of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries; is this the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt?

Here, as so often in the use of technical phrases, Shakespeare adds to their difficulty for modern readers by playing upon words, as in the fine of his fines', where 'fine ', in the singular, means end', and 'fines' is the term in conveyancing.

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For an explanation of the obsolete or peculiar words, which have been broadly classified and illustrated above, and of the still more numerous miscellaneous difficulties of phraseology that confront him, the student will naturally turn to an annotated edition or a glossary to Shakespeare's works. When, for instance, in Hamlet he comes across such a line as unhouseled, disappointed, unanel'd' (1. v. 77), or a phrase like 'miching mallecho ', or a word like eisel', he realizes at once that they need interpretation. But there is another type of words more likely to mislead the reader just because they do not at first sight present any difficulty. Many nouns, adjectives, and verbs while the same in form as in Shakespeare's days have considerably changed their meaning. Unless this is borne in mind the sense of a passage will often be misunderstood. A common instance of this is the word 'presently', which now means shortly, after a while '. In Elizabethan English it has the sense instantly, at once'. The Tempest (Iv. i. 41–3) provides an admirable example. Prospero tells Ariel that he is going to show Ferdinand and Miranda' some vanity of his art':

Pro.

It is my promise

Pro. Ay, with a twink (i. e. in the twinkling of an eye).

Among the adjectives which generally or sometimes have a different meaning from that current to-day are 'close' (secret),

fond' (foolish), 'nice' (dainty or subtle), 'sad' (serious), while 'old' and 'dear' had various intensive uses. Verbs which are similarly noticeable are abuse' (deceive), 'allow' (approve), censure' (form a judgement of), ' learn' (teach), ' owe' (own), possess (inform), 'prove' (test), ' tell' (count), though they have sometimes their modern meanings. Such nouns as ' fact' (crime), ‘favour' (appearance), 'injury' (insult), 'purpose (meaning), 'success' (result, good or bad) are apt to trip up the unwary. And it is curious that the names of two vices should have undergone a subtle change. By 'envy' the Elizabethans meant malice, and by ‘jealousy' what we now call suspicion. Othello is ruined not through jealousy of Cassio, but through suspicion of his wife. Thus through a change of verbal meaning we are here actually in danger of misconceiving the motive of one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies.

There are many other features in which the language of the plays differs from modern English, but to deal with them would involve a discussion of Shakespearian grammar, which is in itself a wide subject. It is enough here to mention the free use of one part of speech for another; the retention of participial and other forms that were becoming antiquated and are now obsolete; the employment of double comparatives and superlatives, and of the double negative as a strong affirmative; the frequent use of a singular verb before a plural noun. English syntax was far more fluid and elastic than it has become through the stereotyping influence of three centuries of printed books. And beyond changes in vocabulary and grammar there remains the problem of the sinewy and gnarled style of Shakespeare's later plays, where the difficulty lies in the packing of the.. thought into the closest space :

2535.47

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly.

E

What could be simpler than these words in which Macbeth begins to ponder on the murder of Duncan, and what a weight of meaning do they bear? There is no master-key to unlock the secrets of such language, bare and massive as granite-rock. To grasp them fully needs a gift of divination given to few, but patient and loyal study will go far. And whoever has felt the fascination of such study will realize that Shakespeare's language offers almost as boundless a field of interest as his characters or his dramatic technique.

VII

Shakespeare's Poems, Sonnets, and Songs

In the preceding chapter we have considered some features. of Shakespeare's language which, on their own account, are highly interesting to students of philology and of the history of the English tongue. But the ordinary reader would not give them much attention had not Shakespeare woven them into supremely beautiful patterns of verse and prose. Just as he turned to unique use the books which lay open to all, and the ordinary stage conditions of his time, so it was with the forms of speech which were the common inheritance of himself and his fellows. It was because Elizabethan English became in his hands. so glorious an instrument that Wordsworth invoked it as a symbol and bulwark of national liberty :

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake.

With regard to Shakespeare's verse we have, in the first place, to remember that he was not only a playwright, but, in the formal sense, a poet. His fame during his lifetime was based far more than is usually realized on his two verse-narratives, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, published in 1593 and 1594, and dedicated to a noble patron, Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. They were received with flattering enthusiasm. Six editions of Venus and Adonis were called for between 1593 and 1602, and five of Lucrece between 1594 and 1616. The critics of the day paid them glowing tributes. Thus Richard Barnfield wrote in 1598:

And Shakespeare thou, whose hony-flowing Vaine,
(Pleasing the World) thy Praises doth obtaine;

Whose Venus, and whose Lucrece (sweete and chaste),
Thy Name in fames immortal Booke have plac't.

The only partly dissentient voice was that of a Cambridge

dramatist, the author of The Return from Parnassus (1603), who, while praising his heart-throbbing line', urged Shakespeare to try a graver subject instead of 'love's foolish lazy languishment'. But it was just this that gave the poems their wide appeal. Their handling, at once realistic and sentimental, of sexual passion in a classical setting had something of the same attraction as the erotic analysis in certain types of French and Russian novel and their English counterparts has to-day. By the modern reader, whose palate has been educated to a more subtle psychology, and a more unflinching realism, Shakespeare's honied' vein in these poems will be found cloying. The generation that has welcomed Mr. Masefield's The Everlasting Mercy and The Widow in the Bye-Street will not be inclined to linger over Venus and Adonis and Lucrece.

Yet the two poems, apart from their incidental felicities of phrase and description, have enduring interest for all students of Shakespeare's relation to antiquity, and of his management of rhymed verse. Venus and Adonis is written in six-lined stanzas, rhyming ababcc, and for nearly two thousand lines it runs with a swinging gait, partly due to the skilful intermixture of double rhymes. In Lucrece Shakespeare used the rhymeroyal' or seven-lined stanza rhyming ababbcc, which was a favourite of Chaucer, and is employed by Spenser in some of his minor poems. On the whole Shakespeare manages it with less success than the six-line stanza. It has a greater tendency to drag, and the passages of reflection and description, though more highly wrought than in Venus and Adonis, make too much the impression of purple patches'.

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If time has robbed Shakespeare's narrative poems of much of their attraction, it has made amends by adding to the fascination of his Sonnets. First mentioned by Meres as in private circulation among the dramatist's friends in 1598, they were