and criminal, Punch, as to condemn Titus Andronicus on the same plea. If this modern namby-pambyism is to have its way, we should ostracise half of Stevenson's works, and utterly condemn the horrible cannibalistic narrative in the Yarn of the Nancy Bell! What then, we ask again, were the incidents in Titus Andronicus likely, as rendered on the stage of the Globe Theatre, to revolt an Elizabethan audience?

No doubt the incidents which we feel to be revolting in this play are the ravishment and mutilation of Lavinia, the mutilation of Titus and his revenge in cutting the throats of the ravishers and making pastry of their bones and blood. These things are all extremely gruesome, but I fear this is no proof whatever that Shakespeare, when once embarked on such a plot, would excise them or indeed make any serious attempt to mitigate them. If we had the real "source" from which Shakespeare took this plot, if it be not the ballad itself, we should certainly find all those horrors in the original version; and an inexperienced author would, even if he wished (which is doubtful), be afraid to take any liberties with a plot which was certainly, in a cruder form, already familiar to his audience. Had he ventured on such a course," the groundlings," at any rate, would, in their disappointment, have hissed the piece off the stage, although the merely sanguinary incidents and the cannibalism would not be very impressive as then rendered, with a pair of well-worn "property" heads and a few bandages and scraps of red cloth, not to speak of

1 It does not seem to have been generally observed that the story of Lavinia was familiar to Chaucer. See The Legend of Good Women, line 211 earlier version, 257 later version (Skeat's Student's Chaucer).

the pie (coffin) from the nearest cook-shop, which the hungry "supers" would finish off when the play was over.

With regard to the introduction of Rape as a subject for the stage, Mr. F. G. Fleay (Chronicle History of the Life and Work of Shakespeare) writes: "The introduction of rape as a subject for the stage would be sufficient to disprove Shakespeare's authorship." A more ridiculous and fatuous remark it would be impossible to find in the annals of criticism. Did Mr. Fleay forget that about the time this play must have been written Shakespeare had it in his mind, as we see from the play itself, to devote his utmost poetic powers-which he then regarded with infinitely greater reverence than he did his dramatic powers-to writing The Rape of Lucrece? If Shakespeare thought this subject fit for a poem, which was to gain him the favour of the highest in the land, he could have no possible scruple against treating such a subject dramatically; and when we recall his tremendous Sonnet on "Lust," and the theme of his Venus and Adonis, which is the very revolting one of a woman (though a goddess) thrusting her favours on a man, we see the absolute absurdity of Fleay's proposition. fact is that Shakespeare's mind, with all its elevation, was much fascinated by what we would now call "sex-problems," and although he does not again introduce rape, he has the equally "revolting theme of seduction, or attempted seduction, frequently; and in Hamlet we have what was then regarded as incest. It is not, indeed, by his themes that Shakespeare or any great author is to be judged; it is by his treatment of them. What Shakespeare worked for was a "moral resultant," and if anyone dare allege that any play of Shakespeare's, properly studied, leaves him or her

The

worse than it found them, I will undertake to say that the fault is with the reader. In his tragedies especially, when we reach the denouement and see the havoc worked by human weakness and passion, we are certainly in no mood to condone such weakness, or to set about indulging these destructive passions. What impure woman does not quail under Hamlet's reproof of Gertrude, or feel abashed in the presence of Isabel and Imogen ? There are no sermons that ever have been or will be preached that drive home the evilness of evil and the criminality of weakness like these magnificent dramatic homilies. Even in Titus Andronicus, what are our final feelings? Not exultation in the success of Titus' terrible, and, in a sense, just revenge, but a conviction that Cruelty, Lust, and even Revenge are hideous, loathsome, and repulsive to the last degree; and this feeling, which we have, amidst all our horror, stamps the play as essentially Shakespearian in its general outlines and conception. And that is all, or nearly all, that will be here maintained; not that every word and line, not even every scene is the original work of Shakespeare, but that his genius and character is impressed in immature but unmistakable manner on the drama as a whole.

For the idea that the plot of the play is a piece of pure invention on the part of Shakespeare or any other Elizabethan dramatist is, of course, quite out of the question, because it was quite beside the practice of these dramatists, and most of all of Shakespeare himself, to be at the trouble of inventing a fresh plot, when they had so many ready to their hand, and when it was considered no plagiarism or declension from originality to make the freest use of old material wherever they found it.

We have now, I think, touched upon all the acknowledged facts regarding the play in question, which throw any real light on its authorship from without; and it seems we are now for the first time in a position to apply ourselves to the play itself, and to see what further light we can gain by a critical examination of the text.

Whenever we ask ourselves what is the first essential to the making of a great and perennially interesting author of fiction in its widest sense, whether the form be narrative or dramatic, prose or verse, we are always driven back on the one answer, that it is what we are pleased to call "creative power," and in particular the power of creating characters. Gradually, as time goes on, these creators, poets, makers, emerge from the multitude of lesser writers, however accomplished, and take their stations at an altitude that the others can never attain. Stars and lamps are very alike sometimes, but no lamp can for long persuade us that it has the altitude of the Plough or the Pole-star. What this creative power consists in, this power of making imaginative work not only beautiful, or true, or interesting, but actually alive, can no more be stated in words than biologist, chemist, and physicist, or all three together, can really tell us what that, which we call Life, really is. We know only in both cases by results.1

Of this life-giving power, not to use any disputable instance, we have certainly three great exemplars in our literature

Chaucer, especially in his Prologue, Shakespeare,

1 Only the other day a pet kitten was playing in my garden, exuberant with life from whiskers to tail. Then a strange dog, a deft shake in the air, and a weeping domestic brings me a piece of limp fur with a touch of blood, and glazing eyes. Just as great in literature, and as mysterious, is the difference between the living and the dead.

and Scott. Five centuries have not weakened the pulse of life in one of the Canterbury Pilgrims, and the grave Knight and the gay Squire, the genteel Prioress and the vulgar Wife of Bath are living as when their palfreys raised the dust on Kentish roads. While there are some classes of Scott's characters whose original anemia has proved fatal to them, there are others whose cheeks are still fresh and ruddy as winter apples. But high above these, almost in a world of their own, survive in imperishable beauty and vitality the creations of Shakespeare. Here and there, but only here and there, do we find a character looking a little sick and ghostly among the rest, and this almost entirely in his earlier plays. In Love's Labour's Lost we have little more than graceful pen-and-ink sketches and first studies for what were to be his great creations later on; and, in like manner, in Titus Andronicus we find a series of powerful, and even exaggerated, studies for the great characters that peopled his later tragedies. Already in this play the author shows a marvellous power, one of those absolutely essential in the creation of character in fiction, that of discriminating between two characters apparently extremely alike. This power has been pointed out as characteristic of Shakespeare; but I do not remember that anyone has noticed that the two sons of Tamora are a marvellous example of this. At first sight nothing would seem more difficult than to discriminate between these two utter ruffians. But Shakespeare has done it, and he has done it in a peculiarly bold way. The distinction is this, that he makes Chiron, the younger, at once the more sentimental and the more ruthless. At first it comes on us with a kind of shock when we find the sentimentalist, who was