THE PREDECESSORS AND CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE.

The establishment of a variety of theatres is an incident in the history of the people, as well as of the national genius. The drama at first existed, it may be said, in privacy. Royalty and nobility maintained their own companies; the universities acted at their colleges, the “children” or the singing boys at the public schools, the lawyers at their halls; and some of the gentry at their seats had servants who were players. A stage for strollers would occasionally be hastily erected in the unsheltered yards of inns, and they would ramble into the country till an Act of Elizabeth in 1572 controlled these erratic bodies, classing them with “rogues and vagabonds.” Throughout the kingdom there was a growing predilection for theatrical entertainments—it was the national anticipation of a public theatre.

If Elizabeth, a popular sovereign, in 1572 checked the strollers assuming the character of players, two years afterwards, in 1574, she granted a patent to the servants of the Earl of Leicester1 “to exercise the faculty of playing stage-plays, as well for the recreation of our loving subjects, as for our solace and pleasure;” and she added, “within our city of London, and of any of our cities.” This was a boon royally given, in which her “loving subjects” might gather from the tone of this dramatic state-paper, that the queen had resolved in council that the public should not be denied sharing in her own amusements.

The pleasures of the people were not, however, yet those of their grave seignors. The puritanic spirit of the anti-dramatists, which sometimes divided the councils of the queen, had lodged among the honest wardmotes. A protracted contest between the privy-council and the lord mayor in common council, with protests and petitions, rose up; and long it seemed hopeless to patronise the players, who were not suffered to play. The Recorder Fleetwood, of whom we have many curious police-reports in the style of a lieutenant de police—as the chief of his own spies, and the executioner of his own decrees—had himself a fertile dramatic invention, which was largely developed in the singular “orders of the common-council” against the alarming innovation of PUBLIC PLAYS in the boundaries of the civic jurisdiction.2 There was not a calamity, moral and physical, which could happen to any city which the Recorder has not made concomitant with the opening of playhouses. The infection of the plague was, however, then an irrefutable argument. In this contest between the court and the city, the common-council remained dogged assertors of their privileges; they drove the players from their sacred precincts to the boundaries and to “the liberties,” where, however, they harassed these children of fancy by a novel claim, that none were to be free in the “liberties” but themselves, which argument was submitted to the law officers for their decision. The privy-council once more interfered, by a declaration that the chief justices had not yet been able to determine their case, and therefore there was to be no present “intermeddling.” It is evident that the government all along had resolved that the people should have a theatre. After two years of opposition to the patent granted to the players in 1574, the first playhouse was built—a timber house in the suburbs—and received the appropriate title of “The Theatre;” and about the same time “The Curtain” rose in its vicinage, a name supposed to have been derived from that appendage to a stage; for to those who had been accustomed to the open stage of an inn-yard, the drop or “curtain” separating the actors from the audience was such a novelty, that it left its name to the house. The Blackfriars, the Round Globe, the Square Fortune—whence Edward Alleyn, by his histrionic fame, drew the wealth which endowed Dulwich College—are names almost consecrated by the eminent geniuses whose lives were connected with these theatres; and at one time it appears that seventeen playhouses had been erected; they were, however, wooden and thatched, till the Fortune was built with brick, and, in the theatrical phrase, “the heavens,” that is, the open top, was tiled.

The popular fervour of the drama had now a centrical attraction; a place of social resort, with a facility of admission, was now opened;3 and when yet there was no reading public, the theatre would be substituted for the press; and often, wearied of the bearward and coarser sports, they flocked to the more intellectual entertainment. The playhouse was a wider sphere for their exertions, and it opened an arduous competition for the purveyors of these incessant novelties. The managers of theatres had now to look about for plays and playwrights. A general demand required, not only an abundant, but, unfortunately, a rapid supply. What a crisis for genius, for its development and its destruction!

This was an event in the history of our literature which has not occurred in the literary history of any other European people. It was about the middle of the reign of Elizabeth that a race of dramatic writers burst forth on the nation—writers, not easily numbered, of innumerable dramas.

Literature now opened a new avenue for a poor scholar, the first step of advancement in society from a collegiate life for those who found their future condition but ill provided for. A secretaryship, a chaplainship, or to be a gentleman’s usher—in a word, an humble retainer in great families—circumscribed the ambition of the meek and the worthy; but there were others, in “their first gamesome age,” whose

This, however, is but the style of apology which one of them gives to veil the fact that many were ejected from “the teat.” Fiery emanations these, compelled to leave their cloistered solitudes, restless and reckless, they rushed to the metropolis, where this new mart of genius in the rising dramatic age was opened. Play-writing and play-acting, for they were often combined, were too magical a business to resist its delusions.

They wrote, with rare exceptions, without revision. An act or two, composed with some meditation to awaken interest—a few moveable scenes rapidly put together—and, at some fortunate moment, a burst of poetry—usually wound up in pell-mell confusion; for how could they contrive a catastrophe to the chaos? Such writers relied on the passing curiosity which their story might raise, and more on the play of the actors, who, in the last bustling scenes, might lend an interest which the meagre dialogue of the economical poet so rarely afforded. They never wrote for posterity, and seem never to have pretended to it. They betrayed no sympathy for their progeny; the manager’s stock was the foundling hospital for this spurious brood; the Muse even often sold her infant while it still lay on the breast. The huddled act of a play was despatched to the manager as the lure of a temporary loan, accompanied by a promissory note of expedition; and assuredly they kept to their word if ever they concluded the work.

This facility of production may be accounted for, not only from the more obvious cause which instigated their incessant toil, but from the ready sources whence they drew their materials. They dramatised evanescent subjects, in rapid competition, like the ballad-makers of their own day, or the novelists of ours; they caught “the Cynthia of the minute”—a domestic incident—a tragic tale engaging the public attention produced many domestic tragedies founded on actual events; they were certain of exciting the sympathies of an audience. Two remarkable ones have been ascribed to Shakespeare by skilful judges: Arden of Feversham, where the repentance of an adulterous wife in the agony of conscience so powerfully reminds one of the great poet, that the German, Tieck, who has recently translated it, has not hesitated to subscribe to the opinion of some of our own critics; and The Yorkshire Tragedy, which was printed with the name of Shakespeare in his own lifetime, and has been held to be authentic; and surely The Yorkshire Tragedy at least possessed an equal claim with the monstrous Titus Andronicus5 not to be ejected from the writings of Shakespeare. It is most probable that that, among others, was among the old plays which he often took in hand; and our judicial decisions have not always found “the divinity which stirs within them.” The Italian novelists, which had been recently translated in Painter’s “Palace of Pleasure,” these dramatists ransacked for their plots; this source opened a fresh supply of invention, and a combination of natural incidents, which varies the dry matter-of-fact drawn from the “Chronicles,” which in their hands too often produced mere skeletons of poetry. They borrowed from the ancients when they could. Plautus was a favourite. They wrote for a day, and did not expect to survive many.

The rapid succession of this multitude of plays is remarkable; many have wholly perished by casualties and dispersions, and some possibly may still lie unsunned in their manuscript state.6 We have only the titles of many which were popular, while the names of some of these artificers have come down to us without any of their workmanship. In a private collection, Langbaine had gathered about a thousand plays, besides interludes and drolls; and yet these were but a portion of those plays, for many never passed through the press; the list of anonymous authors is not only considerable, but some of these are not inferior in invention and style to the best.7 We may judge of the prolific production of these authors by Thomas Heywood, a fluent and natural writer, who never allowed himself time to cross out a line, and who has casually informed us that “he had either an entire hand, or at least a main finger, in two hundred and twenty plays.”

The intercourse of the proprietors or managers of the theatres and these writers has been only incidentally, and indeed accidentally, revealed to us.8 It was justly observed by Gifford, that these dramatic poets, either from mortification or humility, abstained from dwelling, or even entering upon their personal history. Though frequent in dedications, they are seldom explicit; and even their prefaces fail to convey any information, except of their wants or their grievances, from evils which are rarely specified. The truth is, that this whole poetical race, which suddenly broke out together, a sort of wild insurrection of genius, early found that they were nothing more than the hirelings of some crafty manager, at whose beck and mercy they lived. Writing plays was soon held to be as discreditable an occupation as that of the players themselves; indeed, not seldom the poets themselves were actors—these departments were so frequently combined, that the term player is sometimes used equally for a performer on the stage, and a writer of plays.

This fraternity, children of ill-fortune and of passion, were scarce distinguishable from each other; and if the fortunes, and the fate of some, are more known, it is but by the recklessness of their days—their criminal impetuosity. Several perished in their immaturity, torches blazing, while they were consuming themselves. The chance-record of the violent end of one; a cry of desperation still more horrible of another; the death-bed repentance of a third; the dishonourable life of dupery probably practised by a fourth;9 are adapted to enter into moral, if not into literary history.

The Psychologist, the historian of the soul among the brotherhood of genius—for such were many among them—feels how precious are the slight memorials of noble passions, disguised by a degraded existence. However tortuous their lives seem, some grasped at celebrity, and some looked towards distant fame. If some have eloquently reproached themselves, there are, too, those who exulted in the consciousness of their intellectual greatness. They were of different magnitude, and in the scroll of their names some have been recognised by posterity.

An ungenial critic has morosely censured Robert Greene, who, harboured in an obscure lodging, which a poor man’s charity had yielded, when lying on his death-bed, prayed for the last favour that poor man’s charity could bestow on a miserable, but a conscious poet—that his coffin might be covered with bays. In the shadow of death, the poet and the romancer dwelt on the fame which he cherished as life.

Even their small theatres appeared to the poet “thronged,” and the heart of the dramatist would swell at “the shouts and claps.” Drayton, who, at a later day, joined in several dramas, has perpetuated this rejoicing of the poet, which he himself had experienced in that small world “the proud round” of the Globe Theatre. It is a sonnet in the collection which he has entitled “Idea,” and which no successful dramatist will read without some happy emotion.

The ample roll might not be tedious, though it were long, had we aught to record of this brotherhood of genius—but nothing we know of the much-applauded, and much-ridiculed, and most ingenious John Lyly; nothing of the searching and cynical Marston; nothing of the inventive and flowing Dekker; nothing of the unpremeditated strains of the fertile Heywood; nor of the pathetic Webster; nor of Middleton, from whose “Witch” Shakespeare borrowed his incantations; nor of Rowley, whom Shakespeare aided; nor of the equal and grave Massinger; nor of the lonely and melancholy Ford.

Among these poets stood He, in whose fire the Greek of Homer burned clear in his Homeric English. Chapman often caught the ideas of Homer, and went on writing Homerically; at once the translator and the original. One may read in that “most reverend aspect” of his, the lofty spirit that told how, above all living, was to him the poet’s life—when he exclaimed—

The plays were bought by a manager for his company, and each company was jealously alive that no other should perform their purchased copies. These monopolists were therefore anxious to suppress the publication of plays, and to smother the fame of their dramatist on their own boards. The players, who were usually copartners, at the sovereign pleasure of their proprietorship, unmercifully mutilated the tender limbs of their poet,11 or what was not less usual, made him for ever ridiculous by foisting in whole scenes of the basest humour, as clap-traps for “the groundlings,” and which sometimes were perpetuated in the prompter’s copy. Such scenes of ribaldry have tainted even immortal pages, and have provoked much idle criticism either to censure or to palliate.

As the stock-copies increased and lost their novelty, they required some new-fashioning. The tarnished piece was drawn out of the theatrical wardrobe; once in vogue, and now neglected, the body, not yet moth-eaten, might be flounced with new scenes. To this humiliated state of jobbers of old plays, were reduced the most glorious names in our drama’s roll. Shakespeare, Jonson, and Massinger sate down to this obscure drudgery. Our earlier commentators on Shakespeare had no suspicion that even his plays were often rifacimentos of neglected stock-copies. When the account-books of Henslow, the manager, were discovered at Dulwich College, they supplied some strange literary anecdotes. This entry appears, “lent to Bengemen Jonson, forty shillings for his adycions to Jeronymo,” which was an old favourite play of Kyd’s. Again, more lent for “new adycions.” When Hawkins republished “Jeronymo” in his collection, he triumphantly rejected these “adycions,” as being “foisted in by the players.” This he had detected by collation with the first edition; further his critical decision could not advance. The Diary of Henslow was fatal to the matter-of-fact critic—the passages he had ejected relate to the madness of Hieronymo for the murder of his son; the learned poet never wrote with such a Shakespearian force.

Our early dramatists not only jobbed in this chance-work, but established a copartnership for the quicker manufacture; and we find sometimes three or four poets working on one play, share and share alike, or in due proportions, whenever they could peaceably adjust their mutual celebrities.12 Could we penetrate into the recesses of the theatre of that day, I suspect we should discover civil wars in the commonwealth. These partners sometimes became irreconcilably jealous. Jonson and Marston and Decker, who had zealously co-operated, subsequently exhausted their quivers at one another. Greene was incurably envious of Marlow, and got his friend Nash to be as much so, till Marlow and Nash compromised, and wrote together the tragedy of Dido, with the affection of twins. Lofty Chapman flashed an “invective” against proud “Ben,” and when Anthony Munday, a copious playwright, was hailed by a critic as “the best plotter,” Jonson, in his next play, ridiculed “the best plotter.” Can we forget that in Eastward Hoe, one of the most amusing of our old comedies, whence Hogarth borrowed the hint of his “Idle and Industrious Apprentices,” by Jonson, Chapman and Marston, the madness of Ophelia is poorly ridiculed? It would seem that a junction of the poets usually closed in a rupture.

Our first tragedy and comedy were moulded on the classical model, for both the writers were university-men. It is, however, remarkable that the greater number of our early dramatists who now occupy our attention were also members of the universities, had taken a degree, and some were skilful Greek scholars.13 How then did it happen, that not one of these scholars submitted to the artificial apparatus and the conventional code of their legislator, the Stagyrite? We observe a sudden revolution in the dramatic art.

Our poets had not to address scholastic critics; for, as one of them has delivered himself,—

It was their business to raise up that multiform shape which alone could win the mutable attention of a very mixed audience. At once they clung to the human nature before them; they ran through all the chords of the passions; mingling the comic with the tragic, they struck out a new course in their inartificial drama. They were at all events inventors, for they had no prototypes. Every poet was an original, more suo, mindless of the encumbering alloy, for they knew that the vein they had opened was their own, and confided too frequently in its abundance to find its richness. It was a spontaneous burst which broke forth in the excitement of these new times, and which, as far as the careless prodigality of the vernacular genius is concerned, in the raciness of its idiom, and the flow of its conceptions, and the freshness of its imagery, can never return, for the virgin genius of a people must pass away!

Valueless, indeed, was our early drama held by graver men. Sir Thomas Bodley wholly rejected from his great library all plays, “to avoid stuffing it with baggage-books;” but more particularly objected to “English Plays, as unlike those of other nations, which are esteemed for learning the languages; and many of them,” he adds, “are compiled by men of great wisdom and learning.”

The perplexities of the founder of the noble Bodleian Library were occasioned by our dramatic illegitimacy; we had no progenitors, and we were not spell-bound by the three unities. Originality in every kind startled the mind which could only pace in the trammels of authority. On the principle Bodley rejected our English plays he also condemned our English philosophy; and Lord Bacon rallied him on that occasion by a good-humoured menace of “a cogitation against Libraries,” which must have made the cheeks of the great collector of books tingle. Bodley with excellent truth described himself as “the carrier’s horse which cannot blench the beaten way in which I was trained.”

In banishing the productions of the national genius from that national library which his hand had proudly erected, little was Bodley able to conceive, that a following generation would dwell on those very “English plays,” would appeal to them as the depositaries of our language, and as the secret history of the people, a history which no historian writes, their modes of thinking in the transition of their manners, in the vicissitudes of their passions, and in the scenes of their politics and their religion; and what most would have astonished our great bibliophile, that collectors like himself, presuming on “their wisdom and learning,” would devote their vigils to collate, to comment, and to edit “these baggage-books of English plays,” and above all, that foreigners, after a century or two, should enrich their own literature by the translations, or enlarge their own genius by the imitations of these bold originals.

By emancipating themselves from the thraldom of Greece and the servility of Rome our dramatists have occasioned later critics to separate our own from the classical drama of antiquity. They are placed in “the Romantic” school; a novel technical term, not individually appropriate, and which would be less ambiguous if considered as “the Gothic.”14 At the time when Italy and France had cast themselves into thraldom, by adhering to the contracted models of the drama of antiquity, two nations in Europe, without any intercourse whatever, for even translation was not yet a medium, were spontaneously creating a national drama accordant with the experience, the sympathies, and the imagination of their people. The theatre was to be a mirror of enchantment, a moveable reflection of themselves. These two nations were England and Spain. The dramatic history of Spain is the exact counterpart which perfectly tallies with our own. In Spain the learned began with imitations and translations of the ancient classics; but these formal stately dramas were so coldly received, that they fell into desuetude, and were succeeded by those whose native luxuriant genius reached to the secret hearts of their audience; and it was this second race, not, indeed, so numerous as our own, who closed with the Spanish Shakespeare.15 This literary phenomenon, though now apparent, was not perceived when it was occurring.

Every taste has delivered its variable decision on these our old plays, each deciding by its own standard; and the variance is occasioned not always by deficiency in critical judgment, but in the very nature of the object of criticism, in the inherent defect of our ancient drama itself. These old plays will not endure criticism. They were not written for critics, and they now exist even in spite of criticism. They were all experiments of the freest genius, rarely placed under favouring circumstances. They were emanations of strong but short conceptions, poured forth in haste and heat; they blotted their lines as rarely as we are told did Shakespeare; they revelled in their first conceptions, often forgotten in their rapid progress; the true inspiration was lodged in their breasts, the hidden volcano has often burst through its darkness, and flamed through a whole scene, for often have they written as Shakespeare wrote. We may look in them for entire scenes, felicitous lines, and many an insulated passage, studies for a poet; anthologies have been drawn from these elder dramatists.16 We may perceive how this sudden generation of poets, some of whose names are not familiar to us, have moulded our language with the images of their fancy, and strengthened it by the stability of their thoughts.

1 This Patent, corrected from a former copy in Rymer, has been recovered by Mr. Collier.—Annals of the Stage, i. 211.

2 This 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—

3 At 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!”

4 Two 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.”

5 The 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 was Robert 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.

6 Not many years ago Isaac Reed printed The Witch of Middleton. 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 was The Wild-Goose Chase of Fletcher, 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. When Theobald solemnly 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.

7 See 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—and Jack 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. Yet Doctor Dodypol has wholly escaped the notice even of catalogue-scribes—and Jack Drum is 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.

8 By 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.]

9 Marlow—Nash—Greene—Peele.

10 When 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. His Iliad, 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.

11 An 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.

12 Charles 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 always simultaneously employed in 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.

13 Green, Nash, Lyly, Peele, and Marston were from the university—Marlow and Chapman were exquisite translators from the Greek.

14 The term, the Romantic School, is derived from the langue Romans or Romane, under which comprehensive title all the modern languages may be included; formed, as they are, out of the wrecks of the Latin or Roman language. However this may apply to the origin of the languages, the term is not expressive of the genius of 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 term Gothic, in opposition to the Classical, we fix the origin, and indicate the species.

15 Bouterwek’s Hist. of Spanish Lit. i. 128.

16 Two of these collections are to be valued.

“Cotgrave’s English 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,” by Thomas 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.

The vicissitudes 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.

Shakespeare is a poet who is always now separated from other poets, and the only one, except Pope, 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 when Hurd declared that “This astonishing man is the most original THINKER and SPEAKER since the days of Homer.”

The halo which surrounds the poetic beatitude has almost silenced criticism in its devotion; but a literary historian 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 inventions of 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 the Merchant 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,”

nameless, bodiless, vanishing shadows!

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.1 Of that singular genius 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 original inventors. 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.2 Shakespeare 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?4 Yes, trust them not! There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that with his tyger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast5 out a blank verse as the best of you, and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene in 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 of King 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 his Winter’s Tale, as he took his As You Like It from 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. One of these cunning publishers issued the old play of The Contention of the Two Houses, &c., as newly corrected and enlarged by 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 of King 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 of Minutius 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 Shakespeare adopted are printed in the usual manner; the speeches which he altered or expanded, are marked by inverted commas; and to all the lines entirely composed by 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 are not 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 of Richard 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.

The speech of Queen Margaret, in the third part of Henry 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 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 of King John, and the other of The 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 written originally by 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 “his invention.” 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 after ear 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;7 but 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 that the 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;8 and the airy Fletcher, who would have emulated Shakespeare, was guilty of sneering at his inimitable master. The learned Jonson was apt to be critical; Chapman cast his Greek glances haughtily on the vernacular bard; Marston was caustic; and Drayton, his intimate, who had composed two or three tragedies, could hardly perceive any supremacy in Shakespeare, and for us, seems parsimoniously to commend his “comic vein” as strong

As any one that traffick’d with the stage;

while Ben Jonson is hailed as

It was not from his dramatic brothers that Shakespeare could 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.9 As 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

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 existence Romeo, Macbeth, and Othello, 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,

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 of Shakespeare nor 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 no Shakespeare! 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. Shakespeare was 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 and Condell, 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 a friend and fellow alive 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 of ALL the plays, having lost the proprietorship of several which had stolen abroad in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and to obtain this crafty purpose they practised a fraudulent deception.

Fifteen quarto plays the 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, these first editions were 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. Capel imagined 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 were NOW published “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.11 The recollections of these two players were so inaccurate that they at first totally omitted the Troilus and Cressida, which is inserted without pagination, and with little discrimination in the writings of Shakespeare, preserved the barbarous Titus Andronicus, evidently one of Marlowe’s gigantic pieces, and the old play of “the first part of Henry 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 suspicious Pericles.12 But 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 would descend to the reading of SUCH 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.13 In 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 the CLOSET COMPANION of 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 of not 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.14 Milton 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

was mottled by the modern Gallic in phrase and in criticism, corrupting our national taste, and thus removing us 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 in The Fox, The Silent Woman, and The 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 thus Macbeth shrank into an opera under the hand of Davenant; and the Tempest, 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 Juliet was 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 relished The 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 a divertisement;” that is, Macbeth was Davenant’s opera, with music and dancing. But Pepys read Othello, and we have his deliberate notion; “but having lately read the Adventures of Five Hours, Othello seemed 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 prove the greatest masters in 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 of active 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 of Jonson and Shakespeare, for he that is able to think long and judge well, will be sure to find out better things than another man can hit upon suddenly, though of more quick and ready parts; which is commonly but CHANCE, 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, Butler could 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 a Macbeth, a Hamlet, a Lear, was a philosophical result, which probably no one had yet dreamed of.

If the genius of Shakespeare were 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 academy Della Crusca was 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’s Treatise of Poetry,” dictated “Universal Rules” for all sorts of poetry. Rymer, the collector of our Foedera, 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.17 This critical bomb was learned and lively. The court, and consequently the popular, tastes were classical or Gallic; Rymer haunted 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 of Edgar, or the English Monarch, in rhymed 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 delightful Winter’s Tale of 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.18 Some years after, the critique was honoured by a second edition, and in the following year this combat À l’outrance was again waged, with no diminished intrepidity, in “A Short View of Tragedy, with some reflections on Shakespeare, and other PRACTITIONERS for 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.19 But 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 drama by 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” of Rymer are 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 calls Othello “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.” With Othello’s tragic tale before him, the critic worms himself into “the burlesque or comic parts,” and these he insidiously lauds, to insinuate that Othello is 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 moment forgot Rymer and his “heroic tragedy.” The lines are now very significant.

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, and Measure 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, that Lear being 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 shapeliness or person, lisping in their cradles, with stammering tongues which nothing but their youth and rawness can excuse.” Our dramatic Shakespeare and our epic Milton are 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 quotes Macbeth by 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.”22 As 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 frigid Cato, 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.23 Pope’s idea was similar, in his conversation, not in his preface; and later so was Thomas Warton’s.24

In 1718, Bysshe, in compiling his “Art of Poetry,” which consists of mere extracts, passed by “Spenser and the poets of his age, because their language has become so obsolete that most readers of our age have no ear for them, and therefore Shakespeare is so rarely cited in this collection.”

Rowe silently corrected his unostentatious edition; when fifteen years had elapsed, Tonson called on a greater poet to succeed to the editorial throne. The classical taste of Pope was disturbed and rarely sympathised with “the choice of the subjects, the wrong conduct of the incidents, false thoughts, forced expressions:” in tenderness to Shakespeare these he held to be “not so much defects, but superfoetations,” which are to be ascribed to the times, to interpolation, to the copyists; and contemning “the dull duty” of editorship, he initiated himself into the novel office of expurgator; striking out or inserting at pleasure—not only pruning, but grafting. Schlegel exclaims in agony, that Pope would have given us a mutilated Shakespeare! but Pope, to satisfy us that he was not insensible to the fine passages of Shakespeare, distinguished by inverted commas all those which he approved! So that Pope thus furnished for the first time what have been called “The Beauties of Shakespeare!” but amid such a disfigured text, the faults of Shakespeare must have been too apparent! Pope but partially relished and often ill understood his Shakespeare; yet in the liveliest of prefaces he offers the most vivid delineation of our great bard’s general characteristics. The genius of Shakespeare was at once comprehended by his brother poet; but the text he was continually tampering with ended in a fatal testimony that Pope had no congenial taste for the style, the manner, and the whole native drama of England.25 Pope laid himself open to the investigating eye of Theobald.

The attention of Theobald had been drawn to our old plays by Thomas Coxeter, an enthusiast of our ancient dramatists. This Coxeter was the original projector of their revival, but having communicated his plan, he witnessed the incompetent Dodsley appropriate this fond hope of his dreamy life, and he has left us his indignant groans.26

After an interval of seven years Theobald gave his edition. His attempts were limited to the emendation of corrupt passages and the explanation of obscure ones: the more elevated disquisitions to develope the genius of his author, by principles of criticism applied to his beauties or his defects, he assigned to “a masterly pen.” This at least was not arrogant; the man who is sensible of his own weakness, is safe by not tasking it to the proof. His annotations are amusing from the self-complacency of the writer, who at times seems to have been struck by his own felicitous results; and in truth he was often successful, more than has been honestly avowed by those who have poached on his manor. Theobald exulted over Pope, but he read his triumph in “The Dunciad.”

The Popeians now sunk the sole merit of the laborious sagacity of “the restorer,” as Mr. Pope affectionately called him, to that of “a word-catcher.” But “piddling Theobald,” branded in the forehead by the immortal “Dunciad,” was the first who popularised the neglected writings of Shakespeare.27 His editions dispersed thirteen thousand copies, while nearly a third of Pope’s original subscription edition, of seven hundred and fifty copies, were left unvendible.28

It is an evidence of the spread of Shakespeare’s celebrity, that a fashionable circle had formed themselves into a society under the title of “The Shakespeare Club.” Every week they bespoke some favourite play; but, unexpectedly, the acted plays of Shakespeare seemed to lose greatly of their secret magic: this failure was charged upon the unhappy performers, whose skill appeared all unequal to raise the emotions which the bard had inspired in the closet. Certain it is, that for the full comprehension of the genius of this great poet, we must learn to think, to reflect, to combine, for what has passed is a part of what is going on; and this is a labour more adapted for the repose of the closet than the business of the theatre. Much is written which must remain in the mind, and cannot come within the province of acting. The dramas of Shakespeare, as they have descended to us, modern taste also has always required to be altered and adapted; they are less calculated for performance on the stage than those of almost any other dramatist who has become classical in the theatre. Unquestionably, the great poet had retained much of the barbarism of the old plays which he re-wrote without remodelling; bustle which hurries on our attention without stimulating our feelings; some flagrant indecorums and some absolute nonsense to the taste of “the groundlings of the Globe.” In the reverie of the poet’s pages, the eye glides silently over the offending passages which cannot detain it. It was these prominent defects which provoked so many modern alterations; and no doubt Tate and Cibber, and all that race, exulted like Shadwell, who in his dedication to his alteration of Timon of Athens exclaims, “I can truly say I have made it into a play.” When Sir James Mackintosh observed, that “Massinger’s taste, as Shakespeare’s genius, is displayed with such prodigal magnificence in the parts, but never employed in the construction of the whole,” he was perhaps not aware of the real cause, which was that of our great poet following the construction of old plays, without altering their ordonnance. It is true also, that the characters of Shakespeare require something of his own genius in their personifiers to sustain the perfect illusion; great actors seem always to have felt the deep emotions they raised; they studied, they meditated, till at length they personified the ideal character they represented. We are told this of Burbage and Betterton, and we know it of Garrick and Mrs. Siddons.

A novel fate was now to befal Shakespeare. Theobald had made his volumes useful for all hands; a man of rank, who had been the Speaker of the House of Commons, set the first example of literary magnificence. Sir Thomas Hanmer had cradled his fancy in the idealism of publication; his edition was to be not only “the fairest impression, beautified with the ornaments of sculpture,” but it was not to be sold by booksellers! The Shakespeare of Sir Thomas Hanmer seemed to be a sacred thing, like the shew-bread of ancient Israel, to be touched by no profane hand, nor eaten but by an exclusive class. He made a gratuitous donation of his “sculptured” edition to his Alma Mater, to issue from the university press, at a very moderate subscription price. The embroidered mantle, however, but ill concealed the trifler. Sir Thomas had vigorously attacked the grammatical errors of the poet, which, in fact, was often a violation of the text, for Shakespeare wrote ungrammatically; the other editorial effort was a metrical amusement, gently lopping a redundant, or straightening a limping line; the only harm of his edition was his modesty in adopting all the innovations of his predecessors, for his own were quite innocent. On the whole, Sir Thomas appears to have edited his Shakespeare, wearing all the while his “white kid gloves,” which the Mad Tom Hervey, who ran away with his lady, by information which he ought not to have divulged, assured the world that the baronet always slept in.

Under the veil of giving “dear Mr. Pope’s” edition, which no one craved, the great author of “The Divine Legation” now edited Shakespeare. It must have occurred to the readers of this edition, that hitherto no one had entered into any right conception of a great portion of the poet’s writings. Many passages with which our memory is familiar were wrested into the most whimsical readings; plain matters were for ever obscured by perverse but ingenious interpretations; not only the words, but the thoughts of the author were changed; here a line was to be wholly rejected, and there an interpolation was to clear an imperfect sense; but the most prominent feature of the commentary was that learned fancy which struck out allusions to the most recondite circumstances of learned antiquity.29

In this great commentator on Shakespeare there was always a contest between his learning and his fancy; the one was copious, and the other was exuberant; neither could yield to the other; and the reader was sure to be led astray by both. His fervid curiosity was absolutely creative; all things crowded to bear on his point; in the precipitancy of his pen, his taste or his judgment was not of that degree which could save him even from inglorious absurdities. But the ingenious follies of his literature were such that they have often been preserved, for the sake of all that learning which it required for their refutation.

When all was over, and the battle was fought and lost, the friends of the great man acknowledged that the editor’s design had never been to explain Shakespeare! and that he was even conscious that he had frequently imputed to the poet meanings which had never entered the mind of the bard! Our critic’s grand object was to display his own learning in these amusements of his leisure. Warburton wrote for Warburton, and not for Shakespeare; and the literary confession almost rivals those of Lauder or Psalmanazar.

There is one more remarkable object in the Shakespeare of Warburton. He not only preserved that strange device of Pope to distinguish the most beautiful passages by inverted commas, but carried on that ridiculous process on his own separate account, by marking his favourites by double commas. It is evident that these great editors judged Shakespeare by these fragmentary and unconnected passages, which could not indicate the harmonious and gradual rise of the thoughts, nor the fine transitions of emotions, and less the comprehensive genius of the inventor. They were scattering the living members which must be viewed whole with all their movements, and at last must be sought for by the reader in his own mind. The truest mode of discovering the beauties of an author is first to be conversant with the beautiful, otherwise it is possible that the beauties may escape the readers, even should they be marked by a Pope or a Warburton.

The acknowledged failure of the preceding editions invited to a fresh enterprise, and it was the edition of Johnson, in 1765, which conferred on Shakespeare the stability of a classic, by the vigour and discrimination of his criticism, and the solemnity of his judicial decisions.

When Johnson had issued his proposals twenty years before for an edition of Shakespeare, he pointed to a great novelty for the elucidation of the poet. His intuitive sagacity had discerned that a poet so racy and native required a familiarity both with the idiom and the manners of his age. He was sensible that a complete explanation of an author, not systematic and consequential, but desultory and vagrant, abounding in casual allusions and slight hints, is not to be expected from any single scholiast. He enumerates, however, the desiderata for this purpose; among which we find that of reading the books which Shakespeare read, and to compare his works with those of writers who lived at the same time, or immediately preceded, or immediately followed him. This project, happily conceived, inferred comprehensive knowledge in the proposer; but it was only a reverie; a dim Pisgah view which the sagacity of the great critic had taken of that future Canaan, which he himself never entered. With this sort of knowledge, and these forgotten writers, which the future commentators of Shakespeare revelled in, Johnson remained wholly unacquainted.

But what proved more fatal to the editorial ability of Johnson than this imperfect knowledge of the literature and the manners of the age of Shakespeare, was that the commentator rarely sympathised with the poet, for his hard-witted and unpliant faculties, busied with the more palpable forms of human nature, when thrown amid the supernatural and the ideal, seemed suddenly deserted of their powers; the magic knot was tied, which cast our Hercules into helpless impotence; and in the circle of imaginative creation, we discover the baffled sage resisting the spell, by apologising for Shakespeare’s introduction of his mighty preternatural beings! a certain evidence that the critic had never existed for a moment under their influence. “Witches, fairies, and ghosts, would not now be tolerated by an audience;” such was the grave and fallacious assumption of the unimaginative critic, which seems something worse than Voltaire’s raillery; for though that wit ridiculed the ghost in Hamlet, he afterwards had the poetic agility to transfer its solemnity to his own Semiramis,—though, like all rapid inlayers, the appliquÉ did not fit to his work.30

We may even suspect the degree of our great critic’s susceptibility of the infinitely-varied emotions flowing in the inexhaustible vein of the poet of nature. In those judicial summaries at the close of each drama, his cold approbation, his perplexing balancings, his hazarded doubts, or his positive censures, all alike betray the uncertainty and the difficulties of a critical mind, which misapplied its energies to themes adverse to its habits.

Johnson’s preface to his Shakespeare was long held as a masterpiece; and several splendid passages, after more than half a century, remain to remind us of his nervous intellect. If we now read that preface with a different understanding than that of most of his contemporaries, it is because Johnson himself has revealed his poetical confessions in certain “Lives of the Poets.” We now look on that famed preface much more as a labour of pomp than a labour of love. Far from me be any irreverence to our master-genius of the passed century, whose volumes were read by all readers, and imitated by all writers; my first devotion to literature was caught from his pages; and the fire still burns on that altar. But the literary character of Johnson, with his enduring works, is no longer a subject of inquiry, but of history; of truths established, and not of opinions which are mutable.

Can we imagine that Johnson himself experienced a degree of conviction, some perplexing consciousness, that his spirit was not endowed with the sensibility of Longinus? A profound thinker, acutely argumentative and analytical, though clothed in the purple of his cumbrous diction, and the cadences of his concatenated periods, when he touched on themes of pure imagination, and passions not merely declamatory, had nothing left to him but the solitary test of his judgment, to decide on what lies out of the scope of daily life. He interpreted the pathetic and the sublime, till they ceased to be either by the force of his reasoning and the weakness of his conceptions; he cross-examined shadowy fancies, till they vanished under the eye of the judge. He had no wing to ascend into “the heaven of invention.”

In Johnson’s Shakespeare, therefore, we may trace that deficient sympathy which subsequently betrayed itself in his revolting decisions on Collins, on Gray, on Milton, and on others. It was his hard fate to be called on to deliver his solemn decisions on two of our greatest poets; from Spenser he had fortunately escaped, having wholly forgotten the Muse of Mulla, while his piety and his taste had remembered Blackmore, in the collection of English poets. It is curious to detect the mode by which our great critic extricated himself from the difficulties of his judicial function on Shakespeare and on Milton, by his prudential sagacity, and his passive obedience to established authorities. Johnson’s preface to Shakespeare was grafted on Pope’s, as afterwards, when he came to Milton, he followed the track of Addison. But Johnson was too honest to disguise the reality of his own conviction: it was legitimate to adopt theirs, but it was independent to preserve his own; in this dissonance he has left a lesson and a warning for some who are eminent, and who travel in the high-road of criticism.

It is thus that we find in this famous preface to Shakespeare that he is hailed as the poet of nature, and is placed by the side of Homer; and of this Pope had instructed the critic; but in the sudden change the noble qualities of the bard are minutely reversed; the antithesis was too often in the critic’s own taste; and the characteristic excellence ascribed to Shakespeare seems hardly compatible with the number and the grossness of his faults. Every work of note bears the impression of its times; and we learn from the faithful chronicler of Johnson the real occasion which gave rise to this remarkable preface. “A blind and indiscriminate admiration of Shakespeare had exposed the British nation to the ridicule of foreigners; and this preface was considered as a grave, well-considered, and impartial opinion of the judge.” Such was the defence of the logical critic, who so diligently enumerated the defects of his author, that Voltaire, who could never understand the language nor comprehend the genius of Shakespeare, might sometimes have referred to Johnson to confirm his own depreciating notions.

The extensive plan for the illustration of the poet, imperfectly projected by Johnson, was finally executed through a series of editions, which gave rise to a new class of literary antiquaries.

Shortly after the first edition of Johnson, Dr. Farmer led the way to the disclosure of a new lore in our old books. Farmer had silently pursued an untired chase in this “black” forest, for he had a keen gusto for the native venison, and, alluding to his Shakespearian pursuits, exclaimed in the inspiring language of his poet—

His vivacity relieved the drowsiness of mere antiquarianism. This novel pursuit once opened, an eager and motley pack was hallooed up, and Shakespeare, like ActÆon, was torn to pieces by a whole kennel of his own hounds, as they were typified, with equal humour and severity. But to be severe and never to be just is the penury of the most sordid criticism; and among these

Spirits black, white, and grey,

are some of the most illustrious in English literature.

The original edition of Johnson consisted only of eight volumes; had not the contriving wisdom of the printers impressed the last into twenty and one huge tomes, they might easily have been expanded into forty.

When we survey the massive variorum edition of Shakespeare, we are struck by the circumstance that nothing similar has happened to any other national author. It was not to be expected that, after the invention of the art of printing, an author could arise, whose works should be disfigured by treacherous transcribers, corrupted by interpolations, and still more by a race of men whose art was unknown to the ancients, subjecting his text to the mercy of contending commentators and conjectural critics. But a singular combination of untoward circumstances attached to this poet and his works, produced this remarkable result. The scholiasts among the ancient classics had rejoiced in some rare emendation of the text, or the rhetorical commentator had flourished in the luxuriance of the latent beauties of some favourite author. But a far wider and deeper source of inquiry was now to be attempted, historical or explanatory—comments to clear up obscure allusions; to indicate unknown prototypes; to trace the vicissitudes of words as well as things; to picture forth the customs and the manners which had faded into desuetude; and to re-open for us the records of our social and domestic life, thus at once to throw us back into that age, and to familiarize us with that language, of Shakespeare which had vanished. Shakespeare, it may be said, suddenly became the favourite object of literary inquiry. Every literary man in the nation conned over and illumined “the infinite variety” of the bard. And assuredly they enriched our vernacular literature with a collection of historical, philological, and miscellaneous information, unparalleled among any other literary people. In 1785, Isaac Reed, in one of his prefaces, informs us, that “the works of Shakespeare, during the last twenty years, have been the object of public attention.”

All this novel knowledge was, however, not purchased at a slight cost. It was not only to be snatched up by accidental discovery, but it was more severely tasked by what Steevens called “a course of black-letter!”—dusty volumes, and fugitive tracts, and the wide range of antiquarian research. The sources whence they drew their waters were muddy; and Steevens, who affected more gaiety in his chains than his brothers in the Shakespearian galley, with bitter derision reproached his great coadjutor Malone, whom he looked on with the evil eye of rivalry for drawing his knowledge from “books too mean to be formally quoted.”

The commentators have encumbered the poet, who often has been but a secondary object of their lucubrations, for they not only write notes on Shakespeare, but notes, and bitter ones too, on one another. This commentary has been turned into a gymnasium for the public sports of friendly and of unfriendly wrestlers; where some have been so earnest, that it is evident that, in measuring a cast, they congratulated themselves in the language of Orlando, “If ever he goes alone again, I’ll never wrestle for prize more.”

Thomas Warton once covered with his shield some of the minor brotherhood: “If Shakespeare is worth reading, he is worth explaining; and the researches used for so valuable and elegant a purpose merit the thanks of genius and candour, not the satire of prejudice and ignorance.” But this serves not as an apology for abusing the privilege of a commentator; elucidating the poet into obscurity by information equally contradictory and curious; racking us by fantastic readings which no one imagined before or since; and laying us open to the mercy of some who never ventured to sharpen their pens but on our irresistible Shakespeare. What has been the result of the petty conflicts between the arch maliciousness of Steevens and the fervent plodding of Malone, which raised up two parties among the Shakespearian commentators, till they became so personal, that a Steevenite and a Malonist looked on each other suspiciously, and sometimes would drop the ordinary civilities of life? At length, strange to tell, after Steevens had laboured with zeal equal to the whole confraternity, it became a question with him, In what manner the poet COULD be read? Are we to con over each note appended to each word or passage?—but this would be perpetually to turn aside the flow of our imagination; or are we to read a large portion of the text uninterruptedly, and then return to the notes?—but this would be breaking the unity of the poet into fragments; or, for a final decision, and the avowal must have mortified the ingenuous illustrator, according to a third class of readers, were these illustrations to be altogether rejected? must the poet or the commentator be at continual variance? or shall we endure to see “Alcides beaten by his page?”

Might I be allowed to offer an award on a matter so involved and delicate as this union between the genius of Shakespeare and the genius of his commentators, I would concede the divorce, from the incompatibility of temper between the parties; but I would insist on a separate maintenance, to preserve the great respectability attached to the party most complained of. The true reader of Shakespeare may then accommodate himself with two editions; the one for his hand, having nothing but what the poet has written; the other for the shelf, having all the commentators have conjectured, confuted, and confounded.31

The celebrity of Shakespeare is no longer hounded by his nationality. Even France responds, though the voice of Parisian critics is muffled, confused, and ambiguous; they have not yet solved the great problem, why Shakespeare is an omnipotent dramatist.32 The school of Corneille and Racine are perplexed, like Quin, who could not be brought to acknowledge the creative acting of Garrick, observing that, “If that young man were right, all which they had hitherto done was wrong.”

Voltaire, in early life, to compose the Henriade, to escape from the Bastile, or to conceal his espionage—for he appears to have been a secret employÉ of the French ministry—resided a considerable time in England. He acquired an unusual knowledge of our language, and published an essay on the epic poets in English.33 He discovered a new world among our writers, and was the first who introduced the Literature of England into France. Voltaire expounded to his nation the philosophy of Newton; but unhappily he criticized and translated Shakespeare, whose idiomatic phrases and metaphorical style did not admit of the demonstrations of the Newtonian system. To the author of the Henriade, who had ever before his eyes the two great masters whom he was one day to rival, the anti-classical and “Gothic” genius of a poet of the Elizabethan period, scorning the unities, following events without the contrivance of an intrigue artfully developed, mingling farce with tragedy, buffoons with monarchs, and preternatural beings stalking amid the palpable realities of life—such irregular dramas seemed to the Aristotelian but “des farces monstrueuses,” as we see they appeared to Rymer and Shaftesbury; but Voltaire was too sagacious to be wholly insensible that “these monstrous farces, which they call tragedies, had scenes grand and terrific.” Voltaire, then meditating on his future dramas, in passing over the surface of the soil, discovered that a mine lay beneath—

and the embedded treasure was worked with more diligence than with gratitude to the owner. If Voltaire ridiculed what he had found, it was partly with the desire of its concealment, but not wholly; for it was impossible for any foreigner to interpret sweet words, and idiomatic phrases, not to be found in dictionaries; or to make way through the bewilderment of the perpetual metaphorical diction of the daring fancy of the great poet; but the deformities of the bard would be too intelligible; all those parts which Pope would have struck out as “superfoetations.” A bald version, or a malicious turn, would amuse the world by those amazing absurdities, which the wit, too famous for his ridicule, rejoiced to commit, and Europe yet knew nothing of Shakespeare, and lay under the sway of this autocrat of Literature.34

Mrs. Montague was the Minerva, for so she was complimented on this occasion, whose celestial spear was to transfix the audacious Gaul. Her “Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, compared with the Greek and French dramatic poets,” served for a popular answer to Voltaire. This accomplished lady, who had raised a literary coterie about her, which attracted such fashionable notice that its title has survived its institution, found in “the Blue-stocking Club” choral hymns and clouds of incense gathering about the altar in Portman Square! The volume is deemed “a wonderful performance,” by those echoes of contemporary prepossessions, the compilers of dictionary-biography; even the poet Cowper placed Mrs. Montague “at the head of all that is called learned.”

This lady’s knowledge of the English drama, and the genius of our ancient Literature, is as vague and indistinct as that of the Greek tragedians, to whom she frequently refers, without, we are told, any intimacy with the originals. She discovers many bombast speeches even in Macbeth, but she triumphantly exclaims, “Shakespeare redeems the nonsense, the indecorum, the irregularities of his plays;” irregularities which seem to her incomprehensible. Her criticisms are the random reflections of her feelings; but trusting to our feelings alone, unaccompanied by that knowledge on which they should be based, is confiding in a capricious, and often an erring dictator, governed by our own humours, or by fashionable tastes.

Thus have we viewed our bard through distinct eras, from the time in which he was not yet pre-eminently distinguished among his numerous peers; the Shakespeare of his own day could not be the Shakespeare of posterity; his rivals could only view that genius in its progress, and though there was not one who was a Shakespeare, yet, in that bursting competition of genius, there were many who were themselves Shakspearian. In a succeeding era, novel and unnational tastes prevailed; to the Drydenists who, dismissing the language of nature, substituted a false nature in their exaggerated passion, Shakespeare might have said of himself—

and when tried by the conventional code of criticism, and condemned; the poet of creation, might have exclaimed to Rymer and to Shaftesbury—

Emerging into light through his modern editors, the volume in the hands of all men; the English public, with whom the classical model was held as nothing, received him as their national bard; for every one read in “the chance” that could only “hit suddenly,” as Butler has described the genius of Shakespeare, revelations about himself. It seemed as if the poet had served in all professions, taking every colour of public and domestic life. Lawyers have detected their law-cunning in the legal contrivances of the poet; physicians have commented on the madness of Lear, and the mystery of Hamlet; statesmen have meditated on profound speculations in civil polity; the merchant and the mechanic, the soldier and the maiden—all, from the crowned head to the sailor-boy, found that in the cursory pages of the great dramatist, he had disclosed to all the tribes of mankind the secrets of their condition. The plenitude and the pliancy of the Shakespearian mind may be manifested by a trivial circumstance. We are a people of pamphleteers; a free country has a free communication; and many, for interest or vainglory, rush to catch the public ear. To point out the drift of their effusions, and aid a dubious title by an unquestioned authority, the greater number of these incessant fugitives, coming in all shapes, will be usually found to have recourse for this apposite thought, and crowning motto, to the prodigal pages of Shakespeare, who, thus pressed into their service, has often made the drift of the pamphleteer intelligible, vainly sought in his confused pamphlet.

When the strange condition of his works made the poet the noble prey of a brood of commentators, antiquarian and philological, from that generation he derived nothing of that abstract greatness with which we are now accustomed to contemplate a genius which seems universal. It was not by new readings, contested restorations, conjectural emendations, and notes explanatory of customs and phrases, however useful, that we could penetrate into the depths of a genius profound as nature herself, and it was only when philosophical critics tested this genius by their own principles, that the singularity was discovered to Europe.

Hitherto the critical art had been verbal, or didactic, or dogmatic; but when the mind engaged itself in watching its own operations, by analysis and combination, and when the laws of its constitution formed a science, educing principles, and exploring the sources of our emotions, all arbitrary conventions were only rated at their worth, while the final appeal was made to our own experience: these nobler critics founded the demonstrations of their metaphysical reasonings on our consciousness. This novel philosophy was more surely and more deeply laid in the nature of man, and whatever concerns man, than the arbitrary code of the Stagyrite, who had founded many of his laws on what had only been customs. We were passing from the history of the human understanding to the history of the imagination; and the whole beautiful process of the intellectual faculties was a new revelation. Theories of taste and systems of philosophy multiplied our sympathies, and amplified our associations; the intellectual powers had their history, and the passions were laid bare in their eloquent anatomy. But in these severe investigations, this new school had to seek for illustrations and for examples which might familiarize their abstract principles; and these philosophical critics appealed to nature, and drew them from her poetic interpreter.

It was the philosophical critics who, by trying Shakespeare by these highest tests, fixed him on his solitary eminence. From Lord Kaimes, through a brilliant succession of many a Longinus, the public has been instructed. The strokes of nature and the bursts of passion, the exuberance of his humour and the pathos of his higher mood, untutored minds had felt more or less, and Shakespeare was lauded for what they considered to be his “natural parts;” and it was parts only on which they could decide, for the true magnitude they could not yet comprehend. The loneliness of his genius, in its profundity or its elevation, and the delicacy of its delineations, the mighty space his universal faculty extends before us, these they could never reach! The phenomenon had not been explained—the instruments had not yet been invented which could fathom its depths, or take the admeasurement at the meridian.

But if philosophical criticism has been so far favourable to develope the truth of nature in the great poet, it is not a consequence that Shakespeare himself produced his poetry on those revolving systems of metaphysics by which some late Æsthetic and rhetorical German critics have somewhat offuscated the solitary luminary. They have developed such a system of intricate thinking in the genius of the poet, such a refined connexion between his conceptions and the execution of his dramatic personages—they have so grafted their own imagination upon his, that at times it becomes doubtful whether we are influenced by the imagination of the critic, or that of the poet. In this seraphic mode of criticism, the poem becomes mythic, and the poet a myth; in the power of abstraction, these critics have passed beyond the regions of humanity. We soar with them into the immensity of space, and we tremble as if we stood alone in the universe; we have lost sight of nature, as we seem to have passed her human boundaries. The ancient divinity of poetry itself, even Homer, is absorbed in the Shakespearian myth; for Shakespeare, to snatch a feather from the fiery wing of Coleridge, is “the Spinosistic deity, an omnipresent creativeness.”

Thou whose rapt spirit beheld the vision of human existence, “the wheel in the middle of the wheel, and the spirit of the living creature within,” and wrotest thy inspirations, how shall we describe thy faculty? To paint lightning, and to give it no motion, is the doom of the baffled artist. Something, however, we may conceive of the Shakespearian faculty when we say that it consisted in a facility of feeling, an aptitude in following those trains of thought which constitute that undeviating propriety, in the consonance of the character with its action, and the passion with its language. Whether the poet followed the romancer or the chronicler in his conception of a dramatic character, he at the first step struck into that undeviating track of our humanity amid the accidents of its position. The progress of each dramatic personage was therefore a unity of diction and character, of sentiment and action; all was direct, for there was no effort where all was impulse; and the dramatic genius of Shakespeare, as if wholly unstudied, seems to have formed the habit of his intellectual character. Was this unerring Shakespearian faculty an intuitive evidence, like certain axioms; or may we venture to fancy that our poet, as it were, had discovered the very mathematics of metaphysics?

Besides this facility of feeling appropriating to itself the whole sphere of human existence, there is another characteristic of our national bard. He struck out a diction which I conceive will be found in no other poet. What is usually termed diction would, applied to Shakespeare, be more definite, and its quality more happily explained, if we call it expression, and observed in what magic the Shakespearian expression lies. This diction has been subject to the censure of obscurity. Modern critics have ascribed the invention of our dramatic blank verse to Shakespeare; but Shakespeare was no inventor in the usual acceptation of the term, and assuredly was not of unrhymed metre: what, indeed, are imperfectly or rarely found among his tuneful predecessors and contemporaries, are the sweetness of his versification, combined with ceaseless imagery; we view the image through the transparency of the thought never disturbing it; it is neither a formal simile nor an expanded metaphor—it is a single expression, a sensible image combined with an emotion.

THE “HUMOURS” OF JONSON.

Jonson studied “THE HUMOURS,” and not the passions. What were these “humours”? The bard himself does not distinguish them from “manners”—

Their Manners, now call’d Humours, feed the stage.

The ambiguity of the term has confounded it with humour itself; they are, however, so far distinct, that a “humour,” that is, some absorbing singularity in a character, may not necessarily be very humorous—it may be only absurd.

When this term “humours” became popular, it sunk into a mystification. Every one suddenly had his “humour.” It served on all occasions as an argument which closed all discussion. The impertinent insisted on the privilege of his “humour.” “The idiot” who chose to be “apish,” declared that a lock of hair fantastically hung, or the dancing feather in his cap, were his “humour.” A moral quality, or an affection of the mind, was thus indiscriminately applied to things themselves, when they were objects of affectation or whim. The phrase was tossed about till it bore no certain meaning. Such indeed is the fate of all fashionable cant—ephemera which, left to themselves, die away with their season.

The ludicrous incongruity of applying these physical qualities to moral acts, and apologizing for their caprices by their “humours,” was too exquisitely ludicrous not to be seized on as the property of our comic satirists. Shakespeare and Jonson have given perpetuity to this term of the vocabulary in vogue, and Jonson has dignified it by transferring it to his comic art. Shakespeare has personified these “humours” in that whimsical, blunt, grotesque Corporal Nym, the pith of whose reason and the chorus of whose tune are his “humours;” admirably contrasting with that other “humourist,” his companion, ranting the fag-ends of tragedies “in Cambyses’ vein.” Jonson, more elaborate, according to his custom, could not quit his subject till he had developed the whole system in two comedies of “Every Man IN” and “Every Man OUT of his Humour.”

The vague term was least comprehended when most in use. Asper, the censor of the times,1 desires Mitis, who had used it, “to answer what was meant:” Mitis, a neutralized man, “who never acts, and has therefore no character,” can only reply, “Answer what?” The term was too plain or too obscure for that simple soul to attach any idea to a word current with all the world.

The philosopher then offers

This rejoices his friend Cordatus:

It is then that Asper, or rather Jonson, plunges into a dissertation on “the elements,” which, according to the ancient philosophy, compound the fragile body of man, with the four “humours,” or moistures.2

Had not this strange phrase been something more than a modish coinage, it had not endured so long and spread so wide. Other temporary phrases of this nature were equally in vogue, nor have they escaped the vigilant causticity of Jonson. Such were “the vapourers,” and “the jeerers;” but these had not substance in them to live, and Jonson only cast on them a side-glance. “The humours” were derived from a more elevated source than the airy nothingness of fashionable cant.