rant us in hastily pronouncing the play before us not to be Shakspere's. As in the case of Arden of Feversham,' we have to look, and we look in vain, for some known writer of the period whose works exhibit a similar combination of excellences. The Countess of Salisbury is speedily relieved from her besiegers by the arrival of Edward with his army. The king and the countess meet, and Edward becomes her guest. His position is a dangerous one, and he rushes into the danger. There is a very long and somewhat ambitious scene, in which the king instructs his secretary to describe his passion in verse. It is certainly not conceived in a real dramatic spirit. The action altogether flags, and the passion is very imperfectly developed in such an outpouring of words. The next scene, in which Edward avows his passion for the countess, is conceived and executed with far more success:- "Cou. Sorry I am to see my liege so sad: What may thy subject do, to drive from thee This gloomy consort, sullen melancholy? Edw. Ah, lady, I am blunt, and cannot straw The flowers of solace in a ground of shame :-- Should think my sovereign wrong! Thrice Acquaint me with your cause of discontent. Edw. How near then shall I be to remedy? power Can pawn itself to buy thy remedy. Cou. All this is done, my thrice dread That power of love, that I have power to give, Cou. If on my beauty, take it if thou canst; It haunts the sunshine of my summer's life. Cou. As easy may my intellectual soul The Earl of Warwick, father to the Countess Edw. If thou speak'st true, then have I my whole natural and effective. The skill with redress: which the father is made to deliver the message of the king, and to appear to recommend a compliance with his demands, but so at the same time as to make the guilty purpose doubly abhorrent, indicates no common power : "War. How shall I enter in this graceless errand? I must not call her child; for where's the That will, in such a suit, seduce his child? No, he's my friend; and where is found the friend That will do friendship such endamagement? Neither my daughter, nor my dear friend's wife. I am not Warwick, as thou think'st I am, To pawn thine honour, rather than thy life; Honour is often lost, and got again; But life, once gone, hath no recovery. The sun, that withers hay, doth nourish grass; The king, that would distain thee, will advance thee. The poets write, that great Achilles' spear The king's great name will temper thy misdeeds, And give the bitter potion of reproach Which without shame could not be left undone. Thus have I, in his majesty's behalf, Cou. Unnatural besiege! Woe me, unhappy, And cancel every canon that prescribes War. Why, now thou speak'st as I would have thee speak; And mark how I unsay my words again. The greater man, the greater is the thing, Lilies, that fester, smell far worse than weeds; name To the black faction of bed-blotting shame! [Exit. Cou. I'll follow thee: And, when my mind turns so, My body sink my soul in endless woe! [Exit." There is a line in the latter part of this scene which is to be found also in one of Shakspere's Sonnets-the ninety-fourth :"Lilies, that fester, smell far worse than weeds." We are of opinion that the line was original in the sonnet, and transplanted thence into this play. The point is material in considering the date of the sonnet, but it throws no light either upon the date of this play or upon its authorship. During the tempest of Edward's passion, the Prince of Wales arrives at the Castl of Roxburgh, and the conflict in the mind of the king is well imagined: "Edw. I see the boy. Oh, how his mother's face, Moulded in his, corrects my stray'd desire, And rates my heart, and chides my thievish eye; Who, being rich enough in seeing her, Pri. I have assembled, my dear lord and The choicest buds of all our English blood, For our affairs in France; and here we come, To take direction from your majesty. Edw. Still do I see in him delineate Away, loose silks of wavering vanity! Desires access unto your majesty. [Advancing from the door, and whispering him. Edw. Why, there it goes! that very smile of hers Hath ransom'd captive France; and set the king, The dauphin, and the peers, at liberty.-Go, leave me, Ned, and revel with thy friends. [Exit Prince." The countess enters, and with the following scene suddenly terminates the ill-starred passion of the king : "Edw. Now, my soul's playfellow! art thou come, To speak the more than heavenly word of yea, To my objection in thy beauteous love? Cou. My father on his blessing hath commanded Edw. That thou shalt yield to me. Edw. And that, my dearest love, can be no less Than right for right, and tender love for love. Cou. Than wrong for wrong, and endless But, sith I see your majesty so bent, Edw. Name them, fair countess, and, by Cou. It is their lives, that stand between our love, That I would have chok'd up, my sovereign. Edw. Whose lives, my lady? Cou. Who living have that title in our love, sworn. Edw. No more; thy husband and the queen shall die. Fairer thou art by far than Hero was; Cou. Nay, you'll do more; you'll make the river too, With their heart-bloods that keep our love asunder, Of which, my husband, and your wife, are twain. Edw. Thy beauty makes them guilty of their death, And gives in evidence, that they shall die; Upon which verdict, I, their judge, condemn them. Cou. O perjured beauty! more corrupted judge! When, to the great star-chamber o'er our heads, The universal sessions calls to count This packing evil, we both shall tremble for it. Edw. What says my fair love? is she resolute? Cou. Resolute to be dissolved; and, therefore, this, Keep but thy word, great king, and I am thine. The remarks of Ulrici upon this portion of the play are conceived upon his usual principle of connecting the action and characterization of Shakspere's dramas with the development of a high moral, or rather Christian, principle. He is sometimes carried too far by his theory; but there is something far more satisfying in the criticism of his school than in the husks of antiquarianism with which we have been too long familiar: "We see, in the first two acts, how the powerful king (who in his rude greatness, in his reckless iron energy, reminds us of the delineations of character in the elder 'King Stand where thou dost, I'll part a little from John,' 'Henry VI.,' and 'Richard III.') thee, And see how I will yield me to thy hands. queen, And learn by me to find her where she lies; sinks down into the slough of common life before the virtue and faithfulness of a powerless woman; how he, suddenly enchained by an unworthy passion, abandons his great plans in order to write verses and spin intrigues. All human greatness, power, and splendour fall of themselves, if not planted upon the soil of genuine morality: the highest energies of mankind are not When they are gone, then I'll consent to proof against the attacks of sin, when they love. Stir not, lascivious king, to hinder me; And hear the choice that I will put thee to: are directed against the weak unguarded side this is the substance of the view of life here taken, and it forms the basis of the first Part. But true energy is enabled again to elevate itself! it strengthens itself from the virtues of others, which by God's appointment are placed in opposition to it. With this faith, and with the highest, most masterly, deeply penetrating, and even sub Or else, by heaven [kneeling], this sharp- lime picture of the far greater energy of a pointed knife woman, who, in order to save her own honour Shall stain thy earth with that which thou and that of her royal master, is ready to wouldst stain, My poor chaste blood. Swear, Edward, swear, The power to be ashamed of myself, I never mean to part my lips again In any word that tends to such a suit. commit self-murder, the second act closes. This forms the transition to the following second Part, which shows us the true heroic greatness, acquired through self-conquest, not only in the king, but also in his justly celebrated son. For even the prince has also gone through the same school: he proves this, towards the end of the second act, by his quick silent obedience to the order of his father, although directly opposed to his wishes." In the third act we are at once in the heart of war; we have the French camp, where John with his court hears of the arrival of Edward's fleet, and the discomfiture of his own. The descriptions of these events are, as we think, tedious and overstrained; at any rate they are undramatic. The writer is endeavouring to put out his power, where the highest power would be wasted. There is less ambition, but much more force, in the following speech of a poor Frenchman who is flying before the invaders : "Fly, countrymen, and citizens of France ! Sweet-flow'ring peace, the root of happy life, Is quite abandon'd and expulsed the land: Instead of whom, ransack-constraining war Sits like to ravens on your houses' tops; Slaughter and mischief walk within your streets, And, unrestrain'd, make havoc as they pass: oven: And, as the leaking vapour in the wind Upon the left his hot unbridled son, And in the midst our nation's glittering host; All which, though distant, yet conspire in one To leave a desolation where they come." Before the battle of Cressy we have an interview between the rival kings. The debate is not managed with any very great dignity on either side. Upon the retiring of John and his followers, the Prince of Wales is solemnly armed upon the field :— "And, Ned, because this battle is the first That ever yet thou fought'st in pitched field, As ancient custom is of martialists, To dub thee with the type of chivalry, In solemn manner we will give thee arms." The famous incident of the battle of Cressy, that of the king refusing to send succour to his gallant son, is told by Froissart. The dramatist has worked out this circumstance with remarkable spirit; it is, we think, the best business scene in the play-not overwrought, but simple, and therefore most effective*. There is a fine scene where the Prince of Wales is surrounded by the French army before the batttle of Poitiers; but it is something too prolonged and rhetorical; it has not the Shaksperean rush which belongs to such a situation. One specimen will suffice, where the prince exhorts his companion in arms, old Audley, to fly from the danger "Now, Audley, sound those silver wings of thine, And let those milk-white messengers of time Show thy time's learning in this dangerous time: Thyself art bruised and bent with many broils, Aud. To die is all as common as to live; If then we hunt for death, why do we fear it? Pri. Ah, good old man, a thousand thou- These words of thine have buckled on my back: Ah, what an idiot hast thou made of life, Seek him, and he not them, to shame his glory. * Of the historical portions of Edward III.' we shall have to give full extracts in the proposed volume of this series- The Dramatic History of England.' |
