Shakespeare's Love-tales.

sought to draw out the linked sweetness of every detail by expansion of the poet's imagery, sententious lines, and dainty variation of the thoughts associated with each incident, Shakespeare wrote his "Venus and Adonis" and "Lucrece." With all their grace and wit and sweetness, these love-tales have also the spirit of Shakespeare in their themes. One is of the innocence of early manhood that is proof against the blandishments of Venus. The other is of the innocence of womanhood outraged by a man's lust, and choosing death to set the pure mind free from the prison of a tainted body. "Venus and Adonis" is in stanzas of the "common metre" used by Lodge for his love-tale of Glaucus and Scilla. In Shakespeare's hands that measure is here at its sweetest. myth of Adonis is so told as to make the youth's innocent ignorance the foremost feature of the tale. It is proof against all blandishments of Venus. He hates not love, but her device in love; and breaks from her endearments with words showing the gist of the whole poem as Shakespeare treats it

"Call it not love, for love to heaven is fled,

Since sweating lust on earth usurped his name ;
Under whose simple semblance he hath fed
Upon fresh beauty, blotting it with blame;
Which the hot tyrant stains, and soon bereaves,
As caterpillars do the tender leaves.

"Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,
But lust's effect is tempest after sun;
Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain,
Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done:
Love surfeits not, lust like a glutton dies;
Love is all truth, lust full of forgéd lies.

"More I could tell, but more I dare not say;
The text is old, the orator too green.
Therefore, in sadness, now I will away;

My face is full of shame, my heart of teen.

The

Mine ears, that to your wanton talk attended,
Do burn themselves for having so offended.”

In "Lucrece "lust is shown all hateful and unsatisfying, through the passions in the mind of Tarquin; and if the elaboration of ideas that arise out of each incident is excessive, as Shakespeare represents it in the mind of Lucrece after the wrong done to her, Shakespeare himself took care to guard those passages-which include some of the best stanzas in the poem-with comment that unites them to the voice of Nature:

“Thus cavils she with everything she sees ;

True grief is fond and testy as a child,

Who wayward once, his mood with naught agrees;
Old woes, not infant sorrows, bear them mild;
Continuance tames the one; the other wild,
Like an unpractised swimmer plunging still,
With too much labour drowns for want of skill.

"So she, deep-drenched in a sea of care,

Holds disputation with each thing she views,
And to herself all sorrow doth compare ;
No object but her passion's strength renews;
And as one shifts, another straight ensues :
Sometimes her grief is dumb, and hath no words;
Sometimes 'tis mad, and too much talk affords."

In "Lucrece" Shakespeare used, not the common metre, which was thought specially fit for tales of love, but the seven-lined Chaucer stanza, which, though full of sweetness, has its deeper notes that could more fitly express tragic passion. That is the reason for the difference of measure. Shakespeare's two love-tales were thus meant as antidotes to lust. One paints a young and manly innocence, unallured by the sweetness of its first enticement;

the other paints the guilty passion with its wild-beast force, stripped of disguise, in all its hatefulness.

In a dedication of "Venus and Adonis" to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton-then twenty years old -Shakespeare calls that poem the first heir of his invention. It was his first published work. "Lucrece" was dedicated to the same good friend.

The first edition of Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis " had for its title-page, "Venus and Adonis. Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flavus Apollo. Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua. London. Imprinted by Richard Field, and are to be sold at the signe of the White Greyhound in Paules Churchyard, 1593." A second edition was issued in 1594, with no change on the title-page except the date. There was a third edition in 1596, printed by R. F. (Richard Field) for John Harison; a fourth in 1599, printed for William Leake, was found by Mr. Charles Edmonds in the library of Sir Charles Isham, at Lamport Hall, Northamptonshire. A fifth edition was printed by I. H. for John Harrison in 1600. Two editions were published in 1602, and have been discovered by Mr. William Aldis Wright, one in the British Museum, one in the Bodleian, the only known copy of each.

The first edition of Shakespeare's Lucrece" had on its title-page "Lucrece. London, Printed by Richard Field, for Iohn Harrison, and are to be sold at the signe of the White Greyhound; in Paules Churchyard 1594." There was a second edition in 1598 printed by P. S. for John Harrison, and a third printed by I. H. for Iohn Harrison in 1600. There was not another until 1607.

CHAPTER IX.

ROMEO AND JULIET "-" A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM" "THE MERCHANT OF VENICE."

"Romeo and Juliet."

"ROMEO AND JULIET" was, before Shakespeare's time, one of the most popular of love-stories. In 1562-two years before the birth of Shakespeare-Arthur Brooke published a poem on the "Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, containing a rare example of love constancy; with the subtill counsels and practices of an old Fryer, and their ill-event." * In the preface to his poem, Arthur Brooke spoke of a previously existing play. "Though," he says, "I saw the same argument lately set forth on the stage with more commendation than I can look for (being there much better set forth than I have, or can do), yet the same matter, penned as it is, may serve the like good effect." Neither of the play so referred to, nor of any other play upon "Romeo and Juliet," before Shakespeare's, has any copy been preserved.

A part of Friar Laurence's expostulation with Romeo upon his passion in the cell (Act III., Sc. 3) is directly paraphrased from Arthur Brooke. These are Brooke's lines :

"Art thou,' quoth he, 'a man? Thy shape saith so thou art;

Thy crying and thy weeping eyes denote a woman's heart

If thou a man or woman wert or else a brutish beast.'"

* "E. W." viii. 287, 288.

These are Shakespeare's

"Art thou a man? Thy form cries out thou art;

Thy tears are womanish; thy wild acts denote

The unreasonable fury of a beast.'

The tale of Juliet was first told by an Italian, Luigi da Porto, of Vicenza, who died in 1529, six years before the printing of it-at Venice, in 1535-as "The Story of Two Noble Lovers, with their piteous death, which happened in the city of Verona in the time of the Signor Bartolomeo Scala." Luigi da Porto said that he had it at the baths of Caldera from a talkative archer of Verona, Captain Alexander Peregrino, a man fifty years old. But he might have got the suggestion from a tale of Sienna, clearly the same, the thirty-third of the "Novellino" of Masuccio Salernitano, published in 1476. In 1554 the story was printed again at Lucca, as retold by Bandello. It was soon afterwards told again in French, with variations, by Boaisteau, from whose novel it was shaped into English verse, with further alterations and additions, by Arthur Brooke, in 1562. Boaisteau's novel was translated by William Painter for the second volume of his collection of novels published in 1567 as "The Palace of Pleasure."

A history of Verona, to the year 1560, by Girolamo della. Corte, places the story of Romeo and Juliet in the year 1303. Dante's "Divine Comedy," dating in 1300, names the Capulets and Montagues among the quarrellers of Verona, who represented the fierce spirit that made Italy savage and unmanageable. The Scalas then ruled in Verona, and the time of Bartolomeo Scala was that assigned to the story by Luigi da Porto. Scala became, in the several versions of the tale, Escala, and, as in Shakespeare, Escalus, the prince's name.

There were two plays on this popular love story in Spanish literature, one by Lope de Vega, and one by Francisco de Roxas.