[139] Act i, Sc. 2.
[140] Work cited, p. 90.
[141] It would be unjust to omit to acknowledge that Dr. Furnivall seeks to frame an inductive notion of Shakspere, even when rejecting good evidence and proceeding on deductive lines; that in the works of Professor Dowden on Shakspere there is always an effort towards a judicial method, though he refuses to take some of the most necessary steps; and that the work of Mr. Appleton Morgan, President of the New York Shakspere Society, entitled Shakspere in Fact and Criticism (New York, 1888), is certainly not open to the criticism I have passed. Mr. Morgan's essentially rationalistic attitude is indicated in a sentence of his preface: "My own idea has been that William Shakspere was a man of like passions with ourselves, whose moods and veins were influenced, just as are ours, by his surroundings, employments, vocations ... and that, great as he was, and oceanic as was his genius, we can read him all the better because he was, after all, a man...." In recognising the good sense of Mr. Morgan's general attitude, I must not be understood to endorse his rejection of the "metrical tests" of Mr. Fleay and other English critics. These seem to me to be about the most important English contribution to the scientific comprehension of Shakspere. On the other hand, it may be said that the naturalistic conception of Shakspere as an organism in an environment was first closely approached in the present century by French critics, as Guizot and Chasles (Taine's picture of the Elizabethan theatre, adopted by Green, having been founded on a study by Chasles); that the naturalistic comprehension of Hamlet, as an incoherent whole resulting from the putting of new cloth into an old garment, was first reached by the German Rümelin (Shakspere Studien); and that the structural anomalies of Hamlet as an acting play were first clearly put by the German Benedix (Die Shakspereomanie) these two critics thus making amends for much vain discussion of Hamlet by their countrymen before and since; while the naturalistic conception of the man Shakspere is being best developed at present in America. The admirable work of Messrs. Clarke and Wright and Fleay in the analysis of the text and the revelation of its non-Shaksperean elements, seems to make little impression on English culture; while such a luminous manual as Mr. Barrett Wendell's William Shakspere: a Study in Elizabethan Literature (New York, 1894), with its freshness of outlook and appreciation, points to decided progress in rational Shakspere-study in the States, though, like the Shakspere Primer of Professor Dowden, it is not consistently scientific throughout.
[142] Life of Shakspere, 1886, p. 128.
[143] See Mr. Appleton Morgan's Shakspere's Venus and Adonis: a Study in Warwickshire Dialect.
[144] Professor Dowden notes in his Shakspere Primer (p. 12) that before 1600 the prices paid for plays, by Henslowe, the theatrical lessee, vary from £4 to £8, and not till later did it rise as high as £20 for a play by a popular dramatist.
Compare the 78th Sonnet, which ends;—
But thou art all my art, and dost advance As high as learning my rude ignorance.
[146] Life of Shakspere, pp. 29, 128.