Immagini della pagina
PDF
ePub

, in v. i. 367, hon, your most scence of or deon, which was have taken the Persian Lords"

7 was of some resting reference d Manningham, emple, in a letter che production of st we had a play ch like the Com

but most like and

enerally speaking, s of Shakespeare's ne comparatively tion of character

firm and precise his partiality for nd from the budisible in the other Two Gentlemen of idsummer-Night's

ming couplets are n the poetic love ys just mentioned,

though to a somewhat less extent in the Two Gentlemen of Verona. These are the high water mark of his poetic achievement in The Errors. Such beautiful and harmoni

[blocks in formation]

are not far removed either in point of time or in point of excellence from the loftier and more sustained poetic pitch of the Venus and Lucrece.

On this poetic usage, Knight in vol. i. of his Shakespere, p. 213, somewhat acutely remarks: "There was clearly a time in Shakespeare's poetical life when he delighted in this species of versification; and in many of the instances in which he has employed it in the dramas we have mentioned [Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer-Night's Dream], the passages have somewhat of a fragmentary appearance, as if they were not originally cast in a dramatic mould, but were amongst those scattered thoughts of the young poet which had shaped themselves into verse, without a purpose beyond that of embodying his feeling of the beautiful and the harmonious. When the time arrived that he had fully dedicated himself to the great work of his life, he rarely ventured upon cultivating these

XX

offshoots of his early versification. The dog rejected, the alternate rhymes no longer their music, to introduce a measure which with the dramatic spirit-the couplet was a more sparingly—and he finally adheres to which he may almost be said to have crea certainly the grandest as well as the sweet the highest thoughts were ever unfolded manity."

Another characteristic of The Errors, a of Love's Labour's Lost and The Tamin the somewhat free use of the comic tri doggerel verses, the "rime dogerel" of referred to, which Shakespeare almost Errors puts in the mouths of the twi Dromios. Roughly speaking, the trime play in the following passages: II. ii. 47, 4 11-83; III. ii. 146, 147; IV. i. 21; IV. ii. 29 i.e., something less than 100 lines in all, b portion in a short play of less than 1800 li appears to have had its origin in one of t tus himself. It was not unknown to Cha what is probably a modification of it in Thopas; see Canterbury Tales, Group B 197; I Pollard, 288):

In bataille and in tourneyme
His name was Sire Thopas.

But it is interesting to note that at line 210
stynteth Chaucer of his Tale of Thopas" in
gent lines:-

gerel was entirely empted him, by is scarcely akin dopted more and the blank verse ed-in his hands st form in which to listening hu

d to a less degree - of the Shrew, is meter or so-called Chaucer, already always in The attendants, the cer occurs in this 8, 202, 203; III. i. -62; V. i. 423-25; ut still a fair proes. The trimeter le metres of Plauucer, who employs his Tale of Sir , 1906-7 (4 Skeat,

nt,

8" Heere the Hoost the following pun

Min erës aken of thy drasty speche

Now swiche a rym the divel I biteche! [i.e. commend to]
This may wel be rym dogerel, quod he.

And see Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (ante 1589),
"Such maner of Poesie is called in our vulgar ryme dogrell"
(Arber, p. 89). The verse is a survival of the metres of the
old moralities and it is used in other old plays by Shake-
speare's immediate predecessors, such as Damon and Pithias
(1564-5); Like will to Like (1568); Gammer Gurton's Needle
(ante 1575), where it constitutes the great bulk of the dia-
logue; Promos and Cassandra (1578); The Three Ladies of
London (1584); examples from which are quoted by Malone
(see vol. 20, p. 462, of the Variorum of 1803). But Shake-
speare seems to have used it in a rather free and irregular
fashion. A reference to the "doggerel" passages in the play
will show many trisyllabic feet, as well as differences between
the halves of each verse, one being trochaic and the other
iambic, or vice versa. Anapaestic feet are also not un-

common.

Further evidence of an early date appears in the frequent quibbles, the mild play upon words, and other modest quips and quaint conceits; and in certain passages suggestive of like passages in the other early plays. Examples of the latter are-II. ii. 201, where Luciana says: "If thou art changed to aught 'tis to an ass," vividly reminding us of Bottom's transformation or "translation," in the MidsummerNight's Dream; IV. i. 93, where Antipholus of Ephesus says to Dromio of Syracuse, "Why, thou peevish sheep, What ship of Epidamnum stays for me?" suggestive of Love's Labour's Lost, II. i. 219, where Maria says, “ Two hot sheeps,

[ocr errors]
[blocks in formation]

marry! Boyet. And wherefore not ships ?" And Speed's pun in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, I. i. 72:

Twenty to one, then, he is shipp'd already,

And I have played the sheep in losing him.

1

Shakespeare was beyond doubt indebted, directly or indirectly, to the Menaechmi of Plautus for the general outline of his Errors, and, though in a much less degree, to the same Roman author's Amphitryon. Long before Shakespeare's time the favourite dramatic subject of mistaken identity had been utilised by many writers, in different European languages, in the various forms of translations, paraphrases and adaptations. But whether Shakespeare's debt to Plautus is direct or indirect is a matter somewhat difficult to determine. The question opens up the wider question of Shakespeare's knowledge of Latin, a subject which has recently been much discussed; but which, in its general aspects, is beyond the scope of this Introduction. He may, of course, have gone direct to the original; but my opinion is distinctly against this view. I cannot believe that Shakespeare, probably owing to his early removal from the Stratford grammar school on account of his father's pecuniary embarrassments, ever obtained anything more than a very limited training in Latin at Stratford, or that he had, when engaged in active daily work in London, either the leisure or the inclination to resort to the Latin text, and a comparatively difficult Latin text at that, for his dramatic material, when, for all practical purposes, the material lay

1 See, for example, an elaborate article by Professor Churton Collins in his Studies in Shakespeare (1904), Essay I,, entitled "Shakespeare as a Classical Scholar,"

[blocks in formation]

ready to his hand in older plays and translations. "Feeding on nought but the crumbs that fall from the translator's trencher," to quote Nash's gibe in his preface to Greene's Menaphon, 1589, may well have its own special significance in Shakespeare's case. A painful and laborious resort to the Latin originals would have been directly contrary to all we know of his practical methods of work in the case of other plays. He was an actor in the first place. With his "fellowship in the cry of players" he was actively concerned in the management of his company's theatre; and he was a hardworking playwright, producing on an average two plays every year. And we have evidence enough to lead us to believe that he did not neglect his social advantages. It is therefore most difficult to believe that he would have wasted time over the mere acquisition of a plot or situations from a somewhat difficult Latin original. That he had abundant dramatic material in English available for all the purposes of his Errors is evident enough. A play now lost called "The Historie of Error" was "shown at Hampton Court on New Yere's daie at night 1576, 77, enacted by the children of Powles" (i.e. Pauls: see the Variorum of 1821, vol. iii., p. 387); and from this piece, as Malone remarks, "it is extremely probable that he was furnished with the fable of the present Comedy," as well as the designation of "Surreptus or "Sereptus" appended to the name of Ant. E. in the Folio, and which is more fully referred to later on. Later, in 1582, this play recurs as the History of Ferrar (sic), in the accounts of the Revels at Court, as a drama produced at Windsor; and it may well be conjectured that this "Historie of Error" was nothing but a free rendering of the Menaechmi

[ocr errors]
« IndietroContinua »