Thou shalt endure to encrease their joy, And, Fortune, thou to manifest thy might, Their pleasures and their pastimes thou shalt destroye, The Prince and his love' are Hermione, a young courtier, and Fidelia, daughter to Duke Phizantius ; and then follows a silly, meagre story (commencing with the second act) of Fidelia's escape from her father's court, in search of her lover who had been banished, and who has taken shelter with an old necromancer called Bomelio, who afterwards turns out to be the father of Hermione. Fidelia is pursued by her brother Armenio, who is struck dumb by Bomelio, and subsequently restored to speech by the blood of Fidelia, flowing from a slight wound inflicted by her own father. In the end Hermione and Fidelia are united, all parties are reconciled, and the old magician, having lost his books, (which were taken away by his son,) renounces his art. At the end of the acts, the triumphs of Venus and Fortune are alternately sounded by different instruments, as each goddess has been successful in aiding or defeating the lovers the success of Venus is celebrated by a noise of viols,' while trumpets, drums, cornets, and guns resound for Fortune. The best lines in that part of the performance which relates to the lovers are the following, part of a soliloquy by Bomelio. 'Now weary lay thee downe thy fortune to fulfill, 'Goe yeeld thee captive to thy care to save thy life, or spill. The pleasures of the feelde, the prospect of delight, to thy sight; The hollow craggy rocke, the shriking owle to see, 'To heare the noyse of serpentes hisse-that is thy hermony. For as unto the sicke all pleasure is in vaine, 'So mirth unto the wounded minde encreaseth but his pain.' The piece ends with a speech from Fortune, who has been reconciled to Venus by Jupiter, and who compliments the Queen in a strain of less adulation than usual. There is a species of dramatic representation, different from any of which we have yet spoken, and which may be said to form a class of itself:—it may be called domestic tragedy, and pieces of this kind were founded upon comparatively recent events in our own country. Of these several are extant, such as Arden of Feversham, the story of which relates to a murder committed in the reign of Edward VI.; A Warning for Fair Women, arising out of a similar event in 1573; Two Tragedies in one, part of which is founded upon the assassination of a merchant of London of the name of Beech, by a person called Thomas Merry *, and *This play was by Robert Yarrington, and it deserves notice, inasmuch as two very different stories, occurring in two distant countries, England and Italy, are brought into one play, forming a double plot, without the slightest connexion between the two. One of them, as is stated above, dramatically related the events connected with the murder of a Mr. Beech, in Thames-street; and the other is upon the story of 'The Babes in the Wood,' the difference being, that in the latter there VOL. III. E The Fair Maid of Bristol, which had its origin also in a recent tragical incident: indeed, it seems to have been the constant practice of the dramatists of that day, to avail themselves (like the ballad-makers) of any circumstances of the kind, which attracted attention, in order to construct them into a play, often treating the subject merely as a dramatic narrative of a known occurrence, without embellishing, or aiding it with the ornaments of invention. Shakespeare is supposed to have been concerned, at least, in one production of this description, The Yorkshire Tragedy (founded 6 was only one child concerned, instead of two. The scene alternates, exactly at the will of the author, between England and Italy, and it is the only piece, precisely of this kind, with which I am acquainted. It was printed in 1601; but the murder of Beech had been adopted as the subject for another play, by Haughton and Day, as appears by Henslowe's Diary, where in one place it is called 'The tragedy of Thomas Merry,' and in another, ‹ Mr. Beech's Tragedy,' under the date of November 1599. Henslowe's MS. also contains traces of several other pieces of the same kind, as 'The Stepmother's Tragedy,' 'The Tragedy of John Cox of Collumpton,' 'The Lamentable Tragedy of Page of Plymouth,' 'Black Bateman of the North,' &c. &c. 'The Lamentable Tragedy of Page of Plymouth,' which he found in Henslowe's Diary spelt in various ways, puzzled Malone past his finding out; but had he turned to the works of Taylor the Water Poet, 1630, fol. p. 135, a book he has over and over again quoted, but, it seems, little read, he would have found all his difficulty removed, for there, in reference to a recent murder by a person of the name of John Rowse, Taylor says, 'Arden ' of Feversham, and Page of Plymouth, both their murders are fresh ' in memory, and the fearful ends of their wives and aiders, in those bloody actions, will never be forgotten.' The Lamentable Tragedy of Page of Plymouth was, in fact, nothing more than a play, like Arden of Feversham, founded upon an actual occurrence. upon an event in 1604), which was played at the Globe theatre, and printed with Shakespeare's name in 1608. The internal evidence, however, of Shakespeare's authorship is much stronger than the external, and there are some speeches which could scarcely have proceeded from any other pen *. It has been also said in * I am aware that this has not been the general opinion of the commentators, which might confirm the belief that Shakespeare had at least something to do with the authorship of The Yorkshire Tragedy. The story is very simply treated, according to the facts which were then public, and which had been put into the form of a ballad, and sung about the streets. I doubt if Shakespeare would have taken such a subject of his own choice; but perhaps he yielded to the necessity of the case, and therefore contributed this one of four short plays presented on the same night. It is to be remarked, that it is the only one of the four plays that has been preserved: the three others, being by persons of less note, the bookseller, perhaps, did not think it would be to his advantage to publish, when he printed The Yorkshire Tragedy, as the work of Shakespeare, in 1608. I refer especially to the first speech of the wife, when she is lamenting over the ruin her husband is bringing upon his family by his passion for gaming, beginning, • What will become of us? All will away ! The lines in a subsequent speech, by the husband, 'Divines and dying men may talk of hell, 'But in my heart her several torments dwell,' are borrowed by him from Nash's Pierce Penniless' Supplication, 1593, of which the commentators, who are usually good at little else, were not aware; and Steevens, anxious to make a note, refers to a parallel passage in Rowe's Tamerlane. S. N., whoever he might be, who wrote Acolastus his Afterwitte in 1600, stole these lines, among his other comparatively modern times, and by no very competent judge, that he was the author of another of the domestic tragedies, the titles of which I have mentioned-Arden of Feversham, which was printed anonymously, first in 1592, and performed probably a year or two earlier; so that if our great dramatist had any thing to do with it, it must have been one of his very earliest compositions. It was reprinted in 1599 and 1633, and again in 1770, by Jacob, who was the first (upon the strength of certain parallel passages, or passages which he thought parallel) to assign it to Shakespeare. He generally selects mere conventional expressions, and common phrases in proof of his hypothesis; and proceeding upon this, and even upon more extended principles of taste and criticism, it would not be difficult to make out a claim on the part of our great dramatist to a share in many other theatrical productions, besides those in which he was actually engaged: the Warning for Fair Women, for instance*, might be manifold and barefaced plagiaries, some of them from Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece :-he says, If on the earth there may be found a Hell, 'Within my soule her several torments dwell.' * The Warning for Fair Women was printed in 1599, but is certainly considerably older. It relates to the murder of a London merchant, of the name of Sanders, by Brown, the paramour of his wife, and we shall here find several resemblances to passages in Shakespeare's undisputed plays. Before he assassinates Sanders, Brown thus invokes the night Oh, sable night, sit on the eye of heaven, 'That it discern not this black deed of darkness! |