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of civil war are at last atoned for, and the evil which culminates in Richard falls with Richard from its bad eminence. The loveless solitude, haunted by terrible visions of his victims, on the night before his last battle, almost overmasters his resolution; but the stir and movement of the morning reanimates him, and he dies in a paroxysm of the rage of battle. Richmond conquers as the representative of the cause of God.

The Folio (1623) text of this play differs in many small points, and in some important particulars, from that of the Quartos which all follow the first Quarto, 1597. Whether the Folio gives the text as corrected by Shakspere himself, or as altered by an inferior hand from a copy previously corrected and augmented by Shakspere, is a question in dispute. (See New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1875–76.)

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9. Venus and Adonis was entered in the Stationers' Company register on April 18, 1593, and was published the same year. The poem at once became popular, and before the close of 1602 it had been reprinted no fewer than six times. "As the soule of Euphorbus," wrote Meres in his Wit's Treasury (1598), thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare; witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c." Ovid had told the story of the love of Venus for Adonis, and the death of the beautiful hunter by a wild boar's tusk the coldness of Adonis, his boyish disdain of love, was an invention of later times; and it is in this later form that Shakspere imagines the subject. The Metamorphoses of Ovid had been translated into English verse by Arthur Golding (1567), and Shakspere, if not now, was certainly at a later date acquainted with this translation. A speech of Prospero in The Tempest (Act V. Sc. i.), beginning—

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves,

is suggested by a passage of Golding's Ovid; but

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Shakspere's treatment of the subject of the Venus and Adonis has less in common with Ovid than with a short poem by a contemporary writer of sonnets and lyrical poems, Henry Constable, which appeared in a collection of verse published in 1600, under the name of England's Helicon. It is uncertain which of the two poems, Constable's or Shakspere's, was the earlier written.

When Venus and Adonis appeared Shakspere was twenty-nine years of age; the Earl of Southampton, to whom it was dedicated, was not yet twenty. In the dedication the poet speaks of these "unpolisht lines" as "the first heire of my invention." Did Shakspere mean by this that Venus and Adonis was written before any of his plays, or before any plays that were strictly original-his own "invention?” or does he, setting plays altogether apart, which were not looked upon as literature, in a high sense of the word, call it his first poem because he had written no earlier narrative or lyrical verse? We cannot be sure. It is possible, but not likely, that he may have written this poem before he left Stratford, and have brought it up with him to London. More probably it was written in London, and perhaps not long before its publication. The year 1593, in which the poem appeared, was a year of plague; the London theatres were closed: it may be that Shakspere, idle in London, or having returned for a while to Stratford, then wrote the poem. Whenever written, it was elaborated with peculiar care. The subject of the poem is sensual, but with Shakspere it becomes rather a study or analysis of passion and the objects of passion, than in itself passionate. Without being dramatic, the poem contains the materials for dramatic poetry, set forth at large. The descriptions of English landscape and country life are numerous, and give a spirit of breezy life and health to portions of the poem which could ill afford to lose anything that is fresh and healthful.

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10. Lucrece was entered in the Stationers' register May 9, 1594, and was published the same year. Like the Venus and Adonis, it is dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, having been perhaps the "graver labour" promised in the dedication of the Venus and Adonis. The two poems resemble one another in several respects, especially in the detailed descriptive style, which draws out at length the particulars of a scene, an incident, or an emotion. The poem of later date, however, exhibits far less immaturity than does the "first heire" of Shakspere's invention. Part of this may be due to the fact that the subject is deeper and more passionate instead of the enamoured Venus we have here the pure and noble Lucretia; instead of the boy Adonis, the powerful figure of the evil Tarquin. The versification is freer and bolder; in the Venus and Adonis the stanza was one of six lines, consisting of a rhymed quatrain followed by a couplet; here a fifth line is introduced between the quatrain and couplet, rhyming with lines two and four. This structure tends to encourage more variety in the arrangement of pauses, and may perhaps, in some degree, explain the fact that run-on lines are much more frequent in the Lucrece than in the Venus and Adonis. The proportion of the run-on lines in the Lucrece is 1 in 1081, in Venus and Adonis 1 in 25 40. (FURNIVALL.) The Lucrece was a poem highly admired by Shakspere's contemporaries, and was several times republished, though less often than the Venus. The story of Lucretia is told by Livy and Ovid, and was versified by Gower, and again related in Paynter's Palace of Pleasure, 1567.

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II. Romeo and Juliet.-The story of the unhappy lovers of Verona, as a supposed historical occurrence, is referred to the year 1303; but no account of it exists of an earlier date than that of Luigi da Porto, about 1530. A tale in some respects similar is set forth in the Ephesiaca of Xenophon of Ephesus, a mediæval Greek romance writer; and one essentially the same,

narrating the adventures of Mariotto and Gianozza of Siena, is found in a collection of tales by Masuccio of Salerno, 1476; but Da Porto first names Romeo and Giulietta, and makes them children of the rival Veronese houses. The story quickly acquired an European celebrity. Altering the name and some particulars, Adrian Sevin relates it (about 1542) for his French patroness; Gherardo Boldiero turns it into verse for his readers at Venice. Bandello, partly recasting the narrative, recounts it once more in his Italian collection of novels, 1554; and five years later Pierre Boisteau, probably assisted by Belleforest, translates Bandello's Italian into French, and again recasts the story (1559). In three years more it touches English soil. Arthur Brooke in 1562 produced his long metrical version, founded upon Boisteau's novel, and a prose translation of Boisteau's Histoire de Deux Amans, appeared in Paynter's Palace of Pleasure, 1567. We have here reached Shakspere's sources: Paynter he probably consulted; in nearly all essentials he follows the Romeus and Juliet of Brooke. It must be noted, however, that Brooke speaks of having seen "the same argument lately set forth on stage probably the English stage; it is therefore possible that Shakspere may have had before him an old English tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, of which no fragment remains with us. Resemblances between passages of Shakspere's tragedy and passages of Groto's Italian tragedy of Hadriana are probably due to accident.

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The precise date of Shakspere's play is uncertain. In 1597 it was published in quarto, "as it hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely by the right Honourable the L [ord] of Hunsdon his servants." Now the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Lord Hunsdon, died July 22, 1596; his son, George Lord Hunsdon, was appointed Chamberlain in April, 1597. Before July, 1596, or after April, 1597, the theatrical company would have been styled by the more honourable designation, "the Lord Chamberlain's servants;" but

during the interval they would be described as on the title-page of the quarto. The Nurse's mention of the earthquake (Act I. Sc. iii. L. 23), ""Tis since the earthquake now eleven years," has been referred to as giving the date, 1591, a memorable earthquake, felt in London, having occurred eleven years previously, in 1580; but, while professing an infallibly accurate recollection, the garrulous old woman blunders sadly about her dates, so that even if an actual English earthquake were alluded to, the point of the jest may have been in the inaccuracy of the reference. Several lines in Romeo's speech in presence of Juliet in the tomb (Act V. Sc. iii. L. 74-120) seem written with a haunting recollection of passages in Daniel's Complainte of Rosamunde (1592). The internal evidence favours the opinion that this tragedy was an early work of the poet, and that it was subsequently revised and enlarged. There is much rhyme, and much of this is in the form of alternate rhyme; the forced playing upon words, and the overstrained conceits (see, for example, Act I. Sc. iii. 81-92) point to an early date. If, however, rhymed verse be present in large quantity, the quality of the scenes chiefly written in blank verse is far higher than that of the rhyming passages. We may perhaps accept the opinion that Romeo and Juliet was begun, and in part written, as early as 1591, and that it assumed its final form about 1597. The first quarto, already mentioned (1597), is a pirated edition, "made up partly from copies of portions of the original play, partly from recollection and from notes taken during the performance." The second quarto, 1599, is described on the title-page as "newly-corrected, augmented, and amended." This perhaps exaggerates the fact; but here we obtain a true representation of the play, and comparing this with the earlier text, it appears that the play "underwent revision, received some slight augmentation, and in some few places must have been entirely rewritten."

Romeo and Juliet, apart from its intrinsic beauty,

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