Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 95.djvu/291

Rh beginner, and is but his A B C of compliment.” In Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune, it is said that the courtier

Sir Thomas Overbury, describing the character of “A Fine Gentleman,”’ says he “speaks Euphues, not so gracefully as heartily. His discourse makes not his behaviour, but he buys it at court, as countrymen their clothes in Birchin Lane.”

The list could doubtless be extended: but these quotations are enough to enable us to recover from the shock of Dr. Furness’s attack, and to continue to picture the Elizabethan courtier of the second last decade of the sixteenth century ornamenting his discourse with the far-fetched figures, the alliteration, and the balanced antitheses, which characterized the style of John Lyly.

Dr. Furness’s scepticism is not confined to the question of Euphuism at court. He has little sympathy with the attempts to identify the characters of Love ’s Labour ’s Lost with historical personages, as, for example, Holofernes with Florio. In this he will, we imagine, carry with him an increasing number of modern scholars. Less general assent will be won by his opposition to the view of Biron and Rosaline as the predecessors of Benedick and Beatrice. He admits that “Berowne and Benedick are in love against their will; Rosaline and Beatrice are irrepressibly fond of banter;” but he questions whether the resemblance goes farther. He makes an analysis of the two pairs of characters in order to emphasize the points of difference; and he unquestionably does service in indicating the limits of the parallelism. But he confuses the issue when he says: “Could we point to defects in the earlier character which are remedied in the later, then we might say that Berowne is Benedick’s predecessor. But are there any such defects? Are they not essentially different?” It is not a question of better character, but of better characterization. Benedick and Beatrice may or may not be stronger characters than Berowne and Rosaline; it is certain that they are more vividly delineated. One may doubt, however, whether those numerous critics who have seen in the hero and heroine of Love’s Labour’s Lost the fore-runners of Benedick and Beatrice, have meant more than that in the earlier play there is the hint, later worked out, of the situation produced by two people who amuse us by the interchange of pointed and vigorous raillery, and by a reluctance, which we feel is destined to be vain, to acknowledge each other’s charm.

To the more minute student of Shakespeare’s text, Dr. Furness offers a special contribution in drawing attention to the evidence in this play in favor of the view that the Elizabethan compositors sometimes set up the copy to dictation. The importance of this is obvious when we consider that explanations of defects in the text are then to be looked for in mistakes of the ear as well as of the eye. But he goes too far in saying that if this surmise is correct “it is fatal to emendations founded on the ductus litterarum.” He seems to forget that the compositor’s reader, if not the compositor himself, must still have used his eye, and so must have been liable to the same kind of mistake as was made at times by the compositor when he set directly from written copy.

It is seldom that the veteran editor can let one of these volumes out of his hands without a yawning “cui bono?” Here it takes the form of a depreciation of all that kind of scholarship of which his edition is a compendium. “But, after all,”’ he concludes, “is it of any moment whether Berowne preceded Benedick, or Rosaline Beatrice? All four of them fill our minds with measureless content; and if there be in them indications of the growth of Shakespeare’s art, then these indications are never heeded when we see the living persons before us on the stage. What care