A LETTER

ON

SHAKSPERE'S AUTHORSHIP

OF

The Two Noble Kinsmen.

A LETTER

ON

SHAKSPERE'S AUTHORSHIP

OF

The Two Noble Kinsmen;

AND ON THE CHARACTERISTICS OF SHAKSPERE'S STYLE
AND THE SECRET OF HIS SUPREMACY.

BY THE LATE

WILLIAM SPALDING, M.A.,

FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH AND AFTERWARDS PROFESSOR OF LOGIC, RHETORIC, AND METAPHYSICS IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREW'S; AUTHOR OF 'A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE,' ETC., ETC.

New Edition, with a Life of the Author,

BY

JOHN HILL BURTON, LL.D.,

AUTHOR OF
'THE HISTORY OF SCOTLAND,' ETC., ETC.

PUBLISHT FOR

The New Shakspere Society

BY N. TRÜBNER & CO., 57, 59, LUDGATE HILL,

LONDON, E.C., 1876.

Series VIII. No. 1

JOHN CHILDS AND SON, PRINTERS.

FOREWORDS

This Letter by Prof. Spalding has always seemd to me one of the ablest (if not the ablest) and most stimulating pieces of Shakspere criticism I ever read. And even if you differ from the writer's conclusion as to Shakspere's part, or even hold that Shakspere took no part at all, in the Play, you still get almost as much good from the essay as if you accept its conclusions as to the authorship of The Two Noble Kinsmen. It is for its general, more than for its special, discussions, that I value this Letter. The close reasoning, the spirited language, the perception and distinction of the special qualities of Shakspere's work, the investigation into the nature of dramatic art, the grasp of subject, and the mixt logic and enthusiasm of the whole Letter, are worthy of a true critic of our great poet, and of the distinguisht Professor of Logic, Rhetoric, and Metaphysics, who wrote this treatise, that at once delights and informs every one who reads it. No wonder it carrid away and convinct even the calm judicial mind of Hallam.

Indeed, while reading the Letter, one can hardly resist the power of Prof. Spalding's argument, backt as it is by his well-chosen passages from the Play. But when one turns to the play itself, when one reads it aloud with a party of friends, then come doubt and hesitation. One begins to ask, 'Is this indeed Shakspere, Shakspere at the end of his glorious career, Shakspere who has just given us Perdita, Hermione and Autolycus'?

Full of the heavenly beauty of Perdita's flowers, one reads over The Two Noble Kinsmen flower-song, and asks, pretty as the fancy of a few of the epithets is, whether all that Shakspere, with the spring-flowers of Stratford about him, and the love of nature deeper than ever in his soul—whether all he has to say of the daisy—Chaucer's 'Quene of flourës alle'—is, that it is "smelless but most quaint"; and of marigolds, that they blow on death-beds[v:1], when one recollects his twenty-years' earlier

use of them in Lucrece (A.D. 1594):—

Full of the ineffable charm and consistency of Miranda and Perdita, one asks of Emilia—Chaucer's daring huntress, virgin free, seeking no marriage-bed—whether Shakspere, at the crisis of her life, degraded her to a silly lady's-maid or shop-girl, not knowing her own mind, up and down like a bucket in a well, balancing her lovers' qualities against one another, saying she'd worn the losing Palamon's portrait on her right side, not the heart one, her left, &c.; and then (oh dear!) that Palamon might wound Arcite and spoil his figure! What a pity it would be!

V. iii. 68-71, p. 81, ed. Littledale.

I say, is it possible to believe that Shakspere turnd a noble lady, a frank gallant nature, whose character he had rightly seizd at first, into a goose of this kind, whom one would like to shake, or box her ears well? The thing is surely impossible. Again, is it likely—and again, I say, at the end of his career, with all his experience behind him, that Shakspere would make his hero Palamon publicly urge on Venus in his prayer to her, that she was bound to protect him because he'd believd a wanton young wife's word that her old incapable husband was the father of her

child? Is this the kind of thing that the Shakspere of Imogen, of Desdemona, of Queen Catherine, would put forward as the crown of his life and work? Again I say, it can hardly be.

Further, when at one's reading-party one turns to the cleverest and most poetic-natured girl-friend, and says, 'This is assignd to Shakspere. Do you feel it's his?' She answers, 'Not a bit. And no one else does either. Look how people's eyes are all off their books. They don't care for it: you never see that when we're reading one of Shakspere's genuine plays.' Then when you note Prof. Spalding's own admission in his Letter, p. 81, that in Shakspere's special excellence, characterization, the play is—as of course it is—weak, and that it is to be compard on the one hand with his weaker early work, and on the other with his latest Henry VIII, more than half of which Fletcher wrote, you are not surpris'd to find that in 1840,[vii:1] seven years after the date of his Letter, Professor Spalding had concluded, that on Shakspere's having taken part in The Two Noble Kinsmen, his "opinion is not now so decided as it once was," and that by 1847 he was still less decided, and declared the question "really insoluble." Here is the full passage from his article on Dyce's "Beaumont and Fletcher," in the Edinb. Review, July 1847, p. 57:—