Some Recent Books on the Elizabethan Drama

THE publishers of the new “Elizabethan Shakspere ” give three reasons for its inception: —

“1. Shakspere is in many passages an unintelligible author to those who read him without a knowledge of the wordforms and word-meanings, the pronunciation, the syntax, and the idioms of Elizabethan English.

“2. The advance in the knowledge of Shakspere and of Elizabethan English that scholarship has made during the last thirty years is greater than the advance made during the whole preceding century.

“3. The last preceding text of the plays published is the ' Cambridge ’ text, which was begun fifty years ago. There is, therefore, no previous edition of Shakspere that contains the accumulated wealth of modern scholarship.”

The first premise of this syllogism is unquestionable; the second is probably unexceptionable; but the third statement involves something very like a quibble, and uses “accumulated wealth of modern scholarship ” in a very limited sense. May the ten invaluable volumes of the Variorum Edition of Dr. Furness be counted out in this way simply because all of Shakespeare’s plays have not yet appeared in them ? Is it not true that, though the Cambridge Edition was begun forty years ago, it has been reëdited by Dr. Wright within fifteen years? If the Elizabethan Shakspere is to justify itself, then, it should either provide what neither the Cambridge Edition, in its latest form, nor the Variorum volumes supply, or its editor must be able to issue, more rapidly than Dr. Furness, volumes at least equally good.

Recent editions of Shakespeare have led students to expect variorum volumes to provide, with a scholarly text, an elaborate critical apparatus, — material as to the sources of the play, the verse, the dramatic methods, and even the different interpretations of the characters given by critics and by a class too often neglected by Shakespearean critics, but in many cases best fitted to interpret, — the actors. Much of this the Elizabethan Shakspere omits, or merely touches. In treating the characterization of Macbeth, its editor gives, somewhat dogmatically, a personal interpretation. The emphasis in the volume is upon the language of Shakespeare: indeed, study of Shakespeare’s English seems to be the limited use of “scholarship ” in the prospectus.

Professor Liddell has prepared himself widely on Elizabethan English, and his attitude on the First Folio text is a relief: when its phrasing, however strange to our ears to-day, can be justified by Elizabethan usage, it must stand untouched. He has sought carefully, too, for Elizabethan illustrations to explain words and phrases which have been troublesome in the past. But it is not clear for just what readers he intends this edition. The forty volumes, of which only one, Macbeth, has as yet appeared, cost $12.50 apiece, a price which means a market only among libraries, wealthy bibliophiles, and students who may be compelled to afford the book because it has proved itself indispensable. Yet, the glossing suggests readers who are approaching not merely Shakespeare, but Elizabethan English for the first time, and therefore know nothing of its simplest idioms and commonest uses. Surely persons not of this class will hardly need to be told that prythee is Elizabethan for pray thee, and that, all in all is but toyes means, the sum of things, everything. One wonders, too, whether a reader who speaks present-day English with any sense of the meaning of his words needs to be told that serious in There ’s nothing serious in mortalitie means important, of value. Yet these examples, are from one page, chosen at randomThe fact is, this edition is, in the matter of language, so over-annotated, that, it well-nigh negatives thought by a reader, — surely not the desideratum in opening up our older literature. If, resenting the amount of annotation, a reader tries to lose himself in the play itself, he finds it broken up into such small patches by the enframing notes that an absorbed reading of it is almost impossible.

The publishers evidently feel considerable pride in returning to the custom among early printers of setting the text of annotated editions in a framework of notes, and declare this Elizabethan Shakspere “the most beautiful set of books ever issued from an American press.” On that declaration only an expert in printing is competent to pass final judgment. Certainly the type is handsome and clear. Has it been shown, however, that our admiration of the old editions depends at all upon this arrangement of the notes as a framework to the text ? The writer has supposed that it was given to what rightly claims praise in this edition, the clearness and beauty of the type. Far too often these pages suggest a volume entitled Illustrations of Elizabethan English, with Interlineations by Wm. Shakspere. Certainly a sequential reading of these patches of text is difficult and unattractive.

Because of the large amount of unnecessary annotation it is hard to decide just what is the real addition made by the Elizabethan Shakspere to the knowledge of Elizabethan English already easily accessible. To the writer it does not seem large. Certainly any student must miss in this edition much, provided by the Variorum of Dr. Furness, which he has found invaluable in his study of Shakespearean plays — as plays.

The long-promised first volume of Representative English Comedies has appeared. Its purpose is, by selected plays and by monographs covering periods from which no play is given, to represent the development of English comedy from the beginnings of the English drama to Shakespeare. John Heywood’s Play of the Wether and his delightful Johan Johan, the Husband, Tyb, the Wyfe, and Syr Jhan, the Preest, Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister, Gammer Gurton’s Nedle (W. Stevenson ?), Lyly’s Alexander and Campaspe, Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale, Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and Henry Porter’s Two Angry Women of Abingdon are the plays given. Their editors are, in order, Mr. A. W. Pollard, Professor Flügel, Mr. Henry Bradley, Professor Baker, Professor Gummere, and, for the last two plays, the editor-in-chief, Professor Gayley. He contributes, also, the opening monograph, an Historical View of the Beginnings of English Comedy. Professor Woodberry writes of Greene’s Place in Comedy, and Professor Dowden of Shakespeare as a Comic Dramatist.

Readiness to break with conventional, but groundless, or over - cautious statements of past students of our drama is, perhaps, the most striking characteristic of the book. Even Professor Gayley’s opening monograph so adjusts the old facts to the newer theories that a well-worn subject is made interesting. It is, for instance, a pleasure to see the probability of French influence on John Heywood and the interludes of his time squarely faced, not minimized or dodged. In this volume, not only is Heywood’s Johan Johan made, for the first time, really accessible, but Heywood himself is given the prominent place he deserves among the predecessors of Shakespeare. Professor Flügel contributes some new light on Nicholas Udall, and Professor Woodberry for the first time individualizes Greene among the dramatists of 1585—92. Incidentally he makes quite clear why Greene’s plays are not the “imperfectly drawn tea ” with which J. R. Lowell waved them aside in his Elizabethan Dramatists.

In one instance, however, it seems to the writer that the receptiveness to new ideas is carried too far. It has long been clear that the case for Bishop John Still as the author of Gammer Gurton’s Nedle was not conclusive, and that the case for John Bridges was unconvincing; in this volume Mr, Bradley advances a new claimant, William Stevenson, Fellow of Christ Church, Cambridge. It must be granted, from the title-page of the only extant edition of the play, that a “Mr. S.” seems to have been the author, and the place of its production, Christ’s College. It may be granted, too, that general probability and internal evidence point to a date of composition considerably earlier than 1575, the date of the extant edition ; but beyond this it is hard to follow Mr. Bradley in his reasoning, which leads to William Stevenson as the author. He points out that on July 22, 1563, Colwell, the publisher twelve years later of Gammer Gurton’s Nedle, paid for a license for a play, Diccon of Bedlam, and declares it “a fair presumption, ” because Diccon of Bedlam is a character in Gainmer Gurton’s Nedle, that the second play is “in substance identical ” with the first. Surely this must seem a huge assumption if one recalls the frequent similarity of title between Elizabethan plays. Who ventures to declare King Leir and His Three Daughters, The Taming of a Shrew, and the lost Troilus and" Cressida of Dekker and Cliettle, " in substance identical ” with Shakespeare’s plays with similar titles ? Critics are still wondering whether there was any connection between the Comedy of Umors entered in Henslowe’s Diary and Jonson’s later Every Man in His Humour, but no one seriously maintains that they were “in substance identical.” In 1559 Mr. Bradley finds in the records of Christ’s College, “Spent at Mr. Stevenson’s plaie, 5s,” and says: “As no evidence to the contrary lias been found, it appears highly probable that the ' Mr. S. ’ of Gammer Gurton’s Nedle was William Stevenson of Christ’s College.” Surely absence of proof either for or against a theory does not tip the scales of critical justice. This is the argument of lynch law. Mr. Bradley meets the possible objection that the title-page speaks of the play in 1575 as represented “not long ago ” by the suggestion that Colwell reprinted the title-page of Diccon, only changing the name. Is it not curious that he should change the name and not so obvious an error as “played not long ago,” referring to a date sixteen years before? Why not suppose that, at a revival of Diccon not long before 1575, the name of the play was changed, and that to some such revival the “not long ago” refers? But there is no proof that the plays are “in substance identical; ” and, even if that were proved true, there is no proof that William Stevenson wrote either. Surely, then, to put his name on the title-page in this volume, without even a query, is hardly cautious.

Naturally, in preparing plays like these for publication, editors become interested in minutiæ of their subjects, but discussion of them in a book for the general reader may unwisely distract his attention or bore him till he is unwilling to read farther. Interesting as Professor Gayley’s discussion of the chronology of Greene’s plays (some twenty-eight pages) may be to a special student of Greene, might it not have been better to print it in some learned publication, giving here only the conclusions, with references to the article ? Certainly it is enough to daunt any one except the special investigator. Perhaps the pages on the metrics of Greene may seem open to the same criticism, but Professor Gayley’s insistence that only after such an examination of Greene’s verse can it safely be emended is sound, and has needed stating.

The preparation of these texts has brought out some valuable bibliographical information. Mr. Pollard has discovered that the copy of the Play of the Wether in the Pepys Collection at Magdalene College, Cambridge, is a complete copy of the edition of 1533, heretofore known only in an incomplete form. Professor Gay ley gives reasons for identifying the so-called 1599 edition of Friar Bacon mentioned by Dyce, Grosart, and Ward, as the 1630 edition.

It is a pity that much time elapsed between the casting of some of the contributions to this volume and its publication, for, as a consequence, an editor is at times unjustly made to seem ignorant of important studies of his subject. It is startling to any one accustomed to use Brandi’s by no means new Quellen und Forschungen to read Mr. Pollard’s words: “At the time I write, the Play of the Wether has not been reprinted since the sixteenth century, ” but Mr. Pollard’s introduction to the Heywood plays evidently antedates Brandl’s book. Yet, for its critical attitude toward conventions of our dramatic history, for its texts, the suggestiveness of its critical essays, this first volume of Representative English Comedies is sure to be a useful book. It is one more step in a much needed re-writing of the details of the history of the English drama.

Mr. Bond has certainly made every effort to give definitiveness to his Complete Works of John Lyly. He faces all the puzzling questions raised by the biography of John Lyly; he gives reprints of the early editions of Lyly’s work which seem to him best, collating them with all other editions known to him; he goes minutely into the bibliography of each publication; he prints full notes for each; he writes essays on Euphues and Euphuism, on Lyly as a Playwright, notes on Sentence Structure in Euphues, Italian Influence on Lyly, and The Allegory in Endimion, and numerous introductions; in a “doubtful ” list he includes The Maid’s Metamorphosis, the anti-Martinist poem, A Whip for an Ape, and parts of Mar-Martin; and at the end of volume i. he adds some seven entertainments, at the end of volume iii. some seventy poems not heretofore assigned to Lyly. It is interesting to note the change in the editor as he has worked at his long labor. The introductory Life, of volume i., has a certain jauntiness, a lack of tolerance for views other than his own, a readiness to settle all mooted questions, which passes as he settles to his long and difficult task and realizes that no man amid evidence so tangled, facing the impossibility of finding much desired evidence, can hope to convince even a majority of his readers of the truth of all his theories or guesses. In the second mood, shown in the treatment of the texts and their notes, Mr. Bond is almost unexceptionable. Unfortunately, a third stage develops, known well by every student who has made the work of some Elizabethan stylist — Donne, Marlowe, Marston — the subject of special investigation. Soon such a worker comes to see Donne, Marlowe, or Marston in almost everything of the period unassigned, and, last stage of all, even in work already assigned. Mr. Fleay’s useful Chronicle of the English Drama affords numerous instances of this temporary critical astigmatism. Mr. Bond grows to feel that he can detect Lyly where his presence lias never been suspected. Now that he has found a MS. of The Bee, in which it is assigned to Lyly (III. p. 437), that may prove to be the dramatist’s, but the writer doubts the acceptance of most of the other new ascriptions. Certainly some errors must be weeded out, such as giving to Lyly (in No. 57,) not unfamiliar lines of Spenser. The identifications, in the entertainments as well as in the poems, rest, in too many cases, on mere metrical similarities, or on a use of similes and metaphors common to these poems and Lyly elsewhere. But nowhere is the frank imitation of the Elizabethans in form and substance more evident than in the song-books, from which Mr. Bond culls most of the poems. It is a great pity that the Life was not written last, for then its tone would surely be more judicial and its conclusions would have been corrected by the discoveries Mr. Bond made near the end of his labors (printed as a Biographical Appendix). They are, a copy, in the Bodleian Library, of the second of the so-called “begging-letters” dated 1601, which Mr. Bond believes finally settles the long-mooted question of the dates of the two letters, and also, four other interesting letters of Lyly. (See I. pp. 389—396.) The Life needs re-writing because the date 1601 for the second begging-letter disturbs an assumption of Mr. Bond’s, important in his argument, that Lyly was vice-master of Paul’s in 1585, and because, as Professor Littledale has shown (Athenæum, February 14, 1903), he quite overlooked the evidence that during the period in which he urges that Lyly was clerk in the Revels Office, one Packenham held that position.

Much of Mr. Bond’s writing is controversial, — in the introductions to Euphues and Endimion especially, — for he dissents sharply from the reasons assigned by Professor Baker for the delay in publishing Euphues and His England, and, though he accepts the allegorical significance of Endimion, denies that it was written in Leicester’s behalf, places it in 1586, and decidedly changes former identifications of the minor characters. This is not the place for detailed examination of Mr. Bond’s argument on these matters, but, though the questions may, in the light of Mr. Bond’s ideas, need reëxamination, they are certainly still open for discussion.

When one turns to the texts, their notes, and the bibliographical material, Mr. Bond’s work compels almost unqualified admiration. He clearly establishes the superiority of the quartos over Blount’s collective edition of the plays. He distinguishes deftly among early editions of Euphues and His Anatomie of Wit, heretofore confused or incorrectly dated. His texts give one a pleasant sense of accuracy. In the textual notes he shows resource, wide reading, and large results. Never before have so many of Lyly’s curious comparisons and illustrations been hunted home. Nor has his debt to Pettie’s Palace of Pleasure heretofore been made as clear as it is in the notes to Euphues. Indeed, it is in these bibliographies, texts, and notes, that this edition reveals its permanent value. Whatever its faults, its merits would have justified Mr. Bond in placing at the end of the third volume the motto the Elizabethans were so fond of using, — " Opus exegi quod nec Jovis ira nec ignis.”

George P. Bak er.