Chapter 19

The echo has been dropped by Fletcher, who has thus achieved the remarkable musical feat of turning a nightingale's note into a sparrow's. The mutilation of Philomela by the hands of Tereus was a jest compared to the mutilation of Shakespeare by the hands of Fletcher: who thereby reduced the close of the first verse into agreement if not into accordance with the close of his own. This appended verse, as all the world does not and need not know, ends thus:

But first set my poor heart free, Bound in those icy chains by thee.

Even an earless owner of fingers enough to count on may by their help convince himself of the difference in metre here. But not only does the last line, with unsolicited and literally superfluous liberality, offer us a syllable over measure; the words are such as absolutely to defy antiphonal repetition or reverberation of the three last in either line. Let us therefore, like good scriptural scholars, according equally to the letter and the spirit of the text, render unto Fletcher the things which be Fletcher's, and unto Shakespeare the things which be Shakespeare's.

{210} It is worth remark that in a still older sample of an older and ruder form of play than can have been the very earliest mould in which the pristine or pre-Shakespearean model of _Pericles_ was cast, the part of Chorus here assigned to Gower was filled by a representative of his fellow-poet Lydgate.

{217} Except perhaps one little word of due praise for the pretty imitation or recollection of his dead friend Beaumont rather than of Shakespeare, in the description of the crazed girl whose "careless tresses a wreath of bullrush rounded" where she sat playing with flowers for emblems at a game of love and sorrow--but liker in all else to Bellario by another fountain-side than to Ophelia by the brook of death.

{220} On the 17th of September, 1864.

{232} The once too celebrated crime which in this play was exhibited on the public stage with the forcible fidelity of a wellnigh brutal realism took actual place on the private stage of fact in the year 1604. Four years afterwards the play was published as Shakespeare's. Eight years more, and Shakespeare was with AEschylus.

{237} Written in 1879.

{239} Capell has altered this to "proud perfumes"; marking the change in a note, with the scrupulous honesty which would seem to have usually distinguished him from more daring and more famous editors.

{245a} The feeble archaic inversion in this line is one among many small signs which all together suffice, if not to throw back the date of this play to the years immediately preceding the advent of Marlowe or the full influence of his genius and example, yet certainly to mark it as an instance of survival from that period of incomposite and inadequate workmanship in verse.

{245b} Or than this play to a genuine work of Shakespeare's. "Brick to coral"--these three words describe exactly the difference in tone and shade of literary colour.

{246} Here for the first time we come upon a verse not unworthy of Marlowe himself--a verse in spirit as in cadence recalling the deep oceanic reverberations of his "mighty line," profound and just and simple and single as a note of the music of the sea. But it would be hard if a devout and studious disciple were never to catch one passing tone of his master's habitual accent.--It may be worth while to observe that we find here the same modulation of verse--common enough since then, but new to the patient auditors of _Gorboduc_ and _Locrine_--which we find in the finest passage of Marlowe's imperfect play of _Dido_, completed by Nash after the young Master's untimely death.

Why star'st thou in my face? If thou wilt stay, Leap in my arms: mine arms are open wide: If not--turn from me, and I'll turn from thee; For though thou hast the power to say farewell, I have not power to stay thee.

But we may look long in vain for the like of this passage, taken from the crudest and feeblest work of Marlowe, in the wide and wordy expanse of _King Edward III_.

{247} A pre-Shakespearean word of single occurrence in a single play of Shakespeare's, and proper to the academic school of playwrights.

{248} _The First Part of Tamburlaine the Great_, Act v. Sc. ii.

{252} It may be worth a remark that the word _power_ is constantly used as a dissyllable; another note of archaic debility or insufficiency in metre.

{255} Yet another essentially non-Shakespearean word, though doubtless once used by Shakespeare; this time a most ungraceful Gallicism.

{256} It may obviate any chance of mistake if I observe that here as elsewhere, when I mention the name that is above every name in English literature, I refer to the old Shakespeare, and not to "the new Shakspere"; a _novus homo_ with whom I have no acquaintance, and with whom (if we may judge of a great--or a little--unknown after the appearance and the bearing of those who select him as a social sponsor for themselves and their literary catechumens) I can most sincerely assert that I desire to have none.

{261} Surely, for _sweet'st_ we should read _swift'st_.

{262a} This word occurs but once in Shakespeare's plays--

And speaking it, he wistly looked on me;

(_King Richard II_. Act v. Sc. 4.)

and in such a case, as in the previous instances of the words _invocate_ and _endamagement_, a mere [Greek text] can carry no weight of evidence with it worth any student's consideration.

{262b} This form is used four times by Shakespeare as the equivalent of Bretagne; once only, in one of his latest plays, as a synonym for Britain.

{263a} Another word indiscoverable in any genuine verse of Shakespeare's, though not (I believe) unused on occasion by some among the poets contemporary with his earlier years.

{263b} This word was perhaps unnecessarily altered by our good Capell to "tender."

{264a} Yet another and a singular misuse of a word never so used or misused by Shakespeare.

{264b} Qu. Why, so is your desire: If that the law, etc.?

{264c} _Sic_. I should once have thought it impossible that any mortal ear could endure the shock of this unspeakable and incomparable verse, and find in the passage which contains it an echo or a trace of the "music, wit, and oracle" of Shakespeare. But in those days I had yet to learn what manner of ears are pricked up to listen "when rank Thersites opes his mastiff jaws" in criticism of Homer or of Shakespeare. In a corner of the preface to an edition of "Shakspere" which bears on its title-page the name (correctly spelt) of Queen Victoria's youngest son prefixed to the name I have just transcribed, a small pellet of dry dirt was flung upwards at me from behind by the "able editor" thus irritably impatient to figure in public as the volunteer valet or literary lackey of Prince Leopold. Hence I gathered the edifying assurance that this aspirant to the honours of literature in livery had been reminded of my humbler attempts in literature without a livery by the congenial music of certain four-footed fellow-critics and fellow-lodgers of his own in the neighbourhood of Hampstead Heath. Especially and most naturally had their native woodnotes wild recalled to the listening biped (whom partial nature had so far distinguished from the herd) the deep astonishment and the due disgust with which he had discovered the unintelligible fact that to men so ignorant of music or the laws of music in verse as my presumptuous and pitiable self the test of metrical harmony lay not in an appeal to the fingers but only in an appeal to the ear--"the ear which he" (that is, which the present writer) "makes so much of--AND WHICH SHOULD BE LONG TO MEASURE SHAKSPERE." Here then the great Sham Shakespearean secret is out at last. Had I but known in time my lifelong error in thinking that a capacity to estimate the refinements of word- music was not to be gauged by length of ear, by hairiness of ear, or by thickness of ear, but by delicacy of ear alone, I should as soon have thought of measuring my own poor human organs against those of the patriarch or leader of the herd as of questioning his indisputable right to lay down the law to all who agree with his great fundamental theorem--that the longest ear is the most competent to judge of metre. _Habemus confitentem asinum_.

{266} A Latin pun, or rather a punning Latinism, not altogether out of Shakespeare's earliest line. But see the note preceding this one.

{269} The simple substitution of the word "is" for the word "and" would rectify the grammar here--were that worth while.

{270} Qu. So there is but one France, etc.?

{271} Non-Shakespearean.

{273} I choose for a parallel Shakespeare's use of Plutarch in the composition of his Roman plays rather than his use of Hall and Holinshed in the composition of his English histories, because Froissart is a model more properly to be set against Plutarch than against Holinshed or Hall.

{278} This brilliant idea has since been borrowed from the Chairman--and that without acknowledgment--by one of those worthies whose mission it is to make manifest that no burlesque invention of mere man's device can improve upon the inexhaustible capacities of Nature as shown in the production and perfection of the type irreverently described by Dryden as 'God Almighty's fool.'

{279} This word was incomprehensibly misprinted in the first issue of the Society's Report, where it appeared as "foulness." To prevent misapprehension, the whole staff of printers was at once discharged.

{291} When the learned member made use of this remarkable phrase he probably had in his mind the suggestive query of Agnes, _si les enfants qu'on fait se faisaient pas l'oreille_? But the flower of rhetoric here gathered was beyond the reach of Arnolphe's innocent ward. The procreation in such a case is even more difficult for fancy to realise than the conception.