Dryden is the father of Shakespearian criticism. Though he disguised his
veneration at times, he expressed his true faith when he wrote,
deliberately, the fervent estimate in the _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_.
Johnson saw that Pope had expanded it, and his own experience made him say
that the editors and admirers of Shakespeare, in all their emulation of
reverence, had not done much more than diffuse and paraphrase this
“epitome of excellence.” But concurrently on to Johnson’s time we can
trace the influence of Thomas Rymer, who, in his _Short View of Tragedy_,
had championed the classical drama, and had gone as far in abuse as his
greater contemporary had gone in praise. The authority which each exerted
is well illustrated by Rowe’s _Account of Shakespeare_. Rowe is of the
party of Dryden, but he cannot refrain from replying to Rymer, though he
has resolved to enter into no critical controversy. He says he will not
inquire into the justness of Rymer’s remarks, and yet he replies to him in
two passages. That these were silently omitted by Pope when he included
the _Account of Shakespeare_ in his own edition in 1725 does not mean that
Rymer was already being forgotten. We know from other sources that Pope
rated his abilities very highly. But the condensed form in which the
_Account_ was regularly reprinted does not convey so plainly as the
original the influence of the rival schools at the beginning of the
eighteenth century. In addition to the passages on Rymer, Pope omitted
several valuable allusions to Dryden. The influence of Dryden, however, is
plain enough. He seems to have been ever present to Rowe, suggesting ideas
to be accepted or refuted. Rowe must have been indebted to the
conversation of Dryden as well as to the researches of Betterton.
Rowe’s own dramatic work is an interesting comment on the critical
portions of his _Account of Shakespeare_. When he professes to have taken
Shakespeare as his model,(9) which shows that his editorial work had
taught him the trick of an occasional line contrary to the normal rules of
blank verse. Notwithstanding a brave prologue, he was not able to shake
himself free from the rules, which tightened their grip on English tragedy
till they choked it. His regard for Shakespeare did not give him courage
for the addition of a comic element or an underplot. He must obey the
“hampering critics,” though his avowed model had ignored them.
Accordingly, in his more deliberate prose criticism we find, amid his
veneration of Shakespeare, his regard for the rules of the classical
drama. The faults of Shakespeare, we read, were not so much his own as
those of his time, for “tragi-comedy was the common mistake of that age,”
and there was as yet no definite knowledge of how a play should be
constructed.
The burden of Rowe’s criticism is that “strength and nature made amends
for art.” The line might serve as the text of many of the early
appreciations of Shakespeare. Though the critics all resented Rymer’s
treatment of the poet, some of them stood by his doctrines. They might
appease this resentment by protesting against his manners or refuting his
plea for a dramatic chorus; but on the whole they recognised the claims of
the classical models. The more the dramatic fervour failed, the more the
professed critics counselled observance of the rules. In 1702 Farquhar had
pleaded for the freedom of the English stage in his _Discourse upon
Comedy_, but his arguments were unavailing. The duller men found it easier
to support the rigid doctrines, which had been fully expounded by the
French critics. The seventh or supplementary volume of Rowe’s edition of
Shakespeare was introduced by Charles Gildon’s _Essay on the Art, Rise,
and Progress of the Stage in Greece, Rome, and __ England_, which, as the
title shows, was a laboured exposition of the classical doctrines. Gildon
had begun as an enemy of Rymer. In 1694 he had published _Some Reflections
on Mr. Rymer’s Short View of Tragedy and an Attempt at a Vindication of
Shakespeare_. Therein he had spoken of “noble irregularity,” and censured
the “graver pedants” of the age. By 1710 he is a grave pedant himself. In
1694 he had said that Rymer had scarce produced one criticism that was not
borrowed from the French writers; in 1710 the remark is now applicable to
its author. Gildon’s further descent as a critic is evident eight years
later in his _Complete Art of Poetry_. He is now a slave to the French
doctrine of the rules. He confesses himself the less ready to pardon the
“monstrous absurdities” of Shakespeare, as one or two plays, such as the
_Tempest_, are “very near a regularity.” Yet he acknowledges that
Shakespeare abounds in beauties, and he makes some reparation by including
a long list of his finer passages. Gildon was a man whose ideas took their
colour from his surroundings. In the days of his acquaintanceship with
Dryden he appreciated Shakespeare more heartily than when he was left to
the friendship of Dennis or the favours of the Duke of Buckinghamshire.
His _Art of Poetry_ is a dishonest compilation, which owes what value it
has to the sprinkling of contemporary allusions. It even incorporates,
without any acknowledgment, long passages from Sidney’s _Apologie_. We
should be tempted to believe that Gildon merely put his name to a
hack-work collection, were it not that there is a gradual deterioration in
his criticism.
John Dennis also replied to Rymer’s _Short View_, and was classed
afterwards as one of Rymer’s disciples. In his _Impartial Critick_ (1693)
he endeavoured to show that the methods of the ancient Greek tragedy were
not all suitable to the modern English theatre. To introduce a chorus, as
Rymer had recommended, or to expel love from the stage, would, he argued,
only ruin the English drama. But his belief in the classical rules made
him turn the _Merry Wives_ into the _Comical Gallant_. As he found in the
original three actions, each independent of the other, he had set himself
to make the whole “depend on one common centre.” In the Dedication to the
letters _On the Genius and Writings of Shakespeare_ we read that
Aristotle, “who may be call’d the Legislator of Parnassus, wrote the laws
of tragedy so exactly and so truly in reason and nature that succeeding
criticks have writ justly and reasonably upon that art no farther than
they have adhered to their great master’s notions.” But at the very
beginning of the letters themselves he says that “Shakespeare was one of
the greatest geniuses that the world e’er saw.” Notwithstanding his
pronounced classical taste, his sense of the greatness of Shakespeare is
as strong as Rowe’s, and much stronger than Gildon’s. His writings prove
him a man of competent scholarship, who had thought out his literary
doctrines for himself, and could admire beauty in other than classical
garb. The result is that at many points his opinions are at marked
variance with those of Rymer, for whom, however, he had much respect.
Rymer, for instance, had said that Shakespeare’s genius lay in comedy, but
the main contention of Dennis’s letters is that he had an unequalled gift
for tragedy. As a critic Dennis is greatly superior to Rymer and his
disciples. The ancients guided his taste without blinding him to modern
excellence.
Even Lewis Theobald, whom some would consider Shakespeare’s greatest
friend in this century, believed in the rules. He complied with the taste
of the town when he wrote pantomimes, but he was a sterner man when he
posed as a critic. He would then speak of the “general absurdities of
Shakespeare,” and the “errors” in the structure of his plays. He passed
this criticism both in his edition of Shakespeare and in the early
articles in the _Censor_ on _King Lear_, which are also of considerable
historical interest as being the first essays devoted exclusively to an
examination of a single Shakespearian play. His complacent belief in the
rules prompted him to correct _Richard II._ “The many scattered beauties
which I have long admired,” he says naïvely in the Preface, “induced me to
think they would have stronger charms if they were interwoven in a regular
Fable.” No less confident is a note on _Love’s Labours Lost_: “Besides the
exact regularity of the rules of art, which the author has happened to
preserve in some few of his pieces, this is demonstration, I think, that
though he has more frequently transgressed the unity of Time by cramming
years into the compass of a play, yet he knew the absurdity of so doing,
and was not unacquainted with the rule to the contrary.”(10) Theobald was
a critic of the same type as Gildon. Each had profound respect for what he
took to be the accredited doctrines. If on certain points Theobald’s ideas
were liable to change, the explanation is that he was amenable to the
opinions of others. We do not find in Theobald’s criticism the courage of
originality.
There is little about the rules in Pope’s Preface. That Pope respected
them cannot be doubted, else he would not have spoken so well of Rymer,
and in the critical notes added to his Homer we should not hear so much of
Le Bossu’s treatise on the Epic.(11) But Pope was a discreet man, who knew
when to be silent. He regarded it as a misfortune that Shakespeare was not
so circumstanced as to be able to write on the model of the ancients, but,
unlike the pedant theorists, he refused to judge Shakespeare by the rules
of a foreign drama. Much the same is to be said of Addison. His belief in
the rules appears in his _Cato_. His over-rated criticism of _Paradise
Lost_ is little more than a laboured application of the system of Le
Bossu. But in the _Spectator_ he too urges that Shakespeare is not to be
judged according to the rules. “Our critics do not seem sensible,” he
writes, “that there is more beauty in the works of a great genius who is
ignorant of the rules of art than in those of a little genius who knows
and observes them. Our inimitable Shakespeare is a stumbling-block to the
whole tribe of these rigid critics. Who would not rather read one of his
plays where there is not a single rule of the stage observed, than any
production of a modern critic where there is not one of them
violated?”(12) The rigid critics continued to find fault with the
structure of Shakespeare’s plays. In the articles in the _Adventurer_ on
the _Tempest_ and _King Lear_, Joseph Warton repeats the standard
objection to tragi-comedy and underplots. In the _Biographia Britannica_
we still find it stated that Shakespeare set himself to please the
populace, and that the people “had no notion of the rules of writing, or
the model of the Ancients.” But one whose tastes were classical, both by
nature and by training, had been thinking out the matter for himself. It
was only after long reflection, and with much hesitation, that Johnson had
disavowed what had almost come to be considered the very substance of the
classical faith. In his _Irene_ he had bowed to the rules; he had,
however, begun to suspect them by the time he wrote the _Rambler_, and in
the Preface to his edition of Shakespeare suspicion has become conviction.
His sturdy common sense and independence of judgment led him to anticipate
much of what has been supposed to be the discovery of the romantic school.
His Preface has received scant justice. There is no more convincing
criticism of the neo-classical doctrines.(13)
Henceforward we hear less about the rules. Johnson had performed a great
service for that class of critics whose deference to learned opinion kept
them from saying fully what they felt. The lesser men had not been at
their ease when they referred to Shakespeare. We see their difficulty in
the Latin lectures of Joseph Trapp, the first Professor of Poetry at
Oxford, as well as in the Grub Street _Essay upon English Tragedy_ (1747)
by William Guthrie. They admire his genius, but they persist in regretting
that his plays are not properly constructed. Little importance attaches to
Mrs. Montagu’s _Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare_
(1769).(14) It was only a well-meaning but shallow reply to Voltaire,(15)
and a reply was unnecessary. Johnson had already vindicated the national
pride in Shakespeare. That his views soon became the commonplaces of those
critics who strike the average of current opinion, is shown by such a work
as William Cooke’s _Elements of Dramatic Criticism_ (1775). But traces of
the school of Rymer are still to be found, and nowhere more strongly than
in the anonymous _Cursory Remarks on Tragedy_ (1774). In this little
volume of essays the dramatic rules are defended against the criticism of
Johnson by a lame repetition of the arguments which Johnson had
overthrown. Even Pope is said to have let his partiality get the better of
his usual justice and candour when he claimed that Shakespeare was not to
be judged by what were called the rules of Aristotle. There are laws, this
belated critic urges, which bind each individual as a citizen of the
world; and once again we read that the rules of the classical drama are in
accordance with human reason. This book is the last direct descendant of
Rymer’s _Short View_. The ancestral trait appears in the question whether
Shakespeare was in general even a good tragic writer. But it is a
degenerate descendant. If it has learned good manners, it is unoriginal
and dull; and it is so negligible that it has apparently not been thought
worth while to settle the question of its authorship.(16)