Chapter 5

'historical masque.' It was first printed in the folio of Shakespeare's works in 1623, but shows traces of more hands than one. The three chief characters--the king, Queen Katharine of Arragon, and Cardinal Wolsey--bear clear marks of Shakespeare's best workmanship; but only act i. sc. i., act ii. sc. iii. and iv. (Katharine's trial), act iii. sc. ii. (except ll. 204-460), act v. sc. i. can on either aesthetic or metrical grounds be confidently assigned to him. These portions may, according to their metrical characteristics, be dated, like the 'Winter's Tale,' about 1611. There are good grounds for assigning nearly all the remaining thirteen scenes to the pen of Fletcher, with occasional aid from Massinger. Wolsey's familiar farewell to Cromwell (III. ii. 204-460) is the only passage the authorship of which excites really grave embarrassment. It recalls at every point the style of Fletcher, and nowhere that of Shakespeare. But the Fletcherian style, as it is here displayed, is invested with a greatness that is not matched elsewhere in Fletcher's work. That Fletcher should have exhibited such faculty once and once only is barely credible, and we are driven to the alternative conclusion that the noble valediction was by Shakespeare, who in it gave proof of his versatility by echoing in a glorified key the habitual strain of Fletcher, his colleague and virtual successor. James Spedding's theory that Fletcher hastily completed Shakespeare's unfinished draft for the special purpose of enabling the company to celebrate the marriage of Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine, which took place on February 14, 1612-13, seems fanciful. During May 1613, according to an extant list, nineteen plays were produced at Court in honour of the event, but 'Henry VIII' is not among them. {263a} The conjecture that Massinger and Fletcher alone collaborated in 'Henry VIII' (to the exclusion of Shakespeare altogether) does not deserve serious consideration. {263b}

XVI--THE CLOSE OF LIFE

Plays at Court in 1613. Actor-friends.

The concluding years of Shakespeare's life (1611-1616) were mainly passed at Stratford. It is probable that in 1611 he disposed of his shares in the Globe and Blackfriars theatres. He owned none at the date of his death. But until 1614 he paid frequent visits to London, where friends in sympathy with his work were alone to be found. His plays continued to form the staple of Court performances. In May 1613, during the Princess Elizabeth's marriage festivities, Heming, Shakespeare's former colleague, produced at Whitehall no fewer than seven of his plays, viz. 'Much Ado,' 'Tempest,' 'Winter's Tale,' 'Sir John Falstaff' (_i.e._ 'Merry Wives'), 'Othello,' 'Julius Caesar,' 'and Hotspur' (doubtless 'Henry IV'). {264} Of his actor-friends, one of the chief, Augustine Phillips, had died in 1605, leaving by will 'to my fellowe, William Shakespeare, a thirty-shillings piece of gold.' With Burbage, Heming, and Condell his relations remained close to the end. Burbage, according to a poetic elegy, made his reputation by creating the leading parts in Shakespeare's greatest tragedies. Hamlet, Othello, and Lear were roles in which he gained especial renown. But Burbage and Shakespeare were popularly credited with co-operation in less solemn enterprises. They were reputed to be companions in many sportive adventures. The sole anecdote of Shakespeare that is positively known to have been recorded in his lifetime relates that Burbage, when playing Richard III, agreed with a lady in the audience to visit her after the performance; Shakespeare, overhearing the conversation, anticipated the actor's visit, and met Burbage on his arrival with the quip that 'William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.' {265a}

Such gossip possibly deserves little more acceptance than the later story, in the same key, which credits Shakespeare with the paternity of Sir William D'Avenant. The latter was baptised at Oxford on March 3, 1605, as the son of John D'Avenant, the landlord of the Crown Inn, where Shakespeare lodged in his journeys to and from Stratford. The story of Shakespeare's parental relation to D'Avenant was long current in Oxford, and was at times complacently accepted by the reputed son. Shakespeare is known to have been a welcome guest at John D'Avenant's house, and another son, Robert, boasted of the kindly notice which the poet took of him as a child. {265b} It is safer to adopt the less compromising version which makes Shakespeare the godfather of the boy William instead of his father. But the antiquity and persistence of the scandal belie the assumption that Shakespeare was known to his contemporaries as a man of scrupulous virtue. Ben Jonson and Drayton--the latter a Warwickshire man--seem to have been Shakespeare's closest literary friends in his latest years.

Final settlement at Stratford.

At Stratford, in the words of Nicholas Rowe, 'the latter part of Shakespeare's life was spent, as all men of good sense will wish theirs may be, in ease, retirement, and the conversation of his friends.' As a resident in the town, he took a full share of social and civic responsibilities. On October 16, 1608, he stood chief godfather to William, son of Henry Walker, a mercer and alderman. On September 11, 1611, when he had finally settled in New Place, his name appeared in the margin of a folio page of donors (including all the principal inhabitants of Stratford) to a fund that was raised 'towards the charge of prosecuting the bill in Parliament for the better repair of the highways.'

Domestic affairs.

Meanwhile his own domestic affairs engaged some of his attention. Of his two surviving children--both daughters--the eldest, Susanna, had married, on June 5, 1607, John Hall (1575-1635), a rising physician of Puritan leanings, and in the following February there was born the poet's only granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall. On September 9, 1608, the poet's mother was buried in the parish church, and on February 4, 1613, his third brother Richard. On July 15, 1613, Mrs. Hall preferred, with her father's assistance, a charge of slander against one Lane in the ecclesiastical court at Worcester; the defendant, who had apparently charged the lady with illicit relations with one Ralph Smith, did not appear, and was excommunicated.

[Picture: Signature on Purchase-Deed]

Purchase of a house in Blackfriars.

In the same year (1613), when on a short visit to London, Shakespeare invested a small sum of money in a new property. This was his last investment in real estate. He then purchased a house, the ground-floor of which was a haberdasher's shop, with a yard attached. It was situated within six hundred feet of the Blackfriars Theatre--on the west side of St. Andrew's Hill, formerly termed Puddle Hill or Puddle Dock Hill, in the near neighbourhood of what is now known as Ireland Yard. The former owner, Henry Walker, a musician, had bought the property for 100 pounds in 1604. Shakespeare in 1613 agreed to pay him 140 pounds. The deeds of conveyance bear the date of March 10 in that year. {267} Next day, on March 11, Shakespeare executed another deed (now in the British Museum) which stipulated that 60 pounds of the purchase-money was to remain on mortgage until the following Michaelmas. The money was unpaid at Shakespeare's death. In both purchase-deed and mortgage-deed Shakespeare's signature was witnessed by (among others) Henry Lawrence, 'servant' or clerk to Robert Andrewes, the scrivener who drew the deeds, and Lawrence's seal, bearing his initials 'H. L.,' was stamped in each case on the parchment-tag, across the head of which Shakespeare wrote his name. In all three documents--the two indentures and the mortgage-deed--Shakespeare is described as 'of Stratford-on-Avon, in the Countie of Warwick, Gentleman.' There is no reason to suppose that he acquired the house for his own residence. He at once leased the property to John Robinson, already a resident in the neighbourhood.

[Picture: Signature on Mortgage-Deed]

Attempt to enclose the Stratford common fields.

With puritans and puritanism Shakespeare was not in sympathy, {268} and he could hardly have viewed with unvarying composure the steady progress that puritanism was making among his fellow-townsmen. Nevertheless a preacher, doubtless of puritan proclivities, was entertained at Shakespeare's residence, New Place, after delivering a sermon in the spring of 1614. The incident might serve to illustrate Shakespeare's characteristic placability, but his son-in-law Hall, who avowed sympathy with puritanism, was probably in the main responsible for the civility. {269a} In July John Combe, a rich inhabitant of Stratford, died and left 5 pounds to Shakespeare. The legend that Shakespeare alienated him by composing some doggerel on his practice of lending money at ten or twelve per cent. seems apocryphal, although it is quoted by Aubrey and accepted by Rowe. {269b} Combe's death involved Shakespeare more conspicuously than before in civic affairs. Combe's heir William no sooner succeeded to his father's lands than he, with a neighbouring owner, Arthur Mannering, steward of Lord-chancellor Ellesmere (who was ex-officio lord of the manor), attempted to enclose the common fields, which belonged to the corporation of Stratford, about his estate at Welcombe. The corporation resolved to offer the scheme a stout resistance. Shakespeare had a twofold interest in the matter by virtue of his owning the freehold of 106 acres at Welcombe and Old Stratford, and as joint owner--now with Thomas Greene, the town clerk--of the tithes of Old Stratford, Welcombe, and Bishopton. His interest in his freeholds could not have been prejudicially affected, but his interest in the tithes might be depreciated by the proposed enclosure. Shakespeare consequently joined with his fellow-owner Greene in obtaining from Combe's agent Replingham in October 1614 a deed indemnifying both against any injury they might suffer from the enclosure. But having thus secured himself against all possible loss, Shakespeare threw his influence into Combe's scale. In November 1614 he was on a last visit to London, and Greene, whose official position as town clerk compelled him to support the corporation in defiance of his private interests, visited him there to discuss the position of affairs. On December 23, 1614, the corporation in formal meeting drew up a letter to Shakespeare imploring him to aid them. Greene himself sent to the dramatist 'a note of inconveniences [to the corporation that] would happen by the enclosure.' But although an ambiguous entry of a later date (September 1615) in the few extant pages of Greene's ungrammatical diary has been unjustifiably tortured into an expression of disgust on Shakespeare's part at Combe's conduct, {271} it is plain that, in the spirit of his agreement with Combe's agent, he continued to lend Combe his countenance. Happily Combe's efforts failed, and the common lands remain unenclosed.

Death. Burial.

At the beginning of 1616 Shakespeare's health was failing. He directed Francis Collins, a solicitor of Warwick, to draft his will, but, though it was prepared for signature on January 25, it was for the time laid aside. On February 10, 1616, Shakespeare's younger daughter, Judith, married, at Stratford parish church, Thomas Quincy, four years her junior, a son of an old friend of the poet. The ceremony took place apparently without public asking of the banns and before a license was procured. The irregularity led to the summons of the bride and bridegroom to the ecclesiastical court at Worcester and the imposition of a fine. According to the testimony of John Ward, the vicar, Shakespeare entertained at New Place his two friends, Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson, in this same spring of 1616, and 'had a merry meeting,' but 'itt seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feavour there contracted.' A popular local legend, which was not recorded till 1762, {272a} credited Shakespeare with engaging at an earlier date in a prolonged and violent drinking bout at Bidford, a neighbouring village, {272b} but his achievements as a hard drinker may be dismissed as unproven. The cause of his death is undetermined, but probably his illness seemed likely to take a fatal turn in March, when he revised and signed the will that had been drafted in the previous January. On Tuesday, April 23, he died at the age of fifty-two. {272c} On Thursday, April 25 (O.S.), the poet was buried inside Stratford Church, near the northern wall of the chancel, in which, as part-owner of the tithes, and consequently one of the lay-rectors, he had a right of interment. Hard by was the charnel-house, where bones dug up from the churchyard were deposited. Over the poet's grave were inscribed the lines:

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbeare To dig the dust enclosed heare; Bleste be the man that spares these stones, And curst be he that moves my bones.

According to one William Hall, who described a visit to Stratford in 1694, {273} these verses were penned by Shakespeare to suit 'the capacity of clerks and sextons, for the most part a very ignorant set of people.' Had this curse not threatened them, Hall proceeds, the sexton would not have hesitated in course of time to remove Shakespeare's dust to 'the bone-house.' As it was, the grave was made seventeen feet deep, and was never opened, even to receive his wife, although she expressed a desire to be buried with her husband.

[Picture: Signatures from each sheet of the will]

The will. Bequest to his wife.

Shakespeare's will, the first draft of which was drawn up before January 25, 1616, received many interlineations and erasures before it was signed in the ensuing March. Francis Collins, the solicitor of Warwick, and Thomas Russell, 'esquier,' of Stratford, were the overseers; it was proved by John Hall, the poet's son-in-law and joint-executor with Mrs. Hall, in London on June 22 following. The religious exordium is in conventional phraseology, and gives no clue to Shakespeare's personal religious opinions. What those opinions were, we have neither the means nor the warrant for discussing. But while it is possible to quote from the plays many contemptuous references to the puritans and their doctrines, we may dismiss as idle gossip Davies's irresponsible report that 'he dyed a papist.' The name of Shakespeare's wife was omitted from the original draft of the will, but by an interlineation in the final draft she received his second best bed with its furniture. No other bequest was made her. Several wills of the period have been discovered in which a bedstead or other article of household furniture formed part of a wife's inheritance, but none except Shakespeare's is forthcoming in which a bed forms the sole bequest. At the same time the precision with which Shakespeare's will accounts for and assigns to other legatees every known item of his property refutes the conjecture that he had set aside any portion of it under a previous settlement or jointure with a view to making independent provision for his wife. Her right to a widow's dower--_i.e._ to a third share for life in freehold estate--was not subject to testamentary disposition, but Shakespeare had taken steps to prevent her from benefiting--at any rate to the full extent--by that legal arrangement. He had barred her dower in the case of his latest purchase of freehold estate, viz. the house at Blackfriars. {274} Such procedure is pretty conclusive proof that he had the intention of excluding her from the enjoyment of his possessions after his death. But, however plausible the theory that his relations with her were from first to last wanting in sympathy, it is improbable that either the slender mention of her in the will or the barring of her dower was designed by Shakespeare to make public his indifference or dislike. Local tradition subsequently credited her with a wish to be buried in his grave; and her epitaph proves that she inspired her daughters with genuine affection. Probably her ignorance of affairs and the infirmities of age (she was past sixty) combined to unfit her in the poet's eyes for the control of property, and, as an act of ordinary prudence, he committed her to the care of his elder daughter, who inherited, according to such information as is accessible, some of his own shrewdness, and had a capable adviser in her husband.

His heiress. Legacies to friends.

This elder daughter, Susanna Hall, was, according to the will, to become mistress of New Place, and practically of all the poet's estate. She received (with remainder to her issue in strict entail) New Place, all the land, barns, and gardens at and near Stratford (except the tenement in Chapel Lane), and the house in Blackfriars, London, while she and her husband were appointed executors and residuary legatees, with full rights over nearly all the poet's household furniture and personal belongings. To their only child and the testator's granddaughter, or 'niece,' Elizabeth Hall, was bequeathed the poet's plate, with the exception of his broad silver and gilt bowl, which was reserved for his younger daughter, Judith. To his younger daughter he also left, with the tenement in Chapel Lane (in remainder to the elder daughter), 150 pounds in money, of which 100 pounds, her marriage portion, was to be paid within a year, and another 150 pounds to be paid to her if alive three years after the date of the will. {276a} To the poet's sister, Joan Hart, whose husband, William Hart, predeceased the testator by only six days, he left, besides a contingent reversionary interest in Judith's pecuniary legacy, his wearing apparel, 20 pounds in money, a life interest in the Henley Street property, with 5 pounds for each of her three sons, William, Thomas, and Michael. To the poor of Stratford he gave 10 pounds, and to Mr. Thomas Combe (apparently a brother of William, of the enclosure controversy) his sword. To each of his Stratford friends, Hamlett Sadler, William Reynoldes, Anthony Nash, and John Nash, and to each of his 'fellows' (_i.e._ theatrical colleagues in London), John Heming, Richard Burbage, and Henry Condell, he left xxvj_s_. viij_d_., with which to buy memorial rings. His godson, William Walker, received 'xx' shillings in gold.

The tomb.

Before 1623 {276b} an elaborate monument, by a London sculptor of Dutch birth, Gerard Johnson, was erected to Shakespeare's memory in the chancel of the parish church. {277} It includes a half-length bust, depicting the dramatist on the point of writing. The fingers of the right hand are disposed as if holding a pen, and under the left hand lies a quarto sheet of paper. The inscription, which was apparently by a London friend, runs:

Judicio Pylium, genio Socratem, arte Maronem, Terra tegit, populus maeret, Olympus habet.

Stay passenger, why goest thou by so fast? Read, if thou canst, whom envious death hath plast Within this monument; Shakespeare with whome Quick nature dide; whose name doth deck ys tombe Far more than cost; sith all yt he hath writt Leaves living art but page to serve his witt.

Obiit ano. doi 1616 AEtatis 53 Die 23 Ap.

Personal character.

At the opening of Shakespeare's career Chettle wrote of his 'civil demeanour' and of the reports of 'his uprightness of dealing which argues his honesty.' In 1601--when near the zenith of his fame--he was apostrophised as 'sweet Master Shakespeare' in the play of 'The Return from Parnassus,' and that adjective was long after associated with his name. In 1604 one Anthony Scoloker in a poem called 'Daiphantus' bestowed on him the epithet 'friendly.' After the close of his career Jonson wrote of him: 'I loved the man and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry as much as any. He was, indeed, honest and of an open and free nature.' {278a} No other contemporary left on record any definite impression of Shakespeare's personal character, and the 'Sonnets,' which alone of his literary work can be held to throw any illumination on a personal trait, mainly reveal him in the light of one who was willing to conform to all the conventional methods in vogue for strengthening the bonds between a poet and a great patron. His literary practices and aims were those of contemporary men of letters, and the difference in the quality of his work and theirs was due not to conscious endeavour on his part to act otherwise than they, but to the magic and involuntary working of his genius. He seemed unconscious of his marvellous superiority to his professional comrades. The references in his will to his fellow-actors, and the spirit in which (as they announce in the First Folio) they approached the task of collecting his works after his death, corroborate the description of him as a sympathetic friend of gentle, unassuming mien. The later traditions brought together by Aubrey depict him as 'very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit,' and there is much in other early posthumous references to suggest a genial, if not a convivial, temperament, linked to a quiet turn for good-humoured satire. But Bohemian ideals and modes of life had no genuine attraction for Shakespeare. His extant work attests his 'copious' and continuous industry, {278b} and with his literary power and sociability there clearly went the shrewd capacity of a man of business. Pope had just warrant for the surmise that he

For gain not glory winged his roving flight, And grew immortal in his own despite.

His literary attainments and successes were chiefly valued as serving the prosaic end of providing permanently for himself and his daughters. His highest ambition was to restore among his fellow-townsmen the family repute which his father's misfortunes had imperilled. Ideals so homely are reckoned rare among poets, but Chaucer and Sir Walter Scott, among writers of exalted genius, vie with Shakespeare in the sobriety of their personal aims and in the sanity of their mental attitude towards life's ordinary incidents.

XVII--SURVIVORS AND DESCENDANTS

The survivors. Mistress Judith Quiney.

Shakespeare's widow died on August 6, 1623, at the age of sixty-seven, and was buried near her husband inside the chancel two days later. Some affectionately phrased Latin elegiacs--doubtless from Dr. Hall's pen--were inscribed on a brass plate fastened to the stone above her grave. {280} The younger daughter, Judith, resided with her husband, Thomas Quiney, at The Cage, a house which he leased in Bridge Street from 1616 till 1652. There he carried on the trade of a vintner, and took part in municipal affairs, acting as a councillor from 1617 and as chamberlain in 1621-2 and 1622-3; but after 1630 his affairs grew embarrassed, and he left Stratford late in 1652 for London, where he seems to have died a few months later. Of his three sons by Judith, the eldest, Shakespeare (baptised on November 23, 1616), was buried in Stratford Churchyard on May 8, 1617; the second son, Richard (baptised on February 9, 1617-18), was buried on January 28, 1638-9; and the third son, Thomas (baptised on January 23, 1619-20), was buried on February 26, 1638-9. Judith survived her husband, sons, and sister, dying at Stratford on February 9, 1661-2, in her seventy-seventh year.

Mistress Susannah Hall.

The poet's elder daughter, Mrs. Susanna Hall, resided at New Place till her death. Her sister Judith alienated to her the Chapel Place tenement before 1633, but that, with the interest in the Stratford tithes, she soon disposed of. Her husband, Dr. John Hall, died on November 25, 1635. In 1642 James Cooke, a surgeon in attendance on some Royalist troops stationed at Stratford, visited Mrs. Hall and examined manuscripts in her possession, but they were apparently of her husband's, not of her father's, composition. {281} From July 11 to 13, 1643, Queen Henrietta Maria, while journeying from Newark to Oxford, was billeted on Mrs. Hall at New Place for three days, and was visited there by Prince Rupert. Mrs. Hall was buried beside her husband in Stratford Churchyard on July 11, 1649, and a rhyming inscription, describing her as 'witty above her sex,' was engraved on her tombstone. The whole inscription ran: 'Heere lyeth ye body of Svsanna, wife to John Hall, Gent. ye davghter of William Shakespeare, Gent. She deceased ye 11th of Jvly, A.D. 1649, aged 66.

'Witty above her sexe, but that's not all, Wise to Salvation was good Mistress Hall, Something of Shakespere was in that, but this Wholy of him with whom she's now in blisse. Then, passenger, ha'st ne're a teare, To weepe with her that wept with all? That wept, yet set herselfe to chere Them up with comforts cordiall. Her Love shall live, her mercy spread, When thou hast ne're a teare to shed.'

The last descendant.

Mrs. Hall's only child, Elizabeth, was the last surviving descendant of the poet. In April 1626 she married her first husband, Thomas Nash of Stratford (_b._ 1593), who studied at Lincoln's Inn, was a man of property, and, dying childless at New Place on April 4, 1647, was buried in Stratford Church next day. At Billesley, a village four miles from Stratford, on June 5, 1649, Mrs. Nash married, as a second husband, a widower, John Bernard or Barnard of Abington, Northamptonshire, who was knighted by Charles II in 1661. About the same date she seems to have abandoned New Place for her husband's residence at Abington. Dying without issue, she was buried there on February 17, 1669-70. Her husband survived her four years, and was buried beside her. {282} On her mother's death in 1649 Lady Barnard inherited under the poet's will the land near Stratford, New Place, the house at Blackfriars, and (on the death of the poet's sister, Joan Hart, in 1646) the houses in Henley Street, while her father, Dr. Hall, left her in 1635 a house at Acton with a meadow. She sold the Blackfriars house, and apparently the Stratford land, before 1667. By her will, dated January 1669-70, and proved in the following March, she left small bequests to the daughters of Thomas Hathaway, of the family of her grandmother, the poet's wife. The houses in Henley Street passed to her cousin, Thomas Hart, the grandson of the poet's sister Joan, and they remained in the possession of Thomas's direct descendants till 1806 (the male line expired on the death of John Hart in 1800). By her will Lady Barnard also ordered New Place to be sold, and it was purchased on May 18, 1675, by Sir Edward Walker, through whose daughter Barbara, wife of Sir John Clopton, it reverted to the Clopton family. Sir John rebuilt it in 1702. On the death of his son Hugh in 1752, it was bought by the Rev. Francis Gastrell (_d._ 1768), who demolished the new building in 1759. {283}

Shakespeare's brothers.

Of Shakespeare's three brothers, only one, Gilbert, seems to have survived him. Edmund, the youngest brother, 'a player,' was buried at St. Saviour's Church, Southwark, 'with a fore-noone knell of the great bell,' on December 31, 1607; he was in his twenty-eighth year. Richard, John Shakespeare's third son, died at Stratford in February 1613, aged 29. 'Gilbert Shakespeare adolescens,' who was buried at Stratford on February 3, 1611-12, was doubtless son of the poet's next brother, Gilbert; the latter, having nearly completed his forty-sixth year, could scarcely be described as 'adolescens;' his death is not recorded, but according to Oldys he survived to a patriarchal age.

XVIII--AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, AND MEMORIALS

Spelling of the poet's surname. Autograph signatures.

Much controversy has arisen over the spelling of the poet's surname. It has been proved capable of four thousand variations. {284} The name of the poet's father is entered sixty-six times in the council books of Stratford, and is spelt in sixteen ways. The commonest form is 'Shaxpeare.' Five autographs of the poet of undisputed authenticity are extant: his signature to the indenture relating to the purchase of the property in Blackfriars, dated March 10, 1612-13 (since 1841 in the Guildhall Library); his signature to the mortgage-deed relating to the same purchase, dated March 11, 1612-13 (since 1858 in the British Museum), and the three signatures on the three sheets of his will, dated March 25, 1615-16 (now at Somerset House). In all the signatures some of the letters are represented by recognised signs of abbreviation. The signature to the first document is 'William Shakspere,' though in all other portions of the deed the name is spelt 'Shakespeare.' The signature to the second document has been interpreted both as Shakspere and Shakspeare. The ink of the first signature in the will has now faded almost beyond decipherment, but that it was 'Shakspere' may be inferred from the facsimile made by Steevens in 1776. The second and third signatures to the will, which are also somewhat difficult to decipher, have been read both as Shakspere and Shakspeare; but a close examination suggests that whatever the second signature may be, the third is 'Shakespeare.' Shakspere is the spelling of the alleged autograph in the British Museum copy of Florio's 'Montaigne,' but the genuineness of that signature is disputable. {285} Shakespeare was the form adopted in the full signature appended to the dedicatory epistles of the 'Venus and Adonis' of 1593 and the 'Lucrece' of 1594, volumes which were produced under the poet's supervision. It is the spelling adopted on the title-pages of the majority of contemporary editions of his works, whether or not produced under his supervision. It is adopted in almost all the published references to the poet during the seventeenth century. It appears in the grant of arms in 1596, in the license to the players of 1603, and in the text of all the legal documents relating to the poet's property. The poet, like most of his contemporaries, acknowledged no finality on the subject. According to the best authority, he spelt his surname in two ways when signing his will. There is consequently no good ground for abandoning the form Shakespeare, which is sanctioned by legal and literary custom. {286}

Shakespeare's portraits. The Stratford bust. The 'Stratford' portrait.

Aubrey reported that Shakespeare was 'a handsome well-shap't man,' but no portrait exists which can be said with absolute certainty to have been executed during his lifetime, although one has recently been discovered with a good claim to that distinction. Only two of the extant portraits are positively known to have been produced within a short period after his death. These are the bust in Stratford Church and the frontispiece to the folio of 1623. Each is an inartistic attempt at a posthumous likeness. There is considerable discrepancy between the two; their main points of resemblance are the baldness on the top of the head and the fulness of the hair about the ears. The bust was by Gerard Johnson or Janssen, who was a Dutch stonemason or tombmaker settled in Southwark. It was set up in the church before 1623, and is a rudely carved specimen of mortuary sculpture. There are marks about the forehead and ears which suggest that the face was fashioned from a death mask, but the workmanship is at all points clumsy. The round face and eyes present a heavy, unintellectual expression. The bust was originally coloured, but in 1793 Malone caused it to be whitewashed. In 1861 the whitewash was removed, and the colours, as far as traceable, restored. The eyes are light hazel, the hair and beard auburn. There have been numberless reproductions, both engraved and photographic. It was first engraved--very imperfectly--for Rowe's edition in 1709; then by Vertue for Pope's edition of 1725; and by Gravelot for Hanmer's edition in 1744. A good engraving by William Ward appeared in 1816. A phototype and a chromo-phototype, issued by the New Shakspere Society, are the best reproductions for the purposes of study. The pretentious painting known as the 'Stratford' portrait, and presented in 1867 by W. O. Hunt, town clerk of Stratford, to the Birthplace Museum, where it is very prominently displayed, was probably painted from the bust late in the eighteenth century; it lacks either historic or artistic interest.

Droeshout's engraving.

The engraved portrait--nearly a half-length--which was printed on the title-page of the folio of 1623, was by Martin Droeshout. On the opposite page lines by Ben Jonson congratulate 'the graver' on having satisfactorily 'hit' the poet's 'face.' Jonson's testimony does no credit to his artistic discernment; the expression of countenance, which is very crudely rendered, is neither distinctive nor lifelike. The face is long and the forehead high; the top of the head is bald, but the hair falls in abundance over the ears. There is a scanty moustache and a thin tuft under the lower lip. A stiff and wide collar, projecting horizontally, conceals the neck. The coat is closely buttoned and elaborately bordered, especially at the shoulders. The dimensions of the head and face are disproportionately large as compared with those of the body. In the unique proof copy which belonged to Halliwell-Phillipps (now with his collection in America) the tone is clearer than in the ordinary copies, and the shadows are less darkened by cross-hatching and coarse dotting. The engraver, Martin Droeshout, belonged to a Flemish family of painters and engravers long settled in London, where he was born in 1601. He was thus fifteen years old at the time of Shakespeare's death in 1616, and it is consequently improbable that he had any personal knowledge of the dramatist. The engraving was doubtless produced by Droeshout very shortly before the publication of the First Folio in 1623, when he had completed his twenty-second year. It thus belongs to the outset of the engraver's professional career, in which he never achieved extended practice or reputation. A copy of the Droeshout engraving, by William Marshall, was prefixed to Shakespeare's 'Poems' in 1640, and William Faithorne made another copy for the frontispiece of the edition of 'The Rape of Lucrece' published in 1655.

The 'Droeshout' painting.

There is little doubt that young Droeshout in fashioning his engraving worked from a painting, and there is a likelihood that the original picture from which the youthful engraver worked has lately come to light. As recently as 1892 Mr. Edgar Flower, of Stratford-on-Avon, discovered in the possession of Mr. H. C. Clements, a private gentleman with artistic tastes residing at Peckham Rye, a portrait alleged to represent Shakespeare. The picture, which was faded and somewhat worm-eaten, dated beyond all doubt from the early years of the seventeenth century. It was painted on a panel formed of two planks of old elm, and in the upper left-hand corner was the inscription 'Willm Shakespeare, 1609.' Mr. Clements purchased the portrait of an obscure dealer about 1840, and knew nothing of its history, beyond what he set down on a slip of paper when he acquired it. The note that he then wrote and pasted on the box in which he preserved the picture, ran as follows: 'The original portrait of Shakespeare, from which the now famous Droeshout engraving was taken and inserted in the first collected edition of his works, published in 1623, being seven years after his death. The picture was painted nine [_vere_ seven] years before his death, and consequently sixteen [_vere_ fourteen] years before it was published. . . . The picture was publicly exhibited in London seventy years ago, and many thousands went to see it.' In all its details and in its comparative dimensions, especially in the disproportion between the size of the head and that of the body, this picture is identical with the Droeshout engraving. Though coarsely and stiffly drawn, the face is far more skilfully presented than in the engraving, and the expression of countenance betrays some artistic sentiment which is absent from the print. Connoisseurs, including Sir Edward Poynter, Mr. Sidney Colvin, and Mr. Lionel Cust, have almost unreservedly pronounced the picture to be anterior in date to the engraving, and they have reached the conclusion that in all probability Martin Droeshout directly based his work upon the painting. Influences of an early seventeenth-century Flemish school are plainly discernible in the picture, and it is just possible that it is the production of an uncle of the young engraver Martin Droeshout, who bore the same name as his nephew, and was naturalised in this country on January 25, 1608, when he was described as a 'painter of Brabant.' Although the history of the portrait rests on critical conjecture and on no external contemporary evidence, there seems good ground for regarding it as a portrait of Shakespeare painted in his lifetime--in the forty-fifth year of his age. No other pictorial representation of the poet has equally serious claims to be treated as contemporary with himself, and it therefore presents features of unique interest. On the death of its owner, Mr. Clements, in 1895, the painting was purchased by Mrs. Charles Flower, and was presented to the Memorial Picture Gallery at Stratford, where it now hangs. No attempt at restoration has been made. A photogravure forms the frontispiece to the present volume. {290}

Of the same type as the Droeshout engraving, although less closely resembling it than the picture just described, is the 'Ely House' portrait (now the property of the Birthplace Trustees at Stratford), which formerly belonged to Thomas Turton, Bishop of Ely, and it is inscribed 'AE. 39 x. 1603.' {291a} This painting is of high artistic value. The features are of a far more attractive and intellectual cast than in either the Droeshout painting or engraving, and the many differences in detail raise doubts as to whether the person represented can have been intended for Shakespeare. Experts are of opinion that the picture was painted early in the seventeenth century.

Early in Charles II's reign Lord Chancellor Clarendon added a portrait of Shakespeare to his great gallery in his house in St. James's. Mention is made of it in a letter from the diarist John Evelyn to his friend Samuel Pepys in 1689, but Clarendon's collection was dispersed at the end of the seventeenth century and the picture has not been traced. {291b}

Later portraits.

Of the numerous extant paintings which have been described as portraits of Shakespeare, only the 'Droeshout' portrait and the Ely House portrait, both of which are at Stratford, bear any definable resemblance to the folio engraving or the bust in the church. {291c} In spite of their admitted imperfections, those presentments can alone be held indisputably to have been honestly designed to depict the poet's features. They must be treated as the standards of authenticity in judging of the genuineness of other portraits claiming to be of an early date.

The 'Chandos' portrait.

Of other alleged portraits which are extant, the most famous and interesting is the 'Chandos' portrait, now in the National Portrait Gallery. Its pedigree suggests that it was intended to represent the poet, but numerous and conspicuous divergences from the authenticated likenesses show that it was painted from fanciful descriptions of him some years after his death. The face is bearded, and rings adorn the ears. Oldys reported that it was from the brush of Burbage, Shakespeare's fellow-actor, who had some reputation as a limner, {292} and that it had belonged to Joseph Taylor, an actor contemporary with Shakespeare. These rumours are not corroborated; but there is no doubt that it was at one time the property of D'Avenant, and that it subsequently belonged successively to the actor Betterton and to Mrs. Barry the actress. In 1693 Sir Godfrey Kneller made a copy as a gift for Dryden. After Mrs Barry's death in 1713 it was purchased for forty guineas by Robert Keck, a barrister of the Inner Temple. At length it reached the hands of one John Nichols, whose daughter married James Brydges, third duke of Chandos. In due time the Duke became the owner of the picture, and it subsequently passed, through Chandos's daughter, to her husband, the first Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, whose son, the second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, sold it with the rest of his effects at Stowe in 1848, when it was purchased by the Earl of Ellesmere. The latter presented it to the nation. Edward Capell many years before presented a copy by Ranelagh Barret to Trinity College, Cambridge, and other copies are attributed to Sir Joshua Reynolds and Ozias Humphrey (1783). It was engraved by George Vertue in 1719 for Pope's edition (1725), and often later, one of the best engravings being by Vandergucht. A good lithograph from a tracing by Sir George Scharf was published by the trustees of the National Portrait Gallery in 1864. The Baroness Burdett-Coutts purchased in 1875 a portrait of similar type, which is said, somewhat doubtfully, to have belonged to John lord Lumley, who died in 1609, and to have formed part of a collection of portraits of the great men of his day at his house, Lumley Castle, Durham. Its early history is not positively authenticated, and it may well be an early copy of the Chandos portrait. The 'Lumley' painting was finely chromo-lithographed in 1863 by Vincent Brooks.

The 'Jansen' portrait.

The so-called 'Jansen' or Janssens portrait, which belongs to Lady Guendolen Ramsden, daughter of the Duke of Somerset, and is now at her residence at Bulstrode, was first doubtfully identified about 1770, when in the possession of Charles Jennens. Janssens did not come to England before Shakespeare's death. It is a fine portrait, but is unlike any other that has been associated with the dramatist. An admirable mezzotint by Richard Earlom was issued in 1811.

The 'Felton' portrait.

The 'Felton' portrait, a small head on a panel, with a high and very bald forehead (belonging since 1873 to the Baroness Burdett-Coutts), was purchased by S. Felton of Drayton, Shropshire, in 1792 of J. Wilson, the owner of the Shakespeare Museum in Pall Mall; it bears a late inscription, 'Gul. Shakespear 1597, R. B.' [_i.e._ Richard Burbage]. It was engraved by Josiah Boydell for George Steevens in 1797, and by James Neagle for Isaac Reed's edition in 1803. Fuseli declared it to be the work of a Dutch artist, but the painters Romney and Lawrence regarded it as of English workmanship of the sixteenth century. Steevens held that it was the original picture whence both Droeshout and Marshall made their engravings, but there are practically no points of resemblance between it and the prints.

[Picture: Plaster-cast of bust of William Shakespeare]

The 'Soest' portrait.

The 'Soest' or 'Zoust' portrait--in the possession of Sir John Lister-Kaye of the Grange, Wakefield--was in the collection of Thomas Wright, painter, of Covent Garden in 1725, when John Simon engraved it. Soest was born twenty-one years after Shakespeare's death, and the portrait is only on fanciful grounds identified with the poet. A chalk drawing by John Michael Wright, obviously inspired by the Soest portrait, is the property of Sir Arthur Hodgson of Clopton House, and is on loan at the Memorial Gallery, Stratford.

Miniatures.

A well-executed miniature by Hilliard, at one time in the possession of William Somerville the poet, and now the property Of Sir Stafford Northcote, bart., was engraved by Agar for vol. ii. of the 'Variorum Shakespeare' of 1821, and in Wivell's 'Inquiry,' 1827. It has little claim to attention as a portrait of the dramatist. Another miniature (called the 'Auriol' portrait), of doubtful authenticity, formerly belonged to Mr. Lumsden Propert, and a third is at Warwick Castle.

The Garrick Club bust.

A bust, said to be of Shakespeare, was discovered in 1845 bricked up in a wall in Spode and Copeland's china warehouse in Lincoln's Inn Fields. The warehouse had been erected on the site of the Duke's Theatre, which was built by D'Avenant in 1660. The bust, which is of black terra cotta, and bears traces of Italian workmanship, is believed to have adorned the proscenium of the Duke's Theatre. It was acquired by the surgeon William Clift, from whom it passed to Clift's son-in-law, Richard (afterwards Sir Richard) Owen the naturalist. The latter sold it to the Duke of Devonshire, who presented it in 1851 to the Garrick Club, after having two copies made in plaster. One of these copies is now in the Shakespeare Memorial Gallery at Stratford, and from it an engraving has been made for reproduction in this volume.

Alleged death-mask.

The Kesselstadt death-mask was discovered by Dr. Ludwig Becker, librarian at the ducal palace at Darmstadt, in a rag-shop at Mayence in 1849. The features resemble those of an alleged portrait of Shakespeare (dated 1637) which Dr. Becker purchased in 1847. This picture had long been in the possession of the family of Count Francis von Kesselstadt of Mayence, who died in 1843. Dr. Becker brought the mask and the picture to England in 1849, and Richard Owen supported the theory that the mask was taken from Shakespeare's face after death, and was the foundation of the bust in Stratford Church. The mask was for a long time in Dr. Becker's private apartments at the ducal palace, Darmstadt. {296a} The features are singularly attractive; but the chain of evidence which would identify them with Shakespeare is incomplete. {296b}

Memorials in sculpture.

A monument, the expenses of which were defrayed by public subscription, was set up in the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey in 1741. Pope and the Earl of Burlington were among the promoters. The design was by William Kent, and the statue of Shakespeare was executed by Peter Scheemakers. {297} Another statue was executed by Roubiliac for Garrick, who bequeathed it to the British Museum in 1779. A third statue, freely adapted from the works of Scheemakers and Roubiliac, was executed for Baron Albert Grant and was set up by him as a gift to the metropolis in Leicester Square, London, in 1879. A fourth statue (by Mr. J. A. Q. Ward) was placed in 1882 in the Central Park, New York. A fifth in bronze, by M. Paul Fournier, which was erected in Paris in 1888 at the expense of an English resident, Mr. W. Knighton, stands at the point where the Avenue de Messine meets the Boulevard Haussmann. A sixth memorial in sculpture, by Lord Ronald Gower, the most elaborate and ambitious of all, stands in the garden of the Shakespeare Memorial buildings at Stratford-on-Avon, and was unveiled in 1888; Shakespeare is seated on a high pedestal; below, at each side of the pedestal, stand figures of four of Shakespeare's principal characters: Lady Macbeth, Hamlet, Prince Hal, and Sir John Falstaff.

At Stratford, the Birthplace, which was acquired by the public in 1846 and converted into a museum, is with Anne Hathaway's cottage (which was acquired by the Birthplace Trustees in 1892), a place of pilgrimage for visitors from all parts of the globe. The 27,038 persons who visited it in 1896 and the 26,510 persons who visited it in 1897 represented over forty nationalities. The site of the demolished New Place, with the gardens, was also purchased by public subscription in 1861, and now forms a public garden. Of a new memorial building on the river-bank at Stratford, consisting of a theatre, picture-gallery, and library, the foundation-stone was laid on April 23, 1877. The theatre was opened exactly two years later, when 'Much Ado about Nothing' was performed, with Helen Faucit (Lady Martin) as Beatrice and Barry Sullivan as Benedick. Performances of Shakespeare's plays have since been given annually during April. The library and picture-gallery were opened in 1881. {298} A memorial Shakespeare library was opened at Birmingham on April 23, 1868, to commemorate the tercentenary of 1864, and, although destroyed by fire in 1879, was restored in 1882; it now possesses nearly ten thousand volumes relating to Shakespeare.

XIX--BIBLIOGRAPHY

Quartos of the poems in the poet's lifetime.

Only two of Shakespeare's works--his narrative poems 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Lucrece'--were published with his sanction and co-operation. These poems were the first specimens of his work to appear in print, and they passed in his lifetime through a greater number of editions than any of his plays. At the time of his death in 1616 there had been printed in quarto seven editions of his 'Venus and Adonis' (1593, 1594, 1596, 1599, 1600, and two in 1602), and five editions of his 'Lucrece' (1594, 1598, 1600, 1607, 1616). There was only one lifetime edition of the 'Sonnets,' Thorpe's surreptitious venture of 1609; {299} but three editions were issued of the piratical 'Passionate Pilgrim,' which was fraudulently assigned to Shakespeare by the publisher William Jaggard, although it contained only a few occasional poems by him (1599, 1600 no copy known, and 1612).

Posthumous quartos of the poems.

Of posthumous editions in quarto of the two narrative poems in the seventeenth century, there were two of 'Lucrece'--viz. in 1624 ('the sixth edition') and in 1655 (with John Quarles's 'Banishment of Tarquin')--and there were as many as six editions of 'Venus' (1617, 1620, 1627, two in 1630, and 1636), making thirteen editions in all in forty-three years. No later editions of these two poems were issued in the seventeenth century. They were next reprinted together with 'The Passionate Pilgrim' in 1707, and thenceforth they usually figured, with the addition of the 'Sonnets,' in collected editions of Shakespeare's works.

The 'Poems' of 1640.

A so-called first collected edition of Shakespeare's 'Poems' in 1640 (London, by T. Cotes for I. Benson) was mainly a reissue of the 'Sonnets,' but it omitted six (Nos. xviii., xix., xliii., lvi., lxxv., and lxxvi.) and it included the twenty poems of 'The Passionate Pilgrim,' with some other pieces by other authors. Marshall's copy of the Droeshout engraving of 1623 formed the frontispiece. There were prefatory poems by Leonard Digges and John Warren, as well as an address 'to the reader' signed with the initials of the publisher. There Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' were described as 'serene, clear, and elegantly plain; such gentle strains as shall re-create and not perplex your brain. No intricate or cloudy stuff to puzzle intellect. Such as will raise your admiration to his praise.' A chief point of interest in the volume of 'Poems' of 1640 is the fact that the 'Sonnets' were printed then in a different order from that which was followed in the volume of 1609. Thus the poem numbered lxvii. in the original edition opens the reissue, and what has been regarded as the crucial poem, beginning

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,

which was in 1609 numbered cxliv., takes the thirty-second place in 1640. In most cases a more or less fanciful general title is placed in the second edition at the head of each sonnet, but in a few instances a single title serves for short sequences of two or three sonnets which are printed as independent poems continuously without spacing. The poems drawn from 'The Passionate Pilgrim' are intermingled with the 'Sonnets,' together with extracts from Thomas Heywood's 'General History of Women,' although no hint is given that they are not Shakespeare's work. The edition concludes with three epitaphs on Shakespeare and a short section entitled 'an addition of some excellent poems to those precedent by other Gentlemen.' The volume is of great rarity. An exact reprint was published in 1885.

Quartos of the plays in the poet's lifetime.

Of Shakespeare's plays there were in print in 1616 only sixteen (all in quarto), or eighteen if we include the 'Contention,' the first draft of '2 Henry VI' (1594 and 1600), and 'The True Tragedy,' the first draft of '3 Henry VI' (1595 and 1600). These sixteen quartos were publishers' ventures, and were undertaken without the co-operation of the author.

Two of the plays, published thus, reached five editions before 1616, viz. 'Richard III' (1597, 1598, 1602, 1605, 1612) and '1 Henry IV' (1598, 1599, 1604, 1608, 1615).

Three reached four editions, viz. 'Richard II' (1597, 1598, 1608 supplying the deposition scene for the first time, 1615); 'Hamlet' (1603 imperfect, 1604, 1605, 1611), and 'Romeo and Juliet' (1597 imperfect, 1599, two in 1609).

Two reached three editions, viz. 'Henry V' (1600 imperfect, 1602, and 1608) and 'Pericles' (two in 1609, 1611).

Four reached two editions, viz. 'Midsummer Night's Dream' (both in 1600); 'Merchant of Venice' (both in 1600); 'Lear' (both in 1608); and 'Troilus and Cressida' (both in 1609).

Five achieved only one edition, viz. 'Love's Labour's Lost' (1598), '2 Henry IV' (1600), 'Much Ado' (1600), 'Titus' (1600), 'Merry Wives' (1602 imperfect).

Posthumous quartos of the plays.

Three years after Shakespeare's death--in 1619--there appeared a second edition of 'Merry Wives' (again imperfect) and a fourth of 'Pericles.' 'Othello' was first printed posthumously in 1622 (4to), and in the same year sixth editions of 'Richard III' and 'I Henry IV' appeared. {302} The largest collections of the original quartos--each of which survives in only four, five, or six copies--are in the libraries of the Duke of Devonshire, the British Museum, and Trinity College, Cambridge, and in the Bodleian Library. {303} All the quartos were issued in Shakespeare's day at sixpence each.

The First Folio. The publishing syndicate.

In 1623 the first attempt was made to give the world a complete edition of Shakespeare's plays. Two of the dramatist's intimate friends and fellow-actors, John Heming and Henry Condell, were nominally responsible for the venture, but it seems to have been suggested by a small syndicate of printers and publishers, who undertook all pecuniary responsibility. Chief of the syndicate was William Jaggard, printer since 1611 to the City of London, who was established in business in Fleet Street at the east end of St. Dunstan's Church. As the piratical publisher of 'The Passionate Pilgrim' he had long known the commercial value of Shakespeare's work. In 1613 he had extended his business by purchasing the stock and rights of a rival pirate, James Roberts, who had printed the quarto editions of the 'Merchant of Venice' and 'Midsummer Night's Dream' in 1600 and the complete quarto of 'Hamlet' in 1604. Roberts had enjoyed for nearly twenty years the right to print 'the players' bills,' or programmes, and he made over that privilege to Jaggard with his other literary property. It is to the close personal relations with the playhouse managers into which the acquisition of the right of printing 'the players' bill' brought Jaggard after 1613 that the inception of the scheme of the 'First Folio' may safely be attributed. Jaggard associated his son Isaac with the enterprise. They alone of the members of the syndicate were printers. Their three partners were publishers or booksellers only. Two of these, William Aspley and John Smethwick, had already speculated in plays of Shakespeare. Aspley had published with another in 1600 the 'Second Part of Henry IV' and 'Much Ado about Nothing,' and in 1609 half of Thorpe's impression of Shakespeare's 'Sonnets.' Smethwick, whose shop was in St. Dunstan's Churchyard, Fleet Street, near Jaggard's, had published in 1611 two late editions of 'Romeo and Juliet' and one of 'Hamlet.' Edward Blount, the fifth partner, was an interesting figure in the trade, and, unlike his companions, had a true taste in literature. He had been a friend and admirer of Christopher Marlowe, and had actively engaged in the posthumous publication of two of Marlowe's poems. He had published that curious collection of mystical verse entitled 'Love's Martyr,' one poem in which, 'a poetical essay of the Phoenix and the Turtle,' was signed 'William Shakespeare.' {304}

The First Folio was doubtless printed in Jaggard's printing office near St. Dunstan's Church. Upon Blount probably fell the chief labour of seeing the work through the press. It was in progress throughout 1623, and had so far advanced by November 8, 1623, that on that day Edward Blount and Isaac (son of William) Jaggard obtained formal license from the Stationers' Company to publish sixteen of the twenty hitherto unprinted plays that it was intended to include. The pieces, whose approaching publication for the first time was thus announced, were of supreme literary interest. The titles ran: 'The Tempest,' 'The Two Gentlemen,' 'Measure for Measure,' 'Comedy of Errors,' 'As you like it,' 'All's Well,' 'Twelfth Night,' 'Winter's Tale,' '3 Henry VI,' 'Henry VIII,' 'Coriolanus,' 'Timon,' 'Julius Caesar,' 'Macbeth,' 'Antony and Cleopatra,' and 'Cymbeline.' Four other hitherto unprinted dramas for which no license was sought figured in the volume, viz. 'King John,' '1 and 2 Henry VI,' and the 'Taming of the Shrew;' but each of these plays was based by Shakespeare on a play of like title which had been published at an earlier date, and the absence of a license was doubtless due to an ignorant misconception on the past either of the Stationers' Company's officers or of the editors of the volume as to the true relations subsisting between the old pieces and the new. The only play by Shakespeare that had been previously published and was not included in the First Folio was 'Pericles.'

The prefatory matter.

Thirty-six pieces in all were thus brought together. The volume consisted of nearly one thousand double-column pages and was sold at a pound a copy. Steevens estimated that the edition numbered 250 copies. The book was described on the title-page as published by Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard, and in the colophon as printed at the charges of 'W. Jaggard, I. Smithweeke, and W. Aspley,' as well as of Blount. {306} On the title-page was engraved the Droeshout portrait. Commendatory verses were supplied by Ben Jonson, Hugh Holland, Leonard Digges, and I. M., perhaps Jasper Maine. The dedication was addressed to the brothers William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, the lord chamberlain, and Philip Herbert, earl of Montgomery, and was signed by Shakespeare's friends and fellow-actors, Heming and Condell. The same signatures were appended to a succeeding address 'to the great variety of readers.' In both addresses the two actors made pretension to a larger responsibility for the enterprise than they really incurred, but their motives in identifying themselves with the venture were doubtless irreproachable. They disclaimed (they wrote) 'ambition either of selfe-profit or fame in undertaking the design,' being solely moved by anxiety to 'keepe the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare.' 'It had bene a thing we confesse worthie to haue bene wished,' they inform the reader, 'that the author himselfe had liued to haue set forth and ouerseen his owne writings. . . .' A list of contents follows the address to the readers.

The value of the text.

The title-page states that all the plays were printed 'according to the true originall copies.' The dedicators wrote to the same effect. 'As where (before) we were abus'd with diuerse stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of incurious impostors that expos'd them: even those are now offer'd to your view cur'd and perfect in their limbes, and all the rest absolute in their numbers as he conceived them.' There is no doubt that the whole volume was printed from the acting versions in the possession of the manager of the company with which Shakespeare had been associated. But it is doubtful if any play were printed exactly as it came from his pen. The First Folio text is often markedly inferior to that of the sixteen pre-existent quartos, which, although surreptitiously and imperfectly printed, followed playhouse copies of far earlier date. From the text of the quartos the text of the First Folio differs invariably, although in varying degrees. The quarto texts of 'Love's Labour's Lost,' 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' and 'Richard II,' for example, differ very largely and always for the better from the folio texts. On the other hand, the folio repairs the glaring defects of the quarto versions of 'The Merry Wives of Windsor' and of 'Henry V.' In the case of twenty of the plays in the First Folio no quartos exist for comparison, and of these twenty plays, 'Coriolanus,' 'All's Well,' and 'Macbeth' present a text abounding in corrupt passages.

The order of the plays.

The plays are arranged under three headings--'Comedies,' 'Histories,' and 'Tragedies'--and each division is separately paged. The arrangement of the plays in each division follows no principle. The comedy section begins with the 'Tempest' and ends with the 'Winter's Tale.' The histories more justifiably begin with 'King John' and end with 'Henry VIII.' The tragedies begin with 'Troilus and Cressida' and end with 'Cymbeline.' This order has been usually followed in subsequent collective editions.

The typography.

As a specimen of typography the First Folio is not to be commended. There are a great many contemporary folios of larger bulk far more neatly and correctly printed. It looks as though Jaggard's printing office were undermanned. The misprints are numerous and are especially conspicuous in the pagination. The sheets seem to have been worked off very slowly, and corrections were made while the press was working, so that the copies struck off later differ occasionally from the earlier copies. One mark of carelessness on the part of the compositor or corrector of the press, which is common to all copies, is that 'Troilus and Cressida,' though in the body of the book it opens the section of tragedies, is not mentioned at all in the table of contents, and the play is unpaged except on its second and third pages, which bear the numbers 79 and 80.

Unique copies.

Three copies are known which are distinguished by more interesting irregularities, in each case unique. The copy in the Lenox Library in New York includes a cancel duplicate of a leaf of 'As You Like It' (sheet R of the comedies), and the title-page bears the date 1622 instead of 1623; but it is suspected that the figures were tampered with outside the printing office. {308} Samuel Butler, successively headmaster of Shrewsbury and Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, possessed a copy of the First Folio in which a proof leaf of 'Hamlet' was bound up with the corrected leaf. {309a}

The Sheldon copy.

The most interesting irregularity yet noticed appears in one of the two copies of the book belonging to the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. This copy is known as the Sheldon Folio, having formed in the seventeenth century part of the library of Ralph Sheldon of Weston Manor in the parish of Long Compton, Warwickshire. {309b} In the Sheldon Folio the opening page of 'Troilus and Cressida,' of which the recto or front is occupied by the prologue and the verso or back by the opening lines of the text of the play, is followed by a superfluous leaf. On the recto or front of the unnecessary leaf {309c} are printed the concluding lines of 'Romeo and Juliet' in place of the prologue to 'Troilus and Cressida.' At the back or verso are the opening lines of 'Troilus and Cressida' repeated from the preceding page. The presence of a different ornamental headpiece on each page proves that the two are not taken from the same setting of the type. At a later page in the Sheldon copy the concluding lines of 'Romeo and Juliet' are duly reprinted at the close of the play, and on the verso or back of the leaf, which supplies them in their right place, is the opening passage, as in other copies, of 'Timon of Athens.' These curious confusions attest that while the work was in course of composition the printers or editors of the volume at one time intended to place 'Troilus and Cressida,' with the prologue omitted, after 'Romeo and Juliet.' The last page of 'Romeo and Juliet' is in all copies numbered 79, an obvious misprint for 77; the first leaf of 'Troilus' is paged 78; the second and third pages of 'Troilus' are numbered 79 and 80. It was doubtless suddenly determined while the volume was in the press to transfer 'Troilus and Cressida' to the head of the tragedies from a place near the end, but the numbers on the opening pages which indicated its first position were clumsily retained, and to avoid the extensive typographical corrections that were required by the play's change of position, its remaining pages were allowed to go forth unnumbered. {310}

Estimated number of extant copies.

It is difficult to estimate how many copies survive of the First Folio, which is intrinsically the most valuable volume in the whole range of English literature, and extrinsically is only exceeded in value by some half-dozen volumes of far earlier date and of exceptional typographical interest. It seems that about 140 copies have been traced within the past century. Of these fewer than twenty are in a perfect state, that is, with the portrait _printed_ (_not inlaid_) _on_ the title-page, and the flyleaf facing it, with all the pages succeeding it, intact and uninjured. (The flyleaf contains Ben Jonson's verses attesting the truthfulness of the portrait.) Excellent copies in this enviable state are in the Grenville Library at the British Museum, and in the libraries of the Duke of Devonshire, the Earl of Crawford, the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, and Mr. A. H. Huth. Of these probably the finest and cleanest is the 'Daniel' copy belonging to the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. It measures 13 inches by 8.25, and was purchased by its present owner for 716 pounds 2s. at the sale of George Daniel's library in 1864. Some twenty more copies are defective in the preliminary pages, but are unimpaired in other respects. There remain about a hundred copies which have sustained serious damage at various points.

Reprints of the First Folio.

A reprint of the First Folio unwarrantably purporting to be exact was published in 1807-8. {311} The best reprint was issued in three parts by Lionel Booth in 1861, 1863, and 1864. The valuable photo-zincographic reproduction undertaken by Sir Henry James, under the direction of Howard Staunton, was issued in sixteen folio parts between February 1864 and October 1865. A reduced photographic facsimile, too small to be legible, appeared in 1876, with a preface by Halliwell-Phillipps.

The Second Folio. The Third Folio. The Fourth Folio.

The Second Folio edition was printed in 1632 by Thomas Cotes for Robert Allot and William Aspley, each of whose names figures as publisher on different copies. To Allot Blount had transferred, on November 16, 1630, his rights in the sixteen plays which were first licensed for publication in 1623. {312a} The Second Folio was reprinted from the First; a few corrections were made in the text, but most of the changes were arbitrary and needless. Charles I's copy is at Windsor, and Charles II's at the British Museum. The 'Perkins Folio,' now in the Duke of Devonshire's possession, in which John Payne Collier introduced forged emendations, was a copy of that of 1632. {312b} The Third Folio--for the most part a faithful reprint of the Second--was first published in 1663 by Peter Chetwynde, who reissued it next year with the addition of seven plays, six of which have no claim to admission among Shakespeare's works. 'Unto this impression,' runs the title-page of 1664, 'is added seven Playes never before printed in folio, viz.: Pericles, Prince of Tyre. The London Prodigall. The History of Thomas Ld. Cromwell. Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham. The Puritan Widow. A Yorkshire Tragedy. The Tragedy of Locrine.' The six spurious pieces which open the volume were attributed by unprincipled publishers to Shakespeare in his lifetime. Fewer copies of the Third Folio are reputed to be extant than of the Second or Fourth, owing to the destruction of many unsold impressions in the Fire of London in 1666. The Fourth Folio, printed in 1685 'for H. Herringman, E. Brewster, R. Chiswell, and R. Bentley,' reprints the folio of 1664 without change except in the way of modernising the spelling; it repeats the spurious pieces.

Eighteenth-century editors.

Since 1685 some two hundred independent editions of the collected works have been published in Great Britain and Ireland, and many thousand editions of separate plays. The eighteenth-century editors of the collected works endeavoured with varying degrees of success to purge the text of the numerous incoherences of the folios, and to restore, where good taste or good sense required it, the lost text of the contemporary quartos. It is largely owing to a due co-ordination of the results of the efforts of the eighteenth-century editors by their successors in the present century that Shakespeare's work has become intelligible to general readers unversed in textual criticism, and has won from them the veneration that it merits. {314}

Nicholas Rowe, 1674-1718.

Nicholas Rowe, a popular dramatist of Queen Anne's reign, and poet laureate to George I., was the first critical editor of Shakespeare. He produced an edition of his plays in six octavo volumes in 1709. A new edition in eight volumes followed in 1714, and another hand added a ninth volume which included the poems. Rowe prefixed a valuable life of the poet embodying traditions which were in danger of perishing without a record. His text followed that of the Fourth Folio. The plays were printed in the same order, except that he transferred the spurious pieces from the beginning to the end. Rowe did not compare his text with that of the First Folio or of the quartos, but in the case of 'Romeo and Juliet' he met with an early quarto while his edition was passing through the press, and inserted at the end of the play the prologue which is met with only in the quartos. He made a few happy emendations, some of which coincide accidentally with the readings of the First Folio; but his text is deformed by many palpable errors. His practical experience as a playwright induced him, however, to prefix for the first time a list of _dramatis personae_ to each play, to divide and number acts and scenes on rational principles, and to mark the entrances and exits of the characters. Spelling, punctuation, and grammar he corrected and modernised.

Alexander Pope, 1688-1744.

The poet Pope was Shakespeare's second editor. His edition in six quarto volumes was completed in 1725. The poems, edited by Dr. George Sewell, with an essay on the rise and progress of the stage, and a glossary, appeared in a seventh volume. Pope had few qualifications for the task, and the venture was a commercial failure. In his preface Pope, while he fully recognised Shakespeare's native genius, deemed his achievement deficient in artistic quality. Pope claimed to have collated the text of the Fourth Folio with that of all preceding editions, and although his work indicates that he had access to the First Folio and some of the quartos, it is clear that his text was based on that of Rowe. His innovations are numerous, and are derived from 'his private sense and conjecture,' but they are often plausible and ingenious. He was the first to indicate the place of each new scene, and he improved on Rowe's subdivision of the scenes. A second edition of Pope's version in ten duodecimo volumes appeared in 1728 with Sewell's name on the title-page as well as Pope's. There were few alterations in the text, though a preliminary table supplied a list of twenty-eight quartos. Other editions followed in 1735 and 1768. The last was printed at Garrick's suggestion at Birmingham from Baskerville's types.

Lewis Theobald, 1688-1744.

Pope found a rigorous critic in Lewis Theobald, who, although contemptible as a writer of original verse and prose, proved himself the most inspired of all the textual critics of Shakespeare. Pope savagely avenged himself on his censor by holding him up to ridicule as the hero of the 'Dunciad.' Theobald first displayed his critical skill in 1726 in a volume which deserves to rank as a classic in English literature. The title runs 'Shakespeare Restored, or a specimen of the many errors as well committed as unamended by Mr. Pope in his late edition of this poet, designed not only to correct the said edition but to restore the true reading of Shakespeare in all the editions ever yet publish'd.' There at page 137 appears Theobald's great emendation in Shakespeare's account of Falstaff's death (Henry V, II. iii. 17): 'His nose was as sharp as a pen and a' babbled of green fields,' in place of the reading in the old copies, 'His nose was as sharp as a pen and a table of green fields.' In 1733 Theobald brought out his edition of Shakespeare in seven volumes. In 1740 it reached a second issue. A third edition was published in 1752. Others are dated 1772 and 1773. It is stated that 12,860 copies in all were sold. Theobald made the First Folio the basis of his text, although he failed to adopt all the correct readings of that version, but over 300 corrections or emendations which he made in his edition have become part and parcel of the authorised canon. Theobald's principles of textual criticism were as enlightened as his practice was triumphant. 'I ever labour,' he wrote to Warburton, 'to make the smallest deviation that I possibly can from the text; never to alter at all where I can by any means explain a passage with sense; nor ever by any emendation to make the author better when it is probable the text came from his own hands.' Theobald has every right to the title of the Porson of Shakespearean criticism. {317a} The following are favourable specimens of his insight. In 'Macbeth' (I. vii. 6) for 'this bank and school of time,' he substituted the familiar 'bank and shoal of time.' In 'Antony and Cleopatra' the old copies (v. ii. 87) made Cleopatra say of Antony:

For his bounty, There was no winter in't; an Anthony it was That grew the more by reaping.

For the gibberish 'an Anthony it was,' Theobald read 'an autumn 'twas,' and thus gave the lines true point and poetry. A third notable instance, somewhat more recondite, is found in 'Coriolanus' (II. i. 59-60) where Menenius asks the tribunes in the First Folio version 'what harm can your besom conspectuities [_i.e._ vision or eyes] glean out of this character?' Theobald replaced the meaningless epithet 'besom' by 'bisson' (_i.e._ purblind), a recognised Elizabethan word which Shakespeare had already employed in 'Hamlet' (II. ii. 529). {317b}

Sir Thomas Hanmer, 1677-1746.

The fourth editor was Sir Thomas Hammer, a country gentleman without much literary culture, but possessing a large measure of mother wit. He was speaker in the House of Commons for a few months in 1714, and retiring soon afterwards from public life devoted his leisure to a thorough-going scrutiny of Shakespeare's plays. His edition, which was the earliest to pretend to typographical beauty, was printed at the Oxford University Press in 1744 in six quarto volumes. It contained a number of good engravings by Gravelot after designs by Francis Hayman, and was long highly valued by book collectors. No editor's name was given. In forming his text, Hanmer depended exclusively on his own ingenuity. He made no recourse to the old copies. The result was a mass of common-sense emendations, some of which have been permanently accepted. {318} Hanmer's edition was reprinted in 1770-1.

Bishop Warburton, 1698-1779.

In 1747 Bishop Warburton produced a revised version of Pope's edition in eight volumes. Warburton was hardly better qualified for the task than Pope, and such improvements as he introduced are mainly borrowed from Theobald and Hanmer. On both these critics he arrogantly and unjustly heaped abuse in his preface. The Bishop was consequently criticised with appropriate severity for his pretentious incompetence by many writers; among them, by Thomas Edwards, whose 'Supplement to Warburton's Edition of Shakespeare' first appeared in 1747, and, having been renamed 'The Canons of Criticism' next year in the third edition, passed through as many as seven editions by 1765.

Dr. Johnson, 1709-1783.

Dr. Johnson, the sixth editor, completed his edition in eight volumes in 1765, and a second issue followed three years later. Although he made some independent collation of the quartos, his textual labours were slight, and his verbal notes show little close knowledge of sixteenth and seventeenth century literature. But in his preface and elsewhere he displays a genuine, if occasionally sluggish, sense of Shakespeare's greatness, and his massive sagacity enabled him to indicate convincingly Shakespeare's triumphs of characterisation.

Edward Capell, 1713-1781.

The seventh editor, Edward Capell, advanced on his predecessors in many respects. He was a clumsy writer, and Johnson declared, with some justice, that he 'gabbled monstrously,' but his collation of the quartos and the First and Second Folios was conducted on more thorough and scholarly methods than those of any of his predecessors not excepting Theobald. His industry was untiring, and he is said to have transcribed the whole of Shakespeare ten times. Capell's edition appeared in ten small octavo volumes in 1768. He showed himself well versed in Elizabethan literature in a volume of notes which appeared in 1774, and in three further volumes, entitled 'Notes, Various Readings, and the School of Shakespeare,' which were not published till 1783, two years after his death. The last volume, 'The School of Shakespeare,' consisted of 'authentic extracts from divers English books that were in print in that author's time,' to which was appended 'Notitia Dramatica; or, Tables of Ancient Plays (from their beginning to the Restoration of Charles II).'

George Steevens, 1736-1800.

George Steevens, whose saturnine humour involved him in a lifelong series of literary quarrels with rival students of Shakespeare, made invaluable contributions to Shakespearean study. In 1766 he reprinted twenty of the plays from the quartos. Soon afterwards he revised Johnson's edition without much assistance from the Doctor, and his revision, which embodied numerous improvements, appeared in ten volumes in 1773. It was long regarded as the standard version. Steevens's antiquarian knowledge alike of Elizabethan history and literature was greater than that of any previous editor; his citations of parallel passages from the writings of Shakespeare's contemporaries, in elucidation of obscure words and phrases, have not been exceeded in number or excelled in aptness by any of his successors. All commentators of recent times are more deeply indebted in this department of their labours to Steevens than to any other critic. But he lacked taste as well as temper, and excluded from his edition Shakespeare's sonnets and poems, because, he wrote, 'the strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into their service.' {320} The second edition of Johnson and Steevens's version appeared in ten volumes in 1778. The third edition, published in ten volumes in 1785, was revised by Steevens's friend, Isaac Reed (1742-1807), a scholar of his own type. The fourth and last edition, published in Steevens's lifetime, was prepared by himself in fifteen volumes in 1793. As he grew older, he made some reckless changes in the text, chiefly with the unhallowed object of mystifying those engaged in the same field. With a malignity that was not without humour, he supplied, too, many obscene notes to coarse expressions, and he pretended that he owed his indecencies to one or other of two highly respectable clergymen, Richard Amner and John Collins, whose surnames were in each instance appended. He had known and quarrelled with both. Such proofs of his perversity justified the title which Gifford applied to him of 'the Puck of Commentators.'

Edmund Malone, 1741-1812.

Edmund Malone, who lacked Steevens's quick wit and incisive style, was a laborious and amiable archaeologist, without much ear for poetry or delicate literary taste. He threw abundance of new light on Shakespeare's biography, and on the chronology and sources of his works, while his researches into the beginnings of the English stage added a new chapter of first-rate importance to English literary history. To Malone is due the first rational 'attempt to ascertain the order in which the plays attributed to Shakespeare were written.' His earliest results on the topic were contributed to Steevens's edition of 1778. Two years later he published, as a supplement to Steevens's work, two volumes containing a history of the Elizabethan stage, with reprints of Arthur Brooke's 'Romeus and Juliet,' Shakespeare's Poems, and the plays falsely ascribed to him in the Third and Fourth Folios. A quarrel with Steevens followed, and was never closed. In 1787 Malone issued 'A Dissertation on the Three Parts of King Henry VI,' tending to show that those plays were not originally written by Shakespeare. In 1790 appeared his edition of Shakespeare in ten volumes, the first in two parts.

Variorum editions.

What is known among booksellers as the 'First Variorum' edition of Shakespeare was prepared by Steevens's friend, Isaac Reed, after Steevens's death. It was based on a copy of Steevens's work of 1793, which had been enriched with numerous manuscript additions, and it embodied the published notes and prefaces of preceding editors. It was published in twenty-one volumes in 1803. The 'Second Variorum' edition, which was mainly a reprint of the first, was published in twenty-one volumes in 1813. The 'Third Variorum' was prepared for the press by James Boswell the younger, the son of Dr. Johnson's biographer. It was based on Malone's edition of 1790, but included massive accumulations of notes left in manuscript by Malone at his death. Malone had been long engaged on a revision of his edition, but died in 1812, before it was completed. Boswell's 'Malone,' as the new work is often called, appeared in twenty-one volumes in 1821. It is the most valuable of all collective editions of Shakespeare's works, but the three volumes of preliminary essays on Shakespeare's biography and writings, and the illustrative notes brought together in the final volume, are confusedly arranged and are unindexed; many of the essays and notes break off abruptly at the point at which they were left at Malone's death. A new 'Variorum' edition, on an exhaustive scale, was undertaken by Mr. H. Howard Furness of Philadelphia, and eleven volumes have appeared since 1871 ('Romeo and Juliet,' 'Macbeth,' 'Hamlet,' 2 vols., 'King Lear,' 'Othello,' 'Merchant of Venice,' 'As You Like It,' 'Tempest,' 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' and 'Winter's Tale').

Nineteenth-century editors.

Of nineteenth-century editors who have prepared collective editions of Shakespeare's work with original annotations those who have most successfully pursued the great traditions of the eighteenth century are Alexander Dyce, Howard Staunton, Nikolaus Delius, and the Cambridge editors William George Clark (1821-1878) and Dr. Aldis Wright.

Alexander Dyce, 1798-1869. Howard Staunton, 1810-1874. The Cambridge edition, 1863-6.

Alexander Dyce was almost as well read as Steevens in Elizabethan literature, and especially in the drama of the period, and his edition of Shakespeare in nine volumes, which was first published in 1857, has many new and valuable illustrative notes and a few good textual emendations, as well as a useful glossary; but Dyce's annotations are not always adequate, and often tantalise the reader by their brevity. Howard Staunton's edition first appeared in three volumes between 1868 and 1870. He also was well read in contemporary literature and was an acute textual critic. His introductions bring together much interesting stage history. Nikolaus Delius's edition was issued at Elberfeld in seven volumes between 1854 and 1861. Delius's text is formed on sound critical principles and is to be trusted thoroughly. A fifth edition in two volumes appeared in 1882. The Cambridge edition, which first appeared in nine volumes between 1863 and 1866, exhaustively notes the textual variations of all preceding editions, and supplies the best and fullest _apparatus criticus_. (Of new editions, one dated 1887 is also in nine volumes, and another, dated 1893, in forty volumes.)

Other nineteenth-century editions.

Other editors of the complete works of Shakespeare of the nineteenth century whose labours, although of some value, present fewer distinctive characteristics are:--William Harness (1825, 8 vols.); Samuel Weller Singer (1826, 10 vols., printed at the Chiswick Press for William Pickering, illustrated by Stothard and others; reissued in 1856 with essays by William Watkiss Lloyd); Charles Knight, with discursive notes and pictorial illustrations by F. W. Fairholt and others ('Pictorial edition,' 8 vols., including biography and the doubtful plays, 1838-43, often reissued under different designations); Bryan Waller Procter, _i.e._ Barry Cornwall (1839-43, 3 vols.); John Payne Collier (1841-4, 8 vols.; another edition, 8 vols., privately printed, 1878, 4to); Samuel Phelps, the actor (1852-4, 2 vols.; another edition, 1882-4); J. O. Halliwell (1853-61, 15 vols. folio, with an encyclopaedic collection of annotations of earlier editors and pictorial illustrations); Richard Grant White (Boston, U.S.A., 1857-65, 12 vols.); W. J. Rolfe (New York, 1871-96, 40 vols.); the Rev. H. N. Hudson (the Harvard edition, Boston, 1881, 20 vols.) The latest complete annotated editions published in this country are 'The Henry Irving Shakespeare,' edited by F. A. Marshall and others--especially useful for notes on stage history (8 vols. 1888-90)--and 'The Temple Shakespeare,' concisely edited by Mr. Israel Gollancz (38 vols. 12mo, 1894-6).

Of one-volume editions of the unannotated text, the best are the Globe, edited by W. G. Clark and Dr. Aldis Wright (1864, and constantly reprinted--since 1891 with a new and useful glossary); the Leopold (1876, from the text of Delius, with preface by Dr. Furnivall); and the Oxford, edited by Mr. W. J. Craig (1894).

XX--POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION

Shakespeare defied at every stage in his career the laws of the classical drama. He rode roughshod over the unities of time, place, and action. There were critics in his day who zealously championed the ancient rules, and viewed with distrust any infringement of them. But the force of Shakespeare's genius--its revelation of new methods of dramatic art--was not lost on the lovers of the ancient ways; and even those who, to assuage their consciences, entered a formal protest against his innovations, soon swelled the chorus of praise with which his work was welcomed by contemporary playgoers, cultured and uncultured alike. The unauthorised publishers of 'Troilus and Cressida' in 1608 faithfully echoed public opinion when they prefaced the work with the note: 'This author's comedies are so framed to the life that they serve for the most common commentaries of all actions of our lives, showing such a dexterity and power of wit that the most displeased with plays are pleased with his comedies. . . . So much and such savoured salt of wit is in his comedies that they seem for their height of pleasure to be born in the sea that brought forth Venus.'

Ben Jonson's tribute.

Anticipating the final verdict, the editors of the First Folio wrote, seven years after Shakespeare's death: 'These plays have had their trial already and stood out all appeals.' {327a} Ben Jonson, the staunchest champion of classical canons, noted that Shakespeare 'wanted art,' but he allowed him, in verses prefixed to the First Folio, the first place among all dramatists, including those of Greece and Rome, and claimed that all Europe owed him homage:

Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show, To whom all scenes [_i.e._ stages] of Europe homage owe. He was not of an age, but for all time.

In 1630 Milton penned in like strains an epitaph on 'the great heir of fame:'

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones The labour of an age in piled stones? Or that his hallowed reliques should be hid Under a star-ypointing pyramid? Dear son of memory, great heir of fame, What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name? Thou in our wonder and astonishment Hast built thyself a lifelong monument.

A writer of fine insight who veiled himself under the initials I. M. S. {327b} contributed to the Second Folio of 1632 a splendid eulogy. The opening lines declare 'Shakespeare's freehold' to have been

A mind reflecting ages past, whose clear And equal surface can make things appear Distant a thousand years, and represent Them in their lively colours' just extent.

It was his faculty

To outrun hasty time, retrieve the fates, Roll back the heavens, blow ope the iron gates Of death and Lethe, where (confused) lie Great heaps of ruinous mortality.

Milton and I. M. S. were followed within ten years by critics of tastes so varied as the dramatist of domesticity Thomas Heywood, the gallant lyrist Sir John Suckling, the philosophic and 'ever-memorable' John Hales of Eton, and the untiring versifier of the stage and court, Sir William D'Avenant. Before 1640 Hales is said to have triumphantly established, in a public dispute held with men of learning in his rooms at Eton, the proposition that 'there was no subject of which any poet ever writ but he could produce it much better done in Shakespeare.' {328} Leonard Digges (in the 1640 edition of the 'Poems') asserted that every revival of Shakespeare's plays drew crowds to pit, boxes, and galleries alike. At a little later date, Shakespeare's plays were the 'closet companions' of Charles I's 'solitudes.' {329a}

1660-1702. Dryden's view.

After the Restoration public taste in England veered towards the French and classical dramatic models. {329b} Shakespeare's work was subjected to some unfavourable criticism as the product of nature to the exclusion of art, but the eclipse proved more partial and temporary than is commonly admitted. The pedantic censure of Thomas Rymer on the score of Shakespeare's indifference to the classical canons attracted attention, but awoke in England no substantial echo. In his 'Short View of Tragedy' (1692) Rymer mainly concentrated his attention on 'Othello,' and reached the eccentric conclusion that it was 'a bloody farce without salt or savour.' In Pepys's eyes 'The Tempest' had 'no great wit,' and 'Midsummer Night's Dream' was 'the most insipid and ridiculous play;' yet this exacting critic witnessed thirty-six performances of twelve of Shakespeare's plays between October 11, 1660, and February 6, 1668-9, seeing 'Hamlet' four times, and 'Macbeth,' which he admitted to be 'a most excellent play for variety,' nine times. Dryden, the literary dictator of the day, repeatedly complained of Shakespeare's inequalities--'he is the very Janus of poets.' {330a} But in almost the same breath Dryden declared that Shakespeare was held in as much veneration among Englishmen as AEschylus among the Athenians, and that 'he was the man who of all modern and perhaps ancient poets had the largest and most comprehensive soul. . . . When he describes anything, you more than see it--you feel it too.' {330b} In 1693, when Sir Godfrey Kneller presented Dryden with a copy of the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, the poet acknowledged the gift thus:

TO SIR GODFREY KNELLER.

_Shakespear_, thy Gift, I place before my sight; With awe, I ask his Blessing ere I write; With Reverence look on his Majestick Face; Proud to be less, but of his Godlike Race. His Soul Inspires me, while thy Praise I write, And I, like _Teucer_, under _Ajax_ fight.

Writers of Charles II's reign of such opposite temperaments as Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, and Sir Charles Sedley vigorously argued for Shakespeare's supremacy. As a girl the sober duchess declares she fell in love with Shakespeare. In her 'Sociable Letters,' which were published in 1664, she enthusiastically, if diffusely, described how Shakespeare creates the illusion that he had been 'transformed into every one of those persons he hath described,' and suffered all their emotions. When she witnessed one of his tragedies she felt persuaded that she was witnessing an episode in real life. 'Indeed,' she concludes, 'Shakespeare had a clear judgment, a quick wit, a subtle observation, a deep apprehension, and a most eloquent elocution.' The profligate Sedley, in a prologue to the 'Wary Widdow,' a comedy by one Higden, produced in 1693, apostrophised Shakespeare thus:

Shackspear whose fruitfull Genius, happy wit Was fram'd and finisht at a lucky hit The pride of Nature, and the shame of Schools, Born to Create, and not to Learn from Rules.

Restoration adaptations.

Many adaptations of Shakespeare's plays were contrived to meet current sentiment of a less admirable type. But they failed efficiently to supersede the originals. Dryden and D'Avenant converted 'The Tempest' into an opera (1670). D'Avenant single-handed adapted 'The Two Noble Kinsmen' (1668) and 'Macbeth' (1674). Dryden dealt similarly with 'Troilus' (1679); Thomas Duffett with 'The Tempest' (1675); Shadwell with 'Timon' (1678); Nahum Tate with 'Richard II' (1681), 'Lear' (1681), and 'Coriolanus' (1682); John Crowne with 'Henry VI' (1681); D'Urfey with 'Cymbeline' (1682); Ravenscroft with 'Titus Andronicus' (1687); Otway with 'Romeo and Juliet' (1692), and John Sheffield, duke of Buckingham, with 'Julius Caesar' (1692). But during the same period the chief actor of the day, Thomas Betterton, won his spurs as the interpreter of Shakespeare's leading parts, often in unrevised versions. Hamlet was accounted that actor's masterpiece. {332a} 'No succeeding tragedy for several years,' wrote Downes, the prompter at Betterton's theatre, 'got more reputation or money to the company than this.'

From 1702 onwards.

From the accession of Queen Anne to the present day the tide of Shakespeare's reputation, both on the stage and among critics, has flowed onward almost uninterruptedly. The censorious critic, John Dennis, in his 'Letters' on Shakespeare's 'genius,' gave his work in 1711 whole-hearted commendation, and two of the greatest men of letters of the eighteenth century, Pope and Johnson, although they did not withhold all censure, paid him, as we have seen, the homage of becoming his editor. The school of textual criticism which Theobald and Capell founded in the middle years of the century has never ceased its activity since their day. {332b} Edmund Malone's devotion at the end of the eighteenth century to the biography of the poet and the contemporary history of the stage, secured for him a vast band of disciples, of whom Joseph Hunter and John Payne Collier well deserve mention. But of all Malone's successors, James Orchard Halliwell, afterwards Halliwell-Phillipps (1820-1889), has made the most important additions to our knowledge of Shakespeare's biography.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there arose a third school to expound exclusively the aesthetic excellence of the plays. In its inception the aesthetic school owed much to the methods of Schlegel and other admiring critics of Shakespeare in Germany. But Coleridge in his 'Notes and Lectures' {333} and Hazlitt in his 'Characters of Shakespeare's Plays' (1817) are the best representatives of the aesthetic school in this or any other country. Although Professor Dowden, in his 'Shakespeare, his Mind and Art' (1874), and Mr. Swinburne in his 'Study of Shakespeare' (1880), are worthy followers, Coleridge and Hazlitt remain as aesthetic critics unsurpassed. In the effort to supply a fuller interpretation of Shakespeare's works textual, historical, and aesthetic--two publishing societies have done much valuable work. 'The Shakespeare Society' was founded in 1841 by Collier, Halliwell, and their friends, and published some forty-eight volumes before its dissolution in 1853. The New Shakspere Society, which was founded by Dr. Furnivall in 1874, issued during the ensuing twenty years twenty-seven publications, illustrative mainly of the text and of contemporary life and literature.

Stratford festivals.

In 1769 Shakespeare's 'jubilee' was celebrated for three days (September 6-8) at Stratford, under the direction of Garrick, Dr. Arne, and Boswell. The festivities were repeated on a small scale in April 1827 and April 1830. 'The Shakespeare tercentenary festival,' which was held at Stratford from April 23 to May 4, 1864, claimed to be a national celebration. {334}

On the English stage. The first appearance of actresses in Shakespearean parts. David Garrick, 1717-1779.

On the English stage the name of every eminent actor since Betterton, the great actor of the period of the Restoration, has been identified with Shakespearean parts. Steele, writing in the 'Tatler' (No. 167) in reference to Betterton's funeral in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey on May 2, 1710, instanced his rendering of Othello as proof of an unsurpassable talent in realising Shakespeare's subtlest conceptions on the stage. One great and welcome innovation in Shakespearean acting is closely associated with Betterton's first name. He encouraged the substitution, that was inaugurated by Killigrew, of women for boys in female parts. The first role that was professionally rendered by a woman in a public theatre was that of Desdemona in 'Othello,' apparently on December 8, 1660. {335} The actress on that occasion is said to have been Mrs. Margaret Hughes, Prince Rupert's mistress; but Betterton's wife, who was at first known on the stage as Mrs. Saunderson, was the first actress to present a series of Shakespeare's great female characters. Mrs. Betterton gave her husband powerful support, from 1663 onwards, in such roles as Ophelia, Juliet, Queen Catherine, and Lady Macbeth. Betterton formed a school of actors who carried on his traditions for many years after his death. Robert Wilks (1670-1732) as Hamlet, and Barton Booth (1681-1733) as Henry VIII and Hotspur, were popularly accounted no unworthy successors. Colley Cibber (1671-1757) as actor, theatrical manager, and dramatic critic, was both a loyal disciple of Betterton and a lover of Shakespeare, though his vanity and his faith in the ideals of the Restoration incited him to perpetrate many outrages on Shakespeare's text when preparing it for theatrical representation. His notorious adaptation of 'Richard III,' which was first produced in 1700, long held the stage to the exclusion of the original version. But towards the middle of the eighteenth century all earlier efforts to interpret Shakespeare in the playhouse were eclipsed in public esteem by the concentrated energy and intelligence of David Garrick. Garrick's enthusiasm for the poet and his histrionic genius riveted Shakespeare's hold on public taste. His claim to have restored to the stage the text of Shakespeare--purified of Restoration defilements--cannot be allowed without serious qualifications. Garrick had no scruple in presenting plays of Shakespeare in versions that he or his friends had recklessly garbled. He supplied 'Romeo and Juliet' with a happy ending; he converted the 'Taming of the Shrew' into the farce of 'Katherine and Petruchio,' 1754; he introduced radical changes in 'Antony and Cleopatra,' 'Two Gentlemen of Verona,' 'Cymbeline,' and 'Midsummer Night's Dream.' Nevertheless, no actor has won an equally exalted reputation in so vast and varied a repertory of Shakespearean roles. His triumphant debut as Richard III in 1741 was followed by equally successful performances of Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, King John, Romeo, Henry IV, Iago, Leontes, Benedick, and Antony in 'Antony and Cleopatra.' Garrick was not quite undeservedly buried in Westminster Abbey on February 1, 1779, at the foot of Shakespeare's statue.

Garrick was ably seconded by Mrs. Clive (1711-1785), Mrs. Cibber (1714-1766), and Mrs. Pritchard (1711-1768). Mrs. Cibber as Constance in 'King John,' and Mrs. Pritchard in Lady Macbeth, excited something of the same enthusiasm as Garrick in Richard III and Lear. There were, too, contemporary critics who judged rival actors to show in certain parts powers equal, if not superior, to those of Garrick. Charles Macklin (1697?-1797) for nearly half a century, from 1735 to 1785, gave many hundred performances of a masterly rendering of Shylock. The character had, for many years previous to Macklin's assumption of it, been allotted to comic actors, but Macklin effectively concentrated his energy on the tragic significance of the part with an effect that Garrick could not surpass. Macklin was also reckoned successful in Polonius and Iago. John Henderson, the Bath Roscius (1747-1785), who, like Garrick, was buried in Westminster Abbey, derived immense popularity from his representation of Falstaff; while in subordinate characters like Mercutio, Slender, Jaques, Touchstone, and Sir Toby Belch, John Palmer (1742?-1798) was held to approach perfection. But Garrick was the accredited chief of the theatrical profession until his death. He was then succeeded in his place of predominance by John Philip Kemble, who derived invaluable support from his association with one abler than himself, his sister, Mrs. Siddons.

John Philip Kemble, 1757-1823. Mrs. Sarah Siddons, 1755-1831.

Somewhat stilted and declamatory in speech, Kemble enacted a wide range of characters of Shakespearean tragedy with a dignity that won the admiration of Pitt, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, and Leigh Hunt. Coriolanus was regarded as his masterpiece, but his renderings of Hamlet, King John, Wolsey, the Duke in 'Measure for Measure,' Leontes, and Brutus satisfied the most exacting canons of contemporary theatrical criticism. Kemble's sister, Mrs. Siddons, was the greatest actress that Shakespeare's countrymen have known. Her noble and awe-inspiring presentation of Lady Macbeth, her Constance, her Queen Katherine, have, according to the best testimony, not been equalled even by the achievements of the eminent actresses of France.

Edmund Kean, 1787-1833.

During the present century the most conspicuous histrionic successes in Shakespearean drama have been won by Edmund Kean, whose triumphant rendering of Shylock on his first appearance at Drury Lane Theatre on January 26, 1814, is one of the most stirring incidents in the history of the English stage. Kean defied the rigid convention of the 'Kemble School,' and gave free rein to his impetuous passions. Besides Shylock, he excelled in Richard III, Othello, Hamlet, and Lear. No less a critic than Coleridge declared that to see him act was like 'reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.' Among other Shakespearean actors of Kean's period a high place was allotted by public esteem to George Frederick Cooke (1756-1811), whose Richard III, first given in London at Covent Garden Theatre, October 31, 1801, was accounted his masterpiece. Charles Lamb, writing in 1822, declared that of all the actors who flourished in his time, Robert Bensley 'had most of the swell of soul,' and Lamb gave with a fine enthusiasm in his 'Essays of Elia' an analysis (which has become classical) of Bensley's performance of Malvolio. But Bensley's powers were rated more moderately by more experienced playgoers. {338} Lamb's praises of Mrs. Jordan (1762-1816) in Ophelia, Helena, and Viola in 'Twelfth Night,' are corroborated by the eulogies of Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. In the part of Rosalind Mrs. Jordan is reported on all sides to have beaten Mrs. Siddons out of the field.

William Charles Macready, 1793-1873.

The torch thus lit by Garrick, by the Kembles, by Kean and his contemporaries was worthily kept alive by William Charles Macready, a cultivated and conscientious actor, who, during a professional career of more than forty years (1810-1851), assumed every great part in Shakespearean tragedy. Although Macready lacked the classical bearing of Kemble or the intense passion of Kean, he won as the interpreter of Shakespeare the whole-hearted suffrages of the educated public. Macready's chief associate in women characters was Helen Faucit (1820-1898, afterwards Lady Martin), whose refined impersonations of Imogen, Beatrice, Juliet, and Rosalind form an attractive chapter in the history of the stage.

Recent revivals.

The most notable tribute paid to Shakespeare by any actor-manager of recent times was paid by Samuel Phelps (1804-1878), who gave during his tenure of Sadler's Wells Theatre between 1844 and 1862 competent representations of all the plays save six; only 'Richard II,' the three parts of 'Henry VI,' 'Troilus and Cressida,' and 'Titus Andronicus' were omitted. Sir Henry Irving, who since 1878 has been ably seconded by Miss Ellen Terry, has revived at the Lyceum Theatre between 1874 and the present time eleven plays ('Hamlet,' 'Macbeth,' 'Othello,' 'Richard III,' 'The Merchant of Venice,' 'Much Ado about Nothing,' 'Twelfth Night,' 'Romeo and Juliet,' 'King Lear,' 'Henry VIII,' and 'Cymbeline'), and has given each of them all the advantage they can derive from thoughtful acting as well as from lavish scenic elaboration. {340a} But theatrical revivals of plays of Shakespeare are in England intermittent, and no theatrical manager since Phelps's retirement has sought systematically to illustrate on the stage the full range of Shakespearean drama. Far more in this direction has been attempted in Germany. {340b} In one respect the history of recent Shakespearean representations can be viewed by the literary student with unqualified satisfaction. Although some changes of text or some rearrangement of the scenes are found imperative in all theatrical representations of Shakespeare, a growing public sentiment in England and elsewhere has for many years favoured as loyal an adherence to the authorised version of the plays as is practicable on the part of theatrical managers; and the evil traditions of the stage which sanctioned the perversions of the eighteenth century are happily well-nigh extinct.

In music and art.

Music and art in England owe much to Shakespeare's influence. From Thomas Morley, Purcell, Matthew Locke, and Arne to William Linley, Sir Henry Bishop, and Sir Arthur Sullivan, every distinguished musician has sought to improve on his predecessor's setting of one or more of Shakespeare's songs, or has composed concerted music in illustration of some of his dramatic themes. {341} In art, the publisher John Boydell organised in 1787 a scheme for illustrating scenes in Shakespeare's work by the greatest living English artists. Some fine pictures were the result. A hundred and sixty-eight were painted in all, and the artists, whom Boydell employed, included Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Romney, Thomas Stothard, John Opie, Benjamin West, James Barry, and Henry Fuseli. All the pictures were exhibited from time to time between 1789 and 1804 at a gallery specially built for the purpose in Pall Mall, and in 1802 Boydell published a collection of engravings of the chief pictures. The great series of paintings was dispersed by auction in 1805. Few eminent artists of later date, from Daniel Maclise to Sir John Millais, have lacked the ambition to interpret some scene or character of Shakespearean drama.

In America.

In America no less enthusiasm for Shakespeare has been manifested than in England. Editors and critics are hardly less numerous there, and some criticism from American pens, like that of James Russell Lowell, has reached the highest literary level. Nowhere, perhaps, has more labour been devoted to the study of his works than that given by Mr. H. H. Furness of Philadelphia to the preparation of his 'New Variorum' edition. The Barton collection of Shakespeareana in the Boston Public Library is one of the most valuable extant, and the elaborate catalogue (1878-80) contains some 2,500 entries. First of Shakespeare's plays to be represented in America, 'Richard III' was performed in New York in March 1750. More recently Edwin Forrest, Junius Brutus Booth, Edwin Booth, Charlotte Cushman, and Miss Ada Rehan have maintained on the American stage the great traditions of Shakespearean acting; while Mr. E. A. Abbey has devoted high artistic gifts to pictorial representation of scenes from the plays.

Translations. In Germany. German translations.

The Bible, alone of literary compositions, has been translated more frequently or into a greater number of languages than the works of Shakespeare. The progress of his reputation in Germany, France, Italy, and Russia was somewhat slow at the outset. But in Germany the poet has received for nearly a century and a half a recognition scarcely less pronounced than that accorded him in America and in his own country. Three of Shakespeare's plays, now in the Zurich Library, were brought thither by J. R. Hess from England in 1614. As early as 1626 'Hamlet,' 'King Lear,' and 'Romeo and Juliet' were acted at Dresden, and a version of the 'Taming of The Shrew' was played there and elsewhere at the end of the seventeenth century. But such mention of Shakespeare as is found in German literature between 1640 and 1740 only indicates a knowledge on the part of German readers either of Dryden's criticisms or of the accounts of him printed in English encyclopaedias. {342} The earliest sign of a direct acquaintance with the plays is a poor translation of 'Julius Caesar' into German by Baron C. W. von Borck, formerly Prussian minister in London, which was published at Berlin in 1741. A worse rendering of 'Romeo and Juliet' followed in 1758. Meanwhile J. C. Gottsched (1700-66), an influential man of letters, warmly denounced Shakespeare in a review of Von Borck's effort in 'Beitrage zur deutschen Sprache' and elsewhere. Lessing came without delay to Shakespeare's rescue, and set his reputation, in the estimation of the German public, on that exalted pedestal which it has not ceased to occupy. It was in 1759, in a journal entitled 'Litteraturbriefe,' that Lessing first claimed for Shakespeare superiority, not only to the French dramatists Racine and Corneille, who hitherto had dominated European taste, but to all ancient or modern poets. Lessing's doctrine, which he developed in his 'Hamburgische Dramaturgie' (Hamburg, 1767, 2 vols. 8vo), was at once accepted by the poet Johann Gottfried Herder in the 'Blatter von deutschen Art and Kunst,' 1771. Christopher Martin Wieland (1733-1813) in 1762 began a prose translation which Johann Joachim Eschenburg (1743-1820) completed (Zurich, 13 vols., 1775-84). Between 1797 and 1833 there appeared at intervals the classical German rendering by August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck, leaders of the romantic school of German literature, whose creed embodied, as one of its first articles, an unwavering veneration for Shakespeare. Schlegel translated only seventeen plays, and his workmanship excels that of the rest of the translation. Tieck's part in the undertaking was mainly confined to editing translations by various hands. Many other German translations in verse were undertaken during the same period--by J. H. Voss and his sons (Leipzig, 1818-29), by J. W. O. Benda (Leipzig, 1825-6), by J. Korner (Vienna, 1836), by A. Bottger (Leipzig, 1836-7), by E. Ortlepp (Stuttgart, 1838-9), and by A. Keller and M. Rapp (Stuttgart, 1843-6). The best of more recent German translations is that by a band of poets and eminent men of letters including Friedrich von Bodenstedt, Ferdinand von Freiligrath, and Paul Heyse (Leipzig, 1867-71, 38 vols.) Most of these versions have been many times reissued, but, despite the high merits of von Bodenstedt and his companions' performance, Schlegel and Tieck's achievement still holds the field. Schlegel's lectures on 'Shakespeare and the Drama,' which were delivered at Vienna in 1808, and were translated into English in 1815, are worthy of comparison with those of Coleridge, who owed much to their influence. Wordsworth in 1815 declared that Schlegel and his disciples first marked out the right road in aesthetic criticism, and enjoyed at the moment superiority over all English aesthetic critics of Shakespeare. {344} Subsequently Goethe poured forth, in his voluminous writings, a mass of criticism even more illuminating and appreciative than Schlegel's. {345} Although Goethe deemed Shakespeare's works unsuited to the stage, he adapted 'Romeo and Juliet' for the Weimar Theatre, while Schiller prepared 'Macbeth' (Stuttgart, 1801). Heine published in 1838 charming studies of Shakespeare's heroines (English translation 1895), and acknowledged only one defect in Shakespeare--that he was an Englishman.

Modern German writers on Shakespeare.

During the last half-century textual, aesthetic, and biographical criticism has been pursued in Germany with unflagging industry and energy; and although laboured and supersubtle theorising characterises much German aesthetic criticism, its mass and variety testify to the impressiveness of the appeal that Shakespeare's work has made to the German intellect. The efforts to stem the current of Shakespearean worship made by the realistic critic, Gustav Rumelin, in his 'Shakespearestudien' (Stuttgart, 1866), and subsequently by the dramatist, J. R. Benedix, in 'Die Shakespearomanie' (Stuttgart, 1873, 8vo), proved of no effect. In studies of the text and metre Nikolaus Delius (1813-1888) should, among recent German writers, be accorded the first place; in studies of the biography and stage history Friedrich Karl Elze (1821-1889); in aesthetic studies Friedrich Alexander Theodor Kreyssig (1818-1879), author of 'Vorlesungen uber Shakespeare' (Berlin, 1858 and 1874), and 'Shakespeare-Fragen' (Leipzig, 1871). Ulrici's 'Shakespeare's Dramatic Art' (first published at Halle in 1839) and Gervinus's Commentaries (first published at Leipzig in 1848-9), both of which are familiar in English translations, are suggestive but unconvincing aesthetic interpretations. The German Shakespeare Society, which was founded at Weimar in 1865, has published thirty-four year-books (edited successively by von Bodenstedt, Delius, Elze, and F. A. Leo); each contains useful contributions to Shakespearean study.

On the German stage.

Shakespeare has been no less effectually nationalised on the German stage. The three great actors--Frederick Ulrich Ludwig Schroeder (1744-1816) of Hamburg, Ludwig Devrient (1784-1832), and his nephew Gustav Emil Devrient (1803-1872)--largely derived their fame from their successful assumptions of Shakespearean characters. Another of Ludwig Devrient's nephews, Eduard (1801-1877), also an actor, prepared, with his son Otto, an acting German edition (Leipzig, 1873 and following years). An acting edition by Wilhelm Oechelhaeuser appeared previously at Berlin in 1871. Twenty-eight of the thirty-seven plays assigned to Shakespeare are now on recognised lists of German acting plays, including all the histories. {346a} In 1895 as many as 706 performances of twenty-five of Shakespeare's plays were given in German theatres. {346b} In 1896 no fewer than 910 performances were given of twenty-three plays. In 1897 performances of twenty-four plays reached a total of 930--an average of nearly three Shakespearean representations a day in the German-speaking districts of Europe. {347} It is not only in capitals like Berlin and Vienna that the representations are frequent and popular. In towns like Altona, Breslau, Frankfort-on-the-Maine, Hamburg, Magdeburg, and Rostock, Shakespeare is acted constantly and the greater number of his dramas is regularly kept in rehearsal. 'Othello,' 'Hamlet,' 'Romeo and Juliet,' and 'The Taming of the Shrew' usually prove most attractive. Of the many German musical composers who have worked on Shakespearean themes, Mendelssohn (in 'Midsummer Night's Dream'), Schumann, and Franz Schubert (in setting separate songs) have achieved the greatest success.

In France. Voltaire's strictures.

In France Shakespeare won recognition after a longer struggle than in Germany. Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655) plagiarised 'Cymbeline,' 'Hamlet,' and 'The Merchant of Venice' in his 'Agrippina.' About 1680 Nicolas Clement, Louis XIV's librarian, allowed Shakespeare imagination, natural thoughts, and ingenious expression, but deplored his obscenity. {348a} Half a century elapsed before public attention in France was again directed to Shakespeare. {348b} The Abbe Prevost, in his periodical 'Le Pour et Contre' (1733 et seq.), acknowledged his power. But it is to Voltaire that his countrymen owe, as he himself boasted, their first effective introduction to Shakespeare. Voltaire studied Shakespeare thoroughly on his visit to England between 1726 and 1729, and his influence is visible in his own dramas. In his 'Lettres Philosophiques' (1731), afterwards reissued as 'Lettres sur les Anglais,' 1734 (Nos. xviii. and xix.), and in his 'Lettre sur la Tragedie' (1731), he expressed admiration for Shakespeare's genius, but attacked his want of taste and art. He described him as 'le Corneille de Londres, grand fou d'ailleurs mais il a des morceaux admirables.' Writing to the Abbe des Fontaines in November 1735, Voltaire admitted many merits in 'Julius Caesar,' on which he published 'Observations' in 1764. Johnson replied to Voltaire's general criticism in the preface to his edition (1765), and Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu in 1769 in a separate volume, which was translated into French in 1777. Diderot made, in his 'Encylopedie,' the first stand in France against the Voltairean position, and increased opportunities of studying Shakespeare's works increased the poet's vogue. Twelve plays were translated in De la Place's 'Theatre Anglais' (1745-8). Jean-Francois Ducis (1733-1816) adapted without much insight six plays for the French stage, beginning in 1769 with 'Hamlet,' his version of which was acted with applause. In 1776 Pierre Le Tourneur began a bad prose translation (completed in 1782) of all Shakespeare's plays, and declared him to be 'the god of the theatre.' Voltaire protested against this estimate in a new remonstrance consisting of two letters, of which the first was read before the French Academy on August 25, 1776. Here Shakespeare was described as a barbarian, whose works--'a huge dunghill'--concealed some pearls.

French critics' gradual emancipation from Voltairean influence.

Although Voltaire's censure was rejected by the majority of later French critics, it expressed a sentiment born of the genius of the nation, and made an impression that was only gradually effaced. Marmontel, La Harpe, Marie-Joseph Chenier, and Chateaubriand, in his 'Essai sur Shakespeare,' 1801, inclined to Voltaire's view; but Madame de Stael wrote effectively on the other side in her 'De la Litterature, 1804 (i. caps. 13, 14, ii. 5.) 'At this day,' wrote Wordsworth in 1815, 'the French critics have abated nothing of their aversion to "this darling of our nation." "The English with their bouffon de Shakespeare" is as familiar an expression among them as in the time of Voltaire. Baron Grimm is the only French writer who seems to have perceived his infinite superiority to the first names of the French theatre; an advantage which the Parisian critic owed to his German blood and German education.' {350a} The revision of Le Tourneur's translation by Francois Guizot and A. Pichot in 1821 gave Shakespeare a fresh advantage. Paul Duport, in 'Essais Litteraires sur Shakespeare' (Paris, 1828, 2 vols.), was the last French critic of repute to repeat Voltaire's censure unreservedly. Guizot, in his discourse 'Sur la Vie et les OEuvres de Shakespeare' (reprinted separately from the translation of 1821), as well as in his 'Shakespeare et son Temps' (1852), Villemain in a general essay, {350b} and Barante in a study of 'Hamlet,' {350c} acknowledge the mightiness of Shakespeare's genius with comparatively few qualifications. Other complete translations followed--by Francisque Michel (1839), by Benjamin Laroche (1851), and by Emil Montegut (1867), but the best is that in prose by Francois Victor Hugo (1859-66), whose father, Victor Hugo the poet, published a rhapsodical eulogy in 1864. Alfred Mezieres's 'Shakespeare, ses OEuvres et ses Critiques' (Paris, 1860), is a saner appreciation.

On the French stage.

Meanwhile 'Hamlet' and 'Macbeth,' 'Othello,' and a few other Shakespearean plays, became stock pieces on the French stage. A powerful impetus to theatrical representation of Shakespeare in France was given by the performance in Paris of the chief plays by a strong company of English actors in the autumn of 1827. 'Hamlet' and 'Othello' were acted successively by Charles Kemble and Macready; Edmund Kean appeared as Richard III, Othello, and Shylock; Miss Smithson, who became the wife of Hector Berlioz the musician, filled the _roles_ of Ophelia, Juliet, Desdemona, Cordelia, and Portia. French critics were divided as to the merits of the performers, but most of them were enthusiastic in their commendations of the plays. {351a} Alfred de Vigny prepared a version of 'Othello' for the Theatre-Francais in 1829 with eminent success. An adaptation of 'Hamlet' by Alexandre Dumas was first performed in 1847, and a rendering by the Chevalier de Chatelain (1864) was often repeated. George Sand translated 'As You Like It' (Paris, 1856) for representation by the Comedie Francaise on April 12, 1856. 'Lady Macbeth' has been represented in recent years by Madame Sarah Bernhardt, and 'Hamlet' by M. Mounet Sully of the Theatre-Francais. {351b} Four French musicians--Berlioz in his symphony of 'Romeo and Juliet,' Gounod in his opera of 'Romeo and Juliet,' Ambroise Thomas in his opera of 'Hamlet,' and Saint-Saens in his opera of 'Henry VIII'--have sought with public approval to interpret musically portions of Shakespeare's work.

In Italy.

In Italy Shakespeare was little known before the present century. Such references as eighteenth-century Italian writers made to him were based on remarks by Voltaire. {352} The French adaptation of 'Hamlet' by Ducis was issued in Italian blank verse (Venice, 1774, 8vo). Complete translations of all the plays made direct from the English were issued by Michele Leoni in verse at Verona in 1819-22, and by Carlo Rusconi in prose at Padua in 1831 (new edit. Turin, 1858-9). 'Othello' and 'Romeo and Juliet' have been very often translated into Italian separately. The Italian actors, Madame Ristori (as Lady Macbeth), Salvini (as Othello), and Rossi rank among Shakespeare's most effective interpreters. Verdi's operas on Macbeth, Othello, and Falstaff (the last two with libretti by Boito), manifest close and appreciative study of Shakespeare.

In Holland.

Two complete translations have been published in Dutch; one in prose by A. S. Kok (Amsterdam 1873-1880), the other in verse by Dr. L. A. J. Burgersdijk (Leyden, 1884-8, 12 vols.)

In Russia.

In Eastern Europe, Shakespeare first became known through French and German translations. Into Russian 'Romeo and Juliet' was translated in 1772, 'Richard III' in 1783, and 'Julius Caesar' in 1786. Sumarakow translated Ducis' version of 'Hamlet' in 1784 for stage purposes, while the Empress Catherine II adapted the 'Merry Wives' and 'King John.' Numerous versions of all the chief plays followed; and in 1865 there appeared at St. Petersburg the best translation in verse (direct from the English), by Nekrasow and Gerbel. A prose translation, by N. Ketzcher, begun in 1862, was completed in 1879. Gerbel issued a Russian translation of the 'Sonnets' in 1880, and many critical essays in the language, original or translated, have been published. Almost every play has been represented in Russian on the Russian stage. {353a}

In Poland.

A Polish version of 'Hamlet' was acted at Lemberg in 1797; and as many as sixteen plays now hold a recognised place among Polish acting plays. The standard Polish translation of Shakespeare's collected works appeared at Warsaw in 1875 (edited by the Polish poet Kraszewski), and is reckoned among the most successful renderings in a foreign tongue.

In Hungary.

In Hungary, Shakespeare's greatest works have since the beginning of the century been highly appreciated by students and by playgoers. A complete translation into Hungarian appeared at Kaschau in 1824. At the National Theatre at Budapest no fewer than twenty-two plays have been of late years included in the actors' repertory. {353b}

In other countries.

Other complete translations have been published in Bohemian (Prague 1874), in Swedish (Lund, 1847-1851), in Danish (1845-1850), and Finnish (Helsingfors, 1892-5). In Spanish a complete translation is in course of publication (Madrid, 1885 et seq.), and the eminent Spanish critic Menendez y Pelayo has set Shakespeare above Calderon. In Armenian, although only three plays ('Hamlet,' 'Romeo and Juliet,' and 'As You Like It') have been issued, the translation of the whole is ready for the press. Separate plays have appeared in Welsh, Portuguese, Friesic, Flemish, Servian, Roumanian, Maltese, Ukrainian, Wallachian, Croatian, modern Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Japanese; while a few have been rendered into Bengali, Hindustani, Marathi, {354} Gujarati, Urdu, Kanarese, and other languages of India, and have been acted in native theatres.

XXI--GENERAL ESTIMATE

General estimate.

No estimate of Shakespeare's genius can be adequate. In knowledge of human character, in wealth of humour, in depth of passion, in fertility of fancy, and in soundness of judgment, he has no rival. It is true of him, as of no other writer, that his language and versification adapt themselves to every phase of sentiment, and sound every note in the scale of felicity. Some defects are to be acknowledged, but they sink into insignificance when measured by the magnitude of his achievement. Sudden transitions, elliptical expressions, mixed metaphors, indefensible verbal quibbles, and fantastic conceits at times create an atmosphere of obscurity. The student is perplexed, too, by obsolete words and by some hopelessly corrupt readings. But when the whole of Shakespeare's vast work is scrutinised with due attention, the glow of his magination is seen to leave few passages wholly unillumined. Some of his plots are hastily constructed and inconsistently developed, but the intensity of the interest with which he contrives to invest the personality of his heroes and heroines triumphs over halting or digressive treatment of the story in which they have their being. Although he was versed in the technicalities of stagecraft, he occasionally disregarded its elementary conditions. But the success of his presentments of human life and character depended little on his manipulation of theatrical machinery. His unassailable supremacy springs from the versatile working of his insight and intellect, by virtue of which his pen limned with unerring precision almost every gradation of thought and emotion that animates the living stage of the world.

Character of Shakespeare's achievement.

Shakespeare's mind, as Hazlitt suggested, contained within itself the germs of all faculty and feeling. He knew intuitively how every faculty and feeling would develop in any conceivable change of fortune. Men and women--good or bad, old or young, wise or foolish, merry or sad, rich or poor--yielded their secrets to him, and his genius enabled him to give being in his pages to all the shapes of humanity that present themselves on the highway of life. Each of his characters gives voice to thought or passion with an individuality and a naturalness that rouse in the intelligent playgoer and reader the illusion that they are overhearing men and women speak unpremeditatingly among themselves, rather than that they are reading written speeches or hearing written speeches recited. The more closely the words are studied, the completer the illusion grows. Creatures of the imagination--fairies, ghosts, witches--are delineated with a like potency, and the reader or spectator feels instinctively that these supernatural entities could not speak, feel, or act otherwise than Shakespeare represents them. The creative power of poetry was never manifested to such effect as in the corporeal semblances in which Shakespeare clad the spirits of the air.

Its universal recognition.

So mighty a faculty sets at naught the common limitations of nationality, and in every quarter of the globe to which civilised life has penetrated Shakespeare's power is recognised. All the world over, language is applied to his creations that ordinarily applies to beings of flesh and blood. Hamlet and Othello, Lear and Macbeth, Falstaff and Shylock, Brutus and Romeo, Ariel and Caliban are studied in almost every civilised tongue as if they were historic personalities, and the chief of the impressive phrases that fall from their lips are rooted in the speech of civilised humanity. To Shakespeare the intellect of the world, speaking in divers accents, applies with one accord his own words: 'How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in apprehension how like a god!'

APPENDIX

I.--THE SOURCES OF BIOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE.

Contemporary records abundant.

The scantiness of contemporary records of Shakespeare's career has been much exaggerated. An investigation extending over two centuries has brought together a mass of detail which far exceeds that accessible in the case of any other contemporary professional writer. Nevertheless, some important links are missing, and at some critical points appeal to conjecture is inevitable. But the fully ascertained facts are numerous enough to define sharply the general direction that Shakespeare's career followed. Although the clues are in some places faint, the trail never altogether eludes the patient investigator.

First efforts in biography.

Fuller, in his 'Worthies' (1662), attempted the first biographical notice of Shakespeare, with poor results. Aubrey, in his gossiping 'Lives of Eminent Men,' {361} based his ampler information on reports communicated to him by William Beeston (_d._ 1682), an aged actor, whom Dryden called 'the chronicle of the stage,' and who was doubtless in the main a trustworthy witness. A few additional details were recorded in the seventeenth century by the Rev. John Ward (1629-1681), vicar of Stratford-on-Avon from 1662 to 1668, in a diary and memorandum-book written between 1661 and 1663 (ed. C. A. Severn, 1839); by the Rev. William Fulman, whose manuscripts are at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (with valuable interpolations made before 1708 by the Rev. Richard Davies, vicar of Saperton, Gloucestershire); by John Dowdall, who recorded his experiences of travel through Warwickshire in 1693 (London, 1838); and by William Hall, who described a visit to Stratford in 1694 (London, 1884, from Hall's letter among the Bodleian MSS.) Phillips in his 'Theatrum Poetarum' (1675), and Langbaine in his 'English Dramatick Poets' (1691), confined themselves to elementary criticism. In 1709 Nicholas Rowe prefixed to his edition of the plays a more ambitious memoir than had yet been attempted, and embodied some hitherto unrecorded Stratford and London traditions with which the actor Thomas Betterton supplied him. A little fresh gossip was collected by William Oldys, and was printed from his manuscript 'Adversaria' (now in the British Museum) as an appendix to Yeowell's 'Memoir of Oldys,' 1862. Pope, Johnson, and Steevens, in the biographical prefaces to their editions, mainly repeated the narratives of their predecessor, Rowe.

Biographers of the nineteenth century. Stratford topography.

In the Prolegomena to the Variorum editions of 1803, 1813, and especially in that of 1821, there was embodied a mass of fresh information derived by Edmund Malone from systematic researches among the parochial records of Stratford, the manuscripts accumulated by the actor Alleyn at Dulwich, and official papers of state preserved in the public offices in London (now collected in the Public Record Office). The available knowledge of Elizabethan stage history, as well as of Shakespeare's biography, was thus greatly extended. John Payne Collier, in his 'History of English Dramatic Poetry' (1831), in his 'New Facts' about Shakespeare (1835), his 'New Particulars' (1836), and his 'Further Particulars' (1839), and in his editions of Henslowe's 'Diary' and the 'Alleyn Papers' for the Shakespeare Society, while occasionally throwing some further light on obscure places, foisted on Shakespeare's biography a series of ingeniously forged documents which have greatly perplexed succeeding biographers. {362} Joseph Hunter in 'New Illustrations of Shakespeare' (1845) and George Russell French's 'Shakespeareana Genealogica' (1869) occasionally supplemented Malone's researches. James Orchard Halliwell (afterwards Halliwell-Phillipps) printed separately, between 1850 and 1884, in various privately issued publications, all the Stratford archives and extant legal documents bearing on Shakespeare's career, many of them for the first time. In 1881 Halliwell-Phillipps began the collective publication of materials for a full biography in his 'Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare;' this work was generously enlarged in successive editions until it acquired massive proportions; in the seventh and last edition of 1887 it numbered near 1,000 pages. Mr. Frederick Gard Fleay, in his 'Shakespeare Manual' (1876), in his 'Life of Shakespeare' (1886), in his 'History of the Stage' (1890), and his 'Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama' (1891), adds much useful information respecting stage history and Shakespeare's relations with his fellow-dramatists, mainly derived from a study of the original editions of the plays of Shakespeare and of his contemporaries; but unfortunately many of Mr. Fleay's statements and conjectures are unauthenticated. For notices of Stratford, R. B. Wheler's 'History and Antiquities' (1806), John R. Wise's 'Shakespere, his Birthplace and its Neighbourhood' (1861), the present writer's 'Stratford-on-Avon to the Death of Shakespeare' (1890), and Mrs. C. C. Stopes's 'Shakespeare's Warwickshire Contemporaries' (1897), may be consulted. Wise appends to his volume a tentative 'glossary of words still used in Warwickshire to be found in Shakspere.' The parish registers of Stratford have been edited by Mr. Richard Savage for the Parish Registers Society (1898-9). Nathan Drake's 'Shakespeare and his Times' (1817) and G. W. Thornbury's 'Shakespeare's England' (1856) collect much material respecting Shakespeare's social environment.

Specialised studies in biography. Useful epitomes.

The chief monographs on special points in Shakespeare's biography are Dr. Richard Farmer's 'Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare' (1767), reprinted in the Variorum editions; Octavius Gilchrist's 'Examination of the Charges . . . . of Ben Jonson's Enmity towards Shakespeare' (1808); W. J. Thoms's 'Was Shakespeare ever a Soldier?' (1849), a study based on an erroneous identification of the poet with another William Shakespeare; Lord Campbell's 'Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements considered' (1859); John Charles Bucknill's 'Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare' (1860); C. F. Green's' 'Shakespeare's Crab-Tree, with its Legend' (1862); C. H. Bracebridge's 'Shakespeare no Deer-stealer' (1862); William Blades's 'Shakspere and Typography' (1872); and D. H. Madden's 'Diary of Master William Silence (Shakespeare and Sport),' 1897. A full epitome of the biographical information accessible at the date of publication is supplied in Karl Elze's 'Life of Shakespeare' (Halle, 1876; English translation, 1888), with which Elze's 'Essays' from the publications of the German Shakespeare Society (English translation, 1874) are worth studying. A less ambitious effort of the same kind by Samuel Neil (1861) is seriously injured by the writer's acceptance of Collier's forgeries. Professor Dowden's 'Shakspere Primer' (1877) and his 'Introduction to Shakspere' (1893), and Dr. Furnivall's 'Introduction to the Leopold Shakspere,' are all useful summaries of leading facts.

Aids to study of plots and text. Concordances. Bibliographies.

Francis Douce's 'Illustrations of Shakespeare' (1807, new edit. 1839), 'Shakespeare's Library' (ed. J. P. Collier and W. C. Hazlitt, 1875), 'Shakespeare's Plutarch' (ed. Skeat, 1875), and 'Shakespeare's Holinshed' (ed. W. G. Boswell-Stone, 1896) are of service in tracing the sources of Shakespeare's plots. Alexander Schmidt's 'Shakespeare Lexicon' (1874) and Dr. E. A. Abbott's 'Shakespearian Grammar' (1869, new edit. 1893) are valuable aids to a study of the text. Useful concordances to the Plays have been prepared by Mrs. Cowden-Clarke (1845), to the Poems by Mrs. H. H. Furness (Philadelphia, 1875), and to Plays and Poems, in one volume, with references to numbered lines, by John Bartlett (London and New York, 1895). {364} A 'Handbook Index' by J. O. Halliwell (privately printed 1866) gives lists of obsolete words and phrases, songs, proverbs, and plants mentioned in the works of Shakespeare. An unprinted glossary prepared by Richard Warner between 1750 and 1770 is at the British Museum (Addit. MSS. 10472-542). Extensive bibliographies are given in Lowndes's 'Library Manual' (ed. Bohn); in Franz Thimm's 'Shakespeariana' (1864 and 1871); in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' 9th edit. (skilfully classified by Mr. H. R. Tedder); and in the 'British Museum Catalogue' (the Shakespearean entries in which, comprising 3,680 titles, were separately published in 1897).

Critical studies.

The valuable publications of the Shakespeare Society, the New Shakspere Society, and of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, comprising contributions alike to the aesthetic, textual, historical, and biographical study of Shakespeare, are noticed above (see pp. 333-4, 346). To the critical studies, on which comment has already been made (see p. 333)--viz. Coleridge's 'Notes and Lectures,' 1883, Hazlitt's 'Characters of Shakespeare's Plays,' 1817, Professor Dowden's 'Shakspere: his Mind and Art,' 1875, and Mr. A. C. Swinburne's 'A Study of Shakespeare,' 1879--there may be added the essays on Shakespeare's heroines respectively by Mrs. Jameson in 1833 and Lady Martin in 1885; Dr. Ward's 'English Dramatic Literature' (1875, new edit. 1898); Richard G. Moulton's 'Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist' (1885); 'Shakespeare Studies' by Thomas Spencer Baynes (1893); F. S. Boas's 'Shakspere and his Predecessors', (1895), and Georg Brandes's 'William Shakespeare'--an elaborately critical but somewhat fanciful study--in Danish (Copenhagen, 1895, 8vo), in German (Leipzig, 1895), and in English (London, 1898, 2 vols. 8vo).

Shakespearean forgeries.

The intense interest which Shakespeare's life and work have long universally excited has tempted unprincipled or sportively mischievous writers from time to time to deceive the public by the forgery of documents purporting to supply new information. The forgers were especially active at the end of last century and during the middle years of the present century, and their frauds have caused students so much perplexity that it may be useful to warn them against those Shakespearean forgeries which have obtained the widest currency.

John Jordan, 1746-1809.

The earliest forger to obtain notoriety was John Jordan (1746-1809), a resident at Stratford-on-Avon, whose most important achievement was the forgery of the will of Shakespeare's father; but many other papers in Jordan's 'Original Collections on Shakespeare and Stratford-on-Avon' (1780), and 'Original Memoirs and Historical Accounts of the Families of Shakespeare and Hart,' are open to the gravest suspicion. {366a}

The Ireland forgeries, 1796.

The best known Shakespearean forger of the eighteenth century was William Henry Ireland (1777-1835), a barrister's clerk, who, with the aid of his father, Samuel Ireland (1740?-1800), an author and engraver of some repute, produced in 1796 a volume of forged papers claiming to relate to Shakespeare's career. The title ran: 'Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare, including the tragedy of "King Lear" and a small fragment of "Hamlet" from the original MSS. in the possession of Samuel Ireland.' On April 2, 1796 Sheridan and Kemble produced at Drury Lane Theatre a bombastic tragedy in blank verse entitled 'Vortigern' under the pretence that it was by Shakespeare, and had been recently found among the manuscripts of the dramatist that had fallen into the hands of the Irelands. The piece, which was published, was the invention of young Ireland. The fraud of the Irelands, which for some time deceived a section of the literary public, was finally exposed by Malone in his valuable 'Inquiry into the Authenticity of the Ireland MSS.' (1796). Young Ireland afterwards published his 'Confessions' (1805). He had acquired much skill in copying Shakespeare's genuine signature from the facsimile in Steevens's edition of Shakespeare's works of the mortgage-deed of the Blackfriars house of 1612-13, {366b} and, besides conforming to that style of handwriting in his forged deeds and literary compositions, he inserted copies of the signature on the title-pages of many sixteenth-century books, and often added notes in the same feigned hand on their margins. Numerous sixteenth-century volumes embellished by Ireland in this manner are extant, and his forged signatures and marginalia have been frequently mistaken for genuine autographs of Shakespeare.

Forgeries promulgated by Collier and others, 1835-1849.

But Ireland's and Jordan's frauds are clumsy compared with those that belong to the present century. Most of the works relating to the biography of Shakespeare or the history of the Elizabethan stage produced by John Payne Collier, or under his supervision, between 1835 and 1849 are honeycombed with forged references to Shakespeare, and many of the forgeries have been admitted unsuspectingly into literary history. The chief of these forged papers I arrange below in the order of the dates that have been allotted to them by their manufacturers. {367a}

1589 (November). Appeal from the Blackfriars players (16 in number) to the Privy Council for favour. Shakespeare's name stands twelfth. From the manuscripts at Bridgewater House, belonging to the Earl of Ellesmere. First printed in Collier's 'New Facts regarding the Life of Shakespeare,' 1835. 1596 (July). List of inhabitants of the Liberty of Southwark, Shakespeare's name appearing in the sixth place. First printed in Collier's 'Life of Shakespeare,' 1858, p. 126. 1596. Petition of the owners and players of the Blackfriars Theatre to the Privy Council in reply to an alleged petition of the inhabitants requesting the closing of the playhouse. Shakespeare's name is fifth on the list of petitioners. This forged paper is in the Public Record Office, and was first printed in Collier's 'History of English Dramatic Poetry' (1831), vol. i. p. 297, and has been constantly reprinted as if it were genuine. {367b} 1596 (_circa_). A letter signed H. S.(_i.e._ Henry, Earl of Southampton), addressed to Sir Thomas Egerton, praying protection for the players of the Blackfriars Theatre, and mentioning Burbage and Shakespeare by name. First printed in Collier's 'New Facts.' 1596 (_circa_). A list of sharers in the Blackfriars Theatre, with the valuation of their property, in which Shakespeare is credited with four shares, worth 933 pounds 6s. 8d. This was first printed in Collier's 'New Facts,' 1835, p. 6, from the Egerton MSS. at Bridgewater House. 1602 (August 6). Notice of the performance of 'Othello' by Burbage's 'players' before Queen Elizabeth when on a visit to Sir Thomas Egerton, the lord-keeper, at Harefield, in a forged account of disbursements by Egerton's steward, Arthur Mainwaringe, from the manuscripts at Bridgewater House, belonging to the Earl of Ellesmere. Printed in Collier's 'New Particulars regarding the Works of Shakespeare,' 1836, and again in Collier's edition of the 'Egerton Papers,' 1840 (Camden Society)) pp. 342-3. 1603 (October 3). Mention of 'Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe' in a letter at Dulwich from Mrs. Alleyn to her husband; part of the letter is genuine. First published in Collier's Memoirs of Edward Alleyn,' 1841, p. 63. {368} 1604 List of the names of eleven players (April 9). of the King's Company fraudulently appended to a genuine letter at Dulwich College from the Privy Council bidding the Lord Mayor permit performances by the King's players. Printed in Collier's 'Memoirs of Edward Alleyn,' 1841, p. 68. {368b} 1605 (November-December). Forged entries in Master of the Revels' account-books (now at the Public Record Office) of performances at Whitehall by the King's players of the 'Moor of Venice'--_i.e._ 'Othello'--on November 1, and of 'Measure for Measure' on December 26. Printed in Peter Cunningham's 'Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court' (pp. 203-4), published by the Shakespeare Society in 1842. Doubtless based on Malone's trustworthy memoranda (now in the Bodleian Library) of researches among genuine papers formerly at the Audit Office at Somerset House. {369a} 1607. Notes of performances of 'Hamlet' and 'Richard II' by the crews of the vessels of the East India Company's fleet off Sierra Leone. First printed in 'Narratives of Voyages towards the North-West, 1496-1631,' edited by Thomas Rundall for the Hakluyt Society, 1849, p. 231, from what purported to be an exact transcript 'in the India Office' of the 'Journal of William Keeling,' captain of one of the vessels in the expedition. Keeling's manuscript journal is still at the India Office, but the leaves that should contain these entries are now, and have long been, missing from it. 1609 (January 4). A warrant appointing Robert Daborne, William Shakespeare, and others instructors of the Children of the Revels. From the Bridgewater House MSS. first printed in Collier's 'New Facts,' 1835. 1609 List of persons assessed for poor (April 6). rate in Southwark, April 6, 1609, in which Shakespeare's name appears. First printed in Collier's 'Memoirs of Edward Alleyn,' 1841, p. 91. The forged paper is at Dulwich. {369b} 1611 (November). Forged entries in Master of the Revels' account-books (now at the Public Record Office) of performances at Whitehall by the King's Players of the 'Tempest' on November 1, and of the 'Winter's Tale' on November 5. Printed in Peter Cunningham's 'Extracts from the Revels Accounts,' p. 210. Doubtless based on Malone's trustworthy memoranda of researches among genuine papers formerly at the Audit Office at Somerset House. {369c} II.--THE BACON-SHAKESPEARE CONTROVERSY.

Its source. Toby Matthew's letter.

The apparent contrast between the homeliness of Shakespeare's Stratford career and the breadth of observation and knowledge displayed in his literary work has evoked the fantastic theory that Shakespeare was not the author of the literature that passes under his name, and perverse attempts have been made to assign his works to his great contemporary, Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the great contemporary prose-writer, philosopher, and lawyer. It is argued that Shakespeare's plays embody a general omniscience (especially a knowledge of law) which was possessed by no contemporary except Bacon; that there are many close parallelisms between passages in Shakespeare's and passages in Bacon's works, {370} and that Bacon makes enigmatic references in his correspondence to secret 'recreations' and 'alphabets' and concealed poems for which his alleged employment as a concealed dramatist can alone account. Toby Matthew wrote to Bacon (as Viscount St. Albans) at an uncertain date after January 1621: 'The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation and of this side of the sea is of your Lordship's name, though he be known by another.' {371} This unpretending sentence is distorted into conclusive evidence that Bacon wrote works of commanding excellence under another's name, and among them probably Shakespeare's plays. According to the only sane interpretation of Matthew's words, his 'most prodigious wit' was some Englishman named Bacon whom he met abroad--probably a pseudonymous Jesuit like most of Matthew's friends. (The real surname of Father Thomas Southwell, who was a learned Jesuit domiciled chiefly in the Low Countries, was Bacon. He was born in 1592 at Sculthorpe, near Walsingham, Norfolk, being son of Thomas Bacon of that place, and he died at Watten in 1637.)

Chief exponents. Its vogue in America.

Joseph C. Hart (U.S. Consul at Santa Cruz, _d._ 1855), in his 'Romance of Yachting' (1848), first raised doubts of Shakespeare's authorship. There followed in a like temper 'Who wrote Shakespeare?' in 'Chambers's Journal,' August 7, 1852, and an article by Miss Delia Bacon in 'Putnams' Monthly,' January, 1856. On the latter was based 'The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare unfolded by Delia Bacon,' with a neutral preface by Nathaniel Hawthorne, London and Boston, 1857. Miss Delia Bacon, who was the first to spread abroad a spirit of scepticism respecting the established facts of Shakespeare's career, died insane on September 2, 1859. {372} Mr. William Henry Smith, a resident in London, seems first to have suggested the Baconian hypothesis in 'Was Lord Bacon the author of Shakespeare's plays?--a letter to Lord Ellesmere' (1856), which was republished as 'Bacon and Shakespeare' (1857). The most learned exponent of this strange theory was Nathaniel Holmes, an American lawyer, who published at New York in 1866 'The Authorship of the Plays attributed to Shakespeare,' a monument of misapplied ingenuity (4th edit. 1886, 2 vols.) Bacon's 'Promus of Formularies and Elegancies,' a commonplace book in Bacon's handwriting in the British Museum (London, 1883), was first edited by Mrs. Henry Pott, a voluminous advocate of the Baconian theory; it contained many words and phrases common to the works of Bacon and Shakespeare, and Mrs. Pott pressed the argument from parallelisms of expression to its extremest limits. The Baconian theory has found its widest acceptance in America. There it achieved its wildest manifestation in the book called 'The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cypher in the so-called Shakespeare Plays' (Chicago and London, 1887, 2 vols.), which was the work of Mr. Ignatius Donnelly of Hastings, Minnesota. The author pretended to have discovered among Bacon's papers a numerical cypher which enabled him to pick out letters appearing at certain intervals in the pages of Shakespeare's First Folio, and the selected letters formed words and sentences categorically stating that Bacon was author of the plays. Many refutations have been published of Mr. Donnelly's arbitrary and baseless contention.

Extent of the literature.

A Bacon Society was founded in London in 1885 to develop and promulgate the unintelligible theory, and it inaugurated a magazine (named since May 1893 'Baconiana'). A quarterly periodical also called 'Baconiana,' and issued in the same interest, was established at Chicago in 1892. 'The Bibliography of the Shakespeare-Bacon Controversy' by W. H. Wyman, Cincinnati, 1884, gives the titles of two hundred and fifty-five books or pamphlets on both sides of the subject, published since 1848; the list was continued during 1886 in 'Shakespeariana,' a monthly journal published at Philadelphia, and might now be extended to fully twice its original number.

The abundance of the contemporary evidence attesting Shakespeare's responsibility for the works published under his name gives the Baconian theory no rational right to a hearing while such authentic examples of Bacon's effort to write verse as survive prove beyond all possibility of contradiction that, great as he was as a prose writer and a philosopher, he was incapable of penning any of the poetry assigned to Shakespeare. Defective knowledge and illogical or casuistical argument alone render any other conclusion possible.

III.--THE YOUTHFUL CAREER OF THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON.

Southampton and Shakespeare.

From the dedicatory epistles addressed by Shakespeare to the Earl of Southampton in the opening pages of his two narrative poems, 'Venus and Adonis' (1593) and 'Lucrece' (1594), {374a} from the account given by Sir William D'Avenant, and recorded by Nicholas Rowe, of the earl's liberal bounty to the poet, {374b} and from the language of the sonnets, it is abundantly clear that Shakespeare enjoyed very friendly relations with Southampton from the time when his genius was nearing its maturity. No contemporary document or tradition gives the faintest suggestion that Shakespeare was the friend or _protege_ of any man of rank other than Southampton; and the student of Shakespeare's biography has reason to ask for some information respecting him who enjoyed the exclusive distinction of serving Shakespeare as his patron.

Parentage. Birth on Oct. 6, 1573.

Southampton was a patron worth cultivating. Both his parents came of the New Nobility, and enjoyed vast wealth. His father's father was Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII, and when the monasteries were dissolved, although he was faithful to the old religion, he was granted rich estates in Hampshire, including the abbeys of Titchfield and Beaulieu in the New Forest. He was created Earl of Southampton early in Edward VI's reign, and, dying shortly afterwards, was succeeded by his only son, the father of Shakespeare's friend. The second earl loved magnificence in his household. 'He was highly reverenced and favoured of all that were of his own rank, and bravely attended and served by the best gentlemen of those counties wherein he lived. His muster-roll never consisted of four lacqueys and a coachman, but of a whole troop of at least a hundred well-mounted gentlemen and yeomen.' {375a} The second earl remained a Catholic, like his father, and a chivalrous avowal of sympathy with Mary Queen of Scots procured him a term of imprisonment in the year preceding his distinguished son's birth. At a youthful age he married a lady of fortune, Mary Browne, daughter of the first Viscount Montague, also a Catholic. Her portrait, now at Welbeck, was painted in her early married days, and shows regularly formed features beneath bright auburn hair. Two sons and a daughter were the issue of the union. Shakespeare's friend, the second son, was born at her father's residence, Cowdray House, near Midhurst, on October 6, 1573. He was thus Shakespeare's junior by nine years and a half. 'A goodly boy, God bless him!' exclaimed the gratified father, writing of his birth to a friend. {375b} But the father barely survived the boy's infancy. He died at the early age of thirty-five--two days before the child's eighth birthday. The elder son was already dead. Thus, on October 4, 1581, the second and only surviving son became third Earl of Southampton, and entered on his great inheritance. {375c}

Education.

As was customary in the case of an infant peer, the little earl became a royal ward--'a child of state'--and Lord Burghley, the Prime Minister, acted as the boy's guardian in the Queen's behalf. Burghley had good reason to be satisfied with his ward's intellectual promise. 'He spent,' wrote a contemporary, 'his childhood and other younger terms in the study of good letters.' At the age of twelve, in the autumn of 1585, he was admitted to St. John's College, Cambridge, 'the sweetest nurse of knowledge in all the University.' Southampton breathed easily the cultured atmosphere. Next summer he sent his guardian, Burghley, an essay in Ciceronian Latin on the somewhat cynical text that 'All men are moved to the pursuit of virtue by the hope of reward.' The argument, if unconvincing, is precocious. 'Every man,' the boy tells us, 'no matter how well or how ill endowed with the graces of humanity, whether in the enjoyment of great honour or condemned to obscurity, experiences that yearning for glory which alone begets virtuous endeavour.' The paper, still preserved at Hatfield, is a model of calligraphy; every letter is shaped with delicate regularity, and betrays a refinement most uncommon in boys of thirteen. {376a} Southampton remained at the University for some two years, graduating M.A. at sixteen in 1589. Throughout his after life he cherished for his college 'great love and affection.'

Before leaving Cambridge, Southampton entered his name at Gray's Inn. Some knowledge of law was deemed needful in one who was to control a landed property that was not only large already but likely to grow. {376b} Meanwhile he was sedulously cultivating his literary tastes. He took into his 'pay and patronage' John Florio, the well-known author and Italian tutor, and was soon, according to Florio's testimony, as thoroughly versed in Italian as 'teaching or learning' could make him.

'When he was young,' wrote a later admirer, 'no ornament of youth was wanting in him;' and it was naturally to the Court that his friends sent him at an early age to display his varied graces. He can hardly have been more than seventeen when he was presented to his sovereign. She showed him kindly notice, and the Earl of Essex, her brilliant favourite, acknowledged his fascination. Thenceforth Essex displayed in his welfare a brotherly interest which proved in course of time a very doubtful blessing.

Recognition of Southampton's youthful beauty.

While still a boy, Southampton entered with as much zest into the sports and dissipations of his fellow courtiers as into their literary and artistic pursuits. At tennis, in jousts and tournaments, he achieved distinction; nor was he a stranger to the delights of gambling at primero. In 1592, when he was in his eighteenth year, he was recognised as the most handsome and accomplished of all the young lords who frequented the royal presence. In the autumn of that year Elizabeth paid Oxford a visit in state. Southampton was in the throng of noblemen who bore her company. In a Latin poem describing the brilliant ceremonial, which was published at the time at the University Press, eulogy was lavished without stint on all the Queen's attendants; but the academic poet declared that Southampton's personal attractions exceeded those of any other in the royal train. 'No other youth who was present,' he wrote, 'was more beautiful than this prince of Hampshire (_quo non formosior alter affuit_), nor more distinguished in the arts of learning, although as yet tender down scarce bloomed on his cheek.' The last words testify to Southampton's boyish appearance. {377a} Next year it was rumoured, that his 'external grace' was to receive signal recognition by his admission, despite his juvenility, to the Order of the Garter. 'There be no Knights of the Garter new chosen as yet,' wrote a well-informed courtier on May 3, 1593, 'but there were four nominated.' {377b} Three were eminent public servants, but first on the list stood the name of young Southampton. The purpose did not take effect, but the compliment of nomination was, at his age, without precedent outside the circle of the Sovereign's kinsmen. On November 17, 1595, he appeared in the lists set up in the Queen's presence in honour of the thirty-seventh anniversary of her accession. The poet George Peele pictured in blank verse the gorgeous scene, and likened the Earl of Southampton to that ancient type of chivalry, Bevis of Southampton, so 'valiant in arms,' so 'gentle and debonair,' did he appear to all beholders. {378}

Reluctance to marry.

But clouds were rising on this sunlit horizon. Southampton, a wealthy peer without brothers or uncles, was the only male representative of his house. A lawful heir was essential to the entail of his great possessions. Early marriages--child-marriages--were in vogue in all ranks of society, and Southampton's mother and guardian regarded matrimony at a tender age as especially incumbent on him in view of his rich heritage. When he was seventeen Burghley accordingly offered him a wife in the person of his granddaughter, Lady Elizabeth Vere, eldest daughter of his daughter Anne and of the Earl of Oxford. The Countess of Southampton approved the match, and told Burghley that her son was not averse from it. Her wish was father to the thought. Southampton declined to marry to order, and, to the confusion of his friends, was still a bachelor when he came of age in 1594. Nor even then did there seem much prospect of his changing his condition. He was in some ways as young for his years in inward disposition as in outward appearance. Although gentle and amiable in most relations of life, he could be childishly self-willed and impulsive, and outbursts of anger involved him, at Court and elsewhere, in many petty quarrels which were with difficulty settled without bloodshed. Despite his rank and wealth, he was consequently accounted by many ladies of far too uncertain a temper to sustain marital responsibilities with credit. Lady Bridget Manners, sister of his friend the Earl of Rutland, was in 1594 looking to matrimony for means of release from the servitude of a lady-in-waiting to the Queen. Her guardian suggested that Southampton or the Earl of Bedford, who was intimate with Southampton and exactly of his age, would be an eligible suitor. Lady Bridget dissented. Southampton and his friend were, she objected, 'so young,' 'fantastical,' and volatile ('so easily carried away'), that should ill fortune befall her mother, who was 'her only stay,' she 'doubted their carriage of themselves.' She spoke, she said, from observation. {379}

Intrigue with Elizabeth Vernon.

In 1595, at two-and-twenty, Southampton justified Lady Bridget's censure by a public proof of his fallibility. The fair Mistress Vernon (first cousin of the Earl of Essex), a passionate beauty of the Court, cast her spell on him. Her virtue was none too stable, and in September the scandal spread that Southampton was courting her 'with too much familiarity.'

Marriage in 1598.

The entanglement with 'his fair mistress' opened a new chapter in Southampton's career, and life's tempests began in earnest. Either to free himself from his mistress's toils, or to divert attention from his intrigue, he in 1596 withdrew from Court and sought sterner occupation. Despite his mistress's lamentations, which the Court gossips duly chronicled, he played a part with his friend Essex in the military and naval expedition to Cadiz in 1596, and in that to the Azores in 1597. He developed a martial ardour which brought him renown, and Mars (his admirers said) vied with Mercury for his allegiance. He travelled on the Continent, and finally, in 1598, he accepted a subordinate place in the suite of the Queen's Secretary, Sir Robert Cecil, who was going on an embassy to Paris. But Mistress Vernon was still fated to be his evil genius, and Southampton learnt while in Paris that her condition rendered marriage essential to her decaying reputation. He hurried to London and, yielding his own scruples to her entreaties, secretly made her his wife during the few days he stayed in this country. The step was full of peril. To marry a lady of the Court without the Queen's consent infringed a prerogative of the Crown by which Elizabeth set exaggerated store.

Imprisonment, 1601-3.

The story of Southampton's marriage was soon public property. His wife quickly became a mother, and when he crossed the Channel a few weeks later to revisit her he was received by pursuivants, who had the Queen's orders to carry him to the Fleet prison. For the time his career was ruined. Although he was soon released from gaol, all avenues to the Queen's favour were closed to him. He sought employment in the wars in Ireland, but high command was denied him. Helpless and hopeless, he late in 1600 joined Essex, another fallen favourite, in fomenting a rebellion in London, in order to regain by force the positions each had forfeited. The attempt at insurrection failed, and the conspirators stood their trial on a capital charge of treason on February 19, 1600-1. Southampton was condemned to die, but the Queen's Secretary pleaded with her that 'the poor young earl, merely for the love of Essex, had been drawn into this action,' and his punishment was commuted to imprisonment for life. Further mitigation was not to be looked for while the Queen lived. But Essex, Southampton's friend, had been James's sworn ally. The first act of James I as monarch of England was to set Southampton free (April 10, 1603). After a confinement of more than two years, Southampton resumed, under happier auspices, his place at Court.

Later career. Death on Nov. 10, 1624.

Southampton's later career does not directly concern the student of Shakespeare's biography. After Shakespeare had congratulated Southampton on his liberty in his Sonnet cvii., there is no trace of further relations between them, although there is no reason to doubt that they remained friends to the end. Southampton on his release from prison was immediately installed a Knight of the Garter, and was appointed governor of the Isle of Wight, while an Act of Parliament relieved him of all the disabilities incident to his conviction of treason. He was thenceforth a prominent figure in Court festivities. He twice danced a correnta with the Queen at the magnificent entertainment given at Whitehall on August 19, 1604, in honour of the Constable of Castile, the special ambassador of Spain, who had come to sign a treaty of peace between his sovereign and James I. {380} But home politics proved no congenial field for the exercise of Southampton's energies. Quarrels with fellow-courtiers continued to jeopardise his fortunes. With Sir Robert Cecil, with Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, and with the Duke of Buckingham he had violent disputes. It was in the schemes for colonising the New World that Southampton found an outlet for his impulsive activity. He helped to equip expeditions to Virginia, and acted as treasurer of the Virginia Company. The map of the country commemorates his labours as a colonial pioneer. In his honour were named Southampton Hundred, Hampton River, and Hampton Roads in Virginia. Finally, in the summer of 1624, at the age of fifty-one, Southampton, with characteristic spirit, took command of a troop of English volunteers which was raised to aid the Elector Palatine, husband of James I's daughter Elizabeth, in his struggle with the Emperor and the Catholics of Central Europe. With him went his eldest son, Lord Wriothesley. Both on landing in the Low Countries were attacked by fever. The younger man succumbed at once. The Earl regained sufficient strength to accompany his son's body to Bergen-op-Zoom, but there, on November 10, he himself died of a lethargy. Father and son were both buried in the chancel of the church of Titchfield, Hampshire, on December 28. Southampton thus outlived Shakespeare by more than eight years.

IV.--THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON AS A LITERARY PATRON.

Southampton's collection of books.

Southampton's close relations with men of letters of his time give powerful corroboration of the theory that he was the patron whom Shakespeare commemorated in the sonnets. From earliest to latest manhood--throughout the dissipations of Court life, amid the torments that his intrigue cost him, in the distractions of war and travel--the earl never ceased to cherish the passion for literature which was implanted in him in boyhood. His devotion to his old college, St. John's, is characteristic. When a new library was in course of construction there during the closing years of his life, Southampton collected books to the value of 360 pounds wherewith to furnish it. This 'monument of love,' as the College authorities described the benefaction, may still be seen on the shelves of the College library. The gift largely consisted of illuminated manuscripts--books of hours, legends of the saints, and mediaeval chronicles. Southampton caused his son to be educated at St. John's, and his wife expressed to the tutors the hope that the boy would 'imitate' his father 'in his love to learning and to them.'

References in his letters to poems and plays.

Even the State papers and business correspondence in which Southampton's career is traced are enlivened by references to his literary interests. Especially refreshing are the active signs vouchsafed there of his sympathy with the great birth of English drama. It was with plays that he joined other noblemen in 1598 in entertaining his chief, Sir Robert Cecil, on the eve of the departure for Paris of that embassy in which Southampton served Cecil as a secretary. In July following Southampton contrived to enclose in an official despatch from Paris 'certain songs' which he was anxious that Sir Robert Sidney, a friend of literary tastes, should share his delight in reading. Twelve months later, while Southampton was in Ireland, a letter to him from the Countess attested that current literature was an everyday topic of their private talk. 'All the news I can send you,' she wrote to her husband, 'that I think will make you merry, is that I read in a letter from London that Sir John Falstaff is, by his mistress Dame Pintpot, made father of a goodly miller's thumb--a boy that's all head and very little body; but this is a secret.' {383a} This cryptic sentence proves on the part of both earl and countess familiarity with Falstaff's adventures in Shakespeare's 'Henry IV,' where the fat knight apostrophised Mrs. Quickly as 'good pint pot' (Pt. I. II. iv. 443). Who the acquaintances were about whom the countess jested thus lightly does not appear, but that Sir John, the father of 'the boy that was all head and very little body,' was a playful allusion to Sir John's creator is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility. In the letters of Sir Toby Matthew, many of which were written very early in the seventeenth century (although first published in 1660), the sobriquet of Sir John Falstaff seems to have been bestowed on Shakespeare: 'As that excellent author Sir John Falstaff sayes, "what for your businesse, news, device, foolerie, and libertie, I never dealt better since I was a man."' {383b}

His love of the theatre.

When, after leaving Ireland, Southampton spent the autumn of 1599 in London, it was recorded that he and his friend Lord Rutland 'come not to Court' but 'pass away the time merely in going to plays every day.' {383c} It seems that the fascination that the drama had for Southampton and his friends led them to exaggerate the influence that it was capable of exerting on the emotions of the multitude. Southampton and Essex in February 1601 requisitioned and paid for the revival of Shakespeare's 'Richard II' at the Globe Theatre on the day preceding that fixed for their insurrection, in the hope that the play-scene of the deposition of a king might excite the citizens of London to countenance their rebellious design. {383d} Imprisonment sharpened Southampton's zest for the theatre. Within a year of his release from the Tower in 1603 he entertained Queen Anne of Denmark at his house in the Strand, and Burbage and his fellow players, one of whom was Shakespeare, were bidden to present the 'old' play of 'Love's Labour's Lost,' whose 'wit and mirth' were calculated 'to please her Majesty exceedingly.'

Poetic adulation. Barnabe Barnes's sonnet, 1593.

But these are merely accidental testimonies to Southampton's literary predilections. It is in literature itself, not in the prosaic records of his political or domestic life, that the amplest proofs survive of his devotion to letters. From the hour that, as a handsome and accomplished lad, he joined the Court and made London his chief home, authors acknowledged his appreciation of literary effort of almost every quality and form. He had in his Italian tutor Florio, whose circle of acquaintance included all men of literary reputation, a mentor who allowed no work of promise to escape his observation. Every note in the scale of adulation was sounded in Southampton's honour in contemporary prose and verse. Soon after the publication, in April 1593, of Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis,' with its salutation of Southampton, a more youthful apprentice to the poet's craft, Barnabe Barnes, confided to a published sonnet of unrestrained fervour his conviction that Southampton's eyes--'those heavenly lamps'--were the only sources of true poetic inspiration. The sonnet, which is superscribed 'to the Right Noble and Virtuous Lord, Henry, Earl of Southampton,' runs:

Receive, sweet Lord, with thy thrice sacred hand (Which sacred Muses make their instrument) These worthless leaves, which I to thee present, (Sprung from a rude and unmanured land) That with your countenance graced, they may withstand Hundred-eyed Envy's rough encounterment, Whose patronage can give encouragement To scorn back-wounding Zoilus his band. Vouchsafe, right virtuous Lord, with gracious eyes-- Those heavenly lamps which give the Muses light, Which give and take in course that holy fire-- To view my Muse with your judicial sight: Whom, when time shall have taught, by flight, to rise Shall to thy virtues, of much worth, aspire.

Tom Nash's addresses.

Next year a writer of greater power, Tom Nash, betrayed little less enthusiasm when dedicating to the earl his masterly essay in romance, 'The Life of Jack Wilton.' He describes Southampton, who was then scarcely of age, as 'a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves.' 'A new brain,' he exclaims, 'a new wit, a new style, a new soul, will I get me, to canonise your name to posterity, if in this my first attempt I am not taxed of presumption.' {385a} Although 'Jack Wilton' was the first book Nash formally dedicated to Southampton, it is probable that Nash had made an earlier bid for the earl's patronage. In a digression at the close of his 'Pierce Pennilesse' he grows eloquent in praise of one whom he entitles 'the matchless image of honour and magnificent rewarder of vertue, Jove's eagle-borne Ganimede, thrice noble Amintas.' In a sonnet addressed to 'this renowned lord,' who 'draws all hearts to his love,' Nash expresses regret that the great poet, Edmund Spenser, had omitted to celebrate 'so special a pillar of nobility' in the series of adulatory sonnets prefixed to the 'Faerie Queene;' and in the last lines of his sonnet Nash suggests that Spenser suppressed the nobleman's name

Because few words might not comprise thy fame. {385b}

Southampton was beyond doubt the nobleman in question. It is certain, too, that the Earl of Southampton was among the young men for whom Nash, in hope of gain, as he admitted, penned 'amorous villanellos and qui passas.' One of the least reputable of these efforts of Nash survives in an obscene love-poem entitled 'The Choosing of Valentines,' which may be dated in 1595. Not only was this dedicated to Southampton in a prefatory sonnet, but in an epilogue, again in the form of a sonnet, Nash addressed his young patron as his 'friend.' {386}

Markham's sonnet, 1595. Florio's address, 1598.

Meanwhile, in 1595, the versatile Gervase Markham inscribed to Southampton, in a sonnet, his patriotic poem on Sir Richard Grenville's glorious fight off the Azores. Markham was not content to acknowledge with Barnes the inspiriting force of his patron's eyes, but with blasphemous temerity asserted that the sweetness of his lips, which stilled the music of the spheres, delighted the ear of Almighty God. Markham's sonnet runs somewhat haltingly thus:

Thou glorious laurel of the Muses' hill, Whose eyes doth crown the most victorious pen, Bright lamp of virtue, in whose sacred skill Lives all the bliss of ear-enchanting men, From graver subjects of thy grave assays, Bend thy courageous thoughts unto these lines-- The grave from whence my humble Muse doth raise True honour's spirit in her rough designs-- And when the stubborn stroke of my harsh song Shall seasonless glide through Almighty ears Vouchsafe to sweet it with thy blessed tongue Whose well-tuned sound stills music in the spheres; So shall my tragic lays be blest by thee And from thy lips suck their eternity.

Subsequently Florio, in associating the earl's name with his great Italian-English dictionary--the 'Worlde of Wordes'--more soberly defined the earl's place in the republic of letters when he wrote: 'As to me and many more the glorious and gracious sunshine of your honour hath infused light and life.'

The congratulations of the poets in 1603.

The most notable contribution to this chorus of praise is to be found, as I have already shown, in Shakespeare's 'Sonnets.' The same note of eulogy was sounded by men of letters until Southampton's death. When he was released from prison on James I's accession in April 1603, his praises in poets' mouths were especially abundant. Not only was that grateful incident celebrated by Shakespeare in what is probably the latest of his sonnets (No. cvii.), but Samuel Daniel and John Davies of Hereford offered the Earl congratulation in more prolonged strains. Daniel addressed to Southampton many lines like these:

The world had never taken so full note Of what thou art, hadst thou not been undone: And only thy affliction hath begot More fame than thy best fortunes could have won; For ever by adversity are wrought The greatest works of admiration; And all the fair examples of renown Out of distress and misery are grown . . . Only the best-compos'd and worthiest hearts God sets to act the hard'st and constanst'st parts. {388a}

Davies was more jubilant:

Now wisest men with mirth do seem stark mad, And cannot choose--their hearts are all so glad. Then let's be merry in our God and King, That made us merry, being ill bestead. Southampton, up thy cap to Heaven fling, And on the viol there sweet praises sing, For he is come that grace to all doth bring. {388b}

Many like praises, some of later date, by Henry Locke (or Lok), George Chapman, Joshua Sylvester, Richard Brathwaite, George Wither, Sir John Beaumont, and others could be quoted. Beaumont, on Southampton's death, wrote an elegy which panegyrises him in the varied capacities of warrior, councillor, courtier, father, and husband. But it is as a literary patron that Beaumont insists that he chiefly deserves remembrance:

I keep that glory last which is the best, The love of learning which he oft expressed In conversation, and respect to those Who had a name in arts, in verse or prose.

Elegies on Southampton.

To the same effect are some twenty poems which were published in 1624, just after Southampton's death, in a volume entitled 'Teares of the Isle of Wight, shed on the Tombe of their most noble valorous and loving Captaine and Governour, the right honorable Henrie, Earl of Southampton.' The keynote is struck in the opening stanza of the first poem by one Francis Beale:

Ye famous poets of the southern isle, Strain forth the raptures of your tragic muse, And with your Laureate pens come and compile The praises due to this great Lord: peruse His globe of worth, and eke his virtues brave, Like learned Maroes at Mecaenas' grave.

V.--THE TRUE HISTORY OF THOMAS THORPE AND 'MR. W. H.'

The publication of the sonnets in 1609.

In 1598 Francis Meres enumerated among Shakespeare's best known works his 'sugar'd sonnets among his private friends.' None of Shakespeare's sonnets are known to have been in print when Meres wrote, but they were doubtless in circulation in manuscript. In 1599 two of them were printed for the first time by the piratical publisher, William Jaggard, in the opening pages of the first edition of 'The Passionate Pilgrim.' On January 3, 1599-1600, Eleazar Edgar, a publisher of small account, obtained a license for the publication of a work bearing the title, 'A Booke called Amours by J. D., with certein other Sonnetes by W. S.' No book answering this description is extant. In any case it is doubtful if Edgar's venture concerned Shakespeare's 'Sonnets.' It is more probable that his 'W. S.' was William Smith, who had published a collection of sonnets entitled 'Chloris' in 1596. {390} On May 20, 1609, a license for the publication of Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' was granted by the Stationers' Company to a publisher named Thomas Thorpe, and shortly afterwards the complete collection as they have reached us was published by Thorpe for the first time. To the volume Thorpe prefixed a dedication in the following terms:

TO THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF THESE INSUING SONNETS MR. W. H., ALL HAPPINESSE AND THAT ETERNITIE PROMISED BY OUR EVER-LIVING POET WISHETH THE WELL-WISHING ADVENTURER IN SETTING FORTH

T. T.

The words are fantastically arranged. In ordinary grammatical order they would run: 'The well-wishing adventurer in setting forth [_i.e._ the publisher] T[homas] T[horpe] wisheth Mr. W. H., the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet.'

Publishers' dedication.

Few books of the sixteenth or seventeenth century were ushered into the world without a dedication. In most cases it was the work of the author, but numerous volumes, besides Shakespeare's 'Sonnets,' are extant in which the publisher (and not the author) fills the role of dedicator. The cause of the substitution is not far to seek. The signing of the dedication was an assertion of full and responsible ownership in the publication, and the publisher in Shakespeare's lifetime was the full and responsible owner of a publication quite as often as the author. The modern conception of copyright had not yet been evolved. Whoever in the sixteenth or early seventeenth century was in actual possession of a manuscript was for practical purposes its full and responsible owner. Literary work largely circulated in manuscript. {391} Scriveners made a precarious livelihood by multiplying written copies, and an enterprising publisher had many opportunities of becoming the owner of a popular book without the author's sanction or knowledge. When a volume in the reign of Elizabeth or James I was published independently of the author, the publisher exercised unchallenged all the owner's rights, not the least valued of which was that of choosing the patron of the enterprise, and of penning the dedicatory compliment above his signature. Occasionally circumstances might speciously justify the publisher's appearance in the guise of a dedicator. In the case of a posthumous book it sometimes happened that the author's friends renounced ownership or neglected to assert it. In other instances, the absence of an author from London while his work was passing through the press might throw on the publisher the task of supplying the dedication without exposing him to any charge of sharp practice. But as a rule one of only two inferences is possible when a publisher's name figured at the foot of a dedicatory epistle: either the author was ignorant of the publisher's design, or he had refused to countenance it, and was openly defied. In the case of Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' it may safely be assumed that Shakespeare received no notice of Thorpe's intention of publishing the work, and that it was owing to the author's ignorance of the design that the dedication was composed and signed by the 'well-wishing adventurer in setting forth.'

But whether author or publisher chose the patron of his wares, the choice was determined by much the same considerations. Self-interest was the principle underlying transactions between literary patron and _protege_. Publisher, like author, commonly chose as patron a man or woman of wealth and social influence who might be expected to acknowledge the compliment either by pecuniary reward or by friendly advertisement of the volume in their own social circle. At times the publisher, slightly extending the field of choice, selected a personal friend or mercantile acquaintance who had rendered him some service in trade or private life, and was likely to appreciate such general expressions of good will as were the accepted topic of dedications. Nothing that was fantastic or mysterious entered into the Elizabethan or the Jacobean publishers' shrewd schemes of business, and it may be asserted with confidence that it was under the everyday prosaic conditions of current literary traffic that the publisher Thorpe selected 'Mr. W. H.' as the patron of the original edition of Shakespeare's 'Sonnets.'

Thorpe's early life.

A study of Thorpe's character and career clears the point of doubt. Thorpe has been described as a native of Warwickshire, Shakespeare's county, and a man eminent in his profession. He was neither of these things. He was a native of Barnet in Middlesex, where his father kept an inn, and he himself through thirty years' experience of the book trade held his own with difficulty in its humblest ranks. He enjoyed the customary preliminary training. {393a} At midsummer 1584 he was apprenticed for nine years to a reputable printer and stationer, Richard Watkins. {393b} Nearly ten years later he took up the freedom of the Stationers' Company, and was thereby qualified to set up as a publisher on his own account. {393c} He was not destitute of a taste for literature; he knew scraps of Latin, and recognised a good manuscript when he saw one. But the ranks of London publishers were overcrowded, and such accomplishments as Thorpe possessed were poor compensation for a lack of capital or of family connections among those already established in the trade. {393d} For many years he contented himself with an obscure situation as assistant or clerk to a stationer more favourably placed.

His ownership of the manuscript of Marlowe's 'Lucan.' His dedicatory address to Edward Blount in 1600.

It was as the self-appointed procurer and owner of an unprinted manuscript--a recognised role for novices to fill in the book trade of the period--that Thorpe made his first distinguishable appearance on the stage of literary history. In 1600 there fell into his hands in an unexplained manner a written copy of Marlowe's unprinted translation of the first book of 'Lucan.' Thorpe confided his good fortune to Edward Blount, then a stationer's assistant like himself, but with better prospects. Blount had already achieved a modest success in the same capacity of procurer or picker-up of neglected 'copy.' {393e} In 1598 he became proprietor of Marlowe's unfinished and unpublished 'Hero and Leander,' and found among better-equipped friends in the trade both a printer and a publisher for his treasure-trove. Blount good-naturedly interested himself in Thorpe's 'find,' and it was through Blount's good offices that Peter Short undertook to print Thorpe's manuscript of Marlowe's 'Lucan,' and Walter Burre agreed to sell it at his shop in St. Paul's Churchyard. As owner of the manuscript Thorpe exerted the right of choosing a patron for the venture and of supplying the dedicatory epistle. The patron of his choice was his friend Blount, and he made the dedication the vehicle of his gratitude for the assistance he had just received. The style of the dedication was somewhat bombastic, but Thorpe showed a literary sense when he designated Marlowe 'that pure elemental wit,' and a good deal of dry humour in offering to 'his kind and true friend' Blount 'some few instructions' whereby he might accommodate himself to the unaccustomed _role_ of patron. {394a} For the conventional type of patron Thorpe disavowed respect. He preferred to place himself under the protection of a friend in the trade whose goodwill had already stood him in good stead, and was capable of benefiting him hereafter.

This venture laid the foundation of Thorpe's fortunes. Three years later he was able to place his own name on the title-page of two humbler literary prizes--each an insignificant pamphlet on current events. {394b} Thenceforth for a dozen years his name reappeared annually on one, two, or three volumes. After 1614 his operations were few and far between, and they ceased altogether in 1624. He seems to have ended his days in poverty, and has been identified with the Thomas Thorpe who was granted an alms-room in the hospital of Ewelme, Oxfordshire, on December 3, 1635. {395a}

Character of his business.

Thorpe was associated with the publication of twenty-nine volumes in all, {395b} including Marlowe's 'Lucan;' but in almost all his operations his personal energies were confined, as in his initial enterprise, to procuring the manuscript. For a short period in 1608 he occupied a shop, The Tiger's Head, in St. Paul's Churchyard, and the fact was duly announced on the title-pages of three publications which he issued in that year. {395c} But his other undertakings were described on their title-pages as printed for him by one stationer and sold for him by another; and when any address found mention at all, it was the shopkeeper's address, and not his own. He never enjoyed in permanence the profits or dignity of printing his 'copy' at a press of his own, or selling books on premises of his own, and he can claim the distinction of having pursued in this homeless fashion the well-defined profession of procurer of manuscripts for a longer period than any other known member of the Stationers' Company. Though many others began their career in that capacity, all except Thorpe, as far as they can be traced, either developed into printers or booksellers, or, failing in that, betook themselves to other trades.

Very few of his wares does Thorpe appear to have procured direct from the authors. It is true that between 1605 and 1611 there were issued under his auspices some eight volumes of genuine literary value, including, besides Shakespeare's 'Sonnets,' three plays by Chapman, {395d} four works of Ben Jonson, and Coryat's 'Odcombian Banquet.' But the taint of mysterious origin attached to most of his literary properties. He doubtless owed them to the exchange of a few pence or shillings with a scrivener's hireling; and the transaction was not one of which the author had cognisance.

Shakespeare's sufferings at publishers' hands.

It is quite plain that no negotiation with the author preceded the formation of Thorpe's resolve to publish for the first time Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' in 1609. Had Shakespeare associated himself with the enterprise, the world would fortunately have been spared Thorpe's dedication to 'Mr. W. H.' T. T.'s' place would have been filled by 'W. S.' The whole transaction was in Thorpe's vein. Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' had been already circulating in manuscript for eleven years; only two had as yet been printed, and those were issued by the pirate publisher, William Jaggard, in the fraudulently christened volume, 'The Passionate Pilgrim, by William Shakespeare,' in 1599. Shakespeare, except in the case of his two narrative poems, showed utter indifference to all questions touching the publication of his works. Of the sixteen plays of his that were published in his lifetime, not one was printed with his sanction. He made no audible protest when seven contemptible dramas in which he had no hand were published with his name or initials on the title-page while his fame was at its height. With only one publisher of his time, Richard Field, his fellow-townsman, who was responsible for the issue of 'Venus' and 'Lucrece,' is it likely that he came into personal relations, and there is nothing to show that he maintained relations with Field after the publication of 'Lucrece' in 1594.

In fitting accord with the circumstance that the publication of the 'Sonnets' was a tradesman's venture which ignored the author's feelings and rights, Thorpe in both the entry of the book in the 'Stationers' Registers' and on its title-page brusquely designated it 'Shakespeares Sonnets,' instead of following the more urbane collocation of words invariably adopted by living authors, viz. 'Sonnets by William Shakespeare.'

The use of initials in dedications of Elizabethan and Jacobean books.

In framing the dedication Thorpe followed established precedent. Initials run riot over Elizabethan and Jacobean books. Printers and publishers, authors and contributors of prefatory commendations were all in the habit of masking themselves behind such symbols. Patrons figured under initials in dedications somewhat less frequently than other sharers in the book's production. But the conditions determining the employment of initials in that relation were well defined. The employment of initials in a dedication was a recognised mark of a close friendship or intimacy between patron and dedicator. It was a sign that the patron's fame was limited to a small circle, and that the revelation of his full name was not a matter of interest to a wide public. Such are the dominant notes of almost all the extant dedications in which the patron is addressed by his initials. In 1598 Samuel Rowlands addressed the dedication of his 'Betraying of Christ' to his 'deare affected _friend_ Maister H. W., gentleman.' An edition of Robert Southwell's 'Short Rule of Life' which appeared in the same year bore a dedication addressed 'to my deare affected _friend_ M. [_i.e._ Mr.] D. S., gentleman.' The poet Richard Barnfield also in the same year dedicated the opening sonnet in his 'Poems in divers Humours' to his '_friend_ Maister R. L.' In 1617 Dunstan Gale dedicated a poem, 'Pyramus and Thisbe,' to the 'worshipfull his verie _friend_ D. [_i.e._ Dr.] B. H. {397}

Frequency of wishes for 'happiness' and 'eternity' in dedicatory greetings.

There was nothing exceptional in the words of greeting which Thorpe addressed to his patron 'Mr. W. H.' They followed a widely adopted formula. Dedications of the time usually consisted of two distinct parts. There was a dedicatory epistle, which might touch at any length, in either verse or prose, on the subject of the book and the writer's relations with his patron. But there was usually, in addition, a preliminary salutation confined to such a single sentence as Thorpe displayed on the first page of his edition of Shakespeare's sonnets. In that preliminary sentence the dedicator habitually 'wisheth' his patron one or more of such blessings as health, long life, happiness, and eternity. 'Al perseverance with soules happiness' Thomas Powell 'wisheth' the Countess of Kildare on the first page of his 'Passionate Poet' in 1601. 'All happines' is the greeting of Thomas Watson, the sonnetteer, to his patron, the Earl of Oxford, on the threshold of Watson's 'Passionate Century of Love.' There is hardly a book published by Robert Greene between 1580 and 1592 that does not open with an adjuration before the dedicatory epistle in the form: 'To --- --- Robert Greene wisheth increase of honour with the full fruition of perfect felicity.'

Thorpe in Shakespeare's sonnets left the salutation to stand alone, and omitted the supplement of a dedicatory epistle; but this, too, was not unusual. There exists an abundance of contemporary examples of the dedicatory salutation without the sequel of the dedicatory epistle. Edmund Spenser's dedication of the 'Faerie Queene' to Elizabeth consists solely of the salutation in the form of an assurance that the writer 'consecrates these his labours to live with the eternitie of her fame.' Michael Drayton both in his 'Idea, The Shepheard's Garland' (1593), and in his 'Poemes Lyrick and Pastorall' (1609), confined his address to his patron to a single sentence of salutation. {398} Richard Brathwaite in 1611 exclusively saluted the patron of his 'Golden Fleece' with 'the continuance of God's temporall blessings in this life, with the crowne of immortalitie in the world to come;' while in like manner he greeted the patron of his 'Sonnets and Madrigals' in the same year with 'the prosperitie of times successe in this life, with the reward of eternitie in the world to come.' It is 'happiness' and 'eternity,' or an equivalent paraphrase, that had the widest vogue among the good wishes with which the dedicator in the early years of the seventeenth century besought his patron's favour on the first page of his book. But Thorpe was too self-assertive to be a slavish imitator. His addiction to bombast and his elementary appreciation of literature recommended to him the practice of incorporating in his dedicatory salutation some high-sounding embellishments of the accepted formula suggested by his author's writing. {399a} In his dedication of the 'Sonnets' to 'Mr. W. H.' he grafted on the common formula a reference to the immortality which Shakespeare, after the habit of contemporary sonnetteers, promised the hero of his sonnets in the pages that succeeded. With characteristic magniloquence, Thorpe added the decorative and supererogatory phrase, 'promised by our ever-living poet,' to the conventional dedicatory wish for his patron's 'all happiness' and 'eternitie.' {399b}

Five dedications by Thorpe.

Thorpe, as far as is known, penned only one dedication before that to Shakespeare's 'Sonnets.' His dedicatory experience was previously limited to the inscription of Marlowe's 'Lucan' in 1600 to Blount, his friend in the trade. Three dedications by Thorpe survive of a date subsequent to the issue of the 'Sonnets.' One of these is addressed to John Florio, and the other two to the Earl of Pembroke. {400a} But these three dedications all prefaced volumes of translations by one John Healey, whose manuscripts had become Thorpe's prey after the author had emigrated to Virginia, where he died shortly after landing. Thorpe chose, he tells us, Florio and the Earl of Pembroke as patrons of Healey's unprinted manuscripts because they had been patrons of Healey before his expatriation and death. There is evidence to prove that in choosing a patron for the 'Sonnets,' and penning a dedication for the second time, he pursued the exact procedure that he had followed--deliberately and for reasons that he fully stated--in his first and only preceding dedicatory venture. He chose his patron from the circle of his trade associates, and it must have been because his patron was a personal friend that he addressed him by his initials, 'W. H.'

'W. H.' signs dedication of Southwell's poems in 1606.

Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' is not the only volume of the period in the introductory pages of which the initials 'W. H.' play a prominent part. In 1606 one who concealed himself under the same letters performed for 'A Foure-fould Meditation' (a collection of pious poems which the Jesuit Robert Southwell left in manuscript at his death) the identical service that Thorpe performed for Marlowe's 'Lucan' in 1600, and for Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' in 1609. In 1606 Southwell's manuscript fell into the hands of this 'W. H.,' and he published it through the agency of the printer, George Eld, and of an insignificant bookseller, Francis Burton. {400b} 'W. H.,' in his capacity of owner, supplied the dedication with his own pen under his initials. Of the Jesuit's newly recovered poems 'W. H.' wrote, 'Long have they lien hidden in obscuritie, and haply had never scene the light, had not a meere accident conveyed them to my hands. But, having seriously perused them, loath I was that any who are religiously affected, should be deprived of so great a comfort, as the due consideration thereof may bring unto them.' 'W. H.' chose as patron of his venture one Mathew Saunders, Esq., and to the dedicatory epistle prefixed a conventional salutation wishing Saunders long life and prosperity. The greeting was printed in large and bold type thus:--

To the Right Worfhipfull and Vertuous Gentleman, Mathew Saunders, Efquire W.H. wifheth, with long life, a profperous achieuement of his good defires.

There follows in small type, regularly printed across the page, a dedicatory letter--the frequent sequel of the dedicatory salutation--in which the writer, 'W.H.,' commends the religious temper of 'these meditations' and deprecates the coldness and sterility of his own 'conceits.' The dedicator signs himself at the bottom of the page 'Your Worships unfained affectionate, W.H.' {401}

The two books--Southwell's 'Foure-fould Meditation' of 1606, and Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' of 1609--have more in common than the appearance on the preliminary pages of the initials 'W. H.' in a prominent place, and of the common form of dedicatory salutation. Both volumes, it was announced on the title-pages, came from the same press--the press of George Eld. Eld for many years co-operated with Thorpe in business. In 1605 he printed for Thorpe Ben Jonson's 'Sejanus,' and in each of the years 1607, 1608, 1609, and 1610 at least one of his ventures was publicly declared to be a specimen of Eld's typography. Many of Thorpe's books came forth without any mention of the printer; but Eld's name figures more frequently upon them than that of any other printer. Between 1605 and 1609 it is likely that Eld printed all Thorpe's 'copy' as matter of course and that he was in constant relations with him.

'W. H.' and Mr. William Hall.

There is little doubt that the 'W. H.' of the Southwell volume was Mr. William Hall, who, when he procured that manuscript for publication, was an humble auxiliary in the publishing army. Hall flits rapidly across the stage of literary history. He served an apprenticeship to the printer and stationer John Allde from 1577 to 1584, and was admitted to the freedom of the Stationers' Company in the latter year. For the long period of twenty-two years after his release from his indentures he was connected with the trade in a dependent capacity, doubtless as assistant to a master-stationer. When in 1606 the manuscript of Southwell's poems was conveyed to his hands and he adopted the recognised role of procurer of their publication, he had not set up in business for himself. It was only later in the same year (1606) that he obtained the license of the Stationers' Company to inaugurate a press in his own name, and two years passed before he began business. In 1608 he obtained for publication a theological manuscript which appeared next year with his name on the title-page for the first time. This volume constituted the earliest credential of his independence. It entitled him to the prefix 'Mr.' in all social relations. Between 1609 and 1614 he printed some twenty volumes, most of them sermons and almost all devotional in tone. The most important of his secular undertaking was Guillim's far-famed 'Display of Heraldrie,' a folio issued in 1610. In 1612 Hall printed an account of the conviction and execution of a noted pickpocket, John Selman, who had been arrested while professionally engaged in the Royal Chapel at Whitehall. On the title-page Hall gave his own name by his initials only. The book was described in bold type as 'printed by W. H.' and as on sale at the shop of Thomas Archer in St. Paul's Churchyard. Hall was a careful printer with a healthy dread of misprints, but his business dwindled after 1613, and, soon disposing of it to one John Beale, he disappeared into private life.

'W. H.' are no uncommon initials, and there is more interest attaching to the discovery of 'Mr. W. H.'s' position in life and his function in relation to the scheme of the publication of the 'Sonnets' than in establishing his full name. But there is every probability that William Hall, the 'W. H.' of the Southwell dedication, was one and the same person with the 'Mr. W. H.' of Thorpe's dedication of the 'Sonnets.' No other inhabitant of London was habitually known to mask himself under those letters. William Hall was the only man bearing those initials who there is reason to suppose was on familiar terms with Thorpe. {403a} Both were engaged at much the same period in London in the same occupation of procuring manuscripts for publication; both inscribed their literary treasure-trove in the common formula to patrons for whom they claimed no high rank or distinction, and both engaged the same printer to print their most valuable prize.

'The onlie begetter' means 'only procurer'.

No condition of the problem of the identity of Thorpe's friend 'Mr. W. H' seems ignored by the adoption of the interpretation that he was the future master-printer William Hall. The objection that 'Mr. W. H.' could not have been Thorpe's friend in trade, because while wishing him all happiness and eternity Thorpe dubs him 'the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets,' is not formidable. Thorpe rarely used words with much exactness. {403b} It is obvious that he did not employ 'begetter' in the ordinary sense. 'Begetter,' when literally interpreted as applied to a literary work, means father, author, producer, and it cannot be seriously urged that Thorpe intended to describe 'Mr. W. H.' as the author of the 'Sonnets.' 'Begetter' has been used in the figurative sense of inspirer, and it is often assumed that by 'onlie begetter' Thorpe meant 'sole inspirer,' and that by the use of those words he intended to hint at the close relations subsisting between 'W. H.' and Shakespeare in the dramatist's early life; but that interpretation presents numberless difficulties. It was contrary to Thorpe's aims in business to invest a dedication with any cryptic significance, and thus mystify his customers. Moreover, his career and the circumstances under which he became the publisher of the sonnets confute the assumption that he was in such relations with Shakespeare or with Shakespeare's associates as would give him any knowledge of Shakespeare's early career that was not public property. All that Thorpe--the struggling pirate-publisher, 'the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth' wares mysteriously come by--knew or probably cared to know of Shakespeare was that he was the most popular and honoured of the literary producers of the day. When Thorpe had the luck to acquire surreptitiously an unprinted manuscript by 'our ever-living poet,' it was not in the great man's circle of friends or patrons, to which hitherto he had had no access, that he was likely to seek his own patron. Elementary considerations of prudence impelled him to publish his treasure-trove with all expedition, and not disclose his design prematurely to one who might possibly take steps to hinder its fulfilment. But that Thorpe had no 'inspirer' of the 'Sonnets' in his mind when he addressed himself to 'Mr. W. H.' is finally proved by the circumstance that the only identifiable male 'inspirer' of the poems was the Earl of Southampton, to whom the initials 'W. H.' do not apply.

Of the figurative meanings set in Elizabethan English on the word 'begetter,' that of 'inspirer' is by no means the only one or the most common. 'Beget' was not infrequently employed in the attenuated sense of 'get,' 'procure,' or 'obtain,' a sense which is easily deducible from the original one of 'bring into being.' Hamlet, when addressing the players, bids them 'in the very whirlwind of passion acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.' 'I have some cousins german at Court,' wrote Dekker in 1602, in his 'Satiro-Mastix,' '[that] shall beget you the reversion of the Master of the King's Revels.' 'Mr. W. H.,' whom Thorpe described as 'the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets,' was in all probability the acquirer or procurer of the manuscript, who, figuratively speaking, brought the book into being either by first placing the manuscript in Thorpe's hands or by pointing out the means by which a copy might be acquired. To assign such significance to the word 'begetter' was entirely in Thorpe's vein. {405} Thorpe described his _role_ in the piratical enterprise of the 'Sonnets' as that of 'the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth,' _i.e._ the hopeful speculator in the scheme. 'Mr. W. H.' doubtless played the almost equally important part--one as well known then as now in commercial operations--of the 'vendor' of the property to be exploited.

VI.--'MR. WILLIAM HERBERT.'

Origin of the notion that 'Mr. W. H.' stands for 'Mr. William Herbert.'

For fully sixty years it has been very generally assumed that Shakespeare addressed the bulk of his sonnets to the young Earl of Pembroke. This theory owes its origin to a speciously lucky guess which was first disclosed to the public in 1832, and won for a time almost universal acceptance. {406} Thorpe's form of address was held to justify the mistaken inference that, whoever 'Mr. W. H.' may have been, he and no other was the hero of the alleged story of the poems; and the cornerstone of the Pembroke theory was the assumption that the letters 'Mr. W. H.' in the dedication did duty for the words 'Mr. William Herbert,' by which name the (third) Earl of Pembroke was represented as having been known in youth. The originators of the theory claimed to discover in the Earl of Pembroke the only young man of rank and wealth to whom the initials 'W. H' applied at the needful dates. In thus interpreting the initials, the Pembroke theorists made a blunder that proves on examination to be fatal to their whole contention.

The Earl of Pembroke known only as Lord Herbert in youth.

The nobleman under consideration succeeded to the earldom of Pembroke on his father's death on January 19, 1601 (N. S.), when he was twenty years and nine months old, and from that date it is unquestioned that he was always known by his lawful title. But it has been overlooked that the designation 'Mr. William Herbert,' for which the initials 'Mr. W. H.' have been long held to stand, could never in the mind of Thomas Thorpe or any other contemporary have denominated the Earl at any moment of his career. When he came into the world on April 9, 1580, his father had been (the second) Earl of Pembroke for ten years, and he, as the eldest son, was from the hour of his birth known in all relations of life--even in the baptismal entry in the parish register--by the title of Lord Herbert, and by no other. During the lifetime of his father and his own minority several references were made to him in the extant correspondence of friends of varying degrees of intimacy. He is called by them, without exception, 'my Lord Herbert,' 'the Lord Herbert,' or 'Lord Herbert.' {407} It is true that as the eldest son of an earl he held the title by courtesy, but for all practical purposes it was as well recognised in common speech as if he had been a peer in his own right. No one nowadays would address in current parlance, or even entertain the conception of, Viscount Cranborne, the heir of the present Prime Minister, as 'Mr. J. C.' or 'Mr. James Cecil.' It is no more legitimate to assert that it would have occurred to an Elizabethan--least of all to a personal acquaintance or to a publisher who stood toward his patron in the relation of a personal dependent--to describe 'young Lord Herbert,' of Elizabeth's reign, as 'Mr. William Herbert.' A lawyer, who in the way of business might have to mention the young lord's name in a legal document, would have entered it as 'William Herbert, commonly called Lord Herbert.' The appellation 'Mr.' was not used loosely then as now, but indicated a precise social grade. Thorpe's employment of the prefix 'Mr.' without qualification is in itself fatal to the pretension that any lord, whether by right or courtesy, was intended. {408}

Thorpe's mode of addressing the Earl of Pembroke.

Proof is at hand to establish that Thorpe was under no misapprehension as to the proper appellation of the Earl of Pembroke, and was incapable of venturing on the meaningless misnomer of 'Mr. W. H.' Insignificant publisher though he was, and sceptical as he was of the merits of noble patrons, he was not proof against the temptation, when an opportunity was directly offered him, of adorning the prefatory pages of a publication with the name of a nobleman, who enjoyed the high official station, the literary culture, and the social influence of the third Earl of Pembroke. In 1610--a year after he published the 'Sonnets'--there came into his hands the manuscripts of John Healey, that humble literary aspirant who had a few months before emigrated to Virginia, and had, it would seem, died there. Healey, before leaving England, had secured through the good offices of John Florio (a man of influence in both fashionable and literary circles) the patronage of the Earl of Pembroke for a translation of Bishop Hall's fanciful satire, 'Mundus alter et idem.' Calling his book 'The Discoverie of a New World,' Healey had prefixed to it, in 1609, an epistle inscribed in garish terms of flattery to the 'Truest mirrour of truest honor, William Earl of Pembroke.' {409} When Thorpe subsequently made up his mind to publish, on his own account, other translations by the same hand, he found it desirable to seek the same patron. Accordingly, in 1610, he prefixed in his own name, to an edition of Healey's translation of St. Augustine's 'Citie of God,' a dedicatory address 'to the honorablest patron of the Muses and good mindes, Lord William, Earle of Pembroke, Knight of the Honourable Order (of the Garter), &c.' In involved sentences Thorpe tells the 'right gracious and gracefule Lord' how the author left the work at death to be a 'testimonie of gratitude, observance, and heart's honor to your honour.' 'Wherefore,' he explains, 'his legacie, laide at your Honour's feete, is rather here delivered to your Honour's humbly thrise-kissed hands by his poore delegate. Your Lordship's true devoted, Th. Th.'

Again, in 1616, when Thorpe procured the issue of a second edition of another of Healey's translations, 'Epictetus Manuall. Cebes Table. Theoprastus Characters,' he supplied more conspicuous evidence of the servility with which he deemed it incumbent on him to approach a potent patron. As this address by Thorpe to Pembroke is difficult of access, I give it _in extenso_:

'To the Right Honourable, William Earle of Pembroke, Lord Chamberlaine to His Majestie, one of his most honorable Privie Counsell, and Knight of the most noble order of the Garter, &c.

'Right Honorable.--It may worthily seeme strange unto your Lordship, out of what frenzy one of my meanenesse hath presumed to commit this Sacriledge, in the straightnesse of your Lordship's leisure, to present a peece, for matter and model so unworthy, and in this scribbling age, wherein great persons are so pestered dayly with Dedications. All I can alledge in extenuation of so many incongruities, is the bequest of a deceased Man; who (in his lifetime) having offered some translations of his unto your Lordship, ever wisht if _these ensuing_ were published they might onely bee addressed unto your Lordship, as the last Testimony of his dutifull affection (to use his own termes) _The true and reall upholder of Learned endeavors_. This, therefore, beeing left unto mee, as a Legacie unto your Lordship (pardon my presumption, great Lord, from so meane a man to so great a person) I could not without some impiety present it to any other; such a sad priviledge have the bequests of the _dead_, and so obligatory they are, more than the requests of the _living_. In the hope of this honourable acceptance I will ever rest,

'Your lordship's humble devoted, 'T. Th.'

With such obeisances did publishers then habitually creep into the presence of the nobility. In fact, the law which rigorously maintained the privileges of peers left them no option. The alleged erroneous form of address in the dedication of Shakespeare's 'Sonnets'--'Mr. W. H.' for Lord Herbert or the Earl of Pembroke--would have amounted to the offence of defamation. And for that misdemeanour the Star Chamber, always active in protecting the dignity of peers, would have promptly called Thorpe to account. {410}

Of the Earl of Pembroke, and of his brother the Earl of Montgomery, it was stated a few years later, 'from just observation,' on very pertinent authority, that 'no men came near their lordships [in their capacity of literary patrons], but with a kind of religious address.' These words figure in the prefatory epistle which two actor-friends of Shakespeare addressed to the two Earls in the posthumously issued First Folio of the dramatist's works. Thorpe's 'kind of religious address' on seeking Lord Pembroke's patronage for Healey's books was somewhat more unctuous than was customary or needful. But of erring conspicuously in an opposite direction he may, without misgiving, be pronounced innocent.

VII.--SHAKESPEARE AND THE EARL OF PEMBROKE.

With the disposal of the allegation that 'Mr. W. H.' represented the Earl of Pembroke's youthful name, the whole theory of that earl's identity with Shakespeare's friend collapses. Outside Thorpe's dedicatory words, only two scraps of evidence with any title to consideration have been adduced to show that Shakespeare was at any time or in any way associated with Pembroke.

Shakespeare with the acting company at Wilton in 1603.

In the late autumn of 1603 James I and his Court were installed at the Earl of Pembroke's house at Wilton for a period of two months, owing to the prevalence of the plague in London. By order of the officers of the royal household, the King's company of players, of which Shakespeare was a member, gave a performance before the King at Wilton House on December 2. The actors travelled from Mortlake for the purpose, and were paid in the ordinary manner by the treasurer of the royal household out of the public funds. There is no positive evidence that Shakespeare attended at Wilton with the company, but assuming, as is probable, that he did, the Earl of Pembroke can be held no more responsible for his presence than for his repeated presence under the same conditions at Whitehall. The visit of the King's players to Wilton in 1603 has no bearing on the Earl of Pembroke's alleged relations with Shakespeare. {411}

The dedication of the First Folio.

The second instance of the association in the seventeenth century of Shakespeare's name with Pembroke's tells wholly against the conjectured intimacy. Seven years after the dramatist's death, two of his friends and fellow-actors prepared the collective edition of his plays known as the First Folio, and they dedicated the volume, in the conventional language of eulogy, 'To the most noble and incomparable paire of brethren, William Earl of Pembroke, &c., Lord Chamberlaine to the King's most excellent Majesty, and Philip, Earl of Montgomery, &c., Gentleman of His Majesties Bedchamber. Both Knights of the most Noble Order of the Garter and our singular good Lords.'

The choice of such patrons, whom, as the dedication intimated, 'no one came near but with a kind of religious address,' proves no private sort of friendship between them and the dead author. To the two earls in partnership nearly every work of any literary pretension was dedicated at the period. Moreover, the third Earl of Pembroke was Lord Chamberlain in 1623, and exercised supreme authority in theatrical affairs. That his patronage should be sought for a collective edition of the works of the acknowledged master of the contemporary stage was a matter of course. It is only surprising that the editors should have yielded to the passing vogue of soliciting the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain's brother in conjunction with the Lord Chamberlain.

The sole passage in the editors' dedication that can be held to bear on the question of Shakespeare's alleged intimacy with Pembroke is to be found in their remarks: 'But since your lordships have beene pleas'd to thinke these trifles something, heretofore; and have prosequuted both them, and their Authour living, with so much favour: we hope that (they outliving him, and he not having the fate, common with some, to be exequutor to his owne writings) you will use the like indulgence toward them you have done unto their parent. There is a great difference, whether any Booke choose his Patrones, or find them: This hath done both. For, so much were your lordships' likings of the severall parts, when they were acted, as, before they were published, the Volume ask'd to be yours.' There is nothing whatever in these sentences that does more than justify the inference that the brothers shared the enthusiastic esteem which James I and all the noblemen of his Court extended to Shakespeare and his plays in the dramatist's lifetime. Apart from his work as a dramatist, Shakespeare, in his capacity of one of 'the King's servants' or company of players, was personally known to all the officers of the royal household who collectively controlled theatrical representations at Court. Throughout James I's reign his plays were repeatedly performed in the royal presence, and when the dedicators of the First Folio, at the conclusion of their address to Lords Pembroke and Montgomery, describe the dramatist's works as 'these remaines of your _Servant_ Shakespeare,' they make it quite plain that it was in the capacity of 'King's servant' or player that they knew him to have been the object of their noble patrons' favour.

No suggestion in the sonnets of the youth's identity with Pembroke.

The sonnets offer no internal indication that the Earl of Pembroke and Shakespeare ever saw each other. Nothing at all is deducible from the vague parallelisms that have been adduced between the earl's character and position in life and those with which the poet credited the youth of the sonnets. It may be granted that both had a mother (Sonnet iii.), that both enjoyed wealth and rank, that both were regarded by admirers as cultivated, that both were self-indulgent in their relations with women, and that both in early manhood were indisposed to marry, owing to habits of gallantry. Of one alleged point of resemblance there is no evidence. The loveliness assigned to Shakespeare's youth was not, as far as we can learn, definitely set to Pembroke's account. Francis Davison, when dedicating his 'Poetical Rhapsody' to the earl in 1602 in a very eulogistic sonnet, makes a cautiously qualified reference to the attractiveness of his person in the lines:

[His] outward shape, though it most lovely be, Doth in fair robes a fairer soul attire.

The only portraits of him that survive represent him in middle age, {414} and seem to confute the suggestion that he was reckoned handsome at any time of life; at most they confirm Anthony Wood's description of him as in person 'rather majestic than elegant.' But the point is not one of moment, and the argument neither gains nor loses, if we allow that Pembroke may, at any rate in the sight of a poetical panegyrist, have at one period reflected, like Shakespeare's youth, 'the lovely April of his mother's prime.'

But when we have reckoned up the traits that can, on any showing, be admitted to be common to both Pembroke and Shakespeare's alleged friend, they all prove to be equally indistinctive. All could be matched without difficulty in a score of youthful noblemen and gentlemen of Elizabeth's Court. Direct external evidence of Shakespeare's friendly intercourse with one or other of Elizabeth's young courtiers must be produced before the sonnets' general references to the youth's beauty and grace can render the remotest assistance in establishing his identity.

Aubrey's ignorance of any relation between Shakespeare and Pembroke.

Although it may be reckoned superfluous to adduce more arguments, negative or positive, against the theory that the Earl of Pembroke was a youthful friend of Shakespeare, it is worth noting that John Aubrey, the Wiltshire antiquary, and the biographer of most Englishmen of distinction of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was zealously researching from 1650 onwards into the careers alike of Shakespeare and of various members of the Earl of Pembroke's family--one of the chief in Wiltshire. Aubrey rescued from oblivion many anecdotes--scandalous and otherwise--both about the third Earl of Pembroke and about Shakespeare. Of the former he wrote in his 'Natural History of Wiltshire' (ed. Britton, 1847), recalling the earl's relations with Massinger and many other men of letters. Of Shakespeare, Aubrey narrated much lively gossip in his 'Lives of Eminent Persons.' But neither in his account of Pembroke nor in his account of Shakespeare does he give any hint that they were at any time or in any manner acquainted or associated with one another. Had close relations existed between them, it is impossible that all trace of them would have faded from the traditions that were current in Aubrey's time and were embodied in his writings. {415}

VIII.--THE 'WILL' SONNETS.

No one has had the hardihood to assert that the text of the sonnets gives internally any indication that the youth's name took the hapless form of 'William Herbert;' but many commentators argue that in three or four sonnets Shakespeare admits in so many words that the youth bore his own Christian name of Will, and even that the disdainful lady had among her admirers other gentlemen entitled in familiar intercourse to similar designation. These are fantastic assumptions which rest on a misconception of Shakespeare's phraseology and of the character of the conceits of the sonnets, and are solely attributable to the fanatical anxiety of the supporters of the Pembroke theory to extort, at all hazards, some sort of evidence in their favour from Shakespeare's text. {416}

Elizabethan meanings of 'will.'

In two sonnets (cxxxv.-vi.)--the most artificial and 'conceited' in the collection--the poet plays somewhat enigmatically on his Christian name of 'Will,' and a similar pun has been doubtfully detected in sonnets cxxxiv. and cxlvii. The groundwork of the pleasantry is the identity in form of the proper name with the common noun 'will.' This word connoted in Elizabethan English a generous variety of conceptions, of most of which it has long since been deprived. Then, as now, it was employed in the general psychological sense of volition; but it was more often specifically applied to two limited manifestations of the volition. It was the commonest of synonyms alike for 'self will' or 'stubbornness'--in which sense it still survives in 'wilful'--and for 'lust,' or 'sensual passion.' It also did occasional duty for its own diminutive 'wish,' for 'caprice,' for 'good-will,' and for 'free consent' (as nowadays in 'willing,' or 'willingly').

Shakespeare's uses of the word.

Shakespeare constantly used 'will' in all these significations. Iago recognised its general psychological value when he said, 'Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners.' The conduct of the 'will' is discussed after the manner of philosophy in 'Troilus and Cressida' (II. ii. 51-68). In another of Iago's sentences, 'Love is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will,' light is shed on the process by which the word came to be specifically applied to sensual desire. The last is a favourite sense with Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Angelo and Isabella, in 'Measure for Measure,' are at one in attributing their conflict to the former's 'will.' The self-indulgent Bertram, in 'All's Well,' 'fleshes his "will" in the spoil of a gentlewoman's honour.' In 'Lear' (IV. vi. 279) Regan's heartless plot to seduce her brother-in-law is assigned to 'the undistinguished space'--the boundless range--'of woman's will.' Similarly, Sir Philip Sidney apostrophised lust as 'thou web of will.' Thomas Lodge, in 'Phillis' (Sonnet xi.), warns lovers of the ruin that menaces all who 'guide their course by will.' Nicholas Breton's fantastic romance of 1599, entitled 'The Will of Wit, Wit's Will or Will's Wit, Chuse you whether,' is especially rich in like illustrations. Breton brings into marked prominence the antithesis which was familiar in his day between 'will' in its sensual meaning, and 'wit,' the Elizabethan synonym for reason or cognition. 'A song between Wit and Will' opens thus:

_Wit_: What art thou, Will? _Will_: A babe of nature's brood,

_Wit_: Who was thy sire? _Will_: Sweet Lust, as lovers say.

_Wit_: Thy mother who? _Will_: Wild lusty wanton blood.

_Wit_: When wast thou born? _Will_: In merry month of May.

_Wit_: And where brought up? _Will_: In school of little skill.

_Wit_: What learn'dst thou there? _Will_: Love is my lesson still.

Of the use of the word in the sense of stubbornness or self-will Roger Ascham gives a good instance in his 'Scholemaster,' (1570), where he recommends that such a vice in children as 'will,' which he places in the category of lying, sloth, and disobedience, should be 'with sharp chastisement daily cut away.' {418a} 'A woman will have her will' was, among Elizabethan wags, an exceptionally popular proverbial phrase, the point of which revolved about the equivocal meaning of the last word. The phrase supplied the title of 'a pleasant comedy,' by William Haughton, which--from 1597 onwards--held the stage for the unusually prolonged period of forty years. 'Women, because they cannot have their wills when they dye, they will have their wills while they live,' was a current witticism which the barrister Manningham deemed worthy of record in his 'Diary' in 1602. {418b}

Shakespeare's puns on the word.

It was not only in the sonnets that Shakespeare--almost invariably with a glance at its sensual significance--rang the changes on this many-faced verbal token. In his earliest play, 'Love's Labour's Lost' (II. i. 97-101), after the princess has tauntingly assured the King of Navarre that he will break his vow to avoid women's society, the king replies, 'Not for the world, fair madam, by my _will_' (_i.e._ willingly). The princess retorts 'Why _will_ (_i.e._ sensual desire) shall break it (_i.e._ the vow), _will_ and nothing else.' In 'Much Ado' (V. iv. 26 seq.), when Benedick, anxious to marry Beatrice, is asked by the lady's uncle 'What's your will?' he playfully lingers on the word in his answer. As for his 'will,' his 'will' is that the uncle's 'goodwill may stand with his' and Beatrice's 'will'--in other words that the uncle may consent to their union. Slender and Anne Page vary the tame sport when the former misinterprets the young lady's 'What is your will?' into an inquiry into the testamentary disposition of his property. To what depth of vapidity Shakespeare and contemporary punsters could sink is nowhere better illustrated than in the favour they bestowed on efforts to extract amusement from the parities and disparities of form and meaning subsisting between the words 'will' and 'wish,' the latter being in vernacular use as a diminutive of the former. Twice in the 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' (I. iii. 63 and IV. ii. 96) Shakespeare almost strives to invest with the flavour of epigram the unpretending announcement that one interlocutor's 'wish' is in harmony with another interlocutor's 'will.'

It is in this vein of pleasantry--'will' and 'wish' are identically contrasted in Sonnet cxxxv.--that Shakespeare, to the confusion of modern readers, makes play with the word 'will' in the sonnets, and especially in the two sonnets (cxxxv.-vi.) which alone speciously justify the delusion that the lady is courted by two, or more than two, lovers of the name of Will.

Arbitrary and irregular use of italics by Elizabethan and Jacobean printers.

One of the chief arguments advanced in favour of this interpretation is that the word 'will' in these sonnets is frequently italicised in the original edition. But this has little or no bearing on the argument. The corrector of the press recognised that Sonnets cxxxv. and cxxxvi. largely turned upon a simple pun between the writer's name of 'Will' and the lady's 'will.' That fact, and no other, he indicated very roughly by occasionally italicising the crucial word. Typography at the time followed no firmly fixed rules, and, although 'will' figures in a more or less punning sense nineteen times in these sonnets, the printer bestowed on the word the distinction of italics in only ten instances, and those were selected arbitrarily. The italics indicate the obvious equivoque, and indicate it imperfectly. That is the utmost that can be laid to their credit. They give no hint of the far more complicated punning that is alleged by those who believe that 'Will' is used now as the name of the writer, and now as that of one or more of the rival suitors. In each of the two remaining sonnets that have been forced into the service of the theory, Nos. cxxxiv. and cxliii., 'will' occurs once only; it alone is italicised in the second sonnet in the original edition, and there, in my opinion, arbitrarily and without just cause. {419}

The conceits of sonnets cxxxv-vi. interpreted.

The general intention of the complex conceits of Sonnets cxxxv. and cxxxvi. becomes obvious when we bear in mind that in them Shakespeare exploits to the uttermost the verbal coincidences which are inherent in the Elizabethan word 'will.' 'Will' is the Christian name of the enslaved writer; 'will' is the sentiment with which the lady inspires her worshippers; and 'will' designates stubbornness as well as sensual desire. These two characteristics, according to the poet's reiterated testimony, are the distinguishing marks of the lady's disposition. He often dwells elsewhere on her 'proud heart' or 'foul pride,' and her sensuality or 'foul faults.' These are her 'wills,' and they make up her being. In crediting the lady with such constitution Shakespeare was not recording any definite observation or experience of his own, but was following, as was his custom, the conventional descriptions of the disdainful mistress common to all contemporary collections of sonnets. Barnabe Barnes asks the lady celebrated in his sonnets, from whose 'proud disdainfulness' he suffered,

Why dost thou my delights delay, And with thy cross unkindness kills (_sic_) Mine heart, bound martyr to thy wills?

Barnes answers his question in the next lines:

But women will have their own wills, Since what she lists her heart fulfils. {420}

Similar passages abound in Elizabethan sonnets, but certain verbal similarities give good ground for regarding Shakespeare's 'will' sonnets as deliberate adaptations--doubtless with satiric purpose--of Barnes's stereotyped reflections on women's obduracy. The form and the constant repetition of the word 'will' in these two sonnets of Shakespeare also seem to imitate derisively the same rival's Sonnets lxxii. and lxxiii. in which Barnes puts the words 'grace' and 'graces' through much the same evolutions as Shakespeare puts the words 'will' and 'wills' in the Sonnets cxxxv. and cxxxvi. {421a}

Shakespeare's 'Sonnet' cxxxv. runs:

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will, And will to boot, and will in over-plus; More than enough am I that vex thee still, To thy sweet will making addition thus. Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious, {420b} Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine? Shall will in others seem right gracious, And in my will no fair acceptance shine? The sea, all water, yet receives rain still, And in abundance addeth to his store; So thou, being rich in will, add to thy will One will of mine, to make thy large will more. Let no unkind no fair beseechers kill; Think all but one, and me in that one--Will.

Sonnet cxxxv.

In the opening words, 'Whoever hath her wish,' the poet prepares the reader for the punning encounter by a slight variation on the current catch-phrase 'A woman will have her will.' At the next moment we are in the thick of the wordy fray. The lady has not only her lover named Will, but untold stores of 'will'--in the sense alike of stubbornness and of lust--to which it seems supererogatory to make addition. {421c} To the lady's 'over-plus' of 'will' is punningly attributed her defiance of the 'will' of her suitor Will to enjoy her favours. At the same time 'will' in others proves to her 'right gracious,' {422a} although in him it is unacceptable. All this, the poet hazily argues, should be otherwise; for as the sea, although rich in water, does not refuse the falling rain, but freely adds it to its abundant store, so she, 'rich in will,' should accept her lover Will's 'will' and 'make her large will more.' The poet sums up his ambition in the final couplet:

Let no unkind no fair beseechers kill; Think all but one, and me in that one--Will.

This is as much as to say, 'Let not my mistress in her unkindness kill any of her fair-spoken adorers. Rather let her think all who beseech her favours incorporate in one alone of her lovers--and that one the writer whose name of "Will" is a synonym for the passions that dominate her.' The thought is wiredrawn to inanity, but the words make it perfectly clear that the poet was the only one of the lady's lovers--to the definite exclusion of all others--whose name justified the quibbling pretence of identity with the 'will' which controls her being.

Sonnet cxxxvi.

The same equivocating conceit of the poet Will's title to identity with the lady's 'will' in all senses is pursued in Sonnet cxxxvi. The sonnet opens:

If thy soul check thee that I come so near, Swear to thy blind soul that I was thy will, {422b} And will thy soul knows is admitted there.

Here Shakespeare adapts to his punning purpose the familiar philosophic commonplace respecting the soul's domination by 'will' or volition, which was more clearly expressed by his contemporary, Sir John Davies, in the philosophic poem, 'Nosce Teipsum:'

Will holds the royal sceptre in the soul, And on the passions of the heart doth reign.

Whether Shakespeare's lines be considered with their context or without it, the tenor of their thought and language positively refutes the commentators' notion that the 'will' admitted to the lady's soul is a rival lover named Will. The succeeding lines run:

Thus far for love, my love-suit, sweet, fulfil. {423a} Will will fulfil the treasure of thy love; Ay, fill it full with wills, and my will one. In things of great receipt with ease we prove Among a number one is reckon'd none: Then in the number let me pass untold, Though in thy stores' account, I one must be; For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold That nothing me, a something sweet to thee.

Here the poet Will continues to claim, in punning right of his Christian name, a place, however small and inconspicuous, among the 'wills,' the varied forms of will (_i.e._ lust, stubbornness, and willingness to accept others' attentions), which are the constituent elements of the lady's being. The plural 'wills' is twice used in identical sense by Barnabe Barnes in the lines already quoted:

Mine heart, bound martyr to thy _wills_. But women will have their own _wills_.

Impulsively Shakespeare brings his fantastic pretension to a somewhat more practical issue in the concluding apostrophe:

Make but my name thy love, and love that still, And then thou lovest me--for my name is Will. {423b}

That is equivalent to saying 'Make "will"' (_i.e._ that which is yourself) 'your love, and then you love me, because Will is my name.' The couplet proves even more convincingly than the one which clinches the preceding sonnet that none of the rivals whom the poet sought to displace in the lady's affections could by any chance have been, like himself, called Will. The writer could not appeal to a mistress to concentrate her love on his name of Will, because it was the emphatic sign of identity between her being and him, if that name were common to him and one or more rivals, and lacked exclusive reference to himself.

Loosely as Shakespeare's sonnets were constructed, the couplet at the conclusion of each poem invariably summarises the general intention of the preceding twelve lines. The concluding couplets of these two sonnets cxxxv.-vi., in which Shakespeare has been alleged to acknowledge a rival of his own name in his suit for a lady's favour, are consequently the touchstone by which the theory of 'more Wills than one' must be tested. As we have just seen, the situation is summarily embodied in the first couplet thus:

Let no unkind no fair beseechers kill; Think all but one, and me in that one--Will.

It is re-embodied in the second couplet thus:

Make but my name thy love, and love that still, And then thou lovest me--for my name is Will.

The whole significance of both couplets resides in the twice-repeated fact that one, and only one, of the lady's lovers is named Will, and that that one is the writer. To assume that the poet had a rival of his own name is to denude both couplets of all point. 'Will,' we have learned from the earlier lines of both sonnets, is the lady's ruling passion. Punning mock-logic brings the poet in either sonnet to the ultimate conclusion that one of her lovers may, above all others, reasonably claim her love on the ground that his name of Will is the name of her ruling passion. Thus his pretension to her affections rests, he punningly assures her, on a strictly logical basis.

Sonnet cxxxiv. Meaning of Sonnet cxliii.

Unreasonable as any other interpretation of these sonnets (cxxxv.-vi.) seems to be, I believe it far more fatuous to seek in the single and isolated use of the word 'will' in each of the sonnets cxxxiv. and cxliii. any confirmation of the theory of a rival suitor named Will.

Sonnet cxxxiv. runs:

So now I have confess'd that he is thine, And I myself am mortgaged to thy will. {425} Myself I'll forfeit, so that other mine Thou wilt restore, to be my comfort still. But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free, For thou art covetous and he is kind. He learn'd but surety-like to write for me, Under that bond that him as fast doth bind. The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take, Thou usurer, that putt'st forth all to use, And sue a friend came debtor for my sake; So him I lose through my unkind abuse. Him have I lost; thou hast both him and me; He pays the whole, and yet am I not free.

Here the poet describes himself as 'mortgaged to the lady's will' (_i.e._ to her personality, in which 'will,' in the double sense of stubbornness and sensual passion, is the strongest element). He deplores that the lady has captivated not merely himself, but also his friend, who made vicarious advances to her.

Sonnet cxliii. runs:

Lo, as a careful housewife runs to catch One of her feathered creatures broke away, Sets down her babe, and makes all swift despatch In pursuit of the thing she would have stay; Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase, Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent To follow that which flies before her face, Not prizing her poor infant's discontent: So runn'st thou after that which flies from thee, Whilst I, thy babe, chase thee afar behind; But if thou catch thy hope turn back to me, And play the mother's part, kiss me, be kind: So will I pray that thou mayst have thy will, {426} If thou turn back and my loud crying still.

In this sonnet--which presents a very clear-cut picture, although its moral is somewhat equivocal--the poet represents the lady as a country housewife and himself as her babe; while an acquaintance, who attracts the lady but is not attracted by her, is figured as a 'feathered creature' in the housewife's poultry-yard. The fowl takes to flight; the housewife sets down her infant and pursues 'the thing.' The poet, believing apparently that he has little to fear from the harmless creature, lightly makes play with the current catch-phrase ('a woman will have her will'), and amiably wishes his mistress success in her chase, on condition that, having recaptured the truant bird, she turn back and treat him, her babe, with kindness. In praying that the lady may have her 'will' the poet is clearly appropriating the current catch-phrase, and no pun on a man's name of 'Will' can be fairly wrested from the context.

IX.--THE VOGUE OF THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET, 1591-1597.

The sonnetteering vogue, as I have already pointed out, {427a} reached its full height between 1591 and 1597, and when at its briskest in 1594 it drew Shakespeare into its current. An enumeration of volumes containing sonnet-sequences or detached sonnets that were in circulation during the period best illustrates the overwhelming force of the sonnetteering rage of those years, and, with that end in view, I give here a bibliographical account, with a few critical notes, of the chief efforts of Shakespeare's rival sonnetteers. {427b}

Wyatt's and Surrey's Sonnets, published in 1557. Watson's 'Centurie of Love,' 1582.

The earliest collections of sonnets to be published in England were those by the Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt, which first appeared in the publisher Tottel's poetical miscellany called 'Songes and Sonnetes' in 1557. This volume included sixteen sonnets by Surrey and twenty by Wyatt. Many of them were translated directly from Petrarch, and most of them treated conventionally of the torments of an unrequited love. Surrey included, however, three sonnets on the death of his friend Wyatt, and a fourth on the death of one Clere, a faithful follower. Tottel's volume was seven times reprinted by 1587. But no sustained endeavour was made to emulate the example of Surrey and Wyatt till Thomas Watson about 1580 circulated in manuscript his 'Booke of Passionate Sonnetes,' which he wrote for his patron, the Earl of Oxford. The volume was printed in 1582, under the title of '[Greek text], or Passionate Centurie of Loue. Divided into two parts: whereof the first expresseth the Authours sufferance on Loue: the latter his long farewell to Loue and all his tyrannie. Composed by Thomas Watson, and published at the request of certaine Gentlemen his very frendes.' Watson's work, which he called 'a toy,' is a curious literary mosaic. He supplied to each poem a prose commentary, in which he not only admitted that every conceit was borrowed, but quoted chapter and verse for its origin from classical literature or from the work of French or Italian sonnetteers. {428a} Two regular quatorzains are prefixed, but to each of the 'passions' there is appended a four-line stanza which gives each poem eighteen instead of the regular fourteen lines. Watson's efforts were so well received, however, that he applied himself to the composition of a second series of sonnets in strict metre. This collection, entitled 'The Teares of Fancie,' only circulated in manuscript in his lifetime. {428b}

Sidney's 'Astrophel and Stella,' 1591.

Meanwhile a greater poet, Sir Philip Sidney, who died in 1586, had written and circulated among his friends a more ambitious collection of a hundred and eight sonnets. Most of Sidney's sonnets were addressed by him under the name of Astrophel to a beautiful woman poetically designated Stella. Sidney had in real life courted assiduously the favour of a married lady, Penelope, Lady Rich, and a few of the sonnets are commonly held to reflect the heat of passion which the genuine intrigue developed. But Petrarch, Ronsard, and Desportes inspired the majority of Sidney's efforts, and his addresses to abstractions like sleep, the moon, his muse, grief, or lust, are almost verbatim translations from the French. Sidney's sonnets were first published surreptitiously, under the title of 'Astrophel and Stella,' by a publishing adventurer named Thomas Newman, and in his first issue Newman added an appendix of 'sundry other rare sonnets by divers noblemen and gentlemen.' Twenty-eight sonnets by Daniel were printed in the appendix anonymously and without the author's knowledge. Two other editions of Sidney's 'Astrophel and Stella' without the appendix were issued in the same year. Eight other of Sidney's sonnets, which still circulated only in manuscript, were first printed anonymously in 1594 with the sonnets of Henry Constable, and these were appended with some additions to the authentic edition of Sidney's 'Arcadia' and other works that appeared in 1598. Sidney enjoyed in the decade that followed his death the reputation of a demi-god, and the wide dissemination in print of his numerous sonnets in 1591 spurred nearly every living poet in England to emulate his achievement. {429a}

In order to facilitate a comparison of Shakespeare's sonnets with those of his contemporaries it will be best to classify the sonnetteering efforts that immediately succeeded Sidney's under the three headings of

(1) sonnets of more or less feigned love, addressed to a more or less fictitious mistress;

(2) sonnets of adulation, addressed to patrons; and

(3) sonnets invoking metaphysical abstractions or treating impersonally of religion or philosophy. {429b}

(1) Collected sonnets of feigned love. Daniel's 'Delia,' 1592.

In February 1592 Samuel Daniel published a collection of fifty-five sonnets, with a dedicatory sonnet addressed to his patroness, Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pembroke. As in many French volumes, the collection concluded with an 'ode.' {429c} At every point Daniel betrayed his indebtedness to French sonnetteers, even when apologising for his inferiority to Petrarch (No. xxxviii.) His title he borrowed from the collection of Maurice Seve, whose assemblage of dixains called 'Delie, objet de plus haute vertu' (Lyon, 1544), was the pattern of all sonnet-sequences on love, and was a constant theme of commendation among the later French sonnetteers. But it is to Desportes that Daniel owes most, and his methods of handling his material may be judged by a comparison of his Sonnet xxvi. with Sonnet lxiii. in Desportes' collection, 'Cleonice: Dernieres Amours,' which was issued at Paris in 1575.

Desportes' sonnet runs:

Je verray par les ans vengeurs de mon martyre Que l'or de vos cheveux argente deviendra, Que de vos deux soleils la splendeur s'esteindra, Et qu'il faudra qu'Amour tout confus s'en retire. La beaute qui si douce a present vous inspire, Cedant aux lois du Temps ses faveurs reprendra, L'hiver de vostre teint les fleurettes perdra, Et ne laissera rien des thresors que i'admire. Cest orgueil desdaigneux qui vous fait ne m'aimer, En regret et chagrin se verra transformer, Avec le changement d'une image si belle: Et peut estre qu'alors vous n'aurez desplaisir De revivre en mes vers chauds d'amoureux desir, Ainsi que le Phenix au feu se renouvelle.

This is Daniel's version, which he sent forth as an original production:

I once may see, when years may wreck my wrong, And golden hairs may change to silver wire; And those bright rays (that kindle all this fire) Shall fail in force, their power not so strong, Her beauty, now the burden of my song, Whose glorious blaze the world's eye doth admire, Must yield her praise to tyrant Time's desire; Then fades the flower, which fed her pride so long, When if she grieve to gaze her in her glass, Which then presents her winter-withered hue: Go you my verse! go tell her what she was! For what she was, she best may find in you. Your fiery heat lets not her glory pass, But Phoenix-like to make her live anew.

In Daniel's beautiful sonnet (xlix.) beginning,

Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, Brother to Death, in silent darkness born,

he has borrowed much from De Baif and Pierre de Brach, sonnetteers with whom it was a convention to invocate 'O Sommeil chasse-soin.' But again he chiefly relies on Desportes, whose words he adapts with very slight variations. Sonnet lxxiii. of Desportes' 'Amours d'Hippolyte' opens thus:

Sommeil, paisible fils de la Nuict solitaire . . . O frere de la Mort, que tu m'es ennemi!

Fame of Daniel's sonnets.

Daniel's sonnets were enthusiastically received. With some additions they were republished in 1594 with his narrative poem, 'The Complaint of Rosamund.' The volume was called 'Delia and Rosamund Augmented.' Spenser, in his 'Colin Clouts come Home againe,' lauded the 'well-tuned song' of Daniel's sonnets, and Shakespeare has some claim to be classed among Daniel's many sonnetteering disciples. The anonymous author of 'Zepheria' (1594) declared that the 'sweet tuned accents' of 'Delian sonnetry' rang throughout England; while Bartholomew Griffin, in his 'Fidessa' (1596), openly plagiarised Daniel, invoking in his Sonnet xv. 'Care-charmer Sleep, . . . brother of quiet Death.'

Constable's 'Diana,' 1592.

In September of the same year (1592) that saw the first complete version of Daniel's 'Delia,' Henry Constable published 'Diana: the Praises of his Mistres in certaine sweete Sonnets.' Like the title, the general tone was drawn from Desportes' 'Amours de Diane.' Twenty-one poems were included, all in the French vein. The collection was reissued, with very numerous additions, in 1594 under the title 'Diana; or, The excellent conceitful Sonnets of H. C. Augmented with divers Quatorzains of honourable and learned personages.' This volume is a typical venture of the booksellers. {431} The printer, James Roberts, and the publisher, Richard Smith, supplied dedications respectively to the reader and to Queen Elizabeth's ladies-in-waiting. They had swept together sonnets in manuscript from all quarters and presented their customers with a disordered miscellany of what they called 'orphan poems.' Besides the twenty sonnets by Constable, eight were claimed for Sir Philip Sidney, and the remaining forty-seven are by various hands which have not as yet been identified.

Barnes' sonnets, 1593.

In 1593 the legion of sonnetteers received notable reinforcements. In May came out Barnabe Barnes's interesting volume, 'Parthenophil and Parthenophe: Sonnets, Madrigals, Elegies, and Odes. To the right noble and virtuous gentleman, M. William Percy, Esq., his dearest friend.' {432a} The contents of the volume and their arrangement closely resemble the sonnet-collections of Petrarch or the 'Amours' of Ronsard. There are a hundred and five sonnets altogether, interspersed with twenty-six madrigals, five sestines, twenty-one elegies, three 'canzons,' and twenty 'odes,' one in sonnet form. There is, moreover, included what purports to be a translation of 'Moschus' first eidillion describing love,' but is clearly a rendering of a French poem by Amadis Jamin, entitled 'Amour Fuitif, du grec de Moschus,' in his 'OEuvres Poetiques,' Paris, 1579. {432b} At the end of Barnes's volume there also figure six dedicatory sonnets. In Sonnet xcv. Barnes pays a compliment to Sir Philip Sidney, 'the Arcadian shepherd, Astrophel,' but he did not draw so largely on Sidney's work as on that of Ronsard, Desportes, De Baif, and Du Bellay. Legal metaphors abound in Barnes's poems, but amid many crudities, he reaches a high level of beauty in Sonnet lxvi., which runs:

Ah, sweet Content! where is thy mild abode? Is it with shepherds, and light-hearted swains, Which sing upon the downs, and pipe abroad, Tending their flocks and cattle on the plains? Ah, sweet Content! where dost thou safely rest In Heaven, with Angels? which the praises sing Of Him that made, and rules at His behest, The minds and hearts of every living thing. Ah, sweet Content! where doth thine harbour hold? Is it in churches, with religious men, Which please the gods with prayers manifold; And in their studies meditate it then? Whether thou dost in Heaven, or earth appear; Be where thou wilt! Thou wilt not harbour here! {433a}

Watson's 'Tears of Fancie,' 1593.

In August 1593 there appeared a posthumous collection of sixty-one sonnets by Thomas Watson, entitled 'The Tears of Fancie, or Love Disdained.' They are throughout the imitative type of his previously published 'Centurie of Love.' Many of them sound the same note as Shakespeare's sonnets to the 'dark lady.'

Fletcher's 'Licia,' 1593.

In September 1593 followed Giles Fletcher's 'Licia, or Poems of Love in honour of the admirable and singular virtues of his Lady.' This collection of fifty-three sonnets is dedicated to the wife of Sir Richard Mollineux. Fletcher makes no concealment that his sonnets are literary exercises. 'For this kind of poetry,' he tells the reader, 'I did it to try my humour;' and on the title-page he notes that the work was written 'to the imitation of the best Latin poets and others.' {433b}

Lodge's 'Phillis,' 1593.

The most notable contribution to the sonnet-literature of 1593 was Thomas Lodge's 'Phillis Honoured with Pastoral Sonnets, Elegies, and Amorous Delights.' {433c} Besides forty sonnets, some of which exceed fourteen lines in length and others are shorter, there are included three elegies and an ode. Desportes is Lodge's chief master, but he had recourse to Ronsard and other French contemporaries. How servile he could be may be learnt from a comparison of his Sonnet xxxvi. with Desportes's sonnet from 'Les Amours de Diane,' livre II. sonnet iii.

Thomas Lodge's Sonnet xxxvi. runs thus:

If so I seek the shades, I presently do see The god of love forsake his bow and sit me by; If that I think to write, his Muses pliant be; If so I plain my grief, the wanton boy will cry. If I lament his pride, he doth increase my pain If tears my cheeks attaint, his cheeks are moist with moan If I disclose the wounds the which my heart hath slain, He takes his fascia off, and wipes them dry anon. If so I walk the woods, the woods are his delight; If I myself torment, he bathes him in my blood; He will my soldier be if once I wend to fight, If seas delight, he steers my bark amidst the flood. In brief, the cruel god doth never from me go, But makes my lasting love eternal with my woe.

Desportes wrote in 'Les Amours de Diane,' book II. sonnet iii.:

Si ie me sies l'ombre, aussi soudainement Amour, laissant son arc, s'assiet et se repose: Si ie pense a des vers, ie le voy qu'il compose: Si ie plains mes douleurs, il se plaint hautement. Si ie me plains du mal, il accroist mon tourment: Si ie respan des pleurs, son visage il arrose: Si ie monstre la playe en ma poitrine enclose, Il defait son bandeau l'essuyant doucement. Si ie vay par les bois, aux bois il m'accompagne: Si ie me suis cruel, dans mon sang il se bagne: Si ie vais a la guerre, it deuient mon soldart: Si ie passe la mer, il conduit ma nacelle: Bref, iamais l'inhumain de moy ne se depart, Pour rendre mon amour et ma peine eternelle.

Drayton's 'Idea', 1594.

Three new volumes in 1594, together with the reissue of Daniel's 'Delia' and of Constable's 'Diana' (in a piratical miscellany of sonnets from many pens), prove the steady growth of the sonnetteering vogue. Michael Drayton in June produced his 'Ideas Mirrour, Amours in Quatorzains,' containing fifty-one 'Amours' and a sonnet addressed to 'his ever kind Mecaenas, Anthony Cooke.' Drayton acknowledged his devotion to 'divine Sir Philip,' but by his choice of title, style, and phraseology, the English sonnetteer once more betrayed his indebtedness to Desportes and his compeers. 'L'Idee' was the name of a collection of sonnets by Claude de Pontoux in 1579. Many additions were made by Drayton to the sonnets that he published in 1594, and many were subtracted before 1619, when there appeared the last edition that was prepared in Drayton's lifetime. A comparison of the various editions (1594, 1599, 1605, and 1619) shows that Drayton published a hundred sonnets, but the majority were apparently circulated by him in early life. {435a}

Percy's 'Coelia,' 1594.

William Percy, the 'dearest friend' of Barnabe Barnes, published in 1594, in emulation of Barnes, a collection of twenty 'Sonnets to the fairest Coelia.' {435b} He explains, in an address to the reader, that out of courtesy he had lent the sonnets to friends, who had secretly committed them to the press. Making a virtue of necessity, he had accepted the situation, but begged the reader to treat them as 'toys and amorous devices.'

Zepheria, 1594.

A collection of forty sonnets or 'canzons,' as the anonymous author calls them, also appeared in 1594 with the title 'Zepheria.' {435c} In some prefatory verses addressed 'Alli veri figlioli delle Muse' laudatory reference was made to the sonnets of Petrarch, Daniel, and Sidney. Several of the sonnets labour at conceits drawn from the technicalities of the law, and Sir John Davies parodied these efforts in the eighth of his 'gulling sonnets' beginning, 'My case is this, I love Zepheria bright.'

Barnfield's sonnets to Ganymede, 1595.

Four interesting ventures belong to 1595. In January, appended to Richard Barnfield's poem of 'Cynthia,' a panegyric on Queen Elizabeth, was a series of twenty sonnets extolling the personal charms of a young man in emulation of Virgil's Eclogue ii., in which the shepherd Corydon addressed the shepherd-boy Alexis. {435d} In Sonnet xx. the author expressed regret that the task of celebrating his young friend's praises had not fallen to the more capable hand of Spenser ('great Colin, chief of shepherds all') or Drayton ('gentle Rowland, my professed friend'). Barnfield at times imitated Shakespeare.

Spenser's 'Amoretti', 1595.

Almost at the same date as Barnfield's 'Cynthia' made its appearance there was published the more notable collection by Edmund Spenser of eighty-eight sonnets, which in reference to their Italian origin he entitled 'Amoretti.' {435e} Spenser had already translated many sonnets on philosophic topics of Petrarch and Joachim Du Bellay. Some of the 'Amoretti' were doubtless addressed by Spenser in 1593 to the lady who became his wife a year later. But the sentiment was largely ideal, and, as he says in Sonnet lxxxvii., he wrote, like Drayton, with his eyes fixed on 'Idaea.'

'Emaricdulfe,' 1595.

An unidentified 'E.C., Esq.,' produced also in 1595, under the title of 'Emaricdulfe,' {436a} a collection of forty sonnets, echoing English and French models. In the dedication to his 'two very good friends, John Zouch and Edward Fitton Esquiers,' the author tells them that an ague confined him to his chamber, 'and to abandon idleness he completed an idle work that he had already begun at the command and service of a fair dame.'

Sir John Davies's 'Gullinge Sonnets,' 1595.

To 1595 may best be referred the series of nine 'Gullinge sonnets,' or parodies, which Sir John Davies wrote and circulated in manuscript, in order to put to shame what he regarded as 'the bastard sonnets' in vogue. He addressed his collection to Sir Anthony Cooke, whom Drayton had already celebrated as the Mecaenas of his sonnetteering efforts. {436b} Davies seems to have aimed at Shakespeare as well as at insignificant rhymers like the author of 'Zepheria.' {436c} No. viii. of Davies's 'gullinge sonnets,' which ridicules the legal metaphors of the sonnetteers, may be easily matched in the collections of Barnabe Barnes or of the author of 'Zepheria,' but Davies's phraseology suggests that he also was glancing at Shakespeare's legal sonnets lxxxvii. and cxxxiv. Davies's sonnet runs:

My case is this. I love Zepheria bright, Of her I hold my heart by fealty: Which I discharge to her perpetually, Yet she thereof will never me acquit[e]. For, now supposing I withhold her right, She hath distrained my heart to satisfy The duty which I never did deny, And far away impounds it with despite. I labour therefore justly to repleave [_i.e._ recover] My heart which she unjustly doth impound. But quick conceit which now is Love's high shreive Returns it as esloyned [_i.e._ absconded], not to be found. Then what the law affords I only crave, Her heart for mine, in wit her name to have (_sic_).

Linche's 'Diella,' 1596.

'R. L., gentleman,' probably Richard Linche, published in 1596 thirty-nine sonnets under the title 'Diella.' {437a} The effort is thoroughly conventional. In an obsequious address by the publisher, Henry Olney, to Anne, wife of Sir Henry Glenham, Linche's sonnets are described as 'passionate' and as 'conceived in the brain of a gallant gentleman.'

Griffin's 'Fidessa,' 1596. Thomas Campion, 1596.

To the same year belongs Bartholomew Griffin's 'Fidessa,' sixty-two sonnets inscribed to 'William Essex, Esq.' Griffin designates his sonnets as 'the first fruits of a young beginner.' He is a shameless plagiarist. Daniel is his chief model, but he also imitated Sidney, Watson, Constable, and Drayton. Sonnet iii., beginning 'Venus and young Adonis sitting by her,' is almost identical with the fourth poem--a sonnet beginning 'Sweet Cytheraea, sitting by a brook'--in Jaggard's piratical miscellany, 'The Passionate Pilgrim,' which bore Shakespeare's name on the title-page. {437b} Jaggard doubtless stole the poem from Griffin, although it may be in its essentials the property of some other poet. Three beautiful love-sonnets by Thomas Campion, which are found in the Harleian MS. 6910, are there dated 1596. {437c}

William Smith's 'Chloris,' 1596.

William Smith was the author of 'Chloris,' a third collection of sonnets appearing in 1596. {437d} The volume contains forty-eight sonnets of love of the ordinary type, with three adulating Spenser; of these, two open the volume and one concludes it. Smith says that his sonnets were 'the budding springs of his study.' In 1600 a license was issued by the Stationers' Company for the issue of 'Amours' by W. S. This no doubt refers to a second collection of sonnets by William Smith. The projected volume is not extant. {438a}

Robert Tofte's 'Laura,' 1597.

In 1597 there came out a similar volume by Robert Tofte, entitled 'Laura, the Joys of a Traveller, or the Feast of Fancy.' The book is divided into three parts, each consisting of forty 'sonnets' in irregular metres. There is a prose dedication to Lucy, sister of Henry, ninth Earl of Northumberland. Tofte tells his patroness that most of his 'toys' 'were conceived in Italy.' As its name implies, his work is a pale reflection of Petrarch. A postscript by a friend--'R. B.'--complains that a publisher had intermingled with Tofte's genuine efforts 'more than thirty sonnets not his.' But the style is throughout so uniformly tame that it is not possible to distinguish the work of a second hand.

Sir William Alexander's 'Aurora.'

To the same era belongs Sir William Alexander's 'Aurora,' a collection of a hundred and six sonnets, with a few songs and elegies interspersed on French patterns. Sir William describes the work as 'the first fancies of his youth,' and formally inscribes it to Agnes, Countess of Argyle. It was not published till 1604. {438b}

Sir Fulke Greville's 'Caelica.'

Sir Fulke Greville, afterwards Lord Brooke, the intimate friend of Sir Philip Sidney, was author of a like collection of sonnets called 'Caelica.' The poems number a hundred and nine, but few are in strict sonnet metre. Only a small proportion profess to be addressed to the poet's fictitious mistress, Caelica. Many celebrate the charms of another beauty named Myra, and others invoke Queen Elizabeth under her poetic name of Cynthia (cf. Sonnet xvii.) There are also many addresses to Cupid and meditations on more or less metaphysical themes, but the tone is never very serious. Greville doubtless wrote the majority of his 'Sonnets' during the period under survey, though they were not published until their author's works appeared in folio for the first time in 1633, five years after his death.

Estimate of number of love-sonnets issued between 1591 and 1597.

With Tofte's volume in 1597 the publication of collections of love-sonnets practically ceased. Only two collections on a voluminous scale seem to have been written in the early years of the seventeenth century. About 1607 William Drummond of Hawthornden penned a series of sixty-eight interspersed with songs, madrigals, and sextains, nearly all of which were translated or adapted from modern Italian sonnetteers. {439a} About 1610 John Davies of Hereford published his 'Wittes Pilgrimage . . . through a world of Amorous Sonnets.' Of more than two hundred separate poems in this volume, only the hundred and four sonnets in the opening section make any claim to answer the description on the title-page, and the majority of those are metaphysical meditations on love which are not addressed to any definite person. Some years later William Browne penned a sequence of fourteen love-sonnets entitled 'Caelia' and a few detached sonnets of the same type. {439b} The dates of production of Drummond's, Davies's, and Browne's sonnets exclude them from the present field of view. Omitting them, we find that between 1591 and 1597 there had been printed nearly twelve hundred sonnets of the amorous kind. If to these we add Shakespeare's poems, and make allowance for others which, only circulating in manuscript, have not reached us, it is seen that more than two hundred love-sonnets were produced in each of the six years under survey. France and Italy directed their literary energies in like direction during nearly the whole of the century, but at no other period and in no other country did the love-sonnet dominate literature to a greater extent than in England between 1591 and 1597.

Of sonnets to patrons between 1591 and 1597, of which detached specimens may be found in nearly every published book of the period, the chief collections were:

II. Sonnets to patrons, 1591-7.

A long series of sonnets prefixed to 'Poetical Exercises of a Vacant Hour' by King James VI of Scotland, 1591; twenty-three sonnets in Gabriel Harvey's 'Four Letters and certain Sonnets touching Robert Greene' (1592), including Edmund Spenser's fine sonnet of compliment addressed to Harvey; a series of sonnets to noble patronesses by Constable circulated in manuscript about 1592 (first printed in 'Harleian Miscellany,' 1813,