The Shakespeare-Expositor. Thomas Keightley

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СКАЧАТЬ there can be little doubt that it was them chiefly that Green had in view in the passage quoted above from his Groat's Worth of Wit, &c.; and upon examination it appears that in the first of them Shakespeare's additions and improvements amount to a fifth, in the second to only an eighth part of the text. Of the other two, The First Part of Henry VI. and Titus Andronicus, after a very careful study of them, my decided opinion, and apparently that of Mr. Dyce also, is that, with an exception presently to be noticed, neither the one nor the other contains a single speech or even a single line from the pen of Shakespeare. How they got into the folio is a question not easy to answer. Heminge and Condell, no doubt, may not have been critics, and so may have fancied that he had had to do with The First Part of Henry VI. also; or they may have merely inserted it as being connected with the other Parts. As to Titus Andronicus, I have already given a reason for its appearance in Meres's list. He had probably heard that it was by Shakespeare, and he made no exact inquiry, and so ascribed it to him; and the editors of the folio may have taken it on his authority, or have followed the same tradition. I do not believe that it was at any time in Shakespeare's nature to write the horrors of one of these plays, or to treat the noble Maid of Orleans as she is treated in the other, or even to labour on and improve the pieces that contained them. Besides, there are nowhere to be found plays more entirely of one single cast than these are. There is also displayed in them an acquaintance with Horace and others of the ancient Classics which Shakespeare did not possess. They may have been written by either Kyd or Marlow, each of whom had this acquaintance, and also a taste for horrors, and abundant talent for their composition. At the same time I think it possible that, as there is a Clown in Titus Andronicus—the only instance I believe out of the plays of Shakespeare—the two short, trifling, and needless scenes in which he appears may be from our poet's pen, and that hence the play was hastily ascribed to him.

      The following plays also were published during Shakespeare's life-time with his name, in full or in initials, on the title-pages: Locrine, 1595; The Life of Sir John Oldcastle, 1600—known to be by Munday, Drayton, Wilson, and Hathway; History of Thomas Lord Cromwell, 1602; The London Prodigal, 1605; The Puritan, or The Widow of Watling Street, 1607; A Yorkshire Tragedy, 1608. These, with Pericles, Prince of Tyre—also published under his name in 1609—were printed in the 3rd folio, 1664, and reprinted in the 4th, 1685, and finally by Rowe in his edition of Shakespeare's Plays. The Two Noble Kinsmen, by Fletcher and Shakespeare, was published in 1634.

      Of the first six of these plays the opinion of the critics is tolerably unanimous that Shakespeare had nothing whatever to do with them. Yet, as in Locrine (printed so early as 1595) it is said, "newly set forth, overseen and corrected, by W. S." it is possible, though most unlikely, that it may be one of the plays on which he operated in the early part of his dramatic career; and the fame of his Poems lately printed, may have induced the publisher to place his initials in the title-page. As to Pericles, it was rejected, with Locrine, &c., by Pope, Theobald, and all the editors down to Malone, who printed all these pieces in 1780 in the Supplement to the edition of Johnson and Steevens; he did not, however, include any of them in his own edition of 1790. Steevens admitted Pericles into his edition of 1793 on the authority of Farmer, but marked with an asterisk, as being only in part Shakespeare's, to which opinion Malone, who at first thought it wholly his, acceded. It finally was included in Reed's and in the Boswell-Malone or Variorum edition, which succeeding editors have followed. From mine it has been excluded, as I am most firmly of opinion that it does not contain a single line of Shakespeare's, and that it is an insult to his memory to give it a place among his genuine works. In fact the deliberate rejection of it by Heminge and Condell from the folio ought to outweigh all conjectural proofs in its favour. These, we must recollect, were not ordinary players, they were Shakespeare's fellows or partners in the theatres; and it was therefore utterly impossible that any play could be acted there without their knowing who was the author. They must, then, have known that Shakespeare had had nothing to do with it; for their admission of 1 Hen. VI. and Titus Andronicus proves that evidence even of the slenderest kind would have turned the beam with them. His name at full length in the title-page proves nothing; for it is also in that of Sir John Oldcastle, 1600, which is known not to be his.

      As to the Two Noble Kinsmen, it was published in 1634 as "written by the memorable worthies of their time, Mr. John Fletcher and Mr. William Shakespeare"—putting the greater last—an evident bookseller's artifice; for surely Shakespeare at the zenith of his fame, and toward the close of his dramatic career, would not join with a young poet in the composition of a play, a thing that he never seems to have done, even when he was a young poet himself. Mr. Dyce, who had rejected, afterwards adopted the theory of its being in a certain sense a joint composition; and he makes some strange hypotheses upon the subject, which to me seem utterly devoid of probability. Surely, for example, it is not to be supposed that a man of Shakespeare's business-habits would, when winding-up, as we may term it, leave behind him, in the hands of the House, an unfinished drama, and that what he left should have been the beginning and the end of a play! It is pretty generally agreed that the entire play, except the first and fifth acts, is by Fletcher. To me it seems certain that the first act, though the work of a superior poet, is not Shakespeare's; and I feel quite confident that the first, as well as the second, scene of the last act is by Fletcher; while the concluding scenes are by some other poet, different from, and, I think, superior to, the writer of the first act. My theory is, that Fletcher either obtained the commencement of a play by some one else, or began to write in conjunction with some one, and, the play being unfinished at his death, it was concluded by another poet, possibly Massinger, who alone seems capable of writing such a noble termination of so fine a drama.

      THE TEXT

      CORRECTED AND ELUCIDATED.

      INTRODUCTION.

      I. THE TEXT. II. THE VERSE.

      COMEDIES.

      HISTORIES.

      TRAGEDIES.

INTRODUCTION.

       Table of Contents

I. The Text.

       Table of Contents

      1.

      In reading and criticising the plays of Shakespeare, we must always bear in mind that they were written for the stage, not for the closet, to be acted, not to be read. Shakespeare, as it would appear, was utterly regardless of literary fame; he had, as we have seen, one sole object in view, to acquire as much money as would enable him to quit the hurry and bustle of London, and settle down in his native Stratford-on-Avon as a man of independent property, and be, if possible, the founder of a family. Pouring forth, therefore, his tragic and comic strains, with as little apparent effort as the songsters of the grove warble their native notes, he set no value on them but as they filled the Globe and the Blackfriars and thus tended to the realization of the great object of all his ambition; and he never gave a single one of them to the press, as was done by Jonson and others who sought for literary fame by their dramas. Hence, though the verse is always melodious, we must not look in them for the finish and perfection which we find in those of a Racine or a Molière; we must, on the contrary, be prepared to meet with all the marks of haste and carelessness, with contradictions and even with absurdities. It would really dismay one to think of their being submitted to the ordeal through which the pieces of the great Corneille have been made to pass by Voltaire. Corneille, by the way, like Shakespeare, valued his plays by the money they produced.

      Copies of about one-half of his plays were surreptitiously obtained by the booksellers, who printed them with more or less of care; but of this he took no heed: and when he finally retired СКАЧАТЬ