the quatrain. Rhymed couplets are, of course, also abundant in most of the earlier plays, and till nearly the end of his career Shakespeare used them for special purposes, as in epigrams, aphorisms, and to mark the close of scenes. But as a whole it may be said that the couplet is alien to his genius. Even in the Sonnets the closing distich has often the least touch of his verbal magic. Among the host of lines from the plays that have become part of current speech there are very few couplets. One of the most familiar is Hamlet's cry, re-echoed by pessimists in every age (1. v. 188-9):

The time is out of joint; O cursed spite!

That ever I was born to set it right!

But of all Shakespeare's rhymed verse there is none that makes so instant and universal an appeal as the exquisite lyrics scattered through the plays. Ever since Noah's wife in the Chester Miracle pageant sat drinking with her gossips, and carolling The flude comes fleetinge in full faste', songs have been a feature in English drama. Even minor Elizabethan play`wrights had the secret of throwing off these magical trifles with apparently effortless ease. Some of Shakespeare's songs, like those of his fellows, are merely incidental and lose nothing when detached from their context, and given modern musical settings. Such are the two songs at the end of Love's Labour's Lost, of Ver, the Spring,

When daisies pied and violets blue;

and of Hiems, Winter,

When icicles hang by the wall;

the serenades in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Iv. ii) :

Who is Silvia? what is she?

and in Cymbeline (11. iii) :

Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings;

the pages' duet in As You Like It (v. iii) :

It was a lover and his lass;

and the Clown's ditty at the close of Twelfth Night: When that I was and a little tiny boy.

Others are specially appropriate to the singer or to the situation in which they are introduced. The song in Much Ado (11. iii) : Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,

prepares the way for the trick by which Beatrice is represented to be sighing in vain for Benedick; while the deserted Mariana's heart must be wrung by the poignancy of

Take, O take those lips away

in Measure for Measure (Iv. i). So too the song of 'willow', of the forsaken maid, Barbara, haunts Desdemona on the eve of her own hapless doom. Love's cruelty, seen in another light, is the theme of the song old and plain',

Come away, come away, death,

wherewith Feste in Twelfth Night (11. iv) charms the ears of the sentimental Duke, Orsino. The songs of Amiens in the Forest of Arden (As You Like It, II. v and vii),

and

Under the greenwood tree,

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,

breathe the very spirit of the woodland. Ariel's ditties in The Tempest (1. ii and v. i),

Come unto these yellow sands,

and

Full fathom five thy father lies,

and

Where the bee sucks, there suck I,

have the magical note of the enchanted island.

These songs of Ariel, with the lovely dirge in Cymbeline (IV. ii),

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,

and the light-hearted tinker's catch of Autolycus in The Winter's Tale (1v. ii),

When daffodils begin to peer,

6

are among the last heirs of' Shakespeare's invention'. It is remarkable that while his blank verse in the dramatic romances' had shed most of its lyrical quality his rhymed lyrics were never more fragrant, never so ethereal. Had Shakespeare not written a line of dialogue his songs and sonnets would make him secure of his place on Parnassus.

VIII

Shakespeare through Three Centuries

WHEN the student has begun to find his way about the plays of Shakespeare, and to form his own impressions and have his individual preferences, he will soon wish to know something of what, during the three centuries since the publication of the First Folio, men of succeeding generations have thought and said about the dramatist and his work. He will then find that, though there is no time in which he has not been held in honour, there have been strange fluctuations of opinion about various aspects of his art, and a constant shifting of the perspective from which it has been viewed.

During his lifetime his reputation probably rested as much ・on his poems as on his plays, the majority of which did not appear in print till seven years after his death. And though he is spoken of with warm appreciation he is not regarded as in any sense unique-scarcely even as primus inter pares. Thus John Webster, himself a master in the tragic art, writing in 1612 when Shakespeare's career was nearing its close, speaks of other men's worthy labours, especially the full and heightened style' of George Chapman, the ‘labor'd and understanding works' of Ben Jonson, the 'no less worthy composures' of Beaumont and Fletcher, and lastly 'the right happy and copious industry' of Shakespeare, Dekker, and Heywood. Here Shakespeare is mentioned in the same breath as a number of other contemporary playwrights, and has to share with Dekker and Heywood the honours of a single complimentary clause.

It was in the commendatory' verses prefixed to the First Folio that Ben Jonson, though his own conceptions of dramatic art were essentially different, and though he could on occasion

pungently criticize his great rival's technique, paid the first glowing tribute to the universality of Shakespeare's genius : Triumph, my Britain! thou hast one to show,

To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.

He was not of an age, but for all time.

While these lines of Jonson have been resounding in men's ears for three centuries, it is curious that some verses written soon afterwards in no less fervent strain have only recently been brought to light. They were addressed to the editors of the First Folio, Heminges and Condell, by a reader who recognized that they had gained for England a more precious prize than the conquistadores had won for Spain :

But you have pleased the living, loved the dead:

Raised from the womb of earth a richer mine
Than Cortes could with all his Casteline

Associates; they did but dig for gold,

But

you for treasure much more manifold.1

Milton, too, must, as a young man at Cambridge, have been an eager reader of the First Folio, for when the Second Folio appeared in 1632 it contained a noble eulogy from his pen, written in 1630:

What needs my Shakespear for his honour'd bones

The labour of an age in piled stones? . . .

... Thou our fancy of it self bereaving,

Dost make us marble with too much conceiving ;
And so sepulcher'd in such pomp dost lie,

That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

But it may be noted that his lovely youthful poems L'Allegro and Il Penseroso suggest that to him Shakespeare was rather the poet of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night The lines are facsimiled in full, in the original spelling, on page 79.