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Mayor. But, master Franklin, are you sure

't is he?

Frank. I am too sure; would God I were deceiv'd!

Alice. Find out the murderers; let them be known.

Frank. Ay, so they shall come you along with us.

Alice. Wherefore?

Frank. Know you this hand-towel and this knife?

Susan. Ah, Michael through this thy negligence, Thou hast betrayed and undone us all. [Aside.

Mich. I was so afraid, I knew not what I did;

I thought I had thrown them both into the well. [Aside.

Alice. It is the pig's blood we had to sup

per.

But wherefore stay you? find out the murderers.

Mayor. I fear me you'll prove one of them yourself.

Alice. I one of them? what mean such questions?

Frank. I fear me he was murder'd in this house,

And carried to the fields; for from that place,
Backwards and forwards, may you see
The print of many feet within the snow;
And look about this chamber where we are,
And you shall find part of his guiltless blood,
For in his slip-shoe did I find some rushes,
Which argue he was murder'd in this room.
Mayor. Look in the place where he was

wont to sit :

See, see, his blood; it is too manifest.

Alice. It is a cup of wine which Michael shed.

Mich. Ay, truly.

Frank. It is his blood, which, strumpet,
thou hast shed;

But, if I live, thou and thy complices,
Which have conspired and wrought his death,
Shall rue it."

In a subsequent scene the unhappy woman makes confession :

"Mayor. See, Mistress Arden, where your husband lies.

Confess this foul fault, and be penitent.

The more I sound his name the more he bleeds.

This blood condemns me, and in gushing forth Speaks as it falls, and asks me why I did it. Forgive me, Arden! I repent me now;

And would my death save thine, thou shouldst not die.

Rise up, sweet Arden, and enjoy thy love, And frown not on me when we meet in heaven: In heaven I love thee, though on earth I did not."

The concluding scene shows us the principal culprits condemned to die :

"Mayor. Leave to accuse each other now, And listen to the sentence I shall give: Bear Mosbie and his sister to London straight, Where they in Smithfield must be executed: Bear Mistress Arden unto Canterbury, Where her sentence is, she must be burnt: Michael and Bradshaw in Feversham Must suffer death.

Alice. Let my death make amends for all my sin.

Mosbie. Fie upon women, this shall be my song."

After the play, Franklin, in a sort of epilogue, somewhat inartificially tells us that Shakebag was murdered in Southwark, and Black Will burnt at Flushing; that Greene was hanged at Osbridge, and the painter fled. Bradshaw, according to the Chronicle' and the dramatic representation, was an innocent person. The drama concludes with the following apologetical lines :—

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"Gentlemen, we hope you 'll pardon this naked tragedy,

Wherein no filed points are foisted in
To make it gracious to the ear or eye;
For simple truth is gracious enough,
And needs no other points of glozing stuff."

These lines appear to us as an indication
that the author of 'Arden of Feversham,'
whoever he might be, was aware that such a
story did not call for the highest efforts of
dramatic art. It was a naked tragedy,"
-"simple
filed
truth," requiring
points" or "glozing stuff." To a very young
man, whose principles of art were not

"no

Alice. Arden, sweet husband, what shall I formed, and who had scarcely any models

say?

before him, this tragic story might have ap

peared not only easy to be dramatized, but a | to Shakspere by any of his contemporaries; worthy subject for his first efforts. We have and yet it must have been a popular play, to consider, too, how familiar the fearful nar- for it was reprinted forty years after its pubrative must have been to the young Shak-lication. spere. The name of his own mother was Arden; perhaps the Kentish Arden had some slight relationship with her family; but it is evident that the play originally bore the name of Arden of Feversham, as if it were to mark the distinction between that family and the Ardens of Wilmecote. The tale, too, was narrated at uncommon length in the Chronicle' with which Shakspere was very early familiar. There is considerable inequality in the style of this play, but that inequality is not sufficient to lead us to believe that more than one hand was engaged in it. The dramatic management is always skilful; the interest never flags; the action steadily goes forward; there are no secondary plots; and the little comedy that we find is not thrust in to produce a laugh from a few barren spectators. The writer, we think, was familiar with London, which is not at all inconsistent with the belief that it belongs to the youth of Shakspere. Still, the utter absence of external evidence must have left the matter exceedingly doubtful, even if the tragedy had possessed higher excellences than belong to it. It was never attributed

Without doubt there may have been some writer, of whose name and works we know nothing, to whom this play may have been assigned; but if it be improbable that Shakspere had written it, it is equally improbable that any of the known dramatists who had attained a celebrity in 1592 should have written it. It has none of the characteristics of any one of them-their extravagance of language; their forced passion; their overloading of classical allusions; their monotonous versification. Its power mainly lies in its simplicity. The unhappy woman is the chief character in the drama; and it appears to us that the author especially exhibits in "Mistress Arden" that knowledge of the hidden springs of human guilt and weakness which is not to be found in the generalities of any of the early contemporaries of Shakspere. Still we must be understood as not attempting to pronounce any decided opinion upon the question of authorship. We neither hold with the German critics, whose belief approaches credulity in this and other cases, nor with the English, who appear to consider, in most things, that scepticism and sound judgment are identical.

BOOK III.

CHAPTER I.

THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA.

A CHARGE which has been urged against Shakspere, with singular complacency on the part of the accusers, is, that he did not invent his plots. A writer, who in these later days has thought that to disparage Shakspere would be a commendable task, says, If Shakspere had little of what the world

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calls learning, he had less of invention, so far as regards the fable of his plays. For every one of them he was, in some degree, indebted to a preceding piece."* The assertion that the most inventive of poets was without invention, as far as regards the fable of his

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* Life of Shakspeare,' in Lardner's Cyclopædia.

or is supposed to have borrowed, is the story of the shepherdess Felismena, which is thus translated by Mr. Dunlop :-"The first part of the threats of Venus was speedily accom

plays," is as absurd as to say that Scott did not invent the fable of ' Kenilworth,' because the sad tale of Amy Robsart is found in Mickle's beautiful ballad of 'Cumnor Hall.' The truth is, that no one can properly appre-plished; and, my father having early folciate the extent as well as the subtilty of Shakspere's invention-its absorbing and purifying power-who has not traced him to his sources. It will be our duty, in many cases, to direct especial attention to the material upon which Shakspere worked, to show how the rough ore became, under his hands, pure and resplendent-converted into something above all price by the unapproachable skill of the artist. It is not the workman polishing the diamond, but converting by his wonderful alchymy, something of small value into the diamond. The student of Shakspere will understand that we here more particularly allude to the great plays which are founded on previous imaginative works, such as Romeo and Juliet,' and 'Lear;' and not to those in which, like 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' a few incidents are borrowed from the romance-writers.

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lowed my mother to the tomb, I was left an
orphan. Henceforth I resided at the house
of a distant relative; and, having attained
my seventeenth year, became the victim of
the offended goddess by falling in love with
Don Felix, a young nobleman of the pro-
vince in which I lived. The object of my
affections felt a reciprocal passion; but his
father, having learned the attachment which
subsisted between us, sent his son to court,
with a view to prevent our union. Soon after
his departure I followed him in the disguise
of a page, and discovered on the night of my
arrival at the capital, by a serenade I heard
him give, that Don Felix had already dis-
posed of his affections. Without being re-
cognised by him, I was admitted into his
service, and was engaged by my former
lover to conduct his correspondence with the
mistress who, since our separation, had sup-
planted me in his heart.”

|
This species of incident, it is truly observed
by Steevens, and afterwards by Dunlop, is
found in many of the ancient novels.

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In

Twelfth Night,' where Shakspere is supposed to have copied Bandello, the same adventure occurs; but in that delightful comedy, the lady to whom the page in disguise is sent falls in love with him. Such is the Story of Felismena. It is, however, clear that Shakspere must have known this part of the romance of Montemayor, although the translation of Yong was not published till 1598; for the pretty dialogue between Julia and Lucetta, in the first act, where Julia upbraids her servant for bringing the letter of Proteus, corresponds, even to some turns of expression, with a similar description by Felismena of her love's history. We give a passage from the old translation by Bartholomew Yong, which will enable our

"But what shall we do?" said the barber in Don Quixote,' when, with the priest, the housekeeper, and the niece, he was engaged in making a bonfire of the knight's library -"what shall we do with these little books that remain ?" These," said the priest, are probably not books of chivalry, but of poetry." And, opening one, he found it was the 'Diana' of George Montemayor, and said (believing all the rest of the same kind), "These do not deserve to be burnt like the rest, for they cannot do the mischief that those of chivalry have done: they are works of genius and fancy, and do nobody any hurt." Such was the criticism of Cervantes upon the 'Diana' of Montemayor. The romance was the most popular which had appeared in Spain since the days of Amadis de Gaul ;'* and it was translated into English by Bartholomew Yong, and published in 1598. The story involves a perpetual confusion of modern manners and ancient my-readers to compare the romance-writer and thology; and Ceres, Minerva, and Venus, as the dramatist :well as the saints, constitute the machinery. The one part which Shakspere has borrowed, * Dunlop's 'History of Fiction.'

"Yet to try if by giving her some occasion I might prevail, I said unto her-And is it so, Rosina, that Don Felix, without any regard to

mine honour, dares write unto me? These are things, mistress (said she demurely to me again), that are commonly incident to love, wherefore, I beseech you, pardon me; for, if I had thought to have angered you with it, I would have first pulled out the balls of mine eyes. How cold my heart was at that blow, God knows; yet did I dissemble the matter, and suffer myself to remain that night only with my desire, and with occasion of little sleep."-P. 55.

The writer in Lardner's Cyclopædia, whom we have already mentioned, says, 666 The Two Gentlemen of Verona' (a very poor drama) is indebted for many of its incidents to two works-the 'Arcadia' of Sidney, and the 'Diana' of Montemayor." The single incident in Sidney's 'Arcadia' which bears the slightest resemblance to the story of The Two Gentlemen of Verona' is where Pyrocles, one of the two heroes of the 'Arcadia,' is compelled to become the captain of a band of people called Helots, who had revolted from the Lacedæmonians; and this is supposed to have given origin to the thoroughly Italian incident of Valentine being compelled to become the captain of the outlaws. The English travellers in Italy, in the time of Shakspere, were perfectly familiar with banditti, often headed by daring adventurers of good family. Fynes Moryson, who travelled between Rome and Naples in 1594, has described a band headed by "the nephew of the Cardinal Cajetano." We may, therefore, fairly leave the uninventive Shakspere to

have found his outlaws in other narratives

than that of the 'Arcadia.' With regard to the 'Diana' of Montemayor, we have stated the entire amount of what the author of The Two Gentlemen of Verona' is supposed

to have borrowed from it.

Amongst the objections which Dr. Johnson, in the discharge of his critical office, appears to have thought it his duty to raise against every play of Shakspere, he says, with regard to the plot of this play, "he places the emperor at Milan, and sends his young men to attend him, but never mentions him more." As the emperor had nothing whatever to do with the story of 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' it was quite unnecessary that Shakspere should mention

him more; and the mention of him at all was only demanded by a poetical law, which Shakspere well understood, by which the introduction of a few definite circumstances, either of time or place, is sought for, to take the conduct of a story, in ever so small a degree, out of the region of generalization, and, by so doing, invest it with some of the attributes of reality. The poetical value of this single line

"Attends the emperor in his royal court”*can only be felt by those who desire to attach precise images to the descriptions which poetry seeks to put before the mind, and, above all, to the incidents which dramatic poetry endeavours to group and embody. Had this line not occurred in the play before us, we should have had a very vague idea of the scenes which are here presented to us; and, as it is, the poet has left just such an amount of vagueness as is quite compatible with the free conduct of his plot. He is not here dramatizing history. He does not undertake to bring before us the fierce struggles for the real sovereignty of the Milanese between Francis I. and the Emperor Charles V., while Francesco Sforza, the Duke of Milan, held a precarious and disputed authority. He does not pretend to tell us of the dire calamities, the subtle intrigues, and the wonderful reverses which preceded the complete subjection of Italy to the conqueror at Pavia. He does not show us the unhappy condition of Milan, in 1529, when, according to Guicciardini, the poor people who could not buy provisions at the exorbitant prices demanded by the governor died in the streets,-when the greater number of the nobility fled from the city, and those who remained were miserably poor,— and when the most frequented places were overgrown with grass, nettles, and brambles. He gives us a peaceful period, when courtiers talked lively jests in the duke's saloons, and serenaded their mistresses in the duke's courts. This state of things might have existed during the short period between the treaty of Cambray, in 1529 (when Francis I. gave up all claims to Milan, and it became

*Act 1. Scene 111.

a fief of the empire under Charles V.), and the | chronisms we are quite willing to believe. death of Francesco Sforza, in 1535; or it might He saw, and we think correctly, that there have existed at an earlier period in the life was not less real impropriety in making the of Sforza, when after the battle of Pavia, he ancient Greeks speak English than in making was restored to the dukedom of Milan; or the same Greeks describe the maiden "in when, in 1525, he received a formal investi- shady cloister mew'd" by the modern name ture of his dignity. All that Shakspere at- of a nun*. He had to translate the images tempted to define was some period when of the Grecks, as well as their language, into there was a Duke of Milan holding his au- forms of words that an uncritical English thority in a greater or less degree under the audience would apprehend. Keeping this emperor. That period might have been principle in view, whenever we meet with a before the time of Francesco Sforza. It commentator lifting up his eyes in astonishcould not have been after it, because, upon ment at the prodigious ignorance of Shakthe death of that prince, the contest for the spere, with regard to geography, and chrosovereignty of the Milanese was renewed nology, and a thousand other proprieties to between Francis I. and Charles V., till, in which the empire of poetry has been sub1540, Charles invested his son Philip (after-jected by the inroads of modern accuracy, wards husband of Mary of England) with we picture to ourselves a far different being the title, and the separate honours of a Duke | of Milan became merged in the imperial family.

The one historical fact, then, mentioned in this play, is that of the emperor holding his court at Milan, which was under the government of a duke, who was a vassal of the empire. Assuming that this fact prescribes a limit to the period of the action, we must necessarily place that period at least half a century before the date of the composition of this drama. Such a period may, or may not, have been in Shakspere's mind. It was scarcely necessary for him to have defined the period for the purpose of making his play more intelligible to his audience. That was all the purpose he had to accomplish. He was not, as we have said before, teaching history, in which he had to aim at all the exactness that was compatible with the exercise of his dramatic art. He had here, as in many other cases, to tell a purely romantic story: and all that he had to provide for with reference to what is called costume, in the largest sense of that word, was, that he should not put his characters in any positions, nor conduct his story through any details, which should run counter to the actual knowledge, or even to the conventional opinions, of his audience. That this was the theory upon which he worked as an artist we have little doubt; and that he carried this theory even into wilful ana

from the rude workman which their pedantic demonstrations have figured as the beau idéal of the greatest of poets. We see the most skilful artist employing his materials in the precise mode in which he intended to employ them; displaying as much knowledge as he intended to display; and, after all, committing fewer positive blunders, and incurring fewer violations of accuracy, than any equally prolific poet before or after him. If we compare, for example, the violations of historical truth on the part of Shakspere, who lived in an age when all history came dim and dreary before the popular eye, and on the part of Sir Walter Scott, who lived in an age when all history was reduced to a tabular exactness-if we compare the great dramatist and the great novelist in this one point alone, we shall find that the man who belongs to the age of accuracy is many degrees more inaccurate than the man who belongs to the age of fable. There is, in truth, a philosophical point of view in which we must seek for the solution of those contradictions of what is real and probable, which, in Shakspere, his self-complacent critics are always delighted to refer to his ignorance. One of their greatest discoveries of his geographical ignorance is furnished in this play :-Proteus and his servant go to Milan by water. It is perfectly true that Verona is inland, and that even the river *Midsummer Night's Dream.'

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