h

external testimony, though we should not rely too much. on that as to Shakspeare, has assigned to him; but the play is full of evident marks of an inferior hand. Its date is unknown; Drake supposes it to have been his earliest work, rather from its inferiority than on any other ground. Titus Andronicus is now by common consent denied to be, in any sense, a production of Shakspeare; very few passages, I should think not one, resemble his manner.

k

Errors.

36. The Comedy of Errors may be presumed, by an allusion it contains, to have been written before comedy of the submission of Paris to Henry IV. in 1594, which nearly put an end to the civil war. It is founded on a very popular subject. This furnishes two extant comedies of Plautus, a translation from one of which, the Menæchmi, was represented in Italy earlier than any other play. It had been already, as Mr. Collier thinks, brought upon the stage in England; and another play, later than the Comedy of Errors, has been reprinted by Steevens. Shakspeare himself was so well pleased with the idea that he has returned to it in Twelfth Night. Notwithstanding the opportunity which these mistakes of identity furnish for ludicrous situations, and for carrying on a complex plot, they are not very well adapted to dramatic effect, not only from the manifest difficulty of finding performers quite alike, but because, were this overcome, the audience must be in as great embarrassment as the represented characters themselves. In the Comedy of Errors there are only a few passages of a poetical vein, yet such perhaps as no other living dramatist could have written; but the story is well invented and well managed; the confusion of persons does not cease to amuse; the dialogue is easy and gay beyond what had been hitherto heard on the stage;

h Malone, in a dissertation on the tragedy of Pericles, maintained that it was altogether an early work of Shakspeare. Steevens contended that it was a production of some older poet, improved by him; and Malone had the candour to own that he had been wrong. The opinion of Steevens is now general. Drake gives the last three acts, and part of the former, to Shakspeare; but I can hardly think his share is by any means so large.

i Notwithstanding this internal eviVOL. II.

dence, Meres, so early as 1598, enumerates Titus Andronicus among the plays of Shakspeare, and mentions no other but what is genuine. Drake, ii. 287. But, in criticism of all kinds, we must acquire a dogged habit of resisting testimony, when res ipsa per se vociferatur to the contrary.

kAct iii. scene 2. Some have judged the play from this passage to be written as early as 1591, but on precarious grounds.

N

there is little buffoonery in the wit, and no absurdity in the circumstances.

Two Gentlemen of Verona.

37. The Two Gentlemen of Verona ranks above the Comedy of Errors, though still in the third class of Shakspeare's plays. It was probably the first English comedy in which characters are drawn from social life, at once ideal and true; the cavaliers of Verona and their lady-loves are graceful personages, with no transgression of the probabilities of nature; but they are not exactly the real men and women of the same rank in England. The imagination of Shakspeare must have been guided by some familiarity with romances before it struck out this comedy. It contains some very poetical lines. Though these two plays could not give the slightest suspicion of the depth of thought which Lear and Macbeth. were to display, it was already evident that the names of Greene, and even Marlowe, would be eclipsed without any necessity for purloining their plumes.

Love's La bour Lost.

38. Love's Labour Lost is generally placed, I believe, at the bottom of the list. There is indeed little interest in the fable, if we can say that there is any fable at all; but there are beautiful coruscations of fancy, more original conception of character than in the Comedy of Errors, more lively humour than in the Gentlemen of Verona, more symptoms of Shakspeare's future powers as a comic writer than in either. Much that is here but imperfectly developed came forth again in his later plays, especially in As you Like It, and Much Ado about Nothing. The Taming of the Shrew is the only play, except Henry VI., in which Shakspeare has been very largely a borrower. The best parts are certainly his, but it must be confessed that several passages for which we give him credit, and which are very amusing, belong to his unknown predecessor. The original play, reprinted by Steevens, was published in 1594.' I do not find so much genius in the Taming of the Shrew as in Love's Labour Lost; but, as an entire play, it is much more complete.

Taming of the Shrew.

1 Mr. Collier thinks that Shakspeare had nothing to do with any of the scenes where Katherine and Petruchio are not introduced. The underplot resembles,

he says, the style of Haughton, author of a comedy called Englishmen for my Money, iii. 78.

Night's

39. The beautiful play of Midsummer Night's Dream is placed by Malone as early as 1592; its supe- Midsummer riority to those we have already mentioned affords Dream. some presumption that it was written after them. But it evidently belongs to the earlier period of Shakspeare's genius; poetical, as we account it, more than dramatic; yet rather so because the indescribable profusion of imaginative poetry in this play overpowers our senses till we can hardly observe anything else, than from any deficiency of dramatic excellence. For in reality the structure of the fable, consisting as it does of three if not four actions, very distinct in their subjects and personages, yet wrought into each other without effort or confusion, displays the skill, or rather instinctive felicity, of Shakspeare, as much as in any play he has written. No preceding dramatist had attempted to fabricate a complex plot; for low comic scenes, interspersed with a serious action upon which they have no influence, do not merit notice. The Menæchmi of Plautus had been imitated by others as well as by Shakspeare; but we speak here of original invention.

Its ma

chinery.

40. The Midsummer Night's Dream is, I believe, altogether original in one of the most beautiful conceptions that ever visited the mind of a poet, the fairy machinery. A few before him had dealt in a vulgar and clumsy manner with popular superstitions; but the sportive, beneficent, invisible population of the air and earth, long since established in the creed of childhood, and of those simple as children, had never for a moment been blended with "human mortals" among the personages of the drama. Lily's Maid's Metamorphosis is probably later than this play of Shakspeare, and was not published till 1600. It is unnecessary to observe that the fairies of Spenser, as he has dealt with them, are wholly of a differ

ent race.

Its language.

41. The language of Midsummer Night's Dream is equally novel with the machinery. It sparkles in perpetual brightness with all the hues of the rainbow, yet there is nothing overcharged or affectedly ornamented. Perhaps no play of Shakspeare has fewer

m

Collier, iii. 185. Lily had, how- them speak, into some of his earlier ever, brought fairies, without making plays. Ibid.

blemishes, or is from beginning to end in so perfect keeping; none in which so few lines could be erased, or so few expressions blamed. His own peculiar idiom, the dress of his mind, which began to be discernible in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, is more frequently manifested in the present play. The expression is seldom obscure; but it is never in poetry, and hardly in prose, the expression of other dramatists, and far less of the people. And here, without reviving the debated question of Shakspeare's learning, I must venture to think that he possessed rather more acquaintance with the Latin language than many believe. The phrases, unintelligible and improper, except in the sense of their primitive roots, which occur so copiously in his plays, seem to be unaccountable on the supposition of absolute ignorance. In the Midsummer Night's Dream these are much less frequent than in his later dramas. But here we find several instances. Thus, "things base and vile, holding no quantity," for value; rivers, that "have overborn their continents," the continente ripa of Horace; "compact of imagination;" "something of great constancy," for consistency; "sweet Pyramus translated there; "the law of Athens, which by no means we may extenuate." I have considerable doubts whether any of these expressions would be found in the contemporary prose of Elizabeth's reign, which was less overrun by pedantry than that of her successor; but, could authority be produced for Latinisms so forced, it is still not very likely that one who did not understand their proper meaning would have introduced them into poetry. It would be a weak answer that we do not detect in Shakspeare any imitations of the Latin poets. His knowledge of the language may have been chiefly derived, like that of schoolboys, from the dictionary, and insufficient for the thorough appreciation of their beauties. But, if we should believe him well acquainted with Virgil or Ovid, it would be by no means surprising that his learning does not display itself in imitation. Shakspeare seems now and then to have a tinge on his imagination from former passages; but he never designedly imitates, though, as we have seen, he has sometimes adopted. The streams of invention flowed too fast from his own mind to leave him time to

accommodate the words of a foreign language to our own. He knew that to create would be easier, and pleasanter, and better."

42. The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is referred by Malone to the year 1596. Were I to judge by Romeo and internal evidence, I should be inclined to date this Juliet. play before the Midsummer Night's Dream; the great frequency of rhymes, the comparative absence of Latinisms, the want of that thoughtful philosophy, which, when it had once germinated in Shakspeare's mind, never ceased to display itself, and several of the faults that juvenility may best explain and excuse, would justify this inference.

Its plot.

43. In one of the Italian novels to which Shakspeare had frequently recourse for his fable, he had the good fortune to meet with this simple and pathetic subject. What he found he has arranged with great skill. The incidents in Romeo and Juliet are rapid, various, unintermitting in interest, sufficiently probable, and tending to the catastrophe. The most regular dramatist has hardly excelled one writing for an infant and barbarian stage. It is certain that the observation of the unity of time, which we find in this tragedy, unfashionable as the name of unity has become in our criticism, gives an intenseness of interest to the story, which is often diluted and dispersed in a dramatic history. No play of Shakspeare is more frequently represented, or honoured with more tears.

and blem

44. If from this praise of the fable we pass to other considerations, it will be more necessary to modify Its beauties our eulogies. It has been said above of the Mid- ishes. summer Night's Dream, that none of Shakspeare's plays have fewer blemishes. We can by no means repeat this commendation of Romeo and Juliet. It may be said rather that few, if any, are more open to reasonable censure;

"The celebrated essay by Farmer on the learning of Shakspeare put an end to such notions as we find in Warburton and many of the older commentators, that he had imitated Sophocles, and I know not how many Greek authors. Those indeed who agree with what I have said in a former chapter as to the state of learning under Elizabeth will

not think it probable that Shakspeare could have acquired any knowledge of Greek. It was not a part of such education as he received. The case of Latin is different: we know that he was at a grammar school, and could hardly have spent two or three years there without bringing away a certain portion of the language.