From 1702 onwards.
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 editor. 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. [332b] 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 Halliwell-Phillipps (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’ [333] 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.