To chide at your extremes it not becomes me; commencement of a new play. Shakspere | But Greene was unequal to conceive the made the difficulties of his plot bend to his grace of mind which distinguishes Perdita:art; instead of wanting art, as Ben Jonson 'Sir, my gracious lord, says. Autolycus and the Clown prepare us for Perdita; and when the third scene opens, what a beautiful vision lights upon this earth! There perhaps never was such a union of perfect simplicity and perfect grace as in the character of Perdita. What an exquisite idea of her mere personal appearance is presented in Florizel's rapturous exclamation, "When you do dance, I wish you A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do Greene, in describing the beauties of his "It happened not long after this that there was a meeting of all the farmers' daughters in Sicilia, whither Fawnia was also bidden as the mistress of the feast, who, having attired herself in her best garments, went among the rest of her companions to the merry meeting, there spending the day in such homely pastimes as shepherds use. As the evening grew on and their sports ceased, each taking their leave at other, Fawnia, desiring one of her companions to bear her company, went home by the flock to see if they were well folded; and, as they returned, it fortuned that Dorastus (who all that day had been hawking, and killed store of game) encountered by the way these two maids, and, casting his eye suddenly on Fawnia, he was half afraid, fearing that with Acteon he had seen Diana, for he thought such exquisite perfection could not be found in any mortal creature. As thus he stood in amaze, one of his pages told him that the maid with the garland on her head was Fawnia, the fair shepherd whose beauty was so much talked of in the court. Dorastus, desirous to see if nature had adorned her mind with any inward qualities, as she had decked her body with outward shape, began to question with her whose daughter she was, of what age, and how she had been trained up? who answered him with such modest reverence and sharpness of wit, that Dorastus thought her outward beauty was but a counterfeit to darken her inward qualities, wondering how so courtly behaviour could be found in so simple a cottage, and cursing fortune that had shadowed wit and beauty with such hard fortune." With a swain's wearing; and me, poor lowly Most goddess-like prank'd up." 66 Fawnia, poor soul, was no less joyful that, being a shepherd, fortune had favoured her so as to reward her with the love of a prince, hoping in time to be advanced from the daughter of a poor farmer to be the wife of a rich king." Here we see a vulgar ambition, rather than a deep affection. Fawnia, in the hour of discovery and danger, was quite incapable of exhibiting the feminine dignity of Perdita : "I was not much afeard: for once, or twice, gone? In the novel we have no trace of the interruption by the father of the princely lover in the disguise of a guest at the shepherd's cottage. Dorastus and Fawnia flee from the country without the knowledge of the king. The ship in which they embark is thrown by a storm upon the coast of Bohemia. Messengers are despatched in search of the lovers; and they arrive in Bohemia with the request of Egistus that the companions in the flight of Dorastus shall be put to death. The secret of Fawnia's birth is discovered by the shepherd; and her father recognises her. But the previous circumstances exhibit as much grossness of conception on the part of the novelist, as the different management of the catastrophe shows the matchless skill and taste of the dramatist. We forgive Leontes for his early folly and wickedness; for during sixteen years has his remorse been bitter and his affection constant. The pathos of the following passage is truly Shaksperean : Whilst I remember "Leon. the region of the literal that it would be worse than idle to talk of its costume. When the stage-manager shall be able to reconcile the contradictions, chronological and geographical, with which it abounds, he may decide whether the characters should wear the dress of the ancient or the modern world, and whether the architectural scenes should partake most of the Grecian style of the times of the Delphic oracle, or of the Italian in the more familiar days of Julio Romano. We cannot assist him in this difficulty. It may be sufficient for the reader of this delicious play to know that he is purposely taken out of the empire of the real;-to wander in some poetical sphere where Bohemia is but a name for a wild country upon the sea, and the oracular voices of the pagan world are heard amidst the merriment of "Whitsun pastorals" and the solemnities of "Christian burial;" where the "Emperor of Russia" represents some dim conception of a mighty monarch of far-off lands; and "that rare Italian master, Julio Romano," stands as the abstract personification of excellence Now, in art. It is quite impossible to imagine that he who, when it was necessary to be precise, as in the Roman plays, has painted manners with a truth and exactness which have left at an inmeasurable distance such imitations of ancient manners as the learned Ben Jonson has produced,-that he should To make a perfect woman, she, you kill'd, She I kill'd! I did so: but thou strik'st me The appropriateness of the title of the "From the point of view taken in this drama, have perplexed this play with such anomalies through ignorance or even carelessness. There can be no doubt that the most accomplished scholars amongst our early dramatists, when dealing with the legendary and the romantic, purposely committed these anachronisms. Greene, as we have shown, of whose scholarship his friends boasted, makes a ship sail from Bohemia in the way that Shakspere makes a ship wrecked upon a Bohemian coast. Yet, when we consider how differently Jonson and Shakspere worked, in their respective schools, it is not to be wondered at that Jonson, in his free conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden, in January, 1619, should say that "Shakspere wanted art." When Jonson said this, he was in no laudatory mood. Drummond heads his This comedy is so thoroughly taken out of record of the conversation thus: "His life appears like a singular and serene, even while terrifying, winter's tale, related by the flickering light of the fire in a rough boisterous night, in still and homelike trustiness, by an old grandmother to a listening circle of children and grandchildren, while the warm, secure, and happy feeling of the assembly mixes itself with a sense of the fear and the dread of the related adventures and the cold wretched night without. But this arises only through the secret veil which lies over the power of chance, and which is here spread over the whole. It appears serene, because everywhere glimmers through this veil the bright joyful light of a futurity leading all to good; because we continually feel that the unhealthy darkness of the present will be again thrown off even through an equally obscure inward necessity." B B Drummond, offers the most direct evidence "Yet must I not give Nature all: thy art, Upon the Muses' anvil: turn the same censure of the English poets was this." | absurd opinion so long propagated that Censure is here, of course, put for opinion; Shakspere worked without labour and withalthough Jonson's opinions are by no means out method. Jonson's own testimony, defavourable to any one of whom he speaks.livered five years after the conversation with Spenser's stanzas pleased him not, or his matter; Sir John Harrington's 'Ariosto,' under all translations, was the worst; Abraham France was a fool; Sidney did not keep a decorum in making every one speak as well as himself; Shakspere wanted art. And so, during two centuries, a mob of critics have caught up the word, and with the most knowing winks, and the most profound courtesies to each other's sagacity, have they echoed-"Shakspere wanted art." But a cunning interpolator, who knew the temper of the critics, the anonymous editor of Cibber's 'Lives of the Poets,' took the heads of a conversation" between Jonson and Drummond, prefixed to Drummond's works in 1711, and bestowed a few finishing touches upon them, after his own fashion. And thus, to the great joy of the denouncers of anachronisms, and other Shaksperean absurdities, as they are pleased to call them, we have read as follows for a hundred years:-"He said, Shakspere wanted Art, and sometimes Sense; for, in one of his plays, he brought in a number of men, saying they had suffered shipwrack in Bohemia, where is no sea near by 100 miles." Jonson, indeed, makes the observation upon the shipwreck in Bohemia, but without any comment upon it. It is found in another part of Drummond's record, quite separate from "Shakspere wanted art ;" a casual remark, side by side with Jonson's gossip about Sidney's pimpled face and Raleigh's plagiaries. It was probably mentioned by Jonson as an illustration of some principle upon which Shakspere worked; and in the same way Shakspere wanted art" was in all likelihood explained by him, in producing instances of the mode in which Shakspere's art differed from his (Jonson's) art. It is impossible to receive Jonson's words as any support of the There can be no difficulty in understanding Jonson's dispraise of Shakspere, small as it was, when we look at the different characters of the two men. Jonson, in all likelihood, did not intend to impute an ignorant blunder to Shakspere, but a wilful inconsistency. Mr. Collier has quoted a passage from Taylor, the water-poet, who published his 'Journey to Prague,' in which the honest waterman laughs at an alderman who "catches me by the goll, demanding if Bohemia be a great town, whether there be any meat in it, and whether the last fleet of ships be arrived there." Mr. Collier infers that Taylor "ridicules a vulgar error of the kind" committed by Shakspere. We rather think that he meant to ridicule very gross ignorance generally; and we leave our readers to take their choice of placing Green and Shakspere in the same class with Taylor's “Gregory Gandergoose, an Alderman of Gotham," or of believing that a confusion of time and place was considered (whether justly is not here the question) a proper characteristic of the legendary drama-such as 'A Winter's Tale.' CHAPTER II. CYMBELINE. 'THE Tragedie of Cymbeline was first printed in the folio collection of 1623. The play is very carefully divided into acts and scenes-an arrangement which is sometimes wanting in other plays of the folio edition. 66 These We have in previous chapters given extracts from a book of plays and notes thereof, for common policy," kept by Dr. Symon Forman, in 1610 and 1611. notes, which were discovered and first printed by Mr. Collier, contain not only an account of some play of Richard II., at which the writer was present, but distinctly give the plots of Shakspere's 'Winter's Tale,' 'Macbeth,' and 'Cymbeline.' We shall take the liberty of reprinting from Mr. Collier's 'New Particulars' Forman's account of the plot of 'Cymbeline:' "Remember, also, the story of Cymbeline, King of England, in Lucius' time: how Lucius came from Octavius Cæsar for tribute, and, being denied, after sent Lucius with a great army of soldiers, who landed at Milford Haven, and after were vanquished by Cymbeline, and Lucius taken prisoner, and all by means of three outlaws, of the which two of them were the sons of Cymbeline, stolen from him when they were but two years old, by an old man whom Cymbeline had banished; and he kept them as his own sons twenty years with him in a cave. And how one of them slew Cloten, that was the Queen's son, going to Milford Haven to seek the love of Imogen the King's daughter, whom he had banished also for loving his daughter. "And how the Italian that came from her love conveyed himself in a chest, and said it was a chest of plate sent from her love and others to be presented to the King. And in the deepest of the night, she being asleep, he opened the chest and came forth of it, and viewed her in her bed, and the marks of her body, and took away her bracelet, and after accused her of adultery to her love, &c. And, in the end, how he came with the Romans into England, and was taken prisoner, and after revealed to Imogen, who had turned herself into man's apparel, and fled to meet her love at Milford Haven; and chanced to fall on the cave in the woods where her two brothers were: and how by eating a sleeping dram they thought she had been dead, and laid her in the woods, and the body of Cloten by her, in her love's apparel that he left behind him, and how she was found by Lucius," &c. "This," Mr. Collier adds, "is curious; principally because it gives the impression of the plot upon the mind of the spectator, at about the time when the play was first produced." We can scarcely yield our implicit assent to this. Forman's note-book is evidence that the play existed in 1610 or 1611; but it is not evidence that it was first produced in 1610 or 1611. Mr. Collier, in his 'Annals of the Stage,' gives us the following entry from the books of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels:-"On Wednesday night the first of January, 1633, Cymbeline' was acted at Court by the King's players. Well liked by the King." Here is a proof that for more than twenty years after Forman saw it 'Cymbeline' was still acted, and still popular. By parity of reasoning it might have been acted, and might have been popular, before Forman saw it. Coleridge, in his classification of 1819, places Cymbeline,' as he supposes it to have been originally produced, in the first epoch, to which he assigns 'Pericles: "In the same epoch I place 'The Winter's Tale' and 'Cymbeline,' differing from the Pericles by the entire rifaccimento of it, when Shakspere's celebrity as poet, and his interest no less than his influence as manager, enabled him to bring forward the laid-by labours of his youth." Tieck, whilst he considers it "the last work of the great poet, which may have been written about 1614 or 1615," adds, “it is also not impossible that this varied-woven romantic history had inspired the poet in his youth to attempt it for the stage." Tieck assigns no reason for believing that the play as we have received it is of so late a date as 1614 or 1615. Malone has observed, and we think very justly (for in matters in which he was not tainted by the influences of his | age his opinions are to be respected), that its versification resembles that of 'The Winter's Tale' and 'The Tempest.' To whatever age these romantic dramas shall be ultimately assigned we have no doubt that on every account-from the nature of the fable, as well as the cast of thought, and the construction of the language-' Cymbeline' will go with them. But, however this may be, we heartily join in the belief, so distinctly expressed by two such master-minds as Coleridge and Tieck, that the sketch of 'Cymbeline' belongs to the youthful Shakspere. We have fancied that it is almost possible to trace in some instances the dove-tailing of the original with the improved drama. The principal incidents of the story of Imogen are in Boccaccio. Of course, with reference to the knowledge of Shakspere, we do not hold with Steevens that they, "in their original Italian, to him at least, were inaccessible." Such a fable was exactly one which would have been seized upon by him who, from the very earliest period of his career, saw, in those reflections of life which the Italian novelists present, the materials of bringing out the manifold aspects of human nature in the most striking forms of truth and beauty. As far as the main action of the drama was concerned, therefore, we hold that it was as accessible to the Shakspere of five-and-twenty as it was to the Shakspere of five-and-forty; and that he had❘ not to wait for the publication in 1603 of a story-book in which the tales which were the common property of Europe were remodelled with English scenes and characters, to have produced Cymbeline.' All the historical accessories too of the story were familiar to him in his early career. Assuming, then, that 'Cymbeline' might have been sketched at an early period, and comparing it more especially with 'Pericles,' which assuredly has not been re-written, we venture to express a belief that the scenes have, in some parts, been greatly elaborated; and that this elaboration has had the effect of 6 | thrusting forward such a quantity of incidents into the fifth act as to have rendered it absolutely necessary to resort to pantomimic action or dumb show, an example of which occurs in no other of Shakspere's works. This might have been remedied by omitting the "apparition" in the fifth act, which either belongs not to Shakspere at all, or belongs to the period when he had not clearly seen his way to shake off the trammels of the old stage. But would an audience familiar with that scene have parted with it? We believe not. The fifth act, as we think, presents to us very strikingly the differences between the young and the mature Shakspere, always bearing in mind that the skill of such a master of his art has rendered it very difficult to conjecture what were the differences between his sketch and his finished picture. The soliloquy of Posthumus in that Act, in its fulness of thought, belongs to the finished performance, the minute stage directions which follow to the unfinished. Nothing can be more certain than that the dialogue between Posthumus and the gaoler is of the period of deep philosophical speculation; while the tablet left by Jupiter has a wondrous resemblance to the odd things of the early stage. The greater part of the play is certainly such as no one but Shakspere could have written, and not only so, but Shakspere in the full possession and habitual exercise of his powers. The mountain scenes with Imogen and her brothers are perhaps unequalled, even in the whole compass of the Shaksperean drama. They are of the very highest order of poetical beauty,-not such an outpouring of beauty as in the 'Romeo and Juliet' and 'The Midsummer's Night's Dream,' where the master of harmonious verse revels in all the graces of his art-but of beauty entirely subservient to the peculiarities of the characters, the progress of the action, the scenery, ay, and the very period of the drama, whatever Dr. Johnson may say of "incongruity." There is nothing to us more striking than the contrast which is presented between the free natural lyrics sung by the brothers over the grave of Fidele, and the elegant poem which some have thought so much more beautiful. |