James,-the only passage in which "the greatness of his name" is separated from that of Elizabeth,-occupies the remaining part of the prophecy; and that the thread which connects the whole with Elizabeth may not be dropped, even while those six lines are uttered, Cranmer returns to the close of her life, which in two-thirds of the previous seventeen lines he had constantly inferred :— was also then granted for the encourage- |sion of the dominion of England, under ment of the colony, which was struggling with great difficulties. That James took an especial interest in this important settlement, and naturally enough was recognised as the founder of " new nations," may be readily imagined. In the inscription upon a portrait of the king, which belonged to Lord Bacon, he is styled "Imperii Atlantici conditor." This part of Cranmer's prophecy, therefore, would fix the date of the play after the settlement of Virginia. But a new difficulty arises: All that part of the prophecy relating to James, which we have quoted, is held to be an addition, made upon a revival of the play in 1613. "These lines," says Dr. Johnson, "to the interruption by the king, seem to have been inserted at some revisal of the play, after the accession of King James. If the passage be left out, the speech of Cranmer proceeds in a regular tenor of prediction and continuity of sentiments; but, by the interpolation of the new lines, he first celebrates Elizabeth's successor, and then wishes he did not know she was to die; first rejoices at the consequence, and then laments the cause." Is it so? The presumed interpolation immediately follows these lines: "In her days, every man shall eat in safety, Under his own vine, what he plants; and sing The merry songs of peace to all his neigh bours," &c. The poet then adds- "She shall be, to the happiness of England, An aged princess," &c. It might as well be assumed, we venture to think, that the " Tu Marcellus eris” of Virgil is an interpolation. That famous passage is most skilfully connected with all that accompanies it; but it might nevertheless be as easily severed as the lines which are here maintained to be an unskilful addition. But it is held, further, that Shakspere did not write these lines; that Ben Jonson wrote them; that Shakspere might properly compliment Elizabeth in her lifetime, but that he would not descend to flatter James, who was "a contemptible king." Shakspere, it is well known, had reason to be grateful to James for personal kindnesses; but there is not a word here of James's personal qualities. The lines apply to the character of his government-its "peace, plenty, love, truth, terror"-the extension of its growth make new nations." Would Jonson, had he written this passage, have forgotten that James was somewhat prouder of his to Nor shall this peace sleep with her: But as reputation as a scholar than as a king; and when The bird of wonder dies. **** So shall she leave her blessedness to one, Who, from the sacred ashes of her honour, Is it true, then, that he "first celebrates that one who knew him well had not hesitated to say to him, and perhaps, indeed, in sincerity, "There has not been since Christ's time any king or temporal monarch which has been so learned in all literature and erudition, divine and human "?* We have no hesitation in accepting the passage as one that Shakspere might not have blushed to have written, and which derogates nothing from the manly independence of his character. The later editors consider that the interpolation rested at the interruption of the * Bacon 'Advancement of Learning.' king. Theobald would carry it further, through the remainder of Cranmer's speech: "If this play was wrote, as in my opinion it was, in the reign of Elizabeth, we may easily determine where Cranmer's eulogium of that princess concluded. I make no question but the poet rested here :— by the poet-that is, in the sequence of the dramatic action—as the impelling motive for his divorce from Katharine ? Would she have tolerated the masque-scene immediately succeeding that in which Katharine is told by her husband, "You have half our power"? Would she have endured that her father, "And by those claim their greatness, not by upon his next appearance after the meeting blood." Theobald omits to state the most obvious reason for his opinion. We hold that Shakspere, in the age of Elizabeth, would never have written "She shall be, to the happiness of England, An aged princess." That passage is also, to our minds, clearly an interpolation, assuming that the play was produced during Elizabeth's reign. She, of all sovereigns, would least have endured to be called aged; she, of whom, in her seventieth year, the French Ambassador writes, “Her eye is still lively, she has good spirits, and is fond of life, for which reason she takes great care of herself; to which may be added an inclination for the Earl of Clancarty, a brave, handsome Irish noble man. This makes her cheerful, full of hope and confidence respecting her age." About a year before this time it is held that the 'Henry VIII.' was written, and that it originally included the close of Cranmer's prophecy. "An aged princess!" "But she must die!" Shakspere must indeed have been a bold man to have ventured upon such truths. But let us yield the whole question of interpolation to those who assert that the 'Henry VIII.' was written in the time of Elizabeth, and give up even the passage of the "aged princess." It is held that the play was written to please Elizabeth. The memory of Henry VIII., perhaps, was not cherished by her with any deep affection; but would she, who in her dying hour is reported to have said, "My seat has been the seat of kings," allow the frailties, and even the peculiarities, of her father to be made a public spectacle? Would she have borne that his passion for her mother should have been put forward in the strongest way with Anne Bullen, when he exclaims, "The fairest hand I ever touch'd! O beauty, Till now I never knew thee !" and "By Heaven, she is a dainty one !-Sweetheart, I were unmannerly to take you out, And not to kiss you' that he should be represented in the depth of his hypocrisy gloating over his projected divorce, with— "But, conscience, conscience, Oh, 't is a tender place, and I must leave her”? upon Would she have been pleased with the jests of the old lady to Anne her approaching elevation-her title-her "thousand pound a-year"—and all to be instantly followed by the trial-scene,—that magnificent exhibition of the purity, the constancy, the fortitude, the grandeur of soul, the selfpossession, of the "most poor woman and a stranger" that her mother had supplanted ; contrasted with the heartless coldness, salved over with a more heartless commendation of his injured wife, from the hypocritical tyrant, who ends the defence of his conduct expressed in "the sharp thorny points Of my alleged reasons drive this forward," with the real truth, spoken aside, "I may perceive, These cardinals trifle with me * * * Cranmer, Pr'ythee, return! with thy approach, I know, My comfort comes"? Finally, would she have licensea the stage exhibition of her father's traditionary peculiarities, in addition to the portraiture, which cannot be mistaken, of his sensual, arrogant, impatient, and crafty character? Would she have laughed at his perpetual "ha!"; or taken away Burbage's licence? | interest us in the memory of her mother Would she have wept over the most touching | Anne Boleyn; and to impress us with a sorrow of the dying Katharine; or sent Shakspere to join the company of his friend Southampton in the Tower? Those who have written on the subject say she would have borne all this; and that the pageant of her mother's coronation, with the succeeding representation of her own christening, capped with the prophecy of her future greatness, were to ensure the harmlessness of all these somewhat explosive materials, and to carry forward the five acts to a most felicitous conclusion "This little one shall make it holiday.” Malone, as it appears to us, says all that can be said, in the literal way, to prove that such a drama as this would be acceptable to Elizabeth: "It is more likely that Shakspeare should have written a play the chief subject of which is the disgraces of Queen Katharine, the aggrandizement of Anne Boleyn, and the birth of her daughter, in the lifetime of Elizabeth, than after her death; at a time when the subject must have been highly pleasing at court, rather than at a period when it must have been less interesting. Queen Katharine, it is true, is represented as an amiable character, but still she is eclipsed; and, the greater her merit, the higher was the compliment to the mother of Elizabeth, to whose superior beauty she was obliged to give way.' This is the prosaic, we may say the essentially grovelling, mode of viewing the object of Shakspere,--an object pre-supposing equal vulgarity of mind in the dramatist and his court audience. Our readers will be sure that we appreciate far more highly Mr. Campbell's poetical creed in this matter : 66 Shakspeare contrives, though at the sacrifice of some historical truth, to raise the matron Katharine to our highest admiration, whilst at the same time he keeps us in love with Anne Boleyn, and on tolerable terms with Henry VIII. But who does not see, under all this wise management, the drift of his design, namely, to compliment Elizabeth as a virgin queen; to * 'Chronological Order,' p. 390. belief of her innocence, though she suffered as an alleged traitress to the bed of Henry? The private death of Katharine of Arragon might have been still remembered by many living persons, but the death of Anne Boleyn was still more fresh in public recollection; and a wiser expedient could not have been devised for asserting the innocence of Elizabeth's mother than by portraying Henry's injustice towards Queen Katharine. For we are obliged to infer that, if the tyrant could thus misuse the noble Katharine, the purest innocence in her lovely successor could be no shield against his cruelty."+ There is one slight objection to this theory. Shakspere wrote for an audience; and an audience is a thing of impulses; it sympathizes with the oppressed, and hates the oppressor. An audience does not "infer." The poet who trusts to an audience perceiving "the drift of his design" through the veil of a dramatic action which moves their feelings entirely in an opposite direction to that in which he intends them to be moved, has, to our minds at least, a different theory of his art from that of Shakspere. We hold that the Prologue which we shall presently examine is a complete exposition of the idea of this drama. The Prologue is fastened upon Jonson, upon the theory that he wrote it after Shakspere's retirement from the stage, when the old play was revived in his absence. We believe in the one piece of external evidence,-that a 'Henry VIII.' was produced in 1613, when the Globe was burned; that it was a new play; that it was then called All is True;' and that this title agrees with the idea upon which Shakspere wrote the 'Henry VIII.' Those who believe that it was written in the time of Elizabeth have to reject this one piece of external evidence. We further believe, from the internal evidence, that the play, as it stands, was written in the time of James I., and that we have received it in its original form. Those who assert the contrary have to resort to the hypothesis of interpolation, and, further, have to explain how many things + Life. Moxon's edition of Shakspere. which are, to a plain understanding, incon- | the Clowns of the same stage, whom he had sistent with their theory, may be interpreted, indeed reformed, but who still delighted by great ingenuity, to be consistent. We the "ears of the groundlings" with their believe that Shakspere, amongst his latest extemporal rudeness, might be slightly dramas, constructed an historical drama to renounced. He disclaimed, then, "both fool complete his great series,-one that was and fight:" these were not amongst the agreeable to the tone of his mind after his attractions of this work of his maturer age. fiftieth year:— He had to offer weighty and serious things, sad and high things, noble scenes that commanded tears; state and woe were to be exhibited together: there was to be pageantry, but it was to be full of pity; and the woe "Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe." Those who take the opposite view hold that the chief object of the poet was to produce something which might be acceptable to Queen Elizabeth. Our belief is the obvious one; the contrary belief may be the more ingenious. We now proceed to the most remarkable Prologue of the few which are attached to Shakspere's plays. It thus commences : "I come no more to make you laugh; things now, That bear a weighty and a serious brow, It is, to our minds, a perfect exposition of the principle upon which the poet worked in the construction of this drama. Believing, whatever weight of authority there may be for the contrary opinion, that the 'Henry VIII.' was a new play in 1613, there had been a considerable interval between its production and that of the 'Henry V.,'-the last in the order of representation of his previous Histories. During that interval several of the poet's most admirable comedies had been unquestionably produced; and the audience of 1613 was perhaps still revelling in the recollections of the wit of Touchstone, or the more recent whimsies of Autolycus. But the poet, who was equally master of the tears and the smiles of his audience, prepares them for a serious view of the aspects of real life:-"I come no more to make you laugh." He thought, too, that the popular desire for noisy combats, and the unavoidable deficiencies of the stage in the representation of battle-scenes-he had before described it as an "unworthy scaffold" for "vasty fields" -might be passingly adverted to; and that was to be the more intense from its truth. And how did this master of his art profess to be able to produce such deep emotion from the exhibition of scenes that almost came down to his own times; that the fathers and grandfathers of his audience had witnessed in their unpoetical reality; that belonged not to the period when the sword was the sole arbiter of the destinies of princes and favourites, but when men fell by intrigue and not by battle, and even the axe of the capricious despot struck in the name of the law? There was another great poet of this age of high poetry, who had indicated the general theme which Shakspere proposed to illustrate in this drama :"What man that sees the ever-whirling wheel Of change, the which all mortal things doth sway, But that thereby doth find, and plainly feel, How Mutability in them doth play The cruel sports to many men's decay?"* From the first scene to the last, the dramatic action seems to point to the abiding presence of that power which works "Her cruel sports to many men's decay." We see the "ever-whirling wheel," in a succession of contrasts of grandeur and debasement; and, even when the action is closed, we are carried forward into the depths of the future, to have the same triumph of "Mutability" suggested to our contemplation. This is the theme which the poet emphatically presents to us under its aspect of sadness: "Be sad, as we would make you: Think, ye see The very persons of our noble story, *The Faerie Qucene.' Two cantos of Mutabilitie As they were living; think, you see them great, Bearing in mind the great principle of the play, it appears to us to open with singular art. The Field of the Cloth of Gold is presented to our view, not as a mere piece of ordinary description, but as having a dramatic connexion with the principal action. By this description we are at once, and most naturally, introduced to the characters of the proud nobles whose hatred Wolsey has provoked. The sarcastic Norfolk may probably abide the frown of the great cardinal; but in the temperament of the impetuous Buckingham there is inevitable danger. What a portrait of self-willed pride has the poet drawn of Buckingham in all that scene! How the haughty peer first displays his rough contempt of "such a keech" as Wolsey; then throws out his random allegations against his honesty; next encounters him with an eye "full of disdain," and is scarcely kept from following him to the king to "outstare him;" and, finally, lashes himself to the utterance of a torrent of words, while his friends evidently tremble more for him in the consequences of his blind hatred than they look with hope to its power to injure the man whom they equally hate. And how does all this close? In "my life is spann'd already : I am the shadow of poor Buckingham," we see the coming end of the rash and haughty man ;—his "noble blood" will be reckoned as nothing in the "beggar's book;" the "butcher's cur" will tear him. If the arrest of Buckingham had been followed by his "coming from his arraignment," we should have seen indeed the "misery" following upon the "mightiness;" but we should not have seen the moving cause of this rapid transition of fortune. There sits the absolute king, prejudging his victim before examination : "I stood i' the level Of a full-charged confederacy." 66 comes, in the spirit of honesty and justice, to represent to the king that his subjects are in great grievance." Upon his minister does the king lay the blame, and desires the grievance to be redressed. This looks like equity and moderation : "We must not rend our subjects from our laws, And stick them in our will." The queen, who has obtained the redress of the subjects' wrong, is to "sit by," and hear the charges against Buckingham. To her upright and sagacious mind it is evident that the charges are the exaggerations of revenge, stimulated by corruption. The king will see only the one side of the evidence. When Katharine exhorts Wolsey to "deliver all with charity," Henry desires the witness to "speak on;" when Katharine lays bare the "spleen" of the Surveyor, with Henry it is still "Let him on." The allegation rests only upon the testimony of a discarded servant as to words spoken; but upon these is the duke condemned; for, after the decision of the king, a trial is but a form :"He is attach'd; Call him to present trial: if he may It is evident that the hatred of Wolsey It is the wonderful art of Shakspere in this play to command our entire sympathies for the unfortunate. He has taken no care to render Buckingham an object of our love, or even respect, till he perishes. We think him a wilful man; we see that there is a struggle for power between But an interruption takes place. The queen him and Wolsey: it is his "misery" alone D D |
