[{210}] It is worth remark that in a still older sample of an older and ruder form of play than can have been the very earliest mould in which the pristine or pre-Shakespearean model of Pericles was cast, the part of Chorus here assigned to Gower was filled by a representative of his fellow-poet Lydgate.
[{217}] Except perhaps one little word of due praise for the pretty imitation or recollection of his dead friend Beaumont rather than of Shakespeare, in the description of the crazed girl whose “careless tresses a wreath of bullrush rounded” where she sat playing with flowers for emblems at a game of love and sorrow—but liker in all else to Bellario by another fountain-side than to Ophelia by the brook of death.
[{220}] On the 17th of September, 1864.
[{232}] The once too celebrated crime which in this play was exhibited on the public stage with the forcible fidelity of a wellnigh brutal realism took actual place on the private stage of fact in the year 1604. Four years afterwards the play was published as Shakespeare’s. Eight years more, and Shakespeare was with Æschylus.
[{237}] Written in 1879.
[{239}] Capell has altered this to “proud perfumes”; marking the change in a note, with the scrupulous honesty which would seem to have usually distinguished him from more daring and more famous editors.
[{245a}] The feeble archaic inversion in this line is one among many small signs which all together suffice, if not to throw back the date of this play to the years immediately preceding the advent of Marlowe or the full influence of his genius and example, yet certainly to mark it as an instance of survival from that period of incomposite and inadequate workmanship in verse.
[{245b}] Or than this play to a genuine work of Shakespeare’s. “Brick to coral”—these three words describe exactly the difference in tone and shade of literary colour.
[{246}] Here for the first time we come upon a verse not unworthy of Marlowe himself—a verse in spirit as in cadence recalling the deep oceanic reverberations of his “mighty line,” profound and just and simple and single as a note of the music of the sea. But it would be hard if a devout and studious disciple were never to catch one passing tone of his master’s habitual accent.—It may be worth while to observe that we find here the same modulation of verse—common enough since then, but new to the patient auditors of Gorboduc and Locrine—which we find in the finest passage of Marlowe’s imperfect play of Dido, completed by Nash after the young Master’s untimely death.
Why star’st thou in my face? If thou wilt stay,
Leap in my arms: mine arms are open wide:
If not—turn from me, and I’ll turn from thee;
For though thou hast the power to say farewell,
I have not power to stay thee.