"Get you to your command,

And there preach to your sentinels, and tell them
What a brave man you are. I shall laugh at you."

This is a "recollection" of, among other lines:

"Go show your slaves how choleric you are,

And make your bondmen tremble."'

Now, although Evadne's speech is in a scene mainly by Fletcher, I might have assumed, justifiably perhaps, that the lines cited were some of Beaumont's additions. But the word "preach" is sufficient witness to me of Fletcher's authorship of the lines in question. (I still stand by my assertion that Fletcher's undoubted work, previous to the Maid's Tragedy, does not show any signs of his knowledge of Julius Caesar.)

In one other respect, the reader may have his doubts. He may credit me with honesty, but he may justly deny me any title to speak with authority upon what Beaumont did or did not write. On this point, my claims are modest. There may have been-I have no doubt that there have been-many men who have read Beaumont with more intelligence than I have. It is probable that some who have read him with more intelligence have, for that reason, read him less often. But I doubt whether anyone-from the publication of the 1647 Folio to the present day-has bestowed so much time upon the study of the works of the two dramatists who rank next in order to Shakespeare as I have, although there are others who have given less time to that study with, probably, more fruitful results. "I am not one of those who can take in all the beauties and blemishes of a poet in one neglecting glance." But, for more years than I care to number, Beaumont and Fletcher have been my constant, almost daily, literary companions. It is no exaggeration to say that I have read all the partnership plays at least a hundred times—in some cases, I may write "hundreds —a waste of time, if profit were the only

consideration. Such a course of reading, even if no more than careless, is bound to leave an impress, conscious or unconscious,

upon the mind of the reader. By the aid of the echoes from this often unconscious impression one obtains a knowledge of the style of the author studied. No man can properly call himself a critic upon a question of authorship without this knowledge, often of an uncommunicable kind.

The parallels that have been gathered out of Beaumont's works are for the reader's use-not mine. Before I had noted any of these parallels, I had come to the conclusion that a large part of Julius Caesar was written by Beaumont. But, had I found no parallels at all, my belief would have been unshaken, although, of course, I should not have expected anyone to share it. A man who loves a woman knows thoroughly the sound of her voice, whether in speech or in song. He can detect it in a distant hubbub of conversation, when all others are vague and indistinct. And should she be singing in a choir of many, he can still follow that voice with certainty, though to most listeners it may be no more than an indefinite part of a blur or a compact of harmony. Some such an intimate knowledge as this implies prompted me one day to say, when passing from the first to the second scene of Julius Caesar, "This is the voice of Francis Beaumont."

MUCH

CHAPTER IX.-RE-CAPITULATION.

UCH time need not be wasted in pressing the claims of Marlowe to the ownership of Julius Caesar, in its first form. It will not be amiss, however, tersely to re-state them. In Never Too Late, a prose tract published in 1590, Greene alludes to a speech in an un-named play, the burden of which was "Ave, Caesar." Its composition was attributed to Marlowe-the "cobler"-and it was spoken by Wilson-"Roscius." In a play of about the same time-Orlando Furioso-Greene again alludes to an "Ave, Caesar" speech, this time connecting it with the "dumping" of Cassius. It is unlikely that Greene had in view two distinct speeches, and the justifiable inference from these facts is that Marlowe wrote a play on Julius Caesar. A probable line from that play, "Yet Caesar shall go forth!" which Marlowe himself used in the Massacre at Paris, appears in the tragedy that bears Shakespeare's name, though not his nature. It is unlikely that Shakespeare stole from Marlowe, and that Marlowe, in his turn, cribbed from an unknown writer of a play on Caesar. It is far more likely that Marlowe repeated in the Massacre a line that he had previously used in the tragedy with which Greene obliquely associated him. There are other repetitions of lines from the Roman play in dramas of a time considerably earlier than the date usually assigned for its composition by Shakespeare. Finally, Julius Caesar contains a large number of Marlowean reminiscences-so many, in fact, that they force the belief that the play was written by Marlowe, if not by a poet who slavishly imitated him. It is doubtful whether Shakespeare ever did this,

while it is certain that he was not slavishly imitating Marlowe so late as 1600. To sum up on this head: There is enough matter of a Marlowean temper and cast in Julius Caesar to convince all but the completely-biased critic, even without the implied affirmation of Greene that Marlowe wrote a play on a cognate subject, that the tragedy, as we now have it, still contains a large amount of the work of the poet of Tamburlaine.

Still, granting this, the reader may say that, though the groundwork was Marlowe's, the superstructure is Shakespeare's. Or, that our great poet has done here as he has done with other old plays-collected the dead bones and breathed new life into them. This has been done, I admit, but not, in this case, by Shakespeare. The newer spirit in the play is Beaumont's. In support of this, many parallels-with other evidencehave been brought forward. I do not believe that I have discovered all that there are: I have certainly suppressed some that were significant only to a critic soaked in Beaumont's style. Though these have a value in showing the trail of the reviser, they have not a sufficient weight to decide the truth of the claims of rival authors. Some of the closest and most important parallels are grouped below. One by one, they may have been poohpoohed out of court: in a solid phalanx, they are more capable of attack and defence. In some cases, there is an exact repetition of phrase: in others, identity of treatment; while the style is in all homogeneous. I should like to ask the reader to suspend his judgment on the second question-whether Shakespeare did or did not entirely revise the work of Marlowe-until he has once again considered the following:

When Cæsar says, 'do this,' it is performed.

Brutus, I do observe you now of late:

I have not from your eyes that gentleness
And show of love as I was wont to have:
You bear too stubborn and too strange a hand
Over your friend that loves you.

J. C., i. 1, 32-6.

Methinks your words

Fall not from off your tongue so evenly,
Nor is there in your looks that quietness
That I was wont to see.

Philaster, iii. 1.

What master holds so strict a hand

Over his boy?

Ibid., ii. 1.

Amintor, we have not enjoyed our friendship of late,
For we were wont to change our souls in talk.

I have observed your words

(The scene from which the last extract is taken should be studied carefully, not only to compare the method of approach pursued by Melantius towards Amintor with that of Cassius towards Brutus, but to note the resemblances between the subsequent quarrels and reconciliations of the characters concerned.)

Into what dangers would you lead me, Cassius,
That you would have me seek into myself

For that which is not in me?

J. C., i. 1, 63-5.

I have done her wrong,

And made myself believe much of myself
That is not in me.

A King and No King, iii. 1. (That a certain quality is or is not "in me" or "in you" is a frequent declaration with Beaumont. I do not claim that this feature is absent from the work of other poets, but I think it a temperate statement to make that in the plays of no other dramatist of Beaumont's time is it so often present.)