PREFACE
I believe this volume serves a useful purpose. It is the fruit of a suggestion which I made to its compiler, Mr. Hughes, in the following circumstances.
At the beginning of last year I engaged in controversy in the Times newspaper with certain persons who laboured under the delusion that the evidence of Shakespeare’s authorship of those plays and poems, which for three centuries have been published as his, was inconclusive. In defiance of the fact that the acknowledged work of Bacon, the prose writer and philosopher, proves him to be incapable of writing verse of genuine merit, some of my opponents held Bacon and no other to be responsible for those manifestations of supreme poetic genius which are associated with Shakespeare’s name. Other sceptics, of less raw judgment, hesitated to commit themselves to this extravagance,—they confined themselves to the slightly more plausible contention that the facts recorded of Shakespeare by contemporaries were scanty, and that his career was clothed in a mystery, which justified wild attempts at a solution.
The whole of the sceptical argument ignored alike the results of recent Shakespearean research and the elementary truths of Elizabethan literary history. But confirmed sceptics are not easily convinced
of defects of knowledge. With especial emphasis did even the most enlightened among those who declared their doubt in print, persist in affirming that Shakespeare was unnoticed by his contemporaries, and that his achievements failed to win reputation in his lifetime or in the generations succeeding his death. It was that allegation, to a greater degree than any other, which seemed to encourage the inference that the received tradition of the Shakespearean authorship of the plays needed revision.
The conjecture that Shakespeare lived and died unhonoured rests on no foundation of fact. The converse alone is true. Shakespeare’s eminence was fully acknowledged by his contemporaries, and their acknowledgments have long been familiar to scholars.
Yet the reiterated assertion that Shakespeare’s contemporaries left on record no recognition of his worth, proved that information on the subject was narrowly diffused, and that public intelligence suffered by the strait limits as yet assigned to the distribution of genuine knowledge of the topic. I suggested to Mr. Hughes that he should remedy this defect by collecting in a volume that might be generally accessible all notices of Shakespeare which were penned in early days.
Subsequently, when I considered the scheme in detail, I deemed it wise for Mr. Hughes to enlarge its scope so that the volume might form a contribution to the history of opinion respecting Shakespeare of no single period, but of all periods from the earliest to the present day. Thereby the force and persistence of that Shakespearean tradition which ignorance had lately impugned might be rendered plainer, and the liability to misconception might be to a
greater degree diminished. The fulfilment of the design on the extended scale might also, I thought, give the work some value as a chart of æsthetic development through the ages. Students of Shakespeare who in the course of three centuries have recorded their impressions of him, include men and women of varying degrees of intellectual capacity, and the orderly presentation of their views could not fail to illustrate with some graphic force the working of the law of taste in literature.
A further justification for the compilation of the work on an exhaustive scale, lies in the fact that it has not been done already. Charles Knight seems to be the only writer who has hitherto attempted any sketch of a general history of opinion respecting Shakespeare. His essay formed part of his Studies of Shakespeare, which were first published in 1849, and it was reissued separately as the first volume of a new edition of his Cabinet Edition of Shakespeare which was published in London by William S. Orr & Co., of Paternoster Row, in 1851.[vii:1] Knight surveys his subject somewhat perfunctorily from Edmund Spenser to Coleridge. He devotes much space to the eighteenth century, but he pays scant attention to the nineteenth, and he is far from exhaustive in his treatment of earlier periods. Commendable as is his pioneer effort, it is now, alike in form and matter, largely out of date.