Was ever personification more exquisitely beautiful? The writer of these lines, with his wondrous facility, was equal to anything that did not demand the very highest qualities for the drama; and those qualities we do not think are manifest in the first and

last acts of 'The Two Noble Kinsmen,' rich as these are in excellences within the range of such a writer as Chapman, especially when his exuberant genius was under the necessary restraint of co-operation with another writer.

THE first known edition of this play was published in 1662, under the following title: -The Birth of Merlin: or, the Childe hath found his Father: as it hath been several times Acted with great Applause. Written by William Shakespear and William Rowley.' Of this very doubtful external evidence two of the modern German critics have applied themselves to prove the correctness. Horn has written a criticism of fourteen pages upon 'The Birth of Merlin,' which he decides to be chiefly Shakspere's, possessing a high degree of poetical merit with much deep-thoughted characterization. Tieck has no doubt of the extent of the assistance that Shakspere gave in producing this play :"This piece is a new proof of the extraordinary riches of the period, in which such a work was unnoticed among the mass of intellectual and characteristic dramas. The modern English, whose weak side is poetical criticism, have left it almost to accident what shall be again revived; and we seldom see, since Dodsley, who proceeded somewhat more carefully, any reason why one piece is selected and others rejected." He adds, "None of Rowley's other works are equal to this. What part has Shakspere in it ?-has he taken a part?—what induced him to do so?-can only be imperfectly answered, and by supposition. Why should not Shakspere for once have written for another theatre than his own? Why should he not, when the custom was so common, have written in companionship with another though less powerful poet?" Ulrici takes a different,

The

and, we think, a much juster view. play, he holds, must have been produced late in Shakspere's life. If he had written in it at all, he would have put out his matured strength. All the essentials,-plan, composition, and character, belong to Rowley. Peculiarities of style and remarkable turns of thought are not sufficient to furnish evidence of authorship, for they are common to other contemporary poets. It is not very easy to trace the exact progress of William Rowley. He was an actor in the company of which Shakspere was a proprietor. We find his name in a document of 1616, and again in 1625. The same bookseller that published "The Birth of Merlin' associated his name with other writers of eminence besides Shakspere. He is spoken of by Langbaine as an author that flourished in the reign of King Charles I.;" but there is no doubt that he may be considered as a successful writer in the middle period of James I. It is impossible to think that he could have been associated with Shakspere in writing a play until after Shakspere had quitted the stage; and we must therefore bear in mind that Rowley's supposed associate was at that period the author of 'Othello' and Lear,' of 'Twelfth Night' and 'As You Like It.'.

A few years after the accession of James I. the fondness of the court for theatrical entertainments, and the sumptuousness of the masks that were got up for its special delight, appear to have produced a natural influence upon the public stage in rendering

some of the pieces performed more dependent upon scenery and dresses and processions than in the later years of Elizabeth. The 'Birth of Merlin' belongs to the class of show-plays; and the elaboration of that portion which is addressed merely to the eye has imparted a character to those scenes in which the imagination is addressed through the dialogue. There is an essential want of refinement as well as of intellectual power, partly arising from this false principle of art, which addresses itself mainly to the senses. We have a succession of incidents without any unity of action. The human interest and the supernatural are jumbled together, so as to render each equally unreal. Extravagance is taken for force, and what is merely hideous is offered to us as sublime. The story, of course, belongs to the fabulous history of Britain. Its movements are so complicated that we should despair of tracing it through its scenes of war and love, of devilry and witchcraft. The Britons are invaded by the Saxons, but the British army is miraculously preserved by the power of Anselm, a hermit. The Saxons sue for peace to Aurelius, the King of Britain, but the monarch suddenly falls in love with Artesia, the daughter of the Saxon general, and marries her, against the wishes of all his court. Uter Pendragon, the brother of Aurelius, has been unaccountably missing, and he, it seems, had fallen in love with the same lady during his rambles. Upon the return of Prince Uter to his brother's court, the queen endeavours to obtain from him a declaration of unlawful attachment. Her object is to sow disunion amongst the Britons, to promote the ascendancy of the Saxons. She is successful, and the weak Aurelius joins his invaders. During the progress of these events we have love-episodes with the daughters of Donobert, a British nobleman. The character of Modestia, one of the daughters, who is resolved to dedicate herself to a religious life, is drawn with considerable skill, and she expresses herself with a quiet strength which contrasts advantageously with the turmoil around her:"Noble and virtuous! could I dream of

marriage,

I should affect thee, Edwin. Oh my soul, Here's something tells me that the best of creatures,

These models of the world, weak man and

woman,

Should have their souls, their making, life, and being,

To some more excellent use: if what the sense
Calls pleasure were our ends, we might justly
blame

Great Nature's wisdom, who rear'd a building
Of so much art and beauty, to entertain
A guest so far incertain, so imperfect:
If only speech distinguish us from beasts,
Who know no inequality of birth and place,
But still to fly from goodness; oh! how base
Were life at such a rate! No, no! that
Power

That gave to man his being, speech, and
wisdom,

Gave it for thankfulness. To Him alone
That made me thus, may I thence truly
know,

I'll pay to Him, not man, the love I owe."

The supernatural part of this play is altogether overdone, exhibiting far less skill in the management than a modern fairy spectacle for the Easter holidays. Before Merlin appears we have a Saxon magician produced who can raise the dead, and he makes Hector and Achilles come into the Saxon court very much after the fashion of the apparition of Marshal Saxe in the great gallery at Dresden (see Wraxall's 'Memoirs”). The stage-direction for this extraordinary exhibition is as follows:

"Enter PROXIMUS, bringing in HECTOR, attired and armed after the Trojan manner, with target, sword, and battle-axe; a trumpet before him, and a Spirit in flame-colours with a torch: at the other door, ACHILLES, with his spear and falchion, a trumpet, and a Spirit in black before him: trumpets sound alarm, and they manage their weapons to begin the fight, and after some charges the Hermit steps between them, at which, seeming amazed, the Spirits tremble."

That the poet who produced the cauldron of the weird sisters should be supposed to have a hand in this child's play is little less than miraculous itself. But we soon cease to take an interest in mere Britons and

Saxons, for a clown and his sister arrive at court, seeking a father for a child which the lady is about to present to the world. After some mummery which is meant for comedy, we have the following stage-direction :"Enter the Devil in man's habit richly attired, his feet and his head horrid ;" and the young lady from the country immediately recognises the treacherous father. After another episode with Modestia and Edwin, thunder and lightning announce something terrible; the birth of Merlin has taken place, and his father the Devil properly introduces him reading a book and foretelling his own future celebrity. We have now prophecy upon prophecy and fight upon fight, blazing stars, dragons, and Merlin expounding all amidst the din. We learn that Artesia has poisoned her husband, and that Uter has become King Pendragon. The Saxons are defeated by the new king, by whom Artesia, as a murderess, is buried alive. In the mean time the Devil has again been making some proposals to Merlin's mother, which end greatly to his discomfiture, for his powerful son shuts him up in a rock. Merlin then, addressing his mother, proposes to her to retire to a solitude he has prepared for her, to weep away the flesh you have offended with;" "and when you die," he proceeds,"I will erect a monument

66

Upon the verdant plains of Salisbury,—
No king shall have so high a sepulchre,—
With pendulous stones, that I will hang by

art,

Where neither lime nor mortar shall be usedA dark enigma to the memory,

For none shall have the power to number them;

A place that I will hallow for your rest; Where no night-hag shall walk, nor were-wolf tread,

Where Merlin's mother shall be sepulchred." As this is a satisfactory account of the origin of Stonehenge, we might here conclude; but there is a little more to tell of this marvellous play. Uter, the triumphant king, desires Merlin to

"show the full event That shall both end our reign and chronicle." Merlin thus consents:—

"What Heaven decrees, fate hath no power to alter:

The Saxons, sir, will keep the ground they

THE rank as a writer which Shakspere took in his own time is determined by a few decided notices of him. These notices are as ample and as frequent as can be looked for in an age which had no critical records, and when writers, therefore, almost went out of their way to refer to their literary contemporaries, except for the purposes of set compliment. We believe that, as early as 1591, Spenser called attention to Shakspere, as

"the man whom Nature self had made To mock herself, and truth to imitate;" describing him also as

"that same gentle spirit, from whose pen Large streams of honey and sweet nectar flow."

66

We know that the envy of Greene, in 1592, pointed at him as 'an absolute Johannes factotum, in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country;" and we receive this bitterness of the unfortunate dramatist against his more successful rival as a tribute to his power and his popularity. We consider that the apology of Chettle, who had edited the posthumous work of Greene containing this effusion of spite, was an acknowledgment of the established opinion of Shakspere's excellence as an author:"Divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, that approves his art." This was printed in 1592, and yet the man who had won this reluctant testimony to his art, by "his facetious grace in writing," is held by modern authorities to have then been only a botcher of other men's works, as if "facetious grace' were an expression that did not most happily mark the quality by which Shakspere was then most eminently distinguished above all his contemporaries,

| his comic power,—his ability above all others to produce

"Fine counterfesance, and unhurtful sport,

Delight, and laughter, deck'd in seemly sort." But passages such as these, which it is almost impossible to apply to any other man than Shakspere, are still only indirect evidence of the opinion which was formed of him when he was yet a very young writer. But a few years later we encounter the most direct testimony to his pre-eminence. He it was that, in 1598, was assigned his rank, not by any vague and doubtful compliment, not with any ignorance of what had been achieved by other men ancient and modern, but by the learned discrimination of a scholar; and that rank was with Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, Eschylus, Sophocles, Pindar, Phocylides, and Aristophanes amongst the Greeks; Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Silius Italicus, Lucan, Lucretius, Ausonius, and Claudian amongst the Latins; and Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Warner, Marlowe, and Chapman amongst the English. According to the same authority, it was "in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakspere" that "the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives." This praise was applied to his 'Venus and Adonis,' and other poems. But, for his dramas, he is raised above every native contemporary and predecessor: "As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latins; so Shakspere among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage." These are extracts with which many of our readers must be familiar. They are from 'The Wits' Commonwealth' of Francis Meres, "Master of Arts of both Universities;" a book largely circulated, and mentioned with applause by contemporary writers. The author delivers not these sentences as his own peculiar opinion; he speaks unhesitatingly, as of a fact ad

mitting no doubt, that Shakspere, among the English, is the most excellent for Comedy and Tragedy. Does any one of the other "excellent" dramatic writers of that day rise up to dispute the assertion, galling, perhaps, to the self-love of some amongst them? Not a voice is heard to tell Francis Meres that he has overstated the public opinion of the supremacy of Shakspere. Thomas Heywood, one of this illustrious band, speaks of Meres as an approved good scholar, and says that his account of authors is learnedly done*. Heywood himself, indeed, in lines written long after Shakspere's death, mentions him in stronger terms of praise than he applies to any of his contemporariest. Lastly, Meres, after other comparisons of Shakspere with the great writers of antiquity and of his own time, has these words, which nothing but a complete reliance upon the received opinion of his day could have warranted him in applying to any living man: "As Epius Stolo said that the Muses would speak with Plautus' tongue, if they would speak Latin; so I say that the Muses would speak with Shakspere's fine filed phrase, if they would speak English."

Of the popularity of Shakspere in his own day, the external evidence, such as it is, is more decisive than the testimony of any contemporary writer. He was at one and the same time the favourite of the people and of the Court. There is no record whatever known to exist of the public performances of Shakspere's plays at his own theatres. Had such an account existed of the receipts at the Blackfriars and the Globe as Henslowe kept for his company, we should have known something precise of that popularity which was so extensive as to make the innkeeper of Bosworth, "full of ale and history," derive his knowledge from the stage of Shakspere:

* "Here I might take fit opportunity to reckon up all our English writers, and compare them with the Greek, French, Italian, and Latin poets, not only in their pastoral, historical, elegiacal, and heroical poems, but in their tragical and comical subjects, but it was my chance to happen on the like, learnedly done by an approved good scholar, in a book called Wits' Commonwealth,' to which

treatise I wholly refer you, returning to our present subject."-'Apology for Actors,' 1612.

'Hierarchy of Blessed Angels,' 1635.

But the facts connected with the original publication of Shakspere's plays sufficiently prove how eagerly they were for the most part received by the readers of the drama. From 1597 to 1600, ten of these plays were published from authentic copies, undoubtedly with the consent of the author. The system of publication did not commence before 1597; and, with four exceptions, it was not continued beyond 1600. Of these plays there were published, before the appearance of the collected edition of 1623, four editions of Richard II., six of The First Part of Henry IV., six of Richard III., four of Romeo and Juliet, six of Hamlet, besides repeated editions of the plays which were surreptitiously published—the maimed and imperfect copies described by the editors of the first folio. Of the thirty-six plays contained in the folio of 1623, only one-half were published, whether genuine or piratical, in the author's lifetime; and it is by no means improbable that many of those which were originally published with his concurrence were not permitted to be reprinted, because such publication might be considered injurious to the great theatrical property with which he was connected. But the constant demand for some of the plays is an evidence of their popularity which cannot be mistaken, and is decisive as to the people's admiration of Shakspere. As for that of the Court, the testimony, imperfect as it is, is entirely conclusive.

"Sweet Swan of Avon! what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of
Thames

That so did take Eliza and our James," is no vague homage from Jonson to the memory of his "beloved friend;" but the record of a fact. The accounts of the revels at Court, between the years 1588 and 1604, the most interesting period in the career of Shakspere, have not been discovered in the

*Bishop Corbet, who died in 1635.