VIII. FIRST SKETCHES IN EARLY QUARTOS.

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FROM DR. FLEAY's PAPER IN THE PROCEEDINGS
THE METRICAL TESTS 219
TABLE OF RATIOS OF RIME-LINES
IN RIME-SCENES TO BLANK-VERSE LINES IN EACH PLAY.
( riKST APPKOXIMATION. ) COMEDIES. HISTORIES AND TftAGEDIES.
First period.
Love*s Labour* 8 Lost .6
Mid. Nighf s Dream i Richaixi II. 4
Comedy of Enort 3 Romeo and Juliet 4.3
I
!
I St Pt of 2 Gent, of Ver. 7 ist Plot of Troy. & Cress. 8.4
1st Plot of Twelfth Night 7.5 ind do. do. 13.6
Second period.
Richaixi III. *
Merchant of Venice 1 6 John 1 6
SMuch Ado, tec. 11 ^ i Henry IV. 19
Merry Wives of Windsor 22
As You Like It 19 ( Henry V. 19
Co-npln. of 1 2th Night. Prose. Com. of Tam. of the Shrew *
Third period,
AU's Well, &c. (rewrit.) 22 Julius Catsar *
Measure for Measure 22 f Hamlet about 30
I Othello „ 30
i Lear yj 30
Macbeth? „ *
(^ Cymbeline „ 30
iPart of Pericles 32
Part of Timon of A. 23
Fourth period.
Compln. of Troyl. and Cres. 54.5
Coriolanus 60
Julius Caesar ? *
Antony and Cleopatra 66
Fifth period.
i Tempest 729 ( Part of Two N. Kinsmen 281
i
\ Winter's Tale infinity \ Part of Henry VIII. infinity
The above table is corrected up to the date of my present investigations (May 17, 1874) from one published in The Academy by me (March 28, 1874).
My reasons for all alterations will be given in my special paper on each play. They are based chiefly on more scientific application of the rime-test, aided by the lueak-ending test, the smiddii'sy liable test, and above all by the casura-test, which is next in importance to the rime-test: and has helped me much in making a different division of the plays in some instances. Cymheline, however, was misplaced through another cause, a numerical blunder ; which I have now corrected. As these investigadons extend, this table will require further correction.
Much Ado and Merry H^i'ues are apparently out of order. There is so much prose in them that two rimes would be a suflicient diflerence to justify their present poution: this number is too small to overbalance other considerations which will be given in due time.
F. G. Fleay. OF THE NEW SHAKSPERE SOCIETY FOR I 874.
220 SHAKSPERE AND HIS FORERUNNERS
But while this general line of advance is clear, when the theory is pressed to the extent of holding that we can minutely determine priority as between two plays which we know to have been written close together but whose exact dates we do not know, and that we can confidently assume the play containing the greater percentage of rimes to have been written earlier — though it may be only a few months earlier — than the play with the smaller percen- tage, then surely we must pause, we must indeed say No, unless all the other considerations and tests support the conclusion : in which event the rime test is certainly admirable as cumulative evidence. For example, proceed- ing upon the relative number of rimes alone, Mr. Fleay places the Midsummer Night's Dream here a long time before The Two Gentlemen of Verona. But loving and acute criticism finds many indications that this is not the proper order as between those two plays, and it would certainly seem that a sober view would never allow the rime test alone to outweigh all those indications, when we consider (i) that the growing disuse of rimes, unquestion- able as between large periods, cannot, from the very nature of the mind, be taken to have gone on, like the growth of a Madeira vine, at the uniform ratio of so many inches a day, and (2) that there would be some plays whose fan- ciful nature might naturally call for treatment in rime, such as the Midsummer Night's Dream, while a more serious play like The Two Gentlemen of Verona — which I have always thought was a very earnest sort of comedy — might as appropriately contain less of rime. When we investigate the history of English rime, we find that rime has been unquestionably the favourite artistic form in which the Englishman has habitually embodied his prayers, his thoughts of death, his aspirations, all his deepest feel- ings, ever since a long time before Chaucer. Suddenly in
THE METRICAL TESTS 221
the sixteenth century we hear Surrey chanting his transla- tion of Virgil in the old Chaucer rhythm but without the Chaucer rime; and then, fifty years afterwards, we come across a noisy debate about rime which went on just as Shakspere was beginning to be a craftsman in verse, Harvey and Nash and Greene and Puttenham and Webbe and Gascoigne and even Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney all appearing on one side or other. Now the light of these facts streams all along the path of Shakspere's advance as a craftsman, and certainly reveals that general line of develop- ment as one which by the most natural course in the world proceeded, not, as Mr. Fleay's very pardonable eagerness would have it, by a uniform rate of disuse of rime, but to the much higher plane of artistic technic where rime came to be regarded as a perfectly appropriate vehicle for some kinds of matters and as a less appropriate one for other kinds of matters, making the whole question of the use or non-use of rime a question of artistic propri- ety. That Shakspere so regarded it, and that every word- artist who looks at matters from a lofty point of view must so regard it, I have no doubt.
With these precautions, then, we may safely use the rime test. The practical application of it will presently be illustrated when we come to make the special contrast between the Midsummer Nighfs Dream and T^he ^empest^ in summing up all the doctrines developed in these lectures.
Meantime, let us now go on to a view of a wholly dif- ferent metrical test from the rime test, namely, the remarkable change in Shakspere's habit of versification shown by the great difference in the relative numbers of what are called run-on lines and end-stopped lines in his later plays as compared with his earlier ones.
An end-stopped line in verse is a line in which a
222 SHAKSPERE AND HIS FORERUNNERS
comma or other punctuation-mark, or a break in the sense, compels the voice to pause at the end of the line in read- ing, and thus to mark off that line sharply for the ear as a group of five bars.
For example, take the following stately speech of Theseus in that heavenly opening of the Midsummer Night's Dream :
Go, Philostrate, Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments ; Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth : Turn melancholy forth to funerals ; The pale companion is not for our pomp.
{Exit Philostrate.)
And Theseus turns to Hippolyta.
Hippolyta, I woo'd thee with my sword, And won thy love, doing thee injuries ; But I will wed thee in another key. With pomp, with triumph and with revelling.
Now here, you observe, each line ends with a pause of the sense and of the voice. Each line is here, therefore, an end-stopped line. On the other hand, take an example of the run-on line from The Tempest. Prospero, in Scene II of Act I, is describing to Miranda the treachery of his brother, who had ousted him from his kingdom :
To have no screen between this part he played
And him he played it for, he needs will be
Absolute Milan. Me, poor man, my library
Was dukedom large enough : of temporal royalties
He thinks me now incapable ; confederates
(So dry he was for sway) wi* the King of Naples, etc.
THE METRICAL TESTS 223
Here, you observe, no line ends with a comma, and at the end of none is there any occasion for a reader's voice to pause. On the contrary, each mark of punctuation, each pause of the reader's voice, occurs somewhere in the body of the line. Now, before advancing farther, I ask you to notice the precise effect of using these two very different kinds of lines — the end-stopped and the run-on. The end-stopped, you must observe immediately, if used con- tinually gives a stiff character to the verse. In the speech of Theseus I just quoted it happens to be well enough, for a certain large formality and regulated pomp seem suited to his kingly state ; but you have no difficulty in perceiving that the general effect of a continuous succes- sion of such lines is to give a stilted, wooden, and monot- onous character to the movement of the verse. You are all familiar with that exaggeration of this stiffness which reaches its height when not only a comma but a rime terminates every line, as in the verses of the Pope school. A quotation from Pope, which is quite in point in more ways than one, occurs to me, and illustrates this wooden- ness perfectly. Pope, using the same line with blank verse, you observe — the five-barred iambic — drones through page after page like this, fondly thinking it a copy of the " exact Racine."
He is speaking of the superiority of French verse to English, and remarks apologetically :
Not but the tragic spirit was our own, And full in Shakspere, fair in Otway, shone ; But Otway failed to polish or refine, And fluent Shakspere scarce eflfaced a line : E'en copious Dryden wanted, or forgot, The last and greatest art — the art to blot.
The lines move two and two, by inexorable couples, like charity-school children in procession, each pair holding
224 SHAKSPERE AND HIS FORERUNNERS
hands ; and the exactness becomes presently intolerable to the modern ear.
On the other hand, notice the freedom, the elasticity, the possibilities of varied swing, which come as soon as the pause is allowed to pass the end of the line and fall wherever it likes in the body of the next line. Here the poet has almost the scope of prose with the rhythmic pulse and beat of verse ; it is, in fact, nothing more than a prose mesuree.
Now if we examine Shakspere's plays with reference to his use of these two sorts of lines, — the end-stopped and the run-on, — we find that in the early plays, that is, in the plays which we know by indisputable external evi- dence to be early, he used the end-stopped lines almost exclusively, while in the late plays there is an increase in the number of run-on lines so great and striking as to offer a notable proof of advance in his technic. The versification of the late plays is freer, more natural, and larger in music than that of the early plays. This metrical test agrees perfectly with the order of the plays which is here placed before you based upon other evi- dences. Now careful Shakspere students, proceeding upon the hint of end-stopped and run-on lines, which was given first, I think, by Bathurst, have counted the number of end-stopped lines and the number of run-on lines in all Shakspere's plays, and have calculated their percentages relatively to the whole number of lines in each play ; and it is invariably found that while he used the end-stopped or stiflF line almost exclusively in the earlier plays, he varied It more and more with the run-on or fi-ee line in the later plays. For example : in ^he Two Gentlemen of VeronUy which is one of the earliest plays, it is found that there are ten times as many end-stopped lines as run-on lines ; while in T'he Tempesty which, you remember, is one
THE METRICAL TESTS 225
of the very latest plays, there are only about three times as many. Stating it in another way, Shakspere uses about three times as many run-on lines in ^he tempest as he does in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Between other plays the proportion is still greater. Thus in the Comedy of Errors^ which is one of the early plays, the propor- tion of run-on lines to end-stopped lines is only as i to 10.7; while in Cymbeliney which belongs to the latest group, the proportion is as i to 2.52 : that is, there are more than four times as many of the free lines in Cymbe- line as there are in The Comedy of Errors. But again : in Love's Labour s Lost^ which is among the first plays, the proportion of run-on lines to end-stopped lines is only as I to 18.14, while in The Winter s Taleit is as i to 2.12; that is, in The Winter s Tale Shakspere has used about nine times as many of the run-on or free-form lines as in Love's Labour s Lost. Here we see Shakspere's growth in technic so far brought to mathematical measurement that when estimated by this particular metrical test the plays arrange themselves substantially in that order which their other internal characteristics would lead us to sus- pect and which the external evidence forces us to admit. It does not require that one should be practically familiar with versecraft in order to recognise in the use of these run-on lines a certain advance in breadth of view which simply embodies in technic that spiritual advance in majesty of thought, in elevation of tone, in magnanimity, in largeness of moral scope, which you perceive as you reflect upon the plots of the plays as here chronologically arranged. When the line runs on, as in my quotation from The Tempest^ you see that it acquires a larger port and a more sweeping carriage. It has quite the same effect as the long phrase in music compared with the short phrase. Those of you who heard the Romance in the
226 SHAKSPERE AND HIS FORERUNNERS
Suite by Bach played at the Peabody concerts last winter will remember the sense of heavenly breadth and infinite expanse given by the length of the musical phrases which Bach has there employed ; and if you compare the grandeur of these phrases with the slighter-proportioned phrases of an ordinary waltz or march, you will have a good musical analogue of the difference between Shak- spere's later verse, which is full of run-on lines, and his earlier verse, which is full of end-stopped ones ; while at the same time you will have a good musical analogue of the difference between the moral width and nobleness of such plays as The Winter* s Tale and The Tempest and all this forgiveness-and-reconciliation group, and the wild, deli- cious riot and undebating abandon of the comedy group, the Bright Period.
And now there is but a moment to carry these two metrical tests we have been discussing over into the larger plane and bring them into their proper relations in the larger scheme of form in general.
For this purpose let us note precisely the very differ- ent rhythmic functions of rime and of the end-stopped line on the one hand, and of the run-on line on the other hand. A rime at the end of two lines marks ofF those two lines as a discrete rhythmic group in a very distinct manner for the ear; and if the rime recur regularly throughout the verse then a striking rhythmic pattern is clearly defined throughout the whole series of sounds by this recurrent tone-colour. Just so, the pause or rest at the end of an end-stopped line has the rhythmic efFect of grouping all the bars of sound in that line into one larger bar, as it were, and thus of presenting the ear with that pattern — a five-pattern if it be a five-barred line like these, a four-pattern if it be a four-barred line, and so on. In other words, just so long as a succession of end-
THE METRICAL TESTS
227
stopped lines continues in blank versCy just so long does the ear run a regular formal pattern of 5's through the mass of sounds.
The rhythmic function, therefore, of the rime and of the end-stopped line is a function of regularity, or form. But precisely antagonistic is the rhythmic function of the run-on line. Here, instead of marking off regular sets, of five bars in a set, by the line group as defined through the end-stop, we interrupt the pattern, we disturb the regu- larity, we break the form, by placing the pause at different and unexpected points so as to mark off groups of bars larger or smaller than the line group. In short, it is easy to see that the rhythmic function of the run-on line is to disestablish the very rhythmus which it is the function of the end-stopped line and the rime to establish. If now we remember the opposition list headed by the words Form — Chaos* as limiting terms of thought, we see
1 We find the poet or maker (rrotiy- rr/c) presiding at the genesis of a poem to be exactly the image of the Maker presiding at the genesis of a world : both are rhythmising chaos, both weaving patterns of tune, of rhythm proper, and of tone-colour upon the woof of things, as dimly hinted in the old saying, God made the world by measure, weight, and tunc. Hence, remembering the doctrine of oppo- sition in rhythm or nature, let us oppose the terms :
its chaos, so the scientific imagina- tion rhythmises its chaos, we have as parallel terms of opposition :
Form
Chaos
Then, bearing in mind that just as the poetic imagination rhythmises
Generalisation
Particular
Going on to assemble various terms of opposition which have been used in these discussions, we may place here
Aristotle's Katholon Kathekaston The all The Individual
The others Myself
Altruism Egoism
Love Selfishness
And through the good spirit op-
228 SHAKSPERE AND HIS FORERUNNERS
immediately that the rime and the end-stopped line belong on this Form side, because they tend to form, while the run-on line belongs on this Chaos side, because it tends toward chaos.
Now these opposite rhythmic functions lead us to a large principle which rules over all the work of the verse- craftsman as it rules over all art and all form. The ear will neither tolerate rigid form, nor lawless chaos, in sounds. It must have form. Form, in art, is like that agreeable-disagreeable fellow of whom it was said :
He had so many quips and cranks about him, There is no living with him nor without him.
posed to the evil spirit whose si was selfishness we have
sm
Good
Evil
And through this evil which was said to come of selfishness or liberty we have
Foreknowledge
Design
Belief
Freewill
Accident
Scepticism
Now, to do no more at present than to supply the means of profit- ably collating these partial terms, our life is a sort of lane which is bounded by these great contradicto- ries. We live between them, as we live between those two other great contradictories, the mys- tery of birth and the mystery of death, which we shall presently find taking their appropriate place in this list of terms. We cannot deny either : we must accept both.
Here, then, we have a few of what, when we complete the list, we may
find reason to call limiting forms of thought. According as a given philosophy approaches near to one or the other, so it takes its charac- ter. Philosophies, as well as life, live in this little lane between these two mysterious contradictions. These limiting forms bound our human thought on either side much like those two darknesses which appear in the pathetic story of the old Anglo-Saxon Thane. " Sir," said he, describing the heathen life, when the missionary had been un- folding to the assembly the wonders of revelation, " Sir, like as at night when one ray of light streams from tne illuminated hall, and a sparrow flits across from the darkness on one side to the darkness on the other, so is the life of man."
Now, such being the opposition of things, we shall find our Shak- spere rhythmising his spheres and atoms, making music from antago- nism, making good of ill.
THE METRICAL TESTS 229
In other words, the ear insists upon having form but no monotony, and chaos but no lawlessness. The more form you give me, the better, says the ear; and at the same time says. The more chaos you give me, breaking the uni- formity of your forms, the better.
We shall find this principle of opposite functions greatly enlarging itself in the next lecture. Meantime, looking upon this enormous chasm between the limiting forms of thought and of procedure which the artist must fill, and wondering at the miracle of it, I am reminded of a story which comes to us from old Beda. It is related that upon a certain occasion a good father died, but afterwards came again to life. During his short sleep of death he had a vision of hell, which he remembered and told. He thought that he beheld a profound and terrible gulf, which was bounded on the one side by an infinite wall of flame, on the other by an infinite wall of ice. Between these two awful boundaries vibrated a prodigious swarm of souls in search of rest, now flying to the wall of flame, driven by it over towards the wall of ice, again repelled by that towards the wall of flame.
When we think that the artist is placed over just such a gulf, between two like walls, driven now towards the flame of chaos which would consume all things to ashes, now toward the ice of form which would chill all things to deadness, we must needs wonder anew at the divine miracle of genius which not only in verse, but in life, thus placed, rescues itself from these awful oppositions, and converts this hell of antagonism into the heaven of art. It is by this process of converting a hell into a heaven that we find Shakspere crying, in that wonderful Sonnet CXIX :
What potions have I drunk of Siren tears, Distilled from limbecks foul as hell within, Applying fears to hopes and hopes to fears, Still losing when I saw myself to win !
230 SHAKSPERE AND HIS FORERUNNERS
What wretched errors hath my heart committed. Whilst it hath thought itself so blessed never ! How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted, In the distraction of this madding fever ! O benefit of ill ! now I find true That better is by evil still made better ; And ruin'd love, when it is built anew. Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater. So I return rebuk'd to my content. And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent.