SHAKESPEARE AND HIS CRITICS CHAPTER I THE DEPARTMENTS OF SHAKESPEAREAN CRITICISM LITERARY criticism has been one branch of the writer's profession since the days of Aristotle. Shakespeare is so preeminently an important and interesting figure in our literary history that the criticism of his plays forms a large library. Some of it is unintelligent, but it cannot be said that any part of it is unimportant, because the gradual development of reasonable views on the subject is parallel to the gradual growth of liberalism in religion and politics. The history of Shakespearean criticism is an epitome of the history of the general mind of Christendom since the seventeenth century. There is to be seen in both the same progress from conservatism and reverence for authority to reliance on reasoned principles based on an examination of the thing itself regardless of the codified law, and also the same perception that codified law is not necessarily erroneous because it is ancient, but, unless misinterpreted, is an expression of truth, with the reservation that it is truth as it appeared to the general mind in a certain stage of its development. We have learned to respect both Samuel Johnson and Samuel Coleridge. Shakespearean criticism has its historical value and slow line of development as much as free institutions. It may well be, too, that it is still in the same partially developed condition. Shakespearean literature concerns itself with several distinct kinds of subject-matter. I. TEXTUAL CRITICISM As the plays of Shakespeare were printed long before large publishing establishments had brought the art of proof-reading to its present state of exactness, and were particularly unfortunate in not coming under the eye of a corrector of any intelligence, the first editions, the large folio of 1623 and the earlier quartos, are full of errors. Some of the plays in the folio were much better printed than others, perhaps because the copy was better; but in all the proof was very imperfectly corrected, if corrected at all. It seems as if it were a matter of indifference to the compositors whether the words they set up were intelligible or not. In questions of punctuation their rule apparently was: when in doubt use a question mark. In consequence, the first thing to do when Shakespeare's works were edited in 1709 was to correct the most obvious mistakes, many of which were so plainly typographical as to call for no ingenuity. But others present all degrees of difficulty. The main authority for the text is the large folio volume of 1623, of which some hundred copies are known to exist. It was brought out, seven years after Shakespeare's death, by two of his partners, who, although they did not understand the duties of publishers very well, may be supposed to have desired to produce as good a book as possible, and in particular to have included all the plays of their late associate which could justly be called his composition. This First Folio, then, is the basis of the Shakespearean text; for the Second Folio, the Third Folio, and the Fourth Folio are merely reprints issued with no systematic effort at improvement. But before the printing of the folio many of the plays had been printed soon after their production in pamphlet form, apparently against the wishes of the promoters of the theatre,1 for the editors speak of them as 'stolen and surreptitious copies.' Many of these have survived, varying greatly in quality, and these very editors used seven of them as printer's copy, although they stigmatized them all as stolen. In some cases the quarto is fuller than the same play in the folio. In others the folio is the better; and for eighteen it is the sole authority, no quarto having come down to us for Macbeth, The Tempest, Winter's Tale, As You Like It, Cymbeline, Julius Caesar, Timon of Athens, and several others. Of some of the plays several quartos were issued; six or seven of Richard III and four of Richard II. In some cases, when the dates are far apart, the quartos show the play in different stages of development, and are then, as in the case of Hamlet, of great value in showing how the author amplified his work. In some instances different copies of the same edition of a quarto differ, as if the press work had been stopped and changes made in the form. As the early quartos, 1 There seems to have been a brisk demand for 'playbooks' in the seventeenth century. Prynne, author of Histriomastix, 1633, says that forty thousand of them were issued in the two years before his writing. This is within the bounds of possibility. They were used in the theatre as prompt-books, as is evident from the fact that in some of them the names of the actors are written before the entrances of the character. In the folio the name of Kemp, the famous comedian who took the part, appears a number of times in the place of Dogberry in the margin, showing that Much Ado About Nothing was set up from the very copy used by the prompter. But doubtless the greater number were bought for individual reading. After the printing of the folio many Shakespearean quartos were issued down to the eighteenth century. These are known as 'players' quartos,' and are not of the slightest value in settling disputed readings, and of little as bibliographic curiosities. even if surreptitious, are authentic, it is evident that they are valuable in settling disputed readings, and that the labor of collating or comparing them line by line with the folio was a task requiring infinite patience and industry. It was begun in the eighteenth century, and carried out in the course of one hundred and fifty years by English and German scholars, to whom the thanks of posterity are due. Dr. Johnson advised the student to read the plays through before consulting any notes. It is true that all or very nearly all of the famous passages are correctly printed and need no textual commentary, and it is true also that we gather the suggested meaning of poetry without a logical comprehension of the words and phrases. But the young student who reads the first three acts of Winter's Tale, or any part of Cymbeline, or many passages of other plays where the style is involved and condensed, or the allusions dark to him, certainly needs illustrative notes and a text in which the principal errors are corrected and the punctuation modernized. Suppose him to come across the following speech of the Duke of Buckingham in the first scene of the first act of Henry VIII: Why the devil, Upon this French going out, took he upon him, He readily understands that the 'French going out' is the embassy to France when Henry met Francis on the Field of the Cloth of Gold; possibly he may see that the next to the last line is parenthetical and means, the council not being in session, or being disregarded; but if he can interpret the last line without a note telling him that 'him' is equivalent to him whom,' also that 'papers' is a verb, meaning 'puts on the list,' he is one of a thousand. The errors which have been corrected come under several heads: (a) In some cases speeches are plainly attributed to the wrong person, in the folio and quartos both, as, for example, in the speech of the ghost in Hamlet: Thus was I, . . Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, It seems unlikely that the ghost, who has but a few minutes left, should interrupt himself to comment on his murder, and natural that his son should interject the line beginning, 'O, horrible!' and not confine the expression of his feeling to dumb show. It is very easy for the printer to omit the speaker's name. The speech is usually taken by the actor of Hamlet, and it would seem rightly. But there are other cases where the transference of speeches is not warranted, though the sequence of ideas would be more manifest if it were done. (b) As a matter of course many words and phrases used in 1600 have since become obsolete. Some of these are explained as allusions to social customs, to folklore of the day, or to sports, as archery, hawking, or bowls. The vocabulary of slang is very ephemeral. No one ever uses wrongly a slang expression of his time, but it is sometimes very difficult to appreciate the force of ob ! |