SHAKSPEARE CORRESPONDENCE.
Songs and Rimes of Shakspeare.—I find in Mr. J. P. Collier's History of Dramatic Poetry (a work replete with dramatic lore and anecdote) the following note in p. 275., vol. iii.:
"The Mitre and the Mermaid were celebrated taverns, which the poets, wits, and gallants were accustomed to visit. Mr. Thorpe, the enterprising bookseller of Bedford Street, is in possession of a manuscript full of songs and poems, in the handwriting of a person of the name of Richard Jackson, all copied prior to the year 1631, and including many unpublished pieces, by a variety of celebrated poets. One of the most curious is a song in five seven-line stanzas, thus headed: 'Shakespeare's Rime, which he made at the Mytre in Fleete Streete.' It begins: 'From the rich Lavinian shore;' and some few of the lines were published by Playford, and set as a catch. Another shorter piece is called in the margin,—
'Shakespeare's Rime.
Give me a cup of rich Canary wine,
Which was the Mitres (drink) and now is mine;
Of which had Horace and Anacreon tasted,
Their lives as well as lines till now had lasted.'
"I have little doubt," adds Mr. Collier, "that the lines are genuine, as well as many other songs and poems attributed to Ben Jonson, Sir W. Raleigh, H. Constable, Dr. Donne, J. Sylvester, and others."
Who was the purchaser of this precious MS.? In this age of Shakspearian research, when every newly discovered relic is hailed with intense delight, may I inquire of some of your numerous readers, who seem to take as much delight as myself in whatever concerns our great dramatist and his writings, whether they can throw any light upon the subject?
Again: "A peculiar interest," Mr. Collier says, "attaches to one of the pieces in John Dowland's First Book of Songs (p. 57.), on account of the initials of 'W. S.' being appended to it, in a manuscript of the time preserved in the Hamburgh City Library. It is inserted in England's Helicon, 4to., 1600, as from Dowland's Book of Tablature, without any name or initials; and looking at the character and language of the piece, it is at least not impossible that it was the work of our great dramatist, to whom it has been assigned by some continental critics. A copy of it was, many years ago, sent to the author by a German scholar of high reputation, under the conviction that the poem ought to be included in any future edition of the works of Shakspeare. It will be admitted that the lines are not unworthy of his pen; and, from the quality of other productions in the same musical work, we may perhaps speculate whether Shakspeare were not the writer of some other poems there inserted. If we were to take it for granted, that a sonnet in The Passionate Pilgrim, 1599, was by Shakspeare, because it is there attributed to him, we might be sure that he was a warm admirer of Dowland,
'whose heavenly touch
Upon the lute doth ravish human sense.'
However, it is more than likely, that the sonnet in which this passage is found was by Barnfield, and not by Shakspeare: it was printed by Barnfield in 1598, and reprinted by him in 1605, notwithstanding the intermediate appearance of it in The Passionate Pilgrim."
May I inquire if any new light has been thrown upon this disputed song since the publication of Mr. Collier's Lyric Poems in 1844?
The song is addressed to Cynthia, and, as Mr. Collier says, is not unworthy of Shakspeare's muse. As it is not of any great length, perhaps it may be thought worthy of insertion in "N. & Q."
"To Cynthia.
"My thoughts are wing'd with hopes, my hopes with love;
Mount, love, unto the moone in cleerest night,
And say, as she doth in the heavens move,
In earth so wanes and waxes my delight:
And whisper this, but softly, in her eares,
Hope oft doth hang the head, and trust shed teares.
"And you, my thoughts, that some mistrust do cary,
If for mistrust my mistresse do you blame,
Say, though you alter, yet you do not vary,
As she doth change, and yet remaine the same.
Distrust doth enter hearts, but not infect,
And love is sweetest season'd with suspect.
"If she for this with cloudes do maske her eyes,
And make the heavens darke with her disdaine,
With windie sighes disperse them in the skies,
Or with the teares dissolve them into rain.
Thoughts, hopes, and love return to me no more,
Till Cynthia shine as she hath done before."
J. M. G.
Worcester.
Mr. Collier's "Notes and Emendations:" Passage in "All's Well that Ends Well."—
"O you leaden messengers,
That ride upon the violent speed of fire,
Fly with false aim; move the still-peering air,
That sings with piercing, do not touch my lord!"
Such is the text of the first folio. Mr. Payne Collier, at p. 162. of his Notes and Emendations, informs us that the old corrector of his folio of 1632 reads volant for "violent," wound for "move," and still-piecing for "still-peering."
Two of these substitutions are easily shown to be correct. In the Tempest, Act III. Sc. 3., we read:
"The elements,
Of whom your swords are tempered, may as well
Wound the loud winds, or with bemockt-at stabs
Kill the still-closing waters."
What is still-closing but still-piecing, the silent reunion after severance? What is to wound the loud winds but to wound the air that sings with piercing?
But as to the third substitution, I beg permission through your pages to enter a caveat. If
we had no proof from the text of Shakspeare that violent is the correct reading, I fancy that any reader's common sense would tell him that it is more an appropriate and trenchant term than volant. "What judgment would stoop from this to this?" Volant, moreover, is not English, but French, and as such is used in Henry V.; but happily, in this case, we have most abundant evidence from the text of Shakspeare that he wrote violent in the above passage. In Henry VIII., Act I. Sc. 1., we have the passage,
"We may outrun,
By violent swiftness, that which we run at,
And lose by over-running."
In Othello, Act III. Sc. 3., we have the passage,
"Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,
Shall ne'er look back."
These passages prove that violent is a true Shakspearian epithet for velocity. But how exquisitely appropriate is the epithet when applied to the velocity of a ball issuing from the mouth of a cannon: and here we have full confirmation from Romeo and Juliet, Act V. Sc. 1., where we read:
"As violently as hasty powder fir'd
Doth hurry from the fatal cannon's womb."
I trust that Mr. Collier will not, in the teeth of such evidence, substitute volant for violent in correcting the text of his forthcoming edition.
C. Mansfield Ingleby.
Birmingham.