No More Learning

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. Several, Romeo and Juliet,
Richard II, Richard III, were printed in 1597; Love's Labour's
Lost (with alterations) in the next year. Titus Andronicus was
acted in January 1593/4 and printed in the latter year, in which
The Merchant of Venice, as The Venetian Comedy, may have
appeared. This is all ; and it will be observed, first, that much of
it comes close up to the Meres date itself; secondly, that it con-
cerns only a few of the plays. We have, therefore, to fall back on
internal evidence, as it is called. But internal evidence is of very
different kinds; and it is important to distinguish them from each
other with the greatest possible care. One kind-or, rather, group
of kinds-has figured very largely, indeed, in Shakespearean study.
It is based on what may be broadly called 'allusions'-passages in
the plays which seem to refer to contemporaneous and known
events, coincidence of the general subject of them with such
events, or, sometimes, references in other more or less certainly
dated work to them. It cannot be too strongly asserted, from the
point of view of the present survey, that this class of evidence is
open to the gravest suspicion. It ought not, of course, to be
judged from its caricatures, as in the case where the mention of
'pepper' is supposed to be connected with a known capture of
a large cargo of that comforting spice. But, in almost all cases,
it is exceedingly difficult to be sure that the coincidences are not


## p. 176 (#200) ############################################

176
Shakespeare
purely imaginary. Nor is this the worst part of the matter. Admit
that they are not purely imaginary—that the actual cited passages
may have had some connection with the actual known events.
How are we possibly to be certain that these passages were parts
of the play as originally acted, much more as originally written?
“Those who live to please must please to live': the topical insertion
or 'gag' is one of the best known features of theatrical composition
and is probably as old as Thespis in ancient times or Boileau's
imaginary pilgrims in modern. Some of Shakespeare's plays, we
know, were not printed till nearly thirty years after they were
first acted; it is not impossible that, in some cases, the interval
may have been even longer. Even if you can date the passage, it
will give you no right whatever to date the play accordingly. , If,
therefore, this whole class of evidence' is not to be ruled out
bodily, it must be relegated to the utmost margin-kept strictly in
the court of the Gentiles.
The other kind of internal evidence is not itself quite homo-
geneous, except that it is, or should be, always and entirely
concerned with literary matters—with the quality, style, con-
struction, form, character generally, of the work. Even here,
there are dangers—and quite as fantastic tricks have been played
in this way as in the other. By judging piecemeal, by adopting
arbitrary standards of judgment and, above all, by considering,
not what Shakespeare wrote but what we should like Shakespeare
to have written, or think he ought to have written, it is possible to
go as far wrong in this as in any way whatever. In no way, how-
ever, is it possible to reach so far and so safely, if due precaution
be observed and if there be brought to the enterprise, in the first
place, a sufficient study of the whole of Shakespeare's work, and,
in the second, a competent knowledge of preceding and contem-
porary English literature.
The invaluableness of the Meres statement is that it provides
us with a trustworthy and far reaching criterion between Shake-
speare's earlier and his later work. It is, of course, possible that
Meres may not have known of some early pieces or may have
omitted them by accident; but in a list already so considerable as
his and, as in the case of the Sonnets, showing knowledge of a more
than merely outside character, it is very improbable that he omitted
much that was completed, publicly performed and notoriously
Shakespeare's. On the other hand, we have this early body of
.
work. coted' and named as early. If we can discover any charac-
teristics of the kind least likely to deceive the characteristics of


## p. 177 (#201) ############################################

The Earliest Group
177
construction, style, prosody—which differ remarkably as wholes
from those of the plays not named, or most of them, this will
give us light of the most important and illuminative kind. If we
can perceive that, in these same respects, the plays of the early
list differ from each other singly or in groups—that there is
evidence of the same progress and achievement inside the
group as there is between it and plays like Hamlet, As You Like
It, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello-we may almost know that we
are in the right path. And we may branch from it, though with
caution and almost with fear and trembling, into comparison of
the same kind with immediately preceding or contemporary writers,
to obtain additional illustration and illumination.
By the steady carrying out of all these processes—the com-
parison of the Meres list with the other plays; the comparison of
the plays in that list with each other; and the comparison of the
work of the Marlowe group, of Lyly and of a few other known
or unknown writers—the least hasty or fanciful of critics will
probably be induced to mark off from the Meres list of un-
doubtedly early plays a smaller group of almost undoubtedly earlier
and, perhaps, a smaller still of probably earliest. From this last,
he will probably be wise in refusing to select an 'earliest of all,'
because the marks of earliness in them are not quite the same.
They are all such as would characterise a genius in its novitiate;
but it would be an exceedingly rash person who should undertake
to say that, of the various kinds of literary measles which they
show, one would be likely to attack the patient sooner than another.
The group in question consists, as it seems to the present writer,
of three plays, which, to mention them in the unquestion-begging
order of the folio, are The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's
Lost and Titus Andronicus. The Two Gentlemen of Verona,
which, in the same notoriously haphazard order, comes before
them all, is, in this order of criticism, very near them as a whole,
but with perhaps later qualities; and so is Meres's probable Love's
Labour's Won (All's Well that Ends Well). Let us take the five
in order and the three, together and separately, first. That The
Comedy of Errors is, in substance, a mere adaptation of the
Menaechmi of Plautus would, in itself, have very little to do with
probable earliness or lateness; for it is a point so well known as
to require no discussion, explanation, apology or even frequent
statement, that Shakespeare never gave himself the slightest
trouble to be 'original. ' Its earliness is shown by the comparative
absence of character, by the mixed and rough-hewn quality
12
>
E. L. V.
CH, VIII.


## p. 178 (#202) ############################################

178
Shakespeare
of the prosody (a connected view of Shakespeare's versification
will be given later) and, last and most of all, by the inordinate
allowance of the poorest, the most irrelevant and, occasionally, the
most uncomely wordplay and 'foolery. This last characteristic
has, of course, been charged against Shakespeare generally, and
the charge will have to be dealt with in general. It need only be
said now that in no play or passage from The Tempest to Pericles
is there anything to which, as it seems to the present writer, the
words above used can be applied as they can to passage after
passage between the Dromios and their masters. He does not
therefore think, as would some, that Shakespeare did not write
these latter passages ; he does think that Shakespeare wrote them
before he knew better. But that Shakespeare was certain to know
better before long is proved in this very play by the fine, though
stiff, tirades of the opening scene, by the extremely beautiful
poetry of Adriana and her sister, as well as by touches of nascent
power over character in both of them, and by numerous flashes
here and there in which the spirit, not quite fullgrown as yet,
hurries itself through the bonds of imperfect training in speech
and metre. It is, however, on the whole, the crudest and most
immature of all the plays, and may well have been the earliest.
That position has more commonly been assigned to Love's Labour's
Lost, and here, too, the assignment has justifications, though they
are different. The play exhibits not so much (though there is
something of this) the inability of youth to finish, as its prodigality
and want of selection. The poet cannot make up his mind what
metre to select : blank verse, couplets, stanzas, fourteeners more
or less doggerel-he tries them all by turns and does them all with
a delightful improvisation. He has a real plot-partly borrowed,
of course—but he overloads it in every direction with incident and
character. Of the latter, in hasty but astonishingly creative forms,
he is the most prodigal of younkers. Nobody is a mere figure-
head: Biron, Armado, Holofernes, Costard, Rosaline, even Sir
Nathaniel, are of the true Shakespearean family; and the exquisite
Shakespearean lyric makes its appearance. There is almost every-
thing in the piece but measure and polish; and one is almost
tempted to say: ‘Measure and polish are most excellent things;
but they can wait or we can wait for them. '
Titus Andronicus, as we have it, has been denied to Shakespeare,
but this denial really passes the bounds of all rational literary
criticism.