Of their loose mantles made a silver chime."
This solidification of the dewdrops does not occur in the Shakespeare parallel, ii. 1. 15. Mr. Halliwell's fancy that Spenser's line in Fairy Queen, vi.—"Through hills and dales, through bushes and through briers" must have been imitated by Shakespeare in ii. 1. 2, is very flimsy; hill and dale, bush and brier, are commonplaces of the time. Nor is there any proof that this song could not have been transmitted to Ireland in 1593 or 1594.
Richard II. cannot be definitely dated by external evidence, but all competent critics agree that it is the earliest of Shakespeare's historical plays; the question of authorship, &c., of Richard III. being reserved for the present. It is a tragedy like Marlowe's Edward II., not a "life and death" history. The Civil Wars of Daniel, from which Shakespeare seems to have derived a few hints, was entered on S. R. 11th October 1594. The play probably was produced after this date, and before the publication of the Pope's bull in 1596, inciting the Queen's subjects to depose her. In consequence of this bull the abdication scene was omitted in representation, and in the editions during Elizabeth's lifetime. In like manner, Hayward was imprisoned for publishing in 1599 his History of the First Year of Henry IV., which is simply the story of Richard's abdication. The omitted scene was restored in 1608 under James I. as "new additions." Such new additions on title-pages are often restorations of omitted passages. The Folio copy omits a few other speeches, the play having been evidently found too long in representation; but it contains the abdication scene. This being the first play of Shakespeare's that passed the press was carelessly corrected, whence much apparently unShakespearian and halting metre, which is easily set right. The source of the plot is Holinshed's Chronicle; "the earlier play on Richard II. lately printed" (says Mr. Stokes in 1878) "I have not seen; but it concludes with the murder of the Duke of Gloster." The play seen at the Globe by Forman in 1611 began with the rebellion of Wat Tyler. It was not Shakespeare's. There is no prose in this play, in John, or the Comedy of Errors; a sign of early work.
1595.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a striking instance of the difficulties in which we are involved if we attempt to assign a single date for the production of every play, and neglect the fact that alterations were and are continually made by authors in their works. Drake and Chalmers date this play in 1595; Gervinus, Delius, and Stokes 1591. Malone at different times adopted both dates. I believe that all these opinions are reconcilable, that the play was produced in 1591, with work by a second hand in it, which was cut out and replaced by Shakespeare's own in 1595. For a date after 1593 is distinctly indicated in the play as we have it by the allusions to Hero and Leander in i. 1. 21, iii. 1. 119; and to the pestilence in ii. 1. 20; a still closer approximation is shown to the Merchant of Venice, by the mistake of Padua for Milan in ii. 5. 2. If Shakespeare had not, at the time when he finally produced the Two Gentlemen, begun his study for the Venetian story, whence this name? It only occurs there, once in Much Ado, and in the non-Shakespearian parts of The Taming of the Shrew. In like manner the mistake of Verona for Milan in iii. 4. 81, v. 4. 129, indicates that he had been preparing Romeo and Juliet. That our play lies between the Errors and the Dream on one hand and The Merchant on the other, becomes pretty clear by comparing the development of character in the Dromios, Launce and Speed, Lancelot Gobbo; in Lucetta and Nerissa; in Demetrius and Lysander, Valentine and Proteus. Nor are marks of the twofold date wanting. In the first two acts we find Valentine at the Emperor's court, no Duke mentioned; in the last three at the Duke's, no Emperor mentioned. The turning-point is in ii. 4, where, though "Emperor" occurs in the text, "Duke" is used in the stage directions. In i. 1. 32, "If haply won perhaps a hapless gain; if lost, why then a grievous labour won," there is surely an allusion to Love's Labour's Won, and Love's Labour's Lost; we shall see hereafter that in 1591 these were quite recent plays. The Eglamour of Verona mentioned in i. 2. 9 is not the Eglamour of Milan who appears in iv. 3, v. 1. Style and metre require an early date for i. ii. 1-3 and parts of iii. 1; but in any argument of an internal nature, Johnson's weighty remark should be remembered—"From mere inequality, in works of imagination, nothing can with exactness be inferred." The immediate origin of the plot is unknown; parts of the story are identical with those of The Shepherdess Filismena in Montemayor's Diana, translated in MS. by Young, c. 1583, and of Bandello's Apollonius and Sylla in Rich's Farewell to Military Profession (1581). Felix and Philiomena had been dramatised and acted at Court by the Queen's players, 1584-5. That the revision of The Two Gentlemen was hurriedly performed is clear from the unusually large number of Exits and Entrances that are not marked. This hurry accounts, in some degree, for the weakness of the play, which induces so many critics to insist on an early date for it as a whole. Yet the special blemish they discover, v. 4. 83, the yielding up of Silvia by Valentine, is paralleled in the Dream, where (iii. 2. 163) Lysander says, "With all my heart, in Hermia's love I yield you up my part:" and that Shakespeare felt the unreality of this part of the plot is clear from Two Gentlemen, v. 4. 25, which to me seems a manifest reminiscence of his last play, "How like a dream is this I see and hear!" (cf. Midsummer-Night's Dream, iv. 1. 190, "It seems to me that yet we sleep, we dream"). He had been reading Chaucer, as we know, and from him had adopted this method of presenting stories in a dream. A slighter reminiscence of Chaucer's Knight's Tale occurs in the mention of Theseus, iv. 4. 173.
1595-6.
Romeo and Juliet was surreptitiously printed by J. Danter in 1597; "as it hath been often with great applause played (publicly), by the Rt. Hon. the L. of Hunsdon, his servants." This edition must have been printed in 1596 (old reckoning), for the players would have been called the Chamberlain's servants except during the tenure of that office by W. Brooke, Lord Cobham, from 23d July 1596 to 5th March 1597. That it was on the stage as well as Richard II. in 1595-6, appears from Weever's Epigrams. A correct edition of Romeo appeared in 1599. The relation of these two versions of the play presents a difficult problem. The 1599 Quarto Q2 is unquestionably the play of 1595-6, as acted by the then Chamberlain's players at the Theater; for it does not follow, as Mr. Halliwell supposes, that because they continued to act it when called Lord Hunsdon's players, they had not ever acted it before. Such reasoning would compel us to assign all plays published as "acted by the King's players" to a date subsequent to 1602—Hamlet, for example, and Troylus and Cressida. Nor does it follow that because it was acted at the Curtain, where Marston mentions it in his Scourge of Villany (S. R. 8th September 1598), that it was produced at that same theatre. Mr. P.A. Daniel has shown, in his Parallel Text Edition, that the 1597 Quarto Q1 is a shortened version of the play, no doubt for stage purposes (compare the Quartos in i. 1; i. 3; iii. 1). He has also with great ingenuity conclusively proved that Q2 is a revised copy made on a text in many places identical with Q1 (see i. 1. 122; i. 4. 62; ii. 3. 1-4; iii. 2. 85; iii. 3. 38-45; iii. 5. 177-181; iv. 1. 95-98, 110; v. 3. 102, 107). But his conclusion that Q1 is partly made up from notes taken during the performance, is not borne out by any evidence. There are no "mistakes of the ear" in this play, nor is this conclusion consistent with his own theory that Q2 was a revision made on the text of Q1. I owe what I believe to be the real solution to a hint from my son, a boy of thirteen. When a play was written and licensed, at least three copies would be made of it. One, with the Master of the Revels' endorsement (which I will call R), would be kept in the archives of the theatre intact; one would be made for the manager (M), which would have occasional notes of stage direction, &c., inserted; and one, an acting copy, for the prompter (P), usually much abridged from the original and always altered: this would contain stage directions, &c., in full, but in the unaltered passages would be identical with M. Now Q1 shows evident signs of being printed from a shortened copy P; Q2 is manifestly a revision of a full copy M. The genealogy of the Quartos then stands thus:—
| R (author's first version). | |||
| P | M | ||
| Q1 | Q2 | ||
Q2 is, according to this theory, a revised version made on a complete copy of an early version of the play, while Q1 is printed from the prompter's copy of the same early version. When the revision took place this copy would be thrown aside as worthless; and any dishonest employé of the theatre could sell it to an equally dishonest publisher, who would publish it as the play now acted. If this solution be correct, and it is the only one yet proposed that meets all the difficulties of the case, Q1 is specially interesting as being the earliest extant play (as acted) in which Shakespeare had a share. For it is clear that some passages in it, especially ii. 6, the laments in iv. 5, and Paris' dirge in v. 3, are not only unlike the corresponding passages in Q2, but unlike anything we have from Shakespeare's hand. The date of the early form of the play was 1591, eleven years after the earthquake of 1580 (i. 3. 23, 30). As confirmatory of the conclusion that Q2 was revised from an early play note that in i. 1 the servants are nameless in Q1, but have names in the stage directions in Q2; that in 1. 3 the servant is called clown in Q1; that in iii. 5 in Q2, where the prefixes vary between Lady and Mother, it is in the unaltered parts that Mother is used as in Q1, but Lady always where enough alteration has taken place to require a completely fresh transcript; that in v. 3 there is a double entry marked for the Capulets (a sure sign); that in ii. 3. 1-4, v. 3. 108-111, duplicate versions occur. On the other hand, the printing of the Nurse's speeches in italics in both Quartos is conclusive for identity of origin in that scene. Other points worth noting are that "Queen Mab, what's she?" i. 4. 55 in Q1 are omitted in Q2: Mab had become well known in 1595, probably through Drayton's Nymphidia. In ii. 2. 144, "I am afraid all this is but a dream," reminds us of similar passages in Errors, ii. 2. 184; Two Gentlemen, v. 4. 26; and Dream, iv. 1. 199, &c. W. Kempe acted the part of Peter (see entry in iv. 5); Balthazar is proparoxyton in v. 1. The line in iii. 2, 75, "O serpent heart hid with a flowering face" (where Q1 has "serpent's hate"), is very like the often-quoted "O tiger's heart wrapt in a woman's hide" (3 Henry VI. i. 4. 137). The play is founded on Arthur Brooke's poem, The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, containing a rare example of true constancy. Constancy in love is its main subject. He took the Italian form of the name Romeo, and the time of Juliet's sleep forty-two hours ("forty at least" in the novel) from Rhomeo and Julietta in Painter's Palace of Pleasure. Much unnecessary writing has been expended on this forty-two hours; the plot requires forty-eight. Daniel, in his Rosamund (S. R. February 1591-2), and the author of Doctor Doddypol (c. October 1594), have passages very like some in this play. A ballad founded on the play was entered S. R. 15th August 1596. On the mention of "the first and second cause" in ii. 4. 26 and (in Q1 only) in iii. 1, some critics base the conclusion that this play must be subsequent to Saviolo's Book of Honour, &c. (S. R. 19th November 1594). I believe that the book referred to is The Book of Honor and Arms, wherein is discussed the CAUSES of quarrel,&c. (S. R. 13th December 1589). The same expression occurs in Love's Labour's Lost, i. 2. 184; in any case it probably belongs to the revised version of this last named play. The alteration in ii. 4 from "to-morrow morning" to "this afternoon," shows that in the revision Shakespeare attended to details in the time of action.