Mast. Surgeons! surgeons! she recovers life:One of his men all faint and bloodied! 1 Ser. Follow; our murderous master has took To kill his child at nurse. O, follow quickly. 1 Ser. Good sir, do follow him. [Exeunt Master, and two Servants. Wife. O my children! 1 Ser. How is it with my most afflicted mis- Wife. Why do I now recover? Why half live, 1 Ser. I, thinking to prevent what his quick Had so soon acted, came and rushed upon him. To render this intelligible, it should be understood, that the ancient spurs had rowels whose points were more than an inch long, with keen broad edges like daggers.-PERCY. To raise the town upon him.-The town of Calverly, as I am informed, is about a mile from the spot where these murders were committed.-STEEVENS. 22 O'erthrew me with his arms-i. e. employed his arms as its instrument, or agent.—STEEVENS, 23 Like a man mad in execution.—The servant means to compare his master either to a person whose rage kindles in the progress of its gratification; or to a madman busied in the commission of frantic barbarity.---STEEY ENS. The fifty diseases stop thee! 24 Oh, I am sorely bruised! Plague founder thee! [Cry within.] Follow, follow, follow. Hus. Ha! I hear sounds of men, like hue and cry. way. Up, up, and struggle to thy horse; make on; men, and Attendants, with halberds. All. Here, here; yonder, yonder. Mast. Unnatural, flinty, more than barbarous! Hus. Why, he can have no more of us than our And some of them want but fleaing. 1 Gent. Great sins have made him impudent. Must. He has shed so much blood, that he cannot blush. 2 Gent. Away with him; bear him to the jus- A gentleman of worship dwells at hand : much: Would it had ne'er been thought on! Sir, I bleed 1 Gent. Your father's sorrows are alive in me. What made you show such monstrous cruelty? Hus. In a word, sir, I have consumed all, played away long-acre; and I thought it the charitablest deed I could do, to cozen beggary, and knock my house o' the head. Knight. O, in a cooler blood you will repent it. Hus. I repent now that one is left unkilled; My brat at nurse. I would full fain have weaned him. Knight. Well, I do not think, but in to-mor row's judgment, The terror will sit closer to your soul, When the dread thought of death remembers 24 The fifty diseases stop thee !" Had he as many diseases as two and fifty horses," occurs, I think, in the Taming of a Shrew.-- MALONE. There is an old book, entitled the Fifty Diseases of a Horse; by Gervase Markham.-STEEVENS. 25 Till this black minute without stain or blemish.-It should seem from hence, that the worthy magistrate was the only person in the neighbourhood unacquainted with this gentleman's course of life, or that he thought his preceding extravagance, and inhumanity to his wife, was no disgrace to his family. The farther I proceed, the more am I convinced, that our little drama was a piece of hasty patchwork. STEEVENS. 26 That man is nearest shame, that is past shame.-The compositor perhaps caught this word from the end of the line. The author, I believe, wrote: That man is nearest sin, that is past shame.---MALONE. SCENE X.---Before Culverly Hall. Hus. I am right against my house,---seat of my I hear my wife's alive, but much endangered. His Wife is brought in. Gent. See, here she comes of herself. Wife. O my sweet husband, my dear distressed Now in the hands of unrelenting laws, Hus. How now? Kind to me? Did I not wound Left thee for dead? Wife. Tut, far, far greater wounds did my. Unkindness strikes a deeper wound than steel. Hus. 'Faith, and so I think I have; I did my murders roughly out of hand, eyes Seven wounds apiece. Now glides the Devil from me, Departs at every joint; heaves up my nails. Wife. O my repentant husband! Hus. O my dear soul, whom I too much have wronged; For death I die, and for this have I longed. If the law could forgive as soon as I. [The two Children laid out. Hus. What sight is yonder? Hus. Here's weight enough to make a heart- O were it lawful that your pretty souls O that I might my wishes now attain ! Wife. It makes me even forget all other sor rows, And live apart with this. Offi. Come, will you go? Hus. I'll kiss the blood I spilt, and then I'll go : My soul is bloodied, well may my lips be so.— Farewell, dear wife; now thou and I must part; I of thy wrongs repent me with my heart. Wife. O stay! thou shalt not go. Hus. That's but in vain; you see it must be so. Mast. O kind wife, Be comforted; one joy is yet unmurdered; 27 I am right against my house, seat of my ancestors :-I am told, such general horror was inspired by the fact on which this play is founded, that the mansion of Mr Calverly was relinquished by all his relations, and, being permitted to decay, has never since proved the residence of persons of fashion or estate, being at present no more than a farm-house. They say also, it would be difficult even now to persuade some of the common people in the neighbourhood, but that the unfortunate master of Calverly Hall u derwent the fate of Regulus, and was rolled down the hill before his own seat, enclosed in a barrel stuck with nails. Such is one of the stories current among the yeomanry of the circumjacent villages; where it is likewise added, that the place of Mr Calverly's interment was never exactly known, several coffins, supposed to be filled with sand, having been deposited in various parishes, that his remains might elude the pursuit of the populace, who threatened to expose them to public infamy on a gibbet. They were imagined however, at last, to have been clandestinely conveyed into the family vault in Calverly church, where the bodies of his children lie; and it was long believed, that his ghost rode every night with dreadful cries through the adjoining woods, to the terror of those whose business compelled them to travel late at night, or early in the morning.---I have related all this mixture of truth and fable, only t gain an opportunity of observing, that no murders were ever more deeply execrated, or bid fairer for a lasting remembrance.---STEEVENS, Heaven give my body strength, which is yet faint | I'll ever praise a woman for thy sake. CONCERNING this play I have not been able to form any decided opinion. The arguments produced by Mr Steevens in support of its authenticity, appear to me to have considerable weight. If its date were not so precisely ascertained, little doubt would remain, in my mind at least, upon the subject. I find it, however, difficult to believe that Shakespeare could have written Macbeth, King Lear, and the Yorkshire Tragedy, at nearly the same period.---MALONE. The Yorkshire Tragedy hath been frequently called Shakspeare's earliest attempt in the drama; but most certainly it was not written by our poet at all. The fact on which it is built, was perpetrated no sooner than 1505; much too late for so mean a performance from the hand of Shakespeare. FARMER. Long ago was it observed by Dr Johnson, that from mere inequality in works of imagination, nothing could with exactness be inferred; but if Dr Farmer's argument be allowed to operate in respect to Shakespeare on this occasion, may it not be employed hereafter with equal force in regard to Dryden and Rowe? It will surely tend to prove, that the author of Don Sebastian did not finish his dramatic career with so mean a performance as Love Triumphant, or that the despicable Biter was produced earlier than all the other plays by the same hand, as much as that Shakespeare was not the writer of the Yorkshire Tragedy, because it is unworthy of his ripened genius and amended judgment. I confess I have always regarded this little drama as a genuine but a hasty production of our author.28 Though he was seldom vigilant of reputation as a poet, he might sometimes have been attentive to gain as a manager. Laying hold, therefore, on the popular narrative 29 of this" bloody business," it was natural enough that he should immediately adapt it to the stage. His play, indeed, has all the marks of an unpremeditated composition. As fast as ideas on the subject presented themselves, whether clothed in verse or prose, they seem to have been thrown on paper, without the slightest regard to method or uniformity of writing. The piece was probably meant for representation no longer than while its original continued fresh in the memory of the audience; and we therefore find the corruptions in it are few, being proportioned to the shortness of its run. Other reasons, however, may be assigned for the appearance of a tragedy compressed within such narrow limits. Perhaps it was contrived as a prop to some feeble, or as a supplement to some scanty performance;-was produced through a wish to join with three particular friends in the entertainment of a single afternoon;-or was only intended as a sketch which the author would at leisure have transplanted on a more extensive canvas. It is possible, also, that it was manufactured out of some loose unconnected scenes, attempted in the infancy of Shakespeare's art,30 being meant by him to have comprehended the whole circle of misfortunes incident to an unthinking London Prodigal ; 3! 28 It was not only printed as Shakespeare's, but is entered with his name on the Stationers' Books. See also the coincidences between his other plays and this, which, considering its size, exhibits as many as will be found in Pericles, 29 On the 12th of June 1605, the following entry was made on the books of the Stationers' Company : "Twoo unnaturall murthers, the one practised by Mr Coverly a Yorkshire gent. uppon his wife, and happened on his children the 23d of April 1605. The other practised by Mrs Browne, and performed by her servant upon her husband, who in Lent last were executed at Berry in Suffolke." Again, July 1605: "A ballad of a lamentable murther done in Yorkeshire by a gent. uppon 2 of his owne children, sore wounding his wife and nurse." Again, August 24, 1605: The Arraiguement and Condempnacion of Mr Calverly at Yorke in August 1605." 30 The frequent mixture of rhyme with blank verse, may serve to strengthen this supposition. 31 The hero of the Yorkshire Tragedy first enters reflecting on the fatal throw that cost him the small and as this intention of his was divulged in the theatre among his comrades, it might prove the reason why another piece with the same title was afterwards ascribed to him. When the news of the Yorkshire catastrophe arrived in London, he might have been tempted to accommodate this his early prolusion, as well as haste would permit (for indeed his later corrections often militate against his original plans) to the particulars of another story, (as Otway has since converted Romeo into the younger Marius) for many events are introduced into our tragedy which form no part of the tale, as I received it from a person who heard it frequently related in the parish where the hero of it lived. Hence the incongruity of the beginning, &c. with all the rest, and the accumulation of incidents neither to be found in Stowe's Continuator, or the ballads of the age, which usually confined themselves within the bounds of circumstantiality and truth. Yet whatever was its origin or mode of construction, though by no means one of our author's most powerful effusions, it is still entitled to better treatment than it has hitherto met with from its various editors. If, on the whole, it has less poetical merit than some of the serious dialogues in the Midsummer Night's Dream, or Love's Labour's Lost, it has surely as much of nature as will be discovered in many parts of these desultory dramas. Murder, which appears ridiculous in Titus Andronicus, has its proper effect in the Yorkshire Tra gedy; and the command this little piece may claim over the passions, will be found to equal any our author has vested in the tragic divisions of Troilus and Cressida,-I had almost said in King Richard the Second, which critics may applaud, though the successive audiences of more than a century have respectfully slumbered over it as often as it has appeared on the stage. Mr Garrick bad once resolved on its revival; but his good sense at last overpowered his ambition to raise it to the dignity of the acting list. Yet our late Roscius's chief expectations from it, as he himself confessed, would have been founded on scenery displaying the magnificence of our ancient barriers.-To return to my subject; this tragedy in miniature, (exhibiting at least three of the characteristics of Shakespeare, I mean his quibbles, his facility of metre, and his struggles to introduce comic ideas into tragic situations) appears at present before the reader with every advantage that a careful comparison of copies, and attention to obscurities, could bestow on it; and yet among the slight outlines of our theatrical Raphael, and not among his finished paintings, can it expect to maintain a place. The Companion to the Playhouse, however, informs us, that the late Mr Aaron Hill has founded on it "a very beautiful piece of one act, entitled, Fatal Extravagance." It was represented, if not published, in 1720, under the name of Joseph Mitchell; an unfortunate though an amiable man, who was then in need of pecuniary assistance. I have never met with this production; but additional respect is surely due to the plot of the Yorkshire Tragedy, since it has been adopted by the transla tor of Merope and Zayre, who possessed no common share of dramatic sagacity, and has the merit of being the first who showed our theatrical adventurers the way into the treasury of Voltaire. Mr Hill, however, was not, like some of his successors, a borrower without acknowledgment, or a copier who had produced no originals. As the ability and erudition displayed by Mr Malone in the publication of the preceding plays, cannot fail to obtain for them a greater number of readers than they have hitherto met with, perhaps this is no improper time to suggest an inquiry, how it happened, that the name of Shakespeare should be prefixed to five dramas of discordant styles, and inconsiderable merit, rather than to as many others approaching nearer to his own language, and not altogether so much beneath his acknowledged excellence. The scanty light I can throw on this matter, is, by supposing that our author had casually mentioned a future design of adopting subjects similar to those of Locrine, the Puritan, &c.; and was afterwards known to have been instrumental in bringing pieces with such titles on the stage;--or remains of his fortune. Concerning this too he expresses himself as of a recent calamity, an occurrence that had happened immediately before his appearance on the scene. Por of the last throw, &c. Here Mr Malone observes, that, being just returned from London into the country, the circumstance which occasioned his final loss might yet be uppermost in his mind. I am still however influenced by the suspicion have already encouraged; for, considering the state of roads a century and a half age, our hero could not have reached his seat at Calverly in less than six or eight days; and, before that time was elapsed, it is natural to conceive, that all his recollection of the particulars of loss must have given way to the single overwhelming idea of hopeless misery and decisive ruin. If, as Mr Malone observes, this couple were just arrived from the metropolis, how happened it that no application was made by the wife (as soon as her husband was beggared by gaming) to her uncle who resided in London? Was it necessary for her to travel down into Yorkshire, only that she might return to town, and then go back again? I am more and more confirmed in my former belief, that this play was hastily and carelessly constructed with heterogeneous materials, |