Great Shakespeareans Set II 9781441184481, 1441184481

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Great Shakespeareans Set I

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Great Shakespeareans Each volume in the series provides a critical account and analysis of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and around the world. General Series Editors: Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame, USA Adrian Poole, Trinity College Cambridge, UK Editorial Advisory Board: David Bevington (University of Chicago, USA), Michael Cordner (University of York, UK), Michael Dobson (Birkbeck College, University of London, UK), Dominique Goy-Blanquet (University of Picardy, France), Barbara Hodgdon (University of Michigan, USA), Andreas Höfele (University of Munich, Germany), Tetsuo Kishi (Kyoto University, Japan), Russ McDonald (Goldsmith’s College, University of London, UK), Ruth Morse (University of Paris 7, Denis Diderot, France), Michael Neill (University of Auckland, New Zealand), Stephen Orgel (Stanford University, USA), Carol Rutter (University of Warwick, UK), Ann Thompson (King’s College, University of London, UK) and Paul Yachnin (McGill University, Canada). Great Shakespeareans: Set I Volume I: Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Malone, edited by Claude Rawson Volume II: Garrick, Kemble, Siddons, Kean, edited by Peter Holland Volume III: Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge, edited by Roger Paulin Volume IV: Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats, edited by Adrian Poole Great Shakespeareans: Set II Volume V: Scott, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, edited by Adrian Poole Volume VI: Macready, Booth, Irving, Terry, edited by Richard Schoch Volume VII: Jameson, Cowden Clarke, Kemble, Cushman, edited by Gail Marshall Volume VIII: Emerson, Melville, James, Berryman, edited by Peter Rawlings Volume IX: Bradley, Greg, Folger, edited by Cary DiPietro Great Shakespeareans: Set III Volume X: Marx and Freud, Crystal Bartolovich, Jean Howard and David Hillman Volume XI: Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner, Britten, edited by Daniel Albright Volume XII: Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Auden, Beckett, edited by Adrian Poole Volume XIII: Wilson Knight, Empson, Barber, Kott, edited by Hugh Grady Great Shakespeareans: Set IV Volume XIV: Hugo, Pasternak, Brecht, Césaire, edited by Ruth Morse Volume XV: Poel, Granville Barker, Guthrie, Wanamaker, edited by Cary Mazer Volume XVI: Gielgud, Olivier, Ashcroft, Dench, edited by Russell Jackson Volume XVII: Welles, Kozintsev, Kurosawa, Zeffirelli, Mark Thornton Burnett, Kathy Howlett, Courtney Lehmann and Ramona Wray Volume XVIII: Hall, Brook, Ninagawa, Lepage, edited by Peter Holland

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Great Shakespeareans Set I

Edited by Claude Rawson, Peter Holland, Roger Paulin and Adrian Poole

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Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com

Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Malone © Claude Rawson and contributors 2010

Garrick, Kemble, Siddons, Kean © Adrian Poole and contributors 2010

Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge © Roger Paulin and contributors 2010

Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats © Peter Holland and contributors 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. EISBN:

978-1-4411-8448-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

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To the Memory of Harold Love

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Contents

List of Illustrations Series Editors’ Preface Notes on Contributors Part I

ix xi xiii Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Malone Edited by Claude Rawson

Acknowledgements

2

Introduction Claude Rawson 1 John Dryden Harold Love 2 Alexander Pope Simon Jarvis 3 Samuel Johnson Freya Johnston 4 Edmond Malone Marcus Walsh Notes Select Bibliography Part II

14 68 117 162 202 228

Garrick, Kemble, Siddons, Kean Edited by Peter Holland

Introduction Peter Holland 5 David Garrick Peter Holland 6 John Philip Kemble Michael Dobson 7 Sarah Siddons Russ McDonald

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235 242 289 339

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Contents

viii

8

Edmund Kean Peter Thomson

372

Notes Select Bibliography

416 436

Part III Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge Edited by Roger Paulin Introduction Roger Paulin 9 Voltaire Michèle Willems 10 Johann Wolfgang Goethe Stephen Fennell 11 August Wilhelm Schlegel Christine Roger and Roger Paulin 12 Samuel Taylor Coleridge Reginald Foakes Notes Select Bibliography

443 447 486 534 570 615 631

Part IV Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats Edited by Adrian Poole Introduction Adrian Poole 13 Charles Lamb Felicity James 14 William Hazlitt Uttara Natarajan 15 John Keats Beth Lau Notes Select Bibliography Index

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List of Illustrations

Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5 Figure 6

Figure 7

Figure 8

Figure 9

Figure 10 Figure 11

Henry Fuseli, Garrick and Pritchard in Macbeth (c. 1766). © Kunsthaus Zürich. Henry Fuseli, Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers (exhibited 1812). © Tate, London. Joshua Steele’s notation of his own voice (Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech, London, 1775, p. 40). Joshua Steele’s notation of Garrick’s voice (Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech, London, 1775, p. 47). William Hogarth, David Garrick as Richard III (1746). © National Museums, Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery. John Philip Kemble as Coriolanus. Painting by Thomas Lawrence (1798). Guildhall Art Gallery, Corporation of London. ‘Hamlet Apostrophizing the Skull’, engraved by J. Rogers (c. 1817) from the painting by Thomas Lawrence (1801). [property of the author] Kemble as Othello, one of his last performances at Drury Lane, 1802; a rapid eye-witness sketch (subsequently gone-over with watercolours) by Thomas Loftie. Harvard Theatre Collection TS 990.1.40. The Shakespearean actor as a gentleman; ‘J. P. Kemble, Esq.’ (c. 1817) from a drawing by Thomas Lawrence (1801). [property of the author] Stage and auditorium during the riots of 1763 Auditorium in 1813

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264

264 266

293

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338 573 574

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Series Editors’ 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 part 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’

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or ‘Some Great Shakespeareans’, but it will, we hope, be 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 parts 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 set – and as few as two in the case of Part 10 – our contributors have space to present their figures more substantially and, we trust, more engagingly. Each part has a brief introduction by the part editor and a section of ‘Select Biography.’ We hope these part 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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Notes on Contributors

Michael Dobson is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. His publications include The Making of the National Poet (Oxford, 1992), The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (with Stanley Wells, Oxford, 2001, revised 2005, 2009), England’s Elizabeth (with Nicola Watson, 2002) and Performing Shakespeare’s Tragedies Today (Cambridge, 2006), together with articles and chapters in Shakespeare Survey, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, Redefining British Theatre History, Performance Research and elsewhere. He reviews regularly for the BBC and the London Review of Books, and has written programme notes for Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Peter Stein and others. Stephen Fennell lectures at the University of Cambridge. He researches on eighteenth-century German literature and philosophy, and on the contact between German and Asian literatures and philological traditions. He has published on Hölderlin, Goethe and Jean Paul Richter, and lectured widely on comparative literature. Reginald Foakes, Emeritus Professor at UCLA, edited Coleridge’s Lectures 1808–1819 On Literature for the Bollingen Foundation edition of Coleridge’s Collected Works (2 vols, Princeton University Press, 1987), and then a selection of Coleridge’s Criticism of Shakespeare (Athlone Press, 1989). He has also published a number of essays on related topics such as Coleridge’s concept of dramatic illusion, most recently in the Coleridge Bulletin, New Series, 29 (Summer, 2007). Peter Holland is McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre and Associate Dean for the Arts at the University of Notre Dame. From 1997 to 2002 he was Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon and Professor of Shakespeare Studies in the University of Birmingham. He is editor of Shakespeare Survey, co-editor (with Stanley Wells) of the series Oxford Shakespeare Topics (Oxford University Press), and editor of Redefining British Theatre History (Palgrave Macmillan). He has published widely on Shakespeare in performance, including English Shakespeares and Shakespeare,

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Memory and Performance (both for Cambridge University Press), as well as editing a number of Shakespeare editions (including A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Oxford Shakespeare). He is currently completing an edition of Coriolanus for the Arden Shakespeare. He wrote the entry on Shakespeare for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the longest entry in the entire work. Felicity James is a lecturer in eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature at the University of Leicester. She held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (2005–2008) at Christ Church, Oxford, where she completed a doctorate on the early writing of Charles Lamb. Her book, Charles Lamb, Coleridge, and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2008. Her research currently focuses on Unitarian friendships and literary networks in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from the Aikin family to Elizabeth Gaskell. 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. Beth Lau is Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. She is the author of Keats’s Reading of the Romantic Poets (University of Michigan Press, 1991) and Keats’s Paradise Lost (University Press of Florida, 1998). She has also edited Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (Houghton Mifflin, 2002) and the forthcoming collection of essays, Fellow Romantics: Male and Female British Writers, 1790–1835 (Ashgate). 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

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Notes on Contributors

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(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). Russ McDonald is Professor of English Literature at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and the author of the widely adopted Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents. A specialist in early modern poetics, he published his most recent book, Shakespeare’s Late Style, with Cambridge in 2006. In the field of theatre history, he has written Look to the Lady: Sarah Siddons, Ellen Terry, and Judi Dench on the Shakespearean Stage (Georgia, 2005), which originated as the Averitt Lectures at Georgia Southern University. Uttara Natarajan is Senior Lecturer in English at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the author of Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense (Clarendon Press, 1998) and co-editor (with Tom Paulin and Duncan Wu) of Metaphysical Hazlitt (Routledge, 2005). She has published numerous scholarly essays on Hazlitt and is the editor of The Hazlitt Review. She is currently working on a monograph about the practices and forms of literary idealism in the nineteenth century. Roger Paulin is Emeritus Schröder Professor of German in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College. He is the author of Ludwig Tieck: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), The Critical Reception of Shakespeare in Germany 1682–1914: Native Literature and Foreign Genius (Hildesheim: Olms, 2003) and has edited the volume Shakespeare im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007). Adrian Poole is Professor of English at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His monographs include Shakespeare and the Victorians (Arden, 2003) and Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2005), and he has co-edited (with Gail Marshall) Victorian Shakespeare, 2 vols. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). In 1999 he delivered the British Academy Shakespeare Lecture, ‘Macbeth and the Third Person’, and he has written introductions to Romeo and Juliet and Henry IV, Part Two (Penguin, 2005). 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

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University Press), and God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination 1492–1945 (2001, Oxford University Press). Christine Roger teaches at the Université de Picardie, Jules Verne, at Amiens, and works on the literary and cultural relationships between Germany, France and England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her publications include Shakespeare vu d’Allemagne et de France des Lumières au Romantisme, sous la direction de C. Roger (Paris: CNRS editions, 2007), and La réception de Shakespeare en Allemagne de 1815 à 1850: propagation et assimilation de la référence étrangère, avec une préface de Roger Paulin (Berne: Peter Lang, 2008). Peter Thomson is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Exeter. He is a Research Associate of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, editor of the journal Studies in Theatre and Performance and General Editor of the three-volume Cambridge History of British Theatre. His books include Shakespeare’s Theatre, Shakespeare’s Professional Career, The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 1660 to 1900 and a study of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. He has written about Edmund Kean in his book of essays, On Actors and Acting, and provided the substantial biographical entry in the DNB. In retirement, he continues to play cricket, a game at which he was offered a trial by Warwickshire in the 1950s. If his next book is not about theatre, it is likely to be about cricket. Marcus Walsh, who is Kenneth Allott Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool, has edited A Song to David, Hymns and Spiritual 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. Michèle Willems is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Rouen. Her publications, both in French and English, are centred on the representation of Shakespeare’s drama through the ages,

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from her early incursion into reception studies with La genèse du mythe shakespearien, 1660–1780 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1979), to recent research on ‘Hamlet in France’ (www.hamletworks.org) and Ducis’s adaptations of Shakespeare (Shakespeare Survey 60, 2007), and contributions, in various Cambridge University Press publications, to the study of Shakespeare on screen.

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Part I

Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Malone Edited by

Claude Rawson

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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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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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Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Malone

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 paradox ical 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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Introduction

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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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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 defi ning 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 fi xed 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 fi rst 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 prefix 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 prefi xed 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 fi rst 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 prefi x’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 fifth 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 fi x 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 fi rst 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 fi rst 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 fi rst 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 first 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 fi nd 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 fi x’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, fi nds 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

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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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204 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

4

5

6 7

8

9

10

11

12 13 14 15 16 17

18

19

20

21

22 23

205

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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206 24

25

26 27

28

29

30 31

32

33 34

35

36

37

38 39

40

41

42

43 44

45

46

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

55

56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63

64

65

66 67 68 69

70 71

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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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72

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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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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‘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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10 11

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13 14

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20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29

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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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31

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33

34

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36 37

38

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40 41

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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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44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51

52 53 54 55

56

57 58 59

60 61

62

63

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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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65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72 73

74

75

76

77 78

79 80

81 82

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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. Pope, Prose Works, vol. 2, p. 16 Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 21 Ibid., p. 20–1. 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. Pope, Prose Works, vol. 2, p. 25. Ibid., p. 24. 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). 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. 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). 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). Pope, Prose Works, vol. 2, p. 25. 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. 1714, vol. 6, p. 346; 1725, vol. 6, p. 51. Hinman, First Folio of Shakespeare, p. 773; The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, by William Shakespeare (London, 1605), n. p. The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1605), n.p. 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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83

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

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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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Notes 3

4

5

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7

8

9 10

11

12

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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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16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

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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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Notes 26

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31 32

33 34

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38 39 40

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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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222 42

43

44

45

46 47

48 49

50 51 52

53 54

55

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58

59 60

61

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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

72

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78 79

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81 82 83

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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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224 84

85

86 87 88

89 90 91

92

93

94

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

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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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226 21

22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

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34 35 36 37

38 39

Notes

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

227

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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Select Bibliography

Aden, John M., The Critical Opinions of John Dryden: A Dictionary (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1963). Babcock, Robert Witbeck, The Genesis of Shakespeare Idolatry, 1766–1799: A Study in English Criticism of the Late Eighteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1931). Bate, Jonathan, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Belanger, Terry, ‘Tonson, Wellington and the Shakespeare copyrights’, in Studies in the Book Trade in Honour of Graham Pollard (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1975), pp. 195–209. Bertram, Paul, White Spaces in Shakespeare: The Development of the Modern Text (Cleveland, OH: Bellflower Press, 1981). Black, Matthew W., and Matthias A. Shaaber, Shakespeare’s Seventeenth-Century Editors, 1632–1685 (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1937). Brown, A. D. J., Alexander Pope’s Edition of Shakespeare: An Introduction. Available online at http://www.adjb.net/popes_shakespeare/ —, ‘The little fellow has done wonders: Pope as Shakespeare editor’, Cambridge Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 2 (1992), 120–49. Butt, John, Pope’s Taste in Shakespeare (London: Shakespeare Association, 1936). Capell, Edward, Notes and Various Readings to Shakespeare, 3 vols (London, 1779–83). Capell, Edward, ed., Mr. William Shakespeare: His Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, 10 vols (London, 1768). A Catalogue of Early English Poetry and other Miscellaneous Works Illustrating the British Drama, Collected by Edmond Malone Esq. and now Preserved in the Bodleian Library (Oxford, 1836). de Grazia, Margreta, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Dixon, Peter, ‘Pope’s Shakespeare’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 63 (1964), 191–203. Dobson, Michael, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Dryden, John, Letters of John Dryden, ed. Charles E. Ward (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1942). —, The California Edition of the Works of John Dryden, ed. E. N. Hooker, H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., et al., 20 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956–2002). —, Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson, 2 vols (London: Dent, 1962).

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Eastman, Arthur M., ‘In Defense of Dr. Johnson’, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 8 (1957), 493–500. —, ‘The Texts from which Johnson printed his Shakespeare’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 49 (1950), 182–91. Eliot, T. S., ‘Shakespeare Criticism from Dryden to Coleridge’, in A Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. Harley Granville-Barker and G. B. Harrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934). Frank, Marcie, Gender, Theatre, and the Origins of Criticism: From Dryden to Manley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Gelber, Michael Werth, The Just and the Lively: The Literary Criticism of John Dryden (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). Gondris, Joanna, ed., Reading Readings: Essays on Shakespeare Editing in the Eighteenth Century (Cranbury, NJ, and London: Associated University Presses, 1998). Hammond, Paul, ‘The Janus poet: Dryden’s Critique of Shakespeare,’ in John Dryden (1631–1700) His Politics, His Plays, and His Poets, ed. Claude Rawson and Aaron Santesso (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004). —, John Dryden: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991). Hart, John A., ‘Pope as Scholar-Editor’, Studies in Bibliography, vol. 23 (1970), 45–9. Holland, Peter, ‘Modernizing Shakespeare: Nicholas Rowe and The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 1 (Spring, 2000), 24–32. Hume, Robert D., Dryden’s Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970). Ingleby, C. M. et al., eds, The Shakspere Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakspere from 1591 to 1700, ed. J. Munro (1909), rptd. with Preface by Sir Edmund Chambers, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1932). Ireland, Samuel, Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakspeare: Including the Tragedy of King Lear and a Small Fragment of Hamlet, from the Original MSS in the Possession of Samuel Ireland, of Norfolk Street (London, 1795). Jarvis, Simon, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearean Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Jensen, H. James, A Glossary of Dryden’s Critical Terms (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969). Johnson, Samuel, Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968; volumes VII and VIII of the Yale edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson). Johnson, Samuel, ed., The Plays of William Shakespeare, with the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators, 8 vols (London, 1765). Johnson, Samuel, and George Steevens, eds, The Plays of William Shakespeare, 2nd ed., 10 vols (London, 1778); rev. ed. (London: for T. Longman etc., 1793), 15 vols. —, The Plays of William Shakespeare, 10 vols (London: for C. Bathurst, etc. 1773). —, The Johnson-Steevens Edition of the Plays of William Shakespeare, 12 vols. [1778] (London: Routledge / Thoemmes Press, 1995). Jones, R. F., Lewis Theobald, his Contribution to Scholarship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1919). Kowalk, Wolfgang, Popes Shakespeare-Ausgabe als Spiegel seiner Kunstauffassung (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1975).

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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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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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Part II

Garrick, Kemble, Siddons, Kean Edited by

Peter Holland

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Introduction Peter Holland

It always seems to have been better in the past, whatever ‘it’ may be. As Shute Barrington, Bishop of Durham, wrote to a friend, Nothing more palpably shows that we are miserably lost to a sense of true delicacy, and refi nement, than the success of our new, and wretched, dramatick productions. By the ignorance, and impertinence of some theatrical criticks, KEMBLE has, in our days, been preferred to GARRICK.1 It does not seem entirely ridiculous for someone – or, indeed, for an entire theatregoing public – to prefer the new to the old, to refuse to allow the increasingly roseate glow of memories of the past to overwhelm the excitement of the present. After all, as Michael Dobson explores in his chapter on Kemble, John Philip Kemble was triumphant in a narrow range of roles, most potently as Shakespeare’s Roman patricians Brutus and Coriolanus, parts which Garrick never acted. But the bishop’s apoplectic incredulity is not really at the comparison at all but a conjuring up of an iconic name as the obvious stick with which to beat the present. ‘Garrick’ stands for something much more powerful than the details of Garrick’s or Kemble’s performances and productions. Ask a theatre-lover now about the great actors of the past and three at least of the four actors whose careers are the subject of this volume are quite likely to be named (John Philip Kemble being the probable exception), even though, as with so much in our construction of memories of theatrical performances, their work is too far in the past to be in any conventional sense ‘remembered’. If, like many clichés, the notion of theatre as an ephemeral art has a great deal of truth within it, then theatre history is always made out of memory, memories either of what has just been seen or of what was watched long ago, memories of continuities or of breaks, of the ways in which the succession of theatre performances and productions

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is the creation of a tradition or of ways in which the sequence is seen as a series of exhilarating fractures of the past or an unstoppable decline from its brilliance. What the bishop describes in such horrified tones is a culture believing it is marked by progress, where, for him, its choices can only be marked as a rapid collapse in a couple of decades from that standard of taste and critical judgement on which culture should be based. And, of course, it is Shakespeare’s place as the foundational basis of the theatres’ repertory that allows for the comparisons of like with supposed like, the recognition, in the critic’s eye and ear, of what is better or worse, what is built on the foundations of the past and what is construed as a fundamental shift of the modes of performance. What is known of these past performers and performances, of their Shakespeare then as well as that Shakespeare in the ever-shifting now with which they are compared, depends for the theatre historian in large part on the materials that create the illusions of transmission, of the completely unwarrantable belief that what happened on stage when Garrick played Romeo, Kemble Brutus, Siddons Lady Macbeth or Kean Richard III can be known well enough, remembered clearly and documented convincingly to make the comparison fair. Of course it cannot. Yet, even before the seismic shift into liveness, 2 the materials out of which these four actors may be both described and analysed are startlingly greater than for any of their predecessors. Though, as David Roberts shows in his new biography of Thomas Betterton (1635–1710), the greatest actor of his time,3 we can discover much more about him than we might think, the total pales beside Garrick and his successors. There are printed accounts in reviews and pamphlets, the evidence in editions of Shakespeare’s plays as performed and in commentaries to other editions, the documents in playbills and advertisements; there are letters to and from fellow-actors and patrons, friends and enemies, fans and sharp critics; there are diaries of playgoers and some detailed transcriptions of what an actor did on stage noted down by a member of the audience; there are numerous surviving promptbooks and other playhouse materials; there are the play manuscripts submitted for censorship and piles of plays never produced; and there is the visual evidence of paintings, from miniatures to more than life-size canvasses, engravings and drawings, sculptures and ceramics, showing over and over again how artists responded to society’s thirst for images of these actors on stage and off, performing their most famous roles and out of stage costume but still performing as, for instance, a wealthy gentleman in his country estate or seated as the muse of tragedy. In the new commerce of print-making, it was possible for many to own their own pictures of the stage’s celebrities.

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Beyond this array of material evidence, there are further ways of knowing the actors’ social and intellectual worlds. My chapter on Garrick and Dobson’s on Kemble turn to the details of the two actors’ libraries4 and it is equally significant how few books there were in the sales of the effects of Edmund Kean: Arnott’s facsimiles of the sale catalogues of Garrick’s library, finally sold when his widow died, nearly 50 years after his death, take up over 200 pages, even without the vast collection of English plays which Garrick had bequeathed to the infant British Library; those for Kemble run to 140 pages, while the catalogues of the two sales for Edmund Kean, covering the contents of his houses in Richmond and on the Isle of Bute, are fewer than 20 pages in total. But even for Kean, the cataloguer noted the ‘Eighteen vols. of plays, including most of Mr. Kean’s favorite Characters, bound and lettered, many of them containing memoranda by Mr. Kean, respecting the Stage business’, which sold for 8 shillings a volume, the copies of the Shakespeare first and fourth folios, 5 the ‘Macbeth Sword, worn by Mr. Kean in this Tragedy’, sold for 8 guineas, two different swords he wore ‘in the character of Othello’, one Turkish and one Venetian, sold for a guinea each, various decorations once worn by Garrick which Mrs Garrick gave Kean, and, as lot 147, the odd assembly of ‘Part of the desk Shakespeare first wrote upon, Shylock’s knife, and a buffalo’s skin’.6 Some of these objects speak eloquently of an actor’s success, like the silvergilt ice-pail and cup, ‘most elaborately chased with masques’ of Shakespeare, Massinger and the muses of tragedy and comedy, presented to Kean in June 1816 by Robert Palmer, ‘Father of the Drury Lane Company’, in the names of Byron and 57 others ‘[i]n testimony of their admiration of his transcendent Talents’, especially as Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts.7 It is just as intriguing that Arnott notes that the 1831 sale catalogues of Siddons’s possessions ‘lump together books and furniture, objets d’art and costumes’.8 Whatever rich treasure troves of evidence the libraries, archives and art galleries of the world reveal – and the reach of evidence can genuinely be seen as global when one of the great paintings of Garrick as Macbeth is in Baroda in India – the analysis of the material is part of our understanding of the ways in which actors became celebrities. If the cult of celebrity now is intimately bound up with the fantasy of cinema, for no other kind of celebrity is as inevitably starry as being a film-star, then eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century theatre is a recognizable early version of the same thing. These actors participate in a culture of the commerce of celebrity, the wish to buy up and buy into the star’s life, through the images and memorabilia that the market creates but also through something

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beyond the artefacts: the experience or illusion of connection, the ‘public intimacy’ which Joseph Roach has so brilliantly defined.9 Garrick, Siddons and Kean are all centrally part of that development of celebrity and all earn their place in any account of theatre as the locus for the creation of celebrity.10 All are beneficiaries of the aura of significance that the celebrity of Thomas Betterton created and which Roach saw as pinpointed in the extraordinary event of Betterton’s funeral.11 But there is something beyond the conventional trappings of celebrity in the charisma that was generated by all four of the actors here. Whatever public focus of social meaning Betterton had earlier acquired, there is a new language surrounding them. It makes excellent sense for Jeffrey Kahan’s study of Kean to be called The Cult of Kean, a cult as idolatrous as that for any star, just as Hazlitt could legitimately speak of having been ‘brought up . . . in the Kemble religion’.12 No actress before Siddons could have been painted as the tragic muse, as Reynolds chose to do. Michael Dobson writes of the ‘air of vatic solemnity’ surrounding Kemble and Russ McDonald points to the way in which Reynolds ‘borrow[ed Siddons’s] posture from Michelangelo’s representation of the prophet Isaiah on the Sistine ceiling’.13 If such quasi-religious language and iconography was not usually used for Garrick, even though he became in effect the priest looking after the temple he erected to Shakespeare in his Thames-side home, Richard Cumberland’s account of a historical leap stands for a different kind of moment at which celebrity metamorphoses into something more extensive, more powerful than simply the latest in a line of stars: when after long and eager expectation I first beheld little Garrick, then young and light and alive in every muscle and in every feature, come bounding on the stage . . . – heavens, what a transition! – it seemed as if a whole century had been stept over in the transition of a single scene.14 Garrick, the most frequently painted non-royal of the century, became iconic in a fuller than usual sense of the word, someone venerated as imbued with a more than human ability. It seems only right that the word ‘star’ to mean a theatre celebrity should, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), have been first used of Garrick: ‘The little stars, who hid their dimished rays in his presence’.15 If Garrick is the first star, the man who moved theatre on by a century, he also becomes an originating point of a tradition: Edmund Kean, on his deathbed, tries to pass on to his son Charles details of Garrick’s performance as King Lear; Charles Matthews, in his parodic performances,

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‘imitates Kemble imitating Garrick imitating Richard III’.16 Knowing what an actor did becomes itself an industry, as with the publication of Shakespeare’s plays in the performing editions used at the Theatres Royal in Drury Lane and Covent Garden that John Bell published in 1773–1774, complete with annotation by Francis Gentleman that commented on what the theatres did do, might do or should not have done.17 Alongside the great line of eighteenth-century editions of Shakespeare, the succession of scholarship from Rowe through Capell and Johnson to Malone, emerges a second strand of editing, equally significant, one far less concerned with what Shakespeare wrote or his theatres played than with the immediacy of what is being played now in London and also on the provincial circuits across the country. But Garrick originates something beyond a moment of acting. At one moment in Peter Barnes’s play Jubilee about Garrick’s celebration of Shakespeare in his birthplace,18 three figures from the future appear to Garrick in his dream. Sir Peter Hall explains, on behalf of the other two, Trevor Nunn and Terry Hands, We’re future directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford. We’ve entered your dreams to thank you. From this Jubilee there’ll spring a worldwide Shakespeare industry. It’s a million-dollar enterprise . . . If you don’t say ‘yes’, there’ll be no Shakespeare Jubilee, no Memorial Theatre, no plays, no money and no prestige . . . Everything depends on you. You lit the flame that blazoned Shakespeare across the world stage . . . As Nunn clarifies, Those plays’re our bread and butter. We’d be lost. The state spends millions promoting Shakespeare every year. He’s on the school curriculum so he has a guaranteed audience, which he wouldn’t have if he wasn’t part of our national heritage. 19 Overstated as any such moment in a celebratory play should be, Barnes’s point is fair. Thanks to Garrick, Shakespeare is heritage, cash, fame and status for the industry he generated and for those who thrive within it. Their roles in Shakespeare were not the only parts that made this volume’s actors famous. Garrick’s most frequently performed role, apart from the walk-on part of Benedick in the pageant at the end of his own play The Jubilee, was as Ranger in Benjamin Hoadly’s The Suspicious Husband and, after Benedick in Shakespeare’s play, a role he played at least once

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every season for 28 years, came Sir John Brute in Vanbrugh’s The Provoked Wife, Archer in Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem and Bayes in his own adaptation of The Rehearsal. It was Massinger, not Shakespeare, who gave Kean the role in which he scored such a triumph as to be given the silver icepail. Siddons’s definition for her age of the figure of pathos and emotional excess (whether grief, fear or rage) was created in a long series of roles in non-Shakespearean plays, as McDonald traces, while Kemble’s domination of the London stage was to a significant extent built on his performance of the title role in Jephson’s The Count of Narbonne (1780).20 But it was now not possible for an actor to be a star, to dominate the stage, to be sought after as celebrity, without towering success in Shakespeare roles. That demand was new, something that Thomas Betterton had not needed to accomplish for, though he was a great Hamlet, he was not great because he was a great Hamlet. There was no shortage of Shakespeare in the repertory of London theatre before Garrick and there would be no shortage of new plays and of other stock drama in the repertory of the theatres of Kemble, Kean and Siddons.21 Yet Shakespeare had come to occupy a special place in the culture, through the careful editing of his works, the beginnings of Shakespeare scholarship and the start of the long line of accounts of his life and his society, as well as through the excitement that would be generated by the new styles of performance, the new approaches to character and to production that all four would participate in and lead. Perhaps it is going too far yet to call it ‘bardolatry’ – and the word would not be coined until George Bernard Shaw used it first in 1901 and frequently thereafter – but there was a qualitative difference in the significance given to Shakespeare, in the reverence for his works, and in the use of the plays as the standard measure of an actor’s talents. Across the period, the text of Shakespeare as performed would change, sometimes radically with Restoration adaptations discarded in favour of something nearer to Shakespeare as first printed, sometimes through small changes of a line or two, sometimes through further adaptation. Kemble may have been famous as Coriolanus but there was a great deal not by Shakespeare in the text he produced and starred in. Kean’s Richard III was still essentially Cibber’s version of 1700, in some ways adjusted back towards Shakespeare’s play, of course, but still a long way from being unaltered. Garrick’s King Lear was not a pure production of Nahum Tate’s adaptation but it was still one in which neither Lear nor Cordelia died. What was viable in the theatre may have been changing – and the essays that follow all engage with how the audience’s taste was altering and what they wanted

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or were prepared to tolerate – but there was no search for an authentic Shakespeare, if by that we mean performances of the quarto or folio texts unaltered. At the very least all the plays were heavily cut, as the demands of productions with spectacular scenery which took time to shift had to be balanced with the comparative brevity required of a main-piece or a two or three act afterpiece fitted into the variety bill of an evening’s entertainment in the theatre. Even as the stars made their contributions to the transformation of a role or the entire form of production, they had to negotiate with the limits of audience receptivity, to serve their time in provincial theatres before conquering London, to gain acceptance (some faster than others), to maintain audience approval, to develop the iconic status that their greatest achievements warranted. If no subsequent Lady Macbeth has ever been as acclaimed as Siddons, no Coriolanus as patrician as Kemble’s, no Shylock as energized and energizing as Kean’s and no Lear as capable of reducing the audience and other actors to tears as Garrick’s, each had worked hard to overcome critical resistance. Garrick and Kean also had the problem of being short and Kean’s driven self found in alcohol such a ready response that he was often – far too often – drunk on stage. Kemble’s odd and muchmocked pronunciation was an individual eccentricity but Siddons had to overcome the automatic association of female actors and prostitution, striving always for a dignity and approval that women were rarely accorded. As they moulded their careers as best they could, they also remoulded Shakespeare, making their favourite characters into the figures the age would accept and leaving behind them exhilarating legacies in the new ways of seeing and hearing Shakespeare they made possible. They initiated new ways of thinking about him and understanding him that have continued to influence the cultural meanings of Shakespeare ever since and stretched his plays’ capabilities for infinite reworking in directions that previous generations would have found unthinkable but which we cannot do without. It is those transformations that have made Garrick, Kemble, Siddons and Kean necessary candidates for inclusion in Great Shakespeareans and that mark the impact on the history of Shakespeare that these chapters all point towards.

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Chapter 5

David Garrick Peter Holland

Statues There are many well-known events with which my consideration of Shakespeare and David Garrick might begin: with the extraordinary impact of Garrick’s first performances in Shakespeare roles in London in 1741, for example, or with Dr Johnson’s manifesto-prologue at the opening of the Drury Lane season in Garrick’s first year as co-manager and -patentee with James Lacy in 1747, or with the Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769. All are potent moments in the history of the cultural shift in the understanding and significance of Shakespeare that Garrick so powerfully helped to effect; all will appear later in this chapter. But I begin instead with a moment of cultural tourism, a sightseeing trip by three sisters visiting London from Bristol, their home town. Hannah More, the brilliant young playwright, spent the winter of 1773– 1774 in London with her two sisters, Sarah and Martha, the first trip to the capital for all of them. Among the trips they made from their flat near Covent Garden, one was along the Thames to Hampton to see the villa, set in six acres, that David Garrick had bought in 1754 and which, for more than 20 years, would be altered, extended and decorated on the advice of the innovative architect and designer Robert Adam. When the sisters visited, the house was yet again undergoing building work but Hannah was pleased ‘infinitely’ by the gardens and by the ‘grateful temple to Shakespeare’ as Horace Walpole called it,1 that Garrick had had Adam design, about 40 yards away from the house, on the river frontage. The small octagonal brick building with Ionic columns for the portico contained some of Garrick’s greatest treasures. ‘Here’, wrote Hannah to a friend in Bristol, ‘is the famous chair, curiously wrought out of a cherry tree’ – she should have written ‘a mulberry tree’ – which really grew in the garden of Shakespeare at Stratford. I sat in it, but caught no ray of inspiration. But what drew, and deserved, my attention

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was a most noble statue of this most original man, in an attitude strikingly pensive – his limbs strongly muscular, his countenance strongly expressive of some vast conception, and his whole form seeming the bigger from some immense idea [with] which you suppose his great imagination pregnant.2 The statue had been commissioned by Garrick in 1757 from the sculptor Louis François Roubillac at a cost, Hannah More noted, of ‘five hundred pounds’ (other accounts suggested only £315 but that was still a huge sum). Garrick’s fame was established on his special bond with Shakespeare and his plays but the statue was marked by a more particular identification than a quasi-religious adoration mixed with gratitude for Shakespeare’s part in Garrick’s successful career and the wealth it had brought him, the (good) fortune that had enabled him to buy the Hampton villa, build the temple and commission the statue: a widespread contemporary rumour suggested that the statue was not only for Garrick but also of him, that Garrick was the model as well as the patron, that Garrick was here performing or becoming Shakespeare. For Garrick, respect for Shakespeare was akin to an act of faith and the temple was not only jokingly the appropriate place in which to worship a divine being. As he wrote to a French friend, the translator and journalist Jean Suard, in 1765, ‘I will not despair of seeing you in my temple of Shakespeare, confessing your infidelity, and bowing your head to the god of my idolatry, as he himself so well expresses it’ and, anticipating a visit to Hampton by other French gentlemen, Garrick looked forward to a day ‘when we shall throw all dramatic critics and critical refinements into the Thames, and sacrifice to Shakespeare’.3 As Juliet encourages Romeo to swear ‘by thy gracious self, / Which is the god of my idolatry’ (Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.113–14), so Garrick’s friend must bow to Shakespeare – and Garrick, like a high priest, was Shakespeare’s earthly ‘representative’: in 1758, the London Magazine published some verse, supposedly ‘dropt in Mr. Garrick’s Temple of Shakespeare’, in which Shakespeare’s voice identifies Garrick anew: Unnotic’d long thy Shakespeare lay, To dullness and to time a prey; But lo! I rise, I breathe, I live In you, my representative!4 Roubillac’s statue was certainly not the first monument of and to Shakespeare. The bust in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon was in place by 1623. The recognition of Shakespeare as a national figure

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was signalled in 1735 by his being placed, along with Milton and Pope, as the representative British poets among the sixteen figures in the Temple of the British Worthies created for Viscount Cobham in his gardens at Stowe. But there were already signs of a campaign to have Shakespeare appropriately memorialized in marmoreal form in Westminster Abbey, a movement that gathered force once a bust of Milton had been placed there in 1737. The author of one of the first elegies on Shakespeare, William Basse, had argued that Shakespeare should be placed beside Chaucer, Spenser and Beaumont in the Abbey, a proposal that Ben Jonson strongly resisted, proclaiming, in his elegy on Shakespeare printed in the First Folio, that Shakespeare did not need such a memorial: ‘Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe, / And art alive still while thy Booke doth live.’ But others were not so sure and were determined that a monument would be exactly what Shakespeare would have. With benefit performances of Julius Caesar and Hamlet to raise money (and with Shakespeare seen in the prologues to those shows as the ghosts of both Caesar and Old Hamlet, as some rightful king or aspirant to kingship murdered), the statue by Peter Scheemakers could be unveiled in 1741 and later revised when the blank scroll towards which Shakespeare gestured and which contemporary satirists mocked for its blankness was fi lled by inaccurately quoted lines from The Tempest. Often reproduced, soon available as a small porcelain souvenir and, in the twentieth century, eventually placed on the £20 note, the Abbey monument was a sign of Shakespeare’s cultural value. Clearly the words of Shakespeare’s voice about his being ‘Unnotic’d long’ hugely overstated the case for seeing the playwright as neglected before Garrick’s arrival on London’s theatrical and social scene and I shall come back to how much Shakespeare was being noticed soon. But the myth continued, finding its place at the end of the century in an inscription on the plinth of another statue: a contemporary described the statue of Garrick put up in Westminster Abbey in 1797 as showing Garrick ‘throwing aside a curtain, which discovers a medallion of the great Poet . . . The curtain itself is designed to represent the Veil of Ignorance and barbarism, which darkened the drama of the immortal bard till the appearance of Garrick’, while the inscription explains the meaning further: Tho’ sunk in death the forms the Poet drew, The Actor’s genius bade them breathe anew. Tho’, like the Bard himself, in night they lay, Immortal Garrick call’d them back to day.5

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Visit Garrick’s Shakespeare temple now to admire its 1990s restoration and you will not find the Roubillac statue, only a reproduction of it. In his will, as the symbolically placed second item, after the disposition of the Hampton estate, Garrick left the statue to the British Museum where it stood in the King’s Library until the opening of the new British Library where, instead, it stands at the foot of the library’s main staircase. Garrick plainly wished to have it seen as occupying a different kind of space from the temple; no longer part of religious fervour but instead as part of the national collection of the genius of the country that the new museum and its central feature, the library, were intended to symbolize.

Collecting Books When the statue came to stand in the Museum’s Bloomsbury home surrounded by the great collection of the monarch’s books, the centrepiece of the library’s holdings, Garrick had also contributed to that scholarly resource more practically but no less symbolically. On his death, Garrick had also willed to the British Museum his collection of English drama, the ‘Collection of Old Plays’ as it was known, amounting to about 1300 plays, carefully catalogued and bound in 242 volumes. Supplemented by subsequent purchases and bequests, the Garrick collection is still the most remarkable demonstration of the range of accomplishment of early modern English drama, of the plays, some famous, many forgotten, that underpinned the history of the theatre in which Garrick starred. As early as the 1750s, when the collection was already substantial, widely known and equally widely admired, Garrick had indicated his intentions for its final destination. In collecting on this scale, Garrick was not primarily forming a library for his own use, nor indulging in one of the signs of the gentleman he saw himself as having become, nor only making a statement for future scholars; it was especially a way of defining a canon and generously aiding the creation of a discipline of textual editing and literary criticism, for the library was used by many scholars and critics whom Garrick knew and to whom he generously gave access. Shakespeare editors like George Steevens and Edward Capell (who compiled the catalogue of Garrick’s collection and helped find ways of filling the gaps to make it as complete as possible), Shakespeare scholars like Peter Whalley, critics interested in Shakespeare’s contemporaries like Bishop Thomas Percy and Thomas Warton, all made extensive use of Garrick’s holdings. As Percy wrote in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), ‘In Mr. Garrick’s curious collection of old plays

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are many scarce pieces of ancient poetry, with the free use of which he indulged the Editor, in the politest manner,’,6 identifying precisely which scarce pieces he had found there by the shelf-marks of the bound volumes Garrick owned. When Percy was working on a new key to the parodies and quotations in The Rehearsal by the Duke of Buckingham and others, a play still in the repertory in revised form and in which Garrick starred as Bayes the poet, he wrote to Lord Hailes that Mr Garrick very politely gave me access to his collection for that purpose. I have accordingly read over every play therein, which was published between the year 1660, and 1672 when the Rehearsal was first printed: the number is little less than 200 . . .7 In 1771, when Warton introduced to Garrick another scholar, Thomas Hawkins, Garrick wrote back, ‘if he is in town he shall with pleasure collate any plays, &c. in my collection’. Hawkins’s plan was to publish a collection of early English drama, a revision, in effect, of the multi-volume Select Collection of Old Plays that Robert Dodsley had published in 1744. Garrick thought Dodsley’s work ‘might have been better’ but he also wondered, ‘Does not Mr. Hawkins think that the old plays are in general more matters of curiosity than of merit?’8 Dodsley, a bookseller as well as editor, playwright and Garrick’s publisher (and good friend, at least until Garrick refused to produce one of Dodsley’s plays in 1758), had been the source of many of Garrick’s holdings, plays which Dodsley had acquired as part of the dispersal of the Harleian Library, the great collection of the Earls of Oxford. In this complex social network for the transmission of books through the culture of acquisition and dispersal, of collecting and library-formation, as in so many other aspects of the organization of mid-eighteenth century society, Garrick had come to occupy a position at the heart. As Dr Johnson commented after Garrick’s death, ‘his profession made him rich and he made his profession respectable.’ Garrick, with his villa on the Thames with its temple and statue, with his books and his estates, had achieved all this unprecedented status for a theatre professional through his brilliance as an actor, his effectiveness as a manager and his commercial eye as a dramatist. All of it, as he profoundly knew, had its origins in and its continued dependence on his engagement with Shakespeare. Statues will figure again much later in this account of his work, but I shall move from the books and pamphlets Garrick collected to the ones he published or was the cause of being published before focusing on some of his encounters with Shakespeare’s plays rather than with his representation in marble.

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Editor and Commentator When in 1766 George Steevens published a Prospectus for his updating of Dr Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare, he indicated a heavy reliance on Garrick. Steevens would complete Johnson’s inadequate collation of early texts and supplement the notes, explaining obscure passages by referring to other early modern works, both tasks which heavily depended on his using Garrick’s play collection, and he would ask Garrick for comments about Shakespeare to add to the notes so that Garrick could ‘transmit some part of that knowledge of Shakespeare to posterity, without which, he can be his best commentator no longer than he lives’.9 In a poem Steevens wrote ‘on the report of [Garrick’s] intending to leave the stage, 1775’, he mockingly portayed Shakespeare oppressed by his critics and editors: Shall equal wrong attend his publish’d lays, Where critick ivy choaks poetic bays? . . . Shall final ruin Johnson, Steevens, bring, Who clog with notes of lead his active wing . . .? But he saw Garrick as Shakespeare’s defender precisely through his incisive understanding of Shakespeare’s meaning, a comprehension communicated through the details of his performances in Shakespeare roles: Garrick ’tis thine his suffering worth to shield, Bestride the vanquishd and regain the field; One meaning glance of eyes like thine can show What labouring criticks boast in vain to know . . .10 Questioned by Boswell, who was troubled by Dr Johnson’s refusal to mention Garrick in his edition of Shakespeare, Johnson replied that Garrick ‘cannot illustrate Shakespeare’,11 but that function of illustrator, precisely as the person who clarifies by acting as editor and commentator, is exactly what others saw Garrick as performing: as an anonymous poet put it in writing to Garrick ‘upon his dedication of a temple to Shakespear’, Dull menders of a Syllable, a learned, motley Train, The Page with vague Conjectures fill; and puzzle, not Explain: In thy Expression Shakespeare’s Meaning shines, Thou finest Commentator on his Lines!12

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John Bell’s edition of Shakespeare published in 1773–1774, dedicated to Garrick and reprinting the plays ‘as they are now performed at the Theatres Royal in London; regulated from the prompt-books of each house’, including, in later version, prints of actors in character, was prefaced by equal size portraits of Shakespeare and Garrick and praised the latter as ‘the best illustrator of, and the best living comment, on Shakespeare, that has ever appeared’.13 Garrick was certainly willing to think of himself as an editor in many of the senses current at the time. In his advertisement to the third edition of his version of Romeo and Juliet, Garrick referred to himself as ‘the present editor’,14 where the modern concept would have been of Garrick as adaptor or reviser or transformer. Garrick edited Shakespeare by changing the performing text and he offered commentary on that text as he performed in it. Performance becomes illustration and what Garrick did to, with and for Shakespeare throughout his career. As Vanessa Cunningham points out, Dr Johnson defined an editor as a ‘Publisher: he that revises or prepares any work for publication’ and, since Johnson’s primary sense of ‘publish’ is to ‘discover to mankind; to make generally and openly known’, then this was ‘exactly the service that Garrick’s admirers saw him as performing for Shakespeare by revealing the plays to an ever-wider public’.15

Examining the Actor Certainly, if editors lie awake at night worrying about details of punctuation and lineation, Garrick was repeatedly engaged both in analysis and in discussion about exactly that. Richard Warner suggested, in publishing as a letter to Garrick his proposal for a Shakespeare glossary, Garrick was the deserved recipient, given ‘[t]he intimate acquaintance you have had with his writings, the very minutiæ of which you have made your study’.16 That there was minute dissection of Garrick’s way of speaking particular lines is in itself remarkable, a sign of a theatre history, specifically a history of audience response as listening, that no longer happens. As early in his acting career as 16 December 1741, Garrick received a letter from one of his greatest fans, Rev Thomas Newton, who was, like Garrick, both born in Lichfield and an heir to an alcohol merchant. Newton, while concerned for Garrick’s health (‘I hope in the mean time you will spare yourself as much as you can, till you are recovered from your cold, and your voice may

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appear in perfection’), is also unable, as James Boaden, the first editor of Garrick’s correspondence in 1831, puts it, to allow a ‘trivial error to sully long the general merit of his performance’ as Richard III: In the last scene between Richard and Lady Ann, there is one thing that I think you did not speak quite properly, though I am somewhat doubtful. She says ‘What have I done? What horrid crime committed? Rich. To me the worst of crimes – outliv’d my liking.’ In the latter part, outliv’d my liking, you spoke with the same voice, only exalting it; whereas I imagine it should have been with an alteration of voice, more peevishly and angrily.17 Garrick received another complaint about a word in his performance as Hamlet: something . . . seems to me wrong about the pronunciation of a single word . . . It is tropically. That o, I imagine, should be pronounced short, as we pronounce the o in logical; and both for the same reason, because the vowel in the original words, from whence they are derived, is in both an o [i.e. Greek omicron], not an ω [i.e. Greek omega] – a short o, not a long one. I believe you will find custom to be on this side of the question . . .18 When he was playing Macbeth in January 1744, Garrick was told by another correspondent that ‘I see no reason for pronouncing the speech that begins with “Blood hath been shed ere now,” aside.’19 Even more striking is the fact that Garrick seems to have kept the letters, for, while most of the correspondence Boaden included is from the 1770s, the early letters that survive in his collection are, apart from the ones to and from Garrick’s family, predominantly the ones of complaint about such matters of delivery. Rather than throwing them in the bin, Garrick seems to have cared enough to answer them, when not anonymous, and keep them. His answers were often detailed and strikingly apologetic in tone. In other words, Garrick engaged with this kind of detailed analysis of delivery, more evidence of his concern with what Warner called ‘the very minutiæ of which you have made your study’, when it came to the sound (here rhythm, syntax, pronunciation and stage-focus) of Shakespeare.

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No actor before Garrick had had his or her performance as minutely or as publicly examined. A recent biographer identified over 500 items commenting on Garrick published during his lifetime.20 When, for instance, Thaddaeus Fitzpatrick with others was annoyed by Garrick’s tendency to misaccent a line of verse, they decided that, ‘as our memories did not serve us to clear up the point, it was agreed that we should go to the tragedy of Hamlet this evening, each man, furnished with a printed play and a pencil, mark such improprieties, in respect of speaking, as Mr. G– might possibly fall into’. Fitzpatrick’s complaints were first published as letters to journals and then gathered together in a pamphlet, An Enquiry into the Real Merit of a Certain Popular Performer (1760), an attack to which Garrick replied, again in print, in his satire The Fribbleriad (1761) but whose detailed charges he completely ignored. The complainants listed twenty examples from Hamlet, moments where they claimed Garrick created a caesura in a line in ways that worked nonsensically against the syntax: Oh that this too too solid – flesh would melt. He would drown – the stage with tears. I’ll have these players Play something like – the murther of my father. Lay not that flattering – unction to your soul.21 They listed others where Garrick emphasized the last word in a line with a similarly meaningless pause before the next: Or that the everlasting had not fixt – His canon ’gainst self-slaughter. Whether it is nobler in the mind, to suffer – The stings [sic] and arrows.22 Another twenty examples from Richard III distinguish between ‘the words printed in Italics, [which] are those he thought fit to lay emphasis on; . . . such as are in Small Capitals, I apprehend he ought to have spoken emphatically’ (p.27), for example: Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths, Our stern alarms are changed to merry meetings; Our dreadful marches to delightful measures . . . I, that am curtail’d of man’s fair proportion, Deform’d unfinish’d, sent before my time – Into this breathing world, scarce half made up . . . (p.28)

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For many of his examples, there are detailed explanations of why Garrick’s choice was mistaken, for example, for Richard’s line to Lady Anne ‘Then bid me kill myself, and I will do it’: By his former conduct, and confession, it appears, that he was sufficiently ready to kill, and therefore the verb might have escaped the emphasis; but as he seemed willing to change the object, if she ordered him, he should have marked himself. (p.32) It is a fair note to an actor and I often make similar mental notes when listening to actors at the RSC and elsewhere. The Fitzpatrick pamphlet can in some respects be seen as part of the pamphlet culture wars that surrounded Garrick’s management, a sign of the cultural investment – and the profit for publishers – in such wars of words focused on the institution of the theatre. But the extraordinarily long list of pamphlets for and against Garrick throughout his career is the sign of a sustained and very public engagement with his performances. If one wants to write about Burbage or Betterton, one minutely dissects the fragments of evidence, the small corpus of accounts of their performances. But for Garrick there is an immense quantity of description: pamphlets and newspaper reviews, letters and diaries, reports of conversations and early biographies, promptbooks and printed texts, portraits and prints, a mass of votes for and against that swirl around him. No actor before and comparatively few since have ever been so written about, so visible, so important to a society’s need to engage with its cultural events. I shall use Garrick’s Macbeth as a test case for this before turning back to the early stages of his career.

Playing Macbeth As early in his career as 1744, just before he was about to appear as Macbeth for the first time, a pamphlet titled An Essay on Acting, in which will be considered the mimical behaviour of a certain fashionable faulty actor (to give only part of its lengthy title) appeared, starting with a ‘Short Treatise on Acting’ and then offering ‘Critical Observations upon the Character of Macbeth, as it is at present Attempted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury Lane’, an apparently brutal attack on Garrick that seems to be praising the performance of James Quin (1693–1766), the established star in the role of Macbeth. One of its title-page epigraphs adjusts Shakespeare to allude to Garrick’s short stature (‘So have I seen a Pygmie strut, / Mouth and rant, in a Giant’s

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Robe.’) and suggests he is ‘well form’d for Fleance, or one of the Infant Shadows in the Cauldron Scene’ (p.14). But, since Arthur Murphy’s biography of Garrick in 1801, it has been assumed that the pamphlet was written by Garrick himself, a clever piece of negative puffery, designed, as it describes what Quin did, to suggest that what Garrick was doing at the same moment was better. So, for instance, when seeing the ‘air-drawn dagger’, he should not rivet his eyes to an imaginary object as if it really was there but should show an unsettled motion in his eye . . . ‘Come, let me clutch thee’ is not to be done by one motion only but by several successive catches at it, first with one hand and then with the other, preserving the same motion at the same time with his feet, like a man who, out of his depth and half-drowned in his struggles, catches at air for substance. (p.17) Where Quin moved repeatedly, Garrick played the speech with a stillness, a single grab at the dagger sufficient to make the point and the immobility of the head and the focus of the eyes more powerful than Quin’s restlessness. Garrick used the same control in keeping ‘a fi xed eye’ on Banquo’s ghost. A letter of 1761, again writing to someone who had criticized his delivery of an individual line, claiming he had made an unwarrantable pause after ‘single’ in ‘Shakes so my single state of man’ (1.3.140), gives a clear sense of how Garrick thought through a speech and sought to make his voice reveal the character’s thought: If I stop at ye last word, it is a glaring fault, for the Sense is Imperfect – but my Idea of the passage is this – Macbeth is absorb’d in thought, & struck with ye horror of ye Murder, tho but an Idea (fantastical) and it naturally gives him a slow – tremulous – undertone of voice, & tho it might appear I stop’d at Every word in ye Line, more than Usual, yet my intention, was far from dividing the Substantive from its adjective, but to paint ye horror of Macbeth’s Mind, & keep ye voice suspended a little – wch it will naturally be in such a Situation – 23 The key word for Garrick is ‘naturally’, a desire to replace what he saw as the excesses of the traditional acting style with something that can always be justified by reference to realism. But he was also concerned to make clear his view of Macbeth as a heroic and courageous warrior and as a

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man filled with passions, particularly remorse, perhaps the quintessential sentiment of the mid-century male. The man of sensibility is deeply affected by his murderous behaviour and the behaviour is mitigated by, for instance, cutting the onstage murder of Young Macduff, what Paul Prescott has described as making sure that ‘certain atrocities are airbrushed’.24 Contemporaries praised Garrick for the precision of his representation of Macbeth’s thought and his control throughout the play. Thomas Wilkes, who played Ross, noted that It was curious to observe in him the progress of guilt from the intention to the act. How his ambition kindles at the distant prospect of a crown . . . And with what reluctance he yields . . . to the perpetration of the murder! How finely he does show his resolution staggered . . . until he is roused to action by the signal . . . It is impossible to convey an adequate idea of the horror of his looks when he returns from having murdered Duncan . . . How does his voice chill the blood when he tells you ‘I’ve done the deed!’25 And so on through an equally exclamatory account of the whole play. The return from the murder was clearly one of the performance’s high points, with Thomas Davies praising ‘his distraction of mind and agonizing horrors . . . finely contrasted by her [Lady Macbeth’s] seeming apathy, tranquility, and confidence’.26 Most extraordinarily, Garrick managed to suggest that ‘his complexion grew whiter every moment’, perhaps, so a newspaper suggested, simply by having wiped off his make-up before entering,27 and the disarray of his costume, his coat and waistcoat unbuttoned and his wig awry, ‘added greatly to the resemblance of nature in that part of his character’.28 Wilkes may have found it ‘impossible to convey’ Garrick’s performance after the murder but two painters attempted to capture the scene. I shall come back later to the extraordinary number of paintings of Garrick, the most painted non-royal of the century,29 but Johann Zoffany’s characteristically elegant representation of the moment, now in the Baroda Museum in India, does little to convey what Davies described as ‘the wonderful expression of heartful terror, which Garrick felt when he shewed his bloody hands’.30 Henry Fuseli painted the scene twice: the first, still with the actors in contemporary dress recognizably the same as in Zoffany’s image, exhilaratingly captures Garrick’s staring, traumatized eyes, still focused on the offstage moment, with the daggers held up aggressively in front of him at head height, unable to let go of them, making Lady Macbeth, played by Hannah Pritchard, recoil in desperation

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Figure 1 Henry Fuseli, Garrick and Pritchard in Macbeth (c. 1766). © Kunsthaus Zürich.

as she tries to quieten him (see Figure 1); the second reaches a kind of abstraction of character and of scene with little hint of theatre or costume, all now subordinate to the manic energy and eerie lighting of the engagement of the two (see Figure 2).31 Jean Georges Noverre, a French ballet-master whom Garrick had brought over to Drury Lane in a disastrous attempt to stage one of Noverre’s ballets in 1755, described Garrick’s death throes in the role – and Garrick, Thomas Davies reported, ‘excelled in the expression of convulsive throes and dying agonies’:32 The approach of death showed each instant on his face; his eyes became dim, his voice could not support the efforts he made to speak his thoughts . . . his legs gave way under him, his face lengthened, his pale and livid features bore the signs of suffering and repentance. At last, he fell; . . . His plight made the audience shudder, he clawed the ground and seemed to be digging his own grave, but the dread moment was nigh, one saw death in reality, everything expressed that instant which

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Figure 2 Henry Fuseli, Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers (exhibited ?1812). © Tate, London.

makes all equal. In the end he expired. The death rattle and the convulsive movement of the features, arms and breasts gave the final touch to this terrible picture.33 Again, it is the ‘reality’ of what Garrick was doing that so impressed Noverre, the action revealing its truthfulness. Garrick’s performance as Macbeth reclaimed the role as a sustained exploration of guilt and ambition. As Thomas Davies commented, prior to Garrick actors did not even like the encounter with Banquo’s ghost: Before Mr Garrick displayed the terrible graces of action from the impression of visionary appearance, the comedians were strangers to the effects which this scene could produce. Macbeth, they constantly claimed, was not a character of the first rate; all the pith of it was exhausted, they said, in the first and second act of the play . . . [Garrick] said he should be very unhappy if he were not able to keep alive the attention of the spectators to the last syllable of so animated a character.34

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Editing Macbeth Garrick’s first performance as Macbeth was on 7 January 1744. The playbills and newspaper notices advertising and hyping the new production both gave notice of his intention to revive Macbeth as originally written by Shakespeare . . . Quin cried out, with an air of surprise, ‘What does he mean? don’t I play Macbeth as written by Shakespeare?’ 35 But Quin did not. Since 1664, the play had been performed in Sir William Davenant’s adaptation, in which, indeed, the pith of the play is indeed exhausted before the banquet scene. As Stephen Orgel comments on Garrick’s pointing to Shakespeare in the playbills, Twenty years earlier a producer could have expected to attract audiences by advertising a wholly new Macbeth, bigger and better; Garrick’s assertion, the invocation of the author to confer authority on the production, marks a significant moment in both theatrical and textual history.36 Where audiences had since the Restoration come to accept as validating for any new performance its strong connection with the growing tradition of approved star performances, Garrick, as Paul Prescott has argued, offered ‘the claim of textual authenticity . . . to justify, to a potentially hostile community of interpreters, Garrick’s divergence from performance tradition and to locate the privileged origins of his originality’.37 So, for instance, Murphy argued that Garrick published An Essay on Acting precisely because he knew that his manner of representing Macbeth would be essentially different from that of all the actors who had played it for twenty or thirty years before; and he was therefore determined to attack himself ironically to blunt, if not prevent, the remarks of others.38 The notion of tradition in performance is perhaps best expressed in a comment about the post-Restoration performance of Hamlet by Thomas Betterton, the greatest Hamlet from the 1660s until his retirement in 1708: The Tragedy of Hamlet; Hamlet being Perform’d by Mr. Betterton, Sir William [Davenant] (having seen Mr. Taylor of the Blackfryars Company Act it, who being Instructed by the Author Mr. Shakespear) taught Mr. Betterton in every Particle of it.39

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Davenant’s version of Macbeth, the version against which Garrick’s public statement of his return to Shakespeare was pitted, was, for his company’s prompter, John Downes, a huge success precisely because of the spectacle, the ‘bigger and better’ Macbeth, that it had been: being dressed all in its Finery, as new Clothes, new Scenes, Machines, as flyings for the Witches; with all the Singing and Dancing in it . . . it being all Excellently performed, being in the nature of an Opera, it Recompensed double the Expense; it proves still a lasting Play.40 Davenant was, in some respects, simply continuing the pre-Restoration performances of Macbeth. The earliest published text, in the First Folio of 1623, is already an adaptation, with scenes by Middleton that add ‘Singing and Dancing’, though not ‘flyings’. The title-page of Davenant’s version (published in 1674) announces it ‘with all the alterations, amendments, additions, and new songs’ but Davenant did more than add spectacle. He revised the language to suit the taste of the times for clarity and a less extravagantly metaphoric language. Instead of Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red (2.2.59–62) Quin and the other actors who used Davenant’s text spoke can the Sea afford Water enough to wash away the stains? No, they would sooner add a tincture to The Sea, and turn the green into a red. (pp.18–19). As Michael Dobson comments, Elsewhere, alterations are dictated by decorums as much social as linguistic: Davenant’s Macbeth, for example, never forgets himself in front of the servants, and instead of venting the furious ‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!’ (5.3.11) politely asks, ‘Now, Friend, what means thy change of Countenance?’ (p.54). In such a well-spoken Scotland as this there can be no place for the drunken Porter.41 In order to sustain this much more narrowly conceived concept of tragedy, all high nobility with little trace of humour, and in order to create a better sense of the moral balance which Shakespeare’s play conspicuously

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lacks but which Restoration ethical and aesthetic principles expected, Davenant also expanded the roles of the Macduffs who are now given new scenes together in which they too meet the witches and ‘debate the moral problem of tyrannicide in rhyming couplets’42. This has the added advantage, for a theatre now casting women as well as men, of making Lady Macduff into a much more substantial role, one able to have her own maid-cum-confidante with whom to converse. Macbeth was Garrick’s first attempt at producing his own acting version of a Shakespeare play, rather than performing the current stage adaptation. He began from first principles, using Lewis Theboald’s edition of 1740 but also emending it in the light of the ideas of William Warburton and Dr Johnson whose Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth would be published in 1745. In effect what Garrick created was an efficient acting text, 269 lines shorter than Shakespeare’s but with almost all of Davenant’s material removed. Even the Porter is momentarily reinstated, though reduced to a single line, ‘Faith, sir, we were carousing till the second cock’ (2.1.155), in part to give Garrick as Macbeth enough time to change his costume and ‘Get on [his] nightgown’ (148).43 Lady Macduff’s role returns to its normal proportions and the play’s concentration on its star role, that is, of course, Garrick’s role, is helped by also cutting a number of Lady Macbeth’s speeches. In one respect only did Garrick expand on Davenant’s lead. Where Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Macduff exit fighting, Davenant had given Macbeth a single dying line: ‘Farewell, vain world, and what’s most vain in it, Ambition.’ But that was not enough of a tragic end for Garrick. He borrowed Davenant’s lines giving Macduff an appropriate counterweight to each thrust of his sword: ‘This for my royal master Duncan! / This for my bosom friend, my wife! and this for / The pledges of her love and mine, my children!’ When Macduff exited bearing off Macbeth’s sword ‘to / Witness my revenge’, for there can be no decapitation for Garrick’s Macbeth, Garrick, alone on stage, can have an appropriately substantial final speech: ’Tis done! the scene of life will quickly close. Ambition’s vain, delusive dreams are fled, And now I wake to darkness, guilt and horror. I cannot bear it! Let me shake it off. – ‘Twa’ not be; my soul is clogged with blood. I cannot rise! I dare not ask for mercy. It is too late, hell drags me down. I sink I sink – Oh! – my soul is lost forever! Oh! (Dies). (5.6.73–81)

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It is against this speech that the stage business of dying that Noverre described took place. Francis Gentleman, who provided a commentary to Shakespeare for the edition published by John Bell in 1773 from the Drury Lane promptbooks, was severe on Shakespeare here and equally severe on Garrick: where Shakespeare’s idea of having his head brought on by Macduff, is either ludicrous or horrid, therefore commendably changed to visible punishment – a dying speech, and a very good one, has been furnished by Mr. Garrick, to give the actor more eclat; but . . . we are not fond of characters writhing and flouncing on carpets.44 Garrick’s excellence in death scenes was not to everyone’s taste. But the aim throughout was to ensure a proper affective response from the audience. Where Davenant’s version had had to negotiate the notion of usurpation and regicide, a difficult topic in the tense years after the Restoration (and where it was also politic to cut Malcolm’s comments on royal lust), Garrick’s primary concern was less political than emotional, horror and pity as appropriate. He replied apologetically, for instance, to a criticism of his speaking of ‘Out, out, brief candle’ (5.5.23) with ‘two starts, . . . each with a strong action of both hands’, thereby, to his correspondent, failing to convey ‘the insignificance of life’ and ‘a philosophical contempt’: ‘I must have spoke those words quite ye reverse of my own Ideas, if I did not express with them the most contemptuous indifference of Life.’45 But, as another correspondent put it, ‘Macbeth’s comparison of life to [“A poor player”] pronounced by the softest voice that ever drew pity from the heart of man, I well remember to have affected me beyond expression.’46 In spite of his success in the role, Garrick did not perform Macbeth all that often after the 1744 season; only 37 performances in his entire career, compared with 113 as Benedick, 90 as Hamlet and 85 as Lear.47 In 1767 he was, he wrote to his brother George, ‘very fat. I am made too much of, & Eat & drink too freely – it won’t do – & I can’ undertake Macbeth this season.’48 By 1772, when asked to revive it by Lord North, he politely refused: ‘I am really not yet prepar’d for Macbeth, ’tis the most violent part I have.’49

Authentic Macbeth But Garrick also mentioned to North’s secretary that he had ‘a design to exhibit ye Characters in ye old dresses’.50 Macbeth was played at Drury Lane (without Garrick) ‘dressed in the Habits of the Times’ on 25 November

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1776, as the prompter William Hopkins recorded in his diary. 51 But by then Charles Macklin (1699?–1797) had played the role at Covent Garden, in October 1773, and had been widely ridiculed for his performance. Nonetheless, it was Macklin who explored the possibility of historical accuracy in costuming Macbeth to an extent that Garrick never envisaged. Throughout his career, Garrick toyed with historicism in costume designs for Shakespeare, taking further what other contemporaries had experimented with, planning a production of King John in 1750 dressed ‘half old English, half modern’ as the company had in William Shirley’s Edward the Black Prince the same year, 52 trying Richard III and Henry IV, Part 2 in ‘old English habits’ in the 1760s and finally playing Lear in what was conceived of as historical authenticity in his final performances in 1776. But Macklin went much further. When preparing to play Shylock in 1741, a role he performed for 48 years, he read and reread Josephus’s History of the Jews and went daily to watch Jewish businessmen in London coffee-houses, copying manners, gesture and accent and wearing a red three- cornered hat because he had discovered that Venetian Jews usually wore one. For Macbeth he was determined to follow through his historical research. Cooke, Macklin’s first biographer, noted, Macbeth used to be dressed in a suit of scarlet and gold, a tail wig, &c. in every respect like a modern military officer. Garrick always played it in this manner . . . Macklin, however, . . . saw the absurdity of exhibiting a Scotch character, existing many years before the Norman Conquest, in this manner, and therefore very properly abandoned it for the old Caledonian habit.53 As Zoffany’s painting shows, Garrick wore formal contemporary clothes as Macbeth, a court version of a military uniform for the murder, just as, for his second encounter with the witches, he wore the outfit of a modern fine gentleman so that . . . you looked like a beau who had unfortunately slipped his foot and tumbled into a night-cellar, where a parcel of old women were boiling tripe for their supper.54 Where Garrick’s experiments with historical accuracy, when they occurred at all, were limited to costume for the principals, Macklin went much further and ‘shewed the same attention to the subordinate characters as well as to the scenes, decorations, music and other incidental parts of the performance’.55 His own costume as Macbeth draped the plaid

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over his back, used the traditional belted tunic and a bonnet, and rightly avoided the kilt, a late innovation in Scottish wear. His first entrance, Macklin noted, ‘should be preceded by fife, drum, bagpipe (query) and a bodyguard in highland dress’.56 Even the set was to depict the world of the historical Macbeth as Macklin understood it: for the interior of Macbeth’s castle, ‘every room should be full of bad pictures of warriors, sword, helmet, target and dirk, escutcheons – and the Hall, boars stuffed, wolves, and full of pikes and broadswords.’57 Macklin’s designs were full of anachronisms: the Scottish troops carried pistols and the castle battlements had cannon. But his vision of the play was far beyond anything Garrick ever attempted, the fullest attempt yet to create a design for a Shakespeare play that was both historical and imaginative. It was also, conspicuously unlike Garrick’s success with Macbeth, something of a disaster with near-riots in the audience so that the management cancelled performances and, after further confrontations with the playgoers, Macklin was dismissed. Where Garrick had worked hard in 1744 to restore the Shakespeare text and oust Davenant’s, as well as ensuring that it properly set off the brilliance of his own performance, Macklin was concerned only with historical authenticity, a unified production style and detailed realism. Macklin may have been mocked but his style of production prefigured the nineteenth century fascination with historicism and the twentieth century fascination with unified, conceptually driven modes of directorial interpretation.

Contexts for change: Garrick the actor Where Macklin’s revolution in theatrical design was anything but an instant success, Garrick’s revolution in acting style at the start of his career certainly had been or, at least, the impact of the challenge that Garrick offered to traditional modes of performance was seen by contemporaries as profound and exhilarating. Garrick was born in Hereford in 1717 and grew up in Lichfield, educated in part at Samuel Johnson’s school nearby. Johnson and Garrick journeyed to London together in 1737 and Garrick, though registered as a prospective law student at Lincoln’s Inn, went into partnership in the wine trade with his older brother Peter. But it was soon clear that Garrick’s true interest was in the theatre. In April 1740 his first play, Lethe, or Aesop in the Shades, a satire on various fashionable foibles, was performed at Drury Lane as an afterpiece, a short play performed after the main work, as part of the benefit night for Henry Giffard. Garrick’s second play, The Lying Valet, would be performed in

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November 1741. It is significant that Garrick’s theatre career begins as a playwright, for his work on adapting and restoring Shakespeare is a combination of the sensitivity of an actor to what makes a great role in midcentury theatre and the perceptiveness of a playwright of how plays are effectively structured in mid-century drama. Giffard was crucial to the first steps of Garrick’s career. In 1729 Giffard had become manager of the theatre in Goodman’s Fields and had then built a new theatre nearby in 1733. The Licensing Act of 1737, which restricted the theatres able to perform plays to two, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, threatened to close down theatres like Giffard’s, especially when the licensees of the patent houses sought to have their monopoly enforced. Garrick asked his brother to use his contacts to help Giffard gain a licence. But Giffard, using a loophole in the act that permitted concerts, reopened Goodman’s Fields in 1741 with a new pantomime, Harlequin Student, celebrating the legitimate drama and ending with the entrance of a monument to Shakespeare. One night, as the lead actor, Richard Yates, was ill, ‘I put on ye Dress & did 2 or three Scenes for him, but Nobody knew it but him and Giffard’, as Garrick wrote to his brother.58 During the summer Giffard ran a season in Ipswich with Garrick in the company and on 19 October 1741 Garrick made his London debut as Richard III, appearing as ‘a Gentleman (who never appear’d on any Stage)’, as the playbill announced. A notice in a newspaper the next day, perhaps planted, described the audience’s response to Garrick as ‘the most extraordinary and great that was ever known upon such an Occasion’ while a Lichfield man, John Swinfen, wrote to Peter Garrick the next day I believe there was not one in the House that was not in raptures. I heard several men of judgment declare it their opinion that nobody ever excelled him in the part.59 Garrick himself wrote to Peter as well: Last Night I play’d Richard ye Third to ye Surprize of Every Body & as I shall make very near £300 p Annum by It & as it is really what I doat upon I am resolv’d to pursue it.60 The combination of economic sense and passion is something that characterizes Garrick’s entire career. Certainly the change of career was a sound move for Garrick and the excitement created by his performances was a huge success for Giffard’s theatre.

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At the heart of Garrick’s success lay his difference from the prevailing style of acting tragedy. The playwright Richard Cumberland, writing nearly 60 years later, described the contrast between Garrick and Quin in a performance of Rowe’s The Fair Penitent in 1746: with very little variation of cadence, and in a deep full tone, accompanied by a sawing kind of action, which had more of the senate than of the stage in it, [Quin] rolled out his heroics with an air of dignified indifference, that seemed to disdain the plaudits that were bestowed upon him. Mrs. Cibber in a key, high-pitched but sweet withal, sung or rather recitatived Rowe’s harmonious strain . . . it was so extremely wanting in contrast, that, though it did not wound the ear, it wearied it; . . . but when after long and eager expectation I first beheld little Garrick, then young and light and alive in every muscle and in every feature, come bounding on the stage . . . – heavens, what a transition! – it seemed as if a whole century had been stept over in the transition of a single scene.61 But Cumberland also suggests that, even at this point in Garrick’s career, 6 years after that triumphant debut, the audience preferred Quin and ‘bestowed far the greater show of hands upon the master of the old school than upon the founder of the new’.62 Theatre revolutions do not really happen overnight. Nonetheless, what Garrick offered as a shift in theatrical form was clearly towards something more vital and faster – hence Cumberland’s emphasis on Garrick ‘bounding on’, ‘light and alive’ – but also something far more realist and mobile, changeable and fluid. At his most teasing, Garrick’s refusal to stop changing his expression drove Reynolds, painting his portrait, to throw ‘down his pallet and pencils on the floor, saying he believed he was painting from the devil’.63 Macklin catches this quality in his description (envious perhaps as well as irritated) of Garrick’s speed: Garrick huddled all passions into strut and quickness – bustle was his favourite. In the performance of a Lord Townly he was all bustle. In Archer, Ranger, Don John, Hamlet, Macbeth, Brute – all bustle! bustle! bustle! The whole art of acting, according to the modern practice, is compriz’d in – bustle! ‘Give me a Horse!’ – ‘Bind up my Wounds!’ – ‘Have mercy Jesu!’ – all bustle! –everything is turned into bustle!64 Something of the bustling speed is apparent in the exact representation of Garrick’s voice that was included in Joshua Steele’s analysis of ‘To be or

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not to be’ (Fig.1), his one attempt to recover from the past ‘some of the celebrated speeches from Shakespeare . . . noted and accented as [actors] spoke them’. Steele, in his attempt to define the ‘melody and measure of speech’, set out rhythm, metre and inflection for the speech ‘as I pronounced it’.

Figure 3 Joshua Steele’s notation of his own voice (Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech (London, 1775), p. 40)

But then, ‘[s]ince writing the foregoing treatise, I have heard Mr. Garrick in the character of Hamlet’ and he marks the differences ‘that I can remember’ between Garrick and himself.65

Figure 4 Joshua Steele’s notation of Garrick’s voice (Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech (London, 1775), p. 47)

It is the most extraordinary document to have survived to demonstrate the sound of an eighteenth-century actor, even though we have no means of knowing how accurate Steele is.66 Where Steele spoke it ‘in the stile of a ranting actor, swelled with forte and softened with piano, he [Garrick] delivered with little or no distinction of piano and forte, but nearly uniform; something below the ordinary force, or, as a musician would say, sotto voce, or sempre poco piano’. But comparing Steele’s version of the first line with Garrick’s it is clear too that Garrick’s is about speed. In every case where the quantity of the syllable is different, Garrick is shorter: ‘or’ is a crotchet length (U.S. quarter-note) where Steele has a dotted minim (half-note), and Steele gives it a whole foot where Garrick gives it a light stress after the pause; ‘that is’ is dotted crotchet and quaver (eighth-note) where Steele has a dotted minim and minim, lightening the stress on ‘is’ considerably from Steele’s ponderous mode.67 At the very end of the speech, Steele notes that Garrick pronounced the last word, ‘orisons’, with a short i, where Steele himself had made it ‘long and heavy, by supposing the word to have been

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originally Norman French, oraison’.68 But Garrick did without the pause after ‘Nymph’, just as his pauses after ‘To die’ and ‘to sleep’ were markedly shorter than Steele’s. This is not just bustle but a search for the throughline of the speech, its architecture as important as its momentary effect. Steele, incidentally, particularly praises Garrick for the clarity of his diction: he and Mrs Cibber ‘are distinctly heard even in the softest sounds of their voices; when others are scarcely intelligible, though offensively loud’.69 If one of the central characteristics of Shakespeare’s dramatic language is the compression of rapid and extreme mobility of thought in densely imaged speech, then the speed of Garrick’s movement and speaking is a necessary precondition for the actor’s adequacy to take on major Shakespeare roles. Indeed, one of the recurrent emphases of modern voice-training for Shakespeare is precisely on speed and lightness, these qualities that defi ned Garrick. His response to the lengthy structures of Shakespeare’s syntax was, as Ronald Hafter suggests, to achieve this ability to represent ever-changing feeling and thought ‘by splintering his syntax into emotional rather than grammatical units . . . The timing of his lines was determined by psychological factors, not mechanical rules’.70 The shift of which Garrick was a part was also a movement towards a form of realism derived not from a set of rules for declamation but from observation and imitation. Macklin, as I noted above, prepared to play Shylock in 1741 by going every day to watch contemporary Jewish businessmen, to observe speech and movement and gesture, as if Shylock was to be found in the coffee-houses of Macklin’s London rather than in an early modern Venice. Friedrich Grimm, watching Garrick in Paris in 1765, catches this quality perfectly: The great art of David Garrick consists in the facility with which he abandons his own personality. He never oversteps truth . . . His vivacity is extreme . . . He is a perfect monkey, imitating everything he sees; yet he always remains graceful. He has perfected his great talents by a profound study of nature and by researches full of shrewdness and of broadness of thought. For that purpose he is ever mingling with the crowd, and it is there that he comes on nature in all its native originality.71 Garrick’s sociable nature, his wish to be in company and, as we might now say, ‘networked’, is also part of his work as an actor, observing, researching, analyzing and then using. The kinds of description of a character’s thought that he repeatedly offers in letters and comments are then part of a psychological approach derived from moving both inwards from the character’s

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speech and from observation and outwards from the character’s thought and emotional state to the vocal and physical representation of the feelings and imagination. ‘Sympathetic imagination’, a common phrase to describe his style, is a coded and communicable realism, the performance of ‘character’ that foregrounds its likeness to the audience as a feeling, thinking being, created through a supposed sympathy. It depends on a recognition of likeness, not difference. Perhaps the most extreme narrative of this form of observation, though one that is often suggested to have been a myth Garrick created, is Garrick’s account of his source for King Lear’s madness, recorded by Arthur Murphy. Garrick claimed to have known a man who accidentally killed his daughter by dropping her from a window, went mad and endlessly repeated the action of playing with the child, dropping her and, bursting into a flood of tears, filled the house with shrieks of grief and bitter anguish. He then sat down, in a pensive mood, his eyes fixed on one object, at times looking slowly round him, as if to implore compassion . . . There it was, said Garrick, that I learned to imitate madness; I copied nature, and to that owed my success in King Lear.72

Figure 5 William Hogarth, David Garrick as Richard III (1746). © National Museums, Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery.

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It is no accident that Hogarth’s brilliant portrait of Garrick as Richard III (See Figure 5), perhaps the most famous of all images of Garrick in Shakespeare, should represent both energetic vitality, as the character bursts out of the frame towards the viewer/spectator, and a figure who is not some abstracted embodiment of evil but all too human as he wakes from the horrific nightmare of the ghosts’ visitation. There is, indeed, nothing in the image of Richard himself to define the character as evil, only as a startled and traumatized individual. Richard’s speech at this moment, a speech that marks Shakespeare’s own breaking through earlier conventions of dramatic speech towards a new realism, is one that demands an analogous realism from the actor, something that Garrick supremely achieved. Even though in Cibber’s version (the adaptation that Garrick always performed) the speech is cut from Shakespeare’s thirty lines to an extensively rewritten nine, something of the charge is still there and a simplified but still individualized presence is demanding to be acted: Give me a horse – bind up my wounds! ‘Have mercy, Heaven. Ha! – soft! – ’Twas but a dream: But then so terrible, it shakes my Soul. Cold drops of sweat hang on my trembling Flesh, My blood grows chilly, and I freze with horror.73 A new realism in acting is of course nothing but a set of acting conventions that are read by the audience as differing markedly and convincingly from the previous set, now read as codified and artificial. But the degree of change that Garrick embodied and voiced was striking.74

Contexts for change: the Shakespeare revival That Garrick had an enormous effect on contemporary responses to Shakespeare in performance is agreed and that he wanted to restore Shakespeare’s texts to those plays performed with Shakespeare’s titles (as in the example of Macbeth) and to restore some more Shakespeare plays to the standard theatre company repertory, its stock of plays, is similarly clear. But the idea, once conventional wisdom and indicated frequently in Garrick’s time as ever since, that somehow Shakespeare had vanished from the stage before Garrick restored his mighty presence is plainly false.75 From the mid 1730s onwards, for instance, a group of women formed the Shakespeare Ladies Club with the intention of persuading theatre managers to put on Shakespeare plays more often.76 From January 1737

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a number of playbills for Shakespeare performances were indicated to be ‘At the Desire of several Ladies of Quality’, while plays ‘in Imitation of Shakespear’s Stile’ and new adaptations, as well as performances of Shakespeare plays not seen in London for decades (Cymbeline and King John, for example) were also the result of the success of this cultural pressure-group. In March 1737 a letter appeared in The Grub Street Journal from the ghosts of Shakespeare, Jonson, Dryden and Rowe announcing that ‘ ’Tis a great Pleasure for us to hear, that the Ladies begin to encourage Common Sense; which makes us in hopes that the Gentlemen will follow their Example’, while in another newspaper Shakespeare’s ghost praised women: ‘the late glorious Stand the Ladies have made in defence of Wit . . . will prove that your Relish of what is truly good and poetical, is at least equal, if not superior to [men’s].’77 Statistical counts are vulnerable but Avery puts the rise in the percentage of Shakespeare performances from the 1735–1736 season to the 1737–1738 one as a movement from 14 per cent to 22 per cent, while in 1737–1738 Covent Garden alone had 28 per cent Shakespeare in its calendar.78 Arthur Scouten, pushing strongly the argument that Garrick’s influence has been over-rated, argues that if one counts stock plays there were 15 Shakespeare plays in the repertory in 1717, 16 in 1724, 18 in 1740, while in the first year of Garrick’s management of Drury Lane there were 22 in the repertory and in 1776, Garrick’s last year as manager, there were 13.79 Part of the rise in the number of Shakespeare performances was the consequence of the censorship instigated by the 1737 Licensing Act which now required all new plays to be sent to the Lord Chamberlain before performance for approval. Inevitably, the number of new plays per season declined and the number of stock performances increased with Shakespeare supplying many of the latter. As Brian Vickers puts it, Shakespeare’s plays became ‘safe choices, low-risk theatre’ and, as a result of the frequency with which the most popular dozen were performed and the frequency with which audiences returned to see them every season, in the same productions with the same casts, meant that the plays became familiar enough for audiences to attend to ‘nuances of voice and gesture’.80 There is a vast increase in the quantity of writing about theatre from the 1740s, not only in terms of reviewing or otherwise discussing performances and performers in the press but also formulating theories of acting or offering critical analysis of the play-texts, all of which makes Garrick and his Shakespeare work so especially visible and recoverable, for the writing from the 1740s onwards is not only descriptive but also an attempt to ‘evaluate interpretation’.81

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Some of the publications are even designedly practical, like The Dramatic Timepiece (1767), put together by John Brownsmith, for a time prompter at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, ‘being a calculation of the length of time every act takes in the performing in all the acting plays . . . as minuted from repeated observations’, as the title-page lengthily phrased it. Brownsmith details 66 tragedies and 80 comedies. For Hamlet, for example, Act 1 takes 40 minutes, Act 2 22, Act 3 40, Act 4 27 and Act 5 30, making up 2 hours 39 minutes including 7 minutes per act-break. Of other Shakespeare plays Othello took 2 hours 23 minutes, King Lear 2.34 and Macbeth 2.20, while Merry Wives could be completed in only 1.26. The purpose of this was to enable gentry to work out exactly when to turn up at the playhouses to watch from Act 3 onwards, a common practice, and when to require their servants to turn up with the carriage at the end, ‘instead of assembling in public houses or houses of ill fame, to the destruction of their morals, properties and constitutions’.82 Above all, there was edition after edition of Shakespeare’s plays, edited expensively for Jacob Tonson and his heirs by the great line of eighteenthcentury editors (Rowe, Pope, Theobald and Warburton) and, in competition, published cheaply by Robert Walker, lowering the price to an affordable amount, so that, by the 1740s, Shakespeare texts were increasingly to be found everywhere.83 There would be an increasingly clear division between scholarly editions to be read and editions that reprinted the theatres’ performing texts: by Bell’s version of 1773–1734, it could be described in his advertisement as ‘not an edition meant for the profoundly learned, nor the deeply studious’.84 But the unending stream of editions, representing a range of theatre performances as well as critical commentary and scholarly emendation, testifies to the reading public’s commitment to buying (and perhaps occasionally reading) Shakespeare’s plays – and the reading public and theatregoing public always overlapped very considerably.

Plays problematic and triumphant Though Garrick was fairly general in his love of Shakespeare, the range of plays which he was willing and able successfully (that is, successfully in terms of his responsibilities as manager) to mount at Drury Lane was extremely limited. After all, Dr Johnson’s manifesto of a prologue that opened Garrick’s career as co-manager of Drury Lane in 1747 may have begun with an announcement of Shakespeare’s centrality to England’s image of its cultural (and political) importance – ‘When Learning’s Triumph o’er

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her barb’rous Foes / First rear’d the Stage, immortal Shakespear rose’ but it also accepted the power of the audience: Ah! Let not Censure term our Fate our Choice, The Stage but echoes back the publick Voice. The Drama’s Laws the Drama’s Patrons give, For we that live to please, must please to live.85 Garrick occasionally played Henry IV in Henry IV, Part 2 and even more rarely played Hotspur in Part 1; he played the Chorus in Henry V a few times, though Drury Lane rarely put the play on, even when the country was at war with France. Following what was almost a tradition, Garrick revived Henry VIII at the time of George III’s coronation in 1761 but the production, done on the cheap, did not impress. Richard III was the only history play in which Garrick was a success and which his company often performed. Some plays were even less successful: he worked with Edward Capell on adapting Antony and Cleopatra and played Antony himself but the production, in January 1759, managed only six performances in the season and was never revived. Garrick was long interested in Cymbeline, asking for John Hoadly’s new version in 1746. Covent Garden played an adaptation of the play in the 1758– 1759 season made by William Hawkins, Professor of Poetry at Oxford and author of Praelectiones Poeticae, a set of lectures in Latin on Shakespeare, the first series ever at an English university, given between 1751 and 1756 and published in 1758. Hawkins’s proudly patriotic version, for he found ‘something . . . truly British in the subject of it’, was heavily adapted.86 Garrick’s version for Drury Lane was premiered in November 1761, with Garrick as Posthumus. This was much closer to Shakespeare’s than Hawkins’s had been but was still heavily cut, especially in Act 5 which lost over 500 lines. Garrick apologized in the published text for the cutting: The admirers of Shakespeare must not take it ill that there are some scenes, and consequently many fine passages, omitted . . . It was impossible to retain more of the play and bring it within the compass of a night’s entertainment.87 ‘A night’s entertainment’ included entr’actes and an afterpiece and therefore required the main play to be kept reasonably brief. But Garrick made sure his Cymbeline was as patriotic as Covent Garden’s, with no sign at the end of Britain agreeing to pay tribute to Rome.

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There were many plays now staples of the Shakespeare repertory which Garrick simply ignored. Even Julius Caesar seems only to have interested him enough to create Ragandjaw, a wonderfully bawdy parody of the quarrel scene, between Brutarse and Cassiarse, performed at private theatricals at Rev Hoadly’s in July 1746, with Hogarth providing the set and playing Grilliardo, the Devil’s cook.88 Garrick tried playing Othello in 1745, a role in which his great predecessors, Thomas Betterton and Barton Booth, had triumphed. Quin too had been a great success in the role and Garrick aimed simply to be different, most especially in the epileptic fit which Quin avoided but Garrick did to excess, at least in Macklin’s view. In 1746 he described one scene at length to the artist Francis Hayman who had illustrated Shakespeare’s plays for Hanmer’s edition and was now preparing a revised suite of six prints; Garrick recommended the moment when Emilia reveals the truth about the handkerchief when ‘the Whole Catastrophe of the play is unravell’d’ with Othello ‘thunderstruck with Horror, his Whole figure extended’ and Iago should express the greatest perturbation of Mind, & should shrink up his Body . . . with his Eyes looking askance . . . on Othello & gnawing his Lip in anger at his Wife; but this likewise will be describ’d better by giving you the Expression when I see You.89 Garrick had played Iago in Dublin in 1745 and he would again a few times thereafter in England, last in 1753, but neither role really suited him, though the box-office was always good. He began rehearsing Othello again in 1775 but it did not reach performance. Sometimes Garrick had to learn from experience. He turned The Tempest into a three-act opera in 1756, derived directly from Shakespeare with comparatively little taken from the operatic version by Thomas Shadwell of the Davenant-Dryden adaptation of The Tempest, but the failure of that version convinced him to try a version of the play fairly straight and that was another lasting success. But there were immediate great successes too. Garrick adapted The Taming of the Shrew into a three-act comedy afterpiece, Catherine and Petruchio, in 1754, playing Petruchio, and The Winter’s Tale into a three-act ‘dramatic pastoral’, Florizel and Perdita, in 1758, playing Leontes, the two short plays performed together as a double-bill. Garrick’s prologue to the production envisaged The Winter’s Tale as a ‘precious liquor’ that now ‘lay by, forsaken’, a statement hardly true since Macnamara Morgan’s version of Shakespeare’s Act 4 as The Sheep-Shearing had appeared regularly at Covent

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Garden since 1754, but Garrick offered his three-act version as the play ‘now confined, and bottled for your taste’ for ‘ ’Tis my chief wish, my joy, my only plan, / To lose no drop of that immortal man!’90 Both parts of the bill proved lastingly popular, with Catherine and Petruchio being a staple of the repertory through most of the nineteenth century. Garrick simply dumped large sections of both plots to achieve the abbreviated narrative he needed. But he also adjusted the action to produce the right emotional and moral effect. Everything awkward about The Taming of the Shrew was renegotiated: this Catherine may be irritated by having Petruchio foisted on her (‘Reduced to this, or none, the maid’s last prayer, / Sent to be wooed like bear unto the stake?’) but she can see a solution (‘And he the bear / For I shall bait him’) and finds him immediately attractive: ‘yet the man’s a man’.91 Determined to tame Petruchio she also announces the consequence of failure: Cath’rine shall tame this haggard; or, if she fails, Shall tie her tongue up and pare down her nails.92 By the end, this may be a marriage of mutual attraction but it is still based on Catherine’s acquiescence to Petruchio’s absolute dominance, especially when Garrick ends the play by giving him some of Shakespeare’s Katherine’s speech of submission, voicing patriarchal and marital power with no hint of the ironies and discomforts later generations might find in it. Florizel and Perdita performs a similarly redemptive act with an awkward play, not only in terms of its time-scale but also its bawdiness, still present in Morgan’s version, and social improprieties. Even more importantly, the play now creates the proper emotional response of virtually non-stop weeping, from Polixenes’s first line to Paulina, ‘Weep not now’, onwards. Tears were, after all, the ideal index of sympathy and sensibility, signs of the right emotions like love and compassion. By the end, amidst the floods of tears repentant and joyful shed both by Leontes and, Garrick must have hoped, by the audience, the nuclear family is virtuously recreated with the restoration of an heir to the monarchy less significant than the re-establishment of the family unit.93 This need to adjust the play to ensure the proper moral and emotional response had been fully present in Garrick’s 1748 revision of Romeo and Juliet which turned back from Thomas Otway’s 1680 toga-play The History and Fall of Caius Marius and Theophilus Cibber’s 1744 adaptation of Otway under Shakespeare’s title. Garrick kept Otway’s innovation (and

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followed Shakespeare’s source in Bandello) by having Juliet wake before Romeo dies so that there could be a 75-line reunion scene, using every cliché of contemporary tragedy to produce the strongest emotional effect with Romeo momentarily forgetting he is dying from the poison, Juliet lamenting ‘Did I wake for this?’, Romeo cursing his fate as ‘ ’Twixt death and love I’m torn’ and carefully emphasizing ‘She is my wife; our hearts are twined together’ before he dies.94 There could be no room here for Rosaline for Romeo cannot appear to be a Romeo by switching love-objects but there was room for ample spectacle, especially when Spranger Barry, who fi rst played Romeo in Garrick’s version, left for Covent Garden in 1750, Garrick took over the role and the two theatre companies went head to head with rival performances for twelve nights in a row to the increasing annoyance of playgoers, as a contemporary satirist caught it: Well, what’s to-night? cries angry Ned, As up from bed he rouses; Romeo again! and shakes his head; Ah! Pox on both your houses!95 Covent Garden had an elaborate funeral procession for Juliet with music by Thomas Arne and Garrick countered with one by William Boyce, complete with choirs and tolling bells. For the tomb, Garrick’s carpenters and set-painters created a superbly intense, claustrophobic space on stage with a landscape behind and the hint of moonlight. Garrick’s theatre won the war and, while Barry was adjudged the finer Romeo for the first two acts, Garrick’s weakness as passionate lover was offset by his undoubted power and superiority in the tragic emotionalism of the end. On the comparison of the two in the balcony scene, one woman was reported to have announced, Had I been Juliet to Garrick’s Romeo, so ardent and impassioned was he, I should have expected he would have come up to me in the balcony; but had I been Juliet to Barry’s Romeo, so tender, so eloquent and so seductive was he, I should certainly have gone down to him!96

Fairies and comedy At the core of Garrick’s negotiations with Shakespeare’s plays in the theatre was always that tension between a desire to expand the Shakespeare

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repertory, increasing the number and variety of Shakespeare plays in performance, and a recognition of the limits of commercial viability, of what the audience was willing to pay to see. No play typifies that tension and the changes in performance culture more than A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Garrick repeatedly tried to make it work at Drury Lane and never succeeded. After Samuel Pepys saw it, presumably unaltered, at the King’s Theatre on 29 September 1662 and found it ‘the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life’,97 there is no record of a performance of anything quite like Shakespeare’s play until the nineteenth century. Instead it appeared next adapted into a spectacular opera in The Fairy Queen, probably by Thomas Betterton with Henry Purcell’s dazzling music for the interludes at the end of each act, complexly rethinking what the act has performed. The Fairy Queen was itself adapted as a comic puppet-show with some human actors as well, played in the Little Piazza of Covent Garden ‘with new Scenes, machines, several Dances by the Fairies’, probably also functioning as a burlesque of the craze for Italian opera. Thereafter A Midsummer Night’s Dream was a resource, through versions of the ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ playlet abstracted from the rest of the play’s action, for further parody of contemporary operatic forms in Richard Leveridge’s The Comick Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe, performed at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1716, and John Frederick Lampe’s ‘Mock-Opera’ of Pyramus and Thisbe (Covent Garden, 1745), or simply transposed into Charles Johnson’s adaptation of As You Like It as Love in a Forest (1723) to fi ll a gap in the action. Performing the play itself seems not to have occurred to anyone. In 1755 Garrick’s company performed a full-scale through-sung opera, The Fairies, almost certainly the work of Garrick himself, with music by John Christopher Smith, friend and pupil of Handel. Less than a quarter of Shakespeare’s text was left in: Many passages of the first merit and some whole scenes . . . are necessarily omitted in this opera to reduce the performance to a proper length; it was feared that even the best poetry would appear tedious when only supported by recitative.98 Since a separation of genres makes comic and serious operatic styles incompatible, the workers are cut completely and what remains is a drama of lovers and fairies, with Shakespeare’s text supplemented, wherever – and that was frequently – he had unaccountably failed to supply ‘the

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composer with songs’, from Milton, Waller, Dryden and others. Loathed by Walpole who found it a ‘detestable English opera’, taken from a play he thought ‘forty times more nonsensical than the worst translation of any Italian opera-books’, The Fairies was packed with ‘all true lovers of their country’.99 It is the fantasy of the play that so infuriates Walpole and indeed most of his culture. This was one Shakespeare play that in 1755 was not yet stageable. It was not any more stageable 8 years later when Garrick tried to create a five-act version. But Garrick had not attempted to create a main-piece, five-act drama out of any Shakespeare comedy. He carefully worked on the adaptation of Dream and then, ill and discouraged by attacks on his work as actor and manager, Garrick left for an extensive trip, a 2-year grand tour of Europe, putting George Colman in charge of Drury Lane. Garrick wrote to Colman from Paris: ‘as for Midsummer Nights, &. I think my presence will be necessary to get it up as it ought – however if you want to, do for ye best – & I’ll Ensure It’s success.’100 Colman completed the adaptation, cutting Act 5 completely, as Garrick had done for The Fairies, and did not wait for Garrick’s return to perform it. The result was catastrophic. As William Hopkins, the theatre’s prompter, noted in his diary, Upon the whole, never was anything so murder’d in the Speaking . . . Next day it was reported. The Performers first Sung the Audience to Sleep, & then went to Sleep themselves. Fairies pleas’d – Serious parts displeas’d – Comic between both.101 A newspaper review found the play ‘a lively picture of the ungoverned imagination of that great Poet. The fairy part is most transcendently beautiful, and is, in poetical geography, a kind of Dramatic Map of Fairy Land’, though the rest was ‘very fl at and uninteresting’.102 But the production was abandoned and, after a night’s work, Colman had created a two-act afterpiece, A Fairy Tale, performed three days later, following the paper’s praise of the fairy scenes by cutting everything else as completely as possible and trying to control the ‘ungoverned imagination’. It, too, was not a success. If Shakespeare was praised for the extremes of his imagination, the investigation of realms of fantasy and the supernatural, then the stage was not yet the place where that could be shown. In paintings like Fuseli’s of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or in music like Thomas Linley the Younger’s extraordinary A Lyric Ode on the Fairies, Aerial Beings and Witches of Shakespeare (1776), setting a text by French

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Lawrence, the wildness of Shakespeare’s imagination could be demonstrated in a form that is proto-romanticist in its extravagance – but not on stage.

Hamlet I have been charting something of the ambivalence of response that many of Shakespeare’s plays generated both for audiences and for Garrick. Hamlet represents for Garrick, along this continuum, both success and failure: a supremely popular performance as Hamlet and a controversial decision as adaptor. Garrick played Hamlet for nearly 35 years, from 1742 to 1776, the interpretation deepening but not altering. At the core was melancholy, of course, but also filial piety and something approaching religion, while for Hannah More Garrick ‘never once forgot he was a prince’.103 As Lichtenberg wrote in 1775, of Hamlet’s first soliloquy, ‘O that this too, too solid flesh’, Garrick is completely overcome by tears of grief, felt with only too good a cause, for a virtuous father and on account of a light-minded mother, . . . The last of the words: ‘So excellent a King’, is utterly lost; one catches it only from the movement of the mouth, which quivers and shuts tight immediately afterwards, so as to restrain the all too distinct expression of grief on the lips, which could easily tremble with unmanly emotion.104 But while ‘To be or not to be’ could not match this emotional effect, it exceeded it by an audience response Lichtenberg found extraordinary: a large part of the audience not only knows it by heart as well as they do the Lord’s Prayer, but listens to it, so to speak, as if it were a Lord’s Prayer, . . . with a sense of solemnity and awe . . . In this island Shakespeare is not only famous, but holy.105 Balancing this was, at the moment of Hamlet’s meeting his father’s ghost, the awe and horror felt by the character and the audience and carefully engineered by Garrick. It was rumoured that Garrick wore a trick-wig for the scene, made by a Mr Perkins, so that his hair could literally stand on end. Lichtenberg’s description of the moment, lengthy and detailed as Garrick turns, staggers, drops his hat, stretches out his arms (the left

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further than the right), opens his mouth and stands rooted to the spot, all ‘with no loss of dignity’, is also one of sympathetic response: His whole demeanour is so expressive of terror that it made my flesh creep even before he began to speak. The almost terror-struck silence of the audience, which preceded this appearance and filled one with a sense of insecurity, probably did much to enhance this effect.106 Murphy thought Garrick managed to change colour, ‘fixed in mute astonishment, . . . growing paler and paler’,107 and Francis Gentleman agreed it was a moment of sheer brilliance, that ‘give[s] us the most pleasing, I had almost said astonishing sensibility’.108 However, Partridge, going to Hamlet with Tom Jones in Fielding’s novel (1749), found good grounds to sneer at Garrick’s performance: ‘He the best player! . . . Why, I could act as well as he myself. I am sure if I had seen a ghost, I should have looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did.’109 When Garrick first played the role in August 1742 he worked from the standard performance text, a version based on that used by Robert Wilks (c. 1635–1732) when he played Hamlet, and published in 1718, itself derived from Davenant’s Restoration adaptation which was less an extensive rewriting than a cutting and touching up of passages to align them with contemporary taste. The Wilks Hamlet was less introspective and reflective than active and various, shorn of his speech over the praying Claudius and ‘How all occasions’. When first published in 1676 Davenant’s text layered the performance version onto Shakespeare, printing the play whole but marking passages left out in contemporary performance practice, thereby separating reading from watching as explained in a prefatory note that also defines Shakespeare’s special status: This Play being too long to be conveniently Acted, such places as might be least prejudicial to the Plot of 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‘‘110 Garrick’s was a performance to watch but he was well aware of what he was not playing. He altered the play here and there throughout his career but in 1772, to make his most radical change, he turned back to the Wilks playing text rather than to the edition of 1763 which contained his current performing version and did not include lines omitted on stage.

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Through the first four acts he restored over 600 lines, moments like the dispatch of the ambassadors to Norway which are still often cut but also much of Hamlet’s role that he had not previously performed, including ‘How all occasions’. The roles of Polonius, Ophelia and Laertes were built back up to Shakespearean proportions and Garrick found time for the whole of the Mousetrap (though not the dumb show). But Garrick was determined also to produce a more generically restricted version, a Hamlet that was properly tragic and far less funny. The impact of his recent trip to France and fascination with French drama, as well as his awareness of what French intellectuals found most unacceptable about Shakespeare, was a driving force but he had also long been annoyed by, for instance, the lead billing given to Osric; in 1754, for instance, Osric was billed higher than anyone except Hamlet. The answer was to cut Osric and the gravediggers completely and, where Shakespeare took 800 lines to move from Ophelia’s last, mad exit to the end, Garrick managed it in barely 60, creating a patchwork of Shakespeare’s own lines and adding very few of his own. Dislike of the gravediggers was not restricted to France. An anonymous pamphlet on the play in 1736 found them ‘very unbecoming such a Piece as this’ while another in 1752 thought that ‘To mix Comedy with Tragedy is breaking through the sacred Laws of Nature.’111 Early reviews of Garrick’s 1772 performances were mostly admiring: one commented that ‘the tedious interruptions of this beautiful tale no longer disgrace it; its absurd digressions are no longer disgusting.’112 There were also favourable reviews by George Steevens who, admittedly, had worked with Garrick on the adaptation, putting back Shakespeare word by word where he could, but who later savagely mocked Garrick’s editing as self-serving: ‘Mr. Garrick . . . has reduced the consequence of every character but himself; and thus excluding Osric, the Gravediggers, &c. contrived to monopolize the attention of the audience.’113 Garrick wrote to a French friend that ‘I have dar’d to alter Hamlet, I have thrown away the gravediggers . . . & notwithstanding the Galleries were so fond of them, I have met with more applause than I did at five and twenty.’114 Perhaps the most sharply critical and witty response was by Arthur Murphy in a superb parody which circulated in manuscript, with Shakespeare’s ghost complaining to Garrick that he was Doom’d for a certain term to leave my works Obscure and uncorrected; to endure The ignorance of players; the barbarous hand Of Gothic editors; the ponderous weight Of leaden commentator; fast confin’d

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In critic fires, till errors, not my own, Are done away, and sorely I the while Wish’d I had blotted for myself before. Garrick is accused of tampering ‘With juice of cursed nonsense in an inkhorn, / And o’er my fair applauded page did pour / A Manager’s distilment’ so that the play was ‘brought upon the stage / With all your imperfections on my head!’ The ghost warns Garrick against further adaptations but, after he leaves, Garrick tells his brother George: This Ghost is pleas’d with this my alteration, And now he bids me alter all his Plays. His plays are out of joint; – O cursed spite! That ever I was born to set them right!115 The radical revision did not outlive Garrick’s career and the playing text reverted to the kind of cut version Garrick had tried to overturn. The constrictions of playing time had meant moving both towards and away from Shakespeare. The search for the dramatic rhythm of the earlier parts of the play had necessitated destroying the rhythms of the fi nal sequence. The problem emblematizes Garrick’s dilemma and the culture’s ambivalence. The play to be read and the play to be seen could not be fully aligned.

King Lear Even for a culture which saw an excess of sensibility relieved by the outpouring of weeping as the highest state of emotional sympathy, sometimes there can be too many tears. When Garrick played King Lear for the last time in 1776 a reviewer found no decline in his power: The curse at the close of the first act, his phrenetic appeal to heaven at the end of the second on Regan’s ingratitude, were two such enthusiastic scenes of human exertion, that they caused a kind of momentary petrifaction thro’ the house, which he soon dissolved universally into tears. Even the unfeeling Regan and Goneril forgetful of their characteristic cruelty, played through the whole of their parts with aching bosoms and streaming eyes.116 It was not exactly the actresses’ fault, for they knew this was the last time that his performance, the most majestic and potent machine for generating the right response to the pathetic that the theatre had seen, would be

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experienced. Years earlier, when Boswell saw Garrick’s Lear in 1762, the theatre was packed more than two hours before the performance. Boswell prepared himself for the experience: I kept myself at a distance from all acquaintances, and got into a proper frame. Mr. Garrick gave me the most perfect satisfaction. I was fully moved, and I shed an abundance of tears.117 It had been the same earlier still when Garrick, not all that impressive in the role when he first played it in 1742, responded magnificently to Macklin’s coaching and, in the reunion with Cordelia, ‘exhibited such a scene of the pathetic . . . as drew tears of commiseration from the whole house’.118 Like yawning and laughter, one person’s tears can generate tears in another. Garrick’s Lear cried and cried. In the curse on Goneril, for instance, Samuel Foote complained in 1747 that Garrick wept: Nor can I easily pardon the Tears shed at the Conclusion. The whole Passage is a Climax of Rage, that strange mixture of Anger and Grief is to me highly unnatural; and besides this unmanly Sniveling lowers the Consequence of Lear.119 An anonymous pamphleteer, responding, turned back to Shakespeare: had he look’d into Shakespeare, he would not have been so severe upon your Tears shed at the Conclusion, or have said that the strange mixture of Grief and Passion was highly unnatural; for this speech immediately following the curse is your direction and authority.120 But Garrick’s Lear did not mention ‘these hot tears, which break from me perforce’ or speak to his ‘Old fond eyes, / Beweep this cause again, I’ll pluck ye out’ (1.4.296, 299–300), for the text he was then using was essentially Nahum Tate’s 1681 adaptation, King Lear with a happy ending, and Tate’s Act 1 ended with the curse, not with the rest of the scene, giving or indeed the following one, so that the focus is on Lear as he storms out with the added words ‘Away, away’.121 The writer knew and Garrick knew what Shakespeare had written but the text for Garrick’s Lear was never to be Shakespeare’s. Throughout his career, Garrick rethought the version of King Lear he performed, even though the broad outlines of his performance hardly changed. He would never restore either the Fool or the tragic ending,

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though both were encouraged. Garrick’s defender in 1747 called for ‘the original, Fool and all’,122 and Davies reported that ‘It was once in contemplation with Mr Garrick to restore the part of the Fool, which he designed for Woodward, who promised to be very chaste in his colouring, and not to counteract the agonies of Lear,’ but Garrick never dared to do it: ‘the manager would not hazard so bold an attempt; he feared, with Mr Colman, that the feelings of Lear would derive no advantage from the buffooneries of the parti-coloured jester.’123 Whenever this discussion with Woodward took place, Garrick was thinking hard about King Lear in 1756 and especially about the ending. There had been pressure to abandon Tate throughout the century, starting well before Garrick first played the role. Garrick’s 1747 champion wondered about Tate’s lines How can you [Garrick] keep your Countenance when you come to the Spheres stopping their Course, the Sun making halt, and the Winds bearing on their rosy Wings that Cordelia is a Queen? . . . the last scene . . . must shew you to advantage.124 Samuel Richardson used the postscript to the last volume of his hugely popular novel Clarissa (1748) to complain of the continued performance of Tate’s ending, wonder whether ‘this strange preference be owing to the false Delicacy or affected Tenderness of the Players, or to that of the Audience’, and urge Garrick, his friend, that ‘if it were ever to be tried, Now seems to be the Time’ since Garrick ‘owes so much, and is gratefully sensible that he does, to that great Master of the human Passions’.125 Arthur Murphy, writing a series of articles on Shakespeare and particularly on King Lear in the Gray’s Inn Journal in 1753–1754, opposed restoring Shakespeare and assumed that ‘after the heart-piercing sensations which we have endured through the whole piece, it would be too much to see this actually performed on the stage: from [Garrick] . . . I am sure it would. I should be glad, notwithstanding, to see the experiment made.’126 Dr Johnson, in his comments on the play in his 1765 Shakespeare edition, was less radical and more content with what ‘the publick has decided’ and recorded his own inability to cope with Shakespeare’s ending: ‘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.’127 When Covent Garden staged King Lear in February 1756, its first performances of the play for 10 years, now with Spranger Barry as Lear and

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Mrs Cibber as Cordelia, Garrick responded the next day with the premiere of John Brown’s Athelstan, another play about a king of ancient Britain who dies broken-hearted over his daughter’s body. If this was indeed an attempt to see whether the public might tolerate Garrick as a tragic Lear, the play’s failure warned him off.128 Garrick played King Lear in October, advertising the production’s ‘restorations from Shakespeare’. In truth there was little restored – only ten lines – but there were 200 fewer lines from Tate. As with the battle of the Romeos in 1750, Garrick once again deliberately put himself in direct competition with Barry and again he was the winner. A contemporary rhyme explained why: The town has found out different ways To praise the different Lears. To Barry they give loud hizzas, To Garrick – only tears. ‘A King? Nay, every inch a king’ Such Barry doth appear, But Garrick’s quite a different thing: He’s every inch King Lear.129 In 1768 George Colman produced a different version of the play for Covent Garden, aiming, as he announced in the preface to the published version, ‘to purge the tragedy of Lear of the alloy of Tate, which has so long been suffered to debase it’, though that did not mean incorporating the Fool and, as to the end, he wanted ‘to reconcile the catastrophe of Tate to the story of Shakespeare’.130 Less horrifying than Shakespeare and even than Tate (for Gloucester’s blinding is performed off-stage, not on), Colman’s Lear is, like Garrick’s, all about families. Murphy had argued against another essayist in The Gray’s Inn Journal that Lear goes mad wholly as a result of his daughters’ actions, that the loss of kingship plays no part compared to fi lial ingratitude, and that ‘parental distress’ creates the proper response for the audience where ‘a monarch voluntarily abdicating . . . would, I fear, border upon the ridiculous’.131 When Garrick described the play in a letter in 1770 he wrote of Lear as ‘a Weak man’, ‘an Old Man full of affection, Generosity, Passion, & what not meeting with what he thought an ungrateful return from his best belov’d Cordelia, & afterwards real ingratitude from his other Daughters’, a man whose ‘unhappiness proceeded from good qualities carry’d to excess of folly’, but he never describes Lear as a king.

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As for Murphy, Garrick’s Lear suffers because of his daughters and ‘an audience must feel his distresses & Madness which is ye Consequence of them’.132 Colman’s version of 1768 was not a success. Garrick continued to tinker with the text, putting back in some more Shakespeare, cutting a little more Tate, but he would not go as far as Colman had; for example, Garrick always retained the Edgar–Cordelia romance which Colman had tried excising. Lear-centred – just as his Hamlet was Hamlet-centred – Garrick’s Lear focused on a father and a dutiful daughter, as so many eighteenthcentury plays did.133 It is striking that Cordelia, a part most actors now avoid if at all possible, was seen then as a star role. Lear gave Garrick the perfect opportunity to display a range of emotions and a rapid movement between them. As Davies praised, Garrick had displayed all the force of quick transition from one passion to another. He had, from the most violent rage, descended to sedate calmness, had seized, with unutterable sensibility, the various impressions of terror and faithfully represented all the turbid passions of the soul.134 But, as an awe-struck playgoer wrote to Garrick in 1763, he achieved it ‘without departing once . . . from the simplicity of nature, the grace of attitude or the beauty of expression’.135 ‘Garrick was one night coming on the Stage in Lear’, Hester Thrale noted, when Johnson laughing or arguing behind the Scenes made such a Noise that the little Man was teized by it – and said at last – do have done with all this Rattle. – it spoyls my Thoughts, it destroys my Feelings – No No Sir returns the other – (loud enough for all the players to hear him) – I know better things – Punch has no feelings.136 But, whatever Garrick did or did not feel, his Lear made his audience feel deeply. No wonder, then, that an image of Garrick as Lear in the storm, based on a 1761 painting by Benjamin Wilson, was on one side of the mulberry box presented to Garrick in 1769.

1769: Garrick, Shakespeare and cultural tourism In September 1750, at the start of the theatre season, Garrick delivered a new prologue, once again reminding his audience, as Dr. Johnson’s prologue

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had in 1747, that the audience ruled over the repertory. As Garrick himself put it in this prologue in 1750, Sacred to Shakespeare was this spot design’d, To pierce the heart, and humanize the mind. But if an empty House, the Actor’s curse, Shews us our Lears and Hamlets lose their force; Unwilling we must change the nobler scene, And in our turn present you Harlequin; Quit Poets, and set Carpenters to work, Shew gaudy scenes, or mount the vaulting Turk . . .137 The sacred quality Garrick attributes to the theatre space seems logical enough but Garrick’s creation of a temple to Shakespeare at Hampton, as I explored at the start of this chapter, moved the locus of the sacred space from the public sphere of the actor-manager’s activity to the private space of the grounds of the gentleman’s Thames-side villa, open for himself, his friends and cultural tourists permitted to visit. But sacred spaces cannot stay so strictly private; they need the possibility of a congregation and of pilgrims. When the plans for the Stratford Jubilee were developing, Garrick made clear how he viewed the birthplace: the humble shed, in which the immortal bard first drew that breath which gladdened all the isle, is still existing; and all who have a heart to feel, and a mind to admire the truth of nature and splendour of genius, will rush thither to behold it, as a pilgrim would to the shrine of some loved saint; will deem it holy ground.138 Not quite a manger but the next best thing, this site was to be more even than the shrine of a saint. As William Cowper put it in 1785, For Garrick was a worshipper himself; He drew the liturgy, and framed the rites And solemn ceremonial of the day, And call’d the world to worship on the banks Of Avon famed in song.139 That appropriation of Juliet’s line ‘the god of my idolatry’ that Garrick used in a letter of 1765 would reappear in the great Ode which was the centrepiece of the Jubilee celebrations. And the very notion of a jubilee,

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as Garrick hatched the plan with the burgesses of Stratford-upon-Avon, was designed to evoke pilgrimage and religion from its origins in Leviticus through Boniface VIII’s fourteenth-century institution of a period of remission from punishment for sin consequent on pilgrimage to Rome. Whatever else it was, the Stratford Jubilee was to be the creation of a national religious cult of Shakespeare worship. But the Jubilee was also bound up with paintings and statues, with Garrick’s self-image and commercial sense, with what Shakespeare was and was not, with his ‘apotheosis’, as the Gentleman’s Magazine expected the conclusion of the celebration to be,140 and with Garrick’s ability to create a triumph out of the disastrous consequences of the vagaries of English weather. The process began in 1767 with the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon seeking a way to be given something to decorate their rebuilt Town Hall, either a portrait of Shakespeare or a statue of him to put in an empty niche or a portrait of Garrick or, indeed, all three. They offered to elect Garrick a Freeman of the town and give him the document in a box made from the wood of Shakespeare’s mulberry tree, the box one side of which would show Garrick as Lear. Garrick, flattered, offered in return all three. For the painting of himself, he asked Gainsborough to rework a portrait he had commissioned and which Gainsborough had exhibited in 1766, and to create a painting of Shakespeare. Conveniently, the portrait of Garrick showed him leaning elegantly against a pillar surmounted with a bust of Shakespeare, a stance which deliberately replicates that of Shakespeare himself in the Westminster Abbey statue. This was doubly appropriate as the statue Garrick ordered was to be a copy of Scheemakers’. But Gainsborough could not produce the painting of Shakespeare that Garrick requested, try as he might, and thought Shakespeare’s bust in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford ‘a silly smiling thing’, much to Garrick’s fury, for he wrote on Gainsborough’s letter ‘Impudent scoundrel’ and cancelled the commission.141 Benjamin Wilson’s painting of Shakespeare in his study with his source books around him was cheaper and Garrick persuaded the town to pay for the reworked Gainsborough. By late 1768 Garrick began to plan for a celebration of Shakespeare, ‘a Jubilee in honour and to the memory of Shakespeare’, to be held in September 1769 in Stratford-upon-Avon with himself as the Steward, and by May 1769 notices of the event appeared in newspapers with Garrick advertising it in his closing epilogue for the theatrical season: ‘My Eyes, till then, no Sight like this shall see, / Unless we meet at Shakespeare’s Jubilee.’142 A rotunda was constructed ‘On Avon’s banks’ for the main events. Commemorative medals were struck, ribbons designed to be worn

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as favours and wooden souvenirs carved from the unending supply of the mulberry tree. There would be a masked ball, concerts, fireworks, processions and a horse race for the Jubilee Cup. There would be no performance of a Shakespeare play – apart from anything else, there was no theatre for it – but Thomas Arne’s sacred oratorio Judith would be performed, perhaps because the name recalled Shakespeare’s eldest daughter. Since the jubilee was widely proclaimed to be the social event of the summer – Shakespeare as cultural icon defining elitism and social acceptability – then Stratford’s inhabitants responded to consumer demand for beds and meals by overpricing magnificently. Stratford became no longer a provincial backwater but the destination of fashionable London, the perfect spot for cultural tourism. In the event it rained after the first day, 6 September 1769, steadily and torrentially. Processions and fireworks were cancelled and, as the Avon ‘overpeering of his list’ burst its banks, getting to the masked ball necessitated getting across flooded fields. The racecourse was under water and so too was the Rotunda, preventing a repeat performance of the one unquestioned success, the performance of Garrick’s Ode. The Ode itself, staged complete with a planted heckler, the actor Thomas King, playing a fop and complaining that Shakespeare was a provincial nobody, with vast orchestra and chorus and Garrick declaiming magnificently, centred on the statue, set squarely in the midst of the performers: ‘ ’Tis he! ’Tis he! / “The god of our idolatry!” ’143 Shakespeare worship, which in the temple at Hampton had been accompanied by the same line from Romeo and Juliet, was now a national religion and Shakespeare was the sacred icon of nationalism: ‘Can British gratitude delay, / To him the glory of this isle, / To give the festive day / The song, the statue, and devoted pile?’144 But the celebration of the new religion and its intimate connection with patriotism was a financial disaster and roundly mocked by urban satirists. Within a month, Covent Garden staged an afterpiece by George Colman the Elder, Man and Wife; or, The Stratford Jubilee, gently mocking the event but showing off a grand processional pageant ‘exhibiting the characters of Shakespeare’, and ending with ‘The car (drawn by the Muses) containing the Bust of Shakespeare, crowned by Time and Fame’.145 Garrick, hearing of the plans, responded with startling speed: as he wrote in December, I set myself down to work, & in a day & a half produc’d our Jubilee – which has now had more success than any thing I Ever remember – it is crowded in 15 Minutes after ye Doors are open’d, & will be play’d to morrow for ye 39th time.146

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By the end of the season it had been played over 90 times, an unprecedented success. As a French character commented in Colman’s play New Brooms (1776): ‘Vat signify your triste Sha-kes-peare? Begar, dere was more moneys got by de gran spectacle of de Sha-kes-peare Jubilee dan by all de Comique and tragique of Shakespeare beside, ma foi!’147 Garrick’s afterpiece mocked provincial stupidity, of course, for this is the celebration of Shakespeare replaced into the metropolitan context where it still primarily belonged, but, while attendance at the Jubilee had been the exclusive preserve of the fashionably wealthy, attendance at The Jubilee was the right of those urban theatregoers less wealthy but equally fascinated by the spectacle of Shakespeare worship. Both a way of distancing the audience from the experience of cultural tourism (Shakespeare as virtual theme park) and an opportunity to have at least a simulacrum of the event as well, The Jubilee moved inexorably through its insistent celebration of ‘the Bard of all bards’, for ‘the Will of all Wills was a Warwickshire Will’,148 towards the pageant, ‘With bells ringing, fi fes playing, drums beating, and cannon firing’. Hugely outdoing Colman’s pageant at Covent Garden, Garrick’s started with ‘9 Men Dancers with tambourines’, the 3 Graces and 9 muses, then 19 groups representing individual plays, with, in the middle, ‘The statue of Shakespear supported by the Passions and surrounded by the Seven Muses with their trophies’.149 The last scene ‘is a magnificent transparent one in which the capital characters of Shakespeare are exhibited at full length, with Shakespeare’s statue’, yet again, ‘in the middle crowned by Tragedy and Comedy’, and, as Garrick enthusiastically wrote at the end of the manuscript, ‘Bravo Jubilee! Shakespeare forever!’150 In 1761 Reynolds had painted ‘David Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy’, a wonderful take on the familiar trope of the choice between virtue and vice.151 Now it would be Shakespeare crowned by both genres. If we recall Garrick’s brief appearance as Harlequin in 1741 in a play with the Shakespeare statue, it seems only right that Henry Woodward should mock the Stratford events at Covent Garden in 1770 with Harlequin’s Jubilee ending with ‘the descent of the statue of the late Mr Rich, under the name of Lun, which he always adopted when he performed the character of Harlequin’, as one reviewer noted.152 The Jubilee and The Jubilee did nothing to change Shakespeare production, fascinating signs though they are of the economics of culture. They did nothing to make any of the plays more or less popular. But they mark the apotheosis of Shakespeare as cultural symbol almost completely dissociated from the messy complexities of the works themselves. After Garrick’s death George Carter painted ‘The Apotheosis of Garrick’ (1780), showing

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his fellow actors dressed as characters in Shakespeare. But the confusion between Garrick and Shakespeare that Garrick had so carefully promoted had continued to the end of his life: Garrick planted his own mulberry-tree at Abington Abbey in 1778. In 1816 the bicentenary of Shakespeare’s death was celebrated in Hereford, Garrick’s birthplace, with a Garrick Jubilee, a year before the centenary of Garrick’s birth. It ended with a performance of The Jubilee now ending with ‘A Grand Procession . . ., representing the leading Characters in Shakespeare’s various Plays, . . . surrounding a full transparent Portrait of Garrick.’153

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Chapter 6

John Philip Kemble Michael Dobson

The Memory of Kemble Of all the major Shakespearean actor-managers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, John Philip Kemble may have come the closest to being completely forgotten. If for nothing else, Edmund Kean is famous for having collapsed and died while playing Othello, while William Charles Macready is still remembered as a friend of Charles Dickens and a foe of Edwin Forrest; David Garrick has a celebrated club named after him, Sir Henry Irving a pub on the Strand. But although the road in Prescot, Lancashire where John Philip was born is still known as Kemble Street, no inscription marks the site of the lodging-house where his actor parents were staying in February 1757 during one of their long provincial tours, and it is unlikely that any of the street’s current inhabitants know the origins of its name. Similarly, while the facade of the former pub named after him a few doors from the site of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden (on the corner of Bow Street and Long Acre) still bears the words ‘Kemble’s Head’, no portrait of Kemble remains. (Nor does any other inn-sign, since the premises are now a nondescript Greek restaurant.) It is doubtful in any case how many passing West End theatregoers would recognize a likeness of Kemble if they saw one. Kemble’s elder sister Sarah Siddons, as Russ McDonald points out elsewhere in this volume, is widely remembered as one of the great Shakespearean divas: she is commemorated by a handsome statue on Paddington Green near the site of her grave, and her Lady Macbeth in particular is still consciously emulated by some Shakespearean actresses.1 It would be hard, however, to find a modern actor who wanted to play Macbeth in the manner of Kemble, if he even had any notion of what that might have been, and Kemble’s grand metropolitan home at 89 Great Russell Street is not marked by so much as a blue plaque.

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It was not always thus: those who had witnessed Kemble’s towering performances in unprecedentedly opulent and visually coherent productions of Shakespearean tragedy had a very different sense of his significance. On 30 November 1825, for instance, a little more than two years after Kemble’s death, the great actor-manager was affectingly brought to mind during a social gathering at the Tontine Inn in Sheffield. The Sheffield Shakespeare Club had been founded seven years earlier, when a series of sermons against plays and players delivered by the local vicar had spurred a group of prominent theatregoers in his congregation to inaugurate an annual act of public defiance. Every year the club sponsored the local theatre to give a designated matinee performance of a Shakespeare play, after which they would repair to a local hostelry, eat a large dinner, drink healths, sing songs, and make speeches, in praise of Shakespeare and his stage interpreters and in dispraise of the vicar. Although he had retired a year before the club was founded, Kemble, first established as a professional actor on the York-centred touring circuit in the late 1770s, was regularly mentioned by these northern enthusiasts from the outset: some of them may even have remembered seeing him perform as a novice in Sheffield in June 1781, when he had not only appeared in Othello, Henry VIII and other plays but recited William Collins’s ‘Ode on the Passions’.2 Even after achieving stardom in London Kemble had continued to accept engagements in the provinces, and the familiarity with which his work was still being discussed in Sheffield through the 1820s is testimony to the fact that he continued to enjoy national celebrity. At the club’s first dinner in 1819 the scholarly and deliberate Kemble was praised for the literary insight brought to his interpretations of the plays and toasted as ‘one of the best commentators on the text of Shakespeare’;3 the only other contemporary performer cited nearly as often on this and subsequent occasions was his sister and frequent costar, ‘Mrs Siddons, the Tragic Muse’. After Kemble’s death in 1823 he was officially elevated to Sheffield’s pantheon of all-time great Shakespeareans, when at the next annual dinner a solemn toast was drunk to ‘The Memory of David Garrick and John Kemble’. The tribute offered to the late Kemble at the 1825 meeting was both especially marked and especially revealing. At every such gathering there would be speeches by certain designated officers of the club, including the manager of the Theatre Royal, Sheffield, who was a member ex officio: he always brought with him a number of his actors (referred to in the club’s minutes simply as ‘members of the corps dramatique’), though they usually participated only by eating, drinking and singing songs on demand. In 1825, however, the company’s leading actor, a Mr Salter, felt moved towards

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the end of the evening to rise spontaneously to his feet ‘to propose the memory of one who, in defiance of all difficulties, . . . sustained and purified the stage; who . . . conquered all opinions, and at last obtained the general admiration of his country’. Having already drunk to The King, The Land that the King Governs (This England), The Duke of York, The Shakespeare Club, The Memory of Shakespeare, The Duke of Norfolk, Earl Fitzwilliam and The Ladies, as well as to Mrs Siddons and to Kemble’s younger brother Charles, Salter was overflowing with sincerity and candour, and instead of confining himself to a toast he felt moved to share a personal recollection. In 1820, Salter explained, the year in which the by-then retired Kemble had made one last visit to his homeland in order to sign away his remaining share in the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, I was performing at the Dover Theatre; the play was Hamlet. About the commencement, the manager came round to inform me that the great Kemble was in the house. I was naturally agitated; I feared to meet the gaze and judgement of so great a master. Kemble had arrived at Dover but a few hours before, on his way to Lausanne, from which place it was decreed he should never return. For whatever reason, Kemble had decided to spend his last night in England watching someone else playing one of the Shakespearean tragic roles in which, before finally succumbing to asthma and depression, he had been pre-eminent for over 30 years, from his London debut at Drury Lane in 1783 to his retirement from Covent Garden in 1817. Salter was even given to understand that Kemble had enjoyed the experience, sufficiently at least to grant this obscure junior colleague an audience. The following morning he rushed to Kemble’s lodgings to pay his respects: He had left but a few minutes before, on his way to the pier, about to make his last embarkation. I overtook him on the sands. Upon introduction, Mr Kemble received me with kindness, and encouraged me with his praise. I parted from him with pain, and I now have the melancholy satisfaction of knowing, that I was the last English actor who held converse with him here, and that the tragedy of Hamlet, which had contributed so much to his fame, was the last play which the great tragedian witnessed on his native theatre.4 For Salter, clearly, whose anecdote echoes Kent’s dealings with King Lear as well as the Prince of Denmark’s encounter with his father’s spirit, this

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was a defining moment of professional legitimation. It was as if the authoritative Hamlet of his time had explicitly given him his dying voice: through this valedictory contact, Salter could feel part of an apostolic native succession of Shakespeareans going back to Garrick and beyond. Receiving the endorsement of a man who had been the actor-manager of both metropolitan Theatres Royal in succession (Drury Lane from 1788 to 1796 and 1800 to 1801, Covent Garden from 1803 to 1817), and whose performances in Shakespearean tragedy had been imbued with such an air of vatic solemnity that William Hazlitt had famously described his coming of age as a theatregoer in the 1790s as being ‘brought up . . . in the Kemble religion’,5 was as close as Salter could have got in 1820 to receiving a benediction from Shakespeare in person. It is no wonder that at the Tontine Inn five years later, on hearing Kemble’s surviving siblings remembered before John Philip himself, Salter should have been overcome with emotion, even to the extent of being embarrassed by his own resulting boldness: My feelings have led me to say this. I witnessed the drinking the health of the junior brother, Mr Charles Kemble, and I could not resist the inclination to pay my tribute of respect to the memory of the great master of our stage. The Memory of John P. Kemble. After which toast, there seems to have been a slight pause, before the President of the Club reassumed control of the meeting and moved on to propose the health of a local aristocrat, the Earl of Harewood. Where could one look now to find the memory of that ‘great master of our stage’ perpetuated with anything like Salter’s level of enthusiasm? With the passing of Salter’s generation of disciples and emulators, Macready among them, Kemble went decisively out of fashion, and thereafter he largely vanished from public consciousness. Dying in Switzerland, he was not given the Westminster Abbey funeral bestowed on some of his peers and, although a statue was installed there after his death as a memorial (a likeness by Hinchcliff, to a design by Flaxman, depicting him in the title role of Addison’s Cato), it was quietly removed in 1865. Even his modest grave in Lausanne is now impossible to find, since the Pierre-le-Plan cemetery was deconsecrated and redeveloped as a park in the 1960s: a small memorial panel to him was installed at the local English church only in the late 1990s.6 There can be few actors of the past more dependent for their posthumous fame on the visual arts; thanks to his friendship with Thomas Lawrence, R. A., for instance, at least the National Portrait Gallery, the

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Guildhall art gallery and Tate Britain still promulgate Kemble’s memory, through the prominent display of Lawrence’s massive portraits of him in the roles of Cato (1811),7 Coriolanus (1798, see Figure 6) and Hamlet (1801, Figure 7) respectively. To some extent, Kemble has merely suffered from the inevitable simplifications of popular stage history. It has not been easy for modern accounts of the development of the English theatre to produce a rapid slogan-like summary of his distinctive contributions to the staging of Shakespeare. While his immediate predecessor as a major Shakespearean actor-manager,

Figure 6 John Philip Kemble as Coriolanus. Painting by Thomas Lawrence (1798). Guildhall Art Gallery, Corporation of London.

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Figure 7 ‘Hamlet Apostrophizing the Skull’, engraved by J. Rogers (c. 1817) from the painting by Thomas Lawrence (1801). [property of the author]

Garrick, is lauded for restoring more of Shakespeare’s plays to the repertory, and his successor, Macready, is praised for removing the interpolations of adaptors, Kemble neither popularized any hitherto unrevived Shakespeare plays nor banished any established adaptations. (He continued, for example, to perform Colley Cibber’s version of Richard III and Nahum Tate’s happy ending to King Lear, and he even put the extra sisters for Caliban and Miranda contributed to The Tempest in 1667 by Sir William Davenant and John Dryden back into its acting script, years after both Garrick and Sheridan had revived the original play without them). While Garrick’s achievements in comedy and tragedy are habitually celebrated as

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an appropriately Shakespearean versatility, Kemble’s two specialities as a performer are liable simply to look inconveniently contradictory. Stage historians tend to describe him either as the most Gothic of Shakespearean actors, a master of archaic supernatural terror best seen confronting ghosts as Macbeth, or as the most neo-classically rational, best seen striking noble attitudes in a toga as Brutus. Most of all, Kemble has been overshadowed by the celebrity of his contemporary Kean – a mercurial, intemperate outsider, apparently as much the victim of his talent as its possessor – who has fitted modern ideas of the paradigmatic actor much more comfortably, and who has inspired not just several new biographies but a whole book on his enduring fame since the last time anyone published a biography of Kemble, in 1980.8 Some of the neglect into which Kemble has fallen, however, has been the result of long-term historical trends against which he was already embattled during his own lifetime, a continuation of the ‘difficulties’ and contrary ‘opinions’ acknowledged even by Salter. The terms in which Kemble defined his priorities as a Shakespearean manager and performer were already noisily contested during his career, and the fact that those terms have largely fallen into disuse since his retirement has made it difficult either to understand the nature of his art or to recognize his lasting achievements. At his farewell performance on 23 June 1817, Kemble assured his audience that his managerial policy had always been directed towards achieving ‘a union of propriety and splendour in the representation of our best plays, and particularly those of the divine Shakspeare’.9 I will set out to explain what Kemble meant by this in due course, since the words ‘propriety’ and ‘splendour’ must be almost obsolete in current theatre criticism, quite apart from being largely alien to the aesthetics of present-day Shakespearean directors such as Deborah Warner or Nicholas Hytner. Kemble’s leading qualities as a performer, as described by his admirers, sound equally remote from those of more recent Shakespearean actors such as Simon Russell Beale or Anthony Sher. ‘[W]e hesitate not to pronounce,’ declared the editor of An Authentic Narrative of Mr Kemble’s Retirement from the Stage (1817), that, with a magnificent expression of countenance, and grandeur of form, he united a correspondent tone of thought and feeling; – that, from his judgment, taste, and genius, displayed with continued success through a brilliant professional life, we are bound to consider him a master of his art; – and that so splendid a combination of acquirements must entitle, to an inscription on the tablet of Fame, the name of KEMBLE.10

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This chapter may have little chance of renewing Kemble’s inscription on the tablet of Fame, least of all by restoring a conservative early nineteenthcentury valuation of ‘ judgment, taste, and genius’ to popular currency, but what it can offer is a fresh understanding of how this remarkable actor understood and deployed Shakespeare. Streamlining and intensifying the great tragic roles for an increasingly operatic public theatre, Kemble, I will argue, was the supreme Platonist of the English Shakespearean tradition, committed to making visible in performance the ideal forms which for him were only imperfectly embodied in the plays’ printed texts. As well as achieving extraordinary force as a tragedian, furthermore, he sought a hitherto unknown level of coordination between every aspect of the productions mounted under his management. With an unusually developed visual sense, he anticipated what has more recently been called ‘designer Shakespeare’, focussing and expressing his interpretations of the plays via meticulously organized decor and movement and immense stage tableaux. If his accomplishments in these respects have been undervalued, it is also partly, I will argue, because Kemble found himself having to negotiate and situate this ambitious work as a performer and producer of Shakespeare in turbulent and divisive times. Kemble was an advocate of classical tradition in a period which some contemporaries and most successors would conceive as romantic, and a high Tory royalist in an age of political ferment on behalf of democracy. His statuesque, idealized performances as Shakespeare’s Romans were contemporary with vogues for nautical melodramas, child-stars and performing dogs, and his career as a respectful impersonator of Shakespeare’s English kings began during the American war of independence and ended only two years after the final defeat of revolutionary France. It speaks volumes about his professional self-image and his perceived relations to his audience and to his age that the role in which he chose to bid farewell to the London crowds was that of Caius Martius Coriolanus, defier of the mob. To his devotee Salter, Kemble was at once a representative of tradition and a figure for its power, and what will become clear in the account of his career below is that to Kemble most questions, whether artistic, political, religious or managerial, were ultimately questions of authority. In the era of the French Revolution, all such questions, including that of the authority and allegiances of Shakespearean drama itself, were inescapably politicized, and it is just possible that nowadays more social and political historians than students of the theatre read about Kemble, as a result of the major public disturbances which his work helped to precipitate.11 At each of the Theatres Royal in turn, he faced a

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tumultuous crisis of his authority as the leading Shakespearean of his time. At Drury Lane it was the scandal and uproar surrounding the staging of a forged Shakespeare play, Vortigern, in which Kemble played the title role in 1796. At Covent Garden it was the most sustained instance of theatrical disorder Britain has ever seen, the 67 consecutive nights of the Old Price Riots in 1809. Both episodes dramatized an unresolved tension between Shakespeare as high culture and Shakespeare as mass-market commodity. Kemble entertained higher notions of Shakespearean tragedy as an art form than any of his predecessors in an era when London’s legitimate playhouses were accommodating larger popular audiences than at any time before or since, and it is perhaps this contradiction more than any other which has haunted and undermined his posthumous reputation.

Becoming ‘Great John Kemble’: Kemble and the Gothic That contradiction made itself felt very early. Kemble’s apprenticeship as a Shakespearean, unusually and with lasting consequences, allied him both to the popular theatre and to the world of literary scholarship. In the terms of gothic cliché, he inherited two family curses: the life of a touring player, and the self-image of a learned Catholic martyr. His father Roger was an ex-barber from Herefordshire, who, after making his stage debut in Canterbury, had in 1752 joined a provincial theatre company active around the Cotswolds and along the Anglo-Welsh border. He subsequently married the manager’s actress daughter Sarah Ward, and he would take over the company on his father-in-law’s retirement in 1761. Alongside these theatrical ambitions, however, Roger Kemble also cherished his family’s tradition of loyalty to the Stuart monarchy and the Old Faith. His direct ancestor, Captain Richard Kemble, had fought with Charles II’s army at Worcester in 1651, and his great-uncle Father John Kemble had been executed on trumped-up charges of treason in 1679 during the hysteria over an alleged ‘Popish Plot’. Although he made the conventional compromise with his Anglican wife that any daughters would be raised in the established church (hence their first child Sarah Siddons’s orthodox Protestantism), Roger Kemble hoped to bring up his sons as worthy heirs to the family’s earlier generations of Jesuits and Jacobites. The young John Philip, like his siblings, occasionally helped out in the itinerant family business by appearing in infant roles, but he was always, at least according to the rumours later peddled by such celebrity publications as The Secret History of the Green Room, ‘Intended for a Catholic Priest’.12

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Whether or not Kemble senior definitely hoped his eldest son would become a clergyman, he certainly didn’t want him to become an actor. James Boaden, Kemble’s first real biographer, who met both of his parents, declared that Roger ‘never intended the stage as a profession for any of his children’, and that he sent John Philip to the Catholic seminary at Sedgley Park in Staffordshire and thence to the English college at Douai ‘to qualify him . . . for one of the learned professions’.13 (In the era before either the Catholic Emancipation Act or the founding of non-Anglican institutions beyond Oxbridge, such as University College, London, this devout establishment in Flanders offered the only further education available to an English Catholic unwilling to renounce his faith). At the end of 4 years in college, however, Kemble decided that he had no vocation for either the priesthood, the law or medicine, and that he wanted to follow in his parents’ footsteps instead, or perhaps more immediately in his sister’s. The summer in which the 18-year-old John Philip left Douai, 1775, was the same in which the 20-year-old Sarah, already playing leading roles and married to a fellow-actor, was spotted by one of David Garrick’s talent scouts and recruited to Drury Lane, and it was through her influence that Kemble obtained most of his early opportunities. Kemble’s bookish schooling may have had no influence on his choice of career, but it had a permanent effect both on his personality and on his approach to the stage. Whatever hardships and indignities his chosen calling might offer he never regarded himself as just another jobbing actor. His kinship to an accredited Catholic martyr provided a social cachet at Douai which, coupled with his own conspicuous excellence in classics and rhetoric, gave him an early sense of his own distinction, and having enjoyed a formal academic education at all, never mind a Catholic one, set him apart socially and culturally from most of his future colleagues in the commercial theatre. Returning to England with an enthusiasm for the works of Aristotle and Sophocles, a deep familiarity with academic theology, and a reputation as a student and declaimer of English poetry,14 the young Kemble set about becoming an actor as though the stage were one of the learned professions into which his father had dreamed of launching him. Prompting literary ambitions which his work in the practical theatre never quite displaced, and underpinning social aspirations which were visible even as he made a hand-to-mouth living strolling the provinces, Kemble’s education was always prominent in his self-presentation. (It is entirely typical that while Garrick, once he had achieved prosperity, bought a townhouse just around the corner from the Theatres Royal, Kemble

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would choose one immediately next door to the British Museum). In his early 20s, as a member of Tate Wilkinson’s itinerant troupe in Yorkshire, he alternated between playing juvenile leads and giving ‘Lectures on Public Speaking’ which incorporated Hamlet’s advice to the players, poems of his own composition, and passages from St Paul.15 When a colleague in the company, Joseph Inchbald, died suddenly in 1779, Kemble wrote two elegies, one of them in Latin, which he published alongside pastorals, epilogues and love poems in a slim volume called Fugitive Pieces the following year.16 For his benefit performance in 1778, when he was still only 21, Kemble chose to play the eponymous hero of his own tragedy Belisarius, the story of the last Roman general ever to be granted a triumph.17 This play was moderately successful, but, as in his acting, Kemble was less at home in comedy, whether original or Shakespearean. His farce The Female Officer, 1779, was not printed, and nor was his 1780 adaptation of The Comedy of Errors, which was unpromisingly retitled Oh! It’s Impossible and rewrote the twin slaves, the Dromios, as stereotypical African-Americans. (‘Had this alteration been printed’, wrote an embarrassed James Boaden nearly 20 years after slavery had been abolished within British dominions, ‘I incline to think [Kemble’s] maturer judgement would certainly have consigned the whole impression to the flames’).18 At York Kemble was ‘courted by most of the considerable inhabitants’, who laid aside their general disapproval of actors because ‘[i]t was known that he had received a learned education and had acquired academic distinction.’19 He even collected the first of a growing number of aristocratic friends, Lord Percy, subsequently the Duke of Northumberland, typically after persuading him to lend some of the regiment of dragoons he had brought to York to swell the crowd scenes in The Female Officer. During a visit to London in April 1780 Kemble further developed his social profile by joining the debating society known as the ‘School of Eloquence’ at Carlisle House in Soho, where before an audience of 1500 he spoke on behalf of the motion ‘that our senators ought to be answerable in a private capacity for what they say in a public’. One commentator described him as ‘modest, calm, argumentative . . . the Burke of Carlisle House’, but another, noticing what were perhaps early symptoms of the asthma which would always dog him and would later result in an addiction to opiates, complained that ‘Mr Kemble should speak rather louder . . . I am sure the Ladies and Gentlemen at the bottom of the Hall, could barely hear a fine speech, which more confidence would have made felt.’20 Kemble was evidently determined from the start that recognition as an actor should not preclude recognition as a scholar and (once he had the income to support

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the status) a gentleman. If that meant cultivating a manner and lifestyle as much patrician as thespian, then so be it. This desire to be both actor and gentleman would have been inconceivable had it not been for David Garrick’s efforts, over the previous 40 years, to render the theatre respectable. Kemble’s adult debut, in the title role of Nathaniel Lee’s Theodosius, or the Force of Love at Wolverhampton in January 1776, took place only months before Garrick’s retirement, and his London debut in 1783 only a few seasons after Garrick’s death: this coincidence was not lost on Kemble’s later admirers, who saw Kemble as continuing Garrick’s work as guarantor of the theatre’s social acceptability. ‘It is a circumstance worthy of observation, that just about this period GARRICK retired from the public scene,’ observed the Monthly Mirror in a retrospective article published during Kemble’s ascendancy in the 1790s, ‘and it should seem as if NATURE took THE STAGE under her immediate protection, by thus early endeavouring to atone for the loss it had recently suffered’.21 It was not immediately obvious, however, that the young Kemble – despite being better educated, taller, and more conventionally handsome – would adequately compensate the Stage for Garrick’s departure. For one thing, whatever twilight benevolence he may have mustered for Salter, he lacked Garrick’s conciliatory touch with colleagues. Tate Wilkinson, for instance, relates a story of Kemble petulantly insisting on playing Hamlet in defiance of the claims of a more experienced and locally better-known performer, and at Drury Lane he would on one notorious occasion resort to a managerial strategy which Garrick had never adopted, namely fighting a duel with one of his actors.22 Even as a very junior member of a provincial company, he could be just as uncompromising with audiences. When a baronet’s daughter continued to talk and laugh loudly with her friends during the last act of Arthur Murphy’s Zenobia at York in April 1779, Kemble stopped in mid-scene, haughtily announcing that he would proceed only ‘when that lady has finished her conversation, which I perceive the going on with the Tragedy only interrupts’.23 Noisy scenes in the auditorium, with one faction calling for an apology from Kemble and another supporting him, continued for the remainder of the play and at every successive performance for a week, but Kemble stuck indignantly to his guns, and the affair eventually passed off without any apology being offered. Thirty years later, during the Old Price Riots, he would attempt to face down unruly audiences in just the same manner, but with very different results. Wilkinson seems to have been comparatively unfazed by this incident – all publicity was good publicity. What concerned him more was the question

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of his imperious up-and-coming star’s range. Although he found Kemble ‘almost unexceptionable’ in ‘particular characters, where sternness is requisite’, he regarded him as deficient ‘in the tender passions’ demanded by roles such as Romeo.24 This view was shared by another member of Wilkinson’s company, Joseph Inchbald’s widow Elizabeth, a fellow Catholic with whom Kemble enjoyed at very least an amitié amoureuse in the early 1780s and who would remain both a confidante and a perceptive commentator on his work during her subsequent career as a playwright and novelist. According to Inchbald, Kemble was ill-suited to playing conventionally amorous leading men, especially in comedy. ‘It is one of the reproaches on Mr Kemble, as an actor, that he cannot paint the passion of love,’ she would later write, ‘nor can he, in water colours, as it is usually done’. She qualified this, however, by reference to a different set of roles: The truth is, Kemble cannot love moderately – sighs, soft complainings, a plaintive voice, and tender looks, bespeak more moderation – he must be struck to the heart’s core, or not at all: – he must be wounded to the soul with grief, despair, or madness . . . Garrick . . . could imitate the manners of the whole human race – [Kemble] can describe only their passions.25 Kemble, in short, poor at mimickry but unrivalled at embodying grief, despair and insanity, was perfectly suited as an actor to the style which was just coming into vogue during his youth, the Gothic. (Indeed, Inchbald would use him as the model for the forbidding but sexy Catholic guardian Dorriforth in her novel A Simple Story, 1791, a direct literary forbear of Mr Rochester and Heathcliff). The meanings implied by the term ‘gothic’ as a description of a literary or cultural mode were piquantly compressed by Sigmund Freud when he observed that the repressed always returns, 26 and in the late eighteenth-century theatre much of what had been repressed in favour of lucid Enlightenment modernity in earlier generations made a dramatic comeback: castles, ghosts, sensational violence, archaizing blank verse, and representations of the Catholic and feudal past. Around Shakespearean history and tragedy, admittedly, some of this had never faded away, but Richard III and Macbeth came to look very different in a repertory now rapidly filling up with their latterday imitators. During Garrick’s youth some of Shakespeare’s plays were still being rewritten to make them more closely resemble modern ones; during Kemble’s time modern plays were instead being written deliberately to resemble Shakespeare’s, or at least to emulate effects of inexorable gloom and horror associated with the

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tragedies. Garrick had spent much of the time when he wasn’t performing Shakespeare appearing in light-hearted contemporary satirical comedies; Kemble would instead specialize in pseudo-Shakespearean spectacles of guilt and remorse, plays such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre (1797) and James Boaden’s Aurelio and Miranda (1799, an adaptation of Lewis’s 1796 novel The Monk, itself indebted to Measure for Measure).27 These roles would inevitably influence his work in Shakespeare proper, and in practice the dividing line between his way with the gothic and his way with Shakespeare would always be a blurred one. Premonitions of this trend were visible even in Kemble’s childhood: his very first appearance on the professional stage, at the age of ten, was in the role of the infant Duke of York (the future James II) in William Havard’s King Charles the First: An Historical Tragedy. Although this was not an expensive production (it took place at the King’s Head in Worcester), the playbills drew particular attention to its archaeological accuracy (‘The Characters to be dressed in ancient habits, according to the fashion of those times’), 28 something which Kemble’s adult career would develop further. The whole event, moreover, was designed to sound as old-fashioned as it looked, since the script was ‘Written in Imitation of Shakespeare’s Style’. Hence the first iambic pentameters which Kemble ever recited in public came not from Shakespeare but from Havard’s hyper-royalist parting scene, set just before Charles’s execution: KING: . . . Come hither, James; nay, do not weep, my Boy, Keep thy Eyes bright to look on better Times. JAMES: I will command my Nature if I can, And stop these Tears of Sorrow, for indeed They drown my Sight; and I would view thee well; Copy my Royal Father in his Death, And be the Son of his heroic Virtues.29 As an adult, the first new play in which Kemble conspicuously shone was also an exercise in simulating a gloomy and violent past, Robert Jephson’s The Count of Narbonne (1780), adapted from Horace Walpole’s pioneering Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (published in 1764 with a long preface justifying its romantic horrors by appeal to Shakespearean precedent). Kemble, having moved (along with Mrs Inchbald) from Wilkinson’s company to the Smock Alley theatre in Dublin in 1781, was cast in the title role in the play’s first Irish production. As Inchbald pointed out, Jephson’s dramatization of the guilty Count’s renunciation of his loyal

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wife was much enhanced by borrowings from Shakespeare (‘Neither “The Winter’s Tale” nor “Henry VIII” were [in 1780] performed at either of the [London] theatres; and the town had no immediate comparison to draw between the conjugal incidents in “The Count of Narbonne” and those which occur in these two very superior dramas’), 30 but this was Shakespearean pastiche put to definitively Gothic ends: the play’s depiction of the Count’s haunted attempts to murder the rightful heir of Narbonne, his thwarted, predatory pursuit of a younger bride, and his accidental murder of his own daughter (played in Dublin by the young Dorothy Jordan, a future Drury Lane colleague) provided Kemble with ample scope for the ‘sternness’ recognized by Wilkinson. Placing its terrors on a set designed to simulate medieval architecture, Jephson’s play may have provided hints for Kemble’s later visualizations of Macbeth: in any event, it provided him with a cod-Shakespearean blank verse dying speech not very different from the one through which he would gasp as Macbeth: COUNT: . . . But, hateful to myself, hated by thee, By Heaven abandon’d, and the plague of earth, This, this remains, and all are satisfied. [Stabs himself]. Forgive me, if ’tis possible – but – oh – [Dies].31 As even this passage suggests, Gothic dramas like this sought to achieve psychic intensity rather than minute psychological realism; so too would Kemble.32 Significantly, it was this role, rather than any from the native classics, which assured Kemble’s early success. ‘Mr Kemble made a very strong impression in the Count . . . he burst upon the audience in the full blaze of his powers; from that moment his reputation was increased, or rather then decided,’ wrote Boaden. ‘That winter he added Sir Giles Overreach [in Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts] and Romeo to his Hamlet and Alexander [in Nathaniel Lee’s The Rival Queens], but the Count of Narbonne was the unrivalled attraction.’33 To Kemble’s satisfaction, this local triumph also gave him the entrée, via Jephson, to the élite social circles of Dublin Castle, where he made the acquaintance of the likes of Lord Inchiquin, and of a man destined to become the most important Shakespearean scholar of his time, Edmond Malone, who had written a prologue for Jephson’s play. 34 Kemble remained a close associate of Malone, and indeed a colleague, to the extent of ultimately contributing footnotes of his own to the posthumous expansion

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of Malone’s great 1790 edition of Shakespeare, the Malone-Boswell edition of 1821. 35 By the time that Kemble, thanks to the success of his elder sister, was invited by Richard Brinsley Sheridan to return from Ireland and join the company at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1783, he had ample experience of playing Shakespeare, but was best-established as a specialist in the Gothic. Fortunately for his hopes of establishing himself as the leading Shakespearean actor of his generation, Shakespeare too provided drama in which the repressed returns, forcing an educated humanist to struggle against the irrationality of the passions, confronting a prince with a ghost. For his debut on 30th September, Kemble chose the same role in which he had first appeared in Dublin, determined that his career on the boards which Garrick had dominated for so long would begin with his own interpretation of one of the late master’s signature parts: Hamlet. In playing this role, as his friend Sir Walter Scott would later put it, Kemble ‘was to encounter at once the shade of the murdered King of Denmark, and, in the mind’s eye of the audience, that of the lost Garrick’. 36 Kemble’s dealings with both ghosts were entirely characteristic. He had long ago prepared the part of the Prince meticulously in the study before ever playing it in public; now, as well as looking at current London promptbooks, he examined scholarly editions and, when he could obtain them, the earliest printed editions too. (In 1790 he spent £17.6s.6d on acquiring his own copy of the fi rst, ‘bad’ quarto: in time he would amass a scholarly library even bigger than Garrick’s, including a First Folio among some 4,000 other volumes of plays). 37 Starting from this re-examination of the text, he evolved his own cuts (he replicated many that had been made by earlier actors, such as the removal of all reference to Fortinbras, but decisively rejected Garrick’s drastic alterations to the last two acts), and he developed his own inflections of individual lines. Rather than aiming solely for maximum momentby-moment effect, these were designed to serve an overarching conception of the role, the keynote of which was a pained, melancholy dignity brought into ever-increasing tension with the violent exigencies of the plot. His was a princely, slow-spoken Hamlet, who tenderly singled out his friend Horatio in questioning him about the Ghost (‘Did not you speak to it?’), almost wept as he remembered his father on ‘I shall not look upon his like again’, and took every occasion to kneel dutifully to his parents, whether in fi lial reverence as his father’s ghost descended

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through the trapdoor in the fi rst act, or with gentle supplication to Gertrude in the closet scene on ‘Mother, for the love of grace, / Lay not this flattering unction to your soul . . . ’ (‘His Hamlet shows the Gentleman compleat, / His easy manners – Oh heavenly Treat’, rhymed one admirer).38 In preparing this role, as with most others, Kemble singled out a ruling passion (in this instance, Melancholy) and a set of personal manners by which to qualify it (here, supreme gentility), and then played both with absolute consistency, clarity and mounting intensity over the duration of the play. In the graveyard in 5.1, he was ‘studiously graceful’, as if already posing for Thomas Lawrence’s 1801 painting (destined to become one of the most widely reproduced theatrical prints of the period, Figure 7), and by this stage ‘he looked an abstraction’, as Boaden observed, ‘of the characteristics of tragedy’.39 This was a world away from his predecessor’s improvised-looking starts and rapid turns of thought and mood. Kemble was pensive and deferential to the shade of old Hamlet, but as far as possible he simply ignored the shade of old Garrick. This conception of the part didn’t please everyone, either in 1783 or over the three ensuing decades during which Kemble would continue to play the Dane. Tate Wilkinson, though he admired Kemble’s nobility in the third act, missed Garrick’s more naturalistic ‘quick flashes of fire, and variety of conveyance’,40 and Hazlitt, who similarly criticized Kemble for ignoring the ‘wildness’ and ‘undulations’ of the role, felt that Kemble always played Hamlet ‘like a man in armour . . . in one undeviating straight line’.41 In keeping with its cerebral style, this was a debut which inspired critical discussion rather than immediate passionate enthusiasm. ‘[His] evidently minute study of the text, and the tout ensemble of his performance, made a powerful impression on the public mind,’ recalled one member of the first-night audience, but ‘the whole seemed to be rather marked by the nicety of study than the vivid spirit of nature.’42 ‘ “Did not you speak to it” is an Emphasis not at all justified by the context,’ complained the Public Advertiser.43 Strikingly, however, even those who accused Kemble of pedantically straining after novelty were sufficiently impressed by his seriousness and presence to start using the epithet ‘great’. When John Philip’s fat younger brother Stephen failed to impress as Othello at the rival theatre in the same season, for instance, wits observed that Covent Garden had made the mistake of hiring the big Kemble instead of the great one,44 and in November 1783, as Kemble’s fame grew, the Morning Chronicle printed an ‘EPIGRAM, to Mr. J. K. on his unequalled originality’. In comparing ‘great

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John Kemble’ with some of his most famous predecessors, even this squib hovers ambiguously between sarcasm and genuine praise: THOU soul of Betterton, thou voice of Booth, Graceful in all, in nothing e’er uncouth; Thou eye of Garrick, with the form of Barry, Sure Nature’s choicest bounties thou dost carry! What crouds on crouds attend thee every night, To see thee stalk and stare, or dance and fight! Talk not of Quin, let Garrick be forgot; For great John Kemble’s all – that they were not.45 In some respects the anonymous author had got it right: Kemble’s Hamlet did mark a decisive break with the existing manner of staging Shakespeare, and not only because it seemed so much statelier and more stylized than Garrick’s. Although this was one of the few Shakespearean roles in which Kemble did not choose a costume radically different from those worn by his forbears (like Garrick, he played Hamlet in contemporary clothing, ‘a modern court dress of rich black velvet, with a star on the breast, the garter and pendant ribband of an order, – mourning sword, and buckles with deep ruffles: the hair in powder’),46 it was already clear that his interpretation of Shakespeare’s plays would be based not on theatrical tradition but on his own critical re-readings of their texts. Betterton, Booth, Barry, Quin, Garrick et al. had been merely players: Kemble was not just an actor but a scholar, and he knew better. Both this approach and the attitude that went with it would become more obvious after Kemble, his stardom established, was promoted to acting manager of the company in autumn 1788 on the retirement of the resident leading tragedian, William ‘Gentleman’ Smith, and could make what we would now think of as directorial decisions about overall decor and movement and the casting of other players. In the meantime Sheridan – as far as the interests of Smith would permit – tried him in other parts. Avoiding the more protean role of the slumming Prince Hal, Kemble was an immense success as the young Percy in Henry IV part 1. ‘His Hotspur is a grand delineation, / The true Spirit of the English Nation’, applauded one feudal patriot;47 Sir Walter Scott, more judiciously, would attribute Kemble’s success at conveying ‘the rapid and hurried vehemence of Hotspur’ to his affinity with characters single-minded or affected almost to the point of monomania: ‘He seems to me always to play best those characters in which there is a predominant tinge of some over-mastering passion or acquired habit of

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acting and speaking colouring the whole man.’48 Kemble’s Benedick, by contrast, like most of his juvenile leads in comedy, pleased few, though he was a convincingly snobbish Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well. Posthumus in Cymbeline, with Siddons as Imogen, proved a sufficiently straight-faced role to become another career-long favourite; his inflexible Othello, also played initially opposite Siddons as an unlikely Desdemona, drew mixed reviews (see Figure 8); but Kemble’s Richard III was, by general agreement, a failure. In this role, as some complained of his Hamlet, Kemble

Figure 8 Kemble as Othello, one of his last performances at Drury Lane, 1802; a rapid eye-witness sketch (subsequently gone-over with watercolours) by Thomas Loftie. Harvard Theatre Collection TS 990.1.40.

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lacked the bustling energy of Garrick (even his first entrance, according to Henry Mercer Graves, was too ‘slow and measured’),49 and though he played Richard at intervals over many years he was never sufficiently impolite to be wholly convincing. (According to Boaden, Kemble insisted that in order to deceive so many fellow-royals, Richard ‘must have been refined in his manners’.)50 Within his own lifetime he would, unusually, be eclipsed in this role, by both George Frederick Cooke and, later, Edmund Kean. In 1801, indeed, Kemble had the embittering experience of reading the anonymous pamphlet Remarks on the Character of Richard the Third, as played by Cooke and Kemble. As he did so, he furiously underlined the word ‘one’ in the sentence ‘After disapproving of Mr Kemble in so many instances, let me mention one in which he is admirable: the words in Hamlet, “There is an especial providence, in the fall of a sparrow.” ’ In the margin the actor then wrote, in his best scholar-and-gentleman persona, ‘Mr Kemble is much obliged to the candour of a Critick, who allows that he can speak one line properly, in a Character that contains many hundred.’51 In just as scholarly a manner, Kemble meticulously learned the lines for each fresh role he undertook by neatly copying them out, with just their cues, in a series of leather-bound notebooks, most of them subsequently labelled with the date and place where he first acted them in public. Many of these part-books are now in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, among them ‘King John. Theatre Royal Drury-lane December 1st 1783’ (another lasting success, usually with Siddons as Constance), ‘Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Theatre Royal, Drury-lane. Jany 22nd 1784’ (in which Kemble, like many other Shylocks since, allowed himself an added ‘Oh!’ on his exit from the trial scene, not to mention a ‘Hoh!’ on being sentenced to Christianity), ‘King Lear, Theatre Royal Drury-Lane Jany 21st 1788’ (a role of which Kemble was regrettably deprived in his later years, since the play was withdrawn from the repertories of both Theatres Royal in deference to the madness of King George III from 1811 until after Kemble’s retirement) and ‘Macbeth. Theatre Royal Drury Lane March 31st 1785’.52 Characteristically, Kemble staked his claim to this latter major role, destined to be one of his most celebrated, not only on the stage but in critical prose. In 1786, in response to the posthumous publication of an essay by the critic Thomas Whately in which he had argued that Macbeth was less ‘intrepid’ than Richard III, Kemble published Macbeth Reconsidered: An Essay Intended as an Answer to Part of the Remarks on Some of the Characters of Shakespeare, complete with a dedication to Malone.53 Kemble, he would have us know, not only acted in Macbeth but read widely about it and discussed the play with the greatest scholars of the day.

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Kemble would cement his identification as the finest Macbeth of his time when he staged a lavish new production in 1794. Between his initial London performances in the role in 1785 and this first Macbeth which he might be considered to have produced as well as starred in, however, two major developments occurred which would drastically affect the nature and reception of his performance. One of these was political, the other architectural, and in time the two would overlap. Within a year of Kemble assuming the management of Drury Lane for Sheridan, the Bastille fell. The progress of the Revolution had major consequences for British politics, with Whigs at first welcoming what looked like a French attempt to secure constitutional liberties which the British had enjoyed since the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, and Tories decrying the reforms initiated by the National Assembly as steps towards mob rule. But since British cultural identity had for years been structured around an opposition to all things French, the Revolution had consequences for the meanings of Shakespeare too. During the earlier eighteenth century, especially during the Seven Years War (1756–1763), Garrick and others had successfully identified Shakespeare’s hybrid, generously irregular plays with British (Protestant) liberty, contrasted with the rigid neoclassicism of the French stage and the Catholic despotism of the French monarchy and aristocracy. According to this logic, the unwritten British constitution was normal and good because, like Shakespearean drama, it was freer and more socially inclusive than that of Britain’s nearest continental neighbour and rival.54 But if the antithetical French were now going to be too libertarian and democratic instead of too reactionary, then in order to anchor British cultural identity against Frenchness, Shakespeare, for some at least, would have to stand less for freedom than for a different set of native values: continuity with the glorious feudal past, a sensible resistance to cultural and governmental innovation, a proper respect for traditional royal prerogatives. Whether or not one espoused this assimilation of Shakespeare to the conservative perspective on the Revolution articulated by Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies looked more controversial after 1789 than they had for generations. As the revolutionaries moved from reforming their monarchy to attacking the very concept of royalty, and as the Corresponding Societies and other radical groups sought to promulgate their ideas in England, so it became possible to wonder whether Shakespeare’s dramatizations of medieval England’s succession crises were reverential or sceptical about kingship. After the execution of the French royal family in 1793, Shakespeare’s dramatizations of regicide seemed alarmingly topical, and his depictions of political conspiracy,

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popular protest and assassination were deemed too inflammatory to be staged. As a result, Kemble was deprived for more than a decade of a role in which he had excelled since early 1789, Coriolanus, and his plans to revive Julius Caesar had to be shelved until the 1811–1812 theatrical season. ‘[W]hen the circumstances of certain periods make certain incidents of history most interesting’, sighed a sympathetic Inchbald, those are the very seasons to interdict their exhibition. Till the time of the world’s repose, then, the lovers of the drama will, probably, be compelled to accept of real conspiracies, assassinations, and the slaughter of war, in lieu of such spectacles ably counterfeited.55 In these troubled times Kemble, always instinctively sympathetic towards aristocrats, nailed his colours to the mast early. His response to France’s first moves towards popular emancipation was, in October 1789, to revive what was regarded as Shakespeare’s most anti-French play, Henry V, starring as a very royal Henry. The subsequent outbreak of hostilities between Britain and France only seemed to vindicate this choice of repertoire. As Jonathan Bate points out, Kemble played the role of Henry sixteen times between 1789 and 1792, then revived his production in 1803, the year in which war was renewed after the fragile peace of Amiens; the performance of 25 November that year was given ‘for the Benefit of the PATRIOTIC FUND’ and furnished with a concluding ‘Occasional Address to the Volunteers.’56 Any lingering doubts about Kemble’s opinion of the Revolution were removed in January 1793, when he temporarily closed Drury Lane as a mark of respect for the guillotined Louis XVI. This display of solidarity with the ancien régime infuriated his Whiggish proprietor Sheridan, but pleased both Kemble’s aristocratic patrons, such as the Duke of Norfolk, and the more conservative of his fellow-Shakespeareans, such as Edmond Malone. Among the new friends Kemble cultivated in the 1790s, furthermore, were some who were not just anti-Jacobin by inclination but counter-revolutionary by profession. These included the bilingual Swiss agent Charles Michel Lullin, who had been recruited to the Aliens Office by the spymaster William Wickham to infiltrate potential émigré conspiracies. (Lullin consulted Kemble about the art of acting while preparing the French verse translation of Richard III which he staged with a cast of expatriate amateurs – as a pretext, presumably, for keeping them under his eye – in 1798).57 While some of his circle, such as Inchbald, maintained

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acquaintance with both reformists and reactionaries, Kemble scorned to temporize with radical opinion. When he staged Macbeth in 1794 he carefully framed the first performance so that nobody could mistake the immediate applicability of Shakespeare’s account of the dire consequences of killing a king: in a specially commissioned prologue, ‘the flourishing state of this country, compared with that of a neighbouring nation, was very judiciously introduced.’58 If Kemble’s 1794 Macbeth was different in political emphasis from its 1785 precursor, it was different stylistically too. Sheridan had been a feckless and unreliable proprietor even before his political career had substantially distracted him from the proper management of Drury Lane, and under his stewardship Christopher Wren’s 1674 building had received no essential maintenance since the cosmetic makeover by the Adam brothers which Garrick had commissioned in 1775. In 1791 the playhouse was declared unsafe, and the company transferred to the Haymarket while the building was demolished and rebuilt to a new design by Henry Holland. Although London’s potential audience for live theatre had grown enormously since 1674, the city’s two Theatres Royal still enjoyed a monopoly on the performance of ‘legitimate’ spoken drama, and the temptation to accommodate as many paying customers as possible at each performance, regardless of the demands of visibility or acoustics, proved irresistible to the shareholders. Towering above Westminster so as to accommodate five tiers of galleries, Holland’s new Theatre Royal, Drury Lane was one of the largest secular buildings in London; while its predecessor accommodated about 2,000 spectators at a time, this auditorium seated 3,600. As Benjamin Wyatt would explain of the 3,000-seater with which he replaced Holland’s after the fire of 1809, I was aware of the existence of a very popular notion, that our Theatres ought to be very small; but it appeared to me, that, if that popular notion should be suffered to proceed too far, it would tend, in every way, to deteriorate our Dramatic Performances; by depriving the Proprietors of that Revenue which is indispensable to defray the heavy expenses of such a Concern, and to leave a reasonable Profit to those whose Property might be embarked in the undertaking.59 The fact that Wyatt’s Drury Lane (nowadays limited to admitting 2,100) has in our time proved much more hospitable to spectacular musicals than to Shakespeare cannot be attributed solely to the depravity of popular taste. In general, modern audiences prefer their Shakespearean productions to flow smoothly across open stages without long breaks for the changing of scenery,

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and they value a sense of twitch-by-twitch intimacy with their leading players; it is difficult to achieve either in the immense proscenium-arch houses built during the Romantic period. Kemble had trained in the provinces in some very small theatres indeed – similar to the surviving Theatre Royal built in Richmond, Yorkshire, in 1788, which can now hold only 214 – but the cavernous new playhouses of Georgian London demanded a different scale of acting and design entirely. Holland’s Drury Lane, which would open with Macbeth on 12 March 1794, had a stage 83 feet wide and 92 feet deep, and in its fully lit auditorium almost twice as many people as had attended Kemble’s previous performances in the role would be able to see and hear one another’s reactions to the actors at least as well as they could see and hear the actors themselves. In such a playhouse, changes of mood which in smaller theatres might be signalled by variations in facial expression and vocal tone had at the very least to be underlined by incidental music; visual indications which in our time can be made by a single lighting cue – such as the introduction of a blue filter to suggest the approach of evening – could be made only by large painted backdrops; scenes had to be made short enough to accommodate the changing of those backdrops, or to be played downstage in front of painted shutters while larger alterations of scenery were being carried out behind them, and they had to be organized into a sequence that would minimize the need for such scene-shifting; and costumes had to be showy enough to read from a very long way away. (Hence the size of Kemble’s plume as Hamlet, Figure 7). ‘The splendours of the scene, the ingenuity of the machinist and the rich display of dresses, aided by the captivating charms of music, now in a great degree supersede the labours of the poet,’ lamented the playwright Richard Cumberland in 1806: There can be nothing very gratifying in watching the movement of an actor’s lips when we cannot hear the words that proceed from them, but when the animating march strikes up, and the stage lays open its recesses to the depth of a hundred feet for the procession to advance, even the most distant spectator can enjoy his shilling’s worth of show.60 Kemble knew more than had most actor-managers since the 1660s about the playhouses for which Shakespeare’s plays had originally been written – his friend Malone had only recently discovered the papers of the Elizabethan manager Philip Henslowe and had incorporated his findings into the account of the Elizabethan theatre prefaced to his 1790 edition of Shakespeare – but, stage historian or none, he knew that his productions of Shakespeare needed to provide plenty of shillings’ worth of show. He

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recognized that he was essentially working in a different theatrical medium to that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and he clearly prided himself on his ability to translate from the one into the other: after 1788 he took to publishing his acting versions of Shakespeare’s plays, often before his productions opened, much as a nineteenth-century conductor might have published his own arrangements of early music for modern instruments. He allowed Inchbald to reprint directly from his current promptbooks in her British Theatre compilation of 1808, and he then republished his Shakespeares as part of a complete set of the ‘Old English Plays’ he had adapted in 1815, establishing a precedent for those subsequent nineteenthcentury Shakespearean actor-managers who similarly wished to maintain a presence in the book market as well as on the stage, such as Macready and Irving.61 One notable distinguishing feature of these texts probably reflects Kemble’s career-long interest in making his bit-part actors fit more thoroughly into his productions, namely his provision of personal identities for figures never named in Shakespeare’s dialogue and labelled in previous cast-lists only by such designations as ‘First Gentleman’ or ‘Attendants’. Under Kemble, for example, The Merchant of Venice included very minor characters called ‘Stephano’ and ‘Pietro’ and Measure for Measure featured one ‘Leopold’; The Winter’s Tale a ‘Phocion’, ‘Lamia’ and ‘Thasius’; Othello ‘Luca’, ‘Giovanni’, ‘Marco’, ‘Paulo’, ‘Antonio’, ‘Julio’, ‘Lorenzo’ and ‘Canno’. These tiny alterations may simply represent Kemble self-importantly adding his own finishing touches to Shakespeare’s unpolished art, but the stage directions he supplies for these newly-christened cast members allow us to see the care he devoted to choreographing the whole traffic of his stage. If the names made his messengers and attendants feel more important and more inclined to pay attention in their rehearsals, even when not about to speak their only two lines in the play, so much the better. In its text and its decor alike, Kemble’s Macbeth provides the perfect example of what the actor-manager meant by a ‘union of propriety and splendour’. It amply fulfilled his early recognition, as Boaden described it, that ‘a grand and permanent attraction might be given to Drury Lane by encreasing the power of Shakespeare’: This he proposed to effect by a more stately and perfect representation of his plays – to attend to all the details as well as the grand features, and by the aids of scenery and dress to complete the dramatic illusion.62 The 1794 Macbeth was not only a visually splendid and reassuringly expensive-looking spectacle – complete with 16 separate sets and a drop curtain,

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newly commissioned from seven named artists, a huge massed advance down the stage by Macbeth’s army, and an apparition scene in which, counting supernumerary children as spirits and choruses of extra witches, a hundred people were on stage at once – but a show in which everything matched.63 Its costumes, in particular, were all carefully chosen to place the play’s action within a consistent, self-contained world. Instead of following the customary eclecticism accepted by Garrick – whereby each character’s clothing was primarily intended to give a clear signal about his or her social status and role, regardless of region or period, so that his Macbeth, for instance, had worn the red coat appropriate to an eighteenth-century general – Kemble turned to the example of Charles Macklin, who in 1773 had for the first time dressed Macbeth in clothes designed to suggest, however vaguely, both Scotland and the medieval past. In 1785 Kemble had only added a tartan cloak and scarlet breeches to Garrick’s red coat, but now, after considerable research, he dressed the Thane and his fellow- soldiers in ‘the bold military habit of the ancient Scots’.64 These newly historicized human figures were perfectly congruent with scenery which included an ‘Inside view of the palace at Fores – A very fine Gothic Apartment’, ‘The Blasted Heath, with Bridge, &c’ and a ‘Gothic Apartment at Dunsinane’.65 ‘It is impossible to contemplate the consistent disposition of able actors, of appropriate habiliments, and of picturesque scenery, with which this tragedy is now embellished,’ commented an approving Elizabeth Inchbald, ‘and not boldly demand – where was Garrick’s taste?’66 The witches, meanwhile, were stripped of the elements of burlesque they had retained in earlier eighteenth-century performance and given an appearance sufficiently eerie and portentous to be consistent with high tragedy. Whereas in Garrick’s time, as W. C. Oulton remembered, they had been represented as ‘beggarly Gammers’, Kemble, after studying other seventeenth-century texts about witchcraft,67 dressed them as ‘preternatural beings, distinguishable only by the fellness of their purposes, and the fatality of their delusions’: thanks to these ‘appropriate vestures’, they could now ‘strike the eye with a picture of supernatural power’, and ‘avoid all buffoonery in those parts, that Macbeth might no longer be deemed a Tragi-Comedy’.68 Kemble’s quest for what he regarded as generically ‘proper’ to the play led him further than this. In cutting the gross comedy of the Porter (Macduff was instead admitted by a shamefaced Seyton who excused his lateness only by remarking that he had been carousing till the second cock), and omitting the onstage killing of Lady Macduff’s son (the whole shockingly naturalistic and brutal scene disappeared), Kemble was only following Garrick, but he made a new cut

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of his own in the banquet scene. While Old Hamlet was a dignified and respectable ghost and could be knelt to accordingly, there was something crude and potentially comic about the blood-boltered Banquo. As Robert Lloyd had written as early as 1760, When chilling Horrors shake th’affrighted King And Guilt torments him with her Scorpion Sting . . What need the Ghost usurp the Monarch’s Place, To frighten Children with his mealy Face? The King alone should form the Phantom there, And talk and tremble at the vacant Chair.69 Kemble, determined to focus the attention of the audience not on an old-fashioned exercise in gory makeup but on his own portrait of a mind approaching the point of collapse, followed exactly this suggestion. (According to the Biographia Dramatica, this was ‘an alteration in which every classical mind must agree with Mr Kemble’.)70 Here as elsewhere Kemble privileged cultivated taste over absolute fidelity to the letter of Shakespeare’s text: the point was not only to perform the play in the manner best calculated to render it effective in the theatre of 1794, scenery, music, extras and all, but to perform it in the manner in which Shakespeare would have written it himself had he been better informed about aesthetics. This wasn’t to be just Shakespeare’s Macbeth as published in the Folio by Heminge and Condell, but the Platonic ideal of Macbeth as discerned underlying it by Kemble. As in his acting, which was committed, as an admirer explained, to ‘exhibiting Nature, not with perfect truth, but mellowed, or heightened’, so it was with Kemble’s textual dealings with the Poet of Nature. Kemble’s acting text presented Shakespeare as consciously subjected to the theories on how Art selectively edits Nature propounded by Joshua Reynolds in connection with history painting: as far as Kemble was concerned, it was ‘the best part of Nature only, which should be given . . . stooping to represent the common defects of common life, either in person or action, degrades the character and the art’.71 Hence wherever Shakespeare had made the unclassical mistake of suggesting that there might be an unheroic side to this play’s tragic hero, such as by depicting an anxiously premature haste to don his armour at the approach of battle in act 5, Kemble silently removed it, just as he removed Macbeth’s striking of the messenger who brings the news that Birnam Wood is approaching Dunsinane (a stage direction added in Nicholas Rowe’s edition of 1709 that had been followed by most Macbeths since).

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Kemble’s conception of the Thane’s character, as he explained at length in Macbeth Reconsidered, was one in which personal cowardice had no part. This Macbeth was a uniformly valiant warrior misled into crime but undaunted almost to the last by the horrors he encountered thereafter, so much so that in practice he tended to face up to Banquo’s invisible ghost with little sign of the trembling recommended by Lloyd. As ever, Kemble’s performance followed an inexorable straight line until reaching a dramatic breaking point, in this instance, according to most eyewitnesses, the news of Lady Macbeth’s death. As William Charles Macready remembered, when the news was brought, ‘The queen, my lord, is dead’, he seemed struck to the heart; gradually collecting himself he sighed out, ‘She should have died hereafter’. Then as if with the inspiration of despair he hurried out distinctly and pathetically the lines, Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day . . . . . . rising to a climax of desperation that brought down the enthusiastic cheers of the closely packed theatre.72 After this, Kemble’s Macbeth went to pieces, but they were still heroic pieces. Though momentarily appalled by the news that Macduff was not of woman born, he roused himself to his greatest display of martial ardour yet on ‘Lay on, Macduff!’ Crucially, though, he finally regained a sense of his story’s moral meaning, and took a last opportunity to point it out. However courageously he defied Macduff, this Macbeth ultimately conceded the justice of his exemplary punishment. Shakespeare had clearly been wrong to have him decapitated offstage, let alone to have his severed head displayed tastelessly to the audience: Garrick had only been completing the true design of the play when he had allowed Macbeth to perish onstage recognizing the proper reward of regicidal ambition. Kemble, accordingly, retained most of the dying speech which his predecessor had supplied: ’Tis done! The scene of life will quickly close. Ambition’s vain, delusive dreams are fled, And now I wake to darkness, guilt, and horror. – I cannot rise: – I dare not ask for mercy – It is too late; – hell drags me down;– I sink, I sink; – my soul is lost for ever! – Oh! – Oh! – [Dies].73

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This may seem like a heavily simplified version of the play, but, to judge from contemporary reports of the effect not just of Kemble and Mrs Siddons in the leading roles but of the entire production, what it lost in ambiguity it gained in power. To Mrs Inchbald, for instance, this was Kemble’s masterpiece, a vindication of the didactic force which the modern theatre might exert when all its resources were expertly directed to a single end: [T]o those, who are unacquainted with the effect wrought by theatrical action and decoration, it may not be superfluous to say – The huge rocks, the enormous caverns, and blasted heaths of Scotland, in the scenery; – the highland warrior’s dress, of centuries past, worn by the soldiers and their generals; – the splendid robes and banquet at the royal court held at Fores; – the awful, yet inspiring music, which accompanies words assimilated to each sound; – and, above all – the fear, the terror, the remorse; – the agonizing throbs and throes, which speak in looks, whispers, sudden starts, and writhings, by Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, all tending to one great precept – Thou shalt not murder, – render this play one of the most impressive moral lessons which the stage exhibits.74 We are unlikely to see a Macbeth like this in our time; in terms of theatrical aesthetics, the nearest thing available nowadays might be a rather old-fashioned production of Verdi’s opera. This same season, indeed, would see the premiere, in June 1794, of Kemble’s greatest commercial success as a writer, which was itself a Gothic opera, his adaptation of a French ‘musical romance in three acts’, Lodoiska. (The score was by Stephen Storace, responsible for Drury Lane’s 1789 smash hit The Haunted Tower). With its wicked Polish baron, finally defeated when his castle, already ablaze, is stormed by a band of heroic Tartar warriors, this gothic spectacular catered to a different taste from Macbeth – but perhaps not as different as all that. The triumphant dedication of the new Drury Lane ‘as a monument to the Genius of Shakspeare’75 by Kemble’s splendour-and-propriety-enhanced Macbeth marked the actor’s most successful public assumption yet of Garrick’s mantle as Shakespeare’s current representative on earth. In case anyone hadn’t noticed this during the play, moreover, his company’s claim to own both the national poet and Garrick’s legacy was pointed out by a special ritual after the first performance. ‘After the Epilogue the statue of Shakespeare was displayed, and was crowned with bays by Miss Farren. Mr. Dignum sung the song in praise of the Mulberry-tree [written by Garrick for his Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769], and the scene was closed by a peal from an excellent set of bells.’76 As Macbeth, Kemble, according to those of his devotees as familiar

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with Burke’s writings on aesthetics77 as with those on politics had touched the sublime: he was now ‘the great John Kemble’ indeed.

Becoming ‘King John’: Kemble and the Crowd If the 1794–1795 season marked a high-point of Kemble’s career as a provider of simultaneously popular and high-minded live Shakespeare, however, it also included one conspicuous low. One consequence of Kemble’s desire that every aspect of the shows produced under his management should reveal the influence of a single guiding intelligence was a degree of personal responsibility for matters which previous actor-managers had been content to delegate, and his recognition that on the immense new stage of Drury Lane more extras (with more names) needed to be more carefully marshalled than ever before in crowd scenes obliged him considerably to increase the amount of rehearsal undertaken by supernumeraries and principals alike. The resulting overwork in London was compounded not only by the taxing engagements in Edinburgh, Dublin and elsewhere which Kemble accepted in order to maximize his income whenever Drury Lane was closed, but by depressing unpopularity among his colleagues. To some of his fellow actors, Kemble’s high artistic ambitions just looked like the symptoms of megalomania, and during the 1790s the mutterings against him acquired a distinctly political cast: he was ‘the Autocrat of Drury Lane’, a ‘dictator’ who subjected his fellow-performers to ‘tyranny and oppression’.78 Although Kemble had long been in the habit of resorting to drink as a means of coping with the resulting isolation and stress, he had always scrupulously maintained his professional respectability. In 1787 he had abruptly married Priscilla Brereton (like Mrs Inchbald, the widow of a fellow-actor),79 and their childless, companionable marriage had seemed to most observers to be an invulnerably placid arrangement until early in 1795. In pursuit of his heroic ambitions Kemble had been marching undeviatingly forward for years, but now, suddenly, something snapped. On 28th January, most of the London newspapers published the following announcement: I, John Philip Kemble, of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, do adopt this method of publicly apologising to Miss de Camp, for the very improper and unjustifiable behaviour I was lately guilty of towards her, which I do further declare her conduct and character had in no wise authorised; but on the contrary, I do know and believe both to be irreproachable.80

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Fanny de Camp was a young singer and actress in the Drury Lane company. Kemble had sexually assaulted her backstage, but her cries for help brought rescue for her and utter humiliation for her drunken attacker. As the other Kembles gathered around to soothe the injured party and minimize the public damage, de Camp developed a strong attachment to Charles Kemble, a relationship fiercely opposed by John Philip, who succeeded in delaying their engagement until 1800 and their actual marriage until 1806, a full decade later than they would have wished it. (It was this couple’s children, even so, among them Fanny Kemble, who would in time inherit the family’s thespian capital.) Screams from the tyrant’s lair; a wronged, innocent maiden taken under the protection of a virtuous younger brother and brought into the bosom of the dynasty in defiance of the autocrat’s curses; a moment’s lapse into unforgiveable crime, to be brooded over and repented forever; to contemporary show-business gossip it seemed as though Kemble’s life offstage was now every bit as Gothic as his roles onstage. The last thing Kemble needed after an imbroglio which ‘more seriously affected his honour than any other part of his conduct through life’81 was something which might further damage his reputation by compromising his artistic integrity as a performer and producer of Shakespeare. The following season, however, that is what happened. It involved another blurring of the boundaries between Shakespearean tragedy and the contemporary popular gothic. Late in 1794 William Henry Ireland, the illegitimate teenaged son of the writer and antiquary Samuel Ireland, had begun to present his father with documents purporting to be in the hand of William Shakespeare himself. Somehow swallowing a bizarrely protoFreudian account of their provenance (which included a mysterious publicity-shy nobleman who wanted to share these priceless relics because they had been presented by Shakespeare to a Jacobean William Henry Ireland who had rescued the Bard from drowning), Samuel put these materials on show to an invited selection of fascinated literati at the family home in Norfolk Street, just off the Strand: some were even taken to St James’s Palace for the inspection of an intrigued Prince George. At the end of 1795 Ireland published a generous selection of the documents in facsimile as Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare, including the Tragedy of King Lear, and a Small Fragment of Hamlet, from the Original MSS. in the Possession of Samuel Ireland,82 and the appearance of this book prompted a wave of renewed public interest. Everyone who was anyone in the republic of letters felt obliged to declare themselves either a ‘Believer’ or an ‘Unbeliever’. Given how incompetent

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these forgeries look to modern readers more accustomed to seeing what Elizabethan spelling and handwriting really look like, it may seem surprising that there were any believers at all, but William Henry knew exactly what the late eighteenth-century public most wanted to hear about Shakespeare. His atrociously spelled documents perfectly filled the gaps in the Bard’s life-story about which scholars had remained silent for want of evidence. The Shakespeare they purported to reveal professed a zealous orthodox Anglicanism, wrote charmingly rustic love poems to Anne Hathaway (or rather ‘Hatherrewaye’), and was personally thanked for ‘prettye Verses’ by Elizabeth I. Kemble’s friend Malone, who was carrying out research for a biography of Shakespeare at the time, had declined an invitation to examine the documents in person, but he saw through them the moment he opened a copy of Ireland’s book, and on 10 January 1796 he started work on a detailed exposée, An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments, Published Dec. 14 1795.83 Ordinary readers in large numbers were deciding whether or not to accept Ireland’s papers as genuine on the grounds of pure uninformed consumer preference, apparently convinced that gentlemanly taste alone was sufficient to distinguish true Shakespeare from false. Malone was so determined that they should be put right by the most rigorous forensic scholarship he could muster that what began as a pamphlet eventually swelled into a 424-page book.84 The episode of the Ireland forgeries, then, marked a struggle for the right to pass judgement on matters Shakespearean between amateur opinion and a newly professionalized form of specialist scholarship. In the 1790s this struggle could not help but be seen in political terms: to Malone, for instance, who sent a copy of his Inquiry to a pleased Edmund Burke, the forgeries represented an upsurge of the masses against their educated betters, symptomatic of the lamentably revolutionary times in which he lived. Addressed to the Earl of Charlemont, his book professed a patriotic desire to preserve the national poet’s texts ‘pure and unpolluted by any modern sophistication or foreign admixture whatsoever’, and it accused the Irelands of attributing scandalously and anachronistically French republican opinions to Shakespeare in one of the forged verses.85 But while the laymen and the scholars argued over what might best qualify someone to recognize what was and wasn’t Shakespeare, where was the stage? As the most conspicuous professional Shakespearean in London, famed for his expertise in preparing Shakespeare’s texts for performance at a Theatre Royal which displayed a statue of Shakespeare as one of its trademarks, Kemble was naturally expected to voice an opinion. His freedom to make his views known, however, was in practice compromised by the theatre’s

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status as a commercial institution. In addition to forging letters, verses, manuscripts of known plays and legal documents, the industrious William Henry had also provided two hitherto unknown Shakespeare plays, Vortigern and Henry II, and Sheridan had accepted Vortigern for performance at Drury Lane. Given the level of public excitement about the Ireland documents, Sheridan realized, Vortigern would be compulsory viewing for believers and unbelievers alike, who might each want to see it several times before reaching their conclusions as to whether it was really by Shakespeare or not. (Sheridan’s agreement with the Irelands was that he should pay them £300 for the manuscript and then give them a 50 per cent share of the profits from the first 60 performances – a very optimistic projection of the play’s commercial potential – and it was probably he who discouraged Samuel from immediately publishing the script, thereby compelling the curious to see it in performance.)86 To ensure the maximum box-office return, then, the company would have to present the play impartially to the ticket-buying public and let them decide as to its real authorship: as James Bland Burgess’s prologue would tell the audience at the first night, ‘With you the judgment lies: / No forgeries escape your piercing eyes! / Unbiass’d, then, pronounce your dread decree, / Alike from prejudice or favour free.’87 This strategy – of allowing all shades of opinion free rein so long as they paid for admission – necessarily involved giving Vortigern a full-scale production featuring Drury Lane’s best-regarded Shakespearean actors, with the greatest of them, Kemble, in the title role. As a friend and colleague of the scholar who was busily penning a savage demolition of the Ireland forgeries while Vortigern went into rehearsal, even had he lacked the wit to detect their errors himself, Kemble can’t have thought the play genuine for a moment. As Sheridan’s salaried actormanager, however, he could neither refuse the part nor damage the play’s profitability by openly declaring it to be fraudulent. As Sheridan later explained, he himself ‘had nothing to do with the private piques and animosities of Mr Kemble, or whether he approved of the manuscripts or not . . . [I] regarded that gentleman merely as a servant of the theatre’, a member of staff whose duty was solely to ‘exert himself to the utmost for the benefit of his employers’.88 Being obliged to play the leading role in a manifestly forged play was clearly a deeply humiliating position for Kemble, calculated to undermine his authority as a learned and discriminating Shakespearean actor, but while Sarah Siddons could evade the whole embarrassing debacle by refusing her allotted role on the plea of a strategic heavy cold, all Kemble could do, given his position as manager, was squirm and stall. The date for the first performance of Vortigern

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progressively slipped, probably because Kemble was hoping that the publication of Malone’s Inquiry would burst the Ireland bubble first so that the play could be withdrawn before it ever opened. His bargaining position with Sheridan was weakened in March, however, after he gave a flagrantly uncommitted performance in George Colman the younger’s The Iron Chest, an adaptation of the novelist and political theorist William Godwin’s notoriously radical (and, to Kemble, repugnant) Caleb Williams. Kemble tried nonetheless to persuade Sheridan that his conscience would only allow him to appear in Vortigern if the first performance took place on April Fools’ Day, but Sheridan finally set the date for 2 April 1796. By then, however, the play was already destined for a very stormy premiere. Malone’s conclusively damning Inquiry appeared on 31st March , too late to force a cancellation, but just in time to guarantee that the first-night audience of Vortigern would include a substantial number of spectators who were there not to make a dispassionate appraisal of the script but to vent their anger at having been deceived by Ireland’s other forgeries. One irony in all this is that, fraudulent or not, Vortigern provided Kemble with a role perfectly tailored to his acting. Ireland, a keen theatregoer, later admitted that ‘every leading character introduced in the Vortigern was positively written for some certain performer,’89 and its rambling plot is a composite of the Shakespearean tragedies and histories in which Kemble had most conspicuously shone to date, particularly Macbeth, Cymbeline, and King John. In scenic structure, incident and diction, however, it more closely resembles the pseudo-Shakespearean gothic of Jephson’s Count of Narbonne or Kemble’s own Lodoiska. Vortigern is an ambitious, intermittently guilt-stricken but uniformly valiant regicide and usurper (shades of Kemble’s Macbeth) who turns from his virtuous wife in order to pursue the lovely Saxon maiden Rowena (shades of the de Camp affair?), but who is finally besieged in the Tower of London and, despite a courageous Richard III-like performance in battle (‘Give me another sword, I have so clogg’d / And badgèd this with blood and slipp’ry gore / That it doth mock my gripe’),90 is defeated by the rightful heirs to the throne. Conscious of the text’s spuriousness, Kemble must have felt that he was being obliged to perform a nightmarishly public act of self-parody. It can’t have made him any happier to discover, on 2nd April, that he would be doing so before the largest single audience of his career. So many people crowded so eagerly into the theatre when the doors opened that many were swept past the front-of-house staff without paying; some had to drop down from overcrowded boxes to squeeze into a dense throng in the pit. Many brandished a printed flyer which Samuel Ireland had distributed,

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attacking Malone and demanding a fair hearing for the play; others were forearmed with potential projectiles. Estimates put the combined audience of what were dubbed ‘Irelandites’ and ‘Maloneites’ at over 4,000. Although there were some skirmishes between believers and unbelievers at intervals during the first four acts, the evening remained relatively calm until, during the fi fth, Kemble could no longer endure the false position in which he had been placed. The crux came during Vortigern’s soliloquy on mortality, a pastiche of ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow . .’ and Richard II’s ‘For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground’, with a touch from Falstaff’s narrated death in Henry V. Addressing a Death alleged to take a special interest in the king, Kemble started to intone O then thou dost ope wide thy hideous jaws, And with rude laughter and fantastic tricks Thou clapp’st thy rattling fingers to thy sides, And when this solemn mockery is o’er, With icy hand thou tak’st him by the feet, And upward, so, till thou dost reach the heart And wrap him in the cloak of ‘lasting night. ‘No sooner was the above line [“And when this solemn mockery is o’er”] uttered in the most sepulchral tone of voice possible,’ remembered William Henry Ireland, than the most discordant howl echoed from the pit that ever assailed the organs of hearing. After the lapse of ten minutes, the clamour subsided; when Mr Kemble, having again obtained a hearing, instead of proceeding with the speech at the ensuing line, very politely, and in order to amuse the audience still more, redelivered the very line above quoted with even more solemn grimace than he had in the first instance displayed.91 Despite further frequent interruptions, the play eventually reached its conclusion, but when an announcement was made to the effect that it would be repeated the following night such violent disorder erupted that a different play had to be announced instead (Sheridan’s School for Scandal). Kemble had finally let it be known that he did not believe Shakespeare had written Vortigern, and as a result the solemn mockery would not be performed again until a small-scale revival at the Bridewell Theatre in 1996, mounted out of antiquarian interest in honour of the scandal’s two hundredth anniversary.92

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This belated reassertion of Kemble’s integrity as a Shakespearean – which could do nothing to exempt him from the charge of being knowingly privy to what amounted to a hoax – cost Sheridan a great deal of money, and it permanently soured relations between the actor-manager and the proprietor, already precarious after an incident in late 1795 in which Kemble had been arrested for some of Sheridan’s debts. From this point onwards, Kemble started purposefully to save money towards buying himself a position in which, as he hoped, his own artistic authority would be paramount. He resigned from his managerial duties at the end of the 1795–1796 season, and, despite a later patching-up of his quarrels with Sheridan and a brief period of renewed management, in 1801 he spent the enormous sum of £20,000 (much of it borrowed) on acquiring a one-sixth share in the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. Here he would remain as actor-manager (taking his brother Charles, sister Sarah and nephew and niece Henry and Harriet Siddons with him) for the remainder of his career. After the Vortigern affair he undertook only one more new Shakespearean role at Drury Lane. In 1799 Kemble gave his first performance as a lowering, misanthropic Jaques in As You Like It, a part which after the pressures and disappointments of the preceding five years scarcely required any acting at all. As Elizabeth Inchbald observed, ‘it is one of those characters in which he gives certain bold testimonies of genius, which no spectator can controvert – yet the mimic art has very little share in this grand exhibition.’93 If Kemble thought that becoming a major shareholder as well as manager and performer would solve the problems of cultural authority which the Vortigern scandal had highlighted, especially the problem of maintaining the intellectual integrity of the Shakespearean stage while continuing to run it on a mass-market commercial basis, he would be sadly disappointed. Before taking up his new position, he reasserted his status as a cultured, respectable (and French-speaking) gentleman by taking advantage of the Peace of Amiens to carry out a mini-Grand Tour, with Priscilla, to Madrid and to Paris. In Paris he was feted by the Comédie Française, and he spent a good deal of time being shown the treasures of the Louvre by the tragedian regarded as his French counterpart, Talma, taking extensive notes about classical and neo-classical art for future use at Covent Garden. After his return, hoping to repeat his auspicious debut at Drury Lane 20 years earlier, Kemble gave his fi rst performance at Covent Garden on 24 September 1803 in the role of Hamlet, but over the next two seasons less excitement would be generated by his account of the Prince than by that of ‘Master Betty, the Infant Roscius’

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(William Henry West Betty, b.1791). This child-star proved to be such a box-office draw that Kemble’s fellow-shareholders could not resist him (on one occasion William Pitt even suspended Parliament so that members could see Master Betty as Hamlet), and the fact that in the 1804– 1805 season he added two more Kemble roles to his repertoire – Macbeth and Richard III – can’t have soothed the newly installed actor-manager’s pique. Managing the longer-established Covent Garden players whose best roles Kemble and Siddons were now taking over was difficult too: Johanna Schopenhauer (the philosopher’s mother), for instance, provides a fine eyewitness account of one tricky occasion when Kemble, in the middle of a performance of Sheridan’s Pizarro, dismissed George Cooke from the stage for drunkenness and replaced him in the title role with Henry Siddons.94 Over the next few seasons, however, Kemble did what he could to restore his credentials as a Shakespearean. In 1804 he revived Henry VIII, one of the first Shakespeare plays in which he had showcased Siddons at Drury Lane, and after 1806 he took to playing Wolsey opposite her Queen Katharine, cutting the play to focus it more squarely on their antagonism. From 1811 onwards, splendour and propriety to the fore once again, he experimented with an unprecedented level of historical detail in this play’s pageantry and mise-en-scene.95 More controversially, Kemble flaunted his antiquarian qualifications in other directions too. Some of his pronunciation had always been regarded as slightly eccentric, but at Covent Garden his insistence on here and there adopting what he regarded as Elizabethan phonetics definitely became a mannerism. When he staged his own new acting version of The Tempest in 1806, which followed the advice Francis Gentleman had published in 1773 to the effect that a better play than either Shakespeare’s original or Davenant and Dryden’s 1667 adaptation might be produced by blending the two,96 Kemble seemed determined to compensate for the inauthenticity of its text by speaking Prospero’s surviving Shakespearean lines with all the authenticity he could manage. This included pronouncing the word ‘aches’ as a disyllable, ‘aitches’, in ‘Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar’ (in the original, 1.2.373), and while this was clearly more metrical than the modern pronunciation, and while Kemble could have produced any number of parallel Jacobean instances in his own vindication (of which his commonplace books are full),97 audiences took to jeering the line in the usually gratified hope of provoking Kemble into defiantly repeating it. The point wasn’t whether Kemble was right; the point was that he was perceived to be saying ‘aitches’ only to irritate them, performing his perceived superiority. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for instance, conceded in his ‘Notes

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on the Tragedies’ that ‘aitches’ would indeed have been the normal pronunciation in Shakespeare’s time, but then wrote ‘N.B. This is not meant to palliate, much less justify, Kemble’s insufferable coxcombry.’98 Kemble was now almost 50, his style of acting the inescapable status quo of the legitimate stage, and to some restive playgoers he was beginning to look like a caricature of his younger self. Having scrupulously identified themselves with the Establishment during their Drury Lane years, the Kembles and Siddonses were now very definitely theatre royalty, but, in a latently republican age liable to regard any hint of nepotism as a deplorable vestige of ‘Old Corruption’, that wasn’t always to their advantage. (William Hazlitt, for instance, waspishly remarked in 1816 that ‘we see no more reason why Mr Stephen Kemble should play Falstaff, than why Louis XVIII is qualified to fill a throne, because he is fat, and belongs to a certain family.’)99 Kemble soon found that after being regarded as ‘the Autocrat of Drury Lane’ at his previous place of work he was now identified with a specific, royal tyrant. One of the new nicknames he acquired among both company and audiences at Covent Garden – rather ambiguously honouring his regular performances as Shakespeare’s insecure and doomed usurper – was ‘King John’.100 In 1809 he was compelled to sign his Magna Carta. One recurrent problem with eighteenth-century theatres was that their proscenium-arch stages, with chimney-like flies above, not only resembled enormous hearths but behaved just like them in the event of fire, and in 1808 the auditorium which John Rich had built with the profits from Gay’s Beggar’s Opera more than 70 years earlier burned down so rapidly that even its famous organ, formerly used by Handel, could not be rescued from the blaze. Insurance covered only half the value of the building. Kemble was naturally horrified (‘Of all this vast treasure nothing now remains,’ he is reported to have exclaimed in his best high tragedy manner, ‘but the ARMS OF ENGLAND over the entrance of the theatre – and the ROMAN EAGLE standing solitary in the market place!’),101 but he seized the opportunity for a fresh start, at last able to commission a building which would match his elevated conceptions of the theatre both as an art-form and as an expression of proper social order. With money variously borrowed, donated by the Prince Regent and loaned by the Duke of Northumberland (who later waived any repayment), Kemble commissioned the architect Robert Smirke to design a true temple of dramatic art, complete with a portico, columns, reliefs influenced by the Parthenon friezes (at the time in the process of removal and shipment to London), and an overall shape modelled on the Parthenon itself. The poet and essayist Leigh Hunt, present at its opening, described the new building

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as ‘classical and magnificent throughout’, and he commented particularly on the classicism of its interior: the Ionic mock-porphyry columns up the grand staircase, the bronze Grecian-style lamps on tripods, the casts of famous classical statues in the lobby (among them ‘the Farnesian Flora, so justly celebrated for its magnificent breadth of drapery’), and the new statue of Shakespeare (by Rossi) in the ante-room. In the auditorium, he was impressed by the general air of ‘chaste and classical elegance’ (the lower circle of boxes was ‘ornamented with a simple Etruscan border in gold, and the rest with the Grecian honeysuckle alternately upright and inverted’), and by the decorative curtain across the stage which, ‘worthy the general classicality’, represented ‘a temple dedicated to Shakespeare, who stands in the vista in his usual attitude, while your eye approaches him through two rows of statues, consisting of the various founders of the drama in various nations, Aeschylus, Menander, Plautus, Lope de Vega, Ben Jonson, Molière, &c.’102 What impressed Hunt much less favourably, however, was the extent to which the new theatre’s private boxes – of which Smirke’s building incorporated 26 more than had its predecessor – occupied such a large proportion of its auditorium, greatly reducing the capacity of the gallery above. He was especially indignant that their aristocratic tenants were now able to take their places by separate entrances and staircases from the rest of the audience, and he was equally upset by the increased admission charges which the management had imposed in order to help pay for the building. So too, it transpired, were most of the rest of the theatre’s regular audience. This auditorium appeared to reify a conception of theatre’s place in society in which public taste was both owned and dictated by wealthy patricians. In the hopes of containing the ignorant mass-market whose power had been highlighted by the scandalous if short-lived success of the Ireland forgeries, Kemble, it seemed, had visibly affiliated the drama with the titled elite among whom he notoriously liked to socialize, and on whom he was now extensively (and to some, ignobly) dependent for capital. Rather than acknowledging their common fellowship in the national theatrical culture, the aristocracy would now grudgingly admit only a limited number drawn from the more plebeian orders of society to eavesdrop on their entertainment from the less desirable areas of the house. The good news for Kemble and his associates was that the inequalities in wealth and privilege which Smirke’s architecture made visible did not result in a repetition in London of the revolution that had swept Paris exactly two decades earlier. The bad news was that, starting on 18 September 1809, London went in for the Old Price Riots instead.

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Just as he had sought to repeat his Drury Lane debut by beginning his reign at Covent Garden as Hamlet, so Kemble chose to open this second new auditorium of his career with Macbeth. If the first time, in 1794, the production had been a great tragedy, the second, in 1809, it was a farce. ‘On Mr Kemble’s appearance in the dress of Macbeth, the character he was about to play’, reported Hunt a week later, he was received with a partial applause, which was instantly drowned in a torrent of execration, and after plaintively bowing, and looking as tenderly disconsolate as he could, for a minute or two, he was compelled to retire. The curtain then drew up, and the noise and outcry that followed were continued with an energy truly terrific the whole evening. It was impossible that more determined resistance could be displayed on any occasion . . . After the farce, some persons, said to be magistrates, appeared on the stage, but soon vanished before the general indignation; and it was not till two o’clock that the audience retired, growling as they went, like Homer’s lions, at those who had laid toils for them . . . ’Twas the same the next night, and the next, and the next . . . Each succeeding evening increased in noise: to catcalls were added horns and trumpets; and to a placard or two, banners all over the house covered with proverbs, lampoons, and encouragements to unanimity.103 The British public, it appeared, whatever it tolerated in the sphere of politics, would not tolerate this sort of treatment in the sphere of theatre, and though usually respectful towards King George they were prepared to resist King John by whatever carnivalesque means presented themselves. Demonstrators called for an immediate return to the old prices, and lots more besides. Some, outraged at aristocratic misuse of the privacy which privileged spaces in the auditorium could provide, used a journalistic abbreviation drawn from divorce courts where ‘criminal conversation’ was the current term for adultery: their placards demanded a remodelling which would feature ‘No Crim. Con. boxes!’ The catcallings, banner-wavings and other disruptive forms of protest continued for 67 consecutive nights. Becoming a shareholder, it transpired, rather than allowing Kemble to exert his artistic authority unchecked, had guaranteed only that he would attract a larger share of public opprobrium when that authority came to be challenged. As a performer as well as a manager, moreover, Kemble had no choice but to appear night after night before the angry crowds, inevitably the focus of

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their antagonism, and his attempts to display a cool professionalism by playing on regardless were interpreted as lordly contempt for the people. These performances, moreover, were usually followed by a rabble following him home to Great Russell Street and breaking his windows. Throughout the ‘O. P.’ crisis, Kemble was mercilessly pilloried in cartoons, ballads and pamphlets, whether as ‘King John’, as ‘Black Jack’, or as the usurping Macbeth. In one caricature by Isaac Cruikshank, Is This A Rattle Which I See Before Me?, Kemble is seen in his Macbeth costume recoiling in horror from an air-drawn watchman’s rattle (one of the noise-making implements most favoured by the rioters), above a caption in which his management of Covent Garden is likened to regal oppressions both Shakespearean and real: ‘. . oh then I must / forego my Schem[e]s of Power, of Rule, and Tyranny; / give up the Princely income which my Family / have long enjoyed.’ Another, by Charles Williams, A Parody On Macbeth’s Soliloquy at Covent Garden Theatre. Boxes 7/-, sees the riots as an instance of the libertarian gothic, the return of the politically repressed: the demand for a reinstatement of the old prices is described as ‘a forc’d creation / Proceeding from the hard oppressed people.’104 Espousing both the rhetoric and the methods of political radicalism, the Old Price rioters – their activities organized by, among others, Francis Place, a veteran of the pro-revolutionary Corresponding Societies of the previous decade105 – represented their cause as a struggle for the possession of the national drama between John Bull and King John.106 It was a confrontation between the old conception of Shakespeare as emblem of British liberty and Kemble’s anti-Jacobin sense of Shakespeare as up-market guarantor of constitutional conservatism. Compromise or surrender eventually had to come. Such sustained and well-co-ordinated consumer agitation could not be resisted forever, and on 14th December Kemble had no choice but to attend an ‘O. P. Banquet’ with the tribunes of the people at the Crown and Anchor Tavern. Here he agreed to reduce the private boxes to the number that had existed in 1802, to restore the old prices for admission to the pit, to drop all legal charges against the rioters, and to apologize to the public for the whole affair. He did not, however, reduce the price for admission to the boxes. From now on, wealthier theatregoers would be seen to be subsidizing the pleasures of the less wealthy, and Kemble would have to accept that the drama’s laws would henceforth be given by all of the drama’s patrons. When a vocal faction in the Covent Garden audience subsequently took to shouting for a restoration of Banquo’s ghost to the banquet scene, Kemble acquiesced without a murmur. Mildly, even.

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Ending as an Old Roman: Kemble and the Classical Whatever unpopularity Kemble experienced from the pit and gallery during the Old Price riots, he would always remain the actor of choice for gentlemanly connoisseurs of the arts, especially the visual arts. ‘In viewing the fine performances of Kemble’, wrote one, we have felt the same kind of pleasure, and experienced a renovation of the same pleasing train of ideas, into which we were led while we gazed upon the immortal glories of the Apollo or the Laocoon.107 The architect Sir John Soane, who had taught Robert Smirke, and who knew Kemble from seeing him at the Royal Academy dinners to which he was regularly invited, seems to have agreed. He kept a likeness of Kemble among a number of classical heads, including casts of the children from the Laocoon, on a table in his sculpture gallery, next to a bust of Augustus and near a reproduction of the Apollo Belvedere. Soane also bought Francis Bourgeois’s 1797 painting of Kemble as Coriolanus, which he hung opposite a depiction of the Pyramid of Caius Cestius in Rome and close to the artefacts he had brought back from Pompeii.108 Throughout his career, Kemble had always insisted on his classicism, and his career-long penchant for toga roles, from his own Belisarius to Addison’s Cato, together with an acting style consciously aloof from everyday-modern behaviour, resulted in a widespread sense that Kemble was to all intents and purposes an honorary Roman. Given his determination to be the pre-eminent Shakespearean actor of his day, it isn’t surprising that he gave special attention to Shakespeare’s Roman plays. Antony and Cleopatra, with its proliferation of short scenes and different locations, was regarded as unstageable in Kemble’s time (instead, he and Siddons occasionally played Dryden’s All for Love, though with little success), and Titus Andronicus was too tastelessly violent to touch. Kemble, however, had excelled in Coriolanus before its banning in the 1790s, and he was permitted to resume playing it at Covent Garden after 1805. The last item in his portfolio of Shakespearean Romans, however, had to wait until 1812: the noblest of them all, Brutus. The 1812 Julius Caesar – which was revived in every subsequent season until Kemble’s retirement in 1817 – was in many ways Kemble’s culminating achievement as a producer of Shakespeare. Committed as ever to splendour and propriety, Kemble found Shakespeare’s Rome brick, and

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left it marble. As was also the case with his Coriolanus, the designs Kemble commissioned for this play were knowingly anachronistic in the cause of superior pictorial effect: rather than depicting a particular city at a particular historical moment, the thirteen immense sets presented a perfected, super-Roman Rome in which buildings erected only in the time of Augustus and later were clearly and unashamedly visible. Flowing elegantly across this faux-marble cityscape, enormous crowd scenes dazzled the Covent Garden audience. Caesar’s entry in the second scene brought at least 71 people onto the stage (one version of the promptbook lists 106), who left through a full-scale triumphal arch, and the Soothsayer was given his own altar, complete with a sacred flame to tend. Before the assassination proper, the entire Senate was ‘discovered’ sitting in the Capitol, while Caesar sat enthroned between priests, lictors and guards; the Capitol was subsequently replaced by an equally lavish and populous recreation of the Julian Forum. John Ripley, author of the defi nitive account of this play’s stage history, describes how Kemble’s Julius Caesar artfully combined painted backdrops and carpentry with what he terms ‘living scenery’, consisting of processions and statuesque groupings of supernumeraries roughly comparable in function to draperies in beau idéal paintings. Costumes, based on antiquarian research, were relatively accurate, colours were simple and subdued, movement was kept to a minimum, and groupings were arranged according to the sculptural principles admired by Reynolds.109 This was just the sort of theatrical experience which Sir John Soane might have relished, and perfectly in keeping with the auditorium which Smirke had designed as a homage to Kemble’s neoclassical principles. Kemble’s multitude of carefully drilled human ‘draperies’ were carefully disposed around a characteristically measured, focussed and intense central performance. Cutting a quarter of the text, Kemble reduced the number of characters by 14, usually redistributing their speeches to others (Casca and Trebonius did especially well): in this way he both balanced the cast more equally between the Caesar–Antony faction and the conspirators, and imposed a properly classical unity which he felt Shakespeare had failed to achieve between the section of the play devoted to the assassination and that devoted to the subsequent civil war. (Hence the army led by Brutus and Cassius was essentially the conspiracy under military

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orders, with fewer new roles introduced in the fourth and fi fth acts). Unity was imposed on the central characters too, who were carefully deprived of any instances of ignoble or at least inconsistent behaviour, and who were much less irrationally interested in omens and the supernatural than their Shakespearean originals. This was especially true of Brutus, who in Kemble’s account of the play became a more uniformly stoical figure than in Shakespeare’s unaltered text and much more obviously the play’s tragic hero. As Ripley puts it, ‘the self-deceived fanatic, the impatient husband, the frightened general, the all-but maternal master, well nigh disappear.’110 This, clearly, was the sort of Roman Kemble would have liked to be, and his performance, which according to Boaden displayed ‘the purity of patriotism and philosophy’,111 was by all accounts a triumph of undeviating, almost robotic Romanitas. (Leigh Hunt, less excited than many, conceded that Kemble’s performance was ‘excellent as far as philosophic appearance and manner can make it so’, but complained that ‘this artificial actor does so dole out his words, and so drop his syllables one by one upon the ear, as if he were measuring out laudanum for us.’)112 The inflexible, attitudestriking nobility of this Brutus, however, was not without its share of pathos. ‘If it be surmised that Mr Kemble, from his strict attention to magnificence in deportment, which was his proud peculiarity, was thereby less effective in the delivery of passages, or even in the working up of entire scenes’, recalled one eyewitness, let us call to mind his interview with Cassius, where he relates the circumstance of the death of Portia: could any thing exceed the melancholy composure, the manly resignation, with which he delivered the three words, ‘Portia is dead!’ In a common Actor, these words would but convey the relation of a single fact! – melancholy indeed, and therefore affecting; – but as delivered by Mr Kemble, they are teeming with electric effect.113 This sounds very like the way in which Kemble played Macbeth’s reception of the news of the death of Lady Macbeth, a sudden break under intolerable pressure into a hitherto unexpected register. As in his handling of that play too, Kemble insisted that the character he played should fi nally be allowed to underline the moral of his fate with his dying breath, even if it meant retaining a non-Shakespearean interpolation in order to do so. Hence Kemble’s Brutus similarly died at the close of a speech that

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was not entirely authentic, if eminently well-judged to draw a round of applause: This was the justest cause that ever men Did draw their swords for; and the gods renounce it, – Disdaining life, to live a slave in Rome, Thus Brutus strikes his last – for liberty! – Farewell, Beloved country! Caesar now be still; I kill’d not thee with half so good a will.114 How far was Kemble consciously seeking to escape from the pressures of his own life and times in using Shakespeare as the passport to such an idealized version of Rome? Certainly by the end of his career this sort of dignified and elevating classical spectacle was one last area of the repertory in which he remained unchallenged. The sensational debut of the small, agile Edmund Kean at Drury Lane in 1814 served to remind contemporary audiences of the spontaneity, naturalism and dash which Kemble had never achieved, and Kean, in a further bid to sell himself as the modern alternative to his ageing rival, deliberately allied himself with the egalitarianism of the Old Price rioters into the bargain.115 Kean’s advent, coming as it did not long after the retirement of Mrs Siddons in 1812, clearly helped to hasten Kemble’s departure from the stage, but right to the end Kemble would yield to nobody when it came to wearing a toga, declaiming blank verse, and looking like a monument. It was only to be expected, then, that Kemble would choose one of Shakespeare’s Romans for the last of his farewell performances, on 23 June 1817, in a season that also saw him bid adieu to King John, Hotspur, Wolsey, Posthumus and Macbeth. What was less predictable was that Kemble, despite the sudden outpouring of public affection which greeted the news of his impending retirement, would choose not the calm, unalterably noble Brutus but a role of almost uninterrupted anger and disdain, a role, moreover, which could only serve to remind his audiences of his defiant assertion of managerial privilege throughout the Old Price Riots. But he himself was the best judge of his own strengths and his own feelings, and if ever there was an actor born to play Coriolanus – in fact, an actor who found it difficult not to – it was Kemble. ‘[I]t is not infrequent to hear it asserted’, as one enthusiast admitted, ‘that the cause of Mr Kemble’s excellence in this character is his close approximation to

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it in real life’.116 The role of Caius Martius required less paring for singularity and intensity of effect than did that of any other Shakespearean tragic hero, and it already fitted the pattern Kemble liked to fi nd in the others, that of marching undeviatingly in a straight line until reaching a single, climactic breaking point – in this instance, Coriolanus’s yielding to Volumnia’s pleading in act 5. The play, furthermore, provided perfect opportunities for exquisitely choreographed massed crowd and battle scenes, notably Coriolanus’s victory procession in the second act, advertised on Covent Garden playbills as the ‘Ovation’, which Kemble supplied with an ‘Ode’, and into which he incorporated 200 extras.117 His own performance was similarly calculated for visual effect throughout – hence the fame, for example, of his pause at Aufidius’s threshold, disguised not only by his cloak but by the effect of shade produced by his placing of himself between the audience and an onstage fire (Figure 6). Kemble’s political views were clearly visible in his acting text’s removal of both lines and sympathy from the tribunes of the people – regarding Coriolanus as a menace to Roman civil society best banished as soon as possible was not supposed to be an option for Kemble’s audiences – and as elsewhere he built up the relative importance of his own role in proportion to the cuts he made in others. Volumnia’s great pleading speeches, for instance, following Thomas Sheridan’s earlier adaptation and incorporating many of its new lines, were greatly shortened, and the single scene into which act 5 was compressed achieved its effects by visual rhetoric as much as verbal, offering a careful tableau-like animation of Poussin’s history painting of the same incident.118 According to all the reviews of Kemble’s final performance – as the critics rushed to hail the departing hero as a national treasure, now that he was safely on his way out – his Coriolanus was unquestionably sublime, just as it always had been. ‘He entered into the conception of the poet’, wrote one, and gave us a Roman, such as Virgil would have drawn him. It is impossible to conceive of anything of more majesty. It was an epic painting, – not of what Rome was, and still less of what Coriolanus was; but of that beau ideal of Rome and Coriolanus, which existed in the imagination of Virgil, of Shakspeare, and of Mr. Kemble.119 ‘[T]he martial air, the patrician haughtiness, the impetuous vehemence, and the towering superiority of the valiant soldier’, wrote another, ‘were pourtrayed with a depth of feeling, a sustained grandeur, and an astonishing power of expression, which defy competition, and challenge the

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severest superiority of criticism’.120 ‘His style was essentially classical’, summarized The News, distinguished by the unity of design, the severe grandeur, the majestic simplicity which characterized the fine arts in the classic ages. It had nothing in it of the modern school, nothing of the romantic or the sentimental, no minor beauties, no second-rate decorations; it was massive, grand, severe and lofty, a whole, of majestic beauty and classic grace.121 In keeping with this last-minute upsurge of enthusiasm – what Salter would call ‘the general admiration of the whole country’ – the actor’s emotional speech of valediction after the close of his final performance as Coriolanus was interrupted by shouts of ‘No farewell!’ A weeping Talma then clambered onto the stage to present Kemble with a long and elaborate petition begging him not to retire.122 Four days later, on 27th June, an enormous dinner was held in Kemble’s honour, which followed much the pattern later adopted by the annual meetings of the Sheffield Shakespeare Club except with a larger budget and a more distinguished guest-list. Listening to the speeches, joining in with the songs, hearing an Ode and drinking the toasts were many peers, many artists (among them Turner, Soane, Lawrence, Haydon, West, Smirke and Westmacott), and many actors (among them Talma, Kean, and the now grown-up and obscure Master Betty). John Fawcett, replying to a toast to the performers at Covent Garden and making one to those at Drury Lane, declared that Kemble had raised the theatrical profession ‘to a degree of respectability which it never before possessed’ (Nobody mentioned Miss de Camp). A vase designed by Flaxman was presented to Kemble with an inscription crediting him with the stage’s ‘present state of Refinement’, and proclaiming that the theatre, ‘aided by his unrivalled Labours (Most worthily devoted to the support of the LEGITIMATE DRAMA, and more particularly to the GLORY OF SHAKSPEARE)’, had now ‘attained a degree of Splendour and Propriety Before unknown’.123 As Kemble left at the end of the evening, passing the cast of Shakespeare’s Stratford bust which had been borrowed for the occasion, the Company appeared to feel, that it was more than an ideal separation between the Poet and the Actor, and to think, that as the latter withdrew from the image of the Bard, his compositions would lose a prop of their fame, in the absence of so intelligent an expositor.124 After that, Kemble’s public career was over. In pursuit of better air for his ailing lungs, he and Priscilla settled in Toulouse, but they found living as Britons uncomfortable in post-Waterloo France. After revisiting England

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in 1820 to make over Kemble’s share in Covent Garden to Charles and Fanny née de Camp (and, as it transpired, to see Mr Salter play Hamlet), they moved instead to Switzerland, where Kemble’s old friend Lullin (now settled in Geneva on a generous British government pension) had dedicated himself to welcoming English expatriates and staging English plays (They bought a house in Lausanne, called Beausite, close to Lullin’s sister’s estate at Beaulieu).125 The exile’s wanderings, however, were not quite complete: there was still a world elsewhere. ‘His concluding ambition’, wrote Boaden, ‘was to tread the soil which his Coriolanus, his Brutus and his Cato had trod’,126 or, as Kemble put it more jauntily in a letter to Mrs Inchbald, ‘now I think I shall make out my tour to Italy, and end perhaps like an old Roman.’127 In the event he did just that, but in Helvetia. The atmosphere of the real Rome agreed with him less well than had that of the ideal, and a few weeks after his return to Switzerland, Kemble died of a stroke, in 1823.128 At Kemble’s retirement dinner, Lord Holland declared that Kemble had ‘done more for the permanent prosperity of the Stage’ than any of his predecessors: For as long as the British Theatre exists – as long as the plays of Shakspeare shall be represented in the metropolis, the result of his learning and industry will be seen in the propriety of the scenic decorations, in the improvement of the costume, and in many matters of apparently minor consideration; but which, when effected, shew the man of research, and of ability, and display the mind of the scholar and the critic.129 This was certainly true for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Not only did Kemble’s acting versions remain the basis for many subsequent productions (especially of Julius Caesar), but the pictorialism in which he had excelled remained their dominant style. What changed was that Kemble’s antiquarianism was taken much further by his successors. It had been enough for Kemble that his Shakespeares should consistently have looked like the best and most familiar pictures of the past – hence his Henry VIII was accurate about the Tudor period principally because Holbein was. For Kemble’s brother Charles, however, who commissioned J. R. Planché to produce newly authentic medieval designs for King John in 1823, and for Kean’s son Charles, who would make this kind of visual authenticity his stock-in-trade at the Princess’s in the 1850s, productions of Shakespeare should show their audiences what history had really looked like, rather than how they had already seen it represented by others. That

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antiquarian impulse has since shifted a stage further, from a desire to replicate the historical periods in which Shakespeare set his plays into a desire to replicate the plays’ own Elizabethan mise-en-scene. While Kemble would certainly have been appalled at the lack of illusionistic scenery on display at Shakespeare’s Globe and other venues which subscribe to the ‘original practices’ movement, he might just have recognized, during their occasional experiments in reviving authentic Elizabethan pronunciation to complement their authentic Elizabethan architecture, faint echoes of his own controversial aitches. Kemble’s most important inheritors, though, were not the theatrical archaeologists but the crowd-masters, exponents of total theatre determined to stamp their own large vision (encompassing sound, decor and movement) onto very large stages: figures like the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen and even Richard Wagner. (It isn’t inappropriate that Covent Garden, rebuilt in 1857 after another fire but still displaying Flaxman’s friezes, is now the home of grand opera.) As a producer of overwhelmingly visual Shakespeare, Kemble perhaps has heirs too in that most totalitarian and supernumerary-friendly medium of current Shakespearean production, the cinema: Zeffirelli, Luhrmann, Branagh. In the mainstream of contemporary theatrical production, though, Kemble was perhaps closest in aims and assumptions to those directors who have consciously sought, sometimes successfully and sometimes to universal derision, a symbiosis between the aesthetics of the academically informed Shakespearean stage and those of the through-composed West End musical: Trevor Nunn, Adrian Noble, Gregory Doran. In trying simultaneously to ally his interpretations of Shakespeare with the royal establishment, with his wealthy sponsors, with nationally popular entertainment and with intellectual prestige, Kemble was, after all, only anticipating the impossible trick which the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is still obliged by its charter to attempt, season after season. Whether the RSC will ever see acting like Kemble’s, however, seems doubtful. His offstage Establishment manner (Figure 9) has perhaps survived among some distinguished classical actors granted the honours which in his day were almost entirely hereditary; Lord Olivier, for one, though in many respects more like Kean as a performer, was just as anxious to identify his Shakespeare with the monarchy, and Kemble would have been just as content as are the likes of Sir Donald Sinden and Sir Derek Jacobi to mingle with the great and the good at the Garrick Club. On stage, though, only Kemble’s perverse, wilful ingenuity with individual words and lines, and his enthusiasm for classical culture, have been occasionally glimpsed

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Figure 9 The Shakespearean actor as a gentleman; ‘J. P. Kemble, Esq.’ (c. 1817) from a drawing by Thomas Lawrence (1801). [property of the author]

in our time, in the work of John Wood, say, another great Brutus, or of Greg Hicks, another natural Coriolanus. Kemble’s defining belief that Shakespeare’s tragic heroes should be definitely larger and more titanic than mere mortals, however, has not been propounded on the English stage since the heyday of Sir Donald Wolfit in the 1940s. John Philip Kemble followed the comparatively naturalistic Garrick, and at the end of his career as a consciously great Shakespearean in the grand manner the pendulum swung back towards realism once again with the advent of Kean. Most of the history of Shakespeare’s tragedies on the stage since then have likewise been devoted to domesticating and psychologizing their protagonists, to making them more familiar rather than more astonishing. But if the pendulum ever does swing back towards the massive, grand, severe and lofty, to majestic beauty and classic grace, perhaps 89 Great Russell Street will finally get its blue plaque, and the pub on the corner of Bow Street will once again display the sign of Kemble’s head.

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Chapter 7

Sarah Siddons Russ McDonald

Four days after Christmas of 1775, the 20-year-old Sarah Siddons stepped hesitantly onto the stage at Drury Lane for the first time, as Portia in The Merchant of Venice. David Garrick, in his last year of management there, had identified her on a tip from Reverend Henry Bate, one of his talent scouts. Having accrued some experience in the provinces, she listed 23 roles she was prepared to present if engaged in London. Bate promised Garrick that ‘her face . . . is one of the most strikingly beautiful for stage effect that ever I beheld,’ claimed that her physical assets ‘are nothing to her action and general stage deportment which are remarkably pleasing and characteristic’, and declared that he knew of ‘no woman who marks the different passages and transitions with so much variety and at the same time propriety of expression’.1 Much was expected of her. Press and public, however, were disappointed: the debut was a flop. The next day the reviewer for The Middlesex Journal urged that she be sent back to the provinces forthwith: There is not room to expect anything beyond mediocrity. Her figure and face . . . have nothing striking, her voice . . . is far from being favourable . . . she possesses a monotone not to be got rid of; there is a vulgarity in her tones, ill calculated to sustain that line in a theatre she has at first been held forth in.2 Another was equally dismissive and more contemptuous: On before us tottered rather than walked, a very pretty, delicate, fragile-looking young creature, dressed in a most unbecoming manner, in a faded salmon-coloured sack and coat, and uncertain whereabouts to fi x either her eyes or her feet. She spoke in a broken tremulous

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tone; and at the close of a sentence her words generally lapsed into a horrid whisper, that was absolutely inaudible. After her first exit, the buzzing comment went round the pit generally. She certainly is very pretty, but then how awkward, and what a shocking dresser! Towards the famous trial scene, she became more collected, and delivered the great speech to Shylock with the most critical propriety, but still with a faintness of utterance which seemed the result rather of internal physical weakness than of a deficiency of spirit or feeling. Altogether, the impression made upon the audience by this first effort was of the most negative nature.3 Appearances in other parts over the next months failed to improve her standing with the public, and when at the end of the season she went off to Birmingham expecting details of re-engagement, she received word from the management that she would not be needed in the coming year. Given the heights Siddons was later to attain at Drury Lane, this initial season represents one of the most spectacular cases in theatrical history of ‘If at first you don’t succeed . . .’ We cannot recover all the circumstances behind Siddons’s failure in her first London effort, but the information we have provides clues to the icon she would become. From the beginning the engagement did not take advantage of her strengths, literal and professional. Considering that she had given birth to her first daughter some 8 weeks before, in November of 1775, physical weakness must have compromised her performance on that evening. The playing space, recently renovated and enlarged, was grander than the provincial houses to which she was accustomed, and apparently she did not manage to make herself consistently audible. It is also possible that she was unnerved by the importance of the occasion, or by the hostile atmosphere created by the established actresses in the company. She later complained that Garrick was deploying her as a weapon against Mrs Yates and Miss Younge, who were giving him trouble: ‘I really think it was meerly for the pleasure of mortifying others that he distinguished me!’4 More telling than any of these considerations, probably, was miscasting. The manager’s decision to present her in a comic part for the debut must be considered a blunder: Portia offers an actress no opportunities for pathos or grand passion. Siddons’s Reminiscences, composed at the very end of her life, are exceedingly brief and mostly so anodyne that they have not received much attention, but on this point the volume is revealing, indicating that she protested the role but was overruled so that Garrick could

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avoid offending his other star actresses. The manager, in those initial negotiations, objected to my appearing in any very prominent character, telling me that the fore namd ladies [Mrs. Yates and Miss Younge] would poison me if I did. I of course thought him not only an Oracle but my friend, and in consequence of his advice, Portia in the Mt. of Venice was fi xd for my debut, a Character in which it was not likely that I should excite any great sensation. I was therefore meerly tolerated.5 Nor did her subsequent roles in the new year – Lady Anne to Garrick’s Richard III and leads in several comedies – require the histrionic effects for which she would soon be celebrated.6 ‘Power’ was the key to Siddons’s career, and London saw little of it in the season of 1775–1776. Her return to Drury Lane some six years later, in October 1782, was a triumph, the public abuzz, the press lavish in its praise. Appearing in a popular favourite, Isabella, or The Fatal Marriage, Garrick’s adaptation of Southerne’s original, she made the most of her climactic moment in the plot. Here is how James Boaden put it: ‘But the LAUGH, when she plunges the dagger into her bosom, seemed to electrify the audience; and literally the greater part of the spectators were too ill themselves to use their hands in her applause.’7 For the next three decades critics would continue to describe her affective gifts in just such terms, and indeed the critical register she normally inspired soon began to provoke a satiric reaction, as in the following account of her reception on the Dublin stage in 1788. One hundred and nine ladies fainted! Forty-six went into fits! And ninety-five had strong hysterics! The world will scarcely credit the truth when they are told that fourteen children, five old women, a one-handed sailor, and six common-council men, were actually drowned in the inundation of tears that flowed from the galleries, lattices, and boxes, to encrease the briny pond in the pit. The water was three feet deep, and the people that were obliged to stand upon the benches, were in that position up to their ankles in tears.8 Siddons commanded immense power, and her audiences eagerly submitted themselves, responding with tears, fits of hysteria, and loud encouragement. Among journalists and critics, diarists and letter-writers, references to Siddons’s ‘command’, ‘strength’, ‘force’ and ‘power’ appear everywhere. And yet it is vital that we recognize that this authority was exercised in

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Shakespearean parts only occasionally and, moreover, that our tendency to identify her automatically with Shakespeare is a distortion of theatrical history. My major aim in the following pages is to examine some distinctions between Siddons the Shakespearean actress, Siddons the sovereign of the London stage, and Siddons the cultural icon. Those roles all intersect, but they are not identical, and finally we are obliged to modify what we think we know about The Divine Sarah.

I The broad outline of Sarah Sidddons’s life will be familiar to some readers, but certain facts, events, and themes warrant rehearsing because they have a bearing on her work as a Shakespearean. The most salient of these is family: born Sarah Kemble on 5 July, 1755 , she entered the world in The Shoulder of Mutton Inn in Brecon, Wales, where her mother and father, both actors, were touring; at the age of 18 she married an actor, William Siddons, a member of her parents’ troupe; and not only she but her siblings also entered the family business. Indeed, so important a member of the London theatrical scene was her brother John Philip Kemble, both as actor and manager, that the period between the death of David Garrick (1779) and the emergence of Edmund Kean (1814) has become known as the Age of Kemble. (It may be said with some justice that it ought to be known as the Age of Siddons.) For three decades she acted regularly with her brother, playing Lady Macbeth to his Macbeth, Hermione to his Leontes, Volumnia to his Coriolanus, and paired with him in many nonShakespearean works. Her husband, however, soon came to recognize that he was less talented than Sarah or her brother, and while he continued to act now and then, his primary role shifted to something like that of business manager. This inferior status apparently produced some strain in the marriage, and one of the most incongruous details in the story of the virtuous Mrs Siddons – we learn about it from one of Hester Thrale Piozzi’s letters, gossipy but sympathetic – is that her straying Willy seems to have infected her with a case of the pox. That disease is significant because it is anomalous, an insult to the moral rectitude that early on became a dominant feature of the actress’s public persona. One of her notable achievements was to sustain her image as the chaste, maternal woman, a stance especially meaningful considering the amorous habits of most English actresses of the day. Although there were exceptions, most of her predecessors had been, and many of her rivals

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were still, the mistresses of powerful men, some of more than one or two. Indeed, throughout the eighteenth century the range of the luvvies’ lovers was very wide: many well-known actresses had begun as ordinary prostitutes; at the other end of the scale, however, Dorothy Jordan, Siddons’s counterpart in comedy in London of the 1780s and 1790s, became the mistress of the Duke of York. Mrs Siddons – I use the title advisedly – helped to make acting potentially respectable for women. The press, which seems to have differed little from our own tabloids, attempted to exploit two alleged amorous incidents. In the first, the Galindo affair, she was accused of having taken up with one of her protégés, an actor and fencing teacher in Dublin. In 1802 the 47-year-old Siddons was playing Hamlet to the dashing, young Mr Galindo’s Laertes. In 1809 his wife published letters allegedly from Sarah Siddons to Mr Galindo, claiming that the great lady had destroyed the happiness of the Galindo family. In 1804 the painter Thomas Lawrence, who around that time was carrying on disastrous liaisons with two of her daughters, was whispered to have conquered their mother’s heart as well. William Siddons purchased newspaper space offering money to anyone who could prove where these rumours were originating, and after a while the gossip subsided. Despite these loudly hurled charges of hypocrisy or impropriety, Mrs Siddons managed to maintain her reputation for righteousness. Confirmation of her personal integrity is found in The Siddoniad, a panegyric poem published in Ireland in 1784 following one of her tours there. In particular, the poet extols her performances in her great maternal roles, associating those portrayals specifically with her private life. But well may she assume sensations here, Who dignifies her state in PRIVATE sphere, The WIFE unblemish’d, and the MOTHER dear. ‘Tis FICTION which commands our stage applause, Practice in private life adorns her cause.9 A year later, in London, the poem was reprinted, amplified, and addressed specifically to the moral ambiguity of the London stage. Sacred Morality! how is thy reign Exalted! how the reign of Virtue bless’d, By SIDDONS’ delegated sway! SIDDONS! The admiration of the gazing world! Long had the genius of the comic-scene

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Usurp’d Brittania’s stage, and sunk the mind To love of vanity; but now, again, MELPOMENE awakes; and to the eye Of longing expectation raises up Her charms celestial; SIDDONS leads ’em on And ev’ry generous, British bosom burns With its own native fires.10 Such moral boosterism is audible throughout Siddons’s career, and it served to insulate her against the possible damage she might have suffered in the scandals associated with Mr Galindo and Thomas Lawrence. Her celebrated virtue made her a tempting target, but her enemies were unable to make their charges stick. Another side of her public image was perhaps less commendable: she was thought to be an incurable skinflint. A James Gillray cartoon, ‘Melpomene’ of 1784, depicts Siddons as the Muse of Tragedy straining to reach bags of gold suspended just over her head. One of her nicknames, in addition to The Divine Sarah and The Siddons, was ‘Lady Sarah Save-all’, a reference to her frequently repeated claim that it was her intention to save 10,000 pounds so that she could purchase a cottage. Mrs Piozzi disapprovingly tells a correspondent that Siddons should not insist on playing Lady Macbeth late in pregnancy, fearing that ‘people have a notion She is covetous, and this unnecessary Exertion to gain Money will confirm it.’11 Some of the exceptional industry for which she is famous must have derived from this acquisitive impulse. In 1784, having established herself at Drury Lane for two successful seasons, she undertook an ambitious tour of Scotland and Ireland lasting from May to September, returning home with takings of something like 4,000 pounds, this at a time when a leading provincial actor might have earned somewhere in the neighbourhood of 50 pounds over the same period. Some of these mercenary allegations were surely hyperbolic, but smoke almost always denotes fire, and the smoke was very thick. The most serious of the charges involved a contretemps in Dublin in 1784, when the press denounced Siddons for refusing to play a benefit for an ailing actor named Digges, and charged that when she finally agreed to help, she did so on such piratical terms that the act of charity was nullified. As she put it in her reminiscences, Alas! How wretched is the being who depends on the stability of public favour! I left London the object of universal approbation, and on my return, but a very few weeks afterwards, was recieved [sic] on my first

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nights appearance with universal opprobrium, – accus’d of hardness of heart, of the most sordid avarice, and total insensibility to evry thing and evry body, except my own interest.12 Word of the scandal followed her – indeed, seems to have preceded her – to Drury Lane. Her first performance in the 1784–1785 season, as Mrs Beverly in Edward Moore’s The Gamester, was disrupted first by shouting and unruliness, from which Kemble rescued and revived her, and then by chilly silence. Shortly thereafter letters arrived from Dublin that, when published in the press at her insistence, apparently exonerated her. But it seems clear that she was driven by financial fears, and these concerns were connected with her attachment to her family. As she said of the hostile audience on the night described, ‘but in consideration of my children, I never would have appeared again’.13 The combination of celebrity and accomplishment made Siddons one of the most important women in England. No actress before her had managed to attain such a level of fame and respect. She became arguably the first female English theatrical superstar, one of the earliest A-list actors in the tradition of Burbage, Betterton and Garrick. Dr Johnson, unable to go out, received her in his rooms: as she and her companions settled themselves, he flattered her by remarking that wherever she appeared there was a shortage of chairs. Her portrait was painted by Reynolds, Lawrence, Gainsborough, Romney and others; she made huge quantities of money by touring throughout the kingdom; and her comings and goings were of unfailing interest to the increasingly active British press. Having achieved theatrical sovereignty at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, she found herself associated with actual royalty: King George and Queen Charlotte both attended the theatre when she performed, and later in her career she was often summoned to the royal palace to read to them. William Hazlitt’s famous description of her cultural significance can scarcely be omitted in any treatment of her career. The homage she has received is greater than that which is paid to Queens. The enthusiasm she excited had something idolatrous about it; she was regarded less with admiration than with wonder, as if a being of a superior order had dropped from another sphere, to awe the world with the majesty of her appearance. She raised Tragedy to the skies, or brought it down from thence. It was something above nature. We can conceive of nothing grander. She embodied to our imagination the fables of mythology, of the heroic and deified mortals of elder time. She was not less than a goddess, or than a prophetess inspired by the gods. Power was seated on her brow,

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passion emanated from her breast as from a shrine. She was Tragedy personified. She was the stateliest ornament of the public mind. She was not only the idol of the people, she not only hushed the tumultuous shouts of the pit in breathless expectation, and quenched the blaze of surrounding beauty in silent tears, but to the retired and lonely student, through long years of solitude, her face has shown as if an eye had appeared from heaven; her name has been as if a voice had opened the chambers of the human heart, or as if a trumpet had awakened the sleeping and the dead. To have seen Mrs. Siddons was an event in everyone’s life.14 The Romantic cast of the prose conveys distinctly the force of Siddons’s effect on her audiences, and by implication on the culture at large: ‘Power was seated on her brow’; she ‘hushed the tumultuous shouts’, ‘quenched the blaze’; the utterance of ‘her name’ made it seem ‘as if a trumpet had awakened the sleeping and the dead’. Hazlitt’s enthusiasm, while certainly emphatic, is not unrepresentative. At the other end of the literary scale we find a different proof of Siddons’s cultural centrality. In the 1788 edition of Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, an annotated catalogue of prostitutes available to ‘Gentlemen of Pleasure’, complete with sexual specialties and prices, we find a young woman calling herself ‘Miss Sarah Siddons’: She is about twenty-three, light hair and eyes, a good skin, and size completely adapted for this season, and which seems to please the greatest part of her friends and customers, who think two arms full of joy twice as good as one; she is remarkably good-natured and affable to those who favour her with a visit, and will take almost any sum rather than turn her visitor away; but if you absolutely bilk her, beware of the consequence; for she is so well convinced that she does not merit such treatment, that she will, if possible, avenge the injury.15 Probably to have seen Miss Siddons was not an event in everyone’s life, but the whore’s appropriation of the famous name is a marker of its commercial power.

II The ‘brow’ where, according to Hazlitt, ‘power was seated’ was an attractive one, and Siddons’s physical appearance surely contributed much to her

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success. Thomas Campbell, her biographer, offers an illustrative episode that occurred on a journey he made to Paris with Siddons and Kemble after her retirement. His recollection of their visit to the Louvre to see the Apollo Belvedere, occupying some 4 pages of his book, is valuable less as a record of what they saw than for what it says about their being seen: When we walked round to other sculptures, I observed that almost every eye in the hall was fi xed upon her, and followed her; yet I could perceive that she was not known, as I overheard the spectators say, ‘Who is she? – Is she not an Englishwoman?’ At this time she was in her fifty-ninth year, and yet her looks were so noble, that she made you proud of English beauty, even in the presence of Grecian sculpture.16 Siddons seems to have been the observed of all observers. Even allowing for Campbell’s partiality, the anecdote captures the visual charisma, especially the air of nobility, that everyone seems to have felt in Siddons’s presence. Lady Greatheed, for example, for whom the teen-aged Siddons worked as a maid and governess, ‘felt an irresistible inclination to rise from the chair when Sarah came in to attend her’.17 What did she look like? According to the Frenchman Jacques Henri Meister, who recorded his impressions in 1799, ‘she exceeds most women in height’, and he continues by urging that her tall stature entails no awkwardness or disproportion.18 Walpole, seeing her act late in his life and prejudiced by memories of the performers of his youth, thought her ‘a good figure, handsome enough, though neither nose nor chin according to the Greek standard’.19 The numerous visual representations left by the greater and lesser artists of the age, both those that depict her in a fictional role and those that do not, convey something of her monumentality. It is significant that Reynolds’s portrait of her as The Tragic Muse (1784) borrows her posture from Michelangelo’s representation of the prophet Isaiah on the Sistine ceiling. An anonymous writer responding to her second Drury Lane debut in 1782 and cited by Boaden years later comments that ‘There never, perhaps, was a better stage figure than that of Mrs. Siddons.’ After mentioning her ‘energy and grace’, the writer goes on to remark on the harmonious blend of her features. The symmetry of her person is exact and captivating. Her face is peculiarly happy, the features being finely formed, though strong, and never for an instant seeming overcharged, like the Italian faces, nor coarse and unfeminine under whatever impulse. On the contrary, it is so thoroughly

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harmonized when quiescent, and so expressive when impassioned that most people think her more beautiful than she is.20 She was striking, it seems, rather than perfectly beautiful. Her face was a vehicle for her celebrated expressiveness, and a major asset therein was her pair of black eyes. Michael Booth notes that reviewers regularly commented on their ‘piercing’, ‘brilliant’, ‘flashing’ quality,21 and Campbell’s biography includes an anecdote about an actor who, having played with her in Henry VIII in Edinburgh, confessed that he never wanted to share the stage with her again, so unnerved was he by her penetrating gaze.22 The impact of the eyes was enhanced by her extremely white skin. Clearly she was proud of this feature, as her report of an exchange with King George III indicates: ‘the King, who had been told that I used white paint, (which I always detest,) sent me, by my friend, Sir Charles Hotham, a condescending message, to warn me against its pernicious effects. I cannot imagine how I could be suspected of this disgusting practice.’23 She also reports that when Reynolds, in finishing The Tragic Muse, had wanted to darken her skin slightly, she objected. According to Walpole, ‘her hair is either red, or she has no objection to its being thought so, and had used red powder,’ but Siddons in her Memoirs denies it, differentiating herself from other actresses who employed red powder and pomatum.24 One of her most effective histrionic instruments was her voice. Her first season at Drury Lane had generated complaints that her speaking was inadequate, that the voice was incapable of carrying sufficiently. Horace Walpole, while he described it as ‘clear and good’ declared that he ‘thought she did not vary its modulations enough’.25 But these views seem not to have been shared by most of her contemporaries. In conversation, Fanny Burney found her voice ‘deep and dragging’.26 Judith Pascoe has recently attempted to complicate our thinking about Siddons’s voice: that it would have changed more than once over the course of her 50-year career on the stage, and that the enlargement of the London playhouses accompanying the transition from the Georgian into the Romantic theatre would have required adjustment and would have conditioned the way that she sounded.27 Despite the occasional sniping, there was mostly unanimity about the commanding effect of her voice upon a crowded playhouse. She was, apparently, a potent speaker of Shakespeare’s verse. Boaden records ‘the solemn and melodious dignity of her declamation’, and we have the benefit of abundant commentary on the way she used her voice and its contribution to her success.28 Professor G. J. Bell, a Scottish barrister devoted to the stage and fascinated with Siddons, has supplied precise annotations

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for her vocal effects as Lady Macbeth and Queen Katherine. In Macbeth, for example, in the early encounter when Macbeth wishes to abandon the scheme, her question, ‘Was the hope drunk / Wherein you dressed yourself?’ was spoken ‘Very cold, distant, and contemptuous’; and the subsequent ‘From this time / Such I account thy love’ was delivered with a ‘Determined air and voice. Then a tone of cold contemptuous reasoning’.29 Similar notations of tone and volume and pitch, as well as a record of the words emphasized, are found in Bell’s account of her performance in Henry VIII. The distinctive quality of the voice seems to have had something to do with her particular bent for tragedy. One commentator remarks that ‘her voice is naturally plaintive, and a tender melancholy in her level speaking denotes a being devoted to tragedy.’30 Anthony Pasquin (a pseudonym for the satirist and rake John Williams), mocking her Rosalind in 1785, complained that ‘Her hoarse awful accents were never design’d / To lighten those cares which obtrude on the mind.’31 Although her speaking voice was neither especially deep nor powerful, it seems to have had a distinctive tint, a suggestion of darkness – ‘hoarse’ and ‘awful’ – that helped to reinforce her general impression of gravity. This consistency is suggested by Meister’s comment that ‘there is a certain force of expression in her eyes and mouth which can only be compared with the tone of her voice, which is at once melodious, clear, articulate, and thrilling.’32 Whether attributable to the innate quality of the instrument or to her remarkable use of it, her speaking voice frequently called forth in reviewers and correspondents some version of that participle ‘thrilling’. Concluding his biography in 1827 – his subject is still alive – James Boaden devotes himself to a description of Siddons’s person, borrowing the language of a FOREIGN WRITER of her own sex; and I shall annex it in the original language, claiming only the praise for first presenting to the British nation, so eloquent a description, and so admirable a likeness: ‘Elle étoit grande et de belle taille, mais de cette grandeur qui n’epouvant point, et ne sert qu’ à la bonne mine. Elle avoit le teint fort beau, les cheveux d’un châtain clair, le nez très-bien fait, la bouche bien taillée, l’air noble, doux, enjoué, modeste, et pour render sa beauté plus parfaite, les plus beaux yeux du monde. Ils étoient noirs, brillans, doux, passionnés, pleins d’esprit. Leur éclat avoit je ne sais quoi qu’on ne sauroit exprimer. La mélancholie douce y paroissoit quelquefois avec tous les charmes qui la suivent. Lenjouement s’y faisoit voir à son tour, avec tous les attrais que la joie peut inspirer. Son esprit étoit fais exprés pour

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sa beauté, grand, doux, agréable. Elle parloit juste et naturellement, de bonne grace et sans affectation. Elle savoit le monde, et mille choses don’t elle ne faisoit pas vanité. Elle avoit mille appas inevitable; de sorte qu’unissant les charmes de la vertu a ceux de la beauté et de l’esprit, on pouvoit dire qu’elle meritoit l’admiration qu’on eut pour elle.’ [Though she was tall, with a fine figure, it was a height that never startled [the word means to frighten – as a ghost might frighten], serving only her fine features. She had a beautiful complexion, light chestnut hair, a perfect nose, a well-defined mouth, an air of nobility: gentle, modest, and, to render her beauty even more perfect, the most beautiful eyes in the world. They were dark, shining, sweet, passionate, full of intelligence that shone with a je-ne-sais-quoi impossible to catch. Sometimes a gentle melancholy appeared, with all the charms that belong to it. Then gaiety took its turn, with all joy’s winning attractiveness. Her intelligence seemed made for her beauty: large, sweet, sympathetic. Her speech was appropriate and natural, graceful and unaffected. She knew the world, and a thousand other things about which she was never vain. Her thousand charms intertwined the attractions of virtue with those of beauty and mind; one could say that she deserved the admiration she enjoyed.] The reader will be delighted, I have no doubt, with so fine a likeness, and require only to be told the name of the fair and eloquent writer. But it is with pride and pleasure I inform him, that for this portrait, Mrs. SIDDONS never sat, however striking the resemblance. It is the sketch, still of one of the greatest, and best of women – of Madame de MAINTENON, by her friend Mademoiselle de Scudery.33 Boaden’s clever device not only exalts Siddons by internationalizing her, associating her with a legendary European beauty and suggesting that a noble foreign tongue is required to capture her dignified appearance, but it also takes advantage of the frequency with which Siddons sat for portraits – ‘so fine a likeness’ – by the great painters of the day.

III Siddons’s reputation as probably the greatest English actress, combined with Shakespeare’s status as the greatest playwright, has generated an inevitable identification between the two. This connection is misleading. It is worth remembering that – always excepting the role of Lady Macbeth – Siddons’s fame was built not exclusively and perhaps not even chiefly on the great Shakespearean parts. When she triumphed as Lady Macbeth in

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the third season at Drury Lane (February 1785), the anonymous reviewer for The Public Advertiser welcomed her conquest for serving to ‘gag the drivellers who . . . ventured a sweeping prophecy of condemnation, that “the Siddons never could play Shakespeare” ’.34 Such an opinion, although it seems incomprehensible given the way we think of her now, probably arose from her repeated portrayals, to increasing acclaim, of tragic heroines featured in plays nowadays mostly forgotten. Euphrasia in Arthur Murphy’s The Grecian Daughter, Mrs Beverly in The Gamester, Isabella in Garrick’s Isabella, Belvidera in Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved, Calista in Nicholas Rowe’s The Fair Penitent, and the title part in Rowe’s The Tragedy of Jane Shore – these were the roles in which she triumphed and for which she was continually in demand. If few of them depended upon a complex characterization, all were nevertheless showcases for the tragic actress. They required immoderate emotional expression, usually some form of grief or fear or rage, and the opportunities for lamentation or pathos were legion: Siddons was celebrated not only for the laugh mentioned earlier but for the shrieks uttered at a climactic moment in The Fatal Marriage, and for her pitiable representation of the heroine’s physical distress in Jane Shore. It is with her Shakespearean roles that this chapter is concerned, however, and in this arena her experience was broad if not comprehensive. She played about 20 Shakespearean parts, although it must be added that different biographers count differently: should Katherina be included, for example, since the version of Shrew she played was not Shakespeare’s but Garrick’s adaptation? The following list counts Ariel, her first recorded role, performed with her parents’ troupe when she was 9 (but apparently she forgot it and failed to mention that early experience to Thomas Campbell); and the Prince of Denmark in Hamlet, which she did not present in London but in the provinces and in Dublin. (Reverend Bate impishly warned Garrick that she might challenge his ownership of the role.)35 In the tragedies, she played Juliet, Ophelia, Gertrude, Desdemona, Cordelia (in Tate’s adaptation), Lady Macbeth and Volumnia; in the histories, Lady Anne and Queen Elizabeth in Cibber’s version of Richard III, Constance in King John, the Princess of France in Henry V and Queen Katherine in Henry VIII; in the comedies, Portia, Beatrice, Olivia, Rosalind, Isabella, Imogen and Hermione. Some of these performances were undertaken early in her career and some not given in the capital. Her portrayal of Beatrice, for example, was seen early and only once, before her return to London in 1782: Henderson came through Bath on a provincial tour and she performed Much Ado with him there.36 Juliet she did not play in

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London until she was 34 years old, in 1789, and she reserved Hermione, Gertrude and Queen Elizabeth until quite late in her career. Her most important characterizations, those she performed most often and for which she received the greatest adulation, were Lady Macbeth, Constance in King John, and Queen Katherine in Henry VIII. Indeed, Michael Booth proposes that these were the only Shakespearean representations ‘considered outstanding in her time’. 37 This may be going too far. The discourse of reviewing in the period differs markedly from the writing we are accustomed to: critics tended to express themselves hyperbolically, and sometimes the disappointment either stated or implied has to do with the high expectations that accompany a star actor’s status. Thus the newspapers often complain about acting that may have been, by almost any other standards, extremely effective. On the other hand, some of the praise she regularly garnered must be taken with modified scepticism, and it is unwise to trust entirely the hagiographic biographers, Thomas Campbell and James Boaden. What is most helpful is saturation in the theatrical journalism of the day accompanied by an effort to read the reviews with a historical sensitivity. It is instructive to contemplate some of the parts Siddons did not play, a rather surprising list. Despite her talent for heroics, there was no Cleopatra, although she did play the part in Dryden’s All for Love, which throughout the eighteenth century was preferred to the original. Campbell addresses (but does not regret) this gap in her career: . . . would Shakespeare’s Cleopatra have suited Mrs. Siddons’s powers? I am pretty sure it would not. The energy of the heroine, though neither vulgar nor comic, has a meteoric playfulness and a subtle lubricity in the transition of feelings, that accords with no impression which can be recollected from Mrs. Siddons’s acting.38 Likewise, she never played Shakespeare’s shrew but did appear in Garrick’s adaptation, Catherine and Petruchio. Neither Titania nor any of the women in Dream was in her repertory, nor Viola nor Adriana nor Helena in All’s Well. Some of these omissions are attributable to the fluctuating popularity of certain titles. Much Ado about Nothing did not achieve the popularity it now enjoys until the days of Irving and Terry at the Lyceum, although Garrick and Hannah Pritchard had played it successfully; apart from the Bath performance with Henderson, Siddons left Beatrice alone. Georgian audiences apparently cared little for Twelfth Night, now one of Shakespeare’s most admired comedies, and The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost,

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Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Tempest were given much less frequently than nowadays. The three Henry VI plays were known only to readers, and Richard III was played in Cibber’s adaptation. To some extent this phenomenon of limited repertory is a function of gender. Decisions about what was produced usually rested in the hands of the actor-managers, and since these were invariably male, dramas without a strong masculine lead were less likely to be scheduled. Repertory also depended obviously upon commercial considerations, deriving from the need to keep a powerful performer happy, whether male or female. Had Siddons been a brilliant comic actor, for example, then her choices would have shaped the repertory of the day in that direction. Commercial considerations also manifested themselves in open competition between actors. It seems that the decision to stage Cymbeline for her at Drury Lane arose from the ongoing public comparison of Siddons and Dorothy Jordan, who was acting Imogen at Covent Garden. One of the London reviewers ventured to offer Siddons some career advice on the basis of her Lady Macbeth. ‘[T]o this line of magnificence, Mrs. Siddons should adhere; the softer tones of nature are not suited either to her voice, or her countenance; the big passion of love is not within her capability of excellence; but the majestic, the terrible, is all her own.’39 This is the keynote struck by most critics of the day. It was generally acknowledged that Mrs Siddons was not much of a comedienne. After her retirement, the author of the biographical article in Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography summarized the consensus: Whilst saying thus much of the talents of this truly ‘wondrous woman,’ candour compels us to add, that her sphere of acting was a confined one. Tragedy was not only her forte, but the only line for which she had any aptitude. It was the Mediterranean of her mind, whilst her comedy was like a small stream, full of bubbles, and pursuing its course, without attracting or deserving any particular notice.40 Such an analysis helps to contextualize the disappointment of that first Portia in The Merchant of Venice for Garrick, and it explains the relative lack of enthusiasm about her portrayal of Shakespeare’s other comic heroines, notably Rosalind, Olivia, Isabella in Measure for Measure, Imogen and Hermione. For none of these was she greatly admired. One source of the problem was not gender but sex. The more the role depended on vivacity and sexual attraction, the less likely was Siddons to triumph in it. A precise statement of this deficiency was recorded by

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Anna Seward, poet and correspondent known as the Swan of Lichfield, after seeing Siddons perform Rosalind: ‘the playful scintillations of colloquial wit, which most strongly mark that character, suit not the dignity of the Siddonian form and countenance.’ Seward adds that the actress didn’t look the part either, since her refusal to flaunt her body meant that in the Ganymede outfit she ‘seemed neither male nor female’.41 Another difficulty was Siddons’s competitor in the role, the adorable Dorothy Jordan. Quick, sexy, irresistibly charming, Jordan was acknowledged even by Siddons’s champions, even by Boaden and Campbell, to be the superior Rosalind.42 This view of the incompatibility of Siddons’s talent and the style required was shared by one of her colleagues, the famous comedian Jack Bannister. Here Thomas Campbell reports on a conversation with the retired actor: [He] had at first, I thought, a delicate reserve in touching on the subject of her talents for comedy, and suffered me, without contradiction, to say, that surely some passages of her Rosalind must have been respectable; but, when I requested of his candour to tell me whether her comic acting had, in any character, or in the smallest degree, ever pleased him, he shook his head, and remarked, that the burthen of her inspiration was too weighty for comedy.43 Isabella in Measure for Measure was evidently more convincing because the character’s religious vocation demands little in the way of wit and proscribes overt sexual allure. It was the first Shakespeare part she undertook at Drury Lane after her victorious return there in 1782, and she waited until the second season. Isabella’s ‘inborn purity creates a dignity beyond that of power, and . . . moral energy . . . unequalled in the volumes of Shakespeare’ says Boaden, his diction indicating that the critic’s conception of the character has been shaped by the approach of his favourite performer.44 Hermione in The Winter’s Tale and Imogen in Cymbeline seem to have been generally if not excessively admired. It is pertinent that both these plays represent a special kind of comedy, known today as tragicomedy or romance; also, both characters are married women, and so the need for overt flirtation is absent. Siddons was 47 when she first played Hermione, appearing with Kemble as Leontes; while some coquetry with Polixenes might have been appropriate in the opening scene, nothing of the kind is mentioned. Reviewers instead concentrate on the dignity and gravitas that made her memorable in the statue scene. The part was also akin to the suffering nonShakespearean heroines for which she was celebrated. Moreover, Hermione was the last new role she undertook, a decade before her retirement, and by

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this time the newspapers had effectively stopped reviewing in very specific terms the phenomenon known as The Siddons. As for Imogen, aspects of that part suited her quite well, especially the indignation she visits upon Iachimo and her incredulity and emotional pain at Posthumus’s treachery. At the same time, Dorothy Jordan’s competing Imogen benefited from the disguise required from Act Three to the end of the play: costumed as the boy Fidele, she was able to show off her legs. Apparently, then, each actress brought something to the part that the other could not.45

IV In the first year of her conquest of Drury Lane, the autumn of 1782, Siddons did not play Shakespeare at all. The suffering heroines served her well – she was presenting them to the London public for the first time – and it is possible that she harboured bitter feelings about her Shakespearean flops of seven years before. But the neglect of his major female parts was fostering comment and doubt. Finally, on 3 November 1783, she appeared as Isabella in Measure for Measure, performing to what Campbell calls ‘undivided applause’ and repeating the part shortly thereafter for the pleasure of the King and Queen. A month later, gratifying the royal request that she and Kemble appear together in King John, she added Constance. The notes she left for Campbell adumbrate her thoughtful conception of the part. My idea of Constance is that of a lofty and proud spirit, associated with the most exquisite feelings of maternal tenderness, which is, in truth, the predominant feature of this interesting personage.46 Most of the several pages of commentary enlarge upon this combination of nobility and tenderness. But into this mix Siddons introduces a significant term, one to which she frequently reverts: ‘abstraction’. The noun seems to mean something like ‘concentration’, the nearest OED definition indicating a separation of inessentials. It also connotes, in the case of Constance, what Campbell describes as ‘imperiously holding the mind reined-in to the immediate perception of those calamitous circumstances which take place during the course of her sadly eventful history’.47 In other words, she seeks to differentiate among the multiple states of mind through which the beleaguered woman must pass. To illustrate this requirement, she describes an efficacious psychological aid:

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I never omitted to place myself, with Arthur in my hand, to hear the march, when, upon the reconciliation of England and France, they enter the gates of Angiers to ratify the contract of marriage between the Dauphin and the Lady Blanche; because the sickening sounds of that march would usually cause the bitter tears of rage, disappointment, betrayed confidence, baffled ambition, and, above all, the agonizing feelings of maternal affection to gush into my eyes. In short, the spirit of the whole drama took possession of my mind and frame, by my attention being incessantly riveted to the passing scenes.48 Such a holistic approach to character would have been unknown to most of her predecessors, except perhaps Garrick. Shakespeare depicts Constance as a powerless victim of international politics: her efforts to promote the monarchical claims of her son Arthur and then to protect his life are ultimately futile, and the frustrations in which the part is grounded allow the actress much space for heightened expression. KING PHILIP Patience, good lady! Comfort, gentle Constance! CONSTANCE No, I defy all counsel, all redress, But that which ends all counsel, true redress, Death, death. O, amiable, lovely death! Thou odoriferous stench! Sound rottenness! Arise forth from the conch of lasting night, Thou hate and terror to prosperity, And I will kiss thy detestable bones, And put my eyeballs in thy vaulty brows, And ring these fingers with thy household worms, And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust, And be a carrion monster like thyself. Come, grin on me, and I will think thou smil’st And buss thee as thy wife! Misery’s love, O, come to me!49 For a tragic actress specializing in victimized mothers, this offers tempting possibilities. Further in the scene, moreover, Constance first binds up and then unbinds her hair: according to Campbell, ‘The true actress is in every thing an artist; the genius before us dishevelled even her hair with

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graceful wildness.’50 Constance served Siddons well, and vice-versa, particularly because the writing afforded her the chance to exhibit the kind of maternal suffering she had employed in many of her contemporary roles. Of the revival in 1800 – Siddons continued playing the part until late in her career – one of the London newspapers commented, ‘We have scarcely ever witnessed a more admirable display, even of her great talents, than she exhibited in this arduous character; her reproach of the Duke of Austria, and her grief for the loss of her child, were expressed with great force and beauty.’51 Siddons triumphed also as Queen Katherine of Aragon in another comparative rarity, Henry VIII, Shakespeare’s last history play and a collaboration with John Fletcher (although it was not widely recognized as such until the nineteenth century). Like King John, it was more popular on the eighteenth- than on the twenty-first-century stage, partly because Siddons was so memorable in it. She undertook the role, with Kemble as Cromwell, 5 years after her first London Shakespeare, having performed in the meantime a number of his other roles, including Lady Macbeth. That revival, on 25 November 1788 was lavish and well prepared, The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser disclosing to its readers that ‘The rehearsal of Henry the Eighth on Monday took up nearly five hours. After this, no one can venture to assert that the play was brought out without much previous pain to render it worthy of the publick approbation.’52 Despite the relative brevity of the role, Siddons made Queen Katherine one of her signature portrayals. Although the histrionic range is more restricted than with Constance and certainly more subdued than in tragic non-Shakespearean parts, Katherine offers great opportunities for unbowed dignity and noble suffering. Several witnesses reported a memorable turn in her treatment of the text, the following account taken from the biographical essay in Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography and Histrionic Anecdotes (1825): . . . the line ‘Lord Cardinal, to you I speak,’ had always been spoken as we have pointed it; but Mrs. SIDDONS employed a little stage trick, with admirable effect, exclaiming, ‘Lord Cardinal,’ on which Cardinal Campeius approached her, when she, darting her electric looks at Wolsey, exclaimed, ‘to you I speak.’53 This talent for rejecting the familiar, for making the lines seem both new and self-evident, is one of the qualities that surfaces repeatedly in treatments of her distinctive gifts.

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Campbell omits his own recollection of her Katherine in favour of one apparently written by Daniel Terry, an actor-associate of her brother Stephen Kemble. This account emphasizes her characteristic gravity and command – useful attributes in playing the proud but humiliated Spanish queen – but also the clarity with which she rendered her character’s emotions. Speaking of her entrance into the Council-Chamber, he writes: This is a quiet scene, affording no opportunities for energetic exertions, or flashes of effect, but displaying those excellencies which Mrs. Siddons alone possesses, – that quiet majesty of deportment, arising from the natural majesty of her form and mind, which imposes reverence and commands subjection; and that clear and intelligent harmony of unlaboured elocution, which unravels all the intricacies of language, illuminates obscurity, and points and unfolds the precise truth of meaning to every apprehension. This unrivalled excellence was illustrated in every speech of the scene.54 This analysis is helpful because it comes from an actor, emphasizing particularly the care Siddons has taken to make her words perspicuous. She continued to act the part, choosing it for her benefit in March 1792, when the take for that night alone was £493 16s. Given that her normal fee was £30 per performance around this time, this was a substantial sum and a testimony to her commercial clout. The Shakespearean role for which she remains most famous is Lady Macbeth. She waited to introduce the part in London until the third season of her second stint at Drury Lane, although she had first played it in the provinces some 10 years before. Here is her description of how she prepared that very early effort. It was my custom to study my characters at night, when all the domestic cares and business of the day were over. On the night preceding that in which I was to appear in this part for the first time, I shut myself up, as usual, when all the family were retired, and commenced my study of Lady Macbeth. As the character is very short, I thought I should soon accomplish it. Being then only twenty years of age, I believed, as many others do believe, that little more was necessary than to get the words into my head; for the necessity of discrimination, and the development of character, at that time of my life, had scarcely entered into my imagination. But, to proceed. I went on with tolerable composure, in

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the silence of the night, (a night I never can forget), till I came to the assassination scene, when the horrors of the scene rose to a degree that made it impossible for me to get farther. I snatched up my candle, and hurried out of the room, in a paroxysm of terror. My dress was of silk, and the rustling of it, as I ascended the stairs to go to bed, seemed to my panic-struck fancy like the movement of a spectre pursuing me. From this memory she proceeds to the admission that her youthful Lady was not what it should have been and to allow that she learned from that episode the folly of procrastination. Her assumption of the part at Drury Lane in February 1785, however, was one of the great nights in the annals of theatre history. There was much hoopla leading up to the premiere. Although Macbeth had never left the repertory, this production was seen as a major revival: many patrons remembered well the pairing of David Garrick and Hannah Pritchard, and those who had not seen it were not allowed to forget that they had missed something. Siddons’s partner in this first series of performances was William ‘Gentleman’ Smith, a respected actor who apparently spoke well enough but (as his nickname intimates) never really became the character. He seems to have made little impression at all, especially next to the memory of Garrick’s blazing impersonation, or rather the characterization was unconvincing. A year later, a satiric poem entitled The New Rosciad reported on his portrayal: When stung by conscience’ wound, the fell Macbeth Feels keen remorse for good King Duncan’s death, What frog-like anguish shakes his tortur’d soul! His hair stands upright, and his eye-balls roll.55 Reviewers agreed that Siddons overwhelmed Smith, that the strength and fresh complexity of her portrayal effected a dangerous imbalance in the dynamics of the performance. Once in that same season, John Philip Kemble took the title part for his benefit, and when Smith retired 3 years later, Kemble became the proprietor of the role for the next two decades, creating with his sister a partnership that took its place with, and may even have supplanted, that of Pritchard and Garrick. The anxiety of influence weighed heavily on Siddons as she prepared the role. Since she was by this time well on her way to becoming the great tragedienne of the age, her taking on the part of the ‘fiend-like queen’

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caused much anticipation. Specifically, great excitement attended the rumour that had emerged from rehearsals, that Lady Macbeth in the sleepwalking scene would set down the candle. This was unprecedented, violating as it did the canons of tradition and convention. The eighteenthcentury theatrical public had established exactly the way it liked its major classical parts performed, that is, more or less the way they had been performed before. And thus the idea of introducing such a radical change was decidedly risky. In her memoirs, Siddons recounts at length the story of receiving Thomas Sheridan, the manager of Drury Lane, in her dressing room moments before the first performance was to begin and of his begging her not to take the extraordinary step of putting the candle down onto the table. As she tells it, however, she had no choice: she had already conceived of the moment in this way and, inclined though she might be to respect Sheridan’s experience and authority, she could not instantaneously alter the way she had rehearsed the Lady’s movements in that crucial scene. After the show, the doubter confessed his error: ‘Mr. Sheridan himself came to me, after the play, and most ingenuously congratulated me on my obstinacy.’56 The press and public were agog, as the anonymous reporter for the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser attests: By the simple circumstance of putting the candlestick on the table, she acted as consequentially as Shakespeare meant her to do; and as we all of us know is done in actual slumbers of agitation. Thus the two hands being at liberty, she can and does go through her accustomed action, and seems to be washing her hands. This improvement may also be transferred into the performances of other actresses.57 Siddons’s portrayal of Lady Macbeth sealed her status as the greatest tragedienne of the age. ‘Her acting was by far the finest heroic we have ever seen – and yet we have seen and not forgotten Mrs. Pritchard – but Mrs. Pritchard sinks into comparative futility, when the sublime and terrible graces of Mrs. Siddons are before us.’58 The setting down of the candlestick is the most celebrated moment in Siddons’s portrayal, but there is more to see if we examine reports of the performance and scrutinize the role in greater detail. Critics have got themselves into unseemly quarrels over the conflict between, on the one hand, Siddons’s description of how she thought about the character and, on the other, the press reports and spectators’ memoirs that seem

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to contradict that conception. In Siddons’s Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth, which Campbell included in his Life, the most puzzling passage comes near the beginning of her sketch: According to my notion, it is of that character which I believe is generally allowed to be most captivating to the other sex, – fair, feminine, nay, perhaps even fragile. . . . Such a combination only, respectable in energy and strength of mind, and captivating in feminine loveliness, could have composed a charm of such potency as to fascinate the mind of a hero so dauntless, a character so amiable, so honourable as Macbeth.59 Charm and ‘femininity’ underpin her characterization, but those qualities are overpowered by her monstrous ambition: citing the speech about dashing out the brains of the nursing child, she claims that ‘Even here, horrific as she is, she shews herself made by ambition, but not by nature, a perfectly savage creature.’60 It is the savagery, however, that dominates records of her performance, for all the talk of femininity. Professor Bell concluded that her Lady was marked by ‘turbulent and inhuman strength of spirit’,61 and that she was ‘not the affectionate aider of her husband’s ambition, but the fell monster who tempts him to transgress, making him the mere instrument of her wild and uncontrollable ambition’.62 James Boaden saw in her portrayal ‘the daring steadiness of her mind, which could be disturbed by no scruple, intimidated by no danger. . . . She is as thoroughly prepared in one moment, as if visions of greatness had long informed her slumbers; and she had awaked to meditate upon every means, however dreadful, that could secure her object’.63 This apparent clash of conception and effect is reconciled in a detailed, thoughtful article by Joseph Donohue about the pairing of Kemble and Siddons in the tragedy. Donohue makes two significant assertions. The first is that the brutal power of her performance becomes excessive ‘when the role of Macbeth is in the hands of an inferior actor’ – i.e., in the run of performances before Kemble replaced Smith.64 And it is true that the press reports of Smith’s Macbeth almost uniformly acknowledge her tendency to dominate him. Donohue’s second sensible notion is that ‘Siddons is not writing conventional literary criticism but, on the contrary, describing a private image helpful in creating her role . . . as every piece of evidence contributes to show, Mrs. Siddons has discovered an initial concept of the character against which she can play from the moment she steps on stage.’65 The problem of reconciling these opposing features of the character has

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troubled most actresses who have since undertaken Lady Macbeth, most notably Ellen Terry and Judi Dench. Professor Bell’s notes on inflections and pieces of business, while coloured with romantic hyperbole, offer aural and visual snapshots of the performances of both Kemble and Siddons. The reporter is often impatient with him, writing of the first scene between the two (the end of 1.5), ‘Kemble plays it not well, yet some things good.’66 His enchantment with Siddons, however, is almost invariable.67 Although he sometimes introduces italics or accent marks into the text itself – but without The illness should attend it: what thou wouldst highly, That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false, And yet wouldst wrongly win.68 – most of his commentary is confined to his footnotes to the dialogue of the scenes in which Lady Macbeth appears. One of the fullest illustrates her line about Duncan’s not leaving the palace: O, never . . . (never) Shall sun that morrow see!15 15

‘O, never’. A long pause, turned from him, her eye steadfast. Strong dwelling emphasis on ‘never,’ with deep downward inflection, ‘never shall sun that morrow see!’ Low, very sustained voice, her eye and her mind occupied steadfastly in the contemplation of her horrible purpose, pronunciation almost syllabic, not unvaried. Her self-collected solemn energy, her fixed posture, her determined eye and full deep voice of fixed resolve never should be forgot, cannot be conceived nor described.69 Bell’s notes derive apparently from later performances, and it is worth recalling that Siddons apparently shaped her characterizations over the course of a run, but they are nonetheless invaluable as a guide to how the performance must have sounded. The adulation of Boaden and Campbell and Bell is not atypical, but the brilliance of the acting did not blind all reviewers into uncritical acceptance. The reviewer for The Morning Chronicle and Advertiser, writing on 14 February 1785, tinges his valentine with some complaint: But, were there no defects? There were defects. And defects that we wonder at, as well as lament.

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In the reading of the letter, the surprise does not come sufficiently soon, nor stay sufficiently long. ‘Give him tending.’ ‘He brings great news.’ Evidently, not both lines to the servant; the first, only to him. The great news, is to herself; a visiting of nature on her fell purpose. The taunt following from ‘Was the hope drunk?’ was a little underdone; the hypothetical dashing of the infants brains out, was overdone. Bating these few minute defects, which, like the few maculae on the surface of the sun, scarcely do not at all dim its radiance, and are not perhaps discoverable without much magnifying power – bating these defects, the Lady Macbeth was every thing, of which the art was capable!70 Such reservations were unusual, and the effectiveness of performance generally has led to a virtually automatic identification between Siddons and Lady Macbeth. To cite the famous phrase of Charles Lamb, ‘We speak of Lady Macbeth, while in reality we are thinking of Mrs. S.’71 Following Lady Macbeth, she made a considerable success in the role of Volumnia in Coriolanus, Kemble’s adaptation of two earlier versions, by James Thomson and Thomas Sheridan. Whereas Bell’s notes on her Lady Macbeth and Queen Katherine tend to emphasize the voice, apparently in this role she made herself unforgettable by means of various physical tactics. The testimony of the actor Charles Mayne Young provides a clear picture of these efforts. I remember her coming down the stage in the triumphal entry of her son, Coriolanus, when her dumb-shew drew plaudits that shook the building. She came alone, marching and beating time to the music; rolling (if that be not too strong a term to describe her motion) from side to side, swelling with the triumph of her son. Such was the intoxication of joy which flashed from her eye, and lit up her whole face, that the effect was irresistible. She seemed to me to reap all the glory of that procession to herself. I could not take my eye from her. Coriolanus, banner, and pageant, all went for nothing to me, after she had walked to her place.72 Apparently the partnership with Kemble as mother and son was one of their most effective pairings. It should also be emphasized that Siddons was hardly the aged Gorgon we sometimes imagine Volumnia to be: in

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fact she was 34 years old, that same season playing Juliet to her brother’s Romeo.

V Debate over whether or not Siddons deserves her exalted reputation, whether she was ‘better’ than Fanny Kemble or Ellen Terry or Peggy Ashcroft, is idle. The fact is that she has it, justly or not. It is worthwhile, however, to analyse her contribution to the profession of Shakespearean acting and to assess the value and meaning of those achievements. The first thing to be said is that Siddons was the first great Shakespearean actress, the first woman to be identified – again, rightly or wrongly – with Shakespearean parts. Her predecessors, from Mrs Betterton and Mrs Cibber to Hannah Pritchard and Mrs Crawford, had performed some of Shakespeare’s major roles to great acclaim, and Mrs Pritchard, as I have indicated, was celebrated for her portrayal of Lady Macbeth, in partnership with Garrick. But Siddons on her own stamped the role with her distinctive interpretation, before she had acquired in Kemble an adequate partner. And once she established that supremacy, her title to foremost Shakespearean tragedienne was uncontested. Not only should we call her the first great Shakespearean actress, but we should also recognize the implications of that judgement. She managed to impress audiences in ways that, until this point, only men had been able to do. Burbage, Betterton, Macklin, Garrick – these men occupied a plane of their own, a histrionic pre-eminence separating them from their ordinarily talented male – and from all their female – colleagues. Siddons was the first woman permitted to join their fraternity. That she did so is attributable largely to her having transcended the confines of gender. Her effect upon audiences, in other words, especially in her great tragic parts, was as powerful as that which only a few male predecessors had been able to create. To use the diction of the time, her acting achieved a level that her contemporaries described as ‘sublime’. According to Edmund Burke, [T]he passion caused by the great and sublime in nature . . . is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other.73 This description is implicated with notions of gender. Contemporary thought associated the Sublime with masculinity, strength, infinity. The

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Beautiful, on the other hand, implied femininity, elegance, restraint. Numerous writers employ such a vocabulary to describe the effect of Siddons’s work in tragedy: William Godwin, for example, father of Mary Shelley, found ‘her conceptions . . . of her characters . . . more sublime than anything even in Garrick’s action’,74 and Fanny Burney met her at the Royal Lodge in Windsor and ‘found her the heroine of Tragedy – sublime, elevated and solemn’.75 Siddons possessed the ability to generate the astonishment Burke describes, although the Shakespeare canon afforded her relatively few roles requiring such power. Attention to this aspect of her talent helps to explain why Lady Macbeth, Constance, and, in another key, Queen Katherine were her greatest Shakespearean successes. One of Siddons’s lasting contributions to the performance of Shakespeare’s plays was the seriousness with which she took her contribution to the whole enterprise. She imagined her character as existing in a network of other persons, actions and words, and this sort of reticulation was novel. Without providing here a lengthy survey of eighteenth-century acting – and indeed it would be necessary to speak not of an acting style in the period but of changing acting styles – it is safe to suggest that most players were concerned mainly with their own performances and not with the integration of all roles and participants into a harmonious artistic whole. The ideal of an ensemble, of several performers creating a stylistically coherent presentation of a theatrical text, takes hold much later in the history of the theatre. (Exactly when it comes to prominence is difficult to determine, but certainly there was little sense of collaboration in the late eighteenth century.) Often the star actor made no effort to interact with fellow players unless it was to the star’s advantage, or the advantage of the star’s character; many famous actors merely lounged about the stage until the time came for their big moments; often players would greet latecomers from the platform or nod to friends in the house, disdaining the idea of theatrical illusion. Siddons in thus taking the entire text seriously repudiated the cavalier attitude of her most famous predecessor. Hannah Pritchard, it was said, declined to read scenes in which she did not appear and was ignorant of what happened at the end of Macbeth. Siddons’s consciousness of this difference appears in the attention she devotes to the story in her memoir, and to the source of the tale, a visit with Dr Johnson: When I beggd to know his opinion of Mrs. Pritchard’s acting, whom I had not seen, he said, ‘Madam, she was a vulgar idiot. She never read any part of the Play, except her own part, . . . . ’ Is it possible, thought I, that Mrs. Pritchard, the greatest of all the Lady Macbeths should

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never have read the Play? I concluded that he must have been misinformed, but I was afterwards told by a gentleman, an acquaintance of Mrs. P., that he had sup[p]ed with her one night after acting that Part and that he then heard her say she never had read that Play. I cannot believe it.76 Whether she believed it, and whether or not it is exaggerated, the fact that such astonishing solipsism can be mentioned at all is worth mentioning. Siddons’s unparalleled sense of professional responsibility emerges from the reports of all her biographers. To begin with, she immersed herself in her characters, never permitting the temptations of her celebrity or the personal atmosphere of the theatre to distract her. Such discipline is verified in Boaden’s description of her performance in the short scene in Macbeth when Lady Macbeth welcomes Duncan to Inverness Castle: ‘The honoured hostess received his Majesty with all the exterior of profound obligation. She was too pure an actress to allow a glance of triumph to stray towards the spectators.’77 Boaden’s delight in her self-control clearly implies what the norm seems to have been. Second, Siddons thought about each of her roles in relation to the whole text, as part of a narrative and theatrical network. In King John her listening backstage to the sickening march that forecasts her son’s demise bespeaks her seriousness of purpose. It is further notable that in that same play she took a dressing room near the stage and left the door ajar: Constance is on stage very little, and by this stratagem Siddons afforded herself the chance to monitor the performances of the other characters. Such commitment to the fiction was forward-looking in the 1780s. Although all such judgements are relative, it appears that she did not over-act, exercising noticeable restraint even in roles where it might not have been expected. Notwithstanding the emphasis on Siddons’s talent for powerful expression, the critics are also agreed that she did not indulge in the unearned or meretricious tactics that other performers seem to have employed. According to Michael Booth, ‘Siddons was rarely included in the animadversions against English tragic actors by domestic and foreign critics, who objected not only to loudness but also to overdeclamatory speech or rant, mechanical movements, a stress upon and lengthening of cries and exclamations, sudden tricksy starts, and, in the women, a forced vibrato and an artificial heaving of the breasts.’78 And contemporary corroboration of this self-discipline is found in a letter from the actor Charles Mayne Young to Thomas Campbell, who included it in the later version of his biography: Young recalled that Siddons ‘never

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sought by unworthy means to entrap her audience. She disdained to apply any of the petty resources of trickish minds, in order to startle or surprise her hearers’.79 Siddons’s devotion to the whole theatrical enterprise was a concomitant of her larger work ethic. She was tireless in meeting the multiple demands of marriage, motherhood, professional actor and public celebrity. Before her second Drury Lane contract, her schedule in the provinces was punishing as she performed a vast range of parts, learned and rehearsed new roles (usually late in the evening and into the early morning, after the show), travelled between towns, cared for her children, and received the attentions of the social elite encamped at Bath. In the three seasons between 1779 and 1782, working mainly in Bath and Bristol, she performed some one hundred roles while at the same time bearing three children, one of whom died in infancy. Once settled in London she continued to exhibit this formidable industry, acting constantly in a wide array of parts, making herself an element in (if not a centrepiece of) London society, undertaking summer tours to Edinburgh and Dublin, and still varying her repertory as age and popular taste dictated. Whether this tremendous energy was financially or artistically motivated makes little difference. Her performance of her great Shakespearean heroines throughout the kingdom kept potentially marginal roles and plays before the public, and the tours also allowed her some liberty not appropriate to London: for example, in 1802 (at the age of 47!) she chose Dublin in which to return to the title role in Hamlet. Siddons also brought to the Shakespearean text an exceptional intelligence and independence of approach. In one of his scouting letters to Garrick, Reverend Bate praises her exceptional intellect: ‘She is the most extraordinary quick study I ever heard of: – this cannot be amiss, for if I recollect right we have a sufficient number of the leaden-headed ones at D. Lane already?’80 Not only could she learn a role rapidly, as her description of preparing her fi rst Lady Macbeth reveals, but she was known for her scrupulous thinking about how to communicate the words of the part. She regularly applied that intelligence to the new roles she undertook and those she elected to re-study. This would seem to be an obvious way of proceeding for almost any actor, particularly in Shakespeare, but at the risk of rehearsing the familiar I would reiterate the eighteenth century’s attachment to tradition and convention. All the great popular dramatic texts, especially those of Shakespeare, consisted of moments known as ‘points’: speeches, lines, episodes, reactions, even pauses and gestures to which the audience could look forward and on

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which an actor’s work might be compared with that of others, particularly favourite performers of the past. Every new assumption of a part, every revival of a familiar play, entailed a contest between tradition and innovation. An actor was expected to observe the conventions associated with a role but also – delicately, acceptably – to stretch the possibilities. As Alan S. Downer puts it, ‘Throughout the eighteenth century, this strange paradox of the actor persists. The art of acting is traditional, conventional, hereditary, yet the art of the individual actor is a constant revolt against tradition, convention, heredity.’81 If the performer took a liberty that pleased the house, the moment would be rewarded with applause; if not, the response was hissing. Garrick had succeeded in elasticizing his roles, altering the conventions that his predecessors had observed, especially the dignified James Quin, and Siddons performed such service for female parts. The putting down of the candle in Macbeth is a good example of a radical innovation that worked. Siddons throughout her career displayed impatience with received ways of reading, an attitude she shared with her brother John. The exchange in Henry VIII between Queen Katherine and the two Cardinals illustrates her fresh approach to a familiar line, and reviewers frequently mention her ingenuity in speaking well-known bits. Playing Portia to Kemble’s Bassanio at Drury Lane in 1786, for example, she impressed careful listeners by altering her approach to the character’s most famous point, ‘The quality of mercy’ speech. As the critic for the Morning Chronicle reported, the speech was delivered ‘as it certainly should be spoken – but as in truth we never heard it spoken – as a reply to “On what compulsion must I?” From every other Portia it has always appeared as a recitation, prepared for the occasion’. 82 Such an imaginative address to the text is one of the repeated themes in Professor Bell’s annotated record of her Lady Macbeth and Queen Katherine. A careful reading of Bell’s notes suggests that her stresses, pauses, pitches and variations in volume sound manifestly right to the modern ear – by this I mean the lines as Bell represents them sound as we would expect them to sound when we go to the theatre. And the fact that Bell records a particular stress or variation must in certain cases imply that it is new, that it struck him because it had not been done that way before. In other words, I would suggest that we are hearing the beginning of what we would recognize as ‘modern acting’. Siddons also took seriously the words she spoke, and her fidelity to the text was much remarked upon. After the revival of Coriolanus at Drury Lane for her and Kemble in 1789, The Morning Chronicle and Advertiser printed a

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letter from someone styling himself ‘Quintilian’ who, having first taxed Kemble for an alleged mispronunciation, objects to what he considers an uncharacteristic textual error by Siddons. The details of the controversy are muddled, but what is significant is the writer’s tribute to Siddons’s concern for accuracy: ‘She has always appeared to me so faithful to her text [that] I ask for information.’83 We must remember that such fidelity existed within the confines of Georgian theatrical convention: many of the Shakespeare plays in which she acted had been modified by the likes of Cibber and Tate. This Coriolanus, as I have indicated, was Kemble’s own combination of the Shakespearean original with at least two earlier adaptations. Sheridan’s (1755) was actually called Coriolanus, or the Roman Matron, and perhaps this elevation of the female role contributed to the extraordinary success Kemble and Siddons made of it. One more observation from the Reverend Bate: in his initial report to Garrick on the 20-year-old Sarah Siddons’s talent, he emphasizes her skill with ‘transitions’. While this may seem to us a self-evident criterion in the appreciation of great acting, the word is loaded with special significance in the last quarter of the eighteenth century because it hints at what would become a new kind of psychological verisimilitude on the stage. The reviewer of The Merchant of Venice is applauding much the same skill when he praises Siddons for not delivering ‘The quality of mercy’ as if it were a ‘recitation’. Despite the conventionality of acting in the period, the theorists and critics repeatedly appeal to ‘nature’ as the basis for judging theatrical representation; it seems clear that almost no sense of the term ‘natural’ as it is now understood would be applicable to Georgian acting. We might do better to replace that adjective with an alternative – perhaps ‘psychologically plausible’. That phase of theatrical history in which the conventions of neo-classical performance began to yield to what is now called ‘Romantic acting’ was exactly the period in which Siddons came to prominence and dominated the London stage. No single contemporary document articulates her contribution to this shift, but reading over the range of reviews and commentaries does suggest a metamorphosis in process. Our wider perspective allows us to trace the gradual loosening of style that was invisible to those observing it from within, as it happened. Kemble’s celebrated dignity – the probably malicious suggestion that he had great dignity and nothing else – may have retarded this transition from Garrick to Kean, but on the female side Siddons appears to have hastened it. Recognition of these competing energies helps to elucidate our sense of Siddons’s cultural importance. Some of the indicators I have mentioned

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remind us of how thoroughly enmeshed in London culture she was at the end of the eighteenth century – the great portraits, the connection to the king and queen, the friendship with major literary and artistic figures, the adulation recorded by the likes of Hazlitt and Godwin. But Siddons may also be seen as reflecting not just a theatrical transition but as participating in the greater cultural shift from Neo-classicism to Romanticism. Critics have long debated, and continue to debate, exactly when the former mode of thought yielded to the latter. Earlier in the twentieth century critics used to speak of Pre-Romanticism, finding in the 1770s and 1780s evidence of the now-familiar emphasis on nature and authenticity that Wordsworth and others would celebrate. For a time, this interpretation based on continuity was succeeded by belief in a more radical break, with critics discounting early signs of change and finding instead a paradigm shift that ushered in the Romantic age. More recently, a modified version of the older, ‘transitional’ viewpoint seems to have emerged. Whichever model one prefers, in her particular arena, the stage, Siddons represents elements of both cultural strains. The paintings and other visual representations depict her as subscribing to the two different styles: we see in the Gainsborough portrait (1785), for example, the distinctive Georgian dress and style generally, whereas the Harlow portrait of Lady Macbeth shows her in an Empire gown with a more nearly ‘natural’ coiffure. Her acting style was formal, conventional and neo-classical, except that her memoir and the early biographers suggest that she was also personal and individualistic. She was powerful and yet female, conventional and yet distinctive. She reconciled contradictions. And she unites the three other figures in this volume. At the beginning of her career she acted with David Garrick; throughout she performed with John Philip Kemble; at the end she appeared with the very young Edmund Kean.

VI Siddons lived for the stage, and thus she found that she had great difficulty in leaving it. She announced her retirement for the end of the 1811– 1812 season, in her 57th year, in the role of Lady Macbeth; everyone knew that she had achieved, in Paul Prescott’s phrase, ‘a possessive synonymity with the part’.84 The response of the house was so powerful that after the sleepwalking scene the performance was suspended. This was the official farewell, but informally Siddons continued to act for the next five years,

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appearing occasionally in benefit performances, in which she repeated a few of her most celebrated roles, and giving readings both private and public. These late stage appearances may have been ill-advised, or so thought the anonymous author of the entry in Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography: The last time she appeared, (as Lady Macbeth, we think, in 1817), the loss of teeth rendered her articulation very indistinct, and she occasionally whistled, which, as the character is not a musical one, was by no means effective.85 Such venomous commentary was mostly exceptional, although it is worth noting that Hazlitt’s extravagant praise (quoted earlier) occurs in an essay urging her to face the fact of mortality and quit the public stage. She tried sculpting, and clearly she enjoyed the company and attention of friends, but according to her niece, the actress Fanny Kemble, the last years of her aunt’s life consisted of ‘vapid vacuity’. Despite her personal dissatisfactions, Siddons remained a kind of national monument until her death in June of 1831, as the spectacular funeral accorded her confirmed.86 And she has sustained that status over the past two centuries.

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Chapter 8

Edmund Kean Peter Thomson

The new actor had come from nowhere, bearing nothing. That, at least, was the supposition of most of the people who attended the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane on 26 January 1814, without much in the way of expectation, to witness yet another revival of The Merchant of Venice. They were wrong, of course, but that wrongness provided the initial impetus for the Kean legend. Here was the untutored genius, mysteriously inspired, an actor, not by nurture, but by nature. The excitement generated in London by Kean’s performance of Shylock owed something to a preceding discontent about the state of the London theatre in general and of Drury Lane in particular. Hungry for a new sensation, the faithful were delighted to find one; and while there is no doubt that Kean’s Shylock was startling in some of its details, it is equally certain that his general approach met the approved standards laid down by connoisseurs of great acting. Had his innovations been as revolutionary as some of his contemporaries and many later theatre historians have claimed, he would have been rejected by a stubbornly conservative public. The model remained David Garrick, in recognition of whose genius Robert Lloyd had expressed in rhyming couplets what was already a commonplace in prose: To this one standard make your just appeal, Here lies the golden secret; learn to FEEL. Or fool, or monarch, happy, or distrest, No actor pleases that is not possess’d.1 Lloyd’s poem was written in 1760, but its insistence that ‘Nature’s true knowledge is [the] only art’ of the actor was as much a truism in 1814 as it had been in the first year of old (mad) George III’s reign. And as an exemplar of the actor ‘possessed’, Kean has understandably displaced Garrick. The displacement occurred with astonishing rapidity. Despite resistance

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from some quarters, it was almost complete by the summer of 1814. The underlying purpose of this chapter is to explore how and why this came about. It is not possible wholly to detach the ‘real’ Edmund Kean from his legend, not least because biographical information is scanty and often unreliable, and the legend so pervasive.2 Legend and truth were already intersecting during his lifetime: the confusion is evident in Francis Phippen’s hastily produced and misleadingly titled Authentic Memoirs of Edmund Kean, rushed through the press in 1814 to capitalize on his triumphant first season at Drury Lane. It is not unlikely that this assemblage of tales of mischief and derring-do had Kean’s blessing. Phippen, after all, was a cut above the green-room gossips who compiled scandalous ‘biographies’ of stage favourites to satisfy prurient readers in Regency England. His later investigation of the craft of dowsing would carry him into the inquisitive pages of Notes and Queries. If we knew more of the secret history behind the publication of the Authentic Memoirs, the knowledge would probably confirm Kean’s shared culpability in the myth-making that distorted his achievement while he was alive and superseded it after his death. The cockily confident actor treading the path to certain triumph whom Phippen portrays is a figure from fiction. Two things are certain: first, that Kean’s seminal influence on the reception of Shakespeare’s plays in nineteenth-century England dates from his breakthrough performances at Drury Lane in 1814 and, secondly, that the nature of those performances was conditional on the dreary history of his earlier struggles. Edmund Kean was born unwelcome in 1787, the illegitimate son of Ann Carey, a jobbing actress who supplemented her income by prostitution. Her grandfather, Henry Carey, had been prominent in the 1730s as the authorcomposer of such musical burlesques as Chrononhotonthologos (1734) and The Dragon of Wantley (1737), but his mental instability culminated in his hanging himself in 1743. Like his great-grandson, he would probably have been classified, in a later generation, as a manic depressive. There is uncertainty about which of three brothers Kean fathered Edmund: the oldest, Aaron, was an alcoholic, the second, Moses, a moderately successful mimic and entertainer, the third (and likeliest, since his name, too, was Edmund) was articled to a surveyor at the time of Kean’s birth, but committed suicide in 1793. Ann Carey seems to have left her son’s upbringing to other women, most consistently to Moses Kean’s mistress, Charlotte Tidswell. As a minor, but long-serving member of the Drury Lane company, ‘Aunt Tid’ brought Kean into early acquaintance with the theatre. It is probable that she fostered his evident talent by promoting his childhood performances

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in taverns or middle-class drawing rooms. The story is that she set him to rehearse face-to-face with a portrait to heighten his awareness of dramatic address. She was well aware that her charge was attractive – small, darkeyed and athletic – and unafraid of being the centre of attention. If she was being put to the expense of bringing up another woman’s child, she would have thought it reasonable to look for some financial return, and, at the time, young Kean probably relished being put on display as ‘Master Carey’, the infant prodigy. The drawbacks of that kind of exposure tend to manifest themselves in adolescence or adulthood. To some extent, Kean’s uncommonly retentive memory compensated for his patchwork education, though his attempts to disguise his lack of learning during his years of fame are tinged with pathos. The straightforward fact was that he needed to earn his keep, and that meant seeking paid employment as a performer. There is some evidence that, presumably through Aunt Tid, he made occasional appearances as one of a chorus of children (once, perhaps, as Cupid, and just possibly as Prince Arthur to John Philip Kemble’s King John) at Drury Lane. For a time, he was certainly one of John Richardson’s boys on the portable booth-stage that Richardson’s troupe carted from fair to fair. His athleticism was his main asset, whether as tumbler or acrobat, but Richardson featured cut-down versions of plays alongside more raucous forms of entertainment. Kean would later credit him with giving him his first outing in a major role, that of Young Norval in John Home’s Douglas. He was probably in his early teens.

Provincial Playing Working for Richardson did nothing to prepare Kean for Shakespeare, but it provided him with basic training for the acrobatic (generally silent) role of Harlequin in the pantomimes of the period. His regular provincial employment as Harlequin may have mortified him as much as he later claimed, but it was probably what won him his first engagements, in Sheerness in 1804 and Belfast in 1805, and kept him mostly in work despite a gathering reputation as a difficult company member. One of the more persistent legends is that Kean, while rehearsing a tumbling sequence (sometimes an equestrian routine) with Richardson, broke a leg (sometimes both legs) so badly that he carried an impediment for the rest of his life. This is the kind of ‘fact’ that intrigues myth-makers, but it is difficult to reconcile it with a decade of provincial popularity as Harlequin. Kean’s gracefulness, his dancer’s lightness of foot, was singled out by most of the

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reviewers of his Drury Lane appearances in the Shakespearean roles that made him famous. It was an essential part of his appeal, acquired in youth by diligent exercise and sustained through his often overlooked years of provincial touring. For the stock companies which conducted their theatrical business in regional circuits, versatility was a precious asset in an actor. To local newspapers, like the Exeter Flying Post in 1811, it mattered that Kean was ‘equally at home in tragedy, comedy and pantomime. He dances well, shows great activity and bids fair to be a great favourite with the public’.3 Once he was famous, Kean confined his appearances to major roles, but both the legend and the factual traces speak to his earlier delight in exhibiting his versatility to provincial spectators. J. F. Molloy, a biographer who made no effort at original research, lists Kean’s activity during a single night’s benefit performance in Waterford: the title role in Hannah More’s Percy, interludes of tight-rope dancing and sparring with ‘a professional pugilist’, singing the lead in a musical sketch and concluding with ‘Chimpanzee the monkey in the melodramatic pantomime of La Perouse’.4 The problem was that, at about 5’ 6” (1.67 metres), he was too short to play the model hero. It was, allegedly, Kean himself who spread the story that Sarah Siddons, on one of her provincial tours, told him, ‘You have played very well, sir, very well. It’s a pity, but there’s too little of you to do any thing.’5 If the story is true, he waited until he was famous before spreading it. There is no reason to doubt the ferocity of Kean’s ambition during his years of struggle. Often forced into secondary roles, he strove to make them remarakable – and there is no quicker way to make enemies of senior actors. If Mrs Siddons did pay him the barbed compliment he reported, it was most likely because she had found his bid for attention irritating: the little man didn’t know his place. Kean’s perception of acting as a fight for public favour had probably become habitual during his years in the provinces, linking his profession to his hobbies of fencing and boxing. Other actors were his adversaries, and he tilted at them. Nor was this adversarial style confined to the stage. It conditioned his whole demeanour, leading to quarrels with theatre managers, and even, as at Sheerness in 1807, with local grandees. The emergent egalitarianism that was, in part, the English reaction to the French Revolution had, in Kean, its supreme theatrical representative. That is not to say that he developed a coherent political philosophy, only that he instinctively sided with the oppressed. He felt himself to be one of them, an underdog straining against the power of privilege, and his first response to authority, sometimes even to the authority of the popular voice, was defiance. It was their adversarial quality that gave to Kean’s performances a peculiar edginess, both before and after his rise to celebrity. But there is

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a contradictory impulse that needs to be borne in mind. Despite his occasional outbursts against the aristocratic occupants of Drury Lane’s boxes, Kean had an irrational yearning to be one of them. Why else would he have put it about that his true father was Charles Howard, 11th Duke of Norfolk (with whom Aunt Tid may have had a brief liaison), and named his two sons Howard and Charles as a kind of baptismal affirmation? And why else would he have subjected Charles to the mockery of fellow pupils by sending him to school at Eton? Kean was well enough aware of the contradiction to despise it in himself, and fully conscious that the claiming of aristocratic parentage was mere bluster. What deserves attention, though, is the likely effect of these conflicting impulses on his reading of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. There are issues of belonging in the three parts in which he certainly excelled – Shylock, Richard III and Othello – as well as in Hamlet, in which some critics thought him supreme. Kean’s marriage to Mary Chambers was, in his intention, a step towards gentility. They had met in 1807 or early 1808 when working for William Beverley’s company on the Gloucester circuit. Of Irish extraction, Mary was 8 years his senior and sufficiently stagestruck to be diverted from her employment as a governess. What attracted Kean was probably her possession of two things he lacked, education and social ease. The probability is that she fell under Kean’s spell while playing Columbine to his Harlequin in Harlequin Mother Goose. They were married hastily in July 1808. If Kean was hoping for a substantial dowry, he was disappointed. The marriage was probably doomed anyway, but the theme was poverty. Looking for theatrical employment as a pair was not easy – there is no evidence that Mary had much more than looks on her side – and the birth of two sons (in 1809 and 1811) thrust new responsibilities onto Kean, whose characteristic response to difficulty was to run away from it. A pattern of prolonged drinking bouts, casual liaisons and absences from home was established early. It was a pattern he would try – and fail – to change for the rest of his life. It came near to reducing him to begging by the end of 1811, before the theatrical engagement that, largely by coincidence, would change his fortune. Once Kean’s place at the head of his profession was established, his years of hardship took their place in the legend. They are ringingly incorporated into Pierce Egan’s dedication to his now-eminent friend of his picaresque novel The Life of an Actor (1825): With the vicissitudes of the stage, and the LIFE OF AN ACTOR, no person, sir, connected with the drama possesses such a competent knowledge, or who can have acquired more experience upon the

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subject – in fact, who can be said to be so completely up in the part throughout the various changes of the Dunstable Hero to the kingly Richard, as yourself – the booth, the assembly room, the barn, the circus, and provincial playhouse, have all been overtopped by the exertion of your genius and splendid talents. You have not only, sir, been the architect of your own fortune, but in the day of trial proved yourself a hero among heroes. By the time Egan, the first great journalist of bare-fist boxing, wrote this fulsome dedication, Kean was wealthy enough to join the ‘flash’ in betting heavily on prize fights. We can only speculate on the drink-loosened conversations that lay behind it, but Kean had evidently regaled Egan with narratives that figure, however ornamented, in The Life of an Actor. The career of the book’s hero, Peregrine Proteus, shadows Kean’s in reaching its climax with ‘The Strolling Player metamorphosed into the King’s servant’ at one of London’s ‘royal’ theatres, and by a route that closely resembled Kean’s. Richard Hughes, manager of the Exeter circuit, had employed Kean before, and thought well enough of him to offer leading roles: Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Richard III – and Harlequin. The pay was never more than adequate, and much of it was squandered in the nearby Turk’s Head tavern, but Kean persevered (and Hughes compromised) for 2 years. There are different accounts of the circumstances that brought Kean back to London and to fame. Dr Joseph Drury, retired headmaster of Harrow and friendly with members of the Drury Lane committee, appears in most of them. He saw Kean performing in the Teignmouth playhouse and recommended him. The Drury Lane committee, at a point of financial crisis, sent its acting manager, Samuel Arnold, to Dorchester, where he saw Kean in John Philip Kemble’s part of Octavian in George Colman the Younger’s limping tragicomedy The Mountaineers. The introverted but dignified Octavian was not a role suited to Kean, and Arnold had his reservations. The position was further complicated by the fact that Kean had already accepted an offer from the manager of the Olympic, one of London’s growing number of illegitimate theatres. He may have concealed this from Arnold, whose offer of employment at Drury Lane he duplicitously accepted. There were exonerating circumstances: the Keans’ elder son was desperately ill and would, indeed, be dead within a week. Poverty had hampered his recovery from measles, and Drury Lane paid more than the Olympic. But the inevitable outcome was that, when Kean arrived in London early in December 1813, there was a dispute about his employment, during which he remained

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unpaid for six weeks. The legend is that he hovered about Drury Lane, destitute and ignored, until a compromise was reached. This involved a downward adjustment of Kean’s promised salary in order to pay compensation to the manager of the Olympic, Robert William Elliston. Elliston would figure significantly in Kean’s subsequent career. The point to be stressed here is that Kean’s debut as a leading actor at Drury Lane was fraught with controversy in advance. He felt embattled and he chose to fight. The years of struggle, a failing marriage and a 2-months-dead son might have weighed him down. Instead, they became part of his weaponry. Kean was 26 years old and had nurtured, against the odds, a conviction of his own special gifts for at least ten of them. An inchoate they – the theatrical establishment, the privileged classes, the ranks of polite society – had held him down. Now, if ever, it was pay-back time.

26 January 1814: Shylock The timing of Kean’s debut as Shylock was auspicious. Two days earlier, Napoleon had left Paris to join his depleted army in a desperate attempt to salvage his empire. The tide had turned, and there was a mood of triumphalism in London, not shared by at least one member of the Drury Lane Committee that had given formal approval to Kean’s engagement. ‘Buonaparte has lost all his allies but me & the King of Wirtemberg,’ Lord Byron had written to Lady Melbourne on 4 November 1813. Byron took his work for Drury Lane more seriously than anyone can have expected, but he was away from London on 26 January. Returning in February, he confided to his journal (18 February) his current thoughts: Napoleon! – this week will decide his fate. All seems against him; but I believe and hope he will win – at least, beat back the Invaders. What right have we to prescribe sovereigns to France? Oh for a Republic! ‘Brutus, thou sleepest.’ The next night’s journal entry includes Byron’s first recorded response to Kean, though it was the second time he had seen the new actor’s Richard III: Just returned from seeing Kean in Richard. By Jove, he is a soul! Life – nature – truth – without exaggeration or diminution. Kemble’s Hamlet is perfect; – but Hamlet is not Nature. Richard is a man; and Kean is Richard.

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And on 20 February, Kean was still on Byron’s mind. The journal entry here is sadly prescient: An invitation to dine at Holland-house to meet Kean. He is worth meeting; and I hope by getting into good society, he will be prevented from falling like Cooke.6 He is greater now on the stage, and off he should never be less. There is a stupid and under-rating criticism upon him in one of the newspapers. I thought that, last night, though great, he rather under-acted more than the first time. This may be the effect of these cavils; but I hope he has more sense than to mind them. He cannot expect to maintain his present eminence, or to advance still higher, without the envy of his green-room fellows, and the nibbling of their admirers. But, if he don’t beat them all, why, then – merit hath no purchase in ‘these coster-monger days’. No one was better placed than Byron, whose newly published ‘Turkish tale’ The Corsair was simultaneously selling like hot cakes and being savaged by the Tory press, to know the fickleness of the public voice, and there is evidence of real insight into the theatrical world in this spontaneous reflection. Kean could only have been the winner if the incipient friendship between poet and actor had flourished. In the event, he had too few mental resources to cope with the sudden change in his life-style. Having arrived unrecognized in a London buzzing with rumours of war, he found himself, 2 months later, dining with the country’s most famous poet – and a Lord at that – at the home of the most politically active of the Whig grandees.7 Whether he knew it or not, Kean was being sized up as a potential vote-catching recruit to the Whig party in opposition. It is possible that Kean was alert to the political subtext. He must, certainly, have been aware of the Whiggish leanings of the Drury Lane Committee and the contrastingly Tory affiliations of Covent Garden, now operating in open rivalry with Drury Lane. When Kean came to London, Covent Garden was under the active management of the age’s leading tragedian, John Philip Kemble. Like Kean, Kemble had served his apprenticeship in the provinces, but he had been established in London since 1783 – before Kean was born. And the redoubtable Sarah Siddons was his sister. They both belonged to the Prince Regent’s social circle. To the striving Kean, it must have seemed that the whole Kemble family had been silver-spooned to success. In reaction, he came to Shakespearean tragedy like an invader, not an adherent. He had seen Kemble act, and knew where he could not rival him. Kemble was comparatively tall and shapely,

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and quite handsome enough to suit the image of a hero. The athleticism of his youthful performances was behind him by 1814 – he was, after all, well into his 50s – and he had learned to replace it with a stateliness that contemporaries, some admiringly, others vituperatively, called statuesque. But not even his detractors questioned his gentility, a quality highly valued in the fashionable circles of Regency London. In the new year of 1814, Kemble had reason to be serenely confident of Covent Garden’s supremacy over the frenetically back-tracking Drury Lane. Even if he had heard rumours of it, he was certainly not fearing the advent of Kean at the rival playhouse. But there is an important story here, one that not only fuelled responses to Kean’s Shylock on 26 January 1814 but also shaped the furious debates about relative merit that would occupy theatregoers for the next 20 years. Late in 1809, Kemble had been the focus of popular hostility over the increase in admission charges to the rebuilt Covent Garden. Through the course of the Old Price Riots, he had been identified with the ‘old corruption’ of the ruling classes. His whole demeanour during the long disruption of performances – better understood as an attempt to retain some kind of dignity under immense pressure – was read as disdain for the citizenry. And in the end, on behalf of the theatre management, he was forced to compromise. The loss of face had hit Kemble hard, and as soon as circumstances allowed he had taken a 2-year leave of absence from the London stage. His comeback performance, in his favoured role of Coriolanus, had taken place on 15 January 1814. The decision was not without risk: the Coriolanus who scorns the Roman plebs carried echoes of the ‘Black Jack’ who had attempted to ignore the Old Price rioters. But the consensus was that Kemble was back in command. What was Drury Lane going to do about it? Traditionally, challengers for theatrical supremacy would step forward in a role that was ‘possessed’ by the actor they wished to challenge, but Kean was shrewd enough to know that he was ill-equipped to dispossess Kemble of Coriolanus. He chose to put himself forward in the role of an underdog, in stark contrast to Kemble’s Shakespearean overlord. The decision was a wise one. Kean was always at his most effective in playing strong characters whose fate it is to be ultimately outmanoeuvred by people who can better manipulate the rules of the establishment. Shylock, Richard III, Othello, Sir Giles Overreach (in Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts 8), even King Lear are all victims of what we might now call insider dealing. There are signs of the paranoia that contaminated Kean’s life in his ready identification with outstriven strivers.

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Kean’s Shylock startled people, though it is not always clear why. Douglas Jerrold said that it was ‘like a chapter of Genesis’,9 which is clever but imprecise. William Hazlitt, the best writer and the most searching of the firstnight reviewers, was immediately confident that ‘no actor has come out for many years at all equal to him.’10 Hazlitt was 9 years older than Kean, and still unproven. A. C. Grayling has made the compelling point that ‘the rapid ascent of Hazlitt as a critic and Kean as an actor was something of a double act.’11 It is a coincidence that underpins Kean’s commonly recognized status as the exemplary Romantic actor. Hazlitt’s stance on Shakespeare was as fresh as his stance towards acting. For him, playwright and actor should cast the rules aside and operate in the service of truth, not in order to reproduce life as it is lived but to penetrate its deceptive surface. For that reason, his admiration of Kean’s Shylock was balanced by doubt: ‘There was a lightness and vigour in his tread, a buoyancy and elasticity of spirit, a fire and animation, which would accord better with almost any other character than with the morose, sullen, inward, inveterate, inflexible malignity of Shylock.’12 It was Kean’s energy that Hazlitt found irresistible: ‘in giving effect to the conflict of passions arising out of the contrasts of situation, in varied vehemence of declamation, in keenness of sarcasm, in the rapidity of his transitions from one tone and feeling to another, in propriety and novelty of action, presenting a succession of striking pictures, and giving perpetually fresh shocks of delight and surprise, it would be difficult to single out a competitor.’13 That so much of the historical appraisal of Kean’s acting should be encapsulated in a single review, and after a first encounter, is nothing short of astonishing. But Hazlitt thought it proper to check the legitimacy of his recollection by attending Kean’s second performance of the role on 1 February. His style of acting is, if we may use the expression, more significant, more pregnant with meaning, more varied and alive in every part, than any we have almost ever witnessed. The character never stands still; there is no vacant pause in the action; the eye is never silent. For depth and force of conception, we have seen actors whom we should prefer to Mr Kean in Shylock; for brilliant and masterly execution, none. It is not saying too much of him, though it is saying a great deal, that he has all that Mr Kemble wants of perfection. He reminds us of the descriptions of the ‘far-darting eye’ of Garrick.14 It was not Hazlitt’s intention to denigrate Kemble, whose ‘depth and force of conception’ he admired, but, finding comparison irresistible, he was

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in the vanguard of writers who, by placing Kean among the Romantics, have frozen Kemble, who may belong more properly to the ‘picturesque’, into the posture of the ‘classic’. Looking back over 30 months of theatre reviewing, Hazlitt would summarize his position for readers of the Examiner on 8 December 1816: ‘We wish we had never seen Mr Kean. He has destroyed the Kemble religion and it is the religion in which we were brought up.’15 Kean’s was a Shylock for what has been termed ‘the Age of Reform’, against whose challenges Kemble had closed the shutters of his mind before he retired from the stage in 1817. It was a performance that implicitly questioned the appropriateness of English law. For some few of the audience, it may have pointed a quizzical fi nger at the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews, founded as recently as 1809 in the pious hope of providing an emancipatory escape route into the professions.16 Kean’s was more an emotionally revelatory than a theatrically revolutionary Shylock. Charles Macklin had stripped the role of its comedic accretions as long ago as 1741 in a performance that humanized a stage grotesque. In preparation, Macklin had not only paid observational visits to London’s Jewish quarter but also read Josephus’s History of the Jews. The possibility that Macklin’s performance contributed to the passing of the Jewish Naturalisation Act of 1753 cannot be discounted. But the Act, familiarly decried as the Jew Bill, was repealed within months. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, there was a measurable renewal of sympathy for the Jewish community in London, much of it in response to the pugilistic feats of Daniel Mendoza (1764–1836). Kean knew the slightly built Mendoza, may even have taken lessons in boxing under his guidance during his attachment to Richardson’s troupe. The fact that his father, whether Aaron, Moses or Edmund Kean, was almost certainly Jewish must have some bearing on the choice of Shylock for his debut. The Jewish Encyclopedia reminds us that his contemporaries ‘alluded frequently to Kean’s Jewish physiognomy’, and though he was never inclined to research of the Macklin kind, relying rather on his own intuitive reading, expressive face and speaking gesture, he had no need of it in preparing his Shylock. If he modelled his performance on anyone, Mendoza is the likeliest candidate.17 Kean was an expert mimic, but never a slavish one. Bryan Waller Procter,18 his fi rst serious biographer, was convinced that he ‘owed . . . as little to the example of others as any actor who ever appeared before the public’.19 The belief was widely shared. It was on the promise of novelty that Drury Lane was packed to capacity for the second performance

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of The Merchant of Venice. ‘His body thought’ was one observer’s resonant comment on Kean’s Shylock. 20 It was a simple vocal stress that brought Kean his first applause on 26 January 1814. To Shylock’s ‘I think I may take his bond,’ Bassanio has answered, ‘Be assured you may.’ A slight pause, and then, ‘I will be assured I may’ (1.3.26–28). Prolonged applause was the customary way for the audience to signal its approval of a successful innovation. What was being recognized on this occasion was a Shylock in command of himself, the dictator of his own will. But Kean’s eye for detail carried further. In modern editions, the full sentence is usually punctuated thus: ‘I will be assured I may, and that I may be assured, I will bethink me.’ That is not how Kean spoke it. The applause over, he started again: ‘I will be assured I may, and that I may be assured I will – bethink me.’ The antithetical patterning of the spoken sentence rides over the comma. It was always the detail rather than the whole of a part that drew the best out of Kean. This was something both recognized and relished by John Keats. Instead of thinking constantly of the ‘sum-total effect’ (Keats is referring to actors in the school of Kemble), ‘Kean delivers himself up to the instant feeling, without a shadow of a thought about anything else. He feels his being as deeply as Wordsworth, or any other of our intellectual monopolists’: Surely this intense power of anatomizing the passion of every syllable – of taking to himself the wings of verse, is the means by which he becomes a storm with such fiery decision; and by which, with a still deeper charm, he ‘does his spiriting gently’.21 The quality of Kean’s voice, assessed in musical terms, was not high, and it was already registering the effects of dissipation by 1814 – but if Kemble could make the sound of the meaning more melodious, no one rivalled Kean’s ability to point up the meaning of the sound, to make individual words dance. His vocal transitions were as sudden as his physical transitions. Typical was the drop in the voice, after the cataloguing of Antonio’s abuses and the interrogative ‘and what’s his reason?’, on ‘I am a Jew’ (3.1.53–54). This short scene – in which Shylock defies the mockery of Bassanio’s friends, unleashes his ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ tirade and goes on to mix with Tubal the anguish over the loss of his daughter (and his ducats) and a fierce relish at the sinking of Antonio’s ships – is punctuated by staccato transitions, tailor-made for Kean’s ‘electric, colloquial, sometimes vulgar virtuosity’.22 It confirmed the authority of Drury Lane’s new star.

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Romantic Shakespeare It was the general intention of Shakespearean productions, from the Restoration right through to the Regency, to smooth the rough edges of a too profuse genius. Even Garrick, whose preparedness to behave ‘in the moment’ was exceptional, set about regularizing Shakespeare in the versions he prepared for performance. Kemble’s comparatively scholarly pursuit of the ruling passion was an actor’s bid to unify plays threatened by too much variety. So far as the theatrical conventions of the time allowed, he interested himself in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, while Kean, lacking the steadiness of purpose that distinguished Kemble at his best, sought only to exploit the emotional range. His impulse, in preparing himself for each new public display, was to ransack a role on the page in search of its peaks. Most of his memorable ‘points’ were inspired footnotes in action. I have in mind a dangerously enthusiastic scholar who undertakes to prepare an edition of a whole play because he knows of a dozen passages for which he can supply original interpretations. It was, then, Kean’s good fortune to reach London at a hospitable time. ‘Grand manner’ Shakespeare, a neoclassical compromise with the Burkean sublime, 23 was increasingly under scrutiny: with all his faults, George Frederick Cooke had tempted theatregoers with a quirky alternative. Cooke had struggled to survive on the comparatively placid stage of the early 1780s, but the after-effects in England of the French Revolution had changed everything. Shakespeare’s troubled kings had now to be re-imagined, and ‘imagination’, even before Coleridge had placed it at the centre of the Romantic aesthetic, was on the way to displacing ‘sublimity’ as the best evidence of genius. For the artist Henry Fuseli, writing in the wake of the storming of the Bastille, it was ‘an age pregnant with the most gigantic efforts of character, shaken with the convulsions of old, and the emergence of new empires: whilst an unexampled vigour seemed to vibrate from pole to pole through the human mind, and to challenge the general sympathy’.24 Fuseli (1741–1825) was old enough to have seen – and painted – Garrick in action, and sufficiently long-lived to witness Kean in his early glory. He stands as far outside the school of Sir Joshua Reynolds as Kean stood outside the school of Kemble, and his Shakespearean paintings, while telling us nothing specific about contemporary performance, are both theatrically uncanny and uncannily theatrical. ‘What Fuseli really discovered in Shakespeare, apart from his immense dramatic variety, was the mysterious, secretive, orphic nature of the theatre.’25 Kean’s capacity

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to leave his audiences awestruck says much about the rawness of sensibility in Regency London. Emotion was being legitimized as an aesthetic response as well as being vaunted as a creative imperative. Fuseli’s 200th ‘Aphorism’ might almost be read as a commentary on Kean’s style of performance: Consider it as the unalterable law of Nature that all your power upon others depends on your own emotions. Shakespeare wept, trembled, laughed first at what now sways the public feature; and where he did not, he is stale, outrageous or disgusting.26 It was considered entirely appropriate, both before and during Kean’s career, to link actors and painters – ‘ut pictura poesis’ was regularly trotted out as a truism that embraced actors as well as poets. Garrick had commissioned Hogarth, instructed Hayman and cultivated Zoffany with a view to publicizing himself in the present and pictorializing his acting for posterity. Kemble’s staging drew inspiration from the canvases of Nicolas Poussin and the English history painters, and he himself was monumentalized in portraits by Thomas Lawrence. Unlike these illustrious forebears, Kean numbered no notable painters among his erratic circle of friends. George Cruikshank, who drew Kean brilliantly,27 dated his addiction to theatre from a boyhood appearance with him (date unrecorded) – in the kitchen of a public house owned by a theatrical publisher – in Blue Beard.28 They were occasional drinking partners long before Cruikshank’s unlikely conversion to the ranks of the Temperance Movement. But Kean, conscious of his own shortcomings, was generally ill at ease in the company of the culturally sophisticated. The artist who most vividly reflects Kean’s influence in his Shakespearean paintings was not English. Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) saw him as Shylock, Richard III and Othello in 1825, when French Romanticism was at its height, and the performances contributed to his own ‘romantic’ assessment of Shakespeare: Is disproportion one of the conditions that compel admiration? If Mozart, Cimarosa, and Racine are less striking because of the perfect proportion in their works, do not Shakespeare, Michelangelo and Beethoven owe something of their effect to the opposite quality?29 The Shakespeare of Delacroix – and of Kean – achieved a semblance of unity through irregularity: a ‘multitude of separate details’ that ‘seems

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nevertheless to make a single, unified impression on the mind’.30 If Kean’s performances made a unified impression on the minds of his audiences, that apprehension of unity owed more to the audience than to the actor. His admirers celebrated him for his painterly moments: Hazlitt and Procter think most often of Titian, G. H. Lewes of his ‘mingling strong lights and shadows with Caravaggio force of unreality’.31 Coleridge’s much quoted obiter dictum – ‘To see him act, is like reading Shakspere [sic] by flashes of lightning’ – is of the same painterly kind. Part of Coleridge’s unverifiable Table Talk, it is too often cited as the expression of unqualified admiration. The sentences his future son-in-law actually recorded in 1823 are hedged with reservations. Coleridge was, after all, well aware that sitting in a dark room and waiting for lightning is not the best way of reading one of Shakespeare’s plays: Kean is original; but he copies from himself. His rapid descents from the hyper-tragic to the infra-colloquial, though sometimes productive of great effect, are often unreasonable. To see him act, is like reading Shakspere [sic] by flashes of lightning. I do not think him thorough-bred gentleman enough to play Othello.32 The third of these sentences, robbed of its context, is regularly trotted out as the supremely brief summary of Kean’s acting style. Tracy C. Davis was sufficiently antagonized by this practice to argue that Coleridge was using ‘flashes of lightning’ in its contemporary colloquial sense of ‘glasses of gin’.33 Her claim is that Coleridge was not voicing any kind of admiration, but expressing his contempt for Kean’s low-life addiction to cheap alcohol. An ingenious reappraisal of a famous judgement, the essay is nonetheless unconvincing.34 It would be, after all, the ‘reader’ of Shakespeare (Coleridge, not Kean) who imbibes ‘flashes of lightning’ while holding the playbook – an addict (partially reformed) drunkenly contemplating an unregenerate toper. It is safer to accept, however reluctantly and despite its critical framing, the greater probability that the favoured sentence records the visual (and aural) impact of Kean’s ‘Caravaggio force’ amid the lights and shadows of Drury Lane’s unevenly illuminated stage. He was a subject for a Romantic artist, not for Reynolds. When Coleridge delivered his series of lectures on Shakespeare in 1811– 1812, he did so in the knowledge that Milton’s invitation to hear ‘sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child / Warble his native wood-notes wild’35 had become a commonplace of criticism. Coleridge’s Shakespeare, by contrast,

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was a moral philosopher whose understanding of human nature disciplined his creation of dramatic characters: Shakspere [sic] has this advantage over all other dramatists – that he has availed himself of his psychological genius to develop all the minutiae of the human heart: shewing us the thing that, to common observers, he seems solely intent upon, he makes visible what we should not otherwise have seen.36 It was a recognition developed in greater detail in Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817), and one which played into Kean’s hands. Hazlitt valued the plays for their emotional truth and Kean’s performances for their grasp of it. Through the variety of his passions, Kean presented images of psychological complexity to audiences newly alerted to the tricks of the human mind. For John Keats, the effect was irresistible. ‘One of my Ambitions’, he wrote, ‘is to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting’.37 He had the actor in mind throughout his collaboration with Charles Brown on their five-act tragedy, Otho the Great (1819), despite the touching uncertainty of his conditional, ‘If he smokes the hotblooded character of Ludolph’.38 In the event, and for whatever reason, Kean did not ‘smoke’ Ludolph, and Keats tried again with King Stephen, a project abandoned less than 200 lines in when he read of Kean’s plans to tour America. Keats’s dramatic model, unsurprisingly, was Shakespeare, whose Troilus and Cressida he was reading, or had just read, when he wrote his famous letter on the ‘poetical character’: As to the poetical Character itself (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself – it has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated – It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion poet. 39 Hovering above this letter is the vision of a selfless Shakespeare creating ‘selves’ for actors to embody, a poet who must have felt, like Keats, ‘as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds’.40

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Of the second generation of Romantic poets, Keats had the greatest affinity with Kean. They even looked alike, both small men with vivid eyes and restless energy, and both, in Keats’s words, living ‘in gusto’. They had similar temperaments, too: both binge-drinkers, both given to running away when life became too threatening for comfort and both running the risk of burning themselves out through some kind of inner compulsion. Keats recognized, and to some extent shared, Kean’s street-fighting impulse: ‘Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest Man shows a grace in his quarrel.’41 Dining with Horace and James Smith, celebrated wits of the period, and hearing them denigrate Kean for the low company he kept, ‘Would I were with that company instead of yours said I to myself’.42 It was, above all, the ferocity with which Kean threw himself into a part that excited Keats’s admiration. He saw it as an abandonment of the self comparable with that of the ‘camelion poet’. This may have been a misjudgement – it would be easy to mount a case for placing any great actor in the camp of the ‘egotistical sublime’ – but it is not without an element of truth. The stage provided Kean with an escape from his unruly self, often enough an escape into grandeur. Unlike Keats, Byron, a Romantic by association more than by inclination, had dealings with the off-stage Kean, and was favourably impressed at first. Two weeks into the actor’s second season at Drury Lane (on 17 October 1814), he wrote to Lady Melbourne: Kean (the Kean) & myself dined together. – Kean is a wonderful compound – & excels in humour & mimicry – the last talent is rather dangerous – but one cannot help being amused with it: in other respects – in private society – he appears diffident & of good address – on the stage he is all perfect in my eyes. Inside Drury Lane, though, the diffidence soon evaporated, and Byron was infuriated the next year by Kean’s rejection of his recommendation that the company should stage William Sotheby’s Ivan. The memory was still rankling on 2 April 1817, when Byron wrote from Venice to his publisher, John Murray. By then Kean, towards the end of his third season at Drury Lane, was tasting failure, and reviewers blamed his performance for the weak showing of Charles Robert Maturin’s second play, Manuel.43 Byron was unsurprised: ‘they ought to act [Sotheby’s] “Ivan” – as for Kean he is an “infidus Scurra”44 and his conduct on this occasion is of a piece with all one ever heard of him.’ Even so, at least three of Byron’s plays – Werner, Cain and The Deformed Transformed – are indebted to Kean’s Richard III,

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and Manfred, where it smoulders, owes something to the same performance. It is in the charismatic figure of the Byronic hero that Kean’s impact might best be felt by a modern reader. Byron’s Shakespeare lacked the subtleties of Coleridge’s or Hazlitt’s. His taste, like Kean’s, was for the bold strokes, and there is food for thought in Alan Downer’s striking suggestion that Kean ‘played Shakespeare’s heroes as if they had been created by Lord Byron’.45

Richard III The decision to follow Shylock with Richard III was a sensible one. It was a part in which Kean felt secure, and one to which he was physically wellsuited. There was the further advantage that it was outside Kemble’s familiar repertoire.46 Royal misdemeanours were no longer a well-kept secret during the Regency. George III had finally been declared unfit to rule in early 1811, and the Prince Regent’s view of marriage was quite as cynical as Richard III’s. Of the old king’s twelve surviving children, few were free from scandal by 1814, and none of his wayward sons could seriously aspire to be, like Hamlet, ‘the mirror of all Christian kings’. Public regard for the monarchy was as low as it had ever been, and would sink lower in the immediate aftermath of George IV’s accession, but that served only to heighten sensitivities, as Mary Russell Mitford would discover in 1825, when she submitted her play Charles the First to the Covent Garden management. By way of justifying his banning of performance, George Colman the Younger, Chief Examiner of Plays, referred to dialogue that was ‘democratical, most insulting to Charles, in particular, and to the Monarchy in general’.47 Shakespeare’s historical plays may have been, through sheer theatrical usage, exempt from censure, but actors who played his kings continued to be measured against idealized concepts of regality. Just how far Kean associated himself with radical republicanism is unknown. He is, though, on record as publicly taking Queen Caroline’s side in her antagonistic marital relationship with George IV as Prince of Wales, Regent and King,48 and there was to be nothing definably ‘kingly’ in his approach to Richard III. That would be the recurrent complaint of the minority of critics who found his interpretation objectionable. The argument over kingliness dated back to Garrick, whose London debut in the role had been received as revolutionary in 1741. It had raged again more recently, and in more overtly fervent times, during George Frederick Cooke’s seasons (1800–1803) at Covent Garden. Here, too, the

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Kemble style had been set up in opposition. James Boaden, friend and biographer, speaks for Kemble: A too apparent CUNNING, broadly marked out to the spectator, Kemble always thought improper, and vulgar in acting. He rightly conceived that the daring ‘Son of York,’ who deceived so many, and moulded all to his purposes, must have been refined in his manners, and, indeed, every thing to all men.49 It was along these lines that Charles Lamb complained of Cooke’s Richard that ‘The hypocrisy is too glaring and visible. It resembles more the shallow cunning of a mind which is its own dupe, than the profound and practised art of so powerful an intellect as Richard’s.’50 What Boaden and Lamb neglect to say is that Cooke’s performance of the role thrilled audiences as Kemble’s never did. And Cooke was Kean’s precedent. It should be borne in mind that the script of Richard III that Kean employed incorporated some of his own emendations to Kemble’s version of Colley Cibber’s adaptation (1700) of a text that had not proved itself sufficiently theatrical to hold its place on the post-Restoration stage. In reconfiguring the title role, Cibber had probably in mind the most effective of contemporary stage villains, the notoriously ugly Samuel Sandford – a ‘villain from necessity’, as Robert H. Ross has reminded us.51 Cibber so cut and pasted the play as to make it a cautionary tale of evil that perishes, scorpion-like, by stinging itself to death. Shakespeare’s variety has been pared down, and for an actor to succeed in the role, as Garrick, Cooke and Kean did, the demand is for extraordinary energy. The problem is clearly expressed in Hazlitt’s review: It is possible to form a higher conception of this character (we do not mean from seeing other actors, but from reading Shakespeare) than that given by this very admirable tragedian; but we cannot imagine any character represented with greater distinctness and precision, more perfectly articulated in every part. Perhaps, indeed, there is too much of this; for we sometimes thought he failed, even from an exuberance of talent, and dissipated the impression of the character by the variety of his resources.52 And always available was the familiar complaint: ‘in Richard he was unkingly’ was Crabb Robinson’s reminiscence after the end of Kean’s astonishing first season at Drury Lane.53 Significantly, the theatregoing public ignored the handful of detractors. Richard III had opened on 12 February

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1814. For its third performance on 19 February, the free list was suspended (‘no orders will be admitted’ was pasted across the playbills), and the next week an urgent request went out from the management to ‘all persons, to whom a free admission has been granted . . . to abstain from the use of it on the nights of Kean’s performance’.54 Looking back, in 1821, on his career so far, Kean had good reason to call Richard III ‘that character which has been the foundation of my fame and fortune’.55 The survival of detailed notes – amounting almost to a personal promptbook – allows us to come closer to reconstructing Kean’s Richard III than any of his other characters, though these notes tell us little about the impact of his performance.56 They were taken down by the American actor James Hackett (1800–1871) over a series of Kean’s New York appearances in 1825–1826. In them, Hackett claims, ‘I have noted all of the business and readings of Mr Kean in this play, during at least a dozen of his performances of Richard, which will be found here recorded with remarks & readings of my own throughout.’ There is no doubt about the detail. Hackett purports to have underlined each word Kean stressed and, in the margins, to have described every significant movement and gesture. The eyewitness evidence of a fellow professional has a value distinct from, and complementary to, the written responses of reviewers, and although Hackett saw the actor at the latter end of his career, there is good reason to accept that, once he had established himself in a character, Kean aimed to reproduce, not to vary, his performance of it. His rule of thumb, when acting Richard on tour with a stock company of which he had no personal knowledge, was that no actor should come within an arm’s length of him – until the duel with Richmond – and the persistent story is that his ‘rehearsal’ in the new venue was restricted to counting out his paces on the unfamiliar stage. We cannot, of course, know exactly how Hackett measured vocal stresses, and his system of underlining is not sophisticated, but his marking up of the opening soliloquy – delayed until the second scene in Cibber’s adaptation – is indicative of his method. Kean entered to stage centre, ‘hastily – head low – arms folded’: Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by the sun of York; And all the clouds, that lower’d upon our house, In the deep bosom of the ocean – buried. And here, he ‘unfolds his arms and walks the stage’. As the soliloquy progresses, and always at the same points, he ‘stops short’, ‘grins and frets’,

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‘pulls on his gauntlets tighter and keeps the centre writhing his body R & L and using his right hand’, ‘plays with his sword belt’, ‘starts and crosses’, ‘swings his right arm’, ‘strikes his breast 3 times & points to his forhead’, ‘chuckles’ and exits hastily after the line, ‘And my first step shall be [here he “hesitates”] on Henry’s head’. Hackett’s notes explain and verify Hazlitt’s initial response to Kean’s Shylock: ‘The character never stands still; there is no vacant pause in the action; the eye is never silent.’57 They also go some way to revealing the mechanics of some of Kean’s most famous ‘points’, the clap-traps that punctuated his performance. Bursts of applause were an obligatory audience response to well-made ‘points’, and trained eyes and ears in the auditorium both anticipated and rewarded them. An actor was expected to follow the established rules of stage business at key moments in the play – to make the traditional ‘points’. Kean added new ones, and it was these that his admirers most relished. There are, for example, no references to his killing of Henry VI – a significant interpolation in Cibber’s version, and one which militates against ‘kingliness’ – which culminated in ‘thrusts sword perpendicularly thro’ his body several times’; but few reviewers failed to mention Kean’s conduct on the entrance of Lady Anne. Hackett’s note is mechanically prosaic: ‘Goes to R. H. 1st wing & leans – doffs cap & listens to Lady A.’ G. H. Lewes is much more graphic: Who can ever forget the exquisite grace with which he leaned against the side-scene while Anne was railing at him, and the chuckling mirth of his ‘Poor fool! what pains she takes to damn herself!’ It was thoroughly feline – terrible yet beautiful.58 For the generally unimpressed Crabb Robinson, this scene with Ann was Kean’s finest, ‘And his mode of lifting up her veil to watch her countenance was exquisite.’59 Hackett fills in the gaps of unrecorded ‘points’, as when Richard and Buckingham are plotting the route to the throne: Kean ‘approaches Buck[ingham] and leans on his left shoulder biting his half bent forefinger sideways’. This is the ‘unkingly’ Richard in action, as he was again in the scene with the Lord Mayor. The complaint was that he acted too much there, not only when he was speaking, but also when he was listening. The act of listening gave scope to Kean’s relish of emotional pantomime. This is Hackett’s description of his reaction to Buckingham’s line, ‘Long live our sovereign, Richard, king of England’: ‘Richard loses his self-command at the word “King”, from over-joy, squeezes his book to his breast, then

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instantly checks himself.’ The violent flinging away of the Bible after the departure of the Lord Mayor’s party was an inherited ‘point’: it would have been presumptuous to omit it. But the two most admired of Kean’s innovations came towards and at the end of the play. The first was an insight into Richard’s state of mind on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth. It followed his instruction to Catesby, ‘An hour after midnight, come to my tent, / And help to arm me.’ Hackett’s note reads, ‘pauses & marks out the Battle on the stage with his sword. Stops abruptly & bids “good night”.’ Hazlitt was touched by the ordinariness of the moment as a counterpoint to crisis, and featured it in his comments on Richard III in his Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays: His manner of bidding his friends ‘Good night’, after pausing with the point of his sword, drawn slowly backward and forward on the ground, as if considering the plan of the battle next day, is a particularly happy and natural thought.60 His review for the Morning Chronicle added that, in Drury Lane, it ‘received shouts of applause’. Leigh Hunt, who had been in prison during Kean’s opening season, saw his Richard III in February 1815. It was his first encounter with the actor of whom he had heard so much, and his review for the Examiner is largely taken up with expressions of disappointment, but . . . it would be impossible to express in a deeper manner the intentness of Richard’s mind upon the battle that was about to take place, or to quit the scene with an abruptness more self-recollecting, pithy, and familiar, than by the reverie in which he stands drawing lines upon the ground with the point of his sword, and his sudden recovery of himself with a ‘Good night’. Here, for Hunt, was a rare example of Kean’s ability ‘in a very happy manner to unite common life with tragedy – which is the great stage-desideratum’.61 Hunt was soon to be won over by Kean’s knack of introducing lifelike elements without lessening the intensity of tragedy. Byron needed no persuading. His ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’, written in April 1814, transports a stage gesture from Drury Lane to the island of Elba by inviting the poem’s subject to ‘trace with thine all idle hand, / In loitering mood upon the sand, / That Earth is now as free’. And the memory was still with Byron when he put the finishing touches to his play Werner in January 1822. It is recaptured in a stage direction: ‘Siegendorf first looks at the Hungarian,

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and then at Ulric, who has unbuckled his sabre, and is drawing lines with it on the floor – still in its sheath.’ Few items of stage business have such an extended literary life, and fewer have been so universally admired. There was clearly something in the little man’s manipulation of his body during the ominous silence that he had himself created that fired the imagination of onlookers. It was often the case, particularly as his health began to fail, that a supreme effort in one scene led to a falling off in the next, and Kean made suprisingly little of the subsequent confrontation with the ghosts of his victims. Hackett tersely notes – evidently as an afterthought, written with a different pen – that ‘Kean’s is a failure in this scene, universally acknowledged.’ There is the further possibility that he was storing energy for the supreme effort of the second of his most admired innovations. Death scenes, not least Kean’s, are easily parodied, and the detail of the play’s final moments is unlikely to appeal to modern sensibilities. At the time, though, his acting out of Richard’s death at the hands of Richmond was a stunning effect. Crabb Robinson’s comment that ‘his sudden death fall was shockingly real as I should suppose men fall on the field’ is an understatement of the emotional impact in performance. Hackett gives a blow-by-blow account of the single combat from Kean’s perspective: fights furiously back & forth – in turning loses balance, falls on his knee, & fights up – in turning, receives Richmond’s thrust – lunges at him feebly after it – clenching is shoved from him – staggers – drops the sword – grasps blindly at him – staggers backward & falls – head to R. H. turns upon right side – writhes – rests on his hands – gnashes his teeth at him (L. H.) – as he utters his last words – blinks – & expires rolling on his back. It goes without saying – the age demanded it – that Richard was given a dying speech of ten lines which Cibber had culled from Othello (‘Perdition catch thy arm’) and his commonplace book, and that the performance came quickly to an end after a single speech from the victorious Richmond and his proclamation by the Earl of Derby as ‘Henry the Seventh, king of England’. Crabb Robinson, who attended the performance on 7 March 1814, was irritated that, after such a death, Kean got up, not only to take a curtain call but also to repeat the ‘spurious lines’ of his dying speech. If there was a precedent for this kind of self-display – Kean might have passed it off as an actor’s generous gratification of the clamour for an encore – Robinson seems not to have known of it.62 The epilogues of the

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Garrick stage were no longer customary. Instead, a leading actor would come before the curtain to ‘give out the play for repetition’, subject to the approval of the audience. Kean might justifiably have taken such approval for granted in 1814, but a wiser man would have hesitated longer before resurrecting his dead self. The legitimate inference is that, over the month that separated his Drury Lane debut as Richard III and Robinson’s visit, public adulation was beginning to go to Kean’s head. It might be argued in his defence that the performance of this part in particular made on him demands comparable with those made on athletes and sportsmen. To cap it with the physical challenge of a fight like this would probably have induced euphoria, a vulnerable condition in which to make rational decisions. Hazlitt, a more discerning judge than Robinson, had nothing but praise for Kean’s physical exertions throughout: He gave to all the busy scenes of the play the greatest animation and effect. He filled every part of the stage. The concluding scene, in which he is killed by Richmond, was the most brilliant. He fought like one drunk with wounds: and the attitude in which he stands with his hands stretched out, after his sword is taken from him, had a preternatural and terrific grandeur, as if his will could not be disarmed, and the very phantoms of his despair had a withering power.63

Othello Kean is the only major British actor to have settled on Othello as his signature part:64 and the choice is all the more surprising because he was, in conventional terms, so ill-suited to it. Coleridge, as we have already seen, did not consider Kean enough of a ‘thorough-bred gentleman’ to play Shakespeare’s Moor, and his physique should have ruled him out even if his claims to gentility had been undeniable. The Othello of convention is a muscular hero, destroyed by the wiles of a man who is both literally and metaphorically smaller. But, as the stage history of the play makes clear, the actor of Iago has a singular advantage over him – he has a licence to make contact with the audience. An opportunistic and legitimately playful Iago is always in a position to make mincemeat of his Othello. Henry Irving did it to Edwin Booth in 1881 after he had, with apparent generosity, invited Booth to alternate the roles at the Lyceum. At the time, although Booth’s season at the small Princess’s Theatre in Oxford Street had been financially unrewarding, there was a groundswell of opinion that he was a finer

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Shakespearean actor than the undisputed champion of England, Irving himself, by now regularly accompanied by Ellen Terry. Louis Napoleon Parker was there for the first night: We were all agog to welcome our Henry and our Ellen. Incidentally we were quite ready to be polite to our American guest, but I think I can honestly say we never saw him. There was, to be sure, a pleasant gentleman representing Othello, but he was timid, he acted in corners; he seemed to beg us not to look at him. And, indeed, it was difficult to see him as all the time our Henry was doing clever bits of by-play, eating grapes and spitting out the pips in a significant manner, which rendered Booth invisible.65 Irving, despite his Victorian respectability, was as capable of mischievous ambition as Kean, whom he considered the greatest of all his predecessors. But even Iagos innocent of malice can obliterate their Othellos. My own memory of watching Bob Peck play Iago opposite Donald Sinden at Stratford in 1979 is very similar to Parker’s at the Lyceum. It is a decent human response, when someone is making a fool of himself in public, to try to divert attention from him, and I left the theatre that night with a strong sense that Peck had been trying to save the show even if it meant annihilating the star. Kean must have known the magnitude of the risk he was taking when he chose Othello as the fourth Shakespearean role of his first Drury Lane season. Either to please the management, or to prove himself for the first time in a role that was currently in Kemble’s possession, he had come out as Hamlet on 12 March 1814, when his novelty value was at its height, and had been rewarded with generally favourable reviews. There was no crying need to hazard another major Shakespearean role as his first season at Drury Lane drew to its end. After all, he had already, single-handedly, transformed a theatre threatened with bankruptcy into a profitable outfit. Why risk burn-out? The opening of Othello was timed for 5 May 1814, during a period when the annual actors’ benefit performances were interspersed with the established repertoire. Benefits traditionally allowed sponsored actors to take risks in front of an abnormally tolerant audience: a comedian might indulge his hankering for tragedy or a tragedian try his voice in a singing role. It may just be that Kean was cautiously slotting his unexpected Othello into the season of good will, but that seems unlikely. With Shylock, Richard III and Hamlet behind him, he was closer to being fearless than he had ever been. It was comparatively easy to chalk up another success in Iago – the

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transition from Richard III to Iago is a natural one – but Kean’s impulse, like Byron’s or Napoleon’s (the heroes of 1814), was less to gratify expectation than to exceed it. Even so, there is presumptive evidence that his success as Othello exceeded his expectations. He had already determined, as back-up, to switch to Iago for the second performance of the play, and he continued to make occasional appearances in that part, to different – and always indifferent – Othellos until 1822. For anyone who saw both, Kean’s Iago bore a family resemblance to his Richard. He played him, as Irving evidently and Peck certainly did, as ‘a cordial, comfortable, easy, humorous villain’,66 while displaying enough of the ‘diseased intellectual activity’67 to satisfy Hazlitt. There were, of course, fine touches. Perhaps taking a hint from Cooke, Kean ensured that the audience did not miss the importance to Iago that Roderigo should not recover from his wounds to give the game away: He therefore, though he at the same time converses coolly with those about him, throws his eye perpetually towards the prostrate body . . . sometimes he walked by it carelessly, and surveyed it with a glance too rapid to be observed: sometimes he deliberately approached it, and looked at it with his candle . . . and thus he continued to hover over and watch it till he leaves the stage.68 Eloquent pantomime of this kind was always the product of careful study, and must sometimes have signalled a disregard for those on stage with him. But there were ensemble touches, too: at the end of the play, his arms pinioned by guards, Kean’s Iago used the power of his eyes to direct Othello’s gaze towards the dead Desdemona. ‘Was not Iago perfection?’ wrote Byron to Thomas Moore the day after the 7 May performance, ‘particularly the last look. I was close to him (in the orchestra), and never saw an English countenance half so expressive’. The role of Iago is the least strenuous in Kean’s repertoire of major Shakespearean characters. He could have continued playing it effectively even when his health and memory were failing, were it not for a major drawback. Iago wins. Kean’s sympathetic imagination fastened on characters who resist the way things are and go their own angular way about challenging the status quo. In the fullness of time, such men fall victim to conservative forces. The outsider, whatever the present promise, is never fully assimilated. It was through intuitive fellowfeeling that Kean insinuated himself into the psychology of his favourite Shakespearean characters during his first season at Drury Lane. Shylock tries to work the Venetian system – and fails. Richard III, born to be an

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outsider, worms his way brilliantly to the centre, only to be overwhelmed by what we might now call insider dealing. Hamlet, with all his subtlety, is ultimately defeated by the Danish system. And Othello is no match for Iago when it comes to the politics of everyday Venetian life. What Kean’s ‘last look’ signified to Othello and to the audience was, ‘if you want proof of the power of the system, there it lies’. The invitation to express – at some length – the full pathos of defeat is sufficient to explain Kean’s preference for Othello; but there is more. The year of Kean’s birth, 1787, was also the year in which the London Abolition Committee was founded. He was 20 when the slave trade was formally abolished, but it was not until 1834, the year after Kean’s death, that slavery itself was outlawed in all British dominions. Throughout his life, then, slavery was a hot issue, and its abolition precisely the kind of cause that excited his radical engagement. It is only Kean’s instinctive championing of oppressed races that explains and justifies his embarrassingly exaggerated delight in being appointed an honorary chief of the Huron Indians while he was performing in Quebec in 1826. The fact that the Moors were not an enslaved people is of no relevance here. Othello was received, on the early nineteenth-century stage, as the noble representative of an ignorant race. Apart from his military credentials, he would not have been distinct, even in the minds of the competently educated, from Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745–1797), whose activities in England had given significant impetus to the abolitionist movement. Othello is black either because Shakespeare thought Moors were black, or because ‘black’ is a synonym for ‘non-white’, and he is admirable, in the fi rst place, because he has risen in society despite the disadvantages of his race and colour. Kean was among those for whom this kind of admiration brought the axioms of ‘society’ into question. William Cowper, a self-elected outsider who lived not far from Equiano and was, like him, embroiled in Methodism, had taken up the cause in 1788 with ‘A Negro’s Complaint’: Deem our nation brutes no longer Till some reason ye shall find Worthier of regard and stronger Than the colour of our kind. Slaves of gold, whose sordid dealings Tarnish all your boasted pow’rs, Prove that you have human feelings Ere you proudly question ours.

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It is possible (I have found no useful reference to his reading habits) that Kean had access to the 1806 edition of Cowper’s works, which contains Fuseli’s powerful illustration to this poem. The posture of Fuseli’s negro is one to catch the eye of an actor, and there is no doubt that Kean pictorialized his creation of Othello with particular care. As Richard, he was over-elaborately dressed, but there was always freedom for movement in his intricately embroidered Othello-tunic. His skin was coffee-tinted, not black, and his flamboyant ear-rings combined exoticism with a hint of the street-arab. This was to be an Othello whose passion, once aroused, released an impulse to take revenge on his oppressors.69 The literature of the period is peppered with noble savages, from Robert Bage’s Hermsprong (1796) to Fenimore Cooper’s last of the Mohicans (1826). There is an early theatrical sketch in Cumberland’s The West Indian (1771) and another in the younger Colman’s Inkle and Yarico, first staged in the year of Kean’s birth. Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko (1695), too, held its place in the national repertoire into the nineteenth century. (Kean demanded its revival in January 1817.) It is true that these plays, to which might be added Thomas Morton’s The Slave (1816), rely on cardboard stereotypes and tend to exonerate the English. Without such a compromise, they would have been censored, since the spirit of something that could seriously be called egalitarianism was not readily welcomed on the early nineteenth-century stage. The significant point is that, despite their prevarications, they relied for their popular reception on a wave of sentiment that was as powerful in the slave ports of Bristol and Liverpool as it was in London. It was this wave that Kean’s Othello rode. Leigh Hunt considered it ‘the masterpiece of the living stage’,70 and Hazlitt supposed it ‘the finest piece of acting in the world’.71 Even the sceptical Crabb Robinson was persuaded: ‘Of all the characters in which I have yet seen Kean – Othello is the one for which he is by nature the least qualified. And it is that in which he has most delighted me.’72 Robinson’s is a significant voice here. He was not alone in being surprised into admiration. So early in his London career, Kean had turned the tables on his would-be detractors. His fondness for Othello is best understood in competitive terms. It was a role that even his supporters feared was beyond him. More even than his unknown Shylock at the opening of his season, his Othello was the victory of an underdog. The price of Kean’s success was his paranoia – but paranoia may also have been the condition of his success, the undetected factor that gave his performances their overpowering edginess during the 6 or 7 years that he had it under control. More even than Richard III, Othello became his weapon in the constant theatrical warfare in which he felt himself engaged. The

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most famous example occurred during Kean’s third season at Drury Lane. In the search for a rival attraction, the Covent Garden management had lighted on Junius Brutus Booth (1796–1852), who had schooled himself on Kean and threatened to outshine him. With Kean’s connivance, and on the opportunistically seized pretext of a salary dispute, Booth was enticed to play Iago at Drury Lane. What followed was a hatchet job. The general view is that honours were even for the first two acts, while Kean prepared himself for the tumultuous confrontation in Act Three. Then, as Procter recalls, Kean ‘glared down upon the now diminutive Iago; he seized him and tossed him aside, with frightful and irresistible vehemence’.73 We should give credit to Procter’s retrospect on the fierce choreography of this on-stage combat, since it is variously recorded in so many contemporary accounts. ‘There is no doubt’, he writes, ‘that Kean was excited on this occasion, in a most extraordinary degree; as much as though he had been maddened by wine. The impression which he made upon the audience has, perhaps, never been equalled in theatrical annals’. This prize-fight defeat of 20 February 1817 was a disaster for Booth. By the evening of the scheduled repeat performance, two days later, he had left London and had to be replaced by Kean’s regular whipping-boy and drinking partner, Alexander Rae.74 Over the years that followed, when challenged by a rival talent, Kean would routinely arrange for him to play Iago and allow him to build up his confidence before pulverizing him in Act Three. This was still the case in 1822, by which time Kean’s dissipated lifestyle had destroyed his stamina. Under its impulsive new manager – Charles Lamb’s ‘great lessee’, Robert William Elliston75 – Drury Lane was again in crisis, and Elliston hit on the ruse of pairing Kean with the last great relic of the Kemble school of rhetoric, Charles Mayne Young (1777–1856). There is an aura of pathos around Kean’s reaction. He hated to admit, even to himself, that he was already past his best. ‘Aut Caesar, aut Nullus is my text,’ he wrote to Elliston. ‘If I become secondary in any point of view, I shrink into insignificance.’76 There was no denying that Young’s was the finer voice,77 and the contrast promised to be the classic one, replayed in the twentieth-century rivalry of Olivier and Gielgud, between the actor you see (the essentially pantomimic actor that Kean was) and the actor you hear. Later in the 1822–1823 season, Kean would complain to James Winston of having to ‘play again with that bloody thundering bugger’.78 But the contentious issue to be resolved was the choice of play for their first appearance together. Young’s preference was for Venice Preserved, with himself as Pierre opposite Kean’s Jaffeir. ‘If Mr. Young is ambitious to act with me,’ wrote Kean, ‘he must commence with Iago . . . I have doubtless

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my choice of weapons. He must play Iago! Before I act Jaffeir. I am told he is extraordinarily great in Pierre – if so – I am beaten – this must not be – I cannot bear it. I would rather go in chains to Botany Bay – I am not ashamed to say – I am afraid of the contest.’79 The language of weaponry and contest has taken on a defensive tone which it would never have had when Kean was at his peak. At least, though, he won the first phase of the battle. It was in Othello, on 27 November 1822, that Young and Kean made their first appearance together, and once again in Act Three that the possessed Othello threatened to blow his Iago away. If Young survived, it was because of the quality of ‘repose’ that he had inherited from Kemble. Even his admiring son and biographer concedes that Young ‘hardly ever astonished’.80 When Kean failed to astonish, he was nothing. In repose, or when coasting to preserve his energy for the next physicalization of passion, he came increasingly to border on the inert. It was, perhaps, because Act Three of Othello produced from him the most sustained piece of impassioned acting he ever attempted that his performance stood out – primus inter pares. ‘I have gotten a box for Othello tonight, and send the ticket for your friends,’ Byron told Thomas Moore on 26 May 1814. ‘I seriously recommend to you to recommend to them to go for half an hour, if only to see the third act.’ The history of Kean’s Othello is as long as his active life. G. H. Lewes remembers his playing the part opposite Macready, late in his career and coping with a gouty hobble and a drinker’s hoarseness, but still ‘irradiated with such flashes that I would again risk broken ribs for the chance of a good place in the pit to see anything like it’.81 And it was in a gesture of public reconciliation – characteristically mixed with pique at the Drury Lane manager’s refusal to extend him a loan – that, on 25 March 1833, he crossed to Covent Garden to play Othello to his respectable son’s Iago. Charles Kean had never hidden his disapproval of his father, openly taking his mother’s side over the scandal of their separation and establishing a life-style in pious contradiction of the paternal example. He had defied his father by becoming an actor, and hated to be compared with him – not surprisingly, since any comparison was likely to be detrimental. But Charles was no fool. It was the family connection that had raised him to unearned prominence. They had played together in the provinces, and their joint engagement at Covent Garden was calculated to bring in the crowds. The reiterated story of what happened on the night of 25 March is almost too bad to be true – legend blurring with history. As usual, Kean glided through the first two acts, but the exertions of Act Three were too much for him. He got no further than ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone’

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before being forced to lean on Charles for support, and whispering, ‘I am dying – speak to them for me.’ Or so they say. What is certain is that he was dead within two months. It is tempting to speculate on the possibility that he might have lived a little longer if he had opted for Iago rather than for Othello. His personal investment would have been measurably smaller. For Kean, Othello was as much a slogan as a role. The Moor stood in for the victimized and the rejected, which is to say that he stood for Kean.

Other Shakespearean Roles Kean got away with Hamlet in the heady atmosphere of his opening season, although Hazlitt, who paradoxically praised the performance, questioned the overall interpretation: ‘we think his general delineation of the character wrong. It was too strong and pointed.’82 Charles Kemble, John’s younger brother, similarly criticized Kean’s Othello: ‘If the justness of the conception had been but equal to the brilliancy of the execution it would have been perfect; but the whole thing was a mistake; the fact being that Othello was a slow man.’83 Kean’s eye was always for detail rather than consistency. He travelled through character like a picaresque hero through circumstance, plucking possibilities on his way. Hazlitt alludes to one of his footnote-like innovations: ‘In the scene where he breaks from his friends to obey the commands of his father, he keeps his sword pointed behind him, to prevent them from following him, instead of holding it before him to protect him from the Ghost.’84 Unlike Kemble’s, Kean’s Hamlet met his father’s ghost with filial love rather than mortal fear. Of his other innovations, perhaps the most theatrically exciting was his decision to abort his exit, after he has condemned Ophelia to a nunnery, by rushing back to kiss her hand before leaving the stage precipitately. But Hamlet burns slowly. It was not a part for Kean, who preferred to blaze. His remedy was to simmer like a Byronic hero, nursing the knowledge of a secret guilt, and caring little about the effect on others of his bizarre behaviour. His conduct during the play-within-the-play was too graceless for the Herald reviewer: During the mimic representation, Mr. Kean so far forgot that inalienable delicacy, which should eternally characterize a gentleman in his deportment before the ladies, that he not only exposed his derrière to his mistress, but positively crawled upon his belly towards the King like a wounded snake in a meadow, rather than a Prince openly indulging himself in moral speculation in the salon of a royal palace.85

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For the dissentient minority, it was a source of gratification to see through the Prince of Denmark to the guttersnipe behind the costume. His playing of Hamlet is a crux for those who stand in judgement, for or against, Kean. Reiko Oya makes it the focus of her discussion of Kean’s cultural significance in the Romantic assault on the values of the eighteenth century,86 but she is unaffected by the moral dilemma that confronted his contemporaries and, much more radically, the Victorian generations that followed. From the vantage-point of 1845, the splendidly outspoken ‘Old Playgoer’, William Robson, calls on Colley Cibber as a witness for the prosecution in his case against Kean for presuming to play Hamlet. What Cibber had said about George Powell, who ‘was something in the Kean vein’, applies here: ‘the briskest loose liver, or intemperate man, though morality were out of the question, can never arrive at the necessary excellence of a good or useful actor.’ Robson’s case is proven: Kean was a vulgar actor [who] might keep the denizens of the Coal-hole87 in a roar, and be followed to the theatre by his troop of ‘wolves;’ but such orgies could never qualify him to represent that Prince who was ‘the glass of fashion and the mould of form; the courtier’s, scholar’s, soldier’s, eye, tongue, sword’.88 Coleridge, whether or not Tracy Davis has rightly interpreted him, was saying much the same thing 20 years earlier. Kean’s Macbeth, the first new role of his second season at Drury Lane, was a curate’s egg, strongest when sinking to the depths of bewilderment or rising to the heights of determination. Romeo, which he reluctantly agreed to take on in competition with the successful revival of the play at Covent Garden (Eliza O’Neill as the Juliet of men’s fantasies), was even less within his compass. There was nothing of the naive lover about his stage persona. For the last Shakespearean outing of his second season, Kean selected the title role in the rarely performed Richard II. The text used was mangled beyond recognition, and his performance elicited from Hazlitt one of his most celebrated formulae: ‘Mr. Kean made it a character of passion, that is, of feeling combined with energy; whereas it is a character of pathos, that is to say of feeling combined with weakness.’89 Hazlitt seems always to have been capable of holding Shakespeare in his head while watching and listening to a garbled version, and he had an indisputable point to make. The fact would seem to be that Kean lost his access to feeling whenever he forfeited his energy. Unlike Kemble and Young, he could not feel in repose.

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The craze for Kean was already on the wane by the end of the 1814– 1815 season, which is not to say that he had fallen out of favour, only that novelty has a limited time-span. He was now established as Kemble’s only serious contender for the crown of tragedy, and confident enough to choose his own friends rather than hover, cap in hand, on the fringes of fashion. It was in the summer of 1815 that he founded the Wolves Club at the Coal Hole Tavern in Fountain Court. So many rumours and scandals attached themselves, during its short life, to the activities of this hard-drinking society that its raison d’être has been obscured. Kean spelt it out, with calculated pomposity, in his address to members at the fi rst official meeting: When men consider they were created for each other, not only for themselves, the interests of mankind must be blended with individual speculation, and in everyone that bears the human form each man must be a brother; and it is my wish to instil these sentiments into the minds of our little community, that no insignificant distinctions shall have weight when we can (with personal convenience) serve a fellow creature; or worldly exaltation prevent us from mixing with worthy men, whom I must conceive the great Author of all being intended for equality.90 Stripped of its bluster, this is a declaration of radical opposition to privilege. The Wolves knowingly satirized the manners and attitudes of the gentlemen’s clubs on which their ‘society’ was mockingly modelled. It was a gentlemen’s club from which gentlemen were excluded. Instead, prize-fighters mingled and drank with actors and tradesmen. There is no clearer evidence of Kean’s political position than the attacks to which he and the Wolves were subjected in the Tory press. Although surviving proof is scarce, A. C. Grayling is surely right in saying that, at least until fear silenced him, ‘Kean vociferously publicized his radical political views off-stage.’91 More concerned to shore up his reputation than to risk it, Kean took on no new Shakespearean roles during his third season. Early in his fourth (1816–1817), though, he persuaded the management of Drury Lane to stage Timon of Athens. Leigh Hunt surmises that the managers agreed because of ‘the great success of Mr. Kean in characters of a certain caustic interest’.92 For Kean, always careless of dramaturgy, the title role had ‘outsider’ appeal, and he was still confident of his ability to carry a shaky play. The Hon. George Lamb, a member of the management committee,

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had already abridged the text, and it was Kean’s established custom, when working up a play for performance, to eliminate any remaining material that threatened to shift the focus away from him. He had done so successfully, at the end of the 1815–1816 season, with Maturin’s Bertram (the staged version was quite as much Kean’s as Maturin’s). Why not with Timon? The audience responded respectfully, but without enthusiasm, and Timon left the repertoire after seven performances. By the summer of 1817, Drury Lane was again in financial crisis. Kean was now powerful – and bloodyminded – enough to limit his appearances to the agreed number, and it was no longer true that the box-office income on his performance nights compensated for the shortfall elsewhere. In the desperate hope of persuading him to appear more often, the managers gave him free choice of plays for his fi fth season (1817–1818). Even at the time, and certainly in retrospect, that was a mistake. Herman Merivale’s squeezing of the Henry VI plays into the single Richard Duke of York provided Kean with a pallid reflection of Richard III – it lasted for seven performances – and as King John, a Kemble part in the year of Kemble’s heralded retirement from the stage, he had his first outright Shakespearean failure. The production struggled through three nights. Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, with Kean as Barabas, fared better (eleven performances) and a dramatization of Byron’s poem, The Bride of Abydos, was repeated fourteen times. This was the only play in which Kean openly took on the role of a Byronic hero. By the end of the season, receipts at Drury Lane had fallen £4,000 below the running costs. Despite his aspirations and his confidence that he could do better than the gentleman-amateurs who were running the theatre, Kean had no aptitude for management. The gentleman-amateurs knew that. When, in the summer of 1819, they offered up Drury Lane for rent, Kean’s application was rejected and the lease went to Elliston. Kean’s years of undisputed greatness were few. By 1820, the best were behind him. It was probably in that year that he began the protracted affair with Charlotte Cox that would reach its shattering conclusion in his January 1825 trial for ‘criminal conversation’ with a married woman. It was also in 1820 (24 April) that he made his London debut as King Lear, the last of his Shakespearean roles to retain any historical interest. Two months earlier, a victim of his own competitiveness, he had been spurred to rival Macready’s Covent Garden Coriolanus, widely received as second only to Kemble’s. The inevitable comparisons favoured Macready and fed Kean’s paranoia. In context, the determination to play Lear was brave. Charles Lamb was not alone in believing the play unperformable

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and better unperformed. Reviewing Kean’s performance for the London Magazine, Hazlitt hedged his bets: There are pieces of ancient granite that turn the edge of any modern chisel; so, perhaps, the genius of no living actor can be expected to cope with Lear. Mr. Kean chipped off a bit of the character here and there; but he did not pierce the solid substance, nor move the entire mass.93 For Hazlitt, ‘the third act of Othello and the three first acts of Lear, are Shakespeare’s great master-pieces in the logic of passion.’94 Kean, never a logical actor, had surprised him in the third act of Othello, but it was not until Kean’s Lear fell to his knees, with his head thrown back ‘like the figure of a man obtruncated’, to curse Goneril that Hazlitt felt his first ‘electric shock’.95 Other observers were more positive and some reviewers adulatory. For them, this was a supreme example of the actor’s craft of self-abandonment. The Blackwood’s critic found Kean’s Lear ‘most purely unaffected and untheatrical’, F. W. Hawkins placed it second only to Othello among his characters, and Elliston was gratified by full houses at last. Kean had considered restoring the tragic ending, but settled for following custom with Nahum Tate’s prettier resolution. In 1820 he was not as defiant as he had been in 1815. The Wolves Clubman had become a Freemason.96 It was a relief to Kean, after the 1819–1820 season of disappointed hopes, to escape to America, where he did the round of his favourite Shakespearean roles, made a lot of money, and offended Bostonian pride by refusing to perform Richard III to a sparse audience (it was the summer of 1821, and the well-heeled of Boston had left the city). Elliston shrewdly made a grand procession out of his return to Drury Lane, but the 1821–1822 season was a bitter one. Kean’s Wolsey in Henry VIII was coldly received, and he was an unhappy Posthumus opposite Young’s Iachimo in Cymbeline. He would have liked to prove himself equal to Garrick’s versatility by playing comedy, but shrewd opinion was against it: ‘he had no playfulness that was not as the playfulness of a panther, showing his claws every moment’ was G. H. Lewes’s cautionary retrospect.97 With a single exception, the rest of his Shakespearean career was confined to the repetition of the public’s favourite roles: Shylock, Richard III, Othello and occasionally Hamlet. The exception was the occasion for one of the saddest episodes in an increasingly sad story. Kean had been living wildly for well over a decade when the Cox v Kean trial opened in January 1825. Prurient interest was fed by the reading in court of some of his extravagant love-letters, and the verdict, unsurprisingly, went against him, His sense of being hunted

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in London was not new – he had acquired a house and 20 acres on the Isle of Bute as a bolt-hole and love-nest in 1822 – but now it frequently overwhelmed him. Worst of all, his memory was failing him. He was comfortable with his familiar roles, but new ones eluded him. He ought to have known that. The fiasco of his attempt at his friend Thomas Colley Grattan’s Ben Nazir in May 1827 had shocked him as much as it had shocked Grattan. But Kean was a fighter, and it galled him to hear reports of Macready’s growing repertoire of roles at Covent Garden. Like a veteran boxer on the comeback trail, he needed to show the public that he could still measure up. He needed to prove it to himself, too. Even so, without the assistance of an abnormally wide self-destructive streak, Kean would never have attempted Henry V at Drury Lane in March 1830. He struggled through for as long as he could on smatterings of half-remembered lines against hisses from the auditorium, but, despite his pleading apology before the final act, there was no hope of recovery. Abject, he wrote to his friend W. H. Halpin, editor of the Star: Fight for me, I have no resources in myself; mind is gone, and body is hopeless. God knows my heart. I would do, but cannot. Memory, the first of goddesses, has forsaken me, and I am left without a hope but from those old resources that the public and myself are tired of. Damn, God damn ambition. The soul leaps, the body falls.98

Non-Shakespearean Roles Kean’s arrival in London coincided with the flowering of melodrama as the dramatic mode most accommodating to the taste of the time. Shylock, Richard III and Othello are comparatively easily tilted towards the melodramatic, as is the finest of Kean’s non-Shakespearean roles, that of Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts. Contemporaries were persuaded by great acting that they were privileged to be present at great drama – a sleight-of-hand that inflated the reputation of Maturin’s Bertram and the younger Colman’s The Iron Chest. Because Kean shone in them, these ‘modern’ plays were accorded a place in the tragic repertoire, and yet, however advertized to their first audiences, they are melodramas. It is clear enough how tragedy is dramaturgically different. It follows through with the logic of its own dire narratives instead of setting up the inevitable and then avoiding it. But the distinction is not so clear when approached from the perspective of the actor. What, for example, of King Lear, in the

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form in which Kean’s company played it? Nahum Tate preserves the old king to ‘gently pass our short reserves of time / In calm reflections on our fortunes past’, and ensures the country’s future prosperity by marrying a healthy Cordelia to Edgar. Kean would not have changed his ‘tragic’ style because the ‘tragedy’ had been mangled into melodrama. He played it, as he played every part that mattered to him, as if it was his life that was on the line. Even John Kemble acknowledged that: ‘our styles of acting are so totally different, that you must not expect me to like that of Mr. Kean,’ he told James Boaden, ‘but one thing I must say in his favour, – he is at all times terribly in earnest.’99 Hazlitt, who knew the difference between a good play and a bad one, nevertheless felt the force of Kean’s Sir Edward Mortimer in The Iron Chest: The last scene of all, his coming to life again after his swooning at the fatal discovery of his guilt, and then falling back after a ghastly struggle, like a man waked from the tomb, into despair and death in the arms of his mistress, was one of those consummations of the art, which those who have seen and have not felt them in this actor, may be assured that they have never seen or felt anything in the course of their lives, and never will to the end of them.100 The implicit slur on anyone who could see Kean act without being moved was a common one. It gave rise to quarrels, even among friends, and cemented the rivalry of Keanites and Kembleites.101 What can be said with confidence is that Kean knowingly worked on his audience. There was no fourth wall in his Drury Lane, and the auditorium was not separated from the stage by darkness. It is a different experience of theatre if you can see (and hear) the reactions of people around you as well as those of the actors, and an actor who must milk an audience he can see as well as hear must know how to read the signs. It was Kean’s good fortune to arrive in London at a time when theatregoers were attuned by melodrama to excess. His admirers were convinced that he, more than any other actor – ever, knew how to carry the emotional truths of tragedy into their consciousness. For them, perhaps he did. But we need to be wary of neat distinctions between tragedy (which appeals to the emotions) and melodrama (which plays on the nerves) when we speculate on the nature of Kean’s achievement. Hazlitt’s response to his death scene in The Iron Chest (but, this being melodrama, Mortimer survives) demands further consideration. The Iron Chest failed on its first production at Drury Lane in 1796. Among the reasons for that failure was John Kemble’s fumbling inadequacy in the

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role of Sir Edward Mortimer. It may be that he had overdosed on laudanum – a treatment for the asthma that increasingly afflicted him – or it may be that he was drunk. (Despite the aura of respectability that surrounded him, Kemble was almost as indulgent as Kean, but wise enough to get drunk with his social superiors rather than before them.) Colman took Kemble to task in an angry preface to the published play, and its reputation was rescued when the author revived it at the Haymarket, of which he was then manager, with the versatile Elliston in Kemble’s role. It would have been a special delight for Kean to succeed in 1816 where Kemble had failed 20 years earlier. Colman called The Iron Chest a tragedy, but it is a melodrama avant la lettre, and Mortimer is interesting only because he transposes the ‘secret guilt’ of Gothic plays into a less rarefied world. The source was William Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams (1794), from which Colman had scrupulously expunged anything that might ‘inculcate levelling principles, and disrespect for the Laws of our Country’.102 What remains is a reasonably well made, but utterly routinized, mixed drama, with songs and low comedy interspersing scenes of pathos and extremity. Whenever Mortimer is on stage, he carries inner turmoil with him, and the eventual revelation of his guilt produced from Kean a representation of human pain that Hazlitt registered as ‘one of those consummations of the art’ of acting. The ability to perform so affectingly without serious support from the play has to be seen as remarkable. When Irving, the supreme exponent of secret guilt, set out to emulate Kean at the Lyceum in 1879, his playing of Mortimer was similarly singled out, but times had changed and the play was found wanting. As one admirer of Irving observed, The Iron Chest is ‘a vehicle for a great actor’s performance, in which he can succeed only if he has an overpowering personality’.103 A ‘personality actor’, like Kean and like Irving, never disappears into a part: he relocates himself in it. Sometimes even more is needed: since Colman neglected, or failed, to endow Mortimer with any character of his own, Kean and Irving (and even Elliston) had to fill the hollow with their own ‘personality’. And when, as became increasingly obvious with Kean, the personality is so manifestly a damaged one, theatricality and psychopathology combine to stimulate an irresistible curiosity. The test case is that of Sir Giles Overreach in A New Way to Pay Old Debts. So long as Kean was fit to perform it, Massinger’s play was an essential item in the national repertoire, and the descent into madness of Sir Giles Overreach had an effect on Kean’s audiences comparable with that of his writhings as Sir Edward Mortimer. The routinely cited case is that of Lord Byron, who purportedly had a fit (or, alternatively, fainted) at a

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performance in 1816. Legend and truth are tangled here, and Byron’s own recollection invites scepticism. Writing to John Murray from Bologna on 12 August 1819, he provides a more probable explanation: Last night I went to the representation of Alfieri’s Mirra – the last two acts of which threw me into convulsions. – I do not mean by that word – a lady’s hysterics – but the agony of reluctant tears – and the choaking shudder which I do not often undergo for fiction. – This is but the second time for anything under reality, the first was on seeing Kean’s Sir Giles Overreach. ‘Reluctant tears’ and a ‘choaking shudder’ are evidence enough of an actor’s impact, and Kean was clearly able to uncover in Massinger’s villainous capitalist – a blueprint for the heartless landlords of nineteenth-century melodrama – an emotional profundity that threatened the play’s status as a comedy. He had seized on Shylock with a similar rapacity, but the selfidentification with Overreach was even more compelling. The play was not Kean’s discovery. Garrick had revived it, and Kemble had played it during the previous century, but dropped it from his repertoire after unfavourable comparisons with Cooke, until unwisely reviving it, in conscious competition with Kean, a few weeks after the Drury Lane première. Kemble had no temperamental affinity with Overreach, no personal sense of the ‘strange antipathy / Between us, and true gentry’ (2.1.88–9). For Kean, the contradiction at the heart of the role was an expression of his own confusion. Overreach’s contempt for the aristocracy is matched by his determination to marry his daughter into it: ‘All my ambition is to have my daughter / Right honourable’ (4.1.99–100). (Kean sends his son to Eton.) A New Way to Pay Old Debts is almost exclusively concerned with issues of class. (So was the Wolves Club, founded a few months before Kean’s London debut as Overreach.) Massinger scattered into Overreach’s lines the words ‘Lord’ and ‘honourable’. ‘We think Mr. Kean never shewed more genius than in pronouncing this single word, Lord’, wrote Hazlitt after his second visit to the Drury Lane production:104 Sir Giles, he continued, ‘makes use of Lord Lovell merely as the stalking-horse of his ambition. In other respects, he has the greatest contempt for him, and the necessity he is under of paying court to him for his own purposes, infuses a double portion of gall and bitterness into the expression of his self-conscious superiority’. Overreach has more money than the aristocracy, and knows it: ‘my wealth / Shall weigh his titles down, and make you equals’ (3.2.103–4). Kean had more talent than the aristocracy, and knew it. His dependence on the approbation

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of the occupants of the boxes riled him constantly. In the end, Overreach is outmanoeuvred (a fear of being outmanoeuvred kept Kean on the qui vive), and ‘offers to kill’ his own daughter. Lord Lovell intervenes: at the best you are but a man, And cannot so create your aims, but that They may be crossed. (5.1.297–9) And Overreach spits at him. It was an action that lingered in Byron’s memory, and one that he reproduced in his play Marino Faliero. To John Murray, who had warned him of Ugo Foscolo’s objection to this episode, he wrote on 8 October 1820: I know what F means about Calendaro’s spitting at Bertram – that’s national – the objection I mean. – The Italians and French – with those ‘flags of Abomination’ their pocket handkerchiefs – spit there – and here – and every where else – in your face almost – and therefore object to it on the Stage as too familiar. – But – we who spit nowhere – but in a Man’s face – when we grow savage – are not likely to feel this. – Remember Massinger – and Kean’s Sir Giles Overreach. We should not forget, when assessing the significance of Kean’s spitting at a Lord in 1816, the levelling tendency of melodrama, a genre in which simple virtue might outshine high birth. Overreach, to be sure, is to be compared with the heartless landowners who try to dispossess the helpless heroines of melodrama. But Kean found in him the victim of establishment conspiracy – like Shylock, an exploited exploiter. The Venetian Christians had spat on Shylock’s Jewish gabardine. Kean’s Overreach was spitting back. A New Way to Pay Old Debts stayed in Kean’s repertoire for the remaining 17 years of his life: he last played Overreach at Brighton in late February 1833. In failing health, he could hold himself in reserve for four acts, in anticipation of the supreme effort of Act Five and, if his performance was uneven, he never disappointed his audiences at the climax. For G. H. Lewes, who contended that ‘[t]he greatest artist is he who is greatest in the highest reaches of his art’: all defects were overlooked or disregarded, because it was impossible to watch Kean as Othello, Shylock, Richard, or Sir Giles Overreach without being strangely shaken by the terror, and the pathos, and the passion of a stormy spirit uttering itself in tones of irresistible power.105

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Such a judgement reflects a significant shift in what social historians have called the mentalité of the British public – a shift already discernible in the difference between a portrait by Joshua Reynolds and one by Gainsborough, and fully established by the time Thomas Lawrence created his images of Kemble. Shakespeareans were being led away from the Johnsonian dictum that ‘Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.’106 Kemble, it might be argued, pursued a Johnsonian route through Shakespeare’s heroes. ‘In the writings of other poets’, Johnson continued, ‘a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.’ We can be fairly certain that Johnson would have hated Kean: The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight a-while, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth. Romantic Shakespeare, by contrast, delighted in the ‘pleasures of sudden wonder’, and ‘fanciful invention’ had brought into question ‘the stability of truth’. Kean spoke to an age that preferred the individual to the general. ‘Our’ Shakespeare, as Coleridge wrote, is ‘myriad-minded’,107 and he countered Johnson with a dictum of his own: ‘Nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise.’108 It was because he seemed, however mysteriously, to contain within himself the reasons why Shylock, Richard III, Othello and Sir Giles Overreach were so, and not otherwise, that Kean persuaded audiences of the truth of his characterizations. No one else would, or could, have come so close to the sources of behaviour. Kean’s intense style of acting was, for those alert to it, complex psychology in action. The nineteenth-century novel would adopt him. Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff was not far away.

A Coda Without its sequel in the steep decline into dissipation, the story of Edmund Kean’s triumph would not have leant itself so readily to legend. Alcohol and philandering have damaged many other actors’ careers, but most have been better at concealment than Kean was. The trajectory of John Barrymore (1882–1942) runs parallel: the intense rivalry with his brother

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Lionel, his increasing tendency to go missing when the pressure became too great, the addiction to women (four of whom he married), the friendships with boxers (Kid McCoy and Jack Dempsey), his purchase of a rural bolt-hole, the self-humiliation involved in continuing to act when he could no longer hold lines in his head. And there is, of course, a Barrymore legend: Everything he did was in an epic way, and, even when he appeared to be making an embarrassing clown of himself, he did so on a grand and wholesale scale, coming apart with boisterous gargantuan humor and a sardonic air of self-criticism.109 There is too little sign, though, of a capacity for self-criticism in Kean, and very little humour in the legend, unless embroidered by Mark Twain. But Barrymore belonged to the theatrical aristocracy: Kean slid into the theatre through the tradesman’s entrance. He had no better way of dealing with fame than the drug-doomed rock stars of the twentieth century. Followers of American boxing may remember the fate of Jack Johnson: followers of British football may think of the genius of George Best, who remained a working-class Belfast boy while living like a lord and drinking himself to at least three deaths. Best, who looked a bit like Kean and moved with a similar sinister grace, even has an airport named after him. Biographers, even one as uneasy as Bryan Waller Procter, stimulate legends, but Kean’s was better fed by Alexandre Dumas père. Working over a rejected script, Dumas produced a play (Kean: ou, Désordre et génie) in which any relation to anything that might be called historical truth is entirely accidental. His Kean is an irresistible force, let loose on the English classsystem, a mixture of ‘master-at-arms and mountebank, drunkard and Lovelace’,110 loved by modest women, greedily pursued by their aristocratic ‘betters’, feared by the Prince of Wales, resourceful in adversity – a blood relation of Cyrano de Bergerac and D’Artagnan, with a low-life dash of François Villon. Kean was staged at the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris, just over three years after its subject’s death, and with the largerthan-life Frédérick Lemaître (1800–1876) in the title role. Lemaître lived as excessively, and courted notoriety as brazenly, as Kean had during the glory years, and his charisma was vital to the play’s theatrical success.111 He played Kean as a kindred spirit, as a man both burdened and uplifted by the need to live up to his heroic onstage image. Robert Baldick concludes his biography of Lemaître by drawing attention to a sheet of paper

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on which the actor had copied a speech from the play. It is an excerpt from the scene in which Kean warns a young aspirant to the stage of the perils she must encounter: Once you have set your foot on the fatal path of the theatre, you must follow it to the end, exhaust its joys and its sorrows, drain its cup and its chalice, drink its honey and its lees; you must finish as you began and die as you have lived – die as Molière died, to the sound of clapping, hisses and cheers! But if there is still time for you not to take that road, if you have not yet opened the gate, then do not enter . . . believe me, on my honour, believe me.112 At the foot of the page, as if to sign the Faustian pact on Kean’s behalf as well, Lemaître has written his own name. Dumas’s implied proposition that Kean was killed by the thing he loved, like the play itself, has limited merit. (It might equally be argued that success prolonged a death-marked life.) But legend necessarily merges with truth, whether the subject is Kean, Lemaître or Freddie Mercury. It did so for the German poet, Heinrich Heine, who saw Kean in Paris: The whole production is wonderfully true to life. It took me right back in spirit to old England, and I really thought I was watching the late Edmund Kean again, whom I saw so often over there. The illusion was doubtless largely due to the actor who played the leading role, although Frédérick Lemaître is a tall, imposing figure and Kean was short and stocky. But there was something in the latter’s personality and acting which is also to be found in Frédérick Lemaître. He is a sublime buffoon whose sinister clowning turns Thalia pale with fear and Melpomene radiant with happiness.113 Heine’s image of an actor who could frighten the Muse of comedy and bring joy to the Muse of tragedy is evocative of Kean at his most mischievous, and it is, perhaps, a pity that Dumas’s play has been displaced on the modern stage by Jean-Paul Sartre’s comparatively sober reworking of it. Sartre finds in the ‘idea’ of an actor an intriguing challenge to the ‘idea’ of reality. His Kean, tied to the contingencies of existence, finds himself void of essence and therefore, unlike Dumas’s, without the resources to take control. That is not to say that Sartre’s version debars bravura performance. Pierre Brasseur, who played the title role in Paris in 1953, had already brilliantly reincarnated Frédérick Lemaître in Marcel Carné’s 1945 film,

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Les Enfants du Paradis. There was nothing shy about his acting, nor that of Alan Badel, who played Sartre’s Kean at the Oxford Playhouse in 1971.114 Most recently (2007), the part has been played in London by Sir Antony Sher, an actor quite as likely as Kean was to make a virtue of eccentricity. Partly shielded by the earned respectability of knighthood, Sher has experienced (still experiences?) the disorientating mixture of exhilaration and torment that may well be inherent in acting for a living. Interviewed by Matt Wolf for Broadway.com on 18 June 2007, he quoted from the speech that best explained the hold Sartre’s play had on him: ‘You don’t act to earn a living, you act to lie to yourself, you act so as not to know yourself. You act because you’d go mad if you didn’t.’ It might be argued that a line of ‘rogue’ British actors runs parallel with the line of ‘respectable’ actors from Richard Burbage (which line was he on?) to Ian McKellen: it links Kean to Sher, and perhaps to Ben Kingsley, who is unmistakably of Kean’s physical type. Kingsley performed Raymund FitzSimons’s one-man play, Edmund Kean, in 1983. This is how FitzSimons, feeding the legend in the service of truth, describes what he wrote: In the play, Kean is conceived as a monster – a man of relentless ambition, forever seeking instant fame: a man paranoidly convinced that everyone is conspiring against him: a megalomaniac allowing no one else to shine beside himself: a sinister man, a volcano of accumulated resentment, a thunderstorm of venom, a torrent of bile: a man with an urge for self-destruction, who burns himself out by the time he is thirty. Yes, Kean is a monster, drink-sodden and syphilitic. But the glorious mystery is this – he is also the first great Romantic actor and the matchless interpreter of Shakespeare.115

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Notes

Introduction 1

2 3

4

5 6 7 8 9

10

11

12

13 14

15

16

17

18 19 20 21

Quoted Michael Caines, ed., David Garrick (Lives of Shakespearian Actors I, vol. 1, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), p. xxvii. See Philip Auslander, Liveness (New York: Routledge, 1999). David Roberts, Thomas Betterton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). See James Fullarton Arnott, Actors (Sale Catalogues of the Libraries of Eminent Persons, vol. 12; London: Mansell, 1975). Ibid., pp. 364 and 374. The copy of F4 made 3 guineas while F1 was sold for only 2. Ibid., p. 378. Ibid., p. 376. Ibid., p. [vii]. See Joseph Roach, ‘Public Intimacy: The Prior History of “It” ’, in Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody, eds, Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 15–30. See the articles by Jacky Bratton on Kean, Peter Thomson on Garrick and Shearer West on Siddons in Luckhurst and Moody, Theatre and Celebrity. See Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), ch. 3 ‘Betterton’s Funeral’, pp. 73–118. Jeffrey Kahan, The Cult of Kean (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); William Hazlitt, ‘Mr Kemble’s King John’ (7 Dec 1816), in Selected Writings, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols, London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998, 3: 178, quoted Dobson, p. 58. See pp. 58 and 113. Quoted in Ian McIntyre, Garrick (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1999), pp. 125–6. OED star n. 1, 5.a, the quotation comes from 1779; see also Simon Varey, ‘A Star Is Born’, Notes and Queries 238 (Sept 1993): 335–6. Jacky Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 118. See Kalman A. Burnim and Philip H. Highfill, Jr., John Bell, Patron of British Theatrical Portraiture (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998). See pp. 49–54. Peter Barnes, Jubilee (London: Methuen, 2001), pp. 30–1. See pp. 107 and 68–9. See Robert D. Hume, ‘Before the Bard: “Shakespeare” in Eighteenth-Century London’, ELH 64 (1997): 41–75.

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Notes

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Chapter 5 1 2

3

4

5

6

7 8 9

10 11 12 13

14

15 16

17

18 19 20

21 22 23

Ian McIntyre, Garrick (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1999), p. 233. George Winchester Stone, Jr., and George M. Kahrl, David Garrick: A Critical Biography (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), p. 429. David Garrick, The Letters of David Garrick, ed. David M. Little and George M. Kahrl, 3 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), Letter 362, 2: 463. Quoted by Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 182. Quoted by Vanessa Cunningham, Shakespeare and Garrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 8. George M. Kahrl, The Garrick Collection of Old English Plays (London: The British Library, 1982), p. 36. Ibid., p. 37. David Garrick, The Letters, Letter 627, 2: 732. Quoted by Tiffany Stern, ‘ “I do wish that you had mentioned Garrick”: The Absence of Garrick in Johnson’s Shakespeare’, in Eric Rasmussen and Aaron Santesso, eds, Comparative Excellence: New Essays on Shakespeare and Johnson (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 2007), p. 72. Stern’s article brilliantly shows how and why Johnson’s edition so sedulously avoided mention of Garrick. Quoted by Stern, p. 90. Quoted by Stern, p. 73. Quoted by Cunningham, p. 6. Quoted by Cunningham, p. 162. On Bell’s edition see Kalman A. Burnim and Philip H. Highfill, Jr., John Bell, Patron of British Theatrical Portraiture (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998). Harry William Pedicord and Frederick Louis Bergmann, eds, The Plays of David Garrick, vols 3 and 4, Garrick’s Adaptations of Shakespeare (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), 3: 79. Cunningham, p. 7. Richard Warner, A Letter to David Garrick, Esq., concerning a Glossary to the Plays of Shakespeare (London, 1768), p. 92. James Boaden, ed., The Private Correspondence of David Garrick, 2 vols (London, 1831–1832), 1: 3–4. Ibid., 1: 11. Ibid., 1: 20. See George Winchester Stone, Jr., ‘David Garrick and the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Notes toward a New Biography’, in Stone and Philip H. Highfill, Jr., eds, In Search of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), p. 9. On early biographies of Garrick as a sign of celebrity, see Cheryl Wanko, Roles of Authority: Thespian Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2003), pp. 187–213. Fitzpatrick, An Enquiry, p. 21. Ibid. David Garrick, The Letters, Letter 281, 1: 350.

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418 24

25

26 27

28 29

30 31

32 33

34 35

36 37 38 39

40 41

42 43 44 45

46 47

48 49 50 51

Notes

Paul Prescott, ‘Doing All That Becomes a Man: The Reception and Afterlife of the Macbeth Actor, 1744–1889’, Shakespeare Survey 57 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 85. Thomas Wilkes, A General View of the Stage (London, 1759), pp. 248–9, quoted by Stone and Kahrl, p. 555. Thomas Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, 3 vols (Dublin, 1784), 2: 93–4. Murphy, Life of Garrick, 1: 82; The Connoisseur, 1 September 1754, quoted by Kalman A. Burnim, David Garrick, Director (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961), p. 113. ‘Sir’ John Hill, The Actor (London, 1755), p. 266, quoted by Burnim, p. 113. One authoritative catalogue lists over 280 portraits, prints, statues, busts and other such images; see Philip H. Highfill, Jr., Kalman A. Burnim and Edward A. Langhans, eds, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses . . . and other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–1993), 6: 81–103. Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, 2: 148. The first is in the Kunsthaus in Zürich, the second in the Tate Modern, London. On the portraits see Stephen Leo Carr and Peggy A. Knapp, ‘Seeing through Macbeth’, PMLA 96 (1981): 837–47. Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, 2: 118. Jean Georges Noverre, Letters on Dancing and Ballets, trans. Cyril W. Beaumont (London, 1930), pp. 84–5. Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, 2: 105. Arthur Murphy, The Life of David Garrick, 2 vols (London, 1801), 1: 70–1. The classic account of Garrick’s adaptation is George Winchester Stone, Jr., ‘Garrick’s Handling of Macbeth’, SP 38 (1941): 609–28. Stephen Orgel, ‘The Authentic Shakespeare’, Representations 21 (1988): 15. Prescott, ‘Doing All That Becomes a Man’, p. 84. Murphy, 1: 198. John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus (1708), ed. Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume (London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1987), pp. 51–2. Downes, pp. 71–2. Michael Dobson, ‘Improving on the Original: Actresses and Adaptations’, in Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson, eds, Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 55. Ibid., p. 56. Pedicord and Bergmann, 3: 28. Quoted by Pedicord and Bergmann, 1: 72. Boaden, Private Correspondence, I: 134; David Garrick, The Letters, Letter 281, 1: 352. Boaden, Private Correspondence, 1: 377. See Stone and Kahrl’s appendix of Garrick’s roles by frequency of performance, pp. 656–8. David Garrick, The Letters, Letter 452, 2: 565. Ibid., Letter 726, 2: 838. Ibid. Quoted in ibid.

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Notes 52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74

75

76 77 78 79

80

81

419

David Garrick, The Letters, Letter 93, 1: 152. William Cooke, Memoirs of Charles, Macklin, Comedian (London, 1804), pp. 283–4. Quoted by Burnim, David Garrick, Director, pp. 121–2. Cooke, Memoirs of Macklin, p. 284. Quoted by Denis Donoghue, ‘Macklin’s Shylock and Macbeth’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 43 (1954): 428. Ibid. David Garrick, The Letters, Letter 20, 1: 34. Both quoted in McIntyre, p. 39. David Garrick, The Letters, Letter 15, 1: 28. Quoted in McIntyre, pp. 125–6. Ibid., p. 126. Ibid., p. 127. Quoted in McIntyre, p. 2. Joshua Steele, An Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech (London, 1775), pp. 39 and 47. David Thomas’s comment that it is ‘impossible to interpret meaningfully’ is unduly cautious. See David Thomas and Arnold Hare, eds, Restoration and Georgian England, 1660–1788 (Theatre in Europe: A Documentary History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 353. Steele, pp. 40 and 47. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid. Ronald Hafter, ‘Garrick and Tristram Shandy’, SEL 7 (1967): 475–89 (484). Quoted in McIntyre, p. 350. Ibid., p. 49. C. Cibber, The Tragical History of Richard III (1700), p. 52. Cibber represents Shakespeare’s lines in italics and lines substantially Shakespearean are marked with an initial quotation mark. There are fine accounts of Garrick’s acting in, for example, Stone and Kahrl, pp. 23–51 and 471–572, but Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1985), chs 2–4, is brilliant in its analysis of the connection with contemporary scientific theory and with Diderot whose theory of acting in the Paradoxe sur le comédien was profoundly affected by his encounter with Garrick’s style. See Robert D. Hume, ‘Before the Bard: “Shakespeare” in Eighteenth-Century London’ ELH, 64 (1997), pp. 41–75 for the best summary of what was happening in Shakespeare performance from 1700 to the arrival of Garrick. See Emmett L. Avery, ‘The Shakespeare Ladies Club’, SQ, 7 (1956), pp. 153–8. Quoted in Avery, p. 155. Avery, p. 156. Arthur H. Scouten, ‘The Increase in Popularity of Shakespeare’s Plays in the Eighteenth Century: A Caveat for Interpretors of Stage History’, SQ 7 (1956): 189–202, 193–4. Brian Vickers, ed., Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, vol. 3 1733–52 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1975), p. 13. Ibid.

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420 82

83

84 85

86 87 88

89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

98 99 100 101

102 103 104

105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112

113 114 115

Notes

Quoted in Thomas and Hare, Restoration and Georgian England, 1660–1788, pp. 247–50. See Don-John Dugas, Marketing the Bard (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2006), pp. 180–238. Quoted in Cunningham, pp. 162–3. Samuel Johnson, Prose and Poetry, ed. Mona Wilson (London’: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1950), pp. 143–4. See Dobson, Making of the National Poet, pp. 205–7. Pedicord and Bergmann, 4: 97. See Harry William Pedicord, ‘Ragandjaw: Garrick’s Shakespearean Parody for a Private Theatre’, PQ 60 (1981): 197–204. David Garrick, The Letters, Letter 47, 1: 83. Pedicord and Bergmann, 4: 225. Ibid., 3: 197. Ibid., 3: 200. On this and other adaptations of the play, see Cunningham, pp. 78–95. Pedicord and Bergmann, 3: 143–4. Quoted in Stone and Kahrl, p. 92. Quoted in Burnim, pp. 131–2. Samuel Pepys, The Diary, ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews, 11 vols (London: Bell and Hyman, 1970–1983), 3: 208. ‘Advertisement’ to the published text, in Pedicord and Bergmann, 3: 154. Ibid., 3: 422. Letter 317, 1: 387. Quoted by George Winchester Stone, Jr., ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Hands of Garrick and Colman’, PMLA 54 (1939): 467–82 (p. 474). Ibid., p. 480. Quoted by Cunningham, p. 142. Margaret L. Mare and W. H. Quarrell, eds, Lichtenberg’s Visits to England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 15. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 10. Quoted in Stone and Kahrl, p. 543. Ibid., pp. 547–8. Quoted in McIntyre, p. 65. Hamlet (1676), sig. [A]2a. Both quoted by Cunningham, p. 152. Brian Vickers, ed., Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, vol. 5 1765–1774 (1979), p. 483. Vickers quotes extensively from reviews, pp. 466–86. Quoted by Cunningham, p. 139. David Garrick, The Letters, Letter 730, 3: 841. Vickers, vol. 5 1765–1774, pp. 466–70. On Murphy’s piece, see Richard W. Schoch, ‘ “A Supplement to Public Laws”: Arthur Murphy, David Garrick, and Hamlet, with Alterations’, Theatre Journal 57 (2005): 21–32. For another playlet, by Richard Cumberland, responding to Murphy’s and supporting Garrick, see Dobson, pp. 174–6.

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Notes 116

117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126

127 128

129

130

131 132 133

134 135 136

137 138

139 140 141

142 143 144 145 146

421

Quoted by George Winchester Stone, Jr., ‘Garrick’s Production of King Lear: A Study in the Temper of the Eighteenth-Century Mind’, SP 45 (1948): 89–103, p. 103. Quoted in Cunningham, p. 27. Cooke, Memoirs of Macklin, p. 107. Vickers, 1733–52, p. 212. Ibid., p. 263. See Pedicord and Bergmann, 3: 324. An Examen of the New Comedy (London, 1747), p. 22. Davies, 2: 172. Vickers, 1733–52, p. 269. Ibid., p. 326. Brian Vickers, ed., Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, vol. 4 1753–1765 (1976), p. 108. Vickers, vol. 5 1765–1774, p. 140. See J. D. Hainsworth, ‘King Lear and John Brown’s Athelstan’, SQ 26 (1975): 471–7. Quoted by Arthur John Harris, ‘Garrick, Colman and King Lear: A Reconsideration’, SQ 22 (1971): 61. George Colman, The History of King Lear (London, 1768), in Colman, The Dramatic Works, 4 vols (London, 1777), 3: 103. Vickers, vol. 4, p. 99. Letter 574, 2: 682–3. See Jean I. Marsden, ‘Daddy’s Girls: Shakespearian Daughters and EighteenthCentury Ideology’, Shakespeare Survey 51 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 17–26. Davies, 2: 208. Quoted in Burnim, p. 145. Quoted by Reiko Oya, Representing Shakespearean Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 36. Vickers, Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, vol. 3 1733–52, pp. 365–6. Quoted in Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 31. Ibid., pp. 31–2. Ibid., p. 31. See Christian Deelman, The Great Shakespeare Jubilee (London: Michael Joseph, 1964), p. 69. Traces of Gainsborough’s attempts to paint the Shakespeare portrait have been found by x-raying another portrait. On portraits of Garrick, see two excellent exhibition catalogues: Christopher Lennox-Boyd et al., eds, Theatre: The Age of Garrick (London: Christopher Lennox-Boyd, 1994) and Every Look Speaks: Portraits of David Garrick (Bath: Holburne Museum of Art, 2003). Quoted in McIntyre, p. 415. Vickers, vol. 5 1765–1774, p. 345. Ibid., p. 354. George Colman the Elder, Man and Wife (1770), p. 42. Letter 567, 2: 675.

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422 147 148 149 150 151 152 153

Notes

Colman, New Brooms (1776), p. 30. Pedicord and Bergman, Garrick’s Own Plays (1980), 2: 108. Ibid., pp. 115, 119. Ibid., pp. 125–6. See Every Look Speaks, pp. 44–6. Quoted in Dobson, p. 216, n. 46. Quoted in Deelman, p. 290.

Chapter 6 1

2

3

4 5

6 7

8

9

10 11

12

13

14

See, for example, Sian Thomas, ‘Lady Macbeth’, in Michael Dobson, ed., Performing Shakespeare’s Tragedies Today: The Actor’s Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 95–105, esp. 95–7. See Tate Wilkinson, The Wandering Patentee, or, A History of the Yorkshire Theatres, from 1770 to the Present Time, 4 vols (York: Wilson, Spence and Mawman, 1795), 2: 115–16. Proceedings of the Sheffield Shakespeare Club, from its Commencement, in 1819, to January, 1829. By a Member of the Club (Sheffield: Crookes, 1829), p. 4. See also pp. 22, 27, 96–7. Proceedings of the Sheffield Shakespeare Club, pp. 78–9. William Hazlitt, ‘Mr Kemble’s King John’ (7 December 1816), in Selected Writings, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), 3: 178. See Theatre Notebook 52, 3 (1998): 175; 53, 1 (1999): 2. The NPG bought the portrait of Kemble as Cato in 2009; the press release they issued at the time has far more to say about the importance of Lawrence than it has about that of Kemble. Even this biography, Linda Kelly’s The Kemble Era: John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons and the London Stage (London: Bodley Head, 1980), is as much about Siddons as it is about Kemble. On the continuing proliferation of lives of Kean, see Jeffrey Kahan, The Cult of Kean (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). The best short biography of Kemble currently available is Peter Thomson’s entry in H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 31: 155–61. An Authentic Narrative of Mr Kemble’s Retirement from the Stage (London: Miller, 1817), p. 6. An Authentic Narrative, p. xxvii. See, for example, Marc Baer, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1992. [Joseph Haslewood] Secret History of the Green Room (London: Symmonds, 1792), p. 14. The same publication mischievously claims that Kemble earned his first £5 not as an actor but as a Methodist preacher, pp. 110–11. James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1825), 1: 5. Since despite his best intentions eight of Roger Kemble’s children pursued theatrical careers, he must have been a very disappointed man. See Boaden, 1: 5–6.

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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

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Boaden, 1: 19–20. Boaden, 1: 17–19. Kemble published these poems in Fugitive Pieces (York: Blanchard, 1780), pp. 32–6. Wilkinson, 2: 9, 14, 105; Boaden, 1: 13. Boaden, 1: 19. Belisarius, The Female Officer and Oh! It’s Impossible survive in manuscript in the Huntington Library. Boaden, 1: 21–2. Undated manuscript letter, Harvard Theatre Collection, ‘Kembleiana’, TS 997 480.20. Monthly Mirror 3 (April 1798): 68. Wilkinson, 2: 50. The duel was with James Aickin in March 1792; see Boaden, 2: 291–2. Wilkinson, 2: 49–51. Wilkinson, 2: 6. Elizabeth Inchbald, ‘Remarks on The Wheel of Fortune’, in Elizabeth Inchbald, ed., The Inchbald, The British Theatre, 25 vols (London: Longman et al., 1808), 18: 3–5;. 4–5. See e.g. Sigmund Freud, ‘Introductory lectures on Psycho-Analysis’, in James Strachey, tr., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols (London: Hogarth, 1953–1974), 15: 23. Kemble’s performance as the Angelo-like monk in Aurelio and Miranda, with Siddons as his chief victim, resonated worryingly with his performance as the monastically-dressed Duke in Measure for Measure, in which Siddons played a saintly Isabella. The playbill for this occasion (12 February 1767) is reproduced in An Authentic Narrative, p. 72. William Havard, King Charles the First: An Historical Tragedy (London: Watts, 1737), p. 56. Elizabeth Inchbald, ‘Remarks on The Count of Narbonne’, in The British Theatre, 20: 3–4; 3. Robert Jephson, The Count of Narbonne, in Inchbald, ed., The British Theatre, 20: 62. On Shakespeare and the rise of the Gothic, see especially John Drakakis and Dale Townshend, eds, Gothic Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2008). Boaden, 1: 23. On Kemble’s friendship with Malone, see Peter Martin, Edmond Malone, Shakespearean Scholar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 70. See Arthur Sherbo, The Birth of Shakespeare Studies (Ann Arbor, MI: Colleagues Press, 1986), pp. 177–9. Sir Walter Scott, review of Boaden’s Life, Quarterly Review April 1826. ‘Who buys “such readings as were never read”, / Must show such acting as was never seen’, scoffed an epigram in March 1790: in Folger Shakespeare Library W.a.40. The bulk of Kemble’s library was bought by the Duke of Devonshire, and is now in the Huntington Library in Palo Alto, California. The remainder was auctioned in 1821; see A. L. Munby, general ed., Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, 12 vols (London: Mansell, with Sotheby Parke Bernet Publications), vol. 12, ‘Actors’, ed. J. F. Arnott, 1975.

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424 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48

49

50 51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58 59

60

61

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Anonymous MS poem, 1817; Harvard Theatre Collection ‘Kembleiana’ vol. 7, TS 990 480.20. Boaden, 1: 51–61, 92. Wilkinson, 2: 50–1. Hazlitt, 3: 212. The Sun, June 24 1817. Public Advertiser 6 October 1783. Cited in Linda Kelly, The Kemble Era, p. 27. Morning Chronicle 11 November 1783. Boaden, vol. 1. Anonymous MS poem on Kemble’s retirement, 1817; Harvard Theatre Collection ‘Kembleiana’ vol. 7, TS 990 480.20. ‘Sir Walter Scott, letter to Lady Abercorn’, spring 1817, in H. J. C. Grierson, ed., The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, 12 vols (London: Constable, 1932–1937), 4: 420. Henry Mercer Graves, An Essay on the Genius of Shakespeare (London: Bigg, 1826), p. 167. Boaden, 1: 132. Remarks on the Character of Richard the Third, as played by Cooke and Kemble (London: Bryer, 1801), p. 47: Folger Shakespeare Library, W.b.67 item 94. These part-books are catalogued in the Folger as T.a.8–31. The Merchant of Venice is T.a.30. He felt strongly enough about the views it expressed, and annoyed enough that Whately’s opinions had subsequently been endorsed by Malone’s rival George Steevens in the notes to his 1803 edition of Shakespeare, to republish this work in expanded form in the year of his farewell season, as Macbeth, and King Richard the Third: An Essay (1817). On Shakespeare and eighteenth-century Francophobia, see Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, chapter 5. Inchbald, ‘Remarks of Julius Caesar’, in The British Theatre, 4: 3. On the banning of Coriolanus, see vol. 5, ‘Remarks on Coriolanus’, p. 5. Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 63. On Lullin’s Richard III, see le Vicomte Gauthier de Brecy, Memoires véridiques et ingénus de la vie privée, moral et politique d’un homme de bien (Paris: Guiraudet, 1834), pp. 282–4; on his friendship with Kemble, see the letter from Egerton Brydges reproduced in W. Powell Jones, ‘Sir Egerton Brydges on Lord Byron,’ Huntington Library Quarterly 13, 3 (May 1950): 325–37. Unidentified press cutting, April 22 1794, in Folger W.b.577, item 12. Benjamin Wyatt, Observations on the Design for the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, as Executed in the Year 1812 (London: Taylor, 1813), pp. 1–2. On theatre design in the age of Kemble see especially Iain Mackintosh, Architecture, Actor, Audience (London: Routledge, 1993), esp. pp. 25–40. Richard Cumberland, Memoirs of Richard Cumberland, Written by Himself, 1806–1807 (Philadelphia: Parry and McMillan), 1856, p. 387. Kemble usually then used these printed editions as the basis for his promptbooks: see especially Charles Shattuck, ed., John Philip Kemble Promptbooks, 11 vols

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Notes

62 63

64 65 66 67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74 75 76 77

78 79

80 81 82 83

425

(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1974). Boaden, 2: 279. See Joseph W. Donohue, Jr., ‘Kemble’s production of Macbeth (1794)’, Theatre Notebook 21 (1967): 63–74; The World, 22 April 1794. See also David Rostron, ‘Contemporary Political Comment in Four of J. P. Kemble’s Shakespearean Productions’, Theatre Research 12 (1972): 113–19. The Oracle, 8 May 1794. The World, 22 April 1794. ‘Remarks on Macbeth’, in Inchbald’s British Theatre, 4: 3. See, for example, his transcription of lines about the dress and appearance of witches in The Late Lancashire Witches, 1634, beside which he wrote ‘Macbeth # Dress of Witches in Shakespeare’s time.’ Undated commonplace book, Folger W.b.577 item 47. W. C. Oulton, The History of the Theatres of London, 2 vols (London: Martin and Bain, 1796), 2: 139–40. Robert Lloyd, The Actor (1760); cited in Arthur Colby Sprague, Shakespeare and the Actors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), p. 256. David Erskine Baker, Isaac Reed and Stephen Jones, Biographia Dramatica, or, a Companion to the Playhouse, 3 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees et al., 1812), 1: xlviii. An Authentic Narrative, pp. xxiv–xxvii. On Kemble’s Macbeth and Reynolds’ theories, see especially Reiko Oya, Representing Shakespearean Tragedy: Garrick, the Kembles, and Kean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 84–108. William Charles Macready, Reminiscences, ed. Pollock, vol. 1, p. 148; cited in Dennis Bartholomeusz, Macbeth and the Players (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 135–6. On Kemble’s Macbeth in general see pp. 98–153; also Oya, Representing Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 67–84. ‘Macbeth’, in Inchbald’s British Theatre, 4: 71. (Inchbald printed this speech in italics to indicate its non-Shakespearean provenance). In 1785 Kemble had retained the whole of Garrick’s added speech: see his part-book, Folger T.a.11. ‘Remarks on Macbeth’, in Inchbald’s British Theatre, 4: 4. Biographia Dramatica, p. xlviii. Unidentified press cutting, 22 April 1794, in Folger W.b.577, item 12. Principally his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1756. See e.g. Authentic Memoirs of the Green-Room, pp. 109, 117. The marriage was so abrupt and unceremonious (it took place in the afternoon and Mrs Kemble was on stage again in the evening) that a story got about that a nobleman whose daughter was threatening to elope with Kemble had promised the actor £4,000 if he would marry someone else within a fortnight, but had then declined to pay up. See Authentic Memoirs of the Green-Room, pp. 111–17. Public Advertiser 28 January 1795. The Drama, or, Theatrical Pocket Magazine, vol. 4 (London: Elvey, 1823), p. 117. London: Cooper and Graham, ‘1796’ [1795]. London: Cadell and Davies, 1796.

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426 84

85 86

87 88 89 90 91 92

93 94

95

96

97

98

99 100

101 102

103 104

Notes

On Malone and the Ireland forgeries, see especially Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 193–220; Peter Martin, Edmond Malone, pp. 188–203. Malone, Inquiry, pp. 2–3, 150–1. William Henry Ireland, The Confessions of William Henry Ireland (London: Goddard, 1805), pp. 139–40. William Henry Ireland, Vortigern (London: Barker et al., [1799]), p. xi. Ireland, Confessions, p. 159. Ireland, Confessions, pp. 146–7. Ireland, Vortigern, p. 67. Ireland, Confessions, pp. 157–8. On the first night of Vortigern see especially The Oracle, 4 April 1796; Jeffrey Kahan, Reforging Shakespeare: the Story of a Theatrical Scandal (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1998). The 1996 revival was delightful, despite playing, on the night I saw it, to an audience consisting largely of Shakespearean editors. Inchbald, ‘Remarks on As You Like It’ in The British Theatre, 4: 5. Russell Jackson, ‘Johanna Schopenhauer’s Journal: A German View of the London Theatre Scene, 1803–5,’ Theatre Notebook 52 (1998): 142–60, 152–4. This production is commemorated, probably not entirely accurately, by George Henry Harlow’s painting of the trial scene, often known as ‘The Kemble Family’ (c.1819), now at Basildon Park. See Bell’s Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays, 8 vols (London: 1773–1774), ‘Introduction’ to The Tempest, 4: 3. Inchbald applauded Kemble’s version on the grounds that Shakespeare’s ‘does not interest the passions.’ See ‘Remarks on The Tempest’, The British Theatre, 5: 5. See, for example, the pages catalogued as Folger W.b.577 items 92 and 96, where Kemble has transcribed relevant passages from sixteenth- and seventeenth¯ chés’ alongside them. century texts and written the word ‘A Thomas Middleton Raysor, ed., Coleridge’s Shakespearean Criticism, 2 vols (London: Constable, 1930), vol. 1, p. 83. The Examiner 13 October 1816. This nickname was also used, not always to Kemble’s face, by friends and acquaintances: see e.g. J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., 7 vols (Edinburgh: Cadell, 1837), vol. 3, pp. 266–7. See also the frontispiece to the second edition of the anonymous The Life of John Philip Kemble, Esquire, a Proprietor and Stage Manager of Covent Garden Theatre; Interspersed with Family and Theatrical Anecdotes (London: Johnston, 1809), in which Kemble is labelled ‘King John’ (and is crying ‘O my “aitches” ’). Boaden, 2: 516. Lawrence Huston Houtchens and Carolyn Washburn Houtchens, eds, Leigh Hunt’s Dramatic Criticism, 1808–1831 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), pp. 26–7. Leigh Hunt’s Dramatic Criticism, pp. 29–30. Both cartoons are reproduced and discussed in Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions, pp. 43–4, plates 8 and 9; see also Baer, Theatre and Disorder, plate 1, p. 181n, 254n.

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Notes 105 106

107 108

109

110 111 112 113

114 115

116 117

118

119 120 121 122 123 124 125

126 127 128 129

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Baer, pp. 129–32. See, e.g. Cruikshank’s cartoon King John and John Bull, reproduced in Baer, plate 8, and the rhyming placard ‘King John of old . . . ’ quoted in Baer, p. 80. Morning Chronicle 24 June 1817. A New Description of Sir John Soane’s Museum, 1955: 11th revised edition (London: Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2007), pp. 34–5, 43–4. John Ripley, ‘Julius Caesar’ On Stage in England and America, 1599–1973 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 50–73; 51. Kemble’s commonplace books are full of details transcribed from military manuals and works on ancient history suitable for use in such procession scenes: see e.g. Folger W.b.577, items 33, 39. Ripley, p. 53. Boaden, 2: 563. Hunt, Dramatic Criticism, pp. 67–8. An Authentic Narrative, pp. xviii–xix. Scott also drew attention to this moment in Kemble’s performance, in his review of Boaden’s biography. Ripley, p. 54. On this rivalry, see especially Peter Thomson, On Actors and Acting (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), chapter 9. An Authentic Narrative, p. xxiii. It is a mark of the success of Kemble’s Coriolanus at Covent Garden that in 1815 it inspired the printer William West to produce a set of scenes and characters from the play for use in toy theatres; these now provide some of our best evidence about how the play looked in Kemble’s revivals. The Rome depicted by the scenery, as in the case of Julius Caesar, was a compositely magnificent, marble ideal. See George Speaight et al., William West and the Regency Toy Theatre (London: Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2004), p. 32. See David George, ‘Poussin’s Coriolanus and Kemble’s Roman Matron’, Theatre Notebook 48 (1994): 2–10; David Rostron, ‘John Philip Kemble’s Julius Caesar and Coriolanus: An Examination of the Prompt Copies,’ Theatre Notebook 23 (1968): 26–33; John Ripley, ‘Coriolanus’ On Stage in England and America, 1609–1994 (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1998), chapter 4; Jane Moody, ‘Romantic Shakespeare’, in Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 37–57; 44–6. Bell’s Weekly Messenger 29 June 1817. Morning Chronicle 24 June 1817. The News 29 June 1817. An Authentic Narrative, pp. 4–11. An Authentic Narrative, p. 44. An Authentic Narrative, p. 68. On Lullin’s theatricals with his sister at Beaulieu, see Alville, Anna Eynard-Lullin et l’époque des congrés et des revolutions, Lausanne: Feissly, 1955, pp. 98–103. Boaden, 2: 585. Quoted in Kelly, The Kemble Era, p. 203. See London Magazine 7 (1823): 449–60. An Authentic Narrative, p. 55.

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Notes

Chapter 7 1 2

3

4

5 6

7

8

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12 13 14

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Henry Bate to David Garrick, 12 August 1775, British Library Add. MSS 25,383. 30 Dec 1775, cited in Philip Highfill, Jr., Kalman A. Burnim and Edward A. Langhans, eds, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–1993), 14: 5. Quoted by Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, 2 vols. (London: Effingham Wilson, 1834), 1: 68–9. Sarah Kemble Siddons, Reminiscences of Sarah Kemble Siddons, 1773–1785, ed. William Van Lennep (Cambridge, MA: Widener Library, 1942), p. 20. Ibid., p. 5. See Michael Booth, ‘Sarah Siddons’ in Three Tragic Actresses, ed. Booth, John Stokes, and Susan Bassnett (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), p. 14. James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, Interspersed with Anecdotes of Authors and Actors (London: Henry Colburn, 1827), p. 147. Edwin’s Pills to Purge Melancholy: Containing all the Songs sung by Mr. Edwin, of Covent Garden Theatre . . . With an Humorous Account of Mrs. Siddons’s first Reception in Dublin (London: William Holland, 1788), pp. iv–v. Sarah Kemble Siddons, The Siddoniad: A Characteristic and Critical Poem (Dublin: R. Marchbank, 1784), p. 15. Sarah Kemble Siddons, The Siddoniad: A Poetical Essay (London: H. Reynell, 1785), 4–5. Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (Later Mrs. Piozzi), 1776–1809, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), pp. 876–7. Reminiscences of Sarah Kemble Siddons, pp. 29–30. Ibid., p. 31. William Hazlitt, ‘Mrs. Siddons’, from ‘The Fight’ and other Writings, ed. Tom Paulin and David Chandler (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 48–9. Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies; or, Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar for the Year 1793 (New York: Garland, 1986), pp. 84–5. Life of Mrs. Sidddons, 2: 357–8. Roger Manvell, Sarah Siddons: Portrait of an Actress (London: Heinemann, 1970), p. 18. Letters Written During a Residence in England, translated from the French of Henri Meister, containing many curious remarks upon English manners and customs, government, climate, Literature, theatres etc. (London: Longman and Rees, 1799), p. 196. Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis and A. Dayle Wallace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 33: 359. Boaden, p. 141. Booth, pp. 52–3. Campbell, Life, 2: 143. Campbell, Life, 1: 244. Reminiscences of Sarah Kemble Siddons, p. 19. Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 33: 359.

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Notes 26 27

28 29

30

31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49

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Cited in Highfill et. al., Biographical Dictionary, 14: 18. ‘Sarah Siddons, Theatre Voices and Recorded Memory’, Shakespeare Survey 61 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 1–12. Boaden, p. 327. Jenkin, H. C. Fleeming, ‘Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth and Queen Katherine, with an Introduction by Brander Matthews’, Publications of the Dramatic Museum of Columbia University. 2nd series, 3 (New York, 1915), p. 46. Anonymous reviewer of her appearance at Drury Lane, 10 October 1782, quoted in Boaden, p. 141. The Children of Thespis (London: 1786), p. 18. Letters Written During a Residence in England, 1799, p. 198. Boaden, pp. 381–2. 4 February 1785. ‘ . . . nay beware yourself Great Little Man, for she plays Hamlet to the satisfaction of the Worcestershire critics’. Quoted in Highfill et. al., Biographical Dictionary, 14: 4. Reminiscences, p. 8. ‘Sarah Siddons’, p. 28. Campbell, 2: 126. Unsigned review, General Advertiser, February 28, 1785. ‘Memoir of Sarah Siddons’, in Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography and Histrionic Anecdotes, ed. William Oxberry (London: G. Virtue, 1825), vol. 1, p. 139. Letter of 20 July 1786, quoted in Highfill et. al., Biographical Dictionary, 14: 16. Jonathan Bate has written brilliantly about the different cultural strains represented by the rival actresses: ‘Siddons stood for tragedy, decency of birth, Englishness, freedom from scandal, reserved dignity, and financial prudence (to the point that she was sometimes accused of stinginess). She was admired by George III, read uplifting works to the royal daughters, and was painted many times by Thomas Lawrence, the king’s chosen painter. Jordan stood for comedy, illegitimate birth, traces of Irishness, scandal (she had illegitimate children by different men), sociability, and generosity with money (to the point of profligacy). She was the mistress of one royal son and was admired by the circle of another (the group around Fox and Sheridan, which caused the Prince of Wales to be thought of as an anti-government figure). She was painted many times by Hoppner, the Prince of Wales’s chosen painter.’ ‘Shakespeare and the Rival Muses: Siddons Versus Jordan,’ in Notorious Muse: The Actress in British Art and Culture, 1776–1812, ed. Robyn Asleson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 99. Life of Mrs. Sidddons, 2: 11–12. Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, p. 210. See Bate, pp. 95–6. Campbell, 2: 211. Ibid., 2: 213. Ibid., 2: 215. King John, 3.4.22–36. From William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (New York: The Penguin Group, 2002).

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430 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76 77 78 79 80

81

82 83

84

85

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Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, p. 220. Courier and Evening Gazette, Monday, 1 December 1800. Wednesday, 26 November 1788. ‘Memoir of Sarah Siddons’, in Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography, 138–9. Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, 2: 141–2. The New Rosciad: A Poem (London: 1786), p. 7. Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, 2: 39. Unsigned review, 14 February 1785. 5 February 1785. Quoted in Campbell, 2: 11. Ibid., 18. Jenkin, ‘Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth and Queen Katherine’, p. 36. Ibid., p. 38. Boaden, p. 256. Joseph Donohue, ‘Kemble and Mrs. Siddons in Macbeth: The Romantic Approach to Tragic Character,’ Theatre Notebook, 22 (Winter 1967–1968): 66. Ibid., 67. Jenkin, ‘Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth and Queen Katherine,’ p. 40, n. 7. The one complaint he ventures is his wish that in the sleepwalking scene she had entered ‘less suddenly. A slower and more interrupted step more natural.’ Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., p. 43. Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, Mon, 14 Feb 1785. Cited in Highfill et. al., Biographical Dictionary, 14: 14. Quoted by Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, 2: 157. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (New York: Garland, 1971), p. 58. Cited in Campbell, 1: 198. From her Diary, cited in Highfill et al., Biographical Dictionary, 14: 18. Reminiscences of Sarah Kemble Siddons, p. 14. Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, p. 258. ‘Sarah Siddons’, p. 54. Life of Mrs. Siddons (London: Edward Moxon, 1839), p. 371. Letter from Henry Bate to David Garrick, 19 August 1775, British Library Add 25,383. Alan S. Downer, ‘Nature to Advantage Dress’d: Eighteenth-Century Acting’, PMLA 58 (1943): 1005. Cited in Highfill et al., A Biographical Dictionary, 14: 17. Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 13 February 1789. I have benefited from the expertise of Professor Peter Holland on the stage history of Coriolanus. Paul Prescott, ‘Doing All That Becomes a Man: The Reception and Afterlife of the Macbeth Actor, 1744–1889’, Shakespeare Survey 57 (Cambridge, 2004), p. 82. ‘Memoir of Sarah Siddons’, Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography and Histrionic Anecdotes, ed. William Oxberry (London: G. Virtue, 1825), 1: 137. Fanny Kemble, Record of a Girlhood, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1878), 2: 64.

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Notes

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Chapter 8 1 2

3

4

5

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Robert Lloyd, The Actor (London: C. W. Beaumont, 1926), p. 27. The legend has been traced by Jeffrey Kahan in The Cult of Kean (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). Quoted in Eric R. Delderfield, Cavalcade by Candlelight (Exmouth: Raleigh Press, 1950), p. 48. J. Fitzgerald Molloy, The Life and Adventures of Edmund Kean, 2 vols. (London: Ward and Downey, 1888), 1: 86–7. Save for a few additional documents, Molloy is almost entirely dependent on the earlier biographical labours of ‘Barry Cornwall’ and F. W. Hawkins, more parasite than biographer. ‘Barry Cornwall’, The Life of Edmund Kean, 3rd edition (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1847), p. 59. George Frederick Cooke (1756–1812) was the most notorious sufferer from the actors’ ‘old complaint’ of drunkenness. During his American tour of 1821, Kean, who had seen him act, arranged for his remains to be reinterred and for a monument to him to be erected in New York, where Cooke had died of cirrhosis of the liver. The 3rd Baron Holland (1773–1840) was the nephew of the great Whig politician Charles James Fox. He, and particularly his wife, ran what amounted to a political and literary salon at Holland House. A New Way to Pay Old Debts (c.1625) had been readmitted to the theatrical repertoire by David Garrick in 1748, and the role of Sir Giles Overreach had subsequently attracted such major actors as John Henderson, John Philip Kemble and George Frederick Cooke. Kean’s first Drury Lane appearance as Overreach took place on 12 January 1816. Quoted in G. H. Lewes, On Actors and the Art of Acting (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1875), p. 11. William Hazlitt, Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1930–1934), 1: 179. A. C. Grayling, The Quarrel of the Age: The Life and Times of William Hazlitt (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000), p. 167. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 5: 179. Ibid., p. 179. Ibid., p. 180. Ibid., p. 345. This was the route that Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) chose. Mendoza’s personal stock had fallen after his engagement by Kemble and the Covent Garden management as leader of the strong-arm team engaged in 1809 to eject Old Price rioters. As a direct result, he delayed publishing his Memoirs, written in 1808–1809, until 1816. Procter (1787–1874) wrote under the pen-name of Barry Cornwall. He was a literary associate of Charles Lamb, Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, but a reluctant biographer. His problem in writing a life of Kean was that he admired the actor, but not the man. Blackwood’s Magazine (September 1825) ungenerously summarized Cornwall as ‘a slight, slim poetaster mincing a-muck among the great English bards’.

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432 19 20 21

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25 26 27

28

29 30 31 32

33

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38 39 40 41 42 43

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45

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‘Barry Cornwall’, The Life of Edmund Kean, p. xix. Quoted in J. Fitzgerald Molloy, The Life and Adventures of Edmund Kean, 1: 139. Keats’s review appeared in The Champion on 21 December 1817. It is most readily available in Stanley Wells (ed.), Shakespeare in the Theatre: An Anthology of Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 51–2. The description is Jane Moody’s, from her chapter in The Cambridge History of British Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), vol. 2, p. 214. Edmund Burke’s Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) introduced new terms and concepts into the language of dramatic criticism. Applied to Garrick, they were better embodied by Sarah Siddons. Kemble’s aspirations to sublimity veered towards the picturesque. Fuseli wrote this three months after the storming of the Bastille, for the Analytical Review of December 1789. See Henry Fuseli (London: Tate Gallery, 1975), p. 41. Giulio Carlo Argan, quoted in Henry Fuseli, p. 11. See Henry Fuseli, p. 48. Most famously in ‘The Theatrical Atlas’, published in April 1814, in which Kean is depicted as Richard III carrying the whole weight of Drury Lane on his crooked shoulders. See John Buchanan-Brown, The Book Illustrations of George Cruikshank (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1980), p. 247, n. 34. George Colman the Younger’s Blue Beard: or, Female Curiosity had remained a popular spectacle since its first performance at Drury Lane on 16 January 1798. The Journal of Eugène Delacroix (London: Phaidon Press, 1951), p. 181. The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, p. 298. Lewes, On Actors and the Art of Acting, p. 8. Henry Nelson Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2nd edn (London: John Murray, 1836), p. 13. Tracy C. Davis, ‘ “Reading Shakespeare by Flashes of Lightning”: Challenging the Foundations of Romantic Acting Theory’, ELH 62, 4 (1995): 933–54. My thanks to Peter Holland for drawing my attention to this essay. Oddly, Davis risks undermining her own argument by raising doubts about whether Coleridge ever uttered the much-quoted sentence. John Milton, L’Allegro, ll. 133–4. Coleridge’s Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930), vol. 2, p. 132. John Keats, Letters, 1814–1821, ed. Hyder Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 2: 139. Keats, Letters, 2: 217. Keats, Letters, 1: 386–7. Keats, Letters, 1: 403. Keats, Letters, 2: 80. Keats, Letters, 1: 193. The success of Maturin’s Bertram a year earlier had, by contrast, been ascribed entirely to Kean’s performance of the title role. Byron is using the word ‘scurra’ to mean ‘buffoon’ rather than the more acceptable ‘joker’. Alan Downer, Oxberry’s 1822 Edition of King Richard III, ed. Alan S. Downer (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1959), p. xix.

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Notes 46

47

48

49

50

51

52 53

54 55 56

57

58 59 60 61

62

63 64

65

66

67 68

69

70 71

433

Kemble played the part, of course. No aspirant to tragic acclaim could avoid it. But he was conscious that George Frederick Cooke’s less refined portrait was more popular, and he could never have rivalled Kean. Quoted in Julia Swindells, Glorious Causes: The Grand Theatre of Political Change, 1789 to 1833 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 10. See F. W. Hawkins, The Life of Edmund Kean (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1869), vol. 1, p. 110 and vol. 2, p. 176. James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, Esq. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825), vol. 1, p. 132. Lamb’s review appeared in the Morning Post of 4 January 1802. It is reprinted in George Rowell (ed.), Victorian Dramatic Criticism (London: Methuen & Co., 1971), pp. 20–2. Robert H. Ross, ‘Samuel Sandford: villain from necessity’, in PMLA 76 (1961): 367–72. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 5: 181. The London Theatre, 1811–1866: Selections from the Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Eluned Brown (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1966), p. 26. Oxberry’s 1822 Edition of King Richard III, p. xiv. Quoted in ‘Barry Cornwall’, The Life of Edmund Kean, p. 227. Hackett’s notes are the distinguishing feature of Alan S. Downer’s edition of Oxberry’s 1822 Edition of King Richard III (see above, n. 45). Hazlitt, Complete Works, 5: 180. (Hazlitt repeats these words in a later review. See 5: 295.) Lewes, On Actors and the Art of Acting, p. 10. The London Theatre, 1811–1866, p. 56. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 5: 182. Hunt’s review is reprinted in George Rowell (ed.), Victorian Dramatic Criticism, pp. 51–3. Neither did V. C. Clinton-Baddeley, who, in tracing the history of the solo curtaincall ascribes its innovation to Kean – but not until 1818, after the first performance of John Howard Payne’s Brutus. (See All Right on the Night (London: Putnam, 1964), pp. 47–56.) Hazlitt, Complete Works, 5: 182. Laurence Olivier’s playing of Othello at the National Theatre in 1964 was certainly extraordinary, but it is not his signature role. Parker’s recollection appears in We Saw Him Act, ed. H. A. Saintsbury and Cecil Palmer, (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1939), p. 109. Hawkins, The Life of Edmund Kean, 1: 247–8. Hawkins has silently hijacked Hazlitt’s description of Kean’s Iago as ‘a careless, cordial, comfortable villain’. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 4: 206. Contemporary review quoted in Arthur Colby Sprague, Shakespeare and the Actors: The Stage Business in His Plays, New York: Russell & Russell, 1963, p. 208. Fuseli’s illustration to Cowper’s poem shows the negro standing erect on a rocky promontory, his left arm pointing out to sea, where a slave-ship is sinking in a tornado. The woman clutching at his waist is white, and the engraving was titled ‘The Negro Revenged’. See Rowell, Victorian Dramatic Criticism, p. 56. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 4: 263.

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434 72 73 74

75

76

77 78 79 80

81 82 83

84 85

86

87

88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

97 98 99 100 101

Notes

The London Theatre, 1811–1866, p. 57. ‘Barry Cornwall’, The Life of Edmund Kean, p. 180. Kean bears an indirect responsibility, then, for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, since Booth took refuge in America, where his sons included Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Elliston figures frequently in Lamb’s Essays of Elia, not least in the fond obituary, ‘To the Shade of Elliston’ (1831): ‘Magnificent were thy cappriccios on this globe of earth, ROBERT WILLIAM ELLISTON’. See Raymund FitzSimons, Edmund Kean: Fire from Heaven (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976), p. 166. Young evidently practised his speeches to piano accompaniment. See FitzSimons, Edmund Kean, p. 171. See FitzSimons, Edmund Kean, pp. 164 and 166–7. Quoted in Bertram Joseph, The Tragic Actor (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), p. 264. Lewes, On Actors and the Art of Acting, p. 5. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 5: 187. The Journal of Thomas Moore, ed. Peter Quennell (London: B. T. Batsford, 1964), p. 190. It is not clear from the journal which Kemble spoke the words he is quoting. John was long dead by 1829 – the journal entry is dated 13th to 15th August 1829 – but, from the context, it may be that John Murray, the publisher, introduced the quotation into an anecdote about him. For no clear reason, the opinion is generally ascribed to John, but Moore knew both the brothers. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 5: 188. Quoted in John A. Mills, Hamlet on Stage: The Great Tradition (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), p. 52. Reiko Oya, Representing Shakespearean Tragedy: Garrick, the Kembles, and Kean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). The reference here is to the Wolves drinking club, which met, under Kean’s chairmanship, in an alehouse called the Coal Hole. William Robson, The Old Playgoer (London: Joseph Masters, 1846), pp. 117–18. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 5: 223. Hawkins, The Life of Edmund Kean, 1: 306. Grayling, The Quarrel of the Age, p. 168. Stanley Wells (ed.), Shakespeare in the Theatre, p. 46. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 18: 332–3. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 4: 259. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 18: 333. By March 1818, Kean was a member of the St. Mark’s Lodge in Edinburgh. F. W. Hawkins records his reception there after a performance of Bertram in the city (The Life of Edmund Kean, 2: 39). Lewes, On Actors and the Art of Acting, p. 10. J. Fitzgerald Molloy, The Life and Adventures of Edmund Kean, 2: 230. James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, Esq., 2: 555. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 5: 344–5. I have written at greater length about this rivalry in chapter 9 of On Actors and Acting (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000).

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Notes

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102

George Colman the Younger, Random Records (London: Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley, 1830), vol. 2, p. 183. 103 Ernest E. Probert, in We Saw Him Act, ed. H. A. Saintsbury and Cecil Palmer (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1939), p. 162. 104 Hazlitt, Complete Works, 5: 277. 105 Lewes, On Actors and the Art of Acting, p. 3. 106 Samuel Johnson, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1958– ), vol. 7, pp. 61–2. 107 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Everyman edition (London: J. M. Dent, 1956), p. 175. 108 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, p. 172. 109 Richard Watts Jr., quoted in Gene Fowler, Good Night, Sweet Prince (New York: Viking Press, 1944), p. 236. 110 Georges Duval, Frédérick-Lemaître et son temps (Paris: Tresse, 1876), p. 190 [my translation]. ‘Lovelace’ is, I assume, a reference to the attractive, but duplicitous wooer of Clarissa Harlowe in Samuel Richardson’s novel of that name, but Duval has probably confused him with the chivalrous cavalier poet, Richard Lovelace (1618–1658). 111 The best biography of Lemaître in English remains Robert Baldick’s The Life and Times of Frédérick Lemaître (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1959). 112 Baldick, The Life and Times of Frédérick Lemaître, p. 247 [Baldick’s translation]. 113 Quoted in Baldick, The Life and Times of Frédérick Lemaître, p. 158. 114 The play was translated and directed by Frank Hauser. 115 ‘Kean in Sicily’, a pamphlet for private circulation only, published by Anne FitzSimons in Carlisle, 1989, p. 3.

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Scott, Sir Walter, review of Boaden’s Life of John Philip Kemble, The Quarterly Review 34, 1826. Shattuck, Charles (ed.). John Philip Kemble promptbooks, 11 vols. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1974. Siddons, Sarah Kemble. The Siddoniad: A Characteristic and Critical Poem. Dublin: R. Marchbank, 1784; revised as The Siddoniad: A Poetical Essay. London: H. Reynell, 1785. —. The Reminiscences of Sarah Kemble Siddons, 1773–1785, ed. William van Lennep. Cambridge, MA: Widener Library, 1942. Steele, Joshua. An Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech. London, 1775. Stone, George Winchester Jr. ‘Garrick’s Handling of Macbeth’, SP 38 (1941): 609–28. —. ‘Garrick’s Production of King Lear: A Study in the Temper of the EighteenthCentury Mind’, SP 45 (1948): 89–103. Stone, George Winchester Jr. and Kahrl, George M. David Garrick: A Critical Biography. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979. Thomas, David and Hare, Arnold (eds). Restoration and Georgian England, 1660– 1788. Theatre in Europe: A Documentary History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Thomson, Peter. On Actors and Acting. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000. —. ‘Edmund Kean’, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. —. ‘John Philip Kemble’, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Vickers, Brian (ed.). Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 6 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1974–1981. West, Shearer. The Image of the Actor: Verbal and Visual Representation in the Age of Garrick and Kemble. London: Pinter, 1991. Whalley, Rev. Thomas. Verses Addressed to Mrs. Siddons on Her Being Engaged at The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1882. London: T. Cadell, 1782. Woo, Celestine. Romantic Actors and Bardolatry: Performing Shakespeare from Garrick to Kean. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.

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Part III

Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge Edited by

Roger Paulin

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Introduction Roger Paulin

Isaiah Berlin once indulged in a fantasy in the style of Walter Savage Landor that imagined Voltaire meeting Shelley and a dialogue of the deaf ensuing. Some of our four writers did meet (Goethe and Schlegel, for instance). But what if Voltaire really had met Goethe (quite possible) or Schlegel or Coleridge? Would there have been any debate possible on the essentials of Shakespeare? Would national pride have triumphed over a real common interest? Would Voltaire have been outraged at the, for him, unreflecting enthusiasm for wild genius, his younger interlocutors uncomprehending of a failure to see basics? This volume seeks to bring these four figures together in both historical and cognitive debate, to discover what they had in common and where national and cultural attitudes to foreign or native genius divided them. Of our four writers, Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel and Coleridge, one (Voltaire) was born in the seventeenth century, the other three outlived the eighteenth century by over a generation and continued to produce significant work on Shakespeare well into the nineteenth. To accommodate them in one sequent stretch of time we may have to expand our views of an already long eighteenth century and elongate it into a new chronological entity. Shakespeare, of course, is rooted in time, his own specific times, to which our four writers on different occasions refer. But for some, he is also heralded as a universal genius with semi-divine powers, transcending established notions of historical computation. Our four figures and their contemporaries are acutely aware of this. Voltaire prefers to align Shakespeare with his ‘Times’ and seeks an explanation for his ‘faults’ with reference to them. Others, like Goethe and Schlegel, elevate him to a transcendent Christ-like figure with salvific powers. Are these positions irreconcilable, where Voltaire finds at most flashes of genius amid general barbarity, while Goethe in 1771, with an insouciance for theological niceties, is calling him ‘Pan’, ‘Prometheus’ and Christ, Schlegel for good measure declaring him ‘arisen and walking amongst us’? At face value, yes; in historical terms, no. For all are rooted in notions of

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progress: without it, Voltaire would never have come to Shakespeare in the first place and would never have devoted so much time and energy to this exotic genius whose touches of brilliance made him an object worthy of study. And it says much that the most influential homme de lettres in eighteenth-century Europe took this line. That is why he must feature prominently in a volume on eighteenth-century Shakespeare reception, as Michèle Willems’s essay tells his story. Of course progress means different things to different people. Voltaire, with Dryden and Pope and Johnson, believes in a notion of linear chronological progress, ‘the gradual discovery of one age improving on another’ (Johnson), ‘from a rude origin and obscure beginnings to a perfection in a later age’ (Thomas Warton). ‘L’art était dans son enfance du temps d’Eschyle, comme à Londres du temps de Shakespeare.’ This position is predicated on the belief that discretion in matters of taste and literary style is already ours. But it is of interest to trace the historical progress from our rude forebears to our present perfection. We can see that they had sparks of genius, despite being occluded by general darkness and barbarity. This is essentially Voltaire’s position, and almost everything that is known about Shakespeare on continental Europe before about 1750 can be ultimately traced back to Voltaire’s influence and enjoys a consensus based on him. Why then has Voltaire had such a bad press? It was his insistence that Shakespeare was a figure for study, not for emulation or imitation. There were questions of national pride here. Voltaire saw no inconsistency between an admiration of Shakespeare and a belief that his own century had reached a pinnacle in taste. But those who wished to equate Shakespeare with French achievement were simply being unpatriotic. Voltaire’s opposition to translations or adaptations, the stridently anti-English tone of his later utterances on Shakespeare, have obscured his real merits as a mediator of Shakespeare to be measured only with figures like Dryden or Pope. Not surprisingly, there is an anti-French reaction to this across the channel, much talk about Voltaire’s ‘petty cavils’ or the ‘Misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire’. The Germans also form part of this wave of anti-Voltaire sentiment. Indeed, after having been first introduced to Shakespeare largely through French mediation, they turn abruptly away from such foreign tutelage. There is a leap of the imagination from the cautious advocacy of things Shakespearean in the 1760s to the theophanies of the early 1770s. It will now not do to rein in Shakespeare, to adjust him to moral or aesthetic systems. He becomes a supernal life-giving force that is part of nature and of universal history, of its time but transcending it. This is the

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kind of vocabulary that we find in German utterances after 1770: they are not critical analyses but revivalist homilies. The young Goethe is part of this, with all the insouciance and brashness of youth setting aside all the reservations of the French (and also the English). This is where we see a different notion of progress coming into play. Whereas the French, despite occasional bouts of Shakespeare mania, are never prepared to deny their classical heritage, the Germans feel left behind. They have doubts as to whether they have come of age as a literary nation. Here Shakespeare acts as a catalyst; he is a mover and doer; he sets things alight; he unlocks older poetic traditions and gives young poets the courage to emulate them. Goethe’s career as a poet and playwright (set out here by Stephen Fennell) is one of initial dependence on such a father figure, then of gradual attainment of maturity and ironical distance. Yet part of Goethe’s active career also coincides with the translation into German of Shakespeare and his establishment on the German stage (where he still remains the most-performed dramatist to this day). And later readers of Goethe’s Faust, whether Coleridge or Hugo or Delacroix, Manzoni or Leopardi, are imbibing Shakespearean influence through the texture of Goethe’s drama. The younger generation of German Romantic writers (see the chapter by Christine Roger and Roger Paulin) shares these positions, but has retreated from any uncritical enthusiasms. August Wilhelm Schlegel stresses Shakespeare’s artistry, his intentionality, not merely his unreflective genius. He also believes that the Germans now have taken over the initiative in things Shakespearean, that ‘English critics have no idea of Shakespeare,’ indeed that he is ‘completely ours’. These annexational and proprietary claims had some substance in so far as they were grounded on a sense of Shakespeare’s participation in the larger issues of history and time, and in the continuum of world drama. Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, delivered in Vienna in 1808, exercise their influence ‘from Cadiz to Edinburgh, Stockholm and St Petersburg’ (as he himself claims), because they take in these huge spreads of history, examine each national tradition and define the substance of the work of art within them. When Samuel Taylor Coleridge, also delivering public lectures on Shakespeare, first encountered Schlegel’s published version late in 1811, he was seized by the rightly famous 25th Lecture that distinguishes the ‘mechanical’ from the ‘organic’ work of art. (The long and sterile debate about Coleridge’s so-called plagiarisms should be finally laid to rest by Reginald Foakes’s chapter in this volume.) Coleridge takes part in debates on Shakespeare that know no national boundaries (on dramatic illusion

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or dream, or wholeness, for instance), that reflect the fluid movements of the various national Romantic movements, so that even famous formulations like ‘willing suspension of belief’ or ‘we chuse to be deceived’ may find an echo in German criticism. Schlegel’s lectures, if anything, enable Coleridge to find his own voice and his own emphasis. He already knew, like Schlegel, that translating a foreign text unlocks the inner structures of the work of art. Coleridge proceeds from general principles of the work of art that enable him to describe and to analyse, to show the interplay of the general and the particular. When coming to Shakespeare, he is not presumptive or morally censorious, as Samuel Johnson often had been, but like Johnson and unlike Schlegel he undertakes close textual analysis while never losing sight of the whole, the age in which Shakespeare lived, his development as a poet, his conscious artistry, his judgement and purpose. Coleridge’s ‘practical criticism’ is of necessity text based; his commentaries on character never disregard the subtleties of poetic expression, the artistry of language that contributes to the unfolding of character. Would Voltaire have sympathized with any of this? He might have nodded agreement that Shakespeare was something both special and unique, even if he could not see Shakespeare, in Coleridge’s words, as ‘true romantic poetry’. He would even have echoed Coleridge’s flourish that Shakespeare was ‘the dramatic poet of England’, while resting secure in his own neoclassical positions. The account of Shakespeare’s reception in this volume will not bridge any such ideological gaps or irreconcilabilities of taste, but it will give equal validity to the responses of four representative figures in the history of Shakespeare’s reception in the long eighteenth century, and thereby seek to do them justice in historical and critical terms.

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Chapter 9

Voltaire Michèle Willems

Although in the history of European culture Voltaire appears as one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment, when it comes to the reception of Shakespeare he is mostly remembered as leading the army of French anti-Shakespeareans. Indeed, his name has so often been associated, particularly in English-speaking countries, with iconoclastic resistance to the Bard, that defining him as a ‘Great Shakespearean’ may appear as a paradox, if not as a provocation. It has been common critical practice to explore the reception of Shakespeare in France (‘Finicky France’, as could recently be heard at a Paris conference on the subject) as a site of genetic incomprehension, reflecting the incompatibility between the great English dramatist and ‘l’esprit français’,1 as epitomized by Voltaire. Instead of deciding that the alleged incapacity of the French to appreciate Shakespeare’s drama is, like so many other national defects, ‘la faute à Voltaire’,2 it is perhaps more profitable to approach his criticism of the dramatist from a different angle, in relation to the century which his life roughly spans (he was born in 1694 and died in 1778). Straddling the excesses of a declining monarchy and the chaos of a social revolution, the ‘Siècle des Lumières’ is in effect, culturally and ideologically, the seat of tensions between stability and movement, which some would perceive as order and disorder. Voltaire often mirrors these contrarieties, nostalgia for the age of Louis XIV coupled with admiration for the progressiveness of England being but one example of his own inner strains. In the light of the paradoxes and contradictions which are the trademark of his age and of his life, it may thus be instructive to revisit Voltaire’s contribution to the reception of Shakespeare in France, and in Europe. Both as a discoverer and a deprecator of Shakespeare, Voltaire is, from the start, in two minds about the plays which he imports into France. Successively in the vanguard and in the rearguard of the promotion of the English dramatist on the Continent, he can also be found in both places at once, often

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serving the dramatist’s reputation even as he most reviles him. His famous definition of Shakespeare’s drama as pearls in a dunghill epitomizes his contradictions: rather than the irreverence that it is generally thought to express, it basically reflects the ambivalence of the classicist’s reception of Shakespeare. But it also subsumes the multi-layered paradoxes of his personal attitude to the English intruder. ‘C’est moi qui le premier montrai aux Français quelques perles que j’avais trouvées dans son énorme fumier’, he writes to his friend d’Argental:3 even as he pleads guilty to having introduced Shakespeare’s drama into the preserves of the French masters, he is eager to remind the world that he was the first to call attention to his beauties.

Voltaire’s Shakespearean Criticism: A Chronological Approach 1729–60: The Lettres Philosophiques and the Discours sur la tragédie: Shakespeare discovered through Hamlet and Julius Caesar Voltaire was probably right in priding himself on being the French discoverer of the dramatist. In fact, at a time when France was the arbiter of literary taste in Europe and its language the main vector of culture, he can also be said to have sown the first seeds of interest in Shakespeare on the Continent. Before him, knowledge of the dramatist was extremely limited, his name hardly ever mentioned, his works scarcely referred to. The 1632 Folio figured in Louis XIV’s library, and a copy of the plays was registered in 1661 in Fouquet’s. Both may have been read or leafed through; but in spite of the close connection of the Sun King’s ill-fated Chancellor with the artistic world of his time, the only comment that has come down to us is that by the King’s librarian, Nicolas Clément, discovered in the 1675–84 Catalogue. Ce poète anglais a l’imagination assez belle. Il pense naturellement, il s’exprime avec finesse, mais ces belles qualités sont obscurcies par les ordures qu’il mêle dans ses comédies. [This English poet has a rather fine imagination. His thoughts are natural, his expression is subtle, but these fine qualities are marred by the rubbish with which they are mixed in his plays.]4 These mixed feelings, and their formulation, will soon be part of the stock-in-trade of Shakespearean criticism. The ‘Dissertation sur la poésie

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anglaise’, 5 which is often quoted as having first introduced Shakespeare in France, was in fact more widely publicized since, after being published in The Hague in 1717, it was reproduced in the Mercure de France, but not before January 1728. This text is exclusively concerned with Hamlet, relating its plot in French for the first time, and – not for the last time – with derogatory mentions of its ghost and gravediggers. By 1728 Voltaire had been in London for almost two years, gaining firsthand knowledge of ‘the author of Hamlet’, as he was soon going to make him known on the Continent. His discovery of Shakespeare on the occasion of three years of political exile in England was one side-effect of the militancy that brought him into early conflict with authority. In 1717–18, he had spent eleven months in the Bastille after writing an epigram in Latin against the Regent.6 He was soon to return there after a quarrel with the Chevalier de Rohan, a nobleman who refused to fight a duel with a roturier and had him cudgelled instead. Born François-Marie Arouet, and the son of a lawyer, Monsieur de Voltaire, as he was soon known in the Parisian salons, was indeed low-born; although he had inherited his father’s handsome fortune, he had to face the nobleman’s scorn for ‘not even having a name’, to which he is said to have replied: ‘My name is only just beginning, yours is coming to an end’ (‘Mon nom, je le commence, et vous finissez le vôtre’). This stroke of prophetic insolence earned him another ticket to the Bastille. He was freed in May 1726, on condition of leaving immediately for England where he was welcomed in London by Lord Bolingbroke, thanks to letters of recommendation from Horace Walpole, then English Ambassador in Paris, with whom he continued to correspond throughout his life. These three years of exile, from May 1726 to February 1729, nourished his progressive ideas on equality and freedom of speech. He confirmed, developed and refined his philosophy through contact with a new civilisation and a number of enlightened minds: he met Berkeley, Swift, Gay, Pope, and Young with whom he had spent some time in France in 1727. It was possibly through the latter that he discovered Shakespeare. But it was through the theatre and the live performance of his plays that he was really introduced to the dramatist. He patronized the Drury Lane theatre (often as the guest of Colley Cibber) where Chetwood, the prompter, would give him a copy of the play: ‘He told me that he never at the play could follow without a book any actors except Booth and Mrs Oldfield,’ Richard Neville writes, on 4 July 1772.7 According to Odell, he also enjoyed the privilege of sitting in the orchestra pit, the better to hear the actors’ words.8 After eighteen months, his comprehension of the language had improved so much

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that he could read and write it, though not speak it very well. It is clear from his criticism of Shakespeare that he was most impressed by Julius Caesar and Hamlet. He also very probably attended performances of Othello (another play he often mentions), and of Macbeth and King Lear. If we are to believe George Adams, he also saw Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Troilus and Cressida, and Coriolanus.9 His subsequent critiques indicate that he must have read Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV and Henry V at some time, but there is no evidence that he concentrated on the study of Shakespeare during his stay in England. Voltaire was already passionately interested in the theatre and it was through his plays that he had first made a name for himself in Paris. After his first success with Œdipe, in 1718, he had subsequently written three plays to be performed at the Court of Fontainebleau on the occasion of King Louis XV’s wedding, in 1725. It is one of the paradoxes of his life that he alternately gained the favour of the Court through his plays and incurred its censure through his pamphlets and satires. In the same way he repeatedly found his place in Paris society through the theatre, only to lose it through his philosophical writings. Posterity has reversed the paradox, since his plays are now forgotten while he is remembered for his tales and pamphlets. When he returned from exile in 1729, Voltaire imported Shakespeare into France, along with a number of the progressive ideas he had gathered in England. His own tragedies were immediately acclaimed in Paris, among them Brutus (1730) and Zaïre (1734), obviously influenced by Shakespeare. Yet in 1734 the unauthorized publication in Rouen of his Lettres Philosophiques provoked a new lettre de cachet and he was forced to flee to Cirey where he retired for ten years in the château of Madame Châtelet, his first lover and his protectress. Cirey was within easy reach of Lorraine where he could flee whenever he was pursued by Parisian censure. Gustave Lanson, in his still authoritative study of Voltaire, describes the Lettres Philosophiques as ‘the first bomb thrown at the Ancien Régime’.10 Most of these ‘Letters from England’ as they were first called, do indeed stress the progressiveness of the English political regime in contrast with the despotism and intolerance of French society. Anticipating the censure which was rife at the time, Voltaire had first published his essays in English, in London, under the title Letters concerning the English Nation (a sign, incidentally, that he was more proficient in the English language than has often been indicated). As is often the case, the prosecution of its author increased the popularity of the book which ran into five editions in 1734 alone, and into five more between 1734 and 1739. Yet the whole of the pamphlet cannot be described as revolutionary: though the first seven letters

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expound on the religious tolerance nurtured in England by the multiplicity of sects, and the following ten emphasize the superiority of English philosophers,11 in Letters 18 to 22 he regrets the irregularity and absence of taste of English poets in spite of their genius and imagination, and in Letter 18 he praises Addison’s Cato (the English equivalent of a French classical tragedy) above Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Voltaire may have been attracted by new ideas in politics, but he obviously baulked at novelty in the theatre. The opening lines of this famous Letter 18, entitled ‘On Tragedy’, describe the English dramatist as the Corneille of England and the near contemporary of Lope de Vega. Essentially, its very first paragraph articulates the tension between genius and taste which informs Voltaire’s appreciation of Shakespeare until his death. Shakespear boasted a strong, fruitful Genius; he was natural and sublime, but had not so much as a single Spark of good Taste, or knew one rule of the Drama. . . . The great Merit of this Dramatic Poet has been the Ruin of the English stage. There are such beautiful, such noble, such dreadful Scenes in this Writer’s monstrous Farces, to which the name of Tragedy is given, that they have always been exhibited with great success . . . (VS 44) Over the next fi fty years, the formulations vary, and also the balance between the beauties and the faults; but the initial ambiguity about the nature of Shakespeare’s drama remains. Shakespeare’s plays are, from the start, defined as ‘monstrous farces, to which the name of Tragedy is given’; the tag tragedy is attached to them in reference to the only dramatic model with which the early eighteenth century was familiar. Remarkably, Letter 19, entitled ‘On Comedy’ does not even mention Shakespeare’s name, though it commends Wycherley (‘an excellent comic writer’) and Congreve, but finds fault with Shadwell (‘despised by all persons of taste’). The same letter observes that witty exchanges, allusions and puns are lost upon foreigners. Could this explain why Voltaire does not appear to have seen a Shakespeare comedy on the stage while he was in London? It is true that the tragedies were then more often performed. The Tempest, however, was then one of the stock plays of the Drury Lane repertoire, admittedly in the Dryden and Davenant version; but the Macbeth that he saw was the adaptation by Davenant and the King Lear that by Nahum Tate.12 Voltaire’s knowledge of Shakespeare’s drama may have been comparatively extensive, but it never included comedy, a genre which he did not himself practice. The plays he, and his contemporaries, refer to are limited in number and they are always labelled tragedies, a generic

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restriction which conditioned the French reception of Shakespeare from the start. At first Voltaire used Hamlet and Julius Caesar to assess Shakespeare. As examples of the ‘dreadful Scenes in this Writer’s monstrous Farces’, he quotes the gravediggers, ‘drinking, singing Ballads, and making humorous Reflexions’ on skulls, and ‘the Jokes of the Roman Shoemakers and Coblers, who are introduc’d in the same Scene with Brutus and Cassius’. But since he also wants to call attention to ‘some of the beauties of great Genius’s’ (sic), he provides his own version of ‘part of the celebrated soliloquy in Hamlet’, an adaptation in rhyming alexandrines beginning with ‘Demeure; il faut choisir, et passer à l’instant / De la vie à la mort, et de l’être au néant’ (VS 44–8). In his exhaustive study of Shakespeare and Voltaire, Thomas Lounsbury translates this back into ‘Pause, it is incumbent to choose and pass in an instant / From life to death, or from existence to nothingness’, defining the imitation as ‘a half-pennyworth of Shakespeare to an intolerable deal of Voltaire’.13 Yet one should not underestimate the significance of this first example of French appropriation of Shakespeare’s text and of the domestication of blank verse into the diction of classical tragedy. Voltaire was the first French critic to translate and isolate as one of Shakespeare’s ‘beauties’ a soliloquy which was soon to become iconic, perhaps because it was immediately transposed into the literary idiom familiar to the readers of the time. In the following years, other critics contributed to the promotion of this gem: in 1733 the Abbé Prévost (the translator of Richardson and author of Manon Lescaut) gave a literal prose rendering of Hamlet’s soliloquy in his diary, then in 1747 the Abbé Le Blanc enthused about the ‘greatest beauty’ of the prince’s monologue.14 This may explain why, in 1761, in an anonymous pamphlet entitled Appel à toutes les nations de l’Europe des jugements d’un écrivain anglais, Voltaire deemed it necessary to assert his seniority, reminding his readers that he had been the first, thirty years earlier, to mention Shakespeare’s name and to acquaint the French public with his beauties (‘M. de Voltaire est le premier qui les ait fait connaître’). To prove this point (which was to become an obsession), he reproduced his previous ‘imitation’ of ‘To be . . . ’ and added his own literal translation. In the following years, Voltaire expressed his interest in Shakespeare through references to Julius Caesar more than to Hamlet. In 1730, Brutus, a play which he had started writing in England, was performed at the Comédie-Française. This tragedy has nothing to do with Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, since its hero is Junius Brutus, a Roman consul who had to judge his own sons accused of high treason against the recently created Republic, an apt situation for a Cornelian conflict between love and duty.

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But the play was published with a dedication to Bolingbroke (himself the author of a Caesar tragedy), known as the ‘Discours sur la tragédie’, in which several allusions to Julius Caesar come to support the author’s reflections on tragedy. Starting from the recurrent idea, apparently shared by Bolingbroke, that the English theatre has many defects, but ‘some admirable scenes in (its) monstrous plays’, Voltaire concedes that their one great merit is their sense of action and he then draws on his own experience of the English stage : Avec quel plaisir n’ai-je point vu à Londres votre tragédie de Jules César, qui, depuis cent cinquante années fait les délices de votre nation! Je ne prétends pas assurément approuver les irrégularités barbares dont elle est remplie. . . . Mais, au milieu de tant de fautes grossières, avec quel ravissement je voyais Brutus, tenant encore un poignard teint du sang de César, assembler le peuple romain et lui parler ainsi du haut de la tribune aux harangues. [It was with the greatest of pleasure that I saw in London your tragedy of Julius Caesar which has been the delight of your nation for one hundred and fi fty years. I do not claim to approve without reservation the barbarous irregularities with which it is filled. . . . But, in the midst of so many boorish defects, how enraptured I was when I saw Brutus, still holding the dagger tainted with Caesar’s blood, assemble the Roman people to harangue them thus from the rostrum.] (VS 51) There follows his own translation of Brutus’s oration and of the reactions of the citizens (translated as Choeur des Romains), as well as a summary of the rest of the scene and of Antony’s manipulation of the Romans to rouse them to revenge. Although he wonders whether a French audience would suffer the sight of the body of Caesar on the stage, it is clear that, when he was part of a London audience, his own classical reservations were swept away by the excitement of the performance, a reaction which he now justifies by quoting Greek precedents. The lasting impression made on Voltaire by the discovery of live Shakespeare comes through on other occasions, mostly in connection with Julius Caesar. Though he must have attended some performances of Hamlet while he was in London, he never mentions them. His various summaries, analyses and (repetitive) strictures testify to his close knowledge of the play, a sign that, contrary to the view that he criticized what he could not understand, he was a competent reader of Shakespeare. But his relation to Julius Caesar is different. He criticizes and censures the play, as he does Hamlet and, more incidentally, a few other tragedies for the

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same reasons. But Julius Caesar is the only play which he also imitates and translates at length: in 1731, he writes La mort de César, a rehash of the Shakespearean original in alexandrines, in which Brutus is revealed to be the hero’s natural son (and thus the seat of another nice conflict between love and duty) and Octavius his adopted son. The subject of the play, as the title indicates, is the death of Caesar; it concludes with Antony’s determination to succeed Caesar, after an oration which Voltaire describes, in several letters,15 as ‘a fairly faithful translation from a dramatist living a hundred and fi fty years ago [une traduction assez fidèle d’un auteur qui vivait il y a cent cinquante ans].’ His actual translation of the play will be published much later, as part of the Commentaire de Corneille appended, in 1764, to his first edition of his Théâtre de Corneille. As the translation covers only the first three acts (ending appositely on Cassius’s prophecy that ‘this our lofty scene’ was to be often re-enacted in ages to come), one may wonder whether it had not been completed much earlier, at the time when he was composing his own play on the same subject. The rest of Voltaire’s Shakespeare criticism is centred almost exclusively on Hamlet. In 1748, he introduces a ghost in his tragedy Sémiramis and in the preface to the play, entitled Dissertation sur la tragédie ancienne et moderne, he quotes Hamlet’s father as a precedent: Les Anglais . . . voient tous les jours avec plaisir, dans la tragédie d’Hamlet, l’ombre d’un roi qui paraît sur le théâtre dans une occasion à peu près semblable à celle où l’on a vu, à Paris, le spectre de Ninus. [The English see every day with pleasure, in the tragedy of Hamlet, the shade of a king appearing on an occasion almost similar to that on which we have recently seen the ghost of Ninus on a Paris stage.] (VS 57) Then, as if to exonerate himself from using Shakespeare as a source, he immediately launches into a violent attack on the play, drawing a list of its gross irregularities, and marvelling at their coexisting with such sublime features as the ghost. This is one of Voltaire’s most famous diatribes, culminating in an exclamation often considered as summarizing his criticism of the dramatist: ‘this play seems to be born of the imagination of a drunken savage [On croirait que cet ouvrage est le fruit de l’imagination d’un sauvage ivre].’ Voltaire was never to live down this comparison, which is generally taken out of context, but it is true that he now often assumes the tone of the pamphleteer, more preoccupied with effect than with accuracy: the prince, he writes, kills the father of his mistress, pretending to kill a rat; while Hamlet and the gravediggers exchange coarse banter, an actor

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is conquering Poland; Hamlet, his mother and step-father drink together on the stage. . . . The brief synopsis verging on caricature seems designed to shock the reader out of the idea that a Shakespeare play could be worthy of imitation.

1760–78: Open war: Voltaire and the translators of Shakespeare As it becomes obvious that other critics hold the dramatist in high esteem, the tone of Voltaire’s criticism gradually changes for the worse. The year 1760 marks the beginning of what appears to be a war with Shakespeare, but it is also a war with the other discoverers of the dramatist, with those who dare to promote his plays. A letter written to his friend the Marquise du Deffand at the end of 1760 marks the turning-point and clarifies his motivations: Je suis fâché contre les Anglais. Non seulement ils m’ont pris Pondichéri à ce que je crois, mais ils viennent d’imprimer que leur Shakespear est infiniment supérieur à Corneille. [I have fallen out with the English. Not only have they deprived me of Pondicherry as far as I know, but now they have just published that their Shakespear is infinitely superior to Corneille.] (VS 62) The cause for this outburst was an article entitled ‘Parallèle entre Corneille et Shakespeare’. Published anonymously in the Journal encyclopédique on 15 October 1760, it proclaimed its author’s preference for Shakespeare over Corneille. The historical context was the complicated Seven Years’ War between France and England, in the course of which France’s colonial empire was gradually dismantled and the British Empire constituted. Pondicherry was one of the five Indian towns eventually returned to France, the only concession in the disastrous Paris Treaty through which, in 1763, Louis XV surrendered Canada and Louisiana and renounced all claim to India. Although Voltaire, like many of his contemporaries, had little interest in the colonies and scoffed at the loss of Canada (‘a few acres of snow’) to the English, his reference to the loss of Pondicherry in association with the decline of Corneille’s reputation is significant: England was now perceived as both a literary and military enemy. A fortnight later, the Journal encyclopédique published a ‘Parallèle entre Otwai (sic) et Racine’,16 a confirmation that the supremacy of the French Masters was threatened, and with it, that of the French model of tragedy which had prevailed throughout Europe for more than a century. Resistance to the foreign invader now

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appeared as a duty, and after 1760, Voltaire embarked on an avowedly ‘patriotic’ campaign against Shakespeare’s drama. The tone of his critiques is now different: Shakespeare now tends to be referred to as ‘Gilles’ (a traditional clown in popular fairs), a means of stressing his vulgarity. He often resorts to irony in order to underline irregularities that were bound to shock a reader bred on the classical theatre. Thus, Voltaire’s complaint to Mme du Deffand continues with a sarcastic summary of the wooing-scene in Richard III, in which Anne is described as mourning her own husband rather than her husband’s father. But the campaign against Shakespeare becomes public with the Appel à toutes les nations de l’Europe des jugements d’un écrivain anglais, a pamphlet published anonymously in 1761. In reply to the two articles in the Journal encyclopédique, Voltaire calls upon all European readers to settle the difference between ‘the tragedy of London and the tragedy of Paris’ (VS 63–80). As supporting evidence, he includes a summary of Hamlet and another one of Otway’s The Orphan. His seemingly objective synopsis of Hamlet reads like a parody, its prosaic paraphrase and bland narration slyly reducing the play to a senseless disconnected story. This is told in every detail, accumulation highlighting the complication of a plot which appears to lack focus since all the incidents are narrated with the same ironical distance and in the same flippant tone. His final explanation that Shakespeare was content to turn into dialogue the story of Claudius, Gertrude and Hamlet, which Saxo Grammaticus had narrated before him, confirms his bias which is to elevate, by implicit contrast, the economy of classical tragedies; so this, he concludes, is the masterpiece which is now preferred to Corneille’s Cinna. And he attributes the success of such tragedies in London to their socially mixed audiences and also to a few scattered beauties like the ‘To be’ monologue. And yet his reason for providing a literal rendering of the original to be compared with his own imitation is that he wants to emphasize its obscurities. More precise reference to the text is a remarkable feature of the new approach to Shakespeare criticism inaugurated by the Appel. Voltaire is no longer content with allusions or brief summaries. His mostly accurate synopsis of Hamlet alternates narration and quotation, the characters coming to the fore to tell the story in their own words. But this often takes the form of biased paraphrase, as when Hamlet exclaims, before killing ‘le bonhomme Polonius’ as he is familiarly called: ‘Ah! ma mère, il y a un gros rat derrière la tapisserie’ [Oh! Mother, there’s a big rat behind the arras]. This, and the translations proper, are often given out of context and are carefully selected to stress the vulgarity and lack of taste of the dramatist.

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Apart from the now famous ‘To be or not to be’, the only other monologue mentioned is that which opens on ‘What a rogue . . . ’ at the end of Act 2. After a reference to Hecuba, his paraphrase conflates the prince’s vituperation against Claudius with the abuse he piles upon himself; the French equivalents, which range from ‘une putain’ to ‘une vraie salope’ and to the rather unexpected ‘torchon de cuisine’ (a kitchen cloth for ‘a very drab’), are meant to show how unprincely Hamlet’s language is. Voltaire’s censure is now more and more directed at Shakespeare’s low style. He translates for the first time Francisco’s reply to Barnardo ‘not a mouse stirring’, leaving the French sentence (‘ je n’ai pas entendu une souris trotter’) to speak for itself. A few years later he turns to commentary. He is reviewing Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism17 in which ‘the Scottish critic’, as he scornfully refers to him, had judged Francisco’s line more natural than Racine’s description of the silence of the night in the opening scene of his Iphigénie. Voltaire again leaps into the arena to defend the French dramatist against the attacks of a foreign critic. The translation of isolated lines, phrases or even words, chosen to stress the inadequacy of Shakespeare’s dramatic language, now constitutes his usual weapon. In the review, he wonders at Desdemona’s falling in love with a negro who speaks of antres, deserts, Cannibals and Anthropophagi and who has told her that he had almost drowned her (sic): ‘il avait été sur le point de la noyer’ probably refers, however remotely, to Othello’s mention of ‘moving accidents by flood and field’ (1. 3. 135). Such approximations are a sign of polemical dishonesty rather than of linguistic incompetence. In Voltaire’s war, the end now justifies the means. The end was to discredit, not so much Shakespeare, as the work of the translators who were trying to promote his drama. The first Frenchman to introduce Shakespeare to a public of readers was Pierre-Antoine de La Place, with his Théâtre anglois. From 1746 to 1749 he published an eight-volume anthology of English drama ranging from Shakespeare to Congreve and Addison. Shakespeare was granted the best part of the first four volumes, prefaced by a Discours sur le théâtre anglois, largely borrowed from Pope. French readers were thus made acquainted with ten different plays, starting with Othello ou le More de Venise and Henry VI, roi d’Angleterre. Not all of them were tragedies: La vie et la mort de Richard III, Hamlet, prince de Danemark and Macbeth took up volume 2, but Cymbeline was next to Jules César and Antoine et Cléopâtre in volume 3, and Les Femmes de bonne humeur ou les Commères de Windsor figured along with Timon ou le Misanthrope in volume 4. In volume 3, analyses or summaries of the rest of Shakespeare’s historical dramas completed the sequence provided by Henry VI and Richard III in the first two

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volumes. A variety of plays were thus made available to a variety of French readers. What La Place was offering was neither translation, nor adaptation (he made it clear that his texts were not meant to be performed), but shortened versions of the plays which alternated translation or paraphrase with synopsis, the latter being reserved for ‘everything which is not connected with the plot’, as he explains in the Discours.18 Some passages were translated into prose, others in alexandrines with a sometimes Cornelian flavour. As Pierre Brumoy had done before with his prose versions of Greek tragedies, La Place seeks to acclimatize Shakespeare’s plays, not only to a different language, but also to a different cultural environment. Such attempts at making Shakespeare acceptable were anathema to Voltaire, especially as the dramatic model he represented was beginning to cast a shade over the classical model. In his present mood, he was bound to be annoyed at La Place’s expressed desire to spare Shakespeare ‘“our compatriots’” criticism for passages they might consider as weak, ridiculous or improper’ (Discours 1: cxii); the omission of monstrous scenes or vulgar passages deprived him of important evidence in his prosecution of Shakespeare. This explains why, in the last part of the Appel, he undertook to fi ll in some of the gaps left in Othello by ‘le traducteur’ (meaning La Place). He thus selected for precise translation the coarsest language spoken by Iago to taunt Brabantio and Othello, as well as the latter’s abuse of Desdemona as he strangles her. Reversing the process of positive selection initiated by La Place, Voltaire set about putting together an anthology of indecorous passages designed to prove Shakespeare’s unrefined taste. La Place’s dissemination of the text had a major side-effect: the production of ‘imitations’ of Shakespeare by Ducis. Jean-François Ducis was a great admirer of the dramatist but, unlike Voltaire and many of his contemporaries, he could not read English. So, as he wrote in the Foreword to his 1769 Hamlet, he turned to the only existing ‘translation’ of the play which, at the time, was the version published by La Place. Until 1793 he went on to produce adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Macbeth, King John, and Othello which all enjoyed great and lasting success with audiences and readers alike: the only Hamlet performed at the Comédie-Française for the next 82 years was the adaptation by Ducis, and its 1770 edition alone was reprinted seven times. This must have enraged Voltaire, since Shakespeare’s plays, however adulterated, were now made available not only to readers but also to spectators. And yet, while he repeatedly took the translators to task in his criticism, he never mentioned Ducis’s name. If this was deliberate snubbing, it is ironic to remember that it was aimed at

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the very man who was to succeed him in his seat at the Academy; he does briefly allude, in letters to friends, to the success of Hamlet, and later of Roméo, giving this as a sign of the degeneracy of French taste: ‘shades will become fashionable [les ombres vont devenir à la mode]’, he writes cryptically, reminding his correspondent that he had paved the way when he introduced a ghost in his Semiramis. The feeling that some upstarts were poaching on his Shakespearean preserves also motivated his campaign against the first actual translator of the plays, Pierre Le Tourneur, who published his twenty volumes of Shakespeare’s Works between 1776 and 1782. This was the first authentic prose rendering of the plays and it was immediately successful. The first volume was published with a long preface which aimed at satisfying the readers’ growing curiosity, since it included the life of the dramatist, an account of Garrick’s 1769 Jubilee, and a long Discours inspired by the prefaces to various English editions. It opened with an Épître au Roi, Louis XVI, the French royal family, and even the King of England being the most prestigious subscribers. This seal of official approval must have nettled Voltaire (all the more so as his name was nowhere mentioned) because it confirmed that Shakespeare’s drama was threatening the stronghold of classicism and challenging more and more the superiority of Corneille and Racine. July 1776 finds Voltaire venting his wrath against Le Tourneur, ‘this impudent imbecile’, in a letter to his friend d’Argental: Ce misérable . . . veut nous faire regarder Shakespear comme le seul modèle de la véritable tragédie . . . ; il l’appelle, le dieu du théâtre . . . Il ne daigne pas même nommer Corneille et Racine. [The wretch . . . wants us to consider Shakespeare as the only model for tragedy . . . ; he calls him the god of the theatre . . . and does not deign to name Corneille and Racine]. (VS 174) He appeals to his friend’s patriotism: ‘Souffrirez-vous l’affront qu’il fait à la France?’ [Will you endure his affront to France?], and he presses his point by remarking that ‘this monster’ (Le Tourneur, not Shakespeare) has supporters in France, particularly, as he adds in a subsequent letter, the youth of Paris, a city where English trestles and whorehouses are now more popular than the theatre of Racine and the noble scenes of Corneille. The same month, he writes to Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, then Secretary of the Academy, to ask him to read in his name a letter addressed to this noble body of critics. He wishes to put his case in front of the French arbiters of literary taste, although, being exiled in Ferney, he cannot come to Paris.

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The sequence of letters makes it clear that his quarrel is with Le Tourneur at least as much as with Shakespeare. On 26 July he asks d’Alembert to read his memo against ‘our enemy, Monsieur Le Tourneur’ (VS 176); on 13 August, having complied with the Academy’s request that the translator should remain unnamed, he sends the Secretary the final version of ‘his declaration of war to England [ma déclaration de guerre à l’Angleterre]’, with this commentary: Le grand point . . . est d’inspirer à la nation le dégoût et l’horreur qu’elle doit avoir pour Gilles-le-Tourneur, préconiseur de Gilles-Shakespeare . . . et de conserver un peu de notre honneur, s’il nous en reste. [The main thing . . . is to inspire the nation with the disgust and horror it should have for Gilles Le Tourneur, the advocate of Gilles Shakespeare . . . and to save some remnant of our honour]. (VS 182) On 15 August he writes to Jean François de La Harpe, the editor of the conservative journal, Le Mercure de France, and a member of the Academy, in order to enlist his support in the patriotic battle to defend Corneille and Racine (as well as Sophocles and Euripides, supposedly as approved sources) against Gilles Shakespeare and Pierrot Le Tourneur (VS 184). The vocabulary of war is everywhere present: Voltaire writes of ‘his war against England [ma guerre contre l’Angleterre]’ and of his campaign and order of battle; he calls d’Alembert ‘mon général’,19 and the two men refer to Le Tourneur and to some unnamed men of letters as ‘deserters’.20 The 1763 Paris treaty still rankles, and ensuring the victory of Racine and Corneille over Shakespeare has become a point of national honour. With this in view, Voltaire sets about translating literally the indecent passages which Le Tourneur has omitted or glossed over. He thus pursues the strategy already tried against La Place, of discrediting both Shakespeare for his irregular plots and improper language, and his translators for trying to make him regular and proper. In order to kill the dramatist and his translator with one stone, he refers to his own ‘faithful’ translation of Julius Caesar which, he says, does not attempt to deceive the reader; he also draws on his past translations of indecorous passages already publicized in the Appel: Iago’s and Othello’s sexual language, Cleopatra’s conversation with the peasant and Henry V’s wooing of Kate had already served, along with Francisco’s mouse, to illustrate Shakespeare’s want of taste in an article on ‘Art dramatique’.21 In his discourse to the Academy, Voltaire again uses Hamlet as an example of Shakespeare’s vulgarity and lack of art, but more briefly this time: a short

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travesty of a synopsis foregrounds the ghost, the murder of Polonius (due to his being mistaken for a rat), Ophelia’s madness and, predictably, the scene with the gravediggers which ‘the translator’ is blamed for maintaining in the play when even Garrick has done away with it, a paradoxical reproof considering that the same man is elsewhere censured for his omissions. Le Tourneur clearly can do no right: he has committed the unforgivable sin of mentioning neither Corneille or Racine, nor indeed Voltaire, in his Discours des préfaces. The critic who, on the contrary, is out to prove the superiority of the French Masters, presently enlarges his collection of Shakespearean ‘monstrosities’ which now range from the porter in Macbeth to the servants’ brawl in Romeo and Juliet compared with the exposition of Racine’s Bajazet, through King Lear contrasted with Corneille’s Pompey. It is noticeable that his now obsessional concern with Shakespeare’s vulgarity, manifest in the regular reappearance of Francisco’s mouse or Iago’s obscenities, remains limited to tragedies. The comedies are definitely outside his range. The (in)famous Lettre à l’Académie française was published in 1777. It made its way into the English papers, and, unsurprisingly, it sealed Voltaire’s reputation in England as an enemy of Shakespeare. Plays like Zara, Aaron Hill’s 1736 adaptation of his Zaïre, continued to be popular in London, but a number of English critics voiced their displeasure. As early as 1747, Samuel Foote had inveighed against ‘that insolent French Panegyrist’, accusing him of plagiarism. In 1753 Arthur Murphy, in a letter to Voltaire entitled ‘Shakespeare Vindicated’, published in The Gray’s Inn’s Journal, had called attention to his misrepresentations of Hamlet, while in 1765 Horace Walpole had defended the mixing of genres censured in his Commentary on Corneille, and Dr Johnson, in his Preface, had dismissed the ‘narrower principles’ of both Rymer and Voltaire, as ‘the petty cavils of petty minds’.22 But it was Elizabeth Montagu, the celebrated ‘Queen of the Blue Stockings’ who set up a more specific defence of the national poet with her Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear, Compared with the Greek and French Dramatic Poets, with Some Remarks upon the Misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire. Although it had been published in English in 1769 (and translated into German in 1771), Voltaire took it to be a reply to his Academy discourse, since its French translation, under the title Apologie de Shakespeart (sic), appeared only in 1777, the anonymous translator (long believed to be Le Tourneur himself) being probably eager to cash in on the agitation around Shakespeare. In fact Montagu’s essay must have been motivated by the 1764 publication of Voltaire’s Commentary on Corneille in which his translation of Julius Caesar was used as a foil to Cinna, since

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her main argument is that his English is insufficient to enable him to be a fair judge of Shakespeare. Listing a number of ‘miserable mistakes and galimatheus of this dictionary work’, she translates them back for the benefit of English readers, hoping that they ‘will deter other beaux esprits from attempting to hurt works of genius by the masked battery of an unfair translation’.23 Voltaire’s reply to Elizabeth Montagu was a new letter to the Academy, printed in 1777 as the dedication to Irène. This was his last play, a memorable success on the stage and the occasion of the ‘apotheosis’ of its author with the crowning of his bust at the ComédieFrançaise, perhaps meant as a parallel to the crowning of Shakespeare during Garrick’s Jubilee. The 1777 letter is often considered as the second part of his Academy discourse. But since it was conceived as a reply to Mrs Montagu’s praise of Shakespeare at the expense of Corneille, it is mainly concerned with establishing a contrario the superiority of French classical tragedy. The criticism of the English dramatist remains implied in the numerous references to the precepts of Boileau and the recurrent allusions to the difficulty of writing rhymed, as opposed to blank, verse (one of Voltaire’s pet themes). The demonstration however soon turns into a panegyric of Racine, the master of emotion. The letter concludes with the hope that future generations will be equal to the great century of Louis XIV and not degenerate for believing that they are superior [‘ . . . que les siècles à venir égalent le grand siècle de Louis XIV, et qu’ils ne dégénèrent pas en croyant le surpasser’] (VS 227). Voltaire died the following year. He had started his literary career as an open-minded pioneer, looking towards the future; but although as a pamphleteer he fought throughout to promote progress, social justice and tolerance, 24 as a dramatic critic he ended his life entrenched in the past.

Voltaire’s Criticism of Shakespeare: Ambivalence and Paradox The contradiction between Voltaire’s early and late reception of the dramatist is more apparent than real. The critical arguments remain the same throughout, but in the second half of the century the balance between praise and censure becomes more and more tilted towards condemnation as he realizes that he has, himself, set the Shakespearean fox to mind the classical geese, and thus endangered the future of the French model of tragedy which had so far ruled over Europe.

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Voltaire the classicist Voltaire’s early reception of Shakespeare is overdetermined by his century’s cultural and critical environment: his objections to Shakespeare’s drama merely reflect contemporary taste in tragedy and the basic incompatibility between his dramatic practice and the classical doxia, a set of rules supposedly inherited from Aristotle. Actually, when Voltaire was a visitor in London, the aesthetic, cultural and critical contexts were very similar on both sides of the Channel, as well as in Germany. In England too Shakespearean drama was then often unfavourably compared with the classical model of tragedy that had prevailed in London since the reopening of the theatres after the Restoration. Voltaire and his French peers reacted no differently from their English counterparts when they hailed Shakespeare’s sublime beauties but bewailed his monstrosities. In 1730 Voltaire could thus write to Lord Bolingbroke to whom he was dedicating his Brutus: J’ai entendu de votre bouche que vous n’aviez pas une bonne tragédie; mais en récompense, dans ces pièces si monstrueuses, vous avez des scènes admirables. [I have heard you say that you have no good tragedy; but, by way of compensation, you have some admirable scenes in those monstrous plays.] (VS 53) His correspondent could not deny the second statement either, since it echoed the mixed reactions of his own contemporaries, later defined as ‘beauty-and-faults’ criticism. This was the ambivalent response to Shakespeare of an age whose normative aesthetics (an avatar of their rational comprehension of the world) were suddenly confronted with the powerful plays of a non-conformist. On the one hand, critics were intent on checking Shakespeare’s conformity to their prescribed models (and the French were not the only ones to judge by the book of rules), hence the censuring of what they perceived as ‘irregularities’. On the other hand, they admired some isolated beauties such as fine speeches or moral thoughts, hence their selective approach to the plays, a constant of Shakespearean criticism on both sides of the Channel. The only variable was the proportion of praise allocated by way of compensation. Voltaire’s much-derided remark on the pearls he had discovered in the Shakespearean dunghill had in fact been anticipated by quite a few English critics: Dryden, whose Essay of Dramatick Poesie had described Shakespeare as ‘the Janus of poets’, had seen his 1675 adaptation of Troilus and Cressida as removing ‘the heap of rubbish under which many excellent thoughts lay wholly bury’d’. Charles Gildon, in his

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1710 Remarks on the Plays and Poems of Shakespeare, had resorted to a similar metaphor (‘beauties . . . in a heap of rubbish’), which an anonymous commentator on Hamlet had improved upon, in 1735, as ‘gold strangely mixed with dross’. Voltaire is similarly ambivalent from the start, and he follows the process of selection and rejection which is the trademark of neoclassical criticism of Shakespeare. In 1729, when he first introduces French readers to Hamlet, he translates the prince’s monologue as an example of ‘those strong, forcible Passages which atone for all (Shakespeare’s) faults’ (VS 45); in 1748, he describes the ghost of his father as one of the ‘beauties that shine in the midst of terrible extravagances’ (VS 57). But whereas in these instances he lists and mocks the gross irregularities he finds in the play, when he writes to Bolingbroke, his approach is more theoretical, as befits a discourse on tragedy: Il a manqué jusqu’à présent à presque tous les auteurs tragiques de votre nation cette pureté, cette conduite régulière, ces bienséances de l’action et du style, cette élégance, et toutes ces finesses de l’art qui ont établi la réputation du théâtre français depuis le grand Corneille. [What has been missing among almost all your nation’s tragic writers is the purity, the observance of the rules, the sense of propriety in action and style, the elegance and all the refinements of art which have established the reputation of the French theatre since the time of the great Corneille.]25 In other words, what English tragic writers lack is taste, le bon goût, which is a prerequisite in French classical tragedy and is, in his view, exemplified by Racine better than by Corneille. Any analysis of Voltaire’s criticism of Shakespeare must take into account the tyranny of taste which had governed the French theatre since the reign of Louis XIV and which the critic exerted and enforced to the bitter end.

The primacy of taste Whereas in England the critical debate revolves around dichotomies like nature and culture or inspiration and art, in France the second term of the opposition refers to the taste, elegance or refinement acquired through education and polite conversation. For Voltaire, as for Boileau before him, nature is only acceptable as la belle nature, ‘nature artfully veiled [cette nature qu’il faut voiler avec soin]’, as he writes in 1736, in the second epistle to Zaïre; any representation of reality must be subject to bienséances and decorum. Most of the irregularities deplored and later derided in his

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critiques of Shakespeare’s plays are offences against what he considers to be proper and acceptable on stage. Letter 18 already contains the gist of his objections: Othello strangling his wife on the stage, the gravediggers singing ballads in Hamlet, cobblers joking in the same scene as Brutus and Cassius in Julius Caesar (VS 44–5), these and similar breaches of propriety will be jeered at time and again over the years. Violations of the unities, which one might expect to be censured, are sometimes mocked, but they are generally waved aside. The nine years, dozen locations and thirty-seven main events in Richard III are pronounced to be trifles (‘une bagatelle’) compared to the indecencies of the wooing scene.26 In fact, for Voltaire and many of his contemporaries, the height of bad taste is the mixing of genres or styles. It is significant that, in the article on Taste which he contributed to the seventh volume of Diderot’s Encyclopédie in 1757, he should compare the man of taste to a gourmet who rejects the blending of styles. This allergy to mixtures explains his recurrent targeting not only of low characters such as gravediggers, cobblers or porters, whose vulgar jokes and comical quips debase the sublime of tragedy, but also of low style, which includes Hamlet’s quibbling, Iago’s sexual remarks, Ophelia’s mad scenes or even Francisco’s mouse. The demand for linguistic propriety, an avatar of bienséances, justifies many exclusions and rejections. As the years go by, Voltaire’s war with Shakespeare appears more and more as a crusade for Taste which barely conceals certain ideological options concerning the stage. The competition between Racine and Shakespeare, the two icons later used by Stendhal to illustrate the differences between classicism and romanticism,27 is not only a conflict between divergent aesthetics of drama. In a country with a well-established tradition of Court theatre, the tension also reveals antithetical politics for the stage. Court theatre versus the Pont-Neuf Voltaire’s elitist conception of the theatre is a constant in his life and works. His preference for Court theatre is apparent both in his dramatic practice and in his critical writings. His first plays were written for the Court. His theatrical production is essentially made up of tragedies in rhymed alexandrines, and their success throughout the century signals the expectations of the conservative audience of the Comédie-Française where his own plays were mostly performed. The notion of a theatre reserved for the happy few contrasts with the more democratic flavour of his political pamphlets, but it tallies with the aristocratic pretensions of François-Marie Arouet who insisted on being called Monsieur de Voltaire in the Parisian salons. He

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looked down upon melodramas like Diderot’s Père de famille, which catered for the taste of the middle class, and heartily despised the popular entertainments of the Pont Neuf, the Paris bridge on which clowns were known to perform.28 His conception of a theatre audience is ‘one hundred men of bon goût’ for whom ‘there is no pleasure without bienséance [Il n’y a point pour eux de plaisir sans bienséance]’ as he writes in the second Epistle to Zaïre,29 certainly not a mixture of social classes with groundlings to boot. In 1750, there were more than 150 private playhouses in Paris, testifying to aristocrats’ attraction to the theatre.30 Voltaire himself set up playhouses wherever he stayed, generally to stage his own plays. When he was residing in Switzerland, the ban on the building of playhouses pronounced by Geneva’s puritanical Council was the occasion of one of his many controversies with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the other great figure of the eighteenth century. In response to the restriction which caused him to move from ‘Les Délices’ to Ferney,31 he prompted d’Alembert to write an Encyclopédie article on Genève, in which he praised the town but regretted its lack of a playhouse. Rousseau replied with the famous Lettre à d’Alembert sur les Spectacles (1758), a denunciation of the immorality of the stage which evokes the worst Puritan attacks against the theatre. From then on, he was Voltaire’s pet enemy,32 but the contention was not really based on principle. Voltaire liked to pick a quarrel and he was in any case jealous of Rousseau’s status in the world of letters. The building of playhouses, in Switzerland or elsewhere, was not a cause he ever defended. The theatre he set up in Ferney in one of his out-houses could accommodate up to 200 persons, but although he would round up the butler or the coachman as attendants, the performances took place in front of friends and visitors and this was anything but a public playhouse.33 We learn more of Voltaire’s priorities for the theatre from the bulky study he published in 1751 on Le Siècle de Louis XIV, a century which he hails as the heyday of French tragedy. His conviction that the development of the arts is linked to the harmonious development of a civilisation, which in turn benefits from the refining and pacifying influence of the arts, again runs counter to Rousseau’s belief that civilisation brings corruption in its wake. But he also contends that this high period ended with the death of the enlightened monarch: ‘Genius is confined to one century, then it must needs degenerate [Le génie n’a qu’un siècle, après quoi il faut qu’il dégénère’].’34 His nostalgia for the court of the Sun King is manifest in his admiration for Racine, whom he ranks above Corneille, judged too irregular. Throughout his career he remains obsessed with Racine, in whom he finds the perfect conjunction of genius and taste; his elegance, sobriety

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and command of verse he tries to imitate in his own plays. Conversely, his mostly negative appreciation of Molière expresses the rejection of what he repeatedly calls ‘low comedy’, designed to please the populace. This he explains in Le Temple du Goût, where he deplores the fact that, after writing Le Misanthrope, a play for an enlightened public, this ‘wise man’ should have disguised himself as a clown to amuse the multitude with Le médecin malgré lui. Leaving aside the unacceptable mixing of genres, comedy itself should be refined and aim at diverting the higher classes of society. Unsurprisingly, it is the same elitism which colours his reception of Shakespeare whose crudity of language and breaches of propriety he considers calculated to please ‘the dregs of the people’. Whatever his advanced ideas in other domains, Voltaire was and remained a conservative where the theatre was concerned, a contradiction which, over the years, turned the enthusiastic discoverer of Shakespeare into his aggressive deprecator. Shakespeare versus Gilles His advocacy of the theatre as an aristocratic entertainment became more visible as interest in Shakespeare, nurtured by the translation of his plays, developed among his contemporaries. However approximate or bowdlerized, the texts disseminated by La Place and Le Tourneur acquainted French readers with a dramatic tradition completely alien to their own. From then on, Voltaire’s reactions betray his growing fear that vulgarity might be allowed to trespass upon the hallowed precincts of aristocratic theatre. This is perceptible in the way a number of his arguments develop and how they then recur. For instance, his frequent comparison of the English theatre with its Spanish counterpart, which is at first purely historical and factual, soon serves to oppose the coarseness of the theatre in these two uncivilized countries to the refined taste of polished nations like France and Italy. In 1729, the Lettres Philosophiques merely point to the similarities between Shakespeare and Lope de Vega, who both created the theatre in their respective countries. The comparison here serves to explain the powerful but unruly genius of dramatists writing at a time when art was still in its infancy, an excuse also commonly offered by English critics for the plays’ irregularities. The argument, this time supported by an allusion to the Greek theatre, is taken up in the dedication of Brutus to Bolingbroke, and again, in a letter to Horace Walpole in which Voltaire wishes to correct his reputation as Shakespeare’s enemy: ‘I said that his genius was his own but that his faults were his century’s [J’avais dit que son génie était à lui et que ses fautes étaient à son siècle.].’35 Like Lope de

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Vega, he goes on, Shakespeare is a mixture of grossness and grandeur, of buffooneries and terror, a deviation for which he is prepared to blame the custom of having fools at Court. But as his critiques become more geared to the defence of a model of tragedy ruled by taste, Spain and England together provide a foil for the delicacy and taste of the French (and Italian) theatre. In his Observations on Julius Caesar, both countries are blamed for ‘applauding for one hundred years plays which revolt other nations’, and for sharing ‘strange tastes . . . because they never knew any better’. In 1764 Voltaire is still prepared to stress that Shakespeare and Lope had genius, while lacking in taste. But in 1770, in a long article on ‘Art dramatique’, what he emphasizes is the vulgarity common to theatres meant for the populace and not for the Court. Le théâtre anglais . . . fut très animé, mais ce fut dans le goût espagnol; la bouffonnerie fut jointe à l’horreur. Toute la vie d’un homme fut le sujet d’une tragédie: les acteurs passaient de Rome, de Venise, en Chypre; la plus vile canaille paraissait sur le théâtre avec les princes, et ces princes parlaient souvent comme la canaille. . . . [The English stage . . . was very lively, but this was in the Spanish taste; fooleries were combined with horror. A man’s whole life was the subject of a tragedy: the actors moved from Rome and Venice to Cyprus; the lowest rabble appeared on the stage alongside princes, and these princes often spoke like the rabble.]. (VS 160) Again, the violation of the unities is only mentioned as incidental to the unacceptable mixing of classes and languages. What Voltaire objects to is not so much the presence of gravediggers or cobblers as their conversing with a prince or with a senator, and essentially the lowering of style that this entails. In the same article, he scoffs at Dr Johnson for ‘including clowning and drunkenness among the beauties of tragic theatre’ (Johnson’s preface had stated that ‘the poet disdains those accidental distinctions of condition and country . . . ‘). For Voltaire, distinctions of condition are anything but negligible. On the contrary, he returns to them again and again, churning out the same examples, supported by the same quotations. His allergies are wide-ranging and mostly caused by Shakespeare’s language. In an Encyclopedia article entitled ‘Goût’ a translation of Prince Hal’s first dialogue with Falstaff serves to illustrate the dramatist’s lack of taste (an heir to the throne should not converse with a mere army general). Henry V’s unseemly courting of Kate or Richard II’s indecorous mention of toads and spiders in his address to his kingdom are frequently condemned, and

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Francisco’s mouse is as recurrent a source of indignation as Iago’s obscenities, perhaps because it can be each time unfavourably compared with Racine’s elegant reference to Neptune. The discourse to the Academy clarifies the nature of Voltaire’s objections to the mouse: Un soldat peut s’exprimer ainsi dans un corps de garde, mais non pas sur le théâtre, devant les premières personnes d’une nation, qui s’expriment noblement, et devant qui il faut s’exprimer de même. [A soldier may speak like this in a guardroom, but not on a stage, in front of the elite of a nation, who use elevated language and before whom one should do the same.]. (VS 201) This is by way of saying that the language spoken in Shakespeare’s plays, whether obscene, indelicate or merely mundane, is unfit for the aristocratic theatre. Tragedies must be written in the elevated style expected by the Court and by an exclusive elite. Conversely, and logically, since he repeats that Shakespeare wrote for the populace, Voltaire explains the success of Hamlet by its appeal to the vulgar taste of the groundlings, sailors, cab-drivers, butchers, who will throng to see cock-fights, bull-baiting and ghosts.36 Significantly, the critic can conceive of no middle position between the court theatre and the village fair. In his crusade for taste, he refers to Shakespeare more and more as a ‘Gilles de la foire’, a market-place entertainer, a clown intent on amusing the populace, and less and less as a dramatist of genius. The difference between the two has more to do with language than with anything else: either this is suitably filtered, preferably through verse, in order to conform to decorum and taste and to the high style of tragedy; or else it is debased because it serves to represent everyday reality, and this is the low style which is acceptable only on the Pont-Neuf. Hamlet, whose famous soliloquy he applauds (especially when translated, by himself, into alexandrines),37 is censured for his ‘too solid flesh’ monologue. This time it is the character, not the dramatist, who is likened to a village clown: ‘Gilles, dans une foire de province, s’exprimerait avec plus de décence et de noblesse que le prince Hamlet. [Gilles, in a country fair, would express himself with more decency and propriety than prince Hamlet.]’ (VS 87). Voltaire, who here provides an adequate blank verse translation of this first monologue (which he had merely paraphrased in the Appel),38 does not reveal what he considers indecent or improper; he is content to comment ironically that ‘the gist of Hamlet’s speech is in nature: this is sufficient for the English [Le fond du discours d’Hamlet est

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dans la nature: cela suffit aux Anglais].’ The context is a review in which he sneers at Lord Kames for judging the allusion to a mouse ‘natural’. It is thus logical to infer that in Voltaire’s view words like ‘garden’, ‘seeds’ or ‘shoes’, not to mention ‘appetite’, should never be pronounced by a prince. What Lord Kames commends as natural beauty, he censures as offences against taste. Adjusting Shakespeare to French taste: La Place, Le Tourneur and Ducis La Place and Le Tourneur were as aware as Voltaire that Shakespeare’s choice of words might shock their contemporaries. That was why, unlike him, they chose to omit, correct, or tone down his worst deviations from classical rectitude. La Place’s option of cutting out ‘uncalled-for details [des détails déplacés]’, was one means of making Shakespeare’s plays acceptable to what he calls in his preface ‘the refined taste of our century [le goût épuré de notre siècle (Discours 1: xi )].’ His positive selectiveness is reminiscent of that of the English adaptors and critics who chose to highlight what conformed to the classical prescriptions, and to ban or explain away what did not. In England, from Pope’s 1725 edition, with its asterisks and daggers, to Dodd’s 1752 anthology of The Beauties of Shakespeare, bardolatry had gone in leaps and bounds. In France, in the 1770’s, Pierre Le Tourneur anthologized English criticism in his Discours des préfaces, but avoided upsetting his noble subscribers by separating the wheat from the chaff in his prose translations. He took a number of liberties with the text, refining the style, skipping over obscenities and quibbles and silently emending some unmentionable words. In Hamlet, for instance, the rat behind the arras is transformed into a thief (‘un voleur’), Francisco’s mouse into an insect (‘pas un insecte n’a remué’); ‘old mole’ is rendered by ‘invisible fantôme’ and ‘something rotten’ by ‘quelque vice caché’ [‘some hidden vice’]. Almost a century later Le Tourneur provides a sitting target for a Victor Hugo intent on promoting his son’s translation of the Complete Works. In his celebration of genius entitled William Shakespeare, Hugo is very critical of the dramatist’s first translator. His main preoccupation, he writes, was to take the edge off Shakespeare’s writing, to smooth down its contours and angles, to make him pass, thus making him only just passable [‘(il était) uniquement occupé d’émousser Shakespeare, de lui ôter les reliefs et les angles, de le faire passer, donc de le rendre passable’].39 Taking up Hugo’s word play, it may be more accurate to describe La Place and Le Tourneur, less disparagingly, as des passeurs, cultural mediators

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striving to make Shakespeare accessible to their contemporaries. Both are also mediators at second remove, since Jean-François Ducis used them as a source when writing his ‘imitations’ of Shakespeare, turning to the latter for some of his last plays. In his drastic rewriting of Hamlet, Ducis certainly does his best to make Shakespeare’s play pass the classical test. In a letter to Garrick dated 14 April 1769, he explains that he found the original so full of ‘wild irregularities [des irrégularités sauvages]’ and ‘dramatic mainsprings totally unacceptable on the French stage [des ressorts dramatiques totalement inacceptables sur notre scène]’ that he had to create a new play.40 The result is an orthodox tragedy in which everything happens in one place, within 24 hours and in the course of a single plot involving only eight characters. They all speak in rhyming alexandrines and in the elevated style of tragedy. Ducis also translates action into narration by flanking his four main characters (Claudius, Gertrude, Hamlet and Ophelia) with confidants to whom they can relate past events and reveal future plans; he creates a prince torn between duty and love by making Ophelia the daughter of his father’s murderer, a Claudius who is the queen’s ex-lover and is also plotting to usurp the throne. The popularity of Ducis’s imitations certainly had much to do with the impact of actors like Molé, and later of Talma, in the title roles. But their lasting success also derived from the sprinkling of innovation which seasoned their orthodoxy, even though this was sometimes too much for the French public’s taste. Ducis enlarged, for instance, the part of Gertrude into that of a guilty but repentant mother and stressed the prince’s filial piety. This emphasized the family relationships characteristic of bourgeois domestic drama which then appealed to a new public, rather than the love interest central to classical tragedy. Replacing the ghost, who was decorously maintained off-stage, by an urn containing the ashes of the dead father, a dramatically effective metonymy, reconciled stage decorum with stage effect.41 But the attempt to make the ghost call for revenge, even from off-stage, could not be repeated after the first night, and even in 1791, in the midst of the Revolution, the attempt to have Desdemona murdered on stage caused the ladies in the audience to faint and the gentlemen to protest. Ducis subsequently imagined a happy ending for his Othello, as he had earlier for his Roméo & Juliette. The time was not ripe for imitating Shakespeare too closely. However tentative and limited, the assimilation of Shakespearean drama through translation and adaptation was a way of bridging the gap between opposing dramatic traditions and cultural ideologies. In their different ways, La Place, Ducis and Le Tourneur acted as intermediaries between

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Shakespeare’s drama and classical tragedy. Their resonance abroad testifies to their success. It was through Ducis’s play, for instance, that many countries in and even outside Europe discovered Hamlet and five of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Apart from their direct influence at a time when French was still the language of European culture, most of these plays were translated, or freely adapted, into Italian, Spanish, Dutch and into the languages of Latin America. Voltaire could not be aware of this. In any case, he would probably have considered that these rewritings had little in common with their originals, to reassure himself that Shakespeare had not acquired the status of model and had not spelled the final defeat of French tragedy. In his 1756 Essai sur les mœurs, he explained that the dramatist’s lack of taste had prevented his plays from crossing the sea, and in his first discourse to the Academy, he again argued that none of his plays had ever been performed outside England.42 He judged that such ‘monstrous farces’ were not transferable and he applied himself to prove them so, widening the gap that others were trying to bridge. At the end of his life, taste had become his only criterion and while the translators strove to adjust Shakespeare to French taste, he was busy collecting examples of the dramatist’s vulgar language in order to advertise his bad taste. Highlighting Shakespeare’s lack of taste: Voltaire the polemical translator For all that has been said, Voltaire is a talented, accurate translator, and he states some sound principles in the prologue to his 1764 translation of Julius Caesar. For the first and probably the only time in his criticism of Shakespeare, he refers to him as a poet, a definition never found in contemporary criticism. The Sonnets were unknown in France at the time (they were only published in 1871),43 and critiques of his language never envisaged that his style could be ‘poetic’. In this case, however, Voltaire compares the original work to a picture and assigns the translator the task of giving an exact rendering of all its components, organisation, colour and of its faults and beauties [‘C’est un tableau dont il faut copier exactement l’ordonnance, les attitudes, le coloris, les défauts et les qualités, sans quoi vous donnez votre ouvrage pour le sien’] (VS 94). But the passages he then chooses to illustrate his method betray his ulterior motives: he immediately produces a very precise translation of Iago’s obscene language in the opening scene of Othello, offering it for comparison with La Place’s admittedly toned down version: ‘Je dis, monsieur, que vous êtes trahi, & que le Maure est actuellement possesseur des charmes de votre fille. [I say,

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Sir, that you have been betrayed and that the Moor is now enjoying your daughter’s favours.]’ Why, he comments, should we conceal any aspect of this dramatist who is presented as so admirable? Later, in his first discourse to the Academy, he justifies his close translation of the porter’s definition of the effects of drink with the same apparent candour: Si de telles idées et de telles expressions sont en effet cette belle nature qu’il faut adorer dans Shakespeare, son traducteur ne doit pas les dérober à notre culte. Si ce ne sont que les petites négligences d’un vrai génie, la fidélité exige qu’on les fasse connaître, ne fût-ce que pour consoler la France, en lui montrant qu’ailleurs il y a peut-être aussi des défauts. [If such ideas and expressions indeed represent the beautiful nature which we must adore in Shakespeare, his translator must not withhold them from our admiration. If they are nothing but the minor blunders of a real genius, a faithful translation should make them known, if only to comfort France by showing that faults may be found elsewhere too.] (VS 190) In his theoretical approach to translation Voltaire is ahead of his time. Accuracy and respect for the original are principles that Victor Hugo was later to put forward in the preface to his son’s translation.44 But in the last decade of his life Voltaire’s practice of the art of close translation is exclusively applied to the vulgar speeches, indecent language and bawdy passages which he knows will shock his contemporaries’ taste and which the other translators had omitted for that very reason. Quoting them out of context, without any critical reflection on their function or any account of the character who speaks them, amounts to collecting an anthology of Shakespeare’s Horrors when the rest of Europe has started concentrating on his Beauties. His translator’s talents are now used to discredit the very dramas which they earlier served to promote. A survey of his translations magnifies the progression from appreciation to denigration in his reception of Shakespeare. He started by collecting pearls; he ended up sifting through the dunghill itself. In the 1730s his belle infidèle in alexandrines, followed by his more literal prose translation, made Hamlet’s monologue famous. In 1761 his precise, sometimes elegant prose rendering of the various extracts illustrating his synopsis, familiarized readers with the play itself. Then in 1764 the first three acts of Jules César became available, thanks to him, in a much more faithful version than that offered earlier by La Place, and well before Le Tourneur’s. Voltaire’s translation alternates prose

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(reserved for the commoners), and unrhymed alexandrines, which he refers to as ‘vers blancs’, his personal equivalent for blank verse. One of his recurrent arguments to prove the superiority of French tragedy is that it is written in rhymed verse, and he repeats that blank verse (‘which is as easily turned out as a letter’) would mean the death of tragedy: ‘si on s’avise de faire des tragédies en vers blancs et de les jouer sur notre théâtre, la tragédie est perdue’. In the case of this Jules César, it is striking that a translation in alexandrines (even unrhymed), with its attendant rhythm, its inversions, repetitions and other necessary expedients, gives Shakespeare’s play the flavour of a classical tragedy. Some notes attract attention to powerful passages (as in Pope’s edition), but much more often to the indecorous language which the translator apologizes for having to translate, reminding the reader that Shakespeare was catering for the taste of the populace. In such cases, Voltaire the polemicist already peeps out from behind the translator. Translating Shakespeare is also a means of settling accounts. Presenting his own Jules César as ‘the most faithful, indeed the only faithful translation ever published in French of an ancient or foreign poet’45 amounts to running down La Place’s previous work without naming him. And interrupting the translation after Caesar’s death, thus reducing the play to the conspiracy against him, actually allows the critic to launch into a mostly unfavourable comparison with Corneille’s treatment of the same subject in his Cinna. After this, Voltaire’s resort to translation becomes purely polemical. The same dialogues between or with low characters, the same obscene or merely improper speeches are quoted again and again, and always out of context. They are designed as much to underscore the other translators’ omissions and glosses as to publicize Shakespeare’s ‘baseness and depravity’,46 which the former are accused of concealing deliberately. Voltaire makes his objective clear in a letter to La Harpe of 15 August 1776, as he is putting the fi nal touch to his discourse to the Academy: Le vrai but de mon travail [est] que le public soit bien instruit de tout l’excès de la turpitude infâme qu’on ose opposer à la majesté de notre théâtre. Il est clair que l’on ne peut faire connaître cette infamie qu’en traduisant littéralement les gros mots du délicat Shakespeare. [The public should be well informed of all the excess of infamous turpitude that some dare oppose to the majesty of our own theatre. It is clear that the only way of revealing this infamy is to translate literally the bad language of the delicate Shakespeare.] (VS 184)

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In the published edition of the discourse, this advertising strategy is again completed by footnotes of apology to his readers, particularly ladies, a way of making sure that Shakespeare’s transgression does not pass unnoticed. Paradoxically, Voltaire is ahead of his time as a translator, but behind his time in the critical use which he makes of it. In turning the selective process of neoclassical criticism into the collecting of faults without beauties, he is running against the rising tide of bardolatry which is doing exactly the opposite. Both as translator and critic, he is fighting a losing battle to maintain the supremacy of French classical tragedy. Voltaire, the cosmopolitan-turned-nationalist In the 1770s not only is Shakespeare’s reputation developing in France and on the Continent, but references to his dramatic practice are used more and more as a means of shaking off French literary domination and of shattering norms so far based on a European consensus. Voltaire channels his dismay at the loss of French authority in Europe into a fierce vindication of the national dramatic model. No holds are barred as the nationalistic undertones of his former critiques are first modulated into the overtones of his attacks against Le Tourneur ‘the deserter’, before being transmuted into the chauvinistic worship of Racine’s elegance and the systematic denunciation of Shakespeare’s vulgarity: ‘You should know that the French, against whom you inveigh, will accept what is simple, but not what is low and coarse’, he explains to Kames in patronizing tones.47 In his ‘patriotic’ war, Voltaire does not always steer clear of xenophobia (the line between foreigner and barbarian is always thin), and his excesses backfire: his aggressiveness increases German critics’ desire to shake off the imperialism of French classicism and the echoes of his diatribes against the now venerated national poet ruin his own reputation with English critics. Once again Voltaire appears enmeshed in contradictions as when, in his patriotic crusade in defence of French taste, the political anglophile turns into a literary anglophobe and even makes fun, in various letters and in his discourse to the Academy, of the anglomania in which he earlier participated. And yet his recurrent eulogies of Addison and his neoclassical Cato continue to coexist with his adverse reactions to English drama. In his article on ‘Art dramatique’, he praises Cato on a par with the French tragedies, and he remarks that Shakespeare would have been a perfect poet, had he lived in Addison’s time [‘Shakespeare eut été un poète parfait s’il avait vécu au temps d’Addison’] (VS 168). In fact, Shakespeare is not a barbarian because he is English, but because he was born in a barbarous

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age and could not benefit from the refinement of polite conversation. This is essentially what Dryden and the English neoclassicists said, but much earlier. Voltaire is the voice of classicism as much as the voice of France, though they merge more and more in his diatribes. This is because, even in France, the voice of classicism is beginning to sound old-fashioned. Shakespeare’s dramatic model, however travestied or bowdlerized, is slyly undermining confidence in French national tragedy. In his frantic defence of the French Masters, Voltaire can count on the support of the Academy and of a few conservative die-hards like La Harpe.48 But even his closest friend, Madame du Deffand, to whom he earlier confided his anxieties on the future of French bon goût, writes to Horace Walpole in 1768: ‘How I admire your Shakespeare! . . . He almost makes me think . . . that the rules are obstacles to genius.’49 This creative god, as Le Tourneur defines him to Voltaire’s horror, is throwing French critical theory off balance with his attractive irregularities. La Place, for instance, who picks and chooses and expurgates, unexpectedly maintains the gravedigger scene in full, ‘because it is famous in England, being so unusual’ (Discours 2 d: 379n.). Le Tourneur also retains what Voltaire calls ‘this abominable scene’ (VS 192). While a few of his contemporaries acknowledge the effectiveness of some deviations from the norm, Voltaire is more and more committed to an orthodoxy that is fast losing its validity. The conservative becomes reactionary. In 1776, more than ten years after Dr Johnson had dismissed Voltaire’s and Rymer’s objections to the ‘mélange des genres’, Voltaire still quotes approvingly from Rymer’s Short View of Tragedy of 1693. And yet, contrary to his later dogmatic pronouncements, his earlier critiques had echoed the most favourable judgements of the English critics of the 1720s and the dispensations they conceded to geniuses. Thus, in 1727, in the Essay on Epic Poetry, Voltaire granted Shakespeare ‘the privilege of the inventive genius who cuts a path for himself where no one has walked before; he runs without guide, art or rules, he gets lost in his course, but he leaves far behind him everything which has to do only with reason and exactness.’50 In Le siècle de Louis XIV, Corneille, another true but irregular genius, was similarly granted the privilege of committing grievous faults, because he opened a new way: ‘C’est le privilège du vrai génie, et surtout du génie qui ouvre une carrière, de commettre impunément de grandes fautes.’51 His early conception of taste was much less absolute. In the 1761 Appel he quoted Hamlet’s monologue, ‘an unpolished diamond full of flaws [un diamant brut qui a des taches]’ as evidence of ‘the diversity of national tastes [il n’y a peut-être pas un plus grand exemple de la diversité du goût

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des nations]’ (VS 76). But as Shakespeare threatened to be considered as a model, this open-mindedness gave way to rigidity. For the critic of the final decade, taste was absolute and universal, and genius no longer an excuse for straying. He proscribed and ostracized, heedless of La Place’s warning in his Discours: ‘Let us beware of rejecting today what our nephews may applaud later on [Gardons-nous de condamner sans retour aujourd’hui ce que nos neveux applaudiront peut-être un jour’]’ (Discours 1: xxi). La Place’s foresight contrasts with Voltaire’s pronouncement that Shakespeare can never be performed outside England, and with the feeling developing on the other side of the Channel that his drama is being measured with a yardstick now inadequate. But the later Voltaire ignores the critics from abroad, unlike La Place, whose Discours is largely inspired by Pope, or Le Tourneur, who provides a survey of Shakespearean criticism in England in his Discours des préfaces and also uses the latest German criticism. And yet, even though the pressure of other critics or of another dramatic model never causes him to question his critical concepts, he is not himself immune to the fascination with this unorthodox drama which disconcerted even the most inveterate classicists.

The spectator versus the critic: the dramatist’s dilemma With Voltaire, irritation and rejection override his attraction as soon as Shakespeare’s intrusion threatens to become an invasion, but fascination with his drama persists throughout, as if the enthusiastic spectator of Julius Caesar had refused to disappear behind the critic. Also, Voltaire is, and remains, a dramatist, and his early contact with the London stage has obviously made him aware of the limitations of the theatre of his time, an awareness which may have increased his sense that Shakespeare represented a threat. His 1733 Essai sur la poésie épique provides the first instance of unfavourable comparison between French tragedy and its English counterpart: Chez les Français, la tragédie est pour l’ordinaire une suite de conversations en 5 actes avec une intrigue amoureuse. En Angleterre, la tragédie est véritablement une action. [In France, tragedy is usually a sequence of conversations in five acts, with a love plot. In England, tragedy is a genuine action.]52 This is repeated in the Discours sur la tragédie and again much later, sometimes in connection with Corneille, often in association with complaints

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about the insipid love-plots and interminable conversations of French tragedies to which he opposes the energy and liveliness of English drama.53 The dynamism of Shakespearean drama obviously contrasts with the static declamations of classical tragedy. Strikingly, Voltaire several times manifests his preference for the former, always in association with his memories of the murder of Caesar on stage. In his 1730 Discours he confesses his ‘rapture’ at the sight of Brutus, the murderer, haranguing the mob. But even in the context of his 1764 translation, he can expatiate on the attraction of such savage and unusual plays, opposing the emotion induced, even by a murder, to the tedium generated by ‘long confidences of cold love, or even colder political reasonings [J’avoue qu’en tout j’aimais mieux encore ce monstrueux spectacle, que de longues confidences d’un froid amour, ou des raisonnements politiques encore plus froids]’ (VS 155). Voltaire’s preference for spectacle, however ‘monstrous’, over the narration of offstage events is a remarkable confession on the part of a classical dramatist and critic, all the more remarkable since this preference obviously results from his experience as a spectator. The short analysis of Julius Caesar, which follows his translation of the first three acts, revolves around his habitual censure of the English dramatist’s coarseness and lack of taste. But this is in several places qualified by his reminiscences of the play in performance. His past reactions, alternately described as interest, curiosity or emotion, appear to have been channelled into the traditional beautyand-fault approach, as if the spectator’s enthusiasm had been taken over by the critic’s rationality. But the former surfaces when he writes: ‘Despite so many ridiculous incongruities, I could feel that the play was taking possession of me [Malgré tant de disparates ridicules, je sentis que la pièce m’attachait.]’ (VS 155). Even after many years, the spectacle of the murder comes to the fore whenever he reminisces on Julius Caesar on the stage. The lasting impressions left by Julius Caesar in performance must have influenced the dramatist as well as the critic, since in 1731, he admits to having used the play as a source for his own Mort de César. In this tragedy Cassius appears on stage carrying a blood-stained dagger, after the murder has taken place off-stage. This is heard, but not seen, as if the dramatist was steering a middle course between the tedium of a decorous narration and the excitement of a scene of horror, a hesitation which signals the tension between the critic’s allegiance to classical taste and the spectator’s attraction for sensational novelty. In Sémiramis (1748) Ninias enters ‘covered with the parricide’s blood [couvert du sang du parricide]’, as indicated in a stage direction, and he proceeds to tell the spectator, in the correct idiom of classical diction, that he has just killed Ninus, his father: ‘ j’ai deux fois dans

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son sang plongé ce fer vengeur’. Yet in the earlier Zaïre (1736), Orosmane stabs the heroine on stage, in a scene and with a speech very reminiscent of Othello. The attraction to Voltaire the dramatist of a predecessor whom he denigrates as a critic is so obvious that he has often been accused of plagiarism. Aaron Hill’s prologue to his adaptation of Zaïre is explicit: From rack’d Othello’s rage he raised his style And snatch’d the brand that lights his tragic pile. When his remonstrances against Shakespeare became known in England, critics like Samuel Foote retaliated by taxing him with ‘pilfering’ the very plays that he so harshly criticized and by inviting readers to compare his Mahomet with Macbeth.54 As late as 1902 Thomas Lounsbury accused Voltaire of plagiarizing Hamlet in Sémiramis, a play where the ghost of the slain king roams the stage in search of retribution. 55 Indeed in his preface to this play Voltaire refers to the ghost as one of ‘the beauties shining in the midst of the terrible extravagances’ which he has listed, and he remarks that ‘the shade of Hamlet’s father is one of the most impressive stage-effects [(Il faut avouer que, parmi) les beautés qui étincellent au milieu de ces terribles extravagances, l’ombre du père d’Hamlet est un des coups de théâtre les plus frappants.]’ (VS 57). He was not the only critic to be impressed by ‘the terror and force of the ghost scene’, as the Abbé Le Blanc wrote in his ‘Critical examination of the tragedy of Hamlet’.56 And yet, as Ducis later wrote to Garrick, ‘an out-and-out ghost who is given long speeches [le spectre tout avoué qui parle longtemps]’57 was unacceptable on the French stage at the time, which explains why in his own Hamlet, he keeps the character off-stage and replaces it with an urn. It is a measure of Voltaire’s desire for innovation that he tried to meet the challenge twice, in Eriphyle (1732) where his ghost had to thread his way among the young fops then still allowed to sit on the stage, and again, despite this first flop, in Sémiramis (1748) where his ghost was criticized for appearing to the whole court. Voltaire was certainly influenced by Shakespeare, and he does imitate his drama in his own way. In La mort de César Voltaire introduces a mob which he calls Romains; they speak the same language as Antony, exclaiming ‘Oh spectacle funeste !’ when the body of Caesar is brought in. In the second prefatory Epistle to Zaïre, he acknowledges that he has borrowed his subject from national history in imitation of the English stage. In effect, situating his plot at the time of the Crusades allows him to create a conflict between love and religion in a context of tension between Christian and Islamic culture. It is the moral

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dilemma of the heroine, and not the jealousy of the hero which is at the root of the tragedy, and it is inaccurate to accuse him of having plagiarized Othello. His deviations from the classical tradition show his desire to inject some new blood into a genre that he felt needed rejuvenating. They contradict the critic’s resistance to change and seem paradoxical. His classical plays were very popular, while his attempts at innovation were not always crowned with success. His imitations of Shakespeare confirm the fascination as a spectator which as a critic he seems ashamed to confess. Using the dramatist as a model was indeed a paradox, considering his frantic defence of the classical dramatic model. Yet the fascination surfaces at times in the midst of his criticism, as when he defines the appeal of Hamlet’s monologue, in spite of all its faults as ‘a je ne sais quoi which attracts and moves us much more than elegance would [un je ne sais quoi qui attache, et qui remue beaucoup plus que ne ferait l’élégance.]’ (VS 76). Finding that the classical codes and their rational categories are ineffectual in explaining Shakespeare’s impact, he resorts like English critics before him to the undefined je ne sais quoi, or to irrational concepts like ‘instinctive genius’. But his most emblematic reaction is probably to be found as late as 1764, not in a published critique, but in a private letter to Bernard Joseph Saurin, another dramatist. Moving from his usual censure of Gilles’s barbarity and ridicule to his also recurrent judgement that Corneille’s reasonings are icy (‘à la glace’) he concludes by comparison: ‘People still flock to see his (Gilles’s) plays and enjoy them, even while they find them absurd [Les raisonnements de Pierre Corneille sont à la glace en comparaison du Tragique de ce Gilles. On court encor à ses pièces, et on s’y plait en les trouvant absurdes.]’ (VS 84). The French On (on court; on s’y plait) could here just as well be translated by we, which includes I. Enjoyment is here coexistent with absurdity. The paradox of Shakespeare’s appeal, here explicitly stated, implicitly expresses the perplexity of the classical critic. Faced with the inadequacy of his categories, he takes refuge in oxymoron, as when he pronounces Shakespeare a barbarian genius and his plays attractive monsters.

The Resonance and Afterlife of Voltaire’s Shakespeare Criticism Voltaire never let his fascination with Shakespeare overrule his classical restrictions, and in his final decade the critic’s censures smothered the spectator’s initial attraction. Yet although his name is more often associated

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with the demotion of the dramatist than with his promotion, the overall positive resonance of his Shakespeare criticism has been disproportionate to the number of lines he actually wrote. Conversely, the two Hugos, who contributed much more profusely to the appreciation and dissemination of his dramas, are less present in international bibliographies. And yet Victor the father celebrated the tercentenary with a bulky volume that is too often dismissed as a preface to his son’s translation. And between 1859 and 1865, François-Victor Hugo published translations of the Complete Works which serve to this day. Yet he never managed to establish a name of his own, since posterity, particularly abroad, often confuses him with his father. So why does Voltaire hold such an important place in the reception of Shakespeare in France, to the point of being (too) often considered to epitomize the French reception of Shakespeare? Certainly because he was a pioneer, possibly because he was and remained a classicist. When Voltaire first introduced Shakespeare into France through criticism and translation, French was the language of culture, spoken in all the courts of Europe, and he himself was known and influential throughout Europe: ‘J’ai un petit malheur, c’est que je n’écris pas une ligne qui ne coure l’Europe [I have a small problem: I can’t write a line that doesn’t run through Europe],’ he would say, and he later described himself in his letters as ‘the innkeeper of Europe’, welcoming a great number of visitors, French and foreign, in his Ferney residence. Though at the end of his life he appears as a literary dinosaur, he was for decades considered to be the oracle of Europe. Thus, his discovery, his critiques and his translations of Shakespeare resounded throughout the Continent and initiated new currents and ideas which circulated and interacted in the following decades. His resistance to Shakespeare had a number of paradoxical effects: in England, the defence of the native poet against the carping French critic encouraged bardolatry; in Germany, his aggressive vindication of French cultural domination boosted the Shakespearean alternative. In fact his criticism might have had less positive impact on the reputation of the dramatist if his judgements had been less provocative. The ripples and waves created in literary circles by irate letters, angry pamphlets and replies, aroused curiosity about the plays. Thus, the quarrel triggered by his reactions to the publication of Le Tourneur’s Shakespeare traduit de l’anglois brought Shakespeare to the centre of literary preoccupations and attracted attention to the translations. The growing interest in Shakespeare of both readers and spectators can often be traced back to Voltaire, sometimes through unexpected paths. The synopsis of Hamlet that is the backbone of his Appel should perhaps be considered as another intertext for Ducis’s Hamlet since,

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biased and ironical though it is, it offers a mostly accurate summary of the play which must have nurtured familiarity with the plot. Voltaire’s criticism of Shakespeare also reverberates through the centuries because it is so emblematic of the neoclassical reception of Shakespeare. Over its fi fty years of contradictions and excesses, it covers the gamut of classical reactions to the plays, offering a magnified vision of the dichotomy between the two dramatic models confronted during the eighteenth century and setting up the terms of a dialectic of rejection and attraction which remains unresolved until the next one. More than French resistance to Shakespeare, Voltaire epitomizes the classicist’s resistance to a rival model, not so much in its attachment to a set of rules as in its rejection of the mixing of genres, social classes and styles. While England deplored the dramatist’s exuberant and overblown style, France, through Voltaire, essentially censured the intrusion of everyday realism into the elevated preoccupations of tragedy. This allergy was a lasting obstacle to the recognition of the dramatist’s specific appeal and distinctive style. It is impossible to decide whether the spectacle of a Shakespeare comedy on the stage would have shaken Voltaire’s certainties about decorous language and propriety. Both were ingrained in his belief in the purity of tragedy, and this was not swayed by another sensible remark of La Place’s in his Discours (1: xxi), that if the label ‘tragedy’ was removed, the irregularities would disappear [‘ôtez le titre de tragédies et l’irrégularité tombera’]. Eighteenth-century France was in any case never subjected to the influence of Shakespeare’s comedies since none of them was performed on a French stage before the twentieth century. This may explain why, even apart from Voltaire’s hostility, French criticism soon lagged behind that of England and Germany, where literary concepts evolved under the influence of the Shakespearean model of drama. In Germany, C. M. Wieland’s first published translation was that of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by C. M. Wieland, and the first theatrical performance was a version of The Tempest, staged by the same Wieland.58 The Tempest also opened Le Tourneur’s translation, but like the other comedies it was only available to the reading public.59 The fairies and Caliban remained unknown to French spectators, even while the marvellous in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Tempest contributed to shatter the concept of imitation in European literary criticism. Though Addison’s seminal essay on ‘the fairy way of writing’ became known on the Continent through a translation in the French Spectateur, it seems to have passed through France unnoticed.60 First published in English in 1712 under the title ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’, it was translated the same year,

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well before France discovered Shakespeare. The debates it launched on the dramatist’s use of the supernatural never involved the French critics. And the questioning of the superiority of mimetic reproduction over the power of imagination which ensued does not appear to have weakened the confidence of the French classicists in their own model of tragedy. Its linguistic formalism was difficult to eradicate and its authority was less easily controverted in the country which had used it as an instrument for the literary colonization of Europe than in those who saw in the Shakespearean model a means of dislodging the colonizer. Voltaire had introduced Shakespeare into France, but in spite of some personal reactions and innovations that betray his repressed admiration, his public stance and his ossified classicism largely impeded the necessary renewal of French dramatic forms.

Victor Hugo, the Anti-Voltaire In France the revolution in the aesthetics of drama occurred well after the social revolution and its main actor was Victor Hugo. As he claims at the end of his revolutionary preface to his 1827 Cromwell: ‘there is now a literary ancien régime as there is a political ancien régime [Il y a aujourd’hui l’ancien régime littéraire comme l’ancien régime politique.].’61 His name is indeed associated with the 1830 battle of Hernani and the victory of romantic drama over classical tragedy, but his contribution to the understanding of Shakespeare is often underestimated. And yet, the new theory of drama which he puts forward in his preface constantly refers to Shakespeare. And the combination of the grotesque and the sublime on which it is based vindicates those very features that previously found disfavour: Shakespeare, c’est le Drame; et le drame qui fond sous un même souffle le grotesque et le sublime, le terrible et le bouffon, la tragédie et la comédie. [Shakespeare is Drama, drama which fuses in the same breath the grotesque and the sublime, terror and foolery, tragedy and comedy.]62 For Hugo, Shakespeare is not a bogey, but a standard. He quotes as precedents the witches in Macbeth, the gravediggers in Hamlet or the apothecary in Romeo, at the same time as he derides the restrictions imposed on the theatre by classical dogma. In his preface he champions his new model of drama in opposition to the old model of tragedy, in the same way as, in his William Shakespeare (1864), he vindicates Shakespeare’s singularity as a

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genius against the strictures of the classicists. Voltaire is sometimes explicitly taken to task, about the pearls in a dunghill and his chauvinistic letter to d’Argental, for instance, but he is more often implicitly mocked as the quintessential Classicist, blind to the genius of Shakespeare because of his obsession with taste: Ce Shakespeare ne respecte rien . . . il enjambe les convenances, il culbute Aristote . . . il est sans pitié pour les pauvres petits estomacs qui sont candidats à l’Académie. Cette gastrite qu’on appelle le bon goût, il ne l’a pas. [This Shakespeare has no respect for anything . . . he disregards propriety, he makes light of Aristotle . . . He has no pity for the poor little stomachs that are candidates for the Academy. He does not suffer from the gastritis which they call taste.]63 The ironic allusion to Voltaire is even more obvious and the theoretical difference apparent when he rehabilitates Gilles as inseparable from Shakespeare : J’admire Shakespeare et j’admire Gilles; j’admire le cri insensé ‘un rat !’. J’admire les calembours de Hamlet. [I admire Shakespeare and I admire Gilles; I admire the insane cry ‘a rat’. I admire Hamlet’s quibbles.]64 Contrary to the recurrent classical argument that the success of Hamlet rested on a few isolated beauties, Hugo refuses to see the play as a tragedy defaced by scenes of comedy. For him, Shakespeare’s drama is an organic whole to be appreciated in its integrity. His recognition of the distinctive style of a genius who combines ‘Olympus and the fairground trestles [l’Olympe et le théâtre de la foire]’ is also the result of the linguistic revolution which he had initiated in his poetry and drama. This is based on his refusal to distinguish between high and low style, which, in a vindictive poem, he sums up as deciding to call a pig a pig.65 On the same principles, François-Victor’s translation, hailed by his father as ‘Shakespeare unmuzzled [Shakespeare sans muselière]’66 calls a mouse a mouse and a rat a rat and reintroduces passages and words expunged by earlier translators. Although critics and translators in the romantic period cleared away the main classical obstacles to the reception of Shakespeare, French spectators were still only treated to domesticated versions of Shakespeare’s ‘tragedies’. The contradiction between the revolution in critical theory and stage practice that continued to classicize Shakespeare, was bemoaned by convinced Romantics like Théophile Gautier, a famous witness and actor of the battle

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of Hernani. In his theatrical chronicles Gautier deplores the fact that the conservative Comédie-Française (with its bored audience in yellow gloves, as he describes it) should prefer Ducis’s Othello to Vigny’s more authentic version and should only perform Shakespeare ‘in very small doses’. In a provocative review of a pantomime, metaphorically entitled ‘Shakespeare aux Funambules’,67 Gautier dreams of Shakespeare’s comedies being performed in a popular playhouse, in front of a public, ‘in their shirtsleeves . . . with caps over their ears’. Si jamais l’on peut représenter Le Songe d’une nuit d’été, La tempête et Le Conte d’hiver de Shakespeare, assurément ce ne sera que sur ces pauvres tréteaux vermoulus devant ces spectateurs en haillons. [If Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale can ever be staged, it will have to be on such poor worm-eaten trestles, in front of such a tattered audience.]68 It was to be years before a Shakespeare comedy entered the French repertoire and roughly another century before Gautier’s wish for both an open theatrical space and a popular audience came true.69 After the revolution in stage practice initiated by André Antoine at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, and the development of theatre in the provinces in the course of its first decades, Jean-Louis Barrault, presenting his Hamlet in Edinburgh in 1948, could state that Shakespeare was more often performed in France than Racine.70 Posterity had vindicated Voltaire as the discoverer of Shakespeare but disowned him as his detractor.

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Chapter 10

Johann Wolfgang Goethe Stephen Fennell

Introduction As we see in the volumes of this series, there are numerous ways in which one can be a Great Shakespearean: one can be a dedicated actor or producer or director of Shakespeare’s plays, one can be a critic or commentator or eulogist of his works or one can be a literary writer: a translator, an epitomator or else a writer of original work which somehow signally bears witness to Shakespeare’s influence. It should little surprise us that so magisterial a figure as Goethe (1749–1832) should be found in not one but several of the above ‘Great Shakespearean’ roles, and indeed occasionally in more than one role at a time. Goethe commented in his later years that neither he nor Shakespeare were creatures of their own making,1 and his own immense debt to Shakespeare was at least part of what Goethe meant by these remarks. Thus, when we examine Goethe’s debt itself, we see that it was a semi-organic outgrowth, partly Goethe’s own response to the Stratford genius, partly a series of reactions to and assimilations of existing German and French views of Shakespeare’s work. Goethe’s reception of Shakespeare is decisively conditioned by these views in the generations before, during and following his own and by the form in which Shakespeare’s work was present in Germany in those years. Goethe was by no means the first German to become fully aware of Shakespeare and his greatness, nor was it any accident that, from around the time of Goethe’s birth, the greatest dramatist of the English stage would gradually come into his own as an icon of the German theatre.

The Young Goethe As a young patrician son from Frankfurt, Goethe grew up with a love of the theatre and with his father’s well-stocked library that soon became a

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source for the young Goethe’s mental culture: it awoke his love of literature and contained many of the works from various European traditions, old and new, whose influence would remain palpable throughout his own life and œuvre. We know that his father, Caspar Goethe, promptly acquired the fi rst volume of Wieland’s translation of Shakespeare in the early 1760s. He appears to have learnt some English in Frankfurt from a young Englishman who was fond of chatting with his sister, but more in Leipzig, where he went to study at the age of 16. Thus, by the time he went to study in Leipzig in 1765, Goethe had a reasonable vocabulary for reading contemporary English texts, but soon he would meet with language of greater age and sophistication. By March 1766 Goethe had begun reading William Dodd’s The Beauties of Shakespeare, which, in his later autobiography Poetry and Truth, he recalled having read with great pleasure and excitement.2 Yet it has been pointed out that Goethe’s early gleanings from Dodd, enthusiastic though they are, all stem from the early pages of the work, and it has been speculated (no doubt correctly) that a fully appreciative reading of the remainder of Dodd would have been beyond Goethe’s English reading capacity at this point.3 He did, however, write some English verse. Why exactly did Goethe do this strange thing? Because he felt the need for an analysis of human nature and relationships and situations of which German written culture and the current projections of German society offered no adequate comprehension. Particularly in his amatory affairs Goethe felt things and saw himself in situations for which German culture provided no apposite expression. Indeed, one searches in vain for prior German models with quite this kind of expressive power and immediacy.4 But to find a just expression for these sentiments was for Goethe not an end in itself, for the situations were acute in their own way, as amatory debacles will be, and Goethe most certainly sought some practical profit as well from Shakespeare’s genius: the skill of formulating and comprehending these features of human interaction satisfactorily was something Goethe saw as a necessary formative capacity in himself, and realigning himself to a situation with the help of Shakespeare’s figuration and expression of it was part of a gradual Bildung for the fashionable young man. As a motive for adopting the ‘wisdom of Shakespeare’, nothing could be more simple or obvious, yet it was this initial presupposition of its application to himself that would characterize, and indeed motivate, virtually all Goethe’s borrowings and adaptations of ideas and formulations from Shakespeare throughout his long life; this, as we shall see, was to remain

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the case precisely due to a certain autobiographical element in virtually all of Goethe’s works, sometimes in an individual character, often split among a number of characters including the narrator and most strikingly in the first person of his lyric poetry. Goethe had by this time also read the full complement of Wieland’s Shakespeare translations, and apparently some works (among them As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale) in the original. Apart from its direct influence on Goethe himself, Wieland’s epochmaking Shakespeare translation and comments ‘launched a thousand ships’ in the cultural seas of Germany, and several of these subsequent works in turn constituted a further layer of influences on Goethe’s vision and understanding of Shakespeare. The translation would be effectively completed and revised in 1775–7 by Johann Joachim Eschenburg (1743– 1820), 5 but at this early point of Goethe’s career it was Eschenburg’s publication (1771) of a translation of Elizabeth Montagu’s essay of 1769 comparing Shakespeare with the Greeks and French6 that would prove most instrumental in promoting Goethe’s interest in the Englishman, for this translation prompted a review of the essay by the young clergyman and budding literary critic Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803): Herder was a consummate and highly versatile philologist, perhaps the greatest polyglot of his generation, and soon to become the single greatest influence on Goethe’s literary development and outlook. Herder met the young Goethe in Strasbourg in the winter of 1770–1. Despite the fact that Herder was already familiar with Shakespeare’s work, and had been eloquent on his genius since 1766, it was primarily Wieland’s and Mrs Montagu’s work that prompted Herder’s epoch-making essay Shakespear, soon to be published along with Goethe’s essay On German Architecture (Von deutscher Baukunst) and others in the collection On German Character and Art (Von deutscher Art und Kunst) (1773) (HA 12: 7–15). This collection, and Herder’s essay in particular, both in the style of its writing and in the thrust of its content, quickly became an evangel of the impetuously emotion-driven Sturm und Drang movement, for which the grand sweep of Herder’s published ideas and perspectives was already a potent inspiration. In his Shakespear essay, as always, Herder mounts his argument from first principles. With the geo-anthropological thinking characteristic of his organic understanding of history and language, he sets about explaining the nature and purpose of Greek theatre in the context of its own circumstances of origin and development. From this he deftly makes out how, with its mimic and choric origins and the kinds of elaboration effected by Aeschylus and Sophocles, its success developed from the specificities of its

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own culture’s criteria. Thus, their apparent observance of certain ‘rules’ was in reality ‘no artifice at at all! It was Nature!’7 Herder then turns to France, giving a more punctiliously reasoned assessment than what he had read in Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy, but reaching similar conclusions on the artificiality, misguided imitativeness, cultural unsuitability and unfitness-for-purpose of French tragedy (the reasoning would apply similarly to comedy as well). Returning once more to the axioms provided by his geo-anthropological grasp of cultural history, Herder then turns to Shakespeare’s handling of time, place and ‘plot’. He goes into the very meaning of these categories and concludes profoundly and persuasively that they are – above all, in a medium that aspires to the illusion of Nature – entirely relative and their realism utterly subservient to the nature of the action. Herder goes on to explain how suitable, indeed how necessary Shakespeare’s choice and treatment of time and action are, conjuring up the effect of these elements of action in relation to King Lear, Othello, Macbeth and Hamlet in a breathtaking manner and with an irresistible verve that, of his contemporaries, perhaps only Goethe might have been able to emulate. On the issue of trueness to nature, Herder rightly refers to the inner and highly personal importance of seemingly trivial details and moments, and to Shakespeare’s way of investing each one of these with the emotion dictated by its place in the organic spectacle of the whole play. Herder puts to rest the argument on the significance of the unities of time, place and action with a firmness and conviction – and panache – beyond the means of even Lessing. By dint of this demonstration and his penetrating vision of cultural diversity and its consequences, Herder is able to set Shakespeare on the same pinnacle as Sophocles had attained in his age of the world; the French do not figure in this schema, and the petty critics of Shakespeare both in England and Europe are brusquely dismissed. The underlying aim of the essay, of which Herder makes no secret, is to plot some basic principles and strategies for the development of German drama whilst the language of Shakespeare is still accessible: Happy am I that, though time is running out, I still live at a time when . . . you, my friend, . . . can still dream the sweet dream worthy of your powers, that one day you will raise a monument to him here in our degenerate country, drawn from our own age of chivalry and written in our own language. (SWS 5: 231) The friend he is addressing here is Goethe, whose essay immediately followed Herder’s. In the company of the fastidious Herder, Goethe must

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initially have felt more than a tinge of shame, for he himself had first become acquainted with Shakespeare through that very anthology of Dodd’s which Herder in his essay pillories as ‘a new Stobaeus or Florilegium or cornucopia of Shakespeare’s wisdom’. During the winter of 1770–1 in Strasbourg, Goethe attended dutifully to Herder, collected local traditional folksongs for him and received in return a handsome education in life and letters from the most cosmopolitan German mind of the age. Among other works – those of Homer, Möser,8 Hamann – Shakespeare was read extensively and Wieland’s fine prose translation subjected to careful scrutiny. Zum Schäkespeares-Tag (1771) While in the Alsatian capital, Goethe composed a short speech, On Shakespeare’s Day (Zum Schäkespeares-Tag), first read to a gathering of his friends upon his return to Frankfurt; the piece was partly inspired by David Garrick’s public eulogy at the inaugural Stratford Shakespeare Festival of September 1769. From Goethe’s extraordinary little declamation we may see clearly the element of the English playwright’s work that so urgently motivated the young German. The speech – a classic Sturm und Drang effusion written in speciously ex tempore guise, and little longer than a political flysheet – was, both in its content and its form, the manifesto for a new drama, a new literature, based on the realization of a new grasp of human nature and character. This ‘secret point’ in each human character, that which animates its individuality, but which even mystical literatures had struggled to comprehend, was what Shakespeare had miraculously succeeded in making manifest. As the breathless exultation of the speech suggests, Shakespeare’s first impact on Goethe was not primarily thoughtprovoking but more visceral: So far I have thought little about Shakespeare; entertaining notions, or feelings at a pinch, is the utmost I have been able to manage. (HA 12: 224) Shakespeare ‘spoke’ to Goethe in a praeter-rational way – to Goethe’s heart, Goethe’s soul, Goethe’s whole being. It is in this last item, ‘Goethe’s whole being’ that the key to Shakespeare’s effect on Goethe lies: The first page of him that I read made me his own, for life; and as I was finished with the first play, I stood like one born blind who has been given

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sight by a miraculous hand in that moment. I recognised, I felt, with utmost vividness, my existence augmented by an infinity. (HA 12: 224–5) It is specifically Goethe’s own existence (not merely his intellectual horizon or literary repertoire) that he feels is augmented by this experience, and it is no exaggeration to say that, in various ways at various times, ranging from the formulation of lines and expressions, to the overall conception of certain works, to the development of his overall literary thought, to his insight into the world and its occupants and even to the vision of his own destiny as a colossus of world literature, Goethe was indeed Shakespeare’s ‘own, for life’. This is a vital aspect of what Goethe means when he says that Shakespeare’s works tell us about our own nature: He competed with Prometheus, formed his human beings feature by feature in the latter’s image, but on a colossal scale: that is why we fail to recognize our brothers, and then he brings them all to life with the breath of his spirit, he speaks from their mouths, and one recognises their affinity. (HA 12: 227) It is this authenticity to nature (‘Natur! Natur!’), and above all: our own nature, which commended Shakespeare’s work as a kind of existential imperative to Goethe, who thus blushes at his own momentary thought that he might have executed this or that particular a little differently: Afterwards I realise that I am a poor sinner, that Shakespeare prophesies for nature, and that my figures are soap bubbles inflated by novelistic fancies. (HA 12: 227) In dwelling on the matter of nature, the relentless probing of reality and of our experience of it, rather than the more comfortable, essentially sociological sympathies common to both French neoclassical and bourgeois tragic drama, Goethe had put his finger here on the very epicentre of this great rift of taste. And these words of the young Goethe, barely into his 20s, were no rash or ephemeral declaration: for all the intervening changes in the fine-print of his view, this is precisely what Goethe still, in his 71st year, would mean by the line ‘What I am, I owe to you’ of 1820, partly addressed to Shakespeare. Götz von Berlichingen Goethe’s first major play, the first version of Götz von Berlichingen, was drafted in Frankfurt in about six weeks from October to December 1771,

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partly in order to elicit from his mentor of the day, Herder, some views on various features of character, realism and, ultimately, aesthetics. The play itself is a rambling tale of swashbuckling and intrigue, centred around the vanishing politics of regional and sub-regional individualism in the Holy Roman Empire at the dawn of the Reformation period. Its plot evolves from a conflict between Götz, the aging, dyed-in-the-wool Germanic knight with a small fiefdom among the imperial maze of German territories on the one hand, and the Prince Bishop of Bamberg on the other. Götz’s old friend and alter ego, the corruptible and wheedling imperial official Weislingen, is won over by the femme fatale Adelheid von Walldorf to the Bishop’s cause, and the ensuing political and military machinations (besides encompassing the demise of Weislingen and Adelheid) result ultimately in Götz’s imprisonment and death. It was an age of change, in which political and administrative expediency were beginning to ‘rationalize’ the exuberance of individualist privileges within the imperial domains: the viability of Götz’s tiny sub-realm and the interests of its subjects were being challenged by the intrigues of pettifogging chancery. It is a parable of the strife between bureaucracy and individuality, a fight for the soul of German national identity, and partially a mirror reflection of conflicts which Goethe’s own era had seen – the inevitable decay of the moribund empire, and the uprising of stridently individual political talent in the person of Frederick the Great. Goethe’s choice of precisely Götz’s moment in history will hardly have been accidental in the early 1770s: dissolution and a new order could not be long in coming. So, was the present day Goethe’s moralitas on the false direction taken by earlier history? With its strident theatricality and notorious strength of language, Götz is precisely that: a work on earlier history, on its author’s own national history, and therein lies a conspicuous commonality with the ‘Historical Plays’ of Shakespeare, as Goethe knew them, for this choice of subject matter was a relatively rare one in German drama, and will certainly have been made with both Herder’s folk-history premium and the great historical achievements of Shakespeare squarely in mind. Goethe’s first draft of Götz was highly redolent not just of Shakespeare’s formal principles and characterization traits but even of his diction, and Herder fairly commented that ‘Shakespeare has quite ruined you’ when he read the manuscript.9 Goethe revised the manuscript in 1773 to diminish the element of superficial imitation in favour of a more dignified and reflective use of Shakespeare’s legacy, but the sixty-scene 1771 version remains enlightening. Most conspicuously, the constellation of characters in Götz was set to exploit some of the same interplays of political and

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personal factors as Shakespeare did in Antony and Cleopatra: the dominant triad of Götz, his sister Maria and adversary Weislingen neatly reflects that of Caesar, his sister Octavia and adversary Antony.10 Adelheid the ‘femme fatale’ shares characteristics with Lady Macbeth; the involvement of gypsies in the first version of Götz was more clearly inspired by Shakespeare’s ‘weird sisters’ and included a supernatural folksong with incantatory elements; the forest near Jaxthausen is in the later version still said to be full of ‘gypsies and witches’ (1. 2). The figure of the unknown commoner who warns Lady Macduff against imminent capture we find also in Götz (5.5, HA 4: 163), warning the titular hero of the impending backlash of the rebels, and refusing to give his name in both cases. There are numerous further moments of characterization and theme which Götz von Berlichingen – again most poignantly in its first version – shares with Hamlet, Julius Caesar and King John, for these plays occupied Goethe in much the same way as Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra in those heady months in Strasbourg. Some passages of Hamlet (such as the gravediggers’ scene) leave a mark on Götz. The dying Götz asking to be taken out into the open air at the end of the first version of the play – ‘Carry me here under this tree, that I may once more draw in a chestful of the air of freedom, and die’ – calls to mind the final scene of Shakespeare’s King John. Goethe’s fi fty-six-scene version of 1773 brought with it a greater independence of structure and diction, a greater determination to work the remaining debts a little harder into his own mould. Nonetheless, the changes made relatively little difference to the situational correspondences and the commonalities of overriding cultural politics intrinsic to Götz and its Shakespearean models, and there remain many utterances such as ‘My voice would be a herald of my weakness’11 (in a cameo appearance by Brother Martin, the young Luther) still testifying to Shakespearean verbal inspiration, and one or two additional Shakespearean touches, such as the comet heralding the death of the emperor, much as comets were summoned to knell the death of Henry V in the opening lines of Henry VI, Part One.12 Some obvious elements of Götz – its relationship to nationalistic historical themes and the impetuosity of its subject matter – will readily have commended themselves to the young exponent of the Sturm und Drang, but the basic motivation for choosing this constellation in particular was intensely personal. Seminally in this play, Goethe selected a theme which also defined his own relationship to his historical surroundings: promethean individual genius versus the triumphal sea of mediocrity. The underlying paradigm, that of man fundamentally at odds with his times

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and surroundings, was one for which Shakespeare had provided not one but a whole range of virtuoso models – hence the range of those plays drawn upon in the writing of Götz.

Contemporary Criticism of Götz That Götz met with a highly variable reception is hardly surprising: for a start, the gangliness of this epic drama of several hours’ sitting and still nearly five-dozen scenes is not rivalled even by Shakespeare’s sprawling forty-two-scene Antony and Cleopatra. Wieland in one of his ‘Letters to a Young Poet’ cautiously and even-handedly defends the achievements of both Shakespeare and Götz: I don’t insist on denying . . . that Götz von Berlichingen has given at least as much innocent occasion as Shakespeare himself for the mischief that people of very varied kind have brought about on our stages in the past ten years. . . . But I deny outright that the author of Götz intended in his work to produce a workable play for our mostly travelling troupes of actors, or to supplant from our stages those rule-governed plays whose least virtue was their regularity. His purpose was surely in the main to test his powers on a great dramatic painting of an age and its manners . . . I suppose he felt himself strongly tempted at the time to yield to the call of his genius, which drew him to a dramatic career; he perhaps merely wanted to legitimise his standing in the eyes of the nation by this first effort; . . . The public was amazed at the marvel, was at first dazzled by the mass and diversity of such completely unaccustomed beauties, but soon enraptured and overwhelmed by the natural truth and the living spirit that breathes in so many, so varied persons of all classes, from the Emperor Maximilian to the groom, and from the groom right down to the gypsy lad.13 By this applause for the vibrancy of life in Götz’s social diversity, Wieland (despite the nervousness on this subject evident in his Shakespeare translation) is implicitly also defending the japes of the lower types in Hamlet and the notorious crowd scenes of Julius Caesar. Having himself been lauded as the doyen of that life and verve and authenticity which the Sturm und Drang so admired, Goethe was at this time understandably censorious of inauthentic specimens of the genre. A neat sample of his criticism is the review in which Johann Georg Sulzer’s

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neatly trimmed ‘Sophoclean’ version of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline meets with similar disapproval, with Goethe neatly sidestepping the necessity of any specific reference to Cymbeline: these reviews were written in fairly cavalier fashion, with more attention to viewpoint than to scholarship14 (HA 9: 550). It would not be long, however, before Goethe’s jealous guardianship of the Sturm und Drang spirit would ripen into a more objective stance: the denunciation of a subjectivity so beguilingly portrayed that many, and perhaps most, readers would overlook its whole point – The Sorrows of Young Werther. Once more, the patron saint of this new grasp of reality would be Shakespeare. Werther It has been rightly commented15 that the driving force behind virtually all of Shakespeare’s great protagonists and their tragedies is not simply that they are at odds with circumstances or social norms, but that they are each of a mental cast quite outside the comprehension of those around them: Othello, Hamlet, Prince Hal, Macbeth, Caesar, Lear, even Shylock. There is something about this inscrutable mindset which speaks to us all the more grippingly, as it has spoken to each generation of Europeans since Shakespeare’s own times. Goethe, however, is partaking of something almost new in kind, though something so subtle and now so ingrained in modern thinking that we could easily overlook it: it is simply the perception of these characters’ psychology itself, rather than some version of a plot structure. For it appears to have been only since the mid-eighteenth century, and the generation of Goethe’s immediate predecessors, that the psychology of character itself was looked into with such piercing interest on mainland Europe (a glance back at earlier French criticism emphatically confirms this), and this is undoubtedly among the main reasons why Shakespeare was so misprized in Europe until this point. The degree of that novelty we can gauge from the international reaction to Goethe’s reception of Shakespearean character depth in his epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. An instant sensation among the offerings of the Leipzig Book Fair in the autumn of 1774, and one soon to be replicated (legally and illegally) elsewhere in Europe, Werther was intimately bound up with events in and around Goethe’s own life. Set in 1771–2, almost contemporaneously with its composition, Werther is the eighteen-month long saga of a middle-class but evidently wellconnected young man who writes the hypnotically subjective letters which

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make up the almost monomaniacal form and perspective of the novel. Werther falls in love with an already all-but-affianced local girl, Lotte, with whom he shares a spontaneity and love for poetry. He sues vigorously and self-indulgently for her favours, breaks off and departs in frustration due to her ongoing attachment to his rival, the steady homme d’affaires Albert. Werther takes up an appointment at court, but he oversteps his social rank and is soon forced to resign. He returns to his rural love triangle, where he deteriorates mentally now that he finds Lotte married to Albert. At Christmastide, after yielding to the urge to embrace and kiss her, he borrows his rival’s pistols and shoots his brains out over the open pages of one of Lessing’s plays. In Götz, we saw a character at odds with the trajectory of his age, ‘out of joint’ as one might say. In Werther, we have an individual whose demands on human existence are altogether incommensurate with what life in the real world could offer; he is just more deeply possessed by his own ‘cast of thought’ than the practicalities of the situation will bear – a signally Hamletic trait. Various features of the plot seem preset to underline this nexus: like Hamlet, Werther is lacking a father, and the entire work is in both cases dominated by the forlorn prosecution of an elusive ‘inheritance matter’; both men are patently talented, but artistically frustrated and metaphysically haunted individuals with a fatally compromised grasp of reality, bound up in an infeasible love and fated to die as a result of their own folly or incontinence. As if referring squarely to Hamlet’s speech, ‘What a piece of work is man . . . in apprehension, how like a god! . . . and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?,’16 Werther devotes his last epistolary words to questioning the adequacy of human fabric: ‘What is Man, the praised demigod! Does he not lack the powers just there, where he needs them most?’17 It is this which similarly forces Werther to confront the question of ‘being and not being’ in the letter of 15 November. Critically, in both cases, character drives plot rather than the converse. To borrow an expression from the literature on Goethe’s later works: both Werther and Hamlet (in Goethe’s – or at least Wilhelm Meister’s – subsequent interpretation of him) are men put in a situation to which they are not equal. For Hamlet it is the demands of a dynastic broil of which he is the centre; howsoever much he would, and despite his resolution and unremitting enterprise in all other affairs, he does not have the wherewithal to carry out the one task laid upon him until his own demise has been sealed: it is the task of appropriating his own identity, that of the rightful King of Denmark. Werther’s task is a numinously ill-defi ned

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‘inheritance matter’ which becomes for him the taking possession of the objects of his desire, primarily the woman Lotte, but in some sense (as the early letters make clear) the entire universe, and he fails in the one as inevitably as in the other. His possession-taking of reality is symbolized in the activity of sketching, apprehending some part of the world on a possessible piece of drawing paper, but even on the day when he can say he was ‘never more of an artist than today’, the truth is that he can produce ‘not a stroke’ (HA 6: 9), the acts of appropriation which would define who he is are acts of which he is incapable. Hamlet too uses art, not to catch the whole world but to apprehend his uncle and in that way take hold at least of his own kingdom. But for Hamlet it is a tool ill-suited to one who cannot carry out what the outcome of his art dictates. The kind of cosmic possession-taking envisaged by Werther results, as we can see from the letter of 10 May, in him simply investing his being in the entire cosmos, like some god, and dispersing his substance. In fact, this feeling of possession of nature is itself only a slight refiguration of the principle of infi nite expansion which took Goethe himself by storm, as we saw, in his first encounter with Shakespeare: Werther’s relationship to the world is the desire to make it his own, for this is the underlying nature of the ‘inheritance matter’ that takes him to ‘Wahlheim’ (the domicile and playground of his will), and he becomes owned by it, much as Goethe became Shakespeare’s ‘own, for life’ in the Shakespeare’s Day speech (HA 12: 225). T. S. Eliot has criticized post-Shakespearean writers, and indeed Goethe in particular, for imposing their own character onto Hamlet’s – a thought Goethe had surely toyed with in a number of connections, including the later Clavigo-parable – and making ‘a Werther’ of him.18 Indeed, Goethe does appear to have tapped into Hamletic features in order to exorcize, in the person of Werther, the jeopardies he perceived in his own character and inclinations. Yet we should conversely not overstate the extent to which Werther is merely a new Hamlet, a distracted globe overchallenged by his situation: the fine print of their demise is in each case quite distinct, and the socio-economic pathology at the bottom of Werther’s predicament, and many features of the predicament itself, are an entirely new reflection on some of the darker potentialities of the human spirit. If a successor he is, then Werther is surely a worthy successor, rather than a jejune rehash of the Dane, and all the more now, with the wind of outrageous international success in his sails, did Goethe aspire to be a worthy peer of the Dane’s creator: Werther’s celebrity thus heralded a whole new chapter in Goethe’s relationship to Shakespeare.

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Clavigo In the months following the composition of Werther, Goethe turned once more to drama, though this time to romantic tragedy of a fairly conventional sort, both structurally and linguistically. Clavigo (1774) was largely written, within the space of a week or so (Eckermann, 11. 3. 28) from the newly published early Mémoires (1773–4) of the mercurial French courtier Beaumarchais, and despite Goethe’s apparent satisfaction with the piece as a rule-obeying counterpoint to Götz, and the rather different nuances of character he introduces, the action of the first four Acts is fairly close to, and in places almost a translation of Beaumarchais’ description: Goethe curiously justifies this appropriation of chronicle material by reference to the way Shakespeare practised it (Eckermann, 10. 4. 29). In the play, Beaumarchais’ sister Marie is abandoned by the unscrupulous careerist Clavigo at the court of Madrid; Beaumarchais succeeds in pressuring him into a recommitment, but the lovesick Marie dies after Clavigo’s friend convinces him to rescind the relationship once more for ambition’s sake. The scene in Act 5 where Clavigo steals from his house at night and comes across the torchlight vigil for his betrothed Marie, and has to ask who the deceased is, before being run through by Beaumarchais, is obviously indebted to Hamlet’s encounter with Laertes at Ophelia’s funeral (5. 1) in Shakespeare’s play.19 Clavigo presents us with a further triangle of identification involving Goethe, one of his fictional characters, and one of Shakespeare’s. The implicitly evolving relationship to Shakespeare himself, as the fourth party, remained for the moment a project rather than a direct corollary, a project whose realization would demand forms of confrontation that went far beyond the compass of drama itself. Weimar Largely on account of the interest inspired by the international acclaim of The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe was invited as a guest to Weimar by the future Duke Carl August. Soon after his arrival in November 1775 came the opportunity to seek formal appointment and long-term patronage for his literary activities. Wieland, whose Shakespeare translations and cosmopolitan novelistic work had also attracted the attention of the ducal family of Saxe-Weimar, had preceded Goethe as an appointee, and been made tutor to Carl August and his brother in 1772. Goethe, now in his mid-20s, quickly became a boon-companion and mentor to the young prince, and shared heartily in his youthful revels, rags and outrages. It was looking back on this first period at Weimar, which Goethe

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later described it, in his poem Ilmenau of 1783, in terms of a comparison with the life of Shakespeare’s duke in the Forest of Arden:20 Is it a fugitive prince as once in Arden’s Wood? A man astray, do I in mazy gorges here Find bodied forth the spirits of Shakespeare? And yes, aright this notion doth me lead: It is their selves, or else some similar breed!21 It is clear that in these years – from the mid-1770s through till the mid1780s – Goethe perceived his life, in some small part at least, as a reenactment of Shakespearean scenarios, and not for the last time.

Falstaff Fragments Doubtless also stemming from Goethe’s early Weimar years, we have two fragmentary scenes of a Falstaff drama.22 Of the phases of Falstaff’s career in Shakespeare’s plays Goethe chooses that of the newly fallen Falstaff of the end of Henry IV, after Hal’s accession to the throne and the banishing of his old friend. Goethe’s first fragment sees Bardolph talking to Poins; they and the still sleeping Falstaff are already in ‘banishment’, languishing in a London prison. Bardolph and Poins commiserate with each other and bemoan Falstaff’s plight, though not abandoning hope that another change of the princely heart will see them recalled. Falstaff – who is referred to as Silenus – awakens. But it is the second fragment where Goethe begins to show more substantial originality of conception: the catechism of honour with which Falstaff holds forth in Shakespeare is replaced by a more earthy doctrine: that of the rational body (which sensibly demands its food, drink and sleep) and the irrational soul with its superfluous demands. It seems that Goethe may have intended to propound a more frankly epicurean philosophy in his Falstaff, as against the genuinely multivalent, partly hypocritical, partly sincere shades of character in which Shakespeare paints the old knight. Yet in Poetry and Truth, Goethe would recall originally having been especially taken with ‘the humoristic features’ (HA 9: 493) of Shakespeare, and Goethe’s riotous rendition of Henry IV to the court theatre23 (presumably in early 1792) suggests that this edge to his admiration had not dulled in the meantime: one wonders, therefore, whether the philosophical integrity of such a ‘rationalized’ Falstaff would have meant sacrificing those junctures of moral vacillation which make Shakespeare’s mercurial rogue

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so captivating. No doubt some such realization on Goethe’s part is the reason why these sketches remained – fragments. Despite making himself indispensable in an increasing number of the Duchy’s administrative affairs, Goethe did manage to draft a number of important plays in these years, and some were performed, but he clearly did not feel that he could put a final hand on their written form while so heavily occupied with the duchy’s business. Egmont, Cäsar fragment The first of these plays was Egmont, written from 1775. It deals, fairly freely, with one episode in the history of the Netherlands’ domination by Spain, with the historical record recast somewhat to Egmont’s advantage (he is younger, more idealistic and more patriotically inclined). Initially an eminent general and supporter of the Spanish hegemony in the Netherlands after the death of Emperor Charles V), Goethe’s Count Egmont gradually embraces the cause of local freedoms and religious tolerance, without realizing how repugnant this must be to the Spanish regents of the province. Ignoring the warnings of the local nobility, he is deposed and arrested by his old adversary the Castilian Duke Alba. Goethe’s play charts the interaction between Egmont’s public life (his relationships with the soldiery, the populace and the regent Margaretha von Parma) and his private life (his love for the local townswoman Klärchen, and the psychology revealed in dialogue with his secretary) up to the time of his execution in Brussels. In this, Goethe’s second completed ‘grand political’ play (after Götz), Goethe’s mind naturally turned to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and considerable draft materials for a Julius Cäsar of his own were intimately bound up with Egmont’s conception and composition. In June 1774, for example, Goethe wrote to Schönborn: ‘I have contrived some further plans for great dramas. . . . My Cäsar, which you will get to enjoy at some point, also seems to be developing’ (HABr 1: 162). The following February, we find Prince Carl of Saxe-Meiningen reporting that Goethe ‘told me that he was working on two plays: the death of J. Caesar, a tragedy, and an opera.’24 In precisely what respects Goethe was seeking to diverge from Shakespeare’s treatment is not clear, but putting Caesar rather than Brutus at the centre of the piece will undoubtedly have been part of it: for what it is worth, the extant fragment indicates the young Caesar’s encounter with Sulla some thirty-sex years before Caesar’s death, and even if Goethe eventually shied away from such an epic length of plot as this suggests – far beyond the plot-length of even Götz – he will hardly have followed Shakespeare in pursuing the

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action much beyond Caesar’s death. Goethe’s comments on the characters of Shakespeare’s Caesar and Brutus in Lavater’s Physiognomic Fragments for the Promotion of the Understanding and Love of Mankind (1775–8) show in each case a mixture of rapt admiration and reservation: Caesar the tyrannical and (for Goethe) almost inscrutable god of deeds versus Brutus, the restless and resistless, but not entirely natural genius of political action, 25 but the apparently keener insight into Brutus’ mind there leaves us with little clue as to what improvements Goethe had in mind for his Caesar. We must assume that Goethe at some point destroyed most of what he had written on the subject of Caesar, possibly because he thought it in some regard too callow with the looming prospect of comparison with Shakespeare in mind, for the Cäsar material will have lacked some of the saving graces of Götz (such as the naturalism of its parlance, and its importance as a German national historical manifesto). It has been suggested that Goethe’s Cäsar draft perished because he had already carved off some of its finer features for more nationalistic use in Götz, but the relative longevity of the project indicates rather, as Biedermann26 and later critics have mooted, that Goethe’s Egmont was the ultimate destination for its nobler parts: as with the Shakespearean influences ploughed into Götz, Goethe decided to use his Julius Cäsar material on historical scenarios set closer to home. It has been suggested that the reason for longish delay in the publication of Egmont (it was printed only in 1788 after Goethe’s return from Italy, and premièred the following year) was Goethe’s vacillation over whether this was the best use for his ‘Cäsar’ material, but the real reason is likely to have been purely a question of consistency: during the last stages of work on it in Rome, Goethe reported having trouble recapturing the mood of his earlier composition period and fashioning the drafted material to satisfy his present standards.27 There remains the question of the extent of Shakespeare’s direct influence on Egmont as we have it. The main focus of comparative comment has been the crowd scenes, the representation of the minds and character of various members of the lower orders, and the hero’s relationship to the mass; the idea that these were indeed the chief excellences of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was already well entrenched in Goethe’s time. Goethe’s ‘crowd’ figures three times in the course of the play: as the casual holiday gathering of the opening scene, relating some of the contextual circumstances of the historical setting; then as the credulous audience of a political agitator, and finally as the fearful onlookers unswayed by the pleas of Egmont’s girlfriend to rebel and rescue him. Schiller’s 1788 review of Egmont,28 as

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part of the preparation for his own adaptation and staging of the play, compares Goethe’s crowd scenes with Shakespeare’s as a glowing compliment,29 though of course the suggestion of imitation is also implicitly an accusation of compromised originality – and this from a man who even a decade later would not shy from quoting Shakespeare virtually verbatim in his own dramatic works! The review marks, as one might expect, a low point in the relationships between Schiller and Goethe (and by no means the only one), but Goethe’s writing throughout the 1790s evidently draws important lessons from it. Goethe, despite the scuffle, remained justly unrepentant of having given his work this Shakespearean dimension, though one should not overlook the important differences in the motivation and execution of those scenes: Goethe’s crowd-member types are highly individualized and historically very specific, and despite their shortcomings they are presented as the salt of the earth, the bearers of the traditional culture whose ancient rights and liberties Goethe’s Egmont committed himself to protect; Shakespeare’s poorly individualized rabble was presented as craven, avaricious, vacillating and hardly worthy of the godsend of such a ruler as Caesar. Goethe, by injecting more detailed individualism into his commoners, had taken his crowd further towards an acknowledgement of their political worthiness, and certainly a good way away from the faceless choric host in another of the step-progeny of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: Herder’s musical drama Brutus of 1774 (SWS 28: 52–68). Quite apart from the crowd-scene issues, however, there are in Egmont clear reminiscences of memorable lines from Shakespeare’s play. Brutus’ simple yet sublime speech on freedom – for good reason a firm favourite of Voltaire’s30 – is both mentioned and echoed in the soliloquy by Egmont’s hopeless amatory rival Fritz Brackenburg at the end of the first Act, when he dejectedly compares past and present: ‘As a schoolboy I was quite a different lad! When an exercise was set: “Brutus’ freedom-speech, for practice in oratory”; then Fritz was always first’ (1. 3; HA 4: 388); Brutus’ own early remark about Casca springs to mind: What a blunt fellow is this grown to be! He was quick mettle when he went to school. (Julius Caesar, 1. 2. 295–6) In another example from earlier in the same scene, Caesar says to Antony: Let me have men about me that are fat, Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights. Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look, He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous. (1. 2. 192–5)

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In the same vein Goethe’s Vansen says of Duke Alba: Vansen: . . . See, the tall duke gives you the very impression of a crossspider, not a fatbellied one, those are less hazardous, but of one of those longlegged lean-bodied ones, that doesn’t get fat from its eating. (Egmont 4. 1; HA 4: 420) What Goethe was modelling on Shakespeare was a new kind of psychological realism in the interaction of character, event and speech. To make these chains of reality and psychology and language evident in their plays was one of the greatest feats that German playwrights of this generation needed to master: they did master it, and the marks of their greatest model are not far to seek in their work. Yet influence of this magnitude could be threatening as it was inspiring. In 1825 Goethe would say to Eckermann: Shakespeare is altogether too rich and powerful. A productive spirit may read only one play by him each year, if it does not wish to be ruined by him. I did well to get him off my back through writing Götz and Egmont. (Eckermann, 25. 12. 25)31 And there is some truth in the notion that in the 1770s the Shakespearean content of at least Goethe’s drama was largely restricted to those plays, for the other plays of the 1770s show little sign of Shakespearean influence. With the belated completion of Egmont, Shakespeare’s influence on Goethe’s drama not so much entered, as already found itself in an ongoing lull, for the other two major plays of Goethe’s first period in Weimar, Torquato Tasso and Iphigenie auf Tauris, largely dispense with any psychological and situational inspiration from the English playwright. On the one hand, however, the slack was (as we shall see) more than taken up by Goethe’s prose writings, and, on the other hand, it is not quite true to say that Tasso and Iphigenie entirely turn away from the influence of Shakespeare, in that they are cast in blank verse. Wilhelm Meister As the Shakespearean influence on Goethe’s dramatic œuvre gradually ebbed in Weimar in the course of the late 1770s and early 1780s in favour of Greco-Roman inspiration, his continued experimentation with narrative prose would, however, bring a further surge of Shakespearean fascination,

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this time in the form of a more objectifying, analytic fictional treatment, though once again squarely autobiographical in its inspiration: the early work on what would become the novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years. If we look back over the sporadic letters documenting the genesis of the work,32 spanning some twenty years, we see that Goethe had not really ‘moved on’ from Shakespeare in any absolute sense; rather, it is clear that some of the problems concerning Goethe’s own relationship to Shakespeare and certain Shakespearean characters had intermittently preoccupied him throughout his first decade in Weimar. The Wilhelm Meister project was to be the tale of a young man born into a well-off German middle-class background, who becomes an itinerant and devotes himself to the theatre as a major part of the attempt to ‘educate’ or ‘shape’ himself – or ‘find’ himself, as we might say these days. As Wilhelm’s surname (‘Master’) suggests, this teleological schema is certainly to be understood as an existential strategy, intended from the outset as a more constructive paradigm than that which had characterized Werther’s existential career. The material treating Wilhelm’s story was written in two versions: the ‘Ur-Meister’, Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission (Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung) composed in six books from 1777 to 1785, its title first being mentioned to Goethe’s friend Carl Ludwig von Knebel (1744–1834) in 1782 (HABr 1: 401), and then, following the interval of Goethe’s Italian journey and its aftermath, Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship published in eight books in 1795–6. The Theatrical Mission was written during a period – after the initial drafting of Egmont, but before the renewed impetus of work on Iphigenie and Tasso – when Goethe had come to feel that the nature and purpose of his career had become in various ways problematic.33 Despite the steady trickle of opuscula which would have satisfied most literati of the day, the number of major literary landmarks actually completed at Weimar was not at all what Goethe himself would have wished. In short, Goethe found in Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission a way of considering precisely this question: how should one’s talents be directed in life? In the service of the creation of illusion, or in some more useful regime of pursuits? For Goethe it was, even in these latter years, Shakespeare who manifested the best and greatest that might be achieved by the business of illusioneering, and so it was the confrontation with Shakespeare’s finest work that Goethe chose to form the culmination of the Theatrical Mission. Rather, like the hero of his novel, Goethe had studied Hamlet closely during a week-long convalescent interruption to his journey to Carlsbad in June 1785,34 and in that year he had seen the Bellomo troupe stage Hamlet (as well as King Lear, Macbeth and

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream) in Weimar: the telos for his new biographical mission was, for the time being, decided.35 The story of the Theatrical Mission begins with a description of Wilhelm’s childhood and school years, which are dominated by the blossoming of his interest in the theatre: like Goethe himself at a tender age, Wilhelm is given a puppet theatre, comes across and studies avidly a number of books, practises taking roles and gradually becomes estranged from the idea of following his father’s profession – that of a trader, in Wilhelm’s case.36 The outside romantic interests of Wilhelm’s mother make for an unsettled home life that only serves to encourage Wilhelm’s gravitation towards the theatre: it becomes his obsession. Wilhelm meets a calculating, dubiously affianced actress, Mariane, they fall in love, and he decides that he must eventually leave his family and become a star actor in a national theatre: disappointment ensues on both fronts. At one point Wilhelm’s brother-in-law Werner, now in charge of the family business, sends him on tour as a debt collector, in the course of which he enjoys various theatrical experiences, embraces the Aristotelian idea of tragedy as a catharsis of the passions, and meets some performance artists. He is particularly fascinated by the young androgynous girl Mignon who has been bought by a band of players from a tightrope-walking troupe to save her from the whippings she received from her previous masters. Wilhelm supports the company financially. One of his own plays, Belshazar, is performed, in which it becomes clear (as an observer tells Wilhelm) that here is a man who knows his own heart, but little of the world beyond it. Unexpectedly Wilhelm has to step in to play the lead role at the first performance, and does so with great success. But the troupe leaders abscond with Wilhelm’s money, leaving Mignon to his care. Together with a beguiling and promiscuous actress called Philine, who has managed to seduce Wilhelm, he travels onward with the pretentious but disillusioned actor Melina and wife, and Mignon, resolving (with some difficulty) to avoid further sexual entanglements, including approaches from Melina’s wife. They pick up a melancholic harper whose music enchants Wilhelm, but notwithstanding his commitment to care for Mignon, Wilhelm realizes that he is in bad company with these actors. Nonetheless, torn between the many possibilities he is faced with, he decides to abandon the debt collecting, and they find employ for some weeks at a count’s palace. After being pressed by the count to stage a sycophantic scenario for the adulation of a visiting prince, and praise Racine for the prince’s benefit, Wilhelm is reminded by the courtier and man of the world Jarno (a figure in some ways reminiscent of Herder) of the worthlessness of both his theatre and its rewards. Jarno introduces him

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to Shakespeare, whereupon Wilhelm secludes himself to study the English playwright’s work obsessively and undisturbed: it is a revelation to him. The troupe’s appointment at court comes to an end, and despite warnings concerning the danger of bandits, they arm themselves and travel on. Sure enough, while Wilhelm and the actor Laertes are dressed in period clothing and rehearsing their swordsmanship for the final scene between Hamlet and Laertes’ Shakespearean namesake, the troupe is duly attacked and robbed, with Wilhelm sustaining serious injuries. As he convalesces, with the strange musical company of Mignon and the Harper, Wilhelm studies various Shakespeare plays, particularly Hamlet, intimately identifying himself with its hero. Wilhelm and his companions later catch up with Melina’s troupe in the city of ‘H’ and meet the theatre director Serlo (plausibly identified with the Shakespearean actor and director Friedrich Ludwig Schröder (1744–1816), actor and manager of the Hamburg theatre through the 1770s, late 1780s and 1790s), and Serlo’s widowed and mentally unstable sister Aurelia. Aurelia too observes Wilhelm’s rather tenuous understanding of real people, despite his intuitive insight into human nature in the abstract, and admires his grasp of dramatic art and skill as a dramatic poet. Serlo agrees reluctantly to take on Melina’s troupe, in various ancillary capacities, if Wilhelm will join him, and expresses keen interest in staging this Hamlet, but – very much against Wilhelm’s insistence – only in a judiciously adapted version, especially of the last two Acts; Wilhelm also stoutly resists Aurelia’s suggestion of replacing Ophelia’s bawdy lines and ditties. Much of this last surviving book of the Theatrical Mission is taken up with Aurelia’s mixed reflections on the German theatre public, and with Wilhelm’s expositions of the interpretation of Hamlet he had worked up during his convalescence. Whereas Wilhelm’s initial reading of (and identification with) Hamlet had centred around the Danish prince’s malaise and frustration, it is now the imagined commonalities in their overall plight that form the dominant theme of Wilhelm’s exegesis: Wilhelm professes to have gathered together all the clues as to what Hamlet’s character was like before the royal fratricide and the encounter with his father’s ghost, though in the text we have, there is in fact little evidence beyond the merest mention of his studies in Wittenberg, and Ophelia’s description of him as The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword, Th’ expectation and rose of the fair state, The glass of fashion, and the mould of form, Th’ observ’d of all observers, quite, quite down! (Hamlet 3. 1. 151–4)37

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Wilhelm seems unconscious of the various evidence in the play for a certain native darkness, for bitterness and passion, and for the mercurially capable, resolute and boldly active aspects in Hamlet’s character: from his supposed gleanings (perhaps more directly actuated by his own recent martial failure in Hamletic guise than by any failure of Hamlet’s)38 Wilhelm concocts an interpretation of Hamlet as simply a noble, gentle and idealistic soul, tasteful, relaxed, restrained and unimpassioned, suddenly emburdened with the task of a deed beyond his capacities. Partly as a corollary of this, the pattern of tragedy and Hamlet’s eventual revenge are attributed to a guiding fate rather than to any calculus of human motives or flaws: this neatly coincides with the way that Wilhelm sees his own career thus far. Wilhelm’s assessment has since made its way into the history of serious critical interpretations of Hamlet, under the plausible assumption that it was also Goethe’s view at the time. There is room for doubt on this issue, however, since Goethe has Serlo point out certain misapprehensions in Wilhelm’s interpretation of his own fate thitherto: it has in fact left Wilhelm in a state quite opposite to Hamlet’s. Significant at all events in this character- and fate-driven conception of tragedy is Wilhelm’s abandonment of the Cornelian primacy of plot: he has understood something vital about the nature of Shakespearean drama which marks it off from neoclassical drama. The question of Wilhelm’s affinity with Hamlet is complicated by the affinity of Goethe himself with both characters. As one of numerous such parallels, the patently simplistic interpretation of Hamlet as essentially weak when confronted with woman’s ‘frailty’, is ominously reminiscent of Goethe’s description of his own ‘frailty’ in one of his Shakespeare-quoting letters of 1767 to his Leipzig friend Behrisch.39 In this and other details, however, it is not just Wilhelm’s Hamlet who is reflecting Goethe, but also Wilhelm who is doing this recasting of character: there is of course something of a self-fulfilling prophecy implicit in Wilhelm’s interpretation, for the distortions required to arrive at it are precisely the result of the kinds of editing and adaptation that Wieland, Heufeld,40 Schröder, and finally Schlegel, and Goethe himself variously carried out on this and other Shakespearean plays staged in Germany during these decades, in order to appease the (real or supposed) sensibilities and limitations of the audience. The disappearance of Hamlet’s mercuriality was achieved by the excision and curtailment of various banter-and-intrigue episodes (even by Wieland) and by the deletion of ‘thematically peripheral’ episodes like his trip to England, capture by pirates and disposal of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (these all in the cause of simplifying the action or ‘focusing the plot’);

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some of Hamlet’s less endearing aspects were neatly sidestepped by editing out the darker side of some of the soliloquies, all trace of the sexual improprieties of his prior relationships with Ophelia and so on: some of these very changes would also feature in Wilhelm’s own eventual adaptation of the play. The ‘critical’ process here was not so much the construction of an interpretation to clarify Shakespeare’s play, as the progressive retailoring of the play itself to meet such an interpretation. Why Hamlet? The question has often been asked of why Goethe took such particular interest in Hamlet, chose it as the signal text in the Theatrical Mission in the first place, and later made even more extensive use of it in the Apprenticeship Years. In fact, many reasons for doing so will have colluded in the decision: of Shakespeare’s plays it was certainly the most popular on both the English and German stages, and it had attracted the most critical comment. Beyond this, it was uniquely well suited to the treatment of Bildung, which would become all the more central a theme in the Apprenticeship Years: personal formation, as a conscious project to encompass one’s destiny or optimize one’s future, must in some sense be a planned or contemplated aim, and thus involve self-modelling of some sort; this self-modelling inevitably takes the form of imagined scenarios in some kind of developmental sequence and is hence intrinsically dramatic in nature. Hamlet is the striking case of a man who stages drama precisely in order to encompass his ‘destiny’, and the relationship to the roles of (partially autobiographical) drama in both Goethe’s and Wilhelm Meister’s lives makes Hamlet especially rich pickings for the German aspirant and his literary alter ego. As the various apostasies and rebellions in his own life and the ongoing work on Faust would make particularly clear, Goethe was also – again with partly self-modelling purposes in mind – looking for what the man of the future, modern man, should be like, as part and parcel of his developmental vision for the individual. In this regard too, Hamlet’s predicament and character offered a new and complex model that Goethe wished to explore; whatever the actual merits of seeing Hamlet as ‘modern man’, criticism since that time has repeatedly taken up this thesis,41 and Goethe certainly espoused some features of it. The manuscript of Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission – and probably, not far beyond it, the draft itself – breaks off in the sixth book, despite some evidence that Goethe had planned six further books of even this draft project.42 As one might expect in view of the strong autobiographical element of this unfinished curriculum vitae, its writer suspended its completion and publication at least partly because he realized that his own nature and talent were not yet fully formed, and he could thus not yet put the last

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hand on even the early career of his novelistic avatar Wilhelm Meister. It is common critical wisdom that Goethe, with his constantly evolving views on theatre’s role in the great scheme of things, had decided that the stage of drama could not be coextensive with the stage of life, and that Meister’s further progress in the world of affairs should be made to follow after his scuffle with Shakespeare. It is, however, also very likely that, for Goethe, even the Shakespeare who embodied the pivotal moment of that career would need to be a Shakespeare deeply understood, and not one frivolously superseded, of whom Goethe’s reading public would all too soon see the better. Having recently seen a number of brave but somewhat roughand-ready productions of Shakespeare, and well aware of the scale of the challenges with which Shakespeare confronted German culture, Goethe’s confidence in his grasp of those plays may still have been prudently muted at this point. Further inspiration on that front was not quick in coming, and Wilhelm Meister was thoughtfully shelved. Indeed, many developments would intervene between this and Goethe’s reprise of the material in the 1790s. The most momentous was his Italian Journey. Although of course it brought Goethe to the real settings (Venice, Verona, Rome) of a few of Shakespeare’s dramas, and into the more general geographic environs of several, the overall project of the journey was not to re-experience fictional settings by a romantic re-projection onto reality, but rather to see and do things at first hand: his experience of nature, the human environment and available works of art in Italy reflects this in various ways. The dramas that were reworked in Italy (Iphigenie auf Tauris, Torquato Tasso) certainly illustrate that immediacy, and the audible ancestors within these plays are predominantly those of classical antiquity and the Italian (rather than Elizabethan) Renaissance. The Weimar-Jena scene to which Goethe returned in late 1788 was also soon to become the haunt of his younger colleague and budding dramatic theorist Schiller, and from this era, and indeed up till Schiller’s death, we find various testimonies to the two Olympians’ downplaying of the centrality of acting, and to their devaluing of the role of reality in theatre.43 Theatrical illusion was to be worn on the sleeve rather than totally overcome in the excellence of performance: the playwright’s manipulation of reality was to be overt in the theatre, and appreciated and admired in its own right – though no very coherent theoretical justification for these ideas was ever mounted by either proponent. The subscript is clear enough, however: despite the rise of a new generation of brilliant actors, the playwright’s cerebral poetic vision is king, not some petty visual/auditory experience.

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No doubt keen to draw the practical consequences of these insights for Shakespearean theatre, as early as the year after his appointment as Director General of the Court Theatre in 1791, Goethe staged Eschenburg’s Hamlet, and – significantly just when drafting the relevant books of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years in 1795 – Schröder’s second adapted version of the play. About these performances we know little in detail beyond what the playbills themselves reveal. Both texts already represented substantial adaptations to middle-class and aristocratic German taste and will have been subjected to considerable further cuts and alterations: even from the cast list of the 1795 production we can see that the last scene was missing, and those scenes involving Valtemand, Cornelius and Osric. To their credit, however, Goethe’s productions – unlike most of their German predecessors – at least retained the principle that Hamlet actually dies at the end!44 By this critical and practical exercise of carrying out in real life the Hamlet production that Wilhelm Meister had been poised to tackle at the breakdown of the Theatrical Mission manuscript, Goethe will have remedied any deficiencies of engagement that may have contributed to that impasse, and now nothing could have been more natural than for him to resume and complete the fictional correlate of his theatrical life. The 1795 Hamlet production provided the pivotal turn of affairs for Wilhelm’s Apprenticeship Years just as Italy had been the κμη πραγμάτων for the blank-verse Iphigenie. Goethe’s relatively new and more managerial relationship to Shakespeare inevitably brought with it quite a new outlook on the roles of Shakespeare and the theatre in the novel which Goethe had from the outset conceived as (pseudo-)confessional:45 the breath of new insight had come, and the changes which Goethe wrought even in the first stages of redrafting were correspondingly bracing. There were clearly differences. As far as the conception and economy of the new version was concerned, Goethe swept with an iron broom: somewhat to the cost of the autobiographical sequencing in the earlier parts of the work, the events of the six books we have of the Mission were compressed into four. There is a more carefully distanced relationship between the narrator and the events, the various characters are inducted more hurriedly and pointedly than in the Mission’s epic picaresque procession, some of them in carefully recalculated form. Wilhelm’s mother, now the donor of the puppet theatre, is no longer a ‘scarlet woman’ but a decent and proper matron. This sanitizing of the childhood home signally deprives Wilhelm of any convincing psychological excuse for his ‘flight’ to the realm of theatre.

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The depiction of Wilhelm’s father also becomes less radiant, as if to reduce the plausibility of any Hamletic reminiscence of Old Denmark. There is still the (entirely benign) enstatement of Wilhelm’s brother-in-law Werner at the helm of the family business, but the ‘philandering mother’ theme is in some sense replaced by another kind of inheritance issue, though again it is laughably more trivial than Hamlet’s. Perhaps in nettled memory of the sale, in the autumn of 1793, of his own father’s pictures and other possessions from the old Goethe house in the Hirschgraben in Frankfurt,46 Goethe now had Wilhelm’s father sell off the cherished art collection that had belonged to the grandfather, including one painting of a sick prince to which Wilhelm had been vaguely attached since boyhood. The sick prince is a conventional Hamletic cipher, but what Wilhelm feels he has been dispossessed of here is of course a mere representation of an inheritance issue (in his actual inheritance, the family business, Wilhelm takes precious little interest). Goethe may here simply be underlining the pathology of embracing illusory images of fate, as he would do once again in the 1809 novel Elective Affinities. The revised Wilhelm we see in the new Book 1, crucially, is no longer a poetic talent and does not triumph even momentarily by performing any play of his own creation: there is thus scarcely any evidence of a grand fate for him to pursue. In curtailed reformulation, the subsequent early books (2–4) of the Apprenticeship Years proceed through the tale of loyalties divided between family business and the allurements of theatre (rather as Goethe’s own life had been split between administration and art), featuring or retaining a similar array of Hamletisms, great and small, to what we saw in the Mission. Among the many direct references and reflections of character and structure that have been noted, by Roberts, Ermann and others,47 between Hamlet and Wilhelm Meister, both surrounding the Hamlet performance itself and elsewhere in the narrative of the Mission and Apprenticeship Years, are Wilhelm’s grey attire (HA 7: 117) after his sexual betrayal by Mariane (imitating Hamlet’s black attire in the wake of his mother’s perfidy), the ‘head in the lady’s lap’ episode (HA 7: 224), Wilhelm’s repeated shows of apparent misogyny, the hero’s persistent irresoluteness, the duplicity of the roles of chance and fate, the quasi-Ophelian complex of love, abandonment and madness in Serlo’s sister Aurelia and the death of the hero’s father (this time placed suggestively close to Wilhelm’s performance of Hamlet himself and the encounter with the ghost). Yet each of these ‘parallels’ is set up in a consciously bathetic way in the Apprenticeship Years, as if to drive home not its similarity but its difference from the theatrical archetype: Hamlet’s dressing in black was due to the cruel death of his father the

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king, putting Denmark’s future and his dynastic fate in jeopardy, whereas Wilhelm’s grey attire was merely due to his being cuckolded by a tawdry actress, the cause of Wilhelm’s misogyny is his own gullibility rather than any grand Hamletic grudge (indeed his Mariane-grudge is quite weakkneed even at its height); Wilhelm’s observed foolishness is neither witty nor feigned for any great purpose, but simply arises from his being duped and imperceptive; far from pursuing a fate, Wilhelm merely lets himself be wafted along in an aimless, often hypocritical fashion; despite being the most obvious Hamletic ‘plant’, Wilhelm’s colleague Laertes has nothing whatever in common with his Shakespearean namesake, beyond the fact of being assigned his character in a performance; the grand and fateful piratic kidnapping of Hamlet becomes in Wilhelm Meister a case of walking gormlessly into an armed robbery of which he has been specifically warned; the wounding of Wilhelm and Laertes by the robbers while they have been practising fencing for the final Hamlet scene is an almost comical remix, a pastiche of plot elements from the play (despite being armed to the hilt, the two were powerless to defend themselves in reality); similarly, the later elements of suicide and death among the other characters of the Apprenticeship Years, though interpretable as parallels, were clearly intended by Goethe to bear little meaningful comparison to their exemplars in Shakespeare’s play. Like those deliberately chimerical destiny omens which would litter the pages of the Elective Affinities, all these correspondences are certainly intended to be taken with a large grain of salt as part of the basic message of the Apprenticeship Years: a warning against misguided fatalism. Despite correction on the point by various individuals, Wilhelm persistently interprets the forces of fate as ruling his own life in much the same way he (equally misguidedly) interprets them as ruling Hamlet’s. After Wilhelm is told of his father’s death by Werner, and offered joint proprietorship of the firm, the central parts of the fi fth book are now devoted to Wilhelm’s confrontation with Hamlet in the context of Serlo’s theatre: a confrontation of criticism, of performance and intimate experience of the play’s parabolic content. The exposition of Wilhelm’s interpretation remains much what it was in the Mission. Here too, Wilhelm initially echoes the young Herder (and the younger Goethe) by insisting on a virtually unadapted text as script.48 With managerial prudence, however, Serlo also draws on Herder’s views in his ethnological argument to the effect that the Elizabethan spectators for whom Shakespeare’s plays were written were more culturally primitive than the theatregoers of the city of H. Wilhelm, whose independent force of will and aesthetic judgement are here no more formidable than in the Mission, is persuaded astonishingly quickly

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by this, and (also with mystifying rapidity) produces an adaptation allegedly reflecting his ‘pre-fratricide Hamlet’ interpretation and suggestive of the neoclassical compromises and simplified plot schema already seen in Goethe’s own Weimar productions and other previous German adaptations of Hamlet.49 The aplomb with which we then see Wilhelm lecturing and dressaging his actors is undoubtedly also a reflex of Goethe’s own newfound directorial pedagogy.50 Also reflected, however, in Wilhelm’s script is Goethe’s scruple about Hamlet’s death: despite Serlo’s populist plea that the hero survive, Wilhelm still demurs – successfully, for a change.51 This point is surprising, but highly significant: by simultaneously making what is almost his first firm decision in life, and thereby preserving that feature of the play which would mark Hamlet out as an unviable model, Meister is finally sowing the seeds of his escape from the life of theatre. The Hamlet performance itself, with Wilhelm in the lead role, is only cursorily described, with the exception of the mysterious intervention by the unknown character who plays the ghost of Hamlet’s father. No actor was cast for this role, until an anonymous note was received assuring Wilhelm that the role would be filled on the night. In the event, the character’s voice and demeanour remind Wilhelm of his own recently deceased father, and the ghost leaves Wilhelm a note urging him to flee. The actors’ lodging house burns down that night, Melina and Serlo remove Wilhelm and Aurelia from stage duties and the troupe disperses due to various causes: like Serlo, Wilhelm has realized that acting cannot be his métier, despite the production’s success, and so his engagement with Shakespeare is over. Wilhelm leaves the world of theatre, and when he is sent on an errand by the dying Aurelia, he proceeds to another stage in his ‘formation’ in the hands of a secret lodge which has carefully watched his fortunes hitherto. After a chapter-long insert of pietistic meditations which are involved in the later plot, Wilhelm’s affairs and relationships and ongoing tribulations with members of the lodge (including a bizarre induction into it) and several of the earlier characters take up the remainder of the novel. So we see that, in line with the promptings of the art connoisseur and several other figures from both versions of the novel, the encounters with the life of theatre itself constitute in the Apprenticeship Years no more than precisely a ‘stage’ in Wilhelm’s evolution. The reasons for this, however, lay not in any downgrading of the significance of Hamlet, but rather arose directly from an enhanced understanding of Shakespeare’s text. Goethe saw that the use of the theatre was for the prince of Denmark merely instrumental, and even his use of it as an instrument was a misguided prevarication; thus, the same Jarno who recommends Shakespeare to Wilhelm (3. 8)

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also urges him to embrace a more worldly employment than the theatre (3. 11) (HA 7: 179–81, 193). Werner, Mignon, Herr C., the Countess and finally the ghost figure also tell Wilhelm in various ways to drop the theatre: Shakespeare was for learning from, not for emulating! Wilhelm only gradually comes to understand this in the aftermath of the novel’s great turning point, the performance of Hamlet. What then are we to make of Goethe’s own implicit relationships to his Wilhelm and their Hamlet? What kind of life catharsis could Wilhelm possibly undergo by performing Hamlet under such delusory auspices? The later books of the Apprenticeship Years, concerning the Tower Society and various later figurations of Wilhelm’s character, have been questioned (by Boyle and many others) regarding their seriousness as an answer to questions of life trajectory; could it be that the Hamlet episode is an equally red herring? Goethe’s opinions on Hamlet, and indeed on Shakespeare, as we shall see, vacillate in various ways for the remainder of his life, and it is not at all easy to answer these questions of irony raised by Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years. Despite the much lamp-oil and acribia expended hitherto on the Apprenticeship Years, there seems, to this day, to be no stable consensus on its bottom line: even on whether or not it is indeed a classic exposition of Bildung! It is hard to ignore the possibility, then, that the many imitators and ridiculers of Wilhelm Meister’s progress have underestimated the irony of Goethe’s ultimate intentions with Wilhelm Meister, and that the greatest persifleur of Wilhelm’s delusions is Goethe himself.

Goethe and the Weimar Theatre Goethe’s appointment in 1791 as director of the Weimar court theatre came not long after Schiller’s professorial appointment in nearby Jena, and since Schiller spent the early 1790s mainly working on the grand scheme of his theory of drama, the two ‘Dioscurides’ as they came to be called, soon conferred regularly regarding the ongoing work of the court theatre as well. True to the caution later uttered to Eckermann, recommending only limited exposure to Shakespeare lest one’s creativity be cowed, Goethe was indeed fairly sparing with the Shakespearean offerings of the Weimar theatre: the twenty-six years of his directorship saw only ten Shakespeare productions, nestled among a repertoire of more comfortable fare. 52 Nor did the two Olympians spare any effort to make their Shakespeare ‘comfortable’ as well: despite already using prudently adapted texts from Eschenburg, Schröder and Voss (and later A.W. Schlegel’s) a good deal of

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Goethe’s and Schiller’s own further effort would go into ensuring inoffensive, linear plot and almost unity-observant plays whose heroes and villains cut a rather more courtworthy and less metaphysically disturbing figure than the Shakespearean originals. Starting promptly with King John in 1791, and following with a suitably sanitized remix of Henry IV, Goethe and Schiller were certainly mindful of the role theatre was expected to play in a hereditary autocratic ducal court: enlightened culture bolstering the values of rational good behaviour and shunning any of the perturbation that had so regrettably unhinged the politics and society of neighbouring France in these years. This represented of course, especially for Schiller, a marked change of heart over his earlier cast of thought, but the theory of drama on which he was engaged was indeed, for all its veneration of the poet’s importance, a teleological scheme aimed at rationally educated social stability. From this it becomes obvious how little scope there was for any deep Shakespearean commitment in their repertoire or the manner of its delivery: in this mannered neoclassical paradise, actors were expected to wear their illusionistic credentials on their sleeves, and the roaring chaos of reality – internal and external – was to be kept primly pruned (edited out if necessary) and in any case firmly at bay. Little surprise then, that after the initial spate of plays Shakespeare had to wait another three years for his next run on the Weimar stage (Schröder’s anaemically bourgeois second rewrite of Hamlet in 1795, and King Lear in 1796) – and yet another four for the one after that (Macbeth in 1800). The spirit of all these productions, from what is known of their scripts, seems profoundly anti-Shakespearean, and one might wonder what it was that sustained any desire to persist with the bard at all under such circumstances. Yet the answer is not far to seek: due to Germany’s increased exposure to actual translations of Shakespeare during the 70s and 80s, the Voltairean argument had evaporated, Shakespeare’s reputation as the international pinnacle of the art could no longer be avoided and all major theatres – Vienna, Hamburg, Leipzig, Mannheim – saw themselves constrained to host his work in whatever manner they could; the most unflappably traditionalist audience could not overlook the new depth and breadth of human character which Shakespeare, even an editorially ransacked Shakespeare, brought them, and no dramatic poet worth his salt could now ignore the wealth of resources that the Englishman’s work offered – and none did. The magnum opus of Goethe’s mature years would eventually reveal its full debt to Shakespeare, and Schiller’s return to playwriting in the late nineties already presents us with a seamless continuation of Shakespearean influence.

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After the death of Schiller in 1805, it must have seemed to Goethe, and to the German reading and theatre-going public, that a great monument of classicism had passed away, a man whose work had so profoundly legitimated the partnership of enlightened autocratic rule and the wholesome genius and culture of the educated middle class. But some details in our discussion may have alerted the reader to the partly illusory character of such an assessment – and again, it is Schiller’s lifelong fascination with Shakespeare that reveals some of the cracks in that wholesome synthesis. Schiller had indeed assiduously reread Shakespeare’s works – in Wieland’s and Eschenburg’s and later in Schlegel’s translations53 – since his schooldays, and it has not escaped the notice of modern critics that Schiller’s recurrent preoccupation with his Shakespearean sources almost invariably centred around the arrestingly cruel aspects of character and action, the impassioned murders and suicides, the grisly spectres of the dead, the shocking malice of betrayal and conspiracy, the on-stage strangulation, the upheld severed head:54 these darker, irrational elements were documentably for Schiller the most fascinating of all the manifestations of ‘Nature’ to be found in the Briton’s work. Nor is this entirely surprising in view of the content of even Schiller’s lyric output, particularly the ballads, many of which – The Cranes of Ibycus, The Diver and The Ring of Polycrates are among the most famous – culminate in or spring from just such an event; in fact, his early interest in medicine may well have been the reflex of a somewhat macabre underlying interest rather than any profound sense of Hippocratic vocation. Nor did it escape Goethe’s notice that his colleague had ‘a certain eye for cruelty’, and Goethe, who had repeatedly edited and bowdlerized the bard for the provincial beau monde, knew better than anyone how fruitful a source Shakespeare will have been for this grimmer side of Schiller’s repertoire; around the turn of the century, at the zenith of Schiller’s celebrity, Goethe had also reread Macbeth, King John, Coriolanus and King Lear.55 Goethe himself, though, was ever the didactic in some way or other, and never a man to confront his public with an abysm without leaving at least fair indication of the way out – an avoider of tragedy, as he has been called; so for Goethe these unhealable wounds of human cruelty in which almost all of Schiller’s plays culminate cannot have been the most attractive feature of the man’s work. In retrospect, it is tempting to speculate that it was partly Schiller’s take on the presentation of reality in Shakespeare that decisively conditioned Goethe’s later view of the Englishman’s work. The year of Schiller’s death still saw Goethe’s production of Voss’s Othello translation, and 1809 saw the production of A. W. Schlegel’s blank-verse

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Hamlet, but during most of the second half of this decade the formalization of his marriage, various scientific work, lesser items on the Weimar theatre repertoire, the novel Elective Affinities, the beginnings of an autobiography and the steady escalation of conflict with Napoleonic France took up much of Goethe’s time. Goethe met Napoleon in personal audience: the first figure of such historic stature that Goethe had encountered and was quite deeply taken with him. As Goethe must have been aware, this was his first real encounter with the kind of grand political desire that inhabited a number of Shakespeare’s historical plays, but the turmoil of these years did nothing to whet Goethe’s taste for the harsh and lingering chaotic consequences of that desire, and this is reflected nowhere more clearly than in his next Shakespeare project, a stage adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.

Goethe’s Production of Romeo and Juliet 1811–12 The idea of adapting Romeo and Juliet for the contemporary German stage had been with Goethe at least since October 1767, when he mentioned such a plan to his university friend Behrisch after being disappointed with Christian Felix Weisse’s version of the drama. After sporadic diary-entries in his later years mentioning discussions of Romeo and Juliet with various interlocutors, 56 Goethe was finally moved to take on the task of producing a revised Romeo and Juliet from the fi fth of December to Christmas Day 1811. Goethe produced the version by conflation and adaptation of (and sometimes detectable improvement on) the Wieland, Eschenburg and A. W. Schlegel texts, and his intention is most clearly stated in a note to Friedrich Schlegel: he simply wanted to ‘concentrate’ the play’s action by removing everything that was extraneous to its central story (WA 4. 2. 327). This, however, meant the excision of some 46 per cent of Shakespeare’s lines (including two-thirds of the first Act), extensive remodelling, and the addition of 488 verses of Goethe’s own to the play as a whole.57 Was it merely practicality, or the frisson of counterfeit immortality in seeing such a quantity of one’s own verses performed as ‘Shakespeare’? The character of Mercutio, who is in Shakespeare a strong and effective worldly counterfoil to Romeo, is dismissed by Goethe as a kind of extraneous clown or Falstaff-type character, and thus given rather shorter shrift in the adaptation. As in many other Shakespeare versions of the age, audience foibles were pandered to with a reconciliation of the two families at the end, presumably in the attempt to ‘harmonize’ the elements of the play, as Goethe repeatedly phrased it.58 The overall effect of removing many of the scenes

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which reflect on the feud and the romance from various points of view, is to depersonalize the overarching conflict. The removal of one or two scenes of high emotion (such as the parents’ reaction at Juliet’s supposed death, in 4. 4) again detracts from the presentation of the objective effect of the news, the social ‘imbeddedness’ of the action, and reminds one of the objections of Goethe’s German predecessors to raw, untrammelled emotion on stage. The admixture of humour, relatively common in Shakespeare but severely pilloried by the French and (in deference to Voltaire in particular) even the more sympathetic of Goethe’s predecessors, is now eliminated by the omission of material such as the end of that same scene (4. 4), a bantering exchange between Peter and the musicians. These changes and the overwhelmingly rhymed character of Goethe’s additions bring the tone of parts of the play into the almost sing-song ‘Voltairean’ orbit: just the kind of de-Shakespeareanizing treatment that Wilhelm Meister and the younger Goethe had initially deplored, and – to be less charitable – perhaps even bearing comparison with the kind of unity-observing simplification to which Christian Felix Weisse had subjected the play! But this was no symptom of sudden change in Goethe’s thinking on Shakespeare: interestingly, Goethe once again more or less used Herder’s theory of temporal and geographical specificity to justify the deletions, saying that what he cut was just the disharmonious dross that Shakespeare was forced to include by English taste of those times, 59 and one might well read the result as a specimen of the very type of treatment that the narrator of Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship had coyly promised for Hamlet, but the author had not delivered. Yet there remained even now, as there would always remain, a seed of the old reverence in Goethe’s mind, the awareness that – howsoever successfully – he was ephemerally tinkering with the work of an ungraspable genius: This work was a great study for me, and I have probably never looked more deeply into Shakespear’s [sic] talent, but he, like all ultimate things, remains after all unfathomable. (HABr 3: 177) No doubt partly due to Goethe’s meticulous tailoring of the play to Weimar audience tastes, the production on the first day of February 1812 was a tolerable success, as were those in March and November of that year; this version returned periodically to the Weimar stage and occasionally other major theatres until at least 1816. Apart from its usefulness as a theatre script, however, Goethe seems – as his above quoted words indicate – to have regarded the processing of Romeo and Juliet as a kind of propaedeutic

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exercise, though the literary uses to which he subsequently put his understanding of Shakespeare might leave one wondering what the scrupulous pruning was for: the sprawling pyroclastic flows of Faust II would be the next major receptors for this newfound ‘concision and discipline’. Before we examine the influence of Shakespeare on Goethe’s later work and thought, it may be best to pause to consider to what stature Shakespeare had grown more generally in Germany by this time. As one would expect, there are various marginal remarks on this question in letters and reviews by the major German Shakespearean intellectuals themselves, but a less ‘professionally involved’ view from an outsider might better serve here as testimony. There are numerous memoirs by Englishman who visited Germany around these years (for since the turn of the century it was Goethe and Schiller who had set the bon ton for the English literary elite), but this brief account from William Jacob, the merchant, scientist and parliamentarian with no more than a polite interest in letters, may be taken to speak for the many: The admiration of Shakespeare is in Berlin, and indeed throughout Germany, carried to an extent which is very gratifying to our national taste. Schlegel has pointed out his beauties with so much discriminating genius, and has, in his contrasts between him and the other modern poets, so exalted him, that when the name of Shakespeare is uttered, I have always been prepared for, and not frequently disappointed of hearing a quotation from Schlegel.60 It was against this background, then – partly generated and abetted by himself – that Goethe embarked on the remainder of his literary career after leaving the management of the Weimar court theatre.

Goethe’s Later Views on Shakespeare During the years following Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years, a fully blown movement of Romanticism had grown up around Goethe’s feet, partly inspired, as we have seen, by his own works, and partly by those of Shakespeare. As we might suspect from the source of authority mentioned in William Jacob’s observations, this movement had quickly come to dominate literary fashion in England as well, where – perhaps incomprehensibly for Goethe at the time – he and Schiller were also regarded as part of that movement. In Germany, however, through the first decades of the new

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century there was a theoretical debate going on, both in Goethe’s mind and in public, concerning England’s greatest literary export, namely, the whole nature of Shakespeare’s genius. Was it truly universal literary genius, or somehow culturally limited, a provincially British phenomenon? Was Shakespeare a genius of the theatre itself, or merely of dramatic poetry? These questions had in various ways already been implicit in the to-andfro of earlier German views about Shakespeare’s stageability, cultural compatibility and rank among the other great European dramatists, but in the new century these issues took on a more personal significance for Goethe: he was himself a figure on the world literary stage, and German Romanticism, which eventually found itself in competition with much of what Goethe stood for, had a bardology of its own. Since Shakespeare’s Europe-wide reputation had meanwhile exceeded all precedented bounds, nothing could have been more predictable than that the Romantics and the Weimar school should place conflicting claims on him and fight over his posterity, and so they did. For Goethe, the most troublesome element of the Romantic claim on Shakespeare was undoubtedly this same, inexhaustible August Wilhelm Schlegel. By the turn of the century he had placed the Shakespeare-reading German public deeply in his debt by producing a classic prosodic translation of seventeen of the plays, and by its quality set a new benchmark for the art of translation itself; by an astonishing depth, and breadth, and constant expansion of philological grasp he had also (as Goethe well knew)61 made the world of literary criticism his own. On the other hand, there was Ludwig Tieck’s minute knowledge of the plays and editions of Shakespeare and his contemporaries,62 though this mastery of detail went hand in hand with an apparently arbitrary anti-rational line in regard to Shakespeare’s status and the dating of his plays. Both critics saw Shakespeare as representing a synthesis of poetry and nation, a status they were not willing to accord to Goethe. Goethe’s Shakespeare und kein Ende! (No End of Shakespeare) We find Goethe’s reaction to these views of the Romantics scattered through various references in letters and later remarks to Eckermann, but most pithily expressed in the essay No End of Shakespeare (HA 12: 287–98); its first two parts were written in 1813 and published in 1815; the third part was written in 1816 but only published a decade later. The first section of the essay aims to persuade the reader that Shakespeare, whilst a uniquely effective purveyor of the real world and of human nature,

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achieves this not by the action in his plays but by the extraordinarily communicative nature of his characters’ language. A more seasoned present-day connoisseur of Shakespeare would probably point out that the additional depth in spoken content certainly further potentiates the action of the plays, but that this action itself (both acted and reported) is for precisely that reason all the more eloquent! Goethe’s emphasis on the cerebral element of the plays in this essay is in fact the first move in a strategy to redefine Shakespeare as ‘closet drama’: There is no more sublime and no purer pleasure than to close your eyes and have one of Shakespeare’s plays recited (not declaimed) to you by a naturally appropriate voice. (HA 12: 289) Goethe ‘excuses’ Shakespeare for his supposed shortcomings once more by means of the partly Herderian argument on Shakespeare’s English parochiality and contempt for authentic portrayal, though these points seem largely defeated by Goethe’s admissions that England was ‘everywhere’, ‘active in all parts of the world’, and that, rather than details of costume, it is a fundamental realism of human character that makes for authenticity, and Shakespeare was a ‘connoisseur’ of this.63 Although Goethe’s view of Shakespeare as the arch-exponent of inner feelings and natures remains, then, he clearly no longer shares Tieck’s conviction about Shakespeare’s merits as a specifically theatrical talent. In the second section of the essay Goethe lists a number of topical antitheses of literature: the ancient, naive, heathen, heroic, real and necessary versus the modern, sentimental, Christian, romantic, ideal and free. Without taking specific issue with the validity of these implied alignments, he adds a further antithesis: that between obligation and will (Sollen and Wollen). Goethe – on the whole, perceptively – explains ancient tragedy as the clash of obligation with infeasibility, and modern tragedy as the clash of will (or desire) with infeasibility; he then credits Shakespeare with constituting a synthesis of these two clashes. In view of well-understood features of the predicaments in major works such as Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Othello and Macbeth, there is again some plausibility and interest value in this thesis, though one would have been grateful for some actual illustration of its workings. Although this schema does flatter Shakespeare with a unique status in the gamut of Western literature, it does not in itself militate either for or against Goethe’s ‘closet Shakespeare’ thesis, although if we were to take the ‘real–ideal’ dichotomy (and its implied alignment with the ‘obligation–will’ dichotomy) seriously – as one probably should in

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Shakespeare’s case – it does leave us with the question of how a playwright commanding a unique synthesis of the ideal and the real (and whose thrust is thus not purely imaginary) can be so unsuitable for real-life theatrical presentation. The essay’s third section, continuing the argument of the first, is devoted to a more frontal assault on Shakespeare’s capability as a writer for the theatre, though it is at first diplomatically hedged by saying that Shakespeare’s achievement belongs to the history of poetry, and only then do the gradual denials of his theatrical acumen trickle in (HA 12: 295–8). Without wasting ink on empirical or analytical exposition, Goethe pursues his argument in an almost purely speculative manner, though the one specific example he does give (the untheatricality of Mercutio and the nurse in Romeo and Juliet) – a trivial instance, but presumably the piece of evidence he found particularly persuasive – exposes a certain naïvété in his structural understanding of these characters and does not bode well for whatever examples he might have used to substantiate some of his other points. Why did Goethe do this? Was it his real view, or tactical theorizing? This Shakespeare ‘lacking in audience effect’ was of course partly just the Shakespeare that Goethe (like Schröder, no less than Weisse and Heufeld and Schiller64) had created by their various dumbings-down of scripts, editing and toning down of characters, and prudish acts of censorship and orderly Frenchifications: Goethe is talking, in a sense, about the Shakespeare that he felt his own milieu, and perhaps he himself, could ‘handle’, and so arguably the supposed ‘stageability’ limits of the plays, and the supposed limits to Shakespeare’s stage-writing talent, were simply the limitations of an audience that was not sufficiently in touch with its own human nature, its sexuality, its contradictoriness, its irrational elements. Not that there was any lack of others (such as Gerstenberg, and perhaps Schiller in his heart of hearts) who saw through this and demanded the real thing. Despite the contemporary German audience’s relatively unevolved perceptions (of which Goethe was well aware), it seems highly unlikely that Goethe himself failed to grasp Shakespeare’s generally superb sense of theatrical impact. But as a man with his own prestige at heart, Goethe could not live with real Shakespeare in public, as its performance would mean showing an artistic vision both against his audience’s comprehension and sentiment, and, in the longer term, going against his own reputation’s interests both as writer and critic. This non-theatrical image of Shakespeare was a conscious, or subconscious assimilation to what Goethe, nudged subtly by Schiller and less clemently by Schlegel, now recognized as his own shortcoming: an attempt to ‘cut Shakespeare down to (Goethe’s

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own) size’. His inspiration for this ‘closet Shakespeare’ may even have been taken from the lips of Hamlet: I heard thee speak me a speech once, but it was never acted, or if it was, not above once; for the play, I remember, pleas’d not the million, ‘twas caviary to the general. but it was – as I receiv’d it, and others whose judgments in such matters cried in the top of mine – an excellent play, well digested in the scenes, set down with as much modesty as cunning. (Hamlet, 2. 2. 434–40) Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years) Among the most substantial works completed in the last decade or so of Goethe’s life was the eccentric patchwork sequel to the Apprenticeship Years: Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, published in 1821, and appearing in an expanded edition in 1829. The novel is known to have been jostled together from an assortment of Goethe’s miscellaneous stories and other papers, and the question of whether Goethe, now his 70s, did enough by way of shaping this material into a conceptually coherent work has divided critics since the initial publication. Certainly neither Goethe’s own remarks on the work65 nor what we know about the manner of its composition (HA 8: 581–2, 602–6) would incline one to reprieve the work beyond the status of a postmodernist experiment, despite the interest in its symbolism and its value as a testimony to Goethe’s growing preoccupation with the idea of renunciation. With the action following quite some time after Wilhelm’s fateful Hamlet performance and abandonment of the theatre (and in consideration of what Goethe may have meant by that), we would not expect a reprise of Shakespearean interest in the Journeyman Years, but there are a few features of the novel in which Goethe ‘looks over his shoulder’, so to speak, at Shakespeare. Wilhelm’s various reactions to the panoramic spectacle of the universe, in the scene of the Journeyman Years wherein Makarie takes him to the observatory, his feeling of nothingness, his inability to ‘see’ it properly, have been revealingly compared to his reaction to Shakespeare in the Shakespeare’s Day speech.66 The reason of course is that Shakespeare presented one with a whole world, a whole universe; Shakespeare, according to that speech, showed how each person had as their essence a ‘midpoint’ which was also their real access to the world, much as Wilhelm Meister needed this midpoint (i.e. he relies precisely on the lesson taught by Shakespeare) in order to be able to even conceive of himself in the midst of the great cosmos.

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Shakespeare himself, however, appears no longer to be the donor of this sense of midpoint. The sublime figure of veneration in the novel, Makarie, is herself in various ways portrayed as revolving around a mysterious midpoint, sometimes designated as the sun, sometimes as some point she is progressively rising away from in a spiral ascent, but again, there is no longer any place for Shakespeare in this scheme of things. In the collection of maxims and reflections ‘From Makarie’s Archive’, with which the third and final book of the Journeyman Years ends, Shakespeare is paired with Goethe’s pet abhorrence Calderón: after praising the flying start that these two have given to the enviably well-educated state of German theatrical talent, Goethe cautions: yet in this, one should ponder whether here precisely this impressive foreign element, this talent sublimated to the point of untruth, must be harmful to German cultural education. . . . How much falsehood Shakespeare and particularly Calderon have subjected us to, how these two great lights of the poetic firmament have become ignes fatui for us, let the writers of the future note in retrospect. (HA 8: 479) Although much of this material was accumulated in the years 1821–9, we know that some of it dates back as far as the beginning of the century, and it is just possible that these last remarks were written in that early phase, when Goethe may still have been railing at the Romantics’ calderonolatry and their particular take on Shakespeare. This said, it cannot be argued that it is out of keeping with the attitudes to Shakespeare and the theatre in the remainder of Goethe’s Journeyman Years, ‘carpetbag’ production though they may have been. Most likely is that they were jottings from some period when Goethe, perhaps annoyed at some temporary stagnation of his own, was mentally experimenting with this ‘resentful’ view of Shakespeare, and the Journeyman Years offered some opportunity to get them into print at a time when sagacious editing was not among Goethe’s most urgent priorities. Parallel to some of the work on the second edition of the Journeyman Years ran, among other things, a project infinitely closer to his heart and substance. Faust The monumental drama Faust is these days undoubtedly the work for which Goethe is most widely regarded in the world at large, and on its two Parts he expended vast amounts of thought, time and energy at various periods

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in his long adult life. The question of its Shakespearean credentials may be thought to pale alongside the long ranks of other earlier authors whose influence is detectable therein, from Homer through the Greek tragedians and comedians, through most of the major literary veins of the classical, mediaeval and modern European world as Goethe knew it. But there are, as we shall see, a number of cardinal features in the conception of Goethe’s Faust which mark the metaphysical mutineer out in a clear line of descent from the Shakespearean heritage. Goethe’s long-term fascination with Faust bore its first fruit in the Sturm und Drang years 1772–5 with the so-called Urfaust, a version of the Gretchen tragedy which would later become Part I of the final work; whether it was the rarefied sociopolitical climate of Weimar, or some other factor which suddenly caused him to shelve the work is hard to say. Upon his return from Italy, during the years 1788–90, Goethe wrote a further Faust ‘Fragment’, a poetically more refined draft of this material. From 1797 to 1805 he produced what is now Part I of Faust. Eine Tragödie, of whose twenty-eight scenes (plus dedicatory poem) about half had been significantly remodelled since the Urfaust, or added, including the Prologue in Heaven, the Prelude in the Theatre, most of the first scene in Faust’s Study, the Witch’s Kitchen, the Walpurgis Night scene and the Walpurgis Night’s Dream. Since 1800, when Goethe drafted some vital sections from what would eventually be Act 3 of Part 2, it was clear that the Faust being written in these years was destined to be only the first part of a play of far greater magnitude and conceptual scope. The bulk of the work on Part 2 was only taken up again in 1825, and finished in 1831, the year before Goethe’s death at the age of eighty-two. An important innovation in Goethe’s treatment of the Faust legend and its materials is that, following the early university drama and devil’spact scenes, he combines the scene of rejuvenation-by-witchcraft with a supernatural premonition of an encounter with absolute beauty: it is a vision of Helen of Troy, whom Goethe (like Marlowe67 and some of the other antecedents) conjures up later in Part 2 of the tragedy, in connection with his grand fantasies of political power. In Goethe this premonition is a mysterious kind of mission statement. The remainder of Part 1 primarily features the expansion of the rejuvenated Faust’s amatory episode into a bourgeois social tragedy, the seduction of the young local girl Gretchen, her family’s ruination, her pregnancy and (in Faust’s absence) subsequent infanticide, imprisonment and death sentence. While on a fantastical junket to a debauched witches’ sabbath gathering on St Walburga’s Eve (Walpurgis Night), Faust is deliberately exposed

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by his companion Mephistopheles to subliminal omens of his own guilt and his sweetheart’s plight, ending in a horrifying spectre of her death by decapitation. Faust prevails on the reluctant Mephistopheles to race to her aid; as a traditionally religious girl, however, she refuses to be rescued supernaturally by Mephistopheles’ power. With Faust’s heavyhearted abandonment of her, and a celestial voice declaring her salvation, the fi rst Part ends. The action of Part 2 begins with him waking from sleep in an idyllic natural landscape, apparently granted oblivion by tutelary nature spirits; we soon find him in the imperial court mixing (with Mephistopheles’ dubious magical assistance) in the financial fortunes of the emperor and suing for his favour. In return for his services Faust is granted the fee of a piece of ‘land’ which has to be reclaimed from the sea. As preparation for the ideal society and culture he wishes to found there, we are treated to a grand allegory (the Classical Walpurgis Night), a kind of mystical procession of all the elements of Golden-Age Greek culture; as generative concepts of the new Man whom he wishes to breed on these elements, we have a homunculus created before us, and chased through the scenes of the cultural allegory; as the single, defining principle of beauty and proportion which was the quintessence of that ideal culture and was to be the keystone of his new society, Faust summons up the shade of Helen of Troy, purifies her of temporal associations (in a fanciful time-warp conflict with her husband Menelaus), begets a child – shortlived though the embrace and its fruit turn out to be – and proceeds to construct the territorial and economic basis of his new realm. But Faust grows old, and his efforts to create a humane society are undermined by Mephistopheles: goods are taken from slave plantations, an old couple whose house is in the way are killed and the corpses of many who die in the land-reclamation work are used in the polderwork itelf. When Faust himself dies there is a conflict over the fate of his soul, but in the end it is pronounced ‘saved’, as Gretchen’s was at the end of Part 1. Faust as a drama represents the realization of Shakespearean synthesis, Shakespearean cross-fertilization of the individual and the political sphere, in a manner which met another of Goethe’s lifelong missions. The form which Goethe gave, and surely had to give to the working out of so vast a network of links and consequences as the exposition of such an historically pivotal character would require, owed something to the sprawling form that Goethe had pioneered in Götz von Berlichingen, at a time when the liberty of adopting this form could only be justified by reference to the success that Shakespeare had had with it. What strikes us

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‘on the mazard’, as soon as we even fl ick through a copy of Faust, is indeed its multiplicity of historical time frames, characters and highly disparate scenes, forty-five in all, many of them very long in dramatic terms. It is Shakespearean formal liberty taken to a grand extreme, about as far from the unities of time, place and (according to many critics) action68 as one can get, there is indeed the impression of the ‘planlessness’ of which Shakespeare had also been accused. In riding roughshod over the dramaturgical rules of the day in this way, Goethe may well have seen himself as placing his trust in the same exuberance which had brought some of Shakespeare’s greatest triumphs. Moreover, there are, in this signally non-Shakespearean fable of Faust, a number of details which show that Shakespeare was indeed intermittently on Goethe’s mind during the composition of the work. The theatre director whom we see in Goethe’s ‘Prelude in the Theatre’ is a relatively uncommon character to have in a play,69 though Hamlet, and Peter Quince from A Midsummer Night’s Dream are among the few who carry out that role. The physical detail of the theatre in Goethe’s Prelude (‘the posts, the boards have been erected,’ ‘our stall’, ‘the narrow portal of grace’, ‘the ticket counter’) also recalls the theatre’s physical form referred to in the prologue of Henry V: ‘this unworthy scaffold’, ‘this cockpit’, ‘this wooden O’, ‘in little place’, ‘these walls’ (10–19). In thematizing the theatre in this way, far beyond the mere use of a narrator or prologue reader, Goethe was consciously putting his drama in a very specific tradition of which Shakespeare was the pre-eminent exponent, and the aim of their gesture here was ultimately the same: where Shakespeare’s chorus implores the audience to extrapolate to grandeur according to the imaginative principle he has reiterated, Goethe’s director is urging his troupe to maximize the effect and do justice to the magnitude of the material, exceeding even Shakespeare’s ‘vasty fields of France’: Pace out, then, in this narrow boarded spell Entire Creation’s universe, And at deliberate gait traverse From heaven, through the world, to hell.70 The ‘Witches Kitchen’ scene where Faust is rejuvenated by a potion does not serve (as we saw the first version of the gypsies’ scene in Götz serve) as the juncture of direct prophecy by the witches – indeed, Goethe designs this scene and its speeches from quite different materials, almost as if to avoid further echoes of Macbeth – but in its function as Faust’s first glimpse of

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Helena, it does in fact serve as the supernatural mission-dispensing scene in the same way as Macbeth 4. 1 (in the cavern, with the three apparitions) and Hamlet 1. 4–5 (with his father’s ghost), and likewise by means of a spectre. The first strophe of a song sung by Mephistopheles (allegedly to warm Gretchen to her next encounter with Faust) – What dost before Thy sweetheart’s door, Young Katelin? – for The night is scarcely o’er. Do not begin! He’ll let thee in, As maiden in, But out as maid no more.71 – is a deliberate adaptation of Schlegel’s translation72 of the popular folk song which the deranged Ophelia sings to King Claudius: Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s day, All in the morning betime, And I a maid at your window To be your Valentine. Then up he rose and donn’d his clo’es, And dupp’d the chamber-door; Let in the maid, that out a maid Never departed more. (Hamlet, 4. 5. 48–55) Goethe even used the name Valentine for Gretchen’s brother, who confronts Faust and Mephistopheles immediately after the song, and remarked to Eckermann on 18 January 1825: So Mephistopheles sings a song from Shakespeare, and why shouldn’t he? Why should I take the trouble to invent one of my own, when Shakespeare’s was just right, and said just what it was supposed to?73 The deliberate effect of these correspondences is primarily to present Faust’s plight in the same light as Hamlet’s: both men were responsible for the murder of their sweetheart’s sibling and sole remaining parent, but were themselves the victims of social scandal and needed to overthrow various strictures threatening their existence.

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Curiously, Goethe inserted at the end of the Walpurgis Night scene an interlude (supposedly performed in the open on the Blocksberg near the witches’ sabbath) called ‘A Walpurgis Night’s Dream, or Oberon’s and Titania’s Golden Wedding Celebration’. The few opening speeches from Oberon, Titania, Puck and (from The Tempest) Ariel,74 on the humorous theme of separation as a form of therapy for marital conflict, bear only distant or perhaps ironic relationship to Faust’s predicament, and are followed by an array of mostly topical-type satirical quatrains. These satires serve as pure distractions and are thus of a piece with Mephistopheles’ strategy with Faust, and so the Shakespearean wedding theme is used as a little more than a passing emblem here; the only lasting impression being that of the helpful, ethereal figure of Ariel, though presumably the part is only played by some sprite from the witches’ sabbath. Ariel himself (in much the same character) appears as one of the tutelary nature spirits rousing Faust from his regenerative oblivion at the very start of Part 2: again in purely emblematic capacity, unless, as in The Tempest, the natural setting is meant as a kind of asylum from the hero’s previous debacle. (The heroes’ names, ‘Prospero’ and ‘Faust’, are also semantically close and may also be intended to abet such a parallel.)

Conclusion As a playwright and practising dramatist, and aspirant to the very peaks of ‘world literature’, Goethe would always have to share his trough, for better or worse, with Shakespeare, his works and reputation. Goethe’s handling of this fact changes, perhaps predictably, along with his interests in the course of time: for the young Goethe looking for a ladder to the star to which his talent justly aspired, there was none better to scale than Shakespeare; for the established but still mercurial Goethe of the middle and later years, being himself now a ‘ladder’ for the aspirations of Tieck and many others, a situation of unenviable competition arose between his own reputation, his own status as an emulable model, and Shakespeare’s. How uncomfortably Goethe reacted to this contention at times, we have seen, yet at no time did Goethe entirely lose the pure, simple sense of admiration for Shakespeare’s work, or the gratification of comprehending something of the genius of the man who produced it, and this admiration and comprehension enriched Goethe’s own genius again and again throughout his long life. In the form not just of Faust, or of Götz or of Egmont, or even of Wilhelm Meister’s mission, but, in a deeper sense, in the form of his œuvre

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as a whole, Goethe surely succeeded in carrying out the ‘mission’ laid on him by Herder in 1773: Happy am I that, though time is running out, I still live at a time when it is possible for me to understand him; and when you, my friend, who feel and recognise yourself in reading his dramas, and whom I have embraced more than once before his sacred image, can still dream the sweet dream worthy of your powers, that one day you will raise a monument to him here in our degenerate country, drawn from our age of chivalry and written in our own language.75 It was of course far from Goethe’s only achievement, and had that not been so, there would of course have been no monument to speak of. But how did Goethe feel that it had succeeded, this raising of a monument? In May 1825 he said to Eckermann: ‘If I could say for what all I am indebted to great predecessors and contemporaries, then that would not leave much.’76 As to who might have been the chief practical contributors, we may guess from his biography; as to who might have been the most enduring influences on his work, we could simply begin with those honoured in his own reflective poem of as late as 1820: Einer Einzigen angehören, Einen Einzigen verehren, Wie verfeint es Herz und Sinn! Lida! Glück der nächsten Nähe,

To belong to one sole woman, To venerate one sole man, How it refines heart and sense Lida! Joy of most intimate closeness, William! Stern der schönsten Höhe, William! Star of most beautiful height, Euch verdank’ ich, was ich bin. What I am, I owe to you. Tag’ und Jahre sind verschwunden, Days and years have disappeared, Und doch ruht auf jenen Stunden And yet upon those hours lies Meines Wertes Vollgewinn. The net profit of my worth. Curiously – though perhaps not surprisingly in this evocative structural parison with Shakespeare77 – the woman he mentions (‘Lida’) is the halfBritish Charlotte von Stein, the muse of Goethe’s mid-20s to mid-30s, and it would be tempting to think that Goethe is here merely transporting himself back in a nostalgic reverie to his early and mid-20s and that it is only to this era that his thoughts apply, but the later lines emphatically rebut

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this impression. From our perspective of much later literary history – for a rather greater span of years has now elapsed since Goethe’s death than stood between Shakespeare’s death and Goethe’s birth – and being primarily engaged, as we are here, to highlight Goethe’s relationships with and debt to Shakespeare, we might be inclined to suspect ourselves of an exaggeration of the intensity or importance of these relationships. But this poem would seem to confirm from the poet’s own lips the spirit and weight of what we have said here concerning Goethe the Shakespearean. Nor, on closer inspection, did Goethe’s fundamental veneration of Shakespeare change significantly: the discussion with Eckermann on 2 January 1824 represents an explanation of how it was possible for at least a German not to be overawed and inhibited from writing in the wake of such a breathtaking genius: ‘A dramatic talent’, Goethe continued, ‘if it was of any significance, could not but take notice of Shakespeare, indeed it could not but study him. If it studied him, however, it could not but realise that Shakespeare had already exhausted the entirety of human nature, in all directions, and unto all depths and heights, and that basically there was nothing left for it, the successor’s talent, to do. And whence should one have garnered the courage even so much as to take up the pen, once his serious and acknowledging soul were aware of such unfathomable and unattainable works of excellence, already done? . . . It is with Shakespeare as with the mountain ranges of Switzerland. Transplant Montblanc to the great plain of the Lüneberg Heath, and words will fail you for very astonishment at its magnitude. But visit it in its gigantic homeland, approach it via its great neighbours: the Jungfrau, the Finsteraarhorn, the Eiger, the Wetterhorn, the St Gotthard and Monte Rosa, and Montblanc will still remain a giant, yet it will no longer strike us with such astonishment. Incidentally, whoever finds it unbelievable,’ Goethe continued, ‘that a good deal of Shakespeare’s greatness is attributable to his great and vigorous era, should ask himself whether he considers such a breathtaking phenomenon possible in today’s England of 1824, in these bad days of divisive and criticising journals?’ (Eckermann, 2 January 1824) Again, even in the midst of garnering the second edition for the Journeyman’s Years, Goethe starts from the assumption of Shakespeare’s stupendous achievement, and only begins to trammel this impression – once again using his own version of Herder’s anthropological view – when it comes to

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considering how we should react to that phenomenon. Among Goethe’s very last words was also his last word on Shakespeare: Just let someone try, with human desire and human strength, to produce something that one could set alongside the creations that bear the name of Mozart, Raphael or Shakespeare. I well know that these are not the only ones and that in all areas of art innumerable excellent minds have been at work who have produced things every bit as good as those named just now. But if they were as great as those figures, then they exceeded the common run of human nature to that same extent, and were just as divinely gifted as them. (Eckermann, 2. 1. 24) This does make the remarks preserved in Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years seem a temporary aberration or whimsy, or merely an uncomfortable nuancing of what we should do (or not do) in response to such superordinate genius. With this in mind, one can interpret Goethe’s deliberate overlooking of Shakespeare’s specifically theatrical genius in a number of ways. Ermann attributes Goethe’s statically poetological valuation of Shakespeare primarily to the indelible nature of his early impressions,78 where the emotional effect on Goethe was the overriding factor, as we saw in the Shakespeare’s Day oration. Yet I would say that a number of reasons grew up around this: on the one hand, Goethe genuinely appreciated Shakespeare’s perceptiveness, and ever more as his own life wore on and his understanding of life grew, the spell that Shakespeare’s vision of life had on the receptive mind only increased; on the other hand, however, Goethe avoided putting himself too seriously in Shakespeare’s shadow and did so by means of just this focus on the effect that Shakespeare had on the individual’s mind, for which no actual theatre was necessary. In our examination of the many aspects of Goethe’s relationship to Shakespeare, perhaps we should pause to spare just a moment’s thought for Shakespeare’s debt to Goethe, for we must not imagine that Goethe’s occupation with Shakespeare was entirely a matter of one-way interest. The German excitement for and translation of his works – the work of Bodmer, Lessing, Wieland, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Tieck and Schlegel – was what largely motivated the French translation by Le Tourneur in 1776–82, the thirteen-play prose version of Michele Leoni of 1819–22 and Carlo Rusconi’s full prose version in 1838, and these became some of the main weapons in a literary debate in France and Italy in the decades following Napoleon’s downfall.79 The revolution in German literature which, for the French and Italians, began with Werther’s popularity and continued

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via the uptake of Goethe’s and Schiller’s plays, also largely inspired the rise of wider European interest in Shakespeare and conditioned the progress of poetic, dramatic and operatic Romanticism in those countries,80 though in Italy, for example, no actual play of Shakespeare’s would be performed in public until 1842,81 and the full blossom of public enthusiasm for Shakespeare would follow almost a century behind that in Germany. The details of these movements after Goethe’s death have been examined by other scholars, but the transmission and reception patterns of these middle decades of the nineteenth century show that Goethe and those around him had a decisive input in the process of Shakespeare’s rise on mainland Europe through the remainder of that century. In some small part at least, Goethe did indeed repay his debt to Shakespeare.

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Chapter 11

August Wilhelm Schlegel Christine Roger and Roger Paulin1

Section A

The Reception of Shakespeare in Germany 1682–1785

Introduction When Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) published his translation of Shakespeare’s plays (Zurich 1762–6)2 he gave his informed readers one of their fi rst opportunities to discover in depth a dramatist whom they had previously known mainly through indirect translations of English sources. French second-hand translations of English texts, far from being a mere curiosity in eighteenth-century Europe, were the rule rather than the exception. By the time the fi rst volume of Wieland’s translation was published, containing Alexander Pope’s Preface to his edition (1725), A Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear, there had been references to Shakespeare in German critical discussions for more than three-quarters of a century. Despite several mentions of Shakespeare, there is no convincing evidence that any writer or scholar, not even the major literary critics Johann Christoph Gottsched, the Leipzig professor and man of letters, or his Zurich counterparts Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger, had actually read a play by him before Caspar Wilhelm von Borcke’s version of Julius Caesar appeared in 1741. From the early 1740s on, his name passed more frequently into the stream of critical discourse. During the 1740s and 1750s, he figured repeatedly in the debates that were taking stock of the national cultural and literary achievement, past and present. The discussions confronted the question

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of whether German letters, compared with France and England, were ‘retarded’, and as a corollary sought for new poetic models and forms which could inspire a German literary renaissance and establish German as a major language of poetry and discourse. Shakespeare’s texts, however, presented through titles only or brief excerpts, remained largely unread until Wieland’s work appeared. The knowledge of his plays remained cursory. Shakespeare’s dramas had in fact been present in the German-speaking lands almost since his own lifetime. 3 Bastardized and truncated versions of Much Ado about Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet and of the best-known among them, Hamlet (as Der bestrafte Brudermord [Fratricide Revenged]), recognizable only in the barest outlines of plot, were among the plays that had been brought to the German-speaking lands and to the rest of the Continent from the late sixteenth century by the ‘Englische Komödianten’. Bands of strolling players, touring across the territories largely outside the official theatrical and literary circuits of the courts, Latin schools and universities, brought simplified versions of the plays to the Continent, staged in English using strong body language and spectacular effects to compensate for language barriers. They were later followed by translations, but at no stage did the English Comedians attribute their plays to any particular author. In the German-speaking lands Shakespeare long remained only a name found in lists of English dramatists (Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben Jonson etc.), compiled by scholars who relied on English sources and their translations without having read any of the original texts. It is generally assumed that the polymath Daniel Georg Morhof’s (1639–91) Unterricht von der Teutschen Sprache (1682) (Primer of the German Language) was the first reference.4 In the terms of the ‘Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’, the debate that dominated literary discourse in Europe during the late seventeenth century and for much of the eighteenth, Morhof sees Shakespeare (whom he had not read) as a ‘modern’. Short biographical accounts that were clearly derivative of English sources, articles in lexica and compendia make up the sparse references to Shakespeare up to about 1730.5 Even in 1740, a critic and translator such as Johann Jakob Bodmer in Zurich was not even sure of Shakespeare’s name (‘Sasper’).6 The English might be able to spell it, but the Italians (Bodmer’s source) might not. A crucial increase in Shakespeare’s exposure in Germany resulted not only from the reception of the supreme ‘modern’, Voltaire,7 but also of the London cultural journals of the early 1700s, the Tatler, the Spectator,

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the Guardian,8 in which Shakespeare’s work was often and sometimes elaborately discussed and of which French translations were beginning to appear from 1714 onwards. Indeed it is through French mediation, Voltaire’s and others’, that Shakespeare was initially to feature in German critical discourse. The first notable critic to square with Shakespeare in the public sphere was Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–66), who exercised an almost papal authority over aesthetic judgement in Germany, in his productions of live theatre (from 1730 inwards) and by the publication of his normative Critical Poetics (Critische Dichtkunst) in 1730. It was his wife Luise who set about translating the Spectator into German,9 resulting in the first preserved snippets of genuine Shakespeare translation. Gottsched’s own neoclassical views, indebted to seventeenth-century French dramatic theory and practice, led to his disparagement of the irregular composition of English playwrights, singling out Julius Caesar for particular censure, as formally chaotic and populated with both noble and base characters. This was of course drawing on a narrow factual base, Julius Caesar, his source for all his references to Shakespeare, being the first German translation of a complete Shakespeare play (1741).10 But this translation, little appreciated and soon forgotten, was an important step in Shakespearean reception. For Caspar Wilhelm von Borcke’s version of Julius Caesar (1741)11 had the honour of being the first translation (as opposed to an adaptation like Voltaire’s La Mort de César) of a Shakespeare play into any language. A homogenized version in rhymed alexandrines, the standard verse form of classical French tragedy, it brought the first real knowledge of a Shakespearean text to Germany and is thus an important testimony of the neoclassical tradition in Shakespeare translation. For Gottsched, it might involve no more than infringement of the rules of the stage and good sense. But it also elicited the first, tentative defence of Shakespeare. This came from within the Gottschedian circle itself, from the young Saxon critic and dramatist Johann Elias Schlegel (1718–49). An uncle of August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, and like them a poet, playwright and critic, he was for a time a follower of Gottsched’s. His Vergleichung Shakespears und Andreas Gryphs (Comparison of Shakespeare and Andreas Gryphius, 1741) (Blinn: 1982, 41–61) echoed the main problems common to eighteenth-century Shakespearean reception in England and on the Continent: the question of nature and decorum, reference to the authenticity of the characters and comments on Shakespeare’s ‘beauties’ and ‘faults’. Of course there was much that the Schlegel the neoclassic could not sanction. But by seeing in Shakespeare a master of the characterization of authentic human nature, Schlegel took

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an independent critical position of his own. His reference to Shakespeare as a ‘mind that grows spontaneously’ (Blinn, 1982, 61) in his invention of characters and the liveliness of his imagination, points forward to Edward Young’s famous definition of genius as something that ‘grows’ and is not made.12 With this we have one of the standard topoi of the century’s Shakespeare reception. For all this, in the twenty years between Borcke’s Cäsar and Wieland’s translation work (1762–6) there are only a few scattered records of any sustained critical interest in Shakespeare. An exception would be Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698–1783). Coming from an interest in Milton and Addison and Dante, no less a neoclassic than Gottsched, he nevertheless lighted on an insight that could further an understanding of Shakespeare. Objects that are not amenable to rational analysis, such as we find in Milton and by analogy in Shakespeare, may nevertheless be deemed ‘natural’; the products of fancy and imagination are part of ‘nature’ if we extend that term to accommodate them.13 Bodmer also seizes on Dryden’s and Addison’s phrase ‘fairy way of writing’,14 and through this opens up a part of Shakespeare’s world that appealed to the century’s weakness for the orient, the romance, the fairy tale, the frisson imparted by the supernatural or by popular superstition.15

Shakespeare in the Age of Enlightenment The translation of Voltaire’s chapters on Shakespeare and English tragedy and comedy from the Lettres sur les Anglais in the first number of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s and Christlob Mylius’s periodical Beyträge zur Historie und Aufnahme des Theaters (Towards a History and Reception of the Theatre, 1750),16 including Hamlet’s soliloquy, the mentions of Othello and Julius Caesar there, can be seen as a reminder of the importance of the French in mediating Shakespeare to Germany at the beginning of the 1750s. The decade brought to readers of German a deeper knowledge of Shakespeare’s texts. There was first Johann Daniel Titius’s periodical Neue Erweiterungen der Erkenntnis und des Vergnügens (1753). With passages lifted from Rowe’s life of Shakespeare (1709) and Pope’s preface (1725), mention of all of Shakespeare’s plays by title, it gave an account of his life and works, a sample of texts and a portrait of Hamlet.17 It was followed three years later in the same journal by scenes selected from Richard III,18 thirty pages which later formed part of the basis of Lessing’s discussion of that character.

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By any measure, the most spectacular and effective pro-Shakespearean manifesto is Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s (1729–81) famous seventeenth Literaturbrief in Briefe, die Neueste Litteratur betreffend (1759) (Blinn, 1982, 70–2). In a single issue of his periodical, Lessing mercilessly rejected Gottsched’s reforms of the theatre for their having introduced the French taste and style on stage. He criticized his (as Lessing saw it) unreflected francophilia, suggesting new canons and alternative models in an attempt to revivify and redefine German letters, not least the ‘grand, terrible and melancholic’ of the English (Blinn, 1982, 72 ). In histories of German literature, the polemical seventeenth Literaturbrief is often taken to be the origin of Shakespeare enthusiasm in Germany in that it silenced Gottsched’s voice. Lessing certainly was the most radical critic in the 1760s, but his views were not utterly new. Many of his statements could already be found in earlier essays by his fellow critics Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) and Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86). Lessing and Mendelssohn, in the process of reinterpreting Aristotelian terminology, are more interested in the psychological effect of Shakespeare on his audience, arresting characters and strong passions that move the heart, while Nicolai stresses the reality of his characters. But all three use Shakespeare mainly to challenge the conventions of neoclassical drama as interpreted by the French and their domination. Mendelssohn, in 1758, is also most interested in the naturalness of psychological motivation in Shakespeare’s characters, citing Hamlet and Othello as examples and devoting a detailed discussion to the yet largely unknown King Lear in the 123rd Literaturbrief.19 Significantly, except for King Lear, Lessing, Nicolai and Mendelssohn did not widen the canon of plays that had already been circulating in Germany since Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques, and it remained surprisingly small until the beginning of the 1760s: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth and Henry IV. Even after Shakespeare had become a valuable asset against French neoclassical drama, it would seem that he was still more of passing reference than widely known or read and that even among those who praised his greatness deeper insights into his drama were seldom to be found. The appearance of the second translation of a Shakespeare play demonstrated once more the limited interest in Shakespeare as late as the end of the 1750s: Romeo and Juliet, the first translation to be based on a contemporary acting text, David Garrick’s abridged and re-arranged version of the tragedy produced at Drury Lane in 1748. The author was the Swiss pastor Simon Grynäus (1725–99). Romeo und Juliet was published in Basle in 1758,

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as one of nine mainly Augustan neoclassical tragedies translated in a collection of plays entitled Neue Probstücke der Englischen Schaubühne (including plays by Young, Addison, Dryden, Lee, Otway, Congreve and Rowe).20 It was effectively the first theatrical text in German to use blank verse, and it started the fashion in the German-speaking lands for Shakespearean adaptations and imitations: Christian Felix Weisse’s Richard der Dritte (1758–9) and Romeo und Julie (1767) are examples. Grynäus’s Romeo and Juliet was received with indifference. With the Shakespeare canon at the beginning of the 1760s consisting almost entirely of the same few plays taken from English and French criticism of the early decades of the century, the times were hardly propitious for Christoph Martin Wieland’s laborious undertaking, his effort at translating the complete plays of Shakespeare. It was the first attempt to do so into any language, at a time which saw the revival of every single play in the Shakespeare canon in England. In France, Pierre Antoine de La Place’s (1707–93) much-acclaimed eight-volume collection of English theatre (Le Théâtre anglois, 1746–9) had contained but ten plays by Shakespeare, rendered in prose.21

Wieland’s Shakespeare Translation Viewed from the perspective of later in the eighteenth century and beyond, it is easy to see Wieland’s translation as merely one element in the inexorable surge of German and Continental interest in Shakespeare. But considering the literary situation of his day, it is evident that Wieland was the one who made Shakespeare accessible to a wider circle of German readers. Before 1762, Shakespeare was known, but only superficially. Nearly all German critics from Gottsched to Lessing had made use of him as an abstract idea, as a counterforce to the canons of French neoclassicism. Johann Elias Schlegel’s review of Borcke’s Cäsar in 1741 remained more than twenty years later the only detailed analysis of a Shakespeare play in German. Thus, Wieland deserves credit not only for offering the German public a more convenient way of reading the English poet but also the very first detailed account of his plays. It is instructive to view Wieland’s Shakespeare translation from the perspective of the period immediately preceding it, as well as to consider the way our understanding of Wieland’s achievement has been shaped through the readings of the generations following him. Later critical reactions saw little more than historical interest in Wieland’s translation and failed to

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appreciate its aesthetic qualities. With this went a condescension that the texts themselves did not justify.22 The most striking and disconcerting characteristic of Wieland’s Shakespeare is that the plays were rendered in prose. Wieland used this medium to represent all of Shakespeare’s multiple formal features, prose, blank verse and rhyme. Only A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the first play he translated, is in blank verse, but with very little of the rhyme so characteristic of that play. Wieland had been among the pioneers in introducing blank verse into the German drama (Lady Johanna Gray, 1758) and was thus clearly aware of Shakespeare’s formal qualities and their beauties. His decision to work in the medium of prose in twenty-one of the twenty-two plays that he translated was not forced on him, nor did he lack a facility with verse. It implies instead a feeling that the essential elements of Shakespeare’s plays could be reproduced in prose. There was as yet but scant notion of a fully integrated text, and Wieland set a new standard of fidelity. Given the proportions and the difficulties of Wieland’s task and his other simultaneous literary projects,23 it is little wonder Wieland sometimes felt as if he were performing the labours of Hercules.24 The only French translations of Shakespeare at the time, by Pierre Antoine de La Place, had used frequent summaries to fill in the plot between scenes translated in full, a widespread practice at the time. One of the most widely available versions of Shakespeare in England and in Germany was William Dodd’s (1729–77) collection of highlights, The Beauties of Shakespear (1752). Another model was an ‘analytic’ version, similar to Père Brumoy’s celebrated Théâtre des Grecs (1730). But Wieland chose none of these. Whatever his merits as a translator – and opinions here remain divided – Wieland did tackle plays that even the great Schlegel never attempted, like Othello or King Lear or a problematic comedy like Measure for Measure. His verse translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream puts the ‘fairy way of writing’ in the forefront and counters La Place’s and Lessing’s emphases on the terrible and monstrous in Shakespeare. True, he was not assisted by using Warburton’s faulty edition, but that was in itself a sign of the times.25 Goethe in 1813, some fi fty years later, describing the initial reception of Wieland’s Shakespeare,26 claims that Wieland’s use of prose rather than verse was effective in resolving intricate problems inherent in the very process of translation and that it enabled him to reach a learned readership. He implies that prose provided readers with a general understanding of the text and a common idiom. Goethe is praising Wieland here, but he uses much the same language as Wieland’s detractors and employs the

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essential categories applied to Wieland’s translation in the period after a prose Shakespeare had become obsolete. The translation was successful, Goethe argues, because it appealed not only to a specifically literary audience, but was generally accessible to most readers. It was written in the common language of the people rather than in the more esoteric language of poetry. In his remarks Goethe implicitly denies Wieland’s translation the status of ‘Poesie’. Wieland’s accomplishment, in Goethe’s view, is a matter of ‘Gehalt’ (‘substance’) versus mere ‘Inhalt’ (‘content’), where the former has more status than the latter. In the notes that he wrote for his West-östlicher Divan (published 1819), Goethe once again uses Wieland as an example of translation techniques and praises his accomplishment as being representative of his time, rather than of inherent aesthetic value.27 His success lies far more in making the new seem familiar and amenable, than in conveying the real essence of its foreignness. Unlike Goethe from his vantage point in 1813, Wieland’s contemporary critics, commenting on the translation as it was still in progress, found it problematic because of its ‘slavish’ adherence to the English original in matters of style. And indeed Wieland did shape his German diction to a surprising degree according to the English original.28 A large number of English words and phrases come into German through his translation, sometimes directly (‘Clown’, ‘Hobgoblin’, ‘Lullabei’), sometimes by giving a new meaning to an already existing word or stem (‘entweiben’, ‘luftig’), most often by forming new words from native words on the model of the English (‘blaßwangig’ for ‘pale-visaged’, ‘Werkeltagswelt’ for ‘working-day world’).

Shakespeare and the Sturm und Drang The last quarter of the eighteenth century inaugurated a new phase in Shakespeare reception and accelerated the shift from French to English models in the arts. The young writers of the so-called Sturm und Drang were particularly attracted to the drama, and would find its most characteristic expression in prose tragedies. Herder’s comment to Goethe ‘daß Euch Shakespeare ganz verdorben’ (‘Shakespeare has completely ruined you’), 29 referring to Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen) (1771, revised 1773), makes it clear that both he and Goethe shared the perception that Goethe’s drama was Shakespearean. Some of its qualities, particularly its many short scenes and rapid shifts of place and time, could have been taken directly from the English playwright. But most of the play’s elements are actually those

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of Wieland’s Shakespeare, including its essential form as a prose tragedy and above all its vigorous language. Much of what the young Goethe and others considered Shakespearean language is mediated through Wieland’s translation. His renderings of moments of great passion with their attendant irregular syntax and rhythms seem to have made a powerful impression, or perhaps provided the linguistic tools that the new generation most sought. Wieland’s contributions to the language of the Sturm und Drang went unappreciated. The initially warm reception discernible in Goethe’s description of his student days in Leipzig quickly cooled to outright hostility among writers of the younger generation. Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg (1737–1823) set the tone for their response in his essays on Shakespeare on the occasion of Wieland’s translation, in the Briefe über Merkwürdigkeiten der Litteratur (Letters on Curiosities of Literature) (1766–7) (Blinn: 1982, 75–91). In the 1760s and 1770s, Gerstenberg, Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder began to speak of translation in ways that would eventually provide the basis for Romantic translation theory. What Gerstenberg found so intolerable in Wieland’s translation was the way that Wieland distanced himself from Shakespeare, above all in the footnotes (ibid., 76). Gerstenberg is one of the first German critics to break with the long-standing English and Continental tradition of simultaneously praising Shakespeare and calling attention to his weaknesses. He insists that Shakespeare deserves absolute reverence and dismisses the neoclassical categories that question Shakespeare’s judgement. Gerstenberg recognizes a fundamental ambiguity in Wieland’s unfavourable criticism of many of the very features he is translating. His attack on Wieland, and the ill-will of the other young writers who would adopt his attitude, is motivated by impatience at Wieland’s censure of certain Shakespearean qualities in the footnotes. The notes seem out of touch with the post-Sturm und Drang understanding of Shakespeare. The great majority of the footnotes are purely explanatory, giving the reader historical background or helps with obscure phrases. Others explain wordplays that he confesses he is unable to reproduce. But the ones that are most memorable and that have had the greatest effect are those that show Wieland’s willingness to tamper with the text, that take issue with Shakespeare’s taste or explain why certain expressions could not be translated for reasons of decorum, to suggest that Shakespeare’s text can be divided into good and bad parts. Shakespeare’s unfortunate need to satisfy the world of his time is a frequent theme in the notes, used to defend Shakespeare’s honour against strict moral and aesthetic judgements. The

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division of Shakespeare into positives and negatives is a characteristic neoclassical approach to the poet. This would remind readers too much of Voltaire’s view of Shakespeare and its basis in the Shakespeare criticism of Dryden and Pope. Johann Gottfried Herder’s (1744–1803) essay Shakespear in his collection Von deutscher Art und Kunst (On German Character and Art, 1773) (Blinn, 1982, 104–19) is one of several at about the same time by writers of the young generation that rejected neoclassicism and the dominance of French taste. It comes two years after Goethe’s rhapsodic speech, composed to be read among friends at the celebration of Shakespeare’s name day, Zum Schäkespears-Tag (1771) (Blinn, 1982, 98–101), and precedes by a year Jakob Michael Lenz’s (1751–92) essay on Shakespeare, Anmerkungen übers Theater (Notes on the Theatre, 1774) (Blinn, 1982, 123–43). All three contributions seem to represent a new departure in German Shakespeare criticism, a different awareness of the English playwright, close to a religious conversion. They overturn the carefully balanced view discernable in Wieland’s notes, replacing it with unequivocal enthusiasm. A stress is now put on the ‘organic unity’ of a work of art, and the power and genius of the artist is an important object of attention. This represents a perceptible shift away from the traditional emphasis of the previous neoclassical generation on questions of taste, judgement, decorum and the moral value of literature. Herder’s 1773 essay stresses that Shakespeare’s plays are a whole, that Shakespeare is a ‘dramatic God’, a maker of worlds, but that he cannot be detached from the English culture which had formed him and which he then helped to form. It follows that Germany could not acquire a national literature like that of England or France merely by imitating English or French models: Germany had to identify and draw on its own resources, on its medieval past, its popular tales, its folk songs. It means that intellectuals had to renew shared traditions that had long been forgotten or neglected and had to restore ‘lost’ continuities in German history, culture and society. The Sturm und Drang view of Shakespeare could be summarized by saying that it did not invent new categories for understanding Shakespeare, at least not in its theoretical pronouncements, but that it assigned new evaluations to the categories that already existed, substituting positives where there had been negatives.

Eschenburg’s Translation Wieland’s translation was completed by Johann Joachim Eschenburg (1743–1820). It appeared between 1775 and 1777, with a supplement in

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1782.30 A professor at the Collegium Carolinum in Braunschweig, his major qualification for the task was a translation of Elizabeth Montagu’s monograph An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear (1769)31 and a nearly complete blank-verse rendition of King Richard III. He would later write the first book-length scholarly study of Shakespeare in German, the compendium Über W. Shakspeare (1787).32 Subsequent criticism of Eschenburg’s Shakespeare translation has suffered from his association with a scholarly approach, little appreciated at the time. Indeed his translation benefited from a new generation of English Shakespeare editions that had appeared in the few years since Wieland had fi nished his translation (Johnson, Capell, Steevens, Jennen). Eschenburg seems to have used Johnson’s 1765 edition and Johnson and Steeven’s 1773 edition. The result of Eschenburg’s attempt to reproduce the English text as closely as possible is visible in the way he adopted the Jacobean English system of numbering acts and scenes. His knowledge of English Shakespeare criticism shows up clearly in the footnotes and the critical apparatus, where he quoted from a large body of critical opinion, sometimes weighing one commentator’s view against another’s, sometimes suggesting his own interpretations. Except for the songs and for Richard III, Eschenburg’s Shakespeare is in prose. The absence of blank verse has been taken as a sign of Eschenburg’s stylistic identity with Wieland’s work and his separation from later translators. Shakespeare’s use of blank verse was nevertheless not a matter of indifference to Eschenburg, and his own use of prose was not self-evident and unreflective (he had translated the illustrative passages from Shakespeare in Elizabeth Montagu’s Shakespeare Essay into blank verse in 1771), and he says in the preface to his first edition of Shakespeare that he had already translated most of Richard III into blank verse before he received the commission to undertake the publication of the complete works. But prose was easier to use for such an enormous undertaking and Eschenburg was more concerned to produce a version that would read like German than to render slavishly every expression in the original. He did, however, set a standard for semantic accuracy and thoroughness that would influence all subsequent German translators of Shakespeare. One cannot place too high expectations of innovation on a translation that was a revision and a continuation of Wieland. But he nevertheless stands at the beginning of a long tradition within the German Shakespeare, not just in broad terms of accuracy but in individual formulations that no one has managed to do better. In the twenty years after Eschenburg’s complete edition only isolated translations and adaptations of individual plays appeared, many

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of them conceived for the theatre,33 until Schlegel’s version started coming out in 1797–1801. *

*

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Section B

August Wilhelm Schlegel and the Romantic Shakespeare34

It is necessary to relate August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) to this earlier corpus of Shakespearean reception. His uncle, Johann Elias, is part of it. Another uncle, Johann Heinrich, was an earlier practitioner in German of blank verse.35 His father, Johann Adolf, translated Batteux’s normative aesthetics from the French. There is in this family tradition something of the formidable erudition, the sense of order, the concern to expand the limits of existing knowledge and experience, which inform August Wilhelm’s career as translator, critic and interpreter. Through his father, he was able to correspond with Eschenburg and Herder, pioneers in the process of making a verse translation of Shakespeare available to the Germans.36 Schlegel may not seem a natural translator of Shakespeare or an interpreter of his work. He disliked the English, once expressing to his friend Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) the hope that Shakespeare was after all not ‘one of those frigid, stupid souls on that brutal island’.37 He regarded English as a hybrid language, lacking the Germanic purity of his own.38 His ideal of humanity, he later said, would be an amalgam of the best qualities of the Germans and the French.39 The English and their institutions, he believed, were motivated by profit and gain, not ideas and ideals.40 English literature after the Jacobeans was not worth studying.41 The list can be extended. But there was Shakespeare. When Schlegel in 1796 famously – or infamously – said that Shakespeare was ‘ganz unser’,42 completely ours, he was making the first important utterance of proprietary and annexational claims by the Germans, ones that the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries were only too happy to echo. And later generations of German Shakespeareans could point to a translation (Schlegel’s) which, while of course not as good as the original, was a work of art in its own right and part of a national heritage that now included Shakespeare. They could with some justification claim that they had better philological tools for teasing out the intricacies

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of the Shakespearean text than the English. They had the oldest and most active society devoted to Shakespeare (1864, and still going strong).43 This was a process that had set in before Schlegel stepped into prominence as a Shakespearean. Whereas Wieland and Eschenburg were deferential towards English Shakespeare editors and commentators and (in the case of Eschenburg) produced a kind of digest of their insights, the younger generation that included Herder showed growing impatience and exasperation with Augustan Shakespeare criticism. It might be better than the French, but it was too hedged around with qualifications, too circumspect, too unwilling to face the full blast of the Shakespearean text. Almost nothing of it was translated into German after William Richardson’s study of Shakespeare’s characters. Instead, it would be necessary, as Herder did, to relate Shakespeare to the largest of human issues, to historical processes on the widest of scales, the natural rise and fall occasioned by ‘forces’ in mankind’s development, to creative urges. The young Goethe’s development as a Shakespearean is informed by such thinking. Where they discuss character, they relate it to the whole structure of a play, Herder seeing the action of King Lear defined by ‘two old fathers’, not one (Blinn, 1982, 112), Goethe in the first draft of Wilhelm Meister referring his hero to Hamlet’s subjection to the powers of dynasty and succession.44 There is much that is Herderian in Schlegel’s critical language, not least the vocabulary of organic growth and processual development that so struck Coleridge when first reading him. The Romantic generation, to which Schlegel belonged together with his brother Friedrich and Ludwig Tieck, nevertheless had two parallel thrusts. It saw Shakespeare’s wholeness, the vast extent of his oeuvre (including the poetry), his place in wider historical and political developments, the phases of his development. But it was also concerned to define, through the closest of analysis, what constituted the work of art of which Shakespeare was the supreme practitioner and craftsman. The young Romantics might despise Johnson or Steevens (while using their editions), but they knew their Malone and the arguments there for readings and datings. This is Ludwig Tieck’s forte, Schlegel’s less. Where Tieck became more and more enmeshed in the minutiae of Shakespeare scholarship,45 declaring – as infamously as Schlegel’s pronouncement – that ‘no Englishman in print had ever understood him,’46 Schlegel never lost sight of the artistry that the text contained and its challenges for the translator. Nevertheless, Tieck’s essay on The Tempest of 1796 and Schlegel’s on Romeo and Juliet of 1797 are an early high point in Romantic Shakespeare appreciation, aware that the indefinables of artistry may

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indeed be defined through the analysis of ‘management’ (Tieck) and ‘wholeness’ (Schlegel). All this is by way of saying that Schlegel is part of a wider German Romantic reception of Shakespeare that involved all of its major figures and that saw Shakespeare influence the output of the principle dramatists of its generation and of that following (Kleist, Zacharias Werner, Grillparzer) and many minor ones as well. Schlegel’s name stands out for several reasons. His famous Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, delivered in Vienna in 1808 and published in 1809–11, were translated into the major European languages and passed on into other cultures notions of Shakespeare (and of much else), easily accommodated to national Romantic movements, be they French, Russian, Polish, Spanish or whatever. His two seminal essays from the 1790s do not form part of this ‘Romantic message to Europe’, as one critic has defined it,47 for the simple reason that they were not translated at the time.48 Coleridge’s debt to Schlegel, having read him of course in the original, is to his critical language in the Lectures rather that to his analysis of Shakespeare’s plays;49 indeed it is unlikely that he knew the earlier essays. It is through the Lectures that other nations learned that Schlegel was also a translator, not the other way round. For the Germans, however, the translation and the Lectures stand as equal beacons of their national achievement in matters Shakespearean. Yet they also have the effect of overshadowing other significant aspects of that achievement, others’ – often successful – attempts at translation, lectures by others involving Shakespeare (by Schlegel’s brother Friedrich, for instance, or by Adam Müller) and a considerable corpus of textual scholarship, most of it associated with the name of Ludwig Tieck and witness to a knowledge of Shakespeare that no lesser critic than Coleridge called ‘ASTONISHING’. 50 Schlegel’s limited interest in the practical matters of theatrical production meant that the adaptation of his translation for the German stage and its reception there (Goethe’s reworking of his Romeo and Juliet, for instance) were of little concern to him once his reputation as a critic was established. Schlegel’s activity as a Shakespeare critic and translator, while seeming to fall into neat categories or chronological segments, has no predictable trajectory. The translation of Shakespeare is only one part of his multifarious activity; there may be a link between his Shakespeare and his later Sanskrit scholarship, but it is not necessarily one of inner logic. But the translator did not go about his work in a haphazard fashion. He had already gained practical experience of translating before he enunciated his general principles on translation. His translations went through various drafts, most

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of them hidden from the general reader, before reaching published form. But once in the public domain, they were subject to the scrutiny of others and altered or ‘improved’ contrary to his wishes, indeed it is fair to say that he later effectively dropped Shakespeare and concentrated on other, perhaps more congenial, areas. Yet it is imperative that we see the critic and translator as one entity, the one activity as inseparable from the other. Older scholarship on German Romanticism and on Schlegel specifically tended to diminish his translation achievement by associating it with other writers, perceived to be greater than he, and by seeing Schlegel merely as an accessory to their greatness. Thus, Friedrich Gundolf’s once influential study, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (1911), was able to accommodate Schlegel in its account of the German-Shakespearean symbiosis by stating him to be the logical fulfilment of all that Goethe stood for.51 Critics in the nineteenth century, but by no means only then, disparaged Schlegel the translator by deeming him to be merely the ‘imitator’, the ‘empathizer’, the ‘receiver’, the ‘vessel’, as opposed to creative and original genius such as Goethe’s or Schiller’s.52 There is here a wish to play down the fact that Shakespeare, by 1864 (or whatever other convenient date), had effectively become the third German ‘classic’ alongside Goethe and Schiller, that foreign genius had had almost as great a role in the forging of a German national literature as native-grown products. There is an unwillingness here to acknowledge that the long eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth in Germany had seen translation, apart from its undeniable virtues as a vehicle for the dissemination of wisdom and beauty, as a means towards stimulating a poetic revival such as Spain or England had had in their respective Golden Ages. It is also fair to say that nearly all of the significant figures in German letters during that period had been travellers in those realms of gold. Indeed Goethe and Schiller themselves, in the 1790s decade that also saw the first volumes of Schlegel’s Shakespeare and his two critical essays, were aware of how foreign models, Greek, Roman, Italian, English, could enrich their own endeavours, and of how definitions of literature and its categories (Schiller’s ‘naïve’ and ‘sentimental,’ for instance) were informed by reference beyond the narrow confines of one’s own traditions, and how strivings towards an indigenous national achievement must always be measured against the great foreign exemplars. 53 Goethe’s notion of ‘Weltliteratur’, formulated in 1827, was already in effect acknowledged around 1790 (Wieland had actually used the word privately more than a generation before Goethe), 54 and it is there, spoken or tacit, in all that Schlegel writes about literature and poetry, occidental or oriental.

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Georg Forster, prefacing his own translation of Sir William Jones’s version of Kalidasa’s Shakuntalâ (1791), averred that the Germans’ role was to take the fragments of alien cultures and interpret them for others. 55 That might be taking the analogy too far, for such a view could be read as overlooking one of the conditions of alien reception: the need for an adequate style. For the debate about translation in the eighteenth century had been accompanied by another discussion: was German poetic expression capable of the task of rendering the great models of foreign literature? If one looked at translations earlier in the century, Bodmer’s of Milton or even Wieland’s of Shakespeare, one saw that prose, the medium of mere comprehension, was the norm in Germany (and in France). What is more, German poets (Johann Elias Schlegel among them) were finding it difficult to abandon the neoclassical alexandrine for the blank verse in which English drama, Shakespearean or even still Augustan, was largely cast. Christian Felix Weisse, with his adaptations of Romeo and Juliet and Richard III in the 1765s and 60s, was one who had made the transition. Wieland, a virtuosic versifier when the mood caught him, had done a very commendable verse rendition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while Eschenburg, in his turn, had produced a splendid blank-verse King Richard III. German poets did not find blank verse easy at first, and it is not until the 1780s, with Lessing’s Nathan, Goethe’s Iphigenie and Schiller’s Don Carlos, that we see this verse form being used creatively. But it is a very large step indeed from those verse dramas to a kind of style that would be adequate for Shakespeare, not to speak of their content. Stage adaptations of Shakespeare in the Sturm und Drang period had been in prose. For one thing, they were often based on Wieland; for another, they saw Shakespeare generally in terms of the rapid and fulsome speech and quick scene-change that prose best expresses.

Schlegel’s Beginnings56 Schlegel’s beginnings as a translator are rooted both in that movement and in the reaction against its limitations. These are summed up in the figure of Gottfried August Bürger (1747–94), Schlegel’s mentor while a student in Göttingen from 1786 to 1791. Bürger, a major poet in the popular ballad style of the Sturm und Drang, had in 1783 essayed a version of Macbeth.57 It is, however, worth remembering that in keeping with the wider notions then associated with translation, he had also tried his hand at Petrarch (in the sonnet form of the original), the Iliad (iambic) the late

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Latin Pervigilium Veneris and the Song of Songs. His Macbeth bore much of the stamp of the Sturm und Drang: it was in prose, it was shortened (and censored: no Porter, for instance), and Bürger the folk balladeer had with some gusto translated the witches into racy verse not unlike his own. This would certainly not pass muster under Schlegel’s later stringent criteria for the translator. Bürger, early aware of the young Schlegel’s talents (he had worked on the Vergil edition of the great Göttingen classicist Heyne but was also competent in English, French and Italian), took him in hand, gave him an outlet for his first poetic efforts and guided him towards the adequate style in Shakespeare translation that he himself had not found. The ‘young eagle’ (Bürger on Schlegel) and his mentor worked together on a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that would both outdo Wieland and also establish a critical basis for the future.58 It is hardly a collaboration; the young translator might learn a thing or two about versification from Bürger the sonneteer, but Bürger by and large gave the young man his head, or, more accurately, the young star pupil disregarded his teacher and set out patterns for the future: verse-by-verse rendition (where possible), elegance and concision of expression, poetry rendered by poetry. This version never saw the light of day in its time and was only to serve as the basis for the one published in 1797, which with Romeo and Juliet signalled his debut as a translator. But Schlegel, ever one to have more than one string to his bow, had also been encouraged by Bürger to translate Dante (part of the Purgatorio that appeared in 1791). There, the self-confident young poet-translator had laid down principles that were also to hold for Shakespeare: ‘as accurately as possible’, observing the constraints of the original terza rima and its peculiarities, a ‘poetical translation’ that reproduces the ‘character of the original’ (SW, 3: 227–30).

Schlegel’s Essays for Schiller’s Die Horen (1795–7) Yet Bürger would not suffice for an ambitious young man eager to make his mark in the world of criticism and letters. It is an irony that the man who was to give Schlegel the first really important outlet for his publications was Friedrich Schiller, the same who in a review of his works in 1791 had savaged Bürger’s reputation as a person and poet. But in 1794, when announcing his new periodical Die Horen (The Hours), Schiller was all conciliation, calling for men (and even women) of good will to contribute.59 His short-lived periodical, famous for its contributions by Goethe and by Schiller himself, is also notable for containing three essays by Schlegel and

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some of the first samples of his Shakespeare translation. It is also fair to say that Schlegel fulfilled in exemplary fashion the aspiration expressed in the announcement of Die Horen, to break down the partition between the aesthetic and the learned worlds, bring ‘learning into society’ and ‘taste into scholarship’ (Horen, 1795, 1: v). Here already were enunciated the principles that would make Schlegel’s later Vienna Lectures accessible both to a wider reading public and to the scholarly community. For Schiller, it was politic to have this formidably learned and technically brilliant young man on his side. While Schlegel in these Horen essays kept his more theoretical remarks separate from his actual translations, the two elements, as already said, belong together. It would not be enough to discuss the various kinds of translation (literal, empathetic etc.), as in the eighteenth century D’Alembert or Le Tourneur or Woodhouselee had done and Goethe, Schleiermacher and Humboldt were to do.60 It was necessary to go into the very nature of language itself. This Schlegel does in his Letters on Poetry, Metre and Language (Briefe über Poesie, Silbenmaß und Sprache) that appeared in Die Horen in 1795–6 (Horen, 1795, 11: 77–103; 1796, 1: 54–74, 2: 54–74; SW, 7: 98–154), not in the form of a learned treatise, but in a series of letters to a lady, thus making accessible the century’s discourses on language and poetry and their origins. His aim is to establish that rhythm, dance, metre belong to the innermost forms of human expression. As poetry has been from the beginnings of human life an essential means of articulating basic needs, urges and wishes, so rhythm, expressed in the form of metre, is part of the quintessence of language, not a mere incidental. This is the basic insight that will inform his thinking about translation, even if it does yet not form the thrust of the 1795–6 essay. Like Schlegel’s later, more technical, essays on metrics and scansion it forms part of a wider discussion of what language can do and what the translator must be aware of. In approaching Schlegel’s first essay devoted to Shakespeare, in which he also sets out the criteria for an adequate translation, we have to bear two factors in mind. First, translation into German had taken on a new dimension through the recent hexameter translations of Homer (1781, 1793) by Johann Heinrich Voss (1751–1826), that redoubtable figure who would later compete with Schlegel’s Shakespeare. It was a proof of what the German language could achieve, consigning to oblivion the various earlier renditions, French or English, which believed Homer could be contained in rhyming couplets (or Bürger’s iambs). Second, Schlegel made absolute claims for Shakespeare and translation that diminished the contribution

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made by Wieland and Eschenburg, both of whom were very much alive and one of whom (Eschenburg) was soon to reissue his prose translation (1798–1806).61 Behind the necessary deference to them, there was a clear challenge. Thus, Schlegel, using the protection and prestige that Die Horen afforded in its association with Goethe and Schiller, was informing the wider reading public that there might be something in the offing. The snippets from The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar that Schiller was only to glad to take for his periodical, would substantiate expectations, Schlegel using Die Horen for his own strategic purposes, as indeed Goethe and Schiller were using it for theirs.

The Wilhelm Meister Essay62 The title of the essay of 1796 (Horen, 1796, 4: 57–112; SW, 7: 24–70) Something on William Shakespeare on the Occasion of Wilhelm Meister (Etwas über William Shakespeare bei Gelegenheit Wilhelm Meisters) puts Goethe’s novel centre stage and thus invokes the great man in the ultimate processes of revelation. For on the second page of the essay, Schlegel states that, with the appearance of this novel (1795–6) and its association with Hamlet, Shakespeare has ‘risen from the dead and walks among the living’ (SW, 7: 24–5). This Shakespearean apotheosis, theophany, would not surprise anyone familiar with the junketings of 1769 or with Goethe’s and Lenz’s subsequent invocation of a Christ-like Shakespeare. Except that Goethe’s little essay of 1771 was still securely locked in his bottom drawer, not to emerge during his lifetime. If that were not enough, Schlegel on the fi rst page claims that the Hamlet sections of Wilhelm Meister ‘cannot be regarded as a mere episode’ (ibid., 24). This would raise in the reader expectations of an analysis of Goethe’s novel, but these hopes are not sustained. There is no awareness of the deep structure of paternity and inheritance that enables us today to relate the Hamlet sections to the main themes of the novel, nor would we expect these to be apparent in 1796. Rather it is perhaps little more than a rhetorical flourish, a gambit, to make us aware that Hamlet is a ‘Gedankenschauspiel’ (ibid., 31), a reflective play or a play about thoughts, where no solutions are offered, but where contradictory moral problems will be centred on one character, the unravelling of which will occupy the reader or spectator. Schlegel is here addressing a special kind of reader who will respond to a particular kind of criticism. The task of criticism is not merely to exercise

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moral judgement, as Samuel Johnson perceived it. A ‘more genuine kind of criticism’ will have as its ‘most laudable task’ to grasp the overall meaning that creative genius places in its works, often preserves in the very core of their arrangement, purely, completely, sharply and definitely, to give it meaning and thereby raise observers who are less independent but nevertheless receptive, to the right level for seeing things correctly. But only rarely has it achieved this. Why? Because contemplating the characteristics of others closely and directly as if it were a part of one’s own consciousness, is intimately related to the divine capacity for creation itself. (ibid., 25–6) This is aligning criticism with the processes of creation, going as far as to remove the barriers between the two spheres, making it possible for the critic to put himself inside his subject and redefining his task in those very terms. With this insight underlying all that follows, Schlegel essentially takes leave of Wilhelm Meister. But not quite. Wilhelm’s dilemma, whether to produce the uncut text of Hamlet (but in prose) or to bow to convention and shorten, becomes the lead-over to Schlegel’s real concern: how to present the Germans with the integrated work of art that the Shakespearean drama is, and in their own language. To do this, they will need to read his plays in a poetic translation. Seeing them on the stage is but an inadequate medium; indeed Schlegel here, perhaps covering himself for his later neglect of the ‘problem plays’ in his translation, says it is no loss if most of his dramatic oeuvre will never be performed in Germany. With this Schlegel comes to his short account of Shakespeare in Germany, not only Wieland and Eschenburg of course (but with faint praise), but also Lessing and above all Goethe. It is the renewal of their own dramatic literature, not so much translations, which has enabled the Germans to embrace Shakespeare with such fervour and empathy, no other foreign nation coming near them in their love and admiration for him. He is ‘COMPLETELY OURS’! (ibid.: 38) [my caps] His virtues are our virtues, his language related to ours. And German has the quality of flexibility and adaptability, which places a poetic translation within our grasp. So far, so good. But Schlegel still feels the need to counter the argument that the different styles and registers in Shakespeare need not be rendered in translation, that prose will still suffice. Perhaps he needed to scotch this notion once and for all. Perhaps his fellow countrymen needed convincing, for they might note that Shakespearean mixtures of style were absent from

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modern dramatic production: Lessing’s Emilia Galotti was all in prose but his Nathan der Weise all in blank verse, Schiller’s Die Räuber and Don Carlos similarly divided, or Goethe’s Egmont and Iphigenie, with only his recent Faust. Ein Fragment, if quite different from Shakespeare, demonstrating the commingling of the two media. Instead, he chooses an example from quite outside, Shakuntulâ, so recently translated by Sir William Jones. In the much earlier culture out of which this play arose, gradations in social status and office were defined by variations in language. But Shakespeare is much more complex: he apportions language according to situation, not merely to status, often to the same character. It is his innate sense of rightness, of what is appropriate, which guides him, which causes his characters to speak in verse or in prose accordingly, that explains his ‘Mannigfaltigkeit’ (ibid., 44), his endless variety (a term that will recur in his discussion of Romantic drama in 1808). This brings Schlegel to the more technical questions of translation (he later subtitles this concluding section ‘Über den dramatischen Dialog’). We have not only to come to terms with the multiformity of Shakespeare’s prose and verse, but with rhythmic irregularities within the verse itself, with rhymed verse, with unrhymed, with songs. To do this justice, the translator will be involved in the hardest of contests with his own language. On the other hand, he will have at his disposal ‘everything of which the German language is capable’ (‘alles in Deutschen Thunliche’, ibid., 62) and total freedom in marshalling it. Schlegel’s phrase is a statement of faith in his native language, its richness and its malleability. It expresses both challenge and accommodation, the search for aptness, but the courage to be free rather than stiff and literal. For example: German blank verse, with its regular stress, must adapt to Shakespeare’s freedoms; it must above all avoid monotony. Or: the unmanageable is better left out; compensations must be made for the sake of comprehensibility (play on words, for instance, should never be rendered literally). Where appropriate, German should unlock its resources to confer an archaic dignity. These are the translation principles on which Schlegel is not prepared to negotiate. They are uncompromising on basics and remind us that the going may be tough. They may place accuracy and poetic expression on the same footing, but they also allow for flexibility where the differences between the languages are irreconcilable. Above all, they confer on the translator a status above all drudgery and hackwork and make him, as Schlegel was proudly to say in 1826, a ‘herald of genius’, ‘a messenger from nation to nation’.63 Schlegel differs from contemporaries like Schleiermacher or Wilhelm von Humboldt, who stress the closed systems of each language and the ultimately insuperable

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difficulties of penetrating into an alien linguistic experience. Humboldt’s phrase, ‘Farbe der Fremdheit’ (‘tinge of alienness’),64 means that the foreign will always emerge through the translated text. Schlegel’s ‘alles im Deutschen Thunliche’ suggests that Shakespeare can be translated and can read like German. Their irreconcilable differences emerge already in 1796 when Humboldt writes to Schlegel about his scenes from Shakespeare in Die Horen and suggests that he is attempting to solve the insoluble.65 Schlegel perseveres nevertheless.

The Romeo and Juliet Essay In the 1796 volume of Die Horen Schlegel had published anonymously twelve pages of a ‘new metrical translation’ of Romeo and Juliet (Horen, 1796, 3: 92–104) and twenty-one from The Tempest (ibid., 6: 61–82), and it is to these that Humboldt is referring in his letter. He selects the scenes from Romeo and Juliet (2. 1: Romeo, Benvolio and Mercutio; 2. 1: Romeo and Juliet, the first balcony scene; 2. 2: Friar Laurence and Romeo) to demonstrate different registers and his the translator’s mastery of them. Readers of the third scene would note, for instance, that Schlegel was rendering Laurence’s and Romeo’s rhymed verse into German alexandrines that had little of the repetitiveness once associated with this metre (still in Johann Elias Schlegel). They would remark that wit, tenderness and reflection occur in quick succession and require differing reactions from the reader or spectator, and might wonder how these differing styles could be reconciled and integrated. Schlegel would answer these questions in the 1797 issue of Die Horen, in Über Shakespeares Romeo und Julia (Horen, 1797, 6: 18–41; SW, 7: 71–97), indeed by then his own full version of the play had appeared separately. Schlegel is using his critical essay to mediate between the needs of the text and its comprehension; he is seeking to make the work of art accessible through the analysis of its organism. Ludwig Tieck had attempted something similar in 1796 with the essay Über Shakespears Behandlung des Wunderbaren (How Shakespeare Employs the Wondrous) (Blinn: 1988, 69–90) that accompanied his prose translation of The Tempest. The German Romantics are moving away from the established patterns of English Shakespearean criticism, with its emphasis still on character, especially individual character, to explore general questions of artistic form and its wholeness. They are also reacting against the uncritical, sometimes dithyrambic outpourings of their own native Sturm und Drang reception of Shakespeare, in order to stress Shakespeare’s conscious artistry,

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his ‘intentionality’ (a word that Schlegel uses in his Vienna Lectures) (SW, 6: 185). Thus, Tieck seeks to demonstrate, to analyse, how Shakespeare makes deliberate use of the devices of magic and the numinous to create his own set of congruities, to bring about a world into which he leads us and elicits our surrender to it. These young Romantics may be privately aware of what they owe to older critics (Tieck to Elizabeth Montagu, for instance), but in public they are at pains to stress their differences from those obtuse ‘Englishmen in print’. Thus, Schlegel in his Romeo and Juliet essay excoriates Samuel Johnson: he sedulously overlooks Johnson’s point about ‘the airy sprightliness of juvenile elegance’ (Vickers, 5: 155) which is not far from his own formulations and plays down the sombre undertones that Johnson had detected (and also Tieck and Coleridge were to). Where Johnson gives individual insights through his commentary, Schlegel seeks ‘inner unity’ (SW, 7: 76), striving to look beyond the surface and the incidentals and to fathom the deep structures, the spiritual or intellectual (German ‘geistig’, ibid.) way of seeing that all art involves. This is what that ‘more genuine kind of criticism’ can achieve and this is why it is related to the very creative processes themselves. Amid all the contradictions and paradoxes of Shakespeare’s text, his exuberance and inventiveness, the limiting and containing forces as well, the critic seeks the ‘inner unity’. Schlegel in the German uses here ‘ergründen’ (ibid.), a word with mystical associations of sounding out God’s unknowability. This process can, however, involve close and technical analysis, establishing how Shakespeare unites formal devices with their emotional expression. And this will be the ‘hinge’, as he says, ‘on which everything turns’ (ibid., 77). Through it we can reconcile and solve the antitheses inherent in the play, its tendernesses and its frenzies; we can comprehend that these sets of antitheses are the very structural principle that holds everything together. Schlegel is insistent that Romeo and Juliet, despite the boldness of their speech, its often mannered ‘artificiality’, speak from out of the inner truth of their hearts, they express what for them is ‘nature’ and ‘purity’ (ibid., 80–1). The very intensity of their love absolves them from everyday concerns of life; their existence ‘creates itself’ (‘selbstschaffend’, ibid., 83). It lifts them above social and linguistic norms, so that the language that they speak does not belong to common nature; it transcends it and enters a realm of its own significance. What for others may be mere ‘conceit’ or invention is the expression of their very selves. Juliet’s character Schlegel sums up in terms of love and virtue, without the conflicts of duty and inclination that a modern heroine like Schiller’s

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must contend with. Romeo is full of noble feeling that takes him nevertheless through the whole gamut of the passions and their every gradation. Mercutio, not Romeo represents the violent extremes of mood, the play’s jagged edges, the forces that impel the play towards its tragic denouement. The overall antithetical structure, which Schlegel sees as the basis of the play, extends to both major and minor characters. This reading, concentrating as it does on the lyrical, gentle, magic moments of the play and investing them with a higher reality of their own, permits Schlegel to see in Romeo and Juliet a tragedy – which cannot of course be denied – but a tragedy softened and mitigated by the reconciliation of the families, by the ‘tragic decorum’ (ibid., 90) of the ending, where the tender love of the tragic pair may be said to live beyond their last moments. The play is a ‘wonder of harmony’, almost a Petrarchan antithesis, resolved of ‘sweet and painful, pure and fiery, tender and passionate’ (ibid., 97). Schlegel’s is a ‘close reading’, examining the language, the constellations of character, the shades of feeling that make up the work of art. Unlike Coleridge,66 he is less interested in the processes that bring this about, or its place in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, its status as an early work, for instance. He is not interested in Romeo’s development, but posits him as a character who is suddenly ‘there’, in the full flight of love; Coleridge examines the stages of Romeo’s love. Coleridge relates the play to wider moral issues; for Schlegel, it creates its own moral universe in its own terms. Schlegel’s discussion of the play in his Vienna Lectures differs very little from his analysis of 1797; indeed the ‘colours of the dawning’ that he sees radiating from it there are made more vivid by contrasting it with the ‘Rembrandt tones’ of Othello (SW, 6: 244).

Schlegel’s Shakespeare Translation67 By the time Schlegel’s essay on Romeo and Juliet appeared, the first volume of his own translations of Shakespeare had come out, with this play heading the series.68 The critic is seemingly asking his readers to verify for themselves the insights of the essay by examining the text in a version that sought to do justice to the styles and devices that he has analysed. Schlegel is writing for that ideal reader who needs no visual or aural promptings, just the text. His reader gets nothing else, no preface, no apparatus, no variants, no datings; he or she is not even told the original editions that form its base (they are in fact the Malone edition of 1786–90 and the Bell edition of Johnson and Steevens published in 1788).69 Schlegel is here following his

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predecessor Wieland, except that the older translator had supplied a footnote commentary, often uncomplimentary, on passages that eluded him or were considered unseemly. Eschenburg’s translation, by contrast, contained a scholarly apparatus, as Tieck’s was to do. Schlegel’s title, Shakspeare’s dramatische Werke, had echoes of both Wieland and Eschenburg, but he was making no concessions to the needs or requirements of producer or actor. Here was the full text, take it or leave it. (Goethe would need to cut a third of Schlegel’s Romeo and Juliet and rewrite much before he considered it suitable for the Weimar stage.)70 The only exception is a version of his Hamlet translation adapted for the great actor-producer August Wilhelm Iffland.71 Dramatische Werke would also mean that the poetry was excluded, and indeed Schlegel’s interest in it is marginal. Schlegel did not undertake his translation single-handed, but kept this fact quiet. There is ample evidence of the guiding hand of his wife Caroline, who, like other woman Shakespeareans in Germany, Luise Gottsched or Dorothea Tieck, is usually written out of the account. Indeed the end of their relationship is effectively the end of the translation enterprise. It is not clear whether Schlegel ever hoped to translate the whole of Shakespeare’s plays; of the seventeen titles he did complete, sixteen appeared between 1797 and 1801. Other projects and enterprises crowded in to push the Shakespeare translation aside, with only a straggler King Richard III later, in 1810. The Vienna Lectures delivered in 1808 encompass Shakespeare’s whole oeuvre, but not in the detail that the translator demands. His priorities, inasmuch as we may extrapolate them from what he did translate, suggest that he intended to give no more than a sample of Shakespeare’s range. Or, seen differently, they reflect many, but not all, of the eighteenth century’s existing preferences. Romeo and Juliet had been in the forefront of German Shakespeare reception since the 1760s; the two fairy plays, A Midsummer Nights’ Dream and The Tempest, had been Wieland’s favourites and were now Ludwig Tieck’s; Hamlet needed no introduction; Julius Caesar had been reviewed by his uncle Johann Elias as far back as 1741; The Merchant of Venice was much loved by theatre-goers, not always for laudable reasons;72 As You Like It and Twelfth Night were generally accessible; King Henry IV and King Richard III were well established on the German stage. Why not add the remaining Histories, all of which Schlegel translated (except King Henry VIII)? But where were Macbeth, King Lear and Othello, also now part of the standard dramatic repertoire? Why the concentration on the history plays and not on Coriolanus or Much Ado About Nothing, also part of the theatrical canon? It was clear from the start that Schlegel, for all that he set

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standards of translation never before attained, was not going to deliver the full Shakespeare and that others would need to be involved. Wieland and Eschenburg, for all their limitations and reservations, had not baulked at the dark and offensive in Shakespeare. Schlegel, as the Vienna Lectures later make clear, did not warm to all aspects of Shakespeare and shrank instinctively from the most unpleasant and disturbing. It explains why Goethe in 1800 commissioned Schiller to do a version of Macbeth for the Weimar stage.73 It might not conform to Schlegel’s stringent criteria (and Schlegel criticizes it in his Vienna Lectures, SW, 6: 253), but the contest of Schiller with Shakespeare is exciting. The first complete German verse translation of Shakespeare was in fact that by Johann Heinrich Voss and sons (1818–29),74 followed by several others.75 What remained of Schlegel’s Shakespeare was taken over by Ludwig Tieck; using Wolf von Baudissin and Dorothea Tieck as (anonymous) translators, he brought out the socalled ‘Schlegel-Tieck’ in 1825–33.76 While completing the series, it also ‘corrected’ and ‘improved’ Schlegel’s existing text and caused him much heartache. He, in turn, began to undo the ‘improvements’, but soon gave up the effort. None of the many versions of the ‘Schlegel-Tieck’ published subsequently and still in print today as the standard German Shakespeare, actually contains Schlegel’s full original text. It is that text alone that deserves to be associated with his name. Schlegel’s published text had its faults and errors; had Schlegel had the time and leisure, he might have done his own corrections. The versions of some of the plays evolved over time, not in a momentary burst of energy. We can trace, for instance, A Midsummer Night’s Dream over two drafts and a printed version; there are manuscript drafts for most of the other plays, which diverge from the published text, and for Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar and The Tempest we have the extracts in Die Horen which differ from the Dramatische Werke. But his interests turned elsewhere. As it is, we are able to trace the development of his own translation skills and their growth in sophistication. More importantly, we have versions of seventeen plays that, for better or for worse, must be regarded as definitive and which have influenced all subsequent translators. But we should not forget that Schlegel’s translation is also part of the continuum of the German Shakespeare. Without so much as an acknowledgement, he used to his advantage both Wieland and Eschenburg.77 Often he was unable to improve on his predecessors, at most putting their felicitous prose formulations into verse. And Eschenburg’s blank-verse King Richard III could stand on an equal footing with Schlegel’s. Schlegel’s translation cannot avoid being caught in the time frame of its conception. It is linguistically not dissimilar to Schiller, but its range of

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expression is of necessity wider. A ‘classic’ of German literary production, it represents the largest single corpus of dramatic verse in the language. As such, it both shares the limitations of ‘what the language is capable of’ and is a living proof of how that language can be extended in range and expression – because an alien text is forcing it to do so. Despite Schlegel’s reference to ‘doughty forebears’ (SW, 7: 63), German did not immediately have the lexis to accommodate Shakespeare’s range. Should one create it? Would the obscurity and difficulty of Shakespeare’s language not be compounded in the foreign medium? He is acutely aware of the limits fi xed on each language: when reviewing Voss’s Homer in 1796 (SW, 10: 150), he places comprehensibility at the head of his translation priorities. There was also the question of how much his readership could be expected to take when confronted with as full a Shakespeare text as the times would stand. There were the needs of the individual plays: the three extracts in Die Horen demonstrated that each play had its own ‘tone’. For instance, it is fair to say that Schlegel’s understanding of Petrarch and of the European baroque style helped him with puns and quibbles, especially in Romeo and Juliet, but he avoided Love’s Labour’s Lost. Above all, Schlegel was aware of the built-in inadequacies of such a translation enterprise and knew that sacrifices would have to be made. This would involve occasional censorings, adjustments and smoothings, accommodations and compensations. One critic speaks of him casting ‘over the plays a thin veil, which, transparent though it is, slightly dims the colours and blunts the contours’.78 But he does usually succeed in line-for-line translation, and he does respect the essential integrity of Shakespeare’s metaphorical structure. As a poet himself more competent and correct than gifted, the best metricist in an age given to fi xed metres, Schlegel nevertheless makes a good showing with the songs in Shakespeare and is aware of their musical qualities. Latinisms are, however, an insuperable problem, as ‘consummation’, ‘contumely’, ‘quietus’ demonstrate, to take the most famous of Shakespeare’s monologues. Yet if we stay with Hamlet, surely the ultimate test of the Shakespeare translator, we see Schlegel at his best and also perceive his limitations. Detractors of Schlegel usually point to his worst insult to the text: ‘Seyn oder Nichtseyn, das ist hier die Frage’ (‘To be, or not to be; that is the question’). The German infinitive is, however, monosyllabic, and thus unalterable, and will produce a regular verse in a way that Shakespeare’s is not. Adding an extra ‘hier’ that is not in the text balances the line. A prose version like Wieland’s prose could omit that extra syllable, but not a verse translation. ‘O schmölze doch dieß allzu feste Fleisch’ (‘O that this too too solid flesh would melt’) is another correct line that cannot capture the heavy repeated

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stress of the original, while introducing a heavy accentuation of its own, which is not Shakespeare’s. In fairness, Schlegel has recognized the problem and has made the only accommodation available to him. Sometimes the original has to be recast, as in Claudius’s ‘Words without thoughts never to heaven go’ (Schlegel: ‘Wort ohne Sinn kann nie zum Himmel dringen’): plural becomes singular (and ‘Sinn’ standing neatly for ‘Gedanken’); the stress falls on the final two-syllable verb and extends Shakespeare’s ‘go’. It is a felicitous turning. Often the unusual word in Shakespeare has to be rendered by a more common one in German, as the ‘bodkin’ becomes ‘Nadel’ or ‘bisson rheum’ ‘Thränengüsse’. Or a recurrent word in Shakespeare produces potential problems. ‘Conscience’ he can translate in all contexts as ‘Gewissen’, but ‘memory’ and ‘remembrance’, words used in several contexts by different characters in Hamlet, are rendered in the German by four distinct remembering words that give a different emphasis from the original. When Schlegel translates Claudius’s ‘O my offence is rank, it smells to heaven’ with ‘O meine That ist faul, sie stinkt zum Himmel,’ we note that German inflection forces him to opt for ‘deed’, a monosyllable, while ‘stinkt’ makes the original even more pungent. ‘What if this cursed hand/Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood?’ becomes ‘Wie? wäre diese Hand/Auch um und um in Bruderblut getaucht,’ where he sacrifices the ‘cursed’ but makes the following line even more graphic by having Claudius dip his hand time and again in his brother’s gore. For Hamlet’s ‘king of shreds and patches’ we have ‘Ein geflickter Lumpenkönig’: Schlegel can play on the double sense of the German (‘Lump’ / scoundrel, ‘Lumpen’ / rag) and add an association different from Shakespeare’s. Schlegel is often prudish, but he leaves nothing to the imagination when he renders the royal couple’s ‘honeying, and making love/Over the nasty stye’ as ‘buhlend und sich paarend über dem garst’gen Nest’. Yet these examples cannot blind us to the fact that there is nevertheless a homogeneity in Schlegel’s Shakespeare, a levelling of lexis, a regularity, an easing of obscurities alien to the original. By the same token, it is fair to say that it is a text that makes Shakespeare more accessible to the linguistic experience of modern German audiences or readers than is the case with their Anglo-Saxon counterparts and the original.

The Vienna Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1808) If Schlegel is known outside Germany, it is because of these Lectures and their Europe-wide reception. The German original first appeared between

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1809 and 1811 (in which version Coleridge read them),79 then came the French translation by Albertine Necker de Saussure (1813), the cousin of Madame de Staël, which so influenced Stendhal and Victor Hugo,80 followed by the English version by John Black (1815) (a pirated edition soon appeared in the United States).81 Schlegel could later claim that these lectures had spread his name and influence from ‘Cadiz to Edinburgh, Stockholm and St Petersburg’,82 and it was no exaggeration. It would be what one expected from a ‘citizen of the world’ (SW, 5: IX), as he describes himself in the preface. There are several reasons for this world-wide effect. For some readers, the Lectures would be the first accessible account of what the German Romantics had been saying about literature for at least ten years, but in much more esoteric contexts and for an initiated and conditioned readership. Very little of that material had been translated: in France and England one was still coming to terms with Goethe and Schiller, let alone with the younger generation. Madame de Staël’s famous De l’Allemagne, when it finally appeared in 1813, had more to say about the Weimar Classics than about Schlegel’s contemporaries. Coleridge, who, unlike most other readers, was actually familiar with the language of German idealism, seizes on the famous passage in the 25th Lecture because it sums up so neatly what Herder or Goethe or Schelling had been saying about the distinction between the ‘mechanical’ and the ‘organic’. This insight enables him to cast new light on Shakespeare, whereas the actual Shakespeare sections in Schlegel lack much of Coleridge’s energy and vibrancy and boldness of formulation. Some of Schlegel’s readers would of course receive their first general comprehensive introduction to Shakespeare through these lectures. They were not directed at experts – far from it – but contained nothing to affront a specialist. But those already familiar with Shakespeare, those who knew their Johnson and Steevens and Malone and Chalmers, for instance, would learn little of a factual nature that they had not already assimilated. German readers of Eschenburg’s Ueber W. Shakspeare would similarly not have their field of knowledge much extended. But the context is crucial. Placing Shakespeare in a continuum of world drama, in the way that it is done here, was something radically new. The framework might remind one of Herder’s great sweep from Sophocles to Shakespeare, but his approach had not been systematic, carrying his readers along in a tide of homiletic declamation. And his had been a voice crying in the European wilderness. Schlegel could build on the basic scheme. The excuses made for Shakespeare’s inadequate classical learning, his rudeness and rusticity, his failure to observe the rules and bienséances – the

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stock-in-trade of eighteenth-century Shakespeare reception – all this would melt away before the insight that Shakespeare was totally different from the Greeks and that any attempt to assimilate him to them was illusory. But it was not merely a question of confronting Greeks and Elizabethans, however revealing that might be. There were other national traditions of drama that had got in the way of our appreciation of either. And so, set between ancient drama and that of the Romantic moderns, Schlegel devotes eight lectures to the systematic demolition of French classical drama and demonstrates with merciless insistence that it lacks the very ‘organic’ qualities that are then expounded in the lectures following. Thus, the overall pattern of the Lectures emerges: Greek drama is autochthonous, national (Athenian), self-sufficient, inimitable, but it, too, is subject to patterns of rise and fall. Roman, Italian and French drama falls largely into the category of imitation. This leaves Shakespeare and Calderón to exemplify the Romantic drama, something essentially different from the Ancients but with its own equally valid congruities and sets of categories. What hitherto only fusty compendia had treated in isolation, Schlegel brings together, Shakespeare and Calderón, for instance. For these lectures are also important for their remarks about the Spanish dramatist. This is what the term ‘vermittelnde Kritik’, ‘mediating criticism’ (SW, 6: 159) stands for. It links, bridges, juxtaposes what until now had been divided. While Shakespeare and Calderón are in many ways irreconcilably different, especially in matters religious, their association with state and nation is instructive for the ideological structure underlying the Lectures. For Schlegel is telling his audience that the theatre is essential for the creation of a nation, central for a national culture and literature. This would modify the accepted wisdom, following Homer or Vergil, by which only the epic could express a nation’s spirit and character. English readers of the Romantic generation, for instance, could infer from Schlegel that it was Shakespeare whom they should be reading and studying, and not Milton. German readers, while noting that Schlegel’s final lecture is devoted to Goethe and Schiller, would learn that the spirit of Shakespeare (not, of course, his imitation) might yet bring about a German drama that was truly national and patriotic and historical. Coming but a few years after Schiller’s death and during Goethe’s active lifetime, here was a challenge to accepted verities. The historical context is also vital. The lectures are delivered in 1808 to the haute volée of Viennese society, with princes and countesses jostling for tickets.83 In political terms, the lectures fall between Austerlitz and Wagram, two humiliations inflicted on the Austrian Empire by Napoleon.

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The lament in the preface of 1809 over the disunity of the Germanspeaking peoples, linked only by language, the spirit and the intellect, the mentions of despotism, political catastrophe and usurpation in the section on Shakespeare’s Histories, could only be read as references to the ‘Zeitgeist’ and to the ultimate Usurper himself. That Schlegel was able to give these lectures in Vienna in the first place, he owed in no small measure to Madame de Staël, whom he had been accompanying since 1803, and she was well known as an opponent of Napoleon. The times in which the lectures were delivered and published, 1808–11, were, therefore, ones of turmoil but also of hope for a German nation not yet in being. Other German contemporaries, too, were seeking in the same year 1808 through lectures and speeches to express similar hopes, political and cultural, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Adam Müller. Müller even went as far as to see a pattern in Shakespeare’s Histories that might be a guide for the times: political upheaval and civil war followed by the establishment of a Henrician order.84 Schlegel is much less specific, but he notes that Shakespeare is the product of an age of national upsurge, of stirring times, Calderón similarly. By analogy, he hopes for a coincidence of German nation-building and national drama. Given that these aspirations were to be deceived by the post-1815 restorations and reactions in the German lands, readers of the lectures after that date would be aware of the irony of those remarks. The irony would be even greater when one reflected that Prince Metternich, the author of this repression, had actually attended Schlegel’s lectures. All this might suggest a spontaneous reaction to the times, the involvement of Shakespeare not just in an aesthetic context, as in Die Horen, but in the political arena and its cultural extension. But in fact the lectures also repeat and reformulate much that Schlegel had already said. The critical lexis that expressed notions of organic growth, analogies from plant life, the biological processes of seed and ripening, of self-creation, which introduce the whole series and are present in the famous 25th Lecture, are already a part of Schlegel’s vocabulary and would be familiar to readers of Herder and of Goethe. His insistence on a mythology for the modern drama, Shakespeare’s or Calderón’s, was part of a general Romantic insistence that myth and poetry sustain each other; it was the message that Schlegel had already propounded in an earlier set of lectures, given to a very different audience in Berlin in 1801–3, but largely unpublished. There, it had been his aim to reverse the Enlightenment’s notion of progress, the view that earlier historical periods were only of interest as primeval articulations of what a later age had brought to eloquent perfection. Instead, he had placed

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the emphasis on European Christian and medieval culture, on Christian legend and fable and deeds of chivalry. For German hearers of his Berlin lectures, Schlegel’s praise of the Nibelungenlied as their national epic would encapsulate both the ideological and the aesthetic side of his remarks. His aspirations for a German historical drama along Shakespearean lines had been preformulated in 1806 in a long programmatic letter to his protégé, the poet Friedrich von La Motte-Fouqué (SW, 8: 142–53). Readers of his Comparaison entre la Phèdre de Racine et celle d’Euripide (1807) would be familiar with his views on French drame classique. And those who remembered Die Horen would note that his remarks on Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet had hardly changed in the interim. But it was ‘vermittelnde Kritik’ that now brought together Ancient and Modern, Classical and Romantic, classified them, contrasted them, and presented each as equally valid representatives of their own age and culture. This was something that mere ‘philologische Kritik’ (SW, 6: 166) (a distinction based on the analogy of ‘mechanical’ versus ‘organic’) could not do. It would involve huge syntheses and sets of opposites, tempting in their absoluteness: whole versus mixed, finite versus processual, human nature here and now versus intimations and intuitions of a future state, plastic versus picturesque. Another famous passage from the 25th Lecture, while it might not apply in all its details to the realities of Shakespeare, is seductively formulaic: Ancient art and poetry strives for the strict severance of the disparate, the Romantic takes pleasure in indissoluble mixtures: all opposites, nature and art, poetry and prose, the grave and the gay, memory and intuition, the intellectual and the sensuous, the earthly and the divine, life and death, it stirs and dissolves into one solution. As the oldest lawgivers proclaimed their teachings and precepts in modulated harmonies, as Orpheus, the fabled tamer of the still wild human race, is praised in fable: in the same way the whole of ancient poetry and art is a rhythmic set of prescriptions, the harmonious proclamation of the eternal precepts of a world, finely ordered, that reflects the eternal archetypes of things. The Romantic, by contrast, is the expression of the mysteries of a chaos that is struggling to bring forth ever new and wondrous births, that is hidden under the order of nature, in its very womb: the life-giving spirit of primal life hovers here anew over the waters. The one is simpler, clearer and more akin to nature in the self-sufficient perfection of its single works; the other, despite its fragmentary appearance, is closer to the secret of the universe. (SW, 6: 161)

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Schlegel then characterizes Ancient drama in terms of sculpture, of ordered and matching groupings; Romantic he sees in terms of painting, with a reference beyond itself into mysteries not yet formulated. But how could one apply this to Shakespeare? One would need to supply this general definition and its elegant modulations with a historical context. This Schlegel does by declaring that only English and Spanish drama represent the true national and popular tradition of theatre. Turning to Shakespeare, he identifies his real place in time as an age where poetry, learning, chivalry, an aristocratic and courtly culture were fused, where political life was lived to the full but where art, too, found an adequate outlet. Like Raphael (a common Romantic bracketing), living in a poetic age, Shakespeare would use to his advantage all the progressive elements of his time. As a playwright reacting to his times, he knew the rules and conventions, but followed his own imagination and allowed himself to be guided solely by it. He had the instinctive sense of rightness that only genius imparts and in one respect had nothing to learn, but he also knew that art can be learned through practice and experience. With this, the stage is set for an account of Shakespeare himself. It is fair to say that Schlegel’s factual discussion hardly takes us beyond the conventions established by Augustan criticism: learning, anachronisms, knowledge of humanity, character, mixtures of styles and verse forms, versification, chronology. But unlike the Augustans, his tone is approving, not grudging. Much of Augustan disapproval (like Johnson’s) had of course been elicited by individual loci: Schlegel hardly discusses the text. In the discussion of the individual plays, his own preferences emerge. Thus, the order in which he treats the plays is in itself revealing. He is aware of the problems of chronology, but chooses to proceed by genres rather than by ‘periods’. Unlike Friedrich Schlegel or Tieck or Coleridge, he is not really interested in periodizations, ‘early’, ‘middle’ or ‘late’, involving speculations as they do. At most, he discusses the so-called suppositious plays and exercises much greater caution than his friend Ludwig Tieck. He has no problems with attributing Titus Andronicus to Shakespeare, for instance, and is able to accommodate it in his general categories of genius and experience. In dealing first with the Comedies, Schlegel knows that categorizations are always perilous, that the borders between the comic and the tragic in Shakespeare are always fluid. Yet the Comedies cohere as a group in that they have novellas as their basis; they are rooted in domestic or family life but involve romantic love stories; they are based on reality but soon veer off into the wondrous or the high-flown. Romeo and Juliet and Othello, although tragedies, also follow this pattern. We see here another

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aspect of Schlegel’s ‘vermittelnde Kritik’, this time linking the Italian prose novella and Shakespeare’s drama as exemplars of a ‘Romantic poetry’ that knows no national or generic boundaries. As said, Schlegel’s account of the Comedies (Lecture 28) is conventional and by and large limited to plot. In fairness, many of his hearers or readers would not have been familiar with the plays that lay outside of the theatrical canon. Two sections stand out for what they do or do not say: Measure for Measure (he does not mention that it is also set in Vienna, however fabled) is for Schlegel a ‘triumph of grace over punitive justice’ (ibid., 223), a far cry from Coleridge (he is in fact closer to Hazlitt). His discussion of The Merchant of Venice seeks on the one hand to free the play from the antiSemitic crudities to which Viennese audiences would be conditioned, but it fails to discern any genuine humanity in Shylock (here Hazlitt would differ). When treating the ‘fairy plays’ (Lecture 29), Schlegel has a clear preference for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where everything comes about as if inspired by the merest breath, the lightest shade or hue, the most delicate touch. Yet Schlegel rehearses the eighteenth-century insight of ‘waking dream’ first formulated by Kames and expressive of those states where consciousness and surrender to imagination are held in balance. Like Tieck, he sees the persuasive artistry of The Tempest, but differs from him (and Coleridge and Hazlitt) in his negative and dismissive view of Caliban. The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline receive relatively more attention than Schlegel’s contemporaries accord them: they contain a tragic potential, if one that Shakespeare finally averts, and they oscillate between the domestic and affairs of state. They provide a bridge to the section dealing with his favourite Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet. He has little to add to his remarks of 1797, and still unrepentantly finds in it harmony and unity, a ‘sigh’ (ibid., 243), where others see frenzied passion. He quite clearly prefers it to Othello, a play he contrasts to its disadvantage (and one which he did not translate). Hamlet of course receives a long section. It is now divorced from its former associations with Wilhelm Meister; his view of Hamlet’s character has changed since 1796, but does not of course distinguish between Goethe’s interpretation of Hamlet and Wilhelm’s or allude to the ironic distance between creator and hero. It is subsumed solely under ‘GedankenTrauerspiel’ (ibid., 247) (‘reflective tragedy’, compare Coleridge’s ‘ratiocinative’). What Wilhelm Meister failed to see (or what his creator withheld from him) were the prince’s weaknesses, his spite, his cruelty, his enjoyment of others’ sufferings, and these Schlegel now brings to the fore. If space is any indicator, Schlegel now seems to prefer Macbeth (Lecture 30) to Hamlet. If he disagrees with Goethe over the one, he has even less

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time for Schiller over the other. Macbeth may remind us of elements of Greek tragic fate, but Shakespeare is not bound by its conventions. It is, therefore, wrong to try to assimilate the play to Greek tragedy, as Schiller’s stage adaptation had done (the witches as Eumenides), thus excluding the ‘numinous shadow side of nature’ (ibid., 254) and the horror it engenders. Schlegel is willing to admit some admiration for Macbeth’s nobility of character, even in its perversion; where Hamlet does nothing, Macbeth at least acts, and Schlegel clearly is attracted to a tragedy that contains something of Nordic heroism, something that appeals to an admirer of the Nibelungenlied. King Lear, by contrast, elicits only pity, engendered by the deepest human misery, madness. Where for Macbeth words like ‘terror’ or ‘abhorrence’ were adequate, Lear calls for ‘Entsetzen’ (‘horror’, ibid., 261). And this superlative terror is all the more dreadful in that our moral sense revolts at seeing it not merely once, but twice. (Again, Herder had already seen the effect of this double plot.) One feels that Schlegel seizes on the parallel of Cordelia with Antigone to restore some sense of moral order to an action otherwise devoid of it. The Roman plays, which follow in Schlegel’s account, offer some relief. Yet Schlegel the classical scholar is clearly not happy with historical dramas that presuppose so much background knowledge (Antony and Cleopatra) or that present characters unhistorically (his uncle Johann Elias, too, had had trouble with Shakespeare’s Caesar) or that reach their climax too early. Schlegel is more at home in the simpler moral world of Timon or in the medieval Troy that he sees as the basis of Troilus and Cressida. Perhaps Schlegel’s noble and distinguished hearers grew restive in their chairs as they sat through by far the longest section of the lectures on Shakespeare, that devoted to the Histories (Lecture 31). But in a sense this was the climax, the peroration. Not only did he know these texts inside out from translating them. They represented for him two things that were a prerequisite for a national literature. They were a kind of heroic epic in dramatic form. Here Schlegel was echoing ideas current at the time, or soon to be current, on the multi-authored ‘songs’ of Homer (Friedrich August Wolf) or the heroic lays that must have predated Roman historiography (Barthold Heinrich Niebuhr). This was the English epic cycle, if one wished (by implication, one could forget Milton). The Histories were also a direct reaction to their own times, a mirror of princes, a source of political wisdom, and Schlegel’s use of the words ‘usurpation’, ‘tyranny’ (ibid., 273) and ‘despotism’ (277) leaves his audience in no doubt as to their specific and timely relevance. The analogy of Henry VIII’s settlement might suggest to some minds the Emperor Francis who had emerged from

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the loss of the Holy Roman Empire to rule over Austria. It is noticeable that while Schlegel devotes due space to Falstaff, his real hero is Henry V, his anti-hero Richard III, chivalric virtue versus the incarnation of evil. When Schlegel at the end of the whole series (Lecture 37) asks rhetorically which Romantic dramatic genre is most suited to the times in which his hearers live, he opts without hesitation for the historical drama. Where once Shakespeare used Angevins and Plantagenets to record the patterns of national history and its ascendance, the German dramatic writer should now turn to Arminius, to the Hohenstaufen, and not least to the house of Habsburg under whose aegis Schlegel’s lectures were taking place. It was not to be Schlegel’s most positive legacy, if indeed it was he who was responsible for the rash of historical dramas that nineteenth-century Germany was to see, and the first half of the twentieth. It could, however, be said that Schlegel is here giving articulation to aspirations that were already present, had seen a fulfilment, a climax even, in the dramas of Schiller’s maturity, and were able to draw on these potent sources, now enriched by the supernal influence of Shakespeare himself.

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Chapter 12

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Reginald Foakes

Samuel Taylor Coleridge changed fundamentally the ways in which Shakespeare came to be understood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and his influence has been pervasive. Rejecting eighteenth-century habits of judging plays by external rules and in terms of beauties or defects, he sought, by an act of sympathetic imagination, to enter into the spirit of each play he dealt with, to reveal its inner organizing principle, and to show how Shakespeare exercised artistry and judgement. Dismayed by the emphasis on spectacle in the theatres of his age he developed a mode of criticism on the basis of close analysis of the text and its imagery, and saw the plays as poetic dramas, in which a single line or a striking image might be of vital importance in contributing to the effect of the whole. He redefined the critical vocabulary he inherited from the eighteenth century, and introduced new terms, most notably in his application of what he called practical criticism and in his interest in psychology. His major writings on Shakespeare were delivered in the form of lectures, for which no systematic records remain, and which he never published, but his ideas can be recovered substantially from his own notes together with newspaper reports and notes taken at the lectures by friends and admirers. In analyses of Coleridge’s Shakespeare criticism little attention is given as a rule to his own connections with the stage, and even a commentator who does notice their importance relegates his remarks to an appendix (Badawi, 198– 203, but see also Jackson).1 The present essay seeks to show that Coleridge’s own efforts in writing plays for Drury Lane and his involvement with the stage prompted his incisive investigation of the nature of scenic and dramatic illusion which in turn had a vital influence on the development of his commentaries on Shakespeare. It is divided into seven sections, as follows: 1. On Coleridge’s dismay at the way Shakespeare’s plays were being staged at Drury Lane or Covent Garden, and how this led to his important

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redefinition of the concept of dramatic illusion, which is basic to his analysis of Shakespeare’s works. Coleridge’s criticism in its relation to the major eighteenth-century critics. On Coleridge’s knowledge of German and the impact in particular of A. W. Schlegel’s writings. Coleridge’s interest in psychology and his understanding of character. The impact of politics on Coleridge’s criticism, and in particular the importance of his reaction to Napoleon. An examination of Coleridge’s critical method. Coleridge’s development as a critic of Shakespeare.

The Stage and Dramatic Illusion Coleridge’s career as a literary critic effectively began when he accepted an invitation, probably through the agency of his old friend Humphry Davy, to give a course of lectures at the Royal Institution in 1808. He had spent two years in Malta, returned in August 1806, ‘shirtless and almost penniless’ (CL II. 1077), and was looking for a way to earn money. After the Royal Institution was founded in 1799, other Institutions sprang up in London, forming educational and cultural centres for middle-class people, especially non-conformists in religion who were denied entrance to the universities at Oxford and Cambridge (Manning, 232–7). These institutions provided libraries and reading rooms, and were intended, according to a pocket guide to London published in 1820, to promote ‘the general diffusion of science and literature by means of lectures and experiments’ (LL I. 8 and n.). The fame of Davy ensured that the Royal remained the most distinguished, and by 1806 three courses of lectures related to literature were offered there, one on ‘English Literature’ by the Rev. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, an antiquarian and bibliographer; one on ‘Dramatic Poetry’ by the Rev. William Crowe, known for his descriptive poem ‘Lewesdon Hill’ published in 1787; and one on ‘Belles Lettres’ by the Rev John Hewlett, who published sermons and biblical commentaries. Coleridge had been invited by Davy to lecture there in 1806 and 1807, but declined because of ill-health and the persuasion of Wordsworth and Robert Southey. When Coleridge finally did agree in 1808 to present a course on ‘The Principles of Poetry’, beginning with ‘the genius & writings of Shakespere’, William Crowe reverted to his 1804 topic, ‘Civil Architecture’.

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Unfortunately only fragmentary notes survive for the first four lectures, and no notes that can certainly be connected with eight more that were also devoted to Shakespeare, so that it is not easy to appreciate how extraordinary Coleridge’s scheme for lectures on the principles of poetry was. He may have exaggerated in claiming later that his views ‘appeared at that time startling Paradoxes’ (CL IV. 839), but his plan was for lectures of a more incisive and original kind than his audience may have expected, since he aimed to rebut critical concepts derived conventionally from eighteenth-century writers. His first was on taste and the idea of beauty. In the second he sought to ‘clear the ground for a just estimate of Shakespeare’ (LL I. 56) by giving a potted history of the development of drama since the time of the ancient Greeks. The third lecture led from a definition of poetry via the fancy and imagination to a detailed appreciation of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. The fourth extended Coleridge’s comments on Shakespeare as a poet in a discussion of some of his sonnets. His aim was to establish the idea of Shakespeare as a ‘great dramatic Poet’ (LL I. 82). He then seems to have gone on to the topic of dramatic illusion before launching into the commentary on Shakespeare’s plays that occupied the following eight lectures. In order to understand Coleridge’s method it is important to see it in relation to his passion for the stage, both as theatre-goer and as would-be dramatist, which began early and continued long (PW I. 1. clxviii–clxx). He had collaborated with Robert Southey in 1794 in writing The Fall of Robespierre, a short blank-verse tragedy in three acts, written for publication, not with the stage in mind. In 1797, prompted by a request from Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the principal proprietor of the Drury Lane theatre, Coleridge completed Osorio, a tragedy in the conventional mode of five acts in blank verse, intended for production there. Sheridan apparently retained the manuscript but did not put the play on. It was revised as Remorse, and eventually staged at Drury Lane in 1813 after Sheridan was no longer in control. There it ran successfully for twenty performances (PW III. 2. 1038–43). Coleridge went on to write Zapolya, ‘A Christmas Tale’, published 1817 as ‘in humble imitation of the Winter’s Tale of Shakespear’ (PW III. 2.1338). This romance, as altered by T. C. Dibdin, was staged at the Surrey Theatre in 1818. Coleridge translated Friedrich Schiller’s Die Piccolomini and Wallensteins Tod, possibly Goethe’s Faust (see Crick, 83–4), and produced many plans for other works for the stage. Although his one great success was with a tragedy, his ‘later dramatic projects were almost all comedies, farces, entertainments, musical dramas, or pantomimes’, projects for works of a popular kind that might make money (PW I. 1. clxix). At this time two theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, retained the royal patent awarded by Charles II that licensed them as the only London

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theatres permitted to stage plays. During Coleridge’s youth, however, some radical changes were taking place. As the population of London grew rapidly a number of other theatres were established in order to stage shows, spectacles, burlettas consisting of recitative and songs with musical accompaniment, and other forms of entertainment. The two patent theatres responded in two ways. In the first place, each was enlarged: Drury Lane was demolished in 1791 and replaced by a much larger theatre seating 3600, the largest in Europe (Survey of London, 52), while Covent Garden was refurbished in 1792 with an audience capacity increased from 2170 to more than 3000. In the second place, these theatres took advantage of new technology to offer much more in the way of spectacle, scenery and lighting effects. The result was a radical reconfiguration of the typical Georgian theatre. Until well on in the eighteenth century the major playhouses could be described as ‘a form [of theatre] with a deep forestage, flanked by entrance doors in the proscenium sides, and standing in front of an “inner” stage which was intended primarily as a scenic area, the acting area being confined to the forestage’ (Southern, 119). This arrangement can be seen in the well-known engraving of a riot that took place in Covent Garden theatre in 1763 during a performance of the opera Artaxerxes by Thomas Arne, about a Persian emperor of the 4th century BCE (Figure 10). The actors are shown on the forestage, two of them in exotic costumes. The proscenium arch is marked by incongruous cut-out female figures on either side. Behind it the wings representing columns and the backdrop at the rear

FIGURE 10

Stage and auditorium during the riots of 1763

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have nothing to do with the play, and simply provide a neutral neoclassical interior that suggests a room in a large modern house. Candelabra hang over the forestage to produce a constant light. This kind of stage was well served by the comedies of manners popular in the eighteenth century. The best seats were in the tiers of boxes at the sides of the forestage, and actors might address to them the many asides that often feature in such plays as Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777). During the later part of the century radical changes were introduced in lighting and in scenery. Chandeliers over the stage were discarded, and by the late 1770s the stage at Drury Lane was lit by lights on vertical metal strips, with shields that could be drawn round to suggest shade. Gauzes, transparencies and pivoting lights made possible ever more sophisticated changes and effects of lighting (Hogan, lxv–lxvii). At the same time the forestage retreated as stage action was moved behind the proscenium arch, where flat wings in fi xed grooves were replaced by movable scenery using ground-rows in separate pieces supported by braces. The side boxes were removed, and actors played to the audience in front of the stage (Figure 11). The theatres, partly driven by a need to compete with the

FIGURE 11

Auditorium in 1813

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shows at the popular stages, sought to create ever more naturalistic scenes. On February 17, 1776 a reporter in the Morning Chronicle praised Philip de Loutherbourg, a painter and inventor brought over from Paris to London by David Garrick in 1771, as ‘the first artist who showed our theatre directors that by a just disposition of light and shade the eye of the spectator might be so effectively deceived in a playhouse as to take the produce of art for real nature’ (Rosenfeld, 92). Theatre managers and dramatists were seeking to maximize scenic illusion and to the extent that they succeeded they transformed a theatre of the ear into a theatre of the eye. In the huge patent theatres of the 1790s acoustics were poor, and many in the audience had difficulty in hearing spoken dialogue. Plays became more dependent on spectacle, with dancing and singing between the acts (Hogan, lxxxviii). An increasing emphasis on realistic antiquarian detail was to be seen in the staging of plays on historical topics, like those by Shakespeare. For melodramas and Gothic plays, given an impetus by the great success of Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Castle Spectre at Drury Lane in 1797, elaborate landscapes and interiors were devised. Lewis’s play, set in a medieval world of castles and dungeons, was ‘classically Gothic: in a wild inhospitable setting a hidden event of past years exerts a fateful influence on the present, so allowing an evil force to hold sway over unprotected innocence’ (Donohue, 98–9); in other words, there is a noble hero, and a heroine threatened by an evil villain, whose character is complicated by remorse for what he has done. Sheridan, once noted for his comedies, had his greatest triumph later on with his historical melodrama Pizarro (1799), about the invasion by Spain of Peru when ruled by the Incas, which had elaborate scenery for the audience to enjoy. Scenes included pavilions and tents, trees on a rocky eminence, ‘A wild retreat among stupendous rocks’, a dungeon in a rock, a thick forest, ‘a dreadful storm’ with thunder and lightning, a ‘romantic recess among the rocks’ and, as a climax in Act 5, Scene 2, ‘an outpost of the Spanish camp, wild and rocky background. Torrent falling down a precipice, with bridge formed by a tree’. The Inca hero, Rolla, fleeing the Spanish soldiers, escapes under fi re across the tree with a babe in his arms, and tears the tree away from the bank opposite. Dialogue was hardly necessary here. The success of this play, which Coleridge, writing in December 1800, scornfully regarded as ‘a Pantomime’ (CL 1. 653), made him think that no serious tragedy would succeed ‘in the present size of the Theatres’. He nevertheless retained his ambition to write a tragedy, with Shakespeare as his model.

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Pizarro was based on a play by the German writer August von Kotzebue, whose impact on theatre in London was identified as mania by one anonymous critic (Sheridan, Works II. 636), who commented on the ‘noise, faintings, the startings and ravings’, as well as a ‘strong abhorrence of common sense’ in its victims. This author also complained that it ‘extinguished the light of morality’, so that ‘what had been formerly considered as crimes were metamorphosed into virtues, and religion and decency were thrown aside like old garments.’ This critique might have been written by Coleridge, who poured out his scorn for Kotzebue’s ‘pantomimic tragedies and weeping comedies’ (BL II. 185), associating them with Beaumont and Fletcher, in contrast to Shakespeare, who ‘never clothed vice in the garb of virtue’ (LL I. 520). He reserved his fullest attack on such plays for his extended criticism of Charles Maturin’s play Bertram, or The Castle of St. Aldobrand, staged to acclaim at Drury Lane in 1816. He was scornful of its absurdities of plot, disgusted by its lack of moral principles, as in its apparent sympathy for adultery, and mocked its stage effects, describing the heroine Imogine as she ‘wanders about in dark woods with cavern-rocks and precipices in the back-scene; and a number of mute dramatis personae move in and out continually, for whose presence there is at least this reason, that they afford something to be seen, by that very large part of a Drury-Lane audience who have small chance of hearing a word’ (BL II. 232). At the same time, Coleridge recognized that he would have to adapt to the conventions of the age if he was to get a tragedy of his own put on at Drury Lane. His play Remorse, staged in 1813, was, like Pizarro and Bertram set in the remote past, the age of Philip II of Spain, and a remote place, and it makes use of typical settings, a Spanish seashore, a ‘wild and mountainous country’, the inside of a cottage, a courtyard before a castle, a hall of armoury with an altar, the interior of a chapel, a dark cavern with moonlight and a dungeon. The action includes sorcery, a flash of fire and the appearance of a picture as if by magic. In its moral concern with guilt and remorse it differs from the works Coleridge attacked, but it conforms to the melodramatic style of the period, and Coleridge had great respect for the professionals who worked in the theatre, commenting as early as 1800 ‘That actors and managers are often wrong, is true; but still their Trade is their Trade, & the presumption is in favor of their being right’ (CL I. 636; compare PW III. 2.1038). Right, that is to say, in relation to the practical exigencies of the cavernous theatres of the age. Coleridge’s familiarity with the ways of these theatres showed him that he could not expect to see Shakespeare’s plays properly acted in them. He

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thought of the theatre in Shakespeare’s age as having a bare stage: ‘The Theatre itself had no artificial, extraneous inducements – few scenes, little music, & all that was to excite the sense in a high degree was wanting’ (LL I. 228). Shakespeare, Coleridge argued, appealed to the imagination, not the senses. The developments in stage technology during this period led to ever more ambitious attempts to achieve pictorial realism, not only in the rocks, caves and dungeons of Gothic drama, but also in the settings for historical plays such as Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII in 1811–12 at Drury Lane, for which John Philip Kemble employed the antiquarian scene-painter William Capon to create what seemed at the time authentic reproductions of early sixteenth-century palaces and streets. In a mock debate between himself as plaintiff and a ‘spokesman of the crowd’, Coleridge made the defendant praise the performers on the stage for their strength and ability to ‘take such prodigious leaps!!’ He goes on ‘And what is done on the stage is more striking even than what is acted. I once remember such a deafening explosion, that I could not hear a word of the play for half an act after it: and a little real gunpowder being set fire to at the same time, and smelt by the spectators, the naturalness of the scene is quite astonishing!’ (BL II. 189). Things done on stage, ‘prodigious leaps’, naturalistic effects, like the deafening explosion, summed up for Coleridge what he thought most appealed to the audiences at the theatres of his age. In his course of lectures in 1808 he led into his discussion of Shakespeare in Lecture 3 by considering some sonnets and especially Venus and Adonis. Most recent commentators on Shakespeare, such as Dr Johnson, had little or nothing to say about his early poems, and Coleridge was innovatory in beginning by drawing attention away from the drama and what was done on the stages at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, and emphasizing instead Shakespeare’s powers of mind and imagination. His fourth lecture was devoted to the topic of stage illusion, which he rightly thought very important, not least because of ‘practical Errors & false criticisms’ (LL I. 135). Dr Johnson, as Coleridge observed, had famously dismissed the matter in the Preface to his edition of Shakespeare (1765) by asserting that ‘the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players’ (SCH 5. 70). But this pronouncement was made before the enormous changes that radically affected the theatres in the decades after his Preface appeared in 1765. His reference to ‘spectators’ suggests that he was thinking in fact of scenic illusion, as later Charles Lamb did in his

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essay on ‘Imperfect Dramatic Illusion’, the title when first published in the London Magazine in 1825, later in the Last Essays of Elia (1833) called ‘Stage Illusion’, which begins confusingly by stating as if it were an obvious truth, ‘A play is said to be well or ill acted in proportion to the scenical illusion produced.’ Lamb also does not distinguish between these various kinds of illusion. The wider theoretical context of Coleridge’s thinking about illusion and its connection with poetic faith has been examined by Frederick Burwick, and my concern is more limited. Coleridge needed to investigate the nature of dramatic illusion in order to explain why the theatres he knew, with their devotion to scenic illusion, failed to stage Shakespeare’s plays adequately, and also in order to establish the special distinction of Shakespeare. His draft notes begin by considering the relation between stage scenery and painting as a fine art and establish a crucial distinction between a copy and an imitation. The aim of the stage was, he argued, that of ‘imitating Reality (Objects, Actions, or Passions) under a Semblance of Reality. Thus Claude imitates a Landscape at Sunset, but only as a Picture; while a Forest-scene is not presented to the Audience as a Picture, but as a Forest’ (LL I. 133). When we look at a work of art, ‘it is a condition of all genuine delight’ that we should not be deceived, whereas a scenic representation on the stage has as its very purpose ‘to produce as much Illusion as its nature permits’, even if ‘in the full sense of the word we are no more deceived by the one than the other’ (LL I. 133–4). Coleridge observed that small children may be deceived by stage scenery, but he did not assume, as did the reviewer of Philip de Loutherbourg’s show The Wonders of Derbyshire that the spectator could be ‘so effectually deceived in a playhouse as to take the produce of art for real nature’. The aim of stage effects was to represent rocks or woods or buildings as accurately as possible in the effort to deceive spectators by an illusion of reality that depended on how closely the originals were copied. By contrast, a painting of a scene by a great artist gives us pleasure as an imitation, as a picture, through our awareness of the difference between it and nature – in other words, by our consciousness of its artistry. This principle Coleridge extended to drama in his 1808 lectures on Shakespeare, and in every subsequent course: ‘The end of Dramatic Poetry is not to present a copy, but an imitation of real life. Copy is imperfect if the resemblance be not, in every circumstance, exact; but an imitation essentially implies some difference’ (LL I. 83, II. 277). For Coleridge this crucial distinction enabled him to explain the role of the imagination in understanding Shakespeare’s plays, and to reject the claims of

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eighteenth-century critics like Dr Johnson, who thought of Shakespeare as ‘the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life’ (SCH 5. 57). His experience of the theatre led Coleridge to dismiss this idea of Shakespeare as mirroring or copying life, and to associate him above all with the imagination. This is why he argued, according to the report by John Payne Collier of Lecture 3 in the 1811–12 series, as follows: It was natural that Shakespear should avail himself of all that imagination afforded. If he had lived in the present day & had seen one of his plays represented he would the first moment have felt the shifting of the scenes – Now, there is so much to please the senses in the performance & so much to offend them in the play, that he would have constructed them on a different model – ‘We are grateful’, said Coleridge, ‘that he did not – since there can be no comparative pleasure between having a great man in our closet & on the stage. All may be delighted that Shakespear did not anticipate, & write his plays with any conception of that strong excitement of the senses, that inward endeavour to make everything appear reality which is deemed excellent as to the effort of the present day. (LL I. 228–9) Shakespeare spoke not to the sense, as was now done, but to the mind, and in modern plays, in ‘the glare of the scenes, with every wished-for object industriously realized, the mind becomes bewildered in surrounding attractions; whereas Shakespear, in place of ranting, music and outward action, addresses us in words that enchain the mind, and carry on the attention from scene to scene’ (LL I. 564). Coleridge’s preference for Shakespeare in the ‘closet’ (LL I. 229), as read rather than as staged, is thus directly related to his own involvement with the stage, and the development in London of a theatre of the eye, of sensation and scenery. This preference led him to further refinements in his theory of dramatic illusion. The idea of scenic illusion, a deception of the eye, was inadequate to explain the workings of the imagination. For Coleridge all ‘Stage Presentations, are to produce a sort of temporary HalfFaith, which the spectator encourages in himself & supports by a voluntary contribution on his own part because he knows that it is at all times in his power to see the thing as it really is’ (LL I. 134). A crucial development in his conception of dramatic illusion lay in shifting the location of illusion from the stage (the illusion of a realistic location, or the illusion of the actor as being in a different world or historical period from the spectator)

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and conceiving it as an activity of the mind or imagination on the part of the reader or audience. Although Coleridge deplored the scenic displays and the stimulation of the senses at the playhouses, he nonetheless understood the power of the shifting scenes. He recognized that an adult may retain something of a child’s sensibility, so that through the strength of what he called ‘inward illusion’ he might make up imaginatively for the deficiencies of the stage. In the case of an adult, however, this ‘sort of negative Belief’ (LL I. 135) must be assisted by the will. The experience of watching or reading a play he contrasted with the experience of dreaming, when ‘Images and Thoughts possess a power in and of themselves’ (CL IV. 641): In sleep we pass at once by a sudden collapse into this suspension of Will and the Comparative power: whereas in an interesting Play, read or represented, we are brought to this point, as far as it is requisite or desirable gradually, by the Art of the Poet and the Actors, and with the consent and Aidance of our own will. We chuse to be deceived. (LL II. 266) In this phrase, ‘We chuse to be deceived’, Coleridge added the necessary qualification that helps to explain how dramatic illusion works in relation to Shakespeare’s plays, both as they are played on the stage and as read in the study. Whatever distracts or forces itself on the attention of theatregoers so as to prevent the mind from supporting a ‘willing Illusion’ is a defect. Implicitly Coleridge still has in mind the superiority of reading over performance in relation to Shakespeare, in whose plays (the remarks quoted were designed as an introduction to a lecture on The Tempest), the characters, unity of interest, appropriateness of style, together with the ‘charm of language and sentiment’ all contribute to and support the dramatic illusion. The idea that we may through an act of will voluntarily yield to a temporary illusion while knowing we can snap out of it at any moment was given its most brilliant formulation in chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria (1817), where Coleridge was writing with specific reference to the plan he and Wordsworth devised for Lyrical Ballads (1798), but there too he was thinking of Shakespeare when he wrote of their aim ‘as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’ (BL II. 6). The phrase ‘shadows of imagination’ echoes the words of Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, commenting on the performance of the actors in the play

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with the play, ‘The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them’ (5.1.211–12). The willed suspension of disbelief freed the imagination to work, and it was only through the imagination, Coleridge claimed, not in the conditions of theatrical performance at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, that Shakespeare’s plays could be fully appreciated.

Coleridge and Eighteenth-century Criticism If it was important for Coleridge to establish his theory of dramatic illusion in relation to the inadequacies of the treatment of Shakespeare in the theatres of his day, he felt it was also necessary to distance himself from the eighteenth-century critics who still had great influence, not least because the introductions to the editions by Nicholas Rowe (1709, 1714), Alexander Pope (1725), William Warburton (1747), Lewis Theobald (1733), Sir Thomas Hanmer (1743–44) and Dr Samuel Johnson (1765) continued to be treated as seminal and were reprinted in later major editions, such as the edition by Isaac Reed in 21 volumes, the so-called 1803 Variorum, used by Coleridge in his second course of lectures in 1811–12. It is not easy now to realize how influential these editors were as establishers of critical positions. Critical writings of the period that we now see as innovative, such as Maurice Morgann’s An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Falstaff (1777) or Walter Whiter’s A Specimen of a Commentary on Shakespeare (1794), attracted little attention when published and were not noticed by Coleridge (or Hazlitt or Keats). Coleridge could fairly assume that most of his audience at the Royal Institution in 1808, or at the London Philosophical Society’s meetings in 1811–12, were comfortable with a neoclassical perspective on Shakespeare, judging the plays by the unities and rules of drama and calling attention to beauties and defects. It was a mode of criticism that received its best and most influential formulation in the Preface by Dr Johnson to his edition of 1765. Johnson’s account of Shakespeare as a dramatist is haunted by the ideal of rules established ‘by the ancients’ in Greece and Rome. Shakespeare’s plays ‘are divided between serious and ludicrous characters’, in a ‘practice contrary to the rules of criticism’ (SCH 5. 61). He observes that the unities were either not known or not observed by Shakespeare, but such ‘violations of the rules’ suit Shakespeare’s genius, and ‘the greatest graces of a play, are to copy nature and instruct life’ (SCH 5. 71–2). Johnson thus found ways to excuse Shakespeare’s ignorance or inattention to the rules, his failure

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to be ‘a correct and regular writer’ like Joseph Addison. The work of such a writer he compares to a garden, but Shakespeare’s compositions are like a forest, ‘gratifying the mind with endless diversity’ (SCH 5. 76). However, Johnson’s enthusiasm for Shakespeare and strong appreciation of his plays are usually qualified by the critical methods he inherited. He assumes that Shakespeare grew up at a time when the stage was ‘in a state of the utmost rudeness’ (SCH 5. 78). He feels bound to consider the plays in relation to rules of drama and of criticism, and he follows the common practice of commenting on beauties and blemishes: ‘Shakespeare with his excellencies has likewise faults, and faults sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit’ (SCH 5. 65). Major faults include carelessness about morality and in pursuing a plot, neglecting the latter parts of his plays, and a style that is ‘ungrammatical, perplexed and obscure’ (SCH 5. 83). Johnson was not bound by the rules, and said, ‘there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature’ (SCH 5. 61), but he could serve for Coleridge as exemplifying a mode of criticism that generally applied external criteria to Shakespeare’s plays. Others besides Johnson were beginning to stress truth to nature as more important than subservience to rules in the representation of characters, and Coleridge probably knew the Elements of Criticism (1762) by Henry Home, Lord Kames, Thomas Whately’s Remarks on Some of the Characters of Shakespeare (written by 1770, not published until 1785), which in fact deals only with Richard III and Macbeth, and also William Richardson’s A Philosophical Analysis and Illustration of Some of Shakespeare’s Remarkable Characters (1774; second series 1784; additional essay on Falstaff, 1789; collected essays 1812). Whately insisted that ‘the distinction and preservation of character’ in Shakespeare’s plays was the topic most worthy of critical attention. Richardson offered a corrective to Johnson, who put at the top of the list of faults he found in Shakespeare his propensity for sacrificing ‘virtue to convenience’ so that he seemed ‘to write without any moral purpose’ (SCH 5. 65); Richardson by contrast treated Shakespeare’s characters as illustrating moral principles of conduct. In his lectures Coleridge pays little attention to individual predecessors other than Pope and Johnson, who served to typify most of what he was rejecting in eighteenth-century criticism. In spite of Johnson’s scepticism about the rules, he provided Coleridge with evidence that he remained in thrall to them. So Coleridge could ‘throw down the glove with a full challenge’ when lecturing on the opening scenes of Othello in 1819 (LL II. 316). He said, ‘Dr Johnson has remarked that little or nothing is wanting to render the Othello a regular Tragedy but to have opened the play with the arrival of Othello in Cyprus, and to have

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thrown the preceding Act into the form of narration’ (see SCH 5. 166), and Coleridge proceeded to attack the notion of regularity as exemplified in the application of external rules such as the three unities. For him rules were ‘means to ends’ and ‘the End must be determined and understood before it can be known what the rules are or ought to be.’ Coleridge began his first course of lectures on Shakespeare by redefining the critical vocabulary then current, terms such as taste and beauty, and promising to consider others, such as wit, fancy, imagination and sublimity in later lectures (LL I. 30). He aimed for an elucidation of critical principles based on a recognition of the essential qualities and determining characteristics of a poem or play. Rejecting a prescriptive and generalizing mode of criticism, he moved from the establishment of terms and principles to a descriptive and analytical practice attentive to both the details and the overall unity of each work. The fragmentary remains of his notes for the lectures of 1808 show that his effort from the beginning was to derive principles of judgement in criticism from the work under consideration, not from rules. The mainstream of eighteenth-century Shakespeare criticism had been anti-historical in its concern to generalize and apply those ‘rules of criticism’ referred to by Johnson. There had been a continuing debate about the extent of Shakespeare’s learning, which culminated in Richard Farmer’s Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare (1767), in which he dismissed the claim of various scholars who had found echoes of ancient Greek or Latin writers in the plays, and showed that these were ‘either borrowed from contemporary translations or illustrated by contemporary usage’ (Nichol Smith, xxvi). Farmer concluded that Shakespeare’s ‘Studies were most demonstratively confined to Nature and his own Language.’ Farmer seems to have meant to praise Shakespeare, but his conclusions, which Coleridge knew, helped to confirm the idea of the dramatist as a child of nature; as Johnson put it, ‘The English Nation, in the time of Shakespeare, was yet struggling to emerge from barbarity’ (SCH 5. 74), and ‘the greater part of his excellence was the product of his own genius.’ Although Johnson acknowledged the emergence of humanist learning in the period, he said it was confined to scholars or people of high rank. Coleridge based his criticism on an understanding of the age of Elizabeth as intellectually favourable to the ‘full development of Shakespeare’ (LL I. 287–8), as an age that produced a ‘great activity of mind’ and ‘a galaxy of great men’, such as Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser. In his lectures Coleridge cited or referred also to others such as Richard Hooker, Sir Philip Sidney and Sir John Davies, so reclaiming for Shakespeare a context of cultivation and knowledge. In his first course of lectures in 1808 he sought to establish that

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already in his poems Shakespeare ‘previously to his Drama – gave proof of a most profound, energetic, & philosophical mind’ (LL I. 82), so claiming a new and elevated status for him from the beginning of his career. Coleridge was anxious to counter another assumption that was taken for granted in much earlier criticism of Shakespeare, namely that he was a ‘a sort of Lusus Naturae, a delightful monster – wild indeed, without taste or Judgement . . . In nine places out of ten in which I find his awful name mentioned, it is with some epithet of wild, irregular, pure child of nature, &c &c &c –’ (LL I. 79). This comment is from his notes for Lecture 4 in his first series in 1808, and Coleridge often returned to this topic in later series. Shakespeare was commonly assumed to be ‘a child of nature’, composing his plays by instinct or intuition, uneducated, growing up in Stratford-upon-Avon, where, as David Garrick put it in his Ode upon Dedicating a Building and Erecting a Statue, to Shakespeare (1769), ‘Nature led him by the hand, / Instructed him in all she knew’ (SCH 5. 345). Even Johnson, who commented on Shakespeare’s reading, lent authority to this image of Shakespeare by describing him as writing in a country ‘unenlightened by learning’, for a public audience that was ‘gross and dark’, and comparing Shakespeare’s plays to a wild forest of trees ‘interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles’ (SCH 5. 74). Johnson meant to praise Shakespeare as ‘gratifying the mind with endless diversity’, but at the same time he confirmed an idea of the dramatist as writing works ‘clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities’ (SCH 5. 76). It was of vital concern to Coleridge to reject such accounts of Shakespeare because he sought to demonstrate the poet’s artistry from the very beginning of his career. Hence he emphasized Shakespeare’s judgement in constructing the plays, ‘The judgement with which Shakespear always in his first scenes prepares, & yet how naturally and & with what a concealment of art, for the Catastrophe – how he presents the germ of all the after events’ (LL I. 559). Where Johnson saw a kind of jungle, Coleridge likened a play to a tree, stressing the distinctive form each tree possesses. He may well have had Johnson’s image in mind when seeking to show in 1811 how all the parts of a play, in this case The Tempest, contribute to an overall unity, illustrating his argument by ‘referring to the growth of Trees, which from the peculiar circumstances of soil air or position differed in shape even from trees of the same kind but every man was able to decide at first sight which was an ash or a poplar’ (LL I. 358). In 1818 he claimed, that it ‘has been and it still remains my Object to prove that at all points from the most important to the most minute, the Judgement of Shakespear is commensurate with his Genius’ (LL II. 263). Coleridge’s insistence on Shakespeare’s

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conscious artistry rejects formulations such as Johnson’s, that Shakespeare’s ‘drama is the mirrour of life’ (SCH 5. 59–60), a mere reflection, and relates to his conception of art as an imitation not a copy, marked by difference from nature, not sameness. These general principles inform Coleridge’s consideration of Shakespeare’s poems and plays. He substituted for the image of Shakespeare as taught by nature in a country emerging from an age of barbarism an idea of ‘those truly heroic times in body & in soul the days of Elizabeth’ (LL I. 354), an age that could nurture in Shakespeare a profoundly philosophic mind. Coleridge also rejected the tradition of treating Shakespeare’s plays in parts rather than as wholes. Johnson was the best of a series of editors and critics who regarded Shakespeare’s plays in terms of beauties and faults, parts rather than as wholes, and summed up his view by saying, ‘He has scenes of undoubted and perpetual excellence, but perhaps not one play, which, if it were now exhibited as the work of a contemporary writer, would be heard to the conclusion’ (SCH 5. 82). Coleridge changed the course of criticism by his emphasis on the artistry of each play considered as a whole. Hence his concern from the beginning with dramatic illusion and the role of the imagination in enabling us to appreciate the unity of Shakespeare’s plays, and hence, too, the need he felt to attack the basic ideas of preceding critics, and his anxiety to establish general criteria and new definitions of critical terms in commencing his lectures on Shakespeare’s poems and plays.

Coleridge, Germany and Schlegel In September 1798, a few days before Lyrical Ballads was published, Coleridge, with his friend John Chester, a young farmer who aimed to study agriculture, set off with William and Dorothy Wordsworth to spend three months in Germany. The Wordsworths soon removed to Goslar to be on their own, and Coleridge in fact spent ten months partly in Ratzeburg and partly in Göttingen. He had begun to study German in 1796 (CL I. 209), and he now learned to speak German, studied with German professors and read voraciously, with a special enthusiasm for the plays and dramatic criticism of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and did not set off on his return journey to England until June 24, 1799. He had attended lectures on ‘Physiology, Anatomy, & Natural History’ (CL I. 518–19), collected materials for a life of Lessing and had in mind writing a major work on metaphysics. He returned to England with an enthusiasm for German philosophy

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and thought as represented notably in the works of Kant and Schiller, two parts of whose massive trilogy Wallenstein he translated (CN 1. 451–4). He continued to extend his reading in German criticism and philosophy in later years. In BL, chapter 9, he writes of his obligations to the thinking of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich W. J. Schelling and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and he also knew works by Johann Gottfried Herder and Jean Paul Richter. During the series of lectures Coleridge gave on Shakespeare in 1811–12 he also encountered and devoured the Shakespeare criticism of August Wilhelm Schlegel. In the mainstream of eighteenth-century Shakespeare criticism in Britain there is no reference to German thought. Coleridge’s study of German criticism and philosophy helped to provide a new framework and theoretical basis for his courses of lectures. The courses on literature or belles-lettres presented at the Royal Institution before 1808 appear to have been devoted to historical surveys or genial compliment, so that Coleridge’s proposal for a course on ‘the Principles of Poetry’ which would contain ‘the whole result of many years’ continued reflection on the subjects of Taste, Imagination, Fancy, Passion, the sources of our pleasures in the fine Arts . . . & the connection of such pleasures with moral excellence’ (LL I. 12) was wildly ambitious and radically innovatory. He was intending to reconsider the terms used in the accepted vocabulary of criticism in relation to literature and the fine arts, and to establish a basis for making a new range of distinctions and discriminations. Coleridge’s 1808 course was postponed when Davy fell ill, interrupted later when Coleridge himself became sick, and was terminated early because of illness. The surviving fragmentary notes all relate to the first four lectures on the history of drama, Shakespeare’s poems and dramatic illusion. Coleridge began by discussing the meaning of ‘taste’ in an effort to distinguish its use in relation to the arts from its more common senses. He then related taste to an idea of beauty defined as ‘a pleasurable sense of the Many (by Many I do not mean comparative multitude, but only as a generic word opposed to absolute unity – ) reduced to unity by the correspondence of all the component parts to each other & the reference of all to one central Point’ (LL I. 35). He thus brought together pleasure and judgement, for, as he argued, the purpose of the arts is to ‘gratify the Taste’ by uniting ‘a sense of immediate pleasure in ourselves with the perception of external arrangement’ (LL I. 37). Taste in eighteenth-century criticism had been commonly linked to judgement, while genius had been related to pleasure; hence, Shakespeare might be acclaimed as a genius, and at the same time accused of lacking judgement. As Lewis Theobald put it, ‘The

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Genius, that gives us the greatest Pleasure, sometimes stands in Need of our Indulgence. Whenever this happens with regard to Shakespeare, I would willingly impute it to a Vice of his Times’ (SCH 2. 477). By sharpening his definition of these terms Coleridge was demonstrating that Shakespeare’s artistry combined both genius and judgement. In considering Venus and Adonis in Lecture 3 he began by discussing the first stanza in order to explain how Shakespeare ‘in six simple lines puts the reader in possession of the whole argument of the Poem’ (LL I. 66). Here, as frequently later on, his effort was to show how the beginnings of Shakespeare’s works contain the germ of the whole, and to demonstrate that by his imagination he was able to combine ‘many circumstances into one moment of thought’ so as to produce artistic unity (LL I. 68). Almost no records remain of the ten or more lectures on Shakespeare’s plays Coleridge went on to deliver in 1808, but substantial accounts in notes taken at the lectures by J. Tomalin and John Payne Collier as well as some of Coleridge’s own preparations and newspaper reports survive of ten lectures in the similar series on ‘Shakespear and Milton in Illustration of the Principles of Poetry’ he gave at the London Philosophical Society in 1811–12. As in 1808, he began by defining what he meant by terms like poetry and taste before proceeding in Lecture 4 to a close analysis of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Critics had neglected the early narrative poems, which for Coleridge established the basic premise of his criticism, namely, that Shakespeare was above all a great poet, and his plays invited attention primarily to their language. The fuller records of 1811 provide a better explanation of Coleridge’s claim that the poems reveal ‘the great Instinct which impelled the Poet to the Drama’, so that ‘His Venus and Adonis seem at once the characters themselves, and the whole representation of those Characters by the most consummate Actors. You seem to be told nothing; but to see & hear every thing’ (LL I. 242). The poems also exemplified ‘That gift of true Imagination, that capability of reducing a multitude into unity of effect’ (LL I. 249). In developing further the ideas sketched in the 1808 lectures, Coleridge impressed Henry Crabb Robinson and a German friend he took to hear Lecture 4, who was ‘delighted to find the logic & rhetoric of his Country delivered in a foreign language. There is no doubt that Coleridge’s mind is much more German than English’ (LL I. 259). Coleridge digressed a good deal in these lectures from Shakespeare’s plays, and by Lecture 9 had discussed in any depth only three plays, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Romeo and Juliet, and The Tempest. Part of the problem was, as one reviewer, James Amphlett, noted, that his aim, to illustrate general

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principles, ‘beats him out of that which is simple into that which is complex; from individualities to generalities’ (LL I. 321). It seems likely, too, that Coleridge had not worked out in advance the development of his ideas. His account of Romeo and Juliet in Lecture 7, which focuses mainly on the characters in the play, differs greatly from A. W. Schlegel’s essay, published in Die Horen in 1797 and reprinted in Charakteristiken und Kritiken (1801), in which he claimed that the play had an ‘inner unity’ (‘innere Einheit’), the result of ‘choosing and ordering’ (‘Wählen und Anordnen’) (Horen, 23–4), or Schlegel’s Lectures which declared it perfect, where ‘nothing could be taken away, nothing added, without mutilating and disfiguring the perfect work’ (‘nichts hinwegnehmen, nichts hinzufügen, nichts anders ordnen könne, ohne das vollendete Werk zu verstümmeln und zu entstellen’: Schlegel II, ii, 54; Black II. 127; LL II. 279). Coleridge, by contrast, described the play as an early work in which the parts were ‘less happily combined’ and not united in harmony, a work composed before Shakespeare’s judgement and taste were developed (LL I. 303). But then, shortly before he gave Lecture 9, which was on The Tempest, Coleridge said he was presented by a German named Bernard Krusve with a copy of Schlegel’s Über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur (Heidelberg, 3 vols, 1809, 1811). Nothing more is known about the donor, whose name Coleridge might have misspelt, but he could be the German friend taken by Henry Crabb Robinson to hear Lecture 4. Schlegel’s thirty-seven lectures dealt with European drama from the beginnings in ancient Greece to current developments in Spain and Germany. Seven of his lectures focus on Shakespeare, and he goes through all the plays devoting a page or two to each, with more space given to the tragedies. Coleridge was especially impressed by Schlegel’s introductory lecture on Spanish and English drama (Lecture 25), in which he defended the abandonment of the rules by Calderón and Shakespeare by his brilliant formulation of the concept of organic unity as innate and growing from within. Coleridge developed the contrast by relating mechanic form to a copy, and organic form to ‘the growth of Trees’ (LL I. 358), and Schlegel’s formulation helped him to realize that the best way to establish the idea of organic unity in Shakespeare’s plays was to illustrate the growth of the play from, as it were, a seed planted in the opening scenes, or in the first introduction of a character. Coleridge went on to focus on specific plays in the remaining lectures on Shakespeare in this course, though records of what he said survive only for Lecture 12, which was on Richard II and Hamlet. Reading Schlegel helped Coleridge to formulate his general ideas, but it is notable that he went on in this series to devote a lecture to a detailed critique of Dr Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare.

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In his early courses Coleridge had rejected the application of external rules to drama, and the concern of earlier critics with the unities of time, place and action. He argued in Lecture 3 of the 1811–12 series that the unities were ‘a mere effect of accident in the Greek drama’ (LL I. 226, 254), and Schlegel, who described Shakespeare’s plays as neither tragedies nor comedies but romantic dramas (Lecture 25, 110) helped him to push his ideas further. Coleridge went on in 1812 to contend that if the works of Sophocles are ‘in the strict sense of the word’ tragedies, and the works of Aristophanes comedies, then Shakespeare’s plays require a new word; they are in the ancient sense neither Tragedies nor Comedies, nor both in one—but a different genus, diverse in kind, not merely different in Degree—romantic Dramas or dramatic Romances’ (LL I. 466), plays that appeal to the imagination rather than the senses. A new kind of drama required a new mode of criticism, and was not to be judged by old criteria. He did not in fact develop this argument, but chose rather in lecturing to divide Shakespeare’s plays into four classes, comedies, histories, tragedies and romances. By 1818 Coleridge could refer casually to The Tempest as a romance (LL II. 268), and he thus gave currency to a term that has been of great importance in evaluating Shakespeare’s late plays. Coleridge gave further courses of lectures on drama and Shakespeare in London in 1812 and 1813, and in Bristol also in 1813. For these he seems to have taken the volumes of Schlegel’s lectures into the lecture-room (LL I. 419–20) and carried on a kind of dialogue with the latter’s ideas, translating, paraphrasing and criticizing. The great German critic’s work was virtually unknown in Britain at the time and was not translated until 1815. By the time he gave his series of lectures in Bristol, Coleridge was compressing most of the general and historical material borrowed from Schlegel into his opening lecture and commenting in detail on a range of plays in subsequent lectures. His basic aim in his lectures remained the same, but he seems to have realized that he did not need to spend so much time preparing his audience for novelty in his approach. It was enough to repudiate Dr Johnson’s image of Shakespeare’s plays as irregular, a wild forest interspersed with weeds and brambles, and emphasize instead the idea of organic form, acknowledging his debt to ‘a Continental Critic’: ‘The organic form . . . is innate, it shapes as it developes itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one & the same with the perfection of its outward Form’ (LL I. 495). His concern to bring home to his audiences this idea of organic unity reinforced the emphasis he had laid consistently since his first course in 1808 on ‘the judgment with which Shakespear in his first scenes prepares, & yet how naturally & with what a concealment of

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art, for the Catastrophe—how he presents the germ of all the after events’ (citing notes for a lecture on Richard II, given in 1813, LL I. 559). Coleridge’s method thus changed in his later series of lectures on Shakespeare, which were much more focused on individual plays and characters. The basic ideas that he began to formulate in his first course in 1808 were firmed up and sharpened by his reading and use of Schlegel’s lectures. He offered what at the time was a new approach to Shakespeare for his London and Bristol audiences. He made Dr Johnson rather unfairly into an exemplar of what was wrong with earlier criticism, but was citing the figure most likely to be familiar to his audiences. In 1808 he used the latest in English scholarship, the Variorum edition by Isaac Reed in 21 volumes (1803), which included the prefaces written by all the major eighteenth-century editors from Rowe to Steevens, and which also contained Edmond Malone’s historical account of the English stage and his first serious attempt to establish a chronology of Shakespeare’s plays. From the beginning he was also influenced in his general mode of thinking by the German scholars he had studied under in Göttingen, and his reading there in authors such as Lessing, Herder, Kant and Schiller. The acquisition of a copy of Schlegel’s lectures on drama helped him to refine his critical method and led him to focus especially on the opening scenes in his later commentaries on Shakespeare’s plays.

Psychology and Character Criticism Coleridge’s concern to demonstrate the organic unity of the plays he commented on, like his account of dramatic illusion and insistence on Shakespeare as imitator rather than copyist in the creation of characters, constituted a new mode of criticism. He also advanced the analysis of characters significantly. He knew the essays by Thomas Whately on the characters of Richard III and Macbeth (published posthumously in 1775), and William Richardson’s account of Macbeth, Hamlet, Jaques and Imogen (1774). He may also have read the latter’s two further volumes on Richard III, Lear, Timon, Falstaff and female characters (1784, 1789). Whately aimed to show Shakespeare’s judgement in the way these characters are ‘preserved entire and distinct’, though he also finds much ‘bad composition’ and blemishes in the plays. Richardson provided Coleridge with the image of Shakespeare as ‘the Proteus of the drama; he changes himself into every character, and enters easily into every condition of human nature’ (LL I. 69). Coleridge subtly changes the image by insisting that we remain

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aware of Shakespeare at the same time as he becomes ‘by power of imagination’ another, like Proteus, ‘yet still the God felt to be there.’ Indeed, Coleridge coined the term ‘Shakespearianized’ (not in the OED) in 1804 to suggest ‘The Proteus essence that could assume the very form, but yet known & felt not to be the Thing by that difference of the Substance which made every atom of the Form another thing – that likeness not identity’ (CN II. 2274). Likeness, not identity, imitation, not copy. These important distinctions supported his claim that Shakespeare’s characters were drawn rather from meditation than observation: ‘whatever forms they assumed, they were still Shakespeare, or the creatures of his meditation’ (LL I. 289), not copied as by someone ‘going about the world with his Pocket book, noting down what he has heard & observed’ (LL I. 306). The late eighteenth-century critics seem, in accordance with neoclassical theories, to have had two main concerns in their approach to Shakespeare’s characters: first, that they should be ‘consistent – they should be “preserved,” “sustained,” or maintained as a coherent whole’ (Vickers SS 12), and second, that they should ‘fulfil some moral purpose’. Coleridge inherited a vocabulary from his predecessors, but modified or changed terms and meanings in relation to the idea of imaginative coherence. In his lectures he speaks as a rule not of consistency, but rather of plays or characters being ‘in keeping’, a term he borrowed from discussions of painting in art, and meaning the maintenance of harmony in composition, or of a proper relationship between ‘the representations of nearer and more distant objects in a picture’ (OED, ‘keeping’, 9a; LL I. 86, 303). As to moral purpose, Coleridge was aware of Dr Johnson’s complaint that Shakespeare sacrificed ‘virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose’ (SCH 5. 65), and he no doubt knew William Richardson’s claims in response that Shakespeare’s characters could serve to illustrate the moral principles of human conduct. Coleridge dealt with this matter by claiming that Shakespeare’s plays might represent vice, but always within a moral context, hence his superiority to Beaumont and Fletcher: ‘The grossest passages of Shakespear were purity to theirs,’ for Shakespeare kept ‘at all times the high road of life; with him there were no innocent adulteries, he never rendered that amiable which religion and reason taught us to detest; he never clothed vice in the garb of virtue, like Beaumont and Fletcher’ (LL I. 522, 520). These two issues came into especial focus in relation to the character of Hamlet. George Steevens was one of a number of critics who was troubled by ‘the glaring inconsistencies in the character of the hero’ (Vickers SS 13). Others, however, explained the oppositions and contradictions in Hamlet

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by arguing that they were not evidence of poor dramaturgy but rather the expression of a mind divided within itself. The best formulation of this idea was by a Scottish critic, Thomas Robertson, whose work Coleridge does not appear to have known, and who argued that in Hamlet’s character opposite qualities lead to a kind of paralysis in ‘the fluctuation of his mind between contriving and executing’ (Vickers SS 14). By offering a psychological explanation Robertson anticipates in some measure the account of Hamlet proposed by Coleridge, who, however, offers a different and more nuanced perception of Hamlet’s inaction as resulting from ‘that aversion to action which prevails among such as have a world within themselves’ (LL I. 386), those for whom the world of the imagination is more vivid than reality. He described Hamlet as a consistent character, who keeps ‘still determining to execute and still postponing the execution’ until he must ‘in the infirmity of his nature at last hopelessly place himself in the power and at the mercy of his enemies’ (LL I. 390). The moral issue in the play Coleridge dealt with in his comments on Dr Johnson’s note on Hamlet’s speech as he contemplates killing Claudius at prayer and wishes rather to do so when he is ‘about some act / That has no relish of salvation in’t’ (3.3.91–2). This speech was for many early critics savage and inhuman, and, as Dr Johnson said in a note on it, ‘too horrible to be read or uttered’. Some then countered by arguing that Hamlet did not mean what he said but was inventing an excuse to delay his revenge. So to claim was to offer a psychological solution to a moral problem – how could the morally upright Hamlet behave in this way? Coleridge’s method was, as he said, psychological, and he never claims moral rectitude for Hamlet, but insists rather that though possessing ‘all that is amiable and excellent in nature’ (LL I. 390) he has a fatal weakness in his inability to act. So allowing Claudius to ‘escape at such a moment was only part of the same irresoluteness of character. Hamlet seizes hold of a pretext for not acting, when he might have acted so effectually’ (LL I. 389). For Coleridge, then, Hamlet’s behaviour here is in keeping with his character, another mark of his weakness rather than a moral issue. Among the chief writers on Shakespeare’s characters, Whately had not commented on Hamlet at all, Richardson had sought to defend Hamlet in moral terms and Schlegel saw him as malicious and possessing a ‘natural inclination for crooked ways’ (Black, 405; Schlegel II. ii. 149: ‘er hat einen natürlichen Hang dazu, krumme Wege zu gehen’). Coleridge found in Hamlet an admirable figure, brave and perceptive, seeing through ‘the very souls of all who surround him’ (LL I. 386), aware of his moral duty and not indecisive: ‘he knew well what he ought to do & over & over again he made

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up his mind to do it’ (LL I. 387), but he could not bring himself to act: ‘he is a man living in meditation, called upon to act by every motive human & divine but the great purpose of life is defeated by continually resolving to do, yet doing nothing but resolve’ (LL I. 390). So Hamlet ‘delays action, till action is of no use: and he becomes the victim of circumstances and accident’ (LL I. 544). Hamlet’s vivid imagination made for him an inner world that was so rich that it led to an aversion to action, a ‘retiring from all reality’ (LL I. 388). Hamlet was a special case in relation to these questions of morality and psychology, and clearly fascinated Coleridge. Late in his life Coleridge saw in Hamlet something of his own failings, and famously commented, ‘I have a smack of Hamlet myself’ (Table-Talk, 1827, II. 61). Character criticism in the period was mainly concerned with Shakespeare’s major tragic characters and Falstaff, and Coleridge followed suit, offering fresh and subtle commentaries on Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. For Coleridge, the special excellence of Shakespeare’s characters lay in what he identified as his method. In all of them ‘we find individuality every where, mere portrait no where’, and we ‘may define the excellence of their method as consisting in that just proportion, that union and interpenetration of the universal and the particular, which must ever pervade all works of decided genius and true science’ (Friend, I. 457). What this meant in practice can be seen in his insights into characters such as Macbeth. Whately describes Macbeth as ‘a man not destitute of the feelings of humanity’, who is induced by the weird sisters and his wife to act ‘contrary to his disposition’ and commit murder. Coleridge’s account is much more probing and subtle, giving more importance to Macbeth’s response to the Witches as showing how he is ‘rendered temptible by previous dalliance of the fancy with ambitious thoughts’ and so is made to ‘start and seem to fear’, as Banquo notes, on hearing them speak. Coleridge contrasts Banquo’s openness and ‘talkative curiosity’ with Macbeth’s silence and sees Macbeth as becoming a tempter to himself, as he ‘mistranslates the recoilings – and ominous whispers of Conscience into prudential and selfish Reasonings’ (LL I. 529). So Coleridge’s emphasis was on the ‘ingenuity with which a man evades the promptings of conscience before the commission of a crime’, compared with his total helplessness after it has been committed (LL I. 531). It is as if Whately describes the characters from outside, while Coleridge sees them from the inside. Coleridge’s comments on Lady Macbeth are equally incisive. It had been a commonplace of eighteenth-century criticism to depict her as a monster; so George Steevens, in a note reprinted in the 1803 edition Coleridge knew, said that Shakespeare ‘never omits any opportunity of adding a trait

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of ferocity, or a mark of the want of human feeling, to this monster of his creation’, and William Richardson described her as ‘a character invariably savage’, who moves ‘without reluctance to the contrivance of the blackest crimes’ (LL I. 532). Coleridge saw her very differently, as ‘a woman of a visionary and day-dreaming turn of mind: her eye fi xed on the shadows of her solitary ambition’, whose constant effort was ‘to bully conscience.’ He goes on, A passage where she alludes to ‘plucking her nipple from the boneless gums of her infant’, though usually thought to prove a merciless and unwomanly nature, proves the direct opposite: she brings it as the most solemn inforcement to Macbeth of the solemnity of his promise, to undertake the plot against Duncan: had she so sworn, she would have done that, which was most horrible to her feelings, rather than break the oath: and as the most horrible act which it was possible for imagination to conceive. . . . Her courage Coleridge saw as an aspect of day-dreaming, the boldness of words not actions, marked in her promise to chastise her husband with the valour of her tongue (LL II. 308). In the fragmentary notes and comments that survive Coleridge opened up a new way of interpreting the characters in this play. His accounts of a number of characters in other favourite plays show a similar probing of motives and psychology. In commenting on Othello he linked Iago, Richard III and Falstaff as characters who are confident of their superiority of intellect, and ‘reverse the order of things’ by subordinating feelings and morality to intellect, leading to contempt for whatever did not display intellectual power (LL I. 575). In Iago Shakespeare came near to presenting as coexisting in the same individual what is admirable in the mind with what is most detestable in the heart, ‘without any apparent connection, or any modification of the one by the other’ (LL II. 328). Courage, intellect and strength of character Coleridge regarded as forms of power, and he recognized that we cannot help admiring power without any reference to a moral aim. Hence our complex involvement with Iago’s ‘passionless character, all will in intellect’ as he deludes Roderigo and goes on to soliloquize about duping Cassio and Othello at the end of Act 1, displaying ‘the motive-hunting of motiveless Malignity’ (LL II. 315) – a phrase that continues to echo in interpretations of this play (Honigmann, 33–5). Coleridge commented at length in several lectures on Romeo and Juliet. He wrote especially vividly on the Nurse as possessing ‘all the garrulity

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of old age and all its fondness which was one of the great consolations of humanity’ (LL I. 308). He also elaborated a definition of love in order to distinguish between Romeo’s passion for Rosaline which showed ‘in truth he was in love only with his own idea’ and his genuine love for Juliet. Hence, Romeo can refer to Rosaline in terms of ‘the devout religion’ of his eye, and yet ‘instantly becomes a heretic’ when he sees Juliet ‘and commences the fullness of attachment which forms the subject of the tragedy’ (LL I. 334). It had been common theatrical practice, as in David Garrick’s performances, to cut the references to Rosaline altogether, and Coleridge understood her importance in Shakespeare’s conception. The surviving records of Coleridge’s commentaries on Shakespeare contain many perceptive assessments of characters in other plays. So, for example, he notes how Richard II ‘scatters himself into a multitude of images, and in the conclusion endeavours to shelter himself from that which is around him by a cloud of his own thoughts’, while Bolingbroke returns from exile under the pretence of claiming his dukedom, ‘at last letting out his design to the full extent of which he was himself unconscious in the first stages’ (LL I. 382, 383). Ariel in The Tempest ‘is neither born of Heaven nor of earth but between both’, and while Shakespeare ‘gives him all the advantages all the faculties of reason he divests him of all moral character’ (LL I. 363–4). In Troilus and Cressida Coleridge contrasts the vehement passion of Cressida with the affection of Troilus, an affection that is passionate, ‘but still having a depth of calmer element, in a will stronger than Desire, more entire than Choice, and which gives permanence to its own act by converting it into Faith and Duty’ (LL II. 376).

Coleridge, Shakespeare and Politics Coleridge’s interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays were made during a period when Napoleon threatened to conquer Europe and when England seemed in danger from his power. From the end of 1799 Coleridge had contributed regularly essays for the Morning Post, in which he frequently updated his assessment of Napoleon, who at first ‘had the splendour of a hero in romance’ (EOT I. 57) and appeared, with George Washington, to be a military genius. The latter, however had moral greatness, whereas by becoming ‘First Consul’ in 1802, Napoleon established a link with ancient Roman emperors, and, like them, encouraged great public works while abolishing political freedom and creating a new despotism. As Napoleon’s conquests grew so Coleridge accused him of sacrificing more human blood

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than tyrants such as Tamburlaine and Genghis Khan (EOT II. 368). By 1809 he was depicting the French emperor (titled thus in 1804) as an offspring of Satan and ‘enemy of the human Race’ (Friend II. 162; EOT II. 76). If Coleridge’s denunciations of Napoleon sank at times into abuse, he was keeping up the spirits of his readers in a period of alarm. At the same time he recognized in the French emperor a figure without parallel in recent European history, an awesome commanding genius who was imposing his will on most of the continent. In looking for a yardstick by which to measure Napoleon, to provide a comparison for a career that was at once magnificent and horrendous, Coleridge turned naturally to literature, relating the emperor’s playing out of roles in military or Roman costume on his political stage to fictional stages on which characters like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost enacted their roles. In an early lecture in 1808 he found an analogy for Napoleon in Macbeth, describing the latter as, like Napoleon, a ‘Commanding Genius’, in whose temperament hope is the ‘Master Element’, but meeting with ‘an active & combining Intellect, and an Imagination of just that degree of vividness which disquiets & impels the Soul to try to realize its Images’ (LL I. 137). This is a lesser creative power than that of the poet or artist whose images compose a world satisfying in itself. The commanding genius as military leader has to impose himself on his world, and when successful the hope that impelled him may turn to fear: ‘the General who must often feel even tho’ he may hide it from his own consciousness, how great a share Chance had in his Successes, may very naturally become irresolute in a new scene, where all depends on his own act & Election.’ Coleridge’s use of the words ‘General’ and ‘scene’ merge Macbeth into Napoleon, who at this time was seen by him as a kind of tragic hero. Much later, looking back in 1819, Coleridge found a way of accounting for Napoleon in his analysis of the complex character of Edmund in King Lear. He observed that Shakespeare does not show Edmund’s wickedness as originating in mere ‘fiendishness of nature’, or allow it to pass ‘into utter monstrosity’, by providing circumstances, such as his being a bastard and cut off from domestic influences by being sent away from home for his education, which affected the way his character was formed. His ‘Courage, Intellect and strength of Character were the most impressive forms of Power,’ and it was inevitable that we should admire power without any reference to a moral purpose, ‘whether it be displayed in the conquests of a Napoleon or Tamurlaine, or in the foam and thunder of a Cataract’ (LL II. 328). The image of the cataract links these figures and Edmund with forces of nature, and it is notable that in the lecture that preceded this

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one, Lecture 5 of the 1818–19 series, Coleridge had commented on Iago, describing him as ‘A being next to Devil – only not quite Devil’ (LL II. 315), but did not connect him with Napoleon. He saw Edmund and now Napoleon as complex tragic figures, not merely evil. Coleridge liked to distinguish between men of ‘commanding genius’, or a will to power that expresses itself in action, and those who possess ‘absolute genius’, the poet or philosopher who can ‘rest content between thought and reality’ (BL I. 30–3). The former ‘come forth as the shaping spirit of Ruin’ in times of tumult, while the latter, exemplified in Chaucer and Shakespeare, have a manly cheerfulness (Chaucer) or an ‘evenness and sweetness of temper’ (Shakespeare). Coleridge’s critique of Napoleon helped him to formulate his accounts of Macbeth and Edmund, and also affected his own political views as well as his conception of Shakespeare’s politics. Like Wordsworth and many others, Coleridge was initially an ardent supporter of the French Revolution, but with the rise of Napoleon his views changed, as in his journalism he was concerned with the defence of his threatened country. Later on William Hazlitt never tired of attacking Coleridge for what he regarded as his apostasy in his political views and rejection of his early radicalism, and by 1811, was making insulting comments about his Shakespeare lectures. Hazlitt said then, as reported by John Payne Collier, that Coleridge was incompetent to lecture on Shakespeare and ‘was not well read in him’ (LL I. 233), when in fact Coleridge referred to, cited or commented on all the plays in his lectures and published writings. Hazlitt was six years younger than Coleridge, came to maturity after the French Revolution and could maintain a radicalism of a different kind in relation to repressive government in England. In his lectures from 1808 onwards Coleridge represented England differently as a bastion of liberty holding out alone against the threat of Napoleon’s armies. In 1817 Hazlitt published his Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, and the following year, when Coleridge was lecturing at the London Philosophical Society’s premises, Hazlitt lectured on Shakespeare at the Surrey Institution, where Coleridge had given a course in 1812–13. Hazlitt wrote and lectured from a conscious political perspective as a radical who argued in his comments on Shakespeare’s Coriolanus that ‘The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power’, that the principle of poetry is anti-democratic and ‘puts the individual for the species, the one above the infinite many, might before right’ (Hazlitt IV. 214–15). It is hardly surprising, then, that Hazlitt wilfully misunderstood Coleridge’s position when he censured the latter’s lectures on Shakespeare. Responding to the Tory William Gifford’s

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review of his book in the Quarterly Review in 1818, Hazlitt asked, ‘Do you then really admire those plague spots of history, and scourges of human nature, Richard III, Richard II., King John, and Henry VIII.? Do you with Mr. Coleridge, in his late Lectures, contend that not to fall down in prostration of soul before the abstract majesty of kings as it is seen in the diminished perspective of centuries, argues an inherent littleness of soul?’ (Hazlitt IX. 35). Coleridge said nothing of the kind. In assessing Napoleon Coleridge had recognized the way power, ‘without reference to any moral end’, compels admiration (LL II. 328), but did not identify this power with the language of poetry. His Shakespeare criticism was affected by the political situation, and in 1811 and 1813 he spoke on Richard II, a favourite play, both for its characterization of the leading roles and for its blending of epic and tragic. He saw Richard as having ‘immediate courage’ (LL I. 381) when faced with murderers, and powers of mind, but as ‘weak and womanish’, and ‘altogether unfit for a King’. Richard’s rapid transitions, from love to resentment and hatred, contradicted Dr Johnson’s perception of him as pious. The ambitious Bolingbroke, he thought, gradually acknowledges his design to claim the throne, and his pretended humility is contradicted by a sense of his self-importance. Coleridge began, however, by reading and emphasizing Gaunt’s famous speech beginning ‘This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle’ (2. 1. 40–66) as collecting ‘Every motive, every cause producing patriotism’ (LL I. 378), and as pointing to the moral superiority of England over the enemy, Napoleon and his powers. In stressing Gaunt’s speech for its patriotism, Coleridge abstracted it for political purposes from a play which did not portray model kings, but which supported the idea of a monarchy, of ‘royal kings, / Fear’d by their breed, and famous by their birth’. For Hazlitt, by contrast, writing in 1817, by which time Napoleon was ailing in exile on the island of Saint Helena, Gaunt’s speech merely fed ‘the pampered egotism of our countrymen’ (Hazlitt IV. 275), though he quotes it all the same. In more general terms, Coleridge rehabilitated the Elizabethan age from Dr Johnson’s idea of it ‘struggling to emerge from barbarity’, and represented the period as one showing an amazing development of intellectual power, an age of great men even if they applied their powers to prudential ends. Even greater was the republican age that followed, as Coleridge contrasted the ‘fullness of grand principle’ that informed the seventeenthcentury Puritan revolution in England with the barbarity and ‘want of all principle’ in the French Revolution. Coleridge’s version of Shakespeare and his age was closely connected with a perceived need for patriotism and a growing national pride in response to the French domination of Europe.

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England was also perceived as the home of liberty in contrast to the tyranny of Napoleon, and in reworking Lecture 4 of the 1811–12 series for Biographia Literaria Coleridge ended Chapter 15 with praise of Shakespeare and Milton, citing from a sonnet by Wordsworth: O what great men hast thou not produced, England! My country! Truly indeed – Must we be free or die, who speak the tongue Which SHAKESPEARE spake . . . (BL II. 28) Shakespeare thus became a spokesman for English liberty, and was preeminent in his use of the English language, which was superior to other languages in its range of meanings and multiplicity, constituting ‘the unconscious wisdom of the whole nation’ (LL I. 292). Napoleon was given his due by Coleridge, but in assessing him as a hero-villain in relation to Macbeth, Edmund and Milton’s Satan, Coleridge effectively subordinated him to Shakespeare. These analogies enabled Coleridge to preserve a sense both of the grandeur of the French emperor and of the evil consequences of his lust for empire. At the same time they also implicitly supported the idea of the superiority of the absolute poetic genius of Shakespeare over the military commanding genius of Napoleon, and of England over France. In this larger sense Coleridge’s elevation of Shakespeare in his critical accounts of the plays has political implications. If Shakespeare upholds freedom, at the same time ‘he is always the philosopher and the moralist with a profound veneration for all the established institutions of society,’ and ‘never promulgates any party tenets’ (LL II. 272). These remarks he made in a lecture on The Tempest in which, as on a number of occasions, he distinguished between Shakespeare’s way of ‘keeping to the high road of feelings’ and the politicized treatment of characters by Beaumont and Fletcher and Massinger. In Beaumont and Fletcher he saw prejudice in their royalism, exemplified in Fletcher’s ‘vulgar mockery’ (LL I. 317) of priests, no doubt thinking of plays like The Spanish Curate; in Massinger he detected ‘rank republicanism’ (LL II. 272). Shakespeare, by contrast, ‘made no copies from the bad parts of human nature’ (LL I. 317), and never introduced ‘a professional character, as such, otherwise than as respectable’, but treated priests and monks so as to win ‘love and respect’ for them. Commenting on Alonso and Sebastian in The Tempest Coleridge observed that in Shakespeare’s plays only bad men show scorn for others, ‘as a mode of getting rid of their uneasy feelings of inferiority to the good, and also, by making the good ridiculous, of rendering the transition of others to wickedness easy’ (LL II. 271–2). He distinguished Caliban from

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these characters as having the ‘dawnings of understanding without reason or the moral sense’, so that his behaviour is marked ‘by the appearance of vice’. In Coleridge’s reading of Shakespeare politics and morality are closely linked: ‘For it is in the primacy of the moral being only that man is truly human’ (LL II. 270), as he illustrates especially in his incisive account of this play.

Coleridge’s Critical Method In his Shakespeare criticism Coleridge used the term ‘method’ both in relation to education and understanding, and in explaining his own mode of reasoning. His discussion ‘is confined to Method as employed in the formation of the understanding and in the constructions of science and literature’ (Friend I. 449), and he associates method with an educated and well-disciplined mind, ‘which has become accustomed to contemplate not things only, or for their own sake alone, but likewise and chiefly the relations of things, either their relations to each other, or to the observer, or to the state and apprehension of the hearers’ (Friend I. 451). In such a mind thought connects and imagination combines all things into one. The words ‘observers’ and ‘hearers’ might relate to the theatre, and Coleridge’s essay on the principles of method in The Friend (1818) is in fact largely devoted to demonstrating the supreme excellence of the ‘myriad-minded Bard’ Shakespeare (Friend I. 453; compare BL II. 19). In the conclusion of the essay Coleridge praises Shakespeare’s ability to create a huge variety of characters; in his plays, ‘we find individuality every where, mere portrait nowhere.’ He then ends by describing what he means by method in the plays: Speaking of their effect, i.e. his works themselves, we may define the excellence of their method as consisting in that just proportion, that union and interpenetration of the universal and the particular, which must ever pervade all works of decided genius and true science. For Method implies a progressive transition and it is the meaning of the word in the original language. (Friend I. 457) Coleridge’s concept of method here may be linked on the one hand to his insistence that Shakespeare’s characters are never copies of individuals, but imitations from nature, and on the other, to his theory of the imagination as enabling the poet to diffuse a ‘spirit of unity’ in ‘the balance or

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reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities’ (BL II. 15–17). It also connects Shakespeare with philosophers and scientists, as Coleridge finds method also in the elements of Euclid and the discourses of Plato. From his first lectures on Shakespeare Coleridge pointed to the dramatist’s power and energy of thought, and found in his early poems ‘proof of a most profound, energetic & philosophical mind, without which he might have been a very delightful Poet, but not the great dramatic Poet’ (LL I. 82). His concept of method in Shakespeare reinforced his elevation of the bard to the status of an absolute genius. Coleridge liked to distinguish genius from talent, defining genius ‘as originality in intellectual construction: the moral accompaniment, and actuating principle of which consists perhaps, in the carrying on of the freshness and feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood’ (Friend I. 419). He also stressed what he saw as ‘the creative, and self-sufficing power of absolute Genius’ in those like Shakespeare who ‘rest content between thought and reality, as it were in an intermundium [i.e. a space between two worlds; Coleridge’s coinage] of which their own living spirit supplies the substance, and their imagination the ever-varying form’ (BL II. 31–2). Hence, Coleridge’s insistence that Shakespeare’s characters are drawn from his imagination, and always ‘the consciousness of the Poet’s Mind must be diffused over that of the Reader or Spectator’ (LL I. 86). Shakespeare’s method thus establishes the unity and harmony of his plays, and illustrates why he was especially drawn, according to Coleridge, to the great tragic villains. He said that power is an object of desire and admiration for us all, and ‘without power, virtue would be insufficient and incapable of revealing its being’; but power goes with ambition, and ‘the co-existence of great intellectual lordship with guilt has never been adequately represented without exciting the strongest interest.’ In such a combination we can ‘contemplate the intellect of man more exclusively as a separate self-subsistence, than in its proper state of subordination to his own conscience, or to the will of an infinitely superior being’. Hence the ‘sacred charm’ of characters like Richard III, Iago and Edmund, who are all ‘cast in the mould of Shakespeare’s gigantic intellect’ (BL II. 216–17). Shakespeare delighted in portraying characters of pre-eminent intellectual powers, but in whom the ‘moral faculties are wanting,’ at the same time that he taught the ‘superiority of moral greatness’ (CRD I. 309). If examples of grossness and offences against decency could be found in Shakespeare’s plays, they were not ‘aimed at the moral feeling, nor designed to corrupt’. Coleridge compared Shakespeare’s plays with the drama of his own time,

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having in mind especially the popular plays translated from the works of Kotzebue, which, like the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, exemplified for Coleridge ‘the refinements of modern immorality’: in them ‘vice and virtue are confounded; and through the delicacies of language and sentiment, we are tempted to connect innocence with adultery; humanity with murder; and to consider wickedness as entitled, not to detestation, but to sympathy and pity’ (LL I. 514). Coleridge’s discussion of what he called the principles of method in Shakespeare systematizes ideas expressed in his early lectures in 1808, in which he stressed the connections between just taste and morality, sought to show that the dramatist has a most profound and philosophic mind (LL I. 82) and praised especially the dramatist’s power of imagination in ‘combining many circumstances into one moment of thought to produce that ultimate end of human Thought and human Feeling, Unity’ (LL I. 68). In these lectures he rejected the eighteenth-century concern with rules and external criteria in relation to drama, and offered what amounted to an organic concept of Shakespeare’s art and judgement, even if he did not find a neat formula for his ideas until he read Schlegel’s lectures on dramatic art and literature late in 1811, which in many ways echoed his own thinking, but better articulated, and supplied him with the terms ‘organic’ and ‘mechanic’ with which to distinguish between the special excellence of Shakespeare’s plays and the kind of regularity demanded by rules of drama (LL I. 358). Method in Shakespeare is not to be confused with Coleridge’s own critical method, which changed and developed over the years. Coleridge had given political lectures in Bristol in 1795, and in his Unitarian phase had delivered sermons, but lecturing on literature was a novel experience for him and his audience in 1808. As he conceived his course, it was to be much more ambitious than the typical belletristic fare offered in previous years at the Royal Institution, and he was setting out to challenge the main line of Shakespeare criticism through the eighteenth century and redefine its vocabulary. Hence he felt a need to present the result of many years of continued reflection on ‘the source of our pleasures in the fine Arts in the antithetical balanceloving nature of man, & the connection of such pleasures with moral excellence’ (LL I. 12). The course was to explain the ‘Principles of Poetry’ and in defining his terms in his first lecture he apologized for the tedium his hearers might feel as he spoke on Taste and ‘the definition of the Fine Arts’ (LL I. 30). He was not well, and in letters commented that he could only read Lecture 2 through, scarcely taking ‘his eyes off the paper’ (CL II. 59). There were further apologies as sickness caused the cancellation of

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lectures between the second on February 5th and the third on March 30th, and it may be that illness and opium left him unable to prepare fully for some lectures. This lack of preparation seems to have been a mixed blessing in fact, for it enabled him to discover that he might be able to dazzle an audience by eloquence. One attender at a literary lecture in this series recalled that he apologized for the absence of notes, but that he was so fluent she thought he had left his notes at home on purpose (LL I. 149). I think it very probable too that Coleridge realized that his ‘main Object’ in the course, which was to define terms, establish principles and demonstrate, as he said in Lecture 4, ‘the reciprocal connections of Just Taste with pure Morality’ (LL I. 78), made rather hard going for his audience, and in the opening lecture he remarked, ‘I feel the heaviness of my subject considered as a public Lecture’ (LL I. 30). Little is known about the content of the rest of the lectures Coleridge devoted to Shakespeare in this course, except for Lecture 15. Following one on Milton, Coleridge returned to the topic of the supremacy of Shakespeare as a poet and dramatist and spoke about several plays. An account of this lecture appears in a letter written by Henry Crabb Robinson to Mrs Clarkson on 15 May 1808, and is notable for his comment: ‘Coleridge’s digressions are not the worst part of his lectures, or rather he is always digressing’ (LL I. 118). By this time it seems that his lectures were successful, as Coleridge said to John Payne Collier, when they came ‘warm from the heart’ (C on Sh 44). The course was successful enough to encourage him to hire a hall and offer a public course of a similar kind in 1811–12. Coleridge again began by defining terms, and in relation to this spoke on the causes of false criticism. This lecture was reviewed in several newspapers, and the comments in the Sun are especially interesting, as showing that after beginning by reading from notes, Coleridge addressed his audience directly. The reporter found his ‘occasional digressions’ were ‘exceedingly beautiful’, and, referring also to the 1808 course, recommended ‘Mr. C. to speak as much, and to read as little as possible’ (LL I. 196). The relatively full records of the 1811–12 course show that Coleridge could, in a lecture advertised as dealing with Romeo and Juliet talk ‘very amusingly without speaking at all on the subject’, as Henry Crabb Robinson reported (CRB I. 53; LL I. xlviii). Friends like Robinson, looking for more systematic arguments, might be irritated or disappointed, but they were familiar with his conversation, and there was not enough difference between this, which Robinson said ‘was a sort of lecturing & soliloquizing’ (LL I. xlvii), and the colloquial style of his public speaking. Coleridge was too pleased with his ability to improvise, and sometimes claimed that ‘with the exception of

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the general Plan & leading Thoughts’ his lectures were ‘strictly extempore, the words of the moment’ (CL III. 471–2). This may well have been true of some of the lectures in the 1811–12 course, when his commentary on Romeo and Juliet stretched to three lectures and he was forced to squeeze Richard III and Falstaff into one lecture, and Richard II and Hamlet into another to complete his promised coverage of Shakespeare. In fact he seems to have prepared carefully for most of his lectures, and the series that ended in January 1812 was successful enough to encourage him to offer two more courses each of six lectures in London in the spring of 1812, one on drama generally, the second on Shakespeare. The first of these courses was much indebted to Schlegel’s account of drama, and the second was abandoned in June for lack of support. Coleridge then accepted an invitation to present twelve lectures on ‘the Belles Lettres’ at the Surrey Institution beginning in November 1812. His syllabus, like those for the 1808 and 1811–12 series, begins from a grand plan to consider the principles of poetry and the origin of the fine arts in general, with a promise of four lectures on Shakespeare late in the course. He appears in fact to have devoted the last five lectures of the course to Shakespeare, which ended to great applause. In all the series thus far Coleridge had begun from general principles, and in the lectures he gave after December 1811 had made much use of his copy of Schlegel. Then in 1813 at short notice he set up a course of eight lectures in Bristol, six on Shakespeare and two on education, in an effort to raise money for his friends John and Mary Morgan. For this series he abandoned his attempt to deal with general principles, and, building on old lectures notes, began to focus more closely on the text and characters of the plays he dealt with. He took relevant volumes of the edition of Shakespeare by Joseph Rann (6 vols, 1786–94) and his copy of Schlegel with him into the lecture room, as his notes show (LL I. 540–2). Quoting from these, and commenting on and quarrelling with Schlegel, helped him to develop readings of favourite plays, Macbeth, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, Othello, Richard III and Richard II, mainly in relation to the major characters. The last lectures Coleridge gave on Shakespeare in 1818–19 show a remarkable innovation in his method, seen from time to time in earlier courses, which owes nothing to Schlegel. Towards the end of a course on European literature in May 1818 Coleridge drafted an announcement for a proposed course of six lectures ‘of particular and practical Criticism, taking some one play of Shakespear’s, scene by scene, as the subject of each Lecture’ (LL II. 34). He had given currency in 1817 to a concept of ‘practical criticism’ in his commentary on Venus and Adonis in Chapter 15

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of his Biographia Literaria, which was developed from a lecture of 1808. This concept, applied to determine qualities in a poem ‘which may be deemed specific symptoms of poetic power’ (BL II. 19) was in turn taken over by I. A. Richards in 1929 as the title of a book that came to constitute a kind of manifesto for the ‘New Criticism’, the practice of close reading that became so influential in succeeding decades. Coleridge’s note for the first lecture show he was consciously intending to comment on Shakespeare’s works ‘in a somewhat different and I would fain believe more instructive form’ than hitherto (LL II. 263). In his first lecture he began with a brief introduction on drama as imitation not copy and on dramatic illusion, then launched into a discussion of The Tempest as a play of the imagination, having no allegiance to time or place. He went on in the six lectures of the 1818 course and in the first three lectures of the course he gave in 1819 on Shakespeare and Milton to focus in detail on the texts of the plays as he considered the major tragedies, including for the first time King Lear, and ending with Troilus and Cressida. He promised to devote each lecture to one play, considered ‘scene by scene, for the purpose of illustrating the conduct of the plot, and the peculiar force, beauty and propriety, of the language, in the particular passages’ (LL II. 254). For these lectures he had a copy of Samuel Ayscough’s edition of Shakespeare (1807) interleaved with blank sheets on which he could make notes, and took it into the lecture room, so that he spoke directly from the text of the play in front of him. This concentration on minutiae was a notable departure from the practice of lecturers like Schlegel and Hazlitt of going through the plays one by one describing the plot and pointing out beauties and faults. Coleridge’s notes for his late courses mostly relate to the close reading and exposition of the play text, especially the early scenes.

Coleridge’s Development as a Critic of Shakespeare Although Coleridge never published his lectures, the records of them, incomplete or fragmentary as they are, show how his thinking changed and developed. In the first two courses he was anxious to illustrate the principles of poetry as a way of establishing his own mode of criticism. Coleridge was also keen to establish Shakespeare as a political hero, an absolute genius providing England with a philosophical and moral superiority over Napoleon, the commanding genius who had military and political domination over Europe. In 1812 Napoleon was forced to retreat

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from Moscow, in 1813 he was defeated in Spain and much of Europe was freed from French rule and in 1815, after escaping from exile in Elba, he was finally defeated at Waterloo. In his 1811–12 lectures Coleridge was anxious to promote a patriotic belief in the English as ‘one of the gyant nations of the world’ since the heroic times of Queen Elizabeth, with a moral superiority embodied in Shakespeare, ‘the greatest man that ever lived,’ a superiority that still enables them to ‘struggle with the other, the evil genius of the Planet’ (LL I. 354–5), that is, Napoleon. In 1814, by contrast, Coleridge could conclude a lecture on Milton with an analysis of the late French emperor, who now, after his abdication, had dwindled into ‘Napoleon Bonaparte, the cowardly Corsican Usurper, Rebel and Assassin’ (LL II. 13). From his earliest lectures Coleridge sought to rebut the common eighteenth-century conception of Shakespeare as summed up by Hugh Blair in his Lectures on Rhetoric (1783): ‘Great he may be justly called, as the extent and force of his natural genius, both for Tragedy and Comedy, is altogether unrivalled. But, at the same time, it is genius shooting wild, deficient in just taste, and altogether unassisted by knowledge or art’ (II. 523). Coleridge insisted on Shakespeare’s consummate artistry, and began with a general lecture on taste, redefining it in relation to art as having as its purpose ‘to combine & unite a sense of immediate pleasure in ourselves with the perception of external arrangement’ (LL I. 37). Already he was linking just taste with judgement and artistry, and he went on to show how Shakespeare displays these qualities in his earliest poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, works generally neglected by earlier critics. In the fragmentary notes for these lectures he sought to show in Shakespeare’s poems an ‘endless activity of Thought’ energized by fancy, or the ‘aggregative Power’ (LL I. 66–7), and Imagination, or ‘the power by which one image or feeling is made to modify many others, & by a sort of fusion to force many into one’ (LL I. 81). His aim was to demonstrate that Shakespeare proved himself as a great poet before he began to write plays. When he went on to speak of Shakespeare as a dramatist, Coleridge divided the characteristics of drama into ‘Language, Passion, and Character’ (LL I. 85), giving primacy to language, and insisting that the consciousness of the poet’s mind must be ‘diffused over that of the Reader or Spectator’ (LL I. 86), allowing for different styles within one work, as long as all are ‘always in keeping’ or in harmony. In his first two courses of lectures on Shakespeare his initial effort was to arrive at a definition of poetry, culminating in a ‘Final Definition’ of a poem and poetry (LL I. 245) in their highest sense, a definition reworked in Biographia Literaria, chapter 14. He insisted above all

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on the ‘capability of reducing a multitude into unity of effect’, and strove to establish an idea of great poetry as combining ‘a more than usual State of Emotion with more than usual Order’ (compare BL II. 17), and as harmonizing ‘the Natural and the Artificial’. Coleridge needed to work out this formulation in order to establish grounds for claiming that Shakespeare was a supreme artist, not just a ‘child of nature.’ The range of plays he went on to discuss in detail was limited, but included examples of the genres Shakespeare experimented with, comedy, history, tragedy and romance. In 1811–12 he commented on Love’s Labour’s Lost, Romeo and Juliet; The Tempest; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, then Richard III and Falstaff (no records of these two lectures are known); and lastly Richard II and Hamlet. The chronology of Shakespeare’s plays was far from being settled, and Malone’s attempt to settle the matter on the basis of external evidence produced some strange results, such as dating Twelfth Night in 1614, which Coleridge found unconvincing. He proposed a chronology on the basis of internal evidence (Lecture 4 in the 1811–12 series, revised in Lecture 3 in the course of 1819; LL I. 239–44, II. 373–5), which is closer to the order now generally accepted. One of his main concerns was to claim that Love’s Labour’s Lost was Shakespeare’s earliest play, and showed that his habits before he left Stratford ‘had been scholastic & those of a student’ (LL I. 265). The claim was important to Coleridge because he argued that from the beginning Shakespeare as poet and philosopher conveyed ‘profound truths in the most lively Images’, and wrote as ‘a man of reading and learning’, not from mere observation of nature (LL I. 275). He noticed at the same time the limitations of the apprentice dramatist in the play’s defects, especially in having only ‘the embryos of characters’ (LL I. 276). He dealt at length with Romeo and Juliet, dwelling especially on the difference between Romeo’s idealization of Rosaline as an abstraction and his love for Juliet as a person. Coleridge’s main concern was to show that while in this play Shakespeare displayed many of his excellences, the parts were not combined into a harmonious whole, so that there are speeches in which the ‘Poet forgets the character & speaks in his own person’ (LL I. 311). In speaking on the plays Coleridge commented mainly on the early scenes and the way various characters were introduced. In relation to Richard II he focused on Richard, Gaunt, Bolingbroke and York at specific points in the play. In his account of Hamlet he attended mainly to the character of Hamlet in a brilliant analysis explaining his failure to act not in terms of cowardice or indecision, but from a sort of imaginative overload producing an aversion to action.

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Always he had in mind Shakespeare’s judgement and the unity of the whole play. He aimed to show how Shakespeare’s judgement appeared in the way each scene was ‘still preparing and still recalling like a lively piece of music’ (LL I. 365). He also sought to demonstrate that Shakespeare was no common dramatist connecting ideas ‘by association or logical connection’, but a vital writer, who ‘in a moment transports himself into the very being of each character’ (LL I. 359). In this way he might convey to his hearers a sense of the dramatist’s imaginative power, and of the relation of individual scenes to the whole, and, as he said in comments on The Tempest, there would be no need to go through the whole play, describe the plot, or point out all its beauties: ‘were he to repeat them he should pass from the character of a lecturer into a mere reciter’ (LL I. 366). Coleridge said in Lecture 4 of this course that he would pursue a ‘psychological, rather than a historical, mode of reasoning’ (LL I. 253), and this is exemplified in such analyses as that of a passage in Richard II cited below; but it is most prominent in his account of Hamlet, a character with whom Coleridge had a special affinity, as Henry Crabb Robinson noted after attending Lecture 12, commenting sardonically that it was an elegy on Coleridge himself, as the lecturer ended with his striking account of Hamlet’s inability to act: ‘No intellect however grand is valuable if it draw us from action & lead us to think and think till the time of action is passed by and we can do nothing’ (LL I. 391). In later courses Coleridge returned to these plays, and also added The Winter’s Tale and Othello in 1812, and in 1818–19 King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and Troilus and Cressida. In these late courses of lectures he developed his innovatory technique of ‘particular and practical Criticism’ dealing with a range of Shakespeare’s plays. The first lecture in the 1818–19 course was advertised as a discussion of The Tempest and Coleridge chose this play no doubt because ‘It addresses itself entirely to the imaginative faculty’ and he aimed to show that although dramatic illusion might be ‘assisted by the effect on the senses of the complicated scenery and decorations of modern times, . . . the principal and only genuine excitement ought to come from within’ (LL II. 268). His close readings of the texts in this course were thus connected with his theory of dramatic illusion as he went on to speak with the text in front of him, basing his comments on brief notes written on the pages interleaved in his copy of the edition of Shakespeare by Samuel Ayscough (1807). There is no way of knowing how he developed at length most of his commentaries, for the few brief newspaper reports offer little help, but the notes he made are continually interesting and original in their attentiveness to detail and perceptive analysis of language in relation to character.

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From his early series Coleridge moved easily between the general and the particular, sometimes zooming in on a line, and image, or a detail of the action, with a penetrating comment on the play of meaning in the dialogue. So for example Lecture 12 in the 1811–12 series he cites Bolingbroke’s (or Bullingbrook’s) lines on arriving at Berkeley Castle to learn that Richard II is within its walls. He calls on Northumberland to deliver a message: Noble lord, Go to the rude ribs of that ancient castle; Through brazen trumpet send the breath of parley Into his ruin’d ears, and thus deliver: Henry Bullingbrook [On both his knees] doth kiss King Richard’s hand, And sends allegiance and true faith of heart To his most royal person; . . . (3.3.31–8) Coleridge noticed the slippage between the castle and Richard in ‘his ruin’d ears’, the pronoun ‘his’ showing that ‘altho Bolingbroke was only speaking of the castle his thoughts dwelt on Richard the King’ (LL I. 384). In spite of his protestations he knows and means to exploit Richard’s ruin. The point is missed in many modern editions: the Riverside, second edition (1997) glosses ‘its ruin’d ears’ as ‘its (the castle’s) ruined loopholes’, and in the Norton Shakespeare (1997), the phrase is explained as ‘its battered loopholes’. The modern editors miss the psychological subtlety Coleridge noticed. He also drew attention to the suggestion of self-importance in ‘Bullingbrook’ stretching his name into the equivalent of a blank verse line. It was, however, only in his late lectures that he fully realized what was new and exciting about his critical approach, and he probed more deeply in relation to Richard II, observing, for instance, how the rhymes that end Bolingbroke’s accusations against Mowbray in the opening scene show he has planned his part in advance, and ‘well express the preconcertedness of Bolingbroke’s Scheme, so beautifully contrasted with the vehemence and sincere irritation of Mowbray’ (LL II. 284) in the opening scene. In this way he showed how attention to rhymes provides an insight into the characters of these challengers. Coleridge went on to consider other uses of rhyme in the play, and to demonstrate how their mode of speech reveals aspects of the characters of Richard and Gaunt especially. He also brilliantly observes how the Queen’s foreboding about being parted from her ‘sweet Richard’ in 2.2 illustrates the character of Richard, who is no ‘vulgar Debauchee’,

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but rather displays a ‘wantonness in feminine shew, feminine friendism, intensely Woman-like love of those immediately about him – mistaking the delight of being loved by him for a love for him’ (LL II. 287). In this comment on Richard as in his the remark on Bolingbroke Coleridge was driven to invent terms (‘preconcertedness’, ‘friendism’) to explain what he meant. He devoted two of his late lectures to Hamlet, one to the first two acts, with an analysis of the character of the hero, then recommencing ‘the particular Criticism’ (LL II. 301) or detailed commentary on the text. This offers many insights about the way the text prepares the audience for the development of the play, and again Coleridge felt a need to introduce new terms, as in his comment on Horatio as representative of the ignorance of the audience in the first scene, when he asks, ‘has this THING appeared again to-night?’ Coleridge pointed out that the words ‘thing’ and ‘again’ have a ‘credibilizing effect’ before the Ghost turns out to be no thing but indeed an ‘intelligent Spirit’ (LL II. 295). The presence of ‘Flesh and Blood Sympathists’, Coleridge argued, helps to create a double effect in the appearance of the Ghost: ‘This accrescence of Objectivity in a Ghost that yet retains all its ghostly attributes & fearful Subjectivity, is truly wonderful’ (LL II. 299). Here the lecturer introduced more new terms in ‘Sympathists’ and ‘accrescence’, having coined ‘subjectivity’ previously. The remaining lectures were devoted mainly to the major tragedies, and in these too Coleridge introduced coinages of words he found necessary to explain particular effects. In discussing Macbeth Coleridge saw the Witches as invoking the imagination in contrast to the opening of Hamlet, which moves from simple forms of conversation to ‘the language of impassioned Intellect’ (LL II. 305), and went on, coining another term, to show how Macbeth’s character is revealed through the ‘unpossessedness of Banquo’s mind, wholly present to the present Object’ (LL II. 306). While Banquo is unconcerned by the appearance of the witches and openly curious, Macbeth reveals his anxious state of mind (‘Good sir, why do you start and seem to fear / Things that do sound so fair?’ 1. 3. 51). Here Macbeth betrays ‘the guilt in its Germ anterior to the supposed cause & immediate temptation’ (LL II. 307). Banquo’s mind, Coleridge said, is ‘wholly present to the present Object – an unsullied, unscarified Mirror’, ‘unscarified’ being another new word. Other coinages include ‘presentimental’, or conveying some feeling relating to future events (as in Duncan’s response to the news of the death of Cawdor in Macbeth, 1. 4: ‘There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face’). His need to invent a new critical vocabulary relates to the novelty of Coleridge’s analysis in these lectures, which prompted

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one sympathetic reviewer in the Courier to write: ‘He appears to us, to have studied our great Bard with an intensity of the reasoning faculties, and at the same time with a fervor and sensibility of poetical feeling which rarely unite in the same person. He has opened to himself an entirely new path’ (LL II. 334). The commentary on Othello is especially notable for the analysis of Iago’s character, as revealed in his exchanges with Roderigo in the early scenes, showing ‘the coolness of a preconceiving Experimenter’ (LL II. 313), and at the same time revealing ‘the dread of contempt’ in someone who has his ‘keenest pleasure’ in contempt of others. As noted earlier, Coleridge also vigorously defended the unity of the play against Dr Johnson, who wished the play had begun with Act 2 in Cyprus. In King Lear Edmund especially intrigued Coleridge, as possessing admirable qualities, courage, intellect and strength of character, and at the same time a viciousness that can be explained, if not justified, through the voice of his father, Gloucester. His insensitive comments bring out the shame of Edmund’s bastardy and his being sent away for his education. Lear himself Coleridge saw as embodying old age: ‘Old age, like Infancy, is itself a character – in Lear the natural imperfections increased by life-long habits of being promptly obeyed’: so his faults become the ‘means and aggravations of his Sufferings & his Daughters’ ingratitude’ and increase our pity for him (LL II. 330, 332–3). Coleridge wound up his lectures on Shakespeare with another commentary on Romeo and Juliet, and a final lecture speculating on the chronology of the plays, but ending with a discussion of Troilus and Cressida. A reviewer in the New Times newspaper quoted what the lecturer said about Thersites, expanding Coleridge’s own note, which refers to the way the heroes of paganism in the play are translated into ‘Knights of Christian Chivalry’, but does not, as the reviewer reports, describe the characters as ‘all Gothic faces, and in Gothic drapery, each intensely filling the space it occupies’ (LL II. 379). This description helps to explain why Coleridge saw the play as a ‘grand History-piece in the robust style of Albert Dürer’ (LL II. 378). This newspaper report gives some idea of the way Coleridge elaborated and developed his notes when lecturing. In his lectures he commented in detail on about a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays and did not attempt a systematic overall view. This was not, as Hazlitt insultingly said in conversation at a gathering at Charles Lamb’s house in 1811, because Coleridge had not read the works and knew no more than the excerpts printed in Elegant Extracts – indeed, Coleridge chose to dwell on a selection of favourites in his lectures in order to demonstrate Shakespeare’s artistry in the way the early scenes, as he said, contain the ‘germ of all the after events’ (LL I. 559).

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The records of Coleridge’s lectures are frequently sketchy and never better than incomplete. He published only two formal essays on Shakespeare, the essay on method in The Friend, the periodical he edited in 1809–10, the other on Shakespeare’s poetry, worked up from lecture notes for Biographia Literaria, Chapter 15. In his other works there are many scattered comments on Shakespeare, especially in his letters, notebooks and in the records of his Table-Talk. However, most of his innovative and original Shakespeare criticism has to be recovered from notes and the reports of people who attended the lectures. This explains some of its limitations, such as the lack of a sustained argument. He has little to say on the comedies, and his sense of Ophelia as lacking what he called outjuttings (LL II. 351), as having no edge to her character, or being free from faults, was related to his perception of other heroines such as Miranda, Imogen and Queen Katherine in Henry VIII as possessing ‘the exquisite harmony of all the parts of the moral being constituting one living total of head and heart’ (LL II. 270).However, his comments on the nurse in Romeo and Juliet and on Lady Macbeth show a much deeper understanding of female characters. He enlisted Shakespeare as a patriot gentleman in opposition to Napoleon, and came to envisage him as a ‘philosophical aristocrat, who treated the mob with “affectionate superiority,”’ and had ‘a profound veneration for the established institutions of society’ (LL II. 272–3). At times he relied on Schlegel too casually for a snap judgement, as when, in a lecture hurriedly put on at short notice in 1813, he said he could not remember a single pun in Macbeth, echoing a remark by Schlegel in his Lecture 27 that he found no example of wordplay in this text (LL I. 572; DKL II. 134). In his 1811–12 lecture Coleridge had vigorously defended Shakespeare’s use of puns (LL I. 293). In spite of such limitations and the fragmentary nature of his criticism Coleridge summed up his original insights in a memorable way, so that his formulations remain a challenge or stimulus to later critics. He was especially attentive to the subtleties of Shakespeare’s poetic language, and to the way the plays grow from the opening scenes into a unified whole. Perhaps it is as well that none of his lectures is recoverable in its totality, for they were not designed for publication, but developed for the occasion, and involved the personality of the speaker in direct engagement with his subject. Some deplored his spontaneity (LL II. 338), but his doctor, James Gillman, commented that ‘In his lectures he was brilliant, fluent and rapid; his words seemed to flow as from a person repeating with grace and energy some delightful poem’ (LL II. 250). After Coleridge the most important Shakespeare criticism of the Romantic period was that of William Hazlitt, who was decidedly hostile to Coleridge when he published in 1817 his Characters

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of Shakespeare, and ignored him while praising Schlegel and criticizing Dr Johnson at length in his preface. Hazlitt’s commentaries provide important accounts of plays such as Cymbeline which Coleridge hardly touched on, and his readings of some other plays offer a fresh perspective in the light of Hazlitt’s radical political bias, notably in his account of Henry V as an ‘amiable monster’ and of Coriolanus as a celebration of ‘the insolence of power’ (Hazlitt IV. 215, 286). Hazlitt may be innovatory in reappraising these plays in relation to the politics of his own age, but in his general critical methods he seems old-fashioned in relation to Coleridge. He goes through all the plays one by one, is judgemental, includes long quotations to illustrate beauties, is much concerned with the ruling passion in leading characters and shows no interest in what was central for Coleridge, the organic growth of the plays from the opening scenes. It is significant that the works Coleridge used to demonstrate Shakespeare’s poetic genius from the beginnings of his career, his early poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, are dismissed by Hazlitt as ‘a couple of ice-houses. They are about as hard, as glittering, and as cold’ (Hazlitt IV. 358). He also had little time for Love’s Labour’s Lost, observing, ‘If we were to part with any of the author’s comedies, it should be this’ (Hazlitt IV. 332). This was the play with which Coleridge began his commentary on plays in 1811, thinking of it as the earliest of Shakespeare’s dramas, but as already displaying the dramatist’s genius as in ‘The wonderful activity of Thoughts throughout the whole first Scene’ (LL I. 265). Hazlitt was more systematic, conveyed an enthusiasm which fired Keats, but he relied on quoting long passages and tended to move towards generalities. Coleridge differed from him in his critical practice also in scorning the theatrical conditions of the age, the prominence given to stars like Kemble and Mrs Siddons, while other parts were ‘usurped by fellows who owed their very elevation to dexterity in snuffing candles’ (LL I. 254), and the emphasis on spectacle. Dramatic illusion, as Coleridge defined it, could work for the reader as well as the viewer, and he increasingly focused on the language of the plays as shaping character and imaginative coherence, so that he came to think that the best criticism should be concerned with particulars. In his notes for his lecture on Macbeth in 1819 he remarked on the ‘easily satisfied mind’ of Banquo in interrogating the Weird Sisters, compared with Macbeth’s eagerness to find out more, and quoted from their dialogue (omitting one phrase): B. The Earth hath bubbles – Whither are they vanished? M. Into the air – and what seemed corporal melted As Breath into the wind – WOULD THEY HAD STAY’D.

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Is it too minute to notice the appropriateness of the Simile ‘As Breath’ in a cold climate? (LL II. 307) Coleridge acutely observes here how breath in a cold climate like that of Scotland may become visible as vapour, so that the image is suggestive of the location. Much earlier, in a notebook entry while reading Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake and thinking of the Edinburgh Review in 1810 he had jotted down, ‘I must not forget in speaking of the certain Hubbub, I am to undergo for hypercriticism, to point out how little instructive any criticism can be which does not enter into minutiae’ (CN III. 3971). All through the records of his lectures there are marvellous examples of incisive close readings of Shakespeare’s texts, but it was only in his late lectures that he learned to build his arguments for the power and unity of the plays from the minutiae of practical criticism. In spite of the incomplete and often scattered nature of Coleridge’s own notes and the reports of his lectures, there still remains enough to establish him as a seminal critic, indeed one of the most influential of all Shakespeare’s interpreters. As Alfred Harbage put it, ‘When we read Johnson, we think what a wonderful man Johnson is. When we read Schlegel, we think what a wonderful summary this is. When we read Coleridge we think what a wonderful artist is Shakespeare. Coleridge’s is the criticism with immediacy, the power to evoke the works criticized; when he speaks Shakespeare is there’ (Harbage 25–6).

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Notes

Chapter 9 1

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See, for instance, John Pemble’s recent book where the French failure to understand Shakespeare is also blamed on ‘the stubborn endurance of Catholicism in France’ (Shakespeare Goes to Paris: How the Bard Conquered France (London: Hambledon and London, 2005), 20. This common expression, which mocks the reactionary view that Les Lumières are to be blamed for the ills that befell the following ages, originates from the song which Gavroche, the quintessential Paris brat, sings on the barricades in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. This letter is dated 19 July 1776; similar reminders are frequent, for example, in the 1761 Appel, or in a letter to Horace Walpole dated 15 July 1768. References to Voltaire are to Theodore Besterman’s edition (1967) Voltaire on Shakespeare (Geneva: Droz, 1967), here, successively, 175, 73 and 158. Hereafter cited as VS. Quoted by F. Baldensperger in ‘Esquisse d’une histoire de Shakespeare en France’, Etudes d’histoire littéraire: second series (Paris: Hachette, 1910), 157. The translations of the French quotations are my own. Note that in the seventeenth century, comédie can refer to any play. Mme de Sévigné calls Racine’s Bajazet (1672) ‘une comédie’. This text, now generally attributed to Justus Van Effen, was published in the Journal littéraire (1717), ix, 1: 157–216. In 1716 already, his Ecrits satiriques had banished him to the provinces. See Sir Gavin de Beer and André-Michel Rousseau (eds), Voltaire’s British Visitors (Geneva: Droz, 1967), 157. Hereafter referred to as British Visitors. G. C. D. Odell, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, 2 vols (London: Constable, 1920), 1: 282. P. G. Adams, ‘How much of Shakespeare did Voltaire know?’ Shakespeare Association Bulletin 16 (1941), 126. G. Lanson, Voltaire (Paris: Hachette, 1920), 52. Bacon is hailed as the father of experimental philosophy (Letter 12), Locke as its promoter (Letter 13), and Newton is considered superior to Descartes (14 to 17). Odell, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, 1, 259–60, and J. Genest, Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830, 10 vols (Bath: Carrington, 1832), 3: 185–246. T. R. Lounsbury, Shakespeare and Voltaire (London: David Nutt, 1902), 66. Lounsbury’s very informative but often adverse study has sometimes been considered as responsible for Voltaire’s discredit among English-speaking

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Shakespeareans. Theodore Besterman, for instance, the editor of the prestigious Oxford edition of Voltaire’s Works, describes the book as ‘insensitive and intemperate’ (VS 11, n. 1). See Abbe J. B. Le Blanc, Letters on the English and French Nations, 2 vols (London: J. Brindley, 1747), 2: 77. See For example, a letter to P. R. Le Cornier de Cideville, dated 3 November 1735 (VS 55). Both articles were presented as translated from the English and are believed to have been written by the Abbé Prévost. This was published in La gazette littéraire on 4 April 1764 (VS 85–9) P. A. de La Place, Le Théâtre anglois, 8 vols (Discours sur le théâtre anglois, 1, i–cxi; London: n. p., 1746–9), 1: cxi. Hereafter cited as Discours. See in particular the beginning of his letter of 3 September 1776, in which he plans the printing of his discourse to the Academy (VS 211). ‘Il faut faire voir à ces tristes et insolens Anglois, que nos gens de lettres savent mieux se battre contre eux que nos soldats et nos généraux. Malheureusement il y a parmi ces gens de lettres bien des déserteurs et des faux frères’ [we must show these wretched and insolent English that our Men of Letters can fight against them better than our soldiers and generals. Unfortunately, there are many deserters and traitors among these men of letters], d’Alembert replies to Voltaire whom he calls his general (VS 180 n.). This was published in 1770 in the second volume of his Questions sur l’encyclopédie. Samuel Foote, The Roman and English Comedy Consider’d and Compar’d; Arthur Murphy, Essays on Shakespeare (1753–4). Horace Walpole, Second Preface to The Castle of Otranto (1765). All quoted in Brian Vickers (ed.), Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 6 vols (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974–81), successively, 3: 222 and 4: 90–4 and 548–9. For Dr Johnson’s Preface, see W. K. Wimsatt (ed.), Dr Johnson on Shakespeare (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 61. Elizabeth Montagu, Essay on the writings and genius of Shakespear, compared with the Greek and French Dramatic Poets, with some remarks upon the misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire (London, 1769), 214 and 218. ‘I do not pretend, as Mr Voltaire does, to make the reader a judge of the stile of Corneille by my translation’, she adds (220). As in his 1763 treatise on tolerance (Traité sur la Tolérance) or through his combat in favour of a number of victims of religious fanaticism. ‘Discours sur la tragédie’ in Voltaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Louis Moland, 52 vols (Paris: Garnier, 1877–85), 1: 311–25. Lettre à la Marquise du Deffand (VS 62). Stendhal’s Racine et Shakespeare II, published in 1825, is a politico-literary pamphlet which uses Shakespeare as a positive ‘romantic’ pole opposed to an ‘academic’ theatre hampered by its use of alexandrines and its strict observance of the unities. Reference to the Pont-Neuf was derogatory from the seventeenth century, as indicated by this line in Boileau’s Art poétique: ‘Et laissons le burlesque aux plaisants du Pont-Neuf [Let us leave farce to the entertainers of the Pont-Neuf.].’ ‘L’honnête homme éclairé’ is another definition of the acceptable spectator.

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Their private taste did not always correspond to the critics’ prescriptions and performances of libertine scenes graced many a society dinner. After Mme Châtelet’s death, Voltaire lived mainly at ‘Les Délices’, in Switzerland, from 1755 to 1760, and then in Ferney, on French territory, almost until his death in 1778. From then on, Voltaire did not spare him, making fun of L’Émile, Rousseau’s treatise on education, and turning to ridicule the return to nature which it advocates: ‘One feels like walking on all fours when one reads your book. [Il prend envie de marcher à quatre pattes, quand on lit votre ouvrage]’, he wrote to Rousseau on 30 August 1755 (Correspondance, ed. Th. Besterman, 13 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1977–92), 4: Letter 4183. On play-acting at Ferney, see the testimony of John Conyers in a letter dated August 1765 (British Visitors, 114–15). Voltaire, Le siècle de Louis XIV (Paris, 1752; reprinted Librairie générale française, 2005), 747. This letter, dated 15 July 1768, is a reply to the preface of The Castle of Otranto (VS 158; see n. 22). ‘Les porteurs de chaises, les matelots, les fiacres, les courtauds de boutique, les bouchers, les clercs même, aiment beaucoup ces spectacles; donnez-leur des combats de coqs, ou de taureaux. . . . des gibets, des sortilèges, des revenants, ils y courent en foule.’ Lettre à l’Académie française (VS 201). He refers to his translation as being imitated in French with the precautions demanded by a nation excessively punctilious on the subject of bienséances [(ce monologue) . . . qu’on a imité en français avec les ménagements qu’exige une nation scrupuleuse à l’excès sur les bienséances.] ‘Art dramatique’ (VS 167). His translation of ‘ . . . that the Everlasting had not fixed / His canon ‘gainst selfslaughter’ by ‘Oh! Si l’Etre éternel n’avait pas du canon / Contre le suicide!’, is one of his rare errors of comprehension; he may also have missed the gravedigger’s pun on Adam ‘carrying arms’, since he translates it by ‘les armes’, without an explanatory footnote. Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1864), 454. Lettres de J. F. Ducis, par M. Paul Albert (Paris: G. Jousset, 1879), 7–8. A scanned image of the fifth reprint of the Gogué edition (Paris: Ruault, 1789) can be consulted on www. hamletworks.org. For a more detailed analysis of Ducis’s play, see my article, ‘The mouse and the urn: re-visions of Shakespeare from Voltaire to Ducis’, Shakespeare Survey 60 (2007): 214–22. ‘Pourquoi aucune pièce de Shakespeare n’a-t-elle pu passer la mer? C’est que le bon est recherché de toutes les nations.’ (VS 61) ; ‘On n’a jamais représenté, sur aucun théâtre étranger, aucune des pièces de Shakespeare.’ (VS 206) In 1821, François Guizot published a revised edition of Le Tourneur’s translations which included the Poems. The Sonnets were only included in the 1871 re-edition. In the ‘Préface pour la nouvelle traduction de Shakespeare,’ which concludes his William Shakespeare (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1864), Hugo insists, with his usual rhetoric, that the true translator should evade nothing, omit nothing, blunt nothing,

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conceal nothing: ‘traduire réellement . . . c’est ne rien éluder, ne rien omettre, ne rien amortir, ne rien cacher’ (456). ‘La traduction que l’on donne ici de ce César, est la plus fidèle, & même la seule fidèle qu’on ait jamais faite en notre langue d’un poète ancien, ou étranger’ (VS 95). The words are used in a letter to D’Alembert (VS 180), as well as in a letter to La Harpe (VS 180), both written in August 1776. ‘Sachez que les Français, contre lesquels vous vous déchaînez, admettent le simple, et non le bas et le grossier’ (VS 168). His lectures, later published in his 18-volume Lycée, ou Cours de littérature ancienne et moderne (1797) put forward a reactionary defence of an aristocratic theatre. Quoted in P. Van Tieghem, Le préromantisme, 3: La découverte de Shakespeare sur le continent (Paris: Sfelt, 1947), 3: 194. This was published in English; the French Essai sur la poésie épique (1733) is already less advanced in its views. Le siècle, 738. Voltaire repeats the same idea in his Commentaire sur Corneille, published in 1764. Voltaire considered at the time that taste could vary from country to country, since this first chapter was entitled ‘Des différents goûts des peuples’. ‘[L]’amour est insipide dans presque toutes ses pièces [Love is insipid in almost all his plays],’ he writes in the article on ‘Goût’ which was first published in 1771, in volume vi of the Questions sur l’encyclopédie (VS 169), but he goes on to say that Corneille is still infinitely superior to Shakespeare in matters of taste. Foote, Roman and English Comedy, see n. 22. Conversely, F. C. Green controverts this accusation in his first Appendix, A Critical Study of French and English Ideas in the Eighteenth Century (London: Dent, 1935), 467–70. Le Blanc, Letters, 2: 77. Letter 59 (2: 75–89) censures both the gravediggers and Ophelia’s scenes of madness. Lettres de Ducis, 7–8. Wieland published his translation of twenty-four plays between 1762 and 1766. The Tempest was performed in 1761. See Roger Paulin, The Critical Reception of Shakespeare in Germany 1682–1914 (Hildesheim, Zurich, New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2003), 113–15, and Christine Roger’s contribution to the chapter on Schlegel in this volume. La Place had included Cymbeline and Les Femmes de bonne humeur ou les Commères de Windsor in his anthology. Addison’s article was published in The Spectator 46. The journal, which was very influential in England between 1711 and 1714, was translated into French and published irregularly at Amsterdam from 1714 as Le Spectateur ou le Socrate moderne, 7 vols (Amsterdam: Wetstein & Smith). J. G. Robertson explains that, partly because it was often abbreviated, it was not an effective vehicle for spreading knowledge of Shakespeare. See ‘The knowledge of Shakespeare on the Continent at the beginning of the eighteenth century’, MLR 1 (1905): 316. Victor Hugo, Cromwell (1827; reprinted Paris: Nelson, 1949), 68. Ibid., 28. Hugo, Shakespeare, 226, 228. Ibid., 297.

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Hugo claims that he topped the old dictionary with the legendary red cap worn by revolutionaries (‘Je mis un bonnet rouge au vieux dictionnaire: / Je nommai le cochon par son nom; pourquoi pas ?’). The poem, entitled ‘Réponse à un acte d’accusation’ [In Answer to An Indictment], was published in Les Contemplations in 1856. Hugo, Shakespeare, 223. This title refers to the Théâtre des Funambules, originally reserved for tight-rope walkers, which was later popularized by Jacques Prévert and Marcel Carné’s 1945 film, Les Enfants du Paradis. This was published in 1842 in La revue de Paris; quoted in Anne Ubersfeld, Théophile Gautier (Paris: Stock, 1992), 225. See Théophile Gautier, Histoire de l’art dramatique en France depuis vingt-cinq ans (Paris, 1859), 285 and 263. Published in ‘Shakespeare et les Français’ (1959), Nouvelles réflexions sur le théâtre (Paris, 1959), 116–28.

Chapter 10 1

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Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. H. H. Houben (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1913), 30 March 1824. Hereafter cited as Eckermann, with date of letter. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Werke (‘Hamburger Ausgabe’), ed. Erich Trunz, 14 vols (Munich: Beck, 1981), 9: 492–3. Hereafter cited as HA. Kurt Ermann, Goethes Shakespeare-Bild, Studien zur deutschen Literatur 76 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1983), 7. The closest comparison might be with Johann Christian Günther (1695–1723), a short-lived Catullan ingénu two generations prior to Goethe: largely overlooked these days, but certainly read and admired by Goethe and fondly remembered in Poetry and Truth (2. 7; HA 9: 264–5). William Shakespear’s Schauspiele, 13 vols (Zurich: Orell, Gessner, Füessli, 1775–82). [Elizabeth, Montagu] Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear Compared with the Greek and French Dramatic Poets, with some remarks upon the Misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire. Johann Gottfried Herder, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan, 33 vols (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–1913), 5: 211. Hereafter cited as SWS. Justus Möser (1720–94): statesman, lawyer, historian and commentator on politics and literature. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Briefe (‘Hamburger Ausgabe’), ed. K. R. Mandelkow (Munich 1988), 1: 133. Hereafter cited as HABr. This and many of the following comparisons have been noted by Jakob Minor and August Sauer, ‘Die zwei ältesten Bearbeitingen des Götz von Berlichingen’ in Studien zur Goethe-Philologie (Vienna: Konegen, 1880), 237–92. We hear in All’s Well That Ends Well: ‘my heart / Durst make too bold a herald of my tongue’ (5. 3. 45–6); in Much Ado About Nothing, ‘Silence is the perfectest heralt of joy’ (2. 1. 306); the king’s colour comes ‘Like heralds ’twixt two dreadful battles set’ in King John (4. 2. 78).

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‘Comets, importing change of times and states, / Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky’ (1. 1. 2–3). ‘Briefe an einen jungen Dichter. Dritter Brief’, in Der Teutsche Merkur (March 1784): 239 ff.; trans. Timothy J. Chamberlain, in H. B. Nisbet (ed.), Eighteenth Century German Criticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 237. Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 271. Walter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Individualism. An Original Study: Essays on Shakespeare and Goethe, Hegel and Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud, Jaspers, Heidegger, and Toynbee (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 40–3. Hamlet, 2. 2. 303–8. Letter of 6 December, 1772; Benjamin Bennett, ‘Goethe’s Werther: double perspective and the game of life’, German Quarterly 53 (1980): 64–78 (70). T. S. Eliot, ‘Hamlet and his Problems’, in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1921), 95. Eliot similarly accuses Coleridge of making ‘a Coleridge’ of Hamlet. Goethe himself refers it to an English ballad, probably the ‘Lucy and Colin’ written by Addison’s friend Tickell, the original of the ballad which Herder included as ‘Röschen und Kolin’ among his Volkslieder collection (SWS 25: 180–2), though in fact it does not parallel much of Goethe’s content in Act 5. Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age; vol. 1: The Poetry of Desire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 284. Ist es ein flüchtiger Fürst wie im Ardenner-Wald?/Soll ich Verirrter hier in den verschlungnen Gründen/Die Geister Shakespeares gar verkörpert finden?/Ja, der Gedanke führt mich eben recht:/Sie sind es selbst, wo nicht ein gleich Geschlecht! (Ilmenau, am 3. September 1783, 52–6; HA 1: 108) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Werke, herausgegeben im Auftrage der Grossherzogin Sophie von Sachsen (‘Weimarer Ausgabe’), (Weimar: Böhlau, 1887– 1919), 1. 53. 94–6. Hereafter cited as WA. This is recorded in the memoirs of the pastrycook-become-court-actor Eduard Franz Genast (cited by Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 217); Genast was a gravedigger in Goethe’s first two productions of Hamlet. Goethes Gespräche. Gesamtausgabe, ed. Flodoard Freiherr von Biedermann, 5 vols (Leipzig: Biedermann, 1909), 1: 53. Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 59–62. Flodoard von Biedermann, Goethe-Forschungen (Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening, 1879), 173; Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 55. 11 August 1787, to Duke Carl August (HABr 2: 63). Friedrich Schiller, Schillers Werke: Nationalausgabe, ed. Julius Petersen and Gerhard Fricke (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1943 ), 22: 199–209. Hereafter cited as Schiller. T. J. Reed, The Classical Centre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 52–3. See preface to Voltaire’s Brutus (1730); influence is also detectable in Cassius’s speech in Act II of La Mort de César (1735). Daniel Jacoby, ‘Zu Goethes Egmont. 1: Egmont und Shakespeares Julius Cäsar’, Goethe-Jahrbuch 12 (1891): 247–52 (252). The earliest actual mention of the novel is in a diary entry of 16 February 1777 (WA 3. 1. 34), though a reference, in a letter of 1773 (HABr 1: 152), to ‘slow’ work on a novel may well also refer to Wilhelm Meister material.

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Although his utterances at the time were more circumspect, Goethe’s later remarks, such as his acquiescence (in the 3 May 1827 conversation with Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 497–8) in Ampère’s view of this part of his career, confirm this assessment. Boyle, Goethe, 1: 386. Marvin Carlson, Goethe and the Weimar Theatre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 49; Boyle, Goethe, 1: 400. Caspar Goethe, though not a trader himself, had been a jurist and honorary imperial counsellor living comfortably on the proceeds of his father’s winetrading business. Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 118. The general tendency of the interpretation to ‘goetheanize, meisterize, wertherize, egmontize’, Hamlet is neatly diagnosed by Gustav Landauer in Shakespeare. Dargestellt in Vorträgen. ed. Martin Buber, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening, 1923), 1: 208–14. 11 October 1767, HABr 1: 62; as Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild notes (119), Goethe’s remark there is an explicit epanorthosis on Hamlet 1. 2. 146. Heufeld’s prim, draconian and – even compared with its already truncated Wieland original – extensively mutilated Hamlet was first staged in Vienna in 1773, and was widely used in the years thereafter. Detailed assessment in Simon Williams, Shakespeare on the German Stage, vol. 1: 1596–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 70–2. The earliest of these seems to be Goethe himself, implicitly referring to Hamlet in No End of Shakespeare: ‘a desire which exceeds the powers of the individual, is modern’ (HA 12: 294). It was mentioned in a letter of December 1785 to Charlotte von Stein (WA 4. 7. 138). ‘Frauenrollen auf dem Römischen Theater durch Männer gespielt’ refers to the ‘pleasure of seeing not the thing itself but its imitation, being entertained not by nature but by art’, and Goethe implements this in ‘Rules for Actors’, especially in the last paragraph where he reminds the actor ‘that it is supposed to be an imitative spectacle and not an unadorned reality’. Goethe, Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, ‘Münchner Ausgabe’, ed. Karl Richter et al. (Munich: Hanser, 1985–98), 3. 2. 175 and 6. 2. 703–45. Schiller similarly rails against the artless imitation of nature (Schiller 29: 56–9, 179). Simon Williams rightly draws attention to the political principle behind these views (German Stage, 1: 90–2). Carlson, Goethe and the Weimar Theatre, 72. In a letter to Herder of May 1794, Goethe admitted to revising the novel not in order to make a good job of it, but rather to ‘get it, as a pseudo-confession, off my chest’ (HABr 2: 176). Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age; vol. 2: Revolution and Renunciation (Oxford; Clarendon, 2000), 235. David Roberts, The Indirections of Desire: Hamlet in Goethe’s ‘Wilhelm Meister’ (Heidelberg: Winter, 1980), 33, 60, 111–12, 120–7; Roger Paulin, ‘Shakespeare 1564–1616’ in Goethe-Handbuch, ed. Bernd Witte et al., 4 vols in 5 (Weimar, Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996–8), 4. 2: 985; Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 118 ff.; even the more cautious Mark Evan Bonds, ‘Die Funktion des Hamlet-Motivs in Wilhelm

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Meisters Lehrjahre’, Goethe Jahrbuch 96 (1979): 101–10, and R. Ellis Dye, ‘Wilhelm Meister and Hamlet, identity and difference’, in Goethe Yearbook: Publications of the Goethe Society of North America 6 (1992): 67–85, contribute to the comparison. ‘[T]hat “Hamlet” was to be staged in full and unmutilated’ (Apprenticeship Years 5. 4, HA 7: 293). Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 158–164. HA 7: 273; Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 155. Apprenticeship Years 5. 4; HA 7: 298. In contrast, current statistics reveal that Shakespeare is far and away the most frequently staged playwright in twenty-first-century German theatre. Karl S. Guthke, ‘Schiller, Shakespeare und das Theater der Grausamkeit’, in Roger Paulin (ed.), Shakespeare im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 181–94 (183); Schiller’s familiarity with the text of the English originals was limited to a handful of passages: his knowledge of English was far poorer than Goethe’s. Guthke, ‘Schiller, Shakespeare und das Theater der Grausamkeit’, 181–94. Boyle, Goethe, 2: 648. A. W. Schlegel in June 1797 (WA 3. 2. 73ff.), the Weimar librarian Riemer (1774– 1835) in 1806 (WA 3. 3. 121), and others in March 1811 (WA 3. 4. 188); see Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 274–5. Calculated by G. R. Hauschild (1907), cit. Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 277. See also Heinrich Huesmann, Shakespeare-Inszenierungen unter Goethe in Weimar, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-historische Klasse, 258. 2 (Graz, Vienna, Cologne: Böhlau, 1968), 157–9. Thus, for example, in the letter to Caroline von Wolzogen of 28 June 1812 (WA 4. 22. 246). Thus in the letter of 28 June 1812 (WA 4. 22. 246) to Wolzogen, and in the letter of 13 February 1813 to C. F. von Reinhard (HABr 3: 177). William Jacob, A View of the Agriculture, Manufactures, Statistics, and State of Society of Germany, and Parts of Holland and France, Taken During a Journey through those countries in 1819 (London: John Murray, 1820), 220. A. W. Schlegel is among the ‘knowledgeable men’ to whom Goethe refers in his deprecation of the English theatre (No End of Shakespeare, HA 12: 298). For the ‘ASTONISHING’ depth and accuracy of this knowledge, and Tieck’s firsthand intimacy with the vast swathe of other central and western European literature, we have Coleridge’s spellbound testimony of 1817: Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956–71), 4: 744. HA 12: 290; ‘but they are indeed human individuals, fundamentally so, and on such characters a Roman toga may also fit.’ Even A. W. Schlegel, as late as 1808 acquiesced in the excision of certain moments of humour that were incompatible with contemporary audience sensibilities. Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, Lecture 28. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Eduard Böcking, 12 vols (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1846–7), 6: 186–90; Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 322.

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These are assembled at HA 8: 572–8; the Tag- und Jahreshefte for 1807 refer to the Wanderjahre as ‘little stories strung together by a romantic thread’, which are meant to form ‘a marvellously attractive whole’. Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 209–11. Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, Act V, Scene 1. Stuart Atkins, Goethe’s Faust: A Literary Analysis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 6, 58, 276; Ronald Gray, Goethe: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 165–71. A ‘theatre master’ (i.e. scenery builder) appears at the beginning of the Walpurgis Night’s Dream (4223–6), and Mephistopheles himself acts as ‘prompt’ in the mumchance at the emperor’s court at the beginning of Part 2 (4955). Faust 239–42; compare Henry V, Prologue 12. Faust, 3682–9 (‘Was machst du mir / Vor Liebchens Tür,/ Kathrinchen, hier / Bei frühem Tagesblicke? Laß, laß es sein! / Er läßt dich ein, / Als Mädchen ein, / Als Mädchen nicht zurücke.’) Schlegel substituted ‘Sankt Kathrin’ for Shakespeare’s ‘Saint Charity’ in the following strophe. Eckermann, 18 January 1825. Faust, 4231–50. ‘Shakespeare’, trans. Joyce Crick, modified by Barry Nisbet, in Eighteenth Century German Criticism, ed. by Timothy J. Chamberlain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 161. ‘Wenn ich sagen könnte, was ich alles großen Vorgängern und Mitlebenden schuldig geworden bin, so bliebe nicht viel übrig’. (Eckermann, 12 May 1825) L. A. Willoughby noted this rationale for Goethe’s choice here in ‘Goethe looks at the English’, MLR 50. 4 (Oct. 1955): 464–84 (476). Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 327. Piero Weiss, ‘Verdi and the Fusion of Genres’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 5. 1 (Spring 1982): 138–156 (139). Lacy Collison-Morley, Shakespeare in Italy (Stratford-upon-Avon, UK: Shakespeare Head Press, 1916), 98–150; Paul van Tieghem, Le Préromantisme: Études d’histoire littéraire européenne, III: La Découverte de Shakespeare sur le continent (Paris: Sfelt, 1947). Weiss, ‘Verdi and the Fusion of Genres’, 141.

Chapter 11 1

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3

Christine Roger is the author of the first section of this chapter, ‘The Reception of Shakespeare in Germany 1682–1785’ (pp. 92–103), and Roger Paulin of the second, ‘August Wilhelm Schlegel and the Romantic Shakespeare’ (pp. 103–127). [Christoph Martin Wieland], Shakespear Theatralische Werke. Aus dem Englischen übersezt von Herrn Wieland [ . . . ], 8 vols (Zurich: Orell Gessner, 1762–6). On this see Albert Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: an Account of English Actors in Germany and the Netherlands and of the Plays

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7 8

9

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11

12

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14 15

16

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Presented by Them During the Same Period (London: Asher, 1865), esp. 263–303; Simon Williams, Shakespeare on the German stage. Vol. 1: 1586–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 27–45. Daniel Georg Morhof, Unterricht von der Teutschen Sprache und Poesie [1682], ed. Henning Boetius, Ars Poetica. Texte 1 (Bad Homburg v.d.H: Gehlen, 1969), 110, 121, 129. J. G. Robertson, ‘The knowledge of Shakespeare on the Continent at the beginning of the eighteenth century’, MLR 1 (1906): 312–21. Gustav Becker, ‘Johann Jakob Bodmers “Sasper” ’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch 73 (1937): 139–41. See the essay by Michèle Willems in this volume. See Fritz Rau, Zur Verbreitung und Nachahmung des ‘Tatler’ und ‘Spectateur’, Anglistische Forschungen 145 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1980). Der Zuschauer. Aus dem Engeländischen übersetzet [trans. Luise Gottsched] (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1739). See Hilary Brown, ‘“Als käm sie von der Thems und von der Seyne her”: Luise Gottsched als Übersetzerin’, in Brunhilde Wehinger and Hilary Brown (eds), Übersetzungskultur im 18. Jahrhundert: Übersetzerinnen in Deutschland, Frankreich und der Schweiz (Hanover: Wehrhahn, 2008), 37–52. Texts in Hansjürgen Blinn (ed.), Shakespeare-Rezeption. Die Diskussion um Shakespeare in Deutschland. vol. 1: Ausgewählte Texte von 1741 bis 1788 ; vol. 2: Ausgewählte Texte von 1793 bis 1827 (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1982, 1988), 1: 40–1, 62–3. Subsequent references in text as Blinn: 1982, 1988. Versuch einer gebundenen Uebersetzung von dem Tode des Julius Cäsar, trans. Caspar Wilhelm von Borcke (Berlin: Haude, 1741). [Edward Young], Conjectures on Original Composition (London: Millar and Dodsley, 1759), 12. See Roger Paulin, The Critical Reception of Shakespeare in Germany 1682–1914. Native Literature and Foreign Genius, Anglistische und Amerikanistische Texte und Studien 11 (Hildesheim, Zurich, New York: Olms, 2003), 49–53. In the Spectator essay ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’, Tuesday, July 1 1712. See Roger Bauer, ‘“The fairy way of writing”. Von Shakespeare zu Wieland und Tieck’, in Roger Bauer et al. (eds.), Das Shakespeare-Bild in Europa zwischen Aufklärung und Romantik, Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik. Reihe A: Kongressberichte 22 (Berne, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Paris: Peter Lang, 1988), 143–61. [Christlob Mylius], ‘Des Herrn Voltaire Gedanken über Trauer- und Lustspiele der Engländer, aus seinen Briefen über die Engländer, übersetzt’, Beyträge zur Historie und Aufnahme des Theaters. Erstes Stück (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1750), 96–136. Neue Erweiterungen der Erkenntis und des Vergnügens, 9 vols (Frankfurt, Leipzig: Lankisch, 1753–9), 4. Stück (1753), 275–97. Ibid. 39. Stück (1756). See Paulin, The Critical Reception, 90–2. [Simon Grynäus], Neue Probstücke der englischen Schaubühne, aus der Ursprache übersetzet von einem Liebhaber des guten Geschmacks (Basel: Schorndorff, 1758). See Balz Engler, ‘Was bedeutet es, Shakespeare zu übersetzen? Die erste deutsche Fassung von Romeo and Juliet’, in Roger Paulin (ed.), Shakespeare im 18. Jahrhundert, Das achtzehnte Jahrhundet. Supplementa 13 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 39–47.

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Notes 21

22

23

24

25

26

27 28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

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[Pierre Antoine de La Place], Le Théâtre anglois, 8 vols (London [Paris]: n.p. 1746–9). See Sabine Kob, Wielands Shakespeare-Übersetzung. Ihre Entstehung und ihre Rezeption im Sturm und Drang, Europäische Hochschulschriften, Reihe XIV, 365 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2000); Dieter Martin, ‘Le Shakespeare de Wieland entre lecteur et spectateur’, in Christine Roger (ed.), Shakespeare vu d’Allemagne et de France des lumières au romantisme, Revue Germanique Internationale 5 (2007) (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2007), 109–20. Manfred Fuhrmann, ‘Wielands Übersetzungsmaximen,’ in Christoph Martin Wieland, Werke, ed. Gonthier-Louis Fink et al., 12 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1986–), 9: 1089–95. Christoph Martin Wieland, Briefwechsel, ed. Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 20 vols (Berlin: Akademie, 1963–), 3: 375. The Works of Shakespear in eight volumes [ . . . ], being restored from the blunders of the first editors, and the interpolations of the two last [ . . . ] by Mr Pope and Mr Warburton, 8 vols (London: Knapton, 1747). In Dichtung und Wahrheit, part 3, book 11. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Erich Trunz, 14 vols (Hamburg: Wegner, 1960), 9: 493–6. Goethe, Hamburger Ausgabe, 2: 255–6. See Kyösti Itkonen, Die Shakespeare-Übersetzung Wielands (1762–1766). Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung englisch-deutscher Lehnbeziehungen, Studia Philologica Jyväskyläensia 7 (Jyväskyla: Jyväskylän Yliopisto, 1971). Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Briefe. Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Karl Robert Mandelkow, 4 vols (Hamburg: Wegner, 1962–5), 1: 133. William Shakespear’s Schauspiele. Neue Ausgabe. Von Joh. Joach. Eschenburg, 13 vols (Zurich: Orell, Gessner, Fuessli, 1775–7, 1782). [Elizabeth Montagu], Versuch über Shakespears Genie und Schriften [ . . . ] Aus dem Englischen übersetzt und mit einem doppelten Anhange begleitet von Johann Joachim Eschenburg (Leipzig: Schwickert, 1771). Johann Joachim Eschenburg, Ueber W. Shakspeare (Zurich: Orell, Gessner, Fuessli, 1787). See Renate Häublein, Die Entdeckung Shakespeares auf der deutschen Bühne des 18. Jahrhunderts. Adaption und Wirkung der Vermittlung auf dem Theater, Theatron 46 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005). On the Romantic movement and Shakespeare, see Paulin, Critical Reception, 253–96. Jakob Thomson’s Sophonisba ein Trauerspiel aus dem Englischen übersetzt und mit Anmerkungen erläutert [ . . . ] von Johann Heinrich Schlegeln (Leipzig: Hahn, 1758). Letters in Michael Bernays, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen Shakespeare (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1872), 254–60. Ludwig Tieck und die Brüder Schlegel. Briefe, ed. Edgar Lohner (Munich: Winkler, 1972), 23. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Vorlesungen über Enzyklopädie (1803), ed. Frank Jolles and Edith Höltenschmidt, Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen, 3 (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, Zurich: Schöningh, 2006), 350–1. Krisenjahre der Frühromantik. Briefe aus dem Schlegelkreis, ed. Josef Körner, 3 vols. (Brno, Vienna, Leipzig: Rohrer, 1936–7, Zurich: Francke, 1958), 2: 381–2.

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626 40 41 42

43 44 45

46 47

48

49 50

51

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54 55

56

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58 59

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Schlegel, Vorlesungen, 221. This is the burden of the 34th Lecture in his Vienna series. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Eduard Böcking, 12 vols (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1846–7), 7: 38. All subsequent references to Schlegel’s works from this edition in text as ‘SW’, volume and page number. The Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft. See the contribution to this volume by Stephen Fennell. See Michael Hiltscher, Shakespeares Text in Deutschland. Textkritik und Kanonfrage von den Anfängen bis zur Mitte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Münsteraner Monographien zur englischen Literatur 12 (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Berne, New York, Paris, Vienna: Peter Lang, 1993), esp. 57–178. Ludwig Tieck, Kritische Schriften, 4 vols (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1848–52), 1: 159. Josef Körner, Die Botschaft der deutschen Romantik an Europa, Schriften zur deutschen Literatur für die Görresgesellschaft 9 (Augsburg: Filser, 1929) gives an account of the dissemination of the Lectures. Schlegel’s essay on Romeo and Juliet was, for instance, not translated into English until 1820. Julius Hare, ‘A. W. Schlegel on Shakspeare’s Romeo and Juliet; with remarks upon the character of German criticism’, Olliers Literary Miscellany 1 (1820): 1–39. See the contribution by Reginald Foakes to this volume. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956–71), 4: 744. Friedrich Gundolf, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (Berlin: Bondi, 1911), 350–5. Examples are Rudolf Haym, Die romantische Schule. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Geistes [1871] (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972), 15 and Ricarda Huch, Die Romantik. Vol. 1: Blütezeit der Romantik (Leipzig: Haessel, 1911), 3–25. See Hans-Joachim Simm, ‘Einleitung: Literarischer Kanon und literarische Klassik’ in Literarische Klassik, suhrkamp taschenbuch 2084 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 7–41. Hans-J. Weitz, ‘“Weltliteratur” zuerst bei Wieland’, arcadia 22 (1987): 206–8. Georg Forster, Werke. Sämtliche Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe, ed. Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 18 vols (Berlin: Akademie, 1958–85), 7: 285. For this account see Bernays, Entstehungsgeschichte, 29–95; Frank Jolles, A. W. Schlegels Sommernachtstraum in der ersten Fassung vom Jahre 1789, Palaestra 244 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1967), 31–55; Peter Gebhard, A. W. Schlegels Shakespeare-Übersetzung. Untersuchungen zu seinem Übersetzungsverfahren am Beispiel des Hamlet, Palaestra 257 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1970), 14–31. Macbeth. Ein Trauerspiel in fünf Aufzügen nach Shakespear [ . . . ] von G.A. Bürger (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1783). For the text see Jolles, Sommernachtstraum. Die Horen. Eine Monatsschrift herausgegeben von Schiller [1795–7], 6 vols (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1959), 1: iv, v, ix. Subsequent references in text as Horen, year, volume and page number. See generally Rolf Kloepfer, Die Theorie der literarischen Übersetzung. Romanischdeutscher Sprachbereich, Freiburger Schriften zur romanischen Philologie (Munich: Fink, 1967).

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Notes 61

62 63

64 65

66

67

68

69

70

71 72 73

74

75

76

77

78 79

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William Shakspeare’s Schauspiele. Von Johann Joachim Eschenburg. Neue ganz umgearbeitete Ausgabe, 12 vols (Zurich: Orell, Gessner, Füssli, 1798–1806). See Gebhard, Shakespeare-Übersetzung, 239–54. August Wilhelm Schlegel, ‘Über die Bagavad-Gita’, in Hans Joachim Störig (ed.), Das Problem des Übersetzens, Wege der Forschung 8 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969), 98. Störig, Probleme des Übersetzens, 83. Anton Klette, Verzeichniss der von A.W. von Schlegel nachgelassenen Briefsammlung (Bonn: n.p.), vi. See Gerhard A. Schultz, Literaturkritik als Form der ästhetischen Erfahrung. Eine Untersuchung am Beispiel der literaturkritischen Versuche von Samuel Taylor Coleridge und August Wilhelm Schlegel über das Shakespeare-Drama Romeo und Julia, Analysen und Dokumente 14 (Frankfurt am Main, Bonn, New York: Peter Lang, 1984). On Schlegel’s translations see Bernays, Entstehung; Margaret E. Atkinson, August Wilhelm Schlegel as a Translator of Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958); Gebhard, Shakespeare-Übersetztung; Jürgen Wertheimer, ‘ “So macht Gewissen Feige aus uns allen”. Stufen und Vorstufen der Shakespeare-Übersetzung A.W. Schlegels’, in Bauer (1988), 201–25; Paulin, Critical Reception, 297–370. Shakspeare’s dramatische Werke, übersetzt von August Wilhelm Schlegel, 9 vols (Berlin: Unger, 1797–1801, 1810). The Plays of William Shakespeare. Accurately printed from the text of Mr Malone’s edition, 7 vols (London: Rivington, 1786–90); The dramatick writings of Will. Shakspere, with the notes of all the various commentators [ . . . ]. Ed. Sam. Johnson and Geo. Steevens, 20 vols (London: Bell, 1788). Heinrich Huesmann, Shakespeare-Inszenierungen unter Goethe in Weimar, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte 258, 2 (Graz, Vienna, Cologne: Böhlau, 1968), 148–86. See also the chapter by Stephen Fennell in this volume. Shakspeare’s Hamlet. Übersetzt von Aug .Wilh. Schlegel (Berlin: Unger). Häublein, Entdeckung, 279–304. Macbeth ein Trauerspiel von Shakespear. Zur Vorstellung auf dem Hoftheater zu Weimar eingerichtet von Schiller (Tübingen: Cotta, 1801). Shakespeare’s Schauspiele von Johann Heinrich Voß und dessen Söhnen Heinrich Voß und Abraham Voß, 9 vols (1–3 Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1818–19; 4–9 Stuttgart: Metzler, 1822–9). These are listed in Christine Roger, La réception de Shakespeare en Allemagne de 1815 à 1850. Propagation et assimilation de la référence étrangère, Theatrica 24 (Bern, Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008), 363–407. Shakspeare’s dramatische Werke. Uebersetzt von August Wilhelm von Schlegel, ergänzt und erläutert von Ludwig Tieck, 9 vols (Berlin: Reimer, 1825–33). See Kenneth Larson, ‘The origins of the “Schlegel-Tieck” Shakespeare in the 1820s’, Germanic Quarterly 60 (1987), 19–37. See Marion Candler Lazenby, The Influence of Wieland and Eschenburg on Schlegel’s Shakespeare Translation (Baltimore: n. p., 1942). Atkinson, Schlegel as Translator, 50. The first edition reads Über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur. Vorlesungen von August Wilh. Schlegel, 2 parts: I and II, i (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1809; II, ii 1811). All references to the Lectures follow the revised edition in SW.

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628 80 81 82

83 84

Notes

Körner, Botschaft, 59–69. Ibid., 69–70. Georg Hirzel,’Ungedruckte Briefe an Georg Andreas Reimer’, Deutsche Revue 18, vol. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1893), 98–114, 238–53 (249). Those attending are listed in Krisenjahre, 3: 302–6. Johannes von Schlebrügge, ‘Adam Müllers Shakespeare: Ein Verbündeter im romantischen Kampf gegen Napoleon’, in Bauer: 1988, 226–39.

Chapter 12 1

All references are given in the text, using the following abbreviations:

Badawi: M. M. Badawi, Coleridge Critic of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) Black: John Black, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and literature, by Augustus William Schlegel, trans. by John Black; revised by the Rev. A. J. W. Morrison (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1846) Burwick: Frederick Burwick, Illusion and the Drama. Critical Theory of the Enlightenment and Romantic Era (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Pres, 1991) BL: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series LXXV, 7. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983) CL: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–71) CN: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Notebooks, ed. Kathleen Coburn, Vols. 1–3 (The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series L. New York: Pantheon Books, 1957–61; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973) C on Sh: Coleridge on Shakespeare: The Text of the lectures of 1811–12, ed. Reginald Foakes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971) CRB: Henry Crabb Robinson, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938) CRD: Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Thomas Sadler, 3rd edition, 2 vols (London and New York: Macmillan, 1872) Crick: Joyce Crick, review of ‘Faustus from the German of Goethe translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’, ed. Frederick Burwick and James C. McKusick, Coleridge Bulletin, New Series 32 (Winter 2008): 70–84 Donohue: Joseph W. Donohue Jr., Theatre in the Age of Kean (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975) EOT: Essays on His Own Times in The Morning Post and The Courier, ed. David V. Erdman, 3 vols (The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series LXXV, 3. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978)

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Notes

629

Friend: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara Rooke, 2 vols (The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series LXXV, 4. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969) Harbage: Alfred Harbage, Introduction to Coleridge on Shakespeare: A selection of the essays and lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge on the poems and plays of Shakespeare, ed. Terence Hawkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969) Hazlitt: William Hazlitt, The Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1930–4) Hogan: Charles Beecher Hogan, The London Stage 1776–1800. A Critical Introduction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968) Honigmann: Introduction in Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann. The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997) Horen: August Wilhelm Schlegel, ‘Ueber Shakespeare’s Romeo und Julia’, Die Horen eine Monatsschrift herausgegeben von Schiller, Jahrgang 1797, 6. Stück, 18–48 Jackson: J. R. de J. Jackson, ‘Coleridge on Dramatic Illusion and Spectacle in the Performance of Shakespeare’s Plays’, Modern Philology LXII (August, 1964): 13–21 LL: Lectures 1808–1819 On Literature, ed. Reginald Foakes, 2 vols (The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series LXXV, 5). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987) Malone: Edmond Malone, An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays Attributed to Shakspere Were Written (London, 1778) Manning: Peter J. Manning, ‘Manufacturing the Romantic Image’, in Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840, ed. James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 227–45 Nichol Smith: D. Nichol Smith (ed.), Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare, 2nd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963) Norton Shakespeare: The Norton Shakespeare, general editor Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997) PW: Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays, 6 vols (The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series LXXV, 16. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) Richards: I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1929) Riverside: The Riverside Shakespeare, second edition, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997) Rosenfeld: Sybil Rosenfeld, A Short History of Scenic Design in Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), reworked as Georgian Scene Painters and Scene Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) SCH: Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Brian Vickers, 6 vols (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974–81) Schlegel: Über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur. Vorlesungen von August Wilh. Schlegel. 2 parts in 3 vols (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1809–11) Sheridan: Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Dramatic Works, ed. Cecil Price, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) Southern: Richard Southern, Changeable Scenery (London: Faber and Faber, 1952)

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630

Notes

Survey of London: The Theatre Royal Drury Lane and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. The Survey of London, general editor F. H. W. Sheppard, Vol. XXXV (London: Athlone Press, University of London, 1970) TT: Table Talk, recorded by Henry Nelson Coleridge and John Taylor Coleridge, ed. Carl Woodring (The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series LXXV, 14. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1990) Vickers SS: Brian Vickers, ‘The Emergence of Character Criticism, 1774–1800’, Shakespeare Survey 34 (1981): 11–21

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Minor, J. and Sauer, A. ‘Götz und Shakespeare’. In Studien zur Goethe-Philologie. Vienna, Konegen, 1880: 237–92. Montagu, Elizabeth. Essay on the writings and genius of Shakespear, compared with the Greek and French Dramatic Poets, with some remarks upon the misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire. London: Dodsley et al., 1769. Reprinted New York: August M. Kelley Publisher, 1970. Nichol Smith, D. (ed.) Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare. 2nd edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963. Paulin, Roger. The Critical Reception of Shakespeare in Germany 1682–1914. Native Literature and Foreign Genius. Anglistische und Amerikanistische Texte und Studien 11. Hildesheim, Zurich, New York: Olms, 2003. — (ed.) Shakespeare im 18. Jahrhundert, Das achtzehnte Jahrhundet. Supplementa 13. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007. Roberts, David. The Indirections of Desire: Hamlet in Goethe’s ‘Wilhelm Meister’. Heidelberg: Winter, 1980. Robertson, J. G. ‘The knowledge of Shakespeare on the Continent at the beginning of the eighteenth century’, MLR 1 (1906): 312–21. Roger, Christine. La réception de Shakespeare en Allemagne de 1815 à 1850. Propagation et assimilation de la référence étrangère. Theatrica 24. Berne, Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008. — (ed.) Shakespeare vu d’Allemagne et de France des lumières au romantisme, Revue Germanique Internationale 5 (2007). Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2007. Rosenfeld, Sybil. A Short History of Scenic Design in Britain. Oxford: Blackwell, 1973. Reworked as Georgian Scene Painters and Scene Painting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Schiller, Friedrich. Werke. Nationalausgabe. Edited by Julius Petersen and Gerhard Fricke 42 vols. Weimar: Böhlau, 1943–. —. Die Horen. Eine Monatsschrift. Herausgegeben von Schiller [1795–7]. 6 vols. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1959. Schlegel, August Wilhelm. Sämmtliche Werke. Edited by Eduard BÖcking, 12 vols. Leipzig: Weidmann, 1846–7. —. Shakspeare’s dramatische Werke, übersetzt von August Wilhelm Schlegel. 9 vols. Berlin: Unger, 1797–1801, 1810. —. Shakspeare’s dramatische Werke. Uebersetzt von August Wilhelm von Schlegel, ergänzt und erläutert von Ludwig Tieck. 9 vols. Berlin: Reimer, 1825–33. Schultz, Gerhard. Literaturkritik als Form der ästhetischen Erfahrung. Eine Untersuchung am Beispiel der literaturkritischen Versuche von Samuel Taylor Coleridge und August Wilhelm Schlegel über das Shakespeare-Drama Romeo und Julia. Analysen und Dokumente 14. Frankfurt am Main, Bonn, New York: Peter Lang, 1984. Van Effen, J. ‘Dissertation sur la poésie anglaise’. Journal littéraire, ix (1717), 1: 157–216. Van Tieghem, Paul. Le préromantisme, 3: La découverte de Shakespeare sur le continent. Paris: Sfelt, 1947. Vickers, Brian. ‘The Emergence of Character Criticism, 1774–1800.’ Shakespeare Survey 34 (1981): 11–21. —(ed.) Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. 6 vols. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974–81.

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Voltaire, F. M. Arouet de. Œuvres completes. Edited by Louis Moland. 52 vols. Paris: Garnier. 1877– 85. Wieland, Christoph Martin. Shakespear Theatralische Werke. Aus dem Englischen übersezt von Herrn Wieland [ . . . ]. 8 vols. Zürich: Orell Gessner, 1762–6. Williams, D. Voltaire, ‘Literary Critic’. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century XLVIII (48). Geneva: Les Délices, 1966. Williams, Simon. Shakespeare on the German stage. Vol. 1: 1586–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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Part IV

Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats Edited by

Adrian Poole

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Introduction Adrian Poole

No writer of the Romantic age, indeed scarcely an artist or thinker of any kind, was untouched by Shakespeare. But just as Romanticism meant different things in different countries and cultures, for Goethe, Schiller and Hegel; for Stendhal, Hugo and Delacroix; and for Manzoni, Leopardi and Verdi, so too did Shakespeare. He stood for an idea of liberation, but liberation from what and to what ends? In the land of his birth he embodied many urgent questions about what it meant to be English at a time when national identities, both in continental Europe and across the Atlantic, were being spectacularly re-defined. He also represented particularly vertiginous ideas, as overwhelming as they might be inspiring, about the capacities of the creative imagination. And yet these were ideas, no matter how lofty, expressed in words that anyone might speak, or even write, a kind of verbal currency on which perhaps we could all get our hands, whoever ‘we’ were. The three writers addressed by this volume played a key role in the making of an early nineteenth-century English Shakespeare, one that would be influential on ideas of creative genius, on the relations between the page and the stage, on the possibilities of poetic language, for at least the rest of the century. Of course there were others, such as Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, the Gothic novelists, the painters of the popular Boydell Gallery, including Henry Fuseli, and a host of lesser artists: their work would not have been what it was without Shakespeare. Besides Lamb, Hazlitt and Keats, three other figures stand out and feature elsewhere in this series, namely, Coleridge (vol. 3), Kean (vol. 2) and Scott (vol. 5).1 Born in 1772 Coleridge was three years senior to Lamb, his school fellow at Christ’s Hospital, and collaborated with him in the 1790s. Six years older than Hazlitt, Coleridge enthralled the younger man but came to represent almost everything he disapproved of and disagreed with. Born in 1795, Keats was too much younger to fall directly under Coleridge’s spell, but Edmund Kean

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was a different matter, and Keats shared Hazlitt’s fascination with the turbulent, erratic actor (Lamb does not seem to have been impressed). If Hazlitt owes a good deal to Lamb and Coleridge, often in sharp reaction against the latter, then Keats in turn owes a massive though not passive debt to Hazlitt. His writings and lectures, especially on Shakespeare, had an intimate impact on Keats, as Beth Lau and Uttara Natarajan both discuss, on his idea of the ‘camelion poet’, on his antipathy to poets with a ‘palpable design on us’, on his admiration for ‘gusto’.2 Despite the near-generational difference in age between the young poet and the two older essayists, the connections between the three are close and the sense of live dialogue strong. Lamb helped Hazlitt to establish literary connections in London, and to employment as a journalist in 1812, at a point in his life (aged 34) when he was at risk of penury. Their friendship was shaken by political differences; Hazlitt was bitterly disappointed at Lamb’s failure to sympathize over Napoleon’s fall (Lamb was not alone). But Hazlitt’s Shakespearean criticism draws freely and explicitly on Lamb, and Characters (1817) was dedicated to him ‘as a mark of old friendship and lasting esteem’. Lamb reviewed Hazlitt’s Table Talk (1821) enthusiastically and, shortly before his own death in 1834, is supposed to have declared Hazlitt ‘worth all modern prose-writers put together’.3 One of the fruits of Hazlitt’s faltering early ambitions as philosopher and painter was a fine portrait of Lamb in 1804, dressed as a Venetian senator, in the style of Titian. (It now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.) Keats was personally acquainted with Lamb and Hazlitt. He owned a copy of Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets; Lamb reviewed Keats warmly and is said to have judged him the greatest of contemporary poets after Wordsworth.4 Keats marked and annotated his copy of Hazlitt’s Characters, and was moved to imagine its author looking like Ferdinand in The Tempest: ‘“in an odd angle of the Isle sitting” – his arms in this sad knot’.5 Felicity James argues persuasively for the sociable ethos of informal debate promoted by her subject Charles Lamb, his role in making Shakespeare ‘familiar’ – indeed, to draw on the line in Henry V from which Charles Dickens would lift the title of his periodical, ‘Familiar in his mouth as household words’ (4. 3. 52). Hazlitt’s essays and Keats’s letters are riddled with allusion to Shakespeare, as if his words were essential to the very way they thought and felt. Far-reaching questions arise about the effect of such allusion and echo in Keats’s own poetry or in Hazlitt’s most impassioned prose. But at the informal level – at which indeed all of Lamb’s and most of Hazlitt’s public writings are purposively pitched – the presence of Shakespeare’s affable familiar ghost provides an instructive contrast to the awesome

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unapproachable figure of genius. Lamb turned the ‘Feathers’ in Holborn into a ‘Boar’s Head’, and Falstaff was no less congenial to Hazlitt, who borrowed his abuse of Mistress Quickly and applied it with brilliant malice to the slippery Coleridge: ‘You can no more know where to have him than an otter’ (19: 210).6 Keats too drew inspiration and encouragement from Falstaff’s resilient bravado, though it is hard with hindsight not to find in these words to his friend J. H. Reynolds a terrible pathos: ‘Banish money – Banish sofa – Banish Wine – Banish Music – But right Jack Health – honest Jack Health, true Jack Health – banish health and banish all the world’ (Letters, 1: 125). On his deathbed Keats confessed that ‘Like poor Falstaff, though I do not babble, I think of green fields’ (Letters, 2: 260). Hazlitt often wrote admiringly of Shakespeare’s ‘magnanimity’, for example, – reflecting on the Bastard in King John, and his ‘spirit, invention, volubility of tongue’ – of ‘the heedless magnanimity of his [Shakespeare’s] wit’ in contrast to Ben Jonson’s ‘laborious caution’ (4: 311). Though Hazlitt was inclined to describe his own taste as ‘more saturnine than mercurial’ (4: 316), he was encouraged by the companionable Lamb to imagine himself on similar terms with Shakespeare himself, and he passed this benign idea on to anyone who cared to listen or read him, including the eager, attentive young Keats. Reflecting on the difference in their treatment of the Troilus and Cressida story, Hazlitt describes, as he sees it, Chaucer’s capacity to do just one thing at a time: His ideas were kept separate, labelled, ticketed and parcelled out in a set form, in pews and compartments by themselves. They did not play into one another’s hands. They did not re-act upon one another, as the blower’s breath moulds the yielding glass. There is something hard and dry in them. What is the most wonderful thing in Shakespear’s faculties is their excessive sociability, and how they gossiped and compared notes together. (4: 226) ‘Excess’ can rarely have seemed so forgivable. Lamb, Hazlitt and Keats have in common an appetite for Shakespeare partly deriving from the congeniality of their modest social origins and their distance from the seats of cultural and political power. Unlike Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley, they did not go to Cambridge or Oxford, and they enjoyed no independent income or wealthy patrons: they needed to earn their own living, as Lamb did for many years as a clerk for the East India Company. As the breach between Hazlitt and Lamb over Napoleon’s eclipse suggests, there were differences, both political and

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temperamental, between the two older men, yet they were both marked by the turbulent 1790s. Felicity James recovers much of the anxious context in which Lamb’s first writings were produced and received. It is of more than passing interest that the astonishingly durable Tales from Shakespear compiled with his sister Mary were published in 1806 by the radical William Godwin and that the Tory press viewed them with corresponding suspicion. The poetry of the upstart young Keats also excited the malign attention of journalists eager to keep ‘Cockney’ riff-raff in their place. When the blatantly ‘Jacobin’ Hazlitt published in 1819 a ferocious self-defence against the virulent assaults of William Gifford, Keats copied out page after page in admiration, so he told his brother, of its ‘style of genius’ and the ‘force and innate power with which it yeasts and works up itself’ (Letters, 2: 76). No wonder that they were drawn to the outsiders, underdogs and victims in Shakespeare (though, be it noted, mainly male: for a richer appreciation of Shakespeare’s women we must wait until a bit later in the century, for Anna Jameson, Mary Cowden Clarke and others; see vol. 7). Lamb sets the tone with his sympathetic response to Shylock (‘in the midst of his savage purpose, [he] is a man’), and his diatribe against the caricature to which contemporary actors reduced ‘the monster’ Richard III, as distinct from ‘the man Richard, whom Shakespeare drew’. No wonder the play seemed richer in reading than in such coarse travesty: ‘Nothing but his crimes, his actions, is visible; they are prominent and staring; the murderer stands out, but where is the lofty genius, the man of vast capacity – the profound, the witty, accomplished Richard?’ (4: 26, 1: 37, 1: 106).7 As for the great Romantic actor of the age, Edmund Kean, it was as Shylock and Othello that he dazzled most effectively. ‘Mr Kean’s Othello is his best character, and the highest effort of genius on the stage. We say this without any exception of reserve,’ began Hazlitt’s review for the Examiner, 7 January 1816, though typically he goes on: ‘Yet we wish it was better than it is’ (5: 271). The discovery of some previously unregarded inwardness to a familiar dramatic character invariably distinguishes the bright new theatrical phenomenon. But these keen theatregoers and readers believed they could see more than the stage of their times could ever offer, not least in the great models of passion, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear, of which this last, in Lamb’s influential hands, became a test case: [W]hile we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear, – we are in his mind, . . . ; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, . . . (1: 107)

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‘Irregular’ is itself a regular enough word, but ‘immethodized’ is a brilliant coinage to match the aberration with which Lamb is identifying. Shakespeare was, for the Romantics and their Victorian successors, whatever banner they marched under, the measure of creative possibility, or impossibility. The young Matthew Arnold gives an early Victorian expression of this in a sonnet entitled ‘Shakespeare’ (1844): Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask – Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill, Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty, Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea, Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place, Spares but the cloudy border of his base To the foiled searching of mortality; . . . 8 Arnold is sketching an image of unscaleable elevation and impregnable opacity, directly derived from Romantic poetics and the idealist philosophical positions on which, broadly speaking, they are based. Nevertheless, however impressed by Shakespeare’s sublimity, Arnold’s Romantic predecessors were never quite as crushed and overwhelmed as this. The idea of sublime failure provides the perspective in which to view the Romantics’ influential statements about the essential incompatibility between poetry and performance and the intrinsic superiority of reading Shakespeare over seeing his plays in the theatre. The classic statement here is Charles Lamb’s ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare’ (1811), with its confession that ‘I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage, than those of almost any other dramatist whatever’ (1: 99). Hazlitt frequently echoes these sentiments, but it is important to read these declarations in the context of their first utterance. One wonders how many of those who confidently cite Lamb’s essay in particular as the epitome of anti-theatrical prejudice have actually read it. Felicity James positions Lamb’s essay, and indeed all his writings in the circumstances of their first production, and Uttara Natarajan shrewdly addresses the large philosophical context in which Hazlitt’s particular comments need to be seen. In reading Lamb and Hazlitt it is at the least important to know that they were both enthusiastic and knowledgeable playgoers (much more so than Coleridge). Whatever one’s allegiances in the arguments about ‘text’ and ‘performance’, their essays are still vital accounts of the endless rival claims for the imaginative

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freedom of reading against the limiting fixities of performance, for the liberating embodiment of textual potential on stage against the monocularity of singular reading and so on. Furthermore, whatever convictions about the self we may now hold or whatever fictions we may entertain, we should recognize the sheer excitement that comes through these writings – the discovery, as it seems, of whole new vast inner vistas to be charted and energies to be hailed. These revelations would go on to animate both the great introspective and lyric poetry of the nineteenth century and its most dramatic narrative fictions. Here it is worth juxtaposing Lamb’s reflections on the impossibility of adequately performing King Lear with the practice embraced in the Tales from Shakespear written in collaboration with his sister Mary. The Lambs stress their aim of introducing young readers to Shakespeare, ‘for which purpose, his words are used whenever it seemed possible to bring them in’ (3: 1). There is an important argument, well deployed by Natarajan, that the Romantic artist may trail a faint but genuine remnant of the sublime. An analogous case can be made for the whole activity of literary translation that will become so important to the nineteenth century. We might apply this idea to the Lambs’ ‘performance’ of Shakespeare. These narrative versions are of course not adequate to their sublime originals, yet they preserve a true trace of their divine source. Even more can be claimed for them, not merely that they trail clouds of glory from the past but that they make promises for the future. The Lambs explicitly make such a pledge, that the child will return as an adult to re-enter the original paradise and claim ‘the rich treasures from which these small and valueless coins are extracted’ (3: 1). The surface rhetoric may be one of apology for failure, but it harbours a promise of good things to come: Faint and imperfect images they must be called . . . and even in some few places, where his blank verse is given unaltered, as hoping from its simple plainness to cheat the young readers into the belief that they are reading prose, yet still his language being transplanted from its own natural soil and wild poetic garden, it must want much of its native beauty. (3: 1–2) Much, but not all – and imagine the wild poetic garden ahead. This emphasis on the future is no less important to Hazlitt, who takes inspiration from Romeo and Juliet (both the characters and their whole play) to challenge Wordsworth’s depiction of childhood, in what he calls

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the ‘Ode on the Progress of Life’ (normally known as the ‘Immortality Ode’). It is a classic statement of faith. It is not from the knowledge of the past that the first impressions of things derive their gloss and splendour, but from our ignorance of the future, which fills the void to come with the warmth of our desires, with our gayest hopes, and brightest fancies. . . . There is no occasion to resort to any mystical union and transmission of feeling through different states of being to account for the romantic enthusiasm of youth; nor to plant the root of hope in the grave, nor to derive it from the skies. Its root is in the heart of man: it lifts its head above the stars. (4: 250) It is true that Hazlitt’s impassioned ‘speech’ – as if incited by the spirits of the young lovers – continues on its ecstatic precarious course until it expires on the thought that love ‘withers and dies almost as soon [as it is born]!’ Hazlitt’s prose is itself so dramatic that it is easy to misrepresent by selection. But the point holds, that Hazlitt believes that ‘romantic enthusiasm’ is orientated towards the future, and more generally, that it is such passion that makes things happen, and that it is the mark of the greatest artists to depict such passion. Shakespeare’s characters and language may have been companionable familiar presences, but when it came to the mind that created them, the Romantics stood back in awe. And puzzlement. So familiar have their formulations become, especially Keats’s about ‘Negative Capability’ and the ‘camelion poet’ that we now tend to read them as more definite and confident than they were ever intended to be. Both Lau and Natarajan demur at identifying their authors too strictly with the pronouncements they make. Keats’s ideas about the ‘selflessness’ of the poet did not remain unchanged until the end of his short explosive career, Lau argues. Nor should Hazlitt’s ideas about power, will and selfhood, be confused with Keats’s, Natarajan proposes. There remains in all these memorable expressions something more tentative and provisional than the hardening effect of their endless repetition out of context allows. The essays in this volume will have done good service if they urge readers back to the original settings in which these ideas were framed or, as it often more accurately seems, tossed out. Those qualities that Hazlitt fondly attributes to Shakespeare, of a certain ‘heedless magnanimity’, a capacity for ‘running on’ – these characterize his own hazardous way of writing, one that is close to the erratic rhythms and spontaneous shifts of direction in unscripted speech. These

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are exactly the features that Hazlitt and Keats, and to a more muted extent Lamb, value in the artists they most admire. And yet who or what in the end was Shakespeare? On 27 January 1818 Keats went to hear Hazlitt lecture at the Surrey Institution ‘On Shakespeare and Milton’. He heard this, among other things: He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune, or conflict of passion, or turn of thought. (5: 47) No wonder that ‘protean’ is a word favoured by Hazlitt (and Coleridge) for this magical power of endless becoming, as if the ‘infinite variety’ with which Cleopatra is endowed were also the clue to her creator’s being. Keats certainly admired Cleopatra and her play, and Beth Lau makes a powerful case for taking very seriously the hint thrown out by B. W. Procter that Antony and Cleopatra may have been Keats’s favourite Shakespeare play. It is certainly evident that Keats recognized in Shakespeare a rivalry between competing perspectives for which the traditional terms that offer themselves are tragedy and comedy. For Keats himself these would more accurately be called tragedy and romance. This is the burden of the sonnet addressed to the experience of reading the tragedy Keats agreed with Lamb and Hazlitt in finding the most ‘intense’. In Characters, Hazlitt wrote: ‘Lear stands first for the profound intensity of the passion.’ (4: 186) A few days before hearing Hazlitt lecture Keats wrote the sonnet ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’ that begins: O golden-tongued Romance, with serene lute! Fair-plumed siren, queen of far-away! Leave melodizing on this wintry day, Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute. Adieu! Over the next ten days he went on to write another sonnet that deliberately invokes one or more of Shakespeare’s own: When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,

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Before high piled books, in charact’ry, Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain; . . . 9 In 1880 Matthew Arnold felt able to praise the ‘Shakespearian’ quality in Keats, ‘the fascinating felicity’, ‘his perfection of loveliness’.10 Lau reminds us that Arnold’s admiration was always qualified and, earlier in his career, more sharply so. Yet these terms of praise seem more applicable to Keats’s earlier than later poetry, too soft to do justice to the strength pulsing through the loveliness. ‘Absent thee from felicity awhile’, the dying Hamlet exhorts Horatio, ‘And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain . . . ’ (5. 2. 354–5) Keats knew about drawing one’s breath in pain and his greatest poetry mourns for mortality no less than it exults in loveliness. Charles Lamb had described King Lear as ‘too hard and stony’; no wonder people wanted love scenes and a happy ending (1: 107). It is something of this stony, wintry quality in Shakespeare’s art that all three of these great Shakespeareans intuited, not only of course in King Lear, nor ever without intense feeling for the tender human spirit at its mercy.

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Chapter 13

Charles Lamb Felicity James

Can we really know Lamb the Shakespearean? A great deal of Charles Lamb’s Shakespeare criticism seems to have existed in conversation, in the dark back rooms of London taverns or the ‘many lively skirmishes’ of the Lambs’ Wednesday and Thursday evening gatherings.1 ‘Many of his best remarks about Shakespeare’, as Jonathan Bate points out, ‘may therefore be lost to us’.2 What we do have, however, suggests how his work might have played a part in larger Romantic dialogues of creativity, sympathy, reader response and performance. It is also intimately bound up with his relationship with his sister, Mary, joint author of the Tales from Shakespear (1806): the Lambs’ engagement with Shakespeare is essentially sociable, not only familial, but also involving friends and other writers. This sociable engagement, however, took place against a backdrop of family tragedy. In September 1796, in what Charles would term a ‘day of horrors’, Mary Lamb killed her mother in a manic fit of violence, stabbing her in the heart.3 Once the verdict of lunacy was returned, Mary was bound over to the care of Charles. Thereafter, until Charles’s death in 1834, brother and sister lived together, successfully managing Mary’s mental illness, which twentieth-century biographers have tentatively diagnosed as manic-depressive in nature.4 She periodically spent time in private asylums, but otherwise lived a full and creative life. Her relationship with her brother was one of mutual care, since Charles was himself subject to depression and struggled with what he termed ‘my cursed drinking’ (Marrs, 2: 169). This was, as Jane Aaron has put it, a relationship in which ‘both partners appear to have functioned alternately as caretaker and cared-for’: a relationship which was mutually supportive and sustaining but which could also be constraining and highly difficult.5 It is surely not coincidental that their readings of Shakespeare – such as Charles’s play, John Woodvil (1799–1802), heavily influenced by his admiration of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama – are shaped by an intimate knowledge of tragedy and a capacity for sympathetic

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understanding. As we will see, there is also a persistent pattern of attraction towards creative freedom and imaginative possibility, coupled with a certain anxiety and desire for restraint: a double movement which will become particularly pronounced in the Tales from Shakespear, discussed in the concluding section. The creative sociability of the Lambs’ work on Shakespeare, then, was hard won, and heroically self-constructed: one reason, perhaps, for its enduring influence. Charles and Mary Lamb were brought up in the Inner Temple, where their father was employed by the bencher Samuel Salt: the close and mutually loyal relationship between lawyer and servant is celebrated in Lamb’s Elia essay ‘The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple’. It was Salt who enabled Lamb and his brother John to attend Christ’s Hospital. Mary, 10 years older than her brother, had only basic schooling, followed by an apprenticeship to a needlewoman, after which she became a mantua-maker. She did, however, derive benefit from the relationship with Salt – free access to his extensive library, ‘a spacious closet of good old English reading’, into which, in the words of Elia, she was ‘tumbled early’.6 Her love of reading would be life long, and she also frequently accompanied Charles to the theatre and took an active role in entertaining and conversing at their evening gatherings. This means that any discussion of Charles’s writing must also recognize Mary’s participation, the faithful Bridget-Elia. Although the main focus of this chapter is on Charles – who is referred to as Lamb in the main body of the text – this is not intended to exclude Mary. Though she comes to the fore only in my closing exploration of the Tales, she should be acknowledged as a constant, unspoken presence throughout. Through Charles Lamb’s theatre reviews, plays, selections of extracts and periodical essays, domestic and familial discussions about Shakespeare are opened to larger Romantic conversations, with Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt and Keats. Lamb’s engagement with Shakespeare spans his whole career, beginning with the Shakespearean language of his little-known sonnets of the 1790s, written in the first throes of admiration for Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Born in 1775, Lamb was almost 3 years younger than Coleridge and had attended the same school, Christ’s Hospital, looking up to Coleridge as a ‘Grecian’, or senior scholar. Lamb, by contrast, was not destined for university – his stammer meant he would, in any case, have been unsuited to a career in law or the Church – and left school at 14. By 1792, he was beginning his life-long career as a clerk at the East India House. Eager for literary and social stimulation, he began to frequent taverns such as the ‘Salutation and Cat’, where he grew close to Coleridge, and the ‘Feathers’, where he kept company with another Christ’s Hospital

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friend, James White, and helped him to write his bardolatrous parody, Falstaff’s Letters (1796). These 1790s engagements with Shakespeare through poetry and prose – marked by allusion and quotation, sometimes verging on appropriation – are early signs of Lamb’s intense interest in the relationship between reading and theatre, and the vexed negotiations between author, actor, audience and reader. This could manifest itself in adaptations which removed Shakespeare from the stage entirely, such as the Tales from Shakespear, and his selection of extracts from Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived about the Time of Shakspeare (1808). Yet he also had a life-long interest in the stage itself, considering theatre reviewing in the early 1800s, when he commented in depth on the performance of G. F. Cooke in Richard III, first to his friend Robert Lloyd in a letter of June 1801, then in a review in the Morning Post in 1802. Both pieces contribute to his famous essay ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare’ (1811), which has long been read as an anti-theatrical manifesto. However, his continued engagement with the theatre is evident in essays such as ‘Shakspeare’s Improvers’ (1828) and contributions to the London Magazine such as ‘On Some of the Old Actors’ and ‘On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century’ – as well as the knowing performance of his alter ego, Elia. This scattered body of work on Shakespeare and drama is often provocative and challenging. When considered as a whole, it may be seen to present an evolving, yet coherent critical attitude, as Roy Park has shown in his collection of Lamb’s criticism. Park has argued that Lamb is ‘with Hazlitt, the greatest critic of the drama of his own or any other age in England’.7 Certainly, despite his later fall from critical fashion, he seems to have exerted a powerful inspirational effect on his contemporaries. Lamb, claimed William Hazlitt, ‘has furnished many a text for C[oleridge] to preach upon’ (Howe, 12: 36); in turn, Coleridge himself asserted that he preferred Lamb’s ‘exquisite criticisms on Shakspeare’ to ‘Hazlitt’s round and round imitations of them’.8 Reading Lamb the Shakespearean, then, is in part an effort of reconstruction – recreating these larger dialogues and listening into lost conversations, like those recorded in Hazlitt’s vivid memory of Lamb at his evening gatherings: His jests scald like tears: and he probes a question with a play upon words. What a keen, laughing, hair-brained [sic] vein of home-felt truth! What choice venom! How often did we cut into the haunch of letters, while we discussed the haunch of mutton on the table! . . . ‘And, in our flowing cups, many a good name and true was freshly remembered.’ (Howe, 12: 36)

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Shakespeare is at the heart of this sociable intellectual debate, since Hazlitt’s quotation is from Henry V, albeit slightly altered: Then shall our names, Familiar in his mouth as household words, Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester, Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d. (Henry V, 4. 3. 51–5) The line which is elided here gives us an insight into how Lamb and his circle treated Shakespeare: ‘Familiar in his mouth as household words’. What Lamb is constantly trying to create is a ‘familiar’ Shakespeare, in the sense both of a deeply known Shakespeare, constantly present through allusion and quotation – and also of Shakespeare as domesticated and brought into the family circle, as in the Tales from Shakespear and the Specimens of English Dramatic Poets. This domestication of Shakespeare was hugely successful, reaching far into the nineteenth century; it may be glimpsed, for example, in Charles Dickens’s Household Words, which continues this pattern of Shakespearean storytelling, appropriation and reinvention.9 Both the Tales and the Specimens were products of Lamb’s intimate relationships – familial and friendly – and both works in turn help to produce a Romantic and nineteenth-century sense of intimacy with Shakespeare. Tales from Shakespear was composed in collaboration with his sister Mary, and published by a friend, William Godwin: it encodes a familiar, household scene of shared creativity, when, as Mary described, ‘we often sit writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting) like Hermia & Helena in the Midsummer’s Nights Dream. or rather like an old literary Darby and Joan’ (Marrs, 2: 229). It then promotes a scene of family reading, as older brothers are asked to explain ‘to their sisters such parts as are hardest for them to understand’, and then to read aloud to them from the plays themselves, ‘carefully selecting what is proper for a young sister’s ear’ (Lucas, 3: 2). Specimens, similarly, bears the traces of long-running conversations, since it not only attempts to open up dialogue between Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but it also repeats extracts and comments Lamb had already shared with friends such as Robert Southey, and it was then in turn extensively used by Hazlitt in his Lectures Chiefly on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1820). A copy of Specimens was among Keats’s cherished possessions, given to him by his friend Benjamin Bailey, and later passed on to Fanny Brawne. Through this cycle of gift giving,

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the book thus becomes a part of Keats’s own conversations of friendship, which are themselves carried on inside the book through the eager annotations of Bailey and Keats. One of Keats’s most enthusiastic comments comes next to Lamb’s footnote comparing Heywood to Shakespeare: Shakspeare makes us believe, while we are among his lovely creations, that they are nothing but what we are familiar with, as in dreams new things seem old: but we awake, and sigh for the difference.10 Keats underlined the comment, adding: ‘This is the most acute deep sighted and spiritual piece of criticism ever penned.’11 It is, as Helen Haworth has pointed out, the mention of the ‘familiar’ which seems to have held particular appeal for Keats – he and Lamb, she suggests, ‘have similar views of the aesthetic experience, that its beauty is not a surprise, but comfortingly familiar’.12 This ability to make us feel ‘familiar’ with a range of sensations is linked to Shakespeare’s capacity for sympathy. Keats and Lamb, like Coleridge and Hazlitt, try repeatedly to elucidate the ways in which Shakespeare can ‘go out of himself’, to quote Lamb’s Specimens. Lamb develops the point in a comparison between Chapman and Shakespeare: Chapman, he claims, ‘could not go out of himself, as Shakspeare could shift at his pleasure, to inform and animate other existences’ (Specimens, 98). As we will see, this helps Shakespeare imbue each character with significance and humanity, so that even Richard III ‘impresses’ Lamb ‘. . . with awe and deep admiration of his witty parts’ (Marrs, 2: 7). While the concept of Shakespeare as a humane, sympathetic author was by no means a new idea, it takes on a special significance for this group of writers, themselves struggling to articulate the relationship of art to larger ideals of humanity and sympathy. It is present in Hazlitt’s discussion of the ‘generic quality’ of Shakespeare’s mind, its ‘power of communication with all other minds’, in his lecture on Shakespeare and Milton. Shakespeare was in no way an ‘egotist’; his mind reflected all ages and all people, and his genius ‘shone equally on the evil and on the good, on the wise and the foolish’ (Howe, 5: 47). This lecture – itself informed by Hazlitt’s reading of Lamb – lies behind Keats’s definition of the ‘camelion Poet’, the poetic character which has ‘no self – it is every thing and nothing.’ Similarly, it makes no distinction of rank or morality, and ‘has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen’.13 The same idea, as Bate has explored, is also present in Coleridge’s assertion that Shakespeare ‘darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion’.14

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Lamb was not only taking part in a larger Romantic dialogue about the nature of Shakespearean genius, he was also formulating a deeply personal view of creativity and attempting to define his own critical approach. As we will see, his ideal of creative writing and reading would be modelled on what he saw as the Shakespearean loss of identity – the author’s ability to ‘go out of himself’, prompting a corresponding creative sympathy in the reader. It is this conviction which informs, for instance, his comments on Wordsworth as ‘narrow and confined in his views’: ‘He does not, like Shakespeare, become everything he pleases, but forces the reader to submit to his individual feelings.’15 Later readers not only identified his writing as sympathetic with Shakespeare’s, but also used his own concept of Shakespearean sympathy to describe him as a critic. The young Henry James was struck by Lamb’s sociable fellow feeling with Shakespeare, and, in a letter to his friend Thomas Sergeant Perry in 1864, imagined himself transported to a convivial literary heaven, populated by Shakespeare, Goethe and Charles Lamb. ‘Elia,’ he wrote, ‘is delicious . . . He and W. S. have great times together. Elia is forever spouting out quotations from the Plays, which Shake never recognises.’16 Walter Pater offers another image of posthumous sympathy: ‘how must the souls of Shakespeare and Webster have been stirred . . . at his exquisite appreciations,’ he exclaims. What distinguishes Lamb’s criticism, for Pater, is the very ‘self-forgetful’ capacity Lamb had himself identified in Shakespeare, a ‘sort of boundless sympathy’ which stems from ‘immediate contact with what is real’.17 Similarly, E. M. W. Tillyard comments on Lamb’s ‘quality of self-surrender’ and his ‘intimate sympathy’ with Shakespeare.18 But can this ‘familiar’, sympathetic Shakespeare survive in the theatre? This is the central issue of Lamb’s famous essay ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare’: It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of Shakspeare are less calculated for performance on a stage, than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguished excellence is a reason that they should be so. There is so much in them, which comes not under the province of acting, with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do. (Lucas, 1: 115) It is a sly and ambivalent piece, probing issues which fascinated Lamb throughout his life, such as the relationship between author, actor and audience; the nature of acting, watching and reading; and larger questions

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of the role of imagination in response. Early readers, such as John Wilson, reviewing Lamb’s Works in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, raised issues which continue to trouble critics. Wilson comments on the way in which Lamb ‘adopts a paradox’ in the essay and finds his own response to be something of a paradox, too. He finds himself convinced by Lamb on some levels, admitting that ‘some of Shakspeare’s finest plays must afford us greater delight in the closet than they possibly can do on the stage.’19 But he runs up against the problem that, after all, Shakespeare ‘wrote for the stage’ and it is, therefore, illogical to suggest that he should not be appreciated in his proper medium. Wilson’s hesitation between reading and performance foreshadows later divisions of thought about Lamb’s Shakespearean criticism. For critics such as Pater or A. C. Bradley, it was Lamb who, ‘reading, commenting on Shakespeare’ and his Elizabethan contemporaries, represented the ‘very quintessence of criticism’, and was, simply, ‘the best critic of the nineteenth century’.20 Bradley’s late Romantic strain of subjective, sympathetic criticism freely admitted its debts to Lamb; he expanded and furthered Lamb’s reading of particular characters and agreed that plays such as King Lear and The Tempest were ‘too huge’ for the stage. For Bradley, Lear – ‘one of the world’s greatest poems’ – was more akin to aesthetic experiences such as the Divine Comedy, Beethoven’s symphonies and the statues of the Medici Chapel than the theatre.21 Later twentieth-century responses, however, indignantly returned to Wilson’s contention that Shakespeare ‘wrote for the stage’ and must be judged in performance. Lamb’s views came to be seen as ‘baroque whimsicalities’ – the outdated and complacent misjudgements of an armchair critic.22 René Wellek’s comment is a fairly kindly example of this approach: [the] view that the ‘plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage, than those of almost any dramatist whatever’ can hardly be taken seriously except as a means of drawing our attention to the greatness of Shakespeare’s poetry and the diverse shortcomings of the stage in the time of Lamb.23 Contemporary theatrical limitations are certainly an issue for Lamb, as for Hazlitt and Coleridge. He frequently expresses his frustration at late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century theatrical conventions: revisions and alterations of Shakespeare’s texts by Nahum Tate and Colley Cibber, the huge space of the remodelled theatres which meant the actors had

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to shout to be heard, a ‘star’ system of dominant actors and the insistence on spectacle and stage machinery. Lamb’s attitude towards Shakespeare in performance, however, goes beyond these constraints to explore the very nature of the relationship between audience and actor. His essay knowingly poses paradoxical questions to the reader, not least because of the way it seems at odds with his own fondness for theatre-going and actors. Lamb saw his first play in 1780 – Thomas Arne’s 1762 opera Artaxerxes, followed by Garrick’s pantomime Harlequin’s Invasion (1759) – and ‘left the temple a devotee’ (Lucas, 2: 114). Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833) – highly theatrical performances in their own right – contain evocative imagery of ‘the good old one shilling gallery days’ of playhouse visiting (Lucas, 2: 285–6) and of the effect of the play on a child’s imagination. While ‘My First Play’ charts his later disappointment with theatrical illusion, in other ways Lamb never lost faith in the theatre. The author of four largely unsuccessful plays – the first written in 1799, the last in 1828 – he persisted in attempting to have his work staged, despite having his only production, Mr. H-, hissed on its first night. Actors were also an intimate part of Lamb’s social circle: he proposed to Fanny Kelly, who was also a close friend of Mary’s, and knew actors such as Robert William Elliston and Charles Mathews well. As Elia, he almost idolizes actors such as Joseph Munden, whose ‘gusto’ – a Hazlittian concept most famously worked out in his 1816 essay ‘On Gusto’ in The Examiner, and knowingly appropriated by Lamb in his essay ‘On the Acting of Munden’, first published in The Examiner (1819) and reprinted with some changes in The London Magazine (1822) and Elia – is represented as something ennobling and morally sanctifying. Lamb’s essay imagines Munden ‘diffus[ing] a glow of sentiment which has made the pulse of a crowded theatre beat like that of one man’; he comes, argues Elia, ‘in aid of the pulpit, doing good to the moral heart of a people’ (Lucas, 2: 169). The feeling of admiration was mutual: Thomas Noon Talfourd gives a description of Munden’s last performance, when Munden found room for Charles and Mary Lamb in the corner of the orchestra, popping out between the end of the play and the beginning of the after-piece farce, to hand a glistening ‘huge porter-pot’ to Charles – nicely symbolic of the sociable interchange between actor and audience in which Lamb could freely participate.24 Lamb is decisively not, then, anti-theatre. Yet what are we to make of his criticisms of the ‘inherent fault of stage representation’, the ways in which Shakespeare’s speeches may be ‘sullied and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large assembly’ (Lucas, 1: 116)? How should we read his conclusion that there is ‘something in the nature of acting which levels

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all distinctions’, and erases the distinct genius of Shakespeare (Lucas, 1: 121)? More recent criticism has found this implied elitism troubling. Jonathan Bate, for instance, has repeatedly put forward the view that Lamb’s – as opposed, say, to Hazlitt’s – is an enclosing, limiting commentary on Shakespeare, and implicitly (although Bate carefully does not use the term) conservative. As Lamb grew older, argues Bate, ‘he made the characteristic inward turn of the Romantic.’25 And making this turn, Bate adds, ‘he took Shakespeare with him,’ making him into something private and individualistic, removed both from the theatre, and from public consumption in the shape of appropriation, caricatures and parodies which could be deployed to radical ends: Lamb’s reservations about the stage, which Coleridge shared, are symptomatic of a far-reaching desire to repossess Shakespeare for the self and to remove him from the political appropriators. Some would praise Coleridge and Lamb for this; others would argue that the Romantics are themselves engaged in a political appropriation in the name of privacy and individualism.26 Bate’s argument is a powerful one, but leaves several key issues unexamined. First, we need to consider whether Lamb did make an ‘inward turn’ post1790s, or whether his interest in the inward, the private, had in fact always been a part of his political identity. James Gillray’s cartoon of 1798, illustrating the Anti-Jacobin poem, ‘New Morality’ gives us Lamb’s one public appearance among his radical contemporaries, placing him alongside Godwin, Coleridge, Southey, a gaggle of Whig politicians and Radical Dissenters. Here, Lamb and his collaborator Charles Lloyd are shown as frog and toad, croaking together from their volume of poetry, Blank Verse, as they gambol around a Cornucopia of Ignorance, containing books such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman. Blank Verse, however, was hardly a radical pamphlet. It is a volume of highly introspective, personal poems of sensibility and loss, repeatedly returning to the private scene, the secluded ‘cot’, the fire side, the home. Nevertheless, it was characterized by the AntiJacobin as ‘folly’ and ‘wickedness’ written in a ‘kind of baby language which they are pleased to term blank-verse’.27 David Fairer has superbly analysed how the simplicity and sympathy of this ‘baby language’ could be viewed as a radical threat, a challenge to existing power structures. Yet as he also points out, the volume simultaneously carries conservative implications, since all this introspective simplicity ‘contains within itself the germ of conservatism, nostalgia and retreat’.28 On one level, Lamb was obviously

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viewed by the Anti-Jacobin as a threat, but at the same time he was not entirely identifiable with the radical community: ‘I know not what poor Lamb has done,’ commented Southey, ‘to be croaking there’.29 Southey’s uncertainty should continue to trouble our understanding of Lamb, whose political approach can never be easily categorized. On one hand, Lamb does shy away from overtly radical comment; his comments on performance and his efforts to control and direct the readers of Specimens and Tales may seem to be enclosing, limiting, conservative. Yet on the other hand, Lamb was always fascinated by the unsettling, subversive potential of reading. Even by the fire side, silently absorbed in the page, the reader may be challenging authority. The most recent work on his Shakespearean criticism has focused on his challenging concepts of creative response. Younglim Han, whilst exploring Lamb’s ‘elitism and individualism’, also makes the case for understanding his approach to Shakespeare as an ‘act of sympathetic imagination’, which may be considered alongside readerresponse theorists such as Wolfgang Iser.30 Janet Ruth Heller has also linked Lamb’s and Iser’s concepts of ‘author-reader interaction’, and urged a reading of Lamb as Shakespearean which focuses not on elitism or ‘antitheatricality’, but on his attempts to encourage imaginative freedom and urge readers (and writers) ‘to participate actively in the experience of literature’.31 Martin Buzacott argues from another angle for a reconsideration of Lamb’s ‘anti-theatricality’. Buzacott identifies what he sees as two distinct camps of Shakespearean criticism, with the Romantics – Lamb, Hazlitt, Hunt and Coleridge, accompanied by L. C. Knights and A. C. Bradley – pushed into the role simply of ‘close readers’, and set against ‘‘‘performance critics” who claim the theatre as the location of the “real” Shakespearean meaning’, such as Jonas Barish or Bernard Beckermann. This oppositional reading imposes, he argues, a one-dimensional anti-theatricality upon Lamb, when in fact his argument may be viewed as ‘pro-theatrical in the sense that it argues for the greater significance of theatrical characterisation’.32 To argue for Lamb’s straightforward trajectory from 1790s Jacobin to post-1800 conservatism and a correspondent ‘inward turn’ towards reading, privacy and individualism is, therefore, to over-simplify the issue. Reaching up to take a porter-pot from Munden, or attempting to recreate the comedian’s performance – as he ‘stands wondering, amid the common-place materials of life’ (Lucas, 2: 170) – in his self-consciously theatrical Elian essays, Lamb constantly negotiates the boundaries between theatrical illusion and reality, page and stage. Lamb was, moreover, always fascinated by the potential of individual reading and interpretation, and the persistent return to ideals of creative sympathy and sociability that he first explored in

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the 1790s should complicate our understanding of his Shakespearean appropriations.

Mrs. Siddons in the ‘Salutation and Cat’ A good example of Lamb’s complex negotiations with privacy and sociability, and the relationship between domestic and theatrical, between individual and communal experiences of Shakespeare, comes in his very first published response to Shakespeare on stage: a little-known sonnet dating to winter 1794, written collaboratively with Coleridge. The sonnet offers a vivid, sensuous portrayal of the theatrical experience, evoking and celebrating the spectacle of Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth. It was first published in 1794 as part of Coleridge’s series of ‘Sonnets on Eminent Characters’ in the Morning Chronicle, although it would later be republished as Lamb’s in Coleridge’s 1796 edition of Poems on Various Subjects. Although it was later reclaimed as Coleridge’s, it is evident from Lamb’s letters that its authorship was shared, and as such it gives us an insight into Lamb’s early conversation on Shakespeare: As when a Child, on some long Winter’s night, Affrighted, clinging to its Grandame’s knees With eager wond’ring and perturb’d delight Listens strange tales of fearful dark decrees Mutter’d to Wretch by necromantic spell Of Warlock Hags, that, at the ’witching time Of murky Midnight, ride the air sublime, Or mingle foul embrace with Fiends of Hell–– Cold Horror drinks its blood! Anon the tear More gentle starts, to hear the Beldam tell Of pretty Babes, that lov’d each other dear– Murder’d by cruel Uncle’s mandate fell: E’en such the shiv’ring joys thy tones impart;– E’en so thou, SIDDONS! meltest my sad heart!33 In focusing on Siddons’s evocative portrayal of Lady Macbeth, Lamb and Coleridge demonstrate the crucial importance of actors in mediating Shakespearean characters for eighteenth-century playgoers. ‘Garrick had led the way by startling audiences to an awareness that characters could be played in other than the traditional manner,’ as Joan Coldwell has pointed

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out, ‘and for at least a century after his debut controversy raged around the validity of characterizations presented by such actors as Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, Cooke, Kean, and Macready.’34 The fascination with Siddons’s creation of Lady Macbeth foreshadows Lamb’s own enduring interest in character analyses and also underscores the way in which these interpretations were grounded in close observation of theatrical practice and the performance of particular actors. In many ways the Coleridge–Lamb sonnet is highly conventional in its homage to the moving quality of Siddons’s performance and its incredible power over her audience. Watching her play Jane Shore for instance, in Nicholas Rowe’s 1713–14 The Tragedy of Jane Shore, James Boaden recalled ‘the sobs, the shrieks’, the fainting fits, hysteria and tears she provoked in playgoers.35 Very often, evocations of her power as an actress centre on the spectator’s inability to act normally, or to exert self-control. ‘Literally the greater part of the spectators,’ wrote Boaden about her title role in Isabella, or, The Fatal Marriage (adapted and abridged from Thomas Southerne’s 1694 original by David Garrick in 1757), where she laughed as she plunged the dagger into her own breast, ‘were too ill themselves to use their hands in her applause’.36 ‘Even now, my agitation is so great, that I must lay by my pen,’ wrote the author of Letters from a Lady of Distinction to Her Friend in the Country, trying to express her emotions at seeing Siddons in the role of Belvidera, in Thomas Otway’s 1682 Venice Preserv’d.37 Her sentiments are echoed by Anna Seward, who struggled in the thick of a ‘terrible, fierce, maddening crowd’ in the pit to get a glimpse of her: Powers which surpass every idea I had formed of their possibility, press so forcibly upon my recollection that my pen has more than once stood still upon my paper, transfixed by the consciousness how poor and inadequate are all words to paint my Siddonian idolatry.38 Helen Maria Williams, in her ‘Sonnet. To Mrs Siddons’, also attempts to summon up Siddons’s overwhelming emotional effect through drawing attention to the limits of writing. To capture Siddons as Lady Macbeth – ‘when fierce ambition steels thy daring breast’ – is simply beyond the reach of description: who can trace The instant light, and catch the radiant grace! (ll. 13–14)39 A very similar consciousness of inadequacy is evident in a 1794 sonnet, ‘On Seeing Mrs Siddons the First Time, and then in the character of Isabella’ by

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a close friend and school fellow of Coleridge and Lamb, Charles Valentine Le Grice. Watching Siddons, Le Grice finds ‘all my senses flown’. The act of viewing leaves him powerless, his soul ‘suspended’ as his tears flow: My soul had fled it’s [sic] nook, and in my eye Suspended hung in tearful extasy.40 The Coleridge–Lamb sonnet, however, differs in its evocation of Siddons. Instead of her acting leaving the sonneteer powerless or overcome, it prompts a different train of creative thoughts entirely. Rather than call attention to Siddons’s physicality – her striking looks and mobile facial expressions, those ‘graces of personal beauty’ so frequently praised by other commentators – this sonnet somewhat perversely figures her as an aged beldam, holding the child spellbound with her stories of witchcraft. Judith Pascoe insightfully comments that the image the sonnet gives of Siddons is ‘both enthralling and disturbing’: The poem perfectly represents the complex of attraction and revulsion characteristic of male romantics’ responses to the theater and performance. Coleridge invokes both the sentimental bond between grandmother and child and the ‘foul embrace’ of witch and fiend.41 Pascoe is, I think, right to discern a basic ambivalence in the sonnet concerning Siddons’s performance as Lady Macbeth – she reads this mainly in the context of attitudes towards female performance, but it may also be read in terms of rival approaches to Shakespeare. For while the sonnet overtly pays homage to Siddons as an actress, it also takes her performance of Lady Macbeth off the stage and into the domestic circle. Other responses to Siddons document the writers’ inability to put pen to paper, to find the right words to describe her; this poem rejects the idea that acting overwhelms other forms of creative response, and replaces the stage with a scene of family reading and storytelling, foreshadowing those of the Tales from Shakespear. The spectacle is domesticated: Shakespeare is brought home. Over his career, Lamb would elaborate this idea in various ways – most famously, of course, in ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare’, when he specifically returns to Siddons’s performance and speaks of the possible problems of response it engenders: ‘We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we are in reality thinking of Mrs S’ (Lucas, 1: 114). Focusing too much on the specific traits of a successful actor, rather than on the words of Shakespeare, we find that we have ‘materialized and brought down a fine vision to the standard of

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flesh and blood. We have let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance’ (Lucas, 1: 114–15). Only in the individual imagination can this fine vision truly be achieved; only in the act of reading can it be set free. Is this simply a case of Romantic conservatism? The sonnet offers a useful test case for the difficulty of untangling conservative and radical appropriations of Shakespeare. It appears to shy away from the power of the spectacle – and to display a particular wariness about the kind of ‘terrible, fierce, maddening crowd’ who, as Seward testified, might gather to see Siddons play. The fireside is altogether a safer place than the crowded theatre; the imagination safest of all. This would seem to correspond with Bate’s argument concerning Lamb’s ‘inward turn’ – that Lamb, like Coleridge, removes Shakespeare from the stage, and conducts his own ‘political appropriation,’ of Shakespeare, ‘in the name of privacy and individualism’.42 In this light, taking Siddons’s Lady Macbeth away from the stage and enfolding her in the bosom of the family, with children as her only auditors, may be seen as a shrewd anti-inflammatory move, especially significant in light of the post-Revolutionary significance of Macbeth. Macbeth himself might be seen, as Mary Jacobus has put it, as a ‘man of his troubled times’, his murder of Duncan unsettling ‘moral, social and natural hierarchies’ in ways which resonated strongly with the anxieties of the 1790s. Banishing his regicide acts from the stage, as she explores, carries a special political charge, ‘consigning Macbeth to the inner theatre or textual world of Romantic poetry, and effecting a palace revolution from which the reader emerges as the leading actor and the author’s only legitimate usurper’.43 Yet the power of the reader is hard to quantify or to control and may still carry a rebellious charge. To bring Shakespeare home may not entirely ‘remove him from the political appropriators’, since to domesticate is not necessarily to depoliticize. After all, the Mrs. Siddons sonnet first appeared in the context of radical political commitment, as one of Coleridge’s ‘Sonnets on Eminent Characters’. The first sonnet had praised Thomas Erskine’s ‘matchless eloquence’ in his defence of John Thelwall, Thomas Hardy and John Horne Tooke at the Treason Trials in October 1794.44 The other ‘Eminent Characters’ in the series were all figures whom Coleridge closely identified with Revolutionary debate, and included philosophers and intellectuals such as Joseph Priestley and William Godwin, and politicians such as William Pitt – scathingly attacked as a ‘dark scowler’ – and Edmund Burke.45 Through their very form and publication context, the sonnets make the case for the way emotive literature might play a part in political action. Moreover, both Lamb and Coleridge were at this point

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thinking about the place of the domestic and private in programs of reform: ‘I am not fit for public Life,’ runs Coleridge’s famous statement, ‘yet the Light shall stream to a far distance from the taper in my cottage window’.46 Domesticating Mrs. Siddons’s Shakespearean acting in this sonnet thus might not simply be a private or individualistic move, since it appears in a highly politically engaged series, and takes its place in a public postRevolutionary debate. The complicated example offered by this sonnet sets the tone for Lamb’s later views on Shakespeare, which similarly conduct a perpetual negotiation between the demands of reading and acting, home and stage, imagination and reality – and which also carry an ambiguous political charge. It allows us to read the preoccupations of works such as ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare’, the Tales and the Specimens, back into the 1790s, showing how we might detect continuities across Lamb’s critical work on Shakespeare.

Early Shakespearean Appropriations: Falstaff’s Letters and John Woodvil Sonnets like that on Mrs. Siddons are characteristic of Lamb’s early work, which owed a joint debt to Coleridge and to Shakespeare. His first independently published work, ‘We were two pretty babes; the youngest She’, written in 1795 and published in July 1796, is heavy with echoes which show just how far Shakespeare’s language had worked itself into Lamb’s poetic register. It is a meditation on the fragility of affection: ‘The time has been,’ says the poet, ‘We two did love each other’s company,’ but as the sonnet progresses, it becomes clear that the poet has left his companion, Innocence, to venture out into the world, thus losing her forever. The ‘pretty babes’ – who make their first appearance in the sonnet to Mrs. Siddons – are derived from The Comedy of Errors; the phrase ‘the time has been’ borrows, perhaps, from Macbeth’s meditation on the loss of his innocence as he waits at Dunsinane, hearing the women cry out over Lady Macbeth’s death. The most interesting Shakespearean connection of the poem, however, is its first publication context. It appeared in the Monthly Magazine, a respectable Dissenting periodical published by Joseph Johnson and Richard Phillips, and edited by John Aikin, distinguished by contributions from, among others, Coleridge, Charles Lloyd, Mary Hays and Anna Letitia Barbauld. There were, however, other literary endeavours occupying the Monthly in that issue: a few pages before Lamb’s first independent appearance in print, the periodical dryly notes the unmasking of William

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Henry Ireland’s spurious Shakespeare manuscripts: ‘a most laborious, but most impudent forgery’. Charles Lamb thus began his published literary career at a key moment for Romantic Shakespeare interpretation. News of these remarkable discoveries had been transfixing London over the preceding 2 years. In December 1794, William Henry Ireland – just the same age as Lamb – had forged the first of his many Shakespeare documents, a mortgage deed between ‘William Shakspeare’ and Michael Fraser, supposedly found by rummaging in a ‘great quantity of papers tied up in bundles’ in the house of a mysterious gentleman.47 They were eagerly seized on by his book-dealer father Samuel, an ardent bardolater, travel writer, and antiquarian. Doing his best to satisfy his father’s desire for Shakespeareana, William Henry supplied him with a nest of deeds, wills and, growing bolder, manuscript plays. Ireland senior established a small bardic shrine at his shop in Norfolk Street, where devotees, like James Boswell, could come to pay their respects to the originals; despite his son’s reluctance, he then insisted on publishing a lavish 4-guinea folio containing numerous ‘Shakespeare’ letters and play drafts. The hysteria culminated in a production of Shakespeare’s ‘lost play’, Vortigern, at Drury Lane – unluckily timed, since Edmund Malone’s scathing Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments, had emerged only a few days previously. The audience, apparently egged on by John Philip Kemble in the leading role, greeted it as a farce, with hisses, boos, catcalls and rotten fruit. As the Monthly Magazine put it, ‘Vortigern and Rowena was acted – and the mask fell off. The publications, and the whole transaction, will soon be forgotten; or will only be remembered, and preserved, as a monument of credulity.’ Having summarily dismissed Ireland’s presumption, the Monthly Magazine moved on to some genuinely ‘original poetry’ – including that of ‘Charles Lamb, of the India House’. As Ireland’s Vortigern failed, Lamb’s creative star began to rise. It was an appropriate beginning, since Lamb and William Henry Ireland shared several key interests. Both questioned authorial identity, genius and originality. Both engaged in complex games with the name and status of the author, interrogating and re-reading Romantic narratives of authorship and inspiration while they laid claim to their own versions of Shakespeare. Ireland claimed that his forgeries were prompted purely by the desire to ‘occasion a little mirth, and shew how far credulity would go in the search for antiquities.’48 One of Lamb’s earliest Shakespearean rewritings, similarly, plays with ideas of ‘mirth’ and credulity, albeit in more obviously parodic fashion: Original Letters, &c, of Sir John Falstaff and His Friends (1796). This was published under the name of James White, Lamb’s friend from Christ’s

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Hospital, but Lamb probably had a hand in the book, and certainly promoted it energetically among his friends.49 A play on the excesses of late eighteenth-century bardolatry and antiquarianism, Falstaff’s Letters provides a rumbustious background story for The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry V and the two Parts of Henry IV. The letters, embroidering Falstaff’s deer-stealing and carousing exploits, were supposedly ‘found by Mrs. Quickly, Landlady of the Boar Tavern in Eastcheap’, in a deliberate play on Samuel Ireland’s presentation of his son’s manuscript ‘find’: Miscellaneous papers and legal instruments under the hand and seal of William Shakespeare.50 Lamb and White, keen playgoers, may well have been in the Drury Lane audience to witness the performance of Vortigern being derisorily shouted down at the line: ‘And when this solemn mockery is ended’.51 ‘Put I will end with this solemn mockery,’ echoes White’s Captain Fluellin (who can never pronounce the letter ‘b’), knowingly quoting the fatal phrase.52 This is typical of the way in which Falstaff’s Letters constantly, gleefully, alludes to the whole Ireland affair. Its black lettered ‘Introduction’ is dedicated to ‘Master Samuel Irelaunde’, and encrusted with exuberant misspellings in mockery of his son’s manuscripts. Ireland is specifically directed to look at the frontispiece engraving of Falstaff dancing, ‘a ryghte venerable picture traunsmitted downewardes throughe our house forre foure hondredde yeares’, to find the name Ireland actually inscribed on Falstaff’s belt. Perhaps, suggests the introduction, ‘an ancestor of thyne was a maker of Trunke Hose or [. . .] Pantaloones’.53 This neatly skewers William Henry Ireland’s own outrageous ploy to write himself into Shakespeare’s forged will and demonstrates the book’s selfconscious questioning of historical authenticity and transmission – it is entirely appropriate that the actual responsibility of White or Lamb as authors is itself questionable. Falstaff’s Letters cunningly exploits the storm of denial and defence stirred up by William Henry Ireland’s presumption in faking Shakespeare. But it does not do so by reverting to the idea of Shakespeare’s unique and solitary genius – ‘so strangely irregular, and so different from that of every other Mortal’, in the words of William Duff’s An Essay on Original Genius (1767).54 Instead, it suggests an intertextual, imaginatively re-written response to Shakespeare, which parodies the idea of what it terms ‘your picked man of genius’.55 Its sympathetic character study of Falstaff also shows an awareness of another developing strand of Shakespearean criticism, highly popular in the latter half of the eighteenth century. From Thomas Whately’s Remarks on Some of the Characters of Shakespeare (written c.1768–9, published 1785) to Maurice Morgann’s Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777),

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emphasis shifted away from Shakespeare’s plots to focus on his characters – psychological constructs which helped refute neoclassical arguments over Shakespearean inconsistencies, so that ‘his supposed faults in dramatic design were shown to be intentional subtleties of characterization.’56 Falstaff’s Letters – albeit eccentrically – thus participates in major trends in Shakespearean scholarship and criticism, and, furthermore, links them to the developing creative dynamics of a particular group of friends. Lamb’s later promotion of the volume furthers this association between Shakespeare and friendship. In September 1819, for instance, Lamb contributed a review of the book to Hunt’s journal The Examiner, presenting the letters as ‘almost . . . kindred with those of the full Shakspearian genius itself’.57 Lamb’s reading of Falstaff’s Letters is bound up with his friendship with ‘my fine-tempered friend, J. W.’, whom he describes reading (significantly, not watching) Henry IV at Lamb’s recommendation: We remember when the inspiration came upon him; when the plays of Henry the Fourth were first put into his hands.58 This scene of Shakespearean inspiration is linked to drinking, talking and storytelling, ‘the pleasant evenings which ensued at the Boar’s Head, [. . .] when over our pottle of sherris he would talk you nothing but pure Falstaff the long evenings through’.59 Lamb turns the ‘Feathers’ tavern in Holborn, where he and other ex-Christ’s Hospital schoolboys White and John Matthew Gutch used to meet to drink Burton ale, into Falstaff’s inn, ‘the Boar’s Head’. Sociable, friendly conversation and reading with contemporaries becomes indistinguishable from sympathetic absorption in the literary past; White’s language is ‘kindred’ with Shakespeare’s genius. The conversation stretched to include later authors, too: in 1832 he gave a copy of Falstaff’s Letters to Walter Savage Landor, inspiring, as David Chandler has shown, Landor’s mock trial, Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare (1834).60 Lamb’s and White’s appropriation of Shakespearean language in Falstaff’s Letters, while it raises serious questions of canonicity and authenticity, has comedy at its heart. Lamb’s next Shakespearean experiment, however, had more serious intent: his play John Woodvil, begun in 1799. Falstaff’s Letters is a playful product of Lamb’s lively, sometimes rowdy male friendships in the mid-1790s; John Woodvil is a much darker work, shaped by Lamb’s experiences after the ‘day of horrors’ in September 1796. Probing the nature and limits of friendly and familial loyalty, the play reflects both Lamb’s experiences in caring for Mary, and his subsequent revaluation of his emotional attachments,

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including a quarrel with Coleridge – his one-time hero and mentor – resulting in a silence which lasted from 1798 to 1800. At the heart of John Woodvil is a shattered family – the Woodvils, divided both physically and emotionally by their different allegiances after the Restoration of 1660. Sir Walter, the head of the family, was a supporter of the old parliamentary regime; he has since fled with his son Simon and gone into hiding in Sherwood Forest. The ancestral home is now occupied by his other son John and is rapidly falling into decay and debauchery, witnessed sorrowfully by Sir Walter’s orphan ward, Margaret. Once courted by John Woodvil, Margaret is now abandoned, and harassed by John’s drunken Cavalier companions, and – in a reworking of As You Like It – decides to set off into the forest in disguise. However, the forest idyll is destroyed when, in a fit of drunkenness, John reveals his father’s hiding place to a supposed friend. The old knight is hunted down and dies; John is tormented by remorse and guilt and comes to find solace only in Margaret’s continued affection and loyalty. The play thus seems to appropriate and refigure events from Lamb’s own life; here, however, it is the sister who, patiently and lovingly, comforts the guilty, parricidal brother. If Lamb was appropriating and reworking events from his own life, he was also self-consciously remodelling favourite dramatists. ‘I go upon the model of Shakspere in my play, and endeavour after a colloquial ease & spirit something like him,’ he told Southey, quoting from Henry IV and Midsummer Night’s Dream to emphasize the parallels (Marrs, 1: 159). Lamb’s creative plunderings were not limited to Shakespeare. At the same time, he was sending Southey snippets of Marlowe – one extract, discussing The Jew of Malta in terms of ‘the terrible Idea our simple ancestors had of a Jew’ (Marrs, 1: 138), reappears in his Specimens of Dramatic Poets 9 years later – and discussing George Wither and Francis Quarles alongside Beaumont and Fletcher. Even as Lamb celebrates Shakespeare, he is drawing him into dialogue with other Elizabethan poets, and also with Lamb’s own contemporaries, as in Simon’s description of his joys in the forest: To see the sun to bed, and to arise, Like some hot amourist with glowing eyes, Bursting the lazy bands of sleep that bound him, . . . To view the graceful deer come tripping by, Then stop, and gaze, then turn, they know not why, Like bashful younkers in society. To mark the structure of a plant or tree, And all fair things of earth, how fair they be. (Lucas, 1: 473)

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This brings together Elizabethan vocabulary with an allusion to Southey’s poetry, playing with issues of authorship and originality. As Lamb told Southey: I love to anticipate charges of unoriginality; the first line is almost Shakespere’s; – ‘To have my love to bed & to arise’ midsummer nights dream I think there is a sweetness in the versification not unlike some rhymes in that Exquisite play – and the Last line but three is yours an Eye ‘That met the gaze, or turn’d it knew not why’ Rosamunds Epistle (Marrs, I: 160)61 Moreover, Hazlitt claimed that this passage had so deep an effect on Godwin that, forgetting where he had first heard it, he searched for the phrase ‘hot amourist’ among the Elizabethan poets, until ‘after hunting in vain for it in Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and other not unlikely places, sent to Mr. Lamb to know if he could help him to the author’ (Howe, 11: 183). This is the same kind of confusion which Falstaff’s Letters had prompted – re-workings which tease the reader into questioning the boundaries of authorship and period. In the late 1790s, then, following the violent debates over Shakespearean authenticity and authorship, Lamb was quietly practising his own forgeries and appropriations. Falstaff’s Letters not only mocks hoaxers such as Ireland and Thomas Chatterton – it also allows an important insight into the ways in which we might read the genesis of Lamb’s approach to Shakespeare. While it pays homage to Shakespeare’s language and characters, Falstaff’s Letters also questions Romantic narratives of genius and writes Shakespeare into a narrative of creative friendship. Similarly, John Woodvil plays with concepts of originality and authorship and mediates personal relationships through Shakespeare, as well as showing how Lamb would increasingly seek to place Shakespeare within a wider context of Elizabethan writing.

Theatrical Encounters John Woodvil has been received largely as poetry, or, in the words of Hazlitt, ‘a dramatic fragment, intended for the closet rather than the stage’ (Howe, 6: 346). Yet it was designed for performance, and unsuccessfully submitted

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to John Philip Kemble for production at Drury Lane Theatre. A subsequent play, the farce Mr. H-, was accepted by Richard Wroughton and produced at Drury Lane, but was hissed at its only performance in December 1806. Two later plays, The Wife’s Trial, sent to Charles Kemble at Covent Garden in 1827, and The Pawnbroker’s Daughter – offered to Charles Mathews for production at the Adelphi in 1828 – were also rejected. Lamb seems never to have given up his desire to see one of his plays produced, and these repeated attempts show that he continued thinking actively about the relationship of poetry to performance throughout his career. He had better success with the prologues and epilogues he wrote for other plays, including Godwin’s tragedies Antonio (1800) and Faulkener (1807), Coleridge’s Remorse (1813), and James Kenney’s farce Debtor and Creditor (1814). These familiarly mention well-known actors – Richard Suett (1755–1805) and Jack Bannister (1760–1836) who will reappear in the Essays of Elia – and remind us that Lamb was a regular and enthusiastic theatregoer. A vivid image of his response to contemporary acting comes in a letter to his friend Robert Lloyd – brother of Lamb’s collaborator Charles – reporting on George Frederick Cooke’s performance in Richard III. This marks the beginning of a series of pieces about actors and acting, reading and the stage, which gradually evolve and coalesce into his essay ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare’, and the Essays of Elia. Lamb’s criticism has two main foci: Cooke’s interpretation of the part, and Colley Cibber’s simplified and revised version of the play, which was hugely popular throughout the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Richard itself is wholly metamorphosed in the wretched Acting play of that name, which you will see: altered by Cibber. (Marrs, 2: 9) The two concepts – Cooke’s portrayal of the character, and Cibber’s changes – are intertwined. As Janis Lull has pointed out, Cibber ‘shrewdly exaggerated the play’s potential as a star vehicle, initially for himself’, giving Richard a greater proportion of the lines and streamlining him into a more easily comprehensible, villainous figure.62 Cibber’s rewrite furthered interest in the dominant, compelling figure of Richard, whom actors then seized on as an ideal showcase for their talents, comparable to Hamlet. Just as Cooke was following the celebrated examples of David Garrick and John Philip Kemble in the role, Lamb was therefore responding to a long tradition of intense focus on the play as character study. His letter to

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Lloyd, dated June 1801, launches straight into lively criticism of Cooke’s performance as ‘a perfect caricature’: He gives you the monster Richard, but not the man Richard. Shakespear’s bloody character impresses you with awe and deep admiration of his witty parts, his consumate [sic] hypocrisy, and indefatigable prosecution of purpose. You despise, detest, and loath the cunning, vulgar, low and fierce Richard, which Cooke substitutes in his place. (Marrs, 2: 7) Lamb develops the idea that Cooke’s acting, while ‘strong, coarse & vigorous’, can only engage the audience on one level. The essential ambivalence of Richard’s character does not emerge – the co-existence of the ‘monster’ and the ‘man’, and the ways in which a ‘bloody character’ might also have an engaging wit and liveliness. Lamb uses this as a basis for a re-reading of Richard’s character as a feeling and human character, who reveals a ‘deep knowledge of the heart’ (Marrs, 2: 9). This is perhaps the ‘first developed response to a sympathetic Richard’, and can be set alongside his searching and idiosyncratic analyses of other Shakespearean characters such as Malvolio, whom he examines in ‘On some of the Old Actors’ through the performance of William Bensley (1738–1817).63 Just as he argued for a humanized Richard, here Lamb – as Elia – argues for a romanticized Malvolio, whose frustrated dreams evoke a ‘kind of tragic interest’ (Lucas, 2: 155). But whereas the essay argues for the success of Bensley’s portrayal of Malvolio, Cooke’s performance cannot convey these different aspects of Richard, and, similarly, cannot do justice to Shakespeare’s poetry: ‘the lofty imagery and high sentiments and high passions of Poetry come black & prose-smoked from his prose Lips’ (Marrs, 2: 8). Lamb’s focus in the review remains essentially the same. He begins by paying homage to those who have taken on the role in the past and their enduring effect on spectators: Some few of us remember to have seen, and all of us have heard our fathers tell of Quin, and Garrick, and Barry, and some faint traditional notices are left us of their manner in particular scenes . . . Hence our curiosity is excited, when a new Hamlet or a new Richard makes his appearance, in the first place, to inquire, how he acted in the Closet scene, in the Tent scene; how he looked, and how he started, when the Ghost came on. . . .64 (Lucas, 1903, 1: 36)

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Hamlet and Richard exist in dialogue between generations of actors and theatregoers, and interpretation of plays is presented as a sociable, conversational activity, in which Lamb now participates, reporting that Cooke ‘“bustled” through the scenes with at least as much spirit and effect as any of his predecessors’ (Lucas, 1903, 1: 36).65 However, it becomes quickly clear that this is not a straightforward review, but rather a meditation on a central question: ‘whether that popular actor is right or wrong in his conception of the great outlines of the character; those strong essential differences which separate Richard from all the other creations of Shakespeare’. Before he begins his character analysis, Lamb deals severely with Cibber’s re-writing – an un-Shakespearean ‘compilation or a cento of passages extracted from other of his Plays’ – which he says makes the actor’s task harder by producing ‘an inevitable inconsistency of character’. Yet the actor should still adhere ‘as much as possible, to the spirit and intention of the original Author’: Lamb details several instances in which he feels Cooke has failed in this, revolving around the same distinction he had outlined to Lloyd, between ‘the man Richard, whom Shakespeare drew’ and the ‘monster Richard, as he exists in the popular idea’ (Lucas, 1903, 1: 37). Cooke’s Richard is not subtle enough: he is too glaring a hypocrite, his humour is absent and he shows self-disgust in his deformity, rather than ‘the joy of a defect conquered’. Similar complaints appear in the more conventional review which follows: Cooke’s performance as Lear is ‘too vigorous’, his manner and voice too ‘firm’, ‘clear and strong’, and he fails to excite pity in the audience (Lucas, 1903, 1: 398–400). These pieces directly feed into his most famous commentary on Shakespeare and the stage, ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation’. Although reprinted in his 1818 collected Works, it was first published in the last issue of Leigh Hunt’s Reflector, number IV (1811), under the title of ‘Theatralia. No. I. – On Garrick, and Acting; and the Plays of Shakspeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation’. The Reflector was a lively, confidently written quarterly magazine, with a clear political agenda, mirroring Hunt’s other periodical, the Examiner, in ‘speaking freely of all parties without exception’ and showing itself to be ‘most anxious for Reform’.66 ‘Politics, in times like these, should naturally take the lead in periodical discussion,’ claimed its ‘Prospectus’; moreover, it went on, political and artistic expression are intertwined, acting upon and reacting to one another.67 The state of the nation may be glimpsed in different art forms, including theatrical performances, which – properly performed – should ‘exhibit our virtues in social action’.68 Theatrical and literary criticism is

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interlinked with the Reflector’s intention to prompt serious consideration of politics among its readers. Hunt’s own Feast of the Poets – printed immediately following Lamb’s essay on Shakespeare – swipes at the pretensions of a vast range of contemporary authors, who, Hunt adds pointedly, after mentioning Coleridge and Wordsworth, ‘have lost the bloom of their political character’.69 Hunt was equally critical of the state of the theatre. He particularly disliked the huge royal theatres. Their size assisted in ‘the substitution of show for delicate acting’, and their fondness for spectacle reduced performances to ‘caricatures’, designed to provoke easy laughter, and ill-suited to deeper material: ‘When SHAKSPEARE appears now and then in the list of performances, he looks like a sage in a procession of merry-andrews, and is suffered to pass by with little more than a cold respect.’70 Yet this did not mean that Shakespeare had to be considered entirely seriously: the first issue contained a teasing piece by Lamb’s friend Barron Field, ‘Shakspeare sermons’. In a lengthy disquisition on the mention of an ass in ‘Much Ado about Nothing’, the piece mocks both the excesses of Shakespeare worship and antiquarian pedantry, and the ‘cant of methodist preachers’.71 It is no coincidence that this is followed by a letter ‘On the Pernicious Effects of Methodism in Our Foreign Possessions’, condemning ‘missionary mania’; the target of both pieces is intolerance and ‘the rage for proselytism’.72 The main thrust of the Reflector is to provoke free thought and to encourage a questioning attitude among its readers, and its articles very often mock extremism, cliché and different types of fixed views and prejudices. Lamb’s own contributions prior to his essay on Shakespeare follow this general line, repeatedly returning to the deceptive power of the visual. Since the essay is usually considered in isolation, it is especially important to remember its original context – as part of a series of pieces, often with a piquant personal edge, in which Lamb explores how first impressions and outward appearances may generate prejudice. His first contribution, ‘On the Inconveniences Resulting from Being Hanged’, is narrated by ‘Pensilis’, a figure of ‘stigmatized innocence’ who has been hanged and then, at the last moment, cut down. Quoting Thomas Brown’s A Comical View of London and Westminster, and its mock play-bill for a hanging – ‘Doleful Procession up Holborn-hill about Eleven . . . Show over by One’ – alongside Measure for Measure, the essay reinforces the performative aspect of a public execution.73 ‘Pensilis’ carries upon him the ‘fatal mark’ of his abortive hanging, visible to all, yet neither understood nor sympathized with by the idle spectators: ‘My griefs have nothing in them that is felt as

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sacred by the bystanders.’74 Moreover, the reference to the ‘fatal mark’ recalls Lamb’s own complaints that ‘poor Mary’s disorder, so frequently recurring, has made us a sort of marked people’ (Marrs, 1: 207). Thanks to the jury’s verdict of ‘lunacy’, Mary escaped hanging for the death of her mother, but she and her brother are still ‘in a manner marked –’ (Marrs, 1: 202) and constantly subject to the prejudice of onlookers. The swift, ‘senseless’ misjudgement of the public is again attacked in ‘On the Custom of Hissing at the Theatres, with Some Account of a Club of Damned Authors’, which of course also has a highly personal subtext, as Lamb recalls the painful damning of his own play.75 Again and again, the public readiness to pass judgement on the basis of outward show and first impressions is condemned, in pieces such as ‘On the Danger of Confounding Moral with Personal Deformity; with a Hint to Those Who Have the Framing of Advertisements for Apprehending Offenders’. Here Lamb emphasizes that ‘in every species of reading, so much depends upon the eyes of the reader’: we yearn to read morality from outward appearance, but continually ‘mistake . . . grossly concerning things so exterior and palpable’.76 Lamb often takes the part of those being judged, such as the stigmatized ‘Pensilis’, or even Guy Fawkes. His essay ‘On the Probable Effects of the Gunpowder Treason in This Country If the Conspirators Had Accomplished Their Object’ knowingly quotes Edmund Burke’s Letter to a Noble Lord as it sympathizes with ‘Guy Faux’ and blows social hierarchies sky-high, creating a comic, violent, imaginative ‘dream of universal restitution’.77 To some extent, the sociable performance of the periodical format interrogates the nature of other performances, social and theatrical, and provides a place for those who are misjudged – from the hanged man and Guy Fawkes to, as we will see, the villainous characters of Shakespeare – to find their voices. All this has a special significance for our understanding of Lamb’s essay on Shakespeare: its apparent ‘anti-theatricality’ must be read in this wider context of reflections on misreading, prejudice and visual confusion. ‘On Garrick, and Acting; and the Plays of Shakspeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation’ begins with an image of the essayist as spectator, looking at the statue of Garrick in Westminster Abbey. As essayist and actor stare at one another, the battle lines are being drawn over theatrical territory. Lamb – or, rather, his essayist persona – invites us to consider the confusion between outward appearance and inner content, between actor and author. Like his previous Reflector essays, this again raises the question of how to form accurate visual judgements, and seeks to emphasize how misleading the ‘instantaneous nature of the impressions

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which we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse’ can be, how ‘contagious the counterfeit appearance of any emotion is’.78 This is partly a problem caused by the very nature of the theatre. As in his objections to Cooke playing Richard III, Lamb complains that performance relies on broad strokes of enunciation and gesture which rely on immediate effect and cannot convey nuances of character. This was particularly galling for an early nineteenth-century audience who, after the expansion of Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres, had to put up with huge size, poor lighting and bad acoustics.79 A spectator at a distance, perhaps up in the ‘gods’, could not hope to appreciate all the finely detailed expression of an actor like Kean, and, as Hazlitt commented, ‘All strong expression, deprived of its gradations and connecting motives, unavoidably degenerates into caricature’ (Howe, 5: 284–5). Another problem was the audience’s fondness for spectacle and elaborate costume, and Lamb bitterly complained about the ‘elaborate and anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury of the age demands’ – particularly in plays such as The Tempest.80 However, specific problems of staging are not Lamb’s main focus. He also wants the reader to reflect on the particular aesthetic qualities of Shakespeare: I mean no disrespect to any Actor, but the sort of pleasure which Shakspeare’s plays give in the acting seems to me not at all to differ from that which the audience receive from those of other writers; and, they being in themselves essentially so different from all others, I must conclude that there is something in the nature of acting which levels all distinctions.81 As in Falstaff’s Letters, Lamb is, in his own way, developing and expanding the popular eighteenth-century argument about the special genius of Shakespeare. In part, as we will see in his notes to his Specimens, he is eager to reject Samuel Johnson’s view that Shakespeare may have had ‘faults’ and to defend the willed dramatic unity of the plays. He also rejects the incursions of ‘such ribald trash as Tate and Cibber’ – a point to which he would return in his 1828 essay ‘Shakespeare’s Improvers’, where he attacks Nahum Tate’s reworking of Coriolanus, Shadwell’s revisions of Timon of Athens, and a 1678 London acting edition of Macbeth in which ‘Lady Macbeth is brought in repentant’ (Lucas, 1: 379). Instead, he is eager to show that each aspect of Shakespeare’s plays has a special purpose. This might not always emerge on stage, but – as the character critics of the late eighteenth century argued – it becomes apparent in a close reading of the original. He is not, therefore, necessarily making the claim that Shakespeare should not be performed – but he is making a much larger

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claim for reading, and the relationship between author and reader. ‘I am not arguing,’ he states, ‘that Hamlet should not be acted, but how much Hamlet is made another thing by being acted’.82 The main problem with Hamlet on the stage is, Lamb feels, that full sympathetic identification with the character, and an appreciation of the part he occupies in the play as a whole, are lost. He gives an acute character description of Hamlet’s ‘soreness of mind’ and asperity in dealing with Polonius and Ophelia; these are ‘temporary deformities in the character’ the purposes of which become clear as the play progresses, ‘we forgive afterwards, and explain by the whole of his character.’83 Full sympathy with Hamlet can only emerge, suggests Lamb, through the consideration of the whole afforded by reading. He uses the same argument in discussing Lear. The appearance of an ‘old man tottering about the stage’ arouses pity, he argues, whereas ‘while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear’: Shakespeare’s sympathetic understanding of the character transfers itself to the reader (Lucas, 2: 308). Similarly, he describes the way in which spectators might feel prejudiced towards the appearance of Othello, ‘a blackamoor [who] in a fit of jealousy kills his innocent white wife’: For of the texture of Othello’s mind, the inward construction marvellously laid open with all its strengths and weaknesses, its heroic confidences and its human misgivings, its agonies of hate springing from the depths of love, they see no more than the spectators at a cheaper rate, who pay their pennies a-piece to look through the man’s telescope in Leicester-fields, see into the inward plot and topography of the moon.84 This sets up parallels with Wordsworth’s 1807 lyric, ‘Star-Gazers’, which depicts the same queue of spectators in ‘Leicester’s Busy Square’, eager to see the heavens through a showman’s telescope. When they have done so, however, they ‘seem less happy than before’; they ‘slackly go away, as if dissatisfied’, and the poem becomes an exploration of expectation and disappointment which can be read as a reflection on the relationship between author and audience. The crowd of spectators seems to summon up, too, Wordsworth’s fear of an anonymous, rapidly expanding urban readership. ‘Star-Gazers’ may be seen, as Lucy Newlyn has analysed, as an ‘exemplary expression’ of Romantic anxieties of reception, ‘anxieties that centre not just on the writer’s subjection to the invasive gaze of anonymous readers, but on the nature of reception itself, as it became divorced from oral culture’.85 Lamb’s use of the same image points to the ways in which the essay is in dialogue with Wordsworth; both men are struggling with anxieties over the

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commodification of culture, the ways in which mass culture might constrain and limit imaginative involvement with a star-like poetic genius like Shakespeare. However, in its very form and publication context, Lamb’s essay seems to offer a more optimistic solution. If performance forestalls sympathetic interchange between audience and author, then perhaps reading – particularly sociable reading, among friends, family or even in the periodical format – can restore a sense of mutual relationship. Lamb had been developing this sense of the potential of sociable reading since the 1790s, and his viewpoint had crystallized in an exchange with Wordsworth in 1801 following the publication of the second volume of Lyrical Ballads. Lamb had objected to the ‘diminishing’ effect of the 1800 ‘Preface’, which he thought tried to impose a particular interpretation upon its readers, instead of encouraging a mutual, democratic response, allowing for the ‘unwritten compact between Author and reader’ (Marrs, 1: 266). Lamb ‘noticed without approval a will to power in the work of his contemporaries’, in Jane Aaron’s words, repeatedly complaining about shows of egotism and attempts to limit and direct meaning.86 His complaints about actors who impose a particular interpretation by ‘eye, tone, or gesture’, allowing no room for the audience’s own imaginative response may, therefore, be seen not simply in terms of ‘anti-theatricality’, but also in the wider context of his ongoing attempts to negotiate questions of reception and sympathy. Lamb repeatedly returns to the ways in which a sympathetic relationship can be established between author and reader, artist and viewer, actor and audience. His essay ‘On the Genius and Character of Hogarth’ similarly circles around issues of representation and audience and probes the way in which the imaginative sympathy – the ‘meditative tenderness’ – of the spectator can be aroused.87 Hogarth’s pictures appeal not only to the visual sense: they ‘have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words’.88 Specifically, it is Shakespeare’s words they recall, and Lamb develops a comparison – ‘moral’ and poetic – between Timon of Athens and the Rake’s Progress. Both, he says, mingle ‘the ludicrous with the terrible’: both use satire as a means to a moral end, which might lead on ‘to some more salutary feeling than laughter’.89 Both Hogarth and Shakespeare, too, practise a type of ‘imaginary work’ – Lamb has borrowed the phrase from The Rape of Lucrece (1594), to which he refers as Tarquin and Lucrece – which encourages reader response. In Lamb’s words, ‘where the spectator must meet the artist in his conceptions half way; . . . it is peculiar to the confidence of high genius alone to trust so much to spectators or readers.’90 If the popular prints of Hogarth can prompt this relationship between

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spectator and artist, so too can actors, in special circumstances. Lamb compares Munden, for instance – with his multiple facial expressions which work on the reader’s imagination like opium – to Hogarth (Lucas, 2: 169). Equally powerful artists, for Lamb, are comedians such as Jack Bannister (1760–1836) who can keep up ‘a tacit understanding’ with the audience, making them ‘unconsciously to themselves, a party in the scene’ (Lucas, 2: 185). Lamb himself, in the development of the essay form, is attempting something similar. The Reflector essays, with their elaborate narrative voices – ‘Pensilis’ and ‘Edax’ – and self-conscious references to their periodical context are calling attention to themselves as performances and inviting the reader to respond. That early reviewer, John Wilson, was right to note their ‘paradoxical’ nature, but these paradoxes are not the ‘baroque whimsicalities’ deplored by later critics, but, rather, ways of prompting an imaginative reaction and continuing the interchange between author and audience.91 The essayist asks us to reflect on the ways in which an audience may confuse reality and show – as, for instance, in his slighting discussion of The History of George Barnwell (1731) in comparison with Othello. A footnote, however, begs the theatre managers to stop the holiday performance of George Barnwell because it makes ‘uncle-murder too trivial’: ‘Uncles that think anything of their lives, should fairly petition the Chamberlain against it.’92 The footnote not only invites us to laugh at the essayist’s failure to distinguish the stage from reality, but it also creates a certain complicity with the reader, a form of periodical sociability which perhaps serves as a print substitute for those evening gatherings recalled by Hazlitt. This performative sociability is more fully developed in Elia and The Last Essays of Elia, where quotations and allusions to Shakespeare are woven into the essay, creating a sense of shared reading and mutual knowledge. Elia is alert to the ways in which London itself can function as a stage, which he peoples with Shakespearean characters – heirs to the sly, allusive ‘Falstaff’ originally created over a friendly ‘pottle of sherris’ in the 1790s. The clerks in ‘The South-Sea House’ are such characters: John Tipp is evoked through Fortinbras; Maynard is heard ‘in tones worthy of Arden’ chanting ‘that song sung by Amiens to the banished Duke’ (Lucas, 2: 6–7). By the close of the essay, Elia is asking the reader to consider the reality of such depictions: Reader, what if I have been playing with thee all this while – peradventure the very names, which I have summoned up before thee, are fantastic – insubstantial – like Henry Pimpernel, and old John Naps of Greece. (Lucas, 2: 8)

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In presenting the theatrical performance of his own essay in words borrowed from Shakespeare’s fantasies in The Taming of the Shrew, Lamb urges his reader towards an appreciation of different ambivalent performances within the city: in the periodical, in the workplace, in the streets. Chimney sweeps find an echo in Macbeth’s ‘apparition of a child crowned with a tree in his hand’ (Lucas, 2: 124). Beggars not only recall the ‘poor and broken bankrupt’ of As You Like It, but act out the Duke’s injunction to find ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones’ (2. 1. 16–17), since they are ‘the standing morals, emblems, mementos, dial-mottos, the spital sermons, the books for children’ of the city (Lucas, 2: 133). Elia himself becomes an actor, taking on various personae – at times borrowing Coleridge’s voice, at others quoting Falstaff, sometimes appearing as ‘a votary of the desk’, but then escaping to ‘Oxford in the Vacation’ to ‘play the gentleman, enact the student’ (Lucas, 2: 9–10). Elia, suggests Simon Hull, is ‘Lamb’s attempt at managing theatre on his own terms: by appropriating theatre’s illusory, emancipative qualities to the unspectacular figure of the periodical essayist’.93 Those multiple allusions and quotations show how Elia also functions as a skilful re-appropriation of Shakespeare which may be read not as a private, individualistic, enclosing turn, but as a rivalrous claim for the power of the periodical form. A brief passage in the London Magazine version of ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’ nicely demonstrates this rivalry, as Elia describes ‘the indignation of a crowd that was justling in with me at the pit-door of Covent Garden theatre, to have a sight of Master Betty – then at once in his dawn and his meridian – in Hamlet’ when they saw him reading the play: I happened to have in my hand a large octavo of Johnson and Steevens’s Shakspeare, which, the time not admitting of my carrying it home, of course went with me to the theatre. Just in the very heat and pressure of the doors opening – the rush, as they term it – I deliberately held the volume over my head, open at the scene in which the young Roscious [sic] had been most cried up, and quietly read by the lamp-light. The clamour became universal. ‘The affectation of the fellow’, cried one. ‘Look at that gentleman reading, papa,’ squeaked a young lady, who in her admiration of the novelty almost forgot her fears. I read on. ‘He ought to have his book knocked out of his hand,’ exclaimed a pursy cit, whose arms were too fast pinioned to his side to suffer him to execute his kind intention. Still I read on – and, till the time came to pay my money, kept as unmoved, as Saint Antony at his Holy Offices, with the satyrs, apes, and hobgoblins, mopping, and making mouths at him, in the picture, while

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the good man sits as undisturbed at the sight, as if he were sole tenant of the desart. – The individual rabble (I recognized more than one of their ugly faces) had damned a slight piece of mine but a few nights before, and I was determined the culprits should not a second time put me out of countenance.94 Here, the periodical essayist is almost violently at odds with the crowd – yet he is also one of them, a fellow theatregoer and (spurned) playwright. This little anecdote vividly sets in conflict two competing strands of Shakespearean appreciation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century: the rise of star actors such as the celebrated prodigy Master Betty, William Henry West (1791–1874), and increasing interest in scholarly editions of the plays such as the heavily footnoted Johnson-Steevens edition of 1773 (later reprinted and enlarged).95 The periodical essayist mediates between the two, literally making space for an act of reading in the theatre, and it is perhaps significant that when the essays make their transition into book form, this passage disappears. If – as we have seen – he has doubts about actors, so too is Lamb, particularly as essayist, sceptical about scholarly appropriations of Shakespeare. Elia tells us earlier in ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’ that he prefers ‘the common editions of Rowe and Tonson’ to more lavish productions such as Boydell’s engraved versions. He also strongly dislikes Malone’s whitewashing of the coloured effigy of Shakespeare at Stratford-on-Avon, which seems symbolic of scholarly ‘meddling’ with the popular version of the playwright. Steering a path between theatrical and scholarly claims to Shakespeare, Elia stands up for a sociable, popular Shakespeare who seems to exist between the two: ‘I have a community of feeling with my countrymen about his Plays,’ he claims, ‘and I like those editions of him best, which have been oftenest tumbled about and handled.’96 The essays were one way of expressing that ‘community of feeling’ about Shakespeare, so too were his Specimens and the Tales from Shakespear. Each of them had, as we will see, their own constraints and limitations, yet both attempted to argue for an imaginative, sympathetic, sociable response to Shakespeare.

Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakspeare Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakspeare was first published in 1808 by Longman. After a slow start,

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it proved popular, reprinted by Edward Moxon in 1835 and in at least five other editions during the nineteenth century. It was – yet again – a work created among friends, which would also go on to influence friends’ writing on Shakespeare. Its earliest beginnings may be glimpsed in a ‘little extract book’ of quotations from Beaumont and Fletcher, which Lamb burnt after the ‘day of horrors’ (Marrs, 1: 30). By 1804, however, we hear of a scheme by Southey to prevail upon Longman to publish a collection of extracts from the ‘scarce old English poets’: ‘my name must stand to the prospectus,’ he tells Coleridge, ‘and Lamb shall take the job and the emolument, for whom, in fact, I invented it, being a fit thing to be done, and he the fit man to do it.’97 The project then faltered, but seems to have begun again in 1806, possibly with some involvement by Wordsworth, and the volume was published by September 1808. By then it seems primarily to have assumed the function of a device to revive the Lambs’ fortunes after the disappointment of Mr. H-. ‘So I go creeping on,’ wrote Lamb to Thomas Manning about his work on the Specimens, ‘since I was lamed with that cursed fall from off the top of Drury Lane Theatre into the Pit something more than a year ago’ (Marrs, 2: 272). As so often with Lamb’s approach to drama, the collection thus represents a movement from the crowded and unpredictable theatre into the world of friendly readership. Once again, however, as we have seen with his earliest sonnets, this movement cannot be interpreted in purely conservative or limiting terms, since the collection seeks to increase public knowledge of obscure Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists and to make their work accessible to a wide audience. There is an afterword to the Specimens in 1827 in the shape of a series of contributions to Hone’s Table Book, Extracts from the Garrick Plays, which Lamb suggests should be considered as ‘after-gleanings’, ‘supplementary’ to the Specimens. These follow a very similar format, taken from the Garrick collection of plays at the British Museum, which Lamb – after his retirement from the East India House in 1825 – had more leisure to explore. In the ‘Preface’ to Extracts, he presents an image of the Museum reader as ‘having the range of a Nobleman’s Library, with the Librarian to your friend’: again, the emphasis is on opening obscure texts to a wider readership.98 Lamb’s collecting of the extracts repeats and furthers the democratizing endeavour of the British Museum itself. Just as the retired clerk is allowed entry to ‘a Nobleman’s Library’, so too are readers of Hone’s Table Book now permitted to access the old plays. Nevertheless, the readers of Lamb’s collections are not exactly allowed a free range of these ‘specimens’ and ‘extracts’, since in both the Specimens and the Extracts, Lamb imposes a strict structure and interpretive framework on his selections.

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Specimens includes extracts from Lamb’s old favourites Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, all of whom had been important influences on John Woodvil. There are also extracts from John Webster, John Ford, Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe, as well as lesser known curiosities such as The Merry Devil of Edmonton. The plays Lamb used were drawn partly from the collection at the British Museum, and also from Robert Dodsley’s twelve-volume Select Collection of Old Plays (1744–5). The purpose of Lamb’s selection of these dramatists was two-fold. First, he sought to convey an appreciation of Shakespeare’s context and an insight not only into the drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, but also into the preoccupations of the age. In selecting plays which focused on human interest, ‘life and manners, rather than masques, and Arcadian pastorals’, Lamb stated his intention ‘to illustrate what may be called the moral sense of our ancestors’, and with this in mind carefully chose passages which involved ‘scenes of passion’, ‘interesting situations’ and ‘serious descriptions’ (Specimens, vi). In giving an insight into the historical and emotional context of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Lamb hoped, he said, to show ‘how much of Shakspeare shines in the great men his contemporaries, and how far in his divine mind and manners he surpassed them and all mankind’ (Specimens, vi). Yet this bardolatry co-exists with an urge to break down strict canons and to encourage contextualization, since the second purpose of the volume was to bring together the most admired scenes in Fletcher and Massinger, in the estimation of the world the only dramatic poets of that age who are entitled to be considered after Shakspeare, and to exhibit them in the same volume with the more impressive scenes of old Marlowe, Heywood, Tourneur, Webster, Ford, and others: to show what we have slighted, while beyond all proportion we have cried up one or two favourite names. (Specimens, vii) Lamb’s ‘Preface’ seems, therefore, to posit a dual focus for the Specimens – at once supporting the pre-eminence of Shakespeare, but also proposing a re-opening and re-ordering of the canon. Lamb’s process of selecting and presenting the extracts shares in this ambivalence. On one hand the extracts encourage the reader’s imaginative response to the plays, since Lamb gives ‘entire scenes, and in some instances successive scenes’, rather than isolated quotations – ‘detached beauties’ – which split up the dramatic unity of the play (Specimens, v). On the other hand, these scenes are carefully managed and at times censored, not only by leaving out potentially confusing references or secondary characters, but

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also in expunging ‘without ceremony all that which the writers had better never have written, that forms the objection so often repeated to the promiscuous reading of Fletcher, Massinger, and some others’ (Specimens, v). For instance, his extracts from Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess pointedly exclude the ‘ugly deformity’ of Cloe, a ‘character of lewdness’: ‘Female lewdness’, comments Lamb scathingly, ‘at once shocks nature and morality’ (Specimens, 384). John Coates has gone so far as to argue that Lamb was creating a ‘kind of “conduct book’’’ through his excerpts; in Coates’s words, he ‘appears to have been concerned to a marked extent with a right way to do things’, both morally and socially.99 In his notes to Webster’s Devil’s Law Case, for example, Lamb comments on the duel between Contarino and Ercole as ‘a model of a well-managed and gentlemanlike difference’ (Specimens, 199); ‘a beauty and truth of moral feeling’ is evident in Middleton’s and Rowley’s portrayal of disputes in A Fair Quarrel (Specimens, 136). Lamb’s morally judgemental mode has a literary equivalent, since – as we will see – all the dramatists are read according to Shakespearean criteria, and a sense of literary hierarchy is taken for granted. ‘After all,’ Lamb concludes his note on The Maid’s Tragedy, ‘Beaumont and Fletcher were but an inferior sort of Shakspeares and Sidneys’ (Specimens, 351). Like the Tales from Shakespear, the Specimens thus has several overlapping moral and literary motives, and the collection simultaneously encourages and seeks firmly to control readerly response. Lamb was conscious that the mode he had chosen to present the extracts was already well established. As he pointed out to Manning, the idea of selecting ‘specimens’ was ‘becoming fashionable’ (Marrs, 2: 272); volumes such as The British Muse (1738), or The Beauties of the English Stage (1756), presented quotations and ‘different modes of theatrical Expression’ from Shakespeare to contemporary dramatists.100 However, Lamb felt he was doing something different in his attempt to interest readers in a broader Shakespearean context, closing an 1827 summary of his own career with the conclusion that ‘he also was the first to draw the Public attention to the old English Dramatists.’101 This was not quite true, since William Gifford, for instance, produced an edition of Massinger in 1805 (followed up in 1813) which ‘did much for the text and fame’ of the playwright.102 However, recent reassessment of the reputations of playwrights such as Jonson, Webster and Marlowe has nevertheless confirmed the importance of the Specimens. Tom Lockwood suggests that the volume fostered a widespread interest in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama: evident not only among the reading public but among the printers, publishers, and booksellers of Paternoster-Row and elsewhere in

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London: witness the editions of John Ford and of Beaumont and Fletcher edited by Scott’s amanuensis, Henry Weber, and more importantly, the decision of the publisher John Stockdale to venture in 1811 a single-volume edition of Jonson, which can clearly be seen as a commercial recognition of the climate of appreciation to which Lamb’s work had given rise.103 Bryan Waller Procter noted in his copy of Specimens that ‘most of the plays from which these extracts are taken’ had since been reprinted, citing collections such as The Ancient English Drama (1814–33), The Old English Drama: A Selection of Plays from the Old English Dramatists (1825), and the collected works of Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and copying out further extracts from Webster to supplement Lamb’s selection. Procter’s annotations were typical of the appreciative response the Specimens prompted to little-read authors such as Webster. Indeed, Don D. Moore salutes Lamb as the ‘critic who first looked closely at Webster, at the plays as literature’ and credits him with prompting nineteenth-century literary appreciation of the playwright: earlier interest in Webster, he argues, had mainly been antiquarian, and limited to ‘booksellers and anthologists’. The difference in the Specimens, claims Moore, is Lamb’s ‘genuinely critical acumen’, his ‘impressionistic approach to the plays as literature, not as antique curiosities’.104 Thomas Dabbs similarly sees the Specimens as ‘an important event in the study of old drama’, since Lamb’s arranging and glossing of exciting dramatic moments ‘lent artistic credence to dramas that many prior critics had found unrefined’ – a credence bolstered by Lamb’s repeated emphasis on their Shakespearean elements and affiliations, evident from the very title of the collection.105 The notes attached to the extracts persistently urge Shakespearean comparisons – very often to the detriment of the other dramatists. Extracting two speeches by Barabas from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, for instance, Lamb compares Barabas to Shylock, who ‘in the midst of his savage purpose is a man,’ whereas ‘Barabas is a mere monster brought in with a large painted nose to please the rabble’ (Specimens, 31). Middleton’s witches, from The Witch: A Tragicomedy, also compare unfavourably to those in Macbeth; the former ‘can hurt the body; those have power over the soul’ (Specimens, 174). A scene from The Merry Devil of Edmonton is commended for having ‘much of Shakspeare’s manner in the sweetness and goodnaturedness of it’ (Specimens, 53), whereas Fletcher is disparaged for showing a general preference for ‘unnatural and violent situations’: ‘Shakspeare had nothing of this contortion in his mind, none of that

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craving after romantic incidents, and flights of strained and improbable virtue, which I think always betrays an imperfect moral sensibility’ (Specimens, 404). The portrayal of love in The Faithful Shepherdess, similarly, is unfavourably compared to the ‘loves of Hermia and Lysander’, which are judged to be properly innocent (Specimens, 383). Lamb thus explores the ways in which Shakespeare’s characters might affect the reader, in terms of sympathetic response or imaginative arousal, and defends Shakespeare morally – a point which will become important as we explore how he situated himself against Samuel Johnson. Underpinning this is Lamb’s interest in the way in which Shakespeare composed and structured his scenes. Selecting a scene from Fletcher’s Thierry and Theodoret: A Tragedy, Lamb commends it as Fletcher’s ‘finest’: yet when ‘compared with Shakspeare’s finest scenes’, he concludes, it ‘is slow and languid’ (Specimens, 404). He develops this comparison between Fletcher and Shakespeare through a number of notes, culminating in his comments on The Two Noble Kinsmen, where he discusses the distinction between the two dramatists in detail: [Fletcher’s] ideas moved slow; his versification, though sweet, is tedious, it stops every moment; he lays line upon line, making up one after the other, adding image to image so deliberately that we see where they join; Shakspeare mingles every thing, he runs line into line, embarrasses sentences and metaphors; before one idea has burst its shell, another is hatched and clamorous for disclosure. (Specimens, 419) Mingling, hatching, clamouring: Lamb is participating in – and helping to create – a Romantic reading of Shakespeare which emphasizes his vital, active creativity. The point of the volume, it becomes clear, is not simply to contextualize Shakespeare’s plays and to discuss Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, but also to help formulate a coherent critical view of Shakespeare. In particular, Lamb seeks to rebuff neoclassical strictures on Shakespeare’s ‘irregularities’, such as his inattention to dramatic unities. Pedantic attention to these had always frustrated him – witness his ironic comments on George Dyer’s opinion of Shakespeare: ‘he calls him a great but irregular genius, which I think to be an original & just remark’ (Marrs, 1: 229). The theme is developed at greater length in Specimens, when Lamb attempts to rebuff the ‘vulgar misconception of Shakspeare, as of a wild irregular genius “in whom great faults are compensated by great beauties”’ (Specimens, 99). The quotation is not exact, but he is probably situating

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himself in relation both to Alexander Pope, and to Johnson’s views of Shakespeare, as put forward in his 1765 Preface: Shakespeare with his excellencies has likewise faults, and faults sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit.106 When Johnson’s Preface is read alongside Specimens, it becomes clear that it functions as a kind of shadow text to the later work, as indeed it does to Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817). Although – as will be discussed – Lamb does borrow several key Johnsonian concepts, many of Lamb’s points about Shakespeare seem to be developed in contention with the Preface. Lamb engages with two major, interrelated issues raised by Johnson: Shakespeare as moralist, and Shakespeare as dramatist. One of the main problems, as Johnson sees it, is that Shakespeare ‘seems to write without any moral purpose’ – whereas it is ‘always a writer’s duty to make the world better’.107 In Shakespeare’s comic scenes, moreover, Johnson objects to ‘gross’ jests and licentious pleasantry: ‘neither his gentlemen nor his ladies have much delicacy.’108 As we have seen, Lamb seeks to defend Shakespeare’s morality. Indeed, in certain notes, he seems to be directly answering Johnson’s accusation, as in his discussion of Helena in All’s Well That End’s Well, who reverses ‘the ordinary laws of courtship’. Despite this, Lamb argues, Shakespeare handles the subject with ‘such exquisite address’ that she retains her honour, ‘delicacy dispenses with her laws in her favour’ (Specimens, 351). Lamb also argues for a renewed appreciation of Shakespeare as a highly selfconscious, successful dramatist, rebutting Johnson’s reading of a Shakespeare who ‘seems not always fully to comprehend his own design’. Shakespeare’s plots are ‘loosely formed’ and ‘carelessly pursued’, argues Johnson, and the playwright thus ‘omits opportunities of instructing and delighting’.109 For Lamb, on the other hand, Shakespeare’s refusal to impose an overt moral runs alongside his aesthetic power. Looseness here – ‘he runs line into line’ – becomes a sign not of artistic lack of control but of creative genius. Lamb’s defence of Shakespeare is seconded by Wordsworth in his Essay Supplementary to the Preface (1815). Wordsworth quotes directly from the note in Specimens in his discussion of the ways in which German perceptions of Shakespeare’s genius and dramatic unity have out-stripped English criticism: The Germans only, of foreign nations, are approaching towards a knowledge and feeling of what he is. In some respects they have acquired a

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superiority over the fellow countrymen of the Poet: for among us it is a current, I might say, an established opinion, that Shakspeare is justly praised when he is pronounced to be ‘a wild irregular genius, in whom great faults are compensated by great beauties’. How long may it be before this misconception passes away, and it becomes universally acknowledged 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, is not less admirable than his imagination, his invention, and his intuitive knowledge of human Nature?110 By Germans, Wordsworth is thinking particularly of A. W. von Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1808; translated into English in 1815). The way in which Wordsworth’s reference to Schlegel appears in the same sentence as his quotation from Lamb’s Specimens is particularly intriguing. Schlegel’s views on Shakespeare have, of course, a deep impact on the Romantic perspective, best seen in Hazlitt’s introduction to the Characters of Shakespear’s Plays. Hazlitt sets Schlegel’s perspectives on the aesthetic unity of Shakespeare’s plays in contrast with Johnson’s views, which he somewhat unfairly characterizes as dry and unyielding: ‘cast in a given mould, in a set form . . . made up by rule and system’ (Howe, 4: 175). This is obviously doing Johnson an injustice, since his criticism is deeply aware of ‘Shakespeare’s resistance to system’.111 But Hazlitt needs to set Johnson up as an opposition figure – he needs to put forward this concept of a hard ‘set form’ the better to elucidate his own dynamic, evolving, sympathetic approach. Johnson, suggests Bate, ‘is a great antithetic critic, where Hazlitt is a great sympathetic one’.112 Hazlitt’s approach is also distinctly sociable, sympathetically responding both to Shakespeare, and to a wider circle of contemporary writers and friends. If the sympathy of the Characters of Shakespear’s Plays is filtered through Schlegel, it is also equally powerfully indebted to the dedicatee of Hazlitt’s book, Lamb – since, in that image of Shakespeare forging his mingled materials into a dramatic whole, Specimens pre-empts Schegel. The image is mirrored by Coleridge’s Lectures on the Principles of Poetry, also given in the early part of 1808, from January to June, and his refutation of ‘the popular notion, that he was a great Dramatist, by a sort of Instinct’. He disparages those who talk of Shakespere as a sort of beautiful Lusus Naturae, a delightful Monster – wild indeed, without taste or Judgment . . . uttering amid the

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strangest follies the sublimest truths. In nine places out of ten in which I find his awful name mentioned, it is with some epithet of wild, irregular, pure child of nature, &c &c &c.113 That ‘wild, irregular’ suggests the interconnection with Lamb, whose Specimens would not be published until later in 1808, but who had, after all, been discussing Shakespeare with Coleridge since the mid-1790s.114 It is another instance of the ways in which the Romantic view of Shakespeare might be formed through ongoing conversation. The concept of Shakespeare’s unifying, inventive, imaginative power, and his aesthetic judgement, owes as much to the discussions within and around Specimens as it does to Schlegel – Lamb’s early attempts to refute Johnson’s neoclassical strictures make a powerful and long-lasting contribution to Romantic perspectives of Shakespeare. Yet it would be wrong to suggest that Lamb and Johnson are diametrically opposed, since they share a similar conception of the source of Shakespeare’s power. Both see him as ‘a poet of nature’, but develop the concept in different ways. Johnson sees both Shakespeare’s ‘excellencies’ and his ‘faults’ as stemming from this natural quality. On one hand, Shakespeare has a deep capacity to represent nature – his drama is ‘the mirrour of manners and of life’ – but he is also prone to faults of his own human nature.115 These can lead him both into a poor representation of morality – he carries his characters, for instance, ‘indifferently through right and wrong’ – and into dramatic sloppiness, including hurrying the conclusions of his plays, ‘shorten[ing] the labour to snatch the profit’, and getting carried away by a ‘quibble’: ‘the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career’.116 On the other hand, as a ‘poet of nature’ he is able to transcend conventions such as the dramatic unities, and successfully to bring comedy and tragedy together in what Johnson terms a ‘mingled drama’.117 Johnson’s use of the word ‘mingled’ perhaps inspires Lamb’s own assertion that ‘Shakspeare mingles every thing,’ in which he pushes Johnson’s original point further. Like Johnson, Lamb characterizes Shakespeare as inspired by nature: ‘Shakespeare chose her [Nature] without a reserve: and had riches, power, understanding, and long life, with her, for a dowry’ (Specimens, 409). This does not mean, however, that he is a purely ‘natural’ poet, but rather that he has an ability to reflect upon and recreate nature: ‘not Nature’s nature,’ he suggests in a note to the Extracts from the Garrick Plays, ‘but Imagination’s substituted nature’ (Lucas, 1903, 401). The point recurs in ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare’: It is common for people to talk of Shakspeare’s plays being so natural; that every body can understand him. They are natural indeed, they are

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grounded deep in nature, so deep that the depth of them lies out of the reach of most of us.118 Lamb is building on Johnson’s point: Shakespeare is not merely a ‘poet of nature’, but a poet who commands nature. This allows him both to create his own literary and critical conventions and also to convey his own morality. For just as the plays have an aesthetic unity and power, so too do they have a deep moral sense, even if we are not immediately able to see it at work. This leads into the final important point of difference between Johnson and Lamb: their perception of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Johnson concludes that Shakespeare had to contend with an age ‘yet struggling to emerge from barbarity’, where ‘literature was yet confined to professed scholars, or to men and women of high rank’: ‘Plebeian learning’, he maintains, was a matter of ‘adventures, giants, dragons, and enchantments’.119 Lamb’s intention, however, is to depict a full range of literary achievements of the period and to show the ‘gentlemanlike’ civilization and moral depth of this literature. Contemporary inability to appreciate different presentations of morality was a recurrent point of frustration for him. In an angry note to Middleton’s and Rowley’s A Fair Quarrel, for instance, he claims that the play’s ‘admirable passions’ would not be tolerated in early nineteenth-century theatre because of the ‘insipid levelling morality to which the modern stage is tied down’: Our audiences come to the theatre to be complimented on their goodness. They compare notes with the amiable characters in the play, and find a wonderful similarity of disposition between them. (Specimens, 136) Instead of encouraging a ‘delicacy of perception in questions of right and wrong’, Lamb claims, modern playwrights are better content to deliver the audience with ‘two or three hackneyed sentences’ of clichéd sentiment. This vehement support of Middleton and Rowley is comparable to ‘On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century’, which argues that contemporary audiences – spoilt by ‘the exclusive and all devouring drama of common life’ – have lost the ability to distinguish between drama and reality, and apply the same ‘moral test’ to both (Lucas, 2: 161). The comedies of Congreve and Farquhar are, therefore, judged licentious, since contemporary playgoers have lost the ‘middle emotions’ which would allow them to enter into the ‘imaginary freedom’ of the plays (Lucas, 2: 161–2). This then lends a special significance to Lamb’s stated aim in the ‘Preface’ of Specimens ‘to illustrate what may be called the moral sense of our ancestors’. Lamb’s carefully structured and argued notes attempt to

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create another sympathetic, imaginative relationship between playwright and reader which will allow the latter to appreciate the aesthetic unity and morality of these dramatists. As Gillian Russell has discussed, Lamb ‘mediates between the reader and the old play’.120 He opens up a way for the reader to appreciate – to become familiar with – the narrative structure, literary and dramatic qualities, and ‘moral sense’ of a distinctly different world. In doing so, he also emphasizes the imaginative power and aesthetic achievement of Shakespeare, inextricable from his deeper moral consciousness. And whilst being fiercely defensive of Shakespeare’s pre-eminence, the Specimens also awaken a larger interest in his literary world and urge a full-scale revaluation of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. They are also revealingly structured, negotiating between Lamb’s desire to afford the reader freedom, and his anxiety to control response. Like the Tales from Shakespear, the volume’s concentrated presentation of narrative and character in each of the plays gives ‘the specimen the intensity of a well-wrought short story’, carefully presented and directed.121 The plays are at once domesticated and set free; they are made accessible to the reading public and yet tightly controlled by their presentation as ‘specimens’. Their influence, too, was powerful, long-lasting, and to some extent limiting. As late as 1924, for instance, T. S. Eliot famously complains in his essay ‘Four Elizabethan Dramatists’ about the hampering influence of the Specimens, which, he claims, established ‘the accepted attitude towards Elizabethan drama’. ‘By publishing these selections, Lamb set in motion the enthusiasm for poetic drama which still persists’, encouraging a distinction which Eliot saw as ‘the ruin of modern drama – the distinction between drama and literature’.122 The packaging and presentation of Specimens, he claimed, exerted a strong influence not only over perceptions of Elizabethan drama, but also over the way drama itself, and its relationship to literature, was being considered in the early twentieth century. Eliot’s struggles to free his own drama from the patterns imposed by Lamb point to the power of Specimens through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The volume still deserves a full-scale reconsideration as a crucial intervention in Romantic and nineteenth-century perceptions of Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama. It also forms an indispensable companion piece to ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare’, with its similarly ambivalent and difficult approach to the relationship between poetry and play, reader and drama, audience and author. Both help us to understand the complex thinking behind Charles and Mary Lamb’s best-known Shakespearean appropriation, the Tales from Shakespear. This deceptively simple volume, which has never been out of print since its first publication

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at the very close of 1806, has not only shaped generations of first encounters with Shakespeare, but it has also had a surprising influence in mediating Shakespeare for audiences abroad. The Tales served to introduce Shakespeare to China in 1903, and they are still being pressed into service as Penguin English readers. They form, therefore, an appropriate conclusion – not only showing how the Lambs’ circle of sociability might have expanded across the globe, but also reminding us of the limitations, restrictions and careful negotiations of their view of Shakespeare. They also allow us a special insight into the dynamics of the Lambs’ family creativity – and into Mary Lamb’s views on Shakespeare, which, in this final section, come to the fore.

Tales from Shakespear The Tales from Shakespear had their origin not only in more than a decade of thinking and writing about Shakespeare, but also in a famous letter to Coleridge of 1802, when Lamb condemned the lack of good, imaginative books for children.123 ‘Goody Two Shoes’, he wrote, referring to the old Newbery classic of 1765, ‘is almost out of print. Mrs. Barbauld[’s] stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery.’ He and, he implies, Mary were out of patience with ‘Mrs. B’s & Mrs. Trimmer’s nonsense’: Knowledge insignificant & vapid as Mrs. B’s books convey, it seems, must come to a child in the shape of knowledge, & his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers, when he has learnt, that a Horse is an Animal, & Billy is better than a Horse, & such like: instead of that beautiful Interest in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child. (Marrs, 2: 81) This opposition between ‘the shape of knowledge’ and ‘wild tales’ is another version of Lamb’s plea for imaginative sympathy between writer and reader; children, too, deserve their freedom as readers. Yet it is also slightly unfair – ‘Goody Two Shoes’ was a highly moralistic work, and, conversely, Barbauld’s writing for children is imaginative, sympathetic and experimental in encouraging independent reading. Perhaps Lamb was already thinking of himself as a literary rival on the contemporary children’s market. Several years later, at the close of 1806, he and Mary published Tales from Shakespear with the Godwins’ ‘Juvenile Library’: twenty short, lively prose adaptations of the comedies, tragedies and late plays. The tales represent the first literary

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expression of their ‘double singleness’, since the writing was shared between them. Mary took the comedies; Charles, Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Romeo, Hamlet and Othello. They also, subtly, offer an insight into the Lambs’ creative relationship, and their familial bond. In their delicate attempts to control family readings of Shakespeare, the Tales also reveal the Lambs’ perpetual negotiations with their own family situation. On the surface, the little volume seems to be the vindication of that earlier desire to rouse the child’s ‘beautiful Interest in wild tales’. Their stories, although summarized and simplified, are designed to involve the child reader – first in terms of the portability of the original books. Each tale was first issued separately in a little child-friendly sixpenny edition, containing three illustrations, some said to have been done by Blake, before being repackaged and sold together as a small volume. This attention to the experience of the child reader is echoed by the imaginative way in which they are introduced, often directly, to Shakespearean language. Like Henrietta Bowdler’s Family Shakespeare of the same year, the Tales actively consider the ways in which children might engage with Shakespeare’s language, giving what the ‘Preface’ calls a ‘few hints and little foretastes’ of the Shakespeare they will later ‘read . . . at full length’ (Lucas, 3: 1–2). As F. J. Harvey Darton puts it in his classic Children’s Books in England, the Tales – like the Specimens the following year – try to give ‘something like a reality of the Elizabethan spirit’.124 The Tales may, therefore, be seen as heirs to that imaginative vision of the 1802 letter, opening up what the Lambs term in the ‘Preface’ the ‘wild poetic garden’ of Shakespeare’s language. Yet that ‘wildness’ is not entirely straightforward. The Lambs seem to be setting their book in neat opposition to didactic views of children’s literature, apparently fighting, as Paul Heins has it, against the ‘rise of a didactic, moralistic school of writing for children’.125 Yet – as in the Specimens – the Tales also demonstrate a desire to manage and direct the child’s reading of Shakespeare. Like the problems Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess posed for the Specimens, sexually charged and ambiguous plays such as The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well proved distinctly problematic for conversion into children’s narratives. Mary Lamb wrote to her friend Sarah Stoddart that All’s Well ‘teazed me more than all the rest put together’ (Marrs, 2: 235). The bed trick has to be replaced by a nighttime conversation, during which the ‘simple graces of [Helena’s] lively conversation and the endearing sweetness of her manners’ win over Bertram. Mary ingeniously attempts to extricate herself from the implausibility involved in this plot development by explaining that Helena’s extreme reverence for Bertram has previously left her ‘always silent in his presence’

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(Lucas, 3: 124). The ending of the tale, while not imposing a direct moral, replaces the ambiguity of the King’s speech with a conclusive assertion of Helena’s happiness as a ‘beloved wife’ (Lucas, 3: 126). There are numerous other changes and expurgations throughout the Tales: Mariana has had to be married off to Angelo, for instance, and Imogen’s cinque-spotted mole has moved to her neck, whereas even the Bowdlers’ Family Shakespeare keeps the original, ‘On her left breast’. For critics such as Jean Marsden, these changes, alongside the emphasis on feminine propriety, submission and ideal love, suggest that the Tales were designed not to free the ‘wild’ imagination of the child, but to ‘instill lessons regarding proper female behaviour’; an argument comparable to that put forward by Coates in viewing the Specimens as a form of ‘conduct book’.126 As we saw in the Specimens, the desire to structure and control might be an integral part of the Tales, whose imaginative ‘wildness’ seems inextricably intertwined with their didactic element. Charles’s assertion of the importance of ‘that beautiful Interest in wild tales’, is, after all, because the reading of such tales ‘made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child’. The concept of the ‘wild’ has, therefore, an important educational and moral role, subtly enforced. One of the most important features of the Tales’ appropriation of Shakespeare is the way in which Shakespearean language and dialogue is carefully enclosed and bounded within the third-person narrative voice. Joseph Riehl has termed this ‘their most original, pervasive, and informing contribution to the Tales’, subtly implying ‘the sort of authoritative moral vision which we associate with the novel’.127 We have seen an example of Mary’s negotiation with issues of sexual and emotional tension in the comedies; in a similar way, Charles, who took charge of the tragedies, tries to direct the child’s imaginative involvement. In Macbeth the witches’ brew is gleefully rendered in full: Their horrid ingredients were toads, bats, and serpents, the eye of a newt, and the tongue of a dog, the leg of a lizard, and the wing of the night-owl, the scale of a dragon, the tooth of a wolf, the maw of the ravenous salt-sea shark, the mummy of a witch, the root of the poisonous hemlock (this to have effect must be digged in the dark), the gall of a goat, and the liver of a Jew, with slips of the yew tree that roots itself in graves, and the finger of a dead child. . . . (Lucas, 3: 111) This is contained, however, within a clear narrative structure of judgement. The events take place, we are told in the first sentence, ‘when Duncan the

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Meek reigned king of Scotland’; the first introduction to Lady Macbeth is as a ‘bad ambitious woman’, reminiscent, incidentally, of Hazlitt’s description of her as ‘a great bad woman’ (Howe, IV: 188). This double movement is at the heart of the Lambs’ games with authority in the Tales – on one hand marked by imagination and inventiveness, on the other by the desire for control and direction. The ‘wildness’ of the Tales is a contested, divided concept, which should be considered from several different perspectives. It is invested with political and religious implications for the Lambs and their publishers, William and Mary Jane Godwin; it reflects anxieties over female reading and behaviour, and, lastly, it has special personal significance for the Lambs themselves, constantly aware of the dangers of insanity. The publishing context of the Tales, firstly, needs to be taken into account, since that ambiguous ‘wildness’ takes on a special charge when considered in relation to its original publication by the ‘Juvenile Library’ run by William Godwin and his second wife, Mary Jane. Godwin and Lamb did not meet until 1800, when, despite Lamb’s initial reservations, they quickly became close.128 However, others had drawn connections between their political views in the 1790s; they had, after all, appeared alongside one another in the Anti-Jacobin poem, ‘New Morality’. Although the Tales do not seem immediately to have a political subtext, their emphasis on the child’s imagination takes on a slightly different aspect in the context of William Godwin’s own approach to children’s literature, which encouraged imaginative engagement as a means of moral – and politically radical – education. The Godwins set up the ‘Juvenile Library’ in 1805, prompted by financial and personal reasons. After the death of his first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, in 1798, Godwin had not only to support his daughter by her, Mary (Shelley), but also Wollstonecraft’s first child, Fanny, by Gilbert Imlay, and his marriage to Mary Jane in 1801 brought her two children into the household also. A children’s bookshop not only seemed a way of taking advantage of a potentially lucrative and rapidly expanding middle-class marketplace, it also fitted in well with Godwin’s own experiments in educating the children of his own household, and, indeed, his larger aims. Pamela Clemit has shown how, for Godwin, intervention in the children’s book market was a profoundly ideological move: ‘far from withdrawing from public debate under the pressure of economic necessity, as is sometimes thought, Godwin turned to children’s books as a continuation of his radical program of the 1790s.’129 Just as his plays and novels – such as Caleb Williams (1794) – had attempted to popularize his political ideas, so too did Godwin use children’s

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literature as a way of fostering the autonomy of the young reader, with the larger aim of encouraging independent thought and challenging existing hierarchies, political and social. The ‘Juvenile Library’ brought out stories such as the Swiss Family Robinson alongside educational works, all the time paying shrewd attention to how, through pricing and marketing strategies, the child reader might be attracted and involved. That initial issue of the Tales from Shakespear ‘in single stories like the childrens little shilling books,’ as Mary Lamb puts it, was specifically designed to encourage a child’s own reading (Marrs, 2: 228).130 This emphasis on independent reading also carried political implications. Indeed, Godwin’s move into children’s publishing was regarded with suspicion by certain onlookers. A report on the ‘Juvenile Library’ by a government informer in 1813 condemned the ‘principles of democracy and Theophilanthropy’ it propagated, suggesting that its educational works were nothing more than an ‘insidious and dangerous’ indoctrination into ‘every principle professed by the infidels and republicans of these days’.131 The report even singled out the subversive nature of a School Dictionary of the English Language: ‘take the word “revolution,”’ it continues in indignation, ‘the meaning given is, “things returning to their just state.”’ Do the Tales share this subversive potential? Their emphasis on independent, imaginative reading does overlap with Godwin’s own interest in the ‘child’s exercise of free judgement’, encouraged through imaginative response and poetic language.132 In Godwin’s Bible Stories, for instance, it is not the child’s understanding of scripture, but the child’s power of sympathetic imagination – ‘the ground-plot upon which the edifice of a sound morality must be erected’ – which is foregrounded.133 Moreover, the Bible Stories are rendered in the ‘simple’, ‘dignified’, ‘natural’ and ‘impressive’ language of the ‘Authorised Version’, mirroring the Lambs’ desire to retain the ‘effect of the beautiful English tongue in which [Shakespeare] wrote’ (Lucas, 3: 1).134 Godwin also insisted that the child should also be allowed to select his or her own reading: ‘Suffer him,’ he wrote, ‘to wander in the wilds of literature’.135 That mention of the ‘wilds of literature’ looks forward to the Lambs’ description of the ‘wild poetic garden’ of Shakespeare’s language and Charles Lamb’s reflections to Coleridge on the power of ‘Tales and old wives fables’: Godwin and Lamb seem to have shared a conviction that imaginative stories could ‘quicken the apprehensions of children’ and arouse a larger moral sense.136 Indeed, Lamb could go much further than Godwin, as his angry response to the publication of the Tales in book-form shows. They were accompanied by illustrations which Lamb condemned, writing to Wordsworth that he

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held Mary Jane Godwin – the ‘bad baby’ – responsible for their ‘damn’d beastly vulgarity’ (Marrs, 2: 256). It was not merely the subjects which Lamb disliked, it was the fact that the scenes did not correspond properly to the tales: ‘no atom of authority was in the tale to justify it,’ he complains of one; another, of Hamlet and the gravedigger, ‘is not hinted at in the story’ (Marrs, 2: 256). Thus, attention to the visual could mislead a child reader: the same concern about deceptive appearance which would later surface in the Reflector essays. Lamb shows himself to be attentive to all aspects of the child’s response, alert to the ways in which imaginative involvement with the text might be prompted – or discouraged. Another disagreement with Godwin was prompted by Lamb’s second commission for the ‘Juvenile Library’, The Adventures of Ulysses (1808). Like the Tales from Shakespear, this is an adaptation designed both to open up the classics for children, and to celebrate Elizabethan poetry, since it is a version – sometimes very close – of George Chapman’s 1614 translation of the Odyssey. Lamb’s inventive, poetic retelling of famous aspects of Ulysses’ story retains some of Chapman’s strong and savage descriptions. Lamb’s Cyclops, for instance, seizes two of Ulysses’ men and makes ‘a lion’s meal’ of them, ‘lapping the blood’ (Lucas, 3: 244). Godwin was somewhat taken aback by such passages. ‘We live in squeamish days,’ he wrote to Lamb, urging him to curtail his language in light of female readers and their parents: ‘you exclude one half of the human species’ (Marrs, 2: 278). Lamb refused to back down, and the text remained largely unchanged. Introducing challenging ideas and poetic language to children, unleashing their imagination and setting them on the path to become questioning, alert adult readers; the Lambs’ children’s work, therefore, does seem to fit in well with the radical aspects of the ‘Juvenile Library’ – and even, in some cases, to surpass Godwin’s own boundaries. Yet in other ways, the Tales from Shakespear do seem to exhibit anxiety about their own imaginative potential, and their effect on female readers, a concern picked up by none other than the Anti-Jacobin Review, which still, in 1807, had its eye on Godwin and his circle: [W]e are not of opinion, that the tales of Shakspeare, though told, as they are by Mr. Lamb, as decently as possible, are very proper studies for female children. And we certainly object to the language of the preface, where girls are told, that there are parts in Shakspeare improper for them to read at one age, though they may be allowed to read them at another. This only serves as a stimulus to juvenile curiosity, which requires a bridle rather than a spur.137

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Perhaps in response to this, the second edition of the Tales (1809) carried an ‘Advertisement’ which promoted it as ‘an acceptable and improving present for young ladies advancing to the state of womanhood’. The whole book seems to be alert to questions of propriety, taste and gender, raised as early as the ‘Preface’ in the first edition – begun by Mary and finished off by Charles. Although the Tales were aimed at ‘very young children’, Mary Lamb explains that they were designed specifically with young ladies in mind, boys being ‘permitted the use of their fathers’ libraries at a much earlier age’. It is a brother’s duty to lend ‘kind assistance in explaining to their sisters such parts as are hardest for them to understand,’ and to read aloud to them from the original plays, ‘carefully selecting what is proper for a young sister’s ear’ (Lucas, 3: 2). Women’s appropriation of Shakespeare is thus bounded; on one hand they are allowed a possibly subversive glimpse of the paternal literary inheritance, yet on the other, it is made clear that this insight into what she terms the ‘manly book’ of Shakespeare should be determined and ordained by the male reader. This impression was unfortunately reinforced by the publication of the Tales under Charles’s name only. This was probably done to shield Mary from publicity, but it went against Charles’s original intentions; he complained to Wordsworth that Godwin had ‘cheated me into putting a name to them, which I did not mean, but do not repent’ (Marrs, 2: 256). Marsden reads this tension concerning female presence and authority pessimistically, concluding that the Tales are bounded by Mary Lamb’s ‘adherence to moral expectations’ and early nineteenth-century ideals of feminine behaviour: ‘The library door was unlocked, but the books themselves were out of reach.’138 Susan Wolfson has offered a more subversive reading. Her useful model of ‘divided energy’ shows how Mary Lamb’s tales seem at once to question, and simultaneously to collude with, conventional gender distinctions within and around Shakespeare. In the first place, argues Wolfson, her choice of the comedies enables her to discuss female characters who show a lively freedom in the face of patriarchy. Mary Lamb’s engagement with these plays thus places her in a situation of testing the possibilities, and what emerges are narrative treatments ranging from optimistic openness to a conservatism narrower than that of the Shakespearean original.139 There is a sly humour at work, for example, in Mary’s description of the marriage laws at the opening to A Midsummer Night’s Dream: [B]ut as fathers do not often desire the death of their own daughters, even though they do happen to prove a little refractory, this law was

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seldom or never put into practice, though perhaps the young ladies of that city were not unfrequently threatened by their parents with the terrors of it. (Lucas, 3: 13) However, at other points, the liveliness of the narrative voice is toned down. The mention of Katherine’s ‘ungovernable spirit’ at the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew (Lucas, 3: 126–7) bodes promisingly for a discussion of ‘wildness’, but the reader is quickly and firmly advised to sympathize with the ‘witty and most happy-tempered humourist’ Petruchio in his quest to control Katherine and tame her into ‘the most obedient and duteous wife in Padua’ (Lucas, 3: 135). The ‘Sly’ prologue is cut out, so that – as in Garrick’s adaptation – a certain level of interpretive ambiguity is removed, and we begin in a family setting, as Baptista and Petruchio discuss the marriage. Both examples demonstrate an alertness to the ways in which families work to contain – or constrain – their rebellious female children, which, though it may be gently mocked, is never challenged outright. This is not only a question of Mary Lamb’s careful negotiations with female reading and writing practices, however. It forms part of a more general awareness in the Tales of how family readings of Shakespeare might be directed and controlled. As we have seen, the Tales reflect their composition within a family setting, as brother and sister sat ‘writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting) like Hermia & Helena in the Midsummer’s Nights Dream’ (Marrs, 2: 229). The comparison with Hermia and Helena is an interesting one, since the structure of the Tales seems to privilege narratives of sibling and friendly relationship. Following the Folio edition, the Lambs begin with The Tempest, but then move to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, followed by The Winter’s Tale, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Merchant of Venice. From the image of Hermia and Helena, ‘growing up together in fashion of a double cherry’, to Leontes and ‘his dear friend and old companion’ Polixenes; the ‘strict friendship’ of Rosalind and Celia to the affection between Anthonio and Bassanio, ‘but one heart and one purse between them’, the cumulative effect is one of friendship and family affection often threatened but eventually strengthened (Lucas, 3: 19, 24, 45, 70). This is nicely paralleled by the way in which the Lambs construct their own relationship, ‘like an old literary Darby and Joan’, living ‘in a sort of double singleness’, to borrow the Elian phrase (Lucas, 2: 86). Yet the reverse side of the intense family affection they celebrate is the domestic horror of Mary Lamb’s insanity. Despite being her legal guardian, Charles often adopts the position of younger and morally weaker sibling.

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This mutual identification meant that the family was both a source of support and, during Mary’s recurrent periods of illness, torment. When Charles describes them as ‘wedded’, telling Dorothy Wordsworth, ‘I know that she has cleaved to me for better, for worse,’ the imagery of mutual attachment, the cleaving, might also be that of bondage (Marrs, 2: 169–70). He continues in imagery which seems, in its evocation of bereftness, to carry an echo of Lear: Meantime she is dead to me, – and I miss a [prop]. All my strength is gone, and I am like a [fool, bere]ft of her co-operation. (Marrs, 1: 169) This experience of ‘double singleness’ is another factor which shapes the double movement of the Tales. While they celebrate familial and friendly affection, even the comedies simultaneously show a deep understanding of the powerful or dangerous forces it can exert. The friends whom Mary Lamb evokes, Hermia and Helena, for instance, are haunted by the threat of family-imposed death, and, within their friendship, by ‘great anger’ and ‘disturbed and angry spirits’. Characters celebrated for the strength of their friendship such as Leontes and Proteus are then shown to be consumed by ‘ungovernable jealousy’ (Lucas, 3: 18, 22, 24). Similarly, bleakness and loss within the family is a feature of the tragedies, as in the ending of King Lear: as elsewhere, Charles rejects revised stage versions by including the death of Cordelia, although not directly confronting its cause. There is no comforting conclusion here, rather the ‘awful truth, that innocence and piety are not always successful in this world’ (Lucas, 3: 105). This ambiguity surrounding the theme of the family is linked back to the differing meanings of ‘wildness’, which may signify both a welcome imaginative freedom and also the dangers of madness and chaos. If we return to the central image of the Tales as having, in Wolfson’s phrase, a ‘divided energy’ – simultaneously radical and conservative, pushing against and maintaining boundaries – we can see how this might have become invested with personal significance for the Lambs. Their ambivalence towards ‘wildness’ may have reflected the way in which, in their own lives, they both continually strove to achieve a careful and necessary balance between freedom and confinement, between childhood and adult responsibility, between the sympathy of familial bonds, and the constraints they might impose. Perhaps, on a wider level, this also reflects the ambivalent nature of the process of adaptation itself. Adaptations such as the Lambs’ at once unleash new possibilities and new ways of reading Shakespeare; they simultaneously

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confine and limit the parent text. On one hand, the Tales open up Shakespeare for the child reader, acting as an important introduction to his language, characters and situations. On the other, they seek to control and guide the reactions of that reader towards an engagement with a print-based Shakespeare, which also becomes invested with the Lambs’ own preoccupations and ambivalences. How powerful these new readings of Shakespeare are, however, may be seen in the way in which the Tales have assumed an afterlife of their own, subject to constant re-makings and re-appropriations. From the start, they were popular, with a second edition issued within 2 years; this carries an approving comment from the Critical Review (May 1807), giving the Tales ‘first place’ in children’s literature, with the possible exception of Robinson Crusoe, and adding that they ‘stand unique, without rival or competitor’.140 They have since been widely translated, not only into European languages but also into Arabic and Samoan, and have inspired other adapters of Shakespeare for children: Edith Nesbit, for example, paid homage to her ‘recollection of Lamb’s tales’ in the preface of her own, family-based Shakespeare narratives.141 Leon Garfield’s Shakespeare Stories also owe a debt to Lamb, as does his script for the popular BBC series of the 1990s, Shakespeare: The Animated Tales.142 Furthermore, the Tales are constantly reissued in diverse formats, which serve to reflect and further their rich ambiguities. A recent Folio edition introduced by Katherine Duncan-Jones, for example, seems to act as a Romantic canonization of the Tales, placing them among other late eighteenth and early nineteenth century responses to Shakespeare through its illustrations: Fuseli’s Titania embracing Bottom and The Three Witches, and James Barry’s King Lear Weeping over the Dead Body of Cordelia.143 On the other hand, the Tales have a long history of use as an educational tool. Editions aimed at English-language learners have been popular since the late nineteenth century, a good example being Bholanauth Paul’s Notes on Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, Etymological, Grammatical, and Explanatory, with Extracts from Shakespeare and Other Standard Authors in Elucidation of the Text, and Questions to Test the Student’s Knowledge in English. This cheap, yellow-jacketed edition, sold by the ‘Canning Library’, Calcutta, helpfully questions the student on the distinction between corn and corns, or the use of the infinitive; it also points outward to a range of other English authors including Tennyson, Scott, Cowper and Milton, so that the Tales become a key to the English canon. The Tales are being pressed into colonial duty at the ‘Canning Library’: correctly understanding Lamb’s rendering of Shakespeare, suggests the edition, will provide access to a larger English

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tradition. Paul’s edition finds a modern equivalent in the Penguin Readers series, aimed at young English-language learners and extensively marketed worldwide. Cutting out much of the Lambs’ humour, this version emphasizes the ‘explicit moral purpose’ of the Tales and turns the Lambs’ didacticism in a new direction, to present and market a specific view of English literature and culture.144 Meanwhile, as Murray J. Levith relates, it was through the Tales that Shakespeare – transmogrified, revised, moralized – first entered Chinese culture, through a 1903 translation by Lin Shu (also known as Lin Qinnan) and Wei Chunshu (Wei Yi) entitled Strange Tales from Abroad.145 Perhaps most surprisingly, they still hold their place in the contemporary children’s market: one of the most interesting recent republications is the version issued by Capercaillie Books, which repeats the format of the sixpenny editions, issuing the tales separately in small child-friendly versions, each, like the Godwins’ originals, containing three illustrations. The books declare their intention to ‘keep faith with [the] sentiment’ of the Lambs’ ‘Preface’, and although they revise the Tales they do not simplify them.146 The changes made, such as the restoration of Lear’s desolate ‘O you are men of stone’ speech, return the child reader to Shakespeare’s text; the lively drawings by Gary Andrews, with their emphasis on the startling and the magical, similarly encourage imaginative involvement. The didactic and the ‘wild’ elements of the Tales, therefore, continue to co-exist – and to have an active role in shaping contemporary cultures of childhood. The Lambs’ Shakespeare, then, is still a ‘familiar’ part of contemporary culture, read at home and school. The ways in which Shakespeare might help us understand the Lambs has also prompted imaginative reinterpretations, as in Dorothy Parker’s and Ross Evans’s Shakespearean tragic homage, The Coast of Illyria, first produced in April 1949 in Dallas, but unpublished until 1990.147 Prefaced by a quotation from Mary Lamb’s retelling of Twelfth Night – ‘There were a brother and sister . . . who were shipwrecked off the coast of Illyria’ – the play takes place as the Tales are being written and is set in the Lambs’ ‘room in London’, furnished with a liquor cabinet and Hogarth prints, with their worktable, scattered with the half-finished Tales, permanently present on stage. Parker and Evans compress chronology, so that the play encompasses several main events in the Lambs’ lives – chief among them Lamb’s unsuccessful proposal to Fanny Kelly of 1819 and his receipt of a pension from the East India House in 1825. The play weaves together Shakespearean allusion with repeated Romantic quotations, primarily taken from the essays and letters of the Lambs, but also from Hazlitt, Coleridge and De Quincey. It thus interrogates both literary ownership and

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self-possession and continues the authorial games we first encountered in Charles Lamb’s own work of the 1790s. Sociability – literary and friendly – is at the heart of the play, just as it perpetually informs the Lambs’ own view of Shakespeare. Parker and Evans take their cue from Hazlitt’s ‘On the Conversation of Authors’ to recreate ‘all the talking, the drinking and the smoking’ of the Thursday night gatherings.148 Indeed, the Lambs’ Thursday evenings perhaps served, in the words of the play’s 1990 editor, Arthur F. Kinney, ‘as a nineteenth-century equivalent for – and so a measuring stick of – the Algonquin Round Table’.149 But – both for Lamb and for Parker – this sociability has a darker side of drink, depression and self-destructiveness. As Lamb attempts to placate Fanny Kelly’s (entirely fictional) disapproving mother, he is tormented by a series of nocturnal – in Lamb’s dreadful pun, ‘knock-eternal’ – guests: the hapless George Dyer, struggling about with one shoe; Coleridge, a ‘Prince Hamlet’ tormented by laudanum, self-pity and guilt; Hazlitt, equally melancholy; and the drug-soaked Thomas De Quincey. The friends – a regular ‘rat’s nest of drunkards and lunatics and divorced men’, in Mrs. Kelly’s appalled judgement – unwittingly destroy Lamb’s chances with Fanny. So too does the ever-present threat of Mary’s madness: ultimately, brother and sister cannot be parted, and the play closes with the realization that they must continue to care for one another. Although the play crackles with the combined wit of Lamb and Parker, it is acutely sensitive to the Lambs’ situation, in terms both of their achievements and of what might be termed their co-dependency. It is also, in Kinney’s estimation, ‘harrowingly autobiographical’, haunted by Parker’s self-identification with Mary Lamb, and her own sense of the sociability of artists as both creative and destructive.150 Mediated through Shakespearean and Romantic language, the play insightfully brings out the ‘dual loneliness’ as well as the creative fruitfulness of the Lambs’ lives – as well as the double sense of the Tales, hovering between wildness and restraint.151 Another allusive reinterpretation of the Lambs’ relationship through – and with – Shakespeare is Peter Ackroyd’s The Lambs of London (2004).152 This novel take on the Lambs in the 1790s forges a relationship between William Henry Ireland and Mary Lamb which borrows lavishly both from Shakespeare and from the Essays of Elia, setting the plays and essays in baroque, fictional dialogue. Ackroyd is a true ‘snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’, who loves – like Lamb in that letter to Southey – ‘to anticipate charges of unoriginality’ (Marrs, 1: 160).153 Scholars, as Ackroyd’s Samuel Ireland tells his master-forger son, ‘give too much thought to sources. To origins’.154 So Lamb’s essays and letters are chopped up and quoted without acknowledgement; biographical facts are gleefully reordered so

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that De Quincey replaces Coleridge, Mr. H– and the Elia essays appear in the 1790s; and, most seriously, Mary Lamb is killed off in the asylum in 1804, her letters, essays, poems and fiction written out of the story altogether. Ackroyd’s Mary dies in the midst of an asylum performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, expiring as Charles speaks the line ‘Ever true in loving be’.155 Ackroyd does not spend much time, however, on her true Shakespearean connection, allotting a brief paragraph to the siblings’ ‘stories taken from the plays of Shakespeare’ which ‘received much critical praise’.156 ‘I have invented characters,’ Ackroyd writes in his prologue, ‘and changed the life of the Lamb family for the sake of the larger narrative’. This narrative, however, is narrower than that of Parker and Evans, whose Mary is strong, creative and generous, ‘a prop for the giants’ who constantly reassures and guides her friends, and whose work as an author, forging the Tales out of a potentially shipwrecked life, is given full credit.157 In Ackroyd’s reading, Mary remains essentially a madwoman; Charles somewhat feeble-minded and often ‘sozzled’. Only William Henry Ireland, red-haired, impetuous, daring to recreate Shakespeare in his own image, emerges triumphantly. Both The Coast of Illyria and The Lambs of London testify to the powerful influence of the Lambs’ Shakespearean writing, and, particularly, to their ideal of imaginative sympathy. We have seen how Charles Lamb’s attitude to Shakespeare – sociable, sympathetic, at times subversive – feeds into key Romantic viewpoints, subtly shaping the tenets of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt and Keats. Through Pater, then Bradley and Tillyard, he passes into the mainstream of later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century criticism. Through the Tales, and their re-tellings, Mary too has helped shape approaches to Shakespeare among general readers. The Lambs’ appropriations and adaptations of Shakespeare, created in a sociable setting and bearing the traces of larger friendly conversations, continue to prompt response and reinvention in turn.

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Chapter 14

William Hazlitt Uttara Natarajan

Early Career When William Hazlitt (1778–1830) became a working journalist in the autumn of 1812, in the capacity of parliamentary reporter for the Morning Chronicle, he had at last found his métier, the profession which launched him in his most characteristic and successful genre, the informal essay. He was 34 at the time, and had already attempted, and failed in, two alternative careers. Traces of both survive in his subsequent work. His skills as a portraitist, that ‘great power as a Painter of Character Portraits’ to which Coleridge attested,1 are confirmed, not only in the well-known painting of Charles Lamb in the National Portrait Gallery, but also in Hazlitt’s brilliant achievements in verbal portraiture. The portraitist’s view, obviously relevant, for instance, to The Spirit of the Age (1825), is manifest, too, in Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817), another kind of portrait gallery. More generally, indeed, the impact of his artist’s training is discernible throughout Hazlitt’s works.2 By his own declaration, ‘They are not, then, so properly the works of an author by profession, as the thoughts of a metaphysician expressed by a painter’ (17: 311).3 In that comment, Hazlitt names the other unfulfilled vocation that had a lasting impact on his oeuvre. If painting influenced his practice as a writer, the intellectual weight of his essays derived from his philosophy. His first, and to himself, most important publication (1805), was a long philosophical treatise in the style of the eighteenth century, as he saw it, ‘an important metaphysical discovery, supported by a continuous and severe train of reasoning, nearly as subtle and original as anything in Hume or Berkeley’ (17: 312). Masked by a forbidding title, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action: Being an Argument in Favour of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind. To which are added, Some Remarks on the Systems of Hartley and Helvetius is a persuasive and passionately argued theory of the creative mind. Falling,

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in the shape in which it was first published, ‘still-born from the press’ (17: 312),4 this theory migrated to Hazlitt’s shorter prose essays, to the foundations of his moral and critical judgements. Briefly, Hazlitt’s purpose, in his first published work, was to counter those philosophies that ground human responses in the senses and human motives in self-interest. His thesis is that all voluntary action begins in the imagination, that the senses have no part to play at all in any of our acts of will. The realm of the senses, he argues, is the immediate present, but the will reaches always towards the future: in willing, our object is that which, lacking in the present, we wish to gain in the future. In the instant of willing, then, the object of the will is always imaginary, and thus beyond the grasp of the senses. So-called self-interest is not based on sensory response at all, but a future (imagined) state of self-satisfaction, which, in the present, the imagination projects. But unlike the senses, which restrict us to ourselves alone, the imagination knows no limits, and, if it can project a future self, can also project other selves, those of our fellow beings. If one such imaginary object can motivate the will, then so can the other. Selfishness and benevolence, both springing from imagination, are both, on that common ground, natural to humanity. Hazlitt does not deny that we act selfishly, but he does deny that we can act in no other way. By his philosophy, creativity is fundamental to human action. The imagination is the seat of action, so that the mind or self is autonomous, driving from within. Most emphatically, the mind is powerful, not passively subject to external stimuli, nor mechanically bound to a narrow self-interest. Later, his ambitions in systematic philosophy long abandoned, Hazlitt’s philosophical beliefs irradiate words such as ‘genius’, ‘imagination’, ‘originality’ and ‘gusto’, words to which he returns again and again in conversational prose and literary criticism.

Hazlitt and Kean By the summer of 1812, Hazlitt had finished his last professional portrait, of Thomas Robinson, brother of the diarist, Henry Crabb Robinson; the latter recorded that the portrait ‘has somewhat of the fierceness of the Saracen’.5 If it did (it has not survived), it had this quality in common with the best of Hazlitt’s later prose. From January to April that year, he had also delivered his first series of public lectures, his last on the topic of philosophy. Late that autumn, he obtained his position at the Morning Chronicle, and he had been some months in this position when he published for the first time, in

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September 1813, a ‘familiar’ essay, ‘On the Love of Life’, afterwards the opening essay of the Round Table. Towards the end of 1813, he began to share the duties of dramatic critic of the Chronicle with the then incumbent, William Mudford, and by early 1814, had taken over from Mudford entirely. It is in the fitness of things that Hazlitt’s start in theatrical criticism, and the beginning of his reputation as a writer, were so nearly coincident with the entrance of Edmund Kean on the London stage. Reviewing Kean’s performances for the Chronicle, Hazlitt began to develop the critical positions that he maintained in all of his subsequent writing on Shakespeare. The view of Shakespeare contained in Hazlitt’s numerous reports of contemporary performances, Kean’s and others’, found its way in due course to the book-length compilations in which it became known most widely. Before these more canonical publications, his sequence of reviews of Kean’s first London performances, from January 1814 to March 1815, in the Chronicle to start with, then the Champion and the Examiner, may usefully be treated as a complete body of work in itself, Hazlitt’s first sustained exercise in Shakespeare criticism.6

The Shakespearean sublime The very first of the reviews, printed in the Chronicle on 27 January 1814, making it the first published response to the legendary debut, puts Hazlitt at the heart of English Romanticism. Celebrating Kean’s virtuosity, he enters a proviso: There was a lightness and vigour in his tread, a buoyancy and elasticity of spirit, a fire and animation, which would accord better with almost any other character than with the morose, sullen, inward, inveterate, inflexible malignity of Shylock. . . . The fault of his acting was (if we may hazard the objection), an over-display of the resources of the art, which gave too much relief to the hard, impenetrable, dark groundwork of the character of Shylock. (5: 179) This is a fine example of the way in which Hazlitt’s text so often reproduces the characteristic figures of Shakespeare’s (hendiadys, synonymia), but that is beside the point I am making here. In his exposure of the gap between text and performance, between the character of Shylock and Kean’s rendering of it, Hazlitt posits, not just a discrepancy, but a binary split, fundamental to romantic poetics: the split between the sublime and its representation.

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The markers of the sublime – though the word itself is not mentioned – theorized in Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), are recognizable in Hazlitt’s construction of Shakespeare’s characters, as they are in the canonical works of his romantic contemporaries. Hazlitt’s admiration of Burke, despite his antipathy to Burke’s politics, is expressed throughout his writings, and I have commented elsewhere on the pertinence of Burke’s aesthetics, particularly the sublime, to Hazlitt’s.7 Without entering in detail into Hazlitt’s complex relationship with Burke’s thought, we might register, in the present context, that Shylock’s sublimity is conveyed in the impression of magnitude or depth produced by Hazlitt’s epithets (‘inward’, ‘impenetrable’, ‘dark’); the sheer accumulation of those epithets expresses the overwhelming effect of the sublime. The aesthetic principle, that the sublime is diminished by representation, is contained in the contrast between the qualities of the representation (‘lightness’, ‘elasticity’, ‘animation’) and those of the original character (‘hard’, ‘inflexible’, ‘sullen’). Kean’s extraordinary power as an actor all the more makes the point, that the failings in his performances of Shakespeare are due, less to the actor’s limitations, than to the unattainability of his object. Hazlitt confirms as much in his review of Kean’s next part, as Richard III: ‘Why do we try this actor by an ideal theory? Who is there that will stand the same test?’ (5: 184).8 ‘Ideal’, in Hazlitt’s usage, tends to resonate both with Burke’s aesthetics and with Kant’s: the ideal, which cannot be realized, bears the attributes of the sublime, which cannot be represented.9 Simply put, the quality of the sublime is infinity, of the ideal, perfection. On the grounds of their magnitude, Shakespeare’s characters are sublime; on the grounds of their perfect identity with nature, they are also ideal, and in that sense, perpetually beyond realization. Nonetheless, the ‘ideal theory’ is present to Hazlitt in each of Kean’s Shakespearean roles. Thus, the character of Richard III ‘should have a little more solidity, depth, sustained, and impassioned feeling, with somewhat less brilliancy, with fewer glancing lights, pointed transitions, and pantomimic evolutions’ (5: 181). The relation of text to performance, as Hazlitt describes it here, is the antithetical relation of great to little, the substantial to the ephemeral. In Kean’s second performance as Richard III, ‘In pronouncing the words in Richard’s soliloquy, “I am myself alone,” Mr. Kean gave a quick and hurried movement to his voice, as if it was a thought that suddenly struck him, or which he wished to pass over; whereas it is the deep and rooted sentiment of his breast’ (5: 183). Again, depth is reduced to surface, the permanent to the passing. In Hamlet, changeability itself,

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engrained in Hamlet’s nature, becomes sublime: it ‘never loses its continuity. It has the yielding flexibility of “a wave of the sea.”’ In this case, Kean’s ‘too strong and pointed’ representation takes away from an infinitely fluid character, the infinitude and depth that make it sublime (5: 187). Being infinite, the sublime is also indivisible. In Burke’s analysis, ‘every thing great by its quantity must necessarily be, one, simple and entire.’10 Hazlitt finds that the unity of Shakespeare’s sublime characterizations is too frequently undermined by the variety of Kean’s dramatic resources. As Shylock, ‘The fault of his acting was . . . an over-display of the resources of the art, which gave too much relief to the hard, impenetrable, dark groundwork of the character of Shylock’ (5: 179). In Kean’s first appearance as Richard III, similarly, he ‘dissipated the impression of the character by the variety of his resources’ (5: 181); in his second, ‘The extreme elaboration of the parts injures the broad and massy effect’ (5: 184). Participating in contemporary Romantic aesthetics, at the same time, Hazlitt brings to his understanding of Shakespeare’s characterization, his own philosophical commitments. The unity of thought and action (all thought and action originate in a unified mind or imagination) and the innate power of the mind are present in his earliest theoretical formulations. In these comments on Kean, likewise, ‘hard . . . groundwork’, ‘impression’, ‘massy’, indicate not only the unity of character, but also its force. As well as singleness, moreover, Shakespeare’s tragic figures exhibit the singularity of mind or character. The tenet of ‘ruling character’, not only in Shakespeare’s creations, but in art and literature more generally, is well established by the time of Hazlitt’s reviews. Both Coleridge and Lamb make use of this tenet, in lectures and essays that predate the reviews.11 Absorbed into romantic aesthetics, especially in relation to Shakespeare, ‘ruling character’ asserts an inner principle of unity, the unity of character, which supersedes and negates the neoclassical unities, dismissed by the romantics as artificial and externally imposed. For Hazlitt, beyond this, the notion has a larger significance. The idea of a pronounced and distinct individuality, encapsulated in one dominant attitude or purpose, an idea central to the view of human nature set out in Hazlitt’s familiar essays, begins to be developed in his Shakespeare criticism. Shylock’s ‘one unalterable purpose’ (5: 179), Hamlet’s ‘natural bias of . . . character’ (5: 186), Iago’s ‘incorrigible love of mischief’ (5: 215), all support a notion of engrained character that pertains, in turn, to the emphases on individuality and innateness in Hazlitt’s philosophy of mind. The singularity of Shakespeare’s characters is treated at length in Hazlitt’s review of Kean’s Macbeth in the Champion, where the different traits of Macbeth and Richard III, two individuals in similar

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circumstances, as Hazlitt sees them, show Shakespeare’s separation of one creation from another by ‘the leading principle of the character’ or ‘peculiar trait of character’ (5: 205).12 In his review of Kean’s Hamlet, Hazlitt identifies the only exception to the rule of singular or biased human nature: Shakespeare himself. The mind or genius that imagines a variety of biased minds must itself be free of bias: The poet appears for the time being, to be identified with the character he wishes to represent, and to pass from one to the other, like the same soul, successively animating different bodies. By an art like that of the ventriloquist, he throws his imagination out of himself, and makes every word appear to proceed from the very mouth of the person whose name it bears. His plays alone are properly expressions of the passions, not descriptions of them. (5: 185) Behind Hazlitt’s observations is the established tradition of Shakespeare as the universal genius, the mirror of nature; Hazlitt explicitly draws on that tradition when he goes on to observe that ‘Each object and circumstance seems to exist in his mind as it existed in nature’ (5: 185). The related premise, that Shakespeare transformed himself into each of his characters, was favoured by both Coleridge and Lamb, as Hazlitt knew.13 For Hazlitt, however, this Protean quality has a particular relation to a theory of ‘bias’ that is distinctly his own. Shakespeare’s freedom from bias makes him the exception to the ordinary norms of humanity. In Hazlitt’s subsequent expositions, whether of creative genius or everyday human behaviour, he locates Shakespeare always outside of his general view of the mind and its workings. Performing Shakespeare My effort so far has been to outline, in Hazlitt’s early responses to Kean, an approach to Shakespeare that is both characteristically romantic and distinctively Hazlitt’s. Prizing the textual and conceptual (that the two are interchangeable in Shakespeare’s characters all the more confirms their ideal standing), this approach is nonetheless firmly grounded in Hazlitt’s spontaneous reactions to actual performances. Far from being unresponsive, he is, on the contrary, intensely responsive to the experience of theatre. Side by side with his construction of an unrepresentable ideal, we must set his close engagement with performance, and his awareness that a great

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actor could, and did, succeed in realizing, sometimes newly illuminating, Shakespeare’s text. Hazlitt’s delight in Kean’s acting bursts out all over the Chronicle reviews, making even blame look like praise. The fault of Kean’s Shylock is ‘a lightness and vigour in his tread, a buoyancy and elasticity of spirit, a fire and animation’ (5: 179); of his Richard III, ‘an exuberance of talent’ (5: 181); of his Iago, ‘extreme grace, alacrity, and rapidity’ (5: 190). Such judgements can only barely be seen to be critical. On the other hand, Hazlitt’s admiration for Kean is expressed in superlatives. ‘His style of acting is, if we may use the expression, more significant, more pregnant with meaning, more varied and alive in every part, than any we have almost ever witnessed’ (in Shylock, 5: 180); ‘we cannot imagine any character represented with greater distinctness and precision, more perfectly articulated in every part’ (in Richard III, 5: 181). ‘Mr. Kean’s representation of the character had the most brilliant success’ (in Hamlet; 5: 187). ‘There were . . . repeated bursts of feeling and energy which we have never seen surpassed’ (in Othello, 5: 189). Each time Hazlitt reiterates Kean’s failure to realize Shakespeare’s conceptions completely, he attests, at the same time, and more emphatically, to the extent of Kean’s success. In fact Hazlitt is peculiarly alert to the symbiotic possibilities of text and performance. Thus, in his report of Kean’s second performance as Richard III, he shows how the text can direct the actor, quoting Hastings’s description of Richard in act 3, scene 4 (beginning ‘His grace looks cheerfully and smooth this morning’) as ‘a perfect study for the actor’ (5: 181). In the same review, he then shows the converse, how the actor can enhance the text. Kean’s enactment of the courtship of Richard and Anne brings out the text’s literary genealogy, by turning the scene into a reworking of the original temptation myth: ‘He seemed, like the first tempter, to approach his prey, certain of the event, and as if success had smoothed the way before him’ (5: 182). Another instance, of acting that enriches the text, is in the last scene of the play, ‘The attitude in which he stands with his hands stretched out, after his sword is taken from him, had a preternatural and terrific grandeur, as if his will could not be disarmed, and the very phantoms of his despair had a withering power’ (5: 182). Sublimity is manifest here, not only in Shakespeare’s character, but also in Kean’s rendering of it. Hazlitt’s report of the performance becomes indistinguishable from his interpretation of the character, or, more simply, his description of Kean becomes a reading of Shakespeare. Elsewhere, Hazlitt recognizes how the actor’s (extra-textual) movements or gestures – what he sometimes calls ‘bye-play’ (5: 202) – can alter

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interpretation. In the part of Hamlet, Mr. Kean has introduced in this part a new reading, as it is called, which we think perfectly correct. In the scene where he breaks from his friends to obey the command of his father, he keeps his sword pointed behind him, to prevent them from following him, instead of holding it before him to protect him from the Ghost. (5: 188) Kean’s choice of gesture becomes an interpretation of Hamlet’s state of mind. Similarly, ‘the manner of his coming back after he has gone to the extremity of the stage, from a pang of parting tenderness to press his lips to Ophelia’s hand . . . was the finest commentary that was ever made on Shakespear’ (5: 188). Hazlitt goes further still in the review of Kean’s Iago, where he actually praises the licence of Kean’s interpretation, ‘preferring his liberal and spirited dramatic versions, to the dull, literal, common-place monotony of his competitors’ (5: 190). A successful performance excuses liberties with Shakespeare’s text, and Hazlitt acknowledges, ‘Besides, after all, in the conception of the part, he may be right, and we may be wrong’ (5: 190). All this must surely establish that the critical commonplace, that the romantic stance is against the performance of Shakespeare’s plays, hardly works for Hazlitt. His reputation and Kean’s were made together. The new theatre critic of the Chronicle attracted wide public notice with the impassioned prose in which he celebrated a rising star, and in so doing, played no small part in promoting and cementing the reputation of that star. Hazlitt’s enthusiasm for Kean’s performances was so strong initially that the rumour arose, with no other foundation, that he had been bribed £1,500 to secure the failing fortunes of the Drury Lane theatre.14 As familiarity bred censure, in the reviews from October 1814 onwards, Hazlitt’s awareness of the discrepancy between text and performance became more pronounced. But although he was ready to declare, in his March 1815 review of Kean’s Richard II for the Examiner, ‘that the reader of the plays of Shakespear is almost always disappointed in seeing them acted; and, for our own parts, we should never go to see them acted if we could help it,’ he was still careful to except ‘Mrs. Siddons and Mr. Kean – the former of whom in one or two characters, and the latter, not certainly in any one character, but in very many passages, have raised our imagination of the part they acted’ (5: 222). There is a profounder implication here. In a recent issue of the European Romantic Review (2007), the critic Emily Allen is especially concerned to

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celebrate romantic theatre as a form of ‘low’ romanticism, although she acknowledges too the instability of the distinction between the literary (‘high’) and the theatrical (‘low’) in the romantic period.15 My own interest, by contrast, is in the attributes of a ‘high’ romanticism in Hazlitt’s view of the contemporary stage, that is, in a quality of magnitude that emerges, at least where Shakespeare is concerned, not only from the literary text, but also from its theatrical performance. Uniquely in Hazlitt’s case, the actor gains rather than loses from the romantic relation between text and performance in Shakespearean drama. This is nowhere more manifest than in the Examiner review which I have just cited, where, having expressed his disenchantment with the acting of Shakespeare’s plays, Hazlitt goes on to theorize the dynamic of actor and author. Shakespeare, he argues, demands a greater effort from an actor than any other dramatist, because Shakespeare stimulates the faculties of the actor more . . . he [the actor] perceives how much he has to do, the inequalities he has to contend with, and he exerts himself accordingly; he puts himself at full speed, and lays all his resources under contribution; he attempts more, and makes a greater number of brilliant failures; . . . (5: 222) Attempting to realize Shakespeare’s conceptions, the great actor strains at the limit of his own potential; his failure is ‘brilliant’, because it arises from the magnitude of his aspiration. Hazlitt uses the distinctly romantic metaphor of the fragment or residue, to describe such a failure or partial realization: ‘If the genius of Shakespear does not shine out undiminished in the actor, we perceive certain effects and refractions of it in him. If the oracle does not speak quite intelligibly, yet we perceive that the priest at the altar is inspired with the god, or possessed with a demon’ (5: 223). The attempt, which, in failing, retains something of the infinitude of its object, is fundamental to romantic aesthetics; it takes a more abstract form, for instance, in the construction of the modern or ‘sentimental’ consciousness by the German romantic theorist, Friedrich Schiller. The sentimental poet, as Schiller describes him, ‘is constantly dealing . . . with reality as boundary and with his idea as the infinite’.16 His endeavour is perpetual because his goal is unattainable; thereby, his art is ‘the art of the infinite’.17 Schiller’s formulation suggests a useful paraphrase. At the broadest level of generalization, the romantic endeavour might be described as the attempt, or more pessimistically, the failure, to render the infinite – call it conception, nature, the sublime, or the ideal – by finite means. The poetry

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and prose of the romantics is frequently concerned with, at the same time that it embodies, this attempt or failure. Just such a concern emerges in Hazlitt’s responses to Kean, but also more than this. Hazlitt shows us in Kean a kind of romantic artist different from poet or essayist or painter: the romantic performer. That Kean was the exemplary romantic actor is by now accepted critical wisdom. Reinvigorating the cliché, we might elicit, from Hazlitt’s earliest notices of Kean, the idea of romantic performance, that which, attempting, and falling short of the ideal, still shows the reach and achievement, as it shows the failure, of human aspiration. Schiller declared that poetry ‘means nothing else than to give humanity its most complete expression possible’.18 Unaware of the echo, Hazlitt wrote in 1817, ‘Mr. Kean . . . shows us the utmost force of what is human’ (18: 261).

Coleridge and Lamb The subject of performance is a convenient basis for a comparison between Hazlitt and his nearest contemporaries in Shakespeare criticism, Coleridge and Lamb. Hazlitt attended Coleridge’s 1811–12 lectures on Shakespeare and Milton at the London Philosophical Society, before he himself began to write on Shakespeare. He had also read and admired Lamb’s commentary on Shakespeare in Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (1808), and in the two Reflector essays of 1811, ‘On the Genius and Character of Hogarth’ and ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare’. In more than a few details, the coincidence of Hazlitt’s readings of Shakespeare with those of Coleridge and Lamb is manifest. I have mentioned already the principle of ‘ruling character’, as well as the contention that Shakespeare becomes the character he represents, a shared premise to which I will return more fully in due course. Numerous other indications, whether of influence or simply concurrence, can also be shown. On performance, however, Hazlitt departs considerably from his immediate precursors. Coleridge’s attitude to performance in the 1811–12 lectures belongs to an idea of Shakespeare to which is central the romantic claim that Shakespeare’s creations are the products of an inner faculty, the imagination, rather than the senses, which are controlled by the external world. The poet’s creativity attests to the human ability to surpass empirical response. In poetic creation, the mind is constitutive, not merely receptive. Hence Coleridge’s distinction between copy and imitation, the latter being ‘not the mere copy of things, but the contemplation of mind upon things’, and the related distinction, between observation and meditation: ‘Mere

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observation might be able to produce an accurate copy of a thing . . . : Meditation looked at every character . . . only as it contains something generally true.’19 In turn, Shakespeare’s creations stimulate a reader’s imagination, not a spectator’s senses. By addressing the reader rather than the spectator of Shakespeare’s plays, throughout the 1811–12 lectures, Coleridge promotes a standard romantic aesthetics that sets imagination against the senses.20 As he perceived it, the conditions of the stage in Shakespeare’s day ‘left Sh. to rely on his own imagination, & to speak not to the senses as was now done, but to the mind. He found the stage as near as possible a closet, & in the closet only could it be fully & completely enjoyed.’21 The reader in the closet actively engages with Shakespeare’s text; his imagination, free of sensory stimuli, fully participates in the act of reading. By contrast, the spectator in the modern theatre, his senses besieged by the physical paraphernalia of production, becomes passive, his scope for intellectual activity altogether curtailed. The ‘mere passivity of our nature’, Coleridge explains in Lecture 5, ‘must diminish in proportion as our intellectual faculties become active’.22 Coleridge’s treatment of Shakespearean composition and characterization in the 1811–12 lectures belongs to the model of imagination afterwards outlined in Biographia Literaria. His antipathy to performance is anchored in a Shakespeare criticism that is primarily theoretical, forming the basis for what is later set out as theory in Biographia. In the whole course of the 1811–12 lectures, no reference is made to any actual performance or production, and indeed, if we are to believe Crabb Robinson’s description of Coleridge’s preparation for these lectures, ‘C. cant be induced to read Shakespear.’23 Certainly from the title of the series, ‘A Course of Lectures on Shakespear and Milton, in illustration of the Principles of Poetry’,24 and from the records that survive, Coleridge’s method is not to draw a general principle from a textual example, but to adduce the example to illustrate a stated principle. In this respect, the kind of observation that he praises in Shakespeare, ‘the observation of that mind which having formed a theory & a system in its own nature has remarked all things as examples of the truth and confirming him in that truth’,25 might justly be attributed to Coleridge himself. Stage representation, on which Coleridge touches in passing and in the abstract, is the main focus, as its full title announces, of Lamb’s great essay of 1811, ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation’. Unlike Coleridge, Lamb is an inveterate playgoer, and like Hazlitt’s, his comments on performing Shakespeare

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are based on long experience. Yet for Lamb, the sheer pleasure of the theatre alerts him all the more to its danger, that of momentarily indulging the senses to the more lasting detriment of the imagination. In his attitude to Shakespearean performance, Lamb shares with Coleridge the fear that the stimulation of the senses curbs the freedom of mind, ‘operates upon the mind, to have its free conceptions . . . crampt and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing actuality’.26 The inwardness of Shakespeare’s characters is perceptible only to the reader whose imagination is unhindered by the senses: ‘What we see upon a stage is body and bodily action; what we are conscious of in reading is almost exclusively the mind, and its movements.’27 Shakespeare’s characters ‘have . . . something in them which appeals too exclusively to the imagination, to admit of their being made objects to the senses without suffering a change and a diminution’.28 For Lamb, as for Coleridge, performance and text constitute an antithesis, that of the senses and the imagination, or surface and depth. But beyond the anxiety that Coleridge expresses, about the overpowering paraphernalia of the modern stage, Lamb derogates the very nature of acting itself. Shakespeare’s delineation is of the inner character; the actor portrays an exterior that has little or nothing to do with that inwardness. If Coleridge’s distinction is between imitation and copy, Lamb’s is between the authentic and the counterfeit, between the genius who understands the internal workings of the mind and the actor who is no more than a mimic of its outward expressions. ‘To know the internal workings and movements of a great mind, of an Othello or a Hamlet for instance, . . . seems to demand a reach of intellect of a vastly different extent from that which is employed upon the bare imitation of the signs of these passions in the countenance or gesture’29; Lamb’s ‘bare imitation’ is lesser even than Coleridge’s ‘copy’. Such is the instantaneous effect of the senses, however, compared to the slowness of the intellect, that this ‘bare imitation’ easily supplants the ideal original. Not as a theorist, like Coleridge, but as an ardent and lifelong theatregoer, Lamb warns, not only that the experience of the spectator is lower than that of the reader, but also that the pressure (and pleasure) of the actual destroys the reader’s pleasure in, and appreciation of, the ideal. Hazlitt’s commitment, from his first philosophical publication onwards, is also to the romantic subordination of the senses to the mind or imagination. But where for Coleridge and Lamb such a commitment translates directly to a dichotomy of text and performance, Hazlitt does not make this particular translation. To him, the text stimulates the actor’s imagination, as it does the reader’s. Expressing the relation between Shakespeare’s text and a great performance, Hazlitt turns, ultimately, from one kind of romantic

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figuration, the antithesis, to another, the remnant or residue. In other words, he departs from his contemporaries in his perception of presence in the actor’s effort. In the flawed performance of the great actor, something of his greater original, the character created by Shakespeare, might still be felt. At least in this respect, in Hazlitt’s perception of the possibilities of performance, he outstrips by far his two closest peers in Shakespeare criticism.

Models of Genius Kean showed Hazlitt ‘the utmost force of what is human’. In Hazlitt’s first miscellaneous collection, The Round Table, published jointly with Leigh Hunt in 1817, this ‘force’ or ‘power’ of the human mind, whether in ordinary human behaviour or in art and literature (the more frequent topic of the Round Table essays), emerges to the fore. That the mind is active and empowered, self-directed rather than subject to the senses, is the argument of Hazlitt’s early philosophical Essay on the Principles of Human Action. The mind’s power (‘imagination’) enables it to choose freely between selfishness and benevolence; contrary to the empiricist position, the mind is not automatically impelled to the first. Neither is it habitually directed to the second, as Hazlitt finds in the shorter literary and familiar essays that he starts to publish nearly ten years later. The abstract model of the mind in Hazlitt’s long Essay becomes, in these later essays, an ego, a self that delights in the exercise of its own power. The innate power of the mind, emphasized in his philosophical treatise only as the basis of the mind’s moral capacity, in the Round Table essays is separated from that capacity. Moral possibility is all too often unfulfilled, as the power on which it rests is directed to other ends. An extreme instance of this truth is Shakespeare’s Iago. This is Hazlitt’s main contention in the Round Table essay ‘On Mr. Kean’s Iago’, originally published as the first part of a two-part review in The Examiner. ‘The character of Iago, in fact, belongs to a class of characters common in Shakespeare, and at the same time peculiar to him – namely, that of great intellectual activity, accompanied with a total want of moral principle’ (4: 15). The conception of Iago indicates in Shakespeare, not only the practical morality of the universal genius, but also an intellectual grasp of an abstract truth or theoretical position. ‘Shakespeare . . . was quite as good a philosopher as he was a poet.30 He knew that the love of power, which is another name for the love of mischief, was natural to man’ (4: 15). Iago illustrates this

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philosophical knowledge, that the active power of the mind, which Hazlitt otherwise calls imagination, is not in itself a guarantee of moral action: [T]here is a natural tendency in the mind to strong excitement, a desire to have its faculties roused and stimulated to the utmost. . . . Iago is only an extreme instance of the kind; that is, of diseased intellectual activity, with an almost perfect indifference to moral good or evil, or rather with a preference of the latter, because it falls in more with his favourite propensity, gives greater zest to his thoughts, and scope to his actions. (4: 15–16) The mind’s power, in Iago’s case, finds its ultimate exercise in evil rather than good. The creative energy that makes Iago, in the second part of the original review (not reprinted in The Round Table), ‘an amateur of tragedy in real life’ (5: 215), elsewhere bears more fruitful results. In the works of Milton, ‘The power of his mind is stamped in every line’; ‘The quantity of art shews the strength of his genius;’ ‘His imagination has the force of nature’ (‘On Milton’s Versification’, 4: 37). Here, the mind’s urge towards the fullest exercise of its power creates the great literature which bears the impress of that mind, ‘stamped in every line’. Celebrating such literature, whose criterion is a strong authorial ego, Hazlitt’s emphasis is still on force, rather than moral function. Self-assertion, not the awareness of others, is the usual concomitant of creative power. In The Round Table, Wordsworth is an especially problematic case in point. His Excursion has an ‘overwhelming, oppressive power’; ‘An intense intellectual egotism swallows up every thing’; ‘The power of his mind preys upon itself’ (‘Observations on Mr. Wordsworth’s Poem “The Excursion”’, 4: 111, 113). Admiration and repulsion are conjoined in Hazlitt’s response to this particular poetic ego. Egotism, implicit in Hazlitt’s postulate of a natural or ruling bias in all human character, persists in, and is indeed fundamental to, his model of creativity in The Round Table. Devoid of such bias, Shakespeare is the sole exception to the rule. Shakespeare’s only singularity is his lack of singularity. In the essay, ‘On Posthumous Fame’, first published in The Examiner in May 1814, during the period of the Kean review series, Hazlitt reiterates Shakespeare’s protean quality, and its origin, the absence of ego: He seemed scarcely to have an individual existence of his own, but to borrow that of others at will, and to pass successively through ‘every variety of untried being,’ – to be now Hamlet, now Othello, now Lear, now

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Falstaff, now Ariel. In the mingled interests and feelings belonging to this wide range of imaginary reality, in the tumult and rapid transitions of this waking dream, the author could not easily find time to think of himself, nor wish to embody that personal identity . . . (4: 23) Sharing Coleridge’s and Lamb’s position, that Shakespeare becomes the characters he creates, Hazlitt insists, in addition, that Shakespeare himself has no discernible identity or ‘individual existence of his own’. His very being consists in otherness. Shakespeare’s freedom from that egotism that is elsewhere the criterion of poetic achievement, means that the Shakespearean self is undetectable. Shakespeare’s want of egotism entails a want, too, of ‘gusto’. The word ‘gusto’, made current as a critical term in Hazlitt’s day by its use in his aesthetics, expresses the creative energy of a powerful authorial or artistic self. In the Round Table essay ‘On Gusto’, ‘Gusto in art is power or passion defining any object’ (4: 77). ‘Michael Angelo’s forms are full of gusto’; Titian’s landscapes have a prodigious gusto’; ‘Rubens has a great deal of gusto’ (4: 78). In marked contrast, in Shakespeare’s works, the absence of a singular and biased authorial ego, in every other case the necessary condition of literary and artistic creation, shows in a corresponding decrease in gusto: ‘The infinite quantity of dramatic invention in Shakespeare takes from his gusto. The power he delights to show is not intense, but discursive.’ On the other hand, ‘Milton has great gusto. He repeats his blows twice; grapples with and exhausts his subject’ (4: 79). In The Round Table, Hazlitt’s critical theory and practical criticism emphasize the force of the creative mind. Intellectual power, which, by his philosophy, enables moral agency, in his familiar essays, is displayed independently of moral purpose. Manifest in the great works of art and literature, such power confirms, in these works, a strong authorial ego. In this respect, the difference between genius and ordinary minds, however great, is still merely a difference of degree. Alone in relation to Shakespeare, however, all other genius, with the rest of humanity, is rendered ordinary. The impact of Shakespeare’s characters, established in the reviews of Kean, is distinct from the personality, the authorial identity, of their creator. To Hazlitt, Shakespeare’s is the only difference of kind.

Magnum Opus Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, a landmark of romantic Shakespeare criticism, was published near the middle of 1817. By this time, Hazlitt’s

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reputation as a drama critic was established. From the Morning Chronicle, he had gone on to fill that office at the Champion, then the Examiner. The Examiner was also the venue, in the period from 1814 to 1816, for the greater number of the informal short essays that were later collated, with a few of Leigh Hunt’s, in The Round Table, published early in 1817. On the basis of his credentials as an art critic, moreover, Hazlitt had been commissioned in January 1816 to contribute an essay, ‘On the Fine Arts’, for the Encyclopaedia Britannica; it appeared in the Supplement that summer, and subsequently in the uniform issue, in which it remained till as late as 1842. From 1813 onwards, he had also been writing literary reviews for various periodicals, including, from 1815, the great Whig organ, the Edinburgh Review, under its magisterial editor, Francis Jeffrey. In this period, too, writing had increasingly become Hazlitt’s means to political expression, in numerous essays on political subjects; in his attacks on The Times; and in his notices of the contemporary poets, Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth. In Characters, Hazlitt drew on material he had already published, particularly in the theatre reviews of 1814–16, importing some of that material verbatim into the new volume, from the early sequence on Kean, which I have treated as a body for the purpose of this discussion, and from his many subsequent reports of Kean and other performers. He added to this material extensively, with close and exemplary analyses of Shakespeare’s text. The book combined a detailed reading knowledge of Shakespeare’s works with the practical experience of the seasoned theatre critic. Its energy and insight were manifest, and its popularity made Hazlitt, for the first time, a literary celebrity. English romantic Shakespeare Somewhere in the background of Characters, we might register Alderman John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, a collection of paintings on subjects from Shakespeare’s plays, commissioned for the purposes of a new illustrated edition and a separate folio of prints. Many of these paintings were by lesser artists, but the collection also included some of the great names of eighteenth-century British art, among them, Joshua Reynolds, Benjamin West, Henry Fuseli, John Opie, Angelica Kaufman; also Hazlitt’s friend, James Northcote. The gallery, which opened in 1789, closed, despite its immense popularity, for lack of funds, in 1805, but the print folio, published in 1805, was re-issued throughout the nineteenth century. In the late eighteenth century, Boydell’s collection contributed to Shakespeare’s popular appeal, and in general, the representations of Shakespeare in the visual

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arts both promoted, and profited by, his growing importance to English nationalistic pride. Aside from stage representation, Hazlitt was very much aware of this other mode of representing Shakespeare, and in his reports of contemporary performances, made the link to the Boydell Gallery: ‘Mr. Kean’s acting in Richard, as we before remarked in his Shylock, presents a perpetual succession of striking pictures. He bids fair to supply us with the best Shakespear Gallery we have had!’ (5: 184). Here, Kean’s performances excel Boydell’s pictures as renditions of Shakespeare’s text. In a later review (in which Kean does not figure), disgusted by a poor performance of The Tempest, Hazlitt exclaims, ‘Even those daubs of pictures, formerly exhibited under the title of the Shakespear Gallery, had a less evident tendency to disturb and distort all the previous notions we had imbibed from reading Shakespear’ (5: 234). In this case, the Boydell collection is a standard of failure against which an extremer failure shows up the more plainly. In Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, Hazlitt constructs his own Shakespeare Gallery, using another means of representation, a series of readings of the plays, especially their main characters. He appeals, as Boydell did, to the potent combination of Shakespeare’s popularity with nationalistic pride. The volume is dedicated to Lamb ‘as a mark of old friendship and lasting esteem’ (4: 167), and its Preface opens with a quotation from Pope, which Hazlitt endorses. The Preface goes on, however, to indict the failures of English Shakespeare criticism, mentioning Johnson in particular, whose shortcomings are set against the strengths of the German critic, A. W. Schlegel. Praising Schlegel at the outset, Hazlitt adds, ‘some little jealousy of the character of the national understanding was not without its share in producing the following undertaking, for “we were piqued” that it should be reserved for a foreign critic to give “reasons for the faith which we English have in Shakespeare”’ (4: 172). The implication is clear: the foreigner’s claim to a treasured national possession must be counteracted by an English criticism of equal or greater standing. Schlegel’s 1808 lectures on drama were published in English translation in 1815, under the title, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. The translator, John Black, formerly Hazlitt’s colleague at the Morning Chronicle, was by then a close friend. Hazlitt reviewed the translation, of which he had obtained an advance copy from Black, for the Edinburgh in February 1816, where, for the most part, he wrote admiringly of Schlegel. His reservations, given in the form of a contrast between the German and English national characters, were to do mainly with Schlegel’s tendency to

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abstraction, or to use Hazlitt’s word, ‘mysticism’. In Characters, Hazlitt declares himself the practical critic in relation to the German theoretician, ‘avoiding an appearance of mysticism . . . , not very attractive to the English reader, and . . . bringing illustrations from particular passages of the plays themselves, which Schlegel’s work, from the extensiveness of his plan, did not admit’ (4: 172). The moralistic and nationalistic note is audible, in the English claim to plain-speaking, against German obfuscation.31 The familiar topic of Shakespeare and nature runs through the volume, without, however, any startling new departures. Hazlitt does not concern himself, as Coleridge does in his distinction between ‘copy’ and ‘imitation’,32 with the precise character of the correspondent relation between nature and Shakespeare’s art. Readily endorsing a well-worn wisdom – ‘There can be little doubt that Shakespear was the most universal genius that ever lived;’ ‘his imagination borrowed from the life, and . . . produced a world of men and women as distinct, as true and as various as those that exist in nature’ (4: 239, 294) – Hazlitt tends to eschew a clearly defined relation between Shakespeare and nature, for a more fluid interaction: ‘The peculiarity and the excellence of Shakespear’s poetry is, that it seems as if he had made his imagination the hand-maid of nature, and nature the plaything of his imagination’ (4: 284). Shakespeare’s figures are original, not simply in the romantic sense, that they are self-generated, but in the sense that real people are; they make their impression upon us directly and at first-hand, as real people do, not as authors do, at second-hand through their creations: ‘Other writers give us very fine versions and paraphrases of nature; but Shakespear, . . . gives us the original text’ (4: 233). The emphases of Hazlitt’s earlier writings on Shakespeare, uniqueness (‘Shakespear’s genius alone appeared to possess the resources of nature,’ 4: 186, author’s emphasis) and alterity, remain. This last emphasis is so strong, indeed, that in the closing essay of the volume, on the ‘Poems and Sonnets’, Hazlitt finds that Shakespeare fails when he attempts to speak in his own voice, in the long poems, because the very essence of his genius is otherness: ‘In expressing the thoughts of others, he seemed inspired; in expressing his own, he was a mechanic. The licence of an assumed character was necessary to restore his genius to the privileges of nature’ (4: 358). The absence of the Shakespearean self allows the emergence of the reader’s. Autobiography, a mode later central to Hazlitt’s essayistic practice, is very much part of the critical practice of Characters, most perceptibly in the essay on Hamlet: ‘It is we who are Hamlet.’ This assertion is followed by one of Hazlitt’s characteristic long sentences, which, gaining momentum and intensity from

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clause after clause in its course, renders in cameo his own life – its disappointments, its lost ideals and defeated aspirations – as Hamlet’s: Whoever has become thoughtful and melancholy through his own mishaps or those of others; whoever has borne about with him the clouded brow of reflection, and thought himself ‘too much i’ th’ sun’; whoever has seen the golden lamp of day dimmed by envious mists rising in his own breast, and could find in the world before him only a dull blank with nothing left remarkable in it; whoever has known ‘the pangs of despised love, the insolence of office, or the spurns which patient merit of the unworthy takes’; he who has felt his mind sink within him, and sadness cling to his heart like a malady, who has had his hopes blighted and his youth staggered by the apparitions of strange things; who cannot be well at ease, while he sees evil hovering near him like a spectre; whose powers of action have been eaten up by thought, he to whom the universe seems infinite, and himself nothing; whose bitterness of soul makes him careless of consequences, and who goes to a play as his best resource to shove off, to a second remove, the evils of life by a mock representation of them – this is the true Hamlet. (4: 232–3) Similarly, in the essay on Romeo and Juliet, Hazlitt’s exposition of the nature of youthful love turns into a record of his own youthful consciousness (4: 250–1). ‘Romeo is Hamlet in love’ (4: 254), where Hamlet is already identified with Hazlitt himself. Less impressionistic, and more useful, perhaps, is Hazlitt’s attention to the internal coherence of the plays, to unifying patterns of action, imagery, and language. Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare had emphasized his ‘judgement’, so as to counter the neoclassical notion of the irregular genius who wrote spontaneously and without plan.33 To the same end, Schlegel had formulated the concept of innate or ‘organical form’, which ‘unfolds itself from within’34; he had also condemned, as ‘the most superficial and cheap mode of criticising works of art’,35 the eighteenth-century practice of displaying the separate ‘beauties’ of Shakespeare’s plays, without reference to a whole. Mindful, perhaps, of this admonition, Hazlitt, for all his prizing of favourite passages, remains keenly aware of schematic connections. In Cymbeline, with which he begins, ‘the principle of analogy’ links the unalterable fidelity of Imogen . . . the amorous importunities of Cloten . . . the persevering determination of Iachimo . . . the faithful attachment of Pisanio to his mistress . . . the obstinate adherence to his

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purpose in Bellario . . . the incorrigible wickedness of the Queen, and even the blind uxorious confidence of Cymbeline. (4: 183–4) If analogy is the organizing principle in Cymbeline, in Macbeth, it is contrast, inscribed as much in the details of language, as in the larger scale of action and passion: MACBETH (generally speaking) is done upon a stronger and more systematic principle of contrast than any other of Shakespear’s plays. . . . It is a huddling together of fierce extremes, a war of opposite natures which of them shall destroy the other. . . . This circumstance will account for the abruptness and violent antitheses of the style. . . . ‘So fair and foul a day I have not seen,’ etc. ‘Such welcome and unwelcome news together.’ ‘Men’s lives are like the flowers in their caps, dying or ere they sicken.’ ‘Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.’ . . . In Lady Macbeth’s speech ‘Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done’t,’ there is murder and filial piety together.’ (4: 191) The same attention to the connecting patterns inscribed in the details of Shakespeare’s text shows Hazlitt, in Antony and Cleopatra, that the first description of Cleopatra’s seductive power, in her barge, presages the second, also set on the water, that of the sea-fight, when Antony ‘leaves the battle, and “like a doating mallard” follows her flying sails’ (4: 229). Close focus, again, makes him notice, in The Tempest, that ‘even the drunken sailors, who are made reeling-ripe, share, in the disorder of their minds and bodies, in the tumult of the elements’ (4: 239). The descriptor ‘romantic’ becomes very much part of Hazlitt’s vocabulary for Shakespeare in Characters. In his review of Schlegel in the Edinburgh, Hazlitt had treated Schlegel’s distinction between classical and romantic, explaining that the ‘romantic’ pertains, not to the object of representation itself, but to its associative power. Furthermore, ‘the associations of ideas belonging to the romantic character, may vary infinitely, and take in the whole range of nature and accident’ (16: 61). In Characters, the epithet ‘romantic’ expresses just this infinite range of the associative imagination. Antony and Cleopatra shows us life as ‘a strange and romantic dream, long, obscure, and infinite’ (4: 231). Bottom ‘is the most romantic of mechanics’ (4: 244). Romeo and Juliet exhibits ‘the romantic enthusiasm of youth. . . . Its root is in the heart of man: it lifts its head above the stars’ (4: 250). In the essay on Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare’s ‘romantic grace’ leads Hazlitt to comment on how his ideas ‘play into one another’s hands’, ‘re-act upon

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one another’ (4: 226), and he recurs to this constant, instantaneous reaction and change in the essay on Romeo and Juliet: ‘it is not merely the force of any passion that is given, but the slightest and most unlooked-for transitions from one to another, the mingling currents of every different feeling rising up and prevailing in turn, swayed by the master-mind of the poet’ (4: 255). The infinite variety of the poet’s imagination ensures an infinite variability in the dramatic interactions, hence the perennial freshness of surprise, the ‘unlooked-for transitions’.36 To Hazlitt, the perpetual play of ideas in Shakespeare’s works, their volatility and dynamism, is enabled by a range of imagination that belongs to the protean genius which is Shakespeare’s alone. Such a range, with the concomitant absence of a determinate authorial ego, is, as Hazlitt suggested in the Round Table, to the detriment of Shakespeare’s ‘gusto’: a sustained intensity of effect, the effect of one idea or character rather than another. Celebrating the exceptional achievement of the great dramatist, Hazlitt is still half inclined to regret the trait that sets Shakespeare apart. The ambivalence is perceptible in the essay on Troilus and Cressida, in the comparison of Shakespeare with Chaucer: His genius was dramatic, as Chaucer’s was historical. He saw both sides of a question, the different views taken of it according to the different interests of the parties concerned, and he was at once an actor and spectator in the scene. If any thing, he is too various and flexible: too full of transitions, of glancing lights, of salient points. If Chaucer followed up his subject too doggedly, perhaps Shakespear was too volatile and heedless. The Muse’s wing too often lifted him from off his feet. He made infinite excursions to the right and the left. (4: 225) Shakespeare and the forms of power ‘Gusto in art’, Hazlitt had written in The Round Table, ‘is power or passion defining any object’. Shakespeare’s volatility detracts from his gusto, yet throughout Characters, Hazlitt’s sustained attention is precisely to ‘power’ or ‘passion’ in Shakespeare’s plays. At the outset, he takes the plays’ subject to be the ‘strong movements of passion’, beyond the scope of Johnson’s common sense (4: 175); later, it is reading Lear that establishes for Hazlitt that ‘the greatest strength of genius is shewn in describing the strongest passions’ (4: 271). There is little real contradiction here. The term ‘gusto’ in Hazlitt’s critical vocabulary refers to the impact of a representation, not of an actual individual or thing; ‘gusto’, that is, is an authorial attribute,

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displayed in the author’s compositions. In Shakespeare’s plays, passion, along with its force, belongs not to the author, but to his creations. Synonymously, the power of Shakespeare’s characters is that of the thing itself, the power of real people, not of texts. The locus of power, in Shakespeare’s works alone, is to be discerned in the creations, not the creator. Noticeably, therefore, ‘gusto’ is absent as a critical descriptor in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays;37 at the same time, Hazlitt’s engagement here is with the varying forms of individual power, of which Shakespeare provides the examples.38 Extraordinary power, in an individual, is the concomitant of an extraordinary self-will. Prospero’s ‘sense of preternatural power makes him arbitrary, tetchy, and impatient of opposition’ (4: 242). The Taming of the Shrew ‘shews admirably how self-will is only to be got the better of by stronger will’ (4: 341). An extremer instance than either Prospero or Petruchio is Iago, in whom, as I have already discussed, power and self-will are unallied with any trace of moral tendency. Hazlitt’s analysis of Iago, first published in his review of Kean in that role, and republished in The Round Table, appears again in the essay on Othello in Characters. In Richard III, too, he discerns the same combination, of power and moral lack: ‘The ground-work of the character of Richard, [is] that mixture of intellectual vigour with moral depravity, in which Shakespear delighted to show his strength’ (4: 300). The most compulsive example of ‘power’, signifying, as with Iago, a kind of terrible creative energy, detached from moral principle, is Lady Macbeth. Like Iago, ‘distinguished by her . . . inexorable self-will’, Lady Macbeth surpasses him in stature, her power so great that it lifts her into sublimity: ‘The magnitude of her resolution almost covers the magnitude of her guilt. She is a great bad woman, whom we hate, but whom we fear more than we hate’ (4: 188). Hazlitt’s terms, ‘magnitude’, ‘great’, ‘fear’, are standard descriptors of the sublime; fear or awe, by Burke’s influential aesthetics, is the characteristic response to the sublime. For all its loftiness, however, the power of mind owned and exercised by Lady Macbeth is only an extreme version of an ordinary human trait: as Hazlitt makes clear, Lady Macbeth shows the excesses of which humanity is capable. Her humanity makes her distinct from the witches, ‘who become sublime from their exemption from all human sympathies and contempt for all human affairs, as Lady Macbeth does by the force of passion!’ (4: 189). Her fault is no more than ‘an excess of that strong principle of self-interest and family aggrandisement’ (4: 189), a principle, that is, which is part of the common human condition. Because power inheres in the very nature of the human being, the exercise of such power, whether it is the creative energy of the poet, or that of a tyrant or a murderer, finds a responsive echo in its ordinary human

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audience, exactly the response produced by the sublime. To Hazlitt, the political implications of this truth are momentous, and they are spelled out in what is now perhaps the best-known of the essays in Characters, the chapter on Coriolanus. ‘The love of power in ourselves and the admiration of it in others are both natural to man: the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave’ (4: 215). In the essay on Coriolanus, the insights into the nature and effects of power, gained from Lady Macbeth, take on an explicitly political tenor. The essay treats the interconnection of aesthetics, politics and morals. The aesthetic response to literary or artistic genius – where ‘genius’, as I have shown, is ordinarily biased, exclusive and egotistical – is closely related to the normative response to other kinds of extraordinary individual power, that of the evil-doer, such as Lady Macbeth, or the despot, such as Coriolanus. The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power. The imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty: it takes from one thing to add to another: it accumulates circumstances together to give the greatest possible effect to a favourite object. The understanding is a dividing and measuring faculty: it judges of things not according to their immediate impression on the mind, but according to their relations to one another. The one is a monopolising faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of present excitement by inequality and disproportion; the other is a distributive faculty, which seeks the greatest ultimate good, by justice and proportion. The one is an aristocratical, the other a republican faculty. The principle of poetry is a very anti-levelling principle. It aims at effect, it exists by contrast. It admits of no medium. It is every thing by excess. It rises above the ordinary standards of suffering and crimes. It presents a dazzling appearance. Its shows its head turreted, crowned, and crested. Its front is gilt and blood-stained. Before it ‘it carries noise, and behind it leaves tears.’ It has its altars and its victims, sacrifices, human sacrifices. Kings, priests, nobles, are its train-bearers, tyrants and slaves its executioners. – ‘Carnage is its daughter.’ (4: 214) These much-quoted, frequently de-contextualized, comments first appeared in an essay, ‘Coriolanus’, published in The Examiner on 15 December 1816, and they belong with Hazlitt’s political commentary in this period. The outburst against poetry resonates, in particular, with the critique of the ‘spirit of poetry’ in another essay, published in The Examiner a week later, ‘Illustrations of “The Times” Newspaper: On Modern Lawyers and Poets’, later extracted in The Round Table under the title ‘On Poetical Versatility’.

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Despite the glancing reference to Shakespeare at the opening of the ‘Coriolanus’ essay (‘Shakespeare himself seems to have had a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question’; 4: 214, 5: 347), the similarity of sentiment in the two essays confirms that it is not primarily Shakespeare whom Hazlitt has in mind in these comments, but the ‘modern poets’ who are the subject of the second essay, the familiar targets of his political writings at the time, Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Both essays belong squarely to the political moment in which they were written. Their purport is immediate and pressing, not general and remote, their critique of poetry, for all its forcefulness, contingent, not absolute. In the passage above, Hazlitt’s two quotations, the first from Coriolanus (2. 1. 158–9), the second from Wordsworth, so juxtaposed, specifically associate the damage wrought by Coriolanus with that by Wordsworth’s poetry. Earlier in 1816, Wordsworth had published his Thanksgiving Ode (‘Ode: The Morning of the Day Appointed for a General Thanksgiving. January 18, 1816’), containing his most abhorrent, and soon notorious, endorsement of the ruling power, in the lines that celebrated the slaughter at Waterloo as part of the ‘pure intent’ of God: ‘But Thy most dreaded instrument / In working out a pure intent, / Is Man – arrayed for mutual slaughter – / – Yea, Carnage is Thy Daughter!’ Encoded, then, in Hazlitt’s quotation of this last line is his own republicanism and ardent loyalty to Napoleon, with his excoriation of Wordsworth’s, and other contemporary poets’, support of the establishment. The very words of Wordsworth’s infamous proclamation become the words of Hazlitt’s indictment: the poet, not God, is charged with promoting man’s slaughter by man; carnage is his daughter. Partly at least, Hazlitt’s Shakespeare criticism becomes an extended forum for the principles and opinions he was expressing at the same time in writings more overtly addressed to contemporary politics and current affairs. His essay on Henry V is another example of the way in which he finds in Shakespeare a channel to the political situation of his day. The opening description of Henry recalls Leigh Hunt’s famous ‘libel’ on the Prince Regent in 1812: ‘He was careless, dissolute, and ambitious; – idle, or doing mischief . . . he seemed to have no idea of the common decencies of life’ (4: 285). In its general tenor, at least, this description is not far off Hunt’s account of the Prince Regent as ‘a violator of his word, a libertine . . . , a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps’.39 As the essay continues, Hazlitt’s opinion of the Napoleonic wars bears directly on his analysis of Henry’s war with France: ‘Because he did not know how to exercise the enormous power, which had just dropped into his hands, to

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any one good purpose, he immediately undertook (a cheap and obvious resource of sovereignty) to do all the mischief he could’ (4: 285). The comparison is then spelled out: The object of our late invasion and conquest of France was to restore the legitimate monarch, the descendent of Hugh Capet, to the throne; Henry V in his time made war on and deposed the descendent of this very Hugh Capet, on the plea that he was a usurper and illegitimate. What would the great modern catspaw of legitimacy and restorer of divine right have said to the claim of Henry and the title of the descendants of Hugh Capet? (4: 286) Here too, as in the essay on Coriolanus, Hazlitt fleetingly suggests the gap between Shakespeare’s politics and his own: ‘Shakespear . . . labours hard to apologise for the actions of the king’ (4: 285). For all his speculations about Shakespeare’s royalist leanings, however, Hazlitt’s comments on poetry at the opening of the ‘Coriolanus’ essay, of which so much is made by present-day critics, do not tell the whole story, whether about Shakespeare or the complex connections that Hazlitt draws between poetic and political power. More fully to unravel those connections, we might usefully relate the political commentary in the essay on Coriolanus to that in the essay on Julius Caesar. In the latter, arguing that ‘the whole design of the conspirators to liberate their country fails from the generous temper and overweening confidence of Brutus in the goodness of their cause and the assistance of others’, Hazlitt goes on, ‘That humanity and honesty which dispose men to resist injustice and tyranny render them unfit to cope with the cunning and power of those who are opposed to them. . . . Tyranny and servility are to be dealt with after their own fashion’ (4: 198). The distinction between ‘humanity and honesty’ and ‘tyranny and servility’ is recognizably the same as that between ‘understanding’ and ‘imagination’ in the essay on Coriolanus. Because tyranny and servility are allied with imagination, where humanity and honesty belong to the understanding, the appeal against tyranny, after its own fashion, has to be to the heart, not the head. ‘Cassius was better cut out for a conspirator,’ Hazlitt declares, because his ‘heart prompted his head’ (4: 198). The heart, not the head, responds with, and to, enthusiasm and excess. By implication, poetry is the fittest instrument against, as it is for, tyranny. To say that an unjust power is often poetical, or that poetry and such power are mutually readily suited, is not to say they are necessarily so. Explaining

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his remarks on Coriolanus some years later, in his Letter to William Gifford (1819), Hazlitt affirms ‘that poetry, that the imagination, generally speaking delights in power, in strong excitement, as well as in truth, in good, in right, whereas pure reason and the moral sense approve only of the true and the good’ (9: 37). As the imagination’s delight in power might be turned to the purpose of tyranny, its delight in good might be turned against that purpose. In Characters, in as many instances as he exposes the alliance of poetry and unjust power, Hazlitt also shows their opposition. Thus, in Lear, the excess of evil represented stimulates a proportionately excessive desire for good: ‘in proportion to the greatness of the evil, is the sense and desire of the opposite good excited’ (4: 272). Elsewhere poetry, which might choose to add allure to power, might also strip it of such allure. In Achilles’ slaying of Hector in Troilus and Cressida, ‘There is something revolting as well as terrific in the ferocious coolness with which he singles out his prey: nor does the splendour of the achievement reconcile us to the cruelty of the means’ (4: 224). This response, of revulsion or repugnance to the display of power, is most perceptible in relation to Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. In his essay on Henry VIII, Hazlitt takes the opposite position to that of his essay on Coriolanus. There, in the Roman play, Shakespeare might have seemed to side with the aristocrat against the rabble, but here, in his portrayal of recent English history, he is unequivocally the adversary of kings: Henry VIII’s power is most fatal to those whom he loves: he is cruel and remorseless to pamper his luxurious appetites; bloody and voluptuous; an amorous murderer; an uxorious debauchee. . . . It has been said of Shakespear – ‘No maid could live near such a man.’ It might with as good reason be said – ‘No king could live near such a man.’ (4: 305) In the Letter to Gifford Hazlitt writes, ‘I have said that Shakespeare has described both sides of the question, and you ask me very wisely, ‘Did he confine himself to one? No, I say that he did not; but I suspect that he had a leaning to one side, and has given it more quarter than it deserved’ (9: 36). The ability to describe both sides of the question is the exclusive characteristic of the great dramatist, as Hazlitt repeats over and over, and it shows itself in Shakespeare’s delineation of the allurements, as well as the evils, of personal and political power. The relations between these two kinds of power are complex and varying, and Hazlitt draws out this complexity from Shakespeare, as he does in his familiar essays and political journalism from the real world, his own social and historical moment.

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Stage and closet In Characters, as in Hazlitt’s theatre reviews, the performances of particular plays or parts are commended or disparaged with equal warmth. The problems of performance usually arise from the specific demands of a play or role, which exceed the capabilities of an actor. In the essay on Hamlet, for instance, Hazlitt’s stance is firmly against performance: ‘We do not like to see our author’s plays acted, and least of all, HAMLET. There is no play that suffers so much in being transferred to the stage. Hamlet himself seems hardly capable of being acted.’ Kean and Kemble both fail in the part: ‘Mr. Kemble plays it like a man in armour, with a determined inveteracy of purpose, in one undeviating straight line, which is as remote from the natural grace and refined susceptibility of the character, as the sharp angles and abrupt starts which Mr. Kean introduces into the part’ (4: 237). On the other hand, the performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream fails, not because of the difficulty of any one character, but because so much of the play is pure poetry, and ‘Poetry and the stage do not agree well together’ (4: 247). The case is different again with Lear. Hazlitt quotes verbatim Lamb’s strictures against the performance of the play, but he acknowledges, too, the poverty of all representations of Lear, his own commentary included: ‘All that we say must fall far short of the subject; or even of what we ourselves conceive of it’ (4: 257). Against such observations, we might set Hazlitt’s opinions on other of Shakespeare’s plays, which, in his view, work better on stage than as reading texts, as well as his sustained admiration, expressed throughout Characters, of his favourite actors, Siddons and Kean. The essay on Richard III opens with the comment that the play ‘may be considered as properly a stage-play: it belongs to the theatre, rather than to the closet’ (4: 298) and goes on to reiterate, from the theatre reviews, Kean’s brilliance in the part. The Winter’s Tale, again, is one of the best-acting of our author’s plays. We remember seeing it with great pleasure many years ago. . . . Mrs. Siddons played Hermione, and in the last scene acted the painted statue to the life – with true monumental dignity and noble passion; Mr. Kemble, in Leontes, worked himself up into a very fine classical phrensy; and Bannister, as Autolycus, roared as loud for pity as a sturdy beggar could do who felt none of the pain he counterfeited, and was sound of wind and limb. (4: 325–6) In more than one instance, Hazlitt’s interpretation of a character is significantly influenced by a favourite actor. Thus Lady Macbeth’s sublimity is

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inseparable from Siddons’s rendering of it. ‘In speaking of the character of Lady Macbeth, we ought not to pass over Mrs. Siddons’s manner of acting that part. We can conceive of nothing grander. . . . Power was seated on her brow, passion emanated from her breast as from a shrine; she was tragedy personified’ (4: 189). The contrast with Lamb, who complained that Siddons’s Lady Macbeth ultimately diminished his own conception of the character, is telling.40 Of Kean’s performance of Romeo, Hazlitt maintains that ‘He treads close indeed upon the genius of the author.’ Kean is an ‘able commentator on Shakespear’, and Hazlitt notes, in parentheses, that ‘actors are the best commentators on the poets’ (4: 256). In the essay on The Merchant of Venice, Kean’s view of Shylock, which Hazlitt had once criticized as being too elastic and variable, sends him back to the text, where he finds that Kean was right after all, that Shylock’s singleness of purpose is entirely compatible with mental agility: That he has but one idea, is not true; he has more ideas than any other person in the piece; and if he is intense and inveterate in the pursuit of his purpose, he shews the utmost elasticity, vigour, and presence of mind, in the means of attaining it. But so rooted was our habitual impression of the part from seeing it caricatured in the representation, that it was only from a careful perusal of the play itself that we saw our error. The stage is not in general the best place to study our author’s characters in. It is too often filled with traditional common-place conceptions of the part, . . . a man of genius comes once in an age to clear away the rubbish. (4: 324) There is another purport in these comments. Kean’s ability to ‘clear away the rubbish’ makes him anti-establishment, a challenge to entrenched error and the authority of tradition. The political inference is stated more plainly in an essay, published many years later in The Liberal, ‘On the Spirit of Monarchy’ (January 1823). Kean, writes Hazlitt in this essay, ‘is a radical actor. He savours too much of the reality. . . . How should those, who look to the surface, and never probe deeper, endure him? He is the antithesis of a court-actor’ (19: 257). Kean’s radicalism is in his commitment to the natural man, antithetical to that artificial entity, the monarch. The reality of feeling and character (the ground of human equality), as Kean displays it, is the reality hidden or suppressed by the system of monarchy.41 Once again, then, the juxtaposition of Hazlitt’s pronouncements against stage representation with his numerous declarations in its favour, precludes any simple or absolute hierarchy of closet and stage. In his finished work on Shakespeare, Hazlitt retains from his theatre reviews a dynamic

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engagement with performance. Shakespeare, as Hazlitt sees him, belongs in the present. Contemporary theatre and contemporary politics both sustain that conviction. Aftermath Characters of Shakespear’s Plays was the first of Hazlitt’s published works to sell well and immediately. The 1817 edition was followed by a second in 1818, which also sold rapidly, according to Hazlitt, till the Quarterly’s review brought sales to an end (8: 99). Unsurprisingly, the reviews were split along political lines. The Edinburgh Review praised the volume, although with some equivocation. Francis Jeffrey calls Hazlitt an enthusiast rather than a commentator, before going on to quote long passages with approval, including the ‘moral and political reflections’ on Julius Caesar and Coriolanus.42 Leigh Hunt’s three notices in The Examiner all proclaim Hazlitt’s critical ability.43 In another liberal periodical, The Champion, the reviewer, John Hamilton Reynolds, is the most fervent of all: ‘This is the only work ever written on Shakespeare, that can be deemed worthy of Shakespeare.’44 The Tory periodicals uniformly denounced the book. The New Monthly Magazine, at the time still staunchly conservative, found it blasphemous and profane.45 To the British Critic’s reviewer, the work is ‘stuffed with dull, common-place Jacobin declamation’. The reviewer is ‘caught, entrapped, surprised into reading tirades of democratic trash’. ‘Politics’, he warns, ‘lurk under every aphorism that the author enunciates, and the reader, in gathering the flowers of poetry, must constantly beware of the snake that lurks beneath it’.46 In similar vein, John Russell, in The Quarterly Review, deigns to notice ‘the senseless and wicked sophistry of this writer’, only ‘. . . to show how very small a portion of talent and literature was necessary for carrying on the trade of sedition’. This was the second of three attacks on Hazlitt’s works in successive issues of the Quarterly, the provocation, cumulatively, for his fiery Letter to William Gifford in 1819. Political partisanship notwithstanding, there is little doubt that Characters of Shakespear’s Plays established Hazlitt’s literary reputation. His pre-eminence as a commentator on Shakespeare secured the publication not only of the second edition of Characters, but also A View of the English Stage (1818). By this time, Hazlitt had gone on as drama critic from The Examiner to The Times, formerly the target of his bitterest polemic, but now under a new editor, Thomas Barnes. A View of the English Stage, a collation of reports of contemporary performances from the period 1813–17 (omitting most of the reviews from Hazlitt’s 8-month stint at The Times), ‘gave the almost

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unprecedented dignity of a book to a newspaper critic’s reviews of the theater’, as the Hazlitt scholar, John Kinnaird, has pointed out.47 The material on Shakespeare that it contains overlaps too substantially with the writings I have already treated to warrant separate consideration. This material aside, the book’s interest is in its extensive coverage of the London actors of the day, in Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean roles: apart from Kean, Sarah Siddons and John Kemble; also Charles Macready, Eliza O’Neill, Charles Young, William Abbott, John Emery, J. B. Booth, Sarah Booth and a host of others. The response of a contemporary reader, Mary Russell Mitford might be noted in passing: ‘I had seen most of them before, but I could not help reading them all together; though so much of Hazlitt is rather dangerous to one’s taste – rather like dining on sweetmeats and supping on pickles. So poignant is he, and so rich, everything seems insipid after him.’48

The English Canon At the end of Hazlitt’s stint as theatre critic of The Times in December 1817, another phase of his career came to a close, and a new one began, with a return to public lecturing. His fame was high when he gave his Lectures on the English Poets at the Surrey Institution in Blackfriars, London, during January and February 1818. The Institution was founded in 1808, to promote the spread of knowledge of the arts and sciences among a wider public, and the lectures delivered there were by the established authorities in their subjects. The audience at Hazlitt’s series on the English poets was large, and it included many writers and artists whose names are now well known: among the first, Keats, Godwin, John Hunt, Procter (‘Barry Cornwall’), Crabb Robinson and Thomas Noon Talfourd; among the second, the Landseers and William Bewick. On the conclusion of the series, Hazlitt was asked to repeat it, manifest proof of its success, and the lectures were duly delivered again in full, during April and May 1818, at the Crown and Anchor Tavern on the Strand. Publication followed almost at once, about a month after A View of the English Stage, and only days before the publication of the second edition of Characters by Taylor & Hessey, the same firm that published the lectures. Shakespeare, Milton and the question of morals Shakespeare is central to two lectures in the series. The first is the opening lecture, ‘On Poetry in General’. This is Hazlitt’s great poetic ‘defence’; its

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place, yet to be acknowledged, is in a generic tradition that begins with Aristotle’s Poetics and continues with Sidney’s A Defence of Poetry, and, closer to Hazlitt’s own time, Shelley’s Defence of Poetry. Hazlitt’s lecture belongs to this genre of prose essays that set out to vindicate the necessity and stature of poetry against the discourses and habits of thought inimical to it. But where the emphasis in Aristotle’s text, as in Sidney’s and Shelley’s, is on the morality of poetry, in Hazlitt’s the claim is not so much for morality as humanity. Poetry, as he celebrates it, is fundamental to the human condition, and Shakespeare gives him the means to illustrate this thesis. ‘Man is a poetical animal: and those of us who do not study the principles of poetry, act upon them all our lives’ (5: 2). In the lecture ‘On Poetry in General’, Shakespeare’s plays, which contain all of the natural man, the whole range of human passion, best exemplify the nature of poetry itself. The plays’ subject, as Hazlitt had already made clear in Characters, is the force of passion, and ‘Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions’ (5: 1). Poetry inheres in the union of imagination with passion, that is to say, in imaginative excess, and Shakespeare’s drama furnishes an abundant display of such excess. Hazlitt draws on Shakespeare to illustrate the same tendency that Ruskin was to deplore a generation later as ‘pathetic fallacy’, to Ruskin, the characteristic fault of romantic thought: the tendency of the imagination, under the influence of passion, to spill out of itself and absorb the world around it. What Ruskin censures, Hazlitt celebrates: ‘when he [Lear] exclaims in the mad scene, “The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me!” it is passion lending occasion to imagination to make every creature in league against him’ (5: 5). But Hazlitt also recognizes that hyperbole and pathetic fallacy are only one mode in which the force of passion finds its expression; a compelling simplicity is another: ‘the “So I am” of Cordelia gushes from her heart like a torrent of tears, relieving it of a weight of love and of supposed ingratitude, which had pressed upon it for years’ (5: 5). The lecture ‘On Poetry in General’ reiterates the version of catharsis that Hazlitt had formulated in Characters from his experience of reading Lear, that tragic suffering can rouse in us a proportionate desire for an antithetical good. Shakespeare’s tragedy promotes a humanitarian end because it makes us feel more deeply, ‘makes us drink deeper of the cup of human life; tugs at the heartstrings; loosens the pressure about them; and calls the springs of thought and feeling into play with tenfold force’ (5: 6). Yet Hazlitt is careful not to generalize this moral reaction. Poetry works because of its power, not its goodness; it ‘has its source and ground-work in the common

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love of strong excitement’ (5: 7). This propensity for excitement or action or power, quintessentially human, as Hazlitt sees it, neither precludes nor compels an attendant moral response. Shakespeare’s works show us the moral possibility inherent in the natural man; Milton’s, moral compulsion. In the third of the Lectures on the English Poets, Shakespeare is ‘the poet of nature’, Milton, ‘the poet of morality’ (5: 46). Or more precisely, Shakespeare’s stimulus is human nature, Milton’s, moral aspiration. The lecture sharpens and amplifies a contrast that Hazlitt had already emphasized in his commentary on Shakespeare in The Round Table. There Milton displays the gusto that Shakespeare wants. His is the ‘ordinary’ genius par excellence, a powerful, but determinate or biased authorial self, discernible throughout its works. Further arguing this position, the lecture ‘On Shakspeare and Milton’ presents, in its most cogent and expansive form, Hazlitt’s version of a duality central to romantic poetics. In the practice of the romantic poets, the duality of Shakespeare and Milton is perceptible in the double motivation to drama and epic. In literary theory, it figures prominently, for instance, in Coleridge’s 1811–12 lectures on Shakespeare and Milton (and later in Biographia Literaria), where Shakespeare is ‘seated . . . on one of the two Golden Thrones of the English Parnassus, with Milton on the other / – the one darting himself forth, & passing into all the forms of human character & passion, the other attracting all forms & things to himself, into the unity of his own grand Ideal’.49 For Coleridge, the distinction is between a dispersed and an encompassing creator, parallel, as the Coleridge scholar Seamus Perry has shown, to that between a pantheistic and an orthodox deity.50 Hazlitt’s lecture ‘On Shakspeare and Milton’ shares with Coleridge this characterization of Shakespeare’s genius as plural, where Milton’s is singular. The distinction for Hazlitt, however, does not derive, as it does with Coleridge, from contrary religious impulses. Rather, it is the secular, quite simple distinction between what we might call the sublime of nature and the sublime of art. The attributes of the poet of nature are those that Hazlitt had already described in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, variety and range, their enabling condition the absence of self (5: 46–7). Such variety goes hand in hand, as before, with speed and movement. Action and reaction are instant, ongoing and unexpected. In Shakespeare’s portrayal of character, ‘there is a continual composition and decomposition of its elements, a fermentation of every particle in the whole mass, by its alternate affinity or antipathy to other principles which are brought in contact with it’ (5: 51). Hazlitt’s

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first reviews of Kean had criticized the actor for making Shakespeare’s sublime characters too variable. Over time, however, this variability becomes central to his own conception of Shakespeare’s characters, and the same quality – rapid movement, the very antithesis to stasis – also distinguishes Shakespeare’s language. ‘He seems always hurrying from his subject, even while describing it’; his words ‘are struck out at a heat, on the spur of the occasion’ (5: 54). Nature simply is, art aspires. The characteristics of Milton’s works are morality and elevation, the attributes of art, not nature. In his creations we discern what is absent in Shakespeare’s – effort: ‘He always labours, and almost always succeeds. He strives hard to say the finest things in the world, and he does say them’ (5: 58). The authorial self capable of such effort is powerful, distinct and palpable: ‘In reading his works, we feel ourselves under the influence of a mighty intellect, that the nearer it approaches to others, becomes more distinct from them’ (5: 58). By as much as it is distinct and particular, however, this kind of intellect is also fixed and limited. Thus, where Shakespeare’s characterization is wide-ranging, ‘Milton took only a few simple principles of character, and raised them to the utmost conceivable grandeur’ (5: 51). Shakespeare’s genius is identical to nature, but in Milton, ‘The quantity of art in him shews the strength of his genius’ (5: 58). The words of the poet of nature ‘have all the truth and vividness of actual objects’ (5: 54); Milton ‘makes words tell as pictures’ (5: 59). His blank verse is ‘stately and uniformly swelling’, where Shakespeare’s is ‘varied and broken by the inequalities of the ground it has to pass over in its uncertain course’ (5: 54). An analogy may be elicited on this ground between Hazlitt’s comparison of Shakespeare and Milton, and the disparate romanticisms of the German philosophers, Schlegel and Schiller. In his seminal essay, ‘Schiller and the Genesis of German Romanticism’ (1948), the influential historian of ideas, A. O. Lovejoy, distinguishes the romantic thought of Friedrich Schlegel (with his brother, A. W. Schlegel) on one hand, from that of Friedrich Schiller, on the other, by their differing conceptions of the ideal.51 This difference is germane to Hazlitt in some, though not all respects; mainly, in the axes, horizontal or vertical, along which the two ideals are measured. Schlegel’s ideal is multiplicitous, Schiller’s is lofty; the first is characterized by its breadth, the second, by its height. Shakespeare is Schlegel’s exemplar. The correspondence with Hazlitt’s view of Shakespeare and Milton confirms the way in which his discrimination of genius both reflects and contributes to the diverse romanticisms of his day.52

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Other canonical contexts Hazlitt’s commentary on Shakespeare in his two further series of literary lectures is thinner and less noteworthy. The Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819) is his forum for a consideration of Shakespeare’s merits as a writer of comedy. In tragedy Shakespeare stands alone, but where comedy is concerned, ‘I cannot help thinking, for instance, that Moliere was as great, or a greater comic genius than Shakspeare, . . . I think that both Rabelais and Cervantes, the one in the power of ludicrous description, the other in the invention and perfect keeping of comic character, excelled Shakspeare’ (‘On Shakspeare and Ben Jonson,’ 6: 31). Comedy finds its sharpest edge, Hazlitt argues, in the exposure of vanity and affectation, which flourish ‘only in a highly advanced state of civilisation and manners’, rather than in the ‘state of greater rudeness and simplicity’ of Shakespeare’s day (6: 36–7). The stimulus to wit is folly, not so much the natural folly of an individual as the collective folly of a social group: ‘its lash is laid on with the utmost severity, to drive before it the common herd of knaves and fools, not to lacerate and terrify the single stragglers’ (6: 35). But although this critique turns out, predictably enough, to be praise (‘Shakespeare’s comic Muse is . . . too good-natured and magnanimous’; 6: 35), Hazlitt, who has Falstaff in mind, is still reluctant to take it too far. ‘I will not say’, he quickly concedes, ‘that he [Shakespeare] had not as great a natural genius for comedy as any one; but I may venture to say, that he had not the same artificial models and regulated mass of fashionable absurdity or elegance to work upon’ (6: 38). The ensuing comparison of Shakespeare with Ben Jonson is in Hazlitt’s characteristic mode, the antithesis, here deployed to set the ‘natural’ and spontaneous genius, shown in Shakespeare’s comic characters, against the studied, mechanical creations of Ben Jonson (6: 38–41). In the lecture ‘On Shakspeare and Ben Jonson’, Hazlitt’s perception of Shakespeare as a lone phenomenon is moderated by the awareness of his location within a culture, the social and historical conditions of his time. In his last series of literary lectures, again, in which he treats the achievement of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, he does so on the ground that that achievement, emerging from a shared social and cultural context, facilitates a better understanding of Shakespeare’s. The ‘Advertisement’ to the Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth (1820) announces that the lectures say ‘little . . . of Shakespear’ (6: 173). Nonetheless, the introductory lecture makes clear that the interest of the Elizabethan dramatists is in their relation to Shakespeare: ‘They are indeed the scale by which we ascend to the true knowledge and love of him. Our admiration of them does not lessen

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our relish for him: but, on the contrary, increases and confirms it’ (6: 181).53 Hazlitt’s surprising declaration here that Shakespeare ‘did not form a class or species by himself, but belonged to a class or species,’ and that ‘His age was necessary to him’ (6: 180), in fact hardly unsays his previous insistence on Shakespeare’s uniqueness. Shakespeare’s is still the single mind that includes, as it surpasses, all others: ‘his contemporaries, with their united strength, would hardly make one Shakespear’ (6: 181).

Familiar Style By the time Hazlitt had concluded and published his last series of literary lectures, the sustained hostility of the Tory press had taken its toll on his morale and reputation. Battle-scarred as he was, however, his best work was still to come.

The London Magazine Hazlitt returned to theatre reviewing on a regular basis in 1820, as drama critic of the monthly London Magazine, newly resuscitated under the editorship of John Scott. He wrote in this capacity a series of articles on the drama, reporting on past and established favourites, and new contenders for favour, among the actors of his day. A passion for the theatre illuminates these essays: The stage at once gives a body to our thoughts, and refinement and expansion to our sensible impressions. It has not the pride and remoteness of abstract science: it has not the petty egotism of vulgar life. It is particularly wanted in great cities (where it of course flourishes most) to take off from the dissatisfaction and ennui, that creep over our own pursuits from the indifference or contempt thrown upon them by others; and at the same time to reconcile our numberless discordant incommensurable feelings and interests together, by giving us an immediate and common topic to engage our attention and to rally us round the standard of our common humanity. We never hate a face that we have seen in the pit. (18: 273) Of the writing on Shakespeare in the London Magazine essays, the most stimulating pertains, again, to Kean, this time in the new roles of Coriolanus and Lear. Kemble’s performance of Coriolanus had been the occasion of

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Hazlitt’s commentary on the play in the Examiner in December 1816, later republished in the famous essay in Characters. In the Examiner article, ‘Mr. Kemble in the part of Coriolanus was as great as ever’ (5: 350). Kemble’s air of loftiness just suited the part; by contrast, ‘Mr. Kean’s acting is not of the patrician order; he is one of the people, and what might be termed a radical performer’ (18: 290). Kean’s style is spontaneous and immediate where Kemble’s is stately and distanced, and in Hazlitt’s notice in the London Magazine (February 1820), this too-human aspect of Kean’s performance gets in the way of his rendering of a character whose settled sense is of superiority to the common man. Mr. Kean, instead of ‘keeping his state’, instead of remaining fixed and immoveable (for the most part) on his pedestal of pride, seemed impatient of this mock-dignity, this still-life assumption of superiority; burst too often from the trammels of precedent, and the routine of etiquette, which should have confined him; and descended into the common arena of man, to make good his pretensions by the energy with which he contended for them, and to prove the hollowness of his supposed indifference to the opinion of others by the excessive significance and studied variations of the scorn and disgust he expressed for it. The intolerable airs and aristocratical pretensions of which he is the slave, and to which he falls a victim, did not seem legitimate in him, but upstart, turbulent, and vulgar. (18: 290, emphases in original) Kean’s volatility is presented here as revolutionary energy, which ‘burst . . . the trammels of precedent’, is ‘upstart, turbulent, and vulgar’. Such energy is wholly incompatible with the fixed, mechanical and deathly attributes of the tyrant or established power. Hazlitt’s adjective ‘legitimate’ is politically loaded; ‘legitimacy’, as in the extract from the essay on Henry V, which I cited earlier (4: 286) is his antithesis to natural right or justice, the basis on which the established authority claims its arbitrary power.54 Judging Kean’s performance to be a failure in dramatic terms, Hazlitt turns this failure into a political example, in which form, it becomes more valuable than success. Once again, the pretensions of kings are shown to be at the expense of humanity. Kean’s failure in Lear is less happy. Lamb’s declaration, endorsed in Characters, that ‘The LEAR of Shakespeare cannot be acted’ (4: 271), happened also to be a literal statement of fact during the Regency period: the obvious parallels between Lear and the mad king, George III, ensured an embargo on the staging of the play, lifted only on the king’s death in 1820.

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The performances that followed were subject, therefore, as much to the pressure of long anticipation as to the romantic idealization of the part. Nonetheless, in the London Magazine essays, Hazlitt’s conviction that the play is unperformable is at first qualified by his praise for J. B. Booth’s Lear at Covent Garden (‘There was no feebleness, and no vulgarity in any part of Mr. Booth’s acting, but it was animated, vigorous, and pathetic throughout’; 18: 328), and by his anticipations of Kean’s: ‘We had thought Mr. Kean would take possession of this time-worn, venerable figure, . . . and . . . shake it with present inspiration: – that he would set up a living copy of it on the stage’ (18: 332). Inevitably, however, the proportions both of Hazlitt’s conception of the character and his expectations of the actor doom Kean to failure. Playing Nahum Tate’s Lear rather than Shakespeare’s (in itself a disappointment to Hazlitt), ‘Mr. Kean chipped off a bit of the character here and there: but he did not pierce the solid substance, nor move the entire mass’ (18: 333). The main critical interpretation of note in this essay is Hazlitt’s reading of Lear’s cursing of Goneril – another instance, as he sees it, of passionate excess – which in turn dictates unusually specific directions to the actor: The very bitterness of the imprecations is prompted by, and runs upon, an allusion to the fondest recollections: it is an excess of indignation, but that indignation, from the depth of its source, conjures up the dearest images of love: it is from these that the brimming cup of anguish overflows; and the voice, in going over them, should falter, and be choked with other feelings besides anger. (18: 333)

Familiar essays The more expansive, more personal and intimate style of Hazlitt’s London Magazine articles matches that of the familiar essays he had begun to write in this last and greatest phase of his career, when he developed and brought to fruition the genre of which he was supreme practitioner. Hazlitt’s achievements in conversational prose furnish two extraordinary anthologies, Table-Talk (1821–2) and The Plain Speaker (1826); the essays that remained uncollected – among them, ‘The Fight’ (1822), ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ (1823), ‘On a Sun-Dial’ (1827) – might easily have made up a third. Sheer length, in the first place, sets these later familiar essays apart from those of The Round Table, but in subject, too, there is a perceptible shift, from art and literature to everyday life and experience.

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The occasional commentary on Shakespeare in Table-Talk or The Plain Speaker adds little to what Hazlitt had said already. The ambivalence about imagination, discernible in his earliest writings, grows progressively into the insistent exposure of its errors, and Shakespeare, again, is the only exception. In Table-Talk, the watchword is ‘common sense’, the test by which extremism and egotism of all kinds are judged. The two-part essay, ‘On Genius and Common Sense’, central to this collection, returns Hazlitt to the distinction between Milton and Shakespeare, the ordinary and the Protean genius, in terms that forcefully communicate a warning. In Milton’s works, he writes, ‘you trace the bias and opinions of the man in the creations of the poet,’ and he goes on, Shakespear (almost alone) seems to have been a man of genius, raised above the definition of genius. . . . He was the Proteus of human intellect. Genius in ordinary is a more obstinate and less versatile thing. It is sufficiently exclusive and self-willed, quaint and peculiar. It does some one thing by virtue of doing nothing else: it excels in some one pursuit by being blind to all excellence but its own. (8: 42–3) In the great moral essays of The Plain Speaker – sustained, stupendous pieces of prose – Hazlitt returns again and again to ‘bias’ as the defining principle of human character, referring in essay after essay to ‘the internal original bias’ or ‘the first pre-disposing bias’ or ‘natural bias’ or ‘first bias’ or ‘ruling bias’, or in a synonymous phrase, ‘ruling character’ (12: 230, 263, 275, 349, 152). Scott is the only instance, besides Shakespeare, of a genius without bias or ego, and in the essay, ‘Sir Walter Scott, Racine, and Shakespear’, this commonalty draws Hazlitt into an extended comparison. His view of Shakespeare is by now established, but the terms of the comparison, and the instances used to illustrate it, are still of some critical interest. Coleridge’s distinction between ‘copy’ and ‘imitation’ becomes the distinction here between Scott and Shakespeare: ‘It is the difference between originality and want of it, between writing and transcribing’ (12: 339–40). Another formulation embodies the transition that M. H. Abrams has made archetypal in romantic thought, from the mimetic to the expressive view of art, from art as mirror to art as lamp: ‘Shakespear’s spirit, like fire, shines through him: Sir Walter’s, like a stream, reflects surrounding objects’ (12: 340). Scott’s material is external – historical fact and established tradition – Shakespeare’s, internal; the absence of self in the first leads to mere replication, while the second, himself free of bias, is ‘a half-worker with nature’, rendering ‘ruling passion’ in numerous conditions of imagined extremity (12: 343).55

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Human beings, each uniquely characterized by one form or other of bias or ruling character, are naturally prone to the habit that Ruskin later termed ‘pathetic fallacy’ and that Hazlitt calls the ‘over-weening importunity of the imagination’ (12: 343). As in the Lectures on the English Poets, it is the particular mark of Shakespeare’s genius that he so finely and copiously illustrates this importunity, ‘which indeed is every where predominant (perhaps to a fault) in Shakespear’ (12: 344). So when Othello swears ‘By yon marble heaven’, the epithet is suggested by the hardness of his heart from the sense of injury; the texture of the outward object is borrowed from that of the thoughts; and that noble simile, ‘Like the Propontic,’ &c. seems only an echo of the sounding tide of passion, and to roll from the same source, the heart. (12: 344)

Shakespearean quotations My discussion so far has progressed, more or less chronologically, through Hazlitt’s treatment of the subject of Shakespeare, from his first theatre reviews of Kean, to his later, great, familiar essays. Another form in which Shakespeare stays present in Hazlitt’s text, even when he is not directly its subject, remains to be considered. Hazlitt’s extensive use of Shakespearean quotation is a characteristic aspect of his prose style. Quotation is fundamental to his practice as a writer, and by far the greatest number of his quotations, as Jonathan Bate has emphasized, are from Shakespeare’s works.56 More than one Hazlitt scholar has written insightfully about the nature and implications of his practice of quotation. In David Bromwich’s complex and subtle reading, quotation is part of the radical effect, the revolutionary energy of Hazlitt’s writing: it belongs to a quality of sublimity (by Longinus’ definition, ‘the echo of a great soul’) in his prose, whose effect is attested to by its impact on its audience.57 Jonathan Bate’s conclusions, in his useful survey, ‘Hazlitt’s Shakespearean Quotations’, are more routine. Quotation, Bate points out, is a version of sympathetic identification with a great precursor; moreover, Hazlitt’s quotations bring the archaic, though still powerful, language of Shakespeare, no longer current, into fresh and allowable use.58 More recently, Paul Hamilton has argued that quotation is the exemplary practice that embodies Hazlitt’s view of the continuity of private and public, of the enriching and endorsing of individual

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perception by its participation in, and renovation of, a shared cultural universe.59 Any discussion of Hazlitt’s Shakespeare criticism should register, especially, that quotation and allusion can become, too, modes of commentary; that quoting, as Bromwich has put it, is ‘a particularly compressed sort of interpretation which requires all the reader’s ingenuity to unpack’.60 For example, Hazlitt’s master work, The Spirit of the Age, begins, as Bate notes, with a quotation from Hamlet on the title-page: ‘To know another well were to know one’s self,’ amended to ‘For to know a man well, were to know himself’ in the second edition. Bate points out that Hazlitt quotes more frequently from Hamlet than from any other of Shakespeare’s plays, a fact that he connects, without taking it further, to Hazlitt’s identification of himself with Hamlet.61 The implications of any one such identification, however, are well worth pursuing. In the epigraph to The Spirit of the Age, we might register, beyond the quotation itself, the dual claim it contains: Hamlet’s modernity is attested to in his finding a continued existence in the person of the essayist; at the same time, Hazlitt’s portrayal of his contemporaries is announced as an exercise in self-analysis, a form of autobiography. Equally insightfully, the political content of Shakespeare’s plays emerges not only when Hazlitt makes that content explicit in his analysis of particular plays, but also indirectly, in his deployment of Shakespearean quotations throughout his essays on contemporary politics. Characters makes clear enough the political bearing of Coriolanus or Henry V, but Hazlitt’s political essays elicit such bearing from the whole range of plays from which they quote. To choose only one instance among many, the incident of Gloucester’s blinding in Lear becomes a potent simile, in Hazlitt’s radical polemic, for the assault on liberty. The enemies of the people ‘would tread out the eye of liberty all over the world, as Albany trod out the eyes of Gloucester. “Out out, vile jelly!”’ (The Examiner, 29 September 1816; 19: 165 – Hazlitt means Cornwall, not Albany of course), or in another iteration, ‘would tread out the eye of Liberty’ (the light of nations), like “a vile jelly” (The Yellow Dwarf, 7 March 1818; 7: 259). The class connotations – here turned into egalitarian assertion – of ‘vile’, in its old sense of ‘lowly’, are brought out by the context of Hazlitt’s quotation. Another quotation from Lear absorbed into the cause of the people is Edmund’s exclamation, ‘Fine word “legitimate”!’ (1. 2. 18). ‘Legitimacy’, as we have seen, is Hazlitt’s republican shorthand for unjust monarchical privilege and the divine right of kings, and the quotation enriches the shorthand: ‘Such is the old doctrine of Divine Right, new-vamped up under the style and title of

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Legitimacy. “Fine word, Legitimate!”’ (The Yellow Dwarf, 7 March 1818; 7: 260). Edmund’s scorn amplifies Hazlitt’s own, and the natural-born Edmund is transformed by the quotation into a spokesman for the natural man. Elsewhere, Hazlitt presses the close association between legitimacy and bastardy implied in the original, turning Edmund’s assertion that ‘Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund / As to th’legitimate’ into the terms of indictment: ‘That “fine word Legitimate” never produced any thing but bastard philosophy and patriotism’ (The Yellow Dwarf, 14 March 1818; 7: 269). Invariably, thus, the repetitions of the phrase remind us of the context of revolutionary aspiration in which it was originally uttered, despite the character of the speaker: ‘ . . . the base / Shall top th’ legitimate/’. Such examples are no more than a bare indication of the complexity and depth of Hazlitt’s quotations from Shakespeare, the greater number of which might fruitfully be unpacked in this way. The interest of these quotations is not only political. By absorbing into his prose, whatever its subject, Shakespeare’s words and phrases, Hazlitt keeps up a running commentary on Shakespeare, adding to, and extending outside the limits of, his more direct literary analysis. In so doing, he gains for Shakespeare’s works, a dynamic bearing on the immediate present, as he gains for himself, a powerful kind of shorthand, integral, as Bromwich has argued, to the energy of his prose. It must surely be with such gains in mind that he retorts to Gifford: ‘There is one objection . . . which you make to me which is singular enough: viz. that I quote Shakespear. I can only answer, that “I would not change that vice for your best virtue”’ (Letter to William Gifford, 9: 43).

Hazlitt, Keats and Shakespeare I want to close my discussion with the single most important instance of the dissemination of Hazlitt’s Shakespeare criticism. The impact of Hazlitt’s view of Shakespeare on Keats’s ideals of poetry and poethood has long been established by a succession of scholars.62 In particular, Keats’s reading of The Round Table can be shown to inform his famous comments on the ‘poetical Character’ in the letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818: As to the poetical Character itself, (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself – it has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich

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or poor, mean or elevated – It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosp[h]er, delights the camelion Poet.63 In a much earlier letter, September 1817, to John Hamilton Reynolds, Keats had already expressed his enthusiasm for The Round Table and its author: ‘How is Hazlitt? We were reading his Table last night. I know he thinks himself not estimated by ten People in the World – I wish he knew he is –.’64 Over a year later, in the letter to Woodhouse, the fruits of that reading are still perceptible. Hazlitt’s key critical term, ‘gusto’, from the essay ‘On Gusto’, is absorbed into Keats’s ‘it lives in gusto.’ The references to Iago and Imogen make it clear that it is Shakespeare with whose ‘poetical Character’ Keats is identifying his own, in terms which, as a number of critics have pointed out, recall Hazlitt’s characterization in the essay ‘On Posthumous Fame’: ‘He seemed scarcely to have an individual existence of his own, but to borrow that of others at will, and to pass successively through “every variety of untried being,” – to be now Hamlet, now Othello, now Lear, now Falstaff, now Ariel’ (4: 23). The phrase ‘wordsworthian or egotistical sublime’, too, was probably suggested by Hazlitt’s remarks on Wordsworth in the Round Table essay on The Excursion: ‘An intense intellectual egotism swallows up everything’; ‘He lives in the busy solitude of his own heart; in the deep silence of thought’ (4: 113). This last parallel is strengthened by the echo of the essay on The Excursion in another criticism of Wordsworth, also in a letter to Reynolds, 3 February 1818. Keats’s complaint, ‘We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us – . . . Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject,’65 matches Hazlitt’s declaration that ‘There is, in fact, in Mr. Wordsworth’s mind an evident repugnance to admit anything that tells for itself, without the interpretation of the poet, – . . . a systematic unwillingness to share the palm with his subject’ (4: 114). Earlier, I showed how two types of genius, Shakespeare’s and others’, the second including both Wordsworth and Milton, emerge in The Round Table. Exactly these two types are posited also by Keats, in his distinction between ‘that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member’ and ‘the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime’. Keats draws from Hazlitt, and in particular from the Round Table essays, the absolute distinction between Shakespeare and Wordsworth, as well as the basis of that distinction, the presence or absence of a powerful self or sublime ego. Hazlitt’s Shakespeare is instrumental in forming Keats’s own ideal of poethood, reiterated throughout his letters, as that which lacks or refuses a definable self.66

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Beth Lau’s chapter on Keats in the present volume treats Hazlitt’s influence on Keats in further detail, and there is little to be gained in my going over the same ground here. Instead, I want to highlight a kind of reverse effect of that influence: its impact, in turn, on the way in which Hazlitt has come to be read over time. The canonical status that Keats’s writing has attained has had a significant effect on the critical interpretation of Hazlitt. The identification of sources in Hazlitt for particular passages in Keats has gone hand in hand with the assumption that those sources represent the main thrust of Hazlitt’s thought also, both in philosophy and literary criticism. That is, the recognition that Hazlitt was a precursor to Keats has led, almost unanimously, to a reading of Hazlitt as a protoKeatsian. Roy Park’s study of Hazlitt finds, for instance, a ‘demand for imaginative sincerity, a concept that in Hazlitt’s writings fulfils a function somewhat similar to Keats’s use of negative capability’.67 If self-annihilation and the rejection of the egotistical sublime can be taken to summarize Keats’s ideal of poethood in his letters, then it is exactly such an ideal that is supposed to embody the cardinal points of Hazlitt’s literary theory. We can cite Bromwich’s analysis, ‘. . . the poet not confined to his own personality has the . . . advantage over the poet thus confined,’ or John Mahoney’s summary, ‘Poetry – and literature in general – . . . seeks to minimize personality.’68 Yet, as we have seen, the example of Shakespeare can hardly be taken to represent Hazlitt’s literary theory more generally. The ‘genius’ that emerges from his theory of imagination is ‘ordinary’; as described in the essays ‘On Genius and Common Sense’ in Table-Talk, ‘it is just the reverse of the cameleon; for it does not borrow, but lend its colour to all about it’ (8: 43). The contrast with Keats’s ‘camelion poet’ could not be more pointed. The chameleon is Hazlitt’s simile for the view of the mind that his entire metaphysics seeks to refute: ‘a chameleon, colourless kind of thing, the sport of external impulses and accidental circumstances’ (‘On Liberty and Necessity’, Lectures on English Philosophy; 2: 269). His own notion, of a partial and exclusive genius, belongs to a theory of innate ‘bias’, grounded, in turn, in the model of an empowered and active mind, directed from within, by the laws of its own fixed constitution. Where to Keats, selflessness is the key to poetic achievement, for Hazlitt, in any other instance than Shakespeare, the absence of a powerful self is the condition of artistic failure. Hence, for example, his praise for the characterization of Hamlet, ‘whom we may be said almost to remember in our after-years; . . . his speeches and sayings . . . as real as our own thoughts’ (4: 232), is expressed

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in the same terms as his criticism of Dr. Johnson: ‘His reflections present themselves like reminiscences; do not disturb the ordinary march of our thoughts’ (‘On the Periodical Essayists’, Lectures on the English Comic Writers; 6: 100). Hazlitt lauds in Shakespeare precisely the quality that he disparages in Johnson, namely, the absence of a strong authorial presence that dominates the reader’s. Walter Scott, in the Plain Speaker essay that I have already discussed, is another case in point. For Keats, on the other hand, Hazlitt’s observations on Hamlet become a prescription or ‘axiom’ for poetry in the letter to Taylor, 27 February 1818: ‘I think Poetry . . . should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance.’69 Tellingly, too, in his comments on ‘poetical Character’, he claims ‘gusto’ for the self-effacing poet, where Hazlitt tends to withhold it. By registering that Shakespeare, who is Keats’s rule, is Hazlitt’s single exception, we might admit the debt, without allowing it to obscure the consistency of Hazlitt’s thought. The theory of the imagination elicited from his analyses of literature and art is inseparable from the epistemological model at the heart of his philosophy: it is the theory of a powerful self, which cannot be exemplified by the sole, if glorious deviation from what he perceived to be the standard pattern of artistic composition.70 In summary, then, the truism, that Shakespeare and nature are one, is endorsed by Hazlitt, but its implications for him are far from truistic. Shakespeare stands both at centre and margin in Hazlitt’s critical thought. In the first position, his characters present the same range of humanity that Nature does, the material on which the essayist draws, as he draws on life itself, to illustrate his central tenets regarding human behaviour and social structures. As real people do, Shakespeare’s major characters embody, for Hazlitt, powerful, biased individualities, each distinct from the other. In Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, these individuals are the means to unfolding the workings of power, and especially, the complex connections between personal and political power, with immediate bearing on contemporary political developments. In Lectures on the English Poets, Shakespeare’s language, uttered by his characters, is the basis on which Hazlitt establishes that poetry – or imaginative plenitude – is fundamental to the very condition of humanity. Shakespeare is central to Hazlitt, too, in that, more than any other writer, he is part of the basic fabric of Hazlitt’s prose. However, although Shakespeare’s creations exemplify Hazlitt’s general view of the human condition, Shakespeare himself does not. As an author, Shakespeare is always Hazlitt’s exception, always outside of his theory of

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how the creative imagination ordinarily works. Hence, in the Round Table, he goes so far as to deny Shakespeare gusto, normally the hallmark of genius in his judgements of art and literature. As he explains it later in Table- Talk, ‘Shakespear (almost alone) seems to have been a man of genius, raised above the definition of genius’ (8: 42). Tantalizingly, ‘almost’ and ‘seems’ hint at other instances besides Shakespeare, but if Hazlitt had any in mind, he does not name them, here or elsewhere in his writings.

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Chapter 15

John Keats Beth Lau

It is common for poets to begin their careers admiring and imitating certain influential role models, but John Keats (1795–1821) is remarkable for the degree to which he looked to other great writers for inspiration and guidance. Each stage of his career is marked by the figures who were dominant in Keats’s literary pantheon at the time, and the development of his poetry to a large extent can be traced by studying the influence of Spenser, Leigh Hunt, Wordsworth, Milton, Dante and others on the style and themes of his work. Of all of Keats’s literary heroes, however, Shakespeare was supreme. Keats’s letters are filled with enthusiastic praise of Shakespeare’s achievement and sprinkled with quotations from the plays and sonnets, and two copies of Shakespeare’s plays containing Keats’s copious marginalia attest to his close, devoted study of his great predecessor’s works. Early on in his career, Keats expressed a belief that Shakespeare was his ‘good Genius’ or ‘Presider’, encouraging and aiding his poetic efforts.1 Other people, beginning with Keats’s friends and continuing throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have also perceived a special affinity between Keats and Shakespeare. Walter Savage Landor says that Keats ‘had something of Shakespear in him’; A. C. Bradley writes that Keats ‘was of Shakespeare’s tribe’; John Middleton Murry wrote an entire book based on the premise that Keats ‘was essentially like Shakespeare’ and that ‘a right understanding of Keats is the easiest, and perhaps the only possible, way to a right understanding of Shakespeare’; and Caroline Spurgeon similarly claims that ‘Keats and Shakespeare had a very unusual, a very close, and subtle relationship. They were alike in certain qualities of mind and art . . . and in some of these qualities they are unique among English poets.’2 Indeed, it has long been customary to regard Shakespeare as Keats’s primary forebear and Keats as one of Shakespeare’s closest literary descendants. And yet, obvious differences are apparent between the Renaissance playwright and the Romantic lyric poet. Although Keats aspired to become

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a dramatist, declaring that his ‘greatest ambition’ was ‘the writing of a few fine Plays’ (Letters, 2: 234), his one finished play, Otho the Great, written in collaboration with his friend Charles Brown, is widely viewed as a dismal production, full of static characters spouting ‘farragos’ of ‘Shakespearean phraseology’ but without the action, coherence, complexity of characterization or interest of Shakespeare’s own work.3 Keats cannot be entirely blamed for defects in the play, since Charles Brown dictated the plot to him, and most critics find the fragment King Stephen, which Keats wrote by himself shortly after Otho in fall 1819, an improvement in action and liveliness over his previous effort.4 King Stephen, however, is a mere four short scenes in length. However promising it might be considered, the fact remains that Keats abandoned his second attempt at the drama after barely getting started. Clearly Keats was not like Shakespeare in being a successful playwright. What then are the Shakespearean qualities in Keats’s work and character? What elements of Shakespeare’s plays and poems did Keats pay most attention to and draw upon for his own poetry and aesthetic principles? This chapter will address these questions as it explores some of the considerable evidence for Keats’s reading (or viewing) of and response to Shakespeare. The first section outlines when Keats became familiar with his ‘Presider’ and what friends and other sources contributed to his particular approach to Shakespeare’s work and image. The middle sections explore two major aspects of Keats’s response to Shakespeare: his focus on selected passages and images in the plays and poems and his celebration of Shakespeare’s ‘Negative Capability’. The final section provides an in-depth examination of one play, Antony and Cleopatra, in relation to central conflicts, characters and techniques in Keats’s poems.

Keats’s Reading of and Response to Shakespeare: Chronology and Context Keats probably was introduced to Shakespeare when he was a student at John Clarke’s school in Enfield, which he attended from the ages of 8 to 15. The earliest evidence of his familiarity with the plays comes from Edward Holmes, a schoolmate at Clarke’s school, who reported that Keats ‘must have read Shakspeare as he thought that “no one wd dare to read Macbeth alone in a house at two oclock in the morning.”’5 Charles Cowden Clarke, the schoolmaster’s son, became Keats’s first important mentor, both as a teacher and later as a friend after Keats left school and was apprenticed to the surgeon Thomas Hammond in nearby Edmonton. During this period

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(from 1811 until he entered Guy’s Hospital in London in October 1815), Keats used frequently to walk to Enfield to read and discuss literature with Clarke. Charles Cowden Clarke went on to have a distinguished career as a lecturer, editor and critic of Shakespeare; his wife Mary (Novello) Cowden Clarke compiled the first Shakespeare concordance and also edited the plays and wrote many books on Shakespeare, both on her own and in collaboration with her husband.6 Clarke provides an anecdote about the future poet’s reaction to Cymbeline from the period of Keats’s apprenticeship: ‘Once, when reading the “Cymbeline” aloud, I saw his eyes fill with tears, and his voice faltered when he came to the departure of Posthumus, and Imogen saying she would have watched him – “Till the diminution Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle; Nay follow’d him till he had melted from The smallness of a gnat to air; and then Have turn’d mine eye and wept”’. (1. 3. 18–22)7 Clarke notes that he frequently attended the theatre at this time, walking the 12 miles between Enfield and London to see the great actors and actresses of the day, including Edmund Kean, whom Clarke ‘saw . . . in all his first perfection’ when he ‘came upon the London stage’ and ‘electrified the town by his fire’.8 Since Kean ‘came upon the London stage’ in January 1814, Clarke probably shared his enthusiasm for Kean’s Shakespeare performances with his young friend, and indeed he reports that the latter ‘idolized’ Kean, though it is unlikely that Keats himself attended the theatre until he was living in London.9 Despite Keats’s opportunities for becoming acquainted with Shakespeare through Clarke, however, the playwright was not a special favourite during his years as a student and apprentice. As Clarke notes, Spenser was Keats’s first great poetic passion, and he ‘knew but little of [Shakespeare] till he had himself become an author’.10 Some of Keats’s earliest surviving poems contain general references to the plays. For example, ‘Imitation of Spenser’ (1814) describes a wondrous isle that could ‘rob from aged Lear his bitter teen’, and both ‘To a Friend Who Sent Me Some Roses’ (June 1816) and ‘To Charles Cowden Clarke’ (September 1816) mention Titania.11 In addition, Shakespeare is mentioned in the 1815 poems ‘Ode to Apollo’ (where Shakespeare appears along with Homer, Virgil, Milton, Spenser and Tasso in a pantheon of great ‘Bards’) and ‘To George Felton Mathew’ (where ‘warm-hearted Shakespeare’ greets Chatterton in the afterlife). Nonetheless, scholars agree that Keats’s serious

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study and appreciation of Shakespeare did not commence until 1817, after he became acquainted with a new set of friends who profoundly affected his poetic career: Leigh Hunt, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, and John Hamilton Reynolds, all of whom he met in October 1816. William Hazlitt, who Keats also met in the winter of 1816–17, did not become as close a personal friend as the others, but his writings and lectures were probably the single greatest influence on Keats’s thinking about literature in general and Shakespeare in particular.12 Leigh Hunt, whose liberal newspaper The Examiner Keats had been reading for years, participated in his age’s celebration of Shakespeare, but less so than the other friends Keats met in 1816. It is true that a 3 May 1820 Indicator essay on ‘Shakspeare’s Birth-Day’ is as fulsome an example of bardolatry as one is likely to find, saluting Shakespeare as ‘thou divine human creature’ from whose productions ‘a very spring and vernal abundance of all fair and noble things is to be found’.13 As Jeffrey Fleece argues, however, Hunt ‘never falls completely under the spell of the Romantic enthusiasm for Shakespeare’.14 For Hunt, as for the early Keats, Spenser was a greater personal favourite than the Renaissance dramatist. Hunt’s 1844 work, Imagination and Fancy, which consists, as the subtitle explains, of ‘Selections from the English Poets, with Markings of the Best Passages’, includes twentyfour passages from Spenser as compared to eight from Shakespeare. In a sonnet called The Poets, published in The Examiner on 24 December 1815, Hunt considers which poet he would choose ‘could I take but one’. His response is that he would take Shakespeare ‘as long as I was unoppressed / With the world’s weight’, but if he wished to ‘lay a wounded heart in leafy rest, / And dream of things far off and healing’ he would choose ‘Spenser’, and since this is the way the sonnet concludes Hunt’s overall preference for the latter seems clear.15 Hunt was an advocate for cheerful, soothing poetry that provides a respite from the ills of life, and Spenser (as he was read by Hunt and by Keats as well) answered this need more so than Shakespeare did. When Keats wrote his sonnet ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’ in January 1818, he makes the opposite choice, preferring the ‘fierce dispute’ of Shakespeare’s tragedy to the ‘fair plumed syren’ of ‘Romance’, chiefly associated for Keats with Spenser’s Faerie Queene. One perspective on Shakespeare that Keats is likely to have learned and to some extent absorbed from Hunt is the association of the playwright with liberal politics. Jack Lynch notes that, once Shakespeare became identified as the great English genius, people in the eighteenth and increasingly in the nineteenth century sought to ally him with their own political agendas.

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In 1812, the Whig Morning Chronicle and the Tory Morning Post engaged in a debate over Shakespeare’s political views, each side claiming that the plays expressed allegiance with its own position.16 Leigh Hunt clearly used Shakespeare in this partisan fashion. As Nicholas Roe demonstrates, Hunt frequently invokes Shakespeare ‘as presiding over “our liberties” in a liberal pantheon that included King Alfred, Chaucer, Milton, Sydney, and Marvell’. For example, in a 2 March 1817 Examiner article protesting the suspension of Habeas Corpus, Hunt seeks to rally his readers to resistance by addressing them as ‘FELLOW-COUNTRYMEN, Inheritors of Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights, Demanders of Constitutional Reform . . . Descendants of the ALFREDS, the RUSSELLS, the HAMPDENS, the SHAKESPEARES’. Roe claims that, when Keats used a portrait of Shakespeare for the frontispiece of his 1817 volume of Poems along with the epigraph ‘What more felicity can fall to creature, / Than to enjoy delight with liberty’ (from Spenser’s Muiopotmos; or, The Fate of the Butterfly), followed by a dedicatory sonnet To Leigh Hunt, Esq. – thereby linking Shakespeare, ‘liberty’ and the radical Hunt – he was declaring the liberal political affiliation of his book in a way that readers of the time would instantly recognize.17 Hunt along with Percy Bysshe Shelley also sought to enlist Shakespeare in the liberal cause by claiming that Shakespeare was not a Christian, since the church was associated with repressive politics and hierarchical social relations at the time. For several months in 1817, the members of the Hunt circle debated the question of Shakespeare’s religion, with Shelley and Hunt the main proponents of the non-Christian position and Benjamin Robert Haydon and Joseph Severn, both of whom were staunch believers, arguing for Shakespeare’s Christianity. Both sides used evidence from the plays to support their views. As Haydon records in his Autobiography, the debate commenced in January 1817 during a dinner at Horace Smith’s that included Hunt, his wife and sister, Shelley, Haydon and Keats. While Haydon, Hunt and Shelley fiercely argued for and against Shakespeare’s religious beliefs, Keats, Haydon notes, remained silent. Joseph Severn left a record of another occasion in which Keats was present when he (Severn) and Shelley disputed Shakespeare’s faith. Shelley ‘attempted to deny the great poet’s belief and quoted the sailor in “Measure for Measure”’ whereas Severn cited ‘counter quotations . . . from the utterances of Portia, Hamlet, Isabella, and numerous others’. Keats as well as Hunt on this occasion, Severn notes, ‘declared I had the best of the argument’.18 In a 10 May 1817 letter to Hunt, Keats makes his own contribution to the debate, citing one passage in support of Shakespeare’s Christianity (Measure for Measure, 2. 2. 72–5) and one against (Twelfth Night, 3. 2. 70–3; Letters, 1: 138). Despite

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the fact that Keats himself was a religious sceptic, he was not like Shelley and Hunt committed to allying Shakespeare with his own views. Instead, the position regarding Shakespeare’s beliefs that Keats appears to have held is that the plays are noncommittal or even contradictory and can supply evidence both for and against a Christian perspective. As we shall see, Keats’s belief in the works’ open-endedness and many-sidedness became central to his understanding of Shakespeare’s genius. Haydon was ardent in all of his beliefs and aspirations, and one of his primary passions was Shakespeare. Scholars agree that, to a greater extent than Hunt, Haydon was instrumental in inspiring Keats’s turn to Shakespeare in 1817.19 In a May 1817 letter Haydon urges Keats to ‘go on, dont [sic] despair . . . read Shakespeare and trust in Providence’ (Letters, 1: 135), and after Keats’s death he recorded in his diary that ‘I have enjoyed Shakespeare more with Keats than with any other Human creature!’20 Haydon encouraged Keats to immerse himself in Shakespeare and frequently read and discussed the plays with his young friend. The tone of Haydon’s Shakespeare worship is conveyed in a 4 March 1818 letter which reports that a ring supposedly belonging to Shakespeare was found in Stratford: ‘My dear Keats’, Haydon writes breathlessly, ‘I shall certainly go mad! – In a field at Stratford upon Avon, in a field that belonged to Shakespeare; they have found a gold ring and seal with the initial thus – a true WS Lover’s Knot between; if this is not Shakespeare who is it? – a true lovers Knott!! – I saw an impression to day, and am to have one as soon as possible – As sure as you breathe, & that he was the first of beings the Seal belonged to him – Oh Lord!’ (Letters, 1: 239–40). In the spirit of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bardolatry, Haydon hopes to acquire a relict of ‘the first of beings’; he regards Shakespeare as virtually divine.21 Keats catches Haydon’s style and attitude when he concludes a letter to the painter on 11 May 1817, ‘So now in the Name of Shakespeare Raphael and all our Saints I commend you to the care of heaven!’ (Letters, 1: 145). This is the same letter in which Keats imagines Shakespeare as his ‘Presider’, like a guardian spirit watching over him. Haydon had given Keats the idea of ‘a good Genius presiding over’ his own creative efforts (Letters, 1: 142), but in the letter to which Keats is probably alluding Haydon describes his relationship to great artists of the past somewhat differently from the way Keats does. ‘Often,’ Haydon writes on March 1817, ‘have I sat by my fire after a day’s effort . . . and mused on what I had done and with a burning glow on what I would do till filled with fury I have seen the faces of the mighty dead crowd into my room, and I have sunk down & prayed the great Spirit that I might be worthy to accompany these immortal beings in their

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immortal glories, and then I have seen each smile as it passed over me . . . in awful encouragement’ (Letters, 1: 124). Although Haydon could speak of great men of the past in religious terms, his own Christian beliefs ensured that God remained the ‘great Spirit’ or supreme deity to whom he prayed. Keats, however, who did not share Haydon’s piety, embraced wholeheartedly the religion of art, with Shakespeare as his god.22 The other friend Keats met in the fall of 1816, who encouraged his appreciation of Shakespeare, and whose influence in this regard has been largely overlooked, is John Hamilton Reynolds.23 The first letter in which conspicuous quotations from Shakespeare – from 1 Henry IV – appear is addressed to Reynolds (Letters, 1: 125), and thereafter many of Keats’s most significant comments on Shakespeare occur in correspondence to this friend. Reynolds’s references to Shakespeare are as worshipful as those of Haydon or Hunt but without the overlay of Christianity in the former or contemporary politics in the latter and, therefore, may have especially suited Keats. As his biographer Leonidas Jones writes, ‘Reynolds frequently used religious terms to express the extent of his devotion, on one occasion describing Shakespeare as the “divinity of the world of imagination.”’24 In a review of Edmund Kean in Richard Duke of York – an essay so similar in content and style to Keats’s writing that it was long thought to be his – Reynolds expresses the common Romantic belief that critics should not point out any faults in Shakespeare, who had none: ‘we feel that criticism has no right to purse its little brow in the presence of Shakespeare. He has to our belief very few imperfections, – and perhaps these might vanish from our minds, if we had the perfection properly to scan them.’25 Reynolds like Keats revered William Hazlitt and in July 1817 enthusiastically reviewed his Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, declaring, ‘This is the only work ever written on Shakespeare, that can be deemed worthy of Shakespeare.’26 As we shall see, Keats also acquired, read and annotated a copy of Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays in 1817. It is likely that Reynolds encouraged Keats’s belief that Hazlitt was the finest critic of the age as he (along with Hazlitt) encouraged Keats’s study and love of Shakespeare. In April 1818 Keats referred to ‘feast[ing] upon’ Shakespeare with Reynolds in the previous year (Letters, 1: 274). Reynolds was certainly one of the cluster of people who encouraged Keats to adopt Shakespeare as his primary literary role model and presiding deity. Without doubt 1817 was the year in which Shakespeare, in Douglas Bush’s words, ‘assumed the throne in Keats’s mind’.27 In particular, when Keats left Hampstead, where he was then living with his brothers, for the Isle of Wight in order to commence his first long poem Endymion, his letters suddenly

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blossom with quotations from and references to Shakespeare. It was at this point that Keats acquired his seven-volume edition of The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare, with critical notes by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens (Chiswick: C. Whitingham, 1814; hereafter referred to as the Johnson and Steevens edition). He wrote his name and ‘April 1817’ on the title page of volume 1, and all the volumes are filled with his markings and annotations, the evidence of his close study of the plays throughout this year.28 Keats’s first letter after leaving London reports to his brothers, ‘I felt rather lonely this Morning at breakfast so I went and unbox’d a Shakspeare – “There’s my Comfort,”’ quoting from The Tempest, 2. 2. 45, 55 (15 April 1817; Letters, 1: 128). Two days later he tells Reynolds that he found a portrait of Shakespeare he liked ‘extremely’ in the hall of his lodging-house and hung it over his books; his landlady kindly allowed Keats to take the portrait with him when he left, and it remained with him the rest of his life (Letters, 1: 130, 142; 2: 62). The same letter to Reynolds reports that ‘the passage in Lear – “Do you not hear the Sea?” – has haunted me intensely,’ after which Keats copies out his own sonnet ‘On the Sea’, probably his first poem to be inspired by one of Shakespeare’s plays. The letter to Reynolds continues the following day, proposing that ‘Whenever you write say a Word or two on some Passage in Shakespeare that may have come rather new to you; which must be continually happening, notwithstandg that we read the same Play forty times,’ and Keats cites several lines from The Tempest (1. 2. 326–8, 1. 2. 50) as examples (Letters, 1: 133). The letters to Hunt with evidence for and against Shakespeare’s belief in Christianity (10 May 1817) and to Haydon proposing Shakespeare as his ‘Presider’ (10, 11 May 1817), already mentioned, follow soon after. By mid-June Keats was back in Hampstead working steadily on Endymion, and he wrote few letters over the next several months. This summer, however, was probably when Keats ‘feasted on’ Shakespeare with Reynolds. Besides his seven-volume set, Keats may have read with Reynolds from two other Shakespeare texts. One is an 1808 facsimile of the first folio, Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, which is inscribed ‘John Keats / 1817’ and which also contains Keats’s markings and annotations.29 Another book Keats came to own was The Poetical Works of William Shakespeare (London: Thomas Wilson, 1806), containing the sonnets, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Passionate Pilgrim, and The Lover’s Complaint. The title page records that Reynolds gave this book to Keats in 1819, and it contains many markings in Reynolds’s and several other hands, though we cannot with confidence ascribe any to Keats.30 In a 22 November 1817 letter to Reynolds, Keats says that ‘One of the three Books I have with me is

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Shakespear’s Poems: I neer found so many beauties in the sonnets,’ and he quotes from sonnets 12, 13, 17, 19 and 21 as well as from Venus and Adonis, lines 1033–8 (Letters, 1: 188–9). This is probably the same copy that Reynolds eventually gave to Keats, which Keats had earlier borrowed from his friend. In September 1817 Keats stayed with Benjamin Bailey in Oxford, where he wrote his third book of Endymion. Bailey is best known for encouraging Keats to appreciate and study Wordsworth and Milton, but Shakespeare also came up in their literary conversations, as Bailey remembered that Keats was fond of reciting Ulysses’s speech in Troilus and Cressida that begins, ‘Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, / Wherein he puts alms for oblivion’ (Bailey quotes these and the following three and a half lines from 3. 3. 145–50). According to Bailey, Keats thought the speech was ‘pregnant with practical wisdom’.31 Bailey and Keats also made a pilgrimage to Stratford on Avon, which as Lynch notes had at this time become ‘a kind of literary Lourdes or Mecca’.32 They visited Shakespeare’s birthplace, where they signed their names on the wall along with ‘the “numbers numberless”’ already there, and also visited the Church of the Holy Trinity, where Keats admired the statue of Shakespeare.33 When Keats was approaching Robert Burns’s cottage during his walking tour of Northern England and Scotland in the summer of 1818, he anticipated that ‘I shall look upon it hereafter with unmixed pleasure as I do upon my Stratford on Avon day with Bailey’ (Letters, 1: 323). As mentioned previously, William Hazlitt was a major influence on Keats’s appreciation of and particular approach to Shakespeare. In his 11 May 1817 letter to Haydon, Keats declares that ‘I am very near Agreeing with Hazlitt that Shakspeare is enough for us’ (Letters, 1: 143); the source for this statement is unclear, but it was probably an essay from The Examiner or another periodical, which is where Keats had chiefly encountered Hazlitt’s writing at this time.34 In September 1817 Keats reports reading with Bailey Hazlitt’s Round Table, a collection of essays formerly published in The Examiner (Letters, 1: 166); as we shall see, a number of the Round Table essays bear on Keats’s subsequent remarks about Shakespeare. At some point in 1817, perhaps in early December, Keats bought and read Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, published in June of that year and reviewed by Reynolds in July. Keats’s copy of Hazlitt’s Characters survives, with notes and markings in the essay on King Lear, a brief note at the end of the essay on The Tempest, and quotations from Wordsworth’s Excursion and The Merchant of Venice (2. 2. 17–18) along with Keats’s signature on the title page.35 From January to March 1818 Hazlitt gave a series of lectures on the English poets

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(published in book form later that year), all but one or two of which Keats attended36; the lecture ‘On Shakspeare and Milton’ was especially influential. Keats’s admiration of Hazlitt’s criticism caused him to declare in January 1818 that ‘Hazlitt’s depth of Taste’ was ‘one of three things to rejoice at in this Age’ (Letters, 1: 203, 205). A 3 May 1818 letter which playfully indulges in a stream of associations links ‘Shakespear to Hazlitt, Hazlitt to Shakespeare’ (Letters, 1: 280), indicating that the two figures were closely connected in Keats’s mind. Even Keats’s habit of sprinkling his letters with quotations from Shakespeare may have been learned from Hazlitt, and some of those quotations could have struck him in Hazlitt’s writings rather than in the plays themselves.37 One of the fruits of Keats’s intense study of Shakespeare and the combined influences of his various friends and mentors in 1817 is the famous ‘Negative Capability’ letter of 21, 27(?) December 1817, which will be discussed in what follows. This may be the place, however, to bring up the importance of Edmund Kean for Keats. The ‘Negative Capability’ letter begins by stating that ‘I saw Kean return to the public in Richard III, & finely he did it’ (Letters, 1: 191). Further along in the letter he describes a dinner at Horace Smith’s where the company and conversation did not suit his taste. ‘They talked of Kean & his low company’, Keats writes; ‘Would I were with that company instead of yours said I to myself’ (Letters, 1: 193). Keats saw Kean in Richard III on 15 December 1817 (and again on 12 January 1818) and wrote a review of the performance for The Champion (substituting for Reynolds who was theatrical reviewer for the paper), published on 21 December 1817. Keats’s review adopts the style and many of the terms and concepts of Hazlitt, as well as of Reynolds imitating Hazlitt. Keats uses Hazlitt’s term ‘gusto’ (from the Round Table essay ‘On Gusto’) to describe Kean’s voice and weaves quotations from Shakespeare and other writers into his prose. The essay begins and ends by celebrating Kean as ‘a relict of romance’ who restores a measure of ‘chivalry’ and excitement to the present ‘unimaginative days’ (Hampstead Keats, 227).38 Throughout the review Keats enthusiastically praises Kean’s vivid acting, in particular the ‘elegance, gracefulness, and music of elocution’ in his voice. In reading Shakespeare, Keats writes, one perceives the ‘spiritual’ pleasures of verse and the ‘hieroglyphics of beauty’ expressed in ‘charactered language’. Kean’s performance, on the other hand, conveys ‘the sensual life of verse’. For Keats, as for Hazlitt as well, Kean was the rare actor who brings to life an aspect of Shakespeare’s text not available on the page, so that his performance, when experienced by someone who is already ‘learned in the spiritual portion

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of those lines to which Kean adds a sensual grandeur’, conveys the full weight and meaning of the play (Hampstead Keats, 229).39 Kean remained an important cultural hero for Keats; the actor was intimately connected with Keats’s aspiration to become a playwright himself. ‘One of my Ambitions’, he told Bailey on 14 August 1819, ‘is to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting’ (Letters, 2: 139). He wrote Otho with Kean in mind for the character Ludolph and was dismayed to learn that the actor was going on tour in America when he had hoped to have the play performed (see Letters, 2: 148, 186, 217). His abandonment of King Stephen may have been prompted by the news that Kean would be leaving the country. We recall that Charles Cowden Clarke said Keats ‘idolized’ Kean; Clarke added that Keats’s appearance reminded him of the actor, for ‘the two were not very dissimilar in face and figure.’40 As Peter Thomson explains, both were short men with ‘vivid eyes and restless energy’.41 Keats is likely to have identified with Kean not just because of their physical similarities but from the fact that Kean like Keats was an outsider striving to rise through talent alone in a society that still valued the kind of family and educational credentials both men lacked. Both Kean, the illegitimate son of a (probably) Jewish father, and Keats, ridiculed by conservative reviewers as an upstart Cockney versifier, experienced condescension and rejection by elite society and turned to art (and to Shakespeare) as a means of gaining distinction. Both men were also allied with liberal politics, Keats through his association with the Hunt circle and Kean through his connection with the Whig-leaning Drury Lane theatre, his formation of the ungentlemanly gentleman’s club ‘the Wolves’, and his preference for underdog, outsider roles like Shylock, Othello and Richard III. As Thomson remarks, ‘The emergent egalitarianism that was, in part, the English reaction to the French Revolution had, in Kean, its supreme theatrical representative.’42 Keats can be considered one of the major poetical representatives of the ‘emergent egalitarianism’ of the age, and his worship of Kean’s Shakespearean acting acknowledges the social as well as artistic ‘revolution’ in which both were engaged. When Keats tells Taylor on 27 February 1818, ‘thank God I can read and perhaps understand Shakspeare to his depths’ (Letters, 1: 239), he may be signalling that he has at this point completed his major period of reading and studying Shakespeare’s works. Important references to Shakespeare continue throughout the remaining few years of Keats’s life, but they become less frequent over time. White claims that Keats ‘outgr[ew] his buoyant idolatry’ of Shakespeare after 1817 and that by 1819 ‘the allusions to Shakespeare are few and far between.’ For that very reason, however,

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White claims that the Shakespeare allusions that do appear in letters and poems carry ‘great weight as the distilled residuum of what Keats’s memory retains as important to his own experience’.43 We can nonetheless assume that Keats continued to consult his copies of Shakespeare from time to time, and some evidence of such reading is available. His sonnet ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’, written in January 1818 in his folio Shakespeare (at the end of Hamlet, facing Lear), records one such occasion. Another occurred on 4 October 1818, the date Keats wrote in his folio Lear beside the phrase, ‘poore Tom’ (3. 4. 38), which he underscored.44 Keats was nursing his brother Tom, dying of consumption, when he made this brief, moving annotation. On 16 December 1818 he tells his brother and sister-in-law in America, ‘I shall read a passage of Shakspeare every Sunday at ten o Clock – you read one {a}t the same time and we shall be as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room’ (Letters, 2: 5). Whether or not Keats kept his word, the statement indicates his intention of maintaining a weekly schedule of Shakespeare readings. When Keats tells Bailey on 14 August 1819 that ‘Shakspeare and the paradise Lost every day become greater wonders to me – I look upon fine Phrases like a Lover’ (Letters, 2: 139), he implies some recent perusal of Shakespeare’s texts (this is the same letter in which he says he would like to ‘make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting’). Keats is still focused on his dramatic writing when he tells John Taylor on 17 November 1819 that his ‘greatest ambition’ is ‘the writing of a few fine Plays’ and explains that he is reading ‘Holingshed’s Elisabeth’ in preparation for composing a play based on ‘the Earl of Leicester’s historry [sic]’ (Letters, 2: 234). Keats also bought John Selden’s Titles of Honor in 1819, probably as a reference work to consult in writing historical plays.45 Perhaps Keats was modelling himself on Shakespeare by beginning his dramatic career with plays based on English history. If so, he may have re-read some of Shakespeare’s early history plays at the same time.46 These and other literary plans, however, were cut short by Keats’s illness, which became apparent when he experienced a haemorrhage from the lungs on 3 February 1820. From that point on he wrote no new poems, though Shakespeare remained an important presence to the end. He took both the Johnson and Steevens edition of the plays and The Poetical Works of William Shakespeare with him to Italy; he copied his ‘Bright Star’ sonnet into the latter book, on the blank leaf facing A Lover’s Complaint, while on board his ship the Maria Crowther.47 Keats bequeathed both books to Joseph Severn, who accompanied him to Italy; the seven-volume Johnson and Steevens set is now at Harvard and the Poetical Works at Keats House in

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Hampstead. The folio Shakespeare Keats gave to his fiancée Fanny Brawne before he left England is now housed at Keats House. Keats obviously found comfort from having his beloved Shakespeare volumes with him in his final illness, and one of the greatest gifts he could think of bestowing on the woman he loved was a copy of Shakespeare’s plays, enriched with his marginalia.48 Images and selected passages Keats’s letters, marginalia and poems reveal a number of significant patterns in his response to Shakespeare. One such pattern is his tendency to focus on discrete, isolated passages, often with little regard for the larger context. This approach is apparent in an 18 April 1817 letter to Reynolds, where he states, ‘Whenever you write say a Word or two on some Passage in Shakespeare that may have come rather new to you’ and cites as examples the lines from The Tempest, ‘Urchins / Shall, for that vast of Night that they may work, / All exercise on thee’ and ‘In the dark backward and abysm of time’ (Letters, 1: 133; emphasis in original). Keats gives no indication that the first passage (1. 2. 326–8) comes from an exchange between Prospero and Caliban, in which Prospero threatens Caliban with punishment for his hostility and unruliness. Likewise, the second passage (1. 2. 50) is extracted from Prospero’s and Miranda’s discussion of her recollection of their former life in Milan, but Keats makes no reference to the scene from which the line derives. Similarly, when he writes to Reynolds about his reading of Shakespeare’s Poetical Works he states, ‘I neer found so many beauties in the sonnets – they seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally – in the intensity of working out conceits.’ He then quotes the second quatrain of sonnet 12 – ‘When lofty trees I see barren of leaves / Which erst from heat did canopy the herd, / And Summer’s green all girded up in sheaves, / Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,’ followed by a reference to ‘cockled snails’ from Love’s Labour’s Lost (4. 3. 335), which brings into his mind a simile involving a snail in Venus and Adonis (1033–8). Keats’s letter continues, ‘He [Shakespeare] overwhelms a genuine Lover of Poesy with all manner of abuse, talking about – “a poets rage / And stretched metre of an antique song” – Which by the by will be a capital Motto for my Poem [Endymion] – wont it? – He speaks too of “Time’s antique pen” – and “aprils first born flowers” and “deaths eternal cold”’ (Letters, 1: 188–9). The various lines Keats quotes here come from sonnets 17, 19, 21 and 13. In none of these references does he consider the context of the quotation but merely seizes on isolated ‘beauties’ or ‘fine things’, often ‘conceits’ or similes and

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metaphors appreciated for their own sake rather than for what they convey about the subject matter of the poem. As White says, ‘The very fact that Keats can confuse the contexts between the Sonnets and Venus and Adonis, and also throw in the phrase “cockled snails” from Love’s Labour’s Lost, shows that he makes association through images . . . rather than having a rooted sense of literal context.’49 Shakespeare was not the only writer Keats read in this way; indeed, it appears that he typically read poetry as a series of striking lines and images. Charles Cowden Clarke notes that Keats ‘especially singled out epithets’ in his response to Spenser’s Faerie Queene.50 When he was ill and anticipating journeying to Italy for his health in July 1820, Keats told Fanny Brawne that he was ‘employed in marking the most beautiful passages in Spenser, intending it for you, and comforting myself in being somehow occupied to give you however small a pleasure’ (Letters, 2: 302). At this late stage in his career, Keats still approached The Faerie Queene as a collection of ‘beautiful passages’ to be enjoyed without reference to their larger contexts. Benjamin Bailey records that, when Keats visited him in Oxford in September 1817, he found the young poet deficient in his appreciation of Wordsworth, liking him ‘rather in particular passages than in the full length portrait, as it were, of the great imaginative & philosophic Christian Poet’, and he set about trying to teach Keats to better understand and value the ideas informing Wordsworth’s poems.51 Keats’s marginalia in his personal copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost reveal a similar pattern: he habitually marks descriptive passages, rich in visual and other sensory imagery, but ignores most of the major speeches in the poem that convey its central themes, plot and character development.52 His habit of reading poetry selectively, for isolated images, epithets and other striking phrases, may be one reason why Keats was unable to realize his ambition of writing ‘a few fine Plays’ and why his narrative poems too are often loosely organized and episodic (Endymion) or incomplete (from the early ‘Imitation of Spenser’ and Calidore to the two Hyperion poems).53 Matthew Arnold praised the verbal magic of Keats’s poetry and thought ‘No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness.’ Arnold is best remembered for what he says next. After citing Keats’s belief that ‘I shall be among the English Poets after my death’ (Letters, 1: 394) Arnold declares, ‘He is; he is with Shakespeare.’54 Arnold is hardly unqualified in his celebration of the connection between Keats and Shakespeare, however. According to Arnold, besides lacking ‘the faculty of moral interpretation which is in Shakespeare’, Keats also is deficient in ‘the architectonics of poetry’.55

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In several writings from the 1850s, Arnold is even more specific in describing the flaws he perceives in Keats’s verse, which he attributes to the Romantic poet’s misguided approach to Shakespeare. In a letter of 28 October 1852 Arnold writes, More and more I feel that . . . Keats and Shelley were on a false track when they set themselves to reproduce the exuberance of expression, the charm, the richness of images, and the felicity, of the Elizabethan poets. Yet critics cannot get to learn this, because the Elizabethan poets are our greatest, and our canons of poetry are founded on their works. They still think that the object of poetry is to produce exquisite bits and images – such as Shelley’s clouds shepherded by the slow unwilling wind, and Keats passim; whereas modern poetry can only subsist by its contents . . . it must not lose itself in parts and episodes and ornamental work, but must press forwards to the whole.56 Similarly, in the Preface to the first edition of his Poems (1853), Arnold declares Shakespeare a dangerous model for young writers, who absorb his ‘abundant, and ingenious expression’ but neglect other aspects of his work, with the result that in their own poems ‘the details alone are valuable, the composition worthless.’ Arnold gives as an example Keats’s Isabella, which he calls ‘a perfect treasure-house of graceful and felicitous words and images’. Nonetheless, Arnold concludes, ‘so feebly is it conceived by the Poet, so loosely constructed, that the effect produced by [the action], in and for itself, is absolutely null.’57 As Arnold’s remarks indicate, however, Keats was not alone in his approach to Shakespeare; many others of his time likewise isolated the ‘beauties’ of Shakespeare and other poets from their contexts and are likely to have influenced Keats in this tendency. Anthologies of passages from Shakespeare’s plays, such as William Dodd’s The Beauties of Shakespear, Regularly Selected from each Play (1752), were commonplace. Charles Cowden Clarke may have encouraged Keats to read selectively; his account of introducing Keats to Chapman’s translation of Homer describes how they ‘turn[ed] to some of the “famousest” passages’, and he lists several lines, images and metaphors that particularly appealed to Keats.58 The title of the sonnet Keats wrote in response to this occasion, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, suggests a cursory rather than sustained reading experience (‘looking into’). As Orrin Wang notes, ‘looking into’ also indicates the visual emphasis in Keats’s approach to poetry.59 Leigh Hunt definitely focused on selected passages in poems and compiled several anthologies of

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excerpts from longer works. Imagination and Fancy, mentioned previously, is one such compilation of extracts from various poets, including Shakespeare, with brief commentary on each. Hunt like Keats especially relished passages striking for their visual appeal. One section in Imagination and Fancy called ‘A Gallery of Pictures from Spenser’ provides quotations from The Faerie Queene and then proposes an artist who would be appropriate for depicting each scene described. Greg Kucich claims that Hunt ‘taught Keats how to read The Faerie Queene as a gallery of discrete, gorgeous pictures . . . instead of following [Spenser’s] narrative’.60 Hazlitt also praises Shakespeare’s imagery and dazzling verbal skill in a way that recalls Keats. In his lecture ‘On Shakspeare and Milton’, Hazlitt states that the ‘felicity [of Shakespeare’s images] is equal to their force. Their likeness is made more dazzling by their novelty. They startle, and take the fancy prisoner in the same instant’ (5: 54). Such remarks imply that the reader’s attention is arrested by certain passages, which stand out from the surrounding text. Shakespeare also ‘has a magic power over words’, Hazlitt writes. ‘His epithets and single phrases are like sparkles, thrown off from an imagination, fired by the whirling rapidity of its own motion. His language is hieroglyphical. It translates thoughts into visible images’ (5: 54–5). Like Keats, Hazlitt values ‘epithets’, ‘single phrases’, and ‘visible images’; he even uses the same term, ‘hieroglyphical’, that Keats uses in his December 1817 review of Kean, where he says that the spiritual aspect of poetry ‘is felt when the very letters and points of charactered language show like the hieroglyphics of beauty’ (Hampstead Keats, 229). Susan Wolfson believes that Hazlitt in this case is echoing Keats’s review, since it appeared before Hazlitt delivered his Lectures on the English Poets. If so, Hazlitt himself recognized the similarity between Keats’s and his own approach to Shakespeare’s poetry.61 An attention to striking phrases and images is more likely to occur when reading than when viewing plays, and in fact Hazlitt cites as a disadvantage of stage productions of Shakespeare the fact that [n]ot only are the more refined poetical beauties and minuter strokes of character lost to the audience, but the most striking and impressive passages, those which having once read we can never forget, fail comparatively of their effect, except in one or two rare instances indeed. It is only the pantomime part of tragedy . . . which is sure to tell . . . on the stage. All the rest, all that appeals to our profounder feelings, to reflection and imagination, all that affects us most deeply in our closets, and in fact constitutes the glory of Shakespear, is little else than an interruption and

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a drag on the business of the stage. . . . Those parts of the play on which the reader dwells the longest, and with the highest relish in the perusal, are hurried through in the performance. (A View of the English Stage, 5: 221–2) Hazlitt here expresses the common Romantic opinion that Shakespeare’s plays are better read than viewed in performance, a position most memorably stated by Charles Lamb in his 1811 Reflector essay ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare, Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation’. It is not known whether Keats read Lamb’s essay, though he knew Lamb slightly and owned a copy of his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets.62 Even if Keats did not read ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare’, however, its point of view was widely shared; Reynolds, for example, also claims that ‘We do not much like to see Shakspeare tortured on the stage.’63 Keats appears to express the same opinion of the inadequacy of theatrical productions when in his Champion review he provides the following qualified praise of Kean’s performance as Luke Traffic in Sir James Bland Burges’s Riches; Or, The Wife and Brother: Kean, says Keats, ‘acted Luke in Riches, as far as the stage will admit, to perfection’ (Hampstead Keats, 228). Certainly Keats’s copious marginalia reflect his intense study of Shakespeare’s texts, and his habit of citing isolated lines and images apart from their contexts is more consistent with a reading than a viewing experience of the plays. It may be telling as well that, as Jonathan Bate claims, the Shakespeare play that most inspired Keats’s own creativity was King Lear, which was not performed at all during the Regency period because the government feared it would remind British subjects of their own mad king.64 Despite Keats’s disparagement of the stage, certain aspects of Romantic theatre are in keeping with his own response to Shakespeare. His appreciation of pictorial effects in Shakespeare’s works is consistent with the highly visual emphasis in Romantic-era theatrical productions. The large sizes of Drury Lane and Covent Garden Theatres encouraged an emphasis on spectacle and scenery, and the actors were required to use exaggerated gestures in order to appeal to their vast audiences.65 Middle-class culture generally was characterized by a fascination with the visual, as reflected in the exhibitions, fairs, panoramas, phantasmagorias and other public entertainments common in London in the early nineteenth century. This visual culture— which Orrin Wang calls the pre-cinema, in that it contains the values and impulses that eventually blossomed with the emergence of film—carried over to the theatre, creating a fondness for spectacle and tableau.66 Richard Schoch describes how Victorian productions of Shakespeare ‘were . . .

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committed to a pictorial mise-en-scène’ and presented the plays as ‘animated painting[s]’. Schoch notes that such pictorial tastes were shaped by ‘a century-long tradition of reading illustrated editions of Shakespeare’s plays and looking at painting, prints and engravings [of] . . . the playwright’s characters’.67 Indeed, paintings of scenes from Shakespeare proliferated in the Romantic period, most notably in the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, which ran from 1786–1802 (after which many of the paintings were published in the form of engravings). Keats’s friend Joseph Severn in 1817 painted a scene from Midsummer Night’s Dream depicting Hermia and Helena embroidering together and affixed the relevant lines from the play (3. 2. 203–8) to the painting when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1819. The same passage is thought to have influenced a description of Endymion’s sister Peona, relaxing with playmates in her bower, in Keats’s poem (Endymion l. 431–5).68 Keats’s highly visual poetry participates in the pictorial aesthetic of his time, which no doubt helped to shape his focus on imagery and conceits in Shakespeare’s works. Keats’s idol Edmund Kean was a highly visual actor, known more for his graceful and animated movements than for his voice. Hazlitt said his performance in Richard III ‘presents a perpetual succession of striking pictures. He bids fair to supply us with the best Shakespear Gallery we have had,’ thereby linking Kean’s acting to the paintings in Boydell’s exhibit (A View of the English Stage, 5: 184). In addition, Kean was famous for memorable ‘points’ in his Shakespeare performances, or moments when he struck an impressive pose, delivered his lines in a forceful and original manner, or engaged in some noteworthy stage business. Such highlights, which audiences came to expect from Kean, were usually followed by bursts of applause in a way that must have interrupted the flow of the performance.69 In this sense, Kean like Keats emphasized particular moments in the plays, detached from their larger contexts. Keats seems to recognize and appreciate this quality of Kean’s acting when he says in his Champion review, ‘Other actors are continually thinking of their sum-total effect throughout a play. Kean delivers himself up to the instant feeling, without a shadow of a thought about any thing else’ (Hampstead Keats, 231). As Thomson notes, Keats recognized that ‘It was always the detail rather than the whole of a part that drew the best out of Kean.’70 Keats also lists a number of memorable lines spoken by the actor and concludes, ‘We could cite a volume of such immortal scraps, and dote upon them with our remarks’ (Hampstead Keats, 230). Just as he ‘look[s] upon fine Phrases like a Lover’ when reading Shakespeare, Keats dotes upon ‘immortal scraps’ of dialogue when viewing the plays, especially as performed by Kean.

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In his focus on striking individual passages and images in Shakespeare, Keats clearly participated in tendencies shared by his culture. The fact that others in the nineteenth century regarded Shakespeare’s gift for striking phrases, imagery and epithets as central to his genius is further indicated by remarks comparing Keats to Shakespeare. Walter Savage Landor in 1828 wrote of Keats that ‘in none of our poets, with the sole exception of Shakespeare, do we find so many phrases so happy in their boldness.’ In 1847, William Howitt declared that ‘there is no poet, living or dead, except Shakspeare, who can pretend to anything like the felicity of epithet which characterizes Keats.’ David Masson in 1853 allied Keats with Shakespeare (and Milton) in the way their poetry ‘teem[s] with accumulated concrete circumstance’ and abundant imagery that sometimes verges on the excessive. Even Matthew Arnold, as we saw, praised Keats’s verbal ‘felicity’, which he found like Shakespeare’s.71 For all of these critics, Keats’s poetry is Shakespearean in the elements Keats himself most relished in Shakespeare’s poetry: its verbal facility, imagery and epithets. In the twentieth century, critics have continued to characterize as Shakespearean Keats’s diction and imagery, which relishes the concrete and particular and draws upon various senses. A. C. Bradley in 1909 thought Keats, like Shakespeare, was ‘a master of magic in language’. Walter Jackson Bate (1963) links the quatrain in sonnet 12 quoted by Keats in his 22 November 1817 letter to Reynolds – ‘When lofty trees I see barren of leaves / Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,’ and so on – to Keats’s own development of powerful pictorial images that contain a sense of process, of a present that includes the past or of ‘energy caught in momentary repose’ in poems such as The Eve of St. Agnes, the odes and the Hyperion poems. Bate also believes that ‘Keats reminds us of Shakespeare’ in his use of vivid imagery that combines several senses. Jack Stillinger (1982, 2006) claims that ‘Keats is definitely “with Shakespeare”’ (quoting Matthew Arnold) in the ‘particularity and concreteness’ of his ‘diction and imagery. . . . There is a striking quantity of things in [Keats’s poetry], things that can be visualized or that stimulate the auditory and other senses.’72 Virtually everyone who writes on Keats and Shakespeare agrees that the rich, sensuous imagery, the striking epithets and condensed language that characterizes Keats’s best poetry are reminiscent of the same qualities in Shakespeare’s verse and are likely to have been influenced or enhanced by the Romantic poet’s in-depth study of his Presider’s works. If Keats did not realize his ambition of writing successful plays like his great predecessor, he drew on the qualities his poet’s temperament best understood and responded to in Shakespeare’s

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works and produced his own lyric and narrative poems replete with memorable imagery and ‘fine Phrases’. Negative Capability and dramatic character Keats’s most famous contribution to Shakespeare criticism is his coining of the term ‘Negative Capability’ to denote ‘what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare posessed [sic] so enormously’ (Letters, 1: 193). Keats’s concept of Negative Capability involves a number of implications, one of which is that the true poet has no fixed identity but instead projects himself into the identities of his creations. Just a month before the Negative Capability letter Keats tells Benjamin Bailey that ‘Men of Genius are great as certain ethereal Chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral intellect – b[ut] they have not any individuality, any determined Character’(Letters, 1: 184). In a 3 February 1818 letter to Reynolds, Keats castigates Wordsworth, Byron and other contemporary writers he labels ‘Egotists’, whose subjective poetry expresses their personal ‘li[ves] & opinions’, comparing it unfavourably with the Elizabethans’ ‘great & unobtrusive’ works (Letters, 1: 223–5). In a 27 October 1818 letter to Richard Woodhouse, Keats describes ‘the poetical Character . . . (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself – it has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated – It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosop[h]er delights the camelion Poet’ (Letters, 1: 386–7). Woodhouse, commenting on this definition of the poet to John Taylor, agreed with Keats’s account, and added that ‘Shakspr was a poet of the kind above mentd – and he was perhaps the only one besides Keats who possessed this power in an extry degree, so as to be a feature in his works’ (Letters, 1: 390). Although Keats coined the term ‘Negative Capability’, the idea that poets project themselves into their creations by means of what was called the sympathetic imagination developed in the eighteenth century and was common in the Romantic period. Moreover, it was customary to cite Shakespeare as the chief representative of this ability.73 Coleridge compared Shakespeare to Proteus and contrasted Milton, who ‘himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost’, to Shakespeare, whose ‘poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakespeare.’74 Keats’s mentor in critical matters, William Hazlitt, likewise extolled Shakespeare as ‘the

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least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become.’ Shakespeare, Hazlitt states, ‘may be said, for the time, to identify himself with the character he wishes to represent, and to pass from one to another, like the same soul successively animating different bodies. By an art like that of the ventriloquist, he throws his imagination out of himself, and makes every word appear to proceed from the mouth of the person in whose name it is given’ (5: 47, 50). These remarks were delivered in Hazlitt’s lecture ‘On Shakspeare and Milton’ on 27 January 1818, shortly before Keats criticized Wordsworth and the modern poets as ‘egotists’ and praised the ‘unobtrusive’ Elizabethans in his letter to Reynolds.75 Reynolds himself had earlier contrasted the objectivity of Shakespeare to the subjectivity of other poets in his essay ‘On Egotism in Literature’, published in the 2 June 1816 Champion. Like Hazlitt and Keats, Reynolds believes that ‘Shakspeare certainly was no egotist. He never shines through his characters. All his persons speak like real men and women, and their conversation seems to spring up from the circumstances of the moment.’76 Keats shares with and probably learned from contemporaries the idea that Shakespeare’s genius involves his ability to project himself wholly into his characters. Not only do members of Keats’s circle share his view of Shakespeare as a chameleon, Proteus or ventriloquist, but many of them believe that Keats like his Presider possesses this quality to an uncommon degree. Woodhouse’s comments in his letter to Taylor have already been cited. Woodhouse makes similar points in his 8 June 1818 Champion review of Endymion. He claims that, unlike most of ‘our modern poets’ who ‘give to every thing the colouring of their own feeling’, ‘Mr Keats goes out of himself into a world’ of his own creation. Like Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, Woodhouse writes, Endymion provides ‘a representation and not a description of passion. Both these poems would, we think, be more generally admired had the poets been only veiled instead of concealed from us. Mr Keats conceives the scene before him, and represents it as it appears. This is the excellence of dramatic poetry.’77 In his letter to Taylor, Woodhouse gives another example of Keats’s own Negative Capability: ‘He has affirmed that he can conceive of a billiard Ball that it may have a sense of delight from its own roundness, smoothness volubility. & the rapidity of its motion’ (Letters, 1: 389). Charles Cowden Clarke also claimed that ‘Keats, like Shakespeare, and every other real poet, put his whole soul into what he had imagined, portrayed, or embodied.’ Clarke provides an example of Keats’s ability to imaginatively enter into a scene as he recounts Keats’s description of a bear-baiting. Keats’s ‘personification of the baiting, with his position – his legs and arms

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bent and shortened till he looked like Bruin on his hind legs, dabbing his fore paws hither and thither, as the dogs snapped at him, and now and then acting the gasp of one that had been suddenly caught and hugged – his own capacious mouth adding force to the personation, was a remarkable and as memorable a display.’ Clarke goes on to make a connection to Shakespeare: ‘I am never reminded of this amusing relation,’ he writes, ‘but it is associated with that forcible picture in Shakespeare, in “Henry VI.:” – “. . . As a bear encompass’d round with dogs, / Who having pinch’d a few and made them cry, / The rest stand all aloof and bark at him.”’78 Later critics have concurred that Keats, like Shakespeare, is a supreme exemplar of Negative Capability. Bernice Slote cites Woodhouse’s account of Keats’s ability to imagine what a billiard ball feels and Clarke’s report of Keats’s impersonation of a bear, among other examples, to argue that Keats did possess a dramatic temperament much like Shakespeare’s.79 David Perkins also states that Keats’s poetry is ‘essentially dramatic’ in that ‘Keats does not come forward in his own person in any direct way; he merely presents or narrates. Even in the lyrics, a form in which by definition and convention the author directly expresses his own feelings and reactions, Keats often remains in the background.’ Jay Clayton similarly claims that Keats, like Shakespeare and like his contemporary Jane Austen, is ‘essentially dramatic’ in his focus on ‘his subject, not on his own feelings’. W. J. Bate asserts that Keats’s ‘gift for empathic concentration of image’, whereby the poet fully identifies with the objects or scenes described, ‘develop[ed] to a degree hardly rivaled since Shakespeare himself’.80 Certain qualifications nonetheless can be made to the claim that Keats demonstrates the same quality of Negative Capability he assigns to Shakespeare. Significantly, all of the examples of Keats’s ability to enter into his own creations cited above involve animals, natural scenery or even objects rather than people, as Shakespeare does in his plays. Certainly, as noted in the previous section, Keats’s poetry is dense with vivid imagery and sensory details, but it contains few if any memorable characters. As Grant Scott notes, ‘figures like Saturn [in Hyperion], Porphyro [in The Eve of St. Agnes], and Autumn are defined less in terms of conventional character psychology and motivation than they are in terms of ekphrastic principles and rhetoric’; they are presented in pictorial terms, like sculpture or figures in a tableau, rather than as dynamic, three-dimensional human beings.81 Jonathan Bate also claims that ‘the kind of empathy Keats achieved in his own poems was very different from that of Shakespearean drama,’ and that Keats ‘throws himself into the nightingale and the urn’ in his odes ‘more fully than into Otho the Great and Ludolf’ in his play.82

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Not only was Keats unsuccessful in creating well-rounded characters in his own poetry, but he appears not to have paid much attention to this dimension of Shakespeare’s plays. Moreover, in this tendency Keats deviates from most of his friends and other contemporaries, who celebrated and delighted to analyse the unique individuality of Shakespeare’s characters. In fact, interpreting the distinctive personalities of Shakespeare’s people was probably the dominant critical approach to the plays throughout the nineteenth century. Coleridge and Hazlitt, influenced by A. W. Schlegel, emphasized the originality and psychological complexity of Shakespeare’s dramatis personae, and Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays is devoted to illustrating this principle, as the Preface explains, citing Schlegel as a precedent (4: 171–4). John Hamilton Reynolds, who extolled Characters of Shakespear’s Plays in his review of that work, likewise insisted that ‘Macbeth, and Lear, and Othello are real beings’ and, in Leonidas Jones’s words, ‘felt that the critic’s primary duty lay in interpreting personalities and motives’.83 Charles Cowden Clarke published Shakespeare-Characters, Chiefly Those Subordinate in 1863, a book devoted to analyzing the minor figures in the plays. Mary Cowden Clarke also contributed to the critical tradition of character analysis in her series of articles for Sharpe’s London Magazine (1848–51) ‘On Shakespeare’s Individuality in His Characters’.84 Keats, by contrast, as we have seen, concentrates on isolated beauties in the language of the plays, often divorced from their contexts, and seldom comments at length on the characters. When Keats does refer to Shakespeare’s characters he often focuses on their visual appearance, as when he quotes (to the painter Haydon) Enobarbus’s description of Antony, ‘He’s walking in the garden – thus: and spurns the rush that lies before him, cries fool, Lepidus!’ (Antony and Cleopatra, 3. 5. 16–17, emphasis in original; Letters, 1: 144). In another letter to Haydon Keats refers to Shakespeare and other writers to convey his sense of a heroic painting: ‘large prominent round and colour’d with magnificence – somewhat like the feel I have of Anthony and Cleopatra. Or of Alcibiades, leaning on his Crimson Couch in his Galley, his broad shoulders imperceptibly heaving with the Sea – That [for ‘What’] passage in Shakspeare is finer than this “See how the surly Warwick mans the Wall”’ (3 Henry VI, 5. 1. 17; Letters, 1: 265). These passages highlight characters’ posture or gestures, or what Keats in a marginal note to Paradise Lost termed the ‘stationing’ of figures, as if they were subjects of a painting or tableau.85 Keats comments on a number of Shakespeare’s female characters, as when he tells Jane and Marianne Reynolds, ‘I sincerely believe that Imogen is the finest Creature; and that I should have been disappointed at hearing

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you prefer Juliet. . . . Yet I feel such a yearning towards Juliet and that I would rather follow her into Pandemonium than Imogen into Paradize – heartily wishing myself a Romeo to be worthy of her’ (Letters, 1: 157–8). He also describes an attractive woman he meets as ‘not a Cleopatra; but she is at least a Charmian. She has a rich eastern look; she has fine eyes and fine manners. . . . I believe tho’ she has faults – the same as Charmian and Cleopatra might have had.’ Keats goes on to distinguish between ‘two tempers of mind in which we judge of things – the worldly, theatrical and pantomimical; and the unearthly, spiritual and ethereal – in the former Buonaparte, Lord Byron and this Charmian hold the first place in our Minds; in the latter John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child’s cradle and you my dear Sister [Georgiana Keats] are the conquering feelings. As a Man in the world I love the rich talk of a Charmian; as an eternal Being I love the thought of you. I should like her to ruin me, and I should like you to save me’ (Letters, 1: 395–6). Although Keats is clearly fascinated with Imogen, Juliet, Cleopatra and Charmian and regards them as distinct types of women, the terms in which he characterizes them are fairly broad and do tend to classify the women as types, even stereotypes, such as the ‘good’ moral woman and the ‘bad’ sexual one, rather than analyzing them as unique individuals. It is telling that he does not distinguish between Cleopatra and Charmian but instead classifies them together, only seeming to regard Charmian as different in degree rather than in kind from her mistress. Moreover, Keats treats these women as beings with whom he personally would like to be involved. Although this demonstrates that Keats like Hazlitt or Reynolds regards Shakespeare’s characters as living beings, he does not like those and other Romantic critics analyse their personalities and motives in the plays but instead emphasizes his own personal response to them. Similarly, Keats often speaks of his identification with male characters such as Troilus and Hamlet, as when he tells his brother and sister-in-law that ‘I throw my whole being into Troilus and repeating those lines, “I wander, like a lost soul upon the stygian Banks staying for waftage”, I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate that I am content to be alone’ (Troilus and Cressida, 3. 2. 9–10; Letters, 1: 404), or when he bitterly tells Fanny Brawne, whom he suspects of being emotionally unfaithful to him, ‘Hamlet’s heart was full of such Misery as mine is when he said to Ophelia “Go to a Nunnery, go, go!”’ (Hamlet, 3. 1. 120, 128–9, 136–7, 139; Letters, 2: 312). Keats here refers to the feelings of Shakespeare’s characters as a means of expressing his own, rather than demonstrating his ability to identify with characters different from himself. Whatever quality of Negative Capability Keats possessed,

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it did not involve an empathic projection into other people in a way that prompted him to analyse complex literary characters or create them himself. Tensions in Keats’s celebration of Negative Capability also arise from the fact that the poet did not consistently extol selflessness but at times speaks of the importance of identity and a strong sense of self. In his 3 May 1818 letter to Reynolds, Keats develops an analogy of life as a ‘Mansion of Many Apartments’ that he says parallels Wordsworth’s account of human development in Tintern Abbey, and he decides that Wordsworth ‘is deeper than Milton – though I think it has depended more upon the general and gregarious advance of intellect, than individual greatness of Mind’ (Letters, 1: 280–1). After unfavourably comparing Wordsworth and the moderns to Shakespeare and Milton in his 3 February 1818 letter to Reynolds, Keats now reverses his assessment and finds Wordsworth’s subjective verse, which explores individual growth and experience, superior to Milton’s epic poem. On 21 April 1819, Keats describes to his brother and sister-in-law a ‘system of Salvation’ to replace the Christian scheme. The purpose of our world of suffering, according to Keats, is to act upon the mind and the heart of each individual for the purpose of developing a soul or identity. ‘I say . . . Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence’, Keats writes, ‘There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions – but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself’ (Letters, 2: 102). Whereas Keats had previously regarded a lack of identity as the mark of ‘Men of Genius’ or ‘a Man of Achievement’ (Letters 1: 184, 193), here he considers the development of identity as the goal of every individual, a form of secular salvation. Relevant to this shift in values is the way Keats revised Hyperion as The Fall of Hyperion. The first version of the poem presents a narrative of the fallen Titans and the new sun-god Apollo, after the manner of Paradise Lost or, in its depiction of the dethroned Saturn, King Lear. The Fall of Hyperion, by contrast, presents the same story through the perspective of a first-person poet-narrator, whose personal growth and education is fostered by the tale of the old and new gods (and in fact little of that tale is presented in The Fall of Hyperion, which is chiefly composed of the framing account of the poet-narrator’s spiritual journey). In August 1819 Keats tells Taylor that his current state of ‘Pride and egotism will enable me to write finer things than any thing else could,’ and to Reynolds he writes, ‘The more I know what my diligence may in time probably effect; the more does my heart distend with Pride and Obstinacy,’ adding that this ‘is the only state for the best sort of Poetry’ (Letters, 2: 144, 146–7). A year later, on 16 August 1820, he tells Percy Bysshe Shelley that an artist ‘must have

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“self concentration” selfishness perhaps’ (Letters, 2: 322–3). Instead of deploring egotism in poetry as he formerly did, Keats now regards it as essential to the creative process.86 One can even note instances in which Keats ascribes self-expression rather than self-annihilation to Shakespeare. On 19 February 1819 Keats declares that ‘A Man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory – and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life – a life like the scriptures, figurative. . . . Lord Byron cuts a figure – but he is not figurative – Shakspeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it’ (Letters, 2: 67). Although Keats contrasts Shakespeare to the image-conscious Byron, the former’s works are nonetheless said to be autobiographical. The difference between Byron and Shakespeare seems a matter of style and emphasis rather than of substance; both express their identities in their works but the latter is more subtle and conveys his inner life rather than a public persona. On 9 June 1819 Keats tells Sarah Jeffrey that ‘The middle age of Shakspeare was all c[l]ouded over; his days were not more happy than Hamlet’s who is perhaps more like Shakspeare himself in his common every day Life than any other of his Characters’ (Letters, 2: 115–16). Here Shakespeare, instead of disappearing into diverse characters, creates one much like himself who expresses his own mood and circumstances. One conclusion that can be drawn from the contradictions in Keats’s statements about identity is that, as Keats himself recognizes in his 3 May 1818 letter to Reynolds (when he says that Wordsworth’s superiority to Milton ‘has depended more upon the general and gregarious advance of Intellect, than individual greatness of Mind’), poets are the products of their time and culture and inevitably reflect the style and values of their age. Keats could not escape being a subjective Romantic poet. Whether as a result of temperament, historical conditioning, or both, Keats is primarily a lyrical or meditative rather than a dramatic or narrative writer.87 Despite his celebration of Shakespeare’s Negative Capability, his own bent was not to create a cast of diverse characters as Shakespeare did. Jonathan Bate states that ‘On the matter of entering into his creations, Keats was least Shakespearean in his plays and most empathic in his least Shakespearean form, the ode.’88 The ode’s introduction into English literary history is usually dated from 1629, with Ben Jonson’s ‘To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of That Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison’ and John Milton’s ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’. The form became increasingly important throughout the eighteenth century, flowering in the Romantic period with such works as Coleridge’s ‘Dejection’, Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ and Shelley’s ‘Ode to

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the West Wind’. Moreover, the ode is associated with the rhapsodic expression of an inspired bard and, in the Romantic period, with the poet’s struggle over a personal crisis.89 Historically and aesthetically, the ode is far removed from Shakespeare’s dramatic art. Nonetheless, Keats’s odes can be considered Shakespearean in a number of ways. As noted in the previous section, Keats draws from Shakespeare what serves his own lyrical needs best as he fills his odes with vivid, concrete images of objects and scenes from the natural world. Moreover, the odes do achieve a dramatic effect, not from the interactions and oppositions of various characters as is usual in the drama but from the self-conflict of the speaker, as he debates the value of an eternal versus a time-bound state (especially in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’). The odes also successfully draw upon Shakespeare in that they contain many echoes of the plays but in an unobtrusive fashion that incorporates Shakespeare’s words into Keats’s own distinctive voice. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in particular contains about fifty Shakespeare allusions.90 Keats’s desire to drink wine and ‘fade away’ with the nightingale, forgetting ‘The weariness, the fever and the fret’ of human life, and his invocation of death as a means of escaping the pain of existence, have been linked with both Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ and ‘O that this too too solid flesh would melt’ soliloquies (3. 1. 55ff., 1. 2. 129ff.); with the Duke’s ‘Be resolute for death’ speech (Measure for Measure 3. 1. 5ff.) and Claudio’s ‘I will encounter darkness as a bride’ and ‘Ay but to die, and go we know not where’ speeches in the same play (3. 1. 82–3, 3. 1. 117ff.); and with a number of passages in Antony and Cleopatra celebrating wine or drugs and death.91 Keats’s two ‘Adieu’s’ to the nightingale at the end of the ode suggests the Ghost in Hamlet’s repeated ‘adieu’, and many other echoes have been detected from The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Othello. The quantity of Shakespeare allusions in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is even more striking when one realizes that the poem is also filled with allusions to other writers, including Coleridge, Milton, Hazlitt and Horace. My own study of Keats and Wordsworth determined that ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ contains more allusions to Wordsworth’s poems than does any other of Keats’s works.92 One of Keats’s distinctive achievements is the way in which he could absorb passages from other writers and meld them into a voice uniquely his own. In this way, it can be said that Keats draws upon Shakespeare and other writers to enable his own verse but avoids a servile imitation that would highlight his own belatedness and dependency. Similarly, by incorporating references to Shakespeare’s plays in his own lyric poems, in a form never used by his great Presider, Keats achieves greater originality than he

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would if he had followed Shakespeare more closely by writing dramatic works (or than he did in fact achieve in his plays Otho the Great and King Stephen).93 ‘To Autumn’ has frequently been characterized as Keats’s most Shakespearean poem, even though it contains few direct parallels to Shakespeare’s works. Murry finds ‘To Autumn’ ‘deeply Shakespearean . . . in its rich and opulent serenity of mood . . . in its lovely and large periodic movement’ and in the way it expresses ‘the truth contained in the magic words: “Ripeness is all”’ (King Lear, 5. 2. 11).94 Murry describes a mood or outlook as the Shakespearean quality in Keats’s ode, rather than pointing out specific verbal echoes. Helen Vendler similarly believes that Shakespeare is one of ‘the great Presiders’ of ‘To Autumn’ although ‘there are no echoes so overt as to be outright allusions.’ According to Vendler, the ode follows Shakespeare’s example in his sonnets of ‘working out conceits’ (Letters, 1: 188), letting the metaphors unfold without the kind of direct allegorizing Keats used in many previous poems. Jonathan Bate sees a connection between the masque of Ceres in The Tempest (4. 1. 60–138) and ‘To Autumn’, though not in explicit echoes but in such stylistic effects as ‘a fullness of vocabulary’ and ‘copious compounds and adjectives formed from nouns’.95 William Flesch interprets ‘To Autumn’ as a poem that actually wrestles with the oppression of Shakespeare’s intimidating example. For Flesch, the figure of Autumn in the poem represents Shakespeare, whose overwhelming plenitude threatens to paralyze the speaker. That threat is dealt with by the ode’s depiction of Autumn’s decreasing abundance in each stanza, suggesting Keats’s ‘refusal of [Shakespeare’s] wealth and hence of the obligation it marks’.96 In various ways, critics find Keats most successful in drawing upon Shakespeare when he does so obliquely, adapting passages and techniques to his own uses as he maintains a balance of indebtedness to and independence from his great predecessor. Negative Capability: masking power Another way to understand the apparent contradictions in Keats’s alternate celebrations of selflessness and selfhood is suggested by the fact that his definition of Negative Capability involves the paradox that by negating his identity, a poet becomes ‘a Man of Achievement’ like Shakespeare. Although Keats contrasted ‘Men of Genius’ to ‘Men of Power’, the former of whom have ‘not any individuality, any determined Character’ (Letters, 1: 184), the genius’s annihilation of self can be regarded as a means of gaining power, especially for those like Keats who lack the privileges of birth and education

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required for the status of gentleman in his society. This strategy has been observed in the work of other writers such as Thomas Chatterton, the eighteenth-century attorney’s clerk who tried to pass off his own pseudoMedieval ‘Rowley’ poems as the work of a fifteenth-century Bristol monk. Many scholars engaged in the Rowley controversy wondered why Chatterton would ascribe his poems to someone else if he could claim them as his own. The reason, as Bridget Keegan explains, is that by coming before the literary establishment as the possessor and editor of valuable manuscripts rather than as a youth from the provinces trying to make a name for himself as an author, Chatterton could ‘hide behind a more authoritative voice than his own to gain access to a literary world from which he would have otherwise been excluded’.97 Chatterton paradoxically acquires more power by assuming the identity of someone else than by writing as himself. Jane Austen was often compared to Shakespeare in the nineteenth century for her ability to create a range of wholly believable characters while remaining herself invisible. Richard Whately, for example, writes in 1821 that Austen follows ‘the important maxim . . . illustrated by Homer, and afterwards enforced by Aristotle, of saying as little as possible in her own person, and giving a dramatic air to the narrative, by introducing frequent conversations; which she conducts with a regard to character hardly exceeded even by Shakspeare himself’. George Henry Lewes in an 1859 Blackwood’s article similarly states that ‘instead of telling us what her characters are, and what they feel, she presents the people, and they reveal themselves. In this she has never perhaps been surpassed, not even by Shakespeare himself.’ Lewes twice uses ‘dramatic ventriloquism’, the term Hazlitt used for Shakespeare’s ability to inhabit his characters, to describe Austen’s similar power.98 D. A. Miller has recently argued that Austen’s celebrated impersonal narrative style, the source of her ‘godlike authority’ as a novelist, derived from her social anxiety. Austen disappeared into her characters, Miller claims, in order to escape her own marginalized status as an unmarried female. ‘Behind the glory of [Austen’s] style’s willed evacuation of substance lies the ignominy of a subject’s hopelessly insufficient social realization, just as behind [her] style’s ahistorical impersonality lies the historical impasse of someone whose social representation doubles for social humiliation’ (emphasis in original).99 Keats, like Chatterton and Austen, has been viewed as a writer who hid behind masks or assumed the voices of others in order to gain an authority he did not possess as a middle-class youth trained as a surgeon-apothecary. Thomas McFarland argues that Keats adopts in his poems what McFarland calls the masks of Camelot and of Hellenism, both of which were settings

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already popular in literature of the Romantic era. ‘The whole point of the Keatsian masks’, McFarland writes, ‘was to convert a felt inadequacy in the author into a visage that could be readily accepted by the reading public of his time’. ‘Unlike Wordsworth’, according to McFarland, ‘Keats achieves his greatness not through the truth-telling of a primary self, but through the masks of a presented self speaking from the worlds of Camelot and Hellas.’100 Keats can be said to assume the voices of others not by literally pretending to be another person as Chatterton did but by his habit of imitating the styles of various literary role models. Marjorie Levinson calls Keats’s poetry ‘aggressively literary’ (emphasis in original) to the point of being parodic. According to Levinson, Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ model of literary relationships does not apply to Keats but only to those writers who regard themselves as legitimate heirs of their national literary tradition. The ‘Cockney’ Keats, as he was labelled by conservative reviewers, paradoxically had to establish his legitimacy by proving his derivativeness from more respected literary figures such as Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth and, of course, Shakespeare.101 By composing poems like ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ filled with allusions to other writers’ works, Keats succeeded in earning a place ‘among the English poets’ (Letters, 1: 394); by surrendering his identity, he became ‘a Man of Achievement’ like his hero Shakespeare. In this sense we can qualify the point made previously and say that Keats is both a subjective, lyric poet and a self-distancing, dramatic one.102 Keats’s strategy for achieving status and fame by cultivating self-loss is also a trait he shares with Edmund Kean, another socially discredited Romantic artist who gained recognition by assuming the identities of Shakespeare’s characters. Hazlitt in his Round Table essay ‘On Actors and Acting’ describes players as the ultimate practitioners of Negative Capability, always inhabiting other people, so that ‘The height of their ambition is to be beside themselves’ and ‘To-day kings, to-morrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves, that they are nothing’ (4: 153). As Peter Thomson notes, however, it may be more accurate to place actors ‘in the camp of the “egotistical sublime”’ rather than that of the ‘camelion poet’. Certainly Kean was ambitious, even megalomaniacal according to some.103 The fact that his favourite Shakespeare roles were those of underdogs and marginalized figures like himself also challenges the idea that Kean was a chameleon who disappeared into the identities of other characters; instead, he can be said to have chosen roles that would permit him to express his own feelings and perspective. It is interesting that Keats in his December 1817 review of Kean states that ‘He feels his being as deeply as Wordsworth, or any other of our intellectual monopolists’ (Hampstead Keats, 5: 231). As he praises

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Kean’s skill in inhabiting Shakespeare’s characters, he also ascribes to him a core identity as authentic and inalienable as that of the ‘egotistical’ Wordsworth. When Keats says that he wishes to make ‘as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting’ (Letters, 2: 139), he aspires to the kind of fame (and wealth) acquired through assuming other identities that Kean’s example illustrated. Of course it could be argued that Shakespeare himself participated in the same strategy of practising self-loss in order to achieve fame, wealth and social status. As the son of an upwardly mobile glover, who himself sought to establish a genteel family estate and lineage, the chameleon Shakespeare was obviously socially ambitious. The fact that he was ridiculed in the 1590s as an ‘upstart Crow’ by the university-educated Robert Greene reflects the resistance he encountered from members of more privileged classes, who resented a mere actor’s and social inferior’s success as a playwright. In Keats’s own time, Shakespeare’s humble background was often stressed. Hazlitt, in a passage Keats copies into a 13 March 1819 letter to George and Georgiana Keats, states that Shakespeare in Coriolanus reflects a fascination with power and an indifference to the common people ‘perhaps from some feeling of contempt for his own origin’ (Letters, 2: 74). The ‘peasant poet’ John Clare commonly linked Shakespeare and Chatterton to the point that, as John Goodridge remarks, for Clare Shakespeare ‘never seems to be too far away when Chatterton is on the agenda’. Keegan proposes that Clare associated (and identified with) the two writers because ‘both Shakespeare’s and Chatterton’s less-than-perfect pedigrees invited some readers to question the authenticity of their literary production – much as Clare’s detractors distrusted the achievements of a “peasant poet.”’104 In August 1819, Richard Woodhouse gave £50 to Keats because, as he told Taylor, ‘Whatever People regret that they could not do for Shakespeare or Chatterton, because he did not live in their time, that I would embody into a Rational principle, and . . . do for Keats’ (Letters, 2: 151). Woodhouse here links Shakespeare, Chatterton and Keats as disadvantaged writers without the gentleman’s luxury of a private income. Keats himself associated Chatterton and Shakespeare, first in ‘To George Felton Mathew’, where the persecuted Chatterton is greeted by ‘warm-hearted Shakspeare’ in the afterlife (57). Both writers, along with others mentioned, demonstrate ‘the fearful dearth of human kindness / To those who strove with the bright golden wing / Of genius, to flap away each sting / Thrown by the pitiless world’ (62–5). In the original Preface to Endymion, Chatterton (to whom Endymion is dedicated) is called ‘the most English of Poets except Shakspeare’ (Poems of John Keats, 738). Keats, like Clare and Woodhouse, classifies Shakespeare

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with Chatterton as struggling geniuses insufficiently appreciated by their societies. A. C. Bradley in 1909 remarked that Keats ‘was at a disadvantage in intellectual training and acquisitions, like the young Shakespeare among the University wits’.105 By celebrating Negative Capability as the quality that ‘went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare posessed so enormously’, Keats may well have identified a strategy he shared with his Presider and with others who came from middleclass backgrounds or marginalized groups and paradoxically succeeded in literature or the arts by effacing their own identities. What Shakespeare accomplished by disappearing into his characters Keats accomplished both by empathically entering into the scenes and objects he describes and by absorbing and reproducing the styles of other writers, including Shakespeare himself.

Antony and Cleopatra Despite the widespread agreement that Shakespeare was one of Keats’s most important literary precursors, surprisingly few studies have explored in-depth parallels between the two writers’ works. R. S. White’s and Caroline Spurgeon’s are the only books on Keats and Shakespeare, and both specifically treat Keats’s marginalia rather than the broader topic of Shakespeare’s influence on Keats’s poetry (J. M. Murry’s Keats and Shakespeare, despite the title, is chiefly a study of Keats’s life and poetic career with periodic, rather impressionistic references to parallels between the two writers). Jonathan Bate’s two chapters on Keats in Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination provide probably the most extensive treatment of the subject, but one would assume that much more could be written on such a rich topic. The majority of publications on intertextual relations between Shakespeare’s plays or poems and Keats’s work have been articles or notes pointing out isolated echoes of the former in the latter.106 This fact may indicate the extent to which Keats did focus on particular passages in Shakespeare rather than on larger matters of theme, structure or characterization. Nonetheless, a few plays – particularly King Lear and Hamlet – have been identified as more substantial sources of influence on important concepts, figures and motifs in Keats’s poetry.107 Another play that may have had a significant and pervasive impact on Keats’s work but whose influence has received relatively little attention is Antony and Cleopatra.108 There is abundant evidence for Keats’s close reading of and interest in the play. He mentions to Haydon on 11 May 1817 that he has recently been

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reading Antony and Cleopatra and quotes six passages from the text (Letters, 1: 144). According to White, Antony and Cleopatra has ‘the highest actual number of markings in the Johnson-Steevens edition’; it also contains the longest marginal note Keats wrote in this seven-volume set of Shakespeare’s plays.109 Another marginal note in the same edition quotes ‘Your Crown’s awry / I’ll mend it’ (5. 2. 318–19) in response to one of Johnson’s commentaries on the play (Hampstead Keats, 278–9). Several other of Keats’s references to the play have already been mentioned: his comparison of an attractive woman he has met to Charmian and his conception of a heroic painting as ‘large, prominent, round and colour’d with magnificence – somewhat like the feel I have of Antony and Cleopatra’ (Letters, 1: 395–6, 265). Keats also mentions Cleopatra in a 9 July 1818 letter to his brother Tom (Letters, 1: 320) and in the poems ‘Welcome joy, and welcome sorrow’ and ‘Fragment of Castle-builder’. Perhaps the most significant and intriguing piece of evidence for Antony and Cleopatra’s importance to Keats is Bryan Waller Procter’s (‘Barry Cornwall’) statement in an 8 May 1820 letter to John Scott that this was Keats’s favourite play. Leonidas M. Jones, who reports the statement, claims that Procter ‘probably heard of Keats’s preference for Antony and Cleopatra from Keats himself’, since he had met Keats several times in 1820, beginning in March.110 Jones, however, is sceptical of the validity of Procter’s information, noting that Keats refers to Hamlet and King Lear more frequently than he does to Antony and Cleopatra, and he concurs with W. J. Bate’s assessment that Lear should be considered the ‘central Shakespearean influence’ on Keats. After all, Jones claims, ‘Keats wrote no “On Sitting Down to Read Antony and Cleopatra Again” to separate escapist romance from “the agonies, the strife / Of human hearts”’.111 Although Jones cites ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’ to demonstrate the superior importance of Lear over Antony and Cleopatra for Keats, the sonnet actually points towards a major parallel between the latter play and Keats’s poetry that has been overlooked in Keats scholarship. The conflict Keats describes in this sonnet between ‘Romance’ or a literature of sensuous luxury, remote from familiar existence, characterized as an exotic, deceptive woman (‘golden-tongued Romance, with serene lute! / Fair plumed syren, queen of far-away!’), and a literature that confronts the harsh facts of life and exhibits traditionally masculine qualities of judgment and self-determination (‘Let me not wander in a barren dream. . . . Give me new phoenix wings to fly at my desire’) was central to Keats’s career. In fact, Keats’s career is often described as an evolution from Romance or ‘the realm . . . Of Flora, and old Pan’ to a more tragic or realistic mode that

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accepts ‘the agonies, the strife / Of human hearts’ as Keats characterized the two types and stages of poetry in ‘Sleep and Poetry’ (101–2, 124–5). The Shakespeare play that itself is structured around similar conflicts between a feminine world of luxury and emotion and a masculine world of stoicism, duty and reason, however, is not King Lear but Antony and Cleopatra. To the extent that this play informed Keats’s own treatment of the competing attractions of ‘sensations’ and ‘thoughts’ (see Letters, 1: 185), romance and reality, or masculine and feminine attributes, one would have to consider its influence significant indeed. As the lines from ‘Sleep and Poetry’ indicate, Keats’s conflict between opposing value systems and literary modes is apparent from the start of his career. It is especially conspicuous in his narrative poems which feature love relationships, usually between a mortal man and a supernatural woman. Endymion is the first major work in which these conflicts are central (and it was the poem Keats began writing when he first reports reading Antony and Cleopatra). Subtitled ‘A Poetic Romance’ and based on the myth of a Greek shepherd who was loved by the moon goddess, visited by her in his dreams, and eventually immortalized, it appears to have been intended to validate the power of love and imagination to provide escape from the common, mortal world to a finer realm of existence. In the first book Endymion, who is a ‘shepherd prince’ (2. 43) or man of authority in Keats’s poem rather than a mere shepherd, defends his obsession with a visionary woman to his sister Peona. In an impassioned celebration of love, Endymion declares the supreme happiness to be a ‘fellowship divine’ in which two beings ‘Melting into [love’s] radiance . . . blend, / Mingle, and so become a part of it’ (1. 778, 810–11). ‘Aye, so delicious is the unsating food’ of love, Endymion claims, ‘That men, who might have tower’d in the van / Of all the congregated world . . . Have been content to let occasion die, / Whilst they did sleep in love’s elysium’ (1. 816–23). Powerful men who might have gained renown for their heroic deeds happily abandon their ambitions in order to sleep, merge and mingle in union with their beloveds. At the beginning of book 2, the narrator prioritizes love over masculine exploits in terms similar to Endymion’s, as he claims that tales of tragic passion such as Romeo and Juliet, Cymbeline and Hero and Leander are superior to epics of battle and adventure such as The Iliad, The Odyssey and The Aeneid (2. 1–43). Despite these defences of love, dream and bliss over action and ambition, the poem expresses doubts about the validity and worth of Endymion’s quest for his visionary lover. Such scepticism is first voiced by Peona, whose response to her brother’s account of a meeting with the moon goddess is to

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chide him for neglecting his proper duties and his chance to make a name for himself in the world; ‘Why pierce high-fronted honour to the quick / For nothing but a dream?’ she concludes (1. 759–60). Not only does Peona believe that Endymion is shamefully neglecting his masculine responsibilities for preoccupations more suited to a lovelorn maiden (see 1. 723–36); she suspects that the woman he loves is a mere figment of his imagination. Near the end of the poem, Endymion agrees with her as he forswears his quest and declares that ‘I have clung / To nothing, lov’d a nothing, nothing seen / Or felt but a great dream!’ (4. 636–8). In the course of the poem, other developments challenge the premise that a relationship with a goddess is worth sacrificing all other earthly rewards for. In book 3 Glaucus, who has many similarities with Endymion, enters into a sensuous, idyllic union with a seductive woman who ‘did so breathe ambrosia; so immerse / My fine existence in a golden clime. / She took me like a child of suckling time, / And cradled me in roses’ (3. 454–7). To his horror, however, ‘this arbitrary queen of sense’ to whom he ‘bow’d a tranced vassal’ (3. 459–60) turns out to be Circe, who transforms her lovers into beasts. This episode raises the fear that surrendering oneself to a powerful, exotic woman could prove deadly, as the woman may be a witch who betrays her emasculated lovers. In book 4, a new complication is introduced when Endymion meets and falls in love with an Indian maid and is torn between his desire for both a mortal and an immortal woman, for life in the human world of flux and sorrow and for a permanent state of bliss. The conclusion of the poem miraculously solves Endymion’s dilemma by making the moon goddess and the Indian maid one and the same woman, but few readers have been satisfied with this abrupt, artificially convenient outcome. Shortly after he finished Endymion Keats wrote his King Lear sonnet, bidding farewell to ‘syren’ Romance and embracing Shakespearean tragedy. Keats’s conflicts between love and ambition, romance and reality, took on new urgency in 1819 after the poet fell deeply in love for the first time. The experience of love thus became more palpable to Keats than ever before, but it also exacerbated his insecurities and what he admitted was his ‘Prejudice’ and ‘not . . . right feeling towards Women’ (Letters, 1: 341–2). Keats’s anxieties about his attractiveness to the opposite sex and distrust of women probably stemmed both from his short stature, so that he does not suppose women ‘care whether Mister John Keats five feet hight [sic] likes them or not’ (Letters, 1: 342), and from his relationship with his mother. Keats was 8 years old when his father died suddenly; his mother remarried just over 2 months after the funeral, leaving John and the other children

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with her mother; she later returned to the family ill with tuberculosis and died when Keats was 14. As Leon Waldoff argues, Keats thus lost his mother twice, and the experience is likely to have left him with a distrust of women’s constancy and a fear of being abandoned by them.112 Such attitudes are expressed in Endymion by the Circe episode in which a lovermother figure (‘She took me like a child of suckling time / And cradled me in roses’) turns out to be a deadly witch, and by both the moon goddess’s and the Indian Maid’s habit of vanishing just when Endymion believes he possesses them. Certainly Keats was never confident in Fanny Brawne’s love but was haunted by ‘the fear of [her] being a little inclined to the Cressid’ as he wrote to her in February 1820 (Letters, 2: 256). His relationship with Fanny brought to the fore his suspicions of, and anxieties about, women, as is made clear in the many passages in his letters to her expressing jealousy, possessiveness and doubts about her love for him (e.g. Letters, 2: 123,132, 290–1, 303–4, 312). At other times, Keats declares his absolute devotion to her, as when he writes, ‘I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray, pray, pray to your star like a Hethen [sic]’ and ‘Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you. . . . You have ravish’d me away by a Power I cannot resist’ (Letters, 2: 133, 223–4). As his letters to Fanny Brawne attest, Keats also regarded his love for her as a threat to his poetic ambitions. ‘Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom,’ he writes in July 1820 (Letters, 2: 123). Keats throughout the summer and early fall was working on Otho the Great, Lamia and The Fall of Hyperion in a desperate bid for literary and financial success. His writing, he says, requires determination, focus and repression of romantic desire, though the latter is always threatening to overpower him. ‘Thank God for my diligence!’ he writes to Fanny on 5 August 1819, ‘were it not for that I should be miserable. I encourage it, and strive not to think of you – but when I have succeeded in doing so all day and as far as midnight, you return as soon as this artificial excitement goes off more severely from the fever I am left in’ (Letters, 2: 137). A few weeks later he apologizes to her for an ‘unloverlike’ letter, saying he is too busy to indulge in thoughts of love, and ‘My heart seems now made of iron.’ By the end of the letter, however, his resistance to tender feelings and erotic desire begins to break down: ‘it seems to me that a few more moments thought of you would uncrystallize and dissolve me – I must not give way to it – but turn to my writing again – if I fail I shall die hard – O my love, your lips are growing sweet again to my fancy – I must forget them’ (Letters, 2: 141–2). In this passage, Keats is clearly torn between his ambition as a poet and his love for Fanny Brawne, which he regards as

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mutually exclusive commitments. His reference to being ‘uncrystallized’ and ‘dissolved’ by thoughts of Fanny are reminiscent of the mingling, melting and merging in love’s radiance that Endymion celebrates. At this point, however, Keats both desires and fears that dissolution of identity. In fact, Margaret Homans believes that Keats’s shift from celebrating the selfless chameleon poet to valuing identity and a stable sense of self was prompted by his relationship with Fanny Brawne. Fearing her power to ‘absorb [him] in spite of [him]self’ (Letters, 2: 133) Keats, according to Homans, reverts to the assumption of ‘a specifically masculine authority and subjectivity’ as ‘a necessary . . . antidote to [Fanny’s] threat to his identity – a sense of identity he scarcely thought he wanted, until he felt she would take it from him’.113 In Antony and Cleopatra, Keats would have found strikingly similar conflicts between a realm of love, sensuality and abandonment to another, represented by Cleopatra’s Egypt, and the Roman world of duty, self-discipline and masculine reputation and power in the public realm, presided over by Octavius Caesar. Antony is frequently derided by other men for forsaking his duties as he luxuriates in Egypt and allows Cleopatra to dominate him. As Philo contemptuously remarks in the first scene, ‘The triple pillar of the world [is] transformed / Into a strumpet’s fool’ (1. 1. 12–13). In the second act Pompey, leading a rebellion against Rome, hopes that Antony will remain out of the way in Egypt and characterizes his life there as an orgy of sensual gratification: all the charms of love, Salt Cleopatra, soften thy wan’d lip! Let witchcraft join with beauty, lust with both, Tie up the libertine in a field of feasts, Keep his brain fuming – Epicurean cooks Sharpen with cloyless sauce his appetite, That sleep and feeding may prorogue his honor, Even till a Lethe’d dullness. (2. 1. 20–7) Antony himself later calls for wine to ‘[steep] our sense / In soft and delicate Lethe’ (2. 7. 107–8), a passage that has been associated with ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.114 Egypt is a world of pleasure, appetite, emotion and languorous ease, presided over by the wanton Cleopatra, who appears witchlike in her ability to captivate and enfeeble warriors, much like Circe in Keats’s Endymion. Her world is also similar to ‘the realm . . . Of Flora, and old Pan’ and of ‘golden-tongued Romance’ in Keats’s poetry.

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Throughout the play Antony is torn between the worlds of Egypt and Rome. In the first scene he dismisses the latter and commits himself to the former as he declares, ‘Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / Of the rang’d empire fall! Here is my space, / Kingdoms are clay. . . . the nobleness of life / Is to do thus [embracing] – when such a mutual pair / And such a twain can do’t’ (1. 1. 33–8). Like Endymion in book 1 and the narrator in book 2 of Keats’s poem, Antony prioritizes love over war and ambition. After a messenger brings news of military and political developments in Rome, however, Antony resolves to return there, saying, ‘These strong Egyptian fetters I must break, / Or lose myself in dotage’ (1. 2. 116–17) and ‘I must from this enchanting queen break off’ (1. 2. 128). Suddenly he fears being emasculated and entrapped by a powerful, ‘enchanting’ woman, much as Glaucus in Endymion wakes from his idyllic tryst to discover that he has become the ‘tranced vassal’ (3. 460) of an evil woman with supernatural powers, or as Keats fears that Fanny Brawne has ‘entrammelled’ him and may sabotage his poetic ambitions. Antony frequently doubts Cleopatra’s loyalty to him. These suspicions come to a head when his naval fleet defects to Caesar and Antony holds Cleopatra responsible, declaring, ‘This foul Egyptian hath betrayed me’ (4. 12. 10). In his anger he loads her with derisive epithets, calling her a ‘Triple-turn’d whore’, ‘false soul of Egypt!’, ‘grave charm’, ‘gypsy’ and ‘witch’ (4. 12. 13, 25, 28, 47). He also says that Cleopatra ‘has robb’d me of my sword’ (4. 14. 23), implying that she has stolen his virility. In a passage that Keats both underlined and quoted in a marginal note, Antony refers to the shifting and dispersing shapes of clouds to characterize his own sense of self-dissolution after what he believes is Cleopatra’s betrayal, saying, ‘here I am Antony, / Yet cannot hold this visible shape’ (4. 14. 2–14).115 Like Keats who fears that thoughts of Fanny Brawne will ‘uncrystallize and dissolve’ him, Antony believes that his love for Cleopatra has undermined the integrity of his own identity.116 When Mardian tells him (falsely) that Cleopatra has killed herself, however, Antony once again commits himself to her and decides to die in order to ‘o’ertake thee, Cleopatra, and / Weep for thy pardon’ (4. 14. 44–5). Like Keats in his letters to Fanny Brawne, Antony is torn between allegiance to a masculine world of heroic deeds, reputation and fixed ego boundaries and self-dissolution in erotic abandonment to the woman he loves. Besides representing emotion and sensuality, Cleopatra also is allied with art and the imagination in contrast to Roman reason and empirical reality. After Antony’s death, Cleopatra tells the Roman soldier Dolabella that she ‘dreamt there was an Emperor Antony’ (5. 2. 76) and goes on to describe

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the Antony of her dream in grandiose terms in a passage beginning ‘His legs bestrid the ocean, his reared arm / Crested the world’ and including the lines, ‘For his bounty, / There was no winter in’t, an [autumn] it was / That grew the more by reaping’ (5. 2. 82–92), which Flesch believes Keats alludes to in ‘To Autumn’. Cleopatra asks Dolabella if he believes ‘there was or might be such a man / As this I dreamt of?’ to which he responds ‘no’, denying that such an ideal being could actually exist (5. 2. 93–4). She, however, asserts that her vision of a larger-than-life Antony is true. As Janet Adelman notes, the passage demonstrates the way love ‘creates its own imaginative versions of reality’. The conclusion of the play overall, in which the two lovers declare they will meet and love forever in the afterlife, is expressed in such gorgeous, moving language that we are left with ‘the feeling of assent in spite of all logic’.117 Keats early in his career famously declared that ‘The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth. I am the more zealous in this affair, because I have never yet been able to perceive how any thing can be known for truth by consequitive reasoning’ (Letters, 1: 185). Keats here speaks like Cleopatra in declaring the power of the imagination to make one’s dreams a reality, even if this belief defies the way truth and reality are defined by ‘consequitive reasoning’. The story of Endymion likewise is based on the premise that an ideal woman encountered in dreams can turn out to be real if one persists in pursuing and believing in her. White believes that Antony and Cleopatra gave Keats ‘precedent for believing in the truth of imagination’ in that the principal characters ‘do not allow literal reality to dislodge their imaginative conceptions of each other’, citing Cleopatra’s ‘His legs bestrid the ocean’ speech as illustration.118 In the play, however, the lovers’ visions are opposed in numerous ways. Antony as we have seen is criticized for ‘mak[ing] his will / Lord of his reason’ (3. 13. 3–4) by following Cleopatra. Enobarbus, who speaks the above line, frequently deflates Antony’s romantic declarations with cynical remarks, many of which Keats underscored in his copy of the play.119 The self-disciplined, pragmatic Caesar proves victorious over the lovers, thereby calling into question the validity of their beliefs. Keats’s work also expresses distrust of the imagination, especially a visionary form that transports one away from the familiar world to a timeless realm of bliss. If he declares his faith in the truth of the imagination in the November 1817 letter to Bailey, in March 1818 he tells Bailey, ‘I am sometimes so very skeptical as to think Poetry itself a mere Jack a lanthern to amuse whoever may chance to be struck with its brilliance’ (Letters, 1: 242). As we have seen, Endymion in various ways calls into question the protagonist’s commitment to his visionary

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goddess, denouncing her as ‘nothing but a dream’, and Keats’s King Lear sonnet rejects Romance, which creates an ideal but false portrait of existence, for art that depicts a more painful but accurate version of human life. In his odes, Keats challenges the ideal world of art and the imagination, finds it false and cold, and increasingly embraces the empirical world he initially sought to transcend. Keats’s poems, like Antony and Cleopatra, frequently juxtapose belief in and distrust of dreams and the imagination. Several critics have claimed that one of the major elements in Shakespeare’s plays to which Keats responded was their many contrasts and oppositions, a principle that is also central to Keats’s poetry.120 Of all Shakespeare’s plays, Antony and Cleopatra may be the one most conspicuously structured around contrasting perspectives. Carol Cook states that it is ‘arguably the most schematic of Shakespeare’s plays. Though Shakespeare uses schematic oppositions throughout his dramatic corpus . . . the detail with which the oppositions are worked out in Antony and Cleopatra is exceptional, as though binariness itself . . . is offered to our attention.’121 Moreover, the particular oppositions the play treats – imagination and reality, emotion and reason, love and work, self-loss and self-affirmation, sensation and thoughts, luxury and stoicism, feminine and masculine – are those that most haunted Keats’s work. The special distinction of Antony and Cleopatra, however, is not simply its binary oppositions but its radical ambiguity. The question of which world and value system, that of Egypt or Rome, is privileged in the play has been exhaustively debated, and most critics now concur with the view that neither prevails over the other but that the play presents the pros and cons, the validity and hollowness, of both.122 The play’s ambiguity centres around the motives and personalities of the major characters, especially Cleopatra. As we have seen, various characters in the play, including Antony, both condemn her in the harshest terms as a whore, a witch and a gypsy and also praise her as a goddess, a ‘great fairy’ (4. 8. 12), and ‘a lass unparallel’d’ (5. 2. 316). Not only is she perceived as both benign goddess and demon but in her ‘infinite variety’ (2. 2. 235) she appears as a larger-than-life, supernatural being and as a common woman. Keats marked Cleopatra’s jealous desire to learn how tall Antony’s wife Octavia is (2. 5. 118), a passage White says reflects Keats’s interest in the ‘petty humanity’ of ‘grand, heroic’ characters.123 Keats also asterisked Antony’s remark to Cleopatra, ‘Fie, wrangling queen!’ (1. 1. 48), and wrote his longest note in the Johnson and Steevens volumes in response: ‘How much more Shakespeare delights in dwelling upon the romantic and wildly natural than upon the monumental – see Winter’s Tale, “When you do dance.” &c’ (Hampstead Keats, 278). Keats’s

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comment, as White states, celebrates the ‘uncontrollable turbulence of the emotions of the lovers’, but as Spurgeon emphasizes it also relishes the way Antony’s remark humanizes the lovers and brings them ‘down to the normal and natural’.124 Cleopatra as Keats recognized is a complex, ambiguous figure whom others perceive as alternately ideal, depraved and approachably human. She is both romance and reality, like the moon goddess and the Indian Maid combined. If Cleopatra’s character and motives are in question, however, so are Antony’s. He too is a mixed figure, ‘painted one way like a Gorgon, / The other way’s a Mars’ (2. 5. 116–17). As is the case with Cleopatra, some characters in the play praise him extravagantly (Agrippa calls him ‘The god of Jupiter’ and ‘Arabian bird’ [3. 2. 10, 12]), while others abuse him for his folly, weakness and degradation. Moreover, if Antony has reason to suspect Cleopatra’s love and faithfulness to him, she likewise has reason to doubt his loyalty to her. When the play opens, he is married to Fulvia, who Cleopatra believes has more power over Antony than she does (1. 3. 22–3). Of herself she says, ‘O, never was there queen / So mightily betrayed’ (1. 3. 24–5). As she goes on to reason, ‘Why should I think you can be mine, and true / (Though you in swearing shake the throned gods), / Who have been false to Fulvia?’ (1. 3. 27–9). Since Antony is cheating on his wife in his affair with Cleopatra, the latter has good reason to suspect that he will not be faithful to her either. Her doubts are confirmed when Antony returns to Rome and, his wife Fulvia having died, marries Octavia in order to cement his alliance with Caesar. In this case, his bond with a powerful man and desire for political influence supersede his love for Cleopatra. Antony proves no more constant to Octavia or Caesar than he does to Cleopatra, however, for despite his protestations of loyalty to both, he soon is in conflict with Caesar and has abandoned Octavia and returned to Cleopatra in Egypt. Even this action may not be motivated purely by his love for Cleopatra, however, for he only decides to return to Egypt after a soothsayer tells him that he will always have ill luck when Caesar is nearby.125 Certainly there is abundant evidence of the instability of Antony’s devotion to the Egyptian queen, so that she may well be justified for her impulses to distrust him and look out for her own safety. Octavius Caesar is also an ambiguous character whom some readers admire for his temperance, pragmatism and ability to rule passion with reason but whom others find ‘cold, Machiavellian, mean-spirited, and a little priggish’.126 Caesar does defeat the forces of Antony of Cleopatra, but for many readers the lovers ultimately prove victorious over him in the grandiosity of their passion, which appears to transcend death as

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well as Caesar’s political schemes. As with the other principal characters, the play generates conflicting perspectives on Caesar’s motives, virtues and flaws. Even the genre of Antony and Cleopatra has provoked controversy. For many commentators, the play contains too many comic and satiric elements to be considered a tragedy, and some feel that it anticipates Shakespeare’s romances in its celebration of the power of love and imagination to create their own reality. Adelman argues that Antony and Cleopatra occupies a middle ground between tragedy and romance. In Shakespeare’s romances, the marvellous literally becomes real, as in The Winter’s Tale when Leontes’s kiss awakens Hermione from her condition as a statue. In Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra’s kiss does not save Antony from death as she desires (4. 15. 39–40), but both of the lovers speak so passionately about reuniting in the afterlife that we partly believe in their eternal union, even though we are never given proof of it. Instead, all that we witness at the play’s end are Caesar and his men viewing and commenting upon the dead bodies of Cleopatra and her attendants. ‘The symbolic pattern of reunion’, Adelman writes, ‘begins to take precedence over any literal-minded questions about how precisely the lovers plan to be together. At these moments, the modes of tragedy and romance are competing; and we must be willing to acknowledge the claims of both.’127 Another dimension of Keats’s concept of Negative Capability is relevant to the rich ambiguity of Antony and Cleopatra. Keats’s defines Negative Capability (‘which Shakespeare posessed so enormously’) as that condition ‘when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason – Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge’ (Letters, 1: 193–4). The truth of human experience is complex, Keats suggests, and those who wish to come closest to understanding and conveying it must remain open to new information and be comfortable with loose ends and grey areas rather than neat conclusions and fixed opinions. A similar point of view is expressed in a 24 September 1819 letter in which Keats explains a flaw in his friend Charles Dilke’s personality. ‘Dilke’, Keats writes, is ‘a Man who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he has made up his Mind about every thing. The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up ones mind about nothing – to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts. Not a select party. . . . Dilke will never come at a truth as long as he lives; because he is always trying at it’ (Letters, 2: 213). Truth for Keats is best acquired by open-mindedness, by discarding

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preconceived notions and entertaining multiple points of view. The greatest artists, exemplified by Shakespeare, create works that reflect this Negatively Capable embrace of multiplicity. All of Shakespeare’s plays can be said to have this quality, but Antony and Cleopatra is arguably his most indeterminable work and the one most productive of competing readings. Deats calls it Shakespeare’s ‘most anamorphic drama, a judgment validated by 350 years of vehemently conflicting interpretations’.128 Keats’s narrative love poems of 1819 most closely parallel the method and achievement of Antony and Cleopatra. The Eve of St. Agnes and Lamia present multiple perspectives in their treatment of male–female relationships, creating a rich ambiguity much like that of Shakespeare’s play regarding victims and predators and competing value systems.129 Homans believes that, however empathetic Keats was generally, he was unable to enter into the feelings of women but instead preferred to keep them at a distance as ‘objects of vision’.130 Although this conclusion may be valid based on the evidence of Keats’s letters, it does not accurately characterize the poems. In his best works Keats achieved the open-minded Negative Capability he praised in Shakespeare. As has frequently been noted, The Eve of St. Agnes is indebted to Romeo and Juliet, featuring as it does young lovers whose families are mortal enemies, a nurse who assists the lovers and a number of other plot parallels and verbal echoes.131 The poem also has important similarities to Antony and Cleopatra, however, which have gone unremarked. Like that play, St. Agnes is structured around contrasts – youth and age, cold and warmth, sensuousness and asceticism, love and hatred, belief and scepticism – which signify competing values and experiences. On one hand are the young lovers, who are associated with images of heat (‘across the moors, / Had come young Porphyro, with heart on fire / For Madeline’ [74–6]), warm colours (‘Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, / And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast . . . Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest / And on her silver cross soft amethyst’ [217–21]) and rich food (‘candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd; / With jellies soother than the creamy curd, / And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon’ [265–7]). When Porphyro ‘melt[s]’ into Madeline’s dream the two unite in a ‘Solution sweet’ (320, 322), much as Endymion ‘melt[s]’ into love’s radiance in his ecstatic encounters with the moon goddess. Opposed to the lovers are the severe winter weather, the elderly Beadsman who denies himself all pleasures of the flesh and Madeline’s father the Baron and his ‘warrior-guests’ (373) who would attack Porphyro if they caught him in the castle. As in Antony and Cleopatra, a world of passion and sensuality at the centre of which is a beautiful, desirable

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woman is contrasted to a world of harsh conditions, stoicism and violence presided over by powerful men. The plot of Keats’s poem revolves around the legend of St. Agnes’ Eve, according to which a young woman who follows certain rituals will dream of her future husband. When Porphyro learns that Madeline is engaged in these rituals he decides to play along and appear in her bedroom as the lover of her dream. In fact, Madeline not only dreams of Poryphro but then wakes to find him at her bedside. Earl Wasserman interprets this incident to reflect Keats’s faith in the imagination, as expressed in his November 1817 letter that declares ‘the Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth’ (Letters, 1: 185). Wasserman also argues that when Porphyro unites with Madeline – ‘Etherial, flush’d, and like a throbbing star / Seen mid the sapphire heaven’s deep repose; / Into her dream he melted’ (318–20) – he enters a heavenly state.132 Like Cleopatra whose dream of Antony as a mythic figure she declares to be true, Madeline’s dream of her ideal lover is realized. Like both Antony and Cleopatra who imagine an eternal life together beyond the grave, the lovers in Keats’s poem are transported by their passion to a heightened reality beyond the ordinary, empirical world. And yet The Eve of St. Agnes, like Antony and Cleopatra, is filled with jarring elements that call into question its ostensible celebration of love and the imagination. Jack Stillinger in an influential reading interprets Porphyro as a calculating seducer who takes advantage of Madeline’s credulous belief in a superstitious ritual in order to have sex with her while she is not fully awake. Madeline herself, according to Stillinger, is a self-deluded figure whose belief in dreams renders her the victim of an unscrupulous man. In Stillinger’s reading of St. Agnes the imagination is false and untrustworthy, and the poem advances the claim that ‘an individual ought not to lose touch with the realities of this world’. Stillinger elsewhere characterizes the major poems of 1819, including The Eve of St. Agnes, as ‘anti-romances’ and ‘skeptical lyrics’ that reject the visionary and marvellous for a firm grounding in the here and now.133 Some readers have discerned in Madeline not a victim of Porphyro’s ‘stratagem’ (139) but a seducer herself. Mary Arseneau points out various ‘threatening aspect[s] of Madeline’ that ally her with femmes fatales in other Keats poems, especially Lamia and the fairy lady in ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. Most significantly, when Madeline undresses she is described as ‘Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed’ (231). As both Arseneau and Fleming McClelland observe, mermaids traditionally are malign supernatural females who often lure men to their deaths. Arseneau further notes that

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when the lovers unite, it is Porphyro who is appropriated by Madeline rather than vice versa. He ‘melt[s]’ into her dream ‘as the rose / Blendeth its odour with the violet, – / Solution sweet’ (320–2). Porphyro’s identity dissolves into and blends with Madeline’s, much as Keats in his letters to Fanny Brawne speaks of being ‘absorb[ed]’ by her, his own selfhood ‘uncrystallize[d]’ and ‘dissolve[d]’ into her being.134 Porphyro also resembles Antony, who feels his identity disperse like shifting clouds. Various readings of Keats’s poem portray Madeline, like the ambiguous Cleopatra, as by turn a divine being, a deadly seductress and the victim of an unscrupulous man. Porphyro, like Antony, is a passionate lover, a cruel ‘traitor’ (Eve of St. Agnes, 330), and the victim of a powerful woman who absorbs his identity in a love union that is both feared and desired. Also like Antony and Cleopatra, The Eve of St. Agnes is composed of multiple generic conventions and shifts in tone. It contains elements of romance and of anti-romance, of tragedy and comedy, and of satire and sentiment. Madeline’s loss of virginity, the realization of which causes her to lament ‘alas! alas! and woe is mine! / Porphyro will leave me here to fade and pine. – / Cruel! What traitor could thee hither bring?’ (328–30), is a serious matter befitting a tragedy, and critics have discerned allusions in Keats’s poem to the rape of Philomel, the rape of Clarissa Harlowe in Richardson’s novel, the villainous Iachimo gazing on the sleeping Imogen in Cymbeline and Satan whispering in the ear of Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost.135 The lovers do not die, however, nor does Porphyro abandon Madeline but runs off with her presumably to make her his bride. Then again, we never learn what happens to the lovers after they ‘fled away into the storm’ (371), and Herbert Wright proposes that they may very well have perished in the hostile elements.136 Porphyro in some passages appears to be a calculating villain but in others he is a sentimental lover, as when he ‘grew faint’ at the sight of Madeline’s purity (224). Elsewhere he comes across as a comic figure; in his dramatic entrance (‘He ventures in: let no buzz’d whisper tell: / All eyes be muffled, or a hundred swords / Will storm his heart, Love’s fev’rous citadel’ [82–4]) he reminds Stuart Sperry of a campy hero of opera or melodrama.137 The harsh note on which the poem ends, with its description of the sleeping revellers’ grotesque nightmares and the report that ‘Angela the old / Died palsy-twitch’d, with meager face deform’ (375–6), ironically undercuts the breathless account of the lovers’ escape from the castle, and in lines his publisher refused to print Keats intended to make the conclusion even more stark and satirical. The poem as revised by Keats reminded Richard Woodhouse of Byron’s comic satire Don Juan, with its ‘style of mingling up sentiment & sneering’ (Letters, 2: 163). As is

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the case with Antony and Cleopatra, the complexity of Keats’s poem results in part from its blending of genres and tones. In Anne Mellor’s words, The Eve of St. Agnes ‘exquisitely balances enthusiasm with skepticism. Everything in the poem is qualified: Keats undercuts his romance with cynicism, his cynicism with romance, his seriousness with comedy, his comedy with seriousness.’138 Mellor’s comments could just as aptly be applied to Antony and Cleopatra without changing a word. Of all Keats’s poems, Lamia, written in the summer of 1819 when his conflicts over love and ambition were at their peak, most closely resembles Antony and Cleopatra. The poem is based on a story related in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, the relevant passage from which Keats included in his 1820 volume. As Burton narrates, a lamia or serpent woman ‘in the habit of a fair gentlewoman’ seduces a young Greek man, ‘a philosopher, otherwise staid and discreet, able to moderate his passions, though not this of love’, who eventually marries her. One of the wedding guests is Apollonius, who exposes the lady and her house as ‘mere illusions . . . and thereupon she, plate, house, and all that was in it, vanished in an instant’ (Poems, 475). Burton’s tale in a number of respects parallels Shakespeare’s play: both feature a rational man who is ruled by his passions when he becomes involved with a beautiful but deceptive and sinister foreigner (she tells him she is a Phoenician but turns out to be of a different species altogether). The lamia is associated not only with love or lust but also the imagination in her ability to change shapes and create illusions. Apollonius, like Caesar, is a cool, self-possessed figure who is immune to the lady’s charms; condemns her as a depraved being; and conquers her and her domain. If the story as narrated by Burton already resembles Antony and Cleopatra, however, several aspects of Keats’s development render it even more Shakespearean.139 Keats’s poem, like Shakespeare’s play, sets up contrasting worlds that reflect opposing values. Lamia’s home is a ‘purple-lined palace of sweet sin’ (2. 31) where she and Lycius dwell in luxurious repose. In opposition to her sensuous, imaginary realm is ‘the noisy world’ (2. 33) Lycius has forsaken, the public arena presided over by his former philosophy teacher Apollonius, a male authority figure associated with scientific rationalism. Lycius, like Antony, vacillates between these two worlds and may be said to perish as a result of his inability to commit himself to either unreservedly.140 In part 2, his idyllic life with his beautiful lady is disrupted when there came a thrill Of trumpets – Lycius started – the sounds fled, But left a thought, a buzzing in his head.

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For the first time, since first he harbour’d in That purple-lined palace of sweet sin, His spirit pass’d beyond its golden bourn Into the noisy world almost forsworn. The lady, ever watchful, penetrant, Saw this with pain, so arguing a want Of something more, more than her empery Of joys; and she began to moan and sigh Because he mused beyond her, knowing well That but a moment’s thought is passion’s passing bell. (2. 27–39) Just as Antony is struck by ‘a Roman thought’ (1. 2. 83) that suddenly makes him dissatisfied with his sensuous life in Egypt with Cleopatra, so Lycius is roused from his ‘long love dream’ (Endymion, 3. 440) by sounds from the busy world that make him eager to re-enter it. Lamia watches her lover’s reaction with uneasiness as she realizes that the pull of the masculine, rational, public realm will alienate him from her. ‘You have deserted me; – where am I now? / Not in your heart while care weighs on your brow: / No, no, you have dismiss’d me’ (2. 42–4), she laments, much as Cleopatra regrets Antony’s abandonment of her when his Roman allegiances become uppermost in his mind. Besides featuring a similar central conflict and trio of major characters, Lamia resembles Antony and Cleopatra in its radical ambiguity and complexity. Whereas in Burton the three principal figures are presented straightforwardly as wicked and false (the snake woman), misguided by passion (Lycius) and triumphant in his ability to discern and banish illusion (Apollonius), in Keats’s poem as in Shakespeare’s play the characters have mixed attributes that make them alternately admirable and deplorable, victim and predator. Most significantly, Keats’s Lamia is much more complex and sympathetic than Burton’s. On one hand, we see Lamia transformed from a serpent into a beautiful woman, waylay Lycius on his journey home from ‘Egina isle’ (1. 225) and tangle his life ‘in her mesh’ (1. 295), seeming to employ malign supernatural powers to ensnare the young man. In one passage she is said to have a ‘Circean head’ (1. 115) and in another she is called ‘The cruel lady, without any show / Of sorrow for her tender favourite’s woe’ (1. 290–1); in other words, she is a belle dame sans merci. She withers and vanishes when Apollonius confronts her and declares her to be ‘A Serpent’ (2. 305), and Lycius perishes as a result of his involvement with her. Many details, however, qualify the impression of Lamia as a sinister being. For one thing, we do not even know for certain if she truly is a serpent. Although we first see her as a snake, she tells Mercury, ‘I was a woman,

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let me have once more / A woman’s shape, and charming as before’ (1. 117–18). According to this account, she was originally a mortal woman who was transformed into a snake, so that when she takes on the appearance of a lovely lady she has resumed her true nature rather than a deceptive disguise. In part 2, the narrator directly states, ‘The serpent – Ha, the serpent! certes, she / Was none’ (2. 80–1). When Lamia first encounters Lycius, he regards her as a goddess and she refers to herself as such, but she eventually ‘threw the goddess off, and won his heart / More pleasantly by playing woman’s part’ (1. 336–7). The statement suggests that she is merely acting the role of a mortal woman, but it could also be construed as implying that the goddess role was the false one, since she discards it easily. Like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, Lamia is alternately an evil supernatural being, a goddess and a common woman. In addition, Lamia’s stated reason for wishing to assume a woman’s form is that she ‘love[s] a youth of Corinth’ (1. 119), and the narrator also explains how she ‘fell into a swooning love’ of Lycius (1. 219). We are not given evidence of any malicious intentions she harbours toward Lycius, and her behaviour throughout the poem suggests that she is truly devoted to him. When he decides he wants to marry her in a public ceremony, she ‘Beseech[es] him, the while his hand she wrung, / To change his purpose’ (2. 68–9), for she knows that she risks being exposed and their life together destroyed, but when he refuses to change his mind she generously agrees to conform to his wishes. In this scene, Lamia appears to be the victim of Lycius’s unfeeling tyranny. When she implores him not to go through with his wedding plans He thereat was stung, Perverse, with stronger fancy to reclaim Her wild and timid nature to his aim: Besides, for all his love, in self despite, Against his better self, he took delight Luxurious in her sorrows, soft and new. His passion, cruel grown, took on a hue Fierce and sanguineous . . . (2. 69–76) Just as Antony at times betrays and hurts Cleopatra, so Lycius here is cruel to Lamia and exercises power over her rather than vice versa. As stated previously, Apollonius is a rational, self-possessed male authority figure like Caesar in Shakespeare’s play. Apollonius condemns Lamia and

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calls Lycius a ‘Fool’ and a ‘serpent’s prey’ (2. 291, 295, 298), much as Antony is derided as a ‘strumpet’s fool’ (1. 1. 13). With his cold, unflinching gaze, Apollonius conquers Lamia, thereby demonstrating the triumph of unsentimental reason and empirical reality over passion and illusion. As Lamia withers and fades ‘with a frightful scream’ (2. 306) under Apollonius’s stern gaze, however, she comes across as a sympathetic victim and he as a heartless oppressor. The narrator offers the following condemnation of the world-view and values Apollonius represents: Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine – Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade. (2. 229–38) As others have noted, the critique of Enlightenment rationalism in this passage is similar to that in Keats’s review of Edmund Kean, where Keats calls on Kean to ‘Cheer us a little in the failure of our days! for romance lives but in books. The goblin is driven from the heath, and the rainbow is robbed of its mystery!’ (Hampstead Keats, 232). Both passages are indebted to Hazlitt’s claim in his lecture ‘On Poetry in General’ that ‘the progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry’ (5: 9).141 In Lamia as in Antony and Cleopatra, reason triumphs over romance and the imagination, but in dying the lovers gain more sympathy for their point of view than does the man who defeats them. Also like Antony and Cleopatra (and The Eve of St. Agnes), Lamia is unusual in its mixture of tones and generic conventions. Probably in reaction to the hostile reviews of Endymion, Keats wanted in Lamia to ‘use more finesse with the Public’ and write a poem that ‘cannot be laugh’d at in any way’. He felt ‘There was no objection of this kind to Lamia’ and had ‘great hopes of success’ with the poem ‘because I make use of my Judgment more deliberately than I yet have done’ (Letters, 2: 174, 128). The poem reflects this concern to forestall ridicule with a knowing, satirical narrator who

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often makes worldly-wise, cynical remarks, such as this at the opening of part 2: Love in a hut, with water and a crust, Is – Love, forgive us! – cinders, ashes, dust; Love in a palace is perhaps at last More grievous torment than a hermit’s fast: – That is a doubtful tale from faery land, Hard for the non-elect to understand. (2. 1–6) The initial description of Lamia as a snake is bizarre and comic, rather than ominous: she is ‘Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, / Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d,’ with a serpent’s head but ‘a woman’s mouth with all its pearls complete’ (1. 49–50, 60). The narrator’s flippant comments often render the main characters silly or foolish and prevent readers from engaging with them fully. And yet, the narrator seems sincere when he condemns ‘cold philosophy’ in part 2, and the poem’s tragic conclusion does arouse sympathy for Lamia and (to a lesser extent) Lycius. The deaths of the protagonists ally the poem with tragedy, though its supernatural elements are more consistent with romance. As with Antony and Cleopatra, comedy, tragedy, satire and romance intermingle in Lamia, contributing to the work’s many-sidedness and ambiguity.142 Keats’s direct allusions to Antony and Cleopatra are not particularly revealing and by themselves might not suggest that the play was especially important to him. In addition, compared to some other Shakespeare works, we find relatively few verbal echoes of Antony and Cleopatra in Keats’s oeuvre. Nonetheless, Keats’s poems, especially his love narratives, have striking parallels with major features of Shakespeare’s tragedy. The play’s central conflicts – between passion and reason, love and ambition, luxury and discipline, the imagination and reality, selflessness and identity, masculine and feminine, belief and scepticism, realism and romance – are integral to many of Keats’s works. In addition, the central characters in Shakespeare’s play—an exotic woman who alternately appears sinister and divine, loving and treacherous; a man who wavers between adoring and condemning the lady and who himself appears cruel and disloyal at times; and a rational, successful man firmly in control of himself and his fate – have corollaries in Endymion, The Eve of St. Agnes and Lamia. Finally, the radical ambiguity of Antony and Cleopatra, which has generated a remarkable number of opposing interpretations, is likewise characteristic of Keats’s best poems. In these works, Keats demonstrates the dimension of Negative Capability

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that involves remaining open to divergent viewpoints without ‘irritabl[y] reaching after’ a single, unified perspective. This quality, ‘which Shakespeare posessed so enormously’, is particularly on display in Antony and Cleopatra, his ‘most anamorphic drama’.143 If this work informed Keats’s own tendency to structure his poems around central conflicts and contrasting figures and images, which never resolve themselves into fixed conclusions but instead generate radically different responses from readers, we have good reason to accept Bryan Waller Procter’s claim that Antony and Cleopatra was Keats’s favourite Shakespeare play.

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Notes

Introduction 1

2

3

4 5 6

7

8

9

10

Born in 1771, Scott belongs to the same generation as Coleridge, Lamb and Hazlitt, but his novels, beginning with Waverley in 1814, become such an enduring presence through the rest of the nineteenth century that he is more appropriately partnered in vol. 5 by Dickens, Eliot and Hardy. The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1: 386–7 and 224. Hereafter cited in the text as Letters. Lamb as Critic, ed. Roy Park (London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 300. Park, Lamb as Critic, 243. R. S. White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 32. Quotations from Hazlitt are from The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1930–4); references are to volume and page. Cf. King Henry IV, Part I, 3. 3. 122–8. References are to The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 7 vols (London, 1903–5); to volume and page. Arnold: The Complete Poems, ed. Miriam Allott (London and New York: Longman, 1979), 39–40. Keats’s poems are quoted from The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); here, page 225. Essays in Criticism, 2nd Series (London: Dent, 1964), 291.

Chapter 13 1

2

3

4

5

‘On the Conversation of Authors’, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London, 1930–4), 12: 35. Hereafter cited in text as Howe; references are to volume and page. Jonathan Bate, ‘Lamb on Shakespeare’, Charles Lamb Bulletin 51 (1985, July): 76–85 (77). The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, 3 vols (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 1: 48. Hereafter cited in text as Marrs. The original spelling and punctuation of the Lambs’ letters has been retained. See Mary Blanchard Balle, ‘Mary Lamb: Her Mental Health Issues’, Charles Lamb Bulletin 93 (1996): 2–11. Jane Aaron, A Double Singleness: Gender and the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 3.

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Notes 6

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8

9

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12 13

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19 20

21 22

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The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 8 vols (London: Methuen, 1912), 2: 87. Hereafter cited in text as Lucas; references are to volume and page. This edition is generally cited as standard. However, there is also an earlier edition, The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. by E. V. Lucas, 7 vols (London: Methuen, 1903–5), a large format edition which contains additional material, including several theatre reviews by Lamb, as well as the full texts of Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived about the Time of Shakspeare (1808). This will also be occasionally cited in the text as Lucas, 1903. Lamb as Critic, ed. Roy Park (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 18. 6 August 1832, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols, vol. 14 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series 75 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 2: 417. As Valerie L. Gager has noted, Dickens was familiar with Lamb’s Shakespeare and theatre criticism as well as the Tales, commenting, for instance, on how Lamb ‘gossips so delightfully’ about Twelfth Night. See Gager, Shakespeare and Dickens: The Dynamics of Influence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 135. Charles Lamb, Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived about the Time of Shakspeare: With Notes (London: 1808), 112. References will be to the first edition and will be cited in text as Specimens. Helen E. Haworth, ‘Keats’s Copy of Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poetry’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 74 (1970): 419–27 (422). Ibid. Letters of John Keats, ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1: 387–8. Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. J. Bate, 2 vols, vol. 7 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series 75 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2: 27. Jonathan Bate was among the first to notice the ways in which Coleridge’s distinction between Shakespeare and Milton mirrors Lamb’s earlier comparison between Chapman and Shakespeare; he also posited a ‘less direct’ link with Keats which can now, with the publication of Keats’s annotations on Specimens, also be substantiated. See Jonathan Bate, ‘Lamb on Shakespeare’, 80–2. Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1938), 1: 17. Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne (London: Penguin Classics, 2001), 3. Walter Pater, Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan, 1901), 109–11. A Selection from the Literary Criticism of Charles Lamb, ed. E. M. W. Tillyard (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1923), ix, xi. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 3 (April–September 1818), 607. Pater, Appreciations, 75–6; A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1909), 105. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 208. W. K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Knopf, 1957), 494.

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798 23

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27 28

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36 37 38

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41 42 43

Notes

René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, Vol. 2: The Romantic Age (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 192. Thomas Noon Talfourd, Memoirs of Charles Lamb, ed. Percy Fitzgerald (London: 1892), 129–30. Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 132. Ibid., 132. Jonathan Arac, in ‘The Media of Sublimity: Johnson and Lamb on King Lear’, Studies in Romanticism (1987): 209–20, similarly argues that Lamb ‘attacked the public and relied instead on an elite of individual readers’ (212). Anti-Jacobin Review (1798), 178. David Fairer, ‘Baby Language and Revolution: The Early Poetry of Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd’, Charles Lamb Bulletin 74 (1991): 33–52 (35). The Life and Correspondence of the Late Robert Southey, ed. C. C. Southey, 6 vols (London, 1849), 1: 345. Younglim Han, Romantic Shakespeare, from Stage to Page (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001), see ch. 1 and 3, and pp. 135 and 143. Janet Ruth Heller, Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), see ch. 5, and pp. 119 and 127. Martin Buzacott, The Death of the Actor: Shakespeare on Page and Stage (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 91. Morning Chronicle, 29 December 1794. Published with some minor changes (the ‘Warlock hags’ become simply ‘those hags’, for instance) in Poems 1796 and Poems 1797, attributed in both instances to Lamb. However, in the 1803 edition of Poems on Various Subjects, published by Longman and Rees, where Lamb’s work does not appear at all, this poem is reprinted and attributed solely to Coleridge. Joan Coldwell, ‘The Playgoer as Critic: Charles Lamb on Shakespeare’s Characters’, Shakespeare Quarterly 26: 2 (1975, Spring): 184–95 (184). See also Peter Holland’s essay on Garrick in vol. 2 of this series, Garrick, Kemble, Siddons, Kean: Vol. 2, ed. Peter Holland (London: Continuum). Quoted by Michael R. Booth, ‘Sarah Siddons’, Three Tragic Actresses, ed. Michael R. Booth, John Stokes, Susan Bassnett (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 18. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 19. Anna Seward, The Swan of Lichfield, ed. Hesketh Pearson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937), 68. See Judith Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 19. ‘Sonnet, to Mrs. Siddons’. In Helen Maria Williams, Poems, by Helen Maria Williams. In Two Volumes (London, 1786), 179–80. Charles Valentine Le Grice, The Tineum. Containing Estianomy, or the Art of Stirring a Fire: The Icead, a Mock-Heroic Poem: An Imitation of Horace (Cambridge, UK: B. Flower, 1794), 45. Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality, 32. Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions, 134. Mary Jacobus, ‘“That Great Stage Where Senators Perform”: Macbeth and the Politics of Romantic Theatre’, Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference: Essays on the Prelude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 37–8.

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Notes 44

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48 49

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55 56

57 58 59 60

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Morning Chronicle, 22 December 1794. For details of the arrests and trials see John Barrell and Jon Mee, Trials for Treason and Sedition, 1792–1794, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006–7), 1: xxvii–ix. 1, addressed to Erskine, appeared on 1 December 1794; 2, to Burke, on 9 December 1794; 3, to Priestley, on 11 December 1794; 4, to Fayette, on 15 December 1794; 5, to Kosciusko, on 16 December 1794; 6, to Pitt, on 23 December 1794; 7, to Bowles, on 26 December 1794; 8, to Siddons, on 29 December 1794; 9, to Godwin, on 10 January 1795; 10, to Southey, on 14 January 1795; 11, to Sheridan, on 29 January 1795. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), 1: 277. W. H. Ireland, An Authentic Account of the Shaksperian Manuscripts, &c. By W. H. Ireland. (London: 1796), 12. Ireland, An Authentic Account of the Shaksperian Manuscripts, 3. Southey, for instance, thought that White and Lamb were ‘joint authors’ of the book; John Matthew Gutch, for instance, suggested that Lamb had given White ‘incidental hints and corrections’. See the (anonymous) introduction to James White, Falstaff’s Letters [...] with Notices of the Author Collected from Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt and Other Contemporaries (London: 1877), xix. Original Letters: &c. of Sir John Falstaff and His Friends; Now First Made Public by a Gentleman, a Descendant of Dame Quickly, from Genuine Manuscripts Which Have Been in the Possession of the Quickly Family Near Four Hundred Years (London: 1796), xii. For more on the William Henry Ireland scandal, see Nick Groom, The Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature (London: Picador, 2002), 218–55 and Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997), 83–91. Jeffrey Kahan, Reforging Shakespeare: The Story of a Theatrical Scandal (London: Associated University Press, 1998), deals in detail with William Henry Ireland, his family and the staging of Vortigern. Original Letters of Sir John Falstaff, 122; see also T. W. Craik, ‘Jem White and Falstaff’s Letters’, Charles Lamb Bulletin 91 (1995): 118–29 (121). Original Letters of Sir John Falstaff, ix. William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (1767; rpt. New York: Garland, 1970), 287. See also Robert Macfarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 20. Original Letters of Sir John Falstaff, xxiii. For a general discussion, see Brian Vickers, ‘The emergence of character criticism, 1774–1800’. In Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 34 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11–22 (16). The Examiner, 5 September 1819, 569–70. Ibid., 570. Ibid. David Chandler, ‘Lamb, Falstaff’s Letters, and Landor’s Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare’, Charles Lamb Bulletin 131 (2005): 76–85. See also Chandler’s essay on the authorial games of the volume, its allusions and later uses: ‘Charles Lamb, James White, Shakespeare’s Papers, and John Warburton’s Cook’, Doshisha University Academic Repository, , accessed 1 May 2009.

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800 61

62

63

64

65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85

86 87 88

Notes

The quotation is in fact taken, slightly altered, from Southey’s poem ‘Rosamund to Henry; Written after She Had Taken the Veil’, published in his collaborative volume with his friend Robert Lovell, Poems, Containing ‘The Retrospect’ (London: Bath, 1795), 85–96. ‘Introduction’. King Richard III, ed. Janis Lull (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 25. Coldwell, ‘The Playgoer as Critic’, 188. Coldwell notes how Lamb’s character readings of Richard shaped the criticism of Tillyard and John D. Wilson, and discusses his view of Malvolio at length. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. by E. V. Lucas, 7 vols (London: Methuen, 1903–5), I: 36; this will hereafter be cited as Lucas, 1903. This may be a conscious allusion to the disparagement of Garrick by his rival Charles Macklin, discussed by Peter Holland in his essay on Garrick in vol. 2 of this series. ‘Garrick huddled all passions into strut and quickness,’ commented Macklin, ‘– bustle was his favourite. In the performance of a Lord Townly he was all bustle. In Archer, Ranger, Don John, Hamlet, Macbeth, Brute – all bustle! bustle! bustle!’ Lamb’s self-conscious quotation marks seem to point back to this earlier controversy and Macklin’s assertion that the ‘whole art of acting, according to the modern practice, is compriz’d in – bustle!’ ‘Prospectus’, The Reflector, 2 vols (1811), 1: v. Ibid., 1: iv–v. Ibid., 1: vi. Ibid., 2: 322. Ibid., 1: vi. Ibid., 1: 30. Ibid., 1: 35–43. Legacy for the Ladies [...]With a Comical View of London and Westminster, ed. Thomas Brown (London: 1705), 116. Reflector, 1: 381. Ibid., 2: 124. Ibid., 1: 424–7. Ibid., 1: 434. Ibid., 2: 299; 303. See Wayne McKenna, Charles Lamb in the Theatre (Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1978), 19–36 and John I. Ades, ‘Charles Lamb, Shakespeare, and Early Nineteenth-Century Theater’, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 85: 3 (1970, May): 514–26. Reflector, 2: 311. Ibid., 2: 305. Ibid., 2: 302. Ibid., 2: 304–5. Ibid., 2: 304. Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 16. Aaron, Double Singleness, 145. Reflector, 2: 73. Ibid., 2: 62.

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Notes 89 90 91

92 93

94 95

96 97

98

99

100

101 102

103

104

105

106

107 108

801

Ibid., 2: 62, 64. Ibid., 2: 65. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 3 (April–September 1818), 605; Wimsatt and Brooks, Literary Criticism, 494. Reflector, 2: 303. Simon Hull, ‘The Ideology of the Unspectacular: Theatricality and Charles Lamb’s Essayistic Figure’, Romantic Spectacle, ed. John Halliwell and Ian Haywood, Romanticism on the Net 46 (2007). Hull’s excellent essay differs from my viewpoint here in arguing for a distinct ‘difference in attitude towards theatre between the pre-Elian and Elian Lamb’, whereas I see a continuity between Elia and Lamb’s earlier exploration of essayistic voice in the Reflector periodicals and appropriations of Shakespeare. The London Magazine (July–December 1822), 36. See Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen, Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), and Colin Franklin, Shakespeare Domesticated: The Eighteenth Century Editions (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1991) for a discussion of the evolution of eighteenth-century editions and their critical practice. London Magazine (July–December 1822), 34. To Mrs. Southey, May 1804; to S. T. Coleridge, 11 June 1804; The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey (1855), 180–1. For a full account of Southey’s and Wordsworth’s partial involvement in the volume, see Marrs, 2: 255n. In quoting from the Extracts, I use the text reprinted in E. V. Lucas’s large format edition of The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, 7 vols (London: Methuen, 1903–4), 4: 397, cited in text as Lucas, 1903. I use the first edition of Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakspeare: With Notes (London: 1808), cited in text as Specimens. John Coates, ‘Lamb’s Bias in Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets’, Charles Lamb Bulletin 39 (1982): 125–43 (126). Gillian Russell, ‘Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets: The Publishing Context and the Principles of Selection’, Charles Lamb Bulletin, 65 (1989): 1–8 (3). Biographical sketch written for William Upcott, 10 April 1827, Lucas, 1: 376. Martin Garrett, Massinger: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 21. While drawing attention to the high standards of Gifford’s editing, Garrett suggests that Gifford’s Massinger is essentially an ‘establishment’ figure – perhaps a contributing factor in Massinger’s declining popularity. Tom Lockwood, Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 85–6. Don D. Moore, John Webster: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 49, 8. Thomas Dabbs, Reforming Marlowe: The Nineteenth-Century Canonization of a Renaissance Dramatist (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1991), 31–6. ‘Preface’. In Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vols 7 and 8 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 7: 71. Ibid. Ibid., 7: 72.

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802 109 110

111 112 113

114

115 116

117 118 119 120 121 122

123

124

125

126

127

128

129

130

Notes

Ibid., 7: 71. Essay, Supplementary to the Preface (1815), The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 3: 69. Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions, 148. Ibid. ‘“Lecture 4,” 1808 Lectures on Principles of Poetry’. In Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, V, Bollingen Series, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 1: 78–9. A notice is published in the Monthly Literary Advertiser for July 1808 (p. 50), but as Marrs remarks, this is probably premature; he notes that the firm’s ledgers point to its publication in early September (Marrs, 2: 255). Sherbo, Johnson on Shakespeare, 7: 62. Ibid., 7: 71–4. Even as far back as Falstaff’s Letters, there is a parodic allusion to this passage, when the ‘editor’ comments on the man of genius who turns aside to ‘catch at a Golden Apple’; The Original Letters of Sir John Falstaff , xxiii. Sherbo, Johnson on Shakespeare, 7: 67. Reflector, 2: 303. Sherbo, Johnson on Shakespeare, 7: 81–2. Russell, ‘Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets’, 4. Ibid., 6. ‘Four Elizabethan Dramatists’. In T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), 109–10. Parts of this section have already been published as an article, “‘Wild tales” from Shakespeare: Readings of Charles and Mary Lamb’, Shakespeare 2: 2 (2006, December) < http://www.informaworld.com> accessed 1 May 2009, and I am grateful to the publishers for permission to include the material here. F. J. Harvey Darton, Children’s Books in England. Five Centuries of Social Life (1932), 3rd ed., rev. Brian Alderson (Newcastle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1999), 191. Crosscurrents of Criticism: Horn Book Essays 1968–1977, ed. Paul Heins (Boston, MA: Horn Book, 1977), viii. Jean I. Marsden, ‘Shakespeare for Girls: Mary Lamb and Tales from Shakespeare’, Children’s Literature, ed. Francelia Butler, Margaret Higonnet and Barbara Rosen, vol. 17 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989): 47–63 (51). Joseph E. Riehl, Charles Lamb’s Children’s Literature, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 94 (Salzburg, Austria: University of Salzburg Press, 1980), 178. Disturbed by Political Justice, Lamb had been generally hostile to Godwin and his ‘cold hearted well bred conceited disciple[s]’ (Marrs, 1: 22) during the 1790s; however, when the two met in 1800, Lamb recorded himself ‘a good deal pleased’ with Godwin, ‘a well behaved decent man’ (Marrs, 1: 185–6). Pamela Clemit, ‘Philosophical Anarchism in the Schoolroom: William Godwin’s “Juvenile Library,” 1805–25’, Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 9: 1/2 (2000–2001): 44–70 (45). See Brian Alderson, ‘“Mister Gobwin” and His “Interesting Little Books, Adorned with Beautiful Copper-Plates”’, Princeton University Library Chronicle 59 (1998): 159–89 and David Foxon, ‘The Chapbook Editions of the Lambs’ Tales from

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Notes

131 132

133

134 135 136

137 138 139

140 141

142

143

144

145

146

147

148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155

803

Shakespear’, Book Collector 6: 1 (1957): 41–53, for a full discussion of these very rare small sixpenny editions. Clemit, ‘Philosophical Anarchism in the Schoolroom’, 45–6. William Godwin, ‘Autobiography’. In The Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, vol. 1, ed. Pamela Clemit, Maurice Hindle and Mark Philp, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), 1: 42. William Godwin, Educational and Literary Writings, vol. 5, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin Series, ed. Pamela Clemit and Mark Philp, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), 313–14. Godwin, Educational and Literary Writings, 315. Godwin, ‘Autobiography’, 42; Educational and Literary Writings, 142. C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols (London: H. S. King, 1876), 2: 119. Anti-Jacobin Review (1807), 298. Marsden, ‘Shakespeare for Girls’, 60. Susan Wolfson, ‘Explaining to Her Sisters: Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespear’. In Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare: On the Responses of Dickinson, Woolf, Rich, H. D., George Eliot, and Others, ed. Marianne Novy (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990): 16–40 (23). Tales from Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (London: 1809). Edith Nesbit, Children’s Stories from Shakespeare (London: Raphael Tuck & Sons Ltd, 1897), 14. Leon Garfield, Shakespeare Stories (London: Victor Gollancz, 1985); many thanks to Leon Garfield’s sister, Karen Gunnell, for kindly introducing me to these stories and the animated Tales. Tales from Shakespeare, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Folio Society, 2003). Tales from Shakespeare, Penguin Readers, Level 5 (London: Pearson, Longman, 1999). Murray J. Levith, Shakespeare in China (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 4. Tales from Shakespeare, ed. Kay Strang, illustrated by Gary Andrews (Blairgowrie, Perkshire, UK: Capercaillie Books, 2002). Dorothy Parker and Ross Evans, The Coast of Illyria: A Play in Three Acts, introduced by Arthur F. Kinney (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1990). Kinney comments that Parker was probably responsible for the writing of the play; she gave her collaborator and partner at the time, Evans, ‘primary credit for helping her research the play and for going to the library for the countless books which she said she consulted’ (29). Parker and Evans, The Coast of Illyria, 87. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 159. Peter Ackroyd, The Lambs of London (London: Chatto and Windus, 2004). Ibid., 98. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 215.

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804 156 157

Notes

Ibid., 211. Parker and Evans, The Coast of Illyria, 136.

Chapter 14 1

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Letter to Thomas Wedgewood, 16 September 1803. See S. T. Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), 2: 990. The best analysis of the importance of painting in Hazlitt’s thought and writing is Roy Park’s Hazlitt and the Spirit of the Age: Abstraction and Critical Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). All quotations from Hazlitt are taken from The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1930–4). References are by volume and page. The phrase echoes David Hume’s famous comment: ‘my Treatise of Human Nature . . . fell dead-born from the press’ (Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1985), xxxiv). Hazlitt’s seemingly self-mocking remark, once it is recognized as a version of Hume’s description of his own first philosophical publication, is revealed to be a coded assertion of pride. The allusion suggests that the cold reception of Hazlitt’s treatise is comparably at odds, as in Hume’s case, with the real worth of the work. P. P. Howe identifies this as Hazlitt’s last attempt in professional portraiture: see P. P. Howe, The Life of William Hazlitt, intro. Frank Swinnerton (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1947), 132. For Crabb Robinson’s diary entry, see H. C. Robinson, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, ed. E. J. Morley, 3 vols (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd, 1938), 1: 104. This section on Hazlitt and Kean, with the ensuing section on Coleridge and Lamb, is largely taken from my article, ‘Hazlitt and Kean’, The Hazlitt Review I (2008): 17–26. See my Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense: Criticism, Morals, and the Metaphysics of Power (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), especially 24–6, 29–31. Failing in Shakespeare, Kean succeeds more completely in parts that are close enough to Shakespearean roles to bring out his skills, without exposing their shortcomings. Just outside the period of the review sequence under discussion, in the character of Zanga in Edward Young’s Revenge, ‘his general style of acting is . . . completely adapted’ to the part (5: 227). As Bajazet in Nicholas Rowe’s Tamerlane, ‘Mr. Kean did justice to his author, or went the whole length of the text’ (18: 205). In Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense, I argue the parallels between Hazlitt’s idealism and Kant’s, but without any claim that Kant directly influenced Hazlitt. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (2nd ed. 1759; rpt. Menston, UK: Scholar Press, 1970), 264. For instance, Lecture 12 of Coleridge’s 1811–12 lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, some or all of which Hazlitt attended, begins with the ‘ruling impulse’ or ‘reigning impulse’ in Shakespeare’s characters. See S. T. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Samuel

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13

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17 18 19

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805

Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen series 75, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 1: 377. In his 1811 essay, ‘On the Genius and Character of Hogarth’, Lamb also refers to the ‘ruling character’ of Hogarth’s works, immediately before he goes on to compare Hogarth with Shakespeare. See The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas (London: Methuen, 1903–5), 1: 70. Further references to Lamb are to this edition. Pope, in a passage from his Preface to Shakespeare that Hazlitt quotes at the opening of Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, is probably Hazlitt’s source here: ‘every single character in Shakespear, is as much an individual, as those in life itself; it is as impossible to find any two alike; and such, as from their relation or affinity in any respect appear most to be twins, will upon comparison, be found remarkably distinct.’ See The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, Vol II: The Major Works, 1725–1744, ed. R. Cowler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 13–14. In Lecture 12 of the 1811–12 series, Coleridge also draws on this passage, when he makes it a ground of Shakespeare’s superiority to other dramatists, ‘that this great man could take two characters which seem to be the same (at first sight) and yet when minutely examined are totally distinct’ (Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, 1: 378). Shakespeare’s Protean ability is posited by Coleridge in his 1808 lectures at the Royal Institution, as well as throughout the 1811–12 lectures at the London Philosophical Society, including Lecture 3, at which Hazlitt was certainly present. See Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, 1: 69, 225; Hazlitt’s attendance at Lecture 3 of the 1811–12 series is confirmed by J. P. Collier’s records (Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, 1: 232–3). Lamb’s version of the premise can be found in a note to his selections from Chapman, in Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare (1808), as well as in his 1811 essay, ‘On the Genius and Character of Hogarth’ (Works, 4: 83 and 1: 78). According to A. G. L’Estrange, in an annotation to a reference, in one of Mary Russell Mitford’s letters, to Hazlitt’s reviews of Kean in the Chronicle: ‘The belief of the time was, that Hazlitt received 1500l. from the management of Drury Lane for those articles. They made Kean’s reputation and saved the theatre.’ A. G. L’Estrange, ed., The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, Related in a Selection from her Letters to her Friends, 3 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1870), 2: 47n. Emily Allen, ‘Section Introduction: The Low-Down on Romantic Theater’, European Romantic Review 18: 2 (2007, April): 135–8. Friedrich Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, trans. H. WatanabeO’Kelly (Manchester, UK: Carcanet New Press, 1981), 42. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 39. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, 1: 225, 289. Coleridge draws the distinction between copy and imitation in his 1808 lecture series (ibid., 1: 83), and repeatedly in the 1811–12 series (ibid., 1: 223, 289, 349). Janet Ruth Heller’s Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1990), offers an overview of the way in which the distrust of the senses informs the romantic critics’ attitude to drama, and of the intellectual origins of that distrust from the aesthetics of Plato and Aristotle onwards. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, 1: 254.

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806 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

32

33

34

35 36

37

38

39

40 41

Notes

Ibid., 1: 270. Ibid., 1: 410. Ibid., 1: 179. Ibid., 1: 306. Lamb, Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1: 99. Ibid., 1: 108. Ibid., 1: 108. Ibid., 1: 98. There is an echo here of Coleridge’s reiterated emphasis on the union of poet and philosopher in Shakespeare (see, for instance, Coleridge, Lectures 1808– 1819 on Literature, 1: 230, 267). Germanic ‘mysticism’ is a fault that Hazlitt elsewhere also attributes to Coleridge, and might account, perhaps for the absence of any mention of Coleridge in Characters. Another reason, personal and political animosity aside, might have been that Hazlitt judged Coleridge’s commentaries on Shakespeare, then unpublished, and with which he was familiar mainly from his sporadic attendance at Coleridge’s lectures, to be too disembodied to warrant mention. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, 1: 225. Coleridge draws the distinction between copy and imitation in his 1808 lecture series (ibid., 1: 83), and repeatedly in the 1811–12 series (ibid., 1: 223, 289, 349). See, for instance, Lecture 2 of the 1811–12 series, where Coleridge declares that Shakespeare’s judgement is the ‘most wonderful’ of his powers (ibid., 1: 210); this insistence on Shakespeare’s ‘judgement’ is found throughout Coleridge’s commentary on Shakespeare. A. W. Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black, 2 vols (London: Baldwin & Co., 1815), 2: 94. Ibid., 2: 128. Philip Davis’s excellent essay, ‘“The Future in the Instant”: Hazlitt’s Essay and Shakespeare’, in Metaphysical Hazlitt: Bicentenary Essays, ed. U. Natarajan, T. Paulin and D. Wu (London: Routledge, 2005), 43–55, offers a detailed account of Hazlitt’s sense of the ceaseless dynamic of action and reaction in Shakespearean drama. The single exception is Theseus’ description of his hounds in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (4. 1. 119–27), of which Hazlitt remarks, ‘Even Titian never made a hunting-piece of a gusto so fresh and lusty’ (4: 247). Here, too, however, ‘gusto’ is the character’s (Theseus’), rather than the author’s. David Bromwich finds that ‘Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays is misleadingly titled in one sense; though it contains unforgettable sketches of many individual characters, the larger concern of the book is power.’ See his ‘Hazlitt on Shakespeare and the Motives of Power’, The Hazlitt Review I (2008): 5–15, 5. ‘The Prince on St. Patrick’s Day’ (22 March 1812) in The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt, Vol. I: Periodical Essays, 1805–14, ed. G Kucich and Jeffrey N. Cox (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), 221. Lamb, Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1: 99. Hazlitt’s sense of Kean’s radicalism is in line with Kean’s own political sympathies. For an account of Kean’s radical leanings, see Peter Thomson’s essay on Kean in vol. 2 of the present series.

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Notes 42

43

44

45 46 47

48 49 50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58 59

807

Francis Jeffrey, ‘Hazlitt on Shakespeare’, Edinburgh Review 28 (August 1817): 472–88; see 480–2 for the extracts from Hazlitt’s essays on Julius Caesar and Coriolanus. The Examiner, 26 October 1817, 683; 2 November 1817, 697–8; 23 November 1817, 746–8. J. H. Reynolds, Selected Prose of John Hamilton Reynolds, ed. Leonidas M. Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 113. The New Monthly Magazine viii (August 1817), 51. The British Critic ix (January 1818): 15–22, 19, 21. John Kinnaird, William Hazlitt: Critic of Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 166. L’Estrange, Life of Mary Russell Mitford, 2: 47. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, 1: 244. See Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 209–11. A. O. Lovejoy, ‘Schiller and the Genesis of German Romanticism’. In Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1948), 207–27, esp. 220–7. Here, as in other instances of concurrence between German romantic thought and Hazlitt’s, my claim is not influence, but only analogy or correspondence. Cf. Lamb’s announcement in the Preface to his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets of his intention ‘To show . . . how much of Shakspeare shines in the great men his contemporaries, and how far in his divine mind and manners he surpassed them and all mankind’ (Works, 4: xii). In Jane Moody’s admirable summary, ‘in the years following Waterloo, legitimacy came to define its corrupt inversion: that form of government not legitimated by the consent of the people’ – Jane Moody, ‘“Fine Word, Legitimate!” Towards a Theatrical History of Romanticism’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 38: 3/4 (fall/winter 1996): 223–44, 231. See also Moody’s analysis, far more detailed than mine, of Hazlitt’s complex response to Kean’s Coriolanus (ibid., 235–7). I have already suggested (Note 12) that Pope was Hazlitt’s source for the notion of ‘ruling character’. The phrase ‘ruling passion’, well known in Hazlitt’s time from Pope’s Essay on Man and his Moral Essays enables us to locate the origins of Hazlitt’s notion of ‘bias’ also to some extent in Pope’s psychological theory. In the Essay on Man, ‘So, cast and mingled with his very frame,/The Mind’s disease, its ruling passion came’ (Epistle II, ll. 137–8), and in the Moral Essays, Pope laments that ‘The ruling Passion, be it what it will,/The ruling Passion conquers Reason still’ (Epistle III, ll. 155–6). For Hazlitt, however, ‘bias’ is more than merely ‘The Mind’s disease’; as we have seen, it is as much the enabling as it is the limiting condition of human endeavour. Jonathan Bate, ‘Hazlitt’s Shakespearean Quotations’, Prose Studies 7:1 (1984 May): 26–37. David Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1999), esp. 275–9. Jonathan Bate, ‘Hazlitt’s Shakespearean Quotations’, esp. 28–30. Paul Hamilton, ‘Hazlitt and the “kings of speech”’, in Metaphysical Hazlitt, 68–90.

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808 60 61 62

63

64 65 66

67 68

69 70

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Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, 278. Jonathan Bate, ‘Hazlitt’s Shakespearean Quotations’, 34. See, for instance, C. L. Finney, The Evolution of Keats’s Poetry, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936); R. T. Davies, ‘Keats and Hazlitt’, KeatsShelley Memorial Bulletin 8 (1957): 1–8; K. Muir, ‘Keats and Hazlitt’, in John Keats: A Reassessment, ed. Kenneth Muir (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1958), 139–58; W. J. Bate, John Keats (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), esp. 239–40, 244–5, 254–9; H. M. Sikes, ‘The Poetic Theory and Practice of Keats: the Record of a Debt to Hazlitt’, Philological Quarterly 38 (1959): 401–12; Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, 362–401; R. S. White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 31–55. Beth Lau’s chapter on Keats in the present volume is the latest study of Keats’s engagement with Hazlitt’s Shakespeare. The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1: 386–7. Ibid., 1: 166. Ibid., 1: 224. In her chapter on Keats, Beth Lau argues persuasively that Keats’s emphasis on self-effacement is qualified by indications elsewhere in his writings that selfassertion is the condition of creativity. Admitting the qualification, by Lau’s own showing, the importance of the ideal of self-annihilation for Keats, and Hazlitt’s impact on that ideal, still remain. Park, Hazlitt and the Spirit of the Age, 6. Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, 131; J. L. Mahoney, The Literary Criticism of William Hazlitt, 2nd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1981), 104. Rollins, Letters of John Keats, 1: 238. For a fuller analysis of the alignments of Hazlitt, Keats and Shakespeare in relation to each other, see my ‘Power and Capability: Hazlitt, Keats, and the Discrimination of Poetic Self’, Romanticism 2: 1 (1996): 54–66.

Chapter 15 1

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The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1: 142 (11 May 1817). Quotations from Keats’s letters (and from some of his correspondents) are to this edition, referred to in the text as Letters. Walter Savage Landor in G. M. Matthews, ed., Keats: The Critical Heritage, (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 261; A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 2nd ed. (1909; rpt. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1961), 211; John Middleton Murry, Keats and Shakespeare: A Study of Keats’ Poetic Life from 1816 to 1820 (London: Oxford University Press, 1925), 5, 7; Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Keats’s Shakespeare: A Descriptive Study Based on New Material, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), 53–4. Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 187. On Otho’s shortcomings see also Douglas Bush, ‘Keats and Shakespeare’, in Shakespeare: Aspects of Influence, ed. G. B. Evans (Cambridge,

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8 9

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16

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MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 81; Andrew Motion, Keats (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 422. Bernice Slote provides arguments both for and against Otho’s merits as a play (Keats and the Dramatic Principle [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1958], 108–12). See Slote, Keats and the Dramatic Principle, 113–15; Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 188. Murry, who champions the Keats– Shakespeare connection more unreservedly than any other critic, believes King Stephen is more like Shakespeare’s early history plays ‘than anything ever written by another hand than Shakespeare’s’ (Murry, Keats and Shakespeare, 202). Andrew Motion states the contrasting view when he declares that King Stephen, like Otho, is ‘too frankly derivative, too quick in its narration, and too stiffly theatrical’ (Motion, Keats, 429). The Keats Circle, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2nd ed., 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 2: 164. For information on the Clarkes see Richard Altick, The Cowden Clarkes (London: Oxford University Press, 1948). Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers (1878; rpt. Fontwell, Sussex, UK: Centaur Press, 1969), 126. The passage from Cymbeline is part of the quotation from Clarke (with his emphasis). Elsewhere in this essay Shakespeare’s works are quoted from The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 14. Ibid., 123. Slote believes Keats first began attending the theatre after he came to London as a student at Guy’s Hospital in October 1815 and that he became ‘a regular’ theatre-goer in the 1816–1817 season (Slote, Keats and the Dramatic Principle, 44). Keats’s response to Kean will be discussed further as follows. Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 156. On Spenser as Keats’s ‘first love, in poetry’, see 126–7. Keats’s poems are quoted from The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). Hazlitt’s importance for Keats is widely acknowledged and discussed; see, for example, Kenneth Muir, ‘Keats and Hazlitt’, in John Keats: A Reassessment, ed. Kenneth Muir (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1958), 139–58. For Hazlitt’s influence on Keats’s thinking about Shakespeare see R. S. White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), chap. 2; Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 161–65; and Uttara Natarajan’s essay in the current volume. Leigh Hunt, ‘Essays and Miscellanies Selected from The Indicator and Companion’, in Works, 4 vols (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1859), 4: 207. Jeffrey A. Fleece, ‘Leigh Hunt’s Shakespearean Criticism’. In Essays in Honor of Walter Clyde Curry (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1954), 189. The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, ed. H. S. Milford (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), 239. Jack Lynch, Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife That Turned a Provincial Playwright into the Bard (New York: Walker, 2007), 138 and ch. 5 passim. The Morning Chronicle and Morning Post debate is discussed by Jonathan Bate,

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17

18

19

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21

22

23

24

25

26 27

28

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‘The Romantic Stage’, in Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History, ed. Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 106–7. Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 209–10, 109. The passages from both Haydon and Severn are quoted and discussed by Robert Ryan, Keats: The Religious Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 91–3; see also 144. On Haydon’s importance for Keats’s interest in Shakespeare in 1817 see Ryan, Keats: The Religious Sense, 144; also Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the Romantic Imagination, 158–9. The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Willard Bissell Pope, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960–3), 2: 318. Lynch documents the way in which Shakespeare came to be spoken of in religious terms, with accompanying relicts and shrines, during the 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee (249–52). Although the term ‘bardolatry’ was coined by George Bernard Shaw in 1901, it aptly characterizes the worship of Shakespeare pervasive since the late eighteenth century. Ryan also notes how Keats responds to Haydon’s explicitly Christian references by using similar language to express his own religion of art, converting ‘God into Shakespeare’ (Ryan, Keats: The Religious Sense, 106–7). Neither Jonathan Bate (Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination) nor White mentions Reynolds as an influence on Keats’s response to Shakespeare in the crucial year 1817, though both discuss other men’s influence. Robert Gittings (John Keats [1968; rpt. London: Penguin, 1971], 185, 218) and Andrew Motion (Keats, 160) briefly mention Reynolds along with Haydon in this capacity. Leonidas M. Jones, The Life of John Hamilton Reynolds (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1984), 81; the phrase comes from Reynolds’s review of Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays. Selected Prose of John Hamilton Reynolds, ed. Leonidas M. Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 208. Jones, Selected Prose of Reynolds, 113; see also Jones, Life of Reynolds, 82–3. Bush, ‘Keats and Shakespeare’, 73. See also Murry, Keats and Shakespeare, 33; Spurgeon, Keats’s Shakespeare, 3; Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 157; White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 16. All of these works provide surveys of Keats’s major references to Shakespeare throughout 1817 and early 1818. See Frank Owings, Jr., The Keats Library: A Descriptive Catalogue (London: Keats– Shelley Memorial Association, 1978), 57. See Owings, The Keats Library, 55. Gittings believes that Reynolds and Keats read from this folio edition in the summer of 1817 (Gittings, John Keats, 218). No complete edition of Keats’s Shakespeare marginalia exists, but several sources provide selections. Spurgeon (Keats’s Shakespeare) reproduces all of Keats’s notes and markings in five plays: The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure and Antony and Cleopatra from the Johnson and Steevens edition, and Troilus and Cressida from Keats’s folio Shakespeare. R. S. White does not provide any transcriptions of the marginalia in Keats’s two copies of Shakespeare, but he

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31 32 33 34 35

36 37

38

39

40 41 42

43 44 45

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quotes from and analyses them extensively. Elizabeth Cook prints the annotations in Keats’s folio Shakespeare (John Keats, ed. Cook [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990], 333–6). All of Keats’s notes and a few of his markings in both the folio and the Johnson and Steevens editions are included in The Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats: Hampstead Edition, ed. Harry Buxton Forman, rev. Maurice Buxton Forman, vol. 5 (New York: Scribner’s, 1939), 280–6. This work is hereafter referred to as Hampstead Keats, and quotations from it will be documented in the text. Spurgeon (Keats’s Shakespeare, 39) assumed that most of the markings in this volume were by Keats, but Gittings (John Keats, 280) and Owings (The Keats Library, 53) more persuasively ascribe the majority to Reynolds. Even if Keats is responsible for some of the markings, it would be extremely difficult to pick out his from the multiple hands appearing in the book. Rollins, Keats Circle, 2: 285. Lynch, Becoming Shakespeare, 255–6. Rollins, Keats Circle, 2: 271–2. See Rollins, Letters, 1: 143, n. 6, and Owings, The Keats Library, 27. Owings, The Keats Library, 27. Keats’s notes and markings in Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays are printed in Hampstead Keats, 280–6. Walter Jackson Bate believes that Keats acquired his copy of Hazlitt’s Characters in December 1817 (John Keats [1963; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966], 262). On which lectures Keats missed, see Muir, ‘Keats and Hazlitt’, 143. So Rollins suggests (Letters, 2: 228, n. 6). See also Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 172. Hazlitt frequently describes the past as a more propitious age for the arts than modern times, as in his Round Table essays ‘On Modern Comedy’ and ‘Why the Arts Are Not Progressive.’ He repeats the point in his first lecture on the English Poets (‘On Poetry in General’). See The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–4), 4: 10–14, 160–4; 5: 9–10. Quotations from this edition will hereafter be documented in the text. For further discussions of Keats’s review of Kean, including its indebtedness to Hazlitt, see Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 166–7; White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 89–90; John Kandl, ‘Plebian Gusto, Negative Capability, and the Low Company of “Mr. Kean”: Keats’ Dramatic Review for the Champion (21 December 1817)’, Nineteenth-Century Prose 28 (2001): 130–41; and Jonathan Mulrooney, ‘Keats in the Company of Kean’, Studies in Romanticism 42 (2003): 238–43. Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 123. Peter Thomson, ‘Edmund Kean’, in Great Shakespeareans, 2: 16. Thomson (‘Edmund Kean’, 4). In addition to Thomson, Jonathan Bate, ‘Romantic Stage’, treats Kean’s association with radical politics (106–10). On the significance of Kean’s class status and political affiliation for Keats, see also Kandl (‘Plebian Gusto’) and Mulrooney (‘Keats in the Company of Kean’). White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 190–1. Owings, The Keats Library, 55. Ibid., 51.

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812 46

47 48

49

50 51 52

53

54

55 56 57

58 59

60

61

62

63 64

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According to White, Otho and King Stephen chiefly reflect the influence of Macbeth (Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 131–2). Owings, The Keats Library, 53. When Fanny Brawne learned of Keats’s death, she wrote her name and the date, ‘April 17 1821’, next to ‘Finis’ at the end of As You Like It in the folio Shakespeare. Joanna Richardson, Fanny Brawne: A Biography (New York: Vanguard, 1952), 89; see also 72. White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 43. Spurgeon notes that Keats’s marginalia reveal that ‘epithets and imagery’ especially attracted him in the plays, and she gives many examples of such passages marked in his copies of Shakespeare (6, 17). Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 126. Rollins, Keats Circle, 2: 274. See Beth Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998), 36–49. On this point see also Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 200–1. Introduction to Keats selection in A. W. Ward’s English Poets (1880), in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, vol. 9 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1973), 215. Murry uses Arnold’s statement, ‘He is; he is with Shakespeare’ as an epigraph to his book and cites it approvingly on 4 and 10. An 1889 edition of three essays by Keats also uses Arnold’s statement as an epigraph (Hampstead Keats, 225). See also Spurgeon (Keats’s Shakespeare, 54). Another example of a critic (Jack Stillinger) who invokes Arnold’s comment is cited in the following. Super, Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, 215. Matthews, Keats: The Critical Heritage, 326. Ibid., 327. Arnold regards Endymion as ‘so utterly incoherent, as not strictly to merit the name of a poem at all’ (327). Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 129–30. Orrin N. C. Wang, ‘Coming Attractions: Lamia and Cinematic Sensation’, Studies in Romanticism 42 (2003): 475, n. 24. Greg Kucich, Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 150. Elsewhere Kucich describes Hunt’s practice of reading Spenser ‘for discrete passages of beauty to the exclusion of narrative or allegorical continuity’ (‘Leigh Hunt and Romantic Spenserianism’, Keats-Shelley Journal 37 [1988]: 119). John Keats, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (New York: Pearson-Longman, 2007), 74, n. 4. White attributes both Hazlitt’s and Keats’s interest in particular details, especially pictorial effects, in Shakespeare to their shared empirical bent and Romantic preference for the individual and concrete over the universal and abstract (Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 33–7, 41–3). See Helen Haworth, ‘Keats’s Copy of Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library 74 (1970): 419–27. See Jones, Life of Reynolds, 84; Jones, Selected Prose of Reynolds, 153. Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 168. Lear was performed on 24 April 1820 with Kean in the title role, but Keats was ill at this time and confined at Hampstead.

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Notes 65

66 67

68

69

70 71

72

73

74

75

76 77 78 79 80

81

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See Timothy Webb, ‘The Romantic Poet and the Stage: A Short, Sad History’, in The Romantic Theatre: An International Symposium, ed. Richard Allen Cave (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1986), 34–7. Wang, ‘‘Coming Attractions’, 461–74. Richard W. Schoch, ‘Pictorial Shakespeare’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 59. See Amy Lowell, John Keats, 2 vols (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 1: 348–9; Spurgeon, Keats’s Shakespeare, 15. On Kean’s points see Thomson (‘Edmund Kean’), 13, 20–1; Webb, ‘The Romantic Poet and the Stage’, 37. On Kean as an actor known for his appearance rather than his voice, see Thomson, (‘Edmund Kean’), 29, and Mulrooney, ‘Keats in the Company of Kean’, 237, 240. Thomson, ‘Edmund Kean’, 12. For Landor, Howitt and Masson, see Matthews, Keats: The Critical Heritage, 259, 312, 357; Super, Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, 215. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 239; W. J. Bate, John Keats, 245–6, 411; Jack Stillinger, ‘What Keats is About’, in Romantic Complexity: Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth [Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 2006], 16; rpt. of Introduction, John Keats: Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1982). See James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 151–5, 213. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. J. Bate, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2: 27 and n. 2; Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 1: 125. Hazlitt also refers to Shakespeare as a ventriloquist in ‘Mr. Kean’s Hamlet’, originally published 14 March 1814 in The Morning Chronicle and reprinted in 1818 in A View of the English Stage (5: 185). Other essays in which Hazlitt extols Shakespeare’s selflessness and castigates Wordsworth’s egotism that Keats could have read before he wrote his Negative Capability letter include ‘On Posthumous Fame – Whether Shakespeare was influenced by a Love of it?’ and ‘Observations on Mr. Wordsworth’s Poem The Excursion’, both included in The Round Table. Jones, Selected Prose of Reynolds, 59. Matthews, Keats: The Critical Heritage, 89. Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 149, 145. Slote, Keats and the Dramatic Principle, 13–20. David Perkins, The Quest for Permanence: The Symbolism of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 196; Jay Clayton, Romantic Vision and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 74–5; W. J. Bate, John Keats, 254. Grant F. Scott, The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995), xiv. Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 172–3. Charles Rzepka also notes Keats’s preference for projecting his imagination into animals, natural scenery, or inanimate objects rather than people and explores reasons behind this impulse (The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986], 169–72).

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814 83

84

85 86

87

88 89

90

91

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94 95

96

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Reynolds, ‘Manuel’ (Champion, 16 March 1817), in Jones, Selected Prose of Reynolds, 178; Jones, Life of Reynolds, 82. On Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke’s publications, see Altick, The Cowden Clarkes, 195–8, 133–5. Leigh Hunt like Keats deviates from the predominant Romantic approach to Shakespeare’s characters, in that he treats them more as generalized types than unique individuals. See Fleece, ‘Leigh Hunt’s Shakespearean Criticism’, 185, 191–5. Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost, 142–3; see also 27, 38–9. A number of critics have noted conflicts in Keats’s attitude toward self and selflessness. See for example Bush, ‘Keats and Shakespeare’, 83–5; Muir, ‘Keats and Hazlitt’, 157–8; Engell, The Creative Imagination, 288–92; Margaret Homans, ‘Keats Reading Women, Women Reading Keats’, Studies in Romanticism 29 (1990): 352–5; Beth Lau, ‘Protest, “Nativism”, and Impersonation in the Works of Chatterton and Keats’, Studies in Romanticism 42 (2003): 537–8. So also conclude Bush, ‘Keats and Shakespeare’, 88–9; Helen Vendler, Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 46; and Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 173. Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 173. For histories of the ode see Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 63–84; John Creaser, ‘John Keats, Odes’, in A Companion to Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 239–41. The number provided by Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 192. He traces many of these allusions on 193–7. See also Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 85, 93, 100, 102, 105, 306–7, n. 8; White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 141, 147. White (Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 141) cites 2. 7. 104–6 and Vendler (Odes of John Keats, 307) 4. 15. 80–2 of Antony and Cleopatra in relation to ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Other relevant passages in Antony and Cleopatra are 1. 5. 4–6, 4. 2. 44–5, 4. 14. 99–101, 5. 2. 243–4, 281–2, 294–6, 309–10, 356. Lau, Keats’s Reading of the Romantic Poets (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 28. On Keats’s ability to incorporate allusions to Shakespeare and other writers into his own distinctive voice, see White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 21, 106–7, 195 and ch. 1 passim; Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 177–9, 183, 188, 190; Lau, Keats’s Reading of the Romantic Poets, 28, and Keats’s Paradise Lost, 4. Murry, Keats and Shakespeare, 189. Vendler, Odes of John Keats, 274–7; Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 199–200. William Flesch, ‘The Ambivalence of Generosity: Keats Reading Shakespeare’, ELH 62 (1995): 149–69; the passage quoted is on 150. Bridget Keegan, ‘Nostalgic Chatterton: Fictions of Poetic Identity and the Forging of a Self-Taught Tradition’, in Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, ed. Nick Groom (New York: St. Martins, 1999), 214. Marjorie Levinson notes the perplexity of eighteenth-century scholars as to why Chatterton would choose

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105 106

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‘the inferior reputation of translator-editor’ if he could claim that of author (Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of A Style [Oxford: Blackwell, 1988], 10–11). See also my essay, ‘Protest, “Nativism”, and Impersonation’, 532–3. Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, ed. B. C. Southam, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1968), 97–8, 157, 162. D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 31, 28. I compare Keats’s and Austen’s practice of negating the self in order to gain literary authority in ‘Jane Austen and John Keats: Negative Capability, Romance and Reality’, Keats-Shelley Journal 55 (2006): 107–9. Thomas McFarland, The Masks of Keats: The Endeavour of a Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3, 18. Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, 5, 10; see also Lau, ‘Protest, “Nativism”, and Impersonation’, 535; Lau, ‘Jane Austen and John Keats’, 108–9. Another critic who claims that Keats is self-distancing rather than personally revealing in his poems is Susan J. Wolfson, The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 199–202. See Thomson, ‘Edmund Kean’, 17, 43. John Goodridge, ‘Identity, Authenticity, Class: John Clare and the Mask of Chatterton’, Angelaki 1.2 (1993–1994): 137; Keegan, ‘Nostalgic Chatterton’, 211. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 212. There are scores of such studies, but the following are representative examples: R. F. Rashbrook, ‘Keats and “Hamlet”’, Notes and Queries 195 (1950): 253–4; Stuart M. Sperry, ‘Madeline and Ophelia: A Source for “The Eve of St. Agnes,” XXVI, 4–7’, Notes and Queries 4 (1957): 29–30; D. G. James, ‘Keats and “King Lear”’, Shakespeare Survey 13 (1960): 58–68; Howard Felperin, ‘Keats and Shakespeare: Two New Sources’, ELN 2 (1964): 105–9; J.-C. Sallé, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnet 27 and Keats’s “Bright Star!”’, Notes and Queries 14 (1967): 24; Bruce E. Haley, ‘The Infinite Will: Shakespeare’s Troilus and the “Ode to a Nightingale”’, Keats-Shelley Journal 21–22 (1972–3): 18–23; Barry Gradman, ‘King Lear and the Image of Ruth in Keats’s “Nightingale” Ode’, Keats-Shelley Journal 25 (1976): 15–22; Willard Spiegelman, ‘Keats’s “Coming Muskrose” and Shakespeare’s “Profound Verdure”’, ELH 50 (1983): 347–62; John Kerrigan, ‘Keats and Lucrece’, Shakespeare Survey 41 (1989): 103–18; Cedric Watts, ‘Keats’s “Bright Star” and “A Lover’s Complaint”’, Notes and Queries 53 (2006): 320–2. White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate (Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination), Helen Vendler (Odes of John Keats) and W. J. Bate, among others, treat the importance of King Lear and Hamlet for Keats. Several scholars have explored connections between Antony and Cleopatra and Keats’s poetry, though none have done so extensively. White analyses Keats’s markings in Antony and Cleopatra along with those in Troilus and Cressida and Romeo and Juliet in a chapter on Shakespeare’s ‘Tragedies of Love’. William Flesch argues for Cleopatra’s reference to her ‘salad days / When I was green injudgment’ (1. 5. 73–4) and her praise of Antony’s generosity, which had ‘no winter in’t; an [autumn] it was / That grew the more by reaping’ (5. 2. 87–8) as key passages for understanding Keats’s ‘To Autumn’. He also treats the play’s influence on Hyperion. See also Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic

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110

111

112

113 114 115

116

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118 119 120

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Imagination, 197–8; Greg Kucich, ‘Keats and the Shards of Antony and Cleopatra’, American Notes and Queries 1.2 (1988): 56–8; Adrien Bonjour, ‘From Shakespeare’s Venus to Cleopatra’s Cupids’, Shakespeare Survey 15 (1962): 74. White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 135; Spurgeon observes that Keats’s marginal note in response to Antony and Cleopatra, 1. 1. 48 (‘Fie, wrangling queen!’) is the longest he wrote in this edition (33). This note will be discussed further in the following. Leonidas M. Jones, ‘Keats’s Favorite Play’, ELN 15 (1977): 43–4. On Keats’s meetings with Procter see also W. J. Bate (John Keats, 642–3). Jones, ‘Keats’s Favorite Play’, 44. As explained below, ‘The agonies, the strife/Of human hearts’ is quoted from Keats’s ‘Sleep and Poetry’, 124–5. Leon Waldoff, Keats and the Silent Work of Imagination (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 27; see also 28–30, 86–91. Others who discuss Keats’s complex feelings toward women include Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Keats’s “Gordian Complication” of Women’, in Approaches to Teaching Keats’s Poetry, ed. Walter H. Evert and Jack W. Rhodes (New York: MLA, 1991), 77–85; Wolfson, ‘Feminizing Keats’, in Critical Essays on John Keats, ed. Hermione de Almeida (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1990), 325–30; Homans, ‘Keats Reading Women’, 341–70; Mary Arseneau, ‘Madeline, Mermaids, and Medusas in “The Eve of St. Agnes”’, Papers on Language and Literature 33 (1997): 228–31. Homans, ‘Keats Reading Women’, 354–5. See White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 141. Ibid., 413: White notes Keats’s underlining of the passage in which ‘Antony’s uncertainty about identity . . . [is] expressed in the image of shifting clouds.’ Keats quotes ‘Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish &c’ (4. 14. 2) in the margins of Z. Jackson’s Shakspeare’s Genius Justified (Hampstead Keats, 288). In other lines from this passage, Antony says, describing the clouds, ‘That which is now a horse, even with a thought/The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct/ As water is in water’ (4. 14. 9–11). These lines are reminiscent of the phrase Keats chose for his epitaph, ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water,’ and could possibly be a source. Another source that has been proposed is Henry VIII, 4. 2. 45–6 (‘Men’s evil manners live in brass, their virtues/We write in water’). See A. M. Muirhead, ‘Keats’s Epitaph’, TLS, 28 January 1926, 63. Janet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), 106, 159. Adelman treats the association of Cleopatra and Egypt with art and the imagination and Rome with reason, empiricism and scepticism throughout ch. 3: ‘Nature’s Piece ’gainst Fancy: Poetry and the Structure of Belief in Antony and Cleopatra’. Sara Munson Deats cites others who have made these connections (‘Shakespeare’s Anamorphic Drama: A Survey of Antony and Cleopatra in Criticism, on Stage, and on Screen’, in Antony and Cleopatra: New Critical Essays, ed. Deats [New York: Routledge, 2005], 4). White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 146. Ibid., 145. See Slote, Keats and the Dramatic Principle, 24, 29–30; White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 44–5. Carol Cook, ‘The Fatal Cleopatra’, in Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 250.

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123 124 125

126 127

128 129

130 131

132

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139

817

Deats, ‘Shakespeare’s Anamorphic Drama’, 1–34, provides a helpful survey of critical debates on the ethos and characters of Antony and Cleopatra. For those who advocate the play’s ambivalence, see 10–12. White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 136. Ibid., 139; Spurgeon, Keats’s Shakespeare, 34. Adelman, The Common Liar (191, n. 6) questions Antony’s motives and cites Matthew N. Proser (The Heroic Image in Five Shakespearean Tragedies [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965], 187), who believes that Antony leaves Octavia and returns to Egypt ‘for political reasons and as a matter of honor’ rather than for love of Cleopatra. On Antony’s possible treachery to Cleopatra see also David S. Berkeley, ‘Of Oversimplifying Antony’, College English 17 (1955): 96–9. Deats, ‘Shakespeare’s Anamorphic Drama’, 3; see also 32–4. Adelman, The Common Liar, 168, 52; see also 49–52, 103, 164–7. For surveys of criticism on the mixed generic conventions of the play see Adelman, 190, n. 2, 199–200, n. 37, 227, n. 49; and Deats, ‘Shakespeare’s Anamorphic Drama’, 2, 12–14. Ibid., 1. The same points can be made about ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, but in the interest of space I shall omit that poem from my discussion and concentrate on the longer romances. Homans, ‘Keats Reading Women’, 345. See Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 186–7; White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 161–8. Jack Stillinger usefully surveys other critics who link Romeo and Juliet and The Eve of St. Agnes (Reading The Eve of St. Agnes: The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], 58–9). Earl Wasserman, The Finer Tone: Keats’ Major Poems (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953), 101–12. Jack Stillinger, ‘The Hoodwinking of Madeline: Skepticism in The Eve of St. Agnes’, in The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats’s Poems, 87; ‘Keats and Romance: The “Reality” of Isabella’, in The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats’s Poems, 45. Arseneau, ‘Madeline, Mermaids, and Medusas’, 231–41; the direct quotation is on 231. See also Fleming McClelland, ‘Does Madeline Sleep, or Does She Wake? The Hoodwinking of Porphyro’, Keats-Shelley Review 10 (1996): 33–4. Stillinger, ‘Hoodwinking of Madeline’, 76–81; Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 186. Herbert G. Wright, ‘Has Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes” a Tragic Ending?’ Modern Language Review 40 (1945): 90–4. Stuart M. Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 201. Stillinger notes various ‘touches of humor’ in the poem (‘Hoodwinking of Madeline’, 83). Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 89. My student Sean Sepko in his MA thesis first brought to my attention core similarities between Lamia and Antony and Cleopatra. One conspicuous difference between the two works may be noted: in Keats’s poem the lovers are

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818

140

141

142

143

Notes

younger than Apollonius, whereas in Shakespeare’s play the lovers are older than Caesar. Lawrence Bowling argues that Antony’s fatal flaw is his inability to choose between the worlds of Rome and Egypt (‘Antony’s Internal Disunity’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 4 [1964]: 239–46). See Muir, ‘Keats and Hazlitt’, 145; Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 167. On Lamia’s radical ambiguity see Charles I. Patterson, Jr., The Daemonic in the Poetry of John Keats (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 185–9; Wolfson, The Questioning Presence, 333–43. Deats, 1. Stillinger compares Shakespeare and Keats as writers notable for the ambiguities, contradictions and inexhaustibility of their works (Reading The Eve of St. Agnes, 127–9; ‘The “Story” of Keats’, in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan J. Wolfson [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001]; rpt. in Jack Stillinger, Romantic Complexity, 118). My points here may seem to contradict my previous claim that Keats does not exhibit the same Negative Capability he found in Shakespeare; however, I believe a distinction can be made between the different implications of this concept as Keats employed it. Keats does not demonstrate Shakespeare’s ability to lose himself in other identities as he creates psychologically complex, memorable characters. Figures such as Madeline and Porphyro, Lamia, Lycius and Apollonius, I contend, are not fully realized human portraits such as most of those found in Shakespeare’s plays. They do reflect a variety of attitudes, beliefs and values, however, and Keats demonstrates the Negative Capability to consider a range of such perspectives without privileging one over the others. One of the reasons Antony and Cleopatra may especially have appealed to Keats is that its protagonists are more opaque, their inner lives less fully revealed than those in Shakespeare’s other tragedies, and some critics have argued that the play ‘becomes a more unified and explicable whole if it is read as a lyric poem or an allegory to which questions of character are largely irrelevant’ (Adelman, The Common Liar, 19; see also 15–18).

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Aaron, Jane. A Double Singleness: Gender and the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Ackroyd, Peter. The Lambs of London. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004. Bate, Jonathan. ‘Hazlitt’s Shakespearean Quotations’. Prose Studies 7.1 (May 1984): 26–37. ——--——. ‘Lamb on Shakespeare’. Charles Lamb Bulletin 51 (1985): 76–85. ——--——. Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. ——--——. Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730–1830. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Bate, Walter Jackson. John Keats. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Bromwich, David. Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1999. ——--——. ‘Hazlitt on Shakespeare and the Motives of Power’. In The Hazlitt Review 1 (2008): 5–15. Bush, Douglas. ‘Keats and Shakespeare’. In Shakespeare: Aspects of Influence, edited by G. B. Evans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. Buzacott, Martin. The Death of the Actor: Shakespeare on Page and Stage. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Chandler, David. ‘Lamb, Falstaff’s Letters, and Landor’s Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare’. Charles Lamb Bulletin 131 (2005): 76–85. Clarke, Charles Cowden and Mary Cowden Clarke. Recollections of Writers. (1878) Reprinted Fontwell, UK: Centaur Press, 1969. Coldwell, Joan. ‘The Playgoer as Critic: Charles Lamb on Shakespeare’s Characters’. Shakespeare Quarterly 26:2 (1975): 184–95. Coleridge, S. T. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by E. L. Griggs. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71. ——--——. Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature. Edited by R. A. Foakes. Vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen series 75, 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Davis, Philip. ‘“The Future in the Instant”: Hazlitt’s Essay and Shakespeare’. In Metaphysical Hazlitt: Bicentenary Essays, edited by Uttara Natarajan, Tom Paulin and Duncan Wu. London: Routledge, 2005. Davies, R. T. ‘Keats and Hazlitt’. Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin 8 (1957): 1–8, 139–58. Flesch, William. ‘The Ambivalence of Generosity: Keats Reading Shakespeare’. English Literary History 62 (1995): 149–69. Hamilton, Paul. ‘Hazlitt and the “kings of speech”’. In Metaphysical Hazlitt: Bicentenary Essays, edited by Uttara Natarajan, Tom Paulin and Duncan Wu. London: Routledge, 2005.

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Han, Younglim. Romantic Shakespeare, from Stage to Page. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001. Haworth, Helen E. ‘Keats’s Copy of Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poetry’. Bulletin of the New York Public Library 74 (1970): 419–27. Hazlitt, William. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Edited by P. P. Howe. 21 vols. London and Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1930–4. Heller, Janet Ruth. Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1990. Howe, P. P. The Life of William Hazlitt. Introduction by Frank Swinnerton. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1947. Hull, Simon. ‘The Ideology of the Unspectacular: Theatricality and Charles Lamb’s Essayistic Figure’. In Romantic Spectacle, edited by John Halliwell and Ian Haywood, Romanticism on the Net 46, 2007. Keats, John. The Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats: Hampstead Edition. Edited by Harry Buxton Forman, revised by Maurice Buxton Forman. Vol. 5. New York: Scribner’s, 1939. ——--——. Letters of John Keats. Edited by H. E. Rollins, 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958. ——--——. The Poems of John Keats. Edited by Jack Stillinger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Kinnaird, John. William Hazlitt: Critic of Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Lamb, Charles. A Selection from the Literary Criticism of Charles Lamb. Edited by E. M. W. Tillyard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923. ——--——. Lamb as Critic. Edited by Roy Park. London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. Lamb, Charles, and Mary Lamb. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. Edited by E. V. Lucas. 7 vols. London: Methuen, 1903–5. ——--——. The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb. Edited by Edwin W. Marrs. 3 vols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975. Lau, Beth. Keats’s Paradise Lost. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998. Levinson, Marjorie. Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of A Style. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. Mahoney, J. L. The Literary Criticism of William Hazlitt. 2nd ed. New York: Fordham University Press, 1981. Marsden, Jean I. ‘Shakespeare for Girls: Mary Lamb and Tales from Shakespeare’. In Children’s Literature, vol. 17, edited by Francelia Butler, Margaret Higonnet and Barbara Rosen. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Matthews, G. M. (ed.). Keats: The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971. McFarland, Thomas. The Masks of Keats: The Endeavour of a Poet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. McKenna, Wayne. Charles Lamb in the Theatre. Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1978. Moody, Jane. ‘“Fine Word, Legitimate!” Towards a Theatrical History of Romanticism’. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 38, 3/4 (fall/winter 1996): 223–44. Muir, Kenneth. ‘Keats and Hazlitt’. In John Keats: A Reassessment, edited by Kenneth Muir. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1958.

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Murry, John Middleton. Keats and Shakespeare: A Study of Keats’ Poetic Life from 1816 to 1820. London: Oxford University Press, 1925. Natarajan, Uttara. ‘Hazlitt, Keats, and the Discrimination of Poetic Self’. Romanticism 2:1 (1996): 54–66. ——--——. Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense: Criticism, Morals, and the Metaphysics of Power. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Owings, Frank, Jr. The Keats Library: A Descriptive Catalogue. London: Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, 1978. Park, Roy. Hazlitt and the Spirit of the Age: Abstraction and Critical Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Parker, Dorothy, and Ross Evans. The Coast of Illyria: A Play in Three Acts. Introduced by Arthur F. Kinney. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1990. Reynolds, John Hamilton. Selected Prose. Edited by Leonidas M. Jones. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. Riehl, Joseph E. Charles Lamb’s Children’s Literature. Salzburg Studies in English Literature. Salzburg, Austria: University of Salzburg Press, 1980. Rollins, H. E. (ed.) The Keats Circle. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Schlegel, A. W. A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. Trans. John Black. 2 vols. London: Baldwin & Co., 1815. Sikes, H. M. ‘The Poetic Theory and Practice of Keats: the Record of a Debt to Hazlitt’. Philological Quarterly 38 (1959): 401–12. Spurgeon, Caroline F. E. Keats’s Shakespeare: A Descriptive Study Based on New Material. 2nd ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1929. Stillinger, Jack. Romantic Complexity: Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Vendler, Helen. The Odes of John Keats. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Waldoff, Leon. Keats and the Silent Work of Imagination. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985. White, R. S. Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Wolfson, Susan J. The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. ——--——. ‘Explaining to Her Sisters: Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespear’. In Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare: On the Responses of Dickinson, Woolf, Rich, H. D., George Eliot, and Others, edited by Marianne Novy. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

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Index

Aaron, Jane 646, 673 Abbott, E. A. 115 Abbott, William 729 Abrams, M. H. 737 Ackroyd, Peter 698–9 Adam, Robert 242, 311 Adams, George 450 Addison, Joseph 12, 64, 185, 292, 330, 451, 457, 475, 482, 537, 539, 582 Cato 12, 292, 330, 451 Adelman, Janet 783, 786, 816, 817, 818 Aeschylus 207, 327, 488 Aikin, John 660 Alfieri, Vittorio 410 Alfieri 410 Allen, Emily 707–8 Amphlett, James 587 Andrews, Gary 697 Antoine et Cléopâtre 457 Antoine, André 485 Antony and Cleopatra 8, 12, 35, 38, 43, 52, 141, 270, 330, 450, 493, 494, 568, 608, 644, 719, 746, 767, 776, 777, 778, 781, 784, 786, 787, 788, 789, 790, 791, 793, 794, 795 Appel à toutes les nations de l’Europe 452, 456, 458, 460, 469, 476, 481 Ariosto, Ludovico 36 Aristotle 17, 24, 25, 53, 92, 208, 298, 463, 484, 730, 773, 805 Arminius 569 Arne, Thomas 273, 286, 573, 653 Judith 286 Arnold, Matthew 641, 645, 758–9, 763, 812 Arnold, Samuel 377 Arnott, James Fullarton 237

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Arrowsmith, Joseph 20 Arseneau, Mary 788 Art dramatique 460, 468 Artaxerxes 573, 653 Artaxerxes, King 573 As You Like It 43, 106, 107, 274, 324, 488, 558, 664, 674, 675, 694 Ashcroft, Dame Peggy 364 Aubrey, John 192 Augustus, Emperor 24 Austen, Jane 766, 773, 815 Avery, Emmett L. 268 Ayscough, Samuel 605, 608 Bacon, Francis 583 Badel, Alan 415 as Kean (Sartre, Kean) 415 Bage, Robert 399 Bailey, Benjamin 649–50, 753, 755, 756, 758, 764, 783 Bajazet 461 Baldick, Robert 413–14 Bandello, Matteo 273 Bannister, Jack 354, 666, 674, 726 Barbauld, Anna Letitia 660, 687 Barber, Alderman John 78 Barish, Jonas 655 Barnes, Peter 239 Jubilee, The 239 Barrault, Jean-Louis 485 Barrington, Shute, Bishop of Durham 235 Barry, Elizabeth 667 Barry, James 696 Barry, Spranger 273, 281 as Romeo 273, 282 as Lear 281–2

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824

Index

Barrymore, John 412–13 Barrymore, Lionel 412–13 Basse, William 244 Bate, Jonathan 310, 418, 421, 424, 426, 429, 646, 654, 738, 761, 766, 770, 772, 776, 796–9, 802, 807–15, 817–18 Bate, Rev Henry 339, 428, 430 Bate, Walter Jackson 628, 763, 811 Bateson, F. W. 115 Baudissin, Wolf von 559 Beale, Simon Russell 295 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de 498 Beaumont, Francis 40, 41, 46, 244, 535, 576, 591, 599, 602, 664, 665, 677, 678, 679, 680 Beckermann, Bernard 655 Beethoven, Ludwig van 385, 652 Behn, Aphra 45 Behrisch, Ernst Wolfgang 507, 517 Bell, John 239, 248, 259 Bell, Professor G. J. 348–9, 361–3, 368 Bensley, William 667 Benson, William 78 Bentley, Richard 39, 81, 89, 97, 166, 169, 171, 181, 198, 200 Berkeley, George 449, 700 Berlin, Sir Isaiah 443 Bertram 154 Best, George 413 Bestrafte Brudermord, Der 535 Betterton, Mary 364 Betterton, Thomas 37, 41, 42, 43, 45, 58, 93, 186, 236, 238, 240, 251, 256, 271, 274 Fairy Queen, The 274 as Hamlet 43, 256 as Othello 271 Betty, Master (William Henry Best) 324–5, 335, 675, 676 Betty, William Henry West, ‘Master Betty’ 335 as Hamlet 324–5 as Macbeth 325 as Richard III 325 Bevington, David 4, 102, 202

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Bewick, William 729 Biographia Literaria 580, 599, 605–6, 612, 710, 731 Birch, Thomas 123 Black, John 562, 716 Blair, Hugh 606 Blake, William 637, 688 Bloom, Harold 774 Blount, Thomas 191 Boaden, James 249, 298, 299, 302, 303, 305, 308, 313, 332, 336, 341, 347–50, 352, 354, 361, 362, 366, 390, 408, 657 Aurelia and Miranda 302, 423n. Bodley, Sir Thomas 3 Bodmer, Johann Jakob 532, 534, 535, 537, 549 Boileau, Nicolas 462, 464 Bolingbroke, Henry, Lord 449, 453, 463, 464, 467, 595, 598, 607, 609 Boniface VIII, Pope 285 Booth, Barton 210, 271 as Othello 271 Booth, Edwin as Iago (Othello) 400 as Othello 395–6 Booth, Junius Barton 400, 729, 736 as Iago (Othello) 400 Booth, Michael 348, 352, 366 Booth, Sarah 729 Borcke, Caspar Wilhelm von 534, 536, 537, 539 Boswell, James 13, 117–19, 134, 139, 140, 144, 156–7, 165, 185, 188, 247, 280, 661 Boswell, James, the Younger 165, 188 Bourgeois, Francis 330 Bowdler, Henrietta 688, 689 Bowdler, Thomas 689 Bowers, Fredson 95 Boydell, John 676, 715–16, 762 Bradley, A. C. 652, 655, 699, 745, 763, 776 Branagh, Kenneth 337 Brasseur, Pierre as Kean (Sartre, Kean) 414 as Lemaître (Carné, Les Enfants du Paradis) 414–15

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Index Braudel, Fernand 27 Braunmuller, A. R. 84 Brawne, Fanny 649, 757, 758, 768, 780, 781, 782, 789 Brecht, Bertolt 9 Breitinger, Johann Jakob 534 Brockbank, Philip 158 Brocklesby, Dr. 160–1 Bromwich, David 738, 739, 740, 742 Brontë, Charlotte 301 Brontë, Emily 301, 412 Brown, A. D. J. 103 Brown, Charles 387 Brown, John Athelstan 282 Brown, Thomas 669 Brownsmith, John 269 Brumoy, Pierre 458, 540 Brutus 450, 452, 463, 467, 502 Buckhurst, Lord see Dorset, Sixth Earl of Buckingham, George Villiers, 2nd Duke of, 18, 57, 58, 246 The Rehearsal 21, 246 Bullokar, William 191 Burbage, Richard 195, 251, 345, 364, 415 Bürger, Gottfried August 549–50, 551 Burgess, James Bland 321 Burke, Edmund 309, 318, 320, 364–5, 659, 670, 703, 704, 721 Burney, Charles 191 Burney, Fanny 348, 365 Burns, Robert 753 Burrow, Colin 4, 202 Burton, Robert 790, 791 Bush, Douglas 751 Butler, Samuel 4, 78 Buzacott, Martin 655 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 378, 379, 388–9, 393, 397, 401, 402, 405, 409–11, 637, 639, 764, 768, 770, 789 Bride of Abydos, The 405 Cain 388 Deformed Transformed, The 388 Manfred 389

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825

Marino Faliero 411 Werner 388, 393–4 Bysshe, Edward 106 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 524, 563, 564, 588 Camden, William 186, 191 Campbell, Thomas 347, 348, 351, 352, 354, 355–6, 358, 361, 362, 366 Capell, Edmund 82 Capell, Edward 8, 13, 95, 162, 163, 167, 168–9, 171–3, 180, 181, 186, 190, 199, 239, 245, 270, 544 Caravaggio 386 Carey, Ann 373 Carey, Henry 373 Chrononhotonthologos 373 Dragon of Wantley, The 373 Carl August, Duke of SaxeWeimar 498 Carl of Saxe-Meiningen, Prince 500 Carné, Marcel 414–15 Caroline, Queen 389 Carter, George 287 Castle Spectre, The 302, 575 Cato 12, 292, 451, 475 Cave, Edward 122 Cavendish, William see Newcastle, Earl (later Duke of) Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 733 Chalmers, Alexander 562 Chandler, David 663, 799 Chapman, George 44, 650, 692, 759, 797, 805 Charlemont, Earl of 320 Charles I 24, 62, 187, 192 Charles II, King 24, 32, 55, 297 Charles V, Emperor 500 Charlotte, Queen 345 Châtelet, Émilie du 450 Chatterton, Thomas 164, 665, 747, 773–6, 814 Chaucer, Geoffrey 7, 10, 24, 26, 48, 56, 65, 244, 597, 639, 720, 749 Cheselden, William 96 Chester, John 585 Chettle, Henry 191

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826 Chetwood, William 449 Cibber, Colley 21, 93, 294, 390, 403, 449, 652, 666 King Richard III 240, 544, 549, 558 Cibber, Susanna 263, 265, 282, 364 as Cordelia (King Lear) 282 Cibber, Theophilus Romeo and Juliet 272 Cicero 23 Cimarosa, Domenico 385 Cinna 456, 461, 474 Clare, John 775 Clark, Peter 16, 22 Clarke, Charles Cowden 746–7, 755, 758, 759, 765–7 Clarke, John 746 Clarke, Mary Cowden 640, 814 Clarkson, Mrs 603 Claude (Claude Lorrain) 578 Clavigo 497–8 Clayton, Jay 766 Clément, Nicholas 448 Clemit, Pamela 690 Coates, John 679, 689 Cobham, Viscount 244 Coldwell, Joan 656, 798 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 325, 384, 386, 389, 395, 403, 412, 443, 445–6, 546–7, 556, 557, 562, 566–7, 570–614, 637–9, 641, 644, 647–8, 650, 652, 654–60, 664, 666, 669, 675, 677, 683–4, 687, 691, 697–700, 704–5, 709–11, 714, 715, 717, 718, 723, 731, 737, 764, 767, 770–1, 786 Collier, John Payne 579, 587, 597, 603 Collins, William 290 Colman, George, the Elder Fairy Tale, A 275 King Lear 282–3 Man and Wife 286 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 275 New Brooms 287 Colman, George, the Younger 138 Blue Beard 385 Inkle and Yarico 399

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Index Iron Chest, The 322, 407–9 Mountaineers, The 377 Commentary on Corneille 461 Condell, Henry 196, 315 Congreve, William 6, 21, 26, 27, 31–3, 35, 46, 57, 57, 59, 63–4, 451, 457, 539, 685 Cook, Carol 784 Cooke, George Frederick 308, 325, 384, 389–90, 397, 410, 431, 433, 666–8, 671 as Iago (Othello) 397 as Richard III 390, 666–8, 671 as Sir Giles Overreach (Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts) 431n. Cooper, James Fenimore 399 Coriolanus 43, 91, 235, 240, 241, 293, 296, 310, 330, 331, 333–5, 336, 338, 342, 351, 363, 368–9, 380, 405, 450, 516, 558, 597, 613, 671, 722, 723, 724, 725, 728, 739, 775 Corneille, Pierre 23, 45, 455, 456, 459, 460, 461, 462, 464, 466, 474, 476, 477, 480 Cornwall, Barry, see Procter, Bryan Waller Coryat, Thomas 191 Cotgrave, Randle 191 Cotton, Charles 58 Cowler, Rosemary 68 Cowper, William 284, 398–9, 696 Cox, Charlotte 405–6 Crawford, Ann 364 Cromwell 483 Crowe, Rev. William 571 Crowne, John 43, 45 Cruikshank, George 385 Cruikshank, Isaac 329 Cumberland, Richard 238, 263, 312, 399, 420n., 424n. West Indian, The 399 Cunningham, Vanessa 248 Cymbeline 43, 110–1, 112, 177, 268, 270, 307, 322, 333, 351, 353, 354, 355, 387, 406, 457, 495, 567, 613, 689, 718, 719, 747, 778, 789

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Index D’Alembert, Jean Le Rond 459–60, 466, 618 D’Argental, Charles Augustin Feriol, Comte 448, 459, 484 D’Urfey, Thomas 191 Dabbs, Thomas 680 Dante Alighieri 9, 537, 550, 745 Darton, F. J. Harvey 688 Davenant, Sir William 11, 191, 194, 209, 256, 257, 258, 261, 271, 277, 294, 325, 451 Hamlet 277 Macbeth 256–9 Davenant, Sir William, and John Dryden Enchanted Island, The 271, 294, 451 Davies, Sir John 583 Davies, Thomas 253–5, 281, 283 Davis, Tracy C. 386, 403 Davy, Humphry 571, 586 de Camp, Fanny 318–19, 335, 336 De Grazia, Margreta 163–5, 199 De Quincey, Thomas 697, 698, 699 Deffand, Marie-Anne, Marquise du 455, 456, 476 Delacroix, Eugène 385, 445, 637 Dempsey, Jack 413 Dench, Dame Judi as Lady Macbeth 362 Denham, Sir John 10, 40 Dennis, John 16, 50, 62 Descartes, René 36 Dibdin, Rev. Thomas Frognall 571 Dibdin, T. C. 572 Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) 499, 619, 625 Dickens, Charles 289, 638, 649, 796, 797 Diderot, Denis 465–6 Digby, Kenelm 58 Digges, Mr, (actor) 344 Dignum, Mr, (actor) 317 Dilke, Charles 786 Discours sur la tragédie 448, 453, 477, 616 Discours sur le théâtre anglois 457 Dissertation sur la tragédie ancienne et moderne 454

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827

Dobson, Michael 4, 78, 202, 204, 213, 219, 235, 237, 238, 257 Dodd, William 470, 487, 490, 540, 759 Dodsley, Robert 246, 678 Don Carlos 549, 554 Donne, John 10, 24, 25 Donohue, Joseph 361 Doran, Gregory 337 Dorset, Sixth Earl of (Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst) 6, 7, 20, 23, 57–64, 66, 203, 211, 212 Downer, Alan S. 368, 389 Downes, John 41, 42, 43, 191, 209, 257, 418 Drummond of Hawthornden, William 17 Drury, Dr James 377 Dryden, John 4–10, 14–67, 209, 212, 268, 294, 325, 330, 352, 444, 451, 476, 537, 539, 543 Absalom and Achitophel 24, 57 Aeneid, translation of 36, 38, 39, 44, 59, 63 All for Love 8, 52, 57, 66, 207 Dedication to The Rival Ladies 34, 50 Don Sebastian 43, 46, 47 Of Dramatick Poesie 5, 6, 7, 14, 18, 19, 21, 23, 25, 28, 29, 34, 36, 44, 50, 58 Examen Poeticum 28, 45 Fables 47, 56, 65 ‘Life of Plutarch’ 35 Mac Flecknoe 9, 10 The Tempest 42, 50, 52, 66, 205 ‘To My Dear Friend Mr Congreve’ 6, 27, 31, 59, 203 ‘To Sir Godfrey Kneller’ 64 Troilus and Cressida 42–3, 52, 66 Ducis, Jean-François 458, 471–2, 479 Duff, William 662 Dugdale, Sir William 186, 187 Dumas, Alexandre, père Kean 413–14 Duncan-Jones, Katherine 696 Dürer, Albert 611 Dyer, George 681, 698

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828

Index

Eckermann, Johann Peter 498, 503, 514, 520, 528, 530, 531, 532 Egan, Pierce 376–7 Egmont 500–4, 529, 554 Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried 200 Eliot, T. S. 8, 9, 10, 158, 497, 686, 796, 802 Elizabeth I, Queen 180 Elliston, Robert William 378, 400, 405, 406 as Mortimer (Colman the Younger, The Iron Chest) 408–9 Emery, John 729 Emilia Galotti 554 Ennius 56 Equiano, Olaudah 398 Ériphyle 479 Erskine, Thomas 659 Eschenburg 488, 510, 514, 516, 517, 543–6, 549, 552, 553, 558, 559, 562 Essai sur la poésie épique 477 Essais sur les moeurs 472 Essay of Dramatick Poesie 463 Essay on the Dramatic Character of Falstaff, An 581 Etherege, Sir George 23, 27, 32, 44 Euclid 601 Euripides 29 Evans, Ross 697–9 Fairer, David 654 Fairfax, Edward 58 Fairy Queen, The 274 Fall of Robespierre, The 572 ‘Falstaff’ 499–500 Farmer, Richard 162, 165, 170, 171, 179, 186, 199, 219, 222 Farquhar, George 46, 191, 240, 685 Beaux’ Stratagem, The 240 Farren, Elizabeth 317 Faust 445, 508, 519, 524–9, 554, 572 Fawcett, John 335 Femmes de bonne humeur, Les 457 Fennell, Stephen 445 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 564, 586 Field, Barron 669

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Fielding, Henry 8, 9, 277 Fitzpatrick, Thaddaeus 250 FitzSimmons, Raymund Edmund Kean 415 Fitzwilliam, Earl 291 Flaxman, John 292, 335, 337 Flecknoe, Richard 5, 19, 34, 57, 206 Fleece, Jeffrey 748 Flesch, William 772, 783, 814, 815 Fletcher, John 16, 19, 23, 27, 28, 29, 32, 39, 40, 41, 43, 45, 46, 50, 52, 58, 59, 65, 66, 191 Florio, John 191 Foakes, R. A. 226, 445, 626 Foote, Samuel 280, 461, 479, 616 Ford, John 678, 680 Forrest, Edwin 289 Forster, Georg 549 Foscolo, Ugo 411 Foucault, Michel 27 Fowler, John 24, 26, 30, 52 Foxon, David 101 Francis I, Emperor 568 Freud, Sigmund 301, 319 Fuller, Thomas 17, 191 Fuseli, Henry 253, 254, 255, 275, 384, 385, 399, 432, 433, 637, 696, 715 Gager, Valerie L. 797 Gainsborough, Thomas 285, 345, 370, 412 Galindo, P. 343–4 as Laertes (Hamlet) 343 Garfield, Leon 696 Garrick, David 4, 8, 120, 157, 195, 221, 235–90, 294, 298, 300–5 as Archer (The Beaux’ Stratagem) 240, 263 as Bayes (Buckingham, The Rehearsal) 240, 246 as Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing) 239–40, 259 as Chorus (Henry V) 270 as Don John (Buckingham, The Chances) 263 as extra (Harlequin Student) 262

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Index as Hamlet 249, 259, 263–5, 276–9, 283, 306 as Henry IV (Henry IV Part 2) 270 as Hotspur (Henry IV Part 1) 270 as Iago (Othello) 271 as King Lear 238, 240, 259, 260, 266, 279–83, 285 as Leontes (The Winter’s Tale) 271 as Lothario (The Fair Penitent) 263 as Macbeth 256, 258, 259, 260, 261, 263 as Othello 271 as Petruchio (Garrick, Catherine and Petruchio) 271 as Posthumus (Cymbeline) 270 as Ranger (Hoadly, The Suspicious Husband) 239, 263 as Richard III 239, 262, 266, 267 as Romeo 236, 273 Shakespeare Jubilee 239, 242, 317, 810 as Sir John Brute (Vanbrugh, The Provoked Wife) 240, 263 as Townly (Cibber, The Provoked Husband) 263 Works: Antony and Cleopatra 270 Catherine and Petruchio 271–2, 352 Cymbeline 270 Essay on Acting, A 251–2, 256 Fairies, The 274–5 Florizel and Perdita 271–2 Fribbleriad, The 250 Hamlet 43–5, 49, 249, 250, 259, 264, 276–8, 283 Isabella, or The Fatal Marriage 341, 351 Jubilee, The 239, 287 King Lear 120, 240–1 Lethe 261 Lying Valet, The 261 Macbeth 258–61 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 274 ‘Ode’ 286 ‘Prologue’ (1750) 283–4 Ragandjaw 271 Rehearsal, The 246 Romeo and Juliet 248, 272, 286

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829

Tempest, The 271 Productions: Henry IV Part 2 260 Henry VIII 270 King John 260 King Lear 260 Macbeth 258–9 Richard III 260 Tempest, The 294 Garrick, Eva Maria, née Veigel 237 Garrick, George 259, 279 Garrick, Peter 261, 262 Garson, Barbara 9 Gautier, Théophile 484–5 Gay, John 9, 326, 449 Beggar’s Opera, The 9, 326 Geddes, Alexander 200 Genghis Khan 596 Gentleman, Francis 239, 259, 277 George III, King 270, 308, 348, 372, 389, 429, 735 George, Prince of Wales (later Prince Regent and King George IV) 326, 389, 413, 723 Gerstenberg, Heinrich Wilhelm von 522, 542 Gielgud, Sir John 400 Giffard, Henry 261–2 Gifford, William 597–8, 640, 679, 725, 740 Gildon, Charles 463–4 Gillman, James 612 Gillray, James 344, 654 Gittings, Robert 810, 811 Godwin, Mary Jane 690, 692, 697 Godwin, William 322, 365, 370, 409, 640, 649, 654, 659, 665, 666, 690, 691, 692, 693, 729 Goethe, Caspar 487 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 443, 445, 486–533, 540–3, 546–59, 562–4, 567, 572, 637 Goldsmith, Oliver 11 Goodridge, John 775 Gosson, Stephen 191 Gottsched, Johann Christoph 534, 536, 537, 538, 539

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830

Index

Gottsched, Luise 536, 558 Götz von Berlichingen 491–4, 526, 541 Gould, Robert 63 Grattan, Thomas Colley Ben Nazir 407 Graves, Henry Mercer 308 Grayling, A.C. 381, 404 Greatheed, Lady 347 Greene, Robert 775 Greg, W. W. 95 Griffin, Dustin 62–3 Grillparzer, Franz 547 Grimm, Friedrich 265 Grynäus, Simon 538, 539 Gundolf, Friedrich 548 Gutch, John Matthew 663, 799 Gwyn, Nell 41 Hackett, James 391–4 Hadot, Pierre 52 Hafter, Ronald 265 Hailes, Lord 246 Hales, John 17 Halio, Jay L. 104, 155 Hall, John 187 Hall, Joseph 191 Hall, Sir Peter 239 Halpin, W.H. 407 Hamann, Johann Georg 490, 542 Hamburgische Dramaturgie 489 Hamilton, Paul 738 Hamlet 9, 10, 11, 40, 41, 42, 43, 73, 74, 75, 87, 131, 133, 171, 172, 176, 198, 240, 244, 249, 250, 256, 263–5, 269, 276–9, 283, 291–2, 293–4, 299, 303, 304–6, 324–5, 328, 351, 352, 367, 377, 378, 389, 396, 398, 402–3, 406, 449, 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, 456, 458, 459, 460, 461, 464, 465, 469, 470, 471, 472, 479, 481, 483, 484, 485, 489, 493, 494, 504, 506, 507, 508, 510, 512, 513, 514, 515, 521, 523, 528, 538, 552, 553, 558, 560, 561, 565, 567, 588, 604, 607, 608, 610, 666, 667–8, 672, 675, 688, 692, 698, 703, 704, 705, 706, 707, 711, 713,

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717, 718, 726, 739, 742, 743, 756, 768, 770, 771, 776, 777 Hammond, Paul 15, 48 Han, Younglim 655 Handel, George Frederick 274, 326 Hands, Terry 239 Hanmer, Sir Thomas 87, 101, 123, 126, 152, 153, 271, 581 Harbage, Alfred 614 Harcourt, Simon Lord 70–2 Hardy, Thomas 659 Harewood, Earl of 292 Harlequin Student 262, 287 Harlow, George 370 Hart, Charles 19, 37, 40–1, 43–5, 54, 55 Harvey, Gabriel 191 Havard, William King Charles the First 302 Hawkins, F. W. 406 Hawkins, Thomas 246 Hawkins, William Cymbeline 270 Haworth, Helen 650 Haydon, Benjamin Robert 748, 749–50, 751, 752, 753, 767, 776 Hayman, Francis 271, 385 Hays, Mary 660 Hazlitt, William 238, 292, 305, 326, 345, 346, 370, 371, 381, 382, 386, 387, 389, 390, 392, 393, 395, 397, 399, 402, 403, 406, 408, 409, 410, 597–8, 605, 611, 612, 613, 637, 638–9, 640, 641, 642, 643, 644, 647, 648, 649, 650, 652, 653, 654, 655, 665, 671, 674, 682, 683, 690, 697, 698, 699, 700–44, 748, 751, 753, 754, 760, 761, 762, 764, 765, 767, 768, 771, 773, 774, 775, 793 Characters of Shakespear’s Plays 682, 683, 714, 716, 721, 728, 731, 743, 751, 753, 767 An Essay on the Principles of Human Action 700, 712 ‘The Fight’ 736 Lectures on English Philosophy 742 Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth 649, 733

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Index Lectures on the English Comic Writers 733 Lectures on the English Poets 729, 731, 738, 743, 753, 760 Letter to William Gifford 725, 728, 740 ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ 736 ‘Observations on Mr Wordsworth’s Poem “The Excursion”’ 713, 813 ‘On a Sun-Dial’ 736 ‘On Genius and Common Sense’ 737, 742 ‘On Gusto’ 653, 714, 741 ‘On Milton’s Versification’ 713 ‘On Mr Kean’s Iago’ 712–13 ‘On Poetical Versatility’ 722–3 ‘On Poetry in General’ 729–31, 793 ‘On Posthumous Fame’ 713, 741, 813 ‘On Shakespeare and Milton’ 644, 805 ‘On the Conversation of Authors’ 698 ‘On the Fine Arts’ 715 ‘On the Love of Life’ 702 ‘On the Spirit of Monarchy’ 727 The Plain Speaker 736, 737, 743 The Round Table 702, 712–13, 714, 715, 720, 721, 722, 731, 736, 740, 741, 744, 753, 754, 774 ‘Sir Walter Scott, Racine, and Shakespeare’ 737 The Spirit of the Age 700, 739 Table-Talk 638, 736, 737, 742, 744 A View of the English Stage 728, 729, 761, 762 Hegel, Georg William Friedrich 637 Heine, Heinrich 414 Heins, Paul 688 Heller, Janet Ruth 655 Heminge, John 195, 196, 315 Henderson, John 351 as Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing) 352 as Sir Giles Overreach (Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts) 431n.

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831

Henry IV, Part I 41, 270, 306, 333, 662, 663, 664, 675, 751 Henry IV, Part II 130, 131, 260, 270, 639, 662, 663, 664, 675 Henry V 129, 136, 137, 152, 157, 160, 175, 194, 270, 310, 323, 351, 407, 450, 460, 468, 493, 527, 569, 613, 638, 649, 662, 723–5, 735, 739 Henry VI 43, 165 Henry VI, Part 1 353, 405 Henry VI, Part 2 353, 405 Henry VI, Part 3 353, 405 Henry VIII 40, 43, 79, 89, 120, 125, 160, 270, 290, 303, 325, 333, 336, 348, 349, 351, 352, 357–8, 365, 368, 406, 577, 612, 725, 816 Henry VIII, King 193 Henslowe, Philip 192, 193, 194, 312 Herbert of Cherbury, Edward, Lord 192 Herbert, Sir Henry 192, 195 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 200, 488, 489, 490, 492, 502, 505, 512, 518, 521, 530, 531, 532, 541, 542, 543, 545, 546, 562, 564, 568, 586, 590 Hernani 483, 485 Herrick, William 186 Heufeld, Franz 507, 522 Hewlett, Rev. John 571 Heyne, Christian Gottlob 550 Heywood, Thomas 191, 650, 678 Hicks, Greg as Coriolanus 338 Hill, Aaron 461, 479 Hinchcliffe, John 292 Hoadly, Benjamin Suspicious Husband, The 239, 263 Hoadly, Rev John 270 Cymbeline 270 Hogarth, William 266–7, 271, 385, 673, 674, 709 as Grilliardo (Garrick, Ragandjaw) 271 Holbein, Hans 336 Holland, Henry 311–12 Holland, Lord 336

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832

Index

Holland, Peter 41, 47, 82, 83, 208, 209, 210, 214, 224 Holmes, Edward 746 Homans, Margaret 781, 787 Home, John Douglas 374 Homer 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 26, 28, 30, 31, 33, 51, 54, 56, 70, 72, 80, 108–9, 200, 328, 490, 525, 551, 563, 568, 747, 759, 773 Hone, William 677 Hooker, Richard 583 Hopkins, William 260 Horace 7, 10, 23, 28, 31, 33, 56, 58, 60, 61, 65, 69, 70, 118, 178 Hoskyns, John 58 Howard, Charles, 11th Duke of Norfolk 376 Howard, James 42 Howard, Sir Robert 23 Hughes, John 177 Hughes, Richard 377 Hugo, François-Victor 481, 484 Hugo, Victor 445, 470, 473, 481, 483, 484, 562, 637 Hull, Simon 675, 801 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 551, 554–5 Hume, David 700, 804 Hume, Robert D. 39 Hunt, John 729 Hunt, Leigh 326–8, 332, 393, 399, 404, 431, 655, 663, 668–9, 712, 715, 723, 728 Hytner, Nicholas 295 Iffland, August Wilhelm 558 Ilmenau 499 Imlay, Fanny 690 Imlay, Gilbert 690 Inchbald, Elizabeth 302, 310, 313–14, 317–18, 324, 336 Inchbald, Joseph 299, 301 Inchiquin, Lord 303 Ionesco, Eugene 9 Iphigenie auf Tauris 503, 509, 510, 549, 554 Iphigénie 457

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Ireland, Samuel 196, 198, 319, 320, 322, 662 Ireland, William Henry 165, 196–8, 319, 323, 661, 662, 665, 698, 699 Henry II 321 Miscellaneous Papers 196 Vortigern 297, 321–3 Irène 462 Irving, Sir Henry 289, 313 as Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing) 352 as Iago (Othello) 395–6 as Mortimer (Colman the Younger, The Iron Chest) 409 as Othello 395 Isaiah 238, 347 Iser, Wolfgang 655 Jackson, Macdonald P. 155 Jacob, William 519 Jacobi, Sir Derek 337 Jacobus, Mary 659 James II, King (as Duke of York) 302 James, Henry 651 Jameson, Anna 640 Jarry, Alfred 9 Jarvis, Simon 7, 9, 11, 163 Jeffrey, Francis 715, 728 Jeffrey, Sarah 770 Jennen, Charles 95, 544 Jephson, Robert Count of Narbonne, The 240, 302–3, 322 Jerrold, Douglas 381 John, King 328 Johnson, Charles Love in a Forest 274 Johnson, Dr. Samuel 5, 6, 7, 8, 10–13, 42, 47, 57, 61, 64, 68, 79, 80–1, 88, 96, 101, 110, 129–61, 162, 164, 166–7, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 185, 186, 189, 199, 247, 248, 258, 261, 269, 281, 283, 345, 365, 412, 444, 446, 461, 468, 476, 544, 546, 553, 557, 562, 566, 577, 579, 581, 582, 583, 584, 585, 588, 589, 590, 591, 592, 598, 611,

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Index 613, 614, 671, 675, 676, 681, 682, 683, 684, 685, 716, 720, 743, 752, 756, 777, 784 Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage 126–7 Dictionary 121, 124, 134, 137, 149, 160, 180 The Idler 123 Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland 117–19 The Lives of the Poets 127, 159 Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth 119 ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ 8, 122, 134–45, 181 ‘Proposals for Printing . . . Works of William Shakespeare’ 122, 123 The Rambler 122–3, 138–40, 141 Rasselas 142–3 The Vanity of Human Wishes 160 Johnson, Jack 413 Johnson, Joseph 660 Jones, Inigo 194 Jones, Leonidas 751, 767, 777 Jones, Sir William 549, 554 Jones, Thomas 189 Jonson, Ben 4, 5, 6, 14, 17, 244, 327, 535, 639, 665, 678, 733, 770 Jordan, Dorothy 303, 343, 353, 354, 355, as Imogen (Cymbeline) 355 as Rosalind (As You Like It) 354 Josephus 260 Jules César 453, 457, 473–4 Julius Caesar 4, 9, 18, 41, 43, 59, 92, 95, 235, 244, 271, 295, 310, 330–3, 336, 338, 378, 450, 452, 453, 454, 460, 461, 465, 468, 472, 477, 478, 493, 494, 500, 501, 502, 521, 534, 535, 536, 537, 538, 552, 558, 559, 724, 728 Julius Cäsar 500–1 Juvenal 7, 15, 30, 31, 34, 49, 52, 60, 65 Kahan, Jeffrey 238 Kalidasa 549 Kames, Henry Home, Lord 457, 470, 475, 567, 582

9781441124036_Index_txt_prf.indd 833

833

Kant, Immanuel 586, 590, 703 Kaufman, Angelica 715 Kean, Aaron (father of Edmund Kean?) 373 Kean, Charles (son of Edmund Kean) 336, 401, 402 as Iago (Othello) 396–7 Kean, Edmund 237, 238, 289, 308, 333, 342, 370, 372–415, 637, 640, 702, 747, 751, 754, 762, 774, 793 as Barabas (Marlowe, The Jew of Malta) 405 as Ben Nazir (Grattan, Ben Nazir) 407 as Bertram (Maturin, Bertram) 405 as Blue Beard (Colman the Younger, Blue Beard) 385 as Chimpanzee the Monkey (La Perouse) 375 as Coriolanus 405 as Cupid 374 as Hamlet 377, 396, 398, 402–3, 406 as Harlequin (including Harlequin Mother Goose) 374, 376, 377 as Henry V 407 as Iago (Othello) 397–8 as Jaffeir (Otway, Venice Preserved) 400–1 as King Lear 380, 405–6 as Macbeth 237, 403 as Mortimer (Colman the Younger, The Iron Chest) 408–9 as Octavian (Colman the Younger, The Mountaineers) 377 as Othello 237, 376, 377, 380, 385, 386, 395–6, 399, 401, 402, 411 as Percy (More, Percy) 375 as Posthumus (Cymbeline) 406 as Prince Arthur (King John) 374 as Richard II 403 as Richard III 236, 240, 377, 378, 380, 385, 388, 389, 390–3, 395–7, 399, 406, 407, 412, as Richard (Merivale, Richard, Duke of York) 405 as Romeo 403

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834

Index

as Shylock (The Merchant of Venice) 372, 376, 378, 380, 381, 382–3, 385, 389, 392, 395, 397, 399, 406, 407 as Sir Giles Overreach (Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts) 237, 380, 407, 409, 410, 411 as Timon of Athens 404–5 as Wolsey (Henry VIII) 406 as Young Norval (Home, Douglas) 374 Kean, Edmund (father of Edmund Kean?) 373 Kean, Howard, (son of Edmund Kean) 376 Kean, Mary, née Chambers, (wife of Edmund Kean) 376 as Columbine (Harlequin Mother Goose) 376 Kean, Moses, (father of Edmund Kean?) 373 Keats and Charles Brown Otho the Great 387 Keats, George 775 Keats, Georgiana 768, 775 Keats, John 383, 387, 388, 581, 613, 637, 638, 639, 640, 643, 644, 645, 647, 649, 650, 699, 729, 740, 741, 742, 745–95 ‘Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art’ 756 Endymion 751–3, 757, 758, 762, 765, 775, 778–83, 791, 793, 794 The Eve of St. Agnes 763, 766, 787–90, 793, 794 The Fall of Hyperion 769, 780 ‘Fragment of Castle-builder’ 777 Hyperion 758, 763, 766, 769, 780 ‘Imitation of Spenser’ 747, 758 Isabella 341 King Stephen 387, 746, 755, 772 ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ 788, 817 Lamia 313, 780, 787, 788, 790–4 ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ 766, 771, 784 ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ 766, 771, 774, 781, 784

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‘Ode to Apollo’ 747, 766, 771, 790, 791, 784 ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ 759 ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’ 644, 748, 756, 777 ‘On the Sea’ 752 Otho the Great 387, 746, 766, 772, 780 ‘Sleep and Poetry’ 778 ‘To a Friend Who Sent Me Some Roses’ 747 ‘To Autumn’ 766, 772, 783, 784, 815 ‘To Charles Cowden Clarke’ 747 ‘To George Felton Mathew’ 747, 775 ‘Welcome joy, and welcome sorrow’ 777 ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’ 644–5 Keats, Tom 777 Keegan, Bridget 773, 775 Kelly, Fanny 653, 697–8 Kemble, Captain Richard 297 Kemble, Charles 292, 319, 336, 402, 666 Kemble, Fanny 319, 364, 371 Kemble, John Philip 235–6, 237, 238–41, 289–338, 359, 361, 362, 363, 364, 368–9, 370, 374, 377, 378, 379, 380, 381, 382, 383, 384, 385, 389, 390, 396, 400, 401, 402, 403, 404, 405, 408, 409, 410, 412, 577, 613, 657, 661, 666, 726, 729, 734, 735 Works: Coriolanus 363, 368 Female Officer, The 299 Fugitive Pieces 299 Hamlet 304–5 Lodoiska 317, 322 Macbeth Reconsidered 308, 316 Oh! It’s Impossible 299 Richard III 390 as Alexander (Lee, The Rival Queens) 303 as Antony (Dryden, All for Love) 330 as Aurelio (Boaden, Aurelio and Miranda) 423n. as Belisarius 330

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Index as Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing) 307 as Bertram (All’s Well That Ends Well) 307 as Brutus (Julius Caesar) 235, 236, 295, 330–3, 336, 338 as Cato (Addison, Cato) 292, 293, 330, 336 as Coriolanus 235, 240, 241, 293, 296, 300, 330, 333–5, 336, 338, 342, 363, 368–9, 380, 405 as Count of Narbonne (Jephson, The Count of Narbonne) 240, 302–3 as Cromwell (Henry VIII) 357 as Duke (Measure for Measure) 423n. as Duke of York (Havard, King Charles the First) 302 as Garrick 239 as Hamlet 291, 293–4, 303, 304–6, 312, 324, 328, 396, 402 as Henry V 310 as Hotspur (Henry IV Part 1) 306, 333 as Jaques (As You Like It) 324 as King John 308, 322, 333, 355, 374 as King Lear 294, 308 as Leontes (The Winter’s Tale) 342, 354 as Macbeth 289, 295, 303, 308–9, 322, 325, 328–9, 332, 333, 342, 359, 361–2 as Mortimer (Colman the Younger, The Iron Chest) 408–9 as Octavian (Colman, The Mountaineers) 377 as Othello 290, 307 as Posthumus (Cymbeline) 307, 322, 333 as Prospero (The Tempest) 325 as Richard III 294, 307–8, 325, 408 as Romeo 301, 303, 382 as Shylock (The Merchant of Venice) 326 as Sir Giles Overreach (Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts) 303, 410 as Theodosius (Lee, Theodosius) 300 as Vortigern (Ireland, Vortigern) 339–42

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835

as Wolsey (Henry VIII) 290, 343, 333 Productions: Coriolanus 331 Henry V 310 Henry VIII 303, 325 Julius Caesar 330–1, 336 King Lear 294 Macbeth 309, 311–17 Measure for Measure 313 Merchant of Venice, The 313 Othello 313 Richard III 294 Tempest, The 294, 325 Vortigern 297 Winter’s Tale, The 313 Kemble, Priscilla, née Brereton 318, 335 Kemble, Roger 297–8, 422n. Kemble, Sarah, née Ward 297 Kemble, Stephen 358 as Falstaff (Henry IV Parts 1 and 2) 326 as Othello 305 Kenney, James 666 Kenrick, William 123, 138 Kerrigan, John 145 Killigrew, Henry 192 Killigrew, Thomas 37, 40–1, 43, 192 King John 43, 125, 127, 129, 159, 260, 268, 322, 336, 351, 352, 355, 366, 458, 493, 515, 516, 639 King Lear 8, 40, 101, 104, 120, 128, 144, 145, 146, 149, 151, 152, 155, 156, 198, 238, 240, 241, 260, 266, 268, 269, 279–83, 291, 294, 308, 351, 380, 405, 407–8, 450, 451, 458, 461, 489, 504, 515, 516, 534, 538, 540, 546, 558, 568, 593, 596, 605, 608, 611, 640–1, 642, 644, 645, 652, 672, 688, 695, 748, 753, 756, 761, 769, 771, 772, 776, 777, 778, 779, 784 King, Thomas 286 Kingsley, Sir Ben as Kean (FitzSimmons, Edmund Kean) 415 Kinnaird, John 729 Kinney, Arthur F. 698, 803 Kleist, Heinrich von 547

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836

Index

Knights, L. C. 655 Kotzebue, August von 576, 602 Krusve, Bernard 588 Kucich, Greg 760, 812 L’Estrange, Roger 21 La Harpe, Jean François de 460, 474, 476 La Motte-Fouqué, Friedrich von 565 La Place, Pierre Antoine de 457–8, 460, 467, 470, 471, 472, 473, 474, 476, 477 Lacy, James 41, 242 Lady Johanna Gray 540 Lamb, Charles 363, 390, 400, 405, 577, 578, 611, 637, 638, 639, 640, 641, 642, 644, 645, 646–99, 700, 704, 705, 709–11, 714, 716, 726, 727, 735, 761 The Adventures of Ulysses 692 ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’ 675–6 Essays of Elia 578, 647, 652, 653, 655, 666, 667, 674, 698, 699 Extracts from the Garrick Plays 677, 684 Falstaff’s Letters 648, 660, 662–3, 665, 671 John Woodvil 646, 660, 663–5, 678 The Last Essays of Elia 578, 653, 674 Mr. H– 653, 666, 677, 699 ‘On Garrick, and Acting’ 668, 670 ‘On Some of the Old Actors’ 648, 667 ‘On the Acting of Munden’ 653 ‘On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century’ 648, 685 ‘On the Custom of Hissing at the Theatres’ 670 ‘On the Danger of Confounding Moral with Personal Deformity’ 670 ‘On the Genius and Character of Hogarth’ 673, 709 ‘On the Inconveniences Resulting from Being Hanged’ 669 ‘On the Pernicious Effects of Methodism’ 669

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‘On the Probable Effects of the Gunpowder Treason’ 670 ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare’ 641, 658, 666, 668–73, 685–6, 709–10, 761 The Pawnbroker’s Daughter 666 ‘Salutation and Cat’ 647, 656–60 ‘Shakspeare’s Improvers’ 648 Specimens of English Dramatic Poets 638, 648, 649, 676, 709, 761, 797, 801, 802, 805, 807, 812 Tales from Shakespear 640, 642, 646, 647, 648, 649, 658, 676, 679, 686, 687–99 ‘We were two pretty babes’ 660 Wife’s Trial, The 666 Lamb, Hon. George Timon of Athens 404–5 Lamb, John 647 Lamb, Mary 640, 642, 646, 647, 649, 653, 663, 670, 686–9, 691, 693–5, 697, 698, 699 Tales from Shakespear 640, 642, 646, 647, 648, 649, 658, 676, 679, 686, 687–99 Lampe, John Frederick Pyramus and Thisbe 274 Landor, Walter Savage 443, 663, 745, 763 Landseer, Charles 729 Landseer, Edwin Henry 729 Lansdowne, George Granville, lst Baron 46 Lanson, Gustave 450 Lavater, Johann Kaspar 501 Lawrence, French Lyric Ode, A 275 Lawrence, Sir Thomas 293–4, 305, 335, 338, 343–5, 385, 412, 429 Le Blanc, Abbé 452, 479 Le Grice, Charles Valentine 658, 798 Le Tourneur, Pierre 459, 460, 470–1, 473, 475, 476, 477, 481, 482, 532, 551, 617 Lectures on Literature 1808–1819 629, 802, 804–7, 819

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Index Lee, Nathaniel 41, 300, 303 Rival Queens, The 41, 303 Theodosius 300 Leiden des jungen Werthers, Die (The Sorrows of Young Werther)495, 498 Leigh, Richard 22 Lemaître, Frédérick as Kean (Dumas, Kean) 413–14 Lennox, Charlotte 123 Lenz, Jakob Michael 543, 552 Leoni, Michele 532 Leopardi, Giacomo 445, 637 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 537, 538, 539, 540, 549, 553, 554, 585, 590 Letters on Poetry, Metre and Language 551 Lettre à d’Alembert 466 Lettre à l’Académie française 461 Lettres Philosophiques 448, 450, 467, 538 Lettres sur les anglais (Letters concerning the English Nation) 450, 537 Leveridge, Richard Comick Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe, The 274 Levinson, Marjorie 774, 814 Levith, Murray J. 697 Lewes, George Henry 386, 392, 401, 406, 411, 773 Lewis, C. S. 49 Lewis, Matthew 302, 575 Castle Spectre, The 302, 575 Monk, The 302 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 276 Lille, Alain de 49 Lin Shu 697 Linley, Thomas, the Younger Lyric Ode, A 275 Lloyd, Charles 654, 660, 798 Lloyd, Robert 372, 425, 431, 648, 666–8 Locke, Matthew 42 Lockwood, Tom 679 Loftie, Thomas 307 Longinus 65, 738 Lonsdale, Roger 135–6, 159 Louis XIV, King 447, 448, 462, 464 Louis XV, King 450, 455 Louis XVI, King 310, 459

9781441124036_Index_txt_prf.indd 837

837

Louis XVIII, King 326 Lounsbury, Thomas 452, 479 Loutherbourg, Philip de 575, 578 Love’s Labour’s Lost 43, 89, 112, 183, 184, 352 Lowin, John 41, 196 Lucretius 49 Lucy, Sir Thomas 186, 188–9 Luhrmann, Baz 337 Lull, Janis 666 Lullin, Charles Michel 310, 336, 424, 427 Richard III 424 Lynch, Jack 748, 753, 809 Lyrical Ballads 580, 585, 673 Macbeth 9, 40, 42, 43, 58, 87–9, 117–19, 124–8, 136–7, 149, 158, 160–1, 237, 241, 249, 251–61, 263, 267, 269, 289, 295, 301, 303, 308, 309, 311–17, 322, 325, 328, 332, 333, 342, 349, 350–1, 353, 357, 358–63, 364, 365–6, 367, 368, 370–1, 377, 403, 450, 451, 457, 458, 461, 479, 483, 489, 493, 504, 515, 516, 521, 528, 538, 549, 550, 558, 559, 567, 568, 593, 604, 610, 612, 613, 640, 656–60, 671, 675, 680, 688, 689–90, 719, 746, 767 Macklin, Charles 164–5, 196, 260, 261, 263, 265, 271, 280, 314, 364, 382 as Macbeth 260–1 as Shylock (The Merchant of Venice) 260, 265, 382 Production: Macbeth 260–1, 314 Macready, William Charles 289, 292, 294, 313, 316, 401, 405, 407, 657, 729 as Coriolanus 405 Mahomet 479 Mahoney, John 742 Maintenon, Mme de 350–1 Maizeaux, Pierre des 18 Malone, Edmond 3, 4, 13, 133, 162–201, 215n. 61, 220n. 20, 225n. 14, 225n. 16, n. 20, 226n. 23, 226n. 32, 226n. 54, 239, 303, 304,

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838

Index

308, 310, 312, 320, 322, 323, 546, 557, 562, 590, 607, 661, 676 Account of the Incidents . . . 165 ‘An Attempt to Ascertain the Order . . .’ 164, 181–5 Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley 164 ‘Historical Account of the . . . English Stage’ 190–5 Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers 196–8 John Dryden, edition of 165 Letter to the Rev. Richard Farmer 165 ‘The Life of Shakspeare’ 185–90 The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare 13, 162–95 ‘Shakspeare, Ford, and Jonson’ 195 Sir Joshua Reynolds, edition of 165 Supplement to the Edition of Shakespeare 164, 168, 171 Manning, Thomas 677, 679 Manon Lescaut 452 Manzoni, Alessandro 445, 637 Marlowe, Christopher Jew of Malta, The 405, 664, 680 Marsden, Jean 689, 693 Marston, John 191 Marvell, Andrew 18, 749 Massinger, Philip 191, 237, 240, 303, 380, 407, 409, 410, 411, 599, 678, 679 Matthews, Charles 238–9 Maturin, Charles Robert 388, 405, 407, 432, 576 Bertram 405, 407, 432, 576 Manuel 388 Maubert, James 17 McCoy, Kid 413 McDonald, Russ 238, 240, 289 McFarland, Thomas 773–4 McKellen, Sir Ian 415 McKenzie, D. F. 31, 47 McLaverty, James 101 McLelland, Fleming 788 Measure for Measure 40, 42, 128–9, 132, 133, 134, 302, 313, 351, 353, 354, 355, 540, 567, 669, 688, 689, 749, 771

9781441124036_Index_txt_prf.indd 838

Médecin malgré lui, Le 467 Meister, Jacques Henri 347, 349 Melbourne, Lady 378, 388 Mellor, Anne 790 Menander 327 Mendelssohn, Moses 538 Mendoza, Daniel 382 The Merchant of Venice 43, 84, 184, 237, 241, 260, 265, 308, 313, 339–41, 351, 353, 369, 372, 376, 380–3, 385, 389, 396, 397, 407, 410, 411, 412, 558, 567, 640, 694, 727, 753, 771 Mercury, Freddie 414 Meres, Frances 3, 3, 182, 184 Merivale, John Herman Richard, Duke of York 405, 751 The Merry Wives of Windsor 36, 41, 43, 126, 127, 189, 269, 457, 662, 771 Metternich, Klemens Wenzel, Prince 564 Michelangelo 238, 347, 385 Middleton, Thomas 191, 257, 679, 680, 685 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 43, 109, 183, 274–6, 352, 482, 485, 505, 527, 534, 538, 540, 549, 550, 558, 559, 567, 580, 607, 649, 664, 693, 694, 699, 726, 762, 771 Milhous, Judith 39, 42 Miller, D. A. 773 Milton, John 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 18, 48, 78, 115, 200, 244, 275, 386, 537, 549, 563, 568, 587, 596, 599, 603, 605, 606, 644, 650, 696, 709, 710, 713, 714, 729, 731, 732, 737, 741, 745, 747, 749, 753, 754, 758, 760, 763, 764, 765, 769, 770, 771, 774, 789 Misanthrope, Le 467 Mitford, Mary Russell 389, 729 Charles the First 389 Mohun, Michael 40–1, 43–4, 54, 55 Molé (actor) 471 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 45 Molloy, J. F. 375 Montagu, Charles 62 Montagu, Elizabeth 461–2, 488, 544, 556

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Index Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 70 Moore, Don D. 680 Moore, Edward Gamester, The 345, 351 Moore, Thomas 397, 401 More, Hannah 118, 242–3, 276, 375 Percy 375 More, Martha 242 More, Sarah 242 Moretti, Franco 27–8, 65 Morgan, John 604 Morgan, Macnamara Sheep-Shearing, The 271–2 Morgan, Mary 604 Morgann, Maurice 581 Morhof, Daniel Georg 535 Mort de César, La 454, 479, 536, 620 Morton, Thomas Slave, The 399 Möser, Justus 490 Motion, Andrew 809–10 Moxon, Edward 677 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 385, 532 Much Ado about Nothing 40, 42, 107–8, 307, 351, 352, 535, 558, 669, 694 Mudford, William 702 Muir, Kenneth 84 Mulgrave, John Sheffield, Earl of 16, 39, 57, 59 Müller, Adam 547, 564 Munden, Joseph 653, 655, 674 Murphy, Andrew 203, 220 Murphy, Arthur 132, 155, 156, 157, 163, 252, 256, 266, 277, 278, 281, 282, 283, 300, 351 Grecian Daughter, The 351 Hamlet, with Alterations 278–9 Zenobia 300 Murray, John 388, 410, 411 Murry, John Middleton 745, 772, 776, 812, 814 Mylius, Christlob 537 Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor 378, 517, 532, 563, 564, 571, 595, 596, 597, 598, 599, 605, 606, 612, 638, 639, 723

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839

Nashe, Thomas 187 Nathan der Weise 554 Nesbit, Edith 696 Neville, Richard 449 Newcastle, William Cavendish, Earl (later Duke) of 57, 58, 62 Newlyn, Lucy 672 Newton, Rev Thomas 248–9 Newton, Sir Isaac 115 Nibelungenlied, Das 565, 568 Nicolai, Friedrich 538 Niebuhr, Barthold Heinrich 568 Noble, Adrian 337 Norfolk, Duke of 291, 310 North, Lord 259 Northcote, James 715 Northumberland, Duke of 299, 326 Noverre, Jean Georges 254–5, 259 Nunn, Trevor 239, 337 O’Neill, Eliza 403, 729 as Juliet (Romeo and Juliet) 403 Odell, George Clinton Densmore 449 Oedipe 450 Oldfield, Anne 449 Oldys, John 187, 189, 195 Olivier, Laurence, Lord Olivier 337, 400 Opie, John 715 Orgel, Stephen 256 Orphan, The 456 Osorio 572 Othello 43, 59, 129, 134, 183, 237, 269, 271, 289, 290, 305, 307, 313, 351, 376, 377, 380, 385, 386, 387, 394, 395–402, 406, 407, 411, 412, 450, 457, 458, 459, 460, 465, 468, 471, 472–3, 479, 480, 485, 489, 495, 516, 521, 537, 538, 540, 557, 558, 566, 567, 582–3, 593, 594, 597, 601, 604, 608, 611, 640, 672, 674, 688, 706, 711, 713, 721, 738, 741, 755, 767, 771 Otway, Thomas 42, 45, 46, 272, 456, 539, 657 History and Fall of Caius Marius, The 42, 272, 351 Venice Preserved 351, 657–8

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840

Index

Oulton, W.C. 314 Overbury, Sir Thomas 191 Ovid 4, 8, 15, 21, 65, 114 Oxford, Robert Harley, 2nd Earl of 246 Oya, Reiko 403 Palmer, Robert 237 Park, Roy 648, 742 Parker, Dorothy 697–8 Parker, G. F. 115, 138 Parker, Louis Napoleon 396 Parker, R. B. 91 Pascoe, Judith 348, 658 Pasquin, Anthony see Williams, John Pater, Walter 651, 652, 699 Paul, Bholanauth 696 Paulin, Roger 445 Peck, Bob as Iago (Othello) 396, 397 Pepys, Samuel 16, 19, 43 Percy, Bishop Thomas 245–6 Percy, Lord, Duke of Northumberland 299 Percy, Thomas 191, 199 Père de famille Le 466 Perkins, David 766 Perkins, Mr (wig-maker) 276 Perry, Seamus 731 Perry, T. S. 651 Persius 7 Petrarch 549, 557, 560 Phillips, Richard 660 Phippen, Francis 373 Piozzi, Mrs see Thrale, Hester, Mrs Piozzi Pitt, William, the Younger 325, 659 Pizarro 325, 575–6 Place, Francis 329 Planché, James Robinson 336 Plato 601 Plautus 327 Plutarch 15, 35, 38, 91 Polybius 15, 38 Pompée 461 Pope, Alexander 6, 7–11, 12, 13, 16, 31, 33, 63, 68–116, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131,

9781441124036_Index_txt_prf.indd 840

137, 146, 148, 149, 153, 154, 156, 157, 162, 166, 168, 169, 172, 175, 176, 177, 180, 181, 186, 244, 269, 444, 449, 457, 470, 474, 477, 534, 537, 543, 581, 582, 682, 716 The Dunciad 7, 8, 9, 10, 33, 74, 77, 78, 80, 81, 87, 77, 101 Epistle to Burlington 72 Epistle to Cobham 114 Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot 77 Essay on Man 8, 109, 115 The Odyssey, translation of 70, 108 The Rape of the Lock 114, 123 The Works of Shakespeare 68, 70, 75–116 Poussin, Nicolas 70, 334, 385 Powell, George 403 Prescott, Paul 253, 256, 370 Prévost, Abbé 452 Priest, Josiah 42 Priestley, Joseph 659 Prince Regent, The 326, 379, 389, 723 Prior, Matthew 23, 42, 60, 62 Pritchard, Hannah 253, 352, 359, 360, 364, 365 as Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing) 352 as Lady Macbeth 254, 352, 359–60, 364–5 Procter, Bryan Waller (‘Barry Cornwall’) 382, 386, 400, 413, 644, 680, 777, 795 Prynne, William 191 Purcell, Henry Fairy Queen, The 274 Quarles, Francis 664 Quin, James 251, 252, 256, 257, 263, 271, 306, 368, 667 as Lothario (The Fair Penitent) 263 as Macbeth 251–2, 256, 257 as Othello 271 Quinault, Philippe 45 Rabelais, François 733 Racine, Jean 45, 385, 455, 457, 459, 460, 461, 462, 464, 465, 466, 469, 475, 485, 505

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Index Rae, Alexander as Iago (Othello) 400 Raleigh, Sir Walter 58, 69, 583 Rape of Lucrece, The 3, 4, 587, 606, 613, 673, 752 Raphael 26, 532, 566 Räuber, Die 554 Reed, Isaac 162, 186, 199, 581, 590 Rembrandt van Rijn 557 Remorse 572, 576, 666, Reynolds, Jane 767–8 Reynolds, John Hamilton 639, 728, 741, 748, 751–4, 757, 761, 763, 764, 765, 767, 768, 769, 770, 810, 811 Reynolds, Marianne 767–8 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 117, 238, 263, 287, 315, 331, 345, 347, 348, 384, 386, 412, 715 Rich, John 287, 326 Richard der Dritte 539, 549 Richard II 43, 62, 131, 403, 450, 468, 590, 595, 598, 604, 607, 608, 609–10 Richard II, King 598 Richard III 43, 106–7, 126, 127, 239, 240, 249, 250, 255, 256–7, 260, 262, 266–7, 270, 294, 301, 307–8, 310, 322, 325, 341, 342, 343, 351, 353, 376, 377, 378, 380, 385, 388–95, 396–8, 399, 406, 407, 411, 412, 450, 456, 457, 465, 537, 544, 549, 558, 559, 569, 582, 590, 594, 601, 604, 607, 640, 648, 650, 666–8, 671, 703, 704, 706, 726, 754, 762, 706, 721, 726, 754, 755, 762 Richard III, King 598 Richards, I. A. 605 Richardson, John 374, 382 Richardson, Jonathan 70, 96 Richardson, Samuel 12, 281, 435n. Richardson, William 590, 591, 592, 594, 789 Richter, Jean Paul 586 Riehl, Joseph 689 Ripley, John 331–2 Ritson, Joseph 165 Roach, Joseph 238, 416n.

9781441124036_Index_txt_prf.indd 841

841

Roberts, David 236 Robertson, Thomas 592 Robinson, Henry Crabb 390, 392, 394, 395, 399, 587, 588, 603, 608, 701, 710, 729 Robinson, Thomas 701 Robson, William 403 Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of 20, 21, 23, 55, 57, 58 Roe, Nicholas 749 Roger, Christine 445 Rogers, J. (engraver) 294 Rohan, Chevalier de 449 Romeo and Juliet 19, 40, 42, 183, 184, 185, 243, 248, 272, 284, 286, 303, 351, 352, 364, 403, 450, 458, 459, 461, 476, 477, 483, 517–19, 522, 535, 538, 539, 546, 547, 549, 550, 552, 555–7, 558, 559, 560, 565, 566, 567, 587–8, 594–5, 603–4, 607, 611, 612, 642, 688, 718, 719, 720, 778, 787 Roméo et Juliette 459, 471 Romeo und Julie 517, 539, 549 Romney, George 345 Rosenmeyer, Thomas E. 49 Ross, Robert H. 390 Rossi, John Charles Felix 327 Rostand, Edmond Cyrano de Bergerac 413 Roubillac, Louis François 243, 245 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 466 Rowe, Nicholas 239, 268, 269, 315 Fair Penitent, The 263, 351 Tragedy of Jane Shore, The 351 Rowley, William 679, 685 Rusconi, Carlo 532 Ruskin, John 730, 738 Russell, Gillian 686 Rymer, Thomas 6, 16, 28, 35, 38, 43–5, 58–9, 62, 65, 68, 186, 461, 476 Rzepka, Charles 813 Sackville, Charles see Dorset, Sixth Earl of Saint-Evremond, Charles de 18, 58 Salt, Samuel 647

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842

Index

Salter, Mr, (actor) 290–1, 292, 295, 296, 300, 335, 336 as Hamlet 291, 336 Sandford, Samuel 390 Sartre, Jean-Paul Kean 414–15 Saslow, Edward 59 Saurin, Bernard Joseph 480 Saussure, Albertine Necker de 562 Savile, Henry 21 Saxe-Meiningen, Duke of 337 Saxo Grammaticus 456 Scheemakers, Peter 244, 285 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 562, 586 Schiller, Friedrich 501–2, 514–16, 519, 522, 532, 533, 548, 550, 551, 552, 559, 562, 563, 568, 590, 637, 708, 709, 732 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 443, 445, 446, 507, 514, 516, 517, 519, 520, 522, 528, 532, 534–69, 571, 585, 586, 588, 589, 590, 592, 602, 604, 612, 613, 614, 683, 684, 716, 717, 718, 719, 732, 767 Hamlet 516–17 Schlegel, Caroline 558 Schlegel, Friedrich 517, 546, 547, 548, 566, 732 Schlegel, Johann Adolf 545 Schlegel, Johann Elias 536, 539, 545, 549, 555, 558, 568 Schlegel, Johann Heinrich 545 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 551, 554 Schoch, Richard 761–2 Scholes, Robert 145 School for Scandal, The 323, 574 Schopenhauer, Johanna 325 Schröder, Friedrich Ludwig 506, 507, 510, 514, 515, 522 Scott, Grant 766 Scott, John 734, 777 Scott, Sir Walter 304, 306, 614, 637, 680, 696, 737, 743 Scouten, Arthur 268 Scudéry, Mlle de 350–1 Sedley, Sir Charles 20, 23, 30, 58

9781441124036_Index_txt_prf.indd 842

Selden, John 756 Sémiramis 454, 459, 478–9 Severn, Joseph 749, 756, 762 Seward, Anna 354, 657, 659 Shadwell, Thomas 16, 18, 21–2, 23, 42, 45, 46, 57, 58–9, 271, 451, 671 Tempest, The 271 Shakespear 488–9, 543 Shakespeare, Anne, née Hathaway 187, 320 Shakespeare Ladies Club 267–8 Shakespeare und kein Ende! 520–3 Shakespeare, William Characters Angelo 689 Anthonio 694 Antony 114, 125, 126, 128, 141, 142, 270, 453, 454, 479, 493, 502, 719, 767, 781–6, 788–93 Ariel 351, 529, 595, 714, 715, 741 Bassanio 383, 694 Bertram 85, 136, 307, 688–9 Bottom 696, 719 Brabantio 129 Brutus 8, 41, 89, 91, 235, 295, 330, 331, 332, 333, 336, 338, 378, 452, 453, 454, 465, 478, 500, 501, 502, 724 Caliban 42, 294, 482, 567, 599, 757 Catherine (Henry VIII) 125, 160 Celia 694 Charmian 768, 777 Chorus (Henry V) 94 Claudio (Measure for Measure) 132–4, 771 Claudius 85, 98, 99–100 Cleopatra 8, 10, 135, 141, 142, 352, 460, 644, 719, 767, 768, 777, 781, 782, 783, 784, 785, 786, 788, 789, 791, 792 Cordelia 42, 103, 111, 144–5, 148–9, 150, 151, 155–6 Coriolanus 101, 235, 240, 241, 293, 310, 330, 333, 334, 335, 336, 338, 342, 363, 380, 405, 722 Cornwall 147, 151 Don John 263, 800

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Index Duke, the (Measure for Measure) 771 Duncan 84, 87–8, 137 Edgar 42, 44, 104, 134 Edmund 103, 147, 149, 739, 740 Falstaff 41, 53, 175, 199, 323, 326, 468, 499, 517, 569, 582, 590, 593, 594, 604, 607, 639, 662, 675, 714, 741 Ferdinand 42, 638 Feste 120–1 Fluellen 137 Fool, the (King Lear) 8, 220 Gentleman (King Lear) 150 Gertrude 98, 99, 100–1 Gloucester (King Lear) 134, 145, 149, 151 Goneril 156, 279, 280, 406, 736 Hamlet 43, 98–9, 100–1, 133, 138, 139, 156, 158, 177, 249, 256, 259, 263, 264, 276, 277, 278, 283, 284, 293, 299, 300, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 324, 325, 328, 336, 343, 376, 377, 378, 389, 396, 398, 402, 403, 406, 452, 454, 455, 456, 457, 465, 469, 471, 473, 476, 479, 480, 496, 497, 498, 506, 507, 508, 510, 511, 512, 513, 514, 527, 528, 537, 538, 546, 567, 568, 591, 592, 593, 607, 608, 640, 645, 666, 672, 675, 692, 703–5, 707, 711, 718, 726, 739, 742, 743, 749, 768, 770, 771 Helena (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) 109–10, 528, 649, 694–5, 762 Helena (All’s Well) 352, 682, 688–9 Henry V 129, 407, 460, 468, 493, 569, 613, 724 Henry VIII 43 Hermia 109, 649, 681, 694, 695, 762 Iago 41, 134, 271, 387, 395, 396, 397, 398, 400, 401, 402, 458, 460, 461, 465, 469, 472, 594, 597, 601, 611, 650, 704, 706, 707, 712, 713, 721, 741, 764 Imogen 307, 351, 353, 354, 355, 387, 590, 612, 650, 689, 718, 741, 747, 764, 767, 768, 789 Isabella 351, 353, 354, 355, 657, 749

9781441124036_Index_txt_prf.indd 843

843 Juliet 4, 243, 273, 284, 351, 364, 518, 556, 595, 607, 642, 768 Kent 103, 148, 149–51, 154–5 Lady Macbeth 236, 241, 253, 258, 289, 316, 332, 342, 344, 349, 350, 351, 352, 353, 357, 358, 360, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 370, 371, 493, 593, 612, 656–60, 690, 719, 721, 722, 726, 727 Laertes 176 Launce 106 Lear 42, 43, 102, 103, 150–6, 157–9, 240, 241, 259, 260, 266, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 285, 291, 380, 405, 406, 640, 668, 672, 695, 696, 697, 713, 730, 734, 735–6, 741, 747, 767 Lennox 127 Leontes 134, 271, 272, 342, 354, 694, 695, 726, 786 Macbeth 9, 11, 42, 43, 85, 87, 88, 97–9, 111, 117–19, 125, 126, 128, 134, 137, 237, 249, 251, 252, 253, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 263, 289, 295, 303, 308, 309, 314, 315, 316, 317, 322, 325, 328, 329, 332, 333, 342, 349, 359, 361, 377, 403, 568, 582, 590, 593, 594, 596, 597, 599, 610, 613, 640, 659, 660, 704, 719, 767, 800 Malcolm 84 Mariana 689 Mercutio 43 Miranda 42, 294, 612, 757 Oberon 183 Ophelia 98–9, 101, 172, 176, 278, 351, 402, 461, 465, 471, 498, 506, 508, 528, 612, 672, 707, 768 Othello 41, 43, 237, 271, 289, 305, 307, 376, 377, 380, 385, 386, 395, 396, 397, 398, 399, 401, 402, 406, 407, 411, 412, 457, 458, 460, 465, 479, 495, 538, 582, 594, 640, 672, 706, 711, 713, 738, 741, 755, 767 Petruchio 106 Player Queen (Hamlet) 75 Polixenes 272, 354, 694

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844

Index

Polonius 11, 85, 98–9, 100, 172 Portia 332, 339, 340, 341, 351, 353, 368, 749 Prospero 113–15, 325, 721, 757 Regan 151, 156 Richard II 62, 468, 595, 598, 609, 707 Richard III 236, 239, 240, 249, 262, 267, 307, 308, 325, 341, 376, 377, 378, 380, 385, 388, 389, 391, 395, 397, 399, 405, 406, 407, 412, 569, 582, 590, 594, 598, 601, 640, 650, 671, 703, 704, 706, 755 Romeo 236, 243, 273, 301, 303, 364, 403, 517, 555, 556, 557, 595, 607, 718, 727, 768 Rosalind 106, 349, 351, 353, 354, 694 Rosencrantz 98, 99–100 Shylock 237, 241, 260, 265, 308, 340, 372, 376, 378, 380, 381, 382, 383, 385, 389, 392, 396, 397, 399, 406, 407, 410, 411, 412, 495, 567, 640, 680, 702, 703, 704, 706, 716, 727, 755 Tamora 113 Timon 43 Titania 183, 352, 529, 747 Troilus 595, 639, 768 Ulysses 108, 692, 753 Witches, the (Macbeth) 42, 117–19 Wolsey 160 Plays and Poems All’s Well that Ends Well 43, 85, 106, 126, 131, 136, 307, 352, 682, 688–9 Antony and Cleopatra 8, 12, 35, 38, 43, 52, 141, 270, 330, 450, 493, 494, 568, 608, 644, 719, 746, 767, 776, 777, 778, 781, 784, 786, 787, 788, 789, 790, 791, 793, 794, 795 As You Like It 43, 106, 107, 274, 324, 488, 558, 664, 674, 675, 694 The Comedy of Errors 36, 43, 107, 134, 184, 299, 352, 660 Coriolanus 43, 91, 235, 240, 241, 293, 296, 310, 330, 331, 333–5, 336,

9781441124036_Index_txt_prf.indd 844

338, 342, 351, 363, 368–9, 380, 405, 450, 516, 558, 597, 613, 671, 722, 723, 724, 725, 728, 739, 775 Cymbeline 43, 110–1, 112, 177, 268, 270, 307, 322, 333, 351, 353, 354, 355, 387, 406, 457, 495, 567, 613, 689, 718, 719, 747, 778, 789 Hamlet 9, 10, 11, 40, 41, 42, 43, 73, 74, 75, 87, 131, 133, 171, 172, 176, 198, 240, 244, 249, 250, 256, 263–5, 269, 276–9, 283, 291–2, 293–4, 299, 303, 304–6, 324–5, 328, 351, 352, 367, 377, 378, 389, 396, 398, 402–3, 406, 449, 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, 456, 458, 459, 460, 461, 464, 465, 469, 470, 471, 472, 479, 481, 483, 484, 485, 489, 493, 494, 504, 506, 507, 508, 510, 512, 513, 514, 515, 521, 523, 528, 538, 552, 553, 558, 560, 561, 565, 567, 588, 604, 607, 608, 610, 666, 667–8, 672, 675, 688, 692, 698, 703, 704, 705, 706, 707, 711, 713, 717, 718, 726, 739, 742, 743, 756, 768, 770, 771, 776, 777 Henry IV, Part I 41, 270, 306, 333, 662, 663, 664, 675, 751 Henry IV, Part II 130, 131, 260, 270, 639, 662, 663, 664, 675 Henry V 129, 136, 137, 152, 157, 160, 175, 194, 270, 310, 323, 351, 407, 450, 460, 468, 493, 527, 569, 613, 638, 649, 662, 723–5, 735, 739 Henry VI 43, 165 Henry VI, Part 1 353, 405 Henry VI, Part 2 353, 405 Henry VI, Part 3 353, 405 Henry VIII 40, 43, 79, 89, 120, 125, 160, 270, 290, 303, 325, 333, 336, 348, 349, 351, 352, 357–8, 365, 368, 406, 577, 612, 725, 816 Julius Caesar 4, 9, 18, 41, 43, 59, 92, 95, 235, 244, 271, 295, 310, 330–3, 336, 338, 378, 450, 452,

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Index 453, 454, 460, 461, 465, 468, 472, 477, 478, 493, 494, 500, 501, 502, 521, 534, 535, 536, 537, 538, 552, 558, 559, 724, 728 King John 43, 95, 125, 127, 129, 159, 260, 268, 308, 322, 333, 336, 351, 352, 355–7, 365–6, 458, 493, 515, 516, 639 King Lear 8, 40, 101, 104, 120, 128, 144, 145, 146, 149, 151, 152, 155, 156, 198, 238, 240, 241, 260, 266, 268, 269, 279–83, 291, 294, 308, 351, 380, 405, 407–8, 450, 451, 458, 461, 489, 504, 515, 516, 534, 538, 540, 546, 558, 568, 593, 596, 605, 608, 611, 640–1, 642, 644, 645, 652, 672, 688, 695, 748, 753, 756, 761, 769, 771, 772, 776, 777, 778, 779, 784 The Lover’s Complaint 752 Love’s Labour’s Lost 43, 89, 112, 183, 184, 352 Macbeth 9, 40, 42, 43, 58, 87–9, 117–19, 124–8, 136–7, 149, 158, 160–1, 237, 241, 249, 251–61, 263, 267, 269, 289, 295, 301, 303, 308, 309, 311–17, 322, 325, 328, 332, 333, 342, 349, 350–1, 353, 357, 358–63, 364, 365–6, 367, 368, 370–1, 377, 403, 450, 451, 457, 458, 461, 479, 483, 489, 493, 504, 515, 516, 521, 528, 538, 549, 550, 558, 559, 567, 568, 593, 604, 610, 612, 613, 640, 656–60, 671, 675, 680, 688, 689–90, 719, 746, 767 Measure for Measure 40, 42, 128–9, 132, 133, 134, 302, 313, 351, 353, 354, 355, 540, 567, 669, 688, 689, 749, 771 The Merchant of Venice 43, 84, 184, 237, 241, 260, 265, 308, 313, 339–41, 351, 353, 369, 372, 376, 380–3, 385, 389, 396, 397, 407, 410, 411, 412, 558, 567, 640, 694, 727, 753, 771 The Merry Wives of Windsor 36, 41, 43, 126, 127, 189, 269, 662, 771

9781441124036_Index_txt_prf.indd 845

845 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 43, 109, 183, 274–6, 352, 482, 485, 505, 527, 534, 538, 540, 549, 550, 558, 559, 567, 580, 607, 649, 664, 693, 694, 699, 726, 762, 771 Much Ado about Nothing 40, 42, 107–8, 307, 351, 352, 535, 558, 669, 694 Othello 43, 59, 129, 134, 183, 237, 269, 271, 289, 290, 305, 307, 313, 351, 376, 377, 380, 385, 386, 387, 394, 395–402, 406, 407, 411, 412, 450, 458, 471, 472, 479, 480, 485, 489, 516, 521, 537, 538, 540, 557, 558, 566, 567, 582, 593, 594, 604, 608, 611, 640, 672, 674, 688, 706, 711, 713, 721, 738, 741, 755, 767, 771 The Passionate Pilgrim 752 The Rape of Lucrece 3, 4, 673, 752 Richard II 43, 62, 131, 403 Richard III 43, 106–7, 126, 127, 239, 240, 250, 255, 256–7, 260, 262, 266–7, 270, 294, 301, 307–8, 310, 322, 325, 341, 342, 343, 351, 353, 376, 377, 378, 380, 385, 388–95, 396–8, 399, 406, 407, 411, 412, 450, 456, 457, 465, 537, 544, 549, 604, 607, 640, 648, 650, 666–8, 671, 703, 704, 706, 726, 754, 762, 706, 721, 726, 754, 755, 762 Romeo and Juliet 19, 40, 42, 183, 184, 185, 243, 248, 272, 284, 286, 303, 351, 352, 364, 403, 450, 458, 461, 517, 518, 522, 535, 538, 539, 546, 547, 549, 550, 552, 555, 556, 557, 558, 559, 560, 565, 566, 567, 587, 588, 594, 603, 604, 607, 611, 612, 642, 688, 718, 719, 720, 778, 787 The Sonnets 3, 4, 163, 164, 199, 472, 572, 717, 745, 752–3, 757–8, 772, The Taming of the Shrew 43, 106, 183, 184, 271, 272, 351, 352, 535, 675, 688, 694, 721 The Tempest 10, 36, 40, 42, 50, 52, 64, 66, 77, 89, 95, 113, 114, 165, 205, 244, 271, 294, 325, 351, 353,

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846

Index

451, 482, 485, 529, 538, 546, 552, 555, 558, 559, 567, 580, 584, 587, 588, 589, 595, 599, 605, 607, 608, 638, 652, 671, 694, 716, 719, 752, 753, 757, 772, Timon of Athens 42, 58, 95, 127, 129, 136, 404, 405, 568, 671, 673, 688 Titus Andronicus 330 Troilus and Cressida 36, 42–3, 52, 66, 111, 130, 131, 387, 450, 463, 568, 595, 605, 608, 611, 639, 719, 720, 725, 753, 768, 811, 816 Twelfth Night 40, 106, 120, 351–3, 558, 607, 667, 697–8, 749 The Two Gentlemen of Verona 43, 105, 106, 112, 128, 184, 353, 694, 695 The Two Noble Kinsmen 42, 681 Venus and Adonis 3, 4, 572, 577, 587, 604, 606, 613, 752, 753, 757, 758, 765 The Winter’s Tale 43, 121, 134, 156, 183, 271, 303, 313, 342, 351, 353, 354, 485, 488, 567, 604, 608, 694, 695, 726, 784, 786 Shaw, George Bernard 4, 240, Sheffield, John see Mulgrave, Earl of Sheffield Shakespeare Club 290–2, 335 Shelley, Mary 365, 690, 693 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 443, 637, 639, 730, 749, 750, 759, 769, 770 Sheppard, Fleetwood 16, 58, 62 Sher, Sir Antony 295, 415 as Kean (Sartre, Kean) 415 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 294, 304, 306, 310, 311, 321–5, 572, 574, 575 School for Scandal, The 323, 574 Pizarro 325 Sheridan, Thomas 334, 363, 369 Coriolanus or The Roman Matron 334, 363, 369 Shirley, James 41, 57 Shirley, William 260 Edward the Black Prince 260 Siddons, Harriet, (daughter of Sarah) 324 Siddons, Henry, (son of Sarah) 324

9781441124036_Index_txt_prf.indd 846

Siddons, Sarah née Kemble 289, 297–8, 321, 324, 339–71, 656, 729 as Ariel (The Tempest) 351 as Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing) 351, 352 as Belvidera (Otway, Venice Preserved) 351 as Calista (Rowe, The Fair Penitent) 351 as Cleopatra (Dryden, All for Love) 330, 352 as Constance (King John) 308, 351, 352, 355–6, 365, 366 as Cordelia (Tate, King Lear) 351 as Desdemona (Othello) 307, 351 as Euphrasia (Murphy, The Grecian Daughter) 351 as Gertrude (Hamlet) 351, 352 as Hamlet 343, 351, 367 as Hermione (The Winter’s Tale) 342 as Hermione 351, 353, 354 as Imogen (Cymbeline) 307, 351, 353, 355 as Isabella (Measure for Measure) 351, 353, 354, 355, 423n. as Isabella (Isabella) 341 as Jane Shore (Rowe, The Tragedy of Jane Shore) 351 as Juliet (Romeo and Juliet) 351, 352, 364 as Katherina (Garrick, Catherine and Petruchio) 351 as Lady Anne (Richard III) 341, 351 as Lady Macbeth 236, 241, 289, 317, 342, 349, 350–1, 352, 353, 357, 358–9, 365, 366, 367, 368, 370–1, 656 as Miranda (Boaden, Aurelio and Miranda) 423n. as Mrs Beverly (Moore, The Gamester) 345, 351 as Olivia (Twelfth Night) 351, 353 as Ophelia (Hamlet) 351 as Portia (The Merchant of Venice) 339–40, 351, 353, 369 as Princess Katherine (Henry V) 351 as Queen Elizabeth (Richard III) 351, 352

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Index as Queen Katharine (Henry VIII) 325, 348, 349, 351, 352, 357–8, 365 as Rosalind (As You Like It) 349, 351, 353–4 as Volumnia (Coriolanus) 342, 351, 363, 368–9 Works: Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth 361 Reminiscences 340–1, 344 Siddons, Walter William 342, 343 Sidney, Sir Philip 191, 583, 679, 730 Siebert, Donald 137 Siècle de Louis XIV, Le 462, 466, 476 Sinden, Sir Donald 337 as Othello 396 Slote, Bernice 766, 809 Smirke, Robert 326–7, 330, 331, 335 Smith, Adam 140, 143–4 Smith, Horace 388, 749, 754 Smith, James 388 Smith, John Christopher 274 Smith, William ‘Gentleman’ 359, 361 as Macbeth 361 Soane, Sir John 330, 331, 335 Something on William Shakespeare on the Occasion of Wilhelm Meister 552–5 Sonnets 472 Sophocles 298, 460, 488, 489, 562, 589 Sotheby, William 388 Ivan 388 Southerne, Thomas 27, 44, 46, 191, 341, 399, 657 Isabella 341, 657 Oroonoko 399 Southey, Robert 571, 572, 649, 654–5, 664, 665, 677, 698, 715, 723 Spanish Curate, The 599 Spence, Joseph 70, 76 Spengler, Oswald 27 Spenser, Edmund 26, 48, 115, 244, 583, 745, 747, 748, 749, 758, 760, 774 Sperry, Stuart 789 Spurgeon, Caroline 745, 776, 785, 812, 816 Staël, Germaine de 562, 564

9781441124036_Index_txt_prf.indd 847

847

Steele, Joshua 64, 263–4, 265 Steevens, George 13, 96, 118, 119, 126, 129, 131, 156, 162, 164, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 173, 175, 177, 178, 181, 186, 187, 189, 190, 194, 197, 199, 245, 247, 278, 424n., 544, 546, 557, 562, 590, 591, 593–4, 675, 676, 752, 756, 777, 784 Stein, Charlotte von 530 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) 465, 562, 637 Stern, Tiffany 19, 37 Stewart, Ian 27 Stillinger, Jack 763, 788, 817 Stobaeus 490 Stoddart, Sarah 688 Storace, Stephen 317 Haunted Tower, The 317 Stow, John 191 Stuart, Ludovic (Seigneur D’Aubigny) 18 Suard, Jean 243 Suckling, Sir John 17 Suett, Richard 666 Sulzer, Johann Georg 494 Swift, Jonathan 9, 15, 25, 29, 33, 63, 449 Swinfen, John 262 Talfourd, Thomas Noon 653, 729 Talma, François Joseph 324, 335, 471 Tamburlaine 596 Taming of the Shrew, The 535 Tarlinskaja, Marina 86 Tarlton, Richard 191 Tasso, Torquato 747 Tate, Nahum 8, 42, 120, 144–5, 369, 406, 408, 451, 652, 671, 736 King Lear 8, 280–3, 294, 351, 406–8 Taylor, Gary 84, 102 Taylor, John 191 Taylor, Joseph 41 The Tempest 10, 36, 40, 42, 50, 52, 64, 66, 77, 89, 95, 113, 114, 165, 205, 244, 271, 294, 325, 351, 353, 451, 482, 485, 529, 538, 546, 552, 555, 558, 559, 567, 580, 584, 587, 588, 589, 595, 599–600, 605, 607, 608,

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848

Index

612, 638, 652, 671, 694, 716, 719, 752, 753, 757, 772 Temple du Goût, Le 467 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 696 Terry, Daniel 358 Terry, Ellen 362, 364, 396 as Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing) 352 as Lady Macbeth 362 Thelwall, John 659 Theobald, Lewis 8, 10, 13, 42, 75, 77, 78, 80–2, 83, 91, 101, 124–7, 146, 148–9, 156, 162, 165–8, 171–3, 175–7, 180, 186, 187, 190, 199–200, 269, 581, 586–7 Thomson, James 363 Coriolanus 363 Thomson, Peter 755, 762, 774, 813 Thrale, Hester, Mrs Piozzi 283, 342, 344 Tickell, Thomas 80 Tidswell, Charlotte 373–4, 376 Tieck, Dorothea 558, 559 Tieck, Ludwig 520, 521, 529, 532, 545, 546, 547, 555, 556, 558, 559, 566, 567 Tillyard, E. M. W. 651, 699 Timon of Athens 42, 58, 95, 127, 129, 136, 404, 405, 457, 568, 590, 671, 673, 688 Timpanaro, Sebastiano 92 Titian 386, 638 Titius, Johann Daniel 537 Titus Andronicus 330, 535, 566 Tomalin, J. 587 Tonson, Jacob 4, 35, 39, 46, 56, 62, 63, 64, 95, 96, 122–3, 166, 167, 269 Tooke, John Horne 659 Torquato Tasso 503, 504, 509 Tourneur, Cyril 678 Troilus and Cressida 36, 42–3, 52, 66, 111, 130, 131, 387, 450, 463, 568, 595, 605, 608, 611, 639, 719, 720, 725, 753, 768, 811, 816 Turner, Joseph Mallord William 335 Twain, Mark 413

9781441124036_Index_txt_prf.indd 848

Twelfth Night 40, 106, 120, 351–3, 558, 607, 667, 697–8, 749 Tyrwhitt, Thomas 162, 178 Über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur, (Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature) 445, 547, 588–9 Über Shakespeares Romeo und Julia 555–7 Über Shakespears Behandlung des Wunderbaren (How Shakespeare Employs the Wondrous) 555 Ueber W. Shakspeare 562, 625 Vanbrugh, Sir John 46, 240, 263 Provoked Wife, The 240, 29 Vega, Lope de 327, 451, 467–8 Vendler, Helen 772 Venus and Adonis 3, 4, 572, 577, 587, 604–5, 606, 613, 752, 753, 757, 758, 765 Verdi, Giuseppe 317, 637 Macbeth 317 Vergil 563 Vickers, Brian 268 Vigny, Alfred de 485 Villiers, George see Buckingham, second Duke of Villon, François 413 Virgil 6, 7, 8, 10, 23, 26, 33, 47, 51, 53, 56, 60, 61, 118, 177, 200, 334, 747 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 442, 444, 446, 447–85, 502, 515, 518, 535, 536, 537, 538, 543 Von deutscher Art und Kunst 488 Von deutscher Baukunst 488 Voss, Johann Heinrich 514, 516, 551, 559, 560 Wagner, Richard 337 Wahlverwandtschaften, Die (Elective Affinities) 511, 512, 517 Wakefield, Gilbert 73 Waldoff, Leon 780 Walker, Keith 46 Walker, Robert 269

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Index Wallenstein 572, 586 Waller, Edmund 23, 275 Walpole, Horace 191, 242, 275, 302, 347, 348, 449, 461, 467, 476 Walsh, Marcus 13, 95 Walsh, William 15 Wang, Orrin 759, 761 Warburton, William 77, 92, 120, 121, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 132, 137, 152, 156, 157, 166, 172, 175, 176, 258, 269, 540, 581 Warner, Deborah 295 Warner, Richard 248, 249 Warton, Thomas 123, 190, 191 Washington, George 595 Webster, John 191, 678, 679, 680 Wei Chunshu 697 Weisse, Christian Felix 517, 518, 522, 539, 549 Wellek, René 652 Wells, Stanley 84, 102, 110, 112, 142 Werner, Zacharias 547 West, Benjamin 715 West, William Henry see Master Betty West, William 427n. Westmacott, Sir Richard 335 West-östlicher Divan 541 Whalley, Peter 245 Whateley, Thomas 308, 424, 582, 590, 592, 593, 662 Whately, Richard 773 White, James 648, 661–2 White, R. S. 776, 755–6, 758, 776, 777, 783, 784–5 Whiter, Walter 581 Whyman, Susan E. 20 Wickham, William 310 Wieland, Christoph, Martin 482, 487, 488, 490, 494, 498, 507, 516, 517, 532, 534–7, 539, 540, 541, 542, 543, 544, 546, 548, 549, 550, 552, 553, 558, 559, 560 Wild, Robert 34, 36 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre 504, 506, 512, 513–16, 518, 519, 523, 529, 546, 552–3

9781441124036_Index_txt_prf.indd 849

849

Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung 504–10, 511, 512 Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre 523–4, 531, 532 Wilkes, Thomas 189, 253 Wilkinson, Tate 299, 300–1, 302–3, 305 Wilks, Robert 277 Willems, Michèle 444 William Shakespeare 483–4 Williams, Charles 329 Williams, Helen Maria 657 Williams, John, ‘Anthony Pasquin’ 349 Wilson, Benjamin 283, 285 Wilson, John 652 Winston, James 400 The Winter’s Tale 43, 121, 134, 156, 183, 271, 303, 313, 342, 351, 353, 354, 485, 488, 567, 590, 604, 608, 694, 695, 726, 784, 786 Wither, George 664 Wolf, Friedrich August 568 Wolf, Matt 415 Wolfit, Sir Donald 338 Wolfson, Susan J. 693, 695, 760 Wollstonecraft, Mary 654, 690 Womack, Mark 159 Wonders of Derbyshire, The 578 Wood, Anthony à 191 Wood, John as Brutus (Julius Caesar) 338 Woodhouse, Richard 740, 741, 764, 765, 766, 775, 789 Woodhouselee, Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord 551 Woodward, Henry, as Fool (King Lear) 281 Harlequin’s Jubilee 287 Wordsworth, Dorothy 585, 695 Wordsworth, William 68, 370, 383, 387, 571, 580, 597, 599, 637, 638, 639, 642, 647, 651, 669, 672, 673, 677, 682, 683, 691, 693, 699, 713, 715, 723, 740, 741, 745, 753, 758, 764, 765, 769, 770, 771, 774, 775

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850

Index

Wren, Sir Christopher 311 Wright, George T. 86 Wright, Herbert 789 Wright, Iain 18 Wright, James 191 Wyatt, Benjamin 311 Wycherley, William 20, 27, 41, 44, 55, 451 Yates, Mary Ann 340–1 Yates, Richard 262 York, Duke of 59, 291 Young, Charles 729 Young, Charles Mayne 363, 366–7, 403 as Iachimo (Cymbeline) 406

9781441124036_Index_txt_prf.indd 850

as Iago (Othello) 400–1 as Pierre (Otway, Venice Preserved) 400–1 Young, Edward 449, 537, 539 Younge, Elizabeth 340–1 Zaïre 450, 461, 464, 466, 479 Zapolya 572 Zara 461, 479 Zeffirelli, Franco 337 Zoffany, Johann 253, 260, 385 Zum Schäkespeares-Tag 490–1, 497, 523, 543

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