Boileau.—You say he painted all characters, from kings down to peasants, with equal truth and equal force. I can’t 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.
Pope.—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 nourished? 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 that he was equal in comedy to Molière?
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 École des Femmes, or Tartuffe.
Boileau.—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.