XVIII

POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION

SHAKESPEARE defied at every stage in his career the laws of the classical drama. He rode roughshod over the unities of time, place, and action. There were critics in his day who zealously championed the ancient rules, and viewed with distrust any infringement of them. But the force of Shakespeare's genius-its revelation of new methods of dramatic art - was not lost on the lovers of the ancient ways; and even those who, to assuage their consciences, entered a formal protest against his innovations, soon swelled the chorus of praise with which his work was welcomed by contemporary playgoers, cultured and uncultured alike. The unauthorised publishers of 'Troilus and Cressida' in 1608 faithfully echoed public opinion when they prefaced the work with the note: This author's comedies are so framed to the life that they serve for the most common commentaries of all actions of our lives, showing such a dexterity and power of wit that the most displeased with plays are pleased with his comedies. . . . So much and such savoured salt of wit is in his comedies that they seem for their height of pleasure to be born in the sea that brought forth Venus.'

Anticipating the final verdict, the editors of the First Folio wrote, seven years after Shakespeare's death: 'These plays have had their trial already and stood out all appeals.' Ben Jonson, the staunchest champion of classical canons, Ben noted that Shakespeare ‘wanted art, but he allowed him in Jonson's verses, prefixed to the First Folio, the first place among all dramatists, including those of Greece and Rome, and claimed that all Europe owed him homage:

Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show,

To whom all scenes [i.e. stages] of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time.

tribute.

1660-1702.

In 1630 Milton penned in like strains an epitaph on 'the great heir of fame':

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones

The labour of an age in pilèd stones?

Or that his hallowed reliques should be hid

Under a star-ypointing pyramid?

Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,

What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?

Thou in our wonder and astonishment

Hast built thyself a lifelong monument.

A writer of fine insight who veiled himself under the initials I. M. S. contributed to the Second Folio of 1632 a splendid eulogy. The opening lines declare 'Shakespeare's freehold' to have been

A mind reflecting ages past, whose clear
And equal surface can make things appear
Distant a thousand years, and represent
Them in their lively colours' just extent.

It was his faculty

To outrun hasty time, retrieve the fates,
Roll back the heavens, blow ope the iron gates
Of death and Lethe, where (confused) lie
Great heaps of ruinous mortality.

Milton and I. M. S. were followed within ten years by critics
of tastes so varied as the dramatist of domesticity Thomas.
Heywood, the gallant lyrist Sir John Suckling, the philo-
sophic and 'ever-memorable' John Hales of Eton, and the
untiring versifier of the stage and court, Sir William
D'Avenant. Before 1640 Hales is said to have triumphantly
established, in a public dispute held with men of learning
in his rooms at Eton, the proposition that 'there was no
subject of which any poet ever writ but he could produce it
much better done in Shakespeare.' Leonard Digges (in the
1640 edition of the 'Poems') asserted that every revival
of Shakespeare's plays drew crowds to pit, boxes, and
galleries alike. At a little later date, Shakespeare's plays
were the 'closet companions' of Charles I's 'solitudes.'

Shake

After the Restoration public taste in England veered towards the French and classical dramatic models. speare's work was subjected to some unfavourable criticism as the product of nature to the exclusion of art, but the eclipse proved more partial and temporary than is commonly

6

admitted. The pedantic censure of Thomas Rymer on the score of Shakespeare's indifference to the classical canons attracted attention, but awoke in England no substantial echo. In his 'Short View of Tragedy' (1692) Rymer mainly concentrated his attention on Othello,' and reached the eccentric conclusion that it was 'a bloody farce without salt or savour.' In Pepys's eyes 'The Tempest' had 'no great wit,' and 'Midsummer Night's Dream' was 'the most insipid and ridiculous play'; yet this exacting critic witnessed thirty-six performances of twelve of Shakespeare's plays between October 11, 1660, and February 6, 1668-9, seeing 'Hamlet' four times, and 'Macbeth,' which he admitted to be 'a most excellent play for variety,' nine times. Dryden, the literary dictator of the day, repeatedly Dryden's complained of Shakespeare's inequalities—' he is the very Janus of poets.' But in almost the same breath Dryden declared that Shakespeare was held in as much veneration among Englishmen as Eschylus among the Athenians, and that he was the man who of all modern and perhaps ancient poets had the largest and most comprehensive soul. When he describes anything, you more than see it-you feel it too.' In 1693, when Sir Godfrey Kneller presented Dryden with a copy of the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, the poet acknowledged the gift thus:

TO SIR GODFREY KNELLER.

Shakspear, thy Gift, I place before my sight;
With awe, I ask his Blessing ere I write;
With Reverence look on his Majestick Face;
Proud to be less, but of his Godlike Race.
His Soul Inspires me, while thy Praise I write,
And I, like Teucer, under Ajax fight.

Writers of Charles II's reign of such opposite tempera-
ments as Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and
Sir Charles Sedley vigorously argued for Shakespeare's
supremacy. As a girl the sober duchess declares she fell in
love with Shakespeare. In her 'Sociable Letters,' which
were published in 1664, she enthusiastically, if diffusely,
described how Shakespeare creates the illusion that he had
been transformed into every one of those persons he hath
described,' and suffered all their emotions. When she
witnessed one of his tragedies she felt persuaded that
she was witnessing an episode in real life. Indeed,' she
concludes, 'Shakespeare had a clear judgment, a quick wit,

view.

Restoration adaptations.

From 1702

onwards.

a subtle observation, a deep apprehension, and a most
eloquent elocution.' The profligate Sedley, in a prologue
to the 'Wary Widdow,' a comedy by one Higden, produced
in 1693, apostrophised Shakespeare thus:

Shackspear whose fruitfull Genius, happy wit
Was fram'd and finisht at a lucky hit

The pride of Nature, and the shame of Schools,
Born to Create, and not to Learn from Rules.

Many adaptations of Shakespeare's plays were contrived to meet current sentiment of a less admirable type. But they failed efficiently to supersede the originals. Dryden and D'Avenant converted 'The Tempest' into an opera (1670). D'Avenant single-handed adapted 'The Two Noble Kinsmen' (1668) and 'Macbeth' (1674). Dryden dealt similarly with 'Troilus' (1679); Thomas Duffett with 'The Tempest' (1675); Shadwell with 'Timon' (1678); Nahum Tate with Richard II' (1681), Lear' (1681), and 'Coriolanus' (1682); John Crowne with 'Henry VI' (1681); D'Urfey with Cymbeline' (1682); Ravenscroft with 'Titus Andronicus' (1687); Otway with 'Romeo and Juliet' (1692); and John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, with Julius Cæsar' (1692). But during the same period the chief actor of the day, Thomas Betterton, won his spurs as the interpreter of Shakespeare's leading parts, often in unrevised versions. Hamlet was accounted that actor's masterpiece. 'No succeeding tragedy for several years,' wrote Downes, the prompter at Betterton's theatre, 'got more reputation or money to the company than this.'

From the accession of Queen Anne to the present day the tide of Shakespeare's reputation, both on the stage and among critics, has flowed onward almost uninterruptedly. The censorious critic, John Dennis, in his 'Letters' on Shakespeare's 'genius,' gave his work in 1711 whole-hearted commendation, and two of the greatest men of letters of the eighteenth century, Pope and Johnson, although they did not withhold all censure, paid him, as we have seen, the homage of becoming his editors. The school of textual criticism which Theobald and Capell founded in the middle years of the century has never ceased its activity since their day. Edmund Malone's devotion at the end of the eighteenth century to the biography of the poet and the contemporary history of the stage secured for him a vast

band of disciples, of whom Joseph Hunter and John Payne Collier well deserve mention. But of all Malone's successors, James Orchard Halliwell, afterwards HalliwellPhillipps (1820-1889), has made the most important additions to our knowledge of Shakespeare's biography.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there arose a third school to expound exclusively the æsthetic excellence of the plays. In its inception the æsthetic school owed much to the methods of Schlegel and other admiring critics of Shakespeare in Germany. But Coleridge in his 'Notes and Lectures' and Hazlitt in his 'Characters of Shakespeare's plays' (1817) are the best representatives of the æsthetic school in this or any other country. Although Professor Dowden, in his 'Shakespeare, his Mind and Art' (1874), and Mr. Swinburne, in his 'Study of Shakespeare' (1880), are worthy followers, Coleridge and Hazlitt remain as æsthetic critics unsurpassed. In the effort to supply a fuller interpretation of Shakespeare's works - textual, historical, and æsthetic- two publishing societies have done much valuable work. The Shakespeare Society' was founded in 1841 by Collier, Halliwell, and their friends, and published some forty-eight volumes before its dissolution in 1853. The New Shakspere Society, which was founded by Dr. Furnivall in 1874, issued during the ensuing twenty years twenty-seven publications, illustrative mainly of the text and of contemporary life and literature.

In 1769 Shakespeare's 'jubilee' was celebrated for three Stratford days (September 6-8) at Stratford, under the direction of festivals. Garrick, Dr. Arne, and Boswell. The festivities were repeated on a small scale in April 1827 and April 1830. 'The Shakespeare tercentenary festival,' which was held at Stratford from April 23 to May 4, 1864, claimed to be a national celebration.

stage.

On the English stage the name of every eminent actor On the since Betterton, the great actor of the period of the Resto- English ration, has been identified with Shakespearean parts. Steele, writing in the 'Tatler' (No. 167) in reference to Betterton's funeral in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey on May 2, 1710, instanced his rendering of Othello as proof of an unsurpassable talent in realising Shakespeare's subtlest conceptions on the stage. One great and welcome innovation in Shakespearean acting is closely associated with Betterton's name. He encouraged the substitution, which