only of Richard but of the greater part of Henry V, including the fine choruses which we would fain have kept; and he has left Shakespeare in Julius Caesar not even Antony's famous speech over the body of Caesar. Henry, it seems, was rough hewn " by Marlowe, expanded by Greene, and perhaps Peele, and contains besides "Chapmanesque speeches " and suspicions of Jonson. Shakespeare may possibly have touched it up; but, as a whole, he was incapable of anything so bad." As to Antony's famous speech," the intolerable metaphor" as to the wounds in Caesar's body, which are likened to "dumb mouths "which" do ope their ruby lips," settles the matter, especially because this dreadful figure occurs in a certain obscure murder play. Mr. Robertson's Shakespeare never uses a figure previously employed by anyone else; Mr. Robertson's Shakespeare never wrote tastelessly or beneath the standard fastidiously set for him by Mr. Robert

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son.

The mere scholar stands aghast at the virtuosity of this surprising critic. He can spot you a line of Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, Heywood, whom you will, anywhere and in anybody's alleged writing. Greene cannot elude him, nor Lyly escape. Poor Kit Marlowe, with his scarce seven years of authorship, is worked nearly to death. He could have had little time for atheism. A similarity in places, the use of an unusual word, a bit of boastful rhetoric and especially a percentage of something or other connected with meter, and the trick is turned. According to the "results" of this kind of criticism, the Elizabethan dram

atists collaborated universally and promiscuously, meddling and intermeddling with each other's work, irrespective of time, place, ownership or rivalry. Neither friendship nor enmity deterred them, and they borrowed, stole, and juggled each with the writings of each other with the abandon of a bevy of idiots playing logomachy. The marvel is that any of their productions are readable at all.

Indubitably the age of Shakespeare was much given to collaboration and plays were habitually rewritten, altered and revised, frequently by hands other than the original author's. Tarleton's old Henry V may have been succeeded by other versions of the "history" before Shakespeare took up the theme, and it is not "impossible" — but Mr. Robertson does not prove it — that another play may have intervened. But the point is not here, but in an essential misconception as to Shakespeare. Our foremost poet and dramatist is a very unequal author. In him indeed is "the front of Jove"; but he too was young once and inexperienced, and he was often hurried and careless; and, dare we say it, perhaps even indolent at times as to doing his best. The late Dr. Horace Howard Furness, when he read Cymbeline, used to rise, when he came to the banalities of the dreams and visions of Posthumus towards the end, with the observation: "At this point Shakespeare lost all interest in his subject and naturally so do we." Inequality, imitation of the gait and manner of other men, indifference as to trifles, want of taste, inconsistency, all of these things are true of Shakespeare in places. But we need not for these

reasons "relieve" him of the creation of an ignoble Caesar and a monstrous Richard - both of which Mr. Robertson puts on his packhorse Marlowe - nor of an inconsistent Portia, whom he fathers on Ben Jonson, or is it Chapman?

Perhaps we might put aside this example of a skeptic, devoid of faith in anything except his own surprising powers of discernment. But this species of "revision" of our accepted opinions as to Shakespeare and his works has become a striking feature of much of even our authoritative contemporary scholarship. On the latest volume of The New [Cambridge] Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, a recent reviewer comments pertinently as follows:

Here is the perfect example of Shakespeare at his work as the popular Elizabethan entertainer. In it personal and impersonal are inextricably blended. Can the modern critic stomach it? The new Cambridge editors apparently cannot. At one end of the new volume is Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch busy boring holes in it as a work of art; at the other, is the implacable geologist, Dr. Dover Wilson, detecting stratum after stratum in the upheaved mountain, but with an eye that grows yearly keener for the primeval non-Shakespearean basalt. The strategy of the two editors is strictly according to Moltke: getrennt marchieren, vereint schlagen. The scenes and portions of scenes they reject as nonShakespearean would be almost enough to set up a new Elizabethan playwright in business.3

That the editing of Shakespeare is not a task for the uninitiate, the innumerable "commentaries" of those who have rushed in where scholars fear to tread afford a more than sufficient example. Shakespeare

3 London Times Literary Supplement, June 17, 1926, p. 410.

is heady wine, and even the strong have been exhilarated by him to unwonted temerity or bewildered into guesswork and uncertainty. As to his workmanship for the playhouse, Shakespeare rose like the sun obscured in the vapors of collaboration; and he set, too, with similar clouds dimming his brightness. Precisely how much of the earlier plays may be the residue of work by Marlowe, Greene, Peele, or even lesser men, we cannot ever hope to "know," unless endowed with a sixth sense for the detection of stylistic and metrical niceties, such as Mr. Robertson claims for himself; a sense, it is not to be denied, often cleverly enough invoked, if not always quite convincingly, for Shakespeare as well as for the work of others. In like manner we recognize the assiduity of those who have endeavored to tell us precisely the terms and limitations of the temporary partnership in authorship, which appears to have been Shakespeare's towards the end of his life, with Fletcher, and perhaps Massinger as well. And again and again we find ourselves convinced" it may be by the immediate argument, but slipping back into a stubborn misbelief when, the pleadings withdrawn, we ponder the case at ease, weighed in the scales of average credibility. Is it unfair to surmise that contemporary scholarship, especially in Shakespeare, is somewhat more apt to assume the argumentativeness of the advocate than to rest serene in the dispassionateness of the judge?

Let us return for the nonce to collaboration in playwriting, a matter of crucial importance if we are bent

E. H. C. Oliphant, The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, 1927.

to fix once and for all the precise limitation of Shakespeare's hand in every scrap of his work. A pertinent monograph a few years ago distinguished several kinds of collaboration among Elizabethan dramatists." There was the crude method of meting out the play act by act, sometimes to as many writers as there were acts, more commonly to two or three authors. These appear at times to have worked more or less separately and in their joinings the joints are often visible. This was no unusual method among the henchmen of Philip Henslowe, theatrical promoter and moneyed man who controlled so much of the popular dramatic output of Shakespeare's rivals. But, strange as may appear, it seems likewise to have been the practice at times among the young gentlemen of the Inns of Court in their efforts to entertain their friends and their queen. A more rational collaboration was that in which each of two coadjutors took a plot. Such appears to have been the method of Middleton and Rowley; and an even more vital association was conceivably that of Beaumont and Fletcher, in which each wrote the scene for which his talents best fitted him and the completed product must have been the result of a coöperation alike of plan and of criticism.

But there was quite another kind of joint authorship. Even in Shakespeare's alleged participancy with Fletcher in say Henry VIII, to what extent was this not the work of coequals, but a case of the retouching of an older play by one or other of the alleged authors?

E. N. S. Thompson, "Elizabethan Collaboration," Englische Studien, xi, 30.