attempt on Silvia's honour that he realizes that Proteus is a 'common friend, that's without faith or love,' and renounces all trust in him for ever in words of manly and sorrowful indignation. But a few words of penitence on the part of the wrongdoer disarm his wrath, and with an incredibly quixotic sacrifice of the claims of love to those of friendship, and with airy indifference to the feelings of Silvia, he hands her over to the man who has just offered her the grossest outrage.

The crudity of the situation is heightened by the character of Silvia, which is as far as possible from lending itself to such a summary disposal. Holy, fair, and wise is she': so sing the company of serenaders at her window, and her bearing throughout the drama testifies that it is no idle praise. She is the first and most lightly sketched member of a favourite Shaksperean order of womanhood, which unites outward fairness and transparent purity of soul to keen intellect and resolute will. With good reason do all our swains commend her,' and her treatment of the rivals for her hand illustrates her tact and

firmness of purpose. To Valentine, the man of her choice, she tenders a proof of her favour which, without compromising her maidenly dignity may give him a hint whereon to speak: Thurio she skilfully keeps at a distance, though she offers him no direct incivility, and listens with seeming impartiality to the volleys of wit between Valentine and him: Proteus, in spite of his outward gallantry and skill in the game of love, she sees in his true colours, and repulses with cutting words of scorn. Difficulties are with her only a spur to action, and as she assents to the elopement with Valentine, in order to checkmate her father's scheme for thrusting her into the arms of Thurio, so she afterwards conceives the plan of following her lover in his banishment, and with discriminating eye picks out Sir Eglamour as her fittest companion and helper. That a woman of such high spirit should, in the closing scene, stand by in dumb resignation, while the man whom she has risked all to find turns her over to the traitor from whom she has fled, is the crowning absurdity in a tangle of psychological impossibilities.

The threatened wholesale catastrophe is averted by Julia's self-revelation. She too has braved danger to follow her beloved,

but otherwise she is a complete contrast to Silvia, and belongs to a class of women which occupies a relatively subordinate place in Shakspere's gallery of the sex. The fact that in pursuit of Proteus she dons masculine disguise-a device here used by the dramatist for the first time-suggests a likeness between her and Portia or Rosalind. But the resemblance is superficial, for she entirely lacks the commanding spirit and gaiety of heart of these heroines, and with her pensive, dependent nature is akin in certain aspects to Viola, but finds her true sister in the Euphrasia of Beaumont and Fletcher, who, like her, takes service as a page with the man whom she loves. Self-sacrifice is the law of her being, as self-love is that of Proteus, and though cut to the very core by his perfidy she can endure, in the strength of her devotion, to be his messenger to her rival, and even to bear between them the ring that had been the pledge of her own troth. The spectacle of such humiliation awakens in us a pity not untouched with contempt, and it is a relief to find that she has yet enough womanly instinct left to draw comparisons, by no means to her own disadvantage, between Silvia's face and hers. Truly feminine, too, is her analysis of her rival's picture, and the consoling reflection that the painter flattered her a little,' while even her instinct to scratch out the unseeing eyes' on the canvas is natural under the circumstances. But she refrains from such an outrage, for Silvia's loyalty and sweetness have won her tender heart, and buoyed her up with the belief that Proteus' perfidious suit must fail. Thus the crowning blow comes when she sees Valentine himself surrender his betrothed to this perjured wooer, and she sinks fainting to the ground. Then follows the confession that she is Julia in the habit of a page, and Proteus' sudden relapse to his original attachment; and if he wins her pardon on far too easy terms, this is a dramatic flaw which marks not only the hurried close of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but which clung, as will be seen, to Shakspere's method even in the most matured period of his art.

Parallel to the romantic interest, but not so interwoven with it as in The Comedy of Errors, runs a humorous underplot, which introduces for the first time the Shaksperean Clown in the

stricter sense. The class has here two representatives. Speed and Launce, akin and yet contrasted, as each is contrasted further with the master whom he serves. To the slow-witted Valentine is attached the nimble-tongued Speed, whose plays upon words, repartees, and snatches of doggrel sparkle upon the surface of the main action without stirring its current. Of greater significance is Launce, the attendant on Proteus. His is a richer, more pensive humour, which discharges itself mainly in soliloquies, with his dog Crab as auditor. Round this dumb companion, 'one that I brought up of a puppy,' the thoughts of Launce steadily revolve: we hear, indeed, of a 'milkmaid' who has won his heart, and whose 'items' he discusses with Speed, but her highest praise is, 'She hath more qualities than a water-spaniel, which is much in a bare Christian,' and this does not imply an equality to so unique an animal as Crab. It is only grief over any imperfection in one who is beloved that leads to the assertion, 'I think Crab, my dog, to be the sourest dog that lives,' because he sheds not a tear nor speaks a word,' while Launce's household is plunged in lamentation at his departure for Milan. And Launce's affection is ready to stand the severest test, that of suffering on behalf of its object: ‘I have sat in the stocks for puddings he hath stolen: otherwise he had been executed: I have stood on the pillory for geese he hath killed, otherwise he had suffered for't.' Yet even this friend, for whom he has endured so much, Launce offers to sacrifice in order to do Proteus a service, though he has an instinct that things are not what they should be, 'I am but a fool, look you, and yet I have the wit to think my master is a kind of knave.' And this knavery of the highly-gifted Proteus finds an emphatic though unobtrusive condemnation in the fidelity of his simple servant to the poor cur that has shared his life of hard words and still harder knocks. Thus here, again, the main plot and the underplot, without dovetailing in an elaborate manner, play round the same theme, and embrace, in an unbroken network of relationships, the entire dramatis personae from 'the two gentlemen' down to poor dog Crab.

CHAPTER X.

SHAKSPERE 'ITALIANATE.'

ROMEO AND JULIET

AND THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.

THE first group of comedies, amidst their varieties of source and theme, have one feature in common. Whether the plot be laid in Navarre, Ephesus, Athens, Padua or Verona, the atmosphere is unmistakably English. It is true, of course, that in The Errors and in The Taming of the Shrew, typical characters from Latin or Italian comedy are introduced, but they are set amidst surroundings which suggest London or Stratford. In The Two Gentlemen Shakspere even makes the elementary geographical blunder of representing Valentine as journeying from Verona to Milan by sea. It is therefore startling, when we turn to Romeo and Juliet (drawn, like The Two Gentlemen, from the annals of Verona), to find it steeped in distinctively Italian colour, and yet more amazing to see in The Merchant of Venice intimate knowledge of the city of the lagoons and its neighbourhood. The most satisfactory way of accounting for the contrast is, as has already been stated, to conclude that Shakspere had in the interval visited the North of Italy1. Never again did he so magically reproduce the atmosphere of the South as in these dramas, the fruit, it would thus appear, of his Wanderjahre, as the early histories and comedies were

1 See note to pp. 110-111.

of his Lehrjahre. So, in later years, Macbeth, there is good reason to hold, was written after a recent visit to Scotland. In an age of universal travel, why should Shakspere, of all men, be confined within the narrow seas, and be supposed to have never crossed the Alps or swum in a gondola'?

6

The date of ROMEO AND JULIET cannot be exactly determined. It was first published in quarto in 1597, with the inscription as it hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely by the right Honourable the Lord of Hunsdon his Servants.' The word 'often' opens up an indefinite vista backwards, and makes it certain that the play had been written and acted in some form for an appreciable period before it was printed. How long was that period? Some inquirers base their answer upon the Nurse's words, "'Tis since the earthquake now eleven years,' which in all probability refer to the earthquake of 1580. If the garrulous old lady's chronology is to be trusted, this would give 1591 as the date of the play, and it contains without doubt passages written in rhyme and full of conceits, rhetoric, and verbal quips in the dramatist's earliest manner. But, on the other hand, Shakspere is not likely to have visited Italy at so early a date, and moreover there are features in this first edition of the tragedy, such as the elaborated portraiture of the chief characters and the beauty of much of the blank verse, that point to a period of comparative maturity. The presumption, therefore, is that Shakspere was occupied with his theme during a number of years, and that it took definite literary shape about 1595-6, not long after a continental journey 1.

1 The further question arises: Does this quarto of 1597 do justice to the play as it stood in that year, or is it an imperfect version? For in 1599 appeared a second quarto edition, 'newly corrected, augmented, and amended,' which forms the basis of our present text of the play. In many passages the two quartos are absolutely identical, in others the later edition gives in expanded form speeches which the earlier had only outlined, and in a few scenes, such as the marriage of Romeo and Juliet at the Friar's cell, and the lamentation over Juliet's supposed dead body, they essentially differ. At first sight the inference would be that Shakspere, having put into print in 1597 the result of his labours up to that date, had been still attracted by the theme, and had given it further elaboration, which took final form in 1599. But various passages which occur only in the second quarto are not