include a misunderstanding, such as that of Juliet and her nurse after the death of Tybalt. What Shakespeare manifestly loved was the error, but he loved it best in the form of mystification. The beguiling of Baptista by his daughter Bianca, the denying of Vincentio by his men, and the presentation of the Pedant in his place are perfect examples of that unjust pleasantry the sufferer whereof has no defence, for no wit nor wisdom nor wariness could avail him — he is entirely in the hands of a tormentor who has all the knowledge and all the advantage, and uses them for sport with delight, and without sparing, against the aged, the reverend, or the noble. It is true that the hero-son and lover - does not follow the jest to the utmost; that is left for Arlecchino, the merry rogue without a conscience. Whoever was Shakespeare's coadjutor - if he had one, and in some scenes in the part of Bianca it seems probable-Shakespeare in person took a sharp interest in this "coney-catching." To the greater number of modern spirits it is of so little interest, and so little to be loved, as to stand somewhat between them and their dramatist,—a difference involving the very substructure of humour. There is nothing for it but a reconciliation in the most humorous "Induction." And what is this but a mystification also? Although it is not perhaps the delusion of the tinker that so takes us, but his nature under all fortunes. We have Christopher Sly in common with Shakespeare, let his lord use him as he may. Careless Shakespeare, having carried his inner play to a jolly end, with a preposterous grave moral, sweeps the persons off their little sanctuary stage, and forgets to close up the outer comedy at all; so that we know no more of the tinker, nor of his restoration to the ale-house on the heath and to his quarrel with the ale-wife. Or the conclusion is lost. But, as it stands, the inner play carries off the victory, and the "Induction" is forgotten. The tinker ceases in the illusion of the lord's house. He ceases and vanishes, and the dramatist does not stay to have the laugh finally against him. No one waits to see Christopher Sly himself again, or to hear him attempt an indignant Marian Hacket with the recital of his adventure. So that the last we hear from him is the restless sigh offered by the clown to the fancy of drama and mirth: "Comes there any more of it? . 'Tis a very excellent piece of work, madam lady; would 't were done." A scientific inquiry into the evidence touching the authorship of the play in all its parts is not within the province of this short essay. But it does belong to the appreciation of the comedy, and it is in the competence of a student of verse, to dwell for a moment upon the metrical testimony to the identity of the author of "Love's Labour's Lost" and the author of "The Taming of the Shrew." Anapæsts (I speak of course of anapæsts as one may adapt the word to the use of English prosody) are rare in English literature before the eighteenth century made them its lighter favourites, and peculiarly its own, the expression of its dapper and commonplace gaiety and frolic, whether in the age of Anne or when Mrs. Thrale was rendering epigrams from the French. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries meddled little with this kind of verse. The iambic movement, the noble gait of English poetry, rarely interrupted by a brief shifting to the springing foot of the trochee, is, in all its composure and simplicity, the very pace of these two great centuries. Lyrical poetry goes by in procession, from the stanza of Surrey to the ode of Dryden, to that measure. The dramatist in this matter keeps step and time with the lyrist; the numbers are different, the foot is the same. And Shakespeare's rhymes in the plays are, habitually, iambic - heroic couplets. In "Love's Labour's Lost," however, occurs, among the varied short iambic rhymed verses, the altered rhythm of a rough and imperfect anapæstic verse : "My lips are no common, though several they be." And in "The Taming of the Shrew " is this, with — in various places-two or three more couplets like it : ""T was I won the wager, though you hit the white; Nothing sounds stranger than such a movement in Shakespeare's verse, but the strangeness is common with a quite evident identity of lax and careless rhythm -to the two plays. After all, the value of this comedy is in the “Induction," and the value of the "Induction" is not only in its excellent humour, but in the external incidents-the direct allusion made here by Shakespeare to the daily landscape, the house, the householder of the Warwick shire village known to him. Only in "The Merry Wives of Windsor" and in the "Second Part of Henry IV" do we come thus near to the roads that Shakespeare walked, the heath he looked upon, the man and woman he watched brawling. "The Taming of the Shrew," if it be of earlier date than the two plays just named, has the first passages of this homely external intimacy, and Kit Sly brings us and the Past acquainted. We let the Shrew go by - the excuse for her story is that it but not so the Tinker. passes; ALICE MEYNELL. |
