patent to the world. Their unjust judgments, their hasty condemnations, are published in the face of all men. The Court of Charles robed itself in outward decency and escaped the penetrating eye. Here and there we are able to lift the veil, and we are soon repelled by the vacuity, the want of moral earnestness of the life behind. No wonder Court gentlemen and Court ladies fled from its vacuity to a form of religion which offered to save them from this living death. Upon a play with such an ending it is difficult to rest with satisfaction. Instinctively we turn from her who ends as Camiola ends to her who begins where Camiola ends-to the bright, clear soul of the Isabella of 'Measure for Measure,' which, starting from the restrictions of convent life, and carrying with her the ignorance of the world, the slowness to understand the meaning of evil, the readiness to be guided by others, which naturally flow from such a mode of life, triumphs over them all by the innate purity and bravery of her spirit, and finds at last in the very heart of the city of abominations a place where she can work more worthily than in self-chosen retire-. ment. If we turn from Massinger back to Shakspere, we may turn forward too to the singer of the 'Comus.' Two years were to pass away after the exit of Camiola before Milton took upon himself to unfold "The sublime notion and high mystery of that clearness of spirit and purity of soul which as Shakspere and Milton knew, and as Charles's dramatists did not know, is the saving grace of man and of woman, of the matron and the maid. 332 XII. ON SHAKSPERE'S USE OF NARRATION IN HIS DRAMAS. BY PROFESSOR N. DELIUS. PART II.' (Read at the 29th Meeting of the New Shakspere Society, Friday, IF we consider in the first instance the English Historical Plays of Shakspere's earliest period, we see rather the rising than the consummate dramatist, betraying himself not only in many more essential matters, but also by the less artistic and less thoughtful use of the epic element. While in this respect the plays before considered show with but few exceptions a subtle calculation, truly poetical, and nevertheless practical, our poet seems in the Historical Plays of his youth not yet to have formed a fixed canon for the distinction between that part which must be dramatized and the other for which mere narration suffices. Especially, however, Shakspere's comparative immaturity manifests itself in the more superficial framing of the narrative element, in its but loose connection with the other parts of the play, and in the less dramatic colouring of his not unfrequently dry recounting. To explain, and to a certain extent excuse these shortcomings, we must consider the kind of public for which the poet wrote his first histories; a public as naïve as patriotic, not expecting to enjoy in the theatre a work of art-such our poet had still to create for his stage,—a people eager to see passing before their eyes upon the boards, in simple yet distinct form, the glorious deeds of their forefathers, and the changing destinies of their kings and heroes. There everything striking had to be dramatized, everything The Society is indebted to Miss Eleanor Marx for the englishing of this Paper from its German original, which appears also in the Jahrbuch of the German Shakspere Society. intermediate, so far as it appeared necessary for information or recapitulation, to be mentioned incidentally, without much artistic bywork, without individual impress, as Shakspere found it in the chronicles, only more compressed, and of course versified, as the dignity of the subject required blank verse. The 1st Part of Henry VI commences with the parentation of the just-dead king, Henry V., which in its rhetorical, but not individualizing manner, reminds us of the tragic style of Shakspere's immediate predecessors, and clearly proves that the picture of his future favourite prince had not yet unveiled itself to him. Colourless throughout are, in the same scene, the rapidly succeeding illtidings from France, from which only in general outlines rises the popular hero-figure of Talbot. No more can be said for the next scene of the same act: it is the Pucelle's story told by herself. Shakspere here only repeats the statements of his chronicler Holinshed, giving them no free dramatic form, not elaborating out of them the figure of the God-inspired maid, who, it is true, appeared to his countrymen in quite another light. With somewhat livelier colours, and borne up by English patriotism, appears on the other hand in the 4th scene of Act I. Talbot's narrative of his French captivity, which could not fail to produce an electric effect on Shakspere's public. As a further epic element we find at the end of Act II. the historical retrospect which the poet has placed in the mouth of the dying Mortimer. Of course it was not so much his object to acquaint Richard Plantagenet with his hereditary claim to the English throne, already sufficiently familiar to him, as to enlighten the public on this political contention so essential to the progress of the whole tetralogy. More fully, but in an equally dry manner, this same contest is again expatiated upon in the 2nd Part of Henry VI, II. ii. With more dramatic life, and unmistakably characteristic of Shakspere's meanwhile advanced domination and penetration of his historical materials, appear in this 2nd Part, III. i., the epic elements: the reported forebodings of the approaching troubles; the drastic portraiture (in York's monologue) of Jack Cade, whereby the poet introduces to the public that pretender and rebel before he makes him present himself in the half-comic activity of his revolt. A good example of the more adorned and refined descriptive style, as he knew how to handle it in this his earlier period, Shakspere gives us in the poetical imagery of Queen Margaret recounting her bridal journey. Here the poet had not, as in most of his early historical plays, a chronicle to refer to, but, as in other dramas of this time, gave free vent to his fancy, to his youthful fondness for elegant trifling and conceits, not combined with a deeper characterization of the person speaking. A similar tendency the poet evidently follows in the 3rd Part of Henry VI, II. v., in the monologue of the unhappy king, who during the struggle for his crown, near the battle field, paints to himself the idyllic life of the poor shepherd. this elegy there contrasts strikingly the monologue of Richard Gloster, III. ii., so to say, the programme to the fatal tragedy of crime and ambition unrolled in the last drama of this tetralogy of York and Lancaster. The model of it Shakspere certainly found in the ehronicle, but his own most original creation, the character of Richard, he already here independently traces, the epic sketch for his dramatically elaborated picture, the central point of his play Richard III, which we shall now consider. With The epic elements of this tragedy are principally of a retrospective kind, and show clearly throughout the whole play the tendency of the poet to interlace it with the preceding histories. By means of this criterion I have tried in another paper of the Jahrbuch, vol. vii. p. 124, to vindicate the authenticity of the Folio text of Richard III as opposed to the Quarto text, whose editor, considering such historical reminiscences superfluous to this drama in itself, had consistently rejected them. With respect to this kind of epic element it will therefore suffice to refer to my paper just quoted. But our drama offers also epic elements of another kind. For instance, Act I. sc. iv., Clarence's dream, which, compared to Queen Margaret's story of her bridal voyage, proves the mighty progress meanwhile accomplished by Shakspere's art. While on both these occasions the dramatic form remained as a matter of course excluded, there occur in Richard III two incidents which might as well have been acted on the stage as narrated by the persons concerned in them. The one (III. vii.) is Buckingham's recital of his transactions with the London citizens. Since this narrative was to serve as a proper introduction to the immediately following farce arranged between Gloster and Buckingham, the drastic effect of the scene would rather have been weakened than strengthened by dramatizing the former one. The second incident (IV. iii.) is the murder of the two sons of Edward IV. The poet has perhaps not dramatized it, because the simple suffocation of two sleeping children exhibited on the stage could hardly have produced such an effect on the public as the thrilling relation—from the lips of the trembling, repentant murderers themselves of the touching picture of these children. Between the cycle of plays taken from English History which Shakspere wrote in his earliest period, and those which we may ascribe to his second period, there is the single drama King John, exceptionally not founded on Holinshed's chronicles, but on the older play of an unknown author. In comparing both plays, the point most important for our present purpose is that our poet, though faithfully following, to outward appearance, at least, his dramatic predecessor, nevertheless limits himself to recounting many scenes which the other has dramatized. Thus the achievements of the bastard Faulconbridge in ransacking the churches, is only occasionally, and in general outlines, characterized by Shakspere (III. iv., and IV. ii.), while the older drama delights in presenting him on the boards in the midst of such edifying work, and on that occasion lapses into details more than scurrilous. Thus in the older drama the said Faulconbridge arrests the prophet Peter of Pomfret on the stage during a rather coarse popular scene, while Shakspere (IV. ii.) prefers describing, to showing us, the popular figure of the mob-followed mutineer in his early ended career. Lastly, in the older King John the repast of the king in the garden of the abbey, and his poisoning by the fanatic monk, is enacted before the eyes of the spectators; likewise the monk dies immediately after his draught, and the Bastard stabs the abbot on the stage. Shakspere contented himself with having these things only told, in order not to weaken by the scenic representation of such crass incidents the touching effect of the death-scene of the king. From the drama of his predecessor Shakspere has appropriated another epic element: the introductory |