on literature. literature. The momentous advent of Surrey and Wyatt had revolutionised English poetry: the introduction of the Italian sonnet-form had bent its course in a foreign direcInfluence of tion. Those two noble friends and fellow-courtiers the Sonnets had naturalised Petrarch in England: Spenser, similarly, had depended, to a very great extent, upon his acquaintance with Boiardo and Ariosto. The work of leading back poetry from this exotic quarter was especially the work of Shakespeare; and it is in his Sonnets, the book of poems which in its entirety follows an utterly foreign and alien form of verse, that he wins back poetry to its really national character. Thus he makes the sonnet itself a vehicle for English thought and speech, and not for a style which is at its best but Anglicised Italian; and, in so doing, he makes the form itself purely national, enfranchising and recreating it. He is the true inventor of the English lyric, of the English sonnet, of all that is most light and lovable, of all that is most profound and most emotional in English poetry: he teaches his successors how to grasp a fleeting thought, to arrest a passing emotion, and to preserve it in the imperishable amber of verse. All this is true of the author of the Sonnets. And, this being so, what shall we say of the dramatist, of the poet who controlled the whole gigantic scale of human emotion and passion, even to the most remote and faintly-heard fraction of a semitone; who played upon human life as his perfectly-mastered instrument, improvising at will and transposing his keys as it pleased him; whose improvisations, noted down and varied by his hand, remain for ever our noblest music? If we are permitted to see for ourselves the smallest jot of that incomparable genius, to know but one small corner of that field from which exhaustless harvests are daily and yearly gleaned, we can hardly be thankful enough for the inestimable privilege. NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. A.-CLASSIFIED LIST OF I. HISTORY. Iegendary. (1.) ANCIENT.-Titus Andronicus (Tragedy). Probably an older play on the same subject-the Titus and Vespasian (1592)-not extant in English. A play called Lust's Dominion, attributed to Marlowe, and quoted in Charles Lamb's Selec tions, deals with much the same subject in the same way. Timon of Athens (Tragedy). Painter's Palace of Pleasure. North's Plutarch-life of Antony. Possibly Lucian's dialogue Timon, from which Boiardo had adopted his Timone. An older play, Timon of Athens (1600), may have suggested the general subject. (2.) MEDIEVAL.-Hamlet (Tragedy). An older play, Hamlet, probably by Thomas Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy. The Histoire de Hamlet in the Histoires Tragiques of François de Belleforest; which, in its turn, was borrowed from Saxo Grammaticus' Historia Danica. Belleforest's Hamlet was translated into English in 1608, after the play had appeared. King A (3.) ANCIENT BRITISH. Lear (Tragedy). Most of the material is to be found in Holinshed. play called The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his Three Daughters had appeared the year before the play itself (1605). The episode of Gloucester and his sons is drawn from Sidney's Arcadia (Bk. ii. ch. 10). "Hints for the speeches of Edgar when feigning madness were drawn from Harsnet's 'Declaration of Popish Impostures,' 1603" (Sidney Lee, Life of Shakespeare, pp. 241-2). Samuel Harsnet was master of Pembroke College, Cambridge; afterwards Bishop of Chichester and Norwich; Archbishop of York, 1628-31. Macbeth (Tragedy). Holinshed's Chronicle of Scottish History. Cymbeline (Tragicomedy). Groundwork of story from Holinshed, embroidered with an adaptation of Boccaccio's novel of the falsely accused Ginevra (Decamerone, day 2, nov. 9). Perhaps Shakespeare used the version of the same story to be found in the collection by "Kynde Kit of Kingston," called Westward for Smelts, the first known edition of which is, however, 1620. ii. Authentic. Casar (1.) ROMAN. - Julius (Tragedy). North's Plutarch (1579): lives of Cæsar, Brutus, and Antony. An earlier Julius Cæsar had been acted in 1594 by Shakespeare's company. Antony and Cleopatra (Tragedy). North's Plutarch: life of Antony. Coriolanus (Tragedy). North's Plutarch: life of Coriolanus. There is a story on the same theme in Painter's Palace of Pleasure. (2.) ENGLISH.-King John. An adaptation of The Troublesome Reign of King John (1591; not Bale's Kynge Johan); partly from Holinshed. ENG. LIT, The Tragedy of the Two Roses. Richard II. Mainly from Holinshed, and an earlier Henry VI, part i. Shakespeare's part (probably very small) derived from Holinshed. Henry VI, part ii. An older play called The first part of the Contention betwixt the two famous houses of York and Lancaster (published 1594). Henry VI, part iii." A similar play called The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (published 1595). Richard III. Holinshed and Hall. Possibly The True Tragedy of Richard III (published 1594). Henry VIII. Holinshed and Hall. Cavendish's Life of Wolsey, and, possibly, the poem by Thomas Storer of Christ Church, Oxford, on The Life and Death of Thomas Wolsey, Cardinal (1599). II. FICTION. Love's Labour's Lost (Comedy). No known source, although full of contemporary allusion. Two Gentlemen of Verona (Comedy). In all probability adapted from an older play, The History of Felix and Philomena (1584). The plot is to be found in the Diana Enamorada of Montemayor, under the sub-title of "The Shepherdess Filismena." Another romance laid under contribution was Barnabe Rich's Apollonius and Silla, adapted from Cinthio (see also Twelfth-Night). Comedy of Errors (Comedy). Possibly The History of Error, acted in 1576. Main plot follows the Menæchmi of Plautus, with details from the Amphitruo. Romeo and Juliet (Tragedy). The Italian sources are numerous, as the story was frequently treated. Shakespeare's plot is, most probably, P to be traced back to Bandello | through Arthur Broke's Romeus and Juliet (1562). There also is a version of the story in Painter's Palace of Pleasure (1567). dante and Ginevra (1583). A hint may have been furnished by Spenser (Faëry Queen, Book ii. canto 4, stanzas xix.-xxix.) As You Like It (Comedy). Lodge's Rosalynde: Euphues' Golden Legacy (1590). Hints from Chaucer (The Cook's Tale of Gamelyn) and the fencing-manual of Vincenzo Saviolo (1595). Twelfth-Night (Comedy). The pedigree is intricate. Two Italian plays, both called Gl Inganni (“The Cheats"), may have something to do with it. Another, called Gl' Ingan. Merchant of Venice (Comedy). Older English plays existed on the same subject-The Jew, mentioned by Stephen Gosson in The School of Abuse, and Robert Wilson's Three Ladies of London (1584), which contains the episode of the Jew Gerontus, and suggests a reminiscence of the ballad of Gernutus the Jew. The Gesta Romanorum contains, in two of its stories, the elements of Shake-nati (1538), was the expansion of a speare's double plot. But the whole treatment in embryo of the play is to be found in Ser Giovanni of Florence's book of tales, Il Pecorone (day 4, nov. 1). Midsummer-Night's Dream (Comedy). The plot is due to Shakespeare alone. For its mechanism he went to many sources, which, having little to do with the actual plot, it is unnecessary to mention. Lord Berners' translation of Huon of Bordeaux (1534) probably gave him Oberon and the Fairies. All's Well that Ends Well (Comedy). The story of Giletta of Narbonne, in Painter's Palace of Pleasure (taken from Boccaccio, Decamerone, day 3, nov. 9). Taming of the Shrew (Comedy). A revision of an older play, The Taming of a Shrew (1594). The underplot is partly from Gascoigne's Supposes, an adaptation of Ariosto's I Suppositi. Merry Wives of Windsor (Comedy). Probably from Giov. Francesco Straparola's Tredici piacevoli notti (iv. 4), or the adaptation, "The Two Lovers of Pisa," in Tarleton's News out of Purgatory. Hints may have been furnished by Il Pecorone (day 1, nov. 2), and a story in Westward for Smelts (see ante, Cymbeline). Much Ado about Nothing (Comedy). Much is original. For the groundwork of the plot, the Hero episode, there are two Italian sources: the 22nd novel of Bandello and the fifth canto of the Orlando Furioso. Probability inclines to the second, which had already been dramatised as The History of Ario novel by Bandello. An English adaptation of the same tale by Barnabe Rich, called Apollonius and Silla (1581), is probably the direct ancestor of Shakespeare's play. Many of Bandello's novels_came to England through the French medium of Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques. The play contains a reference, in the words "the lady of the Strachy" (Act ii. sc. 5), to the novel of Bandello which suggested Webster's Duchess of Malfi; but the garbled word "Strachy" for Strozzi, seems to indicate familiarity with a translation rather than with the original. Troilus and Cressida (Tragicomedy). A previous play by Dekker and Chettle, Troilus and Cressida, now lost, seems to be the origin. There was plenty of English material for the story-e.g. Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Lydgate's Troy Book, Caxton's Recuyles, or Destruction of Troy. Chapman's Homer—that is, as much of it as was published up to this time-was probably of use, but the material was obviously medieval rather than contemporary. Othello (Tragedy). Cinthio's novel of Othello (in the Ecatommithi, decad. iii. nov. 3). Measure for Measure (Tragicomedy). Cinthio's novel of Epitia (Ecatommithi, decad. viii. nov. 5). and also his drama on the same theme; with Whetstone's adaptation in his ten-act play of Promos and Cassandra (1578). Pericles (Comedy). Gower's story of Apollonius of Tyre in the Confessio Amantis. Lawrence Twyne, in his Pattern of Painful Adventures (1576), translated it from the French. George Wilkins, later (1608) founded a novel on the play. Winter's Tale (Tragi-comedy). Greene's Pandosto, the Triumph of Time (1588), which, in later versions (after 1648), is called Dorastus and Fawnia. The Tempest (Comedy). Source unknown. Idea derived from Sir George Somers' discovery of the Bermudas in 1609, recorded in 1610 by Sylvester Jourdain. Jacob Ayrer (d. 1605) wrote a play called Die schöne Sidea, not unlike the Tempest in plot, of which it is just possible that Shakespeare may have heard. The Two Noble Kinsmen (Tragicomedy). Chaucer's Knight's Tale. Two plays on the same subject have been lost-viz. Richard Edwardes' Palemon and Arcyte (1566), and another called Palamon and Arsett (1594). B.-BOOKS USEFUL IN THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE. TEXT. (1.) The Cambridge Shakespeare, ed. W. G. Clark and W. A. Wright (9 vols. 1st ed. 1863-6; 2nd ed. 1887; 3rd ed. 10 vols. 1893), gives in footnotes all the readings of the early editions. (2.) Lionel Booth's reprint of the First Folio (3 parts, 1861, 1863, 1864). EDITIONS WITH NOTES. —(1.) The Variorum Shakespeare of 1821, known as "Boswell's Malone (21 vols.), was founded on Edmund Malone's (1741-1812) edition of the plays (10 vols. 1790) and edited by James Boswell the younger. (2.) The Variorum Edition now in publication,ed. Dr. Harold Howard Furness of Philadelphia (vols. i.-xii. 18711900), will, when finished, supersede the 1821 edition; but at present (1900) only twelve plays have been published. (3.) Other well-known English and American editions of the present century are those of Alexander Dyce (1798–1869), 9 vols. 1857; Howard Staunton (18101874), 3 vols. 1868-70; Charles Knight ("Pictorial" edition), 8 vols. 1838-43: John Payne Collier, 8 vols. 1841-4, and, again, privately printed, 1878; Richard Grant White, Boston, Mass., 12 vols. 1857-65. More recent than these are Mr. F. A. Marshall's "Henry Irving Shakespeare," 8 vols. 1888-90, and the selected plays published in separate volumes by the Clarendon Press (ed. W. G. Clark and W. A. Wright). C. Prætorius' reprints of the quartos (1885-6) are most useful to students. GLOSSARIES, etc.-Mrs. CowdenClarke's Concordance to the Plays (1845); Mrs. H. H. Furness' Concordance to the Poems (1875): Mr. John Bartlett's Concordance to Plays and Poems (1895); Alexander Schmidt's Shakespeare Lexicon, 2 vols. 1874. GRAMMAR, VERSIFICATION. Dr. E. A. Abbott's Shakespearian Grammar (1st ed. 1869, new ed. 1893); W. Sidney Walker's Shakespeare and Shakespeare's Versification (1854); Charles Bathurst's Difference in Shakespeare's Versification (1857); Mr. F. G. Fleay's Shakespeare Manual (1876). SOURCES.-J. P. Collier and W. C. Hazlitt's Shakespeare's Library (1875); F. Douce's Illustrations of Shakespeare (1807); Simrock On the Plots of Shakespeare's Plays (Shakespeare Society, 1850). Some of the old plays and novels on which Shakespeare worked have been reprinted, chiefly by the Shakespeare Society (1841-53) and the New Shakspere Society (founded 1874), whose Allusion-Books most valuable. are COMMENTARIES, etc. (a) ENGLISH.-S. T. Coleridge's Notes and Lectures on Shakespeare and other Poets, collected and ed. T. Ashe, 1883; W. Hazlitt's Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817); Professor Dowden's Shakspere, his Mind and Art (1874); A. C. Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare (1880); Mrs. Jameson's Characteristics of (Shakespeare's) Women (1833); Lady Martin's Shakespeare's Heroines (1885); Richard G. Moulton's Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist (1885); F. S. Boas' Shakspere and his Predecessors (1895). (b) FOREIGN. (1.) American : H. N. Hudson's Shakespeare, his Life, Art, and Character (1881). (2.) German: A. W. Schlegel's Shakespeare and the Drama (English | Shakespeare: a Literary Biography translation, 1815); Heine's Shakespeare's Heroines (translation 1895); Ulrici's Shakespeare's Dramatische Kunst (1839; several edd. in English); Gervinus, Shakespeare Commentaries (1848-9; best English ed. 1875); F. A. T. Kreyssig, Vorlesungen über Shakespeare (1858) and Shakespeare-Fragen (1871). Kreyssig's work is the best æsthetic commentary in German since Schlegel, although the tendency to overrate German criticism has attached an immense importance to Gervinus and Ulrici. Hertzberg's prefaces to certain plays (in the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft's edition of Schlegel and Tieck's translation) are very valuable with regard to the metrical question. The D. S.-Gesellschaft has also published a volume yearly since 1865, containing many articles of the highest importance, including Karl Elze's Essays (translated (1874). (3.) French: Guizot, Sur la Vie et les Euvres de Shakespeare and Shakespeare et son Temps (1852); Alfred Mézières Shakespeare, ses Euvres et ses Critiques (1860); Victor Hugo's Shakespeare (1864). (4.) The William Shakespeare of the Danish scholar Georg Brandes (English translation, 2 vols. 1898) has provoked considerable attention. It was first published at Copenhagen (1895). Although most European and some Asiatic countries have produced some translations, and some desultory criticisms have appeared in Russia, Spain, etc., no other country has produced any elaborate critical work. BIOGRAPHY.-The obscure life of Shakespeare has been treated by most of the editors and commentators; but their researches, as a whole, are concerned with the stage history of his time rather than with his biography. The most important stage in this difficult investigation was the publication of the voluminous Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, by J. O. Halliwell (better known to-day as Halliwell-Phillipps), 1881. The last (7th) edition of this, much increased, appeared in 1887. Previously, Samuel Neil's Shakespeare: a Critical Biography (1861), and Karl Elze's German William (1876, translated 1888), were use- C.-LIST OF PLAYS FALSELY Arden of Feversham, a play of |