maligning his "butcherly druggery;" and his reasons for this dislike are "so sharp and sententious; so pleasant without scurrility; witty without affection; audacious without impudency, and learned without opinion;" that it is impossible not to recognise in Commissioner Chalmers (ὁ πολυμαθης και κριτίκος) a flattering representation of the illustrious Holofernes. If in the course of these pages I shall not, however, be persuaded to yield to all his deductions, but shall venture to question the validity of some of his positions, and, rejecting all pugilistic argumentation and dogmatizing criticism, endeavour to rival the more than quakerly moderation of my gentle competitors:-" We'll have no knock-me-down doings in my housethere comes no swaggerers here!"— The indifference manifested by Shakspeare towards the offspring of his great mind, which posterity still contemplates with increased wonder and delight, has left us in perfect igno When Fuller is explaining the proverb, "he looks as the Devil over Lincoln," he says, "the Devil is the map of malice, and his envy (as God's mercy) is over all his works. On which account he is supposed to have overlooked this church, when first finished, with a torve and tetrick countenance maligning men's costly devotion, and that they should be so expensive in God's service. Worthies, folio, p. 153. 1662. rance as to the earliest period of the representation of the greater number of his plays. To discover this desideratum from minute internal evidence, and trifling allusions scattered sparingly in his dramas and in the writings of contemporary authors, opened a new field for "commentating zeal," and Mr. Malone sallied forth upon the arduous adventure.—Ω χαιρε ΒοιωTidiov.* Happy were it for Jonson if his progress had been as harmless as that of the windmill assailant; but, alas! the course of this knight of the woeful countenance has been as ruinous to the reputation of Ben, as the progress of a celebrated knight over roses and tulips, when in eager pursuit of the emperor of Mo rocco. To ascertain the chronological order of these celebrated dramas, from such slender circumstances, must be acknowledged difficult, but some arrangement was resolved on, and of course every passage bearing a reference or a supposed reference, would be brought to support the theory. As Shakspeare's contemporary, Jonson would not, naturally, be overlooked. To illustrate their poet, and degrade Jonson, were objects alike desirable; and to unite these attainments was a double purpose. In order to * Aristophanes in Achar. this, every passage that can by any forced construction or shadow of resemblance be supposed to be levelled at Shakspeare, has been ferretted out by these industrious supervisors; and, instead of first establishing the dates of the plays at which these insulated passages are imagined to be directed, the passages themselves are brought forward with great critical pomp, to bolster up the theory, at the same time that some of them bear not the slightest resemblance to the objects, they are asserted to deride. The first play in Mr. Malone's arrangement,* to which this novel and accommodating species of logic is applied, in order to establish the charge of malignity on the part of Ben, is the tragedy of Hamlet; which is supposed to be sneered at in the following line of "The Case is altered." Angelo says, "But first I'll play the ghost; I'll call him out." Without grounding my defence of Ben upon the fact of their having been a play upon the same subject anterior to that of Shakspeare, I may be permitted to ask Mr. Malone, whether he considers the introduction of a ghost as only to be found in Shakspeare? and in what part of Hamlet the ghost "calls any one out?" The Shakspeare, vol. ii. page 279. + Ben Jonson's Works, Whalley's edition, vol. vii. p. 362. commentator must know well, that the introduction of this supernatural agent is not peculiar to Shakspeare; and he might have remembered, that in "The Spanish Tragedie," the common butt of Shakspeare, Jonson, Fletcher, Massinger, and all contemporary wits, the ghost of Andrea " calls forth" Revenge, a person of the drama, in the following words: Awake! Revenge, if love, as love hath had, n Hieronimo with Lorezo is joined in league, It is equally probable that the subject of Jonson's allusion was the ghost of Dyonisius, in the tragedy of Hero and Leander; the undisguised subject of his ridicule in Bartholomew fair.† The declaration of Dr. Farmer, that "Tom Nash, in the preface to Greene's Arcadia,‡ hath a lash at some vaine-glorious tragedians, and * Reed's old plays, 8vo. vol. iii. page 213. 1780. + Whalley's Ben Jonson, 8vo. vol. ii. p. 392, et seq. 1756. In the above quotation from Farmer's Essay on the learning of Shakspeare, Steevens has substituted Greene for Nash; not aware, perhaps, that the letter, which is addressed to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, was written by the latter and prefixed to Greene's Menaphon, 1589, which, in the edition of 1634, is called Arcadia. Robert Greene was presented to the vicarage of Tollesbury, in Essex, the 19th June, 1584, which he resigned the following year. very plainly at Shakspeare in particular," is much of the same value with Mr. Malone's reference above. Nash's letter alludes to Kydd's old play of Hamlet, and was published in 1589, quarto, some years before Shakspeare appeared as a writer for the stage. The prologue to Ben Jonson's "Every Man in his Humour," which, because it was not prefixed to the printed copy of that comedy in 1601, Mr. Malone concludes was written subsequent to that period, is said to contain several malignant attacks on the favourite bard. It has been observed, that Jonson is said to have been introduced to the stage by Shakspeare, and Mr. Malone presumes that " Every Man in his Humour" was the very play, which was brought on the stage by the good offices of the latter. "Malignant and envious as Ben appears to have been," continues Mr. Malone, "he hardly would have ridiculed his benefactor at the very time he was so essentially obliged to him." In this opinion of the commentator I perfectly agree: but the following lines seem clearly to allude to Henry the Fifth: He rather prays, you would be pleas'd to see Nor creaking throne comes down the boys to please, The gentlewomen, &c. |