mencement of Shakspere's career as a dra- | sider that it possesses an importance much matic author, the proof against his authorship of Titus Andronicus,' thus brought forward by Percy, is to us amongst the most convincing reasons for not hastily adopting the opinion that he was not its author. The external evidence of the authorship, and the external evidence of the date of the authorship, entirely coincide: each supports the other. The continuation of the argument derived from the early date of the play naturally runs into the internal evidence of its authenticity. The fact of its early date is indisputable; and here, for the present, we leave it. higher than belongs to the proof, or disproof, from the internal evidence, that this painful tragedy was written by Shakspere. The question is not an isolated one. It requires to be treated with a constant reference to the state of the early English drama,—the probable tendencies of the poet's own mind at the period of his first dramatic productions, the circumstances amidst which he was placed with reference to his audiences,— the struggle which he must have undergone to reconcile the contending principles of the practical and the ideal, the popular and the true, the tentative process by which he We can scarcely subscribe to Mr. Hallam's must have advanced to his immeasurable strong opinion, given with reference to this superiority over every contemporary. It is question of the authorship of "Titus An- easy to place 'Titus Andronicus' by the side dronicus,' that, "in criticism of all kinds, we of "Hamlet,' and to say,-the one is a low must acquire a dogged habit of resisting work of art, the other a work of the highest testimony, when res ipsa per se vociferatur to art. It is easy to say that the versification the contrary. ."* The res ipsa may be looked of 'Titus Andronicus' is not the versification upon through very different media by dif- of A Midsummer Night's Dream.' It is ferent minds: testimony, when it is clear, and easy to say that Titus raves and denounces free from the suspicion of an interested bias, without moving terror or pity; but that Lear although it appear to militate against con- tears up the whole heart, and lays bare all clusions that, however strong, are not in- the hidden springs of thought and passion fallible, because they depend upon very nice that elevate madness into sublimity. But analysis and comparison, must be received, this, we venture to think, is not just criticism. more or less, and cannot be doggedly resisted. We may be tempted, perhaps, to refine too Mr. Hallam says, ““Titus Andronicus' is now, much in rejecting all such sweeping comby common consent, denied to be, in any parisons; but what we have first to trace is sense, a production of Shakspeare." Who relation, and not likeness:-if we find likeare the interpreters of the common con- ness in a single "trick or line," we may insent?" Theobald, Johnson, Farmer, Stee- deed add it to the evidence of relation. But vens, Malone, M. Mason. These critics are relation may be established even out of diswholly of one school; and we admit that they similarity. No one who has deeply contemrepresent the common consent" of their plated the progress of the great intellects of own school of English literature upon this the world, and has traced the doubts, and point-till within a few years the only school. fears, and throes, and desperate plunges of But there is another school of criticism, which genius, can hesitate to believe that excellence maintains that 'Titus Andronicus' is in every in art is to be attained by the same process sense a production of Shakspere. The Ger- through which we may hope to reach excelman critics, from W. Schlegel to Ulrici, agree lence in morals-by contest, and purification, to reject the common consent" of the English critics. The subject, therefore, cannot be hastily dismissed; the external testimony cannot be doggedly resisted. But, in entering upon the examination of this question with the best care we can bestow, we con 66 66 66 * Literature of Europe, vol. ii. p. 385. until habitual confidence and repose succeed to convulsive exertions and distracting aims. He that would rank amongst the heroes must have fought the good fight. Energy of all kinds has to work out its own subjection to principles, without which it can never become power. In the course of this struggle what it produces may be essentially unlike to the fruits of its after-peacefulness :-for the good has to be reached through the evil -the true through the false—the universal through the partial. The passage we subjoin is from Franz Horn; and we think that it demands a respectful consideration :— "A mediocre, poor, and tame nature finds itself easily. It soon arrives, when it endeavours earnestly, at a knowledge of what it can accomplish, and what it cannot. Its poetical tones are single and gentle springbreathings; with which we are well pleased, but which pass over us almost trackless. A very different combat has the higher and richer nature to maintain with itself; and the more splendid the peace, and the brighter the clearness, which it reaches through this combat, the more monstrous the fight which must have been incessantly maintained. "Let us consider the richest and most powerful poetic nature that the world has ever yet seen; let us consider Shakspere, as boy and youth, in his circumscribed external situation,—without one discriminating friend, without a patron, without a teacher,—with- | out the possession of ancient or modern languages,—in his loneliness at Stratford, following an uncongenial employment; and then, in the strange whirl of the so-called great world of London, contending for long years with unfavourable circumstances,-in wearisome intercourse with this great world, which is, however, often found to be little; -but also with nature, with himself, and with God:-What materials for the deepest contemplation! This rich nature, thus circumstanced, desires to explain the enigma of the human being and the surrounding world. But it is not yet disclosed to himself. Ought he to wait for this ripe time before he ventures to dramatise? Let us not demand anything super-human: for, through the expression of error in song, will he find what accelerates the truth; and well for him that he has no other sins to answer for than poetical ones, which later in life he has atoned for by the most glorious excellences ! "The elegiac tone of his juvenile poems allows us to imagine very deep passions in the youthful Shakspere. But this single tone was not long sufficient for him. He soon desired, from that stage which signifies the world' (an expression that Schiller might properly have invented for Shakspere), to speak aloud what the world seemed to him,-to him, the youth who was not yet able thoroughly to penetrate this seeming. Can there be here a want of colossal errors ? Not merely single errors. No we should have a whole drama which is diseased at its very root,-which rests upon one single monstrous error. Such a drama is this "Titus.' The poet had here nothing less in his mind than to give us a grand Doomsday-drama. But what, as a man, was possible to him in Lear,' the youth could not accomplish. He gives us a torn-to-pieces world, about which Fate wanders like a bloodthirsty lion, or as a more refined or more cruel tiger, tearing mankind, good and evil alike, and blindly treading down every flower of joy. Nevertheless a better feeling reminds him that some repose must be given; but he is not sufficiently confident of this, and what he does in this regard is of little power. The personages of the piece are not merely heathens, but most of them embittered and blind in their heathenism; and only some single aspirations of something better can arise from a few of the best among them ;— aspirations which are breathed so gently as scarcely to be heard amidst the cries of desperation from the bloody waves that roar almost deafeningly." The eloquent critic adds, in a note,—“ Is it not as if there sounded through the whole piece a comfortless complaint of the incomprehensible and hard lot of all earthly? Is it not as if we heard the poet speaking with Faust-All the miseries of mankind seize upon me?' Or with his own 'Hamlet,''How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on 't! O, fie! 't is an unweeded garden That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely.' "And now, let us bethink ourselves, in opposition to this terrible feeling, of the sweet blessed peacefulness which speaks from out of all the poet's more matured dramas: for instance, from the inexhaustibly joyfulminded As You Like It.' Such a contest followed by such a victory!" It is scarcely necessary to point out that this argument of the German critic is founded upon the simple and intelligible belief that Shakspere is, in every sense of the word, the author of 'Titus Andronicus.' Here is no attempt to compromise the question, by the common English babble that 'Shakspere may have written a few lines in this play, or given some assistance to the author in revising it." This is Malone's opinion, founded upon an idle tradition, mentioned by Ravenscroft in the time of James II.,—a tradition contradicted by Ravenscroft himself, who, in a prologue to his alteration of 'Titus Andronicus,' says— "To-day the poet does not fear your rage; Shakespear, by him revived, now treads the stage." In Malone's posthumous edition, by Boswell, "those passages in which he supposed the hand of Shakspere may be traced are marked with inverted commas." This was the system which Malone pursued with 'Henry VI.;' and, as we fully believe, it was founded upon a most egregious fallacy. The drama belongs to the province of the very highest poetical art; because a play which fully realizes the objects of a scenic exhibition requires a nicer combination of excellences, and involves higher difficulties, than belong to any other species of poetry. Taking the qualities of invention, power of language, versification, to be equal in two men, one devoting himself to dramatic poetry, and the other to narrative poetry, the dramatic poet has chances of failure which the narrative poet may entirely avoid. The dialogue, and especially the imagery, of the dramatic poet are secondary to the invention of the plot, the management of the action, and the conception of the characters. Language is but the drapery of the beings that the dramatic poet's imagination has created. They must be placed by the poet's power of combination in the various relations which they must maintain through a long and sometimes complicated action: he must see the whole of that action vividly, with reference to its capacity of manifesting itself distinctly to an audience, so that even the deaf should partially comprehend: the pantomime must be acted over and over again in his mind, before the wand of the magician gives the agents voice. When all this is done, all contradictions reconciled, all obscurities made clear, the interest prolonged and heightened, and the catastrophe naturally evolved and matured, the poet, to use the terms of a sister-art, has completed that design which colour and expression are to make manifest to others with something like the distinctness with which he himself has seen it. We have no hesitation in believing that one of the main causes of Shakspere's immeasurable superiority to other dramatists is that all-penetrating power of combination by which the action of his dramas is constantly sustained; whilst in the best pieces of his contemporaries, with rare exceptions, it flags or breaks down into description,- -or is carried off by imagery,— or the force of conception in one character overpowers the management of the other instruments-cases equally evidencing that the poet has not attained the most difficult art of controlling his own conceptions. And thus it is that we so often hear Christopher Marlowe, or Philip Massinger,—to name the very best of them,-speaking themselves out of the mouths of their puppets, whilst the characterization is lost, and the action is forgotten. But when do we ever hear the individual voice of the man William Shakspere? When does he come forward to bow to the audience, as it were, between the scenes? Never is there any pause with him, that we may see the complacent author whispering to his auditory-“This is not exactly what I meant; my inspiration carried me away; but is it not fine?" The great dramatic poet sits out of mortal ken. He rolls away the clouds and exhibits his world. There is calm and storm, and light and darkness; and the material scene becomes alive; and we see a higher life than that of our ordinary nature and the whole soul is elevated; and man and his actions are presented under aspects more real than reality, and our control over tears or laughter is | tor, who exhibited the same Gothic view of : But we must guard ourselves from being understood to deny that many of the earliest plays of Shakspere were founded upon some rude production of the primitive stage. Andronicus had, no doubt, its dramatic ances He had no models to work upon; and in the very days in which he lived the English drama began to be created. It was not "Learning's triumph o'er her barbarous foes" which "first rear'd the stage," but a singular combination of circumstances which for the most part grew out of the reformation of religion. He took the thing as he found it. The dramatic power was in him so supreme that, compared with the feeble personifications of other men, it looks like instinct. He seized upon the vague abstractions which he found in the histories and comedies of the Blackfriars and the Bel Savage, and the scene was henceforth filled with living beings. But not as yet were these individualities surrounded with the glowing atmosphere of burning poetry. The philosophy which invests their sayings with an universal wisdom that enters the mind and becomes its loadstar was scarcely yet evoked out of that profound contemplation of human actions and of the higher things dimly revealed in human nature, which belonged to the maturity of his wondrous mind. The wit was there in some degree from the first, for it was irrepressible; but it was then as the polished metal, which dazzlingly gives back the brightness of the sunbeams; in after times it was as the diamond, which reflects everything, and yet appears to be self-irradiated in its lustrous depths. If these qualities, and if the humour which seems more especially the ripened growth of the mental faculty, could have been produced in the onset of Shakspere's career, it is probable that the career would not have been a successful one. He had to make his audience. He himself has told us of a play of his earliest period, that “I remember pleased not the million; 'twas caviarie to the general: but it was (as I received it, and others, whose judgments in such matters cried in the top of mine) an excellent play; well digested in the scenes; set down with as much modesty as cunning. I remember, one said there were no sallets in the lines to make the matter savoury; nor no matter in the phrase that might indite the author of affectation; but called it an honest method, as wholesome as sweet, and by very much more handsome than fine.” * Was this play an attempt of Shakspere himself to depart from the popular track? If it were, we probably owe much to the million. We hold, then, that Malone's principle of marking with inverted commas those passages in which he supposed the hand of Shakspere might be traced in this play of "Titus Andronicus' is based upon a vital error. It is not with us a question whether the passages which Malone has marked exhibit, or not, the critic's poetical taste: we say that the passages could not have been written except by the man, whoever he be, who conceived the action and the characterization. Take the single example of the character of Tamora. She is the presiding genius of the piece; and in her we see, as we believe, the outbreak of that wonderful conception of the union of powerful intellect and moral depravity which Shakspere was afterwards to make manifest with such consummate wisdom. Strong passions, ready wit, perfect self-possession, and a sort of oriental imagination, take Tamora out of the class of ordinary women. It is in her mouth that we find, for the most part, what readers of Malone's school would call the poetical *Hamlet,' Act II., Sc. II. | language of the play. We will select a few specimens (Act II., Scene 3) :— "The birds chant melody on every bush; Replying shrilly to the well-tuned horns, Again, in the same scene: "A barren detested vale, you see, it is: The trees, though summer, yet forlorn and lean, O'ercome with moss and baleful misseltoe. Here never shines the sun; here nothing breeds, Unless the nightly owl, or fatal raven. And, when they show'd me this abhorred pit, They told me, here, at dead time of the night, A thousand fiends, a thousand hissing snakes, Ten thousand swelling toads, as many urchins, Would make such fearful and confused cries, As any mortal body, hearing it, Should straight fall mad, or else die suddenly." In Act IV., Scene 4: |