but Capell in his prolusions of 1760 called attention to a resemblance in style between this work and Shakespeare's "earlier performances," and to the fact that Holinshed's Chronicles and Painter's "Palace of Pleasure" (both books having been certainly used by Shakespeare for the plots of plays) supplied the fable. Mr. Fleay believes that Edward III. was a play of Marlowe's which Shakespeare altered and revised. The Shakespearian part he holds to be from the entrance of King Edward in the last scene of act i. to the end of act ii. "For myself," writes Mr. Swinburne, who has made a careful study of the play, "I am, and have always been, perfectly satisfied with one single and simple piece of evidence that Shakespeare had not a finger in the concoction of King Edward III. He was the author of King Henry V." If any man of common judgment, Mr. Swinburne adds, can be found to maintain the theory of Shakespeare's possible partnership in the composition of the play, "such a man will assuredly admit that the only discernible or imaginable touches of his hand are very slight, very few, and very early." This last statement expresses sufficiently nearly my own opinion. In the portion of King Edward III. ascribed to Shakespeare by Mr. Fleay, the amorous king makes an attempt upon the honour of the Countess of Salisbury, which is met by a spirited repulse. With a reference to the Roman Lucrece the king, now brought to his better mind, addresses her:

Arise true English lady: whom our isle

May better boast of, than e'er Roman might

Of her, whose ransack'd treasury hath task'd
The vain endeavours of so many pens.

It seems to me far from probable that the author of the Rape of Lucrece is here alluding to his own poem.

The romantic comedy The Two Noble Kinsmen is of a much later date, and has certainly a far stronger claim to be considered as in part the work of Shakespeare. It was first printed in 1634, eleven years after our great dramatist's death, and on the title-page it bore his name as joint author with Fletcher. Other external evidence than this there is none. The internal evidence yields a doubtful result. Several eminent critics-Coleridge, Hallam, Dyce, Sidney Walker, Mr. Swinburne, and others have accepted the theory of Shakespeare's joint authorship, and schemes for the distribution of the acts and scenes between Fletcher and Shakespeare have been proposed.1 But it is a remarkable fact that one of the most accomplished and careful students of the play, Professor Spalding, who in 1833 published an essay in which he endeavoured, with singular fineness of criticism, to draw the line between Shakespeare's handiwork and Fletcher's, declared in 1840 that his opinion was then "not so decided as it once was," and wrote in 1847 with increasing doubts 1 Shakespeare's part: Act I. (except part of sc. ii.). Act II. sc. i. Act III. sc. i. ii. Act IV. sc. iii. Act V. (except sc. ii.).

that "the question of Shakespeare's share in this play is really insoluble." What happened in Spalding's case has probably happened with not a few persons, who at one time were assured that the hand of Shakespeare can be discerned in The Two Noble Kinsmen. The parts ascribed to him seem to grow less like his work in thought, feeling, and expression, as we, so to speak, live with them. The resemblance which at first impressed us so strongly seems to fade, or, if it remains, to be at most something superficial. At the present moment the drift of opinion is rather in favour of assigning the play to Fletcher and Massinger. The subject of The Two Noble Kinsmen is the story of Palamon. and Arcite (told by Chaucer in his Knightes Tale), with which a wretched. underplot, the work of Fletcher, is connected.

No intelligent reader of Locrine, Mucedorus, The London Prodigal, The Puritan, The Life and Death of Thomas Cromwell, The History of Sir John Oldcastle, Fair Em, The Birth of Merlin, can suppose that a single line was contributed to any one of these plays by Shakespeare. It is conceivable that touches from his hand may exist in A Yorkshire Tragedy, and even in Arden of Feversham. But the chance that this is actually the case is exceedingly small. We may therefore set down King Edward III. and The Two Noble Kinsmen as doubtful plays; the rest for which an idle claim has been made, should be named pseudo-Shakespearian.

IV.

While Shakespeare lived his poems circulated widely and received high commendation; his plays were favourites with the people, and were also esteemed by the courtly patrons of the drama. It is probable that for some years after Shakespeare's death the plays of Fletcher were more popular upon the stage than those of any other writer. Ben Jonson was looked on as the great master of the scholarly or classical school of dramatic writing; he was, however, probably more praised by the judicious than enjoyed by the ordinary spectators of the theatre. Taste was deteriorating from Elizabethan days; the manlier temper of the drama was declining; and Shakespeare's plays soon came to be regarded as somewhat old-fashioned. Yet we know that several were enacted before Charles I., and were, as Sir Henry Herbert records in his Office Book, "well likte by the kinge." It was one of the virtues-not too numerous—of that loyal courtier and slight poet Sir John Suckling that he knew Shakespeare well; when his portrait was painted by Vandyke he was represented as holding in his left hand a folio on the edge of which is a paper bearing the name Shakespeare. The growth of Puritanism was of course unfavourable to the influence of a dramatic writer; yet Milton, the greatest poet of Puritanism, did honour in his earlier days to Shakespeare's memory in verses which tell of the profound impression made by the dramatist's "Delphic lines," and elsewhere celebrated him in contrast with Jonson, the poet of art and erudition, for "his native

woodnotes wild." It was a grief to William Prynne, the author of HistrioMastix (1633), that "Shackspeer's Plaies are printed in the best Crowne paper, far better than most Bibles;" but that grief may have been allayed by knowledge of the fact that no crowne paper" in folio form was used for this unworthy purpose during the period of the struggle against the bishops and the king.

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In Restoration days, when the theatres were reopened and possessed the new attraction of actresses in the female parts, there was something like a Shakespearian revival; but it was accompanied with the feeling that though Shakespeare was one of the glories of the elder English stage, he belonged to an age half-barbarous in comparison with one which had been refined by the growth of general culture and by influences derived from France. Killigrew's new theatre in Drury Lane opened with King Henry IV. The great actor Betterton appeared in several of Shakespeare's leading characters. The dramatist D'Avenant did honour to his memory. On Oct. 11, 1660, Mr. Samuel Pepys saw the "Moor of Venice" at the Cockpit, and on December 5 of the same year at the New Theatre "The Merry Wives of Windsor." In later entries in his diary he mentions that he had been present at performances of Romeo and Juliet, "a play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my life;" A Midsummer Night's Dream, "the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life;" Twelfth Night, "a silly play;" Macbeth, "a most excellent play for variety;" and to this last he returned again and again. The altered taste of the time made it seem necessary that Shakespeare's plays, in not a few instances, should be recast and modernized, a practice which was continued-and, as may readily be conceived, often with lamentable results-during the eighteenth century. The Tempest was altered by D'Avenant and Dryden, with added spectacle and song, new characters, and indecent dialogue. Antony and Cleopatra was improved upon by Sedley, Timon of Athens by Shadwell, Cymbeline by D'Urfey. Songs were written for Macbeth; Shylock was introduced at supper drinking a toast to his lady Money; Grumio of the Taming of the Shrew became a Scotchman. Tate made Edgar a lover of Cordelia, and gave the tragedy a happy denouement. Fortunately Hamlet escaped revision. With this old play even the polite Mr. Pepys was mightily pleased, and above all with Betterton in the leading character, "the best part, I believe, that ever man acted."

Dryden venerated Shakespeare while he admitted (1663) that "others are now generally preferred before him." In "An Essay on Dramatic Poetry" (1668) he ventures to assert that Shakespeare "was the man who of all modern and perhaps ancient poets had the largest and most comprehensive soul;" but Dryden was not insensible to the fact that Shakespeare did not observe the laws of the drama as laid down by the critics whose authority was dominant in the Restoration period. His own All for Love, a play on the subject of Antony and Cleopatra, was written in blank verse, and he tells us that he professed to imitate

in his style "the divine Shakespeare." "The poet Eschylus," he says in his essay On the Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679), “was held in the same veneration by the Athenians of after ages as Shakespeare is by us." This essay, which shows a more mature appreciation of Shakespeare's genius than appears in Dryden's earlier writings, is supposed by Dr. Johnson to have been occasioned by Thomas Rymer's "Tragedies of the last Age considered and examined." In this and subsequent writings the laborious compiler of the Foedera applies to Shakespeare the Aristotelian rules of tragedy, and finds “in the neighing of a horse or the growling of a mastiff... more humanity than many times in the tragical flights of Shakespeare." Gildon and Dennis replied to Rymer; and Dennis, who in his better days was a far more intelligent critic than Pope's satire would lead us to believe, wrote of Shakespeare with sincere and ardent admiration. "One may say of him," writes Dennis, "as they did of Homer-that he had none to imitate, and is himself inimitable. His imaginations were often as just as they were bold and strong. He had a natural discretion which never could have been taught him, and his judgment was strong and penetrating. He seems to have wanted nothing but time and thought to have found out those rules of which he appears so ignorant." When we reach the age of Queen Anne we find the supremacy of Shakespeare's genius generally acknowledged.

The critical editions begin with that of Nicholas Rowe, 1709. The demands of the seventeenth century had been satisfied by four editions in folio, published respectively in 1623, 1632, 1663-64, and 1685; if tried by the same test the popularity of Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher appears to have been less considerable. Rowe did something to purge the text of Shakespeare from its grosser errors; he was himself a dramatic poet, and, moreover, he was a man of good sense. His corrections are not those of a collater of early editions or a student of our elder literature, but such as would occur to any cultivated and judicious reader. He was the first to attempt to write a life of Shakespeare; it is a slender production, but has a value as containing some traditions not elsewhere to be found. Pope followed Rowe in 1725 with his edition in six quarto volumes. "The minute mechanical examination which the enterprise required," writes Pope's latest biographer, Mr. Courthope, "was little suited to the broad and generalizing genius of Pope's criticism, nor did he approach his task in that spirit of sympathy with his author which just editing requires. He altered some expressions in the text because they seemed to him vulgar, and others because the versification did not conform to his ideas of harmony. Comparatively little of his labour was spent in research, but some of the conjectural emendations were happy, and the Preface to the edition, written in his best style-and his critical prose is always excellent-deserves the high commendation that Johnson bestows upon it." In this Preface indeed some admirable thoughts are admirably expressed. "Shakespeare is not so much an imitator, as an instrument, of nature." Can more be said in fewer words?

And on one of the controversies of his own day he thus pronounces his opinion: "To judge of Shakespeare by Aristotle's rules, is like trying a man by the laws of one country who acted under those of another." That Shakespeare was a careless writer who never blotted a line is denied by Pope, on the evidence of the varying text of the quartos; nor was he an unlearned man, unless "learning" means no more than "languages." The Shakespearian drama in comparison with the more finished and regular drama is like "an ancient majestick piece of Gothick architecture compared with a neat modern building.

It has much the greater variety, and much the nobler apartments; though we are often conducted to them by dark, odd, and uncouth passages. Nor does the whole fail to strike us with greater reverence, though many of the parts are childish, ill-placed, and unequal to its grandeur." Finer praise than this we could not expect from the Augustan age which delighted in Cato and the translation of Homer.

Pope's rival as an editor of Shakespeare, Louis Theobald, indebted to Pope, as he says, for some "flagrant civilities," if he was a duller man than his satirist of the Dunciad, was a far better Shakespearian scholar. His method of dealing with Shakespeare was to treat his text as that of a corrupt classic; and he claims to be the first to approach any modern author in this manner. He did some scholarly collation, and was often happy in his conjectural emendations. To him we owe "'a babbled of green fields" in the account of Falstaff's death, and the reading, whether right or wrong, is one which alone might make an editor's reputation. His "Shakespeare Restored," in which he exposes the errors of Pope, appeared in 1726; his edition of Shakespeare in 1733.

The "Oxford Edition," in six quarto volumes, was published in 1744. The editor's name did not appear, but he was soon known to be Sir Thomas Hanmer. Collins celebrated the editor and his author in a poetical epistle, and the edition. was generally received with favour. A country gentleman of literary tastes, Hanmer had amused his leisure hours, he tells us, with noting the obscurities and absurdities introduced into the text, and according to the best of his judgment restoring the genuine sense and purity of it. The emendations multiplied, and "too partial friends" persuaded him to make them public. Unfortunately he was not equipped with the scholarship essential to editorial work. "He did something to better," as Mr. Grant White has justly said, "and somewhat more to injure the text as Theobald left it." Three years later, in 1747, Warburton's edition, based on that of Pope, appeared. In his preface he extravagantly overrates the value of Pope's work as an editor, and attacks Theobald and Hanmer as having pirated his own manuscript notes. The persuasions of "dear Mr. Pope" induced Warburton to condescend to a task so much beneath his high powers as that of defending the true text of Shakespeare from the wrongs done to it by dulness of apprehension and extravagance of conjecture. "Mr. Pope was willing that his edition should be melted down