stamped him as a most base and wicked wretch, and finally drew down upon him the general hatred and execration of his subjects Had he not thus sinned away and lost the hearts of the people, he might perhaps have safely defied the papal interdict; for who can doubt that they would have braved the thunders of the Vatican for him, since they did not scruple afterwards to do so against him? But the fact or the mode of Arthur's death was not the chief, much less the only cause of that loss. So that here the drama involves in its central point such a breach of history, which it is not easy to see how the laws of the dramatic form should require, and which nothing less than such a requirement could fairly excuse: in other words, the rights of historical truth are sacrificed withont sufficient cause.

Such a flaw at the heart of the piece must needs greatly disarrange the order of the work as a representation of facts, and make it very untrue to the ideas and sentiments of the English people at the time; for it implies all along that Arthur was clearly the rightful sovereign, and his uncle as clearly an usurper, and that they were so regarded: whereas, in truth, the rule of lineal descent was not then settled in the state, and the succession of John to the throne was so far from being irregular, that of the last five occupants four had derived their main title from election, the same right whereby John himself took it.

The same objection lies proportionably against another feature of the play. The life of the Austrian archduke, who nad behaved so harshly and so meanly towards Richard I., is prolonged five or six years beyond its actual period, and he is made responsible for the death of the English king, for no other purpose, seemingly, than that the king's natural son may have the honour of revenging his father's wrongs and death. Richard fell in a quarrel with Vidomar, viscount of Lymoges, one of his own vassals. A treasure having been found on the viscount's estate, and a part of it having been offered the king, he claimed the whole; and while in pursuance of this claim he was making war on the owner he was wounded with an arrow from the hand of Gourdon, one of Vidomar's archers. This occurred in 1199, when Leopold of Austria had been dead several years. The play, however, drives the sin against history to the extreme point of making Austria and Lymoges the same person. Now, if such an exploit were needful or desirable for the proper display of Faulconbridge's character, it does not well appear but that the real Vidomar would have answered the purpose: at all events, the thing might surely have been compassed without so gross a breach of historical truth. Here, however, the vice stops with itself, instead of vitiating the other parts, as in the former case.

Again, in the play the people of Angiers stoutly refuse to own either John or Arthur as king, until the question shall have first been decided in battle between them; whereas in fact Anjou, Touraine, and Maine declared from the first for Arthur, and did

not waver at all in their allegiance. The drama also represents the imprisonment and death of Arthur as occurring in England; while in fact he was first put under guard in the castle of Falaise In Normandy, and afterwards transferred to a dungeon in the castle of Rouen, from whence he was never known to come out alive. Other departures from fact there are, which may easily be justified or excused, as being more than made up by a gain of dramatic truth and effect. Such, for example, are the freedoms taken with Constance, who, in the play, remains a widow after the death of her first husband, and survives to bewail the captivity of her son, and the wreck of his hopes; but who, in fact, after a short widowhood was married to Guy of Thouars, and died in 1201, the year before Arthur fell into the hands of his uncle. A breach of history every way justifiable, since it gives an occasion, not otherwise to be had, for some noble outpourings of maternal grief; and ner depth of maternal affection might well enough consist with a second marriage, though to have represented her thus would have mpaired the pathos of her situation, and at the same time have been a needless embarrassment of the action. It is enough that so she would have felt and grieved, had she been still alive; her proper character being thus allowed to transpire in circumstances which she did not live to see.

But of the justifiable departures from fact the greatest consists 'n anticipating by several years the papal instigations as the cause of the war in which Arthur was taken prisoner. For in reality Rome had no hand in setting on that war; it was undertaken by Philip of his own will and for his own ends; there being no rupture between John and the Pope till some time after Arthur had disappeared. The crusade which Philip did undertake against John by order of the Pope was in 1213. Thus the Poet brought the two together; and he was right in doing so for this reason, that the conditions of dramatic interest required more intensity of life than either would yield of itself: united, they might stand in the drama; divided, they must fall. So that, by concentrating the interest of both in one, as much of actual truth was secured as could be told dramatically without defeating the purpose of the telling. Than which no better justification of the thing could well be given, or asked.

Shakespeare drew the material of his other histories from Holinshed, and no doubt he had, or might have had access to the same authority in writing King John. Yet in all the others the rights of historical truth are for the most part duly observed. Which would seem to argue that in this case he not only left his usual guide, but had some special reason for doing so. Accordingly it appears that the forementioned sins against history were not original with him. The whole plot and plan of the drama, the events and the ordering of them, all indeed but the poetry and character, the life and glory of the work, were borrowed. And it seems deserving of special note, that in his historical dramas he committed

no offences worth naming against the laws of his art, but when, building on another's foundation.

"The first and second part of the troublesome Reign of John, King of England," upon which Shakespeare's play was founded, came from the press, first, in 1591, again in 1611, and a third time 'n 1622. The first edition was anonymous; the second claimed to be by "W. Sh.," the third by "W. Shakespeare;' " which has been taken by some as strong evidence of its being the Poet's work; and would indeed go far to prove it, but that plays that were certainly none of his were often thus fathered upon him. Steevens at one time thought it to be Shakespeare's, but he afterwards gave it up, as well he might; and all the English critics since agree that he did not write it, though scarce any two of them agree who did. The German critics, so far as we know, uniformly take the other side, arguing the point at much length, but with little effect. To answer their arguments were more easy than profitable; and such answer can better be spared than the space it would fill, since no English reader of but tolerable competence, none able to understand the reasoning, will need it, after having once read the play. Coleridge, indeed, writing of the play in 1802, went so far as to pronounce it "not his, yet of him;" a judgment in which few, we apprehend, will concur. For not a single passage or even line of the old play is to be found in Shakespeare's King John; and as there are many that were well worth keeping had they been his, this concludes pretty strongly that he had no hand in it.

The Troublesome Reign bears strong internal marks of having been written when the enthusiasm of the nation was wrought up to the height about the Spanish Armada, and when the Papacy was spitting its impotent thunders against the throne and state of the lion-queen. Abounding in spoken and acted satire and invec tive against Rome, the play must have been hugely grateful to that national feeling which, issuing in the Reformation, was greatly deepened and strengthened by its own issues. The subject was strikingly apt for this purpose; which was most likely the cause of its being chosen.

This aptness had suggested a like use or abuse of the same matter many years before. The precise date is not known, but Bishop Bale's Pageant of Kynge Johan was probably written in the time of Edward VI. Touching this singular performance, perhaps we cannot do better than to abridge the account given by Mr. Collier. The design of Kynge Johan was to promote and confirm the Reformation, of which Bale was one of the most strenuous and unscrupulous supporters. Some of the leading events of John's reign, his disputes with the Pope, the sufferings of his kingdom under the interdict, the surrender of his crown to the legate, and his reputed death by poison, are there applied in a way to suit the time and purpose of the writer. Historical persous

also, are liberally introduced, the king himself, who figures largely till his death, Pope Innocent III, Cardinal Pandulph, Stepher Langton, Simon of Swinstead, and a monk called Raymundus and with these are mixed up divers personifications, such as England, who is said to be a widow, Imperial Majesty, who is supposed to take the government at John's death, Nobility, Clergy Civil Order, Treason, Verity, and Sedition, who serves as the Jester of the piece. Thus we have some elements of historical plays, such as were used on the public stage forty or fifty years later, and some of the common materials of the old moralities, which gradually gave place to real or imaginary characters. So that the play stands about midway between moralities and historical plays; and it is the only specimen in that kind of so early a date that is known to exist.

The original manuscript of Bale's Pageant was preserved in the library of the Duke of Devonshire, and has been lately edited by Mr. Collier, and published by the Camden Society. The play, though written by a bishop, teems with the lowest ribaldry and vituperation, insomuch that Mr. Knight pronounces "the intolerance of Bale against the Romish Church the most fierce and rampant exhibition of passion that ever assumed the ill-assorted garb of religious zeal." And, therewithal, the thing is totally barren of any thing that can pretend to the name of poetry or of dramatic life; and, in brief, is at once thoroughly stupid, malignant, and vile. In both these respects the King John of 1591 is a prodigious advance upon its predecessor. The most considerable exception in the later play is where Faulconbridge, while by order of the King he is plurdering the religious houses, finds a fair young nun hidden in a chest which was supposed to contain the abbot's treasures. Campbell regrets that the Poet did not retain this incident; a regret with which we can by no means sympathize for, surely, to set forth the crimes of individuals in such a way or at such a time as to fix a stigma upon whole classes of men, was a work that might well be left to meaner hands. In both the old plays, however, an intense hatred of Popery runs as a special purpose through the drama. Which matter is reformed altogether in Shakespeare; who, no doubt, understood well enough that any such special purpose would not consist with the just proportions of art; that to make the drama a vehicle for any such particular invective or sarcasın was quite "from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first, and now, was, and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature." He therefore betrays no repugnance to popery save in the form of a just and genuine patriotism; has no particular symptoms of a Protestant spirit, but only the natural beatings of a sound, honest English heart, resolute to withstand alike all foreign encroachments, whether from kings, or emperors, or popes. Thus his feeling against Rome is wisely tempered in that proportion which is equally required by the laws of morality and of art, issuing in a firm, manly national

sentiment with which all men may justly sympathize, be their creed what it may. And, surely, no English mouth can refuse the words, -"We must be free or die, who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake." So that the Poet's King John, viewed thus in connection with the model after which it was framed, yields a most forcible instance and proof of his universality. He follows his guide in those things which appeal to the feelings of man as man; but forsakes him in whatsoever flatters the prejudices and antipathies of men as belonging to this or that party or sect. And as aversion to Rome is chastised down from the prominence of a special purpose in the play, the parts of Arthur and Constance and Faulconbridge proportionably rise; parts that spontaneously knit in and combine with the common sympathies and sentiments of humanity,—such a language as may always dwell together with the spirit of a man, and be twisted about his heart for ever.

Still the question recurs, why did Shakespeare, with the authentic materials of history at hand, and with his own matchless power of shaping those materials into beautiful and impressive forms of dramatic life, why did he in the single instance of King John depart from his usual course, preferring a fabulous history to the true, and that, too, even though, for aught now appears, the true would have answered his purpose just as well. It is with the view of suggesting a probable answer to this question that we have dwelt so much at length on the two plays that preceded his. We thus see that for special causes the subject of King John was early brought upon the stage. The same causes long operated to keep it there. The King John of the stage, striking in with the passions and interests of the time, had become familiar to the people, and twined itself closely with their feelings and thoughts. A faithful version would have worked at great disadvantage in competition with the theatrical one already thus established. This strong prepossession of the popular mind Shakespeare probably did not think it wise to offend or disturb. We agree therefore with Mr. Knight, that "it was a submission of his own original powers of seizing upon the feelings and understanding of his audience, to the stronger power of habit in the same audience." In other words, the current of popular association being so strong already, he chose to fall in with it, rather than undertake to stem it. We may regret that he did so; but we can scarce doubt that he did it knowingly and upon principle: nor should we so much blame him for not turning that stream, as thank him for thus purifying it.

The only extant or discovered notice of Shakespeare's King John, till it appeared in the folio of 1623, is by Meres in his Wit's Commonwealth. So that all we can say with any certainty is, that the play was written some time before 1598. Blount and Jaggard made an entry in the Stationers' Register, November 8, 1623, of the plays "not formerly entered to other men;" and King John is uot among them. From which we might naturally