BOOKS.

SHAKESPEARE'S PREDECESSORS.* Tins weighty volume of more than 650 pages is the first instal- ment of a critical inquiry into the conditions of the English drama. It is full to overflowing of interesting matter, which runs from the text into the notes ; and, with much that is familiar to all students of the period, there is much also that is original and suggestive. There is some want of unity in the work. The chapters seem to have been written at different periods and with different purposes. A few are fitted for the pages of a popular magazine, others will be of service to the student, but are not likely to attract the general reader. Obviously there is no novelty in the subject, but it is a boon to have it treated in a style at once so luminous and so masterly.

Mr. Symc.nds reminds us that the whole period of what we call the Elizabethan drama does not exceed fifty years. It began with Greene, and Kyd, and Peele, and with their far greater contemporary Marlowe ; it ended with Massinger and Shirley. Shakespeare, the crown and glory of this wonderful age, does not, in the writer's judgment, move on a different plane from his brother dramatists ; he is only transcendently above them. Mr. Symonds doubts, strange to say, whether he was born to be a playwright, while allowing his art to be as conspicuous as his genius ; but how is it possible to say a man was not born for work in which he attained supreme excellence ? On the other hand, we agree with the author when he writes :-

" The more we study Shakspere in his own works, the more do we perceive that his predecessors no less than his successors, exist for him ; that without him English dramatic art would be but second-' rate; that he is the keystone of the arch, the justifier and interpreter of his time's striving impulses Without those predecessors, Shakspere would certainly not have been what he is. But having him, we might well afford to lose them. Without those successors we should still miss much that lay implicit in the art of Shakspere. But having him, we could well dispense with them. His predecessors lead up to him, and help us to explain his method. His successors supplement his work, illustrating the breadth and length and depth and versatility of English poetry in that prolific age."

Our drama reached its perfection in a period marked by gross manners, by cruel laws, by unrestrained licence on the one hand, by Draconian severity on the other. The players and dramatists were treated very much like vagabonds, and, because they were so treated, acted frequently like men who had no character to maintain. Christian people looked upon the theatre as the Devil's house,—and such, no doubt, it often proved itself. Mr. Symonds, contrasting English interludes with French farces, and English with Italian comedies, is struck with the greater manliness and innocence that marked the comic stage of London. Under Elizabeth, the comic drama did not sink so low as in the Restoration period, when Dryden, the greatest poet of the time, pandered to the obscene tastes of a dissolute Court and City ; when Wycherley, Etherege, Congreve, and Aphra Behn did not even aim at making virtue contemptible, but treated it as impossible. In Shakespeare's day, however, the stage was far from proving a school of morality, and the objections urged against it by the Puritans were by no means groundless. A memorial drawn up by the Common Council in 1575 is quoted by Mr. Symonds. It states some of these objections very plainly, and shows also the social contempt with which actors and playwrights were regarded. Shortly afterwards a preacher at Paul's Cross denounced the theatre houses as a,monument•of London's prodigality and folly. Where, he argued, is the sense of

- • Shakespere's Predecessors in the English Drama. By John Addington Symonds. London : Smith, Elder, and Co..

closing them in times of plague ? " The cause of plague is sin ;. the cause of sin is plays ; therefore the cause of plagues are plays." That the theatre was at that time closely associated. with the brothel is stated by:contemporary writers ; and Mr. Symonds admits that "girls of good character scarce dared to. enter a play-house." The writer describes with great vividness and detail the limitations of the stage and its vulgar- surroundings in the Elizabethan age, and adds :-

" This was the theatre for which Shakspere wrote, where Shakspere acted, where Shakspere gained a livelihood and saved a competence. In slams and suburbs, purlieus and base quarters of the town, stood those wooden sheds which echoed to the verses of the greatest poet of the modern world. Disdainfully protected by the Court, watched with disfavour by the City, denounced by Puritans and preachers, patronised by 'prentices and mechanics, the Muse of England took her station on the public boards beneath a misty London daylight, or paced, half-shrouded in tobacco smoke between the murky torches of the private stage In the history of literature, the- Elizabethan drama is indeed a paradox and a problem."

That Shakespeare felt his position to be one of comparative degradation we know from the sonnets. He writes in one sonnet of the "vulgar scandal" stamped upon his brow ; and in another, he exclaims :—

" 0, for my sake, do you with Fortune chide

The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds ; Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand ; Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed."

The might of his gehins, however, raised the poet wholly above the circumstances which at times depressed him. The poor actor and playwright, whose name was branded by his occupa- tion, lived to gain all that a man most desires for this life— fame, friends, and competence—and enjoyed, too, the certain. conviction that his reputation would not die with him, but that: his verse would ever live young- " So long as men can breathe or eyes can see."

In one way, the Elizabethan drama had an advantage over• the modern stage. It depended almost .totally upon acting, the scenery and mounting being of the rudest kind :—

" It is certain," Mr. Symonds writes, " that acting reached a. very high pitch of excellence in the days of Burbage and Alleyn, Summer and Tarlton. Shakspere could not have written for inferior players those parts which at the present time tax histrionic talent beyond its faculty. As the absence of theatrical machinery helped. playwrights to be poets, so the capacity of actors stimulated literary genius to the creation of characters which the author knew before- hand would be finely and intelligently rendered."

But if the old stage had an advantage over the modern in• one respect, and that the most important, it was at the same, time crippled by a custom which, in the judgment of our age, must have greatly lessened its interest. Although Collins, by some strange fatuity, declares that Fletcher understood best the " female mind," while " stronger Shakespeare felt for man alone," and although Scott, by an equal lapse of critical. judgment, makes a similar remark in his Life of Dryden, every student of our great dramatist will acknowledge his consummate art in the delineation of woman. What a noble collection of portraits hangs in his spacious gallery ! Where out of his plays will you find so many women that are " pure womanly "—alike in their virtues and their faults P These characters, even when slightly drawn, are never abstractions. Almost we can hear them breathe and see them walk. Rosalind, Juliet, Portia, Isabel, Imogeu, Miranda, Viola, and Perdita are more to us than acquaintances,—we seem to know them as friends. And Shakespeare has also drawn women of another order—like Cleopatra, Cressida, Mrs. Quickly, Lady Macbeth, with the same master-band, with the same subtle knowledge of the human heart. The more we think of his art in this direction, the more wonderful does it appear If the dramatist could rely upon securing actors capable of representing Hamlet, Richard III., Falstaff, Iago, and Macbeth, for the representation of his women he had to trust to boys, who- in most cases must have been obviously unable to enter into the parts they played. What youth could understand, even faintly, the divine purity and light-heartedness of Perdita, the- mirth, not unmixed with seriousness, of Beatrice, the filial devotion of Cordelia, the passionate love of Juliet. Too often what should have been pathetic must have become ludicrous ; what ought to have excited admiration must have failed to touch the audience. " How could Shalcspere," asks Mr. Symonds, " have committed Desdemona to a boy ? How had

Fletcher the heart to shadow forth those half-tones and those evanescent hues in his Aspasia P" How indeed P We can but wonder at the good fortune which,. under circumstances so adterse, gave us such a lovely series of fair women.

Is Mr. Symonds right in saying that the Elizabethan drama grew up beneath the patronage of the whole nation P It was, indeed, encouraged by the Court, but the writer admits that the opposition to it was powerful. If the whole nation patronised the theatre, how did it come to pass that the companies were forced to act in suburbs, that strolling players were liable to arrest as rogues, and that, to quote the writer's own words, " a permanent and persistent dishonour attached to the stage P" And he answers our question on another page, where we read : "In the history of literature the Elizabethan drama is indeed a paradox and problem. Nothing so great and noble has emerged elsewhere from such dishonour."

A highly interesting chapter is devoted to the Masque, which

. by the aid of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, attained its perfection' in the reign of James I. It was a splendid and expensive amusement; and, as we read of the large sums spent on the labours of the architect and scene-painter in these aristocratic entertain- ments, we are led to wonder why scenery was so disregarded by the promoters of the legitimate drama. Elizabeth loved magnifi- cence, especially when she had not to pay for it, and she

' warmly patronised the stage; yet, as. already noticed, plays were'put upon the boards in the simplest and rudest fashion. The Masque, on the contrary, although it owed much to Ben Jonson, Chapman, Daniel, and other poets, owed still more to its external splendour. "Money was not spared hy the Royal Family or by the courtiers on these 'ceremonial occasions. At Christmas and Shrovetide it was customary for the. King and Queen each of them to present a-Masque. The Inns of Court vied in prodigality with the Crown when circumstances prompted them. to a Magnificent display." And, in illustration of this prodigality, we read that on one occasion the Inns expended £20,000 on a single performance. Jonson's exquisite lyric genius admirably. fitted him for his post as a writer of Masques. In this art he was unrivalled in his life-time,—or would .have been had not Milton's Comas been presented at Ludlow Castle in 1634.. Mr. Symonds observes that Jonson did. not live to welcome it; but it is not impossible that he may have read the piece in manuscript or have heard a report of its successful representation, for Ben Jonson did not die until 1637,—the year, by the way, in which ()emus appeared in print.

Of Nash and Peele, of Lodge and Lyly, Mr. Symonds writes

with discrimination, and with a largeness of knowledge which students of the period will appreciate. In the chapter, upon Lyly he observes,—" The popularity of Greene's novels and Sidney's Arcadia is not less inexplicable to a modern reader than the fascination exercised by Euph,ues," and he accounts for it by the absolute dearth of books fit for ladies' reading, and by Lyly's defects of style :- "The success of -this book," he writes, "was sudden and astound- ing. Two editions of the first part were exhausted in 1579, a third in 1580, a fourth in 1581. Between that date and 1636 it was nine times reprinted. The second part enjoyed a similar run of luck. How greedily its pages were .devoured is proved by the extreme rarity of the earliest editions."

There was an originality in Lyly both as a writer of prose and of Court plays. It is evident that he influenced his contem- poraries, and the charm which he exercised was strongly felt by Shakespeare. But Shakespeare owed more to Marlowe than to any writer ; and it is fitting that Mr. Symonds should close the volume with a criticism of this great dramatist, whose achieve- ments are Titanic.. The more we read of Marlowe, the more are we astonished at the splendour and, in a sense, at the maturity of his genius. • The sweetness and variety of his versification in " Hero and Leander," the tragic but singular power displayed in his dramas, his mastery over the blank verse which he may be said to have created, and the fact that his art exercised a pro- ' found influence, over Shakespeare,—all contribute to make the name of Marlowe conspicuous. If he wrote much that is in the highest degree bombastic and extravagant, it is well to remember that he was but feeling his way and walking doubtfully in a path hitherto untrodden, when, at the age of twenty-nine, he was killed in a tavern brawl. What Mr. Symonds has to say upon this point is well worthy of quotation :— " When we remember that Marlowe, born in the same year as Shakspere, died at the early age of twenty-nine, while Shakspere's genius was still, so far as the public was concerned, almost a potentiality ; when we reflect upon the life which Marlowe had to- lead among companions of debauch in London, and further estimate

the degradation of the art he raised so high, we are forced to place him among the most original creative poets of the world. His actual achievement may be judged imperfect, unequal, immature, and limited. Yet nothing lower than the highest rank can be claimed for one who did so much in a space of time so short., and under con- ditions so unfavourable. What 8hakspere would have been without Marlowe, how his far more puissant hand and wonder-working brain would have moulded English drama without Marlowe, cannot even be surmised. What alone is obvious to every student is that Shake-

pere deigned from the first to tread in Marlowe's footsteps!' '

We had marked many other subjects fitted to allure the critic and the reader, Our space, however, is exhausted, and it must suffice to recommend this able volume to the attention of the public.