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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Gradually the mists veiling Shakespeare's dramatic production prior to the year 1594 are thinning, and we are enabled with clearer vision to isolate his early steps in play-writing and study his development in artistry. We are becoming more keenly sensible of the fact that his earliest plays in their present form have a false aspect of maturity. On the basis of internal allusions, Professor Charlton would place the Love's Labour's Lost so late as the autumn of 1592; and to the duplications in the text of the same play clearly illustrating Shakespeare's method of amplifying and remodeling, Professor H. D. Gray has added other considerations in an attempt to reconstruct its first form, from which he would entirely eliminate the characters of Sir Nathaniel and Holofernes. Over a decade ago Dr. Tucker Brooke recognized the fact that 1 Henry VI underwent some revision as late as 1599, and pointed out that in 2 and 3 Henry VI the dramatic strength is largely that of Marlowe. Mr. J. M. Robertson has recently renewed the attack upon the problem of Richard III. Professor Pollard's new angle of approach to the history of the texts in the First Folio and the quartos has had fruitful results in the invaluable studies of the editors of the New Cambridge edition, revealing, among other disclosures, an extremely immature Midsummer-night's Dream of 1592 or earlier. Professor Adams, in his new Life of Shakespeare, has discussed the probable significance of the plague years, 1592-93, in the poet's intellectual development. Students of Shakespeare are thus enabled to clarify, and partly to reconstruct, their conceptions of his mentality and professional production in the years 1590-94. We no longer need to assume that Shakespeare came to London in 1586 or 1587 in order to account for his apparent professional maturity in 1591-92; nor do we need to thrust the original form of 1 Henry VI back to 1589 or earlier under the assumption that Shakespeare's connection with a work so immature in parts as the present 1 Henry VI cannot be later than Henslowe's entry of harey the vj in March, 1592.
1 H. B. Charlton, “The Date of Love's Labour's Lost,” in Mod. Lang. Review, XIII, 257-66, 387-400. But cf. the article of A. K. Gray, “The Secret of Love's Labour's Lost” P.M.L.A., XXXIX, 581-611, in which he ingeniously points out the striking adaptability of the play for presentation before the Queen on the occasion of her visit to Titchfield House, the home of the Earl of Southampl ton, on September 2, 1591, and its possible relations to Burleigh's matrimoniadesigns upon the Earl.
2 H. D. Gray, The Original Version of Love's Labour's Lost, (Stanford Univ., 1918).
3 C. F. Tucker Brooke, Yale ed. of 1 Henry VI, 136; also his “The Authorship of the Second and Third Parts of King Henry VI,” Trans. Conn, Acad. Arts and Sciences, XVII, 194-211. Cf. A. Gaw, The Origin and Development of “1 Henry VI” (Univ. of Southern Calif. Studies, Vol. I), pp. 147-158, 160, 166.
4 J. M. Robertson, The Shakespeare Canon, pp. 155-94.
5 A. W. Pollard, Shakespeare Folios and Quartos; King Richard II, a New Quarto; Shakespeare's Fight with the Pirates; The Foundations of Shakespeare's Text.
6 J. Q. Adams, A Life of William Shakespeare, pp. 145, 207.
7 This date, September 4, really means June 22, inasmuch as the London theatres were closed by order of Privy Council from the evening of the 22d until the date of Greene's death.
8 Chettle, Kind-Harts Dreame, ed. Rimbault, Preface, p. iv. Here the New Eng. Dict. interprets facetious as “polished and agreeable, urbane,” (obs., from Lat. facētus, “graceful, pleasing, witty”) and not in the usual sense (from Fr. facétieux), “characterized by pleasantry; .... witty, humorous, amusing.” I am inclined to disagree because (1) the N.E.D. apparently cannot cite any other case of this obsolete use; (2) nothing in the passage compels this interpretation; (3) Chettle was not one from whom an unusual Latinic sense might be expected; (4) facētus itself may mean “witty.” But the N.E.D.' searliest citation of the usual sense dates from 1599 and their earliest case of the English word facete (derived immediately from the Latin) is dated 1603, so that there may possibly have been a period of such usage as to facetious c. 1592.
9 For correction of the date of the second of these performances from the 28th to the 27th see Adams, Shakespeare, 208, n. 1.
10 Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, II, 336.
11 Henslowe Papers, ed. Greg, 40. “Apparel” here would seem to mean their stock of costumes, the most valuable community property they possessed, then useless by reason of the plague.
12 Pembroke ownership of the first named three is established by the title-pages of the Q. editions. The Contention is so linked with the beginning of the True Tragedie (3 Henry VI) as to make it practically certain that they were written to be played as a sequence. Hamlet suddenly appears, together with A Shrew, in the repertory of the Strange-Chamberlain company in their performances at Newington Butts, June 3-13, 1594, immediately after their return to London after the plague that caused the dissolution of Pembroke's Men (Henslowe's Diary, I, 17 ; II, 164). It is to be remembered that the early Hamlet was probably by Kyd, and that he had probably some connection with Pembroke's Men. Cf. Adams, Shakespeare, 120, 131-2, 187, 303-4.
13 Cf. present article, pp. 649-650, and the references there cited.
14 Chettle, Kind-Harts Dreame, ed. Rimbault, Preface, p. iv.
15 Apart from their appearance at Court twice in the 1592-3 Christmas season, possibly owing to their influence of their patron, there is no evidence that the actors of Pembroke's Company in general were especially skilful; and despite Prof. Adams' reference (Shakespeare, p. 268) to their leader as “the eminent Gabriel Spencer,” that player is definitely associated, so far as I can ascertain, with only one part, that of a messenger with a five-line speech in one scene of 3 Henry VI—a strong contrast to the reputations of Alleyn and Burbage. Cf. Greg's statement (Henslowe's Diary, II, 313); “The only noteworthy thing that Spenser ever did was to get killed by Ben Johnson in Horton fields with a three-shilling rapier on 22 Sept. 1598.”
16 T.G.V., New Cambr. ed., p. xvi.
17 III, i, 107-14; V, i, 223-5.
18 II, i, 106; III, i, 117-19.
19 II, ii, 181-212; 222-26.
20 III, ii, 175-77.
21 Errors, New Cambr. ed., 13 and n. 1.
22 Ibid., 74.
23 III, i, 1.
24 IV, iv, 38.
25 Despite the entry under conjurer in New Cambr. ed., Glossary, p. 122, it would not have been natural in Shakespeare's day to identify the conceptions of schoolmaster and exorcist. That attitude is more mediaeval. Further, E. Antipholus' description of Pinch at V, i, 238-42, does not accord with the conception of a schoolmaster.
26 Cambr. ed., p. 74.
27 Ibid., p. 75.
28 Ibid. p. 77. Collier (Hist. Eng. Dram. Poetry, ed. 1879, II, 449) had already suggested the incorporation of parts of the old Historie in the Errors as explaining the doggerel verse Cf. also E.H.C. Oliphant in Mod. Lang. Rev., IV, 347-50.
29 Cambr. ed., pp. 77-78.
30 Ibid., p. 78.
31 Cf. also conjure, in III, i, 34.
32 Cunningham, Extracts from the Revels at Court, p. 102. A possible relation between this entry and the Errors was first pointed out by Malone.
33 Tucker Brooke, Tudor Drama, pp. 113-14, 161.
34 V, i, 326.
35 V, i, 362-68.
36 V, i, 191-95.
37 V, i, 137-38, 198.
38 V, i, 5-8.
39 He has had two lines earlier in the scene (195-96), which also may have been retained from B., although the fact that in the Folio these are mislined renders them liable to suspicion as marginal insertions in the MS. Quite possibly Shakespeare, having for the time forgotten B.'s Ægeon, had to insert them in his own MS.
40 II, i. See Table.
41 Examination of the tables of Prof. Hubbard, in P.M.L.A., XXXII, 68-80, will show that the popularity of the balanced-line construction in stage dialogue for the public theatre must have been mainly due to the influence of Marlowe's epoch-making play.
42 Dr. F. M. Padelford suggests (Errors, Tudor ed., p. xii): “There is still a third source of the play, which scholars have been slow to recognize, in the old story of Apollonius of Tyre, the foundation of Pericles. This story probably was known to Shakespeare from the version in Gower's Confessio Amantis, and also from a printed version of 1576, supposedly the same as that printed in 1607 by Laurence Twine under the title The Patterne of Painefull Adventures. From this source Shakespeare may have taken the suggestions for the shipwreck, the search of Ægeon, and the unexpected reunion of the family, the wife in each case having taken refuge in a religious house. Probably this story also suggested Ephesus as the scene of the play.” The points of similarity here brought together indicate a source for B.'s (not Shakespeare's) materials.
43 II, i, 10-43, 86-116; II, ii, 171-202, 211-19; IV, ii, 1-28.
44 III, ii, 1-70.
45 “Q” in Cambr. ed., p. xxii.
46 Even then they would show acquaintance only with the Amphitruo, not with the Menaechmi.
47 See supra, p. 640.
48 It will be objected that in assigning the Abbess' last speech to B. we are assigning him the line declaring the age of the twins to be thirty-three, which I have called Shakespeare's conception. The answer is that B. probably wrote, in harmony with I, i, 125, and V, i, 320:
Twenty-five years have I but gone in travail
Of you, my sons,
which fits the metre perfectly; and that Shakespeare, filled with the conception of the more mature Antipholuses that he had created from I, ii, to this point, was here suddenly confronted with the incongruous figures and naturally revised them. Observe, too, that even if he noticed the eighteen of I, i, 125, and added to it the seven of V,i,320, (which, being merely a young writer on a piece of hackwork, and not a professional editor, he probably did not), it was impossible for him to emend the eighteen as there were no dissyllables for substitution between twenty, which was too low, and thirty, which was too high. And, in general, it was not Shakespeare's custom to retrace his steps for revision. Certainly, though practically all editors of the play comment on the discrepancy in time, no other satisfactory solution has ever, to my knowledge, been proposed. Theobald's emendation in V, i, 400, of thirty-three to twenty-five (on the supposition that the inconsistent number “was at first written in figures, and, perhaps, blindly”) restores B.'s reading, but on insufficient grounds.
49 III, ii, 123-24.
50 “We may say, then, that it was not until the spring of 1591 that even the English government found the French wars of compelling interest, and in fact, it was some time later before the English public regarded them as topics of the moment. But in July, 1591, another expeditionary force under Essex was dispatched to France with great acclamation..... Essex's expedition is the first which created a public stir. By December 1591 the siege of Rouen was in progress..... This siege was really the event which gripped popular imagination in England. We shall hardly expect—and in fact, do not find-casual references to the French wars before the end of 1591.” (H. B. Charlton, in Mod. Lang. Rev., July, 1918, 262-63).
51 Nashe, Works, ed. McKerrow, I, 301. The Cambridge editors also quote Nashe's words (ibid., I. 271-2) written in another connection, “I borrowed this sentence out of a Play. The Theater, Poets Hall, hath many more such prouerbes.”
52 I collect the following from the notes of the Cambridge editors: Errors, II, ii, 82 (T.G.V., III, i, 350-54); Errors, III, ii, 58 (T.G.V., V. ii, 13-14); Errors, III, ii, 114-38 (T.G.V., III, i, 271-360); Errors, IV, i, 94-95 (T.G.V., I, i, 72-73) ; Errors, IV, iii, 50-51 (T.G.V., III, i, 298) ; Errors, IV, iii, 52 (T.G.V., III, i, 312); Errors, V, i, 376 (T.G.V., V, iv, 26).
53 “Actors' Names in Basic Shakespearean Texts,” P.M.L.A., XL, 530-550.
54 A Gaw, “John Sincklo as One of Shakespeare's Actors,” Anglia, XXXVII, 289-303.
55 Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, I, 54, 70, 82; and cf. discussion by Greg, ibid., II, 90-92.
56 See A. Gaw, The Origin and Development of 1 Henry VI (Univ. of Southern Calif. Studies, Vol. I), 155, n. 22. For the fallaciousness of the supposed evidence of Greene's quotation of the “tiger's heart” line of 3 Henry VI in relation to this question see ibid., 150-52, n. 12. Cf. Adams, Shakespeare, pp. 130-42.
57 Cf. Gaw, ibid., 3-7; 27-28, n. 34; 61; 155, n. 22; 163-5; 168.
58 Kyd, Works, pp. lxiv, lxxiv-lxxv.
59 Shakespeare, p. 131.
60 The balanced-line test, which gives a percentage of 6.3 in Errors, I, i, gives for Greene its highest percentage in Alphonsus of Arragon, where it reaches only 0.8. The reference in Errors (V, i, 367-8) to Greene's character, Menaphon, pointed out in this connection by the New Cambridge editors (p. 112), is quite misleading. The two lines in which the reference occurs both have feminine endings, which never occur consecutively in the work of B., and are clearly Shakespeare's. Further, the reference to Menaphon as “renowned” and a Duke is quite incongruous with Greene's Menaphon, who is a humble shepherd far from heroic. Shakespeare inserted the passage to soften the statement that E. Antipholus “came” to Ephesus from Corinth, as even thirteen years, Shakespeare's conception of the boy's age at the time, was rather too young for the boy to be traveling of his own volition; and in making the insertion Shakespeare thus played up, though very superficially, an allusion of contemporary interest, as he did repeatedly in work of his earliest period.
61 See their notes to II, ii, 35, 45-49 (cf. note to II, i, 71-74); III, ii, 71-80; IV, iii, 15; V, i, 302-6.
62 help for health (I, i, 151); cf. help, same line, a name for hypothetical an aim (III, i, 47) ; cf. thy name, same line.
63 a rival for arrival (I, ii, 4).
64 is for he is or he's (IV, ii, 45).
65 in for hypothetical e'en (II, ii, 101) ; bud for bed (III, ii, 49) ; cook for clock (I, ii, 66), the latter as difficult to explain by ear-error as by eye-error. Here also I should classify (unhap pie a) for hypothetical (unhap pier) (I, ii, 40), since Elizabethan final -r was so vigorously sounded that it might constitute an additional syllable, while the Cambridge editors admit that a and r might be confused in writing, though, they think, hardly at the end of a word.
66 Such I account jollity (changed to hypothetical policy, II, ii, 88), since Dromio's evident meaning is that a bald man should be ruefully glad to lose his hair; and crime (changed to hypothetical grime, II, ii, 141), for the idea of the mixture of dirt with the blood is not Shakespearean in tone, whereas the mixture of abstract and concrete is not uncommon with him.
67 See Sir E. M. Thompson, Shakespeare's Handwriting, p. 49, where eight cases of “stumpy” p are pointed out in 147 lines of text.
68 See Cambr. ed., p. 61.
69 Ibid., p. 90.
70 Here Shakespeare probably first realized that Luce sounded like a cut-down form of Luciana. Every practical playwright knows that names spoken from the stage should stand out in bold contrast. If the writer may cite a parallel case from personal experience, when Pharaoh's Daughter was produced he and his collaborator found it necessary to change the name of one of the characters, Myra, because when she was mentioned audiences tended to confuse her with another with the somewhat similar name Miriam. In Errors, III, i, imagine the audience's conceiving that Dromio, bawling the name Luce (up to that point unmentioned in the play) was calling his mistress' sister Luciana!
71 It must be remembered that there is no evidence that Shakespeare had ever read the Menaechmi, either in the original or in translation.
72 Or possibly Author A., for in the Folio four out of the eleven speech allocations in III, i, 11-82, assigning speeches to E. Antipholus have the E. present, and these may originate with A. In this case A. must be the one responsible for shifting the scene to Ephesus.
73 Similarly Anti. E [rotis]. would have been wrongly interpreted as Antipholus of Ephesus.
74 See the testimony of Heminges and Condell (First Folio, Address to the .... Readers) that “what he thought, he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers;” and Jonson's remark in Timber (Cassell ed., p. 47), “I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line.”
75 Cf. Dr.F. S. Boas' interesting corroboration (Shakespeare and the Universities, p. 10) of Mr. Pollard's contention that an author's original MS might be sent to the Censor for endorsement and then serve as the original prompter's copy. See also J. Q. Adams, Shakespeare, pp. 501-9, and the history of the MSS of 1 Henry VI (A. Gaw, The Origin and Development of 1 Henry VI, p. 168) and of Much Ado (A. Gaw, “Actors' Names in Basic Shakespearean Texts, with special reference to Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado,” P.M.L.A., XL, 543-550).