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CHAPTER III.

ROMEO AND JULIET.

'ROMEO AND JULIET' was first printed in the year 1597, under the following title:An excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet. As it hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely, by the right honourable the L. of Hunsdon his Seruants.' The second edition was printed in 1599, under the following title:-The most excellent and lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and Juliet. Newly corrected, augmented, and amended: As it hath bene sundry times publiquely acted, by the right Honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his Seruants.'

The subsequent original editions, and the folio of 1623, are founded upon the quarto of 1599, from which they differ very slightly. The quarto of 1599 was declared to be "newly corrected, augmented, and amended." There can be no doubt whatever that the corrections, augmentations, and emendations were those of the author. There are typographical errors in this edition, and in all the editions, and occasional confusions of the metrical arrangement, which render it more than probable that Shakspere did not see the proofs of his printed works. But that the copy, both of the first edition and of the second, was derived from him, is, to our minds, perfectly certain. We know of nothing in literary history more curious or more instructive than the example of minute attention, as well as consummate skill, exhibited by Shakspere in correcting, augmenting, and amending the first copy of this play. We would ask, then, upon what canon of criticism can an editor be justified in foisting into a copy, so corrected, passages of the original copy, which the matured judgment of the author had rejected? Essentially the question ought not to be determined by any arbitrement whatever other than the judgment of the author. Even if his corrections did not appear, in every case, to be improvements, we should be still bound to receive them with respect and deference.

We would not, indeed, attempt to establish it as a rule implicitly to be followed, that an author's last corrections are to be invariably adopted; for, as in the case of Cowper's 'Homer,' and Tasso's 'Jerusalem,' the corrections which these poets made in their first productions, when their faculties were in a great degree clouded and worn out, are properly considered as not entitled to supersede what they produced in brighter and happier hours. Mr. Southey has admirably stated the reason for this in the advertisement to his edition of Cowper's 'Homer.' But, in the case of Shakspere's 'Romeo and Juliet,' the corrections and augmentations were made by him at that epoch of his life when he exhibited "all the graces and facilities of a genius in full possession and habitual exercise of power."* The augmentations, with one or two very trifling exceptions, are amongst the most masterly passages in the whole play, and include many of the lines that are invariably turned to, as some of the highest examples of poetical beauty. These augmentations, further, are so large in their amount, that, in Steevens's reprint, the first edition occupies only seventy-three pages; while the edition of 1609, in the same volume, printed in the same type as the first edition, occupies ninety-nine pages. The corrections are made with such exceeding judgment, such marvellous tact, that of themselves they completely overthrow the theory, so long submitted to, that Shakspere was a careless writer. Such being the case, we consider ourselves justified in treating the labour of Steevens and other editors, in making a patchwork text out of the author's first and second copies, as utterly worthless. We most readily acknowledge our own particular obligations to them; for, unless they had collected a great mass of materials, no modern edition could have been properly undertaken. But we, nevertheless, cannot conceal * Coleridge's Literary Remains.'

"I never shall forget it,Of all the days of the year'

"

was for the audience. The poet had to ex

our opinion, that as editors they were rash, All this particularity with reference to the and as critics they were cold and unimagi- | earthquake— native; and we hold it to be the highest duty to attempt to undo what they have done, when they approach their author, as in their manufacture of a text for 'Romeo and Juliet,'" without reverence." We be-hibit the minuteness with which unlettered lieve, as they did not, "that his own judgment is entitled to more respect than that of any or all his critics;" and we shall attempt to vindicate that judgment on every occasion, upon the great principle laid down by Bentley :-"“The point is not what he might have done, but what he has done."

In attempting to settle the Chronology of Shakspere's plays, there are, as in every other case of literary history, two species of evidence to be regarded-the extrinsic and the intrinsic. Of the former species of evidence we have the one important fact that a Romeo and Juliet,' by Shakspere, however wanting in the completeness of the Romeo and Juliet' which we now possess, was published in 1597. The enumeration of this play, therefore, in the list by Francis Meres, in 1598, adds nothing to our previous information. In the same manner, the mention of this play by Marston, in his tenth satire, first published in 1599, only shows us how popular it was:

"Luscus, what's play'd to-day? i' faith, now I

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people, and old people in particular, establish a date, by reference to some circumstance which has made a particular impression upon their imagination; but in this case he chose a circumstance which would be familiar to his audience, and would have produced a corresponding impression upon themselves. Tyrwhitt was the first to point out that this passage had, in all probability, a reference to the great earthquake which happened in England in 1580. Stow has described this earthquake minutely in his Chronicle, and so has Holinshed. "On the 6th of April, 1580, being Wednesday in Easter week, about six o'clock toward evening, a sudden earthquake happened in London, and almost generally throughout all England, caused such an amazedness among the people as was wonderful for the time, and caused them to make their earnest prayers to Almighty God!" The circumstances attendant upon this earthquake show that the remembrance of it would not have easily passed away from the minds of the people. The great clock in the palace at Westminster, and divers other clocks and bells, struck of themselves against the hammers with the shaking of the earth. lawyers supping in the Temple ran from the tables, and out of their halls, with their knives in their hands." The people assembled at the theatres rushed forth into the fields, lest the galleries should fall. The roof of Christ Church, near to Newgate Market, was so shaken, that a large stone dropped out of it, killing one person, and mortally wounding another, it being sermontime. Chimneys toppled down, houses were shattered. Shakspere, therefore, could not have mentioned an earthquake with the minuteness of the passage in the Nurse's speech without immediately calling up some associations in the minds of his audience. He knew the double world in which an excited audience lives,-the half belief in the world

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audience, the play was produced, as well as written, in 1591.

of poetry amongst which they are placed during a theatrical representation, and the half consciousness of the external world of Reasoning such as this would, we acknowtheir ordinary life. The ready disposition ledge, be very weak if it were unsupported of every audience to make a transition from by evidence deduced from the general chathe scene before them to the scene in which racter of the performance, with reference they ordinarily move,-to assimilate what is to the maturity of the author's powers. shadowy and distant with what is distinct But, taken in connection with that evidence, and at hand, is perfectly well known to all it becomes important. Now, we have no who are acquainted with the machinery of hesitation in believing, although it would the drama. Actors seize upon the principle be exceedingly difficult to communicate the to perpetrate the grossest violations of good grounds of our belief fully to our readers, taste; and authors who write for present that the alterations made by Shakspere upon applause invariably do the same when they his first copy of Romeo and Juliet,' as offer us, in their dialogue, a passing allu- printed in 1597 (which alterations are shown sion, which is technically called a clap-trap. in the second copy as printed in 1599), exIn the case before us, even if Shakspere had hibit differences as to the quality of his mind not this principle in view, the association differences in judgment-differences in the of the English earthquake must have been cast of thought-differences in poetical power strongly in his mind when he made the-which cannot be accounted for by the Nurse date from an earthquake. Without reference to the circumstance of Juliet's

age,

"Even or odd, of all days in the year,

Come Lammas-eve at night, shall she be fourteen,"―

he would naturally, dating from the earthquake, have made the date refer to the period of his writing the passage instead of the period of Juliet's being weaned :"Then she could stand alone." But, according to the Nurse's chronology, Juliet had not arrived at that epoch in the lives of children till she was three years old. The very contradiction shows that Shakspere had another object in view than that of making the Nurse's chronology tally with the age of her nursling. Had he written,

""T is since the earthquake now just thirteen years,"

we should not have been so ready to believe that 'Romeo and Juliet' was written in 1593; but as he has written,

""T is since the earthquake now eleven years," in defiance of a very obvious calculation on the part of the Nurse, we have little doubt that he wrote the passage eleven years after the earthquake of 1580, and that, the passage being also meant to fix the attention of an

growth of his mind during two years only.
If the first 'Romeo and Juliet' were pro-
duced in 1591, and the second in 1599, we
have an interval of eight years, in which
some of his most finished works had been
given to the world. During this period his
richness, as well as his sweetness, had been
developed; and it is this development which
is so remarkable in the superadded passages
inRomeo and Juliet.' We almost fancy
that the "Queen Mab" speech will of itself
furnish an example of what we mean.
"Her chariot is an empty hazel-nnt,

Made by the joiner squirrel, or old grub,
Time out of mind the fairies' coach-makers."
These lines are not in the first copy; but
how beautifully they fit in after the descrip-
tion of the spokes-the cover-the traces-
the collars-the whip-and the waggoner;
while, in their peculiarly rich and pic-
turesque effect, they stand out before all
the rest of the passage! Then, the "I have
scen the day—* * * * 't is gone, 't is gone,
't is gone," of old Capulet seems to speak
more of the middle-aged than of the youth-
ful poet, of whom all the passages by which
it is surrounded are characteristic. Again,
the lines in the friar's soliloquy, beginning

"The earth, that 's Nature's mother, is her tomb,"

look like the work of one who had been reading and thinking more deeply of nature's mysteries than in his first delineation of the benevolent philosophy of this good old man. But, as we advance in the play, the development of the writer's powers is more and more displayed in his additions. The critical reader may trace what has been added by the foot-notes in the Pictorial' and 'Library' editions.

same thing," said Marlowe, “the same words were whispered to me by my base envy, when I observed the universal delight, the deep emotion, of every spectator. I endeavoured to comfort myself therewith, and again to recover my lost honours in this miserable manner. I fled from the company; and the house-steward, who had acted as an assistant, gave me the manuscript of the play. In my lonely chamber I sat and read Tieck, who, as a translator of Shakspere, the whole night, and read again,—and each and as a profound and beautiful critic, has time admired the more; for much that had done very much for cultivating the know- appeared to me episodical or superfluous ledge, built upon love, which the Germans acquired, on more exact examination, a sigpossess of our poet, has not been trammelled nificancy and needful fulness. The good by Malone and Chalmers, but has placed house-steward gave me also another poem, 'Romeo and Juliet' amongst Shakspere's which the author has not yet quite comearly plays. We have no exact statements pleted, 'Venus and Adonis,' that I might on this subject by Tieck; but, in a very read it in my nightly leisure. My friend, delightful imaginary scene between Marlowe even here, even in this sweet narrative,and Greene, he has made Marlowe describe even in this soft speech and voluptuous to his brother dramatist the first performance imagery,-in this intoxicating realm, where of Romeo and Juliet' of which he had been I, till now, only looked upon likenesses of witness*. Tieck has made this imaginary myself,—I am completely, completely beaten. conversation a vehicle for the most enthu-O this man, this more than mortal! to him siastic praise of this play. Marlowe describes the performance as taking place at the palace of the Lord Hunsdon. He had expected, he says, that one of his own plays would have been performed; but he found that it was "that old poem, which we have all long known, worked up into a tragedy." After Marlowe has run through the general characteristics of the play, with an eloquent admiration, mingled with deep regret that he himself had been able to approach so distantly the excellence of that "out-sounding mouth, which a godlike muse has herself inspired with the sweetest of her kisses," he thus replies to Greene's inquiry as to who was the poet :-"Wilt thou believe?-one of Henslowe's common comedians, who has already served him many years on very low wages." "And now, if thy fever has passed," said Greene, "let us look on this thing in the broad light. This is merely such a passing apparition as we have seen many of before-admired, gaped at, praised without limit-but full of faults and imperfections, and soon to be altogether forgotten." "The Dichterleben,' von Tieck: Berlin, 1828, p. 128, &c.

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(I feel as if my life depends on it) I must become the most intimate friend or the most bitter enemy. Either I will yet find my way to him, or I will succumb to this Apollo, and he may then speak over my outstretched corpse the last words of praise or blame." Tieck has thus decidedly placed the date of the performance of 'Romeo and Juliet' before 1592,-for Greene died in that year, and Marlowe in the year following. The 'Venus and Adonis,' which is here mentioned as not quite completed, was published in 1593. Tieck built his opinion, no doubt, upon internal evidence; and upon this evidence we must be content to let the question rest.

WHEN Dante reproaches the Emperor Albert for neglect of Italy,—

"Thy sire and thou have suffer'd thus, Through greediness of yonder realms detain'd, The garden of the empire to run waste,”— he adds,

"Come, see the Capulets and Montagues,
The Filippeschi and Monaldi, man

Who car'st for nought! those sunk in grief, | to be found in these sources were embodied

and these

With dire suspicion rack'd."*

The Capulets and Montagues were amongst the fierce spirits who, according to the poet, had rendered Italy "savage and unmanageable." The Emperor Albert was murdered in 1308: and the Veronese, who believe the story of Romeo and Juliet' to be historically true, fix the date of this tragedy as 1303. At that period the Scalas, or Scaligers,

ruled over Verona.

If the records of history tell us little of the fair Capulet and her loved Montague, whom Shakspere has made immortal, the novelists have seized upon the subject, as might be expected from its interest and its obscurity. Massuccio, a Neapolitan, who lived about 1470, was, it is supposed, the writer who first gave a somewhat similar story the clothing of a connected fiction. He places the scene at Sienna, and, of course, there is no mention of the Montagues and Capulets. The story, too, of Massuccio varies in its catastrophe; the bride recovering from her lethargy, produced by the same means as in the case of Juliet, and the husband being executed for a murder which had caused him to flee from his country. Mr. Douce has endeavoured to trace back the groundwork of the tale to a Greek romance by Xenophon Ephesius. Luigi da Porto, of Vicenza, gave a connected form to the legend of Romeo and Juliet, in a novel,

under the title of La Giulietta,' which was published after his death in 1535. Luigi, in an epistle which is prefixed to this work,

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states that the story was told him by an archer of mine, whose name was Peregrino, a man about fifty years old, well practised in the military art, a pleasant companion, and, like almost all his countrymen of Verona, a great talker." Bandello, in 1554, published a novel on the same subject, the ninth of his second collection. It begins, "When the Scaligers were lords of Verona," and goes on to say that these events happened "under Bartholomew Scaliger" (Bartolomeo della Scala). The various materials

* Purgatory,' Canto 6: Cary's Translation.

in a French novel by Pierre Boisteau, a translation of which was published by Painter in his 'Palace of Pleasure,' in 1567; and upon this French story was founded the English poem by Arthur Brooke, published in 1562, under the title of 'The tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, written first in Italian by Bandell, and nowe in Englishe by Ar. Br.' It appears highly probable that appeared previous to Brooke's poem; for a an English play upon the same subject had copy of that poem, which was in the possession of the Rev. H. White, of Lichfield, contains the following passage, in an address to the reader:-"Though I saw the same argument lately set forth on the stage with more commendation than I can look for,

being there much better set forth than I have or can do, yet the same matter, penned as it is, may serve to like good effect, if the readers do bring with them like good minds to consider it, which hath the more encouraged me to publish it, such as materials enough to work upon. But, in it is." We thus see that Shakspere had addition to these sources, there is a play by Lope de Vega in which the incidents are by Luigi Groto, which Mr. Walker, in his very similar; and an Italian tragedy also historical memoir of Italian tragedy, thinks that the English bard read with profit. Mr. assertion, such as a description of a nightinWalker gives us passages in support of his gale when the lovers are parting, which appear to confirm this opinion.

tempted, what Shakspere took from the To attempt to show, as many have atPainter's Palace of Pleasure'—how he was poem of Romeus and Juliet,' and what from Mr. Dunlop has it, because he had not read "wretchedly misled in his catastrophe," as Luigi da Porto-and how he invented only one incident throughout the play, that of character, that of Mercutio, according to the the death of Paris, and created only one sagacious Mrs. Lenox-appears to us somewhat idle work.

The slight foundation of historical truth which can be established in the legend of 'Romeo and Juliet'-that of the "civil

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