SHAKESPEARE AND THE RIVAL POET.* THE writer of this little

volume tells us with some naivete how his interest in the question he has handled was excited by some remarks of Professor Minto ; how he carried Shakespeare's sonnets for ten years in his pocket until be found he had " memorised " the whole; how, in order to follow up Mr. Minto's clue that Chapman was the rival poet referred to in these sonnets, he set to work upon that author's rather crabbed writings, and how before he had got far he made the confirmatory discoveries which the book is now to make public. The discoveries, once made, seemed to their maker so

obvious that he feared to retain them longer lest another should be beforehand with him, as Dr. Boaden was with Mr. Bright in launching the famous Pembroke theory of the friend and patron to whom Shakespeare addressed his sonnets. The reader who is in haste to get to Mr. Acheson's secrets should skip the first sixty-four pages, and at the top of p.6 he will find the first of them thus set out in italics :—" A poem published by Chapman in 1595, called The Amorous Zodiac,' is unques- tionably the poem indicated by Shakespeare in the 21st sonnet." The twenty-first sonnet is as follows :— "SO is it not with me as with that Muse

Stired by a painted beauty to his verse, Who heaven itself for ornament doth use And every fair with his fair doth rehearse ;

Making a couplement of proud compare

With sun and moon, with earth and sea's rich gems, With April's first-born flowers, and all things rare That heaven's air in this huge rondure hems.

0 let me, true in love, but truly write, And then believe me, my love is as fair

As any mother's child, though not so bright As those gold candles fled in heaven's air:

Let them say more that like of hearsay well: I will not praise that purpose not to sell."

Any one acquainted with Elizabethan sonnet literature knows that "couplements of proud compare" are the staple of which

they are made, Shakespeare being as much given to the practice as another; so that commentators have never felt it necessary to inquire whether in this sonnet Shakespeare had any particular poet in his eye, the probability being that, for once, he was simply lowering his key for the greater effect.

There is no reason, however, why he may not have had a particular poem in view; and Chapman's "Amorous Zodiac" is grotesque enough in its comparisons to deserve being laughed at. But it is too much to say, with Mr. Acheson, that it is "unquestionably indicated." Chapman's poem com- pares the body of his mistress to the Zodiac, the various parts corresponding to the various signs, and so far it is a striking

instance of a poem that "heaven itself for ornament doth use " ; but it does not compare it with "earth and sea's rich gems." Mr. Acheson's strongest argument is based on the _Envoi, which contains the following stanza :— " But gracious love, if jealous heaven deny My life this truly blest variety,

Yet will I thee through all the world disperse ; If net in heaven, among those braving fires. Yet here thy beauty, which the world admires, Bright as those flames shall glister in my verse."

It certainly looks as if Shakespeare had seen this passage when be penned the eleventh and twelfth lines of his sonnet. And we make Mr. Acheson a present of a further argument. The last line of the sonnet, which probably is proverbial, may contain a reference to Chapman's name. Of course, it makes excellent sense without any such reference. It says: "People who praise in superlatives are like panders advertising their • Shakesptart and the Rival Poet. By Arthur Acheson. London : John Lane. De. net.] 'painted beauties." But it may also have been understood at the time to mean : "That is a Chapman's way of praising, not mine." We should agree, then, that Mr. Acheson has made a reasonably good case for his first identification.

But having once got Chapman on the brain, Mr. Acheson sees him even in the plays. He contends that Shakespeare holds him up to ridicule both as Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost and as Thersites in Troilus and Cressida ; and he supports his contentions by an array of quotations from Chapman's poems, at which he conceives Shakespeare to have been glancing. This is, of course, merely midsummer mad- ness. How could an audience recognise, in delivery on the stage, references, of a singularly guarded nature, to obscure poems which it is admitted had very little sale P The strongest of the parallels, which Mr. Acheson exhibits in italics, is the following array of triple phrases. Chapman says, in a preface, that "plainness is the way to barbarism, to make the ass run proud of his ears, to take away strength from lions, and to give camels horns," and Holofernes, criticising Biron's sonnet, says : "Imitation is nothing : so doth the hound his master, the ape his keeper, the tired horse his rider." Elizabethan audiences must have been not only very well read, but extraordinarily sensitive, to discover a parody of such delicacy. For the rest, Holofernes was a schoolmaster who lived on a hill, and Chapman is called by Browne "the learned shepherd of fair Hitching-Hill," and, for all we know, may have been a schoolmaster. Now to all this there is a very simple answer. If Shakespeare had wished to ridicule Chapman, he might have put into Holofernes's mouth a recognisable parody of Chapman's verses. He does, as a. matter of fact, put verses into his mouth, the lines beginning "The preyful princess pierced and prick'd a pretty pleasing pricket." But Chapman does not" affect the letter "; he uses alliteration even less than Shakespeare does.

By the time Mr. Acheson approaches his third problem, the discovery of Chapman in Shakespeare's Thersites, he re- nounces altogether sublunary methods of proof, and thinks. mere assertion suffices. "The character of Thersites, ex- travagant caricature as at first sight it may appear, pales into a resemblance very near to portraiture when compared with the personality" to be found in Chapman's own poems. According to Mr. Acheson, all Chapman's poems are attacks on Shakespeare, and he picks out certain lines and stanzas as proof positive. One instance of his keenness for a satirical reference will suffice. In the "Coronet for his Mistress. Philosophy" one sonnet concludes :—

"And never shall my friendless verse envy Muses that Fame's loose feathers beautify.'

On which Mr. Acheson: "In this line Chapman not only indicates our poet, but sneers at his lack of learning." But,, as it happens, the next sonnet opens :—

"Muses that Fame's loose feathers beautify And such as scorn to tread the theatre

Did our poet's Muse scorn to tread the theatre If Mr. Acheson had been content to send a letter, say, to the Athenzurn calling attention to his interpretation of Sonnet XXI., he would have done some service to letters. But the rest of his book is on no higher level than the Baconian literature with which America is flooded. Especially we resent his habit of imagining facts, and then drawing con- clusions from them, which he subsequently calls "proofs." This is the sort of thing :—

"This dedication [that of Chapman's Achilles Shield' to the Earl of Essex], or an equally fulsome one, was, no doubt, first. addressed to Southampton, and was the cause of Shakespeare's- sonnets against Chapman at that time, and also the reason for the satire in Troilus and Cressida' which he probably wrote while still in doubt as to whether or not his patron intended to accept Chapman's advances. The fact that there are no extant dedications from Chapman to Southampton, of this or the earlier period in 1594 or 1595, proves that Shakespeare was successful in his expostulations with Southampton, in defeating Chapman's encroarlunents."

When it is remembered that it is not proved, and is really improbable, that Shakespeare's sonnets were addressed to

Southampton all, the reader will be better able to appre- ciate the excellence of Mr. Acheson's argument.