Page:On Shakespeare, or, What You Will, Furness, 1908.djvu/16

14 blow, and she was a goddess. All we mortals, however, must win what we can of perfection by long, weary, and heavy labor, and at the cost of many dismal failures on the way. To this law of labor and of growth Shakespeare was no exception. When he came to London, there were already great luminaries in the dramatic world, whose plays were alike the delight of the Court and of the people. There was Greene, whose mimic kings talked and bore themselves right royally; and Lyly, who stood so close to the very throne that he dared in his dramas to mirror the Queen and her favorites, and whose clowns excelled in coarse and popular conceits and puns; and Marlowe, who, born within the same twelvemonth with Shakespeare, was, when a mere boy of twenty-three, dazzling all London with his impassioned lines, and revealing the flexibility of blank verse; and Kyd, who reflected those cruel times in his powerful dramas; and there were Chapman and Peele,—all these great dramatists were Shakespeare’s masters, at whose feet he sat when his dramatic life began. They were hardly paralleled throughout Europe, and if the plots of so many of their tragedies were cruel and deserve to be called by Symonds “The Tragedy of Blood,” we must bear in mind that they were really only showing the very form and pressure of their times, when men were accustomed to the sight of blood; when the headsman’s axe was seldom idle, and the ground of Tower Hill was with man’s blood painted gules, gules. This it was that made men tolerate, and applaud to the echo, The Spanish Tragedy. It was under this influence that Shakespeare wrote his earliest tragedy, Titus Andronicus, which he may have written in collaboration with another dramatist, or have remodeled, as was his wont in after years, some older play. The latter supposition is, I think, the more likely. The fable is so unspeakably abhorrent that many editors have rejected the whole play as spurious. This is not, I think, a sufficing reason. The plot is directly in the line of popularity, and Shakespeare needed money, and so far from softening the horrors of the old play, I incline to the belief that, wherever he could, Shakespeare deepened them. Why should he not? The worse it is, the better it is. An author named Meres, in 1598, enumerates Titus Andronicus among the tragedies which had made Shakespeare famous, and I can readily believe it. For myself, personally, I acknowledge that I read it once most carefully, and found many a passage which