Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine, His honour, and the greatness of his name, Shall be, and make new nations: He shall flourish, And, like a mountain cedar, reach his branches To all the plains about him :--Our children's children Shall see this, and bless heaven." This passage would appear to be decisive as to the date of the play, by the introduction of these lines : "Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine, His honour, and the greatness of his name, Shall be, and make new nations." That the colonization of Virginia is here distinctly alluded to is without doubt. The first charter was granted in 1606; the colony was planted in 1607, in which year James Town was built; another charter was given to the colonists in 1612, and a lottery was also then granted for the encouragement of the colony, which was struggling with great difficulties. That James took an especial interest in this important settlement, and naturally enough was recognised as the founder of "( 'new nations," may be readily imagined. In the inscription upon a portrait of the king, which belonged to Lord Bacon, he is styled Imperii Atlantici conditor." This part of Cranmer's prophecy, therefore, would fix the date of the play after the settlement of Virginia. But a new difficulty arises: All that part of the prophecy relating to James, which we have quoted, is hold to be an addition upon a revival of the play in 1613. "These lines," says Dr. Johnson, "to the interruption by the king, seem to have been inserted at some revisal of the play, after the accession of King James. If the passage be left out, the speech of Cranmer proceeds in a regular tenour of prediction and continuity of sentiments; but by the interpolation of the new lines, he first celebrates Elizabeth's successor, and then wishes he did not know she was to die; first rejoices at the consequence, and then laments the cause." Is it so? The presumed interpolation immediately follows these lines:— The poet then adds— "In her days, every man shall eat in safety, Under his own vine, what he plants; and sing The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours," &c. "Nor shall this peace sleep with her: But as when So shall she leave her blessedness to one, (When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness,) Is it true, then, that he "first celebrates Elizabeth's successor, and then wishes he did not know she was to die?" Of the seventeen lines which relate to James, the first eleven never lose sight of Elizabeth. Her "blessedness," her "honour," her "fame were to descend to her "heir." The extension of the dominion of England, under James,-the only passage in which "the greatness of his name is separated from that of Elizabeth,-occupies the remaining part of the prophecy; and that the thread which connects the whole with Elizabeth may not be dropped even while those six lines are uttered, Cranmer returns to the close of her life, which in two-thirds of the previous seventeen lines he had constantly inferred :— "She shall be, to the happiness of England, An aged princess," &c. It might as well be assumed, we venture to think, that the "Tu Marcellus eris" of Virgil is an interpolation. That famous passage is most skilfully connected with all that accompanies it; but it might nevertheless be as easily severed as the lines which are here maintained to be an unskilful addition. But it is held, further, that Shakspere did not write these lines; that Ben Jonson wrote them; that Shakspere might properly compliment Elizabeth in her lifetime, but that he would not descend to flatter James, who was a contemptible king." Shakspere, it is well known, had reason to be grateful to James for personal kindnesses; but there is not a word here of James's personal quali ties. The lines apply to the character of his government" its peace, plenty, love, truth, terror”. the extension of its growth to "make new nations." Would Jonson, had he written this passage, have forgotten that James was somewhat prouder of his reputation as a scholar than as a king; and that one who knew him well had not hesitated to say to him, and perhaps, indeed, in sincerity, HISTORIES.-VOL. IL. Y 321 'There has not been since Christ's time any king or temporal monarch which has been so learned in all literature and erudition, divine and human?"* We have no hesitation in accepting the passage as one that Shakspere might not have blushed to have written, and which derogates nothing from the manly independence of his character. The early editors considered that the interpolation rested at the interruption of the king. Theobald would carry it further,―through the remainder of Cranmer's speech: "If this play was wrote, as in my opinion it was, in the reign of Elizabeth, we may easily determine where Cranmer's eulogium of that princess concluded. I make no question but the poet rested here : "And by those claim their greatness, not by blood." Theobald omits to state the most obvious reason for his opinion. We hold that Shakspere, in the age of Elizabeth, would never have written "She shall be, to the happiness of England, That passage is, also, to our minds, clearly an interpolation, assuming that the play was produced during Elizabeth's reign. She, of all sovereigns, would least have endured to be called aged; she, of whom, in her seventieth year, the French ambassador writes, "Her eye is still lively, she has good spirits, and is fond of life, for which reason she takes great care of herself; to which may be added an inclination for the Earl of Clancarty, a brave, handsome Irish nobleman. This makes her cheerful, full of hope and confidence respecting her age." About a year before this time it is held that the Henry VIII. was written, and that it originally included the close of Cranmer's prophecy. "An aged princess ! " "But she must die!" Shakspere must indeed have been a bold man to have ventured upon such truths. But let us yield the whole question of interpolation to those who assert that the Henry VIII. was written in the time of Elizabeth; and give up even the passage of the "aged princess." It is held that the play was written to please Elizabeth. The memory of Henry VIII., perhaps, was not cherished by her with any deep affection; but would she, who in her dying hour is reported to have said, "My seat has been the seat of kings," allow the frailties, and even the peculiarities, of her father to be made a public spectacle? Would she have borne that his passion for her mother should have been put forward in the strongest way by the poet-that is, in the sequence of the dramatic action-as the impelling motive for his divorce from Katharine? Would she have tolerated the masque-scene immediately succeeding that in which Katharine is told by her husband, "You have half our power?" Would she have endured that her father, upon his next appearance after the meeting with Anne Bullen, when he exclaims, and "The fairest hand I ever touch'd! O beauty, Till now I nover knew thee!" "By heaven, she is a dainty one! Sweetheart, I were unmannerly to take you out, that he should be represented in the depth of his hypocrisy gloating over his projecting divorce, with, "But conscience, conscience, O! 'tis a tender place, and I must leave her?" Would she have been pleased with the jests of the old lady to Anne upon her approaching elevation-her title-her "thousand pound a-year "--and all to be instantly followed by the trial-scene,— that magnificent exhibition of the purity, the constancy, the fortitude, the grandeur of soul, the self-possession, of the "most poor woman and a stranger" that her mother had supplanted; contrasted with the heartless coldness, salved over with a more heartless commendation of his injured wife, from the hypocritical tyrant, who ends the defence of his conduct, expressed in Finally, would she have licensed the stage exhibition of her father's traditionary peculiarities, in addition to the portraiture, which cannot be mistaken, of his sensual, arrogant, impatient, and crafty character? Would she have laughed at his perpetual "ha!"; or taken away Burbage's licence? Would she have wept over the most touching sorrow of the dying Katharine; or sent Shakspere to join the company of his friend Southampton in the Tower? Those who have written on the subject say she would have borne all this; and that the pageant of her mother's coronation, with the succeeding representation of her own christening, capped with the prophecy of her future greatness, were to ensure the harmlessness of all these somewhat explosive materials, and to carry forward the five acts to a most felicitous conclusion "This little one shall make it holiday." Malone, as it appears to us, says all that can be said, in the literal way, to prove that such a drama as this would be acceptable to Elizabeth: "It is more likely that Shakspere should have written a play the chief subject of which is the disgraces of queen Katharine, the aggrandizement of Anne Boleyn, and the birth of her daughter, in the lifetime of Elizabeth, than after her death; at a time when the subject must have been highly pleasing at court, rather than at a period when it must have been less interesting. Queen Katharine, it is true, is represented as an amiable character, but still she is eclipsed; and the greater her merit, the higher was the compliment to the mother of Elizabeth, to whose superior beauty she was obliged to give way." This is the prosaic, we may say the essentially grovelling mode of viewing the object of Shakspere,-an object presupposing equal vulgarity of mind in the dramatist and his court audience. Our readers will be sure that we appreciate far more highly Mr. Campbell's poetical creed in this matter: Shakspeare contrives, though at the sacrifice of some historical truth, to raise the matron Katharine to our highest admiration, whilst at the same time he keeps us in love with Anne Boleyn, and on tolerable terms with Henry VIII. But who does not see, under all this wise management, the drift of his design, namely, to compliment Elizabeth as a virgin queen; to interest us in the memory of her mother Anne Boleyn; and to impress us with a belief of her innocence, though she suffered as an alleged traitress to the bed of Henry? The private death of Katharine of Arragon might have been still remembered by many living persons, but the death of Anne Boleyn was still more fresh in public recollection; and a wiser expedient could not have been devised for asserting the innocence of Elizabeth's mother than by portraying Henry's injustice towards Queen Katharine. For we are obliged to infer that, if the tyrant could thus misuse the noble Katharine, the purest innocence in her lovely successor could be no shield against his cruelty." + There is one slight objection to this theory. Shakspere wrote for an audience; and an audience is a thing of impulses; it sympathizes with the oppressed, and hates the oppressor. An audience does not " infer." The poet who trusts to an audience perceiving "the drift of his design," through the veil of a dramatic action which moves their feelings entirely in an opposite direction to that in which he intends them to be moved, has, to our minds at least, a different theory of his art from that of Shakspere. scenes. We had intended to have said something on "The Prologue," which the commentators hold was written by Ben Jonson, to allow him an occasion of sneering at Shakspere's fools and battleBut as we hold that the Prologue is a complete exposition of the idea of this drama, we shall return to it in our Supplementary Notice. The Prologue is fastened upon Jonson, upon the theory that he wrote it after Shakspere's retirement from the stage, when the old play was revived in his absence. We believe in the one piece of external evidence, that a 'Henry VIII.' was produced in 1613, when the Globe was burned; that it was a new play; that it was then called 'All is True;'-and that this title agrees with the idea upon which Shakspere wrote the Henry VIII. Those who believe that it was written in the time of Elizabeth have to reject this one piece of external evidence. We further believe, from the internal evidence, that the play, as it stands, was written in the time of James I., and that we have received it in its original form. Those who assert the contrary have to resort to the hypothesis of interpolation; and, further, have to explain how many things which are, to a plain understanding, inconsistent with their theory, may be interpreted, by great ingenuity, to be consistent. We believe that Shakspere, amongst his Chronological Order, p. 390. Life. Moxon's edition of Shakspeare. 323 latest dramas, constructed an historical drama to complete his great series,- -one that was agreeable to the tone of his mind after his fiftieth year : "Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe." Those who take the opposite view, hold that the chief object of the poet was to produce something which might be acceptable to Queen Elizabeth. Our belief is the obvious one; the contrary belief may be the more ingenious. COSTUME. THE male costume of the reign of Henry VIII. has been rendered familiar to our very children by the innumerable portraits of "Bluff King Hal," principally copied from the paintings by Holbein, and the female costume scarcely less so by those of his six wives. Henry VIII. was born in 1491, and was therefore just thirty years of age at the period at which the play opens (the arrest and impeachment of Buckingham having taken place in 1521), and forty-two at the time it is supposed to close, as above mentioned. The best authorities, therefore, for the dress of the monarch and his nobles at the commencement of this play would be the curious old painting of the meeting of Henry and Francis, preserved at Windsor Castle, and the bas-reliefs representing the same occurrence, at Rouen. The profusion of feathers in the latter--a fashion of the previous reign, and still raging in 1520-adds greatly to the picturesque effect of the general costume. For the later period, the full-length by Holbein engraved in Lodge's Portraits, or the print by Vertue, in which Henry is seen granting a charter to the barber-surgeons, would be preferable. Of Cardinal Wolsey there is a fine painting by Holbein at Christ Church, Oxford, engraved in Lodge's work. Cavendish, in his Life of Wolsey,' describes him as issuing out in his cardinal's habit of fine scarlet or crimson satin, his cap being of black velvet and in a MS. copy of that interesting work, formerly in the possession of the late Francis Douce, Esq., F.S.A., are three very curious drawings, representing- 1st, The cardinal's progress on his way to France, with his archers, spearmen, cross, pillar, and purse bearers, &c.; 2ndly, The cardinal surrendering the great seal to the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk; and, 3rdly, Dr. Butts sent by the king and Anne Bullen to the sick cardinal with tokens of favour. The gentlemen in the cardinal's train wore, we are told, black velvet livery-coats, the most part with great chains of gold about their necks; and all his yeomen following [Henry and Anne sending Dr. Butts with tokens of favour to the sick Cardinal.] were clad in French tawny livery-coats, having embroidered upon the backs and breasts of the sail coats the letters T and C under the cardinal's hat. In the same beautiful work by Lodge, before mentioned, the portraits will be found of the Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk, Cromwell, Sir Thomas More, and Sir Anthony Denny, by Holbein; and |