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not afraid to express his convictions. Shakespeare has become so idealised, that like some characters in history, many students think he can do no wrong. When an evident wrong, therefore, appears, the attempt is made to throw the responsibility of weak or unworthy lines upon some other pen. Beyond a doubt Shakespeare collaborated. The acute critic can trace (with no fear of contradiction save at the hand of other acute critics) exactly where the Stratford poet ends and Fletcher or Heywood begins. But to attribute all of the gold to the titular author, and all of the alloy to those who worked with him, or whose works he redacted, is folly. Pope struck the key in which Shakespearean study should be carried on, when he says: "It must be owned that with all these great excellencies he has almost as great defects, and that as he has certainly written better, he has as certainly written worse than any other."

Pope defended, moreover, that lack of an observance of those unities of time, place, and action which became the battleground of later critics, and which has been so admirably discussed by a recent writer.1 But Pope's

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defence was of what he himself considered a fault. argues that Shakespeare's mission was to write to the people, and that he did what the people wanted, understood and rejoiced in. Dr. Johnson, in his famous introduction, strikes a truer note, by defending Shakespeare's art. The evolution of the drama since the sixteenth century, undoubtedly influenced by the example of the Master, has been away from the classical models, for which Ben Jonson was so sedulous, and of which Shakespeare was contemptuously and deliberately careless.

1

Prof. Thos. R. Lounsbury (Yale University) in "Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist."

Pope also lifted his voice, not very wisely in my judgment, in defence of Shakespeare's "learning," which has also been a famous battleground. The advocates of the encyclopædic knowledge of our poet leave out of account the sources from which he drew most, if not all of his plays. He is no more responsible for the knowledge of “natural philosophy, mechanics, ancient and modern history, poetical learning and mythology," the customs, rites, and manners of antiquity," the law and medicine and geography treated in the works, than he is for the false historical movements in "King John," or the addition of a sea coast to Bohemia in "A Winter's Tale." He took them from the same sources whence he drew his plots.

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The knowledge of Shakespeare was transferred from his foundation plays and other sources. He was an omnivorous reader, but even this seems to have been limited to the novels, plays, poems, etc., out of which he was quarrying the immortal dramas which bear his

name.

The previous editors, Heminge and Condell, and Rowe, are dealt with by Pope in a manner which becomes amusingly familiar with each succeeding edition; while he (from lack of that patient collation of copies which is the dullest but most necessary part of a commentator's work) fell into many grievous errors which later critics, especially Malone, gleefully held up to public scorn.

A delicious bit of the approved mode of handling others who dared to walk in the same paths is the following preface to the eighth volume of his second edition, apropos of Theobald's critical attempts: 2

Isaac Reed notes this, crediting Mr. Chalmer's "Supplemental Apology" as his authority.

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INTRODUCTORY ESSAY

"Since the publication of our first edition, there having been some attempts upon Shakespeare, published by Lewis Theobald (which he would not communicate during the time wherein that edition was preparing for the press, when we by public advertisement did request the assistance of all lovers of this author), we have inserted in this impression, as many of 'em as are judged of any the least advantage to the poet; the whole amounting to about twenty-five words. And we purpose for the future to do the same with respect to any other persons, who either through candour or vanity shall communicate or publish, the least things tending to the illustration of our author."

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Lewis Theobald followed Pope (1733) and laid himself open to that irritable poet's caustic reference, by remarking that he, Pope, seldom corrected the text but to its injury, and "he frequently inflicted a wound where he intended a cure." Pope's first version of the “Dunciad " appearing about this time, in which Theobald was made the official hero of dulness, may be thought to justify the latter's remark that "His libels have been thrown out with so much inveteracy that, not to dispute whether they should come from a Christian, they leave it a question whether they could come from a man.”

Theobald's preface is turgid and high sounding and gives evidence that he is overcome by the attempt to estimate the poet's genius. He gives liberal space to biographical details, and adds a few unimportant facts to the Account of Rowe. One of these is the visit of Queen Henrietta to Stratford during the Civil War, and her occupancy of New Place.

Theobald felt called upon to apologise for Shakespeare's offences against chronology, etc., attributing

them not to ignorance "but to the too powerful blaze of his imagination." I have already noted that they are properly to be attributed to the sources from whence he drew them. There are still worshippers, however, who seek to explain and account for them on other grounds. His summing up is an arraignment of Pope's method, or lack of method, and although Theobald's work was bitterly attacked both by Pope and his ally Warburton, the sifting of the centuries accords him a higher place in textual criticism than either of his great detractors, although Pope's preface is by far the more valuable. Running through Theobald's sentences we cannot but see that his grief was more over his own wounded vanity than that the great poet was mishandled.

Sir Thomas Hanmer, who followed the hero of Pope's vitriolic verse, was a gentleman of elegant leisure and abundant means, who devoted himself in his latter years to the production of an edition of the poet's works which would be representative of the poet's place in English letters. He was an exception to the run of backbiting critics, praised everything that had been achieved before him, and prefaced a very beautiful set of the works in six quarto volumes published by the University of Oxford (1744), with a short but stately preface, chiefly notable rather than valuable for his contention that a great deal of what he called "low stuff," ribaldry, coarse jests, etc., were interpolated by the players to please the vulgar audiences before which they played. There is much truth in this, but surely not enough to warrant the cutting out of a whole scene in " Henry V. " because the editor considered it "improper in French and unintelligible in English."

Hanmer's.own delicacy of mind and elegance of style

induced him to leave out many such passages which were purely Shakespearean. This contribution to the increasing number of editions of Shakespeare's works deserves to be remembered as the first official recognition by the great Oxford University of the poet who achieved the highest eminence in English letters without passing through her preparatory halls.

Bishop Warburton, who followed closely upon Hanmer (1747), was the first of the long line of clergymen who made Shakespeare the companion of the Old and New Testaments. And he devoted a portion of his lively preface to a defence of his secular studies. He assumes St. Chrysostom as a godfather in poetic studies, who is known to have slept with Aristophanes under his pillow. In this connection he writes something that gives chief value in my opinion to his Preface, and I would that it might be laid to heart by the teachers of all English youth.

"But they will say," he continues, "St. Chrysostom contracted a fondness for the comick poet for the sake of his Greek. To this indeed I have nothing to reply. Far be it from me to insinuate so unscholarlike a thing as if we had the same use for good English, that a Greek has for his Attick elegance.”

Warburton was a friend and admirer of Pope, and after some preliminary misunderstandings, they entered and maintained a close alliance in literary matters, offensive more than defensive. It was said that the poet made the clergyman a Bishop, and the Bishop made the poet a Christian.

Warburton took up Pope's quarrel with Theobald, sneered at Rowe's account as "meagre," although subsequent generations have added little to it, and fell upon

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