Sonnet as cxlvi., already cited, gives a peculiar significance to what Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing says of Benedick: "The man doth fear God, howsoever it seems not in him by some large jests he will make." 1 When, however, we have once ascertained, through the Sonnets, the strong lyrical note that runs through Shakespeare's plays, we have pushed analysis far enough. The poet himself, while alive, asked with just indignation : For why should others' false adulterate eyes Or on my frailties why are frailer spies, Which in their wills think bad what I think good? At my abuses reckon up their own : I may be straight though they themselves be bevel: Even more justly we may apply these words to those who, nearly three hundred years after the poet's death, pry into his affairs with rash curiosity, and attach a literal meaning to thoughts and words which he himself left intentionally obscure. No positive inference can be drawn from his Sonnets as to the persons and incidents alluded to in them. If any one should be inclined to form an unfavourable estimate of his character from the apparent vein of over-emotional weakness which they exhibit, this idea is to be corrected by reference to the masculine strength of his work as a whole, by such conceptions of genuine manliness as are embodied in the persons of Henry V., Horatio, Antonio, Benedick, or Biron. For any conclusions as to the poet's morals, we have no right to travel beyond the facts which are recorded about him by documentary or personal evidence; and these exhibit him to us only as the prudent man of business, the courteous manager, the amiable and delightful companion. In the Sonnets we feel the man himself; the insight we gain from them we are entitled to use for the interpretation, not of his personality, but of his art. 1 Much Ado About Nothing, Act ii. Sc. 3. 2 Sonnet cxxi. CHAPTER III SHAKESPEARE'S EARLY TRAGEDIES: INFLUENCE OF MARLOWE THE earliest mention of Shakespeare's acknowledged pre-eminence as a dramatist is by Meres in his Palladis Tamia, 1598, in which the writer says: As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage: for comedy witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love's Labour's Lost, his Love's Labour's Won, his Midsummer-Night's Dream, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy his Richard II., Richard III., Henry IV., King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet. We have no evidence prior to 1597-the year in which the quarto editions of Richard II., Richard III. and Romeo and Juliet, apparently, first were published—to show that any of the plays mentioned by Meres originally appeared substantially in their existing form, which is that of the folio edition of 1623. Nor does Meres' list appear to aim at being exhaustive. At any rate it makes no mention of the three parts of King Henry VI., nor of The Taming of the Shrew; while, on the other hand, there is no surviving trace of any play with the title of Love's Labour's Won. Nevertheless we have excellent grounds for believing that, in some form or another, Titus Andronicus was produced before 1590. We also know that the two plays now known as King John and The Taming of THE Shrew were based on older plays entitled respectively, The Troublesome Raigne of King John and The Taming of A Shrew; and also that the second and third parts of Henry VI. were reproductions with very slight alterations of two plays, one called The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, first published in quarto in 1594, and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and the Death of Good King Henry the Sixt, first published in quarto in 1595. A long controversy has raged round the question of the authorship of these various early plays. By the older Germans, and some of the earlier English commentators, they were assigned, without much investigation, to Shakespeare; by almost all the English and American critics since Malone (whose opinions have been adopted by many of the modern Germans) Shakespeare has been regarded either as a partner in the plays with other dramatists, or as the unblushing plagiarist of other men's work. In the Appendix to this volume I have examined the various theories that have been advanced on the subject and have stated my own opinion; I need only here therefore repeat my conviction that the elder German critics are right, and the later English wrong, and that Shakespeare alone was the author not only of The Contention and The True Tragedy, but of Titus Andronicus, The Taming of A Shrew, and The Troublesome Raigne of King John. In this chapter I shall start with this assumption, and shall endeavour to set before the reader the character of the poet's earliest work, and the influences to which it owed its form. When Shakespeare began his career as a dramatist the character of theatrical taste had been decisively formed by the practice of Marlowe. Tamburlaine had sufficiently manifested to the general imagination the value of Machiavelli's doctrines as the groundwork of dramatic action. Followed as this play had been by Faustus and the Jew of Malta, the English theatre was now familiar with the representation of resolute villainy, and other playwrights had learned from the example set them by Marlowe to exhibit glaring actions of Lust, Pride, Avarice, and, above all, of Revenge. It was quite natural therefore for a young dramatist like Shakespeare to accommodate himself to the prevailing taste, and in Titus Andronicus he showed that he could furnish the public with the entertainment it desired. This play is coupled by Ben Jonson in the Dedication to Bartholomew Fair with the Spanish Tragedy as an example of the tragic melodrama in vogue about the time of the Spanish Armada; it may therefore be fairly regarded as Shakespeare's maiden play. He has evidently modelled it on The Spanish Tragedy, but intends to outdo his original. Like Kyd's play, the story on which it is founded, while professing to be historical, is entirely fictitious, and sets forth, on the one hand, the revenge of Tamora, Queen of the Goths, on Titus Andronicus, general of the Romans, who had sacrificed her children, and, on the other, the retaliation of Andronicus. Horrors abound in every act. Titus and his daughter are shockingly mutilated by the device of Tamora; and the Roman, in return, having killed the Queen's two sons, bakes their heads and serves them up to their mother in a Thyestean banquet. Out of over twenty dramatis personæ only ten are left alive at the end of the play. The characters are imitated from models in Kyd and Marlowe. Titus Andronicus, in the feigned madness which conceals his plan of revenge, is closely studied after Jeronimo in The Spanish Tragedy; while Aaron, the villainous Moor, is a repetition of Barabas in the Jew of Malta, whose boasts he reproduces in almost identical words: Even now I curse the day—and yet I think 1 Titus Andronicus, Act v. Sc. I. Compare Jew of Malta, Act ii. (Dyce's edition of Marlowe's Works, p. 157). Like Barabas too, Aaron dies resolute : I am no baby, I, that with base prayers I should repent the evils I have done : The style, like all the work of Marlowe's school, is tumid and extravagant, decorated with scraps of Latin, and abounding in classical allusion, as in the following rant of Aaron when he saves his and Tamora's child from the swords of the Queen's sons : Now, by the burning tapers of the sky, That shone so brightly when this boy was got, He dies upon my scimitar's sharp point That touches this my first-born son and heir! I tell you, younglings, not Enceladus, With all his threatening band of Typhon's brood, Shall seize this prey out of his father's hands.2 Nevertheless in many respects Titus Andronicus marked the advent of a dramatist of high genius. Improbable as is the action of the play, it is much better constructed than any of Marlowe's dramas, and it is free from the absurdities of mechanism-such as the introduction of persons like Andrea's Ghost and Revenge-which appear in The Spanish Tragedy. Moreover the new writer showed that he possessed what Kyd and Marlowe utterly lacked, the power of pathos; and the following passage, marred though it is by grave faults of taste, reads like an anticipation of the finished style of emotional imagery prevailing in the latter part of Richard II. Marcus and Titus Andronicus are discoursing about the dumb and mutilated Lavinia : MARC. O, thus I found her, straying in the park, TIT. Seeking to hide herself, as doth the deer. It was my deer; and he that wounded her Hath hurt me more than had he killed me dead: 1 Titus Andronicus, Act v. Sc. 3. in vol. ii. p. 415. Compare speech of Barabas, cited 2 Ibid. Act iv. Sc. 2. |