CHAPTER IX

SHAKESPEARE SINCE 1616

During Shakespeare's lifetime, his plays were mentioned and imitated as often as those of any of his contemporaries. The more important documents bearing on his growing reputation have already been noted in this volume. This popularity, however, was confined to theater-goers and the readers of the sixteen plays that had appeared before 1616. There was no opportunity for a full estimate of his plays as literature until their publication in the Folio of 1623. This is given full and worthy expression in the fine verses which Ben Jonson contributed as a preface to the Folio. He had girded at several of Shakespeare's plays, and his own views of the principles and practices of the dramatic art were largely opposed to Shakespeare's, but he took this opportunity to express unstinted appreciation of Shakespeare's greatness. He notes with discrimination that Shakespeare learned his art in an earlier day, but far outshone Kyd, Lyly, and Marlowe.

Soul of the Age The applause! delight! the wonder of our Stage!

He may challenge comparison with the great Greek tragedians, or in comedies

Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.

He was not of an age but for all time!

The magnitude of Shakespeare's achievement was thus enthusiastically proclaimed by the literary dictator of the time.

From 1623, until the closing of the theaters, the plays continued favorites on the stage, though they yielded somewhat in the current taste to the theatrical successes of Fletcher and Massinger. After 1623, they continued to be read and admired, as is shown by the publication of the second and third folios in 1632 and 1663-1664, and by many appreciations, including those of D'Avenant, Suckling, the Duchess of Newcastle, and Milton. At the Restoration many of the plays were at once revived on the stage, and Dryden's essay _Of Dramatick Poesie_ (1668) summed up in a masterly fashion contemporary opinion on Shakespeare. He is compared with other great dramatists, and is declared less correct than Jonson and less popular and modern than Beaumont and Fletcher, yet is "the man who of all Moderns, and perhaps Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul."

[Page Heading: The Seventeenth Century]

The Restoration was in some doubt about Shakespeare, for while it found in him much to admire, it also found much to condemn. His plays now had the advantage of women actors for the female parts, but they encountered changed fashions in the theater. The romantic comedies were not to the taste of the time, and disappeared from the stage until toward the middle of the eighteenth century. Meanwhile, _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ was the most popular and most highly esteemed of his comedies. The tragedies attracted the genius of Betterton and were constantly acted, but these were subject to revision of various kinds. _Hamlet_ and _Othello_ held their places without alterations, but Nahum Tate's tame version of _King Lear_ and Cibber's version of _Richard III_ superseded the originals for many years. _Romeo and Juliet_, too, gave way to Otway's _Caius Marius_, 1692, which kept large portions of Shakespeare's play; and _Antony and Cleopatra_ yielded place on the stage to Dryden's fine _All for Love_ (1678), in the style of which he professes to imitate the "divine Shakespeare." By 1692, adaptations had also been made of _Troilus and Cressida_, _The Tempest_, _Macbeth_, _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, _Timon_, _Richard II_, _Coriolanus_, _Henry VI_, _Cymbeline_, _Titus Andronicus_, _Julius Caesar_. A great deal of contempt has been visited upon these revisions of Shakespeare, and their attempts to improve on him are usually feeble enough; but sufficient recognition has not been given to the testimony that these revisors bear to a great appreciation and admiration of Shakespeare. They tried to adapt him to current metrical conventions, to current literary fashions, to an idea of art quite foreign to his, but they made these efforts because they admired his genius. If they did not admire everything in his thirty-seven plays, they admired a great deal.

Further, these revisions are the outcome of critical strictures on the plays which were then common and, in essence, have been frequently repeated. Critics objected to the irregularity and confusion of their structure, to their disregard of the unities of action, their mixture of tragic and comic, their obscurity and archaism of diction, their mixed and confused figures, their occasional puns and bombast. These are substantially the criticisms that Dryden offers when under the influence of Rymer. Rymer himself (_A Short View of Tragedy_, 1693) goes much farther. He desires tragedy to give a rationalized view of life, dealing poetic justice to various typical persons, and consequently condemns Shakespeare's persons as too individual, his plots as too irregular, and the total effect of his plays as insufficiently didactic and moral. This view of tragedy was mainly due to the rationalistic and classical ideas which continued for a century to dominate European criticism. But before the seventeenth century was over, Shakespeare's growing reputation had proved itself a rock against which the tendencies in criticism had broken like unavailing waves. However much they might insist on rules in art, critics were generally willing to hail Shakespeare as the great exception. Champions were ready to answer Rymer and to defend Shakespeare. _Othello_, selected by Rymer for special analysis and condemnation, continued to hold its place on the stage and to incite dramatists to emulation. The plays continued to be read, and new editions were demanded. In the forty years from 1660 to 1700, in spite of great changes in theatrical conditions, in spite of changes of taste in readers that relegated most of Elizabethan drama to neglect, and in spite of the formation of a criticism doubtful or neglectful of the very qualities in literature that his plays present, Shakespeare continued to win admirers. By 1700 he was recognized as a dramatist and poet who was one of the great possessions of the English race.

[Page Heading: Widening Influence]

In the two centuries since, Shakespeare's fame and influence have spread and multiplied to an extent difficult to characterize justly in a brief summary. Some important evidences of this growth may indeed be collected and analyzed. The position and importance of his plays on the stage, the ever increasing number of editions, the changing attitudes of critics and men of letters--on these matters it is not difficult to draw conclusions as to Shakespeare's influence at home and abroad. But it is not so easy to say what his influence was on the literature of any generation, and still less easy to summarize with certainty the effects on thought and feeling and conduct which made up his continuing power over generation after generation of readers. This much is clear, that a study of Shakespeare's influence is in part a study of changing ideas and ideals in literature--that as he survived the Restoration taste, so he survived the new classicism of the eighteenth and the romanticism of the early nineteenth century. It is also clear that a full record of the influence of Shakespeare on English-speaking readers would touch on almost all the varied changes of thought and conduct that have entered into the history of two centuries.

The most important of the successive editions of Shakespeare from that of Nicholas Rowe, 1709, to the present time, have been noted in the history of the text in