A more imposing endeavour was made later to deal with the earlier section of the topic. Dr. Ingleby, a
Shakespearean scholar of repute, issued in 1874 the work entitled Shakespeare’s Centurie of Prayse, in which he dealt with the period extending from the year 1591, when Shakespeare first came into notice as a dramatist, until 1693. A second edition of Dr. Ingleby’s volume, revised and enlarged by Miss Toulmin Smith, appeared five years later under the auspices of the New Shakspere Society. A very substantial supplement to this volume, called Some 300 Fresh Allusions to Shakspere from 1594 to 1694, was edited by Dr. Furnivall for the New Shakspere Society in 1886. Thus the Centurie of Prayse in its final shape extends to 912 pages in quarto. The large book is not at everybody’s disposal, but its contents, as far as they go, are very valuable, and no Shakespeare library is complete without it. None the less, it covers less than a third part of that field which a full history of opinion about Shakespeare ought to occupy; it leaves ample room for a treatise on the whole subject.
The general impression produced by Mr. Hughes’s extended survey seems creditable to the discernment of the English literary public—of all generations since Shakespeare began to write. The repute that Shakespeare acquired in his lifetime, though it was rarely defined with subtlety, was in spirit all that judicious admirers could desire. The contemporary estimate was authoritatively summed up in the epitaph which was inscribed on his monument in Stratford-on-Avon church soon after his death. In that inscription he was hailed as the equal of great heroes of classical antiquity—of Nestor in wisdom, of Socrates in genius, of Virgil in literary art; he was acknowledged in plain terms to be the greatest of
contemporary writers; all living writers were declared to be worthy only to serve him as pages or menials. Shakespeare’s epitaph, the significance of which is not always appreciated, justifies no doubt of the supremacy that he enjoyed in the English world of letters of his own day. The homage of literary contemporaries was confirmed without faltering and in finer phrase by Milton, the next occupant of the throne of English letters.
No subsequent change of literary taste or literary fashion in England really dimmed Shakespeare’s fame. In the days of the Restoration, Dryden humbly acknowledged discipleship to him. Some censure he suffered from thoughtless lips; but the right to the rank of a classic, which had been granted him as soon as the breath left his body, was never effectually disputed. The formal critics of the eighteenth century sought to show that much of his work deviated from formal standards or from rules of formal art. But these censors gave him the worship of incessant study. They edited and annotated his writings, with the result that a succeeding generation of readers acquired a more accurate comprehension of his work than was possible before. The triumphal progress of Shakespeare’s reputation was stimulated by eighteenth century research and criticism to a quicker pace.
The critical faculty of the nation was especially acute and sagacious at the opening of the nineteenth century, and Shakespeare’s pre-eminence was then seen in sharper outline and in fuller grandeur than at any earlier epoch. The sympathetic intuition of three early nineteenth century critics—Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt—remains unsurpassed. But there has been no trace of retrogression in the wise
and reasoned enthusiasm of later generations of the reading public.
The history of Shakespeare’s fame is indeed that of a flowing tide; the ebbing was never long enough sustained to give it genuine importance; the forward march was never seriously impeded, and is from start to finish the commanding feature of the chronicle. If Mr. Hughes’s endeavour succeed in impressing that pregnant fact on the public mind, a perilous source of popular misconception regarding Shakespeare’s true place in English literary history will be removed.
SIDNEY LEE.