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personal bias of opinion, must be content to leave 'Arden of Feversham' among anonymous productions until such time, if such time ever come, when light may be thrown upon its authorship from documents. Less can be urged in favour of A Warning for Fair Women.' It was indeed first published as having 'been lately divers times acted by the Right Honourable the Lord Chamberlain his Servants,' that is by Shakspere's Company; and Mr. Collier in his History of the Stage' goes so far as to exclaim that either Shakspere or the Devil set his hand to certain passages. No true critic who rejects 'Arden' on internal evidence, will, however, ascribe 'A Warning' on the ground of style to Shakspere. Should he follow Mr. Collier's opinion in the latter case, he would be forced à fortiori to credit Shakspere with the former play; for 'Arden' is the ripe production of a dramatic artist, while 'A Warning' is hardly better than a piece of solid and sturdy journey-work. This tragedy may, therefore, be relegated to the limbo of adéσTоra-things masterless, without an author's or an owner's name.

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The case is somewhat different with A Yorkshire Tragedy.' This short play formed one of 'Four Tragedies in One,' acted together in the same performance at the Globe. It alone of these four pieces was selected for publication, and was printed with the name of Shakspere. But the collectors of Shakspere's dramatic works did not include it in the first folio; and we are met with the further difficulty that it was produced at the very height of Shakspere's power and fame, when Macbeth' and 'King Lear' had already issued from his hands. Calverley's murder of his

children took place in 1604; the play was published with Shakspere's name in 1608; Anthony and Cleopatra' may be referred with tolerable certainty to the same year. That is to say, between the date of the crime and the date of the play four years elapsed, during which Shakspere gave to the world his ripest, most inimitable masterpieces. Is it then conceivable that this crude and violent piece of work, however powerful we judge it-and powerful it most indubitably is, beyond the special powers of a Heywood or a Dekker-can have been a twin-birth of the Master's brain with 'Julius Cæsar' or with any one of the authentic compositions of his third period? Have we not rather reason to reject it, and to explain the publisher Pavier's attribution, by the fact that it attracted great attention on the stage for which Shakspere worked, and which he helped to manage? Judging merely by internal evidence, there is, I think, rather less than no reason to suppose that Shakspere did more than pass it with approval for his acting company. A slight but highly suspicious point is the insertion, at the very climax, of a couplet from Nash's Pierce Penniless 'into the hero's desperate ravings:

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Divines and dying men may talk of hell,

But in my heart its several torments dwell.

The peculiar power displayed in the short and stabbing daggerthrusts of Calverley's furious utterance cannot, I think, be paralleled by anything in Shakspere's known writing; nor, on the other hand, has Shakspere ever drawn a female character so colourless and tame as that of Mrs. Calverley. Neither the force of Calverley nor the feebleness of his wife is Shaksperian. Mr. A. H. Bullen queries, while these sheets are going through the press, whether it was perchance the work of Tourneur. The suggestion is ingenious. But it seems idle to indulge speculation of this kind on no solid basis.

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This rings upon my ear even more falsely than the line from Shakspere's Sonnets introduced into Edward III.:

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

Were the style of the whole drama, in either of these cases, strongly marked as Shakspere's, or were the dramatic power as unmistakable as it is in Arden of Feversham,' then these lapses into petty larceny and repetition would not be significant. But A Yorkshire Tragedy' has nothing in language or in characterdrawing suggestive of Shakspere. The one-sided force of Calverley's portrait points to a different hand. Therefore this line of argument cannot be maintained, and the Yorkshire Tragedy 'must be left to share the fate of Arden' and 'A Warning.'

The two remaining tragedies upon my list of five, present no such difficult problems as to authorship. 'A Woman Killed by Kindness' is Heywood's uncontested property. The Witch of Edmonton' was printed as 'a Tragi-Comedy by divers well-esteemed poets, William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Ford, &c.' The &c.' is amusing. Though Rowley's name takes the first place, a perusal of the piece will prove that Ford and Dekker, collaborators on a second occasion in domestic tragedy, were responsible for some of the best parts of the drama.1 They, at any rate, worked out the tale of Frank, Winnifrede, and Susan. I am diffident of expressing an opinion that the whole of Mother Sawyer's tale belongs to Rowley." Yet

1 Their Bristol Merchant appeated in 1624; The Witch of Edmonton was acted, according to Gifford, in 1623.

2 The comic parts have, in my opinion, more affinity to Rowley's work in The Birth of Merlin than to Dekker's in The Virgin Martyr.

this appears to me highly probable. It serves, moreover, to explain the want of connection between the two threads of dramatic interest, and the publisher Blackmore's ascription of the Witch to Rowley.

Were I writing for professed students of English dramatic literature, I should hardly venture to enter into the detailed exposition of plays so well known as these five. Still they are not easily accessible to general readers; and the importance of the group in illustration of old English habits, no less than as forming a distinct species of Elizabethan art, is so great, that I shall not hesitate to deal with them at large. The characteristic feature of domestic tragedy, as I have already pointed out, is realism. These plays are studies from contemporary life, unidealised, unvarnished with poetry or fancy; they are this too in a truer sense than any play-work of the period, except perhaps some comedies of bourgeois manners. But this realism which gives the ground tone to their art is varied. Warning for Fair Women' might be compared to a photograph from the nude model. 'A Yorkshire Tragedy' is the same model treated in a rough sketch by a swift fierce master's hand, defining form and character with brusque chiaroscuro. 'Arden of Feversham' adds colour and composition to the study. It is a picture, elaborated with scientific calculation of effect. The painter relied on nature, trusted to the force inherent in his motive. But he interpreted nature, passed the motive through his brain, and produced a work explanatory of his artist's reading of a tragic episode in human life. All this he contrived to do without over-passing the limits of the strictest, the

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most self-denying realism. A Woman Killed with Kindness' is also a picture, realistic in its mise en scène and details, realistic in its character-drawing, but tinctured with a touch of special pleading. The painter did not stand outside his subject here. He added something of his own emotion, and invited his audience to share the pathos which he felt. Here, then, we are upon the verge of idealistic art; and this infusion of idealism renders the work more ethically dubicus, akin to sentimentalism, tainted with casuistical transaction. The Witch of Edmonton,' in its composition of two diverse plots, strays further from the path of bare sincerity. There is no question here of photographic nudity, of passionate life-study, of stern interpretation, or of tear-provoking simplicity. The one part, the part of the witch, is unconsciously didactic. The other part, the part of the murderous husband between his two wives, is romantic. Yet both didactic and romantic elements are worked upon a ground of sombre realism. The artists have drawn their several effects from crude uncoloured homely circumstances. No more than their predecessors, did Rowley, Ford, and Dekker seek effect by rhetoric or by poetical embroidery.

We might compare these five stages in domestic tragedy to the several qualities of realism exhibited by a newspaper report, a scene from one of Zola's stories, a novel by Tourguénieff, a tale like 'Manon Lescaut,' and a piece of Eugène Sue's. These comparisons in criticism do not lead to very much of solid value. They serve their purpose if they remind the student that what we discern as generically realistic contains many species and gradations.