be cleared by a paraphrase or interpretation. I reflection or experience, a deduction of concluWhen the sense is broken by the suppression of sive arguments, a forcible eruption of effervespart of the sentiment in pleasantry or passion, cent passion, are to be considered as proportionthe connexion will be supplied. When any for- ate to common apprehension, unassisted by crigotten custom is hinted, care will be taken to tical officiousness; since to convince them, noretrieve and explain it. The meaning assigned thing more is requisite than acquaintance with to doubtful words will be supported by the au- the general state of the world, and those faculthorities of other writers, or by parrallel passages ties which he must almost bring with him who of Shakspeare himself. would read Shakspeare.

The observation of faults and beauties is one of the duties of an annotator, which some of Shakspeare's editors have attempted, and some have neglected. For this part of his task, and for this only, was Mr. Pope eminently and indisputably qualified; nor has Dr. Warburton followed him with less diligence or less success. But I have never observed that mankind was much delighted or improved by their asterisks, commas, or double commas; of which the only effect is, that they preclude the pleasure of judging for ourselves, teach the young and ignorant to decide without principles; defeat curiosity and discernment, by leaving them less to discover; and at last show the opinion of the critic, without the reasons on which it was founded, and without affording any light by which it may be examined.

The editor, though he may less delight his own vanity, will probably please his reader more, by supposing him equally able with himself to judge of beauties and faults, which require no previous acquisition of remote knowledge. A description of the obvious scenes of nature, a representation of general life, a sentiment of

But when the beauty arises from some adaptation of the sentiment to customs worn out of use, to opinions not universally prevalent, or to any accidental or minute particularity, which cannot be supplied by common understanding, or common observation, it is the duty of a commentator to lend his assistance.

The notice of beauties and faults thus limited, will make no distinct part of the design, being reducible to the explanation of obscure passages.

The editor does not however intend to preclude himself from the comparison of Shakspeare's sentiments or expression with those of ancient or modern authors, or from the display of any beauty not obvious to the students of poetry; for as he hopes to leave his author better understood, he wishes likewise to procure him more rational approbation.

The former editors have affected to slight their predecessors: but in this edition all that is valuable will be adopted from every commentator, that posterity may consider it as including all the rest, and exhibiting whatever is hitherto known of the great father of the English drama.

PREFACE TO SHAKSPEARE.

PUBLISHED IN THE YEAR 1768.

IHAT praises are without reason lavished on | ticism is to find the faults of the moderns, anj the dead, and that the honours due only to excel- the beauties of the ancients. While an author lence are paid to antiquity, is a complaint likely is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst to be always continued by those, who, being performance, and when he is dead, we rate them able to add nothing to truth, hope for eminence by his best. 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.

To works, however, of which the excellence is not absolute and definite, but gradual and comparative; to works not raised upon principles demonstrative and scientific, but appealing wholly to observation and experience, no other test can be applied than length of duration and Antiquity, like every other quality that at- continuance of esteem. What mankind have tracts the notice of mankind, has undoubtedly long possessed, they have often examined and votaries that reverence it, not from reason, but compared; and if they persist to value the posfrom prejudice. Some seem to admire indiscri- session, it is because frequent comparisons have minately, whatever has been long preserved, confirmed opinion in its favour. As among the without considering that time has sometimes co-works of nature no man can properly call a river 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 cri

deep, or a mountain high, without the knowledge of many mountains, and many rivers; so, in the productions of genius, nothing can be styled excellent till it has been compared with other works of the same kind. Demonstration

immediately displays its power, and has nothing | practised by the rest of the world; by the pecuto hope or fear from the flux of years; but works liarities of studies or professions, which can tentative and experimental must be estimated operate but upon small numbers; or by the acby their proportion to the general and collective cidents of transient fashions or temporary opiability of man, as it is discovered in a long suc- nions: they are the genuine progeny of common cession of endeavours. Of the first building humanity, such as the world will always supply, that was raised, it might be with certainty de- and observation will always find. His persons termined that it was round or square; but whe- act and speak by the influence of those general ther it was spacious or lofty must have been re- passions and principles by which all minds are ferred to time. The Pythagorean scale of num- agitated, and the whole system of life is conbers was at once discovered to be perfect; but tinued in motion. In the writings of other poets the poems of Homer we yet know not to trans- a character is too often an individual: in those cend the common limits of human intelligence, of Shakspeare it is commonly a species. but by remarking that nation after nation, and It is from this wide extension of design that century after century, has been able to do little so much instruction is derived. It is this which more than transpose his incidents, new-name fills the plays of Shakspeare with practical his characters, and paraphrase his sentiments. axioms and domestic wisdom. It was said of The reverence due to writings that have long Euripides, that every verse was a precept; and subsisted, arises therefore not from any credu- it may be said of Shakspeare, that from his lous confidence in the superior wisdom of past works may be collected a system of civil and ages, or gloomy persuasion of the degeneracy of economical prudence. Yet his real power is not mankind, but is the consequence of acknow-shown in the splendour of particular passages, ledged and indubitable positions, that what has but by the progress of his fable, and the tenor been longest known has been most considered, of his dialogue; and he that tries to recommend and what is most considered is best understood. him by select quotations, will succeed like the The poet, of whose works I have undertaken pedant in Hierocles, who when he offered his the revision, may now begin to assume the dig-house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a nity of an ancient, and claim the privilege of specimen.

establishing fame and prescriptive veneration. It will not easily be imagined how much ShakHe has long outlived his century, the term com-speare excels in accommodating his sentiments monly fixed as the test of literary merit. What- to real life, but by comparing him with other ever advantages he might once derive from per- authors. It was observed of the ancient schools sonal allusions, local customs, or temporary opi- of declamation, that the more diligently they nions, have for many years been lost; and every were frequented, the more was the student dis topic of merriment, or motive of sorrow, which qualified for the world, because he found nothing the modes of artificial life afforded him, now only there which he should ever meet in any other obscure the scenes which they once illuminated. place. The same remark may be applied to The effects of favour and competition are at an every stage but that of Shakspeare. The theatre, end; the tradition of his friendships and his en- when it is under any other direction, is peopled mities has perished; his works support no opi- by such characters as were never seen, convers nion with arguments, nor supply any faction ing in a language which was never heard, upon with invectives; they can neither indulge vanity, topics which will never arise in the commerce of nor gratify malignity; but are read without any mankind. But the dialogue of this author is often other reason than the desire of pleasure, and are so evidently determined by the incident which therefore praised only as pleasure is obtained; produces it, and is pursued with so much ease yet, thus unassisted by interest or passion, they and simplicity, that it seems scarcely to claim have passed through variations of taste, and the merit of fiction, but to have been gleaned by changes of manners, and as they devolved from diligent selection out of common conversation, one generation to another, have received new and common occurrences. honours at every transmission.

Upon every other stage the universal agent is But because human judgment, though it be love, by whose power all good and evil is distrigradually gaining upon certainty, never becomes buted, and every action quickened or retarded. infallible; and approbation, though long con- To bring a lover, a lady, and a rival into the fable; tinued, may yet be only the approbation of pre-to entangle them in contradictory obligations, judice or fashion; it is proper to inquire, by what peculiarities of excellence Shakspeare has gained and kept the favour of his countrymen.

perplex them with oppositions of interest, and harass them with violence of desires inconsis tent with each other; to make them meet in Nothing can please many, and please long, rapture, and part in agony; to fill their mouths but just representations of general nature. Par- with hyperbolical joy and outrageous sorrow; ticular inanners can be known to few, and there-to distress them as nothing human ever was disfore 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.

tressed; 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, Shakspeare is, above all writers, at least above who caught his ideas from the living world, all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet and exhibited only what he saw before him. that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of He knew that any other passion, as it was remanners and of life. His characters are not gular or exorbitant, was a cause of happiness or modified by the customs of particular places, un- [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 that any 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 expectations of human affairs from the play or from the tale, would be equally deceived. Shakspeare 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 supernatural, 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; Shakspeare 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 shown human nature as it acts in real exigencies, but as it would be found in trials to which it cannot be exposed.

This therefore is the praise of Shakspeare, 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 ecstacies, 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.

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 comic and tragic scenes, as it extends to all his works, deserves more consideration. Let the fact be first stated, and then examined.

Shakspeare'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 frolic 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 ter rors of distress, and some the gayeties 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.

Shakspeare 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 sor row, and sometimes levity and laughter.

and approaches nearer than either to the appearance of life, by showing how great machinations and slender designs may promote or obviate one another, and the high and the low co-operate is the general system by unavoidable concatenation.

That this is a practice contrary to the rules of His adherence to general nature has exposed criticism will be readily allowed; but there is him to the censure of critics, who form their always an appeal open from criticism to nature. judgments upon narrower principles. Dennis The end of writing is to instruct; the end of and Rymer think his Romans not sufficiently poetry is to instruct by pleasing. That the minRoman and Voltaire censures his kings as not gled drama may convey all the instruction of completely royal. Dennis is offended, that Me- tragedy or comedy cannot be denied, because nenius, a senator of Rome, should play the buf-it includes both in its alterations of exhibition, foon: and Voltaire perhaps thinks decency violated when the Danish usurper is represented as a drunkard. But Shakspeare 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 show an usurper and a murderer not only odious, but despicable; he therefore added drunkenness to his other qualities, knowing that

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 dramatic 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 vicismuch, but that the attention may be easily trans situdes of passion. Fiction cannot move so ferred; and though it must be allowed that pleasing melancholy be sometimes interrupted

by unwelcome levity, yet let it be considered | repose, or to luxuriate, as in a mode of thinking likewise, that melancholy is often not pleasing, congenial to his nature. In his tragic scenes and that the disturbance of one man may be the there is always something wanting, but his relief of another; that different auditors have comedy often surpasses expectation or desire. different habitudes; and that, upon the whole, His comedy pleases by the thoughts and the lanall pleasure consists in variety. guage, and his tragedy for the greater part by incident and action. His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct.

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 among 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 light pleasure it afforded in its progress.

The force of his comic 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 superfi cial dyes, 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 History was a series of actions, with no other dissolved by the chance which combined them; than chronological succession, independent on but the uniform simplicity of primitive qualities each other, and without any tendency to intro- neither admits increase, nor suffers decay. The duce or regulate the conclusion. It is not al- sand heaped by one flood is scattered by another, ways very nicely distinguished from tragedy. but the rock always continues in its place. There is not much nearer approach to unity of The stream of time, which is continually washaction in the tragedy of "Antony and Cleo-ing the dissoluble fabrics of other poets, passes patra," 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 Shakspeare'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 pur pose, whether to gladden or depress, or to conduct the story, without vehemence or emotion, through tracts of easy and familiar dialogues, 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.

without injury by the adamant of Shakspeare.
If there be, what I believe there is, in every
nation, a style which never becomes obsolete, a
certain mode of phraseology so consonant and
congenial to the analogy and principles of its re-
spective language, as to remain settled and unal-
tered; this style 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 mod-
ish 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 be-
low refinement, where propriety resides, and
where this poet seems to have gathered his comic
dialogue. He is therefore more agreeable to the

equally remote, and among his other excellencies
deserves to be studied as one of the original mas-
ters of our language.

When Shakspeare's plan is understood, most of the criticisms of Rymer and Voltaire vanish away. The play of "Hamlet” is opened, with-ears of the present age than any other author out impropriety, by two sentinels; lago 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.

Shakspeare engaged in dramatic poetry with the world open before him; the rules of the ancients were yet known to few; the public judgment was unformed; he had no example of such fame as might force him upon imitation, nor critics of such authority as might restrain his extravagance; he therefore indulged his natural disposition; and his disposition, as Rymer 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 comic scenes, he seems to produce, without labour, what no labour can improve. In tragedy he is always struggling after some occasion to be comic; but in comedy he seems to

These observations are to be considered not as unexceptionably constant, but as containing general and predominant truth. Shakspeare'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 ac tions improbable; as the earth upon the whole is spherical, though its surface is varied with protuberances and cavities.

Shakspeare with his excellencies has likewise faults, and faults sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit. I shall show them in the proportion in which they appear to me, without envious malignity or superstitions veneration. No question can be more innocently discussed than a dead poet's pretensions to re

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 instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose. In narration he affects a disproportionate pomp From his writings indeed a system of social duty of diction, and a wearisome train of circumlocumay be selected, for he that thinks reasonably tion, and tells the incident imperfectly in many must think morally; but his precepts and axioms words, which might have been more plainly dedrop casually from him; he makes no just dis-livered in few. Narration in dramatic poetry tribution of good or evil, nor is always careful to is naturally tedious, as it is unanimated and in show in the virtuous a disapprobation of the active, and obstructs the progress of the action; wicked; he carries his persons indifferently it should therefore always be rapid, and enli through right and wrong, and at the close dis-vened by frequent interruption. Shakspeare misses them without further care, and leaves found it an incumbrance, and instead of lighttheir examples to operate by chance. This fault ening it by brevity, endeavoured to recommend the barbarity of his age cannot extenuate; for it it by dignity and splendour. is always a writer's duty to make the world better, and justice is a virtue independent on time or place.