Athens, Pericles, and Henry VIII) which are generally classed with Shakespeare's works, but which awaken grave questions as to collaborative effort, some students even insisting that with such a work as 1 Henry VI he had nothing at all to do. The so-called Shakespeare Apocrypha accordingly starts one on an interesting but baffling trail, and one that raises all sorts of questions. "Almost every class of play is here represented, and one class-that of domestic tragedy—finds in Arden of Feversham and in A Yorkshire Tragedy, two of its most illustrious examples. The Senecan tragedy of vengeance is represented by Locrine; the history or chronicle play by Edward III, The First Part of the Contention, The True Tragedie, The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England, Sir Thomas More, and Cromwell, and, less precisely, by The Birth of Merlin and Faire Em. The romantic comedy of the period is illustrated by Mucedorus, The Merry Devill and The Two Noble Kinsmen, while The London Prodigall and The Puritane are types of that realistic bourgeois comedy which . . . won a firm hold upon the affections of the play-going community." The Two Noble Kinsmen, which makes the strongest claim of all of these plays, was based on the story of Palamon and Arcite in Chaucer's Knight's Tale and published in 1634 as the work of "the memorable worthies of their time, Mr. John Fletcher and Mr. William Shakespeare, Gent." Of the plays undoubtedly Shakespeare's there are no manuscripts that have come down to us. In general while a writer of the day bestowed care on the form of a poem that was to be given to the public, he seems to have felt 14 Moorman: "Plays of Uncertain Authorship Attributed to Shakespeare," C. H. E. L., V, 266. that he had no further interest in a play that he sold to a theatrical company. One or two exceptions occur, however; and we can see both the purpose of the author and the ridicule he awakened when in 1616 Ben Jonson issued a folio edition of his "Works." Before 1623 seventeen of Shakespeare's plays appeared in single quarto editions. In this year, however, two of old colleagues and friends, John Heminge and Henry Condell, with considerable pains brought out what is now known as the first folio edition of the dramatist's work. For the twenty plays that it printed for the first time the First Folio must of course be the chief authority; for the remaining seventeen it must sometimes share authority with the quartos. A second folio, a reprint of the first, appeared in 1632; a third, of 1663, was reprinted in 1664 with the addition of Pericles and six even more doubtful plays; and the fourth folio appeared in 1685. In 1709 Nicholas Rowe set a high standard for later editors by an edition in which he modernized spelling, corrected grammar, added in many cases lists of characters, and made many emendations. In 1725 Alexander Pope brought out his much discussed edition. He had excellent materials on which to work, but he lacked the sympathy with his subject necessary in an editor and he made many mistakes. His errors were exposed in Lewis Theobald's Shakespeare Restored (1726), which study was devoted mainly to Hamlet. Pope replied by placing Theobald in the Dunciad and succeeding in obscuring his reputation until comparatively recent years, when modern scholarship has given him the recognition he deserves. Since the days of Pope and Theobald editions have appeared with increasing frequency, and it would now take pages merely to enumerate these.15 Special importance attaches, however, to the monumental Variorum Edition, which began to be issued in 1871 by H. H. Furness, which is still carried forward by his son, and which attempts to digest all the criticism on a particular play. The best single volume of recent years is the Cambridge edition edited by William Allan Neilson. The Neilson text is the result of independent study and is used as the basis of the separate little volumes in the "Tudor Shakespeare." The question of Shakespeare's reputation and of criticism based upon him of course opens a wide field-one so vast in fact that only slight reference can be made to it here. The high points in the study are the Restoration attitude that sought to refine Shakespeare's works, the rationalistic and didactic point of view represented by such a critic as Rymer, the attitude of the French classicist Voltaire, the interest that developed so rapidly in Germany near the close of the eighteenth century, the rather idolatrous admiration at the height of romanticism in England, and more recent studies of the dramatist's mind and art. An interesting field of course is that of actual presentation on the stage in England, in America, and on the continent of Europe; while hardly less fascinating to the earnest student is the influence in music and painting. Societies are still formed for the study of the dramatist's works, his plays have a high place in colleges and high schools in the United States, and even more in the future than in the past he seems destined to be a force linking the culture of America with that of England and the world. 36. Shakespeare's Greatness.-Shakespeare was the 18 See C. H. E. L., V, 472-84. central figure of the Elizabethan drama, contemporary with both Lyly and Fletcher. He is not to be regarded as some great abnormal or isolated genius, but as eminently a man of his age. He came upon the scene at a time when national feeling ran high and when all England was uplifted by a spirit of hope. One common custom of the period was for a man to use stories and plots wherever he could find them, so that one of the first impressions that one gains from a study of Shakespeare's sources is that of something very like plagiarism. We can best measure his success, however, when we place his achievement by the side of that of others who had at hand the same materials that he had. He then appears more and more as the unequaled artist in technique and characterization. No one else had such insight into human motive; no one else has created characters so lifelike. Finally, he is the poet incomparable not only of England but of all ages and the world. He has his own distinctive note, and he is master of all the sources of his instrument; yet he is not eccentric. He is with us in "the dark backward and abysm of time," or as "the unfolding star calls up the shepherd; "he "knows all qualities with a learned spirit, of human dealings." With him we live and love and dream and hope. He beckons us to all things beautiful-and to God. SHAKESPEARE'S CHAPTER VI LATER CONTEMPORARIES 'AND THE DECLINE OF THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA The 37. General Characteristics of the Period. The present chapter is concerned primarily with the story of the English Drama, exclusive of Shakespeare, from about the year 1596 to the closing of the theatres in 1642. The earlier of these dates is given because it marks the beginning of actual production on the part of Shakespeare's later contemporaries; and in connection with the great dramatist's later work we have already remarked the influences that were brought to bear upon him in his later years, in a very slight measure perhaps from the realistic comedy of Jonson, and in a much larger degree from the more romantic work of Beaumont and Fletcher. tradition of tragedy, so well held aloft by Kyd and Shakespeare, was preserved in the work of Webster, with which playwright indeed the drama of revenge and horror reached its culmination. Other men of the period have their distinctive merits: Dekker, for instance, is possessed of a wholesome geniality of temper that has generally endeared him to lovers of literature; Massinger's plays are of unusual technical excellence; and Shirley has distinct poetic quality. In the earlier years of the century also, in amateur or court circles, the pastoral play or the masque flourished. More and more, however, the stand |