middle of the seventeenth century, when Puritan supremacy retarded dramatic activity. The borrowings are either imitations of scenes and passages, or they are verbal imitations of lines and phrases due to close knowledge of the plays and poems. The imitations of scenes, so far discovered, are not many. Shakspere, like all the great poets of the world, left no school behind him. He was not an initiator; he invented no new style; he introduced no new vogue. Rather he accepted freely the forms and practices laid down by his predecessors and fellows: but he transcended them in all things; he perfected their methods, and their forms; he surpassed them in his style; in his whole art he was inimitable. Both Marlowe and Kyd left behind them types which long served for models; the romantic plays of Beaumont and Fletcher continued to exercise a wide influence over the stage; but it was long before the works of Shakspere ere considered as models which playwrights might profitably study. We shall not expect to find, therefore, in Jacobean and post-Jacobean drama up to the Restoration, any evidence of plays on a Shaksperean model. What we shall find will be inferior imitations of certain incidents, passages, or scenes, often, I believe, made unconsciously. And we may notice in passing, that the dearth of plays of a Shaksperean type is by no means indicative of the superiority in any way of such a man as Marston, who seems to have exercised an influence over the later Revenge tragedy,' but is tributive to the subtlety of that art of which no man could win the secret. were The verbal borrowings are of two kinds: they are lines lifted more or less intact from the Shaksperean text, or they are imitations of Shaksperean lines. All of these are due either to the retention in the memory of remarkable passages heard in the theatre, or to perusal of the printed text. Borrowings which are due to reading only, need not greatly detain us: they are interesting and they are valuable; but they are common to all times, and more or less with the works of all poets. But the borrowings, conscious or unconscious, which are due to knowledge of the plays in the theatre itself, have a particular importance. 1 Tragedy, by A. H. Thorndike, 1908, p. 199. In 1607 John Marston, in What You Will, quoted that famous line, "A Horse, a Horse, my Kingdome for a Horse," and continued, "Looke the I speake play scrappes."2 This, of course, is conscious borrowing, and is a fairly common feature. Marston himself had parodied the same line in his Scourge of Villanie in 1598; 3 Richard Brathwaite cited it in his Strappado for the Divell, 1615. Richard Corbet quoted the line in connexion with Burbage, who acted Richard III, in Iter Boreale, before 1621;5 and the "play-scrap" is again parodied in Beaumont and Fletcher's Little French Lawyer. Other play-scraps were well known on the Elizabethan stage and were even quoted by Shakspere himself. First, there is Pistol's scrap: "haue wee not Hiren here?" 7— probably from Peele's lost Turkish Mahomet and the Fair Greek Hiren. The phrase is repeated in John Day's Law Tricks, 1608; 8 and again in Eastward Hoe, 1605. And next there is that speech of "stalking" Tamburlaine : "Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia! What can ye draw but twenty miles a day . . .?” once more made part of "the swaggering vaine of Auncient Pistoll," 10 and quoted, likewise, in Eastward Hoe. As the Peele and Marlowe phrases occur in the same page, the authors of that play may be borrowing from Shakspere. Lodovick Barrey in the same way quotes Pistol's "die men like dogs," in his Ram-Alley of 1611.11 So much for play-scraps. We pass next to unacknowledged and more or less accurate citations from the text, and imitations of passages. These commence in 1594, when Richard Barnfeild, in his Affectionate Shepheard, helped his muse with Shakspere's Venus and Adonis and probably Lucrece.12 It is difficult to determine whether Barnfeild borrowed intentionally, or reproduced phrases which lingered in his memory: probably the latter is the truth. In any case, in the following year Barnfeild made another series of borrowings, as we may term them, even more definite than those 2 i. 176. 3 i. 52. 1 Richard III, V. iv: Fol., p. 204. 72 Henry IV, II. iv; Fol., p. 83. 2 Tamburlaine, IV. iv. 1–2. 11 i. 221. 10 2 12 i. 17. 6 i. 197. 8 i. 190. Henry IV, II. iv.; Fol., p. 83. previous1: nevertheless, it is just as difficult to say how far Barnfeild consciously followed Shakspere. Exactly similar borrowings to these were made by Nicholson in his Acolastus in 1600.2 The lines he parallels or imitates come from Venus, Lucrece and 3 Henry VI, the one from the latter being “Oh Tygres Hart, wrapt in a Womans Hide," which Greene had previously parodied in 1592. In 1600 was published Bodenham's Belvedere," the first of those collections of citations from various poets, which afterwards became fairly common. An enormous number of quotations from Shakspere have lately been identified in Belvedere by Mr. Crawford (Vol. II., Appendix D.). Subsequently this type of book was represented by The Academy of Complements, 1640, Wit's Labyrinth, 1648, and John Cotgrave's English Treasury, 1655. The quotations and imitations of the poems continue till the middle of the century, when, probably in consequence of widespread Puritan feeling, they decrease. Dekker closely imitated a passage from Venus in Old Fortunatus, 1600. Heywood quoted part of two stanzas of Venus in The Fayre Mayde of the Exchange, 1607, and in the following year Markham and Machin quoted almost the same passage from that book of "maides philosophie in their Dumbe Knight. The apostrophe of Lucrece, "O Opportunity... thou notorious bawd!" has its imitations in Marston's Malcontent, "Entic'd by that great bawd, opportunity"; in Heywood's Fair Maid of the West,-" win Opportunity, Shees the best bawd"; and once more in Ford's Lady's Trial-" the bawd... Opportunity." Alexander Niccholes quoted a passage from Venus in his Discourse of Marriage, 1515,8 apparently from memory. G. Rivers lifted many pieces from Lucrece for his Heroina, in 1639.9 And while Robert Burton introduced bits of the poems in the Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Baron made use of Venus in writing his Fortune's Tennis-Ball, 1650, much in the same way as Nicholson had used the poem for his Acolastus of 1600. 10 The Sonnets and the other poems had not this vogue. Not dealing so much with incidents, and not so full of picturesque description and allusion, they were less quotable and imitable. The commencement of the twelfth piece in The Passionate Pilgrim, Crabbed age and youth cannot live together, finds several imitations and echoes. The first line is quoted in Rowley's A Match at Midnight, 1633; Ford parodied the first two lines in Fancies, Chaste and Noble, 1638; the opening line seems to be parodied in Lady Alimony, 1659,—“Frosty age and youth suit not well together"; and the ballad itself is referred to in Fletcher's Woman's Prize. A line in a madrigal of Sir W. Drummond's may be an echo of Sonnet 271; bits of Sonnet 47 are introduced by Sir John Suckling into his Tragedy of Brennoralt, 1646, and that same author made a continuation of some lines from Lucrece, printed in Fragmenta Aurea, 1646.2 There is sufficient evidence here to lead us to believe that most of these quotations and imitations were not made directly from consulting the printed text. The verbal differences between the original and the imitator's or copier's version seem to be due to small failures of memory, and not to deliberate alteration. For this reproduction of phrases and parallelism to exist, the poems must have been widely read and well known. We must next consider the plays. In our section discussing the mere allusions of Shakspere's contemporaries to his dramatic pieces, we found that the plays which most interested his fellows were Romeo and Richard III, and, subsequently, the Falstaff pieces and Hamlet. It is precisely these four productions which most of all provided material for minor imitations and borrowings up to the middle of the seventeenth century. Of the borrowings made from these plays alone, Richard III and Falstaff provide about 16 and 18 per cent. respectively; Romeo provides about 23 per cent.; and Hamlet about 43 per cent. The total number of references to Falstaff outnumber those to Romeo, but the latter is more imitated and quoted from. It may be opportune, too, at this point, to utter a word of warning in connexion with the allusions 2 i. 386, 404. 1 i. 260. to Hamlet. Apart from the fact that a few of the early allusions may be to the earlier Hamlet,1 we have to remember that, even before the appearance of Shakspere's play, there existed several Revenge tragedies of a Kydian type already characterised by incidents and parts which figure prominently in the Shaksperean tragedy. Almost all the Revenge plays have points of contact in their adoption of the minor conventionalities which accompanied their theme. The incitement of a son by his father's ghost to revenge his father's murder, the son's irresolution, his scholarliness and madness, the wooing of the heroine, and her insanity, the scene in the churchyard, etc., are by no means the peculiar property of Hamlet; and whenever allusions to some older play are concerned with these conventional incidents, it is not always safe to assume that Shakspere's tragedy is implied. This notwithstanding, there are few passages in our text which offer difficulty in that way. In considering the plays, we will deal first with the imitation of phrases, and proceed to the imitation of scenes. Capulet's words in Romeo,2 At my poor house, looke to behold this night, ... are borrowed by Sharpham in Cupid's Whirligig, 1607, "where so many earth-treading starres adornes the sky of state"; they appear again in Armin's Historie of the two Maids of More-Clacke, 1608-" courtly dames or earth's bright treading starres"; and in Fletcher's Noble Gentleman,3 "Beauties, that lights the Court, and makes it shew Like a faire heaven, in a frosty night : And mongst these mine, not poorest." Romeo's words, "It seemes she hangs vpon the cheeke of night, appear in Acherley's Massacre of Money, 1602-" Like to a 1 See, for examples, vol. i. p. 182. 3 i. 202. |