A Study of Shakespeare

This ebook was prepared by Les Bowler.
Begun in the winter of 1874, a first instalment of “A Study of Shakespeare” appeared in the Fortnightly Review for May 1875, and a second in the number for June 1876, but the completed work was not issued in book form until June 1880. In a letter to me (January 31, 1875), Swinburne said:
“I am now at work on my long-designed essay or study on the metrical progress or development of Shakespeare, as traceable by ear and not by finger, and the general changes of tone and stages of mind expressed or involved in this change or progress of style.”
The book was produced at the moment when controversy with regard to the internal evidence of composition in the writings attributed to Shakespeare was raging high, and the amusing appendices were added at the last moment that they might infuriate the pedants of the New Shakespeare Society. They amply fulfilled that amiable purpose.
EDMUND GOSSE
September 1918
CONTENTS A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE I. FIRST PERIOD: LYRIC AND FANTASTIC II. SECOND PERIOD: COMIC AND HISTORIC III. THIRD PERIOD: TRAGIC AND ROMANTIC APPENDIX I. NOTE ON THE HISTORICAL PLAY OF KING EDWARD III. II. REPORT OF THE PROCEEDINGS ON THIS FIRST ANNIVERSARY SESSION OF THE NEWEST SHAKESPEARE SOCIETY III. ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS
The greatest poet of our age has drawn a parallel of elaborate eloquence between Shakespeare and the sea; and the likeness holds good in many points of less significance than those which have been set down by the master-hand. For two hundred years at least have students of every kind put forth in every sort of boat on a longer or a shorter voyage of research across the waters of that unsounded sea. From the paltriest fishing-craft to such majestic galleys as were steered by Coleridge and by Goethe, each division of the fleet has done or has essayed its turn of work; some busied in dredging alongshore, some taking surveys of this or that gulf or headland, some putting forth through shine and shadow into the darkness of the great deep. Nor does it seem as if there would sooner be an end to men’s labour on this than on the other sea. But here a difference is perceptible. The material ocean has been so far mastered by the wisdom and the heroism of man that we may look for a time to come when the mystery shall be manifest of its furthest north and south, and men resolve the secret of the uttermost parts of the sea: the poles also may find their Columbus. But the limits of that other ocean, the laws of its tides, the motive of its forces, the mystery of its unity and the secret of its change, no seafarer of us all may ever think thoroughly to know. No wind-gauge will help us to the science of its storms, no lead-line sound for us the depth of its divine and terrible serenity.