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In the second part of his Never too Late Doron is transformed into Mullidor, a still greater clown, who attempts to compete with the shepherd Eurymachus and Radagon the courtier for the hand of Mirimeda. Evidently the same allegory is continued in the rivalry of Manville, Mounteney, and Vallingford for the hand of Fair Em. Manville, with his final renunciations of love, which are almost textually copied from some which appear so frequently in Greene's three penitential novels, is evidently Greene himself, and by a like rule I should be disposed to identify the two friendly rivals Mounteney and Vallingford with the stately Marlowe and the humbler Shakspere, who is after all the successful candidate. This application would sufficiently account for the three phenomena of Greene's anger at the play, its ascription to Greene by Phillips, and to Shakspere by another tradition.

Similarly the character of William the Conqueror is no more historical than that of William Rufus in the later analogous Satiromastix of Dekker, a play similarly referring to an actor's controversy, and where Rufus is generally understood to mean Shakspere. According to an anecdote preserved by Manningham, William the Conqueror was a name by which Shakspere was occasionally known; but in Fair Em it refers not to him, but to William Kemp, who was known sometimes as the Cavaliero Kemp, sometimes as Don Gulielmo, whom Philip Sidney mentions as Will, my Lord of Leicester's jesting player, and who in 1586 led a troop of English comedians to the Danish Court, to win the Danish public. Ravn has collected the notices of the English players in Denmark in the first No. of For Ide og Virkelighed, Jan. 1870, pp. 79, seqq. In Jan., 1579, we find there three Englishmen, John Craft, John Person, and John Kirkman, to whom Thomas Bull and Matthias Zoega were afterwards joined. John Person after some absence returned to Denmark April 1, 1583, and had his pay reduced in 1585, while Thomas Bull "was beheaded at Kroneborg Aug. 19, 1586." On the 17th of June, 1586, William Kempe, with his boy Daniel Jones, came to the Court, with five other "minstrels or tumblers," Thomas Stevens, George Brian, Thomas King, Thomas Pope, and Robert Percy; Kemp and Jones went away in August or September; the other five stayed a few months, and N. S. SOC. TRANS., 1875.

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then went to the Court of the King of Saxony, where, according to Kohn (Shakspere in Germany,' pt. 1, p. xxiii.), they were in October, 1586.

William the Conqueror is William Kemp, who in the midst of his English triumphs is suddenly stung with the desire of Danish conquests: he goes to Copenhagen, but with an artist's restlessness soon wearies of the place, and changes his Danish for a Swedish love. He leaves Denmark, and goes to Sweden or Dresden, where we find the rest of his troop; anyhow, in the play he suddenly becomes Duke of Saxony instead of Duke of Britain.

The allegory of the play would therefore seem to be as follows: Kemp on going to Denmark left behind certain of his fellows to try their fortunes in England. Two of his men, Mounteney and Vallingford, contend for the favour of the Manchester public (the mill being the theatre, and the miller's daughter the audience), which was then devoted to Greene. Greene is overcome by them, and at last Vallingford secures the hand of the lady. The local allusions of the play are such as could hardly be understood out of Lancashire. As when the disguised Knight, who appears to be the miller, says,

"Why should not I content me with this state
As good Sir Edmund Trostard did the flail?"

Sir Edmund Trafford was a magistrate and frequently high sheriff of Lancashire, and was also the custos of Manchester Castle, where several of the chief recusants were kept. There was a tradition in his family that the Trafford of the day had withstood the Norman invasion, and had, in consequence, been obliged to disguise himself as a clown and thresh corn, and that he was discovered with the flail in his hand. In the middle of the 16th century the family adopted as its crest a thresher with a flail, with the motto, now Thus. The play belonged to Lord Strange's company, which, if it fre quented the lordships of its patron, must have specially belonged to Lancashire.

I have said that the tradition which assigns the play to Shakspere or Greene would be abundantly satisfied with the admission that it was about Shakspere and Greene. Nevertheless it may be worth

while to say a word or two about its ascription to Shakspere. As it stands, it would be an insult to criticism to ask us to consider it to be Shakspere's. But perhaps we have not got it as it was written. It may be no nearer the original than, for instance, the Hamlet of 1603 is like the first version of that play which Shakspere wrote. And if we make abstraction of the dialogue of the play, and look to its plan, we perhaps may find parallels to Shakspere's earlier work, as in the regular alternations of scenes from the two plots, like the Falstaffian and Royal scenes in 1 Henry IV. (2 Henry IV. is quite differently managed), in the absence of all exaggeration in the subjective and not objective presentation of the characters (who speak of themselves, not in the third, but in the first person), in the reduplications of incident, so like those in Much Ado, the Merry Wives, Loves Labour's Lost, and 3 Henry VI.

Even in the language we often come across lines which seem to contain a distorted reminiscence of Shakspere's style. Thus William's disappointment with his first sight of the Danish Blanche,

"Ill head, worse-featured, uncomely, nothing courtly,
Swart and ill-favour'd, a collier's sanguine skin,"

and his first view of Mariana,

"A modest countenance, no heavy sullen look,
Not very fair, but richly deck'd with favour;
A sweet face, an exceeding dainty hand;
A body, were it formed all of wax
By all the cunning artists of the world
It could not better be proportioned."

Compare with the first passage Comedy of Errors, IV. ii. 20:

66 Ill-fac'd, worse bodied, shapeless everywhere,

Vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind,
Stigmatical in making, worse in mind."

And with the second, where the idea is that art excels nature,
Venus and Adonis, 289:

"Look, when a painter would surpass the life
In limning out a well proportioned steed
His art with nature's workmanship at strife,
As if the dead the living should exceed "-

Compare also the Euphuist precepts of the miller to his daughter in

Fair Em, p. 5, with those of the Countess to her son in All's Well,

and of Polonius to Laertes in Hamlet:

"In pursuit of all amorous desires

Regard thine honour. Let not vehement sighs
Nor earnest vows importing fervent love,
Render thee subject to the wrath of lust;
For that transformed to former sweet delight
Will bring thy body and thy soul to shame.
Chaste thoughts and modest conversations
(Of proof to keep out all enchanting vows
Vain sighs, forced tears, and pitiful aspects)
Are they that make deformed ladies fair,
Poor wretch; 2 and such 3 enticing men,
That seek of all 4 but only present grace,
Shall, in perseverance of a virgin's due,"
Prefer the most refusers to the choice

Of such a soul as yielded what they thought.6"

The misreadings in the edition (which are not half so gross here as in a multitude of other passages of the play) show that the copy from which the Quarto was printed was taken down by ear, not transcribed by the eye-former' for 'form of,' 'poor wretch' for 'poor rich,' &c.

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Hence I think that the follies of the existing Fair Em are quite insufficient to prove that Shakspere did not write an original Fair Em to which our present copy may bear the same relation as the Hamlet of 1603 to the authentic Corambis' Hamlet. And the poetic worthlessness of the play in its present state does not at all measure its value as a link in the biography of Shakspere, and the history of his mind.

[' read form of]
[' read such]

[2 read rich]
[ read von]

[3 read all]
[read sought]

V.

ON THE BOND-STORY IN THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, AND A VERSION OF IT IN THE CURSOR MUNDI.

BY MISS TOULMIN SMITH.

(Read at the Society's Meeting on April 9th, 1875.)

In the course of some study of the Cursor Mundi, a long religious poem in English, written about the end of the 13th century, I have been somewhat surprised to find a story, resembling the story of the pound of flesh in the Merchant of Venice, interwoven with the legend of the Finding of the Holy Cross. As any link in the history of one of Shakspere's originals will be of interest to a Shakspere Society, I venture to say a few words upon it here.

This may be the more interesting as it is the oldest example of the tale yet found existing in the English language. An extract containing it has been printed (from the Fairfax MS. in the Bodleian Library) by Dr Rich. Morris in his volume of Legends of the Holy Rood (Early English Text Society, 1871), but, so far as I can find, beside his passing remark upon it, no notice has been taken of the occurrence of this tale in the Cursor Mundi by any other writer except Kemble. The only instances in which the story has hitherto been known in English, which might have been accessible to Shakspere, are—(1) some of the copies of the English version of the Gesta Romanorum (Harl. 7333, printed by Sir Fred. Madden); (2) Anthony Munday's translation of Silvayn's Orator (printed in 1596), which contains a legal argument between a Jew and a Christian over a bond of flesh; and (3) the Ballad of Gernutus a Jew (printed in Percy's Relics from the Pepys Collection).1

1 M. Simrock says, writing in 1831 (On the Plots of Sh. Plays, ed. Halliwell for the Shakespere Society, 1850, p. 48), that "no representation of this story has been found in the English language," besides the ballad of Gernutus and Munday's Orator. He and his editor seem to have overlooked the Gesta story, both in Douce and in Sir F. Madden's English Gesta Romanorum,

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