From The Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors, ed. Charles Wells Moulton, 8 vols. (London: Moulton Publishing, 1901), 1: 541-43. [Prepared and proofread by Deborah Hill.]
Arden of Feversham
The speeches in "Arden of Feversham" have spirit and feeling; but there is none of that wit, that fertility of analogical imagery, which the worst plays of Shakspeare display. The language is also more plain and perspicuous than we ever find in him, especially on a subject so full of passion. --HALLAM, HENRY, 1842, Introduction to the Literature of Europe, pt. ii, ch. vi, par. 33, note.
The play, as a whole, is but a slovenly piece of work, and the characters carrying on its action are throughout either repulsive or uninteresting. There seems an intention to suggest in Arden's avarice a kind of poetic justification of his doom; but the hint is too slight to be of much effect. The character of the wife, hateful in itself, is invested with no adventitius charm or allurement; vice is painted as nakedly and blackly as it is by the chronicler. The personages of the hired ruffians are rather in Ben Jonson's style; but there is little humor to relieve the loathesomeness of the figures. On the other hand, "Arden of Feversham" contains one or two passages which strongly resemble Shakespeare in manner. -- WARD, ADOLPHUS WILLIAM, 1875-99, A History of English Dramatic Literature, vol. II, p. 218.
Either this play is the young Shakespeare's first tragic master-piece, or there was a writer unknown to us then alive and at work for the stage who excelled him as a tragic dramatist not less -- to say the very least -- than he was excelled by Marlowe as a narrative and tragic poet. . . . I camnot but finally take heart to say, even in the absence of all external or traditional testimony, that it seems to me not pardonable merely nor permissible, but simply logical and reasonable, to set down this poem, a young man's work on the face of it, as the possible work of no man's youthful hand but Shakespeare's. -- SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES, 1880, A Study of Shakespeare, pp. 136, 141.
Has no similarities of versification, and does not, in its dealing with the murder of a husband by his wife and her base-born paramour, suggest Shakespeare's choice of subject, but is closer in some ways than any other play to his handling in character and psychological analysis. -- SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1898, A Short History of English Literature, p. 329.
Highly as I esteem "Arden of Feversham," I cannot believe that Shakespeare wrote a single line of it. It was not like him to choose such a subject, and still less to treat it in such a fashion. The play is a domestic tragedy, in which a wife, after repeated attempts, murders her kind and forbearing husband, in order freely to indulge her passion for a worthless paramour. It is a dramatisation of an actual case, the facts of which are closely followed, but at the same time animated with great psychological insight. That Shakespeare had a distaste for such subjects is proved by his consistent avoidance of them, except in this problematical instance; whereas if he had once succeeded so well with such a theme, he would surely have repeated the experiment. The chief point is, however, that only in a few places, in the soliloquies, do we find the peculiar note of Shakespeare's style -- that wealth of imagination, that luxuriant lyrism, which plays like sunlight over his speeches. In "Arden of Feversham" the style is a uniform drab. -- BRANDES, GEORGE, 1898, William Shakespeare, A Critical Study, vol. I, p. 204.
Sir John Oldcastle
"Sir John Oldcastle" is certainly not worthy to be ranked among the works of Shakespear, and it is with great propriety that it has been generally rejected. It has, however, evident marks in places of strong and familiar genius, which might have arisen from his having improved it; but even then they appear to be the shadow of his writing rather than the writing itself. -- DIBDIN, CHARLES, 1795, A Complete History of the Stage, vol. III, p. 77.
"Sir John Oldcastle" is the compound piecework of four minor playwrights, one of them afterwards and otherwise eminent as a poet -- Munday, Drayton, Wilson, and Hathaway: a thin sample of poetic patchery cobbled up and stitched together so as to serve its hour for a season without falling to pieces at the first touch. -- SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES, 1880, A Study of Shakespeare, Appendix, p. 232.
Cromwell
"Cromwell" is one of those plays rejected as Shakespear's, and certainly with great reason, for it has upon the whole less of those marks of his genius and judgment than any of those pieces that have been merely attributed to him. That he had some concern in it, however, cannot be doubted. The foot of Hercules can belong only to Hercules . -- DIBDIN, CHARLES, 1795, A Complete History of the Stage, vol. III, p. 90.
"Thomas Lord Cromwell" is a piece of such utterly shapeless, spiritless, bodiless, soulless, senseless, helpless, worthless rubbish, that there is no known writer of Shakespeare's age to whom it could be ascribed without the infliction of an unwarrantable insult on that writer's memory. -- SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES, 1880, A Study of Shakespeare, Appendix, p. 232.
Yorkshire Tragedy
Is by some attributed to Shakespear as however all his commentators, except Mr. Steevens, have agreed to reject it, to avoid unnecessary cavil, we will agree so far with them as to say that it seems to stand in a predicament something between "Pericles," and "Locrine;" for though there are evidently many images which appear to have emanated from the mind of Shakespear, those passages seem rather to have been written for the assistance of another than that the whole belonged to himself. Let the belief, however, rest either way, the merit of it cannot assist any more than the imperfections of it can diminish his reputation. -- DIBDIN, CHARLES, 1795, A Complete History of the Stage, vol. III, p 335.
For concentrated might and overwhelming weight of realism, this lurid little play beats "A Warning for Fair Women" fairly out of the field. It is and must always be (I had nearly said, thank heaven) unsurpassable for pure potency of horror; and the breathless heat of the action, its raging rate of speed, leaves actually no breathing-time for disgust; it consumes our very sense of repulsion as with fire. But such power as this, though a rare and a great gift, is not the right quality for a dramatist; it is not the fit property of a poet. Ford and Webster, even Tourneur and Marston, who have all been more or less wrongfully though more or less plausibly attacked on the score of excess in horror, have none of them left us anything, so nakedly terrible, so terribly naked as this. Passion is here not merely stripped to the skin but stripped to the bones. I cannot tell who could and I cannot guess who would have written it. "'Tis a very excellent piece of work;" may we never exactly look upon its like again! -- SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES, 1880, A Study of Shakespeare, p. 143.
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