No More Learning

Indeed, we are on safer ground for the appreciation of Marlowe
if we approach him from the literary side. Though he served
English drama surpassingly well by giving it body and momentum,
he rarely supplies a model in the technicalities of that genre.
This is made clear, not only by the lack of variety in the choice of
character and in the setting and construction, but by the absence
of dramatic development in the portrayal of his heroes. What
development we find is the outcome of a purely literary
process, showing eloquence rather than action, a stately epical
movement rather than the playwright's surprises of situation and
character. Even in the passage where Tamburlaine laments by
the bed of his dying Zenocrate, the poet achieves great pathos
not by the mere ‘stir' of the scene, but by that Miltonic know-
ledge of word values, by the conscious (and rarely overconscious)
delight in anaphora and line echo (“To entertain divine Zeno-
crate'), and by the climax of metaphor. We feel that by the
sheer verbal music of the recurring name, as in the scene of the
wooing', and, again, in the great speech in part 1, act v, sc. 1, the
poet attains a dramatic effect undramatically. When has the
magic of the word been used to better purpose than in the
passage in which Tamburlaine, after hearing the speeches of
1 Part I, act i, sc. 2.


## p. 151 (#175) ############################################

Marlowe and Milton. The Chronicle Play 151
Cosroe and Meander, and catching at the parting lines of the
latter,
Your majesty shall shortly have your wish,
And ride in triumph through Persepolis,
says,
‘And ride in triumph through Persepolis ! '
Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles ?
Usumcasane and Theridamas,
Is it not passing brave to be a king,
And ride in triumph through Persepolis? '1
This is the word music which rings out of such lines as
By knights of Logres, or of Lyones,
Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore,
and gives Marlowe as well as Milton his place as an 'inventor of
harmonies. '
Marlowe's high seriousness (bluntly called lack of humour) sug-
gests a further Miltonic analogy, and lends support to the view
that his cast of thought, unlike that of many of his great suc-
cessors in the drama, found readier expression in the processional
of the imagination than in episode and the conflict of character.
His contemporary, Kyd, had a stricter conception of the purpose
and method of the playwright; but Marlowe's gift of the secret
of stateliness was the true capital and endowment of the Eliza-
bethan drama.
Two illustrations may be offered of Marlowe's transforming
power : one, his treatment of the chronicle play; another, his
creation of blank verse as a dramatic instrument.
The first examples of the English chronicle play belong to the
early eighties of the sixteenth century. Historical personages
appear in the drama of the transition, but neither in their treat-
ment nor in their setting do we find anything which approaches
what we must understand by a chronicle play or ‘history. The
use of historical material by the stage represents three artistic
intentions, more or less distinct. The first is didactic or satirical,
and offers the key to some of the leading changes in the later
morality. It appears early in the treatment of Bible story ; later,
in the humanising of allegorical characters, as in the identification
of Herod with 'Cruelty'; later still, in the introduction of his-
torical characters such as cardinal Pandulfus and Stephen Langton.
The second is patriotic in motif, the expression of a strong national
consciousness stirred by the political fervours of Elizabethan
England, and stimulated on the literary side by the appearance of
1 Part I, act 11, 80. 5.
>


## p. 152 (#176) ############################################

152
Marlowe and Kyd
a multitude of prose works on historical subjects. Here, we have the
true beginnings of the dramatic ‘history' ushered in by such plays
as the old Henry V and Jack Straw; defined later by Peele and
Marlowe in their Edwards; and, by the end of Elizabeth's reign,
already exhausted, after the masterpieces of Shakespeare. The
third, the romantic, showing an interest in history because it offers
an artistic relief from contemporary conditions, hardly falls under
consideration at this point. Something of its mood appears in the
mythical tales crudely dramatised in the early Tudor period and
utilised by the Elizabethans; but it was its strangeness, the
opportunity given to fancy and emotion, which attracted the
playwrights. It is the 'unhistorical' sentiment of the romantic
revival of a later century which turned to the Middle Ages for the
a
sheer delight of treading forgotten paths and escaping from the
present.
It is a reasonable question whether there is any such genre as
the chronicle or history play, for the term, in its strictest sense,
means no more than a play, presumably a tragedy, which draws its
subject from the national annals. The ‘history play,' like the
historical novel, is, at its best, an effort to analyse, by dramatic
means, the development and effect of character. Rarely has it set
itself the task of the general interpretation to which the historian
proper is committed. Being a study of character which is in-
cidentally historical, it does not stand apart from the accepted
dramatic categories. The Elizabethan habit, familiarised in the
division of Shakespeare's plays into 'tragedies,' 'comedies' and
'histories,' has exaggerated the value of the distinction. The
true interest of the matter is that, in the popular appeal to
history during the stirring close of the sixteenth century, not a
few of the greater playwrights found their opportunity for the
delineation of character in less tragic circumstance: seldom,
perhaps only in Shakespeare, and in him not often, is the his-
torical interpretation, the 'truth' of the 'true' tragedies, of any
concern. Marlowe's merit as the beginner of the history play so-
called lies in his humanising of the puppets of the Kynge Johan
type, not in the discovery for us of the true Edward.
Edward II is not the first of the patriotic plays which sup-
planted the didactic and satirical morality (the dramatic counter-
part of A Mirror for Magistrates), or of the Senecan variants,
from Gorboduc to The Misfortunes of Arthur and Locrine.
Of the extant forerunners, the roughly drawn Famous Victories
of Henry the fifth and Jack Straw (printed in 1593) may be
6


## p. 153 (#177) ############################################

Marlowe and the Chronicle Play
153
the earliest. A third, The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of
England, in two parts (printed in 1591), supplies a link between the
older King John by Bale and the later by Shakespeare, not merely
as showing a progression in the treatment of a historical theme, but
-and this gives force to the progression—in the humanising of the
chief personages. This breaking with the dull habit of the chronicle
play becomes clearer in Peele's Edward I (even though much of
the roughness of the earlier models remains), and in The First
Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke
and Lancaster and The True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of Yorke
(represented in later form by Parts II and III of Henry VI). We
find like evidence in The True Tragedie of Richard III (printed
in 1594) and in the troublesome'text of I Henry VI, as it appears
in the Shakespeare folio. In this historical laboratory, in which
some ask us to believe that Marlowe gained experience in the
earlier texts on which Parts I and II of Henry VI were founded,
as well as in the Shakespearean revisions, and even in the Shake-
spearean Part I, we have the making of Edward II, and, as a
further effect of the collaboration, of Richard II.
The praise of Edward II has probably been extravagant. Be-
cause it is the first historical play of the stricter type, and because
there is more characterisation and episode in it than in his earlier
plays, it is singled out as Marlowe's best dramatic effort. It is
necessary to supplement this half-truth. Such improvement as it
shows, in construction and in development of character, is less
real than may seem. Every play based on intimate history has
an advantage in these respects. The 'fine restraint' for which
Edward II has been admired is partly due to the fact that,
unlike Richard II, with which it is often compared, it chooses
a more extended period of action, and is, therefore, compelled to
congest or select the episodes. The condensation, which has in-
duced some critics to speak of the simplicity of Marlowe's treatment,
makes against the dramatic interest, and denies the dramatist, often
at the most urgent moments, the opportunity of fuller character-
isation. Even when we make allowance for the greater number
of characters of the first order and for the part of Isabella, it
is impossible to separate the play from the earlier Marlowe
category: not only because it is a re-expression of the simple
problem of the impassioned resolute man, but because it is
fundamentally literary in its mood. Such difference as exists
is the effect of the medium, and of that only. That the old
literary bias is strong hardly requires illustration. The keynote


## p. 154 (#178) ############################################

154
Marlowe and Kyd
6
is struck in Gaveston's opening speeches, especially in that
beginning
These are not men for me;
I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits,
Musicians,
in Edward's talk with his friends in flight, and in the debate on
his abdication. We are disappointed of the stricter dramatic
requirements, of (in Swinburne's words) the exact balance of
mutual effect, the final note of scenic harmony between ideal
conception and realistic execution. ' The characters do not
secure or even excite any finer sympathy or more serious in-
terest than attends on the mere evolution of successive events
or the mere display of emotions (except always in the great
scene of the deposition), rather animal than spiritual in their
expression of rage or tenderness or suffering? We may go
further and say that neither as a pure literary effort nor as a
drama does Edward II overtop, at least in its finest single
passages, what Marlowe has given us elsewhere. In the gruesome
death scene, we hold breath no harder than we do at the critical
moment of Faustus's career. In passion and word music, the play
never surpasses the earlier pieces : the shackles of the chronicle
keep it, on the one hand, from the imaginative range of Tambur-
laine or Faustus, and, on the other, from the reach of great tragedy.
Yet, as an effort to interpret history on the stage, it is the first
of any account, and hardly inferior to what is reputed best in
this genre. Independent of such merit as is individual to it as
literature is the credit of having reformed the awkward manners
of the 'true tragedies' to statelier bearing. Marlowe satisfied
the popular craving for the realities, as he had sought to satisfy
the vaguer spiritual longings of his ambitious age. In no single
case is his achievement final or artistically complete; but the
cumulative effect of his insistence on a great idea, his undiminished
force of passion and his poetic fulness are his great gift to
English tragedy.
To Marlowe's literary instinct rather than to his faculty as a
playwright the Elizabethan drama was indebted for the further
gift of blank verse. Though the development of the instrument
in his hands is the outcome of an experience which, unlike
Milton's, was exclusively dramatic, it is easy to note that the
phases of change, the discoveries of new effects, do not arise, as
might be expected, from dramatic necessity. The plasticity of
1 Age of Shakespeare, 1908, p. 6.


## p. 155 (#179) ############################################

Marlowe's Blank Verse
155
Marlowe's line, which is its most remarkable characteristic, is the
direct expression of his varying poetic mood, the ebb and flow
of metaphor, the organ and pipe music of word and phrase. The
differences are apparent when we pass from such lines as in the
great apostrophe to Helen to thesel:
From Scythia to the oriental plage
Of India, where raging Lantchidol
Beats on the regions with his boisterous blows,
To Amazonia under Capricorn;
And thence as far as Archipelago,
All Afric is in arms with Tamburlaine;
and to these, in the first scene of The Jew of Malta :
The wealthy Moor, that in the eastern rocks
Without control can pick his riches up,
And in his house heap pearls like pebble-stones,
Receive them free, and sell them by the weight;
Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts,
Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds,
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds,
And seld-seen costly stones of so great price,
As one of them indifferently rated,
And of a caret of this quantity,
May serve in peril of calamity
To ransom great kings from captivity.
and to these, from Edward II 2:
The griefs of private men are soon allay'd,
But not of kings. The forest deer, being struck,
Runs to an herb that closeth up the wounds;
But when the imperial lion's flesh is gord,
He rends and tears it with his wrathful paw,
And, highly scorning that the lowly earth
Should drink his blood, mounts up to the air.
Such prosodic transitions do not show the intimate textual
relationship to be found in Shakespeare's plays. In Marlowe's
verse, each and all sort with a variety of mood which, in origin
and expression, is epical, at times lyrical, rarely dramatic.
It is scarcely possible, without giving much space to illus-
tration, to measure the differences in technical accomplishment
between Marlowe and the earlier practitioners in blank verse. It
matters not whether we take Surrey's rendering of the second and
fourth Aeneid, which has the historical interest of being the first
example of the naturalisation of the 'straunge meter,' or Gorboduc,
also historically interesting as the first document' of dramatic
blank verse in English: in these, it is as hard to foresee the
1 Part II, act I, sc. 1.
2 Act v, sc. 1.
6


## p. 156 (#180) ############################################

156
Marlowe and Kyd
finding of a new prosodic instrument as in the experiments of
Drant and his circle. Indeed, in both, there is only a violation of
English sentiment; and nothing is given by way of compensation.
In the confusion of accent and quantity the life of the verse has
gone out; the quantitative twitchings never suggest vitality;
each line is cold and stiff, laid out with its neighbours, in the
chance companionship of a poetic morgue. These conditions are
not entirely wanting in Marlowe: we see them when we institute
a close comparison with Shakespeare and Milton. Nevertheless,
his blank verse is, for the first time in English, a living thing:
often as full-veined and vigorous as anything in the later master-
pieces. This verse (if it be described in general terms) discloses
greater variety in the accentuation of the line, greater regularity
in the use of equivalence in the foot, an occasional shaking of the
caesura from its 'classical' pose, the frequent employment of
feminine endings even in exaggerated form, as
And Faustus hath bequeathed his soul to Lucifer,
or in the lines from The Jew of Malta, quoted on the previous
page; above all, the breaking away from the pause and sense close
at the end of each line. We have, in a word, the suggestion of
that fluidity and movement which we find in the Miltonic verse
paragraph. Marlowe achieves his line by the sheer rush of imagina-
tion, like a swollen river sweeping down on its dried-up channel,
filling its broad banks and moving on majestically. It is accom-
plished by neither stage eloquence nor stage passion: its voice
has the epical timbre, the 08 magna sonaturum. If there be
anything in the hackneyed opinion that the poet weighted his
lines with what has been called 'bombast' and 'rant' to make
good the lost ballast of rime, it tends to a further confirmation
of the belief that his technique was the outcome of an experience
which was literary in origin and process.
The dramatic career of Thomas Kyd covers a shorter period
than Marlowe's; and, despite the great popularity and influence
of The Spanish Tragedie, it lacks both the range and sustained
interest of the work of his junior and associate. He was the
son of one Francis Kyd, a city scrivener, and was educated at
Merchant Taylors' school, in which, from 26 October 1565, he was
a fellow pupil with Edmund Spenser. This date and an earlier
fixing his baptism on 6 November 1558 are the sole biographical
evidence available, with the exception of sundry references, at


## p. 157 (#181) ############################################

Kyd's Literary Labours
157
6
the close of his short life, in papers connected with the judicial
enquiry into Marlowe's religious opinions. For the rest, we must
rely on the interpretation of the well known passage in Nashe's
preface to Greene's Menaphon (1589) and of certain cryptic
entries in Henslowe's diary. The former, by the elaboration of
its satirical anger, acquires the value of a biographical document.
Even if we had not the punning reference to the 'Kidde in
Aesop' (a reminiscence of the ‘May' eclogue of The Shepheards
Calender) we should recognise, with due allowance for the extra-
vagance of the attack, that the series of allusions constitutes
strong circumstantial evidence as to the victim's career down to
1589. From this passage, therefore, we assume that Kyd had early
forsaken his apprenticeship to his father's 'trade of Noverint';
that, being weak in Latinity (and so charged unjustly), he had
turned to play-making and had ‘bled' Seneca through its 'English'
veins; that, in this barber-surgeon enterprise, he had interested
himself in the story of Hamlet; and that, later, he had fallen to
the task of translating from Italian and French. The reference
to the botching up of blank verse 'with ifs and ands' seems to
be explained by a line in The Spanish Tragedie? ; and the
ridiculed phrase "bloud is a beggar' may prove to have a
textual interest when fortune gives us the pre-Shakespearean
Hamlet.
The earliest known dated work ascribed to Kyd is The
Householders Philosophie, a version of Tasso's Padre di Famiglia.
This volume, by 'T. K. ,' printed in 1588, probably represents
the 'twopenny pamphlet' work from the Italian to which Nashe
refers towards the close of his depreciation. The French enter-
prise, also amiably described by the same hand, may remain to
us in Pompey the Great, his faire Corneliaes Tragedie, which
appeared under Kyd's name in 15952 as a translation of Garnier's
Cornélie, and in the record of his intention to follow with a
rendering of that author's Porcie. This intimation of Kyd's
interest in the French Senecan brings him into immediate touch
with lady Pembroke and her coterie, and gives point to Nashe's
double-sensed gibe that the translators "for recreation after their
candle-stuffe, having starched their beardes most curiously' made
'a peripateticall path into the inner parts of the Citie' and
spent 'two or three howers in turning over French Doudie. '
The translation of Cornélie and a pamphlet on The Murthering
1 Act 11, sc. 1, 79.
? An anonymous text appeared in 1594. See bibliography.
>


## p. 158 (#182) ############################################

158
Marlowe and Kyd
of John Brewen, Goldsmith (printed by his brother John Kyd in
1592) appear to be the latest efforts of Kyd's short career, which
came to an end about December 1594. In the short interval
anterior to this hackwork, between 1585 and the publication of
Nashe's attack in 1589, the public were probably in possession
of the works on which his reputation rests, his Hamlet, The
Spanish Tragedie, and The Tragedie of Solimon and Perseda.
These and the discredited First Part of Jeronimo still supply
some of the thorniest problems to Elizabethan scholarship. Here,
only a partial statement can be attempted.
We know that in 1592 The Spanish Tragedie was enjoying the
fullest popular favour. None of the earliest quartos-Allde's
undated print, Jeffes's in 1594, White's in 1599-give a clue to the
authorship. The entry of the licence for The Spanishe tragedie of
Don Horatio and Bellmipeia (Bellimperia) on 6 October 1592 is
silent ; so, too, the later editions, and the notes in Henslowe of
Ben Jonson's additions in 1601 and 1602. It is not till we come to
the casual reference by Thomas Heywood to ‘M. Kid' as the
author' that what might have proved another bibliographical crux
is fully determined. We may assume, from the hints in the in-
ductions to Cynthia's Revels and Bartholomew Fayre, that the
play was written between 1585 and 1587. Not only are there no
direct references to the great events of 1588, such as could hardly
be absent from a 'Spanish' tragedy-but the deliberate allusion
to older conflicts with England’ shows that the opportunity which
Kyd, as a popular writer, could not have missed had not yet come.
The theme of The Spanish Tragedie is the revenge of 'old
Hieronimo' for the undoing of his son Don Horatio and the
'pittiful death of the former in accomplishing his purpose.
Though contemporary satire fixed upon the play, and made it out-
Seneca Seneca in passion for blood, the essence of the drama
lies in the slow carrying-out of the revenge. In this, rather than
in the mere inversion of the rôles of father and son, is there analogy
with the Shakespearean Hamlet; as there is, also, in certain details
of construction, such as the device of the play within the play, the
presence of the ghost (with all allowance for Senecan and early
Elizabethan habit), and, generally, the coordination of three stories
in one plot. Consideration of this analogy helps us to define Kyd's
position in regard to both the English Senecan tragedy and the
Shakespearean: the more immediate matter is that Kyd's interest
1 Apology for Actors, 1612. ? E. g. The Spanish Tragedie, act 1, sc. 5.
>


## p. 159 (#183) ############################################

Kyd and the Early Hamlet 159
in this variant' of the Hamlet story supports, rather than con-
demns, the conjecture that he had already been engaged on the
tragedy of the son’s revenge. Such recasting by one hand of a
single and simple dramatic motif is credible ; and, in Kyd's case,
likely, when we recall the alleged relationship of Solimon and
Perseda with The Spanish Tragedie. There are few authors of
Kyd's repute whose work suggests more clearly a development
from within, a re-elaboration of its own limited material. For this
reason, it is hard to disbelieve that he wrote a 'first part’ to his
Spanish Tragedie, even if we be persuaded that the extant text of
the First Part of Jeronimo is not from his pen.
Kyd's authorship of a Hamlet which served as the basis for the
Shakespearean Hamlet is more than a plausible inference. As the
arguments in support of this are too lengthy for discussion in this
place, only a general statement may be made. In regard to the
date, we conclude, from the passage in Nashe, that the Saxo-
Belleforest story had been dramatised before 1589. As there is no
evidence that it had attracted attention in England before the
tour of English actors on the continent, and, as they returned
from Elsinore towards the close of 1587, we may very reasonably
fix the date of production in 1587 or 1588. The assumption that
Kyd is the author rests on these main bases: that the first quarto
of the Shakespearean Hamlet (1603) carries over some sections of
an original play, and that there are many parallelisms between the
Shakespearean play and The Spanish Tragedie, in construction, in
phrase and even in metre, and between it and Kyd's other works,
in respect of sentiment. The likenesses in construction already
hinted at make up, with the textual data, a body of circumstantial
evidence which the most cautious criticism, fully conscious of the
risks of interpreting the re-echoed expressions of the spirit of the
age as deliberate plagiarism, is not willing to throw aside. Indeed,
the cumulative force of the evidence would appear to convert the
assumption into a certainty. If, as no one will doubt, Shakespeare
worked over, and reworked over, some Hamlet which had already
secured popular favour, why should we, with Nashe and the com-
parative testimony before us, seek for another than Kyd as the
author of the lost, perhaps unprinted, play? We are left with the
regret that, having Shakespeare's revisions, we are denied the
details of the master's transformation of the original copy. The
lesson of this sequence would have told us more of Shakespeare's
‘mind and art' than we could learn írom the unravelling of all his
collaborated plays.


## p. 160 (#184) ############################################

160
Marlowe and Kyd
6
?
6
That Kyd, following his 'serial' habit of production, wrote a
'first part' for his 'tragedy' is, as we have said, possible, but not
a tittle of evidence is forthcoming: that he wrote The First Part
of Jeronimo. With the Warres of Portugall, and the life and
death of Don Andrea, which we have in the quarto edition of 1605,
is, despite the authority lent in support of the ascription to him,
wholly untenable. The problem of Kyd's association with a first
part may be resolved into two main questions. In the first place,
did he write, or could he have written, the extant text of 1605 ?
In the second place, is this piece to be identified with the play
entitled 'Done oracio’ alias “The Comedy of Jeronymo,' alias
'Spanes Comodye donne oracoe,' which appears seven times
in Henslowe's list of the performances, in 1592, of The Spanish
Tragedie? ? A rapid reading of the First Part will show that,
far from there being 'adequate internal evidence for assigning
the play to Kyd, there is proof that it must be by another hand.
To maintain the ascription to Kyd, we should have to adduce
very solid testimony, external as well as internal, that Kyd was
capable of burlesque, was a veritable (sporting Kyd,' and was
Puck enough to make havoc of his art and popular triumph. For,
from beginning to end, the piece is nothing but a tissue of
rhetorical mockery, a satire of 'tragical speeches' and of inter-
meddling ghosts ; often, on closer inspection, a direct quizzing of
The Spanish Tragedie itself. By no access of literary devilry
could the author of old Jeronimo transform that hero to the
speaker of such intentional fustian as
Now I remember too (0 sweet rememberance)
This day my years strike fiftie, and in Rome
They call the fifty year the year of Jubily,
The merry yeare, the peacefull yeare, the jocond yeare,
A yeare of joy, of pleasure, and delight.
This shall be my yeare of Jubily, for 'tis my fifty.
Age ushers honor; 'tis no shame; confesse,
Beard, thou art fifty full, not a baire lesse 2.
And it would be hard to believe that Kyd had joined in the raillery
of Nashe and the pamphleteers,
0, for honor,
Your countries reputation, your lives freedome,
Indeed your all that may be termed reveng,
Now let your blouds be liberall as the sea 3;
or could write the ludicrous dialogue between the ghost of Andrea
and Revenge at the close. The inevitable conclusion is that this
1 Called Jeronymo in Henslowe. ? Act 1, sc. 1. . 3 Act III, so. 1.


## p. 161 (#185) ############################################

Solimon and Perseda
161
First Part cannot have been written by the author of The Spanish
Tragedie; and further (and almost as certainly), that this burlesque
by another hand is not the piece which was interpolated by lord
Strange's men in their repertory of 1592. The opportunity for the
burlesque came more naturally in the early years of the new century,
when The Spanish Tragedie had been refurbished by Ben Jonson,
and attention had been called to it by his characteristic criticism
of the old play. Internal evidence, notably the allusions to the
Roman jubilee of 1600 and the acting of the play by the children
of the chapel, supports the general conclusion against Kyd's
authorship. It should, however, be noted that the argument that
the First Part does not answer Henslowe's label of 'comodey’ is
irrelevant, if we make allowance for the vague nomenclature of
the time and consider that the play makes no pretence to more
than the seriousness' of burlesque. Further, the shortness of the
text may be responsible for the view that the play was a 'fore-
piece,' presumably to The Spanish Tragedie. The Henslowe play
(never acted on the same night as the serious Jeronimo) might as
well be called an afterpiece ; but it is hard, in any circumstances,
to conjure up an audience of the early nineties, or even of 1605,
taking kindly to the two Jeronimos at one sitting.
Though no solid reason has been advanced against the ascription
of Solimon and Perseda to Kyd, it is only on the slenderest
grounds that it has been claimed for him. The story on which it
is based appears in Henry Wotton's Courtlie Controversie of
Cupids Cautels (1578), which also supplies the original of the
pseudo-Shakespearean Faire Em; the play is entered in the
Stationers' register on 22 November 1592, and is extant in an
undated quarto and two quartos of 1599. Its association with Kyd
has been assumed from the fact that he uses the same plot in the
interpolated play which Jeronimo and Bellimperia present in The
Spanish Tragedie. If we assume that one author is responsible
for both renderings, the question remains as to which play was the
earlier. ' Decision on this point is more difficult because of the
long popularity of Wotton's translation, and of Jacques Yver's
original, Le Printemps d'Iver—as shown in the successive refer-
ences, from Greene's Mamillia (1583), to Shakespeare's King John
and Henry IV. Shakespeare's pointed allusions to Basilisco—the
captain Bobadil of Solimon and Perseda-imply an immediate and
current popularity of the play; and for this reason we incline to
dispute Sarrazin's conclusion that it was an early effort, and ante-
cedent to The Spanish Tragedie. It appears, on the whole,
11
E. L. V.
CH, VII.


## p. 162 (#186) ############################################

162
Marlowe and Kyd
reasonable to fix the date of composition between the appearance
of The Spanish Tragedie and the entry in the Stationers' register
in 1592, and to consider it, if it be given to Kyd, as a fuller
handling of the sketch for Jeronimo and Bellimperia. Certain
similarities in motif, construction and phrasel are tempting aids to
the finding of a single author for both plays. On the other hand,
the closer we find the likeness, the harder is it to reckon with the
difficulty of believing that an author would thus repeat himself.
If, as Kyd's most recent editor maintains, Solimon lacks the show
of genius of The Spanish Tragedie, and if, as is also admitted,
there is a close family likeness (on which, indeed, the argument of
one parentage is based), we are in danger of being forced, contrary
to this critic's view and our own (as already stated), to the con-
clusion that the inferior play must be the earlier. The problem
is further complicated by the presence of a strange element of
comedy in Solimon. This, and, especially, the transcript of the
miles gloriosus type in the braggart Basilisco, introduces us, if
not to a new author, to a new phase of Kyd's art. And so we
float, rudderless and anchorless, on the sea of speculation? .
The difficulty of determining the authentic work of Kyd makes
any general estimate of his quality and historical place more or
less tentative; yet the least uncertain of these uncertainties and
the acknowledged work in translation give us some critical foothold.
Kyd, in the words of his Hieronimo, proclaims his artistic
fellowship with the author of Tamburlaine :
Give me a stately written tragedie;
Tragedia cothurnata fitting Kings,
Containing matter, and not common thing83.
Even if we allow, on the most liberal interpretation of the claims
set up by his editors, that he shows a subtler sense of humour than
is to be found in Marlowe, we are never distracted from the sombre
purpose of his art. A closer student of Seneca than was his brother
dramatist, he transfers, with direct touch, the 'tragical' rhetoric,
the ghostly personages, the revel in stage massacre; yet never in
the intimate fashion of the Tenne Tragedies or of his own version
* E. g. the words 'tralucent' (translucent) 'breast' in Solimon, act 11, sc. 1, 60, and
The Spanish Tragedie (act I, sc. 4, 97).
2 The suggestions that Kyd had a share in The Taming of a Shrew (see Fleay's
English Drama, vol. II, pp. 31-33) and in Titus Andronicus, that he wrote Arden of
Feversham (see Crawford, C. , Collectanea, 1st series), or even the indifferent Rare
Triumphs of Love and Fortune (printed in 1589) are not convincing. The fragments
transmitted by Allott in England's Parnassus (1600) may not have had a dramatic
context; and they are too slight for the building up of any theory.
3 The Spanish Tragedie, act iv, sc. 1, 156—8.
a


## p. 163 (#187) ############################################

Kyd's Place in English Drama 163
of Garnier. We have probably exaggerated his love of 'blood.
Despite the sensationalism of Horatio's death, Kyd never reaches
to the depths of horror satirised in the induction of A warning for
Faire Women, or disclosed in Titus Andronicus (and for this
reason we discredit his association with this experiment of youth);
and though, like Webster, whose career as a dramatist began
after Kyd's had ended, he deals rawly with the story of revenge,
we observe that his zest for the terrible is losing force. Popular
opinion neglects these hints of approximation to the gentler mood
of Shakespearean tragedy, as it chooses, also, to forget the con-
tributory usefulness of his and Marlowe’s extravagance in the
making of that tragedy.
The interest of Kyd's work is almost exclusively historical.
Like Marlowe's, it takes its place in the development of English
tragedy by revealing new possibilities and offering a model in
technique ; unlike Marlowe's, it does not make a second claim upon
us as great literature. The historical interest lies in the advance
which Kyd's plays show in construction, in the manipulation of
plot, and in effective situation. Kyd is the first to discover the
bearing of episode and of the 'movement' of the story on
characterisation, and the first to give the audience and reader
the hint of the development of character which follows from this
interaction. In other words, he is the first English dramatist who
writes dramatically. In this respect he was well served by his
instinct for realism. The dialogue of his 'stately written tragedy’
is more human and probable than anything which had gone before,
or was being done by Marlowe. In the working out of his plot, he
escapes from the dangers of rhetoric by ingenious turns in the
situation. In such a scene as that where Pedringano bandies words
with the hangman when the boy brings in the empty box', or in
Bellimperia's dropping of her glove', we are parting company with
the older tragedy, with the English Senecans, with Tamburlaine
and Faustus and even Edward II, and we are nearer Shakespeare.
When we add to this talent for dramatic surprise the talent for
displaying character, as it were, rooted in the plot, and growing in
it-not strewn on the path of a hero who is little more than the
embodiment of a simple idea-we describe Kyd's gift to English
tragedy, and, more particularly, to Shakespeare himself. Direct
references in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, though they
be many, count for little beyond proving the popularity of The
Spanish Tragedie. The indebtedness must be sought in the
· The Spanish Tragedie, act III, sc. 6.
; Ibid. act I, Sc. 4.
11-2


## p. 164 (#188) ############################################

164
Marlowe and Kyd
persistent reminiscence of Kyd's stagecraft throughout the Shake-
spearean plays, of devices which could not come from any earlier
source, and, because of their frequency, could not come by chance.
We reflect on the fact that he, who may have been the young
author making trial of Kyd's manner in Titus Andronicus, found
more than a theatre-hack's task in working and re-working upon
the early Hamlet. From the straggling data we surmise, not
only that Shakespeare knew and was associated with Kyd's work,
but that the association was more to him than a chance meeting in
the day's round. Jonson with his 'additions'-even with the
Painter's Part1 placed to his credit-supplies an instructive con-
trast; he intrudes as a censor, and will not be on terms. Yet the
fact is worth record in the story of Kyd's influence, that his work is
found in direct touch with that of Shakespeare and Jonson. We
want to know more of this association, above all of the early
Hamlet which Shakespeare used; and, wishing thus, we are driven
to vain speculation, till the Jonsonian Hieronimo stays us, as
he may well do elsewhere in the 'quest of enquirie' into Eliza-
bethan authorship :
'Tis neither as you think, nor as you thinke,
Nor as you thinke; you'r wide all :
These slippers are not mine; they were my sonne Horatio's.
1 The Spanish Tragedie, act III, sc. 12 A.
Painter's Part. ' See bibliography,
There are six 'additions, including the
6


## p. 165 (#189) ############################################

CHAPTER VIII
1
SHAKESPEARE: LIFE AND PLAYS
ALL writing which is not of the loosest kind about Shakespeare
must, almost necessarily, be dominated by one of two distinct
estimates of the positive information available on the subject.
There is the view that all this information really comes, as a matter
of fact, to very little; and there is the view that, as a matter of fact,
it comes to a good deal. The former is the more common, and—
though the other has been held by persons whose opinion deserves
the utmost respect, and to whom our debt for the labour they have
spent on the question is very great-it is probably the sounder. The
more impartially, the more patiently and the more respectfully,
so far as regards the laws of critical and legal evidence, we examine
the results of Halliwell-Phillipps among dead, and of Sidney Lee
among living, enquirers, the more convinced do we, in some cases,
at least, become that almost the whole matter is ‘a great Perhaps,
except in two points : that one William Shakespeare of Stratford-
on-Avon was, as a man of letters, actually the author of at any
rate the great mass of the work which now goes by his name, and
that, as a man, he was liked and respected by nearly all who knew
him. These things are proved, the first critically, the second
legally and historically. To the critical certainties we can add con-
siderably, and to the critical probabilities immensely. But, legally
and historically, we are left, at least in the way of certainties, with
a series of dates and facts mostly relating to matters of pure busi-
ness and finance-a skeleton which is itself far from complete, and
which, in most points, can only be clothed with the flesh of human
and literary interest by the most perilous process of conjecture.
We are not quite certain of the identity of Shakespeare's father ;
we are by no means certain of the identity of his wife ; we do not
know, save by inference, that Shakespeare and she ever went through
the actual ceremony of marriage ; we do not know when he began
his dramatic career; we know the actual date of the first production
of very few of his pieces, let alone that of their composition.


## p. 166 (#190) ############################################

166
Shakespeare
6
Almost all the commonly received stuff of his life story is shreds
and patches of tradition, if not positive dream work. We do not
know whether he ever went to school. The early journey to
London is first heard of a hundred years after date. The deer
stealing reason for it is probably twenty years later. The crystal-
lisation of these and other traditions in Rowe's biography took
place a hundred and forty-six years after the poet's supposed birth.
To hark back: it is not absolutely certain, though it is in the highest
degree probable, that the 'Shake-scene' in Greene's outburst is
Shakespeare. 'Shake-scene' is not so very much more unlikely
a term of abuse for an actor than 'cushion-' or 'tub-thumper' for
a minister. And Chettle's supposed apology is absolutely, and, it
would seem, studiously, anonymous. The one solid ground on
which we can take our stand is supplied by Ben Jonson's famous, but
mainly undated, references. They form the main external evidence
for the two propositions which have been ventured above; to
them, as to a magnetic centre, fly and cling all the contemporary,
and shortly subsequent, scraps of evidence that are true metal;
they supply the foundation piece on which a structure, built out
of internal evidence, may be cautiously, but safely, constructed.
Next to them, though in a different kind, comes Meres's Palladis
Tamia passage in 1598. The publication dates of Venus and
Adonis, of Lucrece, of the Sonnets, as well as the fact and date of
the purchase of New Place, are tolerably fast-driven piles; the
death date is another; the publication of the first folio yet
another. We are not, therefore, in a mere whirl of drifting atoms,
a wash of conflicting tides; but we may be more exposed to such
a whirl or wash than men who like solid ground could desire.
No biography of Shakespeare, therefore, which deserves any
confidence, has ever been constructed without a large infusion of
the tell-tale words 'apparently,' 'probably,' 'there can be little
doubt'; and no small infusion of the still more tell-tale 'perhaps,'
‘it would be natural,' 'according to what was usual at the time'
and so forth. The following summary will give the certain facts,
with those which are generally accepted as the most probable,
distinguishing the two classes, so far as is possible, without
cumbrous saving clauses, but avoiding altogether mere guesswork,
unless it has assumed such proportions in ordinary accounts that
it cannot be passed by.
The name of Shakespeare appears to have been very common,
especially in the west midlands; and there was a William Shake-
speare hanged (cf. his namesake's 'Hang-hog is Latin for bacon ')


## p. 167 (#191) ############################################

Family and Education
167
as early as 1248, not far from Stratford itself. In the sixteenth
century, the name seems to have been particularly common; and
there were at least two John Shakespeares who were citizens of the
town about the time of the poet's birth. It has, however, been
one of the accepted things that his father was a John Shakespeare
(son of Richard), who, at one time, was a 'prosperous gentleman'-
or, at any rate, a prosperous man of business as woolstapler, fell-
monger and so forth, thinking himself gentleman enough to make
repeated applications for coat armour, which, at last, were granted.
This John Shakespeare married Mary Arden, an heiress of a good
yeomanly family, but as to whose connection with a more dis-
tinguished one of the same name there remains much room for
doubt. The uncertainty of the poet's birthday is one of the best
known things about him. He was baptised on 26 April 1564;
and probability, reinforced by sentiment, has decided on the 23rd,
St George's day, for the earlier initiation. He would seem to
have had three brothers and two sisters.
There was a free grammar school at Stratford, to which, as the
son of his father, he would have been entitled to admission; and
it has been supposed that he went there. Aubrey, who is almost
entirely unsupported, even says that he was a schoolmaster himself.
The point is only of importance, first in regard to Jonson’s famous
ascription to him of small Latin and less Greek'; secondly, and
much more, in relation to the difficulty which has been raised as
to a person of no, or little, education having written the plays.
The first count matters little-many schoolboys and some school-
masters have answered to Ben's description. The second matters
much for it seems to be the ground upon which some persons of
wit have joined the many of none who are ‘Baconians' or at least
against 'the Stratforder,' as certain anti-Shakespearean Germans
call him.
The difficulty comes from a surprising mixture of ignorance
and innocence. A lawyer of moderate intelligence and no extra-
ordinary education will get up, on his brief, at a few days' notice,
more knowledge of an extremely technical kind than Shakespeare
shows on any one point, and will repeat the process in regard to
almost any subject. A journalist of no greater intelligence and
education will, at a few hours' or minutes' notice, deceive the very
elect in the same way. Omniscience, no doubt, is divine ; but
multiscience--especially multiscience a little scratched and ad-
mitting through the scratches a sea-coast to Bohemia and know-
ledge of Aristotle in Ulysses—is quite human. What is wonderful


## p. 168 (#192) ############################################

168
Shakespeare
is not what, in the book sense, Shakespeare knew, but what he
did and was. And the man—whoever he was—who wrote what
Shakespeare wrote would have had not the slightest difficulty in
knowing what Shakespeare knew.
The stories of his apprenticeship (to a butcher or otherwise)
are, again, late, very uncertain and, in part—such as his making
speeches to the calves he was to kill—infinitely childish, even
when quite possibly true. The story of his marriage, though
starting from some positive and contemporary facts, is a very
spider's web of unsubstantial evolution. On 28 November 1582,
two husbandmen of Stratford, named Sandells and Richardson,
became sureties for £40 in the consistory court of Worcester to
free the bishop from liability in case of lawful impediment, by pre-
contract or consanguinity, to the marriage of 'William Shagspeare
and Anne Hathwey' which might proceed hereupon with only
one publication of banns. On 26 May 1583, Shakespeare's eldest
daughter, Susanna, was baptised at Stratford. Moreover (a much
more surprising thing than this juxtaposition), on the very day
before the signing of the bond, a regular licence was issued for the
marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne Whateley—a coinci-
dence extraordinary in any case, most extraordinary if we note
the extreme closeness of the names Hathwey and Whateley
and remember that Anne Hathaway is not otherwise traceable,
though Agnes Hathaway (the two names are in practice confused)
is. This mystery, however, has been less dwelt on than the
irregular character of the 'bond' marriage and its still more
irregular chronological adjustment to the birth of Susanna. On
this, on the apparent fact that the wife was eight years older than
the husband, who was only eighteen, on his long absences from
Stratford and on the solitary bequest (and that an afterthought)
of his second-best bed to his wife, have been founded romances
moralisings, censures, defences, hypotheses of formal antenuptial
contract, every possible symptomatic extravagance of the lues
commentatoria, every conceivable excursion and alarum of the
hunt after mares' nests. The only rational course of conduct
is to decline to solve a problem for which we have no sufficient
data ; and which, very likely, is no problem at all. Only, as
Shakespeare's works have been ransacked for references to dis-
approval of marriages in which the bride is older than the
husband, and to anticipations of marriage privileges, let us
once more appeal to the evidence of those works themselves.
Ņo writer of any time—and his own time was certainly not one


## p. 169 (#193) ############################################

Guesswork and Evidence
169
а
of special respect for marriage—has represented it so constantly
as not only 'good' but 'delightful,' to retort La Rochefou-
cauld's injurious distinction. Except Goneril and Regan, who,
designedly, are monsters, there is hardly a bad wife in Shakespeare
-there are no unloving, few unloved, ones. It is not merely in
his objects of courtship-Juliet, Viola, Rosalind, Portia, Miranda
—that he is a woman-worshipper. Even Gertrude—a questionable
widow-seems not to have been an unsatisfactory wife to Hamlet
the elder as she certainly was not to his brother. One might
hesitate a little as to Lady Macbeth as a hostess-certainly not as
a wife. From the novice sketch of Adriana in the Errors to the
unmatchable triumph of Imogen, from the buxom honesty of
Mistress Ford to the wronged innocence and queenly grace of
Hermione, Shakespeare has nothing but the beau rôle for wives.
And if, in this invariable gynaecolatry, he was actuated by dis-
appointment in his own wife or repentance for his own marriage, he
must either have been the best good Christian, or the most pigeon-
livered philosopher, or the most cryptic and incomprehensible
ironist, that the world has ever seen. Indeed, he might be all
these things, and feel nothing of the kind. For the next incident
of the biographic legend—the deerstealing and consequent flight
to London—there is, it has been said, no real evidence. It is not
impossible, though the passage in The Merry Wives of Windsor
which has been supposed to be a reference to the fact is at least
equally likely to be the source of the fiction. That Shakespeare
went to London somehow there can be no doubt; how, and when,
and for what reason, he went, there can be no certainty. If the
Greene reference be accepted, he must have been there long
enough to have made a reputation for himself in 1592; by next
year, 1593, the year of Venus and Adonis, he had begun his
unquestionable literary career, and made the acquaintance of lord
Southampton; and, by next year again (1594) (though at the end
of it), we first find him a member of the famous company of which
he became a leader, and which included Burbage, Heminge, Condell
and other persons famous in connection with him.
How long the career—which emerges from obscurity, perhaps
with the first, certainly with the second and third of these dates
and facts—had been going on is, again, guesswork. Casting back,
however, we get a reasonable terminus ante quem non, if not a certain
terminus a quo, in the birth of twins (Hamnet, who died young and
Judith, who lived) to him and his wife, before 2 February 1585,
when they were baptised. Four years later, again, than 1594, the
a


## p. 170 (#194) ############################################

170
Shakespeare
Meres list of 1598 shows to Shakespeare's name, besides Venus and
A donis and Lucrece (1594), the goodly list of plays which will be
seen presently, and the as yet unprinted Sonnets, while Shake-
speare had also become at least a competent actor-a business
not to be learnt in a day-and had acquired money enough to
buy, in 1597, the famous New Place, the largest house in his
native town.
The literary progress of these nine or thirteen years, according
as we take the first theatrical record or the Meres list for goal,
can be assigned, in some cases, with certainty: of the life, hardly
anything whatever is known. Legends about horse-holding at
theatres, in the first place; of the organisation of a brigade of
horse-boys, in the second ; of promotion to callboy and to actor-
are legends. William Shakespeare's name seems to occur, in April
1587, in a deed relating to some property in which his family were
interested. Otherwise, all positive statements in biographies of
credit will be found qualified with the 'doubtless' or the ‘probably,'
the 'may have and the 'would have,' until we find him taking
part in the Christmas entertainments presented to the queen at
Greenwich on St Stephen's day and Innocents' day 1594. Then,
and then only, does the mist disappear; though it hardly leaves
him in a very lively 'habit as he lived. But we have mentions of
houses in London and (before the New Place purchase) at Stratford;
details of financial disaster to his father which seems to have been
repaired, and of the subsequent application for arms, in his father's
name, which was at last granted in 1599; suits about the property
in dispute ten years earlier--a good many business details, in short,
but little more that is satisfying.
But the nature of commentators abhors a vacuum : and this
vacuum has been filled up (excluding for the present the various
arrangements of the Works) from two different sides. In the first
place, we have a series of conjectures dealing with the progress of
Shakespeare's novitiate as actor and playwright, and his relations to
his immediate predecessors in the latter capacity. In the second, we
have the application of hypothetical hermeneutics to the Sonnets!
The first is guesswork pure and unadulterated; or, to speak
with more correctness, adulteration without any purity, except in
so far as concerns the orks themselves—which are reserved for
the moment. From them, it derives whatever shadow of substance
it possesses. We do not know that Shakespeare ever personally
knew a single one of the university wits. ' The Greene reference,
1 For the poetical aspect of these, see the following chapter.


## p. 171 (#195) ############################################

Personal and Local Association
171
taken at its fullest possible, is, distinctly, against personal knowledge.
The Chettle reference, from its obvious and definite disclaimer
of personal knowledge, strengthens the counter-evidence. The
(probably much later) passages in The Returne from Pernassus
give no support to it. Parodies of phrasings universal in
Elizabethan drama go for practically nothing. And the famous
and beautiful appeal to the 'Dead Shepherd' in As You Like It
contains as little to indicate that, wherever Shakespeare was and
whatever he did, from 1585 to 1593, his circle and that of the
'wits' anywhere overlapped.
So, also, the present writer can see no valid evidence of any
personal connection with Spenser. 'Our pleasant Willy' has, almost
necessarily, been given up: the connection of 'Aetion' with
Shakespeare appears to be wholly gratuitous. “No doubt,' as is
pointed out, Shakespeare's company, if he belonged to any before
1594, probably, and, after that, certainly, 'toured in the provinces';
but there is no evidence that he ever was, and no necessity that he
ever should have been, in Germany or Scotland or Denmark ; nor
any reason of either kind why he should have surveyed the battle-
fields of Towton or of Shrewsbury or of Bosworth any more than
those of Actium or Pharsalia. London and Stratford are the only
places in which, from evidence, we can place him. Excepting his
family, business folk in the two places mentioned, lord Southampton
and Ben Jonson, there are hardly any persons with whom, on
evidence, we can associate him.
This manner of handling the subject must, of course, be pro-
foundly unsatisfactory to those who think that, in consequence
of the long discussions of biographical facts and fictions by
scholars, 'final judgments’ should be possible on such points as
Shakespeare's marriage, his religious views, his knowledge of
law, his conduct in business relations and the like. It seems
to be impossible to get a very large number of presumably
educated and not unintelligent people to perceive the difference
between proof and opinion. In all the instances just given, we
have no basis for proof; and, as to all of them, opinion can
never be final, because every person of fair intelligence and
education has a right to his own. Of such argument as that
Shakespeare's father could not have been a butcher because he
was a glover and guild rules forbade the combination, there can
be no end. Those who love it may follow it in its endless
course; it cannot be too peremptorily asserted that those who
do not love it are entitled to reject it entirely and to say 'fight


## p. 172 (#196) ############################################

172
Shakespeare
6
Tradition: fight Presumption' to this shadowy dog and that un-
substantial bear.
The solid fact, however, of Meres's mention of the Sonnets, two
of which (though the whole collection was not published till ten
years later) appeared surreptitiously, it would seem, next year
(1599), introduces another range of hypothetical exercise in
biography, which has sometimes been followed in opposition to
the former method, but has been more frequently combined with
it so as to permit of even more luxuriant and wilder expatiation.
This is the autobiographic reading of Shakespeare's work; and,
more particularly, of the Sonnets themselves. The extravagances
of this ‘method' are a by-word; yet it may be questioned whether
almost everybody-sometimes in the very act of protesting against
them—has not been caught in the mazy meshes. Are we to say to
John Shakespeare ‘Thou art this man,' when we read about testy
and platitudinous fathers like old Capulet and Egeus and Polonius?
Should we substitute the 'best silver bowl' argument for the
‘second-best bed' argument and, calling in The Tempest, see
Judith Quiney, to whom that bowl was left, in Miranda Criticism,
it is to be feared, shakes its head and observes that the colours'
of different ages date from long before Aristotle ; and that, doubt-
less, there were charming girls even before Nausicaa.
It may, however, be fully admitted that the Sonnets stand in a
very different category from that of the plays. Not only does the
poet of this kind speak ex professo from his heart, while the
dramatist speaks ex professo as an outside observer and 'repre-
senter, but there is no poetry of this kind which approaches
Shakespeare's Sonnets in apparent vehemence and intensity of
feeling. There is even hardly any which mingles, with the expression
of that feeling, so many concrete hints, suggesting so broadly a
whole romance of personal experience, as they do. How are we to
take all this?
One of the best known things in Shakespearean study-even to
those who have hardly dabbled in it—is that one of the ways in
which it has been taken is an endless series of earnest and almost
frantic attempts to reconstruct this romance as a history. The
personality of the Mr W. H. to whom the complete edition of 1609
is dedicated, though perhaps the chief, is but one, of the points of
dispute. The reality and identity of the fair young man and the
dark lady who are by turns or together concerned in the Sonnets
themselves come next, and, with some enquirers, first; while the
incidents and sentiments, expressed, implied, commemorated, in


## p. 173 (#197) ############################################

-
Biographical Aspects of the Sonnets 173
them, have occupied a not small library of discussion, appreciation,
attack, defence and so forth.
The extravagance of much of this has always been perceptible
to impartial observers; and, perhaps, the extravagance of most of
it-except the particular theory to which they are themselves
inclined—has been clear enough even to the theorists themselves.
Sometimes—and of late with especial learning and elaboration by
Sidney Lee—a sort of general caveat has been entered on the
ground of the peculiarly traditional and conventional character of
sonnet writing, especially at this particular time. Sometimes, all
attempts to interpret have been shaken off, angrily, contemptuously
or critically, according to temperament. And it may be suspected
that some people who would confess it, and more who would not,
have always inclined to Hallam's curious but courageous wish that
Shakespeare ‘had never written them. '
But he did write them—there is hardly a thing of his as to the
authorship of which-what with Meres's early ascription, the publi-
cation with his name seven years before his death and the entire
absence of denial, counter-claim, or challenge of any kind—we can
be so certain. And, probably, there is no lover of poetry as poetry
who would not wish that anything else ‘had never been written,' so
that these might be saved. But, undoubtedly, the mean is very
hard to hit in the interpretation of these poems. Although it is
quite certain that the sonnet tradition, starting from Petrarch and
continued through generations of Italian, French and English
practitioners, had resulted in a vast and complicated 'common
form' of expression-a huge mass of publica materies of which the
individual builder took his store, sometimes directly from other
individuals, sometimes indirectly—it is possible to lay too much
stress on this. After all, even if the sonnet thoughts and phrases
were as stereotyped as the figures of a pack of cards—and they
were not quite this—there is infinite shuffling possible with a pack
of cards, infinite varieties of general game and still more of
personal play, above all, infinite varieties of purpose and stake.
You may play 'for love' in one sense or ‘for love' in another and
a very different one. You may play for trifles or for your last
penny-to show your skill, or merely to win, or to pass the time, or
from many other motives. That Shakespeare was the Deschapelles
or Clay of sonnet whist is pretty certain. But that he did not
play merely for pastime is almost more so to any one who takes the
advice of Sidney's 'Look in thy heart' and applies it to reading,
not writing.


## p. 174 (#198) ############################################

174
Shakespeare
>
>
The Sonnets, then, are great poetry, that is to say, in a certain
sense, great fiction; and they are intense expressions of feeling,
that is to say, in another certain sense, great facts. But to what
extent and degree are this fiction and this fact dosed and propor-
tioned ? How are we to separate them? How do they colour and
react upon one another? Here, no doubt, is the rub-and it is a
rub which it seems to the present writer impossible to remove or
lubricate. Once more, to those who have accustomed themselves
really to weigh evidence, it is impossible to accept it either as
proved or disproved that ‘Mr W. H. ' was Pembroke, or South-
ampton, or any other friend-patron of Shakespeare, or merely
somebody concerned with the publication, or, in fact, a 'personage'
of any kind in this play. Nor is it possible to extricate, from the
obscurity in which, to all appearance designedly, they were involved,
either the other dramatis personae or even, save to the vaguest
extent, the scenario itself. Friendship and love-bene velle and
amare-exchange parts, combine, divorce, sublimate or materialise
themselves and each other in too Protean a fashion to be
caught and fixed in any form. The least unreasonable of all the
extravagant exegeses would be that the whole is a phantasmagoria
of love itself, of all its possible transformations, exaltations,
agonies, degradations, victories, defeats. The most reasonable
explanation, perhaps, and certainly not the least Shakespearean,
is that it is partly this—but partly, also, in degree impossible to
isolate, a record of actual experience. And it is not unimportant
to observe that the Sonnets, a lock in themselves, become a key
(Dryden would have recognised the catachresis) to the plays. How
far they reveal Shakespeare's facts may be doubtful; his method of
treating fact, his own or others, is clear in them.
Before generalising on what this is, we may turn to the individual
plays themselves, to which we have now come in well grounded
chronological advance. The Meres list is well known; it is as
follows: Gentlemen of Verona, [Comedy of] Errors, Love
labors Lost, Love labours wonne, Midsummer night dreame,
Merchant of Venice, Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, King
John, Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet. Of these, we know
all-for the proposed rejection of Titus Andronicus will be dealt
with presently-except Love's Labour's Won, which has been
identified, as plausibly as mere conjecture can identify anything,
with Al's Well that Ends Well. It is, however, all-important
to observe that Meres gives no order on sequence; and that so large
a bulk of work as this, greater than the whole theatre of some


## p. 175 (#199) ############################################

External Evidence as to Order of Plays 175
considerable dramatists, must have taken no short time to write,
especially when we consider that the writer, during four years un-
questionably and, beyond reasonable doubt, for a good deal longer,
had been busily employed in acting. Twelve years possibly, since
the baptism of Hamnet and Judith, six at least, if 'we accept the
Greene reference, may be suggested as not conjectural items in
the problem; eight or ten as a plausible splitting of the difference.
To the fruits of this time we may add, fairly enough, if no certainty
be insisted upon, Shakespeare's part, whatever it was, in Henry VI
(see below and the chapter on the doubtful plays) as well as
portions or first sketches of others and, perhaps, some whole plays.
But the Meres list, from its solidity, affords such an invaluable
basis for investigation and classification that it is wise, in the first
place, not to travel outside of it in quest of either external or
internal evidence of order, or characteristics of quality.
The external evidence is of the smallest. No one of the plays
except Titus was published till the year before Meres wrote,
and some not till the folio of 1623. A Comedy of Errors was
acted near the close of 1594. The Greene reference quotes a line
of Henry VI-not a Meres play.