2 Child. O Lord, Sir ! Will you betray your ignorance so much? Why throw yourself in state on the stage, as other gentlemen use, Sir.

3 Child. Away, wag! What, wouldst thou make an implement of me? I would speak with your author; where is he?

2 Child. Not this way, I assure you, Sir; we are not so officiously befriended by him as to have his presence in the tiring-house, to prompt us aloud, stamp at the bookholder, swear for our properties, curse the poor tireman, rail the music out of tune, and sweat for every venial trespass we commit, as some author would, if he had such fine engles as we."

It may be presumed from this passage, that it was not uncommon for the author to mix with that part of the audience which sate upon the stage. We may imagine the young "maker" composedly moving amidst this throng of wits and critics. He moves amongst them modestly, but without any false humility. In worldly station, if such a consideration could influence his demeanour, he is fully the equal of his brother poets. They are for the most part, as he himself is, actors, as well as makers of plays. Phillips says Marlowe was an actor. Greene is reasonably conjectured to have been an actor. Peele and Wilson were actors of Shakspere's own company; and so was Anthony Wadeson. The curtain is drawn back, slowly, and with little of mechanical contrivance. The rush-strewn stage is presented to the spectators. The play to be performed is "Henry VI." The funeral procession of Henry V. enters to a dead march; a few mourners in sable robes following the bier. The audience is silent as the imaginary corse; but their imaginations are not stimulated with gorgeous scenery. There is no magical perspective of the lofty roof and long-drawn aisles of Westminster Abbey; no organ peals, no trains of choristers with tapers and censers sing the Requiem. The rushes on the floor are matched with the plain arras on the walls. Bedford speaks:

"Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night."

Lofty is his tone, corresponding with the solemn and unvarying rhythm. It is the "drumming decasyllabon" which Nashe ridicules. The great master of a freer versification is not yet confident of his power. The attention of the auditory is fixed by the stirring introduction. There are old remembrances of national honour in every line The action moves rapidly. The mourners disperse; and by an effort of imagination the scene must be changed from England to France. Charles the king marches with drum and soldiers. The English are encountered, the French are beaten. The Maid of Orleans appears. The people will see the old French wars which live in their memories fought over again; and their spirits rise with every alarum. But the poet will show too the ruinous course of faction at home. The servingmen of Gloucester and Winchester battle at the Tower gates. The Mayor of London and his officers suppress the riot. Again to Orleans, where Salisbury is slain by a "fatal hand." All is bustle and contention in France; but the course of intrigue in England is unfolded. The first page of the fatal history of York and Lancaster is here read. We see the growth of civil war at home; we trace the beginnings of disaster abroad. The action presents a succession of events, rather than developing some great event brought about by a skilful adjustment of many parts. But in a chronicle history" this was scarcely to be avoided; and it is easy to see how, until the great principle of art which should produce a "Lear" and a "Macbeth" was evolved, the independent succession of events in a chronicle history would not only be the easiest to portray by a young writer, but would be the most acceptable to an uncritical audience, that had not yet been taught the dependences of a catastrophe upon slight preceding incidents, upon niceties of character, upon passion evolved out of seeming tranquility, the danger of which has been skilfully

shadowed forth to the careful observer. It was in detached passages, therefore, that the young poet would put out his strength in such a play. The death of Talbot and his son was a fit occasion for such an effort; and the early stage had certainly seen nothing comparable in power and beauty to the couplets which exhibit the fall of the hero and his boy. Other poets would have described the scene. Shakspere dramatized it; and his success is well noticed by Thomas Nashe, who for once loses his satirical vein in fervent admiration ::- "How would it have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to think that, after he had lain two hundred years in his tomb, he should triumph again on the stage, and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times), who, in the tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding!"* The prejudices of the age are gratified by the condemnation of the Pucelle; but the poet takes care to make it felt that her judges are “bloody homicides." At the very close of the play a new series of events is opened, ending here with the mission of Suffolk to bring a bride for the imbecile king; but showing that the issue is to be presented in some coming story.

*"Pierce Pennilesse."

A BELIEF has been long entertained in England, that Greene and Peele either wrote in conjunction the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI., originally published as the two Parts of the "Contention," or that Greene wrote one Part, and Peele the other Part; or that, at any rate, Greene had some share in these dramas. This was a theory propagated by Malone in his "Dissertation; " and it rests, not upon the slightest examination of the works of these writers, but solely on a far-famed passage in Greene's posthumous pamphlet, the "Groat's Worth of Wit," in which he points out Shakspere as a crow beautified with our feathers."

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The entire pamphlet of Greene's is, perhaps, one of the most extraordinary fragments of autobiography that the vanity or the repentance of a sinful man ever produced. The recital which he makes of his abandoned course of life involves not only a confession of crimes and follies which were common to a very licentious age, but of particular and especial depravities, which even to mention argues as much shamelessness as repentance. The portion, however, which relates to the subject

before us stands alone, in conclusion, as a friendly warning out of his own terrible example :-"To those gentlemen, his quondam acquaintance, that spend their wits in making plays, R. G. wisheth a better exercise, and wisdom to prevent his extremities." To three of his quondam acquaintance the dying man addresses himself. To the first, supposed to be Marlowe "thou famous gracer of tragedians"-he speaks in words as terrible as came from

"that warning voice, which he who saw Th' Apocalypse heard cry in heaven aloud."

In exhorting his friend to turn from atheism, he ran the risk of consigning him to the stake, for Francis Kett was burnt for his opinions only three years before Greene's death. That Marlowe resented this address to him we have the testimony of Chettle. With his second friend, supposed to be Lodge, his plain speaking is much more tender: "Be advised, and get not many enemies by bitter words." He addresses the third, supposed to be Peele, as one "driven as myself to extreme shifts;" and he adds, "thou art unworthy better hap sith thou dependest on so mean a stay." What is the stay? "Making plays." The exhortation then proceeds to include the three “gentlemen his quondam acquaintance that spend their wits in making plays."—"Base-minded men all three of you, if by my misery ye be not warned: for unto none of you, like me, sought those burs to cleave; those puppets, I mean, that speak from our mouths: those antics garnished in our colours." Up to this point the meaning is perfectly clear. The puppets, the antics,-by which names of course are meant the players, whom he held, and justly, to derive their chief importance from the labours of the poet, in the words which they uttered and the colours with which they were garnished,—had once cleaved to him like burs. But a change had taken place : "Is it not strange that I, to whom they all have been beholding—is it not like that you, to whom they all have been beholding, shall, were ye in that case that I am now, be, both, of them at once forsaken?" This is a lamentable picture of one whose powers, wasted by dissipation and enfeebled by sickness, were no longer required by those to whom they had once been serviceable. As he was forsaken, so he holds that his friends will be forsaken. And chiefly for what reason? “Yes, trust them not: for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank-verse as the best of you: and, being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country." There can be no doubt that Shakspere was here pointed at; that the starving man spoke with exceeding bitterness of the successful author; that he affected to despise him as a player; that, if “ beautified with our feathers" had a stronger meaning than "garnished in our colours," it conveyed a vague charge of borrowing from other poets; and that he parodied a line from "The Contention." This is literally every word that can be supposed to apply to Shakspere. Greene proceeds, to exhort his friends "to be employed in more profitable courses."—" Let these apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions."66 Seek you better masters." It is perfectly clear that these words refer only to the players generally; and possibly, to the particular company of which Shakspere was a member. As such, and such only, must he take his share in the names which Greene applies to them, of "apes,' -“rude grooms,”—“buckram gentlemen," "peasants," and "painted monsters." It will be well to give the construction that has been put upon these words, in the form in which the "hypothesis" was first propounded by Malone :

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Shakspeare having therefore, probably not long before the year 1592, when Greene wrote his dying exhortation to his friend, new-modelled and amplified these

two pieces (the two parts of the 'Contention'), and produced on the stage what in the folio edition of his works are called the Second and Third Parts of King Henry VI., and having acquired considerable reputation by them, Greene could not conceal the mortification that he felt at his own fame, and that of his associate, both of them old and admired playwrights, being eclipsed by a new upstart writer (for so he calls our great poet), who had then first perhaps attracted the notice of the public by exhibiting two plays, formed upon old dramas written by them, considerably enlarged and improved. He therefore in direct terms charges him with having acted like the crow in the fable, beautified himself with their feathers; in other words, with having acquired fame furtivis coloribus, by new-modelling a work originally produced by them and wishing to depreciate our author, he very naturally quotes a line from one of the pieces which Shakspeare had thus re-written, a proceeding which the authors of the original plays considered as an invasion both of their literary property and character. This line, with many others, Shakspeare adopted without any alteration. The very term that Greene uses,—'to bombast out a blank-verse,'—exactly corresponds with what has been now suggested. This new poet, says he, knows as well as any man how to amplify and swell out a blank-verse. Bumbast was a soft stuff of a loose texture, by which garments were rendered more swelling and protruberant."*

Thus then, the starving and forsaken man-rejected by those who had been “beholding” to him; wanting the very bread of which he had been robbed, in the appropriation of his property by one of those who had rejected him; a man, too, prone to revenge, full of irascibility and self-love-contents himself with calling his plunderer "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers "—" A Johannes factotum"

The only Shake-scene in the country." "He could not conceal his mortification!" It would have been miraculous if he could. And how does he exhibit it? He parodies a line from one of the productions of which he had been so plundered, to carry the point home-to leave no doubt as to the sting of his allusion. But, as has been most justly observed, the epigram would have wanted its sting if the line parodied had not been that of the very writer attacked.† Be this as it may, the dying man, for some cause or other, chose to veil his deep wrongs in a sarcastic allusion. He left the manuscript containing this allusion to be published by a friend; and it was so published. It was a perilous shot out of an elder gun.” But the matter did not stop here. The editor of the posthumous work actually apologised to the "upstart crow:"-" I am as sorry as if the original fault had been my fault, because myself hath seen his demeanour no less civil than he excellent in the quality he professes; besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, that approves his art." This apology was not written by Chettle at some distant period; it came out in the same year with the pamphlet which contained the insult. The terms which he uses-"uprightness of dealing," and "facetious grace in writing"seem as if meant distinctly to refute the vague accusation of "beautified with our feathers." It is perfectly clear that Chettle could not have used these terms if Shakspere had been the wholesale plunderer, either of Greene or of any other writer, that it is assumed he was by those who deprive him of the authorship of the two Parts of the "Contention." If he had been this plunderer, and if Chettle had basely

* Malone gives here a special application to the term bombast, as if it were meant to express the amplification of the old plays charged against Shakspere. The term had been used by Nashe five years before :-"Idiot art-masters, that intrude themselves to our ears as the alchymists of eloquence, who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to outbrave better pens with the swelling bombast of bragging blank-verse." (Epistle prefixed to Greene's "Menaphon," 1587.)

"Edin. Review," July, 1840.

Preface to "Kind-Harte's Dream."