not have made the three Queens, in act i. 1, speak in the cool, oratorical tone in which they express their entreaties, but have made them express themselves in the language of feeling, of deep grief and wrathful indignation; he would certainly not have wasted thirty-nine rhetorically embellished lines in describing the fall of a horse and Arcite's skill in horsemanship, nor have furnished such lines with observations like the following:

"A black horse with

Not a hair-worth of white, which some will say
Weakens his price, and many will not buy

His goodness with a note; which superstition
Here finds allowance-"

and again, where the horse is described as—

"Dancing as 't were to the music

His own hoofs made (for, as they say, from iron
Came music's origin)!"

Still the diction has a touch of Shakspeare's style. But, as I think, the difference between the supposed Shakspearian portions and the other parts of the piece are not so great as they must have appeared to Dyce and other English critics, to convince them of Shakspeare's having had a hand in them. But even granted that the difference were greater than it appears to me, at all events it is not sufficiently great to exclude the possibility that a poet of such eminent talent as Fletcher might in one of his earlier works (for the play cannot, probably, be dated later than about 1608-9) have taken some of Shakspeare's characters as his models, and for a time come under Shakspeare's influence-as the plagiarism' from Hamlet' proves; further, that he might have succeeded in imitating Shakspeare's style in single features of diction, nay, that he might even have succeeded in striking a tone kindred to Shakspeare's own in whole portions of the play. This possibility seems to me much more likely than to assume that Shakspeare wrote scenes and whole acts which, in substance, stand in direct contradiction to the spirit and character of his own compositions.

Having now gone through the whole of Shakspeare's genuine as well as his doubtful plays, I shall subjoin a chronological arrangement of them, so as to give a clear survey of his career as a poet. It must, however, be distinctly understood that I do not claim full historical certainty for this classification. It is only the periods in which I have arranged them that I regard as sufficiently well established; the several years, on the other hand, are purely hypothetical.

First Period, from 1586 to 1591-1592.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre

Titus Andronicus

The First Part of the Contention, etc.

The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York)

1587 1587-88

original form of 1588-89 Henry VI.

The two latter revised and connected with the 1st Part of Henry VI. 1589–90

The Comedy of Errors

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

1590

When on the point of closing this chronological survey, I received the Athenæum of June 1868, and find on p. 863 an article according to which the Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and James I., which P. Cunningham published for the English Shakspeare Society in 1862, and upon which the chronological determination of some of Shakspeare's plays principally depends, are strongly suspected of being forgeries. The anonymous author maintains, it is true, that the entries, which had been lost from the public archives and recently recovered, are on the whole undoubtedly genuine, but that all the entries concerning dramatic representations at Court-hence more especially the entries of The Moor of Venis on the 1st of November, 1604, of The Merry Vives of Winsor on the Sunday following, of Mesur for Mesur on St. Stephan's Night of the same year, as well as of The Tempest and of Ye winter's night's Tayle in 1611-have been added by a later (more modern?) hand; he thinks these entries were no doubt made by some one who had referred to these rolls, some leaves of which had inadvertently been left empty. The writer then adds: 'Who made these additions does not appear. There they are, and experts in old handwriting say they speak for themselves.'

If this supposed forgery should prove to be true, then, as I think, it would be doubtful whether Othello and Measure for Measure could have been written as early as 1601. However, as the author of the above article has not given his name, we are not yet bound to put faith in his assertions; and I am the more inclined to doubt their correctness, as it would deeply grieve me were a new case of deception by literary men again to upset the already unsteady credit of English literary historians.

BOOK VIII.

HISTORY OF SHAKSPEARE'S PLAYS IN ENGLAND.

CHAPTER I.

STATE OF DRAMATIC POETRY DURING THE 17TH CENTURY. As in the preceding Book, my object here cannot be tc enter upon new discoveries in the domain of literary history; the necessary materials for such discoveries are in the possession of Englishmen alone. My intention is merely to arrange well-known historical facts-compressed into a brief sketch-according to a few leading principles, and thus to leave history itself, as it were, to pass sentence upon the aesthetic value of Shakspeare's plays. My object here is simply to give an aesthetic consideration of Shakspeare's plays; accordingly, literary history is to me only a means, even though an indispensable means, in so far as the aesthetic consideration must, as I think, necessarily rest upon an historical foundation.

I have already, in my first volume (pp. 227, 245, 297), stated the reasons why Shakspeare's plays, although not indeed altogether supplanted by the productions of the Ben Jonson School-more especially by those of Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, and others-nevertheless gradually lost the ascendancy which they had enjoyed. This rise of the Ben Jonson School and the reputation acquired by its founder is the first significant event in the history of Shakspeare's plays.

Not that this directly affected the fame and celebrity of Shakspeare, for even at the court of King James, as we

have seen, his plays remained particularly popular, notwithstanding the personal favour which Ben Jonson contrived more and more to obtain for himself. And even at a later period, after Shakspeare's death, they did not by any means disappear from the stage; they may have gradually been less frequently performed, but perhaps only because the public is ever desirous to have something new. On the contrary, Shakspeare's works evidently long continued to be general favourites and highly-esteemed, even though to a less extent than during his lifetime. G. Rümelin* maintains that it was in London alone that the drama created great and general interest, and that Shakspeare was not a national poet in his own day, that his works had never been really popular, inasmuch as his public, even in London, consisted only of the 'jeunesse dorée' of the time, of idlers from the higher ranks, especially the young cavaliers who came to London in search of love adventures, sports, and other amusements, or of the lower orders of the people, artisans, apprentices, bargemen, workmen from the wharfs and manufactories, sailors, servants, and soldiers. But this remark is but the result of Rümelin's ignorance of the true state of the case. Shakspeare's name may, I admit, not have been known throughout the whole of England; for under certain circumstances it can happen that a work may enjoy the greatest popularity, and yet the name and person of its author be known only to limited circles:were not the Greeks wholly ignorant of all concerning the person, the life and the character of their greatest and most popular poet, except his name, of which it is even now doubtful whether it is a proper name! And such circumstances, as we have seen, prevailed in Shakspeare's time, both as regards the English theatres and as regards its dramatists.

The theatre itself, however, was the most popular institution of the England of those days. To repeat a quotation from the eminent historian, Froude,† given in our last volume, acting was the special amusement of the English during the 16th century, from the palace * Shakespeare-Studien, pp. 10, 16 ff. History of England, etc., i. 61.