THE SHAKESPEARE APOCRYPHA.* Tlitis book contains, in a compact and

inexpensive form, a quantity of material deeply interesting to the ordinary reader no less than to the professed Elizabethan ;scholar, and it Will be all the more welcome since it provides for the first time

authoritative texts of many plays which have hitherto been either altogether inaccessible to the general public, or obscured and injured by antiquated editorial work. Mr.

Tucker Brooke, who, in addition to his scrupulously accurate care of the text, contributes an elaborate bibliography and introduction, has performed a difficult task in a manner worthy of the highest traditions of Oxford scholarship. His

introduction is valuable not only for the mass of information which it contains, but also as an original contribution, at once sane and learned, towards the solution of many literary problems of the utmost delicacy. There is, indeed, only one fault to be found with an otherwise admirable volume,— its exceedingly unattractive form. The text is crowded into double coltunns, in small and uncomfortable type; the important textual notes are so rigidly compressed as to be often almost undecipherable; and the archaic spelling and punctuation of the originals have been every- where preserved. The result is that the average reader is harassed, irritated, and repelled. The reproduction of antique methods of orthography is no doubt valuable from a strictly archaeological point of view ; but it is surely put of place in a publication intended for general use. The vagaries of Elizabethan printers are as a rule by no means calculated to assist towards a proper understanding of the text ; they are merely stumbling-blocks, and the unaccustomed reader soon wearies of struggling through the crags and boulders which in the present volume beset his path. This is most unfortunate, because the path is one well worthy of exploration. The fourteen plays which Mr. Brooke has gathered together to form his Shakespeare Apocrypha are all interesting, while some are much more thau interesting,—they are supreme examples of the noble and splendid art of Elizabethan tragedy. There are passages in The Two Noble Kinsmen, in Arden of Fever- sham, and in The Reign of King Edward the Third which deserve to stand in the very front rank of what is excellent in English .poetry.. It is cosily natural that this should be the case in a collection of plays ascribed to Shakespeare, for these ascriptions are in the majority of instances, as Mr. Brooke has shown, due simply to a desire on the part of early critics to appropriate to Shakespeare all that was best in the anonymous productions of his contemporaries. Critics—and especially German critics—have been slow to realise both the extent and the quality of the dramatic talent of that wonderful age. That is the real leeson to be gathered from such a collection as this. Open it where we will, and we shall find some magnificent expression, some charming piece of humour, some memorable observation upon men and things. To mention only a single instance, what a wealth of pnecry and passion lies, as it were, entangled amid those pages of terrible realism called 4 l'Orleshire Tragedy What could be more masterly, both as prose and as drama, than this passage from the soliloquy of a ruined gambler "What is there in three dice to make a man draw tiee three thoussuul acres into tke compass of 4. round little table, and with the gentlepian's palsy in his hand shake out his posterity thieves or beggars ? 'Tia done ! I ha' done't, i'faith : terrible, horrible misery.—How well was I left! very well, very well. My lands showed like a full moon about me, but now the moon's i' the lest quarter, waning, waning : and I am mad to think that moon was mine; mine and my father's, and forefathers'—generation- generations ! Down goes the house of us, down, down it sinks.

pchNreosiwt.e.w4rrieui.nst.,T;thortstwyniaomrit..iaasbniaeggdaer,thbiesgsshiilne miamse !—Zhati4 na4i.r4141, wahwtch Shakespeare need pot have been ssisame4 to have written sucb a passage ; but to believe that i. Itp ron-gun for believing that be wrote it. Afr. Brooke wisely dentings to commit himself p,on the que4ion, and his readers esunot do better than follow his example.

But eggellence of workmanship has 130 been the fAtlY test kvbieli eager critics have applied to plays of donbtful origin in order to prove them the offepring of 4bakp,„§p,eixreo genius. In many case* the nmst trivial and irrelevant facts Liao ken Thg Shakespeare Apocrypha: being a Col1eliingt Fourtept Plays which have been Aseraed lo Shakespeare. Edited, with Introduction, Note, and Biblio• graphy by C. F. Tucker Brooke, B.Litt. Oxford: at the Clarendon Pretw. [5s. net.]

seized upon and declared to be manifest signs of the hand of the master. Schelars have followed the traces of a phantom Shakesneare=a will-o'-the-wisp dancing before their deluded

imaginations—through the woad-rate farces and the mediocre melodramas and the dull historical tragedies of the journey- men playwrights of the age. The curious volume which had place in Charles IL's library, containing The Pair Em, ..71fueedoras, and The Merry Devil of Edmonton bound together under the title "Shakespeare, Vol. I.," has deluded more than one commentator. The Fair Em is a wretched piece of hack- work, and The Merry Devil of Edmonton, though it is full of charm and vitality, contains nothing which could warrant an ascription to Shakespeare. The facts connected with 3face- doras are more singular. The play is a feeble one, but it was exceedingly popular, and long formed part of the repertory of

the Globe Company. The third edition, published in 1610, contains some additional passages which are not only far 'superior to the rest of the work, but undoubtedly recall

more than once the later manner of Shakespeare. "Let me intreat you to intreat no more," says. the melancholy King of

Valentia to his musicians, and continues :—

" Mirth to a soul disturbed are embers turned,

Which sudden gleam with molestation,

But sooner lose their sight fort; 'Tis gold bestowed upon is rioter, Which not relieves, but murders him: 'tis a drug

Given to the healthful, which infects, not cures."

Is it not possible that these lines were thrown off by the author of A.Winter's Tale to fill up an awkward hiatus in the Comedy of .4facedorue? It is perhaps a peasibility ; but it is certainly nothing more.

The most interesting play in Mr. Brooke's collection ig the almost unknown tragedy of Sir Thomas More. The British

Museum manuscript, which has hitherto only been privately printed, and from which Mr. Brooke's text is taken, is highly curious document, apparently composed, in part at least, of transcripts in the actual handwriting of the authors of the work. Unfortunately, however, the evidence which the

manuecript provide is of the most perplexing kind; all that can be determined with certainty is that the work was com-

posed by several authors, and that these authors contributed their shares at different times. Upon this very hazardous foundation a theory has been built up—and to this theory Mr. Brooke himself adheres—ascribing certain passages to the authorship of Shakespeare. If this ascription is correct, it is of peculiar interest, because the passages in question bear all the appearance, in the original manu-

script, of having come straight from their author's pen; so that, if we are to believe Mr. Brooke, we have here an autograph of Shakespeare, and of Shakespeare in the very act of dramatic composition. The lines are full of corrections

and alterations, which, we must suppose, shows that the players were exaggerating when they told Ben Jonson that Shakespeare "never blotted a line." But such speculations are needless, because in truth the whole hypothesis lacks foundation. The speeches which Mr. Brooke assigns to Shakespeare are fine, but they are not eminently characteristic, nor do they differ, either in force or in beauty, from the

greater part of the rest of the play. But Mr. Brooke some- what unexpectedly repeats the old argument that when these lines were composed there was no poet living save Shake- speare who could have written so well. But when were they composed ? The date which Mr. Brooke gives them— between 1590 and 1596—is a mere assumption. There is reason to suppose that some other portions of the tragedy may have been written at about this period ; but Mr. Brooke admits that the passages which he claims for Shakespeare were later additions ; and there is nothing to show how many years may not have elapsed before they were made. By the beginning of the seventeenth century half-a-dozen dramatists were in existence who were capable of this so-called Shake-

spearean work.

Mr. Brooke's willingness to include these passages from Sir Thomas More in the Shakespearean canon is all the more remarkable since he rejects from it the far more certainly authentic passages in The Two Noble Kinsmen. He swallows

a camel and strains at a gnat. His reasons are curious.

The language and verse" of the passages in question are, he admits, "rich in Shakespearian reminiscence " ; but "there hi practically nothing in characterization or dramatic structure which points to the author of the Tempest." And he adds that "the only hypothesis on which present-day criticism can even consider the idea of Shakespeare's connexion with The Two Noble Kinsmen is that the play consists of very late ' poetic ' fragments by Shakespeare subsequently connected and completed by Fletcher." But why is this the "only" hypothesis? Is there not also the hypothesis—and the reason- able hypothesis—that Shakespeare supplied certain scenes of a spectacular and rhetorical nature to complete a work for

which, so far as plot and characterisation were concerned. Fletcher was wholly responsible ? Mr. Brooke, quoting De Quincey, speaks of the "gorgeous rhetoric" of tbe doubtful ecettes, and draws the conclusion that Shakespeare

would never have "foisted in at the very climax of his play" a mass of mere flue writing. But we could understand this if the play were not "his," but Fletcher's ; and even in the most authentic of Shakespeare's dramas—in Coriolanas, for instance—there are examples of rhetoric obscuring and deadening the action of the piece. But, after all, it is rhetoric of a peculiar kind. It is Shakespeare's rhetoric. It is not merely a collection of splendid words, gratifying to the senses. It is something more than " gorgeous " ; it is compact of

thought. This is what differentiates the fine writing 9f Shakespeare from that of every other poet, and this ia the most obvious characteristic of the marvellous verse which, op strangely an4 so splendidly, intensifies and ennobles Fletcher's tragedy :— "There's many a man alive that hath outlived

The love o' the people; yea, i' the selfsame state

Stands many a father with his child; some comfort We have by so considering: we expire And not without men's pity. To live still, Have their good wishes; we prevent The loathsome misery of age, beguile The gout and rheum, that in lag hours attend For grey approaohers ; we come towards the gods Young and unwappered, not halting under crimes Many and stale: that sure shall please the gods,

sooner than such, to give us nectar with 'OM,

For we are more clear spirits."

Surely here, if anywhere, we may ask the cokeetion which tlis cow inentators are never tired of asking, but this time without fear of a reply : "Who but Shakespeare conld have written

this ? "