The Freedom of the Poet [i]
43 lines✦
ichard 111 , though it may not have. Whether he began on the classi-cal or romantic side, farcical or comedic, we can hardly yet say. Buthe developed toward the use of rhyme in comedy, A MidsurmnerNtghfs Dream will have as much rhymed as blank verse, and it maybe instructive that in The Txvo Gentlemeii this proportion is less thanone tenth, in the Errors one third. The Errors, at least, cannot belater than 1594 because it was produced in notorious confusion atGray’s Inn at the end of the year. Lovers Labour Lost is peculiar meverything, partly because a great part of the end of the only versionwe have was rewritten by the poet about 1598. But the diversestrands of mockery blended in this first triumph of Shakespeareancomedy were put at the service of an artistic method he never usedagain, to the end of polemic. A cluster of allusions and likelihood seem to locate Lovers La-bours Lost (the revision apart) late in 1593, perhaps December,* andIts special air marks it as designed for private performance. Some tenthousand persons died in London again this year of plague (as if halfa million New Yorkers were swept away), playing was restrained.Midway between his long poems, Shakespeare was full in the favourof Southampton; the play must have been done for him, perhaps atTitchfield.t We are within a few months of the point where webegan in April of 1594. Now I must invite your attention to somematters that interested the poet. We have seen how he followedFrench affairs. Despite Navarre’s conversion, war dragged on inFrance between his forces under the young Due de Biron, Longue-ville, and others, and the League’s under de Mayenne, English troopswere now engaged, and I suppose curiosity was active about theFrench lasciviousness— the King’s notoriously, and Longueville hadbeen one of his rivals for Gabrielle the year before, de Mayenne hadbeen prostrate with debauchery at Rouen. The young Earl of Essexstood very high at court, Southampton his intimate in one of thedeepest friendships of the age. Essex’s rival Sir Walter Ralegh, still indisgrace for the affair with a maid of honour in 1592 that had senthim to the Tower, had retired sulking to Sherborne and was occupiedwith study and speculation, surrounded by a small group of learned ^ Among them allusions to Henri IV’s conversion in July (iv. i. 21-33),Gabriel Harvey’s F tercels Supererogation of this year (iv. 2. 89), to Chapman’spoem The Shadow of Night, evidently seen in manuscript (Field printed it), forIt was registered on December 31 (iv. 3. 346-7, 255), besides plague allusions and“Lori have mercie on vr” (v. 2. 419). t A garden performance of the comedy a few miles away at Ashford Chacein 3937, by a group from Cambridge, confirmed my impression of its privatecharacter, and fadeless radiance.
✦