chose in his works passages offering striking resemblances with others in old writers, and I asked him if these were cases of imitation, recollection, or re-invention; such passages as these: Je suis, par fatale ordonnance, (Jacques Grévin.) Mais l'amante que j'ai, je ne l'ai pas choisie, (Sully Prudhomme.) When time shall turn those amber locks to grey, J'attends, moi, sa vieillesse et j'en épîrai l'heure, 'Je vous chéris toujours et toujours je vous pleure, Je viens vous rapporter votre jeunesse blonde; Tout l'or de vos cheveux est resté dans mon cœur. (Drayton.) (Sully Prudhomme. Whoe'er she be, That not impossible she That shall command my heart and me; Lock'd up from mortall eye, In the shady leaves of Destiny.. ... (Crashaw.) L'épouse, la compagne à mon cœur destinée, Promise a mon jeune tourment, Je ne la connais pas, mais je sais qu'elle est née, (Sully Prudhomme.) To my inquiries the poet answered that he had never read any of these hypothetical models when he wrote. "I console myself for my early ignorance," he went on to say, "by the thought that if I had known, before I rimed, all that has been written on love, the pen would have fallen from my hands; I would have recognised in others my own emotions, and even in their lives circumstances analogous to those which had aroused them in mine. I confess, to my shame, that I was too ignorant to be a plagiary." He adds that the true originality in a poet "" consists less in what he says than in the inalienable and quite personal timbre of his voice, his accent, and the movement that his passion gives to his song." Except perhaps in the narrative parts of his works, or occasionally in the strangeness of his ways of feeling, a poet "offers nothing new to his readers and does not pretend to do so; he procures them only the satisfaction of recognising themselves. The human heart is the common means of communication turned to account by poetry; it offers in all poets the same gamut of sentiments, but with a different ring." I This ring, this true originality, was preeminently Shakespeare's; by this he was to rise and make his voice heard above all others, and his words were to become unforgettable dicta. Many of his sayings, even the most famous, are to be found, in essence, almost anywhere, in works sometimes within and sometimes beyond his reach: Hamlet's meditations in Seneca, and also in Du Plessis-Mornay, and elsewhere too 2; King Henry IV.'s musings on sleep 'Chatenay, Seine, November 18, 1904. See the complete text at the end of the volume. 2 Chorus of act iii. of "Troas," translated by Jasper Heywood, 1559; above, p. 26. "Je vous prie, qu'est ce qu'estre mort, sinon n'estre plus vivant en ce monde ? Avons nous donc senti quelque douleur lorsque nous n'y étions encores point? . . . Sommes nous jamais plus semblables à un mort que quand nous dormons, ne plus en repos qu'à ceste heure là?"-" Excellent discours de la vie et de la mort, par Philippe de Mornay, gentil-homme françois," 1576, 8vo, p. 56, dedicated to his sister, December 29, 1575. It had been translated by Mary Countess of Pembroke: "A Discourse of Life and Death .. by Ph. Mornay," 1592. I in the same Du Plessis-Mornay, Romeo's love-making in Marot,2 Hotspur's taunts in Luigi Groto,3 and so on ad infinitum. All those thoughts had occurred to others before, but Shakespeare created them anew; they received from him their definitive birth. With all this, book-learning had little enough to do. It was not his fashion to take unnecessary pains, to verify facts and dates, to study difficult old texts, and go to sources, were they English or Latin. He took the first thing that came, the publication nearest his hand, the one easiest to get and understand, the “Troublesome Raigne of John "Ils (the great) ont leurs licts bien mols et bien parez, on orroit quand ils veulent dormir trotter une souris par leur chambre, une mouche ne s'approcheroit pas de leur visage. Et toutefois, alors que le paisan s'endort au murmure d'un ruisseau, au bruit d'un marché n'ayant autre lict que la terre, ni autre couverture que le ciel, ceux-ci parmi tout ce silence et toute cette délicatesse ne font que se retourner leur repos mesme n'a point de repos. -Du Plessis-Mornay, ibid. p. 33. Cf. "2 Henry IV.," iii. I; below, p. 338. 2 Romeo. Give me my sin again. Marot. ... Je suis icy ("Le Baiser volé.") Hamlet's love-letter to Ophelia: "Doubt thou the stars are fire," recalls. e.g., de Pontoux's sonnet cvi: Plustost ardra ceste machine ronde . . Plustost iront les eaux encontre mont, ("L'Idée," 1579.) 3 One of the finds of Mr. P. A. Daniel. The passage occurs in "La Calisto, nova favola pastorale di Luigi Groto" ("nuovamente stampata," Venice, 1586, dedication dated 1580, first played 1561, "ma poi è stata riformata dall Auttore"). Febo, “in forma di pastore,” vaunts his own power as a sorcerer. He can: Da gli antichi sepolchri chiamar le anime. Melio Capraio. Ben il chiamarle sarà cosa facile, Il caso sia che vogliano rispondere (iii. 3). Cf. Hotspur and Glendower, "I Henry IV.,” iii: 1. King of England" rather than "Ajax"; but he transformed by his very touch what he used, reaching or surpassing, in his sudden flights, the sublimity of the Latin and Greek masterpieces unawares, and he did not care any more to methodically form, educate, and perfect his genius than he troubled about leaving to posterity correct texts of the product of the same. Writing especially for the multitude, it is with the multitude that Shakespeare especially succeeded. The applause of the crowd apprised the court of his merit and gave the Queen and the great the curiosity to see, amongst many others, some few of his plays. And although he won, little by little, admirers of all kinds the bulk of his partisans continued to be the frequenters of the pit. The refined could not ignore the true poet he was; but they saw more willingly in him the amourist, the author of "Venus," of "Lucrece," of "sugred" lines; it is usually as the sweet, the mellifluous, the honeytongued Shakespeare that he figures in contemporary criticism; less is said of the sombre, the tragic Shakespeare. It even happens that men of instruction make fun openly of this "sweet writer," as at Cambridge in 1600, where his praise was spoken, as we have seen, in the "Returne from Parnassus," by ridiculous Gullio, who swears only by Shakespeare: "Let this duncified world esteeme of Spenser and Chaucer, I'le worshipp sweet Mr. Shakespeare." 2 Poets are found enumerating the literary glories Examples: Sweet Shakespeare," in "Polimanteia," anonymous, 1595; praise of his “ honey-flowing vaine," Barnfield, 1598; "Mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare," Meres, 1598; “Honie-tong'd Shakespeare," sugred tongues " of the characters in his plays, Weever, 1599, etc. In the seventeenth century he is still often similarly qualified: "Mellifluous Shakespeare, " Th. Heywood, 1635; "Thy Muses sugred dainties," Bancroft, 1639; Shakespeare's gentler Muse," Denham, 1647; "Shakespeare's lighter sound," Cartwright, 1647; "Sweet Shakespeare," Crowne, 1681. 66 46 I 2 In order not to be taxed with injustice, the author places, beside the dithyrambs of silly Gullio and the interested praise he attributes to Kemp (held of the period, at a time when Shakespeare had given all his masterpieces, and omitting him. Wither, in 1613, says how much he would like to know the illustrious singers of his country and of his day—Daniel, Drayton, Jonson, Chapman, Sylvester-but does not mention Shakespeare.1 Another poet speaks, for once, of Shakespeare the tragic writer, Shakespeare the author of "Hamlet," but it is only to oppose, good-humouredly, and as though recording a self-evident fact, the high literary art of a Sidney to the more popular and vulgar product of the dramatist's pen: a preface, says Scoloker, should be, in a way, like the never-too-well-read Arcadia," or, "to come home to the vulgar's element, like friendly Shake-speare's tragedies . . . faith it should please all, like Prince Hamlet." 2 Webster enumerates his models in dramatic art: these are first and foremost, in one group, Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher; "and lastly (without wrong up by him as an ass), his own serious verdict on Shakespeare; he formulates it thus, mentioning nothing save his poems and their "sweeter verse": Who loves not Adon's love or Lucrece rape ? His sweeter verse contaynes hart throbbing line, Without love's foolish lazy languishment. "The Pilgrimage to Parnassus," ed. Macray, Oxford, 1886, 8vo, part 1st of the " Returne," pp. 63 and 87. "Abuses stript and whipt." Cf. below, concerning Browne, 1616, and Herrick, 1648, pp. 353, 354. In his epistle to the reader Scoloker jocosely enumerates the qualities indispensable to a preface: "In the general or foundation [it] must be like Paul's church, resolved to let every knight and gull travel upon [it]. . . . It must have teeth like a satyr, eyes like a critic. . . . It should be like the never-too-well-read' Arcadia,' where the prose and verse, matter and words, are like his mistress's eyes! one still excelling another, and without corrival! or to come home to the vulgar's element, like friendly Shake-speare's tragedies, where the comedian rides and the tragedian stands on tiptoe. Faith it should please all, like Prince Hamlet!”—“Daiphantus or the Passions of Love, comical to read but tragical to act . . . by An. Sc." London, 1604, " English Garner; Longer Poems," Bullen, 1903, p. 367. ... |