The Passionate Pilgrim by William Shakespeare. The Third Edition, 1612. Reproduced inFacsimile from the Copy in the Folger Shakespeare Library by Hyder Edward RollinsReview by: T. BrookeModern Language Notes, Vol. 57, No. 5 (May, 1942), pp. 378-379Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2910175 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 17:34

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toModern Language Notes.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 193.0.146.46 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 17:34:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

378 MODERN LANGUAGE NOTES, MAY, 1942

Shakespeare's supremacy as an artist but also of his spiritual time- lessness, and of the fact that the poetry of democracy cannot cut away from its cultural hesitage, least of all from Shakespeare. Finally comes an exposition of Whitman's recorded notion that the chronicles are Shakespeare's "most eminent " plays, that they dis- play an " essentially controlling plan," and that this plan (carried out later even in the great tragedies Macbeth and Lear) was con- sciously to undermine through the effect of their "barbarous and tumultuous gloom " the political system which they portray. In a word Shakespeare became for Whitman not the spokesman of the old order but its covert enemy-the devoted saboteur. Professor Thaler does not, of course, accept this role for Shakespeare, nor will any other competent critic or historian. But the important point is that Whitman could do so, and thus by his own responses demonstrate that the great artist of the past, rendering "what was to him the truth," could not give sustenance to what was impermanent or evil.

ALFRED HARBAG E University of Pennsylvania

The Passionate Pilgrim by William Shakespeare. The Third Edi- tion, 1612. Reproduced in Facsimile from the Copy in the Folger Shakespeare Library. With an Introduction by HYDE1R EDWARD ROLLINS. Folger Shakespeare Library Publications. New York and London: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940. Pp. xlii + 139.

The publications of the Folger Shakespeare Library are settiiig a high standard of bibliographical subtlety and learning. Onie could wish that the volumes were numbered, and that each con- tained a list of those previously published. Professor Hyder Rol- lins' edition of the 1612 text of The Passionate Pilgrim can be best studied in conjunction with its predecessor in the series, Dr. J. Q. Adams' extraordinarily successful treatment of the problems relat- ing to the fragmentary text of the first (1599) edition of the same book. Professor Rollins also, in his Variorum edition of Shakespeare's Poems (1938), has handled many of the questions that his present introduction takes up, and in part in the same language. Any one who has mastered these three books will know a great deal more than has been known hitherto about William Jaggard's attempt to sell as Shakespeare's work certain wares which in fact had only a veneer of Shakespeare. Along with things more important, he will know that the number of pieces the piratical Jaggard purloined from Thomas Heywood's Troita Britanica to eke

This content downloaded from 193.0.146.46 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 17:34:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

REVIEWS 379

out the third edition of The Passionate Pilgrim is not two, but nine (9) ,-or Mr. Rollins's reiterated prose will halt for 't. It seems, however, a trifle domineering to cast this arithmetical discrepancy so in the teeth of all the unfortunate commentators who, during a couple of centuries, were unable to see one of the two extant copies of the book that Mr. Rollins is now for the first time making avail- able to readers not within the gates of the Bodleian or the Folger Library. Heywood himself was a worse bibliographer but sounder combatant, when he charged Jaggard with pilfering the two long and important poems, and let the small stuff pass. Personally, I would debit Jaggard with eight, not nine, thefts, for Mr. Rollins' poems nos. xxiii and xxiv, though ultimately derived from different parts of Ovid, are contiguous in Heywood; and the words intro- ducing xxiv, "And in another place somewhat resembling this," do not suggest a different poem, and are set in a smaller type than that used by Jaggard to head his various items.

The facsimile text is admirable. The cancel titlepage, which omitted Shakespeare's name, and four pages defective in the Folger copy are reproduced from the other exemplar in the Bodleian. The Introduction, if severe, is lucid, and explains one of the most irregular pieces of Jacobean book-making (technically and morally) with all the fidelity one expects from Hyder Rollins.

T. BRooKE Yale University

The, Use of Rhyme in Shakespeare's Plays. By FREDERIC W. NESS. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941. Pp. xvi + 168. $3.00.

As its Introduction announces, The present study proposes . . . a re-count of the couplets and other rhymes in Shakespeare's plays . . . a critical study of the rhymes with the view . . . of tracing the development of Shakespeare as an artist. Thirdly, it will examine contemporary drama and opinion to ascertain whether the fluctuations and gradual disappearance in Shakespeare are the result of an inner change or of some concession to current tastes. And, lastly, it will try to offer a more satisfactory explanation of Shakespeare's gradual abandonment of rhyme.

Dr. Ness has occasion to cite and sometimes to summarize the work of numerous scholars. For instance, he remarks (p. 10) "The best organized opposition to rhyme was the Areopagus, a group of scholars and poets who entertained themselves throughout much of the last quarter of the sixteenth century with certain reformations of English verse "; and he lists the probable members of this " group." In a footnote, he refers to Dr. Maynadier's well-

This content downloaded from 193.0.146.46 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 17:34:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions