form of what is attributed to him is for the most part epic, and not dramatic; that the action does not disclose itself, nor the characters exhibit their own qualities. The fact that amongst the extraordinary multitude of plays produced in the palmy half-century of the stage, a very great many were composed upon the principle of a division of labour between two, and sometimes three and even four writers, is too satisfactorily established for us to consider that the difficulties attending upon such a partnership would produce imperfect and fragmentary performances where there was not the closest friendship. It is probable, however, that the intimate social life of the poets of that day, many of whom were also actors, led to such a joint invention of plot and character as would enable two or more readily to work upon a defined plan, each bringing to the whole a contribution from his own peculiar stores. The ordinary mixture too of the serious and comic portions of a drama facilitated such an arrangement; and the general introduction of an underplot, sometimes very slightly hung upon the main action, would still further render the union even of more than two writers not a very difficult thing to manage. It must be considered too that the dramatists of that age were all, or very nearly all, thoroughly familiar with stage business. As we have said, many of them were actors; and the literary employment of those who were not so was, if we may use the term, so professional, that it was as necessary for them to be familiar with the practice of the theatre as for a lawyer to know by daily habit the rules of court. All these circumstances made such dramatic partnerships comparatively easy to manage. But we must not cease to bear in mind that these arrangements must always have had especial reference to the particular capacities and excellences of the persons so united, as known by experience, or suggested by their own promptings of what they were most fitted to accomplish. Let us apply these considerations to the case before us. 6 Shakspere and Fletcher, we will assume, agree to write a play on the subject of Chaucer's tale of Palamon and Arcite.' It is a subject which Shakspere in some respects would have rejoiced in. It was familiar to many of his audience in the writings of England's finest old poet. It was known to the early stage. It was surrounded with those romantic attributes of the old legendary tale which appear to have seized upon his imagination at a particular period of his life, and that not an early one. But, above all, it was a subject full of deep feeling,-where overwhelming passions were to be brought into contact with habitual affections; a subject, too, not the less interesting because it required to be treated with great nicety of handling. It may be presumed that, if such a partnership had been proposed by Fletcher to Shakspere (the belief that Shakspere would have solicited Fletcher's assistance is not very probable), the younger poet would have offered to the great master of dramatic action, to the profound anatomist of character, to him who knew best how to give to the deepest and most complicated emotions their full and appropriate language-his own proper task of exhibiting the deep friendship, the impassioned rivalry, the terrible hatred, and the final reconciliation of the two heroes of the tale. The less practised poet might have contented himself with the accessory scenes, those of the introduction and of the underplot. Now, according to the just belief which has been raised upon the dissimilarities of style, Fletcher has not only taken the underplot, but all, or nearly all, the scenes that demanded the greatest amount of dramatic power, the exhibition of profound emotion in connection with nice distinction of character. It was not the poetical faculty alone that was here wanting-that power which Fletcher possessed of expressing somewhat ordinary thoughts in equable and wellrounded verse, producing agreeable sensations, but rarely rising into the sublime or the pathetic, and never laying bare those hidden things in the nature of man which lie too deep for every-day philosophy, but when revealed become truths that require no demonstration. Shakspere, on the contrary, according to the same just belief as to the internal evidence of style, takes those parts which require the least dramatic power, the descriptive and didactic parts; those which, to a great extent, are of an epic character, containing, like a poem properly epic, set and solemn speeches, elaborate narration, majestic invocations to the presiding deities. There can be no doubt as to the high excellence of these portions of the work. But is such a division of labour the natural one between Shakspere and Fletcher? If it be said that Shakspere left portions of a posthumous play which Fletcher finished, we have the same objection differently applied. The internal evidence of style would lead us to assign the first and last acts to Shakspere. The course of the action would of necessity adhere pretty closely to the tale of Chaucer; and thus the beginning and the end might have been written without any very strict reference to what was to come between, provided the subject were in the hands of an author who would look at the completeness of the narrative as the main thing to be worked out. Shakspere might have made the preliminary scenes as full as we find them in The Two Noble Kinsmen;' but when we look at the conciseness with which Chaucer gives the same scenes, and hurries on to the more dramatic parts of the subject, we do not very readily believe that Shakspere would have taken the opposite course. Skilful as he is in the introduction of his subjects, in the preparation with which he brings the mind into the proper state for comprehending and feeling the higher interests which are to be developed, he comes, in almost every case, with that decision which is a quality of the highest genius, to grapple with the passions and characters of the agents who are to work out the events; and when he has done this, and has our imaginations completely subdued to his power, he delays or precipitates the catastrophe,—sometimes lingering in some scene of gentleness or repose to restore the balance of feeling, and to keep the tragic within the limits of pleasurable emotion, and sometimes clearing away by a sudden movement all the involutions of the plot, shedding his sunlight on all the darknesses of character, and yet making this unexpected dénouement the only one compatible with truth and nature. It was out of Shakspere's own power, we believe, because incompatible with those principles of art which were to him as an unerring instinct, to produce the last scenes of a play before he had worked out the characterization which would essentially determine the details of the event. The theory that Shakspere left a portion of The Two Noble Kinsmen,' which, after his death, was completed by Fletcher, is one which, upon a mature consideration of the subject, we are constrained to reject; although it has often presented itself to us as the most plausible of the theories which would necessarily associate themselves with the belief that Shakspere had written a considerable portion of this play. In his 'Specimens of English Dramatic Poets,' Charles Lamb selects from The Two Noble Kinsmen' nearly all the first scene of the first act, part of the scene between Emilia and Hippolyta in the same act, and the dialogue between Palamon and Arcite, before Emilia comes into the garden, in Act II. The latter scene he says "bears indubitable marks of Fletcher: the two which precede it give strong countenance to the tradition that Shakspere had a hand in this play." These and other passages, he adds, " have a luxuriance in them which strongly resembles Shakspere's manner in those parts of his plays where, the progress of the interest being subordinate, the poet was at leisure for description." Upon a principle, then, of arranged co-operation with Fletcher, Shakspere had produced only those parts of The Two Noble Kinsmen' in which the interest is subordinate, and which should resemble his manner when he was at leisure for description. This is the main point which, with every deference for the opinion, founded upon a comparison of style, that Shakspere was associated in this play with Fletcher, we venture to urge as evidence that ought to be impartially taken in support of the opinion that Shakspere was not concerned in it at all. Our own judgment, as far as the question of style is concerned, very nearly coincides with that of the author of the ingenious Letter' to which we have several times referred; but, on a careful examination of the whole question, we are inclined to a belief that Shakspere did not participate in the authorship. We do not, on the other hand, go along with Tieck, who, with somewhat of an excess of that boldness with which his countrymen pronounce opinions upon the niceties of style in a foreign language, says of this play, "I have never been able to convince myself that a single verse has been written by Shakspere. The manner, the language, the versification is as thoroughly Fletcher as any other of his pieces. If Shakspere had the capability of altering his language so variously as we here see, yet he nowhere presents exaggerations of thought and feeling in soft and flowing speeches, which is the characteristic of Fletcher."* This is to mistake the question at issue. Nobody has ever supposed that Shakspere wrote the parts that are commonly assigned to Fletcher; and therefore nobody accused him of putting exaggerated thoughts in soft and flowing speeches. If Tieck, however, considers the scenes of the first act, to which he distinctly alludes, to be in Fletcher's natural and habitual manner, he maintains a theory which in our opinion is more untenable than any which has been proposed upon this question. Steevens holds that the play is for the most part a studied imitation of Shakspere by Fletcher. But if he has imitated style, he has also imitated character; and that most weakly. The gaoler's daughter is a most diluted copy of Ophelia; the Schoolmaster, of Holofernes; the clowns, with their mummery, of the "rude mechanicals" of 'A Midsummer-Night's Dream.' This very circumstance, by the way, is evidence that there was no distinct concert between Shakspere and Fletcher as to the mode in which the subject should be treated. We agree with Lamb, that Fletcher, with * Alt-Englisches Theater, oder Supplemente zum Shakspere.' 6 all his facility, could not have so readily gone out of his habitual manner to produce an imitation of Shakspere's condensed and involved style. He frequently copies Shakspere in slight resemblances of thought; but the manner is always essentially different. These scenes in The Two Noble Kinsmen' are not in Fletcher's manner; it was not very probable, even if he had the power, that he would write them in imitation of Shakspere. We believe that Shakspere did not write them himself. We are bound, therefore, to produce a theory which may attempt, however imperfectly, to reconcile these difficulties; and we do so with a due sense of the doubts which must always surround such questions, and which in this case are not likely to be obviated by any suggestion of our own, which can pretend to little beyond the character of a mere conjecture, not hurriedly adopted, but certainly propounded without any great confidence in its validity. We hold, then, that Fletcher, for the most part, wrote the scenes which the best critical opinions concur in attributing to him: we hold, also, that he had a coadjutor who produced for the most part the scenes attributed by the same authorities to Shakspere: but we hold, further, that this coadjutor was not Shakspere himself. Coleridge has thrown out a suggestion that parts of The Two Noble Kinsmen' might have been written by Jonson. He was probably led into this opinion by the classical tone which occasionally prevails, especially in the first scene, and in the invocations of the fifth act. The address to Diana, "Oh, sacred, shadowy, cold, and constant queen, Sweet, solitary, white as chaste, and pure As wind-fann'd snow," at once reminds us of "Queen and huntress, chaste and fair;" more perhaps from the associations of the subject than from Jonson's manner of treating it. But Coleridge goes on to state that the main presumption for Shakspere's share in this play rests upon the construction of the blank verse. He holds that construction to be evidence either of an intentional imitation of Shakspere, or of his own proper hand. He then argues, from the assumption that Fletcher was the imitator, that there was an improbability that he would |