Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 6.djvu/539

 ii s. vi. DEC. 7, 1912.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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bested by a lad. This, I take it, is the way in which the text originally stood :

Cclia. You bring me out. Soft ! comes he not hither ?

Jioftalind (aside to Celia). I will speak to him like a saucy lackey and under that habit play t he knave with him. Do you hear, forester ?

Shakespeare does not " abide our question " in these small matters ; he so fascinates and diverts us that we do not stop to consider whether an interpolation such as this promotes or impedes the de- velopment of the story. An instinctive taste ; a native bent towards that best art which conceals art ; the sense also proper to genius, whether it aims at immortality .or not, that imaginative works should not bear too evident marks of a temporary and ephemeral origin, made Shakespeare very chary of those caricatures and personalities which made Ben Jonson extremely interest- ing to his contemporaries, but all the less interesting to the general reader of to-day. So much is this the case that there is in some minds a prejudice, which seems to me to be pushed to an extreme, against tracing any such subordinate motives to Shakespeare. In a Preface I once wrote to a school edition of ' King Lear,' I have pointed out that the imaginary fall from Dover cliff has no original in the story in Sidney's ' Arcadia,' from which this part of the tragedy (the Gloucester section) is derived. I have made it look probable, I believe, that it was invented to give ample opportunity to the actor who played Edgar for the display of his peculiar skill in disguise, for it is clear that he assumes no less than four characters, perhaps more, in the course of the play, and was, it seems likely, the same man who was the Autolycus of ' The Winter's Tale.'* Of this theory of mine I have said elsewhere :

" Those who are once for all convinced that any part of our ' Lear ' had this rather vulgar origin will be the first to rejoice that there are many in whom such an opinion excites repug- nance. This will be the very best evidence that Shakespeare's magic has made, for the minds of most men, all traces disappear of those sinister influences which tend to impair the complete perfection of every work of art over which one creative and master mind has not absolute control."

Something like this, mutatis mutandis, may be said of that which really had an occasional origin in ' As You Like It.' And here we may note a discrepancy which

1008, as showing the importance attached to the character of Tom of Bedlam.
 * See the title-page of the ' Lear ' Quarto of

has not, I believe, been rightly explained. Let us set together the following passages as they are found in the Folios.

(a) ' As You Like It, : I. ii. 281-4 :

Orlando. Which of the two was daughter of

the Duke That here was at the wrestling ?

Le Beau. Neither his daughter, if we judge by

manners. But yet, indeed the taller is his daughter.

(6) Ib., III. iii. 116-8:

Rosalind .... Were it not better, Because that I am more than common tall, That I did suit me all points like a man ?

(c) Ib., III. v. 118:

Phcbe (of Rosalind). He is not very tall; yet for his years he 's tall.

(d) Ib., IV. iii. 86-9 :

Oliver (reading description). " The boy is fair. Of female favour, and bestows himself Like a ripe sister : the woman lotc, And browner than her brother."

I conjecture that if we possessed the " stayed " Quarto of 1600 a very interesting light would be thrown, not only on this dis- crepancy, but on the personnel of Shake- speare's actors. It is possible that the line

But yet indeed the taller is his daughter represents the original distribution of th parts, and was left by some incuria tin- changed when other changes were made, and that the earliest Rosalind was the shorter of the two boys. For take the very next of Shakespeare's plays, ' Twelfth Night.' produced in all probability on the night of 6 January, 1601. The vivacious Maria is represented by a small, quick-witted boy ; he is " the youngest lover of mine." " Some mollification for your giant, sweet lady,'' says Viola, with obvious irony- And I conjecture that before Twelfth Night. 1601. the same clsver little lad was acting Rosalind, and that the changes which give us the Rosalind whom we know were due to altered circumstances and belong to a later date. I foresee objections to this theory, but all such doubtful questions- (there may be other hypotheses more plausible than mine) the sight of a Quarto might set for ever at rest.

One may note here, obiter, that Shake- speare's fondness for making the boy-actor drop his female disguise (for this is the clearest way of putting the case) is an evi- dence of his artistic sense. He knew that a lad in a woman's dress is apt to be awkward and unfeminine. In a performance by the Amateur Dramatic Society* of Cambridge (England) an undergraduate enacting a lady lapsed into some gesture unsuited to