Gascon adventurer's triumphant return. They exchange haughty words with the King. "The sword," says Edward, shall hew these knees that now are grown so stiff. Lancaster retorts: Four earldoms have I besides Lancaster- The inevitable effect of such antagonisms and the logical development of characters, lead step by step the heroes of the play to their catastrophe: harsh, proud, and jealous temper of the nobles; feminine, fawning, vindictive temper of Gaveston, with a tinge of anxious melancholy and bitterness, caused by the thought of his low origin and his vertiginous fortune; weak and rash temper of the King, violent in words, feeble in deeds. His mind is a disordered one; unequal to his royal task, he knows neither how to master I. 1. Examples of this haughty, picturesque style, familiar to the French romantics of the nineteenth century, abound in the play: Young Mortimer. This t[a]ttered ensign of my ancestors, Which swept the desert shore of that dead sea, Will I advance upon this castle's walls. Drums, strike alarum, raise them from their sport, Sent to the block by young Edward III., the same Mortimer says: Seeing there was no place to mount up higher Goes to discover countries yet unknown (v. 6). himself nor others. His passionate tenderness for the favourite effaces all other feelings in him : What, Gaveston! welcome-kiss not my hand. . . Why should'st thou kneel? know'st thou not who I am? And sooner shall the sea o'erwhelm my land Than bear the ship that shall transport thee hence. Like all weak beings conquered by passion, having what he cherishes, he defies the universe, laughs at threats, fears nothing, scorns the Pope and his menaces, the French King and his invading army: A trifle! we'll expel him when we please. He has raised within his soul an intangible and invisible fortress, shielding from the view of the profane and from the rumours of the world his inner thoughts and his happiness. But the world is the stronger; the favourite is taken and killed; after the short joy of an incomplete revenge, Edward, captured in his turn, yields to fate and ceases to resist his dreamland fortress has vanished. His calamity is then so great, his plaint so touching, his end so awful, that our scorn is turned into pity. For we are shown that, before dying, he has understood; though a king, he has not reigned; he feels, as it were, a retrospective terror in perceiving what are the harsh realities of a world in which he had lived as if he had been absent from it; let his example be a warning: Commend me to my son, and bid him rule With the "Jew" we were still far from the "Merchant of Venice"; with "Edward II." we are carried beyond "Richard II." A complete arsenal of infallible means for reaching success, admirable samples of rich lyrical poetry; thanks to Marlowe, a unique model of a well-built play, logically developed from beginning to end, in a style sober and strong, a blank verse varied in its pauses and harmony, easy to make even more flexible, the true verse of the English stage: all this was available when Fame began to cast her first and very faint rays upon that player's servant, that "Johannes factotum," who was to carry the dramatic art of his country to heights unknown before him, inaccessible after. CHAPTER VI. SHAKESPEARE-PERSONAL AND LITERARY BIOGRAPHY.1 I. IN the course of the long journey which he undertook through England, to describe the towns and rivers, and to commemorate the historical souvenirs of his country, Camden visited Warwickshire, and, after having recalled the high deeds of Guy of Warwick, "that hero, the subject of so many songs," he described a little river called the Avon : "Swelling in its course, the Avon first passes by Charlecote, the abode of the noble knightly family of the Lucies... then by Stratford, a rather pretty market town that owes all its fame to two of its sons, John of Stratford, Archbishop of Canterbury, who built the church, ' Among thousands of others, many of which are of great value, the following works will be found especially useful: TEXTS: eg. the great Cambridge ed., by W. Aldis Wright and W. G. Clark, 1893, 40 vols. (condensed into one, "Globe edition," Macmillan); Furness's "Variorum " ed., Philadelphia, 1871, ff. (one large vol. per play; "Hamlet" fills two); the " 'Leopold Shakspere," important introd. by Furnivall; the "Old-spelling Shakespeare," by the same, 1907, ff.; the " "Temple Shakesp.," elegant little vols., ed. Gollancz, 1894, ff.; the Herford ed., 1899, 10 vols., good introd. and brief notes; Dowden and Craig's " Arden Shakesp.," 1899, ff., one vol. per play; the handsome Stratford Shakesp., ed. Bullen, Stratford-on-Avon, 1904, ft., 10 vols., 4to; the "Century Shakesp.," ed. Furnivall and Munro, 1908, 40 sm. vols. ; the S. Lee "Caxton" ed. 1910; the Quiller-Couch and Wilson ed. 1921, ff. The 1623 folio has been facsimiled, with a "census" of surviving copies, by S. Lee, Oxf. 1902; the 4 seventeenth and Hugh Clopton, Mayor of London, who built, at great cost, the stone bridge of fourteen arches on the Avon." century folios have been issued in facsimile by Methuen (ed. Pollard), 1904; the quartos are reprinted by the "New Shakspere Society." Cf. Lounsbury, "The Text of Shakespeare," N.Y., 1906; Pollard, " Shakesp. folios and quartos," 1909, "Shakespeare's fight with the Pirates," 1920. GRAMMARS, LEXICONS, ETC.: E. A. Abbott, "A Shakespearian Grammar," 1888; W. Franz, Shakespeare Grammatik," 3d ed. 1924; A. Schmidt, "Shakespeare Lexicon," 1874, ed. Sarrazin, 1902; A. Dyce, 'Glossary to Shakespeare," ed. Littledale, 1902; Onions, "Shakesp. Glossary," 1919; Mrs. Cowden Clarke, "Concordance to Shakespeare," 1885; J. Bartlett, "Complete Concordance," 1894; A. J. Ellis, "Early English Pronunciation," 1869; W. Viëtor, "Shakespeare's Pronunciation," Marburg, 1906, 2 vols. ORIGINALS FOLLOWED BY SHAKESPEARE; HIS READING: Hazlitt and Collier, "Shakespeare's Library," 1875, 6 vols. ; "The Shakespeare Classics," ed. Gollancz, 1907, ff. (Shakespeare's originals in modern spelling); W. G. Boswell-Stone, " Shakespeare's Holinshed," 1896, 4to; W. W. Skeat, "Shakespeare's Plutarch," 1892; Anders, "Shakespeare's Books," Berlin, 1904; Tucker Brooke, "The Shakespeare Classics," 1903, ff. BIOGRAPHIES: Halliwell-Phillipps, “Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare," 1st ed., 1881, 10th illus., 1898 (with a transcription of the then known deeds and records concerning the poet and his family); Fleay, "Chronicle Hist. of Shakespeare," 1886; Sidney Lee, “Life of W. Shakesp.," 1st ed. 1898, 11th 1925, large illus. ed., 1899; J. W. Gray, "Shakespeare's Marriage," 1905; Mrs. Stopes, "Shakespeare's Family," 1901; "Shakesp. Environment," 1914; W. Raleigh, "Shakespeare," in "Eng. Men of Letters," 1907; Lambert, "Cartæ Shakespeareanæ,” 1904, Lives, by Elton, 1904, Adams, 1923. ESSAYS AND COMMENTARIES (innumerable): Coleridge, "Lectures and Notes on Shakspere," Ashe ed., 1902 (the lectures are of 1811-12); W. Hazlitt, "Characters of Shakespeare's Plays," 1817; Dowden, "Shakspere, his Mind and Art," 1875, and his little vol., "Shakspere," in Macmillan's "Primers"; Swinburne, "A Study of Shakesp.," 1880, "Shakespeare," 1909; F. S. Boas, "Shakspere and his Predecessors," 1896; G. Brandes, "W. Shakspeare," 1898, 2 vols. (trans. from the Danish); Studies by Barrett Wendell, 1894, Lounsbury, 1902, Brander Matthews, 1913, Quiller-Couch, 1918, Chambers, 1925. In French: Beyle (Stendhal), "Racine et Shak.," 1823; Guizot, "Shak. et son temps," 1852; Taine in his "Littérat. Anglaise," 1863; Victor Hugo, "W. Shakespeare," 1864; Lamartine, "Shak. et son œuvre," 1865; Alf. Mézières (3 vols. on Shakesp., his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors); Stapfer, "Shak. et l'antiquité," 1879; J. Darmesteter "Shakespeare," 1889. German criticism: e.g. Works of Schlegel, Goethe (notably in "Wilhelm Meister "), Gervinus, Heine, Elze, Ulrici, Delius, Kreyssig, Alois Brandl, etc. FAME: Ingleby and L. T. Smith, “Centurie of Prayse;" Furnivall, “300 fresh Allusions," both New Shak. Soc.; J. J. Munro, "The Shakesp. allusion |