June 1, 1888.] 



♦ KNOMTLEDGK ♦ 



169 



' ^-ILLUSTRATED ^MAGAZINE g 

 ENCE1!TERATURE,& ARIl, 



LONDON: JUNE 1, 1888. 



SHAKESPEARE SELF-DRAWN. 



By " Benvolio." 



"LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST." 



N' regard to the special inquiry on whicli we are 

 now engaged, '■ Love's Labour's Lost," which 

 in its original form was probably the first of 

 Shakespeare's comedies, is one of the most 

 interesting of all his plays. Eegarded as a 

 dramatic composition it is full of faults. It 

 has no plot. It can hardly indeed be called 

 a play, being rather a series of conversations. We catch 

 only a few aotes here and there of the wit and humour and 

 play of fancy of the later comedies. Often, indeed, we find 

 instead of wit a somewhat ill-mannered raillery, instead of 

 humour mere verbal quips, and though play of fancy is by 

 no means wanting in this play (any more than in the still 

 earlier "Titus Andronicus"), the poetical passages in which 

 it finds expression are overloaded with imagery unsuited 

 (as Shake.speare perceived later) for dramatic expression. 

 Again and again we find the poet who was to develop in a 

 few years into the greatest dramatist the world has known 

 forgetting apparently that he is writing a play, and penning 

 passages which might have a])peared among his sonnets, to 

 be admired (in their proper place) for their " sugred sweet- 

 ness " and condensed fulness of meaning. Indeed, there 

 are passages in " Loves Labour's Lost " which seem to me 

 to have been as clearly borrowed from Shakespeare's col- 

 lection of poems and sonnets as Longaville's sonnet " Did 

 not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye?" Berowne's musical 

 little poem '■ If love make me forsworn, how shall I swear 

 to love 1 " and Dumain's " On a day — alack the day ! Love 

 whose month is ever !May." The resemblance between the 

 style of the " sugred sonnets '' and the language of some of 

 the characters in " Love's Labour's Lost " is so great that 

 to any but the most constant students of Shakespeare it 

 would be difllcult to say (unless memory settled the question) 

 that a sonnet selected for the test was not in reality part 

 of the play, or that a part of the play similarly selected was 

 not a sonnet. 



As an example consider the sonnet : — ■ 



Study me how to please the eye indeed, 



By tixing it upon a fairer eye ; 



■Who, dazzling so, that eye shall be his heed, 



And give him light that it was blinded by. 



Study is like the heaven's glorious sun. 



That will not be deep-searched by saucy looks : 



Small have continual plodders ever won, 



Save base authority from others' books. 



These earthly godfathers of heaven's lights. 



That give a name to every iix^d star. 



Have no more profit of their shining nights 



Than those that walk, and wot not what they are. 



Too much to know is to know nought but fame ; 



And every godfather can give a name. 



Shakespeare, of course, would be careful, when embodying 

 poems in the speeches of his dramatis ferso'na, to make 

 such changes as would give them a more natural air. To 

 a writer of his versatility and ease of diction this would be 

 a simple matter. We must not, then, expect to find many 

 complete poems in " Love's Labour's Lost," though, as the 

 earliest of Shakespeare's comedies, it would be in that play 

 probably more than in any other that Shakespeare would 

 hive allowed himself this use of his poems. Indeed, in i:s 

 actual form, '• Love's Labour's Lost" is probably so changed 

 from the form in which it oiiginally appeared that we may 

 wonder rather to find any traces at all of the pieeing-in of 

 outside poems, than that only a few traces here and there 

 should remain. It is evident, however, that Shakespeare, 

 in modifying and enlarging the play, paid more attention to 

 the re-writing of passages which seemed to him defective, 

 and to the addition of matter which seemed wanted to make 

 the play complete, than to any such minor point as the 

 removal of the signs of 'prentice work in this his earliest 

 comedy. Here and there we note cases where changes of 

 the former kind were somewhat carelessly made, .so that 

 signs of "joining " remain. For instance, near the beginning 

 of Berowne's rather lengthy " salve for perjury," we find the 

 lines : — 



For when would you, my lord, or you, or you. 

 Have found the ground of study's excellence 

 Without the beauty of a woman's face ' 



While, a little later, the same thought is expressed more 



fully in the lines : — • 



For when would yon, my liege, or yon, or you, 

 In leaden contemplation have found out 

 Such fiery numbers as the prompting eyes 

 Of beauty's tutors have enriched you with ? 



Evidently Shakespeare had intended to replace the former 

 passage by the latter, hut left several lines unobliterated, or 

 so imperfectly obliterated that his purpose was not recog- 

 nised.* 



* The printers of the folio would seem to have been perplexed by 

 the corrections— not made in ilS. (for the MS. of " Love's Labour's 

 Lost" was probably destroyed in the Globe tire), but probably 

 written as alterations and interlineations in snch printed copy as 

 Shakespeare had used for the theatre text. Thus we find 'the fol- 

 lowing : — 



Learning is but on adiunct to our selfe. 

 And where we are, our Learning likewise is : 

 Then when our selues we see in Ladies' eyes, 

 With our selues. 

 Doe we not likewise see our learning there .' 



Here the words "with our selues" belong manifestly to the 

 original version, but had remained unobliterated. The printers seem 

 to have found much difficulty in deciphering their copy, whatever it 

 may have been. Thus in the folio the following passage occurs, 

 which would be quite unintelligible were not the true version other- 

 wise known : — 



" Cura. Lavs deo, hene intellign. 



Peda. Borne boon for Joo»^rfSciaH, a little scratcht, 'twil 

 seme." 

 Evidently the reviser and compositor could make nothing here of 

 the copy. Bone in the first line seemed clearly wrong ; so he/te was 

 substituted, which would have made nonsense of what followed, 

 even had it been correctly read. But in the next line they found 

 (probably) corrections of the originally wrongly printed words for 

 " Bone for bene" and these (the correct words) were written some- 

 what indistinctly above the wrongly printed words imperfectly 

 scored out. In some such way they found five words which they 

 evidently regarded as all belonging to some strange tongue, and so 

 produced the "jewel, five words long,"— .Borne boon for boon, 

 prescian. What Shakespeare wrote was: — 



Cura. [Sir Xathaniel] Laus deo, bone intelligo. 



Peda. [Holofernes] Bone, for bene. Priscian a little scratcht 



'twill serve. 



[Possibly Mr. Ignatius Donnelly may find some specially Baconian 



significance in " Borne boon for boon prescian." It being nonsense 



as they stand, the words wonld suit the Baconian theory perfectly.] 



