Part 2 (2/2)

This patent raised the company to the rank of his majesty's servants, whereas previously they are supposed to have been simply the servants of the Lord Chamberlain. Perhaps it was in grateful acknowledgment of this royal favor that Shakspeare afterwards, in 1606, paid that sublime compliment to the house of Stuart, which is involved in the vision shown to Macbeth. This vision is managed with exquisite skill. It was impossible to display the whole series of princes from Macbeth to James I.; but he beholds the posterity of Banquo, one ”gold-bound brow” succeeding to another, until he comes to an eighth apparition of a Scottish king,

”Who bears a gla.s.s Which shows him many more; and some he sees Who twofold b.a.l.l.s and treble sceptres carry;”

thus bringing down without tedium the long succession to the very person of James I., by the symbolic image of the two crowns united on one head.

About the beginning of the century Shakspeare had become rich enough to purchase the best house in Stratford, called _The Great House_, which name he altered to _New Place_; and in 1602 he bought one hundred and seven acres adjacent to this house for a sum (320L) corresponding to about 1500 guineas of modern money.

Malone thinks that he purchased the house as early as 1597; and it is certain that about that time he was able to a.s.sist his father in obtaining a renewed grant of arms from the Herald's College, and therefore, of course, to re-establish his father's fortunes. Ten years of well-directed industry, viz., from 1591 to 1601, and the prosperity of the theatre in which he was a proprietor, had raised him to affluence; and after another ten years, improved with the same success, he was able to retire with an income of 300L, or (according to the customary computations) in modern money of 1500L, per annum. Shakspeare was in fact the first man of letters, Pope the second, and Sir Walter Scott the third, who, in Great Britain, has ever realized a large fortune by literature; or in Christendom, if we except Voltaire, and two dubious cases in Italy. The four or five latter years of his life Shakspeare pa.s.sed in dignified ease, in profound meditation, we may be sure, and in universal respect, at his native town of Stratford; and there he died, on the 23d of April, 1616. [Endnote: 18]

His daughter Susanna had been married on the 5th of June of the year 1607, to Dr. John Hall, [Endnote: 19] a physician in Stratford. The doctor died in November, 1635, aged sixty; his wife, at the age of sixty-six, on July 11, 1640. They had one child, a daughter, named Elizabeth, born in 1608, married April 22, 1626, to Thomas Nashe, Esq., left a widow in 1647, and subsequently remarried to Sir John Barnard; but this Lady Barnard, the sole grand-daughter of the poet, had no children by either marriage. The other daughter, Judith, on February 10, 1616, (about ten weeks before her father's death,) married Mr. Thomas Quincy of Stratford, by whom she had three sons, Shakspeare, Richard, and Thomas. Judith was about thirty-one years old at the time of her marriage; and living just forty-six years afterwards, she died in February, 1662, at the age of seventy-seven. Her three sons died without issue; and thus, in the direct lineal descent, it is certain that no representative has survived of this transcendent poet, the most august amongst created intellects.

After this review of Shakspeare's life, it becomes our duty to take a summary survey of his works, of his intellectual powers, and of his station in literature, a station which is now irrevocably settled, not so much (which happens in other cases) by a vast overbalance of favorable suffrages, as by acclamation; not so much by the _voices_ of those who admire him up to the verge of idolatry, as by the _acts_ of those who everywhere seek for his works among the primal necessities of life, demand them, and crave them as they do their daily bread; not so much by eulogy openly proclaiming itself, as by the silent homage recorded in the endless multiplication of what he has bequeathed us; not so much by his own compatriots, who, with regard to almost every other author, [Endnote: 20] compose the total amount of his _effective_ audience, as by the unanimous ”all hail!” of intellectual Christendom; finally, not by the hasty partisans.h.i.+p of his own generation, nor by the bia.s.sed judgment of an age trained in the same modes of feeling and of thinking with himself,--but by the solemn award of generation succeeding to generation, of one age correcting the obliquities or peculiarities of another; by the verdict of two hundred and thirty years, which have now elapsed since the very _latest_ of his creations, or of two hundred and forty-seven years if we date from the earliest; a verdict which has been continually revived and re-opened, probed, searched, vexed, by criticism in every spirit, from the most genial and intelligent, down to the most malignant and scurrilously hostile which feeble heads and great ignorance could suggest when cooperating with impure hearts and narrow sensibilities; a verdict, in short, sustained and countersigned by a longer series of writers, many of them eminent for wit or learning, than were ever before congregated upon any inquest relating to any author, be he who he might, ancient [Endnote: 21] or modern, Pagan or Christian.

It was a most witty saying with respect to a piratical and knavish publisher, who made a trade of insulting the memories of deceased authors by forged writings, that he was ”among the new terrors of death.” But in the gravest sense it may be affirmed of Shakspeare, that he is among the modern luxuries of life; that life, in fact, is a new thing, and one more to be coveted, since Shakspeare has extended the domains of human consciousness, and pushed its dark frontiers into regions not so much as dimly descried or even suspected before his time, far less illuminated (as now they are) by beauty and tropical luxuriance of life. For instance,--a single instance, indeed one which in itself is a world of new revelation, --the possible beauty of the female character had not been seen as in a dream before Shakspeare called into perfect life the radiant shapes of Desdemona, of Imogene, of Hermione, of Perdita, of Ophelia, of Miranda, and many others. The Una of Spenser, earlier by ten or fifteen years than most of these, was an idealized portrait of female innocence and virgin purity, but too shadowy and unreal for a dramatic reality. And as to the Grecian cla.s.sics, let not the reader imagine for an instant that any prototype in this field of Shakspearian power can be looked for there. The _Antigone_ and the _Electra_ of the tragic poets are the two leading female characters that cla.s.sical antiquity offers to our respect, but a.s.suredly not to our impa.s.sioned love, as disciplined and exalted in the school of Shakspeare. They challenge our admiration, severe, and even stern, as impersonations of filial duty, cleaving to the steps of a desolate and afflicted old man; or of sisterly affection, maintaining the rights of a brother under circ.u.mstances of peril, of desertion, and consequently of perfect self-reliance. Iphigenia, again, though not dramatically coming before us in her own person, but according to the beautiful report of a spectator, presents us with a fine statuesque model of heroic fort.i.tude, and of one whose young heart, even in the very agonies of her cruel immolation, refused to forget, by a single indecorous gesture, or so much as a moment's neglect of her own princely descent, and that she herself was ”a lady in the land.” These are fine marble groups, but they are not the warm breathing realities of Shakspeare; there is ”no speculation” in their cold marble eyes; the breath of life is not in their nostrils; the fine pulses of womanly sensibilities are not throbbing in their bosoms. And besides this immeasurable difference between the cold moony reflexes of life, as exhibited by the power of Grecian art, and the true sunny life of Shakspeare, it must he observed that the Antigones, &c. of the antique put forward but one single trait of character, like the aloe with its single blossom. This solitary feature is presented to us as an abstraction, and as an insulated quality; whereas in Shakspeare all is presented in the _concrete_; that is to say, not brought forward in relief, as by some effort of an anatomical artist; but embodied and imbedded, so to speak, as by the force of a creative nature, in the complex system of a human life; a life in which all the elements move and play simultaneously, and with something more than mere simultaneity or co-existence, acting and re-acting each upon the other, nay, even acting by each other and through each other. In Shakspeare's characters is felt for ever a real _organic_ life, where each is for the whole and in the whole, and where the whole is for each and in each. They only are real incarnations.

The Greek poets could not exhibit any approximations to _female_ character, without violating the truth of Grecian life, and shocking the feelings of the audience. The drama with the Greeks, as with us, though much less than with us, was a picture of human life; and that which could not occur in life could not wisely be exhibited on the stage. Now, in ancient Greece, women were secluded from the society of men. The conventual sequestration of the hareem, or female apartment [Endnote: 22] of the house, and the Mahommedan consecration of its threshold against the ingress of males, had been transplanted from Asia into Greece thousands of years perhaps before either convents or Mahommed existed. Thus barred from all open social intercourse, women could not develop or express any character by word or action. Even to _have_ a character, violated, to a Grecian mind, the ideal portrait of feminine excellence; whence, perhaps, partly the too generic, too little individualized, style of Grecian beauty. But prominently to _express_ a character was impossible under the common tenor of Grecian life, unless when high tragical catastrophes transcended the decorums of that tenor, or for a brief interval raised the curtain which veiled it. Hence the subordinate part which women play upon the Greek stage in all but some half dozen cases. In the paramount tragedy on that stage, the model tragedy, the (_OEdipus Tyrannus_ of Sophocles), there is virtually no woman at all; for Jocasta is a party to the story merely as the dead Laius or the self-murdered Sphinx was a party, viz., by her contributions to the fatalities of the event, not by anything she does or says spontaneously. In fact, the Greek poet, if a wise poet, could not address himself genially to a task in which he must begin by shocking the sensibilities of his countrymen. And hence followed, not only the dearth of female characters in the Grecian drama, but also a second result still more favorable to the sense of a new power evolved by Shakspeare. Whenever the common law of Grecian life did give way, it was, as we have observed, to the suspending force of some great convulsion or tragical catastrophe. This for a moment (like an earthquake in a nunnery) would set at liberty even the timid, fluttering Grecian women, those doves of the dove-cot, and would call some of them into action. But which? Precisely those of energetic and masculine minds; the timid and feminine would but shrink the more from public gaze and from tumult. Thus it happened, that such female characters as _were_ exhibited in Greece, could not but be the harsh and the severe. If a gentle Ismene appeared for a moment in contest with some energetic sister Antigone, (and chiefly, perhaps, by way of drawing out the fiercer character of that sister,) she was soon dismissed as unfit for scenical effect. So that not only were female characters few, but, moreover, of these few the majority were but repet.i.tions of masculine qualities in female persons. Female agency being seldom summoned on the stage, except when it had received a sort of special dispensation from its s.e.xual character, by some terrific convulsions of the house or the city, naturally it a.s.sumed the style of action suited to these circ.u.mstances. And hence it arose, that not woman as she differed from man, but woman as she resembled man--woman, in short, seen under circ.u.mstances so dreadful as to abolish the effect of s.e.xual distinction, was the woman of the Greek tragedy. [Endnote: 23] And hence generally arose for Shakspeare the wider field, and the more astonis.h.i.+ng by its perfect novelty, when he first introduced female characters, not as mere varieties or echoes of masculine characters, a Medea or Clytemnestra, or a vindictive Hecuba, the mere tigress of the tragic tiger, but female characters that had the appropriate beauty of female nature; woman no longer grand, terrific, and repulsive, but woman ”after her kind”--the other hemisphere of the dramatic world; woman, running through the vast gamut of womanly loveliness; woman, as emanc.i.p.ated, exalted, enn.o.bled, under a new law of Christian morality; woman, the sister and coequal of man, no longer his slave, his prisoner, and sometimes his rebel.” It is a far cry to Loch Awe; ”and from the Athenian stage to the stage of Shakspeare, it may be said, is a prodigious interval. True; but prodigious as it is, there is really nothing between them. The Roman stage, at least the tragic stage, as is well known, was put out, as by an extinguisher, by the cruel amphitheatre, just as a candle is made pale and ridiculous by daylight. Those who were fresh from the real murders of the b.l.o.o.d.y amphitheatre regarded with contempt the mimic murders of the stage. Stimulation too coa.r.s.e and too intense had its usual effect in making the sensibilities callous. Christian emperors arose at length, who abolished the amphitheatre in its bloodier features. But by that time the genius of the tragic muse had long slept the sleep of death. And that muse had no resurrection until the age of Shakspeare. So that, notwithstanding a gulf of nineteen centuries and upwards separates Shakspeare from Euripides, the last of the surviving Greek tragedians, the one is still the nearest successor of the other, just as Connaught and the islands in Clew Bay are next neighbors to America, although three thousand watery columns, each of a cubic mile in dimensions, divide them from each other.

A second reason, which lends an emphasis of novelty and effective power to Shakspeare's female world, is a peculiar fact of contrast which exists between that and his corresponding world of men. Let us explain. The purpose and the intention of the Grecian stage was not primarily to develop human _character_, whether in men or in women: human _fates_ were its object; great tragic situations under the mighty control of a vast cloudy destiny, dimly descried at intervals, and brooding over human life by mysterious agencies, and for mysterious ends. Man, no longer the representative of an august _will_, man the pa.s.sion-puppet of fate, could not with any effect display what we call a character, which is a distinction between man and man, emanating originally from the will, and expressing its determinations, moving under the large variety of human impulses. The will is the central pivot of character; and this was obliterated, thwarted, cancelled, by the dark fatalism which brooded over the Grecian stage. That explanation will sufficiently clear up the reason why marked or complex variety of character was slighted by the great principles of the Greek tragedy. And every scholar who has studied that grand drama of Greece with feeling,--that drama, so magnificent, so regal, so stately,--and who has thoughtfully investigated its principles, and its difference from the English drama, will acknowledge that powerful and elaborate character, character, for instance, that could employ the fiftieth part of that profound a.n.a.lysis which has been applied to Hamlet, to Falstaff, to Lear, to Oth.e.l.lo, and applied by Mrs. Jamieson so admirably to the full development of the Shakspearian heroines, would have been as much wasted, nay, would have been defeated, and interrupted the blind agencies of fate, just in the same way as it would injure the shadowy grandeur of a ghost to individualize it too much. Milton's angels are slightly touched, superficially touched, with differences of character; but they are such differences, so simple and general, as are just sufficient to rescue them from the reproach applied to Virgil's ”_fortemque Gyan, forlemque Cloanthem;_” just sufficient to make them knowable apart. Pliny speaks of painters who painted in one or two colors; and, as respects the angelic characters, Milton does so; he is _monochromatic_. So, and for reasons resting upon the same ultimate philosophy, were the mighty architects of the Greek tragedy. They also were monochromatic; they also, as to the characters of their persons, painted in one color. And so far there might have been the same novelty in Shakspeare's men as in his women. There _might_ have been; but the reason why there is _not_, must be sought in the fact, that History, the muse of History, had there even been no such muse as Melpomene, would have forced us into an acquaintance with human character. History, as the representative of actual life, of real man, gives us powerful delineations of character in its chief agents, that is, in men; and therefore it is that Shakspeare, the absolute creator of female character, was but the mightiest of all painters with regard to male character. Take a single instance. The Antony of Shakspeare, immortal for its execution, is found, after all, as regards the primary conception, in history. Shakspeare's delineation is but the expansion of the germ already preexisting, by way of scattered fragments, in Cicero's Philippics, in Cicero's Letters, in Appian, &c. But Cleopatra, equally fine, is a pure creation of art. The situation and the scenic circ.u.mstances belong to history, but the character belongs to Shakspeare.

In the great world, therefore, of woman, as the interpreter of the s.h.i.+fting phases and the lunar varieties of that mighty changeable planet, that lovely satellite of man, Shakspeare stands not the first only, not the original only, but is yet the sole authentic oracle of truth. Woman, therefore, the beauty of the female mind, _this_ is one great field of his power. The supernatural world, the world of apparitions, _that_ is another. For reasons which it would be easy to give, reasons emanating from the gross mythology of the ancients, no Grecian, [Endnote: 24] no Roman, could have conceived a ghost. That shadowy conception, the protesting apparition, the awful projection of the human conscience, belongs to the Christian mind. And in all Christendom, who, let us ask, who, who but Shakspeare has found the power for effectually working this mysterious mode of being? In summoning back to earth ”the majesty of buried Denmark,” how like an awful necromancer does Shakspeare appear! All the pomps and grandeurs which religion, which the grave, which the popular superst.i.tion had gathered about the subject of apparitions, are here converted to his purpose, and bend to one awful effect. The wormy grave brought into antagonism with the scenting of the early dawn; the trumpet of resurrection suggested, and again as an antagonist idea to the crowing of the c.o.c.k, (a bird enn.o.bled in the Christian mythus by the part he is made to play at the Crucifixion;) its starting ”as a guilty thing” placed in opposition to its majestic expression of offended dignity when struck at by the partisans of the sentinels; its awful allusions to the secrets of its prison-house; its ubiquity, contrasted with its local presence; its aerial substance, yet clothed in palpable armor; the heart-shaking solemnity of its language, and the appropriate scenery of its haunt, viz., the ramparts of a capital fortress, with no witnesses but a few gentlemen mounting guard at the dead of night,--what a mist, what a _mirage_ of vapor, is here acc.u.mulated, through which the dreadful being in the centre looms upon us in far larger proportions, than could have happened had it been insulated and left naked of this circ.u.mstantial pomp! In the _Tempest_, again, what new modes of life, preternatural, yet far as the poles from the spiritualities of religion! Ariel in ant.i.thesis to Caliban! What is most ethereal to what is most animal! A phantom of air, an abstraction of the dawn and of vesper sun-lights, a bodiless sylph on the one hand; on the other a gross carnal monster, like the Miltonic Asmodai, ”the fleshliest incubus” among the fiends, and yet so far enn.o.bled into interest by his intellectual power, and by the grandeur of misanthropy! [Endnote: 25] In the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_, again, we have the old traditional fairy, a lovely mode of preternatural life, remodified by Shakspeare's eternal talisman. Oberon and t.i.tania remind us at first glance of Ariel. They approach, but how far they recede. They are like--”like, but, oh, how different!” And in no other exhibition of this dreamy population of the moonlight forests and forest-lawns, are the circ.u.mstantial proprieties of fairy life so exquisitely imagined, sustained, or expressed. The dialogue between Oberon and t.i.tania is, of itself, and taken separately from its connection, one of the most delightful poetic scenes that literature affords. The witches in Macbeth are another variety of supernatural life, in which Shakspeare's power to enchant and to disenchant are alike portentous. The circ.u.mstances of the blasted heath, the army at a distance, the withered attire of the mysterious hags, and the choral litanies of their fiendish Sabbath, are as finely imagined in their kind as those which herald and which surround the ghost in Hamlet. There we see the _positive_ of Shakspeare's superior power. But now turn and look to the _negative_. At a time when the trials of witches, the royal book on demonology, and popular superst.i.tion (all so far useful, as they prepared a basis of undoubting faith for the poet's serious use of such agencies) had degraded and polluted the ideas of these mysterious beings by many mean a.s.sociations, Shakspeare does not fear to employ them in high tragedy, (a tragedy moreover which, though not the very greatest of his efforts as an intellectual whole, nor as a struggle of pa.s.sion, is _among_ the greatest in any view, and positively _the_ greatest for scenical grandeur, and in that respect makes the nearest approach of all English tragedies to the Grecian model;) he does not fear to introduce, for the same appalling effect as that for which Aeschylus introduced the Eumenides, a triad of old women, concerning whom an English wit has remarked this grotesque peculiarity in the popular creed of that day,--that although potent over winds and storms, in league with powers of darkness, they yet stood in awe of the constable,--yet relying on his own supreme power to disenchant as well as to enchant, to create and to uncreate, he mixes these women and their dark machineries with the power of armies, with the agencies of kings, and the fortunes of martial kingdoms. Such was the sovereignty of this poet, so mighty its compa.s.s!

A third fund of Shakspeare's peculiar power lies in his teeming fertility of fine thoughts and sentiments. From his works alone might be gathered a golden bead-roll of thoughts the deepest, subtilest, most pathetic, and yet most catholic and universally intelligible; the most characteristic, also, and appropriate to the particular person, the situation, and the case, yet, at the same time, applicable to the circ.u.mstances of every human being, under all the accidents of life, and all vicissitudes of fortune. But this subject offers so vast a field of observation, it being so eminently the prerogative of Shakspeare to have thought more finely and more extensively than all other poets combined, that we cannot wrong the dignity of such a theme by doing more, in our narrow limits, than simply noticing it as one of the emblazonries upon Shakspeare's s.h.i.+eld.

Fourthly, we shall indicate (and, as in the last case, _barely_ indicate, without attempting in so vast a field to offer any inadequate ill.u.s.trations) one mode of Shakspeare's dramatic excellence, which hitherto has not attracted any special or separate notice. We allude to the forms of life, and natural human pa.s.sion, as apparent in the structure of his dialogue. Among the many defects and infirmities of the French and of the Italian drama, indeed, we may say of the Greek, the dialogue proceeds always by independent speeches, replying indeed to each other, but never modified in its several openings by the momentary effect of its several terminal forms immediately preceding. Now, in Shakspeare, who first set an example of that most important innovation, in all his impa.s.sioned dialogues, each reply or rejoinder seems the mere rebound of the previous speech. Every form of natural interruption, breaking through the restraints of ceremony under the impulses of tempestuous pa.s.sion; every form of hasty interrogative, ardent reiteration when a question has been evaded; every form of scornful repet.i.tion of the hostile words; every impatient continuation of the hostile statement; in short, all modes and formulae by which anger, hurry, fretfulness, scorn, impatience, or excitement under any movement whatever, can disturb or modify or dislocate the formal bookish style of commencement, --these are as rife in Shakspeare's dialogue as in life itself; and how much vivacity, how profound a verisimilitude, they add to the scenic effect as an imitation of human pa.s.sion and real life, we need not say. A volume might be written ill.u.s.trating the vast varieties of Shakspeare's art and power in this one field of improvement; another volume might be dedicated to the exposure of the lifeless and unnatural result from the opposite practice in the foreign stages of France and Italy. And we may truly say, that were Shakspeare distinguished from them by this single feature of nature and propriety, he would on that account alone have merited a great immortality.

The dramatic works of Shakspeare generally acknowledged to be genuine consist of thirty-five pieces. The following is the chronological order in which they are supposed to have been written, according to Mr. Malone, as given in his second edition of Shakspeare, and by Mr. George Chalmers in his Supplemental Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare Papers:

Chalmers. Malone.

1. The Comedy of Errors, 1591 1592 2. Love's Labors Lost, 1592 1594 3. Romeo and Juliet, 1592 1596 4. Henry VI., the First Part, 1593 1589 5. Henry VI., the Second Part, 1595 1591 6. Henry VL, the Third Part, 1595 1591 7. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1595 1591 8. Richard III., 1596 1593 9. Richard II, 1596 1593 10. The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1596 1601 11. Henry IV., the First Part, 1597 1597 12. Henry IV., the Second Part, 1597 1599 13. Henry V., 1597 1599 14. The Merchant of Venice, 1597 1594 15. Hamlet, 1598 1600 16. King John, 1598 1596 17. A Midsummer-Night's Dream, 1598 1594 18. The Taming of the Shrew, 1599 1596 19. All's Well that Ends Well, 1599 1606 20. Much Ado about Nothing, 1599 1600 21. As you Like It, 1602 1599 22. Troilus and Cressida, 1610 1602 23. Timon of Athens, 1611 1610 24. The Winter's Tale, 1601 1611 25. Measure for Measure, 1604 1603 26. King Lear, 1605 1605 27. Cymbeline, 1606 1609 28. Macbeth, 1606 1606 29. Julius Caesar, 1607 1607 30. Antony and Cleopatra, 1608 1608 31. Coriola.n.u.s, 1619 1610 32. The Tempest, 1613 1611 33. The Twelfth Night, 1613 1607 34. Henry VIII., 1613 1603 35. Oth.e.l.lo, 1614 1604

Pericles and t.i.tus Andronicus, although inserted in all the late editions of Shakspeare's Plays, are omitted in the above list, both by Malone and Chalmers, as not being Shakspeare's.

The first edition of the Works was published in 1623, in a folio volume, ent.i.tled Mr. William Shakspeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. The second edition was published in 1632, the third in 1664, and the fourth in 1685, all in folio; but the edition of 1623 is considered the most authentic. Rowe published an edition in seven vols. 8vo, in 1709. Editions were published by Pope, in six vols. 4to, in 1725; by Warburton, in eight vols. 8vo, in 1747; by Dr. Johnson, in eight vols. 8vo, in 1765; by Stevens, in four vols.

8vo, in 1766; by Malone, in ten vols. 8vo, in 1789; by Alexander Chalmers, in nine vols. 8vo, in 1811; by Johnson and Stevens, revised by Isaac Reed, in twenty-one vols. 8vo, in 1813; and the Plays and Poems, with notes by Malone, were edited by James Boswell, and published in twenty-one vols. 8vo, in 1821. Besides these, numerous editions have been published from time to time.

NOTES.

NOTE 1.

Mr. Campbell, the latest editor of Shakspeare's dramatic works, observes that ”the poet's name has been variously written Shax-peare, Shackspeare, Shakspeare, and Shakspere;” to which varieties might be added s.h.a.gspere, from the Worcester Marriage License, published in 1836. But the fact is, that by combining with all the differences in spelling the first syllable, all those in spelling the second, more than twenty-five distinct varieties of the name may be expanded, (like an algebraic series,) for the choice of the curious in mis-spelling. Above all things, those varieties which arise from the intercalation of the middle _e, _(that is, the _e_ immediately before the final syllable _spear,_) can never be overlooked by those who remember, at the opening of the Dunciad, the note upon this very question about the orthography of Shakspeare's name, as also upon the other great question about the t.i.tle of the immortal Satire, Whether it ought not to have been the Dunceiade, seeing that Dunce, its great author and progenitor, cannot possibly dispense with the letter _e._ Meantime we must remark, that the first three of Mr. Campbell's variations are mere caprices of the press; as is s.h.a.gspere; or, more probably, this last euphonious variety arose out of the gross clownish p.r.o.nunciation of the two hiccuping _”marksmen”_ who rode over to Worcester for the license; and one cannot forbear laughing at the bishop's secretary for having been so misled by two varlets, professedly incapable of signing their own names. The same drunken villains had cut down the bride's name _Hathaway_ into _Hathwey._ Finally, to treat the matter with seriousness,

Sir Frederick Madden has shown, in his recent letter to the Society of Antiquaries, that the poet himself in all probability _wrote_ the name uniformly _Shakspere._ Orthography, both of proper names, of appellatives, and of words universally, was very unsettled up to a period long subsequent to that of Shakspeare. Still it must usually have happened that names written variously and laxly by others, would be written uniformly by the owners; especially by those owners who had occasion to sign their names frequently, and by literary people, whose attention was often, as well as consciously, directed to the proprieties of spelling. _Shakspeare_ is now too familiar to the eye for any alteration to be attempted; but it is pretty certain that Sir Frederick Madden is right in stating the poet's own signature to have been uniformly _Shakspere._ It is so written twice in the course of his will, and it is so written on a blank leaf of Florio's English translation of Montaigne's Essays; a book recently discovered, and sold, on account of its autograph, for a hundred guineas.

NOTE 2.

But, as a proof that, even in the case of royal christenings, it was not thought pious to ”tempt G.o.d,” as it were, by delay, Edward VI., the only son of Henry VIII., was born on the 12th day of October in the year 1537. And there was a delay on account of the sponsors, since the birth was not in London. Yet how little that delay was made, may be seen by this fact: The birth took place in the dead of the night, the day was Friday; and yet, in spite of all delay, the christening was most pompously celebrated on the succeeding Monday. And Prince Arthur, the elder brother of Henry VIII., was christened on the very next Sunday succeeding to his birth, notwithstanding an inevitable delay, occasioned by the distance of Lord Oxford, his G.o.dfather, and the excessive rains, which prevented the earl being reached by couriers, or himself reaching Winchester, without extraordinary exertions.

NOTE 3.

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