It must be laboriously collected from a thousand sources, its development must be studied, its direction ascertained, its forces weighed, ere we can estimate its general character. Now no author is so constantly judged, even by scholars, by the standard of our age as Shakespeare. It is true, no author can so well afford to be judged by the standard of any age. But if we remain blind to the fact that our great poet breathed in another atmosphere of life than ours, was surrounded by influences which have become foreign to us, and that he was to his latest breath a child of his age, entering into all its hopes and fears with intense interest and sympathy, how shall we be able to summon up before our mind's eye a true picture of the man Shakespeare? And without a knowledge of the man, it is in vain to try to understand the poet. To get at this knowledge of the man then, we must try to understand the age in which he lived. We must trace his development, and measure the influence of his predecessors and contemporaries on him. A good deal has been done towards the study of Shakespeare's immediate predecessors, and more remains to be done. But, in order to come to a trustworthy result, it is not only necessary to study Shakespeare's predecessors and contemporaries. We must also study his successors, if we will measure with any degree of exactness the forces which were at work in his time, under the influence of which his mind was formed. Whilst acknowledging the great amount of good done by the New Shakspere Society, I consider it a great mistake that they are, with the exception of some few articles, so exclusively Shakespearean. They often lose sight of the true starting-point, that everything tending to illustrate his age tends to throw some light on Shakespeare. Now though the question to be treated of in the present article, is of a very special nature, it will be seen in the course of the investigation, that its decision depends on causes which were at work in Shakespeare's time, and which exercised a very appreciable influence on him. It must therefore not be regarded as a question apart, but must be viewed as forming a portion of the general movement of the age a movement which, as we, in our age, move in another direction, we have, in a great measure, consigned to oblivion. In coming to a decision as to the author, or authors, of a doubtful play, the artistic form of the work requires more consideration in the period of the later Drama than in the Shakespearean, or preShakespearean period. This is a natural result of the growth of that form of literature. It was in its childhood when Shakespeare began his literary career, and nowhere is its course more clearly mirrored than in his works. Confining our attention for the present entirely to metrical style, if we compare the metre of, say, The Two Gentlemen of Verona with that of The Tempest, we shall get a measure of the metrical difference between Marlowe and Massinger, the two extremes of the metrical movement. The history of this movement of the development of blank verse has yet to be written, and it is a subject well worth any labour that can be bestowed upon it. That poetic form which for nearly a century, from Marlowe to Milton (there are good reasons which I cannot enter into here for keeping within these limits), was the vehicle of the sublimest thoughts of the greatest minds of the age, must, in the course of its development, continually offer points of interest to an attentive observer. It is not my intention here to offer even a sketch of this development, but it is necessary to call attention to some of the features it presented at various times. I do so the more readily that this field of investigation is comparatively neglected by German scholars. The late Professor Hertzberg called attention to the gradual growth of double endings (weibliche endungen), in Shakespeare's metrical style. They increase slowly from a very small percentage to 35 per cent. This difference will be best appreciated by comparing two extracts from the two plays which stand first in our editions, The Tempest and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. From the latter play we take the Duke's speech III, 1, 22: >> Proteus, I thank thee for thine honest care; That which thyself hast now disclosed to me.« Compare these lines with The Tempest III (opening speech): >>There be some sports are painful, and their labour Delight in them sets off: some kinds of baseness Are nobly undergone, and most poor matters Point to rich ends. This my mean task I need hardly say that the former extract belongs to a very early play, while the latter belongs to a very late one. The difference between the two extracts is easier to feel than to describe. Only a few of the more tangible points of difference can be made plain. The others can only be judged of by the ear. The first, though by no means the most important point we shall mention is that of the double endings. In the first extract there are none, in the second, if we count >> crabbed«, there are 4 in 8 lines. It is not contended that this is a correct representation of the averages of double endings in the earlier and the later plays, but the extracts are undoubtedly typical. The general movement of Shakespeare's verse is from the almost strictly regular blank verse of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, to the 33 per cent double endings of The Tempest. But the double ending is a mere mechanical addition to the length of the line. It does not interfere with its organic structure. It was used simply to break the wearisome monotony of the verse, which was felt to be especially unnatural in the drama. It was perhaps for the same reason that Shakespeare used rhyme so frequently in his earlier plays. At any rate his rhymes become rarer in proportion as his verse acquires variety and flexibility. Neither double endings nor rhyme however are so constant in their character that they can be relied upon alone to determine the chronological order of the plays, as Fleay at first claimed for them. They do serve to distinguish between a very early and a very late play, but are not sufficient to distinguish between two plays of the same period. If we turn again to the extracts above given, we shall find that in the latter the whole music of the verse is different from that of the former. The tiresome monotony has disappeared and given place to a line full of flexibility and grace. It is of course impossible to show all the points of difference which produce such great results, but one great cause we can decidedly point out. The pauses occur in the former extract with tiresome iteration at the end of the line. In dramatic composition this is a serious blemish. The thought is often mutilated by being cut short, or weakened by being stretched out to an undue length. Now in the drama the manner of expression is a very efficient in strument in the delineation of character. Stage-writers soon became aware of the fact that a monotonous style of verse prevented them from marking, so sharply as they wished, traits of character which they could not otherwise delineate. Hence arose the necessity of introducing some change by which the language would become natural, while the harmony of the verse would not suffer. This was accomplished by making the verse-pause coincide with the thought-pause, and it was in this direction that blank verse gradually changed from Marlowe to Massinger. On looking at the second extract, it will be seen that the pauses are distributed all over the line. The proper way of marking the metrical structure, therefore, would be to tabulate the pauses according to the positions in which they occurred. This would obviously be too cumbrous an arrangement. By counting the lines without a pause at the end, we have, from their proportion to lines with a pause, in some degree a criterion for the metrical structure. This test does not of course give an exact result, but it shows approximatively the amount of divergence from the monotony of the Marlowe model. Such lines without a pause at the end are called run-on lines (enjambements). A full account of them and their variations may be found Engl. stud. III, pp. 473-505 under the title >Report of the Tests Committee of the St. Petersburg Sh. Circle«. Light and weak endings (proclitische endungen) are also discussed in the same article. These endings came into use after a freer use of run-on lines had given blank verse more flexibility. They may be regarded as the extreme case of a run-on line. Up to about 1607 comparatively rare, they seem to have rapidly risen into favour. Cyril Tourneur for instance, who has few of them in The Revenger's Tragedy, uses them plentifully in his Atheist's Tragedy. Shakespeare, who has few in Macbeth, uses them freely in his part of Pericles (1607), and in all his later work, in which they form 2 -3 per cent of the total of verse lines. Beaumont, who did not begin to write until the movement had taken a definite form, makes use of them from the first in about the same proportion. Massinger has 5 to 7 per cent of them. He also has them in all his work from the first, at least as far as that work is known. It will be seen then that these metrical peculiarities form a very important feature in the later Drama. Each writer has a style, of his own which can be generally easily recognised by the percentages of metrical peculiarities occurring therein. In Engl. stud. V, pp. 74-97 I gave, for a large number of Beaumont, Fletcher and Massinger plays, an analysis of the metrical peculiarities. On referring to the tables there given, it will be found that the metrical characteristics of our three authors are remarkably constant. Beaumont and Massinger use all the metrical peculiarities mentioned, though not both in the same degree. Beaumont besides uses prose freely and even intersperses it in verse scenes. He is also comparatively fond of rhymes. Fletcher, considerably older than either of these writers, may be supposed to have formed his style before the metrical movement had attained the predominating influence it afterwards exercised. He retained the end-stopped line, and used the double ending to a degree unknown amongst other authors. This gives a softness and effeminacy to his verse which after a few minutes' reading becomes tiresome. From its pronounced peculiarity and monotony, it is more easily distinguished than that of any other author. Besides these easily distinguishable formal characteristics, the later Drama is distinguished by a great difference in its moral tone from the earlier. As Bishop Goodman, a contemporary, in his sketch of the court of James I, says, the reign was a time of peace, during which the people prospered to an unprecedented degree, and they fell into luxury. Manners became more profligate, and the moral tone of society lower, so that the later Drama is much more corrupt than the Shakespearean. This is especially seen in the female characters, whose utterances are often inconceivably corrupt. No doubt the custom of having the female parts performed by boys contributed to make the tone of the female characters more licentious. Writers had less hesitation in making use of an offensive expression because they knew it would not be spoken by an actress. They therefore gradually fell into broad license in this direction, which gave an unhealthy tone to dramatic literature from about the time of Shakespeare's retirement from the theatre. Another great point of difference is the character of the allusions to contemporary events and politics. These allusions had been so carefully veiled in Elisabeth's time that they are often indiscoverable to us. She did not allow herself to be trifled with. But under James they took a bolder tone. Not only were contemporary events freely discussed, and the corruptions of society laid bare, even the politics of the court were attacked, and that with a boldness unheard of before. This political tendency is more particularly characteristic of Massinger, and gives us another means of detecting his hand, which, when combined with the characteristics already mentioned, enables us to say almost with |