Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Malone: Great Shakespeareans: Volume I 9781472554888, 9780826420862

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To the Memory of Harold Love

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Acknowledgements

I owe thanks to the general editors, Peter Holland and Adrian Poole, for advice and help, as well as to my Shakespearean colleagues David Scott Kastan and Lawrence Manley. Special gratitude is due to Meredith Sherlock, who finalized the text of Harold Love’s essay at the time of his last illness. Claude Rawson

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Notes on Contributors

Harold Love (1937–2007) was Emeritus Professor of English at Monash University. His books include Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (1993, Oxford University Press), Authorship and Attribution: An Introduction (2002, Cambridge University Press), English Clandestine Satire 1660–1702 (2004, Oxford University Press), and editions of Thomas Southerne (with R. J. Jordan in 1988), John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1999, Oxford University Press), and George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham (with Robert D. Hume, 2007, Oxford University Press). Simon Jarvis is Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Poetics in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge. Among his books are Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearean Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765 (Oxford, 1995), and Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge, 2007). Freya Johnston is a University Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow in English at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She is the author of Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking, 1709–1791 (Oxford University Press, 2005) and of various articles and chapters on Johnson, Austen, and their contemporaries. She is one of two general editors of The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock (Cambridge University Press, 2015), for which she is co-editing Crotchet Castle. Claude Rawson is Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale University and General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift. His books include Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress (1972, Routledge), Satire and Sentiment 1660–1830 (1994, Cambridge University Press), and God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination 1492–1945 (2001, Oxford University Press). Marcus Walsh, who is Kenneth Allott Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool, has edited A Song to David, Hymns and Spiritual

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Songs, and A Translation of the Psalms of David (1983, 1987) for the Oxford University Press Poetical Works of Christopher Smart (with Karina Williamson); has written extensively on Smart, Swift, Johnson, and Sterne, on the history and theory of editing; and on biblical interpretation and scholarship in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He has published numerous essays on the editing of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century. His monograph on Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing was published in 1997 by Cambridge University Press. His new edition of Swift’s Tale of a Tub, Battle of the Books and Mechanical Operation of the Spirit will appear in 2010 as a volume in the series Works of Jonathan Swift, by Cambridge University Press. He is an Associate Editor of the Oxford Companion to the Book.

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Series Preface

What is a ‘Great Shakespearean’? Who are the ‘Great Shakespeareans’? This series is designed to explore those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. Charting the effect of Shakespeare on cultures local, national and international is a never-ending task, as we continually modulate and understand differently the ways in which each culture is formed and altered. Great Shakespeareans uses as its focus individuals whose own cultural impact has been and continues to be powerful. One of its aims is to widen the sense of who constitute the most important figures in our understanding of Shakespeare’s afterlives. The list is, therefore, not restricted to, say, actors and scholars, as if the performance of and commentary on Shakespeare’s works were the only means by which his impact is remade or extended. There are actors aplenty (like Garrick, Irving and Olivier) and scholars too (Bradley, Greg and Empson), but our list deliberately includes as many novelists (Dickens, Melville and Joyce), poets (Keats, Eliot and Berryman), playwrights (Brecht, Beckett and Césaire) and composers (Berlioz, Verdi and Britten), as well as thinkers whose work seems impossible without Shakespeare and whose influence on our world has been profound, like Marx and Freud. Deciding who to include has been less difficult than deciding who to exclude. We have a long list of individuals for whom we would wish to have found a place but whose inclusion would have meant someone else’s exclusion. We took long and hard looks at the volumes as they were shaped by our own and our volume editors’ perceptions. We have numerous regrets over some outstanding figures who ended up just outside this project. There will, no doubt, be argument on this score. Some may find our choices too Anglophone, insufficiently global. Others may complain of the lack of contemporary scholars and critics. But this is not a project designed to establish a new canon, and our volumes are not intended to be encyclopaedic in scope; for example, the series is not entitled ‘The Greatest Shakespeareans’ or ‘Some Great Shakespeareans’, but it will, we hope, be

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seen as negotiating and occupying a space mid-way along the spectrum of inclusivity and arbitrariness. Our contributors have been asked to describe the double impact of Shakespeare on their particular figure and of their figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, as well as providing a sketch of their subject’s intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider context within which her or his work might be understood. This ‘context’ will vary widely from case to case, and, at times, a single ‘Great Shakespearean’ is asked to stand as a way of grasping a large domain. In the case of Britten, for example, he is the window through which other composers and works in the English musical tradition like Vaughan Williams, Walton and Tippett have a place. So, too, Dryden has been the means for considering the beginnings of critical analysis of the plays as well as of the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays influenced Dryden’s own practice. To enable our contributors to achieve what we have asked of them, we have taken the unusual step of enabling them to write at length. Our volumes do not contain brief entries of the kind that a Shakespeare Encyclopaedia would include, or contain the standard, article-length works typical of academic journals and Shakespeare Companions. With no more than four Great Shakespeareans per volume – and as few as two in the case of Volume 10 – our contributors have space to present their figures more substantially and, we trust, more engagingly. Each volume has a brief introduction by the volume editor and a section of ‘Select Biography.’ We hope the volumes will appeal to those who already know the accomplishment of a particular Great Shakespearean and to those trying to find a way into seeing how Shakespeare has affected a particular poet as well as how that poet has changed forever our appreciation of Shakespeare. Above all, we hope Great Shakespeareans will help our readers to think afresh about what Shakespeare has meant to our cultures, and about how and why, in such differing ways across the globe and across the last four centuries and more, they have changed what his writing has meant. Peter Holland and Adrian Poole

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Introduction Claude Rawson

In 1610, the Bodleian Library (founded 1602) entered into an agreement which entitled it to a copy of every book registered with the Stationers’ Company. Its founder, the distinguished diplomat Sir Thomas Bodley, vehemently insisted that it should refuse to keep ‘idle bookes, & riffe raffes’, in which he included most plays, thus forfeiting the free acquisition of a wealth of early quartos.1 The Library nevertheless became one of the United Kingdom’s major Shakespeare collections, partly thanks to the bequest, two centuries later, of books from the library of Edmond Malone (1741–1812), the last of the four Great Shakespeareans discussed in this volume. The intervening 200 years mark a steady but incomplete evolution of Shakespeare’s reputation towards the pre-eminence we now take for granted. As early as 1598, we hear from Francis Meres, a slightly suspect source, that ‘the sweete wittie soule of Ouid liues in mellifluous & honytongued Shakespeare,’ whose as yet unpublished ‘sugr’d Sonnets’ were known ‘among his priuate friends’. Meres also names Shakespeare as ‘the most excellent’ among the English in both tragedy and comedy, listing over a dozen plays.2 He had also published two poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and the Rape of Lucrece (1594), which he seems to have regarded as more prestigious than writing plays, sharing something perhaps of Sir Thomas Bodley’s prejudices, or at least an awareness that such attitudes were in circulation. There is some suggestion that both Shakespeare and his public attached more importance to his achievement as a poet than as a playwright and that he took greater care over the publication of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece than any of the plays. The poems were reprinted considerably more often than the plays in Shakespeare’s lifetime.3 By contrast, posthumous editions of Shakespeare’s collected works, beginning with the First Folio of 1623, either omit the non-dramatic poems or relegate them to a secondary or marginal status in final or supplementary volumes or

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appendices, until Malone’s Plays and Poems of 1790. The reasons for this, as Colin Burrow explains in the case of the First Folio, were complex. The compilers ‘were men of the theatre’, for example, and the printers of the two ‘extremely popular’ Ovidian poems would have been reluctant to surrender ‘such marketable commodities’.4 The pattern is nevertheless emblematic of the somewhat paradoxical curve of Shakespeare’s long-term reputation. A subsidiary paradox is that the Sonnets, now thought of as Shakespeare’s highest non-dramatic achievement, were only published once in Shakespeare’s lifetime (1609), possibly without his collaboration, though some were in circulation in 1598.5 Though his name appears on the title page in the form ‘ShakeSpeares Sonnets’, the famous dedication ‘To the Onlie Begetter’ is not signed by Shakespeare. Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece, on the other hand, are, according to David Bevington, ‘the only published works of Shakespeare to bear his signature’ (in the dedication, though his name begins to appear on title pages of some plays in 1598).6 What Love calls the ‘first “modern” edition’, in six volumes, by Nicholas Rowe, was published by Jacob Tonson in 1709, some fourteen years after the first annotated edition of Milton’s Poetical Works (1695), from the same publisher.7 Shakespeare’s monument in Westminster Abbey (1741) was also preceded by those of Milton and Samuel Butler.8 According to a recent study, Rowe’s edition was viewed by Tonson ‘as a premium product, saleable as a luxury rather than a popular item’. A duodecimo edition of 1714 evidently did not sufficiently penetrate the popular market, and there were few editions of single plays published in unadapted versions.9 Other stages of his popular reputation, recorded in Michael Dobson’s The Making of the National Poet (1992), were the first known school production of one of his plays in 1728 (Julius Caesar at Westminster School), a series of lectures at Oxford by William Hawkins in the early 1750s, and the famous Garrick Jubilee of 1769, which ratified ‘the promotion of Stratfordupon-Avon as a site of secular pilgrimage’.10 Garrick wrote An Ode upon Dedicating a Building, and Erecting a Statue, at Shakespeare, at Stratford-uponAvon (1769), with the words ‘’Tis he! ’tis he! “The god of our idolatry.” ’ In this phrase of Shakespeare’s Juliet, Garrick seems also to be remembering Ben Jonson, who honoured Shakespeare’s ‘memory (on this side Idolatry) as much as any’, and making the full leap to bardolatry (though the term was apparently coined by Shaw in 1901, who used it repeatedly).11 It is Dryden who, in Harold Love’s words, was ‘the creator of Shakespeare criticism’, though comments on Shakespeare running to hundreds of pages are recorded in Ingleby’s Shakespere Allusion-Book before Dryden

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had written a word.12 The story begins with Of Dramatick Poesie (1668), an essay in dialogue form which contains the first extended critical examination of an English play (by Ben Jonson). But it also contains a statement which ranks among the classic eulogies of Shakespeare, one which Samuel Johnson, himself a master of the genre, described ‘as a perpetual model of encomiastick criticism’:13 To begin with Shakespeare; he 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 learn’d; he needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature; he look’d inwards, and found her there.14 A remarkable feature is that this occurs in a work which gives its major attention to Jonson.15 Of Dramatick Poesie inaugurates a long series of rich engagements with Shakespeare’s writings, not only in Dryden’s essays, prefaces and dramatic adaptations but, even more importantly, through correspondence and conversation, in coffee houses and other social venues, as well as in personal exchanges and other more informal modes of cultural dissemination, which often shaped or influenced the published statements. The dialogue form of Of Dramatick Poesie is a formal emblem of this dissemination, whose conversational give-and-take helped to define English dramatic culture and its relationship to classical and French rivals.16 Dryden inherited a tradition of rivalry of reputations between Ben Jonson, identified with standards of classical correctness, and Shakespeare, with English energy and freedom from rule: according to Richard Flecknoe in 1664, ‘Shakespear excelled in a natural vein, . . . and Johnson in Gravity and ponderousness of Style. . . . Comparing him with Shakespear, you shall see the difference betwixt Nature and Art.’17 This note had already been struck in the lifetimes of both writers. Jonson’s own view ‘That Shakespeare wanted Arte’, was commonly held, and had a long life, though Jonson repeatedly praises Shakespeare for outshining all other playwrights.18 Milton contrasted ‘Jonsons learned Sock’ with ‘sweetest Shakespear, fancies childe’, warbling ‘his native Wood-notes wilde’.19 Milton had already written in his sonnet, ‘On Shakespear. 1630’, for the Second Folio of Shakespeare (1632), of Shakespeare’s work as building, ‘in our wonder and astonishment’, a ‘livelong Monument’, not through lapidary perfection, but a superabundance

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of ‘easie numbers’, which ‘make us Marble with too much conceaving’). Dryden picks up the theme of this superabundance. In a compliment to Congreve that might seem disproportionate, or else ambiguous, or both, Dryden wrote in ‘To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve’ (1694): Heav’n that but once was Prodigal before, To Shakespeare gave as much; she cou’d not give him more. (62–3)20 An ambivalence underlying this couplet, and running through Shakespeare criticism throughout the Restoration and the first half of the eighteenth century, is the sense of a poet overwhelmingly endowed with ‘genius’, pre-eminently the poet of ‘nature’ (two elusive and complex terms), but lacking in classical rigour and the correctness of a politer age, such as that of Dryden and Congreve, Congreve being praised for adding correctness to the Genius of the ‘Gyant Race’ of Shakespeare’s day.21 The absurd compliment embodies a complacency about ‘The present Age of Wit’ (2) which Pope would also inherit. Shakespeare embodies the stereotype of the flawed genius, whose flaws are themselves a token of creative power. The obligatory comparison with Ben Jonson was readily incorporated into the endless preoccupation with ‘art’ and ‘correctness’: Has not Great Johnsons learning, often fail’d? But Shakespear’s greater Genius, still prevail’d.22 The parallel is restated to similar effect when Dryden calls Shakespeare the Homer and Jonson the Virgil of ‘our Dramatick Poets’.23 Love describes how the comparison between Jonson and Shakespeare became, over the years, part of the cultural politics of post-Restoration England, with Buckingham and Dorset, and the critic Thomas Rymer, as supporters of Ben Jonson, while the old Stuart loyalist, Dryden, emphasized Shakespeare as an inclusive and unifying figure, in contrast to ‘the divisive Jonson’.24 The early Of Dramatick Poesie (1668), which had given ‘major attention’ to Jonson, and referred to Shakespeare only ‘glancingly’, had nevertheless described Shakespeare as ‘the man who of all Modern, and perhaps Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive Soul’. The eulogy ‘stands like an isolated pillar of fire’, marking Dryden’s ‘true allegiance’ to an idea of Shakespeare as a universal and foundational figure, who could stand as ‘an icon of national reconciliation’.25 In the Williamite years, Dryden was deprived of the Laureateship by the Earl of Dorset, the poet and courtier who had been Eugenius in Of

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Dramatick Poesie. Dorset had become William’s Lord Chamberlain, but remained something of a patron. Dryden also dedicated his translations of Juvenal and Persius (1693) to Dorset, in a ‘Discourse Concerning Satire’ in which Jonson and Shakespeare were again compared: ‘Shakespear who Created the Stage among us, had rather Written happily, than knowingly and justly; and Johnson, who by studying Horace, had been acquainted with the Rules, yet seem’d to envy to Posterity that Knowledge.’26 Dorset was a power in the land, who had genuine respect for Dryden, now dispossessed of political favour, but influential as an opinion-former through his literary eminence and his presiding presence at Will’s Coffee House.27 Dryden’s dedication to him in the ‘Discourse’ is part of a process of reconciliation which was not merely personal, but a gesture of national healing, ‘through a shared reverence for literature’ of which Dryden’s praise of Shakespeare became an emblem.28 Behind the comparison with Jonson in the ‘Discourse’, conceding that Shakespeare had many faults by comparison with Jonson, stands the affirmation, in Of Dramatick Poesie, that ‘he is alwayes great, when some great occasion is presented to him.’29 That this was being said when Dryden’s literary and perhaps political sympathies were differently distributed shows the steadiness of a view of Shakespeare which was, in the next century, gradually to establish Shakespeare permanently as the national poet in the popular imagination. Though Shakespeare was deeply admired and praised by the great poets of each generation – Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Pope and Samuel Johnson – Johnson felt called upon as late as 1765 to announce that Shakespeare ‘may now begin to assume the dignity of an ancient’, a process which his own edition is dedicated to furthering.30 Even though Pope’s edition (1725) was a monument conferred by the leading poet of the day, it was Milton’s presence, not Shakespeare’s, which left the most visible mark on the poetry of Pope’s time. (Pope, as Jarvis points out, would have had difficulty with the concept of a ‘Great Shakespearian’.) Milton alone among English poets had the status of an honorary classic, comparable to the epic masters of Greece and Rome, and forming, with Homer and Virgil, an epic triad which was a composite basis for allusion and emulation in the more elevated forms of poetry, including ironic versions of heroic idiom which became, in Pope’s day, most notably in the Dunciad (1728–43), the readiest way for a modern poet to attain the heights of what Dryden called ‘Heroique Poetry it self’.31 Even though Dryden referred to Shakespeare (as also to Chaucer) as an English Homer,32 it is to Milton that Pope ‘alludes’, in the way he alludes to the classical poets, Horace,

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Ovid and especially Homer and Virgil, with an expectation of natural recognition (of parallels, disjunctions, ironies and witty confrontations of high and low or past and present), whether in the high discursive mode of the Essay on Man or the dark gravity of the mock-heroic Dunciad. Had Pope written his epic on Brutus, the founder of Britain, it was to Milton he would have turned even in his choice of metre, since the few lines that survive show that, in a career volte-face, the poem would have been in blank verse. Allusion to Shakespeare, of the kind we find in Eliot’s Waste Land two centuries after Pope’s edition of Shakespeare, was not available for poetic exploitation in Pope’s day. It is arguable that Eliot learned the technique in part from Pope’s treatment of Milton and of classical poets. More important, Shakespeare came in the intervening centuries to displace the classical masters as the national poet of Europe, or the Western world. Familiarity with Shakespeare’s plays would perhaps be less than among educated readers today. It would also, I suspect, be less than that assumed, in a literate reader of Dryden or Pope, for Milton or classical writers. Shakespeare had been widely performed on the stage, often in adaptations (including operatic ones) that departed from both the original text and plot, and differences between the original and the adaptations were often indistinct in the public mind.33 Nahum Tate’s adaptation of King Lear (1681), with a happy ending (which Johnson defended) and without the Fool, was the standard form in which the play was performed until the nineteenth century.34 The only eighteenth-century performance of Antony and Cleopatra, billed as ‘the first staging of the play, after Shakespeare’s time’, was in fact a grossly altered version by Garrick and Capell (1758, performed 1759).35 The play was largely eclipsed by adaptations of which the most famous was Dryden’s All for Love: or, the World Well Lost (1678), which was a great success in its own right. When, in the Preface to Shakespeare, Johnson discussed Shakespeare’s habit of punning, remarking that ‘A quibble to him was the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it,’ he instinctively lapsed into the language of Dryden’s subtitle, much as Pope attacked the Shakespearean Theobald in Miltonic allusions.36 Allusion differs from explicit mention, though it does not exclude it. There are plenty of explicit mentions, including lavish praise of Shakespeare, in both discursive and imaginative texts: Fielding’s novels offer several examples. Allusion implies an ability to perceive unspoken resonances in the work which is its subject, whose identity may be signposted, as Eliot signposts the identity of some of his sources in the notes to the Waste Land. Allusion functions beyond this point, as, to a lesser degree, does parody,

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which also presupposes familiar recognition, and may distribute its clues more overtly. Shakespearean parody seems also to have been less frequent in the eighteenth century than in later times. There is mimicry of a scene from Julius Caesar in Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728) which (revealingly) Swift did not catch ‘till I was told it’.37 There is generalized jokerie about the multiple deaths of Shakespearean tragedy at the end of Fielding’s Tragedy of Tragedies (1731). But it appears that the first parody in verse of a more or less full (though somewhat telescoped) Shakespearean plot was The Three Conjurors (1763), a Wilkesite attack on the recently deposed prime minister Bute, who is a Macbeth avatar named Macboote.38 The Three Conjurors is a barely known political squib and seems not to have been performed. A century or two were to pass before Julius Caesar or Macbeth became part of the fabric of Jarry’s Ubu cycle (1890s), Barbara Garson’s MacBird (1966) or Ionesco’s Macbett (1972), and when Shakespeare came to be a natural focus for politically charged mock-heroic in writers of the stature of Brecht. By this time, Shakespeare had largely displaced the classical masters as a normative source, in an international rather than merely British context, not only for the important ironic confrontations between past and present of the kind we identify with Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe or Pope’s Dunciad, and to which we sometimes attach the term mockheroic, but also as a pre-eminent example of literary greatness. T. S. Eliot’s comment that ‘Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third,’ would not have been made about either poet in the period covered by this volume.39 Jarvis writes of the ways earlier poets are remembered by later ones. He shows that Shakespeare was assimilated into Pope’s writing at a level of deep personal absorption, deeper than verbal parallels accumulated by commentators, which generate a ‘vapid verbal stock’ of poetic continuities; a bank of insecure analogues which exercise a tyranny over subsequent annotation and debate; and distort the reading process. Pope’s verbal assimilation of Shakespeare is a more subtle and subterranean process, often unsignposted, like his unusual use of ‘blank’ as a verb in Dunciad, I. 114, recalling ‘blankes the face of ioy’ in Hamlet (III. ii. 220).40 Jarvis speaks well of ‘the subterranean energy, the compressed wit and passion of verse thinking, which Shakespeare continued to nourish in Pope’s verse throughout his career’.41 Such evocations may be independent of thematic preoccupations, and are deeper than ‘parallels’ and distinct from the kind of ‘direct or elaborated allusion . . . with which The Dunciad is, even for a mock-heroic poem, quite extraordinarily saturated’.42 If the fact testifies to a special

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inwardness in Pope’s absorption of Shakespeare, it also marks some limits in the currency of Shakespearean awareness. The ‘allusions’ in Pope are often to classical poets, including Horace and others, and, in the mockepic Dunciad, to Homer and Virgil. Pope also alludes to some English poets, including Denham and Dryden (as well as those, like Chaucer or Donne, whom Pope ‘translated’ or ‘versified’). In the Dunciad, Milton is a strong presence, forming a kind of composite epic triad with the two classical epic writers. The allusions to him carry an ironic charge of recognition which depends on a currency of knowingness that does not seem to have included Shakespeare. The familiar use of Shakespearean texts, involving an inward and versat ile ironic dialogue of past and present, which exists throughout the Waste Land (evoking Hamlet and The Tempest through a poetic technique partly learned from Pope’s allusions to other poets), seems to have been rare in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The familiarity with which Milton’s description of Satan, ‘High on a Throne of Royal State’ (Paradise Lost, II. 1), is recycled, first, in Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (107), and then in the Dunciad (II. 1), with Pope pointedly aware of both predecessors, is of a similar order of knowing pointedness as Eliot’s extended allusion to Shakespeare’s Cleopatra in ‘A Game of Chess’ (Waste Land, 77 ff.), ‘The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne’, but it would be more than a century after Pope that Shakespeare, unlike Milton, would be used widely and naturally by English poets in this way. When Pope writes about low verbal critics who gain their crumb of credit by being ‘Preserv’d in Milton’s or in Shakespear’s name’, the equivalence is between two great poets as against the puny race of critics.43 That is an easy point for Pope to make and does not reflect a close similarity in the character of the two poets as familiar icons of cultural awareness. Although the episode which triggered the Dunciad was Lewis Theobald’s Shakespeare Restored (1726), criticizing Pope’s edition of Shakespeare, and Theobald was the hero of the poem’s early versions, the poem is saturated with Miltonic allusion, pervasive and ostentatiously functional, while Shakespearean allusion in a similar sense is rare. It is an irony of the history of reputations that the figure sitting ‘High on a gorgeous seat’ in all his tarnished Satanic splendour in the Dunciad (II. 1) is a Shakespearean scholar ridiculed through an allusion to Milton. Pope looked down on ‘Verbal Criticks’ as social inferiors, in the approved Augustan rhetoric, especially when they were, like Theobald, more expert than himself.44 He thought of his own exercise of ‘the dull duty of an Editor’ with a rueful ambivalence, sometimes concealing his editorial reasonings to avoid ‘the ostentatious display of minute labour’.45 Samuel Johnson

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bridled at Pope’s phrase, suggesting with some justice that Pope thought the task beneath him, though Pope was also conveying a corresponding emphasis that in translating Homer or editing Shakespeare (Pope’s ‘ten years to comment and translate’)46 he was paying supreme homage to two master poets. Pope, of all English poets the supreme master of reputation management, was somewhat contemptuous of the early phases of the Shakespeare bandwagon. He was sarcastic about the erection of the monument in Westminster Abbey, an event fraught with political manoeuvring as well as gaffes in execution.47 The relation of Pope to Shakespeare, as to his editorial task, is one that Jarvis describes as a ‘co-operative antagonism’. Pope read Shakespeare as a practitioner, a ‘writer of verse’, and it thus was important for him to distinguish himself from mere verbal critics. Pope is increasingly seen to have been, in many ways, an impressive editor. Many of his emendations have survived, and he has helped to establish the accepted lineation of the plays. He is also responsible for the restoration of some old quarto readings. As Jarvis says, ‘much of our “Shakespeare” is Pope’s.’ But equally, much of Shakespeare as we know him is not in Pope. ‘Macbeth’s idea that his bloody hand will “The multitudinous sea incarnadine” ’ will not be found in Pope’s edition. Polonius’s burial ‘hugger-mugger’ (Hamlet, IV. v. 84) is ironed out by Pope to ‘in private’, a casualty of a long-standing concern over the indecorum of Shakespeare’s language: Davenant had replaced the phrase by ‘Obscurely’ over half a century earlier.48 Johnson’s rebuke to Pope, asserting, in Jarvis’s words, that attention to detail ‘is not the work of a small, but of a large mind’, raises the question of ‘how minute knowledge could be reconciled with the comprehensive perspective necessary to make it intelligible’. It is a question central to Johnson’s thinking about both literature and biography. The sweeping assurance of statements about the nature of literature or the workings of the imagination, the largeness and certainty of his views on dramatic illusion or ‘delusion’ (‘Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind,’ ‘Preface’, vol. 1, p. 78), mingle not only with the minuteness demanded by textual annotation but also with an acute understanding of how verbal details are the foundation of critical judgments, however large. Johnson was not much given to theatregoing, professed to despise actors and thought ‘Many of Shakespeare’s plays are the worse for being acted.’ When Goldsmith provoked him, in 1766, a year after publication of the Shakespeare, by saying, ‘you don’t go near the theatres now,’ Johnson replied (alluding to his own earlier theatrical ambitions as a youthful

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fling), ‘the old man does not care for the young man’s whore.’49 Although he sometimes resisted other editors’ emendations of ungrammatical, fragmented or abrupt dialogue in Shakespeare’s plays by appealing to theatrical experience, as well as on naturalistic grounds, he was, as I have suggested elsewhere, expressing a reader’s idea of how a character might express emotional stress (as perhaps in Richardson’s Clarissa, which he admired, though he viewed novels with suspicion). His appreciation of ‘abrupt’ speech often seems a readerly one, even when he seeks to defend it by determining the primacy of the theatrical element.50 Freya Johnston’s perception of the importance of ‘explication of character and motive’ in Johnson’s textual decisions reinforces the view that he read plays to some extent as though they were novels. Johnson often writes as though the natural addressee of a play is a reader, not a theatrical audience. When he praised Addison’s Cato as ‘unquestionably the noblest production of Addison’s genius’, one gets the impression that this partly because it is better read than seen on the stage.51 Though Cato is a special case, such language is instinctive in Johnson. He writes that Shakespeare ‘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’, a comment vividly recycled and particularized in the final note to Antony and Cleopatra, a play on which the preceding commentary had been deflating and lukewarm.52 The comparison with Homer, as in Dryden, occurs more than once in the Preface.53 But it is arresting to see both the oral poet and the playwright described as page-turners. Freya Johnston brings out Johnson’s autobiographical affinity with Shakespeare, a fellow Midlander who moved to London with theatrical ambitions, who used words that Johnson understood whereas other editors tried to emend them.54 She sees Johnson’s criticism as having ‘a cooperat ive bent which reveals his affectionate familiarity with the playwright’, not as distinct as it sounds from Pope’s ‘co-operative antagonism’, but more overtly expressed,’ with a ‘self-inculpating humour’ and readiness for selfcorrection. The resources of the variorum edition are used by Johnson not only to record the views of past editors but also his own errors or changes of mind. In such contexts, the writing acquires a confessional and vulnerable note, reflecting on the precariousness of conjecture (‘every day encreases my doubt of my emendations’) and recording impulses for emendation even when these are discarded. ‘Shall I mention what has dropped into my imagination, that our authour might have written “triple-tongued” [for “triple-turn’d”]?’55 The sleeve-pulling question almost turns the formality

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Introduction

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of scholarly recension into a whimsical self-consciousness, teetering on the edge of ‘sentimental’ novelese. The fourth and last Shakespearean in this volume, Edmond Malone, friend and collaborator of Johnson and his biographer Boswell, was primarily a scholar. His ten-volume edition of the Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare (1790) marks a high point in a developing tradition of scholarly editing, which may be traced back to the editions of Pope’s antagonist Lewis Theobald (1733), Samuel Johnson (1765), George Steevens (1766, 1773, 1778) and Edward Capell (1768, 1774, 1779–83). Malone was a gifted and versatile scholar and collector, whose scholarship extended to other authors, including Dryden, and helped in the preparation of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. He did important work on the dating of the plays. His variorum edition of 1790 and his work on Shakespeare’s biography and stage history, his exposure of Shakespearean frauds and forgeries, greatly expand and consolidate the work of his eighteenthcentury predecessors, who anticipated him in their attention to early texts and archival documentation. His work is distinguished by a tenacious pursuit of accurate readings, a sophisticated conservatism in emendation, an understanding of ‘the comparative value of the various ancient copies of Shakespeare’s plays’, and the demolition of many of the undocumented anecdotes and myths about Shakespeare (like the story of Shakespeare’s stealing the deer at Charlecote). Malone’s work, as Marcus Walsh describes it, is a product of the Enlightenment, representing ‘an evolved eighteenthcentury editorial methodology’, with a heightened regard for historical scholarship. It also marks an important stage in the vast scholarly afterlife of Shakespeare’s works and of works about them.

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Chapter 1

John Dryden Harold Love

That John Dryden was the creator of Shakespeare criticism is a tenet I have no wish to unsettle. With the publication in 1668 of Of Dramatick Poesie a connection was plotted, with a care never previously shown in the language, between the experience of dramatic texts in the theatre and a mature cognitive model of how a good play should shape the moral and political natures of its audiences. Ben Jonson is more widely discussed in that work and better represents its benchmark of theatrical good practice, but it was Shakespeare who stirred Dryden most profoundly as spectator and reader, giving rise to a tension that he was never fully to resolve between theory and passion. The working out of this tension can be followed through a large body of separately issued but collectively coherent writings in which the critic’s struggles become emblematic of a hero journeying Aeneas-like towards a distant, imperfectly envisaged landfall. In what follows, I trace Dryden’s certainties, doubts, compensations, evasions and accommodations and how these were negotiated with a public that steadily expanded throughout his career from a relatively narrow group of fellow patrons of the theatres to the collectivity of polite readers at large. We will fi nd that as the body of separately involved parties grows larger, the political and cultural stakes grow higher, until an engagement with Shakespeare has transformed itself into one with the soul of the British nation as defi ned by the canon of its literature – a canon that Dryden himself has been largely responsible for shaping. To begin, though, we will need to consider the steps by which this public came to be drawn into a dialogue that was in no way restricted to the written. The terminology of Dryden’s published critical writings has been the subject of excellent guides, and, in what follows, I will often be repeating what has already been well explained.1 But studies of Dryden as a critic, because they rarely look beyond the printed texts, convey a distorted idea

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of how the activity of criticism was practised by him and his contemporaries. Today, criticism of the journalistic and academic kind is primarily conducted within print and electronic culture through reviews, articles and books. In Dryden’s time, the criticism that mattered took place through face-to-face discussion, supplemented by personal correspondence. Despite Swift’s couplet ‘Read all the Prefaces of Dryden, | For these our Criticks much confide in,’2 neither the prefaces nor their attendant dedications, examens, discourses, prologues, epilogues and epistles were available during Dryden’s lifetime as a gathered publisher’s artefact. To have read them systematically along with the numerous replies would have meant assembling a sizeable and expensive hillock of quartos.3 Paul Hammond has made the same point about the minor verse, which includes the prologues and epilogues, noting that ‘generally Dryden exhibited a singular unconcern about these many occasional pieces, short but significant works in which he not only cemented friendships but often defined the classical temper and status of Restoration poetry.’4 He was not an accumulator, pursuing criticism as an activity, not as a way of constructing a monument. It was only with the pricey posthumous folio collected edition of 1701 that much of the critical writing could be conveniently consulted together, and even that omitted the substantial essays prefaced to the corporate translations of Ovid, Plutarch, Polybius and Juvenal. The printed criticism certainly mattered (Dryden’s enemies loved to rake through it, or each other’s rakings, for statements with which to embarrass him) but as a series of largely disconnected commentaries offered on specific occasions, not as an ordered Cartesian science. Indeed, by the time individual opinions reached the public in printed form they had often been superseded around the tables that mattered. Dryden himself by the 1680s had virtually disowned his earlier defence of his heroic plays, sometimes wryly citing those very works as examples of bad writing.

Conversations about Shakespeare To assess Dryden’s immense influence as a critic of Shakespeare it is essential that we alert ourselves to conversation and correspondence. Much valuable critical discussion must have been distributed in letters, especially during summer, when he and his fellow writers were usually in the country. A formal letter at this period was a semi-public document, designed to be shown around by the recipient and to serve as a prompt to conversation. Writing to William Walsh in May 1693, Dryden remarks, ‘You may

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see I set not up for a Wit in this letter.’5 The implication is that on other occasions he did set up for a wit, which is to say as a critic. Two pieces of his detailed epistolary criticism have survived in manuscript, and a third was printed during his lifetime by John Dennis, yet the preserved body of correspondence is pitifully small.6 Of the thousands of letters that Dryden must have written only enough survive, together with surviving letters to him, to fill 135 heavily leaded pages in Ward’s edition. Letters too were not for keeping. Even more evanescent is conversation, yet in Restoration London this was the most important medium of all for the reflective inspection of writing and the establishment of rankings among writers, including the fractious triplets, Fletcher, Jonson and Shakespeare. Long before the practice of criticism migrated to print, literary debate was a core activity of that ‘associational world’ that has been revealed by Peter Clark’s British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800.7 Even printed criticism might be promulgated by being read aloud to gatherings, as Dryden himself did with Mulgrave’s anonymously published An Essay upon Poetry.8 Thomas Rymer presents his The Tragedies of the Last Age Consider’d as a substitute for a conversation with Fleetwood Sheppard that he was unable to conduct because of the dedicatee’s absence in the country. The book was written at high speed and uses a consciously conversational tone, as does most of Dryden’s criticism.9 Once Sheppard had returned to London and talk could resume, Rymer abandoned printed drama criticism for another two decades. His reputation, which was sufficient to awe Dryden, rested on the spoken, not the written word. Two regularly reconvened critical discussions were those of the court wits, often conducted semi-publicly in the Great Withdrawing Room at the palace of Whitehall, and those of the professional writers in the upper room of Will’s Coffee House in Russell Street, where for over three decades Dryden himself sat as master of ceremonies, having a special chair reserved by the fire in winter and the window in summer. As early as 1664 Pepys met him at Will’s among ‘all the wits of the town’.10 In 1682 Shadwell advised, You who would know him better, go to the Coffee-house (where he may be said almost to inhabit) and you shall find him holding forth to half a score young fellows . . .11 There was no need to specify which coffee house. When Pope as a boy conspired to have himself led to the door of that magical room so he could gaze on Dryden, he was also peeping into the parliament of critics and the

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forge of reputations. A discussion of Dryden as a critic of Shakespeare must strain to catch the still palpable resonances from that forge. Long prior to written Shakespeare criticism there had been conversation about Shakespeare. The Parnassus plays of 1598–1602 suggest something of its substance among students at Cambridge, and we can imagine that their contemporaries at the Inns of Court were even better informed. The pushier among them may have gained admission to the legendary debates held among the dramatists themselves at The Mermaid and The Devil that formalized themselves into a club known as the Sirenaics.12 Ben Jonson’s views, as repeated in his published writings and his conversations with Drummond, are the best recorded. He gave an intellectual stiffening to discussion of the drama that helped, through the influence of his poetical ‘sons’, to prepare the way for the dominance of neoclassical theory in the generation of Dryden. Shakespeare is portrayed by Thomas Fuller playing a disruptive Socrates to the doctrinaire Jonson: Many were the wit combates betwixt him and Ben Johnson, which two I behold like a Spanish great Gallion, and an English man of War; Master Johnson (like the former) was built far higher in Learning; Solid, but Slow in his performances. Shake-spear with the English-man of War, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his Wit and Invention.13 One can read this as Shakespeare trying to sabotage attempts by Ben to dominate discussion as the self-anointed vicegerent of Horace and Aristotle, but it also parallels a divide in the legal world of the time, whose intellectual traditions so fascinated Shakespeare, between the severe proponents of statute law and the disruptive, precedent-hunting common lawyers. Allegiance to legislating Ben was a declaration of fidelity to the rules of the Ancients.14 A preference for Will was a way of testing and where possible exploding a prevailing orthodoxy, as when ‘in the last Kings Court, when Ben’s reputation was at highest, Sir John Suckling, and with him the greater part of the Courtiers, set our Shakespeare far above him.’15 Suckling’s partisanship extended to having himself painted holding a copy of the Shakespeare Folio, a gesture Dryden conspicuously imitated when his own portrait was painted by James Maubert in 1695. Then there was John Hales combatively to insist ‘there was no subject of which any Poet ever writ, but he would produce it much better done in Shakespeare.’16 The king concurred to the remarkable extent of sending for a copy of the Folio not long before his execution.

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Yet if the case of Shakespeare versus Jonson was ever raised by Dryden with Milton or Marvell during their joint period of service in the Commonwealth civil service, we have no reason to think that he would have dissented at that period from the Jonsonian orthodoxy. Not only had he yet to encounter Shakespeare on the stage but he tells us explicitly that his admiration was fi rst nourished by Sir William D’Avenant.17 D’Avenant remembered Shakespeare well, both as his godfather and as a regular patron of his parents’ inn at Oxford. He also liked to claim among friends that he was Shakespeare’s extra-marital son. (The late Iain Wright has pointed privately to strong circumstantial evidence that Shakespeare was present in Oxford at a date 9 months prior to D’Avenant’s birth.18) Dryden knew several elderly former acquaintances of Jonson but probably very few, apart from D’Avenant, of Shakespeare; moreover, he aspired to be the same kind of man of letters Jonson had been – critic, courtier and polemicist as well as dramatist and poet. A further link was forged when he was awarded the laureateship formerly held by Jonson. In 1660 new voices suddenly entered the conversations of cavaliers whose sharing of the king’s exile had acquainted them with the acted drama of France and the neoclassical critical outlook there dominant. One indicative interchange is identified in Pierre des Maizeaux’s account of discussions between the second Duke of Buckingham, the French exile Saint-Évremond and the king’s cousin, Ludovic Stuart, Seigneur d’Aubigny (d.1665): Being often together, they discours’d about all manner of Subjects, but chiefly about the Dramatick Pieces of several Nations. Mr. de St. Evremond not understanding the English Tongue, those Gentlemen acquainted him with the best Strokes in our most celebrated Plays; of which he retain’d a clear Idea to the very last; and from these ingenious Conversations resulted his Reflections on the English Stage, which are extant in his Works.19 The ‘reflections’ confirm the strength of the mainstream preference for Jonson over Shakespeare, Ben and Shadwell being the only dramatists referred to by name.20 A joint play in French by the three friends, Sir Politick Would-be, Comedie a la maniere des Anglois, borrows its protagonist from Volpone.21 Crites, in Of Dramatick Poesie, claims Jonson for ‘the greatest man of the last age’.22 Dryden’s respect for Ben’s learning and correctness is reexpressed in the disputed prologue to Julius Caesar published in 1672 in

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the Covent Garden Drolery 23 and the prologue to The Silent Woman written for Charles Hart to deliver at Oxford in 1673.24 But he never wanted to write Jonson’s kind of play: creatively Fletcher was his immediate mentor and Shakespeare, as we shall see, his measure of theatrical greatness. Could it be too that Jonson smelled too much of the disloyal City for a dramatist who wrote for the new, leisured constituency of the West End? Richard Flecknoe’s ‘A Short Discourse of the English Stage’, published in 1664 with his play Love’s Kingdom, contrasted Shakespeare, Jonson and Fletcher in a way that was to be a staple of subsequent criticism: To compare our English Dramatick Poets together (without taxing them) Shakespear excelled in a natural Vein, Fletcher in Wit, and Johnson in Gravity and ponderousness of Style; whose onely fault was, he was too elaborate; and had he mixt less erudition with his Playes, they had been more pleasant and delightful then they are. Comparing him with Shakespear, you shall see the difference betwixt Nature and Art; and with Fletcher, the difference betwixt Wit and Judgement: . . .25 The selection of these three dramatists to represent their age was a way of proposing a hierarchy of values that different critics might resolve in different ways. When Lisideius in Of Dramatick Poesie defines a play as ‘A just and lively Image of Humane Nature’ it is again with reference to these criteria: ‘ just,’ indicating judgement; ‘lively,’ wit; and ‘image’, the representation of nature.26 From the early 1660s a new play or significant revival could expect to provoke discussion in a variety of loosely interconnected forums. The first was the auditorium of the playhouse. Tiffany Stern has argued persuasively that Restoration first days, held at doubled prices for a select audience, were actually a form of dress rehearsal, with some actors unwilling to learn their lines properly until they were sure the piece was going to ‘take’. (Pepys records exactly such an experience at the first day of Romeo and Juliet on 1 March 1662.) The audience regarded itself as participating in the creative process and might demand changes to be inserted into the second day’s performance in preparation for the third, which was the real premiere and the source of the author’s income.27 Among that participatory audience, special respect was paid to the habitués of the ‘wits’ row’ in the pit, to which stage poets could claim free entrance and to which specific addresses were often made in prologues and epilogues. Sparkish in The Country Wife, while a bogus wit, takes care to insert himself among the real ones. (‘Pshaw, with your fooling we shall loose the new Play; and

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I wou’d no more miss seeing a new Play the first day, than I wou’d miss setting in the wits Row . . .’28) Discussion in the pit and boxes would be followed by more considered deliberations in the upper room at Will’s and the Great Withdrawing Room. The opinions advanced in these forums would then radiate out to tributary meeting places, among males by means of intellectual commerce between the coffee houses, the two exchanges, and, while it stood, Paul’s Walk, and among females through the social institution of the visit as it has been decoded by Susan E. Whyman.29 The discussion of The Country Wife inserted by Wycherley into Act I, scene 2, of The Plain-Dealer takes place during the course of a visit so defined.30 The epilogue to Joseph Arrowsmith’s The Reformation (1673) offers us a coffeehouse vignette: Or shall’s to th’ Coffee-house and there debate, Each take his Chair and Pipe and judg in State? Lord how they wait a Wit that’s fam’d in Town! He lookes about him with a scornful frown, Then picks his Favourite out and sits him down. Take me how is’t? Have you seen our new Play? Yes faith; and how? a half Crown thrown away . . .31 Rochester’s or Sedley’s ‘Timon’ portrays a heated debate over the merits of dramatists conducted at a dinner party.32 Dryden himself speaks of a poet being ‘damn’d in the Ruelle’, this being the area of the bedchamber where visitors were received while a person of rank was dressing.33 How often the courtiers and the professionals joined together to discuss the drama must have varied between individuals. Dryden’s dedication to Rochester of Marriage A-la-Mode is notably more deferential than that of The Assignation to Sedley of the same year, which pointedly addresses him as ‘My Most Honour’d Friend’ and includes an account of conversations at which ‘our discourse is neither too serious, nor too light; but alwayes pleasant, and for the most part instructive.’34 The most important relationship of all, that with Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst and later Earl of Dorset, will be considered separately, but Shakespeare must surely have been among the topics of Dorset’s legendary writers’ dinners in the ‘Poets’ Parlour’ at Knole, which he had lined with portraits of his favourite authors.35 It was in venues such as these that discussions of Shakespeare mutated from an initial concern with the state of the acted drama into a way of defining British intellectual values in opposition to

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those of the Ancients and contemporary France. Of Dramatick Poesie portrays exactly such a conversation and includes among its speakers the master of Knole. This brings us to Dryden’s own participation in conversations about the drama, about which we have differing reports. Insofar as he is represented by Bayes in Buckingham’s The Rehearsal, he should be seen as a garrulous windbag, but the truth seems to have been that he was not a fluent disputant. Rochester confessed to Henry Savile in 1676: You write me word that I’m out of favour with a certain poet whom I have ever admired for the disproportion of him and his attributes. He is a rarity which I cannot but be fond of, as one would be of a hog that could fiddle, or a singing owl.36 A similar charge is made by Shadwell in The Medal of John Bayes: An old gelt Mastiff has more mirth than thou, When thou a kind of paltry Mirth would’st show. Good humour thou so awkwardly put’st on, It sits like Modish Clothes upon a Clown . . .37 Dryden himself was perfectly happy to concede the point: My Conversation is slow and dull, my humour Saturnine and reserv’d: In short, I am none of those who endeavour to break Jests in Company, or make reparties . . .38 Congreve remembered him as ‘Easily to be discountenanced, in his Approaches, either to his Superiors, or his Equals’.39 This was the cause of friction with the court wits, who could not take a writer seriously who was unable to match their own conversational brilliance. Dryden’s verse declamation also seems to have been off-putting. Colley Cibber was repelled by his reading aloud of Amphytrion ‘in so cold, so flat, and unaffecting a manner, that I am afraid of not being believ’d when I affirm it’ – something that surprises the modern reader reconstituting its lively orality from the page.40 Dryden’s remark that Lord and Lady Radcliffe were ‘not . . . displeas’d’ by his reading aloud of his Ovid translations has to be questioned in the light of Cibber’s comment and a similarly damning one by Roger L’Estrange.41 In the settled, respectful atmosphere of

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Will’s, however, Dryden could adopt the role of the quiet adjudicator in debate. Apart from that, he did his talking with his pen. Shadwell, having described his conversation as ‘lumpish and flegmatick, or arrogant and silly’, added, ‘As for ready Wit, he carries very little or none about him; but, if you draw a Bill upon him, like a Banker, he can answer you at home.’42 There is a sense that Dryden’s critical prose, unmatched in its colloquial ease, artful insinuations and superficially fortuitous but always purposeful transitions from topic to topic, is a splendid act of compensation. Edward Pechter comments: Of course we know that this isn’t conversation, that no one could talk so well, and certainly not Dryden himself if we can trust his own estimate. Yet the essays are so successful in achieving their effect of artlessness that, even with our understanding that this must be a contrived effect, we are inclined more to express appreciation of it than to describe the process by which it is realized.43 Certainly this was writing that drew on conversation and was soon returned to it, sometimes directly, sometimes via the medium of manuscript and printed responses and sometimes via the more pungent medium of gossip and gossip’s written counterpart, the scribally circulated lampoon.44 Written responses might represent themselves as the outcome of conversation, as with those initiated by Leigh’s The Censure of the Rota (its title a pinch from Harrington), which mimic the deliberations of the clubs of the virtuosi. In one of the Rota replies, the personated writer is led to the alleged meeting place of this fabled body in ‘a large room in a Coffee-house kept for them, where thrice a week they met retir’d from company’. The room is equipped with a notice identifying the academy and grotesque symbolic furniture (perhaps a reminiscence of the divided table of the original Rota, designed so that coffee could be served without disrupting debates). The meetings, presided over by six master-dunces, include a secretary to take down their deliberations.45 While in this case the details are imaginary, they draw on the procedure of early discussion clubs recorded by Clark. A text written by a single author might masquerade as a dialogue or ideas hatched collectively represent themselves monologically in writing.46 What was constant to the period was a dialogic cast of mind arising from a simultaneous appreciation of older and newer habits of thought and an ability, through managed cognitive dissonance, to reflect on each from the perspective of the other. So in Dryden’s criticism, while Shakespeare is to be assessed by the measure of the Ancients it is no less true that they have to be measured

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and judged by reference to him. A Crites requires a Eugenius and would be meaningless without him.

Cycles and Subcycles Dryden’s first major critical essay was inevitably a conversation. Of Dramatick Poesie is a dialogue, loosely modelled on Cicero’s De Oratore, between four friendly but energetic disputants. Crites represented Sir Robert Howard, Eugenius, Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst (later sixth Earl of Dorset), Lisideius, Sir Charles Sedley and Neander (‘new man’), Dryden himself. There is no reason to assume that any similar conversation ever took place, but Dryden was acquainted with all three and would not have distorted their known views. Howard, one of his brothers-in-law, was notorious both in real life and in Shadwell’s stage caricature of him as Sir Positive At-all in The Sullen Lovers as an unmufflable monologist on every imaginable subject. He was already a successful dramatist in his own right and a formidable politician. Buckhurst, the dedicatee of the piece, was respected for an unshowy, deliberative style of wit. Matthew Prior said of him in old age that ‘he drivels so much better sense even now than any other man can talk.’47 He had collaborated with Sedley, Waller and others in a translation of Corneille’s La Mort de Pompée, acted in October 1663. Sedley was a wit of the flashier, simile-coining kind, who later established himself as a considerable poet and dramatist.48 He was portrayed as a character in plays by both Etherege and Shadwell and is included together with Buckhurst in Rochester’s ‘An Allusion to Horace’ as one of the poet’s right-judging inner audience.49 The piece works systematically through three linked questions: whether the drama of the Ancients was superior to that of the Moderns, whether among the Moderns the French were to be ranked above the English and whether among the Modern English the age of Shakespeare, Jonson and Fletcher was to be preferred to Dryden’s own time. But what is no less interesting is the conceptual toolkit used to examine these issues. Two striking aspects of Dryden’s critical thinking are its strongly historicist character and the extent to which literary history is seen as governed by recurring cycles. Dryden’s belief in astrology may have been one source of this second predisposition, though it also echoes the Pythagorean premise of a favourite poem, Virgil’s fourth Eclogue: The last great Age, foretold by sacred Rhymes, Renews its finish’d Course, Saturnian times Rowl round again, and mighty years, begun From their first Orb, in radiant Circles run.50

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Absalom and Achitophel demonstrates how Dryden habitually looked to the past for anticipations of the present. Satan’s rebellion against God, Adam’s disobedience in Eden, Achitophel’s plot against David, Cromwell’s dethroning of Charles I and the Whig attempt to secure the succession for Monmouth are introduced as recurrences within what Arthur W. Hoffman called ‘a history with reverberations’.51 Even within ancient history itself, behaviour is cyclic: For, govern’d by the Moon, the giddy Jews Tread the same track when she the Prime renews: And once in twenty Years, their Scribes Record, By natural Instinct they change their Lord.52 (This is also meant to correspond to the English upheavals of 1649, 1660 and 1679.) The habit of thought so displayed is equally evident in Dryden’s critical practice. He was well aware of Aristotle’s division of poetry ‘in relation to the Progress of it’ into ‘Nature without Art: Art begun, and Art Compleated’, which gave the first half of a cycle.53 John Fowler has brilliantly untangled the way in which Dryden’s readings of both ancient Roman and modern English poetry were organized round an assumed cyclic profile that saw each as evolving from a state of linguistic and cultural crudity to a peak of refinement, represented in ancient times by the reign of Augustus and in his own time by that of Charles II.54 Genius might appear at any point in the cycle, but its potential could only be fully actuated (as Dryden saw the matter) during an age of courtly politeness: his criticism on Comedy shows us in constant operation the idée fixe that a civilization’s excellence in language and politeness in wit is bound always to grow slowly through roughness towards the culminating grace, politeness, finish, with the language and style of each several kind distinct from that of the others, but also, and equally, bound thereafter silverly to decline.55 The decline had not yet taken place in his own day but must inevitably succeed the ascent. Dryden’s rewritings of Chaucer and Shakespeare, his recommendation that Donne’s satires deserved to be modernized the same way and even his conscious ironing-out of the ‘too-wilful boldness’ of Persius (a feature of the declining phase of a cycle) were designed ‘to breed up their language and manner to where their natural genius ought to have chronologically placed them’.56 In this way a period-based taxonomy governs the ranking of literary achievement.

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In Of Dramatick Poesie, the first speaker, Crites, opens by asserting that his own age is pre-eminently one of philosophy and science, having seen ‘more Noble Secrets in Opticks, Medicine, Anatomy, Astronomy, discover’d, than in all those credulous and doting Ages from Aristotle’.57 It, therefore, stands in respect of these disciplines at the apogee of a very long cycle, none of whose previous subcycles have ever reached so high. The greatest age of drama, by contrast, was the Athens of the great tragedians, from which, in Crites’s view, all subsequent national and temporal cycles have been part of a prolonged decline. In Dryden’s later criticism, other arts would be found to have their own towering ages – in painting that of Raphael – and likewise their cycle or repeated cycles of raw beginnings, growing refinement, apogee and decadence. One reason for the pre-eminence of the Greek drama, Crites tells us, was that ‘Poesie being then in more esteem than now it is, had greater Honours decreed to the Professors of it.’ This encouraged a ‘Vertuous Emulation’ which in his own time had been inhibited by the envious malice of ‘severe Judges’.58 A second argument, also put by Crites, draws on the then widely held belief that the Ancients had been able to perceive the world with greater freshness and understanding than the Moderns: Those Ancients have been faithful Imitators and wise Observers of that Nature which is so torn and ill represented in our Plays, they have handed down to us a perfect resemblance of her; which we, like ill Copyers, neglecting to look on, have rendred monstrous and disfigur’d.59 Underlying this passage is a second assumption, that of universal secular decline, memorably expounded earlier in the century in Donne’s two Anniversaries and surfacing again in Swift’s The Battle of the Books. The Ancients, it was held, by the very virtue of having lived in the youth of the world, had been mentally and physically superior to their degenerate descendants. This profile originated in the Judaeo-Christian belief in decline from an Edenic perfection and in the classical narrative of the Four Ages, each of which was a falling away from its predecessor. Dryden would later maintain that ‘not only the Bodies, but the Souls of Men, have decreas’d from the vigour of the first Ages.’60 In the literary versions of this profile, beginnings occur as the result of a towering act of individual achievement that then serves as a model of inspiration and imitation to a succession of epigones through a cycle of ever-diminishing returns until the original insights are extinguished. New subcyclical initiatives within a longer cyclic history, whether of a progressive or retrogressive kind, might

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also take this alternative form, though the most common cycle remained that of the conventional arch or ‘normal curve’, already described. It will be observed that Crites’s secular curve for drama reverses that given by the same speaker for philosophy and that Neander’s subsequent claim for the superiority of modern over ancient drama would do likewise. In practice Dryden treats the thesis of universal decline as an optional explanatory convenience rather than a fixed axiom, accepting that its effects could be neutralized by changes in historical conditions or the unpredictable advent of genius. So, even in the ancient world, the thesis worked well for epic but did not hold good for satire. In the cycle of English poetry, the untutored beginning was represented by Chaucer, whose Richardian mode of courtly sophistication was not understood by Dryden, for whom true genius first became evident in Spenser. In English drama, the beginning of the cycle was of the rapid Homeric kind, but it was not clear when and where to place the apogee. At times, as we have seen, Dryden identifies it with the generation of Shakespeare and Jonson; at other times he would clearly like to locate it in the reign of the second Charles; and in one work, to be discussed shortly, he identifies it prophetically with the unfolding career of Congreve; but he normally accepts the compromise identified by Fowler in which the time of Shakespeare represented the apogee of genius and adherence to Nature while his own represented the apogee of civility and polish, separating out the two elements that for epic had been divided by the Ancients in a similar way between Homer and Virgil. Shakespeare was to be seen as inaugurating a subcycle of the Homeric kind within the larger cycle of world drama but, by doing so before the normal process of cyclical maturation had taken effect within his own historical phase, produced towering works of genius that in many fundamental respects remained flawed. Strikingly, in Dryden’s critiques of Shakespeare, the application of different cyclical models may give rise to differing estimates of achievement for the same works. The ‘Homeric’ curve of genius and adherence to Nature, descending from an initial peak, places him in unquestioned supremacy, whereas the ‘normal-curve’ graph of rising correctness has him fairly low on the incline. So, Shakespeare is both a master of elocution and a fumbler at grammar.61 Yet it would be wrong to see this disparity (which was to be softened as Dryden’s views evolved) as evidence of knowing or unknowing inconsistency. Rather, both cycles are useful templates available from the toolbox, to be employed according to the particular kind of illumination they offer and the particular expository task at hand. Difficulties in ranking individual practices, achievements or

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authors can be dealt with by introducing new subcycles that follow their own independent tendencies; in fact, any individual aspect of dramatic practice could be made the substance of a cycle of its own, following either of the two principal kinds examined or others subtly varied. In this way separate narratives could be – and were – implied of the evolution of such matters as characterization, versification, correctness, poetic justice and fidelity in representation, which did not need to coincide. In ‘To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve, on his Comedy, call’d, The Double-Dealer’, each of Fletcher, Jonson, Etherege, Southerne and Wycherley is introduced as standing at the highest point of different existing cycles, all of which, however, had to be redrawn so as to peak with Congreve.62 Related cycles subject to the same external circumstances might easily coincide and would inevitably interact to some degree upon each other but might equally well diverge according to their individual dynamic principles. The cyclical modelling of history still has its enthusiasts today. Studies of the evolution of economic systems invoke it at every level, from the alternation of periods of plenty and poverty to the historical movement of the stock market. The currently fashionable return to the writing of world histories is heavily reliant on diagnoses of cyclic movement.63 Franco Moretti’s influential Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History argues in terms that would have made immediate sense to Dryden that ‘the cycle [is] the hidden thread of literary history.’64 The biomathematician Ian Stewart has explored the workings of simple numerical ratios in the formation of a wide range of physical systems along lines that might productively be applied to Moretti’s data.65 Marxism as a doctrine of historical explanation has strong cyclic elements, though in its case the cycles remain embedded in an overriding narrative of ascent which is the reverse of the older model of secular decline, and which Dryden would have rejected as Utopian. Darwinism, while seen as progressive over the long term as a grand narrative of increasing organic complexity, divides the history of individual species into innumerable cycles of ascent followed by descent into extinction in a way that would also have appealed to Dryden had he been capable of accepting its materialistic premise. (One should note that Darwinian logic in no way rules out the possibility of a universal secular decline that would leave the planet ruled by the cockroach.) Historiographers as diverse as Spengler, Braudel and Foucault invoke an implied cyclic determinism, differing only in their interpretation of its causes and likely future consequences. That cyclical approaches still encounter scholarly resistance results from two powerful intellectual influences of the recent past: the structuralist vogue for explanatory models that placed the determinants

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of history in a timeless space outside the flux of chronology, and the poststructuralist and ‘revisionist’ blanket denial of the validity of both grand narratives and deterministic micronarratives of the kind that fascinate Moretti. As historians become more adept at the application of data-mining techniques to archival information, one may expect to see these objections less and less regarded. Dryden’s settled habit of interpreting events in the world of his own time as recurrences of those of the Biblical and classical pasts came easily to a mind that accepted the idea of a common human nature governed by ‘natural Instinct’: For Mankind being the same in all ages, agitated by the same passions, and mov’d to action by the same interests, nothing can come to pass, but some President of the like nature has already been produc’d, so that having the causes before our eyes, we cannot easily be deceiv’d in the effects, if we have Judgment enough but to draw the parallel.66 But the question at the moment is not one of the validity or otherwise of cyclic determinism, or that of the nature of the mechanisms by which it functions, but the way in which identified cultural cycles might be used in a heuristic way for the elucidation of texts. Critical practices that may puzzle when we try to relate them to some overarching theory become less of a difficulty when accepted simply as tools from the toolkit to be selected according to their explanatory potential. In Of Dramatick Poesie, Crites’s application of the ‘Homeric’ profile of descent from an initial perfection is qualified by Eugenius, who, having declared, ‘there is no man more ready to adore those great Greeks and Romans than I am,’ adds a defence of his own century, slyly supported by a quotation from Horace in which the Roman deplores the hostility to innovation of his contemporaries – bringing in an Ancient to confound the Ancients.67 He then proceeds to criticize Greek and Roman drama on the grounds of the staleness and repetitiousness of its plots, its lack of effective love scenes, the irregularity of its act divisions, its reliance on a narrow range of stock characters, its failure to punish vice and reward virtue and its inability to equal ‘the excellent Scenes of Passion in Shakespeare, or in Fletcher’.68 In this way the speaker replaces a cycle of secular descent with one of slow ascent through a series of subcycles, partly successive and partly overlapping, to a summit that was only reached in the drama of the ‘last age’. Dryden echoes some of these criticisms of the Ancients in the ‘Heads of an Answer to Rymer’ and the Dedication to Examen Poeticum, noting in the former that

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‘For the Characters, they are neither so many nor so various in Sophocles and Euripides, as in Shakespear and Fletcher’; however, in the preface to Oedipus he is prepared to concede that ancient simplicity might still be ‘the most Natural, and the best’, as, under a different cyclic model privileging a noble primitivism that was invoked by Swift in The Battle of the Books and Gulliver’s second voyage, it could equally well be supported.69 Once again, alternative, even contradictory models can each be allowed heuristic value and are to be deployed according to the occasion of any given investigation. The story of epic was clearly, in Dryden’s eyes, one of decline, while that of the drama had progressive features to set against others that had still properly to be evaluated. This last problem is taken up by the two succeeding speakers of Of Dramatick Poesie, who argue over the location of the apogee of the postRenaissance dramatic cycle in its progression from crude beginnings to inevitable decadence. The case for French superiority is put by Lisideius, though with the concession that the English might have triumphed in their place had it not been for the Puritan suppression of stage performance. The nub of his argument is that the French write more regularly than the English and with greater respect for the ‘rules’ – of which more shortly. Lisideius accepts Eugenius’s argument for the history of drama being one of progressive, albeit uneven, cyclic ascent, but disagrees over the location of the apogee of the current subcycle. Neander then contests this proFrench view in terms which are to recur throughout Dryden’s career and which, while respectful of French theory, are dismissive of French practice for reasons similar to those used by Eugenius to disparage the Ancients. French subjection of creativity to criticism stifles the ability of the works so created to give pleasure and, therefore, instruction (dependent on the prior giving of pleasure), which was the primary social goal of the drama. Recognition of Dryden’s reliance on cyclical models of literary history helps to explain the otherwise puzzling eulogy of Shakespeare that is the most often quoted passage from Of Dramatick Poesie. To begin then with Shakespeare; he 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 learn’d; he needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature; he look’d inwards, and found her there.70

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The oddity here is not the vehemence of Dryden’s praise but the fact that this conferring of apogeal status fails to be drawn on more than glancingly in the rest of the work, which gives its major attention to Jonson. Deference to the Jonsonian allegiance of Buckhurst and Sedley must be one reason, but a more telling one is that the megacycle to which this privileging of Shakespeare belongs is not the principal concern of the dialogue. Genius, as Fowler implies, is independent of cycles: it can erupt anywhere and, while its appearance may modify the profiles of the cycles within which it appears, it is otherwise of no assistance in achieving an historical understanding of literary phenomena. Having acknowledged that Shakespeare possessed it and that this allowed him to play the founding, Homeric role in English drama, Dryden turns his attention to a range of much more restrictive cycles related to the growth and decline of courtly refinement, in which Shakespeare’s relationship to his successors is of a markedly different kind. Responsiveness to ‘Nature’ is an early paradigm feature whose significance will vary depending on whether it occurs as part of narratives of ascent or of decline. In the hands of unskilled beginners, like the early practitioners of satirical drama whose achievement is summarized in the ‘Discourse on the Origin and Progress of Satire’ prefixed to the Juvenal, following Nature without the simultaneous possession of genius will produce crude work that requires to be polished over a long process of artistic evolution. Dryden addresses this disparity between Shakespeare as the founding genius and Shakespeare as the inferior (because temporally ‘misplaced’) theatrical craftsman by invoking a fundamental unevenness. 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, insipid; his Comick wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into Bombast. But he is alwayes 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.71 Dryden also believed that Shakespeare’s dramaturgy was not perfected in a single Homeric moment but had to be acquired through experience. Troilus, he assures us, must have been written ‘in the Aprenticeship of his Writing’; he also believed that ‘Shakespear’s own Muse her Pericles first bore’ – in both cases incorrectly.72 (It seems never to have occurred to him that the achievement of Homer may have rested on that of now lost forerunners rather than

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his having lived in the radiant dawn of humanity.) In Shakespeare’s case the superiority to immediate predecessors must have seemed self-evident, Marlowe being a forgotten figure. Having invoked Shakespeare’s genius, Dryden then leaves the topic in order to consider a number of specific dramaturgical features in which he is no longer so favourably placed. Viewed from a strictly historicist perspective, this approach is open to criticism, but the objection is less urgent if, as suggested earlier, we choose to see cyclic reasoning less as an end in itself than as a way of getting to work with texts. Historical approximations, even errors, may be more serviceable for this purpose than exact scholarship. Indeed, cyclical reasoning, as we have just seen, may easily encourage mistaken attempts to correct the records of past happenings – thus, Dryden’s howler that the purity of Latin was ‘more corrupted’ in the time of Persius than that of Horace and Juvenal, when chronologically he falls between them.73 Dryden’s most striking attempt to establish an apogeal moment in the cycle of English drama occurs in ‘To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve’, published in 1694. D. F. McKenzie’s new edition of Congreve, by looking beyond the five plays to the poems, fiction, criticism and libretti, has replicated Congreve’s own rebranding of himself in his three-volume collected edition of 1710 from playwright to exemplary Man of Letters, a status validated by Pope in honouring him with dedication of his own Homer.74 For Dryden, Congreve’s excellence is not the product simply of genius but of a career that promises to form the summit of a cycle whose shape had hitherto been prefigured quite differently. As we have seen, Dryden had been in genuine doubt about the standing of his own generation in the wider narratives of literary ascent and decline. The advent of Congreve showed that what might well have become a permanent falling away from the achievement of Shakespeare and Jonson was only a temporary lapse prior to a new ascent: Well then; the promis’d hour is come at last; The present Age of Wit obscures the past: Strong were our Syres; and as they Fought they Writ, Conqu’ring with force of Arms, and dint of Wit; Theirs was the Gyant Race, before the Flood; And thus, when Charles Return’d, our Empire stood. Like Janus he the stubborn Soil manur’d, With Rules of Husbandry the rankness cur’d: Tam’d us to manners, when the Stage was rude; And boistrous English Wit, with Art indu’d. Our Age was cultivated thus at length;

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But what we gain’d in skill we lost in strength. Our Builders were, with want of Genius, curst; The second Temple was not like the first . . . So far the apogee is still sited in the age of the ‘giant race’ and the subcyclic progress made under the wise encouragement of Charles II seen as falling under an anticline, but Congreve, ‘the best Vitruvius’, while equalling the beauties of his immediate predecessors, has restored the ‘strength’ (a key term with regard to Shakespeare) that seemed to have ebbed. Moreover, Congreve is to be measured not only against an overarching cycle of cultural achievement but over a range of embedded microcycles in each of which he has excelled his most distinguished predecessors. In easie Dialogue is Fletcher’s Praise: He mov’d the mind, but had not power to raise. Great Johnson did by strength of Judgment please: Yet doubling Fletcher’s Force, he wants his Ease . . . But both to Congreve justly shall submit, One match’d in Judgment, both o’er-match’d in Wit. This achievement of new heights also applies to his postdiluvian contemporaries: In Him all Beauties of this Age we see; Etherege his Courtship, Southern’s Purity; The Satire, Wit, and Strength of Manly Witcherly. Congreve’s writing is polished and ‘regular’ in the approved modern way, but this is the lesser of his praises. He is also possessed of a higher attribute that until then had been a sole possession: Time, Place, and Action, may with pains be wrought, But Genius must be born; and never can be taught. This is Your Portion; this Your Native Store; Heav’n that but once was Prodigal before, To Shakespeare gave as much; she cou’d not give him more.75 The last line can be read in two ways, either that Nature had given Congreve the same quantity of genius as she had bestowed on Shakespeare or that she had given Shakespeare only genius and not the powers of judgement

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and regularity enjoyed by Congreve as a result of his living at a more auspicious part of the cycle. In either case the effect of the praise is to post-date the apogeal moment of English drama by a century. The negative aspect of this elevation of Congreve was the near inevitability of subsequent decline, and, indeed, following the year of Dryden’s death, Congreve’s stellar stage career was to cease, with the lure of a gentlemanly lifestyle extinguishing whatever passion he possessed for labouring in the vineyard of commercial theatre. English drama itself was to share this decadence, with little work of comparable significance being produced for over a century and a half after Congreve’s own death in 1729. Pope and Swift were in no doubt that they inhabited a period of cultural decline – thus, The Dunciad and Gulliver’s fourth voyage. Of course, Dryden’s praise of Congreve is not to be taken literally – this was, after all, a poem of encouragement to a young friend – but it is valuable for its unusually frank revelation of the cyclic basis of his thinking and of the ways this influenced his assessment of his own and Shakespeare’s strengths and weaknesses.

The Rules and the Unities If cultural history can validly be plotted as successive or interlinked cycles of development from imperfection to perfection then back to imperfection, it follows that the practices characterizing periods of high achievement should embody standards of accomplishment that may be set against equally recognizable markers of primitiveness or decadence. The method is admittedly circular, since practices classified as apogeal will be those by which the critic has already identified the high point as being a high point, but circularity seldom seems to be an obstacle to literary theorizing. In any case, some weeding out of the contingent from the essential is always permissible, as with Dryden’s rejection of that ‘unprofitable incumbrance’, the classical chorus.76 It has already been shown that not all optimal values may be manifest at any specific age of outstanding achievement, such as the Athens of Pericles or the Rome of Augustus. If Virgil was inferior to Homer in ‘his fiery way of writeing’ while exceeding him in ‘exactness, & sobriety’, then neither of them was truly capable of the ideal epic.77 Indeed, it might be impossible – were one not a Congreve – to excel in one apogeal requirement without some sacrifice of others. Nonetheless, Homer and Virgil do identify two kinds of excellence to be looked for in the work of any given writer of epic. The need to determine relative degrees of individual success or failure as a means of enunciating curves encourages the

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use of the comparative method of analysis that was Dryden’s forte. Thus, in his account of satire, having travelled from the crude beginnings to the time of Lucilius, he examines Horace, Juvenal and Persius as representatives of different kinds of ideal practice, finding each preferable according to different criteria, though Persius has moved part of the way towards decadence. Horace and Juvenal are then compared in the light of such attributes as urbanity, raillery, design, elegance, the curiosa felicitas, vigour, sublimity, greatness of soul and the ‘Commonwealth genius’, with Horace judged superior in some and Juvenal in others, but neither achieving the fusion of talents that would have produced the perfect satirist. The search for a curve-defining summit is finally, though only tentatively, decided in favour of Juvenal, but the most useful outcome of the exercise has been the determination of timeless markers of successful satire. Bad practice could be identified in the same way, as in Crites’s catalogue of the failings of Robert Wild, and Lisideius’s of those of Richard Flecknoe.78 Once aesthetically desirable and undesirable features could be so established, it became possible to analyse their cognitive effects on readers and spectators. Thus, the ‘rules’ and the ‘unities’, which occupy so much of the attention of the speakers in Of Dramatick Poesie, and which, having first been isolated as examples of historical best practice, are then shown to be essential to the drama’s enforcing of conviction as part of its ethical function of schooling the passions. In Dryden’s earliest critical essay, the brief dedication to The Rival Ladies, he asks: ‘For the Stage being the Representation of the World, and the Actions in it, how can it be imagin’d, that the Picture of Human Life can be more Exact than Life it Self is?’79 The neoclassical response was to reduce that gap to a minimum – ‘the nearer and fewer those imaginary places are, the greater resemblance they will have to Truth: and Reason which cannot make them one, will be more easily led to suppose them so.’80 Crites in Of Dramatick Poesie argues for restricting the duration of the action to as close an approximation as practical to the duration of performance and the place of action as far as possible to a single locale (‘for the Stage, on which it is represented, being but one and the same place, it is unnatural to conceive it many’). He would apply the unity of time to the parts of a play as well as the whole: it follows, that all the parts of it are (as near as may be) to be equally subdivided; namely, that one act take not up the suppos’d time of half a day; which is out of proportion to the rest: since the other four are then to be straightned within the compass of the remaining half; for it is unnatural that one Act, which being spoke or written, is not longer than the rest, should be suppos’d longer by the Audience. . . .81

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He also insists that a dramatist should present a single action to which ‘all things in his Play, even the very obstacles, are to be subservient.’82 This third unity, that of action, meets the related need of enforcing attention. In the ‘Life of Plutarch’ Dryden explains that ‘the mind is not capable of digesting many things at once, nor of conceiving fully any more than one Idea at a time.’83 For Crites, any violation of these three rules, as well as being ‘unnatural’, destroys the ‘likelihood of truth’ that is essential to the success of the dramatic illusion and produces a situation where that which should be the business of a day, takes up in some of them an age; instead of one action they are the Epitomes of a mans life; and for one spot of ground (which the Stage should represent) we are sometimes in more Countries then the Map can show us.84 So, we might add, Pericles and Antony and Cleopatra. Supplementing the effect of the unities is that of liaison des scènes (19), by which the departure and arrival of characters are so devised that the stage is never left bare, another subtlety much treasured by Dryden and his disciples, especially Congreve, who for Tonson’s 1710 edition of his complete works adopted the French practice by which each arrival or departure creates a new scene. The observance of the rules, first divined by the Ancients by the light of Nature, could in a philosophical age be shown to enhance the operations of the understanding. Dryden never claims that following the rules would of itself make a capable playwright, but he certainly believed that neglecting them would harm the work of a naturally gifted but untutored one. Similarly, a critic of the acted drama could be guided in judgement by knowledge of the rules and might even adopt the role of a literary policeman entrusted with enforcing them, but could never rely on them mechanically; indeed, the ad hoc, dialogic nature of his own critical practice often put him at odds with principles for which, considered as principles, he had sincere respect (the subtext of his reply to Rymer). So, veneration of French theory as a conceptual system could coexist with misgivings as to its adequacy for the appraisal of success in dramatic writing. When Lisideius is made to praise French drama on the basis of its observance of French rules, Neander has little difficulty in pulling apart that argument. In practice Dryden cites the precepts of the theorists when it suits his turn and finds excuses to dissent from them when that is not the case, or when he feels moved to a little patriotic tub-thumping. The unity of action is of a more fundamental nature than those of place and time in that it applies to all forms of representational writing, not just the drama. Dryden does not deny that irregular dramas might still entertain but denies that they could

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perform the serious business of the heroic poet and tragic dramatist. In the Dedication to the Aeneid, Ariosto is reproved for introducing ‘trifling Novels’ as episodes into Orlando furioso ‘By which the Reader is miss-led into another sort of Pleasure, opposite to that which is design’d in an Epick Poem’.85 The unity of action is also used by Dryden as a criterion for judging the excellence of satire in his 1693 ‘Discourse’. The good satirist would direct each poem to the reprobation of a particular vice or folly within a book or larger unity that collectively addressed a wider range.86 In the ‘Parallel betwixt Painting and Poetry’ both painter and poet are required ‘to put all things in a beautifull order and harmony, that the whole may be of a piece’ and to reject ‘Excrescences, which belong not to the Body, but deform it’.87 The same reasoning influences his dismissive attitude towards Shakespeare’s history plays and the English fondness for double plots.88 Dryden wavers throughout his career over the second matter, sometimes favouring classical strictness and sometimes accepting a need for the dramatist to give pleasure of ‘another sort’ to audiences as a means to their reformation, but always requiring the exclusion of non-congruent elements. Underlying each of his instances is the assumption that the human mind, naturally sceptical and wandering, has to be won despite itself to a belief in the plausibility of represented fictions. Jonson’s The Silent Woman, by obeying all three unities, exemplifies dramaturgy at its most satisfyingly probable; Shakespeare, by contrast, presents some of the worst possible examples. It apparently escaped Dryden’s notice that The Tempest and The Comedy of Errors obey the unities of space and time perfectly, though he was aware of the regularity of the Merry Wives. Troilus and Cressida seemed a total mess. His 1678 rewriting of this play is his strongest statement of his belief in the superiority of the classical ideal over earlier English practice. Descartes, another strong influence on Dryden’s thought, similarly advocated ‘the uniformity of a rational scheme’ in both societies and sciences,89 yet Dryden differs from the Cartesian model of lucidity proposed in the Discourse on the Method in being primarily concerned with conviction, which is subjective, rather than with a mechanistic realism that has at one level to hold faith with the mathematical. The distinction is obliquely touched on in a passage in the scene-setting exordium to Of Dramatick Poesie directed at the Presbyterian versifier Robert Wild who is described as one who is so much a well-willer to the Satire, that he intends, at least, to spare no man; and though he cannot strike a blow to hurt any, yet ought to be punish’d for the malice of the action; as our Witches are justly hang’d because they think themselves to be such; and suffer deservedly for believing they did mischief, because they meant it.90

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It was enough for the ethical ends of the drama that actor and audience shared the experience of the passion presented, irrespective of verisimilitude. When Dryden says of Hart’s Rollo, ‘we stab him in our Minds for every Offence which he commits,’ he is referring to a moral and emotional response to performance, not any willing suspension of disbelief that would deceive an audience into believing that it saw an actual Rollo actually offending.91 What it saw was Hart and later Betterton personating Rollo performing a familiar and admired enactment of certain nominated passions.92 As Stern has demonstrated, actors both of Shakespeare’s and Dryden’s time were strongly egotistic. They learned their parts in isolation, from ‘sides’ that contained only their own lines and cues, and held few group rehearsals prior to the first day, which was a glorified dress rehearsal. They performed to the audience, not to each other, and would often drop out of character when they were not actually speaking. It was habitual for them to acknowledge friends or persons of distinction present in the audience, especially those seated in the stage boxes. Such close ‘instruction’ as they received was one-on-one rather than corporate. Acknowledging this, pre-1642 playwrights wrote ‘for a part-based system of acting’ – they were contrapuntalists rather than homophonists.93 Repertoire pieces, such as the plays of Shakespeare, must sometimes have been revived with no group rehearsal at all. After the Restoration, while D’Avenant, leading the younger and more tractable troupe, seems to have broken to some degree with this tradition, it persisted strongly among Killigrew’s ill-disciplined stars and can be detected behind the dramaturgy of Dryden’s own heroic plays. What mattered was the effectiveness with which the play in performance worked as a machine for purging the passions. To be effective at this task required that the play should, foremost, ‘entertain’, a significant point of departure for Dryden’s later criticism, and a sufficient reason for judicious, relatively minor violations of the unities but not major infractions. So where did this leave Shakespeare? Quite happily placed with regard to Dryden’s own dramaturgy and authorial sense of worth but less well so for modern readers, who find it difficult to understand why he should be subjected to critical standards that seem so ill-contrived to reveal his virtues as a dramatist. Yet justifications can be found. Respect for the rules grew from an estimate of an audience’s receptivity that is not so outrageous if we think in terms of inattentive Restoration playgoers watching in an undarkened auditorium, regarding themselves as an integral part of the show, and untrained at suppressing their social relationship with the performers. Second, the moral work of drama was wholly premised on the notion of its being experienced in the playhouse. This requirement is

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insisted on in the Dedication to the Aeneid, when Dryden has to explain why the unities of space and time do not apply as strictly to epic and satire as they do to tragedy and comedy. The vital distinction is that drama directed itself to the management of the passions while epic was concerned with the refinement of manners (a more reflective procedure94) and satire with the reprobation of vice. The passions were ‘violent’ by their nature and ‘acute Distempers require Medicines of a strong and speedy operation’ – a form of shock therapy to be administered during representation in a dedicated location.95 Silent or even vocal reading of a playtext, as we shall see in the next section, could never have the same therapeutic effectiveness. The unities were one of several means by which this experience could be intensified; however, if Shakespeare were to be removed from the theatre into the wholly imaginative space of poetic narrative, the need to subject the audience to passional shock therapy would be reduced and the texts could be used for a different, more gradual kind of reformation, involving the manners as well as the passions. Dryden, for reasons that we will now consider, found that transition difficult to make, yet it would eventually permit a much more effective defence of Shakespeare against the attacks of Rymer while also allowing his primacy among dramatists to be reinscribed from the carelessly printed quartos of the playhouse to the elegantly ranked, Turkey-leather-bound octavos of literature.

Stage and Page Complicating any understanding of Dryden’s view of the social tasks of the drama is the question whether Shakespeare was to be judged from the effect of his plays in the theatre or from solitary or communal reading. We must also give further attention to the influence of the actor – the egotistical, negligent Restoration actor, interested primarily in putting on a personal show. Most modern discussions of Dryden approach his critical texts as if they were literary criticism in the term’s current meaning. This is justifiable with regard to the preface to the Aeneid, which is about epic, and the ‘Discourse on the Origin and Progress of Satire’, but is misleading for the introductions to the Plutarch and the Polybius, which are about historiography; the ‘Parallel betwixt Painting and Poetry’, which is an attempt at aesthetic theory; and nearly all of the early writing about plays, which should be classified as either drama criticism or theatre criticism. This last point is sometimes directly evident and sometimes only circumstantially. Directly, one quickly discovers that plays Dryden could not encounter in

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the theatre were unlikely to attract his attention in the first place, while nearly all his criticism of specific Shakespearean plays invokes the selection belonging to the repertoire of the Restoration King’s Company (of which until 1678 he was a shareholder) and, absent until the union of 1682 from that of their rivals, the Duke’s Company.96 Circumstantially, the readers to whom he addressed his earlier criticism were also likely to be playgoers, having obtained their quartos from booksellers located close to the theatres. Richard Bentley’s shop was only a few paces from the Drury Lane playhouse; Tonson’s was a little to the south in the Strand. Reading was more likely to be a way of previewing or revisiting performances than a substitute for them. Consider Dryden’s patron, the Earl of Mulgrave, on this topic: Shakespear and Fletcher are the wonders now: Consider them, and read them o’re and o’re, Go see them play’d, then read them as before. For though in many things they grosly fail, Over our Passions still they so prevail, That our own grief by theirs is rockt asleep, The dull are forc’d to feel, the wise to weep.97 We must remember too that the reading described was still at this period likely to be aloud with a single voice performing all the parts. Dramatists would introduce their plays to the actors in this way, while in the domestic circle the prolocutor would be the most fluent reader, placed closest to the candle. But even the silently read play still had to be judged by its potential effect on an imagined audience whose passions were to be tamed within the real time of performance. Epic and tragedy, as we saw from the Dedication to the Aeneid, had different tasks and different methods of achieving them, of which those of the tragedy could be properly realized only in the playhouse. I would distinguish drama criticism from theatre criticism by defining it as concerned with the play as acted, or to borrow Hume and Milhous’s term, the notion of ‘producible interpretation’, but not with any particular performance by any particular performers, though these may be assessed in a comparative way.98 Drama criticism accepts the activity of reading plays as a valid one but secondary to that of witnessing them: the silent reader has to contribute an understanding of performance values and is not allowed to treat the script as a novel or poem in dialogue. Theatre criticism, by contrast, is concerned with the effect of the performed show on real audiences: ‘the sense is lost if it be not taken flying’ was Dryden’s

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way of putting it.99 The distinction is present in his mind when he writes of Fletcher’s A King and No King (a King’s Company stock play): ‘The taking of this Play, amongst many others, I cannot wholly ascribe to the excellency of the action; for I finde it moving when it is read.’100 In this case he is able to compare both experiences to the implied detriment of the second. A stage version, as we will find, might also be significantly different in respect of length and many textual details from one available in print or manuscript. On this basis I would argue that Dryden’s dominant mode was that of drama criticism but of an unusual kind in that it took place within a theatrical culture that did not permit rival performances of the same work. We need, therefore, to know which Shakespearean plays were known to Dryden from performance and which only from the page and in which textual forms he would have encountered them there. We will shortly discover that the two patent companies had significantly different attitudes towards fidelity to the inherited text and that Shakespeare performance was affected by these attitudes. At the reopening of the playhouses in 1660 the two patentees, Thomas Killigrew and Sir William D’Avenant, competed to gain exclusive control of pre-1641 titles. Killigrew’s position was a privileged one because his company’s institutional descent from the pre-war King’s Men gave him a legal claim on their repertoire, which included all the plays of Shakespeare. On 12 December 1660 D’Avenant, otherwise shut out, managed to extract a royal warrant giving him sole rights to perform The Tempest, Measure for Measure, Much Ado, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Henry VIII, King Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet along with two non-Shakespearean plays, Denham’s The Sophy and The Duchess of Malfi, and his own dramatic works. He was also granted temporary rights over three Beaumont and Fletcher titles and Pericles, which he was later able to prolong. For some years these plays were to remain his only share of the pre-1641 repertoire. While D’Avenant was an enthusiastic reviser and modernizer of Shakespeare and Fletcher, Killigrew relied conservatively on the power of his two leading men, Charles Hart and Michael Mohun, to electrify straight, if shortened, versions of the originals. His company could also boast a more direct performance inheritance from the Caroline playhouses than its rival. Hart and Mohun had been actors before the war; Hart was a boy player in the King’s Men, with whom he probably played some Shakespearean women’s roles. He had also travelled on the Continent and was able to adapt the graceful contemporary French style and the associated quasi-musical declamation that in England was known as ‘speaking to a tone’. These were the performers and the performance style for which Dryden created his rhymed heroic plays.

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In Nathaniel Lee’s The Rival Queens, Hart was a spellbinding Alexander the Great to Mohun’s honest soldier Clytus. In comedy, Hart’s grace and matinee-idol allure proved ideal for Dryden and Wycherley: he was Palamede in Marriage A-la-Mode to Mohun’s Rhodophil, and Horner in The Country Wife to Mohun’s surly Pinchwife. His pairing with Nell Gwyn in a series of King’s Company ‘gay-couple’ dramas is seen by Peter Holland as having invented ‘a new possibility of form’ for Restoration comedy.101 But something more forceful must have been required for Hart’s Othello, played to Mohun’s Iago, and Julius Caesar, in which he was a famous Brutus and Mohun a perfect foil as Cassius. It is likely that these versions were influenced by the two performers’ early memories of the pre-1641 King’s Men’s Joseph Taylor and John Lowin in the same roles. Hart had co-starred as the Duchess in Shirley’s The Cardinal and as Euphrasia/Bellario in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster with Taylor and Lowin. Killigrew’s company also did The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which John Lacy played Falstaff, and Henry IV, Part I, in which William Cartwright was Falstaff and Hart Hotspur. Hart’s Othello and Brutus were honoured by Downes, together with his roles in Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No King, The Maid’s Tragedy and Rollo, with the recollection that ‘towards the latter End of his Acting; if he Acted in any one of these but once in a Fortnight, the House was fill’d as at a New Play.’102 Hart and Mohun also paired in Jonson’s The Alchemist, Volpone and The Silent Woman. The effect of their performances on Dryden, who must have seen them many times, is indicated by the centrality of the plays mentioned to his criticism. His response also reflects the impact made on a younger and more impressionable man of the theatre in the heady, formative days of the stage’s Restoration. But what of Betterton’s Shakespeare performances for the Duke’s Company at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Dorset Garden? D’Avenant’s 1660 petition for rights over Hamlet and the other small group of titles had been couched as ‘a proposition of reformeinge some of the most ancient Playes that were playd at Blackfriers and of makeinge them, fitt, for the Company of Actors appointed vnder his direction and Command’, which he proceeded to do.103 Where Killigrew respected, D’Avenant and his dramatists enthusiastically rewrote in the interest of up-to-dateness, so removing his prompt-book versions even further from earlier stage tradition. A measure of ‘reformeinge’ was essential simply in order to adjust the plays to performance in the new indoor, candle-lit theatres equipped with wing-and-shutter scenery and with women’s parts now played by actresses, who had less need to verbalize their femininity. A significant proportion of words had also to be omitted to accommodate slower playing times. It was standard practice

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to cut obscure or redundant verbiage and to remove material that did not contribute to the core action or was politically embarrassing, as in the company’s performing versions of Hamlet and Macbeth. The first of these was published in 1676 as The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark. As it is now Acted at his Highness the Duke of York’s Theatre with the prefatory note: This Play being too long to be conveniently Acted, such places as might be least prejudicial to the Plot or Sense, are left out upon the Stage: but that we may no way wrong the incomparable Author, are here inserted according to the Original Copy with this Mark “ Shakespeare’s eighteenth-century editor Lewis Theobald suspected that Dryden had a hand in determining these cuts.104 The Macbeth was printed in 1674 as Macbeth a Tragedy: with all the Alterations, Amendments, Additions, and New Songs: As it’s now Acted at the Dukes Theatre. Further generic changes arose from the introduction of spectacle, music and dancing as seen in Macbeth’s flyings for the witches; dances by Josiah Priest; elaborate score by Matthew Locke; and the conversion of The Tempest into a semi-opera, with the notorious addition of sisters for Miranda and Caliban, and a brother for Ferdinand. The Duke’s Company’s greater preoccupation with spectacle led to kinds of textual dislocation that were generally avoided by their Drury Lane rivals. The permission to perform D’Avenant’s own plays was used to mount a radically rewritten Measure for Measure as The Law Against Lovers (also drawing on Much Ado) and The Two Noble Kinsmen as The Rivals. Lear, according to John Downes, was acted ‘as Mr. Shakespear Wrote it; before it was alter’d by Mr. Tate’, though no doubt there was the usual pruning and modernizing.105 Tate’s version, first performed in 1680, was more typical of the Duke’s Company approach. It gave the play the happy ending preferred by Dr Johnson, with Lear restored to his throne and a love affair between Edgar and a preserved Cordelia. In the previous year Romeo and Juliet, obtained under the 1660 grant, had been even more radically altered for Betterton by having scenes shoehorned into Otway’s Roman political drama The History and Fall of Caius Marius. Prior to this it had sometimes been performed with a happy ending supplied by James Howard. Judith Milhous has demonstrated how D’Avenant turned the drawback of leading a young and inexperienced company into an advantage by innovation, strong management and his skills as a showman.106 Betterton continued in this path. On 20 August 1668, shortly after D’Avenant’s death, the Duke’s Company was granted rights over a longer list of plays that included Timon of Athens (rewritten by Shadwell in 1678), Troilus and Cressida (rewritten by Dryden

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in 1679) and the three parts of Henry VI (rewritten by Crowne in 1680–81). This claim provoked Killigrew to reassert his rights in 108 plays ‘formerly acted at the Blackfryers’, which, along with much Jonson and Fletcher, which receive pride of place in the list, specified The Winter’s Tale, King John, Richard II, Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labours Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, All’s Well that Ends Well, the two parts of Henry the Fourth, Richard III, Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Othello, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline.107 He did nothing with most of these titles that were not already repertory pieces. The reigning attitude at D’Avenant’s and Betterton’s houses is echoed in Dryden’s dismissive account of Troilus and Cressida, from which he ‘undertook to remove that heap of Rubbish, under which many excellent thoughts lay wholly bury’d’.108 Dryden could have seen Betterton as Hamlet, Henry VIII, Macbeth, Lear, Timon, Mercutio and Othello, though in the last case not until after the union of the two companies in 1682. Pepys praised his Hamlet as ‘beyond imagination’ and ‘the best part, I believe, that ever man acted’. His delivery of ‘To be or not to be . . .’ was so impressive that Pepys had it given a musical setting that could well preserve aspects of the original declamation.109 Downes noted that ‘No succeeding Tragedy for several Years got more Reputation, or Money to the Company than this.’110 Yet Dryden in his criticism displays hardly any interest in Hamlet as a play or Betterton as an actor. His only reference to the play is to the Player King’s monologue as an example of bad writing.111 In 1678, the year Dryden abandoned the declining King’s Company for Betterton’s troupe, he wrote a prologue for Troilus and Cressida in which Betterton, wearing a laurel wreath, personated Shakespeare, but this is not the same thing as performing a part written by Shakespeare. Otherwise Betterton still fails to figure in Dryden’s criticism except as a manager and play-doctor. One reason for this is that the post-1682 criticism is more concerned with poetry and historical writing than with the drama and, when it does touch on the drama, it is largely to amplify points already made or to relate it in a literary way to other genres. The emergence of Thomas Rymer as a rival drama critic and his patronage by the Dorset circle (of which more later) may have encouraged this reticence. But a further important reason for a lack of interest in Betterton’s Shakespeare roles is that, as we have just seen, they mostly appeared in very heavily rewritten versions of the plays. While Dryden praises Betterton’s ‘excellent action’ in his own Don Sebastian, it was Hart and Mohun, representing a purer tradition of Shakespeare performance, who retained the strongest hold on his imagination and most vividly foregrounded the

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disparity between the theatrical experience of a play and its experience as written or recited literature.112 The disparity is famously articulated in Dryden’s account of one of Hart’s favourite roles as the title character of Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois. Here Dryden ‘sometimes wonder’d, in the reading, what was become of those glaring Colours which amaz’d me in Bussy Damboys upon the Theatre’, dismissing the play in terms similar to those applied to Troilus as ‘at best, a scantling of wit which lay gasping for life, and groaning beneath a Heap of Rubbish’.113 Rymer makes the same point about another play: These say (for instance) a King and no King, pleases . . . I say that Mr. Hart pleases; most of the business falls to his share, and what he delivers, every one takes upon content; their eyes are prepossest and charm’d by his action, before ought of the Poets can approach their ears.114 These two passages are usually interpreted as expressions of a literary contempt for the theatre, but they might better be seen as awestruck tributes to its power over the passions – a power that was essential to the realization of the defining ethical purpose of the drama as explained in the Dedication to the Aeneid. While bad writing can be rescued by good acting, good writing can only be experienced at its full perfection through the same means. A play like Rymer’s much-trumpeted Edgar that could not pull its weight in the theatre was an even greater failure than one that fell flat on the page. When Dryden consoled Southerne over the failure of The Wives’ Excuse with the reassurance, ‘The Hearers may for want of Nokes repine, | But rest secure, the Readers will be thine,’ they both knew it was a poor second best. Like his failed rake-hero he had been dismissed with a ‘kind Civility’ but dismissed nonetheless, and it was time for him to return to school with the robuster talents of Etherege and Wycherley.115 The perfect comedy as measured by both theoretical criteria and power to please was, needless to say, The Silent Woman. It is the subject of an extended ‘Examen’ in Of Dramatick Poesie in which it is praised for its observance of the unities, the brilliance of its intrigue (‘the greatest and most noble of any pure unmix’d Comedy in any Language’), the delightfulness and variety of its characters and humours, the wit and acuteness of the dialogue, and the way in which the business of the plot ‘rises’ in every act.116 These things are to be measured by their real or presumed effect on a live audience, which in this case was by implication that of the King’s Theatre watching Hart and Mohun. As we have seen from the comments on Bussy and A King and no King, Dryden’s main concern is with what is heard (the ‘colours’ are

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verbal not visual) and Rymer’s is with what is seen, reflecting the difference between being a hearer and being a spectator. Dryden’s greater interest in the spoken is again evident in the priority given by him to diction among the elements of the drama.117 Discourses must be finely delivered to have their proper effect, and it looks very much as if there was something about the King’s Company style in declaiming Shakespeare that pleased Dryden more than the ‘low and grumbling’ delivery of a Betterton!118 The drawback of judging dramatic texts by their actual or estimated effectiveness in performance is that it is likely to prejudice critics against plays that they have never seen performed to their liking or at all. In Dryden’s case this clearly contributed to his low opinion of French and ancient drama. He never visited France and certainly never saw the masterpieces of Corneille, Quinault, Molière and Racine performed by the artists and in the theatres for which they were written. Troupes did cross the channel for brief seasons from time to time but neither their repertory nor their performers were of the highest class. At best they may have given him a sense of the prevailing style of declamation and gesture. His primary acquaintance came from the imperfect medium of the page. He would, of course, have been aware of the works adapted for the English stage, sometimes relatively faithfully, as in Orinda’s and the court dramatists’ rival translations of Corneille’s La Mort de Pompée but more often in extremely free versions, such as Crowne’s and Otway’s competing attempts at Racine’s Berenice or Behn’s and Shadwell’s at Molière’s Les Précieuses ridicules, which essayed nothing more than hewing materials for an English kind of play from a French quarry. He notes of an English version of Corneille’s Le Menteur that ‘when it came upon the English Stage, though well translated, and that part of Dorant acted to so much advantage by Mr. Hart, as I am confident it never receiv’d in its own Country, the most favourable to it would not put it in competition with many of Fletchers or Ben. Johnsons.’119 A similar reliance on an assumed performativity is displayed in 1693 in the dedicatory essay to Examen Poeticum: They content themselves with a thin Design, without Episodes, and manag’d by few Persons. Our Audience will not be pleas’d, but with variety of Accidents, an Underplot, and many Actours. They follow the Ancients too servilely, in the Mechanick Rules, and we assume too much License to our selves, in keeping them only in view, at too great a distance. But if our Audience had their Tasts, our Poets could more easily comply with them, than the French Writers cou’d come up to the Sublimity of our Thoughts, or to the difficult variety of our Designs.120

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What were essentially the same criticisms were directed at Greek and Roman drama. Yet the criteria by which Dryden assessed French and Ancient playwrights, known to him only from reading, were still those that applied to the acted play performing its specialized task of disciplining the passions. Indeed, the Greeks’ fault was not a literary one but that they ‘only gave us the Rudiments of a Stage, which they never finish’d.’121 By contrast, epic could always treat its themes ‘more amply . . . than the narrowness of the Drama can admit’,122 albeit that narrowness was imposed by exactly those critical prescriptions which were designed to make a tragedy an effective piece of passional shock therapy. It follows that Shakespeare, in order to be fully appreciated, had to be rescued from the Casualty Ward and taken to where a more leisurely and appreciative examination could be conducted. In the preface to Don Sebastian (1690) Dryden enumerates the advantages of this transfer. Unconstrained by limitations of time, readers would be able to search out subtleties of craftsmanship and ‘secret Beauties’; correct misconceptions acquired from performance (‘let them read the Play and think again’); and relish ‘the most poetical parts . . . Descriptions, Images, Similitudes, and Moral Sentences’, which in this case had largely been cut from the performing version.123 Instead of reflection succeeding response at a distance the two would become interwoven. This liberalization of Shakespeare from the iron grip of the playhouse also demanded that Dryden confront the thorny issue of the place drama was to occupy in a national literature. Keith Walker has argued that English literature was the invention of Jacob Tonson I, who, over his long publishing career, aimed at bringing together a body of carefully prepared collected editions of the most admired writers of the past and the present.124 Seeing that Dryden was Tonson’s star author among the living, he must himself be viewed as a participant in the earlier phase of this process and in the new status it bestowed on the printed drama. Tonson gave great attention to dramatists, producing Rowe’s Shakespeare, and a complete Beaumont and Fletcher, along with collected editions of Dryden himself, Congreve, Southerne, Otway, Farquhar, Lansdowne, Shadwell and Vanbrugh.125 He was also a member of the conger responsible for the six-volume Jonson edition of 1716. In this sense there is no doubt about the drama being part of literature considered as a bibliographical or bookselling entity. Shakespeare’s virtues might still be most vividly experienced in the theatre, but the primacy of his genius, along, as we shall see, with his significance as a political icon for the hereditary landed class, demanded his being afforded a greater centrality in national culture. The material nature of Tonson’s editions indicates that they were designed for readers rather

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than playgoers. Rowe’s The Works of Mr William Shakespeare; in Six Volumes of 1709 broke decisively with the clumsy folio format of the four previous editions. With its copperplate illustrations, rationalized ordering of elements (including the division of the plays into their modern acts and scenes) and elegant typography, it asserted a new cultural value for the read play. It was also an expensive 30 shillings; cheap editions of Shakespeare were not available at this period.126 A similar ambition is evident in the extraordinary care taken by Congreve in the creation of his own octavo collected edition of 1710, which, as Holland and McKenzie have both pointed out, was no less decisive a break with the conventions of the traditional play quarto. For Holland ‘the whole force of the ordinary play-quarto is towards a form of shorthand, providing a simple connection that the play-reader could make with his experience as play-goer.’ By contrast, Congreve’s graphic innovations, which were supplemented by quite heavy verbal revision, constituted ‘an entirely original approach to the presentation of contemporary drama, of the text as text, a deliberate obscuring of the actual theatrical performance in search of what a non-playgoing reader might comprehend’.127 While Dryden’s own lifetime editions of his works remained occasional and ad hoc, he had clear intimations of this widened, more reflective readership, which is essentially the same as that addressed in the Virgil and the Fables and which he conjures up as his ideal public for Don Sebastian.

The Nature of ‘Nature’ To observe this development is not to concur with the mistaken belief that Dryden was a reluctant dramatist, forced into a branch of writing for which he had no inborn affinity. This great cliché of Dryden criticism originated with the Victorians in an attempt to relieve him from the opprobrium attending Restoration comedy, because of its licentiousness, and the heroic plays, because of cultural incomprehension of what Johnson called – I think approvingly – their ‘illustrious depravity and majestick madness’. Dryden has always needed to be protected from the constitutionally humourless.128 Like all playwrights he was prone to grumble when his works received a hostile reception, but that happened relatively rarely. Indeed, as measured by printings, numbers of performances and, in my own view, artistic achievement, he is the most gifted dramatist of his half century. In his later years he found non-dramatic verse more congenial than plays because, as he several times tells us, it called for less effort and anxiety, allowing him to swim with the tide and

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amaze himself with his productivity, but his fantasy of writing an epic in the classical manner on King Arthur’s wars against the Saxons or the Black Prince’s conquest of Spain remained a fantasy, and one for which posterity has never expressed regret. His awareness of the advantages of the read over the performed play arose from an understandable desire that the reader should ‘find out those beauties of propriety, in thought and writing, which escap’d him in the tumult and hurry of representing’, but a much more pressing reason soon introduced itself.129 The later criticism’s concern with issues affecting all literature in preference to the narrower and more technical ones affecting writing for the playhouse took rise from a growing sense that the creation of an English literary canon needed an exemplar of transcendent achievement on which all else was to rest and that Shakespeare was the only realistic candidate for that role. No single one of Chaucer, Spenser or Jonson was capable of shouldering such a burden, while Milton was ruled out by his surly identification with faction. Shakespeare, too, was already a national possession in ways ranging from the power of the major plays as repertory staples down to their being drawn on for paintings, drolls, popular songs and other manifestations of national popular culture. The quality that secured this eminence was not obedience to the rules (commendable though that was) but the ‘greater Virtue’ of genius.130 The effects of genius deserved to be examined narrowly, philosophically and at leisure as well as in the throes of performer-induced passion. Criticism by its very nature encouraged this pursuit. ‘Genius’ is used by Dryden in a number of senses that have been documented by Jensen.131 It revealed itself most signally in a privileged comprehension of Nature, a second and even more frequently used key term, yet one whose precise meaning in any given context is not always apparent to a modern reader. This is not because Dryden was confused about what he was saying, but because the range of meanings housed under that convenient verbal umbrella, and which he and his readership were generally able to distinguish, was different from that which huddles under the same umbrella in contemporary English. Paul Hammond has performed a close reading of key passages concerning Shakespeare as a ‘natural’ writer, enumerating the lexical possibilities and proposing some useful intertextualities, yet there was never a single ‘Nature’ from which all these meanings had to derive.132 Given Dryden’s veneration of the Ancients and deep absorption in their languages, we also need to consider the range of senses then understood for the Latin ‘natura’ and the Greek ‘phusis’. Thomas Thomas’s Latin–English

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dictionary of 1587, which Dryden would have known, gives the following range of significations for’ natura’: Nature, which as Seneca saith, is nothing but God, or reason divine, sowne in all the world, and all the partes thereof : also the privie member of man or beast : that whereby a thing is properly in that kinde that it is : manners, conditions, facions, propertie, strength, vertue : natural inclination, or motion.133 Seneca is cited too restrictively here. The term as it appears in his writings was highly elastic, as Thomas E. Rosenmeyer has shown in an article which finds the same elasticity in the Greek cognate.134 From the very start, it seems, the term phusis covers a wealth of significances: from the bare sufficiency of ‘essence’ or ‘being’ through the condition of normalcy opposed to civilization and corruption, and the collective mass of physical phenomena (rerum natura), to the powerful resonance of a personified agency that governs the world.135 There is no trace here of the modern sense of nature as ‘the out-of-doors, especially a landscape unspoiled by human intrusion’ and only a tangential one of the mediaeval concept of ‘natura naturata, nature as it contrasts with cities and the laws’.136 Instead, the two dominant senses are the Aristotelian one of ‘the internal principle of movement in natural objects aiming at their telos’ (natura naturans) and a cosmic sense of nature as the overall interdependent totality of things.137 (C. S. Lewis called the latter ‘the dangerous sense’ because it is ‘the one we are readiest to intrude where it is not required’.138) Dryden was also well aware of Lucretius’s deployment of the term in De rerum natura, from which he has left five stunning translations. While Lucretius’s title refers to the nature of things, his text invokes a personified Nature who is to recur as the goddess of Alan of Lille’s mediaeval De planctu naturae, and, in Lewis’s formulation, ‘Great Mother Nature’.139 Nature in this sense could be invoked as an inspiring force, as happens directly or by implication in a number of Dryden’s references. His pronoun is always the feminine one (‘For Nature is still the same in all Ages, and can never be contrary to her self’140). However, the most frequently invoked context in Dryden’s writings on drama was Nature as the subject of the dramatist’s imitation. In the case of realistic and in particular Jonsonian comedy, this was something close to Juvenal’s ‘quidquid agunt homines, votum timor ira voluptas | gaudia discursus’.141 Fanciful comedy and tragedy by contrast imitated Nature

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‘wrought up to an higher pitch’, giving ‘imitation’ a transforming as well as a reproductive force.142 In other passages Nature is a repertoire of instances and illustrations on which the writer is able to draw. In the Dedication to The Rival Ladies Dryden speaks of Nature as ‘a thing so almost Infi nite, and Boundless, as can never fully be Comprehended, but where the Images of all things are always present’.143 Of Shakespeare, in the passage already quoted from Of Dramatick Poesie, he writes, ‘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.’144 Shakespeare found Nature not by using ‘spectacles of books’ but by looking inward. In the prologue to The Tempest, he is one who Monarch-like gave those his subjects law, And is that Nature which they paint and draw.145 Shakespeare’s ability to apprehend Nature unmediatedly allowed him to inaugurate a whole new national tradition of drama but in a way that, rather than arising from a favourable cyclical movement, was undetermined and unpredictable. Other aspects of Shakespeare likewise broke through the cyclic determinism of Dryden’s historical vision, as we see from a letter to John Dennis probably written about March 1694: I cannot but conclude with Mr. Rym[er], that our English Comedy is far beyond anything of the Ancients. And notwithstanding our irregular ities, so is our Tragedy. Shakespear had a Genius for it; and we know, in spite of Mr. R– that Genius alone is a greater Virtue (if I may so call it) than all other Qualifications put together. You see what success this Learned Critick has found in the World, after his Blaspheming Shakespear. Almost all the Faults which he has discover’d are truly there; yet who will read Mr. Rym– or not read Shakespear? For my own part I reverence Mr. Rym–s Learning, but I detest his Ill Nature and his Arrogance. I indeed, and such as I, have reason to be afraid of him, but Shakespear has not.146 This is a complete turnaround from the position of Of Dramatick Poesie. Another Shakespearean attribute several times praised is ‘strength’, leading to unfavourable comparisons both with Fletcher’s effeminacy and alleged derivativeness (he is ‘a Limb of Shakespeare’) and the more general feebleness of French arts and arms (thus the Alexandrine ‘runs with more

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activity than strength’ and the language ‘is not strung with Sinews like our English’).147 Shakespeare possessed ‘a more Masculine, a bolder and more fiery Genius’ than his ‘Limb’.148 Such essentially individual qualities impacted on culture but could not be produced by it. Shakespeare’s faults, on the other hand, as we have seen, are attributed to his having occurred too early in one or another cycle in which Dryden himself is more favourably located: Yet it must be allow’d to the present Age, that the tongue in general is so much refin’d since Shakespear’s time, that many of his words, and more of his Phrases, are scarce intelligible. And of those which we understand some are ungrammatical, others course; and his whole stile is so pester’d with Figurative expressions, that it is as affected as it is obscure.149 Likewise in Lisideius’s critique of the Histories in Of Dramatick Poesie: if you consider the Historical Playes of Shakespeare, they are rather so many Chronicles of Kings, or the business many times of thirty or forty years, crampt into a representation of two hours and an half, which is not to imitate or paint Nature, but rather to draw her in miniature, to take her in little; to look upon her through the wrong end of a Perspective, and receive her Images not onely much less, but infinitely more imperfect then the life: this, instead of making a Play delightful, renders it ridiculous.150 Jonson, freer from these mechanical faults, still had to yield to Shakespeare in the ‘greater Virtue’: Has not Great Johnsons learning, often fail’d? But Shakespear’s greater Genius, still prevail’d.151 In the cyclic analogy Shakespeare was ‘the Homer, or Father of our Dramatick Poets; Johnson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing’, but the shape of this particular cycle has been determined by the genius of Shakespeare and not by the normative process of cultural improvement which, along with a capacity to absorb the lessons of the Ancient masters, had led to Jonson’s achievement. Consequently, while we ‘admire’ Jonson, we ‘love’ Shakespeare, a love that is an integral part of our response to genius.152 Jonson’s limitations, as seen by Neander, were matters of taste and technique: his incapacity as a writer of love scenes, a certain pedantry

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in his language and his preference for representing ‘mechanic people’ rather than the courtly lovers who populate Shakespeare’s, Fletcher’s and Dryden’s comedies. But the deeper problem was the narrowness of his understanding of Nature, not in any single sense but pretty well all beyond the Juvenalian one. In this judgement Dryden does not incline towards the vision expounded by Pierre Hadot of Nature as a withholder of secrets: on the contrary, there was a certain wilful perversity involved in not perceiving her clear and transparent lessons.153 While cyclic thinking could at times be mechanically wrong-headed, it must also be credited with giving Dryden the confidence he needed to rework Shakespearean materials in three of his most accomplished works for the stage, the revised Tempest (1667), All for Love (1678) and Troilus and Cressida: or, Truth Found Out too Late (1679). The first of these was co-authored with D’Avenant, who seems to have been responsible for the parallel characters of Dorinda, Hippolito and Sycorax. The revision proceeded at one level by the fracturing and multiplication of original relationships into a dramatic simulacrum of a symmetrical French garden and at another by a modernization of language and ‘manners’, which included a dash of modish Hobbism and Cartesianism. The supernatural resonances of Shakespeare’s neoplatonic universe are largely lost in this process, but when the recomposed piece is regarded, as it deserves to be, as a brilliant baroque confection suspended somewhere between pantomime and the modern musical, it can still be admired as a composition for the stage. It is a pity that it is so rarely performed, and never to my knowledge with any respect for its original aesthetic. All for Love by contrast is a total reworking by Dryden alone of a Shakespearean theme, with only the most tenuous dependence on Antony and Cleopatra. Seeing the highly successful Almeida production of 1990 convinced me not only that, approached on its own terms, this is indeed a deeply satisfying play but also that those terms are not Shakespearean ones. Despite its claim to be ‘written in imitation of Shakespeare’s stile’ (i.e. in blank verse, not rhyme), it triumphs because of Dryden’s determination to range himself against Shakespeare rather than because of any real creative affinity. Troilus turns out to be the most interesting case of the three because Dryden is consciously attempting, in the way indicated by Fowler, to apply the philosophical dramaturgy of his own time to what he believed to be a second-rate early piece; however, in attempting to relocate Shakespeare to the point in the cycle he would most appropriately have occupied, he only succeeds in diminishing him. In each case the lesson for a present-day reader is the incompatibility of Dryden’s classical protocols for effective theatrical performance with

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Shakespeare’s own dramatic methods. He could see this himself to some degree, though not to the point where he was prepared to surrender those protocols entirely. Invention in its classical formulation was meant to commence with the choice of a moral and then move on progressively to the devising of a fable to express that moral, to a design, to incidents and characters, and only in the last place to verbal expression; nevertheless, in Shakespeare and, as he tells us several times, in Virgil it was the ‘dictio’ – supposedly the last and least of elements – which affected him most powerfully. Rapin attributes more to the Dictio, that is, to the Words and Discourses of a Tragedy, than Aristotle has done, who places them in the last Rank of Beauties; perhaps only last in Order, because they are the last Product of the Design, of the Disposition or Connexion of its Parts, of the Characters, of the Manners of those Characters, and of the Thoughts proceeding from those Manners. Rapin’s Words are Remarkable: ’Tis not the admirable Intrigue, the surprizing Events, and extraordinary Incidents that make the Beauty of a Tragedy, ‘tis the Discourses, when they are Natural and Passionate. So are Shakespear’s.154 Likewise with character. The classical method involves building a fictive personage proceeded by adding separative attributes to an ethical generality up to the point where the personage was sufficiently distinguished from others of the same work, after which the process would cease.155 An Oedipus did not need to be any more complex than was required to express the moral meaning of his fable and to arouse pity and terror: the introduction of further singularities would simply weaken the work. It must have been perfectly clear to Dryden that a Falstaff was not invented in this way but that Shakespeare worked by a method of refining and consolidating particulars rather than one of thickening abstractions. Dryden himself could never have written a play by this method and was totally ill-equipped as a critic to defend it. His response was to redirect attention from the scene of writing to that of reception, and from the mentally narrowing model of performance as therapy to the richer possibilities of response offered by reflective reading. This accompanied and was one of the reasons for a change over the same years in the composition of his readership and his mode of addressing it, both of which we now need to examine before

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returning to the way in which Shakespeare was appropriated by Dryden to be the Homer of England.

Dryden’s Constituency As indicated earlier, Dryden’s Shakespeare criticism is always directed to specific readers, both in groups and as individuals. Much of it, therefore, only makes complete sense when we understand those readerships and why Dryden chose to address them in the ways he did. One important group is the individually addressed recipients of his dedications, whom he approaches as readers as well as patrons, but other readers can often be sensed as simultaneously present – particular friends, fellow scribes at Will’s, the habitués of the wits’ row at Drury Lane, learned readers at the universities, the articulate upper-class women who patronized the theatre boxes and managed town gossip, and intelligent members of those landowning families who remained still primarily resident in the country. In the earlier criticism it is the theatre audiences – sharers in the experience of performance – who are most strongly present to him, and it will be necessary to ask just how that category was constituted. By the 1680s his horizon has broadened to embrace the whole political nation as he conceived it, and he often seems to be thinking as much of the shires as of London and of readers (silent or aloud) as of playgoers. The audience of the Restoration theatres were a more limited one than that of the playhouses of Shakespeare’s time, though not to the extent often assumed.156 They also varied significantly between the King’s Company’s theatres, those of the socially more inclusive Duke’s Company and the often forgotten playhouse at court. After the Restoration, public theatres of the open pre-1641 kind were suppressed in favour of the roofed private house pioneered by Shakespeare’s Blackfriars. The City audience, despite common belief, were not lost to the stage and remained the main support of the spectacular shows mounted by the Duke’s Company from 1671 at the Dorset Garden house, south of St Pauls; however, middle-class theatregoing was now more likely to be an occasional treat rather than a regular recreation. Within the theatres, the expensive circle and the cheaper middle and upper galleries drew quite distinct kinds of patrons, while playgoers who regarded themselves as connoisseurs gathered in the more promiscuous but still expensive pit. Hart and Mohun, at a series of theatres in the Covent Garden area, drew their core audience from a new constituency, the Town, which in Shakespeare’s time had existed neither demographically

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nor as built environment, and whose members could afford to attend more regularly than the citizens further east, even to the extent of making the boxes and pit a kind of club. This was the result of a steady colonizing of the area now known as the West End by gentry families from the country, first as renters for the winter season and later as proprietors of houses in the rapidly spreading squares, which increasingly became their preferred residences.157 Their presence brought tradesmen, professionals and entertainers into the area, among the latter being the actors of the Drury Lane playhouse. The playhouse auditorium became the venue for a number of the constitutive rituals of this community, a matter closely woven into the action of Wycherley’s The Country Wife.158 The court was a stronger and more direct influence than before the wars but found itself increasingly embedded in the Town. By the late 1690s the cultural leadership of the court, evident in Rochester’s lifetime, had largely vanished, a casualty of the two glum reigns that followed that of Charles II. Much of Restoration drama, particularly its comedy, is directed to the problems experienced by the new generation of immigrants from the shires in adjusting to the cultured, pleasure-centred existence of the Town. Dryden’s early criticism was, among other things, a set of lessons in how to engage profitably in conversation about the acted drama, without exposing oneself to the sniggers of the coffee house or the ruelle. He offered playgoers a critical terminology, a set of literary and linguistic values and an easily digestible overview of Ancient and French opinion in a style that was itself a model for ‘easy’ social discourse. Shakespeare is embedded in criticism directed at this class of readers not only as an invitation to relive the performances of Hart and Mohun and a touchstone for the operations of Nature and genius but also as an occasion for oblique warnings against violations of well-bred behaviour of the kind represented by bad grammar, false wit, addiction to puns and metaphorical disregard for the ‘rules’ – in his case, dramatic, and in theirs, social. These correctives to rusticity were particularly valuable to women of gentry families, who had less formal education than men but were increasingly eager to discuss writing, to attend the theatres and to buy books. They were also, while lacking the Greek and Latin drilled into men, more likely to speak and read French. In addressing the Town considered as a mobile subset of the landed class, Dryden was also addressing an influential segment of the political nation. County families still controlled a preponderance of seats in the Commons, while it was the families of MPs who were most likely to winter in London. From the 1680s this aspect of the criticism becomes more pronounced as part of his open political support of Charles and James and discreet

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opposition to William. At the same time his horizons steadily expanded from the narrow world of the theatre to embrace a fuller representation of country families who were not regularly resident in London. After 1688 he can be seen advocating a cultural alliance between the metropolitan and rural branches of the landed community as a way of resisting the moneyed might of the City.159 His delightful late lines to his cousin, John Driden of Chesterton, celebrate the moral independence of an enlightened, traditionalist landowner who only unwillingly comes to town but is well versed in good writing. This broadening of Dryden’s audience, of which documentary evidence exists in the subscription list to the Virgil, contributed to his shift of critical interest from contemporary and pre-1641 drama to the poets and historians of Greece and Rome, presented by him and his acolytes in a dazzling new series of translations. The preface to the Fables (1700) records a complex engagement with Chaucer as the Ennius of English poetry. Shakespeare as part of the same process comes to be seen not simply as the founding father of the acted drama but as Britain’s Homer. The early criticism most acutely concerned with Shakespeare is much more parochial and Town-centred than that of the years when age, politics and religion were all drawing him towards a national rather than a metropolitan constituency and one which was more likely to be composed of readers than playgoers, this last aspect, as we saw earlier, being reflected in the changing physical form of the publications. The shift is mirrored equally in his alignments with patrons and patronage networks.160 While Dryden is often presented as having begun as a writer in a system dominated by court patrons and then freed himself from that system by his alliance with the publishing bookseller Jacob Tonson, this development was more of an evolution than a new beginning. As the subscription list to the Virgil shows, Tonson’s operation remained deeply reliant on the patronage of the aristocracy and gentry, who were prepared not only to subscribe for copies in advance of publication but also to accept and pay for the dedication of individual copperplate illustrations. The difference was that this patronage was more broadly distributed than that of the older court cliques, while the combination of a Jacobite poet and a shrewd Whig publisher allowed it to transcend limitations of party. (After Dryden had refused to dedicate the Virgil to the king, Tonson cunningly had the plates doctored to give Aeneas William’s hooked nose.) In the earlier part of his career, Dryden had aspired to a position analogous to that enjoyed by Horace and Virgil as the indulged laureate of an autocratic ruler. That he never achieved that standing was the result of Charles and James never being able to afford it, though they did what they could for

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him in small ways, including the award of the titular laureateship and its irregularly paid salary. They may also have suspected as Johnson did that ‘of labour, notwithstanding the multiplicity of his productions, there is sufficient reason to suspect that he was not a lover’.161 Yet we soon discover that, far from wishing to abolish patronage, Dryden schemed to insert himself into the system as a dispenser as well as a receiver of bounty. The difference was that his bounty was not financial but took the form of support for the careers of younger writers he admired, and found suitably deferential, and sabotage of the reputations of writers whom he regarded as rivals (thus his dissections of Rochester in the preface to All for Love, Shadwell in MacFlecknoe and Buckingham in Absalom and Achitophel). Patronage and sabotage were exercised through conversations at Will’s, prologues, commendatory verse, inclusion in his collective publishing ventures, recommendations to grandees and publishers, and praise and blame delivered in dedications, satires and the wider body of his criticism. Despite his political isolation, which did not prevent him from supporting writers such as Congreve of the opposite party, Dryden’s good word may well have counted for as much as Dorset’s or Mulgrave’s authority as ministers of state. Shakespeare had been involved in the politics of patronage from the beginning of Dryden’s career. The most liberal literary patron of the Caroline age had been the then Earl, later Duke of Newcastle, who numbered D’Avenant and Shirley among his followers and was a friend and devotee of Jonson. Being a client of Newcastle involved helping out with his own compositions: in 1667 Dryden himself was unhappily involved with one such arrangement that went wrong over Sir Martin Marr-all. After the Restoration, the now elderly cavalier resumed his former role, writing plays for D’Avenant and encouraging Shadwell and Flecknoe. (MacFlecknoe is a reflection on Newcastle as well as its foregrounded victims.162) As governor to the royal children, he had supervised the education of the second Duke of Buckingham, who made spasmodic efforts to step into his shoes as the old man’s powers faded. But Buckingham was too fickle and forgetful to be an effective patron, and Newcastle’s mantle soon passed to the younger and more willing Dorset, who exercised that function for the remainder of his life, attracting during that time at least thirty-six dedications.163 Dorset in early life was another zealous Jonsonian: Crites notes that ‘you, Eugenius, prefer him above all other Poets.’164 It is likely that this allegiance indicated a political as well as an artistic preference. Newcastle’s royalism was unblemished, but within the royalist camp in exile he and his protégé Buckingham were both opposed to Clarendon, Ormonde and those members of Charles’s inner circle who came to monopolize administrative

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power in the early Restoration years. This division, which opened over the conduct of military affairs in the north and in Scotland during the civil wars, regained its regional alignment after Buckingham succeeded to Fairfax’s seigniorial authority in Yorkshire. Ben’s surliness and satirical bent made him an appropriate cultural hero for the anti-Clarendonians, who, in Buckingham’s and Dorset’s cases, later metamorphosed into Whig opponents of the crown. They may also have known something of Jonson’s admiration of Essex; his friendships with such earlier oppositional figures as Raleigh, John Hoskyns, Kenelm Digby, Cotton and Selden; and his troubles with the authorities over The Isle of Dogs, Sejanus, Eastward Ho and The Silent Woman, though they would hardly have sympathized with his barely concealed Recusantism. Shakespeare had also been linked to Essex but had otherwise avoided the kind of scrape to which the more truculent Ben was prone, while offering through the history plays, Macbeth and Lear, a vision of the British past that emphasized the dangers of faction and the desirability of firm monarchical rule. Jonson’s Sejanus and Catiline, by contrast, betray a veiled fascination with anarchic violence. Having written elsewhere on Dryden’s lifelong association with Dorset, I do not wish to repeat myself more than is necessary, but aspects need to be reviewed in order to arrive at an understanding of Dryden’s emerging vision of Shakespeare as an icon of national reconciliation.165 In his first decade as a published writer, Dryden had assiduously courted Dorset and the other court wits but by the 1670s; following Buckingham’s attack on him in The Rehearsal and Rochester’s in An Allusion to Horace, the relationship had clearly turned sour. Shadwell, inherited by the group from Newcastle, became their dog of war in an abrasive exchange of prefaces, using the banner of Ben to attack Dryden’s Fletcherian comic practice. We have seen that Dryden’s admiration for Jonson as a theatrical craftsman was genuine enough, but the prominence given to him in Of Dramatick Poesie is patently influenced by the known partisanship of Buckhurst and Sedley. The eulogy of Shakespeare that stands like an isolated pillar of fire in the same work marks his true allegiance. Buckingham thought enough of Timon of Athens to encourage Shadwell to rewrite it for Betterton but otherwise showed little interest in Shakespeare. His conversations with Saint-Évremond centred on Jonson. Thomas Rymer, the critic favoured by the Dorset circle, is much kinder to Ben than to either Shakespeare or Fletcher. His The Tragedies of the Last Age Consider’d was dedicated to Dorset’s close associate Fleetwood Sheppard in terms that indicate established friendship.166 In dedicating its notorious successor of 1693, A Short View of Tragedy, to Dorset himself, Rymer wrote: ‘when some years ago, I tryed the Publick with Observations

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concerning the Stage; It was principally your Countenance that buoy’d me up, and supported a Righteous Cause against the Prejudice and Corruption then reigning.’167 In this new work Rymer performs merciless demolitions of Julius Caesar and Othello and expresses reverence for Ben, though not in this instance for Catiline. He is the ‘Tom the Second’ of Dryden’s ‘To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve’, this insult being immediately followed in the poem by an apology for it to Dorset.168 Rymer’s appointment on Shadwell’s death in 1692 to Dryden’s old post of Historiographer Royal was made on Dorset’s authority, though no one would deny that Rymer, through his Foedera, made impressive use of it. (Rymer also seems to have been smitten by Dorset’s illegitimate daughter Mary.169) Intimidated either by Rymer’s critical learning or his closeness to Dorset, Dryden restricted his fullest reply to The Tragedies of the Last Age to a series of notes on the endleaves of a copy. By the late 1670s there were also political differences. Following Buckingham’s dismissal from office in February 1674, Dorset followed his patron into opposition and in the following reign was a plotter in the enterprise that led to William’s invasion. Dryden’s loyalty lay with the king, and more particularly the king’s brother and heir, James, Duke of York, placing him within an inner circle of even more intransigent Stuart loyalism. He now acquired a new patron, John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, who in 1679 called on his aid in attacking the wits of the Buckingham faction in the anonymously circulated Essay upon Satire.170 A consequence for Dryden was a savage beating administered on 18 December 1679 in Rose Alley, of which Edward Saslow in by far the most thorough scholarly study to date proposes Dorset as the likely instigator.171 Mulgrave seems to have been a Shakespearean: in later life he produced an adaptation of Julius Caesar, rewritten according to the Greek model as two separate, ‘regular’ tragedies with choruses.172 His influential An Essay upon Poetry, boosted by Dryden when it was first published anonymously in 1682, has only one passing reference to Ben but expresses views very close to Dryden’s own about Shakespeare and Fletcher.173 In 1696 Mulgrave was to be honoured with the Dedication to Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid. By that date Dryden, as explained, was exercising his own brand of professional power, that of the talented wordsmith and consummate networker, operating in an increasingly uncontrolled literary marketplace, whose pen, if not actively employed for party purposes, required at the very least to be bribed to silence. Such a bribe is sometimes represented as the unspoken condition underlying Dorset’s making a personal gift to Dryden in compensation for his loss of the laureateship to Shadwell in 1688. Whether or not this was the

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case, it was a double-edged offering coming from the man who as William III’s newly appointed Lord Chamberlain was responsible both for the dismissal and the replacement. Yet Dorset, a wide-ranging and discerning reader as well as a generous patron, can be allowed a genuine respect for Dryden as the leading poet and dramatist of his day.174 In the 1690s the relationship between the two had to take place over a chasm separating a Whig grandee from an unrepentantly Jacobite poet, but that chasm seems to have been successfully bridged. Dorset read several of Dryden’s works before publication, entertained him at dinner and on at least one recorded occasion visited him at home. By 1691 Dryden was close enough to be able to solicit Dorset’s help in finding accommodation at Somerset house for an indigent friend.175 When in 1695 Cleomenes was performed by the scholars at Westminster School, Dorset’s young son was chosen to deliver a prologue specially written for the occasion by Prior. In 1696, personally and through members of his family, Dorset paid for five copies of the largepaper edition of the Virgil. Most significantly, he was the recipient in 1693 of Dryden’s longest critical essay, which forms the Dedication to the corporate translation of Juvenal and Persius. The ‘Discourse on the Origin and Progress of Satire’ is best known for its comparative account of the virtues and limitations of Horace, Juvenal and Persius, which shows Dryden’s critical skills at their sharpest and most engaging. But this is embedded in and frequently returns to a deeply personal reflection on what Dorset had meant to Dryden in the past and what might be achieved from their combined strengths in the future. The very dedicating of a work to a leading Williamite was likely to provoke unkind interpretations by Dryden’s fellow Jacobites; nor would he have wished to expose Dorset to similar reflections from his own camp. He, therefore, repeatedly stresses his high respect for Dorset as a poet and critic and his personal affection for him as an admired friend and apostle of good nature. In doing so he is also making the revolutionary suggestion that in a society fiercely divided by political and religious hostility, reconciliation could be achieved through a shared reverence for literature. The Roman satirists, while of their times and the factions of their times (Horace speaking as a client of Augustus and Juvenal as a representative of the ‘Commonwealth spirit’), were united by their concern with universal moral principles. Shakespeare was the ideal agent of reconciliation between Whig, Dissenter, Tory and Jacobite because of the ideological inclusivity of his fictions. As Dryden saw it, he and Dorset could join in a commitment to the literary enterprise while remaining faithful to their opposed political creeds. The idealistic role imagined for literature, and Shakespeare’s place

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in the realization of that role, is made clear in a passage recalling Dryden’s earliest contact with Dorset: ’Tis true, I have one Priviledge which is almost particular to my self, that I saw you in the East at your first arising above the Hemisphere: I was as soon Sensible as any Man of that Light, when it was but just shooting out, and beginning to Travel upwards to the Meridian. I made my early Addresses to your Lordship, in my Essay of Dramatick Poetry; and therein bespoke you to the World: Wherein, I have the right of a First Discoverer. When I was my self, in the Rudiments of my Poetry, without Name, or Reputation in the World, having rather the Ambition of a Writer, than the skill; when I was Drawing the Out-Lines of an Art without any Living Master to Instruct me in it; an Art which had been better Practis’d than Study’d here in England, wherein Shakespear who Created the Stage among us, had rather Written happily, than knowingly and justly; and Johnson, who by studying Horace, had been acquainted with the Rules, yet seem’d to envy to Posterity that Knowledge, and like an Inventer of some useful Art, to make a Monopoly of his Learning: When thus, as I may say, before the use of the Loadstone, or knowledge of the Compass, I was sailing in a vast Ocean, without other help, than the Pole-Star of the Ancients, and the Rules of the French Stage amongst the Moderns . . . yet even then, I had the presumption to Dedicate to your Lordship: A very unfinish’d Piece . . . Yet I was stronger in Prophecy than I was in Criticism: I was Inspir’d to foretell you to Mankind, as the Restorer of Poetry, the greatest Genius, the truest Judge, and the best Patron.176 The older Dryden is seldom so boldly figurative as in this passage, where he represents himself first as a Persian sun-worshipper, or possibly one of the magi (‘we have seen his star in the east’), adoring the rising deity of Dorset; then as a Magellan crossing uncharted seas; and finally, in an echo of Virgil’s fourth eclogue, as a sibyl prophesying the advent of an inspired and heroic genius.177 The weight of compliment so far exceeds the possibility of its application as to imply insincerity, yet the writing conveys no hint of mockery, nor would Dryden have set out to mock a man who was his beau ideal of an intelligent, sharp-judging but benevolent reader. He is genuinely transported by his subject; however, that subject is not Dorset personally but the vision of a great enterprise in which, in an even more daring implied equivalence to the three persons of the Trinity, Shakespeare was the father (‘I found not, but created first the Stage’178);

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Dryden, the suffering but undaunted son; and Dorset, a kind of poetical Holy Ghost. The name of that enterprise was a new formulation of English literature, now first achieving recognition under the tutelary inspiration of Shakespeare and through the agency of Dryden as writer and critic; Dorset as cultural impresario of the Williamite state; and Tonson, who had already embarked on the long series of carefully edited collected editions of admired authors, which were to give the national canon its first bibliographical body and among which was to be the first ‘modern’ edition of Shakespeare. That Dryden could adopt this assured, conciliating tone is further evidence that he was himself in possession of the kind of influence enjoyed by a patron. While the cabal of Dorset, Sheppard, Prior, Charles Montagu and Rymer, backed up by the power of the Lord Chamberlainship, stood as an unprecedented union of private with public patronage, the cabalists must have looked with envy and perhaps some apprehension at the power over careers exercised by that other cabal in the upper room at Will’s, where an approving or disapproving nod from Dryden could confirm or cast doubt upon a reputation. They must also have realized that they were moving into a new kind of world where talented professional writers had to be decently remunerated for their support or silence.179 The question for the cabalists was whether this change was to be resented and resisted or embraced, as Dryden proposed, as an opportunity for collaboration. One stumbling block arose from differences over the respective merits of Shakespeare and Jonson. In the proposal to construct English literature as a neoclassical superstructure on a Shakespearean base, it was the base that was the real problem and part of that problem was political. As we have seen, Jonson had been appropriated for the Whigs by Newcastle and his successors. This left Shakespeare open to appropriation by Dryden’s side of politics, the Tories and Jacobites, an opportunity they were not slow to seize. The process had begun as early as Dryden’s appreciative citing in ‘The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy’ of the description of Richard II’s arrival in London as Bolingbroke’s prisoner, with its unavoidable suggestion to a reader from the crisis year 1679 of the mistreatment of the captive Charles I and the threat from the Exclusionists of a similar fate for York.180 When Dryden, in the letter to Dennis, speaks of Rymer as impotently ‘blaspheming’ Shakespeare, the dramatic forefather is shown as embodying a national spiritual inheritance beyond the ken of sneering metropolitan critics; nevertheless, intelligent Whigs – those conscious of the great continuities so cruelly jarred in 1641, 1660 and 1688 – could surely still join with Dryden in his reverence for Shakespeare and for genius. Dustin Griffin

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has pointed out how Dryden addresses Dorset in a version of Jonson’s line in praise of Shakespeare, ‘The applause! delight! the wonder of our Stage’, which appears in the ‘Discourse’ as ‘the Delight and Wonder of This Age’, just prior to an explicit reference to the original.181 By the 1690s similar assurances were being heard even from the Dorset circle: O happy! happy and Instructive Age When Shakespear Writ, and Allen trod the Stage! To Emulation fir’d, ‘twas hard to tell Which of the famous two did most Excel. But O thou Darling Poet of our Isle, And thou th’ Erecter of this Sacred Pile, How wou’d you Blush were you but now to see, Both Plays and Players black Impiety!182 This passage from Robert Gould’s ‘The Playhouse’ still sees Shakespeare in slightly patronizing terms but agrees with Dryden about his significance for the articulation of a national ethical heritage. Gould was Dorset’s client and steward and a useful weathervane to his master’s opinions. The ‘Discourse’, then, as well as containing some of Dryden’s most engaging comparative criticism, also calls to be read as an invitation, both artistic and personal, to Dorset to join with him in realizing his ideal of a national literary culture centred on the inclusive Shakespeare rather than the divisive Jonson. It simultaneously points forward to the new kind of alliance between professional authorship, enlightened commerce and the power of the state vested in aristocratic patrons that was to be enjoyed by Pope and Swift in their relationship with Harley and Bolingbroke. Dryden’s collaboration with Dorset towards the close of both their lives in encouraging the career of William Congreve shows that such an alliance was perfectly workable. Dryden read and helped revise The Old Bachelour, supported The Double Dealer when it was unsuccessful on the stage and made a famous donation of his by now metaphorical laurel to Congreve in a poem published with that play, and, in return, Congreve saluted the Persius in verse; contributed to the Juvenal; assisted him with revising the Aeneid translation; advised on his contracts with Tonson; and faithfully performed the role of his literary executor.183 Dorset was the dedicatee of Love for Love, which he had read and commented on before its performance; gave both formal and private support to the new theatre company created to perform it; and was rewarded by Congreve’s dutiful Williamite loyalty. At the ends of their lives, poet and patron both looked towards a future in which the

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core values of the English state were to be embodied in an acknowledged national literary canon whose avatar was Shakespeare. In the prologue to The Tempest, Dryden had saluted Shakespeare as the underground root from which subsequent drama had continued to grow. In the late lines ‘To Sir Godfrey Kneller’, thanking the painter for the gift of a copy of the Chandos portrait, the tribute becomes even more elevated: Shakespeare thy Gift, I place before my sight; With awe, I ask his Blessing e’re I write; With Reverence look on his Majestick Face; Proud to be less; but of his Godlike Race. His Soul Inspires me, while thy Praise I write, And I like Teucer, under Ajax Fight; Bids thee through me, be bold; with dauntless breast Contemn the bad, and Emulate the best.184 Here we are being asked not merely to revere but also to worship Shakespeare and the ‘godlike race’ which surely embraces Britain at large as well as her poets. It was to prove an idea of remarkable staying power in elevating Shakespeare to the perpetual laureateship first of a class, next of a nation and then of an empire.185

Conclusion Our review of Dryden’s engagement with Shakespeare has approached it through several loosely linked themes and enterprises developing across the four decades of his active career. On the largest scale, it helped found his construction of a national literature that would be not only a canon of approved work but also the embodiment of British identity independent of religious and political division. This enterprise was still in progress at the time of his death, having been complicated by the advent of Congreve, but had already taken practical shape as a collaboration between Dryden as critic, Dorset as patron and Tonson as publisher. Congreve himself and at a later stage Samuel Johnson were to succeed Dryden as its guiding spirits. The second enterprise was the compilation of an approved body of literary theory to serve as the basis of criticism, considered both as a necessary discipline of letters and as a means of providing models of correct taste and refined behaviour to the nation’s elites. Here, Addison and Steele were to be Dryden’s direct successors. Dryden drew the terms of his critical

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theory from the Ancients, Renaissance Italy and contemporary France, but he did not need the example of Rymer to show that a wholly deductive, doctrinaire criticism, based on a cognitive modelling of audience experience, offered too restrictive an approach. Shakespeare’s virtues were not adequately acknowledged by French generic theory, while his weaknesses were mercilessly exaggerated. Here, Longinus, with his greater receptivity to the extravagant working of genius, offered Dryden a valuable supplement to his toolkit, while also suggesting that Shakespeare could arouse the passions and instruct the soul just as well in the study as in the playhouse. At the level of critical practice, Dryden’s reflections on Shakespeare ingeniously deploy an historical aesthetic grounded in the perception of cultural history as a web of cycles and subcycles. Although this had its origins in ancient and Renaissance ways of interpreting events as reactivations of universal human passions rooted in an historically stable ‘human nature’, it is also close in its practical effects to Franco Moretti’s contemporary cyclic modelling of literary history, which makes no such assumption, and Literary Darwinism, which does. The main difference between Dryden and his present-day counterparts is that Dryden was less concerned with truth as historical fact, about which he was often poorly informed, than with the cyclic model as a way of separating out desirable attributes of a literary work, conceived of as occurring in profiles of ascent and decline, and of aligning individual works and careers synchronically across concurrent cycles. Once understood in this way, the method can be used as a mode of analysis and a basis of rankings even when we do not ourselves share the aesthetic priorities that determined Dryden’s identification of cultural apogees. It was also a useful preliminary stage to regrounding critical practice in psychological first principles. An interest in determining the shape of cycles also encouraged Dryden’s masterful employment of the comparative method as a way of assessing degrees of excellence, evident in such splendid set pieces as the balancing out of Horace, Persius and Juvenal in the ‘Discourse on the Origin and Progress of Satire’; of Chaucer and Ovid in the preface to the Fables; and of Jonson, Fletcher and Shakespeare over a series of publications. By the time Dryden began to publish, he had already acknowledged Shakespeare as the supreme master of the three, but he remained appreciative of the special, very different merits of Jonson and was prepared to let the priority awarded to Ben by the court wits pass for many years without open challenge. Each of the three receives his due but each is also taken to task for his shortcomings, Fletcher most severely. In Fletcher’s case the reservations expressed in The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy may well have been prompted by Dryden’s

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sense that he was himself an expert user of the Fletcherian method, and his mentor’s creative equal. Jonson and Shakespeare presented him with sterner challenges to emulation, which in the first case he had neither the desire nor the capacity to attempt. With Shakespeare, while acknowledging his own inability as a dramatist to write with a Shakespearean strength and amplitude of soul, he was drawn on three separate occasions to attempt the experiment of renewing Shakespearean materials into a form made possible by his own privileged position in the reigning literary cycle. The results in the cases of The Tempest, Troilus and Cressida and All for Love were all impressive, not because of what they took from Shakespeare but because of a creative daring born from the desire to challenge the Shakespearean view of what drama should be attempting as a social art. Lastly, we should return to the point at which we began by noting Dryden’s vision of criticism as a kind of conversation in which the opinions of a range of disparate hearers had always to be kept in consideration and which would expect to be continued in oral discussion after his written version of it was issued to the world. Critics have always been prone to mount the pulpit, the bench or the soapbox, to declaim apodictically, and to lose sensitivity to all but the internalized reader of their own devising; however, in Dryden’s case there is always a variety of implied and real readers sharply in view.186 We have considered only one of them, Dorset, in any detail, but Dryden never put pen to paper without being aware of the likely response of a range of virtual participants in an implied conversation conducted through the page. While his political views favoured autocracy, his practical politics were democratically grounded in the skilled writer’s ability to persuade, by both direct and oblique means, and constant awareness of likely responses. When after 1688 circumstances alienated him from most fellow members of the nation, he did not retreat into dogmatism but became even more diligent as a listener and in sensing how readers might react to his arguments, as a fencer anticipates not just the parry but the attacking stroke to follow that will need to be met by a parry of his own or strategic avoidance. The imaginary room in which he speaks to us contains readers of many diverse persuasions, united only in their enthusiasm for the quintessentially urban activity of debate. In order to invite these readers into a reciprocity of sceptical, responsive listening, Dryden fashioned a critical manner which is that of a genial and undogmatic disputant. Strongly held views are put with good-mannered deference but not relinquished once advanced. Wit and learning work in harmony to achieve the same goals, unlike in those fabled conversations at The Mermaid. Matters likely to be controversial are introduced as adiaphora, worthy of pursuit

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but premising no certain outcome: here Dryden will often deftly review a range of possibilities leaving it for the reader to decide which, if any, is most persuasive, but leaving that reader clear clues about his own preference. Stronger opinions may well be hedged with apology or advanced as personal rather than absolute. Topics are raised and dropped with an implied respect for the reader’s likely degree of patience, often under a pretence of absent-mindedness or, as the years roll on, an elderly man’s mild disorientation. Emerging from a session in this imaginary room, one is left not so much with a body of convictions as with a sense that conversation about Shakespeare is something that never actually ceases but is only adjourned.

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Chapter 2

Alexander Pope Simon Jarvis

Towards the end of the ‘Preface’ to his edition of Shakespeare, Pope hit upon a single analogy which could contain and illustrate the ambivalence of his response to that body of work: I will conclude by saying of Shakespear, that with all his faults, and with all the irregularity of his Drama, one may look upon his works, in comparison of those that are more finish’d and regular, as upon an ancient majestick piece of Gothick Architecture, compar’d with a neat Modern building: The latter is more elegant and glaring, but the former is more strong and more solemn. It must be allow’d, that in one of these there are materials enough to make many of the other. It has much the greater variety, and much the nobler apartments; tho’ we are often conducted to them by dark, odd, and uncouth passages. Nor does the Whole fail to strike us with greater reverence, tho’ many of the Parts are childish, illplac’d, and unequal to its grandeur.1 The analogy from architecture does not begin with Pope, of course. As Rosemary Cowler reminds us, Thomas Rymer had some years earlier remarked that he had thought ‘our Poetry of the last Age was as rude as our Architecture.’2 If Pope’s simile is a partial response to Rymer, it might seem to later readers not only insufficiently respectful but also to propose too external a relationship between parts and whole. Johnson already offered in place of Pope’s architectural metaphor those of a forest and a mine.3 Later critics, too, came to prefer analogies for the whole authorship drawn not from other arts but from nature, proposing not a built, but a living, unity among Shakespeare’s works: a unity so powerful that any attempt to distinguish finer from weaker parts of the organism would be likely to be fatal to it. Wordsworth protested against the whole practice of separating out Shakespeare’s beauties from his faults. Rejecting the ‘established

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opinion’ of Shakespeare as ‘a wild irregular genius, in whom great faults are compensated by great beauties’, the later poet insisted that the judgment of Shakspeare in the selection of his materials, and in the manner in which he has made them, heterogeneous as they often are, constitute a unity of their own, and contribute all to one great end . . . not less admirable than his imagination, his invention, and his intuitive knowledge of human Nature.4 Even some of the eulogistic parts of Pope’s analogy reveal, on closer inspection, a certain ambivalence. What sort of praise is it, for instance, to say of a magnificent building that, once you have broken it up, you will be able to make a great many other buildings out of the scrap materials thus afforded you? The primary sense here, of course, is that Shakespeare’s invention greatly exceeds that of the moderns. Yet Pope picks up on the other sense elsewhere. When, imitating the second epistle of Horace’s second book, he contrasts the self-love of worthless, with the self-criticism of readable, poets, he remarks that the latter are marked not only (as we might expect) by their exacting scrutiny of each brick in the verbal edifice but also by their willingness to retrieve building materials from older fabrics: Their own strict Judges, not a word they spare That wants or Force, or Light, or Weight, or Care, Howe’er unwillingly it quits its place, Nay tho’ at Court (perhaps) it may find grace: Such they’ll degrade; and sometimes, in its stead, In downright Charity revive the dead; Mark where a bold expressive Phrase appears, Bright thro’ the rubbish of some hundred years; Command old words that long have slept, to wake, Words, that wise Bacon, or brave Raleigh spake; . . .5 This does indeed suggest rather the kind of poetical scavenging that hovers as an implication in Pope’s praise of Shakespeare for having provided such a large quantity of material. The ‘bold expressive Phrase’ shines out brightly, but there is a good deal of ‘rubbish’ to be cleared away before it can be picked up. Yet the ambivalence of Pope’s praise of Shakespeare in his ‘Preface’ is accompanied by no smaller ambivalence about the ‘Modern building’. That building is ‘more elegant and glaring, but the former is more strong and more solemn’. The contrast is, deceptively and artfully, shaped as though

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to suggest that all the terms in it are terms of praise, some owed to modern fabrics, others to the ancient. ‘Glaring’, for contemporary judges of painting and verse alike, connotes just that point at which elegance tips over into flashiness: in the second ‘Evening’ of Joseph Spence’s dialogues on Pope’s version of the Odyssey, ‘Philypsus’ uses the word to refer to a passage in that poem in which he thinks that Pope ‘discovers a greater love of Ornament, than is becoming’, while Pope’s painter friend, Jonathan Richardson, who was later to help him collate printed copies of Shakespeare, praises Poussin’s ‘Tancred and Erminia’ by saying that its colours are ‘not Glaring’ even though this might have seemed to be required by the subject.6 From Pope’s imitation of Horace’s epistle, in fact, it emerges not as an accidental, but as an essential feature of ‘the men who write such verse, as we can read’ that they are in practical touch as verse workers, rather than in merely theoretical touch as cultural historians, with the verbal stuff, the ‘materials’ of past verbal art. Only in this way can they be the judges, rather than the prisoners, of what is currently taken in polite society for good writing and speaking. Pope’s particular turn of phrase for this sort of borrowing, that readable poets ‘revive the dead’, is no accident. Because it is so often assumed that Pope’s primary attitude to Shakespeare was that of a finisher and polisher (an assumption which usually goes along with a marked lack of understanding of that sharpest edge of poetic thinking which so-called mere finishing and polishing in fact requires), and because this other aspect of his poetic, the need to strengthen what might otherwise be a vapid verbal stock by immediate, practical contact with past writing, is generally underemphasized in relation to Pope’s encounters with Shakespeare, it is worth developing a little the reasons for, and resonances of, Pope’s having chosen the analogy of an ancient pile as a way of evaluating Shakespeare’s authorship. This can be done by considering Pope’s responses to two actual buildings. Some years before writing the ‘Preface’ to his edition, Pope had spent the summers of 1717 and 1718 at the seat of Lord Harcourt in Oxfordshire, working on another task about the dullness of some of whose demands he sometimes complained: his translation of Homer. Pope gave a detailed description of the house in a letter to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: You must expect nothing regular in my description of a House that seems to be built before Rules were in fashion. The whole is so disjointed, & the parts so detachd from each other, and yet so joining again one can’t tell how; that in a poetical Fitt you’d imagine it had been a Village in Amphions time, where twenty Cottages had taken a dance together, were

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all Out, and stood still in amazement ever since. A Stranger would be grievously disappointed, who should ever think to get into this house the right way. One would expect, after entring thro the Porch, to be let into the Hall: Alas nothing less – you find yourself in a Brewhouse. From the Parlor you think to step into the Drawing room, but upon opening the iron-nail’d door, you are convinc’d by a flight of birds about your ears & a cloud of dust in your eyes, that tis the Pigeon-house.7 Whether or not Pope had Stanton Harcourt in particular in his mind when writing his preface to Shakespeare, the connections between these two pieces of writing, letter and preface, are intimate. The experience of the house in Oxfordshire is above all one of unexpected transitions. The visitor expects a certain relationship between one room and another, only to find a quite different organization in place. Just so, in Shakespeare, the ‘nobler apartments’ are arrived at only through ‘dark, odd, and uncouth passages’. Stanton Harcourt too has its grandeurs: The great Hall is high & spatious, flankd with long tables (images of ancient hospitality) ornamented with monstrous horns, about 20 broken Pikes, & a match-lock Musquet or two, which they say were used in the Civil Wars. Here is one vast archd Window, beautifully darken’d with divers Scutcheons of painted Glass.8 The edifice of modern literature contrasted with Shakespeare is ‘elegant’, also ‘glaring’; into this house light falls through a window ‘beautifully darkened’. The connection between Stanton Harcourt and Pope’s crystallizing simile for the value of Shakespeare’s work as a whole is close enough for this letter to colour also our sense of the penumbra of association surrounding Shakespeare in Pope’s mind. The house’s dining tables are ‘images of ancient hospitality’, of asymmetrical gift relationships not wholly subject to commerce. The house also holds the images of ancient conflict, the broken and obsolete weapons of the civil war. The letter seems almost designed as the pendant to another letter describing a great building which Pope perhaps wrote at around the same time: I never saw so great a thing with so much littleness in it: I think the Architect built it entirely in compliance to the taste of its Owners: for it is the most inhospitable thing imaginable, and the most selfish: it has, like their own hearts, no room for strangers, and no reception for any person of superior quality to themselves . . . The two Sides of the building

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are intirely spoil’d by two monstrous bow-windows which stand just in the middle, instead of doors: And as if it were fatal that some trifling littleness should every where destroy the grandeur, there are in the chief front two semicircles of a lower structure than the rest, that cut off the angles, and look as if they were purposely design’d to hide a loftier and nobler piece of building, the top of which appears above them.9 Blenheim, this forebear of ‘Timon’s villa’ in the Epistle to Burlington, is in almost every respect the antitype to Stanton Harcourt. There, the images of ancient hospitality; here, modern selfishness, an inhospitable deletion of unnecessary extra room in which to accommodate strangers. Here, two ‘monstrous bow-windows’ standing in the middle of the sides of the building; there, the ‘vast’ arched window beautifully darkened. There, a comical yet pleasurable passage through porches, brewhouses and pigeonhouses to the great hall ‘which lets you Up, (and Down) over a very high Threshold into the Parlor’; here, a clumsy bathos by which ‘some trifling littleness should every where destroy the grandeur.’ It seems likely that these two buildings, Blenheim and Stanton Harcourt, though they do not fit in every respect with every aspect of Pope’s simile in the ‘Preface’ (Blenheim is not in Pope’s account ‘elegant’, though it is certainly ‘glaring’), were at least in the back of his mind as he wrote it. The letters, then, can perhaps help to deepen by association our sense of what Pope feels about Shakespeare too. Shakespeare is a hospitable writer. He is a writer with ‘room for strangers’. He is a writer ‘beautifully darkened’. He is a writer whose littlenesses do not destroy his grandeur but let us into it with a charming surprise. Now consider what Pope was doing at Stanton Harcourt – translating Homer. Work went well, Pope continued to Lady Mary: Indeed I owe this old house the same sort of gratitude that we do to an old friend, that harbors us in his declining condition, nay even in his last extremities. I have found this an excellent place for Retirement and Study, where no one who passes by can dream there is an Inhabitant, and even any body that would visit me, dares not venture under my roof. You will not wonder that I have translated a great deal of Homer in this Retreat; Any one that sees it will own, I could not have chosen a fitter or more likely place to converse with the Dead.10 Pope’s translation of Homer is a conversation with the dead. Writers of readable verse ‘revive’ dead words and make them live again. These sorts

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of expression are usually regarded by non-poets as merely conventional, but it is reasonable enough to suppose that it is part of the déformation professionelle of any one who makes their living by attempting to be simply the best writer of verse available that the verse material, the words, rhythms and metres, of the most important predecessors, becomes in a quite literal way part of one’s own brain, one of the ways in which one’s own brain habitually behaves. Because so much of verse thinking takes place slightly below the threshold of paraphrasably explicit consciousness, the deepest links between one poet and another do not invariably take place in moments of direct imitation, significant though these are, or even at moments where two poets are having thoughts which might be paraphrased in similar ways. Intertextual study of the links between Pope and Shakespeare has a long history of prioritizing thematic connections over lexical ones. This is in part a consequence of the extent to which vernacular commentary and editing formed itself upon classical models. Some later eighteenth-century commentaries on Pope, such as Gilbert Wakefield’s, made it their chief business to cull from earlier authors a large quantity of parallels for particular passages in Pope. These commentaries have always subsequently formed part of the stock available to later editors. Faced with the following passage from the Essay on Criticism, for example, As Shades more sweetly recommend the Light, So modest Plainness sets off sprightly Wit: For Works may have more Wit than does ‘em good, As Bodies perish through Excess of Blood. Wakefield recalls Hamlet: For goodness, growing to a plurisy, Dies in his own too much.11 The passages share a thematic connection, but hardly a verbal or verse connection. The Twickenham edition mentions Wakefield’s parallel without commenting on its pertinence or otherwise. Failure to mention such a ‘parallel’, once unearthed by one scholar, can easily be misconstrued as negligence, and so their number mounts. They are only with difficulty expelled from what amounts to the commentator’s equivalent of the editor’s textus receptus.12 We can contrast, as a control, an allusion in the same poem first noted by Bowles, who suggests that the couplet, ‘In the fat

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Age of Pleasure, Wealth, and Ease,/ Sprung the rank Weed, and thriv’d with large Increase,’ alludes to a line from Hamlet: ‘And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed.’13 Here the connection is precisely verbal: the phrase ‘fat weed’ is distributed among two lines, and ‘fat’ is recalled to ‘weed’ by ‘rank’, which assonates with it. Instances like this indicate a subliminal recall rather than (something which is not really to be found in Pope’s relation with Shakespeare) deliberate and professed ‘imitation’ of the kind which Pope found ‘mighty simple’ in Rowe. Nevertheless, a significant verbal connection may be missed where it does not superficially concern the same kind of subject matter. In the first book of the four-book version of The Dunciad, Pope introduced a new element to the description of his anti-hero, now Cibber, not present in earlier versions of the poem. When Cibber is introduced, an ill Run at Play Blank’d his bold visage, and a thin Third day: . . .14 From the very first appearance of The Dunciad, it contained a reference to the third day, the day on which the playwright received the takings: ‘Till genial Jacob, or a warm third-day/ Calls forth each mass, a poem or a play.’15 This reference too remains in the four-book version, producing what is for Pope an unusually proximate repetition of the same idea, and of the same rhyme. Clearly Pope wanted to get this line in. The striking thing about it is the use of ‘blank’ as a verb. It is striking not only because this use is unusual, even in 1743, but because it compacts together two of the possible senses of this verb: ‘To make white, whiten; to make pale’ (OED 1) and ‘To put out of countenance; to nonplus, disconcert, “shut up” ’ (OED 2).16 Cibber is a cipher. Without cash, his face won’t function. The use is unusual, but there is a precedent: Bap. Nor Earth to give me food, nor Heauen light, Sport and repose locke from me day and night: Each opposite that blankes the face of ioy, Meet what I would haue well, and it destroy: Both heere, and hence, pursue me lasting strife, If once a Widdow, euer I be wife.17 Pope’s echo of Shakespeare’s verb presents a challenge to literary taxonomy. It can hardly count as a direct or elaborated allusion, of the kind with which The Dunciad is, even for a mock-heroic poem, quite extraordinarily

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saturated, because there is no functional relationship between the player queen’s overprotesting and Cibber’s misery at his lack of commercial success. Yet the link between the two lines is felt by anyone who has been strongly impressed by Shakespeare’s. Not all kinds of literary texts are remembered in the same way. Whereas we may recall an incident in a novel without necessarily or always calling to mind the particular words in which that incident was narrated, verse art almost always presents memory with the (worked-over) verbal material itself and to the extent, in fact, that, in the case of a poet whom a particular individual knows well, the shape of memory may be just the opposite from that which I mentioned in the case of the novel: single lines may quite often well up in the consciousness without any immediate ability to recall just where they come in what part of what poem or play. ‘Each opposite that blanks the face of joy’ is, for at least one reader, just this kind of line. The resonance produced by its inextricable compound of concretion and abstraction – an ‘opposite’ is a purely relational term, without any content of its own, but here ‘each’ such opposite produces an effect on a ‘face’, at once whitening and disconcerting it – outbraves the context in which it is placed. The line can come back to mind a dozen times without its ever being remembered, perhaps, that it is spoken by the Player Queen in Hamlet. It becomes part of a stock of verse thinking whose force is not wholly contained within a dramatic function. Shakespeare’s verse thinking and its results for the lexicon have here, consciously or unconsciously, become part of Pope’s, reinforcing the latter’s force, light, weight and care.

A Page, a Grave Pope was acutely conscious that his labours on Shakespeare had absorbed a considerable portion of his working life. His edition was published in six volumes (with a further, supplementary volume of non-dramatic work in whose preparation Pope does not appear to have been involved) between 1723 and 1725. It had been preceded by Nicholas Rowe’s edition, first appearing in 1709 and deriving largely from the fourth Folio of 1685, and was followed by that of Pope’s longstanding antagonist Lewis Theobald in 1733. Despite the considerable investment of time which Pope’s work on Shakespeare represented, it is not necessarily a simple matter to know what Alexander Pope might have made of the phrase ‘Great Shakespeareans’ or of the idea that he might himself have been one of them. That Shakespeare himself was great is an idea to which Pope would readily have

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assented – although not upon the condition frequent with us, of admiring everything whatever within Shakespeare’s authorship and of treating weak or unconvincing passages only as fine exemplifications of various kinds of weakness and unconvincingness in their respective speakers. But our phrase implies a new genre of greatness, in which a classic author’s own magnitude is such as to make it capable of sheltering an entire sequence of subsidiary greatnesses beneath it. That it was already in Pope’s day possible to magnify a writer’s name by linking him or her with Shakespeare is indicated by the epitaph which Pope himself wrote for his predecessor as an editor, Nicholas Rowe: Thy Reliques, Rowe! to this sad Shrine we trust, And near thy Shakespear place thy honour’d Bust, Oh next him skill’d to draw the tender Tear, For never Heart felt Passion more sincere: To nobler Sentiment to fire the Brave, For never Briton more disdain’d a Slave!18 Rowe is given only a small part of the praise which Pope offers Shakespeare in the ‘Preface’ to his edition: the power of tender or patriotic sentiment. The tribute is not to Rowe’s skills as an editor but to his own work, especially as the author of the play Jane Shore – of which, however, Pope later remarked to Spence that ‘It was mighty simple in Rowe to write a play now, professedly in Shakespeare’s style, that is, professedly in the style of a bad age.’19 This, at any rate, is a long way from suggesting that Pope could have imagined literary immortality attainable simply from services to a classic author. Pope was acutely sensitive to the possibility that the supposedly honorific relationship between moderns and ancients might in practice merely become a kind of parasitism: Pains, reading, study, are their just pretence, And all they want is spirit, taste, and sense. Comma’s and points they set exactly right, And ‘twere a sin to rob them of their Mite. Yet ne’er one sprig of Laurel grac’d these ribalds, From slashing Bentley down to pidling Tibalds. Each Wight who reads not, and but scans and spells, Each Word-catcher that lives on syllables, Ev’n such small Critics some regard may claim, Preserv’d in Milton’s or in Shakespear’s name.

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Pretty! in Amber to observe the forms Of hairs, or straws, or dirt, or grubs, or worms; The things, we know, are neither rich nor rare, But wonder how the Devil they got there?20 These lines from Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot allow the coalescence into a vivid instant of a number of separate aspects of Pope’s complex and indirect defence to the many pertinent criticisms which Theobald’s Shakespeare Restored had made of Pope’s 1723–25 edition of Shakespeare. From one point of view, the defence is a culturally and intellectually ser ious one. Pope is willing to grant verbal critics their diligence and even their superior accuracy. They nevertheless lack all the essentials for real criticism, the essentials of spirit, taste and sense. Lacking the comprehensiveness of vision necessary to qualification as a general critic – Pope was later, pointedly, to describe Warburton, who later went on to edit not only Pope’s works but also Shakespeare’s, as ‘the greatest general critic I ever knew’ – the merely ‘verbal’ critic cannot, in fact, see his text as a whole. This at least intellectually respectable criticism of minute critics such as Theobald is coloured, however, by an implied social sneer. The partial view which the minute critic has of the text is connected to the partiality of his motives for being its critic in the first place. The ‘word-catcher’ ‘lives on syllables’: he needs to propose emendations, corrections, glosses to text in order to make a crust and the extent of his labour is, therefore, determined not by the intrinsic interest of the subject matter itself but rather by the need to make work. These bits of rubbish are set out with calculatedly chopped-up monosyllabicity into syntactically identical iambs (‘Of hairs, or straws, or dirt, or grubs, or worms’). They take value only from the precious element, the amber, in which they are preserved. The classic’s aldermen, such lines might suggest, borrow all their greatness from the medium which alone brings them to our notice: Shakespeare. Pope, in fact, would no doubt have understood a great deal of what now passes for the tending and nurturing of our literary heritage as just this kind of essentially parasitic activity. Pope’s own participation in the plan for a monument to Shakespeare himself in Westminster Abbey is marked by continual jokes and ironic deflections. The statue was first erected without any inscription, and only in May 1741 were lines from The Tempest inscribed upon it, in a text differing widely, to Pope’s chagrin, from that printed in his own edition: the four-book Dunciad, in a mock-note on the poem’s title, satirized the monument as exhibiting ‘the first Specimen of an Edition of an author in Marble; where (as may be seen on comparing the Tomb

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with the Book) in the space of five lines, two Words and a whole Verse are changed . . .’21 According to one contemporary of Pope, many Latin inscriptions were offered. ‘One was sent to Pope for his appreciation; the sense of it meant that after many years of neglect Shakespeare appeared with general acclamation. Mr Pope could not very well make out the author’s meaning, and enclosed it to Dr Mead with the following translation: After an hundred and thirty years’ nap, Enter Shakespear, with a loud clap.’22 The calculatedly doggerel character of these verses marks Pope’s razorkeen sensitivity to cant in the matters of literary patronage and reputation. It brings the big block of marble down a chip or two. The other epigram which Pope jokingly proposed for the vacant scroll testifies to the same sensitivity: Thus Britain lov’d me; and preserv’d my Fame. Clear from a Barber’s or a Benson’s Name.23 Alderman John Barber and William Benson, the Surveyor-General, had both erected monuments to poets (Butler and Milton, respectively) in the Abbey. Michael Dobson has explored the connections between patriot politics and the project for the monument to Shakespeare; these epigrams also register, perhaps, Pope’s ambivalence about the very project of monumental memorialization, the risk that it might be a way for philistines to preserve themselves in Shakespeare’s amber.24 The experience of immersion in the sort of minute philological work in which even Pope’s edition of Shakespeare involved him, together with the humiliation which Theobald’s corrections must certainly have represented, played, in fact, a central role in the extremely powerful and increasingly systematic critique of cultural production which was developed in the successive, growing and intensifying editions of The Dunciad. That poem, it is sometimes forgotten, is not primarily an arena for the depreciation of literary workers less well-off and less talented than Pope himself. Its chief target is not hack writing as such but the alliance formed by the venal and the vain, the needy writer and the narcissistic patron. One thing which helps to place those passages of the Dunciad which are concerned with textual criticism among the most compressedly furious and powerful in the poem (and it should not be forgotten how few other poets have succeeded in converting disputes over the nature and purpose of philology method

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into the matter of great art) is the powerful analogy which Pope develops between these alliances of need and patronage in early eighteenth-century British literary culture, on one hand, and, on the other, the relationship which minute philology produces between the custodian of literary heritage and the poets who actually make that heritage: When Dulness, smiling – ‘Thus revive the Wits!’ But murder first, and mince them all to bits; As erst Medea (cruel, so to save!) A new Edition of old Aeson gave, Let standard-Authors, thus, like trophies born, Appear more glorious as more hack’d and torn, And you my Critics! in the chequer’d shade, Admire new light thro’ holes your selves have made. Leave not a foot of verse, a foot of stone, A Page, a Grave, that they can call their own; But spread, my sons, your glory thin or thick, On passive paper, or on solid brick. So by each Bard an Alderman shall sit, A heavy Lord shall hang at ev’ry Wit, And while on Fame’s triumphal Car they ride, Some Slave of mine be pinion’d to their side.25 The exquisite comic timing of that last couplet concentrates Pope’s point: the poets and wits, riding on fame’s chariot, pass over the celestial part of the picture first, before we notice the editors, critics and scholiasts who are hanging on for dear life. The aristocrat who proposes himself as the writer’s patron is in fact dragging him down, rather as Johnson later rebuffed Chesterfield’s late offer of imaginary help by describing it as an encumbrance; the editor who offers to look after the text of the poet and to make sure that it comes to no harm is in fact a kind of petty official who obstructs access to the poet or ensures that it is possible only on terms determined by him. Pope’s rage at what would later be called heritage culture here induces some of his most compressed achievements of poetic thinking. Under such curation, the ‘Page’ becomes, with instant echoing fatality, ‘a Grave’. Pope resurrects the dead metaphor of the ‘standard’ author – by having the flag cut up in front of us. The supposed curators of the text are its mutilators. Pope can speak of Medea’s having ‘edited’ Jason – edited him to death. Behind the joke is cold fury. The philological attitude towards culture, the attitude which claims to want to preserve poetry, actually wants to kill it.

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Here we have, I think, to bear in mind the possibility that although Pope’s public assertions about hard literary and philological labour were often dismissive or disdainful, his feelings about it are likely to have been much more complex. There is plenty of mild complaint about the time spent not only editing Shakespeare but also translating Homer: ‘Hibernian politics, O Swift! thy fate’, Pope tells his friend, commiseratingly, before adding, with what might have seemed to less successful rivals like Thomas Tickell or to Lewis Theobald a touch of self-pity, ‘And Pope’s, ten years to comment and translate’.26 The ‘Preface’ to Pope’s edition of Shakespeare affirms wearily (and, some have thought, misleadingly) that Pope has faithfully ‘discharg’d the dull duty of an Editor’.27 That particular choice of epithet, with its connections to everything which the Dunciad was to keep assaulting for the next 20 years, perhaps indicates one part of the poem’s power. Pope had with this declaration connected himself to everything which he then sought, and all the more vehemently for that reason, to attack. It was an affirmation which brought a celebrated and powerful rebuke from Johnson: 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.28 Johnson’s defence of editorial work proceeds by combining those characters of the general critic, on one hand, and the minute or ‘verbal’ critic, on the other, which Pope had done so much to contrast with each other. To get the minute detail right requires comprehensive capacities. So attention to it is not the work of a small, but of a large mind. Despite the apparent straightforwardness of this point, the passage is in truth a bold resolution of a problem which had preoccupied Johnson a good deal : the question how minute knowledge could be reconciled with the comprehensive perspective necessary to make it intelligible. Some trace of that struggle

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remains in the mildly bathetic conclusion to Johnson’s eulogy for the complete editor. There is of course no such person. No living individual can unite the desiderata named. The terms in which Johnson formulates his rebuke to Pope, in fact, probably would not have been as they were without Pope’s own approach to this problem. Pope did much to characterize the problem of philological knowledge as a problem of the relation among partial and comprehensive perspectives. In this sense, tempting as it might be to interpret Pope’s selection of minute or ‘verbal’ criticism as a central target for The Dunciad merely as the result of wounded pride, it becomes clearer and clearer, as the poem grows and develops, that the question of minute philology concentrates central issues in Pope’s understanding of British public culture: The critic Eye, that microscope of Wit, Sees hairs and pores, examines bit by bit: How parts relate to parts, or they to whole, The body’s harmony, the beaming soul, Are things which Kuster, Burman, Wasse shall see, When Man’s whole Frame is obvious to a Flea.29 This speech, which Pope gives to Aristarchus (the name under which he satirizes Richard Bentley, one of the most eminent philologists in Europe) indicate that verbal criticism is an especially acute instance of one of the chief sicknesses of the ‘mighty Dunciad’ which Britain is steadily becoming. The social lowness, and hence partial interestedness, of pedants, is accompanied by a constriction of epistemological perspective. The ‘state of hostility with verbal criticism’ in which Johnson describes Pope as having ‘past the latter part of his life’ no doubt had much of its origin, as Johnson suggests, in Pope’s personal mortification at the criticisms made of his edition of Shakespeare; nevertheless, this hostility grows into much more than its origin, into a central thread of what is little less than a poetic mimesis and critique of the entire emerging ‘culture industry’.30 In this respect, tempting as it might be to offer a Whig narrative championing Theobald, Bentley and others of Pope’s minute critics as the pioneers of currently respectable best practice, it is nevertheless mistaken.31 Pope’s assault opens a problem not only for the history but also for the current practice, of Shakespeare reception. Shakespeare is to be honoured, by being worked on and written about a very great deal. Or perhaps Shakespeare is precisely, by being worked on and written about a very great deal, to be blocked off? To be buried irrecoverably, under expertise so

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bulky and so unable to interrogate its own reasons for coming into being that it presents us, by no means with a single alderman, but with an entire Swiss Guard of keepers? Surely, in fact, it is the sense of just this troubling ambivalence which makes of the history of Shakespeare’s reception such an appealing route towards Shakespeare? In general, Pope has been rebuked over and over again for failing properly to appreciate Shakespeare, for failing to edit his text carefully enough or for editing him too much in the light of the tastes of his own age. Yet at the same time all these things are the mark of the fact that Pope has a real, rather than a merely narrated, relationship to Shakespeare. Pope thinks that Shakespeare’s culture and verse are still enough his, Pope’s, for direct judgement and engagement to be possible. This brings out a second rub in the phrase ‘Great Shakespeareans’. It is equivocal. It might imply either that its subjects, while not necessarily distinguished in any other way, are great nonetheless as Shakespeareans or that those who are in any case and for other reasons great have also become interested in or occupied with Shakespeare. The topic for the present essay sharpens this crux because if the first of these alternatives were the primary criterion it would be hard to understand why it is about Alexander Pope and not about Lewis Theobald. Theobald is the early eighteenthcentury figure from whom a properly historical Shakespearean philology takes its most powerful impetus; he is the figure, before Edmund Capell’s more systematically anti-eclectic mode of editing gets underway, who takes the largest steps towards a mode of textual bibliography in which the early printed copies are not merely raided wherever they seem to provide helpful ways out of difficulties in the received text but are rather in some way evaluated in relation to each other before being put to use (although even Theobald never arrived at a thoroughgoing execution of any such plan); Theobald’s edition is thick with the evidences of continuous and painstaking editorial labour, while Pope’s presents a beautifully printed surface of which page after page, and sometimes dozen after dozen of pages, can on occasion pass without any apparent intervention from the editor at all. (As we shall see, this is an illusion, because line-by-line collation with his copy-text shows that Pope often prefers, as Theobald rarely does, to conceal rather than to display his labour.)32 For all these reasons, this essay, although centred upon Pope, also treats from time to time of his successor and antagonist. Equally, as Peter Holland has argued, it is important not to overlook Nicholas Rowe’s contribution, even after three centuries, to the shape of today’s ‘Shakespeare’. In a detailed study of Rowe’s editorial practice, Holland shows that Rowe made a central impact on the orthography

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and punctuation of Shakespeare’s text and also that Rowe’s edition rests on more substantial work (including use of the second Folio of 1632) than had previously been appreciated – although, as Holland implies, the effects were not uniformly benign: ‘Rowe’s solution has been a further constriction on and a reinterpretation for actors and critics for the past 290 years.’33 Yet if Pope is chosen over Theobald or Rowe here, this will not only be because Pope is a great poet and critic who happened to have to do some work on Shakespeare at some point in his life. Certainly, a central topic for this essay will be Pope’s specifically poetic relationship to Shakespeare’s verse, a relationship which, I shall argue, has often been occluded by the superimposition of large arrays of generalized cultural history, not only over Pope but also over Shakespeare. But it will have at its centre Pope’s most direct engagement with Shakespeare, his engagement as an editor. It will suggest that here, too, Pope is in some sense actually a great Shakespearean, if there be any such thing. The main reason for this is extremely simple. Much of the text which today we recognize as ‘Shakespeare’ has been formed by Pope. This has happened in a number of ways. First of all, there is a strikingly substantial number of emendations first proposed by Pope which retain their place in current texts of Shakespeare. Some of this, no doubt, is chronological luck. Because Pope was the first editor (with his assistants) to make extensive use, however inconsistently and opportunistically, of a wide variety of early editions of Shakespeare in preparing the text, many obvious errors which perhaps many other editors might also have arrived at, had they come first in this way, remained to be corrected. Yet it is startling to discover, on working through Pope’s text or through variorum editions of Shakespeare, just how many celebrated or familiar lines owe their first appearance in just this form to Pope. Pope is also, for the same reason, a source of numerous important restorations of early readings which remain current in today’s text, readings overlooked by the later, seventeenth-century, Folios, from the last of which, the Fourth, Rowe took his copy-text. Pope’s shaping of today’s texts of Shakespeare also persists at a more subtle, but perhaps even more pervasive level, the level of lineation. Pope’s most continuous attention in editing the plays was given to metre. Many passages whose lineation had remained in the form given to them by the first Folio or early Quartos were first relineated as verse by Pope. Especially central to this work of relineation was attention to lines in which a complete metrical line is distributed among more than one speaker. Some of these relineations have not been accepted, but many more have, once more, come to feel as though they just are Shakespeare. Because of this priority

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in time and because of the unprecedentedness of this degree of attention to early printed editions, it is perhaps true to say that of no editor between Shakespeare and the present day does so much of their work survive in current texts of the poet as of Pope’s. Our current editions of Shakespeare are full of passages which have long, almost immemorially, been lineated as Pope first lineated them, but which were disposed otherwise in the first Folio and in early Quartos. Rowe’s text of Malcolm’s reply to Duncan’s inquiry as to whether the traitorous Cawdor has been executed follows the first Folio’s arrangement, which runs thus: My Liege, they are not yet come back. But I have spoke with one that saw him die: Who did report, that very frankly hee Confess’d his Treasons, implor’d your Highnesse Pardon, And set forth a deep Repentance: Nothing in his Life became him, Like the leauing it. Hee dy’de, . . .34 In the first Folio, and in Rowe, the passage peters out in a series of metrically defective lines. Pope completely reworks the lineation of this passage as follows. My liege, They are not yet come back. But I have spoke With one that saw him die, who did report That very frankly he confess’d his treasons, Implor’d your highness’ pardon, and set forth A deep repentance; nothing in his life Became him like the leaving it. He dy’d, . . .35 Kenneth Muir’s Arden text,36 the Taylor and Wells Oxford edition of 1986,37 and A. R. Braunmuller’s Cambridge edition,38 all follow Pope’s lineation here. In such instances the message from contemporary critical consensus is clear, although it is almost never explicitly stated: Pope has indeed restored Shakespeare’s verse from the state in which it was left by its first editors. Such instances of relineation which have remained current to the present day are ubiquitous in Pope’s edition. And many individual words which stand today as Shakespeare’s were first produced by Pope by means of conjectural emendation. For the Quarto’s ‘Trassell’ and Rowe’s and the fourth Folio’s ‘Tassel’ in The Merchant of Venice, Pope’s ‘throstle’39;

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elsewhere Pope is the first to return us to attested readings which had been lost in Rowe’s following of the fourth Folio as his copy-text, so that, in All’s Well That Ends Well, Pope, with the first Folio, has the King say of Bertram’s father that ‘his honour,/ Clock to itself, knew the true minute when/ Exception bid him speak’; Rowe has that honour as a ‘Block to itself’.40 Anyone willing to collate, and with access to the first Folio, could have done this necessary work. In many cases, Pope was the first to do it. If much of our ‘Shakespeare’ is Pope’s, it would also be true to say that of no editor’s work has so much been rejected. If it is startling to discover how deeply our ‘Shakespeare’ is Pope’s, it is also startling to discover how much of our Shakespeare is simply not there in Pope’s text. Any of the many of us for whom Macbeth’s idea that his bloody hand will ‘The multitudinous seas incarnadine’ is among the most memorable feats of verse virtuosity in that play will look in vain for the line in Pope’s text; Claudius, meanwhile, has not interred Polonius ‘in hugger-mugger’, but merely ‘in private’.41 Few subsequent editors can have taken freedoms so readily. Pope found some passages in Shakespeare weak, a view which, whatever it has to commend it, is rarely permitted today. He moved back and forth between two different ways of accounting for these supposed blemishes: the idea that Shakespeare was a rough diamond who took no care to polish his own work, and the idea that Shakespeare’s text had been traduced by his first editors, who, as players, were not gentlemen and, therefore, were insufficiently educated to be left in charge of the text. The latter theory left Pope, despite one or two gestures towards caution in theory, a great deal of scope for his emendatory imagination. Large chunks of the plays were relegated to the foot of the page with asterisks of reprobation. Sometimes Pope specified that such passages were interpolations, not by Shakespeare himself, but often this was left unclear; in any case, the grounds for such relegation were in each case aesthetic or stylistic rather than textual-bibliographical. Low, vulgar or unintelligible expressions were often simply excised. (The corollary to this is found in the strings of inverted commas at the beginning of each line with which Pope marked out for the reader’s special attention passages which he thought especially fine.) Grammatical ‘mistakes’ and historical anachronisms were corrected. And, above all, there is throughout a silent work of metrical resurfacing going on: Pope not only relineates and elides at will but is also often driven to much more radical surgery in order to get Shakespeare’s verse into something which he considers to resemble metre. A good deal of Pope’s editorial work is invisible, in the sense that, while he does from time to time signal one of his emendations by placing the word or phrase rejected at the foot of the page, he much more often fails

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to do so. Additionally, the source of what is put in such footnotes fluctuates without notice. Occasionally the expression placed at the foot of the page derives from the first Folio or from an early Quarto, implying that this is Pope’s emendation to what he in some sense knows to be the best attested text. But much more often the expression so footnoted is from Pope’s copytext, Rowe’s 1714 edition.42 Readers, therefore, are not in a position to do anything with these footnotes. Pope offers them only selectively, apparently choosing for notation those emendations which he considers strongest and which set his work in the most favourable light. The examination of Pope’s work on his edition of Shakespeare, then, throws up results in a number of areas. It shows us a crucial moment in the formation of the practice (which at this date by no means conforms with the theory) of the new discipline of vernacular textual criticism. It is also, of course, an instructive episode in the history of literary taste, and of Pope’s singular taste. But beyond this, and, perhaps, given the way in which Pope approached his task, most consistently and continuously, it is an instance of prolonged work on verse. This is the aspect of Pope’s relationship to Shakespeare which has been least well understood. In part this is because of the decline of interest in verse technique in contemporary poetics and philology. Most contemporary studies of Shakespeare are strikingly indifferent to one of the most pervasive facts about his line of work – his having written preponderantly in verse. There are important exceptions, in an extremely dense, informative and detailed study by the Russian philologist Marina Tarlinskaja and a subtle and percept ive one from a less scientific (or scientistic, according to taste) standpoint by George T. Wright.43 Pope’s critical reception of Shakespeare has often been deprecated for its insensitivity to the dramatic whole. What looks weak to him can be explained, or explained away, by us, as strong in its contribution to the whole play. Where we are weak is in our conviction, implied through omission or under-representation, that verse, rhythm and metre, is in some way a relatively unimportant feature of Shakespeare’s thinking, a feature which, at best, may illustrate, reinforce or enhance a work of creation whose centre lies elsewhere, in drama. Verse in truth needs to be understood as the very medium, the condition of the possibility, of much of Shakespeare’s dramatic thinking. True, lip service is often paid to this idea. But how often is it really placed at the centre of interpretation? For Pope, on the other hand, it is in practice necessarily at the centre of his reception. Pope was addicted to verse. His relationship to Shakespeare, as editor and as poet – a relationship which might be described as a kind of cooperative antagonism – works

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most powerfully at the level of this often unconscious verse thinking. The eighteenth century often called Shakespeare simply a ‘poet’. We more often call him a playwright. It is not only the first of these descriptions which has something one-sided about it.

Labour and elegance in Pope’s editing The line which Pope was consciously or unconsciously recalling in The Dunciad – ‘Each opposite that blanks the face of joy’ – stands out from the stiff verse mostly elsewhere given to the players in Hamlet. Contemporary poetics of drama sometimes overlooks the tension which verse drama thus sets up for itself between the energies of line and those of overall design. To praise the art of a given dramatist has in general become, over a long historical period, to praise the way in which every detail in a play is made to serve the power and coherence of the whole. Yet surely much of Shakespeare’s power comes from our consciousness of something like the opposite? Line in his plays does not only fill out, illustrate or decorate some larger purpose, but prompts thinking of its own, thinking which often exceeds (as it does in this case) the station in which it is placed. Pope reads and edits Shakespeare above all as a writer of verse. The way he does this, of course, the willingness to emend for metre, to degrade and excise for poor rhyme, produces the salient scholarly weaknesses of his edition. Yet the results of reading an edition made at a time when Shakespeare was understood to be simply a fine poet and admirable playwright, rather than a kind of literary pontiff, can be illuminating. When Macbeth is pretending that he discovered Duncan dead, rather than murdering him himself, he says, in the first Folio, this: Here lay Duncan, His Siluer skinne, lac’d with his Golden Blood, And his gash’d Stabs, look’d like a Breach in Nature, For Ruines wastfull entrance: there the Murtherers, Steep’d in the Colours of their Trade; their Daggers Vnmannerly breech’d with gore: . . .44 In Pope’s edition, however, Macbeth’s antithesis of precious metals is removed: Pope reads, ‘His silver skin lac’d with his goary blood.’45 Only Hanmer, of later editors, follows this reading, which has no bibliographical support. The emendation appears to result from a kind of desperation.

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Pope seems unable to believe that Shakespeare could have emitted what appears to him to be a contrived antithesis constructed from two contrived metaphors. What he himself offers hardly constitutes an improvement even given these criteria, since it leaves Duncan’s ‘silver skin’ intact, results in the direct tautology of ‘goary blood’ and the at least inelegant repetition of ‘gore’ within four lines. Yet the later fate of the passage well exemplifies how much editing in the half-century or so after Pope was to take its cue from his work. Later editors quite often rejected Pope’s emendations, but wherever he had attempted emendation they were alerted to the existence of a possible problem requiring emendation either to the textus receptus or to the commentary. Johnson deals with the passage, and Pope’s work on it, thus: Mr. Pope has endeavoured to improve one of these lines by substituting ‘goary blood’ for ‘golden blood’; but it may easily be admitted that he who could on such an occasion talk of ‘lacing the silver skin,’ would ‘lace it’ with ‘golden blood.’ No amendment can be made to this line, of which every word is equally faulty, but by a general blot. It is not improbable, that Shakespeare put these forced and unnatural metaphors into the mouth of Macbeth as a mark of artifice and dissimulation, to show the difference between the studied language of hypocrisy, and the natural outcries of sudden passion. This whole speech so considered, is a remarkable instance of judgment, as it consists entirely of antithesis and metaphor.46 Johnson’s objection to Pope’s emendation is unanswerable. Meanwhile, Johnson himself is in fact developing two different modes of reasoning about the line. The first is that the line as a whole is entirely faulty, to the extent that it cannot be tinkered with, only (if to be at all emended) deleted. The second is that the line belongs to an impressive achievement on Shakespeare’s part, that of, as it were, deliberate bad writing, intended to bring out the falsity of Macbeth’s position. A strong trace of Pope’s way of reading remains in Johnson’s. The appeal to dramatic decorum is only ‘not improbable’, and it is not allowed to efface the judgement on the line emended by Pope, that every word in it is ‘faulty’. Johnson’s equivocality holds in tension attention to both line and design, as a later organicism would not. His close commentary is made possible by a tradition of criticism as fault-finding which is central to Pope’s practice. Pope’s direct assault on the text here is by no means exceptional. Again and again he is willing to introduce, without any prompting from early

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printed copies, readings of his own in place of those he meets in Rowe’s text. One principal category of emendation is grammatical. Pope, while evidently aware of the historically changing nature of the English language, did not have a radically historicist conception of linguistic correctness. For him, double superlatives, double negatives, disagreement between the number of pronoun and the verb governed by that pronoun were, perhaps because they seemed to him to involve logical errors, evident mistakes which were likely to represent the corruption of the text by its various unlearned curators. Thus, for the description of the wound made in Caesar by Brutus as ‘the most unkindest cut of all’, Pope substitutes a line without the double superlative: ‘This, this was the unkindest cut of all.’47 In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the phrase ‘to study, three years is but short’ presents a disagreement between the number of the subject and that of the verb, so that three years duly ‘are but short’ in Pope’s text.48 Pope emends for missing accusatives, too: ‘Who may I rather challenge for Unkindness’ (the line as it stands in Rowe’s Macbeth) becomes, in Pope’s text, ‘Whom may I rather challenge. . . .’49 These kinds of grammatical tidying are significant not only in themselves, but because they indicate the broader un- or even anti-historicist slant of Pope’s editorial approach. The controversy over Richard Bentley’s Dissertations on the Epistles of Phalaris had already foregrounded disagreements about historical philology and its place in the curation of texts in the learned languages: one of the wits’ chief objections to Bentley was what they took to be his excessively minute approach to classical Greek as a historically developing language. Boyle and his allies understood this minute approach to constitute an assault on the stable canon of classical texts and the humanistic educational purposes to which they considered that canon ought to be put.50 This debate was soon recapitulated in the infant sphere of vernacular textual criticism because the necessity for a historical approach to Shakespeare’s English was one of the focal points of the often devastating criticisms of Pope’s edition mounted in Lewis Theobald’s pamphlet Shakespeare Restored (1726) and in his own subsequent complete edition of Shakespeare. Where Pope emended away the double comparative ‘more better’ in Act I of The Tempest, Theobald defended it: ‘This is the genuine Reading, which the last Editor has sophisticated, not observing, I suppose, how frequent it is with Shakespeare, and the other Writers of that Age, to add the Termination to Adjectives of the comparative and superlative Degrees, and at the same time prefi x the Signs showing the Degrees.’51 Where Pope is willing, on occasion, quite markedly to twist the text in order to avoid such solecisms, Theobald is not. In Henry VIII Theobald reads, ‘there is no

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English Soul/More stronger to direct you than your self.’ In order to avoid ‘more stronger’ Pope is, remarkably, willing to produce in his emended reading an acute degree of metrical harshness: ‘There is no English/Soul stronger to direct you than your self.’52 Lying behind these differences of approach are not only two differing conceptions of editorial method but also two different aesthetics of annotation and commentary. A detailed examination of one example, concerning one of Pope’s most notorious emendations, will illustrate this. When editing Hamlet Pope came across the following passage in Rowe’s third edition: Ham. Methinks it is like a Wezel. Pol. It is back’d like a Wezel.53 Pope emended this to Ham. Methinks it is like an Ouzle. Pol. It is black like an Ouzle.54 and appended the following note: ‘An Ouzle or Blackbird: it has been printed by mistake a Weesel, which is not black.’ What is striking about this scholiastic episode is how much Pope finds it unnecessary to trouble the reader by explaining. The reading ‘back’d’ which appears in all the Folios and also in the oldest Quarto available to Pope (as ‘backt’) has been emended to read ‘black’. The only copies reading thus are the later Quartos printed in 1611, 1622 and 1637, and the substantially adapted ‘Players’ Quartos’, the first of which was printed in 1676.55 No indication of any of this appears in Pope’s note; it is likely that he found the expression ‘back’d’ awkward and perhaps ungrammatical, and so preferred ‘black’, a reading which, however, produces an impossible black weasel which must then, upon the authority of no copies whatever, be regularized into a blackbird. There is a further stage of silent reasoning here because ‘Wezel’ is similar enough to ‘Ouzle’ to have been a mistake for it. Each of these steps is in 1725 in principle a perfectly respectable procedure familiar from classical philology. What is ungrammatical (here ‘back’d’) must be corrected, if possible by finding an alternative attested reading; where no such reading is available, emendation for which the reading in the copies could plausibly have been a mistake is preferable to one bearing no literal relation to any attested reading. The point is not that Pope concealed dubious reasonings in order to arrive at a text more satisfactory to himself but that Pope concealed what

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were, in the context of contemporary scholarship, a perfectly acceptable set of reasonings because of his dislike of the ostentatious display of minute labour. Theobald, by contrast, regards it as the editor’s duty to show his working: ‘I am afraid his Reasoning, that it has been printed by Mistake a Weesel, because a Weesel is not black, – will not be altogether so incontestible; when we come to see that the Second Edition in Folio, and several other of the Copies have a various Reading, in which there is not the least Intimation of Blackness.’56 (Theobald refers to the Second Folio because he did not acquire a copy of the First until May 1729.)57 Indeed, there are moments at which Pope appears to let slip his otherwise very clear sense of the difference between editing a classic vernacular text and reworking it. When these come, they are spectacular. In Pope’s text of Coriolanus the text of Brutus’s speech to the citizens towards the end of Act II stands as follows: Bru. Ay, spare us not: say, we read lectures to you, How youngly he began to serve his country, How long continued, and what stock he springs of, The noble house of Martius; from whence came That Ancus Martius, Numa’s daughter’s son, Who after great Hostilius, here was King: Of the same house Publius and Quintus were, That our best water brought by conduits hither. +And Censorinus, darling of the people (And nobly nam’d so for twice being censor) Was his great ancestor.58 The line prefixed with a cross will not be found attested by any previous copy of the play for a simple reason: Pope has made it up. A footnote offers his justification for this: ‘This verse I have supply’d. A line having been certainly left out in this place, as will appear to any one who consults the beginning of Plutarch’s life of Coriolanus, from whence this passage is directly translated.’ For Pope, the justification is clear: the passage must be made to make sense, and this can be simply done, because it is evident that Shakespeare has simply missed something out in reworking his source. We have the source, and so we can supply the line. This would seem to be one of Pope’s most audacious editorial interventions. And yet, in various ways, the subsequent editorial tradition has followed him. R. B. Parker’s 1994 Oxford text, for example, reads, ‘And Censorinus that was so surnamed’ at this point, following Shakespeare’s source, North’s Plutarch.59 The line

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perfectly illustrates the difficulty of assessing the merits of Pope’s edition today: what might look like his most unjustifiably heavy-handed interventions are sometimes capable of determining editors’ sense of what it is and is not acceptable to do with a text even today. The textus receptus tradition does not wholly disappear even where New Bibliographical, or more recent, procedures for determining and following copy-text, are in place, because editors’ sense of what it is and is not acceptable to do remain heavily determined by the weight of centuries of editorial tradition. On other occasions, however, even Pope draws back from the actual insertion into the text of conjectural missing material of this kind, as in the extraordinary instance of his conjecture of a lost anachronism on Shakespeare’s part: Than Julius Caesar, or bright . . . I can’t guess the occasion of the Hemystic, and imperfect sense, in this place; ’tis not impossible it might have been filled up with – Francis Drake – tho’ that were a terrible Anachronism (as bad as Hector’s quoting Aristotle in Troil. and Cress.) yet perhaps, at the time that brave Englishman was in his glory, to an English-hearted audience, and pronounced by some favourite Actor, the thing might be popular, though not judicious; and therefore by some Critick, in favour of the author, afterwards struck out. But this is a meer slight conjecture.60 This is an extremely rare – and self-discounted – instance of a complaint which spreads far more extensively in later eighteenth-century editions of Shakespeare such as William Warburton’s – the editorial imagination run rampant.61 The appearance of an apparently unmotivated hemistich leads Pope inevitably to wonder what the line might have been ‘filled up with’, and, having been forcibly struck by Shakespeare’s anachronisms elsewhere, he now not only imagines one (a much more implausible one) for this passage but also supplies an entire imaginary history of textual corruption: ‘therefore by some Critick . . . afterwards struck out’, before retreating somewhat shamefacedly in the final sentence of his note.

Pope’s editorial rationale Why did Pope feel able to treat the text in this way? In part, because of his scepticism about the value of the early printed copies themselves. The long process of what we might, following the work of Sebastiano Timpanaro,

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call the ‘Lachmannization’ of textual criticism, was in its infancy at the time when Pope was preparing his edition – even in classical and scriptural textual criticism. That is, the process by which it came to be insisted that a coherent palaeographical and/or bibliographical assessment of the relationships among surviving copies of the text must precede the determination of copy-text and the value of other given copies as sources of emendations to that copy-text, rather than beginning simply from the work of the last editor and using manuscripts or early printed copies as a source of emendations to that ‘received’ text, was at the date of Pope’s work only, even in those more developed practices of textual criticism, beginning.62 When we add to this methodological lack of sophistication Pope’s own views about the ‘players’ who had in his view been responsible for the first Folio in particular, we find a flexible set of justifications for a good deal of emendatory freedom. A good deal of Pope’s ‘Preface’ to his edition is concerned with developing these justifications. Pope wavers, in fact, between two different kinds of explanation for Shakespeare’s lapses. In the first kind of explanation, Shakespeare’s own judgement is compromised by the low company he is obliged to keep. The Elizabethan stage predates the rise of acting as a liberal profession: . . . the Judgment, as well as Condition, of that class of people was then far inferior to what it is in our days . . . the top of the profession were then meer Players, not Gentlemen of the stage: They were led into the Buttery by the Steward, not plac’d at the Lord’s table, or Lady’s toilette: and consequently were intirely depriv’d of those advantages they now enjoy, in the familiar conversation of our Nobility, and an intimacy (not to say dearness) with people of the first condition.63 Pope had himself known at least one such ‘Gentleman of the stage’ of his own day: as a young man he had got to know Thomas Betterton, then in his late 60s, widely thought to be the greatest actor of his day (and thought of by Colley Cibber, for one, as being as great an actor as Shakespeare was an author).64 Elizabethan actors were not, Pope insists, gentlemen like Betterton, but, effectively, mechanicals. The damage which in Pope’s view they have inflicted on Shakespeare is both direct and indirect. Shakespeare was himself an actor, Pope admits, and, therefore, likely to model his judgement upon that of other actors.65 Still more directly than this, the players were responsible for the preparation of the first Folio. Accordingly, it is possible to speculate, Pope thinks, that many of the worst defects of

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Shakespeare’s text as it currently stands are not Shakespeare’s own responsibility, but the players’: If we give in to this opinion, how many low and vicious parts and passages might no longer reflect upon this great Genius, but appear unworthily charged upon him? And even in those which are really his, how many faults have been unjustly laid to his account from arbitrary Additions, Expunctions, Transpositions of scenes and speeches, corruptions of innumerable Passages by the Ignorance, and wrong Corrections of ‘em again by the Impertinence, of his first Editors? From one or other of these considerations, I am verily perswaded, that the greatest and grossest part of what are thought his errors would vanish, and leave his character in a very different light from that disadvantageous one, in which it now appears to us.66 What Pope’s ‘Preface’ here develops is an extremely ambiguous and, therefore, extremely flexible theory of Shakespeare’s faults. Pope is not entirely certain whether Shakespeare himself is in any case a gentleman. At one point a kind of a priori gentlemanliness is conferred upon Shakespeare. He is said to be the only instance of an author giving any ground for the idea that not only the poet, but even the man of the world, may be born rather than made.67 In any case, however, Shakespeare was an actor in a day when actors were low, was required to cater to the taste of low audiences and his text was left in the hands of other low actors. Pope takes this situation to support a practice of emendations to the received text which takes its occasion from the discovery of particular faults, which, if grievous or uncharacteristic enough, can be held if necessary to be the responsibility of the players. Yet at the same time there are also pressures pushing in the other direction. If the Folio is particularly compromised by having been ‘published by two Players’, Pope argues, in his ‘Preface’ at least, that the Quartos are, in general, superior. He concedes to the Folio only the correction of ‘literal errors’ in the Quartos; ‘in all respects else it is far worse.’68 Pope does not claim that the Quartos were published with Shakespeare’s approval; indeed, ‘every page is so scandalously false spelled, and almost all the learned or unusual words so intolerably mangled, that it’s plain there either was no Corrector to the press at all, or one totally illiterate.’69 But further opportunities for theatrical and editorial corruption beyond those instanced in the already corrupt Quartos have occurred by the time the Folio comes to be published. Pope’s conception of editorship is sufficiently

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philological to require of him (what is lacking from Rowe’s edition) some sustained effort to collate and exploit the resources of those Quartos which he has been able to consult. Accordingly, Pope made serious efforts to obtain early Quartos. An advertisement in The London Evening Post for 5 May 1722 offered ‘any Satisfaction required’ for the provision of ‘any Editions of the Tempest, Mackbeth, Julius Caesar, Timon of Athens, King John, and Henry the 8th; printed before the Year 1620’ forwarded to Pope’s publisher, Tonson (‘1620’ is mentioned because, it seems, Pope was for some while under a misapprehension about the date of the first Folio). The ‘Table of the Several Editions of Shakespear’s Plays, made use of and compared in this Impression’ lists the seventeen early Quartos which Pope had managed to obtain. As Marcus Walsh points out, Pope had access to ‘a more complete set of original copies than any other editor before Capell or Jennens would have available’.70 Despite the apparent haphazardness of Pope’s approach to collation, its significance lies in its having happened at all. Pope’s is the first edition of Shakespeare in which any sustained attempt is made to consider the relationship between the Folio and the early Quartos. The edition is, for all its flaws, the first critical edition of Shakespeare. The attempt at collecting and using Quarto material reflects Pope’s view that ‘These Editions now hold the place of Originals, and are the only materials left to repair the deficiencies or restore the corrupted sense of the Author.’71 Pope’s own idea of his own performance as an editor, in fact, was more or less the reverse of the verdict which has come to prevail. He describes himself as having edited ‘with a religious abhorrence of all Innovation, and without any indulgence to my private sense or conjecture’.72 This claim looks less implausible than it otherwise would when we consider the long evolution of editorial methodology. In the New Bibliography of twentiethcentury figures such as W. W. Greg and Fredson Bowers there developed, as is well-known, a rationale of ‘copy-text’. This approach to editorial method held that systematic bibliographical scrutiny of the relationships among surviving printed copies and manuscripts should be followed by the selection of one of these by the editor as the ‘copy-text’, the basis for the ensuing edition. The ‘copy-text’ would not invariably be right, but, once determined, it should form the basis for the critical edition. Other relevant copies could not be allowed to afford reasons for introducing emendations to the copy-text wherever they might happen to seem superior to the editor. The systematic investigation of bibliographical relationships among copies preceding the selection of copy-text would also govern the credit given to each copy in any individual instance.73

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Such a rationale of copy-text perhaps once seemed the final telos of the history of editorial method. Since then, debate on editorial method has been opened up again from a wide variety of perspectives.74 In any case, the New Bibliography was only a late stage in a very long-term tectonic shift in philological procedure: the shift, over centuries, away from the idea of the textus receptus, the received text. In receptus-based thinking, each successive editor would take the best printed edition preceding theirs as the copy-text. The work of editing, in such practice, did not begin with a determination of the relative authority of all surviving copies, but with a determination of the best existing recent edition. The aim of collation of differing copies, in such a practice, was not to determine the bibliographical or palaeographical relationships among them, but to indicate places where the textus receptus might stand in need of emendation, or even (in a still more eclectic variant of the practice) to be quarried for solutions where the editor’s reading of the textus receptus might have led him (or rarely her) to suspect a problem. In a letter to Tonson of May 1722, Pope described one of the collation sessions which he organized to help with getting the work for the Shakespeare edition done: ‘I’m resolv’d to pass the next whole week in London, purposely to get together Parties of my acquaintance ev’ry night, to collate the several Editions of Shakespear’s single Plays, 5 of which I have ingaged to this design.’ The letter seems almost to anticipate that the job of collating the Quarto texts which Pope had managed to accumulate will be accomplished in a single week (a ‘whole week’!). There was, of course, no profession of vernacular literary studies: the men assembled were curious gentlemen of parts and learning such as the surgeon William Cheselden and the painter Jonathan Richardson. These collations would certainly have been to the copy-text for Pope’s edition, Rowe’s third edition of 1714. This text was a reprint with occasional minor corrections deriving from Rowe’s first edition of 1709. Rowe’s copy text, meanwhile, had not been the first, but the fourth Folio of 1685.75 This text had been printed from the third, the third from the second and the second from the first Folio of 1623.76 The more recent edition was in each case thought to have been the best place to start. Pope’s reference to ‘a religious abhorrence of all Innovation’ thus needs glossing. Pope has proceeded with abhorrence of innovation, not to the first Folio, or to early Quartos where these have been determined to provide the best text, but to the text as it is currently received. Indeed, the phrase ‘the text’ in this and in all editions in the receptus tradition (i.e. up to Johnson and Steevens) generally simply means ‘the received text’. Thus, when Pope states that ‘The various Readings are fairly put in

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the margin, so that every one may compare ‘em; and those I have prefer’d into the Text are constantly ex fide Codicum, upon authority,’77 ‘the Text’, although unspecified, is the received text, Rowe’s third edition of 1714. Pope’s description of this abhorrence as ‘religious’ probably refers to ecclesiastical conservatism in general, but it also reminds us that the most publicly significant field of textual criticism in early modern Europe pertained to scripture. In scriptural textual criticism, that is, ‘innovation’ could refer pejoratively precisely to critical attempts not to ‘innovate’: to determine the relative authority of copies before establishing the text, rather than simply printing from the receptus. An instance is provided by the hostility which greeted the classical scholar Richard Bentley’s Proposals for Printing a New Edition of the Greek Testament after its publication in 1721. For many of Bentley’s opponents, the received text was adequate to all purposes of salvation; any attempt whatever to alter it, even one resting on critical evaluation of the relationships among surviving manuscripts, would, therefore, constitute the intolerable innovations of a ‘private Regulator’ of the text.78 Pope’s disavowal of any reliance upon his own ‘private sense or conjecture’, however belied by his practice, was no doubt intended to disarm such objections, even in the much less closely monitored new area of vernacular literary editing. Pope’s conception of literary editing, then, is not really a consistently elaborated philological methodology. It is, instead, a meeting point for a number of competing pressures: commercial, aesthetic and scholarly. The text which crystallizes from these conflicting imperatives cannot give us a pure reading of what Pope thought and felt about Shakespeare: this has to be diffracted from the various different kinds of labour and thinking which are going on simultaneously in work towards the edition.

Pope’s editorial practice Complex and contradictory as Pope’s conception of the editor’s task in many ways is, his actual editorial practice is considerably more so. This fact only fully appears by collation of Pope’s readings with his copy-text. Although, as we have seen, Pope advertised the candour of his editorial apparatus, claiming that departures from the text (i.e. from the received text) would always be noted in the margin, and were always made upon the authority of some early printed copy, this is in fact by no means the case. There are very many silent emendations to the received text, not only concerning punctuation, lineation, elision and so on but also concerning

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even more substantial matters. The extent of the work which goes on in this way can be illustrated by comparative analysis of the sources and motives behind a single extended and typical passage from Pope’s text of Hamlet with the same passage in Rowe’s edition. At the beginning of Act III, Claudius is attempting to find out about Hamlet’s mental state. Rosencrantz (‘Rosincrosse’ in Pope’s edition and ‘Roseneraus’ in Rowe’s) tells Claudius that Hamlet is planning to have a play performed:

King. With all my Heart, and it doth much content me To hear him so inclin’d. Good Gentlemen, Give him a further Edge, and drive his Purpose on To these Delights. Ros. We shall, my Lord. King. Sweet Gertrude, leave us too, For we have closely sent for Hamlet hither, That he, as ‘twere by accident, may there Affront Ophelia. Her Father, and my self, lawful Espials, Will so bestow our selves, that seeing unseen We may of their Encounter frankly judge, And gather by him, as he is behaved, If’t be the affliction of his Love, or no, That thus he suffers for. Queen. I shall obey you: And for your part, Ophelia, I do wish That your good Beauties be the happy cause Of Hamlet’s wildness. So shall I hope your Virtues

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King. With all my heart, and it doth much content me To hear him so inclin’d. Good gentlemen, give him a further edge, And drive his purpose into these delights. Ros. We shall, my lord. King. Sweet Gertrude, leave us too, For we have closely sent for Hamlet hither, That he, as ‘twere by accident, may here Affront Ophelia. Her father, and my self, Will so bestow our selves, that seeing unseen We may of their encounter frankly judge, And gather by him, as he is behaved, If it be th’affliction of his love, or no, That thus he suffers for. Queen. I shall obey you: And for my part, Ophelia, I do wish That your good beauties be the happy cause Of Hamlet’s wildness. So I hope your virtues

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Will bring him to his wonted way again, To both your honours. Oph. Madam, I wish it may. Pol. Ophelia, walk you here. Gracious, so please ye, We will bestow our selves: Read on this Book, That shew of such an exercise may colour Your loneliness. We are oft to blame in this, ’Tis too much prov’d, that with Devotion’s Visage, And pious Action, we do suger o’er The Devil himself. King. Oh ’tis too true; How smart a lash that Speech doth give my Conscience?

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May bring him to his wonted way again, To both your honours. Oph. Madam, I wish it may. Pol. Ophelia, walk you here. Gracious, so please ye, We will bestow our selves: read on this book; That shew of such an exercise may colour Your loneliness. We’re oft to blame in this, ’Tis too much prov’d, that with devotion’s visage, And pious action we do suger o’er The devil himself. King. Oh ’tis too true. How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!

This is a passage, like very many in Pope’s edition, altogether devoid of marginal annotation.79 Like many other passages, however, this does not mean that many changes have not in fact been made even to the ‘received’ text. Pope’s declaration of transparency cannot be taken at face value. Typical of the sort of small changes that Pope almost never felt it necessary to record is the contraction of pronoun with verb, ‘We’re oft to blame in this,’ for Rowe’s ‘We are.’ As it happens, Rowe’s text preserves the first Folio’s ‘we are,’ in which the 1605 Quarto, the earliest of the play listed in Pope’s ‘Table’, also concurs.80 But this small contraction provides, in Pope’s view, a clearer view of the line’s metrical conformity, at little cost. Earlier in the passage ‘shall’ is simply omitted for the same, metrical, reason, despite its presence in both the first Folio and the Quarto. Throughout the edition, this sort of minor polishing is going on, working over the surface of Shakespeare’s verse. Elsewhere in this passage, again silently, Pope changes lineation in order to solve metrical problems. By countenancing two (acceptable) hemistiches at ‘To hear and see the matter’ and ‘To hear him so inclin’d’, Pope is able to avoid what he clearly regards as the merely metrically defective line made up of Claudius’s ‘To these delights’ followed by Roseneraus’s ‘We shall, my

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Lord.’ Pope’s handling, here, in fact proceeds with some bibliographical justification. Rowe’s lineation is the same as the first Folio’s. But the 1605 Quarto reads as follows: King. With all my hart, And it doth much content me To heare him so inclin’d. Good gentlemen giue him a further edge, And driue his purpose into these delights. Ros. We shall my Lord.81 What Pope has clearly performed is a conflation of the lineation of the Quarto tradition and that of the Folio tradition. By accepting the first Folio’s and Rowe’s line, ‘With all my heart, and it doth much content me,’ he is able to avoid the series of metrically defective lines in the 1605 Quarto, by accepting that copy’s handling of other aspects of the passage’s lineation, to avoid the metrically defective line of the first Folio. The result is lineation which reflects neither Quarto nor Folio, but Pope’s global view of the incompetence of early printed copies with respect to lineation means that this does not represent a particular problem for him. The procedure is typical of much of Pope’s editing: a good deal of attention has been paid to early printed copies, but the court of final arbitration is Pope’s own judgement. Once more, all this happens without a word of notice being taken of it in marginal matter. No reader who did not undertake this kind of comparison personally would know that Pope had paid any particular attention to this section of the text. Other silent deviations from the textus receptus of this passage confirm that Pope combined careful attention to Quarto readings with an eclectic basis for admission into his own text. With the Quarto, Pope omits those ‘lawful espials’ whose presence in the Folio and in Rowe makes the line in which they appear so excessively long. Hamlet is to meet Claudius and Polonius ‘here’ as in the Quarto, not ‘there’ as in Rowe and the first Folio. None of these changes is by itself especially striking. But taken together, they give us a better idea of the usual texture of Pope’s editorial work than some of the more spectacular advertised emendations. What is more, comparative analysis with successor editions indicates how important continual small changes of this kind to the received text could quickly become in a receptus-minded editorial tradition. One of the more surprising emendations in the foregoing passage is to have Gertrude express her

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hope that Ophelia’s virtues ‘May bring’ Hamlet ‘to his wonted way again’. In Rowe, the Folios and the Quartos the reading is ‘Will bring’. There is no bibliographical support for the emendation, and its motive is hard to detect, yet the editions of Theobald and Johnson, for examples, meekly follow it.82 What emerges is that Pope set much of the essential underlying shape of Shakespeare for most readers for most of the eighteenth century, even in texts whose editors spent a good deal of time explicitly denouncing his. Pope’s decision to keep so many emendations concealed from readers may not have been most centrally motivated by any wish to excuse them from scrutiny. It needs to be understood in relation to the broader aesthetics of his edition as a printed artefact. Rowe’s rather haphazard capitalization of those substantives considered important for some reason is eschewed in favour of lower-case throughout. Coupled with the large-format pages, this gives the edition a predominantly ‘white’ feel, a lower ratio of ink to paper than any other edition in the period, with the possible exception of Hanmer’s, the least philologically serious of all the early eighteenth-century editions. Pope, as David Foxon and James McLaverty have so thoroughly demonstrated, was intensely preoccupied with the printed surface of his poems, and this care appears also, here, to have extended to his edition of Shakespeare. 83 The Dunciad’s central visual effect, repeated on every page of the ‘variorum’ editions, is to place a few lines of clean, light, unencumbered text floating easily over a dark ugly mass of com mentary. For Pope, to note that ‘We are’ had been replaced by ‘We’re’ would not primarily have counted as a necessary act of editorial transparency, but as an unnecessary ostentation of editorial labour. Nevertheless, the opacity of Pope’s textual-critical apparatus means that the facts of his practice can only be detected by collation of the edition with its copy-text. We can develop a more comprehensive appreciation of Pope’s practice by considering Pope’s handling of the Quarto and Folio traditions of King Lear (whether that play is indeed ‘single’ being, of course, one of the elements to be handled) and of the impact of that handling upon the later editorial tradition. The Quarto ‘Historie of King Lear’ and the Folio ‘Tragedie of King Lear’, as scholarship of the last quarter century has emphasized, differ very substantially from each other. For a long time it was not generally believed that these differences represented anything so thorough as authorial revision. In the 1980s, however, that assumption came to be challenged, and the hypothesis of authorial revision became central to

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discussion of the play.84 One of the central targets of this new discussion was the practice of editorial ‘conflation’: the idea, to summarize briefly, that the job of the editor was to wedge as much material as could be fairly thought Shakespeare’s into any edition of the given play, on the assumption of the essential underlying unity of all its versions. This conception was challenged by pointing out that the differences among the different texts of, for example, Lear, were so extensive that it might be necessary to provide separate texts of the Quarto ‘Historie’ and the Folio ‘Tragedie’, a proposal for what one might call ‘disconflation’ which was realized in Stanley Wells’s and Gary Taylor’s Oxford edition of 1986. Nevertheless, as David Bevington pointed out in his review of that edition, the editors were not wholly able to sever links with conflationism, because it became necessary to edit the Quarto text in the light of the Folio and vice versa.85 Pope never seems to have been in any doubt that Shakespeare sometimes revised his work. In the ‘Preface’ to his edition he notes that ‘The Alterations or Additions which Shakespear himself made, are taken notice of as they occur.’ Like many of Pope’s assertions about his practice of annotation, this is only partially true. Although it is unlikely even to have occurred to him to provide separate texts of ‘Historie’ and ‘Tragedie’, he was not for the most part governed by any conflationist wish to cram as much Shakespeare in as possible.86 Pope’s list of the copies of early printed editions consulted in the course of work towards his edition includes two texts of Lear: that in the first Folio, and what is now described as the second Quarto. This last is dated on its title page as having been printed in 1608, the same date as the first Quarto, but is now known to have been published in 1619. Pope refers to this misdated Quarto at one point as ‘the edition of 1608’ (in one of the rare instances in these footnotes in which an early printed edition is given a date of any kind: generally Pope prefers simply ‘the old edition’, even in cases where such a description is manifestly ambiguous), and there is no evidence of his having had sight of a copy of the first Quarto. Confirmation that Pope’s access to the Quarto tradition comes solely from the 1619 Quarto is provided by collation of those passages of the play based on a Quarto text with the 1608 and 1619 Quartos. In no case does Pope follow a 1608 reading in preference to a 1619 reading. At several points, conversely, Pope follows readings present in the second, 1619, Quarto rather than those followed in the 1608 text. When Lear sarcastically tells Kent to ‘take his reward’ of banishment for having supported Cordelia, this is preceded in Pope’s text by the phrase, ‘Our potency make good,’ taken from the 1619 Quarto.87 Both the 1608 Quarto and the first

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Folio, along with Pope’s copy-text, Rowe’s 1714 edition, read, ‘Our potency made good.’88 In the first Folio and the 1608 Quarto Edmund confesses that he had ordered that Cordelia be murdered and that he had planned to lay the blame on her despair ‘That she fordid her selfe’89; in both the 1619 Quarto and in Pope’s text this last phrase is missing. In the first Folio the storm which batters Lear and his companions is described as a ‘Pudder’; in the 1608 Quarto it is, not dissimilarly, a ‘Powther’, but in the second Quarto it is a ‘Thundring’, the reading which is clearly the source for Pope’s own ‘thund’ring’.90 These and other instances demonstrate beyond doubt that Pope’s knowledge of the Quarto tradition is owed to the 1619 Quarto and that he had no sight of the 1608 (the so-called pide Bull) Quarto. There is no sign that he was aware of the existence of the earlier text. Despite this, Pope’s use of the 1619 text brings into his text a good deal of material which had been excluded from the text of Lear ever since the beginning of the Folio tradition in 1623: in many instances, the 1608 and 1619 texts carry identical or near-identical readings. Yet where he did bring in material from the Quarto tradition, Pope evidently felt even freer than usual in its handling. As A. D. J. Brown has argued, Pope’s handling of Quarto material in Lear is ‘selective’.91 Since this material did not in any event appear in the received text, the text towards which Pope declared himself to have acted with a religious abhorrence of all innovation, the decision about what to include and what to exclude seems to have been made largely on the grounds of what Pope thought convincing and persuasive. Accordingly, when introducing a block of material from the Quarto tradition, Pope will often silently emend it in the course of printing it. Thus when Pope draws attention to his addition of Quarto material to the description of Lear in the storm: . . . tears his white hair,† Which the impetuous blasts with eyeless rage Catch in their fury, and make nothing of. This night, in which the cub-drawn bear would couch, The lion, and the belly-pinched wolf Keep their furr dry; unbonneted he runs, And bids what will, take all. † The six following verses were omitted in all the late editions: I have replac’d them from the first, for they are certainly Shakespear’s. The sense is, that any animal, tho’ even provok’d by hunger, or drawn by nature to its young, wou’d not venture out in such a storm.92

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What he does not explain is that he has also jettisoned some material which for some reason did not seem pertinent or valuable to him: after ‘make nothing of’, the 1619 Quarto’s ‘Striues in his little world of man to out-scorne,/ The too and fro conflicting wind and raine’, is simply omitted.93 When some of Edgar’s ‘poor Tom’ material is added, Pope proceeds similarly: † Five fiends have been in poor Tom at once, Hobbididen Prince of dumbness, Mahu of stealing, Mohu of murder, Flibbertigibbet of moping, and Mowing who since possesses chamber-maids and waiting-women. † These lines are added here in the old edition. Not added in Pope’s edition, however, is the full text: Fiue fiends haue beene in poore Tom at once, Of lust, as Obidicut, Hobbididence Prince of dumbnesse, Mahu of stealing, Modo of murder, Stiberdigebit of Mobing, And Mohing who since possesses chambermaids And waiting women, so, blesse thee master.94 Pope takes ‘Mowing’ for one of the five fiends (it is usually now regarded as one of the things that ‘Flibbertigibbet’ does, rather than as the name of a separate fiend), and so had to lose one fiend: the axe falls on ‘Obidicut’, as the 1619 Quarto has it, the fiend of lust. Yet this passage too well demonstrates the extent to which Pope’s contribution to the text of Shakespeare endures: no editor now reads ‘Stiberdigebit’, Pope’s emendation to ‘Flibbertigibbet’ having been accepted even in, for example, a purely quarto-based edition such as Jay L. Halio’s edition of The First Quarto of King Lear 95; and the lines are also today printed, just as Pope first prints them, as prose, not verse.

The editor as verse thinker Pope’s text of Shakespeare, therefore, cannot be taken as a transparent mirror of his taste.96 His practice, instead, responds to a variety of competing pressures – philological, commercial and aesthetic – and finds solutions which, while they are not the result of a systematically coherent editorial rationale, are in many cases far from cavalier, and which have often had an influence on the text which persists to this day. Pope also took the opportunity, however, to offer a less mediated indication of his

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own taste, by marking those passages he especially admired with inverted commas at the beginning of each line and by degrading others to the foot of the page. In this latter case, indeed, there is still a certain ambiguity about whether this operation is part only of general criticism or also, still, of textual criticism, because Pope at some times seems to suggest that the passages so degraded are interpolations and, at others, that although they are probably Shakespeare’s, he nevertheless wishes to condemn them. A note at the foot of one scene in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, for example, says this: This whole Scene, like many others in these Plays, (some of which I believe were written by Shakespear, and others interpolated by the Players), is compos’d of the lowest and most trifling conceits, to be accounted for only from the gross taste of the age that he liv’d in; Populo ut placerent. I wish I had authority to leave them out, but I have done all I could, set a mark of reprobation upon them; throughout this edition.† † †97 Pope does not, however, in every such case indicate whether he believes that the faults of a given passage are occasioned by Shakespeare’s wish to please the vulgar, or from the vulgar’s being, in the shape of the players, directly responsible for them. Indeed it is hard to know how the distinction might be drawn, because both hypotheses are assumed by Pope to terminate in the same result. Pope’s decision in the first place to use this simple graphic method for denoting applause and its opposite is itself a part of his overall aesthetic of annotation: ‘Some of the most shining passages are distinguish’d by comma’s in the margin; and where the beauty lay not in particulars but in the whole, a star is prefix’d to the scene. This seems to me a shorter and less ostentatious method of performing the better half of Criticism (namely the pointing out an Author’s excellencies) than to fill a whole paper with citations of fine passages, with general Applauses, or empty Exclamations at the tail of them.’98 Such a method naturally favours the selection of passages which can stand without their contexts, as anthology pieces, because applause of a given passage on the grounds of its fitness for its place in the play as a whole, its power at that particular moment, requires more discussion and demonstration. For Pope, extended commentary of this kind would be ‘ostentatious’ in an editor. Our taste today can find the whole procedure barbarous, as though it were possible in some way to mark out a passage for admiration independent of its place in the functional totality of a play. It tends, we may worry, to convert plays into a series of bravura

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set-pieces rather than to focus on Shakespeare’s art of the whole. Yet perhaps this view itself underestimates the extent to which set-piece bravura is at least one part of Shakespeare’s appeal. When Pope awards commas to the following celebrated passage in Twelfth Night, ‘A blank, my Lord: she never told her love, ‘But let concealment, like a worm i’th’ bud, ‘Feed on her damask cheek: she pin’d in thought, ‘And with a green and yellow melancholy, ‘She sat like Patience on a monument, ‘Smiling at grief.99 it is hard seriously to contend that violence is being done to the play’s aesthetic by singling this out as a set-piece, because it so clearly marks itself out as a set-piece. Shakespeare’s plays do not in reality operate on any principle that local brilliance must always be tied down to global function. Because the plays are so preponderantly written in verse, they exploit, and expect an audience to respond to, local surpluses of figurative elaboration and verse melody whose ‘function’ in the logic of the play as a whole is not necessarily the most interesting thing about them. Shakespeare’s afterlife has been, for good and ill, a readerly as much as a theatrical one. Readers generally carry about in their minds the recollection of the total effect of a play as concentrated in some single passage or passages. Everyone’s memory produces in any case the kind of acclamation by excerpt which is so easily found deplorable in a commentator or editor.100 Pope’s selections of passages for acclaim are, in the event, by no means consistently predictable (although in some cases he is following precedents set by Edward Bysshe).101 They concern passages of prose more often than one might expect: Launce’s monologues in The Two Gentlemen of Verona,102 Rosalind’s witty speeches in As You Like It,103 the description of Petruchio arriving in a new hat and an old jerkin in The Taming of the Shrew,104 and Parolles on virginity in All’s Well That Ends Well are instances.105 One of the most acutely sensitive areas in Shakespeare for Pope is his handling of rhetoric, which was also, in distinct but related ways, so important for Pope’s own verse practice. Shakespeare not only often touches the brink of all Pope hates but also goes well past it. Pope’s ambivalence towards this aspect of Shakespeare’s art emerges in his treatment of such a play as Richard III. Passages in which the rhetorical patterning is extremely marked clearly feel heavy-handed, rather than powerful, to Pope, and accordingly he relegates them; thus, the Duchess of York’s ‘Dead life,

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blind sight, poor mortal living ghost,/Woe’s scene, world’s shame, grave’s due, by life usurp’d’106 finds itself at the foot of the page. Equally, where Shakespeare’s rhetoric involves continuous repetition of a single word, Pope tends to sense false wit (and tends not to be open to the possibility of a dramatic motivation for forced or highly elaborated rhetorical reflection). Thus Richard’s prolonged play on ‘self’ is relegated from the main body of the text: Then fly – what, from my self? great reason; why? Lest I revenge. What? my self on my self? I love my self. Wherefore? for any good That I my self hath done unto my self? O no. Alas, I rather hate my self, For hateful deeds committed by my self. I am a villain; yet I lie, I am not. Fool, of thy self speak well – Fool do not flatter.107 Pope is no doubt sensitive not only to what he seems to think of as the intrusion of extremely marked verbal patterning into a serious context but also, perhaps, to the thudding identical rhyme which the repetition of ‘self’ produces at the end of a number of lines here. Yet Shakespeare’s handling of rhetoric can also appeal powerfully to Pope. An apparently unremarkable speech by Adriana in The Comedy of Errors draws Pope’s interest by its handling of anaphora. Pope’s commas of approval begin just where that figure commences, and cease where the sentence powered along by it ceases: ‘The time was once, when thou unurg’d wouldst vow,/‘That never words were music to thine ear,/‘That never object pleasing in thine eye,/‘That never touch was welcome to thy hand,/‘That never meat sweet-savour’d in thy taste,/‘Unless I spake, or look’d, or touch’d, or carv’d.’108 The figure also wins Pope’s admiration in his text of As You Like It.109 Leonato’s expression of his grief at the beginning of the fi fth act of Much Ado About Nothing is marked out for special attention with Pope’s commas: ‘Patch grief with proverbs, make misfortune drunk ‘With candle-wasters; bring him yet to me, ‘And I of him will gather patience. ‘But there is no such man; for brother, men ‘Can counsel, and give comfort to that grief ‘Which they themselves not feel; but tasting it,

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‘Their counsel turns to passion, which before ‘Would give preceptial medicine to rage, ‘Fetter strong madness in a silken thread, ‘Charm ach with air, and agony with words. ‘No, no, ’tis all mens office, to speak patience ‘To those that wring under the load of sorrow; ‘But no man’s virtue or sufficiency ‘To be so moral, when he shall endure ‘The like himself; therefore give me no counsel, ‘My griefs cry louder than advertisement.110 This speech is typical of one kind of passage selected for admiration by Pope: Pope is drawn to passages of abstract or general reflection eloquently formulated – often to passages which retain their resonance even when the immediate dramatic context is removed. Part of what Pope admires here, we may conjecture, is the connection of rhetorical with metricorhythmic energy which is concentrated in the line ‘Fetter strong madness in a silken thread’. The line’s compressed wit, its paradox that something strong may be fettered by something so apparently fragile as silk, is distributed antithetically into each half of the line; the arresting concentration of stresses in the strong madness of the beginning of the line (three of the first four syllables) then passes rapidly through a succession of three unstressed syllables to meet its match in the ‘silken thread’ at line’s end. Pope seems to have had this line in his mind when translating the Odyssey (at a date not so distant from his editorial work on Shakespeare). In book ten, Ulysses explains how Hippotades, the king of Aeolius, charmed by Ulysses’ narration of the fall of Troy, speeds him on his way by taming the winds for him: The adverse winds in leathern bags he brac’d, Compress’d their force, and lock’d each struggling blast: For him the mighty Sire of Gods assign’d The tempest’s Lord, and tyrant of the wind; His word alone the list’ning storms obey, To smooth the deep, or swell the foamy sea, These in my hollow ship the Monarch hung, Securely fetter’d by a silver thong.111 For Leonatus’s ‘silk’, Pope’s echoing ‘silver’. In each case the fetter is introduced in the first half of the line and the precious material of which it is

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made up later. The whole passage from Pope’s translation, indeed, is (as is so often the case in Pope’s verse) brought to a kind of epitome in the final line. The passage is, as well as a translation of Homer, a kind of tacit reflection on the poetics of verse, whose ideal in Pope is so often figured as the antagonistic cooperation of lightness and gravity, of elegance and force. The skilful ‘compression’ of natural forces of great power by human dexterity is itself dexterously compressed into this final line, and into this (no doubt, as with all the most significant verse thinking, unconscious) echo of Shakespeare. One important thing to notice here is that the line from Shakespeare itself provides both force and elegance. It is an eminently Popean line, and a poem such as the Essay on Man, with its delight in vertiginous contrasts of scale compressed into a single line, has learnt from this technical virtuosity of Shakespeare’s verse writing, Shakespeare’s verse intelligence. Despite Pope’s own summative metaphor of the disorderly but grand Gothic Shakespearean edifice, he finds, at the level of individual passages, and at the level of verse practice itself, not merely genius but judgement in Shakespeare, not merely nature but wit. Pope’s ambivalence about Shakespeare’s handling of rhetoric can be calibrated, sometimes, by looking at just where the commas of approval run out. Helena’s address on friendship to Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream begins by securing Pope’s special approbation, but then the commas cease: ‘Is all the counsel that we two have shar’d, ‘The sisters vows, the hours that we have spent, ‘When we have chid the hasty-footed time ‘For parting us: O! and is all forgot? ‘All school-days friendship, childhood innocence? ‘We, Hermia, like two artificial gods, ‘Created with our needles both one flower, ‘Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion; ‘Both warbling of one song, both in one key; ‘As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds ‘Had been incorp’rate. So we grew together, ‘Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, ‘But yet an union in partition; Two lovely berries molded on one stem, So with two seeming bodies, but one heart, Two of the first life, coats in heraldry, Due but to one, and crowned with one crest.112

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Pope takes pleasure in the melodic repetitions of this praise of two-inone (‘Both . . . one . . . one . . ./Both . . . one . . . one’) and does not even balk at the developed conceit of the ‘double cherry’, but when this conceit becomes more metaphysically abstruse, and then wanders into the technical domain of heraldry, he finds himself unable to keep his admiration up. One of the features of Shakespeare’s art most keenly admired by Pope, in fact, connects with his own aesthetic of annotation, an aesthetic which insists on the concealment of labour: The Power over our Passions was never possess’d in a more eminent degree, or display’d in so different instances. Yet all along, there is seen no labour, no pains to raise them; no preparation to guide our guess to the effect, or be perceiv’d to lead toward it: But the heart swells, and the tears burst out, just at the proper places: We are surpriz’d, the moment we weep; and yet upon reflection find the passion so just, that we shou’d be surpriz’d if we had not wept, and wept at that very moment.113 Helena’s speech, perhaps, is one of just those instances which Pope has in mind here. In which case we might conjecture that the point at which Pope’s commas of delight run out is just the point at which labour is seen after all, the point at which artifice becomes too obviously worked, too foregrounding of the poet’s and dramatist’s own mental operations. Pope’s sensitivity to what he seems to have experienced as the excessively forced nature of some of Shakespeare’s conceits anticipates Johnson’s response to the ‘metaphysical’ poets. Even in passages where the far-fetched conceit would now seem to many readers worth the carriage because of the complexity of psychological insight, say, afforded by it, Pope tends to read with an alertness to prose sense which can quickly find elaborated conceitedness ridiculous. The following passage from Cymbeline is relegated after the first ‘sigh’, despite the fact that the relegation ruins (what is so often Pope’s care) the metre: Arv. Nobly he yokes A smiling with a sigh. * * – a sigh: As if the sigh Was that it was, for not being such a smile: The smile mocking the sigh, that it would fly

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From so divine a temple, to commix With winds that sailors rail at.114 For us, this passage might recall that in which Cordelia’s countenance is compared to simultaneous rain and sunshine. It is an instance of Shakespeare’s felicitous ability to fi x psychological effects of extreme fluidity and fleetingness. For Pope, implicitly, it collapses when we try to follow its sense to the letter rather than allowing its melody to carry it through, because we must first consent to imagine these facial gestures, sigh and smile, as personifications, and must then consent to imagine a rather complicated set of transactions among these personifications – which are themselves, however, imagined only with difficulty. The price of Pope’s approach is deafness to one important element of Shakespeare’s psychological repertoire; the price of ours, perhaps, a sacrifizio dell’intelletto which tells us not to inquire too closely into anything which sounds so fine. The results of Pope’s approach are so shocking to readers today partly because lines which have become almost proverbial as a result of the breadth and depth of Shakespeare’s diffusion were by no means so in Pope’s day. Macbeth’s ‘Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care’ is simply part of the language for many of us; for Pope, apparently, it was simply a rather unsuccessful conceit which involved the reader in cumbersomely imagining a personified Sleep in the rather unsoporific act of darning a garment, and accordingly he relegates it to the foot of the page in his text.115 Yet Pope can also find himself strongly attracted by passages which one might expect him, on the basis of relegations such as the one we have just examined, to regard as excessively mannered. Patroclus’ address to Achilles in Troilus and Cressida, for example, is adorned with marks of enthusiasm: ‘Oh rouse your self; and the weak wanton Cupid ‘Shall from your neck unloose his am’rous fold, ‘And like a dew-drop from the lion’s mane, ‘Be shook to air.116 The delightful sense here of an effortless dissolution of something which has seemed a powerful and habitual constraint – a dissolution whose apparently magical quality is captured in the sharp collision of ‘dew-drop’ and ‘lion’, and in the double metamorphosis whereby ‘Cupid’ is first miniaturized into a dew drop and then altogether dispersed into air – wins Pope’s

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attention, where the contest of the sigh and smile in Cymbeline had irritated him. Pope is strongly drawn in Shakespeare to effects of rapid or instantaneous change and metamorphosis, especially where they are coupled, as here, by extremely sharp contrasts. What is striking, then, is how slight a difference there can sometimes seem, to us, to subsist between passages which Pope admires and others, often close by and closely related, which he deplores. In editing The Two Gentlemen of Verona (a play of which Pope noted with approval that ‘the Style of this Comedy is less figurative, and more natural and unaffected, than the greater Part of this Author’s’117) Pope degrades the following passage to the foot of the page: * . . . I’ll pray for thee. Val. That’s on some shallow story of deep love, How young Leander cross’d the Hellespont. Pro. That’s a deep story of a deeper love; For he was more than over shoes in love. Val. ’Tis true; for you are over boots in love, And yet you never swom the Hellespont. Pro. Over the boots? nay give me not the boots. Val. No I will not, for it boots thee not. Pro. What? Val. To be in love, &c.118 Pope is habitually uncomfortable with Shakespeare’s wordplay – sometimes, as with Love’s Labour’s Lost’s ‘And then grace us in the disgrace of death’, a single line will be torn from a speech and summarily relegated for this offence119 – and it is hardly surprising that the play on ‘boots’ and ‘it boots thee not’ does not win his approval. Also troubling here, perhaps, is the sequence of identical rhymes produced by the appearance of ‘love’ at the end of four of these rhymes. Yet immediately afterwards a not wholly dissimilar passage is offered commas of approbation: ‘Pro. Yet writers say, as in the sweetest bud ‘The eating canker dwells; so eating love ‘Inhabits in the finest wits of all. ‘Val. And writers say, as the most forward bud ‘Is eaten by the canker e’er it blow; ‘Ev’n so by love the young and tender wit ‘Is turn’d to folly, blasting in the bud,

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‘Losing his verdure even in the prime, ‘And all the fair effect of future hopes.120 The stichomythic principle of construction behind this applauded passage is hardly so different from that behind the one relegated. The dialogue matches not only point for point, but phrase for phrase and word for word, producing again a reiterated identical rhyme (on ‘bud’) closely analogous to that on ‘love’ in the passage which Pope demotes from the text. ‘Canker’ and ‘love’, too, are echoed from one dialogist to another, although not in this case at the sensitive site of line-end. The small difference of lacking the marring wordplay on ‘boot’ apparently makes all the difference between writing unworthy of Shakespeare and writing which is to be considered among his finest achievements. Such closely juxtaposed demotions and promotions indicate how delicate, how sensitive to stimulus, is the texture of Pope’s ambivalence. Everything which he admires and loves about Shakespeare – partly, no doubt, because it lies so close to the vital role of parallelistic and rhetorical energies in his own verse thinking – is, continually, just at the border of everything repellent about him, everything which made it possible for Pope to appear so confident that Shakespeare’s was a ‘bad age’. Pope was attracted, in fact, to a philosophical Shakespeare. Noticing that ‘by a talent very peculiar, something between Penetration and Felicity, he hits upon that particular point on which the bent of each argument turns, or the force of each motive depends’, and surprised that Shakespeare should possess this talent given that he was in Pope’s view ‘a man of no experience in those great and publick scenes of life which are usually the subject of his thoughts’, Pope regarded Shakespeare as the only author giving grounds for the idea ‘That the Philosopher and even the Man of the world, may be Born, as well as the Poet’. Shakespeare was centrally, in other words, a thinker as well as a dramatist and a poet for Pope. Shakespeare nourishes, in fact, just that power of poetical thinking in Pope which saves his philosophical poetry from its own proposed schemas. In general Pope’s applauses do not fall on the most celebrated passages of Shakespeare’s plays (among the more surprising excerpts singled out for praise is, for example, a rather unremarkable piece of scene-setting by Tamora in Titus Andronicus 121) but one which is so decorated is Prospero’s vision of mutability in The Tempest: ‘these our actors, ‘As I foretold you, were all spirits, and ‘Are melted into air, into thin air;

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‘And like the baseless fabrick of their vision, ‘The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces, ‘The solemn temples, the great globe it self, ‘Yea all which it inherit, shall dissolve, ‘And like this insubstantial pageant faded, ‘Leave not a rack behind! we are such stuff ‘As dreams are made on, and our little life ‘Is rounded with a sleep.122 Prospero articulates a vision of the world’s fleetingness into which any number of different sources, including a Christian sense of this world’s impermanence and a classical sense of youth’s transience, may flow. The power of the passage lies partly in the pleasure which it takes in dissolving massive architectures into mobile fluidity – just that power of rapid yet unforced metamorphosis which is so central to many of Pope’s major achievements (and one connection between Shakespeare and Pope, is indeed, the appeal of Ovid to both). This pleasure is matched by the dexterity of Shakespeare’s tonal shift here: the grand catalogue of disappearing edifices, steadily gathering syntactical and rhetorical momentum, is followed by a much more intimate and direct epitome of human life: ‘we are such stuff/ As dreams are made on. . . .’ The ‘great’ is made to collapse into the ‘little’, yet without any bathos or moralizing. Pope’s attraction to Shakespeare’s cloudscapes is also a factor here; elsewhere Antony’s extended reverie on clouds (‘Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish’) is also awarded commas.123 The Tempest, however, seems particularly to have linked itself in Pope’s mind to that poetic of liquidity, of melting fluidity, which flickers through The Rape of the Lock: one line which concentrates this poetic, ‘When melting Musick steals upon the sky’ (2 RL2. 49.162) is clearly related to another passage singled out for approval by Pope: ‘And as the morning steals upon the night,/Melting the darkness. . . .’ Prospero’s meditation on transience was clearly in the back of Pope’s mind as he wrote the ‘Epistle to Cobham’, ‘Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men’: Oft in the Passions’ wild rotation tost, Our spring of action to ourselves is lost: Tir’d, not determin’d, to the last we yield, And what comes then is master of the field. As the last image of that troubled heap,

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When Sense subsides, and Fancy sports in sleep (Tho’ past the recollection of the thought) Becomes the stuff of which our dream is wrought: Something as dim to our internal view Is thus, perhaps, the cause of most we do.124 F. W. Bateson, noticing the allusion, remarked that ‘In spite of his professed admiration, imitations of Shakespeare are few and far between in Pope. E.A. Abbott (p.x) notes only seven,’ but this seems rather to miss the point. Even this passage is not an ‘imitation’ of Shakespeare. It is not in the least like Prospero’s speech, even though the appearance of ‘stuff’ and ‘dream’ in the same line, coupled with Pope’s having singled out the speech for praise, makes the fact of a connection all but certain. Shakespeare, instead, has provided some verbal stuff which has stuck in Pope’s mind and which comes back consciously or unconsciously as he is composing. Pope here in his practice links Prospero’s vision of unlimited mutability with that sceptical current essential to the strength of his meditative poetry upon large topics: scepticism, that is, about the mind’s own knowledge of itself. Fred Parker has recently drawn attention to those moments in the Essay on Man in which ‘the impression of design seems impossible to differentiate from the way things pour out.’125 The poem’s cosmological schemata are continually collapsed and interrupted by this scepticism, a movement best captured in the famous couplet on Newton: ‘Could he, whose rules the rapid Comet bind,/Describe or fix one movement of his Mind?’126 This scepticism is associated with Pope’s delight in just those vertiginous contrasts of scale which can run right down the whole chain of being in a line and a half, and thereby cast practical doubt over any claim that chain might have to be an overarching universal order: ‘Natures aethereal, human, angel, man,/Beast, bird, fish, insect! what no eye can see, . . .’127 Shakespeare feeds that aspect of Pope’s verse thinking – the aspect which makes him a sublime, as well as a delicious, elegant and clever, poet – by which technical virtuosity thinks against, rather than merely decorating, illustrating or otherwise reinforcing, the larger arguments proposed to it. Despite the very marked contrast between Pope’s and Shakespeare’s verse surfaces, Pope’s art would in fact have been impossible without his vital, deep and often unconscious attachment to the verse of Shakespeare (together of course, with other great English predecessors: Spenser, Milton, Dryden). As this chapter has argued, despite the many deficiencies of Pope’s edition of Shakespeare from a scholarly point of view, many of its achievements still mark the shape of what ‘Shakespeare’

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is for us today. Yet more significant than this in the long run, perhaps, is the subterranean energy, the compressed wit and passion of verse thinking, which Shakespeare continued to nourish in Pope’s verse throughout his career. In attending to this, we might also be prompted to think about the continuous presence in Shakespeare’s own work of verse technique, not merely as the illustration or ornamentation of underlying dramatic imperatives, but rather as the very medium and condition of possibility of Shakespeare’s thinking itself.

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Chapter 3

Samuel Johnson Freya Johnston

On Thursday 26 August 1773, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell – just under a fortnight into their joint tour of Scotland – ‘drove over the very heath where Macbeth met the witches’. This, ‘to an Englishman’, as Johnson observed in his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), was ‘classic ground’. For the second time in less than a week, he ‘solemnly repeated’ to Boswell some lines from Macbeth: ‘How far is’t called to Fores? What are these, So wither’d, and so wild in their attire? That look not like the inhabitants o’ the earth, And yet are on’t?’ He repeated a good deal more of Macbeth. His recitation was grand and affecting, and, as Sir Joshua Reynolds has observed to me, had no more tone than it should have: it was the better for it. He then parodied the All-hail of the witches to Macbeth, addressing himself to me. I had purchased some land called Dalblair; and, as in Scotland it is customary to distinguish landed men by the name of their estates, I had thus two titles, Dalblair and Young Auchinleck. So my friend, in imitation of ‘All hail Macbeth! hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!’ condescended to amuse himself with uttering ‘All hail Dalblair! hail to thee, Laird of Auchinleck!’ We got to Fores at night, and found an admirable inn, in which Dr. Johnson was pleased to meet with a landlord who styled himself ‘Wine-Cooper, from LONDON’.1

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We stand, in this passage from Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), on classic ground and disputed territory. Johnson the Englishman impersonates Shakespeare’s version of the Highland chief from whom the Stuarts claimed descent, before imitating the witches who salute Macbeth with the prophecy of kingship. The Scottish innkeeper fancies himself a Londoner. Only Boswell retains his true nationality, enlarging his ancestral claim on the Scottish landscape with a second title (it is, however, bought rather than won or inherited, and he is not yet ‘Laird of Auchinleck’). Less than 30 years after the English defeat of the Jacobite rebels, the tone of this Anglo-Scottish scene – which strives, in line with Johnson’s recitation, to exhibit ‘no more tone than it should have’ – is one of mock solemnity just on the edge of farce. Johnson is intended to be the source, not the butt, of parody, and the varieties of role-play in which every character engages suggest that all is not what it seems. Identifying Macbeth’s heath as ‘classic ground’ is one of the ways in which Johnson construes his Scottish journey as a variation on the Grand Tour, with Shakespeare replacing Virgil or Horace – even if there are major obstacles (the climate, the terrain, the lack of monuments) ‘to reconstructing a classical pantheon in the Highlands’.2 The fact that Shakespeare might, by 1773, have been described as a ‘classic’, was partly because Johnson had 8 years earlier accorded him the privilege of an edition cum notis variorum.3 In other words, Johnson fostered a culture of treating Shakespeare as an ancient writer; in so doing, he transformed the playwright’s succession of vituperative, solitary editors into a community engaged in the business of making and sharing ‘fortuitous discoveries’.4 It is appropriate that this eminently clubbable man should have left Shakespeare criticism a more sociable activity than he found it: Johnson was the first editor to submit his own text to the inspection and revision of another editor, George Steevens (London periodicals were publishing their initial, positive responses to that collaboration, in which several other scholars and commentators appeared for the first time, as the Hebridean tour came to an end). 5 It turned out, however, that the travellers were not actually to enter ‘upon the road, on which Macbeth heard the fatal prediction’ until the morning of Friday 27 August. On 26 August, they had been in the wrong place. Johnson told Hannah More in 1774 that when he and Boswell stopt a night at the spot (as they imagined) where the Weird Sisters appeared to Macbeth, the idea so worked upon their enthusiasm, that it quite deprived them of rest: however, they learnt, the

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next morning, to their mortification, that they had been deceived, and were in quite another part of the country.6 On the night of 26 August, Boswell’s enthusiasm was also being worked upon by other forces than those of the Weird Sisters. In a paragraph almost entirely omitted from the published version of his Journal, he admitted that his own ‘strange curiosity . . . about anything dismal’ had led him, on arrival at Forres, to ‘run up close’ to a gallows on which a recently executed thief hung ‘quite entire. It was still a man hanging.’ He did not immediately tell Johnson what he had done. Otherwise, Johnson later assured him, he would not have ‘diverted himself with trying to frighten’ Boswell, ‘as if the witches would come and dance at the foot of my bed’.7 This is a rather less dignified form of amusement than that noted in Boswell’s official record of the evening, in which Johnson stoops no further than to utter, ‘All hail Dalblair! hail to thee, Laird of Auchinleck!’ Such mortification as the two men endured on discovering that they had not been standing on Macbeth’s heath contained its own potentially instructive value. Even a journey which dealt ‘more in notions than facts’ might help ‘to regulate imagination by reality’.8 Yet Johnson and Boswell seem never to have realized that they went on to mistake the Castle of Inverness for ‘the castle of Macbeth’: Boswell experienced ‘a romantick satisfaction’ at seeing Johnson in the thane’s abode, rashly concluding that it ‘perfectly’ matched ‘Shakspeare’s description’ – a raven was kind enough to croak.9 In the second Johnson–Steevens variorum (1778), the younger editor enshrined that mistake in the form of a note: ‘Dr. Johnson observes, in his Journey to the Western Isles [sic] of Scotland, that the walls of the castle of Macbeth at Inverness are yet standing.’10 By failing to mention Johnson’s spook tactics, his own encounter with a corpse, and the fact that both men had been in the wrong place, Boswell subjected his account of the would-be heath to a decorous revision akin to that which eighteenth-century editors habitually bestowed on the text of Macbeth. The first note in Johnson’s Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth (1745) cautioned that any modern poet would risk demotion ‘from the theatre to the nursery’, were he to found his plot on ‘supernatural agents’ (Yale, vol. 7, p. 3). Boswell, who tended to picture Johnson’s mind as a theatre and life as if it were divided into ‘scenes’, might have feared the expulsion of his biographical narrative from the heroic Roman arena to the realm of mere puerility, if he were to have revealed Johnson’s teasing about the witches.11 As national monuments, both Johnson and Shakespeare tended to be ‘purged of their grosser, fleshlier comic details’.12

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The history of how such details are treated amounts to nothing less than a documentary record of human fallibility, as Johnson himself recognized in a note to Henry VIII (V.ii.44–6)13: --------we are all men In our own natures frail, and capable Of frailty,------If all men were actually frail, they were more than capable of frailty; to understand this therefore, as only said of the natural weakness of humanity, it is absurdly expressed; but this was not our authour’s sense: By, in our own natures frail, he alludes to the doctrine of original sin: So that the sentiment is this, We are sinners by imputation, and liable to become actually so. WARBURTON. This sentence I think needed no commentary. The meaning, and the plain meaning, is, we are men frail by nature, and therefore liable to acts of frailty, to deviations from the right. I wish every commentator, before he suffers his confidence to kindle, would repeat, --------We are all men In our own natures frail, and capable Of frailty; few are angels. [JOHNSON.]14 That all men and women are ‘frail by nature’ is a lesson Shakespeare’s fools like to toy with.15 If Johnson thought it worth reinforcing here as well as in the ‘Preface’ (‘Every work of this kind is by its nature deficient’), it may not only have been because his ‘deepest convictions’ were ‘moral rather than aesthetic’ (Yale, vol. 7, pp. 112, xxxiii). For the textual history of the plays up to this point uncovers both the hubristic licence of their editors and a wish to curtail the presence of certain kinds of human frailty on the stage. While Elizabethan and Jacobean adapters and revisers of Shakespeare liked to ‘amplify jesting and clownage’, their Augustan descendants tried to cut it out: Nahum Tate and David Garrick’s versions of King Lear dispense with the fool entirely.16 Feste therefore shows remarkable prescience about his editors when he attempts in Twelfth Night (I.v.39–49) to disprove Olivia’s charge that he is a dry, dishonest fool with a ‘simple syllogism’ – one which

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releases him from the obligation to ‘mend’ only by showing the absurdity of reformation: Clo. . . . Bid the dishonest man mend himself; if he mend, he is no longer dishonest; if he cannot, let the botcher mend him. Any thing, that’s mended, is but patch’d: virtue, that transgresses, is but patch’d with sin; and sin, that amends, is but patch’d with virtue. If that this simple syllogism will serve, so; if it will not, what remedy? (1765, vol. 2, p. 366) Feste smudges the distinction between sin and virtue on the basis that each is ‘but patch’d’. ‘Patch’d’, by its connection with ‘botcher’ (according to Johnson’s Dictionary, a character which is ‘the same to a taylor as a cobler to a shoemaker’),17 works as a sartorial metaphor and simultaneously invokes the fool’s motley. It also anticipates expert and inexpert attempts to improve Shakespeare’s text. A ‘botcher’ (like an editor) is one who mends and mars, since his mending is inexpertly done. Because to be repaired with patches is also to be spoilt by them, the virtuous and the sinful end up looking identical. In the author’s absence, the dishonesty of a text – the fact that it exists in more than one version, or in apparently less than complete form – cannot be helped. Whatever the editors’ intentions, the plays will continue to be handed on to their readers in an increasingly patched-up state. Johnson, who thought of human beings as ‘perpetually moralists’,18 could not have approved of Feste’s heretical insinuation that the virtuous and the sinful are the same – but he would have agreed that the pursuit of textual perfection makes fools of everyone. Here, thankfully, Shakespeare ‘has no hint at an Editor’ (The Winter’s Tale, 1765, vol. 2, p. 298). Attributing the countless errors in early Shakespeare texts to the failings of players, both as editors and actors, Pope in his edition of the plays (1725) had given himself free rein to improve and reconstruct his source texts, often conflating and rewriting quarto and folio at will before imposing on this approximation of Shakespeare an intricate scheme of metrical regularity.19 His settled editorial practice was to compare an early quarto with later editions in order to expunge from the play in question such passages – especially bawdy or otherwise indecorous ones – as were not in the quarto, on the basis that they sprang from the impertinence of mere players. (Warburton followed suit, suggesting or imposing the excision or rephrasing of hundreds more speeches, on the assumption that they had been interpolated by actors.)20 Monosyllables were deleted or supplied whenever such actions produced a regular line. Forms of expression unusual to

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eighteenth-century ears were rarely allowed to survive. As Pope’s contemporaries immediately understood, his edition was far removed from the scholarly ideal of explaining or recovering an author’s intention, or indeed the original sense of what the author wrote. Instead, its primary motivation was aesthetic. Johnson acknowledged that Pope deserved praise for having communicated ‘the true state of Shakespeare’s text’; he was the first editor to collate ‘the old copies’. And yet, while he ‘restored many lines to their integrity’, Pope tended to think ‘more of amputation than of cure’ (‘Preface to Shakespeare’, Yale, vol. 7, p. 94). In 1756, Johnson took a view of Shakespeare’s corrupted texts at least as dim as that outlined by Pope, but envisaged for himself a very different way of proceeding with them: The editor will endeavour to read the books which the authour read, to trace his knowledge to its source, and compare his copies with their originals . . . by comparing the works of Shakespeare with those of writers who lived at the same time, immediately preceded, or immediately followed him, he shall be able to ascertain his ambiguities, disentangle his intricacies, and recover the meaning of words now lost in the darkness of antiquity. When therefore any obscurity arises from an allusion to some other book, the passage will be quoted. When the diction is entangled, it will be cleared by a paraphrase or interpretation. When the sense is broken by the suppression of part of the sentiment in pleasantry or passion, the connection will be assigned. When any forgotten custom is hinted, care will be taken to retrieve and explain it. The meaning supplied to doubtful words will be supported by the authorities of other writers, or by parallel passages of Shakespeare himself. (‘Proposals for Printing, by Subscription, the Dramatick Works of William Shakespeare, Corrected and Illustrated by Samuel Johnson’, Yale, vol. 7, pp. 56–7) This impressive programme of relentless, global clarification is inevitably superior to the edition which emerged some nine years later. ‘Almost everything about Johnson’s Shakespeare points to irregular and uneven work’: it was the piecemeal activity of decades.21 When Johnson’s original ‘Proposals for Printing a New Edition of the Plays of William Shakespear, with Notes Critical and Explanatory’ appeared, with a textual specimen, in 1745, Jacob Tonson III reportedly acted fast to exert his claim on the copyright in Shakespeare and Edward Cave’s plans to see a 10-volume Johnson edition through the press were brought to a standstill. Evidence

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that Johnson may have contributed some anonymous notes to Tonson’s cheap 1745 reprint of Hanmer’s Works of Shakespear (1743–4) remains inconclusive.22 But he continued to rehearse in print the beauties and challenges of Shakespeare’s texts. Rambler nos. 156 and 168 (1751) discussed the plays in relation, on the one hand, to dramatic ‘laws’ and, on the other, to their ‘conformity’ with nature, as well as examining the characteristics of Shakespeare’s language. No. 156 weighed up the playwright’s tendency to ‘counter-act’ himself and offered an early defence of the ‘mingled drama’ and ‘mirrour of life’ – phrases and images which resurface in the densely ekphrastic ‘Preface’ of 1765.23 Johnson next supplied a curious dedication to Charlotte Lennox’s Shakespear Illustrated (1753), where he sounds as if he is thinking aloud about two different ways of assessing the plays and has not yet worked out how to reconcile them. On Lennox’s behalf, he censures Shakespeare’s dependence on implausible, hectic stories; immediately afterwards, he praises him for his fidelity to nature. That peculiar combination of events ‘far removed from common life’ with ‘a map of life’ and ‘faithful miniature of human transactions’ returns in the 1765 Preface, only here it is offered in terms of a union having been miraculously effected between them – one which Pope went on to achieve in another ‘faithful miniature’, The Rape of the Lock: ‘Shakespeare approximates the remote, and familiarizes the wonderful’; ‘New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new’ (Yale, vol. 7, pp. 49, 82, 65; Life of Pope, Lives, vol. 4, p. 71). In 1756, a few weeks after his second set of ‘Proposals’ was published, Johnson asked Thomas Birch if he might borrow ‘any of the contemporaries or Ancestors of Shakespeare’, as his own stock of such material was poor; 2 years later, on 14 April 1758, he wrote to Thomas Warton that he planned ‘to add an appendix of notes, so that nothing comes too late’ for inclusion in his seemingly imminent edition.24 The very next day, however, the first number of The Idler (1758–60) appeared, and progress on Shakespeare stalled.25 In a pointedly abusive review of 1765, William Kenrick drew attention to the relationship between Johnson’s ‘extreme indolence’, the Shakespeare edition, and his Idler persona, but Kenrick’s target had done the job for him at the beginning of the journal, where he characterized the Idler as one who ‘escapes labours which are often fruitless’.26 Such historical, critical, linguistic and textual labours as had beguiled and maddened Johnson throughout the 1740s, 50s and 60s were, however, to bear plenty of fruit in his work on Shakespeare, just as his work on Shakespeare during those decades was to influence his writing about everything else. He drew frequently in the notes he produced for the

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1765 and 1773 editions on his Dictionary of the English Language (1755) – among whose aims was to elucidate, revive and bestow longevity on Shakespeare’s vocabulary, especially as a source for ‘the diction of common life’27 – and on the ‘small Tracts and fugitive Pieces’ he collated and annotated in order to bring the Harleian Collection into print. Both commissions required him to act as a textual critic; they entailed wrangling with the development of language across time, with some aspects of ‘the Trade of Writing’ in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and with the discrepancies between manuscript and printed works.28 Johnson’s Dictionary, ‘in its many thousands of citations and glosses of Shakespearean usages’, in its attitude to probable meaning and in its occasional attempts at emendation, already constituted ‘a major work of Shakespearean exegetical scholarship’.29 However, Johnson’s typical practice of working sporadically and hastily ensured that his Shakespeare edition could not approach the supreme theoretical command of the field which he exhibited in 1756. It is not only that he failed to supply many of the intra-, inter- and extra-textual readings which he recognized as vital to any edition – let alone plenty of the contextual material which might have assisted him in his explanation of Shakespeare’s ‘ambiguities’ and ‘intricacies’.30 He made no systematic collation of the texts. He omitted numerous variant readings. Johnson may have recognized the primacy of the first folio and in so doing have established a fundamental principle of editorial theory: ‘that printed texts can be arranged in a logical sequence and that the text presumed to be closest to the author’s original has an authority which outweighs that of all other editions.’31 Yet he did not base his own edition on the first folio. Instead, he used the 1757 fourth edition of Theobald’s Works of Shakespeare, supplemented by Warburton’s 1747 text. He moved between these, apparently at random – at one stage even reverting to Theobald’s superseded first edition (1733) – to produce an eccentric conflation of two very different received eighteenth-century Shakespeares.32 Regardless of which version of Theobald Johnson had employed, the major problem with that text was that it had been set in type from a marked-up copy of the second edition (1728) of Pope’s Works of Shakespear. Whatever changes Pope had silently effected which Theobald positively approved (or chose not to contest, or failed to spot) were in their turn now silently adopted. When Theobald incorporated Pope’s minutely attentive revisions and adjustments, his relineations of poetry or the translation of prose into verse, such modifications were now stamped with the apparent endorsement of Pope’s most serious editorial antagonist; they were, as a rule, preserved by Theobald’s successors, Johnson included.33

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Pope had famously ‘degraded’ the Porter’s soliloquy in Macbeth ‘to the bottom of the page’, classifying it as one of those ‘suspected passages which are excessively bad, (and which seem Interpolations by being so inserted that one can intirely omit them without any chasm, or deficience in the context)’.34 Pope here signals a recurrent editorial concern with creating, detecting, plugging and mending gaps in a text. Thus, Theobald, suspecting the loss of a scene or two between the second and third acts of King John, joined Pope in aspiring to supply ‘the Chasm’, a feat he accomplished ‘by rectifying the Division of the Acts’ – only to be ticked off by Johnson for forgetting ‘that there were, in Shakespeare’s time, no moveable scenes’ (1765, vol. 3, p. 441). Following in the footsteps of Pope, Theobald and Warburton, Johnson’s 1745 textual sample (carried over into the 1765 edition) proposed the rejection of a ‘remote and useless image’ contained in the words ‘as it is said,/ Anthony’s was by Cæsar’ from Macbeth’s soliloquy (III.i.57–8). Speculating, in the manner of Pope, that such an image was likely to be ‘an insertion of some player’, Johnson sought justification for its removal from his claim that ‘If these words are taken away, by which not only the thought but the numbers are injured, the lines of Shakespeare close together without any traces of a breach.’ The remedial cut trims a line by one syllable, and it avoids the metrical shift introduced by ‘Anthony’: ‘My Genius is rebuk’d; as, it is said,/Anthony’s was by Cæsar. He chid the Sisters,’ becomes, in Johnson’s proposed emendation, ‘My Genius is rebuk’d. He chid the Sisters’ (1765, vol. 6, p. 424; Yale, vol. 7, pp. 24–5; the 1773 edition reads, ‘Mark Anthony’s was by Cæsar’).35 Macbeth’s ‘numbers’ are thereby regularized, bringing them nearer conventional eighteenth-century pentameter, but how does this square with what the editor himself perceives as the urgency of Macbeth’s thoughts? The basis of Johnson’s complaint about the allusion to Antony is that Macbeth should not be sufficiently relaxed to produce it; however, removing the element of metrical variation results in a speech which is in one obvious sense more equable than its predecessor.36 While appearing to be ‘wholly possess’d with his own present condition’, Macbeth’s line here suggests, anachronistically to the 1745 Johnson, that he is also ‘at leisure to explain his own allusions to himself’ (1765, vol. 6, p. 424; Yale, vol. 7, p. 25). In other words, to accept this passage as wholly Shakespeare’s would be to accept that Shakespeare wilfully traduces his own effects: the desperation of Macbeth’s plight is compromised by his ability to pause and consider himself alongside other rulers in other ages (the pathos of Queen Catharine’s grief is similarly diluted by her ability to pun on ‘Cardinal’ in Henry VIII, 1765, vol. 5, p. 435). And yet, at least by

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the time he came to edit Richard III, Johnson recognized that it was typical of Shakespeare to combine ‘something very trifling, and something very striking’ (1765, vol. 5, p. 353). In fact, the harm done by the intrusion of Antony into Macbeth’s thoughts seems, according to Johnson’s criticisms in his 1765 ‘Preface’ and notes, to be a defining characteristic of Shakespeare’s art. It may not be a tendency which Johnson can approve, but it is identifiably authorial, and by 1765 he had become – in the manner of Theobald – more cautious about attributing such interruptions, deviations and perceived lapses in style and taste to other hands37: ‘This is a very trifling scene, of no use to the plot, and I should think of no great delight to the audience; but Shakespeare best knew what would please’ (The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1765, vol. 2, p. 523); ‘These words, my noble grapes, seem to Dr. Warburton and Sir T. Hanmer, to stand so much in the way, that they have silently omitted them. They may be indeed rejected without great loss, but I believe they are Shakespeare’s words’ (All’s Well That Ends Well, 1765, vol. 3, p. 309). In the first Johnson–Steevens edition (1773), Johnson duly confessed that his 1745 note on the apparently superfluous allusion to Antony – a note which remained in the text – ‘was written before I was fully acquainted with Shakespeare’s manner, and I do not now think it of much weight; for though the words, which I was once willing to eject, seem interpolated, I believe they may still be genuine, and added by the authour in his revision’ (Yale, vol. 8, p. 776). By now, Johnson had come to doubt that proposing emendations to his text was tantamount to restoring it. His attitude to textual interventions underwent a drastic erosion of certainty between 1745 and 1765: ‘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’ (‘Preface’, Yale, vol. 7, p. 108). The fact that he allowed early and late versions of this note to stand in the 1773 edition shows, first, that he wanted his readers to see that an editor might be corrected, by himself as well as by subsequent readers (a variorum edition invites us to participate in the sometimes impossible job of resolving textual cruxes)38; second, his belief in the capacity of an edition to represent first and second thoughts, both critical and authorial (a belief which affects how he treats Shakespeare as a reviser of his own work, and what he thinks of textual collation)39; third, that knowing the author is the most important of any editor’s qualifications, as well as the basis of an edition whose primary motive is to elucidate, not to improve, his source. The place of Macbeth in Johnson’s 1765 Shakespeare, therefore, resembles that of the early version of his Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage (1744)

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which found its way into The Lives of the Poets (1779–81).40 Just as the Life of Savage proceeds at an oddly passionate, urgent pace by comparison with that of other lives within a collection completed more than 35 years later, so the comments on Macbeth can strike an anachronistically sure-footed note in the context of a generally more cautious and uncertain body of annotation. Johnson tells us that Lennox, for instance, was ‘undoubtedly’ meant to say ‘teems’ rather than ‘seems’ in Macbeth (I.ii.47); at I.v.45–6, that ‘it cannot be doubted that Shakespeare wrote differently’ (1765, vol. 6, pp. 376, 394). Such bold assertions echo Warburton’s tendency to adjudicate on what Shakespeare ‘undoubtedly’ wrote, or meant to write,41 and they sound peculiar in an edition which generally endeavours to resist change: ‘Alterations are never to be made without necessity’ (Timon of Athens, 1765, vol. 6, p. 235). Johnson’s task, as he conceived it by 1765, was on the whole akin to Theobald’s: to give ‘the true though not the best reading’ of his author. So, in the king’s speech of II Henry VI (III.i.211), ‘strive’ (Styan Thirlby’s proposed emendation, in an annotated copy of Warburton’s Shakespeare) ‘is the best word, but stray is the right’ (Richard III, 1765, vol. 5, p. 323; II Henry VI, 1765, vol. 5, pp. 51–2). A scrupulous reviser of his own texts, Pope was alert to the implications of Shakespeare’s neglect to oversee the progress of his works through the press, and to the smallest hint of possible authorial revision in the plays. Johnson seems not to have concluded that Shakespeare set about revising his work in any systematic way, although he often hints at the author’s likely practices of ‘review[ing]’ and making alterations to his texts ‘for the stage rather than the press’ (The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1765, vol. 2, p. 522). Of an allusion in King John (III.i.41–54) to Austria wearing the ‘bloody spoil’ of ‘a lion’s hide’, Pope writes: ‘This circumstance renders the anger of the Bastard very natural, and ought not to have been omitted. In the first sketch of this play . . . we accordingly find this insisted upon, and I have ventured to place a few of those verses here.’ The finger-wagging remark that a ‘very natural’, explicatory passage ‘ought not to have been omitted’ might be directed at Shakespeare – who is presumed to have cut it in his revision – or, equally, at his editors, who were foolish enough not to reinstate it. Johnson reprints Pope’s note and comments on the lines in question with typical interest in the motives Shakespeare might have had for making a change between ‘first sketch’ and ‘second draught’: To the insertion of these lines I have nothing to object. There are many other passages in the old play, of great value. The omission of this incident, in the second draught, was natural. Shakespeare, having familiarised the

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story to his own imagination, forgot that it was obscure to his audience; or, what is equally probable, the story was then so popular that a hint was sufficient at that time to bring it to mind, and these plays were written with very little care for the approbation of posterity. (1765, vol. 3, pp. 443–4) As in his comments on Macbeth’s passing reference to Antony, Johnson bears in mind the need, or not, for Shakespeare to explain an allusion – and here he has something in common with Pope, who seeks inclusion of quarto material on the basis that it helps us to understand a character’s behaviour. On the other hand, while Pope thinks primarily of how desirable it is to supplement the later text with a ‘very natural’ excerpt from the earlier, Johnson (who concedes, without further explanation, the ‘great value’ of the extra lines) thinks primarily of the ‘natural’ reason why Shakespeare left it out when he returned to his draft. That reason is elaborated in terms of likely historical and literary contexts, the possible reaction of an audience and what is generally known of the playwright’s character and attitude to his work. Herein lies the difference between an edition with aesthetic intentions and one which hopes to map the contours of the playwright’s thoughts, imagination and memory. Where earlier editors rebuke by turns Shakespeare, his actors and the spectators for their bankrupt tastes, Johnson tends to remind us ‘that our authour well knew what would please the audience for which he wrote’ (King Lear, 1765, vol. 6, p. 159). Of a scene in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (I.i.70–146), Pope comments in a note reproduced by Johnson that it, like many others in these plays (some of which I believe were written by Shakespear, and others interpolated by the players) is composed of the lowest and most trifling conceits, to be accounted for only from the gross taste of the age he lived in; Populo ut placerent. I wish I had authority to leave them out; but I have done all I could, set a mark of reprobation upon them throughout this edition. (1765, vol. 1, p. 183) Johnson responds that proof is needed to back up any accusation that a passage has been interpolated, and with his own suspicion of Pope’s motives: ‘That this, like many other Scenes, is mean and vulgar, will be universally allowed; but that it was interpolated by the players seems advanced without any proof, only to give a greater licence to criticism’ (1765, vol. 1, p. 183). In a note to Measure for Measure (IV.i.58–63) he disputes Warburton’s charge that the players must have transposed some of Shakespeare’s lines to the wrong place, this time considering the practical needs of the stage and the

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plausibility of the action: ‘I cannot agree that these lines are placed here by the players. The sentiments are common, and such as a Prince, given to reflection, must have often present. There was a necessity to fill up the time in which the Ladies converse apart’ (1765, vol. 1, p. 340). And again, on Henry V (II.iv.58), he replies irritably to Warburton’s bad-tempered assertion that the French king’s words are ‘A nonsensical line of some player’: ‘And why of a player? There is yet no proof that the players have interpolated a line’ (1765, vol. 4, p. 401). But the ghost of Johnson’s younger editorial self often resurfaces in 1765, even when he is not citing his notes from 20 years earlier. He still at times perceives the hand of a player in the use of redundant syllables: of Brabantio’s lines in Othello (I.iii.53–5), ‘nor aught I heard of business/Hath rais’d me from my bed; nor doth the general care/Take hold on me,’ he remarks that ‘The word care, which encumbers the verse, was probably added by the players’ (1765, vol. 8, p. 337). If cuts may be suggested without any perceptible damage, so gaps may be discerned with plausible matter to fill them: ‘I imagine’, writes Johnson of Timon of Athens (II.i.10–11), ‘that a line is lost here, in which the usual behaviour of a surly porter was described’; at the beginning of II.ii, ‘I suspect some scene to be lost, in which the entrance of the fool, and the page that follows him, was prepared by some introductory dialogue’ (1765, vol. 6, pp. 194, 198). This imagined material sounds as if it might be of the kind that Pope, had he come across it, would have taken the opportunity to cut: one editor may be envisaged disposing of lines which the other conjures into existence. There is a strange conjunction between playwright and editor when Henry V utters his celebrated lines (III.i.1–2), ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;/Or close the wall up with the English dead’ and Johnson appends the note: ‘Here is apparently a chasm.’ He suspected at least one line was lost, arguing that the king intends to say ‘Dear friends, either win the town, or close up the wall with dead’ (1765, vol. 4, p. 406). While no one would be likely to dispute Johnson’s gloss, it does not require a gap in the text, as Steevens observed in his 1793 edition: I do not perceive the chasm which Dr. Johnson complains of. What the King means to say, is, – Re-enter the breach you have made, or fill it up with your own dead bodies; i.e. Pursue your advantage, or give it up with your lives. – Mount the breach in the wall, or repair it by leaving your carcases in lieu of the stones you have displaced: in short – Do one thing or the other.42 In King John (III.i.41–54), it sufficed that some quarto lines were of ‘great value’ for Johnson to agree with Pope to add them to his text, even if he also

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thought this went against Shakespeare’s decision, when returning to the play, to omit them. The key factor here seems to be the possibility of negligence in Shakespeare’s revision – he was either careless of his own audience, or of his modern one (‘Shakespeare, having familiarised the story to his own imagination, forgot that it was obscure to his audience; or, what is equally probable, the story was then so popular that a hint was sufficient at that time to bring it to mind, and these plays were written with very little care for the approbation of posterity,’ 1765, vol. 3, p. 444). It is also possible that Shakespeare’s revisions were directed towards a stage audience, whereas Johnson’s edition is pitched at a solitary reader. The editor, privileged by his acquaintance with Shakespeare’s manner, is left to adjudicate on such matters – with mixed results. Sometimes he will breach a perceived textual chasm by suggesting in the notes what might once have filled it; sometimes he will cut from his received eighteenth-century text what he considers to be irrelevant or inferior lines. Such decisions may or may not form part of an attempt to recover final authorial intention. In II Henry IV, just after the Prince’s speech (II.ii.9–22), Johnson cuts from the text and places in the notes an excerpt from the quarto which Pope had introduced, commenting: This passage Mr. Pope restored from the first edition. I think it may as well be omitted, and therefore have degraded it to the margin. It is omitted in the first folio, and in all subsequent editions before Mr. Pope’s, and was perhaps expunged by the authour. The editors, unwilling to lose any thing of Shakespeare’s, not only insert what he has added, but recal what he has rejected. (1765, vol. 4, pp. 264–5) Yet Johnson tends to acquiesce in his predecessors’ decisions to recall what he thinks Shakespeare has himself expunged. Had he used the first folio as his base text, the nature of such decisions as well as the form of the plays would have looked quite different; in II Henry IV (II.ii.9–22), he would not be responding primarily to Pope’s disputed restoration, for instance, but to Shakespeare’s apparent excision, and the reasons behind it. As things stand, however, Johnson’s text also preserves the quarto Ajax’s ‘thou unsalted leaven’ in Troilus and Cressida (II.i.14). He gives the following explanation of Shakespeare’s language: If the folio be followed, I read, vinew’d, that is mouldy leven. Thou composition of mustiness and sourness. . . . Unsalted leven is in the old quarto. It means, sour without salt, malignity without wit. Shakespeare wrote first unsalted, but recollecting that want of salt was no fault in leven, changed it to vinew’d. (1765, vol. 7, p. 443)

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‘If the folio be followed . . .’: Shakespeare has apparently, in the process of revising his play, removed a demonstrable error; his second version of the line is superior to his first. Yet the first is here allowed to stand because Johnson’s copy-text prefers it. Instinctively trusting the first folio, he continues to incorporate some quarto passages of whose quality and reliability he is doubtful. In a note to a passage in Richard II IV.i (not included in The Oxford Shakespeare, where it would begin at IV.i.51), he therefore complies with recent editorial practice, even though he believes that to include the speech in question contradicts the playwright’s mature decision to cut it: This speech I have restored from the first edition in humble imitation of former editors, though, I believe, against the mind of the authour. For the earth I suppose we should read, thy oath. (1765, vol. 4, p. 74) Steevens later provided evidence from the quarto of Troilus and Cressida ‘in support of Dr. Johnson’s conjecture’, yet the line remained unaltered in the text (modern editors read ‘earth’, not ‘oath’).43 There are many other instances of Johnson trotting along with recent editorial practices, rather than instituting his own. He allowed two ‘Lords’ in All’s Well That Ends Well (IV.iii) to remain as such, when other evidence designated them ‘Captains’, as Johnson himself notes: The later Editors have with great liberality bestowed lordship upon these interlocutors, who, in the original edition, are called, with more propriety, capt. E and capt. G. It is true that captain E. is in a former scene called Lord E. but the subordination in which they seem to act, and the timorous manner in which they converse, determines them to be only captains. Yet as the later readers of Shakespeare have been used to find them lords, I have not thought it worth while to degrade them in the margin. (1765, vol. 3, p. 363) He might also have mentioned that one of these so-called lords is repeatedly identified as ‘captain Dumain’ later in this scene (1765, vol. 3, p. 368). Such notes as these hover, unsatisfactorily, between two editorial traditions. Wryly alluding, as in his note on II Henry IV, to Pope’s tendency to degrade in the margin any passage whose authenticity he suspected on the ground of his own taste, Johnson nevertheless shows some vestigial attachment to the idea of editing as an aesthetic activity, designed to make Shakespeare newly palat able to the eighteenth-century editor and his contemporaries.44 In Hamlet, he remarks of a line (III.i.79) in the prince’s most celebrated soliloquy that ‘All the old copies have, to grunt and sweat. It is undoubtedly the true reading, but can scarcely be born by modern ears.’ And so, in the

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text, the line remains a slightly more decorous ‘To groan and sweat’ (1765, vol. 8, p. 209). Many conjectural emendations spring, naturally, from quirks of editorial character. One of Johnson’s favourite passages in Shakespeare was Claudio’s speech on death in Measure for Measure (III.i.118–22). Arthur Murphy recalled 8 years after Johnson died that The contemplation of his own approaching end was constantly before his eyes; and the prospect of death, he declared, was terrible. For many years, when he was not disposed to enter into the conversation going forward, whoever sat near his chair, might hear him repeating, from Shakspeare, Ay, but to die and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod, and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods.45 Warburton had rightly understood ‘delighted spirit’ to mean ‘the spirit accustomed here to ease and delights’. Johnson thought such a reading ‘may perhaps stand’, but he also proposed emending a phrase which previous editors had endeavoured ‘to correct’. Of all those attempts, his preferred option was ‘benighted spirit, alluding to the darkness always supposed in the place of future punishment’, but he suggested that we might yet improve on that with ‘delinquent spirit, a word easily changed to delighted by a bad copyist, or unskilful reader’ (1765, vol. 1, p. 320). (If Murphy’s quotation is to be trusted, such an emendation did not replace the standard reading when Johnson mouthed Shakespeare to himself.) What the editor reads into this passage, as he annotates it, illuminates his own fear of an afterlife. As Warburton implies, ‘the delighted spirit’ forms a natural counterpart to ‘This sensible warm motion’; ‘delighted’ is, according to such an interpretation, perfectly comprehensible in terms of a soul ‘Endowed or attended with delight; affording delight, delightful’ (OED ‘delighted’, sense 2, of which this is given as the earliest recorded example). Just as the ‘sensible warm motion’ is reduced to a ‘kneaded clod’, so the ‘spirit’ which ‘delighted’ in life on earth is now compelled to ‘bathe in fiery floods’. The emendation of ‘delighted’ to ‘benighted’ moves us from the realm of the living into that of the dead, where the soul is de-lighted in the sense that it is enveloped by darkness. Given his gloomy view of futurity, it is perhaps not surprising that

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Johnson places the ‘de-lighted’ spirit somewhat too quickly in the land of the dead. But his suggestion of ‘delinquent’ in place of ‘benighted’ moves us one dreadful step further, since a ‘delinquent spirit’ is one that has committed an offence and is, therefore, justly assigned to the ‘place of punishment’ to which he alludes in his note (1765, vol. 1, p. 320). In his gloss of ‘To be, or not to be’ (Hamlet, III.i.58–92), Johnson makes a similarly premature leap into futurity: Hamlet, knowing himself injured in the most enormous and atrocious degree, and seeing no means of redress, but such as must expose him to the extremity of hazard, meditates on his situation in this manner: Before I can form any rational scheme of action under this pressure of distress, it is necessary to decide, whether, after our present state, we are to be or not to be. That is the question, which, as it shall be answered, will determine, whether ’tis nobler, and more suitable to the dignity of reason, to suffer the outrages of fortune patiently, or to take arms against them, and by opposing end them, though perhaps with the loss of life. If to die, were to sleep, no more, and by a sleep to end the miseries of our nature, such a sleep were devoutly to be wished; but if to sleep in death, be to dream, to retain our powers of sensibility, we must pause to consider, in that sleep of death what dreams may come. (1765, vol. 8, p. 207) In other words, Johnson’s Hamlet begins with, rather than proceeds to, the question of an afterlife. Whether we are transformed after our deaths into kneaded clods or delinquent spirits (such as his father) is the basis of his action and inaction; that is the original question, the one which determines everything else. Johnson may have in mind here his favourite passage from Measure for Measure, since ‘to retain our powers of sensibility’ recalls the ‘sensible warm motion’ to which Claudio refers (Johnson’s future wife reportedly exclaimed, on first meeting him, ‘this is the most sensible man that I ever saw in my life.’)46 Edmond Malone, who thought Johnson’s interpretation of Hamlet’s soliloquy far from the most obvious one, countered it with a reading favoured by modern editors47: I cannot but think that Dr. Johnson’s explication of this passage, though excellent on the whole, is wrong in the outset. – He explains the words-– To be, or not to be – “Whether after our present state, we are to be, or not;” whereas the obvious sense of them – To live, or to put an end to my life, seems clearly to be pointed out by the following words, which are manifestly a paraphrase on the foregoing – Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer, &c. or to take arms – 48

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The ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ It is comically and sadly appropriate that Shakespeare’s editor should, when visiting Macbeth’s country, have planted his feet repeatedly in the wrong place. A note to Measure for Measure (III.i.127) glosses Claudio’s reference to ‘lawless and incertain thoughts’ as ‘Conjecture sent out to wander without any certain direction’ (1765, vol. 1, p. 320); another, on The Comedy of Errors (III.ii.126–7), describes ‘sending ou[t] conjecture’, needlessly, ‘in search of refinements’ (1765, vol. 3, p. 136). And yet, in one sense, Johnson knew exactly where he stood with Shakespeare. It was not on ‘classic ground’ (he tends, in the notes as in the ‘Preface’, to underplay the idea that Shakespeare was indebted to ancient literature),49 but in the midlands. Thanks to their shared regional origins and his lexicographical training, Johnson was by far the best qualified of any eighteenth-century editor to explain the playwright’s language. Boswell put the qualification in negative terms when he said that Johnson ‘never got entirely free of those provincial accents’50; in fact, he used his knowledge of midlands speech to explain such remarks as Iago’s ‘I’ve rubbed this young Quat almost to the sense’ (Othello, V.i.11), ‘quat’ having been variously emended by earlier editors to ‘gnat’, ‘knot’, ‘quab’ and quail’: A Quat in the midland counties is a pimple, which by rubbing is made to smart, or is rubbed to sense. Roderigo is called a Quat by the same mode of speech, as a low fellow is now termed in low language a Scab. To rub to the sense, is to rub to the quick. (1765, vol. 8, pp. 449–50) ‘Quat’ does not appear in Johnson’s Dictionary. ‘Mankind’, which does, is glossed in the Shakespeare edition as follows, with reference to Leontes’ phrase ‘A mankind witch’ (The Winter’s Tale, II.iii.68): ‘A mankind woman, is yet used in the midland counties, for a woman violent, ferocious, and mischievous. It has the same sense in this passage’ (1765, vol. 2, p. 267). When Gloucester vows to ‘rake up’ Edgar (Tragedy of King Lear, IV.v.274) Johnson explains the threat as ‘I’ll “cover” thee. In Staffordshire, to “rake” the fire, is to cover it with fuel for the night’ (1765, vol. 6, p. 134). Like Shakespeare, Johnson had left the midlands for the south (‘Staffordshire is the nursery of arts, where the[y] grow up till they are transplanted to London’).51 Like Shakespeare, he had hoped to be a playwright. When he, therefore, refers to the Shakespeare’s ‘career’ in the ‘Preface’ (‘The ground on which a race is run’; ‘Course of action; uninterrupted procedure’; senses 1 and 4 of ‘CAREER’ in the Dictionary), or

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when he writes, also in the ‘Preface’, that Shakespeare’s ‘genius’ was ‘not to be depressed by the weight of poverty’ (in a seeming allusion to his own early poem, London (1738) – ‘SLOW RISES WORTH, BY POVERTY DEPRESS’D’ – written just after he arrived in the city), 52 Johnson seems to be appealing to a real geography, common to author and editor, and (beyond that) to a vividly imagined, shared ethical terrain. He implicitly compares himself to Shakespeare in terms of having suffered the trials of the provinces and of poverty, before triumphing in circumstances ‘very little favourable to thought or to enquiry’ (Yale, vol. 7, pp. 74, 89). There is a close, immediate sense in Johnson of the transient customs, some of them yet retained in the editor’s memory, which governed the peculiarities of Shakespeare’s daily language and daily experience. Behind that shifting, fading scenery, however, exists a permanent realm of moral choices, across which the authorial journeyman pursues his career independent of locality and time (such is the basis on which Johnson distinguishes ‘custom’ from ‘nature’ throughout the ‘Preface’; see especially Yale, vol. 7, 62–6). One of the most celebrated passages in the ‘Preface’ depicts the playwright as a traveller, misled from his true course by the ignis fatuus of mere wordplay. Here, both Shakespeare and his editor emerge as ‘not systematick and consequential, but desultory and vagrant, abounding in casual allusions and light hints’ (Yale, vol. 7, p. 103): 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. (Yale, vol. 7, p. 74) Johnson here creates a mock-tragic plot summary, in which Shakespeare stars as the questing adventurer who deviates from the path to success, embracing his doom as he pursues the wildly seductive, female chimera of a quibble (Roger Lonsdale points out that, in his writings on poetry,

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Johnson often portrays his ‘critical reactions’ as ‘dramas of reluctant attraction, seduction, guilty surrender, and captivity’, 53). The insistent anaphora of ‘A quibble’ provides the ‘sure’ starting point for four of Johnson’s five sentences and, therefore, also promises some solid ground: if we know one thing about Shakespeare, it is that he will lose his way. But a quibble is at once the thing we think we know and the thing which springs up in medias res, diverting our hero from his destined and proper course. Johnson, himself the author of A ‘conclusion, in which nothing is concluded’,54 is often dissatisfied with Shakespeare’s endings – as well as surprisingly confident about what the playwright should have done, but failed to do, next: ‘Shakespeare . . . might easily have shown that a former obligation could not be vacated by a latter: that obligations laid on us by a higher power, could not be overruled by obligations which we lay upon ourselves’ (Macbeth, 1765, vol. 6, p. 399); ‘Decency required that Bertram’s double crime of cruelty and disobedience, joined likewise with some hypocrisy, should raise more resentment; . . . of all this Shakespeare could not be ignorant, but Shakespeare wanted to conclude his play’ (All’s Well, 1765, vol. 3, p. 386); ‘The great defect of this play is the emptiness and narrowness of the last act, which a very little diligence might have easily avoided’ (Henry V, 1765, vol. 4, p. 487). However, the quibbles passage reveals the editor to be drawn, in spite of his censures, to his petty subject: ‘such inadvertencies neither authour nor editor can escape’ (Timon of Athens, 1765, vol. 6, p. 197). Johnson’s criticism has a cooperative bent which reveals his affectionate familiarity with the playwright, even as he criticizes him. Both men, in Johnson’s analysis, repeatedly work against themselves – a tendency which, in his earlier writings on Shakespeare, is construed in terms of the ‘resistless vicissitudes of the heart’: ‘Perhaps the effects even of Shakespeare’s poetry might have been yet greater, had he not counter-acted himself; and we might have been more interested in the distresses of his heroes had we not been so frequently diverted by the jokes of his buffoons’; ‘He no sooner begins to move, than he counteracts himself; and terrour and pity, as they are rising in the mind, are checked and blasted by sudden frigidity’; ‘It is the fate of Shakespeare to counteract his own pathos.’55 Shakespeare may weaken or even destroy his own most beautifully wrought achievements (those of pathos and instruction), yet in such actions and counter-actions he also faithfully reproduces the ‘mingled drama’ that is human life (Yale, vol. 7, p. 67). And how, in any event, can a ‘mingled drama’ avoid perpetually counteracting itself? Shakespeare is praised for faithfully representing the native disproportion in human beings, that same discrepancy between hopes and

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realities, intentions and performances, which Johnson recognized as his own great authorial gift – as rehearsed in such writings as this ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ – thereby justly reflecting the unequal concatenation of high and low in human nature and human actions.56 Can an editor reconcile such contradictions, other than in terms of human nature? As Imlac points out, ‘Inconsistencies . . . cannot both be right, but, imputed to man, they may both be true’ (Yale, vol. 16, p. 33). If the ‘fascinations’ of a quibble ‘are irresistible’ to the playwright, we are also told in the ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ that ‘The allurements of emendation are scarcely resistible’ by the editor (Yale, vol. 7, p. 109). There is, in other words, something inherently human about falling prey to such temptation, so that what may be seen at one point as culpable in Shakespeare is on another occasion remarkably true to the culpability of human beings. Where Pope had ‘endeavoured to improve’ Macbeth’s lines on Duncan’s ‘silver skin’ and ‘golden blood’ (II.iii.112), Johnson concedes that ‘every word’ is indeed ‘equally faulty’, but adds (following Warburton’s suggestion) that the stylistic lapse may be deliberate. If it is, the whole speech is suddenly transformed from being evidence of the author’s lack of judgement to a supreme instance of his mastery of character (the ‘unnatural metaphors’ being an intentional contrast to ‘natural outcries of sudden passion’).57 Johnson’s litotes shows that he remains unsure whether it is one or the other: It is not improbable, that Shakespeare put these forced and unnatural metaphors into the mouth of Macbeth as a mark of artifice and dissimulation, to show the difference between the studied language of hypocrisy, and the natural outcries of sudden passion. This whole speech so considered, is a remarkable instance of judgment, as it consists entirely of antithesis and metaphor. (1765, vol. 6, p. 417) In his most explicitly condemnatory sentence on Shakespeare’s wordplay, Johnson states that ‘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.’ Yet even here, as Donald Siebert notes, the assertion depends partly on wordplay – ‘to purchase’, in the cant usage of Shakespeare’s and Johnson’s time, meant to strike an inherently bad deal. Hence, in Johnson’s Dictionary, sense 2 of ‘To PURCHASE’ is ‘To obtain at any expence, as of labour or danger’; he glosses Fluellen’s exchange with MacMorris (III.iii.19–83) as follows: ‘It were to be wished that the poor merriment of this dialogue had not been purchased with so much profaneness’ (Henry V, 1765, vol. 4, p. 411) . Employing ‘to purchase’ in this sense in

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the ‘Preface’ is, therefore, once again, to impersonate Shakespeare, even at his most despicable – as well as to pay him back in kind.58 Of this section in the ‘Preface’, George Colman remarked, as if he were catching Johnson out, ‘Has not Mr. J. been as culpably fond of writing upon Quibble, as Shakespeare in pursuing it?’ In similar vein, Kenrick wrote: Doth not this whole paragraph serve egregiously to prove that altho’ our Editor may not be fond of down-right punning, he takes full as much delight in starting and hunting down a poor conceit as he affirms Shakespeare did? We will venture to assert, indeed, that this is a species of quibbling which, barren and pitiful as it is, seems to give the critic himself so much delight that he is ‘content to purchase it by the sacrifice of reason, propriety and truth’.59 Such criticisms miss the point of Johnson’s self-inculpating humour. As always in his work, there is a prevailing sense of human weakness and error in the ‘Preface’; the critic’s evident susceptibility to the faults he identifies in Shakespeare is meant to underline, as do his many exasperated notes on the spats of previous editors, that ‘we are all men/In our own natures frail, and capable/Of frailty.’ The generalizing tendency in Johnson’s criticism also aligns him with Shakespeare as the poet of nature. The quibbles passage, like the ‘Preface’ as a whole, centres on the way in which the editor by turns merges himself with, and distinguishes himself from, his subject. Herein lie the serio-comic movements and ‘mingled drama’ of Johnson’s response to Shakespeare. When contemporary reviewers attacked him for his inadequate praise of Shakespeare as a writer who mirrors life and nature, they were refusing to be impressed by the intricate allusiveness of the ‘Preface’ – an allusiveness which demonstrates the editor’s deep and inward knowledge of his text and his capacity to weave into an argument about Shakespeare such descriptions as, for instance, Hamlet’s first speech to the players (III.ii.16–35): ‘any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature’ (1765, vol. 8, p. 214). Kenrick’s complaint against Johnson has also to do with the limited conception he himself espouses of ‘nature’ – a conception which shares more with The Rambler than it does with the ‘Preface’. As G. F. Parker has demonstrated, Rambler 4 outlines a narrow idea of nature, and imposes upon its literary imitations a set of far more exacting, morally selective criteria than Johnson requires of Shakespearean nature.60 Whereas the

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realistic novel – the genre under consideration in Rambler 4 – can achieve at best a fidelity to humdrum, everyday experiences (hence its suitability for young readers), Shakespeare’s faithful pictures of ‘nature’ have the capacity to heal a diseased imagination, to inform the understanding, and tutor the heart: This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirrour 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 extasies, 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. (Yale, vol. 7, p. 65) In spite of a tendency to lose his way, then, Shakespeare directs those who have been misled and perplexed by other writers to a conclusive knowledge of the world and of human beings as they are: ‘fidelity to the truth of the world and fidelity to moral truth become one.’61 Johnson begins the ‘Preface’ as he begins a Rambler essay, with an axiomatic truth whose validity and relevance have yet to be determined (a structure resembling Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be . . .’): 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. (Yale, vol. 7, p. 59) As in The Rambler, so in the ‘Preface’ main and subordinate clauses are frequently reversed, a syntactical indication (akin to litotes) of what Johnson called in his first letter to Boswell ‘the Vacillation of a mind suspended between different motives’, as well a hint at his dogged, hasty method of composition: in the same letter, he reveals that ‘it is not without a considerable effort of resolution that I prevail upon myself to write.’62 The initial subordinate clause functions, then, like an essay title or announcement of subject matter. It seems as if Johnson first writes down the general claim which needs to be rehearsed as central to the author or subject under discussion, before deciding what to do with it; in this instance, he buys himself

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yet more time by continuing to suspend judgment with the phrase ‘. . . is a complaint likely to be always continued by those who . . .’. Sometimes, Johnson’s subordinate clauses underline the absence of any ‘principal’ truth, his language showing heightened and ironic consciousness of its own delaying tactics – the periodic syntactical structures in which it is being elaborated – as well as of the ‘mere trifles’ with which it is concerned: ‘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’ (Yale, vol. 7, pp. 107, 109, my emphases). This artful sentence, in which Johnson the conjectural critic explains via a subordinate–principal clause structure the inability of a conjectural critic to operate within a principal–subordinate clause structure, expresses in miniature the relationship of the ‘Preface’ to the edition it introduces. Ostensibly no more than a subordinate introduction to the plays, the ‘Preface’ is often identified as the principal result of all Johnson’s labours on Shakespeare: according to Adam Smith, it was ‘the most manly piece of criticism that was ever published in any country.’63 As Boswell put it, in a contorted, ambiguous judgement: ‘he at length gave to the world his edition of Shakspeare, which, if it had no other merit but that of producing his Preface, in which the excellencies and defects of that immortal bard are displayed with a masterly hand, the nation would have had no reason to complain’.64 The unanswered questions raised and politely ignored here are, fi rst, whether Johnson’s edition has any merit beyond that of the ‘Preface’, and second, what other reasons the nation might or might not have had to complain about his work. Johnson’s ‘Preface’ is divided into three parts. The first surveys the glories of Shakespeare; the second, his faults; and the third, how his editors have mishandled him and each other. But to summarize the work thus gives no sense of its forceful compression, authority and creative reach, or of the ways in which it turns around and returns to the idea of Shakespeare as, above all else, ‘the poet of nature’ (Yale, vol. 7, p. 62). For Johnson, the poetry of nature comprises (among other things) breadth of vision and design, fidelity to manners and life in general, an intuitive sense of how the world goes and a vivid apprehension of the human mind and character (Yale, vol. 7, p. 62).65 Johnson, like Shakespeare, devoted much of his creative energy to imagining the diseased imagination, and the relationship between drama,

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fancy and truth produces some of his most invigorating reappraisals of earlier critics. The ‘Preface’ asserts, in the course of a paragraph summar izing the case against Shakespeare for violating the unities of time and place, that ‘fiction loses its force when it departs from the resemblance of reality’ (Yale, vol. 7, p. 76). In an earlier essay from The Rambler Johnson had argued, again with reference to Shakespeare, that ‘the force of poetry . . . calls new powers into being,’ that it ‘embodies sentiment, and animates matter’.66 Fiction seemingly weakens, then, as it becomes more remote from the real, while poetry appears to gain in strength as it creates new beings. Is it possible to reconcile the call to simulate reality with the call to invent new worlds? Is this what Shakespeare is doing when he ‘approximates the remote, and familiarizes the wonderful’ (Yale, vol. 7, p. 65)? Developing his argument against those who reprimanded Shakespeare’s lack of regard for (or ignorance of) the unities, Johnson insisted that 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 Caesar, 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 extasy 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. (Yale, vol. 7, pp. 76–7) The imaginative dexterity of the ‘Preface’ is yoked, here, to a satirical instinct to curb the reach of imagination’s purchase on our minds. To credit the drama beyond the limits of credibility as they are narrowly

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defined by Johnson is to be mentally ill, as is the astronomer in Rasselas (composed while Johnson was preparing his Shakespeare edition): ‘By degrees the reign of fancy is confirmed; she grows first imperious, and in time despotick. Then fictions begin to operate as realities, false opinions fasten upon the mind, and life passes in dreams of rapture or of anguish’ (Yale, vol. 16, p. 152). And yet, what comes across from the ‘Preface’ at this stage is not, primarily, a rejection of fancy’s reign, but a sense of the creative vigour and fertility with which Johnson forecloses the remit of imagination. In the course of dismissing the idea that the stage might actually be mistaken for a fictional arena, he lingers on the luxurious details of those fictions: Alexandria, Rome, Antony, Cleopatra, the Ptolemies, Alexander, Caesar, Pharsalia, Granicus. And the ‘state of elevation’ Johnson invokes as ‘above the reach of reason’ and ‘truth’ is, after all, synonymous with ‘the heights of empyrean poetry’. So it is perhaps unsurprising that many readers have mistaken this paragraph as a positive endorsement of the imagination as a superior power.67 As in the quibbles passage, Johnson dwells on – indeed revels in – that which he is repudiating. The ‘Preface’ is governed and energized by the dynamic of a creator who wishes to curb his and our indulgence in creative falsehoods; when it comes to the imagination, Johnson is both patient and doctor, the astronomer and Imlac.68 Imlac’s sympathetic response to his friend’s madness differs markedly from Johnson’s treatment of the theatrical spectator who imagines himself transported to new realms, the point being perhaps that, while the astronomer attempts to reason himself out of his error, the spectator wills himself into it. Where Imlac asks the astronomer, ‘Why, Sir, . . . do you call that incredible, which you know, or think you know, to be true’ (Yale, vol. 16, p. 147), Johnson in the ‘Preface’ asks us as spectators why we call that ‘true’ which we know to be ‘incredible’: ‘Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind’ (Yale, vol. 7, p. 78). Hence the futility of arguing about Shakespeare and the unities: however many weeks and places his dramas choose to represent, none of the plays will be confused with the world beyond it. If the ‘Preface’ is an exercise throughout in distinguishing the wonderful from the incredible and the incredible from the false, Johnson here treats as absurd what he fearfully explores in Rasselas as an ever-present likelihood: the confusion of a fictional realm with reality. In Rasselas, Nekayah and Pekuah are upbraided for laughing at the mad astronomer, but in the ‘Preface’ Johnson adopts a robustly amused tone towards anyone tempted to indulge in the process of imaginary identification of drama with the

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world. On this point, Rasselas and the ‘Preface’ constitute two sides of the same coin, revealing Johnson’s capacity to argue on both sides of a question – and to feel himself genuinely, instinctively, bound to each side of the argument. Johnson does accept that the drama moves its audience, but not because the audience believes that actors have become the characters they play. Rather, it moves us because we fear being exposed to such torments as those being represented on stage, or we remember that we have endured them, or at most because we therefore ‘fancy ourselves unhappy for a moment’ (Yale, vol. 7, p. 78). But even the strictly curtailed employment of the imagination suggested by this momentary act is something which Johnson apparently disapproves. His one true appeal to the imagination comes when he argues that a dramatic imitation provokes the imagination to remember (with appropriate pleasure or pain) the reality; not, he insists again, that the imagination mistakes an imitation for the real thing, ‘We are agitated in reading the history of Henry the Fifth, yet no man takes his book for the field of Agencourt’ (Yale, vol. 7, pp. 78–9). Johnson encourages us to contrast how the drama operates on the mind of a sane observer and on a deluded one: the rational spectator of a tragedy is like a mother who ‘weeps over her babe, when she remembers that death may take it from her’ (Yale, vol. 7, p. 78). Sanity compels us, through drama, to recollect our vulnerabilities in the face of a superior, ineluctable power. Madness compels us to imagine ourselves in control (in the case of the astronomer) or to imagine ourselves elsewhere (in the case of the deluded spectator). In both cases, fictions begin to operate as realities, but only the astronomer has the fantasy of ruling a domain over which he really has no command at all. He sounds more like a playwright, at times, than a member of the audience: he has the instinct to create as well as to govern, and his imaginary administration of ‘exact justice’ when regulating the weather casts him as a more scrupulous playwright than Shakespeare, who, according to Johnson, ‘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.’ The astronomer understands Johnson’s argument that ‘it is always a writer’s duty to make the world better,’ and for all his delusions of grandeur he can never be said to have sacrificed ‘virtue to convenience’ (Yale, vol. 7, p. 71; Yale, vol. 16, pp. 144–5). When he described Johnson’s Shakespeare criticism as ‘manly’ (‘Manlike; becoming a man; firm; brave; stout; undaunted; undismayed’),69 Adam

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Smith perhaps had in mind the fact that Johnson stares things in the face in Shakespeare that the human mind generally refuses to accommodate or to reconcile with one another. In no other play is this more obvious than King Lear: Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of chronicles. . . . A play in which the wicked prosper, and the virtuous miscarry, may doubtless be good, because it is a just representation of the common events of human life: but since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot easily be persuaded, that the observation of justice makes a play worse; or, that if other excellencies are equal, the audience will not always rise better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue. In the present case the publick has decided. Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add any thing to the general suffrage, I might relate, that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor. (1765, vol. 6, p. 159) Like Boswell’s reluctant, tortuous sentence on Johnson’s Shakespeare, hinging on an ‘if’ (see p. 138 of this chapter), the editor’s position here remains conditional: it is both deeply involved in and scrupulously uncommitted to answering the questions it raises. Johnson thinks it ‘doubtless’ the case that ‘a just representation of the common events of human life’ may satisfy the reader, even if it fails to conform to poetic ‘ justice’. After that observation, however, nothing but doubt is registered for the rest of the paragraph. Because of our natural inclination to ‘love justice’, Johnson ‘cannot easily be persuaded’ (but may, eventually, come to accept?) that a play is any ‘worse’ for abiding by a form of poetic justice which in this instance miraculously happens also to confirm ‘the faith of chronicles’. The use of ‘worse’ and ‘better’ here, alongside the competing senses of absolute justice (to the cruelties of life, or to the theatrical distribution of happiness and unhappiness) again shows Johnson’s lack of certainty. Why has Shakespeare departed from his source text, only to frustrate the hopes of the audience? Johnson throws the judgement over to us. On other occasions, he remains convinced that Shakespeare ‘well knew what would please the audience for which he wrote’ (indeed, he is able to say this when

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describing the extrusion of Gloucester’s eyes, 1765, vol. 6, p. 159). When confronted with the death of Cordelia, however, he calls into question any audience’s capacity to remain ‘better pleased’ with Shakespeare’s ending than with Tate’s. How we weigh up Johnson’s personal sensations is left undecided; if they could add anything to the ‘general suffrage’ in favour of Tate’s adaptation, he would tell us of his shock and near-inability to bear the play’s original ending. But does his testimony amount to an endorsement of those who would rewrite Shakespeare? Not exactly. ‘Shakespeare has suffered’, and so has Johnson. The paragraph shows the editor’s mind rising up to confront the seemingly wanton iniquities which Shakespeare visits on his innocent creations – iniquities which, in their outrageously random nature, Johnson also recognizes as ‘common’ to ‘human life’. Perhaps it is right, then, for him to take eventual refuge in the decision of an anonymous ‘publick’, that same audience which Shakespeare ever sought to please. Throughout this passage, Johnson’s thoughts, arguments and creative faculties have been hard at work to understand the playwright as creator; it is as if Shakespeare is endeavouring to persuade his editor of the justice of a world (real and theatrical) in which good people die in just causes. John Kerrigan writes of King Lear in terms that might stand as a gloss of Johnson’s endnote to the play: it makes no concessions to what we would like life to be. Yet, because it also reminds us that (being drama) it could at almost any moment resolve its tragic action in comedy, it makes us think that (since it shows us what life is like) life need not after all be what it is (like), and that its mere being what it is is desperately unfair.70

King Lear Editing King Lear, Johnson sometimes detected the presence of authorial revision. He was generally inclined to accept the folio as the genuine record of Shakespeare’s final intentions, however negligently they may have been recorded – an inclination which directs his careful presentation, collation and discussion of the play. As Robert Scholes points out, Johnson was the first to suggest that the ideal manuscript or vanished archetype posited by some critics as existing behind the text’s multiple and imperfect states probably never came into being, ‘even in the poet’s

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mind’.71 The Tragedy of King Lear (folio) contains about 100 lines not printed in The History of King Lear (quarto); it leaves out around 300 lines (including one entire scene) which are present in the quarto. There are, in addition, hundreds of substantive differences between the two plays. Pope was the first editor of Shakespeare to introduce readings from the quarto into the folio Lear; in 1733, Theobald issued a text based on fullscale conflation of the two early sources.72 Twenty-one quarto passages, totalling 269 lines, were restored in Theobald’s Lear; Johnson accepted and annotated nearly all of them.73 He noted that the folio ‘commonly differs from the fi rst quarto, by augmentations or insertions’ and was, therefore, surprised when such variation consisted of ‘omission’ (King Lear, 1765, vol. 6, p. 27). He used this idea – that revision tends to issue in more text, rather than less – as the basis for speculations about chronology in the end-note to Lear: ‘A lamentable SONG of the Death of King Leir and his Three Daughters’ must, Johnson thinks, pre-date Shakespeare, since the ballad ‘has the rudiments of the play, but none of its amplifications. . . . The writer of the ballad added something to the history, which is a proof that he would have added more, if more had occurred to his mind, and more must have occurred if he had seen Shakespeare’ (1765, vol. 6, p. 160). It is appropriate that a variorum edition of Shakespeare should present the authorial revision of the plays in terms chiefly of accretion, rather than of authorially sanctioned cuts and omissions (even if these also do exist); it means that the closest we can get to the ‘true reading’ is usually via the longest passage – not only because Shakespeare is generally understood to have made his own additions (‘he changed it afterwards’; ‘These two lines were added in the authour’s revison, and are only in the folio’; ‘the whole passage is wanting in the fi rst edition, being added, I suppose, at his revisal’, King Lear, 1765, vol. 6, pp. 10, 88, 129), but because collation will show us a text in a variety of surviving states, just as the variorum’s collated annotation will show us the history of the best (or most recent, or most representative) editorial commentary on a particular passage. Yet collation often limits the chances of producing a performance-friendly edition. Johnson suggests in a note to Lear that seven lines given to Edmund in the quarto (I.ii.165–71) should be restored, since they reveal more of his capacity for evil (1765, vol. 6, pp. 27–8). Here, as ever, the explication of motive and character is a central justification for merging quarto with folio and thereby bulking out the text; Johnson sometimes comments on Shakespeare’s fondness for removing such explication when he returns to

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the plays. Where the reviser chooses to make events more obscure, however, the editor will generally wish to ‘bring the authour and his readers to meet on easier terms’ (1765, vol. 6, p. 241). Evidence of these conflicting perspectives on the text is revealed in Johnson’s handling of a difficult passage combining The History of King Lear (III.ii.16–33) and The Tragedy of King Lear (III.i.8–20): Kent. Sir, I do know you, And dare, upon the warrant of my note, Commend a dear thing to you. There’s division, Although the face of it is cover’d With mutual cunning, ’twixt Albany and Cornwall, 2 Who have, (as who have not, whom their great stars Throne and set high?) servants, who seem no less; Which are to France the spies and speculations Intelligent of our state. What hath been seen, Either in snuffs and packings of the Dukes; Or the hard rein, which both of them have borne Against the old kind king; or something deeper, Whereof, perchance, these are but furnishings. [3But true it is, from France there comes a power Into this scatter’d kingdom; who already, Wise in our negligence, have secret fee In some of our best ports, and are at point To shew their open banner – Now to you, If on my credit you dare build so far To make your speed to Dover, you shall find Some that will thank you, making just report, Of how unnatural and bemadding sorrow The King hath cause to plain. I am a gentleman of blood and breeding, And from some knowledge and assurance of you, Offer this Office.] 2

Who have, as who have not – ] The eight subsequent Verses were degraded by Mr. Pope, as unintelligible, and to no purpose. For my part, I see nothing in them but what is very easy to be understood; and the Lines seem absolutely necessary to clear up the Motives, upon which France prepared his Invasion: nor without them is the Sense of the Context compleat.

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THEOBALD. 3

But true it is, &c.] In the old editions are the five following lines which I have inserted in the text, which seem necessary to the plot, as a preparatory to the arrival of the French army with Cordelia in Act 4. How both these, and a whole scene between the Kent and this gentleman in the fourth act, came to be left out in all the later editions, I cannot tell: they depend upon each other, and very much contribute to clear that incident. POPE. [. . .]

The true state of this speech cannot from all these notes be discovered. As it now stands it is collected from two editions: the lines which I have distinguished by Italicks are found in the folio, not in the quarto; the following lines inclosed in crotchets are in the quarto, not in the folio. So that if the speech be read with omissions of the Italicks, it will stand according to the first edition; and if the Italicks are read, and the lines that follow them omitted, it will then stand according to the second. This speech is now tedious because it is formed by a coalition of both. The second edition [folio] is generally best, and was probably nearest to Shakespeare’s last copy, but in this passage the first is preferable; for in the folio, the messenger is sent, he knows not why, he knows not whither. I suppose Shakespeare thought his plot opened rather too early, and made the alteration to veil the event from the audience; but trusting too much to himself, and full of a single purpose, he did not accommodate his new lines to the rest of the scene. [JOHNSON.] (1765, vol. 6, pp. 78–80) Both Theobald and Pope explain their decisions about what to omit and what to include in terms of dramatic clarification (‘the lines seem absolutely necessary to clear up the Motives, upon which France prepared his Invasion: nor without them is the sense of the Context compleat’; ‘the five following lines . . . seem necessary to the plot’; ‘they . . . very much contribute to clear that incident’). Yet France’s motives are never made clear, either here or later in the play, while Pope’s confidence that the folio lines are ‘to no purpose’ ignores the fact that they contain plausible circumstantial

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information about French spies in English households; Edmund later claims that Gloucester is one such spy (Tragedy of King Lear, III.v.10–12). If we read this scene, as neither Theobald nor Pope suggests, with reference solely to the folio, we come across a major, perhaps authorial, alteration to King Lear’s plot: all mention of the French king and his army has been excised from Cordelia’s mission to rescue her father. The folio, therefore, seems concerned to suppress the fact of invasion, as Johnson notices; ‘the event’ is withheld from the audience and the Gentleman’s mission is insufficiently prepared for. Even if this remains a de facto invasion, it is now construed in terms wholly filial rather than military. Eighteenth-century and subsequent editors of conflated texts, following Theobald, usually treat the folio lines as if they are designed to supplement the quarto, rather than to replace it, a habit which naturally obscures the matter of revision, authorial or otherwise. Johnson, however, underlines the possibility of choosing between quarto and folio, as well as of opting for a combination of the two. He shows some dissatisfaction with the practice of conflation, as with his variorum’s accumulated, contradictory notes: none of these features will ‘discover’ the ‘true state’ of the passage. Indeed, how could they, since to ‘discover’ something (in the eighteenth-century sense of the verb) implies a process of stripping it back to its origins? (Johnson’s primary Dictionary definition of ‘To DISCOVER’ as ‘To shew; to disclose; to bring to light’ describes the opposite of a prevalent editorial tendency to ‘darken’ the text with learned and ill-tempered explications.74) As this passage shows, Johnson was not dogmatic or insistent in his preference for the folio. Here, the quarto apparently gives a more cogent view of cause and effect than that provided by the folio or indeed than that provided by a combination of folio and quarto. So the folio lines represent, to Johnson’s mind, an inferior alternative version of the passage, one which he nevertheless includes, perhaps as evidence of how he thinks the playwright revisited his own work (just as his own early and late notes, as represented in the annotations to Macbeth alongside those on the other plays, show the evolving practices of a textual editor). Johnson felt he needed to include the quarto lines as well as those of the generally superior folio because without the former we will not possess as much knowledge as we might of ‘the event’ under discussion – one which, in revision, Shakespeare veiled too fully from his audience; on another occasion, he would like to restore a passage from the quarto (History of King Lear, I.ii.138–44) because it ‘naturally introduces the following dialogue’ (1765, vol. 6, p. 27). But why not, in this instance, give the quarto alone? Does more text afford greater clarity here? In the quarto, Kent fulfils his promise to ‘Commend a

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dear thing’ to the Gentleman: he passes on news of impending civil strife; he tells him that the French forces at Dover will be sympathetic to Lear; he urges him to report the king’s terrible condition to those forces, and he emphasizes his own credibility. The sequence includes all the information necessary for understanding what follows. Yet Johnson instinctively grasps that clarity, however welcome, is not necessarily what was intended in the revision (if such it was): as readers or editors, we may instinctively prefer a text in which motives are clarified and explanations supplied; when returning to a play, however, Shakespeare apparently sometimes chose to make things more ambiguous. This, Johnson senses, has often to do with pace (the author’s wish to make the action shorter or to reveal it more gradually). The folio text may seem inferior because it repeats the detail about the dukes’ mutual suspicion and hints at ‘something deeper’. Its redundancies, omissions, lack of sequence and grammatical incompletion bring fresh confusion into the speech and scene. Yet there is also some grammatical incompletion or incoherence in the quarto which is not present (or which is tidied up) in the folio.75 And the folio Kent’s repetitions, the layering of suspicions and the arrangement of his speech so that it ends on a suggestion of murkier events to come are true to the spirit of the play. The first, ‘preparatory’ scene of Lear, for instance, already possesses (as Johnson observes) ‘something of obscurity and inaccuracy’: ‘The King has already divided his kingdom, and yet when he enters he examines his daughters, to discover in what proportions he should divide it.’ Lear proceeds to ‘express our darker purpose’. Johnson glosses this last phrase as follows: ‘we have already made known in some measure our design of parting the kingdom; we will now discover what has not been told before, the reasons by which we shall regulate the partition’ (1765, vol. 6, pp. 3, 5). He thought such an explanation served to ‘ justify or palliate’ the obscurity of ‘the exordial dialogue’; it might serve, too, as a means of understanding what is going on in Kent’s folio speech (III.i.8–20). In that version of the text, he does not mention that a French army has landed, nor does he send the Gentleman to Dover to meet the king’s sympathizers. The only thing he commends to the Gentleman is that he can expect to meet Cordelia somewhere and that she will identify the stranger in the storm as Kent, without any explanation of why such identification should occur. He promises to say more to the Gentleman after they find the king, but the conversation never takes place. Although, in the folio, the Gentleman has not been given the facts, message or motive required to undertake a mission and ‘office’ to Cordelia, at the end of III.i (as in the quarto) he departs with a letter to her. It is of this errand that Johnson remarks ‘the messenger is

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sent, he knows not why, he knows not whither.’ Again, however, this is not the only example of inconsistency in the play regarding places and intentions. Why, for instance, does Lear depart for Gloucester’s castle when, as Johnson notes, ‘He seems to intend to go to his daughter’ (1765, vol. 6, p. 44)? He repeats his lack of satisfaction when the king arrives at the castle (Tragedy of King Lear, I.v.6; II.ii.185): ‘It is not very clearly discovered why Lear comes hither. In the foregoing part he sent a letter to Glo’ster, but no hint is given of its contents. He seems to have gone to visit Glo’ster while Cornwall and Regan might prepare to entertain him’ (1765, vol. 6, p. 61). In Johnson’s handling of King Lear III.i, a collated passage is made typographically to reflect the divergence of editorial opinions and preferences contained in the discussion beneath it. The editor has reproduced a synthetic text which he thinks dramatically unsatisfactory – ‘tedious’ because of its length and therefore also inappropriate to a character who prides himself on his direct, concise speaking (Kent can ‘deliver a plain message bluntly’, although the message he has to deliver here is perhaps not susceptible of plainness; 1765, vol. 6, p. 33). Johnson did not think, as a rule, that the more Shakespeare there was in the text, the better (see, for instance, his comment at 1765, vol. 4, pp. 264–5). Yet the advantage of his arrangement of the King Lear passage is that readers are enabled (indeed, encouraged) by the arrangement of brackets and italics to judge for themselves which version (quarto, or folio, or a mixture of the two) is the most dramatically effective, and this judgement will itself depend on whether we think primarily about the scene’s effect on a ‘solitary reader’ or on an eighteenth-century, or indeed, Shakespearean audience.76 We have first to recognize, however, that the primary textual truth of King Lear is irrecoverable – and this sits oddly with Johnson’s prefatory advice, to a new reader of Shakespeare, to ‘read every play from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his commentators’ (Yale, vol. 7, p. 111). At moments when the textual presentation of the play demonstrates so clearly to a reader the work’s internal divisions, obscurities and hiatuses, it is difficult to resist looking at the notes for explanation and guidance; at other moments, consulting such notes may prove a solace to readers of Lear, confronted by the seemingly unendurable scenes of Gloucester’s blinding and Cordelia’s death and compelled ‘to relieve’ their ‘distress’ through such local distractions, as well as ‘by incredulity’ (1765, vol. 6, p. 159). Johnson invites us by turns to ignore the editor and to imagine ourselves in his place – a kind of sympathetic role-play in which we are able to plot the uneven course of his text from first quarto to 1765, and to consider the many different states in which it might conceivably have been reproduced: ‘I cannot forbear to

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transcribe the first sentence of this dialogue [Henry V, III.iv.1–2] from the edition of 1608, that the reader who has not looked into the old copies may judge of the strange negligence with which they are printed’; ‘I will transcribe this passage [Tragedy of King Lear, I.iv.278–82] from the first edition, that it may appear to those who are unacquainted with old books, what is the difficulty of revision, and what indulgence is due to those that endeavour to restore corrupted passages’ (Henry V, 1765, vol. 4, p. 414; King Lear, 1765, vol. 6, p. 42. He handles an earlier textual crux in The Tragedy of King Lear, at I.i.217–20, with similar attention to the reader as editorin-waiting; 1765, vol. 6, p. 14). Johnson generally sought to defend the folio against the intrusion of variants and conjectural emendations which had no better rationale than the editor’s itch to standardize and tidy up Shakespeare’s verse: I have given this passage [Tragedy of King Lear, I.i.147–53] according to the old folio, from which the modern editors have silently departed, for the sake of better numbers, with a degree of insincerity, which, if not sometimes detected and censured, must impair the credit of antient books. One of the editors, and perhaps only one, knew how much mischief may be done by such clandestine alterations. The quarto agrees with the folio, except that for reserve thy state, it gives, reserve thy doom, and has stoops instead of falls to folly. The meaning of answer my life my judgement is, Let my life be answerable for my judgment, or I will stake my life on my opinion. The reading which, without any right, has possessed all the modern copies is this, -----------------to plainness Honour Is bound, when Majesty to folly falls. Reserve thy state; with better judgment check This hideous rashness; with my life I answer, Thy youngest daughter, &c. (1765, vol. 6, p. 10)77 He was more tolerant of such ‘clandestine alterations’ when considering the much-vilified Hanmer, remarking that his care of the metre has been too violently censured [by Warburton]. He found the measures 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 license, which had already

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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. (Yale, vol. 7, p. 97) As elsewhere in the edition, Johnson’s notion of what is ‘ just’ is confusing. For an editor to find his author’s metres already silently, illicitly reformed and to subject them to a little more unacknowledged tinkering is not, apparently, as reprehensible as is imposing such clandestine alterations in the first instance. This hints at Johnson’s idea of his own textual remit. But why should the editor not do his best to erase the traces of former metrical interventions and regularizations; in other words, to return to the original copies (as Johnson had, after all, promised to do)? As far as metre was concerned, Johnson seems not to have followed his own advice to abide by ‘the reading of the ancient books’ – a reading which is ‘not to be disturbed for the sake of elegance, perspicuity, or mere improvement of the sense’ (Yale, vol. 7, p. 106). He claims in a single sentence of the ‘Preface’ to be ‘restoring the authour’s works to their integrity’ and to retain sovereignty over ‘punctuation’, so that ‘Whatever could be done by adjusting points is . . . silently performed.’ He also vaguely gestures towards his authority over ‘a few particles, or other words of slight effect’, which he has ‘sometimes inserted or omitted . . . without notice’ (Yale, vol. 7, p. 107). In practice, Johnson treated any non-substantive changes to diction, word order and tense, made on grammatical grounds, as a sort of accidental, akin to punctuation or spelling. He energetically repointed Shakespeare’s text, aiming to break up strings of run-on phrases and clauses previously linked by commas, semi-colons and colons.78 Even if he was far less permissive of emendation than any of his predecessors had been, Johnson nevertheless allowed into his edition such alterations as those of pronoun use and agreement of subjects with verbs, as they had been imposed by Pope. He seems to have understood the printing of speeches as prose or verse to be another area in which he might ‘silently’ legislate as editor – albeit more mercifully, on the whole, than his predecessors had. As in the paragraph on Hanmer, Johnson claims as his justification for such unacknowledged textual interventions the practice of those who have gone before him – however reprehensible their conduct may strike him as being in the course of his own notes, or indeed elsewhere in the ‘Preface’: ‘I have done that sometimes, which the other editors have done always, and which indeed the state of the text may suffi ciently justify’ (Yale, vol. 7, p. 107). This amounts to a depressingly impoverished statement of editorial policy. Johnson seems to have acquiesced

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in a process of gradually obscuring Shakespeare’s ‘fluent accommodation of the verse to the passions of his dramatis personae’, helping ‘to destroy most of Shakespeare’s subtle touches; to abolish the pauses, the silences, and the rushes’.79 Yet he also aspired to halt licentious editing and pugnacious annotation, establishing in their place a body of unobtrusive, cautious and faithful commentary pitched at general readers and scholars alike. Perhaps in the light of such a mishmash of theories and practices we should not be surprised to find Johnson himself silently reordering two lines of the very passage which he upbraided Pope and others for having either rearranged or left in its editorially adjusted state, instead of checking it against the ‘authority’ of ‘old copies’. The folio text of Lear I.i.147–53 runs as follows: Think’st thou that dutie shall haue dread to speake, When power to flattery bowes? To plainnesse honour’s bound, When Maiesty falls to folly, reserue thy state, And in thy best consideration checke This hideous rashnesse, answere my life, my iudgment: Thy youngest Daughter do’s not loue thee least,80 Beyond the usual changes he imposes on punctuation, Johnson’s sole alteration to this passage was to combine the short second and third lines – a change with which modern editors concur. And yet, as Paul Bertram argues, it is ‘reasonable to suppose that the significance of different line arrangements ought to be related to their possible effects on dramatic and poetic values in performance’ – effects of which Johnson was well aware. 81 The pacing of this speech, which counsels against rashness, is evidently important, as is the weighing of one long or short clause against another; we are invited, after all, to weigh a life against a judgement. The folio arrangement of Kent’s lines may be designed to indicate that, although duty will not ‘dread to speake’, it will at least pause after a question (however rhetorical), and before making the separate assertion (duty not being necessarily synonymous with plain speaking) that ‘To plainnesse honour’s bound’. Kent has just with astonishing impudence and disregard of rank addressed Lear in the second person, and as an ‘old man’; he now retreats into personifications to substitute for himself and Lear: duty, power, majesty. This may call for a moment’s silence.

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Johnson, himself author of the line ‘Nor think the doom of man revers’d for thee’,82 elected to reproduce the folio Kent’s advice to the King to ‘reserue thy state’, rather than the quarto’s ‘Reverse thy doom’, noting that ‘I am inclined to think that reverse thy doom was Shakespeare’s first reading, as more apposite to the present occasion, and that he changed it afterwards to reserve thy state, which conduces more to the progress of the action’ (1765, vol. 5, p. 10). Jay Halio glosses ‘reserue thy state’ as ‘do not relinquish your kingdom,’ observing that recent commentators ‘suggest that in F Kent is thinking more of Lear’s safety than of Cordelia, who in the Q reading is uppermost 83.’ MacDonald P. Jackson thinks the phrase means ‘retain thy royal dignity and power’ and explains Johnson’s reading of the distinction between quarto and folio as follows: the F phrase expresses Kent’s concern with Lear and his kingdom, which is why it ‘conduces more to the progress of the action’ (as Johnson put it) – that progress towards war which the Folio cuts in Acts Three and Four do so much to accelerate. Q’s ‘Reuerse thy doome’ has an entirely different meaning, ‘more apposite to the present occasion’: it relates to Kent’s obvious indignation at Lear’s unfairness to Cordelia.84 So the folio emphasizes Lear’s political folly in surrendering his kingdom; the quarto, which remains closer to the source play, stresses his injustice to Cordelia. This division is shown up once again in Johnson’s end-note on King Lear: There is another controversy among the criticks concerning this play. It is disputed whether the predominant image in Lear’s disordered mind be the loss of his kingdom or the cruelty of his daughters. Mr. Murphy, a very judicious critick, has evinced by induction of particular passages, that the cruelty of his daughters is the primary source of his distress, and that the loss of royalty affects him only as a secondary and subordinate evil; He observes with great justness, that Lear would move our compassion but little, did we not rather consider the injured father than the degraded king. (1765, vol. 6, pp. 159–60) Kingdom or daughters, imperial or domestic tragedy? We can be confident that whoever revised this play had something against the word ‘doom’, since fourteen lines after the change from ‘Reuerse thy doome’ to ‘Reserue thy state’ the quarto’s ‘Reuoke thy doom’ is altered to ‘Reuoke thy guift’. ‘Doome’ again seems to refer to Lear’s judgement on Cordelia,

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while ‘guift’ describes the kingdom, newly presented to Goneril and Regan, as well as the judgement which Lear has presented to Cordelia as her sole portion. Both decisions, in other words, are criticized in the folio. There is, apparently, a new conception of events at work in the play, albeit one not registered by Johnson, who (without any explanation) retains the quarto reading of ‘doom’ (as had Pope, Theobald and Warburton) rather than instituting, in line with his earlier decision to replace ‘doome’ with ‘state’, the folio’s ‘guift’.85 In the folio, as in neither Johnson’s nor Johnson– Steevens’ Shakespeare, we can trace a progressive shift which appears to indicate authorial revision: ‘doome’ has been turned first into ‘state’, then into ‘guift’. An injunction to the king to reverse his decree has itself been reversed to a command to keep what’s his to himself.86 Johnson remained interested throughout his edition in finding evidence for the development of Shakespeare’s thinking, and in the disjunction between thoughts and speech (both in the author and his characters); had he based his text on the folio, this interest might have taken fuller shape in the light of evidence about revision. As things stand, Johnson remarks several times on how the sequence of thought takes precedence over the arrangement of words in Shakespeare: ‘our author . . . attends more to his ideas than to his words’ (Winter’s Tale, 1765, vol. 2, pp. 288–9); ‘Shakespeare, whose mind was more intent upon notions than words’ (King Lear, 1765, vol. 6, p. 74); Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy ‘is connected rather in the speaker’s mind, than on his tongue’ (1765, vol. 8, p. 207). This perceived discrepancy, considered alongside Johnson’s tendency to adjudicate silently on apparently matters of grammar and diction, may contribute to his reinterpretation of Shakespearean metrics. Boswell made numerous attempts to describe the peculiarities of Johnson’s ‘emphatick’, ‘sonorous’ and much-imitated voice, requesting of his readers that they ‘endeavour to keep in mind’ his friend’s ‘deliberate and strong utterance. His mode of speaking was indeed very impressive; and I wish it could be preserved as musick is written.’87 The description of his Shakespearean ‘recitation’ in Scotland as ‘grand and affecting’, with ‘no more tone than it should have’, may begin to suggest how an actor should perform what Johnson commended in his ‘Preface’ as ‘ just representations of general nature’ (Yale, vol. 7, p. 61).88 Murphy recalled, in terms similar to Boswell’s, that Johnson’s ‘manner of reciting verses’ was ‘wonderfully impressive’, adding that it ‘plainly shewed that he thought there was too much of artificial tone and measured cadence in the declamation of the theatre’. Johnson’s mode of recitation, then, was grand, affecting and impressive, yet less markedly declamatory in style

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than were the performances of another friend, David Garrick. Murphy and Boswell suggest that there was more of nature and less of artifice in Johnson’s Shakespeare. (Johnson recalled of his late wife that she ‘read comedy better than any body he ever heard’, but ‘in tragedy she mouthed too much’).89 Such reports may have a bearing on Johnson’s opinion of the St Crispin’s Day speech in Henry V (IV.iii.18–67): ‘like many others of the declamatory kind, [it] is too long. Had it been contracted to about half the number of lines, it might have gained force, and lost none of the sentiments’ (1765, vol. 4, p. 450). But did Johnson’s opinions about tone, force, measure and declamation also encourage him to make changes to Shakespeare’s text? In the folio Lear (IV.v.107–28), one of the king’s speeches – which in the History appears entirely as prose – has been turned into a rough sort of half-verse, half-prose: I, euery inch a King. When I do stare, see how the Subiect quakes. I pardon that mans life. What was thy cause? No, the Wren goes too’t, and the small gilded Fly Do’s letcher in my sight. Let Copulation thriue: For Glousters bastard Son was kinder to his Father, Then my Daughters got ‘tweene the lawfull sheets. Too’t Luxury pell-mell, for I lacke Souldiers. Behold yond simpering Dame, whose face betweene her Forkes presages Snow; that minces Vertue, & do’s shake the head to hear of pleasures name. The Fitchew, nor the soyled Horse goes too’r with a more riotous appetite: Downe from the waste they are Centaures, though Women all aboue: but to the Girdle do the Gods inherit, beneath is all the Fiends. There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the supherous pit; burning, scalding, stench, consumption, Fye, fie, fie; pah, pah; Giue me an Ounce of Ciuet; good Apothecary sweeten my imagination: There’s money for thee.90 Pope had put the first three lines into verse: ‘Ay, every inch a King./When I do stare, see how the subject quakes./I pardon that man’s life. What was thy cause?’, leaving the rest as prose; Theobald and Warburton followed suit.91 Johnson, however, went one stage further, silently relineating the whole speech as verse: Ay, every inch a King. When I do stare, see, how the subject quakes.

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I pardon that man’s life. What was the cause? Adultery? Thou shalt not die; die for adultery? No, The wren goes to’t, and the small gilded flie Does lecher in my sight. Let copulation thrive, for Glo’ster’s bastard son Was kinder to his father, than my daughters Got ’tween the lawful sheets. To’t, luxury, pell mell; for I lack soldiers. Behold yon simpering Dame, Whose face between her forks presages snow; That minces virtue, and does shake the head To hear of pleasure’s name. The fitchew, nor the soyled horse, goes to’t With a more riotous appetite; Down from the waiste they’re centaurs, Though women all above; But to the girdle do the Gods inherit, Beneath is all the fiend’s; there’s hell, there’s darkness, There is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption. Fy, fy, fy; pah, pah; Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, To sweeten my imagination! there’s mony for thee. (1765, vol. 6, p. 128) T. S. Eliot proposed that ‘the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the “freest” verse; to advance menacingly as we doze, and withdraw as we rouse.’92 This is perhaps akin to claiming, as does Philip Brockbank, that Shakespeare ‘hesitated between verse and prose’93 – except that Eliot phrases the matter in terms of a threat to, and strategic retreat from, the auditor; Brockbank, in terms of authorial indecision. Both descriptions apply to Hamlet (he is both menacing and unresolved) and, at this point in the play, to Lear. In his translation of the folio’s prose into a kind of free verse, Johnson gives the king an instinct to reach for, but failure to sustain, metrical regularity: this is not the same kind of alteration as that which he proposed in the 1745 note on Macbeth, where he cut the metrical shift introduced by ‘Anthony’ in order to make the lines run more smoothly. Rather, Lear speaks in this passage in occasional pairs of stuttering pentameters (‘When I do stare, see, how the subject quakes./I pardon that man’s life. What was the cause?’; ‘Whose face between her forks presages snow;/That minces virtue, and does shake the

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head’) but breaks off to point at something or to emphasize a word or idea (‘Adultery?’; ‘Behold’). He is regally inconsistent, rejecting any pattern as soon as it appears to be emerging; or, rather, his grip on reality and ability to exert his power and authority do not endure long enough for any pattern to establish a hold. There is little sense of his having progressed, rhythmically, to anything like completion or recognition by the end of this speech. Johnson has not here denied Shakespeare’s constant restlessness or his precise met rical discrimination. The verse as he construes it incorporates enjambment, masculine and feminine endings, and a wide range of line lengths, from hexameters (‘Let copulation thrive, for Glo’ster’s bastard son’) to dimeter (‘Adultery?’) and trimeter (‘Does lecher in my sight’, ‘Got ’tween the lawful sheets’, ‘Behold yon simpering Dame’, ‘To hear of pleasure’s name’, ‘Though women all above’). His arrangement also brings out the lurking rhymes between ‘No’ and ‘snow’, ‘Dame’ and ‘name’, ‘apothecary’ and ‘for thee’, by placing those words at lineends. Other ghostly pairings and half-rhymes suggest themselves from this lineation, especially through the association of one feminine ending with another: ‘daughters’ and ‘soldiers’, ‘daughters’ and ‘centaurs’, perhaps also ‘daughters’ and ‘darkness’. As dramatic verse, this retains loose, mobile, changeable rhythms while offering new associative clusters of thoughts and images. As Mark Womack argues, Shakespeare combines ‘all the comforts of regularity with all the energy of irregularity’; Johnson organizes this passage so that it generates and seeks out patterns to the extent that no one pattern dominates it.94 Roger Lonsdale observes that Johnson’s ‘technical analyses’ of verse in the Lives of the Poets ‘reveal both the delicacy and the limitations of his ear’. He ‘tries to balance a temperamental craving for metrical regularity and “science” with the attractions of “variety” ’, claiming in the Life of Dryden (1779) that ‘the essence of verse is regularity, and its ornament is variety’ (Lives, vol. 1, p. 121; vol. 2, p. 154). However, this flat assertion does no justice to the passionate gratitude he often expresses for that poetic force in Shakespeare which disdains regularity. Of a speech in King John (IV.ii.231–42) he wrote that ‘These reproaches vented against Hubert are not the words of art or policy, but the eruptions of a mind swelling with consciousness of a crime, and desirous of discharging its misery on another’. At such moments, what Johnson prizes above all else in Shakespeare is his ‘intimate knowledge of mankind’, as it seemingly breaks out or erupts beyond the limits of any formal containment (1765, vol. 3, p. 477). By his own admission, Johnson was ‘not . . . very diligent to observe’ Shakespeare’s ‘poetical beauties’ (Yale, vol. 7, p. 104). But he did describe

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one line in Henry V (I.i.49) – ‘The air, a chartered libertine, is still’ – as ‘exquisitely beautiful’. He liked it enough to cite it under ‘CHARTERED’ (‘Invested with privileges by charter; privileged’) and ‘LIBERTINE’ (‘One unconfined; one at liberty’) in his Dictionary. Its attraction was perhaps that it contains an image in which freedom is held in temporary check, partly by metrical regularity and partly by the effect of the king’s forceful rhetoric. Johnson also singled out for praise Henry VIII IV.ii as ‘above any other part of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and perhaps above any scene of any other poet, tender and pathetick, without gods, or furies, or poisons, or precipices, without the help of romantick circumstances, without improbable sallies of poetical lamentation, and without any throes of tumultuous misery’ (1765, vol. 5, p. 462). All these missing ingredients add up to the implicit affirmation that the ‘poetical’ is synonymous with the natural: true conformity to the ‘mingled drama’ of human life will produce all the regularity and variety which the mind and ear crave. The scene in question unfolds the death of Catherine, who hears of Wolsey’s recent demise in language which must have been on Johnson’s mind when he wrote The Vanity of Human Wishes. The queen asks her usher to relate how ‘the great child of honour’ met his end, that she may have his ‘example’ before her (the reader of Johnson’s poem is similarly asked to contemplate images of Wolsey’s ‘wealth’ and ‘end’, in order to question whether one was worth the other).95 She and her attendant Griffith then compose between them a balance sheet of his faults and virtues. Catherine expresses the wish for ‘such an honest chronicler as Griffith’, whose ‘religious truth and modesty’ will preserve her honour, and Wolsey’s, for posterity (1765, vol. 5, pp. 462–4).96 The scene portrays a heroine overcoming, through faithful companionship, the terrors of mortality. It demonstrates the solace of friendship in the face of death – a solace which Johnson drew from Shakespeare in his last days, when his mind turned again to Macbeth. His physician reminded him, through Shakespeare, that in dying Johnson was at once alone and in excellent company: About eight or ten days before his death, when Dr. Brocklesby paid him his morning visit, he seemed very low and desponding, and said, ‘I have been as a dying man all night.’ He then emphatically broke out, in the words of Shakspeare, ‘Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d; Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow; Raze out the written troubles of the brain;

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And, with some sweet oblivious antidote, Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stiff, Which weighs upon the heart?’ To which Dr. Brocklesby readily answered, from the same great poet: ‘-------therein the patient Must minister to himself.’ Johnson expressed himself much satisfied with the application.97

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Chapter 4

Edmond Malone Marcus Walsh

In 1790 was printed a work which established the high-water mark of eighteenth-century Shakespearean scholarship, a ten-volume octavo edition of The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare. In this massive and innovative edition, a text prepared with thoroughgoing and professional care was attended by substantial textual and explanatory variorum notes, and preceded by prolegomena so lengthy, so detailed and so fully documented as to occupy a virtual fi rst volume requiring division into two bulky physical parts. This edition was the result of more than a decade of intense labour by Edmond Malone, an Irish lawyer turned gentleman scholar. Edmond Malone’s was neither the only nor the original variorum Shakespeare of the century, preceded as it was by Johnson’s 1765 edition, by the second and third editions of Johnson’s Shakespeare as expanded by George Steevens (1773 and 1778) and by the further enhancement undertaken by Isaac Reed (1785). Malone’s remarkable textual thoroughness and conscientious regard for the earliest copies had been anticipated to some degree by the earlier editors, and arguably exceeded, in insight and sophistication, in George Steevens’s textually diplomatic Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare (1766) and Edward Capell’s textually critical Mr William Shakespeare; His Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1768). Malone’s brilliant contextualizing scholarship built on Lewis Theobald’s knowledge and application of what Alexander Pope called ‘all such reading as was never read,’ Samuel Johnson’s extensive professional knowledge of the literature and famously the language of Shakespeare’s period, the profound scholarly engagement of his forerunners Capell and Steevens and the work of other committed Shakespearean scholars, most notably Thomas Tyrwhitt and Richard Farmer.

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By no means surprisingly, the nature and significance of Malone’s edition has been for some time a subject of debate in the world of Shakespearean studies. Margreta de Grazia has argued, in a provocative monograph which contributes to the discourse of radical reassessment of Shakespeare and Shakespearean scholarship of the last two decades, that Malone’s pursuit of ‘authenticity’ in the 1790 apparatus was not merely a development of past efforts, but a ‘definitive break’ with them: The authentic text pre-empted the received text; actual usage in Shakespeare’s time superseded standards of correctness contemporary with the editor; factual accounts discredited traditional anecdotes; the order in which the plays were written replaced generic groupings; the 1609 quarto Sonnets supplanted the adulterated 1640 octavo; interpretations of Shakespeare’s content overtook evaluations of his style. De Grazia insists that the pursuit by Malone, and the presentation in his edition, of authentic Shakespearean texts, determinate interpretations, biographical facts, chronological orderings and historical circumstance, had a fundamental effect in making such elements and materials seem essential to the editing and scholarship of Shakespeare (as of other canonical authors); de Grazia further insists that such elements and materials, far from being essential and constitutive, ‘the interlocked imperatives of the study of Shakespeare, the exemplary author of the English canon’, were historically contingent and acquired their privileged status in Malone’s great enlightenment edition.1 De Grazia’s assessment of Malone’s paradigm-changing place in the history of Shakespearean scholarship has been much questioned. Simon Jarvis argues that ‘the new respectability and dominance which bibliographically and historically based textual criticism had achieved by the 1790s represent no inexplicable epistemological shift’ but are due rather to changing attitudes to ‘the division and professionalization of literary labour’. Andrew Murphy insists that ‘despite his innovative methodologies, residual traces of traditional editorial practices persist in Malone’ and that Malone’s textual methodologies can be clearly distinguished from those of such predecessors as Capell only by a process of ‘special pleading’.2 Peter Martin, in the fullest account of Malone’s life and work so far published, goes further. Denying de Grazia’s contention that Malone’s ‘unprecedented commitment to authenticity “insulated” Shakespeare in a uniquely distorting late eighteenth-century apparatus, . . . prescribing or dictating the terms

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in which he is accepted and read’, Martin queries not only the historical soundness of de Grazia’s argument but also its fundamental theoretical biases: Malone’s own view was simpler, widely comprehensible in his own period, and has remained so ever since among mainstream scholars. He hoped simply to discover as much truth as he could. From now on, he was insisting, nothing old or new could be trusted without documentary support.3 The disagreement between de Grazia and Martin goes beyond assessment of Malone’s place in the evolution of Shakespearean scholarship and editorial method. Where de Grazia represents authenticity as a historical construction, Martin is prepared to assert the persisting and overriding importance and validity of knowledge arrived at through the discovery and examination of documentary (that is to say, textual) evidence. This is a debate, in fact, about the nature and value of literary scholarship and literary knowledge, in our time as well as in Malone’s. This chapter will focus on Malone’s 1790 text and apparatus and will examine both their relationship to Malone’s predecessors and, where appropriate, what they have to tell us about textual and editorial theory and practice, in Malone’s century and later. The 1790 edition, however, was not the first or last of Malone’s many contributions to literary scholarship and to Shakespearean scholarship in particular. The first version of his ‘An attempt to ascertain the order in which the plays attributed to Shakspeare were written’ appeared in the first volume of the 1778 Johnson–Steevens Works of Shakespeare, in which edition Malone worked essentially as George Steevens’s collaborator. The 1780 Supplement to Johnson and Steevens included the first version of Malone’s ‘account of our ancient theatres’, a ground-breaking exercise in archive-based social history of Shakespeare’s theatrical environment. It also presented to the public Malone and Steevens’s two-handed editions, with generous annotation, of Shakespeare’s sonnets (based innovatively on the 1609 quarto), poems and plays of dubious or collaborative authorship. Malone’s lifelong concern with issues of authorship, attribution and authenticity – issues of knowledge and truth – found expression in his exposures of the forgeries of Thomas Chatterton, published as Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley, a Priest of the Fifteenth Century (1782), Charles Macklin’s pamphlet Old Ben’s Light Heart Made Heavy4 and in his demolition, in An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers (1796), of the fake facsimiles and transcriptions uttered by Samuel and William

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Henry Ireland. Malone investigated the authorship of the three parts of Henry VI in his Dissertation published in 1787. In his Letter to the Rev. Richard Farmer (1792) Malone replied to Joseph Ritson’s Cursory Criticisms (1792) of the 1790 edition, taking the opportunity to make an extended formulation of text-editorial principles. In addition to his Shakespearean work, Malone found time and commitment to produce editions of The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden (1800), and of The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1801). In 1809 appeared Malone’s Account of the Incidents from Which the Title and Part of the Story of Shakspeare’s Tempest Were Derived; and Its True Date Ascertained, a highly significant specific examination of the historical and literary context of one of the major plays. At the time of his death in 1812, Malone was working on a long-planned new octavo edition of his great variorum Shakespeare. It would be published, as a result of the further labours of James Boswell the younger, in no fewer than 21 volumes, in 1821; it contained new documentary materials, additional annotations, an essay ‘On the Metre and Phraseology of Shakespeare’ written by Boswell from Malone’s notes, a more complete narrative of Shakespeare’s life and a corrected version of Malone’s ‘Historical Account of the rise and Progress of the English Stage’. In all of these works may be found an overwhelming and intense engagement with the surviving records, whether specifically literary works, the broader body of writings of the past or the evidence to be found in the documents kept in parish registers, government offices, libraries, the courts and private collections. It is that engagement which underlies and informs the great 1790 Variorum and which makes that work, I will argue, not (as de Grazia claims) an insulating of Shakespeare in a distorting and prescribing apparatus, but a methodologically credible and coherent historicizing, contextualizing and above all interpretative reconstruction of Shakespeare’s work.

Editing the Text: Textual Criticism The dominating concerns of eighteenth-century scholarly literary editing are clearly stated as early as the Preface to Theobald’s 1733 edition: The Science of Criticism, as far as it affects an Editor, seems to be reduced to these three Classes; the Emendation of corrupt Passages; the Explanation of obscure and difficult ones; and an Inquiry into the Beauties and Defects of Composition. This Work is principally confin’d to the two former Parts.5

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This threefold division of the science of editing was a familiar one. At least after Pope, and beginning with Theobald (and with the substantial exception of Warburton), scholarly editors concerned themselves very little with ‘the Beauties and Defects of Composition’ (or with ‘standards of correctness contemporary with the editor’),6 and overwhelmingly with the correction or restoration of textual readings, and the interpretation and explanation of textual meanings, ‘two studies’, as George Steevens put it, ‘which have so mutual a relation that they ought to be inseparable’.7 Malone states his own understanding of, and compliance with, this principle quite clearly in the 1790 Preface: ‘the two great duties of an editor are, to exhibit the genuine text of his authour, and to explain his obscurities.’8 Malone’s 1790 variorum came at the end of a century of remarkable advances in both the understanding and the practice of textual criticism of Shakespeare. The first eighteenth-century edition, that of Nicholas Rowe (1709), was based on the fourth Folio (1685), an edition of no independent authority. Alexander Pope’s edition (1723–5) in practice followed this textus receptus, though Pope was contemptuous of the Folio as an interpolated and corrupted text, riddled from the first with the errors and arbitrary omissions and additions of the player-editors. Recognizing the significance of the Quartos, Pope claimed to have gathered ‘Parties of my acquaintance ev’ry night, to collate the several Editions of Shakespear’s single Plays’.9 Lewis Theobald was bound, as the next editor of Shakespeare for the house of Tonson, to use the inherited common text, sending indeed an annotated copy of Pope’s 1728 second edition to the press. Nevertheless, despite his representative scepticism about the reliability of the early printed texts, and his consequent and reasonable conviction that conjectural emendation had an essential role to play in rescuing Shakespeare’s text from corruption, Theobald used the evidence of the surviving early textual witnesses, both Quarto and Folio, much more stringently in his analysis of points of textual difficulty. Crucially for the evolution of editorial methodology, Theobald brought to his Shakespearean textual criticism the rational procedures that he had learnt from the great classical editor Richard Bentley (1662–1742): ‘The Want of Originals reduces us to a Necessity of guessing, in order to amend him; but these Guesses change into Something of a more substantial Nature, when they are tolerably supported by Reason or Authorities’ (Shakespeare Restored, p. 133). After the undisciplined conjectural excesses of Warburton (1747), Samuel Johnson’s edition represents a significant advance towards professional, knowledge-based, textual method. Though he inevitably followed, as the latest Tonsonian editor, the textus receptus of Theobald and Warburton,

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and though he initially shared earlier views of the first copies as ‘evidently vitiated’, he nevertheless promised and to some extent undertook a careful collation. As he proceeded in his editorial work he took on board the nature of authority in a direct succession of texts and the consequences of that for the editorial use of the Folio editions: 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. As Johnson’s editorial experience grew he became more ready to accept the value of the early editions, more prepared to explain their readings and less willing to turn from the documentary evidence to conjectural emendation: 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. . . . where any passage appeared inextricably perplexed, [I] 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.10 A new concern and new level of engagement with the original texts followed hard upon Johnson’s edition. George Steevens, later the collaborator of both Johnson and Malone, first appeared in print as an editor on his own account in his Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare (1766), which offered unannotated old-spelling editions of the plays printed in quarto in Shakespeare’s life time, a highly significant insertion of diplomatic editing into the eighteenth-century Shakespearean tradition. Yet more significantly, Edward Capell, operating outside the main nexus of eighteenth-century Shakespearean editing, in preparing the ten-volume edition which would be printed in 1768 not by the house of Tonson but by Dryden Leach, abandoned the textus receptus as the basis of his text. Instead, he prepared his own careful transcript for the press, based on his extensive personal collection of the Quartos and Folios, in the case of each play

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choosing from these early copies a single early edition as the ‘ground work’ of his own text. Already in Capell we find a forerunner of twentiethcentury editorial practice: a copy-text chosen in the light of careful collation, choices made amongst variant readings on the basis of critical judgement and conjectural correction only resorted to where all copies were ‘very plainly corrupt’.11 Against this background of growing expertise and conceptual and methodological development, Malone’s textual work seems highly informed, self-conscious, meticulous and in some respects conservative. He presents himself as an editor concerned above all with textual knowledge, fidelity, stability and accuracy. The title page of the 1790 Shakespeare announces that both the plays and poems have been ‘collated verbatim with the most authentick copies, and revised with the corrections and illustrations of various commentators’. On the first page of the Preface Malone insists ‘I have endeavoured . . . to give a faithful and correct edition of the plays and poems of Shakspeare.’ The principal duty of the editor must be ‘to ascertain [Shakespeare’s] genuine text, to fix what is to be explained’ (Preface, p. xi). The metaphor of restoration of the text had been used by editors since Theobald, but, Malone insists, he (and editors since Johnson) have worked to a new understanding of what restoration should mean: ‘from the time of Pope’s edition, for above twenty years, to alter Shakspeare’s text and to restore it, were considered as synonymous terms. During the last thirty years our principal employment has been to restore, in the true sense of the word; to eject the arbitrary and capricious innovations made by our predecessors’ (Preface, p. xi). Restoration means recovery of the pristine original scripture. To alter arbitrarily is no less than to touch the ark of the sacred text. When Malone contributed with Steevens to the 1780 Supplement he had felt able to affirm that the Shakespearean textual problem had already been satisfactorily assessed and solved by the labours of the modern editors: By a diligent collation of all the old copies hitherto discovered, and the judicious restoration of ancient readings, the text of this author seems indeed now finally settled. (A4r [p. i]) That early confidence did not survive his own further explorations in the modern editions and independent investigations into the status of the early copies. Exerting ‘every faculty’ in pursuit of the ‘genuine text’, based on what he credibly claimed to have been line by line collation of ‘the original and authentick copies’ of every play and every poem, he discovered that

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Shakespeare’s text remained ‘corrupted in sixteen hundred and fi fty four places’ (the curiously exact enumeration recalls the rhetoric of Richard Bentley). Hence, he set out to correct the text, not by ‘capricious innovation, or fanciful conjecture’, but by ‘the restoration of the poet’s words, as they are found in the only copies of authority’.12 Malone began by questioning what he took to be an inadequate understanding and valuation, at least among earlier eighteenth-century editors, of those ‘copies of authority’, the Quarto and Folio texts in which Shakespeare’s writings had first been printed. Pope had effectively rejected the authority of the Folio edition. Johnson, in his 1756 Proposal, had lamented the general unreliability of the early texts, and especially of the Quartos: To have a text corrupt in many places, and in many doubtful, is, among the authours that have written since the use of types, almost peculiar to Shakespeare. . . . the works . . . were immediately copied for the actors, and multiplied by transcript after transcript, vitiated by the blunders of the penman, or changed by the affectation of the player; . . . and printed at last without the concurrence of the authour, without the consent of the proprietor, from compilations made by chance or by stealth out of the separate parts written for the theatre.13 Malone’s textual policy arose out of a considered and fundamental disagreement with such a judgement. It is not true, he insisted, that ‘the plays of this authour were more incorrectly printed than those of any of his contemporaries,’ or that ‘the art of printing was in no other age in so unskilful hands,’ or that the quartos were compiled from the actors’ parts by chance and stealth.14 He placed (as Capell had done) heavy emphasis on the value of the early editions. He went to new and extended lengths to establish what he termed ‘the comparative value of the various ancient copies of Shakspeare’s plays’.15 He insisted, with a greater emphasis than Johnson, that only the first edition in a single tradition can have authority, with subsequent editions inevitably adding to corruption: It is well known to those who are conversant with the business of the press, that, (unless when the authour corrects and revises his own works,) as editions of books are multiplied, their errours are multiplied also; and that consequently every such edition is more or less correct, as it approaches nearer to or is more distant from the first.16 Not content with the statement of general principle, Malone then provides a list of examples of ‘the gradual process of corruption’ in the succession

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of Shakespearean texts.17 When the player editors published their folio in 1623, they had represented the quartos as stolen, surreptitious, mutilated, incomplete; Malone insists, however, that the accusation holds for only two of them,18 and that consequently, for all plays of which a Quarto exists, the Quartos in general are preferable to the exhibition of the same plays in the folio; for this plain reason, because, instead of printing these plays from a manuscript, the editors of the folio . . . printed the greater part of them from the very copies which they represented as maimed and imperfect, and frequently from a later, instead of the earliest edition. . . . Thus therefore the first folio, as far as respects the plays above enumerated, labours under the disadvantage of being at least a second, and in some cases a third, edition of these quartos. (Plays and Poems (1790), I. i., pp. xii–xiii) The Folio, Malone acknowledges, frequently corrects Quarto readings, and an editor must both examine and collate the Folio with the Quarto. Nevertheless, where a Quarto exists, that is the first edition. By the same token, however, where there is no Quarto, the first Folio is ‘the only authentick edition’. Malone was conscious that in according uniquely authoritative textual status to the first of the Folio editions he followed Johnson, and conscious too that he was at odds with Steevens, who argued that the second Folio, of 1632, contained variant readings which were not attributable to mere error. Malone disagrees, however, with Johnson’s view that the second Folio differs from the first ‘only by accident or negligence’; the cause of variation was more frequently ‘the editor’s profound ignorance of our poet’s phraseology and metre’.19 In his 1790 edition Malone consistently follows what he calls ‘the old copy’. That phrase is used with a degree of principled bibliographical exactness: Whenever I mention the old copy in my notes, if the play be one originally printed in quarto, I mean the first quarto copy; if the play appeared originally in folio, I mean the first folio; and when I mention the old copies, I mean the first quarto and first folio. . . . the folio always means the first folio, and the quarto, the earliest quarto . . . (Plays and Poems (1790), I. i. lii–liii) Having ascertained what were the ‘authentick copies’, he followed them faithfully, so far as substantive readings were concerned, and ‘never knowingly deviated, without apprizing the reader by a note’ (Letter to Farmer,

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p. 22). All emendations proposed by earlier editors ‘are regularly ascribed to him by whom they were made’.20 In general, Malone did all he could to avoid emendation of the authentic copies, insisting that ‘when any sense can fairly be drawn from the old copies, we are, I think, bound to adhere to them’ (Supplement, I., p. 165). That insistence had to some extent been long anticipated. Theobald set out ‘never to alter at all where I can by any means explain a passage into sense’, and indeed used his knowledge of Shakespeare’s literary environment time after time to defend and retain witnessed readings.21 Johnson turned the old text on every side, and sought light in original readings, with yet more tortured labour. Malone, however, was more conservative in his fidelity to the authoritative originals: ‘As some of the preceding editors have justly been condemned for innovation, so perhaps . . . I may be censured for too strict an adherence to the ancient copies. . . . like [Dr Johnson] I “have been more careful to protect than to attack”.’22 The extent of his textual conservatism, of the weight he allowed to the document, is apparent in his rejection of F2: ‘if the second folio had been of any authority, then all the capricious innovations of that copy (in which description I do not include the innumerable errors of the press) must have been adopted’ (Letter to Farmer, p. 23). Theobald had presented himself as an ‘intelligent editor’, that is a critical, editor, following the methods of Bentley: diagnosis of error, and the provision of a correction on the basis of reasoned interpretation rather than, necessarily, surviving textual witness. Malone, though his textual choices are invariably informed by interpretative argument, and though he is plainly an inheritor of a Bentleian tradition, can seem in such diplomatically conscious moments to foreshadow ‘best text’ editing. The effect on Malone’s practice is significant, though not dramatic. Dismissive though he was of Capell, the texts of the two men’s editions are rather similar, as a brief comparison of their practice in Act 1 of Hamlet shows. Malone shows a generally, but by no means radically or consistently, greater textual conservatism. Both editors adopt the second Quarto (Q2) as their base text for Hamlet, in consistency with their stated principles regarding textual authority. Both editors are prepared to adopt variants from the first Folio, where they judge the sense requires it; Malone is certainly no less textually eclectic in this respect. At Hamlet 1. 2. 82 Capell prefers the Q2 reading, ‘shapes of grief’; Malone (after Steevens) prefers the first Folio (F1) variant ‘shews of grief’. At 1. 3. 83 Capell, gives the Q2 reading, ‘The time invests you’ (as also preferred by Theobald); Malone prefers F1’s variant, ‘The time invites you’, with comment on the possible

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meaning of ‘invest’ in Shakespeare’s time. At 1. 5. 33 Capell follows the F1 variant, ‘the fat weed/That rots itself in ease’; Malone’s text adopts the Q2 reading, ‘roots’, on semantic grounds. Both editors are prepared in case of necessity to resort to conjectural emendation, though Malone is marginally more resistant to the practice and particularly learned and sophisticated in justifying witnessed readings on contextual grounds. At 1. 2. 141 Capell amends Q2 ‘beteeme’ (F1 ‘beteene’) to ‘let e’en’, following Theobald; Malone demonstrates that ‘beteeme’ is ‘a word of Shakspeare’s age’, and no conjectural emendation is necessary. At 1. 3. 63 Capell adopts Pope’s emendation, ‘hooks of steel’; so, strikingly, does Malone, though he gives his reasons for rejecting ‘hoops of steel’, the reading of ‘the old copies’ (modern editors do not consider the emendation necessary). Polonius’s words to Ophelia at Hamlet 1. 3. 108–9 have forced virtually all editors into conjecture; in Q2 it reads: Not to crack the wind of the poor phrase, Wrong it thus – you’ll tend me a fool. Capell notes Q2 ‘Wrong it thus’, but in his text follows a conjecture of Warburton and Theobald, ‘wringing it thus’. Malone’s text reads, ‘Wronging it thus’, following ‘the correction . . . made by Mr. Pope’. The modern editor ial preference, equally convinced of the need for emendation, is Collier’s 1853 conjecture, ‘Running’. At 1. 3. 127–30 Capell follows Theobald’s brilliant, and carefully reasoned, conjectural emendation: ‘his vows . . . are brokers,/Breathing like sanctified and pious bawds’ (Q2 and F1 both read ‘bonds’). Malone reads ‘bonds’, arguing at some length that ‘the old reading is undoubtedly the true one’; modern editors tend to accept the necessity for emendation and adopt Theobald’s conjecture. Three lines from Q2 (not present in the Folio) pose particularly difficult interpretative and textual problems: The dram of eale Doth all the noble substance of a doubt To his own scandal. (1. 4. 36–8) Capell’s text reads: The dram of base Doth all the noble substance of worth out, To his own scandal.

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His textual footnote records the third Quarto (not Q2) reading of ease, as well as Q2’s of a doubt. The readings adopted in his text, ‘base’ and ‘of worth out’, are both Theobald’s conjectures. Malone’s text reads: The dram of base Doth all the noble substance of worth dout, To his own scandal. So Malone again adopts Theobald’s conjecture ‘of base’, with a good deal of his own supporting argument. He notes the alternative conjecture, ‘ill’, ‘which is nearer the corrupted word eale’, but gives reason for preferring ‘base’ (other editors have conjectured ‘ill’ [Jennens], ‘e’il’ [Kittredge], ‘ev’l’ [Evans]). The part ‘of worth dout’ is Malone’s carefully argued conjecture (Steevens had proposed ‘often dout’). Capell and Malone, then, for all their differences, both represent an evolved eighteenth-century professional editorial methodology, adhering to critical textual principles. An early and authoritative text is chosen as the base and in practice rather consistently followed; the base text is closely compared with other authoritative texts; textual and interpretative decisions go hand in hand, inseparable as George Steevens had insisted they should be; variant readings from the non-base texts, and conjectural readings, are adopted where the sense requires; and choices of such witnessed and conjectural readings are justified with detailed, interpretative, analysis.

Textual Editing: Interpretation and Explication Malone’s commentary on Shakespeare represents a significant evolution toward a selective and rational interpretative and exegetical methodology. He makes a condensed but strikingly clear, precise and theoretically resonant statement of his own principles and methods in his Preface to the 1790 Variorum. He begins with a claim of comprehensiveness in his clarification of the text: I can with perfect truth say, with Dr. Johnson, that ‘not a single passage in the whole work has appeared to me obscure, which I have not endeavoured to illustrate’. (Plays and Poems (1790), I. i. liv) This is a principle which any modern professional scholarly editor would claim to follow and be disappointed to fail in. In shedding light

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on Shakespeare Malone insists that he has ‘examined the notes of all the editors’, as well as his own ‘former remarks’. However, Malone makes no attempt to provide a full variorum account of the notes of all previous commentators. Nor is he at all interested in joining in editorial disagreement for its own sake. He is insistent that he has chosen only those comments which lead to reliable interpretation: I have in general given the true explication of a passage, by whomsoever made, without loading the page with the preceding unsuccessful attempts at elucidation, and by this means have obtained room for much additional illustration. . . . no superfluous or unnecessary annotations have been admitted.23 This is a central statement of Malone’s sense of his relation to earlier commentators and about his understanding and development of the function of a variorum edition. Like all his eighteenth-century editorial predecessors, Malone believed that ‘true explication’ was possible. The producer of a variorum is an editor, an interpreter, not a mere compiler of what has gone before. Neither the authority of previous commentators nor the mere factual record of their explanatory remarks can be enough to secure the admission of their remarks to an interpretatively coherent variorum commentary. There can be no obligation to cite any but convincing previous interpretative attempts. ‘True explications’ must be supported by illustrative information, providing the fullest, most precise and pertinent evidence for every real difficulty. True explication is evidenced by ‘additional illustration’ – that is, by the citation of pertinent primary evidence. In his variorum annotations Malone attempts, where possible, not merely to recite the record or rehearse the debate but to reach interpretative decisions. Interpretations are usually implied (rather than asserted) by a careful choice and ordering of the remarks of previous and often contemporary commentators and an exact selection of illustrative passages either previously discovered or newly found. Regularly, we are provided with a line of argument leading to a solution, with a trail of cited evidence progressively narrowing the range of possible meaning. Malone’s characteristic method is a dialectic of hypothesis formulation, validation and falsification, involving selection of the most pertinent lines of argument, and the most exactly relevant supporting contextual knowledge; what matters is not so much the source or authority – the ‘voice’ – of an argument or of a piece of information, as its interpretative cogency and propriety.

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Typical of the economy of Malone’s methods, and the marked formal and intellectual change from his predecessors, is his note on a famous crux in the description of Falstaff’s death in Henry V, 2. 3. 16–18, where the first Folio reads ‘his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a table of green fields’ (the words are lacking in the quartos). Alexander Pope reasonably described this as ‘nonsense’ and surmised that the words of a stage direction had accidentally found their way into the text: ‘A Table was here directed to be brought in . . . and this Direction crept into the text from the margin. Greenfield was the name of the Property-man in that time.’ In the Appendix to Shakespeare Restored (pp. 137–8) Theobald demolished Pope’s speculation, drawing on his own more ‘competent Knowledge of the Stage and its Customs’ and proffered a brilliant conjectural emendation, which has been accepted by the great majority of subsequent editors: It is certainly observable of People near Death, and when they are delirious by a Fever, that they talk of moving; as it is of Those in a Calenture, that they have their Heads run on green Fields. The variation from Table to talked is not of a very great Latitude; tho’ we may still come nearer to the Traces of the Letters, by restoring it thus; . . . for his Nose was as sharp as a Pen, and a’babled of green Fields. To bable, or babble, is to mutter, or speak indiscriminately, like Children that cannot yet talk, or dying Persons when they are losing the use of Speech. Theobald’s note, which takes a full page to argue the matter with Pope, is repeated with some changes (mostly in the direction of civility), but no greater brevity, in his 1733 edition (IV, pp. 30–1). The note in the Johnson– Steevens edition of 1778 is of almost equal length, swollen by full citation of Pope’s now plainly failed interpretation, of Warburton’s unconvincing rejection of Theobald, and of a new suggestion, running to a dozen prose lines, by Smith, though Johnson omits Theobald’s note, ‘in pity to my readers’. Malone admits Theobald’s conjectural emendation into the text of his edition. Malone’s note reads, in full: – and ‘a babbled of green fields.] The folio, 1623, (for these words are not in the quarto) reads–and a Table of green fields. Mr. Theobald made the correction. Dr. Warburton objects to the emendation, on the ground of the nature of Falstaff’s illness; ‘who was so far from babbling, or wanting cooling in green fields, that his feet were cold, and he was just expiring.’ But his disorder had been a ‘burning quotidian tertian’. It is, I think, a

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much stronger objection, that the word Table, with a capital letter (for so it appears in the old copy,) is very unlikely to have been printed instead of babbled. This reading is, however, preferable to any that has been yet proposed. Mr. Smith (whose notes were published by Dr. Grey,) would read – upon a table [i.e. a table-book] of green fells: ‘to the backs or covers of which silver or steel pens very sharp-pointed are sometimes affixed.’ Malone. It has been observed (particularly by the superstition of women,) of people near death, when they are delirious by a fever, that they talk of removing; as it has of those in a calenture, that they have their heads run on green fields. Theobald. (Plays and Poems [1790], vol. 5, p. 492). Malone begins here with the reading of the early texts (as, indeed, had Theobald). His note is both economical, and selective. Pope’s suggestion, and Theobald’s rejection of it, are not cited; they do not contribute to the main line of the argument. The first part of the note is signed by Malone but includes the opinions of three other commentators. Theobald’s agency in making the emendation is clearly and simply noted. Warburton’s disagreement with Theobald is cited in order to be dismissed, with the briefest quotation of the refuting evidence. Smith’s more recent suggestion is recorded in the briefest and most apposite form. Malone makes an argument from the traces of the letters as to the likelihood of ‘table’ being printed from ‘babled’, which is, silently, a sceptical response to Theobald’s statement of (one of) the grounds of his emendation. Malone adopts Theobald’s reading, not because he is wholly persuaded by it, but on the basis of the balance of probabilities: ‘this reading is, however, preferable to any that has yet been proposed.’ The last word is not Malone’s, but Theobald’s persuasive contextual explanation, relating to the behaviour of those near death; this, a single sentence, is all that is repeated from Theobald’s long note. Writing after some 65 years of voluminous debate about this crux, Malone writes a note occupying a mere 17 lines, coming without heated rehearsal of all the alternatives to a clear choice of reading, and evaluation of that choice. Malone’s handling of this, one of the most famous of Shakespearean textual and interpretative cruxes, is quite typical of his work as an explicator. ‘There’s rosemary,’ says Ophelia to Laertes, in her flower speech, ‘that’s for remembrance’ (Hamlet, 4. 5.176–7). The vastly learned Samuel Johnson can here only remark, ‘why rosemary indicates remembrance, except that it is

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ever green, and carried at funerals, I have not discovered.’ Steevens can add that ‘Rosemary was anciently supposed to strengthen the memory’ and provide a telling citation from Chester’s 1601 Dialogue between Nature and the Phoenix. From the range of his reading, however, Malone could find an additional illustration and thence an exact explanation, pointing out that ‘Rosemary being supposed to strengthen the memory, was the emblem of fidelity in lovers.’ His supporting quotation is from the poem ‘A Nosegaie Alwaies Sweet,’ printed in A Handfull of Pleasant Delites in 1584: Rosemary is for remembrance, Betweene us daie and night.24 Often, Malone endorses a previous understanding by selective re-citation of earlier commentary. Where he adds his own comment, the effect is invariably interpretative, not merely additive. Hamlet’s wish that ‘the everlasting had not fix’d/His canon ‘gainst self slaughter’ had puzzled earlier commentators. Was ‘canon’ – spelt with two medial ‘n’s in both the Quartos and the Folios – a piece of artillery or a divine decree? Nicholas Rowe, in 1709, and Alexander Pope, in 1725, had followed ‘the old reading’, with two medial ‘n’s, and assumed the former. John Hughes and Lewis Theobald however, certainly correctly, read ‘canon’, with one ‘n’, in the legal sense. Exactly following the 1778 Johnson–Steevens variorum, Malone selectively re-cites Theobald’s note and Steevens’s suggestion of a compelling analogue in Virgil. But Malone goes on to adduce a yet more pertinent illustration, from Shakespeare himself, and a crucial piece of orthographic evidence which nails the interpretation down and reveals (what modern editors of these lines accept) that the ‘crux’ is no crux at all: If the true reading wanted any support, it might be found in Cymbeline: “—’gainst self-slaughter There is a prohibition so divine, That cravens my weak hand.” In Shakspeare’s time canon (norma) was commonly spelt cannon. MALONE.25 Once more the process of annotation is not merely accumulative, but engaged, selective, interpretative. Repeating inherited evidence, Malone goes on to bring more precise evidence to bear on Shakespeare’s words and Shakespeare’s meaning.

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Malone was writing at a historical moment when, though the vernacular variorum edition had effectively established itself, some readers and reviewers remained sceptical of the process by which the author’s text dwindles on the page in proportion to the flood of explanatory annotation. As in previous variorums, Shakespeare’s lines appear in Malone’s edition in a block in the upper half of the page, in a relatively small type. The substantial footnotes, usually taking more space than the text itself, appear in an efficient, yet smaller type, busy with lemmata, hooks, quotation marks, italics and the capitals and small capitals in which the names of comment ators are printed. Such pages, then as now, prompted reactions of aesthetic horror. ‘Poor Shakespeare’, lamented a reviewer in the British Critic, ‘is . . . over whelmed and oppressed with notes till his delightful pages become absolutely terrific’.26 And many a modern theorist has argued that as the editor’s notes trespass upon the space of the author’s text, so the editor commits an act of usurpation against the author’s authority. Malone was fully aware of the implications of ‘subjoining’ the notes to the text itself on the page and the advantages as he thought them of this practice in the explication and reading of distant and difficult literary works. The alternative, stoutly defended by some of the earlier editors and critics, is to present a clean text page, aspiring to the elegance of an Aldine Horace and to relegate the notes and apparatus to a separate volume, as had been done in Edward Capell’s 1768 edition of Shakespeare and Thomas Tyrwhitt’s 1775 Chaucer; however, to do so, argues Malone, would have the consequence that ‘many readers would remain uninformed, rather than undergo the trouble occasioned by perpetual reference from one part of a volume to another.’27 The intent of the weighty scholarly annotation of Malone and his variorum predecessors is to inform, not merely to encumber and distract. The notes are placed where they can interact most closely with the text, where they insist on the editorial act of contextualization and explanation, where they implicate the reader in the complexities of exegesis and understanding. Complaints against the variorum method go beyond aesthetics to issues of interpretative and argumentative methodology. In 1784, a writer in the English Review had offered the following sceptical history of the development of the variorum Shakespeare, from Samuel Johnson’s 1765 edition to George Steevens’s revision of 1778: Dr. Johnson, . . . perhaps from a diffidence of the industry he had employed upon the subject, adopted a multiplicity of notes from various writers into his edition. Mr. Steevens has carefully preserved all this

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farrago, and, beside it, we are now treated with the annotations of himself, Dr. Farmer, Mr. Tyrwhit, Mr. Malone, &c. &c. &c. &c. . . . One gentleman proposes an hypothesis, and a second supports it; a third refutes, and a fourth ridicules it; a fi fth proposes another explanation; a sixth reconciles these explanations to each other, and a seventh sets them in opposition.28 The English Reviewer’s account accepts the possibility of an evolutionary dialectic of hypotheses but concludes in an image of unresolved debate. Notes variorum provide, the Reviewer alleges, not an interpretative resolution, but an endless and self-cancelling quarrel. In his Preface Malone justifies variorum annotation in general, and what he calls ‘the great accession of new notes in the present edition’, against such scepticism: an idle notion has been propagated, that Shakspeare has been buried under his commentators; and it has again and again been repeated by the tasteless and the dull, ‘that notes, though often necessary, are necessary evils.’ Malone takes care to explain this (still) famous observation of Dr. Johnson’s as addressed to ‘the young reader, to whom Shakspeare is new; and him he very judiciously counsels to “read every play from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his commentators” ’. To ‘the greater and more enlightened part of his readers’, however, Johnson gives ‘a very different advice’, very much in line with Malone’s emphasis on the interpretation and explanation of true meaning: ‘Let them to whom the pleasure of novelty has ceased, “attempt exactness, and read the commentators.” ’ For modern readers a new, deeper, knowledge-based pleasure has been enabled by the light that Shakespeare’s editorial exegetes have brought to the text: ‘Every authour who pleases must surely please more as he is more understood, and there can be no doubt that Shakespeare is now infinitely better understood than he was in the last century.’29 The picture painted by the English Reviewer, of multiplying notes going nowhere, of merely vapid contest, is associated by Malone with ‘the era of conjectural criticism and capricious innovation’, when ‘one page was covered with ingenious sophistry in support of some idle conjecture, and another was wasted in its overthrow, or in erecting a new fabrick equally unsubstantial as the former.’ Now, however, ‘this era is . . . happily past away; and conjecture and emendation have given place to rational explanation.’

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Malone’s handling of his argument here is profoundly revealing. The era of full and determinate commentary is for him indispensably connected with the supersession of ‘capricious innovation’. Issues of textual choice, whether the justification of original readings in the face of previous incomprehension, or the choice among possible unwitnessed emendations, are inevitably involved with the process of ‘rational explanation’. And rational explanation depends on knowledge of Shakespeare’s reading, his sources, his references, the knowledge necessary in fact to explain every allusion and elucidate every obscurity. That methodological connection was by no means new. Theobald had insisted that the ‘Editor’, that is the textual editor, must also be ‘a Critick’, that is, an interpreter, and that the process of textual conjecture changes ‘into something of a more substantial Nature’ when ‘tolerably supported by Reason or Authorities’.30 In Theobald’s practice, reason and authority derive time and again from his knowledge of the culture of Shakespeare’s time, which Pope dismissed as ‘all such reading as was never read’, and which Malone would deprecate, not entirely reasonably, as infinitely inferior to his own. This contextualizing not only of explication but also of textual choice was continued and developed by later editors. The results of Johnson’s researches for his great Dictionary (1755) among the language of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is manifest in Johnson’s 1765 edition of Shakespeare. Edward Capell’s personal and intellectual possession of his great collection of the writings of Shakespeare’s time informs both the text of his 1768 edition, and his Notes and Various Readings, especially the School of Shakespeare. Malone drives the argument for a contextually informed textual criticism, and interpretative method, further towards a goal of comprehensiveness and completeness: When our poet’s entire library shall have been discovered, and the fables of all his plays traced to their original source, when every temporary allusion shall have been pointed out, and every obscurity elucidated, then, and not till then, let the accumulation of notes be complained of. I scarcely remember ever to have looked into a book of the age of Queen Elizabeth, in which I did not find somewhat that tended to throw a light on these plays. While our object is, to support and establish what the poet wrote, to illustrate his phraseology by comparing it with that of his contemporaries, and to explain his fugitive allusions to customs long since disused and forgotten, while this object is kept steadily in view, if even every line of his plays were accompanied with a comment, every intelligent reader would be indebted to the industry of him who produced it. (Plays and Poems (1790), I. i. lvi)

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Malone’s insistence on the indebtedness of the reader to the explicatory knowledge of the editor represents a culmination of a century’s movement away from Pope’s gentleman–humanist assertion that ‘Men of a right Understanding generally see at once all that an Author can reasonably mean,’31 towards the demonstration of a necessary professional expertise of editorial interpretation, which places editor and reader in a rather different relationship. If Shakespeare is better understood by his contemporary readers, it is because the knowledge necessary to his understanding has been made available by his editors. ‘Many of these objectors’, Malone complains, ‘to whom the meaning of some of our poet’s most difficult passages is now become so familiar, . . . fancy they originally understood them “without a prompter;” and with great gravity exclaim against the unnecessary illustrations furnished by his Editors.’32 This assertion of professional interpretative responsibility, and claim of teacherly professional interpretative authority, for the editor of vernacular texts has roots in the eighteenth-century rise of classical philological scholarship (of which Richard Bentley was the great English originator), and indeed in the distinctively Anglican argument that, though all men may read the Bible, they cannot hope adequately to understand it without the support of an informed priestly guide.33

The Dates and Order of Shakespeare’s Plays The earliest, as well as one of the most significant, of Malone’s contributions to historical and biographical Shakespearean scholarship was his detailed and extended essay, ‘An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays Attributed to Shakspeare were Written.’ The essay was first published in 1778, in the second edition of the Johnson–Steevens Shakespeare (I. 269–346). This was ground-breaking work. Johnson had accepted, in his 1765 Preface, that Shakespeare’s work showed ‘gradations of improvement’ through his career, but did not investigate the issue, and could only conclude that ‘the chronology of his works is yet unsettled.’34 Capell carried out significant research, but his essay on dates of the plays, entitled ‘Scheme of Their Succession’, was published only in his Notes and Various Readings (1780) and was not apparently known to Malone before his own ‘Attempt’ was published. Malone could, therefore, say, on the basis of his own information, and with some approach to the truth, that ‘no attempt has been made to trace the progress and order of his plays.’ He was all too aware that ‘the materials for ascertaining the order in which his plays were written, are . . . so

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few, that, it is to be feared, nothing very decisive can be produced on this subject.’ He can aim only at probability. ‘Yet surely’, Malone insists, ‘it is no incurious speculation, to mark the gradations by which he rose from mediocrity to the summit of excellence.’35 Malone’s ‘Attempt’ nevertheless involves no merely naive conception of linear literary development or of solipsistic and personal growth. In a footnote early in the essay he rejects any simple notion of the trajectory of Shakespeare’s genius: It is not pretended that a regular scale of gradual improvement is here presented to the publick; or that, if even Shakspeare himself had left us a chronological list of his dramas, it would exhibit such a scale. All that is meant, is, that as his knowledge increased, and as he became more conversant with the stage and with life, his performances in general were written more happily and with greater art. (Plays and Poems [1790], I. i. 262–3 n.) Inevitably, it is true, because so much of the available evidence for the dating of Shakespeare’s plays is internal, the argument Malone had to construct in the ‘Attempt’ is pulled into a circular trajectory: Shakespeare developed as a writer with time and experience; therefore, the more artful plays are written later; therefore, a more artful play has a later date. Malone nevertheless escapes that orbit, partly by his very extensive use of external evidence, of such historical and biographical fact as entry in the Stationers’ books and mention in Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia (1598), and partly by his specification of the nature of the artistic qualities which might determine date (notably, Shakespeare’s diminishing use of puns and of rhyme). An important overall logic for Malone’s construction of the order of Shakespeare’s plays was his belief that ‘of the twenty-one plays which were not printed in our authour’s life-time, the majority were . . . late compositions.’ The later plays, Malone argues, had less time to engage public curiosity. With more force, Malone points out that from the time that Shakspeare had the superintendance of a playhouse, that is, from the year 1603, when he and several others obtained a licence from King James to exhibit comedies, tragedies, histories, &c. at the Globe Theatre, and elsewhere, it became strongly his interest to preserve those pieces unpublished . . . manuscript plays being then the great support of every theatre.

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Before he became a manager, Shakespeare’s plays were less under his control, so more likely to be disseminated, being acted at various theatres and affording the players ‘an easy opportunity of making out copies from the separate parts transcribed for their use, and of selling such copies to printers’.36 The brief opening section of the ‘Attempt’ is followed by a list giving the bare date order of the plays. There are a number of differences between the lists in the ‘Attempt’ as printed in 1778 and 1790. Love’s Labour’s Lost, for example, dated 1591 in the earlier version of the essay, is moved forward to 1594; The Taming of the Shrew is reassigned from 1606 to 1594; The Winter’s Tale, originally dated 1594, is moved forward to 1604. There are certainly, in the hindsight afforded by modern scholarship, some errors; Othello is dated 1611 in both lists. There would be a number of further alterations in the third variorum of 1821, by which time Malone’s dating and ordering consisted closely with modern judgements. The list of dates is followed by the meat of the essay, providing more or less elaborate evidence and argument for each play in turn. Some of Malone’s evidence is inevitably critical or evaluative, and, broadly, internal. So he dates Romeo and Juliet to 1595, on the basis of Shakespeare’s early addiction to rhyming, his preference for a romance narrative and the play’s formal flaws: In this piece more rhymes, I believe, are found than in any other of his plays, Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer-Night’s Dream only excepted. This circumstance, the story on which it is founded, so likely to captivate a young poet, the imperfect form in which it originally appeared, and its very early publication, all incline me to believe that this was Shakspeare’s first tragedy. (Plays and Poems (1790), I. i. 300) Similarly, of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which he dates 1592, Malone writes: The poetry of this piece, glowing with all the warmth of a youthful and lively imagination, the many scenes which it contains of almost continual rhyme, the poverty of the fable, and want of discrimination among the higher personages, dispose me to believe that it was one of our authour’s earliest attempts in comedy. (Plays and Poems (1790), I. i. 283) Beyond this, Malone can only suggest possible sources for Oberon and Titania, dating from 1591, and decisive evidence for a terminus ad quem: ‘A Midsummer-Night’s Dream was not entered at Stationers’ Hall till Oct. 8, 1600,

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in which year it was printed; but is mentioned by Meres in 1598.’ For this as for a number of other Shakespearean plays, internal evidence is still for modern scholars the preponderant, if not the only, ground for dating.37 The Taming of the Shrew, which was first printed in the 1623 Folio, presents a not dissimilar evidential problem. In 1778, Malone had ascribed it to the year 1606. By 1790, Malone had reconsidered the stylistic evidence and moved it back to 1594: ‘on a more attentive perusal of it, and more experience in our authour’s style and manner, I am persuaded that it was one of his very early productions, and near in point of time to The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labours Lost, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona,’ sharing with such works a ‘frequent play of words’, and ‘a kind of doggrel measure’ often found in the old comedies. The historical evidence once more is indecisive: Malone notes what he calls ‘the old piece entitled The Taming of a Shrew, on which our authour’s play is founded’ as being entered in the Stationers’ Register 2 May 1594, and remarks that Shakespeare’s play was not listed by Meres in 1598: ‘a circumstance which yet is not sufficient to prove that it was not then written’.38 For many of the plays, Malone’s thorough and innovative use of the historical sources yielded decisive results, presented in the most straightforward way: 16. The Merchant of Venice, 1598. Entered at the Stationers-hall, July 22, 1598; and mentioned by Meres in that year. Published in 1600. Malone also makes extensive, and carefully analysed, use of allusions to contemporary historical events, and contemporary writings, within the plays. So, A Comedy of Errors is dated 1593,39 on the basis of the pun ‘making war against the hair’, an allusion . . . intended to King Henry IV. the heir of France, concerning whose succession to the throne there was a civil war in that country, from August 1589, when his father was assassinated, for several years. Henry embraced Roman Catholicism July 1593, and was crowned king of France in Feb. 1594; I therefore imagine this play was written before that period. (Plays and Poems (1790), I. i. 288) For Romeo and Juliet, Malone finds and uses extensive historical and bibliographical evidence. The title page of the first Quarto indicates that the

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play was first published in 1597; that it was ‘often acted’ by the servants of Lord Hunsdon, who had died in 1596; and, therefore, ‘probably had been represented in the preceding year’. The reference in Act 3 to ‘the first and second cause’ suggests the play was ‘probably written after the publication of Saviolo’s Book on Honour and honourable quarrels; which appeared in 1595’. Several passages in Act 5 suggest Shakespeare ‘had recently read, and remembered, some of the lines in Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond, which, I believe, was printed in 1592’. In addition Malone cites a passage in the comedy Dr. Dodipoll, ‘which had appeared before 1596’ and which seems to imitate lines in Romeo and Juliet. Mention of sealing up the doors of houses affected by plague may suggest a date later than the plague of 1593. The nurse’s reference to an earthquake 11 years since suggest that Shakespeare may have ‘laid the foundation of this play in 1591’, 11 years after the earthquake of 1580. So historical evidence for a defined chronological window is used both to support and to refine the internal evidence provided by the play’s tendencies to rhyming and romance.

The Life of Shakespeare The Life of Shakespeare printed in Malone’s Prolegomena is representative, in form as well as substance, of his scholarly project. Shakespeare of course presented both specific and general biographical problems. He had lived at a time when English secular biography was in its earliest infancy. Memories of Shakespeare’s life were evanescent. He had no Boswell. The written records of his life and relationships were scattered. Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth-century’s great theorist of writing lives, remarked, in his Life of Addison, that History may be formed from permanent monuments and records; but Lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost for ever. What is known can seldom be immediately told; and when it might be told, it is no longer known.40 Personal recollections of Shakespeare had by Johnson’s time indeed almost all been lost. The archival record, situating Shakespeare in relation to his public and historical world, had only begun to be broached. For the eighteenth century, the standard life of Shakespeare was that written by Nicholas Rowe, published in his 1709 edition of the plays, and

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reprinted in every scholarly edition thereafter. Rowe’s biography is short, based in substantial part on stories gathered in Stratford and communicated to Rowe by the actor Thomas Betterton. It is broadly narrative in form and makes very little reference to substantiating archival evidence. It incorporates such traditional legends as that of Shakespeare’s stealing deer from Sir Thomas Lucy’s park at Charlecote near Stratford. It was first printed without refrigerating learned footnotes and would continue to make an equally clean appearance on the page even as late as the 1778 Johnson–Steevens edition, though appended there are reprints or facsimiles of a variety of documentary materials discovered and assembled by eighteenth-century scholarship: the grant of arms to John Shakespeare dated 1599; the Licence granted by James I to the Globe company, from Rymer’s Foedera; Shakespeare’s will, with a few notes by Steevens; the tale of Shakespeare holding horses at the play-house door, and other anecdotes, with notes by Steevens and Malone, and materials from Farmer; and a list of baptisms, marriages and burials of the Shakespeare family from the Register of Stratford-on-Avon. In Malone’s 1790 edition Rowe’s life of Shakespeare assumes a very different appearance on the page. Rowe’s narrative life is remade into a life variorum, with Rowe’s words constantly accompanied now by elaborate and extensive footnotes, by a variety of commentators both early and contemporary: Pope, Theobald, Capell, Steevens, Farmer, Reed and (the overwhelming majority) Malone himself. On many pages the stream of Rowe’s narrative dwindles almost to nothing; for extended stretches, the running variorum notes supplant Rowe’s words entirely.41 Rowe finished his biography with the words, ‘This is what I could learn of any note, either relating to himself or family’; in Malone’s edition this brief statement, squeezed over the tops of two pages by the learned commentary assembled or written by Malone, makes verbal and visual confession of the thinness of Rowe’s account in contrast to the depth of late eighteenth-century knowledge and scholarship.42 Malone was prepared to use personal oral testimony, as from ‘the Rev. Mr. Davenport, Vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon’, in relation to such stories as the mulberry tree reputedly planted by Shakespeare himself at New Place.43 The great majority of this thickened biographical history, however, is provided from ‘permanent monuments and records’, written, printed or engraved. The researches of Malone or his predecessors among printed books range over such resources as Dugdale’s Antiquities, Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses and Camden’s Remains. Among written materials, Malone makes use of ‘a Manuscript volume of poems by William Herrick and others, in

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the hand-writing of the time of Charles I. which is among Rawlinson’s Collections in the Bodleian Library’ and includes such items from the researches of other scholars as remarks by Steevens based on John Oldys’s notes and collections.44 Malone himself made many significant new investigations and discoveries among the documentary evidence for Shakespeare’s life and relations. He found new information regarding Shakespeare’s descent and family, including his father, his mother’s family the Ardens, his children, and their spouses, from the Stratford Corporation books, parish registers and documents at Worcester, Canterbury, the Stamp Office and the College of Arms. He studied Shakespeare’s own memorial at Stratford and the inscription on Anne Hathaway’s tombstone. To the existing body of known and reproduced documents associated with the bard, Malone added a number of deeds and several wills, including a new and accurate text of Shakespeare’s own will, and transcripts, from the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, of the wills of John Hall, husband of Susannah Shakespeare, the playwright’s daughter, and of Thomas Nashe, husband of his granddaughter Elizabeth.45 Malone’s notes to the Life in the 1790 edition are concerned throughout with information, evidence, argument. Documents such as wills are transcribed and reproduced in extenso, the published and unpublished knowledge of Shakespeare’s contemporaries is everywhere sought and words written or printed or graven on stone are examined in order to find what is necessary ‘to ascertain . . . authenticity’. Susanna ‘was buried on the 16th of July, 1649, as appears from the Register of Stratford’. Theobald’s mistaken opinion, arising from Dugdale, that Susanna died on 2 July 1649, is corrected by the date on her tomb-stone at Stratford, by which her death ‘is ascertained’ as having occurred on ‘the eleventh of July’. Rowe’s blunder that Shakespeare ‘had three daughters’ is refuted by reference to the Register of Stratford, where ‘no mention is made of any daughter of our authour’s but Susanna and Judith.’ Malone is sceptical of inherited oral narratives, rejecting, for example (with Steevens), the tradition that Shakespeare’s first employment at the playhouse was ‘to hold the horses of those that had no servants, that they might be ready again after the performance’.46 In 1790 Malone expressed the hope that, having gathered material sufficient for a new life of Shakespeare ‘less meagre and imperfect than that left us by Mr Rowe’, he might ‘at some future time . . . weave the whole into one uniform and connected narrative’ (1. lxiii).47 In fact he continued to gather information, but the new Life, though lengthy, remained

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incomplete, taking up some 287 pages of the second volume of the 1821 Malone’s and Boswell’s Shakespeare, and pursuing Shakespeare’s biography only a little beyond his departure from Stratford. The younger Boswell was left to append to the Life, Malone’s revised chronology of the plays, to accommodate scattered fragments that he had found among Malone’s papers, and to append yet more documentation and notes of Shakespeare’s Stratford life and family. The 1821 Life continues and makes more explicit Malone’s interrogation of Rowe’s biographical romance. ‘It is somewhat remarkable,’ notes Malone, ‘that in Rowe’s Life of our author, there are not more than eleven facts mentioned; and of these, on a critical examination, eight will be found to be false. Of one (of very little importance) great doubt may be justly entertained; and the two remaining facts, which are unquestionably true (our poet’s baptism and burial), were furnished by the register of the parish of Stratford.’ A footnote, naturally, enumerates Rowe’s eleven facts, and promises that eight of them ‘will all be shown to be false’.48 Devastating, and characteristic, is Malone’s demolition of Rowe’s legend of Shakespeare as poacher of deer from the Charlecote park of Sir Thomas Lucy. Malone makes an interruption of some thirty pages to his ‘narrative’, bound by what he asserts to be the duty of the biographer to examine whether the anecdote be ‘a mere fiction’.49 He does not intend ‘to shake the credit of all traditionary evidence’; a tradition derived by the ‘industrious and careful inquirer’, from ‘persons most likely to be accurately informed concerning the fact related . . . must always carry great weight along with it’. For this traditional tale, however, ‘we have no such authority.’ Such stories as this are regularly deficient in their dates, and ‘we are generally left, as in the present case, to find out, as we can, the time when the supposed fact happened.’ In fact, Malone shows, the Lucy story cannot be made to fit with established elements of Shakespeare’s curriculum vitae. Traditional stories are texts and must be evaluated like other texts by reference to an extended consideration of historical context: ‘To form a right judgment on this, as on many other subjects, it is necessary to take into our consideration the prevalent opinions and practices of the time.’ Malone shows from rehearsal of much evidence that neither social attitude nor legal practice in Shakespeare’s time substantiate in general the story as related by Rowe, and in particular the conclusion that as a result of his felony Shakespeare was compelled to leave Stratford. A satirical ballad was composed on the subject, allegedly by Shakespeare, and affi xed to Lucy’s park gate, but ‘we are left to explore, by conjecture, the date of this early essay of our poet’s muse.’ Malone pursues with deep and sardonic scepticism the traditionary

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descent of the ballad and the story of its posting, from a Mr Thomas Jones of ‘Turbich, a village in Worcestershire’ (modern Tardebigge), who first heard it ‘from several old people of Stratford’; from Jones it passed to a Mr Thomas Wilkes and thence was given to the publick, in 1778, by Mr. Steevens, from the manuscript collection of the late Mr. Oldys, to whom also this anecdote was communicated, by a relation of Mr. Jones. I have since been furnished with the entire song, which was found in a chest of drawers, that formerly belonged to Mrs. Dorothy Tyler . . . of Shottery, near Stratford, who died in 1778, at the age of eighty, and which I shall insert in the Appendix; being fully persuaded that one part of this ballad is just as genuine as the other; that is, that the whole is a forgery. The ballad itself, Malone shows, was ‘formed on various passages in the first scene of The Merry Wives of Windsor’. Most devastating of all, Malone demonstrates, from a dauntingly punctilious examination of historical documentary evidence, that Shakespeare could not have poached from Sir Thomas Lucy’s deer park, and could not as a consequence have been exiled from Stratford, for Sir Thomas never had a park at Charlecote, and never had any deer: ‘I conceive it will very readily be granted that Sir Thomas Lucy could not lose that of which he never was possessed; that from him who is not master of any deer, no deer could be stolen.’ This long digression in Malone’s last version of his Life of Shakespeare, like the notes variorum of his 1790 re-presentation of Rowe, and indeed like the equally intrusive footnotes of his Life of Dryden, demonstrates how antipathetic was his fundamental intellectual and scholarly approach to a continuous discourse in which particularities of detailed citation, consideration and application of evidence yield to the pressures of narrative. The biographical dramatization, romance and legend of Rowe’s account, and its reliance on traditional fiction, are replaced by Malone with a thoroughgoing attempt to establish, so far as surviving documentary evidence or substantiable oral reports allow, the facts of Shakespeare’s life, in its relationship to the world he lived in. Rowe’s life was no forgery, but it was often a fiction, a narrative construction that belonged to a pre-Enlightenment world of literary interpretation and consumption. For Malone, the Shakespeare of story must be replaced by credible knowledge, and evidence needed to be cited where it bore on the argument. With all that is gained in terms of real understanding, there are inevitable losses in narrative continuity, proportion and completeness – as in an earlier work of

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enlightenment scholarship, Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century (3 volumes, 1774–81), where the apparatus of digression, transcription, footnotes and addenda yet more spectacularly enrich, disrupt, substantiate and unbalance a history which, through lack of life and lack of time, similarly never reached its destination. Malone’s biography presents Shakespeare not as a romantic individual but as a writer located within his own historical, social and literary period, and it does so not through horizontal narrative, hastening toward the conclusion of the story, but by the use of every documentary resource available to Malone, adduced at the point required to substantiate his account.

Malone’s Account of the English Stage Even the Life takes second place within Malone’s project of historical contextualization to the ‘Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Stage, and of the Economy and Usages of our Ancient Theatres’ which occupies (with Malone’s inevitable ‘Emendations and Additions’) the first 331 pages of the second part of the first volume of the 1790 edition. For most aspects of Malone’s work, textual, explicatory, historical, it is possible to find forerunners. This exercise, however, in the social, economic, personal and practical history of the stage, and more particularly of the stage of Shakespeare’s time, was very substantially new work, in an area so far little developed. Theobald had not unreasonably, both as a scholar and as a practising dramatist, claimed a ‘competent Knowledge of the Stage and its Customs’, and Capell and Steevens, among many others, could claim a growing scholarly engagement with the surviving evidence of the Elizabethan theatre. Malone’s ‘Historical Account’ draws heavily on the work of contemporaries and predecessors, and is throughout a gathering of wide and communal research, by himself and others. Nevertheless, in extent, information, significance and originality, the Account far surpasses any previous published work in this area. The Account begins derivatively enough with a ‘cursory view’ of the preShakespearean stage, in which Malone frankly and collegially confesses that he ‘can add little to the researches which have already been made on that subject’ in Warton’s ‘elegant and ingenious History of English Poetry’. A substantial part of this cursory view is made up of quotation of Warton’s words and, at length, of requotation of the primary materials already quoted by Warton, but there are long footnotes too, featuring primary

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materials derived from Malone’s own researches. For these opening pages in particular the Account displays, like the Life, some of the formal properties of the variorum. Warton’s text, however, could take Malone only so far, ending as it did before the age of Shakespeare had properly begun. Thereafter, Malone’s Account becomes a tour de force of original investigative research and synthesis. Continuously accompanied, like the Life, by footnotes which often take up three-quarters of the page or more, and incorporating a rich variety of lists, transcriptions, and addenda, it is based on indefatigable research in a variety of primary sources, both familiar and recondite, sought out by Malone and often part of his extensive personal working library. Malone draws, for first-hand evidence of the history of the stage, on a wide range of printed books, in genre including the literary, historical, topographical, biographical and lexicographic, and in time including writings of Shakespeare’s period through to Malone’s own scholarly contemporaries. His references include early historians and critics of literature and the stage, including Stephen Gosson (Schoole of Abuse, 1579), Sir Philip Sidney (Defence of Poesie, 1595), William Prynne (Histriomastix, 1632), Richard Fleckno (Short Discourse of the English Stage, 1664), James Wright (Historia histrionica, 1699) and John Downes (Roscius Anglicanus, 1708); such dramatists as Chettle, Jonson, Fletcher, Webster, Decker, Middleton, Massinger, Shirley, Marston, Davenant, Southerne, Farquhar, and Cibber, as well as Shakespeare himself; the lexicographers Florio, Cotgrave, Blount, and Bullokar; topographers such as John Stow (Survey of London 1598, in its revision by John Strype, 1720) and William Camden (Britannia, 1586); and a wide variety of other writers, including, for example, Gabriel Harvey (Four Letters, 1592), Joseph Hall (Virgidemiarum, 1597), Richard Tarlton (Jests, 1600), Thomas Coryat (Crudities, 1611), Sir Thomas Overbury (Characters, 1614), John Taylor the Water-Poet, Thomas Heywood (History Concerning Women, 1624), Thomas Fuller (Worthies of England, 1662), Anthony à Wood (Athenae Oxonienses, 1691–2), Thomas D’Urfey, Horace Walpole, Thomas Percy (Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 1765), Charles Burney (History of Music, 1776–89) and many others. These copious sources are cited and footnoted with a modern scholar’s, or annotating editor’s, punctiliousness, and with an almost modern stylistic consistency, and are used with an exact eye to their differential authority and reliability. Every statement and judgement Malone makes is supported with the fullest possible evidence, quoted where appropriate verbatim and at length and carefully interpreted and applied. The evidence is drawn overwhelmingly from primary rather than secondary sources, from first-hand witness rather than second-hand reconstruction: ‘These are not the speculations of scholars

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concerning a custom of a former age, but the testimony of persons who were either spectators of what they describe, or daily conversed with those who had trod our ancient stage.’50 Yet more impressive was Malone’s discovery, and extensive use in his Account, of a number of manuscript sources which have remained essential to the scholarship of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. An ‘indenture tripartite’, for example, ‘dated December 31 1666, (which I have seen)’ between Thomas and Henry Killigrew and others, provides evidence regarding the distribution of profits from plays and masques performed by the king and queen’s players; from ‘the manuscript notes of lord Stanhope, Treasurer of the Chamber to king James the first’ Malone determines the standard payment for a performance of a play before the monarch; a manuscript in the Lord Chamberlain’s Office gives him a list of his majesty’s players at May 1629, with a statement of their biennial allowance in ‘bastarde skarlet for a cloake, and a quarter of a yard of crimson velvet for the capes’. He found such documents in a variety of locations in London, including Chancery, the British Museum, the Stamp Office, the Remembrancer’s Office in the Exchequer, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, and in the provinces, including Oxford and the diocese of Worcester. Some of the manuscript sources Malone used were already known, though he often turns them to new scholarly account. He had read in Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses, for example, of manuscripts by John Aubrey surviving in the Ashmolean Museum, but made his own transcription, and used them for what amounted to a continuing critique of Rowe. Many of the manuscript sources were new. One of his most significant discoveries was the Office-book of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels to James I and Charles I, which ‘contains an account of almost every piece exhibited at any of the theatres from August 1623 to the commencement of the rebellion in 1641, and many curious anecdotes relative to them’. For the use of this ‘very curious and valuable Manuscript’ Malone professed himself indebted to Francis Ingram, Deputy Remembrancer in the Court of Exchequer; it had lately been discovered ‘in the same old chest which contained the manuscript Memoirs of Lord Herbert of Cherbury’. At Dulwich College he came across, just as the 1790 edition was being printed, ‘some curious Manuscripts relative to the stage’, one of them being ‘a large folio volume of accounts kept by Mr. Philip Henslowe, who appears to have been proprietor of the Rose Theatre near the Bankside in Southwark’. Henslowe’s volume contained information regarding ‘a great number of plays now lost, and several entries that tend to throw a light on various particulars which

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have been discussed in the preceding History of the English Stage, as well as the Essay on the order of time in which Shakspeare’s plays were written’, and ‘a register of all the plays performed by the servants of Lord Strange, and the Lord Admiral, and by other companies, between the 19th of February 1591–2, and November 5, 1597’. Not the least informative of the Henslowe materials was ‘an exact Inventory of the Wardrobe, playbooks, properties, &c. belonging to the lord Admiral’s servants’. Though these came too late for Malone to include them ‘in their proper places’, he nevertheless drew on them at length in the ‘Emendations and Additions’ to the Prolegomena; here as so often, the entitlement of the public and of scholarship to ‘information and entertainment’ are met by the provision of full transcribed materials, in list rather than narrative forms.51 From this mass of evidence Malone was able to give an account of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage far more informed, more detailed, more coherent and more substantiated than anything that had gone before. Having shown that from the reign of Henry VIII there were ‘regular and established players, who obtained a livelihood by their art’, Malone traces the development of theatres in London, from ‘temporary theatres constructed in the yards of inns’ (which provided a model of a space enclosed on three galleried sides, with a raised stage providing the fourth side) to the first permanent playhouses, and the theatres of Shakespeare’s time, notably Blackfriars and Whitefriars (‘certainly built before 1580’), the Globe, the Curtain, the Red Bull and the Fortune. Over some thirty pages of close discussion and copious evidence, Malone investigates ‘the internal form and economy of our ancient theatres’, with special focus on the theatre most closely associated with Shakespeare, the Globe. He discusses its location on Bankside, ‘contiguous to the Bear-Garden’; its construction, ‘an hexagonal wooden building, partly open to the weather, and partly thatched’, shows that it was used in the summer, and in daylight; derives its name not from its shape but from its sign, Hercules supporting the globe; argues that ‘the exhibitions at the Globe seem to have been calculated chiefly for the lower class of people,’ whereas those at Blackfriars were purposed for ‘a more select and judicious audience’; relates that admission to galleries or pit cost sixpence at both Globe and Blackfriars, but that a seat in a box cost a shilling; and discusses such features as the rush-strewn stage floor, the suspension of the curtains on an iron rod and the placing of the balcony or upper stage. A contemporary manuscript, dated 8 January 1599, found late in his research by Malone and transcribed at length in the ‘Emendations and Additions’, provides golden, first-hand evidence for the ‘dimensions and plan of the Globe Playhouse’ in the form of a legal agreement between

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Philip Henslowe and Edward Allen and Peter Streete, ‘citizen and carpenter of London’, for the building of a new theatre in Southwark. The building specifications for this new theatre are set out in detail in this deed and are ‘to be in all . . . contrivitions, conveyances, fashions, thinge and thinges, effected, finished and doen, according to the manner and fashion of the . . . howse called the Globe’.52 In a lengthy passage, in which the thread of the argument runs over a particularly deep body of footnotes, Malone demonstrates with a lawyer’s precision that the Shakespearean stage used no scenes, in the sense of ‘a painting in perspective on a cloth fastened to a wooden frame or roller’. He acknowledges that moveable painted scenes were used in masques, notably by Inigo Jones at Christ Church in 1605, but shows that the common theatres did not use moveable scenes (though they did run to such things as tombs, coffins, trap doors and beds concealed by curtains). He postulates that Davenant’s use of perspective scenes in The Siege of Rhodes (1656) was an innovation ‘in a regular drama, on a publick theatre’, derived from Italian opera and French drama. He argues that the word ‘scene’ in the new sense came into use between 1639 and 1662. Steevens had argued strenuously that perspective scenery had indeed been known to Shakespeare and his contemporaries and had cited the words of the Chorus in Henry V: ‘Unto Southampton do we shift our scene’; Malone dismisses that evidence by showing that in this line Shakespeare ‘uses the word scene in the same sense in which it was used two thousand years before he was born; that is, for the place of action represented by the stage’, and by adducing Shakespearean parallel passages to the same effect. After more than twenty pages of close argument Malone concludes, ‘The various circumstances which I have stated, and the accounts of the contemporary writers, furnish us . . . with decisive and incontrovertible proofs, that the stage of Shakspeare was not furnished with moveable painted scenes, but merely decorated with curtains, and arras or tapestry hangings, which, when decayed, appear to have been sometimes ornamented with pictures.’53 In succeeding pages Malone goes on to discuss a wide variety of questions of performance: lighting, the size of companies and the doubling of parts, the staging conventions of the play within the play, the use (and non-use) of the epilogue, wigs and masks, the prompter (or ‘book-holder’) and the property man, costume, the acting of women’s parts on the English stage (at some length), the introduction of the clown, ad libbing and other practices, dancing and other diversions, and the use of music before the play and between the acts. In addition to matters of playhouse design and staging, Malone is able to construct a detailed account of theatre management and business practice,

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of the actors themselves, and of staging history after Shakespeare’s lifetime. He adduces evidence from many sources about the advertising, including play-bills for Shakespeare’s own plays (2. 133–4 n.). He discusses author’s benefits. He documents the sale of the copy of the play to the theatre and the retention (after sale by the author) of the rights to the copy by the company. He shows that the standard price of the copy of a play was ‘twenty nobles, or six pounds thirteen shillings and four-pence’, that printed plays sold for sixpence apiece and that ‘the usual present from a patron, in return for a dedication, was forty shillings.’ There is discussion of the payment of the actors, and the value and distribution of playhouse shares. From Oldys and Henry Herbert’s Office-book he is able to estimate emoluments from a benefit day. From the data provided by Herbert he concludes that between 1622 and 1641 the King’s Company produced, at Blackfriars or the Globe, ‘at least four new plays every year’. He provides evidence for command performances of plays at court. He is able to make an educated computation that Shakespeare ‘as author, actor, and proprietor probably received from the theatre about two hundred pounds a year’. Malone goes on to a biographical account of the players, beginning with discussion of ‘our poet’s merit as an actor’ and his ‘knowledge of his art’, providing descriptions of such key figures in Shakespeare’s theatre as Richard Burbage and John Heminge, and biographical vignettes of a significant number of the other actors, with more or less extensive primary evidence, including transcriptions of wills. In the concluding part of the Account Malone provides an extended and detailed account of the production of Shakespeare’s plays during the period from his death until 1741, the beginning of the age of Garrick, drawing heavily as before on Henry Herbert’s Office-book, among other primary sources.54

Shakespearean Forgeries Malone used documentary evidence throughout his life to distinguish the true from the false, as might be expected of a literary scholar who had been trained in the law. A significant part of his scholarly efforts was spent detecting frank literary forgeries, and he devoted a short essay and a substantial book to debunking Shakespearean frauds of his own century. In his 1790 edition Malone published an essay entitled ‘Shakspeare, Ford, and Jonson’, 55 which expressed doubts about the authenticity of a pamphlet, ‘Old Ben’s Light Heart made heavy by young John’s Melancholy Lover’, which had appeared in the General Advertiser (23 April 1748), contained within a

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letter written by Charles Macklin. This was a small and now a superannuated deceit, and Malone attempted to clarify the situation with the aged, and now amnesiac, Macklin himself. Having failed to do so, Malone determined to ‘let the point be tried by those rules of evidence which regulate trials of greater importance’, confident that he would ‘be able to produce such testimony as shall convict our ancient comedian of having . . . invented and fabricated the narrative . . . contrary to the Statute of Biography, and other wholesome laws of the Parnassian Code’. 56 Malone ensured that this ‘fabricated tale’, like Rowe’s biographical narrative, collapsed under the load of the more than twenty pages of controverting documentation he brought to bear upon it. A slightly later, and altogether more sinister, fraud required a far weightier response. In late 1795 appeared a pamphlet, written by Samuel Ireland, entitled Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakspeare. The pamphlet contained texts of a large proportion of a recently discovered collection of manuscripts allegedly written by Shakespeare, or sent to him, but in fact forged by Samuel Ireland’s son, William Henry Ireland. The manuscripts were made available for inspection to a group of carefully chosen observers (which did not include Malone). Ireland’s forgeries included a letter from Queen Elizabeth to Shakespeare, a letter and verses addressed by Shakespeare to ‘Anna Hatherrewaye’, a letter from Shakespeare to the Earl of Southampton and the Earl’s reply, Shakespeare’s ‘Profession of Faith’, a letter from Shakespeare to the actor Richard Cowley with an enclosed portrait, a deed of gift from Shakespeare to ‘William Henry Ireland’ (an alleged ancestor), agreements between Shakespeare and the actors John Lowin and Henry Condell, a lease from Shakespeare and John Heminge to Michael Fraser and his wife, a deed of trust to John Heminge and, most remarkably, ‘the tragedy of King Lear, and a fragment of Hamlet, both alleged to be in the hand-writing of Shakspeare’. To this remarkable production Malone replied in a book of well over 400 pages, An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments (1796). Malone’s Inquiry sets itself out as a legal examination of the genuineness and credibility of the Ireland papers. The first stage in that process is the lawyer’s argument, to ascertain the provenance of the papers themselves: ‘in the Prerogative Court, if any Will or testamentary writing is exhibited at a time when, or from a quarter where, it might not reasonably be expected, the party producing it is always asked . . . where . . . it was found.’ In any court, ‘it is an established rule that the best evidence the nature of the case will admit of, shall always be required.’ These are high standards, but

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Malone the lawyer and literary scholar insists that they must apply in the literary as well as the legal case: in requiring similar evidence . . . it is said, we transfer the matter from a literary tribunal to another jurisdiction: we are not now in a court of law. – It is true, we are not; but all the principal rules of evidence, as Blackstone’s great prototype, Lord Chief Baron Gilbert, has clearly shewn . . . are founded on right reason, on which ground alone they are adopted; and this first and most general rule is just as applicable to the papers in question, as to any deed or other instrument produced in a court of law.57 The second stage in the process is the critic’s argument. Even setting aside external assessments of provenance, the critic, or antiquary, would be able to assess the authenticity of the papers ‘merely as they appear in the printed copy and in the fac-similes’. On the basis of the evidence presented by the papers themselves, therefore, Malone undertakes to prove, from 1. the Orthography, 2. the Phraseology, 3. the Dates given or deducible by inference, and 4. the Dissimilitude of the Hand-writing, that not a single paper or deed in this extraordinary volume was written or executed by the person to whom it is ascribed.58 Following these criteria, Malone cross-examines Ireland’s documents in turn, and, everywhere citing genuine documentation for contrast, finds in each of them palpable evidence of falseness. There are numerous mistakes in spelling, especially of names: ‘Anna’ is a form not used at Shakespeare’s time, and the playwright’s own name is misspelled – as a result of trusting in an error made by Steevens and Malone himself! In one document, ‘complement’ is used as a ‘verb active’, which it never was in Shakespeare’s time; in another, the modern phrase ‘no more at present’ is used, where the idiom of Shakespeare and his contemporaries would invariably have been ‘at this present’. A letter is addressed to Shakespeare at the Globe, at a time when the Globe was not yet built; a deed describes him as residing at Blackfriars, where he never lived; and there is general incriminating ignorance of the publication dates of his plays. The handwriting throughout the documents is a weak simulacrum of the original: ‘in the name which has been exhibited as the hand-writing of the Queen, there are no less than six gross errors’, all analysed in detail by Malone (whose own eyes, after years of close and candle-lit study, were weeping witnesses to what hands of

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Elizabeth’s and James’s times looked like). Considering Ireland’s claimed Shakespearean holographs of King Lear, and the fragment of Hamlet, Malone points out that ‘metrical speeches are written unmetrically’; that ‘the lines throughout are numbered in the margin, a practice unexampled in our author’s time’; and that the manuscript of Lear is written on side of the paper, but all equivalent manuscripts of Shakespeare’s time were written on both sides.59 Malone provides this damning summing up: In the course of this inquiry it has been shewn that the artificer or artificers of this clumsy and daring fraud . . . know nothing of the history of Shakspeare, nothing of the history of the Stage, or the history of the English Language. . . . That the orthography of all the papers and deeds is not only not the orthography of that time, but the orthography of no period whatsoever. That the language is not the language of that age, but is in various instances the language of a century afterwards. That the dates, where there are dates . . . and almost all the facts mentioned, are repugnant to truth, and are refuted by indisputable documents. That the theatrical contracts are wholly inconsistent with the usages of the theatres in the age of Shakspeare; and that the law of the legal instruments is as false as the spelling and phraseology are absurd and senseless. (Inquiry, pp. 352–4) In form and method this is a legal judgement, but it is also a judgement of just the same literary kind that Dr Richard Bentley had made in demonstrating the falseness of the Epistles of Phalaris, a century earlier. As Bentley had brought to bear his own extraordinarily detailed knowledge of the ancient world, of its history, its chronology, its language and its textual forms, to show that the historical tyrant Phalaris of Acragas could not have been the author of the epistles ascribed to him by Sir William Temple and the Christ Church wits,60 so Malone drew on his profound learning in the physical documents, the law, the language, the stage and the chronology of Shakespeare’s time to show that Shakespeare himself could not have penned the manuscripts claimed for him by the Irelands.

Conclusion Malone’s work is characterized by his search for knowledge of the past, based with remorseless and indefatigable consistency on documentary evidence. Such knowledge and understanding depends on what documents

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can be found, and on the interpretation of those documents. It is always the result of a series of interpretative acts, and the validity of interpretative acts is in part dependent on the nature of their objects. In refuting a forgery, Malone could measure the false against true documents and argue that he had offered ‘decisive proofs’ for the prosecution (Inquiry, p. 346). In preferring ‘babled’ to other possible readings in Falstaff’s death speech – in reaching, in fact, a textual and interpretative decision regarding a crux in Shakespeare’s text – Malone implicitly claims only to make a probabilistic judgement on the basis of the available relevant evidence. Such informed probabilistic judgements of course are the aspiration of any properly knowledge-based academic discipline. The evidence that Malone discovered, presented and examined in interpreting Shakespeare’s texts was not generalized background, ‘Shakespeare’s world’, but the context which the text itself draws on; not merely extrinsic data, but the narrowclass evidence which genuinely bears on and serves to resolve particular interpretative problems.61 His aim was valid understanding through knowledge of the text in its contexts, historical, literary, linguistic, lexicographical, biographical and, most significantly and most originally, social and economic. Malone was anticipated in many areas of his Shakespearean work, by his great editorial predecessors Theobald, Johnson, Capell and Steevens most particularly. Variorum editions are inherently cooperative exercises, and Malone’s edition was certainly indebted both to those who had previously ventured into print, and to ongoing social processes of collaboration (as well as rivalry) among literary scholars in general, and Shakespearean scholars in particular, including Steevens, Tyrwhitt, Farmer, Percy and Reed. De Grazia’s judgement that Malone made a defi nitive break with his predecessors, quoted at the start of this chapter, is evidently mistaken: if in his edition ‘the authentic text pre-empted the received text’ he had certainly been anticipated by Edward Capell and George Steevens; if ‘actual usage in Shakespeare’s time superseded standards of correctness contemporary with the editor,’ and if ‘interpretations of Shakespeare’s content overtook evaluations of his style,’ he was following editorial and annotational policies already clearly enunciated by Lewis Theobald, and strongly characteristic of other scholarly eighteenth-century editions of Shakespeare. Some particular and significant elements, however, are new in themselves: the comprehensive recasting of Rowe’s legendary life with ‘factual accounts’; the use of the 1609 quarto Sonnets in place of the ‘adulterated’ 1640 octavo; the dating of the plays and their reordering in a chronological sequence rather

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than within a small Procrustean set of dramatic kinds, as in the Folio. In a far broader sense, however, the 1790 text and apparatus overshadows all previous Shakespearean variora, and represents in significant ways a new and individual achievement, particularly in the comprehensiveness and interpretative focus of its explication of the text, the copiousness of the documentary evidence brought to bear, the concern for the social and economic circumstances of the production of Shakespeare’s text and theatre, and the precise and profitable application to, and integration within, literary scholarship of the disciplinary methodologies of philology, history and the law. Malone’s work lies within, and is a signal triumph of, an enlightenment methodology and discourse, characterized especially by rational textual criticism and textual explication underwritten by the precise application of extensive historical scholarship. His forerunners recognizably include Richard Bentley, and in particular Bentley’s work on the epistles of Phalaris, and Bentley’s Shakespearean acolyte Lewis Theobald. In his own age his work has parallels in the arguments of the great German theologians and critics Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) and Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1753–1827) for an understanding of classical and biblical texts based on a detailed and thorough knowledge of their original languages, poetics and social environment,62 or in the insistence of the radical Scottish textual scholar Alexander Geddes (1737–1802) that the bible must be subjected to ‘a severe rational critique’ of the same kind as that ‘by which we ascertain the true or more probable readings of Homer, Virgil, Milton, Shakespeare’.63 This Enlightenment enquiry was not a mere will o’ the wisp. Its objects of examination, the texts and their meanings, are not radically unknowable, though what lies behind them, the historical breathing Shakespeare, original and multiple performances, may be transient and lost. Malone’s documents, whether the surviving printed texts of Shakespeare, or the documents that record Shakespeare’s life and Shakespeare’s theatre, are not mere substitutes, but determinate and interpretable in themselves. To claim that ‘an appeal to authenticity denied the variability of texts’ is illogically to assume that because textual witnesses are plural they are, therefore, indeterminate and uninterrogable. The use of historical evidence, textual and contextual, is not just another ‘mode of bringing Shakespeare under rule’. The use of documents allows, and in Malone’s practice produces, not a mere ‘temporal construct’, but the focussed interpretation of Shakespeare’s writings according to principles often stated and almost always deducible.64

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Malone’s Shakespearean work has had a profound and lasting effect on Shakespeare studies, and indeed much more widely on professional literary scholarship. It made available new documentary materials which have continued to be staples of Shakespearean investigation to the present day. It reached new conclusions and provided new ways of thinking about Shakespeare’s life and work which retain currency even where they have, inevitably and properly, been questioned or corrected. It represented an evolved and comprehensive model of literary-historical scholarship, and of textual and explanatory editorial methodology, which continues to be intellectually credible and widely practiced within the profession of English literary studies.

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Notes

Introduction 1

2

3

4 5 6 7 8

9

10 11

12 13

14

See Letters of Sir Thomas Bodley to Thomas James, ed. G. W. Wheeler, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1926, pp. xv–xvi, xxxvi–xxxvii, 219, 222. Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia, 1598, pp. 281–2, rptd. New York, Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1938, pp. vii–viii; see Introduction by Don Cameron Allen, pp. vii–viii. ‘Honie–tong’d Shakespeare’ is mentioned before Meres, in 1595, according to the Shakspere Allusion–Book, vol. 1, p. 24; see also vol. 1, p. 51. The question is surveyed in David Bevington, ‘William Shakespeare’, Cambridge Companion to English Poets, ed. Claude Rawson, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, and, with a different emphasis, by Colin Burrow, in his edition of the Complete Sonnets and Poems, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 1–5. On the low estimation of published plays, and Shakespeare’s insouciance on the subject, see David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 14–49, esp. pp. 20, 22, 31–40, 48. For a view that Shakespeare may have been contemptuous or ashamed of his theatrical work, see Meredith Skura, Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). See also Bevington, ‘William Shakespeare’. Burrow, Complete Sonnets and Poems, p. 2. Ibid., pp. 91–103. Bevington, ‘William Shakespeare’. Below, pp. 60, 44–5. Michael Dobson, Making of the National Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 134–41. Don-John Dugas and Robert D. Hume, ‘The dissemination of Shakespeare’s plays circa 1714’, Studies in Bibliography, vol. LVI (2003–4 [actually 2007]), pp. 261–79, esp. pp. 278, 261–2, 265, 267, 269 ff. Dobson, Making of the National Poet, p. 3. Ibid., p. 6; Jonson, Timber, or Discoveries (1640), in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 6 vols., ed. Brian Vickers (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974–81), vol. 1, p. 26; on Shaw, see OED, ‘Bardolatry’. Below, p. 12; Ingleby, Shakspere Allusion-Book, passim. Samuel Johnson, ‘Dryden’, Lives of the Poets (1779–81), ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vol. 2, p. 119. Works of John Dryden, California Edition, vol. 17, p. 55. All quotations from Dryden are from this edition.

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Notes 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40 41 42 43 44

201

Below, pp. 27–8. Below, pp. 16ff. Below, p. 16. Vickers, vol. 1. pp. 11, 23–6. John Milton, ‘L’Allegro’ (1631), III. 132–4. Dryden, ‘To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve’ (1694), Works of John Dryden, vol. 4, pp. 432–3. Dryden, Prologue to Joseph Harris, The Mistakes (1690). Works of John Dryden, vol. 3, p. 258. Works of John Dryden, vol. 17, p. 58. Below, 56ff. Below, 27–8, 56–60. ‘Discourse’, Works of John Dryden, vol. 4, p. 4. See below, p. 56 ff., on Dryden’s relations with Dorset. Loc cit. Of Dramatick Poesie, Works of John Dryden, vol. 17, p. 55. Samuel Johnson, ‘Preface to Shakespeare’, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, VII–VIII: Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 1968, vol. 1, p. 61. Dryden, ‘Discourse concerning satire’, Works of John Dryden, vol. 4, p. 84. Of Dramatick Poesie (Shakespeare), Preface to Fables (1700, Chaucer), Works of John Dryden, vol. 17, p. 58; vol. 7, p. 33. See, for example, Dugas and Hume, ‘Dissemination of Shakespeare’s plays’, pp. 265, 267. See King Lear, ed. Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 62–9; Johnson’s defence of Tate, Johnson on Shakespeare, vol. 2, p. 70. See Claude Rawson, ‘Cooling to a gypsy’s lust: Johnson, Shakespeare, and Cleopatra’, Comparative Excellence: New Essays on Shakespeare and Johnson (New York: AMS Press, 2007), pp. 204, 214–5, 221, 233–5 nn. Preface to Shakespeare, vol. 1, p. 74; Rawson, ‘Cooling to a gypsy’s lust’, pp. 205–6. Jonathan Swift to John Gay, 28 March 1728, Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. David Woolley, 5 vols (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999–), vol. 3, p. 170. See Rebecca Rogers, ‘ “How Scottish was ‘the Scottish play’ ”? Macbeth’s National Identity in the Eighteenth Century’, Shakespeare and Scotland, ed. Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 111–23; Claude Rawson, ‘Brats of humour: Radical sympathies, anti–Scottish satire and the first parody of Shakespeare in an eighteenth-century miscellany’, Times Literary Supplement, 20 July 2007, pp. 3–5. T. S. Eliot, ‘Dante’ (1929), Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1953), p. 265. Below, pp. 68–9, 72–3. Below, pp. 113–14. Below, pp. 72–3. Pope, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, l. 168. Pope, Essay on Criticism (1711), 261.

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202 45

46 47 48 49

50 51 52

53 54 55

Notes

Pope, Preface to Shakespear, Prose Works, Volume II. The Major Works, 1725–1744, ed. Rosemary Cowler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 24; Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen, pp. 31, 17–18. Johnson, ‘Preface to Shakespeare’, I, pp. 94–5. Dunciad, III. 332. Dobson, Making of the National Poet, pp. 134–46. See Vickers, I, pp. 8–9. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell, revd edn, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–50), vol. 2, pp. 14, 92. Rawson, ‘Cooling to a gypsy’s lust’, pp. 228–32. ‘Addison’, Lives of the English Poets, ed. Lonsdale, vol. 3, p. 26. Johnson on Shakespeare, vol. 1, p. 83; vol. 2, p. 873 (‘Cooling to a gypsy’s lust’, pp. 211–2, 230). Johnson on Shakespeare, vol. 1, pp. 60–1, 83, 90. Below, p. 132. Preface; note to Antony and Cleopatra IV, pp. xii, 13 (Johnson on Shakespeare, vol. 1, pp. 108; vol. 2, p. 863; ‘Cooling to a gypsy’s lust’, pp. 216, 220).

Chapter 1 1

2

For terminology see the ‘Glossary of literary terms’, in John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson (London: Dent, 1962), vol. 2, pp. 295–305; John M. Aden, The Critical Opinions of John Dryden: A Dictionary (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1963); and H. James Jensen, A Glossary of John Dryden’s Critical Terms (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969). Helpful general studies include Robert D. Hume, Dryden’s Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970); Dryden: The Critical Heritage, ed. James Kinsley and Helen Kinsley (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971); Edward Pechter, Dryden’s Classical Theory of Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Michael Werth Gelber, The Just and the Lively: The Literary Criticism of John Dryden (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); and Paul D. Cannan, The Emergence of Dramatic Criticism in England from Jonson to Pope (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 20–53. Valuable recent multi-authored studies are John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); John Dryden (1631–1700): His Politics, His Plays, and His Poets, ed. Claude Rawson and Aaron Santesso (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003); and The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden, ed. Steven N. Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For the life see James Anderson Winn, John Dryden and His World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). I particularly wish to thank Meredith Sherlock for her invaluable help in polishing the text of this chapter and verifying references, and the medical and nursing staff of the Cabrini Hospital and Palliative Care Unit, Melbourne, whose patient I was during much of its composition. ‘On poetry: A rhapsody’, in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 2nd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), vol. 2, p. 648.

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Notes 3

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On the expense see Don-John Dugas and Robert D. Hume, ‘The dissemination of Shakespeare’s plays circa 1714’, Studies in Bibliography, vol. 56 (2003–4), 261–79. Paul Hammond, The Making of Restoration Poetry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), p. 15. The Letters of John Dryden with Letters Addressed to Him, ed. Charles E. Ward (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1942), p. 55. Letters of John Dryden, pp. 14–16, 33–6, 70–4. Peter Clark’s British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). See also Katsuhiro Engetsu, ‘Dryden and the modes of restoration sociability’, in Zwicker, John Dryden, pp. 181–96. ‘I gave the unknown Author his due Commendation, I must confess, but who can answer for me, and for the rest of the Poets, who heard me read the Poem, whether we shou’d not have been better pleas’d to have seen our own Names at the bottom of the Title Page?’ (Works, vol. 5, p. 274). The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, ed. Curt A. Zimansky (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), pp. 17, 20–21. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (London: Bell and Hyman, 1970–83), vol. 5, p. 37. Epistle to The Medal of John Bayes (London, 1682), p. A2r; see also The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. Montague Summers (London: Fortune Press, 1927), vol. 5, p. 248. See ODNB, ‘Patrons of the Mermaid Tavern’. Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (London, 1662), p. 2126. See Hammond, Restoration Poetry, p. 9. Dryden, Works, vol. 17, p. 56. Ibid. The Tempest ‘was originally Shakespear’s: a Poet for whom he had particularly a high veneration, and whom he first taught me to admire’ (Dryden, Works, vol. 10, p. 3). For the dating evidence, see his ‘Perspectives, prospectives, sibyls and witches: King James progresses to Oxford’ in Renaissance Perspectives, ed. Jan Lloyd Jones and Graham Cullum (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2006), pp. 109–53. Charles de Saint-Denis, Sieur de Saint-Évremond, The Life of Monsieur de St. Evremond (London, 1714), p. xl. See also Plays, Poems, and Miscellaneous Writings Associated with George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham, ed. Robert D. Hume and Harold Love, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), vol. 1, p. 124. ‘De la Comedie Angloise’, Oeuvres de Monsieur de Saint-Evremond (London, 1725), vol. 3, pp. 163–8. Edited by Wallace Kirsop with an English translation by H. Gaston Hall in Buckingham, Plays, Poems, and Miscellaneous Writings, vol. 1, pp. 123–230; vol. 2, pp. 341–99. Dryden, Works, vol. 17, p. 21. Pierre Danchin, The Prologues and Epilogues of the Restoration 1660–1700 (Nancy: Université de Nancy 1981), I, ii, pp. 453–4 and Works, vii, pp. 535–6. For the attribution see Ibid., pp. 920–1.

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204 24

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30 31

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33 34

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38 39

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Notes

Dryden, Works, vol. 1, pp. 146–7; Danchin, Prologues and Epilogues, vols I, ii, pp. 546–8. Richard Flecknoe’s ‘A short discourse of the English stage’, published in 1664 with his play Love’s Kingdom, p. G6r. Also in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. E. J. Spingarn (London: Oxford University Press, 1908), vol. 2, pp. 93–4. Dryden, Works, vol. 17, p. 15. Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 187–92. Stern speaks of ‘first nights’; however, Restoration performances began during the afternoon. Vols I, i, pp. 322–4 in The Plays of William Wycherley, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 259. See Susan E. Whyman, Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural Worlds of the Verneys 1660–1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 87–109. Friedman, The Plays of William Wycherley, pp. 410–12. Joseph Arrowsmith’s The Reformation (London, 1673, p. L4v); also in Danchin, Prologues and Epilogues, vols I, ii, p. 537. The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Harold Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 261–2. Dryden, Works, vol. 5, p. 272. Dryden, Works, vol. 11, pp. 320–1. The two addresses are more fully compared in Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage in England 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 76–80. Brice Harris, Charles Sackville, Sixth Earl of Dorset, Patron and Poet of the Restoration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1940), pp. 195–6. The Letters of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Jeremy Treglown (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), pp. 119–20. Shadwell, The Medal of John Bayes (London, 1682), p. 3; Summers, Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, vol. 5, p. 253. Dryden, Works, vol. 9, p. 8. Dedication to The Dramatick Works of John Dryden, Esq.; in Six Volumes (London, 1717), vol. 1, p. a8v. An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, ed. B. R. S. Fone (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), p. 67. Dryden, Works, vol. 4, p. 369; L’Estrange, Observator, 3, 79 (Wednesday, 2 June 1686), p. 1. Further discussed in Harold Love, ‘Roger L’Estrange’s criticism of Dryden’s elocution’, Notes and Queries, vol. 246 (2001), 398–400. Epistle to The Medal of John Bayes, p. A1v; Summers, Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, vol. 5, pp. 247, 248. Dryden’s Classical Theory of Literature, pp. 29–30. On this, see Harold Love, English Clandestine Satire 1660–1702 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 191–217. A Description of the Academy of the Athenian Virtuosi: With a Discourse Held There in Vindication of Mr. Dryden’s Conquest of Granada; against the Author of the Censure of the Rota (London, 1673), pp. 6–10. A point raised in Engetsu, ‘Dryden and the modes of restoration sociability’.

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Notes 47

48

49

50 51 52 53 54

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56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63

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The Historical and the Posthumous Memoirs of Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall, ed. H. B. Wheatley, 5 vols (London, 1884), vol. 3, pp. 136–7; cited in Harris, Charles Sackville, p. 226. His Antony and Cleopatra was performed a year before All for Love but for the Duke’s Company and, as his French sympathies would indicate, written in rhyme. Rochester, The Letters of John Wilmot, p. 74. Medley in Etherege’s The Man of Mode and Carlos in Shadwell’s A True Widow seem to have been intended as complimentary representations of Sedley. A True Widow is dedicated to him. Dryden, Works, vol. 5, p. 95. John Dryden’s Imagery (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1962), pp. 73–90. Lines 216–19; Dryden, Works, vol. 2, p. 12. Dryden, Works, vol. 4, p. 29. Dryden actually recognized two cycles within classical Latin literature, the second of which began under Vespasian (Dedication to Plutarch’s Lives Translated, in Dryden, Works, vol. 17, pp. 227–8). John Fowler, ‘Dryden and literary good-breeding’, Restoration Literature: Critical Approaches, ed. Harold Love (London: Methuen, 1972), pp. 243–4. Fowler, ‘Dryden and literary good-breeding’, pp. 227, 245. Dryden, Works, vol. 17, p. 15. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid. Ibid., p. 227. For his transcendent mastery of verbal music see Dryden, Works, vol. 17, pp. 190, 193; for his bad grammar, Dryden, Works, vol. 11, p. 205 and vol. 13, p. 225. Dryden, Works, vol. 4, p. 432. See also the following. Respected examples of the first class are David Hackett Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) and Geoffrey Blainey, The Great Seesaw: A New View of the Western World, 1750–2000 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005), p. 26. For a lucid review of these methods see Ian Stewart, Life’s Other Secret: The New Mathematics of the Living World (London: Penguin, 1998) and Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World (London: Viking, 1994). Dedication to Plutarch’s Lives Translated, in Dryden, Works, vol. 17, pp. 270–1. Ibid., pp. 12–13. Ibid., pp. 21–32, see p. 31. Ibid., pp. 186, 189, and Dryden, Works, vol. 13, p. 117. In the Dedication to Examen Poeticum he speaks of the English poets’ ‘undoubted due, of excelling Æschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles’ (vol. 4, p. 367). Dryden, Works, vol. 17, p. 55. Ibid., pp. 55–6. Although Dryden did not make the change when he had the chance to do so in his revisions for the second edition, one wonders whether he may have originally written ‘I should do him no injury.’

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206

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Dryden, Works, vol. 13, p. 226; vol. 1, p. 158. Dryden, Works, vol. 4, p. 51. 74 The Works of William Congreve, ed. D. F. McKenzie, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 75 Dryden, Works, vol. 4, pp. 432–3. 76 Ibid., p. 367. 77 ‘Letter to Charles Montague’, in Letters of John Dryden, p. 121. 78 Dryden, Works, vol. 17, pp. 10–12. 79 Dryden, Works, vol. 8, p. 95. 80 Dryden, Works, vol. 9, p. 19. 81 Dryden, Works, vol. 17, pp. 18, 17–18. 82 Ibid., p. 19. 83 Ibid., p. 274. 84 Ibid., pp. 18, 20. 85 Dryden, Works, vol. 5, p. 267. 86 Dryden, Works, vol. 4, p. 80. 87 Dryden, Works, vol. 20, pp. 62, 63. 88 Aristotle’s definition of tragedy ‘condemns all Shakespears Historical Plays, which are rather Chronicles represented, than Tragedies, and all double action of Plays’ (Dryden, Works, vol. 13, p. 230). See also Dryden, Works, vol. 17, pp. 35 and 274. 89 The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), vol. 1, p. 89. 90 Dryden, Works, vol. 17, pp. 10–11. 91 Ibid., p. 189. 92 The practice and philosophical principles of this approach to acting are expounded in Aaron Hill’s An Essay on the Art of Acting in which the Dramatic Passions are properly defined and described, with Applications of the Rules peculiar to each, and selected Passages for Practice (London, 1779); originally published in The Works of the late Aaron Hill, Esq., in four Volumes, and consisting of letters on various subjects, and of original Poems, Moral and Facetious, with An Essay on the Art of Acting, 4 vols (London, 1753). 93 Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, p. 92. 94 See Jensen, Glossary of John Dryden’s Critical Terms, pp. 76–7. 95 Dryden, Works, vol. 5, p. 271. 96 For his career with the company and the use he made in his own plays of the talents of its stars, see Peter Holland, The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 75–7. 97 John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, An Essay upon Poetry (London, 1682), p. 14. 98 Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, Producible Interpretation: Eight English Plays 1675–1707 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), pp. 3–34. 99 Dryden, Works, vol. 5, p. 276. 100 ‘The grounds of criticism in tragedy’, Preface to Troilus and Cressida, Dryden, Works, vol. 13, p. 233. 101 Holland, The Ornament of Action, pp. 81–6. The term was first used in John Harrington Smith’s The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948). 73

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Notes

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102

John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, or an Historical Review of the Stage, ed. Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume (London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1987), p. 41. 103 Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660–1900, vol. I, Restoration Drama 1660– 1700, 4th edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), vol. 1, p. 352. 104 Theobald asserted in his single-play edition of 1743 that the cuts marked in the Restoration quartos were made ‘By the directions of Sir William Davenant, Mr. Dryden and others’. The claim is discussed in Henry N. Paul, ‘Players’ quartos and duodecimos of Hamlet’, Modern Language Notes, vol. 49 (1934), 369–75. Paul suggests that Dryden may have been involved with the 1683 quarto in which a number of errors were corrected by reference to the first folio. 105 Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, p. 59. 106 Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln’s Inn Fields 1695–1708 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), pp. 3–25. 107 Nicoll, History of English Drama, vol. 1, pp. 353–4. 108 Dryden, Works, vol. 13, p. 226. 109 Music arranged by Sir Frederick Bridge, Shakespearean Music in the Plays and Early Operas (London: Dent, 1923), pp. 85–93. 110 Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, p. 52. 111 Dryden, Works, vol. 13, pp. 244–5. 112 Preface to Don Sebastian in Dryden, Works, vol. 15, p. 66. 113 Dryden, Works, vol. 14, p. 100. 114 Zimansky, Critical Works, p. 19. A similar point is made in addressing the Earl of Mulgrave in the dedication to the Aeneid translation: ‘Your Lordship knows some Modern Tragedies which are beautiful on the Stage, and yet I am confident you wou’d not read them. Tryphon the Stationer complains they are seldom ask’d for in his Shop. The Poet who Flourish’d in the Scene, is damn’d in the Ruelle; nay more, he is not esteem’d a good Poet by those who see and hear his Extravagancies with delight’ (Dryden, Works, vol. 5, p. 272). 115 The Works of Thomas Southerne, ed. Robert Jordan and Harold Love, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), vol. 1, pp. 270–1. In fact, the play was a masterpiece, but one that required a standard of ensemble acting of which the age was incapable. 116 Dryden, Works, vol. 17, pp. 58–63, see particularly pp. 59 and 63. 117 Ibid., pp. 192–3. 118 Anthony Aston’s description in A Brief Supplement to Colley Cibber, Esq: His Lives of the Late Famous Actors and Actresses (London, 1747), pp. 299–303. 119 Dryden, Works, vol. 17, pp. 44–5, with Q1 ‘by Mr. Hart’ restored to text. 120 Dryden, Works, vol. 4, p. 368. 121 Ibid., pp. 366–7. 122 Dryden, Works, vol. 5, pp. 270–1. 123 Dryden, Works, vol. 15, pp. 71, 70, 66. 124 ‘Jacob Tonson, Bookseller’, The American Scholar, vol. 61 (1992), 424–30. 125 For a fuller view of the evolution of published play texts over this period, see Holland, The Ornament of Action, pp. 99–137. 126 See on this Don-John Dugas and Robert D. Hume, ‘The dissemination of Shakespeare’s plays circa 1714’, Studies in Bibliography, vol. 56 (2003–4), 261–79.

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Holland, The Ornament of Action, p. 126. McKenzie defends Congreve to some degree on this point. 128 The Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905), vol. 1, p. 349. The same point is more delicately made by Colley Cibber in reproving Barton Booth for his deliberate attempt to underplay a carefully calculated absurdity in Aureng-Zebe (Fone, Apology, p. 73). 129 Dryden, Works, vol. 15, p. 66. For the impact of this and related cultural changes on the prestige of the silently read text, see Holland, The Ornament of Action, pp. 99–137. 130 Letters, p. 71. 131 Jensen, Glossary of John Dryden’s Critical Terms, pp. 54–5. 132 ‘The Janus Poet: Dryden’s critique of Shakespeare’, in Rawson and Santesso, John Dryden, pp. 158–79. One contemporary of Dryden who found the term confusing was Robert Boyle, who made it the subject of his A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv’d Notion of Nature; Made in an Essay, Address’d to a Friend (London, 1686). 133 Thomas Thomas, Dictionarium Linguae Latinae et Anglicanae (Cambridge, 1587), p. 2P2v. 134 See on this Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, ‘Seneca and nature’, Arethusa, vol. 33 (2000), 99–119. Dryden’s opinion of Seneca was not of the highest: in Plutarch’s Lives he compares him unfavourably with Plutarch (Dryden, Works, vol. 17, p. 286). 135 Rosenmeyer, ‘Seneca and nature’, p. 101. 136 Ibid., p. 99. 137 Ibid., pp. 101–2. 138 Studies in Words, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 37. 139 Defined by him as ‘not simply all the things there are, as an aggregate or even a system, but rather some force or mind or élan supposed to be immanent in them’ (p. 41). 140 Dryden, Works, vol. 20, p. 57. 141 Satires, vol. 1. p. 86; loosely translated by Dryden: ‘What Humane Kind desires, and what they shun, | Rage, Passions, Pleasures, Impotence of Will, | Shall this Satyrical Collection fill.’ Works, vol. 4, p. 101. 142 Dryden, Works, vol. 17, p. 74. 143 Dryden, Works, vol. 8, p. 97. 144 Dryden, Works, vol. 17, p. 55. 145 Dryden, Works, vol. 10, p. 6. 146 Letters, pp. 71–2.. 147 Dryden, Works, vol. 13, p. 247; vol. 5, p. 322. 148 Dryden, Works, vol. 13, p. 233. 149 Ibid., p. 225. 150 Dryden, Works, vol. 17, p. 36; see vol. 13, pp. 229–30. 151 Dryden, Works, vol. 3, p. 258. 152 Dryden, Works, vol. 17, p. 58. 153 Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 154 Dryden, Works, vol. 17, pp. 192–3.

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155

‘a character being thus defin’d, that which distinguishes one man from another’ (Dryden, Works, vol. 13, p. 236). Consider Dryden himself in the preface to Don Sebastian: ‘beside the general Moral of it, which is given in the four last lines, there is also another Moral, couch’d under every one of the principal Parts and Characters, which a judicious Critick will observe’ (Dryden, Works, vol. 15, p. 71). 156 On this see Harold Love, ‘Who were the restoration audience?’ The Yearbook of English Studies 10 (1980), 21–44. 157 On this see Harold Love, ‘Dryden, Rochester, and the invention of the town’, in Rawson and Santesso, John Dryden, pp. 36–51 and, for the significance of this development for the theatres, Love’s ‘Restoration and early eighteenth-century drama’, The Cambridge History of English Literature 1660–1780, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 107–31. 158 Discussed in my ‘The theatrical geography of The Country Wife’, Southern Review (Adelaide) vol. 16 (1983), 404–15. 159 A theme discussed in my ‘Dryden’s London’, in Zwicker, John Dryden, pp. 113–30, esp. pp. 120–3. 160 On the topic more generally see Griffin, Literary Patronage, pp. 70–98, and John Barnard, ‘Dryden and patronage’, in Zwicker, John Dryden, pp. 199–220. 161 Hill, Lives of the English Poets, p. 413. 162 A relationship discussed in Harold Love’s ‘Shadwell, Flecknoe and the Duke of Newcastle: An impetus for Mac Flecknoe’, Papers on Language and Literature, vol. 21 (1985), 19–27 and ‘Richard Flecknoe as author-publisher’, Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 14 (1990), 41–50. 163 Harris, Charles Sackville, pp. 247–51, including item 4a. 164 Dryden, Works, vol. 17, p. 21. 165 In Rawson’s ‘Dryden’s Dorset’, TLS, 25 May 2007, pp. 12–13. 166 Rymer’s critical project is reviewed with more sympathy than it usually receives in Cannan, pp. 55–82. 167 pp. A3v–A4r. 168 ‘But let ‘em not mistake my Patron’s part; | Nor call his Charity their own desert’ (Dryden, Works, vol. 4, p. 433). Dryden’s boldness here in claiming Dorset as his patron, not theirs, is striking. 169 On this see Harris, Charles Sackville, pp. 161–3. 170 Text in George deF. Lord, gen. ed., Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse 1660–1714, 7 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963–75), vol. 1, pp. 396–413. 171 Edward L. Saslow, ‘The Rose Alley ambuscade’ Restoration 26 (2002), 27–49. Saslow finds the cause of offence in a cruel sneer at Dorset’s countess, who had recently died in childbirth, and suggests that Dorset did not then realize that the culprit was Mulgrave and not Dryden. 172 The Tragedy of Julius Cæsar, Altered and The Tragedy of Marcus Brutus in The Works of John Sheffield . . . Duke of Buckingham (London, 1723), pp. 209–325, 329–453. The prologue to Julius Caesar is modestly dismissive of the enterprise: ‘Hope to mend Shakespear! or to match his Style! | ‘Tis such a Jest, would make a Stoick smile’ (p. 211). 173 An Essay upon Poetry, p. 14. See n. 97 in this chapter.

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Harris’s Charles Sackville, Sixth Earl of Dorset is a tribute both to his assiduity as a reader and collector and to his encouragement of writers. 175 Letters, pp. 48–9. 176 Dryden, Works, vol. 4, pp. 4–5. 177 The navigator image seems to be applied to Magellan by Bevil Higgons in his congratulatory poem on the Persius translations published in Examen Poeticum (London, 1693), p. 250. 178 Dryden, Works, vol. 13, p. 249. 179 A history first explored in Alexandre Beljame’s Le Public et les hommes de lettres en Angleterre au dix-huitième siècle, 1660–1744 (Paris, 1881); English translation as Men of Letters and the English Public in the Eighteenth Century, 1660–1744, trans. Bonamy Dobrée (London: Kegan Paul, 1948). 180 Dryden, Works, vol. 13, p. 246. 181 Griffin, Literary Patronage, p. 84. 182 Rowe, The Works of Mr Robert Gould (London, 1709), vol. 2, p. 261. 183 On the detail of their professional relationship, see Jennifer Brady, ‘Dryden and Congreve’s collaboration in The Double Dealer’ cited in Hammond and Hopkins, John Dryden, pp. 113–39. 184 Dryden, Works, vol. 4, p. 463. 185 The imperial dimension of Shakespeare worship is considered in Rawson’s ‘ “Sir, I am a Tragedian”: Male Superstars of the Melbourne Stage 1850–1870’, in ‘O Brave New World’: Two Centuries of Shakespeare on the Australian Stage, ed. John Golder and Richard Madelaine (Sydney: Currency Press, 2001), pp. 56–71. 186 Dryden’s sensitivity to individual and collective readers is a theme of Ian Jack’s essay on him in The Poet and His Audience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 4–31.

Chapter 2 1

Pope, ‘Preface to Shakespear’, in The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Norman Ault and Rosemary Cowler, 2 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936–86), vol. 2, pp. 13–40, 25–6. 2 Thomas Rymer, The Tragedies of the Last Age Consider’d and Examin’d (London, 1678), p. 142. Quoted in Pope, Prose Works, vol. 2, p. 40. 3 Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, 2 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), vol. 1, p. 84. 4 William Wordsworth, Essay, Supplementary to the Preface to Poems (1815) in Selected Prose, ed. John O. Hayden (London, 1988), p. 395. 5 Pope, The second epistle of the second book of Horace, in Imitations of Horace, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), pp. 164–87; 175–7, ll. 157–66. 6 Joseph Spence, An Essay on Mr. Pope’s Odyssey, in Five Dialogues, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London, 1737) vol. 1, p. 40; Jonathan Richardson, Two Discourses (London, 1719), p. 89. 7 Pope to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu [1718], in The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), vol. 1, pp. 505–8, 505.

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Ibid., pp. 505–6. Pope to Mrs . . . . [addressee unknown], [September 1717?], in Sherburn, Correspondence, vol. 1, pp. 431–2, 432. Pope to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in Sherburn, Correspondence, pp. 505–8, 507. Alexander Pope, ‘An essay on criticism’, in Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), pp. 239–326, pp. 273–4 and note. For comparable ‘allusions’ more recently unearthed, see Kella Svetich, ‘Pope’s “Constant Remembrance”: Shakespearean allusion in An Essay on Criticism’, The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats, vol. 32, no. 2 (Spring, 2000), 347–8; Debra Leissner, ‘Pope, Petrarch and Shakespeare: Renaissance influences in Eloisa to Abelard’, Philological Quarterly, vol. 74, no. 2 (Spring, 1995), 173–87. In both cases the supposed connection is established largely thematically and so fails to persuade. For a contrast, in which a lexical connection is clinched, compare Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, ‘An allusion to Measure for Measure in The Rape of the Lock’, Notes and Queries, no. 47 (245), vol. 2 (June, 2000), 196. Pope, ‘An essay on criticism’, p. 297 and note. The Dunciad in Four Books, ed. Valerie Rumbold (London: Longman, 1999), p. 115 (i. 113–14). ‘The Dunciad, an heroic poem (1728)’, in The Poems of Alexander Pope: The Dunciad (1728) and The Dunciad Variorum (1729), ed. Valerie Rumbold (London: Longman, 2007), p. 24 (i. 45–6); ‘The Dunciad Variorum (1729)’, in Rumbold, The Poems of Alexander Pope, p. 182 (i. 55–6); Rumbold, The Dunciad in Four Books, p. 106 (i. 57–8). OED gives this second meaning as archaic, and the latest passage given in support of it, from Scott, is in fact an allusion to the passage from Pope under discussion (‘which fairly blanked the bold visage of Adam Woodcock’). OED cites neither Pope nor Shakespeare to illustrate the use of ‘blank’ as a verb. William Shakespeare, ‘The Tragedie of Hamlet’, in The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile, prepared by Charlton Hinman (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968), pp, 760–90, 776. Pope, ‘Epitaph on Mr. Rowe. In Westminster-Abbey’, in Minor Poems, ed. Norman Ault and John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 400. Despite its title, the epitaph was not used in this form in Westminster Abbey. Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn, 2 vols (Oxford University Press, 1966), vol. 1, p. 183. Pope, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, ll. 159–72. Rumbold, The Dunciad in Four Books, p. 94 and note. Ault and Butt, Minor Poems, p. 396 n. and p. 395. Ibid., p. 395. Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 135–46. Rumbold, The Dunciad in Four Books, pp. 289–90 (iv. 119–34). Rumbold, The Dunciad in Four Books, p. 263 (iii. 331–2). Pope, Prose Works, vol. 2, p. 24. Sherbo, Johnson on Shakespeare, vol. 1, pp. 94–5. Rumbold, Dunciad in Four Books, p. 306 (iv. 233–8).

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The phrase is T. W. Adorno’s: see Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein, and note in particular Bernstein’s account of the difference between ‘mass’ and ‘popular’ culture in Adorno’s thinking. For different kinds of challenges to this approach, see Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearean Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). The Works of Shakespeare, ed. Lewis Theobald, 7 vols (London, 1733–4). The most important study is Peter Seary’s Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); see also Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen, pp. 63–106. Earlier studies, still containing material of value, include R. F. Jones, Lewis Theobald, His Contribution to Scholarship (New York, 1919) and Thomas R. Lounsbury, The First Editors of Shakespeare (London, 1906). Peter Holland, ‘Modernizing Shakespeare: Nicholas Rowe and The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly 51, vol. 1 (Spring, 2000), 24–32, p. 32. Hinman, First Folio of Shakespeare, p. 741. See Nicholas Rowe, ed., The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, 8 vols (London, 1714, henceforth 1714), vol. 6, p. 242. The Works of Shakespear, 6 vols, ed. Alexander Pope (London, 1723–5; henceforth: 1725), vol. 5, p. 526. Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1972), p. 23. William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 1104. Macbeth, ed. A. R. Braunmuller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 119. 1725, vol. 2, p. 12; The Merchant of Venice, ed. M. M. Mahood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 80; Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto, ed. Michael J. B. Allen and Kenneth Muir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 453. The crux had produced numerous anonymous attempts at improvement. The first Folio reads ‘Trassell’ (Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories and Tragedies [London, 1623], p. 163); the second of 1632 reads ‘Tarssell’ (Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories and Tragedies [London, 1632], p. 165); the third of 1664, ‘Tassell’ (Mr. William Shakespear’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies [London, 1664], p. 165); the fourth, ‘Tassel’ (Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories and Tragedies [London, 1685], p. 148.) Hinman, First Folio of Shakespeare, p. 250; 1725, vol. 2, p. 376. 1725, vol. 6, p. 437. For a sympathetic view of the intervention in Macbeth, at least, see A. D. J. Brown, ‘The little fellow has done wonders: Pope as Shakespeare editor’, Cambridge Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 2 (1992), 120–49, p. 126. A. D. J. Brown, in his valuable and extensive study of Pope’s edition of Shakespeare, suggests that ‘it seems from the evidence of Pope’s correspondence that he took as the basis of his editing, Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare. However, this does not imply that Rowe was a “copy text” with the importance that term implies today’ (Brown, ‘Alexander Pope’s edition of Shakespeare: An introduction’. The author has made this work available online at the following address: http://www.adjb.net/popes_shakespeare/). Brown’s remark correctly

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points out that in so far as ‘copy-text’ implies a strict and coherent editorial rationale, Rowe’s edition is not a copy-text for Pope. All that is implied by use of the phrase here is that Rowe’s 1714 text forms the default basis for Pope’s edition. In many cases, Pope does not notice instances where Rowe deviates, for example from the first Folio, except where he considers there to be some defect in the text supplied by Rowe and, therefore, actively searches in older copies for an alternative reading. Marina Tarlinskaja, Shakespeare’s Verse: Iambic Pentameter and the Poet’s Idiosyncrasies (New York: Peter Lang, 1987); George T. Wright, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Hinman, First Folio of Shakespeare, p. 746. 1725, vol. 5, p. 545. Sherbo, Johnson on Shakespeare, vol. 2, pp. 773–4. 1725, vol. 5, p. 273. 1725, vol. 2, p. 99; 1714, vol. 2, p. 12. 1725, vol. 5, p. 559; 1714, vol. 6, p. 268. For this dispute, see Joseph Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Works of Shakespeare, ed. L. Theobald, 7 vols (London, 1733, henceforth 1733), vol. 1, p. 6. 1733, vol. 5, p. 10. 1714, vol. 6, p. 360. 1725, p. 416. Hinman, First Folio of Shakespeare, p. 777, l. 2251; Allen and Muir, Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto, p. 640; H. H. Furness, ed. Hamlet (Philadelphia, 1877 [A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, 3–4]), p. 272; 1637. sig. H2r; 1676, p. 49; The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (London, 1703; repr. 1969), p. 46; Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: A Tragedy (London, 1718; repr. 1969), p. 62. Lewis Theobald, Shakespeare Restored (London, 1726), p. 97. The interpretation above was first put forward in Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen, pp. 66–7. Peter Seary, Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1990), p. 234. 1725, vol. 5, p. 143. The Tragedy of Coriolanus, ed. R. B. Parker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 244 and note. 1725, vol. 4, p. 7. For Warburton’s much-reviled but fascinating edition, see Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen, pp. 107–28; R. B. McKerrow, ‘The treatment of Shakespeare’s text by his earlier editors (1709–1768)’, in Studies in Shakespeare: British Academy Lectures, ed. P. Alexander (Oxford, 1964), pp. 103–31; Brian Vickers, Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage 1733–1752 (London, 1975), p. 15; Arthur Sherbo, The Birth of Shakespeare Studies (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1986), p. 12; D. N. Smith, Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1928), p. 44; Allardyce Nicoll, ‘The editors of Shakespeare from first folio to Malone’, in 1623–1923: Studies in the First Folio, ed. Israel Gollancz (London, 1924), p. 174. See Timpanaro, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann (Florence, 1963); P. O. Kristeller, ‘The Lachmann method: Merits and limitations’, Text, vol. 1 (1984), 11–20. Pope, Prose Works, vol. 2, p. 23

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For Pope and Betterton see Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 89–93, p. 92. 65 Pope, Prose Works, vol. 2, p. 16 66 Ibid., p. 24. 67 Ibid., p. 14. 68 Ibid., p. 21 69 Ibid., p. 20–1. 70 Marcus Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 [Cambridge studies in eighteenth-century English literature and thought, 35]), p. 129. 71 Pope, Prose Works, vol. 2, p. 25. 72 Ibid., p. 24. 73 W. W. Greg, ‘The rationale of copy-text’, in Collected Papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 374–91; Fredson Bowers, On Editing Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Dramatists (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1955); G. Thomas Tanselle, Textual Criticism since Greg: A Chronicle 1950–1985 (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1987); A Rationale of Textual Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). 74 The history of textual criticism since the fracturing of the New Bibliographical consensus is too large a subject to be fully annotated here; some of the most important work is represented by Jerome McGann’s theory of social editing developed in A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) and his edited collection Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), with a debate subsequently carried on with the bibliographer T. H. Howard-Hill in the pages of Text; and by the radical nominalism of Random Clod (also known under other names, such as Randall McLeod), ‘Information on information’, Text, vol. 5 (1991), 241–82. 75 R. B. McKerrow, ‘The treatment of Shakespeare’s text by his earlier editors, 1709–1768’, in Studies in Shakespeare: British Academy Lectures, ed. P. Alexander, (London, 1964), pp. 103–31 (p. 110). 76 For the second, third and fourth Folios, see Matthew W. Black and Matthias Shaaber, Shakespeare’s Seventeenth-Century Editors, 1632–1685 (London: Oxford University Press, 1937). 77 Pope, Prose Works, vol. 2, p. 25. 78 Conyers Middleton, Remarks, Paragraph by Paragraph, upon the Proposals Lately Published by Richard Bentley, for a New Edition of the Greek Testament and Latin Version (London, 1721), p. 18. 79 1714, vol. 6, p. 346; 1725, vol. 6, p. 51. 80 Hinman, First Folio of Shakespeare, p. 773; The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, by William Shakespeare (London, 1605), n. p. 81 The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1605), n.p. 82 The Works of Shakespeare, ed. Lewis Theobald, 7 vols (London, 1733), vol. 7, p. 284; The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Johnson, 8 vols (London, 1765), vol. 8, p. 206

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James McLaverty, Pope, Print and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); David Foxon, revised and ed. James McLaverty, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 84 The Division of the Kingdoms, ed. Michael Warren and Gary Taylor (Oxford, 1983). 85 David Bevington, ‘Determining the indeterminate: The Oxford Shakespeare’, in Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 38 (1987), 501–24 (p. 506). 86 For eighteenth-century attitudes to the possibility that Shakespeare revised his works, see Grace Ioppolo, ‘ “Old” and “new” revisionists: Shakespeare’s eighteenth-century editors’, Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 52 (1989), 347–61. 87 1725, vol. 3, p. 7. 88 1714, vol. 7, p. 12. Hinman, First Folio of Shakespeare, p. 792 (‘Our potencie made good’); Allen and Muir, Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto, p. 666. 89 Allen and Muir, Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto, p. 703; Hinman, First Folio of Shakespeare, p. 816 (‘That she for-did her selfe’). 90 Hinman, First Folio of Shakespeare, p. 804; Allen and Muir, Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto, p. 684; M. VViliam Shake-speare, His True Chronicle History of the Life and Death of King Lear, and His Three Daughters (London, 1608 [i.e. 1619]), n.p.; 1725, vol. 3, p. 56. 91 Brown, ‘Alexander Pope’s edition of Shakespeare’, chapter 6. 92 1725, vol. 3, p. 53 and note. 93 True Chronicle History of the Life and Death of King Lear (London, 1608 [i.e. 1619]), n.p. See Allen and Muir, Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto, pp. 682–3. 94 True Chronicle History of the Life and Death of King Lear (London, 1608 [i.e. 1619]), n.p.; see Allen and Muir, Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto, p. 690. 95 The First Quarto of King Lear, ed. Jay L. Halio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 94. 96 For two older studies of Pope’s edition as a mirror of his taste, see John Butt, Pope’s Taste in Shakespeare (London: Oxford University Press, 1936) and Wolfgang Kowalk, Popes Shakespeare-Ausgabe als Spiegel seiner Kunstauffassung (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1975). 97 Vol. 1, p. 157. 98 Prose Works, vol. 2, p. 25 99 1725, vol. 2, p. 498. 100 For a development of some of the consequences of this argument, see Jarvis, ‘An undeleter for criticism’, Diacritics, vol. 32, no. 1 (Spring 2002), 3–18. 101 For Pope’s Shakespeare and Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry (London, 1702; many subsequent editions), see P. Dixon, ‘Edward Bysshe and Pope’s Shakespear’, Notes and Queries, vol. 11 (1964), 292–3; and ‘Pope’s Shakespeare’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 63 (1964), 191–203. 102 1725, vol. 2, p. 213. 103 Ibid., p. 248, p. 249. 104 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 320. 105 On the unexpectedness of some of Pope’s selections, see Brown, ‘The little fellow has done wonders’, p. 128.

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1725, vol. 4, p. 402. Ibid., p. 428. 108 1725, vol. 1, p. 432. 109 1725, vol. 2, p. 217: ‘If ever you have look’d on better days;/ ‘If ever been where bells have knoll’d to church;/ ‘If ever sate at any good man’s feast;/’If ever from your eyelids wip’d a tear,/ ‘And know what ‘tis to pity, and be pitied;/ Let gentleness my strong enforcement be, . . .’ The commas have begun before the anaphora, but once again end where it ends. 110 1725, vol. 1, pp. 542–3. 111 Alexander Pope, The Odyssey of Homer, Books I-XII, ed. Maynard Mack (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), vol. 1, p. 340 (x. 26). 112 1723–5, vol. 1, p. 120. 113 Pope, Prose Works, vol. 2, p. 14. 114 1725, vol. 6, p. 197. 115 Ibid., p. 541. 116 Ibid., p. 71. 117 1725, vol. 1, p. 155. 118 Ibid., p. 156. 119 1725, vol. 2, p. 93. 120 1725, vol. 1, pp. 156–7. 121 1725, vol. 4, p. 452. 122 1725, vol. 1, p. 60. 123 1725, vol. 5, p. 399. 124 Pope, ‘Epistle to Cobham’, in Epistles to Several Persons (Moral Essays), ed. F. W. Bateson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), p. 18 (ll. 41–50). 125 Fred Parker, ‘Sworn to no master’: Pope’s scepticism in the Epistle to Bolingbroke and An Essay on Man’, in Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne and Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 137. 126 Pope, Epistle; An Essay on Man, ed. Maynard Mack (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), p. 60 (ii. 35–6). 127 Mack, Pope, An Essay on Man, pp. 44–5 (i. 238–9). 107

Chapter 3 1

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The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1958– ), IX: A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. Mary Lascelles (1971), p. 25. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Together with Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson’s Diary of a Journey into North Wales, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. and enlarged L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–50), V, pp. 115–16. See also Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 1773, ed. Frederick A Pottle and Charles H. Bennett (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), p. 84, and Johnson to Hester Thrale (21 September 1773), The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992–4), II, p. 64. Pat Rogers, Johnson and Boswell: The Transit of Caledonia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 52.

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See Jack Lynch, ‘The dignity of an ancient: Johnson edits the editors’, in Comparative Excellence: New Essays on Shakespeare and Johnson, ed. Eric Rasmussen and Aaron Santesso (New York: AMS Press, 2007), pp. 97–114; Marcus Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 165–8. See The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, VII–VIII: Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo (1968), vol. 1, p. 61 (further references are given in the text); Johnson to Thomas Warton, 14 April 1758, Letters, vol. 1, p. 162. Steevens’ work on the revised edition is mentioned to Richard Farmer (21 March 1770 and 18 February 1771) and Thomas Warton (23 June 1770); Letters, vol. 1, pp. 335, 341, 355. Reviews of the first Johnson–Steevens edition gave credit chiefly to Steevens, in spite of the 84 new and 486 revised notes which Johnson contributed (as well as a revised ‘Preface’). See Arthur Sherbo, Samuel Johnson, Editor of Shakespeare, with an Essay on The Adventurer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), pp. 102–13. See also Critical Review, vol. XXXVI (1773), pp. 345–58, 402–16; Monthly Review, vol. XLIX (1773), pp. 419–24; T. J. Monaghan, ‘Johnson’s additions to his Shakespeare for the edition of 1773’, Review of English Studies, n. s. 4, vol. 15 (1953), 234–48; Arthur Sherbo, ‘1773: The year of revision’, EighteenthCentury Studies, vol. 7 (1973), 18–39. William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, 2nd edn, 4 vols (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1834), vol. 1, p. 50. Cited in Birkbeck, Boswell’s Life, App. D, V, p. 504. Pottle and Bennett, Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, p. 84. The witches were generally treated as ‘ridiculous farce’ until the mid-nineteenth century. See Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Macbeth (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1978), pp. 8–9. Johnson to Boswell (4 July 1774) and Hester Thrale (21 September 1773), Letters, vol. 2, pp. 145, 78. Birkbeck, Boswell’s Life, V, p. 129, App. D, V, p. 511; Johnson, Yale, vol. 9, p. 27 and n. 4. The Johnson–Steevens Edition of the Plays of William Shakespeare, 12 vols, 1778 (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1995), vol. 4, p. 472. Steevens earlier notes that ‘Dr. Johnson observes in his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, that part of Calder castle, from which Macbeth drew his second title, is still remaining’ (vol. 4, p. 462). See also Johnson, Letters, vol. 2, p. 65, n.15; Yale, vol. 9, p. 26. Boswell’s Life, vol. 2, p. 106; Bruce Redford, Designing the Life of Johnson: The Lyell Lectures in Bibliography, 2001–2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 84–6. Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992; repr. 2001), p. 14. Since Johnson’s division of acts and scenes differs from that of modern editors, and he provides no line numbers, act, scene, and line references in the text are to The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). The Shakespearean text itself and Johnson’s annotations to it are (unless otherwise stated) directly cited from his 1765 edition. The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Johnson, 8 vols. (London: for J. and R. Tonson etc., 1765), vol. 5, p. 479. Further references are given in the text.

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See, for instance, Twelfth Night (1765, vol. 2, pp. 366–7); King Lear (1765, vol. 6, pp. 35–6). John Kerrigan, ‘Revision, adaptation, and the Fool’, in The Division of the Kingdom: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear, ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 195–245, 217. On the Fool’s treatment in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 6 vols, ed. Brian Vickers (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974–81), vol. 4, pp. 16–21; Stephen Orgel, ‘Johnson’s Lear’, in Comparative Excellence, pp. 181–202 (pp. 185–6). Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), ed. Anne McDermott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), available on CD-Rom. Further references are to this edition. Johnson, Life of Milton, Lives of the Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vol. 1, p. 249. Johnson may have been prompted to this celebrated phrase by the note which Warburton supplied to his best-known emendation of Hamlet: ‘Hamlet is perpetually moralizing’. Of the ‘noble emendation’ itself (from ‘a good kissing carrion’ to ‘a God, kissing carrion’), Johnson comments that it ‘almost sets the critick on a level with the authour’ (1765, vol. 8, pp. 188–9). See James Boswell the younger, ‘Essay on the phraseology and metre of Shakspeare and his contemporaries’, in The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare, with the Corrections and Illustration of Various Commentators, ed. Edmond Malone and James Boswell the younger, 21 vols (London: for F. C. and J. Rivington etc., 1821), vol. 1, pp. 536–77; Paul Bertram, White Spaces in Shakespeare: The Development of the Modern Text (Cleveland, OH: Bellflower Press, 1981), pp. 18–22. See, for instance, Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, pp. 126–32; Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 64–7. Having cut four lines from The Winter’s Tale, Warburton explains that this ‘infamous, senseless ribaldry, stuck in by some profligate player’, has been ‘cashier’d’; ‘[I] hope no learned critick, or fine lady, will esteem this a castrated edition, for our having now and then on the same necessity, and after having given fair notice, taken the same liberty.’ The Works of Shakespear, ed. William Warburton, 8 vols (London: for J. and P. Knapton etc., 1747), vol. 3, p. 287. For similar notes, see, for example, vol. 3, pp. 42–3, 206, 376, 397. Arthur M. Eastman, ‘In defense of Dr. Johnson’, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 8 (1957), 493–500 (p. 499). See Bernice W. Kliman, ‘Samuel Johnson and Tonson’s 1745 Shakespeare: Warburton, anonymity, and the Shakespeare wars’, in Reading Readings: Essays on Shakespeare Editing in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Joanna Gondris (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1998), pp. 299–317. See The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, III–V: The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (1969), vol. 5, pp. 65–70, 125–9 (pp. 67–9); ‘Preface to Shakespeare’, Yale, vol. 7, pp. 65, 67. Johnson to Thomas Birch (22 June 1756) and Thomas Warton (14 April 1758, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 135, 162. See Sherbo, Johnson, Editor of Shakespeare, pp. 8–10.

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William Kenrick, ‘On Johnson’s Preface’ (1765), in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, vol. 5, p. 184; The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, II: The Idler and the Adventurer, ed. W. J. Bate, John M. Bullitt and L. F. Powell (1963), p. 3. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, XVIII: Johnson on the English Language, ed. Gwin J. Kolb and Robert DeMaria, Jr. (2005), ‘Preface to the Dictionary’, p. 96. See too the ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ on the playwright’s ‘diligent selection out of common conversation, and common occurrences’ (Yale, vol. 7, p. 63). Samuel Johnson, Introduction (1774) to The Harleian Miscellany: or, a collection of scarce, curious, and entertaining pamphlets and tracts, as well in manuscript and print, found in the late Earl of Oxford’s library. Interspersed with historical, political, and critical notes, in Samuel Johnson’s Prefaces and Dedications, ed. Allen T. Hazen (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1937; repr. 1973), pp. 54, 57. Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, p. 169. Arthur Sherbo and Anne McDermott have shown that definitions of words in the Dictionary sometimes resemble editorial glosses of the quotation which is supposed to exemplify them and that Johnson makes the odd attempt at Shakespearean emendation. Sherbo, Johnson, Editor of Shakespeare, p. 6; Anne McDermott, ‘Johnson’s editing of Shakespeare in the Dictionary’, in Comparative Excellence, pp. 115–38; ‘The defining language: Johnson’s Dictionary and Macbeth’, Review of English Studies, vol. 44 (1993), 512–38 (p. 524). For a recent explanation of why Johnson failed to make use of Garrick’s library in order to arrive at a new collation of the quartos and folios, see Tiffany Stern, ‘ “I do wish that you had mentioned Garrick”: The absence of Garrick in Johnson’s Shakespeare’, Comparative Excellence, pp. 71–96. Garrick is, in fact, mentioned once: in a note to Hamlet, Johnson writes that ‘Mr. Garrick produced me a passage, I think, in Brantôme’ – a passage which changed the editor’s mind about the Danish habit of swearing oaths on swords (1765, vol. 8, p. 171). Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, p. 82. See Arthur M. Eastman, ‘The texts from which Johnson printed his Shakespeare’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 49 (1950), 182–91. See Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, pp. 73–4. The Works of Mr William Shakespear, ed. Alexander Pope, 6 vols (London: for Jacob Tonson, 1725), Preface, vol. 1, p. xxii. The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, 10 vols (London: for C. Bathurst, etc., 1773), vol. 4, pp. 459–60. See also Johnson-Steevens ed. [1778], vol. 4, p. 253. For a similar metrical intervention see Macbeth, 1765, vol. 6, p. 433. On Theobald’s habit of ‘correcting Shakespeare “from himself” ’, see Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, pp. 145–9. See Lynch, ‘The dignity of an ancient’, pp. 107–8. See too, for instance, The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1765, vol. 2, p. 473. See Samuel Johnson, Life of Savage, ed. Clarence Tracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. xxxi–ii. See, for instance, the following notes, reproduced (and often disputed) in Johnson’s edition: As You Like It, 1765, vol. 2, pp. 24, 71, 82; Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1765, vol. 2, p. 170; The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1765, vol. 2, pp. 547–8; Much Ado About Nothing, 1765, vol. 2, p. 239; All’s Well That Ends Well, 1765, vol. 3, p. 287.

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59 60

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The Plays of William Shakspeare, ed. Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, rev. ed., 15 vols (London: for T. Longman etc., 1793), vol. 9, pp. 349–50. See, for instance, King Richard II, ed. Peter Ure (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 127. On Johnson’s uneasy combination of two editorial traditions, see Jean I. Marsden, The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), pp. 122–6. Arthur Murphy, An Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1792), repr. in Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill, 2 vols (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), vol. 1, p. 439. Boswell’s Life, vol. 1, p. 95. See, for instance, the Arden edition: Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London and New York: Routledge, 1989, repr. 1990), p. 277 n. Johnson–Steevens ed. [1778], vol. 10, pp. 274–5. See, for instance, Yale, vol. 7, pp. 84–5. Johnson commended Richard Farmer’s Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare (1767), which argued that Shakespeare obtained most of his classically inflected passages ‘from accidental quotations, or by oral communication’ (Yale, vol. 7, p. 85): ‘He remembered perhaps enough of his school-boy learning to put the Hig, hag, hog into the mouth of Sir Hugh Evans; and might pick up in the Writers of the time or the course of his conversation a familiar phrase or two of French or Italian: but his Studies were most demonstratively confined to Nature and his own Language.’ Farmer, in Vickers, Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, vol. 5, p. 278. For Johnson’s praise of this essay, see Boswell’s Life, vol. 3, pp. 38–9, n. 6. Boswell’s Life, vol. 2, p. 464. To Hester Thrale, 16 May 1776, Letters, vol. 2, p. 332. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, VI: Poems, ed. E. L. McAdam Jr., with George Milne (1964; repr. 1975), London, l. 77. Lives, ed. Lonsdale, vol. 1, p. 110. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, XVI: Rasselas and Other Tales, ed. Gwin J. Kolb (1990), p. 175. Further references are given in the text. Rambler 156 (Yale, vol. 5, p. 69); ‘Preface to Shakespeare’, Yale, vol. 7, p. 74; Othello, 1765, vol. 8, p. 456. ‘There are two things which I am confident I can do very well: one is an introduction to any literary work, stating what it is to contain, and how it should be executed in the most perfect manner; the other is a conclusion, shewing from various causes why the execution has not been equal to what the authour promised to himself and to the publick’ (Boswell’s Life, vol. 1, p. 292). The ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ acts, according to these terms, as both introduction and conclusion. For other notes on intentional Shakespearean blunders, see The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1765, vol. 2, p. 459; II Henry IV, 1765, vol. 4, p. 279. Donald T. Siebert Jr., ‘The scholar as satirist: Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, vol. 15 (1975), 483–503 (p. 495). Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, V: 1765–1774 (1979), pp. 179, 187 n. G. F. Parker, Johnson’s Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989; repr. 2001), pp. 19–20. Parker, Johnson’s Shakespeare, p. 21.

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Notes 62 63 64 65

66 67

68

69 70 71

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74

75

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78 79

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Johnson to Boswell (8 December 1763), Letters, vol. 1, pp. 239, 237. Johnsonian Miscellanies, vol. 2, p. 307. Boswell’s Life, vol. 1, p. 496. See also Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, ‘NATURE’, especially senses 4 and 5. Rambler 168 (Yale, vol. 5, p. 127). For a commentary on how this passage has been misread, see Jacob H. Adler, ‘ “He that imagines this” ’, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 11 (1960), 225–8. Lady Knight thought that ‘the character of Dr. Johnson can never be better summed up’ than in his description of the astronomer (see Johnsonian Miscellanies, vol. 2, pp. 175–6 and n.) For Imlac as an authorial self–portrait, see Boswell’s Life, vol. 3, p. 6. Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, ‘MANLY’, sense 1. Kerrigan, ‘Revision, adaptation, and the Fool’, p. 225. Robert Scholes, ‘Dr Johnson and the bibliographical criticism of Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 11 (1960), 163–71 (p. 169). See Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (New York and London: Norton, 1997), p. 509. See Shirley White Johnston, ‘Samuel Johnson’s text of King Lear: “Dull duty” reassessed’, The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 6 (1976), 80–91 (p. 85). ‘Why should a passage be darkened for the sake of changing it?’ (King Lear, 1765, vol. 6, p. 81). Compare, for instance, Lear’s speech at I. iv. 292–3 (History) and at I. iv. 278–9 (Tragedy). See also Stephen Orgel, ‘Johnson’s Lear’, pp. 182–5. See, for instance, his comment on Bardolph’s red face in Henry V (III. iv. 106–7): ‘The conception is very cold to the solitary reader, though it may be somewhat invigorated by the exhibition on the stage. This poet is always more careful about the present than the future, about his audience than his readers’ (1765, vol. 4, p. 423). See also a later comment on King Lear: ‘This passage, which some of the editors have degraded, as spurious, to the margin, and others have silently altered, I have faithfully printed according to the quarto, from which the folio differs only in punctuation. The passage is very obscure, if not corrupt. [. . .] I have at least supplied the genuine reading of the old copies’ (1765, vol. 6, pp. 59–60; The Tragedy of King Lear, II.ii.157–64). See Eastman, ‘Johnson’s Shakespeare and the Laity’, pp. 1115–21. James G. McManaway, ‘Textual studies’, Shakespeare Survey, vol. 2 (1949), 145–53 (p. 150); G. B. Harrison, ‘A note on Coriolanus’, in Joseph Quincy Adams: Memorial studies, ed. James G. McManaway, Giles E. Dawson and Edwin E. Willoughby (Washington: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948), pp. 239–52 (p. 249). The Tragedie of King Lear: The First Folio of 1623 and A Parallel Modern Edition, ed. Nick de Somogyi (London: Nick Hern Books, 2004), p. 11. Bertram, White Spaces, p. 72. The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), l. 156; Yale, vol. 6, p. 99. The Tragedy of King Lear, ed. Jay Halio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 107.

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222 84

85

86 87 88

89 90 91

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95 96

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M. P. Jackson, ‘Fluctuating variation: Author, annotator, or actor?’, in The Division of the Kingdoms, pp. 313–49 (p. 337). See King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition, ed. René Weis (London and New York: Longman, 1993), pp. 60–3. Strangely, in the 1773 Johnson–Steevens edition, the choices of the 1765 edition are themselves neatly reversed: Kent is made to say first, according to the quarto, ‘Reverse thy doom’; second, according to the folio, ‘Revoke thy gift’. Johnson–Steevens ed. (1773), vol. 9, pp. 359–60. Jackson, ‘Fluctuating variation’, p. 338. Boswell’s Life, vol. 1, p. 73; vol. 2, pp. 40, 326–7. See Peter Holland, ‘Playing Johnson’s Shakespeare’, in Comparative Excellence, pp. 1–23 (p. 17). Johnsonian Miscellanies, I, 457, 248. The Tragedie of King Lear, ed. de Somogyi, p. 155. Works of William Shakespear, ed. Pope, vol. 3, p. 87; The Works of Shakespeare, ed. Lewis Theobald, 7 vols (London: for A. Bettesworth, 1733), vol. 5, p. 194; Warburton, Works of Shakespear, vol. 6, p. 116. T. S. Eliot, ‘Reflections on vers libre’, in To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings, new edn (London: Faber, 1978), pp. 183–9 (p. 187). Philip Brockbank, Introduction to New Arden edition, ‘Lineation’. Cited in Bertram, White Spaces, p. 67. Mark Womack, ‘Shakespearean prosody unbound’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 45 (2003) 1–19 (p. 12). The Vanity of Human Wishes, l. 122, Yale, vol. 6, p. 96; 1765, vol. 5, p. 462. Henry VIII, IV.ii.5–75. In a letter to Hester Thrale (30 September 1773), written during the Scottish tour, Johnson noted: ‘I keep a book of remarks, and Boswel writes a regular journal of our travels, which, I think, contains as much of what I say and do, as of all other occurrences together. – “For such a faithful Chronicler as Griffith.” ’ Letters, vol. 2, p. 95. Boswell’s Life, vol. 4, p. 400.

Chapter 4 1

2

3

4

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Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 1, 6. Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 187–8; Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 97. Peter Martin, Edmond Malone: Shakespearean Scholar. A Literary Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 134. In an essay in the 1790 variorum, ‘Shakspeare, Ford, and Jonson’, vol. 1, pp. 387–414. The Works of Shakespeare, ed. Lewis Theobald, 7 vols (London, 1733), vol. 1. pp. xl–xli. This is one of a number of passages which Warburton claimed to have written for Theobald’s Preface. See Peter Seary’s argument that ‘Theobald may be safely credited with the statements of editorial principle found in his

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Preface’ (Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990], pp. 221–30. I discuss the supersession of aesthetic editorial judgments in my Shakespeare, Milton and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), especially pp. 114, 132–3, 145–9, 156, 174–5. Review of Benjamin Heath’s Revisal of Shakespeare’s Text, Critical Review, 19 (1765); ascribed to Steevens by Brian Vickers, and reprinted in his Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 6 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974–81), vol. 4, pp. 565–73 (p. 573). Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare (1790), vols 1, i. p. liv. Pope to Jacob Tonson Jr, 16 or 23 May 1722 (The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 118. Johnson on Shakespeare, Volumes VII and VIII of the Yale edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968), vol. 1. p. 106. See Mr. William Shakespeare, His Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, 10 vols (London, 1768), vol. 1, p. 20; Prolusions, or, Select Pieces of Antient Poetry (London, 1760), vol. 1. Plays and Poems (1790), I. i. 8–9. Sherbo, Johnson on Shakespeare, vol. 1, pp. 51–2. Plays and Poems (1790), vols 1. i, p. x. It should be said that the Samuel Johnson of 1756 is a straw man; the Johnson who completed the edition of 1765 had rejected most of these ascribed views. Malone’s differentiation of himself from his predecessors is in fact more broadly overstated. Theobald, for instance, regrets the absence of authorial manuscripts, but does not blackguard the player editors. Plays and Poems (1790), vols 1, i, p. xi. Plays and Poems (1790), vols 1, i, p. xiii. Malone was fully aware, either from his own logical deduction, or from his awareness of the classical textual theory of his time, that a second or later edition of a printed book might derive authority from inclusion of authorial revision, or derivation from another, potentially superior, textual tradition, ‘from its being printed with the author’s last corrections, or from some more correct manuscript of his work than that from which the first edition was printed’ (Letter to the Rev. Richard Farmer [1792], p. 18). Plays and Poems (1790), vols 1, i, pp. xiii–xvii. The Merry Wives of Windsor, and King Henry V. Like all his predecessors, Malone had no knowledge of the first Quarto (?1603) of Hamlet, which would be discovered only in 1823, among the papers of the Duke of Devonshire. Plays and Poems (1790), vols 1, i, p. xix. As ever, Malone is not content with mere assertion of that ignorance, but demonstrates it in detail through a substantial portion of the Preface (vols 1, i, p. xx–xlii). The instances of the 1632 editor’s ignorance of Shakespeare’s metre, as Ritson would point out, are less persuasive. Malone’s practice did not bear out this claim: his text of Hamlet 1. 1. 118, for instance, reads, ‘Disasters dimm’d the sun.’ Q2 reads, ‘Disasters in the sun.’ Malone remarks, ‘for the emendation I am responsible’ (Plays and Poems [1790], vol. 9, p. 190), but in fact it had already appeared in Capell’s text (p. 7).

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224 21

22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32

33

34 35 36 37

38 39

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Letter to Warburton, 8 April 1729 (John Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century [1817], vol. 2, pp. 209–10); see also Lewis Theobald, Shakespeare Restored (1726), p. 165. For a typical example of his justification of Shakespearean obscurities against Pope’s emendations, see his note on ‘loggats’ (Hamlet, 5. 1. 88; Theobald, Works of Shakespeare (1733), vol. 7, p. 347. Plays and Poems (1790), vol. 1, i, p. xliii. Ibid., pp. liv–lv. Malone makes an analogous claim in his letter to Percy, 28 September 1786: ‘I am at present printing the sixth and seven volumes. . . . I hope not to omit a single note that has ever been written on our author, that is worth preservation. I have been equally diligent not to insert superfluous, fanciful, or controversial ones: in consequence of which care, Warburton has been almost turned out of doors’ (The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Edmond Malone, ed. Arthur Tillotson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1944), p. 34. Plays and Poems (1790), vol. 9, pp. 369–70. Ibid., p. 203. British Critic, vol. 3 (1794), p. 645; 6 (1795), p. 300. Plays and Poems (1790), vols I, i., p. xliv. English Review, vol. 3 (1784), pp. 178–9. Plays and Poems (1790), vols I, i., pp. lxix–lxxi. Theobald, Shakespeare Restored, p. 133. The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. VII: The Iliad of Homer, Bks I–IX, ed. Maynard Mack et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 82. Plays and Poems (1790), vols 1, i, p. lvii. Malone expresses himself more forcibly on the subject in a letter to Percy of 28 June 1808: ‘what have the idle gentlemen of the town to do with first folios or any folio of Shakspeare?—It is very pleasant, however, to hear some of them talk upon the subject:—“Ay, now we shall have the true thing, and perfectly understand this great author, without being bewildered by the commentators.” —I would like to see a paraphrase by some of these gentlemen, on six pages of the first folio, after having been shut up for 12 hours in a room with this volume, and without any other book. It would probably be a very curious performance’ (Tillotson, The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Edmond Malone, p. 242). For discussion of this argument, see my ‘Profession and authority: The interpretation of the Bible in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Literature and Theology, vol. 9 (1995), 383–98. Sherbo, Johnson on Shakespeare, vol. 1, p. 87. Plays and Poems (1790), vols I, i, pp. 262–4. Ibitd., pp. 264–6. R. A. Foakes, for instance, assigns the play to 1595–6, affirming that ‘the best evidence for dating this play remains . . . its nature and style, for it shares with a group of plays written about 1594–7 the mastery of lyrical drama achieved by Shakespeare in the mid 1590s’ (Introduction to the New Cambridge Midsummer Night’s Dream (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 1. Plays and Poems (1790), vols I, i, pp. 291–2. Modern editors, using similar evidence and arguments, think 1591 more likely; see also T. S. Dorsch, New Cambridge Comedy of Errors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 1.

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Notes 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61

62

63

64

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Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), vol. 3, p. 18. For example, at Plays and Poems (1790), vols I, i, pp. 124–30. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 103, 118, 133. Ibid., pp. 105–6, 106–7, 126. Ibid., pp. 105, 132, 134. Ibid., pp. 105, 131–2, 155–7. Ibid., p. lxiii. Plays and Poems (1821), vol. 2, pp. 69–70. Ibid., pp. 119–49. Plays and Poems (1790), vols I, ii, p. 81. Ibid., vols 1, ii, pp. 48, 145, 149, 172–3. The manuscript of Herbert’s Office book is now lost; Malone’s transcription is our only record. Ibid., pp. 325–9. Ibid., pp. 66–88. Ibid., pp. 133–57, 180–220, 221–87. Ibid., pp. 387–414. Ibid., pp. 388. Inquiry, pp. 15, 18. Ibid., pp. 22–3. Ibid., pp. 76, 82, 104, 126, 177–8, 213, 234, 306, 312. ‘Dissertation upon the epistles of Phalaris’, appended to the second edition of William Wotton’s Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (London, 1697); Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris. With an Answer to the Objections of the Honourable Charles Boyle (London, 1699). For an extended discussion of this theoretical issue, with particular regard to interpretative editing, see my ‘Hypotheses, evidence, editing, and explication’, Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 29 (1999), 24–42. See, for example, J. G. Herder, The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, trans. J. Marsh, 2 vols (Burlington, Vermont, 1833), vol. 1, p. 28; vol. 2, p. 228. Address to the Public, on the Publication of the First Volume of his New Translation of the Bible (London, 1793), p. 5. The positions against which I argue here are among those adumbrated by de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim, pp. 93, 98, 111.

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Levine, Joseph M., The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Lewis, Jayne, and Maximillian E. Novak, eds, Enchanted Ground: Reimagining John Dryden (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2004). Mack, Maynard, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). Malone, Edmond, A Dissertation on the Three Parts of Henry VI, Tending to shew that those plays were not Written Originally by Shakspeare (London, 1787). —, Letter to the Rev. Richard Farmer, D.D. Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge; Relative to the Edition of Shakspeare, Published in MCCXC, and some Late Criticisms on that Work (London, 1792). —, An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments, Published Dec. 24, MDCCXCV. and Attributed to Shakspeare, Queen Elizabeth and Henry, Earl of Southampton (London, 1796). —, An Account of the Incidents, from which the Title and Part of the Story of Shakspeare’s Tempest were Derived; and its True Date Ascertained (London, 1808). —, The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Edmond Malone, ed. Arthur Tillotson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1944). —, The Correspondence of James Boswell with David Garrick, Edmund Burke, and Edmond Malone, ed. Peter S. Baker et al., The Yale Edition of the Private Papers of James Boswell, Research Edition: Correspondence, vol. 4 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986). Malone, Edmond, ed., A Supplement to the Edition of Shakespeare, Published in 1778 by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, 2 vols (London, 1780). —, The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare, 10 vols in 11 (London, 1790). Malone, Edmond, and James Boswell Jr., eds, The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare, 21 vols (London, 1821). Marsden, Jean, The Re-imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995). Marsden, Jean, ed., The Appropriation of Shakespeare (London, 1991). Martin, Peter, Edmond Malone: Shakespearean Scholar. A Literary Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Murphy, Andrew, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Parker, G. F., Johnson’s Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989; repr. 2001). Pope, Alexander, ed., The Works of Mr William Shakespear, 6 vols (London, 1723–5). —, The Works of Shakespear, 8 vols (London, 1728). Rasmussen, Eric, and Aaron Santesso, eds, Comparative Excellence: New Essays on Shakespeare and Johnson (New York: AMS Press, 2007). Ritson, Joseph, Cursory Criticisms of the Edition of Shakespeare Published by Edmond Malone (London, 1792). Rowe, Nicholas, and Charles Gildon, eds, The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, 6 vols (London, 1709). Sabor, Peter, and Paul Yachnin, eds, Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). Seary, Peter, Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

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229

Sewell, George, ed., The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. The Seventh Volume (London, 1726). Sherbo, Arthur, Samuel Johnson, Editor of Shakespeare, with an Essay on The Adventurer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956). —, ‘1773: The Year of Revision’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 7 (1973), 18–39. Sherbo, Arthur, ed., The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, VII–VIII: Johnson on Shakespeare (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968). Smith, David Nichol, Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928). Taylor, Gary, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History, From the Restoration to the Present (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989). Taylor, Gary, and Michael Warren, eds, The Division of the Kingdom: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). Theobald, Lewis. Shakespeare Restored: or, a Specimen of the Many Errors, as well Committed, as Unamended, by Mr. Pope in his Late Edition of this Poet (London, 1726). Theobald, Lewis, ed., The Works of Shakespeare, 7 vols (London, 1733). Timpanaro, Sebastiano, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann (Florence: Le Monnier, 1963). Vickers, Brian, ed., Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 6 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974–81). Walsh, Marcus, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Warburton, William, ed., The Works of Shakespear, 8 vols (London: for J. and P. Knapton etc., 1747). Warren, Austin, Alexander Pope as Critic and Humanist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univesity Press, 1929). Wells, Stanley, ed., Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, Shakespeare Survey, vol. 51 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Wells, Stanley, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery, eds, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). —, The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). —, The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Winn, James Anderson, John Dryden and his World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). Zwicker, Steven N., ed., The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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Index

Abbott, E. A. 113 Addison, Joseph 10, 62, 183 Ariosto, Ludovico 34 Aristotle 15, 22, 23, 51, 90, 206 Arrowsmith, Joseph 18 Aubrey, John 190 Barber, Alderman John 76 Bateson, F. W. 113 Beaumont, Francis 38, 39, 44 Behn, Aphra 43 Benson, William 76 Bentley, Richard 37, 79, 87, 95, 164, 167, 169, 179, 196, 198 Bertram, Paul 152 Betterton, Thomas 35, 39, 40, 41, 43, 56, 91, 184 Bevington, David 2, 100, 200 Birch, Thomas 121 Blount, Thomas 189 Bodley, Sir Thomas 1 Boswell, James 11, 115–17, 132, 137, 138, 142, 154–5, 163, 183 Bowers, Fredson 93 Braudel, Fernand 25 Braunmuller, A. R. 82 Brecht, Bertolt 7 Brockbank, Philip 156 Brocklesby, Dr. 158–9 Brown, A. D. J. 101 Buckhurst, Lord see Dorset, Sixth Earl of Buckingham, Second Duke of (George Villiers) 4, 16, 19, 55–6, 57 Bullokar, William 189 Burbage, Richard 193 Burney, Charles 189 Burrow, Colin 1, 200

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Butler, Samuel 2, 76 Bysshe, Edward 104 Camden, William 184, 189 Capell, Edward 6, 11, 80, 93, 160, 161, 165–7, 169–71, 176, 178, 179, 184, 188, 197, 224 Cave, Edward 120 Cavendish, William see Newcastle, Earl (later Duke of) Chapman, George 42 Chatterton, Thomas 162 Chaucer, Geoffrey 5, 8, 22, 24, 46, 54, 63, 176 Cheselden, William 94 Chettle, Henry 189 Cibber, Colley 19, 72, 73, 91, 189 Cicero 21 Clark, Peter 14, 20 Colman, George 136 Condell, Henry 194 Congreve, William 4, 19, 24, 25, 29–31, 33, 44, 45, 55, 57, 61–2 Corneille, Pierre 21, 43 Coryat, Thomas 189 Cotgrave, Randle 189 Cotton, Charles 56 Cowler, Rosemary 66 Crowne, John 41, 43 Dante Alighieri 7 Davenant, Sir William 9, 16, 35, 38–41, 50, 55, 189, 192 De Grazia, Margreta 161–3, 197 Denham, Sir John 8, 38 Dennis, John 14, 48, 60 Descartes, René 34 Digby, Kenelm 56

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Index Dobson, Michael 2, 76 Donne, John 8, 22, 23 Dorset, Sixth Earl of (Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst) 4, 5, 18, 21, 28, 41, 55–62, 64, 201, 209, 210 Downes, John 39, 40, 41, 189 Drummond of Hawthornden, William 15 Dryden, John 2–5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12–65, 113, 157, 163, 165, 187, Absalom and Achitophel 22, 55 Aeneid, translation of 34, 36, 37, 42, 57, 61 All for Love 6, 50, 55, 64, 205 Dedication to The Rival Ladies 48 Don Sebastian 41, 44, 45, Examen Poeticum 26–7, 43 Fables 45, 54, 63 ‘Life of Plutarch’ 33 Mac Flecknoe 7, 8, 55 Of Dramatick Poesie 3, 5, 12, 48 The Tempest 40, 48, 50, 62, 64, 203 ‘To My Dear Friend Mr Congreve’ 4, 25, 29 ‘To Sir Godfrey Kneller’ 62 Troilus and Cressida 40–1, 50, 64 Dugdale, Sir William 184, 185 D’Urfey, Thomas 189 Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried 198 Eliot, T. S. 6, 7, 8, 156 Ennius 54 Etherege, Sir George 21, 25, 30, 42 Fairfax, Edward 56 Farmer, Richard 160, 163, 168, 169, 177, 184, 197, 217, 220 Farquhar, George 44, 189 Fielding, Henry 6, 7 Flecknoe, Richard 3, 17, 32, 55, 204 Fletcher, John 14, 17, 21, 25, 26, 27, 30, 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44, 48, 50, 56, 57, 63, 64, 189 Florio, John 189 Foakes, R. A. 225 Foucault, Michel 25

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231

Fowler, John 22, 24, 28, 50 Foxon, David 99 Fuller, Thomas 15, 189 Garrick, David 2, 6, 118, 155, 193, 219 Garson, Barbara 7 Gay, John 7 Geddes, Alexander 198 Goldsmith, Oliver 9 Gosson, Stephen 189 Gould, Robert 61 Greg, W. W. 93 Griffin, Dustin 60–1 Gwyn, Nell 39 Hadot, Pierre 50 Hales, John 15 Hall, John 185 Hall, Joseph 189 Halio, Jay L. 102, 153 Hammond, Paul 13, 46 Hanmer, Sir Thomas 85, 99, 121, 124, 150, 151 Harcourt, Simon Lord 68–70 Hart, Charles 17, 35, 38–9, 41–3, 52, 53 Harvey, Gabriel 189 Heminge, John 193, 194, 195 Henslowe, Philip 190, 191, 192 Herbert of Cherbury, Edward, Lord 190 Herbert, Sir Henry 190, 193 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 198 Herrick, William 184 Heywood, Thomas 189 Holland, Peter 39, 45, 80, 81 Homer 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 24, 26, 28, 29, 31, 49, 52, 54, 68, 70, 78, 106–7, 198 Horace 5, 8, 21, 26, 29, 32, 54, 56, 58, 59, 63, 67, 68, 116, 176 Hoskyns, John 56 Howard, James 40 Howard, Sir Robert 21 Hughes, John 175 Hume, Robert D. 37

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232 Ionesco, Eugene 7 Ireland, Samuel 194, 196 Ireland, William Henry 163, 194–6 Jackson, Macdonald P. 153 Jarry, Alfred 7 Jarvis, Simon 5, 7, 9, 161 Johnson, Samuel 3, 4, 5, 6, 8–11, 40, 45, 55, 59, 62, 66, 77, 78–9, 86, 94, 99, 108, 127–59, 160, 162, 164–5, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 183, 184, 187 Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage 124–5 Dictionary 119, 121, 122, 132, 135, 147, 158, 178 Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland 115–17 Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth 117 ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ 6, 120, 132–43, 179 ‘Proposals for Printing … Works of William Shakespeare’ 120, 121 Rasselas 140–1 The Idler 121 The Lives of the Poets 125, 157 The Rambler 120–1, 136–8, 139 The Vanity of Human Wishes 158 Jones, Inigo 192 Jones, Thomas 187 Jonson, Ben 2, 3, 4, 5 Juvenal 5, 13, 28, 29, 32, 47, 50, 58, 61 Kenrick, William 121, 136 Kerrigan, John 143 Killigrew, Henry 190 Killigrew, Thomas 35, 38–9, 41, 190 Lacy, John 39 Lansdowne, George Granville, lst Baron 44 Lee, Nathaniel 39 Leigh, Richard 20 Lennox, Charlotte 121 L’Estrange, Roger 19

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Index Lewis, C. S. 47 Lille, Alain de 47 Locke, Matthew 40 Longinus 63 Lonsdale, Roger 133–4, 157 Lowin, John 39, 194 Lucretius 47 Lucy, Sir Thomas 184, 186–7 Macklin, Charles 162, 194 Maizeaux, Pierre des 16 Malone, Edmond 1, 2, 11, 131, 160–99 Account of the Incidents . . . 163 ‘An Attempt to Ascertain the Order . . .’ 162, 179–83 Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley 162 ‘Historical Account of the . . . English Stage’ 188–93 Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers 194–6 John Dryden, edition of 163 Letter to the Rev. Richard Farmer 163 Sir Joshua Reynolds, edition of 163 ‘Shakspeare, Ford, and Jonson’ 193 Supplement to the Edition of Shakespeare 162, 166, 169 ‘The Life of Shakspeare’ 183–8 The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare 10, 160–93 Marston, John 189 Marvell, Andrew 16 Massinger, Philip 189 Maubert, James 15 McKenzie, D. F. 29, 45 McLaverty, James 99 Meres, Frances 1, 180, 182 Middleton, Thomas 189 Milhous, Judith 37, 40 Milton, John 2, 3, 5 Mohun, Michael 38–9, 41–2, 52, 53 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 43 Montagu, Charles 60 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 68 More, Hannah 116 Moretti, Franco 25–6, 63 Muir, Kenneth 82

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Index Mulgrave, John Sheffield, Earl of 14, 37, 65, 67 Murphy, Andrew 161 Murphy, Arthur 130, 153, 154–5 Nashe, Thomas 185 Newcastle, William Cavendish, Earl (later Duke) of 55, 56, 60 Newton, Sir Isaac 113 Oldys, John 185, 187, 193 Otway, Thomas 40, 43, 44 Overbury, Sir Thomas 189 Ovid 2, 6, 13, 19, 63, 112 Parker, G. F. 113, 136 Parker, R. B. 89 Pepys, Samuel 14, 17, 41 Percy, Thomas 189, 197 Persius 5 Polybius 13, 36 Pope, Alexander 4, 5–9, 10, 11, 14, 29, 31, 61, 66–114 Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot 75 Epistle to Burlington 70 Epistle to Cobham 112 Essay on Man 6, 113 The Dunciad 5, 6, 7, 8, 31, 72, 75, 76, 78, 79, 75, 99 The Odyssey, translation of 68, 106 The Rape of the Lock 112, 121 The Works of Shakespeare 66, 68, 73–114 Plutarch 13, 33, 36, 89 Poussin, Nicolas 68 Priest, Josiah 40 Prior, Matthew 21, 40, 58, 60 Prynne, William 189 Quinault, Philippe 43 Racine, Jean 43 Raleigh, Sir Walter 56, 67 Reed, Isaac 160, 184, 197 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 115, 163 Richardson, Jonathan 68, 94 Richardson, Samuel 10

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Ritson, Joseph 163 Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of 18, 19, 21, 53, 55, 56 Rosenmeyer, Thomas E. 47 Rowe, Nicholas 2, 44–5, 72, 73–4, 80–4, 87, 88, 93, 94–9, 101, 164, 175, 183–7, 190, 194, 197 Rymer, Thomas 4, 14, 26, 33, 36, 41–3, 56–7, 60, 63m 66, 184 Sackville, Charles see Dorset, Sixth Earl of Saint-Evremond, Charles de 16, 56 Saslow, Edward 57 Savile, Henry 19 Scholes, Robert 144 Sedley, Sir Charles 18, 21, 28, 56 Shadwell, Thomas 14, 16, 19–20, 21, 40, 43, 44, 55, 56–7 Shakespeare, William Characters Antony 112, 123, 124, 126 Bertram 83, 134 Brabantio 127 Brutus 39, 87, 89 Caliban 40 Catherine (Henry VIII) 123, 158 Chorus (Henry V ) 92 Claudio (Measure for Measure) 130–2 Claudius 83, 96, 97–8 Cleopatra 6, 8, 133, 139, 140 Cordelia 40, 101, 109, 142–3, 146–7, 148, 149, 153–4 Coriolanus 99 Cornwall 145, 149 Duncan 82, 85–6, 135 Edgar 40, 42, 102, 132 Edmund 101, 145, 147 Falstaff 39, 51, 173, 197 Ferdinand 40 Feste 118–19 Fluellen 135 Fool, the (King Lear) 6, 218 Gentleman (King Lear) 148 Gertrude 96, 97, 98–9

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Index

Shakespeare, William (Cont’d) Gloucester (King Lear) 132, 143, 147, 149 Goneril 154 Hamlet 41, 96–7, 98–9, 131, 136, 137, 154, 156, 175 Hermia 107 Helena (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) 107, 108 Henry V 127 Henry VIII 41 Iago 39, 132 Juliet 2 Kent 101, 146, 147–9, 152–3 Laertes 174 Launce 104 Lear 40, 41, 101, 148–54, 155–7 Lennox 125 Leontes 132 Macbeth 7, 9, 83, 95–7, 109, 115–17, 123, 126, 132, 135 Malcolm 82 Mercutio 41 Miranda 40 Oberon 181 Ophelia 96–7, 99, 170, 174 Othello 39, 41 Petruchio 104 Player Queen (Hamlet) 73 Polonius 9, 83, 96–7, 98, 170 Prospero 111–13 Regan 149, 154 Richard II 60 Richard III Rosalind 104 Rosencrantz 96, 97–8 Tamora 111 Timon 41 Titania 181 Wolsey 158 Witches, the (Macbeth) 40, 115–17 Plays A Midsummer Night’s Dream 41, 107, 181 Antony and Cleopatra 6, 10, 33, 41, 50, 139

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All’s Well that Ends Well 41, 83, 104, 124, 129 As You Like It 41, 104, 105 Coriolanus 41, 89 Cymbeline 41, 108–9, 110, 175 Hamlet 7, 8, 9, 38, 39, 40, 41, 71, 72, 73, 85, 88, 96–9, 129, 131, 136, 137, 169–70, 174–5, 194, 196 Henry IV, Part I 39 Henry IV, Part II 128, 129 Henry V 134, 135, 150, 155, 158, 173, 192 Henry VI 41, 163 Henry VIII 38, 41, 77, 118, 123, 158, Julius Caesar 2, 7, 16, 39, 41, 57, 90, 93 King John 41, 123, 125, 127, 157 King Lear 6, 38, 99, 100, 102, 118, 126, 132, 142–54, 194, 196 Love’s Labour’s Lost 41, 87, 110, 181, 182 Macbeth 7, 38, 40, 41, 56, 85–7, 115–17, 122–6, 134–5, 147, 156, 158–9 Measure for Measure 38, 40, 126–7, 130, 131, 132 Much Ado about Nothing 38, 40, 105–6 Othello 41, 57, 127, 132, 181 Richard II 41, 60, 129 Richard III 41, 104–5, 123 Romeo and Juliet 17, 38, 40, 181, 182, 183 The Comedy of Errors 34, 41, 105, 132, 182 The Merchant of Venice 41, 82, 182 The Merry Wives of Windsor 34, 39, 41, 124, 125, 187 The Rape of Lucrece 1, 2 The Sonnets 1, 2, 161, 162, 197 The Taming of the Shrew 41, 104, 181, 182 The Tempest 8, 34, 38, 40, 48, 50, 62, 64, 75, 87, 93, 111, 112, 163, 203

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Index The Two Gentlemen of Verona 41, 103, 104, 110, 126, 182 The Two Noble Kinsmen 40 The Winter’s Tale 41, 119, 132, 154, 181 Timon of Athens 40, 56, 93, 125, 127, 134 Troilus and Cressida 34, 40–1, 50, 64, 109, 128, 129 Twelfth Night 38, 104, 118 Venus and Adonis 1, 2 Shadwell, Thomas 14, 16, 19–20, 21, 40, 43, 44, 57 Sheffield, John see Mulgrave, Earl of Sheppard, Fleetwood 14, 56, 60 Shirley, James 39, 55 Sidney, Sir Philip 189 Siebert, Donald 135 Smith, Adam 138, 141–2 Southerne, Thomas 25, 42, 44 Spence, Joseph 68, 74 Spengler, Oswald 25 Spenser, Edmund 24, 46, 55, 113 Steevens, George 11, 94, 116, 117, 124, 127, 129, 154, 160, 162, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 171, 173, 175, 176, 179, 184, 185, 187, 188, 192, 195, 197 Stern, Tiffany 17, 35 Stewart, Ian 25 Stow, John 189 Stuart, Ludovic (Seigneur D’Aubigny) 16 Suckling, Sir John 15 Swift, Jonathan 7, 13, 23, 27, 31, 61, 68 Tarlinskaja, Marina 84 Tarlton, Richard 189 Tate, Nahum 6, 40, 118, 142–3 Taylor, Gary 82, 100

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235

Taylor, John 189 Taylor, Joseph 39 Theobald, Lewis 6, 8, 11, 40, 73, 75, 76, 78–81, 87, 89, 99, 122–5, 144, 146–7, 154, 160, 163–6, 169–71, 173–5, 178, 184, 185, 188, 197–8 Tickell, Thomas 78 Timpanaro, Sebastiano 90 Tonson, Jacob 2, 33, 37, 44, 54, 60, 61, 62, 93, 94, 120–1, 164, 165 Tyrwhitt, Thomas 160, 176 Vanbrugh, Sir John 44 Villiers, George see Buckingham, second Duke of Virgil 4, 5, 6, 8, 21, 24, 31, 45, 49, 51, 54, 58, 59, 116, 175, 198 Wakefield, Gilbert 71 Walker, Keith 44 Waller, Edmund 21 Walpole, Horace 189 Walsh, Marcus 11, 93 Walsh, William 13 Warburton, William 75, 90, 118, 119, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 130, 135, 150, 154, 155, 164, 170, 173, 174 Warton, Thomas 121, 188, 189 Webster, John 189 Wells, Stanley 82, 100, 108, 110, 140 Whyman, Susan E. 18 Wild, Robert 32, 34 Womack, Mark 157 Wood, Anthony à 189 Wordsworth, William 66 Wright, George T. 84 Wright, Iain 16 Wright, James 189 Wycherley, William 18, 25, 39, 42, 53

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