is perfectly possible to show, and has been well shown by Sidney
Lee, that a great number, perhaps the majority, of sonnet phrases,
sonnet thoughts, sonnet ornaments, are simply coin of the sonnet
realm, which has passed from hand to hand through Italian, French
and English, and circulates in the actual Elizabethan sonnet like
actual coin in the body politic or like blood in the body physical.
All this is true. But it must be remembered that all poetry deals
more or less in this common form, this common coin, this circu-
lating fluid of idea and image and phrase, and that it is the very
ethos, nay, the very essence, of the poet to make the common as if
it were not common. That Shakespeare does so here again and
again, in whole sonnets, in passages, in lines, in separate phrases,
there is a tolerable agreement of the competent. But we may,
without rashness, go a little further even than this. That Shake-
speare had, as, perhaps, no other man has had, the dramatic faculty,
the faculty of projecting from himself things and persons which were
not himself, will certainly not be denied here. But whether he could
create and keep up such a presentation of apparently authentic and
personal passion as exhibits itself in these Sonnets is a much more
difficult question to answer in the affirmative. The present writer


## p. 231 (#255) ############################################

The Dramatic Element in the Sonnets 231
is inclined to echo seriously a light remark of one of Thackeray's
characters on a different matter: 'Don't think he could do it.
Don't think anyone could do it. '
At the same time, it is of the first importance to recognise
that the very intensity of feeling, combined, as it was, with the
most energetic dramatic quality, would, almost certainly, induce
complicated disguise and mystification in the details of the pre-
sentment. It was once said, and by no mere idle paradoxer, that
the best argument for the identity of the dark lady and Mary Fitton
was that Mistress Fitton, apparently, was a blonde. In other words,
to attempt to manufacture a biography of Shakespeare out of
the Sonnets is to attempt to follow a will-o'-the-wisp. It is even
extremely probable that a number, and perhaps a large number,
of them do not correspond to any immediate personal occasion
at all, or only owe a remote (and literally occasional) impulse
thereto. The strong affection for the friend; the unbounded,
though not uncritical, passion for the lady; and the establishment
of a rather unholy 'triangle' by a cross passion between these two-
these are things which, without being capable of being affirmed as
resting on demonstration, have a joint literary and psychological
probability of the strongest kind. All things beyond, and all the
incidents between, which may have started or suggested individual
sonnets, are utterly uncertain. Browning was absolutely justified
when he laid it down that, if Shakespeare unlocked his heart in
the Sonnets, the less Shakespeare he. ' That the Sonnets testify
'
to a need of partial unlocking, that they serve as 'waste' or over-
flow, in more or less disguised fashion, to something that was not
unlocked, but which, if kept utterly confined, would have been
mortal, may be urged without much fear of refutation. We
see the heart (if we see it at all) through many thicknesses of
cunningly coloured glass. But the potency and the variety of its
operation are, however indistinctly, conveyed; and we can under-
stand all the better how, when the power was turned into other,
and freer, channels, it set the plays a-working.
To pass to more solid ground, the Sonnets have some me-
chanical, and many more not mechanical, peculiarities. The chief
of the first class is a device of constantly, though not invariably,
beginning with a strong caesura at the fourth syllable, and a
tendency, though the sonnet is built up of quatrains alternately
rimed with final couplet, to put a still stronger stop at the end of
the second line (where, as yet, is no rime), and at each second line
of these non-completed couplets throughout. The piece is thus


## p. 232 (#256) ############################################

232
Shakespeare: Poems
6
elaborately built up or accumulated, not, as sonnets on the octave
and sestet system often are, more or less continuously wrought in
each of their two divisions or even throughout. This arrangement
falls in excellently with the intensely meditative character of the
Sonnets. The poet seems to be exploring; feeling his way in the
conflict of passion and meditation. As fresh emotions and medita-
tions present themselves, he pauses over them, sometimes entertain-
ing them only to reject them or to qualify them later; sometimes
taking them completely to himself. Even in the most artificial,
such as sonnet 66, where almost the whole is composed of succes-
sive images of the wrong way of the world, each comprised in a
line and each beginning with 'and,' this accumulative character
is noticeable; and it constitutes the strongest appeal of the
greatest examples. While, at the same time, he avails himself
to the full of the opportunity given by the English form for a
sudden "turn'-antithetic, it may be, or, it may be, rapidly sum-
marising-in the final couplet. Of course, these mechanical or
semi-mechanical peculiarities are not universal. He varies them
with the same infinite ingenuity which is shown in his blank verse;
so that, as for instance in the beautiful sonnet 71, the first two
quatrains are each indissoluble, woven in one piece from the first
syllable to the last. But the general characteristics have been
correctly enough indicated in what has been said above.
Still, the attraction of the Sonnets, almost more than that of
any other poetry, consists in the perpetual subduing of everything
in them—verse, thought, diction—to the requirements of absolutely
perfect poetic expression. From the completest successes in which,
from beginning to end, there is no weak point, such as
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,
or
Let me not to the marriage of true minds,
through those which carry the perfection only part of the way,
such as
When in the chronicle of wasted time,
>
down to the separate batches of lines and clauses which appear in
all but a very few, the peculiar infusing and transforming power
of this poetical expression is shown after a fashion which it has
proved impossible to outvie. The precise subject (or, perhaps,
it would be more correct to say the precise object) of the verse
disappears. It ceases to be a matter of the slightest interest
whether it was Mr W. H. or Mistress M. F. or anybody or nobody


## p. 233 (#257) ############################################

Lesser Poems
233
at all, so that we have only an abstraction which the poet chooses
to regard as concrete. The best motto for the Sonnets would be
one taken from not the least profound passage of the Paradiso of
Dante
Qui si rimira nell'arte ch' adorna
Con tanto affetto.
And this admiration of the art of beautiful expression not only
dispenses the reader from all the tedious, and probably vain,
enquiries into particulars which have been glanced at, but positively
makes him disinclined to pursue them.
The lesser poems, if only because of their doubtfulness, may be
dealt with more shortly. A Lover's Complaint, by whomsoever
written, must have been an early poem, but shows good powers in
its writer. The rime royal, of which it is composed, is of the same
general type as that of Lucrece, but has a few lines superior to any
in the larger and more certain poem, such as the well known last
And new peryert a reconciled maid,
or the fine, and quite Shakespearean, second line in
O father! what a hell of witchcraft lies
In the small orb of one particular tear!
The jilted and betrayed damsel who is the heroine and spokes-
woman has sparks of personal character. Of The Passionate
Pilgrim pieces, not already known as Shakespeare's, or assigned
to others, the two Venus and Adonis sonnets might be either
suggested by the authentic poem to someone else or alternative
studies for a different treatment of it by Shakespeare himself;
and it is hardly possible to say of any of the rest that it cannot
be, or that it must be, his. There are flashes of beauty in most of
them; but, considering the way in which such flashes of beauty are
shot and showered over and through the poetry of 1590-1610,
this goes but a little way, or, rather, no way at all, towards identifi-
cation. As for The Phoenix and the Turtle, the extreme meta-
.
physicality of parts of it-
Property was thus appalled
That the self was not the same; etc. -
is by no means inconceivable in the Shakespeare of Love's Labour's
Lost and of some of the Sonnets. The opening lines, and some of
those that follow, are exceedingly beautiful, and the contrast of
melody between the different metres of the body of the poem and
the concluding threnos is 'noble and most artful. '


## p. 234 (#258) ############################################

234 Shakespeare: Poems
Inasmuch, moreover, as some of these minor and doubtful pieces
draw very close to the songs in the plays, and actually figure in their
company under the thievish wand of Hermes-Jaggard, it cannot be
very improper to take them slightly into account, with the songs and
certainly assigned poems, as basis for a short connected survey of
Shakespeare's poetical characteristics in non-dramatic verse. One
of these, which is extremely remarkable, and which has been also
noted in his dramatic verse, is the uniform metrical mastery. This,
when you come to compare the two classical narratives, the Sonnets
and the songs with their possible companions among the doubtful
minors, is extraordinary. Neither Chaucer nor Spenser was good
at light lyrical measures, admirable and beyond admiration as both
were in regard to non-lyrical verse, and accomplished, as was at
least Spenser, in the more elaborate and slowly moving lyric. In
fact, it may almost be said that neither tried them. Shakespeare
tries them with perfect success; while his management of the
sixain and septet is more than adequate, and his management of
the English form of sonnet absolutely consummate. This lesser
exhibition (as some would call it) of his universality-this univer-
sality in form—is surely well worth noting; as is, once more, the
unusually lyrical character of some of his stanza work itself, and
the likeness to his blank verse lines of not a few things both in
stanza and in sonnet. This polymetric character has since become
more and more common because poets have had examples of it
before them. But it is first strongly noteworthy in Shakespeare.
Of the matter that he put into these forms, perhaps the first
thing that ought to be remarked is that most of it certainly, and
nearly all of it (except the later play songs) probably, dates from
a very early period in his literary life; and the second, that the
range of direct subject is not large. From this, enough having been
said of the other productions, we may pass to the third observa-
tion: that in the Sonnets the absolute high water mark of poetry is
touched, at least for those who believe with Patrizzi, and Hazlitt,
and Hugo, that poetry does not so much consist in the selection of
subject as in the peculiar fashion of handling the subject chosen.
What their exact meaning may be is one question, with, as has
been shown in practice, a thousand branches to it. It is a 'weary
river,' and, probably, there is no place where that river "comes safe
to sea' at all. Whether or not we wish, with Hallam, that they had
never been written must be a result of the personal equation. But
that, in the Longinian sense of the Sublime, they 'transport' in their
finest passages as no other poetry does except the very greatest,
<


## p. 235 (#259) ############################################

The Passion of the Sonnets 235
and as not so very much other poetry does at all, may be said to be
settled. If anyone is not transported by these passages, it is not
impertinent to say that he must be like the heavier domestic
fowls' of Dr Johnson's ingenious and effective circumlocution-
rather difficult to raise by external effort and ill furnished with
auxiliary apparatus for the purpose.
The poems other than the Sonnets are either tentative essays
or occasional 'graciousnesses' for a special purpose; the Sonnets
themselves have such an intensity of central fire that no human
nature, not even Shakespeare's, could keep it burning, and sur-
round it with an envelope able to resist and yet to transmit the
heat, for very long. Fortunately, experiment and faculty both
found another range of exercise which was practically unlimited;
fortunately, also, they did not find it without leaving us record
of their prowess in this.


## p. 236 (#260) ############################################

CHAPTER X
PLAYS OF UNCERTAIN AUTHORSHIP ATTRIBUTED
TO SHAKESPEARE
THE foundations of the Shakespearean apocrypha were laid
while the dramatist was still alive, when a number of plays, in the
composition of most of which he could have had no hand, were
entered upon the Stationers' register as his, or were published
with his name or initials on the title-page. Against the laying of
these foundations Shakespeare, so far as we know, raised no protest.
In any case, it is upon them that the ascriptions of publishers and
others in the generation that followed his death, and the theories
advanced by students of the Elizabethan drama during the last two
centuries, have built up a superstructure so massive that the total
of the plays of more or less uncertain authorship attributed to
Shakespeare already equals in quantity that of the accepted canon.
Disregarding those plays—six in all—which were claimed by
their publishers as Shakespeare's, but which have since been lost,
we may attempt the following classification. First, plays which
were published during Shakespeare's lifetime with his name, or
initials, upon the title-page: Locrine (published in 1595); The
first part of the . . . life of Sir John Oldcastle (1600); The whole
life and death of Thomas Lord Cromwell (1602); The London
Prodigall (1605); The Puritane (1607); A Yorkshire Tragedy
(1608); Pericles (1609). Two of these plays do not concern us here:
Sir John Oldcastle, part I, has been assigned, on the evidence of
an entry in Henslowe's diary, to the joint authorship of Munday,
Drayton, Wilson and Hathwaye; and certain parts of Pericles have
been almost universally recognised as the work of Shakespeare.
A second class comprises three plays which were published after
Shakespeare's death with his name, as sole or joint author, upon the
title-page : The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England
(published as Shakespeare's in 1622, after having been issued anony-
mously in 1591); The Two Noble Kinsmen (published as the work
of Fletcher and Shakespeare in 1634); and The Birth of Merlin
(“written by William Shakespear and William Rowley,' 1662).


## p. 237 (#261) ############################################

The Evidence mainly Internal 237
Again, three plays have been attributed to him on the very
slender evidence that they were discovered bound up together in
a volume in Charles II's library, labelled 'Shakespeare, vol. I. '
These are Mucedorus (first published, anonymously, in 1598); The
Merry Devill of Edmonton (1608); and Faire Em (1631)'. None
of these was included in the third folio edition of Shakespeare's
works, which appeared in 1664, and which added to the thirty-six
plays of the first folio the seven plays first mentioned above.
The last class of plays of uncertain authorship attributed to
Shakespeare will comprise those which have been assigned to him
since the beginning of the eighteenth century on the basis of internal
evidence. The number of plays which could be brought under this
heading is very large, but only three of them-Edward III,
Arden of Feversham and Sir Thomas More-can be included here.
Two other plays—The First Part of the Contention and The True
Tragedie of Richard, Duke of Yorke—also fall into this division;
but these, like The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England
mentioned above, have been treated in a preceding chapter?
In considering the question of Shakespeare's share in any
of
the above plays, it is unfortunate that our main evidence has
to be sought in the plays themselves. The appearance of his
name on the Stationers' register, or on the title-page of a play,
is of interest as showing the extent of his popularity with the
reading public of his time, but is no evidence whatever that the
play is his. On the other hand, it is uncritical to reject a play
as Shakespeare's solely because it does not find a place in the
first folio of 1623. Valuable as that edition is as a standard of
authenticity, it does not include Pericles, portions of which are
almost unanimously claimed for Shakespeare, while it includes
The First Part of Henry VI, portions of which are just as
unanimously believed not to be his. There remains, therefore,
the evidence furnished by the plays themselves-evidence which,
for the most part, consists in the resemblances which these plays
bear, in respect of diction and metre, characterisation and plot
construction, to the accepted works of Shakespeare. Such evidence,
confessedly, is unsatisfactory and leaves the whole question under
the undisputed sway of that fickle jade, Opinion.
But the question of Shakespearean authorship is not the only
point of interest presented by the doubtful plays. So varied in
1 There is an undated quarto edition of Faire Em which C. F. Tucker Brooke
considers older than that of 1631 . by perhaps a generation or more' (Shakespeare
Apocrypra, p. xxxviii).
· Chap. vi.
1


## p. 238 (#262) ############################################

238
Plays attributed to Shakespeare
character are the works which go to form the Shakespearean
apocrypha, that they may fairly be said to furnish us with an
epitome of the Elizabethan drama during the period of its
greatest achievement. Almost every class of play is here repre-
sented, and one class—that of domestic tragedy-finds, in Arden
of Feversham and in A Yorkshire Tragedy, two of its most
illustrious examples. The Senecan tragedy of vengeance is repre-
sented by Locrine; the history or chronicle play by Edward III,
The First Part of the Contention, The True Tragedie, The
Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England, Sir Thomas More
and Cromwell, and, less precisely, by The Birth of Merlin and
Faire Em. The romantic comedy of the period is illustrated by
Mucedorus, The Merry Devill and The Two Noble Kinsmen,
while The London Prodigall and The Puritane are types of that
realistic bourgeois comedy which, in Stewart days, won a firm hold
upon the affections of the play-going community.
Of the apocryphal tragedies, the earliest in date of composition
was, probably, Locrine, which, when published by Thomas Creede,
in 1595, was described as 'newly set foorth, overseene and corrected,
By W. S. ' The initials, probably, were intended to convey the
impression of Shakespearean authorship, but nowhere in the five
acts is there the faintest trace of Shakespeare's manner. The
words 'newly set foorth, overseene and corrected' indicate that
Locrine was an old play revised in 1595; and in the number of
revised passages must be included the reference in the epilogue to
queen Elizabeth as
that renowned maid
That eight and thirty years the sceptre swayed.
A feature of the play, pointed out by Crawford? and by Koeppel? ,
and discussed in an earlier chapter, is that some of its verses
reappear almost unchanged in Selimus (1594), and, also, that both
of these plays have imported a number of verses from Spenser's
Ruines of Rome, published in 1591. But, if Locrine, as verse,
diction and plot construction lead us to suppose, was written
before 1590, it is probable that the lines borrowed from Spenser
do not belong to the original edition, but only to the revised
version of 1595.
The play, while yielding to popular taste in respect of stage
action, neglect of the unities and the mingling of kings and
1 Notes and Queries, 1901, Nos. 161, 163, 165, 168, 171, 174, 177.
2 Locrine und Selimus,' Shakespeare Jahrbuch, vol. XLI, pp. 193—200. As to the
relations between Locrine and Selimus, see ante, chap. iv.


## p. 239 (#263) ############################################

Locrine
239
clowns, is, in its main outlines, a Senecan revenge tragedy; and, in
its adaptation of a theme drawn from early British history to the
Senecan manner, it is the direct successor of Gorboduc and The
Misfortunes of Arthur. The story of Locrine, which is also told
by Lodge in his Complaint of Elstred and by Spenser in his
Faerie Queenel was found by the playwright in Geoffrey of
Monmouth's Historia Britonum and the Chronicles of Holinshed.
Weak in characterisation, and somewhat loose and episodic in
plot construction, the play, however, is by no means the caput
mortuum which Lamb declared it to be. It is full of youthful
vigour, and, amid much turgid declamation and a too ready in-
dulgence in Senecan horrors, contains passages of splendid rhetoric.
Sabren's lament to the mountain nymphs, the 'Dryades and light-
foot Satyri,' and the
gracious fairies which at evening tide
Your closets leave, with heavenly beauty stored? ,
is a noble anticipation of Comus, and Locrine's farewell to Estrild
in the same scene-
Farewell, fair Estrild, beauty's paragon,
Fram'd in the front of forlorn miseries;
Ne'er shall mine eyes behold thy sunshine eyes.
But when we meet in the Elysian fields,
advances with the pomp and rhythmic splendour of a legionary
march. The comic scenes, too, are full of vitality, and there are
elements in the character of Strumbo the clown that foretell both
Don Armado and Falstaff.
At different times, the play has been ascribed to Marlowe,
Greene and Peele respectively, and, of late, opinion has veered
strongly in the direction of Peele. But, while there are certain
resemblances of style to The Battell of Alcazar-if, indeed, that
anonymous play be Peele's—there are still more striking re-
semblances to the tragedies of Kyd, past master of that type of
Senecan revenge tragedy to which Locrine very closely approaches.
A comparative study of Locrine and The Spanish Tragedie
brings so many points of resemblance to light as to make it seem
probable that they are the works of the same author; and, in
support of this view, it may be noticed, incidentally, that the
two plays are coupled together in the ridicule which Jonson
metes out to Kyd in Poetaster: Locrine resembles The Spanish
Tragedie in the introduction of the goddess of Revenge, before
each act, in the notable use which is made of the Senecan
1 Book 11, canto 10, stanzas 13-19. 2 Act v, sc. 4. 3 Act II, sc. 1.


## p. 240 (#264) ############################################

240 Plays attributed to Shakespeare
ghost, in the constant appeal to, or tirade against, Fortune
and in the countless references to the horrors of the classic
underworld, with its three judges, Minos, Aeacus and Rhadamanth.
The Senecan rodomontade of The Spanish Tragedie, with its
lurid imagery and wild cries for vengeance, reappears, if possible
with heightened colours, in Locrine, together with the introduction
of Latin verses and even a stray phrase in the Spanish tongue.
There is, too, an affinity between the two plays in situation and
sentiment: just as, in The Spanish Tragedie, Horatio and Lorenzo
strive against each other for the possession of the captured prince
of Portugal, so, in Locrine, two soldiers dispute over the captured
Estrild; while the outraged Hieronimo's appeal to nature to
sympathise with him in his sorrow is echoed in the speech of the
ghost of Corineus? .
Arden of Feversham, apparently the earliest, and, beyond all
question, the highest, achievement of the Elizabethan age in the
field of domestic tragedy, was first claimed for Shakespeare by
Edward Jacob, a Faversham antiquary, who re-edited the play in
1770. Since then, it has passed through numerous editions, and,
engaging the notice of almost every Shakespearean critic, it has
called forth the most divergent views as to its authorship. The
play was entered on the Stationers' register as early as 3 April
1592, and was published anonymously in the same year with the
title, The Lamentable and True Tragedie of M. Arden of Fever-
sham in Kent; later quarto editions, also anonymous, appeared
in 1599 and 1633. The tragic incident upon which the drama is
based took place in 1551, and left so lasting a mark upon the
minds of men, that Raphael Holinshed, in the publication of his
Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, twenty-six years
later, devoted five pages to the story and recorded the details with
considerable dramatic power. The dramatist, although he makes
a few slight alterations and adds the character of Franklin, follows
Holinshed's narrative in all its essential aspects with scrupulous
fidelity. Writing, too, at a time when the exuberant style of
Marlowe and Kyd was in the ascendant, he exercises a marked
self-restraint. Here and there, the spirit of the age lifts him off
his feet-as, for instance, where he makes the ruffian Shakebag
discourse in superb poetry3; but, for the most part, he preserves that
austerity of manner which, he felt, the sordid theme demanded.
The exercise of this self-restraint, which often amounts to a
1 Act 1, sc. 2.
> Act v, sc. 4. As to Locrine, cf. ante, chap. IV.
3 Act II, 80. 2, 1-9.


## p. 241 (#265) ############################################

Arden of Feversham
241
cynical indifference to the principles of art, pertains to much
besides diction. The plot of the play, judged by the standard of
Shakespearean tragedy, is singularly devoid of constructive art; it
advances not by growth from within but by accretion from with-
out. One murderous plot against Arden's life follows another in
quick succession, and, as we see each attempt baffled in turn,
our sense of terror is changed to callousness, and the tragic effect
of the actual murder is, thereby, blunted. The repeated attempts
at murder, again, are merely so many episodes, and, as the drama
proceeds, we are not made to feel that the meshes of the con-
spirators' net are closing upon their prey. Except for the
exigencies of a five-act play, and the author's determination to
abridge none of the details of Holinshed's story, the murder of
Arden might very well have occurred at the end of the first act.
If our sense of terror is blunted by the nature of the plot, so,
also, is our pity for the victim. By reason of his stupidity and
insensate credulity, his avarice and his cruelty to Bradshaw and
Reede, Thomas Arden fails altogether to win our sympathy. The
dramatist, it is true, leaves unnoticed some of the charges brought
against him by Holinshed; but he makes no attempt whatever to
render him attractive, or to awaken our pity at his death. In all
this, we recognise the contrast to the manner of Shakespeare as
displayed, for example, in Macbeth Holinshed's Duncan arouses
as little sympathy as Holinshed's Arden, but Shakespeare, in his
regard for tragic pity, has made of Macbeth’s victim a hero and
a saint. Apart from the work of mere journeymen playwrights,
there is no play in the whole range of Elizabethan dramatic
literature which disregards tragic katharsis, alike in its terror
and its pity, so completely as Arden of Feversham.
But are we to ascribe this neglect of tragic katharsis to
obtuseness of dramatic vision? The marvellous power which the
playwright reveals in the handling of certain situations and the
deftness with which he introduces, now a touch of grim humour
and now a gleam of tragic irony, are sufficient indications that his
treatment of the story was deliberate. And, if any doubt remains
in our minds, we have only to turn to the closing words of the
play, in which the author defends his craftsmanship against all
attack:
Gentlemen, we hope you'll pardon this naked tragedy,
Wherein no filed points are foisted in
To make it gracious to the ear or eye;
For simple truth is gracious enough,
And needs no other points of glosing stuff.
E. L. V.
16
CH. X.


## p. 242 (#266) ############################################

242 Plays attributed to Shakespeare
The author of Arden of Feversham is not only the creator of
English domestic tragedy; he is, also, the first English dramatic
realist, and the first who refused to make nature bend beneath
the yoke of art. Delighting in the ‘simple truth' of Holinshed's
narrative, he refused to alter it-refused to reduce the number of
attempts on Arden's life or to make the victim of the tragedy a
martyr. And, in all this, he stands as a man apart, neither owning
allegiance to the recognised masters of English tragedy, Kyd
and Marlowe, nor claiming fellowship with the rising genius of
Shakespeare. It is impossible to believe that the author of Arden
is the author of Romeo and Juliet. True, there are lines, some-
times whole speeches, in the play which have something very
like the Shakespearean ring in them; and it is also true that
the play reveals, especially in the famous quarrel scene between
Alice Arden and Mosbie', a knowledge of the human heart
which the Shakespeare of 1592 might well have envied. But, in
1592, the temper of Shakespeare was not that of the austere
realist: he was ardent and romantic, a lover of rime and of
‘taffeta phrases,' a poet still in his pupilage, well content to follow
in the steps of his masters; and, in each of these respects, he
differs widely from the creator of Arden. Nor, finally, was it the
principle of Shakespeare, either in 1592 or at any other period of
his life, to place the record of history above art in the way that
the Arden dramatist has done. There is no rigidity in the materials
out of which Shakespeare has fashioned his plays; to him, all
things were ductile, and capable of being moulded into whatever
shape the abiding principles of the playwright's craft demanded.
A Yorkshire Tragedy resembles Arden of Feversham in its
unflinching realism, as well as in being a dramatisation of a tragic
occurrence in the annals of English domestic life.
The event
which it memorises took place at Calverley hall, Yorkshire, early
in 1605, and was recorded very fully by an anonymous pamphleteer,
very briefly by Stow in his Chronicle, by a ballad writer and,
lastly, by two dramatists—the authors of The Miseries of Inforst
Mariage and A Yorkshire Tragedy respectively. The former
play, which was first published in 1607, was by George Wilkins;
the latter, after being acted at the Globe theatre, was entered
on the Stationers' register on 2 May 1608, as 'by Wylliam
Shakespere,' and published in the same year with his name upon
the title-page. Wilkins, appalled by the tragic 'gloom of the
story, alters the facts and brings his play to a happy ending; but
the author of the ten short, breathless scenes which make up
1 Act III, sc. 5.


## p. 243 (#267) ############################################

A Yorkshire Tragedy
243
a
A Yorkshire Tragedy spares us none of the harrowing details.
Keeping very close to the version of the pamphleteer, he furnishes
a record of the last act in a rake's progress to the gallows,
and, delighting in the relentless analysis of criminality, sacrifices
everything for the sake of the criminal. The wife-a faintly-
outlined Griselda of the Yorkshire dales—the various 'gentlemen,'
and the ‘Master of a College,' are little more than lay-figures
grouped around the central character, the master of Calverley hall.
In him, we encounter a being of strange complexity of
character ; at first sight a mere wastrel and ruffian, we realise,
as the play advances, the tragic fascination that he exercises.
Brought to a sense of his evil ways by the Master of a College,
he expresses in soliloquy thoughts which carry with them a
haunting power: 'O, would virtue had been forbidden! We
should then have proved all virtuous ; for 'tis our blood to love
what we are forbidden. ' The soliloquy ended, a tragic surprise
awaits the reader: remorse, which seems to be driving the husband
to repentance, is suddenly turned in a new direction by the impulse
of ancestral pride; and, instead of a repentant sinner, we are
confronted with a murderer, red-handed with the blood of his own
children, whom he slays lest they shall live 'to ask an usurer
bread. ' The closing scene, though it contains Calverley's infinitely
pathetic speech, made over his children's corpses—
Here's weight enough to make a heart-string crack, . . .
is unequal to what has gone before.
There is no sufficient reason for ascribing the play to
Shakespeare. Powerful as it is, the workmanship is not Shake-
spearean, and the fact that a play written about 1606—7 should
introduce rime into some twenty-five per cent. of the total number
of verses is, in itself, it would appear, ample proof that the
ascription of the title-page is unwarranted!
Of the historical plays attributed to Shakespeare, but not
included in the first folio, the most important is Edward III.
The conjecture that he had a hand in this play was not put forward
during his lifetime, and rests entirely on internal evidence.
Edward III was first published, anonymously, in 1596, and a
second edition followed in 1599; but it was not until Capell
re-edited the play in his Prolusions (1760) that the claim íor
Shakespearean authorship was seriously put forward.
Written in verse throughout, the play opens with a scene which
is similar to the first scene of Henry V; but no sooner are the
1 As to the significance of Arden of Feversham and A Yorkshire Tragedy in the
history of English domestic drama, see post, vol. vi, chap. IV (Thomas Heywood).
16-2


## p. 244 (#268) ############################################

244
Plays attributed to Shakespeare
preparations for king Edward's foreign campaign begun than the
main action is impeded by the introduction of the romantic love
story of the king and the countess of Salisbury, which occupies
the rest of the first, and the whole of the second, act. Then, when
the monarch has at last conquered his adulterous passion, the
narrative of military conquest, with the prince of Wales as its
hero, is resumed, and proceeds, without further break, along the
path prescribed to the dramatist by Froissart and Holinsbed.
But, although the countess episode impairs the little unity of
action which this desultory chronicle play would otherwise have,
it must be remembered that that episode is no extraneous matter
foisted into the play for the sake of dramatic effect; the author
goes to Bandello, or, rather, to Bandello's English translator,
William Painter, for the details of the story, but the main outlines
of it are faithfully recorded by Froissart and subsequent chroniclers
of English history. If, however, the double plot of the play furnishes,
in itself, no reason for assuming double authorship, that assumption
must, nevertheless, be made on other and more substantial grounds.
In diction and verse, in the portrayal of character and in the
attainment of dramatic effect, the author of the love scenes stands
apart from the author of the battle scenes. The number of riming
verses and verses with double endings in the love scenes, is
considerably greater than in all the remainder of the play.
Soliloquy is unknown in the battle scenes, whereas, in the countess
episode, one-sixth of the total number of verses are spoken in
monologue. The love scenes are also distinguished from the rest
of the play by the strain of lyricism in which their author indulges ;
it would, indeed, be difficult to find in the whole range of Elizabethan
drama a passage more completely imbued with lyric feeling than that
in which Edward converses with Lodowick, his secretary! It is not
the tempestuous lyricism of Marlowe which we meet with here, but
the elegiac lyricism of the sonneteers, the unfeigned delight in the
play of amorous fancy and the fond lingering over airy sentiment.
Characteristics such as these isolate the countess episode from the
rest of the play, and, at the same time, associate it with much of
the early work of Shakespeare, above all with Romeo and Juliet.
But, in the absence of all external authority, it would be unsafe
to claim the episode for Shakespeare upon such evidence as this
alone; and the same may be said for the resemblances of idea,
imagery and cadence which many passages in these love scenes
bear to passages in his canonical works. If the claim for Shake-
spearean authorship is to be put forward at all, it must be based
1 Act 11, sc. 1.


## p. 245 (#269) ############################################

Edward III
245
-
upon those elements of Shakespeare's genius which ever elude the
grasp of the most skilful plagiarist—the creation of character, the
reaching after dramatic effect and the impalpable spirit of dramatic
art. It is in the person of the countess of Salisbury that the genius
of Shakespeare first seems to reveal itself, and it has been well
said that, without her, his gallery of female characters would be
incomplete. She is a woman as resolute in her chastity as the
Isabella of Measure for Measure, yet far more gracious and far
less austere. We have only to compare her with the Ida of Greene's
James IV to realise the masterly workmanship of the author of
Edward III. The situation in which the two women are placed
is almost identical; but, whereas Ida is a slight, girlish figure who,
for all her purity, has little save conventional commonplace where-
with to rebut the Scottish king's proffers, the countess rises in the
face of trial and temptation to supreme queenliness. And whereas,
in his presentation of the story, Greene wastes every opportunity
of bringing the love suit to a dramatic crisis, the author of the
countess episode displays the highest art of plot construction.
When we compare the dramatic version of the story with that
of the Italian novel, we realise at once the transforming touch of
a master artist. The action in Bandello extends over a considerable
period of time, during which the countess becomes a widow, but
persists, in spite of the importunities of her mother, in rejecting
the king's unlawful suit. At last, dagger in hand, she begs the
king to slay her, or let her slay herself, in order that her chastity
may be preserved. Then the king, impressed now by her fortitude
as before by her beauty, offers her his hand in marriage, and
the countess straightway accepts him as her husband. As we read
the play, we realise. how this Pamela ending offended the finer
taste of the dramatist. Going carefully over the incidents of the
story, he excises here, enlarges there, and, finally, brings his plot
to a crisis and dénouement quite unlike, and infinitely nobler than,
that of Bandello. The one dagger becomes two, and, in the
countess's simple but burning words to the lascivious king, we feel
ourselves in the presence of Shakespeare, and of Shakespeare
rising at one genial leap to the full stature of his divinity:
Here by my side do hang my wedding knives :
Take thon the one, and with it kill thy queen,
And learn by me to find her where she lies;
And with this other I'll despatch my love,
Which now lies fast asleep within my heart:
When they are gone, then I'll consent to love 1.
1 Act 11, sc. 2.


## p. 246 (#270) ############################################

246
Plays attributed to Shakespeare
A prime objection which has been brought against the
Shakespearean authorship of these scenes is that they break in
upon the action of the main story in a way that Shakespeare
would not have tolerated. But a close study of the countess
episode reveals the skill with which the dramatist has lessened
this defect. Throughout the episode we are made aware that the
preparations for the French campaign are proceeding, though the
king is wholly absorbed in his amour. At the beginning of act II,
8C. 2, Derby and Audley appear and inform their sovereign of the
mustering of men and of the emperor's goodwill. The drum
incident which follows, and which leads up to the entrance of the
Black Prince, the hero of the main story, effects, in masterly fashion,
the purpose of keeping the military scenes before the mind of the
spectator. The king's soliloquies, too, as he beholds first his son
all afire with military ardour, and then his secretary returning with
a message from the countess, produce a feeling of true dramatic
tension; and, as we see the monarch borne this way and that by
the impulse of contending passions, we realise once again the hand
of the master.
If we ascribe the countess episode to Shakespeare, there still
remains for consideration the difficult problem of determining the
nature of his task. The choice lies between collaboration of
Shakespeare with another dramatist and revision by Shakespeare
of a play already in existence. The latter theory seems the more
reasonable. The battle scenes, by virtue of their loose, episodic
character, point to a date previous to that reform of the chronicle
play which was effected by Marlowe's Edward II (c. 1590). If,
then, we may conjecture the existence of a pre-Edward III, it
may be further assumed that it contained already some rendering
of the countess episode. Without it, the play would be too brief,
and it is hard to believe that any dramatist, especially if he were
Robert Greene or a member of Greene's school, would have allowed
the romantic love story to pass unnoticed when reading the pages
of Froissart. It is reasonable to believe that, at some time
between 1590 and 1596, Shakespeare found himself engaged upon
a revision of this pre-Edward III chronicle play, and that, in
revising it, he left the story of the king's French wars practically
unaltered, but withdrew entirely the rendering of the countess
episode, substituting for it that pearl of great price which now lies
imbedded in the old chronicle play.
The Life and Death of Lord Cromwell and Sir Thomas More
are among the most notable examples in Elizabethan dramatic


## p. 247 (#271) ############################################

Cromwell and Sir Thomas More 247
literature of what has been called the biographical chronicle play-
an offshoot from the history or chronicle play proper, from which
it differs in that its theme is not the events of a reign but the
record of an individual life. Both of these plays have been
attributed to Shakespeare, the former because on the title-page
of the second edition of the play—that of 1613_stand the words,
written by W. S. ,' and the latter, partly on internal evidence,
and partly on the curious theory, first advanced by Richard
Simpson, that some of the passages in the original manuscript
of the play (Harleian MSS 7368) are in Shakespeare's handwriting.
Cromwell is so devoid of genuine dramatic and poetic power
as to make its ascription to Shakespeare little better than an
insult. The scenes hang loosely together, nowhere is there any
sign of real grasp of character, and only the racy humour of Hodge,
Cromwell's servant, saves it from abject dulness. The desultory
plot is taken from Foxe's Story of the Life of the Lord Cromwell
in the second volume of Actes and Monuments, and there is no
reason to believe that the dramatist went to Bandello for his
account of Cromwell's dealings with the Florentine merchant,
Frescobaldi. Foxe had already borrowed this story from the
Italian novelist, and the dramatic version, throughout, is faithful
to Foxe’s rendering of it. The conception of Cromwell as a popular
hero who, having risen to eminence, delights in remembering the
friends of his obscure youth, is, also, common to the biographer and
the dramatist, and both, again, agree in adopting a strongly, at
times blatantly, protestant standpoint. The studious omission
of Henry VIII from the characters of the play indicates that it
was written before the death of Elizabeth, and the general structure
and versification point to a date of composition anterior by some
years to its entry on the Stationers' register on 11 August 1602.
In every respect, Sir Thomas More is superior to Cromwell.
There is nothing to show that this play was ever published in
Elizabethan times; but the original manuscript is preserved in the
British Museum and was edited by Dyce for the Shakespeare
Society in 1844. The sources of the play, indicated by Dyce, are
Hall's Chronicle, and the biographies of More by his son-in-law,
William Roper, and his great-grandson, Cresacre More. The
dramatist shows considerable skill in the use of his materials, and
the plot, though episodic, approaches much nearer to dramatic
unity than that of Cromwell. The interest of the play lies chiefly
in the masterly and sympathetic portraiture of the great lord
1 The first edition appeared in the year 1602.


## p. 248 (#272) ############################################

248 Plays attributed to Shakespeare
a
chancellor. The idealism, the winning grace and fine sense of
humour, the large humanity and the courage under affliction,
which we associate with the name of Sir Thomas More, are
admirably brought out. The quotations from Seneca and other
Latin writers show that the author was a scholar, and the burden
of some of More's speeches reveals a political thinker of no mean
calibre. The introduction of the play within the play, together
with More's speeches to the actors and his insertion into their
scenes of an extempore speech of his own, is a curious anticipation
of Hamlet. But those who attribute portions of the play to
Shakespeare base their arguments not upon this, but upon the
view that certain scenes are in his handwriting, and that the
thought and diction of these scenes is unmistakably Shakespearean.
As our knowledge of Shakespeare's handwriting is limited to five
autograph signatures, it is difficult to attach great weight to the
theory of Simpson and Spedding that ‘hand D' in the More MS
is the hand of Shakespeare; and there is also a good deal of
difference of opinion among the experts as to how far ‘hand D'
extends. Simpson claimed for it act 11, sc. 3 and 4, 1-172;
act III, SC. 2 and 3. Subsequent investigators have detached some
of these scenes, and the latest opinion that of G. F. Warner,
the keeper of MSS in the British Museum—is that only act II,
SC. 4, 1-172 are in this hand. Since this passage is also
that on which the literary claim for Shakespearean authorship
mainly rests, a close examination of it is necessary. It tells the
story of the insurrection of London citizens against the Lombard
merchants settled in their midst, and contains the long and spirited
speech with which More quells the riot. The talk of the rioters in
the opening lines of the scene resembles, but is inferior to that
of Jack Cade's followers in Part II of Henry VI (act iv, sc.
2 and 3, and 6–8), and there was more than one dramatist in
the last decade of the sixteenth century who, having the Jack Cade
episode in mind, might have written these lines. The speech of More
which follows is full of vigour, and is of peculiar interest as giving
expression to the theory of the divinity of kings, which, in the
late Tudor period, had come to be a widely accepted tenet of
political faith. "God,' says More,
hath not only lent the king his figure,
His throne and sword, but giv’n him his own name,
Calls him a god on earth. What do you, then,
Rising gainst him that God himself installs,
But rise gainst God ? . . .


## p. 249 (#273) ############################################

Sir Thomas More and The Birth of Merlin 249
It may be said that a similar view as to the divinity of the
royal office is put forward by the aged bishop of Carlisle in
Richard II; but can it seriously be contended that this was Shake-
speare's own view? A scorner of democracy, he was far from being
a believer in the divinity of kings. He treats the theory with
mordant irony in Richard II, placing it on the lips of the
hapless king and proving its insufficiency by the remorseless
logic of subsequent events. In Henry V, he returns to the same
theme, and, in words which give forth no uncertain sound, makes
his hero declare: 'I think the king is but a man, as I am. . . all his
senses have but human conditions ; his ceremonies laid by, in his
nakedness he appears but a man? . '
The fact that Sir Thomas More was probably written about
the same time as Richard II, and only a few years before Henry V,
makes it hard to believe that such varying views as to the nature
of the kingly office could have been held by the same man. Nor
can escape from the difficulty be found by regarding More's speech
as merely dramatic. It is more than this : it is lyrical in tone and
doctrinaire in purpose ; and was probably intended to appease the
master of the revels, who, when the first draft of the MS had been
submitted to him, had demanded the excision of the whole of the
insurrection scene.
The Birth of Merlin: Or, The Childe hath found his Father
was first published in 1662 by the Restoration bookseller, Francis
Kirkman, who ascribed it to William Shakespear and William
Rowley. The play is a medley in which legendary history, love
romance, sententious praise of virginity, rough and tumble clown-
play, necromancy and all kinds of diablerie jostle each other, and
where British kings and English nobles, a hermit and a wizard,
the wraiths of Hector and Achilles, the devil, Lucina and the
three Fates, “a little antick spirit' and Joan Go-to-'t, the mother
of Merlin, are warring atoms contending for mastery over the
spectator's attention, and combining to produce a play which
defies classic rule utterly, but keeps at arm's length Pope's 'cloud-
compelling queen,' Dulness.
It is almost certain that more than one hand was engaged in
weaving this particoloured vesture; but Kirkman's association
of the play with the name of Shakespeare may be lightly dismissed.
At no point in the course of the five stirring acts are we
tempted, by plot construction, characterisation or style, to believe
in Shakespearean workmanship. On the other hand, it is highly
1 Act 111, sc. 2 and 3.
? Act 1v, sc. 1, 105–110.
!


## p. 250 (#274) ############################################

250
Plays attributed to Shakespeare
probable that William Rowley was one of its authors; the comic
scenes, alike in their coarseness and racy humour, exhibit his
manner, and it is also possible that some of the serious scenes
are his. The question of authorship involves a comparison of the
play with Middleton's Mayor of Quinborough, of which The Birth
of Merlin, in its main plot, is both a sequel and a copy. An
American scholar, F. A. Howe, has clearly shown that many of the
scenes of the Merlin play were written in imitation of similar
scenes in The Mayor, and that there is just as close an imitation
in the elaboration of some of the leading characters. The de-
pendence of the one play upon the other is certain; but, in spite
of occasional resemblances of style, it is hard to believe that a
dramatist of Middleton's acknowledged inventive power would
have repeated himself in so abject a manner as he has done, if
The Birth of Merlin be partly his work.
However this may be, it is probable that yet another hand may
be detected in its composition. A notable feature in the play is
the sacrifice which, in deference to the popular demand for realism,
has been made of the romantic elements in the Arthurian legend.
Yet, here and there, we are made aware of a certain consciousness
on the dramatist's part of the glamour and magic beauty of the
material under treatment. We feel this most in the presence of
Uther Pendragon, the prince who, when we first encounter him,
has disappeared mysteriously from his brother's court, in order to
follow through forest wastes the quest of the unknown lady whose
beanty has him in thrall:
a
How like a voice that echo spake, but O!
My thoughts are lost for ever in amazement.
Could I but meet a man to tell her beauties,
These trees would bend their tops to kiss the air,
That from my lips should give her praises up . . .
As I have seen a forward blood-hound strip
The swifter of the cry, ready to seize
His wishëd hopes, upon the sudden view,
Struck with astonishment at his arriv'd prey,
Instead of seizure stands at fearful bay;
Or like to Marius' soldier, who, o'ertook,
The eyesight-killing Gorgon at one look
Made everlasting stand; so feard my power,
Whose cloud aspir'd the sun, dissolv'd a shower 1.
In this and in other passages, drama is sacrificed to poetry, the
verse grows lyrical and falls insensibly into rime. This romantic
and lyrical strain is as foreign to Middleton as it is to Rowley,
1 Act 11, sc. 2.


## p. 251 (#275) ############################################

Faire Em. The Merry Devill of Edmonton 251
but it is singularly like what we meet with in the romantic
work of Dekker. The passage quoted above is characterised not
only by its lyricism, but, also, by frequent use of inversion,
irregularity of verse and prevalence, of rime; and, in each of
these respects, it is thoroughly representative of the style of
the more romantic scenes of the play, while, at the same time,
it bears a marked resemblance to the authentic work of Dekker.
The hand of the same dramatist can be detected in the Merlin
scenes. Rowley may very well have created Joan Go-to-'t and
her brother, and have acted as midwife to the marvellous boy
prophet; but, when born, Merlin becomes the property of Dekker,
and reveals his creator in the light-hearted bravura with which
he performs his deeds of magic, no less than in the exercise of
that strong moral sense by virtue of which he punishes the lust
of his father the devil, makes a converted Bellafront of his mother
and sends her to Salisbury plain, to waste away her offending
flesh in groans and solitary sighs.
The sources of The Birth of Merlin, apart from The Mayor
of Quinborough, are somewhat obscure. The story of Merlin
was, of course, familiar enough in Elizabethan times, and a drama
entitled Uter Pendragon is entered in Henslowe's diary under
date 29 April 1597; the difficulty lies in determining what warrant,
if any, the author had for degrading the circumstances of Merlin's
birth.
The evidence in favour of the Shakespearean authorship of
Faire Em, Mucedorus and The Merry Devill of Edmonton is of
the slenderest. Francis Kirkman, the Restoration bookseller,
having found in the royal library the three plays bound together
in a volume on the back of which was the name of Shakespeare,
accepted the word of the original owner-or the binder of the
volume without demur. The internal evidence of all three plays
is strongly against the theory that Shakespeare had anything to do
with their composition.
Faire Em is the work of some member of that early school
of dramatists who, under the leadership of Greene, delighted in
the union of fictitious English history with love romance. There
are two distinct plots in this play, and they have almost nothing
in common. That which furnishes the title is the story of the
.
courtship by three knights of Fair Em, the daughter of an English
noble who, robbed of his lands at the Norman conquest, is now
plying the trade of a miller at Manchester. A ballad, entered
on the Stationers' register on 2 March 1581, and entitled The


## p. 252 (#276) ############################################

252 Plays attributed to Shakespeare
6
Miller's Daughter of Manchester, is the probable source of this
portion of the play. The second plot is taken from Henry Wotton's
Courtlie Controversie of Cupids Cautels (1578), a collection of five
stories translated from Jacques Yver's Le Printemps d'Iver. This
relates the unhistoric adventures of William the Conqueror, who, in
order to win the hand of the Danish king's daughter, visits his
court disguised as a knight and pursues his amours there under
strange changes of fortune. The workmanship of the play is very
poor, but certain allowances must be made for its early date. It
seems to have been in existence in 1587, for, in Greene's intro-
duction to his Farewell to Folly, registered in that year, he makes
a satiric reference to Faire Em, and quotes, in a slightly altered
form, two lines from the closing scene of the play.
The Merry Devill of Edmonton, although the earliest known
edition of it is dated 1608, was certainly written by 1604, when
T. M. (? Thomas Middleton) alludes to it, in company with A Woman
Kilde with Kindnesse, in his Blacke Book; twelve years later, in
the prologue to The Divill is an Asse, Jonson describes it as the
'dear delight' of the theatre-going public. The popularity which
the play enjoyed was not unmerited; in the words of Charles
Lamb, it'seems written to make the reader happy. ' In its blend-
ing of scenes of magic and the black art with a romantic love
comedy, standing out against a pleasant background of English
rural life, The Merry Devill recalls Frier Bacon and Frier
Bongay. But the magic element in the play is little more than
& sop to the popular taste of the day. After an induction,
which is a serio-comic imitation of the famous closing scene in
Dr Faustus, we hear little more of the doings of Peter Fabell,
the Edmonton magician, and give ourselves up to the main story,
which shows by what devices youth and true love overcome the
treasonable counsels of age and prudence. The lovers are lightly
conceived; but in their veins there flows the youthful spirit and
romantic ardour of the early school of Elizabethan comedy, and
Millicent, the heroine, who is willing to dare much lest love be
‘smothered in foggy gain,' is worthy of a place not far below the
early heroines of Shakespeare. The play is not Shakespeare's;
but its author, alike in his love romance and in the humorous and
realistic scenes in which Blague the host, Smug the smith and
Sir John the priest appear, is one of Shakespeare's imitators.
The character of the host of the George tavern at Edmonton
is modelled, as Hazlitt pointed out, on that of the host of The
Merry Wives of Windsor; and this fact furnishes us with a clue as
6


## p. 253 (#277) ############################################

Mucedorus
253
to the period at which the play was written. The source of the
story is unknown, but the adventures of Peter Fabell, who, in
the district round about Enfield Chase, enjoyed something of the
reputation of a Dr Faustus, had been already recorded. There
was a poem, now lost but known to Warton, entitled Fabyl's
Ghoste, written in octave stanzas and printed by John Rastell
in 1533, which may be the same as The Merry Pranks of
Fabyl mentioned by Weever; and, in the same year as that in
which the play was published, Thomas Brewer's prose tract, The
Life and Death of the Merry Devill of Edmonton, with the
Pleasant Pranks of Smug the Smith, Sir John and mine Host
of the George about the stealing of Venison, was entered at
Stationers' Hall. These Fabell stories, doubtless, furnished the
dramatist with some of the materials for the comic by-plot, but
not for the romantic love story.
The popularity of The Merry Devill of Edmonton was as
nothing compared with that of A Most pleasant Comedie of
Mucedorus, the kings sonne of Valentia and Amadine the kings
daughter of Arragon, with the merie conceites of Mouse. The
earliest known edition of this play is dated 1598; but the words,
'newly set foorth,' on the title-page, indicate that it was first
produced at some earlier date; numerous reprints followed, and
W. W. Greg has succeeded in tracing no less than seventeen quarto
editions of the play up to the year 1700. This popularity is the
more remarkable since, as the epilogue makes clear, it was not
written for popular representation, but for a performance at
court. And, having delighted queen Elizabeth, it was revived,
with numerous additions and an altered epilogue, for a Shrovetide
performance at Whitehall early in the reign of James I. The text,
thus enlarged and amended, was first published in 1610. The
vogue of this 'very delectable' comedy, while it illustrates the
uncritical temper of the age, is somewhat hard to understand;
for the play, though doing credit to the infancy of Elizabethan
romantic comedy, is, in respect of plot construction, characterisa-
tion and metric art, a very primitive piece of work. It teems,
however, with action and romantic adventure, and these, with the
crude wit and cruder folly of Mouse the clown, seem to have been
deemed sufficient by courtier and groundling alike. A Spanish
prince, who, in the prosecution of his love, disguises himself first
as a shepherd and then as a hermit; a wild man of the woods, who
combines cannibal instincts with a nice taste for romance; a rustic
clown; and a bear that instructs the princess Amadine how to


## p. 254 (#278) ############################################

254
Plays attributed to Shakespeare
distinguish between the hero lover and the coward—these are the
most notable ingredients of the play. The appearance of such
morality figures as Envy and Comedy in the induction and epilogue
is a sign of an early date of production, and it is hard to believe
that the drama, in its original form, is later than 1590.