Thomas Rhymer judges "Othello:"—
"The moral of this story is certainly very instructive. It is a warning to good housewives to look after their linen."
Then the same Rhymer condescends to give up joking, and to take Shakespeare in earnest:—
"What edifying and useful impression can the audience receive from such poetry? To what can this poetry serve, unless it is to mislead our good sense, to throw our thoughts into disorder, to trouble our brain, to pervert our instincts, to crack our imaginations, to corrupt our taste, and to fill our heads with vanity, confusion, clatter, and nonsense?"
This was printed eighty years after the death of Shakespeare, in 1693. All the critics and all the connoisseurs were of one opinion.
Here are some of the reproaches unanimously addressed to Shakespeare: Conceits, play on words, puns; improbability, extravagance, absurdity; obscenity; puerility; bombast; emphasis, exaggeration; false glitter, pathos; far-fetched ideas, affected style; abuse of contrast and metaphor; subtilty; immorality; writing for the mob; pandering to the canaille; delighting in the horrible; want of grace; want of charm; overreaching his aim; having too much wit; having no wit; overdoing his works.
"This Shakespeare is a coarse and savage mind," says Lord Shaftesbury. Dryden adds, "Shakespeare is unintelligible." Mrs. Lennox gives Shakespeare this slap: "This poet alters historical truth." A German critic of 1680, Bentheim, feels himself disarmed, because, says he, "Shakespeare is a mind full of drollery." Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's protégé, relates this. "I recollect that the comedians mentioned to the honour of Shakespeare, that in his writings he never erased a line. I answered, 'Would to God he had erased a thousand.'"[2] This wish, moreover, was granted by the worthy publishers of 1623,—Blount and Jaggard. They struck out of Hamlet alone two hundred lines; they cut out two hundred and twenty lines of "King Lear." Garrick played at Drury Lane only the "King Lear" of Nahum Tate. Listen again to Rhymer: "'Othello' is a sanguinary farce without wit." Johnson adds, "'Julius Cæsar,' a cold tragedy, and lacking the power to move the public." "I think," says Warburton, in a letter to the Dean of St. Asaph, "that Swift has much more wit than Shakespeare, and that the comic in Shakespeare, altogether low as it is, is very inferior to the comic in Shadwell." As for the witches in "Macbeth," "Nothing equals," says that critic of the seventeenth century, Forbes, repeated by a critic of the nineteenth, "the absurdity of such a spectacle." Samuel Foote, the author of the "Young Hypocrite," makes this declaration: "The comic in Shakespeare is too heavy, and does not make one laugh. It is buffoonery without wit." At last, Pope, in 1725, finds a reason why Shakespeare wrote his dramas, and exclaims, "One must eat!"
After these words of Pope, one cannot understand with what object Voltaire, aghast about Shakespeare, writes: "Shakespeare whom the English take for a Sophocles, flourished about the time of Lopez [Lope, if you please, Voltaire] de Vega." Voltaire adds, "You are not ignorant that in 'Hamlet' the diggers prepare a grave, drinking, singing ballads, and cracking over the heads of dead people the jokes usual to men of their profession." And, concluding, he qualifies thus the whole scene,—"these follies." He characterizes Shakespeare's pieces by this word, "monstrous farces called tragedies," and completes the judgment by declaring that Shakespeare "has ruined the English theatre."
Marmontel comes to see Voltaire at Ferney. Voltaire is in bed, holding a book in his hand; all at once he rises up, throws the book away, stretches his thin legs across the bed, and cries to Marmontel, "Your Shakespeare is a barbarian!" "He is not my Shakespeare at all," replies Marmontel.
Shakespeare was an occasion for Voltaire to show his skill at the target Voltaire missed him rarely. Voltaire shot at Shakespeare as the peasants shoot at the goose. It was Voltaire who had commenced in France the attack against that barbarian. He nicknamed him the Saint Christopher of Tragic Poets. He said to Madame de Graffigny, "Shakespeare pour rire." He said to Cardinal de Bernis, "Compose pretty verses; deliver us, monsignor, from plagues, witches, the school of the King of Prussia, the Bull Unigenitus, the constitutionalists and the convulsionists, and from that ninny Shakespeare! Libera nos, Domine," The attitude of Fréron toward Voltaire has, in the eyes of posterity, as an attenuating circumstance, the attitude of Voltaire toward Shakespeare. Nevertheless, throughout the eighteenth century, Voltaire gives the law. The moment that Voltaire sneers at Shakespeare, Englishmen of wit, such as my Lord Marshal follow suit. Johnson confesses the ignorance and vulgarity of Shakespeare. Frederic II. comes in for a word also. He writes to Voltaire à propos of "Julius Cæsar:" "You have done well in re-casting, according to principles, the crude piece of that Englishman." Behold, then, where Shakespeare is in the last century. Voltaire insults him. La Harpe protects him: "Shakespeare himself, coarse as he was, was not without reading and knowledge."[3]