Of Spenser.
Spenser’s fortunes in this way coincided with Shakespeare’s to a degree which cannot be quite accidental. The third folio of the Faerie Queene appeared in 1679, and the first critical edition—that of Hughes—in 1715. But the study-stage—not the theatrical, considering a list of adapters which runs from Ravenscroft through Shadwell up to Dryden—had spared Shakespeare the attentions of the Person of Quality.[[329]] Before Hughes he[he] had received those of Prior, a person of quality[[330]] much greater; but Prior had spoilt the stanza, and had travestied the diction almost worse than he did in the case of the Nut-Browne Maid. He would not really count in this story at all if his real services in other respects did not show that it was a case of “time and the hour,” and if his remarks in the Preface to Solomon did not show, very remarkably, a genuine admiration of Spenser himself, and a strong dissatisfaction with the end-stopped couplet. And so of Hughes’ edition: yet perhaps the import of the saying may escape careless readers. At first one wonders why a man like Prior should have taken the trouble even to spoil the Spenserian stanza; why an editor like Hughes should have taken the much greater trouble to edit a voluminous poet whose most ordinary words he had to explain, whose stanza he also thought “defective,” and whose general composition he denounced as “monstrous” and so forth; why all the imitators[[331]] should have imitated what most of them at any rate seem to have regarded as chiefly parodiable. Yet one soon perceives that mens agitat molem, that the lump was leavened, that, as in one case at any rate (Shenstone’s), is known to be the fact, “those who came to scoff remained to pray.” They were dying of thirst, though they did not know how near the fountain was; and though they at first mistook that fountain and even profaned it, the healing virtues conquered them at last.
Chaucer.
The same coincidence does not fail wholly even with Chaucer, of whom an edition, little altered from Speght’s, appeared in 1687, while the very ill-inspired but still intentionally critical attempt of Urry came out in 1721, Dryden’s wonderful modernisings again coming between. But Chaucer was to wait for Tyrwhitt, more than fifty years later (1775) before he met any full scholarly recognition, and this was natural enough. There had been no real change in English prosody since Spenser, any more than since Shakespeare: and the archaism of the former was after all an archaism not less deliberate, though much better guided by genius, than that of any of his eighteenth-century imitators. To the appreciation of Chaucer’s prosody one simple but, till turned, almost insuperable obstacle existed in the valued final e, while his language, his subjects, and his thought were separated from modern readers by the great gulf of the Renaissance,—a gulf indeed not difficult to bridge after a fashion, but then unbridged.
Elizabethan minors.
Invaluable as the study of Shakespeare was in itself, its value was not limited to this direct gain. Partly to illustrate him and partly from a natural extension, his fellow-dramatists were resorted to,—indeed Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher had never lost hold of the acting stage. A few of the greatest, Marlowe especially, were somewhat long in coming to their own; but with others it was different, and the publication of Dodsley’s Old Plays, at so early a date as 1744, shows with what force the tide was setting in this direction. Reference was made in the last volume to the very remarkable Muses’ Library which Oldys began even earlier, though he did not find encouragement enough to go on with it,[[332]] and the more famous adventure of the Reliques was followed up in the latter part of the century by divers explorations of the treasures of the past, notably that of the short-lived Headley.[[335]]