SAMUEL JOHNSON: PREFACE TO EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE. 1765.

That praises are without reason lavished on the dead, and that the honours

due only to excellence are paid to antiquity, is a complaint likely to be

always continued by those, who, being able to add nothing to truth, hope

for eminence from the heresies of paradox; or those, who, being forced by

disappointment upon consolatory expedients, are willing to hope from

posterity what the present age refuses, and flatter themselves that the

regard which is yet denied by envy, will be at last bestowed by time.

Antiquity, like every other quality that attracts the notice of mankind,

has undoubtedly votaries that reverence it, not from reason, but from

prejudice. Some seem to admire indiscriminately whatever has been long

preserved, without considering that time has sometimes co-operated with

chance; all perhaps are more willing to honour past than present

excellence; and the mind contemplates genius through the shades of age, as

the eye surveys the sun through artificial opacity. The great contention

of criticism is to find the faults of the moderns, and the beauties of the

ancients. While an author is yet living, we estimate his powers by his

worst performance; and when he is dead, we rate them by his best.

To works, however, of which the excellence is not absolute and definite,

but gradual and comparative; to works not raised upon principles

demonstrative and scientifick, but appealing wholly to observation and

experience, no other test can be applied than length of duration and

continuance of esteem. What mankind have long possessed they have often

examined and compared, and if they persist to value the possession, it is

because frequent comparisons have confirmed opinion in its favour. As

among the works of nature no man can properly call a river deep, or a

mountain high, without the knowledge of many mountains, and many rivers;

so in the production of genius, nothing can be stiled excellent till it

has been compared with other works of the same kind. Demonstration

immediately displays its power, and has nothing to hope or fear from the

flux of years; but works tentative and experimental must be estimated by

their proportion to the general and collective ability of man, as it is

discovered in a long succession of endeavours. Of the first building that

was raised, it might be with certainty determined that it was round or

square; but whether it was spacious or lofty must have been referred to

time. The Pythagorean scale of numbers was at once discovered to be

perfect; but the poems of Homer we yet know not to transcend the common

limits of human intelligence, but by remarking that nation after nation,

and century after century, has been able to do little more than transpose

his incidents, new name his characters, and paraphrase his sentiments.

The reverence due to writings that have long subsisted arises therefore

not from any credulous confidence in the superior wisdom of past ages, or

gloomy persuasion of the degeneracy of mankind, but is the consequence of

acknowledged and indubitable positions, that what has been longest known

has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood.

The poet, of whose works I have undertaken the revision, may now begin to

assume the dignity of an ancient, and claim the privilege of an

established fame and prescriptive veneration. He has long outlived his

century, the term commonly fixed as the test of literary merit. Whatever

advantages he might once derive from personal allusions, local customs, or

temporary opinions, have for many years been lost; and every topick of

merriment or motive of sorrow, which the modes of artificial life afforded

him, now only obscure the scenes which they once illuminated. The effects

of favour and competition are at an end; the tradition of his friendships

and his enmities has perished; his works support no opinion with

arguments, nor supply any faction with invectives; they can neither

indulge vanity, nor gratify malignity; but are read without any other

reason than the desire of pleasure, and are therefore praised only as

pleasure is obtained; yet, thus unassisted by interest or passion, they

have past through variations of taste and changes of manners, and, as they

devolved from one generation to another, have received new honours at

every transmission.

But because human judgment, though it be gradually gaining upon certainty,

never becomes infallible; and approbation, though long continued, may yet

be only the approbation of prejudice or fashion; it is proper to inquire,

by what peculiarities of excellence Shakespeare has gained and kept the

favour of his countrymen.

Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of

general nature. Particular manners can be known to few, and therefore few

only can judge how nearly they are copied. The irregular combinations of

fanciful invention may delight awhile, by that novelty of which the common

satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder

are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of

truth.

Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the

poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of

manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of

particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the

peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small

numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions:

they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will

always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak

by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all

minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion.

In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in

those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.

It is from this wide extension of design that so much instruction is

derived. It is this which fills the plays of Shakespeare with practical

axioms and domestick wisdom. It was said of Euripides, that every verse

was a precept; and it may be said of Shakespeare, that from his works may

be collected a system of civil and œconomical prudence. Yet his real power

is not shewn in the splendor of particular passages, but by the progress

of his fable, and the tenor of his dialogue; and he that tries to

recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in

Heirocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his

pocket as a specimen.

It will not easily be imagined how much Shakespeare excels in

accommodating his sentiments to real life, but by comparing him with other

authors. It was observed of the ancient schools of declamation, that the

more diligently they were frequented, the more was the student

disqualified for the world, because he found nothing there which he should

ever meet in any other place. The same remark may be applied to every

stage but that of Shakespeare. The theatre, when it is under any other

direction, is peopled by such characters as were never seen, conversing in

a language which was never heard, upon topicks which will never arise in

the commerce of mankind. But the dialogue of this author is often so

evidently determined by the incident which produces it, and is pursued

with so much ease and simplicity, that it seems scarcely to claim the

merit of fiction, but to have been gleaned by diligent selection out of

common conversation, and common occurrences.

Upon every other stage the universal agent is love, by whose power all

good and evil is distributed, and every action quickened or retarded. To

bring a lover, a lady, and a rival into the fable; to entangle them in

contradictory obligations, perplex them with oppositions of interest, and

harrass them with violence of desires inconsistent with each other; to

make them meet in rapture, and part in agony; to fill their mouths with

hyperbolical joy and outrageous sorrow; to distress them as nothing human

ever was distressed; to deliver them as nothing human ever was delivered,

is the business of a modern dramatist. For this, probability is violated,

life is misrepresented, and language is depraved. But love is only one of

many passions, and as it has no great influence upon the sum of life, it

has little operation in the dramas of a poet who caught his ideas from the

living world, and exhibited only what he saw before him. He knew that any

other passion, as it was regular or exorbitant, was a cause of happiness

or calamity.

Characters thus ample and general were not easily discriminated and

preserved, yet perhaps no poet ever kept his personages more distinct from

each other. I will not say with Pope, that every speech may be assigned to

the proper speaker, because many speeches there are which have nothing

characteristical; but, perhaps, though some may be equally adapted to

every person, it will be difficult to find any that can be properly

transferred from the present possessor to another claimant. The choice is

right, when there is reason for choice.

Other dramatists can only gain attention by hyperbolical or aggravated

characters, by fabulous and unexampled excellence or depravity, as the

writers of barbarous romances invigorated the reader by a giant and a

dwarf; and he that should form his expectation of human affairs from the

play, or from the tale, would be equally deceived. Shakespeare has no

heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the

reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same

occasion: even where the agency is super-natural, the dialogue is level

with life. Other writers disguise the most natural passions and most

frequent incidents; so that he who contemplates them in the book will not

know them in the world: Shakespeare approximates the remote, and

familiarizes the wonderful; the event which he represents will not happen,

but if it were possible, its effects would probably be such as he has

assigned; and it may be said that he has not only shewn human nature as it

acts in real exigences, but as it would be found in trials to which it

cannot be exposed.

This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirror

of life; that he who has mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms

which other writers raise up before him, may here be cured of his

delirious ecstasies, by reading human sentiments in human language; by

scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and

a confessor predict the progress of the passions.

His adherence to general nature has exposed him to the censure of

criticks, who form their judgments upon narrower principles. Dennis and

Rhymer think his Romans not sufficiently Roman; and Voltaire censures his

kings as not completely royal. Dennis is offended that Menenius, a senator

of Rome, should play the buffoon; and Voltaire perhaps thinks decency

violated when the Danish usurper is represented as a drunkard. But

Shakespeare always makes nature predominate over accident; and if he

preserves the essential character, is not very careful of distinctions

superinduced and adventitious. His story requires Romans or kings, but he

thinks only on men. He knew that Rome, like every other city, had men of

all dispositions; and wanting a buffoon, he went into the senate-house for

that which the senate-house would certainly have afforded him. He was

inclined to shew an usurper and a murderer not only odious, but

despicable; he therefore added drunkenness to his other qualities, knowing

that kings love wine like other men, and that wine exerts its natural

power upon kings. These are the petty cavils of petty minds; a poet

overlooks the casual distinction of country and condition, as a painter,

satisfied with the figure, neglects the drapery.

The censure which he has incurred by mixing comick and tragick scenes, as

it extends to all his works, deserves more consideration. Let the fact be

first stated, and then examined.

Shakespeare’s plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either

tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the

real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and

sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes

of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss

of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is

hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the

malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolick of another; and many

mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design.

Out of this chaos of mingled purposes and casualties, the ancient poets,

according to the laws which custom had prescribed, selected some the

crimes of men, and some their absurdities; some the momentous vicissitudes

of life, and some the lighter occurrences; some the terrors of distress,

and some the gaieties of prosperity. Thus rose the two modes of imitation,

known by the names of _tragedy_ and _comedy_, compositions intended to

promote different ends by contrary means, and considered as so little

allied, that I do not recollect among the Greeks or Romans a single writer

who attempted both.

Shakespeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only

in one mind, but in one composition. Almost all his plays are divided

between serious and ludicrous characters, and, in the successive

evolutions of the design, sometimes produce seriousness and sorrow, and

sometimes levity and laughter.

That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily

allowed; but there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature. The

end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by

pleasing. That the mingled drama may convey all the instruction of tragedy

or comedy cannot be denied, because it includes both in its alternations

of exhibition, and approaches nearer than either to the appearance of

life, by shewing how great machinations and slender designs may promote or

obviate one another, and the high and the low co-operate in the general

system by unavoidable concatenation.

It is objected that by this change of scenes the passions are interrupted

in their progression, and that the principal event, being not advanced by

a due gradation of preparatory incidents, wants at last the power to move,

which constitutes the perfection of dramatick poetry. This reasoning is so

specious, that it is received as true even by those who in daily

experience feel it to be false. The interchanges of mingled scenes seldom

fail to produce the intended vicissitudes of passion. Fiction cannot move

so much, but that the attention may be easily transferred; and though it

must be allowed that pleasing melancholy be sometimes interrupted by

unwelcome levity, yet let it be considered likewise, that melancholy is

often not pleasing, and that the disturbance of one man may be the relief

of another; that different auditors have different habitudes; and that,

upon the whole, all pleasure consists in variety.

The players, who in their edition divided our author’s works into

comedies, histories, and tragedies, seem not to have distinguished the

three kinds, by any very exact or definite ideas.

An action which ended happily to the principal persons, however serious or

distressful through its intermediate incidents, in their opinion

constituted a comedy. This idea of a comedy continued long amongst us, and

plays were written, which, by changing the catastrophe, were tragedies

to-day, and comedies to-morrow.

Tragedy was not in those times a poem of more general dignity or elevation

than comedy; it required only a calamitous conclusion, with which the

common criticism of that age was satisfied, whatever lighter pleasure it

afforded in its progress.

History was a series of actions, with no other than chronological

succession, independent on each other, and without any tendency to

introduce and regulate the conclusion. It is not always very nicely

distinguished from tragedy. There is not much nearer approach to unity of

action in the tragedy of _Antony and Cleopatra_, than in the history of

_Richard the Second_. But a history might be continued through many plays;

as it had no plan, it had no limits.

Through all these denominations of the drama, Shakespeare’s mode of

composition is the same; an interchange of seriousness and merriment, by

which the mind is softened at one time, and exhilarated at another. But

whatever be his purpose, whether to gladden or depress, or to conduct the

story, without vehemence or emotion, through tracts of easy and familiar

dialogue, he never fails to attain his purpose; as he commands us, we

laugh or mourn, or sit silent with quiet expectation, in tranquillity

without indifference.

When Shakespeare’s plan is understood, most of the criticisms of Rhymer

and Voltaire vanish away. The play of _Hamlet_ is opened, without

impropriety, by two centinels; Iago bellows at Brabantio’s window, without

injury to the scheme of the play, though in terms which a modern audience

would not easily endure; the character of Polonius is seasonable and

useful, and the Grave-diggers themselves may be heard with applause.

Shakespeare engaged in dramatick poetry with the world open before him;

the rules of the ancients were yet known to few; the publick judgment was

unformed; he had no example of such fame as might force him upon

imitation, nor criticks of such authority as might restrain his

extravagance: he therefore indulged his natural disposition, and his

disposition, as Rhymer has remarked, led him to comedy. In tragedy he

often writes with great appearance of toil and study, what is written at

last with little felicity; but in his comick scenes, he seems to produce

without labour, what no labour can improve. In tragedy he is always

struggling after some occasion to be comick, but in comedy he seems to

repose, or to luxuriate, as in a mode of thinking congenial to his nature.

In his tragick scenes there is always something wanting, but his comedy

often surpasses expectation or desire. His comedy pleases by the thoughts

and the language, and his tragedy for the greater part by incident and

action. His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct.

The force of his comick scenes has suffered little diminution from the

changes made by a century and a half, in manners or in words. As his

personages act upon principles arising from genuine passion, very little

modified by particular forms, their pleasures and vexations are

communicable to all times and to all places; they are natural, and

therefore durable; the adventitious peculiarities of personal habits are

only superficial dies, bright and pleasing for a little while, yet soon

fading to a dim tinct, without any remains of former lustre; but the

discriminations of true passion are the colours of nature; they pervade

the whole mass, and can only perish with the body that exhibits them. The

accidental compositions of heterogeneous modes are dissolved by the chance

which combined them; but the uniform simplicity of primitive qualities

neither admits increase, nor suffers decay. The sand heaped by one flood

is scattered by another, but the rock always continues in its place. The

stream of time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabricks of

other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare.

If there be, what I believe there is, in every nation, a stile which never

becomes obsolete, a certain mode of phraseology so consonant and congenial

to the analogy and principles of its respective language, as to remain

settled and unaltered; this stile is probably to be sought in the common

intercourse of life, among those who speak only to be understood, without

ambition of elegance. The polite are always catching modish innovations,

and the learned depart from established forms of speech, in hope of

finding or making better; those who wish for distinction forsake the

vulgar, when the vulgar is right; but there is a conversation above

grossness and below refinement, where propriety resides, and where this

poet seems to have gathered his comick dialogue. He is therefore more

agreeable to the ears of the present age than any other author equally

remote, and among his other excellencies deserves to be studied as one of

the original masters of our language.

These observations are to be considered not as unexceptionably constant,

but as containing general and predominant truth. Shakespeare’s familiar

dialogue is affirmed to be smooth and clear, yet not wholly without

ruggedness or difficulty; as a country may be eminently fruitful, though

it has spots unfit for cultivation: his characters are praised as natural,

though their sentiments are sometimes forced, and their actions

improbable; as the earth upon the whole is spherical, though its surface

is varied with protuberances and cavities.

Shakespeare with his excellencies has likewise faults, and faults

sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit. I shall shew them in

the proportion in which they appear to me, without envious malignity or

superstitious veneration. No question can be more innocently discussed

than a dead poet’s pretensions to renown; and little regard is due to that

bigotry which sets candour higher than truth.

His first defect is that to which may be imputed most of the evil in books

or in men. He sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more

careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any

moral purpose. From his writings indeed a system of social duty may be

selected, for he that thinks reasonably must think morally; but his

precepts and axioms drop casually from him; he makes no just distribution

of good or evil, nor is always careful to shew in the virtuous a

disapprobation of the wicked; he carries his persons indifferently through

right and wrong, and at the close dismisses them without further care, and

leaves their examples to operate by chance. This fault the barbarity of

his age cannot extenuate; for it is always a writer’s duty to make the

world better, and justice is a virtue independent on time or place.

The plots are often so loosely formed, that a very slight consideration

may improve them, and so carelessly pursued, that he seems not always

fully to comprehend his own design. He omits opportunities of instructing

or delighting, which the train of his story seems to force upon him, and

apparently rejects those exhibitions which would be more affecting, for

the sake of those which are more easy.

It may be observed that in many of his plays the latter part is evidently

neglected. When he found himself near the end of his work, and in view of

his reward, he shortened the labour to snatch the profit. He therefore

remits his efforts where he should most vigorously exert them, and his

catastrophe is improbably produced or imperfectly represented.

He had no regard to distinction of time or place, but gives to one age or

nation, without scruple, the customs, institutions, and opinions of

another, at the expence not only of likelihood, but of possibility. These

faults Pope has endeavoured, with more zeal than judgment, to transfer to

his imagined interpolators. We need not wonder to find Hector quoting

Aristotle, when we see the loves of Theseus and Hippolyta combined with

the Gothick mythology of fairies. Shakespeare, indeed, was not the only

violator of chronology, for in the same age Sidney, who wanted not the

advantages of learning, has, in his _Arcadia_, confounded the pastoral

with the feudal times, the days of innocence, quiet, and security, with

those of turbulence, violence, and adventure.

In his comick scenes he is seldom very successful, when he engages his

characters in reciprocations of smartness and contests of sarcasm; their

jests are commonly gross, and their pleasantry licentious; neither his

gentlemen nor his ladies have much delicacy, nor are sufficiently

distinguished from his clowns by any appearance of refined manners.

Whether he represented the real conversation of his time is not easy to

determine; the reign of Elizabeth is commonly supposed to have been a time

of stateliness, formality, and reserve, yet perhaps the relaxations of

that severity were not very elegant. There must, however, have been always

some modes of gaiety preferable to others, and a writer ought to chuse the

best.

In tragedy his performance seems constantly to be worse, as his labour is

more. The effusions of passion, which exigence forces out, are for the

most part striking and energetick; but whenever he solicits his invention,

or strains his faculties, the offspring of his throes is tumour, meanness,

tediousness, and obscurity.

In narration he affects a disproportionate pomp of diction and a wearisome

train of circumlocution, and tells the incident imperfectly in many words,

which might have been more plainly delivered in few. Narration in

dramatick poetry is naturally tedious, as it is unanimated and inactive,

and obstructs the progress of the action; it should therefore always be

rapid, and enlivened by frequent interruption. Shakespeare found it an

encumbrance, and instead of lightening it by brevity, endeavoured to

recommend it by dignity and splendor.

His declamations or set speeches are commonly cold and weak, for his power

was the power of nature; when he endeavoured, like other tragick writers,

to catch opportunities of amplification, and instead of inquiring what the

occasion demanded, to shew how much his stores of knowledge could supply,

he seldom escapes without the pity or resentment of his reader.

It is incident to him to be now and then entangled with an unwieldy

sentiment, which he cannot well express, and will not reject; he struggles

with it a while, and if it continues stubborn, comprises it in words such

as occur, and leaves it to be disentangled and evolved by those who have

more leisure to bestow upon it.

Not that always where the language is intricate the thought is subtle, or

the image always great where the line is bulky; the equality of words to

things is very often neglected, and trivial sentiments and vulgar ideas

disappoint the attention, to which they are recommended by sonorous

epithets and swelling figures.

But the admirers of this great poet have most reason to complain when he

approaches nearest to his highest excellence, and seems fully resolved to

sink them in dejection, and mollify them with tender emotions by the fall

of greatness, the danger of innocence, or the crosses of love. What he

does best, he soon ceases to do. He is not long soft and pathetick without

some idle conceit, or contemptible equivocation. He no sooner begins to

move, than he counteracts himself; and terror and pity, as they are rising

in the mind, are checked and blasted by sudden frigidity.

A quibble is to Shakespeare what luminous vapours are to the traveller: he

follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way, and

sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind,

and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or

profundity of his disquisition, whether he be enlarging knowledge or

exalting affection, whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or

enchaining it in suspense, let but a quibble spring up before him, and he

leaves his work unfinished. A quibble is the golden apple for which he

will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. A

quibble, poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was

content to purchase it by the sacrifice of reason, propriety, and truth. A

quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and

was content to lose it.

It will be thought strange, that, in enumerating the defects of this

writer, I have not yet mentioned his neglect of the unities; his violation

of those laws which have been instituted and established by the joint

authority of poets and of criticks.

For his other deviations from the art of writing, I resign him to critical

justice, without making any other demand in his favour, than that which

must be indulged to all human excellence; that his virtues be rated with

his failings: but, from the censure which this irregularity may bring upon

him, I shall, with due reverence to that learning which I must oppose,

adventure to try how I can defend him.

His histories, being neither tragedies nor comedies, are not subject to

any of their laws; nothing more is necessary to all the praise which they

expect, than that the changes of action be so prepared as to be

understood, that the incidents be various and affecting, and the

characters consistent, natural, and distinct. No other unity is intended,

and therefore none is to be sought.

In his other works he has well enough preserved the unity of action. He

has not, indeed, an intrigue regularly perplexed and regularly unravelled;

he does not endeavour to hide his design only to discover it, for this is

seldom the order of real events, and Shakespeare is the poet of nature:

but his plan has commonly what Aristotle requires, a beginning, a middle,

and an end; one event is concatenated with another, and the conclusion

follows by easy consequence. There are perhaps some incidents that might

be spared, as in other poets there is much talk that only fills up time

upon the stage; but the general system makes gradual advances, and the end

of the play is the end of expectation.

To the unities of time and place he has shewn no regard; and perhaps a

nearer view of the principles on which they stand will diminish their

value, and withdraw from them the veneration which, from the time of

Corneille, they have very generally received, by discovering that they

have given more trouble to the poet, than pleasure to the auditor.

The necessity of observing the unities of time and place arises from the

supposed necessity of making the drama credible. The criticks hold it

impossible that an action of months or years can be possibly believed to

pass in three hours; or that the spectator can suppose himself to sit in

the theatre, while ambassadors go and return between distant kings, while

armies are levied and towns besieged, while an exile wanders and returns,

or till he whom they saw courting his mistress, shall lament the untimely

fall of his son. The mind revolts from evident falsehood, and fiction

loses its force when it departs from the resemblance of reality.

From the narrow limitation of time necessarily arises the contraction of

place. The spectator, who knows that he saw the first act at Alexandria,

cannot suppose that he sees the next at Rome, at a distance to which not

the dragons of Medea could, in so short a time, have transported him; he

knows with certainty that he has not changed his place; and he knows that

place cannot change itself; that what was a house cannot become a plain;

that what was Thebes can never be Persepolis.

Such is the triumphant language with which a critick exults over the

misery of an irregular poet, and exults commonly without resistance or

reply. It is time therefore to tell him, by the authority of Shakespeare,

that he assumes, as an unquestionable principle, a position, which, while

his breath is forming it into words, his understanding pronounces to be

false. It is false that any representation is mistaken for reality; that

any dramatick fable in its materiality was ever credible, or, for a single

moment, was ever credited.

The objection arising from the impossibility of passing the first hour at

Alexandria, and the next at Rome, supposes that when the play opens the

spectator really imagines himself at Alexandria, and believes that his

walk to the theatre has been a voyage to Egypt, and that he lives in the

days of Antony and Cleopatra. Surely he that imagines this may imagine

more. He that can take the stage at one time for the palace of the

Ptolemies, may take it in half an hour for the promontory of Actium.

Delusion, if delusion be admitted, has no certain limitation; if the

spectator can be once persuaded that his old acquaintance are Alexander

and Cæsar, that a room illuminated with candles is the plain of Pharsalia,

or the bank of Granicus, he is in a state of elevation above the reach of

reason, or of truth, and from the heights of empyrean poetry may despise

the circumscriptions of terrestrial nature. There is no reason why a mind

thus wandering in ecstasy should count the clock, or why an hour should

not be a century in that calenture of the brains that can make the stage a

field.

The truth is that the spectators are always in their senses, and know,

from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that

the players are only players. They come to hear a certain number of lines

recited with just gesture and elegant modulation. The lines relate to some

action, and an action must be in some place; but the different actions

that complete a story may be in places very remote from each other; and

where is the absurdity of allowing that space to represent first Athens,

and then Sicily, which was always known to be neither Sicily nor Athens,

but a modern theatre.

By supposition, as place is introduced, time may be extended; the time

required by the fable elapses for the most part between the acts; for, of

so much of the action as is represented, the real and poetical duration is

the same. If, in the first act, preparations for war against Mithridates

are represented to be made in Rome, the event of the war may, without

absurdity, be represented, in the catastrophe, as happening in Pontus; we

know that there is neither war, nor preparation for war; we know that we

are neither in Rome nor Pontus; that neither Mithridates nor Lucullus are

before us. The drama exhibits successive imitations of successive actions,

and why may not the second imitation represent an action that happened

years after the first; if it be so connected with it, that nothing but

time can be supposed to intervene. Time is, of all modes of existence,

most obsequious to the imagination; a lapse of years is as easily

conceived as a passage of hours. In contemplation we easily contract the

time of real actions, and therefore willingly permit it to be contracted

when we only see their imitation.

It will be asked how the drama moves, if it is not credited. It is

credited with all the credit due to a drama. It is credited, whenever it

moves, as a just picture of a real original; as representing to the

auditor what he would himself feel, if he were to do or suffer what is

there feigned to be suffered or to be done. The reflection that strikes

the heart is not that the evils before us are real evils, but that they

are evils to which we ourselves may be exposed. If there be any fallacy,

it is not that we fancy the players, but that we fancy ourselves unhappy

for a moment; but we rather lament the possibility than suppose the

presence of misery, as a mother weeps over her babe, when she remembers

that death may take it from her. The delight of tragedy proceeds from our

consciousness of fiction; if we thought murders and treasons real, they

would please no more.

Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for

realities, but because they bring realities to mind. When the imagination

is recreated by a painted landscape, the trees are not supposed capable to

give us shade, or the fountains coolness; but we consider how we should be

pleased with such fountains playing beside us, and such woods waving over

us. We are agitated in reading the history of _Henry the Fifth_, yet no

man takes his book for the field of Agincourt. A dramatick exhibition is a

book recited with concomitants that increase or diminish its effect.

Familiar comedy is often more powerful in the theatre, than on the page;

imperial tragedy is always less. The humour of Petruchio may be heightened

by grimace; but what voice or what gesture can hope to add dignity or

force to the soliloquy of Cato?

A play read affects the mind like a play acted. It is therefore evident

that the action is not supposed to be real; and it follows that between

the acts a longer or shorter time may be allowed to pass, and that no more

account of space or duration is to be taken by the auditor of a drama,

than by the reader of a narrative, before whom may pass in an hour the

life of a hero, or the revolutions of an empire.

Whether Shakespeare knew the unities, and rejected them by design, or

deviated from them by happy ignorance, it is, I think, impossible to

decide, and useless to enquire. We may reasonably suppose that, when he

rose to notice, he did not want the counsels and admonitions of scholars

and criticks, and that he at last deliberately persisted in a practice,

which he might have begun by chance. As nothing is essential to the fable

but unity of action, and as the unities of time and place arise evidently

from false assumptions, and, by circumscribing the extent of the drama,

lessen its variety, I cannot think it much to be lamented that they were

not known by him, or not observed: nor, if such another poet could arise,

should I very vehemently reproach him, that his first act passed at

Venice, and his next in Cyprus. Such violations of rules merely positive

become the comprehensive genius of Shakespeare, and such censures are

suitable to the minute and slender criticism of Voltaire:

Non usque adeo permiscuit imis

Longus summa dies, ut non, si voce Metelli

Serventur leges, malint a Cæsare tolli.

Yet when I speak thus slightly of dramatick rules, I cannot but recollect

how much wit and learning may be produced against me; before such

authorities I am afraid to stand, not that I think the present question

one of those that are to be decided by mere authority, but because it is

to be suspected that these precepts have not been so easily received but

for better reasons than I have yet been able to find. The result of my

enquiries, in which it would be ludicrous to boast of impartiality, is

that the unities of time and place are not essential to a just drama, that

though they may sometimes conduce to pleasure, they are always to be

sacrificed to the nobler beauties of variety and instruction; and that a

play, written with nice observation of critical rules, is to be

contemplated as an elaborate curiosity, as the product of superfluous and

ostentatious art, by which is shewn, rather what is possible, than what is

necessary.

He that, without diminution of any other excellence, shall preserve all

the unities unbroken, deserves the like applause with the architect who

shall display all the orders of architecture in a citadel, without any

deduction from its strength; but the principal beauty of a citadel is to

exclude the enemy; and the greatest graces of a play are to copy nature,

and instruct life.

Perhaps what I have here not dogmatically but deliberately written, may

recall the principles of the drama to a new examination. I am almost

frighted at my own temerity; and when I estimate the fame and the strength

of those that maintain the contrary opinion, am ready to sink down in

reverential silence; as Æneas withdrew from the defence of Troy, when he

saw Neptune shaking the wall, and Juno heading the besiegers.

Those whom my arguments cannot persuade to give their approbation to the

judgment of Shakespeare, will easily, if they consider the condition of

his life, make some allowance for his ignorance.

Every man’s performances, to be rightly estimated, must be compared with

the state of the age in which he lived, and with his own particular

opportunities; and though to a reader a book be not worse or better for

the circumstances of the author, yet as there is always a silent reference

of human works to human abilities, and as the enquiry, how far man may

extend his designs, or how high he may rate his native force, is of far

greater dignity than in what rank we shall place any particular

performance, curiosity is always busy to discover the instruments, as well

as to survey the workmanship, to know how much is to be ascribed to

original powers, and how much to casual and adventitious help. The palaces

of Peru or Mexico were certainly mean and incommodious habitations, if

compared to the houses of European monarchs; yet who could forbear to view

them with astonishment, who remembered that they were built without the

use of iron?

The English nation, in the time of Shakespeare, was yet struggling to

emerge from barbarity. The philology of Italy had been transplanted hither

in the reign of Henry the Eighth; and the learned languages had been

successfully cultivated by Lilly, Linacre, and More; by Pole, Cheke, and

Gardiner; and afterwards by Smith, Clerk, Haddon, and Ascham. Greek was

now taught to boys in the principal schools; and those who united elegance

with learning, read, with great diligence, the Italian and Spanish poets.

But literature was yet confined to professed scholars, or to men and women

of high rank. The publick was gross and dark; and to be able to read and

write, was an accomplishment still valued for its rarity.

Nations, like individuals, have their infancy. A people newly awakened to

literary curiosity, being yet unacquainted with the true state of things,

knows not how to judge of that which is proposed as its resemblance.

Whatever is remote from common appearances is always welcome to vulgar, as

to childish credulity; and of a country unenlightened by learning, the

whole people is the vulgar. The study of those who then aspired to

plebeian learning was then laid out upon adventures, giants, dragons, and

enchantments. _The Death of Arthur_ was the favourite volume.

The mind which has feasted on the luxurious wonders of fiction, has no

taste of the insipidity of truth. A play which imitated only the common

occurrences of the world, would, upon the admirers of _Palmerin_ and _Guy

of Warwick_, have made little impression; he that wrote for such an

audience was under the necessity of looking round for strange events and

fabulous transactions, and that incredibility, by which maturer knowledge

is offended, was the chief recommendation of writings, to unskilful

curiosity.

Our author’s plots are generally borrowed from novels; and it is

reasonable to suppose that he chose the most popular, such as were read by

many, and related by more; for his audience could not have followed him

through the intricacies of the drama, had they not held the thread of the

story in their hands.

The stories which we now find only in remoter authors, were in his time

accessible and familiar. The fable of _As you like it_, which is supposed

to be copied from Chaucer’s _Gamelyn_, was a little pamphlet of those

times; and old Mr. Cibber remembered the tale of _Hamlet_ in plain English

prose, which the criticks have now to seek in _Saxo Grammaticus_.

His English histories he took from English chronicles and English ballads;

and as the ancient writers were made known to his countrymen by versions,

they supplied him with new subjects; he dilated some of Plutarch’s lives

into plays, when they had been translated by North.

His plots, whether historical or fabulous, are always crouded with

incidents, by which the attention of a rude people was more easily caught

than by sentiment or argumentation; and such is the power of the

marvellous, even over those who despise it, that every man finds his mind

more strongly seized by the tragedies of Shakespeare than of any other

writer; others please us by particular speeches, but he always makes us

anxious for the event, and has perhaps excelled all but Homer in securing

the first purpose of a writer, by exciting restless and unquenchable

curiosity, and compelling him that reads his work to read it through.

The shows and bustle with which his plays abound have the same original.

As knowledge advances, pleasure passes from the eye to the ear, but

returns, as it declines, from the ear to the eye. Those to whom our

author’s labours were exhibited had more skill in pomps or processions

than in poetical language, and perhaps wanted some visible and

discriminated events, as comments on the dialogue. He knew how he should

most please; and whether his practice is more agreeable to nature, or

whether his example has prejudiced the nation, we still find that on our

stage something must be done as well as said, and inactive declamation is

very coldly heard, however musical or elegant, passionate or sublime.

Voltaire expresses his wonder, that our author’s extravagancies are

endured by a nation which has seen the tragedy of _Cato_. Let him be

answered, that Addison speaks the language of poets, and Shakespeare, of

men. We find in _Cato_ innumerable beauties which enamour us of its

author, but we see nothing that acquaints us with human sentiments or

human actions; we place it with the fairest and the noblest progeny which

judgment propagates by conjunction with learning; but _Othello_ is the

vigorous and vivacious offspring of observation impregnated by genius.

_Cato_ affords a splendid exhibition of artificial and fictitious manners,

and delivers just and noble sentiments, in diction easy, elevated, and

harmonious, but its hopes and fears communicate no vibration to the heart;

the composition refers us only to the writer; we pronounce the name of

_Cato_, but we think on _Addison_.

The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and

diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented with flowers; the

composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend their

branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds

and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses;

filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind with endless

diversity. Other poets display cabinets of precious rarities, minutely

finished, wrought into shape, and polished into brightness. Shakespeare

opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty,

though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a

mass of meaner minerals.

It has been much disputed, whether Shakespeare owed his excellence to his

own native force, or whether he had the common helps of scholastick

education, the precepts of critical science, and the examples of ancient

authors.

There has always prevailed a tradition, that Shakespeare wanted learning,

that he had no regular education, nor much skill in the dead languages.

Jonson, his friend, affirms that _he had small Latin, and less Greek_;

who, besides that he had no imaginable temptation to falsehood, wrote at a

time when the character and acquisitions of Shakespeare were known to

multitudes. His evidence ought therefore to decide the controversy, unless

some testimony of equal force could be opposed.

Some have imagined that they have discovered deep learning in many

imitations of old writers; but the examples which I have known urged, were

drawn from books translated in his time; or were such easy coincidences of

thought, as will happen to all who consider the same subjects; or such

remarks on life or axioms of morality as float in conversation, and are

transmitted through the world in proverbial sentences.

I have found it remarked that, in this important sentence, _Go before,

I’ll follow_, we read a translation of, _I prae, sequar_. I have been told

that when Caliban, after a pleasing dream, says, _I cry’d to sleep again_,

the author imitates Anacreon, who had, like every other man, the same wish

on the same occasion.

There are a few passages which may pass for imitations, but so few, that

the exception only confirms the rule; he obtained them from accidental

quotations, or by oral communication, and as he used what he had, would

have used more if he had obtained it.

The _Comedy of Errors_ is confessedly taken from the _Menæchmi_ of

Plautus; from the only play of Plautus which was then in English. What can

be more probable, than that he who copied that, would have copied more,

but that those which were not translated were inaccessible?

Whether he knew the modern languages is uncertain. That his plays have

some French scenes proves but little; he might easily procure them to be

written, and probably, even though he had known the language in the common

degree, he could not have written it without assistance. In the story of

_Romeo and Juliet_ he is observed to have followed the English

translation, where it deviates from the Italian; but this on the other

part proves nothing against his knowledge of the original. He was to copy,

not what he knew himself, but what was known to his audience.

It is most likely that he had learned Latin sufficiently to make him

acquainted with construction, but that he never advanced to an easy

perusal of the Roman authors. Concerning his skill in modern languages, I

can find no sufficient ground of determination; but as no imitations of

French or Italian authors have been discovered, though the Italian poetry

was then in high esteem, I am inclined to believe that he read little more

than English, and chose for his fables only such tales as he found

translated.

That much knowledge is scattered over his works is very justly observed by

Pope, but it is often such knowledge as books did not supply. He that will

understand Shakespeare, must not be content to study him in the closet, he

must look for his meaning sometimes among the sports of the field, and

sometimes among the manufactures of the shop.

There is however proof enough that he was a very diligent reader, nor was

our language then so indigent of books, but that he might very liberally

indulge his curiosity without excursion into foreign literature. Many of

the Roman authors were translated, and some of the Greek; the Reformation

had filled the kingdom with theological learning; most of the topicks of

human disquisition had found English writers; and poetry had been

cultivated, not only with diligence, but success. This was a stock of

knowledge sufficient for a mind so capable of appropriating and improving

it.

But the greater part of his excellence was the product of his own genius.

He found the English stage in a state of the utmost rudeness; no essays

either in tragedy or comedy had appeared, from which it could be

discovered to what degree of delight either one or other might be carried.

Neither character nor dialogue were yet understood. Shakespeare may be

truly said to have introduced them both amongst us, and in some of his

happier scenes to have carried them both to the utmost height.

By what gradations of improvement he proceeded, is not easily known; for

the chronology of his works is yet unsettled. Rowe is of opinion that

_perhaps we are not to look for his beginning, like those of other

writers, in his least perfect works; art had so little, and nature so

large a share in what he did, that for ought I know, __SAYS HE__, the

performances of his youth, as they were the most vigorous, were the best._

But the power of nature is only the power of using to any certain purpose

the materials which diligence procures, or opportunity supplies. Nature

gives no man knowledge, and when images are collected by study and

experience, can only assist in combining or applying them. Shakespeare,

however favoured by nature, could impart only what he had learned; and as

he must increase his ideas, like other mortals, by gradual acquisition,

he, like them, grew wiser as he grew older, could display life better, as

he knew it more, and instruct with more efficacy, as he was himself more

amply instructed.

There is a vigilance of observation and accuracy of distinction which

books and precepts cannot confer; from this almost all original and native

excellence proceeds. Shakespeare must have looked upon mankind with

perspicacity, in the highest degree curious and attentive. Other writers

borrow their characters from preceding writers, and diversify them only by

the accidental appendages of present manners; the dress is a little

varied, but the body is the same. Our author had both matter and form to

provide; for, except the characters of Chaucer, to whom I think he is not

much indebted, there were no writers in English, and perhaps not many in

other modern languages, which shewed life in its native colours.

The contest about the original benevolence or malignity of man had not yet

commenced. Speculation had not yet attempted to analyse the mind, to trace

the passions to their sources, to unfold the seminal principles of vice

and virtue, or sound the depths of the heart for the motives of action.

All those enquiries, which from that time that human nature became the

fashionable study have been made sometimes with nice discernment, but

often with idle subtilty, were yet unattempted. The tales with which the

infancy of learning was satisfied, exhibited only the superficial

appearances of action, related the events, but omitted the causes, and

were formed for such as delighted in wonders rather than in truth. Mankind

was not then to be studied in the closet; he that would know the world,

was under the necessity of gleaning his own remarks, by mingling as he

could in its business and amusements.

Boyle congratulated himself upon his high birth, because it favoured his

curiosity, by facilitating his access. Shakespeare had no such advantage;

he came to London a needy adventurer, and lived for a time by very mean

employments. Many works of genius and learning have been performed in

states of life that appear very little favourable to thought or to

enquiry; so many, that he who considers them is inclined to think that he

sees enterprize and perseverance predominating over all external agency,

and bidding help and hindrance vanish before them. The genius of

Shakespeare was not to be depressed by the weight of poverty, nor limited

by the narrow conversation to which men in want are inevitably condemned;

the incumbrances of his fortune were shaken from his mind, _as dew-drops

from a lion’s mane_.

Though he had so many difficulties to encounter, and so little assistance

to surmount them, he has been able to obtain an exact knowledge of many

modes of life, and many casts of native dispositions; to vary them with

great multiplicity; to mark them by nice distinctions; and to shew them in

full view by proper combinations. In this part of his performances he had

none to imitate, but has himself been imitated by all succeeding writers;

and it may be doubted, whether from all his successors more maxims of

theoretical knowledge, or more rules of practical prudence, can be

collected, than he alone has given to his country.

Nor was his attention confined to the actions of men; he was an exact

surveyor of the inanimate world; his descriptions have always some

peculiarities, gathered by contemplating things as they really exist. It

may be observed that the oldest poets of many nations preserve their

reputation, and that the following generations of wit, after a short

celebrity, sink into oblivion. The first, whoever they be, must take their

sentiments and descriptions immediately from knowledge; the resemblance is

therefore just, their descriptions are verified by every eye, and their

sentiments acknowledged by every breast. Those whom their fame invites to

the same studies, copy partly them, and partly nature, till the books of

one age gain such authority, as to stand in the place of nature to

another, and imitation, always deviating a little, becomes at last

capricious and casual. Shakespeare, whether life or nature be his subject,

shews plainly that he has seen with his own eyes; he gives the image which

he receives, not weakened or distorted by the intervention of any other

mind; the ignorant feel his representations to be just, and the learned

see that they are complete.

Perhaps it would not be easy to find any author, except Homer, who

invented so much as Shakespeare, who so much advanced the studies which he

cultivated, or effused so much novelty upon his age or country. The form,

the characters, the language, and the shows of the English drama are his.

_He seems, __SAYS DENNIS__, to have been the very original of our English

tragical harmony, that is, the harmony of blank verse, diversified often

by dissyllable and trissyllable terminations. For the diversity

distinguishes it from heroick harmony, and by bringing it nearer to common

use makes it more proper to gain attention, and more fit for action and

dialogue. Such verse we make when we are writing prose; we make such verse

in common conversation._

I know not whether this praise is rigorously just. The dissyllable

termination, which the critick rightly appropriates to the drama, is to be

found, though, I think, not in _Gorboduc_, which is confessedly before our

author, yet in _Hieronymo_, of which the date is not certain, but which

there is reason to believe at least as old as his earliest plays. This

however is certain, that he is the first who taught either tragedy or

comedy to please, there being no theatrical piece of any older writer, of

which the name is known, except to antiquaries and collectors of books,

which are sought because they are scarce, and would not have been scarce,

had they been much esteemed.

To him we must ascribe the praise, unless Spenser may divide it with him,

of having first discovered to how much smoothness and harmony the English

language could be softened. He has speeches, perhaps sometimes scenes,

which have all the delicacy of Rowe, without his effeminacy. He endeavours

indeed commonly to strike by the force and vigour of his dialogue, but he

never executes his purpose better, than when he tries to sooth by

softness.

Yet it must be at last confessed that as we owe every thing to him, he

owes something to us; that, if much of his praise is paid by perception

and judgment, much is likewise given by custom and veneration. We fix our

eyes upon his graces, and turn them from his deformities, and endure in

him what we should in another loath or despise. If we endured without

praising, respect for the father of our drama might excuse us; but I have

seen, in the book of some modern critick, a collection of anomalies which

shew that he has corrupted language by every mode of depravation, but

which his admirer has accumulated as a monument of honour.

He has scenes of undoubted and perpetual excellence, but perhaps not one

play, which, if it were now exhibited as the work of a contemporary

writer, would be heard to the conclusion. I am indeed far from thinking

that his works were wrought to his own ideas of perfection; when they were

such as would satisfy the audience, they satisfied the writer. It is

seldom that authors, though more studious of fame than Shakespeare, rise

much above the standard of their own age; to add a little to what is best

will always be sufficient for present praise, and those who find

themselves exalted into fame, are willing to credit their encomiasts, and

to spare the labour of contending with themselves.

It does not appear that Shakespeare thought his works worthy of posterity,

that he levied any ideal tribute upon future times, or had any further

prospect than of present popularity and present profit. When his plays had

been acted, his hope was at an end; he solicited no addition of honour

from the reader. He therefore made no scruple to repeat the same jests in

many dialogues, or to entangle different plots by the same knot of

perplexity, which may be at least forgiven him, by those who recollect,

that of Congreve’s four comedies two are concluded by a marriage in a

mask, by a deception which perhaps never happened, and which, whether

likely or not, he did not invent.

So careless was this great poet of future fame, that, though he retired to

ease and plenty, while he was yet little _declined into the vale of

years_, before he could be disgusted with fatigue, or disabled by

infirmity, he made no collection of his works, nor desired to rescue those

that had been already published from the depravations that obscured them,

or secure to the rest a better destiny, by giving them to the world in

their genuine state.

Of the plays which bear the name of Shakespeare in the late editions, the

greater part were not published till about seven years after his death,

and the few which appeared in his life are apparently thrust into the

world without the care of the author, and therefore probably without his

knowledge.

Of all the publishers, clandestine or professed, their negligence and

unskilfulness has by the late revisers been sufficiently shewn. The faults

of all are indeed numerous and gross, and have not only corrupted many

passages perhaps beyond recovery, but have brought others into suspicion,

which are only obscured by obsolete phraseology, or by the writer’s

unskilfulness and affectation. To alter is more easy than to explain, and

temerity is a more common quality than diligence. Those who saw that they

must employ conjecture to a certain degree, were willing to indulge it a

little further. Had the author published his own works, we should have sat

quietly down to disentangle his intricacies, and clear his obscurities;

but now we tear what we cannot loose, and eject what we happen not to

understand.

The faults are more than could have happened without the concurrence of

many causes. The stile of Shakespeare was in itself ungrammatical,

perplexed, and obscure; his works were transcribed for the players by

those who may be supposed to have seldom understood them; they were

transmitted by copiers equally unskilful, who still multiplied errors;

they were perhaps sometimes mutilated by the actors, for the sake of

shortening the speeches; and were at last printed without correction of

the press.

In this state they remained, not, as Dr. Warburton supposes, because they

were unregarded, but because the editor’s art was not yet applied to

modern languages, and our ancestors were accustomed to so much negligence

of English printers, that they could very patiently endure it. At last an

edition was undertaken by Rowe; not because a poet was to be published by

a poet, for Rowe seems to have thought very little on correction or

explanation, but that our author’s works might appear like those of his

fraternity, with the appendages of a life and recommendatory preface. Rowe

has been clamorously blamed for not performing what he did not undertake,

and it is time that justice be done him, by confessing that though he

seems to have had no thought of corruption beyond the printer’s errors,

yet he has made many emendations, if they were not made before, which his

successors have received without acknowledgment, and which, if they had

produced them, would have filled pages and pages with censures of the

stupidity by which the faults were committed, with displays of the

absurdities which they involved, with ostentatious expositions of the new

reading, and self-congratulations on the happiness of discovering it.

As of the other editors I have preserved the prefaces, I have likewise

borrowed the author’s life from Rowe, though not written with much

elegance or spirit; it relates however what is now to be known, and

therefore deserves to pass through all succeeding publications.

The nation had been for many years content enough with Mr. Rowe’s

performance, when Mr. Pope made them acquainted with the true state of

Shakespeare’s text, shewed that it was extremely corrupt, and gave reason

to hope that there were means of reforming it. He collated the old copies,

which none had thought to examine before, and restored many lines to their

integrity; but, by a very compendious criticism, he rejected whatever he

disliked, and thought more of amputation than of cure.

I know not why he is commended by Dr. Warburton for distinguishing the

genuine from the spurious plays. In this choice he exerted no judgment of

his own; the plays which he received were given by Hemings and Condel, the

first editors; and those which he rejected, though, according to the

licentiousness of the press in those times, they were printed during

Shakespeare’s life, with his name, had been omitted by his friends, and

were never added to his works before the edition of 1664, from which they

were copied by the later printers.

This was a work which Pope seems to have thought unworthy of his

abilities, being not able to suppress his contempt of _the dull duty of an

editor_. He understood but half his undertaking. The duty of a collator is

indeed dull, yet, like other tedious tasks, is very necessary; but an

emendatory critick would ill discharge his duty, without qualities very

different from dulness. In perusing a corrupted piece, he must have before

him all possibilities of meaning, with all possibilities of expression.

Such must be his comprehension of thought, and such his copiousness of

language. Out of many readings possible, he must be able to select that

which best suits with the state, opinions, and modes of language

prevailing in every age, and with his author’s particular cast of thought,

and turn of expression. Such must be his knowledge, and such his taste.

Conjectural criticism demands more than humanity possesses, and he that

exercises it with most praise, has very frequent need of indulgence. Let

us now be told no more of the dull duty of an editor.

Confidence is the common consequence of success. They whose excellence of

any kind has been loudly celebrated, are ready to conclude that their

powers are universal. Pope’s edition fell below his own expectations, and

he was so much offended, when he was found to have left any thing for

others to do, that he passed the latter part of his life in a state of

hostility with verbal criticism.

I have retained all his notes, that no fragment of so great a writer may

be lost; his preface, valuable alike for elegance of composition and

justness of remark, and containing a general criticism on his author, so

extensive that little can be added, and so exact, that little can be

disputed, every editor has an interest to suppress, but that every reader

would demand its insertion.

Pope was succeeded by Theobald, a man of narrow comprehension and small

acquisitions, with no native and intrinsick splendor of genius, with

little of the artificial light of learning, but zealous for minute

accuracy, and not negligent in pursuing it. He collated the ancient

copies, and rectified many errors. A man so anxiously scrupulous might

have been expected to do more, but what little he did was commonly right.

In his reports of copies and editions he is not to be trusted without

examination. He speaks sometimes indefinitely of copies, when he has only

one. In his enumeration of editions, he mentions the two first folios as

of high, and the third folio as of middle authority; but the truth is that

the first is equivalent to all others, and that the rest only deviate from

it by the printer’s negligence. Whoever has any of the folios has all,

excepting those diversities which mere reiteration of editions will

produce. I collated them all at the beginning, but afterwards used only

the first.

Of his notes I have generally retained those which he retained himself in

his second edition, except when they were confuted by subsequent

annotators, or were too minute to merit preservation. I have sometimes

adopted his restoration of a comma, without inserting the panegyrick in

which he celebrated himself for his achievement. The exuberant excrescence

of his diction I have often lopped, his triumphant exultations over Pope

and Rowe I have sometimes suppressed, and his contemptible ostentation I

have frequently concealed; but I have in some places shewn him as he would

have shewn himself, for the reader’s diversion, that the inflated

emptiness of some notes may justify or excuse the contraction of the rest.

Theobald, thus weak and ignorant, thus mean and faithless, thus petulant

and ostentatious, by the good luck of having Pope for his enemy, has

escaped, and escaped alone, with reputation, from this undertaking. So

willingly does the world support those who solicit favour, against those

who command reverence; and so easily is he praised, whom no man can envy.

Our author fell then into the hands of Sir Thomas Hanmer, the Oxford

editor, a man, in my opinion, eminently qualified by nature for such

studies. He had, what is the first requisite to emendatory criticism, that

intuition by which the poet’s intention is immediately discovered, and

that dexterity of intellect which dispatches its work by the easiest

means. He had undoubtedly read much; his acquaintance with customs,

opinions, and traditions, seems to have been large; and he is often

learned without shew. He seldom passes what he does not understand,

without an attempt to find or to make a meaning, and sometimes hastily

makes what a little more attention would have found. He is solicitous to

reduce to grammar what he could not be sure that his author intended to be

grammatical. Shakespeare regarded more the series of ideas, than of words;

and his language, not being designed for the reader’s desk, was all that

he desired it to be, if it conveyed his meaning to the audience.

Hanmer’s care of the metre has been too violently censured. He found the

measure reformed in so many passages, by the silent labours of some

editors, with the silent acquiescence of the rest, that he thought himself

allowed to extend a little further the licence which had already been

carried so far without reprehension; and of his corrections in general, it

must be confessed that they are often just, and made commonly with the

least possible violation of the text.

But, by inserting his emendations, whether invented or borrowed, into the

page, without any notice of varying copies, he has appropriated the labour

of his predecessors, and made his own edition of little authority. His

confidence indeed, both in himself and others, was too great; he supposes

all to be right that was done by Pope and Theobald; he seems not to

suspect a critick of fallibility, and it was but reasonable that he should

claim what he so liberally granted.

As he never writes without careful enquiry and diligent consideration, I

have received all his notes, and believe that every reader will wish for

more.

Of the last editor it is more difficult to speak. Respect is due to high

place, tenderness to living reputation, and veneration to genius and

learning; but he cannot be justly offended at that liberty of which he has

himself so frequently given an example, nor very solicitous what is

thought of notes, which he ought never to have considered as part of his

serious employments, and which, I suppose, since the ardour of composition

is remitted, he no longer numbers among his happy effusions.

The original and predominant error of his commentary is acquiescence in

his first thoughts; that precipitation which is produced by consciousness

of quick discernment; and that confidence which presumes to do, by

surveying the surface, what labour only can perform, by penetrating the

bottom. His notes exhibit sometimes perverse interpretations, and

sometimes improbable conjectures; he at one time gives the author more

profundity of meaning than the sentence admits, and at another discovers

absurdities, where the sense is plain to every other reader. But his

emendations are likewise often happy and just; and his interpretation of

obscure passages learned and sagacious.

Of his notes, I have commonly rejected those against which the general

voice of the publick has exclaimed, or which their own incongruity

immediately condemns, and which, I suppose, the author himself would

desire to be forgotten. Of the rest, to part I have given the highest

approbation, by inserting the offered reading in the text; part I have

left to the judgment of the reader, as doubtful, though specious; and part

I have censured without reserve, but I am sure without bitterness of

malice, and, I hope, without wantonness of insult.

It is no pleasure to me, in revising my volumes, to observe how much paper

is wasted in confutation. Whoever considers the revolutions of learning,

and the various questions of greater or less importance, upon which wit

and reason have exercised their powers, must lament the unsuccessfulness

of enquiry, and the slow advances of truth, when he reflects, that great

part of the labour of every writer is only the destruction of those that

went before him. The first care of the builder of a new system, is to

demolish the fabricks which are standing. The chief desire of him that

comments an author, is to shew how much other commentators have corrupted

and obscured him. The opinions prevalent in one age, as truths above the

reach of controversy, are confuted and rejected in another, and rise again

to reception in remoter times. Thus the human mind is kept in motion

without progress. Thus sometimes truth and error, and sometimes

contrarieties of error, take each other’s place by reciprocal invasion.

The tide of seeming knowledge which is poured over one generation, retires

and leaves another naked and barren; the sudden meteors of intelligence,

which for a while appear to shoot their beams into the regions of

obscurity, on a sudden withdraw their lustre, and leave mortals again to

grope their way.

These elevations and depressions of renown, and the contradictions to

which all improvers of knowledge must for ever be exposed, since they are

not escaped by the highest and brightest of mankind, may surely be endured

with patience by criticks and annotators, who can rank themselves but as

the satellites of their authors. How canst thou beg for life, says Homer’s

hero to his captive, when thou knowest that thou art now to suffer only

what must another day be suffered by Achilles?

Dr. Warburton had a name sufficient to confer celebrity on those who could

exalt themselves into antagonists, and his notes have raised a clamour too

loud to be distinct. His chief assailants are the authors of _The canons

of criticism_, and of _The revisal of Shakespeare’s text_; of whom one

ridicules his errors with airy petulance, suitable enough to the levity of

the controversy; the other attacks them with gloomy malignity, as if he

were dragging to justice an assassin or incendiary. The one stings like a

fly, sucks a little blood, takes a gay flutter, and returns for more; the

other bites like a viper, and would be glad to leave inflammations and

gangrene behind him. When I think on one, with his confederates, I

remember the danger of Coriolanus, who was afraid that _girls with spits,

and boys with stones, should slay him in puny battle_; when the other

crosses my imagination, I remember the prodigy in _Macbeth_:

A falcon tow’ring in his pride of place,

Was by a mousing owl hawk’d at and kill’d.

Let me however do them justice. One is a wit, and one a scholar. They have

both shewn acuteness sufficient in the discovery of faults, and have both

advanced some probable interpretations of obscure passages; but when they

aspire to conjecture and emendation, it appears how falsely we all

estimate our own abilities, and the little which they have been able to

perform might have taught them more candour to the endeavours of others.

Before Dr. Warburton’s edition, _Critical observations on Shakespeare_ had

been published by Mr. Upton, a man skilled in languages, and acquainted

with books, but who seems to have had no great vigour of genius or nicety

of taste. Many of his explanations are curious and useful, but he

likewise, though he professed to oppose the licentious confidence of

editors, and adhere to the old copies, is unable to restrain the rage of

emendation, though his ardour is ill seconded by his skill. Every cold

empirick, when his heart is expanded by a successful experiment, swells

into a theorist, and the laborious collator at some unlucky moment

frolicks in conjecture.

_Critical, historical, and explanatory notes_ have been likewise published

upon Shakespeare by Dr. Grey, whose diligent perusal of the old English

writers has enabled him to make some useful observations. What he

undertook he has well enough performed, but as he neither attempts

judicial nor emendatory criticism, he employs rather his memory than his

sagacity. It were to be wished that all would endeavour to imitate his

modesty, who have not been able to surpass his knowledge.

I can say with great sincerity of all my predecessors, what I hope will

hereafter be said of me, that not one has left Shakespeare without

improvement, nor is there one to whom I have not been indebted for

assistance and information. Whatever I have taken from them, it was my

intention to refer to its original author, and it is certain, that what I

have not given to another, I believed when I wrote it to be my own. In

some perhaps I have been anticipated; but if I am ever found to encroach

upon the remarks of any other commentator, I am willing that the honour,

be it more or less, should be transferred to the first claimant, for his

right, and his alone, stands above dispute; the second can prove his

pretensions only to himself, nor can himself always distinguish invention,

with sufficient certainty, from recollection.

They have all been treated by me with candour, which they have not been

careful of observing to one another. It is not easy to discover from what

cause the acrimony of a scholiast can naturally proceed. The subjects to

be discussed by him are of very small importance; they involve neither

property nor liberty; nor favour the interest of sect or party. The

various readings of copies, and different interpretations of a passage,

seem to be questions that might exercise the wit, without engaging the

passions. But whether it be that _small things make __ mean men proud_,

and vanity catches small occasions; or that all contrariety of opinion,

even in those that can defend it no longer, makes proud men angry; there

is often found in commentaries a spontaneous strain of invective and

contempt, more eager and venomous than is vented by the most furious

controvertist in politicks against those whom he is hired to defame.

Perhaps the lightness of the matter may conduce to the vehemence of the

agency; when the truth to be investigated is so near to inexistence, as to

escape attention, its bulk is to be enlarged by rage and exclamation: that

to which all would be indifferent in its original state, may attract

notice when the fate of a name is appended to it. A commentator has indeed

great temptations to supply by turbulence what he wants of dignity, to

beat his little gold to a spacious surface, to work that to foam which no

art or diligence can exalt to spirit.

The notes which I have borrowed or written are either illustrative, by

which difficulties are explained; or judicial, by which faults and

beauties are remarked; or emendatory, by which depravations are corrected.

The explanations transcribed from others, if I do not subjoin any other

interpretation, I suppose commonly to be right, at least I intend by

acquiescence to confess that I have nothing better to propose.

After the labours of all the editors, I found many passages which appeared

to me likely to obstruct the greater number of readers, and thought it my

duty to facilitate their passage. It is impossible for an expositor not to

write too little for some, and too much for others. He can only judge what

is necessary by his own experience; and how long soever he may deliberate,

will at last explain many lines which the learned will think impossible to

be mistaken, and omit many for which the ignorant will want his help.

These are censures merely relative, and must be quietly endured. I have

endeavoured to be neither superfluously copious, nor scrupulously

reserved, and hope that I have made my author’s meaning accessible to many

who before were frighted from perusing him, and contributed something to

the publick, by diffusing innocent and rational pleasure.

The complete explanation of an author not systematick and consequential,

but desultory and vagrant, abounding in casual allusions and light hints,

is not to be expected from any single scholiast. All personal reflections,

when names are suppressed, must be in a few years irrecoverably

obliterated; and customs, too minute to attract the notice of law, such as

modes of dress, formalities of conversation, rules of visits, disposition

of furniture, and practices of ceremony, which naturally find places in

familiar dialogue, are so fugitive and unsubstantial, that they are not

easily retained or recovered. What can be known will be collected by

chance, from the recesses of obscure and obsolete papers, perused commonly

with some other view. Of this knowledge every man has some, and none has

much; but when an author has engaged the publick attention, those who can

add any thing to his illustration, communicate their discoveries, and time

produces what had eluded diligence.

To time I have been obliged to resign many passages, which, though I did

not understand them, will perhaps hereafter be explained, having, I hope,

illustrated some, which others have neglected or mistaken, sometimes by

short remarks, or marginal directions, such as every editor has added at

his will, and often by comments more laborious than the matter will seem

to deserve; but that which is most difficult is not always most important,

and to an editor nothing is a trifle by which his author is obscured.

The poetical beauties or defects I have not been very diligent to observe.

Some plays have more, and some fewer judicial observations, not in

proportion to their difference of merit, but because I gave this part of

my design to chance and to caprice. The reader, I believe, is seldom

pleased to find his opinion anticipated; it is natural to delight more in

what we find or make, than in what we receive. Judgment, like other

faculties, is improved by practice, and its advancement is hindered by

submission to dictatorial decisions, as the memory grows torpid by the use

of a table-book. Some initiation is however necessary; of all skill, part

is infused by precept, and part is obtained by habit; I have therefore

shewn so much as may enable the candidate of criticism to discover the

rest.

To the end of most plays I have added short strictures, containing a

general censure of faults, or praise of excellence; in which I know not

how much I have concurred with the current opinion; but I have not, by any

affectation of singularity, deviated from it. Nothing is minutely and

particularly examined, and therefore it is to be supposed that in the

plays which are condemned there is much to be praised, and in these which

are praised much to be condemned.

The part of criticism in which the whole succession of editors has

laboured with the greatest diligence, which has occasioned the most

arrogant ostentation, and excited the keenest acrimony, is the emendation

of corrupted passages, to which the publick attention having been first

drawn by the violence of the contention between Pope and Theobald, has

been continued by the persecution, which, with a kind of conspiracy, has

been since raised against all the publishers of Shakespeare.

That many passages have passed in a state of depravation through all the

editions is indubitably certain; of these the restoration is only to be

attempted by collation of copies, or sagacity of conjecture. The

collator’s province is safe and easy, the conjecturer’s perilous and

difficult. Yet as the greater part of the plays are extant only in one

copy, the peril must not be avoided, nor the difficulty refused.

Of the readings which this emulation of amendment has hitherto produced,

some from the labours of every publisher I have advanced into the text;

those are to be considered as in my opinion sufficiently supported; some I

have rejected without mention, as evidently erroneous; some I have left in

the notes without censure or approbation, as resting in equipoise between

objection and defence; and some, which seemed specious but not right, I

have inserted with a subsequent animadversion.

Having classed the observations of others, I was at last to try what I

could substitute for their mistakes, and how I could supply their

omissions. I collated such copies as I could procure, and wished for more,

but have not found the collectors of these rarities very communicative. Of

the editions which chance or kindness put into my hands I have given an

enumeration, that I may not be blamed for neglecting what I had not the

power to do.

By examining the old copies, I soon found that the later publishers, with

all their boasts of diligence, suffered many passages to stand

unauthorized, and contented themselves with Rowe’s regulation of the text,

even where they knew it to be arbitrary, and with a little consideration

might have found it to be wrong. Some of these alterations are only the

ejection of a word for one that appeared to him more elegant or more

intelligible. These corruptions I have often silently rectified; for the

history of our language, and the true force of our words, can only be

preserved, by keeping the text of authors free from adulteration. Others,

and those very frequent, smoothed the cadence, or regulated the measure;

on these I have not exercised the same rigour; if only a word was

transposed, or a particle inserted or omitted, I have sometimes suffered

the line to stand; for the inconstancy of the copies is such, as that some

liberties may be easily permitted. But this practice I have not suffered

to proceed far, having restored the primitive diction wherever it could

for any reason be preferred.

The emendations which comparison of copies supplied, I have inserted in

the text; sometimes, where the improvement was slight, without notice, and

sometimes with an account of the reasons of the change.

Conjecture, though it be sometimes unavoidable, I have not wantonly nor

licentiously indulged. It has been my settled principle, that the reading

of the ancient books is probably true, and therefore is not to be

disturbed for the sake of elegance, perspicuity, or mere improvement of

the sense. For though much credit is not due to the fidelity, nor any to

the judgment of the first publishers, yet they who had the copy before

their eyes were more likely to read it right, than we who read it only by

imagination. But it is evident that they have often made strange mistakes

by ignorance or negligence, and that therefore something may be properly

attempted by criticism, keeping the middle way between presumption and

timidity.

Such criticism I have attempted to practise, and, where any passage

appeared inextricably perplexed, have endeavoured to discover how it may

be recalled to sense, with least violence. But my first labour is, always

to turn the old text on every side, and try if there be any interstice,

through which light can find its way; nor would Huetius himself condemn

me, as refusing the trouble of research, for the ambition of alteration.

In this modest industry I have not been unsuccessful. I have rescued many

lines from the violations of temerity, and secured many scenes from the

inroads of correction. I have adopted the Roman sentiment, that it is more

honourable to save a citizen, than to kill an enemy, and have been more

careful to protect than to attack.

I have preserved the common distribution of the plays into acts, though I

believe it to be in almost all the plays void of authority. Some of those

which are divided in the later editions have no division in the first

folio, and some that are divided in the folio have no division in the

preceding copies. The settled mode of the theatre requires four intervals

in the play, but few, if any, of our author’s compositions can be properly

distributed in that manner. An act is so much of the drama as passes

without intervention of time, or change of place. A pause makes a new act.

In every real, and therefore in every imitative action, the intervals may

be more or fewer, the restriction of five acts being accidental and

arbitrary. This Shakespeare knew, and this he practised; his plays were

written, and at first printed in one unbroken continuity, and ought now to

be exhibited with short pauses, interposed as often as the scene is

changed, or any considerable time is required to pass. This method would

at once quell a thousand absurdities.

In restoring the author’s works to their integrity, I have considered the

punctuation as wholly in my power; for what could be their care of colons

and commas, who corrupted words and sentences. Whatever could be done by

adjusting points is therefore silently performed, in some plays with much

diligence, in others with less; it is hard to keep a busy eye steadily

fixed upon evanescent atoms, or a discursive mind upon evanescent truth.

The same liberty has been taken with a few particles, or other words of

slight effect. I have sometimes inserted or omitted them without notice. I

have done that sometimes which the other editors have done always, and

which indeed the state of the text may sufficiently justify.

The greater part of readers, instead of blaming us for passing trifles,

will wonder that on mere trifles so much labour is expended, with such

importance of debate, and such solemnity of diction. To these I answer

with confidence, that they are judging of an art which they do not

understand; yet cannot much reproach them with their ignorance, nor

promise that they would become in general, by learning criticism, more

useful, happier, or wiser.

As I practised conjecture more, I learned to trust it less; and after I

had printed a few plays, resolved to insert none of my own readings in the

text. Upon this caution I now congratulate myself, for every day encreases

my doubt of my emendations.

Since I have confined my imagination to the margin, it must not be

considered as very reprehensible, if I have suffered it to play some

freaks in its own dominion. There is no danger in conjecture, if it be

proposed as conjecture; and while the text remains uninjured, those

changes may be safely offered, which are not considered even by him that

offers them as necessary or safe.

If my readings are of little value, they have not been ostentatiously

displayed or importunately obtruded. I could have written longer notes,

for the art of writing notes is not of difficult attainment. The work is

performed, first by railing at the stupidity, negligence, ignorance, and

asinine tastelessness of the former editors, and shewing, from all that

goes before and all that follows, the inelegance and absurdity of the old

reading; then by proposing something, which to superficial readers would

seem specious, but which the editor rejects with indignation; then by

producing the true reading, with a long paraphrase, and concluding with

loud acclamations on the discovery, and a sober wish for the advancement

and prosperity of genuine criticism.

All this may be done, and perhaps done sometimes without impropriety. But

I have always suspected that the reading is right, which requires many

words to prove it wrong; and the emendation wrong, that cannot without so

much labour appear to be right. The justness of a happy restoration

strikes at once, and the moral precept may be well applied to criticism,

_quod dubitas ne feceris_.

To dread the shore which he sees spread with wrecks, is natural to the

sailor. I had before my eye so many critical adventures ended in

miscarriage, that caution was forced upon me. I encountered in every page

wit struggling with its own sophistry, and learning confused by the

multiplicity of its views. I was forced to censure those whom I admired,

and could not but reflect, while I was dispossessing their emendations,

how soon the same fate might happen to my own, and how many of the

readings which I have corrected may be by some other editor defended and

established.

Criticks I saw, that other’s names efface,

And fix their own, with labour, in the place;

Their own, like others, soon their place resign’d,

Or disappear’d, and left the first behind.—POPE.

That a conjectural critick should often be mistaken, cannot be wonderful,

either to others or himself, if it be considered, that in his art there is

no system, no principal and axiomatical truth that regulates subordinate

positions. His chance of error is renewed at every attempt; an oblique

view of the passage, a slight misapprehension of a phrase, a casual

inattention to the parts connected, is sufficient to make him not only

fail, but fail ridiculously; and when he succeeds best, he produces

perhaps but one reading of many probable, and he that suggests another

will always be able to dispute his claims.

It is an unhappy state in which danger is hid under pleasure. The

allurements of emendation are scarcely resistible. Conjecture has all the

joy and all the pride of invention, and he that has once started a happy

change, is too much delighted to consider what objections may rise against

it.

Yet conjectural criticism has been of great use in the learned world; nor

is it my intention to depreciate a study that has exercised so many mighty

minds, from the revival of learning to our own age, from the bishop of

Aleria to English Bentley. The criticks on ancient authors have, in the

exercise of their sagacity, many assistances, which the editor of

Shakespeare is condemned to want. They are employed upon grammatical and

settled languages, whose construction contributes so much to perspicuity,

that Homer has fewer passages unintelligible than Chaucer. The words have

not only a known regimen, but invariable quantities, which direct and

confine the choice. There are commonly more manuscripts than one; and they

do not often conspire in the same mistakes. Yet Scaliger could confess to

Salmasius how little satisfaction his emendations gave him. _Illudunt

nobis conjecturæ nostræ, quarum nos pudet, posteaquam in meliores codices

incidimus._ And Lipsius could complain that criticks were making faults by

trying to remove them, _Ut olim vitiis, ita nunc remediis laboratur._ And

indeed, when mere conjecture is to be used, the emendations of Scaliger

and Lipsius, notwithstanding their wonderful sagacity and erudition, are

often vague and disputable, like mine or Theobald’s.

Perhaps I may not be more censured for doing wrong, than for doing little;

for raising in the publick expectations, which at last I have not

answered. The expectation of ignorance is indefinite, and that of

knowledge is often tyrannical. It is hard to satisfy those who know not

what to demand, or those who demand by design what they think impossible

to be done. I have indeed disappointed no opinion more than my own; yet I

have endeavoured to perform my task with no slight solicitude. Not a

single passage in the whole work has appeared to me corrupt, which I have

not attempted to restore; or obscure, which I have not endeavoured to

illustrate. In many I have failed like others; and from many, after all my

efforts, I have retreated, and confessed the repulse. I have not passed

over, with affected superiority, what is equally difficult to the reader

and to myself, but where I could not instruct him, have owned my

ignorance. I might easily have accumulated a mass of seeming learning upon

easy scenes; but it ought not to be imputed to negligence, that, where

nothing was necessary, nothing has been done, or that, where others have

said enough, I have said no more.

Notes are often necessary, but they are necessary evils. Let him that is

yet unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel

the highest pleasure that the drama can give, read every play, from the

first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his commentators.

When his fancy is once on the wing, let it not stoop at correction or

explanation. When his attention is strongly engaged, let it disdain alike

to turn aside to the name of Theobald and of Pope. Let him read on through

brightness and obscurity, through integrity and corruption; let him

preserve his comprehension of the dialogue and his interest in the fable.

And when the pleasures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness,

and read the commentators.

Particular passages are cleared by notes, but the general effect of the

work is weakened. The mind is refrigerated by interruption; the thoughts

are diverted from the principal subject; the reader is weary, he suspects

not why; and at last throws away the book which he has too diligently

studied.

Parts are not to be examined till the whole has been surveyed; there is a

kind of intellectual remoteness necessary for the comprehension of any

great work in its full design and in its true proportions; a close

approach shews the smaller niceties, but the beauty of the whole is

discerned no longer.

It is not very grateful to consider how little the succession of editors

has added to this author’s power of pleasing. He was read, admired,

studied, and imitated, while he was yet deformed with all the

improprieties which ignorance and neglect could accumulate upon him; while

the reading was yet not rectified, nor his allusions understood; yet then

did Dryden pronounce, “that Shakespeare was the man, who, of all modern

and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul.”

All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not

laboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see

it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give

him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned: he needed not the

spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her

there. I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him

injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat

and insipid; his comick wit degenerating into clenches, his serious

swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is

presented to him: no man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his wit,

and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets,

Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi.

It is to be lamented that such a writer should want a commentary; that his

language should become obsolete, or his sentiments obscure. But it is vain

to carry wishes beyond the condition of human things; that which must

happen to all, has happened to Shakespeare, by accident and time: and more

than has been suffered by any other writer since the use of types, has

been suffered by him through his own negligence of fame, or perhaps by

that superiority of mind, which despised its own performances, when it

compared them with its powers, and judged those works unworthy to be

preserved, which the criticks of following ages were to contend for the

fame of restoring and explaining.

Among these candidates of inferior fame, I am now to stand the judgment of

the publick; and wish that I could confidently produce my commentary as

equal to the encouragement which I have had the honour of receiving. Every

work of this kind is by its nature deficient, and I should feel little

solicitude about the sentence, were it to be pronounced only by the

skilful and the learned.

RICHARD FARMER: AN ESSAY ON THE LEARNING OF SHAKESPEARE: ADDRESSED TO

JOSEPH CRADOCK, ESQ. 1767.

Preface to the Second Edition, 1767.

THE AUTHOR of the following ESSAY was solicitous only for the honour of

Shakespeare: he hath however, in _his own_ capacity, little reason to

complain of _occasional_ Criticks, or Criticks _by profession_. The very

_Few_, who have been pleased to controvert any part of his Doctrine, have

favoured him with better manners than arguments; and claim his thanks for

a further opportunity of demonstrating the futility of _Theoretick_

reasoning against _Matter of Fact_. It is indeed strange that any _real_

Friends of our immortal POET should be still willing to force him into a

situation which is not tenable: treat him as a _learned_ Man, and what

shall excuse the most gross violations of History, Chronology, and

Geography?

Οὐ πείσεις οὐδ᾽ ἤν πείσῃς is the Motto of every _Polemick_: like his

Brethren at the _Amphitheatre_, he holds it a merit to _die hard_; and

will not say, _Enough_, though the Battle be decided. “Were it shewn,”

says some one, “that the old Bard borrowed _all_ his allusions from

_English_ books then published, our _Essayist_ might have possibly

established his System.”—In good time!—This had scarcely been attempted by

Peter Burman himself, with the Library of Shakespeare before him.—“Truly,”

as Mr. Dogberry says, “for _mine own_ part, if I were as tedious as a

King, I could find in my heart to bestow it all on this Subject”: but

where should I meet with a Reader?—When the main Pillars are taken away,

the whole Building falls in course: Nothing hath been, or can be, pointed

out, which is not easily removed; or rather, which was not _virtually_

removed before: a very little _Analogy_ will do the business. I shall

therefore have no occasion to trouble myself any further; and may venture

to call my Pamphlet, in the words of a pleasant Declaimer against _Sermons

on the thirtieth of January_, “an Answer to every thing that shall

hereafter be written on the Subject.”

But “this method of reasoning will prove any one ignorant of the

Languages, who hath written when Translations were extant.”—Shade of

Burgersdicius!—does it follow, because Shakespeare’s early life was

incompatible with a course of Education—whose Contemporaries, Friends and

Foes, nay, and himself likewise, agree in his want of what is usually

called _Literature_—whose mistakes from equivocal Translations, and even

typographical Errors, cannot possibly be accounted for otherwise,—that

Locke, to whom not one of these circumstances is applicable, understood no

Greek?—I suspect, Rollin’s Opinion of our Philosopher was not founded on

this argument.

Shakespeare wanted not the Stilts of Languages to raise him above all

other men. The quotation from Lilly in the _Taming of the Shrew_, if

indeed it be his, strongly proves the extent of his reading: had he known

Terence, he would not have quoted erroneously from his _Grammar_. Every

one hath met with men in common life, who, according to the language of

the _Water-poet_, “got only from _Possum_ to _Posset_,” and yet will throw

out a line occasionally from their _Accidence_ or their _Cato de Moribus_

with tolerable propriety.—If, however, the old Editions be trusted in this

passage, our Author’s memory somewhat failed him in point of _Concord_.

The rage of _Parallelisms_ is almost over, and in truth nothing can be

more absurd. “THIS was stolen from _one_ Classick,—THAT from

_another_”;—and had I not stept in to his rescue, poor Shakespeare had

been stript as naked of ornament, as when he first _held Horses_ at the

door of the Playhouse.