SHAKESPEARE AND CONTEMPORARY HISTORY.* LARGELY as the result of the
fright given in literary circles by the ease with which Macpherson, Chatterton, Ireland, and to a certain extent Bishop Percy, had imposed their forgeries, impious or pious, on the public, the last century saw the domination in Shakespearean and other literary criticism of the very cautious historic research-man to whom the collecting, verifying and tabulating of minute morsels of literary association are the chief interest, to whom con- jecture is a dangerous pastime and theories of creative art a blasphemy.
However, without the work done by these—to quote the late Sir Walter Raleigh— " old clothes merchants of litera- ture," the new type of critic of which Miss Winstanley is a pioneer would be working in the dark. In this book the author, who is psychologist as much as historian, records for the first time a mass of material bearing on the composition of .Macbeth, much of which historic research of the old tradition would have ruled out as irrelevant, but which the psychologist must recognize as of prime importance. The account in Holin- shed, from which the story of Macbeth is in the first case taken, has suffered very important variations, but until now nobody has worked out the influence of contemporary politics on Shakespeare's treatment of this drama, especially the hopes and fears of the nation on the joyful union of the Protestant crowns of England and Scotland. The important bearing of the Darnley murder and the Scottish witch trials on the play is magnificently presented. Miss Winstanley has made one interesting discovery in a contemporary design from the Record Office. It is a reconstruction of the Darnley murder, in which are depicted a dagger apparently floating in the air as a guiding mark to the murder, the heavily barred gate on which Bothwell knocked with sucfvfury, and the figure of a child with a broken branch that :- "Wears upon his baby brow the round
And top of sovereignty."
Remarkable new evidence is also given on the sources of King Lear. These playa are treated mainly as conscious political symbolism, and an analogy is drawn on this score with Spenser's Faerie Queens and its topical references to Elizabeth and the Court, and here is the only point upon which we disagree with Miss Winstanley. It seems to us that great poetry, a title which nobody can deny to Macbeth and Lear, is not and cannot be the result of mere political propaganda. There must be an emotional conflict of a personal nature behind, working in the unconscious mind, that is translated in terms of this political symbolism. The Faerie Queens could never have been written but for the poet's heart-breaking exile in gloomy Kilcolman and its terrible atmosphere of imminent native rebellion, with the distant glories of the longed-for Court always beckoning and always disappointing. A key to the secret of Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear and the other great tragedies must be looked for, if any- where, in the Tempest and in the Sonnets. Miss Winstanley promises us the politics of the Tempest and we are all ears, but surely the whole truth can never come out of what must be the fundamental psychological fallacy of assuming the impersonal and detached composition of true Romantic Drama. It will be interesting to note the reactions of critics to S. Butler's edition of the Sonnets, promised in a reissue this winter : it was too strong meat for 1899, but much has happened since.
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