which a single one of his original dramas would suffice for so fine a poetical appreciation.

In 1593, the year after Greene's death, Christopher Marlowe came to a violent end, struck through the eye into the brain with his own dagger, in an unhappy brawl, which the enemies of his sentiments and profession have no doubt made the worst of. In the same year the theatres in London were closed, by order of Privy Council, as a precaution against the spread of the plague; a little previously, the prohibition of plays on Sundays had been confirmed in an order, which also restricted performances on a Thursday, which the Bearwards, suffering by competition of wit, claimed as appropriated to bear-baiting by ancient custom.

In this year Shakespeare published his Venus and Adonis, prefixing the following dedication to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, a young nobleman of twenty, or nine years the poet's junior;

66 Right Honourable,

"I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burthen: only if your honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your honourable survey and your honour to your heart's content; which I wish may always answer your own wish and the world's hopeful expectation.

"Your honour's in all duty,

"WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.'

The rapidity with which the poem was reprinted proves its instant popularity, and this was long sustained; at the present time, I apprehend, it is but little read, and perhaps still less admired; and the same may be said of the Rape of Lucrece, published in the ensuing year, and dedicated to the same nobleman. Probably, however, no powers but those of.Shakespeare could have produced them in their only too indiscriminate and exhausting oncentration of intellect, imagination, and fancy. It is

likely they were written in early days at Stratford; and in their minute finishing of external and internal delineation they appear like the early conscientious copies of natural detail, that genius subjects itself to as discipline before it obtains the rights and the mastery of its creative power.

The second dedication has lost much of the formal ceremoniousness of the first—is expressed in terms indeed, which, considering the time, imply almost the familiarity of private friendship and personal attachment, perhaps obligation.

"The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater: meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with happiness.

"Your lordship's in all duty,

"WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.'

With every disposition to be squeamish in such matters, we cannot but see that even the first dedication is independence itself, as compared with the terms addressed by Nash to the same patron about the same period :— "Incomprehensible is the height of your spirit, both in heroic resolution and matters of conceit; unreprievably perisheth that book whatsoever to waste paper, which on the diamond rock of your judgment disasterly chanceth to be shipwrecked." Florio's dedication of his "World of Words" to the Earl, in 1598, is remarkably parallel to Shakespeare's—to the same effect it may be, only less delicately worded:-" In truth, I acknowledge an entire debt, not only of my best knowledge but of all; yea, of more than I can or know to your bounteous lordship, in whose pay and patronage I have lived some years; to whom I owe and vow the years I have to live. But as to me, and many more, the glorious and gracious sunshine of your honour hath infused light and life." Nash calls him " a dear lover and cherisher as well of the

66

lovers of poets as of poets themselves." There is, therefore, no doubt that the tradition was true, in the main, that came down to Rowe through D'avenant, “ that my Lord Southampton at one time gave Shakespeare a thousand pounds, to enable him to go through with a purchase which he had heard he had a mind to." Tradition is not to be trusted for figures,—the value of money at that time was four or five times the present,— but however large the sum may have been, the wonder, without precedent as without imitation, is not that a nobleman should have parted with it so freely, but that he should have had such an opportunity of bestowing it worthily, and availed himself of it. It will be time enough to consider the propriety of the acceptance of the gift when we know time, amount, and circumstances; in the meantime there is no evidence to connect it, as has been done, with the building of the Globe Theatre, by James Burbage.

Burbage's first playhouse was "The Theatre" in Shoreditch, north-east of Finsbury Fields, and situate, almost beyond doubt, in what is now called Curtain Road. He built it in 1576, "with many hundred pounds taken up at interest," but in consequence of quarrels with his landlord, he pulled it down in 1598, and with its materials, and fresh ones, built the Globe, on Bankside, Southwark, in 1598-9. This was a wooden structure, probably on an octagonal plan. To judge from the drawings of these old theatres that remain, the galleries were protected by a roof, sloping outwards, the central part was open to the sky, and the portion occupied by the stage and tiring rooms was surmounted by apartments for dwelling or storage of properties and wardrobe. It was probably much larger than the Blackfriars theatre formed out of converted rooms, but, of course, was only suitable for summer, and for performances by daylight; whereas at the private theatres the daylight itself seems often to have been excluded; though not always, as mention occurs of the darkening of private theatres by clapping to the windows, when a scene of night or

dismalness was to be acted. The foppish custom of privileged spectators sitting on the stage on stools, with pages attendant, was a source of standing annoyance to the general audience, but stood its ground in an age of personal display against outcry, satire, and expense.

The curtains in front of the stage ran upon a rod, and opened in the centre, and the stage itself seems to have had an enclosure of arras, answering the purpose of our side scenes, and towards the back where they were called traverses, they could be drawn and undrawn as required. In the centre of the stage, at the back, was a secondary stage, which may have been more or less permanent, and was of frequent employment in aid of the bold treatment by the dramatists of space generally as well as time. The break of level was assumed to account for any distance of perspective, and thus a double action might proceed in the same scene as independently as the several actions disposed at different heights, but of like scale, are depicted in a mediæval painting or on a panel of the gates of Ghiberti. Thus the ghosts might turn from Richard to Richmond, shown as sleeping in separate camps, or a double dialogue might proceed within a room and without.

In the way of scenery, the utmost that was attempted or cared for seems to have been to put such fixed properties on and about the stage as would suggest the scene required. Tombs, rocks, hell-mouths, steeples, beacons, and trees are found in lists of properties, and also cities and battlements. The accounts of the Revels show that for plays before the court there were devices for counterfeiting thunder and lightning, for exhibiting the sun breaking through a cloud, burning mountains, a battlement of canvas; and payment was made for painting seven cities, one country house, one battlement, a mount, and two great cloths." Graves and trap-doors, ascents and descents from heaven were also provided for. The stage is constantly spoken of as strewn with rushes the custom even of palace-chambers, occasion, by excess of refinement, it was matted. In

66

on

Shakespeare's company several actors of eminence played on different instruments, and the band of eight or ten performers is supposed to have sat in an upper balcony, over what is now called the stage-box.

The audience was not satisfied with costume at so cheap a rate as with scenery; personal bedizenment was the rule of the court and the weakness of the time, and the stage could not lag far behind the coxcombs who sate on stools about the front of it. Mythological personages were fitted out with some degree of appropriateness; as to the foreign and remotely historical, it would not be easy to say at what point the line was even usually drawn. It seems probable that something at least was done to show a difference from contemporary habits, and this is all the compromise that is necessary where the drama itself is the main interest.

Female parts were always sustained by males.

The names of the principal actors in Shakespeare's plays are printed at the beginning of the first edition of 1623, but with no statement of their several parts. Whatever excellence there may have been among the rest, it is only of two, Richard Burbage, chief in tragedy, and William Kemp in comedy, that enough seems to have been said to constitute special renown. This may lead

us to think that the faintness of the tradition of Shakespeare's own powers as an actor is not inconsistent with his considerable merit. Rowe's inference from all he could gather was, that he was not distinguished as an extraordinary actor. "His name is printed, as the custom was in those times, amongst those of the other players, before some old plays, but without any particular account of what sort of parts he used to play; and, though I have enquired, I could never meet with any further account of him this way, than that the top of his performance was the Ghost in his own Hamlet." A late tradition, reported by Capell and Oldys, imports that he played old Adam in As You Like It; and another, that he personated a king before Queen Elizabeth, who essayed to disturb his majesty by a mischievous recog