Shaksperean 'Timon,' it may be well to take | The subsequent dialogue between Mercury a rapid glance at the dialogue of Lucian, to which Mr. Skottowe refers. and Plutus, upon the use of riches, is exceedingly acute and amusing. The gods, upon approaching Timon, descry him working with his spade, in company with Labour, Poverty, Wisdom, Courage, and all the virtues that are in the train of indigence. Poverty thus addresses Plutus:-" You come to find Timon; and as to me who have received him enervated by luxury, he would forsake me when I have rendered him virtuous; you come to enrich him anew, which will render him as before, idle, effeminate, and besotted." Timon rejects the offers which Plutus makes him; and the gods leave him, desiring him to continue digging. He then finds gold, and thus apostrophizes it:"It is, it must be, gold, fine, yellow, noble gold; heavy, sweet to behold. . . Burning like fire, thou shinest day and night: come to me, thou dear delightful treasure! now do I believe that Jove himself was once turned into gold: what virgin would not spread forth her bosom to receive so beautiful a lover?" But the Timon of Lucian has other uses for his riches than Plutus antici 'Timon, or the Misanthrope,' opens with an address of Timon to Jupiter,-the protector of friendship and of hospitality. The misanthrope asks what has become of the god's thunderbolt, that he no longer revenges the wickedness of men? He then describes his own calamities. After having enriched a crowd of Athenians that he had rescued from misery, after having profusely distributed his riches amongst his friends, those ungrateful men despise him because he has become poor. Timon speaks from the desert, where he is clothed with skins, and labours with a spade. Jupiter inquires of Mercury who it is cries so loud from the depth of the valley near Mount Hymettus; and Mercury answers that he is Timon-that rich man who so frequently offered whole hecatombs to the gods; and adds, that it was at first thought that he was the victim of his goodness, his philanthropy, and his compassion for the unfortunate, but that he ought to attribute his fall to the bad choice which he made of his friends, and to the want of dis-pated; he will guard them without employcernment which prevented him seeing that he was heaping benefits upon wolves and ravens: Whilst these vultures were preying upon his liver, he thought them his best friends, and that they fed upon him out of pure love and affection. After they had gnawed him all round, eaten his bones bare, and if there was any marrow in them sucked it carefully out, they left him, cut down to the roots and withered, and, so far from relieving or assisting him in their turns, would not so much as know or look upon him. This has made him turn digger; and here, in his skin garment, he tills the earth for hire; ashamed to show himself in the city, and venting his rage against the ingratitude of those who, enriched as they had been by him, now proudly pass along, and know not whether his name is Timon." Jupiter resolves to despatch Mercury and Plutus to bestow new wealth upon Timon, and the god of riches very reluctantly consents to go, because, if he return to Timon, he should again become the prey of parasites and courtezans. 66 66 ing them; he will, as he says, purchase some retired spot, there build a tower* to keep my gold in, and live for myself alone: this shall be my habitation; and, when I am dead, my sepulchre also: from this time forth it is my fixed resolution to have no commerce or connexion with mankind, but to despise and avoid it. I will pay no regard to acquaintance, friendship, pity, or compassion: to pity the distressed, or to relieve the indigent, I shall consider as a weakness,— nay, as a crime; my life, like the beasts of the field, shall be spent in solitude, and Timon alone shall be Timon's friend. I will treat all beside as enemies and betrayers; to converse with them were profanation; to herd with them, impiety: accursed be the day that brings them to my sight!" The most agreeable name to me, he adds, shall be that of Misanthrope. A crowd approach who have heard of his good fortune; and first comes Gnathon, a parasite, who brings A building called the Tower of Timon is mentioned by Pausanias. him a new poem-a dithyrambe. Timon strikes him down with his spade. Another, and another, succeeds; and one comes from the senate to hail him as the safeguard of the Athenians. Each in his turn is welcomed with blows. The dialogue concludes with Timon's determination to mount upon a rock, and to receive every man with a shower of stones. There can be no doubt, we think, that a great resemblance may be traced between the Greek satirist and the English dramatist. The false friends of Timon are much more fully described by Lucian than by Plutarch. The finding the gold is the same.—the rejection of it by the Timon of Shakspere is essentially the same: the Poet of the play was perhaps suggested by the flatterer who came with the new ode;-the senator with his gratulations is not very different from the senators in the drama;-the blows and stones are found both in the ancient and the modern. There are minor similarities which might be readily traced, if we believed that Shakspere had gone direct to Lucian. But our opinion is that he found those similarities in the play which we are convinced he remodelled. It is in the conception and the execution of the character of Timon that the original power of Shakspere is to be traced. The vices of Shakspere's Timon are not the vices of a sensualist. It is true that his offices have been oppressed with riotous feeders, that his vaults have wept with drunken spilth of wine,-that every room "Hath blaz'd with lights, and bray'd with minstrelsy;" but he has nothing selfish in the enjoyment of his prodigality and his magnificence. He himself truly expresses the weakness, as well as the beauty, of his own character: "Why, I have often wished myself poorer, that I might come nearer to you. We are born to do benefits, and what better or properer can we call our own, than the riches of our friends? O, what a precious comfort 't is, to have so many, like brothers, commanding one another's fortunes!" Charles Lamb, in his contrast between 'Timon of Athens' and Hogarth's 'Rake's Progress,' has scarcely done justice to Timon: "The wild course of riot and extravagance, ending in the one with driving the Prodigal from the society of men into the solitude of the deserts; and, in the other, with conducting Hogarth's Rake through his several stages of dissipation into the still more complete desolations of the mad-house, in the play and in the picture are described with almost equal force and nature." Hogarth's Rake is all sensuality and selfishness; Timon is essentially high-minded and generous: he truly says, in the first chill of his fortunes, "No villainous bounty yet hath pass'd my heart. Unwisely, not ignobly, have I given." In his splendid speech to Apemantus in the fourth act, he distinctly proclaims that, in the weakness with which he had lavished his fortunes upon the unworthy, he had not pampered his own passions "Hadst thou, like us, from our first swath, proceeded The sweet degrees that this brief world affords thyself In general riot; melted down thy youth At duty, more than I could frame employment; That numberless upon me stuck, as leaves The all-absorbing defect of Timon-the root semble sweet instruments hung up in cases, that keep their sounds to themselves." His false confidence is at once, and irreparably, destroyed. If Timon had possessed one friend with whom he could have interchanged confidence upon equal terms, he would have been saved from his fall, and certainly from his misanthropy. If he had even fallen by false confidence, he would have confined his hatred to his That universal philanthropy, of which the | ne'er have use for them: and would most remost selfish men sometimes talk, is in Timon an active principle; but let it be observed that he has no preferences. It appears to us a most remarkable example of the profound sagacity of Shakspere, to exhibit Timon without any especial affections. It is thus that his philanthropy passes without any violence into the extreme of universal hatred to mankind. Had he loved a single human being with that intensity which constitutes affection in the relation of the sexes, and friendship in the relation of man to man, he would have been exempt from that unjudging lavishness which was necessary to satisfy his morbid craving for human sympathy. Shakspere, we think, has kept this most steadily in view. His surprise at the fidelity of his steward is exhibited, as if the love for any human being in preference to another came upon him like a new sensation: "Flav. I beg of you to know me, good my lord, To accept my grief, and whilst this poor wealth lasts, To entertain me as your steward still. Tim. Had I a steward So true, so just, and now so comfortable? Forgive my general and exceptless rashness, With this key to Timon's character, it appears to us that we may properly understand the "general and exceptless rashness" of his misanthropy. The only relations in which he stood to mankind are utterly destroyed. In lavishing his wealth as if it were a common property, he had believed that the same common property would flow back to him in his hour of adversity. "O, you gods, think I, what need we have any friends, if we should never have need of them? they were the most needless creatures living, should we "Most smiling, smooth, detested parasites, Courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears." But his nature has sustained a complete revulsion, because his sympathies were forced, exaggerated, artificial. It is then that all social life becomes to him an object of abomination: Piety and fear, men, -Your potent and infectious fevers heap On Athens, ripe for stroke! thou cold sciatica, And drown themselves in riot! itches, blains, That their society, as their friendship, may Nothing can be more tremendous than this "More counsel with more money, bounteous It tells, in a word, the impotence of his mis- The novelist of the 'Palace of Pleasure' thus "Though thou abhorr❜dst in us our human griefs, Scorn'dst our brain's flow, and those our drop lets which From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye On thy low grave, on faults forgiven." CHAPTER V. ARDEN OF FEVERSHAM. IN 1592 was first published 'The lamentable of that town and port), with a preface, in and true Tragedie of M. Arden of Feversham in Kent.' Subsequent editions of this tragedy appeared in 1599 and 1633. Lillo, the author of George Barnwell,' who died in 1739, left an unfinished tragedy upon the same subject, in which he has used the play of the 16th century very freely, but with considerable judgment. In 1770 the 'Arden of Feversham' originally published in 1592 was for the first time ascribed to Shakspere. It was then reprinted by Edward Jacob, a resident of Feversham (who also published a history which he endeavours to prove that the tragedy was written by Shakspere, upon the fallacious principle that it contains certain expressions which are to be found in his acknowledged works. This is at once the easiest and the most unsatisfactory species of evidence. Resemblances such as this may consist of mere conventional phrases, the common property of all the writers of a particular period. If the phrases are so striking that they must have been first created by an individual process of thought, the repetition G but called, there is necessarily very little; there is still some invention, and that of a nature to show that the author had an imaginative conception of incident and character. Upon the whole, we should be inclined to regard it as the work of a young man; and the question then arises whether that young man was Shakspere. If 'Arden of Feversham,' like the 'Yorkshire Tragedy,' had been founded upon an event which happened in Shakspere's mature years, that circumstance would have been decisive against his being in any sense of the word the author. But whilst we agree with the writer in the Edinburgh Review' that "both in conception and execution it is quite unlike even his earliest manner," we are not so confident that "its date cannot possibly be removed so far back as the time before which his own style had demonstrably been formed.” Whether it be due to the absorbing nature of the subject, or to the mode in which the story is dramatically treated, we think that of them is no proof that they have been twice used by the same person. Another may have adopted the phrase, perhaps unconsciously. General resemblances of style lead us into a wider range of inquiry; but even here we have a narrow inclosed ground compared with the entire field of criticism, which includes not only style, but the whole system of the poet's art. It has been said of this play, "Arden of Feversham, a domestic tragedy, would, in point of absolute merit, have done no discredit to the early manhood of Shakspere himself; but, both in conception and execution, it is quite unlike even his earliest manner; while, on the other hand, its date cannot possibly be removed so far back as the time before which his own style had demonstrably been formed."* Tieck has translated the tragedy into German, and he assigns it with little hesitation to Shakspere. Ulrici also subscribes to this opinion; but he makes a lower estimate of its merit than his brother critic. The versification he holds to be tedious and monoto-Arden of Feversham' cannot be read for nous, and the dialogue, he says, is conducted with much exaggeration of expression. The play appears to us deserving of a somewhat full consideration. It was printed as early as 1592, and was most probably performed several years earlier; the event which forms its subject took place in 1551. What is very remarkable too for a play of this period (and in this opinion we differ from Ulrici), there is very little extravagance of language; and the criminal passion in all its stages is conducted with singular delicacy. There are many passages too which aim to be poetical, and are in fact poetical; but for the most part they want that vivifying dramatic power which makes the poetry doubly effective from its natural and inseparable union with the situation which calls it forth and the character which gives it utterance. The tragedy is founded upon a real event which had been popularly told with great minuteness of detail; and the dramatist has evidently thought it necessary to present all the points of the story, and in so doing has of course sometimes divided and weakened the interest. Of invention, properly so *Edinburgh Review, vol. lxxi. p. 471. the first time without exciting a very considerable interest; and this interest is certainly not produced by any violent exhibitions of passion, any sudden transitions of situation, or any exciting display of rhetoric or poetry; but by a quiet and natural succession of incidents, by a tolerably consistent, if not highly forcible, delineation of character, and by equable and unambitious dialogue, in which there is certainly less extravagance of expression than we should readily find in any of the writers for the stage between 1585 and 1592. Do we then think that 'Arden of Feversham' belongs to the early manhood of Shakspere? We do not think so with any confidence; but we do think that, considering its date, it is a very remarkable play, and we should be at a loss to assign it to any writer whose name is associated with that early period of the drama, except to Shakspere. In questions of this nature there may be a conviction resulting from an examination of the whole evidence, the reasons for which cannot be satisfactorily communicated to others. But we are less anxious to make our readers think with us than to enable them to think for themselves; and we |