In ence; and each had moral feelings and notions of his own. Shirley the distinctive individual difference was small, both in amount and in kind: he was not a great man in himself, but an essentially small man inspired by the creations of great men. Fletcher was his master and exemplar, as Shakespeare was Massinger's; but he imitated much more closely, was much more completely carried away by this model than Massinger was. And although his language and moral feelings and notions (even as regards female types and kings) are Fletcher's, and he had most ambition to emulate Fletcher's dashing and brilliant manner, yet Shirley's plays contain frequent echoes of other dramatists. One great interest in reading him is that he reminds us so often of the situations and characters of his predecessors. It is good for the critic, if for nobody else, to read Shirley, because there he finds emphasised all that told most effectively on the playgoers of the period. We read Greene and Marlowe to know what the Elizabethan drama was in its powerful but awkward youth; Shirley to know what it was in its declining but facile and still powerful old age. True, There were many other able playmakers in the great dramatic period, and notably four Thomases, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Rowley, Thomas Randolph, and Thomas May, but no other that can be called great, either by originality or by imitation. Charles Lamb has called Thomas Heywood "a prose Shakespeare," and that prolific author of 250 plays doubtless has a certain sweet vein of grandmotherly tenderness in him; but if Elia had lived till now, he would, perhaps, have described good old Heywood more accurately by calling him a garrulous Longfellow. One may hope to be excused for feeling no desire to go farther down the scale than Middleton and Shirley. In studying the literature that led to the supreme efflorescence of the Elizabethan drama, one thinks no relic too humble to be worth discussing; but when so many large and powerful minds invite our companionship, and continue always to lay before us fresh points of interest and fresh matter for thought, it is intolerably dull to turn from them to the crowd of mediocrities who hang about their doors and follow their footsteps. 368 APPENDIX A. OUR PLEASANT WILLY. THREE stanzas are often quoted from Thalia's complaint regarding the decay of the theatres in Spenser's "Tears of the Muses," and it has been elaborately argued that they refer to Shakespeare. The date of their publication is 1591. "And he, the man whom Nature's self had made To mock herself, and truth to imitate, With kindly counter under mimic shade, Instead thereof scoffing Scurrility, And scornful Folly with Contempt is crept, But that same gentle spirit from whose pen Large streams of honey and sweet nectar flow, Which dare their follies forth so rashly throw; Than so himself to mockery to sell." I have stated some reasons (p. 263) for refusing to believe that these stanzas, however appropriate to Shakespeare we may think them, can possibly have been applied to him in 1591. I believe that death is, in the first stanza, real and not metaphorical, and that Willy is Spenser's friend Sidney. Sidney's death is lamented under that name in an eclogue in Davidson's Poetical Rhapsody-"an eclogue made long since upon the death of Sir Philip Sidney." "Ye shepherds' boys that lead your flocks, The whilst your sheep feed safely round about, Break me your pipes that pleasant sound did yield, Our happy days, And nothing left but grief to think thereon." The only difficulty in the way of supposing our pleasant Willy to be Sir Philip Sidney is purely factitious. It is taken for granted that all the three of Spenser's stanzas refer to the same person as the first; and then it is argued that the death of our pleasant Willy must be only metaphorical in the first, meaning really his cessation from the composition of comedies, because in the third he is said to be producing large streams of tragedies. But any person who looks at 1 The fact that Sidney did not write comedies, if we exclude his "Lady of the May" from that title, is immaterial. The poet only says that Nature had made him to write comedies-"to mock herself with kindly counter under mimic shade." the whole lament will see that two different persons must be intended. The sequence of thought is this: The first of the three stanzas laments that Willy is dead; the second, that scoffing scurrility and scornful folly have occupied the stage in his stead; the third approves the conduct of a living and producing writer in abstaining from co-operation with base-born play-wrights. If we suppose "that same gentle spirit" to refer back to our pleasant Willy, and not forward to the next line, we land ourselves in a contradiction whether we regard Willy's death as literal or metaphorical, because this gentle spirit is both really and poetically_alive--large streams of honey and nectar are flowing from him. I believe that in the third stanza Thalia refers to Spenser himself, and that here we have his justification of himself for complaining of the withdrawal of learning from the stage, and yet sending no compositions of his own to prop it up. Some such justification was certainly required: Spenser could hardly have asked why learning had forsaken the stage, without giving a reason for withholding contributions from his own copious pen. The vanity of the excuse will not surprise any one who knows what he makes Hobinol and others say concerning Colin Clout. 371 APPENDIX B. AN UNRECOGNISED SONNET BY SHAKESPEARE? IN the Elizabethan age of our literature, when there were neither dailies, weeklies, monthlies, nor quarterlies in which it might be possible to express a friendly partiality for a new book, it was a common mark of friendship to send to an author a set of eulogistic verses, to be printed at the beginning of his book as a guarantee of its worth. In those days very few books were published without one or more such introductory poems of commendation. It was, perhaps, inevitable that this peculiar form of literature should, even in the rich Elizabethan age, be remarkable chiefly for poverty of invention; the circle of ideas for these commendations is almost necessarily limited. We find in great plenty such verses as the following : or or He that shall read thy characters, Nic. Breton, Who reads this book with a judicious eye, Read with regard what here with due regard Such is the commonplace commendatory poem; and the friendly eulogiums of the greatest masters, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Chapman, or Ford, rise very little, if at all, above the level. Most of them are of the three-piled hyperbolical order-containing loud assertions of merit with loud defiance of contradiction, and playing if possible upon the name of the piece or of the author. Even Chapman's ingenuity could devise nothing better than the following lines in a eulogium on Ben Jonson's "Volpone, or The Fox : " Come yet more forth, Volpone, and thy chase Perform to all length, for thy breath will serve thee; The usurer shall never wear thy case, Men do not hunt to kill but to preserve thee. |