SHAKESPEARE AS A PROSE

WRITER.

T is related of Lord Mansfield, one of the profoundest and

himself very much impeded in his early career at the Bar by the reputation which he had acquired for polite learning. A young man who associated with Pope, supped at the "Grecian," and could turn an Ode of Horace, was obviously quite incompetent to wrestle with the technicalities of Coke. It was in vain that he showed convincing proofs of the range and accuracy of his legal attainments. It was in vain that he surrounded himself with the ponderous tomes of Glanvill and Bracton. His plodding brethren would not believe him. They shook their heads at him "as a wit." They could conceive of no alliance between Themis and the Muses-between the idealism of poetry and the plain prose of the law. A fate somewhat similar seems to have befallen our great national poet. We have so long contemplated Shakespeare as a writer of verse, that it seems never to have struck any of his myriad commentators to contemplate him as a writer of prose. During the last century and a half his works have been studied from almost every point of view. Eminent theologians have discussed his theology, eminent lawyers have discussed his legal acquirements. Physicians have illustrated his knowledge of the phenomena of disease. Scholars have estimated his obligations to Greece and Rome. Psychologists and metaphysicians have been busy with his philosophy, historians with his history, and philologists with his language. But from the appearance of Rowe's preface to the appearance of Mr. Swinburne's Essays in England, and from the days of Lessing to the days of Gervinus and Delius in Germany, we cannot call to mind a single attempt to estimate his position and merit as a writer of prose. Delius has indeed dealt at some length with this portion of Shakespeare's work, but his essay is almost entirely confined to an examination of the text itself. His criticism is not comparative, and he has therefore failed to realise the great services which Shakespeare rendered to English prose. He has not shown in what points his prose essentially differs from that

of contemporary writers. He has not traced with sufficient minuteness the history of its development in the great dramatist's hands. He has not distinguished with sufficient precision its various styles.

The truth is that Shakespeare's prose is a phenomenon as remarkable as his verse. In one way, indeed, it is still more remarkable. The prose of Shakespeare stands alone. It was his own creation, as absolutely his own as the terza rima was Dante's, as the Spenserian stanza was Spenser's. For everything else, with the exception only of pure comedy, he had models. English blank verse had been all but perfected by Marlowe and Peele before it passed into his hands. That he added much to it is true. He varied the pauses; he made it more flexible, more perfectly adapted to catch, with exquisite subtlety, the ever-changing phases of thought; but he was not its creator. The historical play had been formulated before he took it up. Tragedy had been formulated. If we except three, all his plots were borrowed. His lyrics, matchless as they are, differ nothing in form, tone, and style from the lyrics of his immediate predecessors. But his prose is essentially original; and how greatly he contributed to the development of this important branch of literature will be at once apparent if we compare his prose diction with the diction both of those who preceded and those who followed him. In two qualities, and in two qualities alone, had English prose excelled, and those qualities were harmony and majesty. For these it had been indebted to Hooker, and Hooker had learned them from the Latin Classics. Such a style was, however, only adapted for subjects which admitted of rhetorical treatment. It provided only for one mode of expression. The rhetorical diction of Hooker and the theologians; the pedantic epigrammatic diction of Lyly and the euphuists; the coarse colloquial vulgarity of Nash and the author of the Martin Mar-Prelate tracts; the loose and slovenly prose dialogue of Peele and Marlowe; the diffuse, involved, and Italian periods of Puttenham and Sidney; the curt and somewhat awkward condensation of Bacon,' in his earlier style, represent very fairly the schools of prose which were flourishing when Shakespeare entered upon his task. Daniel, Donne, Hall, and Raleigh, who are beyond question the best prose writers-we are speaking merely of style-in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, had not begun to publish when Shakespeare was engaged in composition. The translation of the

We make no exception in favour of The Advancement of Learning, which was published in 1606, for its style is as Latin in its rhythm and structure as that of Hooker. Bacon's best prose compositions, and of a very high order of excellence they are, are the Essay on Adversity and the Fragment on Death; but they, it must be remembered, did not appear till 1625.

Bible did not appear till 1611. Now, it must be obvious to any one who will take the trouble to consult them, that these writers, so far from furnishing Shakespeare with a model, do not even contain the germs of those qualities which constitute good prose in a tolerably advanced stage of its development. In one or two passages in his comedies, where they border closely on farce, Shakespeare may, it is true, have borrowed something from Nash and Peele, and he has of course employed occasionally the "three-piled hyperboles and spruce affectations" of Lyly, both seriously to enrich his diction and halfcontemptuously to point his parodies. But here all influences from, and all imitations of, his predecessors cease.

What, then, did Shakespeare do for English prose? He gave it ease, he gave it variety and grace; qualities in which, till he took it in hand, it was entirely deficient. He showed for the first time how it could be dignified without being pedantic, how it could be full and massive without subordinating the Saxon to the Latin element, how it could be stately without being involved, how it could be musical without borrowing its rhythm and its cadence from the rhetoricians of Rome. He made it plastic. He taught it to assume, He showed its capacity

and to assume with propriety, every tone. for dialectics, for exposition, and for narrative. He purified it from archaisms. Indeed, his diction often differs little from that of the best writers in the eighteenth century. The following passage, for example, will, in point of purity, rhythm, and composition, bear comparison with any paragraph in Addison :

First my fear, then my courtesy, lastly my speech. My fear is your displeasure; my courtesy, my duty; and my speech, to beg your pardon. If you look for a good speech you undo me, for what I have to say is of my own making, and what indeed I should say, will, I doubt not, prove my own marring. Here I promised you I would be, and here I commit my body to your mercy. Bate me some, and I will pay you some, and, as most debtors do, promise you infinitely. If my tongue cannot entreat you to acquit me, will you command me to use my legs? But a good conscience would make any possible satisfaction, and so must I. Epilogue to Second Part of "Henry IV."

In light and fleeting dialogue he is not inferior to Vanbrugh and Farquhar. In point and terseness he is not inferior to Congreve. Indeed, it is easy to see that Congreve frequently modelled his prose dialogue on that of Shakespeare. A more magnificent piece of rhetoric than Hamlet's reflections on man was never penned either by Milton, Taylor, or Sir Thomas Browne. A finer specimen of grave and logical disquisition than the dialogue between Bates, Williams, and the King in the fourth act of Henry V. it would not be easy to find in the whole range of our prose literature. The dialogue between Rosalind and VOL. CCXLIX. NO. 1800.

3 B

Celia, and between Rosalind and Orlando in As You Like It, bear the same relation to our prose drama as the dialogues of Molière bear to the dramatic prose of France. The speech of Brutus (Julius Cæsar, act ii. scene ii.); the two monologues of Iago (Othello, act i. scene iii.), of Henry V. (Henry V., act iv. scene i.), the soliloquy of Edmund (Lear, act i. scene ii.), of Hamlet (Hamlet, act ii. scene ii., and again act v. scene i.), the speech of Speed (Two Gentlemen of Verona, act ii. scene i.), are, regarded merely as compositions, masterpieces. The only dramatist who could for one instant stand comparison with Shakespeare as a prose writer would be Ben Jonson; but Ben Jonson's best is far inferior to Shakespeare's best. Jonson's most ambitious prose is cast in a Latin mould. His dedication, for example, of "The Fox" to the two Universities is infinitely more Latin than English; the prose of his "Discoveries" is no advance on that of Sidney; and his dialogue, even at its lightest, is seldom free from stiffness and pedantry. In a word, Shakespeare carried prose composition not only further than any writer during the Elizabethan age,' but further than any writer previous to Hobbes, Cowley, and Temple. In the comparative infancy of our prose literature, he achieved one of the rarest triumphs of its maturity-the union of the graces of rhetoric with the graces of colloquy. He attempted several styles, he excelled in all. Since his time many eminent poets have distinguished themselves in prose composition. At and before his time, such a double triumph was unique; for who could compare the "Vita Nuova" with the "Paradiso," the "Tale of Meliboeus" with the "Knight's Tale," or the "Dialogue on the State of Ireland" with a canto of the "Faery Queen"? Nor is this all. He was the first of our writers who perceived that the mechanism of prose differs essentially from the mechanism of verse, and who discerned how far the laws which govern the rhythm and cadence of metre might, without confusing the lines of demarcation between the two modes of expression, operate beneficially on the rhythm and cadence of pre.

In examining Shakespeare's prose more particularly it is, we think, possible to discern five distinct styles. First will come the euphuistic; secondly, the coarse colloquial prose, modelled on the language of vulgar life; thirdly, the prose of higher comedy; fourthly, prose professedly rhetorical; and, lastly, highly wrought poetical prose.

The style which Lyly had, both by his celebrated romance and

We are speaking, of course, of the extent and variety of his powers of expression. In certain qualities he is excelled perhaps both by Hooker and Bacon, and by Samuel Daniel, whose style is, for the age in which he lived, wonderful,

also by his comedies, made popular—a style which was almost universally affected by the court circles, and which continued to taint our literature till it received its death-blow from Sir Philip Sidney--has left considerable traces on Shakespeare's diction. Euphuism is employed, as we observed before, sometimes seriously and sometimes satirically. Some of the dialogue in As You Like It, in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, and in the Winter's Tale, offers obvious illustrations of the first, though we may observe how the poet's tact and taste has led him to soften down the glaring extravagance of his model. His wit has all the flavour of Lyly's, but, unlike Lyly's, it is seldom forced; with all the point and epigram of his model, he has none of his monstrous conceits, none of his false imagery, none of his frigid puerilities. A very good specimen of this modified euphuism is to be found in the second scene of the fifth act of the Winter's Tale. Who does not recognise the genuine Lyly in such a sentence as "There might you have beheld one joy crown another, so and in such manner that it seemed sorrow wept to take leave of them, for their joy waded in tears;" or again in "one of the prettiest touches of all, and that which angled for mine eyes caught the water though not the fish, was," &c.? His satirical parodies of Lyly are to be found, not so much in entire scenes and dialogues, as in particular passages-though Love's Labour's Lost is from beginning to end one mass of euphuism. An exhaustive catalogue of the characteristics of euphuism might, indeed, be compiled from this single play. Don Adriano de Armado is a euphuist of the first water, and so also, in their way, are Moth and Holofernes. Again, Osric, in Hamlet, is evidently intended to ridicule Lyly's young gentlemen. The speeches of Falstaff and Henry when they are acting the King (Henry IV. part i. act ii. scene v.) are obviously in the same vein. "For though camomile the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet youth the more it is wasted the sooner it wears," sounds like an extract taken verbatim from "The Anatomy of Wit." Shakespeare's obligations to Lyly were therefore of a comparatively unimportant character. His satirical parodies proved that he fully recognised the puerility of euphuism, and where he directly imitates it he imitates it, generally speaking, for the purpose of laughing at it, though he has, it is true, occasionally enriched his diction with some of Lyly's characteristic peculiarities.

We now come to the second of our five divisions-the realistic colloquial prose, modelled on the language of common life. This is the language of the clowns, of the fools, of the citizens, officers, and of all the baser characters; the language of Touchstone, Launce, Bottom, Bardolph, Mrs. Quickly, Thersites, Dogberry, Trinculo,