Theobald tells us, For these thirty years last past, I believe, not a season has elapsed in which it [Hamlet] has not been performed on the stage more than once. The audiences insisted on the gravediggers' scene, and rebelled when it was cut out. This might well have given the critics pause. For when an art representation is delightful to several generations, there must be some philosophical explanation of the fact. The audiences of a season may be wrong, but there is no appeal from the verdict of the audiences of a century. It does not follow that the play which lasts is perfect, but it does follow that its great qualities are far more important than its defects, and are the qualities for which the critic should search and which he should try to bring to the light. It also follows that the defects are not detachable.

These two Shakespearean commentators are by no means of prime importance, but their writings show that the cultivated and scholarly world believed in the early eighteenth century that there were in Shakespeare's plays admirable passages due to an untutored poetical genius, and grave faults due to the fact that he had never learned the rules for a correct drama, and further that his plays might be rewritten so as to retain the beauties and eliminate the errors. When they tried to do this, the result, to their great surprise, was a play which would not hold an audience. Tate's Lear and Cibber's Richard III, it is true, were fairly well received, but the pit demanded the gravediggers' scene in Hamlet, though 'the judicious' could easily prove that it was a dramatic blemish. To the audience it was not merely amusing, but a powerful and truthful presentation of one of the great contrasts of life. To the learned it was always a puzzle why Shakespeare's plays, written in defiance of the rules, were so attractive on the stage in their original

condition, and received with such indifference when the blemishes were removed. That the blemishes were really beauties could not be admitted for an instant, for Aristotle had not said so. The French dramatists were authorities in questions of good taste, and their tragedies were written in accordance with the rules. It took a long time to change this frame of the critical mind, and to this idea that the plays were full of barbarous errors is partly due the craze for amending the text by improvements, which possessed some of the eighteenth-century editors. When dogmas are once firmly established on authority, years must elapse before experience can prove that they are unsound. It is difficult to codify common sense in art so as to make it acceptable to professionals. It is perhaps more difficult to do so in government or religion. We need not wonder that it was a long time before the learned world gave up the idea that Shakespeare's faults were entirely technical and could be cured by applying a just method based on the practice of the writers of a foreign country two thousand years ago, or, rather, on the notions of learned men as to what that method was. The grasp of a dead hand is not readily relaxed.

CHAPTER IV

THE EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

NICHOLAS ROWE (1674-1718)

ROWE was the first of the multitude of Shakespearean editors. He was a successful playwright and literary man of the early eighteenth century, and attained the dignity of poet-laureate under Queen Anne. He brought out his edition of Shakespeare in seven octavo volumes in 1709. He used as his original a copy of the Fourth Folio, and thereby subjected himself to the burden of all the errors that the later folios superinduced on the first, so that many of the emendations he made are merely corrections of misprints he might have avoided by going back to the original. He had no idea of the value of the old quarto 1 texts, and little of the necessity of reading all available books of the Shakespearean period so as to familiarize himself with usages and expressions already becoming obsolete. In fact, neither he nor his successor, Pope, was a Shakespearean scholar in the modern sense. They could not well be so, since the duty of careful collation and investigation of sources was not then understood.

1

Nevertheless, Rowe did a good work. He put it in the power of everybody to procure in a convenient form and at a moderate cost all the plays. Men were no longer forced to buy a rare, cumbrous, and expensive folio or else content themselves with such pamphlets of

1 Nevertheless, Rowe inserted from the 1504 quarto Hamlet, or from some quarto now lost, the lines from 17 to 38, 1, iv; and also fifty lines, IV, iv, including the great soliloquy, 'How all occasions do inform against me.'

separate plays as they could find. Rowe brought the spelling up to date and corrected the irregular punctuation of the folios. He prefixed lists of the dramatis personæ, so useful in introducing the reader to the company whose intimate acquaintance he is about to make. Some of the plays in the folios are divided into acts and scenes, some into acts only, and some printed solid. Rowe divided all into acts and scenes, and his | experience as a practical playwright enabled him to do this in the main properly, so that most of his divisions are accepted at present. The scenes in Shakespeare's plays, when marked in the folios, are distinguished by change of place, all the actors leaving the stage at the end of the scene, and not, as in the French stage, by a change of group so that a scene terminates when one actor departs or another enters. As change of local scene was left largely to the imagination in the Elizabethan period and was not marked by change of scenery,' the scenes in Shakespeare's plays are sometimes very numerous, and this feature presents great difficulty to modern representation, when every place is indicated by a change of 'set.' Rowe's task in dividing the plays into scenes was therefore one of little difficulty. Acts, on the contrary, should indicate the completion of a certain part of the action. Each act should be a chapter in the story, and the divisions plainly marked as steps in the unfolding of the plot and separated by a short interval. In setting these larger divisions, Rowe, thanks to his practical experience, shows in the main great good sense and conception of the artistic and logical effect of the dramatic chapter or act. In the scene divisions he followed, as said before, the method of the plays already divided, and regarded a scene as a locality. The divisions in any example of literary art the paragraphs, the chapters, the cantos,

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the scenes, and the acts-are of great importance in making an impression on the reader's eye and mind. If we regard the play primarily as a spectacle, the scenes should be short, for whenever a new person comes on the stage a new tableau is formed. The scenes thus become like a succession of pictures thrown on an illuminated screen; they succeed one another rapidly and form a unified impression if they are artistically combined and contrasted. But if our fundamental conception of the play is action rather than spectacle, the scene or minor division may be longer and contain a definite part of the action or development of the story. A long scene of this kind is sometimes a little drama of itself. Thus in Hamlet, III, i, 'A room in the Castle,' the entire anti-Hamlet party enter and discuss the question of Hamlet's lunacy, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern retire, the King explains the test of Hamlet's sanity suggested by Polonius (II, ii); the Queen retires; the two, Polonius and the King, instruct Ophelia and hide. Hamlet enters and delivers To be or not to be.' He notices Ophelia, and addresses her with bitter irony. He retires; Ophelia's beautiful soliloquy, 'O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown,' follows; the King and Polonius reënter, and after a few words all depart.

Locally and dramatically this is one scene, and is so marked in the folio. One motif runs through it. From the pictorial point of view it is at least three, if not four. Pope, the next editor, made three without any warrant. He should have followed the folio, and should have noticed that though a drama is a compound of tableaux and actions, in Shakespeare's conception the action, the thing done, is the vital matter; though the action may not be a concrete deed, it may be the 'struggle of a limed soul.' And in Shakespeare's plays, when