BOOKS.

SHASESPEARIA.NA.*

AMONG the most interesting of recent Shakespearean publica- tions is the series of reprints which Messrs. Chatto and

Windus are now issuing under the title of "The Shakespeare Library," with Professor Gollancz as its general editor. The library is to include, besides anew edition of the plays with the original spelling reproduced—the first volume of which is noticed in our "Books of the Week" column—a series of volumes illustrating the life and literature of England at the close of the sixteenth century, and among these many of the works which formed the sources of Shakespeare's dramas will find a place. The latter series will be particularly valuable, for it will bring within the reach of all who are interested in the history of our literature a number of rare books which have hitherto been almost inaccessible to the general reader ; and the volumes already published show that both in scholarship and outward form these excellent reprints leave nothing to be desired. In their treatment of the points of comparison between Shakespeare and his predecessors the editors are always illuminating and precise, so that it is possible in every case to follow easily the line of Shakespeare's indebtedness, and to appreciate at once how much, and how little, he owed to the work of others. The reader is thus enabled to come a step nearer to the inmost chamber of Shakespeare's art. We can catch a glimpse of him, through the keyhole as

it were, at work in his library with his Holinshed or his Plutarch, or turning over the leaves of Greene's -romance of Pandosto, or Brooke's poem of Bomeus and Juliet. We can even detect him marking down his favourite passages, and

underlining this or that significant point, and we can watch him starting off, at some obscure sentence, into a long reverie of

wonderful imaginations and beautiful romance. The occupa- tion is entertaining, and even instructive; but it is a little tantalising too. We seem to have come nearer only to be further off than ever, and, like children when the conjurer shows them "how the trick is done," the more we see the less we understand. Let us take, for instance, the following passage in Greene's Pandosto, and observe how Shakespeare treated it :— " And yet Dorastus shame not at thy shepherd's weed : the heavenly gods have sometimes earthly thoughts : Neptune became a ram, Jupiter a bull, Apollo a shepherd: they gods, and yet in lore; and thou a man appointed to love."

Thus the disguised Prince soliloquises in the euphuistic strain of Greene's day. Shakespeare's Florizel addresses Perdita in almost the same words; the changes are very slight, and yet the result is that a frigid rhetorical exercise has been replaced by the authentic music of passion and poetry :— " The gods themselves, Humbling their deities to love, have taken The shapes of beasts upon them : Jupiter Became a bull, and bellowed ; the green Neptune A ram, and bleated; and the fire-robed god, Golden Apollo, a poor humble swain, As I seem now."

• (1) Shakespeare's Hotinshedr the Chronicle and the Historical Plays Coin. Meby W. G. Boswell-Stone. [10s. 6d. net.]—Greene's "Pandosto; or, altime and Faunas": being the Original. of Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale." Newly Edited by P. G. Thomas. [2s. 6d. net. —Brooke's " Romeus and Juliet " betng the Original of Shakespeare's "Romeo an Juliet." Newly Edited by J. J. Munro. [2s. 6d. net.] "The Shakespeare Library." London: Chatto and Windus.---(2) Four Quarto Editions of Plays by Shakespeare, the Property of the Trustees and Guardians of Shakespeare's Birthplace. Described by Sidney Lee, LL.D.. D.Litt. With 5 Illustrations in Facsimile. Stratford-upon-Avon. [6d. net ; post-free, 74d.]

How has the transformation been effected? What was it that suggested to Shakespeare that exquisite "As I seem now" ?

After all our prying, the qualities of his art remain as mysterious as those of the magic ring in the Arabian romances, which in the twinkling of an eye made beautiful everything it touched.

For purposes of comparison, perhaps the most interesting of these volumes is Brooke's Romeus and Juliet, a long poem in rhymed alexandrines, first published in 1562. In the case of Greene's Pandosto, Shakespeare, though he made use of the outline of the plot and of a few detached phrases which

struck his fancy, treated his predecessor's work chiefly as a point of departure from which to strike out into his own airy region of romantic imagination. Those marvellous scenes of pastoral innocence and happiness and beauty which give to

The Winter's Tale its central charm seem to have been evolved by Shakespeare out of a single sentence in Pandosto :—" He [Dorastus] saw Fawnia sitting all alone under the side of a

bill, making a garland of such homely flowers as the fields did afford." But the originalities of Shakespeare's latest

dramatic style were far from his mind when he wrote hie early tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, which follows very closely indeed the developments and incidents of Brooke's narrative. So far as the conduct of the play is concerned, Shakespeare's principal innovation is the introduction of Mercutio, whose character was doubtless suggested by Brooke's couplet-

" A courtier that each where was highly held in price, For he was courteous of his speech, and pleasant of device "— though, as Mr. Munro tells us, there is some reason to suppose that the role originated in an earlier version of the story with which we are not acquainted. But the real force of Shakespeare's transmuting genius is to be found, not in the construction, but in the spirit of his drama ; and here, of course, it is impossible to exaggerate the completeness of the change. Shakespeare, to use Mr. Munro's phrase, "vitalised Brooke's work." He gilded the pale streams of the earlier poet's versification with his own "heavenly alchemy "; he

converted a conventional narrative, which hardly ever rises above the level of mediocrity, and not seldom sinks below ,it, into the thing we know,—the immortal tragedy of swift and palpitating beauty which is Romeo and Juliet.

If we were asked to say which of Shakespeare's qualities strikes us most forcibly after such a comparison as this, we should be inclined to reply that it is neither his power over language nor his intellectual force. In both those respects, indeed, he is so immeasurably superior to a versifier of Brooke's calibre that there is really no room for comparison at all. In reading Brooke's poem one is no more struck by Shakespeare's greater mental profundity and command of words than one is by the greater heat and brilliance of the sun when one looks at a candle. It is merely as a storyteller that Brooke claims our attention, and in the light of his work it is as a storyteller that Shakespeare is most conspicuously triumphant. Not only is Shakespeare's narrative more con- densed and rapid; his whole conception of it is characterised by an intensity of imaginative vision which is never approached by his predecessor. Brooke tells his story as if he were repeating it from some one else—as indeed he was—as if, in fact, it were a story and nothing more; while Shakespeare, seizing upon the dead bones of the old narrative, has clothed them with a fiery reality, and performed an act of creation. He conceived his imaginations with the definition and the force of actuality. Verona was present to him in all her passion and her beauty, and be was aware, as if he were among them, of the scents and the colours of an Italian night. Thus his play, steeped in that glowing atmosphere, comes to us like "a beaker full of the warm South," and there is something intoxicating in its pages. Poor Brooke at the height of his argument is always ready to wander off into vague disquisitions and moralisings. These are Romeus's first words to Juliet when she speaks to him from the balcony :— "Fair lady mine, dame Juliet, my life, quod he, Even from my birth committed was to fatal sisters three. They may in spite of foes draw forth my lively thread; And they also, whoso saith nay, asunder may it shred."

This is the voice of a rhetorician, not of a lover, and it was in reply to no such utterance as this that Shakespeare's Juliet leant down from her balcony with- " My ears have not yet drunk a hundred words Of thy tongue's uttering, yet I know the sound."

When Romans is about to kill himself he addresses the body of Juliet with a set of verbal conceits :— " 0 Juliet, of whom the world unworthy was,

From which, for world's unworthiness thy worthy ghost did pass . . . ."

Brooke could never have written that if he had clearly imagined the situation of his hero; though, no doubt, what- ever he had imagined, he could never have written this :— " 0 my love! my wife! Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath, Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty : Thou art not conquered; beauty's ensign yet Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks, And death's pale flag is not advanced there."

But to prolong such comparisons would be cruel, and it is more interesting to turn to an instance in which Shakespeare himself fails to make the most of the imaginative capabilities of a scene, and thus not only does not surpass, but actually falls below, his original. The passage occurs in Richard III.,

which is modelled throughout closely upon Holinshed's history. Richard, determined to ruin Hastings, accuses the Queen and Shore's wife of witchcraft, and asks him what punishment they deserve. "Certainly, my lord," was Hastings's reply, according to Holinshed, "if they have so heinously done, they be worthy heinous punishment." And the chronicler proceeds as follows :— " What,' quoth the protector, thou servest me, I ween, with "ifs" and "ands" : I tell thee they have so done, and that I will make good on thy body, traitor!' and therewith, as in a great anger, he clapped his fist upon the board a great rap. At which token one cried 'Treason !' without the chamber. Therewith a door clapped and in come there rushing men in harness, as many as the chamber might hold. And anon the protector said to the lord Hastings : '1 arrest thee, traitor!' ' What, me, my lord?' quoth he. Yea, thee, traitor!' quoth the protector."

This vivid scene, with its exciting finish—the sudden inrush of the armed men, and the quick and violent interchange of words between Gloucester and Hastings—is reduced by Shake- speare to a few lines of ineffective rant :— " Tellest thou me of ifs' ? Thou art a traitor: Off with his head! Now, by St. Paul, I swear I will not dine until I see the same.

Lovel and Ratcliff, look that it be done : The rest that love me, rise and follow me."

But Richard III. was an early and immature work, and there is abundance of evidence that Shakespeare could make every whit as good a use of Holinshed's Chronicle as of Brooke's .Romeus and Juliet. The admirable volume, prepared by the late Mr. Boswell-Stone, in which the relevant portions from Holinshed are collected, together with the necessary references to the passages in the historical plays for which they form the foundation, is a remarkable witness to the transforming power of Shakespeare. Perhaps the best example of all occurs in Henry V, where the King's magnificent and stirring

speech before the battle of Agincourt sprang into being from this hint in Holinshed:—" The day following was the five and twentieth of October in the year 1415; being then Friday, and the feast of Crispin and Crispianus : a day fair and fortunate to the English, but most sorrowful and unlucky to the French." Shakespeare, with the eye of a master, seized upon this reference to the feast of Crispian, and wove around it what is perhaps the most splendid piece of patriotic poetry in the English language.

It is pleasant to know that while such publications as these are spreading a fuller knowledge of our great poet and his times through a wide circle of readers, the public recognition of the debt we owe him is finding appropriate expression in the formation of a library of rare. and valuable books in the

place of his birth at Stratford-upon-Avon. Mr. Sidney Lee's account of the quarto editions of The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, which have lately been added by the Trustees to the Birthplace Library, is well worth the attention of Shake-

speare worshippers, containing, as it does, besides a full description of the newly acquired books, with reproductions of their delightful title-pages, a mass of erudition such as Mr.

Lee alone could supply. The pamphlet is especially interesting on account of the apercu which it affords of a class of men

whose conditions and history have been strangely neglected by modern antiquarians,—the printers and booksellers of Shakespeare's age.