Those faults are not least seen in his Satires, though neither the unbridled voluptuousness which makes his Elegies shocking to modern propriety, nor the far-off conceit which appears in his meditative and miscellaneous poems, is very strongly or specially represented here. Nor, naturally enough, is the extreme beauty of thought and allusion distinctly noteworthy in a cla.s.s of verse which does not easily admit it. On the other hand, the force and originality of Donne"s intellect are nowhere better shown. It is a constant fault of modern satirists that in their just admiration for Horace and Juvenal they merely paraphrase them, and, instead of going to the fountainhead and taking their matter from human nature, merely give us fresh studies of _Ibam forte via sacra_ or the Tenth of Juvenal, adjusted to the meridians of Paris or London. Although Donne is not quite free from this fault, he is much freer than either of his contemporaries, Regnier or Hall. And the rough vigour of his sketches and single lines is admirable. Yet it is as rough as it is vigorous; and the breakneck versification and contorted phrase of his satires, softened a little in Hall, roughened again and to a much greater degree in Marston, and reaching, as far as phrase goes, a rare extreme in the _Transformed Metamorphosis_ of Cyril Tourneur, have been the subject of a great deal of discussion. It is now agreed by all the best authorities that it would be a mistake to consider this roughness unintentional or merely clumsy, and that it sprung, at any rate in great degree, from an idea that the ancients intended the _Satura_ to be written in somewhat unpolished verse, as well as from a following of the style of Persius, the most deliberately obscure of all Latin if not of all cla.s.sical poets. In language Donne is not (as far as his Satires are concerned) a very great sinner; but his versification, whether by his own intention or not, leaves much to desire.
At one moment the ten syllables are only to be made out by a Chaucerian lengthening of the mute _e_; at another the writer seems to be emulating Wyatt in altering the accent of syllables, and coolly making the final iambus of a line out of such a word as "answer." It is no wonder that poets of the "correct" age thought him in need of rewriting; though even they could not mistake the force of observation and expression which characterises his Satires, and which very frequently reappears even in his dreamiest metaphysics, his most recondite love fancies, and his warmest and most pa.s.sionate hymns to Aphrodite Pandemos.
These artificial characteristics are supplemented in the Elizabethan satirists, other than Donne, by yet a third, which makes them, I confess, to me rather tedious reading, independently of their shambling metre, and their sometimes almost unconstruable syntax. This is the absurd affectation of extreme moral wrath against the corruptions of their time in which they all indulge. Marston, who is nearly the foulest, if not quite the foulest writer of any English cla.s.sic, gives himself the airs of the most sensitive puritan; Hall, with a little less of this contrast, sins considerably in the same way, and adds to his delinquencies a most petulant and idle attempt to satirise from the purely literary point of view writers who are a whole head and shoulders above himself. And these two, followed by their imitator, Guilpin, a.s.sail each other in a fashion which argues either a very absurd sincerity of literary jealousy, or a very ign.o.ble simulation of it, for the purpose of getting up interest on the part of the public. Nevertheless, both Marston and Hall are very interesting figures in English literature, and their satirical performances cannot be pa.s.sed over in any account of it.
Joseph Hall was born near Ashby de la Zouch, of parents in the lower yeoman rank of life, had his education at the famous Puritan College of Emanuel at Cambridge, became a Fellow thereof, proceeded through the living of Hawstead and a canonry at Wolverhampton to the sees of Exeter and Norwich, of the latter of which he was violently deprived by the Parliament, and, not surviving long enough to see the Restoration, died (1656) in a suburb of his cathedral city. His later life was important for religious literature and ecclesiastical politics, in his dealings with the latter of which he came into conflict, not altogether fortunately for the younger and greater man of letters, with John Milton. His Satires belong to his early Cambridge days, and to the last decade of the sixteenth century. They have on the whole been rather overpraised, though the variety of their matter and the abundance of reference to interesting social traits of the time to some extent redeem them. The worst point about them, as already noted, is the stale and commonplace impertinence with which their author, unlike the best breed of young poets and men of letters, attempts to satirise his literary betters; while they are to some extent at any rate tarred with the other two brushes of corrupt imitation of the ancients, and of sham moral indignation. Indeed the want of sincerity--the evidence of the literary exercise--injures Hall"s satirical work in different ways throughout. We do not, as we read him, in the least believe in his att.i.tude of Hebrew prophet crossed with Roman satirist, and the occasional presence of a vigorous couplet or a lively metaphor hardly redeems this disbelief.
Nevertheless, Hall is here as always a literary artist--a writer who took some trouble with his writings; and as some of his satires are short, a whole one may be given:--
"A gentle squire would gladly entertain Into his house some trencher-chaplain;[30]
Some willing man that might instruct his sons And that would stand to good conditions.
First, that he lie upon the truckle bed, Whiles his young master lieth o"er his head.
Second, that he do, on no default,[31]
Ever presume to sit above the salt.
Third, that he never change his trencher twice.
Fourth, that he use all common courtesies; Sit bare at meals, and one half rise and wait.
Last, that he never his young master beat, But he must ask his mother to define, How many jerks she would his breech should line.
All these observ"d he could contented be To give five marks and winter livery."
[30] "Chaplain"--trisyllable like "capellan."
[31] Missing syllable.
John Marston, who out-Halled Hall in all his literary misdeeds, was, it would appear, a member of a good Shropshire family which had pa.s.sed into Warwickshire. He was educated at Coventry School, and at Brasenose College, Oxford, and pa.s.sed early into London literary society, where he involved himself in the inextricable and not-much-worth-extricating quarrels which have left their mark in Jonson"s and Dekker"s dramas. In the first decade of the seventeenth century he wrote several remarkable plays, of much greater literary merit than the work now to be criticised. Then he took orders, was presented to the living of Christchurch, and, like others of his time, seems to have forsworn literature as an unholy thing. He died in 1634. Here we are concerned only with two youthful works of his--_Pigmalion"s Image_ and some Satires in 1598, followed in the same year by a sequel, ent.i.tled _The Scourge of Villainy_. In these works he called himself "W. Kinsayder," a pen-name for which various explanations have been given. It is characteristic and rather comical that, while both the earlier Satires and _The Scourge_ denounce lewd verse most fullmouthedly, _Pigmalion"s Image_ is a poem in the _Venus and Adonis_ style which is certainly not inferior to its fellows in luscious descriptions. It was, in fact, with the _Satires_ and much similar work, formally condemned and burnt in 1599. Both in Hall and in Marston industrious commentators have striven hard to identify the personages of the satire with famous living writers, and there may be a chance that some at least of their identifications (as of Marston"s Tubrio with Marlowe) are correct. But the exaggeration and insincerity, the deliberate "society-journalism" (to adopt a detestable phrase for a corresponding thing of our own days), which characterise all this cla.s.s of writing make the identifications of but little interest. In every age there are writers who delight in representing that age as the very worst of the history of the world, and in ransacking literature and imagination for accusations against their fellows. The sedate philosopher partly brings and partly draws the conviction that one time is very like another. Marston, however, has fooled himself and his readers to the very top of his and their bent; and even Churchill, restrained by a more critical atmosphere, has not come quite near his confused and only half-intelligible jumble of indictments for indecent practices and crude philosophy of the moral and metaphysical kind. A vigorous line or phrase occasionally redeems the chaos of rant, fustian, indecency, ill-nature, and muddled thought.
"Ambitious Gorgons, wide-mouth"d Lamians, Shape-changing Proteans, d.a.m.n"d Briarians, Is Minos dead, is Radamanth asleep, That ye thus dare unto Jove"s palace creep?
What, hath Ramnusia spent her knotted whip, That ye dare strive on Hebe"s cup to sip?
Ye know Apollo"s quiver is not spent, But can abate your daring hardiment.
Python is slain, yet his accursed race Dare look divine Astrea in the face; Chaos return and with confusion Involve the world with strange disunion; For Pluto sits in that adored chair Which doth belong unto Minerva"s heir.
O hecatombs! O catastrophe!
From Midas" pomp to Trus" beggary!
Prometheus, who celestial fire Did steal from heaven, therewith to inspire Our earthly bodies with a sense-ful mind, Whereby we might the depth of nature find, Is ding"d to h.e.l.l, and vulture eats his heart Which did such deep philosophy impart To mortal men."
The contrast of this so-called satire, and the really satiric touches of Marston"s own plays, when he was not cramped by the affectations of the style, is very curious.
Edward Gilpin or Guilpin, author of the rare book _Skialetheia_, published between the dates of Hall and Marston, is, if not a proved plagiarist from either, at any rate an obvious follower in the same track. There is the same exaggeration, the same petulant ill-nature, the same obscurity of phrase and ungainliness of verse, and the same general insincerity. But the fine flower of the whole school is perhaps to be found in the miraculous _Transformed Metamorphosis_, attributed to the powerful but extravagant dramatist, Cyril Tourneur, who wrote this kind of thing:--
"From out the lake a bridge ascends thereto, Whereon in female shape a serpent stands.
Who eyes her eye, or views her blue-vein"d brow, With sense-bereaving glozes she enchants, And when she sees a worldling blind that haunts The pleasure that doth seem there to be found, She soothes with Leucrocutanized sound.
"Thence leads an entry to a shining hall Bedecked with flowers of the fairest hue; The Thrush, the Lark, and night"s-joy Nightingale There minulize their pleasing lays anew, This welcome to the bitter bed of rue; This little room will scarce two wights contain T" enjoy their joy, and there in pleasure reign.
"But next thereto adjoins a s.p.a.cious room, More fairly fair adorned than the other: (O woe to him at sin-awhaping doom, That to these shadows hath his mind given over) For (O) he never shall his soul recover: If this sweet sin still feeds him with her smack And his repentant hand him hales not back."[32]
[32] Mr. Churton Collins is "tolerably confident," and perhaps he might have been quite certain, that Leucrocutanized refers to one of the Fauna of fancy,--a monster that spoke like a man. "Minulise," from minurizo, "I sing." "To awhape" = "to confound."
We could hardly end with anything farther removed from the clear philosophy and the serene loveliness of _The Faerie Queene_.
CHAPTER V
THE SECOND DRAMATIC PERIOD--SHAKESPERE
The difficulty of writing about Shakespere is twofold; and though it is a difficulty which, in both its aspects, presents itself when other great writers are concerned, there is no other case in which it besets the critic to quite the same extent. Almost everything that is worth saying has been already said, more or less happily. A vast amount has been said which is not in the least worth saying, which is for the most part demonstrably foolish or wrong. As Shakespere is by far the greatest of all writers, ancient or modern, so he has been the subject of commentatorial folly to an extent which dwarfs the expense of that folly on any other single subject.
It is impossible to notice the results of this folly except at great length; it is doubtful whether they are worth noticing at all; yet there is always the danger either that some mischievous notions may be left undisturbed by the neglect to notice them, or that the critic himself may be presumed to be ignorant of the foolishness of his predecessors. These inconveniences, however, must here be risked, and it may perhaps be thought that the necessity of risking them is a salutary one. In no other case is it so desirable that an author should be approached by students with the minimum of apparatus.
The scanty facts and the abundant fancies as to Shakespere"s life are a commonplace of literature. He was baptized on the 26th of April 1564 at Stratford-on-Avon, and must have been born either on the same day, or on one of those immediately preceding. His father was John Shakespere, his mother Mary Arden, both belonging to the lower middle cla.s.s and connected, personally and by their relations, with yeomanry and small landed gentry on the one side, and with well-to-do tradesmen on the other. Nothing is known of his youth and little of his education; but it was a constant tradition of men of his own and the immediately succeeding generation that he had little school learning. Before he was nineteen he was married, at the end of November 1582, to Anne Hathaway, who was seven years his senior. Their first child, Susannah, was baptized six months later. He is said to have left Stratford for London in 1585, or thereabouts, and to have connected himself at once with the theatre, first in humble and then in more important positions. But all this is mist and myth. He is transparently referred to by Robert Greene in the summer or autumn of 1592, and the terms of the reference prove his prosperity. The same pa.s.sage brought out a complimentary reference to Shakespere"s intellectual and moral character from Chettle, Greene"s editor. He published _Venus and Adonis_ in 1593, and _Lucrece_ next year. His plays now began to appear rapidly, and brought him money enough to buy, in 1597, the house of New Place at Stratford, and to establish himself there after, it is supposed, twelve years" almost complete absence from his birthplace and his family. Doc.u.mentary references to his business matters now become not infrequent, but, except as showing that he was alive and prosperous, they are quite uninteresting. The same may be said of the marriages and deaths of his children. In 1609 appeared the _Sonnets_, some of which had previously been printed in unauthorised and piratical publications. He died on the 23d of April (supposed generally to be his birthday) 1616, and was buried at Stratford. His plays had been only surrept.i.tiously printed, the retention of a play in ma.n.u.script being of great importance to the actors, and the famous first folio did not appear till seven years after his death.
The canon of Shakespere"s plays, like everything else connected with him, has been the subject of endless discussion. There is no reasonable doubt that in his earlier days (the first printed play among those ordinarily a.s.signed to him, _Romeo and Juliet_, dates from 1597) he had taken part in dramatic work which is now mostly anonymous or a.s.signed to other men, and there is also no doubt that there may be pa.s.sages in the accepted plays which he owed to others. But my own deliberate judgment is that no important and highly probable ascription of extant work to Shakespere can be made outside the canon as usually printed, with the doubtful exception of _The Two n.o.ble Kinsmen_; and I do not believe that in the plays usually accepted, any very important or characteristic portion is not Shakespere"s.
As for Shakespere-Bacon theories, and that kind of folly, they are scarcely worthy even of mention. Nor among the numerous other controversies and errors on the subject shall I meddle with more than one--the constantly repeated a.s.sertion that England long misunderstood or neglected Shakespere, and that foreign aid, chiefly German (though some include Voltaire!), was required to make her discover him. A very short way is possible with this absurdity. It would be difficult to name any men more representative of cultivated literary opinion and accomplishment in the six generations (taking a generation at the third of a century) which pa.s.sed between Shakespere"s death and the battle of Waterloo (since when English admiration of Shakespere will hardly be denied), than Ben Jonson, John Milton, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Their lives overlapped each other considerably, so that no period is left uncovered. They were all typical men of letters, each of his own time, and four at least of them were literary dictators. Now, Ben Jonson"s estimate of Shakespere in prose and verse is on record in more places than one, and is as authentic as the silly stories of his envy are mythical. If Milton, to his eternal disgrace, flung, for party purposes, the study of Shakespere as a reproach in his dead king"s face, he had himself long before put on record his admiration for him, and his own study is patent to every critical reader of his works. Dryden, but a year or two after the death of Shakespere"s daughter, drew up that famous and memorable eulogy which ought to be familiar to all, and which, long before any German had spoken of Shakespere, and thirty years before Voltaire had come into the world, exactly and precisely based the structure of Shakespere-worship. Pope edited Shakespere. Johnson edited him. Coleridge is acknowledged as, with his contemporaries Lamb and Hazlitt, the founder of modern appreciation. It must be a curious reckoning which, in face of such a catena as this, stretching its links over the whole period, maintains that England wanted Germans to teach her how to admire the writer whom Germans have done more to mystify and distort than even his own countrymen.
The work of Shakespere falls into three divisions very unequal in bulk.
There is first (speaking both in the order of time and in that of thought, though not in that of literary importance and interest) the small division of poems, excluding the _Sonnets_, but including _Venus and Adonis_, _The Rape of Lucrece_, and the few and uncertain but exquisite sc.r.a.ps, the _Lover"s Complaint_, _The Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim_, and so forth. All these are likely to have been the work of early youth, and they are much more like the work of other men than any other part of Shakespere"s work, differing chiefly in the superior sweetness of those wood-notes wild, which Milton justly, if not altogether adequately, attributed to the poet, and in the occasional appearance of the still more peculiar and unique touches of sympathy with and knowledge of universal nature which supply the main Shakesperian note. The _Venus_ and the _Lucrece_ form part of a large collection (see last chapter) of extremely luscious, not to say voluptuous, poetry which the imitation of Italian models introduced into England, which has its most perfect examples in the earlier of these two poems, in numerous pa.s.sages of Spenser, and in the _Hero and Leander_ of Marlowe, but which was written, as will have been seen from what has been already said, with extraordinary sweetness and abundance, by a vast number of Elizabethan writers. There are extant mere _adespota_, and mere "minor poems" (such as the pretty "Britain"s Ida," which used to be printed as Spenser"s, and which some critics have rather rashly given to Phineas Fletcher), good enough to have made reputation, if not fortune, at other times. There is no reason to attribute to Shakespere on the one hand, any deliberate intention of executing a _tour de force_ in the composition of these poems or, in his relinquishment of the style, any deliberate rejection of the kind as unworthy of his powers on the other. He appears to have been eminently one of those persons who care neither to be in nor out of the fashion, but follow it as far as suits and amuses them. Yet, beautiful as these poems are, they so manifestly do not present their author at the full of his powers, or even preluding in the kind wherein the best of those powers were to be shown, that they require comparatively little critical notice. As things delightful to read they can hardly be placed too high, especially the _Venus_; as evidences of the poet"s many-sided nature, they are interesting. But they are in somewhat other than the usual sense quite "simple, sensuous, and pa.s.sionate." The misplaced ingenuity which, neglecting the _unum necessarium_, will busy itself about all sorts of unnecessary things, has accordingly been rather hard put to it with them, and to find any pasture at all has had to browse on questions of dialect, and date, and personal allusion, even more jejune and even more unsubstantial than usual.
It is quite otherwise with the _Sonnets_. In the first place nowhere in Shakespere"s work is it more necessary to brush away the cobwebs of the commentators. This side of madness, no vainer fancies have ever entered the mind of man than those which have been inspired by the immaterial part of the matter. The very initials of the dedicatee "W. H." have had volumes written about them; the _Sonnets_ themselves have been twisted and cla.s.sified in every conceivable shape; the persons to whom they are addressed, or to whom they refer, have been identified with half the gentlemen and ladies of Elizabeth"s court, and half the men of letters of the time; and every extremity and eccentricity of non-natural interpretation has been applied to them. When they are freed from this torture and studied rationally, there is nothing mysterious about them except the mystery of their poetical beauty. Some of them are evidently addressed in the rather hyperbolical language of affection, common at the time, and derived from the study of Greek and Italian writers, to a man; others, in language not hyperbolical at all, to a woman. Disdain, rivalry, suspense, short-lived joy, long sorrow, all the symptoms and concomitants of the pa.s.sion of love--which are only commonplaces as death and life are commonplace--form their motives. For my part I am unable to find the slightest interest or the most rudimentary importance in the questions whether the Mr. W. H. of the dedication was the Earl of Pembroke, and if so, whether he was also the object of the majority of the _Sonnets_; whether the "dark lady," the "woman coloured ill," was Miss Mary Fitton; whether the rival poet was Chapman. Very likely all these things are true: very likely not one of them is true. They are impossible of settlement, and if they were settled they would not in the slightest degree affect the poetical beauty and the human interest of the _Sonnets_, which, in a strange _reductio ad absurdum_ of eighteenth century commonsense criticism, Hallam thought it impossible not to wish that Shakespere had not written, and which some critics, not perhaps of the least qualified, have regarded as the high-water mark of English, if not of all, poetry.
This latter estimate will only be dismissed as exaggerated by those who are debarred from appreciation by want of sympathy with the subject, or distracted by want of comprehension of it. A harmony of the two chief opposing theories of poetry will teach us that we must demand of the very highest poetry first--the order is not material--a certain quality of expression, and secondly, a certain quality of subject. "What that quality of subject must be has been, as it seems to me, crudely and wrongly stated, but rightly indicated, in Mr. Matthew Arnold"s formula of the "Criticism of Life." That is to say, in less debatable words, the greatest poet must show most knowledge of human nature. Now both these conditions are fulfilled in the sonnets of Shakespere with a completeness and intensity impossible to parallel elsewhere. The merits of the formal and expressive part hardly any one will now question; the sonnets may be opened almost at random with the certainty of finding everywhere the phrases, the verses, the pa.s.sages which almost mechanically recur to our minds when we are asked to ill.u.s.trate the full poetical capacity and beauty of the English tongue, such as:
"The painful warrior, famoused for fight, After a thousand victories once foiled, Is from the book of honour razed quite And all the rest forgot for which he toiled;"
or
"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past;"
or
"Was it the proud full sail of his great verse, Bound for the prize of all too precious you?"
or
"Then hate me if thou wilt,"
with the whole sonnet which it opens; or
"When in the chronicle of a wasted time I see descriptions of the fairest wights, And beauty making beautiful old rhyme In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights;"
or that most magnificent quatrain of all,
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove."
Any competent judge of the formal part of poetry must admit that its force can no farther go. Verse and phrase cannot be better moulded to the melodious suggestion of beauty. Nor, as even these sc.r.a.ps show, is the thought below the verse. Even if Hallam"s postulate of misplaced and ill-regulated pa.s.sion be granted (and I am myself very far from granting it), the extraordinary wealth of thought, of knowledge, of nature, of self-knowledge, of clear vision of others in the very midst of the circ.u.mstances which might make for unclear vision, is still unmistakable.
And if the poet"s object was to catch up the sum of love and utter it with or even without any special relation to his own actual feelings for any actual person (a hypothesis which human nature in general, and the nature of poets in particular, makes not improbable), then it can only be said that he has succeeded. From Sappho and Solomon to Sh.e.l.ley and Mr.
Swinburne, many bards have spoken excellently of love: but what they have said could be cut out of Shakespere"s sonnets better said than they have said it, and yet enough remain to furnish forth the greatest of poets.
With the third and in every sense chief division of the work, the necessities for explanation and allowance cease altogether. The thirty-seven plays of the ordinary Shakesperian canon comprise the greatest, the most varied, the most perfect work yet done by any man in literature; and what is more, the work of which they consist is on the whole the most h.o.m.ogeneous and the least unequal ever so done. The latter statement is likely to be more questioned than the former; but I have no fear of failing to make it out. In one sense, no doubt, Shakespere is unequal--as life is. He is not always at the tragic heights of Oth.e.l.lo and Hamlet, at the comic raptures of Falstaff and Sir Toby, at the romantic ecstasies of Romeo and t.i.tania. Neither is life. But he is always--and this is the extraordinary and almost inexplicable difference, not merely between him and all his contemporaries, but between him and all other writers--at the height of the particular situation. This unique quality is uniquely ill.u.s.trated in his plays. The exact order of their composition is entirely unknown, and the attempts which have been made to arrange it into periods, much more to rank play after play in regular sequence, are obvious failures, and are discredited not merely by the inadequate means--such as counting syllables and attempting to cla.s.sify the cadence of lines--resorted to in order to effect them, but by the hopeless discrepancy between the results of different investigators and of the same investigator at different times. We know indeed pretty certainly that _Romeo and Juliet_ was an early play, and _Cymbeline_ a late one, with other general facts of the same kind. We know pretty certainly that the _Henry the Sixth_ series was based on a previous series on the same subject in which Shakespere not improbably had a hand; that _King John_ and _The Taming of the Shrew_ had in the same way first draughts from the same or other hands, and so forth.
But all attempts to arrange and elucidate a chronological development of Shakespere"s mind and art have been futile. Practically the Shakesperian gifts are to be found _pa.s.sim_ in the Shakesperian canon--even in the dullest of all the plays, as a whole, _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, even in work so alien from his general practice, and so probably mixed with other men"s work, as _t.i.tus Andronicus_ and _Pericles_. There are rarely elsewhere--in _The Maid"s Tragedy_ of Fletcher, in _The d.u.c.h.ess of Malfi_ of Webster, in _The Changeling_ of Middleton--pa.s.sages or even scenes which might conceivably have been Shakespere"s. But there is, with the doubtful exception of _The Two n.o.ble Kinsmen_, no play in any other man"s work which as a whole or in very great part is Shakesperian, and there is no play usually recognised as Shakespere"s which would not seem out of place and startling in the work of any contemporary.
This intense, or rather (for intense is not the right word) this extraordinarily diffused character, is often supposed to be a mere fancy of Shakespere-worshippers. It is not so. There is something, not so much in the individual flashes of poetry, though it is there too, as in the entire scope and management of Shakespere"s plays, histories, tragedies, and comedies alike, which distinguishes them, and it is exactly the characteristic noted above, and well put by Dryden in his famous definition of Shakespere. Perhaps the first branch or phase of this distinction is that Shakespere is never, in the vulgar sense of the word, unnatural. He has not the slightest objection to horrors; the alarmed foreign critics who described his theatre as a "shambles" need not have gone farther than his greatest plays to justify themselves literally. But with barely even the exception which has so often to be made of _t.i.tus Andronicus_, his horrors are never sought beyond a certain usual and probable round of circ.u.mstance, and are almost always tempered and humanised by touches of humour or pathos, or both. The cool sarcastic villany of Aaron (a mood hit off nowhere out of Shakespere, except in Middleton"s De Flores, and not fully there) is the point on which I should chiefly put the finger to justify at least a partial Shakesperian authorship. Contrast the character with the nightmare ghastlinesses and extravagances not merely of Tourneur and Webster, but even of Marlowe in Barabas, and the difference of Shakespere"s handling will be felt at once.