Thomas Warton once covered with his shield some of the minor brotherhood: “If Shakespeare is worth reading, he is worth explaining; and the researches used for so valuable and elegant a purpose merit the thanks of genius and candour, not the satire of prejudice and ignorance.” But this serves not as an apology for abusing the privilege of a commentator; elucidating the poet into obscurity by information equally contradictory and curious; racking us by fantastic readings which no one imagined before or since; and laying us open to the mercy of some who never ventured to sharpen their pens but on our irresistible Shakespeare. What has been the result of the petty conflicts between the arch maliciousness of Steevens and the fervent plodding of Malone, which raised up two parties among the Shakespearian commentators, till they became so personal, that a Steevenite and a Malonist looked on each other suspiciously, and sometimes would drop the ordinary civilities of life? At length, strange to tell, after Steevens had laboured with zeal equal to the whole confraternity, it became a question with him, In what manner the poet COULD be read? Are we to con over each note appended to each word or passage?—but this would be perpetually to turn aside the flow of our imagination; or are we to read a large portion of the text uninterruptedly, and then return to the notes?—but this would be breaking the unity of the poet into fragments; or, for a final decision, and the avowal must have mortified the ingenuous illustrator, according to a third class of readers, were these illustrations to be altogether rejected? must the poet or the commentator be at continual variance? or shall we endure to see “Alcides beaten by his page?”
Might I be allowed to offer an award on a matter so involved and delicate as this union between the genius of Shakespeare and the genius of his commentators, I would concede the divorce, from the incompatibility of temper between the parties; but I would insist on a separate maintenance, to preserve the great respectability attached to the party most complained of. The true reader of Shakespeare may then accommodate himself with two editions; the one for his hand, having nothing but what the poet has written; the other for the shelf, having all the commentators have conjectured, confuted, and confounded.[31]
The celebrity of Shakespeare is no longer hounded by his nationality. Even France responds, though the voice of Parisian critics is muffled, confused, and ambiguous; they have not yet solved the great problem, why Shakespeare is an omnipotent dramatist.[32] The school of Corneille and Racine are perplexed, like Quin, who could not be brought to acknowledge the creative acting of Garrick, observing that, “If that young man were right, all which they had hitherto done was wrong.”
Voltaire, in early life, to compose the Henriade, to escape from the Bastile, or to conceal his espionage—for he appears to have been a secret employé of the French ministry—resided a considerable time in England. He acquired an unusual knowledge of our language, and published an essay on the epic poets in English.[33] He discovered a new world among our writers, and was the first who introduced the Literature of England into France. Voltaire expounded to his nation the philosophy of Newton; but unhappily he criticized and translated Shakespeare, whose idiomatic phrases and metaphorical style did not admit of the demonstrations of the Newtonian system. To the author of the Henriade, who had ever before his eyes the two great masters whom he was one day to rival, the anti-classical and “Gothic” genius of a poet of the Elizabethan period, scorning the unities, following events without the contrivance of an intrigue artfully developed, mingling farce with tragedy, buffoons with monarchs, and preternatural beings stalking amid the palpable realities of life—such irregular dramas seemed to the Aristotelian but “des farces monstrueuses,” as we see they appeared to Rymer and Shaftesbury; but Voltaire was too sagacious to be wholly insensible that “these monstrous farces, which they call tragedies, had scenes grand and terrific.” Voltaire, then meditating on his future dramas, in passing over the surface of the soil, discovered that a mine lay beneath—
| Some ore Among a mineral of metals base, |
and the embedded treasure was worked with more diligence than with gratitude to the owner. If Voltaire ridiculed what he had found, it was partly with the desire of its concealment, but not wholly; for it was impossible for any foreigner to interpret sweet words, and idiomatic phrases, not to be found in dictionaries; or to make way through the bewilderment of the perpetual metaphorical diction of the daring fancy of the great poet; but the deformities of the bard would be too intelligible; all those parts which Pope would have struck out as “superfœtations.” A bald version, or a malicious turn, would amuse the world by those amazing absurdities, which the wit, too famous for his ridicule, rejoiced to commit, and Europe yet knew nothing of Shakespeare, and lay under the sway of this autocrat of Literature.[34]
Mrs. Montague was the Minerva, for so she was complimented on this occasion, whose celestial spear was to transfix the audacious Gaul. Her “Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, compared with the Greek and French dramatic poets,” served for a popular answer to Voltaire. This accomplished lady, who had raised a literary coterie about her, which attracted such fashionable notice that its title has survived its institution, found in “the Blue-stocking Club” choral hymns and clouds of incense gathering about the altar in Portman Square! The volume is deemed “a wonderful performance,” by those echoes of contemporary prepossessions, the compilers of dictionary-biography; even the poet Cowper placed Mrs. Montague “at the head of all that is called learned.”
This lady’s knowledge of the English drama, and the genius of our ancient Literature, is as vague and indistinct as that of the Greek tragedians, to whom she frequently refers, without, we are told, any intimacy with the originals. She discovers many bombast speeches even in Macbeth, but she triumphantly exclaims, “Shakespeare redeems the nonsense, the indecorum, the irregularities of his plays;” irregularities which seem to her incomprehensible. Her criticisms are the random reflections of her feelings; but trusting to our feelings alone, unaccompanied by that knowledge on which they should be based, is confiding in a capricious, and often an erring dictator, governed by our own humours, or by fashionable tastes.
Thus have we viewed our bard through distinct eras, from the time in which he was not yet pre-eminently distinguished among his numerous peers; the Shakespeare of his own day could not be the Shakespeare of posterity; his rivals could only view that genius in its progress, and though there was not one who was a Shakespeare, yet, in that bursting competition of genius, there were many who were themselves Shakspearian. In a succeeding era, novel and unnational tastes prevailed; to the Drydenists who, dismissing the language of nature, substituted a false nature in their exaggerated passion, Shakespeare might have said of himself—