A Life of William Shakespeare Part 5

't.i.tus Andronicus' was in his own lifetime claimed for Shakespeare, but Edward Ravenscroft, who prepared a new version in 1678, wrote of it: 'I have been told by some anciently conversant with the stage that it was not originally his, but brought by a private author to be acted, and he only gave some master-touches to one or two of the princ.i.p.al parts or characters.' Ravenscroft's a.s.sertion deserves acceptance. The tragedy, a sanguinary picture of the decadence of Imperial Rome, contains powerful lines and situations, but is far too repulsive in plot and treatment, and too ostentatious in cla.s.sical allusions, to take rank with Shakespeare's acknowledged work. Ben Jonson credits 't.i.tus Andronicus' with a popularity equalling Kyd's 'Spanish Tragedy,' and internal evidence shows that Kyd was capable of writing much of 't.i.tus.' It was suggested by a piece called 't.i.tus and Vespasian,' which Lord Strange's men played on April 11, 1592; {65} this is only extant in a German version acted by English players in Germany, and published in 1620. {66a} 't.i.tus Andronicus' was obviously taken in hand soon after the production of 't.i.tus and Vespasian' in order to exploit popular interest in the topic.

It was acted by the Earl of Suss.e.x's men on January 23, 1593-4, when it was described as a new piece; but that it was also acted subsequently by Shakespeare's company is shown by the t.i.tle-page of the first extant edition of 1600, which describes it as having been performed by the Earl of Derby's and the Lord Chamberlain's servants (successive t.i.tles of Shakespeare's company), as well as by those of the Earls of Pembroke and Suss.e.x. It was entered on the 'Stationers' Register' to John Danter on February 6, 1594. {66b} Langbaine claims to have seen an edition of this date, but none earlier than that of 1600 is now known.

'Merchant of Venice.'

For part of the plot of 'The Merchant of Venice,' in which two romantic love stories are skilfully blended with a theme of tragic import, Shakespeare had recourse to 'Il Pecorone,' a fourteenth-century collection of Italian novels by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino. {66c} There a Jewish creditor demands a pound of flesh of a defaulting Christian debtor, and the latter is rescued through the advocacy of 'the lady of Belmont,' who is wife of the debtor's friend. The management of the plot in the Italian novel is closely followed by Shakespeare. A similar story is slenderly outlined in the popular medieval collection of anecdotes called 'Gesta Romanorum,' while the tale of the caskets, which Shakespeare combined with it in the 'Merchant,' is told independently in another portion of the same work. But Shakespeare's 'Merchant' owes much to other sources, including more than one old play. Stephen Gosson describes in his 'Schoole of Abuse' (1579) a lost play called 'the Jew . . .

showne at the Bull [inn]. . . representing the greedinesse of worldly chusers and b.l.o.o.d.y mindes of usurers.' This description suggests that the two stories of the pound of flesh and the caskets had been combined before for purposes of dramatic representation. The scenes in Shakespeare's play in which Antonio negotiates with Shylock are roughly antic.i.p.ated, too, by dialogues between a Jewish creditor Gerontus and a Christian debtor in the extant play of 'The Three Ladies of London,' by R[obert] W[ilson], 1584. There the Jew opens the attack on his Christian debtor with the lines:

Signor Mercatore, why do you not pay me? Think you I will be mocked in this sort?

This three times you have flouted me--it seems you make thereat a sport.

Truly pay me my money, and that even now presently, Or by mighty Mahomet, I swear I will forthwith arrest thee.

Subsequently, when the judge is pa.s.sing judgment in favour of the debtor, the Jew interrupts:

Stay, there, most puissant judge. Signor Mercatore consider what you do.

Pay me the princ.i.p.al, as for the interest I forgive it you.

Shylock and Roderigo Lopez.

Above all is it of interest to note that Shakespeare in 'The Merchant of Venice' betrays the last definable traces of his disciples.h.i.+p to Marlowe.

Although the delicate comedy which lightens the serious interest of Shakespeare's play sets it in a wholly different category from that of Marlowe's 'Jew of Malta', the humanised portrait of the Jew Shylock embodies distinct reminiscences of Marlowe's caricature of the Jew Barabbas. But Shakespeare soon outpaced his master, and the inspiration that he drew from Marlowe in the 'Merchant' touches only the general conception of the central figure. Doubtless the popular interest aroused by the trial in February 1594 and the execution in June of the Queen's Jewish physician, Roderigo Lopez, incited Shakespeare to a new and subtler study of Jewish character. {68} For Shylock (not the merchant Antonio) is the hero of the play, and the main interest culminates in the Jew's trial and discomfiture. The bold transition from that solemn scene which trembles on the brink of tragedy to the gently poetic and humorous incidents of the concluding act attests a mastery of stagecraft; but the interest, although it is sustained to the end, is, after Shylock's final exit, pitched in a lower key. The 'Venesyon Comedy,' which Henslowe, the manager, produced at the Rose on August 25, 1594, was probably the earliest version of 'The Merchant of Venice,' and it was revised later.

It was not published till 1600, when two editions appeared, each printed from a different stage copy.

'King John.'

To 1594 must also be a.s.signed 'King John,' which, like the 'Comedy of Errors' and 'Richard II,' altogether eschews prose. The piece, which was not printed till 1623, was directly adapted from a worthless play called 'The Troublesome Raigne of King John' (1591), which was fraudulently reissued in 1611 as 'written by W. Sh.,' and in 1622 as by 'W.

Shakespeare.' There is very small ground for a.s.sociating Marlowe's name with the old play. Into the adaptation Shakespeare flung all his energy, and the theme grew under his hand into genuine tragedy. The three chief characters--the mean and cruel king, the n.o.blehearted and desperately wronged Constance, and the soldierly humourist, Faulconbridge--are in all essentials of his own invention, and are portrayed with the same sureness of touch that marked in Shylock his rapidly maturing strength. The scene, in which the gentle boy Arthur learns from Hubert that the king has ordered his eyes to be put out, is as affecting as any pa.s.sage in tragic literature.

'Comedy of Errors' in Gray's Inn Hall.

At the close of 1594 a performance of Shakespeare's early farce, 'The Comedy of Errors,' gave him a pa.s.sing notoriety that he could well have spared. The piece was played on the evening of Innocents' Day (December 28), 1594, in the hall of Gray's Inn, before a crowded audience of benchers, students, and their friends. There was some disturbance during the evening on the part of guests from the Inner Temple, who, dissatisfied with the accommodation afforded them, retired in dudgeon.

'So that night,' the contemporary chronicler states, 'was begun and continued to the end in nothing but confusion and errors, whereupon it was ever afterwards called the "Night of Errors."' {70} Shakespeare was acting on the same day before the Queen at Greenwich, and it is doubtful if he were present. On the morrow a commission of oyer and terminer inquired into the causes of the tumult, which was attributed to a sorcerer having 'foisted a company of base and common fellows to make up our disorders with a play of errors and confusions.'

Early plays doubtfully a.s.signed to Shakespeare.

Two plays of uncertain authors.h.i.+p attracted public attention during the period under review (1591-4)--'Arden of Feversham' (licensed for publication April 3, 1592, and published in 1592) and 'Edward III'

(licensed for publication December 1, 1595, and published in 1596).

Shakespeare's hand has been traced in both, mainly on the ground that their dramatic energy is of a quality not to be discerned in the work of any contemporary whose writings are extant. There is no external evidence in favour of Shakespeare's authors.h.i.+p in either case. 'Arden of Feversham' dramatises with intensity and insight a sordid murder of a husband by a wife which took place at Faversham in 1551, and was fully reported by Holinshed. The subject is of a different type from any which Shakespeare is known to have treated, and although the play may be, as Mr. Swinburne insists, 'a young man's work,' it bears no relation either in topic or style to the work on which young Shakespeare was engaged at a period so early as 1591 or 1592. 'Edward III' is a play in Marlowe's vein, and has been a.s.signed to Shakespeare on even more shadowy grounds.

Capell reprinted it in his 'Prolusions' in 1760, and described it as 'thought to be writ by Shakespeare.' Many speeches scattered through the drama, and one whole scene--that in which the Countess of Salisbury repulses the advances of Edward III--show the hand of a master (act ii.

sc. ii.) But there is even in the style of these contributions much to dissociate them from Shakespeare's acknowledged productions, and to justify their ascription to some less gifted disciple of Marlowe. {72a} A line in act ii. sc. i. ('Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds') reappears in Shakespeare's Sonnets' (xciv. l. 14). {72b} It was contrary to his practice to literally plagiarise himself. The line in the play was doubtless borrowed from a ma.n.u.script copy of the 'Sonnets.'

'Mucedorus.'

Two other popular plays of the period, 'Mucedorus' and 'Faire Em,' have also been a.s.signed to Shakespeare on slighter provocation. In Charles II.'s library they were bound together in a volume labelled 'Shakespeare, Vol. I.,' and bold speculators have occasionally sought to justify the misnomer.

'Mucedorus,' an elementary effort in romantic comedy, dates from the early years of Elizabeth's reign; it was first published, doubtless after undergoing revision, in 1595, and was reissued, 'amplified with new additions,' in 1610. Mr. Payne Collier, who included it in his privately printed edition of Shakespeare in 1878, was confident that a scene interpolated in the 1610 version (in which the King of Valentia laments the supposed loss of his son) displayed genius which Shakespeare alone could compa.s.s. However readily critics may admit the superiority in literary value of the interpolated scene to anything else in the piece, few will accept Mr. Collier's extravagant estimate. The scene was probably from the pen of an admiring but faltering imitator of Shakespeare. {73}

'Faire Em.'

'Faire Em,' although not published till 1631, was acted by Shakespeare's company while Lord Strange was its patron, and some lines from it are quoted for purposes of ridicule by Robert Greene in his 'Farewell to Folly' in 1592. It is another rudimentary endeavour in romantic comedy, and has not even the pretension of 'Mucedorus' to one short scene of conspicuous literary merit.

VI--THE FIRST APPEAL TO THE READING PUBLIC

Publication of 'Venus and Adonis.'

During the busy years (1591-4) that witnessed his first p.r.o.nounced successes as a dramatist, Shakespeare came before the public in yet another literary capacity. On April 18, 1593, Richard Field, the printer, who was his fellow-townsman, obtained a license for the publication of 'Venus and Adonis,' a metrical version of a cla.s.sical tale of love. It was published a month or two later, without an author's name on the t.i.tle-page, but Shakespeare appended his full name to the dedication, which he addressed in conventional style to Henry Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton. The Earl, who was in his twentieth year, was reckoned the handsomest man at Court, with a p.r.o.nounced disposition to gallantry. He had vast possessions, was well educated, loved literature, and through life extended to men of letters a generous patronage. {74} 'I know not how I shall offend,' Shakespeare now wrote to him, 'in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lords.h.i.+p, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden. . . . But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so n.o.ble a G.o.dfather.' 'The first heir of my invention' implies that the poem was written, or at least designed, before Shakespeare's dramatic work. It is affluent in beautiful imagery and metrical sweetness, but imbued with a tone of license which may be held either to justify the theory that it was a precocious product of the author's youth, or to show that Shakespeare was not unready in mature years to write with a view to gratifying a patron's somewhat lascivious tastes. The t.i.tle-page bears a beautiful Latin motto from Ovid's 'Amores:' {75a}

Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua.

The influence of Ovid, who told the story in his 'Metamorphoses,' is apparent in many of the details. But the theme was doubtless first suggested to Shakespeare by a contemporary effort. Lodge's 'Scillaes Metamorphosis,' which appeared in 1589, is not only written in the same metre (six-line stanzas rhyming _a b a b c c_), but narrates in the exordium the same incidents in the same spirit. There is little doubt that Shakespeare drew from Lodge some of his inspiration. {75b}

'Lucrece.'

A year after the issue of 'Venus and Adonis,' in 1594, Shakespeare published another poem in like vein, but far more mature in temper and execution. The digression (ll. 939-59) on the destroying power of Time, especially, is in an exalted key of meditation which is not sounded in the earlier poem. The metre, too, is changed; seven-line stanzas (Chaucer's rhyme royal, _a b a b b c c_) take the place of six-line stanzas. The second poem was entered in the 'Stationers' Registers' on May 9, 1594, under the t.i.tle of 'A Booke int.i.tled the Ravyshement of Lucrece,' and was published in the same year under the t.i.tle 'Lucrece.'

Richard Field printed it, and John Harrison published and sold it at the sign of the White Greyhound in St. Paul's Churchyard. The cla.s.sical story of Lucretia's ravishment and suicide is briefly recorded in Ovid's 'Fasti,' but Chaucer had retold it in his 'Legend of Good Women,' and Shakespeare must have read it there. Again, in topic and metre, the poem reflected a contemporary poet's work. Samuel Daniel's 'Complaint of Rosamond,' with its seven-line stanza (1592), stood to 'Lucrece' in even closer relation than Lodge's 'Scilla,' with its six-line stanza, to 'Venus and Adonis.' The pathetic accents of Shakespeare's heroine are those of Daniel's heroine purified and glorified. {77a} The pa.s.sage on Time is elaborated from one in Watson's 'Pa.s.sionate Centurie of Love'

(No. lxxvii.) {77b} Shakespeare dedicated his second volume of poetry to the Earl of Southampton, the patron of his first. He addressed him in terms of devoted friends.h.i.+p, which were not uncommon at the time in communications between patrons and poets, but suggest that Shakespeare's relations with the brilliant young n.o.bleman had grown closer since he dedicated 'Venus and Adonis' to him in colder language a year before.

'The love I dedicate to your lords.h.i.+p,' Shakespeare wrote in the opening pages of 'Lucrece,' 'is without end, whereof this pamphlet without beginning is but a superfluous moiety. . . What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours.'