had no need, indeed, for he was a Master of Arts in the University of Cambridge," and consequently able to consult the original. But still he worked-perhaps for the greater facility on the popular English version. It is not of necessity, therefore, that Shakspeare must needs have been unlearned, because, in the composition of his classical dramas, he consulted the translated rather than the original version of his authority. The argument, if good against him, is good against Lodge; but applied to Lodge, it will not hold water; and applied to Shakspeare, it is equally irretentive.t But even were Farmer's argument more staunch than it is with reference to Plutarch, * See Introduction to the play, in Dodsley's col lection. it would leave the result quite inconclusive. "Much," says he, "of Shakspeare's matterof-fact knowledge is deduced from Plutarch." True; but whence is the remainder derived? That remainder is very abundant, and involves a copious and exact acquaintance with the respective national (as well as individual) character of the ancients, their mythology, their religion, their morals, their habits of life, and their modes of thought and expression. Whence had Shakspeare his familiar mastery over this field of learning and knowledge? Doctor Farmer does not attempt to throw any light on the subject; neither does he choose to grapple with the evidence furnished by those remarkable poems on which alone (or in conjunction with his sonnets) Shakspeare himself appears to have relied for permanent fame, and his contemporaries seem to have acknowledged his claims as a poet. We refer, of course, to his Venus and Adonis, and his Rape of Lucrece. These poems-the one a myth of ancient Greece, the other a legend of ancient Rome-evince a very considerable and, we are bold to say, minute and correct acquaintance with a very the literature, the manners, and the modes of thinking of the respective nations from acknowledged he (Octavius) sh'd fall under the whose literary remains they are derived. unequal combat. But if we read Dr. Farmer might be allowed to triumph over Upton, if he did not turn his victories over the critic into discredits on the poet. He certainly proves (against Upton) that in rendering the answer of Octavius to Antony's challenge, Shakspeare had consulted North's translation of Plutarch, and not the original. Shakspeare gives it thus (as from Octavius): -"let the old ruffian know I have many other ways to die." Antony and Cleop., A. S. "What a reply is this!" cries Mr. Upton. 'let the old ruffian know He hath many other ways to die,' " we have the poignancy and the very repartee of Cæsar in Plutark." Upon this Dr. Farmer remarks: "Most indisputably this is the sense of Plutarch, and given so in the modern translation; but Shakspeare was misled by the ambiguity of the old one." And so far the Doctor is right. Shakspeare consulted North; but when the critic thence infers his inability to read the original, he transgresses the bounds of fair inference, and involves writers whose learning he would be the last to dispute; for it is remarkable that Dryden has fallen into the very same mistake, and obviously from the same cause-not consulting the original Greek, but depending on the popular authority, whether North or Shakspeare. Thus: Ventidius. I heard you challenged him [Octavius]. What think'st thou was his answer? 'Twas so tame! All for Love, ii. 1. Was not Dryden a scholar? Nay, did he not translate Virgil, and parts at least of Ovid, Juvenal, Persius, and other Latin classics? Could he not read Greek? Nay, did he not translate Plutarch into the very modern version which Dr. Farmer alludes to ? * Criticism the most captious has been unable to detect in them a mistake; and Malone admits, that to him "they appear superior to any pieces of the same kind produced by Daniel or Drayton, the most celebrated writers of this species of narrative poetry that were then known," both of them university scholars, and men of acknowledged learning. Is it to be thought, then, that a young poet, wishing to establish for the first time a poetical character, and dedicating his productions to one of the most eminent of the nobles in the learned court of Elizabeth, himself a graduate of both the universities, and a distinguished patron of learning and its professors-is it to be imagined, we say, that on such an occasion our poet, or any aspirant for poetical renown, except a mere dunce, would have risked his character on subjects upon which his want of competent knowledge would have betrayed him into frequent blunders, and risked, if not totally marred, the object he had in view? Or, on the other hand, is it to be imagined that a * Notes at the conclusion of the Rape of Lucrece. man who has executed his task so admira- | of Nature needed no stilts to add to his ele bly was ignorant of the materials-the most vation; no wadding, to bombast his preten elementary of the literary materials-upon sions. He was rich enough in himself to which he was working? We would entreat depend on his own resources; and we be the candid reader to peruse the quiet sum-lieve that one of the most marked charac mary, or argument, in which the incidents of the Rape of Lucrece are prefixed to the poem, and then to say whether or not, in his opinion, it was drawn up by a man of competent knowledge, or whether the most exact scholar of his acquaintance could have done it with more easy skill and more clas- | sical mastery of the subject? But even those productions furnish Farmer with no proof of the author's learning; on the contrary, he finds in them nothing but the evidence of two things, so contradictory that one of them must needs be false: namely, an unfounded pretension to learning which he had not, and a modest confession of the ignorance under which he labored. Let us examine each. Shakspeare has prefixed to his Venus and Adonis a couplet from Ovid :— "Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo Pocula Castalia plena ministrat aqua." Upon which the Doctor observes: "But Shakspeare hath somewhere a Latin motto; and so hath John Taylor, and a whole poem upon it into the bargain;" and his inference is, that Shakspeare knew as little of the languages as this "honest John Taylor, the water-poet, who declares he never learned his accidence, and that Latin and French were to him heathen Greek ;" and yet whose works have 66 more scraps of Latin and allusions to antiquity, than are any where to be found in the writings of Shakspeare." If this representation be strictly true, John Taylor was a very singular man. Of his allusions to antiquity we shall make no count, because he, as well as Shakspeare, or any body else, might have picked up much. knowledge on the subject from English books then current; but for his scraps of Latin, which are, indeed, both numerous and aptly applied, he must either have understood their meaning, or used them by inspiration-or his books were not written by himself. But who except Farmer, and for what purpose but a derogatory one, ever thought of naming such men as Shakspeare and Taylor in the same category? However, the water-poet may have needed and sought a meretricious fame. Surely, the great Poet teristics of the highest intellectual power is the scorn of all affectation, the abstinence from all false glitter and borrowed plumage. When Robert Greene, in 1592,* railed at our poet as an upstart crow, beautified with the feathers" of his truly worthless contemporaries, we are told by the editor of the libel that he [Shakspeare] resented the indignity:t and we really are at a loss to know with what reason or propriety he could have done so, if in the following year (1593, when the Venus and Adonis was published) he was prepared to exhibit himself to his patron and the world as a pretender to learning, "beautified with the feathers" of a literature which he did not understand. We there fore believe that the claim to learning ostensibly put forth, not merely in his motto, but in the subject of his poem, was not an idle pretension, because as such it would have been an imposition on the noble friend whose patronage he was courting, and would on detection bring him to shame; and also, because the editor of the very first libel published on his literary fame apologizes for the wrong, and withdraws the charge, expressly on the grounds of our poet's integrity of character and admitted literary resources. Doctor Farmer could have given the subject but very slight consideration when he cast this sneer on the character of an ingenuous man. An opponent of his own, upon the subject in question, prefixed to his essay a Latin motto. Would he have felt justified in disabling his rival's character for learning by such a phrase as this: "Mr. Whalley has somewhere a Latin motto; but so has Taylor, the water-poet!" As well might an Greene's Groat'sworth of Wit, edited by H. Chettle, 1592. Kindheart's Dream, by H. Chettle, 1592. "Divers of worship," says the penitent editor, "have reported his uprightness of dealing, which ing, that approves his art." Whoever is acquainted argues his honestie and his facetious grace in writwith the use of the word art, with reference to letters, at the period in question, will perceive in the passage an admission of our poet's competence in such branches of learning as are taught at universities. Thus Greene, Nash, Chettle, &c., (Gabriel Harvey,) use the term art-master in the sense of one who had studied the art in a university enemy infer, from the absence of a Latin | sense, and to the same degree, was his second motto from his own essay on the learning of offering at the shrine of his patron "untuShakspeare, the Doctor's inability to furnish tored." We may rest assured that he one. Would the objection in either case be would not have ventured to affront the valid? Is it in any case an unprejudiced, a good taste of his accomplished friend and generous, or a candid one? Let any of our patron by sheltering under the protection readers suppose himself about to appear of his name a composition which he conbefore the public in print; would he, if he ceived likely to betray his deficiency in were so unlearned as Doctor Farmer repre- those attainments which were, at that time, sents Shakspeare to have been, prelude his the chief, if not the only passport to poetical labors with a motto from any of the learned reputation, and the possession of which are languages? No; for that would be an implied in the subject and title of his work. affectation of being what he was not-a scholar in the language assumed. Doctor Farmer himself would not, under the circumstances, do so. Why then should he impute to the greatest intellect, perhaps, that the world ever wondered at, an affectation and a fraud which he would himself scorn to practise; and why should we believe an inference at once so discreditable to an honest man, and so improbable in the case of any man of genius? But Farmer has another "irrefragable argument," founded on those very poems, of the poet's want of learning. Did not Shakspeare himself," quoth he, "confess it, when he apologized to his noble friend, the Earl of Southampton, for his untutored lines ?" True, the phrase occurs in his dedication of the Rape of Lucrece; and he offers another apology to the same noble friend, in his dedication of the Venus and Adonis, for his "unpolished lines." Now, what is the purport of either phrase, but the modest deprecation of superior merit, in which poets generally love to veil their own inward sense of the beauties which they feel it more becoming to have praised by others than to praise themselves? The passages are parallel and equivalent. The lines of the one poem are just as "untutored" as those of the other are "unpolished;" the amount of learning and polish in both are pretty fairly balanced, and the epithets so interchangeable, that either of them which first occurred to the poet's mind might have been used to convey the thought which he intended. It is only in the humble estimate of the author, that the lines of the Venus and Adonis are "unpolished;" in the judgment of his contemporaries, they were exquisitely polished and harmonious; and he whose ear was so sensible to all the melody of versification, could not have been unconscious of their charms. In the same The passage in question, therefore, is not a confession on the part of the poet of his ignorance of the learned languages; and it gives so little countenance to Doctor Farmer's argument, that, taken in its content, it affords the presumption that he was not unwilling to be thought a scholar competent to the task he had undertaken. Such an assumption on the part of such a man, (if fairly deducible from all the premises,) outweighs any possible amount of inferential criticism. Readers of the Farmer school, however, will not be so easily reclaimed. They will even be surprised at the fatuity of our undertaking, and question the sincerity of our reverence. "Strange, indeed," they will say, in the words of their coripheus, “strange that any real friends of our immortal POET should be still" [that is, after reading Doctor Farmer's Essay]"willing to force him into a situation which is not tenable: treat him as a learned man, and what shall excuse the most gross violations of history, chronology and geography?" And to this they will add false quantities in Latin names, together with sundry proofs of his ignorance of the modern languages. For our own part, we do not seek to place him in any but the humble position to which his ambition was confined. We do not arrogate for him a rank amongst the profoundly learned of his day. Our sole object is to show that he might have been a student in either of the universities, and thence carried away as much of the learning there taught as the average run of its graduates appear to have done; and if we can show that his works exhibit at least as much learning, and only the same kind of errors, as the works-whether poetical or dramatic-of the graduates of one or both of the universities, who were his contemporaries. we shall have achieved all that we aspire to. To begin, then, with the impeachment of his historical knowledge. In this department he has written dramatic histories; ten English, three Roman, and one Grecian, besides two English, one Scottish, one Roman, and three Greek legendary stories.* It will not be required, we suppose, that the legendary tales shall be justified in every point; and yet they are as true to the original authorities from whence they are drawn, so far as we know them, as it is possible to conceive them. We shall, therefore, pass them over, and apply ourselves to the histories. And first of the English histories. It must never be forgotten that these plays do not profess to be exact chronicles of the reigns from which they are respectively entitled. The historical play of Shakspeare does not profess to represent the entire transactions of a reign, but only such of them as, bearing upon one point, represent a revolution of dynasty, or some great change in the constitution. Let us glance at them for a moment in this light. The main interest of King John is the first great shock which the Papal supremacy received in England, preparatory to its final extinction in the reign of Henry VIII., with which two plays the historical series of our dramatic historian begins and ends. The intermediate series runs in such an uninterrupted se *Viz., English histories: King John; Richard II.; Henry IV., two parts; Henry V.; Henry VI, three parts; Richard III.; Henry VIII. English legends Lear, Cymbeline. Scottish legend: Macbeth. Roman histories: Coriolanus, Julius Cæsar, Antony and Cleopatra. Roman legend: the Rape of Lucrece. Greek history: Timon of Athens. Greek legends: Midsummer Night's Dream, Troilus and Cressida, and Venus and Adonis. The Midsummer Night's Dream, which we have numbered amongst the Greek legends, is founded throughout on Chaucer's Palamon and Arcite. So is the Two Noble Kinsmen of Fletcher; and this simple fact gave rise, we believe, to the supposition which the printer of the latter has embodied on its title-page, namely, that the play was "written by the ever-memorable worthies of the then time, Mr. John Fletcher, and Mr. William Shakspeare, Gent." That they both worked on the same story appears to us (after careful comparison) to be the sole foundation of the thought of its being a joint production. Fletcher, however, has kept close to the original; his rival lovers are knights; Shakspeare's are civilians; and whilst the lady-loves of the latter are both citizen's daughters, those of Fletcher are, the one a princess, the other the daughter of a jailor. quence, the ending of one and the beginning of another are so closely connected together that they seem to constitute less a number of independent dramas than a succession of scenes, arranged into parts convenient for dramatic representation. In this respect they bear a strong analogy to the Grecian system of Trilogies; and may thus perhaps be considered as a great epic drama, or a dramatic epopee, divided, like Spenser's Fairy Queen, into parts, books, and cantos, This great epic drama, then, (if we may be allowed to consider it so,) constitutes a scenic history of the changes of dynasty and constitution which took place in the interval between the accession of Richard II. and the death of Richard III., from the extinction of the Plantagenet line, to the succession of the line of Tudor; and embraces in its scope precisely the same time and the saine revolutions which Daniel meant to have comprised in his heroic poem of the "Civil Wars between the Houses of York and Lancaster," but from the completion of which he was prevented, either by want of encouragement or by death. In Richard II. we have the foundation and commencement of that long and bloody struggle between the rival houses which did not cease to ravage the land until the union of both in the persons of Henry VII. and his queen, and the establishment of the line of Tudor. In the two parts of Henry IV., we find the history (in each respectively) of the two rebellions which disturbed the reign of the usurper. Henry V. records the glories of the British conquest of France, and the union of the French and British crowns. The three parts of Henry VI. are a history of the loss of our French conquests, and the civil wars between the rival Roses, their origin and progress; and Richard III. brings them to a close; so that this part of the series might be called THE QUARREL OF THE ROSES. Henry VI. exhibits- one of the intermediate pieces could be fully understood on perusal, unless the preceding performance had been previously mastered. Of this any reader may convince himself by beginning his study of the series with Richard III., and so trying backwards up to Richard II. The experiment will convince him how exact the succession and dependence of one part upon another is, and how skilfully the poet has secured to each its necessary place; a circumstance which, we need hardly say, could not have happened, were the several pieces independent performances, and not regular parts of an orderly whole. epic drama of those civil wars which pre- | Richard II. to the end of Richard III., interpared the national mind, character, and in-woven and dovetailed, both in point of time stitutions of England for the great reforma- and matter, with the part foregoing, that not tion of religion which was even then impending. For we may observe that, as between the plays of King John and Richard II. there is a long interval of time, so, between those of Richard III. and Henry VIII. there is the unoccupied interval of a long reign; a reign pregnant indeed with civil changes, which, however important in the internal policy of the kingdom, bore no direct relation to the revolution in religion which was then in peace maturing itself for a sturdy contest with the Papal supremacy. Before the Reformed faith could be by law established in England, it was necessary that the intrusive supremacy of Rome should be broken down; and this was effected by the causes and through the agencies which form the sum and substance of our author's Henry VIII. In King John we find the beginning of this great end; in Henry VIII., its consummation. We therefore regard those plays as, respectively, the prologue and epilogue to the great dramatic epopee which lies between them; and believe the whole to be one complete poem, in which the author designed to give to his countrymen a popular and instructive view of the historic events by which the nation was purified and exalted, and prepared for the reception of that Reformation which, commenced by Edward VI., was completed under the auspices of the then reigning sovereign, Elizabeth. This was indeed a design of infinite grandeur, and worthy of the noblest intellect. That it was the design of our poet, may be inferred, without doubt, from the state in which he has bequeathed the performance to posterity. For whether the several parts of the performance were written and produced upon the stage in the exact order of time which the sequence of history requires, or otherwise, it is certain that we have them in the order and in the condition which he finally adopted for their proper order and condition, and in which he left them in the hands of his posthumous editors. If indeed they had been printed in the first edition of his collected works in any other order than that in which we find them, we should ourselves have been obliged to restore them to their natural sequence; for so closely is each succeeding part of the great drama, from That the design was executed with a competent knowledge and consummate ability must be admitted, when we consider that the series has become the great national book of instruction on the subject, and that the people of England have learned from it more of the history of that period than from the most authentic, exact and popular works of their professed historians. Shakspeare, indeed, "was no hunter of MSS." "Tis not the dramatist's business. "Aut famam sequere, aut sibi convenientia finge," is the precept of Horace to the dramatic poet. But as our poet, writing history, was not free to invent a fiction, we do not see what better he could have done than adopt the "famam"-the most popular account of the matters in hand which he could find. Daniel did the same in his "Civil Warres;" he copied from Hall's "Chronicle;" Shakspeare from Holinshed's; and whatever historical mistakes are to be found, either in the historical epic of the one or the epic drama of the other, are the mistakes, not of the respective poets, but of the chroniclers whom they followed. This much is certain, that Shakspeare's history of this period is just as correct as Daniel's. Now, Daniel was a man of admitted learning, proceeded to a master's degree at Oxford, and was a professed historiographer in prose as well as verse. If his errors, few and trifling, do not impeach his character for learning, may we not extend to his rival's case the generous sentiment of the Roman poet: «Verum ubi plura nitent in carmine, non ego paucis |