But, for their virtue only is their show,

They live unwoo'd and unrespected fade,
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;

Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made:
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall vade, my verse distills your truth.

Compare Sonnet 5. 5 fol.:

For never-resting time leads summer on

To hideous winter and confounds him there;
Sap check'd with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'ersnow'd and bareness everywhere:
Then, were not summer's distillation left,

A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,

Nor it nor no remembrance what it was:

But flowers distill'd, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

Note the singularly close parallel to these passages in Midsummer-Night's Dream, i. 1. 76 fol.:

But earthlier happy is the rose distill'd

Than that which withering on the virgin thorn
Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.

And for the contemptuous reference to the "canker-blooms,' or wild roses, compare Much Adó, i. 3. 28: "I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace; and 1 Henry IV.

i. 3. 76:

To put down Richard, that sweet lovely rose,

And plant this thorn, this canker, Bolingbroke.

The allusions to the encroachments of the sea on the land in Sonnet 64 and 2 Henry IV. iii. 1. 45 fol. are strikingly similar. The former reads thus:

When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store-
When I have seen such interchange of state,

Or state itself confounded to decay,

King Henry exclaims:

O God! that one might read the book of fate,

And see the revolution of the times

Make mountains level, and the continent,
Weary of solid firmness, melt itself

Into the sea! and, other times, to see
The beachy girdle of the ocean
Too wide for Neptune's hips.

Critics have wondered that Shakespeare should know anything of these phenomena, and we do not find allusions to them in other poets of the time.

Of peculiar uses of words in the Sonnets and the plays scores of examples might be cited; but a few must serve here as samples. We find expiate with the anomalous sense of "bring to an end" in the only two instances in which Shakespeare uses it—in Sonnet 22. 4: "Then look I death my days should expiate; " and Richard III., iii. 2. 23: "Make haste; the hour of death is expiate." Dateless means "endless, eternal" in the four passages in which it occurs-two in the plays (Richard II. i. 3. 151, Romeo and Juliet, v. 3. 115) and two in the Sonnets (30. 6 and 153. 6). The novel use of sympathized (described sympathetically, or with true appreciation) in Sonnet 82.11 is matched by that in Lucrece, 1113. The unusual expression "advised respects" (deliberate consideration) occurs in Sonnet 49. 4 and King John, iv. 2. 214; and the compound adjective "world-without-end" (apparently Shakespeare's coinage) in Sonnet 57.5 and Love's Labour's Lost, v. 2. 799.

But we must not go on with these "parallelisms." On the whole, if Sir Walter Raleigh wrote the Sonnets, I do not see how we can allow Bacon the credit of the plays.

If the limits of this paper allowed, it would be interesting to consider the Sonnets as poems-to note the "linked sweetness long drawn out of their verse, not unmixed with more sonorous music, and what Coleridge has aptly called their "boundless fertility and labored condensation of thought; " but as it is, I can only close with a summing up of what I have attempted to prove:

1st. That the Sonnets were not edited by Shakespeare, but by some anonymous collector who did not, and presumably could not, ask the poet or the persons to whom they were addressed for aid in settling a textual question.

2d. That the arrangement of the Sonnets in the edition of 1609 was therefore not authoritative, but simply the best conJectural one that the collector could make from a study of the poems and what he knew of their history; and there is, moreover, internal evidence that the order is not strictly chronological.

3d. That the great majority of the Sonnets are personal or autobiographical, and were not intended for publication; but it is not probable that the first 126 (or such of these as are personal) are all addressed to one man, and the rest to one woman, with whom Shakespeare and that man were both entangled. 4th. That, in whatever sense Mr. W. H." may have been the "begetter" of the Sonnets, all the attempts to identify him have been unsuccessful, and some of them ridiculous.

5th. That, while the majority of the Sonnets were probably written before 1599, some of them may be of later date, especially those in which the poet refers to himself as old and tired of life.

Finally, that while some of the more important questions concerning the Sonnets may be settled, others are likely to remain among the insoluble problems of literature.

WILLIAM J. ROLFE.

"THE TITUS ANDRONICUS: " WAS IT SHAKESPEARE'S FIRST PLAY? HOW WAS IT MOUNTED ON THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE? DID IT MEET WITH FAVOR FROM THEATREGOERS?

(Continued from January number.)

HE three kinds of popular shows-the Miracle Play, the Mystery, the Morality-each marks a step in the intellectual developement of the medieval populace. The first was pure realism, the next symbolical, the third didactic. But, by the time mediæval audiences were ready for the didactic, they were sufficiently able to realize that they did not care as much for the Biblical episodes the priests were trying to teach them as they did for the Devil and the Vice, Clown and Pantaloon, who pummelled each other with laths or clubs, and made sport quite of the kind they best enjoyed. The audiences still came to gape at the moralities, but the intervals or interludes, in which the Devil and the Vice had the stage to themselves, were the parts they most preferred. So it was not long again before the actors saw where they could earn pence by cutting lose from clerical employment, and going around playing these same Devil and Vice parts; which, from the prevailing poverty of nomenclature, soon became known as "Interludes "-and meant anything. Dumb show, pantomime, songs, dances, boxing, sparring, or whatever came handiest, horse-play mostly, but for a long time, merely dumb show with improvised ejaculation or dialogue. A step further, and the horse-play was sketched, sufficient dialogue for its development written out, and the improvisitation regulated by such stage directions as "Here they all talke," "Here they talke and rayle what they list," and the like. As they strolled from village to village, these actors put up their stages in barns now and then. But they were mostly made welcome in the Inn Yards, on two sides of which the way-side hostelries were built, the other two being enclosed with walls.

ence.

Habit survives necessity. The first settlers of North America, with unlimited areas to build in, and sunlight free, still followed the models with which they were familiar, and so built their houses with overhanging stories and small and clustering windows like the houses in the crowded city streets they had left. Just so these actors, having played so long in Inn Yards, built their permanent theatres to resemble as nearly as possible an Inn Yard. They had erected their stage with its rear to the entrance; there was nothing specific about this stage itself, any raised platform answered. When the Miracle Plays, Mysteries, and Moralities had been exhibited in the public places and cities, the platform had been as high as the heads of the audience, and a vallence of curtains falling from around it had made the attiring, or 'tiring, room for the actors. For the Interludes this was not repeated, the actors as a rule wearing their ordinary costume, not needing one, or, if they did, they robed and unrobed in the stables or anywhere among the audiThe common run of spectators passed in and around this stage and stood in front of it. The better class looked on from the Inn windows, offices, or gallery. This was repeated in the pit. For the rest-the Inn offices suggested the parterre, and the Inn galleries the best seats. (To-day, we have actually added nothing to this arrangement, except to repeat the galleries one above another, and to add Foyers and Lobbies). And so it was but natural that the actor should retain, and retain for many years, the dumb show which had stood him and his in such good stead for Miracles, Mysteries, and Moralities not only, but for the Interludes from which in his strolling days, his livelihood had come. The performance of the Inn Yard had taken place by daylight, so by daylight still did the actor perform in his fixed theatres. The Inn Yard had no roof, so the theatre must only have a rim of thatch over the galleries. The band of musicians was then perched on a scaffolding ("scaffoldage" Shakespeare calls it in Troilus and Cressida) which brought them to about where the second right-hand proscenium box would come in a modern theatre-and the play-house was complete. The strolling companies had been few in numbers,