QUEEN ELIZABETH.

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for 34 years, she need not indeed-to judge both from her person and appearance-yield much to a young girl of sixteen!

My chief interest at present in the subject mooted, is in relation to the Earl of Southampton and Elizabeth Vernon, and her Majesty's persistent opposition to their marriage. This led me to note other curious circumstances. Will some devout Elizabethan help me out of my doubt and difficulty? Will Mr. Kingsley, who, in his paper on Raleigh, vouches with so much certitude for the Queen's virtue? Perhaps Mr. Froude will produce a satisfactory explanation? Meantime I am at liberty to maintain that it is not necessary to possess a monkish imagination not to be able to chime in with Fuller's emphatic cry of Virginissima,' where he calls Elizabeth when living, the first Maid on Earth, and when dead, the second in heaven.

APPENDIX D.

TITUS ANDRONICUS.

THIS drama has been ascribed to the pen of Shakspeare on the authority of Meres and the first folio; all the other evidence tends to show that Meres made a mistake which was afterwards repeated.

I cannot imagine how anyone who has intimately felt the soul of Shakspeare can possibly countenance such a mistake. For the play has none of the Shakspearian condensation of thought which, in his earliest work, is loosed in the most utter sweetnesses and felicities of expression. None of the Shakspearian gusto of language which makes many of his cordial words as it were the audible kiss of sound and sense. None of the Shakspearian 'flowing continuity of interchangeable pauses: there is nothing of the vital glow or natural ruby' of the Shakspearian life, and can be none of the usual signs of its presence. In the whole play, there is no single touch that his closest acquaintances instantly and for ever recognise as the master's; not one of those nearnesses to nature that we know as Shakspearian; and yet he could not write thirty lines without emitting an authentic flash of such revelation.

In short, those who accept Titus Andronicus' as Shakspeare's work cannot only not have followed out his nearness to nature in the more delicate touches and opal

'TITUS ANDRONICUS' NOT SHAKSPEARE'S.

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escent graces of his poetry, but they totally misapprehend the quality of his coarseness; the signs of his immaturity. 'Pericles' is an early play. Dryden calls it the earliest, and I see no cause for doubting the tradition, but many reasons for accepting it. And this play contains the unmistakeable Shakspearian touch of life, of prompt and pregnant thought, of phrase that glows like the serene fire in a gem. But it is impossible to find any proof of Shakspeare's presence from beginning to end of the Titus Andronicus.'

It reeks blood, it smells

Shakspeare's is the tragedy of Terror; this is the tragedy of Horror. His tragedy is never bloodily sensual; his genius has ever a spiritualising influence. Blood may flow, but he is dealing with more than blood. This play is a perfect slaughter-house, and the blood makes appeal to all the senses. The murder is committed in the very gateways of the sense. of blood, we almost feel that we have handled blood; it is so gross. The mental stain is not whitened by Shakspeare's sweet springs of pity; the horror is not hallowed by that appalling sublimity with which he invested his chosen ministers of death. It is tragedy only in the coarsest material relationships; the tragedy of Horror.

Mr. Knight whose views on the subject of our poet's earliest work, compel his arguments to straddle over impossible spaces past all power of standing, endeavours to show that this play was written by Shakspeare in some period of storm and stress' when he was in the throes and agonies of labouring might too big for birth, and had not yet attained to his repose of power.

Yet, directly after, he remarks that from the first, Shakspeare, with that consummate judgment which gave fitness to everything he did or proposed to do, held his genius in subjection to the apprehension of the people till he felt secure of their capability to appreciate the highest excellence.' But this equally implies his power to stand

over his work and hold his genius in such subjection as should effectually prevent its breaking out in the wild way it must have done supposing him to be the author of 'Titus Andronicus.' It is demonstrable however that Shakspeare did not pass through any such period of agitation or mental green-sickness. His work is healthy from the first. He makes no absurd endeavours to embrace immensity; had no assumptions of strength that collapse in spasm. No tearing of things to pieces tooth and nail. No blind haste or threatening rant. But everywhere the ease, the depth, the fulness, the poise of a rich genius flowering in joy, whose power was from the visible beginning supreme in its range and according to its theme.

We shall best apprehend the superb and happy health of the man by entering into the humour of his Venus and Adonis.' His merry motive all through is to tantalize the passion with which he plays so provokingly. And this he does with the large ease, the sure touch, the ripe humour of human nature's great master. The man who could so early take such an attitude of assured sovereignty could not have afterwards become the fretting fuming slave of 'Storm and Stress.' Besides which we may learn from the Marlowe group of Sonnets that as early as 1592 or 1593 Shakspeare was fully conscious of the gross faults and defects, the surfeiting comparisons, the Brobdignagian bombast that Marlowe and others revelled in, who, as Nash told them, would 'embowel the clouds in a speech of comparison; thinking themselves more than initiated in Poets' immortality if they but once get Boreas by the beard and the Heavenly Bull by the dewlap.' Shakspeare assures us that he does not do this, and in spite of the handsome way in which he spoke of his rival, his finer ear and truer taste must have detected a good deal of bombast in the mighty line. He would see that the glow of Marlowe's imagination had in it a swarthy smoke, so that the poetry never attained the true regulus

A MISTAKE RECTIFIED.

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of colour, but came forth from the furnace as bronze, not having the mellow splendour of pure gold. He knew well enough that Marlowe had not quite found the way to the noble in poetry, and that he strove all the harder to reach the grim heights where frowns the terrible.

One of the greatest differences betwixt Shakspeare and Marlowe was that the latter poet had not sufficient humour to hinder his taking the step from the sublime to the ridiculous, whereas Shakspeare had a most active and ticklish sense of the absurd. This must have been one of his quickest, keenest, most self-preserving instincts! the liveliest part of his self-consciousness. This alone would have prevented his following in the track of Marlowe save for the purpose of sketching on the back of the other poet as it were, a portrait in caricature of his more prominent features-making a face for the fun of the thing, such as setting Pistol to parody Tamburlane, and devoting some of his earliest merriest satire to mock those who talked unlike men of God's making. And yet Shakspeare is supposed to have written or re-written a drama which contains many of Marlowe's worst characteristics, the unnatural spirit of which is far worse than anything in the expression.

Had this play been our Poet's it could not have been very early work. It is assumed to have been produced as a new Play at Henslowe's Theatre on the 23rd of January 1593. This however is a mistake. Titus Andronicus' was not produced until January 23rd 1594.

6

At page 31 of the Diary Henslowe begins his dates with the 27th of December 1593, and continues with that year up to December 31st. Next day January 1st should be dated 1594 or 1593, their New Year's day being March 25th. But the year has been left unchanged, and it continues unchanged up to April 6th in the entry appertaining to the Duke of Sussex's men and the Queen's men, who were then playing together, or else Henslowe