every reason to believe that it had been brought over to Germany by the English Players as early as 1603.

....

CLARK and WRIGHT, after quoting this statement of Cohn's, say: If this hypothesis be correct, it is probable that the German text even in its present diluted form may contain something of the older English Play upon which Shakespeare worked. . . It does not appear that the German playwright made use of Shakespeare's Hamlet, or even of the play as represented in Q,. The theory that it may be derived from a still earlier source is therefore not improbable.

Unfortunately, the text, as we now have it, of this tragedy of Fratricide Punished can be traced no farther back than 1710. It is not given in the English Comedies and Tragedies, printed in 1620. The earliest copy is in manuscript, bearing date "Pretz, den 27 October, 1710," and had been at one time in the possession of Conrad Ekhof, the celebrated actor and manager of the Gotha Theatre, who was born in 1720, and died in 1778. After his death certain extracts were published in the Theater-Kalender auf das Jahr 1779, Gotha, under the care of its editor, H. A. O. Reichard, who afterwards gave the full text of the play in his Periodical: Olla Potrida, Berlin, 1781,' and this text has been reprinted by COHN, and translated in the present volume.

As we have seen, Cohn puts the date at which the tragedy was acted in Germany at ‘about 1603,' but it is to be feared that his enthusiasm has 'outrun the pauser reason,' and the wish to put the tragedy as close to Q, as possible has been the father to the thought. Certain it is that the earliest authentic mention of this tragedy that I can find in Cohn's preface is where it was acted at Dresden in 1626, and we can only infer that the version then acted was substantially what we now have here. Under these circumstances it behoves us to search closely in the play itself for evidence of its date and of its English origin.

The Prologue of the old German Hamlet is spoken by mythological characters, and this fact, says BERNHARDY, 'as well as some turns of expression which forcibly remind us of English poets, and some harsh un-German constructions, appear to establish the foreign origin of the piece, and that it is a translation.' Single passages in the German piece show that an edition of the original must have been used which contained passages that are in the Folio, but not in the First Quarto, while other passages prove incontrovertibly that precisely this Quarto must have been the source employed by the translator. Thus, for instance, the Ghost says: "Hear me, Hamlet, for the time draws near when I must betake myself again to the place whence I have come," and concludes his speech with the words: "So was I of my kingdom, my wife, and my life robbed by this tyrant." The former is evidently taken from the words in our accepted text: "My hour is almost come," &c., I, v, 2; and in the latter the order of the words is the same [as in Q,; see line 521].'

COHN: As the reader has the entire piece before him, it will not be necessary to call attention to the numerous passages, which, in spite of the dilution by unskilful hands, place its early origin beyond all doubt. In other places we can distinctly perceive the hand of the re-modeller, who kept in view the circumstances of the theatre of his own time, and which have given the tone to so many passages. His utter want of skill is sufficiently proved by his introduction of the comic characters, the peasant Jens and Phantasmo, the fool, both of whom are altogether out of place in the piece. The manner in which the scenes taken from Shakespeare's tragedy have been vulgarized, the coarse humour which has been mixed up with the serious

incidents, the box on the ear which the Ghost gives the sentinel, and other absurdities must be laid to the account of the reviser, and not to the actors who first brought the piece to Germany.

The pretty case' which Hamlet tells Horatio, p. 130, about the effect which the cunning of the scene has upon guilty creatures sitting at a play, according to Cohn, enables us to form a conclusion respecting the age of the piece. There can be no doubt that this is the incident which, whether fact or fiction, is introduced in the tragedy, A Warning for fair women, written a little before 1590.' Heywood gives the same story as occurring in Norfolk, and also a similar one that happened in Amsterdam. It is not a little characteristic of the stage at that time,' adds Cohn, 'that the actors who first performed the German Hamlet did not rest satisfied with the mere allusion as they found it in Shakespeare, but related the incident itself. Whether the passage refers to the incident in Norfolk or in Amsterdam, it is a striking evidence that Hamlet was transferred to the German stage at a very early period. The later reviser transferred the scene to Strasburg, as more familiar to his audience. It is probable that the company for which this new version was adapted had come from Strasburg, where we have already seen that there were English Players in 1654. We are inclined to believe that the first form of the version of the piece now before us was made about that time, but that the form in which it is here presented to the reader, and in which it has experienced many alterations and dilutions, is to be ascribed to a more modern hand.'

...

In 1872 Dr LATHAM subjected this old German Hamlet to a severer scrutiny than it had before received; and his conclusion coincides, in the main, with that of Bernhardy, Cohn, and Clark and Wright, viz.: that the old tragedy of Hamlet which preceded Q, may be here preserved either wholly or partially in this translation into German. The order in which the Dramatis Personæ are set down 'is more ancient than modern, the males and females being mixed together, instead of the females being arranged by themselves at the end of the list; and the order being less regulated by the rank of the interlocutors than by the order in which they appear on the stage; though this is not adhered to with the strictness of the classical drama.' In Sigrie Latham sees a corruption of Signe 'the most famous Norse love-tale being that of Signe and Hagbert, whose sad fate made their names household words to every youth and maiden in the North.'. . . . The uncle's name is Eric. This has undoubtedly at the first view as Scandinavian a look as Signe; but it is English as well. In the tale of Argentile and Curan, a well-known episode in Warner's Albion's England, the hero has a wicked uncle, and, just as in the present play, Eric is his name. But in both romances from which the poem seems most especially to be taken no such name is found; the usurper there being Godard. Without enlarging upon the extent to which this connects Warner's Curan with Shakespeare's Hamlet, we may fairly infer that some lost tradition or some unknown record is the common foundation for the two names. Individually, I go further, and think either it may have had a Latin title: Gesta Erici (or Eorici) Regis; or, that out of confusion both of title and subject the actual Chronicon Regis Erici may have been so called. The assumed confusion, however, goes farther, until Gesta Regis ends in the King's Jester, and Eric becomes Yorick. It is only, however, in Shakespeare that the Jester's name appears: indeed, in the German Hamlet the whole scene of the Grave-diggers is conspicuous for its absence.' [See note on V, i, 170.]

Latham finds three special points of detail, viz.: The blunder about Roscius, the allusion to Juvenal, and the reference to Portugal,-of which the first two are more

against than in favor of Shakespeare's having been the author of the original of the German Hamlet, and the third is in favor of the date of the German Hamlet being about 1589.

1. The blunder about Roscius [see last line of p. 128]. In the original, Marus Russig; the latter word is doubtless meant for Roscius,' but what means Marus ? It is submitted that it means Amerinus. Now there were two Roscii, and Cicero delivered an oration in defence of both. One was Roscius the actor; the other Sextus Roscius Amerinus, who was no actor at all. This, however, is the Roscius of Corambus. Now this is a blunder that requires as much scholarship to commit as to avoid, being one that a learned man might make from inadvertency, whereas an unlearned one could not make it at all. It was certainly not made by Shakespeare. This we know from his text, where Roscius stands alone. It could scarcely have been made by the supposed adapters who came after him.

2. The allusion to Juvenal. This is in the same predicament with the preceding. It is more classical than the text of the supposed original. [Latham here cites V, ii, 94-100, and the corresponding passage in the German Hamlet, on p. 140, where Hamlet quizzes Phantasmo about the heat and coldness of the weather, and after comparing the two with Juvenal's Satire, iii, 100, adds: In the German text there is, to say the least, a similarity sufficient to suggest a comparison. The English text has never suggested anything, not even to Johnson, who had paraphrased the Satire.' This I do not understand. The English text suggested Juvenal's Satire to Theobald a hundred and forty years ago. See note on V, ii, 94. Verily, is not a New Variorum needed? ED.]

3. The reference to Portugal. In the German Hamlet [p. 135, ninth line from the top], Hamlet says, "just send me off to Portugal, so that I may never come back again."' In this reference to Portugal, Latham ingeniously finds an allusion to the unfortunate expedition to Portugal in 1589, in which eleven thousand soldiers perished out of twenty-one thousand, and of eleven hundred gentlemen who accompanied it only three hundred and fifty returned to their native country. And this, Latham thinks, fixes the date of the German Hamlet.

Dr LATHAM concludes as follows: In the first place, the dramatic exposition of an action or a situation is one thing: the mere statement that such an action or situation occurred, another. It is one thing to describe in a good business-like, prosaic manner the way in which the elder Hamlet was poisoned; it is another thing to describe the poisoning as Shakespeare does. The same applies to the situation of Hamlet with his drawn sword, and the wicked uncle at prayer. The idea of sparing the murderer until he is certain of eternal condemnation, though sufficiently devilish, is poetic or prosaic according to the mode of exhibiting it.

'Secondly: We must not only note what we find in the German play, but what we miss. Thus,

'a. Of instances of realistic imagery, such as "not a mouse stirring," we find

none.

'b. Of ironical bits of cynicism, such as "We would obey were she ten times our mother," not one.

'c. Of the soliloquies, not one.

Of hypotheses by which the difference may be accounted for, I know but one, and to the notice of this I limit myself. It is, that the German Play is the Play of Shakespeare corrupted, attenuated, shorn of its great nobility, distorted, degraded, vulgarized. But was the German stage thus much below the English? or even if

it were so, how do we reconcile the recognition of the poetical element (such as it is), as shown by the Prologue, with the eschewal of it as manifested by the elimination of the soliloquies?

Again, it is not denied that what with the existence of imperfect texts, and what with "stuff" sometimes "foisted in," and sometimes omitted, by the players much may be achieved. But time is an element in such a process as this, and here we have something like tangible data to go by; or at any rate there are certain limits within which we must confine the effects of what we may call the wear-and-tear of time, and there are also criteria by which we may measure the inferiority (real or imaginary) of the German stage to the English. In neither case have we much latitude.'

It is probably needless to call attention to what must strike every one at the first glance, merely at the Dramatis Person of Fratricide Punished, and that is the name given to Polonius, which is, except in one letter, the same as that in Q,. This is noted by all who have touched upon the subject of this German play. Again, the very name Hamlet shows that the adapter of the German play at least did not go to Belleforest for his tragedy. Furthermore, the allusion to Jephtha points so clearly to the old English ballad, that I think there can be little doubt that in Fratricide Punished we have a translation of an old English tragedy, and most probably the one which is the groundwork of the Quarto of 1603.

In conclusion, let me say a few words as to the following translation. I have endeavored to make it as literal as possible. The admirable translation by Miss GEORGINA ARCHER in Cohn's volume, while it is most felicitous in catching the turn of colloquial expressions, a highly difficult task, appeared to me, as it did to Dr Latham, to yield a little too much to the desire to reproduce Shakespeare's phraseology; if the translation be literal, the student will discover for himself these parallelisms as readily in the English as in the German. In one or two small matters I think I have discovered allusions or interpretations that have escaped my predecessors, e. g. spanische Pfauentritte, I suppose, is equivalent to Pfauentanz, and have therefore translated it by Spanish pavan;' again, in Phantasmo's swearings at Ophelia, I think das elementische Mädchen is not merely simpleton,' as Miss ARCHER translates it, nor that high-flying maiden,' as Dr LATHAM renders it, but that elementische is an adjective eliminated from potz element, and is intended to be comic. But these are the merest trifles, and scarcely worth a thought. By one phrase I confess I was completely gravelled,—as a phrase its meaning is clear enough, but its drift is puzzling: Phantasmo's last words, dass euch die Klinge verlahme! and I am by no means sure that Dr Latham's version is not nearer the genuine than mine: and may the blade hurt you.'

I have included in brackets words which seem to indicate the hand of the German translator, such as harquebusirt, revange, &c. Dr Latham has done it in many instances likewise.

As far as I know, attention was first directed in England to the subject of English actors in Germany by W. J. THOMS in the New Monthly Magazine, July, 1840, in an article which was afterwards reprinted in Three Notelets on Shakespeare.