The Facts About Shakespeare

by William Allan Neilson; Ashley Horace Thorndike

CHAPTER IV

Chronology and Development

The value of a knowledge of the order in which an author's works were composed no longer needs to be argued. The development of power and skill which such knowledge reveals is an important part of biography, and an individual work is more surely interpreted when we know the period and the circumstances of the author's life in which it was written, and what other works, by himself and his fellows, lie nearest in point of time. Without a knowledge of chronology, the indebtedness of contemporary authors to one another and the growth of literary forms cannot be determined.

The fact, so often to be insisted upon, that at the beginning of Shakespeare's career stage plays were hardly regarded as literature at all and were not published by their authors, deprives us of the evidence usually afforded by date of publication. We are thus forced to have recourse to a variety of more or less casually recorded data, and to indications of differences of maturity in style and matter which are often much less clear than could be wished. Before giving the results of the research that has been pursued for a century and a half, it will be worth while to enumerate the most fruitful methods which have been employed, and the sorts of evidence available.

Of purely external evidence, the chief kinds are these: records of the performance of plays in letters, diaries, accounts, and the like; quotation, allusion, imitation, or parody in other works; entries in the books of the Master of the Revels at Court, and in the Register of the Stationers' Company; dates on the title-pages of the plays themselves; facts and traditions about the life of the author; dates in the lives of actors and in the careers of companies known to have performed the plays, and in the histories of theaters in which they were presented. Instances of some of these are the manuscript which tells of a performance of The Comedy of Errors at Gray's Inn in 1594; the diary of the quack, Dr. Simon Forman, who witnessed performances of Macbeth, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale at the Globe in 1610 and 1611; the appreciation of Shakespeare, with a list of a dozen plays by him, in the Palladis Tamia[4] of Francis Meres, 1598; and the pamphlets on Somers's voyage to Virginia, which offered suggestions for The Tempest.

Partly external and partly internal are the evidences derived from allusions in the plays to current events, personal or political, such as the reference in the Prologue to Henry V to the expedition of Essex to Ireland in 1599; references to other books, like the quotation from Marlowe in As You Like It, III. v. 82; Kinds of Evidencereferences from one play of Shakespeare's to another, like the promise in the Epilogue to 2 Henry IV to "continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katherine of France."

The purely internal evidence is seldom as specific as the external, and requires to be handled with much judgment and caution. Most difficult in this class is the weighing of considerations of a moral or esthetic nature; for, though these are often powerful in their effect on the individual reader, they are usually incapable of proof to another person with different tastes and a different point of view. Of such tests, those afforded by a study of the methods used in the treatment of plot and in the development of character are perhaps the least subjective. Somewhat more palpable are the changing characteristics of style. The number and nature of classical allusions and Latin words and quotations; the kind and degree of elaboration of figures of speech, puns, conceits, and the like; diffuseness or concentration in the expression of thought; artificiality or lifelikeness in the treatment of dialogue; the use of prose or verse; the employment of oaths, checked by statute shortly after the accession of James I: these are the main aspects of style which can be used in determining, not exact dates, but the period of Shakespeare's activity within which a given work falls. More capable of mechanical calculation than the tests of either matter or style are those derived from changes in versification, though here too there is often a subjective element in the reckoning. The more important metrical tests include the following: the frequency of rhyme, whether in the heroic couplet or, as not uncommonly occurs in early plays, in alternates and even such elaborate arrangements as the sonnet; doggerel lines; alexandrines, or lines of twelve syllables; the presence of an extra syllable before a pause within the line; short lines, especially at the end of speeches; the substitution of other feet for the regular iambic movement of blank verse; weak and light endings; and, most valuable, the position of the pause in the line ("end-stopped" or "run on"), and feminine endings or hypermetrical lines, such as

"These many summers in a sea of glor-y."

Many of these variable features were not consciously manipulated by the author; and, even when a general drift in a certain direction is clearly observable in his practice with regard to them, it is not to be assumed that his progress was perfectly regular, without leaps forward and occasional returns to an earlier usage. It is to be noted also that the subject and atmosphere of a particular play might induce a metrical treatment of a special kind, in which case the verse tests would yield evidence not primarily chronological at all. Nevertheless, when all allowances have been made and all due caution exercised, it will be found that the indications of the versification corroborate and supplement the external evidences in a valuable way.