In our ancient sepulchral monu- The same proprietor in bringing inments we find considerable variety, to cultivation an elevated dorsum but the above mentioned establish stretching westward from the knoll only these points, viz. that they were above-mentioned, has discovered two erected prior to the introduction of or three more graves of the same kind Christianity, and at a period when the with those above described, as also a practice of burning the dead was laid stone coffin of very rude materials, aside. In the superb subterraneous which contained only a few handfuls cemetery described before, from the of black mould. These stone coffins number of teeth and other fragments are frequently found, and I have exof bodies found mixed with pieces of amined above fifty of them; they gecharred wood and ashes, it was evident nerally contained a little black earth, that it had been used for repeated in- such as is found in church-yards. humation, and that the bodies had From this circumstance, I am disbeen burnt; but in each of the graves posed to reckon them not very anin question only one skeleton was cient, or, at least, very generally used found, and no vestiges of fire were till a comparatively later period; had discernible. ashes and burnt bones been deposited in them, as I found to be the case only in two or three instances, these, being almost indestructible, would still have remained; several of them contained a complete human skeleton, which exhibited no indication of fire having ever been applied to it, but in all of them the bones were disordered and misplaced. To account for this peculiarity, I was led to suppose, owing to the small size of these coffins, not one of which is fit to contain a full grown human body at full length, that they had been obliged to compress the dead bodies or bend them double, and that hence originated the confused order of the bones; but a more minute inspection has convinced me, that no possible compression or distortion of the body could possibly 'produce the disorder in question. I am rather led to suppose, that they buried the bodies in the earth, till the flesh was decayed, and then placed the bones indiscriminately in the said stone coffins, their last and permanent abode. This I advance, however, merely as a probable conjecture, which solves all the phenomena of the case, and leave the point to be settled by the more experienced antiquary, who may possess better means of information.I am, Sir, &c. It would be visionary to attempt to determine the exact era of these graves, though we may safely assign them a longevity of five or six centuries. The Abbey of Arbroath was erected towards the end of the 12th century, and the church or chapel of Lunan, in the near vicinity of the above graves, was one of its early appendages. With Christianity the custom of burying in churchyards, otherwise called consecrated ground, and of laying the head of the dead bodies to the west, would naturally be introduced. So late as the time of Cæsar, who gives us a few particulars of a Gallic funeral, the custom of burning the dead was still kept up in Gaul, and we have no reason to conclude that it was then abandoned in Britain. It would be a matter of no small difficulty, if, indeed, at all practicable, to fix the era when the Celts left off burning their dead. It was, however, most probably in the interval betwixt the extirpation of Druidism, and the complete introduction of Christianity. Druidism received a fatal, though not a final blow, from the Romans, several centuries before Christianity completed the triumph. One thing we are, however, certain of, both from historic testimony and irresistible facts, that the custom of burning the dead was among the Celts the more ancient of the two. Burnt human bones have been found in many places of Scotland where no Roman ever set a foot, so that they cannot be Roman, though the Romans also burnt their dead. On the other hand, the testimony of Cæsar is clear and explicit. ON R. HUDDLESTON. Lunan, 12th Nov. 1818. THE ENGLISH DRAMATIC WRITERS WHO PRECEDED SHAKESPEARE. No. I. I SHALL state in the outset the purpose I have in view in the series of articles I am now commencing. Every body knows that the plays of Shakespeare are different from the plays of any other dramatic writer; and critics, domestic and foreign, have produced many volumes to shew in what respects they are different, yet have left their readers little wiser than before they began to read. I have no ambition to be added to the number of such authors, nor shall I address myself to those who take their notions of the higher qualities of our poet from any book that was ever written -but his own. The republication of the works of Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher, has shewn, and the projected reprint of the productions of Shirley will shew, that although Shakespeare's contemporaries and followers were poets, compared with others, they were scarcely poets, compared with him. Editors, in their zeal to prove that the book upon which they are engaged is the most valuable, may make what assertions they please as to its merits; they may ring out panegyrics on the pathos, the passion, the poetry of their authors; but Í apprehend that they can never make their readers think, that either Ben Jonson, Massinger, or Beaumont and Fletcher, made more than a distant approach to the excellencies of Shakespeare. My business is not, however, with the successors of Shakespeare, but with his predecessors, and my object is not to make a vain attempt to prove that those who went before him were his equals, but to shew how much he exceeded them; at the same time establishing, or at least affording some grounds for establishing for them, as high a reputation as has been acquired by any of the dramatic writers who subsequently employed themselves for the stage. I should explain, however, that among Shakespeare's predecessors I include some who were his contemporaries, and, in a degree, his rivals that is to say, who produced pieces for other theatres, while he was a writer for the Globe, but who, considerably before that date, had acquired great celebrity. In investigating this subject, I shall therefore keep two points especially in view, the one, to observe how far Shakespeare was an imitator of them, and the other, how far they were imitators of him, in such plays as were produ ced by them after the date when he had come forward and attracted such general notice. Both these inquiries are, I believe, quite new; for although disjected pieces by our elder dramatists have been republished from time to time, either separately or in collections, what has been done is totally without system, and independent of critical comparison, unless we except a very few trifling instances, in which some of the commentators upon Shakespeare's text have taken occasion to give new proofs of their insignificance and incompetence. The German literati, who have quite as fervent an admiration of Shakespeare as ourselves, and at the same time perhaps a more learned and judicious admiration, have a saying which is now become almost proverbial among them,-"That as it has pleased Heaven to bless Great Britain with the finest dramatic poet that ever lived, it has also pleased it, in some degree, to balance the account by afflicting our island with the most contemptible annotators upon him." I am not, however, disposed to go the whole length with them, by adding, that Germany only can boast critics worthy of him. Therefore, that the two topics I have referred to are new, at least as a critical system, will probably not be disputed, and that the discussion of them in the present state of information and feeling regarding our elder writers is interesting, I need not waste time in establishing. It is necessary, however, to clear the ground of some rubbish, to mark out a few distances, and to settle some preliminary points, before I attempt to build. In the first instance, the date must be fixed at which Shakespeare began to write for the stage; and in doing so, I shall neither follow the tediously laboured chronology of Malone, nor the still more laboured but less tedious attempt of Chalmers, to correct certain errors, into which, he contended, his precursor had fallen. Those are matters for mere antiquaries, which they are, and which I should be sorry to be. Reason and internal evidence, on a question where external evidence must necessarily be so scanty and uncertain, are far more satisfactory than all the petty circumstances they have been at the trouble of collecting. On this account, if I find Shakespeare in the dedication to his Venus and Adonis of 1593, telling Lord Southampton that it is "the first heir of his invention," I shall not scruple to give him credit in opposition to the meagre produce of researches made more than 200 years afterwards; if, too, I discover in some of his plays proofs of an unformed taste in style, or of an illregulated fancy in composition, I shall not take the word of any commentator who tells me, that, by some ambiguous phrase of an obscure contemporary, he can convince me, that such or such a production was written at an advanced period of the poet's life. The best, indeed the only, chronology is to be made out of the plays them selves; even that would be worth little, the other nothing, unless to exemplify the utter inability of those who knew much less about the spirit and character of the poet they were affecting to illustrate, than about the style and object of the meanest pamphleteer of the reign of Elizabeth. Without further argument, then, I shall take it for granted, for the purposes of these articles, that Shakespeare did not complete his first dramatic work, whatever it might be, until after 1593, the date when his Venus and Adonis was given to the world. Thomas Warton is almost the only man (or one among a very few writers upon old poets and poetry) who joins a correct and delicate taste to a profound knowledge, and as deep a love of his subject; others have learning, but no taste, or love, but no learning; yet he seems to speak as if no author had preceded Shakespeare who had written a play upon a similar system; he observes, (Hist. Engl. Poetry, III. 393,) with more sententiousness than usual, "Shakespeare was above the bondage of the ancients," as if he were the only man who had been above it; as if he were the first who had disdained the shackles of the dramatic unities of time, place, and action. This, how ever, is a very important mistake. Undoubtedly the best, I was going to say the only really good, part of Dr Johnson's preface to Shakespeare, is the justification, upon principle, of this disregard; the topic is much too thread-bare to warrant my entering upon it, and I only advert to it for the purpose of remarking, that there were many writers for the stage be 66 a fore the period when Shakespeare flourished, who, like him, were bove the bondage of the ancients," and who, having established what may be termed the romantic drama, so well adapted to the state of knowledge and habits of the time, set him an example in rejecting the wing-clipping rules of the Greeks and Romans. Thus far, therefore, Shakespeare was no inventor, and has no claim to that merit of originality for which some, in an ignorant zeal for his fame, have given him credit. Historical and other dramatic representations, in which the events of ten, twenty, or thirty years, were crowded into two hours' space, and where the auditor, in fancy, saw the actors transported, by the will of the poet, from England to France, or to Asia, were well known before the' earliest date assigned to any of Shakespeare's plays; and it is an admitted fact, (though hitherto without any very positive or distinct evidence,) that in some instances he only retouched, without remodelling, what he found carved in its coarser features to his hand. While upon this point, regarding which so much has been said, and so little proved, I am desirous of shewing how disinclined I am to follow the example of the commentators; I will prove a great deal by saying a very little. An opportunity of doing so, perhaps, seldom occurs, and I must allow, that the commentators were not in possession of the information which has since come to light; neither the punctilious Capel, the self-conceited Malone, the industrious Steevens, nor any other note-manufacturer had seen what Mr Chalmers has since produced to view,-a copy of a Historical Play by Christopher Marlow, printed in 1595, from which it is perfectly evident, that Shakespeare derived the most important materials out of which he constructed his Henry VI. Part 3: some of those passages that have been most celebrated, have been almost literally copied by him. Marlow was an established writer for the theatre long before Shakespeare was known there: indeed, the dreadful catastrophe that terminated the life of the former happened before 1593, the date of our great poet's first production. Marlow's pieces, therefore, deserve especial attention, not merely on ac All count of the early date at which they were written, not merely because Milton's nephew calls him " a kind of second Shakespeare," nor because Michael Drayton pronounces his style "all air and fire," but because we see the estimation in which Shakespeare himself held him, and because, in Marlow's work before us, entituled, "The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henry the Sixt," we have indisputable evidence how far Shakespeare was sometimes indebted to his precursors or contemporaries. One of his annotators has argued, from a line and a half in one of the choruses to Henry V., that the whole play of Henry VI., Part 3, was his own unaided composition how futile such conclusions often are, we may perceive by the direct contradiction I am about to give it. I will now make a few extracts from Marlow's "True Tragedie," &c. and will contrast them with corre sponding passages in Shakespeare's Henry VI., Part 3. Marlow opens his play with these words: Warwick. I wonder how the king escap'd our hands. York. Whilst we pursued the horsemen of the north, He slyly stole away and left his men ; Whereat the great Lord of Northumberland, Whose warlike ears could never brook retreat, Charg'd our main battle's front; there with him Lord Stafford and Lord Clifford, all abreast, Brake in, and were by th' hands of common soldiers slain. Shakespeare begins thus: War. I wonder how the king escap'd our hands. York. While we pursued the horsemen of the north, He slyly stole away and left his men : Whereat the great Lord of Northumberland, Whose warlike ears could never brook retreat, friends. Shakespeare's text (Act I. Scene I.) only differs by substituting the more modern address my Lords for "Lord. ings," and in placing the verb look after them instead of before. But it may be said, that these are passages of comparatively little import; the next extract, however, from Marlow's performance, will prove, that the title of "a kind of second Shakespeare" was not unmerited; perhaps, as far as this tragedy is concerned, Shakespeare ought more fitly to be called "a kind of second Marlow." Alarums, and then enter WARWICK Warwick. Ah! who is nigh? Come to And tell me who is victor, York or Warme, friend or foe, wick ?— Why ask I that ?-My mangled body shews That I must yield my body to the earth; And by my fall the conquest to my foes. Thus yields the cedar to the axe's edge, Whose arms gave shelter to the princely eagle; Under whose shade the rampant lion slept; Whose top-branch over-peer'd Jove's spreading tree. The wrinkles of my brows, now fill'd with blood, Were liken'd oft to kingly sepulchres; his brow? Lo! now my glory, smear'd in dust and blood, Cheer'd up the drooping army, and him- My parks, my walks, my manors that I self, had, Even now forsake me, and of all my lands Is nothing left me but my body's length! So it stands in Marlow. Shakespeare has made a few alterations and additions, which I have put between brackets for the sake of greater distinctness. Alarum. Enter EDWARD bringing forth WARWICK wounded. Edward. [So, lie thou there! Die thou, and die our fear!] &c. Warwick. Ah! who is nigh, come to me, friend or foe, And tell me who is victor, York or Warwick. Why ask I that? My mangled body shews, [My blood, my want of strength, my sick heart shews,] That I must yield my body to the earth, And by my fall, the conquest to my foe. Thus yields the cedar to the axe's edge, Whose arms gave shelter to the princely eagle, Under whose shade the [ramping] lion slept ; Whose top-branch overpeer'd Jove's spreading tree, [And kept low shrubs from winter's power ful wind. All Shakespeare has here done is an extension of the noble simile which Marlow had furnished, and the addition of a common-place at the end for the sake of a jingling rhyme. I am far from thinking, that he has improved the fine speech, recollecting also, that the dying Warwick would be rather anxious to express himself in as few words as possible, than to waste his breath in needless amplifications. But if readers are astonished to find Shakespeare deprived of the above speech, what will they say to the next specimen, so much in his spirit, so full of boldness and vigour? -yet not one syllable his! The Duke of Gloucester having killed Henry in the Tower, thus, in Marlow's tragedy, exclaims, VOL. III. I need not add the corresponding and well-remembered passage in Shakespeare, who has done nothing more than improve Marlow's metre, which had been corrupted by ill printing. If the reader compares the old quarto of the whole contention be tween the two famous houses of York and Lancaster," which was the original title of Shakespeare's performance, reprinted verbatim et literatim by Steevens, he will find that there even many of the errors in the versification are retained, and in other respects the resemblance is more exact. Shakespeare, as far as we have yet discovered, was more indebted to Marlow than to any other stage-poet; the reader will not fail to recollect, that in the third part of Henry VI. the whole character of Richard L.I. is in fact developed, his cruelty, his ambition, his self-command, and that towering consciousness of mental superiority that made him almost triumph in his personal deformity. This character is derived from Marlow's "True Tragedy ;" and it would be by no means a difficult task to shew, (a task I shall perform at some future |