APR 18 1891

LIBRARY

SHAKESPEARIANA.

APRIL, 1891.

VOL. VIII.

No. 2.

PERICLES: ITS CLAIM TO A SHAKESPEARIAN AUTHORSHIP.

THE play of Pericles, more than any other, has fallen among the destructive commentators, who point to the fact that the play is actually in two, some say three, distinct styles, and therefore is writ ten by three, or at least two, different hands. It is because, while quite as distinctly perceiving these distinct styles and admitting the presence of the different hands, I am as yet unable to see why these two or three hands may not all of them have been Skakespeare's hands; because I have yet to discover anything which Shakespeare could not have done; and because I cannot believe that a man so absolutely successful in concealing himself, his own opinions and predilections, could not have also varied his own rhetorical style, had he seen fit it is because, in short, that in Shakespeare the greater always seems to me to include the less, that I propose in this paper to discuss some circumstantial reasons which appear to me to give the Pericles back to William Shakespeare, to whom the Third Folio editors assigned it, but from whom the modern London Shakespearians have taken it away.

I am not color blind or style blind to the difference to the earthe differences in the rhyme and metre of the different parts of the play. Mr. Walker goes so far, I believe, as to find not two but three different writers-Shakespeare, Rowley, and Wilkins-for the text. But the Gower parts seem to me not so very different in gait and tone from the Prologue's parts in the Henry V., and, as I again submit, it does not seem entirely inappropriate that the brothel scenes should be written in different cadences from the rest of the scenes. Panders and bawds do not, upon the stage at least, tread to the same measures as princes and courtiers and fine ladies. But it is not on any of these accounts that I am forced to call Pericles throughout a Shakespeare play.

Because a very large number of passages in this play are written (most appropriately it would seem to a commentator not belonging to the above-mentioned school) not in mighty lines with stately rhythms, and especially because these scenes take the spectator into the stews, twice actually into a brothel!—and, totally ignoring the fact that from a dramatic point of view, or from any point of view except Mr. Podsnap's perhaps, these brothel scenes are the strongest scenes in the play the purists divide the Quarto title of the play into two parts. Shakespeare, they tell us, did not write "The Late and much Admired Play called, Pericles Prince of Tyre, with the true Relation of the whole Historie, adventures and fortunes of the said Prince," but only certain portions of it which they themselves select, and nominate "the Pure and Charming story of Marina." The facts happen to be that the Quarto title-page, contemporary with Shakespeare himself, does not call this other half of the play "the Pure and Charming story of Marina," but "The no-less Strange and Worthy Accidents in the Birth and Life of" Marina, and that the brothel scenes (to which I am sure it is highly creditable to object) actually do occur-are accidents occurring in this very "Pure and Charming story of Marina" herself, and not in the story of any other principal in the play. But then, of course, so much the worse for the facts! Some editors (among them my good friend Dr. Rolfe) are charitable enough to accept this theory of the parti-Shakespearian authorship of the Pericles, and to give it full rope, by printing that play in two sizes of type (thus giving the first two acts and sundry lines of the fifth act to strangers), with the result, in my own case, of convincing me, had I needed convincing, that the play is the work of a single dramatist, whose warp and woof cannot be chopped in two by chop-logic, or by the hatchet of a stylist critic, without destroying its whole fabric. If I needed further testimony, I find it in an interesting record of an occasion (the latest one of which there appears to be a minute) of a test production of the play on the modern stage. In 1854 Mr. Phelps, then manager of the Sadler's Wells Theatre, in London, brought out the play with considerable care and lavishness of scenic effect. In Mr. Round's Introduction to Pericles in The Henry Irving Edition (Vol. VIII.) is preserved the very interesting play-bill of the piece as then mounted and distributed, besides extracts from the current criticisms upon the performance. In one of the latter, Mr. John Oxenford (the then dramatic critic of the Times newspaper) says of the actress who played Marina: "She sustained the part in an artistic manner . . though the part has lost much of its significance by the necessary omission of the bestiality of the fourth act." In other words, the dramatic critic saw, even more clearly than the casual reader may see, that the part of Marina is a dramatic whole, and her career in the play, whether pleasant or unpleasant to nineteenth century ears and tastes, is still an integral part of that whole. If, then, we admit that Shakespeare's only part in

the Pericles is "the pure and charming story of Marina," are we not forced to assume one of two things?—either that Shakespeare had a collaborateur who, without consulting Shakespeare, could co-create with him a perfect creation (or co-conceive with him a perfect conception), or else that this collaborateur deliberately disregarded Shakespeare's instructions, and made what Shakespeare had intended to be a "pure and charming story" over into one exceedingly risqué, and that Shakespeare not only accepted his work, but allowed two, three, or several different editions of the plays to be sold during his lifetime! Either of these propositions would seem to me absurd. But, admitting the first, it comes pretty dangerously near the composite, or at least the Baconian, theory of the Shakespeare authorship; and, admitting the second, it does not appear that Shakespeare was any "purer" than he should be. To write a risqué story, or to accept and guarantee another man's risqué story, appear to me, so far as motive is concerned, to be pretty much one and the same thing! Do not playwrights (one is tempted to ask) hold themselves responsible for the clowns and oafs and villains in their pieces, as well as for the heroes, the leading ladies, and the ingénues?

When we consider that Shakespeare, in his drama, perfectly reports his environment; that whatever is coarse to modern ears in his panorama is there, in its place, to accommodate itself to and not to dwarf the rest, and that it is not the coarseness any more than (to speak mildly) any other single feature of his drama which makes Shakespeare's immortality; that Shakespeare did not minimize for ears polite, nor distort into prominence for the prurient, but simply embalmed life-size, as it was, and where it belonged, the comédie humaine he beheld around about him!-how from courtier to courtesan, from commander to camp-follower, the sovereign, the soldier, the statesman, the yeoman, the yokel, the clown-how they all talked and walked and lived and died. When we consider this, I for one fail to see why Shakespeare might not have written the brothel scenes in Pericles. So far as they are delineations, they are not beyond his powers, and so far as they are sheer, even if rather metallic and callous, wit (as where the libertines, foiled in their appetites, propose going to hear the Vestals sing), they seem to me rather Shakespearian than contemporary in their brilliancy! And so far as the particulars of these scenes go, even as to the allusions to a somewhat recondite information as to custom, peculiar, say, to Mytélene, I expect to be able to show, in the Introduction to the forthcoming PERICLES in "The Bankside Shakespeare," that Shakespeare had abundant reference to "points" about that custom, quite at his elbow; so that he only did as he was accustomed to do-filled himself up at the nearest reservoir of facts. Should the proof be such, it will follow, as the night the day, that Pericles is not to be taken away from Shakespeare by the arithmetic and Arabic numerals of Fleay, and the Sairey-Gamp criticism of Furnivall, simply

because he, in Pericles, just as in Titus Andronicus, catered to the appetites of his audiences, lewd and coarse as they undoubtedly may have been. He drew in doing so upon sources ready at his hand, and by citing Gower as chorus, he, in this case at least, acknowledged and gave credit to his nearest authority. This, in my opinion, is all there is of the cry that Shakespeare was too holy a person to have brought a blush to the cheek of the nineteenth century pueris virginibusque.

It seems to me that, in view of all the circumstances and contingencies, it would be safest to adhere in these matters to a canon framed somewhat like this, viz.: A play assigned to Shakespeare during the period when London publishers were struggling among themselves to secure the opportunity of bringing out a Shakespeare play, and which shows internal evidence of Shakespeare's own hand, must be his.

The Pericles comes particularly within the above canon, or a canon like the above. For it was one of the uneven pieces which came to the press (and, so we are at liberty to suppose, to the stage) within that period, 1600-1610, when the London publishers began to compete with each other in placing Shakespeare upon the market, and when the plays (the best along with the worst not only, but some which we are very reluctant to consider as even "pseudo-Shakespearian ") crowded from the London presses, in their first commercial importance, and to catch their first sales; such unequal work as the Merchant of Venice, the Titus Andronicus, and the Midsummer Night's Dream, preceded, as Meres assures us, by those splendid poems! Taken alone, how improbable (how much more improbable than that Shakespeare should have written the brothel scenes in Pericles, and written them in prose instead of in blank verse!) is such an array of contrasts as this! But simply apply an ordinary rule, a rule we have seen at work ever since, and it is all accounted for. My friend, Mr. Irving Browne, who is a better lawyer than I am, will not, however, accept this proposition, and argues, very acutely, as I understand him, that a play, not of even performance with all those in the canonical list, must be assigned to wilful or accidental interpolations. But I still fail to perceive why Shakespeare should not have catered to the varying tastes of his audiences. Indeed, I cannot see either how he could have made both ends meet, let alone operated his theatres at a profit, if he had not kept abreast of these tastes as they arrived: nor wherein the rule, inflexible everywhere else, that an author's first success and market creates a demand and a market for his prior and unsuccessful work, should not have applied in Shakespeare's day and to him. I have covered my ideas as to this rather fully in my Introduction to Vol. VII., the Titus Andronicus, in reviewing which Mr. Browne states his proposition acutely as follows: "Mr. Morgan's theory is that it was the dramatist's first attempt, and that it naturally effervesces with boyish friskiness and wantonness and childish love of unadulterated horrors. But if this were so, we should expect to find a gradual change in the later dramas, and not a