[334] R. E. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Tercentenary Celebration, 1864.
[335] Thomas Jordan, a very humble poet, wrote a prologue to notify the new procedure, and referred to the absurdity of the old custom:
For to speak truth, men act, that are between
Forty and fifty, wenches of fifteen
With bone so large and nerve so uncompliant,
When you call Desdemona, enter Giant.
[338] Essays of Elia, ed. Canon Ainger, pp. 180 et seq.
[340a] Hamlet in 1874-5 and Macbeth in 1888-9 were each performed by Sir Henry Irving for 200 nights in uninterrupted succession; these are the longest continuous runs that any of Shakespeare’s plays are known to have enjoyed.
[340b] See p. 346.
[341] Cf. Alfred Roffe, Shakspere Music, 1878; Songs in Shakspere . . . set to Music, 1884, New Shakspere Soc.
[342] Cf. D. G. Morhoff, Unterricht von der teutschen Sprache und Poesie, Kiel, 1682, p. 250.
[344] In his ‘Essay Supplementary to the Preface’ in the edition of his Poems of 1815 Wordsworth wrote: ‘The Germans, only of foreign nations, are approaching towards a knowledge of what he [i.e. Shakespeare] is. In some respects they have acquired a superiority over the fellow-countrymen of the poet; for among us, it is a common—I might say an established—opinion that Shakespeare is justly praised when he is pronounced to be “a wild irregular genius in whom great faults are compensated by great beauties.” How long may it be before this misconception passes away and it becomes universally acknowledged that the judgment of Shakespeare . . . is not less admirable than his imagination? . . .’
[345] Cf. Wilhelm Meister.