students, specially out of the University, we much doubt; and do find our principal actors (whom we have of purpose called before us) very unwilling to play in English."* If Dr. Still were the author of 'Gammer Gurton's Needle,' as commonly believed, the joke is somewhat heightened; but at any rate it is diverting enough, as a picture of manners, to find the University who have opposed the performances of professional players, being called upon to produce a play in the " English vein," a species of composition mostly held in contempt by the learned as fitted only for the ignorant multitude. In relation to Shakspere, we learn from these transactions at Cambridge that at the Christmas of 1592 there were no revels at Court: "her Majesty's own servants in this time of infection may not disport her Highness with their wonted and ordinary pastimes." Shakspere, we may believe, during the long period of the continuance of the plague in London, had no occupation at the Blackfriars Theatre; and the pastimes of the Lord Chamberlain's servants were dispensed with at the palaces. It is probable that he was residing at his own Stratford. The leisure, we think, afforded him opportunity of preparing the most important of that wonderful series of historical dramas which unquestionably appeared within a few years of this period; and of producing some other dramatic compositions of the highest order of poetical excellence. The accounts of the Chamberlains of Stratford exhibit no payments to players from 1587 to 1592; but in that year in the account of Henry Wilson, the Chamberlain, we have the entry of "Paid to the Queenes players XXs," and a similar entry occurs in the account of John Sadler, Chamberlain in 1593. Were these payments to the Lord Chamberlain's company, known familiarly as the Queen's players? We cannot absolutely decide. Another company was at Cambridge pretending to be the Queen's players; and in the office book of the treasurer of the chamber, in 1590, there is the record of a payment" to Lawrance Dutton and John Dutton, her Majesty's players, and their company." The Lord Chamberlain's players appear to have ceased to be called "the Queen's players," about this time. Upon the whole, we are inclined to the belief,-although we have previously assumed that the Queen's players who performed at Stratford in 1587 were Shakspere's fellows,†-that the Lord Chamberlain's servants did not "travel." If the "profit" of their "residence" in London was interrupted by the plague, it did not consist with their " reputation" to seek out the scanty remuneration of uncritical country audiences. It appears to us, also, looking at the poetical labours of Shakspere at this exact period, that there was some pause in his professional occupation; and that many months' residence in Stratford, from the autumn of 1592 to the summer of 1593, enabled him more systematically to cultivate those higher faculties which placed him, even in the opinion of his contemporaries, at the head of the living poets of England.‡ One of the peculiar characteristics of the genius of Shakspere consists in its essentially practical nature-its perfect adaptation to the immediate purpose of its employment. It is not inconsistent, therefore, with the most unlimited re* The various documents may be consulted in Collier's Annals of the Stage,' vol. i. † See page 281. See note at the end of this chapter. verence for the higher qualities of that genius, to believe that in its original direction to the drama it was guided by no very abstract ideas of excellence, but sought to accommodate itself to the taste and the information of the people, and to deal only with what was to them obvious and familiar. It is thus that we may readily admit that many of the earliest plays of Shakspere were founded upon some rude production of the primitive stage. Andronicus had, no doubt, its dramatic ancestor, who exhibited the same Gothic view of Roman history, and whose scenes of blood were equally agreeable to an audience requiring strong excitement. Pericles, however remodelled at an after period, belonged, we can scarcely doubt, to Shakspere's first efforts for the improvement of some popular dramatic exhibition which he found ready to his hand. So of The Taming of the Shrew, of which we may without any violence assume that a common model existed both for that and for the other play with a very similar name, which appears to belong to the same period. It is in the highest degree probable that the three parts of Henry VI. may in the same manner be founded upon older productions; but it is utterly inconsistent with our confidence in the originality of Shakspere's powers, even when dealing with old materials, to believe that those plays which we know as the two parts of The Contention between the Houses of York and Lancaster, were the plays upon which Shakspere founded the second and third parts of Henry VI. They are as much his own as the Hamlet of 1603 is his own, or the Henry V. of 1600, or the Merry Wives of 1602, each of which is evidently the sketch, and perhaps the mutilated sketch, of the finished picture which was subsequently delivered to us. That sketch of Hamlet, which in all probability was the remodelling of something earlier from the same pen (which earliest piece might even have been founded upon some rude dialogue or dumb show of a murder or a ghost), proves to us, comparing it with the finished play, the quarto of 1604, how luxuriantly the vigorous sapling went on year by year to grow into the monarch of the forest. But from the first, Shakspere, with that consummate judgment which gave a fitness to every thing that he did, or proposed to do, held his genius in subjection to the apprehension of the people, till he felt secure of their capability to appreciate the highest excellence. In his case, as in that of every great artist, perfection could only be attained by repeated efforts. He had no models to work upon; and in the very days in which he lived the English drama began to be created. It was not "Learning's triumph o'er her barbarous foes" which "first rear'd the stage," but a singular combination of circumstances which for the most part grew out of the reformation of religion. He took the thing as he found it. The dramatic power was in him so supreme that, compared with the feebler personifications of other men, it looks like instinct. He seized upon the vague abstractions which he found in the histories and comedies of the Blackfriars and the Bel Savage, and the scene was henceforth filled with living beings. But not as yet were these individualities surrounded with the glowing atmosphere of burning poetry. The philosophy which invests their sayings with an universal wisdom that enters the mind and becomes its loadstar, was scarcely yet evoked out of that profound contemplation of human actions and of the higher things dimly revealed in human nature, which belonged to the maturity of his wondrous mind. The wit was there in some degree from the first, for it was irrepressible; but it was then as the polished metal, which dazzlingly gives back the brightness of the sunbeams; in after times it was as the diamond, which reflects everything, and yet appears to be self-irradiated in its lustrous depths. If these qualities, and if the humour which seems more especially the ripened growth of the mental faculty, could have been produced in the onset of Shakspere's career, it is probable that the career would not have been a successful one. He had to make his audience. He himself has told us of a play of his earliest period, that "I remember, pleased not the million; 'twas caviarie to the general: but it was (as I received it, and others, whose judgments in such matters cried in the top of mine) an excellent play; well digested in the scenes; set down with as much modesty as cunning. I remember, one said there were no sallets in the lines to make the matter savoury; nor no matter in the phrase that might indite the author of affectation; but called it an honest method, as wholesome as sweet, and by very much more handsome than fine.” * Was this play an attempt of Shakspere himself to depart from the popular track? If it were, we probably owe much to the million. Let us place then the Shakspere of eight-and-twenty once more in the solitude of Stratford, with the experience of seven years in the pursuits which he has chosen as his profession. He has produced, we believe, several plays belonging to each class of the drama with which the early audiences were familiar. In the tragedy of Andronicus, as it has come down to us, and with great probability in the first conceptions of Hamlet and of Romeo and Juliet, the physical horrors of the scene were as much relied upon as attractions, if not more so, than the poetry and characterization. The struggles for the empery of France, and the wars of the Roses, had been presented to the people with marvellous animation; but the great dramatic principle of unity of idea had been but imperfectly developed, and probably, without the practice of that apprentice-period of the poet's dramatic life, would scarcely have been conceived in its ultimate perfection. Comedy, too, had been tried; and here the rude wit and the cumbrous affectations of his contemporaries had been supplanted by drollery and nature, with a sprinkle of graceful poetry whose essential characteristic is the rejection of the unnatural ornament and the conventional images which belong to every other dramatic writer of the period. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, the Taming of the Shrew, and All's Well that Ends Well, are essentially nobler and purer in their poetical elements than anything that Peele, or Greene, or Lyly, or Lodge, have bequeathed to us. That they are superior in many respects to many of the best productions of Shakspere's later contemporaries may be the result of the afterpolish which we have no doubt the poet bestowed even upon his least important works. They, with the histories and tragedies we have named, essentially *Hamlet, Act II., Sc. II. belonged, we think, to his earliest period. We are about to enter upon the career of a higher ambition. William Shakspere left Stratford about 1585 or 1586, an adventurer probably, but, as we hold, not the needy adventurer which it has been the fashion to represent him. We know not whether his wife and children were with him in London. There is no evidence to show that they did not so dwell. If he were absent alone during a portion of the year from his native place, his family probably lived under the roof of his father and mother. His visits to them would not necessarily be of rare occurrence and of short duration. The Blackfriars was a winter theatre, although at a subsequent period, when the Globe was erected; it was let for summer performances to the "children of the Chapel." With rare exceptions the performances at Court occupied only the period from Hallowmas Day to Shrove Tuesday. The latter part of the summer and autumn seem therefore to have been at Shakspere's disposal, at least during the first seven or eight years of his career. That he spent a considerable portion of the year in the quiet of his native walks we may be tolerably well assured, from the constant presence of rural images in all his works, his latest as well as his earliest. We have subsequently more distinct evidence in his farming occupations. At the time of which we are now writing we believe that a great public calamity gave him unwonted leisure; and that here commences what may be called the middle period of his dramatic life, which saw the production of his greater histories, and of some of his most delightful comedies. There is a well-known passage in A Midsummer Night's Dream which goes very far towards a determination of its date. Titania thus reproaches Oberon: “These are the forgeries of jealousy : And never, since the middle summer's spring, By paved fountain, or by rushy brook, Or on the beached margent of the sea, To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind, And the quaint mazes in the wanton green, The summers of 1592, 1593, and 1594 were so unpropitious, that the minute description of Titania, full of the most precise images derived from the observation of a resident in the country, gives us a far more exact idea of these re markable seasons than any of the prosaic records of the time. In 1594, Dr. J. King thus preaches at York: "Remember that the spring (that year when the plague broke out) was very unkind, by means of the abundance of rains that fell. Our July hath been like to a February, our June even as an April, so that the air must needs be infected." He then adds, speaking of three successive years of scarcity, "Our years are turned upside down. Our summers are no summers; our harvests are no harvests; our seed-times are no seed-times." There are passages in Stow's Annals,' and in a manuscript by Dr. Simon Forman in the Ashmolean Museum, which show that in the June and July of 1594 there were excessive rains. But Stow adds, of 1594,"notwithstanding in the month of August there followed a fair harvest." This does not agree with "The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain, It is not necessary to fix Shakspere's description of the ungenial season upon 1594 in particular. There was a succession of unpropitious years, when mans. 66 "The spring, the summer, The childing autumn, angry winter, change Their wonted liveries." « Our summers are no summers; our harvests are no harvests; our seed-times are no seed-times." Churchyard, in his preface to a poem entitled Charity,' † says, A great nobleman told me this last wet summer the weather was too cold for poets." The poetry of Shakspere was as much subjective as objective, to use one of the favourite distinctions which we have derived from the GerThe most exact description of the coldness of the "wet summer" becomes in his hands the finest poetry, even taken apart from its dramatic propriety; but in association with the quarrels of Oberon and Titania, it becomes something much higher than descriptive poetry. It is an integral part of those wondrous efforts of the imagination which we can call by no other name than that of creation. It is in A Midsummer Night's Dream, as it appears to us, that Shakspere first felt the entire strength of his creative power. That noble poem is something so essentially different from anything which the stage had previously possessed, that we must regard it as a great effort of the highest originality; conceived perhaps with very little reference to its capacity of pleasing a mixed audience; probably composed with the express intention of being presented to "an audience fit though few," who were familiar with the allusions of classical story, of " masque and antique pageantry," but who had never yet been enabled to form an adequate notion of "Such sights as youthful poets dream On summer eves by haunted stream." * See our Illustrations of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 11., Sc. II. ↑ Quoted by Mr. Halliwell in his ' Introduction to A Midsummer Night's Dream.' |