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to Shakspere by any of his contemporaries; and yet it must have been a popular play, for it was reprinted forty years after its pub

peared not only easy to be dramatized, but a
worthy subject for his first efforts. We have
to consider, too, how familiar the fearful nar-
rative must have been to the young Shak-lication.
spere. The name of his own mother was
Arden; perhaps the Kentish Arden had
some slight relationship with her family;
but it is evident that the play originally
bore the name of Arden of Feversham, as if
it were to mark the distinction between that
family and the Ardens of Wilmecote. The
tale, too, was narrated at uncommon length
in the Chronicle' with which Shakspere was
very early familiar. There is considerable
inequality in the style of this play, but that
inequality is not sufficient to lead us to be-
lieve that more than one hand was engaged
in it. The dramatic management is always
skilful;
the interest never flags; the action
steadily goes forward; there are no secondary
plots; and the little comedy that we find is
not thrust in to produce a laugh from a few
barren spectators. The writer, we think, was
familiar with London, which is not at all in-
consistent with the belief that it belongs to
the youth of Shakspere. Still, the utter
absence of external evidence must have left
the matter exceedingly doubtful, even if the
tragedy had possessed higher excellences
than belong to it. It was never attributed

Without doubt there may have been some writer, of whose name and works we know nothing, to whom this play may have been assigned; but if it be improbable that Shakspere had written it, it is equally improbable that any of the known dramatists who had attained a celebrity in 1592 should have written it. It has none of the characteristics of any one of them-their extravagance of language; their forced passion; their overloading of classical allusions; their monotonous versification. Its power mainly lies in its simplicity. The unhappy woman is the chief character in the drama; and it appears to us that the author especially exhibits in "Mistress Arden" that knowledge of the hidden springs of human guilt and weakness which is not to be found in the generalities of any of the early contemporaries of Shakspere. Still we must be understood as not attempting to pronounce any decided opinion upon the question of authorship. We neither hold with the German critics, whose belief approaches credulity in this and other cases, nor with the English, who appear to consider, in most things, that scepticism and sound judgment are identical.

BOOK III.

CHAPTER I.
THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA.

A CHARGE which has been urged against
Shakspere, with singular complacency on the
part of the accusers, is, that he did not in-
vent his plots. A writer, who in these later
days has thought that to disparage Shak-
spere would be a commendable task, says,
"If Shakspere had little of what the world

calls learning, he had less of invention, so far as regards the fable of his plays. For every one of them he was, in some degree, indebted to a preceding piece."* The assertion that the most inventive of poets was without invention, "as far as regards the fable of his *Life of Shakspeare,' in Lardner's Cyclopædia.

or is supposed to have borrowed, is the story of the shepherdess Felismena, which is thus translated by Mr. Dunlop :-"The first part of the threats of Venus was speedily accom

plays," is as absurd as to say that Scott did not invent the fable of 'Kenilworth,' because the sad tale of Amy Robsart is found in Mickle's beautiful ballad of Cumnor Hall.' The truth is, that no one can properly appre-plished; and, my father having early folciate the extent as well as the subtilty of Shakspere's invention-its absorbing and purifying power-who has not traced him to his sources. It will be our duty, in many cases, to direct especial attention to the material upon which Shakspere worked, to show how the rough ore became, under his hands, pure and resplendent-converted into something above all price by the unapproachable skill of the artist. It is not the workman polishing the diamond, but converting by his wonderful alchymy, something of small value into the diamond. The student of Shakspere will understand that we here more particularly allude to the great plays which are founded on previous imaginative works, such as Romeo and Juliet,' and 'Lear;' and not to those in which, like 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' a few incidents are borrowed from the romance-writers.

66

lowed my mother to the tomb, I was left an orphan. Henceforth I resided at the house of a distant relative; and, having attained my seventeenth year, became the victim of the offended goddess by falling in love with Don Felix, a young nobleman of the province in which I lived. The object of my affections felt a reciprocal passion; but his father, having learned the attachment which subsisted between us, sent his son to court, with a view to prevent our union. Soon after his departure I followed him in the disguise of a page, and discovered on the night of my arrival at the capital, by a serenade I heard him give, that Don Felix had already disposed of his affections. Without being recognised by him, I was admitted into his service, and was engaged by my former lover to conduct his correspondence with the mistress who, since our separation, had supplanted me in his heart.”

This species of incident, it is truly observed by Steevens, and afterwards by Dunlop, is found in many of the ancient novels. In

Twelfth Night,' where Shakspere is supposed to have copied Bandello, the same adventure occurs; but in that delightful comedy, the lady to whom the page in disguise is sent falls in love with him. Such is the Story of Felismena. It is, however, clear that Shakspere must have known this part of the romance of Montemayor, although the translation of Yong was not published till 1598; for the pretty dialogue between Julia and Lucetta, in the first act, where Julia upbraids her servant for bringing the letter of Proteus, corresponds, even to some turns of expression, with a similar description by Felismena of her love's history. We give a passage from the old translation by Bartholomew Yong, which will enable our

"But what shall we do ?" said the barber in 'Don Quixote,' when, with the priest, the housekeeper, and the niece, he was engaged in making a bonfire of the knight's library -"what shall we do with these little books that remain ?" 66 'These," said the priest, are probably not books of chivalry, but of poetry." And, opening one, he found it was the 'Diana' of George Montemayor, and said (believing all the rest of the same kind), "These do not deserve to be burnt like the rest, for they cannot do the mischief that those of chivalry have done: they are works of genius and fancy, and do nobody any hurt." Such was the criticism of Cervantes upon the 'Diana' of Montemayor. The romance was the most popular which had appeared in Spain since the days of ' Amadis de Gaul;'* and it was translated into English by Bartholomew Yong, and published in 1598. The story involves a perpetual confusion of modern manners and ancient my-readers to compare the romance-writer and thology; and Ceres, Minerva, and Venus, as the dramatist :well as the saints, constitute the machinery. The one part which Shakspere has borrowed,

* Dunlop's 'History of Fiction.'

"Yet to try if by giving her some occasion I might prevail, I said unto her-And is it so, Rosina, that Don Felix, without any regard to

mine honour, dares write unto me? These are things, mistress (said she demurely to me again), that are commonly incident to love, wherefore, I beseech you, pardon me; for, if I had thought to have angered you with it, I would have first pulled out the balls of mine eyes. How cold my heart was at that blow, God knows; yet did I dissemble the matter, and suffer myself to remain that night only with my desire, and with occasion of little sleep."-P. 55.

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The writer in Lardner's Cyclopædia, whom we have already mentioned, says, "The Two Gentlemen of Verona' (a very poor drama) is indebted for many of its incidents to two works-the Arcadia' of Sidney, and the 'Diana' of Montemayor." The single incident in Sidney's 'Arcadia' which bears the slightest resemblance to the story of The Two Gentlemen of Verona' is where Pyrocles, one of the two heroes of the 'Arcadia,' is compelled to become the captain of a band of people called Helots, who had revolted from the Lacedæmonians; and this is supposed to have given origin to the thoroughly Italian incident of Valentine being compelled to become the captain of the outlaws. The English travellers in Italy, in the time of Shakspere, were perfectly familiar with banditti, often headed by daring adventurers of good family. Fynes Moryson, who travelled between Rome and Naples in 1594, has described a band headed by "the nephew of the Cardinal Cajetano." We may, therefore, fairly leave the uninventive Shakspere to

have found his outlaws in other narratives

than that of the 'Arcadia.' With regard to the 'Diana' of Montemayor, we have stated the entire amount of what the author of 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona' is supposed

to have borrowed from it.

Amongst the objections which Dr. Johnson, in the discharge of his critical office, appears to have thought it his duty to raise against every play of Shakspere, he says, with regard to the plot of this play, “he places the emperor at Milan, and sends his young men to attend him, but never mentions him more." As the emperor had nothing whatever to do with the story of 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' it was quite unnecessary that Shakspere should mention

him more; and the mention of him at all was only demanded by a poetical law, which Shakspere well understood, by which the introduction of a few definite circumstances, either of time or place, is sought for, to take the conduct of a story, in ever so small a degree, out of the region of generalization, and, by so doing, invest it with some of the attributes of reality. The poetical value of this single line

"Attends the emperor in his royal court"*-can only be felt by those who desire to attach precise images to the descriptions which poetry seeks to put before the mind, and, above all, to the incidents which dramatic poetry endeavours to group and embody. Had this line not occurred in the play before us, we should have had a very vague idea of the scenes which are here presented to us; and, as it is, the poet has left just such an amount of vagueness as is quite compatible with the free conduct of his plot. He is not here dramatizing history. He does not undertake to bring before us the fierce struggles for the real sovereignty of the Milanese between Francis I. and the Emperor Charles V., while Francesco Sforza, the Duke of Milan, held a precarious and disputed authority. He does not pretend to tell us of the dire calamities, the subtle intrigues, and the wonderful reverses which preceded the complete subjection of Italy to the conqueror at Pavia. He does not show us the unhappy condition of Milan, in 1529, when, according to Guicciardini, the poor people who could not buy provisions at the exorbitant prices demanded by the governor died in the streets,-when the greater number of the nobility fled from the city, and those who remained were miserably poor,and when the most frequented places were overgrown with grass, nettles, and brambles. He gives us a peaceful period, when courtiers talked lively jests in the duke's saloons, and serenaded their mistresses in the duke's

courts.

This state of things might have existed during the short period between the treaty of Cambray, in 1529 (when Francis I. gave up all claims to Milan, and it became

*Act 1. Scene 111.

H

He saw, and we think correctly, that there was not less real impropriety in making the ancient Greeks speak English than in making the same Greeks describe the maiden "in shady cloister mew'd" by the modern name of a nun*. He had to translate the images of the Greeks, as well as their language, into forms of words that an uncritical English audience would apprehend. Keeping this principle in view, whenever we meet with a commentator lifting up his eyes in astonishment at the prodigious ignorance of Shakspere, with regard to geography, and chronology, and a thousand other proprieties to which the empire of poetry has been sub

a fief of the empire under Charles V.), and the | chronisms we are quite willing to believe. death of Francesco Sforza, in 1535; or it might have existed at an earlier period in the life of Sforza, when after the battle of Pavia, he was restored to the dukedom of Milan; or when, in 1525, he received a formal investiture of his dignity. All that Shakspere attempted to define was some period when there was a Duke of Milan holding his authority in a greater or less degree under the emperor. That period might have been before the time of Francesco Sforza. It could not have been after it, because, upon the death of that prince, the contest for the sovereignty of the Milanese was renewed between Francis I. and Charles V., till, in 1540, Charles invested his son Philip (after-jected by the inroads of modern accuracy, wards husband of Mary of England) with the title, and the separate honours of a Duke of Milan became merged in the imperial family.

The one historical fact, then, mentioned in this play, is that of the emperor holding his court at Milan, which was under the government of a duke, who was a vassal of the empire. Assuming that this fact prescribes a limit to the period of the action, we must necessarily place that period at least half a century before the date of the composition of this drama. Such a period may, or may not, have been in Shakspere's mind. It was scarcely necessary for him to have defined the period for the purpose of making his play more intelligible to his audience. That was all the purpose he had to accomplish. He was not, as we have said before, teaching history, in which he had to aim at all the exactness that was compatible with the exercise of his dramatic art. He had here, as in many other cases, to tell a purely romantic story: and all that he had to provide for with reference to what is called costume, in the largest sense of that word, was, that he should not put his characters in any positions, nor conduct his story through any details, which should run counter to the actual knowledge, or even to the conventional opinions, of his audience. That this was the theory upon which he worked as an artist we have little doubt; and that he carried this theory even into wilful ana

we picture to ourselves a far different being from the rude workman which their pedantic demonstrations have figured as the beau idéal of the greatest of poets. We see the most skilful artist employing his materials in the precise mode in which he intended to employ them; displaying as much knowledge as he intended to display; and, after all, committing fewer positive blunders, and incurring fewer violations of accuracy, than any equally prolific poet before or after him. If we compare, for example, the violations of historical truth on the part of Shakspere, who lived in an age when all history came dim and dreary before the popular eye, and on the part of Sir Walter Scott, who lived in an age when all history was reduced to a tabular exactness-if we compare the great dramatist and the great novelist in this one point alone, we shall find that the man who belongs to the age of accuracy is many degrees more inaccurate than the man who belongs to the age of fable. There is, in truth, a philosophical point of view in which we must seek for the solution of those contradictions of what is real and probable, which, in Shakspere, his self-complacent critics are always delighted to refer to his ignorance. One of their greatest discoveries of his geographical ignorance is furnished in this play :-Proteus and his servant go to Milan by water. It is perfectly true that Verona is inland, and that even the river *Midsummer Night's Dream.'

Adige, which waters Verona, does not take | reality lived in a larger world of art;-art its course by Milan. Shakspere, therefore, was most ignorant of geography! In Shakspere's days countries were not so exactly mapped out as in our own, and therefore he may, from lack of knowledge, have made a boat sail from Verona, and have given Bohemia a seabord. But let it be borne in mind that, in numberless other instances, Shakspere has displayed the most exact acquaintance with what we call geographyan acquaintance not only with the territorial boundaries and the physical features of particular countries, but with a thousand nice peculiarities connected with their government and customs, which nothing but the most diligent reading and inquiry could furnish. Is there not, therefore, another solution of the ship at Verona, and the seabord of Bohemia, than Shakspere's ignorance? Might not his knowledge have been in subjection to what he required, or fancied he required, for the conduct of his dramatic incidents? Why does Scott make the murder of a Bishop of Liege, by William de la Marck, the great cause of the quarrel | between Charles the Bold and Louis XI., to revenge which murder the combined forces of Burgundy and France stormed the city of Liege, when, at the period of the insurrection of the Liegeois described in 'Quentin Durward,' no William de la Marck was upon the real scene, and the murder of a Bishop of Liege by him took place fourteen years afterwards? No one, we suppose, imputes this inaccuracy to historical ignorance in Scott. He was writing a romance, we say, and he therefore thought fit to sacrifice historical truth. The real question, in all these cases, to be asked, is, Has the writer of imagination gained by the violation of propriety a full equivalent for what he has lost? In the case of Shakspere we are not to determine this question by a reference to the actual state of popular knowledge in our own time. What startles us as a violation of propriety was received by the audience of Shakspere as a fact, or, what was nearer the poet's mind, the fact was held by the audience to be in subjection to the fable which he sought to present ;-the world of

divested the real of its formal shapes, and made its hard masses plastic. In our own days we have lost the power of surrendering our understanding, spell-bound, to the witchery of the dramatic poet. We cannot sit for two hours enchained to the one scene which equally represents Verona or Milan, Rome or London, and ask no aid to our senses beyond what the poet supplies us in his dialogue. We must now have changing scenes, which carry us to new localities; and pauses, to enable us to comprehend the time which has elapsed in the progress of the action; and appropriate dresses, that we may at once distinguish a king from a peasant, and a Roman from a Greek. None of these aids had our ancestors :-but they had what we have not-a thorough love of the dramatic art in its highest range, and an appreciation of its legitimate authority. Wherever the wand of the enchanter waved, there were they ready to come within his circle and to be mute. They did not ask, as we were long too accustomed to ask, for happy Lears and unmetaphysical Hamlets. They were content to weep scalding tears with the old king, when his "poor fool was hanged," and to speculate with the unresolving prince even to the extremest depths of his subtlety. They did not require tragedy to become a blustering melodrame, or comedy a pert farce. They could endure poetry and wit-they understood the alternations of movement and repose. We have, in our character of audience, become degraded even by our advance in many appliances of civilization with regard to which the audiences of Shakspere were wholly ignorant. We know many small things exactly which they were content to leave unstudied; but we have lost the perception of many grand and beautiful things which they received instinctively and without effort. They had great artists working for them, who knew that the range of their art would carry them far beyond the hard, dry, literal copying of every-day Nature which we call Art; and they laid down their shreds and patches of accurate knowledge as a tribute to the conquerors who came to sub

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