1This Patent, corrected from a former copy in Rymer, has been recovered by Mr. Collier.—Annals of the Stage, i. 211.2This singular document, incorrectly given by Strype, Mr. Collier has completed. “It throws much new light on the state of the drama at this period;” and still more on the strange arguments which the Puritans of the day alleged against players and plays.—Mr. Collier has preserved an old satirical epigram which had been perilous to print at that day; it was left for posterity on the fly-leaf of a book. It is addressed to—“‘The Fooles of the Cittee,’—They establish as a rule,Not one shall play the fool,But they—a worthy school!”3At the inferior playhouses the admission was as low as a penny for “the groundlings” who stood in the roofless pit, which still retained the name of “the yard”—evidently from the old custom of playing in the yards of inns. In the higher theatres “a room,” or box, varied from sixpence to two shillings and sixpence. They played in daylight, and rose from their dinner to the playhouse. It was one of the City regulations, that “no playing be in the dark, so that the auditory may return home before sunset.” Society was then in its nursery-times; and the solemnity of “the orders in common council” admirably contrasts with their simplicity; but they acted under the terror that, when they entered a playhouse, they were joining in “the devil’s service!”4Two such poor scholars are introduced in “The Return from Parnassus” alternately “banning and cursing Granta’s muddy bank;” and Cambridge, where “our oil was spent.”5The popular taste at all times has been prone to view in representation the most harrowing crimes—probably influenced by the vulgar notion that, because the circumstances are literally true, they are therefore the more interesting. One of these writers wasRobert Yarrington, who seems to have been so strongly attracted to this taste for scenical murder, that he wrote “Two Lamentable Tragedies,” which he contrived to throw into one play. By a strange alternation, the scene veers backwards and forwards from England to Italy, both progressing together;—the English murder is of a merchant in Thames-street, and the Italian of a child in a wood by ruffians hired by the uncle; the ballad deepens the pathetic by two babes—but which was the original of a domestic incident which first conveyed to our childhood the idea of an unnatural parent? It appears that we had a number of what they called “Lamentable Tragedies,” whose very titles preserve the names of the hapless victims. Taylor, the Water-poet, alludes to these “as murders fresh in memory;” and has himself described “the unnatural father who murdered his wife and children” as parallel to one of ancient date. Acts of lunacy were not then distinguishable from ordinary murders.—Collier, iii. 49.6Not many years ago Isaac Reed printedThe WitchofMiddleton. Recently another manuscript play appeared,The Second Maiden’s Tragedy. To the personal distresses of the actors in the days of the Commonwealth we owe several dramas, which they published, drawn out of the wrecks of some theatrical treasury; such wasThe Wild-Goose ChaseofFletcher, which they assured us was the poet’s favourite. It is said that more than sixty of these plays, in manuscript, were collected by Warburton, the herald, and from the utter neglect of the collector had all gone to singe his fowls. WhenTheobaldsolemnly declared that his play,The Double Falsehood, was written by Shakespeare, it was probably one of these old manuscript plays. This drama was not unsuccessful; nor had Theobald shot far wide of the mark, since Farmer ascribed it to Shirley, and Malone to Massinger.7See the last and enlarged edition of Charles Lamb’s “Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets.” In the second volume, in “Extracts from the Garrick Plays,” under the odd names of”Doctor Dodypol, a comedy, 1600,” we have scenes exquisitely fanciful—andJack Drum’s Entertainment, 1601, where “the free humour of a noble housekeeper” may be placed by the side of the most finished passages even in Shakespeare. YetDoctor Dodypolhas wholly escaped the notice even of catalogue-scribes—andJack Drumis not noticed by the collectors of these old plays. I only know these two dramas by the excerpts of Lamb; but if the originals are tolerably equal with “The Specimens,” I should place these unknown dramas among the most interesting ones.8By the discovery of the Diary of Henslow, the illiterate manager of the theatre, connected with Edward Alleyn. Henslow was the pawnbroker of the company, and the chancellor of its exchequer. He could not spell the titles of the plays; yet, in about five years, 160 were his property. He had not less than thirty different authors in his pay.—Collier, iii. 105. [His Diary has been published by the Shakespeare Society under the editorship of Mr. Payne Collier.—Ed.]9Marlow—Nash—Greene—Peele.10When Pope translated Homer, Chapman’s version lay open before him. The same circumstance, as I have witnessed, occurred with the last translator—Mr. Sotheby. Charles Lamb justly appreciated Chapman, when he observed, that “He would have made a great epic poet, if indeed he has not abundantly shown himself to be one; for his Homer is not so properly a translation, as the stories of Achilles and Ulysses rewritten. The earnestness and passion which he has put into every part of these poems would be incredible to a reader of more modern translations.”The striking portrait of Chapman is prefixed to Mr. Singer’s elegant edition of this poet’s version of Homer’s “Battle of the Frogs and the Mice”—and the Hymns. HisIliad, collated with his last corrections and alterations, well deserves to fill a stationary niche in our poetical library. Chapman has, above all our poets, most boldly, or most gracefully, struck out those “words that burn”—compound epithets.11An original leaf of the manuscript of one of Marlow’s plays, in the possession of Mr. J. P. Collier, is a singular literary curiosity. On a collation with the printed copy, the mutilations are not only excessive, but betray a defective judgment. An elaborate speech, designed by the poet to develope the character of the famous Guise, was cut down to four meagre lines.—Annals of the Stage, iii. 134.12Charles Lamb has alluded to this fact; and, in one of his moments of enthusiasm, exclaims—“This was the noble practice of these times.” Would not the usual practice of a man of genius, working his own drama, be “nobler?” We presume the unity of feeling can only emanate from a single mind. In the instance here alluded to we should often deceive ourselves if we supposed, from the combination of names which appear on the old titlepages, that those who are specified were alwayssimultaneously employedin the new direction of the same play. Poets were often called in to alter the old or to supply the new, which has occasioned incongruities which probably were not to be found in the original state.13Green, Nash, Lyly, Peele, and Marston were from the university—Marlow and Chapman were exquisite translators from the Greek.14The term, the Romantic School, is derived from thelangue RomansorRomane, under which comprehensive title all the modern languages may be included; formed, as they are, out of the wrecks of the Latin orRomanlanguage. However this may apply to the origin of thelanguages, the term is not expressive of thegeniusof the people. In the common sense of the term “Romantic,” the Æneid of Virgil is as much a Romance as that of Arthur and his knights. The term “Romantic School” is therefore not definite. By adopting the termGothic, in opposition to theClassical, we fix the origin, and indicate the species.15Bouterwek’s Hist. of Spanish Lit. i. 128.16Two of these collections are to be valued.“Cotgrave’sEnglish Treasury of Wit and Language,” 1655. He neglected to furnish the names of the dramatic writers from whom he drew the passages. Oldys, with singular diligence, succeeded in recovering these numerous sources, which I transcribed from his manuscript notes. Oldys’ copy should now repose in the library of Mr. Douce, given to the Bodleian.A collection incomparably preferable to all preceding ones is “The British Muse, or a Collection of Thoughts—Moral, Natural, or Sublime—of our English poets who flourished in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” byThomas Hayward, gent. 1732, in three volumes. It took a new title, not a new edition, as “The Quintessence of English Poetry.” Such a title could not recommend itself. The prefatory matter was designed for a critical history of all these Anthologies, and was the work of Oldys; but it was miserably mangled by Dr. Campbell, then the Aristarchus of the booksellers, to save print and paper! Our literary antiquary has vented, in a manuscript note, his agony and his indignation. He had also greatly assisted the collector; the circuit is wide and copious, and there is not a name of note which does not appear in these volumes. The ethical and poetic powers of our old dramatic poets, as here displayed, I doubt could be paralleled by our literary neighbours. We were a thoughtful people at the time that our humour was luxuriant—as lighter gaiety was from the first the national inheritance of France.Of this collection, says Oldys, “Wherever you open it, you are in the heart of your subject. Every leaf includes many lessons, and is a system of knowledge in a few lines. The merely speculative may here find experience; the flattered, truth; the diffident, resolution, &c.” For my part, I think of these volumes as highly as Oldys himself.But what has occasioned the little success of these collections of single passages and detached beauties, like collections of proverbs, is the confusion of their variety. We are pleased at every glance; till the eye, in weariness, closes over the volume which we neglect to re-open.Charles Lamb’s“Specimens of English Dramatic Poets” is of deeper interest. He was a nobler workman, and he carries us on through whole scenes by a true unerring emotion. His was a poetical mind labouring in poetry.
1This Patent, corrected from a former copy in Rymer, has been recovered by Mr. Collier.—Annals of the Stage, i. 211.
2This singular document, incorrectly given by Strype, Mr. Collier has completed. “It throws much new light on the state of the drama at this period;” and still more on the strange arguments which the Puritans of the day alleged against players and plays.—Mr. Collier has preserved an old satirical epigram which had been perilous to print at that day; it was left for posterity on the fly-leaf of a book. It is addressed to—
“‘The Fooles of the Cittee,’—They establish as a rule,Not one shall play the fool,But they—a worthy school!”
“‘The Fooles of the Cittee,’—
They establish as a rule,
Not one shall play the fool,
But they—a worthy school!”
3At the inferior playhouses the admission was as low as a penny for “the groundlings” who stood in the roofless pit, which still retained the name of “the yard”—evidently from the old custom of playing in the yards of inns. In the higher theatres “a room,” or box, varied from sixpence to two shillings and sixpence. They played in daylight, and rose from their dinner to the playhouse. It was one of the City regulations, that “no playing be in the dark, so that the auditory may return home before sunset.” Society was then in its nursery-times; and the solemnity of “the orders in common council” admirably contrasts with their simplicity; but they acted under the terror that, when they entered a playhouse, they were joining in “the devil’s service!”
4Two such poor scholars are introduced in “The Return from Parnassus” alternately “banning and cursing Granta’s muddy bank;” and Cambridge, where “our oil was spent.”
5The popular taste at all times has been prone to view in representation the most harrowing crimes—probably influenced by the vulgar notion that, because the circumstances are literally true, they are therefore the more interesting. One of these writers wasRobert Yarrington, who seems to have been so strongly attracted to this taste for scenical murder, that he wrote “Two Lamentable Tragedies,” which he contrived to throw into one play. By a strange alternation, the scene veers backwards and forwards from England to Italy, both progressing together;—the English murder is of a merchant in Thames-street, and the Italian of a child in a wood by ruffians hired by the uncle; the ballad deepens the pathetic by two babes—but which was the original of a domestic incident which first conveyed to our childhood the idea of an unnatural parent? It appears that we had a number of what they called “Lamentable Tragedies,” whose very titles preserve the names of the hapless victims. Taylor, the Water-poet, alludes to these “as murders fresh in memory;” and has himself described “the unnatural father who murdered his wife and children” as parallel to one of ancient date. Acts of lunacy were not then distinguishable from ordinary murders.—Collier, iii. 49.
6Not many years ago Isaac Reed printedThe WitchofMiddleton. Recently another manuscript play appeared,The Second Maiden’s Tragedy. To the personal distresses of the actors in the days of the Commonwealth we owe several dramas, which they published, drawn out of the wrecks of some theatrical treasury; such wasThe Wild-Goose ChaseofFletcher, which they assured us was the poet’s favourite. It is said that more than sixty of these plays, in manuscript, were collected by Warburton, the herald, and from the utter neglect of the collector had all gone to singe his fowls. WhenTheobaldsolemnly declared that his play,The Double Falsehood, was written by Shakespeare, it was probably one of these old manuscript plays. This drama was not unsuccessful; nor had Theobald shot far wide of the mark, since Farmer ascribed it to Shirley, and Malone to Massinger.
7See the last and enlarged edition of Charles Lamb’s “Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets.” In the second volume, in “Extracts from the Garrick Plays,” under the odd names of”Doctor Dodypol, a comedy, 1600,” we have scenes exquisitely fanciful—andJack Drum’s Entertainment, 1601, where “the free humour of a noble housekeeper” may be placed by the side of the most finished passages even in Shakespeare. YetDoctor Dodypolhas wholly escaped the notice even of catalogue-scribes—andJack Drumis not noticed by the collectors of these old plays. I only know these two dramas by the excerpts of Lamb; but if the originals are tolerably equal with “The Specimens,” I should place these unknown dramas among the most interesting ones.
8By the discovery of the Diary of Henslow, the illiterate manager of the theatre, connected with Edward Alleyn. Henslow was the pawnbroker of the company, and the chancellor of its exchequer. He could not spell the titles of the plays; yet, in about five years, 160 were his property. He had not less than thirty different authors in his pay.—Collier, iii. 105. [His Diary has been published by the Shakespeare Society under the editorship of Mr. Payne Collier.—Ed.]
9Marlow—Nash—Greene—Peele.
10When Pope translated Homer, Chapman’s version lay open before him. The same circumstance, as I have witnessed, occurred with the last translator—Mr. Sotheby. Charles Lamb justly appreciated Chapman, when he observed, that “He would have made a great epic poet, if indeed he has not abundantly shown himself to be one; for his Homer is not so properly a translation, as the stories of Achilles and Ulysses rewritten. The earnestness and passion which he has put into every part of these poems would be incredible to a reader of more modern translations.”
The striking portrait of Chapman is prefixed to Mr. Singer’s elegant edition of this poet’s version of Homer’s “Battle of the Frogs and the Mice”—and the Hymns. HisIliad, collated with his last corrections and alterations, well deserves to fill a stationary niche in our poetical library. Chapman has, above all our poets, most boldly, or most gracefully, struck out those “words that burn”—compound epithets.
11An original leaf of the manuscript of one of Marlow’s plays, in the possession of Mr. J. P. Collier, is a singular literary curiosity. On a collation with the printed copy, the mutilations are not only excessive, but betray a defective judgment. An elaborate speech, designed by the poet to develope the character of the famous Guise, was cut down to four meagre lines.—Annals of the Stage, iii. 134.
12Charles Lamb has alluded to this fact; and, in one of his moments of enthusiasm, exclaims—“This was the noble practice of these times.” Would not the usual practice of a man of genius, working his own drama, be “nobler?” We presume the unity of feeling can only emanate from a single mind. In the instance here alluded to we should often deceive ourselves if we supposed, from the combination of names which appear on the old titlepages, that those who are specified were alwayssimultaneously employedin the new direction of the same play. Poets were often called in to alter the old or to supply the new, which has occasioned incongruities which probably were not to be found in the original state.
13Green, Nash, Lyly, Peele, and Marston were from the university—Marlow and Chapman were exquisite translators from the Greek.
14The term, the Romantic School, is derived from thelangue RomansorRomane, under which comprehensive title all the modern languages may be included; formed, as they are, out of the wrecks of the Latin orRomanlanguage. However this may apply to the origin of thelanguages, the term is not expressive of thegeniusof the people. In the common sense of the term “Romantic,” the Æneid of Virgil is as much a Romance as that of Arthur and his knights. The term “Romantic School” is therefore not definite. By adopting the termGothic, in opposition to theClassical, we fix the origin, and indicate the species.
15Bouterwek’s Hist. of Spanish Lit. i. 128.
16Two of these collections are to be valued.
“Cotgrave’sEnglish Treasury of Wit and Language,” 1655. He neglected to furnish the names of the dramatic writers from whom he drew the passages. Oldys, with singular diligence, succeeded in recovering these numerous sources, which I transcribed from his manuscript notes. Oldys’ copy should now repose in the library of Mr. Douce, given to the Bodleian.
A collection incomparably preferable to all preceding ones is “The British Muse, or a Collection of Thoughts—Moral, Natural, or Sublime—of our English poets who flourished in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” byThomas Hayward, gent. 1732, in three volumes. It took a new title, not a new edition, as “The Quintessence of English Poetry.” Such a title could not recommend itself. The prefatory matter was designed for a critical history of all these Anthologies, and was the work of Oldys; but it was miserably mangled by Dr. Campbell, then the Aristarchus of the booksellers, to save print and paper! Our literary antiquary has vented, in a manuscript note, his agony and his indignation. He had also greatly assisted the collector; the circuit is wide and copious, and there is not a name of note which does not appear in these volumes. The ethical and poetic powers of our old dramatic poets, as here displayed, I doubt could be paralleled by our literary neighbours. We were a thoughtful people at the time that our humour was luxuriant—as lighter gaiety was from the first the national inheritance of France.
Of this collection, says Oldys, “Wherever you open it, you are in the heart of your subject. Every leaf includes many lessons, and is a system of knowledge in a few lines. The merely speculative may here find experience; the flattered, truth; the diffident, resolution, &c.” For my part, I think of these volumes as highly as Oldys himself.
But what has occasioned the little success of these collections of single passages and detached beauties, like collections of proverbs, is the confusion of their variety. We are pleased at every glance; till the eye, in weariness, closes over the volume which we neglect to re-open.
Charles Lamb’s“Specimens of English Dramatic Poets” is of deeper interest. He was a nobler workman, and he carries us on through whole scenes by a true unerring emotion. His was a poetical mind labouring in poetry.
SHAKESPEARE.
Thevicissitudes of the celebrity of Shakespeare may form a chapter in the philosophy of literature and the history of national opinions. Shakespeare was destined to have his dramatic faculty contested by many successful rivals, to fall into neglect, to be rarely acted and less read, to appear barbarous and unintelligible, to be even discarded from the glorious file of dramatists by the anathemas of hostile criticism; and finally, in the resurrection of genius (a rare occurrence!) to emerge into universal celebrity. This literary history of Shakespeare is an incident in the history of the human mind singular as the genius which it relates to. The philosopher now contemplates the phenomenon of a poet who in his peculiar excellence is more poetical than the poets of every other people. We have to track the course of this prodigy, and if possible to comprehend the evolutions of this solitary luminary. It is knowledge which finally must direct our feelings in the operations of the mind as well as in the phenomena of nature. We are conscious that even the anomalous is regulated by its own proper motion, and that there is nothing in human nature so arbitrary as to stand by itself so completely insulated as to be an effect without a cause.
Shakespeareis a poet who is always now separated from other poets, and the only one, exceptPope, whose thoughts are familiar to us as household words. His eulogy has exhausted the language of every class of enthusiasts, the learned and the unlearned, the profound and the fantastical. The writings of this greatest of dramatists are, as once were those of Homer, a Bible whence we receive those other revelations of man, and of all that concerns man. There was no excess of wonder and admiration whenHurddeclared that “This astonishing man is the most originalTHINKERandSPEAKERsince the days ofHomer.”
The halo which surrounds the poetic beatitude has almost silenced criticism in its devotion; but a literaryhistorian may not at all times be present in the choir of votaries; his labours lie outwards among the progressive opinions of a people, nor is he free to pass over what may seem paradoxical if it lies in his way.
The universal celebrity of Shakespeare is comparatively of recent origin: received, rejected, and revived, we must ascertain the alternate periods, and we must look for the causes of the neglect as well as the popularity of the poet. We may congratulate ourselves on the numerous escapes of our national bard from the oblivion of his dramatic brothers. The history and the works of Shakespeare, and perhaps the singularity of the poet’s character in respect to his own writings, are some of the most startling paradoxes in literary history.
Malone describes Shakespeare as “the great poet whom nature framed to disregard the wretched models that were set before him, and to create a drama from his own native and original stores.” This cautious but creeping commentator, notwithstanding that he had often laboured to prove the contrary, gaily shot this arrow drawn from the quiver of Dryden, who has delivered very contradictory notions of Shakespeare. Veritably—for we are now writing historically—Shakespeare never “created our drama, disregarding the wretched models before him;” far from this! the great poet had those models always before him, and worked upon them; no poet has so freely availed himself of the inventions of his predecessors, and in reality many of the dramas of Shakespeare had been written before he wrote.
It cannot be denied that our great poet never exercised his invention in the fables of his dramas; thus he spared himself half the toil of his work. He viewed with the prophetic eye of genius the old play or the old story, and at once discovered all its capabilities; he saw at once all that it had and all that it had not; its characterless personages he was confident that he could quicken with breath and action, and that his own vein, allowed to flow along the impure stream, would have the force to clear the current, and to expand its own lucid beauty.
Had not the felicitous genius of our bard revelled in this facility of adopting and adapting the ready-made inventionsof many a luckless playwright, we might have lost our Shakespeare; for he never wrote for us, but for his little theatre. He had no leisure to afford whole days in constructing plots for plays, nor much troubled himself with those which he followed closely even to a fault; nor did the quickness of his genius neglect a solitary thought, nor lose a fortunate expression. To what extent were these borrowings from manuscript plays we cannot even surmise; we have one specimen of Shakespeare’s free use of whatever the poet’s judgment caught, in those copious passages which he transplanted from North’s “Plutarch” and Holinshed’s “Chronicles,” lending their words his own music.
One of his commentators, George Steevens, published six old plays on which Shakespeare had grounded six of his own; but this rash act was in the early days of the commentatorship; Steevens must soon have discovered the inconvenience of printing unreadable dramas, to exhibit the concealed industry of the mighty bard. The spells of Shakespeare did not hang on the artificial edifice of his fable; he looked abroad for mankind, and within his own breast for all the impulses of the beings of his imagination. All he required was a scene; then the whole “sphere of humanity,” as Jonson expressed it, lie wide before him. There was a Jew before theMerchant of Venice; a shrew had been tamed before Katherine by Petruchio; a King Lear and his three daughters, before the only one the world knows; and a tragical Hamlet had philosophised like Seneca, as the satirical Nash told, before our Shakespeare’s: but this list is needless, for it would include every drama he has left us. Even the beings of his creation lie before him in their embryon state. His creative faculty never required more than a suggestion. The prototype of the wonderful Caliban has not hitherto been discovered, but the fairies of the popular mythology become the creatures of his own imagination. Middleton first opened the incantations of “the witches.” The Hecate of Middleton is a mischief-brooding hag, gross and tangible, and her “spirits, black, white, and grey,” with her “devil-toad, devil-ram, devil-cat, and devil-dam,” disturb their spells by the familiar drollery of their names,and their vulgar instincts. Out of this ordinary domestic witchcraft the mightier poet raised “the weird sisters,”
That look not like the inhabitants o’ the earth,And yet are on’t,
That look not like the inhabitants o’ the earth,
And yet are on’t,
nameless, bodiless, vanishing shadows!
And what seemed corporalMelted as breath into the wind.
And what seemed corporal
Melted as breath into the wind.
The dramatic personages which seem to me peculiar to Shakespeare, and in which he evidently revelled, serving his purposes on very opposite occasions, are his clowns and domestic fools. Yet his most famous comic personage, the fat knight, was the rich graft on the miserable scion of Sir John Oldcastle, in an old play; the slight hint of “a mere pampered glutton” was idealised into that inimitable variety of human nature combined in one man—at once so despicable and so delightful!
The life of our poet remains almost a blank, and his very name a subject of contention.1Of that singulargenius who is now deemed the national bard, we can only positively ascertain that the place of his birth was that of his death; a circumstance which, for a poet, is some evidence of his domestic prosperity; but the glorious interval of existence, how and all he performed on the stage of human life, no one observed as differing from his fellows of the company, and he of all men the least; and of his productions, wherein we are to find every excellence to which any poet has reached, our scepticism is often at work to detect what is Shakespearian among that which cannot be.
Of the idle traditions of the youth of Shakespeare, Malone, after “foraging for anecdotes” during half a century, has painfully satisfied us that all which so many continued to repeat was apocryphal. Having with his own eyes ascertained that Sir Thomas Lucy had no park, he closed with his famous corollary, that “therefore he could have no deer to be stolen.” But other parks and other deer were liable to the mischance of furnishing venison for a young deer-fancier to treat his friends; and Sir Thomas Lucy, probably, was Justice Shallow on this occasion to the poetic stripling. The other circumstances of the poet’s early life, too well known to repeat, may stand on the same ground. Personal facts may come down to us confused, inaccurate, and mistaken, but they do not therefore necessarily rest on no foundation. The invention of such irrelevant circumstances seems to be without a motive; and though the propagators of gossip are strange blunderers, they rarely aspire to be originalinventors. We are not concerned with such tales, for there is nothing in them which is peculiar to the idiosyncrasy of the great poet.
The first noticeable incident in the life of Shakespeare was his marriage in 1582, in his eighteenth year; the nuptials of the poet seem an affair of domestic convenience, rather than a poetical incident in “the romance of life.”
In 1586, being only twenty-two years of age, Shakespeare quitted home for the metropolis.
At this critical moment of his life, which Malone sought for in despair, we should have remained in darkness, had not the unfortunate and intrepid industry of the most devoted enthusiast of the Shakespearian school lifted his steady torch.2Shakespeare arrived at the theatre not to hold the horses of gentlemen, as was so long reported, without, for he had a more friendly interest within, doors. There he joined a neighbour in his shire, Richard Burbage, who subsequently became the renowned actor of the future Shakespeare’s creations; and likewise Thomas Green, his townsman, and no inferior actor and poet. It is hardly a conjecture to presume that their friendly invitations had tempted our youthful adventurer to join their company. In three years Shakespeare obtained shares in the theatre, which multiplied every year, till he became the joint-proprietor with Burbage. The friendship of the actor and the dramatist was a golden bond, when each had conferred on the other their mutual popularity. The plays of Shakespeare were higher favourites with the public during the lifetime of this Garrick of the poet’s own days; and the renowned actor was so charmed by his own success, that he perpetuated among his daughters the delightful name of Juliet, which reminded him, with pride, of his own exquisite Romeo.
Shakespeare proved a closer and a more refined observer of the art of acting than nature had enabled him to show himself as an actor, by practising his own professional precepts. Two actors, who long survived the poet, recorded that he had critically instructed the one to enact Hamlet, and the other Henry the Eighth.3
How in an indifferent actor like Shakespeare was betrayed those latent dramatic faculties by which he was one day to be the delight of that stage which he could not tread, remains a secret which the poet has not told. But whether it was by accident or in some happy hour, we know not, that Shakespeare, in conning the manuscript of some wretched drama, felt the glorious impulse which prompted the pen to strike out whole passages, and to interpolate whole scenes; that moment was the obscure birth of his future genius. How he was employed at this unknown era of his life, the peevish jealousy of a brother of the craft has curiously informed us.
When Shakespeare was a name yet scarcely known, save to that mimetic world, tenanted by playwrights, it appears that he was there sustaining an active and secret avocation. The great bard had been serving a silent apprenticeship to the dramatic muse, by trying his hand on the old stock-pieces which lay in the theatrical treasury, and further venturing his repolishing touches on the new. Marlowe, Lodge, and Peele had submitted to his soft pencillings or his sharp pruning-hook. The actors were often themselves a sort of poets, and would compete with those who were only poets; and in pricing the hasty wares, would often have them fashioned to their liking. Alluding to the treatment the dramatists were enduring from their masters, Robert Greene indignantly addressed his peers. This curious passage, first discovered by Tyrwhit, has been often quoted, and indispensably must be once more; for it tells us how Shakespeare, in 1592, had been fully employed within six years of his arrival at the metropolis. Greene desires his friends would no longer submit to the actors. “Do not trust those burrs, who have sought to cleave to us all; those puppets that speak from our mouths, those antics garnished in our colours. Is it not strange that I to whom they all have been beholding, is it not like that you to whom they all too have been beholding, shall, were ye in that case I am now, be both of them at once forsaken?4Yes, trust them not! There isan upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that withhis tyger’s heartwrapt in a player’s hide, supposes he is as well able tobombast5out a blank verseas the best of you, and beingan absolute Johannes Factotum, is, in his own conceit, the onlyShake-scenein a country.”
“The absolute Johannes Factotum,” “the only shake-scene,” and “the crow beautified with their feathers,” are one person; but “the tyger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide,” particularly points out that person. It is, in fact, a parody of a line composed by this batch of poets in one of their dramas,The Contention of the Two Houses of York and Lancaster; and which, with many others, Shakespeare had wholly appropriated. In the third part ofKing Henry the Sixth, in Act I., Scene IV., it stands as Peele or Greene had originally composed it—
O, tyger’s heart wrapt in a woman’s hide!
This attack on our untiger-like Shakespeare turns poor Greene into an enraged wasp, peevish and mortified at the Shakespearian hand which had often larded his leanness, or scarified his tumidities. Greene charges Shakespeare with altering the plays of himself, Marlowe, Lodge, and Peele, and then claiming all the merit of the work!6
Our great bard was not insensible to the fancy of his querulous libeller, since it was on Greene’s “Dorastus and Fawnia” Shakespeare founded hisWinter’s Tale, as he took hisAs You Like Itfrom Lodge’s “Rosalynd,” whose very name he preserved. Thus borrowing from the writings of his unfortunate and reckless brothers of Parnassus, he has made immortal works which have long expired.
The active employment of Shakespeare among the old plays was so well known at the time, that when his name became familiar to the public, the printers were often eager to obtain the original neglected plays in their meagre condition, to avail themselves of the popularity of the Shakespearian rifacimentos. Fraud and deception were evidently practised on the uncritical readers. Oneof these cunning publishers issued the old play ofThe Contention of the Two Houses, &c., asnewly corrected and enlargedby William Shakespeare; which was true as it was acted on the stage, but false in the copy of the elder dramatist which was republished. In this manner several plays not only bear the consecrating name of Shakespeare, but seven which are now discarded from his works appeared in the edition of Rowe; in some of these the hand of Shakespeare appears to have been discerned; and it has been suggested by Mr. Collier, an experienced critic in the history of the drama, that it is possible that all the plays of Shakespeare have not yet been given to the world.
In the second and third parts ofKing Henry the Sixth, for the first was placed in his volume merely to complete the historical series, Shakespeare made ample use of several dramas; and Malone, whose microscopic criticism obtained for him the sarcastic cognomen ofMinutius Felix, by an actual scrutiny, which we may well believe cost him the most anxious pains, computed the lines of these dramas, and has passed his word, that of six thousand and forty-three lines, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-one were written by some author who preceded Shakespeare; two thousand three hundred and seventy-three were formed by him on the foundation laid by his predecessors, and one thousand eight hundred and forty-nine lines were entirely our poet’s own composition. Malone has even contrived to distinguish them in the text; those which Shakespeareadoptedare printed in the usual manner; the speeches which healteredor expanded, are marked by inverted commas; and to all the lines entirelycomposedby himself, asterisks are prefixed. A critical reader may derive a curious gratification by attending to this novel text of our national poet; the only dramatist to whom this singularity has ever occurred, and on whose writings this anomalous operation could have been performed.
Shakespeare was more conversant with these preceding dramatists, most of whose writings have perished, than we can ever discover; but it is fortunate for us that his creative faculties brooded over such a world of chaotic genius. He scrupled not to appropriate those happier effusions which were not only worthy of his own genius, but arenot distinguishable from it. Sometimes he only retouched, sometimes he nobly amplified, expanding a slight hint into some glorious passage, and elevating a creeping dialogue into an impassioned scene. His judgment was always the joint-workman of his fancy.
Who by the interior evidence could have conjectured that the following Shakespearian effusion, musical with his own music, was, in truth, a mere transcription from an old play ofRichard Duke of York, whose author remains unknown? I mark by italics the rejections of Shakespeare. In the slight emendations, we may observe that our poet consulted his ear; but in the first verse he has chosen a more expressive term.
————Doves will peck inrescue(safeguard) of their brood.Unreasonable creatures feed their young;And though man’s face be fearful to their eyes,Yet, in protection of their tender ones,Who hath not seen them even with thosesamewingsWhichthey have sometimesusedinfearful flight,(Which sometime they have used with fearful flight,)Make war with him that climb’d unto their nest,Offering their own lives in their young’s defence?
————Doves will peck inrescue(safeguard) of their brood.
Unreasonable creatures feed their young;
And though man’s face be fearful to their eyes,
Yet, in protection of their tender ones,
Who hath not seen them even with thosesamewings
Whichthey have sometimesusedinfearful flight,
(Which sometime they have used with fearful flight,)
Make war with him that climb’d unto their nest,
Offering their own lives in their young’s defence?
The speech of Queen Margaret, in the third part ofHenry the Sixth, Act V. Scene IV., in the old play, consisted of a single metaphor included in twelve lines. The single metaphor was not rejected, but it is amplified and nobly sustained through forty lines in the queen’s animated address to the lords:—
The mast but now blown overboard,The cable broke, the holding anchor lost, &c.
The mast but now blown overboard,
The cable broke, the holding anchor lost, &c.
The two celebrated scenes in which the dead body of the murdered Duke of Gloster is placed before us, with such precision of horror, minutely appalling, and of the raving despair of Cardinal Beaufort so awfully depicted by his death, “making no sign,” are splendours whose igniting sparks flew out of the ashes of old plays, one ofKing John, and the other ofThe Contentions of the Two Houses, and of the chronicles. But still these sublime descriptions and these fearful images are the inspirations of Shakespeare; their truth of nature, and the completeness of the purpose of the poet, the bare originals could not impart.
These ascertained evidences may suffice—it would be tedious to proceed with their abundance—of the studiousness and propriety of Shakespeare in his adoptions and adaptations of our earlier drama. Dr. Farmer was the first to discover that these plays were not writtenoriginallyby Shakespeare; but that able researcher was not then aware of what only the progress of discovery could demonstrate, that hardly a single drama of our national bard can be deemed to have been of his own original invention.
While thus occupied in altering and writing old plays for his own theatre, in 1593 first appeared to the world the name of William Shakespeare in the dedication to the Earl of Southampton of his “Venus and Adonis.” The poet has called this poem, of a few pages, “the first heir of my invention.” For him who had already written much, the expression is singular, and it looks like a tacit acknowledgment that the poet considered that the five or six plays which he had already set forth had really no claim to “hisinvention.” And the dedication betrays the tremulousness of a virgin effort. “Should this first heir prove deformed,” declared our poet in his own Shakespearian diction, “I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never afterear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest.” The poet, doubtless, was induced to proceed; for the following year, 1594, produced his “Lucrece.” He described his first poem as “unpolished lines;” and he still calls his second his “untutored lines.” As the former, so likewise is the present dedicated to the same earl. The fervour of the style indicates the influence of the patron, and the singleness of the devotion of the poet, who tells his noble patron “What I have done is yours, and what I have to do is yours.” The humble actor’s intercourse with his noble friend is a remarkable incident, for the poet was not yet famous when he prefixed his name to these poems. This earl, then in his youth, we learn was attached to theatrical amusements; and it has been ingeniously conjectured that the princely donation of a thousand pounds, which the peer presented to the poet, a tradition which Davenant had handed down, may have occurred, if it ever happened, in the interval between the publication of these two poems.
The Ovidian deliciousness of “Venus and Adonis,” and the more solemn narrative of “Tarquin and Lucrece,” early obtained celebrity among the youthful and impassioned generation. Shakespeare was long renowned as the amatory poet of the nation by many who had not learned to distinguish the bard among his dramatic brethren. Numerous editions of these poems confirm their popularity, and the public voice resounded from the lyres of many poets.
No poet more successfully opened his career than Shakespeare by these two popular poems; but it is remarkable that he made no farther essay with a view to permanent fame, which, as it would seem to us, he never imagined he was to derive from his dramas.
Meres, a critic of the day, has informed us that, in 1598, some sonnets by Shakespeare were in circulation among his friends. These were effusions of the hour; and, possibly, some may have been descriptive of his own condition. In 1599, a poetical collection called “The Passionate Pilgrim,” appeared under the name of Shakespeare; and ten years afterwards another, entitled “Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” was given to the world; but as poetical miscellanies were formed in those days by publishers who were not nice in the means they used to procure manuscripts, it is quite uncertain what are genuine and what may be the composition of other writers in these collections.
In “The Passionate Pilgrim,” some critics find difficulty in tracing the hand of the poet; and we accidentally discover by the complaint of Heywood, a congenial dramatist, that there were two of his poems in one edition of this collection; and we know that there were also other poems by Marlowe, and Barnefield, and others. Heywood tells us that Shakespeare was greatly offended at this licentious use of his name;7but he must have been imperturbably careless on such matters, otherwise he would not have suffered three editions of this spurious miscellany.
The fate of “The Sonnets” is remarkable. Steevens boldly ejected them from the poet’s works, declaring thatthe strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed could not compel their perusal. Shall we ascribe to this caustic wit a singular deficiency in his judicial decisions, or look to some other cause for the ejection of these sonnets which have become of late the subject of so much curious inquiry? An ingenious attempt has been recently made to form what is called an autobiography of the poet by stringing together the sonnets in six distinct poems; this would be sufficient evidence that they had never passed under the eye of the author, and that he could have had no concern in a publication which has thus mutilated his living members. This bookseller’s collection remains for more than one cause an ambiguous volume.
Shakespeare now stands alone the national bard; but hoary Time, which has decreed who are his inferiors, once saw them his equals; and when he mingled with his fellows, possibly the world looked up to a Coryphæus whose name was not Shakespeare. Two inquiries interest us: Was the pre-eminence of our national bard acknowledged by his contemporaries?—and, What cause occasioned the utter neglect of his own reputation?
Among his contemporaries, Shakespeare could not possess the pre-eminence of the present age, for who were then to be his judges? His rivals or his audience? Our gentle Shakespeare, as Jonson called him, perhaps at no time appreciated his own genius at its peculiar excellence, and therefore was not likely to discover his solitary pre-eminence among a formidable crowd of rivals, nor were they likely to acknowledge in their friend “Will” the prevailing charm which has now subdued the world. They have even occasionally darted a shaft of ridicule or a sharp parody at our immortal tragedian; the madness of Hamlet and Ophelia could serve these dramatic writers as a subject for raillery;8and the airy Fletcher, who would have emulated Shakespeare, was guilty of sneering at his inimitable master. The learnedJonsonwas apt to be critical;Chapmancast his Greek glances haughtily on the vernacular bard;Marstonwas caustic; andDrayton, his intimate, who had composed two or three tragedies,could hardly perceive any supremacy inShakespeare, and for us, seems parsimoniously to commend his “comic vein” as strong
As any one that traffick’d with the stage;
whileBen Jonsonis hailed as
Lord of the theatre, who could bearThe buskin, as the sock, away.
Lord of the theatre, who could bear
The buskin, as the sock, away.
It was not from his dramatic brothers thatShakespearecould have discovered his more than supremacy; and while the brotherhood had family quarrels among themselves, Shakespeare appears never to have moved offensively or defensively. Gifford tells us that he has never mentioned one of his contemporaries with commendation, and only once appears, with Jonson and others, to have contributed some commendatory lines to the volume of an obscure and whimsical poet.9As Shakespeare did not deal in this literary traffic of that day, he has received fewer tributes than some of the meanest of our poets. But if Shakespeare has not noticed any of his associates, neither has the poet ever alluded to himself in his works. He never exults in his triumphs, nor is querulous on those who oppugned them.
With his audience he was unquestionably popular; we hear of none of his plays having been condemned, though such mischances are recorded of his rivals, and, above all, of his great compeer Jonson. We know that he was fortunate in the personation of his characters; and those natural touches, listened to on the spot when nature was left free to act her part, fell on contagious and instantaneous sympathies. But if the poet charmed by his “many-coloured life,” his very faults were not less delightful. His audience revelled in bustle and bombast, and it is possibly in compliance with their stirring unchastised taste that we have received so much of his rude originals.
Our poet’s recklessness of the fate of his own dramas, and his utter disregard of posterity, is at least one unquestionable fact in the blank page of his life. He was utterly reckless of his personal reputation among his contemporary readers, or otherwise he would not have suffered in his lifetime mutilated dramas, or even their first draughts, surreptitiously procured, to pass under his own name;—huddled pieces without even the divisions of the acts, or crude and ridiculous dramas which he was incapable of having written. These were suicidal acts of his own fame, but they never broke his silence; and even in his retreat from the metropolis, in the leisure of his native bowers of Avon, Shakespeare felt not
That last infirmity of noble minds,The spur of fame,
That last infirmity of noble minds,
The spur of fame,
pricking his patient acquiescence, and disturbing his careless freedom; he issued no protest, he uttered no complaint, against the effrontery of the printers of those days, who published, as “newly corrected by William Shakespeare,” old plays which he never wrote; nor did he yield the yearnings of a nurse to those ricketty children of the press which passed as his progeny, bearing a name which he never could have deemed immortal. We may trace to its real cause this utter carelessness of his poetical existence.
The horizon of this poet’s hopes was bounded by his daily task and his prosperous theatre. Assuredly it was not an ordinary gratification to be conscious that his friend Burbage would call into a real existenceRomeo,Macbeth, andOthello, and that the shares of the playhouse would in due time be transferred for Warwickshire acres. But his mind was above his condition, and however the dramatist flourished at “the Globe,” Shakespeare himself felt the misery of a degraded station;—players and play-writing were held to be equally despicable in that day. This “secret sorrow” he may have himself confided to us; for in one of “the sonnets,” he pathetically laments the compulsion which forced him to the trade of pleasing the public; and this humiliation, or this “stain,” as the poet felt it, is illustrated by a novel image—“Chide Fortune,” exclaims the bard,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,That did not better for my life provideThan public means which public manners breeds;Thence comes it thatmy name receives a brand;And almost thence my nature is subduedTo what it works in,LIKE THE DYER’S HAND.
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds;
Thence comes it thatmy name receives a brand;
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in,LIKE THE DYER’S HAND.
Shakespeare, in the vigour of life, withdrew from the theatre and the metropolis, returning to his native abode.10“The properties and the wardrobe” were now exchanged for “land and tithes.” It is consolatory for us to have ascertained that our national bard, not yet, however, national, did not participate in the common misery of his noblest brothers. Four years glided away in the tranquil obscurity of his family, till his death! Yet still some old associations survived with the dramatic bard, some reveries of the winter theatre of “the Blackfriars,” and the summer Globe “open to the sky,” for we are told that two or three of his noblest dramas were composed during his retirement; and he retained his unbroken love for old companionship to the last, for, by a credible tradition, Shakespeare died of a fever contracted by convivial indulgence at a joyous meeting with his beloved cronies Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton.
We hear nothing more ofShakespearenor of any fragmentary manuscripts; no verses were scattered on his funereal bier as with Spenser, no sepulchral volume of elegies was gathered, as with Jonson, to consecrate his memory. There was yet noShakespeare! no national bard! The poet himself could not have favoured a friend with a copy of many of his own plays, and probably could not himself have repeated one of those admired soliloquies which we now get by rote.Shakespearewas wholly insensible to the days which were to come. All this to us seems incredible!
Seven years passed away silently, and the nation remained without their Shakespeare, although Jonson, in the very year that the poet had deceased, had set the first example of a collection of dramas made by their own author; the volume sanctioned by his critical learning he dignified as his “works:” a proud distinction by which he laid himself open to the epigrammatists. At length, in 1623, two of Shakespeare’s fellow-comedians, Heminges andCondell, published the first folio edition of “Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies.”
These player-editors profess that “they have done this office to the dead only to keep the memory of so worthy afriend and fellowalive as was our Shakespeare.” Yet their utter negligence shown in “their fellow’s” volume is no evidence of their pious friendship, nor perhaps of their care or their intelligence. The publication was not, I fear, so much an offering of affection as a pretext to secure the copyright. Their real design seems to have been to recover the monopoly ofALLthe plays, having lost the proprietorship of several which hadstolen abroad in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and to obtain this crafty purpose they practised a fraudulent deception.
Fifteen quarto playsthe public already possessed; no one appears to have known how they had issued from the study of the poet, or the treasury of the theatre. Our player-editors, however, now cautioned their readers that these fifteen plays were a fraud practised on them; that “they were stolen and surreptitious copies maimed and deformed.” But what these new editors themselves alleged, they knew was false; for they actually reprinted, unaltered, in their own collection these declared surreptitious copies. As the reprint became subject to their negligence, thesefirst editionswere appreciated by Capel and Malone as manuscripts, and by these quarto plays they corrected the text of the folio volume. The mystifying republication of these fifteen quarto plays is a piece of literary history of no common occurrence.Capelimagined that the player-editors merely reprinted these very copies which they had so loudly decried to save the labour of transcription. But looking closer into this affair, we seem to detect that a double deception was practised. The printers of these plays had secured the copyright by entering them at Stationers’ Hall, and when the folio collection was projected it was found necessary by Heminges and Condell to admit the proprietors into the copartnership of the volume. Hence their names appear in the titlepage. Malone imagined that this circumstance indicated that the volume of Shakespeare was considered so great a risk that it required the joint aid of these printers. But the parties only united to secure the monopoly of all the plays.
It therefore results that the player-editors pretended to warn the public that all the preceding editions were “maimed and deformed,” and the proprietors of these pretended surreptitious editions silently acquiesced in their own condemnation, for the future advantages they expected to derive from their share in the monopoly.
It is quite obvious that the first proprietors of the quarto plays could never have acquired such complete copies without either Shakespeare or his company having furnished them. Yet Shakespeare, if he had connived at these publications, could never have revised the press; another evidence of the utter recklessness of the poet of the fate of his dramas.
The player-editors supplied about twenty new dramas, and by another adroit deception in their titlepage they announced that all the dramas wereNOWpublished “acording to the original copies.”
Alas! where were these “original copies?” The precious autographs could not have endured through many a season the thumbings of “the book-holder” or the prompter. The playhouse copies, carelessly written out in parts for the actors, interpolated with whole scenes, spurious with ribaldry, and extemporaneous nonsense at the caprice of some favourite actor, corrupt with false readings, obscure with distorted alterations, and often omissions of a line or half a line to connect or to complete the sense, verse lurking in prose, and metre without feet,—such were the original sins of the copies despatched in haste to a rapid press, and the writings of Shakespeare come before the world in these hurried proofs from printers among whom a corrector of the press seems to have been unknown. It is in this prolific soil of weeds that many are still too curiously seeking for the genuine text of Shakespeare, perhaps too often irretrievable.11The recollectionsof these two players were so inaccurate that they at first totally omitted theTroilus and Cressida, which is inserted without pagination, and with little discriminationin the writings of Shakespeare, preserved the barbarousTitus Andronicus, evidently one of Marlowe’s gigantic pieces, and the old play of “the first part ofHenry the Sixth;” but it is by no means certain that not less than twenty other dramas had various degrees of claims to be included in the works of Shakespeare; such as the suspiciousPericles.12But the incompetence of these player-editors, even in transcribing from the prompter’s copies, was not their only fault. “Will” was but “their fellow;” time had not hallowed him into the national poet; and they themselves had formed no elevated conception of the art of Sophocles and Terence; for in their dedication to two peers they express their fear whether their noble patrons from “their greatness woulddescend to the reading ofSUCH TRIFLES;” the immortal writings! These unhappy editors seem to reflect back to us the humiliated feelings of Shakespeare and the age on the histrionic art. In that early epoch of our literature the sock and buskin had indeed been worn by a reckless race.
Charles the First was a lover of the English drama. The king delighted to explore into the manuscript plays which were laid before the master of the revels for his license. Milton has acquainted us that the writings of Shakespeare formed the favourite studies of the monarch.13In the “Iconoclastes,” alluding to those writers who have shown the characteristic religious hypocrisy of tyrants, Milton observes, “I shall not instance an abstruse author wherein the king might be less conversant, but one whom we well know was theCLOSET COMPANIONof these his solitudes, William Shakespeare.”
This has been considered as a designed reproach, and we are startled by such a style from the author of “Comus” and of “Samson Agonistes.” The odious distinction ofnot referring the king to an abstruse author seems a palpable sneer at the course of the king’s reading, who, however, was not deficient in learning; and in making the king’s “closet companion” Shakespeare, Milton too well knew that he was casting the deepest odium on the royal character, for to this poet’s then masters, the puritanical faction, there could be nothing less to be forgiven than a king, and a king in his imprisonments, mockingly here called “these his solitudes,” than to be a play-reader! The slur, the gibe, and the covert satire are, I fear, too obvious. I would gladly have absolved our great bard from this act of treason at least against the majesty of Shakespeare’s genius.14Milton had more deeply studied Shakespeare than any king whatever; but at this moment his literature was to be stretched on the torture of his politics.
In the history of the celebrity of Shakespeare, this day of royal favour sank amid the national tempest: and the theatre was abolished with the throne.
With the Restoration, the drama returned to the people. Half a century only had elapsed since our poet flourished; but in that half century our style, with our manners and modes of feeling, had suffered the vicissitudes of a revolution. If in the reign of Charles the First they perceived a change in the language from that of Elizabeth, that change was more apparent when, in retrograding, it was reduced to the indigent nakedness of the Puritanic period, and then, bursting into an opposite direction, like
Stars shot madly from their spheres
Stars shot madly from their spheres
was mottled by the modern Gallic in phrase and in criticism, corrupting our national taste, and thus removingus still further from the Shakespearian diction in idiom and in imagery. A great master of language, Dryden, confesses he found Shakespeare almost as difficult as old Chaucer.
On the restored theatre, “the renowned Jonson,” thus distinguished by Shadwell, retained his supremacy inThe Fox,The Silent Woman, andThe Alchemist, and the airy and loose Fletcher was popular, being considered by this new generation as having drawn the characters of gentlemen more to their humour than his grave predecessors. One of the first managers was Davenant: to his partiality, for he was eager to acknowledge Shakespeare his father, both in blood and in verse, we may ascribe the revival of that poet’s plays. Dryden has told that it was Davenant who first taught him to appreciate our national bard; they were caught by the fancy of the poet; but the great ethical preceptor of mankind had never entered into their contemplation; and thusMacbethshrank into an opera under the hand of Davenant; and theTempest, after having been seemingly burlesqued by duplicate characters of Miranda, Ferdinand, and Caliban, by Davenant and Dryden together, was turned into an opera by Shadwell, and exhibited as if it were a pantomime, depending now on popular favour for new dresses, new music, and new machinery.Romeo and Julietwas altered by the Honourable James Howard, Dryden’s brother-in-law, to introduce a happy conclusion: however, it is but justice to the town to record that they were so firmly divided in opinion on the catastrophe, that it was alternately played as tragedy and tragic-comic. We may fairly conclude by these profanations, that the true taste for our national bard had passed away.15
Evelyn is a literary man, whose judgment has its value; and assuredly, he records the taste of the court-circle. In 1661 he saw “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, played; but now,the old plays begin to disgust this refined age, since his Majesty has been so long abroad.” Pepys, his contemporary, was a play-haunter: and how he relishedThe Midsummer Night’s Dream, with all its beautiful fancy, appears by his firm opinion, that “it was the most insipid, ridiculous play he had ever seen.”Macbeth, though “a deep tragedy, had a strange perfection in adivertisement;” that is,Macbethwas Davenant’s opera, with music and dancing. But PepysreadOthello, and we have his deliberate notion; “but having lately read theAdventures of Five Hours, Othelloseemed a mean thing!” It is clear from these, and there are other as remarkable instances, that their ideas of the drama had wholly changed; that Nature and Fancy had retired from the stage to give precedence to what are called “Heroic Tragedy,” and comedies of Intrigue.
Shakespeare’s plays, in a great measure, were banished the stage; but we may presume that Shakespeare still preserved some readers, though not critical ones, for four years after the Restoration the third edition of Shakespeare in 1664, with seven additional dramas, one of which,The Yorkshire Tragedy, had been printed with his name in his lifetime, was given to the world.
Leaving the theatre, and its moody humours of the populace, let us turn to those who think in their closet. How did such critics arbitrate? We can have no judge more able than the learned author of “Hudibras,”—“The quickest apprehensions, and aptest geniuses to anything they undertake, do not always provethe greatest mastersin it, for there is more patience and phlegm required in those that attain to any degree of perfection, than is commonly found in the temper ofactive and ready wits that soon tire, and will not hold out.” Butler instances Virgil, who wanting much of that natural easiness of wit that Ovid had, “did, nevertheless, with hard labour and long study, arrive at a higher perfection, than the other, with all his dexterity of wit, but less industry, could attain to. The same we may observe ofJonsonandShakespeare, for he thatis able to think long and judge well, will besure to find out better things than another man can hit upon suddenly, though of more quick and ready parts; which is commonly butCHANCE, and the other wit and judgment.”16
After this long extract, it is quite evident that with a predilection for Shakespeare, alive at times to his true touches of nature,Butlercould not at that day take a comprehensive view of the faculties of the great bard. What we deem his intuitive faculty seemed but “chance” that could only “hit suddenly;” that prodigality of genius, the marvels which modern criticism has revealed to its initiated—was an advent—the day had not yet come! Butler perceived the electrical strokes of Shakespeare; but the mental shadowings—and the oneness—which rose together in the creation of aMacbeth, aHamlet, aLear, was a philosophical result, which probably no one had yet dreamed of.
If the genius ofShakespearewere neglected, it was also destined to be arraigned and condemned.
Critical learning was yet new in our literature; it had taken its birth in Italy, among a crowd of philosophers, rhetoricians and philologists, busied in developing the true principles of every species of literary composition. The academyDella Cruscawas a tribunal, and the “Poetic of Aristotle,” commented on by the renowned Castelvetro, was a code, which was chiefly directed to the dramatic art. Our airy neighbours, whose national theatre at its beginning had much resembled our own in its freedom and originality, at the erection of the famous French Academy, evidently in imitation of the Cruscan, with the great cardinal at its head, surrendered to the Greeks and to Aristotle. Everything now was to be as it had been, and every work, whatever might be its genius, was to be strictly modelled by certain arbitrary decisions; and all tragedies were to be written according to the humour of that ancient people, the Greeks, with their choruses,—and regulated by the severe unities of time and place and action! Bossu set down his prescriptions to compound an Epic, and Père Rapin, in his “Reflections on Aristotle’sTreatise of Poetry,” dictated “Universal Rules” for all sorts of poetry.Rymer, the collector of our Fœdera, in his earlier days, was an excellent scholar, and cultivated elegant literature. He translated this very work of Père Rapin, to which he prefixed an ingenious critical preface on comparative poetry. Enraptured by Grecian tragedy, and vivacious with French criticism, and moreover sanguine with an elevated conception of a certain forthcoming tragedy, which was to appear “a faultless piece” among our own monstrous dramas, Rymer grasped the new and formidable weapon of modern criticism. Armed at all points with a Grecian helmet and a Gallic lance, this literary Quixote sallied forth to attack all the giants, or the windmills, of the English theatre.
Now appeared “The Tragedies of the Last Age examined by the Practice of the Ancients. 1678.” This explosion entirely fell on three of Fletcher’s plays.17This critical bomb was learned and lively. The court, and consequently the popular, tastes were classical or Gallic;Rymerhaunted St. James’s, and soon became one of “their majesties’ servants.” He had formed the most elevated conception of the dramatic art, and that tragedy was a poem for kings; and he tells, that the poets who first brought tragedy to perfection were made viceroys.
“The poetry of the last age,” the age of Elizabeth, he considered was “rude as our architecture,” and he detected the cause in our utter “neglect of the Poetic of Aristotle, on which all the great men in Italy had commented, before on this side of the Alps we knew of the existence of such a book.”
This critic-poet,—for unluckily for Aristotle, Rymer resolved on being both,—had a notion that “though it be not necessary that all heroes should be kings, yet undoubtedly all crowned heads should be heroes;” this was a prerogative of the crown never to be invaded by any parliament of poets. This passive obedience in the critical art was perfume in “the royalty” of a dedication to Charles the Second, preparatory of the writer’s own legitimate tragedy ofEdgar, or the English Monarch, inrhymed verse; and the first inroad of his critical demolition was to expose “the barbarisms” of Milton’s blank! Rymer was as intrepid as he was enterprising. He composed his tragedy on the principles which he advocated, and the result was precisely what happened to the Abbé d’Aubignac, who wrote on the same system. Undoubtedly, he congratulated himself on the perfection of the clockwork machinery of his legitimate drama, where he had inviolably preserved the unities, for the action begins about one o’clock at noon, and the catastrophe closes at ten at night! He would have been right by “Shrewsbury clock.” To the audience, however, the “long hour” might have seemed much longer than the delightfulWinter’s Taleof Shakespeare, which includes the events of twenty years!
The formidable critique, not the tragedy, made a great sensation; many were on the side of the stout Aristotelian, though some might deem that little mercy had tempered his justice. Dryden prepared an answer, for we have its heads; but he seems to have been awed by the critic’s learning, for he never proceeded, and at a later day Rymer was a critic quite after Pope’s own heart on our ancient drama.18Some years after, the critique was honoured by a second edition, and in the following year thiscombat à l’outrancewas again waged, with no diminished intrepidity, in “A Short View of Tragedy, with some reflections onShakespeare, and otherPRACTITIONERSfor the Stage,” 1693. This, notwithstanding the offensive theme, is replete with curious literature, and some original researches in Provençal poetry.
“Rymer is the worst critic that ever lived.” Such is the warm decision of an eloquent modern critic.19But in taste, as well as in more serious affairs, every age is governed by opinions. A mechanical critic then seemed mathematically irrefutable. Judging an English dramaby the practice of the ancients, his triumph was easy. This scholastic doctrine, however, proved too subtle for the English people, and even the learned themselves in time looked up to nature. The philosophy of criticism, that is, of the human mind, was then imperfectly comprehended. A critic will be no longer safe who has nothing by heart but canons of criticism. The curious “Tracts” ofRymerare a memorable evidence how a learned critic deprived of native susceptibility, may distort the noblest productions, by coarse jocularity and that malice of criticism—ridicule! He callsOthello“the tragedy of the pocket-handkerchief.” That beautiful incident Shakespeare had found in Cynthio’s novel, and probably intuitively felt how casualties, small as this one, in human affairs may become associated with our highest passions. Rymer only exposed the poverty of his imagination when, with a morsel of Quintilian, he would demonstrate this incident to be “too small a matter to move us in tragedy, much like Fortunatus’ purse and the invisible cloak, long ago worn threadbare, and stowed up in the wardrobe of obsolete romance.” WithOthello’stragic tale before him, the critic worms himself into “the burlesque or comic parts,” and these he insidiously lauds, to insinuate thatOthellois but “a bloody farce.” The blending of the comic and the serious in the same character, as in that of Iago, as often we find it in the many-coloured scenes of human life, was an artful mixture too potent and poisonous in the cup of mechanical criticism. There is a strange malignant drollery, a bitter pleasantry in the villanous Iago, as in the scene where he alarms Brabantio for the fate of his daughter, which to “the heroic” dramatist, who could only move on stilts, was mistaken for “farce,” and not comprehended in his narrow views of human nature.
Rymer, however, was a ripe scholar, and the founder in our literature of what has been considered as the French or the classical school of criticism; and he has won the unlucky distinction of being designated as “Shakespeare’s critic!” In Dryden’s prologue to “Love Triumphant,” there is an allusion which Sir Walter Scott could not assign to any individual, though he acutely suspected it had a reference to some person: Sir Walter at that momentforgot Rymer and his “heroic tragedy.” The lines are now very significant.
ToShakespeare’s Critic, he bequeaths the curse,To find his faults, and yetHimself make worse.20
ToShakespeare’s Critic, he bequeaths the curse,
To find his faults, and yetHimself make worse.20
The uncertain criticisms of Dryden on Shakespeare were often dictated by the impulse of the moment, and stand in strange opposition to each other. At one happy time, indeed, he exclaimed, “I admire Jonson, but I love Shakespeare;” but he had not dived into the spirit of the poet, else we should not have had the strong censure of a “lethargy of thought for whole scenes together;” we should not have heard of “the bombast speeches of Macbeth;” nor that “the historical plays,The Winter’s Tale, andMeasure for Measure, are so meanly written, that the comedy neither caused your mirth, nor the serious part your concernment.”
Dryden, however great as a poet, was deficient in passion, whose natural touches he acknowledged he had found in Otway. In his earliest pieces, while enamoured of the false taste of his heroic tragedies, it is certain he had formed little relish for nature and Shakespeare, which, at a later period of life, he seems to have been more open to.
In 1681, the Poet Laureate, Nahum Tate, was so little acquainted with Shakespeare, thatLearbeing brought to his notice, he found it a treasure, a heap of jewels unstrung and unpolished; and having had “the good fortune to light upon an expedient to rectify it,” he brought it on the stage.
Shakespeare was now out of fashion, and a man of fashion aimed a last and mortal blow. The noble author of the “Characteristics” anathematised “the Gothic model of poetry.” He told the nation that “the British muses were in their infant state, without anything of shapelinessor person, lisping in their cradles, with stammering tongues which nothing but their youth and rawness can excuse.” Our dramaticShakespeareand our epicMiltonare among these venerable bards, “rude as they were according to their time and age.” The classical pedant had, however, the sagacity to perceive that they have provided us with “the richest ore.” Nature and Shakespeare lifted not their veil to the cold artificial soliloquist whose faint delicacy bred its own sickliness, and who, in the march and glitter of his external pomp, only betrayed the internal failure of his vigour.
The fourth and last folio edition of Shakespeare appeared in 1685. The poet again was locked up in a huge folio for the following twenty-five years, when, in 1709, he was freed by Rowe, who now gave him to the world at large in a more current form, which would meet the eye of the many.21
The appearance of Rowe’s edition at least placed the volumes in the hands of Steele and Addison, and possibly it formed their first studies of this poet. Whoever will take the pains to examine their popular papers may discover the fruits of their first thoughts. Steele at first seems to have derived his knowledge of Shakespeare from the plays as they were represented; he quotesMacbethby memory very faultily in the famous exclamation of Macduff, and seems quite unconscious of the character of Lady Macbeth, and indeed notices that all the female characters of Shakespeare make “so small a figure.”22As we proceed, we discover him more deeply read and more familiar with the poet’s language. It was not to be hoped from Addison’s colder fancy and classical severity, that the Elizabethan poet could transport this critic by his inexhaustible imagery and a diction which paints the passions as well as reveals them. The prosaic genius of Addison, which had produced a frigidCato, could hardly fathom the depth of the mightier soul. He pronounced Shakespeare “very faulty in hard metaphors and forced expressions,” and he joins Shakespeare and Nat Lee as instances of the false sublime.23Pope’s idea was similar, in his conversation, not in his preface; and later so was Thomas Warton’s.24