early plays Shakespeare is apt to place several characters in opposition to the hero, in order that by the various contrasts certain shades of his temperament may become visible. Thus Romeo is contrasted with Tybalt, with Mercutio, with Paris, and Valentine not merely with Proteus but with Sylvia's other lovers. But the method is most important in "Hamlet," where Laertes is the chief foil, but Fortinbras, Horatio, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have all their uses. Fortinbras is like Hotspur in "Henry IV," the man to whom the point of honour is really all the world, who will himself die gladly and send thousands of others to death with a quiet conscience" even for an egg-shell." Laertes does not quite feel this. He wishes his griefs paid for “ Till our scale turn the beam," and it is significant that the first we hear of him after his father's death he has so dealt with the rabble that they are crying “Laertes shall be King." That vengeance for his father will bring himself profit is a distinct advantage in his eyes.

There is no time here to discuss the problem of the reason for Hamlet's delay, but the treatment of Amintor in "The Maid's Tragedy," Beaumont and Fletcher's play discussed later on, makes it quite clear that contemporary critics understood it as a proof of fineness of nature. Further, we find ample proof that disgust at the corruption surrounding him and melancholy as a result was by 1600 a pose so well understood as to be the subject of satire. The alterations in the Folio version of the play emphasize the spiritual basis of life," There's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” and in the omission of the soliloquy caused by Fortinbras's adventure, the soliloquy which praises "greatly to find quarrel in a straw," we see that the dramatist and his audience alike had wandered far away from the Senecan conception.

"Othello," as I said above, is linked with the Revenge

play in that it is a magnificent elaboration of one element in the young Avenger's melancholy. On the other hand, it is important as the first of the later "tragedies of passion" and as the only example in Shakespeare of a domestic tragedy. Othello, that is, is not a prince, and the fate of no kingdom is involved in his fall. The subject of the play became the most frequent theme of post-Shakespearean tragedy and is also that of contemporary Spanish drama.

It is instructive to notice both what Shakespeare has rejected and what he has retained in developing the love episode of the Revenge plays. In the first place, for the subtly intellectual Hamlet type he has substituted a man of grand and simple nature and bestowed all the subtle intellect on the villain. To get the full effect of the tragedy, moreover, Othello must have no doubt of his emotions. To a Hamlet the world might have been darkened by Desdemona's death, it could not have been ended. On the other hand, Desdemona is something like a maturer Ophelia. She combines a complete guilelessness and frank belief in others' good intentions with a timidity which leads her as it does Ophelia to lie to the man she loves and so give colour to his doubts about her. She is like Ophelia too in her singing of pathetic snatches of old coarse songs.

Falstaff has sometimes been called the prose Hamlet," and while the epithet casts a flood of light on "Henry IV," it is equally applicable to Iago. He has Hamlet's capacity for analysis and generalization, Hamlet's scorn for those about him. His connexion with the Revenge play is marked at the end. When Iago anticipates Cassio's question:

Demand me nothing: what you know, you know
From this time forth I never will speak word,”

we are reminded of Hieronimo.

Macbeth" is in its present state supposed to follow

King Lear." In some earlier form it was probably Shakespeare's" first making," so we infer from a jesting reference in Kempe's account of his dance from Norwich to London. In that earlier form it was probably much closer to the Revenge type. Before Elizabeth's death the glorification of the Stewarts is inconceivable, and everything points to Banquo being added at a revision of the play. If this were so, it accounts for the awkward introduction of so important a character as MacDuff when a third of the play is over. In the old play no doubt MacDuff was Macbeth's partner in the wars and perhaps not guiltless of Duncan's death. It would be in strict accord with Senecan tradition if MacDuff suspected an intrigue between Macbeth and his wife, and would account for MacDuff's conduct in leaving wife and children in Macbeth's power. "Why in that rawness left you wife and child?" Malcolm asks and no one answers him. This is one of the many examples of threads hanging loose in the play-MacDuff's conduct is dramatically awkward. For the dramatist to call attention to it and then provide no answer is certain proof of a corruption in the text.

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But Macbeth's chief interest in the history of the drama is as an example of Shakespeare's reaction against the superman hero. When Lady Macbeth taunts him with letting "I dare not wait upon I would," he answers : I dare do all that may become a man, Who dares do more is none." The Senecan heroes would have meant that he was a god who dared commit any crime because he willed the end. Macbeth clearly means that he would be below the human level. Besides the various stage situations that link the play with Marston's " Antonio's Revenge" is one word, which like a tiny floating spar gives evidence of the old play. It is the word "dudgeon" which occurs in the famous soliloquy. It comes also in "The Spanish Tragedy." "Macbeth "Macbeth" finishes Shakespeare's con

nexion with the true Revenge play, though, as I said above," Coriolanus " is an explicit rejection of the conception of human values involved. In his last play, "The Tempest," he looks back again to say:

"The rarer action is

In virtue than in vengeance."

CHAPTER VI

THE APOCRYPHA AND MUNDAY

M

UNDAY is here taken along with the Apocrypha for two reasons. In the first place,

his importance, like that of the Apocryphal plays, is due to the light he appears to throw on early Elizabethan drama; and in the second place he is best treated, like these plays, in a spirit of frank inquiry. Miss Muriel Byrne is at present engaged on a monograph on Munday. She may be able to give a final solution to some of the problems about him. In the meantime no account of Munday is authoritative, and everything said in the text, as elsewhere, should be taken as the hypothesis of a research student thrown out as scaffolding.

Munday was undoubtedly a rogue, and his career has both prejudiced critics against him and cast doubt on his truthfulness. Further, the first modern scholar to see his possible importance was Dr. Collier, whose fall from the position of an almost omniscient Elizabethan authority has been alluded to above. No one doubts that Munday would lie if it seemed to his interest; no one is quite sure how far Collier would permit himself to go in cooking evidence in points on which he had made up his mind. The latter's methods and morals are well worth examination, but cannot detain us here.

Munday must have had some connexion with the Sherwood Forest district and also with Staffordshire. Our first glimpse of him is his travelling on the continent