We know how Shakespeare on the
like occasion was wont to transmute into golden verse the silver speech
supplied to him by North's version of Amyot's Plutarch. {273} With the
text of Lord Berners before him, the author of _King Edward III_. has
given us for the gold of Froissart not even adulterated copper, but
unadulterated lead. Incredible as it may seem to readers of the
historian, the poeticule has actually contrived so far to transfigure by
dint of disfiguring him that this most noble and pathetic scene in all
the annals of chivalry, when passed through the alembic of his
incompetence, appears in a garb of transforming verse under a guise at
once weak and wordy, coarse and unchivalrous. The whole scene is at all
points alike in its unlikeness to the workmanship of Shakespeare.
Here then I think we may finally draw bridle: for the rest of the course
is not worth running; there is nothing in the residue of this last act
which deserves analysis or calls for commentary. We have now examined
the whole main body of the work with somewhat more than necessary care;
and our conclusion is simply this: that if any man of common reading,
common modesty, common judgment, and common sense, can be found to
maintain the theory of Shakespeare's possible partnership in the
composition of this play, such a man will assuredly admit that the only
discernible or imaginable touches of his hand are very slight, very few,
and very early.
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