poems, but the plays, too; beyond reasonable doubt it is the trait which distinguishes Shakspere not only among his contemporaries but from almost any other English writer. At first sight, this concreteness of phrase seems to indicate extreme intensity of conscious thought, on which conclusion have been based many worshipping expositions of the almost divine wisdom and philosophy of Shakspere. The conclusion cannot be denied; it may, however, be reasonably questioned even to the point of growing doubt as to whether Shakspere himself, the Elizabethan playwright, could have had much realizing sense of his own philosophy and wisdom. As we have seen, the literary fashion of his time delighted above all things else in fresh, ingenious turns of phrase; in Shakspere's work, accordingly, fresh, ingenious turns of phrase abound. As we have seen, too, one cannot combine words and phrases without also combining ideas; when language grows definite, words and thoughts combine inextricably. Such a phenomenon as Shakspere's style, then, may well proceed from a cause surprisingly remote from conscious intensity of thought; it may indicate nothing more than a constitutional habit of mind by which words and concepts are instinctively allied with unusual firmness. We all know palpable differences in the habitual alliances of word and concept among our own friends; we know, too, that these differences, which often make uneducated or thoughtless people appear to advantage, are a matter not so much of train ing, as of temperament. Of course the felicities of phrase, and the incidental wisdom, which come from such natural marriages of words and concepts are not absolutely thoughtless; but the difference between them and the feebler expressions of people whose natural style lacks precision is often that while the latter involve acute consciousness of thought, the former involve little more than alert consciousness of phrase. Take care of your words, if your words naturally stand for real concepts, and your thoughts will take care of themselves. Given such a natural habit of mind as this in a healthy human being, given too the immense skill in phrase-making which pervaded the literary atmosphere of Shakspere's time, given an eager effort on Shakspere's part to make phrases which should compare with the best of them, and very surely the result you would expect is just such a style as distinguishes Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. To dwell on this trait of style, even at the risk of tedium, has been well worth our while. Palpable throughout Shakspere's work, it is nowhere more easily demonstrable than here, in the poems which were clearly the most painstaking productions of his early artistic life; for in the poems, admirable as they so often are in phrase, one can find ultimately little else than admirably conscientious phrase-making. Shakspere tells his stories with typical Elizabethan ingenuity; incidentally he infuses them with a permeating sense of fact, astonishingly different from the untrammelled imagination of Marlowe; yet plausibly, if not certainly, this effect is traceable to the instinctive habit of a mind in which the natural alliance of words and concepts was uniquely close. Here, then, we have the trait which, above all others, defines the artistic individuality of Shakspere. To him, beyond any other writer of English, words and thoughts seemed naturally identical. VI THE PLAYS OF SHAKSPERE, FROM TITUS ANDRONICUS TO THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA I. TITUS ANDRONICUS [A Noble Roman Historye of Tytus Andronicus was entered in the Stationers' Register on February 6th, 1593-94. In 1598, Meres mentioned Titus Andronicus as among Shakspere's tragedies. The play, virtually in its present form, was published in quarto, without Shakspere's name, in 1600. There was another anonymous quarto in 1611. Besides Meres's allusion to it, the Centurie of Prayse cites two others during Shakspere's lifetime, neither of which mentions his name. The second of these is in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, which appeared in 1614: "Hee that will sweare Jeronimo1 or Andronicus are the best playes, yet shall passe unexcepted at, heere, as a man whose Judgement shewes it is constant, and hath stood still, these five and twentie, or thirtie yeeres." From this, as well as from its general archaism, the inference has been drawn that the play belongs, at latest, to 1589. As Shakspere was not in London before 1587, then, a reasonable conjectural date for it is 1588. Its precise source is unknown. The story seems to have been familiar. Possibly the play, as we have it, is a retouched version of an older play called Titus and Vespasian, of which a German adaptation exists. The genuineness of Titus Andronicus has been much questioned, on the ground that it is unworthy of Shakspere; the arguments in its favor rest on Meres's allusion, and on the fact that it was included in the folio of 1623. If Shakspere's, it is probably his earliest work.] THE frequent doubt as to the genuineness of Titus Andronicus gains color from the place where the play is generally printed. In most editions of Shaks 1 Le., Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, circ. 1588. pere it occurs between Coriolanus and Romeo and Juliet. Thus placed, it seems little more than a monstrous tissue of absurdities, -a thing of which no author who wrote such tragedies as the others could conceivably have been guilty. Read by itself, however, particularly at a moment when one is not prepossessed by Shakspere's greater work, it does not seem so bad. Crude as it is in general conception and construction, free as it is from any vigorous strokes of character, it has, here and there, a rhetorical strength and impulse which sweep you on unexpectedly. In the opening scene, for example, where Andronicus commits to the tomb the bodies of his sons,1 who have fallen in battle, his halflyric lament has real beauty:— "In peace and honour rest you here, my sons; Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells, In peace and honour rest you here, my sons!" Or again, when Lavinia is brought to him, maimed and ravished, his speech,2 whoever wrote it, has a rude power of its own: "It was my deer; and he that wounded her Hath hurt me more than had he kill'd me dead: For now I stand as one upon a rock Environ'd with a wilderness of sea, Who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave, |