strength," continues Southey, "the armament was superior to any that this country had sent forth since the introduction of cannon. This expedition was directed, as the reader of English history knows, against Cadiz. It left Plymouth on the 3rd of June, 1596; and returned on the 8th of August; having effected its principal object, the destruction of the Spanish fleet. It is to this great armament that Malone thinks Shakspere alludes in the following lines in the second act, where Chatillon describes to King Philip the expected approach of King John : "All the unsettled humours of the land- In brief, a braver choice of dauntless spirits, To do offence and scath in Christendom." The supposed coincidence is, a great armament, principally composed of voluntaries. But does Shakspere speak of these voluntaries in a manner that would have been agreeable to an English audience; or that, however just it might be, was in accordance with the public recognition of the conduct of the army at Cadiz ? The "unsettled humours of the land"-the "rash, inconsiderate, fiery voluntaries"—the "birthrights on their backs”—the “offence and scath in Christendom,"'—are somewhat opposed to the sentiment expressed in the public prayer of thanksgiving, written by Burleigh, in which the moderation of the troops in the hour of victory was solemnly recognised. "War in those days," says Southey, was conducted in such a spirit, that for the troops not to have committed, and with the sanction of their leaders, any outrage upon humanity, was deemed a point of special honour to the commanders, and calling for an especial expression of gratitude to the Almighty." But the narrative of this expedition given in Hakluyt's 'Voyages,' by Dr. Marbeck, who attended the Lord High Admiral, is not equally honourable to the "voluntaries," as regards their respect for property. He speaks of the "great pillage of the common soldiers "the goodly furniture that was debased by the baser people" and "the intemperate disorder of some of the rasher sort." Shakspere might have known of this, but would he go out of his way to reprobate it? If he had written this play a few years later than 1596, he might have kept the expedition in his eye, and have described its "voluntaries," without offence to the popular or the courtly feeling. If he had written it earlier than 1596, he might have described "voluntaries" in general, from the many narratives of reckless military adventure with which he would be familiar. There is another allusion, according to Johnson, which fixes this date to 1596, or to the later date of 1605, which sets aside the evidence of Meres altogether, unless it be supposed that he assigned the old King John' to Shakspere. Pandulph thus denounces John: "And meritorious shall that hand be call'd, The pope published a bull against Elizabeth in 1596;—and in 1605 the perpetrators of the Gunpowder treason were canonized. We have, fortunately, a proof that Shakspere, in this case, abstained from any allusion to the history of his own times. In the old play of 'King John' he found the following passage:— 66 "I, Pandulph," &c., "pronounce thee accursed, discharging every of thy subjects of all duty and fealty that they do owe to thee, and pardon and forgiveness of sin to those or them whatsoever which shall carry arms against thee, or murder thee." Chalmers carries the passion of mixing up Shakspere's incidents and expressions with passing events to a greater extent than Malone or Johnson. According to him, the siege of Angiers is a type of the loss and recapture of Amiens in 1597; the altercations between the Bastard and Austria were to conduce to the unpopularity of the Archduke Albert; and the concluding exhortation, "Nought shall make us rue, If England to itself do rest but true," had allusion to the differences amongst the leading men of the Court of Elizabeth arising out of the ambition of Essex.* For the purpose of fixing an exact date for the composition of this play, we apprehend that our readers will agree with us that evidence such as this is not to be received with an implicit belief. Indeed, looking broadly at all which has been written upon the chronology of Shakspere's plays, with reference to this particular species of evidence, namely, the allusion to passing events, we fear * Supplemental Apology, p. 356. that, at the best, a great deal of labour has been bestowed for a very unsatisfactory result. The attempt, however, has been praiseworthy; and it has had the incidental good of evolving many curious points connected with our history and manners, that present themselves more forcibly to the mind in an isolated shape than when forming a portion of any large historical narration. Yet we are anxious to guard against one misapprehension which may have presented itself to the minds of some of our readers, as it did to our own minds when we first bestowed attention upon the large collection of facts, or conjectures, that have regard to the chronological order of our poet's plays. Properly to understand the principle upon which Shakspere worked, we must never for a moment suffer ourselves to believe that he was of that class of vulgar artists who are perpetually on the look-out for some temporary allusion (utterly worthless except in its relation to the excitement which is produced by passing events), for the mean purpose of endeavouring to "split the ears of the groundlings." If we should take literally what has been told us as regards this play, without examining the passages upon which such opinions are founded,—that it had allusions, for instance, to the expedition to Cadiz, to the bull of the pope against Elizabeth, and to the factions of Essex,-we might believe that the great poet, who, in his "Histories," sought "To raise our ancient sovereigns from their hearse, was one of those waiters upon events who seized upon a fleeting popularity, by presenting a mirror of the past in which a distorted present might be seen. But, rightly considered, the allusions of Shakspere to the passages of his own times are so few and so obscure, that they are utterly insufficient to abate one jot of his great merit, that "he was for all time." He was, indeed, in dealing with the spirit of the past, delighted, as Wordsworth has beautifully said in delineating his character of the poet, "to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them."+ His past was, therefore, wherever it could be interfused with the permanent and universal, a reflex of the present. * On worthy Master Shakespeare and his Poems, by J. M. S. From the folio of 1632. Observations prefixed to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. Thus, in the age of Elizabeth, and in the age of Victoria, his patriotism is an abiding and unchanging feeling; and has as little to do with the mutations of the world as any other of the great elements of human thought with which he deals. When the Bastard exclaims, "This England never did, nor never shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, we feel such lines had a peculiar propriety when they were uttered before an audience that might have been trembling at the present threats of a Spanish invasion, had they not been roused to defiance by the "lion-port" of their queen, and by the mightier power of that spirit of intellectual superiority which directed her councils, and, what was even more important, had entered into the spirit of her people's literature. But these noble lines were just as appropriate, dramatically, four hundred years before they were written, as they are appropriate in their influence upon the spirit two hundred and fifty years after they were written. Frederick Schlegel has said of Shakspere, "The feeling by which he seems to have been most connected with ordinary men is that of nationality." It is true that the nationality of Shakspere is always hearty and genial; and even in the nationality of prejudice there are to be found very many of the qualities that make up the nationality of reflection. For this reason, therefore, the nationality of Shakspere may constitute a link between him and "ordinary men," who have not yet come to understand, for example, his large toleration, which would seem, upon the surface, to be the antagonist principle of nationality. The time may arrive when true toleration and true nationality may shake hands. Coleridge has, in a few words, traced the real course which the nationality of Shakspere may assist in working out, by the reconciliation of these seeming opposites :—" Patriotism is equal to the sense of individuality reflected from every other individual. There may come a higher virtue in both just cosmopolitism. But this latter is not possible but by antecedence of the former."* 66 There is one other point connected with Shakspere's supposed subservience to passing events which we cannot dismiss without an expression of something more than a simple dissent. In reading * Literary Remains, vol. ii., p. 161. the grand scene of the fourth act, between John and Hubert, where John says, "It is the curse of kings to be attended By slaves, that take their humours for a warrant 66 had we not a commentator at our elbow, we should see nothing but the exquisite skill of the poet in exhibiting the cowardly meanness of John in shrinking from his own "warrant" when its execution had proved to be dangerous. This, forsooth, according to Warburton, "plainly hints at Davison's case, in the affair of Mary Queen of Scots ;" and Malone thinks "it is extremely probable that our author meant to pay his court to Elizabeth by this covert apology for her conduct to Mary." Apology? If Shakspere had been the idiot that these critics would represent him to have been, Elizabeth would very soon have told him to keep to his stage, and not meddle with matters out of his sphere;-for, unquestionably, the excuse which John attempts to make, could it have been interpreted into an excuse for Elizabeth, would have had precisely the same effect with regard to Elizabeth which it produces with regard to John-it would have made men despise as well as hate the one as the other. As an example of the utter worthlessness of this sort of conjecture, we may add that Douce says, May it not rather allude to the death of Essex ?" * Mr. Courtenay, in his 'Shakspeare's Historical Plays considered Historically,'-which we have noticed in the Illustrations to Act I.,-agrees with Warburton and Malone in their construction of this passage. Mr. Courtenay is not, however, a blind follower of the opinions of other critics, but has theories of his own upon such matters. One of these conjectures upon Shakspere's omission of the event of the signature of Magna Charta is at least amusing: "How shall we account for Shakspere's omission of an incident so essential in the life and reign of King John?" It had occurred to me, especially when considering the omission of all reference to popular topics, that, as Shakspere was a decided courtier, he might not wish to remind Queen Elizabeth, who set Magna Charta at nought in its most interesting particular, of the solemn undertakings of her ancestors." Mr. Courtenay subsequently says that no great stress was laid upon Magna Charta, even by constitutional writers, before the days of Coke; but that, nevertheless, "Magna Charta ought to have been the prominent feature of the play." He says this upon Coleridge's *Illustrations, i., 406. ' |