Virtual Grub Street: Haines’ “Recent Shakespearean Research” and Literary Forensics

C. R. Haines’ review of “Recent Shakespearean Research”[1] in the January, 1922, issue of The Quarterly Review, is a pleasant reminder of more comfortable days. It is an excellent example of the congenial style in which popular scholarship was written in the best journals.

Fletcher, perhaps the most brilliant dramatist next to Shakespeare, and his coadjutor, surpassed himself in his share of “Henry VIII, but does not show to quite such advantage in the other joint play, “The Two Noble Kinsmen.” The best parts of this are by a greater than he, and who but Shakespeare could be called so? Take the splendid apostrophe to Mars in the third scene of the fourth act, or these lines:

By th’ helm of Mars I saw them in the war,

Like to a pair of lions smeared with prey,

Make lines in troops aghast. I fixed my note

Constantly on them, for they were a mark

Worth a god's view (1, 4, 20).

If this is not by Shakespeare, then had Fletcher learnt to write with his ‘victorious pen’! Surely too, the Shakespeare touch is seen in such words as

That we should things desire that do cost us

The loss of our desire l (v, 4, 127).

Some parts of the play, especially the vulgar and indecent love episode of the jailer's daughter, are a sort of ignoble travesty of Shakespeare's work; but in the song,

Roses, their sharp spines being gone,

Not royal in their smells alone

But in their hue;

Maiden pinks, of odour faint,

Daisies smell-less yet most quaint,

And sweet thyme true,

we find something, if not entirely beyond Fletcher's skill in his happiest moments, yet quite worthy of Shakespeare. In the Quarto of 1634 this play is ascribed to Fletcher and Shakespeare, the order of the names being noticeable, as if Fletcher had worked up Shakespeare material and been responsible for the play.

But there are plays, for Shakespeare's joint author ship of which we have no external evidence whatever, yet seem forced to ascribe to him a share in them. Chief among these comes ‘Edward III,’ first published in 1596. In the first two acts the love episode between the King and the Countess of Salisbury shows a splendor and opulence of thought and diction scarcely to be found but in Shakespeare's admitted work. The incident and its dénouement are both characteristic of him. Many lines recall Shakespeare's style:

And from the fragrant garden of her womb

Your gracious self, the flower of Europe's hope,

Derived is inheritor to France (I, 1, 14).

Upon the bare report and name of arms (1, 2, 80).

It wakened Caesar from his Roman grave (II, 1, 38).

Better than beautiful thou must begin,

Devise for fair a fairer word than fair,

And every ornament that thou would'st praise,

Fly it a pitch above the soar of praise (II, 1, 84).

The style in some places reminds us of the Sonnets, one line, “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds” (II, 1,451), being taken from Sonnet 94, where it seems more in place than here, and the expression ‘scarlet ornaments’ recalls a phrase in Sonnet 142. Compare also

I kill my poor soul and my poor soul me (II, 1,242),

and

Now in the sun it doth not lie

With light to take light from a mortal eye;

For here two day-stars that mine eyes would see

More than the sun steals mine own light from me. (I, 2, 181).

Tennyson affirmed that he could trace Shakespeare's hand through the last three acts. These lines seem the most prominent instance:

To die is all as common as to live . . .

For from the instant we begin to live

We do pursue and hunt the time to die:

First bud we, then we blow, and after seed,

Then presently we fall, and as a shade

Follows the body, so we follow death . . .

Since for to live is but to seek to die,

And dying but beginning of new life (IV, 4, 183).

As for myself, I do think the play Edward III was likely in-progress upon the death of Christopher Marlowe and finished by Shakespeare. How exactly the manuscript came into his hands we will never likely know. No more than we will know exactly how Middleton and Fletcher were chosen to finish the in-progress plays of De Vere after his death in 1604.

As well trained as were Haines’ ears, however, they are not evidence enough to establish these as facts. Now forensic evidence is the standard and the results of those methodologies do not lend themselves to collegial discussion.

Regardless what one thinks about the change, however, there is the still more to ponder. Even the best of attributive and stylistic forensics has not yet proven as effective as close textual analysis by experts in the field of Elizabethan theater. And claims are made to mathematical proof without providing the formulas that the claims are based upon.

Two opposing claims are recently made with the utmost confidence, for example, that The Two Noble Kinsmen was written at two different times by two different men under the name of Shakespeare (which never appears on any contemporary quarto of the play). One declares that the play was a decades-later version of an earlier play not hitherto thought to be extant. To think the author originally cited actually wrote so capable a play, he boldly states, is ridiculous. The other proclaims that his findings across the canon are irrefutable given they were arrived at through forensic means but never shows his work, the specific formulas that underpin his method. In The Kinsmen he finds no borrowings from Thomas North therefore no sign of Shakespeare's hand.

The New Oxford Shakespeare finds that Shakespeare had a hand in the play The Double Falsehood in respect of an analysis using computer software with no previous testing on 16^th century texts. The creators of the software state outright limitations that scholars desperate for a Shakespeare texts demonstrably written after 1604 have chosen to ignore. Even give that, the finding purportedly identifies not a Shakespeare text but scattered phrases here and there surely the remnants of such a text.

Mr. Haines’ collegial style and studied ear has its mighty attractions. Still, those days are gone.