cumstantial evidence to warrant a conjecture as to Shakespearian collaboration with another dramatist whose name is also attached to the particular play. And, finally, the above list is inclusive of four plays which Shakespeare himself actually selected as being worthy enough, or popular enough, to be rewritten by his own hand, and, in their rewritten state, to be admitted to the canon of his acknowledged works. These classes I propose in this paper to examine separately. But the fact that a piece of literary work was ever, at any time and for any reason, assigned to the great dramatist, appears to me to make that piece interesting, at least as indicating the passing opinion, states of criticism, or estimation of different ages or dates: not to suggest dozens of other circumstances of more or less importance, and so as worthy of examination from a circumstantial, even if worthless from a critical point of view. I do not advise anybody to undertake the reading of the thirty above-entitled plays. The reader would find any one of them pretty hard reading: they are, for the most part, wooden, monotonous and lifeless, and to the most casual perusal, very clearly disentitled to admission into the canon. In short, one may safely say, that, as "Shakespearian," (?) they are not "doubtful" in the least. No average consensus of criticism would ever be found among the most casual readers to assign them to Shakespeare. Indeed no "casual" reader has ever so assigned them; it is only by that minute microscopic study which climbs over itself that a suggestion of such an authorship or connection has ever been breathed: a case where one may truly say that the "casual reader" comes in to correct and revise the critical student with the greatest advantage to the critical student, so apt is the nature to become, like the dyer's hand, subdued to what it works in, and so terribly prone is our poor human nature to discover that which it hunts for. For in no field of research is what may be called the "generous specialist" so rare a bird as in the field of Shakespearian study, diagnosis and hermeneutics.

In any consideration of the subject before us, the first four plays mentioned in the above list must command the largest attention: since they were remodelled and rewritten by Shakespeare himself, and re-entitled by him, respectively, The Life and Death of King John, The Life of Henry the Fifth (and I am inclined to think that the suggestion for all the inimitable Falstaff parts of the I. and II. Henry IV. also came from this old play), 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. The last two mentioned revisions were done with some haste and with much less than the care which Shakespeare was wont to bestow upon his work; so hastily and so carelessly, in fact, as to have given rise to innumerable theories, conjectures and surmises-a whole library, in

short, of conjectural literature as to the Shakespeare authorship of the three parts of Henry the Sixth. It is beyond the scope of this paper to enter into this controversy. But I will remark in passing, 'that, carelessly as Shakespeare performed his revision of these two plays, an attentive reader will constantly perceive the hand of the reviser, if in nothing else, in modernizing the diction and allusion of the text whenever, from lapse of time and improvement of conditions, such modernizing was proper or called for.

To two of these "Doubtful Plays," certainly, The Famous Victories and The Troublesome Raine, Shakespeare's attention was not only drawn but concentrated. Both were printed in the old blackletter type, then fast being discarded, employing, however, italic types for proper names and roman types for the stage directions, as if in this order these two were most important-more important than the text itself-for the actor to memorize. In both of these pieces Shakespeare found not only a very considerable dramatic arrangement, but so much dramatic power that he deliberately set to work and made one the foundation (as Mr. Fleming * thinks, and as I agree with him) of the three Henry plays, the I. and II. Henry IV. and the Henry V. perhaps first suggesting to him that the historic, already so popular, might be combined with the comedy, and so make the teaching of history by stage plays even a greater success than it had already been, by means of increasing its already considerable popularity, and the other of his great and sombre tragedy of King John. Probably most of the "Histories" of that day were merely enlarged forms of the Interlude, whose development I have elsewhere traced + from the improvised antics of the disbanded miracle-play actors up to a considerable settlement of form and dialogue. I imagine that the Interlude of Priam and Hecuba, of which specimens are given by the Player King in Hamlet, or the one called The Murder of Gonzago, to which Hamlet himself added a dozen or fifteen lines, represents a stage in this development. And I think that Shakespeare himself, in studying this development, saw that it was at this or at about this stage that these Interludes furnished a capital opportunity for burlesque, and so gave us those two burlesques so unapproachable, one for its delineation of pure stupidity and the other of stupidity and assurance-the Interlude of the Nine Worthies in Love's Labor's Lost, and the Interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Both of the above-quoted plays- The Famous Victories and The Troublesome Raine—are examples of perhaps the mid-development of the Interlude from its first stage of mere horse-play to its following stages of written dialogue with a purpose, and so finally up to the comparatively

* See his Introduction to I. Henry IV., Vol. XII., Bankside Edition. Int. to Vol. VII., Bankside Shakespeare (the Titus Andronicus).

ambitious Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth-which, however, the reader sees is merely a succession of short scenes in which certain persons figure, without much regard to what the same or other persons have done or will do in the prior or succeeding scenes of the same succession. But The Troublesome Raine of John, King of England, is, I think, the next and last stage of the Interlude, just where it ceases to be an interlude and becomes a stage play. It would be a very interesting pursuit, I think, if one should study our early and middle English dramatic literature, to try and find when and in what piece it first dawned upon the writer that to be dramatic one must delineate character as well as action, and that each speaker in the dialogue must develop his own character by his speech and not by his own or another's statement in the course of the play. (Observe Shakespeare himself learning this lesson. Observe how Aaron the Moor, in Titus Andronicus, tells us what his own character is, how he loves bloodshed and is not happy without at least his one crime a day, and then see how, later on, Iago (whom I believe to have been the perfected work for which Aaron was the thumb-nail sketch), far from telling us in so many words that he is a villain, cannot open his lips without assuring us of the fact.) And accordingly, I think, I perceive in this old play of King John that the old writer, in following the chronicle of Holinshed and Hall so exactly, made up his mind that King John's speeches should bear out the character which the old chronicles gave him, viz.:

"He was comelie of stature, but of looke and countenance displeasant and angrie, somewhat cruell of nature, as by the writers of his time he is noted, and not so hardie as doubtfull in time of perill and danger. But this seemeth to be an enuious report vttered by those that were giuen to speake no good of him whome they inwardlie hated."

"Moreouer, the pride and pretended authoritie of the cleargie he could not well abide, when they went about to wrest out of his hands the prerogatiue of his princelie rule and gouernment. True it is that to mainteine his warres which he was forced to take in hand, as well in France as elsewhere, he was constreined to make all the shift he could deuise to recouer monie; and bicause he pinched their pursses, they conceiued no small hatred against him, which when he perceiued, and wanted peraduenture discretion to passe it ouer, he discouered now and then in his rage his immoderate displeasure, as one not able to bridle his affections, a thing verie hard in a stout stomach, and thereby missed now and then to compasse that which otherwise he might verie well haue brought to passe.'

The episodes of the old play, too, show considerable power of dramatic arrangement. This dramatic arrangement Shakespeare adopted. But its dialogue was not so satisfactory, and so he rewrote

* Holinshed III., 196 : 2 I. 4.

+ Ibid., III. 196/1, col. 67.

it from beginning to end. And so, in the parallelization of this old play with the King John of the First Folio, we can distinctly see Shakespeare discharging the branch of the stagewright's vocation. which consists of making old stage favorites over into new ones.

And when Shakespeare undertook to rewrite The Troublesome Raine over into King John, and The Famous Victories over into Henry the Fifth, he did work that simply challenges our enthusiasm, not only for the dazzling splendor of his genius, but for the laborious nicety of his technical touch and his prophetic as well as contemporary knowledge of stage and practical acting requirements, from his own day down to our own, when these two plays are mounted, just as Shakespeare wrote them, with all the lavish magnificence of our modern stage facilities. The first play, as it stood, was mere drivel; a lot of dialogue, without form, beginning, middle nor end: a sequence of actions and situations, with no coherence or interdependence, with nothing to attract or retain the interest or even the attention of an audience. But when he left it, he had seized upon every situation, and made it over into the most concentrated dramatic action: upon every suggestion of a personage, and created a character as immortal as his own: upon every hint of emotion, and evolved an intensity of pathos that will never cease to compel tears as long as English literature endures in the memory or mention of mankind.

I have space here to notice only The Troublesome Raine and its transmutation into the King John. The old play opens with some fifty or sixty lines of rambling dialogue, from which the reader may draw that the King of France desires some sort of conference or "dicker" with King John, relative to the old claims of France to the English crown, and of England to the French crown (which were continually being bandied about-back and forth-in the old Plantagenet days, and concerning which the Historical plays have always so much to say. Shakespeare drew his pen through all this dialogue and opened the play with the single sentence:

"Now say, Chantillon, what would France with us?"

a splendid and imperious utterance, which at once opens the situation, and tells us that France desires an interview not only, but that England does not, and is disposed not only to refuse it, but, if reluctantly granted, to maintain a stern opposition to whatever France may intend to offer or to urge. All this is fairly implied and conveyed to the audience in eight short words of that dramatic diction which the consummate artist playwright uses to not only carry his action along, but to state his situation and infer to the spectator the motive which he finds adverse to him and proposes to thwart, as well as his own probable course, whether straightforward or adroit, in thwarting it. Here (and I, for my part, cannot imagine a more capital specimen) is an exemplification of the Art Dramatic: the art of telling a story to

ear, eye and intelligence at once, an art which, the more I study Shakespeare, seems to me to have been created by him, independently of its evolution from classic or anterior models.*

But something else is wanting besides narrative and action to a perfect drama. There must be a central character for hero: that is to say, a strong individuality for the sympathy of the audience to cling to, one whose fortunes each individual of the audience will follow, and in whose success, moral or material, each spectator is himself to feel rewarded. There was no such personage in The Troublesome Raine. There was, however, a character, Faulconbridge, who, after a rambling sort of fashion, met and surmounted obstacles, and this personage Shakespeare immediately seized upon, and around him he grouped the entire action of the play, making the success of this motive-this character's personal success-and the triumph of the purpose of the play his personal triumph: which for stage availability must always be the successful end and aim of every true dramatic hero. But there is more yet. The perfect piece of dramatic work, written not for the closet, but for the stage and the spectator, must not only avoid obscurity, and allot certain situations to words, certain other to action and certain other to stage scenery or stage effect, and unite all these upon every movement, but it must so unify all these that no situation shall be introduced except as the result of a preceding and the exciting cause of a future situation. No matter how pathetic, comic or eloquent a scene, if it do not belong in the dramatic progress, it will weary the spectator and kill the piece. Now, The Troublesome Raine gives several scenes in which Prince Arthur—not a frail child to work upon our sympathies, as Shakespeare saw the opportunity of making him, but a rather colorless young man, with very little to say for himself-figures. In one of them Hubert is sent to put out his eyes in prison. In the old play Arthur objects upon what we would say were rather intellectual grounds for a young man. about to be tortured. Upon being apprised of his errand he says to Hubert:

Advise thee, Hubert, for the case is hard

To lose salvation for a king's reward.

Hubert. My lord, a subject dwelling in the land

Is tied to execute the king's command.

Arthur. Yet God commands, whose power reacheth further,

That no command should stand in force to murther.

Hubert. But that same Essence hath ordained a law,

A death for guilt, to keep the world in awe.

* Sheridan in the Critic burlesques this undoubted necessity of dramatic dialogue by making Mr. Puff say, "I open with a clock striking to beget an awful attention in the audience-it also marks the time, which is four o'clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about ilding the eastern hemisphere."