"Love's

Labour's
Lost."

1598, said to be then newly augmented, and to have been presented before Queen Elizabeth "this last Christmas." We have it, therefore, as an early play revised. It may contain passages that were added when Shakespeare was shaping Falstaff, or the comedy of "Much Ado about Nothing."

When Shakespeare wrote this play there was the dainty fashion of ingenious speech that had been introduced from Italy, whither young gentlemen then went to rub off the rust of college manners. It had been developed in literature even to the extent of having a name given to it from the "Euphues" of John Lyly, who won praise in the novel of that name by saying earnest things in a way that represented the new style in its perfection. Its own world called this fashion "Euphuism," and to be able to "parley Euphuism was the sign of proper training in a courtier. We have seen that Lyly himself, acknowledged master of this style, knew its defect, and indicated it when he said of himself, "I have ever thought so superstitiously of wit, that I fear I have committed idolatry against wisdom." It will be remembered that, in the dedication of his book to Lord de la Warre, Lyly spoke of "the dainty ear of the curious sifter," the use of superfluous eloquence," the "search after those which sift the finest meal and bear the whitest mouths." He said, "It is a world to see how Englishmen desire to hear finer speech than their language will allow, to eat finer bread than is made of wheat, or wear finer cloth than is made of wool but I let pass their fineness, which can no way excuse my folly.".

Shakespeare plays with the fashion, and gives it happiest expression in the wit-combats of youth. In the princess and her ladies we have, as no grey-headed poet could have represented them, the light hearts of the young. Frolic with

*"E. W." viii. 307, 308.

"Jest and youthful jollity,

Quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles,

Nods, and becks, and wreathéd smiles,”

they sport with the affectations covering the dear affections of the love-lorn lords who have sworn a vow against Nature and are forced to break it. The weakness of phrase-making is shown, with all its grace, in the light-hearted thrust and parry of happy youth right-minded and well-cultured. It is also caricatured in the language of the schoolmaster Holofernes, Sir Nathaniel the curate, and the Spanish Don, Adriano de Armado,

"A man in all the world's new fashion planted,
That hath a mint of phrases in his brain.”

His show of words, with little wit beneath, is like his outward show of fine clothes that he cannot strip off to fight with Costard, because he has no shirt under them.

The notion of the King of Navarre that he will withdraw for three years from his active duties in the world, for study; and will, for the same end, deny himself some part of the food and sleep that life requires; will break also his allegiance to other ties of nature; is made playfully to illustrate what Shakespeare shows more' seriously in some of his later plays-that we live to do the duties of our lives, not to spend all our years in preparation for them, die, and leave nothing done. Biron asks, "What is the end of study, let me know?" He points playfully to the error of his friends, in telling them that—

"You, to study now it is too late,

Climb o'er the house to unlock the little gate."

He tells them euphuistically that their "light seeking light would light of light deprive," by putting it to no real use, while endeavouring to make it more.

L-VOL. X.

"So study evermore is overshot.

While it doth study to have what it would,

It doth forget to DO the thing it should."

The time of immaturity for action is the time for sole. devotion to the forging of the armour to be used in action. Once on the field, there is the battle to be won; and study then is no more than the constant care to keep the armour bright and sound, and add what may be added, in the pauses between action and action, to the means of victory in the next struggle for the doing of whatever we have come into the world to do. It is not insignificant of the disproportion between outside show and inside worth in the men who had lived too long on the almsbasket of words wanting in deeds to match them, that in the pageant of the Nine Worthies little Moth plays Hercules.

The close of the light-hearted play, without changing its character, delivers Shakespeare's mind. Death breaks in upon the sport. Tidings of the death of the princess's father brings all to plain speaking at the close. The king, withdrawn out of the reach of idle tongues, must search into and learn to know himself. Biron, the pleasant mocker without malice, is required to win his love by coming first into close contact with the hard realities of life—

"You shall, this twelvemonth term, from day to day,
Visit the speechless sick, and still converse

With groaning wretches; and your task shall be
With all the fierce endeavour of your wit,

To enforce the painéd impotent to smile.

Biron. To move wild laughter in the throat of death?
It cannot be; it is impossible :

Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.

Rosaline. Why, that's the way to choke a jibing spirit,
Whose influence is begot of that loose grace

Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools."

So, afterwards, the light wit-combats of "Much Ado About Nothing" pass into plain sincerity of word and deed when

the wrong done to Hero brings Benedick and Beatrice in contact with a stern reality of life. So here even Don Adriano de Armado,

"One whom the music of his own vain tongue

Doth ravish like enchanting harmony,"

ends by announcing that he has "vowed to Jaquenetta to hold the plough for her sweet love three years." In the closing songs we have presentments of the Owl and the Cuckoo, one on each side of the stage-visible symbols of the pedant's empty show of wisdom and the idle iteration. of the hander-on of phrases, who have more care for the words than for the thoughts they speak.

CHAPTER VII.

Dramatists between 1592 and 1598.

PLAYWRIGHTS AND PAMPHLETEERS.

ture.

THE death of Marlowe, in the year 1593, closed that period in the history of the English drama during which Shakespeare was mastering his art in London, with a group of dramatists about him who were really poets, and whose plays live in our literaOf this group Christopher Marlowe was the greatest, and the last. Robert Greene was dead. George Peele was falling into sickness and poverty. Those of his plays that are known to us had all been acted. Among those unknown to us, his lost play of "The Hunting of Cupid" was entered at Stationers' Hall on the twenty-sixth of July, 1591, and was, no doubt, printed; but no copy of it has been found. The letter to Lord Burleigh from Peele's sick-chamber * was sent in January, 1596, and Meres speaks of him as dead in 1598. Thomas Lodge was quitting, or had quitted, the stage in 1593,† and, though there was no want of new plays after that date, there was a want of new poets to write them until 1598. In or about that year there began to come into our literature a new company of dramatic poets, among whom Ben Jonson was the greatest, and of whom all rose to their highest powers in the reign of James I. During the six years from 1592 to 1598, when Shakespeare was pouring out his earlier plays at the rate of +"E. W." x. 78, 85.

*

"E. W." x. 78.