our opinion, that as editors they were rash, and as critics they were cold and unimaginative; and we hold it to be the highest duty to attempt to undo what they have done, when they approach their author, as in their manufacture of a text for 'Romeo and Juliet,'" without reverence." We believe, as they did not, "that his own judgment is entitled to more respect than that of any or all his critics;" and we shall attempt to vindicate that judgment on every occasion, upon the great principle laid down by Bentley :—“The point is not what he might have done, but what he has done." In attempting to settle the Chronology of Shakspere's plays, there are, as in every other case of literary history, two species of evidence to be regarded-the extrinsic and the intrinsic. Of the former species of evidence we have the one important fact that a Romeo and Juliet,' by Shakspere, however wanting in the completeness of the 'Romeo and Juliet' which we now possess, was published in 1597. The enumeration of this play, therefore, in the list by Francis Meres, in 1598, adds nothing to our previous information. In the same manner, the mention of this play by Marston, in his tenth satire, first published in 1599, only shows us how popular it was: "Luscus, what's play'd to-day? i' faith, now I know; I see thy lips abroach, from whence doth flow Nought but pure Juliet and Romeo." Of the positive intrinsic evidence of the date of Romeo and Juliet,' the play, as it appears to us, only furnishes one passage. The Nurse, describing the time when Juliet was weaned, says, "On Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen; That shall she, marry; I remember it well. "T is since the earthquake now eleven years; Sitting in the sun under the dove-house wall, * Shake, quoth the dove-house: 't was no need, I trow, To bid me trudge. And since that time it is eleven years." Southey (speaking of Cowper). All this particularity with reference to the earthquake— "I never shall forget it,Of all the days of the year" was for the audience. The poet had to exhibit the minuteness with which unlettered people, and old people in particular, establish a date, by reference to some circumstance which has made a particular impression upon their imagination; but in this case he chose a circumstance which would be familiar to his audience, and would have produced a corresponding impression upon themselves. Tyrwhitt was the first to point out that this passage had, in all probability, a reference to the great earthquake which happened in England in 1580. Stow has described this earthquake minutely in his Chronicle, and so has Holinshed. "On the 6th of April, 1580, being Wednesday in Easter week, about six o'clock toward evening, a sudden earthquake happened in London, and almost generally throughout all England, caused such an amazedness among the people as was wonderful for the time, and caused them to make their earnest prayers to Almighty God!" The circumstances attendant upon this earthquake show that the remembrance of it would not have easily passed away from the minds of the people. The great clock in the palace at Westminster, and divers other clocks and bells, struck of themselves against the hammers with the shaking of the earth. lawyers supping in the Temple ran from the tables, and out of their halls, with their knives in their hands." The people assembled at the theatres rushed forth into the fields, lest the galleries should fall. The roof of Christ Church, near to Newgate Market, was so shaken, that a large stone dropped out of it, killing one person, and mortally wounding another, it being sermontime. Chimneys toppled down, houses were shattered. Shakspere, therefore, could not have mentioned an earthquake with the minuteness of the passage in the Nurse's speech without immediately calling up some associations in the minds of his audience. He knew the double world in which an excited audience lives,-the half belief in the world แ The audience, the play was produced, as well as written, in 1591. Reasoning such as this would, we acknowledge, be very weak if it were unsupported by evidence deduced from the general character of the performance, with reference to the maturity of the author's powers. But, taken in connection with that evidence, it becomes important. Now, we have no hesitation in believing, although it would be exceedingly difficult to communicate the grounds of our belief fully to our readers, that the alterations made by Shakspere upon his first copy of Romeo and Juliet,' as printed in 1597 (which alterations are shown in the second copy as printed in 1599), exhibit differences as to the quality of his mind of poetry amongst which they are placed during a theatrical representation, and the half consciousness of the external world of their ordinary life. The ready disposition of every audience to make a transition from the scene before them to the scene in which they ordinarily move,-to assimilate what is shadowy and distant with what is distinct | and at hand, is perfectly well known to all who are acquainted with the machinery of the drama. Actors seize upon the principle to perpetrate the grossest violations of good taste; and authors who write for present applause invariably do the same when they offer us, in their dialogue, a passing allusion, which is technically called a clap-trap. In the case before us, even if Shakspere had not this principle in view, the association-differences in judgment-differences in the of the English earthquake must have been strongly in his mind when he made the Nurse date from an earthquake. Without reference to the circumstance of Juliet's age, "Even or odd, of all days in the year, Come Lammas-eve at night, shall she be fourteen," he would naturally, dating from the earthquake, have made the date refer to the period of his writing the passage instead of the period of Juliet's being weaned :"Then she could stand alone." But, according to the Nurse's chronology, Juliet had not arrived at that epoch in the lives of children till she was three years old. The very contradiction shows that Shakspere had another object in view than that of making the Nurse's chronology tally with the age of her nursling. Had he written, ""T is since the earthquake now just thirteen years," we should not have been so ready to believe that 'Romeo and Juliet' was written in 1593; but as he has written, ""T is since the earthquake now eleven years," in defiance of a very obvious calculation on the part of the Nurse, we have little doubt that he wrote the passage eleven years after the earthquake of 1580, and that, the passage being also meant to fix the attention of an cast of thought-differences in poetical power which cannot be accounted for by the Made by the joiner squirrel, or old grub, These lines are not in the first copy; but "The earth, that 's Nature's mother, is her look like the work of one who had been reading and thinking more deeply of nature's mysteries than in his first delineation of the benevolent philosophy of this good old man. But, as we advance in the play, the development of the writer's powers is more and more displayed in his additions. The critical reader may trace what has been added by the foot-notes in the 'Pictorial' and 'Library' editions. same thing," said Marlowe," the same words were whispered to me by my base envy, when I observed the universal delight, the deep emotion, of every spectator. I endeavoured to comfort myself therewith, and again to recover my lost honours in this miserable manner. I fled from the company; and the house-steward, who had acted as an assistant, gave me the manuscript of the play. In my lonely chamber I sat and read Tieck, who, as a translator of Shakspere, the whole night, and read again,-and each and as a profound and beautiful critic, has time admired the more; for much that had done very much for cultivating the know- appeared to me episodical or superfluous ledge, built upon love, which the Germans acquired, on more exact examination, a sigpossess of our poet, has not been trammelled nificancy and needful fulness. The good by Malone and Chalmers, but has placed house-steward gave me also another poem, Romeo and Juliet' amongst Shakspere's which the author has not yet quite comearly plays. We have no exact statements pleted, 'Venus and Adonis,' that I might on this subject by Tieck; but, in a very read it in my nightly leisure. My friend, delightful imaginary scene between Marlowe even here, even in this sweet narrative,and Greene, he has made Marlowe describe even in this soft speech and voluptuous to his brother dramatist the first performance imagery,—in this intoxicating realm, where of Romeo and Juliet' of which he had been I, till now, only looked upon likenesses of witness*. Tieck has made this imaginary myself, I am completely, completely beaten. conversation a vehicle for the most enthu-O this man, this more than mortal! to him siastic praise of this play. Marlowe describes the performance as taking place at the palace of the Lord Hunsdon. He had expected, he says, that one of his own plays would have been performed; but he found that it was "that old poem, which we have all long known, worked up into a tragedy." After Marlowe has run through the general characteristics of the play, with an eloquent admiration, mingled with deep regret that he himself had been able to approach so distantly the excellence of that "out-sounding mouth, which a godlike muse has herself inspired with the sweetest of her kisses," he thus replies to Greene's inquiry as to who was the poet :-"Wilt thou believe ?-one of Henslowe's common comedians, who has already served him many years on very low wages." "And now, if thy fever has passed," said Greene, "let us look on this thing in the broad light. This is merely such a passing apparition as we have seen many of before-admired, gaped at, praised without limit-but full of faults and imperfections, and soon to be altogether forgotten." "The * Dichterleben,' von Tieck: Berlin, 1828, p. 128, &c. (I feel as if my life depends on it) I must become the most intimate friend or the most bitter enemy. Either I will yet find my way to him, or I will succumb to this Apollo, and he may then speak over my outstretched corpse the last words of praise or blame." Tieck has thus decidedly placed the date of the performance of Romeo and Juliet' before 1592,—for Greene died in that year, and Marlowe in the year following. The Venus and Adonis,' which is here mentioned as not quite completed, was published in 1593. Tieck built his opinion, no doubt, upon internal evidence; and upon this evidence we must be content to let the question rest. WHEN Dante reproaches the Emperor Albert for neglect of Italy,— "Thy sire and thou have suffer'd thus, "Come, see the Capulets and Montagues, Who car'st for nought! those sunk in grief, to be found in these sources were embodied and these With dire suspicion rack'd."* The Capulets and Montagues were amongst the fierce spirits who, according to the poet, had rendered Italy "savage and unmanageable." The Emperor Albert was murdered in 1308 and the Veronese, who believe the story of Romeo and Juliet' to be historically true, fix the date of this tragedy as 1303. At that period the Scalas, or Scaligers, ruled over Verona. course, If the records of history tell us little of the fair Capulet and her loved Montague, whom Shakspere has made immortal, the novelists have seized upon the subject, as might be expected from its interest and its obscurity. Massuccio, a Neapolitan, who lived about 1470, was, it is supposed, the writer who first gave a somewhat similar story the clothing of a connected fiction. He places the scene at Sienna, and, of there is no mention of the Montagues and Capulets. The story, too, of Massuccio varies in its catastrophe; the bride recovering from her lethargy, produced by the same means as in the case of Juliet, and the husband being executed for a murder which had caused him to flee from his country. Mr. Douce has endeavoured to trace back the groundwork of the tale to a Greek romance by Xenophon Ephesius. Luigi da Porto, of Vicenza, gave a connected form to the legend of Romeo and Juliet, in a novel, under the title of La Giulietta,' which was published after his death in 1535. Luigi, in an epistle which is prefixed to this work, states that the story was told him by "an archer of mine, whose name was Peregrino, a man about fifty years old, well practised in the military art, a pleasant companion, and, like almost all his countrymen of Verona, a great talker." Bandello, in 1554, published a novel on the same subject, the ninth of his second collection. It begins, "When the Scaligers were lords of Verona," and goes on to say that these events happened "under Bartholomew Scaliger" (Bartolomeo della Scala). The various materials *Purgatory,' Canto 6: Cary's Translation. in a French novel by Pierre Boisteau, a translation of which was published by Painter in his 'Palace of Pleasure,' in 1567; and upon this French story was founded the English poem by Arthur Brooke, published in 1562, under the title of 'The tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, written first in Italian by Bandell, and nowe in Englishe by Ar. Br.' It appears highly probable that an English play upon the same subject had appeared previous to Brooke's poem; for a copy of that poem, which was in the possession of the Rev. H. White, of Lichfield, contains the following passage, in an address to the reader:-"Though I saw the same argument lately set forth on the stage with more commendation than I can look for, being there much better set forth than I have or can do, yet the same matter, penned as it is, may serve to like good effect, if the readers do bring with them like good minds to consider it, which hath the more encouraged me to publish it, such as it is." We thus see that Shakspere had materials enough to work upon. But, in addition to these sources, there is a play by Lope de Vega in which the incidents are very similar; and an Italian tragedy also by Luigi Groto, which Mr. Walker, in his historical memoir of Italian tragedy, thinks that the English bard read with profit. Mr. assertion, such as a description of a nightinWalker gives us passages in support of his gale when the lovers are parting, which appear to confirm this opinion. To attempt to show, as many have at tempted, what Shakspere took from the poem of 'Romeus and Juliet,' and what from Painter's Palace of Pleasure'-how he was 'wretchedly misled in his catastrophe," as Mr. Dunlop has it, because he had not read Luigi da Porto-and how he invented only one incident throughout the play, that of the death of Paris, and created only one character, that of Mercutio, according to the sagacious Mrs. Lenox-appears to us somewhat idle work. The slight foundation of historical truth which can be established in the legend of 'Romeo and Juliet'-that of the "civil when withered leaves had dropped into the decayed sarcophagus, and the vines that are trailed above it had been stripped of their fruit. His letter to Moore, in which this passage occurs, is dated the 7th November*. But this wild and desolate garden only struck Byron as appropriate to the legend-to that simple tale of fierce hatreds and fatal loves which tradition has still preserved, amongst those who may never have read Luigi da Porto or Bandello, and who, perhaps, never heard the name of Shakspere. To the legend only is the blighted place appropriate. For who that has ever been thoroughly imbued with the story of Juliet, as told by Shakspere,-who that has heard his "glorious song of praise on that inexpressible feeling which ennobles the soul and gives to it its highest sublimity, and which elevates even the senses themselves into soul," +-who that, in our great poet's matchless delineation of Juliet's love, has perceived "whatever is most intoxicating in the odour of a southern spring, languishing in the song of the nightingale, or voluptuous on the first opening of the rose,"—who, indeed, that looks upon the tomb of the Juliet of Shakspere, can see only a shapeless ruin amidst wildness and desolation? broils" of the two rival houses of Verona- | Moore, as he saw it at the close of autumn, would place the period of the action about the time of Dante. But this one circumstance ought not, as it appears to us, very strictly to limit this period. The legend is so obscure, that we may be justified in carrying its date forward or backward, to the extent even of a century, if anything may be gained by such a freedom. In this case, we may venture to associate the story with the period which followed the times of Petrarch and Boccaccio-verging towards the close of the fourteenth century—a period full of rich associations. Then, the literary treasures of the ancient world had been rescued out of the dust and darkness of ages, -the language of Italy had been formed, in great part, by the marvellous Visions' of her greatest poet; painting had been revived by Giotto and Cimabue; architecture had put on a character of beauty and majesty, and the first necessities of shelter and defence had been associated with the higher demands of comfort and taste; sculpture had displayed itself in many beautiful productions, both in marble and bronze; and music had been cultivated as a science. All these were the growth of the freedom which prevailed in the Italian republics, and of the wealth which had been acquired by commercial enterprise, under the impulses of freedom. To date the period of the action of Romeo and Juliet' before this revival of learning and the arts, would be to make its accessories out of harmony with the exceeding beauty of Shakspere's drama. Even if a slight portion of historical accuracy be sacrificed, his poetry must be surrounded with an appropriate atmosphere of grace and richness. "Of the truth of Juliet's story, they (the Veronese) seem tenacious to a degree,-insisting on the fact, giving a date (1303), and showing a tomb. It is a plain, open, and partly decayed sarcophagus, with withered leaves in it, in a wild and desolate con ventual garden, once a cemetery, now ruined to the very graves. The situation struck me as very appropriate to the legend, being blighted as their love." Byron thus described the tomb of Juliet to his friend "A grave? Oh, no; a lantern, For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes This vault a feasting presence full of light." Wordsworth has a philosophical remark upon Shakspere which is applicable to all the most pathetic scenes, never act upon us his tragedies:-"Shakspere's writings, in as pathetic beyond the bounds of pleasure." Wordsworth adds, that this effect, “in a imagined, is to be ascribed to small, but much greater degree than might at first be continual and regular, impulses of pleasurable surprise from the metrical arrangement."§ In Romeo and Juliet the principle of limiting the pathetic according to the degree in which it is calculated to produce * Moore's Life of Byron,' 8vo.: 1838, p. 327. †A. W. Schlegel's 'Lectures,' Black's translation, vol. ii., p. 187. Ibid. § Observations prefixed to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads.' |
