Shakspeare and His Times

by François Guizot

This tomb now remains in sole possession of the honors which it once shared with Shakspeare's mulberry-tree. About the middle of last century, the Rev. Mr. Gastrell, a man of large fortune, became the proprietor of New Place. This house, which had remained for some time in the possession of the Nash family, had afterward passed through several hands, and undergone many alterations; but the mulberry-tree remained standing, the object of the veneration of the curious. Mr. Gastrell, annoyed at the number of visitors which it attracted, had it cut down, with a savage brutality in which indifference would probably not have indulged, but which frequently characterizes that furious pride of liberty and property which would deem itself compromised if it yielded in the slightest degree to public opinion. A few years afterward, this same Mr. Gastrell, in consequence of a dispute which he had had with the town of Stratford regarding a slight tax which he was required to pay on his house, swore that that house should never be taxed again, and he therefore had it pulled down, and sold the materials. As for the mulberry-tree, part of it was saved from the fire to which it had been consigned by Mr. Gastrell, by a clock-maker of Stratford, a man of sense, who gained a great deal of money by making it into snuff-boxes, toys, and other articles. The house in which Shakspeare was born still exists at Stratford, and is still shown as an object of interest to travelers, who may always see, and, it is said, are constantly able to purchase, either the chair or the sword of the poet, the lantern which he used in performing the part of Friar Lawrence in "Romeo and Juliet," or pieces of the arquebuse with which he killed the deer in Sir Thomas Lucy's park.

It is not from the death of Shakspeare that we must date, in England, that worship, the devotedness of which, after having been maintained with such fervor for sixty years, seems now to have diffused a reflection of its heat over several countries of Europe. Though Shakspeare was dead, Ben Jonson still lived; and though Beaumont had lost his friend Fletcher, he still possessed his talent, the effects of which had been weakened, rather than fortified, by Fletcher. The necessities of curiosity too often overcome those of taste; and the pleasure of going again to admire Shakspeare could not fail to yield to the keener interest of going to judge the newest productions of his competitors. It was not to his dramatic pedantry that Ben Jonson was then indebted for the empire which, in Shakspeare's lifetime, he did not venture to aspire to share. The triumphs of classical taste were confined, in his case, to the unanimous eulogies of the literary men of his time, who were easily satisfied on the score of regularity, and were always glad of an opportunity to avenge science upon the disdain of the vulgar; but the tragedies and comedies of Ben Jonson were not the less coolly received by the public, and were sometimes even rejected with an irreverence for which he afterward took his revenge in his prefaces. But his masques, a kind of opera, obtained general success; and the more Ben Jonson and the erudite strove to render tragedy and comedy tiresome, the more strongly did the public fall back upon masques for their amusement. Several poets of Shakspeare's school also endeavored to satisfy the taste of the public for the kind of pleasure to which he had accustomed them. Their efforts, attended with varying success, but maintained with untiring activity, kept up that taste for the drama which survives the epoch of its master-pieces. About five hundred and fifty dramas, without reckoning those of Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, were printed before the Restoration of Charles II. Of these only thirty-eight can date from times anterior to Shakspeare; and it has been seen that, during his life, the custom was not to print those plays which were intended for representation on the stage. From 1640 to 1660, the Puritans closed nearly all the theatres; and most of these productions, therefore, belong to the twenty-five years which elapsed between the death of Shakspeare and the commencement of the civil wars. This was the weight beneath which the popularity of England's first dramatic poet succumbed for a time.

His memory, however, did not perish. In 1623, Heminge and Condell published the first complete edition of his dramas, thirteen of which only had been printed during his lifetime. His name was still held in respect; but for a finished reputation to inspire something beside respect, time must come to its aid, and must at first efface and suppress it, to give it at some future time the attraction of a neglected glory, and to stimulate the self-love and curiosity of inquiring minds to give it new life by a new examination, and to find in it the charm of a new discovery. A great writer rarely obtains, in the generation succeeding his own, the homage which posterity will lavish upon him. Sometimes even long spaces of time are necessary for the revolution commenced by a superior man to accomplish its course, and to bring the world to perceive its merits. Several causes combined to prolong the interval during which Shakspeare's works were regarded with coldness, and almost utterly forgotten.

The civil wars and the triumph of Puritanism occurred first, not only to interrupt all dramatic performances, but to destroy, as far as possible, every trace of amusement of this kind. The Restoration afterward introduced into England a foreign taste, which did not, perhaps, pervade the nation, but which held sway over the court. English literature then assumed a character which was not effaced by the new revolution of 1688; and French ideas, made honorable by the literary glory of the seventeenth century, and sustained by that of the eighteenth, retained in England a youthful and vigorous influence which had been lost by the old glories of Shakspeare. Fifty years after his death, Dryden declared that his idiom was a little "out of use." At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Lord Shaftesbury complained of his "natural rudeness, his unpolished style, and his antiquated phrase and wit;" and Shakspeare was then, for these reasons, excluded from several collections of the modern poets. In fact, Dryden did not understand Shakspeare, grammatically speaking; of this fact we have several proofs, and Dryden himself has proved, by recasting his pieces, that poetically he comprehended him as little. But not only was Shakspeare not understood, he soon became no longer known. In 1707, a poet named Tate produced a work entitled "King Lear," the subject of which, he said, he had borrowed from an obscure piece of the same name, recommended to his notice by a friend. This obscure piece was Shakspeare's "King Lear."

Distinguished writers, however, had not altogether ceased to allow Shakspeare a share in the literary glory of their country; but it was timidly and by degrees that they shook off the yoke of the prejudices of their time. If, in concert with Davenant, Dryden had recast the works of Shakspeare, Pope, in the edition which he published in 1725, contented himself with omitting all that he could not bring himself to regard as the work of the genius to whom he paid at least this homage. With regard to that which he was obliged to leave, Shakspeare, says Pope, "having at his first appearance no other aim in his writings than to procure a subsistence," wrote "for the people," without seeking to obtain "patronage from the better sort." In 1765, Johnson, waxing bolder, and gaining encouragement from the dawn of a return to the national taste, vigorously defended the romantic liberties of Shakspeare against the pretensions of classical authority; and though he made some concessions to the contempt of a more polished age for the vulgarity and ignorance of the old poet, he at least had the courage to remark that, when a country is "unenlightened by learning, the whole people is the vulgar."

Shakspeare's works, then, were reprinted and commentated; but the mutilations alone obtained the honors of the stage. The Shakspeare amended by Dryden, Davenant, and others, was the only one which actors ventured to perform; and the "Tattler," having to quote some lines from "Macbeth," copied them from Davenant's amended edition. It was Garrick who, finding nowhere so fully as in Shakspeare means to supply the requirements of his own talent, delivered him from this disgraceful protection, lent to his ancient glory the freshness of his own young renown, and restored the poet to possession of the stage as well as of the patriotic admiration of the English.

Since that period, national pride has daily extended and redoubled this admiration. It nevertheless remained barren of results, and Shakspeare, to use the language of Sir Walter Scott, "reigned a Grecian prince over Persian slaves, and they who adored him did not dare attempt to use his language." A new impulse can not be entirely due to old recollections; and an old epoch, that it may bear new fruit, needs to be again fertilized by a movement analogous to that which gave it its first fertility.

This movement has made itself felt in Europe, and England also is beginning to feel its impulse, as Sir Walter Scott's novels sufficiently demonstrate. But England will not be the only country indebted to Shakspeare for the new direction which is manifesting itself in her drama, as well as in other branches of her literature. In the literary movement by which it is now agitated, Continental Europe turns its eyes toward Shakspeare. Germany has long adopted him as a model rather than as a guide; and thereby it has, perhaps, suspended in their course those vivifying juices which impart their vigor and freshness only to fruits of native growth. Nevertheless, the path on which Germany has entered is leading to the discovery of true wealth; and if she will but work her own mines, a rich and fertile vein will not be wanting. The literature of Spain, a natural fruit of her civilization, already possesses its own original and distinct character. Italy alone and France, the fatherlands of modern classicism, are not yet recovered from their astonishment at the first shock given to those opinions which they have established with the rigor of necessity, and maintained with the pride of faith. Doubt presents itself to us as yet only as an enemy whose attacks we are beginning to fear; it seems as though discussion bears a threatening aspect, and that examination can not probe without undermining and overturning. In this position we hesitate, as if about to destroy that which will never be replaced; we are afraid of finding ourselves without law, and of discovering nothing but the insufficiency or illegitimacy of those principles upon which we were formerly wont to rely without disquietude.