Читать книгу The Shakespeare-Expositor - Thomas Keightley - Страница 42

Edition. Only in the folio, 1623.

Date. From the style and the family resemblance—as appears to me—between Imogen, Miranda, and Perdita, I should deem it to be contemporaneous with the Tempest and the Winter's Tale. We may place it, then, in or after 1610.

Origin. The tale of Bernabò da Genova in the Decamerone, which Shakespeare had probably read in the original. There was an imitation of it in a tract called Westward for Smelts, of which, however, no edition earlier than 1620 is known. For the historical part, he, of course, had resorted to Hollinshed.

In these plays we may, I think, distinguish four different phases of composition, in each of which the thoughts and the language of the poet present a peculiar appearance.

The first phase extends we may say from 1593 to 1598, and contains the plays in Meres's list—except 1 Henry IV., and The Merchant of Venice, and The Taming of the Shrew. It is distinguished by a continual play on words and by frequent rimes—both in couplets and in stanzas—while the blank verse, which is as yet unformed, is harmonious and almost always decasyllabic. Richard III. seems to form the connecting link between this and the next phase; for it is free from both rimes and play on words, while the blank verse has not yet acquired its appropriate form.

The second phase would seem to extend from 1598 to 1603. It contains The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Much Ado about Nothing, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, 1 and 2 Henry IV., Henry V., Hamlet, Othello, Julius Cæsar, Antony and Cleopatra. Here the dramatic blank verse is perfect, trisyllabic feet being admitted, and the lines running into each other, rimes only appearing in final couplets. There rarely occurs a play on words, and the language is in general easy and natural.

The third phase may extend from 1603 to 1609. It contains Measure for Measure, Lear, Macbeth, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, and Coriolanus. In this the poet returned to the practice of giving passages of several lines in rime, though not in stanzas, and his language is obscured by periphrases, inversions, and ellipses to such an extent that many places—the speeches of Ulysses, for instance, in Troilus and Cressida—must have been perfectly unintelligible to an ordinary audience. He had already, as in Antony and Cleopatra, begun to place more frequently the preposition or conjunction at the end of one line and the word connected with it at the beginning of the next, and he continues to do so here, chiefly in Coriolanus, though hardly at all in Troilus and Cressida, or in Timon of Athens.

The fourth and last phase contains The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Henry VIII., Cymbeline. He here seems to have made a return to the simpler language of the second phase. In Henry VIII. and The Tempest, what has been said of prepositions and conjunctions goes on to a great extent.

The plays above noticed—thirty-two in number—are the genuine productions of the poet. Two of them, King John and The Taming of the Shrew, were founded on plays that are still extant, and we may see that he used them precisely as he did the tales and chronicles on which he founded so many of his other plays, taking the story, the incidents, the characters, and, when it suited his purpose, the language which they contained.

But beside these, we find in the folio four other plays of a different kind, of which the most that any critic ventures to assert is that they were retouched, improved, and enlarged by Shakespeare. Of two of these, namely The Second and Third Parts of Henry VI. this would seem to be the truth; for we have the two plays in their original form, and 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.