Grethe speaking, it is right to say not only that little inaccuracies of time and place are merely venial faults, but also that they necessarily result from the essential conditions of art itself, and that every drama derived from ancient history, which is the creation of a poet, and not a slavish copy by a mere man of learning, may fearlessly violate temporary and local characteristics and present huge anachronisms. "Shakespeare," says Goethe, "turns his Romans into Englishman, and he does right, for otherwise his nation would not have understood him." With Ben Jonson the case was different; he endeavoured with all the scrupulously exact details furnished by a careful and minute learning to put true Romans on the stage, and ended by writing two tragedies which can only be understood and relished by men of learning, and are quite without interest for the general public. But note the miracle performed by genius:—while Ben Jonson scrupulously preserves the outward covering, the soul escapes him, and his Romans have nothing Roman about them but their costume; but Shakespeare, the creator of souls, makes truer Romans at heart than Ben Jonson does, just because the Englishmen around him, whom we are told he took for his models, have traits of character in common with the citizens of the ancient Republic, and the populace of London is the living image of the populace of Rome, and because what he paints is eternal humanity. Such in rapid outlines are the principal questions that have here to be examined in regard to Shakespeare's classical plays. As of these plays there is only half a dozen, it is a tolerably wide study in a small compass, and this new mode of approaching the genius of the great poet would, if there were any need, make the subject fresh and new, only I venture to think that Shakespeare, under whatever aspects he may be studied, will always possess as fresh an interest as on the day that criticism first laid hands upon him. The study of Shakespeare, far from being stale or from having been worn threadbare, is always new, not only in the sense in which it is true of every great genius. by virtue of the unfathomable depths of his thought, but also from circumstances peculiar to his case. Though born in a period on which the full light of history is shed, scarcely anything is known either of his life or character. The ascertained facts of his history are so "few and far between," that, in order to make a coherent whole, his commentators are driven to fill up the shadowy outlines with conjectures. They ransack his works in hopes of finding some revelation of his personal character, and interrogate his sonnets, which are full of obscurity; but though one commentator is followed by another no two commentaries are alike. They turn to his plays and say, “Hamlet is Shakespeare," and they also see certain features of his disposition in the melancholy of Jaques, the misanthropy of Timon, and the grave sadness of Vincentio ; until a new interpreter arises and says, " You are all wrong. Henry V., hiding practical good sense and a love of action under the mask of madcap jollity, is the real Shakespeare." Nothing is more hazardous than such a mode of proceeding, which tends unconsciously to despoil Shakespeare of his highest glory; forgetting, in fact, that dramatic art is essentially impersonal, and that if Shakespeare is the greatest of dramatic poets it is owing to the infinite variety of characters which he created, as if in play, in more lavish profusion than any other writer, while he floats above them with the quiet smile of a creator standing aloof from his work-so much aloof, in fact, that he would seem not to have troubled himself about it. One would almost say he took up the profession of a poet simply to make his fortune, and this end being attained, he retired from the stage in the full flow of life and talent, and spent the rest of his days in the country, in the enjoyment of the ease and comfort he had secured, without even taking the trouble to publish his works. And yet it can hardly be said that he felt no anxiety about his literary reputation, for he carefully edited and re-edited his poems and sonnets; neither can it be said that he was ignorant of his greatness as a dramatic poet, for the admiration bestowed by his contemporaries spoke plainly enough on this point; nor, finally, can it be said that dramatic works had no existence outside the theatre, and that their fortune was inseparably linked with scenic representation, for Ben Jonson not only published his plays but also found readers, and the drama-loving public was so eager to read Shakespeare's, that eighteen of them were printed off in great haste, and very incorrectly, as works published without the consent and concurrence of the author stand a good chance of being. Thus Shakespeare himself is an enigma to begin with, to which, as to all insoluble enigmas, a different explanation is given by every new guesser. Passing from his personal history to his works, and in the first place to criticism of the text, we find the same uncertainty reigning everywhere. Whether it was that he did not deign to take any trouble about his fame, or that time was wanting to carry out his intentions, or from any other reason that we are pleased to imagine, the fact remains that Shakespeare, as has already been said, did not himself collect and publish his plays. The first complete edition appeared in 1623, seven years after his death, in a folio volume, which, as it swarms with printers' mistakes, unintelligible passages, false lines, wrong punctuation, and errors and absurdities of every kind, cannot be appealed to as the true text, and can only serve as the basis for conjecture. A glance may here be thrown over some of the latest conjectures concerning what are called his doubtful plays, for besides numerous doubtful passages, there are whole plays of which the authenticity is anything but clearly established. Critical studies of his works are published by the New Shakspere Society, which, it may be remarked in passing, has adopted, in the absence of unanimity among critics as to the right mode of spelling the celebrated name it bears, one that has hitherto not been generally in use, so that Shakespeare's very name is uncertain. Many conjectures about disputed points are put forth by the society, but often what is suggested by one member is disputed and contradicted by another: for example, Rev. F. G. Fleay thinks that "Titus Andronicus "-a horrible drama attributed to Shakespeare, at all events in part-should be entirely taken off the list of his works, while Mr. Wheatley protests against this view, and brings forward external proofs which have often done service before in the discussion, and also breaks new ground in producing internal evidence, pointing out all the lines of this atrocious tragedy, which seem to him undoubtedly to bear the mark of the master's hand. Another doubtful play is "Timon of Athens," the incoherencies and inconsistencies of which appear to point to a want of unity in the workmanship; besides which, several scenes are pronounced by competent judges to be baldly and tamely written in a prosaic style quite unlike that of Shakespeare. A duality in its composition is generally admitted, but till now it was usually supposed that Shakespeare rehandled a play already in existence as an acting piece, and introduced new scenes into it. A member of the New Shakspere Society ingeniously reverses this hypothesis, and takes the original portion, the nucleus of the play, to be of Shakespeare's authorship, but believes that it afterwards received amplification at the hands of a clumsy workman. As to the reason of this unfortunate amplification the conjecture advanced by the critic is most original. The printers of the folio edition of 1623, in consequence of some mistake in their measurements, found themselves short of thirty pages, needed to make up the volume. In this necessity they must have taken "Timon of Athens," which was the last play remaining to be printed, and have put it into the hands of some dramaturge, charging him to fill it up to the required length. It may be well to add that the author of this conjecture, justly frightened at his own audacity, owns himself that it is bold even to impudence. The same reversal of opinion has taken place with regard to "Pericles," the third doubtful play. It is now suggested that Shakespeare, instead of touching up and finishing an earlier play, wrote the first sketch of it, composed only of the history of Marina; and to this view Tennyson lends the support of the great authority that belongs to him as a poet. These details sufficiently show how fresh and endless an interest there still is in the critical study of the text of Shakespeare. And much the same uncertainty exists with regard to the chronological order of his plays, a point which used to be looked upon as settled. The question has been again thrown open by a new set of arguments deduced from the changes in the structure of his verse at successive periods of his life. It has been remarked, for instance, that his verses in his youth, when he showed a predilection for rhyme, move with a caution and timidity which they afterwards shook off. In proportion to the ripening of his talent, his versification became ampler and more free, and between his first plays and his last there are differences analogous to those between "Les Orientales" of Victor Hugo and his " Légende des Siècles." Dryden, deeming the drama of "Pericles" unworthy of Shakespeare's genius, regarded it as a work rehandled by him in his youthful days, an opinion in which all critics followed suit, until now, when its original portion, the romance of Marina, is ranked |