SHAKESPEARE AND CHAPMAN.•

IT is always a pleasure to go back to the Elizabethans. The great poetry that they bequeathed to us and the amazing number of literary problems that they left us to solve are, by turns, likely • ankarpsses and Chapman. By .7. IL Robertson, ma.. London: T. Sneer flOs, 50, end to prove an infinite source of enjoyment to the end of time. We are glad that Mr. Roberteon, an old and serious student of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, has had leisure to' produce another book which, though mainly concerned with the problem% shows a proper appreciation also of the poetry by seeking to dis- tinguish between what is really good and what is only second- rate. He may not have proved his new theory—for proof, in the nature of things literary, is impossible—but he will at any rate give his readers some fresh ideas about the Shakespeare plays, and will, in particular, stimulate their interest bc George Chapman. For his theory is, in brief, that Chapman, the Homeric trruislator whom Keats at least has immortalized by a sonnet, was a collabor- ator with Shakespeare in some of his less satisfying plays, especially Titnon of Athens. e may proniee that there is nothing incredible in this. The least observant reader of the Shakespeare Canon must be conscious that much poor stuff is embedded in the mass of comedies and tragedies. No competent critic supposes that every word of the First Folio was written lay Shakespeare, any more than he believes that Pericles, which does not appear in the First Folio, is wholly tin-Shakespearean. We all know that in the Elizabethan theatre the manager paid as little attention to the rights of the author as B. modern pantomime Or review producer is said to give to the writers of the dialogue and what are called the " lyrics." The Elizabethan manager, having bought or stolen a play, felt that he was at liberty to alter it as he pleased, and he doubtless retained one or more needy dramatists to patch up old plays which he had appropriated or to embellieli new plays with prologues and good ranting speeches such so his audiences expected. Shakespeare himself unquestionably did much work of this sort, not merely rewriting old plays, but also touching up new plays such as, to give a minor instance, the Sir Thomas More, the only good speech in the manuscript of which is pronounced by Sir Edward Maunde Thompson to be in Shakespeare's handwriting. There is no reason to suppose that Shakespeare in his own day was regarded as so great an author that even a theatre manager would hesitate to tamper with his text. The supersensitiveness of the dramatist on this point is a very recent development., and we may fairly assume—though Mr. Robertson seems doubtful of this—that what Shakespeare did to other men's plays, other men did to his, though, unlike him, they could not improve on the original from a literary standpoint. This is the main cause of the uncertainty that attache. to Pericles and the other doubtful plays—whether attributed to Shakespeare in the Second and later folios or not, like Arden of Fevershani—as well as of the exit:tenet: of dubious scenes and passages, which do not read like his, in the avowedly Shakespearean dramas. Mr. Robertson is fully entitled, if he can, to disentangle

some of these accretions and to identify them as Chapnaan's

w

He begins his task not with a play but with the pocni that was printed in 1009 with the Sonnets, "A Lover's Complaint." Most of us have read it and forgotten it, and few would agree with Samuel Butler that it was " wonderful." It attracted little attention, at any rate, until Sir Sidney Lee expressed a doubt as to whether it was written by Shakespeare, and Professor Mackail, in an eraxay for the English Association in 1912, came to the same conclusion. Professor Mackaire argument was that the poem " was not the work of a beginner," and that it was either a work of Shakespeare's later and matured period or not a work of his at all ; " the formal style is combined with an intellectual weakness leading here and there to feeblenesses and flatnesses." It is, in fact, one of those artificial poetic exercises which the Elizabethans loved, but which for us have lost their savour, except of course for the famous couplet :— "0 father, what a hell of witchcraft lies In the small orb of one particular tear."

Professor Mackail suggested that it might have been written by the rival poet—the "better spirit "—of Sonnets 80 and 80, and Mint* had already guessed that this rival, sa ith "the proud full sail of his great verse," might be Chapman. Mr. Robertson has applied the comparative test to this hypothesis, and with a long series of parallels, in style, syntax, and vocabulary, from Chapman's works he makes out a very strong ease for Chapman's authorship of the" Complaint." For example, lie shows that Chapman was very fond of the word "particular." as in the preface to the Iliad- " Every man is so loaded with his particular head "—or, in the Iliad itself—" One particular ski° " ; and he quotes from a play, The Gentleman Usher, an image similar to that of the " Complaint " ;—

" An old wife's eye Is a blue crystal full of sorcery."

Anticipating the objection that Chapman could not write anything BO good as the couplet quoted, be gives us as examples of his on. doubted work :—

"And all this while the red sea of her blood EWA' with Leander."

And again :--

" Love is a golden bubble, full of declare., That waking Lemke, and fills lee with extremes."

Out of his plays, of course, we might take many fine things, like the well-known page "Give me a spirit that on this life's rough sea Loves to have his sails filled with a lusty wind Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack, And his rapt ship run on her side so low

That she drinks water and her keel ploughs air." Unfortunately, while Chapman could soar in the heights, he fell too often into depths of dulness, or even vulgarity, and if Ids Homer is almost uniformly admirable, it is because the great epic kept him alert to do his best. Mr. Robertson's study of his vocabulary is -.rideable, bringing out Chapman's exuberant love of coining new words and new compounds and using old words in new senses, like " charmed " for "charming " or " impress " for "attack," Like his curiously elliptical phrases, his wealth of words owed much to his classical studies. Yet, oddly enough, he could be content with plain English words, like "stick," which he worked to death. Thus he wrote :—

" The golden age, starlike shot through our sky. Airia'd at his pomp renew'd, and stuck in 'a eye I" The perpetrator of such a couplet surely must have had something to do with the lino in the "Complaint" about the youth "so commended That maidens' eyes stuck over all his face ! "

Mr. Robertson pauses for a while to examine the stories of a youthful poetic rivalry between Chapman and Shakespeare, who was five years his junior, and the suggestion that Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lon is a genial satire on Chapman, who was always a pedant and may have been a schoolmaster at Hiteltin Hill—" at the eharge.house on the top of the mountain," as Armada says. Chap- man publishes! his Ovid's Banquet of Sense in 1595, and to this and ita affected dedication there seems to be direct reference in Hole- fernes' criticism of a sonnet :— " Here are only numbers ratified ; but for the elegance, facility, and golden cadence of poesy, caret. Ovidius Rase was the moo; and why indeed Nose, but for smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention 1 Teriteri ie nothing."

However that may be, Ifr. Robertson invites us to believe that at a leder date the two poets were not only on friendly terms but were working together at ploys. He argues very strongly for Chap- seen's; authorship of the plot and main structure of Tienon, the few fine passages being added by Shakespeare at a final revision for a performance which, so far as we know, was not given. For Shakespeare's sake, we hope that this very plausible theory is right. To be frank. Timon is a dull morality with masterly touches hero and there, such as Timon's farewell to the Senators :—

"Coma not to me again but say to Athens, Tiraon bath made his everlasting mansion

Upon the beached verge of the salt flood ;

Who once a day with his embossed froth The turbulent surge shall cover : thither come, And let my gravesstone bo your oracle."

The orthodox theory is that Shakespeare's draft was finished by a weaker band; Mr. Robertson's view is the more probable, as the play Is poorly constructed and the verse far below Shakespeare's level. He adduces some remarkable parallels front Chapman, in the irregular and ever-changing metre and in the vocabulary, for many of the Tinton words that do not occur elsewhere in the Shake- speare plays arc commonly used by the lesser man, anti he thus confirms a judgment based on style which is and must be instinct- ively felt by the trained critic of poetry as it is by the expert connoisseur of pictures. Following up Iris verbal clues, Mr. Robert. eonproceeds to suggest that traces of Chapman's handiwork may be found in Pericles, in Troffers and C'ressida, in the three interludes with a classical flavour—the Masque in The Tempest, the interludes in Hamlet, which most of us regard as parodies, and the interlude in Cymbeline ; in Julius Caesar, The Taming of the Shrew, the first ; part of Henry VI., Airs Well that Ends Well and the early comedies, and even in Henry V., where the rather heavy humour of the acme between Henry and Katharine reminds the author of Chapman's weaker comedy, though the mere feet that Chapman was a French scholar proves nothing. Mr. Robertson seems to fear that his revolutionary criticism, tentative though it be, may shock devout Shakespeareans, and therefore he expounds his general theory of Shakespeare in an epilogue, which ought, we think, to have come at the beginning of the book. People, he says, resent the idea that Shakeepeare borrowed his plots and portions of his plays because they admire bins for the wrong things. The prolific author is not often great, nor is the great author always prolific. Scribe had a miraculous facility for inventing plots, but Moline, like Shakespeare, took his goods wherever he could find them and, as Saintestkuve re- marked, was a most imitative as well as a most creative genies; yet no ono doubts that in point of literary merit Moline woos giant and Scribe a pygmy. Where Shakespeare excelled was in Isis power of creating characters that are immortal :—

" The traditional or orthodox conception figures him as a leisured student who for the most part selected themes from the romantic and historical literature of his time and thoughtfolly built up plays on these. This I take to be a serioua misconception. Shakespeare

was not a leisured artist. He WITS MI sictorsmamsger, who aid regular theatre work through nearly all the period in which ise wrote or adapted plays; and as I have never seen ars actor who, starting with an originally high artistic faculty, retained it long intact as a manager, I do not believe that even Shakespeare was either a powerf alai:tor or a dramatist deeply and habitually absorbed in play-construction, . . . If we put the modified proposition that Shakespeare rarely produced a play without seeing either a previous version or a draft by another playwright, I think we shall be very near the truth. And I do not think that this view is in the slightest degree derogatory to Shakespeare's genius, an any sane conception of it. It does not in the least disturb my admiration for him to believe that he worked up Troilus and Cressida from drafts by Chapman and Dekker and Chettle ; on the contrary. that solution elucidates for me the mystery of his authorship of— or in—such a piece, and leaves me more satisfied than ever of his artistic sanity. He handled the matter because it came in his professional way ; it was a possible stage-Oast on a celebrated theme, and he spent upon it some of his highest faculty ; turnim into magnificent verse the didactics of Chapman, and MAWS' limning. as no one else could do, pictures of Cressida and Diomed and Troilus whielt survive all the incongruitice of their framework."

This is well said, and the more we learn abut the Elizabethan theatre, the more probable does this view of Shakespeare's activity appear to be.