contrasts between the pretty little ways of a boyish victim and the ferocity of his tormentors, the ravings of a princess on the verge of madness, word plays, conceits and puns, constant appeals to a patriotism of the crudest sort, are the chief elements of success. The French are again treacherous, ungrateful, ignoble; they are fit to "hug with swine," they quake at the crowing of their own cock, Thinking his voice an armed Englishman. The Dauphin wins a battle which he would have lost without the help of some English lords, but it turns out that, traitor and ingrate, he intends "cutting off their heads as soon as his power is secure; he has sworn it on the same altar where he had promised them "everlasting love." All this enraptured the hearers, fed their passions, and ensured the success of the play; all this was, to be sure, very human; it was not superhuman. Happily the same audience that revelled in the rodomontades and massacres of these historical plays could also take interest in young maidens' dreams, in airy fancies and songs of love; and it was still to please it that Shakespeare, from that early period, began the splendid series of his romantic dramas. First, the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," 2 an immense improve namely, to the famous “ Bâtard d'Orléans,” Dunois, the companion of Joan of Arc; see eg. the scene in which the Bastard takes pride in being one, of royal heroic blood, rather than the legitimate son of an insignificant father"the lawful sonne of that coward cuckolde Cauny," says Dunois (BoswellStone, "Shakspere's Holinshed," 1896, p. 49). I hair: Constance, sister-in-law to the king, rolls upon the ground, tearing her Death, death-O amiable lovely death, I am not mad: this hair I tear is mine. (iii. 4.) 2 "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," performed about 1590-2; first printed : ment on "Love's Labour's Lost." The plot is an impossible one, but many scenes are exquisite; Shakespeare appears there with that God-bestowed power that was to be supremely his he is a life-giver. The power is not yet fully developed. The stage hero, alive, flushed, with beating arteries, suddenly jerks with a grating sound and becomes a puppet again; the strings are visible, at times even the showman's hand. The contrast is singular and striking, for it is absolute; here the work of a street artist, chalk sketches on the pavement, there the work of the Muse. Thurio, Panthino, Speed, are taken from the reserve-store of puppets and properties that Shakespeare unfortunately never closed for good; their parts are so loosely connected with the play that they might be introduced into other dramas with scarcely any change. If great Will happened to glance at this work of his in his later days, he may have been tempted at moments to exclaim, like the host in his comedy: "By my halidom, I was fast asleep!" His genius was. Thurio is drawn from the puppet chest for brainless grotesques; Proteus from the chest for wicked, diabolical, and absurd ones. But Launce is a rabelaisian sketch of high vitality and powerful humour; Silvia is already the sprightly, witty, and kind-hearted maiden to whom Shakespeare was to give several sisters, and Marivaux, too, a few; Julia, whom we shall also meet with again, is the tender heroine in the folio of 1623. Sources: probably a lost play, performed at Greenwich in 158[5], and itself founded on an episode of Montemayor's "Diana." Characteristic of her (and a good example of marivaudage), the pretty device she uses to make Valentine divine her love. She asks him to write out for her in fine style a letter to send to the youth she says she loves And when it's writ, for my sake read it over: And, if it please you, so; if not, why, so. Valentine. If it please me, madam, what then? And upon that she leaves him (ii. 1). who disguises herself as a page, accepts every slight, because she loves, loves, loves. Her words are like a song, and she is sweetest when she tries to swell her warbler's voice to talk floods and storms: The more thou damm'st it up, the more it burns; He makes sweet music with th' enamel'd stones, He overtaketh in his pilgrimage Then let me go and hinder not my course (ii. 7). The duke, "dux ex machina," earliest of a long line of potentates who will reign, in Shakespeare's plays, at Vienna, Venice, or Verona, has already the dignity pertaining to his function, which he understands well and which is ever the same, first to embroil by his decrees the heroes' affairs, then to mourn for them, or congratulate them, according to the occasion, at the end of the drama. "Midsummer Night's Dream" is the first in date of the Shakespearian dramas enjoying universal fame. Nothing better shows the breadth and variety of the poet's genius from his earliest years than this play, . 1 Acted about 1591 (Furnivall), 1593-4 (Dowden), 1594-5 (Lee); 1st ed. "for Th. Fisher," 1600: "A Midsommer nights dreame. As it hath beene sundry times publickely acted by the .. Lord Chamberlaine his servants. Written by William Shakespeare," another ed. "printed by J. Roberts," same date (the real date being, according to Greg, 1619; Library, Apr. 1908; cf. Athenæum, 4237 ff.). Concerning Oberon, who figured already with his fairies in Greene's "James IV." (above, p. 118), and who appears with "Chloris queene of the Faeryes" and Sir David a schoolmaster of the Faery children," in "The Faery Pastorall" by W[illiam] P[ercy] 1603? (Roxb. Club 1824), see, e.g. G. Paris on "Huon de Bordeaux," in "Poèmes et Légendes du MoyenAge" [1900], p. 24. This old French romance had been translated into English by Lord Berners, ab. 1530, and printed ab. 1534. A few hints are borrowed by Shakespeare from Plutarch's life of Theseus. composed at the same period as "Richard III." and so different in tone. Theseus, "duke of Athens," is about to marry Hippolyta, "queen of the Amazons"; four days separate them from the great day: Four days will quickly steep themselves in nights; New bent in heaven, shall behold the night Several young lovers run after or fly from one another, all meant to agree. All happen to meet in "a wood near Athens," where Puck, Oberon, Titania, pass invisible through the iridescent evening air and hide in the hearts of flowers, and where some worthy artisans of the city, the carpenter, the joiner, the weaver, the bellows-mender and their peers, have retreated secretly to rehearse their "most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby," a tragedy to make hearers laugh, like so many tragedies before and after. Pyramus, therefore, and his "lady dear," one of the most popular subjects with dramatists and ballad makers, enliven the nuptials of Theseus and his bride, thus treated to one of those rustics' performances that Elizabeth delighted in. The poet's work, painted in loveliest colours and leading us by winding and flowery paths to the many espousals announced at the start, is permeated with youth and beauty; the lines are as music and the words have a melody which already gives the author his true rank, above all others; lines More tuneable than lark to shepherd's ear When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear What Helena says of Hermia is true of Shakespeare himself. Truer still of him, with "Romeo," the first work in which the dramatist fully reveals himself: the tragic, the comic, the tender, the jocose, the marvellous, the incomparable poet.1 A gentleman of Vicenza, Luigi da Porto, was following, one day, the road bordered by grassy rivulets which leads from Gradisca to Udine, the tall blue Alps on his right, and, on the other side, the marshy plains that stretch to the lagoons of Aquileia and to the sea. His travelling companion, an archer of Verona, to beguile the way, told him a story which the gentleman thought so touching that he wrote it down on reaching his journey's end. It was a version, with many variants, of the old story, told in different forms as early as the Greek times, and often since, of the two lovers parted by their families, the maiden dying, and her friend going to her tomb at night, there to find that her death was only an apparent death, caused by a potion or by magic. The beautiful French romance of Amadas and Ydoine, written in the twelfth century, had made that tale popular throughout Europe: D'un amant vous vuel raconter Et d'une amante ki ama Mult loialment, tant com dura. The young companions of Amadas made fun of him. (“Li chevalier mult le gaboient"), as Benvolio does of Romeo, but for a different cause; serious minded Amadas disdained love; Ydoine, the Duke of Burgundy's An allusion of the nurse to an earthquake gives, as the probable date of the play, 1591; 1st ed. (very faulty) 1597: “An excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet, As it hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely, by the . . . L. of Hunsdon his servants. London, Printed by Iohn Danter"; 2nd ed. "newly corrected, augmented, and amended," 1599, both reprinted by P. A. Daniel, New Shakspere Soc. 1874; other separate editions, 1609, one without date, and one in 1637 the first with Shakespeare's name. |