GREENE's popular drama of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay is wound up with a high-wrought compliment to Elizabeth in the form of a prophecy of her birth and reign, by Friar Bacon : I find by deep prescience of mine art, quoth this ex-post-facto soothsayer, There here, where Brute did build his Troynovant, Shall flourish out so rich and fair a bud, Whose brightness shall deface proud Phoebus flower, -Apollo's heliotropian then shall stoop, And Venus' hyacinth shall veil her top; And Pallas' bay shall 'bash her brightest green; Shall stoop and wonder at Diana' Rose." GREENE died in 1592; his drama was printed in 1594. To either of those years, or to the interval betwixt, the composition of the M. S. N. Dream is assigned by Malone and Halliwell. It is therefore subsequent to Friar Bacon; nor is it possible to suppose that SHAKESPEARE was unacquainted with the works of ROBERT GREENE. From this popular play, then, it is fair to infer that our Poet adopted for his heroine an image familiar to the public, and a name recommended to him no less by its popularity than its beauty; and we thus arrive at the conclusion— which a judgment experienced in the resources of our elder dramatists would, I think, unhesitatingly sanction-that SHAKESPEARE'S Dian's Bud is the same as GREENE's Dian's Rose bud; that is to say, the figurative Queen Elizabeth. If this be conceded, it follows that the "little Western flower" is a female also. Poetical justice as well as critical law is thus fully satisfied: the humble Pansy, triumphant for a while, is finally vanquished by "the Queen of Flowers," the resplendent Rose; the compliment to Elizabeth is complete; her charms and virtues prevail over the arts and graces of her pretty but insignificant rival; and the important event described by Oberon - which, otherwise, begins and ends with his relation, and has no influence on the conduct of the drama-becomes thoroughly interwoven with its texture, and furnishes the agency, or, as the critics call it, the machinery, by which its intricacies are unravelled, and its catastrophe produced. The incident thus retrieves an importance suitable to the dignity of its imperial subject, worthy of the portents which mark the time and place of its occurrence, and is rescued from the derogatory position it has hitherto held in an undiscerning criticism, namely, that of an episode, beautiful and ornamental indeed, but altogether superfluous and impertinent.1 We are now perhaps in a position to interpret the mystery, and give to its shadows “a local habitation and a name.' The subject is obviously one of the many love-adventures in which that most romantic sovereign, whose pride it was to have it graved upon her tomb that she "lived and died a Maiden Queen," was engaged. A lover (1) seeking vehemently, but in vain, to win her hand, whilst he was successfully (2) engaged in winning the affections or corrupting the virtue of a Lady of inferior rank, is the plain prose of the following exquisite poetry: i The incident thus traced in its connections and effects (from its first occurrence, act ii. sc. 2, throughout its operations upon Titania, in act ii. sc. 3, and again, in act iv. sc. 1; upon the Lovers, in act ii. sc. 3, act iii. sc. 1, and act iii. sc. 2) pervades the whole fable, and is the sine qua non of its progress and development. Without it, the ludicrous distress of Titania, and her reconcilement with Oberon, could not have been produced: without it, the amusing embarrassments of the Lovers could neither have been heightened nor finally disentangled: without it, the play might and would have had a denouement; but not such as the poet designed for this piece. As he would pierce a hundred thousand hearts; In maiden meditation, fancy-free. 2. Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell: It fell upon a little western flower— Before milk-white, now purple with Love's wound. It is just possible to suppose that Warburton and his followers had a glimpse of some such meaning; that they imagined in this passage a contrast between the rival queens, with a special compliment to the superior virtue or reserve of Elizabeth ; that while the cold repulse of Cupid's shaft by the imperial votaress shadowed out Elizabeth's rejection of many splendid matrimonial offers, the deep purple which ensued upon the passion of the frailer little flower was no unhappy emblem of Mary's more yielding tenderness and its fatal consequences in the death of Darnley or Norfolk; and they may have piqued themselves on the happiness of the discovery and the beauty of the image thus vaguely presented to their minds. But the beauty will not hold its colours when brought to the light. Mary did not stand, with reference to Elizabeth, as a little flower, or a western flower. She was a Queen, therefore Elizabeth's equal; and her kingdom lay north, not west, of her rival's. But the conclusive fact against them is, that the two Queens were never engaged (as this supposition and the text require) in an affair of the heart with the same person, though they each had a tender of the same hand. Elizabeth, who might have had him herself for the taking, did certainly recommend the Earl of Leicester to Mary as a husband; but, probably enamoured of Darnley at the time, the latter steadily declined the j Among foreign princes: Philip II. of Spain; Erich, King of Sweden; Charles, Duke of Austria, son of the Emperor Ferdinand; Henry, Duke of Anjou; Francis, Duke of Alençon, (afterwards Anjou) &c.—among her own subjects: Sir Wm. Pickering; Henry, Earl of Arundel; Leicester, &c. -See Camden passim. proffer. The Queen of Scots, then, is not the little flower of whose archetype we are in quest.' The late ingenious Mr. Boaden has the merit of having led the way to a true solution of the allegory:m to Sir Walter Scott is probably to be ascribed the more casual desert of having first. suggested it. His charming but inaccurate Historical Romance of Kenilworth exhibited Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester in nearly the same predicament as we find the royal Vestal and her suitor in the Vision of Oberon. Mr. Boaden perceived the striking analogy, and promptly discovered in the first speech of the Fairy King an intimation of the time and place of the action; and, in the second, an account of the action itself and the persons engaged in it. The scene was Kenilworth Castle; the time, the season of its "Princely Pleasures ;" and the action, the double courtship of Leicester with the Queen and his secret paramour. k Camden's Annals of England, anno 1564. 1 To this it may be added, that as the word West, in the line descriptive of the Vestal's kingdom, signifies England, the word western, descriptive of the little flower, and occurring in the same passage, must, by every law of just interpretation, be taken to mean English. The mysterious fair one, therefore, was an Englishwoman: a sense which effectually excludes the Queen of Scots. m Essay on the Sonnets of Shakespeare, &c., by James Boaden, London, 1837. This essay had previously appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine, Sept. and Nov. 1832. I must here be permitted to observe, that, long before I had ever heard of those publications, I had come to the conclusions embodied in these pages. Let me also obtain credit when I declare that I mention this fact (known to many of my friends) with no view of questioning the originality of Mr. Boaden's discovery, or putting in a claim for a share in its honours. My sole object is to corroborate the probable correctness of our common view, to the extent of our mutual coincidence, by showing that at least two independent inquirers had, about the same time and without pre-concert or intercourse, elicited the same conclusions from the same series of evidence. n This is clearly intimated in the words of Oberon: "Since once I sat upon a promontory ;" and again: "that very time I saw," &c. It was during her Majesty's summer progress of 1575 and her residence in Kenilworth Castle, that the Earl of Leicester, under circumstances of peculiar perfidy, made, if not his last, his most elaborate attack on the hand of his royal mistress. Here is an event worthy of prodigies in the waters, in the air, and on the earth; nor can we imagine portents more poetically fit for such an occasion than those striking omens which the Poet has seized upon, as at once foreshadowing the events and fixing the period of their occurrence. But, whilst we should look in vain for such natural prodigies at that time, we shall have no difficulty in finding them among the artificial wonders raised for Elizabeth's amusement during the magnificent festivities of Kenilworth. The language employed by our Poet here, as in many other places, is the language of Pageantry, then popular and well understood; and it describes, with sufficient accuracy with the accuracy of one describing from memory, after the lapse of a few years—some of the most striking and beautiful of the pageants exhibited on the occasion. Laneham, a retainer of Leicester's, Gascoyne, one of the poets engaged to devise the entertainments, and Dugdale, the learned antiquarian, have left accounts of this splendid visitation. Those of Laneham and Gascoyne will be found reprinted in Nichols's Progresses of Elizabeth; Dugdale's, in his Antiquities of Warwickshire. The former were eye-wit • Tempest, act iv. sc. i: "The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces," &c. 66 Hung be the heavens with black," &c. 1. Hen. V’1. act i. sc. 1., &c., &c. P Gascoyne was not the author of the pageant to which Shakespeare alludes: namely, "The Delivery of the Lady of the Lake." It was the work of Master Hunnes. Gascoyne's own parts of the entertainments were more direct attacks upon the hand of Elizabeth than any of the rest. He supplied two pieces, which are given in his Princely Pleasures ; and Nichols remarks, "they were both composed to display to Elizabeth the national wish for her marriage with Leicester, who is represented in the latter piece, under the name of Deep-Desire."— Nichols's Progresses of Elizabeth, i., 503. C |