He then proceeds further in the charge :- school. It appears, from the clearest evidence possible, that his father was a man of no little substance, and very well able to give him such education; which, perhaps, he might be inclined to carry further, by sending him to a university; but was prevented in this design (if he had it) by his son's early marriage, which, from monuments and other like evidence, it appears with no less certainty must have happened before he was seventeen, or very soon after: the displeasure of his father, which was the consequence of this marriage, or else some excesses which he is said to have been guilty of, it is probable drove him up to town; where he engaged early in some of the theatres, and was honoured with the patronage of the earl of Southampton: his 'Venus and Adonis' is addressed to that Earl in a very pretty and modest dedication, in which he calls it 'the first heire of his invention;' and ushers it to the world with this singular motto: 'Vilia miretur vulgus, mihi flavus Apollo But there was another cause of the hostility of Steevens and his school of commentators. FARMER was their Coriphæus. Their souls were prostrate before the extent of his researches in that species of literature which possesses this singular advantage for the cultivator, that, if he studies it in an original edition, of which only one or two copies are known to exist (the merit is gone if there is a baker's dozen known), he is immediately pronounced learned, judicious, laborious, acute. And this was Farmer's praise. He wrote, 'An Essay on the Learning of Shakspeare,' which has not one passage of solid criticism from the first page to the last, and from which, if the name and the works of Shakspere were to perish, and one copy-an unique copy is the affectionate name for these things-could be miraculously preserved, the only inference from the book would be that William Shakspere was a very obscure and ignorant man, whom some misjudging admirers had been desirous to exalt into an ephemeral reputa-him to the last; and it was the recordations, tion, and that Richard Farmer was a very distinguished and learned man, who had stripped the mask off the pretender. The first edition of Farmer's pamphlet appeared in 1767. Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua;' and the whole poem, as well as his 'Lucrece,' which followed it soon after, together with his choice of those subjects, are plain marks of his acquaintance with some of the Latin classics, at least, at that time. The dissipation of youth, and, when that was over, the busy scene in which he instantly plunged himself, may very well be supposed to have hindered his making any great progress in them; but that such a mind as his should quite lose the tincture of any knowledge it had once been imbued with cannot be imagined: accordingly we see that this schoollearning (for it was no more) stuck with as we may call it, of that learning which produced the Latin that is in many of his plays, and most plentifully in those that are the most early: every several piece of it is aptly introduced, given to a proper character, and uttered upon some proper occasion; and so well cemented, as it were, and joined to the passage it stands in, as to deal con Capell, who had studied Shakspere with far more accuracy than this mere pedant, who never produced any literary performance in his life except this arrogant pamph-viction to the judicious, that the whole was let, held a contrary opinion to Farmer :"It is our firm belief that Shakspeare was very well grounded, at least in Latin, at wrought up together, and fetched from his own little store, upon the sudden, and without study. rest eviden able to give her, by send s prevented by his son Auments and with no less efore he wa of, it is pr res, and s the earl donis is al pretty and calls it 'the nd ushers it motto: vus Apolio et aqua; is 'Lucrece gether with plain marks of the Latin The dissipa ras over, the itly plunged sed to have not be im stuck with recordations rring whe many of his ose that are iece of it is per charac er occasion: and joined e whole m 1, and with "The other languages which he has sometimes made use of-that is, the Italian and French-are not of such difficult conquest that we should think them beyond his reach. An acquaintance with the first of them was a sort of fashion in his time. Surrey and the sonnet-writers set it on foot, and it was continued by Sidney and Spenser: all our poetry issued from that school; and it would be wonderful indeed if he, whom we saw a little before putting himself with so much zeal under the banner of the Muses, should not have been tempted to taste at least of that fountain to which of all his other brethren there was such a continual resort let us conclude, then, that he did taste of it; but, happily for himself, and more happy for the world that enjoys him now, he did not find it to his relish, and threw away the cup. Metaphor apart, it is evident that he had some knowledge of the Italian-perhaps just as much as enabled him to read a novel or a poem, and to put some few fragments of it, with which his memory furnished him, into the mouth of a pedant or fine gentleman. of the folio by thrusting in passages out of the first drafts and imperfect copies. To say that his text is the result invariably of a sound judgment would be to say too much; and indeed some of his emendations approach a little to the ridiculous. But we have no hesitation in saying that it is a better text, because approaching more nearly to the originals, than that of many of those who came after him, and went on mending and mending for half a century till the world was tired with the din of their tinkering. The race which succeeded him was corrupted by flattery. Take a specimen : -"Shakspeare's felicity has been rendered complete in this age. His genius produced works that time could not destroy: but some of the lighter characters were become illegible; these have been restored by critics whose learning and penetration have traced back the vestiges of superannuated opinions and customs. They are now no longer in danger of being effaced.”* These critics had an accurate perception of part of their duty when they set out upon their work. The first labour of STEEVENS, which preceded the edition of Capell by two years, was to reprint in fac-simile "twenty of the plays of Shakspeare, being the whole number printed in quarto during his lifetime, or before the Restoration; collated where there were different copies, and published from the originals." Most accurately did he execute this laborious duty. The two great public libraries of England, the British Museum and the Bodleian, possess all the originals. The next progressive movement of Steevens was still in the same safe path. He became united with Johnson in the edition of 1773. In his advertisement he says,-" The labours of preceding editors have not left room for a boast that many valuable readings have been retrieved; though it may be fairly asserted that the text of Shakspeare is restored to the condition in which the author, or rather his first publishers, appear to have left it, such emendations as were absolutely necessary alone admitted." He defines what are absolutely necessary, such as a supply of particles when indispensable to "How or when he acquired it we must be content to be ignorant; but of the French language he was somewhat a greater master than of the two that have gone before; yet, unless we except their novelists, he does not appear to have had much acquaintance with any of their writers; what he has given us of it is merely colloquial, flows with great ease from him, and is reasonably pure. Should it be said he had travelled for it, we know not who can confute us." 66 The principle of Capell's edition, as described by himself in the title-page, was to give the plays of Shakspere as set out by himself in quarto, or by the players, his fellows, in folio." His introduction consists of an analysis of the value of these various authorities; and he discriminates very justly between those plays in quarto which "have much resemblance to those in the folio," and those which were 66 first drafts or else imperfect and stolen copies." His text is formed upon this discriminating principle, not attaching an equal value to all the original copies in quarto, or superseding the text *Mrs. Montagu:- Introduction.' the sense. He rejects with indignation all | attempts to tamper with the text by introducing a syllable in aid of the metre. He declines suggestions of correspondents "that might have proved of great advantage to a more daring commentator." Upon such safe foundations was the edition of 1773 reared. In 1778 it was 66 "revised and augmented," and in 1785 it was reprinted with additions by Isaac Reed, Steevens having declined the further care of the work. Steevens also in 1779 rendered an acceptable service to the students of our dramatic history, by the publication of 'Six | old plays, on which Shakspeare founded his Measure for Measure, Comedy of Errors. Taming the Shrew, King John, King Henry IV., King Henry V., and King Lear.' In 1780 MALONE appeared as an editor of Shakspere. He came forward with 'A Supplement' to the edition of 1778, in which he republished the poems of Shakspere, and the seven doubtful plays which had been printed as his in the third and fourth folios. The encouragement which he had received induced him, in 1790, when Steevens had retired from his editorial labours in connection with the bookseller's edition, to publish a complete edition of his own, but which was still a variorum edition, "with the corrections and illustrations of various commentators." In this first appeared his 'Dissertation on the Three Parts of Henry VI.,' and his 'Historical Account of the English Stage.' Malone professes the same anxiety to adhere to the genuine text of Shakspere as Steevens had professed before him; but he opened a wide field for editorial licence, in his principle of making up a text out of the folio edition and the previous quartos; and, to add to the apparent value of his own labours, he exaggerated, as others have since done, the real value of these quartos :They in general are preferable to the exhibition of the same plays in the folio; for this plain reason, because, instead of printing these plays from a manuscript, the editors of the folio, to save labour, or from some other motive, printed the greater part of them from the very copies which they represented as maimed and imperfect, and fre quently from a late, instead of the earliest, edition; in some instances with additions and alterations of their own." This is not an accurate statement of the question; for the large additions to the folio copy when compared with the quartos, the careful emendations, and even the omissions, which are seldom without some sound apparent reason, could not have been the additions and alterations of the editors of the folio, but must have been the result of the author's labours, perhaps during a series of years. .... It appears from Malone's preface that a feeling was gaining ground that the constant accession of notes to Shakspere was becoming an evil :-" The admirers of this poet will, I trust, not merely pardon the great accession of new notes in the present edition, but examine them with some degree of pleasure.—An idle notion has been propagated that Shakspeare has been buried under his commentators; and it has again and again been repeated by the tasteless and the dull, 'that notes, though often necessary, are necessary evils.' During the era of conjectural criticism and capricious innovation, notes were indeed evils: while one page was covered with ingenious sophistry in support of some idle conjecture, and another was wasted in its overthrow, or in erecting a new fabric equally unsubstantial as the former. . . . . . . While our object is to support and establish what the poet wrote, to illustrate his phraseology by comparing it with that of his contemporaries, and to explain his fugitive allusions to customs long since disused and forgotten,while this object is kept steadily in view, if even every line of his plays were accompanied with a comment, every intelligent reader would be indebted to the industry of him who produced it. Such uniformly has been the object of the notes now presented to the public. Let us then hear no more of this barbarous jargon concerning Shakspeare's having been elucidated into obscurity, and buried under the load of his commentators." There is a great deal of truth in this; but it is not all the truth. Malone disagrees with the following observation of Johnson : "It is not (he remarks) very grateful to consider how little the succession of editors | Shaksperes without feeling the utter want has added to this author's power of pleasing. of a reverent spirit towards the author. He was read, admired, studied, and imitated, These things sank more deeply into the while he was yet deformed with all the im- minds of the readers of Shakspere than the proprieties which ignorance and neglect general expressions of the commentators' could accumulate upon him." The new admiration; which after all seemed little editor, with a pardonable complacency to- more than compliments to themselves in wards his calling, says,—“He certainly was their association with the poet. Schlegel, read, admired, studied, and imitated at the we cannot but acknowledge, has stated the period mentioned; but surely not in the truth with tolerable exactness: "Like same degree as at present. The succession Dante, Shakspere has received the indisof editors has effected this; it has made pensable but cumbersome honour of being him understood; it has made him popular; it treated like a classical author of antiquity. has shown every one who is capable of read- The oldest editions have been carefully coling how much superior he is not only to lated, and where the readings seemed corJonson and Fletcher, whom the bad taste of rupted many improvements have been atthe last age from the time of the Restora- tempted; and the whole literature of his tion to the end of the century set above age has been drawn forth from the oblivion him, but to all the dramatic poets of an- to which it had been consigned, for the sake tiquity." Jonson and Fletcher were not set of explaining the phrases, and illustrating above Shakspere, as we have demonstratively the allusions, of Shakspere. Commentators shown, from the time of the Restoration to have succeeded one another in such numthe end of the century. But, even if they bers, that their labours, with the critical were, it was not the succession of editors controversies to which they have given rise, that had made Shakspere popular. A plain constitute of themselves a library of no inreprint of Shakspere without a single note, considerable magnitude. These labours are but with the spelling modernized, would deserving of our praise and gratitude; and have made him more popular than all the more especially the historical inquiries into critical editions which the eighteenth cen- the sources from which Shakspere drew his tury had produced. Malone says, that materials, and into the former state of the during that century "thirty thousand copies English stage. But, with respect to the of Shakspeare have been dispersed through criticisms which are merely of a philological England." The number would have been nature, I am frequently compelled to differ quadrupled if Shakspere had been left to from the commentators; and where they his own unaided power. Much of what the consider him merely as a poet, endeavour to commentators did, especially in the illustrapronounce upon his merits, and to enter into tion of Shakspere's phraseology and the ex- his views, I must separate myself from them planation of his fugitive allusions, they did entirely. I have hardly ever found either well. But they must needs be critics, with- truth or profundity in their observations out having any system of criticism more and these critics seems to me to be but stamprofound than the easy task of fault-finding; mering interpreters of the general and aland thus they rendered Shakspere less popu- most idolatrous admiration of his countrylar than he would have been in an age when men."* criticism was little understood, and men's eyes were dazzled by an array of names to support some flippant remark upon Shakspere's want of art, some exhibition of his ignorance, some detection of his anachronisms, some discovery of a quibble beyond the plain meaning of the word. It is scarcely possible to read a scene of the variorum ; The editors of the first collection of the works of Shakspere, in their 'Address to the great Variety of Readers,' say—“ Read him therefore; and again, and again: and, if then you do not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger not to understand him.” *Lectures on Dramatic Literature,' Black's Translation, vol. ii. p. 103. This was advice that could not have pro- | ceeded from any common mind. The foundation of a right understanding of Shakspere is love. Steevens read again and again without love, and therefore without understanding. Boswell, the editor of Malone's posthumous edition, speaking of a note on 'Hamlet,' says, that Steevens has expressed himself "with as much asperity as if he had had a personal quarrel with the author." Steevens had a pettifogging mind, without a particle of lofty feeling, without imagination, without even a logical apprehension of the small questions to which he applied himself. But he was wonderfully laborious. Knowing nothing of the principles of philosophical criticism, he spared no pains in hunting up illustrative facts; he dabbled in classical learning so as to be able to apply a quotation with considerable neatness; and he laboured his style into epigrammatic smartness which passed for wit. The vicious style of the letters of Junius was evidently his model; and what that cowardly libeller had been in the political world Steevens was ambitious to be in the literary. He very often attacked, under a mask, those with whom he mixed in intimate companionship; till at last his name became a byword for meanness and malignity. It was impossible that such a man could have written about Shakspere without displaying as much asperity as if he had had a personal quarrel with him." And yet he was to be pitied. Like Hamlet, he had a task laid upon him above his powers. Early in life he attached himself to literature and literary pursuits, not from any necessity, for his fortune was ample, but with a real and sincere devotion. He attached himself to Shakspere. He became an editor of Shakspere. He was associated with Johnson in the preparation of an edition, and what he did in his own way was far superior to what his colleague had effected without him. He gave a new tone to the critical illustration of Shakspere, by bringing not only the elegant literature of Shakspere's own age to compare with him, but by hunting over all the sweepings of the book-stalls of the same age, to find the application of a familiar allusion, or the mean 66 | ing of an uncommon word. But he became ambitious to show his power of writing, as well as his diligence. If we turn over the variorum editions, and light upon a note which contains something like a burst of genial admiration for the author, we find the name of Warburton affixed to it. Warburton's intellect was capacious enough for love of Shakspere. But he delighted in decorating his opinions with the tinsel of his own paradoxes. Steevens was the man to pull off the tinsel; but he did it after the fashion in which the lace was stripped from Brother Jack's coat :-" Courteous reader, you are given to understand that zeal is never so highly obliged as when you set it a-tearing ; and Jack, who doted on that quality in himself, allowed it at this time its full swing. Thus it happened that, stripping down a parcel of gold lace a little too hastily, he rent the main body of his coat from top to bottom; and, whereas his talent was not of the happiest in taking up a stitch, he knew no better way than to darn it again with packthread and a skewer."* The zeal for tearing increased with Steevens. He retired for fifteen years from the editorship of Shakspere, to recreate himself in the usual way in which such minds find diversion-by anonymous attacks upon his literary contemporaries. But in 1793 he returned with renewed vigour to his labour of love, the defacing of Shakspere. Malone, in the interval, had been working hard, though perhaps with no great talent, in the endeavour to preserve every vestige of his author. He was successful, and Steevens was thenceforward his enemy. He would no longer walk in the path that he had once trod. He rejected all his old conservative opinions. In his edition of 1793, he sets out in his Advertisement with the following well-known manifesto against a portion of the works of Shakspere, the supposed merit or demerit of which, it is perfectly evident, must have been applied as a standard for other portions of Shakspere's poetical excellence :—" "We have not reprinted the Sonnets, &c., of Shakspeare, because the strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers *Tale of a Tub.' |
