pricking his patient acquiescence, and disturbing his careless freedom; he issued no protest, he uttered no complaint, against the effrontery of the printers of those days, who published, as “newly corrected by William Shakespeare,” old plays which he never wrote; nor did he yield the yearnings of a nurse to those ricketty children of the press which passed as his progeny, bearing a name which he never could have deemed immortal. We may trace to its real cause this utter carelessness of his poetical existence.
The horizon of this poet’s hopes was bounded by his daily task and his prosperous theatre. Assuredly it was not an ordinary gratification to be conscious that his friend Burbage would call into a real existence Romeo, Macbeth, and Othello, and that the shares of the playhouse would in due time be transferred for Warwickshire acres. But his mind was above his condition, and however the dramatist flourished at “the Globe,” Shakespeare himself felt the misery of a degraded station;—players and play-writing were held to be equally despicable in that day. This “secret sorrow” he may have himself confided to us; for in one of “the sonnets,” he pathetically laments the compulsion which forced him to the trade of pleasing the public; and this humiliation, or this “stain,” as the poet felt it, is illustrated by a novel image—“Chide Fortune,” exclaims the bard,
Shakespeare, in the vigour of life, withdrew from the theatre and the metropolis, returning to his native abode.[10] “The properties and the wardrobe” were now exchanged for “land and tithes.” It is consolatory for us to have ascertained that our national bard, not yet, however, national, did not participate in the common misery of his noblest brothers. Four years glided away in the tranquil obscurity of his family, till his death! Yet still some old associations survived with the dramatic bard, some reveries of the winter theatre of “the Blackfriars,” and the summer Globe “open to the sky,” for we are told that two or three of his noblest dramas were composed during his retirement; and he retained his unbroken love for old companionship to the last, for, by a credible tradition, Shakespeare died of a fever contracted by convivial indulgence at a joyous meeting with his beloved cronies Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton.
We hear nothing more of Shakespeare nor of any fragmentary manuscripts; no verses were scattered on his funereal bier as with Spenser, no sepulchral volume of elegies was gathered, as with Jonson, to consecrate his memory. There was yet no Shakespeare! no national bard! The poet himself could not have favoured a friend with a copy of many of his own plays, and probably could not himself have repeated one of those admired soliloquies which we now get by rote. Shakespeare was wholly insensible to the days which were to come. All this to us seems incredible!
Seven years passed away silently, and the nation remained without their Shakespeare, although Jonson, in the very year that the poet had deceased, had set the first example of a collection of dramas made by their own author; the volume sanctioned by his critical learning he dignified as his “works:” a proud distinction by which he laid himself open to the epigrammatists. At length, in 1623, two of Shakespeare’s fellow-comedians, Heminges and Condell, published the first folio edition of “Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies.”
These player-editors profess that “they have done this office to the dead only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare.” Yet their utter negligence shown in “their fellow’s” volume is no evidence of their pious friendship, nor perhaps of their care or their intelligence. The publication was not, I fear, so much an offering of affection as a pretext to secure the copyright. Their real design seems to have been to recover the monopoly of ALL the plays, having lost the proprietorship of several which had stolen abroad in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and to obtain this crafty purpose they practised a fraudulent deception.
Fifteen quarto plays the public already possessed; no one appears to have known how they had issued from the study of the poet, or the treasury of the theatre. Our player-editors, however, now cautioned their readers that these fifteen plays were a fraud practised on them; that “they were stolen and surreptitious copies maimed and deformed.” But what these new editors themselves alleged, they knew was false; for they actually reprinted, unaltered, in their own collection these declared surreptitious copies. As the reprint became subject to their negligence, these first editions were appreciated by Capel and Malone as manuscripts, and by these quarto plays they corrected the text of the folio volume. The mystifying republication of these fifteen quarto plays is a piece of literary history of no common occurrence. Capel imagined that the player-editors merely reprinted these very copies which they had so loudly decried to save the labour of transcription. But looking closer into this affair, we seem to detect that a double deception was practised. The printers of these plays had secured the copyright by entering them at Stationers’ Hall, and when the folio collection was projected it was found necessary by Heminges and Condell to admit the proprietors into the copartnership of the volume. Hence their names appear in the titlepage. Malone imagined that this circumstance indicated that the volume of Shakespeare was considered so great a risk that it required the joint aid of these printers. But the parties only united to secure the monopoly of all the plays.
It therefore results that the player-editors pretended to warn the public that all the preceding editions were “maimed and deformed,” and the proprietors of these pretended surreptitious editions silently acquiesced in their own condemnation, for the future advantages they expected to derive from their share in the monopoly.