Our meanness succours us; and our mere defects

Prove our commodities.

IV. 6. EDgar.

Come on, sir, here's the place :-stand still,-How fearful

And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low, &c.

The incident of the cliff is so extravagantly improbable that there is no defending it, and we tolerate it only as having given occasion to this which is Shakespeare's only great attempt at describing a particular piece of scenery.

He had probably been at Dover, and sketched the scene upon the place. He evidently prepares the reader for the passage by several allusions to Dover in the earlier parts of the play, and, except for the sake of introducing these descriptive lines, one cannot see why Glo'ster should be led so far as Dover, when he might so easily have executed his purpose elsewhere. There is an obscurity thrown (purposely I think) over the topography of this play.

Shakespeare was himself sensible of the improbability, and Edgar says, "This is above all strangeness." Dr. Johnson says, "This scene and the stratagem by which Glo'ster is cured of his desperation are wholly borrowed from Sidney's Arcadia, book ii. ;" but this is a mistake. It is true we have a blind king who seeks the brow of a rock with the intention of throwing himself headlong. He asks his son to conduct him thither. So far the stories are coincident, but the improbable part is not yet entered upon; and, so far from Shakespeare having here followed Sidney, or having any countenance from a more cautious writer of fiction, the son in the Arcadia even refuses to conduct his father to the spot. Shakespeare, as far as our knowledge at present goes, must be answerable in his own proper person and alone for what is too improbable to give as an incident any degree of pleasure.

At the same time he may have owed the conception of that particular mode of suicide to Sidney, since the passage occurs in that part of the Arcadia to which he owed, according to Steevens, the episodical incidents of Glo'ster, Edmund, and Edgar. But there actually occurred in Shakespeare's time the incident of a London merchant committing suicide by throwing himself headlong from the tower of one of the churches.

OTHELLO.

THE critics who have laboured to establish the exact chronological order of the dramatic writings of Shakespeare, have been not a little perplexed with the play of Othello, or the Moor of Venice. The singular expression,

The hearts of old gave hands,

But our new heraldry is hands, not hearts, Act i. Sc. 4.

was regarded by Warburton as containing an allusion to the addition of the red hand of Ulster to the family arms of persons who were admitted into the order of Baronets, which was founded by King James the First in 1611; whence the inference was very naturally drawn that the play could not have been written earlier than that year, and probably not long after it. It is chiefly on the strength of this passage that in his celebrated Essay, as originally published in 1790, Mr. Malone assigns Othello to 1611. Dr. Drake, who has, however, but small pretension to be regarded as an original investigator in his Shakesperian labours, contends for the succeeding year; and it is known that the addition of the hand was not finally determined on before 1612. Mr. Chalmers, chiefly relying on the same supposed allusion, places this play as late as 1614, making it the latest in the whole series.

It cannot be denied that the expression is a very peculiar one, and one not likely to be made use of by the Poet to express the very ordinary sentiment which it is made to convey, without some peculiar reason for it. The word "heraldry" must be brought in by some association independent of the business of the play. It is also a remarkable coincidence that there should have been a "new heraldry of

hands" in the Poet's lifetime, and that there should be in this passage of his writings mention of a "new heraldry" in connection with "hands." Hands, it will be remembered, were at the institution of the order of Baronets a figure very little used in English heraldry. Yet there is not only every reason to believe, but it is certain, that this play existed long before 1611; and that, therefore, either there is no allusion at all in this passage to the red hand of Ulster, or it is an expression introduced into the play at some period after the play had been for some years upon the stage. And the latter is probably the true solution.

Mr. Malone lived to change his opinion. In the latest edition of his Essay, that published after his death by Mr. Boswell, the work here quoted as Boswell's Malone, 1821, Othello is placed in 1604. "We know," says Mr. Malone, "that it was acted in 1604, and I have therefore placed it in that year." To this Mr. Boswell adds, "Mr. Malone never expressed himself at random. I therefore deeply lament that I have not been able to discover upon what evidence he knew this important and decisive fact." How the knowledge of the fact was acquired by Mr. Malone, it is not material to inquire; but the fact itself rests on very sufficient authority.

Mr. Cunningham in his valuable contribution to dramatic literature, the Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court, 8vo, 1842, published by the Shakespeare Society, has given, at p. 203, extracts from the accounts for the year beginning November 1, 1604, and ending on the 31st October, 1605. In these accounts it appears that the King's Players, that is, the company to which Shakespeare belonged, performed the play of The Moor of Venice, at the Banquetting House at Whitehall, on the night of the first of November, (All Hallows Day,) 1604. The appearance in Mr. Cunning

ham's book of the date " 1605 " immediately over this entry might occasion the fact to be overlooked, that the entry really belongs to 1604; but that it does so is manifest from the whole tenor of the passage.

Here, then, we have the evidence which Mr. Boswell called for; or, if not that particular evidence, yet evidence quite as conclusive as any known to Mr. Malone could be, that Othello was performed in 1604.

Any inference from passages in the play, from its great excellence as a play, from any reference of it to a fancied history of the progress of the Poet's mind and genius, must for nothing when opposed by robust historical testimony such as this.

go

Nobody had ever thought of throwing this noble composition farther back in the Poet's life, when Mr. Collier announced that Othello was performed before Queen Elizabeth in 1602.

This announcement was made in 1836, in a very valuable little volume entitled New Particulars regarding the Works of Shakespeare. The information was derived from a paper at Bridgewater House, part of the papers, private and official, left by Lord Chancellor Ellesmere. Queen Elizabeth honoured him, when Sir Thomas Egerton, with a visit at Harefield in 1602, remaining with him three days, namely, the last day of July and the first and second of August. Nothing appears to have been spared to provide suitable entertainment for Her Majesty and among the accounts of the expenses incurred on that occasion Mr. Collier found the following entry :

:

Rewardes to the Vaulters, Players, and Dauncers-of this, xli to Burbidge's Players for Othello-LXIIIIli XViis xd.

The whole of this paper of accounts was afterwards printed by Mr. Collier in his work entitled The Egerton Papers, published by the Camden Society, in 1840.