3. Some descriptive stage-directions which do not reappear in subsequent editions, and which in all probability are authentic evidence of the action as it was then seen on the stage.
These quartos are the only playbooks existing to-day which can show Shakespeare’s constructive art as a dramatist, and it will be necessary to refer to them from time to time.
Seven years after his death, Shakespeare’s fellow-actors, Heminge and Condell, collected all his dramas, and, with the help of some booksellers, published them in one volume in what is known as the first folio (1623). These “trifles,” as the editors called them, were dedicated to two noblemen in the confidence that this tribute would help to keep the author’s memory alive, and the reader is invited to purchase the book because the plays had found favour on the stage where they were first tried and “stood out all appeales.” There is, besides, some anxiety shown by the editors lest the publication of the volume should detract from the author’s fame as a dramatist, for the reader is urged to read the plays “againe and againe,” if he does not like them, or in other words, if he does not understand them. Now, in this first folio, Heminge and Condell began marking divisions for intervals in the plays. This was an innovation, probably suggested to them by the booksellers at the instigation of Ben Jonson. Fortunately, the editors left their task unfinished, finding, perhaps, that these divisions were unsuitable interpolations.
In 1709 there came a new phase in the history of Shakespearian Bibliography when Rowe, the poet-dramatist, at the suggestion of his bookseller, who believed that “none but a poet should presume to meddle with a poet,” undertook to present to the world a new edition of Shakespeare’s plays, in which the player-dramatist was for the first time to be brought within the fraternity of academicians. His works were to be edited on similar lines to those of the poets of Rowe’s time, with the appendage of a life and a recommendatory preface. The contrast between this preface and that of Heminge and Condell is characteristic. To Rowe it is “a great wonder” that Shakespeare should have advanced dramatic poetry as far as he did; and, since he wrote “under a mere light of nature,” and was never acquainted with Aristotle’s precepts, it would be hard to “judge him by a law he knew nothing of.” With Rowe, also, the “fable” comes first for criticism, because even if it is not the most difficult or beautiful part of the play, it is the most important; yet he contends that in this art Shakespeare has “no mastery or strength.” In accordance with academic notions, Rowe completes the work begun by Heminge and Condell, and divides all the plays into acts and scenes; cutting up the text, as it is said, on “rational principles.”[5] But Rowe’s divisions are both misplaced and unauthorized; and even his text is faulty through being printed from the fourth edition of the first folio, the latest one and the least accurate.
Pope follows Rowe as editor in 1723, and upholds the authority of the early copies, which, as he says with truth, “hold the place of the originals, and are the only materials left to repair the deficiencies, or restore the corrupted sense of the author.” Pope’s study of the “originals,” however, confirms him in Rowe’s opinion that Heminge and Condell were ignorant men, both as editors and actors. It was—
“Ben Jonson, getting possession of the stage, brought critical learning into vogue: and that this was not done without difficulty may appear from those frequent lessons (and indeed almost declamations) which he was forced to prefix to his first plays, and put into the mouth of his actors.... Till then, our authors had no thoughts of writing on the model of the ancients: their tragedies were only histories in dialogue: and their comedies followed the thread of any novel as they found it no less implicitly than if it had been true history.”
Pope also remarks that “players have ever had a standard to themselves upon other principles than those of Aristotle,” and Shakespeare’s “wrong judgment as a poet” must be ascribed to his “right judgment as a player.” It is evident, then, that Pope, like Rowe, had nothing favourable to say about Shakespeare’s art in the management of his “fable,” and if Heminge and Condell put in some act and scene divisions, “often where there is no pause in the action,” Pope marks a change of scene at every removal of place, “which is more necessary in this author than in any other, because he shifts them more frequently.”
It was said of Pope’s edition that he had rejected whatever he disliked, and thought more of amputation than cure. In the controversy which followed, Pope found his match in Theobald. This critic points out in his preface (1726) that an editor should be well versed in the history and manners of his author’s age, “if he aim at doing him service.” But Theobald, like Rowe, fails to understand Shakespeare’s dramatic art, and compares him with a “corrupt classic” for whom classical remedies are necessary. Fortunately, Theobald confines his attention entirely to textual emendations, and, unlike Pope, he does not tamper with the text in order to make Shakespeare “speak better than the old copies have done.” Johnson, in spite of his censure, honoured Theobald by borrowing largely from his labours in his own edition.
Warburton (1747) defends Pope, and shrewdly remarks that Shakespeare’s works “when they escaped the players did not fall into much better hands when they came amongst printers and booksellers,” adding, “the truth is Shakespeare’s condition was yet but ill-understood.” But Warburton is wanting in historical knowledge when he writes, “The stubborn nonsense, with which he was incrusted, occasioned his lying long neglected amongst the common lumber of the stage.” In fact, Warburton abuses Rowe’s editing, yet none the less adopts his tone in disparaging “those impurities,” the original copies.
Dr. Johnson (1765) brings vigour and common sense to bear upon his editorial labours, without, however, betraying special sympathy with the poet’s achievements, or any subtle comprehension of his art as a dramatist. But Johnson never forgets that Shakespeare wrote plays and not poems, and that he sold them to actors and not printers. His criticisms are those of a playgoer writing of plays, as if he had seen them acted at the theatre. At the same time he follows Rowe’s lead in saying that Shakespeare’s plots are so loosely constructed that not one play would now “be heard to the conclusion,” and similarly with Rowe, he generalizes as to the text being vitiated “by the blunders of the penman, or changed by the affectation of the players.” About the division into acts and scenes, he writes: