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speare's plays for there to be any reasonable hope of bringing to an end the work of patience, rather than of intelligence, of pointing them all out. They especially superabound in his earlier works; "Henry VI.,” “ Titus Andronicus," the first acts of " Pericles,"" Love's Labour's Lost," "The Taming of the Shrew," "The Comedy of Errors," and two or three others are profusely adorned, sometimes even to excess, with classical allusions and quotations. This lavish use of Latin erudition clearly betrays the young author, eager to throw open all the stores of his mind, and anxious to please the reigning taste of the day. And for the same reason he turned to Italian models. From Ariosto's comedy of "I Suppositi," translated into English by the poet, George Gascoigne, in 1566, he borrowed part of the subject of "The Taming of the Shrew," in which the love-plot is developed in true Italian fashion, and old Gremio, who makes himself ridiculous by courting young Bianca, is a true Pantaloon. Such also, in the "Comedy of Errors," is Pinch, combining the functions of a schoolmaster, a conjuror, and a doctor:

"A hungry lean-faced villain,

A mere anatomy, a mountebank,

A thread-bare juggler, and a fortune-teller;

A needy, hollow-eyed, sharp-looking wretch,

A living dead man."

(Act V., Sc. 1.)

And the case is the same with all the distinctive features of the Italian school, its quaint conceits and play upon words, which, like the flowers of classical learning, show themselves more or less in all of Shakespeare's plays, but are especially numerous in those of his youth. A specimen may be given from the "Comedy of Errors," in which Luciana, when spoken to of love, exclaims:

“What, are you mad, that you do reason so?

Ant. Not mad, but mated; how, I do not know.

K

Luc. It is a fault that springeth from your eye.

Ant. For gazing on your beams, fair sun, being by.

Luc. Gaze where you should, and that will clear your sight.
Ant. As good to wink, sweet love, as look on night.

Mine eye's clear eye, my dear heart's dearer heart;
My food, my fortune, and my sweet hope's aim,
My sole earth's heaven, and my heaven's claim."

The language of Mercutio in "Romeo and Juliet," another of Shakespeare's earlier plays, is a continual display of fireworks. The comedy of "Love's Labour 's Lost" turns entirely upon witty affectations and the love of "a mint of phrases." If, as has been alleged, Shakespeare intended it as a satire upon Euphuism, the satire, it must be confessed, is of the gentlest description, and one in which he shows himself singularly guilty of the very mania at which his shafts are aimed; he enjoys it, he delights in it, and revels in it to his heart's content; "indulget genio suo."

Shakespeare never indeed completely freed himself from the spirit of the Italian style; the glittering and artificial play upon words occurs far more frequently than could be wished, until we reach the period of his full maturity of genius, beginning with "Julius Cæsar," and ending with "Cymbeline" or the "Tempest;" but it is especially in the outset of his career, in his comedies, that its factitious lustre is most dazzling. The young people in his plays speak a language of their own; and as in order to match the subject its description should be brilliant, I here borrow the pen of M. Taine.

"They are full of animation," writes the historian of English literature," their heads are filled to overflowing, and they amuse themselves, like nervous and enthusiastic artists of the present day, in the seclusion of their own studios. They speak, not to convince nor to be understood, but in order to satisfy their exuberant imagination, and to give an outlet to the mental sap with which they are running over. They play with words, twisting and turning them in and out of every kind of shape, and delight in new and sudden perspectives and in

violent contrasts, which they strike out one after another in rapid and endless succession. They heap flower upon flower, and glitter upon glitter; they are captivated by everything that is brilliant, and their language is embroidered with gold and lacework like their coats."

Shakespeare's first products, however, were not comedies, but two descriptive poems,-"Venus and Adonis," and "Lucrece." Greek and Latin respectively in title and subject as these two poems are, as well as by virtue of various details and several passages in imitation either of Virgil or of Ovid, yet in spirit they are wholly Italian. Their defects are those with which it is usual to reproach Italian literature at that period of its history when, the subject-matter beginning to fail, it fell into excessive refinements and subtleties of form. Shakespeare's sonnets are no less penetrated with the Italian spirit of Petrarch and the Petrarchists. His poems and sonnets, as Gervinus has well remarked

"place him among the number of those clients of the nobles, those scholars trained in a foreign school, those lyric and epic poets at whose head stands Edmund Spenser. If we possessed nothing from Shakespeare but these poems, we should rank him among the Draytons, Spensers, and Daniels, and not a doubt would have arisen over the nobility and dignity of his school and education." (Page 43.)

"Venus and Adonis" appeared in 1593, and "Lucrece " in 1594, when the Earl of Southampton, to whom they were dedicated, was about twenty years of age, but they were probably written several years before they were published. They are full of the exuberance of youth, under the form of a flood of passion and of poetry in the first, and of rhetoric and of prolixity in the second. Venus and Adonis," the subject is the sensual passion of a woman and the cold disdain of a boy; in "Lucrece," the sensual passion of a man and the purity of a woman. The symmetry is complete, but the difference in the merit of the two poems is considerable. It has been said that Shakespeare wrote "Lucrece" in

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expiation of his sin in writing "Venus and Adonis," and if the theory of this very unlikely repentance on his part were admissible, it might furnish a psychological explanation of the mediocrity of the second poem; inspiration had departed, leaving nothing in its place but an honest wish to accomplish a pious task, which is not at all the same thing. In a similar manner, it occurred to Lamartine, after having written the sublime lines of his "Désespoir," that his ode was not quite orthodox, and accordingly he set himself to compose in cold blood the fine, but comparatively feeble, stanzas in which he imagines an answer from "La Providence à l'Homme."

There are two diametrically opposite views taken of "Venus and Adonis." According to one view,—which is that in which I share,-it is a work full of passion. Everything in this poem "betrays," writes Gervinus, "that it was written in the first passion of youth." The German critic, whilst acknowledging that Shakespeare has even exceeded the redundant rhetoric of the Italian school, adds that his poem was distinguished amongst the many elaborate imaginative works then produced by English and Italian writers by its sincerity and truth of feeling. "In treating this subject," he says again, "Shakespeare appears a Croesus in poetic ideas, thoughts and images, a master and victor in the matter of love, a giant in passion and sensual power." This is also the opinion of M. Taine, whom "Venus and Adonis" has inspired with a page as warm and glowing as the subject itself.

But a different view is held by three important English critics-Hazlitt, Coleridge, and Professor Dowden. Hazlitt says, "The two poems of 'Venus and Adonis,' and of Tarquin and Lucrece,' appear to us like a couple of ice-houses. They are about as hard, as glittering, and as cold." Shakespeare writes in this poem," says Coleridge, "as if he were of another planet, charming you to gaze

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on the movements of Venus and Adonis as you the twinkling dances of two vernal butterflies." And lastly, Professor Dowden says: "In holding the subject before his imagination, Shakespeare is perfectly cool and collected . . . he remains unimpassioned-intent wholly upon getting down the right colours and lines upon

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It is a matter of individual impression. The feeling of English readers, especially of those who have tact and judgment, undoubtedly possesses great weight; nevertheless, I cannot refrain from thinking that the coldness of "Lucrece," which is in truth a freezing poem, has reacted disastrously on "Venus and Adonis."

Perhaps there may also have been a little overanxiety to recognize the central quality of Shakespeare's dramatic talent, in his descriptive poems, the calm strength, and height of irony by virtue of which he remained distinct and separate from all the various passions he depicted; for in point of fact his two first poems evince remarkably little dramatic power, and it is this absence of almost every indication of the direction that his genius was afterwards to take, that is the most extraordinary thing about them. If their authenticity were not thoroughly well attested, it would probably never have occurred to anybody to attribute them to Shakespeare.

"Venus and Adonis" brims over with poetry-erotic, lyrical, elegiac, and descriptive, but of dramatic poetry there is none. In a passage imitated from Ovid,† Venus, alarmed at the risks that Adonis runs in his passion for boar-hunting, entreats him, if he needs must hunt, to pursue instead inoffensive animals, like the hare or fox or roe, and she gives a description of a hunted hare, suffi

* "Shakespeare: His Mind and Art," p. 50.
+66 Metamorphoses," Book 10, lines 587 and following.

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