Act 5 — PREFACE TO SHAKESPEARE. (continued 2)

Notes are often necessary, but they are necessary evils. Let him, that is yet unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel the highest pleasure that the drama can give, read every play, from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his commentators. When his fancy is once on the wing, let it not stoop at correction or explanation. When his attention is strongly engaged, let it disdain alike to turn aside to the name of Theobald and of Pope. Let him read on through brightness and obscurity, through integrity and corruption; let him preserve his comprehension of the dialogue and his interest in the fable. And when the pleasures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness, and read the commentators.

Particular passages are cleared by notes, but the general effect of the work is weakened. The mind is refrigerated by interruption; the thoughts are diverted from the principal subject; the reader is weary, he suspects not why; and at last throws away the book which he has too diligently studied. Parts are not to be examined till the whole has been surveyed; there is a kind of intellectual remoteness necessary for the comprehension of any great work in its full design and in its true proportions; a close approach shows the smaller niceties, but the beauty of the whole is discerned no longer.

It is not very grateful to consider how little the succession of editors has added to this author's power of pleasing. He was read, admired, studied, and imitated, while he was yet deformed with all the improprieties which ignorance and neglect could accumulate upon him; while the reading was yet not rectified, nor his allusions understood; yet then did Dryden pronounce "that Shakespeare 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 learned: he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. 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 and insipid; his comick wit degenerating into clinches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always 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."

It is to be lamented that such a writer should want a commentary; that his language should become obsolete, or his sentiments obscure. But it is vain to carry wishes beyond the condition of human things; that which must happen to all, has happened to Shakespeare, by accident and time; and more than has been suffered by any other writer since the use of types[23], has been suffered by him through his own negligence of fame, or, perhaps, by that superiority of mind, which despised its own performances, when it compared them with its powers, and judged those works unworthy to be preserved, which the criticks of following ages were to contend for the fame of restoring and explaining.

Among these candidates of inferiour fame, I am now to stand the judgment of the publick; and wish that I could confidently produce my commentary as equal to the encouragement which I have had the honour of receiving. Every work of this kind is by its nature deficient, and I should feel little solicitude about the sentence, were it to be pronounced only by the skilful and the learned.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Dr. Johnson's Preface first appeared in 1765. Malone's Shakespeare, i. 108. and Boswell's Life of Johnson, i.

[2] Est vetus atque probus, centum qui perficit annos. Hon. Ep. II. 1. v. 39.

[3] With all respect for our great critic's memory we must maintain, that love has the greatest influence on the sum of life: and every popular tale or poem derives its main charm and power of pleasing from the incidents of this universal passion. Other passions have, undoubtedly, their sway, but love, when it does prevail, like Aaron's rod, swallows up every feeling beside. It is one thing to introduce the fulsome badinage of compliment with which French tragedy abounds, and another to exhibit the

—"very ecstacy of love: Whose violent property foredoes itself, And leads the will to desperate undertakings, As oft as any passion under heaven, That does afflict our natures."—

HAMLET. Act ii. Sc. i.

[4] Quaerit quod nusquam est gentium, repent tamen. Facit illud verisimile, quod mendacrium est. PLAUTI PSEUDOLUS, Act i. Sc. 4.

Ficta voluptatis causa, sint proxima veris. HOR. ARS POET, 338.

See too the celebrated passage of Shakespeare himself— Midsummer-night's Dream, Act v. Sc. 1; and Idler, 84.—Ed.

[5] The judgment of French poets on these points may be inferred from the tenour of Boileau's admonitions:

Gardez donc de donner, ainsi que dans Clélie, L'air ni l'esprit françois à l'antique Italie; Et, sous des noms romains faisant notre portrait, Peindre Caton galant, et Brutus dameret. Art Poétique, iii.—Ed.

[6] The critic must, when he wrote this, have forgotten the Cyclops of Euripides, and also the fact, that when an Athenian dramatist brought out his three tragedies at the Dionysiac festival, he added, as a fourth, a sort of farce; a specimen of which Schlegel considers the Cyclops. Mr. Twining, in his amusing and instructive notes on Aristotle's Poetics, refers to the drunken jollity of Hercules in the Alcestis, and to the ludicrous dialogue between Ulysses and Minerva, in the first scene of the Ajax of Sophocles, as instances of Greek tragi-comedy. We may add the Electra of Euripides; for if the poet did not intend to burlesque the rules of tragic composition in many of the scenes of that play, and to make his audience laugh, he calculated on more dull gravity in Athens, than we are accustomed to give that city of song the credit for. The broad ridicule which Aristophanes casts against the tragedians is not half so laughable.

[7] Thus, says Dowries the Prompter, p. 22: "The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet was made some time after [1662] into a tragi-comedy, by Mr. James Howard, he preserving Romeo and Juliet alive; so that when the tragedy was revived again, 'twas played alternately, tragical one day, and tragi-comical another, for several days together." STEEVENS.

[8] This opinion is controverted, and its effects deplored, by Dr. J. Warton, in a note to Malone's Shakespeare, i. p. 71.—Ed.

[9] Dr. Drake conceives that Dr. Wolcot was indebted to the above noble passage for the prima stamina of the following stanza:

Thus, while I wond'ring pause o'er Shakespeare's page I mark, in visions of delight, the sage High o'er the wrecks of man who stands sublime, A column in the melancholy waste, (Its cities humbled, and its glories past,) Majestic 'mid the solitude of time.—Ed.

[10] The poets and painters before and of Shakespeare's time were all guilty of the same fault. The former "combined the Gothic mythology of fairies" with the fables and traditions of Greek and Roman lore; while the latter dressed out the heroes of antiquity in the arms and costume of their own day. The grand front of Rouen cathedral affords ample and curious illustration of what we state. Mr. Steevens, in his Shakespeare, adds, "that in Arthur Hall's version of the fourth Iliad, Juno says to Jupiter:

"The time will come that Totnam French shall turn."

And in the tenth Book we hear of "The Bastile": "Lemster wool," and "The Byble."

[11] The relaxations of "England's queen" with her maids of honour were not, if we may credit the existing memoirs of her court, precisely such as modern fastidiousness would assign to the "fair vestal throned by the west."

[12] A very full and satisfactory essay on the learning of Shakespeare, may be found in Mr. Malone's Edition of Shakespeare, i. 300.

[13] [Greek: Memonomenos d' o tlaemon Aealin aethelon katheudein.] Anac. 8.

[14] The Comedy of Errors, which has been partly taken by some wretched playwright from the Menaechmi of Plautus, is intolerably stupid: that it may occasionally display the touch of Shakespeare, cannot be denied; but these purpurei panni are lamentably infrequent; and, to adopt the language of Mr. Stevens, "that the entire play was no work of his, is an opinion which (as Benedick says) fire cannot melt out of me; I will die in it at the stake." Dr. Drake's Literary Life of Johnson.—Ed.

[15] A list of these translations may be seen in Malone's Shakespeare, i. 371. It was originally drawn up by Mr. Steevens.—Ed.

[16] See Dryden in the Epistle Dedicatory to his Rival Ladies.—Ed.

[17] It appears, from the induction of Ben Jonson's "Bartholomew Fair," to have been acted before the year 1590.—STEEVENS.

[18] The errors of the promoter's books of the present day excite the violent invective of Mr. Steevens, in his notes on Johnson's Preface.—Ed.

[19] This assertion is contradicted by Steevens and Malone, as regards the second edition 1632. The former editor says, that it has the advantage of various readings which are not merely such as reiteration of copies will produce. The curious examiner of Shakespeare's text, who possesses the first of these folio editions, ought not to be unfurnished with the second. See Malone's List of Early Editions in his Shakespeare, ii. 656.—Ed.

[20] It is extraordinary that this gentleman should attempt so voluminous a work, as the Revisal of Shakespeare's text, when he tells us in his preface, "he was not so fortunate as to be furnished with either of the folio editions, much less any of the ancient quartos: and even Sir Thomas Hanmer's performance was known to him only by Dr. Warburton's representation."—FARMER.

[21] Republished by him in 1748, after Dr. Warburton's edition, with alterations, &c.—STEEVENS.

[22] John Andreas. He was secretary to the Vatican library during the papacies of Paul the second and Sixtus the fourth. By the former, he was employed to superintend such works as were to be multiplied by the new art of printing, at that time brought into Rome. He published Herodotus, Strabo, Livy, Aulus Gellius, &c. His schoolfellow, Cardinal de Cusa, procured him the bishopric of Arcia, a province in Corsica; and Paul the second afterwards appointed him to that of Aleria, in the same island, where he died in 1493. See Fabric. Bibl. Lat. iii. 894, and Steevens, in Malone's Shak. i. 106.

[23] See this assertion refuted by examples in a former note.—Ed.