Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 6.djvu/243

 12 s. vi. MAY s, 1920.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

GENERAL JAMES OGLETHORPE (12 S. vi. 13, 139). Numerous references to repro- ductions of portraits of this celebrity will be found in the A.L.A. ' Portrait Index,' 1906, p. 1088. W. ROBERTS.

AUTHORS OF QUOTATIONS WANTED. (12 S. vi. 68.)

2. (Lines on the Forget-me-not.) These lines have been credited to an anonymous American child a<*ed eight. See ' The School World,' 1916, p. 309. N. D. C.

(12 S. vi. 170.)

The Latin quotation, the source of which is desired by Mr. J. E. HofiG, conies from Seneca's 'Epistles,' near the end of No. vii.

" Epicurus cum uni ex consortibus studiorum suorum scriberet, ' Haec,' inquit, ' ego non multis, sed tibi ; satis enim magnum alter alteri theatrum sumus.'"

Seneca, it will be seen, professes to be translating a saying of Epicurus. Dr. W. Aldis Wright, in his edition of the ' Advancement of Learning, points out that the same quotation is given in Bacon's Tenth Essay.

Robert Burton in the introduction ('Democritus to the Reader') to his 'Anatomy of Melancholy'

writes : " I lead a monastick life, ipse mini

theatrum." EDWARD BENSLY.

University College, Aberystwyth.

0n

A Study of Shakespeare's Versification. By M- A.

Bayfield. (Cambridge University Press, 16s.

net.)

TAKING this book as a whole we should say that Mr. Bayfield has proved his point. He seems fully prepared to be told that he goes too far : and therefore we have the less scruple in recording that that is, as to certain details, precisely our own opinion. But, on the other hand, we are ready to maintain that his work constitutes a serious and most illuminating contribution to the study of Shakespeare which will have to be taken account of by all future editors.

The usual formula for the five-foot verse in which the great mass of poetic drama in English is written is five iambic feet. Mr. Bayfield contends that the trochee if not occupying quite the position conventionally assigned to the iambus is a true, normal, and basic element in it. Next, he asserts or, rather, he demonstrates that Shakespeare loved and used, more than any other dramatist of his day, resolutions that is to say, the resolving of the two syllables of the iambus (or trochee) into three, or more, syllables. Not only so, but as Shakespeare's skill and power in versification increased, as his ear became more delicate and his range of music in verse more extended, so were the resolutions multiplied, and it was largely upon these on their subtle weaving, together, balancing, rippling in and out of each other that the sweetness and majesty of his poetry depended. Mr. Bayfield has laboriously

analysed the whole of the plays and worked out the percentages of resolutions in their different places in the line ; he sets the whole before us ; and from the results, which certainly are striking, he draws a new theory of the chronological order of the plays.

We are glad to see him attacking that scheme of Shakespeare's life and work, by which the poet was to have written the great tragedies during a time when his own experience was tragic and bitter, and to have emerged at last into*- mellow peace to present us with ' Cymbeline,' ' The Tempest,' and ' The Winter's Tale.' That theory can hardly have been set up in the- absence of any direct evidence on the subject by any one who was himself employed in works = of the imagination, or who had a keen impersonal interest in many human affairs. The maxim " Beaucoup d'art et peu de matiere " may be understood of the stuff of a poet's own experience quite as well as of the richness of his subject matter. There must be some matiere}: granted ; therefore Shakespeare could do at 45 what he could not have done at 30. But it was- rather added experience in his art and added? observation of and sympathy with men and women than new or dreadful experiences in his individual life which carried him, we think, to the heights and depths of the great tragedies. We agree that ' Cymbeline ' and ' The Winter's Tale ' if regarded as his last word are an anti- climax. The question could not, of course, be- decided if it ever is decided by the versification! alone ; but we think that the increasing love for and mastery of resolutions is one of the few lines along which an outsider can truly trace a master's steps as he progresses towards his culmination. It is a wholesome line, too, to turn contemporary criticism into : for the visual aspect of poetry has been emphasized lately somewhat at the expense- of its musical significance ; and where the soundl of verse has been taken into account it is the- quality of the consonants and the lightness or gravity of the syllables that have usually been.' considered movement having been somewhat neglected.

But Shakespeare's editors were of opinion that blank verse must run in lines of ten syllables^. To that Procrustean bed they cut <>r they stretched the varying rhythms of his verse. Mr. Bayfield has a great deal to say on these editors assuming them to have worked on the principle stated above. He brings forward scores of verses spoilt by elision to get them within the norm : and renders them beautiful simply by restoring the resolution. For these emendations his chapters are well worth retaining ; but about the middle of the book he is struck with a new idea the true one, as we are inclined to believe which renders many of his arguments and much of his censure of editors nugatory. Are we, after all he suggests right in assuming that the abbreviations in the Folio are true elisions, that they really indicate the slurring of syllables, the dropping out of vowels ? Abbreviations in- tended to be read in full are far more frequent in earlier writing than in our own day. Are we not justified in suspecting that a large percentage of the peccant apostrophes simply represent economy of fatigue, first on the part of the writer, of the MS. and then of the printer ? We think that Mr. Bayfield might have developed this afterthought with more confidence than he has shown.