The Date of Love’S Labour’S Lost 9780231892940

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THE DATE OF LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST

T H E D A T E OF LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST BY RUPERT

TAYLOR

CAVALIERE DELL' ORDINE DELLA CORONA D'lTALIA

COLUMBIA

NEW

YORK

UNIVERSITY 1932

PRESS

Copyright 1932 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY P R E S S

Published February, 1932

P R I N T E D IN T H E U N I T E D STATES OF AMERICA GEORGE ΒΛΝΤΑ P U B L I S H I N G COMPANY, U E N A S H A , WISCONSIN

TO MY FATHER

PREFACE This monograph presents the data for assigning the original composition of Love's Labour's Lost to some time about the middle of 1596. These data include the relation of the play to the Russian Episode of the Gray's Inn Revels of 1594-95, the use of the Venus and Adonis stanza, the connection with events in France and England from 1589 to 1596, and the echoes of the quarrel between Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey from 1592 to 1596. So late a date is revolutionary, for the play has usually been considered very early. This late date evolved, however, not from any theory or preconceived idea as to the date, but rather in the face of a strong conviction that theories of date and literary relationships based on interpretation of topical allusions in the play were lamentably wrong. The investigation began, then, in a profound scepticism as to the presence of genuine topical allusions and a determination to test the soundness of some findings previously announced. The result is here presented. It makes, of course, in the lack of direct evidence, a case of probability and as such it must be judged on its merits. It provides a more complete, detailed, and consistent interpretation than has yet been offered. The case rests, in part, on the frequently misused and much suspected method of parallel passages. Some readers, for that reason, may feel inclined to dismiss the whole at once, but the honest student will use the material herein only as a guide, read for himself the Nashe-Harvey pamphlets, and then weigh the case carefully and impartially. The investigation extended from September, 1926, to June, 1927, and the results were committed to writing in the sum-

viii

PREFACE

mer of 1927. These dates need statement since they show that the conclusions result from original work and antedate the publication late in 1930 of William Shakespeare by Sir Ε. K. Chambers, who noted the relation between the play and the Gray's Inn Revels. The material concerning the Venus and Adonis stanza was introduced early in 1928, and a few data concerning the Shakespeare family were incorporated later. The original manuscript contained much other material which came to light in the first investigation but which was removed from the present monograph in a 1930 revision. The present manuscript was out of my hands when I first saw the William Shakespeare of Chambers, and has continued out of my hands until this week. At this last moment I have removed two paragraphs based on an incorrect date taken from a source I did not suspect of inaccuracy, and given correctly by Chambers. I take this opportunity to thank the officials of the Columbia University Library and the Librarian of the Alabama Polytechnic Institute for kindness and courtesy during the stages of the work. I wish also to express my gratitude to Dr. Henry Wells and Professor A. H. Thorndike of Columbia University for reading the manuscript. R. T. N E W YORK CITY

August 15, 1931

CONTENTS I . T H E M A S Q U E OF MUSCOVITES IN L O V E ' S L A B O U R ' S LOST AND THE GRAY'S I N N R E V E L S OF 1 5 9 4 . . .

1

I I . T H E R H Y M E I N L O V E ' S L A B O U R ' S L O S T AND I T S SIGNIFICANCE I I I . L O V E ' S L A B O U R ' S LOST AND CONTEMPORARY

10 RE-

LATIONS B E T W E E N E N G L A N D AND FRANCE

21

I V . L O V E ' S L A B O U R ' S L O S T AND THE N A S H E - H A R V E Y QUARREL V . T H E SIGNIFICANCE OF THE E C H O E S V I . T H E SIGNIFICANCE OF THE D A T E

34 52 72

APPENDICES A . ECHOES OF THE NASHE-HARVEY QUARREL, IN LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST

91

B . T H E ORIGINAL OF HOLOFERNES IN LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST

113

C . LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST, AND AN ANECDOTE OF QUEEN ELIZABETH CONCERNING PURVEYORS INDEX

127 131

CHAPTER

I

T H E MASQUE OF MUSCOVITES IN LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST AND T H E GRAY'S INN REVELS OF 1594 The Masque of Muscovites in the last act of Love's Labour's Lost has frequently been considered strong evidence for dating the play very early. Some scholars, seeing in it an echo of the visit of a Russian ambassador in 1582 to arrange a marriage for the Czar with a kinswoman of Queen Elizabeth, and thinking that such an echo should not be too remote, have dated the play, therefore, as early as 1589. Others, having their own theories of a later date to establish, have said that the visit was made so ridiculous that the memory of it lasted long as a good joke and that in itself it affords no prime reason for giving the play a date so early. In this contention, they are partly right. There are, however, other reasons for the London public's consciousness of Russia and things Russian. In 1591 appeared Fletcher's 1 Of the Russe Commonwealth. There was also at the same time a trading company in London known as the Company of Muscovy Merchants, which on November 16,2 1591, addressed a petition to Burghley and which was mentioned in an order of the Privy Council,3 May 19,1594, to Richard Cox and others trading in Russia without the license of the Russia Merchants. Russia and Russians were not, then, known to Lon1

Noted by Charlton, Η. B., "The Date of Love's Labour's Lost," Modern Language Review, xm, 257 f. and 387 f., 1918. 4 State Papers Domestic Series, 1591-94, p. 122. 8 Acts of the Privy Council, vol. xxv, p. 518.

2

T H E MASQUE OF MUSCOVITES

don playgoers of the 1590's in recollections and tales of the 1582 embassy alone. A yet more notable piece of evidence to explain the London populace's familiarity with things termed Russian seems to have escaped notice. It is especially important in the study of Love's Labour's Lost as it reveals an event sufficiently striking to justify an echo of it in a play so topical as this one. It does more, however, since it offers an explanation for an incongruous element in the masque itself, and a source of a line in the following dialogue. This evidence exists in The Gray's Inn Revels for 1594, which has been so often quoted in regard to the performance of The Comedy of Errors. Students seemed to have stopped with that part which refers to this performance, perhaps only taking the quotation second-hand from the scholar who first made it, and not going to the original themselves. Even the most recent editor of The Revels, 4 in all likelihood not having Love's Labour's Lost in mind, did not note it. Readers of Love's Labour's Lost cannot escape wondering, if only slightly, at the presence of Blackamoors in a company of Muscovites. If they have given it any thought, they have dismissed it, as does Austin K. Gray 5 in his explanation of the play, as a device borrowed from the mummers. But The Revels does offer some explanation of the mixture, as evidenced by the following quotations. The festivities extended beyond Christmas, as has not been generally stated in accounts of them. An episode beginning on Twelfth Night contains the matter of the Muscovites. It begins on Page 20 of Greg's edition. The next grand Night was upon Twelfth-day at Night; at which time the wonted honourable and worshipful Company of Lords, 4

Greg, W. W., Gesta Grayorum, Malone Society, 1914. Gray, Austin K., "The Secret of Love's Labour's Lost," Puhl. Modern Language Assoc., pp. 581—611. 5

THE MASQUE OF MUSCOVITES

3

Ladies, and Knights were, as at other times, assembled; and every one of them placed conveniently, according to their condition. And when the Prince was ascended his Chair of State, and the Trumpets sounded, there was presently a Shew which concerned His Highness's State and Government: The Invention was taken out of the Prince's Arms, as they are blazon'd in the beginning of his Reign, by the King at Arms. First, There came six Knights of the Helmet, with three that they led as prisoners, and were attired like Monsters and Miscreants. The Knights gave the Prince to understand, that as they were returning from their adventures out of Russia, wherein they aided the Emperor of Russia against the Tartars, they surprised these three persons, which were conspiring against his Highness and Dignity: and that being apprehended by them, they would not urge them to disclose what they were: By which they resting very doubtful, there entred in the two Goddesses, Arety and Amity; and they said, that they would disclose to the Prince who these suspected Persons were; and thereupon shewed, that they were Envy, Malecontent, and Folly: Which three had much misliked His Highness's Proceedings,and had attempted many things against his State; and but for them to, Vertue and United Friendship, all their Inventions had been disappointed. Then willed they the Knights to depart, and to carry away the Offenders; and that they themselves should come in more pleasing sort, and better befitting the present. So the Knights departed, and Vertue and Amity promised, that they two would support His Excellency against all his Foes whatsoever, and then departed with most excellent Musick. After their Departure, entred the six Knights in a very stately Mask and danced a new devised Measure; and after that, they took to them Ladies and Gentlewomen, and danced with them their Galliards, and so departed with Musick. Which being done, the Trumpets were commanded to sound, and then the King at Arms came in before the Prince, and told His Honour, that there was arrived an Ambassador from the mighty Emperor of Russia and Muscovy, that had some Matters of Weight to make known to His Highness. So the Prince willed that he should be admitted to his Presence; who came in Attire of Russia, accompanied with two of his own Country, in like Habit. When they were come in presence of the Prince, the Ambassador made his Obeysance, and took out Letters of Credence, and humbly delivered them to the Prince who gave them to the King at Arms, to be read publickly, as followeth.

4

T H E MASQUE OF MUSCOVITES

To the most High and Mighty Henry, Prince of Purpoole. Theodore Evanwhich, the great and mighty Emperor of all Russia, Valderomia, Muscovia and Novogordia; King of Rasan, and of Astrakan; Lord of Plescoe and Sinelescoe; Prince of Tnaria, Sogoria, Perma, Vachekey, and Bolgaria; Lord and Great Duke of Valhadha, Norgordia in the Country of Cherenega; and also of Rescod, Polotzkow, Ogdor, and Belesor; sole Prince of Lothekey, Rostow, Geroslave, the white Lake Liselrund, Owdoria, Condencia, and Fludoria; great Ruler and Commander of Siberia, and of all the North-side; and Lord Governor of many Countries and Provinces; To the most mighty and glorious renowned Henry, Prince of Purpoole, Arch-Duke of Stapulia and Bernardia, Duke of High and Nether Holborn, Marquis of St. Giles and Tottenham, Count Palatine of Bloomsbury and Clerkenwell, great Lord of the Cantons of Islington, Kentishtown, Paddinton, and Knight's-Bridge, Knight of the Most Heroical Order of the Helmet, and Sovereign of the same; All Health, and glorious Renown. We have thought good, Most Invincible Prince, upon some Accidents of Importance happened to our State, wherein the Worthiness of some of your Subjects remaining here have increased your Fame, to dispatch to your Highness Our Most Faithful Councellor, Faman Bega, to intreat with you, in Our Name, of certain important A jfairs: Which, though we must confess, do concern Us in Policy, to have an effectual Regard unto: yet withal, they are such as may minister Occasion to your Highness to add Beams of Honour to your Praise and Glory, which hath already, in a manner, equalled the Light of Heaven in brightness, which is seen throughout the whole World. We refer you herein for the Particulars, to such Instructions as We have under Our own Hand, delivered to this our present Ambassador: Wherein as also in any other Points, whereof he shall treat with your Highness, in Our Name and Affairs, We pray your Sacred Majesty to give Credit to him, as if Our self were present, and treated with you in Person. And so We wish your Excellency all Happiness answerable to your Peerless Vertue. Dated at Our Imperial City of Mosco. When the King at Arms had read this Letter, the Ambassador Made this Speech to the Prince. Most Excellent Prince, 'Fame seemed to the Emperor, my Sovereign, to do your Highness 'Right by filling the world with the Renown of your Princely Ver'tues, and Valour of your brave Court; till of late, the gallant Be-

T H E MASQUE OF MUSCOVITES

5

'havior, and heroical Prowess of divers your Knights of the Helmet, 'whom the good Fortune of Russia, addressed to our cold Climate, 'discovered that Fame to be either envious suppressing a great part 'of your Valour, or unable to set forth so admirable Vertues to their 'full Merits: For by these five Knights (whose greatest vaunts were, 'that they were your Excellency's Servants) an exceeding number of 'Bigarian Tartars, whose vagabond In-roads and inhumane Fierce'ness infested his Borders, captivated his People, bumt his Cities, 'and spoiled whole Provinces, was by a most wonderful victory re'pulsed, and beaten back. And withal, by their brave conduct, they 'surprized another army of Ne-gro Tartars; whose wretched Devices 'ceased not to work the Confusion and Combustion of our whole 'Country, and diverted their barbarous Cruelty where it might do 'us most damage. These same worthy Knights, before they could re'ceive that Honour wherewith my Sovereign intended to adorn their 'Vertues, did withdraw themselves, and are retired, as His Majesty 'is informed, to your Court. Whereupon, he sent me, partly to con'gratulate your Happiness, who deserve to command over such a 'large number of gallant Gentlemen; but especially, to conjure your 'Excellency (according to the ancient League and Amity continued 'betwixt you) that you would send him these six Knights, accom'panied with an hundred other of the same Order; for he doubteth 'not, but by their Forces, who are, in largeness of Dominion, and 'number of People, and all other Warlike Furniture and Provision, 'inferior to no Earthly Potentate, that these Runagate Tartars shall 'be again confined to their Deserts, with their memorable Slaughter, 'and your common Glory and Profit: Common, indeed, both to your 'Highness, and him; inasmuch as His Imperial Majesty, contented 'only with Security and Assurance of his People and Borders, will 'permit all those large Territories, and battable Grounds, which now 'serve those Vermine for Pasturage, be sorted into several Govern'ments, and strengthened with Forts and Castles by your Direction, 'to be holden of your Excellency, as Commendations by the Knights 'of special Vertue and Merit of your Order. So shall you, with honOurable Commodity, have a perpetual Exercise of your Vertues, be'come a Bulwark of Christendom, and by raising continual Trophies 'of strengthened Tartars, keep the Glory of your Vertue in ever'lasting Flourish. My Sovereign, not doubting but that your Resolu'tion will be conformable to your magnanimous Vertue, and his hon'ourable Demand, charged me only to sollicite Expedition, such as 'the Necessity of his People and Country doth require. In the mean

6

T H E MASQUE OF

MUSCOVITES

'time, he hath sent your Excellency, for a Present, a Ship laden with 'divers of the best and fairest Fruits, and other richest Commodities 'of our Country: Not so much, by Gifts to draw your speedy Help, 'to which, he knoweth, the Truth and Justice of the Case will be a 'Spur sufficient; or for Complement of an ordinary and seldom omit'ted Companion of great Embassies; but rather for a Seal and Testi'mony of the exceeding Honour that he beareth to your matchless 'Vertue, and the great love he beareth to your incomparable person. 'The Present is at your next Haven, ready to be offered to your 'Sacred Hands, at your convenient leisure; together with some small 'Gifts sent to those valiant Knights, whose highly deserving Vertues 'my Sovereign meaneth, at their long expected Return to his Court 'to crown with a Garland more worthy his Greatness, and their 'Merits. The answer of the Prince to the Former Speech. Russia Lord, The Emperor, your Master, is happy in having so honourable a Gentleman, as yourself, to do him service. He shall well perceive, that there is nothing in the World more acceptable to Us, than the Friendship of a Prince so mighty and illustrious. We account amongst our greatest Happinesses, this honourable Embassage. His Presents are so large and bountiful, as We have right good Occasion to hold him the most free and magnificent Prince in the World. We joy to hear of his hardy Adventures, that by Our Knights in those parts have been achieved. They may be glad that our worthy Brother invited them to so high an Enterprise, wherein they may do themselves Honour, and his Greatness Service. Rest and refresh your Lordship this present for now We bid you welcome: Assure your self your request is already granted, and that in far greater Measure than you expected or desired. When the Prince had thus spoken, the Ambassador was placed in a chair near the Prince, and then was served up a Running Banquet, for the Prince, and the Lords present, and the rest with variety of Musick. T h e n follow t h e a r r i v a l a n d t h e r e a d i n g of L e t t e r s c-f I n telligence f r o m t h e officers of t h e c o u r t in c h a r g e of various provinces, a n d t h e n l e t t e r s f r o m S t a p u l i a a n d B e r n a r d i a a n n o u n c i n g p l o t s of rebellion. T h e P r i n c e m a d e a speech in which he a n n o u n c e d t h a t he with his chosen K n i g h t s a n d

T H E MASQUE OF MUSCOVITES

7

royal army would go to the help of Russia against the Negarian Tartars and the Barbarian Tartars. After this the Prince and his knights danced with the ladies, and the ceremony ended. On the next Moming His Highness took his Joumey towards Russia, with the Ambassador, and there he remained until Candlemas;6 at which time, after his glorious Conquests abroad, His Excellency returned home again; in which the Purpose of the Gentlemen was much disappointed by the readers and ancients of the House, by reason of the Term: So that very good inventions, which were to be performed in publick as his Entertainment into the House again, and two grand Nights which were intended at his Triumphal Return, wherewith his Reign had been conceitedly determined, were by the aforesaid Readers and Governors made frustrate, for the Want of Room in the Hall, the Scaffolds being taken away, and forbidden to be built up again (as would have been necessary for the good discharge of such a Matter) thought convenient; but it showed rather what was performed, than intended. Briefly, it was as followeth. At dinner, January 28, 1595 (1594, old style), the King at Arms announced the return of the Prince, who was expected to come by Greenwich and to land there to pay his respects to the Queen. It was determined to send a letter to Sir Thomas Heneage, the Vice Chamberlain (also the step-father to Southampton), asking him to arrange for the visit to the Queen. This letter is important, for one phrase of it furnished a line to Love's Labour's Lost. Henry Prince of Purpook, to the Right Honourable Sir Thomas Heneage. Most honourable Knight, I have now accomplished a most tedious and hazardous Joumey, though very honourable, into Russia; and returning within the view of the Court of your renowned Queen, my gracious Sovereign, to whom I acknowledge Homage and Service, I thought good, in passing by, to Kiss her sacred Hands, as a Tender of the Zeal and Duty I owe unto Her Majesty; but in making the Oßer, I found my Desire was greater than ' This was a fiction supposed to represent the ensuing weeks of study.

8

T H E MASQUE OF MUSCOVITES

the Ability of my Body; which by length of my Journey, and my Sickness at Sea, is so weakned, as it were very dangerous for me to adventure it. Therefore, most honourable Friend, let me intreat you to make my humble Excuse to Her Majesty for this present; and to certifie Her Highness, that I do hope by the Assistance of the Divine Providence to recover my former Strength about Shrovetide; at which time I intend to repair to her Majesty's Court if it may stand with mfl oergrsu Purr ο te seca haey Service, and relate the Success of my Journey. And so praying your Honour to return to me Her Majesty's Answer, I wish you all Honour and Happiness. Dated from Ship-board, at our Ark of Vanity, the 1st. of February, 1594. On the first of February the Prince and his train were m e t a t Blackwall, where he left his ship and embarked with his followers in fifteen barges. After delivering this letter at the Palace stairs, the p a r t y moved up the river and disembarked a t the Tower. There they took horses and made a magnificent p a r a d e through Tower-street Fen-Church-street, GraceChurch-street, Corn-Hill, and Cheapside to Paul's Churchyard, where a schoolboy made them a Latin oration. Thence they went through Lud-gate and Fleet-street on to Gray's I n n , amid a large concourse of people. Shrovetide following, t h e y went to the Court and presented a Masque now known to have been written by Davison and Campion. This Russian business, it will be seen, occupied the m o n t h of J a n u a r y and a p a r t of February, 1595 (1594, old style). I t was p a r t of an entertainment t h a t always a t t r a c t e d attention and a t the close provided a pageant spectacular enough to h a v e remained long in the minds of Londoners. I t was, therefore, the most likely source for an echo in Love's Labour's Lost, especially as the mention of Negro T a r t a r s affords an explanation of the presence of Blackamoors among the Muscovites. Furthermore, the phrase in the Prince's letter to the Queen, "which by length of my Journey, and my Sickness a t Sea, is so weakened," occurring as p a r t of such a striking

T H E MASQUE OF MUSCOVITES

9

event, found easily an echo in Rosaline's jest of Biron (Act V, Scene ii, 1. 393 of Cambridge Student Edition), "Sea-sick, I think, coming from Muscovy." The significance of this resemblance of the play to the Revels is that this portion of the play, including the Masque and the following dialogue, must have been written subsequent to February, 1595. Just how much later is still a question.

CHAPTER

II

T H E R H Y M E I N LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE Love's Labour's Lost contains 1028 rhyming pentameter lines and 579 lines of blank verse, 1 one line of blank verse to 1.8 rhyme. This large amount of rhyme is one of the main reasons for assigning the play to a very early date. If rhymes other than pentameter were counted the proportion would be much larger. Except in Midsummer Night's Dream (usually considered a special case), no other play has more than thirtythree and one-third per cent of rhyme to blank verse. Even this high percentage is reached only in The Comedy of Errors. So large a preponderance of rhyme as in Love's Labour's Lost should have aroused suspicion that the play really belongs in a class to itself and that it might contain some special features worthy of further investigation. But scholarship seems to have been content to apply the rhyme test rigidly and rest on the indication that the play is the earliest of Shakespeare's independent compositions. This rhyme, furthermore, is not evenly distributed throughout the play; the great bulk of it occurs in three large sections. Neither is the rhyme confined to couplets, a point that has been noticed but regarded only as additional evidence of an early date. In fact, the rhyme in this play is notable in that so much of it occurs in triplets, quatrains, and the six-line quatrain-couplet stanza familiar in Venus and Adonis. In a few cases an unrhymed line gives variety to a passage almost 1

Neilson, W. Α., and A. H. Thorndike, The Facts about Shakespeare. 1920, p. 71.

T H E S I G N I F I C A N C E OF T H E R H Y M E

11

entirely rhymed. An alexandrine may take the place of a pentameter line. And doggerel is frequent. These three large sections of the play that contain most of the rhyme are Scene 1 of Act 1, Scene iii of Act IV, and Scene ii of Act V. The following table shows the sequence of style in each. ACT I, SCENE i

Lines 1-21 22-23 24-25 26-27 28-30 31-32 33-46 47-60 61-66

67-69 70-73 74-79 80-87 88-93 94-97 98 -99 100-103 104 105-107 108-111

blank verse couplet blank verse couplet blank verse couplet blank verse couplets, sometimes divided between two speakers, a line to each. This rhymed passage begins before the ending of a speech V. A. stanza composed of a quatrain followed by a couplet. The isolation of this passage between a preceding couplet passage and a set of following triplets leaves no doubt as to the intention of writing this particular stanza form. Here, too, the stanza makes a logical unit, but as the poet runs his metrical forms into each other, this logical unity cannot always be regarded as the final test triplets couplets V.A. stanza quatrains V.A. stanza ending one line of discussion in the dialogue, and perhaps ending a sonnet a sequence of four lines all with the same rhyme a couplet in which each line is broken between two speakers quatrain odd line not rhyming with its neighbors, perhaps introduced to break the metrical monotony triplets couplets

12 112-115

116-118 119-134

135-142 143-149 150-161 162 163-174 175-177 178-181

306-311

T H E SIGNIFICANCE OF T H E

RHYME

apparently intended to form a quatrain, but if so,"more" at the end of line 112 and "than" at the beginning of line 113 should be run together to make "more'n" and provide a rhyme for "swome" in line 114 triplet a passage that contains three prose speeches which are excerpts from the king's edict, and two short lines which rhyme with each other and a pentameter line following them quatrains containing an imperfect rhyme of "father"with "hither" couplets two V.A. stanzas in sequence an odd line which closes the speech and rhymes with the following line, which, however, is the opening line of a quatrain quatrains triplets couplets, at the close of which the scene is broken by the entrance of Costard, and the action takes a new turn. With the exception noted below, the language is prose to the end of the scene at line 316 quatrain ACT I V , SCENE iii

Lines 1-25 26-41 42-43 44-45 46-47 48 49-50 51-54 55-58 59 60-73

prose the king's poem of sixteen lines, composed of three quatrains followed by two couplets blank verse couplet a short line followed by a long line, both unrhymed. Omitted by an error in numbering the lines in the Students Cambridge Edition. No line is omitted from the dialogue couplet doggerel couplets though the first line can be scanned as a regular pentameter couplets odd line broken into two speeches Longaville's sonnet of three quatrains and one couplet

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE RHYME 74-75 76-78 79-82 83-84 85-92 93-94 95-100 101-120 121-190 191-213

214-219

220-221 222-288 289-378

379-382 383-386

13

couplet triplet couplets short unrhymed lines couplets doggerel couplet couplets Dumain's Ode, ten seven-syllabled couplets couplets doggerel. The entrance of Costard and Jaquenetta before line 191 affords a change in action, and there is a corresponding change in style. The passage continues to their exit apparently a V.A. stanza, for it is a single speech. A doubter might contend that it is only a quatrain preceding a couplet passage, for the next two lines also make a couplet couplet, but line 221 is alexandrine quatrains blank verse containing Biron's long speech and argument that provides a way out of the dilemma in which the young men find themselves in regard to their oaths. This is the passage usually accepted as rewritten couplets quatrain closing the scene ACT V , SCENE ii

Lines 1-29 30-31 32-42 43-54

55-57 58-60 61-120 121 122-135 136-138

blank verse couplet blank verse, but line 39 is short couplets, but line 46 has an extra syllable in the second foot, line 47 is hypermetrical unless the word "Katherine" is deleted as it could be without destroying the sense, and line 49 has only three feet triplet with "short" rhyming with "heart" and "part" triplet with "so" used twice as a rhyme word couplets odd line couplets blank verse

14

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE RHYME

139-156 157-202 203-214 215 216-240 242-247 248-255 256-261 262-265 266-285 286-309 310-312 313-338 339-354 355-356 357-364 365-384 385-386 387-388 389-392 393 394—413 414-425 426-428 429-444 445

couplets blank verse with a few incomplete lines. The Masque of Muscovites begins with line 157 couplets odd line couplets V.A. stanza broken into five speeches couplets, the first pair of which repeat in reverse order the rhymes of the couplet closing the V.A. stanza preceding it V.A. stanza. The structure of this group of lines forbids its being taken as anything except a stanza, for the last line of the quatrain runs over into the first line of the couplet couplets quatrains couplets bringing to an end the Russian Masque and the conversation of the Princess and her Ladies after it blank verse opening the scene of the return of the King and his gentlemen in their own persons couplets quatrains couplet quatrains couplets 2 blank verse couplet blank verse odd line rhyming the next line which, however, is the first line of a quatrain. See Act I, Scene i, line 162 quatrains couplets triplet couplets an odd line that does not rhyme with either of its neighbors, but is run on and sweeps the sense onward from the

2 This passage from line 339 on is difficult to divide exactly. The quatrains in 339-54 are followed by a single couplet; therefore, the final quatrain could well be taken with this couplet to form a V. A. stanza. The closing of the speech with the couplet would provide a logical unit. But elsewhere Shakespeare writes ten-line stanzas of two quatrains and a couplet. The same is true of lines 357 following. Here may be a sequence of two ten-line stanzas.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE RHYME

IS

preceding line, which is a part of a couplet, into the following line, which is also is a part of a couplet 446-473 couplets 474—477 quatrain, which, perhaps might be taken with the following couplet as a V.A. stanza 478—483 couplets closing the dialogue of the courtiers before the Show of the Nine Worthies is introduced odd line introducing a fresh turn in the action and leading 484 up to the introduction of the Nine Worthies 484-515 irregular rhyming doggerel lines and prose 516-521 couplets 522-720 prose and doggerel containing the Show of the Nine Worthies. Lines 591-597 are a rude V.A. stanza 721-730 blank verse 731-735 prose 736-820 blank verse 821-822 couplet 823-826 quatrain 827-832 blank verse, supposed to be one of the repeated speeches 833-835 triplet 836 odd line 837-846 couplets 847-879 blank verse 881-880 couplet 882 odd line 883-888 couplets closing the real action 889-941 prose and Armado's song of The Owl and the Cuckoo T h e first and the third of these sections have a strong family resemblance in the m a n a g e m e n t of the verse. Both contain couplets, triplets, Venus and Adonis stanzas, and odd lines t h a t do not r h y m e with their neighbors. Both have cases of a line not rhyming with those preceding it b u t rhyming with the following line which is the first of a quatrain and so cannot be grouped metrically with it to form a separate couplet. For instance, line 162 of Act I, Scene i, and line 393 of Act V, Scene ii. These two sections are, therefore, to be considered the work of the same hand and the same time. T h e second section lacks the rhyming triplets and the odd lines, b u t the

16

T H E S I G N I F I C A N C E OF T H E R H Y M E

Venus and Adonis stanza and the long sequence of quatrains indicate the workmanship of the same hand as that of the other two parts. This use of the Venus and Adonis stanza in Shakespeare's plays, and especially in Love's Labour's Lost, is more significant than has been supposed. The mere presence of rhyme, doggerel, and stanza forms has been accepted as proof of very early authorship. But when the plays are examined for metrical peculiarities, this Venus and Adonis stanza, somewhat surprisingly is found to occur in Love's Labour's Lost, Midsummer Night's Dream, King John, Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, Taming of the Shrew, and Much Ado about Nothing. In The Comedy of Errors there is one case of a quatrain followed by a couplet and forming a single speech (Act IV, Scene i, the opening lines), and it might be suspected as a stanza. However, the passage proceeds with a couplet sequence; the intention to write a stanza may, therefore, be doubted, especially as there are no other cases of the kind in the play. The Venus and Adonis stanza does not occur in Henry VI, Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Two Gentlemen of Verona, or The Merchant of Venice, of the plays mentioned by Meres and therefore in existence by the time Love's Labour's Lost was printed. If any conclusion is to be drawn from this fact, it is that the frequent presence of the Venus and Adonis stanza, instead of proving very early authorship, is telling evidence that the play containing it does not belong to the earliest group. Even the presence of quatrains does not prove a play to belong to the very earliest group. There is no quatrain in Henry VI, Titus Andronicus, or Richard I I I . Quatrains occur in The Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Merchant of Venice, not to mention those that came after 1598. If these data mean anything at all, they certainly indicate that Shakespeare in the beginning used only couplets besides

T H E S I G N I F I C A N C E OF T H E R H Y M E

17

blank verse, that he next experimented with quatrains and then advanced to the use of stanzaic forms, which he abandoned in large measure before writing The Merchant of Venice. T h e presence of the Venus and Adonis stanza in plays was no new thing when Shakespeare employed it. Marlowe used it at the close of Scene ii of Act II in Edward the Second, the only instance in his plays. Greene avoided it in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, but used it a t least five times in James the Fourth. There is at least one example in Kyd's Spanish tragedy. Whetstone had used it as early as 1579 in Promus and Cassandra along with other and diverse stanzaic forms. At what time, then, did Shakespeare begin to use this Venus and Adonis stanza in his plays? The exact date is hard to fix, because the plays in which it occurs are hard to date. Richard I I belongs to 1595. Except for Love's Labour's Lost the earliest of the group, according to the table given by Neilson and Thorndike, 3 is King John, which is there dated 1593. This date, however, is not certain. The use of the stanza in this play is specially significant, for it is deliberate. Shakespeare did not find it in the old play which he used as his source, The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England. Other tests than that for rhyme frequency show kinship to the plays that contain the Venus and Adonis stanza. For instance, Love's Labour's Lost has only 7.7 per cent of feminine endings. King John has 6.3; Romeo and Juliet, 8.2; Midsummer Night's Dream, 7.3; Richard II, 11; and Taming of the Shrew, 17.7, as compared with 16.6 in The Comedy of Errors, 18.4 in Two Gentlemen of Verona, and 19.5 in Richard I I I . Towards the close of what is usually called the second period of Shakespeare's workmanship to which the plays using the Venus and Adonis stanza belong, the percentage of feminine endings increased. The percentage of run-on lines in Love's 3

Neilson, W. Α., and A. H. Thorndike, The Facts about Shakespeare, New York, 1920, p. 76.

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Labour's Lost is 18.4; King John, 17.7; Romeo and Juliet, 14.2; Midsummer Night's Dream, 13.2; Richard II, 19.9; Taming of the Shrew, 8.1. The earlier plays have lower percentages. Of speeches ending within the line, Love's Labour's Lost has 10 per cent; King John, 12.7; Romeo and Juliet, 14.9; Midsummer Night's Dream, 17.3; Richard II, 7.3; and Taming of the Shrew, 3.6. Of the earlier plays Two Gentlemen of Verona has the highest, only 5.8. For light endings the record is more varied. Love's Labour's Lost has three to none in the Comedy of Errors and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but Richard I I I has 4; King John, 7; Romeo and Juliet, 7; Midsummer Night's Dream, 1; Richard II, 4; and Taming of the Shrew, 14.4 There is yet another resemblance between Love's Labour's Lost and at least some of the plays that contain the Venus and Adonis stanza—the composition of the company required to present them. The Comedy of Errors and Two Gentlemen of Verona were written for a company that had only two juveniles and three female impersonators. Love's Labour's Lost requires a company of four juveniles and five female impersonators in addition to a boy for Moth's part. King John requires four female impersonators and a boy for Arthur; the men's parts are not juvenile roles except Lewis, Robert Falconbridge, and the Bastard. Richard II calls for at least three female impersonators and one lady in waiting in addition; Richard and Aumerle are juvenile roles, and perhaps some of the minor characters are also juvenile. Midsummer Night's Dream requires four female impersonators, including the boy who played Titania; Oberon was perhaps played by a boy; Lysander and Demetrius are certainly juveniles, and Theseus and Philostrate are not indicated as elderly. Romeo and Juliet demands five juveniles in the parts of Romeo, Benvolio, Paris, Tybalt, and Mercutio; three female impersonators besides the 4

These figures are taken from Neilson and Thomdike, op. cil. pp. 71-72.

T H E S I G N I F I C A N C E OF T H E R H Y M E

19

actor who played the Nurse and who may have been a comedian ; and a Page for Paris. The Taming of the Shrew calls for three female impersonators; Biondello was doubtless played by a boy; Petrucchio, Hortensio, Lucentio, and Tranio were played by juveniles. Even The Merchant of Venice, which does not contain the stanza, seems to have been written for the same company, calling, as it does, for three female impersonators, and at least three juveniles in leading roles and two others in minor parts. Furthermore, the jesting of the courtiers about the face and legs of Armado in Love's Labour's Lost reminds one of the similar jesting at the expense of Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, and makes one wonder if these two parts were not played by the skinny, thin-faced actor who is first described in the part of Robert Falconbridge in King John, and who may also have played the parts of Justice Silence in 2 Henry IV and Slender in Merry Wives of Windsor. Moth is twin brother to Flastaff's Robin. Biron is of the same pattern as Mercutio and Gratiano, and may have been written for the same actor, despite the fact that his is the leading part in Love's Labour's Lost and would fall to Burbage, if he desired to play it. Dumain has no beard; the Princess is considerably larger than her ladies, "the highest and the thickest." These two parts might well fit the actors who played Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night. In that play Sebastian evidently was beardless, for he was mistaken for the disguised Viola, and Viola was as large as Sebastian; evidently the boy, or young man, who played her part was nearly grown. Costard is described as big-boned and was evidently bulky in size. One thinks wonderingly of the "large composition" of the Bastard Falconbridge in King John and the hulky frame of Ajax in Troilus and Cressida, and wonders if they fit the same actor. Such hints as these tally with the others and indicate a company later than that which presented The Comedy of Errors and Two Gentlemen of Verona.

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Can the date at which these sections of the play were written be determined more definitely? In the third section, The Masque of Muscovites evidently echoes the last part of the Gray's Inn Revels of the Christmas season of 1594-5, and line 393 is a clear echo of a phrase in the letter of the prince of Purpoole to Sir Thomas Heneage on February 1, 1595. If this section is later than February, 1595, then the other sections are of the same date. Of course, so late a date conflicts with the results of applying the rhyme test of rhyme frequency. But this test has been applied so long, and is based on a theory so old, that it is time some amendment were made to both. The presence of the Venus and Adonis stanza provides the amendment.

CHAPTER

III

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST A N D C O N T E M P O R A R Y RELATIONS BETWEEN ENGLAND AND FRANCE In an article entitled The Secret of "Love's Labour's Lost," 1 Austin K. Gray offered a solution for the problem as to the earliest performance of Love's Labour's Lost and the occasion for this performance. According to his theory the play was performed at Tichfield House in Hampshire on September 2, 1591, as part of the entertainment offered Queen Elizabeth during her visit there on her progress in 1591. Not only was it a part of the entertainment of the Queen, but it was also a part of Southampton's campaign to escape from marriage with Burghley's granddaughter, the Lady Elizabeth de Vere. Southampton was then about to reach the end of the year's grace he had extorted from Burghley and was still unwilling to commit himself to matrimony. The play so pleased the Queen on this occasion that seven years later she called for its presentation again before her. Presumably her pleasure at the first performance led her to intervene and save Southampton from a match he did not desire. Gray does not make this point, but it is the conclusion to be drawn from his presentation. At any rate Southampton paid Burghley the forfeit and the match was abandoned. Gray assumes that by the year 1591 Southampton was already a devotee of the theater, as he was known later to be, that he had seen Shakespeare act and had made his acquaintance, that he engaged Shakespeare to write the play and then arranged that it should be acted by "the accredited per1

PMLA, xxxix, 581-611.

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formers of the Court" in the serious portions, and by " t h e children of Paul's or the children of the Chapel Royal" in the female and boy roles, and "some troupe of professonal actors" in the humorous portions. Lyly, the Queen's Musicians and the Children of the Chapel Royal are known to have accompanied the Court on this progress. The solution is interesting. It helps to fill the gap in those lost years of Shakespeare's life from 1585 to 1593, it gives Shakespeare some connection with affairs of the Court, and it shows an early association of Shakespeare with Southampton. This last is especially pleasing to those who are convinced that the association must have been very close and must have led the playwright to partisanship with the Essex-Southampton party at Court. Without going into detail as to the merits of this solution for the play, one may say that the facts presented along with it prove only that Burghley desired the match, that Southampton disliked it, and that Queen Elizabeth was at Titchfield House on September 2, 1591. The rest is nothing but inference, attractive as it may be. A fresh consideration of the play in some of its aspects is, therefore, not out of place. The play contains two main groups of characters: the courtiers, and the clowns, the latter including the fantastic Armado from the beginning and later Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel. The King of Navarre, Biron, Longaville, Dumain, Mercade, the Princess of France, Rosaline, Maria, and Katherine compose the courtiers. The clowns are Armado, Nathaniel, Holofernes, Costard, Moth, Dull, and Jaquenetta. A forester also appears for a moment but takes no real part in the action. Because the names of Navarre, Biron, and Longaville belonged to real Frenchmen living at the time, consideration of the play has taken for granted that the play has some connection with contemporary events, but has not agreed as to

ENGLAND AND FRANCE

23

just what this connection was. The King of Navarre has been accepted as representing Henry IV of France, who had been king of Navarre before his accession to the French throne in 1589. Biron and Longueville were two of his chief assistants. But the name Dumain gives trouble. It has usually been interpreted as standing for the Duke de Mayenne, the head of the Leaguers. He had been a childhood friend of Henry, but after 1589 had been his most determined enemy until the latter part of 1595.2 Gray assumes that the Princess of France represents Queen Elizabeth. Such asumption is necessary for his thesis, but other evidence supports the identification. Katherine, Rosaline, and Maria seem to be only fictitious characters invented for the purpose of the plot. So, too, are the relationships to Falconbridge, Perigot, and Alenfon referred to in the dialogue. The first is not a French name at all.3 The family of Alengon had died out before Henry came to the French throne. Henry himself was lord of Perigord. In making a fresh approach to the play it is well to forget for the time being that the play is Shakespeare's. The investigator can thus rid himself of any predisposition, though perhaps unconscious, to view the play in a certain light. He will be the readier to see what he might perhaps ignore or fail to see at all. If he considers the play as anonymous and himself the discoverer trying to place it, he will certainly have a more open mind towards its contents and their possible significance. Approached in this fashion the play challenges attention 2

Charlton, Η. B., in "The Date of Love's Labour's Lost," Modern Language Review, xin, 257 f. and 387 f., recognizing the difficulty presented by the showing of the Due de Mayenne as a friend of Henry, interprets Dumain as representing Daumont. The interpretation is obviously forced. 3 It is interesting to note here that in the old play of The Troublesome Raigne of John King of England the bastard Falconbridge is created Duke of Normandy. Perhaps the geography and genealogy in Love's Labour's Lost owe something to the older play for this item.

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with the people who open the dialogue. Navarre, Biron, and Longaville are accepted at once. But Dumain gives trouble. He was for a long time Henry's most determined enemy. Unless the presentation of him at Henry's court as an intimate friend is ironical, the play cannot have been written during the enmity. But the part contains no hint of irony. This anonymous play must then date later than Mayenne's submission late in 1595. The formal visit of Mayenne to Henry acknowledging this submission occurred in January, 1596. The first speech of the play shows that the King has recently published the edict which he expects will make Navarre the wonder of the world and his court a little "Academe." The audience must have got a thrill out of this, for the court of Navarre, no matter how learned and literary it may have been in the days of Henry's famous grandmother, had in his own a reputation quite different. In fact, the word "stews" would more nearly have described it. The thrill of the audience must have expressed itself in a wide grin when it heard that in accordance with the oath exacted of him he renounced love. This grin must have burst into a ribald guffaw when Biron's objections to the oath showed that for three years it forbade the company of women—this at the court of a man whose amours were notorious, who had elevated Gabrielle d'Estrees to the official position of Maitresse du Roi, and who presented to her the ambassadors to his court. Such a joke had the excellent quality of being double-barrelled, for it could include also Elizabeth's well-known preference for unmarried men in making appointments, and her own praise of the virgin state. Satire has never objected to killing two birds with one stone. Furthermore, the item in regard to study and ing time in sleep, might well be taken as a gibe London group of courtiers and men interested who have been assumed to compose the School

to not wastat a certain in learning, of Night. If

E N G L A N D AND F R A N C E

25

so, the remarks date later than the forming of the school and perhaps later than Chapman's The Shadow of Night of 1594.4 No sooner has the audience learned the matter of the oath than it gets a hint of its violation. First, Biron jests about the subject to be studied: Or having sworn too hard a keeping oath, Study to break it and not break my troth. Next, Biron reminds the King that the expected visit from the French King's daughter will force even him to break the article about not speaking to a woman. The king replies that her visit will force him to dispense with the decree, for she must "of necessity" be received. Biron twits him with being forsworn "on mere necessity" and continues, And he that breaks them in the least degree Stands in attainder of eternal shame. Thus at the very outset, this matter of breaking an oath is underscored. But this is not all. Armado, in the very next scene, confesses that he too will be forsworn. Further, just before the meeting of the Princess and the King, Boyet speaks of the King's seeking a dispensation for his oath. When the King meets the Princess and tells her of the oath, she replies, 'Tis deadly sin to keep that oath, my lord, And sin to break it. Lastly, in the discovery scene, the lovers in turn confess to breaking the oath and enjoin Biron to prove that it should be broken. In the last scene of the play the King announces that he has come to escort the Princess to his court. She insists on his keeping his vow. He protests that the virtue of her eye has caused him to break it. She replies, Virtue's office never breaks men's troth, 4

Acheson, Arthur, Shakespeare

and the Rival Poet, 1903.

26 and

E N G L A N D AND F R A N C E So much I hate a breaking cause to be Of heavenly oaths, vow'd in integrity.

And in her farewell she tells him, Your oath I will not trust. Evidently, if the play was at all topical, this matter of broken oaths, underscored in this fashion and made a theme running throughout the play, must have had some special significance. In relating it to contemporary events, the investigator immediately thinks of Henry's change of religion in 1593. Elizabeth had sent Wilkes to learn the truth, and Henry had replied that on succeeding to the French throne four years previously he had taken an oath to be instructed in the Catholic religion but had postponed the matter. Elizabeth wrote him a letter of regret. But Elizabeth had further trouble in holding him to his promises, especially those he made in regard to paying her troops and giving them a proper place for headquarters. Her expostulations with him in this matter began as early as 1591 but grew more intense in 1594 and 1595. In 1594 she had gone so far as to recall Norris as a step towards bringing Henry to terms. Even as late as 1598 she admonished him to remember his faith given. This matter of broken oaths, then, dates the play as somewhere towards the middle nineties. The reference would have more point if Henry's evasions and breaches of faith had become notorious. Another matter is introduced at the same time as that of broken vows. The King, when he hears of the approaching visit, says, She must lie here on mere necessity. Biron answers in the next line, "Necessity will make us all forsworn," and a few lines later,

ENGLAND AND FRANCE

27

I am forsworn on 'mere necessity.' Such playing on the word "necessity" suggests a topical hit. In 1596 Henry was making a great point of his necessity. In a letter which was written on January 25, 1596, and which found its way to Burleigh, Villeroy wrote: 6 "If she thinks to profit by our necessity and make us receive her people into our places as masters of them she is much mistaken. One bears an injury more willingly from a foe than from a friend, and we would rather give three or four places in return for a benefit than give one to buy it." On March 4,1596, Sir Henry Unton, the English representative at Henry's court, wrote of of an interview in which Henry had made much of necessity.' On June 28,1596, Sir Charles Davers, writing to Robert Cecil, spoke of7 Henry's necessities. On September 22, M. de Reau wrote to Robert Cecil and urged the King's necessity for the prompt aid of 2,000 men.8 So much for "necessity." It gives the date of 1596. To take up the topics as they appear in the play: In the dialogue between the Princess and Boyet at the beginning of Act II, Boyet in answer to her command to announce her arrival to the King, says, Proud of employment, willingly I go.

These particular words seem unjustified as they stand and are consequently open to suspicion as containing an allusion of some sort. In the middle of 1596 Elizabeth was having difficulty in finding a successor to Sir Henry Unton, who had died early that year. Thomas Edmunds, Lord Edward Zouche, Sir Anthony Mildmay, the Earl of Northumberland, and Sir Edward Dymoke begged off in turn as is shown by their letters s

Hatfield Papers, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Vol. 9, part 6, pp. 54-5 S. • Ibid., p. 81. 7 Ibid., p. 224. «Ibid., p. 384.

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E N G L A N D AND F R A N C E

among the Hatfield Papers.' Sir Anthony Mildmay finally accepted. When Boyet returns from his errand, he informs the Princess that the King intends to lodge her in the fields. As soon as she meets the King, she answers his words of welcome by protesting, "Welcome to the wide fields too base to be mine." This passage apparently reflects Elizabeth's long effort to get from Henry "a haven of retreat" for her troops in France. According to Camden's account, it began in 1591 and continued until 1596. In 1593, when no place had yet been given, Henry offered Pimpol or Brehac on condition that the English would not fortify and that they would not lodge in the houses of priests or gentlemen. No town was assigned, and the English spent the winter among the country villages, where they suffered greatly. When Sir Robert Sidney asked for Brest, Henry stopped his ears and refused to listen. In 1594, Morlaix, which had been promised the English, was taken from the enemy, but Daumont, in order to keep the English from entering it, worked into the articles of surrender the condition that none but Catholics should be received into the town. Elizabeth angrily recalled Norris, but the ship sent for him was not allowed to enter the harbor of Morlaix. Read in the light of this, the line, "You may not come, fair Princess, in my gates" (Act II, i, 172) seems to have special meaning. In 1595, Henry declared war on Spain and asked help of Elizabeth, who again complained that the haven of retreat had not been given. In 1596 Henry offered Calais, which the English had wanted all along, provided the English would take it from the Spaniards, and at last Boulogne was assigned. In 1598, when peace with Spain was talked of, Elizabeth instructed her special ambassadors to France to ask about the restitution of Calais in return for the money Henry owed her. Shortly after this protest against being lodged in the fields, • Ibid., pp. 193, 195, 260, 314.

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29

the Princess goes into the matter of her visit. I t is not her intention to force a marriage which Henry had forgotten as Gray erroneously states. It is purely a matter of business. According to the play, Charles, the father of the King, had lent the father of the Princess 200,000 crowns as a war aid and in return had received a mortgage on Aquitaine. France had repaid 100,000 crowns of the original war loan and had left a part of Aquitaine to Navarre as security for the rest of the loan, although the mortgaged part exceeded the value of the loan. The Princess requests the payment of an additional 100,000 crowns for the part of Aquitaine still held. This request looks like a proposal to sell Aquitaine and a desire for enough additional money to meet its full value. When the King expresses his surprise, however, the Princess insists that the second half of the loan has been paid but that Aquitaine has not been released. The King exclaims that he has heard nothing of such repayment. The Princess offers to produce receipts from the proper officials and asks Boyet to show them. Boyet tells her that the packet containing them has not arrived but will be available the next day. There the whole matter of money is dropped as far as the play is concerned. This negotiation about Aquitaine is a piece of pure fiction. But it is given such prominence that it must have some significance. What? Elizabeth was sending Henry money and supplies as well as men. Sometimes she got notes and security promptly, and sometimes she had to urge and haggle. In 1589 she supplied 2,200 pounds in gold; the next year 33,333 crowns on security given by Turenne. In 1591 she had difficulty in getting verification of a new loan by the French Parlement. In 1596 a list of Henry's debts was made, and a copy of it dated May 20, 1596, is to be found among the Hatfield Papers. 10 On one of 1589 is the notation: "There is the King's bond for this." On 10

Ibid., p. 191.

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30

another, " N o ratification yet found." The latest bond in the list is dated May 7, 1596. This list looks like the original of Boyet's packet; if not it, then one like it. If for Aquitaine the word "Calais" is substituted, the passage takes on significance, for, as has been shown, Elizabeth actually tried to get Calais in 1598. Calais had been lost to the English in 1558 under Mary Tudor. Elizabeth came to the throne in the same year, made peace with the French, and left Calais in their hands, receiving a sum of 500,000 crowns for it. After Act I I Love's Labour's Lost concerns itself chiefly with its own fable or with allusions to other circumstances than the relations between France and England. The ending of the play, however, with the unfinished business of the wooing and the condition of a year's delay may well be interpreted as referring to the negotiations of 1596 since earlier lines reflect other events in the relations between the two countries. In 1596 Henry wanted more aid. Elizabeth wanted fulfillment of promises and more security; in fact, she insisted on them rather firmly. There was a deadlock between the two monarchs. Sir Henry Unton, who was representing Elizabeth at Paris, wrote in January, 1596, to Burleigh that Henry was dissatisfied. Henry had expected that Unton had full powers but found, he complained, that Unton had only presented the Queen's explanations and excuses. "He said," wrote Unton, "we did11 still amuse him with words as heretofore." Elizabeth's attitude is well expressed by the words of the Princess to the King in this closing scene, "Your words I will not trust." Unton wrote also to Essex, under date of January 17, 1596, that his message was12 termed among the French "Un Discours du Foin." In this reference to " h a y " one may see an explanation of Dull's words at the close of Act V, Scene ii. He has been present during the planning of Holou u

Murdin, Stale Papers, II, p. 701 f. Supra, p. 706.

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31

fernes and Armado for the Show of the Nine Worthies, but has had nothing to say. Asked what he will do, he replies: I'll make one in a dance, or so: or I will play On the tabor to the worthies, and let them dance the hay The words here, of course, refer to a dance known by the name of "the hay," but the reference to such a dance in this place is so needless that a topical allusion is possible. So a reference to the words of the French in regard to Unton's embassy is not altogether impossible; it may be far-fetched but is worth noting along with other references as within the realm of possibility. As the hint for it would have come from Unton's letter to Essex, the idea of an allusion may find favor with those anxious to establish a close relation between Shakespeare and the Essex-Southampton faction a t court. The bare possibility of an allusion here, vague as it may be, raises the question of another possible allusion elsewhere. At the beginning of Act I I Boyet ends his first speech with fulsome praise of the Princess's beauty. The Princess replies: Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean, Needs not the painted flourish of your praise. Beauty is bought by judgment of the eye, Not utter'd by base sale of chapmen's tongues. I am less proud to hear you tell my worth Than you much willing to be accounted wise. These lines may refer to an episode told by Sir Henry Unton in a letter to Queen Elizabeth under date of February 3,1596. Unton was introduced by Henry to Gabrielle d'Estrees, the Mattresse du Roi, and was asked what he thought of her beauty. For answer, Unton produced a miniature of Elizabeth which he said came far short of her perfection of beaut}'. Henry admired the picture very much and kissed it two or three times while Unton still held it. The allusion, if any, may be faint, but it tantalizes.

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FRANCE

When one has completed this list of possible allusions to relations between France and England, or rather between Elizabeth and Henry I V , and has taken stock of them, still considering the play as anonymous, he finds that they indicate a date of composition sometime in the year 1596. When he recalls that the play is Shakespeare's and is dated anywhere between 1589 and 1592 by scholars, he receives a shock. In thinking over the problem he realizes that these allusions here identified are not proved beyond doubt but are as likely to be true as some of those accepted without question in regard to other plays and considered as evidence valid for dating. He remembers the arguments in favor of an early date and wonders if they are open to fresh scrutiny and verification or modification. He determines to examine them afresh for himself, traditional authority of Malone and others to the contrary, and attacking first the metrical tests, he finds that except for rhyme frequency, they indicate a time of composition somewhat close to that of King J o h n , Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Taming of the Shrew. Even this new examination of the rhyme reveals the presence of the six-line Venus and Adonis stanza not found in the earliest plays of Shakespeare but used in the plays of the Early Middle Period. He wonders if there can be allusions to other and later episodes, and finds in the last part of T h e Gray's Inn Revels of 1594-5 the Russian business of January and February, 1595, and sees there a probable source for the Masque of Muscovites in the last act of Love's Labour's Lost. Going further into such study he finds first the suspicion of some scholars that the play on the words " P i e r c e " and " p e n n y " and " p u r s e " suggests a connection with Nashe's Piers Penniless. A little later he finds that the passage beginning " O f piercing a hogshead" in Act IV, Scene ii,13 has been revealed already as an echo of a passage in Harvey's " Hart, H. C. quoted by Clarkson, op. cit.

ENGLAND AND

FRANCE

33

Pierce's Supererogation. On these hints he plunges into the whole Nashe-Harvey controversy and does what few investigators seem to have done—he reads all the pamphlets in this famous literary quarrel. 14 B u t w h a t he finds in such an investigation is properly the subject of another chapter.

14 A hasty and sceptical reader may leap to the conclusion that Shakespeare could not have known the official documents here quoted to support the interpretation of the topical allusions, and may dismiss the interpretations as invalid. Such a reader ignores the fact that most official information, even confidential, leaks out through various and frequently obscure channels. Those who have had contact with government circles know how constantly the talk turns on matters in hand and how easily knowledge of affairs spreads, even of matters that should not be discussed. Denial of the probability of such in Shakespeare's day is not disproof of the theory, but only revelation of the objector's ignorance.

CHAPTER

IV

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST AND T H E NASHE-HARVEY QUARREL The puns on "pierce," "purse," and "penniless" and the phrase "of piercing a hogshead" in the second scene of Act IV in Love's Labour's Lost make an apparent echo of Nashe's Piers Penniless, and his quarrel with Gabriel Harvey. Students clinging to an early date for the play have explained away the later date these puns would demand, by saying t h a t they occur in a scene written into the play after the first presentation or that the resemblance is accidental. If, however, the independent investigator, forgetting that the play is Shakespeare's, will treat it as a newly discovered anonymous play to be dated, follow the lead afforded by the puns, and himself read all the pamphlets in the quarrel, he will soon have the feeling that the phrases he reads remind him of phrases in the play. If he locates each phrase in the play thus echoed and matches it with the echo in what he is reading, he will finish his work with a mass of detail that challenges attention. Analysis of it will disclose some correspondences so close as to forbid denial of intent on the part of the playwright, some less close which seem likely once the original intent is granted, and then some which a sceptic might justifiably dispute but which take on significance when combined with the others. Naturally, the starting point is contained in the lines (IV, ii, 85-86), "Master Parson quasi pers-on. An if one should be pierc'd, which is the one?" where the puns unmistakably point to Piers Penniless and Pierce's Supererogation. The continuation of the dialogue contains the phrase "of piercing

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35

a hogshead" (1. 88), which the investigator identifies immediately as echoing Harvey's Pierce's Supererogation: 1 She knew what she said, that intituled Pierce, the hogshead of wits, the tosspot of eloquence: & Nashe, the verye inventor of Asses. She it is that must broach the barrell of thy frisking conceit, and canonize the Patriarch of newe writers.' This rather obvious resemblance established, the investigator's eye in its survey of the material is perhaps caught by the parallel between Biron's (III, i, 186) "Dread prince of plackets, king of codpieces," and Nashe's calling Harvey (Have with You, iii, 129) "Codpiece Kinko, Sir Murdred of Placards." The investigator had perhaps wondered why Armado was called (IV, i, 101) "A phantasime, a Monarcho," until he found that Nashe (Have with You, iii, 76) had called Harvey an insulting Monarcho who outdid the original. Only four lines previously in the play, the Princess had asked about Armado, "What vane, what weathercock." Harvey wrote a poem on the weathercock of All Hallowes, and Nashe (Strange Newes, i, 277) teased him about it. The impatient remark of Holofernes about Armado's pronunciation (V, i, 28), "it insinuateth me of insanie" becomes more intelligible when taken in connection with Nashe's taunt (Have with You, iii, 179) that Harvey in seeking patronage was asked "by no mean personage, Unde haec insania?" The phrase "from my snow-white pen the ebon-coloured ink" in Armado's letter (I, i, 245-6) becomes something more than high-flown rhetoric when placed beside Harvey's de1

In this discussion references are to the Students Cambridge Edition of Shakespeare for Love's Labour's Lost, Grosart's edition of Harvey's works, and McKerrow's edition of Nashe's works. 1 According to Charlton, Η. B., "The Date of Love's Labour's Lost," Modern Language Review, xiii, 257 f. and 387 f., this echo was pointed out by H. C. Hart. Charlton disregards it as accidental. It stands in the way of his own theory.

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scription of "the excellent gentlewoman" (Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 16) as "fitter by nurture to be an enchaunting Angell with her white quill, then a tormenting Fury with her blacke inke," and Nashe's remarks in Have with You (iii, 110) where he has much to say of this excellent gentlewoman and quotes these words. Dull's "There's villainy abroad" (I, i, 189) echoes a charge that Harvey continually made against Nashe and other opponents, all of whom he called villains: (Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 51, 63) "all is vanity and villainy," "arch mystery of the busiest modernists in villainy"; (Foure Letters, 224) "paper which containeth the vile misdemeanors and Truth will say, the abhominable villainies of such base shifting companions"; (Newe Letter, i, 289) "Strange newes of villainy." Nashe (Have with You, iii, 15) wrote a burlesque of Harvey's style in which he retorted with the mock phrase, "Villainy by connivance." The word 'thrasonical' which Holofernes applies to Armado (V, i, 13) had been bandied between the disputants. Nashe had used it in his Preface to Greene's Menaphon somewhat as an inkhorn term. Harvey took it up in Foure Letters (i, 168) where he spoke of Nashe's "vainglorious and thrasonical braving," and Nashe retorted (Have with You, iii, 135) by speaking of Harvey's thrasonism. Even Costard's "Latin word for three farthings" (III, i, 138) reveals a probable hit. In the play, it belongs to the exposure of Armado's stinginess. But Nashe (Strange Newes, i, 256-57) referred to Harvey's Foure Letters, to which some sonnets were prefixed, as "four penniworth of letters and three farthing worth of sonnets." The latter phrase was perhaps intended as a ribald pun, for Harvey in one of the sonnets had written "Not worth a Doctor's f — t , " and Nashe, just before the passage quoted, had jested broadly about this line of Harvey's. The ribald and smutloving Elizabethan audience would have been greatly pleased with this allusion to such a jest of Nashe's.

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37

Having gone thus far in recognizing probable hits, the investigator feels impelled to proceed with identification. At the outset he finds that the very name Armado has special significance. I t is usually explained as a coined word reminiscent of the Spanish Armada and here applied as a class name to a Spaniard. But armado was a frequent Elizabethan spelling for armada. Furthermore, Nashe (Have with You, iii, 62, 78, 127) taunted Harvey with sending an Armada of words against him and with having been in the Fleet (a pun on the naval term and the name of the London prison). As the play progresses Armado in his own part is shown to be given to wordiness. Holofernes says of him (V, i, 17-8), "He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument." Harvey (Foure Letters, i, 226) in excusing his own restraint, had written, " I am not to dilate where a sentence is a discourse," and Nashe (Have with You, iii, 37) said of Harvey, "he never bids a man good morrow but he makes a speech as long as a proclamation." Armado closes his soliloquy with the words (I, ii, 191), "for I am for whole volumes in folio." Harvey had written (Foure Letters, i, 200), "he that will be a familiar deviser in folio, must be content with the reward of a notable lier," and (Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 44, 257, 318) he spoke of his opponent as a ruffian in folio, said that he might himself compile whole volumes in commendation of the ass, and expressed regret that so little of value can be performed in perfunctory pamphlets. Nashe (Have with You, iii, 34-5) taunted Harvey with the bulk of Pierce's Supererogation, calling it an "unconscionable vast gorbellied volume." In addition to verbosity, the play makes much of letters and underscores Armado's letter in particular. It begins early in the play (I, i, 189) with Costard's presentation of Armado's missive to Navarre, "This letter will tell you more," and is followed a couple of lines later by "A letter from the magnificent

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Armado." Harvey was fond of the letter form as well as the word letter in his titles. He published Two Letters, Three Letters, Foure Letters, and A Newe Letter. Nashe (Have with You, 33, 34, 41, 90) wrote "more letters yet from the Doctor," "Letters do you call them," "his magnificentest elocution," and "Twice or thrice he had set his magnificent face upon i t , " thus playing up the word magnificent which reappears in the line of the play. Costard in presenting the letter goes on to say (1. 91), "the contempts thereof are as touching m e . " In the mouth of Costard 'contempts' sounds like a blunder for 'contents.' In its real meaning it fits so aptly the manner of expression in the second and third epistles in Foure Letters that no one can doubt the deliberate intention of a hit. Furthermore, Nashe said (Strange Newes, i, 303), " T h y familiar epistles brought thee in contempt" and (Have with You, iii, 56) he accused Harvey of contemning his own birth. The matter is brought back to mind dramatically by the reading of Armado's letter in Act IV, Jaquenetta's presentation of Biron's as Armado's, and the reading of Biron's own letter to convict him in the third scene of the same act. The play, however, was not done with Armado's authorship. The jesting in Act I I I plays upon the word 'l'envoy.' Harvey had written l'envoys to the poems he included in Pierce's Supererogation, and Nashe (Have with You, iii, 4) had twitted him with them. 3 Earlier in the play (I, ii, 114-5) Armado asks about the ballad of the King and the Beggar. If Armado represents Harvey, as seems evident, there is a special gibe in making this caricature of the defender of classical meters show an interest in a popular ballad. Nashe 3 If with his usual gift for confusing words Costard, in rejecting the proposed l'envoy, had mistaken the word for 'convoy,' there is a hit at the full title of Nashe's Strange Newes. The dialogue, however, does not prove the confusion, and the idea is far-fetched.

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39

(Have with You iii, 63) actually accused Harvey of writing ballads as a young man. A few lines later in the play (1. 119— 20) Armado says that he will have the subject of the ballad "Newly writ o'er." Nashe (Have with You, iii, 113) said that the opening lines of the excellent gentlewoman's Dinner in Pierce's Supererogation were adapted from the Ballad of Anne Askew. Another line of the play perhaps alludes to another kind of writing with which Nashe twitted Harvey. In the very opening line of the second scene of Act I, Armado asks Moth, "Boy, what sign is it when a man of spirit grows melancholy?" and Moth replies, "A great sign that he will look sad." The point would be contained in "sign." This is perhaps a gibe at the astrological books and pamphlets of Gabriel Harvey's brothers, in which Nashe (Have with You, iii, 70, 72) insisted that Gabriel himself had a share. Characteristics of Armado's style, furthermore, get attention. Even before naming him, Navarre (I, i, 166) spoke of him as having a "mint of phrases in his brain" and called him (I, i, 169) a "man of complements." Nashe (Have with You, iii, 65) represented Harvey's tutor at Cambridge as speaking of Harvey's "strange untraffiqu't phrases by him new vented and unpackt," and referring to Harvey's Foure Letters wrote (Have with You, iii, 103) "and so proceeds with complement, and a little more complement, and a crust of quips, and a little more complement, and a crust of quips, and a little more complement after that." In the jesting occasioned by Costard's presenting Armado's letter to Navarre, Biron says (I, i, 120-22) "Be it as the style shall give us cause to climb in the merriment." "Climb the style" was a frequent pun in Elizabethan literature, but Biron's words may contain a gibe. Harvey in the "Epistle Dedicatory" to Foure Letters (1. 157) wrote, "It was my intention, so to demean myself in the whole, and so temper my stile in every part: that I might neither seem blinded with affection, nor enraged with pas-

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T H E NASHE-HARVEY QUARREL

sion," and further on, (Foure Letters, i, 201) he used the words, "the onlie high Pole Artique and deep Minerall of an incomparable stile." Nashe (Have with You, iii, 72) called Harvey Doctor Deuce-Ace and Doctor Merryman, the latter sobriquet being perhaps reflected in 'merriment.' The words 'congruent epitheton' (I, ii, 13-14) likewise contain a gibe. Nashe (Strange Newes, i, 270) ironically praised Harvey for variety of epithets and said that he himself for the sake of this variety called Harvey's brother the son of a rope-maker. In Have with You (iii, 14) he said that Harvey in writing Pierce's Supererogation studied Textor's Epithets, and further (iii, 49) he wrote that Harvey always used some "uncircumcised sluggish epithet." The variation of epithets is hit again in the play in Nathaniel's praise of Holofernes (IV, ii, 8-9), " T h e epithets are sweetly varied." Biron's remark (IV, i, 98) after Armado's letter to Jaquenetta has been read to the Princess, " I am much deceived but I remember the style," is a tantalizing reminder of "Nosti manum et s t y l u m " with which Harvey signed a letter to Spenser in Three Letters (i, 107) and Nashe's gibe (Have with You, iii, 80) about it and the repetition of Harvey's Latin. Armado takes pride in his position as a gentleman at court and reminds others of this position. In his letter to Navarre (I, i, 236) he introduces the words, "as I am a gentleman." Harvey was the son of a tradesman but endeavored to improve his social position. Nashe (Strange Newes, i, 257) reminded him that he was the son of a rope-maker, and (Have with You, iii, 56) spoke of the elder Harvey as 'Goodman,' a name never applied to a man of gentle birth. On the same page Nashe pretended that Harvey was so eager to be a gentleman as to imagine himself the illegitimate son of a nobleman. Armado despised 'reckoning' as "Fitting the spirit of a tapster" (I, ii, 112-3). Barnabe Barnes, in a sonnet prefixed to Pierce's Supererogation (ii, 25) called Nashe "Base broaching

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41

tapster of reports untrue," and Nashe in turn (Strange Newes, i, 304) called Harvey "gross shifter for shitten tapestry jests." Moth replies to Harvey's contempt for reckoning by saying (I, ii, 45), "You are a gentleman and a gamester." Nashe (Have with You, iii, 32) recounted Harvey's attempt to break into court society and also wrote of him, "May he crie like a swearing shredded gamester." Armado brags to Holofernes of intimacy with Navarre (V, i, 99), "the king is a noble gentleman and my familiar." Nashe wrote of Harvey (Have with You, iii, 116) "He would do nothing but crake and parret it in print, in how manie noblemen's favors he was in, and blab everie light speach they uttered to him in private." The social parvenu has great respect for authority, precedent, and example. So has Armado. And so, according to Nashe, had Harvey. Armado, in love with Jaquenetta, wants to be sure that he is not errant from the obligations of high position. He asks Moth (I, ii, 67), "What great men have been in love" and after Moth instances Hercules, demands more authority, insisting that they be "men of good repute and carriage." Harvey was always quoting authority or referring to famous precedent or example. Nashe (Have with You, iii, 35) accused Harvey, in his desire to attract attention, of always dragging in the names of Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, and other men of highest credit and said that he then used the names of Nashe and Piers Penniless. Later in the same scene of the play Armado says (1. 120-121) that he will example his digression by some mighty precedent. No matter how good an opinion Armado has of himself, however, it is not shared by the courtiers. In the play he is first mentioned in answer to Biron's question (I, i, 162), "But is there no quick recreation granted?" and he is included with Costard in Longaville's "the swain and he shall be our sport." In the same scene where his letter is read to the Princess (IV,

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i, 101) he is described as "one that makes sport to the Prince and his bookmates." These tally with Nashe's gibes (Have with You, iii, 79) a t Harvey's vain effort to obtain preferment at court. Nashe said t h a t a nobleman to whom Harvey applied found him more meet to make sport with than to be deeply employed. Navarre says of Armado (I, i, 176), " I love to hear him lie." Nashe (Have with You, iii, 118, 131) called Harvey outright a liar. Moth's line in his persiflage with Armado (III, i, 30), " T h e hobby-horse is forgot," though perhaps a current phrase of the day, 4 conceals nevertheless a gibe, for it would recall to spectators familiar with the quarrel Nashe's ridicule (Have with You, iii, 73) of Harvey's conduct a t the court when Queen Elizabeth visited Audley End, which conduct Nashe called "hobby-horse reeling and domineering at Audley E n d . " Maria's rebuke to Costard (IV, i, 139), "You talk greasily," taken in connection with Costard's "how the ladies and I have put him down . . . most incony vulgar wit" (IV, i, 143-4) recalls Nashe's gibing (Have with You, iii, 75) about Harvey's attempt to break into court society a t Audley End, his mingling with the court ladies, and telling them dirty stories. Varied as are Armado's accomplishments they do not include a mastery of arithmetic. Moth asks him (I, ii, 41), "How many is one thrice told?" Harvey was fond of adjectives compounded with thrice. Also, (Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 23) he scoffed at the multiplying spirit not of the alchemist but of the villainist. Armado answers Moth's question (I, ii, 42) with " I am ill at reckoning." Harvey (Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 237) said that he had 20 and 20 charms, etc., but did not give the total sum of 40. Nashe (Have with You, iii 35) ridiculed the bulk of Pierce's Supererogation and twitted Harvey with the inaccurate numbering of the pages. Moth says to Armado (I, ii, 48-9), "You know how much the sum 4

It occurs also in Hamlet.

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43

of deuce-ace amounts to." Nash (Have with You, iii, 72) actually called Harvey Doctor Deuse-Ace. Armado praises Moth's mathematical figure of the dancing horse (I, ii, 57) with the words, "A most fine figure" which Moth caps in the next line with the pun, " T o prove you a cipher," Nashe (Have with You, iii, 120) used the same pun in a gibe, "Rhetorical figure? and if I had a hundred sonnes, I had rather have them disfigur'd & keep at home as cyphers, than send them to schoole to learn to figure after that order." Armado, for all his parade of soldiership and military knowledge, 6 betrayed, when brought to the test in the last of the play by the courtiers who tried to bring about a contest between him and Costard, an extreme reluctance to fight. Early in the play (I, 228-9) cowardice is announced as an object of satire by Costard's capping Navarre's "Peace!" with "Be to me and every man that dares not fight." Nashe (Strange Newes, i, 263) had used the phrase, "Or be sworne true servant to cowardize and patience," and (Have with You, iii 134) had referred to Harvey's threats against him and to the fact that when the two were lodged in the same inn at Cambridge, Harvey made no attempt to meet him and carry out the threats. Armado's lines (I, ii, 187), "Adieu valor! Rust rapier! Be still drum," are evidently a burlesque farewell and are to be expected to contain a hit. The first two phrases have a relation to Nashe's account (Have with You, iii, 99 f.) of Harvey's imprisonment, his refusal at first to surrender his weapons, his drawing his dagger on the jailer's wife, and his final reluctant disarming. "Be still, d r u m " would remind one versed in the quarrel of Harvey's (Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 239-40) address to Nashe as "Tom D r u m " and his threat (Newe Letter, i, 283) to thump Nashe like a drum of Flush5 To be gathered from phrases in Act I, Scene ii, his blustering stanza at the end of his letter to Jaquenetta as read in Act IV, Scene i, and his calling himself a soldier in Act V, Scene i.

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ing. Even the pun on "French brawl" and "brawling in French" (III,i, 8-9) sounds reminiscent of Harvey's insistence (Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 32) that he did not love brawls. Armado's fine show is all front. At the time of the contest the courtiers urge upon him and Costard, he refuses to fight in his shirt (V, iii, 711) and explains his refusal on the ground that he has no shirt, that he goes woolward for penance (V, iii, 716-7). Nashe (Have with You, iii, 7) said that Harvey had been caused to do penance and wear hair-cloth for his sins, and (Have with You, iii, 73-74) he ridiculed in detail the scantiness of Harvey's wardrobe. Boyet (V, iii, 718-21) explains Armado's shirtless and woolward condition as "enjoined him in Rome for want of linen" and adds, "since when, I'll be sworne, he wore none but a dish-clout of Jaquenetta's." Harvey (Newe Letter, i, 281) spoke of a dish-clout of the excellent gentlewoman. Nashe (Have with You, iii, 54) in his ridicule of Harvey's person included "the contemptiblest world's dishclout for a Relique." Perhaps as a result of his poverty, as indicated by his wardrobe, Armado is stingy. The pun on crosses (I, ii, 33 and 35), " I love not to be crossed" and "Crosses love not him" reflects both poverty and stinginess. Nashe (Have with You, iii, 75) taunted Harvey with his poverty and parsimony, and made the same pun, "it were a great deale better for him if he were not free but crost soundly & committed prisoner to the Tower, where, perhaps once in his life, he might be brought to look upon the Queene's coine in the m y n t . " Armado tips Costard three farthings (III, i, 138), but Biron tips him (III, i, 172) one shilling. In giving the gratuity, Armado says, "There is remuneration; for the best ward of mine honour is the rewarding of my dependants." Time and again (Have with You, iii, 71, 73, 88, 90) Nashe referred to Harvey's poverty, stinginess, and failure to pay his debts, especially the wages due his servants. According to Nashe Harvey enticed

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away from the publisher Wolfe a young page, kept him nearly a year, and then discharged him near the end of the year on the ground of inefficiency, which Nashe insisted was only a subterfuge to avoid paying wages. Also Nashe (Have with You, iii, 91), spoke of Harvey's saying in conversation, "remuneration of gratuities." On his visit to Holofernes to arrange for the entertainment, Armado asks that the matter be kept secret, gives the impression that he is sharing with Holofernes the King's confidence, and in the early part of the scene (V, i, 100 f.) seems about to tell more secrets but to abandon them as if after all they are of slight importance. This light regard for sanctity of confidence is anticipated by Costard's "Of other men's secrets" (I, i, 232). Harvey had brought out his earliest English publications anonymously. In them he had printed Spenser's private letters to him. Thus he managed to inform the public of his intimacy with Spenser. Taunted with such betrayal of privacy, he replied (Foure Letters, i, 178 and 180), "Letters may be privately written that would not be publicly divulged" and "many communications and writings may secretlie pass betweene such, even for an exercise of speech and style, that are not otherwise convenient to be disclosed." Nashe, because of this, had said of Harvey (Have with You iii, 116) t h a t he would "blab everie light speech they uttered to him in private." Some lines of the play relate to peculiarities of person or habit, and echo gibes that Nashe had made against Harvey. For instance, in his letter to Navarre, Armado uses the phrase (I, i, 236), "as I betook myself to walk." Nashe (Have with You, iii, 68) ridiculed Harvey for walking at Cambridge with his gown held up to show his legs. Again, Jaquenetta's "with that face" (I, ii, 145), a cant phrase of the time, tallies with Nashe's jests (Have with You, iii, 73, 93) about Harvey's face. Armado in his bragging to Holofernes says of

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Navarre (V, i, 166), "it will please his Grace, by the world, sometimes to lean upon my poor shoulder, and with his royal finger thus, to dally with my excrement, with my mustachio." Harvey (Newe Letter, ii, 291) wrote, "Dalliance in the sagest and highest causes is an absurdity." Nashe (Strange Newes, i, 278) in teasing Harvey made a point of "A well pruned pair of mustachios" and in the burlesque figure of Harvey printed in Have with You showed a prominent mustache. Costard's hankering to buy carnation ribbon with his petty tip from Armado (III, i, 146) echoes one of the most cruel jests Nashe cracked at Harvey's expense. Harvey's desire to be in fashion, he insisted (Have with You, iii, 54), was so great that when Englishmen adopted the Italian fashion of tying carnation ribbons on horses' tails, Harvey thought of dyeing his beard carnation. Even the "extemporal epitaph" (IV, ii, 151) of Holofernes, though most likely proper to the character of Holofernes, has a parallel in Nashe's gibes at Harvey (Have with You, iii, 86) for extemporal versifying on any and all subjects and occasions. One would expect that any satire of Gabriel Harvey would sooner or later allude to his attack on the dead Robert Greene. Such an allusion occurs in the play. It is introduced by Moth's reply, "Of the sea-water green sir," to Armado's question, "Of what complexion?" (I, ii, 86-87), and made more certain by the phrase "Green wit" six lines later. Harvey (Foure Letters, i, 156) wrote of Greene, "Greene (although pitifully blasted & how woefully faded?) still flourisheth in the memory of some green wits," and in one of his abusive addresses to Nashe in Pierce's Supererogation had written "according to thy green wit." The allusion is renewed in Armado's (V, iii, 667) "beat not the bones of the buried," which echoes Nashe's (Strange Newes, i, 268) " N o dead man he spareth" and (Have with You, iii, 87-88) "he would burst, to take vengeance, not only on the living but the dead also."

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47

The word 'prick' contains another hit. The word is introduced in the lines "as my ever-esteemed duty pricks me on" (I, i, 268-9), "too hard for you at pricks" (IV, i, 140), and "The preyful princess pierc'd and prick'd a pretty pleasing pricket" (IV, ii, 59). As used in the first example it is a common Elizabethan term. Harvey (Foure Letters, i, 167, 176, 179) said that his friends pricked him forward and that his tender regard for his father and brothers urged him to write. But Harvey was inordinately fond of the word and used it in many combinations, one of which the chastity of the printed page forbids repeating here. Harvey used it chastely enough but Nashe seized upon it (Have with You, iii, 129) and twitted him obscenely with the ribald interpretation it made possible. The playwright has skilfully insinuated it into the third example, which is a burlesque even to repeating the alliterations of the line, "A Porch of Paynim Pilfryes, Pestred with Prayses," which had been bandied between the two (Strange Newes, i, 296, and Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 276). The playwright warns of the hit beforehand by Nathaniel's reply (IV, ii, 55-56) to the offer of Holofernes to recite his extemporal epitaph, "so it shall please you to abrogate scurrility." Harvey (Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 293), in an apostrophe, wrote "correct the mandrake of scurrility with the myrrhe of curtesie or the saffron of temperance." It is to be noted also that the playwright wove into his nonsense the word 'pierce' that had appeared in the titles of pamphlets by Nashe and Harvey both. The play goes beyond ribaldry to an open charge of lechery. Towards the close, Costard, misinterpreting the lines, "This Hector far surmounted Hannibal" (V, iii, 676-688), as revealing misconduct, accuses Armado of being the father of Jaquenetta's unborn child. Nashe (Have with You, iii, 67, 99, 118) actually charged Gabriel Harvey with incontinence, giving names, and extended his charge (Have with You, iii, 121)

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to Gabriel's brother Richard as if to imply that the vice was characteristic of the family. In addition to these passages that have been grouped around certain qualities of character or appearance, other passages in the play reflect various passages in the pamphlets For instance, the lines, " I t is not for prisoners to be too silent in their words; and therefore I will say nothing. I thank God I have as little patience as another man, and therefore I can be quiet" (I, ii, 168-71), seem at first sight only another group of Costard's blunders. Besides the hit at Harvey's alleged imprisonment, of which Nashe (Have with You, iii, 115, 145) made so much, they are an ironical distortion of Harvey's own praise of himself: (Foure Letters, 166, 176, 205, 222, 226), " I continue my accustomed simplicity to answer vanity with silence," "Patience hath trained me," "Even actions of Silence and Patience have been brought against me," "having wedded myself to private study and devoted myself to public quietness"; (Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 32, 84, 134, 262) " I could still vow silence in brawls," "Profess patience in wrongs," "in patience am to digest the one with moderation," "when he is urged to speak or be suspected for silence," "might it please his confuting Aship by his honourable permission to suffer one to rest in quiet." The "allusion . . . collusion . . . pollusion" passage in the play (IV, ii, 42-48) is difficult to understand but inspection shows that it deliberately works up to 'pollusion' as a point or climax. Such care justifies suspicion of an intended hit. Perhaps it is to be found in Nashe's accusation (Strange Newes, i, 278), "never pollutedest thyself with any plaistrie or dawbing of Doctourship." Armado's "base minnow of thy mirth" (I, i, 251) recalls Nashe's account (Have with You, iii, 80) of the Cambridge plays ridiculing the Harvey brothers, and also his words "another show of the little minnow his brother." Moth's call-

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ing Armado "tough senior" (II, i, 10) sounds like a gibe at Harvey's (Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 227) deriding young men who climb into print by the fall of their seniors. The way the dialogue leads up to Armado's "In thy condign praise" (II, i, 27) suggests a hit in 'condign.' Harvey (Foure Letters, i, 310) wrote, "cannot eyther condignly praise the valourous seede of the one; or sufficiently blesse the fruitful wombe of the other." 'Reprobate' in Armado's "reprobate thought of it" (I, ii, 63) was a frequent enough word to escape suspicion here. But Harvey in Pierce's Supererogation spoke of Piers Penniless's reprobate supplication to the Divell, and Nashe (Have with You, iii, 57) retorted by calling 'reprobate' a periphrasis for 'rope-maker,' a thrust at the trade of Harvey's father and at Harvey's own social extraction. So, too, the use of "praise an eel" (I, ii, 28) and the play on the word when so many other phrases would have sufficed, arouse suspicion. Harvey (Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 56) used the phrase "Eel of Ely" in disparaging Nashe's style. Nashe retorted (Have with You, iii, 58) with "a salt eele, in resemblance of a rope's end" where he combined the word with 'rope's end' which furnished another gibe at Harvey's position as the son of a tradesman, a "rope-maker." The use of 'pathetical' in Armado's jesting with Moth (I, ii, 103) and Costard's "pathetical nit" (IV, i, 150) echoes Harvey's use of the word in "pathetical figure of Pottyposis" (Three Letters, i, 48), "pathetical invectives" (Foure Letters, i, 165) "pathetical notion" (Foure Letters, i, 216), and "pathetical veine" (Newe Letter, i, 273), and Nashe's jest (Strange Newes, i, 315) that he had tried to assemble Harvey's Foure Letters into a pathetical posie. The hit in 'day-woman' (I, ii, 136) requires explanation. As used in the play the word means 'dairy-woman,' and is applied to Jaquenetta. In the final scene of the play, as has been shown, Costard accuses Armado of being Jaquenetta's

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p a r a m o u r . Nashe (Strange Newes, i, 299) called H a r v e y a m o n g other things 'butter-whore.' In Pierce's Supererogation H a r v e y took this up, punned on the word, spoke of his milkmaid's style, a n d referred to himself as a milkmaid (Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 45), " I will not exchange m y milkmaid's Irony for his D r a f f m a i d ' s assery." "Devise, w i t " (I, ii, 190) seems to be an ironical echo of H a r v e y ' s (Newe L e t t e r , i, 261) " t h e gallantest Phisique t h a t nature h a t h affourded, wit devised, or m a g n a n i m i t y practised." 'Festin a t e l y ' ( I I I , i, 15) is used by Shakespeare only in Love's L a b o u r ' s Lost. I t echoes an inkhorn verb Nashe used (Have with You, iii, 91) in writing of Harvey, " H e would accelerate a n d festinate his procrastinating ministers and commissaries in the country, b y Letters as expedite as could b e . " The words "some enigma, some riddle" ( I I I , i, 75) fit so naturally into the dialogue as to escape suspicion. B u t N a s h e called H a r v e y (Have with You, iii, 34) "only pure Orator in senseless riddles" a n d earlier (Have with You, iii, 15) h a d called Lichfield "aenigmaticall linguist," a phrase which he said in the margin was a rag he borrowed from H a r v e y ' s dunghill. " D r u n k i n k " (IV, ii, 27) m a y have been a current locution of the day. Nashe, however, used it (Have with You, iii, 55), " t h o u g h it drink some i n k . " T h e "satis quod sufficit" of Holofernes (V, i, 1) recalls H a r v e y ' s (Foure Letters, i, 212) " E n o u g h , to any is inough; to some, overmuch." Costard's remark to M o t h ( V , i , 4 3 ) , " l marvel t h y m a s t e r h a t h n o t eaten thee for a w o r d " echoes H a r v e y ' s query (Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 113) why Nashe had not dipped a sop in Rhenish wine, named it Gabriel and devoured it up, or called a pickled herring Richard and swallowed it down with a stomach. Costard's blunder of "ad dunghill" for "ad unguem" (V, i, 80) contains another hit. H a r v e y (Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 229-30) said t h a t Nashe bustled for the frank tenement of a dunghill. Nashe retorted (Have with You, iii, 15) in a mar-

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ginal note by explaining "aenigmaticall linguist" as a rag borrowed from Harvey's dunghill. "Singuled from the barbarous" (V, i, 86) seems reminiscent of Nashe's taunting Harvey (Have with You, iii, 50) with writing, Singular are these three, John, Richard, Gabriel Harvey, For logique, Philosophie, Rhetorique, Astronomie. "A shrewd unhappy gallows" (V, ii, 12) brings to mind the excellent gentlewoman's (Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 17) question about Nashe, "Shall Boy the gibbet be of writers all?" and Harvey's calling Nashe (Newe Letter, i, 282) "the gallows of his companions." Moth's "if any of the audience hiss" (V, i, 144-5) may be aimed at Nashe's comment (Strange Newes, i, 296) on Harvey's "Enterlude of Epistles that was hist at." The list of correspondences is much longer. Many of them, however, are of such nature that one not fresh from a close study of the play and pamphlets together would think them accidental. And not a few of them might be accidental. One looking for light in a dark woods often mistakes fox-fire. But this study has presented sufficient resemblances, even when discounted, to make when put together a composite clearer in outline and more definite in content than any yet proposed, and to show that there exists between the play and the pamphlets an unmistakable relation. Dramatic satire of the Harveys was no new thing in 1596. Nashe in Have with You refers to the Cambridge plays satirizing the brothers. Huanebango in Peele's Old Wives' Tale, which was printed in 1595, has been accepted as a satire of Gabriel Harvey.

CHAPTER

V

T H E S I G N I F I C A N C E OF T H E ECHOES A relationship between Love's Labour's Lost and the Nashe-Harvey quarrel once revealed, the significance of it demands interpretation. This in turn necessitates some familiarity with the course of the quarrel. The quarrel itself took distinct shape in 1592, but it seems the outgrowth of earlier quarrels and animosities. The Martin Marprelate controversy raged in 1589. In that year Nashe, recently come to town and launched upon his career, contributed to Greene's Menaphon a Preface, in which, according to the habit of young men just breaking into print, he had spoken severely of contemporary writers. Richard Harvey, who had already attacked the anti-Martinist writers, published in 1590 The Lamb of God, in which without much relevancy he rebuked Nashe for "peremptorily censuring his betters, at pleasure, Poets, Orators, Polihistors, Lawyers, and whome not? and making as much and as little of every man as himself listeth." Robert Greene, who had been one of the anti-Martinist writers, inserted into his Quip for an Upstart Courtier in 1592 an attack on all the Harveys, Gabriel, John, and Richard. 1 Whatever motives impelled Greene, Nashe for his own part attacked Richard Harvey in Piers Penniless, which was licensed on August 8 and issued, according to ' The passage was withdrawn after the first printing, and the only knowledge of it came from Nashe's characterization of it. At last, however, a copy in the Huntingdon Library was found to contain it. The passage itself is quoted in G. B. Harrison's, Shakespeare's Fellows, London,

1923.

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S3

McKerrow, on September 1, 1592. Robert Greene died on September 2 or 3. In the meantime Gabriel Harvey had come to London towards the end of August on business connected with John Harvey's estate and a suit with John Harvey's widow. There he began the composition of Foure Letters. The first of the letters, an introduction, is dated August 29. The second, dated September 5, contains the notorious attack on the dead Robert Greene. In it Harvey made no mention of Piers Penniless but referred to Nashe as a "proper young man if advised in time." Apparently he had not seen Piers Penniless then, but he must have come across it immediately thereafter, for in the third letter, dated September 8 and 9, he referred to it and attacked. T h a t he was not deeply offended by it is evidenced by the fact that in the fourth letter, dated, September 11 and 12, he assured Piers Penniless (Nashe) of his readiness to make friends if he would mend his manners. Harvey's readiness to make friends did not appeal to Nashe. Harvey's tone had been patronizing. The attack on the dead Greene, moreover, was outrageous. Nashe later insisted that he had never been intimate with Greene. His resentment of Harvey's patronizing, however, as well as of the breach of the amenities in the attack on a dead man, drove him on to the writing of Strange Newes, which was licensed in January, 1592-3 and probably issued in February. The battle was now joined. Harvey replied in Pierce's Supererogation, which was off the press in September, 1593, and A Newe Letter in October, 1593. After publishing Strange Newes early in 1593, Nashe apparently regretted his own attack, for in the Epistle Dedicatory to Christ's Tears over Jerusalem, published late in September, 1593, he made an apology. This did not come to Harvey's attention before the publication of Pierce's Supererogation and A Newe Letter, or Harvey deliberately ignored it. Nashe withdrew it from the second edition of Christ's Tears over Jerusalem. There the

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matter rested until 1596 when Nashe, urged on, as he said, by his friends to reply, published Have with You to Saffron Waiden. In 1597 appeared The Trimming of Thomas Nashe, but it is usually supposed to come from some hand other than Harvey's. On June 1, 1599, an official order of Whitgift and Bancroft suppressing several publications provided " t h a t all Nashes bookes and Doctor Harveys bookes be taken wheresoever they may be found and that none of theire bookes be ever printed hereafter." So ended the quarrel. The chief antagonists were Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey, but Robert Greene, alive and dead, had entered into it. P a r t of Harvey's attack in Pierce's Supererogation had been directed against John Lyly, who in his tract Pap with a Hatchet had ridiculed Harvey's disquisition on earthquakes in Three Letters. No great stretch of credulity is necessary to believe Nashe's statement that Lyly was one of those who had urged him to the reply in Have with You. The quarrel lasted, then, from 1592 to 1596. At what time was the play written? Obviously a line in the play is later than the passage it echoes. But this line may be an interpolation later than the episode containing it, or the episode itself may be later than the original play, the result of a revision such as the title page of the first edition of Love's Labour's Lost plainly declares was made. Examination of the play shows that the echo-lines are too frequent and too intimately woven into the texture to be interpolations, and that the episodes are too closely built into the plot flow to be additions. If these episodes were not contained in the original play, the close connection in the extant version could result only from a revision so thorough as to constitute really a new play. T h a t this is true will be evident from a study of the lines in the play arranged in sequence with the echoed passages from the pamphlets, as is printed in the appendix to this mono-

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graph. The echoes begin with "a mint of phrases" at line 166 of Act I, Scene 1, in a long sequence of rhyme composed of couplets, triplets, quatrains, and V. A. stanzas. There are five more echoes in the sequence, which extends to line 181, not counting the "knight from tawny Spain" at line 163, which is not listed. It seemed too vague to begin the list, but one familiar with the material sees in it a possible echo of Nashe's calling Harvey 'Don Diego' in Strange Newes, which may have inspired the playwright to make his caricature a Spaniard. The other six lines echo Have with You of 1596. The speech of the King which contains all but the last of these echoes opens with a line ending in 'haunted.' This line is the first of a quatrain, yet 'haunted' rhymes with 'granted' at the end of the preceding line so as to yoke the two in a metrical sequence which extends from the last excerpt from the King's edict ending at line 133. The flow of the thought content, furthermore, shows that the entire passage from line 48 to the entrance of Dull and Costard at line 182 forms a unit; the verse form, also, makes these lines a structural unit. The entire passage, in fact, is so much a unit of metrics and content that it must be considered a genuine whole. The echoes belong naturally to it and therefore indicate that the complete passage is later than the material echoed, that is, later than the publication of Have with You in 1596. Of the forty-eight lines preceding this rhyme sequence the first ten are in blank verse of such maturity that they have been accepted as belonging to Shakespeare's revision mentioned in the title-page. The next thirty-six lines are mainly in blank verse also, and the last two make a couplet. It might be urged that this patch of blank verse would be anomalous in a passage that is for the most part rhymed. But it could well be noted in reply that Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Midsummer Night's Dream, the other plays containing a high percentage of rhyme, are introduced by blank

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verse scenes, though the first two lines of Comedy of Errors make a couplet. That part of Act I, Scene 1, which follows the entrance of Costard and Dull is written in prose except four lines near the end. Here, too, the echoes come mainly from Have with You and date the passage 1596. In spite of the difference of style, then, the whole of Act I, Scene 1, dates 1596 and makes a plot composite notwithstanding the effort to separate the two parts and assign the rhyme to a hypothetical early version. The combination of verse and prose is not unusual with Shakespeare who frequently made just this distinction in the same scene between the serious and the light part of the play or between the lower class of characters on the one hand and the higher on the other. Costard, then, was in the play from the beginning. Indeed, he is the most essential figure in the fable, for his blunder in confusing the letters resolves the plot complication and provides the turn in events by which the gentlemen argue themselves out of their vows and determine to woo the ladies. The second scene of this first act contains little plot material except Dull's delivery of Costard to Armado and taking Jaquenetta away from Armado to serve as dairy woman in the park. The bulk of the scene is nothing but jesting between Armado and Moth, which sounds like the dialogue between the interlocutor and the end-man in a blackface minstrel show. Because of its almost negligible plot content, the scene has been considered an addition to the original play. Even so, it must have been composed as a whole, for the hits are woven into it so closely that they cannot be detached as interpolations. But since most of them echo Have with You of 1596 and some of them are the most telling in the whole play, and since the separation of Armado and Jaquenetta leads to Armado's letter to her, Costard's delivery of the wrong letter to her, and eventually to the unmasking of Biron, there seems

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slight necessity for considering it an addition. Moreover, it introduces Moth, who must have been in the play from the beginning, for Costard at the end of Act IV, Scene 1, refers to Armado's being accompanied by a page. As Costard comes into this scene to deliver what he thinks is Biron's letter and as Biron's writing the letter is an important detail of the plot and the miscarriage of the letters here provides the dramatic forewarning of the audience, Act IV, Scene 1 is obviously a part of the original play. So this second scene of Act I then belongs to the original play and yet dates no earlier than 1596. The echoes begin again in Act III, which consists of only one scene. The first part is written in prose and doggerel, and extends to the departure of Costard to deliver the letters of Armado and Biron. The second part, much shorter than the first, contains Biron's soliloquy on the strangeness of his being in love, and is written in blank verse, largely end-stopped. The first part is dated 1596 by "festinately," "the hobbyhorse is forgot," "the best ward of my honour is the rewarding of my dependents," "some enigma, some riddle," and "carnation ribbon," all echoes of Have with You. The presence of end-stopped lines, usually considered a mark of Shakespeare's earlier work, might give reason for considering the soliloquy a remnant of that hypothetical earlier play, but even here Have with You intrudes in "Dread prince of plackets, king of codpieces." This line is an integral part of the soliloquy and dates the whole of it 1596. So, then, Act III, like Act I, dates 1596. The phrases, "I remember the style," "a phantasime, a monarcho," "one that makes sport," and "too hard for you at pricks," echoes of Have with You, date the first scene of Act IV as 1596. "What vane, what weathercock?" echoes Strange Newes of 1593, but as the mixture of echoes throughout the play shows that they were all made at the same time, this line only adds to the evidence for 1596. All six of the

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echoes, moreover, occur in doggerel, a fact which shows that Shakespeare wrote doggerel as well as couplets, triplets, quatrains, and V. A. stanzas as late as 1596. Partisans of the theory of an early date for the play have accepted the second scene of Act I V as a piece of late composition despite the doggerel contained in it. The passage, "of piercing a hogshead," gave the original clue to the relationship between the play and the quarrel, but since the echoes are due to one writing, it dates the scene 1596. The other echoes, as shown by the sequence in the appendix, are sufficiently numerous to prove that the scene as it now stands is a whole and not a composite of late interpolations. Nathaniel and Holofernes, it is true, have little to do in the play, only the slightest connection with the plot. But this scene contains the second step that leads to the discovery of Biron's treachery, Jacquenetta's bringing the letter to the schoolmaster for reading and his sending her directly to the King. The characters later provide entertainment for the court. Some such scene stood at this point in the play no matter how the characters were named. 2 Some change seems to have been made in this scene during revision, for Biron's poem contains no silent letters or elided syllables, though Holofernes' criticism of Nathaniel's reading calls for such, "You find not the apostrophas and so miss the accent." The echoes continue in the first scene of Act V, which "he draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument," " i t insinuateth me of insanie," "singuled from the barbarous," and "the King . . . is my familiar" show 1 Changing the names of the characters may account for the confusion of speech-headings in the printed versions. Or if one applies something like the theory used in discriminating between the good and the bad quartos, one might explain the confusion by supposing that an actor who played, say, Nathaniel in the first presentation, played Holofernes at court, and that the sides were consequently confused.

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to be later than Have with You of 1596. This scene has been suspected for late composition, especially by those who believe Holofernes and Nathaniel to have been added to the play for presentation before the Queen. But as the scene in which they first appear belongs intimately to the plot, slight as it is, this first scene of Act V was perhaps written at the same time as the second scene of Act IV. It prepares, moreover, for the anti-masque in the next scene. Containing as it does references to Nashe's charging Harvey with incontinence, to Harvey's abuse of the dead Robert Greene, and to the dish-clout of the "excellent gentlewoman," the antimasque was a part of the original design of the satire. It thus affords a second reason for believing that this first scene of Act V was a part of the original play. The second scene of Act V is concerned chiefly with the court circle and contains few echoes. Those, however, date as 1596 the anti-masque, in which they occur. This anti-masque follows the Russian Masque and the dialogue after the return of the gentlemen in their proper persons. This Russian Masque and the dialogue after the return, as has been shown, date later than the Gray's Inn Revels of February, 1595. Since Moth has a speech in the Russian Masque and is at the same time an important figure in the earlier echo scenes and was in the earliest form of the play, the Russian Masque and the dialogue after the return, then, date 1596. The opening of the scene, since it contains no clear evidence of late composition and since it prepares for the Russian Masque should, therefore, be considered as composed at the same time with it and a part of the original play. What follows the entrance of Mercade and the interruption of the quarrel between Armado and Costard may well be a part of Shakespeare's revision and augmentation. What stood at this place in the original is hard to determine. Mercade's announcement of the death of the King of France has no parallel in actual history which the

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play might reflect. If it is any more than simply a detail of the playwright's fable it has a significance hard to determine. The King's lines, The extreme parts of time extremely forms All causes to the purpose of his speed And often, at his very loose, decides That which long process could not arbitrate, might reflect the capture of Calais by the Spaniards on April 15, 1596, while Elizabeth and Henry were arguing about its being turned over to the English as a haven of retreat. Essex had received instructions dated April 13, 1596, that Calais must be delivered to the Queen to be held until the debts were paid. It is to be remembered that in the play the Princess visited Navarre on the matter of the payment of a debt and that in the interpretation of that part of the play it was suggested that Aquitaine might represent Calais. If the interpretation had any validity there, it gives some explanation to the lines here if they are taken as referring to the fall of Calais. The insistence of the Princess that she cannot consider matrimony for a year and a day may reflect Elizabeth's continued reluctance to grant Henry's various requests. Shortly after the fall of Calais Henry sent representatives to England to negotiate a treaty with Elizabeth. The treaty was actually signed on May 14, 1596. This part of the play may well have been written after the arrival of Henry's emissaries. I t is a minor detail but worth noting inasmuch as Austin K. Gray made so much of the al fresco setting of the play, that during the treaty conferences the French representatives were lodged in summer houses in the park at Greenwich. Hence the play in its very setting could reflect the conference of 1596 as well as it could reflect Elizabeth's visit to Tichfield House in 1591. At the time of the revival for court performance the original lines of this part of the play may have lost sufficient of their timely savour to warrant Shakespeare's rewriting

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them in vaguer terms. Biron's abandonment of fine language may reflect Shakespeare's notion that when Henry IV gave up "fair terms" and talked business he had a chance to make some headway with Elizabeth. This review of the echo sections of the play has been made with the assumption that the student is following the lineand-echo sequence in the appendix. He should be reminded that an earlier section of this monograph showed that the three large rhyme-sections of the play are the work of the same hand and that he has been trusted to find for himself what echoes belong in these rhyme-sections. Hence, the metrical test should go along hand in hand with the echo test. Two parts of the play have been omitted from this echo review, for the reason that they do not contain echoes strong enough for notice, if any at all. They are the third scene of Act IV and the whole of Act II, which contains but a single scene. The relation of Act II to affairs in England and France has already been shown to warrant a probable date of 1596. This probability becomes stronger when the material in the act is placed in its proper relation to the rest of the play. It was obviously a part of the original design and dates with it. In fact, the gibe about "welcome to the wide fields" would gain additional piquancy, for, besides echoing Queen Elizabeth's protest against failure to obtain a haven of retreat, it would be an ironical reminder of the way the tables were turned in 1596 by holding the treaty negotiations in the summerhouses of the park at Greenwich instead of in the palace itself. The third scene of Act IV contains little of assistance in the dating. The events in it deal with the love affairs of the King and his attendants, and lead to their resolutions to circumvent their oaths. It begins with a soliloquy of Biron who says in part, "Well, 'set thee down, sorrow!' for so they say the fool said." Now, Costard had ended Act I with the words,

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"sit thee down sorrow." Biron's use of the words justify the belief in a connection with Costard's and point to the writing of his speech later than Costard's. Furthermore, Giles Fletcher in Rising to the Crown of Richard III, published 1593, had written, "Sorrow sit down and helpe my muse to sing," and Nicholas Breton, in An Epitaph on the Death of a Noble Gentlewoman, licensed 1594, wrote, "Sorrow come sit thee down and sigh and sob thy fill." Neither poet would have used the phrase thus seriously after it had been so thoroughly spoofed as in this play. Further along in the same scene Biron has much to say of the education to be derived from women's eyes. The resemblance of these lines to Southwell's St. Peter's Complaint, printed in 1595, has been noted but the idea of any connection between his poem and the play gained little or no headway. But taken along with other relations shown in this monograph, the idea assumes validity and so indicates a date as late as 1595, if not later, for this scene.3 Moreover the metrical analysis has shown that the same hand wrote this scene as wrote the other long rhymed passages, which have been shown to date 1596. Lastly, since the events in this scene fit so naturally into the plot, the original form of it, for revision is conceded, must have been part of the original plan. Act IV, Scene iii, then, along with the rest of the play dates 1596. A date for composition arrived at, the identification of the characters, since the play proves to be a satire of contemporary events and people, remains. Armado, it is obvious, is a caricature of Gabriel Harvey. Jaquenetta is a burlesque of Harvey's fictitious "gentlewoman" who he pretended in * It is true that Southwell's poem may have circulated in manuscript before publication. But Love's Labour's Lost was written for a public which was expected to recognize echoes. If there is any connection between the play and the poem, the play must have been written after the public had a chance to know the poem.

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Pierce's Supererogation was his friend and had contributed some of the poems he prefixed to that pamphlet. Costard, described as "big-boned", fits so well Nashe's description of Harvey's serving-man, whom Nashe called John-a-Droynes, that Costard may be a burlesque figure representing him as an attendant of Harvey. Moth has been identified as Nashe himself, and the editors of the New Cambridge Edition of Shakespeare's Plays go so far as to see in the name itself an anagram for Thom as an abbreviation of Thomas. This may be true, but they should present evidence that Thom. instead of Thos. or Tho. was the Elizabethan abbreviation of Thomas. Those who doubt that a play satirizing Nashe's opponent would include a representation of Nashe himself, though there is nothing of ridicule or mischievous burlesque in the figure of Moth, may see in him merely a caricature of the page Nashe accused Harvey of enticing from Wolfe the publisher. For the original of Holofernes many candidates have been proposed, but none of them has been widely accepted. Since they are too numerous to be discussed here, consideration of the various candidates has been relegated to an appendix. The original of Holofernes is still to seek. Perhaps, after all, the figure is only a burlesque of Harvey's academic profession just as Armado is a burlesque of his social pretensions. The identification of Nathaniel waits upon the identification of Holofernes. Dull seems to be only Dull. It is possible that the playwright introduced into the play a constable (Dull) making an arrest (of Costard) in order to suggest in this backhanded way the alleged arrest and imprisonment of Harvey and his release by the payment of the costs by another man of the Harvey name but not of the kindred. The King of Navarre, Longaville, Biron, and Dumain represent Henry IV of France and the dukes of Longueville, Biron, and Mayenne. The name Mercade is sometimes explained as derived from the Duke of Mercoeur, but as Mer-

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cade's part is so brief, there is slight need to hunt an original for the character. The Princess of France reflects Queen Elizabeth. Maria, Katherine, and Rosaline seem only characters of the playwright's fable and to be no part of his personal satire. Investigators anxious to establish a connection between Love's Labour's Lost and Shakespeare's imagined attachment to the political fortunes of the Essex-Southampton faction have assumed, with no genuine evidence, that Boyet is a satirical portrait of Burghley. As yet no proof has been shown that any detail in the playwright's description of Boyet (V, ii, 315 f.) fits Burghley. If Boyet's line, "Proud of employment willingly I go," refers to Elizabeth's difficulty in finding an Ambassador to France in the middle of 1596, the student has his choice among those to whom she offered the post. If the student can find that one of them had "teeth as white as whales bone" at a time when foreign visitors commented on the general blackness of English teeth, he may find a man who fits also the other details in Biron's scornful characterization. The introduction of a satirical caricature of Gabriel Harvey into a fable containing a representation of the King of France and the Queen of England might, at first notice, demand explanation. Investigation, however, reveals some warrant. Gabriel Harvey had attended the court when Queen Elizabeth visited Sir Thomas Smith at Audley End in 1579, and, according to Nashe, had conducted himself in a way to incite ridicule though he had hoped to find a patron. In fact, he wrote a Latin poem, Gratulationes Waldenses, for the occasion, and this may be what the playwright had in mind for Holofernes' extemporal epitaph on the killing of the deer by the Princess. As Harvey was ridiculous at the court of Elizabeth, so Armado plays a ridiculous part before the Princess of France. As for the connection with the King of Navarre in the play, some justification for such detail in the fable exists

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in Harvey's praise (Pierce's Supererogation, iii, 103) of Henry IV, who had been the patron of DuBartas, "Report shining Sunne, the dayes-worke of the King: and burning candle, relate his nightes-studdy." In these last words may be the genesis of the Academe of Navarre in the play, a burlesque on the part of the dramatist. The date of 1596 for the composition of the play will prove unwelcome to many who feel obliged to account in some way for the supposed early years of Shakespeare's dramatic activity, and, relying on the rhyme-test and the Russian Masque, have assigned Love's Labour's Lost to that period. The interpretation of the fable as a composite satire of the Nashe-Harvey quarrel and of relations between France and England down to 1596 will encounter strong opposition on the part of those who have interpreted the play to warrant their confidence in Shakespeare's intimacy with the EssexSouthampton coterie and his warm partisanship in behalf of its political intrigues. Both groups of scholars, however, are cordially invited to extend to this later date and the interpretation of the fable here presented the same fair-minded and respectful attention they wish for their own theories. One of the first objections to be raised against the date of 1596 is the rhyme-test. The disagreement between the results of the rhyme-test and those of the other metrical tests has been known for some years but accepted as many people accept disagreeing tenets in their religious doctrine without finding a means to reconcile them. The metrical analysis of Love's Labour's Lost, made in a previous chapter, showed that the presence of the Venus and Adonis stanza brings the play into association with those plays with which the other metrical tests group it. The use of this stanza, then, provides the amendment necessary to the traditional rhyme-test for considering and dating this play.4 4

The honest scholar who is sceptical of these findings will before rejecting

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Belief in the close connection between Love's Labour's Lost and the Russian Embassy of 1584 dies hard. Henry David Gray, 6 for instance, is so firmly convinced of it that he refuses to date the original form of the play later than 1588. Just how aware the Elizabethan public could have been of Russia and Russians will become evident by reading Cheney's treatment of The Muscovy Company® in his history of Elizabeth's last years. The relation of the play to the Gray's Inn Revels of 1594-5 becomes more acceptable in the light of the information Cheney makes available. Henry David Gray, in the monograph previously cited, finds in the rhymed passages a difference in mastery and fulness of tone sufficient to justify his believing that the passages as they now stand contain work of two separate periods. Fullness of tone is a matter of esthetics. Appreciation of esthetic qualities is so much a matter of individual sensitiveness and susceptibility that one who embarks upon a discussion of them entrusts himself to a frail craft on poorly charted seas. General impressions, like generalizations, are unsafe and treacherous. The various metrical tests all indicate a period later than Gray assigns. Until some one defines and illustrates exactly what is meant by fullness of tone or the lack of it, and until he offers statistics showing the tone record of all the plays down to 1598, conclusions based on such alleged discrepancy must remain in the realm of conjecture, where they them plot for himself, as I did, the metrical scheme of all the plays down to 1598. The high cost of printing forbids including these metrical schemes in this study. 5 Gray, Henry David, The Original Version of "Love's Labour's Lost" with a conjecture as to "Love's Labour's Won." Leland Stanford Junior University Publications, University Series, 1918. • Cheney, Edward P., A History of England from the Defeat of the Armada to the Death of Elizabeth, 2 vols., 1926,1, 313 f. I had not had the good fortune to see this book when 1 gathered my own material on the Russian or Muscovy Company.

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will not suffer from loneliness. This discrepancy Gray notes may be due to a possibility later to be discussed. Another reason sometimes assigned for an early date is the attack on Euphuism the play is supposed to contain. In the process of transmission this has been taken to imply that the style of the play is Euphuistic and the presence of Euphuism in the play has become a matter of tradition that many take as accepted fact. In some of the bibliographies given to students Landmann 7 is cited for the Euphuism. But Landmannstates clearly that the styleof Love'sLabour's Lost isnot Euphuistic, that the peculiarities easily mistaken for Euphuism had been known to English style before Lyly, and that the attack on Euphuism is an indirect one contained in Biron's abjuration of "Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise." Euphuism as a literary style came practically to an end in 1590 but Edward Blount in 1632, though his word has since been doubted, declared that Elizabeth's courtiers continued to practise it in their speech. John Dickinson, however, tried to revive it as a literary style in 1594 with his Arisbas. Hence any mockery or satire of Euphuism in the play might be directed against this attempted revival of 1594 or the court circle's practice of it in speech. Weakness of characterization in Love's Labour's Lost has at times been urged as a reason for assigning it a very early date. Here again, as perhaps in the matter of fullness of tone, general impression has usurped the place of fact. Slightness of characterization has been mistaken for weakness. Candid examination of the play reveals instead of weakness indisputable firmness of outline. Slight as the characterization may be, there is about it no unsureness of touch; indeed, it comes from a hand that knows its craft. Longaville speaks only 65 or 66 lines, yet he appears as the man who quickly sums up ' Landmann, F. "Shakspere and Euphuism," Transactions oj the New Skakspere Society, 1880-85, II, 241 f.

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a situation and makes the suggestion what to do. What he says goes straight to the point at issue. Dumain speaks 85 lines. He is not so direct as Longaville, but he is concreteminded, a quality which makes him at the same time sentimental and foul-mouthed. The part of the King runs 312 lines. He is idealistic and hasty in adopting idealistic schemes without thinking them through. He has a sense of humor, and he is good-natured, for his bark is worse than his bite. Polite, courteous, and idealistic, he is, nevertheless, firm in intention and knows how to persist in it without giving too much offense. He is, however, prompt and ready in a decision to change matters once he is convinced that change is just or desirable. His tongue lacks the sharpness of the others, and in the scene just after the Russian Masque he is inclined to sentimentality. Of the men, however, Biron has the keenest and most alert intelligence, the readiest wit, and the greatest independence. All of them, even the King, acknowledge his supremacy of character by turning to him in a dilemma to show them the way out. His part runs 613 lines. No one of these characters, as a literary composition, shows the weakness or the conventional dummy outlines that mar the workmanship in the parts of Proteus and Valentine in spite of good work done at times in these parts. The characters of the women, however, contain the best workmanship on small scale. The longest, that of the Princess, runs only 278 lines, but all are maintained at a level of execution and conception far above the scolds, viragoes, shrews, and hystericals that include the Queen Elizabeth, Queen Margaret, Constance, Adriana, Eleanor, and Hermia of the earlier plays. Only in Julia, Luciana, and Helena were there traces of the conception and workmanship that could achieve these women with so few strokes, and then only traces. More than anything else that is not capable of mathematical demonstration this matter of characterization should

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indicate that Love's Labour's Lost is not an early play. Slightness of characterization, then, has been mistaken for weakness of characterization. The charge of thinness of plot, too, loses its significance on close investigation. The plot is thin. But thinness of plot is not proof of early workmanship. Of the earliest plays only Two Gentleman of Verona has a thin plot. Love's Labour's Lost, however, does not betray the dramaturgic weakness and fumbling of Two Gentlemen of Verona. In the latter the plot action does not get under way until far in the second act and then only with hesitating crudeness. It works up to the usual "big scene" in the third act and then meanders in the byways until the last few minutes of the play. There the playwright huddles together pell-mell all the material which should have been properly developed from the third act onward. Moreover, in order to present his thesis as to the greater validity of friendship between men over man's love for woman he makes Valentine surrender Sylvia to Proteus and in so doing tells a lie about human nature which even his own audience refused to believe. Furthermore, he expects the audience to take his word that Proteus is a decent fellow and not the scoundrel he seems instead of showing Proteus the unwilling and struggling victim of a fascination too powerful for him. There is none of this in Love's Labour's Lost. The plot complication, if not put into immediate action, is so vigorously foreshadowed by Biron's reminder of the approaching visit of the Princess that the spectator's interest is aroused and suspense is created immediately. The arrest of Costard for breach of the new law so shortly thereafter carries the story even further. True, the joke-cracking of Armado and Moth in the next part of the play delays the actual complication and the story halts elsewhere for a similar reason, but each scene of this kind contains at least one bit of action that carries the slender plot closer to its goal. Love's Labour's Lost,

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moreover, makes little pretense to extensive plot. It really should not be considered a play in the same sense in which, say, Merchant of Venice is to be considered a play, with a well-connected plot and action. The review of the echoes should have made clear that a large part of Love's Labour's Lost was not intended to have much connection with a welldeveloped story. It is really an Elizabethan equivalent of the modern revue, and its chief concern is not with a narrative plot but with the things ridiculed, parodied, mocked, or otherwise reflected. What in it resembles plot is merely a skeleton manufactured by the playwright to hang his gibes on, much like the series of episodes Ben Jonson invented in Every Man in His Humour and Every Man Out of His Humour as a framework for his satire. In its general lightness of tone and touch, Love's Labour's Lost evidences a strong family likeness to John Lyly's socalled court comedies. Because of this likeness, some have thought it written early, fresh from the example set by the actual performance of Lyly's plays. By the same token, Much Ado About Nothing, which has a scene of conversation between masked partners in a dance and other resemblances, should have an early date. It, moreover, is written largely in prose and therefore approaches more nearly the Lyly model. But the greater maturity shown in some parts of it, despite the staginess of Claudio's repudiation, mark it as later work. The material in Love's Labour's Lost does not afford the same opportunity for maturer touches. But it does not contain the complementary immaturity which should mark it, by contrast, early. Lightness is one thing, immaturity another. Granted the resemblance to Lyly's work, might not Shakespeare's sensitive receptivity explain composition of his play after the publication of Lyly's plays in the 1590's? And again, if Lyly's influence in style and structure is to be accounted for, might he not have had something to do with

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planning the original play as late as 1596? This idea will receive attention later on. If, then, the play was written in 1596, at what time in that year? Apparently after the publication of Have with You, but the exact date for that is not known. Probably after the fall of Calais before the Spaniards on April 15. Perhaps during the treaty negotiations, if the postponement of a year and a day refers to the course of the conference. But since the interval between April 15 and May 14 is rather brief for the composition of a whole play, maybe the postponement refers to the fact that Henry did not obtain all he asked and that aid was stipulated by years. Furthermore, a secret treaty signed at the same time provided that Henry would accept less than the public treaty gave him and would not ask more aid until the next year.® Though this secret treaty may have remained secret, knowledge of this proviso may have reached the dramatist through some of the usual channels by which secrets reach the light of day. It is possible, also, to see in Armado's fulsome address to Navarre in his first letter, "Great deputy, the welkin's vicegerent, and sole dominator of Navarre," a thrust at the fact that during the conference the French delegates brought up the matter of the French monarch's right of precedence over other monarchs and insisted upon it. Too, "sole dominator of Navarre," if Navarre in the fable represents France as the King of Navarre represents Henry IV, would apply only after the breaking up of the League late in 1595. If these are real reflections of the treaty conference, the play, though begun earlier, may have been completed after the signing of the treaty.

8

See Cheney's discussion, op. cit., of relations between France and England in 1596, II, 110 f.

CHAPTER V I

T H E S I G N I F I C A N C E OF T H E D A T E Dating the original composition of Love's Labour's Lost as late as 1596 constitutes such a break with tradition as to warrant recapitulation of the steps by which this date was reached. 1. The introduction of Blackamoors into the Russian Masque and the line, "Sea-sick, I think, coming from Muscovy," in the conversation after the return of the lords in their own persons, indicate that these parts of the play relate not to the Russian Embassy of 1582 but to the Russian section of the Gray's Inn Revels. Since this section of the Revels was acted in February, 1595, these parts of the play are at least later than February, 1595. 2. The metrical analysis of the play shows that three long rhymed passages have similar peculiarities and are the work of the same hand. One of these contains the Russian Masque and the ensuing conversation, which date later than the Gray's Inn Revels of February, 1595. Moreover, one of the peculiar metrical features is the six-line stanza used in Venus and Adonis. Except for one perhaps doubtful case in Comedy of Errors Shakespeare uses this stanza only in King John, Richard II, Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Taming of the Shrew of the plays mentioned by Meres in 1598. It occurs also in Much Ado about Nothing. These plays all belong to a period later than that to which Love's Labour's Lost is usually assigned. Other metrical tests show a closer relation between them and Love's Labour's Lost than between it and the very early plays. Furthermore, the number

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of parts in Love's Labour's Lost requires a company of much the same size and composition as that which played Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Taming of the Shrew, and Merchant of Venice, and not that which played Comedy of Errors and Two Gentlemen of Verona. I t is even possible to recognize in the physical description of the characters similarities to details given of other characters in the plays that contain the V. A. stanza. 3. Examination of the play reveals lines and themes that contain possible allusions to political events in the relations between France and England, and to historical figures. Any interpretation of such allusions is open to challenge. But any attempt to date the play makes use of such or similar interpretations. In fact, it is a method used in the study in almost all the plays. For instance, the weather in Midsummer Night's Dream. Not all the interpretations are made at one place in this study. Some of them are woven into later discussion after the late date has been shown possible. 4. Study of the play along with the pamphlets in the Nashe-Harvey quarrels shows a large number of phrases and lines in the play that echo phrases and passages in the pamphlets. These echoes, as presented, have been grouped around peculiarities of person or disposition, or around themes. But an appendix shows them in the order in which they occur in the play. The presentation so much resembles the over-worked parallel passage method of ill repute that the unthinking and hasty may reject it immediately. The honest scholar, however, will not reject the theory without first studying for himself—studying and not casually reading—the play and the pamphlets together and so retracing the steps actually made in the investigation out of which the theory took shape. 4. In addition to these tests for the date of the play, another is used at times to supplement them though it is not specifically outlined a t any one place. It may be called the

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test of plot structure, a n d rests upon the assumption: first, t h a t characters necessary to the plot action were in the play from the beginning; a n d , second, t h a t those scenes which use these characters and contain bits of the essential plot action are therefore p a r t s of the original play even if most of the scene is composed of jesting irrelevant to the action and if the possible allusions to historical events or the echoes are more vague than elsewhere. This supplementary test adds to the evidence, circumstantial as it m a y be, for dating Act I, Scene ii, Act IV, Scene ii, and Act V, Scene i. I t also strengthens the likelihood of a later d a t e for Act I I which contains no echoes of the pamphlets strong enough for notice, and in which the interpretation of references to political events might be disputed. 5. In the case of Act IV, Scene iii, the lines reveal no easily recognizable echoes or allusions to events and therefore yield almost no clues to the date. T h e metrical analysis shows t h a t the scene, except for Biron's long blank-verse defense of breaking the oath, is the work of the same hand t h a t wrote the other two long rhymed passages, and that presumably it was written at the same time. T h e fact t h a t the m a j o r events in the scene are essential to the plot at this point and, in fact, comprise the dramaturgic climax confirms this view. T h e connection between Biron's "set thee down, sorrow" in this scene and Costard's similar expression a t the end of Act I, Scene i, shows a time-sequence link and therefore an original structural link between the two parts of the play, and since this phrase was used seriously by known poets in 1593 a n d 1594 who would not h a v e used it seriously after it had been used so mockingly here, the evidence for a late date for this p a r t of the play becomes stronger. T h e resemblance between Biron's praise of women's eyes, p a r t of which belonged to the original version, and similar praise of Christ's eyes by Southwell in St. Peter's Complaint, printed in 1595, seems less a

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matter of accident and more a matter of intentional but goodnatured parody or reminiscence once the possibility of the late date is admitted, and so contributes its bit to strengthening the case for a late date. Once all this evidence, whatever the source and whatever the degree of plausibility, is assembled, every piece fits into place to make a consistent whole. This evidence, also, provides more clues to the meaning of what in the play is not pure fable but is satirical or otherwise allusive. Interpreted in the light of these clues, the play reveals a more definite purpose, a more thorough-going execution, and a more unified design than any previous theory has afforded. The play satirizes the Nashe-Harvey quarrel and the political relations between France and England down to 1596. Even so incongrous a combination finds explanation in Harvey's praise of Henry IV and Nashe's ridicule of Harvey's conduct at Elizabeth's court. In this definiteness of purpose, thorough detail of execution, and unity of design, as well as in the mass of evidence—circumstantial as it may be and varying as it may be in plausibility—rests, then, the merit and the validity of the proposed solution. Applied to Love's Labour's Lost, it shows that the play in its original form was written somewhere around the middle of 1596. The original form as determined by this material differs from the original form proposed by Henry David Gray in containing the Holofernes-Nathaniel scenes (IV, ii, and V, i), the last 40 lines of Act IV, Scene i, the 60 lines in Act IV, Scene iii, immediately preceding Biron's defence of oath-breaking, and the Show of the Nine Worthies in Act V, Scene ii. Some short passages questioned or rejected by Gray make little diference and may easily be granted as additions, though Biron's scornful description of Boyet may well belong to the original. Acceptance of Shakespeare's composition of the play in 1596 means that Shakespeare wrote rhyme and doggerel in

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large quantity as late as 1596. This is out of keeping with the traditional rhyme test. A way out of the apparent dilemma exists in the presence of the V. A. stanza, which is not characteristic of the rhyme in Shakespeare's early rhymed plays. The amount and the consistency of the evidence here presented for a late date is really greater than that for an early date, once the schackles of tradition are loosed. The validity of the older rhyme-test, once it accepts the amendment of the V. A. stanza, remains unimpaired. If, however, the student cannot accept the V. A. stanza as reconciling rhyme-test and the late date revealed by the material here presented, he is driven to the alternative of finding an author for the original play other than Shakespeare. What is the evidence for workmanship other than Shakespeare's, and where should another author than Shakespeare be sought? Among Nashe's friends, or at least among writers hostile to Harvey. There is not enough obvious resemblance to Nashe's Sumner's Last Will and Testament or any part of Dido that might be suspected as his to warrant charging Nashe with the authorship of Love's Labour's Lost. Nashe had a share in The Isle of Dogs, but only a share. In Have with You he spoke of delaying the publication of that pamphlet because he was waiting on some who were to have gone along with him. Love's Labour's Lost might have been the work of these procrastinating coadjutors. So little is known of Nashe's personal life and of his contacts that these tardy associates of his would be hard to identify. Furthermore, he does not say just what they were to do. He knew Greene, though, as he insists, not intimately. Yet his contributing a Preface to Greene's Menaphon and his taking up the cudgels in behalf of Greene after his death justify the supposition that he had some acquaintance with whatever circle of literary friends Greene possessed. One of the circle was Thomas Lodge. Nashe may have known him and Peele,

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to whom a complimentary passage in Piers Penniless seems to refer. If he knew these two he most likely knew their entire circle, for one supposes that members of the literary craft in Elizabethan London knew each other just as members of the same craft in a large city know each other today. In the quarrel with Harvey, Churchyard, who had become reconciled to Nashe, publicly took Nashe's side. Campion seems to have been one of Nashe's friends. If, too, Nashe lodged at the house of John Danter the publisher, as McKerrow suggests, he probably knew the other writers for whom Danter published. He was a guest of Sir George Carey and so can be imagined to have known other writers to whom Sir George was also patron. Nashe resided for some time at the palace of the Archbishop of Canterbury and presumably knew other writers who belonged to any literary circle of the Archbishop. All this, however, brings one little nearer to those who were to have aided Nashe, especially if their help included writing the original of Love's Labour's Lost. The play does not have the indisputable ring of the writers named as possible friends or acquaintances. So then, one must look among those who are known to have had a grudge against Gabriel Harvey. Included in Pierce's Supererogation was an earlier pamphlet, Advertisement for Pap-Hatchet, a bitter and virulent attack on John Lyly. T h a t Lyly resented the attack and purposed some reply Nashe's own words in Have with You prove: For Master Lillie (who is halves with me in this indignitie that is offred) I will not take the tale out of his mouth, for he is better able to defend himself than I am able to say he is able to defend himselfe, and in as much time as hee spendes in taking Tobacco one weeke. he can compile that which would make Gabriell repent himselfe all his life after. With a black sant he meanes shortly to bee at his chamber window, for calling him the Fiddlestick of Oxford.1 1

Quoted from Grosart's edition of Nashe's works, III, 204, by Baker,

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Nashe even hinted t h a t a t the time he was writing H a v e with You Lyly had h a d a reply ready for a year: As for him whom (so artlesse and against the haire of anie similitude or coherence) hee calls the arte of figges, he shall not need long to call for his figs, for hee will bee choakt soone inough with them; they having lyne ripe by him readie gathered (wanting nothing but pressing) anie time this twelve month. 2 Nashe's remarks t h a t Lyly's commendations caused him to a t t e n d the sermons of Doctor Andrews as well as his confident assertions concerning Lyly's feelings and plans indicate a t least a personal acquaintance between the two. Lyly had some connection with the Court in the early 1590's. H e was a member of the Parliament of 1593 and was in London during t h a t year. A son of his was baptized in London in 1596. So his presence in London during the quarrel and the composing of the original play is extremely likely. His enmity with H a r v e y and his acquaintance with Nashe are m a t t e r s of fact. Furthermore, the unsigned letter to Cotton, a t t r i b u t e d to Nashe, 3 indicates t h a t in 1596 Nashe had some connection or relations with Shakespeare's company. If, then, some other author than Shakespeare m u s t be sought for the original play, what better assumption is there than t h a t Lyly, perhaps aided by Nashe, may have had a t least a share in preparing or planning it? Lyly was already a playwright whom H a r v e y had accused not only of writing satirical plays himself but of inciting others to write them. Lyly's partnership in the original, moreover, offers sufficient explanation for any traces of Euphuism found in the play as G. P., edition of Lilly's Endymion, 1894, xcix. This and the following quotation are taken from Baker as my own notes are not full enough and I have neither Grosart's or McKerrow's edition handy at the writing hereof. 2 Baker, Endymion, clxxiv. 3 Printed in McKerrow's edition of Nashe's works, V, 194.

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it stands. Biron's disclaimer of fine language in the future would then be one of Shakespeare's additions. This matter of Lyly's participation in the planning or writing of the original play is not urged here as a part of the thesis with which these pages are concerned. It is offered only as a suggestion if any author other than Shakespeare must be found for the original play. It is recommended to the serious attention and diligent research of whosoever insists that the play has some connection with Euphuism. The purpose of the present study is to establish the date. Whoever wrote the play, acceptance of 1596 as the date of the original composition has definite and undeniable significance in the study of Shakespeare. It removes from that dubious and debatable period of Shakespeare's life, those years from the birth of the twins in 1585 to the publication of Venus and Adonis in 1593, one detail that has been accepted so long theoretically as almost to be felt an established fact. Taken along with the growing conviction that no theatrical manager would entrust a novice to rewrite successful plays of established authors, it leaves in that period little else than the upstart crow, Shake-scene, and tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, of Robert Greene's diatribe in 1592. These have long been interpreted as allusions to Shakespeare, despite the fact that Greene, a year previously in Farewell to Folly, had attacked an unnamed playwright whom no one has taken to be Shakespeare, and despite the possibility that both attacks may have been directed against the same man. Perhaps when the authorship of The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of York, which contains the line parodied in "tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide," has been determined, it will be possible to see that Shake-scene is not a pun on Shakespeare but an Elizabethan equivalent for the modern "hoofer." Of course, this can never be done until scholars give up their favorite sport of dividing this old play and the other con-

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temporaneous anonymous plays among the known writers, and study them by themselves for evidence of workmanship by a single hand that never hesitated to pilfer from successful playwrights. At such time this period of Shakespeare's life will stand free of the undergrowth of assumption, theory, and guesswork that has prevented clear view of it. Then, perhaps, scholars, realizing that for generations they have been threshing to no avail the same old straw will feel emboldened to carry their investigations into new and hitherto untouched fields in order to find the answer to those perplexing questions as to Shakespeare's family, education, and social position. An example of this scholastic bourbonism exists in the reception given Mrs. Stopes's discovery 4 of a lawsuit in 1600 in which William Shakespeare sued John Clayton for seven pounds which Shakespeare, while living in the Parish of St. Mary Arches, Cheapside, had lent Clayton in May, 1592. Needless to say, scholars have marked the item as doubtful or rejected it entirely. But they have not studied the history of John Clayton or William Shakespeare the lender in order to make the matter sure and definite.1· For that matter, neither did Mrs. Stopes. Yet Hotson did just this for the men concerned in the death of Marlowe. The documents may be hard to find, but Hotson discovered what had been lying under British noses for over three hundred years. Much the same holds true of attempts to trace the history 4

Stopes, C. C., Shakespeare's Industry, London, 1916, p. 259. • Sir Sidney Lee mentions the case in the revised edition of his life of Shakespeare, p. 321, but omits the address of Shakespeare in 1592, and dismisses it in summary and magisterial fashion by saying, "There is nothing to identify John Clayton's creditor with the dramatist, nor is it easy to explain why he should have lent money to a Bedfordshire yeomen." Yet Sir Sidney in his lifetime had little patience with the anti-Stratfordians who could not see how the son of a Stratford shopkeeper became the greatest writer in the English language. J. Q. Adams ignores the item entirely in his life of Shakespeare.

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of the Shakespeare family. The dramatist's parentage is sufficiently well established, but the origin of his father, John Shakespeare, is not yet determined beyond question or doubt. John Shakespeare came into Stratford-upon-Avon from some other place. He was there by 1552, for in that year he was fined by the Corporation. For many years he has been considered—and perhaps he was—the son of Richard Shakespeare of Snitterfield, largely because a John Shakespeare on February 10,1561-2, received letters of administration on Richard's estate. In this document, however, John Shakespeare is called agricola and his residence is given as Snitterfield." This identification has persisted in spite of the fact that John Shakespeare, the poet's father, was a tradesman and was living in Stratford-upon-Avon where he had been living since 1552 if not earlier. He was not the farmer Adams takes agricola to mean. In a lawsuit of 1556, five years earlier than the letters of administration, he was styled "glover." 7 Furthermore, the letters of administration plainly give the administrator's residence as Snitterfield. Richard Shakespeare of Snitterfield left also a son named Henry, 8 who contracted a debt to Nicholas Lane for which his brother John Shakespeare of Stratfordupon-Avon became surety. In December of 1587 Lane sued John Shakespeare for the debt. Adams 9 considers that the Latin phrase, Henricus Shakes per, frater iicli Johannes, establishes the identity. But John Shakespeare the shoemaker was by that year a resident of Stratford and may have been the defendant in the case. John Shakespeare, the poet's father, had by that time been not only Alderman but also high Bailiff 6

Adams, J. Q., A Life of William Shakespeare, 1923, p. 10. Stopes, C. C., Shakespeare's Family, London, 1901, p. 50. 8 One who has not seen the actual documents of the administration but who has seen some Elizabethan handwriting wonders if the writing has been correctly interpreted. 7

• Op. cit., p. 11, note.

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and Chief Alderman, and was known as Master John Shakespeare. By virtue of these offices he had been Justice of the Peace and was automatically "gentleman." 1 0 Scholars have apparently overlooked another clue to the Shakespeare genealogy—the relationship to the Greene family. Thomas Greene the lawyer, a graduate of the Middle Temple and later its Treasurer, called William Shakespeare cousin, and in his diary recorded a visit to "cousin Shakespeare" in London. Sir Sidney Lee printed 11 some of the details in the career of Thomas Greene. He was admitted to the Middle Temple on November 20, 1595, as son and heir of Thomas Greene of Warwick, gent., deceased. He was admitted to the Bar in 1600, and was acting as "solicitor" or "counsellor" for the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1601. He held various offices in Stratford until 1617, in which year he resigned, sold his shares in the tithes, and established himself in London. Here the matter of the Greene connection rested until Fripp began his work at Stratford. In his biography of Richard Quyny, Fripp says12 that Thomas Greene the lawyer was the eldest son of Thomas Greene, a mercer in the High Pavement at Warwick, who died in July, 1590, leaving eighty 10 Adams, op. cil.. 31, speaks of the case of 1580, in which "John Shakespeare, of Stratford-upon-Avon, in Co. Warr., yeoman" was fined twenty pounds for failure to appear at court as summoned, and his securities, John Awdley of Nottingham, and Thomas Colley of Stoke, in the neighboring counties of N o t t s and Stafford respectively, were likewise fined. Adams considers that this fine explains the financial difficulties of the poet's father. But following the example of Lee in dealing with the Shakespeare-Clayton suit, he has failed to study the history of all concerned and so to establish their identity beyond question. But since the item fits his own theories he has accepted it, whereas Lee rejected the other. Lee and Adams may both be right, but neither has shown that he is right. 11 A Life of William Shakespeare, new edition, 1916, p. 474, note. u Fripp, Ε. I., Master Richard Quyny, 1924, p. 154 f.

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pounds and a gray mare to his son Thomas; a house in Northampton to his son John, who also became a lawyer; and the residue to be divided between his sons John and Richard. Thomas Greene the mercer had a brother named John, who was a tanner in Tanworth, and a cousin John, the well-to-do host of the Crown Inn at Warwick, who was Justiciary to the Bailiff in Stratford. 13 The Thomas Greene alias Shakespeare, who was buried at Stratford-upon-Avon in March, 1590, Fripp takes to be a brother of the inn-keeper. To none of these men does Fripp attach the designation of "gentleman," yet such is the designation of the father in the admission of Thomas Greene to the Middle Temple in 1595, where the entrant is also called "gentleman." Here is something tangible on which to work, but no one has done anything about it. Fripp, it is true, has brought to light the four cousins of the Greene blood. He guesses that they may have been the grandsons of John Greene and Margaret his wife of Bolton near Haseley, and that Margaret may have been the sister of Richard Shakespeare of Haseley, who may have been also Richard Shakespeare of Snitterfield. For his data concerning the Greenes he quotes the Book of John Fisher and the Black Book of Warwick, but he has not unearthed actual documents for the early history and ancestry of the Greenes or for their place of origin. The important point in these Greene data is that Shakespeare had a cousin who was described as a gentleman and the son of a gentleman. That has definite bearing on the social position of the Shakespeare family. So one of the first things to do is to make sure that Thomas Greene, the Mercer in the High Pavement in Warwick, is the Thomas Greene, gentleman, father of the Thomas Greene, gentleman, the entrant into the Middle Temple in 1595. Then the parentage of the elder Greene must be established, and " Ibid., p. 129.

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next, if he was not born a gentleman as was his son, it should be discovered when and how he became a gentleman. T h a t Thomas Greene, mercer, may have risen in the social scale is suggested by the fact that his son, Thomas Greene the lawyer, had at Stratford-upon-Avon a kinsman named Tom Burnell, whom Fripp 14 describes as a yeoman and tailor living in Chapel Street. T h e Greenes had been living in Warwick for some time. A John Greene was elected Burgess (member of the lower house of aldermen) of Warwick on Sunday, December 17, 1665,15 and continued to be a member for several years. In December, 1571, he led the Burgesses (the lower house) in a complaint against the Bailiff and the Principal Burgesses (the upper house) for not making the lower house a financial statement. Thomas Greene, mercer, according to Fripp, became master of his craft in 1586. Since the Greene kinsmen lived in Warwick and since some Shakespeares also lived there the student feels a legitimate wonder whether John Shakespeare, the glover and Bailiff of Stratford-upon-Avon, if he did not go there from Warwick, was not related to the Warwick family. On May 20, 1577, Thomas Shakespeare, shoemaker, of Warwick, made his will in which he gave his wife Agnes16 lands in Balsall for life, his daughter Jone, wife of Thomas Ley, four pounds, his sons Thomas and John four nobles each, and mentioned his son William as heir. This Thomas Shakespeare, Fripp, in his introduction to The Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon, identifies as the father of John Shakespeare the shoemaker of Stratfordupon-Avon. One imagines that the identification rests upon 14

Fripp, op. cit., p. 128. "Extracts from the Black Book of Warwick," Warwickshire A ntiquarian Magazine (only one volume published), edited by John Featherstone, p. 186. " Stopes, C. C., Shakespeare's Family, 1901, pp. 14-15, where the date is incorrectly given as 1557. ls

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the fact that both men were shoemakers. If so, the identification is extremely vulnerable. Thomas Shakespeare's bequest of four pounds to his daughter instead of the usual twenty shillings indicates that he was a man of substance, a manufacturer of shoes and not a cobbler. What is known of John Shakespeare the shoemaker of Stratford-upon-Avon does not indicate that he was much more than a cobbler. Furthermore, the fact that a Thomas Shakespeare was a Principal Burgess of Warwick in 1619 adds more strength to the idea that the Warwick family of the name had a higher social and financial rank than Fripp realizes. As yet no data identify the Thomas Greene alias Shakespeare, who was buried at Stratford-upon-Avon in March, 1590. Sir Sidney Lee17 called Thomas Greene the lawyer Thomas Green alias Shakespeare. That alias fascinates. It indicates that the bearer of it was known by two names. Thomas Atwood alias Tailor willed Richard Shakespeare of Snitterfield some oxen. Thomas Dickson alias Waterman, a glover in Bridge Street at Stratford-upon-Avon, was a contemporary of John Shakespeare. Sometimes it was used as part of the name during the life of a generation that for some reason was changing its name, and the name following it became the permanent family appellation. The first name was usually the regular or birth name. Sometimes the alias was used as part of the name of illegitimate children. For instance, there is among the State Papers, Domestic Series,18 a document entitled "Pedigree of Edmund Boner alias Savage, Parson of Dunham, Dean of Leicester, and twice Bishop of London, bastard son of Geo. Savage, Parson of Dunham, who was bastard son of Sir John Savage of Cheshire." Here the name of Savage represents the father's family, but the Bishop has gone down in history by the first name, usually spelled 17

Op. cit., p. 289. " Volume 137, p. 148, no. 41.

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Bonner. W h a t e v e r the meaning of the alias in the name of this T h o m a s Greene, it indicates a kinship between the Greene and the Shakespeare families. Interesting as speculation may be as to the connection between the Greenes and the Shakespeares, it m u s t remain speculation until some Hotson discovers the records which no one has yet brought to light. More wills, more inventories and accompanying d a t a from the Inquisitiones post Mortem, court records of any kind to show dates and perhaps some depositions or other papers t h a t give ages, the history of the various land tenures—all when duly unearthed and properly set together will tell the true story. I t is to be hoped t h a t the British will not wait for an American to make such i m p o r t a n t discoveries. T h e record of T h o m a s Greene's admission to the Middle Temple contains another item scholars have ignored. T h e record plainly states t h a t Greene entered as a transfer from Staple Inn. I t reads: Mr. Thomas Greene, late of Staple Inn, gent., son and heir of Thomas Greene, of Warwick, gent., deceased, especially; fine, 4 1., Bound with Messrs. John Marston of the Bench and John his son.19 J u s t when he entered Staple Inn no one has yet revealed. Not even has any one made the s t a t e m e n t whether the records of Staple Inn are extant for this date. If he followed the example of Coke, 20 he remained there not more than a year. B u t even if he remained the year, he was a student at the time of the Gray's Inn Revels in February, 1595. Gray's Inn furnished the Readers for Staple Inn, and during the Revels the Prince received reports from his stewards of his provinces, Stapulia (Staple Inn) and Barnardia (Barnard's Inn). He m a y , perhaps, have witnessed these Revels. One wonders if he made " Middle Temple Records, Minutes of Parliament, 1904, I, 337. ,c Lyon, Hastings, and Block, Herman, Eduard Coke, 1929, p. 32.

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possible the admission of his cousin, William Shakespeare, if this cousin was not busy with acting in the Comedy of Errors. This wonder may be driving matters too hard, but it is worth while bringing home the fact that Shakespeare had in London at least one kinsman of reputable social position. It is interesting to note in connection with this Staple Inn relation that a Thomas Shakespeare, gentleman, of Staple Inn, gave an official explanation in 1604 for not appearing in a lawsuit, and that a Thomas Shakespeare, gentleman, son of Thomas Shakespeare of Lutterworth, Leicestershire, was admitted to Staple Inn in 1607. Were these Shakespeares related to Thomas Greene and was Staple Inn the family law school? Could William Shakespeare have attended Staple Inn and left it, as other young men did, for various activities in the city? 21 At any rate, Thomas Greene's five-year or six-year residence in London while Shakespeare was making his reputation affords fascinating conjectures. The period includes the year 1598 when Meres publicly praised Shakespeare for his plays and his poems. Greene would naturally have been proud of such a cousin and would have sought his company. Almost certain— at least to any one who has lived in the residence hall of a large university inhabited also by law students and has heard them talk or argue law on any and all occasions, and incessantly—is it that Shakespeare heard much law from Thomas Greene. In this way he could easily and naturally have gained that knowledge of famous cases and of customs peculiar to the different schools of law, of which the anti-Stratfordians make so much. Even after being called to the bar, Greene maintained in London what Americans know as a law office, and for several years before his return to London was associated in that office with Rowley Warde, the son of a Warwicka

See Lyon and Block, op. ext., p. 33, for a statement that the Inns were thus used.

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shire gentleman. The anti-Stratfordians have made much of the fact that this lawyer cousin did not write William Shakespeare's will. Failure to see that Thomas Greene may have been in London, or elsewhere, on business is nothing short of plain stupidity. Whatever the relationship of the Greenes, one thing is evident. The Shakespeare family to which the poet belonged had relatives who if not born gentlemen achieved gentility. This connection with the Greenes adds more weight to Fripp's contention in his recent book22 that John Shakespeare's recusancy was not Catholic but inclined to the extremely Protestant. In his discussion of the Greenes in his biography of Quyny, Fripp showed that Thomas Greene, mercer, and his cousin, the inn-keeper, supported the Puritan Job Throgmorton for Parliament in 1586, and that Thomas Greene was presented as a Protestant recusant on July 17, 1596. In this same book,23 Fripp speaks of the young men who went to Oxford from the Quyny-Sturley-Woodward connection and says that they alone afford sufficient evidence of culture in Stratford-upon-Avon and the Shakespeare neighborhood. In his Shakespeare Studies he shows that all the other chamberlains of Stratford-upon-Avon could write and that presumptively John Shakespeare himself could, despite the fact that he used a mark for a signature. In Master Richard Quyny 24 he showed in his account of the Widow Young-Widow Perott suit that in 1595 a Master Shakespeare bought a book that was not a prayer-book. If the Master Shakespeare was John, then John was not illiterate. If the Master Shakespeare was William, then the poet was in Stratford in 1595. The connection between the Greenes and the Shakespeares throws no fresh light on the education of the poet. It suggests, B

Fripp, Ε. I., Shakespeare Studies, 19.S0. Fripp, Ε. I., Master Richard Quyny, p. 209. « Pages 93-95. u

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however, some interesting possibilities. Perhaps he went to live with relatives in Warwick and attended school there. The affair with Anne Hathaway was evidently a youthful scrape much like the amorous adventures of the dappert page Jack Wilton in Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller. The youthful Jack's early amours were with women older than himself. Having been enticed or bullied into a marriage, 2S Shakespeare tried for three years to make the best of a bad bargain and then gave up the attempt. The interval between the birth of Susanna and that of the twins was the normal interval of the day. The fact that no more children were born in an age when large families were the rule is strong evidence that husband and wife lived apart. Where William Shakespeare went and what he did are still matters of conjecture. By 1593 he had written Venus and Adonis. By the end of 1594 he had become sufficiently important in the theatrical company to be one of three sent by it early in 1595 to receive money for playing at Court during the preceding Christmas season. He went in association with William Kemp, the greatest low comedian of the day, and Richard Burbage, whose father was called "gentleman" in legal documents of that year and who was himself a prominent actor. This was certainly no mediocre association. Since John Hemminges acted as financial agent for 25 The theories concerning a pre-contract and the Elizabethan habit of considering such contract sufficient to warrant matrimonial intimacy are well known. Even if they tell the true story, they pay no compliment to the intelligence of the young Shakespeare. A boy of eighteen who is roped-in by a woman of twenty-six, by whatever means, licit or illicit, is always pitied in his community if not despised as a fool. A woman of twenty-six who marries a boy of eighteen is called a cradle-robber, if nothing worse. The marriage of Anne Hathaway and William Shakespeare is not to the credit of either. If one accepts the assumption of illicit relations, which the absolutely known facts seem to justify, the bullying may have been done by an irate Puritanical father of the young man. Or friends of the woman may have found some means to compel the father to urge his son to the match and therefore to give his own consent.

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the company from 1596 to 1630, perhaps these three men cons t i t u t e d a finance committee t h a t served until his appointm e n t . K e m p would owe his membership to his prominence in his profession; Burbage to his father's position as well as to his own; a n d Shakespeare to—well, t h a t is what all students of Shakespeare most w a n t to know. Perhaps to his literary reputation. All these details concerning the Greene connection m a y seem decidedly remote from the date of Love's Labour's Lost. T h e y have not been previously brought together in any one place, and the presentation of them here, thus collected, may therefore have warrant. Their chief value, however, and hence the chief reason for their inclusion here, lies in stimulating f u t u r e investigators, emboldened by the clearing away of Love's Labour's Lost from those dubious years, to muster up courage enough to a b a n d o n the old straw and undertake work in new directions. T h a t the suggestions made will be disputed no one can doubt. T h e y are, a f t e r all, really intended to be only provocative. B u t if the disputers will turn up fresh material and documents—not theories, assumptions, and guesses— to prove their contentions the whole aim of Shakespearean s t u d y will receive rich satisfaction. So, too, in regard to what this s t u d y has presented in regard to the date of Love's Labour's Lost. T h e material is offered in all due humility, in the full knowledge t h a t documents yet hidden under the dust of time m a y tell another story. If so, then the goal will be reached. E v e r y honest Shakespeare scholar desires only one thing—the truth.

APPENDIX A

E C H O E S O F T H E NASHE-HARVEY QUARREL I N LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST Passages which echo the Nashe-Harvey quarrel are scattered throughout Love's Labour's Lost. They observe no order; an echo from an early pamphlet may be followed shortly by an echo from a late pamphlet, and sometimes one phrase in the play may call to mind more than one passage in different pamphlets. Perhaps the best way to acquaint the reader with them is to present them as they occur. The reader should realize, however, that the parallel-passage method has its weakness and that if he wishes to do the subject justice he should read all the pamphlets along with the play and use this presentation merely as a guide to the resemblances. It should be said in the beginning, in order to help the reader, that, strange as it may seem, Armado, if he represents any one person, is a caricature of Gabriel Harvey. In the following list references are to the Student's Cambridge Edition of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, Grosart's edition of Harvey's works, and McKerrow's edition of Nashe's works. Asterisks mark what seem the strongest echoes. T H E NASHE-HARVEY

PAMPHLETS

I, i, 166: mint of phrases in his brain Nashe, Have with You, iii, 65, makes the tutor of Harvey at Cambridge speak of his "strange untraffiqu't phrases by him new vented and unpackt." I, i, 169: a man of complements Nashe, Have with You, iii, 103, speaking of Foure Letters,

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says "and so proceeds with complement, and a little more complement, and a crust of quips, and a little more complement after that." I, i, 171:* Armado hight Nashe, Have with You, iii, 62, 78, 127, taunts Harvey with sending an Armada of words against him, and also with having been in the Fleet (prison). Armado was a frequent Elizabethan spelling of Armada. I, i, 174: Knight from tawney Spain Harvey, Foure Letters, i, 206, refers to Lazarillo de Tormes, and Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 243, to the Cavalcades of Bellerophon and Don Alonso d'Avalos. Nashe, Have with You, iii, 45, refers to them in his burlesque of Harvey's style. This echo would be a jeer. I, i, 176: I love to hear him lie Nashe, Have with You, iii, 118, 131, calls Harvey a liar. I, i, 180:* he shall be our sport Nashe, Have with You, iii, 79, refers to Harvey's attempt to get preferment at court and says that an unnamed courtier (Leicester) to whom he applied found him more meet to make sport with than to be deeply employed. So Armado is the sport of the courtiers. I, i, 189:* There's villainy abroad Harvey continually charges Nashe and other opponents with villainy and calls them villains: Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 61, "All is vanity and villainy"; 63, "arch mystery of the busiest modernists in villainy"; Foure Letters, i, 224, "paper which containeth the vile misdemeanors and Truth will say, the abhominable villainies of such base shifting companions"; Newe Letter, i, 289, "Strange newes of villainy." Nashe, Have with You, iii, 15, in his burlesque of Harvey's style, retorts with the mock phrase, "Villainy by connivance." I, i, 190:* This letter will tell you more

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This can be interpreted as a hit at Harvey's fondness for the word " l e t t e r " in his titles as well as for the letter form. He published Two Letters, Three Letters, Foure Letters, and Ν ewe Letter. I, i, 191:* T h e contempts thereof In the mouth of Costard 'contempts' sounds like a blunder for "contents." I t can refer in his real meaning to the manner of expression in the second and third of the Foure Letters, and to the opening of Pierce's Supererogation. Nashe, Strange Newes, i, 303, says, " T h y familiar epistles brought thee in contempt," and Have with You, iii, 56, he accuses H a r v e y of contemning his own birth. I, i, 193: A letter from the magnificent Armado Another hit a t "letters." Nashe, Have with You, iii, 41, writes "his magnificentest elocution," 33, "more letters yet from the D o c t o r , " 34, "Letters do you call t h e m , " 90, "Twice or thrice he had set his magnificent face upon i t . " I, i, 201-2: Be it as the style shall give us cause to climb in the merriment "Climb the style" is a frequent pun in contemporary literature. Here there may be some echo of Harvey's "Epistle Dedicatory" to Foure Letters, i, 157, " I t was my intention, so to demeane myself in the whole, and so temper my stile in every p a r t : that I might neither seem blinded with affection, nor enraged with passion," and of the third of Foure Letters, i, 201, " t h e onlie high Pole Artique, and deep Minerall of an incomparable stile." Nashe, Have with You, iii, 72, calls Harvey Doctor DeuseAce and Doctor Merryman. I, i, 203-5: The m a t t e r is to me . . . The manner of it " M a t t e r " and " M a n n e r " were the two formal divisions of logic, and the words were also used in contemporary textbooks on rhetoric. The occurrence of the words here may echo Harvey's use of them, Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 318 f., where

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he indicates that he will criticise Nashe's works "touching the m a t t e r " and "touching the m a n n e r . " In the third of Foure Letters, i, 176, he writes, " T h a t is not exactly labored both for matter and manner," and in Newe Letter, i, 269," I terme it a Trifle for the manner; though the matter be, in my conceit, super-excellent." Nashe, Strange Newes, i, 296, writing of Harvey's letters, says, "Show me or Immerito two English letters in print in all points equal to these, both for the matter itself and also for the manner of handling." I, i, 225 (repeated at line 233.) So it is This is a frequent phrase of the time, especially in legal writing. The possibility of its being an echo here is strengthened by the fact that Nashe, Have with You, iii, 65, begins the burlesque letter, which he attributes to Harvey, with these very words. Notice that after the salutation here, they begin the letter proper. I, i, 229:* To every man that dares not fight Nashe, " T o the Reader" in Strange Newes, i, 263, "Or be sworne true servant to cowardize and patience." Also, Have with You, iii, 134, where he refers to Harvey's threats against him and the fact that when the two lodged in the same inn at Cambridge, Harvey made no a t t e m p t to meet him and carry out these threats. I, i, 232:* Of other men's secrets Perhaps a gibe at Harvey's explanation as to how his private letters to Spenser came to be printed. Foure Letters, i, 178, "Letters may be privately written that would not be publicly divulged," and 180, " M a n y communications and writings may secretlie pass betweene such, even for an exercise of speech, and stile, that are not otherwise convenient to be disclosed." I, i, 233-34: besieged with sable-colored melancholy, I did commend the black oppressing humour to the most wholesome physic of thy health-giving air

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Nashe, Have with You, iii, 87, speaking of Harvey's residence in London to write Pierce's Supererogation spoke of his living near a churchyard and "graves which besieged and undermined his very threshold." Any echo here is problematical. Greene in the opening paragraph of the Quip for an Upstart Courtier made the narrator say, "damped with a melancholy humour went into the fields to cheere up my wits with the fresh air." I, i, 235-36:* as I am a gentleman Perhaps a gibe at Harvey's not being born of the gentle class. Nashe, "Epistle Dedicatorie" to Strange Newes, i, 257, reminds Harvey that he is the son of a rope-maker, and Have •with You, iii, 56, speaks of the elder Harvey as "Goodman," a name never applied to a man of gentle birth. On the same page Nashe pretends that Harvey fancies himself to be the illegitimate son of a nobleman. I, i, 236: betook myself to walk Nashe, Have with You, iii, 68, ridicules Harvey for walking at Cambridge with his gown held up to show his legs and ankles. I, i, 244: obscene and most preposterous event "Obscene" seems used here as a synonym for "lewd," which was used in Elizabethan English as meaning ignorant or loutish, as "a lewd fellow," but not in the modern sense. Harvey uses "obscene" very frequently in Pierce's Supererogation in somewhat the same way it is used here. For "preposterous," cf. Foure Letters, i, 179, "Preposterous and untoward courses of divers good wits." I, i, 245-46:* from my snow-white pen the ebon-coloured ink Harvey, Precursor to Pierce's Supererogation, i, 16, speaks of "the excellent gentlewoman" as "fitter by nurture to be an enchaunting Angell with her white quill, then a tormenting Fury with her blacke inke." Nashe, Have with You, iii, 110, has much to say about this

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excellent gentlewoman and quotes the passage from Pierce's Supererogation. I, i, 251: base minnow of t h y mirth Nashe, Have with You, iii, 80, speaking of the Cambridge plays that ridiculed the Harvey brothers, says, "another show of the little minnow his brother." I, i, 263: with . . . 0 , with . . . Harvey, sonnet xiv to Foure Letters, i, 247, wrote, "Oh, Oh, and Oh, a thousand times." I, i, 264: I passion to say wherewith "Passion" had been used as a verb before this. Nashe used it in The Unfortunate Traveler, ii, 136, "Having passioned thus awhile, she hastilie ranne and lookt herself in her glass," and also in the lines of The Choice of Valentines. I, i, 266-67: child of our grandmother Eve Doubtless a frequent expression of the day. Nashe used it in Christ's Teares, ii, 136, " U n t o the greatness of their grandmother Eve, they seeke to aspire." I, i, 267-68: thy sweet understanding The Elizabethans were fond of using the word "sweet." I t occurs 50 times in Love's Labour's Lost, as an adjective or adverb, and 28 times it is spoken by Armado. Harvey uses the word very frequently, and in the letters by his friends, printed with Pierce's Supererogation, he is addressed as "Sweet Doctor." I, i, 268-69:* as my ever-esteemed duty pricks me on Harvey, Foure Letters, i, 167, 176, 179, says that his friends pricked him forward and t h a t his tender regard for his father and brothers urges him to write. Harvey is also fond of the word "pricks," which he uses in numerous combinations. Nashe, Have with You, iii, 129, twitted him obscenely with one particular phrase that invited such attack. This particular phrase is common in Elizabethan literature.

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I, i, 270-71: a man of good repute, carriage, bearing and estimation In the first letter, signed by Bird, Foure Letters, Harvey's father is called a "right honest man of good reckoning." I, ii, 1: Boy This word brings up the question as to whom Moth represents. The editors of the New Cambridge Edition think Nashe himself is intended, and some support would be lent their theory by the fact that the sonnet attributed to the "excellent gentlewoman," Pierce's Supererogation, iii, 242, calls him "Captain of the Boys." Nashe, however, Have with You, iii, 96, accuses Harvey of having enticed a page from his publisher Wolfe, and of finally sending him back unpaid for his services. Identification of Moth as this page has more point, as will be seen as these notes progress. I, ii, 1: what sign is it Perhaps a gibe at the astrological books and almanacs of Gabriel's brothers, in which Nashe, Have with You, iii, 70, 72, insists that Gabriel himself had some share. I, ii, 2: grows melancholy Harvey constantly uses the word "melancholy." I, ii, 5: dear imp Nashe, Have with You, iii, 97, called the borrowed or stolen page, "imp." I, ii, 10: tough senior Harvey, Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 227, derides young men who climb into print by the fall of their seniors. I, ii, 13-14:* congruent epitheton Nashe, "Epistle Dedicatorie" to Strange Newes ironically praises Harvey for variety of epithets. In "Epistle Dedicatorie" to Have with You, iii, 14, he says that Harvey in writing Pierce's Supererogation studied Textor's Epithets, and, 49, that Harvey always uses some "uncircumcised sluggish epithet."

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I, ii, 27:* In thy condign praise The manner in which this line is led up to suggests a hit in the word "condign." Harvey, Foure Letters, i, 310, writes, "cannot eyther condignly praise the valorous seede of the one; or sufficiently blesse the fruitfulle wombe of the other." I, ii, 28: praise an eel Nashe, Have with You, iii, 58, " t h e y shuld plat . . . to have a salt eele, in resemblance of a rope's end," where "rope's e n d " is a gibe at the trade of the elder Harvey. I, ii, 33:* I love not to be crossed Harvey, Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 34, says that every man has his crosses. See also the note below. I, ii, 35:* crosses love not him Nashe taunts Harvey with his poverty and penuriousness, and in Have with You, iii, 75, says that Harvey does without crosses, and makes the same pun, "it were a great deale better for him if he were not free b u t crost soundly & committed prisoner to the Tower, where, perhaps once in his life, he might be brought to look upon the Queene's coine in the mynt." I, ii, 41 :* How many is one thrice-told? Harvey is fond of adjectives compounded with "thrice." In Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 64, he scoffs at the multiplying spirit not of the alchemist b u t of the villainist. See note on 1, i, 189, and also the note below. I, ii, 42 :* I am ill at reckoning Harvey, Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 237, says that he has 20 and 20 charms, etc., but does not give the total sum of 40. Nashe, Have with You, iii, 35, ridicules the bulk of Harvey's Pierce's Supererogation, and twits him with the inaccurate numbering of the pages. I, ii, 42-43:* it fitteth the spirit of a tapster In a sonnet prefixed to Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 23,

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Barnabe Barnes calls Nashe "Base broaching tapster of reports untrue." Nashe, Strange Ν ewes, i, 304, calls Harvey, "thou gross shifter for shitten tapestry jests." I, ii, 45:* a gentleman and a gamester Harvey was not born a gentleman. Nashe, Have with You, iii, 32, recounts Harvey's attempt to break into court society, and also he writes of Harvey, " M a y he crie like a swearing shredded gamester." I, ii, 48-49: You know how much the sum of deuce-ace amounts to See note on 1, ii, 42. I, ii, 57-58: A most fine figure! To prove you a cipher Nashe, Have with You, iii, 120, "Rhetorical figure? and if I had a hundred sonnes, I had rather have them disfigur'd & keep at home as cyphers, than send them to schoole to learn to figure after that order." I, ii, 63:* reprobate thought "Reprobate" is a frequent enough word perhaps to escape significance here, but Harvey in Pierce's Supererogation speaks of Piers Pennilesse's reprobate Supplication to the Divell, and Nashe, Have with You, iii, 57, says that "reprobate" is a periphrasis for "rope-maker." I, ii, 66-67:* What great men? . . . more authority . . . men of good repute and carriage Harvey was always quoting authority or referring to famous precedent and example. Nashe, Have with You, iii, 35, accuses Harvey, in his desire to attract attention, of always dragging in the names of Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, and other men of highest credit, and says that he now uses the name of Nashe and Piers Penniless. I, ii, 86: green complexion

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Perhaps a taunt for Harvey's affair with Greene and abuse of Green's memory. I, ii, 93:* green wit Harvey, "Epistle Dedicatorie" to Foure Letters, i, 156, says, "Greene (although pitifully blasted & how woefully faded?) still flourisheth in the memory of some green wits," and in Pierce's Supererogation, in one of his many abusive addresses to Nashe says, "according to thy green wit." I, ii, 103: pretty and pathetical Harvey, Three Letters, i, 48, speaks of the moving pathetical figure of Pottyposis. Nashe, Strange Newes, i, 315, says that he has tried to assemble Harvey's Foure Letters into a pathetical posie. Harvey, Foure Letters, i, 165, speaks of the pathetical invectives against Tully himself, and 216, "Their owne pathetical notion." In Newe Letter, i, 273, he uses the phrase, "egged on to try the suppleness of his patheticall veine." I, ii, 114-15:* Ballad of the King and the Beggar If Armado represents Harvey, there is a special gibe in making the representative of the defender of classical meters show an interest in a cheap ballad. Nashe, Have with You, iii, 63, accuses Harvey of writing ballads as a young man. I, ii, 119-20:* I will have that subject newly writ o'er Nashe, Have with You, iii, 113, says that the opening lines of the excellent gentlewoman's poem Dinner in Pierce's Supererogation were adapted from the Ballad of Anne Askew. See also the preceding note. I, ii, 120-21: example my digression by some mighty precedent See note on 1, ii, 66, 72. In Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 240, Harvey says, " I have digressed from my purpose and wandered far out of my accustomed way." I, ii, 124: rational hind

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Nashe, Have with You, iii, 67, jests that Harvey while a schoolboy called a rat animal rationale. I, ii, 136:* the day woman " D a y woman" here means "dairy-woman." Nashe, Strange Newes, i, 299, calls Harvey among other things "butterwhore." Harvey, taking this up in Pierce's Supererogation, puns on the word and speaks of his milkmaid's style and himself as a milkmaid: cf., 245, " I will not exchange my milk maid's Irony for his Draffmaid's assery." I, ii, 138:* I do betray myself with blushing Harvey, Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 6, "which I cannot read without blushing." Nashe, Have with You, iii, 76, speaks of Harvey's "blushingly wantoning." I, ii, 145: With that face The Variorum editor says that this is a proverbial expression. But Nashe, Have with You, iii, 73, 93, jests about Harvey's face. I, ii, 149: Fair weather after you The Variorum editor says that this is also proverbial. Harvey uses it in Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 12, "Fair weather in my journey." I, ii, 156:* more bound to you than your fellows, for they are but lightly rewarded See note on 1, ii, 35. I, ii, 160: fast being loose The manner of playing up to this line and its answer show that a joke of some kind was intended. "Fast and loose" was a proverbial expression of the time. Harvey uses the phrase in Foure Letters and Ν ewe Letter, and Nashe uses it in Strange Newes. I, ii, 168-71:* It is not for prisoners to be too silent in their words; and therefore I will say nothing. I thank God I

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have as little patience as another man, and therefore can be quiet These words as they occur in the play are merely a group of Costard's blunders, but they echo Harvey's praises of himself. Foure Letters, i, 166, " I continue my accustomed simplicity to aunswere vanity with silence," and "Patience hath trained me"; 176, "Even actions of Silence and Patience have been commenced against me"; 205, " t o spare quiet men"; 222, "having wedded myself to private study, and devoted my mind to public quietnesse" ; 226, "Patience is an excellent quality; and constancy the honourablest virtue in the world." Pierce's Supererogation: 32, " I could still vow silence in brawls," "Profess patience in wrongs"; 84, "in patience am to digest the one with moderation"; 134, "when he is urged to speak or suspected for silence"; 262, "might it please his confuting Aship by his honourable permission to suffer one to rest quiet." I, ii, 187: Adieu valor! Rust rapier! Be still drum! Harvey, Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 239-40, addresses Nashe, "Tom Drum, reconcile thyself with a counter supplication," and in Newe Letter, i, 283, he threatens to thump Nashe like a drum of Flushing. Nashe, Have with You, iii, 99 f., tells of Harvey's imprisonment in Newgate, his refusal to give up his weapon at first, and his drawing his dagger on the jailer's wife. I, ii, 190: Devise, wit Harvey, Newe Letter, i, 261, "the gallantest Phisique, that nature hath affourded, wit devised, or magnanimity practised." I, ii, 191:* whole volumes in folio Harvey, Foure Letters, i, 200, "he that will be a familiar deviser in folio, must be content with the reward of a notable Lier." Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 44, he speaks of his opponent as a ruffian in folio; 257, he says that he may compile

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whole volumes in commendation of the ass; 318, he expresses regret that little of value can be performed in perfunctory pamphlets. Nashe, Have with You, iii, 34-35, taunted Harvey with the bulk of Pierce's Supererogation, calling it an "unconscionable vast gor-bellied volume." No echoes were observed in Act II. I I I , i, 1: Warble, child; make passionate my sense of hearing Harvey, Foure Letters, i, 197, "sweet Musick requickneth the heaviest spirits of dumpish melancholy." I l l , i, 5 :* festinately Used by Shakespeare only here. Nashe, speaking of Harvey in Have with You, iii, 91, says, " H e would accelerate and festinate his procrastinating ministers and commissaries in the country, by Letters as expedite as could be." I l l , i, 7-8: win your love with a French brawl Moth uses the word "brawl" for a dance, but Armado, misunderstanding him, asks, "Brawling in French." Harvey, Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 32, says that he does not love brawls. I l l , i, 27: How hast thou purchased this experience? Harvey, Foure Letters, i, 204-5, "How might a man purchase the sight of those puissant and hideous terms?" I l l , i, 29:* But O, but Ο Nashe, Strange Ν ewes, i, 300, "But Oh, what newes do you heare of that good Gabriel huffe-snuffe," and Have with You, iii, 127 " B u t Ο what newes of that good Gabriel Harvey Knowne to the world for a foole and clapt in the Fleet for a Rimer?" I l l , i, 30:* The hobby horse is forgot Nashe, Have with You, iii, 73, refers to Harvey's conduct when Queen Elizabeth visited Audley End, as "hobby horse-

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reeling and domineering at Audley E n d . " This phrase may come from an old folk play. It occurrs in Hamlet. I l l , i, 51-52: a horse to be ambassador for an ass Nashe in Strange Ν ewes had called Harvey an ass, and Harvey in Pierce's Supererogation wrote a long ironical praise of asses. I l l , i, 68: By thy favour, sweet welkin Nashe in his burlesque of Harvey style, Have with You, iii, 15, writes, "By your favour I must require your connivance." III,i, 73: some enigma, some riddle Nashe, Have with You, iii, 34, calls Harvey "only pure Orator in senseless riddles," and 15, he calls Lichfield "aenigmaticall linguist," a phrase which he calls in the margin a rag borrowed from Harvey's dunghill. I l l , i, 73-74:* thy l'envoy Harvey was fond of writing l'envoys, as is shown by the poems included with Pierce's Supererogation. Nashe, Have with You, iii, 11, twits him with l'envoy. I l l , i, 73:* no l'envoy If Costard with his usual gift for confusing words mistakes "1' envoy" for "convoy," then there is a hit at the complete title of Strange Ν ewes. I l l , i, 91-4: The fox, the ape, and the humble-bee Were still at odds, being but three, Until the goose came out the door, Staying the odds by adding four. Harvey in the course of Pierce's Supererogation calls Perne a fox, Greene the ape of Euphues, and Nashe a bee and peagoose. Chute in a poem appended to Pierce's Supererogation calls Nashe goose. I l l , i, 132-33:* There is remuneration; for the best ward of mine honour is the rewarding of my dependents See note on I, ii, 35. Another hit at Harvey's failing to pay his servants. Nashe time and again in Have with You, iii, 71,

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73, 88, 90, 91, 95, 101, refers to Harvey's poverty, his stinginess, and his failure to pay his debts. Also Have with You, iii, 91, he speaks of Harvey as saying in conversation with a man "remuneration of gratuities." I l l , i, 135: like the sequel, I Nashe, Strange Ν ewes, i, 268, "Of which in the sequel of his book he most slanderously complaineth." I l l , i, 138:* Latin word for three farthings Harvey in a sonnet prefixed to Foure Letters uses the expression, "Not worth a Doctor's f—t." Nashe, Strange Newes, i, 256-57, jests about these words rather broadly and refers to Harvey's Foure Letters as "four penniworth of letters and three farthing worth of sonnets," most likely intending a broad pun in farthing. I l l , i, 146: carnation ribbon Nashe, Have with You, iii, 54, says that when the Italianate carnation ribbons were the fashion for the tails of horses, Harvey thought of dyeing his beard carnation. III, i, 186:* Dread prince of plackets, king of codpieces Nashe, Have with You, iii, 129, calls Harvey "Codpiece Kinko, Sir Murdred of Placards." IV, i, 97:* What vane? What weathercock? Nashe, Strange Newes, i, 277, teases Harvey about the poem Harvey wrote on the weathercock of All Hallows. IV, i, 98:* I remember the style Harvey signed a letter to Spenser, Three Letters, i, 107, with the Latin words "Nosti manutn et stylum." Nashe, Have with You, iii, 80, repeats this Latin. IV, i, 88: Dearest design of industry Harvey, Pierce's Supererogation, iii, 102, 110, 115, 133, uses the word "industry" and praises Sir Philip Sidney for industry. Nashe, Have with You, iii, 49, in the burlesque of Harvey's style, calls Sidney "Esquire of Industry."

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IV, i, 101 :* a phantasime, a Monarcho Nashe, Have with You, iii, 76, says that Harvey became an insulting Monarcho and outdid the original Monarcho. IV, i, 101 :* one that makes sport See note on I, i, 111. IV, i, 122: when King Pepin of France was a little boy Nashe, Have with You, iii, 129, has "since King Lud was a little boy." IV, i, 125-26: when Queen Guenevere of Britain was a little wench Nashe, Have with You, iii, 102, has "since the reign of Queen Guenevere." IV, i, 139:* you talk greasily These words, taken in connection with Costard's "how the ladies and I have put him down! . . . must vulgar wit," may echo Nashe's gibing, Have with You, iii, 75, about Harvey's attempt to break into court society at Audley End, his mingling with the court ladies, and telling them dirty stories. IV, i, 140:* too hard for you at pricks Nashe, Have with You, iii, 129, for comment on the last word. See also note on I, i, 268 f. IV, i, 150: pathetical nit See note on I, ii, 103. IV, ii, 11: haud credo Doubtless a Latin phrase frequently quoted. Nashe, Strange Ν ewes, i, 279, uses Haud facile credo. IV, ii, 25: he hath never fed of the dainties bred in a book Nashe, Have with You, iii, 67, "the Rat that eat & gnawed his book." IV, ii, 27: drunk ink Nashe, Have with You, iii, 55, "dispense with it though it drink some ink." A reference in the same paragraph shows that the paragraph and line were written in 1596. The phrase may have been common property at the time.

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IV, ii, 126: an animal only sensible in the duller parts See note on I, ii, 124 IV, ii, 42-44: allusion . . . collusion . . . pollusion The manner in which the dialogue leads up to "pollusion" indicates a point in that word. Nashe, Strange Newes, i, 278, "never pollutedest thyself with any plaistrie or dawbing of Doctourship." IV, ii, 51-52:* extemporal epitaph Nashe, Have with You, iii, 86, gibes Harvey for extemporal versifying on any and all subjects and occasions. IV, ii, 55-56: abrogate scurrility Harvey, Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 293, in an apostrophe, writes, "correct the mandrake of scurrility with the myrrhe of curtesie or the saffron of temperance." Nathaniel here sees an opportunity for obscene punning and wants none of it. IV, ii, 58 :* The preyful princess pierc'd and prick'd a pretty pleasing pricket Nashe, Strange Newes, i, 296, had written a burlesque alliteration, "A Porch of Paynim Pilfryes, Pestred with Prayses." Harvey, Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 276, taunts Nashe with this particular jingle. One can see in the words "pierc'd" and "prick'd" a hit at the name Pierce used by Harvey and Nashe in their titles and at Harvey's pet word "prick." IV, ii, 64: a rare talent Nashe, Strange Newes, i, 301, " I that enjoy but a mite of wit in comparison of his talent." IV, ii, 65-66: If talent be a claw, look how he claws him with a talent Harvey, Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 80, says that Nashe "meanly beclaweth a few." Nashe, Have with You, iii, 49, uses "claw" in his burlesque of Harvey's style.

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The use of "talent" here for "talon" would have a special point if employed by a writer favorable to Nashe. IV, ii, 85: Master Parson quasi person. An if one should be pierc'd A reference to Piers Penniless and other pamphlets in the quarrel, and introducing the next point. IV, ii, 88 :* Of piercing a hogshead Harvey, Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 81, writes: "She knew what she said, that intituled Pierce, the hogshead of wits, the tosspot of eloquence: & Nashe, the verye inventor of Asses. She it is, that must broach the barrell of thy frisking conceit, and canonise the Patriarch of newe writers." This echo was pointed out by Hart. The word "Of" has worried commentators, but it was used in phrases to form the titles of chapters in books. Cf. the chapters in Puttenham. Nashe, "Epistle Dedicatorie" to Have with You, writes, "hath his head or his hayre the falling sickness never so, without anie more delay. Of or on, trimmed he must be." IV, ii, 92-3* read me this letter . . . sent me from Don Armado Another gibe at Harvey's fondness for the letter form. IV, ii, 94:* Fauste, precor gelida Harvey, Foure Letters, i, 195, twits Nashe with the Latin margins in Piers Penniless, and says that they are as deeply learned as Fauste Precor Gelida. Nashe makes a retort to this in Strange Newes, i, 306. IV, ii, 102: Ut, re, sol, la, mi, fa Nashe, Strange Newes, 1, 275, ends his nonsense jingle with the words "Sol, fa, mi, fa, conatus in fiddle." IV, ii, 127—29: Ovidius Naso was the man; and, why, indeed, Naso, but for smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy?

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Harvey, Foure Letters, i, 202, uses the phrase, "his good old Flores Poetarum" and also, "than his gayest flower." Nashe, Strange Newes, i, 315, replies, "Flores Poetarum, they are flowers that yet I never smelt too . . . the flowers of your Foure Letters." IV, ii, 163: I will prove those verses to be very unlearned, neither savoring of poetry, wit, or invention Harvey, Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 118, derides two lines of a poem Nashe included in Piers Penniless, and uses the phrases, "crestfallen style," "socket-worn invention," and "starved wit." V, i, 1: *Satis quod sufficit Harvey, Foure Letters, i, 212, "Enough, to any is inough: to some, overmuch." V, i, 13: thrasonical Nashe in the "Preface" to Menaphon uses "thrasonicall huffsnuff," and in Have with You, iii, 135, speaks of Harvey's Thrasonism. Harvey, Foure Letters, i, 168, "his vainglorious and thrasonicall braving." V, i, 14: too picked Nashe, Strange Newes, i, 286, "picked effeminate carpet knight." V, i, 17-18:*1 He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument. Harvey, Foure Letters, i, 226, "I am not to dilate where a sentence is a discourse." Nashe, Have with You, iii, 37, says of Harvey, "he never bids a man good morrow but he makes a speech as long as a proclamation." V, i, 28 :* it insinuateth me of insanie The Quarto reads "infamie," but the following words show that "insanie" is the right word.

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Nashe, Have with You, iii, 179, says of Harvey, "he was asked by no mean personage, Unde haec insatiia?" V, i, 43:* eaten thee for a word Harvey, Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 113, asks why Nashe hasn't dipped a sop in Rhenish wine, named it Gabriel, and devoured it up, or called a pickled herring Richard and swallowed it down with a stomach. V, i, 80:* ad dunghill A Costardism for ad unguem. The use of this particular word here at once suggests a point. Harvey, Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 229-30, says that Nashe bustled for the frank tenement of the dunghill. See also iii, 1, 73, for expression referred to there. V, i, 86:* singuled from the Barbarous Nashe, Have with You, iii, 50, taunts Harvey with writing, "Singular are these three, John, Richard, Gabriel Harvey, For logique, Philosophie, Rhetorique, Astronomie." V, i, 99:* the king . . . is my familiar Nashe, Have with You, iii, 116, says of Harvey, "He would do nothing but crake and parret it in Print, in how manie noblemen's favors he was in, and blab everie light speach they uttered to him in private." V, i, 109: dally with my excrement, with my mustachio Harvey, Newe Letter, ii, 291, "Dalliance in the sagest and highest causes is an absurdity." Nashe, Strange Newes, i, 278, in teasing Harvey, makes a point of " a well pruned pair of moustachios." In The Unfortunate Traveler Nashe refers to chin whiskers as excrements. V, i, 117-18: ostentation, or show, or pageant, or antic, or fire-work Nashe, Strange Newes, i, 296, says, "Signior Immerito brought in to play a part in that his Enterlude of Epistles." Harvey, Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 96, tells Nashe that his

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bawdy poems are out of place now, for "the wind is changed & there is a busier pagent on the stage." V, i, 134-35: this swain because he is great of limb or joint Nashe, Have with You, iii, 95, describes Harvey's servant, whom he calls John-a-Droynes, as "big-boned." Costard most likely represents this John-a-Droynes just as Moth represents the stolen page. V, i, 144-45: if any of the audience hiss Nashe, Strange Newes, i, 296, "Enterlude of Epistles that was hist a t . " V, ii, 12:* a shrewd unhappy gallows too Harvey, Pierce's Supererogation, ii, 17, makes the excellent gentlewoman say of Nashe, "Shall Boy the gibbet be of writers all?" and in Ν ewe Letter, i, 282, he calls Nashe "the gallows of his companions." V, ii, 603-4:* Judas . . . a kissing traitor Nashe, Have with You, iii, 105, taunts Harvey with calling Bodley an intelligencer, which he insists is a Judas name. V, ii, 667-8:* beat not the bones of the buried Another gibe at Harvey for abusing Greene after death. Nashe, Strange Newes, i, 268, says "no dead man he spareth," and Have with You, iii, 87-88, "he would burst, to take vengeance, not onely on the living but the dead also." V, ii, 676:* surmounted Hannibal Nashe, Have with You, iii, 67, "surmounteth and dismounteth the most heroyicalest Countes Momentes of that craft." Costard misunderstands these words as implying an amour with a woman named Hannah Ball and goes on to charge Armado with getting Jaquenetta with child. Nashe, Have with You, iii, 67, openly charges Gabriel Harvey with lechery, and elsewhere in accusing Gabriel of sharing the astrological works of his brothers says that Richard Harvey in putting his name to one of them fathered one of Gabriel's bastards.

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V, ii, 706-7: take a button-hole lower Nashe, "Epistle Dedicatorie" to Have with You, iii, 6, bids Lichfield take Harvey a button lower. V, ii, 714: I both may and will Nashe, " T o the Reader" in Have with You, iii, 23, say, " I both can and will be shut presently of this tedious chapter of contents." V, ii, 716-17:* I have no shirt; I go woolward for penance Nashe, "Epistle Dedicatorie" to Have with You, iii, 7, says, "thou hast caused him to doo penaunce and weareHairecloth for his sins," and Have with You, iii, 73-4, he makes fun of the scantiness of Harvey's wardrobe. V, ii, 119-20:* dish-clout of Jaquenetta's Harvey, Ν ewe Letter, i, 281, speaks of a dishclout of the excellent gentlewoman, whom Jaquenetta represents. Nashe, Have with You, iii, 54, "the contemptliblest world's dishclout for a Relique."

APPENDIX

Β

THE ORIGINAL OF HOLOFERNES I N LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST A favorite sport of Shakespearean students has been the identification of the various characters in Love's Labour's Lost. Of these characters, Holofernes seems to have been more frequently discovered than any other. Warburton as early as the Variorum of 1821 identified Holofernes as a satirical representation of John Florio, the translator of Montaigne and a teacher of Italian in Oxford and London. In support of this identification Warburton quoted definitions from Florio's World of Words which seemed parallel to expressions in the speeches of Holofernes. The chief feature of these expressions was the use of several synonyms strung together dictionary fashion when a single word would suffice. The very first speech of Holofernes affords an excellent example. Holofernes's use of Italian Warburton referred to the same cause. Furthermore, he interpreted Florio's remarks about H. S. in the Epistle to the Reader in the World of Words as applying to Shakespeare despite the difference in initials. Furness in the Variorum of 1904 pointed out that in quoting from the Epistle Warburton skipped a whole folio page and that Florio's remarks are really a part of what he had to say about Aristotle. The Comtesse de Chambrun 1 continues this identification of Holofernes with Florio. In support of it, she alleges Florio's fondness for anagrams and alliterations, the use of Italian by Holofernes, the remarks of Holofernes to Nathaniel about 1

Comtesse de Chambrun, Giovanni Florio, Paris, 1921.

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apostrophes and the accent, Florio's introducing the word "facilitate," 2 the H.S. passage already mentioned, the general pedantry of Florio's style, and the fact that in his translation of Montaigne's Essays Florio joins Will with Hodge as a name equally discredited in England. The particular alliterative passage, "The preyful princess . . . " (Act IV, Scene ii, 1.58), resembles the "Porch of Paynim Pilgrims" bandied about between Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe more nearly than it resembles any other particular alliterative passage. The Italian used by Holofernes is not so extensive as to be beyond the reach of most educated Englishmen of the day and hardly deserves to be singled out from Shakespeare's use of Italian phrases in his other plays, even though Florio did quote the "Venetia" passage himself. The remark of Holofernes about apostrophes and the accent, in support of which the Comtesse quotes a passage from Florio in regard to apostrophes for omitted vowels at the end of Italian words, has no special bearing, since the use of apostrophes in England antedated Florio's World of Words, from which the passage was quoted. 3 Florio was not the only inhabitant of England in the days of the Good Queen Bess who showed a fondness for anagrams, the cross-word puzzles of the day. Florio's remark about the name of Will being as discredited as that of Hodge will apply to any man named Will, and maybe this name was borne by more Englishmen than the dramatist Shakespeare. The H.S. passage remains the H.S. passage, and no good reason has ever been shown for applying the real passage to Shakespeare. General pedantry and the word "facilitate" do not constitute 2 This word is found only three times in all Shakespeare's plays, and all three instances occur in Love's Labour's Lost. • This matter of apostrophes and the accent is after all more a matter of setting words to music than anything else, as examination of Morley's Canzonets of 1593 will show.

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evidence that would stand before a court of law. Besides, Elizabethans experimented more with words ending in " a t e " than use today accepts. Pedantry had long been ridiculed in England since the days of Wilson's Rhetoric if not earlier. The evidence that has been offered does not convict Florio. Professor Lefranc 4 sees Holofernes as a caricature of Richard Lloyd, the tutor who accompanied William Stanley on his travels in France. The chief count against Lloyd is that in 1594 he published a poem of twelve hundred lines on the Nine Worthies under the title: A briefe discourse of the most renowned actes and right valiant conquests of those puissant Princes, called the Nine Worthies: wherein is declared their several proportions and dispositions, and what A rmes everie one gaue, as also in what time ech of them liued, and how at length they ended their liues. This book, says Lefranc, is to be found in the Bodleian Library. Every Worthy introduces himself much as the Worthies in Love's Labour's Lost introduce themselves. Lefranc quotes three of these introductions: Joshua—I am the worthie conqueror Duke Josue the great. Alexander—I am the great and worthie King . . . . Charlemagne—I am the Emperour Charlemaine, surnamed Charles the great. Lloyds' Worthies are Joshua, Hector, David, Alexander, Judas Maccabeus, Julius Caesar, Arthur, Charlemagne, and Guy of Warwick. Alexander, in his speech, goes on to say: And saw rayselfe a conqueror vnto the worlds end . . . And marched backe to Babylon, triumphing as a God, Where all the princes, of the east for me made their abod. There did I hold a Paleament, almost of all the world: For ouer all the orient I was the soeraigne Lord. 4

Lefranc, Abel. Sous le Masque de W. Shakespeare, 2 vols. Paris, 1922-24.

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The italics are Lefranc's to indicate the expressions he thinks are echoed in Love's Labour's Lost. Elsewhere Lloyd describes Alexander's armor: This puissant prince and conqueror bare in his shield a Lyon or, Which sitting in a chaire hent a battel axe in his paw argent. The italics here represent the words he thinks are echoed in Costard's coarse gibe in Act V, Scene ii, 1.580.' Richard Lloyd, according to Lefranc, was born in 1545, attended Shrewsbury School, and was sent by Leicester to France on a mission in 1580. In 1582 he was chosen as tutor by the Earl of Derby to accompany William Stanley on his travels in France. Letters of Lloyd during this year show the itinerary of the two. Another letter of Lloyd's, written in 1610 and addressed to King James and Parliament, accompanied a treatise in English intermixed with Latin phrases like the speech of Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost. The fact that Lloyd wrote a poem on the Nine Worthies and that the formula of introduction used by each Worthy corresponds to that used in Love's Labour's Lost seems at first glance good evidence that Lloyd was the original of Holofernes. But, after all, the Nine Worthies were not new to literature, the play takes only three of the nine named by Lloyd, and the formula for introduction is as old as The Mirror for Magistrates. This evidence, therefore, proves to be almost no evidence at all. Furthermore, Richard Lloyd is too obscure a figure in the national affairs of the country to be noted in a satire that includes the King of France and his courtiers, and men so well known to the London audience as Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe. There is no evidence to connect him sufficiently with the life of London and the 1 Charlton, Η. B., "The Date of Love's Labour's Lost," Modern Language Review, X I I I , 257 f., and 387 f., find the source for this gibe in the 1592 edition of Legh's Accidens of Armory, first published in 1562

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players to show any justification for including him in a satire. Obscurity of person likewise rules out Thomas Hunt, the master of the Free Grammar School at Stratford during Shakespeare's school days. Looney® identified Holofernes with Gabriel Harvey. He first noted a resemblance between the names Holofernes and Hobbinol, the latter being the names used for Gabriel Harvey by Spenser in The Shepheardes Calendar. Having assumed that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare, Looney recalled that Harvey in his Speculum Tuscanismi had caricatured this earl of Oxford and concluded that Oxford had answered by caricaturing Harvey in Holofernes. But the echoes of the Nashe-Harvey quarrel in the play make Harvey the original of Armado. Furthermore, the pronunciations advocated by Holofernes at the opening of Act V do not agree with Harvey's pronunciation as indicated by his spelling. But mqre of this later. Acheson, on the other hand, identified Holofernes with Chapman, 7 whom he took to be the rival poet. He thought that the opening of Love's Labour's Lost through line 93 reflects the theories set forth by Chapman in The Shadow of Night, and thus established a connection between Chapman and the play. The pedantry of Holofernes to him resembled the pedantry of Chapman. Nathaniel's praise of Holofernes for his sweetly varied epithets (Act IV, Scene ii, 1.8) he related to Chapman's dedication to Ovid's Banquet of Sense. And when he recalled that Chapman at one time lived at Hitching Hill and perhaps taught school there, he considered that fact to fit the "charge-house on the mountain" passage and to prove the identification correct. The case thus put by Acheson has doubtless appealed to • Looney, Thomas J., Shakespeare Identified, London, 1920. 7 Acheson, Arthur. Shakespeare and the Rival Poet, London and New York, 1903.

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m a n y as good, especially as it gives some explanation of t h e trouble-some charge-house on the m o u n t a i n a n d mons, t h e hill. B u t Acheson overlooked the opinions of Holofernes on p r o n u n c i a t i o n , a n d C h a p m a n ' s own p r o n u n c i a t i o n as i n d i c a t e d b y his r h y m e s . I n criticising A r m a d o a t the opening of A c t V, Holofernes s a y s : He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument. I abhor such fanatical phantasimes, such insociable and point-devise companions; such rackers of orthography, as to speak doul, fine, when he should say doubt; del when he should pronounce debt—d, e, b, t, not d, e, t; he clepeth a calf, cauf; half, hauf; neighbour vocalur nebour; neigh abbreviated ne. This is abhominable, —which he would call abhominable; it insinuateth me of insanie; ne intelligis, dotninef to make frantic, lunatic. H e r e is s o m e t h i n g definite. I t provides a test b y which to t r y t h e c a n d i d a t e s for the honor of being the original of Holofernes. T h e writings of a n y one proposed for t h a t h o n o r m u s t b e e x a m i n e d for a n y evidence as to his p r o n u n c i a t i o n of words. C h a p m a n in O v i d ' s B a n q u e t of Sense writes, Or else blame me as his submitted debtor, That never mistress had to make one better a n d in T h e T e a r e s of Peace That made me see, I might propose my doubt; Which was: if this were true Peace I found out. T h e s e passages show t h a t he did not p r o n o u n c e the b in " d o u b t " a n d " d e b t , " as Holofernes insisted it should be pron o u n c e d . " N e i g h b o r " does n o t occur as a r h y m e word in C h a p m a n ' s p o e m s previous to the publication of L o v e ' s Lab o u r ' s Lost, b u t he ignores the g u t t u r a l gh in o t h e r words a n d r h y m e s " w r i t e " with " n i g h t , " " h e i g h t " with " r e c e i p t " a n d " c o n c e i t , " " d e l i g h t e d " with " w h i t e d . " Other r h y m e s show t h a t he included in t h e same class the words " l i g h t , " " f i g h t , " " b r i g h t " a n d " r i g h t . " So C h a p m a n is n o t the original of

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Holofernes. Gabriel H a r v e y ' s spelling is not always consistent, b u t he wrote " d e t t o u r " in his signature to the "epistle dedicatorie" of his Foure Letters. T h e pronunciation advocated by Holofernes was archaic, to say the least. J o h n H a r t , who had written T h e Opening of the Reasonable Writing of Our English Tongue as early as 1551 a n d had followed it with An Orthography in 1569 a n d Α M e t h o d e of Comfortable Beginning for all Unlearned in 1570, gave as examples of words containing m u t e conson a n t s " d o u b t , " " a u c t h o r i t i e , " "souldier," " b a p t i s m e , " " c o r p s , " and " c o n d e m p n e d " in which b, c and h, I, s, and p respectively were n o t pronounced. L was likewise omitted in " f a u l t , " " c a u l d r o n , " and " r e a l m . " H a r t advocated the retention of the voiceless open consonant where the ordinary spelling has gh. William Bullokar gave " d o u t " for " d o u b t " as early as 1579. Sir T h o m a s Smith in his pamphlet on English pronunciation appended to his essay on Greek pronunciation in 1568 gave " d e t " for " d e b t . " Mulcaster in his Elementarie of 1582 listed " c a l f " among the words in which the al has the sound of au, the very thing against which Holofernes inveighs. 8 T h e pronunciation recommended by Mulcaster is especially i m p o r t a n t , for, as h e a d m a s t e r of the M e r c h a n t Tailors School, he is today one of the best known Elizabethan schoolmasters, and has for t h a t reason been proposed as an original for Holofernes. His pronunciation rules him out. P u t t e n h a m in C h a p t e r X I I I of the A r t e of English Poesie of 1589 forbade all aspiration of gh and recommended " d e l i t e " for " d e l i g h t . " The cap and gown of Holofernes do not fit any of the candidates proposed for them. Every one fails by one test or a n other. T h e field is again open for a new lot of competitors, b u t the qualifications are rigid. Perhaps for the sake of clearness 8

Jespersen, Otto, "John Hart's Pronunciation of English," Forschungen, X X I I , Heidelberg, 1907.

Anglische

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and definiteness, though at the risk of tediousness, they should be listed in tabular form :9 1. Pedantry. This pedantry must not, however, be misunderstood. I t can not consist only in the use of new and latinate words; that was a vice too frequent in an age of linguistic experiment and cannot single out any one particular person. Florio was not the only man to use such words. Nashe and Harvey in their respective pamphlets charge each other with inventing inkhorn terms. The use of synonyms in a row, t h a t has been frequently urged as evidence for the pedantry of Holofernes, is used by Armado and Nathaniel. I t is really a reflection of the speech used in law and legal papers and processes. In the play itself even Costard is master of such a rare word as honorificabilitudinitatibus. 2. Mixture of Latin and English. This is not very helpful, for such was doubtless the trick of more than one person at the time. 3. Stickling for preciseness of terms. Also too general, perhaps, to be of much service in identifying any single person. 4. The gift for extemporal epitaphs. This may be a clue, of some strength. 5. Alliteration, "affecting the letter which argues facility." This, too is of little value, for the pages of nearly every one who wrote during the Elizabethan age reek with alliteration. Harvey and Nashe use it abundantly, to mention only two. 6. The sentence, "These are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon 9

In attempting to determine the exact qualifications, it must be admitted, the investigator is beset with the difficulty of knowing just what particular detail belongs in character and what is to be considered merely as a general allusion or hit and not belonging to the individual character. Such difficulty opens to attack any explanation offered or an objection to an identification or explanation. It is easy to retort that the passage in question is a general hit and not an integral part of the character.

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the mellowing of occasion." The source of this, when discovered, may give a clue to the identity, or may prove only a general hit. 7. The use of Italian. Previously discussed as too general to serve. 8. The ejaculation of Holofernes, "What, my soul, verses?" This may ultimately be traced to some particular source and aid in identification. 9. The objection to Nathaniel's not finding the apostrophes in Biron's poem and so missing the accent. This likewise is too general to serve. Furthermore, the poem now standing in the play has no written or printed syllables that should be clipped in pronunciation or represented by apostrophes, and only one syllable that should be elided, the " e n ' s " in "heaven's" in the last line. Such a state of affairs suggests that an entirely different poem once occupied this place in the play. 10. The order to Jaquenetta to deliver the letter to the King. This suggests a hit at a known informer. Along with it goes Nathaniel's line, "You have done this in the fear of God, very religiously." But more of this later. 11. The invitation of Holofernes to Nathaniel to join him at dinner with the father of one of his pupils. All of these are to be found in Scene ii of Act IV, where Holofernes appears for the first time. If the playwright wishes to make a stinging satire of some particular person, it is likely that his first showing of the character would include some significant and telling detail. Which of these as enumerated is this telling detail? 12. A fondness, apparently, for argument and a weighty delivering of opinion, as indicated by Nathaniel's praise of his reasons at dinner. 13. The matter of pronunciation, previously discussed. 14. Moth's remark, "he teaches boys the hornbook," and the following jests about the sheep.

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15. The passage about the charge-house on the mountain and mons, the hill. This seems to be a deliberate hit at a particular person and a particular locality. 16. Armado's invitation to Holofernes to assist in devising an entertainment for the Princess and her ladies, "understanding that the curate and your sweet self are good at such eruptions and sudden breaking out of mirth." 17. The proposal of Holofernes to present the Nine Worthies and his immediate assuming charge of the undertaking, along with his proposal to play three of the parts himself. These are to be found in Scene i of Act V. Some of them are general, obviously, but others of them seem to have special significance. The following scene yields only a few that have not already been indicated. 18. The insistence that his part of Judas is not Judas Iscariot, and Biron's jest that he is a kissing traitor. This goes along with the possibility of reference to a known informer. The underscoring of the idea here by its repetition adds strength to the impression of some such reference. 19. The boldness with which Holofernes talks back to the lords deriding him. 20. The remarks about his face, of which Acheson makes a great deal in trying to show that they apply to Chapman's medallion of his own portrait in his books. But his interpretation is far-fetched. If the gibes mean anything, they mean that the face is pale and perhaps bony. The actor may have made up with whitened cheeks and darkened eye-pits so that he actually resembled a death's-head. The qualifications, as here enumerated, reveal little that is definite for the identification of any particular person as the original of Holofernes. Perhaps the most salient of all is the passage about the charge-house on the mountain or mons, the hill. "Charge-house" has been assumed to mean "boardingschool," or at least a school where tuition was charged. That

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meaning will have to s t a n d until another is discovered for it, or until it is found to be the corruption of a perfectly intelligible word, as Charterhouse is the corruption of Chartreux. So the allusion m a y be to some schoolmaster who t a u g h t a private school on the top of a hill. B u t what hill? More t h a n one hill in E n g l a n d in the days of Elizabeth doubtless afforded such a schoolmaster. T h e parish registers of St. Peter's, Cornhill, London, 1 0 contain, for instance, the following e n t r y : 1594, October 23. Wednesday. William Ashbold sonne of Mr. William Ashbold Parson of this church, a toward yong child, and my scholler, he lieth buried in the chauncell under a small blewish stone, hard by the south dore: whose death wrong from mee these suddain verses; wiz. My sweet and little boy, my life, my joyful sight, Thou was thy fathers earthly ioy and mothers chief delight Though happy destinyes haue taen thee soone away, Yet enuious death shall giue thee ioyes that neuer shall decay Thou wast my scholler deare, but henceforth thou shalt bee, A scholler of thy master Christ through all etemitie. And in the margin of the page appear these Latin verses: Dulce caput mi parue mea lux, mea vita: Patris deliciae tum genetricis amor, At si te subito iam tristia fata tulerunt Inuida nunc tibi mors gaudia multa dabit Tu mihi discipulus charus fueras, tamen at nunc Christi discipulus postea semper eris. These entries prove to h a v e been made by William Averill, merchant tailor and parish clerk. On February 20,1594-5, his wife Gillian was buried. T h e e n t r y declares t h a t she died of her seventeenth child. I t is accompanied with four lines of Latin verse. There are in the book a t about the same date other funeral verses in English, Latin, and even Greek. An 10

Registers of St. Peter's, Cornhill, H a r l e i a n Society, p . 144.

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entry of October, 1603, records the burial of the Holdworth boys, " M y schollers," and shows that Averill continued his teaching many years. Another entry of September 23, 1605, records the burial of William Averill, "clerk of this parish, dwelling in Corbet's Court in Gracious Street." Averill had married, November 2, 1578, Gyllian, daughter of Robert Goodale, Brownbaker of St. Peter's parish. One wonders if there was any connection with the player, T. Goodal. Here then is a possible candidate, a man who lived in a place of which hill formed part of the name, a man who taught boys and was facile at writing "extemporal epitaphs." In 1584, according to the British Museum Catalogue, one William Averill published a book with the title, A dyal for dainty darlings, rockt in the cradle of securitie. A glass for all disobedient sonnes to look in. A myrrour for vertuous tnaydes. . . . In 1588 the same name appeared as author on another book, A mervailous combat of contrarieties: malignitie striving in the members of mans bodie, allegorically representing unto us the envied state of our flourishing commonwealth: wherein, dialogue-wise by the way, are touched the extreame vices of this present time, with an earnest and vehement exhortation to all true English harts, courageously to be readie prepared against the enemie. The titles show some effort after alliteration. Nothing, however, was found to connect William Averill, either the parish clerk or the author if they be different men, with Holofernes. But the true original may be found in some such way. "Top of the mountain" and the following correction of "mons, the hill" suggest that the name of the original may be hinted at in them, some such name as Hillcrest, Hilltop, Tophill, or similar combination. The Dictionary of National Biography contains no mention of men with such names, and presumably no one of such name distinguished himself in any way during that period. The Hill family to which be-

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longed Rowland Hill, Lord Mayor of London, descended from a family whose pedigree11 begins with Robert Hill of Hill Top, Esq. This pedigree is carried down to Edward Hill of Charterhouse in the city of Coventry and Hill-Top als Pynely, who died March 28, 1641. The description "of Hill Top" accompanies every generation of the pedigree, but nothing has been found to connect any of these men with Holofernes. These facts, however, hint that the name of the original of Holofernes may have been Hill. The Dictionary of National Biography notices three men of the name as living at this date, Adam Hill, Nicholas Hill, and Robert Hill. Adam Hill was a fellow of Balliol and secured a reputation as a preacher. In 1586 he was prebendary and succentor of Salisbury Cathedral. A sermon of his in 1590 provoked reply from Alexander Hume. Hill answered in 1592 with a sermon, Christ Descended into Hell, which he printed and dedicated to Archbishop Whitgift. In 1593 he printed the Crie of England. He died in 1595. Nicholas Hill was born in London and attended the Merchant Tailors School. In 1587 he was scholar at St. John's, Oxford, where he became B.A. in 1592 and fellow. For a time he was secretary to Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, and was afterwards under the patronage of the Earl of Northumberland. According to Anthony a Wood, he was a "person of good parts but humorous, with a peculiar and affected way, different from others, in his writing, and entertained fantastical notions in philosophy." Robert Hill was a native of Derbyshire, attended Cambridge, and was a fellow of St. John's College. From 1591 to 1602 he was curate of St. Andrew's, Norwich. He took an active part in the disputed election to the mastership of St. John's in December, 1595. In 1601 he became chaplain to Lord Chief Justice Popham and also began publishing. He died in 1623. Nothing inu

Vyvian, Visitation of Cornwall, p. 226.

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dicates, however, that any of these men is the original of Holofernes. The possibility of a hit at a known informer makes one's literary interest crave some way of connecting Holofernes with Richard Topcliffe, the man who during this period was busy running down Catholic recusants and seminary priests, and who arrested the poet, Robert Southwell, at the dwelling of the underkeeper of the Gatehouse in Westminster. In the Promptorium Parvulorum the Latin word for cliff or hill (hill of a cliff)' is given as declivus, thus connecting 'cliff' and 'hill,' but for 'hill' itself in its own alphabetical order other words are given. So after a fashion, Topcliffe satisfies "on the top of the mountain" and "mons, the hill." But only after a fashion. His general activities would satisfy the qualification demanded by Nathaniel's "You have done this in the fear of God, very religiously." His reports to Burghley on the recusants and priests would satisfy the qualification in regard to informers. Furthermore, Southwell was betrayed to Topcliffe by a woman, the wife of the underkeeper of the Gatehouse and daughter of the Bellamy family of Harrow-on-the-Hill, with whom Southwell had been staying. In the records of the Middlesex Sessions Harrow-on-the-Hill is always mentioned as Harrow super montem. Still, there is nothing to show that Topcliffe meets the other qualifications, general and vague as some of them are. So the identification of him as Holofernes, enticing as it may be, is rather far-fetched and, it must be admitted, not allowable with the evidence at hand. As this review of identifications previously made and of the possibilities revealed during the analysis of the character has shown, there is yet nothing to afford a definite and indisputable solution. The original of Holofernes is still to seek.

APPENDIX

C

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST AND AN A N E C D O T E OF Q U E E N ELIZABETH C O N C E R N I N G PURVEYORS Readers of Love's Labour's Lost who have also read Francis Osborne's Memories of Queen Elizabeth and King James may perhaps have wondered if an anecdote of Osborne's may not have been in the mind of the playwright when he wrote that scene of the play (Act IV, Scene i., 1. 41 f.) in which Costard delivers a letter to Rosaline in the presence of the Princess. This part of the scene is short and runs as follows: Enter Clown (Costard) BOYET. Here comes a member of the commonwealth. COSTARD. God dig-you-den all! Pray you, which is the head lady? P R I N C E S S . Thou shalt know her, fellow, by the rest that have no heads. COSTARD. Which is the greatest lady, the highest? P R I N C E S S . The thickest and the tallest. COSTARD, "the thickest and the tallest! It is so; truth is true. An your waist, mistress, were as slender as my wit. One of these maids' girdles for your waist should be fit. Are you the chief woman? You are the thickest here. P R I N C E S S . What's your will, sir? what's your will? COSTARD. I have a letter from Monsieur Biron to one Lady Rosaline.

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PRINCESS. Ο, t h y letter, t h y letter! H e ' s a good friend of mine. Stand aside good bearer. Boyet, you can carve; Break up this capon. T h e anecdote is also short. I t occupies section 9 of the Memories a n d runs as follows: And here I think it not impertinent to insert a Story as it was related by an eye witness. A Purveyor having abused the County of Kent, upon her remove to Greenwich (whither she often resorted, being as I have heard the first air she breathed: and therefore most likely to agree with her) a country man watching the time she went to walk, which was commonly early, and being wise enough to take his time when she stood unbent and quiet from the ordinary occasions she was taken up with, placing himself within reach of her ear, did after the fashion of his coat cry aloud which is the Queen? Whereupon, as her manner was, She turned towards him and he continuing still his question, she herself answered I am your Queen, what would'st thou have with me? You replied the Fellow, are one of the rarest Women I ever saw, and can eat no more than my daughter Madge, who is thought the properest Lass in our Parish, than short of you, but that Queen Elizabeth I look for devours so many of my Hens, Ducks, and Capons, as I am not able to live. The Queen, no less auspicious to all suits made through the mediation of her comely shape, of which she held a high esteem after her Looking Glass (long laid by before her death) might have confuted her in any good opinion of her Face, then malignant to all Oppression above her own, inquiring who was Purveyor, and as the story went suffered him to be hang'd; after a special order for his trial, according to a Statute formerly made to prevent abuses of this kind. T h e reader a t once notices the resemblance in the breaking of an uncouth person u n p e r m i t t e d a n d unannounced into the presence of royalty and demanding to know who is royalty or the chief person present. T h e r e is also a similar reference to the physical appearance of royalty. Lastly, the Princess's use of the word capon for the letter m i g h t be taken as an echo of the real m a t t e r of the K e n t i s h m a n ' s visit to Queen Elizabeth.

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T h a t the story was popular is evidenced by the fact that it continued to be told so long after the death of Queen Elizabeth. 1 Just when in Elizabeth's reign occurred the event of the Kentishman's complaint and resulting investigation is not clear. The phrasing of the anecdote indicates that Elizabeth was then in her old age. There was in August, 1593, 2 a protest from the county of Kent against purveyors. This may be the event; the date tallies with the likelihood. Investigation and trial of the guilty must have extended into 1594. This date is of importance, then, as giving a date for the composition of this part of Love's Labour's Lost, and also as showing that at so late a date Shakespeare was writing doggerel verses.

1 Osborne's publications extended from 1652 to 1659. The Memories was published in 1658. ! Stale Papers, D.S., 1591-94, 365.

INDEX Acheson, Arthur, 117,122 Aquitaine, 29, 30, 60 Armado, 19, 22, 25, 31, 37, 39, 56, 57, 59, 69, 71, 92, 120, 122; a caricature of Harvey, 34-51,62, 63, 64,91, 117 Averiii, William, 123, 124 Ballads, 38,39,100 Barnes, Bamabe, 40,99 Biron, 9, 19, 22-26, 35, 3 8 ^ 1 , 44, 56-58, 61-63, 67H59, 74, 75, 79, 121,123 passim Blackamoors, 2,8,72 Blount, Edward, 67 Boyet, 25,27,28,29, 30,31,44,64 Breton, Nicholas, 62 Bullokar, William, 119 Burbage, Richard, 19, 89 Burghley, Lord, 21, 22, 64 Calais, 28,30,60 Campion, 77; Davison and, 8 Chambers, £ . K., William Shakespeare, viii Chapman, 117, 122; The Shadow of Night, 25 Characterization, in the play, 67 Clayton, John, 80 Comedy of Errors, 2, 10, 16, 17, 18, 19, 55, 56, 72, 73, 87 Company, composition of, 18 Costard, 19, 22, 36-50 passim, 56, 57, 59, 61, 63, 69, 74, 93, 102, 103,104, 106, 111, 116, 120,127 Davers, Sir Charles, 27 Davison and Campion, 8 Dickinson, John, 67 Dull, 22,30,36,56,63

Dumain, 19, 22, 23, 63, 68 Dymoke, Sir Edward, 27 Elizabeth, Queen, 1, 7,21,22,23, 27, 42, 60, 64, 104, 106, 127; and Henry IV, 26-32,60,61,64 England and France, relations between, 21-33, 60, 61, 65, 71, 73, 75 Essex-Southampton faction, 22, 31, 64,65 Estrfies, Gabrielle d', 24, 31 Euphuism in the play, 67, 78, 79 Feminine endings, 17 Fletcher, Giles, 1, 62 Florio, John, 113,120 France and England, relations between, 21-33, 60, 61, 65, 71, 73, 75 Furness, cited, 113 Gray, Austin K., 2, 21, 23, 29, 60 Henry David, 66, 75 Gray's Inn Revels, 1-9, 20, 32, 59, 66, 72 Greene family, 82,86,90 John, 83, 84 Margaret, 83 Richard, 83 Robert, 53, 54; use of Venus and Adonis stanza, 17; Menaphon, 36, 52, 76, 109; Harvey's attack on, 46, 53, 59, 100, 111; Quip for an Upstart Courtier, 52, 95; Nashe's acquaintance with, 76; attack on a playwright, 79 Thomas, Jr., career of; a relation of Shakespeare, 82, 83, 86, 88 Thomas, Sr., 82,83,88 Thomas, alias Shakespeare, 83, 85

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Η. S. passage of Florio, 113, 114 Hamlet, 104 Hart, John, 108, 119 Harvey brothers, 39, 48, 51, 52, 96, 97,110 Gabriel, 114, 116, 120; Armado a caricature of, 34-51, 62, 63, 64, 91, 117; Pierce's Supererogation, 34-54, 63, 65, 77, 92-111 passim; Newe Letter, 36, 38,43, 44, 46, 49-53, 92, 94, 95, 100102,110-112 passim; Foure Letters, 36-40, 45-50, 53 , 91-109, 119 passim; use of "letter" and letter form, 38, 95, 108; Two Letters, 38, 95; Three Letters, 38, 40, 49, 54, 95, 100, 105; style, 39; publication of Spenser's letters, 40, 45, 94; a social parvenu, 40, 49, 95, 99; and Robert Greene, 46, 52, 53, 59, 100, 111; suppression of books, 54; warrants for caricature of, 64; writers hostile to, 76, 77; Grosart edition, cited, 91-112; identified with Holofernes 117; spelling, 119. See also NasheHarvey quarrel. John, 51, 52, 53 Richard, 48, 51,52, 111 Hatfield Papers, 28, 29 Hathaway, Anne, 89 "Hay, the," 31 Hemminges, John, 89, 90 Heneage, Sir Thomas, 7, 20 Henry, Prince of Purpoole, 4, 7, 14, 20 Henry IV, of France, 23, 24, 26, 28, 65, 71; and Queen Elizabeth, 26-32,60, 61,71 Henry Vt (play), 16

Hill, top of the, 122,124, 125 Hill family, 124 Holofernes, 22,30, 35,36,37,40, 45, 46,50,59,64,113; H.-Nathaniel scenes, 58, 75; identification, 63, 113-126; on pronunciation, 117, 118; qualities, 120 Hunt, Thomas, 117 Isle of Dogs, 76 Jaquenetta, 22,38,41,45,47,49, 56, 58, 62 Katherine, 22,23,64 Kemp, William, 89, 90 King John, 16, 17, 18, 19, 32, 72 King of Navarre. See Navarre, King of Kyd, use of Venus and Adonis stanza, 17 Lichfield, 50,104,112 Lloyd, Richard, 115, 116 Longaville, 22,23, 24,41,63, 67 Love's Labour's Lost, and the Russian Embassy, 1-9, 20, 32, 59, 66, 72; significance of rhyme, 10-20, 55, 65, 75; earliest performance, 21; and affairs between England and France, 2133, 60, 61, 71, 73; characters, 22; metrical tests, 32, 55, 57, 58, 62, 65, 66, 72, 74, 75; dated, 32, 54-59,61, 62, 66, 67, 71, 73, 75; and Nashe-Harvey quarrel, 3351,91-112; original clue to relations, 58; significance of the Nashe-Harvey echoes, 52-71; revision of, 54; evidence against interpolations, 54; doggerel, 58,

INDEX 75, 129; identification of characters, 60, 62-64, 71, 97, 111, 113; interpretation of, as a satire, 65, 75; the work of two separate periods, 66; characterization, 67; euphuism in, 67, 78, 79; test of plot structure, 69, 74; resemblance to Lyly's court comedies: equivalent of modem revue, 70; recapitulation of tests for 1596 date, 72-75; company, 73; purpose and design, 75; search for author other than Shakespeare, 76; Student's Cambridge Edition, cited, 91-112; introduction used by Worthies, 116; Queen Elizabeth and purveyors, 127 Lyly, John, 22, 54, 67, 78; court comedies, 70; relations with Harvey and Nashe, 77; participation in play, 78 Maria, 22, 23, 42, 64 Marlowe, Christopher, 17 Martin Marprelate controversy, 52 Masque of Muscovites, 1-9, 20, 32, 59, 72 Mayenne, Duke de, 23, 24 Mercade, 22, 59, 63 Merchant of Venice, 16, 19, 70, 73 Meres, 87; plays mentioned by, 16, 72 Merry Wives of Windsor, 19 Midsummer Night's Dream, 10, 16, 17, 18, 32, 55, 72, 73 Mildmay, Sir Anthony, 27, 28 Möns, the hill, 122, 124 Moth, 18, 19, 22, 39, 41, 42, 43, 46, 48, 51, 56, 57, 59, 63, 69, 103, 121; identification, 63, 97

133

Much Ado about Nothing, 16, 70, 72 Mulcaster, 119 Muscovites, Masque of, 1-9, 20, 32, 59, 66, 72 Nashe, Thomas, 114,116, 120; Piers Penniless, 32, 34, 41, 49, 52, 53, 77,99,108,109; Strange Newes, 35,38, 40-41,43,47-55, 57, 93111 passim; Have with You, 35-51, 54-59, 71, 76-78, 91-112 passim; Preface to Greene's Menaphon, 36, 52, 76, 109; attack on Richard Harvey, 52; other writings, 53, 54, 76, 96, 110; suppression of books: The Trimming of, 54; Moth identified as, 63, 97; associates of, 76, 78; not author of the play, 76; relations with Shakespeare's company, 78; McKerrow edition, cited, 91-112 Nashe-Harvey quarrel, 52; and Love's Labour's Lost, 33-51, 65, 75, 120; significance of the echoes, 52-71, 73; dates, 54; clue to the relationship, 58; passages which echo the quarrel, 91-112 Nathaniel, 22, 40, 47, 59, 63, 107, 117, 120,121,126; Holofernes— N. scenes, 58, 75 Navarre, King of, 22, 23, 24, 39, 42, 46, 55, 60,61, 64,68; identification, 63, 71 Nine Worthies, 31, 75, 115, 116, 122 Oaths, broken, 25, 26, 61 Osborne, Francis, 127,128 Peele, George, 51, 76 Plot structure, 69, 74

134

INDEX

Political affairs reflected in play, French, 21-33, 60, 61, 71, 73; Russian, 1-9, 20, 32, 59, 66, 72 Princess of France, 19, 22, 23, 27, 28, 30, 31, 60, 64, 68, 127 Purveyors, anecdote, 127 Quyny, Richard, 82, 88 Reau, M . de, 27 Richard I I (play), 16, 17, 18, 72 Richard I I I (play), 16,17,18 Romeo and Juliet, 16, 17, 18, 32, 72, 73 Rosaline, 9, 22, 23, 64 Run-on lines, 17 Russian Masque, 1-9, 20, 32, 59, 66, 72 Shake-scene, 79 Shakespeare family, 81, 86, 88, 90, Henry, 81 John, 8 1 , 8 4 , 8 5 , 8 8 Richard, 8 1 , 8 3 , 8 5 Thomas, 85, 87; will: family of, 84 Thomas Greene alias, 83, 85 William, Chambers' William Shakespeare, viii; rhyme test for dating plays, 10-20, 55; metrical tests, 16, 32, 55, 57, 58, 62, 65, 66, 72, 74, 75, 129; lost years, 22, 79; and the Essex-Southampton faction, 22, 31, 64, 65; combination of verse and prose, 56; verse forms in 1596, 58, 75, 129; New Cambridge Edition editors, cited, 63,97; family, education, and social position, 8 0 90; lawsuit, 80; relationship with Greene, 82, 87, 90; knowledge of law, 87; sent to Court, 89; marriage: children, 89;

Variorum editors, cited, 101, 113 William, son of Thomas, 84 Sidney, Sir Philip, 105 Sir Robert, 28 Smith, Sir Thomas, 64,119 Southampton, Earl of, 2 1 , 2 2 , 3 1 , 6 4 , 65 Southwell, St. Peter's Complaint, 62, 74 Spenser, Edmund, 40,45,94, 117 Staple Inn, 86 Stopes, Mrs., 80 Taming of the Shrew, 16, 17, 18, 19, 32,72, 73 Textor's Epithets, 40, 97 Titus Andronicus, 16 Topcliffe, Richard, 126 Topical events. See Political affairs Tripp, Ε. I., 82, 83, 84, 88 Troilus and Cressida, 19 Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England, 17 True Tragedie of Richard D u k e of York, 79 Twelfth Night, 19 Two Gentlemen of Verona, 16, 17, 18, 19, 55, 69, 73 Unton, Sir Henry, 27, 30, 31 Venus and Adonis, 79, 89 Venus and Adonis stanza, 10, 15, 16, 17, 20, 32, 65, 72, 76 Vere, Edward de, Earl, 117 Villeroy, quoted, 27 Warburton, cited, 113 Wood, Anthony ä, 125 World of Words, 113 Worthies, Nine, 31, 75, 115, 116, 122

COLUMBIA

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY NEW YORK

FOREIGN AGENT OXFORD

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

HUMPHREY MILFORD AMEN H O U S E , LONDON, E . C .