It is quite obvious that the first proprietors of the quarto plays could never have acquired such complete copies without either Shakespeare or his company having furnished them. Yet Shakespeare, if he had connived at these publications, could never have revised the press; another evidence of the utter recklessness of the poet of the fate of his dramas.
The player-editors supplied about twenty new dramas, and by another adroit deception in their titlepage they announced that all the dramas were NOW published “acording to the original copies.”
Alas! where were these “original copies?” The precious autographs could not have endured through many a season the thumbings of “the book-holder” or the prompter. The playhouse copies, carelessly written out in parts for the actors, interpolated with whole scenes, spurious with ribaldry, and extemporaneous nonsense at the caprice of some favourite actor, corrupt with false readings, obscure with distorted alterations, and often omissions of a line or half a line to connect or to complete the sense, verse lurking in prose, and metre without feet,—such were the original sins of the copies despatched in haste to a rapid press, and the writings of Shakespeare come before the world in these hurried proofs from printers among whom a corrector of the press seems to have been unknown. It is in this prolific soil of weeds that many are still too curiously seeking for the genuine text of Shakespeare, perhaps too often irretrievable.[11] The recollections of these two players were so inaccurate that they at first totally omitted the Troilus and Cressida, which is inserted without pagination, and with little discrimination in the writings of Shakespeare, preserved the barbarous Titus Andronicus, evidently one of Marlowe’s gigantic pieces, and the old play of “the first part of Henry the Sixth;” but it is by no means certain that not less than twenty other dramas had various degrees of claims to be included in the works of Shakespeare; such as the suspicious Pericles.[12] But the incompetence of these player-editors, even in transcribing from the prompter’s copies, was not their only fault. “Will” was but “their fellow;” time had not hallowed him into the national poet; and they themselves had formed no elevated conception of the art of Sophocles and Terence; for in their dedication to two peers they express their fear whether their noble patrons from “their greatness would descend to the reading of SUCH TRIFLES;” the immortal writings! These unhappy editors seem to reflect back to us the humiliated feelings of Shakespeare and the age on the histrionic art. In that early epoch of our literature the sock and buskin had indeed been worn by a reckless race.
Charles the First was a lover of the English drama. The king delighted to explore into the manuscript plays which were laid before the master of the revels for his license. Milton has acquainted us that the writings of Shakespeare formed the favourite studies of the monarch.[13] In the “Iconoclastes,” alluding to those writers who have shown the characteristic religious hypocrisy of tyrants, Milton observes, “I shall not instance an abstruse author wherein the king might be less conversant, but one whom we well know was the CLOSET COMPANION of these his solitudes, William Shakespeare.”
This has been considered as a designed reproach, and we are startled by such a style from the author of “Comus” and of “Samson Agonistes.” The odious distinction of not referring the king to an abstruse author seems a palpable sneer at the course of the king’s reading, who, however, was not deficient in learning; and in making the king’s “closet companion” Shakespeare, Milton too well knew that he was casting the deepest odium on the royal character, for to this poet’s then masters, the puritanical faction, there could be nothing less to be forgiven than a king, and a king in his imprisonments, mockingly here called “these his solitudes,” than to be a play-reader! The slur, the gibe, and the covert satire are, I fear, too obvious. I would gladly have absolved our great bard from this act of treason at least against the majesty of Shakespeare’s genius.[14] Milton had more deeply studied Shakespeare than any king whatever; but at this moment his literature was to be stretched on the torture of his politics.
In the history of the celebrity of Shakespeare, this day of royal favour sank amid the national tempest: and the theatre was abolished with the throne.
With the Restoration, the drama returned to the people. Half a century only had elapsed since our poet flourished; but in that half century our style, with our manners and modes of feeling, had suffered the vicissitudes of a revolution. If in the reign of Charles the First they perceived a change in the language from that of Elizabeth, that change was more apparent when, in retrograding, it was reduced to the indigent nakedness of the Puritanic period, and then, bursting into an opposite direction, like
| Stars shot madly from their spheres |
was mottled by the modern Gallic in phrase and in criticism, corrupting our national taste, and thus removing us still further from the Shakespearian diction in idiom and in imagery. A great master of language, Dryden, confesses he found Shakespeare almost as difficult as old Chaucer.
On the restored theatre, “the renowned Jonson,” thus distinguished by Shadwell, retained his supremacy in The Fox, The Silent Woman, and The Alchemist, and the airy and loose Fletcher was popular, being considered by this new generation as having drawn the characters of gentlemen more to their humour than his grave predecessors. One of the first managers was Davenant: to his partiality, for he was eager to acknowledge Shakespeare his father, both in blood and in verse, we may ascribe the revival of that poet’s plays. Dryden has told that it was Davenant who first taught him to appreciate our national bard; they were caught by the fancy of the poet; but the great ethical preceptor of mankind had never entered into their contemplation; and thus Macbeth shrank into an opera under the hand of Davenant; and the Tempest, after having been seemingly burlesqued by duplicate characters of Miranda, Ferdinand, and Caliban, by Davenant and Dryden together, was turned into an opera by Shadwell, and exhibited as if it were a pantomime, depending now on popular favour for new dresses, new music, and new machinery. Romeo and Juliet was altered by the Honourable James Howard, Dryden’s brother-in-law, to introduce a happy conclusion: however, it is but justice to the town to record that they were so firmly divided in opinion on the catastrophe, that it was alternately played as tragedy and tragic-comic. We may fairly conclude by these profanations, that the true taste for our national bard had passed away.[15]