ANONYMOUS, 1769
“To the Immortal Memory of Shakespeare.”
Immortal be his name,
His memory, his fame!
Nature and her works we see,
Matchless Shakespeare, full in thee!
Join’d by everlasting ties,
Shakespeare but with Nature dies.
Immortal be his Name,
His memory, his fame!
Shakespeare’s Garland. Being a Collection of New Songs, Ballads, etc., performed at the Jubilee at Stratford-upon-Avon. 1769, p. 15.
WILLIAM RICHARDSON, 1774
(1743-1814)
No writer has hitherto appeared who possesses in a more eminent degree than Shakespeare, the power of imitating the passions. All of them seem familiar to him; the boisterous no less than the gentle; the benign no less than the malignant. There are several writers, as there are many players, who are successful in imitating some particular passions, but who appear stiff, awkward, and unnatural, in the expression of others. Some are capable of exhibiting very striking representations of resolute and intrepid natures, but cannot so easily bend themselves to those that are softer and more complacent. Others, again, seem full of amiable affection and tenderness, but cannot exalt themselves to the boldness of the hero, or magnanimity of the patriot. The genius of Shakespeare is unlimited. Possessing extreme sensibility, and uncommonly susceptible, he is the Proteus of the drama; he changes himself into every character, and enters easily into every condition of human nature.
Many dramatic writers of different ages are capable, occasionally, of breaking out, with great fervour of genius, in the natural language of strong emotion. No writer of antiquity is more distinguished for abilities of this kind than Euripides. His whole heart and soul seem torn and agitated by the force of the passion he imitates. He ceases to be Euripides; he is Medea; he is Orestes. Shakespeare,
however, is most eminently distinguished, not only by these occasional sallies, but by imitating the passion in all its aspects, by pursuing it through all its windings and labyrinths, by moderating or accelerating its impetuosity according to the influence of other principles and of external events, and finally by combining it in a judicious manner with other passions and propensities, or by setting it aptly in opposition. He thus unites the two essential powers of dramatic invention, that of forming characters; and that of imitating in their natural expressions, the passions and affections of which they are composed.
A Philosophical Analysis and Illustration of some of Shakespeare’s remarkable Characters. 1774. Introduction, pp. 39-42.
WILLIAM JULIUS MICKLE, 1775
(1735-1788)
When Heaven decreed to soothe the feuds that tore
The wolf-eyed barons, whose unletter’d rage
Spurn’d the fair muse, Heaven bade on Avon’s shore
A Shakespeare rise, and soothe the barbarous age:
A Shakespeare rose; the barbarous heats assuage.
At distance due how many bards attend!
Enlarged and liberal from the narrow cage
Of blinded zeal, new manners wide extend,
And o’er the generous breast the dews of heaven descend.
Introduction to The Lusiad, or the Discovery of India. An Epic Poem. Translated, 1775.
WILLIAM HAYLEY, 1777
(1745-1820)
When mighty Shakespeare to thy judging eye
Presents that magic glass whose ample round
Reflects each figure in Creation’s bound,
And pours, in floods of supernatural light,
Fancy’s bright beings on the charmed sight,
This chief enchanter of the willing breast
Will teach thee all the magic he possessed.
Placed in his circle, mark in colours true
Each brilliant being that he calls to view:
Wrapt in the gloomy storm, or robed in light,
His weird sister or his fairy sprite.
Boldly o’erleaping, in the great design,
The bounds of nature, with a guide divine.
A Poetic Epistle to an Eminent Painter [George Romney]. 2nd edition, 1779. Part II. ll. 472-84.
THOMAS WARTON, 1777
(1728-1790)
Avon, thy rural view, thy pastures wild,
The willows that o’erhang thy twilight edge,
Their boughs entangling with the embattled sedge;
Thy brink with watery foliage quaintly fring’d,
Thy surface with reflected verdure ting’d;
Soothe me with many a pensive pleasure mild.
But while I muse, that here the bard divine,
Whose sacred dust yon high arch’d aisles enclose,
Where the tall windows rise in stately rows
Above the embowering shade,
Here first, at Fancy’s fairy-circled shrine,
Of daisies pied his infant offering made;
Here playful yet, in stripling years unripe,
Fram’d of thy reeds a shrill and artless pipe:
Sudden thy beauties, Avon, all are fled,
As at the waving of some magic wand;
An holy trance my charmed spirit wings,
And awful shapes of warriors and of kings
People the busy mead,
Like spectres swarming to the wizard’s hall;
And slowly pace, and point with trembling hand
The wounds ill-cover’d with the purple pall.
Before me Pity seems to stand
A weeping mourner, smote with anguish sore,
To see Misfortune rend in frantic mood
His robe, with regal woes embroider’d o’er.
Pale Terror leads the visionary band,
And sternly shakes his sceptre dropping blood.
“Monody written near Stratford-upon-Avon.” Miscellaneous Odes. 1777.
ANNA SEWARD, BEFORE 1782
(1747-1809)
“On Shakespeare’s Monument at Stratford-upon-Avon.”
Great Homer’s birth sev’n rival cities claim,
Too mighty such monopoly of Fame;
Yet not to birth alone did Homer owe
His wondrous worth; what Egypt could bestow,
With all the schools of Greece and Asia join’d,
Enlarg’d th’ immense expansion of his mind.
Nor yet unrival’d the Mæonian strain,
The British Eagle and the Mantuan Swan
Tow’r equal heights. But happier Stratford, thou
With incontested laurels deck thy brow:
Thy bard was thine unschool’d, and from thee brought
More than all Egypt, Greece, or Asia taught.
Not Homer’s self such matchless honours won;
The Greek has rivals, but thy Shakespeare none.
Dodsley’s Collection of Poems by Several Hands. 1782, ii. p. 315.
“The British Eagle,” i.e. Milton.
WILLIAM LISLE BOWLES, 1794
(1762-1850)
“On Shakespeare.”
O sovereign master, who with lovely state
Dost rule as in some isle’s enchanted land,
On whom soft airs and shadowy spirits wait,
Whilst scenes of faerie bloom at thy command!
On thy wild shores forgetful could I lie,
And list, till earth dissolved, to thy sweet minstrelsy!
Called by thy magic from the hoary deep,
Aërial forms should in bright troops ascend,
And then a wondrous masque before me sweep;
While sounds that the earth owned not, seem to blend
Their stealing melodies, that when the strain
Ceased, I should weep, and would so dream again!
The charm is wound: I see an aged form,
In white robes, on the winding sea-shore stand;
O’er the careering surge he waves his wand:
Upon the black rock bursts the bidden storm.
Now from bright opening clouds I hear a lay,
Come to these yellow sands, fair stranger, come away.
Saw ye pass by the weird sisters pale?
Marked ye the lowering castle on the heath?
Hark! hark! is the deed done? the deed of death!
The deed is done—hail, king of Scotland, hail!
I see no more;—to many a fearful sound
The bloody cauldron sinks, and all is dark around.
Pity! touch the trembling strings,
A maid, a beauteous maniac, wildly sings:
“They laid him in the ground so cold,
Upon his breast the earth is thrown;
High is heaped the grassy mould,
Oh! he is dead and gone.
The winds of the winter blow o’er his cold breast,
But pleasant shall be his rest.”
The song is ceased. Ah! who, pale shade, art thou,
Sad raving to the rude tempestuous night?
Sure thou hast had much wrong, so stern thy brow;
So piteous thou dost tear thy tresses white;
So wildly thou dost cry, “Blow, bitter wind,
Ye elements, I call not you unkind.”
Beneath the shade of nodding branches grey,
And rude romantic woods, and glens forlorn,
The merry hunters wear the hours away;
Rings the deep forest to the joyous horn!
Joyous to all, but him who with sad look
Hangs idly musing by the brawling brook.
But mark the merry elves of fairy land!
To the high moon’s gleamy glance,
They with shadowy morris dance;
Soft music dies along the desert sand;
Soon at peep of cold-eyed day
Soon the numerous lights decay;
After the dewy moon they fly.
Let rosy laughter now advance,
And wit with sparkling eye,
Where quaint powers lurking lie
Bright fancy, the queen of the revels, shall dance,
And point to the frolicsome train
And antic forms that flit unnumbered o’er the plain.
O sovereign master! at whose sole command
We start with terror, or with pity weep;
O! where is now thy all-creating wand?
Buried ten thousand fathoms in the deep.
The staff is broke, the powerful spell is fled,
And never earthly guest shall in thy circle tread.
Sonnets, with other Poems. 3rd edition. 1794, pp. 67-70.
This poem appears in later editions of Bowle’s sonnets in a different form. Stanza 9 is omitted, and the remaining stanzas are arranged thus: 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 3, 4, 5, 10:
“Come to these yellow sands.” Ferdinand. See The Tempest.
“The weird sisters.” See Macbeth.
“A beauteous maniac.” Ophelia. See Hamlet.
“Blow, bitter wind.” See King Lear.
“Him, who with sad look.” Jacques. See As You Like It.
“Elves of fairy land.” See Midsummer Night’s Dream.
THE THIRD PERIOD
NINETEENTH CENTURY
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1802
(1770-1850)
It is not to be thought of that the flood
Of British freedom, which, to the open sea
Of the world’s praise, from dark antiquity
Hath flowed “with pomp of waters unwithstood,”
Roused though it be full often to a mood
Which spurns the check of salutary bands,
That this most famous stream in bogs and sands
Should perish; and to evil and to good
Be lost for ever. In our halls is hung
Armoury of the invincible knights of old:
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakspeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung
Of Earth’s first blood, have titles manifold.
“Sonnets dedicated to Liberty.” Poems. 1807.
FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS, 1804
(1793-1835)
“Shakespeare.”
I love to rove o’er history’s page,
Recall the hero and the sage;
Revive the actions of the dead,
And memory of ages fled:
Yet it yields me greater pleasure
To read the poet’s pleasing measure.
Led by Shakespeare, bard inspired,
The bosom’s energies are fired;
We learn to shed the generous tear
O’er poor Ophelia’s sacred bier;
To love the merry moonlit scene,
With fairy elves in valleys green;
Or borne on fancy’s heavenly wings,
To listen while sweet Ariel sings.
How sweet the native wood notes wild
Of him, the Muse’s favourite child!
Of him whose magic lays impart
Each various feeling to the heart.
Poems. By Felicia Dorothea Browne, 1808, p. 48.
One of Mrs. Hemans’ earliest tastes—relates her sister in her Memoirs—was a passion for Shakespeare, which she read as her choicest recreation at six years old. The above lines were written when she was eleven years of age.
SIR WALTER SCOTT, 1814
(1771-1832)
The English stage might be considered as equally without rule and without model when Shakespeare arose. The effect of the genius of an individual upon the taste of a nation is mighty; but that genius, in its turn, is formed according to the opinions prevalent at the period when it comes into existence. Such was the case with Shakespeare. With an education more extensive, and a taste refined by the classical models, it is probable that he also, in admiration of the ancient drama, might have mistaken the form for the essence, and subscribed to those rules which had produced such masterpieces of art. Fortunately for the full exertion of a genius as comprehensive and versatile, as intense and powerful, Shakespeare had no access to any models of which the commanding merit might have controlled and limited his own exertions. He followed the path which a nameless crowd of obscure writers had trodden before him; but he moved in it with the grace and majestic step of a being of a superior order, and vindicated for ever the British theatre from a pedantic restriction to classical rule. Nothing went before Shakespeare which in any respect was fit to fix and stamp the character of a national drama; and certainly no one will succeed him, capable of establishing by mere authority, a form more restricted than that which Shakespeare used.
Article on “Drama,” Encyclopædia Britannica. 4th ed. 1814. 6th ed. vol. viii. p. 157.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 1817
(1772-1834)
No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. In Shakespeare’s Poems, the creative power, and the intellectual energy, wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At length in the Drama they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other. Or, like two rapid streams, that at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other, and intermix reluctantly and in tumult; but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores, blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current and with one voice. The “Venus and Adonis” did not, perhaps, allow the display of the deeper passions. But the story of Lucretia seems to favour, and even demand their intensest workings. And yet we find in Shakespeare’s management of the tale, neither pathos, nor any other dramatic quality. There is the same minute and faithful imagery as in the former poem, in the same vivid colours, inspirited by the same impetuous vigour of thought, and diverging and contracting with the same activity of the assimilative and of the modifying faculties; and with a yet larger display, a yet wider range of knowledge and reflection; and, lastly, with the same perfect dominion, often domination, over the whole
world of language. What then shall we say? even this: that—
Shakespeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration possessed by the spirit, not possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power, by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class; to that power, which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic mountain, with Milton as his compeer, not rival. While the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, to one Proteus of the fire and the flood; the other attracts all forms and things to himself, in the unity of his own Ideal. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of Milton; while Shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself. O what great men hast thou not produced, England! my country!
Biographia Literaria. 1817, chap. xv.
The following is from Coleridge’s Literary Remains, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge, 1867, ii. pp. 68-69:—I greatly dislike beauties and selections in general; but as proof positive of his unrivalled excellence, I should like to try Shakespeare by this criterion. Make out your amplest catalogue of all the human faculties, as reason or the moral law, the will, the feeling of the coincidence of the two (a feeling sui generis et demonstratio demonstrationum) called the conscience, the understanding or prudence, wit, fancy, imagination, judgment,—and then of the objects on which these are to be employed, as the beauties, the terrors, and the seeming caprices of nature, the realities and the capabilities, that is, the actual and the ideal, of the human mind, conceived as an individual or as a social being, as in innocence or in guilt, in a play-paradise, or in a war-field of temptation; and then compare with Shakespeare under each of these heads all or any of the writers in prose and verse that have ever lived! Who, that is
competent to judge, doubts the result? And ask your own hearts,—ask your own common-sense—to conceive the possibility of this man being—I say not, the drunken savage of that wretched sciolist, whom Frenchmen, to their shame, have honoured before their elder and better worthies,—but the anomalous, the wild, the irregular, genius of our daily criticism! What! are we to have miracles in sport? Or, I speak reverently, does God choose idiots by whom to convey divine truths to man?
For a passage on Shakespeare as a “philosophical aristocrat” who “never promulgates any party tenets,” see “Notes on the Tempest.”
FRANCIS LORD JEFFREY, 1817
(1773-1850)
More full of wisdom and ridicule and sagacity, than all the moralists and satirists that ever existed—he [Shakespeare] is more wild, airy and inventive, and more pathetic and fantastic, than all the poets of all regions and ages of the world:—and has all those elements so happily mixed up in him, and bears his high faculties so temperately, that the most severe reader cannot complain of him for want of strength or of reason—nor the most sensitive for defect of ornament or ingenuity. Every thing in him is in unmeasured abundance, and unequalled perfection—but everything so balanced and kept in subordination, as not to jostle or disturb or take the place of another. The most exquisite poetical conceptions, images, and descriptions are given with such brevity, and introduced with such skill, as merely to adorn, without loading the sense they accompany. Although his sails are purple and perfumed, and his prow of beaten gold, they waft him on his voyage, not less, but more rapidly and directly than if they had been composed of baser materials. All his excellences, like those of Nature herself, are thrown out together; and instead of interfering with, support and recommend each other. His flowers are not tied up in garlands, nor his fruits crushed into baskets—but spring living from the soil, in all the dew and freshness of youth; while the graceful foliage in which they lurk, and the ample branches, the
rough and vigorous stem, and the wide-spreading roots on which they depend, are present along with them, and share, in their places, the equal care of their Creator.
The Edinburgh Review, August 1817. Art. IX. “Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, by William Hazlitt.”
Vol. xxviii. p. 474.
WILLIAM HAZLITT, 1818
(1778-1830)
The striking peculiarity of Shakespeare’s mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds—so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune or conflict of passion, or turn of thought. He had “a mind reflecting ages past,” and present:—All the people that ever lived are there. There was no respect of persons with him. His genius alone shone equally on the evil and on the good, on the wise and the foolish, the monarch and the beggar: “All corners of the earth, kings, queens, and states, maids, matrons, nay, the secrets of the grave,” are hardly hid from his searching glance. He was like the genius of humanity, changing places with all of us at pleasure, and playing with our purposes as with his own. He turned the globe round for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives—as well those that they knew, as those
which they did not know, or acknowledge to themselves. The dreams of childhood, the ravings of despair, were the toys of his fancy. Airy beings waited at his call, and came at his bidding. Harmless fairies nodded to him, and did him curtesies: and the night-hag bestrode the blast at the command of “his so potent art.” The world of spirits lay open to him, like the world of real men and women: and there is the same truth in his delineations of the one as of the other; for if the preternatural characters he describes could be supposed to exist, they would speak, and feel, and act, as he makes them. He had only to think of any thing in order to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it. When he conceived of a character, whether real or imaginary, he not only entered into all its thoughts and feelings, but seemed instantly, and as if by touching a secret spring, to be surrounded with all the same objects, “subject to the same skyey influences,” the same local, outward, and unforeseen accidents which would occur in reality.
“On Shakespeare and Milton,” Lectures on The English Poets. 1818, pp. 91-3.
For a comment on this passage by William Minto, see p. [189].
The following occurs in Hazlitt’s essay “On Dryden and Pope” (ib., pp. 137-38):—The poet of nature is one who, from the elements of beauty, of power, and of passion in his own breast, sympathises with whatever is beautiful, and grand, and impassioned in nature, in its simple majesty, in its immediate appeal to the senses, to the thoughts and hearts of all men; so that the poet of nature, by the truth, and depth, and harmony of his mind, may be said to hold communion with the very soul of nature; to be identified with and to foreknow and to record the feelings of all men at all times and places, as they are liable to the same impressions; and to exert the same power over the minds of his readers, that nature does. He sees things in their eternal beauty, for he sees them as they are; he feels them in their universal interest, for he feels them as they
affect the first principles of his and our common nature. Such was Homer, such was Shakespeare, whose works will last as long as nature, because they are a copy of the indestructible forms and everlasting impulses of nature, welling out from the bosom as from a perennial spring, or stamped upon the senses by the hand of their maker. The power of the imagination in them, is the representative power of all nature. It has its centre in the human soul, and makes the circuit of the universe.
See also The Round Table, 1817—“On Posthumous Fame—whether Shakespeare was influenced by a love of it.”
JOHN KEATS, c. 1818
(1795-1821)
The genius of Shakespeare was an innate universality—wherefore he had the utmost achievement of human intellect prostrate beneath his indolent and kingly gaze. He could do easily Man’s utmost. His plans of tasks to come were not of this world—if what he purposed to do hereafter would not in his own Idea “answer the aim,” how tremendous must have been his Conception of Ultimates!
Note on Troilus and Cressida, I. iii. Marginalia from the Shakespeare Folio of 1808. (Works, ed. H. Buxton Forman. 1901, iii. p. 254.)
c. 1818
“Sonnet on sitting down to read King Lear once again.”
O golden-tongued Romance, with serene lute!
Fair-plumed Syren, Queen of far-away!
Leave melodising on this wintry day,
Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute:
Adieu! for, once again, the fierce dispute
Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay
Must I burn through; once more humbly assay
The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit:
Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,
Begetters of our deep eternal theme!
When through the old oak Forest I am gone,
Let me not wander in a barren dream,
But, when I am consumed in the fire,
Give me new Phœnix wings to fly at my desire.
Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats, edited by Richard Monckton Milnes. Vol. i. p. 96.
JOHN WILSON, 1819
(1785-1854)
Shakespeare is of no age. He speaks a language which thrills in our blood in spite of the separation of two hundred years. His thoughts, passions, feelings, strains of fancy, all are of this day, as they were of his own—and his genius may be contemporary with the mind of every generation for a thousand years to come. He, above all poets, looked upon man, and lived for mankind. His genius, universal in intellect, could find, in no more bounded circumference, its proper sphere. It could not bear exclusion from any part of human existence. Whatever in nature and life was given to man, was given in contemplation and poetry to him also, and over the undimmed mirror of his mind passed all the shadows of our mortal world. Look through his plays and tell what form of existence, what quality of spirit, he is most skilful to delineate. Which of all the manifold beings he has drawn, lives before our thoughts, our eyes, in most unpictured reality? Is it Othello, Shylock, Falstaff, Lear, the wife of Macbeth, Imogen, Hamlet, Ariel? In none of the other great dramatists do we see anything like a perfected art. In their works, everything, it is true, exists in some shape or other, which can be required in a drama taking for its interest the absolute interest of human life and nature; but, after all, may not the very best of their works be looked on as sublime masses of chaotic confusion, through which the elements of our moral being appear? It was Shakespeare, the most unlearned of all
our writers, who first exhibited on the stage perfect models, perfect images of all human characters, and all human events. We cannot conceive any skill that could from his great characters remove any defect, or add to their perfect composition. Except in him, we look in vain for the entire fulness, the self-consistency, and self-completeness of perfect art.
“A few words on Shakespeare, May 1819.” Essays Critical and Imaginative. 1866, vol. iii. pp. 420-21.
CHARLES SPRAGUE, 1824
(1791-1875)
Who now shall grace the glowing throne,
Where, all unrivall’d, all alone,
Bold Shakespeare sat, and look’d creation through,
The minstrel monarch of the worlds he drew?
That throne is cold—that lyre in death unstrung,
On whose proud note delighted Wonder hung.
Yet old Oblivion, as in wrath he sweeps,
One spot shall spare—the grave where Shakespeare sleeps.
Rulers and ruled in common gloom may lie,
But Nature’s laureate bards shall never die.
Art’s chisell’d boast and glory’s trophied shore
Must live in numbers or can live no more.
While sculptured Jove some nameless waste may claim,
Still roars the Olympic car in Pindar’s fame:
Troy’s doubtful walls, in ashes pass’d away,
Yet frown on Greece in Homer’s deathless lay;
Rome, slowly sinking in her crumbling fanes,
Stands all immortal in her Maro’s strains;
So, too, yon giant empress of the isles,
On whose broad sway the sun for ever smiles,
To Time’s unsparing rage one day must bend,
And all her triumphs in her Shakespeare end!
O thou! to whose creative power
We dedicate the festal hour,
While Grace and Goodness round the altar stand,
Learning’s anointed train, and Beauty’s rose-lipp’d band—
Realms yet unborn, in accents now unknown,
Thy song shall learn, and bless it for their own.
Deep in the west, as Independence roves,
His banners planting round the land he loves,
Where Nature sleeps in Eden’s infant grace,
In Time’s full hour shall spring a glorious race:
Thy name, thy verse, thy language shall they bear,
And deck for thee the vaulted temple there.
Our Roman-hearted fathers broke
Thy parent empire’s galling yoke,
But thou, harmonious monarch of the mind,
Around their sons a gentler chain shall bind;
Still o’er our land shall Albion’s sceptre wave,
And what her mighty Lion lost, her mightier Swan shall save.
Prize Ode recited at the representation of the Shakespeare Jubilee, Boston, February 13, 1824.
CHARLES LAMB, 1824
(1775-1834)
In “sad civility” once Garrick sate
To see a play, mangled in form and state;
Plebeian Shakespeare must the words supply,—
The actors all were fools—of Quality.
The scenes—the dresses—were above rebuke;—
Scarce a performer there below a Duke.
He sate, and mused how in his Shakespeare’s mind
The idea of old nobility enshrined
Should thence a grace and a refinement have
Which passed these living Nobles to conceive—
Who with such apish, base gesticulation,
Remnants of starts, and dregs of playhouse passion,
So foul belied their great forefathers’ fashion!
He saw—and true nobility confessed
Less in the high-born blood, than lowly poet’s breast.
“Epilogue to an amateur Performance of Richard II.,” ll. 10-24. Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. Ed. E. V. Lucas, 1903-4. Vol. v. p. 128.
JULIUS CHARLES HARE, 1827
(1795-1855)
Shakespeare “glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven.” All Nature ministers to him, as gladly as a mother to her child. Whether he wishes her to tune her myriad-voiced organ to Romeo’s love, or to Miranda’s innocence, or to Perdita’s simplicity, or to Rosalind’s playfulness, or to the sports of the Fairies, or to Timon’s misanthropy, or to Macbeth’s desolating ambition, or to Lear’s heart-broken frenzy—he has only to ask, and she puts on every feeling and every passion with which he desires to invest her.
No poet comes near Shakespeare in the number of bosom lines,—of lines that we may cherish in our bosoms, and that seem almost as if they had grown there,—of lines that, like bosom friends, are ever at hand to comfort, counsel, and gladden us, under all the vicissitudes of life,—of lines that, according to Bacon’s expression, “come home to our business and bosoms,” and open the door for us to look in, and see what is nestling and brooding there.
Guesses at Truth. 1827.
JAMES HOGG, 1831
(1770-1835)
“To the Genius of Shakespeare.”
Spirit all limitless,
Where is thy dwelling-place?
Spirit of him whose high name we revere,
Come on thy seraph wings,
Come from thy wanderings,
And smile on thy votaries, who sigh for thee here!
Come, O thou spark divine,
Rise from thy hallowed shrine;
Here in the windings of Forth thou shalt see
Hearts true to nature’s call
Spirits congenial,
Proud of their country, yet bowing to thee.
Here with rapt heart and tongue,
While our fond minds were young,
Oft thy bold numbers we poured in our mirth;
Now in our hall for aye
This shall be holiday,
Bard of all Nature, to honour thy birth.
Whether thou tremblest o’er
Green grave of Elsinore,
Stayest o’er the hill of Dunsinnan to hover,
Bosworth, or Shrewsbury,
Egypt or Philippi;
Come from thy roamings the universe over.
On by the morning star,
Dream’st on the shadowy brows of the moon,
Or linger’st in fairyland,
’Mid lovely elves to stand,
Singing thy carols unearthly and boon;—
Here thou art called upon,
Come thou to Caledon!
Come to the land of the ardent and free!
The land of the love recess,
Mountain and wilderness,
This is the land, thou wild meteor, for thee!
Oh, never since time had birth,
Rose from the pregnant earth
Gems such as late have in Scotia sprung;—
Gems that in future day,
When ages pass away,
Like thee shall be honoured, like thee shall be sung!
Then here, by the sounding sea,
Forest, and greenwood tree,
Here to solicit thee cease shall we never:
Yes, thou effulgence bright,
Here must thy flame relight,
Or vanish from Nature for ever and ever!
Songs. By the Ettrick Shepherd. Now first collected. 1831, p. 304.
CHARLES LAMB, 1833
(1775-1834)
I am jealous of the combination of the sister arts. Let them sparkle apart. What injury (short of the theatres) did Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery do me with Shakespeare?—to have Opie’s Shakespeare, Northcote’s Shakespeare, light-headed Fuseli’s Shakespeare, heavy-headed Romney’s Shakespeare, wooden-headed West’s Shakespeare (though he did the best in “Lear”), deaf-headed Reynolds’s Shakespeare, instead of my, and everybody’s Shakespeare. To be tied down to an authentic face of Juliet! To have Imogen’s portrait! To confine the illimitable!
Letter to Samuel Rogers, December 21, 1833. Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. Ed. E. V. Lucas, 1903-4. Vol. vii.
HARTLEY COLERIDGE, 1833
(1796-1849)
“To Shakespeare.”
The soul of man is larger than the sky,
Deeper than ocean, or the abysmal dark
Of the unfathom’d centre. Like that Ark,
Which in its sacred hold uplifted high,
O’er the drown’d hills, the human family,
And stock reserved of every living kind,
So in the compass of the single mind
The seeds and pregnant forms in essence lie,
That make all worlds. Great Poet, ’twas thy art
To know thyself, and in thyself to be
Whate’er love, hate, ambition, destiny,
Or the firm, fatal purpose of the heart,
Can make of Man. Yet thou wert still the same,
Serene of thought, unhurt by thy own flame.
Poems. Sonnet XXVIII. 1833, p. 28.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY, 1838
(1785-1859)
In the great world of woman, as the interpreter of the shifting phases and the lunar varieties of that mighty changeable planet, that lovely satellite of man, Shakespeare stands not the first only, not the original only, but is yet the sole authentic oracle of truth. Woman, therefore, the beauty of the female mind, this is one great field of his power. The supernatural world, the world of apparitions, that is another. . . . In all Christendom, who, let us ask, who, who but Shakespeare has found the power for effectually working this mysterious mode of being?
.......
A third fund of Shakespeare’s peculiar power lies in his teeming fertility of fine thoughts and sentiments. From his works alone might be gathered a golden bead-roll of thoughts, the deepest, subtilest, most pathetic, and yet most catholic and universally intelligible; the most characteristic, also, and appropriate to the particular person, the situation, and the case, yet, at the same time, applicable to the circumstances of every human being, under all the accidents of life, and all vicissitudes of fortune. But this subject offers so vast a field of observation, it being so eminently the prerogative of Shakespeare to have thought more finely and more extensively than all other poets combined, that we cannot wrong the dignity of such a theme by doing more, in our narrow limits, than
simply noticing it as one of the emblazonries upon Shakespeare’s shield.
Fourthly, we shall indicate (and, as in the last case, barely indicate, without attempting in so vast a field to offer any adequate illustrations) one mode of Shakespeare’s dramatic excellence, which hitherto has not attracted any special or separate notice. We allude to the forms of life, and natural human passion, as apparent in the structure of his dialogue. Among the many defects and infirmities of the French and of the Italian drama, indeed, we may say of the Greek, the dialogue proceeds always by independent speeches, replying indeed to each other, but never modified in its several terminal forms immediately preceding. Now, in Shakespeare, who first set an example of that most important innovation, in all his impassioned dialogues, each reply or rejoinder seems the mere rebound of the previous speech. Every form of natural interruption, breaking through the restraints of ceremony under the impulses of tempestuous passion; every form of hasty interrogative, ardent reiteration when a question has been evaded; every form of scornful repetition of the hostile words; every impatient continuation of the hostile statement; in short, all modes and formulæ by which anger, hurry, fretfulness, scorn, impatience, or excitement under any movement whatever, can disturb or modify or dislocate the formal bookish style of commencement,—these are as rife in Shakespeare’s dialogue as in life itself; and how much vivacity, how profound a verisimilitude, they add to the scenic effect as an imitation of human passion and real life, we need not say. A volume might be written, illustrating the vast varieties of Shakespeare’s art and
power in this one field of improvement; another volume might be dedicated to the exposure of the lifeless and unnatural result from the opposite practice in the foreign stages of France and Italy. And we may truly say, that were Shakespeare distinguished from them by this single feature of nature and propriety, he would on that account alone have merited a great immortality.
Encyclopædia Britannica. 7th edition, 1838. Article on Shakespeare.
The following fine apostrophe to Shakespeare occurs at the end of De Quincey’s essay “On the knocking at the gate in Macbeth”:—O, mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers,—like frost and snow, rain and dew, hailstorm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert,—but that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident.
JOHN STERLING, 1839
(1806-1844)
“Shakespeare.”
How little fades from earth when sink to rest
The hours and cares that moved a great man’s breast!
Though nought of all we saw the grave may spare,
His life pervades the world’s impregnate air;
Though Shakespeare’s dust beneath our footsteps lies,
His spirit breathes amid his native skies;
With meaning won from him for ever glows
Each air that England feels, and star it knows;
His whispered words from many a mother’s voice
Can make her sleeping child in dreams rejoice,
And gleams from spheres he first conjoined to earth
Are blent with rays of each new morning’s birth.
Amid the sights and tales of common things,
Leaf, flower, and bird, and wars, and deaths of kings,
Of shore, and sea, and nature’s daily round,
Of life that tills, and tombs that load the ground,
His visions mingle, swell, command, pace by,
And haunt with living presence heart and eye;
And tones from him by other bosoms caught
Awaken flush and stir of mounting thought,
And the long sigh, and deep impassioned thrill,
Rouse custom’s trance, and spur the faltering will.
Above the goodly land more his than ours
He sits supreme enthroned in skyey towers,
And sees the heroic brood of his creation
Teach larger life to his ennobled nation.
O! shaping brain! O! flashing fancy’s hues!
O! boundless heart kept fresh by pity’s dews!
O! wit humane and blythe! O! sense sublime
For each dim oracle of mantled Time!
Transcendent Form of Man! in whom we read
Mankind’s whole tale of impulse, thought, and deed;
Amid the expanse of years beholding thee,
We know how vast our world of life may be;
Wherein, perchance, with aims as pure as thine,
Small tasks and strengths may be no less divine.
Poems. 1839, p. 151.
HENRY HALLAM, 1839
(1777-1859)
Of William Shakespeare, whom, through the mouths of those whom he has inspired to body forth the modifications of his immense mind, we seem to know better than any human writer, it may be truly said that we scarcely know anything. We see him, so far as we do see him, not in himself, but in a reflex image from the objectivity in which he was manifested: he is Falstaff, and Mercutio, and Malvolio, and Jaques, and Portia, and Imogen, and Lear, and Othello; but to us he is scarcely a determined person, a substantial reality of past time, the man Shakespeare. The two greatest names in poetry are to us little more than names. If we are not yet come to question his unity, as we do that of “the blind old man of Scios’ rocky isle,” an improvement in critical acuteness doubtless reserved for a distant posterity, we as little feel the power of identifying the young man who came up from Stratford, was afterwards an indifferent player in a London theatre, and retired to his native place in middle life, with the author of Macbeth and Lear, as we can give a distinct historic personality to Homer. All that insatiable curiosity and unwearied diligence have hitherto detected about Shakespeare serves rather to disappoint and perplex us than to furnish the slightest illustration of his character.
Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries. 1839, ii. 382-3.
—— JOHNSTONE, 1840
Some men can only acquire knowledge by a careful process of painstaking investigation, while the minds of others descend at once, and with a swoop, as it were, upon the truth of which they are in search. Others, again, can not only do this, but having grasped the truth, they soar upward with it to the highest pinnacles of imaginative loftiness, or beyond these even, to the empyrean of thought, where the minds of ordinarily gifted men may not follow them. Of this last class was Shakespeare, the most wonderful of mere men that we know to have ever lived.
The Table Talker, or Brief Essays on Society and Literature. 1840, vol. i. p. 183.
THOMAS CARLYLE, 1840
(1795-1881)
“The Hero as Poet.”
It is in what I called Portrait-painting, delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakespeare is great. All the greatness of the man comes out decisively here. It is unexampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakespeare. The thing he looks at reveals not this or that face of it, but its inmost heart and generic secret: it dissolves itself as in light before him, so that he discerns the perfect structure of it. Creative, we said; poetic creation, what is this too but seeing the thing sufficiently? The word that will describe the thing, follows of itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. And is not Shakespeare’s morality, his valour, candour, tolerance, truthfulness; his whole victorious strength and greatness, which can triumph over such obstructions, visible there too? Great as the world! No twisted, poor convex-concave mirror, reflecting all objects with its own convexities and concavities; a perfectly level mirror;—that is to say withal, if we will understand it, a man justly related to all things and men, a good man. It is truly a lordly spectacle how this great soul takes in all kinds of men and objects, a Falstaff, an Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets them all forth to us in their round completeness; loving, just, the equal brother of all. Novum Organum, and all the intellect you will find in Bacon, is of a quite secondary order; earthly, material, poor in comparison with this. Among
modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the same rank. Goethe alone, since the days of Shakespeare, reminds me of it. Of him too you say that he saw the object; you may say what he himself says of Shakespeare: “His characters are like watches with dial-plates of transparent crystal; they show you the hour like others, and the inward mechanism also is all visible.”
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Ed. H. D. Traill. 1898, pp. 104-5.
In Carlyle’s essay on “Corn Law Rhymes” (Edinburgh Review, July, 1832, p. 342) occurs the following:—Foolish Pedant, that sittest there compassionately descanting on the Learning of Shakespeare! Shakespeare had penetrated into innumerable things; far into Nature with her divine Splendours and infernal Terrors, her Ariel Melodies, and mystic mandragora Moans; far into man’s workings with Nature, into man’s Art and Artifice; Shakespeare knew (Kenned, which in those days still partially meant Can-ned) innumerable things; what men are, and what the world is, and how and what men aim at there, from the Dame Quickly of modern Eastcheap to the Cæsar of ancient Rome, over many countries, over many centuries: of all this he had the clearest understanding and constructive comprehension; all this was his Learning and Insight.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1841
(1770-1850)
“Shakespeare and Goethe.”
He (Goethe) does not seem to me to be a great poet in either of the classes of poets. At the head of the first class I would place Homer and Shakespeare, whose universal minds are able to reach every variety of thought and feeling without bringing their own individuality before the reader. They infuse, they breathe life into every object they approach, but you never find themselves. At the head of the second class, those whom you can trace individually in all they write, I would place Spenser and Milton. In all that Spenser writes you can trace the gentle affectionate spirit of the man; in all that Milton writes you find the exalted sustained being that he was. Now, in what Goethe writes, who aims to be of the first class, the universal, you find the man himself, the artificial man where he should not be found; so that I consider him a very artificial writer, aiming to be universal, and yet constantly exposing his individuality, which his character was not of a kind to dignify. He had not sufficiently clear moral perceptions to make him anything but an artificial writer.
Memoirs of William Wordsworth, by Christopher Wordsworth. 1851, vol. ii. pp. 437-8.
The value of this estimate of Goethe is somewhat discounted by a remark made at another time by Wordsworth: “I have tried to read Goethe. I never could succeed. . . . I am not intimately acquainted with them [his poems] generally.” Memoirs, ii. p. 478.
THOMAS BABINGTON, LORD MACAULAY, 1843
(1800-1859)
Highest among those who have exhibited human nature by means of dialogue stands Shakespeare. His variety is like the variety of nature, endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity. The characters of which he has given us an impression, as vivid as that which we receive from the characters of our own associates, are to be reckoned by scores. Yet in all these scores hardly one character is to be found which deviates widely from the common standard, and which we should call very eccentric if we met it in real life. The silly notion that every man has one ruling passion, and that this clue, once known, unravels all the mysteries of his conduct, finds no countenance in the plays of Shakespeare. There man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions, which contend for the mastery over him, and govern him in turn. What is Hamlet’s ruling passion? Or Othello’s? Or Harry the Fifth’s? Or Wolsey’s? Or Lear’s? Or Shylock’s? Or Benedick’s? Or Macbeth’s? Or that of Cassius? Or that of Falconbridge? But we might go on for ever. Take a single example, Shylock. Is he so eager for money as to be indifferent to revenge? Or so eager for revenge as to be indifferent to money? Or so bent on both together as to be indifferent to the honour of his nation and the law of Moses? All his propensities are mingled with each other, so that, in trying to apportion to each its proper part, we find the same difficulty which constantly meets us in
real life. A superficial critic may say, that hatred is Shylock’s ruling passion. But how many passions have amalgamated to form that hatred? It is partly the result of wounded pride: Antonio has called him dog. It is partly the result of covetousness: Antonio has hindered him of half a million; and, when Antonio is gone, there will be no limit to the gains of usury. It is partly the result of national and religious feeling: Antonio has spit on the Jewish gabardine; and the oath of revenge has been sworn by the Jewish Sabbath. We might go through all the characters which we have mentioned, and through fifty more in the same way; for it is the constant manner of Shakespeare to represent the human mind as lying, not under the absolute dominion of one despotic propensity, but under a mixed government, in which a hundred powers balance each other. Admirable as he is in all parts of his art, we most admire him for this, that while he has left us a greater number of striking portraits than all other dramatists put together, he has scarcely left us a single caricature.
Essay on “Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay,” Edinburgh Review, Jan. 1843. Art. IX. vol. lxxvi. pp. 560-1.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1844
(1803-1882)
Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can tell nothing except to the Shakespeare in us; that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his tripod, and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique documents extricated, analysed, and compared, by the assiduous Dyce and Collier; and now read one of those skiey sentences—aerolites,—which seem to have fallen out of heaven, and which, not your experience, but the man within the breast, has accepted as words of fate; and tell me if they match, if the former account in any manner for the latter: or, which gives the most historical insight into the man.
Hence, though our external history is so meagre, yet, with Shakespeare for biographer, instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the information which is material, that which describes character and fortune, that which, if we were about to meet the man and deal with him, would most import us to know. We have his recorded convictions on those questions which knock for answer at every heart,—on life and death, on love, on wealth and poverty, on the prizes of life, and the ways whereby we come at them; on the characters of men, and the influences, occult and open, which affect their fortunes; and on those mysterious and demoniacal powers which defy our science, and which yet interweave their malice and their gift in our brightest hours. Whoever read the volume of the
Sonnets, without finding that the poet had there revealed, under masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love; the confusion of sentiments in the most susceptible, and, at the same time, the most intellectual of men? What trait of his private mind has he hidden in his dramas? One can discern, in his ample pictures of the gentleman and the king, that forms and humanities pleased him; his delight in troops of friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let Antonio the merchant, answer for his great heart. So far from Shakespeare’s being the least known, he is the one person, in all modern history, known to us. What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or function, or district of man’s work, has he not remembered? What king has he not taught State, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behaviour?
“Shakespeare; or, the Poet.” Representative Men. 1844, p. 154.
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON, 1850
(1816-1853)
What I admire in Shakspeare, however, is that his loves are all human—no earthliness hiding itself from itself in sentimental transcendentalism—no loves of the angels, which are the least angelic things, I believe, that float in the clouds, though they do look down upon mortal feelings with contempt, just as the dark volumes of smoke which issue from the long chimney of a manufactory might brood very sublimely over the town which they blacken, and fancy themselves far more ethereal than those vapours which steam up from the earth by day and night. Yet these are pure water, and those are destined to condense in black soot. So are the transcendentalisms of affection. Shakspeare is healthy, true to Humanity in this: and for that reason I pardon him even his earthly coarseness. You always know that you are on an earth which has to be refined, instead of floating in the empyrean with wings of wax. Therein he is immeasurably greater than Shelley. Shelleyism is very sublime, sublimer a good deal than God, for God’s world is all wrong and Shelley is all right—much purer than Christ, for Shelley can criticise Christ’s heart and life—nevertheless, Shelleyism is only atmospheric profligacy, to coin a Montgomeryism. I believe this to be one of Shakespeare’s most wondrous qualities—the humanity of his nature and heart. There is a spirit of sunny
endeavour about him, and an acquiescence in things as they are—not incompatible with a cheerful resolve to make them better.
Life and Letters of Frederick W. Robertson, M.A. Edited by Stopford A. Brooke, M.A. 1886, vol. i. p. 289, Letter LX.
LEIGH HUNT, 1851
(1784-1859)
“Associations with Shakespeare.”
How naturally the idea of Shakespeare can be made to associate itself with anything which is worth mention! Take Christmas for instance: “Shakespeare and Christmas”; the two ideas fall as happily together as “wine and walnuts,” or heart and soul. So you may put together “Shakespeare and May,” or “Shakespeare and June,” and twenty passages start into your memory about spring and violets. Or you may say “Shakespeare and Love,” and you are in the midst of a bevy of bright damsels, as sweet as rosebuds; or “Shakespeare and Death,” and all graves, and thoughts of graves, are before you; or “Shakespeare and Life,” and you have the whole world of youth, and spirit, and Hotspur, and life itself; or you may say even, “Shakespeare and Hate,” and he will say all that can be said for hate, as well as against it, till you shall take Shylock himself into your Christian arms, and tears shall make you of one faith.
Table Talk. 1851, p. 154.
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, 1852
(1818-1894)
We wonder at the grandeur, the moral majesty of some of Shakespeare’s characters, so far beyond what the noblest among ourselves can imitate, and at first thought we attribute it to the genius of the poet, who has outstripped nature in his creations. But we are misunderstanding the power and the meaning of poetry in attributing creativeness to it in any such sense. Shakespeare created, but only as the spirit of nature created around him, working in him as it worked abroad in those among whom he lived. The men whom he draws were such men as he saw and knew; the words they utter were such as he heard in the ordinary conversations in which he joined. At the Mermaid with Raleigh and with Sidney, and at a thousand unnamed English firesides, he found the living originals for his Prince Hals, his Orlandos, his Antonios, his Portias, his Isabellas. The closer personal acquaintance which we can form with the English of the age of Elizabeth, the more we are satisfied that Shakespeare’s great poetry is no more than the rhythmic echo of the life which it depicts.
Short Studies on Great Subjects. First Series. “England’s Forgotten Worthies.” 1878, i. 445-6, reprinted from Westminster Review. 1852.
DAVID MASSON, 1853
(b. 1822)
Shakespeare is as astonishing for the exuberance of his genius in abstract notions, and for the depth of his analytic and philosophic insight, as for the scope and minuteness of his poetic imagination. It is as if into a mind poetical in form there had been poured all the matter that existed in the mind of his contemporary Bacon. In Shakespeare’s plays we have thought, history, exposition, philosophy, all within the round of the poet. The only difference between him and Bacon sometimes is that Bacon writes an essay and calls it his own, while Shakespeare writes a similar essay and puts it into the mouth of a Ulysses or a Polonius.
Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Other Essays. 1874. Essay V. p. 242, reprinted from North British Review. 1853.
MATTHEW ARNOLD, 1853
(1822-1888)
“Shakespeare.”
Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill,
Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty,
Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,
Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place,
Spares but the cloudy border of his base
To the foil’d searching of mortality;
And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,
Self-school’d, self-scann’d, self-honour’d, self-secure,
Didst tread on earth unguessed at.—Better so!
All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow,
Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.
Poems. 1853.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR, 1853
(1775-1864)
“Shakespeare and Milton.”
The tongue of England, that which myriads
Have spoken and will speak, were paralysed
Hereafter, but two mighty men stand forth
Above the flight of ages, two alone;
One crying out,
All nations spoke thro’ me.
The other:
True; and thro’ this trumpet burst
God’s word; the fall of Angels, and the doom
First of immortal, then of mortal, Man,
Glory! be glory! not to me, to God.
The Lost Fruit off an old Tree. No. LVII.
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, 1858
(1801-1890)
A great author, gentlemen, is not one who merely has a copia verborum, whether in prose or verse, and can, as it were, turn on at his will any number of splendid phrases and swelling sentences; but he is one who has something to say and knows how to say it. I do not claim for him, as such, any great depth of thought, or breadth of view, or philosophy, or sagacity, or knowledge of human nature, or experience of human life, though these additional gifts he may have, and the more he has of them the greater he is; but I ascribe to him, as his characteristic gift, in a large sense the faculty of Expression. He is master of the twofold Logos, the thought and the word, distinct, but inseparable from each other. He may, if so be, elaborate his compositions, or he may pour out his improvisations, but in either case he has but one aim, which he keeps steadily before him, and is conscientious and single-minded in fulfilling. That aim is to give forth what he has within him; and from his very earnestness it comes to pass that, whatever be the splendour of his diction or the harmony of his periods, he has with him the charm of an incommunicable simplicity. Whatever be his subject, high or low, he treats it suitably and for its own sake. If he is a poet, “nil molitur inepte.” If he is an orator, then too he speaks, not only “distincte” and “splendide,” but also “apte.” His page is the lucid mirror of his mind and life:
“Quo fit, ut omnis
Votivâ pateat veluti descripta labellâ
Vita senis.”
He writes passionately, because he feels keenly; forcibly, because he conceives vividly; he sees too clearly to be vague; he is too serious to be otiose; he can analyse his subject, and therefore he is rich; he embraces it as a whole and in its parts, and therefore he is consistent; he has a firm hold of it, and therefore he is luminous; when his imagination wells up, it overflows its ornament; when his heart is touched, it thrills along his verse. He always has the right word for the right idea, and never a word too much. If he is brief, it is because few words suffice; when he is lavish of them, still each word has its mark, and aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous march of his elocution. He expresses what all feel, but all cannot say; and his sayings pass into proverbs among his people, and his phrases become household words and idioms of their daily speech, which is tessellated with the rich fragments of his language, as we see in foreign lands the marbles of Roman grandeur worked into the walls and pavements of modern palaces.
Such pre-eminently is Shakespeare among ourselves; such pre-eminently is Virgil among the Latins; such in their degree are all those writers who in every nation go by the name of Classics.
“The Idea of a University defined and illustrated.” Literature, ix. 1873, pp. 291-3.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, c. 1858
(1819-1891)
Only Shakespeare was endowed with that healthy equilibrium of nature whose point of rest was midway between the imagination and the understanding,—that perfectly unruffled brain which reflected all objects with almost inhuman impartiality,—that outlook whose range was ecliptical, dominating all zones of human thought and action,—that power of verisimilar conception which could take away Richard III. from History, and Ulysses from Homer,—and that creative faculty whose equal touch is alike vivifying in Shallow and in Lear. He alone never seeks in abnormal and monstrous characters to evade the risks and responsibilities of absolute truthfulness, nor to stimulate a jaded imagination by Caligulan horrors of plot. He is never, like many of his fellow-dramatists, confronted with unnatural Frankensteins of his own making, whom he must get off his hands as best he may. Given a human foible, he can incarnate it in the nothingness of Slender, or make it loom gigantic through the tragic twilight of Hamlet. We are tired of the vagueness which classes all the Elizabethan playwrights together as “great dramatists,”—as if Shakespeare did not differ from them in kind as well as in degree. Fine poets some of them were; but though imagination and the power of poetic expression are, singly, not uncommon gifts, and even in combination not without secular examples, yet it is the rarest of earthly phenomena to find them joined with
those faculties of perception, arrangement, and plastic instinct in the loving union which alone makes a great dramatic poet possible. We suspect that Shakespeare will long continue the only specimen of the genus. His contemporaries, in their comedies, either force what they call “a humour” till it becomes fantastical, or hunt for jokes, like rat-catchers, in the sewers of human nature and of language. In their tragedies they become heavy without grandeur, like Jonson, or mistake the stilts for the cothurnus, as Chapman and Webster too often do. Every new edition of an Elizabethan dramatist is but the putting of another witness into the box to prove the inaccessibility of Shakespeare’s standpoint as poet and artist.
Library of Old Authors. 1858-64.
For an interesting note on Shakespeare’s “artistic discretion” and the “impersonality” of his writings, see “Shakespeare once more” (Among My Books. 1870, pp. 226-7).
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, 1863
(1804-1864)
Shakespeare has surface beneath surface, to an immeasurable depth, adapted to the plummet-line of every reader; his works present many phases of truth, each with scope large enough to fill a contemplative mind. Whatever you seek in him you will surely discover, provided you seek truth. There is no exhausting the various interpretation of his symbols; and a thousand years hence, a world of new readers will possess a whole library of new books, as we ourselves do, in these volumes old already.
Our Old Home. 1863, i. 171.
In Our Old Home (i. 158-60) Hawthorne records his impressions on visiting Shakespeare’s house.
BISHOP CHARLES WORDSWORTH, 1864
(1806-1892)
Take the entire range of English literature; put together our best authors, who have written upon subjects not professedly religious or theological, and we shall not find, I believe, in them all united, so much evidence of the Bible having been read and used, as we have found in Shakespeare alone. This is a phenomenon which admits of being looked at from several points of view; but I shall be content to regard it solely in connection with the undoubted fact, that of all our authors, Shakespeare is also, by general confession, the greatest and the best. According to the testimony of Charles Lamb, a most competent judge in regard to all the literary elements of the question, our poet, “in his divine mind and manners, surpassed not only the great men his contemporaries, but all mankind.” And, looking at this superiority from my own point of view, I cannot but remark that, while most of the great laymen of that great Elizabethan age—Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, the poet Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Burleigh, Ben Jonson—have paid homage to Christianity, if not always in their practice, yet in the conviction of their understanding, none of them has done this so fully or so effectively as Shakespeare.
“On Shakespeare’s Knowledge and Use of the Bible.” 1864, pp. 291-2.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, 1864
(1809-1894)
O land of Shakespeare! ours with all thy past,
Till these last years that make the sea so wide,
Think not the jar of battle’s trumpet-blast
Has dulled our aching sense to joyous pride
In every noble word thy sons bequeathed
The air our fathers breathed!
War-wasted, haggard, panting from the strife,
We turn to other days and far-off lands,
Live o’er in dreams the Poet’s faded life,
Come with fresh lilies in our fevered hands
To wreathe his bust, and scatter purple flowers,—
Not his the need, but ours!
We call those poets who are first to mark
Through earth’s dull mist the coming of the dawn,—
Who see in twilight’s gloom the first pale spark,
While others only note that day is gone;
For him the Lord of light the curtain rent
That veils the firmament . . .
With no vain praise we mock the stone-carved name
Stamped once on dust that moved with pulsed breath,
As thinking to enlarge that amplest fame
Whose undimmed glories gild the night of death:
We praise not star or sun; in these we see
Thee, Father, only Thee!
Thy gifts are beauty, wisdom, power, and love:
We read, we reverence on this human soul,—
Earth’s clearest mirror of the light above,—
Plain as the record on Thy prophet’s scroll,
When o’er his page the effluent splendours poured,
Thine own, “Thus saith the Lord!”
This player was a prophet from on high,
Thine own elected. Statesman, poet, sage,
For him Thy sovereign pleasure passed them by;
Sidney’s fair youth, and Raleigh’s ripened age,
Spenser’s chaste soul, and his imperial mind
Who taught and shamed mankind.
“Shakespeare Tercentennial Celebration, 23 April 1864.” Songs of Many Seasons. 1875.
CARDINAL WISEMAN, 1865
(1802-1865)
We may compare the mind of Shakespeare to a diamond, pellucid, bright, and untinted, cut into countless polished facets, which, in constant movement, at every smallest change of direction or of angle, caught a new reflection, so that not one of its brilliant mirrors could be for a moment idle, but by a power beyond its control was ever busy with the reflection of innumerable images, either distinct or running into one another, or repeated each so clearly as to allow him, when he chose, to fix it in his memory.
William Shakespeare. 1865, p. 50.
ARCHBISHOP RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, 1865
(1807-1886)
A counsellor well fitted to advise
In daily life, and at whose lips no less
Men may inquire or nations, when distress
Of sudden doubtful danger may arise,
Who, though his head be hidden in the skies,
Plants his firm foot upon our common earth,
Dealing with thoughts which everywhere have birth,—
This is the poet, true of heart and wise:
No dweller in a baseless world of dream,
Which is not earth nor heaven: his words have passed
Into man’s common thought and week-day phrase;
This is the poet and his verse will last.
Such was our Shakespeare once, and such doth seem
One who redeems our later gloomier days.
Poems collected and arranged anew. 1865, p. 83.
FRANCIS TURNER PALGRAVE, 1865
(1824-1897)
Only three or four generations of fairly long-lived men lie between us and Shakespeare; literature in his own time had reached a high development; his grandeur and sweetness were freely recognised; within seventy years of his death his biography was attempted; yet we know little more of Shakespeare himself than we do of Homer. Like several of the greatest men,—Lucretius, Virgil, Tacitus, Dante,—a mystery never to be dispelled hangs over his life. He has entered into the cloud. With a natural and an honourable diligence, other men have given their lives to the investigation of his, and many external circumstances, mostly of a minor order, have been thus collected: yet of “the man Shakespeare,” in Mr. Hallam’s words, we know nothing. Something which seems more than human in immensity of range and calmness of insight moves before us in the Plays; but, from the nature of dramatic writing, the author’s personality is inevitably veiled; no letter, no saying of his, or description by an intimate friend, has been preserved: and even when we turn to the Sonnets, though each is an autobiographical confession, we find ourselves equally foiled. These revelations of the poet’s innermost nature appear to teach us less of the man than the tone of mind which we trace, or seem to trace, in Measure for Measure, Hamlet, and the Tempest: the strange imagery of passion which passes over the magic mirror has no tangible existence before or behind it:—the great artist, like Nature
herself, is still latent in his works; diffused through his own creation.
......
Yet there is, after all, nothing more remarkable or fascinating in English poetry than these personal revelations of the mind of our greatest poet. We read them again and again, and find each time some new proof of his almost superhuman insight into human nature; of his unrivalled mastery over all the tones of love.
Songs and Sonnets of William Shakespeare. Edited by Francis Turner Palgrave. 1865, pp. 238-9 and 243.
FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE, 1866
(1809-1893)
“To Shakespeare.”
Shelter and succour such as common men
Afford the weaker partners of their fate,
Have I derived from thee—from thee, most great
And powerful genius! whose sublime control
Still from thy grave governs each human soul,
That reads the wondrous record of thy pen.
From sordid sorrows thou hast set me free,
And turned from want’s grim ways my tottering feet,
And to sad empty hours, given royally,
A labour, than all leisure far more sweet.
The daily bread, for which we humbly pray,
Thou gavest me as if I were a child,
And still with converse noble, wise, and mild,
Charmed with despair my sinking soul away;
Shall I not bless the need, to which was given
Of all the angels in the host of heaven,
Thee, for my guardian, spirit strong and bland!
Lord of the speech of my dear native land!
Poems. 1866, p. 61.
JOHN RUSKIN, 1868
(1819-1900)
It does not matter how little, or how much, any of us have read, either of Homer, or Shakespeare: everything round us, in substance, or in thought, has been moulded by them. All Greek gentlemen were educated under Homer. All Roman gentlemen by Greek literature. All Italian, and French, and English gentlemen, by Roman literature, and by its principles. Of the scope of Shakespeare, I will say only, that the intellectual measure of every man since born, in the domains of creative thought, may be assigned to him, according to the degree in which he has been taught by Shakespeare.
The Mystery of Life and its Arts. Afternoon Lectures on Literature and Art, delivered at Royal College of Science, St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin, 1867 and 1868. 1869, p. 109.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI, 1871
(1828-1882)
“On the Site of a Mulberry-Tree.”
Planted by William Shakespeare; felled by the Rev. F. Gastrell.
This tree, here fall’n, no common birth or death
Shared with its kind. The world’s enfranchised son,
Who found the trees of Life and Knowledge one,
Here set it, frailer than his laurel-wreath.
Shall not the wretch whose hand it fell beneath
Rank also singly—the supreme unhung?
Lo! Sheppard, Turpin, pleading with black tongue,
This viler thief’s unsuffocated breath!
We’ll search thy glossary, Shakespeare! whence almost,
And whence alone, some name shall be reveal’d
For this deaf drudge, to whom no length of years
Sufficed to catch the music of the spheres;
Whose soul is carrion now,—too mean to yield
Some Starveling’s ninth allotment of a ghost.
Academy, 15 Feb. 1871.[185:1] Collected Works. Ed. W. M. Rossetti. 1886, vol. i. p. 285.
BAYARD TAYLOR, 1872
(1825-1878)
“Shakespeare’s Statue,
Central Park, New York, 23 May 1872.”
Here, in his right, he stands!
No breadth of earth-dividing seas can bar
The breeze of morning, or the morning star,
From visiting our lands:
His wit the breeze, his wisdom as the star,
Shone where our earliest life was set, and blew
To freshen hope and plan
In brains American,—
To urge, resist, encourage, and subdue!
He came, a household ghost we could not ban:
He sat, on winter nights, by cabin fires;
His summer fairies linked their hands
Along our yellow sands;
He preached within the shadow of our spires;
And when the certain Fate drew nigh, to cleave
The birth-cord, and a separate being leave,
He, in our ranks of patient-hearted men,
Wrought with the boundless forces of his fame,
Victorious, and became
The Master of our thought, the land’s first Citizen!
Of softer scenes and grayer skies to dream,
Thatched cot and rustic tavern, ivied hall,
The cuckoo’s April call
And cowslip-meads beside the Avon stream,
He shall not fail that other home to find
We could not leave behind!
The forms of Passion, which his fancy drew,
In us their ancient likenesses beget:
So, from our lives for ever born anew,
He stands amid his own creations yet!
Here comes lean Cassius, of conventions tired;
Here, in his coach, luxurious Antony
Beside his Egypt, still of men admired;
And Brutus plans some purer liberty!
A thousand Shylocks, Jew and Christian, pass;
A hundred Hamlets, by their times betrayed;
And sweet Anne Page comes tripping o’er the grass,
And awkward Falstaff pants beneath the shade.
Here toss upon the wanton summer wind
The locks of Rosalind;
Here some gay glove the damned spot conceals
Which Lady Macbeth feels:
His ease here smiling smooth Iago takes,
And outcast Lear gives passage to his woe,
And here some foiled Reformer sadly breaks
His wand of Prospero!
In liveried splendour, side by side,
Nick Bottom and Titania ride,
And Portia, flushed with cheers of men,
Disdains dear faithful Imogen;
And Puck beside the form of Morse,
Stops on his forty-minute course;
And Ariel from his swinging bough
A blossom casts on Bryant’s brow,
Until, as summoned from his brooding brain,
He sees his children all again,
In us, as on our lips, each fresh, immortal strain!
Poetical Works. Stanzas II.-III. 1880, p. 224.
WILLIAM MINTO, 1874
(1845-1893)
It is a favourite way with some eulogists of Shakespeare to deny him all individuality whatsoever. He was not one man, they say, but an epitome of all men. His mind, says Hazlitt, “had no one peculiar bias or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were or that they could become.” Against such a degradation of Shakespeare’s character, or of any man’s character, it is our duty to protest. On trying to make Shakespeare more than human, the reckless panegyrist makes him considerably less than human: instead of the man whose prudence made him rich, whose affectionate nature made him loved almost to idolatry, and whose genius has been the wonder of the world, we are presented with plasticity in the abstract, an object not more interesting than a quarry of potter’s clay.
“William Shakespeare, his Life and Character.” Characteristics of English Poets. 1874, p. 350.
See the passage from Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets, p. [135].
EDWARD DOWDEN, 1875
(b. 1843)
There are certain problems which Shakespeare at once pronounces insoluble. He does not, like Milton, propose to give any account of the origin of evil. He does not, like Dante, pursue the soul of man through circles of unending torture, or spheres made radiant by the eternal presence of God. Satan, in Shakespeare’s poems, does not come voyaging on gigantic vans across Chaos to find the earth. No great deliverer of mankind descends from the heavens. Here, upon the earth, evil is—such was Shakespeare’s declaration in the most emphatic accent. Iago actually exists. There is also in the earth a sacred passion of deliverance, a pure redeeming ardour. Cordelia exists. This Shakespeare can tell for certain. But how Iago can be, and why Cordelia lies strangled across the breast of Lear—are these questions which you go on to ask? Something has been already said of the severity of Shakespeare. It is a portion of his severity to decline all answers to such questions as these. Is ignorance painful? Well, then, it is painful. Little solutions of your large difficulties can readily be obtained from priest or philosopher. Shakespeare prefers to let you remain in the solemn presence of a mystery. He does not invite you into his little church or his little library brilliantly illuminated by philosophical or theological rushlights. You remain in the darkness. But you remain in the vital air. And the great night is overhead.
Shakspere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art. 1875, p. 226.
GEORGE MEREDITH, 1877
(b. 1828)
Shakespeare is a well-spring of characters which are saturated with the comic spirit; with more of what we will call blood-life than is to be found anywhere out of Shakespeare; and they are of this world, but they are of the world enlarged to our embrace by imagination, and by great poetic imagination. They are, as it were—I put it to suit my present comparison—creatures of the woods and wilds, not in walled towns, not grouped and toned to pursue a comic exhibition of the narrower world of society. Jaques, Falstaff and his regiment, the varied troop of clowns, Malvolio, Sir Hugh Evans and Fluellen—marvellous Welshmen!—Benedict [sic] and Beatrice, Dogberry, and the rest, are subjects of a special study in the poetically comic.
On the Idea of Comedy and of the Uses of the Comic Spirit. A lecture delivered at the London Institution, 1 Feb. 1877. Published 1897.
FREDERICK JAMES FURNIVALL, 1877
(b. 1825)
Altogether “a manly man” (as Chaucer says) this Shakespeare, strong, tender, humourful, sensitive, impressionable, the truest friend, the foe of none but narrow minds and base. And as we track his work from the lightness and fun of its rise, through the fairy fancy, the youthful passion, the rich imaginings, the ardent patriotism, the brilliant sunshine, of his first and second times, through the tender affection of his Sonnets, the whirlwind of passions in his Tragedies, and then to the lovely sunset of his latest plays, what can we do but bless his name, and be thankful that he came to be a delight, a lift and strength, to us and our children’s children to all time—a bond that shall last for ever between all English-speaking, English-reading men, the members of that great Teutonic brotherhood which shall yet long lead the world in the fight for freedom and for truth!
Introduction to The Leopold Shakspere.1877, p. cxvi.
WALTER HORATIO PATER, 1878
(1839-1894)
As happens with every true dramatist, Shakespeare is for the most part hidden behind the persons of his creation. Yet there are certain of his characters in which we feel that there is something of self-portraiture. And it is not so much in his grander, more subtle and ingenious creations that we feel this—in “Hamlet” and “King Lear”—as in those slighter and more spontaneously developed figures, who, while far from playing principal parts, are yet distinguished by a peculiar happiness and delicate ease in the drawing of them; figures which possess, above all, that winning attractiveness which there is no man but would willingly exercise, and which resemble those works of art which, though not meant to be very great or imposing, are yet wrought of the choicest material. Mercutio, in “Romeo and Juliet,” belongs to this group of Shakespeare’s characters—versatile, mercurial people, such as make good actors, and in whom the
“Nimble spirits of the arteries,”
the finer but still merely animal elements of great wit, predominate. A careful delineation of minor yet expressive traits seems to mark them out as the characters of his predilection; and it is hard not to identify him with these more than with others. Biron, in “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” is perhaps the most striking member of this group. In this character, which is never quite in touch, never quite
on a perfect level of understanding, with the other persons of the play, we see, perhaps, a reflex of Shakespeare himself, when he has just become able to stand aside from and estimate the first period of his poetry.
“Love’s Labour’s Lost.” Appreciations with an Essay on Style. 1889, pp. 174-5.
See also “Shakspere’s English Kings,” ib., pp. 201-2.
MATTHEW ARNOLD, 1879
(1822-1888)
Let me have the pleasure of quoting a sentence about Shakespeare, which I met with by accident not long ago in the Correspondant, a French review which not a dozen English people, I suppose, look at. The writer is praising Shakespeare’s prose. “With Shakespeare,” he says, “prose comes in whenever the subject, being more familiar, is unsuited to the majestic English iambic.” And he goes on: “Shakespeare is the king of poetic rhythm and style, as well as the king of the realm of thought; along with his dazzling prose, Shakespeare has succeeded in giving us the most varied, the most harmonious verse which has ever sounded upon the human ear since the verse of the Greeks.” M. Henry Cochin, the writer of this sentence, deserves our gratitude for it; it would not be easy to praise Shakespeare, in a single sentence, more justly. And when a foreigner and a Frenchman writes thus of Shakespeare, and when Goethe says of Milton, in whom there was so much to repel Goethe rather than to attract him, that “nothing has ever been done so entirely in the sense of the Greeks as Samson Agonistes,” and that “Milton is in very truth a poet whom we must treat with all reverence,” then we understand what constitutes a European recognition of poets and poetry as contradistinguished from a merely national recognition, and that in favour both of Milton and
of Shakespeare the judgment of the high court of appeal has finally gone.
Essays in Criticism. Second Series: Wordsworth. 1888, pp. 129-31. Reprinted from Preface to The Poems of Wordsworth, chosen and edited by Matthew Arnold. 1879.
For a comment on Shakespeare’s double faculty of interpreting the physiognomy and movement of the outward world, and the ideas and laws of man’s moral and spiritual nature, see Essays in Criticism, 1865, p. 108.
ANONYMOUS ?c. 1880
So much has been written, so much spoken about Shakespeare, that it would seem a needless, almost a presumptuous superfluity to say more, and yet from another point of view, the man is as strange to us to-day as though we had never heard his name. Johnson and Pope, Warburton, Steevens, Malone and Theobald, Chalmers, Dyce, and a host of foreign exegetes, have edited and annotated, emendated and obelised; but the figure of Shakespeare is clothed in mist, and whilst we laugh and wonder at the vanity and versatility of a Cicero, and stroll lovingly with a Horace about his Sabine farm, dead both of them two millennia, we still grope about in the dark for the meaning, the character, and the inner life of our wondrous poet. Like the ghost in Hamlet, he arose, and, having uttered his pregnant message, disappeared, unregarded at the time but by a few, and still unrealised by the many.
.......
There is a grandeur about the poets of the world, and a reward for those that study them aright. Amid the hurricane of battle and the crash of empires, the calm pulse of life and the glories of the drama remain the same. Men are inclined to gaze upon the outward symbols of existence as though they were primary causes, when they are only the emblems of a deeper power. We have had our Constitution-builders, but where are they? Our Tamerlanes and our Attilas, but whither are they departed? The intellect that revolves a kingdom pales before a heart
that speaks to the soul of man. All nations turn their faces toward a Hamlet, a Lear, or a Catherine of Aragon. The influence of these through the genius of the poet will spread and yield abundant fruit, when the havoc of a Cannæ or an Austerlitz is but dimly discernible in the skeleton of history.
The study of our finer literature is therefore the study of the soul; and the progress made will be upward and inward, and the result a purifying of the ideals and a chastening of the chords of man. Shakespeare gives us all this, he is ennobling as well as instructive; without paying homage in a measure to his memory by the maintenance of a certain form of excellence, no poet since his time has succeeded in being appreciated as great. For they all bear his mark, and although much below him, all dramatic writers since his day are modelled upon his plan.
Manuscript Note inserted before fly-leaf of copy of the 1602 quarto of Merry Wives of Windsor, now in Rowfant Library. Printed in A Catalogue of the Printed Books, etc., collected since 1886 by the late Frederick Locker Lampson. 1900, pp. 28-30.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, 1880
(b. 1837)
In his first stage Shakespeare had dropped his plummet no deeper into the sea of the spirit of man than Marlowe had sounded before him; and in the channel of simple emotion no poet could cast surer line with steadier hand than he. Further down in the dark and fiery depths of human pain and mortal passion no soul could search than his who first rendered into speech the aspirations and the agonies of a ruined and revolted spirit. And until Shakespeare found in himself the strength of eyesight to read, and the cunning of handiwork to render those wider diversities of emotion and those further complexities of character which lay outside the range of Marlowe, he certainly cannot be said to have outrun the winged feet, outstripped the fiery flight of his forerunner. In the heaven of our tragic song, the first-born star on the forehead of its herald god was not outshone till the full midsummer meridian of that greater godhead before whom he was sent to prepare a pathway for the sun. Through all the forenoon of our triumphant day, till the utter consummation and ultimate ascension of dramatic poetry incarnate and transfigured in the master-singer of the world, the quality of his tragedy was as that of Marlowe’s, broad, single, and intense; large of hand, voluble of tongue, direct of purpose. With the dawn of its latter epoch a new power comes upon it, to find clothing and expression in new forms of speech and after a new style.
The language has put off its foreign decorations of lyric and elegiac ornament; it has found already its infinite gain in the loss of those sweet superfluous graces which encumbered the march and enchained the utterance of its childhood. The figures which it invests are now no more types of a single passion, the incarnations of a single thought. They now demand a scrutiny which tests the power of a mind and tries the value of a judgment; they appeal to something more than the instant apprehension which sufficed to respond to the immediate claim of those that went before them. Romeo and Juliet were simply lovers, and their names bring back to us no further thought than of their love and the lovely sorrow of its end; Antony and Cleopatra shall be before all things lovers, but the thought of their love and its triumphant tragedy shall recall other things beyond number—all the forces and all the fortunes of mankind, all the chance and all the consequence that waited on their imperial passion, all the infinite variety of qualities and powers wrought together and welded into the frame and composition of that love which shook from end to end all nations and kingdoms of the earth.
A Study of Shakespeare. 1880, pp. 77-9.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, 1882
(b. 1837)
“William Shakespeare.”
Not if men’s tongues and angels’ all in one
Spake, might the word be said that might speak thee.
Streams, winds, woods, flowers, fields, mountains, yea the sea,
What power is in them all to praise the sun?
His praise is this,—he can be praised of none.
Man, woman, child, praise God for him; but he
Exults not to be worshipped, but to be.
He is; and, being, beholds his work well done.
All joy, all glory, all sorrow, all strength, all mirth,
Are his: without him, day were night on earth.
Time knows not his from time’s own period.
All lutes, all harps, all viols, all flutes, all lyres,
Fall dumb before him ere one string suspires.
All stars are angels; but the sun is God.
Tristram of Lyonesse and other Poems. 1882, p. 280.
See also Mr. Swinburne’s An Autumn Vision, October 31, 1889.
GEORGE MEREDITH, 1883
(b. 1828)
“The Spirit of Shakespeare.”
Thy greatest knew thee, Mother Earth; unsoured
He knew thy sons. He probed from hell to hell
Of human passions, but of love deflowered
His wisdom was not, for he knew thee well.
Thence came the honeyed corner of his lips,
The conquering smile wherein his spirit sails
Calm as the God who the white sea-wave whips,
Yet full of speech and intershifting tales,
Close mirrors of us: thence had he the laugh
We feel is thine: broad as ten thousand beeves
At pasture! thence thy songs, that winnow chaff
From grain, bid sick Philosophy’s last leaves
Whirl, if they have no recompense—they enforced
To fatten Earth when from her soul divorced.
How smiles he at a generation ranked
In gloomy noddings over life! They pass.
Not he to feed upon a breast unthanked,
Or eye a beauteous face in a cracked glass.
But he can spy that little twist of brain
Which moved some mighty leader of the blind,
Unwitting ’twas the goad of personal pain,
To view in curst eclipse our Mother’s mind,
And show us of some rigid harridan
The wretched bondman till the end of time.
O lived the Master now to paint us Man,
That little twist of brain would ring a chime
Of whence it came and what it caused, to start
Thunders of laughter, clearing air and heart.
Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth. 1883, pp. 161-2.
ROBERT BROWNING, 1884
(1812-1889)
“The Names.”
Shakespeare!—to such name’s sounding, what succeeds
Fitly as a silence? Falter forth the spell,—
Act follows word, the speaker knows full well,
Nor tampers with its magic more than needs.
Two names there are: That which the Hebrew reads
With his soul only: if from lips it fell,
Echo, back thundered by earth, heaven and hell,
Would own, “Thou didst create us!” Nought impedes
We voice the other name, man’s most of might,
Awesomely, lovingly: let awe and love
Mutely await their working, leave to sight
All of the issue as below—above—
Shakespeare’s creation rises: one remove
Though dread—this finite from that infinite.
Complete Poetic and Dramatic Works of Robert Browning. Cambridge edition, U.S.A. 1895.
Browning wrote this sonnet as a contribution to the Shakespearean Show-Book issued at the “Shakespearean Show” held in the Albert Hall, London, 29-31 May 1884, in aid of the Hospital for Women in Fulham Road. The sonnet is dated 12 March 1884.
WILLIAM WETMORE STORY, 1886
(b. 1819)
“The Mighty Makers.”
Whose are those forms august that, in the press
And busy blames and praises of to-day,
Stand so serene above life’s fierce affray
With ever youthful strength and loveliness?
Those are the mighty makers, whom no stress
Of time can shame, nor fashion sweep away,
Whom Art begot on Nature in the play
Of healthy passion, scorning base excess.
Rising perchance in mists, and half obscure
When up the horizon of their age they came,
Brighter with years they shine in steadier light,
Great constellations that will aye endure,
Though myriad meteors of ephemeral fame
Across them flash, to vanish into night.
Such was our Chaucer in the early prime
Of English verse, who held to Nature’s hand
And walked serenely through its morning land,
Gladsome and hale, brushing its dewy rime.
And such was Shakespeare, whose strong soul could climb
Steeps of sheer terror, sound the ocean grand
Of passions deep, or over Fancy’s strand
Trip with his fairies, keeping step and time.
His too the power to laugh out full and clear,
With unembittered joyance, and to move
Along the silent, shadowy paths of love
As tenderly as Dante, whose austere
Stern spirit through the worlds below, above,
Unsmiling strode, to tell their tidings here.
Poems. 1886, vol. ii. pp. 273-4.
THOMAS SPENCER BAYNES, 1886
(1823-1887)
Shakespeare’s work alone can be said to possess the organic strength and infinite variety, the throbbing fulness, vital complexity, and breathing truth of Nature herself. In points of artistic resource and technical ability—such as copious and expressive diction, freshness and pregnancy of verbal combination, richly modulated verse, and structural skill in the handling of incident and action—Shakespeare’s supremacy is indeed sufficiently assured. But, after all, it is of course in the spirit and substance of his work, his power of piercing to the hidden centres of character, of touching the deepest springs of impulse and passion, out of which are the issues of life, and of evolving those issues dramatically with a flawless strength, subtlety, and truth, which raises him so immensely above and beyond not only the best of the playwrights who went before him, but the whole line of illustrious dramatists that came after him. It is Shakespeare’s unique distinction that he has an absolute command over all the complexities of thought and feeling that prompt to action and bring out the dividing lines of character. He sweeps with the hand of a master the whole gamut of human experience, from the lowest note to the very top of its compass, from the sportive childish treble of Mamilius, and the pleading boyish tones of Prince Arthur, up to the spectre-haunted terrors of Macbeth, the tropical passion of Othello, the agonised sense
and tortured spirit of Hamlet, the sustained elemental grandeur, the Titanic force, the utterly tragical pathos of Lear.
Encyclopædia Britannica. 9th edition. Art. “Shakespeare.” Vol. xxi. 1886, p. 763.
GERALD MASSEY, 1888
(b. 1828)
Our Prince of Peace in glory hath gone,
With no Spear shaken, no Sword drawn,
No Cannon fired, no flag unfurled,
To make his conquest of the World.
For him no Martyr-fires have blazed,
No limbs been racked, no scaffolds raised;
For him no life was ever shed,
To make the Victor’s pathway red.
And for all time he wears the Crown
Of lasting, limitless renown:
He reigns, whatever Monarchs fall;
His Throne is in the heart of all.
The Secret Drama of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. 1888.
WALT WHITMAN, 1890
(1819-1892)
The inward and outward characteristics of Shakespeare are his vast and rich variety of persons and themes, with his wondrous delineation of each and all—not only limitless funds of verbal and pictorial resource, but great excess, superfœtation—mannerism, like a fine aristocratic perfume, holding a touch of musk (Euphues, his mark)—with boundless sumptuousness and adornment, real velvet and gems, not shoddy nor paste—but a good deal of bombast and fustian—(certainly some terrific mouthing in Shakespeare!).
Superb and inimitable as all is, it is mostly an objective and physiological kind of power and beauty the soul finds in Shakespeare—a style supremely grand of the sort, but in my opinion stopping short of the grandest sort, at any rate for fulfilling and satisfying modern and scientific and democratic American purposes. Think, not of growths as forests primeval, or Yellowstone geysers, or Colorado ravines, but of costly marble palaces, and palace rooms, and the noblest fixings and furniture, and noble owners and occupants to correspond—think of carefully built gardens from the beautiful but sophisticated gardening art at its best, with walks and bowers and artificial lakes, and appropriate statue groups, and the finest cultivated roses and lilies and japonicas in plenty—and you have the tally of Shakespeare. The low characters, mechanics, even the loyal henchmen—all in themselves nothing—serve as capital foils to the aristocracy. The comedies (exquisite
as they certainly are), bringing in admirably portrayed common characters, have the unmistakable hue of plays, portraits, made for the divertisement only of the élite of the castle, and from its point of view. The comedies are altogether non-acceptable to America and Democracy.
But to the deepest soul, it seems a shame to pick and choose from the riches Shakespeare has left us—to criticise his infinitely royal, multiform quality—to gauge, with optic glasses, the dazzle of his sun-like beams.
From Poet-Lore, July 1890. Complete Prose Works. Boston, Mass., 1898, p. 394.
Walt Whitman, when he says that “the comedies are altogether non-acceptable to America and Democracy,” states rather what he considers ought to be, than what actually is. In his essay, “Poetry To-day in America,” he says of Shakespeare, “In portraying mediæval European lords and barons, the arrogant poet, so dear to the inmost human heart (pride! pride! dearest, perhaps, of all—touching us, too, of the States closest of all—closer than love), he stands alone, and I do not wonder he so witches the world.”—Prose Works, Boston, 1898, p. 283.
RICHARD WATSON GILDER, 1891
(b. 1844)
“The Twenty-Third of April.”
A little English earth and breathèd air
Made Shakespeare the divine; so is his verse
The broidered soil of every blossom fair;
So doth his song all sweet bird-songs rehearse.
But tell me, then, what wondrous stuff did fashion
That part of him which took those wilding flights
Among imagined worlds; whence the white passion
That burned three centuries through the days and nights!
Not heaven’s four winds could make, nor round the earth,
The soul wherefrom the soul of Hamlet flamed;
Nor anything of merely mortal birth
Could lighten as when Shakespeare’s name is named.
How was his body bred we know full well,
But that high soul’s engendering who may tell!
“Five Books of Song.” IV. The Two Worlds. 1894, p. 154.
MATHILDE BLIND, c. 1894
(1841-1896)
“Shakespeare.”
Yearning to know herself for all she was,
Her passionate clash of warring good and ill,
Her new life ever ground in Death’s old mill,
With every delicate detail and en masse,—
Blind Nature strove. Lo, then it came to pass,
That Time, to work out her unconscious will,
Once wrought the mind which she had groped to fill,
And she beheld herself as in a glass.
The world of men, unrolled before our sight,
Showed like a map, where stream and waterfall,
And village-cradling vale and cloud-capped height
Stand faithfully recorded, great and small,
For Shakespeare was, and at his touch with light
Impartial as the sun’s, revealed the All.
“Shakespeare Sonnets, VII.” Poetical Works. Ed. Arthur Symons. 1900, p. 443.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, BEFORE 1892
(1809-1892)
There are three repartees in Shakespeare which always bring tears to my eyes from their simplicity.
One is in King Lear, when Lear says to Cordelia, “So young and so untender,” and Cordelia lovingly answers, “So young, my lord, and true.” And in The Winter’s Tale, when Florizel takes Perdita’s hand to lead her to the dance, and says, “So turtles pair that never mean to part,” and the little Perdita answers, giving her hand to Florizel, ”I’ll swear for ’em.” And in Cymbeline, when Imogen in tender rebuke says to her husband:
“Why did you throw your wedded lady from you?
Think that you are upon a rock; and now,
Throw me again!”
and Posthumus does not ask forgiveness, but answers, kissing her:
“Hang there like fruit, my soul,
Till the tree die.”
Life and Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Ed. Hallam, Lord Tennyson. 1898, vol. iv. pp. 39 et seq.
See also ib., pp. 39-43.
SIDNEY LEE, 1899
(b. 1859)
Shakespeare’s mind, as Hazlitt suggested, contained within itself the germs of all faculty and feeling. He knew intuitively how every faculty and feeling would develop in any conceivable change of fortune. Men and women—good or bad, old or young, wise or foolish, merry or sad, rich or poor—yielded their secrets to him, and his genius enabled him to give being in his pages to all the shapes of humanity that present themselves on the highway of life. Each of his characters gives voice to thought or passion with an individuality and a naturalness that rouse in the intelligent playgoer and reader the illusion that they are overhearing men and women speak unpremeditatingly among themselves, rather than that they are reading written speeches or hearing written speeches recited. The more closely the words are studied, the completer the illusion grows. Creatures of the imagination—fairies, ghosts, witches—are delineated with a like potency, and the reader or spectator feels instinctively that these supernatural entities could not speak, feel, or act otherwise than Shakespeare represents them. The creative power of poetry was never manifested to such effect as in the corporeal semblances in which Shakespeare clad the spirits of the air.
So mighty a faculty sets at nought the common limitations of nationality, and in every quarter of the globe to which civilised life has penetrated, Shakespeare’s power is
recognised. All the world over, language is applied to his creations that ordinarily applies to beings of flesh and blood. Hamlet and Othello, Lear and Macbeth, Falstaff and Shylock, Brutus and Romeo, Ariel and Caliban are studied in almost every civilised tongue as if they were historic personalities, and the chief of the impressive phrases that fall from their lips are rooted in the speech of civilised humanity. To Shakespeare the intellect of the world, speaking in divers accents, applies with one accord his own words: “How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in apprehension how like a god!”
Life of William Shakespeare. 1899, chap. xxi.
PART II
“GOOD SENTENCES”
Merchant of Venice, I. ii. 11.
Brief, short, quick, snap.
Merry Wives, IV. v. 2.
In the quick forge and working-house of thought.
Henry V. V. prol. 23.
A good swift simile.
Taming of the Shrew, V. ii. 54.
Shakespeare, we must be silent in thy praise,
’Cause our encomions will but blast thy bays,
Which envy could not, that thou didst so well,
Let thine own histories prove thy chronicle.
Anonymous. Epig. 25. Witts Recreations. 1640, printed 1639.
To-day we bring old gather’d herbs, ’tis true,
But such as in sweet Shakespeare’s garden grew.
And all his plants immortal you esteem,
Your mouths are never out of taste with him.
John Crowne (d. 1703?). Prologue to Henry the Sixth, the First Part. Adapted from Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI. 1681. Sig. A2.
Shakespeare (whom you and every playhouse bill
Style the divine, the matchless, what you will)
For gain, not glory, wing’d his roving flight,
And grew immortal in his own despite.
Alexander Pope (1688-1744). Imitations of Horace. Bk. II. ch. i. ll. 69-72. 1737.
Thrice happy! could we catch great Shakespeare’s art,
To trace the deep recesses of the heart;
His simple plain sublime, to which is given
To strike the soul with darted flame from heaven.
James Thomson (1700-1748). Prologue to Tancred and Sigismundâ. 1745. Sig. A4.
Let others seek a monumental fame,
And leave for one short age a pompous name;
Thou dost not e’en this little tomb require,
Shakespeare can only with the world expire.
Epitaph on a Tombstone of Shakespeare. Gentleman’s Magazine. June 1767, vol. xxvii. p. 324.
Shakespeare came out of Nature’s hand like Pallas out of Jove’s head, at full growth and mature.
George Colman (1733-1794), before 1767.
George Colman, who advocated the theory that Shakespeare had some classic learning, commenting in the Appendix to the second edition of his translation of the comedies of Terence (1768) on Richard Farmer’s Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare (1767), which maintains that Shakespeare got his knowledge of the ancients from translations, says: “Mr. Farmer closes these general testimonies of Shakespeare’s having been only indebted to Nature, by saying, ‘He came out of her hand, as some one else expresses it, like Pallas out of Jove’s head, at full growth and mature.’ It is whimsical enough, that this some one else, whose expression is here quoted to countenance the general notion of Shakespeare’s want of literature, should be no other than myself. Mr. Farmer does not choose to mention where he met with this expression of some one else; and some one else does not choose to mention where he dropped it.” Colman’s “Appendix” was printed in the “Variorum” editions of Shakespeare, and that of 1785 gave an anonymous note, stating that Young “in his Conjectures on Original Composition (vol. v. p. 100, ed. 1773) has the following sentence: ‘An adult genius comes out of Nature’s hands, as Pallas out of Jove’s head, at full growth and mature.’ Shakespeare’s genius was of this kind.” Young’s Conjectures appeared in 1759, so perhaps Colman borrowed, though, as he says (Prose on Several Occasions, 1787, ii. p. 186), “The thought is obvious, and might, without improbability, occur to different writers.” At any rate, his form of the thought is better than Young’s, so he has here been given the credit for it.
To mark her Shakespeare’s worth, and Britain’s love,
Let Pope design, and Burlington approve:
Superfluous care! when distant times shall view
This tomb grown old—his works shall still be new.
Richard Graves (1715-1804). “On erecting a Monument to Shakespeare under the direction of Mr. Pope and Lord Burlington.” Euphrosyne, 1776.
This refers to the monument erected by public subscription in Westminster Abbey in 1741. The design was by William Kent, and the statue of Shakespeare, which was part of it, was executed by Peter Scheemachers.
Our modern tragedies, hundreds of them do not contain a good line; nor are they a jot the better, because Shakespeare, who was superior to all mankind, wrote some whole plays that are as bad as any of our present writers’.
Horace Walpole (1717-1797). Letter to Sir Horace Mann, Oct. 8, 1778. Letters. Ed. Peter Cunningham, 1858, vol. vii. p. 135.
Write like Shakespeare, and laugh at the critics.
Daniel Webb (1719?-1798). Literary Amusements, 1787, p. 22.
Lord of the mighty spell: around him press
Spirits and fairy forms. He, ruling wide
His visionary world, bids terror fill
The shivering breast, or softer pity thrill
E’en to the inmost heart.
W. L. Bowles (1762-1850). “Monody on the Death of Dr. Warton,” 1801. Poems, 1803, vol. ii. pp. 141-2.
Is there no bard of heavenly power possess’d,
To thrill, to rouse, to animate the breast?
Like Shakespeare o’er the sacred mind to sway,
And call each wayward passion to obey?
F. D. Hemans (1793-1835). “England and Spain,” 1807.
Our love of Shakespeare, therefore, is not a monomania or solitary and unaccountable infatuation; but is merely the natural love which all men bear to those forms of excellence that are accommodated to their peculiar character, temperament, and situation; and which will always return, and assert its power over their affections, long after authority has lost its reverence, fashions been antiquated, and artificial tastes passed away.
Francis Lord Jeffrey (1773-1850). Edinburgh Review, Aug. 1811, vol. xviii. p. 285.
Shakespeare had the inward clothing of a fine mind; the outward covering of solid reading, of critical observation, and the richest eloquence; and compared with these, what are the trappings of the schools?
George Dyer (1755-1841). “The Relation of Poetry to the Arts and Sciences,” in The Reflector, 1811. Reprinted in Poetics, 1812, ii. p. 19.
Shakespeare has been accused of profaneness. I for my part have acquired from perusal of him, a habit of looking into my own heart, and am confident that Shakespeare is an author of all others the most calculated to make his readers better as well as wiser.
S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834). “Outline of an introductory Lecture on Shakespeare,” 1812.
Let no man blame his son for learning history from Shakespeare.
Id. Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton. Ed. J. P. Collier, p. 19.
The greatest genius that, perhaps, human nature has yet produced, our myriad-minded[232:1] Shakespeare.
Id. Biographia Literaria, 1817, chap. xv.
The great, ever-living, dead man.
Ibid.
That sprightliest, gravest, wisest, kindest one—
Shakespeare.
Leigh Hunt (1784-1859). Thoughts of the Avon on 28 Sept. 1817.
His plays alone are properly expressions of the passions, not descriptions of them. His characters are real beings of flesh and blood; they speak like men, not like authors.
William Hazlitt (1778-1830). “On Shakespeare and Milton,” Lectures on the English Poets, 1818, p. 98.
In trying to recollect any other author, one sometimes stumbles, in case of failure, on a word as good. In Shakespeare, any other word but the true one, is sure to be wrong.[234:1]
Ibid., p. 108.
Shakespeare was the least of a coxcomb of any one that ever lived, and much of a gentleman.
Ibid., p. 111.
. . . Divinest Shakespeare’s might
Fills Avon and the world with light,
Like omniscient power which he
Imaged ’mid mortality.
P. B. Shelley (1792-1822). “Lines written among the Euganean Hills,” October 1818.
Shakespeare led a life of allegory: his works are the comments on it.
John Keats (1795-1821). Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 18 Feb. 1819.
If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.
William Hazlitt (1778-1830). Table Talk, 1821, vol. i. p. 177.
. . . Shakespeare, who in our hearts for himself hath erected an empire
Not to be shaken by time, nor e’er by another divided.
Robert Southey (1774-1843). A Vision of Judgment, 1821, ix. ll. 17, 18.
I look upon him to be the worst of models, though the most extraordinary of writers.
Lord Byron (1788-1824). Letter to Murray, 14 July 1821. Moore’s Life of Byron.
Schiller has the material sublime: to produce an effect, he sets you a whole town on fire, and throws infants with their mothers into the flames, or locks up a father in an old tower. But Shakespeare drops a handkerchief, and the same or greater effects follow.
S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834). Table Talk, 29 Dec. 1822.
Nature’s chief darling, and illustrious mate,
Destined to foil old Death’s oblivious plan,
And shine untarnish’d by the fogs of Fate,
Time’s famous rival till the final date!
Thomas Hood (1799-1845). The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, cv. 1827, p. 53.
Who knows or can figure what the Man Shakespeare was, by the first, by the twentieth, perusal of his works? He is a Voice coming to us from the Land of Melody: his old brick dwelling-place, in the mere earthly burgh of Stratford-on-Avon, offers us the most inexplicable enigma.
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, “Goethe.” Reprinted from Foreign Review, No. 3, 1828.
Students of poetry admire Shakespeare in their tenth year; but go on admiring him more and more, understanding him more and more, till their threescore-and-tenth.
Ibid.
No one can understand Shakespeare’s superiority fully until he has ascertained, by comparison, all that which he possessed in common with several other great dramatists of his age, and has then calculated the surplus which is entirely Shakespeare’s own.
S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834). Table Talk, 12 May 1830.
The spirit to enchain:
His grasp o’er nature fell,
Creation own’d his reign.
“Poetical Portraits” by A Modern Pythagorean in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. xxvii. 1830, p. 632.
It is not too much to say, that the great plays of Shakespeare would lose less by being deprived of all the passages which are commonly called the fine passages, than those passages lose by being read separately from the play. This is, perhaps, the highest praise which can be given to a dramatist.
Lord Macaulay (1800-1859). Edinburgh Review, June 1831, vol. liii. pp. 567-8.
I believe Shakespeare was not a whit more intelligible in his own day than he is now to an educated man, except for a few local allusions of no consequence. And I said, he is of no age—nor, I may add, of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind: his observation and reading, which were considerable, supplied him with the drapery of his figures.
S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834). Table Talk, 15 March 1834.
I would be willing to live only as long as Shakespeare were the mirror to Nature.
Id., Letters, etc., 1836, i. 196.
Than Shakespeare and Petrarch pray who are more living?
Whose words more delight us? whose touches more touch?
Leigh Hunt (1784-1859). “Blue-stocking Revels; or, the Feast of the Violets.” Canto III. Monthly Repository, 1837.
In the gravest sense it may be affirmed of Shakespeare, that he is among the modern luxuries of life.
T. De Quincey (1785-1859). “Shakespeare,” Encyclopædia Britannica, 7th ed., 1842. Written 1838.
Produce us from any drama of Shakespeare one of those leading passages that all men have by heart, and show us any eminent defect in the very sinews of the thought. It is impossible; defects there may be, but they will always be found irrelevant to the main central thought, or to its expression.
Id. “Pope,” Encyclopædia Britannica, 7th ed., 1842. Written 1839.
Shakespeare, a wool-comber, poacher, or whatever else at Stratford in Warwickshire, who happened to write books! The finest human figure, as I apprehend, that Nature has hitherto seen fit to make of our widely diffused Teutonic clay. Saxon, Norman, Celt or Sarmat, I find no human soul so beautiful, these fifteen hundred known years;—our supreme modern European man.
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). “Geschichte der Teutschen Sippschaft,” translated by Carlyle in Chartism, 1839. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays.
It is to be doubted whether even Shakespeare could have told a story like Homer, owing to that incessant activity and superfœtation of thought, a little less of which might be occasionally desired even in his plays;—if it were possible, once possessing anything of his, to wish it away.
Leigh Hunt (1784-1859). “What is Poetry?” Imagination and Fancy, 1844. Ed. A. S. Cook, 1893, p. 65.
Now, literature, philosophy, and thought are Shakespearised. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see.
R. W. Emerson (1803-1882). “Representative Men.” Shakespeare; or the Poet, 1844.
Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb
The crowns o’ the world: O eyes sublime,
With tears and laughter for all time!
E. B. Browning (1809-1861). A Vision of Poets, 1844.
A rib of Shakespeare would have made a Milton: the same portion of Milton, all poets born ever since.
W. S. Landor (1775-1846). “Imaginary Conversations.” Works, 1846, ii. p. 74.
In poetry there is but one supreme,
Tho’ there are many angels round his throne,
Mighty, and beauteous, while his face is hid.
Id. “On Shakespeare.” “Poems and Epigrams.” Works, 1846.
A long list can be cited of passages in Shakespeare, which have been solemnly denounced by many eminent men (all blockheads) as ridiculous: and if a man does find a passage in a tragedy that displeases him, it is sure to seem ludicrous: witness the indecent exposures of themselves made by Voltaire, La Harpe, and many billions beside of bilious people.
T. De Quincey (1785-1859). “Schlosser’s Literary History.” Tait’s Magazine, Sept., Oct., 1847.
A thousand poets pried at life,
And only one amid the strife
Rose to be Shakespeare.
R. Browning (1812-1889). Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, xvi., 1850.
When I began to give myself up to the profession of a poet for life, I was impressed with a conviction, that there were four English poets whom I must have continually before me as examples—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. These I must study, and equal if I could; and I need not think of the rest.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Memoirs. By Christopher Wordsworth, 1851, vol. ii. p. 470.
I cannot account for Shakespeare’s low estimate of his own writings, except from the sublimity, the superhumanity of his genius. They were infinitely below his conception of what they might have been, and ought to have been.
Ibid.
. . . Matchless Shakespeare, who, undaunted, took
From Nature’s shrinking hand her secret book,
And page by page the wondrous tome explored.
D. M. Moir (1798-1851), before 1851. “Stanzas on an Infant.” Poetical Works, 1852, vol. ii. p. 50.
Shakespeare’s glowing soul,
Where mightiness and meekness met.
Ibid., p. 341, “Hymn to the Moon.”
Kind Shakespeare, our recording angel.
T. L. Beddoes (1803-1849). “Lines written in Switzerland.” Poems, 1851, vol. i. p. 215.
Kinder all earth hath grown since genial Shakespeare sung!
Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton (1805-1873). “The Souls of Books,” i. l. 21. Works, 1853, vol. iii. p. 282.
. . . Wise and true,
Bright as the noon-tide, clear as morning dew,
And wholesome in the spirit and the form.
Charles Mackay (1814-1899). “Mist.” Under Green Leaves, 1857.
I care not how Shakespeare is acted: with him the thought suffices.
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), c. 1860.
I am always happy to meet persons who perceive the transcendent superiority of Shakespeare over all other writers.
R. W. Emerson (1803-1882). “Culture.” Conduct of Life, 1860.
We may consider Shakespeare, as an ancient mythologist would have done, as “enskied” among “the invulnerable clouds,” where no shaft, even of envy, can assail him. From this elevation we may safely predict that he never can be plucked.
Cardinal Wiseman (1802-1856). William Shakespeare, 1865, p. 28.
To say truth, what I most of all admire are the traces he shows of a talent that could have turned the History of England into a kind of Iliad, almost perhaps into a kind of Bible.
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). “Shooting Niagara: and After?” Macmillan’s Magazine, August, 1867.
Shakespeare! loveliest of souls,
Peerless in radiance, in joy.
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888). “Heine’s Grave.” New Poems, 1867, p. 198.
If Shakespeare did not know the ancients, I think they were at least as unlucky in not knowing him.
J. R. Lowell (1819-1891). Among my Books, 1870, p. 190.
Shakespeare recognised both our human imperfections and our human greatness. . . . A woman is dearer to Shakespeare than an angel; a man is better than a god.
Edward Dowden (b. 1843). Shakespeare: His Mind and Art, 1875, p. 346.
Shakespeare frequently has lines and passages in a strain quite false, and which are entirely unworthy of him. But one can imagine his smiling if one could meet him in the Elysian Fields and tell him so; smiling and replying that he knew it perfectly well himself, and what did it matter?
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888). “Preface to Poems of Wordsworth,” 1879. Essays in Criticism, 2nd ser., p. 135.
All Castaly flowed crystalline
In gentle Shakespeare’s modulated breath.
D. G. Rossetti (1828-1882). “On certain Elizabethan Revivals.” Recollections of D. G. Rossetti. By T. Hall Caine, 1882, p. 256.
Conception, fundamental brain work, that is what makes the difference in all art. Work your metal as much as you like, but first take care that it is gold, and worth working. A Shakespearean sonnet is better than the most perfect in form, because Shakespeare wrote it.
Ibid., p. 249.
I close your Marlowe’s page, my Shakespeare’s ope,
How welcome—after gong and cymbal’s din—
The continuity, the long slow slope
And vast curves of the gradual violin!
William Watson (b. 1858). Epigrams of Art, Life, and Nature, 1884, vii.
Shakespeare illustrates every phase and variety of humour: a complete analysis of Shakespeare’s humour would make a system of psychology.
G. Moulton (b. 1849). Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, 1893, p. 285.
From Shakespeare, no doubt, the world may learn, and has learnt, much; yet he professed so little to be a teacher, that he has often been represented as almost without personal opinions, as a mere undisturbed mirror, in which all Nature reflects herself. Something like a century passed before it was perceived that his works deserved to be in a serious sense studied.
J. R. Seeley (1834-1895). Goethe reviewed after Sixty Years, 1894, p. 98.
Shakespeare and Chaucer throw off, at noble work, the lower part of their natures as they would a rough dress.
John Ruskin (1819-1900). Fors Clavigera. Letter XXXIV., 1896, ii. 235.
PART III
“ROUND ABOUT”
What’s here? A scroll; and written round about?
Let’s see.
Titus Andronicus, IV. ii. 19.
With his steerage shall your thoughts grow on.
Pericles, IV. iv. 19.
Falstaff. Of what quality was your love, then?
Ford. Like a fair house built on another man’s ground.
Merry Wives, II. ii. 223.
MARGARET CAVENDISH, DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE, 1664
(1624?-1674)
Remember, when we were very young maids, one day we were discoursing about lovers, and we did enjoin each other to confess who professed to love us, and whom we loved, and I confessed I was in love with three dead men, which were dead long before my time, the one was Cæsar, for his valour, the second Ovid, for his wit, and the third our countryman Shakespeare, for his comical and tragical humour; but soon after we both married two worthy men, and I will leave you to your own husband, for you best know what he is. As for my husband, I know him to have the valour of Cæsar, the fancy and wit of Ovid, and the tragical, especially comical art of Shakespeare, in truth, he is as far beyond Shakespeare for comical humour, as Shakespeare is beyond an ordinary poet in that way.
Letter CLXII. CCXI Sociable Letters written by the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, 1664. Letters CXXIII. and CLXII.
JOSEPH ADDISON, 1711
(1672-1719)
Some years ago I was at the tragedy of “Macbeth,” and unfortunately placed myself under a woman of quality, that is since dead; who, as I found by the noise she made, was newly returned from France. A little before the rising of the curtain, she broke out into a loud soliloquy, “When will the dear witches enter?” and immediately upon their first appearance, asked a lady that sat three boxes from her, on her right hand, if those witches were not charming creatures. A little later, as Betterton was in one of the finest speeches of the play, she shook her fan at another lady, who sat as far on her left hand, and told her in a whisper that might be heard all over the pit, “We must not expect to see Balloon to-night.” Not long after, calling out to a young baronet by his name, who sat three seats before me, she asked him whether Macbeth’s wife was still alive; and before he could give an answer, fell a-talking of the ghost of Banquo. She had by this time formed a little audience to herself, and fixed the attention of all about her. But as I had a mind to hear the play, I got out of the sphere of her impertinence, and planted myself in one of the remotest corners of the pit.
The Spectator, No. 45, 21 April 1711.
HENRY FIELDING, 1743
(1707-1754)
I then observed Shakespeare standing between Betterton and Booth, and deciding a difference between these two great actors concerning the placing an accent in one of his lines: this was disputed on both sides with a warmth which surprised me in Elysium, till I discovered by intuition that every soul retained its principal characteristic, being, indeed, its very essence. The line was that celebrated one in Othello—
Put out the light, and then put out the light,
according to Betterton. Mr. Booth contended to have it thus:—
Put out the light, and then put out the light.
I could not help offering my conjecture on this occasion, and suggested it might perhaps be—
Put out the light, and then put out thy light.
Another hinted a reading very sophisticated in my opinion—
Put out the light, and then put out thee, light.
Making light to be the vocative case. Another would have altered the last word, and read—
Put out thy light, and then put out thy sight.
But Betterton said, if the text was to be disturbed, he saw no reason why a word might not be changed as well as a letter, and instead of “put out thy light,” you may read
“put out thy eyes.” At last it was agreed on all sides to refer the matter to the decision of Shakespeare himself, who delivered his sentiments as follows: “Faith, gentlemen, it is so long since I wrote the line, I have forgot my meaning. This I know, could I have dreamt so much nonsense would have been talked and writ about it, I would have blotted it out of my works; for I am sure, if any of these be my meaning, it doth me very little honour.”
He was then interrogated concerning some other ambiguous passages in his works; but he declined any satisfactory answer; saying, if Mr. Theobald had not writ about it sufficiently, there were three or four more new editions of his plays coming out, which he hoped would satisfy every one: concluding, “I marvel nothing so much as that men will gird themselves at discovering obscure beauties in an author. Certes the greatest and most pregnant beauties are ever the plainest and most evidently striking; and when two meanings of a passage can in the least balance our judgments which to prefer, I hold it matter of unquestionable certainty that neither of them is worth a farthing.”
From his works our conversation turned on his monument; upon which Shakespeare, shaking his sides, and addressing himself to Milton, cried out, “On my word, brother Milton, they have brought a noble set of poets together; they would have been hanged erst have convened such a company at their tables when alive.” “True, brother,” answered Milton, “unless we had been as incapable of eating then as we are now.”
“A Journey from this World to the Next,” Chapter viii. Miscellanies, 1743.
THOMAS EDWARDS, 1747
(1699-1757)
Canon I. A Professed Critic has a right to declare that his Author wrote whatever He thinks he ought to have written, with as much positiveness as if he had been at his elbow.
Canon II. He has a right to alter any passage which He does not understand.
Canon III. These alterations He may make in spite of the exactness of measure.
Canon IV. Where He does not like an expression, and yet cannot mend it, He may abuse his Author for it.
Canon V. Or He may condemn it as a foolish interpolation.
Canon VI. As every Author is to be corrected into all possible perfection, the Professed Critic is the sole judge; He may alter any word or phrase, which does not want amendment, or which will do, provided He can think of anything which He imagines will do better.
Canon VII. He may find out obsolete words, or coin new ones, and put them in the place of such as He does not like, or does not understand.
Canon VIII. He may prove a reading or support an explanation by any sort of reasons, no matter whether good or bad.
Canon IX. He may interpret his Author so as to make him mean directly contrary to what he says.
Canon X. He should not allow any poetical licences, which He does not understand.
Canon XI. He may make foolish amendments or explanations, and refute them, only to enhance the value of his critical skill.
Canon XII. He may find out a bawdy or immoral meaning in his Author where there does not appear to be any hint that way.
Canon XIII. He need not attend to the low accuracy of orthography, or pointing; but may ridicule such trivial criticisms in others.
Canon XIV. Yet, when He pleases to condescend to such work, He may value himself upon it; and not only restore lost puns, but point out such quaintnesses where, perhaps, the Author never thought of them.
Canon XV. He may explain a difficult passage by words absolutely unintelligible.
Canon XVI. He may contradict himself for the sake of showing his critical skill on both sides of the question.
Canon XVII. It will be necessary for the Professed Critic to have by him a good number of pedantic and abusive expressions, to throw about upon proper occasions.
Canon XVIII. He may explain his Author, or any former Editor of him, by supplying such words, or pieces of words, or marks, as He thinks fit for that purpose.
Canon XIX. He may use the very same reasons for confirming his own observations, which he has disallowed in his adversary.
Canon XX. As the design of writing notes is not so much to explain the Author’s meaning as to display the Critic’s knowledge, it may be proper, to show his universal learning, that He minutely point out from whence every metaphor and allusion is taken.
Canon XXI. It will be proper, in order to show his wit, especially if the Critic be a married man, to take every opportunity of sneering at the fair sex.
Canon XXII. He may mis-quote himself, or anybody else, in order to make an occasion of writing notes, when he cannot otherwise find one.
Canon XXIII. The Professed Critic, in order to furnish his quota to the bookseller, may write notes of nothing; that is to say, notes which either explain things which do not want explanation, or such as do not explain matters at all, but merely fill up so much paper.
Canon XXIV. He may dispense with truth, in order to give the world a higher idea of his parts, or the value of his work.
The Canons of Criticism, first published as a Supplement to Mr. Warburton’s Edition of Shakespear. Collected from Notes in that Celebrated Work, and proper to be bound up with it. By the Other Gentleman of Lincoln’s Inn.
Warburton’s edition also elicited An Attempte to Rescue that Auncient English Poet and Play-Wrighte, Maister Willaume Shakespere, from the many Errores faulsely charged on him by Certaine New-fangled Wittes, by a Gentleman formerly of Greys-Inn. 1749. This small treatise dealt with The Tempest in a spirit of genuine zeal, but with less controversial ability than was displayed by the “Other Gentleman.”
MARK AKENSIDE, 1749
(1721-1770)
“The Remonstrance of Shakespeare: supposed to have been spoken at the Theatre Royal, while the French comedians were acting by subscription. 1749.”
If, yet regardful of your native land,
Old Shakespeare’s tongue you deign to understand,
Lo, from the blissful bowers where Heaven rewards
Instructive sages and unblemish’d bards,
I come, the ancient founder of the stage,
Intent to learn, in this discerning age,
What form of wit your fancies have embrac’d,
And whither tends your elegance of taste,
That thus at length our homely toils you spurn,
That thus to foreign scenes you proudly turn,
That from my brow the laurel wreath you claim
To crown the rivals of your country’s fame.
What though the footsteps of my devious Muse
The measur’d walks of Grecian art refuse?
Or though the frankness of my hardy style
Mock the nice touches of the critic’s file?
Yet, what my age and climate held to view,
Impartial I survey’d, and fearless drew.
And say, ye skilful in the human heart,
Who know to prize a poet’s noblest part,
What age, what clime, could e’er an ampler field
For lofty thought, for daring fancy, yield?
I saw this England break the shameful bands
Forg’d for the souls of men by sacred hands:
I saw each groaning realm her aid implore;
Her sons the heroes of each warlike shore;
Her naval standard (the dire Spaniard’s bane)
Obey’d through all the circuit of the main.
Then too great Commerce, for a late-found world,
Against your coast her eager sails unfurl’d:
New hopes, new passions, thence to bosom fir’d;
New plans, new arts, the genius thence inspir’d;
Thence every scene, which private fortune knows,
In stronger life, with bolder spirit, rose.
Disgrac’d I this full prospect which I drew?
My colours languid, or my strokes untrue?
Have not your sages, warriors, swains, and kings
Confess’d the living draught of men and things?
What other bard in any clime appears
Alike the master of your smiles and tears?
Yet have I deigned your audience to entice
With wretched bribes to luxury and vice?
Or have my various scenes a purpose known
Which freedom, virtue, glory, might not own?
Such from the first was my dramatic plan,
It should be yours to crown what I began:
And now that England spurns her Gothic chain,
And equal laws and social science reign,
I thought, Now surely shall my zealous eyes
View nobler bards and juster critics rise,
Intent with learned labour to refine
The copious ore of Albion’s native mine,
Our stately Muse more graceful airs to teach,
And form her tongue to more attractive speech,
Till rival nations listen at her feet,
And own her polish’d as they own’d her great.
But do you thus my favourite hopes fulfil?
Is France at last the standard of your skill?
Alas for you! that so betray a mind
Of art unconscious and to beauty blind.
Say; does her language your ambition raise,
Her barren, trivial, unharmonious phrase,
Which fetters eloquence to scantiest bounds,
And maims the cadence of poetic sounds?
Say; does your humble admiration choose
The gentle prattle of her Comic Muse,
While wits, plain-dealers, fops, and fools appear,
Charg’d to say nought but what the king may hear?
Or rather melt your sympathising hearts,
Won by her tragic scene’s romantic arts,
Where old and young declaim on soft desire,
And heroes never, but for love, expire?
No. Though the charms of novelty, awhile,
Perhaps too fondly win your thoughtless smile,
Yet not for you design’d indulgent fate
The modes or manners of the Bourbon state.
And ill your minds my partial judgment reads,
And many an augury my soul misleads,
If the fair maids of yonder blooming train
To their light courtship would an audience deign,
Or those chaste matrons a Parisian wife
Choose for the model of domestic life;
Or if one youth of all that generous band,
The strength and splendour of their native land,
Would yield his portion of his country’s fame,
And quit old freedom’s patrimonial claim,
With lying smiles oppressions pomp to see,
And judge of glory by a king’s decree.
O blest at home with justly-envied laws,
O long the chiefs of Europe’s general cause,
Whom Heaven hath chosen at each dangerous hour
To check the inroads of barbaric power,
The rights of trampled nations to reclaim,
And guard the social world from bonds and shame;
Oh, let not luxury’s fantastic charms
Thus give the lie to your heroic arms:
Nor for the ornaments of life embrace
Dishonest lessons from that vaunting race,
Whom fate’s dread laws (for, in eternal fate
Despotic rule was heir to freedom’s hate,)
Whom in each warlike, each commercial part,
In civil counsel, and in pleasing art,
The judge of earth predestin’d for your foes,
And made it fame and virtue to oppose.
Odes on Several Subjects. Book II., ode i. Poetical Works. Aldine edition, 1835, p. 199.
ROBERT LLOYD, 1751
(1733-1764)
There stood an ancient mount, yclept Parnass,
(The fair domain of sacred poesy,)
Which, with fresh odours ever-blooming, was
Besprinkled with the dew of Castaly;
Which now in soothing murmurs whisp’ring glides
Wat’ring with genial waves the fragrant soil,
Now rolls adown the mountain’s steepy sides,
Teaching the vales full beauteously to smile,
Dame Nature’s handiwork, not form’d by lab’ring toil.
The Muses fair, these peaceful shades among,
With skilful fingers sweep the trembling strings;
The air in silence listens to the song,
And Time forgets to ply his lazy wings;
Pale-visag’d Care, with foul unhallow’d feet,
Attempts the summit of the hill to gain,
Ne can the hag arrive the blissful seat,
Her unavailing strength is spent in vain,
Content sits on the top, and mocks her empty pain.
Oft Phœbus’ self left his divine abode,
And here enshrouded in a shady bow’r,
Regardless of his state, laid by the god,
And own’d sweet music’s more alluring pow’r.
On either side was plac’d a peerless wight,
Whose merit long had fill’d the trump of Fame;
This, Fancy’s darling child, was Spenser hight,
Who pip’d full pleasing on the banks of Tame;
That, no less fam’d than he, and Milton was his name.
. . . . . . .
Next Shakespeare sat, irregularly great,
And in his hand a magic rod did hold,
Which visionary beings did create,
And burn the foulest dross to purest gold:
Whatever spirits rose in earth or air,
Or bad or good, obey his dread command;
To his behests these willingly repair,
Those aw’d by terrors of his magic wand,
The which not all their pow’rs united might withstand.
Beside the bard there stood a beauteous maid,
Whose glittering appearance dimm’d the eyen;
Her thin-wrought vesture various tints display’d,
Fancy her name, ysprong of race divine;
Her mantle wimpled low, her silken hair,
Which loose adown her well-turn’d shoulders stray’d,
She made a net to catch the wanton air,
Whose love-sick breezes all around her play’d,
And seem’d in whispers soft to court the heav’nly maid.
And ever and anon she wav’d in air
A sceptre, fraught with all-creative pow’r:
She wav’d it round: eftsoons there did appear
Spirits and witches, forms unknown before:
Again she lifts her wonder-working wand;
Eftsoons upon the flow’ry plain were seen
The gay inhabitants of Fairy-Land,
And blithe attendants upon Mab their queen
In mystic circles danc’d along th’ enchanted green.
On th’ other side stood Nature, goddess fair;
A matron seem’d she, and of manners staid;
Beauteous her form, majestic was her air,
In loose attire of purest white array’d:
A potent rod she bore, whose pow’r was such
(As from her darling’s works may well be shown,)
That often with its soul-enchanting touch,
She rais’d or joy or caus’d the deep-felt groan,
And each man’s passions made subservient to her own.
The Progress of Envy, 1751, Stanzas 2-4 and 7-10.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH, 1765
(1728-1774)
The character of old Falstaff, even with all his faults, gives me more consolation than the most studied efforts of wisdom: I here behold an agreeable old fellow, forgetting age, and showing me the way to be young at sixty-five. Sure I am well able to be as merry, though not so comical, as he. Is it not in my power to have, though not so much wit, at least as much vivacity?—Age, care, wisdom, reflection, begone!—I give you to the winds. Let’s have t’other bottle: here’s to the memory of Shakespeare, Falstaff, and all the merry men of Eastcheap.
Such were the reflections that naturally arose while I sat at the Boar’s-head tavern, still kept at Eastcheap. Here, by a pleasant fire, in the very room where old Sir John Falstaff cracked his jokes, in the very chair which was sometimes honoured by Prince Henry, and sometimes polluted by his immoral merry companions, I sat and ruminated on the follies of youth; wished to be young again; but was resolved to make the best of life while it lasted, and now and then compared past and present times together.
“A Reverie at the Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastcheap.” Collected Essays, 1765.
GEORGE, LORD LYTTELTON, 1765
(1709-1773)
“Boileau—Pope.”
BOILEAU
. . . The office of an editor was below you, and your mind was unfit for the drudgery it requires. Would anybody think of employing a Raphael to clean an old picture?
POPE
The principal cause of my undertaking that task was zeal for the honour of Shakespeare: and if you knew all his beauties as well as I, you would not wonder at this zeal. No other author had ever so copious, so bold, so creative an imagination, with so perfect a knowledge of the passions, the humours, and sentiments of mankind. He painted all characters, from kings down to peasants, with equal truth and equal force. If human nature were destroyed, and no monument were left of it except his works, other beings might know what man was from those writings.
BOILEAU
You say he painted all characters, from kings down to peasants, with equal truth and equal force. I cannot deny that he did so; but I wish he had not jumbled those characters together, in the composition of his pictures, as he has frequently done.
The strange mixture of tragedy, comedy, and farce in the same play, nay, sometimes in the same scene, I acknowledge to be quite inexcusable. But this was the taste of the times when Shakespeare wrote.
BOILEAU
A great genius ought to guide, not servilely follow, the taste of his contemporaries.
POPE
Consider from how thick a darkness of barbarism the genius of Shakespeare broke forth! What were the English, and what (let me ask you) were the French dramatic performances, in the age when he flourished? The advances he made towards the highest perfection both of tragedy and comedy are amazing! In the principal points, in the power of exciting terror and pity, or raising laughter in an audience, none yet has excelled him, and very few have equalled.
BOILEAU
Do you think he was equal in comedy to Moliere?
POPE
In comic force I do: but in the fine and delicate strokes of satire, and what is called genteel comedy, he was greatly inferior to that admirable writer. There is nothing in him to compare with the Misanthrope, the Ecole des Femmes, or Tartuffe.
This, Mr. Pope, is a great deal for an Englishman to acknowledge. A veneration for Shakespeare seems to be a part of your national religion, and the only part in which even your men of sense are fanatics.
POPE
He who can read Shakespeare, and be cool enough for all the accuracy of sober criticism, has more of reason than taste.
BOILEAU
I join with you in admiring him as a prodigy of genius, though I find the most shocking absurdities in his plays; absurdities which no critic of my nation can pardon.
POPE
We will be satisfied with your feeling the excellence of his beauties.
Dialogues of the Dead, xiv., 4th edition, 1765. XIV. Boileau—Pope, pp. 125-128.
Three editions of Dialogues of the Dead were published in 1760. Practically the whole of the passage quoted above appeared for the first time in the fourth edition in 1765.
LAURENCE STERNE, 1768
(1713-1768)
“The Passport—Versailles.”
I could not conceive why the Count de B * * * had gone so abruptly out of the room, any more than I could conceive why he had put the Shakespeare into his pocket—Mysteries which must explain themselves, are not worth the loss of time which a conjecture about them takes up: it was better to read Shakespeare; so, taking up Much Ado about Nothing, I transported myself instantly from the chair I sat in to Messina in Sicily, and got so busy with Don Pedro and Benedick and Beatrice, that I thought not of Versailles, the Count, or the Passport.
Sweet pliability of man’s spirit, that can at once surrender itself to illusions, which cheat expectation and sorrow of their wearied moments!—long, long since had you numbered out my days, had I not trod so great a part of them upon this enchanted ground: when my way is too rough for my feet, or too steep for my strength, I get off it, to some smooth velvet path which fancy has scattered over with rosebuds of delights; and, having taken a few turns in it, come back strengthened and refreshed—When evils press sore upon me, and there is no retreat from them in this world, then I take a new course—I leave it—and as I have a clearer idea of the Elysian fields than I have of
heaven, I force myself, like Æneas, into them—I see him meet the pensive shade of his forsaken Dido—and wish to recognise it—I see the injured spirit wave her head, and turn off silent from the author of her miseries and dishonours—I lose the feelings for myself in hers—and in those affections which were wont to make me mourn for her when I was at school.
Surely this is not walking in a vain shadow—nor does man disquiet himself in vain by it—he oftener does so in trusting the issue of his commotions to reason only—I can safely say for myself, I was never able to conquer any one single bad sensation in my heart so decisively, as by beating up as fast as I could some kindly and gentle sensation, to fight it upon its own ground.
When I had got to the end of the third act, the Count de B * * * entered with my passport in his hand. M. Le Duc de C * * *, said the Count, is as good a prophet, I dare say, as he is a statesman—Un homme qui rit, said the Duke, ne sera jamais dangereux. Had it been for any one but the King’s jester, added the Count, I could not have got it these two hours—Pardonnez moi, M. Le Compte, said I—I am not the King’s jester—But you are Yorick?—Yes—Et vous plaisantez?—I answered, Indeed I did jest—but was not paid for it—it was entirely at my own expense.
We have no jester at court, M. Le Compte, said I—the last we had was in the licentious reign of Charles II.—since which time our manners have been so gradually refining, that our court at present is so full of patriots, who wish for nothing but the honours and wealth of their country—and our ladies are all so chaste, so spotless, so
good, so devout—there is nothing for a jester to make a jest of—
Voila un persiflage! cried the Count.
Yorick’s Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, etc., 1768, vol. ii.