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Germany and England, and every petty novelist and journalist can quote "that is the question," and talk glibly of "le vieux William " and "l'immortel Will." Even Dumas translated Hamlet à ses heures perdues, and proposed to make the dénouement more effective and plus logique! M. Ducuing, in 1846, in a very remarkable essay,* ventured to question Shakespeare's superiority over every other dramatist, and to protest in favor of the classic school, demanding des rôles in lieu of characters (to use De Vigny's happy phrase), and in seeing nothing but a mechanical regularity in dramatic structure :

"De démontrer, après tant d'autres, comment Shakespeare a porté dans son cerveau, depuis les plus suaves éclosions de l'éclogue jusqu'aux plus resplendissantes créations de l'épopée, et comment il a su approprier à la scène Anglaise les modes les plus divers de la poesie dramatique; à qui porrait-il aujourdhui paraître profitable de venir le

tenter de nouveau?”

But in due time the French admiration for Shakespeare became so general, and panegyrics so common, that M. Ducuing was forced to apologize for presuming to take the other side. While England wrote eulogies on the poetry, and Germany uttered oracles on the philosophy, the Frenchman remembered that in works written for the stage what we ought first to inquire after is the theatrical art which they display. Sometimes, indeed, he overlooked the fact of Shakespeare being something more than a mere playwright; as, for instance, when he undertook to teach him how he might have produced greater "effects." Thus, Shakespeare makes Macduff slay Macbeth, and appear with his head upon a pole; after which, Malcolm is proclaimed king. M. Deschamps has not only made Macbeth and Macduff mortally wound each other (a most unwarrantable change), but, to produce a coup de théâtre, he summons the witches, who, with torches in their hands, appear on the citadel, and then Macbeth, slightly raising himself, points to them and exclaims :

Malcolm tu vas régner! c'est juste! mais regarde!

Oui! voilà les trois sœurs qui m'ont perdu.-Prends garde
A leurs conceils maudits, et songe à mon adieu !

(Il meurt.-Eclat de rire des sorcières.)

Malcolm. Amis, vive l'Ecosse, et ne croyons qu'en Dieu!]

This is doubtless an "effect;" but it is produced at the expense of poetic consistency. Shakespeare understood the treatment of his supernatural agency a great deal too well to bring witches into any place less congenial to their nature than the "blasted heath" or their own dark cave!

This example alone serves to show how difficult it is for the poet to preserve the integral truth and consistency of his creations, and at

* Shakespeare et notre Repertoire in "La Revue Nouvelle," Jan. 7, 1846.

the same time to achieve theatrical effects. We laugh at Dumas when he alters Hamlet, and at M. Deschamps when he alters Macbeth, thinking to make them more effective; but we should remember that Cibber had done the same with Richard III., and that Garrick-the friend of Johnson and Reynolds-the great Shakesperian interpreter, practised still bolder experiments on the object of his worship, and for precisely the same purpose.

And again, it may, perhaps, be noted that an English play is not a French play, says Jules Lemaître in his Impressions du Theatre: “If Racine had written Hamlet he would have cut out many things either by a scruple of tragic nobility and dignity "-and then proceeds to cut out everything that has, to our minds, the element of nature, "as ignoble and undignified." Le Comédie Humaine (strange that a Frenchman should have originated the phrase) has no place. As the French chef can see no art in serving anything au naturel, but stews his celery and fries his cucumbers, so the French critic will have. none of the still sad music of humanity unless he can find it fully orchestrated and render it on a full band. But in the last years of the nineteenth century came Victorien Sardou, and negatived every rule to which Frenchmen had clung, until every civilized nation competed for the favor of asking the price at which they might purchase his work, and a far-off Norwegian, named Ibsen, found in the narrow and cramped national circumstances, and the mean and humdrum homeliness and closed windows of his small birthright, a full set of chessmen to put at strutting and fretting an hour upon the stage, and play again the Comédie Humaine in all its shuddering and callous realism.

And yet, when one gets back to it, he is as sure to find Shakespeare in Sardou or in Ibsen as he foresaw him in Marlowe, or traced him in Bulwer or Robertson, or looked for him in vain in the School for Scandal, and found him in Caste or Ours, and he "collars" himself, as Mr. Macawber would say, lest he burst into rhapsody over Shakespeare always and everywhere the sum of all that is the soul of all that is to be!

It is only quite recently indeed, that the fact that a work of art cannot be tampered with without injury has been admitted. Possibly we may heighten its theatrical, but it will certainly be at the expense of its dramatic, effect. The poet, to be a poet at all, must labor to preserve the poetic truth of conception in union with the dramatic truth of execution. In so far as he can do this he is a poet. It is because, however near or far others may come to this, Shakespeare succeeds in welding the union into inflexible singleness, that he is the greatest of all poets.

Again, Shakespeare's art consists in the marvellous power with which he produces the most sumptuous and noble poetry in com

bination with the most effective modes of stage representation. To talk of his poetry as poetry, irrespective of the conditions of the stage and the difficulties of those conditions, is as if we were to talk of Raphael's wonderful grace, beauty and mental power, irrespective of his facility in transferring to canvas the images which bewitched his soul. When we think of the plays of such poets as Coleridge, Byron, Wordsworth and Keats, ranking, with all their poetry, in the lowest grade of theatrical merit, and compare with them some of the plays of Shakespeare, ranking as the very highest and most perfect of theatrical pieces, we shall perhaps acknowledge that the criticism which loses sight of theatrical art as a main element in dramatic art must be but one-sided and imperfect. And yet, self-evident as all this is, critics. have been slow to recognize it, beyond the slowness of sluggishness itself. Indeed, it may be said that European critics never recognized it at all, until it was forced upon them by the brave new nation across the ocean, which, at a very early stage in its history, began to think on most things in lines not less revolutionary in literature than in politics. The Philistinism of the American Shakespearian has not been admitted by the English predecessor as helpful to him. But helpful it has been to him, nay, and modulative of him, if even upon the principle that a certain thing is uttered by children and fools! But however he may struggle through prior cycles, our historian may well stumble and call for help when he attacks the record of nineteenth century Shakespearian criticism. How ignobly it was born, with a fussy old bookseller named Ireland. How the structure of forgery this old man reared bore great fruit in Malone, raised up, as it were by Providence, to meet the public craving for facts in the life of this Shakespeare, by a lawyer's calmness of judgment and an enthusiast's patience and research. How the Shakespeare Society, with its magnificent labors in reprinting the sources and material contemporary with Shakespeare, led to emulation, and so to forgery again, which wrecked the Society itself and cast incertitude over the great body of data it had so supremely collected: these episodes are to be chronicles; and as the events crowd, the historian must work more rapidly. James Prior, speaking of Malone's day, said, dryly:

"Editors and commentators appear at every turn in all societies. In the club-house we meet three or four of a morning; in the park see them meditating by the Serpentine or under a tree in Kensington Gardens; no dinner-table is without one or two; in the theatre you view them by the dozens. Volume after volume is poured out in note, comment, conjecture, new reading, statement, misstatement, contradiction. Reviews, magazines and newspapers report these with as little mercy on the reader, and give occasional emendations of their own."

But even this was to be outdone by that peculiar phase of Shake

spearian criticism known as Verse Tests. It was a phase only, originating in a casual remark in a magazine article printed in or about the fifties by James Spedding (known by his huge and rather disproportionate "Life and Letters" of Bacon), to the effect that he (Spedding) thought it possible that two writers instead of one might have been employed in framing the canonical play of Henry VIII., being led-as he demonstrated-to this conclusion by a marked difference in the scansion of certain portions of that play. The temptation to novelty is always a hard one to resist in a presence where commentators are many and competitive, and Mr. Spedding's hint was seized upon by many. A commentator named Daniel developed it into a theory, which, however, he did not push to more than tentative lengths, and even then urged with much moderation and sagacious collateral comThe subsequent appropriation of these verse tests by the extraordinary Furnivall, and their exploitation by him to comic lengths, went far to settle their fate, until their calm and lawyer-like dissection. by Appleton Morgan buried them from sight forever. Mr. Morgan's statement that it was highly probable that, as Shakespeare grew perfect in stage experience, he found that his actors dealt more satisfactorily with irregular blank verse than with long cadences or rhymed lines, and so supplied them with what they handled best, is doubtless all that can be claimed as a criterion as to the sequences of the plays drawn from their prosodial forms. While passing, it may be added that Furnivall's career in what he himself calls "Shakespearian criticism" was noteworthy only for puerility and gossip, and has left no abiding stone upon the cairn. That Furnivall spent toilsome nights and laborious days among old books is undeniable. But whatever of value he extracted he noted in a syntax and an etymology so peculiar and personal that to read him became a labor and a weariness to the flesh; the effect being that whatever he touched remained about as inaccessible after as before his services were enlisted.

But here, as well as elsewhere to come, let us leave our suggestive notes, to spring perhaps to material fruit under another pen. Here, as well as anywhere, let us come to an end. From the days of Elizabeth to the Greek Kalends any period is a relief.

GEORGE HALLAM.

THE THREE PARTS OF "HENRY THE SIXTH."

FIRST PAPER.

THE three dramatic pieces which Heminges and Condell called, respectively, "The First Part of Henry the Sixth," "The Second Part of Henry the Sixth, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey;" and "The Third Part of Henry the Sixth, with the death of the Duke of Yorke," are certainly the most curious of all those rescripts, whencesoever derived, which were included by those editors in their First Shakespeare Folio. As in the case of all Shakespeare's lesser work, it is impossible to exactly feel satisfied to call these three compositions Shakespeare's, and yet it is much easier, even from an internal standpoint, to accept than to reject them as such. For the Shakespeare pattern is there consistently in all three: much, doubtless, which he could never have put there, but still much which nobody else can tear out without dragging some of what Shakespeare certainly did put there along with it. And so we come to a pause imperatively and at once.

We do not know, and cannot discover where the First Folio editors found the first of the above-named pieces. There is no quarto at all corresponding to what they printed under the name of "The First Part of Henry the Sixth." The other two, however, are clearly versions of quartos entitled, respectively, "The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good King Humphrey "-printed by Thomas Creed in London in 1594-and "The True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of York, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt," printed by P. S. (sic) in London in 1595. Both of these quartos were manufactured, as the imprint states, for Thomas Millington, and the latter is expressly stated on its title-page to have been "sundry times acted by the Right Honorable the Duke of Pembroke his servants." Whatever our detective work in the texts of these two quartos may reveal, or fail in revealing, there can be no doubt that the three parts in their First Folio versions are together one consistent piece of work, out of the same workshop, and that the workmanship of them all-whether we decide that it is simple or composite-is one and the same.

Simple or composite, however, which was it? Dr. HalliwellPhillipps believes one way: that they were unitarily and solely Shakespeare's. Richard Grant White, in one of the closest and most elaborate arguments of his able and industrious life, summed up his thesis that there were three quartos-that they were done by Marlowe, Greene and Shakespeare, and perhaps Peele, who happened at the time to be

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