XXII

"EDWARD III." AND "ARDEN OF FEVERSHAM”—SHAKESPEARE'S DICTION-THE FIRST PART OF "HENRY IV." -FIRST INTRODUCTION OF HIS OWN EXPERIENCES OF LIFE IN THE HISTORIC DRAMA-WHY THE SUBJECT APPEALED TO HIM-TAVERN LIFE-SHAKESPEARE'S CIRCLE-SIR JOHN FALSTAFF—FALSTAFF AND THE GRACIOSO OF THE SPANISH DRAMA-RABELAIS AND SHAKESPEARE-PANURGE AND FALSTAFF

THERE is extant a historical play, dating from 1596, entitled The Raigne of King Edward third. As it hath bin sundrie times plaied about the Citie of London, which several English students and critics, among them Halliwell-Phillips, have attributed in part to Shakespeare, arguing that the better scenes, at least, must have been carefully retouched by him. Although the drama, as a whole, is not much more Shakespearean in style than many other Elizabethan plays, and although Swinburne, the highest of all English authorities, has declared the piece to be the work of an imitator of Marlowe, yet there is a good deal to be said in favour of the hypothesis that Shakespeare had some hand in Edward III. His touch may be recognised in several passages; and especially noteworthy are the following lines from a speech of Warwick's :

"A spacious field of reasons could I urge
Between his glory, daughter, and thy shame:
That poison shows worst in a golden cup;

Dark night seems darker by the lightning flash ;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds,
And every glory that inclines to sin,

The shame is treble by the opposite."

The italicised verse reappears as the last line of Shakespeare's Sonnet xciv.; and as this Sonnet seems, to refer (as we shall

afterwards see) to circumstances in Shakespeare's life which did not arise until 1600, we cannot suppose that it was one of those written at an earlier date and circulated in manuscript. The probability is that Shakespeare simply reclaimed this line from a speech contributed by him to another man's play.

It is natural that a foreign student should shrink from opposing his judgment to that of English critics, where English diction and style are in question. Nevertheless he is sometimes driven into dissent with regard to the many Elizabethan plays which now one critic, and now another, has attributed wholly or in part to Shakespeare. Take, for instance, Arden of Feversham, certainly one of the most admirable plays of that rich period, whose merit impresses one even when one reads it for the first time in uncritical youth. Swinburne writes of it (Study of Shakespeare, p. 141):

"I cannot but finally take heart to say, even in the absence of all external or traditional testimony, that it seems to me not pardonable merely nor permissible, but simply logical and reasonable, to set down this poem, a young man's work on the face of it, as the possible work of no man's youthful hand but Shakespeare's.

However small my authority in comparison with Swinburne's upon such a question as this, I find it impossible to share his view. Highly as I esteem Arden of Feversham, I cannot believe that Shakespeare wrote a single line of it. It was not like him to choose such a subject, and still less to treat it in such a fashion. The play is a domestic tragedy, in which a wife, after repeated attempts, murders her kind and forbearing husband, in order freely to indulge her passion for a worthless paramour. It is a dramatisation of an actual case, the facts of which are closely followed, but at the same time animated with great psychological insight. That Shakespeare had a distaste for such subjects is proved by his consistent avoidance of them, except in this problematical instance; whereas if he had once succeeded so well with such a theme, he would surely have repeated the experiment. The chief point is, however, that only in a few places, in the soliloquies, do we find the peculiar note of Shakespeare's style— that wealth of imagination, that luxuriant lyrism, which plays like sunlight over his speeches. style is a uniform drab.

In Arden of Feversham the

Shakespeare's great characteristic is precisely the resilience which he gives to every word and to every speech. We take one step on earth, and at the next we are soaring in air. His verse always tends towards a rich and stately melody, is never flat or commonplace. In the English historical plays, his diction sometimes verges upon the style of the ballad or romance. There is a continual undercurrent of emotion, of enthusiasm, or of pure fantasy, which carries us away with it. We are always far remote from the humdrum monotony of everyday speech. For everyday speech is devoid of fantasy, and all Shakespeare's characters, with the exception of those whose humour lies in their stupidity, have a highly-coloured imagination.

We could find no better proof of this than the diction of the great work which he undertakes immediately after The Merchant of Venice-the First Part of Henry IV.

Harry Percy in this play is placed in opposition to the magniloquent, visionary, thaumaturgic Glendower, as the man of sober intelligence, who keeps to the common earth, and believes only in what his senses aver and his reason accepts. But there is nevertheless a spring within him which need only be touched in order to send him soaring into almost dithyrambic poetry. The King (i. 3) has called Mortimer a traitor; whereupon Percy protests that it was no sham warfare that Mortimer waged against Glendower :

"To prove that true,

Needs no more but one tongue for all those wounds,
Those mouthed wounds, which valiantly he took,

When on the gentle Severn's sedgy bank,

In single opposition, hand to hand,

He did confound the best part of an hour

In changing hardiment with great Glendower.

Three times they breath'd, and three times did they drink,

Upon agreement, of swift Severn's flood,

Who then, affrighted with their bloody looks,

Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds,

And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank

Blood-stained with these valiant combatants."

Thus Homer sings of the Scamander.

Worcester broaches to Percy an enterprise

"As full of peril and adventurous spirit,

As to o'er-walk a current, roaring loud,
On the unsteadfast footing of a spear;'

whereon Percy bursts forth :

"Send danger from the east unto the west,
So honour cross it from the north to south,

And let them grapple:-O! the blood more stirs

To rouse a lion than to start a hare."

Northumberland then says of him that "Imagination of some great exploit Drives him beyond the bounds of patience," and Percy answers :—

"By Heaven, methinks, it were an easy leap

To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac'd moon,

Or dive into the bottom of the deep,

Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drowned honour by the locks."

What a profusion of imagery is placed in the mouth of this despiser of rhetoric and music! From the comparatively weak metaphor of the speaking wounds up to actual myth-making! The river, affrighted by the bloody looks of the combatants, hides its crisp head in the reeds-a naiad fantasy in classic style. Danger, rushing from east to west, hurtles against Honour, crossing it from north to south-two northern Valkyries in full career. The wreath of honour is hung on the crescent moon-a metaphor from the tilting-yard, expressed in terms of fairy romance. Drowned Honour is to be plucked up by the locks from the bottom of the deep having now become, by a daring personification, a damsel who has fallen into the sea and must be rescued. And all this in three short speeches!

Where this irrepressible vivacity of fancy is lacking, as in Arden of Feversham, Shakespeare's sign-manual is lacking along with it. Even when his style appears sober and measured, it is saturated with what may be called latent fantasy (as we speak of latent electricity), which at the smallest opportunity bursts its bounds, explodes, flashes forth before our eyes like the figures in a pyrotechnic set-piece, and fills our ears as with the music of a rushing, leaping waterfall.1

1 It was this characteristic of Shakespeare's style, at the period we are now considering, that so deeply influenced Goethe and the contemporaries of his youth, Lenz and Klinger (and, in Denmark, Hauch and Bredahl), determining the diction of their tragic dramas. Björnson shows traces of the same influence in his Maria Stuart and Sigurd Slembe.

In 1598 appeared a Quarto with the following title: The History of Henrie the Fourth; With the battell at Shrewsburie, betweene the King and Lord Henry Percy, surnamed Henrie Hotspur of the North. With the humorous conceits of Sir John Falstaffe. At London. Printed by P. S. for Andrew Wise, dwelling in Paules Churchyard, at the signe of the Angell. 1598. This was the First Part of Shakespeare's Henry IV., which must have been written in 1597-the play in which Shakespeare first attains his great and overwhelming individuality. At the age of thirty-three, he stands for the first time at the summit of his artistic greatness. In wealth of character, of wit, of genius, this play has never been surpassed. Its dramatic structure is somewhat loose, though closer knit and technically stronger than that of the Second Part. But, as a poetical creation, it is one of the great masterpieces of the world's literature, at once heroic and burlesque, thrilling and side-splitting. And these contrasted elements are not, as in Victor Hugo's dramas, brought into hard-and-fast rhetorical antithesis, but move and mingle with all the freedom of life.

When it was written, the sixteenth century, that great period in the history of the human spirit, was drawing to its close; but no one had then conceived the cowardly idea of making the end of a century a sort of symbol of decadence in energy and vitality. Never had the waves of healthy self-confidence and productive power run higher in the English people or in Shakespeare's own mind. Henry IV., and its sequel Henry V., are written throughout in a major key which we have not hitherto heard in Shakespeare, and which we shall not hear again.

Shakespeare finds the matter for these plays in Holinshed's Chronicle, and in an old, quite puerile play, The Famous Victories of Henry the fifth, conteining the Honorable Battell of Agin-court, in which the young Prince is represented as frequenting the company of roisterers and highway robbers. It was this, no doubt, that suggested to him the novel and daring idea of transferring direct to the stage, in historical guise, a series of scenes from the everyday life of the streets and taverns around him, and blending them with the dramatised chronicle of the Prince whom he regarded as the national hero of England. To this blending we owe the matchless freshness of the whole picture.

For the rest, Shakespeare found scarcely anything in the