but for the elegant and
ingenious introductions he has furnished from his own pen. With regard
to the question whether Shakspeare did or did not write these plays,
our opinion has ever inclined to the negative, and a careful perusal
of Mr. Simms's views has rather confirmed than shaken our impression.
The internal evidence, with the exception of passages in the Two Noble
Kinsmen, is strongly against the hypothesis of Shakspeare's
authorship, and the external evidence appears to us unsatisfactory.
Mr. Simms's idea is that they were the productions of Shakspeare's
youth and apprenticeship, and on this supposition he accounts for
their obvious inferiority to the acknowledged plays. Now it seems to
us that the juvenile efforts of the world's master-mind would give
some evidence of his powers, however imperfect might be the form of
their expression; and especially that they would not resemble the
matured products of contemporary mediocrity. Of the plays in the
present volume, the only one which has the character of youthful
genius is the tragedy of Lecrine, and this is the youth of Marlowe
rather than of Shakspeare. The London Prodigal and the Puritan, Lord
Cromwell and Sir John Oldcastle, have no trace of youthful fire or
even rant. They are the offspring of sober, contented, irreclaimable,
unimprovable mediocrity, with a decided tendency to the stupid rather
than the sublime. They were probably the journey-work of some of the
legion playwrights connected with the London theatres, and cannot be
compared with the dramas of Jonson, Deckar, Middleton, Fletcher,
Marston, Tourneur, Massinger and Ford. They lack the vitality, the
_vim_, which burns and blazes even in the works of the second class
dramatists of the time. The Yorkshire Tragedy bears the stamp of
Middleton rather than Shakspeare. With regard to the Two Noble
Kinsmen, perhaps the greatest play included in the collection of
Beaumont and Fletcher, we think that the Shaksperian passages might
have been imitations of Shakspeare's manner, and we have a
sufficiently high opinion of Fletcher's genius to suppose that this
imitation was not beyond his powers. The general character of the play
shows that Shakspeare, at any rate, merely contributed to it. It is
conceived and developed in the hot and hectic style of Fletcher, and
abounds in his strained heroics and gratuitous obscenities. The
Jailor's Daughter, a coarse caricature of Ophelia, is one of the
greatest crimes agains